What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played a game of Splendor when visiting some friends' shop. It turned into an article. Wonder if I can submit this kind of article to F:AT?

sevej.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/why-id-ne...equest-for-splendor/

ratpfink wrote: First day of a local weekend con is in the books. It's a fundraiser for an American Cancer Society Relay for Life team so I always try to go and support it. Today I decided to be awesome and run all Nate Hayden games, so I taught and played San Quentin Kings, Cave Evil, Psycho Raiders, and Mushroom Eaters. It was glorious. Not sure much more needs to be said.

Au contraire, much needs to be said. Did everyone playing enjoy all games equally or was there a consensus as to what people preferred more?

A whole day of Nate's game? Yeah, that would be pretty glorious. Good on you for doing it.

I've been playing Mage Wars, myself as necromancer vs. my son as druid. Our builds both need some adjustment, and I think I need to mostly abandon the idea of a zombie zerg.

Also played Cutthroat Caverns this weekend because... 12 year olds.

I traded my extra copy of Clash of Cultures for a copy of Runebound and the Mists of Zanaga expansion. I had played once before and I played a game last night with two friends. As one of my friends put it, "Man this is great, I just get to have a big sword and go around and kill shit". It was fun even though I kept getting the crap kicked out of me.

I think this game will be our go-to beer and pretzels type game and I wish I'd have been in the hobby when all those expansions were still available. Maybe FFG will come out with a new edition one of these years.

doubles X-WING tournament. 4x4 playing area.

showed up and paired randomly with a guy i've played against a handfull of times, He loves his bombs.
several of the other teams had designed their lists to be played together, so we were at a slight disadvantage that way.

It wasn't a 200 pt list, it was two 100pt lists paired together, so there was at least 1 list with two 'Outrider' titles and other shenanigans like that.

mine:
Soontir Full (PTL, Autothrusters, Stealth, Royal Guard)
Turr Phennir (PTL, AT, Stealth, Royal Guard)
Shuttle - Omicron Group Pilot (Gunner, Fire Control, Rebel Captive)

His:
Emon Azzamen (andrasta, 3x Prox mines)
Guri (virago, Adv sensors, lonewolf, autothrusters)
Binayre Pirate + Feedback

Game 1:
vs Boba Fett, Kenkirk, Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. so many big ships. so little damage done. only 1 ship died in a 90 minute game, that Boba Fett.
Our Emon was able to use his prox mines to funnel their giant convoy out of their comfort zone and into a bunch of asteroids. at one point the lambda shuttle was chasing kenkirk around the board. the shuttle can't turn around, but neither can the decimator.

Game 2:
2 x Blue Bwings, 1 x Tie Adv, 2 Obsidian TIE fighters, Kenkirk and Leebo in the outrider.
the shuttle has specific targets it wants to kill. knowing those smaller ingame matchups means alot. They set their Bs on one edge, I set the shuttle on the other. They set their Obsidians opposite the shuttle. I said thank you.
We lost 1 ship this game, the little Z95, while Emon did his thing, laid his mine field and was whittled down to 1 hull point left. we killed everything but the two b-wings. they ended up not getting to the fight until the very end.

Game 3:
Mangler Dash, HLC Dash (Double Dash!) 2x rookie X-wings, Ten Numb w/protons and a z95 Tala

we made a huge mistake, and it was mostly communication issues. I thought Emon was dropping a bomb in a spot, and he thought I was going to fly through there. So we ended up turning several ships away from HLC dash and leaving him to the end. HLC dash was also a lonewolf and was pretty rough to deal with. 4 dice is just killer.

killed everything but HLC dash. lost - Emon, z95 and shuttle.

We took first place, won some acrylic range rulers, PTL and Tycho alt cards.

Turr Phennir is still unfortunately screwed by the high PS turret meta. He's still a PTL interceptor, but probably 90% of the time I was just evade/focusing with him to turtle up, not worrying about his ability (it worked great to kill the Obsidian TIEs) most things just shot before he did, the Double Dash's had initiative on him.
Lone Wolf when you have 200 pts on a 4x4 board is hard to get off. especially in relatively short rounds. Guri could have used predator.

4 big ships is terrifying to face, but they had mostly defensive upgrades. seismic charges, Ysanne Isard, draw their fire rebel captive. but still it was only 4 ships. You've got to have some offensive upgrades to balance it out. Predator, gunner, PTL..something. Fat ships will outlast other people in shorter games, but we were able to concentrate and kill something.

We never faced a whisper/Soontir/tycho or other high PS arc dodger. I think we would have struggled. Lambda + rebel captive + gunner helps against them, but is too slow to consistently beat them. Prox Mines with Emon would work well, and the z95 with feedback is a nasty surprise. Also did not face vader crew or much else auto-damage. Vader on a decimator is mean against Soontir. Seismics in the first game never went off. Ten Numb with his protons was the first damage on Soontir, and only because of that auto-crit hit. and after his stealth was knocked off, he became much more vulnerable, and I ran away from the fight with him.

Still a fun day, I love that Buzzsaw shuttle.

Frohike wrote: I've been playing Mage Wars, myself as necromancer vs. my son as druid. Our builds both need some adjustment, and I think I need to mostly abandon the idea of a zombie zerg.

There are rumors of some unbeatable Wall/Push build Loter used to demolish Josh Look with out there. Maybe one of them can comment. I miss Matt.

Played LE HARVRVAVVRER (Shortened style, 3p) last weekend with the wife/daughter. Had some good moments of "Arggggh" to get things right. Wife won in her debut game 142 to 139 to 121. I might have swung the win, but I goofed by taking a Wood offer I thought I would use to build something and then the Town built it, so I just had a ton of wood through the end game. I spent it as energy and all, but even the Colliery would have been a better spent turn.

The kids and I play BOHNANZA and have a great time. Folks should get this--lots of table dynamics with all the trading and hand management.

I haven't talked about it much, but I've built a lunchtime group of 7 people including myself. It's pretty cool to get an hours worth of gaming almost every day. We play a lot with 6 as usually someone isn't there. Lots of light dice stuff. I'd love to do Bohnanza but it's just a bit too long.

Today was a 5-player Cartagena. Two dudes left so the three of us played R-Eco and then a random dude joined us for No Thanks. NT is about the best $10 you can spend on a filler. You can teach ANYONE to play that game and it's always fun.

stormseeker75 wrote: I haven't talked about it much, but I've built a lunchtime group of 7 people including myself. It's pretty cool to get an hours worth of gaming almost every day. We play a lot with 6 as usually someone isn't there. Lots of light dice stuff. I'd love to do Bohnanza but it's just a bit too long.

Today was a 5-player Cartagena. Two dudes left so the three of us played R-Eco and then a random dude joined us for No Thanks. NT is about the best $10 you can spend on a filler. You can teach ANYONE to play that game and it's always fun.

Age of War from FFG would be a good game for your group. Simple dice game with some strategy, for 2-6 players (you could fit 7, too), playable in under an hour.

stormseeker75 wrote: I haven't talked about it much, but I've built a lunchtime group of 7 people including myself. It's pretty cool to get an hours worth of gaming almost every day. We play a lot with 6 as usually someone isn't there. Lots of light dice stuff. I'd love to do Bohnanza but it's just a bit too long.

Bohnanza should be doable within an hour. Perhaps the first time teaching it, you might hit the whole 60 mins....but I have six and seven player games finish in about 35-45 mins. You could also choose to only run through the deck twice instead of three times. I find once everyone has that "a-ha!" moment the game speeds up and tends to finish quicker.

My boys (6 & 10) and I played DC Comics Deck-Building Game again last night. The things I was worried might be issues before I played it the first time - how it's not thematic and there's no narrative - were immediately subsumed by the visceral joy of defeating Villains, playing combos, and scraping together enough Power to defeat Supervillains. I have to coach and remind Bo (6) how to use his Hero Power and card effects, but he knows what's going on and he immediately picked up on buying cards and tallying the Power in his hand. Last night he was Superman and he had a great combo where he kept using the Bat Signal to call the Aquaman card into his hand that allows you to destroy (trash) a card out of your discard for +3 Power. He defeated 3 Supervillains and ended up with 28 points, and I had Green Lantern at 36 points after defeating 4 Supervillains. Mazy (Batman) was annoyed that he only defeated Black Manta, but when tallying his points he not only got 5 points for each of his 2 copies of Utility Belt, but he also had 3 copies of the Suicide Squad for 9 more. His grand total was 38 points but he was still disappointed that he didn't defeat more Supervillains, and Bo insisted that we play with all of the Supervillains next time.

This game is great. I like Legendary, too, and will play it anytime, but I don't know if it's that much better than DCCDBG to warrant the 10x as long setup time. And Legendary can be underwhelming if you pick random heroes and one or two are duds, or if all of them don't synergize with each other very well.

My next project is to make a smaller, custom deck so we can play the coop Crisis expansion on a school night.

Tried Brewcrafters last night. Worker placement game about building up a brewery. Very reminiscent of Agricola.

Enjoyable, but money is very, very tight. Also the buildings that you can construct are fixed, unlike in Agricola where there is tremendous variety in improvements and occupations. So while I'd be happy to try it again I'm not sure if it really has legs.

I've recently got back into my Combat Commander sessions with my regular opponent- my neighbour, whose addiction to the game matches my own. This guy's a monster who has an uncanny ability to master games. I'm still bruised from the 30-game losing streak of Twilight Struggle he inflicted on me 3 or 4 years ago. I could handle him for about 2 months at CC- introductory games and into Normandy , but then we hit Stalingrad where he mastered Russian street fighting on the trot and proceeded to slaughter me monstrously scenario after scenario before repeating the feat through The Fall of The West and Sealion.

We've taken to Resistance for our latest games. After losing the first 2 scenarios straight out of the gate, and determined to break the rot I endured for so long, I decided to play the same scenario (Germans in #64 Predator Becomes Prey) until I won it. It took me 5 goes to eventually grind a victory out. My neighbour's Germans won in one go, naturally enough, and it was the most stunning victory of the scenario's 6 plays, a dazzling surprise manoeuvre. I won our last scenario in my best game in ages.

Just played Struggle of Empires with 6. Game took pretty long to go through since everyone was new. I liked it alot though, the auctioned alliances at the start of each war is a great idea. Combat seems a little weird at first with two dice rolls and adding the difference as strength, and ship movement also seems weird on a map where adjacency is largely irrelevant. But after I got used to that the turns went by pretty fast, especially after all of the tiles were out. I'd like to play the game again except with either 5 or 7 so the alliances don't break down to a nice neat 3v3 for every war.

You know I like to be on the cutting edge of board gaming. I am drawn to the hottest of the hotness.

With that in mind this week's F:AT Thursday featured my inaugural play of Dungeon Twister.

Don't you mean Dungeon Twister 2 or Dungeon Twister the Card Game? No, I do not. And as a side note, is that horrible fad of turning every successful board game into some shitty card game over yet? Certainly the worst trend in gaming since the 5 minute filler game.

Anyway, I've had the game on my shelf for years and never played it. Al and I worked through the rules and played it. I'm impressed. A whole lot going on with a vast number of variables and decisions to make. It made my head hurt a little but I beat Al and that makes any game shoot up in my estimation. I'd gladly play it again.

What a rediculous amount of expansions this game has. 7 or 8? If you were to buy them all you'd have 56+ characters to choose from all with special abilities to remember? That's madness. I'll content myself with the base game.

Then we played Marvel Dice Masters which always impresses me with how much fun it is. I themed my team around "Characters I hate or never play". So Bishop, Magick, and Cable were in there. I used the Imprision action dice to throw most of Al's dice into a dungeon. Then when he was helpless I dealt him one massive knock out blow.

I won again and Al promptly declared the Imprision card to be broken

repoman wrote:
Then we played Marvel Dice Masters which always impresses me with how much fun it is. I themed my team around "Characters I hate or never play". So Bishop, Magick, and Cable were in there. I used the Imprision action dice to throw most of Al's dice into a dungeon. Then when he was helpless I dealt him one massive knock out blow.

I won again and Al promptly declared the Imprision card to be broken

I played with Imprison in a tournament. It's great when it works, but there are a lot of ways to play around it. The obvious one people usually catch on to is they just field characters and attack right away so you can't imprison them. Rinse and repeat. If you manage to capture some of their dice you can't attack or they get them all back, so you have to outlast all the damage they are dishing out while you're building up for that knock out blow. Even smarter is when they buy one or more of your imprison dice. I didn't realize this until someone did it to me but you can buy opponent's action dice too. Not characters, just action dice. That sucks big time when it happens. Also there are some global abilities that can force a character to attack, which will release all of the imprisoned dice to the fielded area.

Definitely not broken.