What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Turns out Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is a pretty great distraction on long car trips. Over 19 hours of driving we’ve finished six cases from Jack the Ripper and West End Adventures. We’ve been monsters in the West End. I don’t count points, but by my reckoning our solutions haven’t been less than half right and we even approached one hundred percent on Goldfyre.

I’m of two minds on the Jack the Ripper series. On the one hand, the uncertainty and effort to figure out just a few facts is delicious. It feels like a real investigation rather than a neatly contained Doyle story. On the other hand I was never aware of the details of the murders and diving into them so deeply for an ostensibly entertaining game is more than a little unseemly.

Brought out Just One at a family reunion. It was a hit. Two people wrote “ear” for Picasso, and the rest of the table thought my “Guernica” clue was terrible. Hellapagos also hit the mark. The team asked to keep it for another play after my wife and I went to bed.

If you like trick taking game you should play Cat In The Box. My copy of the US reprint from Bezier Games came the other day, and I took it to game night last night, and we basically played it all night. Two people their ordered their own copies. It's really really clever and fun.

The hook is that the cards don't have suits until you play them and observe what suit they are (hence the "A Quantum Trick Taking Game" subtitle). Theres a board to keep track of which cards have been played, so when you play a 4 and say it's the Green 4 you put one of your tokens on the Green 4 space and then no one else can play a Green 4 that hand. You bid how many tricks you're going to win in a hand, and then if you make your bid exactly you also score bonus points for connecting your tokens on the board. When someone leads a suit you can also declare that you are out of that suit, and then either trump or last off or whatever. The catch is there a token you remove from your little player board when you say you're out of a suit, and once you say you're out of a suit you can't go back. That brings in PARADOXES! So there are 4 suits and 5 of each number. If you are ever forced to play a card that has already been played you cause a paradox and instantly end the hand, and you score negative points for each trick you win...

There's some more stuff, but that's the gist of it. It takes a few hands to wrap your brain around it, but man it's a treat. Again, if you like trick taking games you gotta get on this one. My literal only complaint is that the card quality is really REALLY bad. Like the cards are showing a LOT of wear after one night. I ordered some opaque sleeves so whatever, but it's still a bummer.

Edit: I'm taking all comers online with this game. If I'm free and we can wrangle 3-5 people I will play this game with you. I want to play it more right now.

mezike and I tried to crack on with Dark Venture this afternoon. There’s a game hidden in there that I’m pretty sure I’d love but the insane amount of book keeping prevented us from getting there. As it is I think I’d prefer my random story generators to either be more table based ala Rocky Mountain Man or more card based ala Arkham Horror 2e. This is a weird halfway point between the two. The map building is a lot of fun though, that shouldn’t be changed if a (much needed) revised second edition is commissioned. As much as I wanted to enjoy this, we abandoned the game after 2 turns and this is likely moving straight to the sale/trade pile.

Earlier we played a game of Pax Porfiriana, another game that could be improved by a revised second edition. In spite of that comment this is definitely staying with me. This game is sharp and clever and really really mean. Tracking other player’s tableaus is so involved that I’m not sure I’d want to play with more than three, it worked beautifully at two though. I managed to fight through all of the topple cards but couldn’t keep mezike’s economy in check resulting in a win for him using life’s default tiebreaker, cash.

We squeezed in a learning game of Radlands which I enjoyed very much. I can’t say the same for my opponent.

We also played Watergate. This game is all about tempo. There’s a beautiful narrative arc to this game that you can viscerally feel. You feel insightful as The Editor and properly villainous as Nixon. Cards feel powerful, borderline broken but it all comes together because those powerful effects get removed from the game, thinning your deck and generally making it worse! You end up cycling through your deck multiple times so this means your opponent gets a chance to counterpunch harder for every punch landed. This tug of war is coupled to a great abstract spatial mini game of pinning evidence to a pinboard to reveal the conspiracy. Nixon drew first blood by taking most of the witnesses out of the game but I managed to make him sweat in the mid game by focusing on two key leads. In the end Nixon persevered and managed to serve out his full term for the win before I could piece together the puzzle. This game packs the full experience of a CDG like Twilight Struggle in about 45 minutes.

The opening game was Floor Plan. My biggest issue with Roll and Writes is the lack of meaningful interaction and the lack of tension in play. This game surprised me as it actually delivered on both fronts. There is no direct interaction but the pressure of hearing your opponent checking off special effects and driving towards the end game trigger meaningfully changes how you plan out your house. Planning out the house is so constrained on this small grid so you feel stressed and tense as you try to squeeze in a 1x6 closet next to the massive pool and deck. Why the hell does the client want a walk in closet with a poolside view and access to the deck?! This may not have been enough to win over my apathy to the genre but it was certainly one of the strongest showings that I’ve played.

One of my bigger beefs with the Eklund Pax games, which I generally think are really good, is how difficult it is to track how close everyone else is to winning. This wouldn't be a big deal but it is CRUCIAL that all players are doing so.

For Pax Porker, we resorted to using colored tokens to track Prestige, way easier to see than the symbols on the cards obscured by all the artwork.

Once you play on Yucate, going back to playing the physical implementation is harsh.

Re: Dark Venture, I found this app which might be enough to beat the tedium apps.apple.com/gb/app/dark-venture-companion/id1448288727

It’s a very well done app which mostly eliminates the need to rifle through the deck and books and manage the player dashboards. I’m still not sure it’s worth the investment of energy but it’s enough for me to try again solo before moving it on.

We had a 3 player game of Battletech Alpha Strike last night. It was my first time, the other two players had played once. Alpha Strike is a highly stripped down subset of the rules, and the benefit you get is a much shorter playtime. We each had one large mech and one smaller one, and it still took 2 1/2 hours. And that was with one of the mechs getting one-shotted on turn 1!

After that we played two rounds of Volt. This was one player's first time, and the first time for everyone with more than two players. I didn't really find the addition of a third player to make decisions much more difficult, as I tended to focus in on the single bot that I felt I had the best chance of injuring / killing.

The one thing I will say is that it made the TIMING on the action dice to be much more vital. I got really lucky on one turn, when I had programmed some late movement, and the other bots were kind enough to line up right in front of me and I shoved them both into the pit!

DarthJoJo wrote: Turns out Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is a pretty great distraction on long car trips.

Just curious how this works out. Is this just a backseat passenger thing, unfolding the map and playing through? Last time we took a long car trip with some gamer friends, we ended up playing "word Zendo" quite a bit since the driver can participate too.

Had a real bad play of Core Space. Core Space can be a bit arbitrary and definitely punishing, and that's what happened. My spouse did not appreciate it and I wasn't having fun either. Wasn't table swept but we definitely stopped before the end. In retrospect, I should have reviewed the rules much more carefully upon coming back to it. We had some things come up (e.g. hunters/rock worms) where I was only somewhat iffy on the rules. Didn't remember the True Born rules very well either.

Ah, that's a bummer. Hopefully you're not completely done with it, but it's hard to overcome bad experiences.

It'll be around for a bit, I might start playing it solo though.

That reminds me of another big plus to playing Battletech last night... I got the other two players on board for a future 3 player game of Core Space. I have literally never played it with another person. I am going to refresh myself on the rules (again) and try to come up with a game composition that will be a good intro. I plan to use pre-configured crews so we can save all of that setup time.

ratpfink wrote:

DarthJoJo wrote: Turns out Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is a pretty great distraction on long car trips.

Just curious how this works out. Is this just a backseat passenger thing, unfolding the map and playing through? Last time we took a long car trip with some gamer friends, we ended up playing "word Zendo" quite a bit since the driver can participate too.

It’s just my wife and me playing up front while the kids do whatever in back. Should have remembered a notebook to track all the clues and leads, but it worked no worse than on a table.

Msample wrote: For Pax Porker, we resorted to using colored tokens to track Prestige, way easier to see than the symbols on the cards obscured by all the artwork.

Once you play on Yucate, going back to playing the physical implementation is harsh.

I second this, we do the exact same thing. I have a bunch of blue/red/green/white disks that we put on everyone's grudge pile, so you can see how much prestige of each color everyone else has at a glance. I highly recommend it if you've got game pieces lying around you can use to do it.

The big one for me lately is Liars Dice, which I hadn't played in a while. Damn, it is a LOT of fun and needs to hit the table more.