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Kevin Klemme
March 09, 2020
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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December 07, 2023
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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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28 Dec 2022 18:19 #337632 by mads b.
Played a game of Arkham Horror (2nd ed) with my wife and the 6yo today. We were up against Hastur and we were just about to seal a bunch of gates when an environment kept that from happening. So instead we pivoted and made ready for the final battle. Which then proceeded to not happen for several turns where we kept getting monster surges and hitting sealed locations. So we decided to pivot back when the environment changed since we had a ton of clues. And just as I had spent eight clues to seal a gate, the final battle began. But we were more than ready and easily dispatched the king in yellow since he only had a -2 combat modifier because of the low terror level.

As always an awesome game. Even without extra boards there's a ton of stuff happening, and a lot of the dice rolls are pretty intense since there's always something at stake.

I also got to play part of a game of Age of Sigmar (500 points) with the 10yo, but he was too tired and bailed after about a turn. But he's the one who's convinced me to start playing, so I'm pretty sure we'll get back to it soon.
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28 Dec 2022 19:07 #337634 by Msample
BASKETBOSS, LOL. One year at WBC a friend dragged us into playing it. I am not a sports gamer AT ALL. By the time I had grasped the game I was far far behind. It was miserable - for me anyways. Ever since then its been a running joke in our group.
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30 Dec 2022 02:56 #337657 by SuperflyPete
I have now played all but one of the Deckscape and Decktective games, and I have to say, they’re the best escape room and detective games I’ver played. And I have played a shit ton.

HotSeatGames and I played a ton of Phantom Division (our spiritual successor to Seal Team Flix) and it is an objectively much better game due to the editorial vision we share and the lessons learned. I absolutely love this game.

I went back and replayed Escape: Curse of the Temple and realized it’s not as bad as I remember but also not that good. It’s fun for what it is, ten minutes of white knuckle panic and bad decisions.

I got a copy of Bombay in a trade and I remembered quickly that you buy it for the elephants and pastel cubes and keep it for the Metchants of Venus Lite.

I revisited Chronicles of Crime and am well positioned to say that it is very scenario dependent and there is a sharp learning curve of questions to ask.
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30 Dec 2022 23:52 #337667 by SuperflyPete
Tonight I went to my best game buddy’s house. We played Torres with his family, it was OK. It’s a little fiddly and there has to be a better way to score it because that shit sucks.

We then played KERO which is easily my new favorite game. Like, I love this game. Love. I lost but I did well. Great, great game.

We then tried to figure out Court of Medici and realized fuck every medici that doesn’t end with ne.

We then played Catan and I was doing well but then his son left for the gym so I asked if he and his wife wanted to quit, and they did, so I called them on a forfeit and took the win :D

Finally, we played Kites which is kind of cool but way less a game than a puzzle, or really, an activity. Not bad.
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31 Dec 2022 10:57 #337674 by Bernie
Been playing Aeon Trespass Odyssey. I had been playing solo to learn the game, and it's a huge game, but my friend was in town so we started from scratch with him learning the game. We proceeded to rumble off six hours in one go.

For those of you unfamiliar with this title it is a wildly ambitious game from a small polish company. Its a mashup of a Kingdom Death Monster boss battler with a huge map exploration element as well as tons of pages of different stories and adventures.

We got in 3 fights, calling it a night a little after our third. Boss fights involve dice rolling for hits and damage with some ability to reroll backed in to mitigate bad luck.

I had a real good idea of what to expect from this title going in, my friend less so and the game delivered a great night. I can't wait for us to dive in again. This won't be a title for most people. It is hinted to clock in at 100 hours or so for the first campaign of 3.. so, it's quite the investment. The most simple summation of it i can give is a less random / punishing update to Kingdom Death Monster with a huge Greek setting / theme. But thats a huge oversimplification.
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31 Dec 2022 11:42 #337675 by charlest
I have it setup on my table and plan on working through the tutorial soon.

It has to be the physically biggest game ever made. A single box weighing 35 pounds, three feet long. I had a tough time getting it out of the shipping box.

It also was only $130 originally on Kickstarter and is now $300 MSRP. Kind of ridiculous.

Supposedly has 300 hours(!) Of content. It's certainly absurd.
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31 Dec 2022 12:18 #337676 by Bernie
My one gripe, and there are documents that mitigate it at this point is that it is not well laid out to open and play. Iss Vanguard was a joy to unbox and setup. A lot of care went into that. Outside of that the learn to play for Aeon Trespass is great. I'm having such a blast with the game.

I did not even talk about the Tech progression and gear building that feels very much like an X-com game in the way it's done. Lots to love, but not for the casual or faint of heart.
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31 Dec 2022 12:32 #337678 by dysjunct
SUPER MEGA LUCKY BOX. Nerd bingo, more or less. A good family weight game. You get 3 cards, consisting of 3x3 grids of numbers 1-9 (but not very number is on every card). When you complete a row or a column you get a bonus: mark off a 6 anywhere on your cards, etc. Has a very nice arc, as the game starts out simple, but as your cards fill up the bonuses start cascading: complete this row and get a 6, then use that 6 to complete a column on another card, which gives you a 4, then use that 4 ….

Good use of dry erase markers to keep things replaceable, although I found out when my wife knocked over a glass of wine that just because cards are laminated on the front and back, it doesn’t make them water-resistant on the edges. Sigh. Anyway the game is on BGA if you want to try it out.

HELLAPAGOS about three times with my mom, pre-teen nieces, and other assorted relations. I thought this would be a bit much for them but they ended up loving it and wanting to play it multiple times in a row. Every time I play I end up being annoyed by the rulebook, which is just a mess. I sometimes want to rewrite it, but really the game probably just needed a few more rounds of development. Or a new edition. There’s a few rules that are anti-thematic, e.g. some permanent items are discarded if you are killed, but some aren’t. It’s supposed to give incentives not to kill certain people — do you really want to eliminate the guy with the tool that allows him to do a task twice as efficiently, if the tool will be lost? But it makes the game harder to learn and play correctly.

TENPENNY PARKS. This turned out to be a bridge to far for my non-nerd family. They liked the chonky bits and the retro stylized art, but really struggled to figure out the rules and had to be reminded of options quite a bit.
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31 Dec 2022 13:32 #337679 by Gregarius
I agree 100% on the Hellapagos rulebook. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize IT was the problem and not ME. I did a quick refresh of the rules in prep for a Thanksgiving games day, and I was surprised by how much simpler it was to explain now that I've internalized (most) of the rules.

The enjoyment of the game itself seems very dependent on the people playing and the group-think that they develop. That's not a knock on the game at all, but just something I have to keep in mind when introducing it.
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31 Dec 2022 21:17 #337680 by Jackwraith
Haven't played since pre-COVID times (it's still weird thinking about that), but can you two elaborate on which rules were throwing you? I don't remember anything being really difficult to grok for either the game nerdz or the norms. Maybe we were playing wrong the whole time...?

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01 Jan 2023 14:04 #337684 by Gregarius
I think it was mostly the cascading pyramid of "if.. then.." scenarios that made it confusing.
  • IF you're short of water, THEN you have a vote. That person is voted out, UNLESS they produce an item for themselves OR shoot someone to bring down the total water needed.
    Everybody votes UNLESS they're the subject of the vote OR bitten by a snake OR some other thing.
  • Repeat for food.
  • Repeat for leader.
  • Repeat for getting on the raft.

In play, it's really not hard at all. But the way the rulebook focuses on the exceptions distracts from the basics.
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01 Jan 2023 21:14 #337686 by Shellhead
For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I had friends over to play board games on New Year's Day. I invited 15 and 4 showed up, which is fine because 5 is a good number of players for many games. One player is new to the non-family games but willing to learn, since she married one of my gamer friends a few months ago.

She likes games with a lot of interaction, so I brought out Paranoia Mandatory Bonus Fun! Card Game. With five players, I should have trimmed our starting clones to three, but I went four, so the game took about 3.5 hours to play. But it was a lot of fun, and I nearly tied for the win, but chose the wrong one of my last two cards on the final mission.

The married couple left, so the three of us played Saltlands. It's a pretty good game and a nice unlicensed take on the Mad Max sort of movies, but it presents two formidable entry barriers. Setup is fiddly and involves a lot of components. And the game is language-independent, so players need to learn an alphabet worth of icons. But once you clear those barriers, the game is fun and implementation of the setting is great.

The loot deck suffered from an odd shuffle, so we picked up a lot of weapons on the first two turns and ruthlessly exterminated the raiders for the rest of the game. Armor didn't show up until mid-game, so our best defense was a strong offense. More crucially, we didn't draw any exploration tokens until late in the game, so we only opened up one additional map section during the whole game. This left us short on map sections, so we only had enough map sections to allow two of us to escape for a partial victory.
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03 Jan 2023 12:43 #337699 by dysjunct

Gregarius wrote: I think it was mostly the cascading pyramid of "if.. then.." scenarios that made it confusing.

  • IF you're short of water, THEN you have a vote. That person is voted out, UNLESS they produce an item for themselves OR shoot someone to bring down the total water needed.
    Everybody votes UNLESS they're the subject of the vote OR bitten by a snake OR some other thing.
  • Repeat for food.
  • Repeat for leader.
  • Repeat for getting on the raft.

In play, it's really not hard at all. But the way the rulebook focuses on the exceptions distracts from the basics.


This, except that there’s no such thing as being “the subject of the vote.” You never choose a person and then vote. You count “3-2-1” and then everyone points at someone. The person with the most fingers pointing at them is out (unless they immediately consume food/water).

(But, the rules are wonky enough that I felt the need had to double check before “well-ackshully-ing” Greg.)

I didn’t catch that you could shoot someone immediately after you were voted out.

I also missed that when gathering wood, you get one for free and then you can try to get 2-5 more. I thought it was either-or until I reread the rules. And I missed that you got the one free wood even if you got sick.

Other weird edge cases:

* If there are multiple votes to short the water rations, and you are voted to not receive water, and you avoid dying of thirst by playing a water bottle, then no one can point at you on the subsequent votes for water. But they can vote for you once the food voting starts. Thematically it makes sense — you’ve already hydrated for that day — but it’s one more thing to remember, and it’s buried in the “dying of thirst or hunger” section, not the voting section.

* If you are sick, you cannot vote, take any actions, or play any cards, EXCEPT if you are going to get shorted food or water, then you may play a food or water card to save yourself. But only yourself, you can’t play them to save someone else. Okay fine, but it’s yet another exception. Print on the food and water cards “may play if you are sick” and let people play them to save others, which they probably won’t ever do.

* If you die, all your permanent cards are discarded, except for guns. Those go back into your hand and are distributed with the rest of your cards to your neighbors. From a game design perspective, I get it. You want to keep the guns in play, because murder (and the threat thereof) is fun. And you want to give incentives not to kill the guy with the fishing rod or some other helpful gear. But the exception creates yet more overhead.

(For a subsequent edition, instead of having a exception for guns, they should create a “Spite” rule: if you are killed, all your cards come back to your hand, then you may discard one of them — you break it or throw it into the ocean with your dying breath, to screw your killers over. It would be functionally the same, as it’s rare that anyone has more than one useful permanent, but it would streamline the rules.)

And as long as I’m spitballing about another edition, this is one of the rare instances where wooden cubes would be better than cards, in the case of the seats on the raft. You end up counting and recounting the stack of raft cards, whereas putting cubes on the appropriate place on the board would let you see at a glance how many seats there are.

Anyway, I criticize because I love. Hellapagos is one of the rare games that scales very well from low numbers to high numbers. It becomes a different game at each player count. And it gets bonus points for playing quickly and having a nice compact package. Highly underrated. I played it 4p, 5p, and then 10p. My mom ordered a copy for herself.

Other games I played while visiting family and friends over New Year:

FORBIDDEN ISLAND. I played once before, years ago. It’s fine I guess. Light and breezy, kind of standard for a coöp, except that when it came out there were not so many standards. The random board setup makes it better than Pandemic, as it requires much more dynamic strategies.

IN VINO MORTE. Classic party filler, simple and fun. Not really much game, and you can also just play with a deck of standard cards (red = wine, black = poison). Lots of laughs and betrayals though.

QE. The infinite money auction/set collecting game. Every time I try the degenerate hyperinflation strategy detailed in Ah Pook’s classic BGG thread (complete train wreck with everything ridiculous about BGG, none of which was Ah Pook’s fault of course), I end up losing. On the upside, that means that the game is fun for us.

HEAT. The current darling shooting up the BGG rankings. Really a great game though, it’s fired all other racing games for me except maybe FLAMME ROGUE. The only other one I’ll play is RALLYMAN GT, and that’s because it’s on BGA and HEAT isn’t. My brother and sister-in-law did really well and liked it; my mom and niece were mostly confused. I still had fun though.
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03 Jan 2023 15:44 #337706 by ubarose
Wonderland Wars - I wanted to like it, but it took 6 frickin hours to play with 5 players. I think we could get it down to 3 hours, but I still wouldn't want to play it for 3 hours.

Heat - Awesome, but you should not buy it, because I need to find a copy. After I get my copy, you can go for it.

Stardew Valley - Still enjoying this one, and still losing. It's challenging.

Cape May - I kinda like this one, but I don't need to own it. I've played about 3 or 4 times now, and finally won, mostly because Al wasn't playing. You build Victorian houses on the beach. It has really pretty pieces. It's kind of relaxing.

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05 Jan 2023 20:20 #337747 by Jackwraith
That's an interesting comment on Wonderland Wars. I remember when that was on KS and I was intrigued at the initial presentation because I'm a huge Wonderland fan (mostly for the derivations of the setting, one of which I used in an old comic series I wrote.) But then I looked into it and it sounded like a pile of mechanisms with no real connection, so I didn't get in on it. But Charlie liked it, as did Dan Thurot, and my tastes align pretty closely with both of them, so I felt like perhaps I'd missed out. But then I haven't heard a great number of positive opinions OTHER than Charlie and Dan's, so I dunno. One thing I do know is that I really don't need another game of that size right now, so it's probably better to wait to make a trade, anyway.
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