What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

MEQ, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, and Dreamblade all in the past few weeks. Gotta fit in with all of the old-timer podcasts around here.

Did you draft or do constructed for Dreamblade? I really like that one, but haven't pulled it out since I shifted to painting my own miniatures.

Each of us grabbed 16 minis from our personal collections. I spent about 5 minutes trying to get a mix of spawn costs and just used Green and Blue figures.

Opponent did roughly the same.

charlest wrote: Dreamblade

Super fun cross between Magic The Gathering, artsy abstract horror, and chess. Too bad everyone always reached for the same pieces, which meant 80% of the stuff they made was rarely used outside of draft.

A pal organises an annual destination games weekend at an Air BnB in a semi-remote sleepy bay town. It's a great time with plenty of dice being thrown, meeples being placed and beers being drunk.

I played a bunch and here are the ones I remember(!).

First up was a four-player game of Dune Imperium with the first expansion. I squeaked out an unlikely win thanks to a well-timed Intrigue card that ensured an opponent couldn't bring his dreadnought into a crucial battle. It made for an extremely lively moment for a eurogame.

Carnival of Monsters is a drafting game by Magic: The Gathering's creator Richard Garfield. There were six of us playing and it was ok. A fine game to play while chatting and little to no downtime but I wouldn't rush out to buy it. There was no player interaction at all besides the draft. Great artwork on the cards.

Evolution is another lightish game that works well in a group. More interactive than CoM as you can evolve your creatures into carnivores and eat your opponents. This is always funny.

I also got into a game of Eclipse: Second Edition, which I've wanted to play since seeing it in action at last year's event. As a new player, there's a lot to take in but the early turns give you some breathing room. The early and mid-game was a lot of fun but it really bogged down in the final two turns. I didn't come close to winning, there were a couple of vets, but I had fun waging a needless, expensive and ultimately self-destructive war with a neighbour over a planet of negligible value. There were some very exciting space battles and solid trash talk at my end of the galaxy.

Played a few races of Flamme Rouge which were super fun. What a great game. A superb marriage of theme and mechanics. Really great.

And I spent one full afternoon engaged in the intergalactic cat-and-mouse of Star Wars: Rebellion. I was the Empire scouring the universe for the rebel base. I captured and tortured one of their captains to narrow down the search and then sent Boba Fett to capture Obi-Wan who was messing about on a planet. After capturing him I turned him to the dark side and Darth Obi then spent the rest of the game countering most of the rebel's missions. Eventually, their hidden location was identified and the Death Star moved in and blew up the whole planet for the win. We were both new to the game and found out afterwards that we messed up a ton of rules. Our battles were a hybrid of core and expansion rules and we were both doing funky things we shouldn't have been. After discussion, we decided that the unintentional "cheating" on both sides probably balanced each other out. Although my Death Star move definitely shouldn't have happened. It did make for an awesome end to the game tho.

And finally Citadels hit the table. I got robbed and murdered twice so came dead last but it was still a good time, mainly due to all the banter across the table.

I also played Rebellion last week in honor of May the 4th. I was the Rebels and squeaked out a fairly unsatisfying victory.

The Empire found my base about halfway through, and even though I fought pretty valiantly against their forces, it was obvious I had to move the base. I picked up Han & Chewie pretty early, and they caused much havoc throughout the galaxy after the Death Star destroyed Kashyyk.

I sent Luke to Dagobah alone, which was a mistake. Leia was right there to help, but I forgot to add her. The Empire mucked the mission, so he never became a Jedi. So just-a-farmboy Luke runs around doing boring missions, we try a few raids, manage to blow up a Star Destroyer, but the Empire just keeps getting more and more ships.

Finally, after destroying another planet, the Empire finds the second base. A massive battle ensues, and the rebels just barely manage to survive. We completed one more objective and win the game. It was weird to win when the galaxy was almost completely overrun by Empire forces, but we had influence all over the map, even without much hardware to back it up.

Played a couple good 4-player games of Cat in the Box. It was a first-time play for everyone but me, but they really got the hang of it by the second or third hand of the first game, talking about the various perspectives you can take with your opening hand and deciding on the discard (Do you dump one of your three 6s so you don't get caught with one that will lead to a paradox or just try to bull your way through and take most of that column?) I won the first game 17-16-14 to -2. But I got crushed in the second game, 18-17-15-2 when I ended up paradoxing in both of the first rounds. This was a good game to introduce to this group, as two of them are experienced bridge players and the third is a gamer of all types. Will definitely be bringing this one again.

Put another five or so hours into The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine across three different groups at all player counts. A hit every time, and I’m enjoying seeing the strategy develop in picking tasks and choosing what to communicate about your hand. People aren’t just indicating they have an assigned card. They’re warning when they have a single suit or showing what could be a dump suit. Good stuff.

Ive been playing a weekly game of Frosthaven with some friends, after someone dropped out of their campaign. It's basically Gloomhaven with more interesting scenario design, and way too much stuff added outside the scenarios. The stuff is all neat when someone else owns the game and keeps up with it all, but I would never EVER want to own this game or try to set it up or store or or anything. It's just way too much shit.

Ah_Pook wrote: It's just way too much shit.

This needs to be the tagline for 80% of modern games.

A friend and I played GLOOMHAVEN most weekends for the better part of a year. It was fun, don't get me wrong. But then I downloaded the Steam version and played several more campaigns solo and man, I just can't muster the energy to play the physical version of FROSTHAVEN. Between the phyiscal chore of set up and take down and the character previews I've read that give me the impression of the characters being harder to manage, I just don't have the energy.

One of my sons is a big fan of the video game Dead by Daylight, so on a whim I picked up the board game adaptation. It was designed by the creator of Millennium Blades, so that gave me some hope. It's also programmed movement, which I like, and it's finally a take on the "killer vs. survivors" genre that DOESN'T use hidden movement.

It's also pretty light and quick. My kids generally don't enjoy board games, but I figured I'd try again. Today, we played.

One son took the role of one of the killers, The Nurse. Myself and my other son each controlled two survivors. We rolled the killer, escaping when they still needed 4 more progress on their victory track. They gain progress on this track by wounding and hooking survivors, just like in the video game. Survivors win by repairing generators and then powering up an exit, which mechanically is just like a generator, but you have to work on it last.

My son who played as the killer was pretty distraught, complaining that he didn't think he should be revealing his movement cards at the same time as everyone else. And this was my biggest mistake.... he was right. Each player reveals their chosen movement card only when it comes to their turn. My bad, I basically ruined the game for him with that one screw up.

I hate teaching games.

We played a "short" game of Xia Legends of a drift system to 10 VP's and ended with Ethnos.

Xia was with all its expansions and was great fun. We had a 5 person game scheduled, but ended up playing with 4. I wanted to play a full 20 VP game but one guy had to leave early so we cut it short. Decided that next time we play it we'll start during the day and play a full game. I love the sandbox type of do whatever you want. The gradual upgrading of your ships to become whatever you want to whether you ship cargo or try to blast everything out of the sky. You can't fully appreciate the game only playing to 10 VP in my opinion but had fun. It's really a beautiful game on the table...you just need to have a big table.

For as luxurious and grand Xia was, Ethnos was not, but I loved the game! Small board, muted color palate (think Shogun) and nice cards.

Its a hand management area control game. You can score in two ways based on card combos you play, but then depending on the card faction card you played, you place a token on that area and build up your control. Whomever has the most control tokens on each area, score points at the end of that season. Believe it's out of print but I plan to find a copy of it as my son and I really enjoyed it. You have a random faction generator that chooses what factions to play with for each game. I believe there are 12 factions and each faction plays differently.

Agree that Ethnos is a great game. It's one of the CMON's last releases that wasn't dominated by miniatures and really doesn't need them for what it is. The color palette is a little washed out and I sympathize with the complaints that it could've gone in another direction that wasn't just generic fantasy, but it's not offensive and it does what it says on the tin, so I'm OK with it. I had been wanting a copy for years but, like you say, it was sold out. But I managed a trade for a copy of Outer Rim last summer and have never regretted it (my first and only play of the latter was poor enough for me to trade it right away.)

Played Tiny Epic Zombies with the regular Monday crew. Argh. I'd forgotten how difficult the rulebook is on this one. Among the entire TE series, it's perhaps the one rulebook that really needs an overhaul to clarify the differences between competitive play (1 zombie player vs human players), other competitive play (against the game AI, but competing to score the most goals by the end), and cooperative play (against the game AI.) Admittedly, having a shrieking 5-year-old and 3-year-old running around the table and asking questions made things a bit more of a trial (Some nights are easier than others, as all of the parental types among you out there know better than I do.) We played cooperatively because that's the easiest way to teach it and we only had three players. Goals were Discover the Source, Find a Cure, and Escort the Army. The first requires us to reveal tokens and guess the outlier to try to narrow down the actual source. The second requires us to find the tokens in order to gene-sequence a cure. And the last requires us to use our movement points to move the army squads into the mall to the courtyard so that the day can be saved. It's all standard zombie flick stuff. Despite the rules confusion, it was an enjoyable game and reminded me, once again, of why I like this series so much, since almost all of them are just fun experiences with a lot of depth and replayability to explore.