What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

charlest wrote: We did the first TIME Stories expansion scenario The Marcy Case. This game is one of the most unique experiences I've ever had. We had 7 people total wanting to play this (most already having a taste from the base game) and we loved it. I'm 100% all in and anyone here who digs a narrative game needs to be playing this.

I'm curious about this. When you say "narrative game", do you mean something like Tales of the Arabian Nights or Dead of Winter where the "narrative" is just reading a pile of text out loud, or do you mean a game where the players are constructing the story on their own?

Legomancer wrote:

charlest wrote: We did the first TIME Stories expansion scenario The Marcy Case. This game is one of the most unique experiences I've ever had. We had 7 people total wanting to play this (most already having a taste from the base game) and we loved it. I'm 100% all in and anyone here who digs a narrative game needs to be playing this.

I'm curious about this. When you say "narrative game", do you mean something like Tales of the Arabian Nights or Dead of Winter where the "narrative" is just reading a pile of text out loud, or do you mean a game where the players are constructing the story on their own?

It reminded me of a game like Professor Layton on the DS (but without the puzzles) or maybe Resident Evil (with less action). Players choose a location, say a specific room in a building they're exploring. Cards are laid out facedown, and together these cards show an image of the room on the card backs and all the potential things to be explored and people to interact with. Players choose a specific space in that location, pick up that space's card, and find out what happens. Some will have you roll dice to try and get through some type of obstacle. The cards will give you clues or items, then you move on to another location (and will maybe have to return to that location if there was a requirement that you haven't yet been able to fulfill).

Some clues/items are persistent, meaning you save them for future plays so that your characters are learning how to get through the scenario better with each attempt (ala Groundhog Day).

I enjoyed the game but I feel the players have limited agency since you're sort of on a track in a certain direction and can't really deviate in any meaningful way (as far as I know). Though I guess the same could be said about dungeon crawls...

Yes, you're uncovering a story that's already there but there is a bit of multiple paths to victory and you can actually lose, depending on the story. You won't see everything or get every item if you don't solve all of the puzzles or keep key NPCs alive.

It's kind of like Sherlock Holmes with much less text and interacting with amazing panoramic spread of art. It feels more first person as you're presented with a first person view of each location, have items, and stats.

It's tense because there's a time pressure element and you can also due in combat.

The game feels extremely unpredictable and the content throws curveballs and tricks at you that are very creative for the limited mechanisms. I absolutely love it.

engineer Al wrote: Here's a little trick for when you want to retry a scenario after a failed attempt: You don't have to reset the map. Just flip the scanned tiles back over and and change the orientation of the starting tile. This changes the direction of ALL the tiles as you play and produces a completely different map.

Glad to hear that you are having fun!

That's a great idea! Unfortunately there's no way around the Aliens/Discovery tokens, but maybe it's not as bad in later scenarios (Moon one - you need to separate the schematics, AND the Mysterium, AND the thralls, then add random ones). It's a bit more work than shuffling different decks, and at least SC:AM avoids that bit which is refreshing.

Probably 2-player Mars mission tonight, as the rest of the group is choking out. Might have to do with last weekend's gaming extravaganza.

Went to the pub and played two games against a friend.

W1812 - this a 15 minute Waterloo wargame that was all the rage a couple of months ago. The main thing its got going for it is a) its 15 minutes long, b) it has pretty graphics.

You have a map with blocks representing divisions on it, but they don't move, the map is really just a very pretty and evocative information tracker, each block being a hit point on one of your corps or reserve. Each corps (you have like 5 of them) has a card, on the card you can do one action and that action involves rolling a die. Each turn you pick a card and roll a die, something happens, thats it. What it does cleverly is use a very simple system to tell waterloo stories. Having each corps have its historical objective you are essentially just determining what is the highest priority and let chance decide the outcome. Its decent for 15 minutes but its quite passable too. Stategically there is very little going on. In some games there might be but ig the french get the allies under the cosh early with some good rolls the Brits will have to waste actions flipping cards out of square and not actually doing anything interesting. Conversely if the brits roll on the prussian card well early, they might as well do that every turn until they win.


Hearts and Minds - a twilight struggle weight CDG about Nam.

Probably has the single worst rule book ever written, in that they neglected to put the win conditions in the book or any where else. Laughable. Otherwise this is a pretty good game. Its a good balance between simplicity and depth. There's enough to feel Nam and watch the quagmire grow and body bags fill but its still easy to play. On the first turn there was a collapse of Saigon government as i didn't understand the rules quite right and lost too many viet causalties. I recovered somewhat with a successful pacification of the southern delta two years later in the three year game. I like this quite a bit, but some cards are really badly worded. Worthington need to get the house in order and actually product test their stuff.

The pub where i was had 7 ales on tap, 6 where pale ales. Whats the deal with pale ale being EVERYWHERE? Its pretty average beer? Is this just a northern UK thing? I blame the craft beer revolution.

Also during the week i played a two player game of Pax Pamir. Not sure waht to make of it yet, i think it has less character than Porfirana and perhaps less room for clever play, particularly with two players. You need to get political cards early and if you don't get em, you are going to be at a major disadvantage. Next time i should steal my opponents ones. Like its predecessor i think its going to take a few games to work out how to think out this game.

Played Robinson Crusoe this evening with my wife after our little thanksgiving. What a game! I out and out still love this game. Pure forever shelf.

We tend to play with the dog and Friday just because my wife doesn't enjoy getting punished and losing---we used to play just Friday and got our win pct reasonable for the Castaway scenario but decided it was our game, why not play the way that made us happy? Been playing the cursed island scenario, IMHO by far the easiest one in the box. I think they should have made that scenario the recommended starter. Primarily because Castaways asks you to surplus and build up a huge amount against hellacious (and potentially swingey) weather---something you won't be doing in other scenarios. In most RC scenarios your goal isn't to turtle up and greedily gather way more than you'll need against an uncertain world. Instead you'll actually be making things and overcoming challenges. So it's odd the starting scenario has you doing slightly atypical things.

As predicted, the 'artists at the beach house 2015' threw down some Wiz-War.

Wiz-War x 3
Bang! x 2
Love Letter x 2
I Hate Zombies x 1

Post turkey, it was a nine player game of I Hate Zombies. It's cute, and I thought it was nice to have a bunch of drunks throwing Rock, Paper, Scissors. After one game, 20 minutes, everyone asked to play something else.

So we played an eight player game of Bang! Jesus Christ, I'm over this game. Too long says I. I thought it was king shit years ago, but now I can't handle it. I especially can't handle it with seven other drunks, two of whom have never played before. On the positive, my wife won as a renegade. That's pretty tough considering the table size.

Wiz-War remains awesome. We're playing more after breakfast.

Happy "Black Friday" y'all.

One of the local game stores does a Black Friday gaming session, 8am to 3am. They charge $40 and feed you and all proceeds go to House of Ruth. Auction items, the works.

One of the games that my buddy Chris asked me to bring Sucking Vacuum, a cheesy production game that sold for about $15 ten years back. All the players are on a Space Station that has been hit by a meteor and have to find their way to the shuttle in order to escape. That may sound like a cooperative game, but the shuttle only has room for two, there's only a few space suit parts available and the game pretty much boils down to two winners and everyone else losers.

Oh, and the rules are a mess. You need to read between the lines for about a dozen issues.

All that said, we had a GREAT time because the entire game is punching each other in the stomach while in a vacuum in an attempt to make the other player exhale. Once they're out of air you can steal their stuff while the try to get to an oxygen station in order to survive. You make due for weapons, I had Hercules the space station's cat for mine, Chris had a baseball bat and his one daughter had a toilet brush. The other had a fire extinguisher.

I started in a bad spot but assembled a full set of space suit pieces. But then I had the helmet taken from me. I took another helmet from the toilet brush girl and got to the shuttle, then patiently waited while my buddy knifed his two daughters to take the second seat. He made it a point to wave to his two girls as we pushed off from the dying station.

The game is a mess but for $15 there's room to have one hell of a good time once you work out the details. More or less you're bullshitting through the entire game, sending the robot assistant to open airlocks just to stick it to someone, standing in front of an oxygen tanks so they can't get a breath, cutting a deal with the one other person that you need to get off the station.

S.

I had the chance to get in some Black Friday gaming and actually got a chance to play Archepelago again.

Designed by Chris Bolinger of Earth Reborn fame, this game pulls together just about every Euro mechanic known to man and wraps them around a civilization/colonization/Polynesia theme. It makes massive use of Euro-glyphics on cards. The rule book is bizarrely set up with pages often divided in half horizontally rather than vertically into columns like, you know, every other rule book in the world. The barrier to getting started is huge. The rules explanation is lengthy and daunting.

All this makes the game sound terrible but it isn't. It is tremendous fun. All these disparate mechanisms fit together like the bits of a Swiss watch and they run smooth as glass. There is a huge variety of options as to what you can do and what strategy to follow. All the while having that feeling of never having enough actions to do everything you want. I mean that in a good way. Also the integration is such that too much of any one thing nearly always has some negative consequences elsewhere. Decisions are plentiful and hard. I also mean this in a good way.

The only gripes I have are that player screens are ridiculously tiny. There is no reason they couldn't be big enough for a normal person to read the player aid information on the back without having to pick them up and thus reveal what they are meant to hide. Also, the game has a semi co-op aspect in that if native discontent reaches a certain point a rebellion happens and all players lose, which is cool, but one of the randomly assigned victory objectives is for a player to make that happen. The hidden traitor mechanic. That might, MIGHT, be ok in a game with the maximum player count (5) but playing with 3 I think it would be crap so we took that objective out of the game.

In the end it didn't matter. Just as we were approaching several of the triggers that would cause the game to end, also randomly determined at the beginning of the game, there was an uprising and we were all murdered in our sleep by angry tribesmen. I can't provide any definitive proof to back it up, but I assert that if Josh Look had used his ampetheater for something other than a continuous revival of the musical South Pacific, things might have gone better for us.

Bali Hai will call you...

Archipelago is an _outstanding_ game. It's somewhat the same approach to Euro gaming that Earth Reborn took to the tactical miniatures genre in that there was no point in which Bolinger thought, "Maybe I have too many mechanics here." The difference here is that it all fits together perfectly and plays very smoothly.

HOWEVER. As Repo said, the screen suck. Better callouts to huts on the tiles rather than having it buried in the artwork would also have been nice. On a much more serious level though, I have a still-inexperienced-but-usually-right suspicion that using anything but the "short game" cards are a bad idea. The game does grind out somewhere in the middle and never gets out of that rut. Hidden victory conditions in most games are poorly handled, and this game is no exception. If you're able to discern what someone is trying to score, great, but then the game becomes a race for everyone to get that thing. If they play it more subtle, it's nothing more than a guessing game. What happens here in longer games is that early game is fine, you know what you personally are going after and are able to set that up. The mid-late game becomes a repetitive slog, either consistently trying to one-up someone or sitting there trying to puzzle out what they're trying to do, and let's face it, worker placement, which is really what the game is running on, does not have enough to it for it to be interesting longterm. Add in more time for the discontent track to add up and you've just wasted a substantial amount of time.

That sounds like I'm being hard on the game, but I do really enjoy it and am eager to play it again. It's just that a little bit of WP goes a long way, especially with the systems designed around it in Archipelago.

My Black Friday was all about decimating three people at Blood Rage and then narrowly coming in second in Cthulhu Wars with Crawling Chaos.

Our new neighbor (moved in right before we left for overseas two years ago) is a professional sculptor. We had pie at their place, then came to our place and played Rat-a-tat-cat. They are not gamers. At all. But it was fun and they are a cool couple, so that is pretty exciting because at 49 you don't really make new friends.

More Robinson Crusoe this evening. I was again struck by the balance in the game between gathering and building actions. Gathering's advantages aren't obvious and it seems like a worse decision, but its value is modulated by a much mellower event deck, sometimes even containing "good" cards, and the dice probabilities which are quite a bit more in the player's favor.

I've been playing a couple of games of Drageborgen - the original Dungeonquest - with my wife, the three-year-old, and the six-year-old. My youngest really only wanted to fight stuff (You find a chest, do you want to open it? No! There might be a monster in there you can fight. Okay!), but was extremely lucky. At one time in the first game he needed to roll 5 or less on a D12 or fall into a bottomless pit which he then did. And later, when he was bit by a poisonous centipede, he needed a 1 on a D12 to survive which he also managed. I'm not sure he understood quite what happened, but on the other hand he really wanted to wake up the dragon when he finally made into the treasure room, so there is that.

My wife survived both times while the rest of us died horrible deaths. In the last game I managed to walk into no fewer than five traps which was simply too much for the rather weak bowman.

I absolutely adore the game and the original has the added benefit of being in Danish (yes, the original is in Swedish, but this is the same edition) which makes it easier for the kids to play. But finding out which cards are which is a pain since they're black and white and all look the same. And while I as a gamer prefer the new combat system from FFG (from the first edition they made), the original rock-paper-scissors system is very easy to use and understand which also helps when playing with kids.

DungeonQuest is a staple in our house. I have the newst FFG edition and it's really great, huge improvement over their first go at it.

My wife has an art group over the house once a week and they've taken to getting at least two games of Camp Grizzly in when they're here. I think I'm going to turn them on to DungeonQuest next time.