What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I've been playing more X-Wing lately, big surprise. I've gotten some games in with Soontir Fel + Push the Limit. What an insane combo. It almost feels like cheating, but I'm sure there's other good stuff out there that can beat him. The only knock on him was that he gets pretty predictable doing a lot of 2-speed maneuvers to clear that stress, but he can gun it at 4 straight periodically to mix it up.

This was my first Geekway, and the only reason I went was because a friend of mine in St. Louis was able to get me a ticket and provide lodging and transpo (I hadn't seen those folks in quite a while!) I was hanging with him and his family, so I spent a lot of time not trying out new hotness as much as introducing them to things they might like or playing things they picked out. Here's the list, with "new to me" annotations.

Thurs

RoboRally
Resistor x 2
Super Motherload

I'd been curious about this for a while, so we gave it a shot at Geekway to the West. It's an okay game, very light on interaction (other than competing in a shared space), with some cool ideas. It's got a great look to it. Neither of us was wowed by the gameplay.

Xia: Legends of a Drift System

At last I've played this thing, which I've been thinking about picking up for some time. At $80 it was not something I was going to grab sight unseen, but now I have seen what it has to offer and...well, I'm still not sure.

Honestly there's no compelling reason to own this. It's essentially Merchants and Marauders in Space, and other than the "in space" part, M&M does pretty much everything better. Xia also has a weird rule that I would have to get rid of immediately: roll a 20 on a d20 and get a VP. The winner of our little 5 point baby game got at least 2 points this way, including the final one, and nobody thought that was a nice touch. Any game where this rule survived into the final rulebook is absolutely suspect.

But, that aside, there's definitely some sloppy fun in it. I can't say I didn't enjoy it. I can't say I don't want to play it some more. At half the cost I'd probably pull the trigger, but $80 is still not getting it done.

Quadropolis

Someday I'll find the city building game that I love. This one is perfectly fine, and beautifully designed, but it's just a city-colored puzzle game, not really city building.

Fri

Neuroshima Hex
Triumvirate
Catacombs
The Voyages of Marco Polo

I gave this a try even though it was blasting "NOT MY THING" rays at me. And sure enough, it was Not My Thing. Absolutely by-the-numbers Euro with a great yet squandered theme to it. Go ahead and add it to all your "New to Me" lists; you've played this even if you haven't played this.

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Skull and Shackles

My friend's daughter got this as her free Geekway game and wanted to play it, so I taught it as best I could based on my previous experience with the original Pathfinder ACG set. This one has ships in it and the rulebook is godawful so I couldn't figure out what, if anything, it did. We mostly ignored it. I got the gist of the game across and they seemed to enjoy it. To me it seemed like more of the same, with boats, which I really liked when I first encountered it but cooled on quickly.

Sat

Mysterium x 2
Dimension

I wasn't sure how much I would go for this, as I don't go fo abstract games usually, but it was a bunch of fun. You're given a set of colored balls and have to arrange them in a way to use as many as possible and satisfy a set of six random "rules" for them. The rules can sometimes contradict each other, which is fine. It's supposed to be timed but we dumped the timer and that didn't make much difference. A surprisingly fun game, though 100% anti-colorblind.

Drakon
Cockroach Poker
Thebes
Dark Moon
Boomtown Bandits

So far I am 0 for about 200 on games where you roll dice and yell. That's including this one.

Last night my friend and I played Shadows Over Normandie. We chose scenario 4, since it seems like the first one in which the Allies have half a chance. We play without the terror rules, because they just make it even worse for the Allies. I was the Mythos, per usual... and I was down to my last unit when the clock ran out and I won. So the victory was a bit hollow.

Then we played a kickstarter card game called Conquest of Speros. It's basically an area control game with secret objectives and point salad. Mildly entertaining and brief. I'd play it again, but I won't ASK to play it again.

I've been playing more X-Wing lately, big surprise. I've gotten some games in with Soontir Fel + Push the Limit. What an insane combo. It almost feels like cheating, but I'm sure there's other good stuff out there that can beat him. The only knock on him was that he gets pretty predictable doing a lot of 2-speed maneuvers to clear that stress, but he can gun it at 4 straight periodically to mix it up.

A good Turret list can wreck havoc on PTL Fel. Also anything that causes him extra stress (tactician, that one droid, debris, etc. are good counters). Oh and blocking him is by far the best way to take him out. I love X-wing for all the crazy squads and counter squads you can make.

I finally played Cthulhu Wars. Its like the best parts of Risk combined with asymmetric powers and giant colorful miniatures (maxiatures?). Will definitely play again.

Buncha games of Get Lucky and Linko. Both light card games, both really good.

Get Lucky is pretty straightforward; you put cards on your two characters to get enough strength to kill Dr Lucky. When you try other players use their cards to stop you. But the turn order goes by the numbers on character cards so it jumps around, and you can swap characters with a pool in the middle, so you can game the turn order to get an advantage. It's a little different and pretty slick.

Linko is a "play all your cards out first" game. But rather than a climbing game like most of this style you can play whatever you want on your turn as long as all the cards you play are the same rank. If you play the same number of cards that other players have played you can Snatch, which is either take their cards into your hand or make the attacked player do something with them. The attacked player can either pick them back up or discard them and draw an equal number. So you're really trying to force other players to refill their hands through card play while getting rid of your hand. It works really well, and is a bit different from games like The Great Dalmuti while still being in the same vein.

I've been digging into Runebound Second Edition pretty consistently as my solo game for the past few weeks, mostly playing Frozen Wastes and ratcheting the difficulty to 18 or so. I'm always certain that I'll run out of time and have to blitz the boss fight, which would usually mean losing unless I find gear that would allow me to survive the 6 round minimum, but the endgame encounters always seem to give me that last set of princess location cards to win the game the easier way. I really enjoy most of the mechanisms that the expansion introduced, adding rumor tokens that incentivize map traversal that isn't just geared to the next encounter (if you find the perfect spot that matches all of your rumor tokens, you can spend them to get some very useful gear), but also adding frost accrual which can result in "White Death" which is the ice equivalent of poison in Descent 1st ed, where your HP cap is effectively dropped and healing doesn't remove the cap. This has the effect of regularly driving you back to towns unless you want to push your luck and/or use a flare to "warp" back to town on the next turn (some event cards can, of course, blow out your flare in the interim, stranding you & resulting in some expensive & dangerous White Death pileups). The expansion also added snowshoes as a cheap $1 item in all towns. These allow the player to change a terrain die to anything they want, which is a great way to speed the game up a bit and not leave the player with a boring turn of pure travel with no encounter/reward. Overall, a lot of nice thematic elements are added that make the game feel richer while playing a little faster.

I've also tried the Isle of Dread expansion and it's easy to see that this was an earlier concept. The map literally feels broken by all of the dead, unusable space that the water creates, despite being peppered with "sea encounter" tiles. These bottleneck travel and span a large range of difficulty, from yellow-level stuff to straight up red+ level encounters and are presumably balanced out by a lot of "you can just escape this automatically" effects and items. Even if you grind through them and get lucky, many of them don't even provide EXP (?!), which is just a terrible design idea especially since these completely replace the blue encounters. It creates an overall sense of stasis, useless turns, and tedious or rewardless travel, which is something Runebound desperately needs to avoid rather than celebrate. Also, the endgame idea of a gauntlet of 8 cards that you'll iterate through, dying and losing your gold at every attempt, until you get the right set of gear to win, seems... hey it's Dark Souls! Anyway, I think I'll park this one and eventually get rid of it. I can't imagine really needing to keep it around with Frozen Wastes, Sands of Al-Kalim, and Mists of Zanaga, but something might come up in a later play to redeem it (doubtful).

We had a take-out-and-game night with another family this evening and had a relaxed game of Archaeology followed by a not-so-relaxed game of Cockroach Poker. Cockroach Poker is particularly fun between families since relatives often think they have an advantage in gauging someone's "I'm intentionally looking like I'm lying" face but it seems like non-relatives are actually better at picking up the tells for this, and it's hilarious to watch. I think this one is going to get a lot of plays in our house.

I've made a slight dent in my surprisingly slow processing of Greenland. There's just something about how the game is structured, even when re-articulated in other player-created material, that grinds my gears to a halt. I think it's the scattered nature of it, not just the rules presentation, that makes me feel like I'm just subjecting my decisions to an event chart without having any context for a general approach or rule of thumb for these decisions. But this could be a fog that will clear once I start to internalize the iconography as well as the places to look for it (some re-roll bonuses in particular seem easy to forget/miss). The cogs started to turn once I got into the third event, but I had to clear the table for our guests. I'll give this one another shot at a full solo play (with survivalist rules) tomorrow.

Cuba Libre is staring at me as well, all shrink-wrapped and judgmental. I keep making excuses like "I need to study the history" etc, but it's the simplest of the COIN series besides Falling Sky. I need to just suck it up & learn it.

Kind of feeling some Gears of War. Might get that out tonight for a solo spin.

Battlelore 2E - an even game that was destroyed by terrible dice rolls from those stupid C&C type dice, reminded me why I sold my whole Memoir'44 collection off.

SW:Rebellion - our fifth game and still the Rebels can't get close to winning. We struggle to see how the Rebels can win against a decent player driving the Empire - all you do is keep expanding and, with Vader or Fett, capture the diplomatic leader (forget her name). Hasn't helped that in two of the three games I have been the Rebels the setup has allowed the Empire to take two of my three systems on the first turn. And it doesn't help that it's actually not that much fun playing the Rebels.
It may be back to War of the Ring for our two player game, that seems more balanced.

World of Tanks:Rush - bought at a sale, rulebook hard to work out but once going it was OK. Bit slow with just two players, can see it playing quicker and bloodier with more.

Frohike: each RB big box is way different. Sands is like Tales of Arabian Nights. Frozen Wastes is like Law and Order: Chainmail Division. Isle is just weird but has a lot of character. Mists is arguably like that Conan book (Freebooter??) where he's in the jungle fighting apes and shit. Good stuff.

I have a lot of small expansions if you want to trade. I'd love Isle again.

Frohike wrote: I've made a slight dent in my surprisingly slow processing of Greenland. There's just something about how the game is structured, even when re-articulated in other player-created material, that grinds my gears to a halt. I think it's the scattered nature of it, not just the rules presentation, that makes me feel like I'm just subjecting my decisions to an event chart without having any context for a general approach or rule of thumb for these decisions. But this could be a fog that will clear once I start to internalize the iconography as well as the places to look for it (some re-roll bonuses in particular seem easy to forget/miss). The cogs started to turn once I got into the third event, but I had to clear the table for our guests. I'll give this one another shot at a full solo play (with survivalist rules) tomorrow.

I'm in the same boat, although sounds like you are well ahead of me in decyphering it. Scientists should not be allowed to design games and then sell them without a health warning !

Five Crowns which is mostly a way to practice shuffling cards, because there are no choices to make. At least I got them to start the (six player) game at 7s instead of 3s.

Mythotopia which felt very familiar coming from A Study in Emerald, but obviously less obtuse. I enjoyed the deck-building which rapidly bring asymmetry to the players much like the draft in Blood Rage. I read many complaints about the end-game as this is one of those games where the leader has to survive a round before claiming victory, but I felt this was the highlight of the game, with all the mathing out the various battle resolutions to figure out if I'd done enough to win (I had, by focusing on scoring tiles while others fought for provinces).

Risk: Star Wars Edition in which the Empire(me) ran the board though the rebel player did manage to max the track.

Neanderthal which took almost three hours with two other new players. There is a lot to digest, and the auctions seemed difficult for them to evaluate. It's a fascinating game, not sure if I'm doing something wrong but there's this idea of developing your species into a tribal one by connecting "portals" in the brain through cards you acquire to your tableau. Being tribal opens up tool making and domestication of animals, but... The game runs for around 10-12 rounds, and it seems to take 8-9 just to convert to tribal (if you choose to), which leaves this whole part of the game about developing tools to hunt better etc, as mostly a postscript. In the end, the player who did the least brain development won, by having more daughter cards and hunters. Tribal is not the only strategy but it's hard to ignore the potential. I'm intrigued by Greenland because of the parallels, and as it can be played as a "sequel" it may expand those tribal concepts.

More Shadows of Brimstone at home. I have the void plague now, along with tentacle fingers and slippery skin. I think I need to visit the doc soon (might fix this broken arm that set wrong also).

Had friends over for a boardgame/cookout. We spent the entire afternoon playing Relic, which is a sucky version of Talisman with a Warhammer 40K setting. Four players, with two players who had played before, and the owner who had played several times. I played the original version of Talisman about 20 years ago and found it mildly entertaining.

Relic was worse than what I remember of Talisman, because Relic involved an awful lot of card-reading for little appreciable increase in meaningful decisions. So turns took longer, and downtime for the other players was increased, and yet the game remained a meaningless randomfest. I had bad luck, in that I kept drawing hostile encounters that I could only beat if I rolled a six and then another six (so a 1 in 36 chance). And I kept rolling low. So I was vanquished (killed) three times, each time losing all my stuff. The game owner was playing a nemesis, and had similar luck with his own character. But he was rolling for all of our encounters, and he kept rolling sixes like crazy. Like, every other die roll was a six. The other two players managed to get up to 4th or 5th level after five hours of play, and then we stopped so we could put some food on the grill. I enjoyed hanging with friends and the burgers were good, but there is zero chance that I will play Relic again.

Got a review copy of Vikings: The Board Game. Wife told me it was based on the TV show. I don't watch TV other than the Late and Late Late shows, so I had no idea.

This is going to be reviewed at the Circus and Miniature Market, and they will be different reviews.

2 plays in, the average score was 3.75, 5 total votes. Need to play with 5 now to make it legit for the Circus, but suffice it to say that the MM review will be worse because that's just my opinion, and in my opinion, they took all of the fun and adventure from Viking stuff and made a spreadsheet game. I'd literally rather do taxes.

One of the Circus Freaks has voted much higher than the balance of us, so that review will be forced to accept that SOME people might like it. Actuaries, statisticians, and perhaps the entire staff of the US OMB.

If this game was a vagina, it would be unfuckably dry and irritated. No amount of Astroglide would be able to quench the desert this game provides.

Cryotozoic needs to stick to card games and let GF9 work on licensed board games.

Played a couple of games over the weekend.

Kingsport Festival - This is the Lovecraft themed sequel to Kingsburg. I've always liked the IDEA of Kingsburg more than the game itself. There were too many issues I had that I could never get past. I hated how inconsequential the end of the year battles seemed to be, there were damn near broken strategies, and each time you played it was just too samey. I've played with the expansion and it really doesn't make any of my main concerns with it go away. So despite the shitty Lovecraft re-theme I was quite pleased to hear about this sequel. I can confirm that the actual nuts and bolts of Kingsport are MUCH better than Kingsburg. I feel like there are actual decisions and strategies. One of the biggest fixes is the inclusion of a sanity meter. You see instead of influencing the king and his merry cohorts you're invoking the powers of the Elder Gods and their minions. Doing this will cost you some of your sanity. The better reward you get the higher sanity it costs. In Kinsburg if you rolled really damn high, you pretty much just used the best possible spaces on the board. In Kingsport, you might not have enough sanity to do so. You can always spend Victory Points to make up the difference in sanity, but is it really going to be worth it? I love this difference. LOVE it. The next thing it adds are spells to cast that will help you in various ways. These can be really powerful and they add some much needed uncertainty to the game. The only thing I'm not a fan of is the production of the game. It takes up a shitload of table-space and important information is not printed on the board. Having to constantly pick up building tokens to remember what they do is a big ol' pain in the ass. Regardless, I can get past those flaws because this is the game I always wished Kingsburg was.

Assassinorium: Execution Force - Finally got this to the table after assembling the minis last week. If you're a fan of what I call "classic style ameritrash" then you're in for a hell of a ride. Barnes wasn't kidding when he mentioned that this feels like a a design from 1991. This game is all dice chucking all the time. You wanna shoot a cultist? Roll two dice. Need to see if a cultist walks down a hallway? Roll a die. Want to heal? Roll a die. I personally LOVE this shit because what passes today as "Ameritrash" is actually a hybrid with modern game design sensibilities. Games like Assassinorium sadly fell out of favor with players years ago and they don't seem to be looking back. I miss these old dice chuckers. The game I played was incredibly easy, but the events were pretty kind to us. Also, we lucked out with guard patrols that would always turn the wrong way. I still loved it though. The game looks like a million bucks with style to spare. The ease of play, quick playtime and exciting dice chucking means it is staying in rotation for a little while.