What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

We do random character draw in almost every game. I'd much rather get something unexpected and try to make it work, rather than always have optimal characters chosen.

Played a fantastic game of Marvel Crisis Protocol last night. Me and a buddy fielded the Asgard foursome of Thor, Loki, Hela, and Valkyrie against the Avengers - Hulk, Captain America, Winter Soldier, and Vision.

Crisis draw had us trying to hold secret serum objective spaces, as well as retrieve different spectral hammers scattered about. The hammers beefed up your attack in addition to rewarding VP every round.

Hulk came out flying, Gamma Leaping across the map and claiming two hammers by the second turn.

He pounded the hell out of Valkyrie and Hela, then Valkyrie used a card to add her defense to attacks for the rest of the game, but she no longer could roll defense. She took huge chunks out of Hulk before being eliminated and Hela finished off the big dude.

On the other side of the table I had Thor get dazed (halfway dead basically and temporarily knocked out), unexpectedly early on due to withering fire from Winter Soldier.

Thor would recover and end up pummelling both Captain America and Bucky while Loki ran interference and focused on objectives.

Ultimately, the Avengers won by a single point. There were several specific attacks/events that would have changed the outcome had they gone another way. It was the closest game of Crisis Protocol yet and probably the best I've played. Has me excited to get more characters built/painted.

ChristopherMD wrote:

Shellhead wrote: Instead of the usual random draw, I let him pick his character and then pick the Great Old One, and I picked my own character.

I had no idea people still did random character draws. We've always handed out 2 characters to everyone and they pick which one they like better. For every game not just Arkham. This way even if someone hasn't played the game to know which one is better they won't be stuck with a character they know they won't like for whatever reason (i.e. they love playing fighters but got stuck with the boring wizard). Everyone I've played with has liked doing games this way better, fwiw.

For Arkham Horror, we usually grab 3 random characters each and pick one to play. One time, we were playing an 8-player game that included 7 new players, and they really wanted to pick their characters. So we ended up with a bunch of monster whackers with guns and nobody with magic weapons or spells. That game went to final battle in one hour, and final battle ended immediately because we were fighting Tsathoggua and nobody had any monster or gate trophies yet. Since this might be the only time my friend would ever play, I let him pick his character from the whole pile, and then I deliberately chose a different sort of character. Since I have played every character multiple times, I am normally fine with taking any random character.

My regular 2-player partner finished classes for the term and texted me the other day about getting some games in, so we sat down to a few today.

First up was TZAAR. I'd been meaning to write an article about the GIPF series when MB and Vysetron and I had been talking about them last summer, but I've failed to get enough plays of them in recently to feel comfortable doing something serious, so I figured I'd pull them out and see how many we could squeeze in this time. TZAAR is one of the best of the series (although I still insist that PUNCT and ZERSK are the best) but the GIPF series weeds out people who aren't comfortable with particular styles of games and one of those is scattered strategy, where you have to keep an eye on several potential angles. I won the first two games quickly, but then made a really risky move in the third which my now-experienced opponent made me pay for, as he took the game.

Then we switched to DVONN. This game is a red flag (with appropriately-colored box) for analysis paralysis, as you have to keep in mind that building that colossal stack will also mean that it's basically frozen and can still be taken from you by any opposing piece. You also have to consider heavily when to try to stack the Dvonn pieces and start moving with them, possibly jeopardizing your own moves in the process. I won the first game by one piece and got routed in the second by several pieces.

With those two successful efforts under our belts, I tried (with some trepidation) to bring out the namesake of the series: GIPF. This one just does not work for me. It has always struck me as slightly more complex tic-tac-toe, although I know there's a fair amount of depth contained within it. Regardless, I just don't have much appreciation for it. I should probably just sit down and will myself to learning it better, but it may just not be my type of game. We played once and I lost.

Then my girlfriend joined us, so pulled out Conspiracy: Abyss. This is one of the best adaptations of another game (and setting) that I've ever encountered. It feels very much like Abyss, but plays more quickly and simply operates at a very condensed level. I like it almost as much as I like the original game. My GF had a couple of amazing draws for both Lords and Locations and finished her Senate Chamber before either of us, ending the game, and winning 49-40-39.

Finally, I tried Cat in the Box on them. My regular opponent is an old hand at euchre, while my GF is not really a trick-taking game player. With this being one step removed from anything even resembling a normal trick-taking game, it took a minute for them to take me seriously while reading the rules, but pretty soon he knew it was just a different form of euchre. I really like it for the design spaces that it's exploring but I think it will do better at 4 or 5 players than at 3. He won even when he triggered a paradox in the last round, 11-8-4.

He and I are going to get back together this week when my GF and the kids are in Florida, visiting her mother, so I'm hoping to get something lengthier on the table. Maybe even some block games...

Played Root for the first time in what feels like ages. Opened up the Marauder expansion tonight and I tried the Lord of Hundreds (Rats) v. Cats, Corvids, and Vagabond (Tinker). Game was tight, scorewise. We all managed to get to 25+, but the Cats pulled it out. The rats are basically the second faction to really care about the items, so it was cool to use them. They are also a very active presence on the board, up there with the Eyrie and Cats. The advanced setup added in this expansion together with the mountain map seemed to breathe life into the cats. A+. Hope to play again soon.

I also played Space Base twice. It’s perfectly fine, I guess?

Had an AWESOME analog day with my kid.

First we went to a pinball arcade which, if you haven't seen a modern pinball machine, is AMAZING, if a bit pricey. We were so psyched to buy Dr. No or The Avengers or whatever for the house till I Google these things and saw the 7-9 THOUSAND dollar price, yeah, Maybe a rental plan???

Then the whole family jumped in on Rummikub which is a game I've never heard of but is kinda like a numerical scrabble of set matching. Nice tactile game, totally hooked the kids and got them off the screens. Looking to bust out Close the Box and Mancala as well.

RUMMIKUB is pretty great, it’s basically rummy, but with all the house rules, and in a mahjong form factor. Clicky Bakelite tiles rule. It’s like the peak 1960s middle America “not smart enough for bridge” game.

I played dreidel tonight with my wife, kid, and in-laws. I came in second. Couldn’t roll a fucking gimel to save my life. Latkes, roasted root vegetables, beer-braised red cabbage, homemade tofu-shallot “sour cream”. Pretty full, probably gained 4.4 pounds (2kg) tonight. Worst part about being vegan and jew-adjacent is having to order dairy-free Hanukkah gelt. Offset by getting to celebrate a holiday where fried food is a religious obligation.

Chag sameach anyway.

dysjunct wrote: RUMMIKUB is pretty great, it’s basically rummy, but with all the house rules, and in a mahjong form factor. Clicky Bakelite tiles rule. It’s like the peak 1960s middle America “not smart enough for bridge” game.

One of my favorite memories of an old girlfriend and her teenage son and his girlfriend was when I taught the three of them to play mahjong. They were staying with my GF's mom at the time (moving houses, divorce, all that rot) and so were eager to get out of the crowded house. The only good place to play at my place was in the kitchen on this glass-topped bistro table that one of my roommates owned. We'd play for hours and all of us had become so adept at it that the movement across the table was very rapid, as tiles (almost cubes, really) got placed and taken. The pieces are like a coated ceramic and very solid, so the clicking noise as they hit the glass table was more significant than we realized, as my roommate came out to the kitchen one time and said it sounded like someone was playing castanets. Still have that set. Haven't managed to find another trio to play it with on the regular, though.

My family was into all the usual family board games when I was growing up, but they sometimes branched out. There was a two-year span where we all really into Rummikub. Now it has been about 40 years since I last played, so I don't even remember any of the rules.

I learned Rummikub 20 years ago from my Romanian girlfriend and her family, so all my knowledge of in-game terms was in that language!

Shellhead wrote: My family was into all the usual family board games when I was growing up, but they sometimes branched out. There was a two-year span where we all really into Rummikub. Now it has been about 40 years since I last played, so I don't even remember any of the rules.

This is my experience as well. Although I used to find sets in thrift shops quite regularly, I never picked one up. Now they're less common.

They sell it at target and Walmart etc. It sees play pretty regularly with my mom and her sister, round my way.

For me, I've just been playing a lot of Heat. It's really great. Also tried out Clank Catacombs a few times recently, and it's quite good as well. Changing to tiles instead of a fixed board is what Clank always needed to fulfill it's potential I think.

Our regular RPG got cancelled Monday night but a few of us still got together for some gaming. Played a game of Nuclear War where everyone died then an intro game of Titan.

At home:

ISS Vanguard is a big story-driven game from Awaken Realms, where a bunch of meatballs are bundled into deep space using weird alien tech after an alarming first contact. We've been playing on a regular basis over the past couple of months and are at a stage where we appear to have unlocked most of the playable items with quite a bit of exploration still to get through so I'd say about halfway through this first wave of content. There is a nice pacing between planetary exploration and ship management, which operate in such distinctly different ways that it is almost like having two concurrent games. This actually helps a lot as it creates clear breaks within play that prevent it grinding into the 'more of the same' territory that often makes lifestyle games grow tedious.

The exploration part of the game is largely a matter of resource and risk management. Each of us are managing two sections (I have Security and Recon whilst my lad has Science and Engineering) and on each landing we choose one crewmember from one of our sections. They have individual unique abilities and bring with them a varying quantity of dice, cards and equipment, meaning that some of them will be better suited to certain trips than others. Wander around strange worlds poking things, collecting specimens, and occasionally stress-testing the waste disposal mechanisms of our suits whenever we have to run away from something extraordinarily dangerous that we either should not have prodded or stolen the spawn of. There is a capital-letter Plot running throughout all of this with plenty to find in a broad variety of star systems that provides much of the impetus and direction during exploration. Characters level-up and have nice bits of personal back-story (with the Personal Files mini-expansion) that adds a nice touch.

You might therefore assume that scanning the planet first and carefully selecting your crew would be an important aspect, and it is and it isn't so - as much as it is true that having the right crew and equipment will enable you to more easily cope with the challenges you will find dirtside, the game engine is ponderously and unrelentingly pulling you through the over-arching story regardless of how well you do on the details. Fail a mission and you can just go back in again with a bit of a dent in your ship management phase that can easily be rectified. If crew members die you can unfreeze some more from their cryogenic pods and there are even some benefits bestowed from putting names up on the memorial wall (my theory here is that 'following the story' is such a fundamental conceit that heroic deaths, being such an important story beat, are therefore incentivised mechanically).

As much as we are enjoying the ride, ISS Vanguard feels like it is somewhat on auto-pilot, pulling us through a linear script with very little room to manoeuvre within it's boundaries. There are moments where we have choices to make and can choose the order and importance in which we act, however all roads seem to eventually lead to the same place. It all feels like an interactive replay of someone else's RPG campaign, with some fun gamey bits that you work through in order to unlock bits of narrative. I don't mean any of this dismissively, far from it as we are enjoying the experience and are still coming back to it once or twice a week to continue moving forward, it's all just a fair step away from the only other Awaken Realms title that I've played (This War of Mine) which felt much more of an open-world with a real risk of failure, and therefore an onus on considerate play, underpinning the development of the story, themes and messages of that game.


Eleven - my copy arrived just in time for Christmas and I have jumped two-footed straight down the rabbit hole. I have a lot more to say on this one but in a nutshell for now it's great so long as a) you like football, b) you are comfortable with it being 95% a solitaire experience and most likely best played solo anyway, c) have an affinity for the 'hand of Trewiczek' where every game component has a special effect that fits into several out of hundreds of little combination plays.

So far I've worked through the eight standard solo campaigns, binged a few times on straight-solo with all the expansions mixed in, and managed to get a couple of multi-player games going so I'm getting a good feel for how it all hangs together. I would say that the Unexpected Events expansion is essential as it activates flavour-text keywords on player cards and brings a bit more personality and thematic feel to the experience. There is a mechanism added for club reputation that emulates two of the best things about the original Club Stories that were cut from this re-imagining, to wit networking and reroll management (respectively enabling you a greater selection from the card markets and the pressure of the game-state impacting your ability to afford dice re-rolls). It's not quite the same but I was pleased to see these making their way back in some form.

The Stadium expansion is also a good addition as it adds in unique staff and infrastructure that are directly linked to events that can happen at the club, and which feels quite special when you come across one. You also get an additional pile of regular infrastructure that provide some further options and variety. The other two gameplay expansions (a club competition and more players) are nice to have but do not elevate the experience quite as much as these other two, and the big solo campaign expansion I am yet to start but it does look very good. For those that want to know, the crowd-funding exclusives are mostly garbage as you would expect - there are some cool bits in there but not enough to make them a must-have, and some of them are bad enough to have already ended up in the trash at chez mezike. Fancy wooden bits and the quite mad 'grassy boards' (a layer of green felt printed with a pitch glued onto the team tactics board) are kinda cool and a definite step-up on the retail version.


At the club:

Cat in the Box is a shoe-in for game of the year for me. It is an absurdly clever and genre-defying take on trick-taking, the kind of simple yet revelatory idea that makes one wonder why it has never been done before. I usually care little for trick-taking games but this one is on a different level as it is completely counter-intuitive to the genre and mixes in elements of area majority, bluff and push-your-luck. I'm getting a feeling that trying to influence player order toward the endgame in high-player count games can be essential, as being first can guarantee avoidance of a paradox (so long as you or your opponents haven't made a mess of things) whereas being last gives you more protection as it makes it more likely that someone else will pop reality before it befalls on you to do so - there might be something to this or it could just be part of the longer learning curve. In any case, I like this a lot!

Managed to wheel out Obsession for a couple of plays. I love the way this is put together, the whole feel of playing it is very much on-point with the thematic intent. It's very straightforward to get into, even with the Upstairs, Downstairs expansion adding a fair degree of complexity to the mix, and a lot of fun to peruse the flavour text on the guest cards and imagine the kind of interactions they are having. The game itself has a lot of random elements and can be unforgiving as a result, however it is so much fun to play that it really doesn't matter much if you find yourself with 'too many ladies and not nearly enough gentlemen'. Favourite part of the game for me is the East-End Ha-Ha tile, where three guests go out but only two come back...

Also delighted to get some John Company played with a handful of new converts. This is already up there as one of my all-time favourite games so it's great to have my buddies also getting into it, here's looking forward to plenty more outings next year!

ISLE OF CATS. Polyomino placing with card drafting. Kind of whatever. Like many modern games, a hodge-podge of mechanics that are perfectly serviceable but don’t have anything compelling that elevates it.

BASKETBOSS. Manage a basketball team over the course of six seasons to take as many championships as possible. Mostly an auction game, lots of different player that you can bid for to try and assemble your team. It’s simplified in that you only ever have five players (no bench or second stringers), one for each position. Players are best in their preferred position (point guard, center, etc.) but can play any if needed. After bidding you calculate your team’s strength, determine which teams get 1st, 2nd, and 3rd this season (which is where you get most of your points). Then you can draft support staff (a physical therapist and so on) who give little benefits.

After that, players age, which is bad or good depending on the player — some players start off middling and hit their stride a few years into their career. Some start amazing and quickly fall off a cliff. But pretty much everyone declines eventually. The players are all on long skinny cards that slide into the player boards, covering up stats as needed. The players generally have punny names like John Magicson, or Curran Steffy.

Anyway, cute, nice small form factor, has that sense of “not enough time or resources to do everything you want,” plus an unusual theme. There’s a lot of football manager sims but I’ve never seen a basketball one before.

Played two games of Dreadball because a friend has recently become interested in it. I don't think I've ever played anything from Mantic before, but Brad and I used to be hardcore GW types, in that we played WHFB, 40K, and a half-dozen other things, so I think this is the one minis outlet that he's willing to engage in these days that is more about just tossing the board out and having a couple beers while rolling dice and moving dudes, rather than building armies and stressing over details.

The two teams he had partially painted were the Draconis All-Stars (robots) and the Ninth Moon Tree Sharks (killer squirrels.) The former are more durable; the latter are faster. It's basically Blood Bowl, but with slightly less emphasis on the violence. It's about making skill checks to knock opposing players over and throw (and catch) the ball and throw it in the scoring hexes to, y'know, score. It's a zero sum scoring system, such that when one side scores, if the opponent does, then the first side's score is reduced. I won the first game with the squirrels on the last possible action of the last possible turn before overtime, 1-0. Brad won the next game with the squirrels by getting two major scores (farthest goal from his side of the pitch) that put him to 7 points, which is the automatic end for a landslide victory. It was a good test of a game that he wants to play on the semi-regular and I had a great time with it.