What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

More Dragon & Flagon which has gone over really well in my group. Had a great series of combos going with the Druid but victory just slipped out of my fingers due to a poor decision to move and line myself up for multiple attacks.

Ice Cool has been a solid amount of fun. The visuals pull you in but the unique wobbly penguin pieces will keep you flicking. In terms of dexterity games, I'd go to Flick 'Em Up before this most of the time but it's a fun game that works well with all ages.

Let Them Eat Cake is a perfectly fine voting/negotiation game. It's not as mean as something like I'm The Boss but it still affords opportunity for screwage and backstabbing, which is when it's at its best. It comes with a cool cardboard guillotine setup and you place pawns on the chopping block and flick them into the basket if you're the executioner.

Also introduced 7 Ronin to a buddy and that went over well.

I played The Others: 7 Sins for the first time. We played against Gluttony in the mission were the traitor gets Avatar stats when he comes out in stage 3. When the GM drew his first Apocalypse card after round one, it locked out any city action spaces that didn't have corruption symbols, which meant our only two places to lower corruption were no longer usable. Great. When we hit stage 3, the Avatar and the traitor were summoned, with the traitor getting the same stats as the Avatar. Killing the traitor would win us the game. We tried to keep them separated but didn't do a good job, and they managed to get into the same space, which meant they were rolling 14+ dice, which basically auto-killed a hero each time due to our high corruption levels. We went down pretty hard in the end.

This game didn't grab me. It is similar to Zombicide in that respect; I just think it was kind of boring. I can see how there can be a ton of strategy, such as character placement to best dispatch monsters and make use of ranged attacks, which characters to keep in reserve, etc. But overall your options seem limited, so I didn't get invested in it at all. I'll have to play it a few more times, but I doubt my opinion will change.

Played Fantahzee. Fun little dice chucker that's 100% Ameritrash. It's named aptly: Fantasy Yahtzee. Really well designed and very tight. Fun shit.

mads b. wrote: I like Eldritch Horror a lot and especially the condition cards are a stroke of genius. But I hate that losing the game can take so long. Or rather, it seems to me like if you aren't close to winning when the GOO awakens, you will probably lose, but you still have to slug throug a lot of extra game to do so. In Arkham, you'd at least get to have the final battle which was a short and somewhat climactic ending.

As much as I love Eldritch Horror (I think it is one of the best games FFG has ever produced), this is a pretty sharp sticking point with it. Winning the game doesn't take too long. But losing does. This is exactly right, above...that if you don't keep pace and fall behind when the GOO triggers...it's an uphill battle in the mud. I've had a few games where we've actually just called it at that point because no one wanted to do the extra 30 minutes-hour for what is likely a foregone conclusion.

Narratively, it makes sense- GOO shows up, everything gets harder and it changes the dynamic of the game...but fun-wise...it can just be sort of a drag in that "remove all progress" kind of way.

But there again, I'm not ever really crazy about THE FINAL BATTLE mechanic anyway and usually play Arkham with Azathoth.

I managed to assemble enough Space Marines to solo the first scenario of Betrayal at Calth. In this scenario, a legion of Ultramarines is attempting to make it past some blast doors at the end of the map before solar flares incinerate them. A legion of the dastardly Word Bearers are trying to do the same thing. There are 3 blast doors. One closes after round 3, one after 4, and after the 6th round the final door closes.

At the start of the game, I sent some units around the outside, basically sprinting for the doors. Some other units were forced to head towards the middle, just because space is cramped. Conflict ensued, and marines started dying pretty quickly. One Word Bearer was saved from being obliterated by a Krak grenade by calling upon dark energies. It was of no use; he later fell to bolter fire.

Four marines on each side had made it past the blast doors, and time was short. One word bearer was close to the final door, but he was pinned down by 2 ultramarines. They chased him toward the door, slowing his progress. In the end, the doors slammed shut and all three were turned to ash.

After one game, I love it. It is so no-nonsense; there are virtually no tokens, no bookkeeping (scenario 1 is the only one you even have to count rounds on, and I just threw a D20 in the box for this purpose). It's refreshing to play something that just gets down to it. I can't wait to get it all assembled and painted.

Our group got introduced to Dominant Species. Being a weeknight we weren't able to finish, but everyone agreed this is going to be played a lot. Easy to learn, every rule and action makes sense. Very nasty. It's not so much that you never have enough actions to do all the things you need to do, rather there is always two or three other cool things you might have done as well. There always seems to be another way to get what you want. Love that in games. Tons of messing up the other players' positions. One of those games where about everyone was going "next time I am going to try this..." which marks a keeper.
I bought Rhino Hero on a whim and it did not disappoint. Brilliant game for all ages.

I just finished fifth in the swiss rounds of the Spanish National Netrunner tournament! I'm so tired, it has been a full 7 rounds, I barely slept and the chiken I ate yesterday was still unhappily lying in my tummy. But it was a lot of fun, incredibly tense and all games were very interesting.

EDIT: I also had the chance to try out two boardgames.

First, I tried my copy of Tragedy Looper. This is a great game! Completely unique, skillful, interesting and incredibly thematic. You really feel you are figuring a tense, life-wrecking mistery and you can also feel the fingerprints of the Mastermind all over. The tension of being manipulated and the way the plot slowly unravels is really great, I think I'll be playing this one a lot.

I also tried a game called Incómodos Invitados (Uncomfortable Guests) which is kind of a remake of Clue. The premise is the same: There has been a murder and you have to guess who did it, how and why as well as whether they had an accomplice. Each turn players draw cards with information of them, like what kind of weapon was used, how many guests were in each room and so on. With these cards

Now, the trick is that you draw cards once and then you trade them with your rivals. So it's not just about solving the crime but guessing what kind of information other players hold and trying to control what is beying traded. In fact, this kind of competition is vital to the game and really elevates it to something else, it's much better than Clue.

Still, there are lots and lots of deduction games and chances are there's a better one out there that does everything in a much smaller package. But I know nothing about this small genre so I'm not one to judge. I also fear the trading mechanism is a bit rough, as cards can be traded back and forth without much in the way of progress.

I like Clue. But I also like the concept of the game more than that actual game. Is this Uncomfortable Guests game available in English?

My buddy brought over his copy of Space Hulk tonight, after owning it 14 months and never playing it. We played scenario 1 twice, switching sides. Genestealers won both times, of course. There were some really fun moments, mostly involving gun jams. Now that the rules are internalized a bit more, I think it will get more interesting.

That said, I'd rather play Betrayal at Calth.

Shadows of Brimstone on Friday and Sunday- more on that in the dedicated topic. Saturday started with Grand Prix, with three of us playing. I think it plays a bit faster than Thunder Alley in terms of getting the cars around the track, and I liked the use of the neutral "NPC" cars that anyone can choose to move- it's ideal if you can move these first (denying their use to other players for that turn) but the situation on the track may mean you need to do something with a different car first. Kind of a vague worker-placement notion in the game, which was cool. I lost 33-31 to the winner- a good, close game between us, though third place was kind of dumped, so that part of the game is no different to Thunder Alley.

Star Realms in which my blue healing deck was able to outlast the green horde for a 38-0 drubbing, though it was close for a while.

Zombicide- Prison Outbreak using one of the downloaded missions. Another variation on the "find coloured Xs, open doors/activate switches". What was hilarious was that both the regular and berserker zombies spawned on the first turn. We spent a lot of time digging through the search deck for the concrete saw.I got it and was able to kill the aboms, then passed the saw on to someone who needed the XP bump. We got all the objectives we needed but we had left too many zombies on the board, and when we ran out of walkers to spawn they triple activated and murdered us. We should have been more aggressively hunting down deaders, but it was a fun game anyway.

Finally played two games of Rumis/Blokus3d which was a nice abstract game. I think I prefer it to Blokus.

hotseatgames wrote: My buddy brought over his copy of Space Hulk tonight, after owning it 14 months and never playing it. We played scenario 1 twice, switching sides. Genestealers won both times, of course. There were some really fun moments, mostly involving gun jams. Now that the rules are internalized a bit more, I think it will get more interesting.

That said, I'd rather play Betrayal at Calth.

Interestingly enough I also played Space Hulk yesterday. We played Scenario 4 (which is similar but I think much better than Scenario 1). I left feeling amazed that I personally don't play it more and that it doesn't get talked about that much on this site, specifically in this thread. I'm curious what you like more about Betrayal at Calth. Also I think the MAY shoot on overwatch rule from 4th edition is weak and the MUST shoot is way better - but I guess the game plays as Aliens in my head and fearful soldiers with itchy trigger fingers works better for me then the elite trained superhumans that the Termies are supposed to be. I'd enjoy hearing if there are any other great things from 1st, 2nd, or 4th edition that I may be missing out on with my 3rd edition set.

I am seriously considering making a 15mm version.

Da Bid Dabid wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: My buddy brought over his copy of Space Hulk tonight, after owning it 14 months and never playing it. We played scenario 1 twice, switching sides. Genestealers won both times, of course. There were some really fun moments, mostly involving gun jams. Now that the rules are internalized a bit more, I think it will get more interesting.

That said, I'd rather play Betrayal at Calth.

Interestingly enough I also played Space Hulk yesterday. We played Scenario 4 (which is similar but I think much better than Scenario 1). I left feeling amazed that I personally don't play it more and that it doesn't get talked about that much on this site, specifically in this thread. I'm curious what you like more about Betrayal at Calth. Also I think the MAY shoot on overwatch rule from 4th edition is weak and the MUST shoot is way better - but I guess the game plays as Aliens in my head and fearful soldiers with itchy trigger fingers works better for me then the elite trained superhumans that the Termies are supposed to be. I'd enjoy hearing if there are any other great things from 1st, 2nd, or 4th edition that I may be missing out on with my 3rd edition set.

I am seriously considering making a 15mm version.

If you're considering a 15mm version, then you might consider Forlorn Hope. I like the 15mm miniatures from khurasanminiatures.tripod.com

Da Bid Dabid wrote: I'm curious what you like more about Betrayal at Calth.

I'll start by saying I've only played Calth one time so far, but I can cite a few reasons:
- MUCH faster setup / tear-down
- much more streamlined gameplay
- balanced forces (obviously this is not what Space Hulk is about, but I don't always want a lopsided game)

Both games are great and have their place. But I can get my space marine fix much easier with Betrayal at Calth. I do wish GW had embossed the Calth tiles like they did Space Hulk.

Ya, had the Khurasan minis in mind, Demons and Exterminators of course. Didn't know about Forlorn Hope, will check it out. Thanks.

Yesterday played two pretty forgettable games.

BANG! The Duel - two player version . One side is sheriff, one side is outlaw. Basically you each get 4 characters at random from a 12 character deck. Last one standing wins. Similar mechanics to base game, but the weapon cards also double as BANG cards, yet lose much of their flavor vs the original. There is no range. Bleh.

HIT Z ROAD - a Martin Wallace zombie game where you must bid to choose a path of cards while picking up resources ( ammo, fuel, adrenaline ) while killing zombies. Nice component values, but pretty generic game play. Looking at the back of the box, it appears there is a non zombie version too. Hadn't even heard of it - not sure if this was one of his "secret" games available via that check kiting funding appeal or something else. Either way, don't bother. I guess when you need money, quantity has a quality all its own.

This BGG review ( not mine ) is a perfect summary:

"Well, it’s a solid game. As I wrote earlier, the zombie meeples are simply great. The rest of the game … well, we really tried to like it. We like the theme, we like the box graphic, we like Martin Wallace. But this game failed big time in creating an atmosphere. It failed telling a story. Although you battle zombies with dice here, it feels like a bland Eurogame (that battle dice rolling could easily also be simulating buying or selling goods on a medieval market) – the theme feels pasted on. And even those adorable zombie meeples couldn’t help saving the game for us. Nevertheless, we played it to the end. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad game, but it fails to deliver what it promises. It’s not about killing zombies and escaping them, it’s simply bidding and then making the best of the situation by spending tokens and rolling

On the wargame front:


Hobbled by an ankle injury and having Friday off, I spent a good chunk of the day setting up Victory Roads, a game I had wanted to play had I attended the Expo this year. As a reviewer elsewhere has pointed out, the set up is a royal PITA. While I won't go all jihad if a game doesn't have set up cards, here I think they are vital. It took a long while to get them populated, but once I did that, I did find they were VERY logically arranged in a pretty much north to south order. I found that when I initially punched the game out and sorted the counters by color, as I figured there are a LOT of subtle variations of color resulting in counters being in the wrong group. When I take it down, I'll probably check vs the set up cards and make sure I at least sort it correctly as its taken down. I am guessing esp for the Germans, once a unit dies it won't be coming back in most cases.

Will review rules this week and then get into it this weekend.