What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Josh Look wrote: 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.

Apart from combat, what are the big differences?

I'm still trying to figure this out too. I've been using the classic combat variant that they published way before the new edition, and it seems fine. Like, the new edition's big improvement seems to be making that the official combat method. Is there really any difference between the original and new reprints that can't be had by using the conversion rules they released?

I'm asking because I've got the original reprint, and I really dig it, so if there's a significant difference I'll upgrade to have the better one, but it seems like they're pretty damn close.

A few times a year, a friend from my old vampire larp crowd hosts a potluck dinner in the party room at his apartment complex. The last few times that I have gone, I have been bringing boardgames and a subset of the attendees are now regulars in the boardgaming corner of the party.

(Here is the place where I was going to post a photo or two from the event to show you that it was an amazing party room with an awesome view of the downtown Minneapolis skyline just across the river. Unfortunately, Facebook and Verizon have conspired to disallow my 2010 non-smartphone to export pictures to anywhere.)

First we played Cosmic Encounter. The four players included my mentee Jessica (a whipsharp recent graduate with an all-around geek background that included some boardgaming), a normal person who was only there to escort her aging mother to the party, and an enthusiastic gamer who has half-melted his brain with pot over the years. I'm sorry, but when somebody has that permanently melted pothead voice going on, they have suffered some lasting damage to their cognitive capacity. Everybody quickly learned the game, except for the pothead who needed to be frogmarched through everything for the entire game. My mentee and I quickly tied for the lead and held on until she finally won. The non-gamer liked the game enough to play the next game with us, which happened to be...

Camp Grizzly with the same four players was fun, except that the pothead was now drinking, and having even more trouble focusing on the game. Just like the first time I played it, Camp Grizzly soon drew several onlookers, who watched the entire game. This time was a cakewalk, partly because we were playing on easy setting. All four counselors survived, and we managed to rescue a couple of campers in the process. Bodycount was one. We escaped via the Ranger Tower, which involved some begging and possibly a blow job for a ranger nearing retirement.

Onlookers liked Camp Grizzly, so we had to play again, this time with six players. Normal woman dropped out, but we picked up a veteran gamer and his girlfriend, plus another woman. Woman really like Camp Grizzly. This six-player game was a lot more challenging, because there was dissension in the group about whether to escape by van or by boat. We had wounded characters at opposite ends of the camp, making it unlikely that they would survive long enough to limp to the opposite side if necessary for an escape. Due to a couple of lucky cards, we managed to get everybody to the boat finale, though my character and one other died in the escape over the falls, along with all four camper kids that we found.

Against my better judgment, we started a game of Sons of Anarchy late in the evening. Jess was is on this one, along with Ziggy the Pothead and Jess's boyfriend. By this pointed, Ziggy was also drunk, so I literally had to re-teach parts of the game everytime it was his turn. Plus, he kept knocking his screen over, or picking it up and squinting at the text. Later, the drunkest girl at the party came over and sat on Ziggy's lap and started talking about drugs with me because I was wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. I was never able to focus much on strategy, and kept forgetting to use my Calaveras gang abilities. At the end, Jess had about 45 cash, but her boyfriend won with 49. I had just 19 cash, and Ziggy had 7. It was a relatively tame game, with only one fatality, and overall not many shootings. There was one huge dogpile brawl in the final turn, with every gang except mine fighting.

Overall, it was fun. My mentee is a very sharp player, but this was offset by the pothead's awkward combination of great enthusiasm and extreme impairment. One girl proclaimed me the "King of Obscure Games" and reminisced about the time we played Nuclear War at a previous party. It turns out that two of her friends work for Atlas Games, so I took that as a compliment that my games were even more obscure than anything from Atlas. She also brought the second game of Camp Grizzly to a hilarious halt when she noticed that Kevin the Swimmer had skill in "water sports." Good times.

I got to try out the new Fury of Dracula last night. I really liked it, but unfortunately we had an atypical outing.

The owner of the game and the guy who played Dracula were both long-time fans of the original edition. However, this hurt Drac more than the other guy. First, he made a *terrible* choice of where to start out. I don't know what he was thinking. On my turn as Mina, I used the power to see if the Count was in the same region, fully expecting him not to be, just hoping to eliminate a region. Turns out, he *was* in our region, and we had him pegged almost immediately. He ran a little, had one fight with Lord Gotterdamerung in which got beaten senseless, then ran a little more. It was not pleasant for the Prince of Darkness.

I almost wish he had just quit at the beginning and we could have reset. But instead, he complained about having bad card draws and how different this version was from the original. Those both may have been true, but they were also irrelevant. The truth was he just played badly and got nailed (ha!) for it. It still took us probably two hours, which was way too long considering how one-sided it was.

It was still a good learning experience, both for the rules and for what *not* to do at the beginning. I felt sorry for Drac, but only until he got all pouty and complainy about his cards.

The impossible happened over the holiday weekend.

I played games with my family. And not just River and Scarlett.

The facilitator was my nine year old cousin Eddie. Big video gamer. Only person in the house that can put me down in Smash. Competitive but still lagging in Mario Kart 8. Sees board game shelf- "can we play one of those?"

So the first thing he grabbed was Star Wars Risk. We had an AMAZING game. For a "first time ever", it was exactly what you hope will happen. It came down to his very last B-Wing. He had redeemed Vader, blew the shields, but lost the Falcon. Partly because I played gentle in the first half. But then I dropped the hammer I the second, just obliterating the fleet makers. He got that one B-Wing up to the Death Star and I told him "You've got to roll a six...if you do, it will be EPIC." Boom, six. He got up, ran around the house screaming.

His dad, Big Ed, wanted to play too so we followed up with a team game and he was in on the games for the rest of the weekend. We also had a 7 year old cousin that joined a couple, and River and Scarlett played some to. So this all hit the table:

Star Wars Risk x3
Pharaoah's Gulo Gulo x2
King of Tokyo (which was probably the least popular out of the lot)
DungeonQuest (Eddie won this after I told him repeatedly "you will die")
Mission Command: Sea x2
BattleBall
Sorry Sliders x2
Villa Paletti x2
Cube Quest x8 (you read that right- HUGE hit)
Survive! Space Attack
Jungle Speed (which resulted in some hurt feelings)
Ave Caesar
Star Wars Epic Duels

I really wanted to get a big Heroscape thing going, but decided against it. I sat there the whole time wishing that I had Thunder Road after Big Ed and I discussed Fury Road. We had games on the table pretty much Friday through last night. Good times!

Wow. All it takes is one person who is willing to try something that might not be "cool."

So all I could picture throughout your entire post was a nine year old version of this:

The 2nd edition copies that Worthington printed did have some production issues where copies wound up being scrapped. John Poniske said that Compass is going to print the 3rd edition, but the ETA is quite some time from now. I will definitely pick it up. I've heard a lot of good things.

For the sake of argument, I think a Vietnam War game without win conditions seems on point

mads b. wrote:

Josh Look wrote: 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.

Apart from combat, what are the big differences?

I don't think there is any difference.

Even the comments over the shittiness of their revamped combat is way overblown -- a couple of guys in my group love it.

mads b. wrote:

Josh Look wrote: 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.

Apart from combat, what are the big differences?

They increased the difficulty. I don't remember the exact survival percentage in the first FFG edition, but I want to say it was around 25-30%. The new Revised edition is said to be 15%.

Josh Look wrote:

mads b. wrote:

Josh Look wrote: 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.

Apart from combat, what are the big differences?

They increased the difficulty. I don't remember the exact survival percentage in the first FFG edition, but I want to say it was around 25-30%. The new Revised edition is said to be 15%.

I hadn't heard that -- is that from players or from FFG? That seems still higher than the original.

It was all light gaming for us over the holidays. A shit-ton of Spyfall, some Great Dalmuti (still THE game for our bigger family gatherings), and a little Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper.

Ken B. wrote: It was all light gaming for us over the holidays. A shit-ton of Spyfall, some Great Dalmuti (still THE game for our bigger family gatherings), and a little Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper.

/Too soon?
//Or is the like one of those end of the Fall Season cliffhangers
///I still believe it's real, dammit.

Played some lighter stuff over the holiday weekend myself, like Bohnanza, Mascarade, and Worm Up (which is a dumb game, that my kids can play). Also, since we exchanged gifts on my side of the family this weekend, my son now has a copy of Loopin' Chewie.

Also I had the opportunity to teach Talisman to my brother-in-law and sister. We had a ball, though we could only play for about two hours. We had made it into the middle region, but that's it. Makes me want to buy all the expansions, instead of making do with the half-dozen or so I already have.

504 is well, not something I'd expect anyone here to like.

I've played two games now (Worlds 123 and 456) and I will tell you this - the individual games are fine but nothing special. 123 was a bit bland but 456 was better as a quickly escalating Euro conquest game with exploration and road building.

Have a lot more to play and experience but so far I'd say the metagame/design approach is brilliant and it's a crazy idea that does work. Don't buy it expecting to get 504 amazing games though. The whole point of it is that book of worlds and seeing how it works to experience FF's brilliant concept. Buying it hoping to get a box full of stellar games is missing the point.

I haven't played Kingdom Death: Monster yet, but I've assembled the prelude survivors and White Lion, read most of the rulebook, and sleeved almost all of the 2k+ cards.

Judging from the rulebook and what research I've done on the game, I'd be very surprised if this doesn't end up somewhere on my best of year list alongside other strong possible contenders like T.I.M.E Stories, The Grizzled, Cthulhu Wars. Oh and that game called Blood Rage. Need to get playing.