What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

This weekend I played the Tholian Web single episode for Attack Wing. The scenario is awesome where it starts at a 3'x3' area and slowly shrink down to 1'x1'.

My fleet consisted of the Voyager and a Borg Sphere...My first time flying.
3 of the 6 players were flying spheres...Ended up being my 2nd and 3rd game against Spheres.

My conclusion is that they are boring.
Fleet building and Movement are the two elements that are most compelling in this game. The Borg remove that movement element. Able to move in the four compass directions and change directions on a dime combined with their 360 fire arc means that chess-match of movement is eliminated from the game.

The most exciting moment (sort of since everyone knew it was coming) was when my sphere and my opponent's sphere managed to blow each other up at the same time. Followed by the least exciting moment when I lost the match after a roll-off.

They have changed the meta a bit and has increased the value of wider fire arcs, rear fire arcs and torpedoes to shoot out of those rear arcs. They are now something to consider and develop new tactics against and making me think more about the game is good.

Them being so easy to use, so brainless to use...The proverbial "hammer" if you will, they'll be popular. And them being popular is pretty boring if you ask me.

Black Barney wrote:

Stonecutter wrote:

Gary Sax wrote:
1) The rules for crossing a river (which is more expensive) are unintuitive and don't fit with reality that people have in their heads. I explained precisely what the rules are but people just couldn't get over it.

I... what? They didn't understand that crossing a river would cost more money than crossing open land? This seems really easy to deal with.

.

nah, the rules for crossing rivers is really weird in Railroad Tycoon. It's tough to get a handle on.

The issue with RotW/RRT's river-crossing rules isn't that crossing rivers is more expensive; the issue is that the rule is that ANY hex with ANY water on it is more expensive. This is absolutely idiotic, and makes the coasts or building anywhere near the Great Lakes extremely undesirable. The publisher/designer has clarified that yes, this is exactly what he meant and that is how it was playtested. This leads to absurd arguments about specks of water in a hex.

Other things I hate about RotW (mainly usability things, because boy is this game a usability disaster):
- the scoreboard. We played this game several times, and I don't think there was EVER a play where we were sure at the end that we'd scored everything OK. There are two terrible things about the scoreboard: 1) how crowded it is, which makes it so that minor nudges to the scoreboard can completely screw up the scores, and 2) the snakey way it winds around, so that sometimes you go up and sometimes you go down, make it easy to be scoring in the wrong direction.

- obviously, the gigantic map. Even in the RotW edition, it was the largest gameboard I had...and so UNNECESSARY. So much of that map appeared to be extremely undesirable to ever build on. This size also made it so that scoreboard had to be on a separate table, which contributes to the whole scoreboard problem.

- the empty city markers are cool, no doubt. BUT they emphasize that whoever was doing the graphic design for the game had no idea how to guide the eye to best convey game information. The most standout, eye-catching pieces on the board function essentially just as a countdown counter; they draw the eye only to the most irrelevant cities!

- gameplay issues: the cards and the auction for first player. WTF. WAY more cards are made available on the first turn of the game than will ever be added to the display again. This frontloads all the reading instead of trickling it in. But more importantly and more objectively wonky, this means that the first turn's auction for first player is way way way more important than any following turns. In following turns, unless a particularly flashy card is flipped up as one of the two or so new cards for the round, the auction is pretty flaccid. This bizarre flow, or lack thereof, of cards-of-interest feels wrong.

- the tycoons are also wildly imbalanced in a way that doesn't contribute any fun to the game. Cosmic Encounter's aliens being imbalanced? That's fun, and becomes part of the gameplay. Randomly being handed or deprived of some points at the end of the game, that's no fun. REALLY unfun is the one tycoon who makes you count how many trains there are on the board or whatever the fuck: don't remember the specifics, just remember that's there's some awful tycoon whose bonus depends on counting up into the 40s.

I dislike Power Grid too, but RotW is so much worse. Both of them, however, just feel dreary and full of calculating how much money you have and will have next turn, to the dollar, over and over and over again. My biggest issue with RotW was just wondering: where is the fun in the game supposed to come from? There didn't seem to be a single really outstandingly "fun" thing about the game.

yeah, i absolutely despise score tracks. I knock them out of place all the time. Caylus, Through the Ages, I've had it with those things. I'd sooner use pencil and paper like in Magic*


*I had to mention it because for some reason you forgot to

This weekend I got to play one of my favourite modern euros, The Castles of Burgundy. I really enjoy the constraints the game puts you in and how you have to work around them. It's also not a snowball game, you gain a few abilities over the course of the game, but generally your first turn and last turn are not that different. There are snowball games I enjoy, RftG, Agricola, Power Grid, Outpost, but I feel it's a very over used game structure. Castles offers a lot of room for crunchy decisions and clever play.

I learned Small World Underground, a semi-sequel to Small World. I enjoy Small World a lot, and this one is -pretty much- Small World, but there are a couple minor tweaks, primarily in the way of artifacts and places. Artifacts are items that are seeded on the board that you can use once per turn (there was a sword that gave +2, a magic carpet you could use to fly anywhere), and I felt these were a pretty fun addition to the system. The places on the other hand were much more swingy. There were some that did barely anything, and some that were very powerful. I get that the idea is you fight over the powerful ones, but it just didn't seem necessary. In addition there was a river dividing the map in two, which I really wasn't into, and many of the races were functional reprints of races from SW, and a couple of the new ones stunk. Overall, it's fun, it's still Small World, but I vastly prefer the original.

I taught my group how to play another Feld game, Bruges. This game is in the vein of a San Juan "use cards for everything" game. I enjoyed it, like Castles it's another combo building game, this has a snowball element, but that seemed to be just one path. One player got some pretty good cards and the rest of us not knowing the deck got blown out. Imagine being a little kid playing magic and having no knowledge of Wrath of God until it's cast against you. Pretty much that. Looking forward to playing more though.

And then a game my group loves but I've never played for some reason, Dungeon Lords. This game was a bear to learn, I'm talking near an hour of unstructured rules explanation. Clearly no one was ready to teach this, but we eventually got through it, thank goodness. This game is in two stages, similar to Galaxy Trucker. In the first stage you're semi-blind bidding minions to go do things for you so you can build up your dungeon. In the second the adventurers knock your door in and smash through as hard as they can. The thing is the "programming" of 3 minions in the first phase seemed to take the other players literally forever, and the run through the dungeon by the heroes was near totally calculable. I found this game pretty boring, which was kind of a surprise after enjoying Dungeon Petz a few weeks back. There's little interesting game here past the concept, and it took us like 3 hours to play.

Also hitting the table: Hanabi, Love Letter

As much as I love RWotW, Andy sure is right about two things...the usability and the graphic design. The board is terrible- ne'er has so much space been wasted. It's just obnoxiously big mainly because that was back when Eagle Games was specializing in obnoxiously big boards. It looks ridiculous, and it doesn't help that the whole thing is covered in that GOD AWFUL Paul Niemeyer artwork. FFS, he is absolutely one of the WORST illustrators ever to work in hobby gaming. His stuff was widely praised as being "great", but only people that think that things like airbrushed American eagle T-shirts and commemorative knives with hunting images are "beautiful" could possibly think that this tacky, no-taste and absolutely classless style of drawing could be "great".

That's a great point about the empty city markers. Why the hell would you make these cool ass pieces to show an EMPTY city? Richard Launius painted all of his, one time I said "that sure is a beautiful marker to show that something is OUT OF THE GAME."

First player auction...huh? I, uh...think we forgot about that...we haven't played it regularly in a while, but we just played in rounds...

I sometimes think scoring tracks were invented to let people cheat and not feel out of the game. They don't make any good sense at all, and certainly not wrapped around the game board where you're leaning over to make your plays.

S.

Michael Barnes wrote: As much as I love RWotW, Andy sure is right about two things...the usability and the graphic design.

Agreed. It's one of my favorite games, but that doesn't mean I can't see its flaws. It especially bothers me when graphic design problems pop up in later expansion maps. Do they just refuse to learn from their own mistakes?

As for the water issue, we just have a house rule that if the water takes up less than about 10% of the tile, ignore it. It's still a judgment call, but people get the idea and are always amenable to the consensus of the table. But yeah, it would have been a heck of a lot easier if they had put a tiny blue wave icon in the middle of the hex like they did with the mountain spaces.

Agreed, absolutely terrible usability.

That was really an issue with Eagle Games in general...usability and also UGLINESS. They were (are?) an odd company, sort of sandwiched between these really clunky, cumbersome and massively bloated kind of post-Gamemaster designs and hybridization. Age of Mythology was arguably the first true hybrid but it had the Eagle Games "mess" about it, including terrible art and crappy product design.

Thinking back on Eagle Games...damn, they made some really bad ones...but they were always at least "good enough" that you thought they were salvagable. Like Attack! and Bootleggers.

Good god. I think a large part of the initial planning for Atlanta Game Factory was conducted over a full game of Attack! with the expansion and like three tables put together. Oh, mercy.

One of the guys in the Hellfire Club _still_ tries to get us to play War! Age of Imperialism two or three times a year.

So weird that I bought that game at a CompUSA.

Not a big fan of Eagle graphic design either. But Bootleggers is better than it is described here sometimes. we play once or twice a yearbut it is. one I will not sell- we had quite. a lot of fun with it.

For the original Railroad Tycoon, the real problem isn't that the board is butt-ugly, it's that about a third of the board is wasted. If you go south of a line from St Louis => Memphis => Jacksonville, you'll lose. And I'm not even talking about dead board space. Why are there hexes north of Toronto and Duluth, or south of Jacksonville?

Having said that, I don't get the scoring track hate. RotW's has the payout as well as the score. You could do it on a second board, but that board is already taking up all of the usual game table space as-is.

But I do like it. I might try to rope the family into it again, or play it at Origins.

The score hate is because the spaces are tiny and they are around the edge of a HUGE board. Which means that the score pieces are sitting in front of every player's elbow, just waiting to be knocked off multiple times a game.

I feel like some sort of colored paper clip would be ideal...

Gary Sax wrote: The score hate is because the spaces are tiny and they are around the edge of a HUGE board. Which means that the score pieces are sitting in front of every player's elbow, just waiting to be knocked off multiple times a game.

I feel like some sort of colored paper clip would be ideal...

Like in the DUNE board game! I love it anytime I get to mention my coveted and precious Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley DUNE game.

dragonstout wrote:

- gameplay issues: the cards and the auction for first player. WTF. WAY more cards are made available on the first turn of the game than will ever be added to the display again. This frontloads all the reading instead of trickling it in. But more importantly and more objectively wonky, this means that the first turn's auction for first player is way way way more important than any following turns. In following turns, unless a particularly flashy card is flipped up as one of the two or so new cards for the round, the auction is pretty flaccid. This bizarre flow, or lack thereof, of cards-of-interest feels wrong.

In crowded games, the auction is reasonably exciting. Or better than 'flaccid', at any rate. There's a good bit of 'beat guy x to city y for the cubes', or 'beat girl x to get the city bonus'.

Just to keep the thread going in the right direction, it turns out my family gamers really like Love Letter. Nothing else made it to the table, and it was a fun time.

I don't know..I love ROTW, it's one of my favorites. Something about the game just clicks with me. I get the reasons why there is some hate for the score board, but who cares really. I just put it off to the side on a smaller tv table or something. Overproduced? Hell yeah! The auctions for the cards make the game more exciting to me. With the right people playing if you want that card, you've got to pay for it, so how much is it worth to you? If I'm playing this with timid people who won't block on the board or in an auction I'll eat em for lunch. Luckily I don't, which is probably why I count wins in this game as preciously few. Man..I'm fired up, now I want to play.