What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Jackwraith wrote: I'm with you on Dune: Imperium. Mechanically, it's very interesting and I think it's a well-designed package except for one fatal flaw: You don't really get to participate in the "deckbuilding" part because you can't easily purge starter cards from your hand and the game is often over so quickly that those cool cards you buy to use in later rounds only show up once or twice because you can't purge the chaff. Rise of Ix fixes this problem, I've been told, because I don't own it and have yet to play with it. But if you're advertising your game as a "deckbuilder" that would have stuck out to me as one of the main things that NEEDS to happen before the design can be considered complete. They essentially did a major patch to a core system with Rise of Ix, which means that to play said deckbuilding game as a deckbuilder, you need to spend more money, which kind of irks me.

I liked the Dune Imperium base game okay but had some similar complaints and was told the expansion(s) address them. My feeling is, I can either buy a game and get two expansions to make it "complete" OR I can simply ignore the whole thing altogether and just play something else. The second option will almost always win for me.

The second expansion is decent but not the huge improvement that the first expansion ( IX ) is. Hell, just proxy the new starter deck card ( CONTROL THE SPICE ) from IX and try it in your base game . It grants you trashing power.

Looking at the card, it looks like: Pay 1 Spice: trash a card and a troop? So it requires removing a troop from the Garrison at the same time you get rid of a card?

No, pay one spice and GAIN a troop and Trash a card.

Blood Bowl Team Manager.

My goodness that was fun.

It's just an excellent game all around. Has a lot of good choices, especially with four players. Plays quickly. Has tons of variety, even in just the base set, with six different teams and their (almost) unique team upgrades, plus all the different star players and staff upgrades and highlights and headlines and... My now-regular Dreadball opponent had never played it, but I described it to him when we were playing and he was all: "Oh, I gotta try that." One of the worst results of recent boardgame industry history was FFG losing the GW license. They were producing so much good stuff with that (CitOW, Forbidden Stars, the card games, on and on.)

We recorded on this one and we were gushing. Just a great play.

So little comes out with this level of refinement.

The other day I got the first of two boxes from the Tanares Adventures Kickstarter. This is the expansion to Arena: The Contest. Tanares' main game mode is a HUGE campaign, which I have yet to start. One other game mode is an AI to play the PvP team vs. team mode solo. You could, of course, play it cooperatively as well.

I took it for a spin tonight in a 3 vs. 3 match. There are a few limitations to the AI team you can form; they restrict you to only the heroes in the base Arena box, and you can't choose any Tacticians. I think this is due to the challenge of getting the heroes to act in a semi-realistic manner. There is a simple set of instructions regarding who each hero wants to target. While there were a few instances where the AI targeted someone I would not have personally selected, for the most part it makes logical sense. I followed their guidelines, and had a great time! I defeated the enemy AI team fairly easily, but they did kill one of my heroes and had another one on the ropes.

I think this game is great; it's easy to play and has a ton of variety. The PvP mode is a lot of fun, although for the most part I'd prefer to play something like Guards of Atlantis II, but that is more of a brain burner. Arena is simple and easier to get to the table. I'm looking forward to starting the campaign.

Cryo: Slick worker placement with nice bits. Very, very tight game. Has one second of potential conflict aside from passive aggressive blocking, which, when it works, is glorious. And it works 50% of the time. Lots of fun.

KERO: Secret Satan has apparently gifted me my favorite new game of the last maybe 10 years. It may be the perfect game. The level of satisfaction when you fuck over your opponent is so high that it’s hard not to go full Skeletor cackle. 6$ at Minuature Market, they’re dumping it because it’s SO AMERITRASH they can’t move it. I bought 2 copies, one each for my 2 best gaming friends.

Solo learning game of ALIEN: FATE OF THE NOSTROMO. Decent family-weight game for kids and nerdy nephews/nieces. Very obviously wears its CAMP GRIZZLY inspirations on its sleeve.

The relatively bloodless play is a weird design choice. I would be fine with it if the rest of the game were super-simple, but it's not really -- you have a bunch of different actions, then a bunch of different things you can craft, each with a different cost and effect and number of uses ... once you're tracking all that, is it really so much trouble to add hit points?

Cracked 1k online games of Summoner Wars 2e this week. I'm still one of the few weirdos into the deck building side of things. Most people prefer the balance of the stock decks. I was asked to be on the latest PHG podcast again, which was fun.

hotseatgames wrote: Had a couple of 3 player games last night. First, a friend impulse bought a game called Mount Everest, solely because he is rather fascinated with mountain climbing. This is essentially a resource management game in which you use two invulnerable guides to try to ferry as many people up to the top of Mt. Everest and back down again with minimal loss of life. The amount of points you get for getting someone to the top is not as much as you will lose if they die, so it's a pretty risky proposition. You can stave off the cold by using a tent, oxygen, and basically just monitoring the weather.

All of your criticisms to Mount Everest apply pretty well the same to K2, Adam Kaluza’s other mountain climbing game but don’t bother me so much. It’s is at worst when it’s most a game. When you abandon a climber at the summit in the last round with no chance at survival but it’s fine because there won’t be another acclimation phase to die in. When you ride an avalanche down the mountain. When you split up climbers to divide exhaustion in an unbelievable way. Or just the anti-climactic endings where the undisputed winner has been known for a few rounds.

K2 is at its best when you feel like a climber, when you’re just two steps from the peak but know you can’t make it and have to turn around or when you overcommit before bad weather rolls in and hope you can survive three days in your tent. K2 really needs the higher difficulties to force these decisions and tension.

I think Mount Everest fails itself by fiddling with the scoring and making your guides immortal, distracting from K2’s stronger elements.

My wife and I learned and played two new games this week. On Monday it was The Mirroring of Mary King. I thought it was well produced and interesting. I would like to explore it some more, but I have learned that if my yearly birthday wish was for her to play it with me, she might leave. Tonight we played a new Small Box Games release, In the Shadow of Atlas. I really enjoyed this, and she seems quite open to give it some more plays. The theme involves colonizing 5 planets and accumulating outposts. The hook seems to be figuring out how to take a meager starting hand and combo your way into powerful turns. As the turns progress, there is a momentum that really builds as you bulldoze your way to the end with a frequently shuffled deck that shrinks rapidly.

Outside of the home, I have continued monthly Godtear and whiskey sessions with a cousin who lives just 5 minutes away. His experience with board games seems to have been heavily chess based, and I think he is really enjoying the tactics that various champion combinations allow. Our most recent game was a brutal knife fight that went 5 rounds, featured some die rolls that demanded a standing view, and had the final 2 rounds decided by a single flag position. Like a good movie, I was thinking about that match for several days afterwards.

After having it sit idle for far too long, I was able to get Guards of Atlantis II to the table again, but only as a two player game. It certainly plays fine this way, with each player running a team of two heroes. It is not as ideal as teams of 2 or even 3, but that's what I had.

Teaching it isn't very bad, you just have to make it clear that all of the card text needs to be understood explicitly, and that this game punishes mistakes rather brutally. However, this game handles hero death in a much more friendly manner than the original game did. Anyway, we had a great time, and I did manage to push the lane all the way to the enemy base pretty easily. I had a lot of Guards experience though, so I had a significant advantage. I did slow myself down a bit by using heroes I had never played before, and both of them were "2 star" difficulty (the game has 1 - 3 star ratings on each hero).

My friend liked it and thought his son might also like it, so I gave him my copy of the original Guards of Atlantis. I certainly had no use for it anymore since Guards II completely eclipses it.

I enjoyed the first Guards of Atlantis but a couple people in my group really struggled with it and were not fans. The penalty for death being a big aspect, which looks to have been smoothed over somewhat.

But I really enjoyed the core gameplay. Everything I've read about GoA II intrigues me. Glad to hear you're enjoying it, Mark. Think I'm going to pledge when it goes back up again.