What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Ah_Pook wrote:

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?

My first game, my opponent got stuck in sort of an early game feedback loop, as did I to a lesser extent while we both spun our wheels waiting to get more cash. The icon overload and poorly organized rules made the game more frustrating than it should have been . An index would have helped. When a game needs 6-7 pages of extended explanations of certain card's effects, you know ( or the developer should have known ) that Houston, we have a problem. While many compare this to Terraforming Mars, its nowhere near as good a game IMO. Plays slower ( I've played four, would not advise ) . The sporadic timing of Income makes for a slow early game, as does the need to go fishing for cards that may or may not help you. Too many have pre requisites and unlike TM you can't sell them back for cash. The limited hand size ( why ? ) makes holding onto cards in hopes you can fulfill the pre reqs later hard. I think its also hard for a player to catch up once falling behind.

The end game scoring is weird to say the least. Its plays slower than TM. At least in TM the number of players doesn't have a linear effect on play time whereas AK it does.

I've only played AN a couple of times and it really feels like it needed another editing pass on everything. It just feels not-quite-there. I can't put my finger on it.

Ark Nova is one of the titles in my group's boardgame mine field. Everybody has a couple of overbearing titles that they "want to get to the table." A dozen lifestyle games that everyone is thinking we should explore for multiple plays.

Except me of course. All my favorite games are brief and compelling.

Y'all have been talking about the deluxiness of the new games and I'm right there with you. Everything is physically big. But a lot of what's coming my way is also rules-big as well and the asymmetry in them isn't helping. Our one guy wants us all to play Root a few more times so that we can really appreciate it, and I don't care if I ever see the game again. Everyone seems to have that game, the one you need to play eight times to really start appreciating how good it is. How many times do I have to play a game before I'm politely allowed to turn it down? How many times until I'm allowed to say I've given it a fair enough chance?

Our foray into podcasting is keeping us on older, more straightforward titles. So that's providing some pushback.

Sagrilarus wrote:
Except me of course. All my favorite games are brief and compelling.

Yeah, yeah. Like, "I'm firm, you're stubborn, they're pigheaded." We get it.

Played some Heroscape for the first time in like at least 3 years. Game is still great. Cancel one of your kickstarters and go back that shit.

Des destroyed me in Cave Evil tonight, brooking no reminder of it being my birthday on her path to conquest.

Our Awakening Evil was revealed to be the Darkest Evil Bitch - if she wakes, she immediately kills the Necromancer with the least Kill Points, then spawns in the Necropolis and attacks whichever player has the fewest KP at the end of each round. I thought I had an ace in the hole by strapping an Astral Bomb to a floating corpse and aiming at her burliest squad, but the damn thing exploded en route. Even though it shredded everything nearby, none of it technically counted for Kill Points because it was a self-own and not a combat action. C'est la vie! She wound up trapping my Wizard in a collapse and took her time murdering all the wandering monsters on the map. When the Darkest Evil Bitch eventually reared her head, our KP totals weren't even close and I was mercilessly devoured. Amazing session.

Legomancer wrote: I've only played AN a couple of times and it really feels like it needed another editing pass on everything. It just feels not-quite-there. I can't put my finger on it.

I had exactly the same impression.

Another successful Nerd Night. Allie was camping in Yosemite last weekend, and we all knew should would want to play the big map we had set up, so tonight was a new four-player scenario on the Old Ones' board.

We drew two Twists for the battle that paired well together: Rainstorm of Ghyran and Azyrite Lightning Storm. The former heals one damage on every wounded figure at the end of each round. The latter means each unit that ends its activation out in the open rolls 2d6 and adds their elevation in inches - on a 10+, lightning strikes them for 2d6 damage.

This is enough damage to kill most chaff units outright or to take 1/3 to 1/2 health off the top of most Big Guys. Whereas the last scenario saw everyone jockeying for the top level to unleash death from above, this bout we're all scrabbling for elbow room under the walkways and trying to avoid getting shoved out into the weather. The platforms on this map are 5" and 10" high, so anybody caught on a platform for some reason has a frighteningly good chance of receiving some God-given electroconvulsive therapy. We're all holding our breath to see who'll attempt to grab the Key objective on the second level...

Grandma gave me a small check for my birthday and insisted that I spend it on games - it does her a lot of good to see family every week and it's really neat how much she knows about our ongoing stories. Once again, I'm the one who owns all of the Warhammer stuff, so I told our group that whoever wins the big battle gets to decide which new miniatures or scenery we put the money towards. Exciting conclusion next weekend!

In exchange for the host's 5-year-old agreeing to go to bed, the Monday night group let him pick the game and he immediately pointed and said: "Dinosaurs!" So, Tiny Epic Dinosaurs it was. I came to appreciate this one much more after a few plays, as my initial couple tries left me kind of cold. But the crucial decisions of in the ranger placement phase extrapolate to so much more strategy, it's just another example of the depth inherent to these small games. I went after contracts quickly, having learned that holding out to swing for the fences often brings more problems than it ends up being worth. Better to churn beasties as fast as possible and keep see-sawing back and forth between resources and dinos. It's getting the rhythm right that is often key. However, one of the most mundane spots on the board is the one that gets you the first player token, which can also be really crucial, depending on how aggressive other people are being. I did manage to wrest it away from the original first player once and then another player took it from me, but our original player managed to get it back and keep it for 4 of the 6 rounds, which turned out to be crucial in terms of a couple key Research cards. I thought I had the win secured with the most public contracts (4) and a private one for 17, but I narrowly came in second behind that first player, 83-81-64-59 and it was on the back of the Research cards that gave him points for most carnivores and points for every 2 dinos on his ranch at the end.

All of that positive talk being said, I'm starting to see the limits of the gameplay in that patterns are emerging and this last play had a bit of the samey feel. Think I might bring in the mini-expansion next time to see if that adds a little dynamism to the flow of the game.

Mosaic.

Isn't within 100 yards of being a 2-hour game. Towards the end we were taking actions just to burn through a deck to get to the third scoring round. We forced the ending to hurry up at 11:30, when we started sometime just after 8.

It was fine, not really a Civ game at all in spite of all the window dressing. There's virtually no movement, and you don't really need to go anywhere much. You can just drop a city anywhere on the whole doggone map when you build, so there's no exploring. With that said, I think you could more or less eliminate the map. It could be replaced by a board with ten or so spaces. No combat, there's a couple of cards where you can eliminate someone else's guys but they just go, there's no risk/reward thing to it. Boink! I just purchased your guys out of existence.

You don't put people on the map. They sit on your player board along with other resources that could just be kept as a number on a track. In fact you could remove all of the resources and replace them with simple counters, and the game could lose 75% of its mass. As it stands they have tracks for your production rate, so they could have just put a track next to each to count your current total. Money too. The only pieces you would need would be the revised board I mentioned above, cities and towns pieces, soldier pieces because those do go on the board, then decks of cards. Oh -- and the places where the cards are turned face-up. There are chunky victory point placards (2x3 inches maybe) that could be cards as well. They have a nice heft to them, but certainly not needed. You could fit the whole game in a GMT standard height box at that point, sell it for $49.99. But -- it would lose its table presence which is kind of odd. They needed the map to be a Mosaic in order to match the name, but it detracts and doesn't blend with the surrounding components.

Likely unplayable by someone with significant vision impairment. My 58 year old eyes were struggling even with my reading glasses, because as with all "big" games the rules are just scattered everywhere, on the far side of a big table setup and facing whichever way and you can't necessarily make an informed decision without reading everything. Yep, first game blues, I'd likely learn which 90% to ignore once I have four or five plays in. But this is the Kickstarter ideal, the functional requirement that is pressed on current game design because it sells. Games that are "big" are more likely to generate revenue, even when "big" doesn't add or even detracts from usability.

Odd game. Kind of has one foot in the boat, one on the pier in a couple of ways. More of an engine builder.

I give it a 7.


One last thought -- my buddy has a "gaming table" and prior to set up of the game we all decided, again, to put the top on it instead of playing in the hole because it's just easier and more comfortable. This seems to be our standard operating procedure, open up the table, start setting things up, question the choice, then putting the top back on and playing on it like we would any normal table. Do people actually use the holes in their tables? Is it just us?

Only one of my gaming friends has a gaming table, and he does use the hole because it helps keep the dice from rolling off the table. If I had such a table, I probably leave the top on.

I could see it being a touch more hassle to play underneath the surface so that makes sense. My use case for it if I had one would be to set up long games and wargames so I could play multisession easily not on a screen with VASSAL or whatever.

Erik Twice wrote:

Legomancer wrote: I've only played AN a couple of times and it really feels like it needed another editing pass on everything. It just feels not-quite-there. I can't put my finger on it.

I had exactly the same impression.

This should be the official motto of Kickstarter-era games.

Shellhead wrote:

fightcitymayor wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: WOW Wrath of the Lich King is one of the most soulless, empty husks of a game I've ever played. Just to offer a counterpoint to Pook's take. I actually returned it to Target.

I've always found Pandemic to be sooooo mechanical, but I managed to get the Cthulhu version fairly cheap at one point, thinking "Okay, this at least has some theme, let's try it out." But I couldn't even get into it there. Collecting colored cards & hoping badguys don't spawn near you (or if you spawn all the bigbads then you lose), it just didn't click for me. No matter how they re-theme it, there is like no immersion there at all. IMHO.

I completely agree. I played vanilla Pandemic once and found it to be dry and mechanical. Everybody else at the table wanted to play again, so I sat out the second game and just watched a repeat of a dry and mechanical experience. A few years ago, I played one game of Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. I wanted to like it, but it was only slightly more interesting than regular Pandemic, and still fairly lacking in theme compared to most Mythos-inspired board games.

I had the same experience. I picked up a used copy vanilla Pandemic at 2nd & Charles, and was stoked to play. After one game, I realized that this wasn't exciting, or fun, for me at all. I found it lacking tension and ver mechanical to the point of boredom. I find the cheap ass copy of Black Death far more exciting.

Gary Sax wrote: I could see it being a touch more hassle to play underneath the surface so that makes sense. My use case for it if I had one would be to set up long games and wargames so I could play multisession easily not on a screen with VASSAL or whatever.

I've been tempted to spring for one of these: www.walmart.com/ip/Fat-Cat-Poker-Blackja...op-8-Players/7730923 or something like it. Except I usually play on the dining room table, not my round "gaming" table (old oak dinette table that I bought 30-some-odd years ago and painted black).