What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Last night I played 3 more games of my Pandemic Legacy campaign. We went W, W, W, L, leading up tonight, and that loss hurt us bad, so we were wary going in, but ended up with W, L, W, and things looking much sunnier, so we have finished May with 5 wins and 2 losses.

The people who hate Pandemic and are assuming they will hate Pandemic Legacy really don't realize how much the legacy system improves on it. Everything that is wrong with Pandemic happened last night, as our wins and losses were more dictated by the card draws and we unfortunately had an alpha gamer (unfortunately me) trying to boss someone around on their turn who had to be hauled in by the other players. But the Legacy system saved us, as the loss that was dictated by the card draw (to give an idea of how bad, at the end of the very first turn we drew an epidemic, and the two cards we drew to add cubes to were cities with 3 cubes in them, and one outbreak caused a chain reaction outbreak, so 3 outbreaks before 3 of the 4 players had done anything) turned out to be one that in the end made us stronger as we used our game end upgrades to change things enough that we are now in a position of relative strength, so I am hoping that June increases the difficulty again. Also when I was being bossy, the other players pointed out the relative complexities of the current board state and how there was no guarantee that my idea was the best one (unlike in normal Pandemic where that is 99% the case), so the player decided their own move with me shutting up.

The last time I played Gears of War we had a game where all the flaws happened and I soon traded it away.

Arcadia Quest looks pretty cool, the Heroquest comparison perks my ears up. The KS 100 piece product line is such a turnoff!

Sagrilarus wrote: I prefer the dice. Adds a gambling aspect.

The last time we played we pulled the nastiest guy for each battle. I had always complained that the battles weren't tough enough to add sufficient pressure, but in this game, wow. Two of us got to peek in the last round, both of us put on a show about how hard it was, and the other players thought we were working them! They got crushed. That was entertaining as hell.

When you describe it that way I could see it work.

Gary Sax wrote: Arcadia Quest looks pretty cool, the Heroquest comparison perks my ears up. The KS 100 piece product line is such a turnoff!

And it's pretty much 100% unnecessary. There's enough game in that retail box to play through the campaign at least 3 times.

Dead Men Tell No Tales is a cooperative game with the premise that you and your pirate buddies need to loot the burning ship. There's one win condition, loot the ship, and a bunch of losing conditions. Basically you move around, fight off the deckhands and skeleton crew and guards, keep the fire under control, and try to get off the ship with the treasure. There's a bit of an exploration/puzzle aspect as you place tiles to reveal the ship as you play and have to keep the doors lined up.
This game doesn't work for me. We lost horribly the first time because we didn't worry too much about keeping the fire under control because, you know, pirates. We did a little better the second time but really the game boils down to keeping the fires and deckhands under control and worrying about the treasures when you can. I read that this game was designed before Flash Point as a firemen game but was held back when Flash Point hit Kickstarter. I suspect that's absolutely true and that theme makes a hell of a lot more sense than the pirate one they stuck on it in the end.

Ultimate Warriorz is a lot of fun. I never want to play King of Tokyo again. I didn't really want to play KoT again to begin with, but Ultimate Warriorz cemented that. This game is basically about beating the hell out of each other, with simultaneous action selection kind of like Witch's Brew or Citadels. Each Warrior has a couple unique abilities, unique size, unique cards, and unique hit points. So there are some mobile little guys, some slow big guys, etc.
There are three really simple things that make the game work extremely well: (1) The first hit point a Warrior loses is worth 3 points, compared to the single point that every further HP a Warrior loses is worth. (2) There's a potential (die roll) penalty for KOing a Warrior in the first three rounds. (3) The game is only seven rounds long. It's really in your best interest to share the wealth when it comes to dealing damage to be the first to damage another Warrior. There's incentive not to gang up on and eliminate players one by one at first, but then the later rounds become a bloodbath. The goal is to be the last man standing, but if there are multiple Warriors left then it's about who took the most VP through dealing damage, so you really want to maximize your assault every single turn. I dig it.

Dragonflame is a neat bluffing game with a little bit of timing and push your luck. Basically you play cards into stacks and at the end of the round each player takes a stack and resolves the cards. Some are treasure, some are bad, and some are dragonflame that lets you torch the villages. The catch is that which stack of cards you claim also determines how you'll play the next round and in which order. The first and second player typically have to play more cards face-up than face-down into the stacks, the middle-of-the-round player is about 50/50 face-up/down, and the later players get to play more face-down. So while going first sort of lets you set the tone, going later lets you hide the cards you play out. Ultimately you want to get the stacks that have Treasure (but not certain combinations that cancel each other), don't have Knights or Curses, and hopefully grab some dragonflame as well. When the game ends your Treasure and how well you torched the villages is what gets you points.
This game can be gotten pretty cheap and is a good social/family game.

Played Sleeping Queens for the first time as well. I was pretty surprised by how solid this game is for how simple it is. Basically there are a dozen sleeping queens worth various points and a few of them have abilities. You win if you get a certain number of queens or points (on the queens) before the other players do. You do so by waking the queens with kings, stealing queens with knights, taking a chance with the jester cards, and so on. You can also send other players' queens back to sleep with potions, but dragons cancel knights and wands cancel potions.
It feels like a trick-taking game, but there aren't any tricks and you aren't putting together points in your hands. All the points are out there on the table. Pretty slick.

Eight Minute Empire; Legends is a game my wife likes that I always thought was decent. More plays and we've kind of soured on it, primarily due to the Lost Lands expansion. Lost Lands gives you a bunch more options and modifications to use, none of which are very good, and most of which made us start to think that the core game is actually pretty fragile. We have better games in the 30-60 minute category, and better games in the area-control category, and don't buy into the "own a game for every situation" mentality so the Eight Minute stuff is going on the sell pile with Dead Men Tell No Tales.

Up next: Pax Pamir, Leaving Earth, and Shadowlord!

Played two games of Churchill, the short game and campaign game. We finished the campaign in about 3 hours 15minutes despite the 4-5hour listed time.

This is probably my GOTY, the tug of war card game is pretty decent of itself but as someone who knows the history of the WW2 conferences and the struggles between allied high command, this game really nails it. Its been a while since i was really wrapped up in a games story as it unfolds. I played as Uncle Joe and won too well and so lost to the Mericans. Roosevelt and Churchill got into an argument over the second front and essentially handed me two conference wins and all the resources I needed for the eastern front. I invaded Germany in late 44 and the war ended a few months early in 1945. We didn't count victory points at any stage during the game deliberately to make it less gamey. I ended up 30 points ahead of the Brits and so the middle player, the US, won. I loved every minute of it. We had played the short scenario the night before but with more rules errors.

Also played another game of Pandemic legacy. Meh, it was ok, we won this time just about, and opened a new box with tokens that did not excite me that much. I still think its better than Pandemic but i enjoy being with my friends than the games real mechanisms.

Another game of Fury of Dracula last night, with my daughter as Drac and two friends as my fellow hunters. We got extremely lucky in that on only the second turn of the game my friend Ben drew the event that lets you choose two cities and Dracula has to reveal if he's been to either of them. He picked Naples, and that's where she had started. Absolutely dumb luck. So we were able to close in on her almost immediately. She nimbly escaped for a little while, throwing us off with a Hide on Athens and then jumping to sea. But she was never quite able to shake us, and never really had a chance to mature any vamps, and we eventually cornered her over in Spain and finished her off early in week three.

Also played Big Book of Madness, which is a pretty good co-op deck-building game by IELLO. Seems really hard, as we got creamed badly on the basic setting, but I like that in a co-op game.

Friends wanted to use their new Imperial epic ships, so we played a large game of X-Wing. 2v2, 600 points per side. I took Rebels and all small ships. My teammate took the Transport for support but it did fuck all. The Raider is just brutal with 5 attacks per turn. The Assault Carriers' docking ability wasn't really utilized very well. They deployed the ships pretty early so I thought, "Why bother?" Rebels just couldn't hold up against the Imperials, despite greater numbers. They were getting really great evade rolls, so that didn't help. Overall I'm not a fan of Epic. They just take way too long and with that many ships on the board, the balance is out of whack. It's nice to look at though.

Holy shit that is pretty.

...childish.

/runs

Our second game of Forbidden Stars for the three of us. We tried making our own map this time and which resulted in two of us putting three of the four objective tokens for the third guy side by side AND WE DIDN'T NOTICE. That on top of me forgetting a couple of the basic rules and teh warp storms screwing the 2nd guy meant an easy win for the 3rd. He played it well but we were bloody asleep.

Followed up with a Fury of Dracula 2nd Ed where the same guy got a good win as teh count by picking on our mate's weaker two hunters while, apart from one fight where I took a line of health off him, with damn lucky draws of encounters (he stopped me five times with fog, bats and a saboteur) and then cancelled my event card to sail straight to his location. By the time I chased him down, as he was going to win by just hiding from us for a round, I was at four health and I died horribly to a knife wielding minion as my dice didn't seem to go above 3.

Forbidden Stars seems the game taht we all think is just right .... just need to learn how to play it a lot better.

Games where it's strategically important how the board gets built are tough (TI3, Runewars). It doesn't help that they tend to be long games that don't come out too often. Games can be decided before everyone warms their knowledge of the system back up.

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That looks wonderful. I wonder how much money is sitting on that table!

I played Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix for the first time with the kids. It was fun, and a little chaotic, and poop jokes were made about clogged and unclogged sections of the track. We even used the switch cards, and it wasn't the end of the world. After one race the money sits at:
teen son: $300,000 (one car, 2nd place)
11-year-old daughter: $280k, bid too much for two cars
Me and teen daughter, who worked on her art class homework during the game: $240k. She had two cars and I had one that only cost $20k.

I've got to find some cars to replace the stock pieces. The game has two circuits! And it's actually portable!

@DukeofChutney

I've been lobbying hard to get Churchill to the table, but it's been a difficult game to get other people into. I miss being at GMT West, when I could play it six times in three days against opponents familiar with it. It's a really great and unique game.

Played MAGE KNIGHT twice in the last week--such a cool game. A gamer's game. Even got my 8yo to try it out. She did great given how frigging confusing it all is. She won too! It was the "learn to play scenario" and she happened upon a temple on the last turn, cashed in 3 blue mana for 7 fame points and stomped us.

My 4yo is now online for card games, so there is a lot of UNO and SLEEPING QUEENS in this house. He's eyeballing LOVE LETTER and POKEMON, but can't read, so we've been able to hold him off those.

TTR:SWITZERLAND came out of retirement and we had a bloodbath over routs to Austria. So many bottlenecks on that tight map. I think vanilla TTR is a little weak unless you have 5 players, but I've never had a bad game on the Swiss map.