What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Exactly!
I think the battles in Inscription work rather well. You can choose to not build a fleet and lose by default, but you miss out on potentially good rewards. But since you also get points for building ships, doing it and then eventually losing the battle is not a total loss.

The voting feels much more like a missed opportunity in the one and a half game I've played. Yes, you get points for getting votes, but if they are inconsequential, then it's basically just another track. It seems like adding permanent effects or maybe having a default advantage for being on the winning side of the vote would make it much more interesting.

FalCon 2012 was this past weekend. Here's what I played, along with what I had to say about some of them:

7 Wonders Duel
waiting for others to arrive. I like this one a bunch and play it on BGA as well. The expansions don't interest me.

Plutocracy
To win Plutocracy, you need to have the most delegates in the Plutocratic Council. To get delegates, you need to hold seats in the planetary parliaments. You get seats by buying them with Space Euros (their term) and you get Space Euros by buying low and selling high. So the main action of the game (buying and selling) is only a step toward what ultimately matters; Space Euros have zero value ultimately.

To buy and sell you travel between planets, which takes time. Take too much time and you're out of play for a while. Also, you don't have a whole lot to begin with. The planets move in their orbits, so you're often considering where a destination will be rather than where it is.

This sounds more interesting than it is, though. The economy is extremely basic, and the buying and selling is kind of by-the-numbers. There is no randomness and nothing is hidden, so each turn there is almost always a single move, obvious to everyone. Money and time are both very tight, so you don't have a lot of wiggle room to explore options.

That said, we played with the basic, introductory setup. There are rules for a random setup that may make things more interesting. While there's still nothing hidden or random after setup, it may provide more interesting trade paths to exploit. So I'd like to give that a try.

An Empty Throne (2x)
I'm a sucker for John Clowdus' weirdo 2p card games and this was an insta-back for me. Omen is an all-timer, and I liked The North, though it's a little too weirdo.

Empty Throne is more on the Omen side. What you want to do is clear, as well as how you'll go about doing it. The challenge comes in that jerk on the other side of the table who is for some reason trying to do the same thing and won't leave you alone. What at first seems like an overwhelming amount of card powers becomes more manageable after only a little play, and you can settle in and just struggle with getting your hands on that empty throne (I guess? The game itself is kind of mum on the subject of the titular throne).

Merchant of Venus
On a custom-made huge board. MoV is always a great time.

Maglev Metro
I really like this one. At first glance it looks like a standard route-building PUAD optimization game but it's actually incredibly thinky and tough. Played Friday night and taught (but didn't play in) Saturday morning.

It's a Wonderful World (x2)
Taught Friday night and they had a good time so we immediately played again.

Free Ride
After struggling with a typical 2F rulebook that makes this game seem far more complicated than it is, this is a pretty light route-building game (it's sot of PUAD except you don't actually pick anything up other than imaginary passengers). There's nothing earth-shattering here but it's pleasant and has some good jostling and racing.

Brian Boru
Not at ALL what I was expecting. I thought this was going to be some kind of typical mechanism fest with some tacked on rune collection or something. Instead it's a really interesting trick-taking game that affects a board. Here's how much I liked it: I'm not going to complain about the marriage track!

This was probably my favorite new-to-me game of FalCon 2022. Ordered a copy.

Mosaic: A Story of Civilization
This is the FalCon game everyone wants to know about. We played the KS edition.

Mosaic is a not-bad civ game. Actions are short, and almost everything is card based. You do what you'd expect to do in it, and it actually plays pretty snappy (our 4p game went maybe 3 hours?)

Mechanically it's fine, though there are some things that grate. Because it's a civ game it naturally has three kinds of combat units you can do stuff with (I don't know what stuff because that never interests me and I paid no attention to it). But if a resource you need is two spaces away from your city, there is no mechanism for sending someone out to get it. You have to just build a whole damn other city to get it or hope a card comes up that will let you have any resource on the board. There are a million things you can possibly just qualify for and get, but you have to be on top of them to know they're out there. (And god help you if you work towards one based on the info card and turns out that one got randomly removed from the game, oopsie!) That was my big complaint based on my strategy.

So let's talk about the deluxe production. You can probably disregard this because I'll sum up by saying how tired I am of this "gorgeous" aesthetic. It's exhausting to me. Most of the plastic isn't even that bad, but there are some functional problems. There are "cities" and "towns" and they're functionally different in the game but they're all just ugly colored hexagon on the board. You have population counters which are figures of people, that do nothing except stand in a spot as a resource to be spent. Why are they plastic? Because they could be. Also the ones that represent five population are slightly bigger, but unless you're looking at the two different sizes there's no way to know, and they're not so much bigger that it's easy to read across the table. As I said, there are three different military units so you have those on the board as well. Combine with a map that is more "beautiful" than functional and it turns into a garish optical assault that might dampen the trousers of the average KS patron but doesn't make the game any better. (Is there an absurd start player token that doesn't actually do anything? Buddy, you didn't have to ask.) Oh, and of course there's metal fucking coins. Oh, I didn't build any but there are also Wonders figures that don't show ownership, which is great.

So if you're into that stuff, it's there, go have a ball. The game itself? As I said, it's fine, but it doesn't do anything especially better than a number of other civ games. However, it's a genre that interests me, and I do want to dig past the deluxe and check out the game more.

It's funny how often "deluxe" versions make a game actively harder or more annoying to play

Ah_Pook wrote: It's funny how often "deluxe" versions make a game actively harder or more annoying to play

And they always "deluxify" in the same ways so that every game ultimately has the exact same aesthetics.

Decktective/Deckscape
I have become an apologist for puzzle games, slowly but surely, and I stumbled across the “Decktective” series. They are really, really good. I mean, shockingly entertaining, clever, and well-designed not just from a puzzle perspective but as a game system.

There’s two types: Decktective, where you jointly (1-5P) try to solve a mystery, and I mean an actual mystery, where visuals matter but not in the kitschy hidden number way…it’s more clever.

The other is the Deckscape version where you are trying to escape from a room, not unlike Unlock or Exit!, but in a much different, far more interesting way.
.
Empty Throne
@Legomancer: John Clowdus’ Bhazum is his great work, in my opinion, even more than Reign and even the one with the repurposed minis and cloth mat. If you haven’t gotten that, get it.

For what it’s worth…Empty Throne is very fun. It somehow made me want to get that Craft Fair game, Ferox, again. They’re not alike so I don’t know why. I never should have sold or given that away. It’s so stupid expensive now.

Rolling Bones
I used to think Heroscape would be my deathbed game, the one I would have known I loved most and played most. While it may still be my greatest gaming love, I have played Rolling Bones far more. Jur sent it to me for Secret Satan maybe 5 years ago and it is played every single weekend at least once. It’s the perfect “I have drank a half bottle of Noah’s Mill and am only capable of minimal rules” game, but it’s more than that. I had to re-ink the dice!

Octo Dice
It’s been a long time since I broke this out, and I’m about 1/3 from out of paper on this one. I absolutely adore this stupid game. It’s Clever but before Clever existed. I may have to get a third set of dice.

Ah_Pook wrote: It's funny how often "deluxe" versions make a game actively harder or more annoying to play

"Deluxe" versions of games seem to be designed more often by the people who sell them than the people who play them. You could make a bong out of Swarovski crystal, but there are reasons beyond cost that people don't.

I'm learning restraint in a similar way with my Warcry board setups. It's fun to squeeze a ton of cool-looking scenery onto a 22x30" board, but there's a fine line between "intricate map" and "unplayable diorama" which makes me grateful that each official terrain expansion includes a deck of cards with varying layouts.

Case in point is the three-level, four-player tournament finale map we used last weekend:



Our Skaven player (new to the game) lucked out in being able set up his Rat Ogor with a Warpfire Cannon for an arm in a sniping position at the top of the tower, and within minutes this scrap was dubbed "The Battle for Ratlantis." Yes, we had a hilarious and dramatic match, but even with plenty of surface area to accommodate four warbands on a single board, platforms at each board edge to allow every player to deploy on the first or second level, and ladders galore, the sheer size of the map still has us working out house rules to balance flight and falling for our next bout. My phone was the de facto jukebox that day, so I'm going to get better photos this weekend.

At the club:

The Essen gang have recently returned in a flop-sweat with a cornucopia of rash purchases. I had a spin on three new games last night:

Eleven, a cardboard tribute to PC football manager sims and an adaptation of the older Club Stories, and which I have been super excited about for some time, was the main event of the evening. I enjoyed it with a few caveats. Despite the hard work by the dev team this is still very much a solo game; it's playable with a group but with the base box on it's own there is literally zero interaction beyond someone taking a card you would have liked (but whatever, there are plenty of other things to do). Some of the additional content and advanced rules create a bit more engagement but... there's no escaping that this is and was always meant to be best served solitaire.

It also very clearly has Trewiczek's fingerprints all over it as almost every component has his signature approach of having some kind of text-heavy special effect that interacts with other parts of the game to create intricate combination plays, a design approach which I happen to love but I also know it turns a lot of other people off. It also makes Eleven a very long-winded affair to play as there is a lot of stuff to take in, the game is an insane table hog with just so much stuff everywhere to constantly take in that one passing wag suggested with knowing irony that it would be better off as a videogame. Again, this is fine for a solitaire affair where you can think about the three actions you want to take in any particular round and then execute them, but the timing and pacing became a bit funky with three of us taking interleaving actions. At one point I had a round where none of my actions were going to impact the game state so, with the blessings of the other players, I took them all at once so that I could pop down to the bar while they carried on without me.

I'll undoubtedly have more to say once my own copy arrives and I've had a chance to delve deeply into it, but my initial hot take is that I liked it every bit as much as I thought I would, however I doubt I will be pushing it much if at all as a group activity on game night.


Heat is the vintage car-racing sorta-sequel to the frankly brilliant Flamme Rouge and takes the approach that moar=betta. It's unfair to make a straight comparison between the two games because they fill very different niches; Heat lacks the tempo of its progenitor due to its additional complexity and leans far more heavily into strategic rather than social play, making it a different game for a different mood. It also comes with a considerable amount of advanced components that we did not try on the night but which I very much want to include the next time we play as they look like they intensify the game in exactly the direction that it needs to go.

The game uses movement cards in a similar way to Flamme Rouge, but also requires you to add 'Heat' cards from a personal supply to your deck for doing various competitive actions such as unsafe cornering or attempting to reach warp speed. If you run out of them then you spin off the course and get some awkward cards added to your deck that force you to make random draws instead of choosing your cards. You can cool down your engine to put Heat cards back into their source pile, which you do by dropping down into lower gears - given that the gear you are in defines how many cards you must play there is a lot of thought that needs to go into timing of card plays and discarding Heat, and how all of this is affected by track position, with the added consideration that playing three or four low value cards allows you to coast safely round a tight corner and ready for a big acceleration in the following turn but prevents you cooling down.

All of this makes for a more thoughtful and slower paced affair and it's something which I think will actually be much better with even more options added in from the advanced cards. I like the Heat and Cool Down mechanism and can see this being more entertaining than the likes of Formula De or Rallyman. Definitely want to play some more of this. As for a quick, fun and sociable racing game though it doesn't come close to hitting the same sweet spot as les Cyclistes do.


Moon Adventure takes Deep Sea Adventure and makes it both far more complicated as well as co-operative. It was incredibly dull, lacking any of the drama or fun of the original. I don't really have much to say about it other than that nobody at the table liked it and it was pretty quickly panned by all.


At home:

Lots and lots of Ark Nova, it was our game of choice over our summer vacation so we got in some intense play of around 20+ games in a short period of time. What I will say about this game is that the learning curve is really freaking long, and surprisingly so; there are things I discovered a dozen games in that surprised me and even more that I had learned by game #20 that changed my perception of how it all works together. It's kind of amusing to read commentators complaining after a couple of games about various parts of the game being over or under powered, or about the size of the draw deck, etc, because boy are they completely and wildly wrong about those assumptions. Things that initially bothered me in the design I now see the purpose of and it all just... works, and works so well. Here's the thing though - after such an intense bout of play we're now at a point where it just feels a bit empty, and our motivation to play has been completely sapped. So despite how much we have enjoyed the journey I feel like it might have just run it's course for us, at least for now.

Glad you're enjoying Eleven. I was kind of leery of the head-down, solitaire aspect to it and, in the end, I just didn't feel like justifying the cost. Guess I've played enough Football Manager in my life.

Yeah, I went into it with no illusions on what it was going to be. I just can’t make room for FM in my life any longer but Club Stories (and now Eleven) hit a sweet spot for me.

The US release is December and I have no doubt there will be a rash of cheap copies available by Spring for anyone sideways curious about it. A lot of people are going to bounce right off this for sure.

I thought eleven looked cool but the amount of add on material on the Kickstarter was a real turn off. I absolutely hate Kickstarter games that come in 20 different boxes where you have to puzzle together what's the best way to play from among the billion poorly tested permutations.

That's true, and I agree, but will note that the expansions here were all based on material that the designer, Thomas Jansen, already had in progress for Club Stories, so it was a sounder footing than many other projects. In fairness Portal were actively stressing the whole way through that the extras were completely superfluous to the experience and I can vouch that there is more than enough content in the base box to keep most people happy for a long time.

The only rough edge for me is caused by the addition of multiplayer, where they appear to have suddenly realised partway through the campaign that PvP is inevitable in the cup competition and the solution they came up with for handling those matches seems a bit off. Lots of people are commenting that they want more interaction, but the interactive parts added in are a bit rubbish. But, like I said above, this is undoubtedly best as a solo game anyway, not least because the entire original design ethos was shaped around that premise.

My own decision to go all-in was based on knowing that it's something I'm getting just for me and the trust I have in Jansen on the back of both Club Stories and Everything Lost. If he hadn't been involved in the project after Portal picked it up then I may well have stuck to just the base box. The promos look like 90% garbage as you would expect.

I will totally let you know how well all the extra stuff works when it arrives in a couple of weeks time

mezike wrote: At home:

Lots and lots of Ark Nova, it was our game of choice over our summer vacation so we got in some intense play of around 20+ games in a short period of time. What I will say about this game is that the learning curve is really freaking long, and surprisingly so; there are things I discovered a dozen games in that surprised me and even more that I had learned by game #20 that changed my perception of how it all works together. It's kind of amusing to read commentators complaining after a couple of games about various parts of the game being over or under powered, or about the size of the draw deck, etc, because boy are they completely and wildly wrong about those assumptions. Things that initially bothered me in the design I now see the purpose of and it all just... works, and works so well. Here's the thing though - after such an intense bout of play we're now at a point where it just feels a bit empty, and our motivation to play has been completely sapped. So despite how much we have enjoyed the journey I feel like it might have just run it's course for us, at least for now.

I gave ARK NOVA 4 tries and walked away. That's more than a lot of games that I've written off. I'm glad you're enjoying it, but I think in this day and age - or even 20 years ago - I think I gave it a fair shot.

The game its been commonly compared to it TERRAFORMING MARS. I've logged 50 FtF plays and god knows how many on the iPad app . I'll still play that because at its core, its different enough and doesn't have some of the same flaws ( IMO ) that ARK NOVA has.

I am not downplaying your like of the game, but I think your commitment to the game in finding its strengths is unusual esp these days with so much stuff to sort through.

Msample wrote:
The game its been commonly compared to it TERRAFORMING MARS. I've logged 50 FtF plays and god knows how many on the iPad app . I'll still play that because at its core, its different enough and doesn't have some of the same flaws ( IMO ) that ARK NOVA has.

What did you not like about AN compared to TM?

while I'm sitting here letting CAD chug in the background (dear lord.... what I would give for some decent 3D software)

My daughter had been playing quite a few games with me during the week, but she's officially a teenager now and really busy with after school stuff, so that's fallen away. But she wanted to play somethings on Sunday for her birthday weekend.

So we played Monopoly Gamer which isn't a terrible version of Monopoly. Mario characters (i think there's another version that's Mario-Kart themed) and some of the income is property based, but there's a race to "fight" the koopalings which is where a bulk of your points will generate. So a built-in timer with the boss fights, a special action die to simulate turtle shells and POW blocks. It's not too bad.

Champions of Hara -

the two of us had gotten on a kick of heavier 2 player games. We had tried things like Duel of Ages and Undaunted, but she likes more- puzzly stuff, with hand management and a single character. So we've played Mage Knight, but Champions of Hara has a significantly lower rules overhead while still having alot of the hand-management puzzle. I played "Leaf" the plant man and she played "Thel" the life/death magic witch. no scenarios, no corrupted villains, just a race to max energy. I jumped at the end and defeated a hydra at the end for the win. Over our half-dozen or so games against each other, it's my first time beating her in Hara.



and the boys and I continue having a game setup during the week, which has been great. Runewars last week, then we finished a game of Spirit Island.

First time playing for the two younger boys, but my eldest son really likes it. He'd only been playing as Lightnings Swift Strike....which does make things easy with every power being fast. But I agree with others who have said it's really not a great learning spirit, because you lose out on having to plan for fast/slow timing. So, i convinced him to take something else, and he took Shadows Flicker like Flame. We also had Lightning, River and I took Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds. No invader, no scenario, just normal mode. and those boys really took to fighting the invaders.

Quickly River was pushing people around so that lightning could zap them. Lightning was helping out by reaching out from the center of the board and Shadows was generating fear and swallowing up explorers to slow things down. We finished at terror level two, with the two spirits far away from me working together to eliminate the last towns on the board. As Keeper, I walled up the line just back from the coast, limiting the exploration that could happen there. It's definitely in the rotation for them, and we'll start on adding the countries to the invaders. Next up is Root.

Msample wrote: ... I think your commitment to the game in finding its strengths is unusual esp these days with so much stuff to sort through.

I do make an effort to go deep on the games that I purchase to play at home (otherwise what's the point of having a copy at home), maybe not so much on the ones I encounter on club nights, but in this particular case we were away with relatives for a couple of weeks and this was the only game we had brought with us Each year we take something with us and due to the brutal midday sun we have a few hours every day indoors; this year it happened to be Ark Nova and we found we could easily knock out back-to-back games in that time which is why we were able to go so deep into it over such a short period.

On balance I prefer TM to AN, but only all-in TM for exhaustive reasons that have been beaten to death in these forums. I think Ark Nova is the kind of game that rewards being played a lot, but I also strongly feel that if you don't like a game enough to go deep then there's no reason to make the attempt.