What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Taught and won two games of The King is Dead, once with the support of the Romano-British and once by leading a United front against the Saxons. It feels like chess. You could devote your life to this game and not feel that you’ve mastered it, but I actually felt today like I made good playsnot just “Enh. Let’s see what happens.” plays.

Taught my mom Fox in the Forest Duet. Won on the very last play of the game on easy (which isn’t nothing for a first game). Mostly just amused that she struggled so much with the concept of the trump/decree. Her trick-taking game of choice growing up was Sheepshead which has some extra rules on leading and following trump and just couldn’t get past them. The struggle is real when you know more than one trick taker.

Also picked up Kabuto Sumo. Lovely dexterity game of beetle wrestling with a very deliberate pace. Only played the beginner mode with special pieces but without special rules. The oldest boy is struggling with it not being a flicking game where he can explode the board immediately.

I finished Week 1 of the campaign in Tanares Adventures. A week consists of 4 quests, 3 City Phases, and 1 World Phase. Based on various conditions, you end up with 2 or 3 choices as far as what quest you go on, and I've seen various ways that your decisions can come back to either help you or bite you in the ass.

The city and world phases are basically a crude deck building resource generation mini-game that ends up feeding into your party's overall power level. I appreciate what they were going for, but I don't find it terribly compelling and would rather they have gone a more traditional "you earned X XP, now go spend it" route. Which, incidentally, is how Phantom Division does it.

I've now done 6 quests (you go on 2 intro quests), and they have all been wildly different. I think I have enjoyed the more traditional quests more, just because special rules are just another thing to remember. That said, I appreciate the variety, which is important when there are over 100 possible quests.

I'm glad I was able to finish the campaign "week" off (there are 6 weeks in the whole thing) because Saturday I've got some friends coming for games and I need to pack all of this stuff away for a while. This is not a bad thing, as Phantom Division development has ramped up 1000x and is taking a ton of time. It won't be long before the campaign gets unveiled.

Set up and read the rules for Hildegard's Story, which presents beautifully on its neat li'l neoprene playmat. Des seems committed to pursuing everything except the main storyline - so far we've managed to puke up a bunch of allspice waffles, which seems on-brand for Spire's End. Looking forward to finishing Chapter 1.

One of the kids got Power Rangers: Deck Building Game for Christmas, so we finally broke it out last weekend. It's really good. We've played it 3 times over the last week. 2v2 and 2v1 mostly, it's surprising how much communication needs to go on within a team. It is just crunchy enough to feel like it has strategy while not being too much for a week-day evening. You definitely get a feeling of equipping your character and using the items...Moreso than something like Legendary. It feels like a cross between a deckbuilder and a tableau builder. Was worth the $15 or so that it cost.

Memoir '44 I doubt any of the kids will be into wargames like I am, which is more than okay. I grew up around the military, and loved tanks, guns and jets.... while they haven't. But Memoir has been a hit as a light weight two player game. We've played 3 games since Christmas I think, and the Germans have lost all of them.

My daughter has really enjoyed Arkham Horror 2e, which is also my wife's favorite game, so we broke it out Sunday while the boys were all at Grandma's It was one of those games where the board just hates you. We generally play with 2 characters each, since inevitably one of your characters is delayed or doing something boring. At one point we had 5/6 characters delayed or Lost in Time and Space. I think I had one guy clinging to the devil's reef in Innsmouth and the other delayed in the dreamlands on that turn.

We re-discovered how bad the really combat focused characters are. Guys like Mark Harrigan (the soldier with the flame thrower) looks super cool.... but can't fight anyone without something to protect their sanity. While other characters with better will/sanity stats can at least gain weapons relatively easily. It wasn't even the GOO screwing people over, just failure on our part to have a cohesive team and bad luck on card draws. but hey, it's Arkham, it happens.

The classic super combat focused characters are the absolute for "lose a turn" in 2nd ed. Not only can they literally lose turns like everyone else, but they fight one monster and have to track back to the asylum if they just eat those 2 mind or whatever damage... only for another monster to spawn again in the meantime.

I traded Atiwa for Woodcraft, the new Vladimir Suchy game. Tried it out solo tonight, and it seems really neat. Basically you're getting dice to fulfill contacts that require certain values of certain colors of colors of dice. Thematically the dice are pieces of wood, and you have a workshop where you can do stuff like cut a die into multiple dice of the same color that add up to the value of the original die or glue multiple lower valued dice together to make one higher valued die. It's all centered around a rondel where the actions that don't get taken become more valuable with bonuses the longer they are untaken. It's all super tight, action and economy wise, so it's pretty tricky puzzling out how to do things efficiently. If you like a crunchy euro it's worth checking out.

A few nights ago I talked my son into playing the shrinkwrapped copy of the CMON version of Blue Moon City. The dragons are smaller and there aren't physical jewels, like the original that I traded away 15 years ago, but the game play was much more fun than I remembered. Putting together combos to create mega-turns is pretty fun. There's a race to win as many dragon scales as possible in order to claim an economic bonus, but with only two players it doesn't feel as urgent. I think it took us 90 minutes but in the future it will be a fun 45 minute game for my kids when they are home from college.

In my memory there were three-dimensional acrylic crystals, but it has been over a decade. My son was eight years old when I first bought it. Time marches on.

Tried Warcry for the first time today. Same friend with the Dreadball fixation (and long-time veteran of other GW stuff) who wanted some practice before Adepticon rolls around. It was his Sigmarites against my Chaos warband of Skaven and Slaaneshi (which also happened to be my two favorite armies in WHFB from 6th to 8th editions.) I liked the dice orientation of saving doubles, triples, and quads for special abilities but there were just as many special abilities to remember as any game of Fantasy, unlike other warband/gang-style games of yore like Necromunda. That's both a good thing if you just want to bash around and a somewhat daunting thing if you're really trying to strategize and need to know what abilities your opponent can possibly pull off. Thankfully, neither of us are hardcore enough any longer for the latter approach. We played a scenario that required control of three objectives to earn victory points and, since I had 9 models to his 6, I had an advantage there just in raw numbers so I engaged that advantage and spread out without thinking about scoring kills so much. I had a 7-2 scoring edge by the fourth and final round and had ransacked (removed) two of the objectives, so the game was over by then, but we played the final round, anyway, and I ended up getting a couple more kills in, as well. So, firm victory for the forces of Chaos over Order. I liked it well enough, but can't say I feel eager about getting anywhere near another GW product. Way too much history (and money) with that stuff, so I'll keep my distance, aside from the occasional game with him.

IRISH GAUGE. Rumor has it that there are some people who can propose playing this game without pronouncing its name in a cartoon Lucky Charms accent. I have never met such a person but I am open to the possibility. Anyway, a fine short game that really captures the essence of the stock market train game without abstracting out too much. It’s not that much more complicated than TTR but it’s much meatier. The other games in the Iron Rails series don’t grab me but this is a favorite.

THE BLOODY INN, 2p. Recently I’ve felt like I am not terrible at this game, so I added in the Carnies. As an aside, I took my kid to Disneyland a couple years ago and the workers there do NOT like being called “carnies” despite the fact that they run carnival rides. “Cast members” is the preferred nomenclature, dude. Anyway the expansion is pretty fun, the new travelers are reasonably seamless with little new overhead; the event cards though are real kicks in the pants. Can just totally hose you with little ability to mitigate. The jury is out. A little chaos is good, to prevent overanalysis, but if it makes the game too random then what’s the point?

Q.E., with expansion, 3p. Still uncertain on the need for the expansion, especially because I lost.

SUPER MEGA LUCKY BOX, 3p. My last post to this thread said that there’s no reason to play with gamers, but I did anyway and it was fun even though I lost.

Jackwraith wrote: It was his Sigmarites against my Chaos warband of Skaven and Slaaneshi (which also happened to be my two favorite armies in WHFB from 6th to 8th editions.)

What were the warband lists, if you remember? Skaven/Slaanesh is an unusual combination.

I'd be hard-pressed to remember all the names involved. There were five Skaven: Skritch, Hrrk the Almost-Trusted, and then three regular dudes (maybe Hungering, Lurking, and Skittering?) and four Slaaneshi, all of whom were unique characters. I think it was just based on what he had available and had painted and since Slaanesh and Skaven are both Chaos, it would be enough points to match his Sigmar dudes.

WHAT GAMES HAVE YOU BEEN PLAYING THAT HAVE A 6.5 ON THAT OTHER SITE BUT COMPLETELY KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF?

I don't pay attention to ratings, only comments ( and not the ones with gibberish shorthand like "sleeved, broken token insert ).

Those types of comments crack me up. If you're obsessive enough to note the shelf state of your game, there's no way you need these"notes" to remember what's sleeved, what's shrinkwrapped, what's slated to be entombed in your sarcophagus. It's a micro, textual equivalent of a shelfie. And to answer Cranberries: pretty much anything that was published prior to 2018 that isn't Gloomhaven.

Frohike wrote: Those types of comments crack me up. If you're obsessive enough to note the shelf state of your game, there's no way you need these"notes" to remember what's sleeved, what's shrinkwrapped, what's slated to be entombed in your sarcophagus. It's a micro, textual equivalent of a shelfie.

Ugh, hear hear. Plus, there's an actual private comments field where they could put information that no one cares about. But then how would they let everyone know that they take great care of games, or kickstart things?