What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played another Fields of Fire WWII mission, I think I'm actually just going to finish the campaign in preparation for the new expansion. The turns where a German 88, a heavy machine gun, and a machine gun equipped squad were revealed covering the objectives was really tense but ended in some pretty cool heroic action for my MG team in a church tower covering the primary objective.

I recently got invited to a discord where the members especially enjoy 18xx and trick-taking games. 18xx can leave the station without me, but I enjoy some cards, and last night I played three new-to-me games on playingcards.io with two other guys. All are designs from Japan, where apparently that scene is really moving.

Ambiente Abissal (aka Planet etuC) - A shedding game so streamlined and dirt-simple that it seems impossible for there to be much to it. And yet, it's a blast. Six cards (1-6) in six colors (red-purple). You get 11 cards dealt to you and have to get rid of them by playing single cards or a pair of cards of a numerical or color value. Everyone has to follow your lead. Nothing to it. Tons of fun.

Segment Trix (aka Seven Segment Trix and Twinkle Starship) - Absolutely wild trick-taking game in which you play cards with digital numbers on them. You also have five wooden segments you can use to modify the card you play. So I can play a 1, add a segment to the top of it to make a digital 7, and voila, I've played a 7. HOWEVER, you are trying to make a bid, and the bid is equal to the number of segments you have left at the end of the round. You really have to balance how you use them so as not to accidentally screw yourself. There's also a way you can "shoot the moon" by using all your segments and taking no tricks. It's weird and twisty, and a whole lot of fun.

Maskmen - The most oddball game I played on trick-taking night, though actually a shedding game. You have a hand of wrestlers you're trying to empty. They have no values but they have colors. Which colors beat other colors? I guess you'll have to make 'em wrestle to find out! You play cards in such a way so as to create the hierarchy of colors. It's very odd and the color strength is hard to track but it's a good time.

The first two are currently in a Kickstarter as Planet etuC and Twinkle Starship. I'm super tempted, but it's $40+ for two games, one of which I can already play physically with a different deck, and both of which I can already play online with playingcards.io. If I buy them, they can then sit unplayed alongside Cobras, Wizard, Sticheln, Triumvirate, Fox in the Forest, Haggis, The Crew... I like to buy and support games I like but this doesn't seem to be...

...in the cards.

Maskmen is fun, We proxied it (you could use a sticheln deck - or a llama deck might be slightly better if you have that).

The eldest has now legitimately beat me twice in King of Tokyo. The first game he bought enough healing cards that he was functionally invulnerable in Tokyo. He proceeded to rub it in by rerolling a killing smash roll to energy and just buying more cards rather than end the game two rounds earlier.

The second time he built a filthy combo of energy-earning cards and another card that scored him a point for every power card he bought. I don’t think he ever entered Tokyo that game.

Good for him.

Oh Maskmen is really interesting- it's a weird game, trick taking AND shedding with no values, only suits (masks)...at first it makes NO sense. But then you realize that you are progressively establishing values as you play. I think it's a really smart little game. Love the Lucha setting too.

I finally got to play Dice Town. I got it in a trade a while back and my oldest daughter wanted to have a game night with her friend, myself, and my ex. It turns out that there are a surprising number of ways to cheat at the game, as evidenced by my daughter telling me the ex was cheating the whole game. My buddy Tom had warned me that this game was super bad for that but I wouldn’t have guessed it would happen at a family game.

The lessons I learned from this were that I like the idea of the game, and that Trader Joe Mango Wine is really just grape juice with malt beverage

For the first time since the pandemic started, I hosted boardgames for a bunch of players at my house. It's October, so the theme was all-horror, all-day.

Sea Evil was better than I had hoped. Even though I had read through the rules three times in recent weeks, we still had struggled at first to get the game rolling. The witch's first summoning delivered a Fungus Man to our ship, where he accomplished nothing the whole game. We found a stowaway boy named Oskar, who joined our crew. Then our lookout spotted a mighty whale, who proceeded to ram our ship and breach the hull. Three of our men rushed to repair the hull, while the rest assaulted the whale with harpoons and firearms. A huge crab clambered aboard and killed one whaler, but we killed it with the harpoon gun. The witch arrived and toasted another crewman with a fireball, but we shot her dead with the harpoon gun and won the game.

Camp Grizzly with five players was fun. Nobody was killed for a surprisingly long time, and we managed to get the goods needed for the Boat escape. However, Otis managed to kill a couple of our people, so the two characters at the escape point left without me. The boat engine wouldn't start, so they tried to swim across the lake, but Otis caught and drowned them both. That pushed the body count to 13, so Otis and I met at the campfire for a final battle. I had a bow and three arrows left, but Otis was fully leveled-up and killed me with a single blow.

I have probably played close to 20 games of The Gothic Game, but this four-player play was possibly the best. Devon drew various lucky cards and surged to 200 stamina. Nobody died for a very long time, and we all had enough cards that it seemed very risky to become the vampire, due to the possibility of anti-vampire items in play. Van tried to snipe Devon from the Tower with the blowgun, but Devon defended himself with the plumped pillow. Finally, Matt survived a lengthy drowning in the moat, only to die several turns later from exhaustion while washing dishes. Van was choking on prunes and trying to get to the Tower for fresh air, and I used the power of adjacency to slow him down. On a subsequent turn, he was unable to get closer to the Tower because I was standing in the space where his roll would have taken him. So he ducked into the Lavatory. I stepped into the Tower and poured boiling oil on him. Devon and I danced around for quite a while near the endless stairs down before I finally got next to him and tossed a scorpion on him. His pet bird killed the scorpion and injured me, but I finally impaled him with a skewer for the win.

Matt brought Vampire: Rivals, so we had to try it. It was Jyhad-lite (Vampire: the Eternal Struggle-lite, I guess) but mildly entertaining. I won with the violent Clan Brujah by ruthlessly attacking civilians for several VP. Devon ousted Van, the only non-Jyhad player present, which triggered the end but didn't give him enough VP to win.

Finally, Matt and Devon and I played Masters of the Night. They wanted to play on standard difficulty but I pushed for easy setting because they hadn't played before. We won very easily, with a six turns to spare, thanks to my suggestion that we ruthlessly exploit the museum early and often for the magic relics.

That sounds like a killer game day. I usually have a horror game night in October but it will have to be later this year, I can’t get anyone to commit lately.

Do not play Mosaic with 6.

Mosaic -- we played with 4 and it ran over 3 hours (and I rushed the ending.)

My three player game came in right at 2 hours. You must have had an unlucky shuffle of the bottom half of your decks with the Empire cards.

I'm deeply addicted to Solforge Fusion these days. I didn't back the Kickstarter, but now I'm going to a retail launch event Thursday and playing multiple games a day. If you like dueling card games this one is well worth a look, it's just really fun to play.

Basically it's Smash Up meets Keyforge, setup wise. You get procedurally generated half decks, and mush 2 together to make a deck. Not deck building, but still some agency. Then there's lane based combat and you're trying to kill each other. The hook is you have a 20 card deck and each cycle you're going to see 15 of the cards, and generally get to play 6 of them (barring things that let you play extra cards etc). Each time you play a card you upgrade it to a better version for your next deck cycle, but you're never guaranteed to draw into the things. There's a really good tension of building board state/doing good this now vs playing cards that you know you want the upgraded versions of later.

Yea so anyway if you like this kinda thing or comes out Thursday and it's great.

Played Shamans last night. It... did not go over well. We played a full game and the Shadows won every round; a couple times by poor use of the dagger on fellow Shamans, but often simply by not following suit without even intending to sandbag the game. I tried to stress to them that communication could be key and how to try to lead other players into finishing a suit might also be key but, given that it was the first game, those kinds of hints may have been hard to grasp. I think that this is one of those games akin to Root and others like it where the real mysteries are discovered by repeated plays, but you have to convince people to keep trying in order to make those discoveries. At least one player was intrigued by the possibilities, but another was completely turned off by it; convinced that Shadow victory was inevitable at 5 players, since it doubles the potential for a loss by the Shamans, compared to 4 players. The other two were relatively unimpressed. So, I might try to bring it back when I know the group is going to be at 4, but it's safe to say that there will be many other picks above this one when it comes time to make a choice.

Went to a Solforge Fusion retail launch event tonight. About 12 people came out. Grabbed a booster and played some games with the fresh decks. Was a ton of fun. Pulled a couple of beefy half decks with some really fun nonsense in them. Just fun to see the game in the wild, and people seemed really excited about it.

Playing more Solforge because it's just great.

Also tried Flamecraft tonight, which was hot shit in Kickstarter a year or so ago and just hit retail. It was a totally fine light worker placement game... Gather resources and fulfill contacts for points. The main draw is the super cute art/theme, which did a lot of heavy lifting. I think this would be a good family game. For $40 retail I thought it was totally enjoyable. I would not have enjoyed spending $100 or whatever on the deluxe Kickstarter version. It also had some weird usability issues presumably from wanting to look fancy on Kickstarter... The main board is a really long and narrow neoprene mat that makes it very hard to see the small text on the far end and serves no purpose beyond making the game harder to play. Game would have been infinitely better served with a regular board.