What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

We played with 4. I can see it would be a little less unpredictable/uncontrollable with only 3.

I've been playing a lot of Ark Nova on BGA. I can see why it's gotten a lukewarm reception because it's got a lot of moving parts, that don't really feel like they quite fit. And it's kind of like Terraforming Mars, where the game depends on card draws, and by the time they show up, if they show up, the game is over. So you play a game, it takes four hours, and you realize that you were dead after turn three. Not all that much fun. But you do feel yourself climbing the learning curve after you play it a few times.

I enjoy Ark Nova far more than Terraforming Mars. When playing with an experienced group, you can play a three or four player game in well under three hours. Turns can be very snappy (I have my next three turns already ready in my asynchronous BGA current play).

I am enjoying Ark Nova a lot more on BGA than I did on the table. Not committing to a 4 hour chuck of time all at once makes it palatable.

The cards are it's biggest strength/weakness.

I just completed two games. In one, it's like the deck was stacked in my favor. I felt bad for my opponents because I ended the game so early and with such a high score. It was a blowout.

The second game, I started a week earlier, and neither one of us could get any traction. There was a period where we took actions for the X tokens, just to get our draw actions to a place where we could do 5 power draws. Apparently, neither of us got anything good, becHae we did the exact same thing AGAIN.

Ark Nova needs half the cards. Then it would be perfect.

Remember, cards are not a form of problematic randomness. For some reason only high stakes dice rolling is.

In theory I should have liked Ark Nova. I liked Terraforming Mars, and I thought the action card/upgrade system from FFG's Civ was clever. But it fell totally flat for me. I gave it another try on BGA and was desperately hoping the game would end ASAP.

It is so very draw dependant.

I have a fix in mind, but I don't own a copy any more so I don't have the motivation to work on it.

Essentially, there are 250 cards in the base set deck. Go through the deck and separate it into five pseudo-balanced/thematic decks. Give them all a color or symbol so you can keep them straight.

At the beginning of the game, pick 3. Boom.

Works for expansion too. Pick 3. Play the game.

Sag even came up with the idea of single deck expansions, like a San Diego Zoo, or a Christmas pack.

Alas, my million dollar idea with die here, on the TWBG forums.

Got together with my friend, Brad, again. We started with Neuroshima Hex because he'd never played before. I gave him Hegemony, as I do with all first-timers. It's the army that can recover best from poor draws and is still quite straightforward in its execution. I took Sand Runners because I still don't have enough games in with them to really feel comfortable. We both ended up with a really slow start, as we drew more action tokens than anything else. Our first two battles inflicted one casualty on each side and little else, although I did get out front in the HQ race. This pattern largely continued through the midgame and I did increase my lead to 14-8 at one point. But then the durability of Hegemony began to pay off. He had a cluster of modules, including his Sargeant, in one corner that I just couldn't crack and our HQs ended up nose-to-nose for the last few turns. We ended up fighting because of a full board and I got hammered down to 4 with him at 8, but managed to clean up a lot of his units. But in the final battle, I could only manage 3 hits and lost, 5-4. Again, Sand Runners is still just not quite working for me. I need more practice using the Sandstorms, but it also would have helped to have a smoother draw. I think I made the classic mistake of not saving a couple tiles for later turns to try to pull off some more elaborate combinations.

Then we tried Atiwa, because I had never played before. It's an Uwe Rosenberg creation and has his particular style all over it. It's a worker placement game about the discovery in Ghana that the local populace could make more money with logging generated by cultivating the fruit bats to spread new growth than they could with gold mining. Gold is still an important resource in the game for building larger settlements that earn more points at the end and for shoring up certain resources needed to keep your engine running, like goats to feed your families. But it's even more important to get your families trained in the bat cultivation system, so that you can keep as large a group of bats as possible and take advantage of bat actions (dropping new trees) after placing each of your three workers. Trained families also don't generate pollution, which gives you more freedom to place all of our resources, including bats. I liked it in a general sense but I'm not really a Rosenberg fan (I don't care for Agricola or Le Havre or many of his more lauded efforts.) I enjoyed this one as much for the environmental theme as for the gameplay. I wonder, though, if it would be really that different with more than two players, since it felt so tightly designed that there was enough tension with two in terms of choices and opportunity cost. In the end, Brad had managed to get a family-gold machine rolling that let him buy two of the largest settlements, where I could only manage the next-smallest type. I knew that would be the margin, even with my significant edge in bats, and I lost 97-93.

We finished with another run through our Hero Realms campaign. The story asked if we wanted to follow the imp or the brigand and I chose the imp because it sounded more interesting... forgetting that every time we faced an imp in our first encounter, it made us discard cards. So now we were facing a boss who did that and several more imps in his deck who did the same. That was kind of aggravating. I stuck to mostly red cards in the market and managed to keep champions in front of me for most of the game so that I took very little damage, but I also was generally only able to knock off the minions in front of me or the elite ones in the boss' area, while Brad unleashed multiple turns of combo damage from his collection of knives and actions. He probably inflicted 80% of the damage needed to down the boss, which kinda left me feeling like a fifth wheel, but I guess I was cleaning up the other stuff, so there's that. We've picked up two treasures each, but mine seem kind of reliant on not having half my hand discarded every turn, so we'll see how they work against the next boss.

Last night, we played Survive: Escape from Atlantis. We run a "Pick-Our-Play" poll on our Discord server where we allow our podcast listeners to vote on one of the games we play each month, and Survive was that game.
Shockingly, this game was initially published in 1982 by Parker Brothers. I won't spoil the episode too much, but it is still a very fun and cutthroat game, and can totally hold its own to today's gaming standards.

We also played my 15th logged, face-to-face play of Wings for the Baron. We played the Standard (Fighter Only) version of the game, based on our experience from the last time we played (Our May 22nd episode). WOW. That was a crazy game. I think we played more Event cards last night than the combined previous 14 games. It was a RIOT. The Standard Game is solidifying itself as my favorite way to play (You were right, Sag), although I'll never turn either version down. It is still solidly in my top 3 games.
I was able to lead Albatros to victory by building a very strong fighter in the middle to middle-late stage of the game. I probably could have rode the last half dozen turns by Build/Banking and raking in the Deutsche Marks and coasting to the win, but Sag and Chris put on the pressure and I had to make at least one more set of improvements to my plane to maintain my contract flow. End the end, I had a monoplane that was only missing one technology, Metal Construction. I could have attempted to push through the Tech deck to find it, but it would have been a huge sacrifice. In the end, I chose the Actual Victory over the perceived victory of a fully-kitted Fighter plane.

I am so excited that GMT is picking this one back up.

I've done the math and I can bust down my miniature assembly backlog if I clean and build 11 models a week until the end of the year. I don't consider it a Pile of Shame, because we've played with most of the stuff I've built so far, but I'd really much rather be painting now.



Des reminded me that games other than Warhammer exist and we played through Spire's End: Hildegard again. Not only was our our path totally different this time around, but the fact that we landed on ending #20 - NOT a victory, mind you - has me hyped to explore it again. The breadcrumb connections to the story of the original Spire's End are awfully tantalizing...

Been enjoying my time with Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn: Red Rains: The Corpse of Viros (Colon: The Game).

I was a little leery of a solo mode for a a competitive card game, but my collection wasn’t getting played otherwise. Turns out it takes a load off not needing to worry about the meta and just being able to play the cards you want. The bot isn’t as clean as Skytear Horde, but what is?

Now I’m looking with a little more interest at the Star Wars CCG solo project Warlords and Insurgents.

Jackwraith wrote: Then we tried Atiwa, because I had never played before. It's an Uwe Rosenberg creation and has his particular style all over it. It's a worker placement game about the discovery in Ghana that the local populace could make more money with logging generated by cultivating the fruit bats to spread new growth than they could with gold mining. Gold is still an important resource in the game for building larger settlements that earn more points at the end and for shoring up certain resources needed to keep your engine running, like goats to feed your families. But it's even more important to get your families trained in the bat cultivation system, so that you can keep as large a group of bats as possible and take advantage of bat actions (dropping new trees) after placing each of your three workers. Trained families also don't generate pollution, which gives you more freedom to place all of our resources, including bats. I liked it in a general sense but I'm not really a Rosenberg fan (I don't care for Agricola or Le Havre or many of his more lauded efforts.) I enjoyed this one as much for the environmental theme as for the gameplay. I wonder, though, if it would be really that different with more than two players, since it felt so tightly designed that there was enough tension with two in terms of choices and opportunity cost. In the end, Brad had managed to get a family-gold machine rolling that let him buy two of the largest settlements, where I could only manage the next-smallest type. I knew that would be the margin, even with my significant edge in bats, and I lost 97-93.

i traded away my copy of this after 5ish plays, but i was pretty done with it after 3. it just felt like a solved puzzle, and every subsequent game felt more like that. you do the exact same things in the exact same way every game, and it didnt feel like there were enough/interesting enough tactical decisions to be made while you were doing them. everyone i played it with ended up in the mid90s except one guy who completely didnt grok it who scored like 70. the last game i played everyone tied (except the 70pt guy), even. there were margins to be gained but it was like maybe gaining 5 pts with perfect optimal play, which didnt feel like it was worth exploring.

edit: the way the economy works on the player board is neat and fun, but the game around that needed significantly more interest imo. you do it a couple times and get how it works and then thats it.

Yeah, it felt less harsh than his earlier stuff like Agricola and that may be why we both scored in the 90s (his second play, my first) and all of you did, as well. The system isn't difficult to figure out. It's an optimization scheme like so many German (or near-German) designs. It's just a matter of knowing the system well enough to focus on that optimization, which is probably why you felt like it was a solved puzzle. I think the variation is supposed to come through the action tiles and what landscape tiles turn up which may trend knowledgeable players toward either the family-gold angle or the family-bat angle, which are the two that we took, respectively. But I only took the bat angle because I had kind of fallen into it in the midgame and realized that I couldn't generate enough gold to compete with his settlement purchases. If I could have competed with his family-gold machine, I would have tried. I'm interested in trying it again just to see if the change in action tiles does really produce some different angles to it, but it does still feel like a Rosenberg design, so that may not be sufficient.

narrator: the sliding action tile thing and the landscape cards did not provide meaningful variation game to game

yknow, imo

I picked up the retail edition of Thunder Road Vendetta, and ran through a 2 player game solo today to get a feel for it. It is pretty easy to understand, as one would expect.

You get a decent amount of player agency, even though the core mechanic is chaos. I think my meager group will really love this game. Of the two teams I was controlling, one was down to a single vehicle, and the other hadn't lost anyone. That team actually ended the game by crossing the finish line.

Also, the production value is fantastic. The graphic design is great, everything is very thoughtfully produced.