What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

The local comic/game shop had a special event today which I decided to attend when my other plans fell through. They were doing demo games of Uno Ultimate Marvel, with players encouraged to cosplay as Marvel characters. I've seen some pretty impressive cosplay at local conventions and my favorite goth bar, so I figured that I wouldn't be the only one in costume. I showed up as Moon Knight. As it turned out, I was the only adult in costume, but there were 10 kids in costume.

Uno Ultimate Marvel is an unholy marriage of Uno and Marvel Champions that somehow actually works. You've got the basic Uno goal of trying to empty your hand by playing cards that match either color or suit of the top card in the discard pile. But some of your cards have an exclamation point icon, which forces you to draw a card from a villain deck containing various enemies and other negative effects. Each player plays a unique hero deck, with modest number of thematic wild cards that represent your hero's powers with various game effects. Your hero deck also comes with a number of villain cards that get mixed into the communal villain deck at the start of the game.

Is it fun? Yes, in a light beer and pretzels way, with a little take-that and a bit of strategy. I played with two of the official demo runners plus an intelligent little girl who had played before. My Black Panther deck was good at healing, which effectively means moving cards from my discard pile to the bottom of my deck. That's better than it sounds because a player can lose if they run out of cards in their draw pile. It took me a couple of turns to get the hang of it, and I won the game after about 45 minutes. With experienced players, this is probably a 20 minute game.

Met up with my Dreadball friend. He encouraged me to bring another game this time, so I grabbed my gimongous container of Funkoverse stuff and hauled that along. He had never played but has a lot of Unmatched and was eager to try one of the counterparts out there. We set up Territory on the Ministry of Magic board. He had Albus Dumbledore (appropriately), Marty McFly, and Darkwing Duck (childhood fan), while I took Alice, Captain Hook, and Rick Sanchez. I had never played Captain Hook before and was eager to see how useful the cannon might be, but he stayed out of its line of sight a couple times and I forgot to move it at the start of Hook's turn a couple times, so probably less impactful than it could have been. I did gun down Albus one time, though. He took DD's Gas Gun for his item, which you almost have to do with DD and it's one of the items I would list as an almost prerequisite for playing that character. The smoke tokens caused a little bit of disruption, but I didn't have any ranged attacks. In fact, my most prominent offensive force was Alice with the Pink Flamingo Mallet, which did get a couple knockdowns, but no knockouts. In the end, his ability to move DD and Marty (with Albus helping) allowed him to capture three of the point tokens and then get a turn with the most control tokens, as well, which led to the win, 10-8.

Then we tried Dreadball again and I have to say that the shine came off a bit with this game. It was the Skittersneak Stealers (Veermyn aka Skaven) versus the Greenmoon Smackers (Orcs & Goblins.) It was the frequent match of speed (them) vs brawn (us) and, as is almost universally the case in games like this, speed is vastly superior. I got a couple huge hits early on that basically reduced his bench to one model, as the ones I removed would be out of the game for 5 and 4 turns in a game that only allows for 7 per team. But then I wasn't left with a whole lot that was worthwhile. He lined up some great hits on my Guards that either knocked them down or injured them for a turn and kept sprinting past me to score, with very little that my slower Guards and Jacks could do about it. Meanwhile, two of the three chances that I had to score were failures and once he got to 5 points, I had to score. It's a zero-sum system (If he has three points and I score two, he goes down to one) so if I didn't reduce his margin, he'd win by a landslide victory (7+)... which is what happened, anyway, because I couldn't stop him. In our first couple games, I had gotten the impression that Jacks (the middle guys between Guards and Strikers) just really weren't that useful; more master-of-none than their namesakes-of-all-trades, which is I believe their designed intent. Guards have +1 on strength tests, so they're good for clearing space. Strikers have +1 on skill tests, so they're good at anything involving the ball (picking up, scoring(!), passing, catching) while Jacks have +1 on speed tests which is useful for one ability in the game, which is Dashing to move one extra space. If you fail, you faceplant. The Smackers are entirely Guards and Jacks. With his team already moving at least one space farther than me in all circumstances (2 if Sprinting), I was never able to keep up, so the opportunity to land some huge hits didn't matter if he still had three Strikers in play who could almost literally run rings around me.

So, yeah. I've gone from liking it to questioning whether it's worth playing anyone except the high speed teams, as we got the same results last time, with the Tree Sharks beating the Draconis in both games, one time with each of us playing them and the difference is the same there (Move 6, compared to Move 5.) That's disappointing. It's still a very small sample size and it is a dice-driven game, so there's definitely some luck involved. But there's no luck in a situation that left me with little to do in more than half of my turns other than try to chase him because he was going to win the game if I didn't.

I played Warpgate during development with the designer, Artyom. He also designed Guards of Atlantis (and part II), which is a great game.

I have been soloing a lot af KNIGHT FALL for the past week or so. The game is about a group of knights defending elders in a monastery from evil demons. If the demons win, they can break into our world, but if the knights can hold them at bay, they can be sealed back into hell.

The game is played on a 3x3 grid of locations, and you use cards to attack, defend, move, activate special abilities and so on. Knights have a shared deck, and so do demons, and in addition each character has special ability like summoning minions, draining life, attacking diagonally, etc.

The game has three different game modes; coop, campaign, and versus. I've only tried the two first (obviously), and supposedly the versus is the best. But solo and campaign play is pretty good (the core gamaplay loop is the same in both, but campaign has a choose you own adventure framework). In that version you play as the knights and demon actions are controlled by a deck of cards with simple commands. In my first game the spatial element seemed non existent, but that has changed later on, and I think it depends a lot on what cards are drawn. The game is not difficult and therefore not as intent as eg Ghost Stories which is shares a tiny bit of DNA with, but I've been having fun slaying demons.

One major caveat, though, is that the rules are very under explained. A lot of the special powers - especially in coop/campaign - are hard to grasp, and their specific wording don't jive well with the cards that activate enemies. And it's a damn shame since the game shouldn't be hard to learn.

No posts on the site all day! I hope you all are playing some fun stuff.

Our first nice day in a while, I did some priming:



In addition to working on the GW official terrain, I picked up a bundle of Monster Scenery because I wanted to mix up our boards with natural terrain. It works nicely.



I like the foam rocks that people make and I'm sure it's inexpensive, but I don't feel like faffing around with one of the hot wire things. It took me months of practice to stop gouging myself with an X-Acto, I don't want to end up looking like a line cook.

How are those trees in person?

They look fantastic. I was a little nervous about how the plain plastic interior would look, but the greens sit such that you can't see any of it unless you're looking from an angle below the level of the table.

I'm thoroughly impressed with their durability. It's a heavier vinyl-like plastic that reminds me more of Heroscape trees than Heroscape hex tiles. I was looking for a better description of the material and it turns out MB reviewed the set here:

therewillbe.games/blogs-by-staff/6845-mo...ster-terrain-preview

I agree with him on all counts. Absolutely happy to have it alongside the grimier, bespoke Age of Sigmar stuff.

The hills in particular are designed with enough space to fit miniatures comfortably at varying levels, which I can't say about most pet store pieces.

I have now started my 5th quest in the Tanares Adventures campaign and have completed 2 "City Phases". The city phase ends up being this pseudo-deck building game in which you play cards to essentially generate resources that you then use to get other resources, be they characters to make your next city phase even better, or actual resources like gold or wood. The main thing you are trying to do here is increase the level of 4 different city structures, each of which is responsible for the power level of 2 different character classes. As these buildings get better, your attack cards during quests get better. You also can gain access to better armor and weapons, but in practice I find armor and weapons to be of limited benefit. Each time you use a piece of equipment in a quest, it gets flipped over, and you have to cycle all of your attack cards (generally there are 4 of these) before you get to use the equipment again. After the 6th quest the first "week" will end and there will be a "World Phase". I'll comment on that when it happens.

The thing that strikes me the most is how wildly different the quests have been. Further, the choices you make in between them can come back around in surprising ways. There is a lot of creativity on display.

Glory to Rome again, after a five year hiatus, again, and had to more or less relearn it.

This time I really didn't see the magic. Everyone loves it, seems pretty ordinary to me.

The Monster Terrain bridges are awesome.



I've been pulling Warcry terrain setup cards and substituting the Monster pieces for the GW pieces, and it's been working wonderfully. Nice to have that extra bit of variety.

Aeon Trespass: Odyssey is back on the table. We packed a lot into three hours of game. We advanced our mane quest which got us into another brawl with the Tenmos. This one was not as awesome as our last. We got wrecked pretty hard and did not press our luck like we did the last time. We took our “victory” as soon as we could. We wanted to press on for one more wound and clear the titan packing 3 despair tokens and a dread card. But would have involved a whole extra turn to maybe do it. And so we left. The penalty for the dread card was brutal. It prevents the argonaut from placing tokens in the kratos pool. If you have not played the game I can’t emphasize how brutal this is. It is SO bad.

Escaping that our chosen path took us twords the pursuer. We chose to engage it instead of spending days and doom to get by it. So fight it we did.

We managed “victory” here too. It only cost us three pieces of gear. But we did our six wounds and left. It went ok. This time we were able to clear our dread card. We put a lot of effort into clearing it. We now press on. We soon have a Heckaton fight. Our first at level 2.

Well, we've had freezing rain falling here for almost 12 hours and, of course, it knocked the power out about 8 hours in. With fewer screens available, I managed to talk my girlfriend into playing a couple games. First we broke out Unmatched: Cobble and Fog. I picked up a copy recently when I heard that Restoration wasn't going to reprint it (I suspect thst means they're going all Marvel from here on out, which is a shame.) She took Dracula and I took Jekyll/Hyde on the 221B map. I think Jekyll is a very swingy character with ways to dump your hand for big hits, but not very many ways to rebuild it. I got the vampire down to 3 health before succumbing to his bloodsucking ways.

Then we tried a first game of Tiny Epic Vikings, which just rolled in the door yesterday. At two players, there is an AI player of sorts who really just slows down occupation of a few of the islands and is a stand-in for the draft that opens each era (round.) I had an awful draft for the last era and she beat me by a single rune, as she had all doubles for her Favor cards and I picked up my last as a single. There's a lot of thinking involved and it's one of the stranger combinations of card drafting and area control I've ever encountered because the long-term thinking for rune types and respective god Fury levels is quite involved. I really like it and can see the depth in it, despite the overall lack of chrome.

Met up with a couple of friends the other night and we started out strong with BRASS: BIRMINGHAM. Two of us had never played it before, and it took a while to grog it all, but it was a very fun game. I managed to lock myself in a corner in the first era and only too late understood how it requires you to react to the board state rather than play towards a grand strategy, but that was okay. I finished dead last, but it wasn't hard to see how I could have ended up number two or possibly even close to first. Or to put it in other words: it wasn't hard to see how I could improve my play for the next game.

Then we followed up with AHOY! where I once again finished last. I was the bluefinn squadron, and while none of us managed to stop the smuggler, only one point separated him from the mollusc union on second place. It was a very fun game with lots of cool moments, and it definitely had a very Root-like vibe, but with a less steep learning curve and shorter playtime. I'm eager to see if it also has legs and how it plays with four players, but so far I'm liking it a lot.