What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

How many games do you get out of Pandemic Legacy? And does it have difficulty levels? I used to play it on the highest level with friends so it would be dissapointing if there was only one difficulty.

Erik Twice wrote: How many games do you get out of Pandemic Legacy? And does it have difficulty levels? I used to play it on the highest level with friends so it would be dissapointing if there was only one difficulty.

Between 12 and 24 games; I think somewhere in the middle is average. There are 12 months and each month is one game if you win, but two if you lose the first one. If you lose the second one you still move along to the next month. There aren't any difficulty levels. There are a few things in the game that scale the difficulty a little if you keep winning or losing.

There aren't any difficulty levels in P:L, but we found it to be pretty damn difficult. (5 epidemic cards are shuffled in).

Probably won't be getting too much gaming in for the rest of the year, since this is the time of year when I seem to have plans made for me every weekend. But I did get some stuff played Friday night:

The Grizzled - This is an absolutely beautiful game, from the charmingly grim artwork to the actual gameplay. I'm not a wargamer, and in fact I'm often very turned off by the almost pornographic affection many gamers have for real-war themes. The Grizzled's theme appeals to me both in how it's presented and how the gameplay goes. And I like the gameplay itself; a cooperative game that isn't more whack-a-mole or hidden traitor is always welcome.

It's a grim game, to be honest, and it's hard as balls, but there's a there there, and every bit of it clicks with me.

Space Cadets: Away Missions - I had intended to read the rules beforehand and punch and sort my copy, but I didn't get time to, so it was sloppy going at first. Fortunately the rules are fairly straightforward.

We played two sessions of the second scenario (the one with the slave cells) and lost both. The first one we did okay on, but ended up dying largely because we didn't know the hazards that could pop up on Alien tiles. In the second one we were literally on what would be the final turn of the game when an Alert tile caused an alien pull. The resulting Alien tile again had a hazard on it which killed us.

I'm pretty sure all the players enjoyed this and I'm eager to see what the other scenarios are like!

Grudunza wrote:

san il defanso wrote: We played some Pandemic Legacy last night. In the abstract, I feel like the game's coolest things operate away from the player. By that I mean that all of the fun twists and exciting moments are generated by the designers and the little twists thrown at you, not by player choices. I don't like that very much, but in practice we've had so much fun it's hard to be too upset. We just finished July.

That's a great way to put it. I like the experience of Pandemic:Legacy a lot, but I do prefer the original game. We played three more games on our campaign yesterday, and the two losses felt so arbitrary. Sometimes that's the case in regular Pandemic, but in Legacy it can feel more like the game and story just playing out with you going along for the ride.

I agree with both of you. I really enjoy playing the game and I'm glad to have experienced it, but the narrative is *so* strong that I sometimes question my own agency.

One other thing that doesn't sit right with me (but is a very minor complaint) is the narrative cognitive dissonance between games. The series of games tell one long continuous story, yet each individual game tells its own story. The reset of the board (despite what changes may occur) seems at odds with the over-arching story. Maybe that's just me, though.

Codenames - Nothing special here. Just the latest party game that will be easily replaced by the next popular party game.

I met with some friends to play Netrunner but we also played a couple fillers while waiting for our food order:

Love Letter (Adventure Time) - This game is fun, but we spent most of the time laughing because...well, the luck factor is really high and most rounds were decided by something dumb. Basically, there are two or three factors that make plays a gamble:

1) Very lethal, the way the game works is through player elimination and a single card can "kill" a player.
2) You must play a card each turn so there's a high chance you'll end up killing somebody without intending to.
3) There aren't many choices (2-3) so there's a high chance you'll get it right.
4) It's very easy to eliminate one of the choices with some psychology but misdirection is really obvious and expensive so it's really easy to get it right which makes getting the right card at the right moment something very powerful.

I don't know, I had fun but I kept thinking "Man, this game is strictly worse than Citadels, why not play that instead?". I know that it's an unfair comparison because Citadels is a classic, but still.

Exploding Kittens - A deck has a set number of cards that kill you if drawn. You need to use special cards to prevent drawing it. The problem is that these special cards are about as deep as the ones in Uno so the game ends up being as interesting and deep as Uno is.

As far as Netunner goes...I've given up on Apex. It has a great design and is lot of fun to play but he just autoloses to the single most common HB deck. Hard. And there's absolutely nothing you can do in the deckbuilding stage to prevent it. I'm playing Geist now which is great against HB and supports Apocalypse. Win/Win.

Mad Dog wrote: Codenames - Nothing special here. Just the latest party game that will be easily replaced by the next popular party game.

I really like Codenames, and I need to grab a copy. But I fully expect a lot of people here will be mostly ambivalent about it.

Last night we played a bunch of stuff, but the one I want to talk about is Mousquetaires du Roy. Man, I really liked this one. It's only a few years old and is already really obscure, probably because the rulebook is an absolute travesty. I had to download the rewrite on BGG, created by our own wadenels, and then I was off to the races. I normally feel like 1 vs. everyone games require the one to kind of act as a DM, to make sure everyone is having fun and holding back when necessary. I did NOT feel that way here, since you can play as rough as you want, and it's the musketeer's job to stop you. It's a great hybrid between the hand management of a Euro and the dicey fighting of an AT game. It actually reminded me a little of Shadows Over Camelot, but I liked this better because the individual areas feels a little looser and just a shade less abstract. Not having to monkey with the traitor is nice too. I'm curious how it will play with just musketeers, no Milady. Either way I can't wait to play again. Thanks to cdennet for the hookup!

I had the game on my shelf for like two years without ever playing it, so I'm stoked you got it to the table and enjoyed it.

Mad Dog wrote: Codenames - Nothing special here. Just the latest party game that will be easily replaced by the next popular party game.

I disagree. It has legs. I might still be riding high from some raucous sessions with a room full of gamers at GenCon, but it was the game that every game designer I knew at the show was talking about.

It's a fun, clever game. If it has no legs, it will probably be because once you've played half the cards, you know what clues to give and/or what clues will be given.

Yeah, but it's more about how those cards combine when they're in a group. The game has an enormous amount of pressure to get a lot of cards covered by a single clue, and failure has a really tough penalty. That's a terrific tension I think.

I sure liked it. I might even buy it at some point, or just make up my own set. As far as components go, there's not a lot going on there, and you have the IOS app which makes the layout cards. I literally could make a set on index cards for like 3$.

I really enjoyed Codenames and I was hoping to pick it up as a Christmas gift for my cousin. Nope. Not only is it sold out at online game sites, the gougers on Amazon are having a field day. Current price: $55.99. For Codenames.

Had to abort my first play of the new Fury of Dracula with my daughter, as I totally screwed up the play sequence. I had her moving Dracula in between each of my day/night phases. Realized it when we met for combat the first time. D'oh!

But we played again last night, and it was awesome. I had only played the 2nd edition twice... loved the first play but the second had some tedious combat and an occurrence of Drac vanishing via the Teleport card, which was a major downer. But this new version kicks ass. And though she's only 10, my daughter was able to play Dracula very well (it helps that we've played Scotland Yard several times). She totally faked me out at one point when I knew she was in the North Atlantic sea zone and moving to either the English Channel or Irish Sea. A minute later she said "I just realized I could have gone to the North Sea, too," showing me the connection around the corner. I said that if you just realized that, then that means you did go to either the English/Irish Sea. But she was deviously playing me, and did go to the North Sea and had not only moved well into the north mainland, but also trapped Van Helsing on England for several turns with not one, but two sea storms.

By that point, though, Drac was weak from sea travel, so I was pretty sure she was heading to Castle Dracula, and this is where she faltered, trying to fool me again by not going directly there. But by not going right there to heal up, it allowed my other three characters (with Van Helsing still waiting for The Beatles in Liverpool) to close in on him and surround Castle Dracula. All three were able to attack him at once, which was enough to kill him, and just in time, as she had matured two vamps for 8 points and was about to invoke her Fury points in just a few more turns.

I was thinking this would be my least likely to hit the mark with on my "play 10 times" list, but now with my daughter totally on board and eager to play more, we should be able to get that. (I'm counting that aborted play, though.)