What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Playing a bunch of stuff online and in person.

I'm still working through Fields of Fire's Normandy campaign. The patrols are a bit of a drag despite having a nice historical/meta point to the player. But it's hard to want to play three 10 turn missions to primarily make a historical point. There's a way to make this work, but it would involve scaling these missions down and not make you track other squads, etc to streamline anything. Glad to be back to the attack missions next mission. My Bulge campaign pack just shipped from GMT so I'm just about ready for that.

Started playing Barrage on BGA. So far, I like it a lot but it isn't incredible. I think the core game, pumping water that collects behind dams that the players also construct, is very good. It creates enormous opportunities to fuck people over and you have to be ultra careful about everything creating opportunities for everyone else. I especially like that the calculations and pathing of this part---the clockwork machine bit---are very simple and easy to grok just glancing at the board. It's a nice relief from Food Chain Magnate where the sums and possibilities are quite complex and need a ton of sitting down to math out. I think this part works well but the rest of the game around it---mostly worker placement---is serviceable but so incredibly artificial. It feels like clumsy design around the edges to slow down/speed up construction and pumping but in really obvious ways. "Hmmm, our game doesn't have enough pumping, let's create little contract chits to draft with workers that give you extra benefits for pumping."

Been playing Pamir 2nd edition on Rally the Troops. I'm zeroing in on my opinion of it but it's mixed. I think it is the tightest, most carefully designed, least bullshit Pax game. It's probably the first one I'd recommend? It also looks beautiful. But it is missing that certain something, that chaotic riding the bull experience while you fight other players character. The factions system doesn't really stand in for like the market mechanic in Ren or the wild market state swings in Porfiriana.

Finally, Oath. Been playing asynch and it's just really good for my game taste. I've decided the lynchpin is play length. This is a two hour game with the kitchen sink in it. So even if you have a play where someone's gambit locks something down and the other players get rocked, it's over quickly. In that way it's a perfect doam game with card combos---the doam is over quickly while the card combos can just be found, put together, and then either win or go quietly into the sun. There's lots of scrambling in late rounds and it's hardly predictable who will win, lots of kingslaying, but it does not outstay its welcome. Close to my GOAT.

Taught myself a 2 player game of Pan Am, and I did my best to have each side play to win. Ended with a difference of 3 shares of stock.

This game is clearly great and I can't wait to actually play with people. It also seems like it is easy to teach.

I pre-ordered a cease-and-desist letter from Games Workshop - only $12! I needed a way to get campaign resources to my Warcry players but nobody checks e-mail with the same frequency and none of use the same social media platforms, so I decided to launch a website with an easily-remembered URL for everyone to look at the night before we play. Incredibly, www.warcry.games was available.

I haven't built a website since maybe 2000, and I was impressed to be up and running with Google Sites in under an hour. My little project isn't publicly searchable (and I also intend to put up a bunch of "I don't own this" language to be safe); I'm hoping that it'll fly under the radar. Honestly, I feel like I wouldn't have made it if GW had collected all of this stuff in one place to begin with. The official Warcry site is basically a flashy order form.

I played a murder party game and it was one of the most fun sessions I've had this year.

It was called The Witch that left with the Twilight and is part of a slate of Japanese games being translated to Spanish in the style of How to Host a Murder. That is, each player gets a character booklet, a personal goal and the idea is that you score points both by fulfilling that goal and by finding who the murderer is. Most of the game is talking and figuring out who falls where in the scenario.

We all got very well into it, and the bouncing around, trying to figure out each other's character was very fun. Our murderer did a fantastic job and wasn't caught, with everyone but me accussing another player.

There are a few things I liked about the game. First, it avoids some of the cheapest tricks in this genre, like not knowing key information about your own character. I was afraid it would pull the old "the murderer doesn't know he's the murderer" bit and I'm glad it didn't. It's also a bit more mechanized than most. Each turn, you have five tokens to pick up location cards. They contain clues or items and can be traded to other players. Coupled with the goals, this created a more rooted experience than usual.

I also liked that it takes itself seriously. There are no punny names or silly motivations. It has socially relevant, realistic darkness and didn't make everyone in the cast a goody-two-shoes character. It felt refreshing considering how infantile most board game "themes" are.

However, I'm a bit at odds when it comes to reviewing it. It has been a fantastic experience, but I can see quite a few flaws. The conclusion was dissapointing and it didn't even react to the murderer not being found. Some parts of the mystery are underwritten and you can fail your objectives simply because someone got a card and you didn't. So I have to review a game that seems middling to me on a pure analitical perspective but that nontheless gave me an amazing experience.

My old friend from Indy was free to hang out yesterday. First, I took him to the best-stocked comic/game store in the Twin Cities, which is just three blocks from my house. Then we played the intro scenario of Silver Tower. This particular friend only played D&D a few times when we were teenagers, because his family moved to a rural area right around the time that our friends were discovering rpgs. But he always loved the idea of a dungeon crawl, so he collected the 1st ed AD&D books and modules. And he played any D&D themed computer games he could get ahold of, especially Temple of Elemental Evil. But he married young and took on a serious career and never really had the chance to play rpgs or ameritrash board games as an adult. So I have been introducing him to my favorite games that can be played either co-op or solitaire, like Marvel Champions and Camp Grizzly.

So, Silver Tower. I let him pick the heroes for both of us while I set up the first mission. He gave me the Darkoath Chieftan and the Knight Questor, while he took the Lord of Chaos and the Aspiring Deathbringer. We sailed through the early encounters, but struggled with the precarious ledge/dice-stacking challenge, then reached the final room. Many poor dice rolls were made that day, and our entire party was wiped out in the final room by a Pink Horror, 4 Blue Horrors, and 8 Khairic Acolytes. Good times.

That sounds awesome. I've read several suggestions for evening out Silver Tower's difficulty, and right now I'm sticking with giving every enemy a 6+ save and disallowing the use of amulet shards to resurrect heroes mid-dungeon.

We have an ongoing game of Silver Tower set up in the back room and I'm stoked to finish up today. The Chaos Adversaries card expansion boasts 41 new enemy types from across the AoS line, and this is the first time we've played since I've finished assembling about 98% of those models. To streamline gameplay, I keep one stack of cards with the regular enemies from the Encounter tables and another stack with the expansion enemies. It's easy to find the common enemy cards, and when the game calls for an Exotic/Mighty adversary, I have Google generate a random number between 1 and 50 and simply count through the stacks.

There's still the same slim chance of rolling an Exotic or Mighty Adversary when you explore a new room, only now they're a real departure from the Tzeentchian milieu. I can already see modifying the Encounter Tables to create Skaven-, Nurgle-, or Khorne-centric dungeon crawls in the future.

This session also renewed my bad attitude towards Gloomhaven. We played six or seven Jaws of the Lion scenarios and I just couldn't be happier to pawn it off to NobleKnight.

I've got both the adversary card expansion and the hero card expansion. We got a choice of Pink Horror or an exotic adversary in the first room, but the exotic adversary was one of those leader of one type plus followers of another type, and it was taking too long to find their tokens (I don't have the minis), so we opted for the Pink Horror. I should probably use more small ziploc bags for the tokens instead of just a few normal size sandwich bags.

My Darkoath Chieftan was rolling so badly yesterday that it became apparent that his dark oath was the F-word.

I taught my son Twilight Struggle, figuring that since he loves War of the Ring and is something of a history buff like I am, he would dig it. I was right, though I think he was a little surprised at how tense the whole game felt. We made it to the late war, but then he ended up winning because I forgot to do any military ops and he got like three more points.

In a grim uncertain world, it's comforting to know that I can still lose Twilight Struggle in increasingly stupid ways.

Shellhead wrote: My old friend from Indy was free to hang out yesterday. First, I took him to the best-stocked comic/game store in the Twin Cities, which is just three blocks from my house. Then we played the intro scenario of Silver Tower.

You remind me that I need to play Silver Tower. It's survived a lot of culling, and now stands as probably my favorite dungeon crawl board game.

Finally got a hold of Scout. That is an -amazing- card game. It is very much one of those "is that it" kind of things and then you start seeing all the subtleties and nuances that really elevate it. At first my son hated it so I was like uh oh might not survive here but once I showed him some of the tricks (like how you use the scout action to reduce the strength of an active set so you can play something) and he started getting into positive points. Fun to see the old Bohnanza no hand sorting rule come out of retirement too. Great, great game. Now I just need to find Cat in the Box...

If you like shedding/trick games, Ambiente Abissal/Planet etuC is fun and easy to proxy. You need 1-6 in 6 colors. It plays 3 though there are 2p rules.

numbers go from 1 (low) to 6 (high). Colors go, say, red (low) - orange - yellow - green - blue - purple (high).

Each player is dealt 11 cards. One goes first. You may play 1 or 2 cards. If you play 2 cards, they must either be same color or same number. Whichever they are, the other aspect is ignored. So if I play a yellow 2 and a blue 2, only numbers matter and colors don't. Next player must play a pair of higher numbers or pass. A 6-6 would automatically win the hand as nothing can beat it. Likewise, if I lead an orange 3 and an orange 5, numbers don't matter and players must follow with a pair of higher colors, like two greens. A pair of purples again would auto-win.

If a single card is led, either the color or the number can be improved, but then that determines what's happening. for example, I lead with a yellow 2. Next player could follow with a yellow 4, which means numbers are what's climbing and colors don't matter. Following player would have to play a 5 or better. Or player 2 could play a green 2 which means colors are climbing, not numbers, and a blue or purple must follow. If player two responds to the yellow 2 with an orange 3, then neither color or number has been ruled out and player 3 can follow with anything that continues to raise the number and/or color.

Whoever takes the hand starts the next.

First to play all their cards gets 2 points. Whoever goes out second gets 1 point. Play hands until someone has 6 points. It's lightning fast.

It doesn't seem like much but you will quickly get into the hand management issue. And the fact that you have 11 cards means you HAVE to do at least one single card hand.

I know you can do it with a Sticheln deck, and I'm sure there are others.

Even though I have owned Core Space for at least 2 years, and have played a fair amount solo, last night was the first time I ever actually played it with another person. We just did the introductory mission of the first set to keep it simple.

It was fun, although I think I should have artificially raised the threat level at the beginning because most of the game was pretty tame. At one point I attacked the rival trader crew just for something to do, and to try to loot them, which I did manage to do since I downed one of them with a pretty devastating 4 dice attack. Even with that, I lost by 4 credits.

Tearing it all down this morning made me wonder how much incentive it's going to take to ever get me to drag it all out again. This game asks a lot of you.

Sounds like you'd be better off playing Arena: The Contest, Mark. Sorry Core Space hasn't worked out for you. I know Gary Sax has had some less than excellent experiences with it as well.

I do really like it. I just don't think I have the committed group to make it really shine. And Arena is infinitely easier to get to the table.

So the question is, do I keep it all, sell it all.... use it to try Stargrave?

Was that my set? I don't remember who I sold it to. It's -awesome- and as far as that genre goes it's one of the best. BUT...I have never seen a game that is more of a PITA to set up, take down, and store. Like, it really impacted my opinion of it because it's so labor intensive to deal with.