What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Barnes’ copy of Bullet: Heart. Haven’t tried the competitive mode yet, but this is a winner. Played some time attack to learn the rules and a few rounds against bosses with my wife. There’s a great tension when you’ve run out of AP and are just watching those last few bullets drop, but it never feels out of control. It even lets you feel clever on the regular. Ling Ling is my girl. She’s a little dependent on drawing high numbers, but she offers great control. Unfortunately she’s also my wife’s girl, so Rie might be my new girl. It feels great to have your teammate keep chucking bullets at you that you’re protected from and reflecting them to the boss.

Is Bullet better than a guitar? Yes. Thus…
Darth JoJo 1
Barnes 0

Also jamming a lot of classics. Pandemic, Ticket to Ride: New York and King of Tokyo. I’d like to play New York with more than two. It’s a super tight map that feels like whoever draws an eight-point ticket wins, but it’s so easy to block that short tickets might be the right pick in higher player counts.

It’s been fun watching the evolving meta of my sons and Tokyo. They used to reroll everything that wasn’t a smash, but now it’s the upgrade card meta. Last game one son lost one to his brother’s twenty but was still happy because he had seven upgrades.

I've gotten in multiple plays of Radlands lately, and I'm really digging it. It is quickly moving towards the top of my favorite 2 players games list.

Played a re-themed Eight-Minute Empire on Saturday. I had a lot of fall chores to do this last weekend, but a friend is getting married in November and he invited me to his bachelor party of boardgaming. I showed up at the start when there were just four people and asked to play something short. I haven't played the original Eight-Minute Empire, but this version was supposedly very similar with a few extra resources added to the board. We each played a native tribe spreading out and taking land around the Great Lakes region, and I got to play the Mohawks. Although three of us were unfamiliar with the rules, it played quickly. I was a threat for the win, so the owner and one other player each killed one of my meeple cubes on the final turn, knocking me into third place with a still respectable 10 vp. One play was enough for me. It seemed obvious that each player wants to alternate activities in this order: move, build a trading post, gain meeple cubes, repeat. After 8 turns, you score territories and resources and it's over. Good, for a filler game.

Have played in a bit of a flurry lately, after hardly playing at all.

Trajan. Trade item, because I've always been a little interested and because I've liked the two other Felds I've played (CoB and Bora Bora). Only played once at 2p, and I suspect it's better with a full boat. It's probably the most obviously point salad game of the three I mentioned, and I explained it when I taught it as being like Mario Party minigames. Would like to try again.

Power Grid with the USA map. None of the four of us had played recently, and I thought I was doing well on being emcee until I realized I'd forgotten to adjust the resource refresh per step. Caught it for step 3, missed it for step 2. Felt really bad about that, but the person who was most punished by this error, because she was always or almost always in first place on the player order track (and thus collected resources last) still won by a wide margin. Unfortunately, as a result, the game did run long. I really like PG and would like to play it more, but I'm probably about the only one around here that feels that way.

Colt Express x3. Played once at 4p and twice at 3p. First time playing. Cute and fun, if a little too 3D for its own good, as the bandits and loot are hard to manipulate inside the train cars. I have the big box, and sorting out the right base-game-only components was a hassle, even though I followed the sorting guide, but everyone was patient with me.

Las Vegas. Probably the lamest Dorn game out there, but it filled a time niche adequately.

Las Vegas is amazing. That tie-breaker rule where nobody who is tied can win is brilliant and makes a simple dice game into a fun filler.

stormseeker75 wrote: Las Vegas is amazing. That tie-breaker rule where nobody who is tied can win is brilliant and makes a simple dice game into a fun filler.

LAS VEGAS is a regular in our groups quiver of late night filler/night cap games.

The tie breaker is easily the best part ; two players can be in a death match for a high value payout with each committing 3-4 dice ; then late in the round a player with a spare die will toss one in hoping that the top two players cancel out one another.

Las Vegas is great. I've found it to really succeed with non-hobbyists as well.

How do you all feel about the expansion stuff that's included in the Royale version?

We haven't used the mini-games but do always play with the larger die.

I didn't even know about it! Guess that needs to go on my watch list.

Never played with expansion, never felt the need.

Played Pan Am for the first time tonight (was a birthday gift which was nice and on theme for me, even if I really don't need any more games...) As with all Funko/Ravensberger/Prospero Hall releases, it's very smart and quite easy to learn, but has a depth of decision-making that's pretty remarkable. There's enough randomness in the expansion die rolls and the event cards to require you to roll with the punches, but those punches always have an upside. Yes, they just took a route that you really worked to create, but they just handed you an assload of cash when they took it which you can then use to buy stock or just jump right to the top of a bidding spot that you otherwise wouldn't have been able to spend so much on. As with a lot of games that I'm teaching and playing for the first time, I kind of meandered around in the middle rounds making sure that everyone else knew what they were doing before I did, so I finished dead last of four, 18-17-15-14, but it was still a good time and I would definitely play again to figure out a better strategy.

As a side note, I will say that the choice to make two player colors gray and olive was a really unfortunate one, given how similar both appear under even mildly yellow lights and especially in contrast to the prominent red and yellow used for the other two colors. Not sure I understand that one, although I guess the other "standard" color of blue would've been difficult on the board. Something like black would have been a better choice than olive.

Updated my BG Stats app for the first time in a while. Warcry is the only game I've had on the table in about five months, and our group has been meeting weekly to play it since May with no signs of slowing down. It's just so good. I have yet to fully paint a fighter model, but I've been crushing my terrain backlog - I've been really into building battlefields to match the narrative of our campaigns. I wonder if anyone plans to review it here?

Looks like Barnes did:

therewillbe.games/articles-boardgame-reviews/7234-warcry-review

And Peter Hopkins a guest writer did:

therewillbe.games/articles-boardgame-reviews/7234-warcry-review

Oh yeah, I read those before I go to bed at night. I love hearing folks say nice stuff about stuff I love.

The game just released its second edition. I'm not sure if enough has changed to really warrant another top-to-bottom breakdown. However, it is easily my favorite skirmish game and I think its chances of taking off with non-hobbyists were hurt a lot by the fact that the game released right before lockdown. A glut of other skirmishers have dropped in the past three years - more than I can keep up with - and I'm kind of curious to know how everything stacks up.

Played a 4-player game of Nemesis: Lockdown yesterday. The game had plenty of epic moments, and overall it very much delivered on being a story generator. A favourite event was when I waited a turn in the surgery because I wanted to search for some bandages to avoid a serious wound when removing the larvae I was infected with. But in the event phase all players with a larvae and zero cards in hand died, which felt pretty perfect. Two of the other players got out of the base, but none of them made their objectives - one of them because the other player managed to survive.

We've played Lockdown once before and I've also soloed it a couple of times. I like all the new stuff like darkness and knowledge, and overall it felt like their was a lot of story hooks in the game - mechanisms that would in some way create fun, tense, or exciting moments while playing. I still think this is true, but after playing yesterday I think the original game is better at it's core. In Lockdown you don't really have to save the base or restore power and whatnot. You can do it, but you don't have to. In the original game you sort of have to make sure the engines are working and that you're going in the right direction, but the thing is that "right direction" can be very different depending on player objectives. Lockdown doesn't seem to have that same incentive to maybe work together. Yes, maybe a player wants to kill another player, and maybe a player wants to destroy the base. But since you don't have to visit the cooling system like you have to visit the engines in the original, deception and mistrust seems like a much smaller part of the game. And that's a shame because the combination of having to cooperate, but now knowing precisely who you can trust is what made the original so good.

Maybe Lockdown is better as a pure coop, but I'm not sure I need two big games that are so much the same on my shelf. But what about you, have you played both? If yes, do you have a favourite?