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Kevin Klemme
March 09, 2020
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Kevin Klemme
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oliverkinne
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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December 12, 2023
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December 07, 2023
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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

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05 Oct 2016 09:50 #235534 by Mr. White
The following user(s) said Thank You: Cranberries, Columbob, hotseatgames, drewcula, JEM

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05 Oct 2016 10:00 #235536 by drewcula
Mr. White! What are those green glass beads representing?

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05 Oct 2016 10:05 - 05 Oct 2016 10:06 #235537 by Mr. White
(Don't have a photo of the 3rd game going on - Terratons v Corp)

The jungle board is serves as our in-season 'relegation' whoever has the lowest league rating plays their match in the jungle. They also don't get to use any official laser cut action markers, score/turn tracker, etc. They use those little Pente-like gem stones. Helps downgrade the match feel from hi to low tech. One side uses green, the other red, white for the score/turn markers.
Last edit: 05 Oct 2016 10:06 by Mr. White.

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05 Oct 2016 11:13 #235543 by Gary Sax

Mr. White wrote: (Don't have a photo of the 3rd game going on - Terratons v Corp)

The jungle board is serves as our in-season 'relegation' whoever has the lowest league rating plays their match in the jungle. They also don't get to use any official laser cut action markers, score/turn tracker, etc. They use those little Pente-like gem stones. Helps downgrade the match feel from hi to low tech. One side uses green, the other red, white for the score/turn markers.


hahaha, that is awesome.

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08 Oct 2016 10:44 #235799 by Hadik
Big sloppy game of Codenames with adults and kids. Had to restrain my desire for order and just enjoy the ride. Everybody had fun and laughs.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Cranberries, scrumpyjack, JEM

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08 Oct 2016 17:25 #235810 by Columbob
Played Dungeon! with the nephews, they each took a fighter while I went in with a wizard, who spent the first third of the game looking for a secret door down to level 6. Close game (I think the kids both had less than 1K to go), but the wizard grabbed enough riches for the win.

On Thursday, 6 player game of Last Night on Earth (it's that time of the year!) - the sheriff, the farm girl, the drifter and the nurse tried to defend the manor house. Very close thing, but 2 turns before the sun would rise, the zombies killed both the nurse (who changed into a zombie hero) and the sheriff.

Also played 3 more games in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign. We still haven't used a single healing surge in 8 missions and we have lots of gear and upgrades.
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08 Oct 2016 21:11 - 09 Oct 2016 14:50 #235816 by wkover

Columbob wrote: Also played 3 more games in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign. We still haven't used a single healing surge in 8 missions and we have lots of gear and upgrades.


We had a decent number of spent surges, but we ran a 2-player campaign with only two heroes, and I don't remember how the game scales exactly. I do remember uncovering multi-spawn tiles on consecutive explorations, though. Those didn't help. Nothing like facing 5-6 monsters all at once.

For those who haven't played ToEE: We screwed up our first game badly by thinking that ToEE worked like all other D&D games and that only one monster spawns per tile. The game got tougher - duh - when we realized that tiles frequently spawn multiple monsters, and sometimes they don't spawn monsters at all - only traps.

My most recent plays:

Mansions of Madness 2nd edition: It was good fun, but I expected more sound effects and voiceovers given that it's app-driven. Still tons of read-alouds, and it didn't help that the attack, evade, and horror text can get repetitive. There were also more horror checks than in 1st edition, unless the owner screwed up the rules somehow. The game started to feel long towards the end, but I'd certainly play again. God help us if there's a scenario that runs longer than 3 hours, though.

Pandemic Cthulhu: I would have liked it more if I had never played a Pandemic game. Still, it's worth 1-2 plays for Pandemic diehards, and a lot more if Pandemic is brand new to you. If someone is thinking of getting into Pandemic for the very first time, instead of Cthulhu I'd recommend buying Pandemic Legacy, playing the vanilla base game at least a dozen times, then moving onto the Legacy campaign.
Last edit: 09 Oct 2016 14:50 by wkover. Reason: In other news, there is no Santa Claus.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Erik Twice, JEM

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10 Oct 2016 07:31 - 10 Oct 2016 08:56 #235848 by JEM
Brimstone Bonus Edition on Friday, more on that elsewhere.

Saturday started out with a great game of Cockroach Poker, in which one player managed to cling to life with one card left while someone else snagged a fourth cockroach. We had a good laugh with it.

After those shenanigans, four of us played Ticket to Ride: Pennsylvania which reminds me a lot of the original TTR map but with the added share certificate scoring making the choice to grab lines for trolling the map a bit tougher. After all was done, I won by two points thanks to better share collections than second place, who got the most tickets bonus.

Next was Wallenstein which was alright. things got weird in the middle of the game when it transpired that one of the cube tower baffles had fallen half down, blocking up all the cubes in a pile in there. We dumped them all out, fixed the tower and kept playing. There were a couple of brutal fights while all those cubes shook out. It's a decent game, I don't know if I'd ask to play again.

Port Royal next, which plays really smoothly. Double Admirals soon scooped up enough cash to buy points each turn for the win. My jester was doing well initially, but I don't think he paid for himself over the length of the game.

Terraforming Mars which was one of two being played at the same time. The other group spent about four hours on theirs, we ran through it in about half that time. I was pushing space events for temp increases, but came in dead last. The player who won did it mostly with grouping cities and forests together, something which he explained at the start was a strong strategy, and we all ignored. The game is so easy to play- some initial problems with iconography/design soon give way to very straightforward turns.
Last edit: 10 Oct 2016 08:56 by JEM.
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10 Oct 2016 12:40 - 10 Oct 2016 13:10 #235863 by Erik Twice
Tragedy Looper keeps being a hit, we played it twice in a row yesterday. The Mastermind and the Protagonist each won one game, though it seemed much harder for the former than the later. I wonder if we should really go all in and introduce the "The Protagonists are only allowed to talk at the end of a loop" rule, it seems though!

Edit: Forgot I played some more stuff at a small boardgame meet-up:

Mission Red Planet: Fun game but it seems to sit on an uncomfortable middle point where I would rather play Citadels or any other Area Control game over it. It's significantly more complex than the former because it has a map and each role does three different things but doesn't give you much more in strategy or fun while its chaos level is too high to compete Liberté or other more "serious" games.

Secret Hitler: This is a lesser variant of The Resistance. There are a couple neat things here and there, but ultimately it's completely forgetable. And while I'm not one to talk about the banalization of evil, its hard not to notice that Secret Hitler is neither fun nor incisive enough to justify its main theme. It felt like geek masturbation and little else.

Spoilers: A movie trivia game with some bluffing. Neither the bluffing nor the questions are that interesting and ultimately don't compliment each other, if you know the answer (unlikely) you choose that, and if you don't, you simply have to decide whether the player asking the question is bluffing. Meh.
Last edit: 10 Oct 2016 13:10 by Erik Twice.
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10 Oct 2016 14:02 #235864 by Legomancer
In a recent order I had a What the Hell moment and threw in a copy of Terraforming Mars. I knew little about it other than the name, but it looked like it might be cool.

Played it yesterday with 4 and wow. That's some really good stuff. Great production, well-done theme/setting, and some good choices. Took a while to play (we were 4 newbs learning from the rulebook) and we botched a couple of rules (nothing major) but everyone walked away impressed and hankering for more. I can't wait to play again.
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10 Oct 2016 15:52 - 10 Oct 2016 15:52 #235872 by Gary Sax
^looks very involved, looking at the BGG entry---how was the complexity? What style of game is it? Worker placement? Each player seems to have a card tableau?
Last edit: 10 Oct 2016 15:52 by Gary Sax.

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10 Oct 2016 15:54 - 10 Oct 2016 15:54 #235873 by JEM
I felt some similarity to Race For the Galaxy in the tableau building (especially if you can make cards synergize in a kind of produce/consume loop) and others said the board part felt a lot like Dominant Species to them.

Tableau/Engine building race game.
Last edit: 10 Oct 2016 15:54 by JEM.
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10 Oct 2016 17:05 #235877 by Hex Sinister

JEM wrote: Tableau/Engine building race game.

Blech. There is some other game with the same theme coming out that looked cooler but it just seems like a "converting cubes into other cubes" worker placement ordeal. I fell asleep sitting up in my chair during the rules overview...
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10 Oct 2016 19:22 #235881 by Gary Sax
Hmmm, interested. How confrontational?

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10 Oct 2016 19:44 - 10 Oct 2016 19:45 #235882 by Jexik

Erik Twice wrote: Tragedy Looper keeps being a hit, we played it twice in a row yesterday. The Mastermind and the Protagonist each won one game, though it seemed much harder for the former than the later. I wonder if we should really go all in and introduce the "The Protagonists are only allowed to talk at the end of a loop" rule, it seems though!


I had a lot of fun with this too.

I strongly recommend trying the "only talk between loops" rule, just because it can be so hard on the mastermind once you have a team of experienced guys... I've still not done it though. Listening to a table of 3 people dissect and dismantle your plans is one of the most uneasing and nerve-wracking experiences I've had in games- up there with the last couple tables of a day-long tournament. I usually give people the option of more loops and no talking during the loops, or fewer loops with talking "on." And they always go for the latter.

I've played it the most 2p. I think it's actually best in that situation, and it's surprisingly quick. I finished the base game, and have the expansion. I really should try to dig into it sometime.
Last edit: 10 Oct 2016 19:45 by Jexik.

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