What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played a game of Advanced Civ for the first time in 3 years. Got absolutely wrecked by Calamities for a few rounds in the middle and ended up in last place. Still had a good time and will recommend it to anyone with the inclination and the opportunity. So much swings in fortune without the roll of a single die.

Seven friends and I rented a VRBO this weekend and had an epic weekend of gaming. We did a variety of big games with eight people at the table (or seven, if someone was cooking -- we made a spreadsheet with dinner/lunch duties), and then smaller games, where we'd split into 4-4, 5-3, etc.

THURSDAY

For the King (and Me). Rethemed Biblios/Scribes, I believe. Much better in person than on BGA, where it's hard to remember what colors people were going after. We had a 4-way tie and then I lost on the tiebreak. Never seen that before.

Raccoon Tycoon. When I first played this, I thought it was a mediocre game with a great name; now I've come around on it a little more. A decent little commodity manipulation game with some other stuff around the edges to provide a little complexity so it's not pure market shenanigans.

Escape the Hidden Castle. I got this for my kid a while back, brought it as a joke. We ended up playing it. It wasn't a very good joke, and was a worse game.

Dungeon Crawl Classics, "Danger in the Air." Zero-level funnel with a weird space fantasy feel. It was this year's Free RPG Day offering from Goodman Games. An extra-planar giant space jellyfish, with its guts hollowed out and replaced with a metal crew compartment, has appeared over the PCs' village. The jellyfish appears dead, as it's drifting aimlessly and dripping gobbets of translucent flesh. And gold coins and jewels. Twenty-one PCs scaled its tentacles, looking for treasure. Bizarre otherworldly artifacts, traps, and security devices awaited inside. Ended in a TPK, as Crom intended.

Food and drink: Chickpea biryani (this was me, made in an insta-pot, and I had the wherewithal to do all the prep work at home so I could mostly be involved in the games). Lots of various IPAs from local breweries, some Suntori whiskey.

FRIDAY

Hellapagos. Curiously underrated; I think this is a great game of screwage and shifting alliances. 7p, five made it off the island. I wasn't one of them.

Clank! In! Space!. I played original Clank once and thought it was okay. This is more interesting mechanically, but less thematically coherent -- clanking around in plate armor makes more sense than constantly tripping over floor waxer robots etc.

Western Legends. 5p with all the expansions. Boy, this took a long time. But some people had never played it and really wanted to. I was a gambler character and just couldn't get going, constantly broke and unable to win at poker or faro. The rest of the players had a great time and wandered around rustling cattle and generally getting involved in the theme. I think it is probably best with the Ante Up expansion and some of the stuff from the small boxes; the full experience is a little overstuffed.

Azul. I wasn't involved in this one. I've played on BGA; it looks very pretty in person but building a mosaic is not especially compelling to me.

Council of Verona. I played this instead. Advanced Love Letter. I lost horribly.

Deep Sea Adventure. 5p I think. Never fails to entertain. Despite making it back to the sub every round, I lost on the last round to some people who made massive hauls.

Shadow Throne. Hadn't heard of this before, turned out to be surprisingly compelling for a medium-short game. It is kind of a like a mapless version of The King is Dead, in that you're trying to curry favor with the faction that will be the most powerful. But then there's Omen-style powers on the cards, and a draft before the power brokerage that has a nice mix of setting up your hand, hate drafting, and trying to encourage people to take cards that you know you can counter.

Camp Grizzly. Base game. Got pretty lucky and found stuff for the van finale almost right away. We took off in the van with Otis hanging on with a garden claw sunk into the side panel. Swerved around corners with Otis trying to stab the driver and us. Finally careened around one last hairpin and Otis lost his grip, falling into Grizzly falls, never to be seen again ... until the sequel. 45 minutes including setup and rules; super fun. I was planning on selling this because of the stupid eBay prices but now I'm not sure. There's really nothing else like it.

Century: Golem. This was the other table during Camp Grizzly. I've played it on BGA; kinda meh. Engine: The Game! Who can draft the most efficient resource conversion chains? Not terribly interesting to me.

Call of Cthulhu. "The Dare," modern scenario, early 1980s, we were all kids being dared to spend the night in an allegedly-haunted house on Halloween. So fun and atmospheric. The game was based on CoC 7e, but simplified down to represent kid investigators. No one died but there was an epic and gory showdown with an old witch. Not really a mythos scenario, but lots of atmosphere and great creepy tropes. I was the class clown kid, backpack full of firecrackers and whoopie cushions.

Food and drink: Tofu bahn mi sandwiches for lunch, homemade slow cooked chili for dinner. More IPAs, then a bunch of assorted craft brews from a central coast brewery, then the rest of the bottle of Suntori, and most of a bottle of Tres Agaves. Good stuff but the CoC scenario went late (like 2am, where I am normally in bed around 9pm and up at 5am), so between being stuffed full of delicious food and delicious booze, I was fading fast. No regerts.

SATURDAY

Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition. 4p, went very long but was fun the whole time. Red player (Vikings) was beset by barbarians and fell behind as he had to deal with them. Blue (me, Phoenicia) and Yellow (Maya) tried to maintain a detente but it quickly fell into both cold and hot war. Purple (China) sat in the other corner and quietly did a bunch of stuff. In retrospect, this was a mistake and purple ran away with it.

San Juan. The classic. I'd play this any time, except when I'm losing at Clash of Cultures.

Mystery Express. From the glory years of Days of Wonder. I wanted to play this but didn't get the chance.

Xia: Legends of a Drift System. One of my friends is super into this; I think it is okay but for sandboxy fun I will always go with Western Legends. So this was 4p on the big table. Meanwhile I played ...

It's a Wonderful World. With the expansion, which seamlessly fits and is easy even for teaching first-timers. Great game, good arc, great art, just very fun.

The Bloody Inn. This is the first game of this I've played that I felt like I knew what I was doing. Usually I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water, everything sucks, and then the game ends and sometimes I win.

Shinobigami. Japanese RPG, translated into English a few years ago. A very odd duck; it has elements of Fiasco in that when it's your turn, you get to set the scene pretty much however you want. But then it's way crunchier than Fiasco; there's specific mechanical effects that each scene type grants. Each character comes with a "public mission" and a "secret" that they are trying to achieve, and most of them are incompatible. The scenario is an intro one where an ancient mystical dagger has been stolen, and each PC is a member of different ninja clan, who has been assigned the task of retrieving the dagger. Quickly turns into shifting alliances, dramatic anime betrayals, and over-the-top ninja techniques. It's set in modern Japan, so one character was a Spike Speigel-inspired street racer, another a problem gambler, another a teacher at private academy, etc. Except they are all secret ninjas who can run up the sides of buildings, or cause an opponent's clothes to constrict and strangle them; basically every weird ninja technique from Ninja Scroll, Demon City Shinjuku, and other anime. The tone is pretty much up to the players; you can do it serious and grim like Ninja Scroll, or veer into Ranma 1/2 or DragonBall territory as you like. I was GMing; this also went super long and I was just exhausted by the end of it.

Food and drink: Pad Thai for lunch, spaghetti for dinner. I didn't really drink anything, having way overdone it the previous day.

SUNDAY

Clean up the VRBO and drive home. We were in a central location; about 2.5 hours for me. Furthest was 5.5 hours, everyone else was in between. A good time, can't wait to do it next year.

That sounds awesome. Wish I could convince some people to do a weekend like that.

This was primarily a reunion for my old Cthulhu group from the CA Central Coast. When I moved away, I joked about putting on a private convention just for them. We kept joking about it over the next ten years. During the lockdowns I reached out to them on a whim and we started playing again on Roll20. Realized how much I missed all those folks, so we finally made it happen. It was incredible.

I'd like to talk about a turd masquerading as a good game: [b/Dungeons, Dice and Danger[/b] from none other than Richard Garfield.

It's a roll and write dungeon crawl. The problem here is that there is so much happening on the board and with the dice being rolled, each player has to constantly evaluate all their options EVERY TURN. It leads to massive slowdown and it's nobody's fault. There are just too many options. Great idea. The execution fails.

Had a few friends over for a couple hours of lighter games after the kids were in bed.

Opened with Hellapagos which unfortunately fell apart in a bad way. Started great as we had both the flask and fishing rod to keep us well nourished. Even finished the raft just in time for a dry day. Managed to survive that between the food mill and a bottle of water but ended on zero. A second dry day immediately afterward was a TPK.

Except we scrounged up two more bottles of water, one dirty, and it became a vote for who survived, which was very weird. I’m not sure if the problem was being too selfless and players not saving the water for themselves until after the vote (can you still shoot them then?) or messed up timing rules. Want to try it again, but this was definitely not Hellapagos’ best side.

Finished the night on Just One. Everyone cottoned to it much faster. Highlights include two of us going for Posh on “Spice,” and the player guessing “addict” off AAA and acid (the word was battery, but three of us went some variant of charge).

its perfectly fine to play Hellapagos as a pure co-op but more fun to dial down the altruism. You can shoot at any time, but it does make better sense to do so before they have had their fill of food and drink

I'm at month 5 of 8 away from home and my collection of soloable games has grown, considerably. I finally won my first game of Black Sonata after my first 5 attempts. Recently won a super close game of Outer Rim (with expansion) and lost my last game of The Brambles. All that being said, I am soooooo looking forward to playing games around a table of my people.

My 6yo convinced me to play a bit of STUFFED FABLES. We have played through the entire game before, and I wasn't keen to return to it, but I had forgotten just how mad the entire experience makes me.

In the game, you play as these toys (stuffies) that are transported into another world. In a story, you play on several game boards in a lovely flip over book with different boards. So you might start in the little girls room, move to a river in the fantasy realm, visit a castle, and so on. In theory, it's great, but in reality each board hardly has anything for the players to do.

In each turn you draw coloured dice from a bag, and there's a real chance of not drawing anything you can use. So if for instance you need to solve a strength task (red dice) and you don't draw any red dice (or purple which are wild), you can't really do anything in that turn. It's extremely frustrating, and it's made worse by the fact that there really isn't much to do on each board.

The game looks amazing, and the game book feels so compelling. But ultimately the core game loop is so boring that I feel no inclination to try out Familiar Tales even though it also looks great.

Jeeze, maybe I should rent my timeshare here instead. Everyone is talking getaways.

last night: Ascending Empires, Eggs and Empires, Dead Man's Draw. Sad that DMD doesn't have imperial aspirations to complete the trifecta.

Eggs and Empires is incredibly underrated as a simultaneous blind-bid game. It so easy to teach and is always a lot of fun.

We have not as much stuff going on during the week through September so started hosting a limited time only, "short run" second game night with a partially different set of folks. The changeup is this new night has a theme: auction games only! We get busy for winter and parts of summer, so I could see running more of these limited run game nights with themes(future theme ideas: trick taking card games, racing games, Knizias, co-ops, rare + weird?) - sometimes putting some constraints on what kind of trouble you can get yourself into is kind of nice.

Two weeks in and we have played: Chinatown(we were 1/3 of the way in before we looked at each other and realized there's no auctions. I mean, other than bidding for your opponents' affection. Whoops! LOL!), QE, Ra, Orongo, High Society, Taj Mahal. Heavy on auction clearly leads to heavy on Knizia, which I am definitely cool with.

QE is so bonkers and was a total blast. We were laughing the whole time. I think we started bids around 100k and ended around 1 billion, so a bit of inflation but maybe not the hyperinflation I've since read about. The meta here fascinates me so I'm looking forward to playing this more often with mostly the same group.

It's been at least a few years since I've played Taj Mahal so was happy to give it another spin. I'm still pretty bad at it... it's like an intense game of chicken, which I should clearly never play, and even more stressful than T&E. (T&E being the gold standard of euro games from my perspective). I played 5 cards in the 3rd visit and got nothing, so was fighting for not-last after that and lost.

Orongo is an interesting Knizia auction. Blind bids, but only the highest bidder has to pay into the pot. Your currency is also part of your building material for the victory conditions so the economy shrinks as it goes. You can bid nothing and take whatever money is in the pot, but you don't get to build anything that turn. So most turns you really want to be the 2nd highest bidder, so it has the group think going on that I like. It's also weird because it simultaneously has great and horrible components at the same time. And I mean the exact same pieces, these shells you bid with, are really cool and awful. They do look like shells, but when you place them on the board to mark spaces you've used to build, they tend to roll all over the place.

Orongo is such a great game. Those shells need to be sanded down on one side so they sit flat. It's annoying.

I got the Stardew Valley board game from my kids for my birthday, and had a chance to play it last week. It's a cooperative board game based on the video game of the same name. If you've played the video game, you're going to see many familiar concepts, like farming, fishing, watering crops, mining, friendship, foraging, and so forth. Instead of the retro pixelated art from the video game, the board game goes for a friendly cartoon-style art, which is a bit of a jarring change at first, but it's fine.

Judging it as a board game, well, it's a "cooperative worker placement game," so if you don't like those things, you won't like them here either. Like most cooperative games, the actual "game" is in discussing what you're going to do and figuring out the best strategy. "You go here, get the thing, then I'll use that thing over here to do this other thing." You have ten randomly-drawn goals you have to accomplish, and the game ends after a set number of turns, so it's all about using those actions and turns as efficiently as possible. The game starts with a pretty manageable set of possible options, but as the game goes on, and you acquire items and upgrades, that decision space really explodes. You'll have lots of conversations like, "You use your special ability to sell crops for more money, then on my turn, I'll use my charcoal burner to collect two wood, then go to Robin's house and build the chicken coop." The last few turns can start to drag as you're up against the clock, and trying to squeeze as much as possible out of your actions.

It's also a long game. For three players, it took us about 2 1/2 hours total, played over a couple of sessions. The game scales well, as most goals are simply based on the number of players. Like, "collect 2 animals per player," for example.

It does a pretty remarkable job of mapping concepts and features from the video game onto a board game structure. Farming and fishing are particularly successful. Mining ... maybe not so much. The board game really abstracts mining. You roll two dice, and based on the two icons you get, match up a row/column on a little 3x3 grid. Maybe you get a geode, maybe you hit a monster, etc. It's fine, but it's definitely my least favorite part of the board game.

I was afraid it was going to be a gimmicky cash-in, like a "Stardew Valley Monopoly" type thing, but there's a real board game here. My son and I liked it. My wife was lukewarm. But my son and I also play the video game, so maybe that helps. Concepts like, "give a parsnip to Marnie so she'll be your friend" were immediately familiar to us. My wife was a little bewildered by some of those parts.

Overall, I think it's a well-designed game, but ... it IS a still a cooperative game, and those are never going to be my favorite no matter how well-designed they are. I prefer games where I DO stuff, not games where I TALK ABOUT what I should do, and then the doing part is mostly perfunctory.