What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Mini-convention for our local game group this weekend. Played Between Two Cities, Fury of Dracula, Doodle Quest, Orleans, A Study in Emerald (2nd), Tumbling Dice, Trains, Mystery Rummy: Escape from Alcatraz, Spyfall, Space Cadets: Away Missions, Tiny Epic Galaxies, Favor of the Pharaoh, Pandemic: Legacy and Burgle Bros. Really fun time, overall! A few comments on a few games...

Orleans may be my new favorite Euro. It's a mix between worker placement and deck-building (bag building, in this case), but feels pretty thematic, and has a nice mix of systems. Might be the first clearly Euro game that I'll buy in a long time. There's an expansion that makes it co-op, and with some solo scenarios, so I'll definitely pick that up, too.

Study in Emerald 2nd: I like how some of the things have been adjusted or truncated, and it works well as a more accessible and shorter version of the game, but I really think this is very much a Lite version, ultimately. Our game was over in 45 minutes, and didn't have nearly the kind of interesting developments and interactions that many 1st edition games have had. In this case, more is more.

Space Cadets: Away Missions - I showed up late that morning, so didn't actually get to play, but sat in and watched a mission. Looks great, and I'll probably be picking this up.

The past weeks I've been playtesting my own game soon to be formerly known as Cults Of Arkham. It's been in development with Mr. B. Games who convinced Richard Launius to codesign it, so I've been testing his changes to my core design which is seven kinds of awesome. It's always difficult to let something go and allow others to work on it, but luckily the game has remained faithful to the core design - just with more Lovecraftian fluff, more variability, more oomph, and over all more fun. Adding to that mr. Launius has been a pleasure to work with - very gracious and very open to ideas. I'm very much looking forward to showing you guys this game. And yes, it will obviously be a Kickstarter thing, hopefully come May.

Also I've recently had to the chance to finally play Fury Of Dracula and I loved it. I was Mina, and early on we managed to cut of the count before he slipped behind our lines to Eastern Europe. He held back, but some lucky hypnosis helped us discover his vampires, so he wasn't much of a threat. Then he went to sea and made a nice bluff, but once again hypnotizing Mina paid off and we spotted him in the isle that's only accessible from sea. Or, from sea or from Determination, so I took a chance and jumped there to face him during day. It was a good gamble since I managed - knife and crucifix in hand - to reduce him to three blood tokens before combat ended. After that it was basically just mopping up since his lack of blood left him with very few options. We stopped him in Ireland and since then the world has felt a little less dark.

My only caveat is that a non-aggressive Dracula can really make the game drag, but then again I can hardly see how the count will win without killing at least one hunter.

After a few days of distance between myself and the FFG Civ, I think my thoughts on it have mellowed just a bit. I did like it a lot, but I don't think it's good enough to replace Clash of Cultures for me, and it would have to replace it since both games feel like they are aiming for the same thing. (Though they get there in different ways.) I'll probably take another crack at it before giving it up though. I did like it enough for someone else to own it and let me play now and then.

Fun night last night at DFW Nerd Night:

Manila - One of my favorite games, and last night was no exception. I was able to take a whole boat with the pirate in the last round, but it turns out it was only enough for me to lost by a smaller amount. Nice to play this one again.

China - I wouldn't gave given Michael Schact the time of day three years ago, but I guess I'm slowing down or something because I really enjoyed this one. It plays really fast, but the best strategy isn't always obvious, and every move had a lot of possibilities in spite of the lean rules. Not something most people here will be into, but it was great in a very ERP kind of way.

Chaosmos - A friend of mine has been on me to play this for a long time, because he knows how much I enjoy Cosmic Encounter. It's clear that this game shares at least some DNA with Cosmic Encounter, and I enjoyed Chaosmos a lot. It has the same kind of goofy, frivolous spirit that I love. The game itself does have just a little more structure, which prevents it from being quite as silly as it could be, and that'll probably be a win for some people who almost like Cosmic. The alien names reminded me a lot of Merchant of Venus as well, which is another good heritage for any sci-fi game. The downside is that you spend a huge amount of time in this game rifling through small decks of cards and exchanging them with what's in your hand. It's not like a big deal, but I found it to be a low-level irritation, like the shuffling in Dominion. Still, I liked it a lot. I'd definitely play again.

I would love to see a short article or post on the two if you get a chance. I don't think Sid Meier is a bad game, it just isn't to my taste. So I like hearing other takes.

Yeah, I need another play on Sid Meier to really get a feel for it. Part of me really wants to experience the expansions, but obviously I don't want to spring for them unless I really felt like I was going to keep the game around.

I've heard good things on the expansions.

I've heard that they basically make the game all it can be, which is really tempting to me. I'll be honest, I'm such a big fan of the license that I'm half-tempted to keep it just because of that.

Last week I mentioned that I liked the different victory conditions, and I still think that's one of the most interesting parts. To some extent you do need to commit to one strategy early, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem. First of all it's a lot like the video game, since you need to really decide early if you're going to go for science, production, or whatever, and those decisions push you toward specific victories a lot of times. Secondly, it might not be as hard-wired as I thought. Of course our game might have been an outlier, but both Rome and Egypt could have won the game in a couple different ways. I was really close on a Science victory along with the Culture track, and Egypt could have picked between science and military very late in the game.

I do question the balance, which I guess is kind of a common complaint. I can see that it might be a little leaky if you played a whole bunch and with the kind of people who can really learn exploits.

More than anything, I'm just interested in thinking about what it has in store. I still feel like it covers a lot of the same thematic ground as Clash of Cultures, and I do think that's probably the better, more intuitive game. But I do like the victory conditions, and the longer historical scope of this one. Maybe there's room for both, I dunno.

After a long hiatus (new job/schedule) got some gaming in the last two weekends.

Warrior knights plus crown and glory, 4 players. It has been so long since we played, that I had forgotten my "adjustments" to the game ( add additional influence, give everyone a size 100 city to start with) and the game ended just as everyone was really getting into it. Still...head of th church managed to kill a rivals general, I stormed out of the assembly when they attempted to burn down me of my major cities and my wife manipulated the entirety of that voting assembly to go her way somehow.

It is clunky, but I love it

Then had some guys over before he went on swing shift, so we played argent with mancers. Three players, and the last round was filled with exploding rooms, locked rooms and time traveling mages. With argent, lords of water deep and archipelago I don't have a need for something like Agricola, and I've been semi actively trying to trade Agricola away for some time.

After the guy left for swing shift the last guy and I pulled out Hannibal, which ended early due to time with Hannibal rampaging through Italy, besieging Rome, Scipio Africanus having just taken new Carthage and Baetica and turning his sights on Africa. I retook Corsica after a Carthaginian invasion, but was unable to retake Syracuse despite a three year siege. I lost every battle against Hannibal, but the superior numbers of the Italians were starting to take their toll.

After a couple really negative weeks at work/industry wide it was nice to take my mind off things.

I played Omen: Reign of War for the first time yesterday with my son. He took an early lead with feats while I bumbled around with poorly balanced ratios of cards/buying power but tried to keep footholds in the cities and get oracles working. I eventually came back with some satisfying chains of soldier actions and lucky oracle procs, allowing me to pull ahead with the "draw 5 cards on one turn" feat and close the game with a city depletion. Hunter was pissed, especially about the lucky oracle draws, but we both really enjoyed the game. Our reaction was much more positive than our attempt at digging into The Convoy again, which seemed to be all about learning the cards enough to hopefully beat the baked in Moloch win.

We took out Super Fantasy today with a guest and were reminded of how good this game is. It feels like the D&D adventure games with the fun injected back into the design, mostly due to a simple idea: hand the player six dice, give them a menu of actions, and let them decide how to allocate their rolls and combine their actions in any order they want. It also mixes in some video gamey concepts like smashing loot barrels and providing three special ability meters that naturally fill up with almost any actions taken in the game (or with the obligatory concentrate-and-fill-my-ability-meter action), and adds some goofy characters like a Lucky Luke knockoff (with "bullet time" among his abilities) and odd Polynesian/Tiki style monsters. Michael already gave an excellent review so I won't be redundant. Basically the game more than makes up for it's loss of high fantasy gravitas and miniatures through personality and gameplay.

The fun I had with Super Fantasy reminded me of another game that hit similar pleasure centers in my brain (with more narrative and certainly no lack of miniatures) and will need to see some play time next weekend: Space Cadets: Away Missions

Had a great three player game of Merchants and Marauders tonight. I've played M&M a decent amount of times, mostly with different people every time, but the last few times have been with the same other pair of players and it's definitely gotten a lot more intense and close the more we play together. We played with the cut-throat variant and the variant that makes each subsequent glory point from stashed gold require 5 more gold than the previous one this time, though the cut-throat scouting roll never came into play.
I started off as a merchant while the other two went the outlaw route and took up marauding, and jumped out to a quick lead thanks to a nearby rumour, goods in demand, and some bad rolls by the pirates on merchant raids. My lead started to wane later in the game as my one friend's dice luck turned around and he found glory on 3 or 4 merchant raids in a row, ending up with a haul of over 40 gold on board and sailing hard for his home port, needing only to stash the booty to get the final 3 points he needed. I on the other hand, had 2 points stashed but didn't notice how much he was hoarding until it was too late and I was two turns from getting back to my home port. I had one last ditch effort - become a pirate and try to win a merchant raid with my Galleon. Fortunately, I was in the sea zone with the "no scouting roll needed if you want to find a Spanish merchant" ability, but my luck ran out when I only drew 9 points in four cards.
It was a damn tightly contested game, and I didn't think I could enjoy M&M even more than I already do, but here we are.

Gary Sax wrote: Played another 2 player game of Argent this evening. It has been a good week for gaming!

Have you found more scope for building an engine and pulling off some longer term strategy with two players? I've always played at least three and it always seems like there are too many spanners to throw in the gears to get anything big played (I've rarely ever seen someone research, let alone play the 3rd tier spells).

On the board gaming front, for me this week it was:
Flock which I got in the MM daily sale for like $10. The box is egregiously large for what amounts to eight tarot sized boards and a bag of tokens, but I actually quite liked the game. It has that "follow/leech actions" idea we've seen before, and I think it's a really nice, relatively short and accessible example of that style. I'll put it in a small plano or something and consider it a nice game to get out with newer gamers. Pretty abstract, though the theme does come through if you squint a bit.

Greed Trounced by a new player who quickly figured out the game and built a nice engine sipping cash and tokens every time he played an action. I can't complain- I passed him most of those cards myself. Still a great game.

Dungeon Roll came out while we were waiting for food. It was alright so far as these dice games go. I think I prefer Wurfel Bohnanza.

Blood Rage with four of us. We played someone else's copy so it was vanilla retail without all the bling and addons. This might be the best version of the game, in my opinion. I like having the options and the shinies (and purple as a choice of player colour is great) from the KS edition, but the base game plays so smoothly. Three of us knew the game, and in the end it came down to two points, 112-110 winning score. Low scores compared t o what I've seen on PBM reports etc, but there was certainly some hate-drafting along with some play errors.

The guy who brought Blood Rage also has Kemet, so I'm looking forward to trying that also.

^Yes. It is quite a bit more calculated. I personally don't think you need to use the rules for 7 mages like the rulebook suggests.

Skipped the Sunday group this week, even though it was the first time I've been able to make it in a while. They were going to play Food Chain Magnate and Mombasa and those looked super ugh to me.

I played Mombasa last week. Super ugh, can vouch.

The past few weeks, I've been playing Sekigahara quite a bit. It's a two player block game set in 17th century Japan that eschews some of the standard block game mechanics. There are no steps or losses, but blocks brought into battle need to be activated with cards of matching clan symbols. When cards are activated, players may have a Treachery card in hand. If played this card can cause blocks to defect to their opponents side for the remainder of a battle. This can only be countered if one has another of the appropriate clan card in hand. While it is an event that seldom occurs, it's something a player always considers when activating clans.

Clocking in under two hours, it generally makes for a tense and tight little game that I've appreciated a bit more with each play. When playing card-driven games, I often prefer CDG's with events to just cards detailing operations values and activations, as the latter doesn't exude very much flavor or detail. That being said, Sekigahara does ooze theme at every turn with its mechanics rather than relying on flavor text and window dressing.

My two plays of Fury of Dracula have not gone as well. It's certainly an improvement over 2nd edition, but the gameplay has been very long (over 3 hours) every time. I appreciate that individual hunters have more to do than investigators in Letters from Whitechapel, while retaining the need to work with other players. It seems to behoove Dracula to sneak and wait, playing Johnny Appleseed with his vampire minions and locking down points. Attacking week hunters early is likely an easy to points for Drac, but alerting other players to your position is worth those few points. I can't speak to the overall balance, having only played Dracula, but I think if the game is the same length as Letters from Whitechapel, I'd probably rather play Letters. Fury is far less strategic and satisfying to me.