What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

im up to 20 in person games played of Solforge Fusion since it hit retail a little over a week ago... games pretty great i gotta say.

I hadn't played my brother and nephews in a while, so we had a gaming afternoon yesterday. We played:

Marvel Munchkin - I had never played Munchkin before, even though I have a copy that my wife got me for Christmas a couple of Christmases ago. I had heard it had that, "Stop the winner RIGHT NOW," drawback, and sure enough they were right. We spent literally an hour trying to stop each other from winning. Rules felt half-baked, and we fell back on a lot of, "Heck, sure, you can do that." At least I did, One of my nephews had about a bajillion +2 cards, and eventually pushed his way through to the win. I guess I get to cross Munchkin off my bucket list. Would I play it again? I guess if everyone wanted to, but I'm not going to request it.

Ticket To Ride - I was lobbying for Pan Am, and I guess I should have lobbied harder. But one of the other nephews wanted to play this, and I like TtR. I put the beatdown on them because they don't know that little connections are Bad.

Terraforming Mars - Ares Expedition - that was the game my brother wanted to play. He sold his soul to the devil to win that game, so he wants to get his money's worth out of it. He managed to pull all the "Draw x and keep y" cards, so at one point he was drawing eight and keeping five every "draw cards" round. That's his style, and he definitely makes it work. His nephew the Munchkin winner gave him a run for his money, but my brother won by three points. I came in DFL; by the time I got my shit together to get points the game was over.

Later that evening I talked my wife and daughter into that game of Pan Am I didn't get. I got lucky on the Event draws, and the final draw was, "Get a share for every route on the map." I had been making money on a crazy number of routes (7?), and that was game. Stocks were cheap throughout the game, and final scores were 33 me, 29 daughter, 27 wife.

RobertB wrote: Terraforming Mars - Ares Expedition - that was the game my brother wanted to play. He sold his soul to the devil to win that game, so he wants to get his money's worth out of it. He managed to pull all the "Draw x and keep y" cards, so at one point he was drawing eight and keeping five every "draw cards" round. That's his style, and he definitely makes it work. His nephew the Munchkin winner gave him a run for his money, but my brother won by three points. I came in DFL; by the time I got my shit together to get points the game was over.

While ARES EXPEDITION retains most of the core mechanics, one key difference is that not only do you not have to buy cards, you can SELL them for $3 each at any time. So a big card drawing engine not only gives you more cards to look at it, but if they don't work out, they can add a lot of money to your engine.

Finally played ARK NOVA. It’s fine, I guess. It’s exactly what you’d expect if you hired a competent but not inspired designer to make a zoo-themed game that was a mashup of Terraforming Mars and Civ New Dawn. Don’t need to play it again, but wouldn’t object if others were into it.

dysjunct wrote: Finally played ARK NOVA. It’s fine, I guess. It’s exactly what you’d expect if you hired a competent but not inspired designer to make a zoo-themed game that was a mashup of Terraforming Mars and Civ New Dawn. Don’t need to play it again, but wouldn’t object if others were into it.

You're about the fifth time I've read someone say "it's fine" as their summary for Ark Nova.

Played Cat in the Box again on the weekend.

It has kicked out Brian Boru as my Game of the Year.

So simple. So evil.

dysjunct wrote: Finally played ARK NOVA... It’s exactly what you’d expect if you hired a competent but not inspired designer to make a zoo-themed game that was a mashup of Terraforming Mars and Civ New Dawn.

With all the back-and-forth about AI-generated artwork, I'm beginning to wonder if we'll start seeing AI generate the games themselves.

Why not, most of the shit that comes out anymore is mix and match anyway. "Worker placement with rondel, area control, card drafting, national park setting, cozy animal artwork"....and generate.

Ugh I want Cat in the Box, Trif!

Michael Barnes wrote: 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.

No, by the time I decided I wanted it, you had already sold yours!

Msample wrote:

RobertB wrote: Terraforming Mars - Ares Expedition - that was the game my brother wanted to play. He sold his soul to the devil to win that game, so he wants to get his money's worth out of it. He managed to pull all the "Draw x and keep y" cards, so at one point he was drawing eight and keeping five every "draw cards" round. That's his style, and he definitely makes it work. His nephew the Munchkin winner gave him a run for his money, but my brother won by three points. I came in DFL; by the time I got my shit together to get points the game was over.

While ARES EXPEDITION retains most of the core mechanics, one key difference is that not only do you not have to buy cards, you can SELL them for $3 each at any time. So a big card drawing engine not only gives you more cards to look at it, but if they don't work out, they can add a lot of money to your engine.

Right. I was leaning on a more traditional TM money engine, that turned out to be a failure.

My wife just doesn't like Ares Expedition for some reason, although she likes the original TM a lot. Go fig.

Michael Barnes wrote: Why not, most of the shit that comes out anymore is mix and match anyway. "Worker placement with rondel, area control, card drafting, national park setting, cozy animal artwork"....and generate.

Just get a copy of 504, and save yourself thousands!

Ark Nova got closed down for good last night. We started at 8pm, and at 10:32 (I checked my watch) I officially lost faith in the game's ability to be entertaining. And that's fundamentally what game time is about. If I'm thinking I should be working and billing my customer instead, the game has failed.

And we had a wide-microphone next to the table because our schtick in this new podcast is to play a game, and then do the post-game show as an episode. Highlights from the game can be edited in. This was my fourth play of Ark Nova and the game was already teetering on the edge with me, but I managed to shed the oppressive cognitive overhead of its technical and graphic design for long enough to assess the game from arm's length, as a whole, not considering my position in the play. The game failed on several levels and I more or less mailed it in for the remainder of the session. I finished with -30 points because of it and felt it a fair trade. With the hot mic on the table I declared "it's 10:32 and the decision is made." What followed was a post-game show that struggled to find anything that any of us could compliment the game on.

Ark Nova failed in its big design decisions, and in its small. The game simply doesn't entertain, doesn't amuse. For very technically-oriented gamers there's just a bucket of things to grab onto in this game, but it is smothered in ambiguity and disconnection, poor artistic and architectural decisions. At the end of the game, with a big pile of shit in front of you on the table, you get the opportunity to disengage from the 35 things you've had to remember in order to maintain your game state and take a refreshing break from the cognitive load.

. . . unless you already did that at 10:32.

I ignored Ark Nova for the same reasons that I ignore most resource management games, but your post prompted me to look it up on BGG. Yeesh, that place really hasn't changed a bit. Massive groupthink and attacks on anybody who dares to give a game a negative review. The comments on the 10 ratings tend to be variations of "it's so dreamy," while the comments on the 6 ratings tend to address actual issues with the game play.

Shellhead wrote: I ignored Ark Nova for the same reasons that I ignore most resource management games, but your post prompted me to look it up on BGG. Yeesh, that place really hasn't changed a bit. Massive groupthink and attacks on anybody who dares to give a game a negative review. The comments on the 10 ratings tend to be variations of "it's so dreamy," while the comments on the 6 ratings tend to address actual issues with the game play.

It's not just the gameplay. The physical exposition of the game is both challenging from an understanding point of view, and for lack of a better term I'll call it uncuddliness. There's nothing on the table in front of you that sparks any kind of wonder or even interest. One of the fundamental design decisions that became glaringly obvious once I lost faith in the game was the use of hexes instead of squares for the zoo maps that each player has. The result at the end of the game is a glob of green and brown with no relatable context to the game's supposed theme. In other games like Oh Zoo Le Mio and Zooloretto you end up with a recognizable zoo in front of you, something that brings the "this is me, these are mine" level of emotional ownership to the game. In Ark Nova the rules explicitly tell you to ignore the locations of animals in your tiles, they don't matter once the tiles are laid. So your "map" is just an assortment of ugly pieces. There's no footing, no structure. Where the pieces are makes no difference whatsoever.

And let's be honest -- this could have just as easily have been done with square tiles instead of the hex shapes (hex shapes with no variation whatsoever for each size which more or less fucked me in last night's game so there's THAT lost opportunity as well) and there would have been an opportunity to put some artistic flair that reflects the reality of a zoo into the mix, to put something warm there to capture your imagination. But that wasn't done. And the same didn't-do-it can be said of the cards, the track in the middle, the absurd symbology that requires its own rulebook to decipher, the meeples (only for one part of the game! The rest are all cubes!) and even the words used to describe the various mechanical aspects in the game. It's not so much that the game is ugly, it's just amorphous. You could switch seats with someone halfway through and just roll with their map instead. It would have zero effect on the game!

In short (too late) the game has a following in spite of significant attempts to scare people away.

I had anticipated one of my podcast cohosts to contradict my thoughts when we recorded. We generally differ in opinion, and he likes "bigger" games. But after a brief moment of politeness he brought out a bigger knife than I did. The three of us spent about 40 minutes calling out one bad design decision after another. This is a complex design made twice as unapproachable by how the designers decided to present it.

Podcast link ?