What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I almost want to start a thread just to see what people call Settlers. I also call it that.

I'm honestly curious how many people don't call it that. But I just can't bring myself to actually create a thread about an actual board game on this site. I have an image to maintain after all. A cancer has to always be cancer after all.

Would that be a BOARDGAMENAME DOME?

I've been playing some Spells of Doom, this Greek mage-dueling game, for MM. It's got some good stuff going for it, but it's really hard to separate it from its obvious influences. It's hard to play it and not think about just playing Wiz-War instead.

I recently did a math trade and received a copy of Kingdoms by Knizia. I played today with my wife and actually liked it quite a bit. It's not exactly his top-shelf work, but I like how much variety and tactical play it gets from a mere 22 tiles. Definitely glad to add that one to my collection, and I look forward to more plays.

One of the Saturday peeps brought some new games and wanted to play them, and I was happy to try them out. The first was City of Iron and I was apprehensive, because Above and Below is awful. It turned out to be a good game though. Soured by one player constantly whinging "If I'd known X I would have played differently" when nobody knew what they were doing for the first three rounds, then taking over five minutes to pick a card. I'm less and less tolerant of grousing these days. Anyway, as I said, the game was good, and I managed to squeak a win by one point.

After that we played Insidious Sevens which is one of those bidding/trick-taking games. You play a card from your hand as a bid on how many tricks you'll take. The suit of the highest bid becomes trump for that round, and you score points- either tricks won+2 if you met your bid, or -1 for every trick over/under. I'm hopeless at these games, but it made sense and I had a good time with it.

Someone else brought Captain Sonar so we got a group of six together to play. A couple walkedi n mid-rules explanation and were invited to join, so we had a full eight. The game is very fragile, though. One of the late-comers was completely checked out which hurt their team, and we had situations with captains making moves without calling clearly or confirming (we were supposedly playing some version where moves should be confirmed by the opposing radio operator). So that was frustrating. Four of us stuck with the game to play 2vs2 with turn by turn play (though still using the big map). That was a much better experience, and my partner and I nailed the enemy sub with a direct torpedo, a near-hit mine and a final near hit torpedo. Good times.

Jexik wrote: The following morning after we all went to the park and got donuts, we played Codenames: Pictures until I basically had to force them to go home. Pictures is solid; I'm not sure which I prefer but a number of my friends and acquaintances seem to like the new one better. We kept my fiancée and I separate for most of the games of codenames, until the last one. We almost won in two back-to-back 4-card clues. After getting 3 correct on the second clue, she hit the assassin. It was an amazing loss.

My preferred method is to mix the two using about half pictures/half words. Use the Pictures answer grid. Very interesting.

All this talk of the FFG/GW split motivated me break out Talisman with my kids (5 and 9). We included the characters and cards from Reaper and Frostmarch, so it was the Wizard (me) vs the Ogre Chieftain and the Assassin. it was a fun game and moved along fairly quickly (we played 5 points of monsters for each stat increase) until the Ogre Chieftain was able to scoop up the crown. I've got the Dungeon, City, and the Dragon expansions as well, so I think that while we did have fun and the kids want to play again, I'm not going to be running out to scoop up any more expansions. (I was debating Cataclysm just because it change up the middle a bunch, or the Deep realm since it combines with Dungeon and City).

I've been using Dungeonquest as a learning tool lately.

To not only teach the spawn who has ADHD about patience, but that if something doesn't to your way, that its not always a bad thing.

Torchlight variant has helped soften the blows, but still push for normal games of it.

Both spawn seem to enjoy it more understanding that it is a game to experience, and not really "win".

I think Talisman can be good for this as well, since it is less cut throat. But I don't know what else to get other than reaper since that and a corner is the only expansion I have for my android app.

I was off yesterday and my daughter was in Pre-School for most of the day, so I pulled out Mansions of Madness 2e, which arrived Monday. Ended up playing four games throughout the day and night solo.

I want to read Matt's review but I'm avoiding that until I write my own. I will say this:

-I like it quite a bit
-Slightly too much focus on the app during play
-HUGE potential. The strengths of the app are just beginning to rear their head.
-Very easy to just sit down and play.

Overall I'm happy with it. I'll be staying with the system. I've just played the first two scenarios thus far and I enjoyed the second (Escape from Innsmouth) much more than the first. Reminded me quite a bit of the old RPG scenario of the same name.

Double post because game night was last night.

I've been playing a lot of Inis lately and a big fan. Thought we were going to play again last night but ended up pulling out Cthulhu Wars with five players instead. I was Crawling Chaos and was up against Black Goat (only new player), Yellow Sign, Windwalker, and Sleeper.

It was a pretty tense game with everyone playing pretty well. No fights occurred until turn three and then things broke open. Late game I killed the King in Yellow but Nyalrthotep was then Hastur'd, doh.

Windwalker took the game but Sleeper led for most of it (not a position you want to be in with this game).

I still prefer 4 players to 5. It works with 5 but it takes much longer and I don't like the dynamic as much. You have too many people who can punch you back and it feels harder to convince others to attack the leader and engage in diplomacy. Just more chaotic and unruly, but the game has enough of that already.

We also played The Dragon & Flagon which was a lot of fun. I tend to enjoy the Engelstein games and this is perhaps my favorite of theirs thus far. It's procedural, which seems to be an Engelstein trait, but doesn't leave out the fun.

What's so great about it is the narrative that emerges. First few turns of the game I leaped up on a table, shot the Monk with my pistol, then was knocked over by the Swashbuckler who shoved my table and pelted in the head with a mug by the paladin. Swinging from the chandeliers, taunting, tossing chairs. Awesome stuff.

We had five players and I'm not sure I'd want to do the 3 or 4 player control two characters route. You have a large hand of cards to program actions from, which can cause some downtime, but I can see this becoming much faster with repeated plays since most of the actions are common in each deck. Very cool and unique game.

We also got in another play of Animals on Board, which is a favorite of ours in that weight class.

Lastly, I got a prototype I'm working on to the table which excelled on its first play. So that's great.

Got the replacement cards for my Twilight Struggle Collector's edition. The optional cards had some issues, Brush War was listed as Early War and three or four of the old cards were missing their "take out of play" bit or had one and shouldn't. I found those to be trivial problems, but I was pretty experienced with the game so if this was my first version of the game it would have been a real issue.

So GMT sent me more control cubes, they've replaced messed up cards, and I basically have a perfect, dream copy of TS. Not bad, all and all, especially given the immense gnashing of teeth and freaking out about the whole thing on BGG and elsewhere. I think a big part of it was that I am a regular GMT P500 customer so I know what to expect from GMT---basically not a giant cool mini or not production despite the cost of the original campaign (130, maybe?). Sufficed to say you'd have to offer me a truly epic amount of money to get my collector's copy out of my hands.

That said, I may have been lucky---I saw some real murdered pictures of other people's copies with everything broken, the box fucked up, etc.

charlest wrote: We also played The Dragon & Flagon which was a lot of fun. I tend to enjoy the Engelstein games and this is perhaps my favorite of theirs thus far. It's procedural, which seems to be an Engelstein trait, but doesn't leave out the fun.

What's so great about it is the narrative that emerges. First few turns of the game I leaped up on a table, shot the Monk with my pistol, then was knocked over by the Swashbuckler who shoved my table and pelted in the head with a mug by the paladin. Swinging from the chandeliers, taunting, tossing chairs. Awesome stuff.

We had five players and I'm not sure I'd want to do the 3 or 4 player control two characters route. You have a large hand of cards to program actions from, which can cause some downtime, but I can see this becoming much faster with repeated plays since most of the actions are common in each deck. Very cool and unique game.

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I've been hearing a lot of good things about this one.

Played a game of Theseus this evening. The problem was we had to get back up to speed with the rules, which are not immediately like a lot of other games even if they are simple. But we only had time for one game, so it was sort of a waste to do that refreshing and then not play a few matches.

Anyway, Theseus is real good and strategically doesn't play like anything else in my collection. Requires a different set of skills.

Someone brought Vast: The Crystal Caverns to game night. It's a multiplayer, totally asymmetric dungeon crawl. In many ways, it's a fantasy-themed, lighter version of a COIN game. We played a 4 player game with no Thief. I played the Dragon.

Maybe the other roles are different, but the Dragon felt highly tactical. One of my goals is to eat goblins, who do their thing the turn before me. So I could never really determine the 'optimal resource spend' until I saw where they ended up. The exciting things you get to do as a dragon are move around a cave map, and spend resources to turn brown sloth cubes into brown wakefullness cubes. The 'fun' is in determining the fastest way to do this each turn, because you are racing to get all of your brown cubes converted and then you race to a couple checkpoints on the map. Other roles are also racing to kill one of the other roles or, in the case of The Cave, everyone.

One interesting thing is the Dragon, Knight, Goblin relationship. Knight wants to kill Dragon. Goblins want to kill night. Dragon eats Goblins. So there's this rock paper scissors thing going on. I'm not sure how this game would play out if one of those 3 were missing. It feels like there would be a huge advantage for the role that doesn't have to worry about running away from their natural enemy.

I'll never find out if this game gets better because the owner put this on the trade pile right after playing. We collectively rated it a BGG 5. It's just not that interesting. The game rules are tough to teach because you have to explain 5 totally separate sets of mechanics. Then you have the problem with any asymmetric game, where you really have to have played every role to have a good understanding of the game and to play at a higher level. Once players have it down it does feel like it would be pretty quick, I bet you could get it done in 60-90 minutes tops. But unless you're in some weird situation of weekly 90 minute game nights or something, I don't know why you wouldn't just play Fire In The Lake or other COIN instead. If I'm going to have to devote that much time to really grok a game, I'm going to put that time into something with a little more meat.

^always enjoy your reports, thanks!

I did a good selling job on Forbidden Stars, and a coworker bought a copy. Maybe it's because we're old, but we had one hell of a time figuring out how movement actually worked. I think we had finally figured it out, after about 4 turns (my 12th turn in the game). My coworker hated it. I'm not really sure why. Pure "I'm not ever playing this fvcking thing again" hate. He's played CitOW and likes it fine, has 3 or 4 fully-painted WH40K armies, but this game just hit him the wrong way. I'd take it off his hands, but I've blown too much money lately to buy it off of him, unless he wants to wait a little bit.

As for the game itself, I was enjoying it, and I think one of my other coworkers (my boss' boss) was liking it okay. Not so much that he was going to buy his own copy, but okay enough. But by the eighth turn, I think we were all tired and let it fizzle out. I had a plan for my third objective, but it got derailed when angry coworker jumped me with everything in that system before I could attack. Boss then jumped that system and won his third objective. I think had enough guys to take it back and let it go to tiebreakers, and I let them know that would be my plan, but we were on hour 5 and we were all kind of done at that point.