What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

that's why they took out the cards mostly from the beginner version. I hope they still do that

SuperflyTNT wrote: At the risk of sounding like a broken record or delivering a false platitude, I am ready to proclaim my opinion on Ferox:

It's a good idea executed semi-poorly. Playing with the starter decks sucks. Drafting is better, but iffy because it can end up worse than the starter decks or way better.

I don't hate it, and the system is brilliant, but the card distribution just fucks it all up.

That said, it gave me the opportunity to come up with a 'Blaxploitation Playlist' so it wasn't a total loss.

I'm the fuckup who designed & illustrated it, and honestly I just wanna hear your blaxploitation playlist. Trade ya:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtA_b_nZU...BFzr7STQh4YapCdp0wXC

Taught my wife Argent. What a fucking game! My wife intuitively understood the single turn combos immediately and did tons of interesting things with spells. She won 6-6 with an influence tiebreak. The VASSAL game we finished had a bunch of hoarding objectives so I didn't do much with spells but this was completely different.

Anyway, Argent is fucking awesome.

played several games over the weekend;

Relic with the Halls of Terra expansion: The expansion adds a new edge board (pretty cool), some new characters (including a terminator), and some new objective cards. One of the objective cards turns the game into a coop, as the chaos battle fleet crusades towards earth corruption cards get played out into the slots on the new board. If it fills up you all lose. So you have to both level up move towards the central show down and go over to the Halls of Terra board and hoover up. We lost but its an interesting dynamic to the talisman structure, and entirely optional. This is a better expansion than the nemsis expansion but not essential.

Another game of Pax Pamir, this time with 3 players. As with all the other games it ended on the first or second topple card. In porfiriana it is far easier to stop someone making use of a topple card, here one side is probably going to win assuming the first topple doesn't come out to soon. I'm starting to distill my thoughts on some of the mechanics. Money in the game is zero sum. It gets moved between players and cards on the board. The effective of this is, if one player gets most of the money they are in the driving seat. Second, military is probably the way to go once you have an economic base. If one empire achieves military superiority you really want to switch over to that empire because that empire will use its army to arbitrarily bash the roads and tribes of the other empires. Once everyone switches over to the same empire quite a few of the game mechanics don't really function and its just a case of money and assassinations to manovure for the topple card. There is still a pretty decent game in this but its far more singular in its direction than the first game. I also think the card deck is abit out of balance. There don't seem to be nearly enough political cards so its easy to get hamstrung with a small tableu. In general i feel somewhere the balance of the game is off. In Porfiriana there always seemed to be options and interesting ones. Here most of the cards on the table are either too expensive or not useful enough to fill a precious space in your tableu.

Mottainai, second game, this time with two players. It worked better this time and i sort of enjoyed it. I think it functions quite well as a 2 player filler version of Glory to Rome but its not real substitute for the original. Because of the scoring and game terminology it actually manages to feel more complex which i'm not sure is a good sign.

Codenames, had a pretty fun game of this. It is a really solid word game, not sure its much of party game though. Unless your idea of a party is a bunch of people sitting around muttering and staring at a bunch of words.

Incidentally, I got up this morning (and I'm not a morning person) and my wife was like "can we play Argent again now?" Uh, yeah, sure. 6-6 influence break win on her part again, but if she had been paying closer attention she would have beat me 8-4 or more.

Longer report in the dedicated thread. It was very fun but had me a little silently annoyed because she was directly leveraging the part of the game we had largely intentionally omitted.

ryancraftfair wrote:

SuperflyTNT wrote: At the risk of sounding like a broken record or delivering a false platitude, I am ready to proclaim my opinion on Ferox:

It's a good idea executed semi-poorly. Playing with the starter decks sucks. Drafting is better, but iffy because it can end up worse than the starter decks or way better.

I don't hate it, and the system is brilliant, but the card distribution just fucks it all up.

That said, it gave me the opportunity to come up with a 'Blaxploitation Playlist' so it wasn't a total loss.

I'm the fuckup who designed & illustrated it, and honestly I just wanna hear your blaxploitation playlist. Trade ya:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtA_b_nZU...BFzr7STQh4YapCdp0wXC

Bill Withers:
Better Off Dead

Curtis Mayfield:
Pusherman
Superfly (obviously)

Clarence Carter:
Strokin

Isaac Hayes:
Shaft theme
Do Your Thing

James Brown:
Get On The Good Foot
Papa Don't Take No Mess

Bobby Womack:
Across 110th Street

Lyn Collins:
Mama Feelgood

The game's core system is dope as fuck and the rage mechanic is one of the coolest tempo-setting innovations ever. The Tribals need more "1 Tribe Attacks" and "2 Tribes Attack" cards and I think that would go a long way toward making it more balanced. I'd also have liked to see an "incapacitate" card which forces an exposed crew member to become "unexposed" if more than two are exposed...that would be awesome.

SuperflyTNT wrote: The game's core system is dope as fuck and the rage mechanic is one of the coolest tempo-setting innovations ever. The Tribals need more "1 Tribe Attacks" and "2 Tribes Attack" cards and I think that would go a long way toward making it more balanced. I'd also have liked to see an "incapacitate" card which forces an exposed crew member to become "unexposed" if more than two are exposed...that would be awesome.

Thanks, man!
I really appreciate the constructive criticism. It's always helpful and, unfortunately, hard to come by.

Regarding the Native attacks:

Both sides have an equal number of Attack cards in their decks, though they're distributed differently. Here's the breakdown:
1 Tribe - 5
2 Tribes - 4
3 Tribes - 4
All Tribes - 2
Special attacks - 3

1 Crew Member - 4
2 Crew Members - 4
3 Crew Members - 3
Special attacks - 7

I'm definitely not a math person, and balancing the two sides took a LOT of trial & error and happy accidents. It's certainly far from perfect, but I settled on the current distribution of cards because something like 90% of our logged playtests came down to the last crew member and last encounter (which, again, is an incredible accident of trial & error that still baffles me to this day). We figured there'd be glitches, but the system seemed to be working so well for us that we didn't catch anything that obviously needed fixing. It's really helpful to hear about your less-than-ideal experience with the game, and it'll definitely help us in crafting a second edition in the future. If you get the chance, I encourage you to give it another shot (don't use the starter decks) and see if the card distribution still fails you. I only ask because having that many unbalanced plays in a row is something I haven't experienced yet and I'm curious/concerned. Any and all feedback is incredibly helpful and absolutely appreciated. We don't view negative reviews as personal affronts or anything ridiculous like that; we see them as an awesome learning tool that will help us refine our designs in the future.

Regarding the Incapacitate idea:

I'd actually never thought of that. Most of our Native playtesters (myself included) tend to go for a strategy of getting as many exposed CM's as possible so they can be attacked. That's what led me to make cards like Smoke Them Out which forces a crew member to become exposed without use of their ability. It's actually really cool to hear a different strategy for the Natives and I'll definitely take that consideration for the next edition.

Thanks again for all the honest feedback (and for the badass playlist)!

Introduced a new player to Wiz-War this weekend. We used the big book of spells, or whatever you call it when you basically have 2 huge decks of cards dividing the schools up. It was fun but really just meant as an introduction, and honestly this game really isn't great for 2 players.

Tonight I ran another solo run of mission 1 of Shadows Over Normandie. The allies crushed it this time. I love how quickly the game plays. I can see me actually getting all the way through the campaign with someone on this.

Dungeonquest still getting love at my place. We play it as when you die you take a different character and start over. I died on the first tile. Then I died on the second tile. My third character survived the dungeon with a few hundred gold. The other survivor had more. We've started writing down high scores.

Got in a second game of Guns & Steel. This time with 4 players. May be due to inexperience, but there was a little AP with this game for everyone. Game only took about an hour still.

Big weekend at Dallas Games Marathon.

Friday night we played Talisman, with Sacred Pool, Dungeon, Highlands, and the Harbinger. If you've never played with the Harbinger, it's another NPC like the Werewolf or the Reaper, except this one causes players to draw from a new deck that's particularly apocalyptic. The Harbinger also cycles through several omens, and when they run out the game is over because the world ended. Our game went six hours, and it was a bruiser. Five characters died through the course of the game, and at least four or five people got toaded as well. We played with seven people at first, though one dropped out early. (For those wondering, this is altogether too many.) The Harbinger omens kept coming, and when the last one came up we were pretty sure the game was going to end that way. But just before that happened the Philosopher drew a Harbinger card that gave him the win if the world ended. Fifteen minutes later, that's exactly what happened. It was a very Talisman ending, and we had a ball. The only downside was that we had a guy hovering around our table giving a running commentary of everything, even when we were trying to talk to each other. He bailed after hour three though, so it picked up a lot after that.

Saturday morning we opened with Merchants & Marauders, using a few modules from the expansion as well. The most notable one was Contraband, which I think is interesting enough to play with every time. This particular session favored the merchants, of which I was one. As we approached the end game one of the pirates parked outside of the port I was in. He was carrying a lot of cash and a Dutch bounty, so I made some quick work of him, then hightailed it back to my home port to stash my gold and win. I felt a little bad since it was his first game, but not so bad that I wouldn't do it again. Everyone but me was learning actually. It's easy to forget how much is involved in that game if you've been playing it for years, but the response was overall pretty positive. I really liked the expansion. It's not enough that Christian Marcussen designed both this and Clash of Cultures, he also gave both games a terrific expansion.

The last game for me was Sid Meier's Civilization. I got this in a trade recently, as I've been playing a lot of Civ V and was curious about how the game worked. I remember the response being somewhat lukewarm when it came out, and I sort of understand that. It does play more like a very heavy Euro than a traditional civ game, but to be honest I liked that. Legomancer has commented several times that he doesn't like it when Civ games get too fighty, and this is one where I felt like a military investment was actually something that took some effort, and not just a direction in which the game spun. Our game was between Egypt, Germany, and Rome (myself). For the first hour or so I felt like we were all just finding our feet, trying to figure out how best to even focus on a victory condition. It looked like Egypt was going to push for Technology or Economy, but he eventually set his sights on Germany for a military victory. This allowed me some time to stabilize, though I got kind of lucky with some great people to boost my military defense, so I could get away without walls. I also teched up in military early, though my army was smaller. It seemed like that was much more important than the size of one's forces.

Anyway, it eventually became very obvious that Egypt was going to knock Germany down in maybe a turn or two. I was going for a Cultural victory by this point, so I had a ton of the event cards throughout the game. I used almost every one of these to hassle Egypt and delay them. Their turn or two stretched out to six or seven turns, while I was producing 15-20 culture a turn, depending on the resources I had out there. The irony is that Egypt would probably have been able to pull it off if they had focused a bit on science, rather than committing to the military victory. Producing another scout and gathering a little further off would have probably won them the game. As it was, Germany was able to survive an epic war by winning a push, even as the Egyptian planes blasted his city. We were using the advanced tiebreaker from the FAQ, so even though I completed the cultural victory in the final turn, Egypt still had one shot to take his capital, which is the only instant win using the tiebreaker. He was about to launch, until Germany sent a spy using Communism to hold their armies where they were, giving me the win. The Egypt player was mad. "Are you just going to give him the win??" To which the response was, "well, he hasn't been hassling me for the last two hours."

I really, really enjoyed this one, much more than I expected. The most direct comparison is Clash of Cultures, and that's definitely the cleaner, more straightforward game. But this was one case where the FFG design model actually serves the game well. I liked that the path to victory is more cloudy, and that the game involves a lot of heavy management, because that feels like the PC game. I was quite impressed by it, and how down-to-the-wire it felt. I'm really interested in grabbing the expansions, since I've heard nothing but good things about them from fans. I am also interested in trying to rejiggered combat system, since out of the box it felt a little shakey in that regard. But overall, I really had a good time with it.

It's interesting, I started with FFG Civ and moved onto Clash, instead of the other way around. I get what you're saying about the game being cloudy---though I will say that what I remember from that game was the clarity of your winning objective. The few times I played it before trading it away I felt like it was all about a race to the objective you chose near the beginning of the game (or was chosen for you by the civ you were dealt).

Six hours of Talisman sounds like way too many hours of Talisman.

Played another game of Mega Civilization, this time with 8 on the Eastern map, which is not a great setup. It gives Saba an entire corner of the map, separated by desert and water, without much of any neighbors (Nubia is out of the game with 8). They can hole up and be untouched, and if they hardly ever get dealt any untradable calamities, they're hard to hit.

But more than that, this second play also revealed some troubling things about the advancements. This is how my pal Matt put it:

I have only one concern about the game. The winner and runner-up of this game (and I'm told the winner of the first play of this copy) focused exclusively on one color of civ card. Civ cards give bonus credits towards the purchase of other cards, and typically cards give the most credits for other cards in their own color. So to rack up giant bonuses in blue, then you need to focus on buying lots of blue cards. To reach the last couple of places on the basic AST, you need two and then three 200-cost cards. To get there you need huge credit bonuses from past purchases. So it may well be that to win the game, you have to pick a color and stick with it. If that is true then that would make me sad. Instead of facing a really fun decision each turn about which of the myriad cards to purchase, you would instead simply choose which color to pursue at the beginning of the game and just follow that path. Instead of a large number of distinct decisions, you would just be making one decision at the beginning of the game and then carrying out the consequences. So the great variety of cards would end up being largely illusionary.

The original CIV had a couple features that encouraged diversifying your portfolio of advances. One of the early hurdles was having three colors of civ cards, so players were forced to diversify at least somewhat. Secondly, there were limited numbers of each advance. Focusing exclusively on a single color of advance incurred a small risk if other players pursued that same color path because they might buy the needed cards first.
I don't remember the game well enough at this point, but I also wonder whether you could score enough points to complete the AST track by pursuing only a single color in the original game.

I hope future plays prove me wrong about this. I'd also like to check out the "expert" side of the AST. It is possible that the expert track has some features that would encourage diversification.

The discounts on upgrades are too huge to ignore and really stifle any kind of diversification. You'd hope that with all those advancements there would be more than five paths through them.

Nevertheless, I had a great time again. The 12 hour playing time makes it hard to get this one going too often, but it's still looking like the Civ game for me.

(To tie into the discussion above, I also like Sid Meier's Civ and dislike CoC, though I should probably give it another play.)

It has been ages since I played a game that long, I wonder if I would still enjoy doing a marathon game like that. I think I would if it was a good game. Not like, say, Diplomacy.

Greed with four players, which I really enjoyed. Probably my favourite of Donald X's games. Outside of the theme maybe being offputting (60s gangsters) I don't see any reason to play a different drafting game.

1775 Should have put this on my 10x10 list, as it's already ahead with two plays in as many weeks. This time we switched and I played as the plucky colonials, taking the continental army and new player patriot militia to a 4/3 win with a huge push into Massachusetts to knock out a flag, after the redcoats had left an empty area in New York for us to march one cube into, removing 2/5ths of their influence in the colonies.

Blood Rage Another three player game, and it was a great, close game. I was worried that one of the other players was having a bad game- down at five points at the end of age 1, but he had a canny third age, staying out of trouble to gain his majority quest, and bonus for guys on the board to win the game by 10 points. 2nd and 3rd were one point apart, so it was not one of the blow-out games like last week. Good times, and both new players quickly got the hang of the game.

Homeland. I got this a couple of months ago when it was on sale for $20 (all GF9 games eventually hit $20-$24). As a game new to all of the players (I played it solo a few rounds to get the hang of it), I think it went well. There's one player who always complains through these games but the general opinion was favourable. I rate it much higher than Dark Moon. With five players we had all three factions, and the terrorist won. No recriminations, because the opportunists were playing their game, and I, as a loyal agent, trying to screw my fellow boy scout, drone-striked his threat instead of the shady "obvious terrizt" player's. Nice game, which makes a lot of sense and flows pretty well once you're in the swing. We might have got some rules wrong but it worked well.