What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

SuperflyTNT wrote:

ubarose wrote:

SuperflyTNT wrote: Yeah, we dig it a lot.

Kind words, Uba!

Right as I was about to make a shot, I had a sudden flash back moment of being 12 years old, playing games on the floor with my brothers. I swear I could hear the sound of Strider and KingPut's voices, like before they changed.

We would have played the heck out of it...until we lost all the disks.

Then we did good.

I used to play this game with my brothers where you put shoes and other detritus on “your side” as entrenchments, cover, etc and then you’d place your armies (green army men, tanks, jeeps, Hueys) and each had their own rules:

Men: one rubber band, can move one finger length (which I later realized was total BS since my brothers are 10 and 12 years older)

Tanks: one of those big ass old school pink newspaper rubber bands which were unfuckable with, can move one forearm length

Jeeps: Two rubber bands off of one finger, could not move.

Huey’s: didn’t shoot but could move anywhere and pick up/deliver men one leg length (again BS as my oldest brother is 6’1” and my next oldest brother is 5’4”) so you can guess who flanked who the most

Each player had ONE unit to activate - move and/or shoot, any order.

This game does a lot of that for me, too. Considering my oldest brother has Lymphoma I think you’ve enticed me to send him a copy, to remind him that our game is still alive, sort of

We had an acre for a backyard, so we played with GI JOES and Cobra. BB guns were shot from your dudes position. You got to use a wrist rocket and crab apples for turrets/artillery. There were some expansion rules for explosives every June, July, and sometimes into August if we hadn't exhausted our supply of Indian Reservation fireworks.

is Indian Reservation a proper noun?

Black Barney wrote: is Indian Reservation a proper noun?

It is if the restaurant is a fancy one.

Villainous. Finally got it to the table in a 3-player. It was Maleficent vs Jafar vs Queen of Hearts. I played the Queen because I love Alice in Wonderland. I find it to be the most subversive of Disney films. My girlfriend was on Jafar, whom she picked randomly, even though I warned that he and Ursula were a bit draw dependent. I think she was kind of coerced into playing because her son really wanted to try it. He's the hardcore gamer of her two kids and immediately gravitated to Maleficent, who would've been my second choice.

I got a couple Card Guards down quickly, but I think I used the discard action a bit too much, as I always seemed to discard something that would've been really useful against Alice or the Dodo or the Caterpillar, all of whom hit my board right after discarding something to use against them, like Off With Her Head. Meanwhile, Maleficent used her first turn to play the Raven, which is quite the start. Jafar, OTOH, didn't listen to my advice about abusing his own discard action, since that's how you'd find the Pendant, the Lamp, and Hypnotize. Maleficent understood that the Genie was key to Jafar's plans and so refused to Fate him for most of the game, but he found the genie, anyway, and then had enough power stocked up to play anything he wanted. I got stalled by one of my Guards being moved to the other side of my realm and the Queen only has one move action. So, after complaining about having nothing to do for much of the game, Jafar hypnotized the genie and moved the lamp over the course of three turns and won. Both of our last-ditch attempts to Fate him turned out to be useless.

Both I and her son enjoyed it, but even though she won, I think my girlfriend wasn't thrilled. We both tried to convince her that it was because she was playing Jafar, who is totally dependent on a couple key cards and she didn't really emphasize his ability to look for them. If I can get her to try again, I'll push her to play Maleficent or Prince John, since their approaches are more straightforward. Despite her being cited as the most difficult, I'd really like to try Ursula next time.

Same reaction as my GF. Though I think I needed to ease her into this one first by:

1) using easier games to illustrate how worker placement functions first.

2) Absolutely hiding the more difficult characters like Ursula and Jafar, so the game could be played as if they didn't exist.

She had neither and was really put off by the game.

If I can get her to play again, I think Maleficent should be one of the default beginner characters for her to try.
But I think I need to intro her to the genre by using maybe Waterdeep or Stone Age as an introduction.

I got Villainous to the table this weekend with my wife and a couple we normally game with. The characters int he first game were Hook, Mal, Jafar, and John. I was John and the three of them fated me hard the first turns. A good strat since that can force me to spend cash I would not normally want to. And they were able to play heroes before the warrants were out. Good heroes as well: Lady Cluck, Maid Marian, Friar tuck with a Give to the Poor card.

My wife won the first game with Hook despite us avoiding to fate her. We were all one turn away from a winning round. Mal was denied earlier after a key fate draw eliminated two of her curses.

The second game had Ursula(me), Hook, Jafar, and The Queen. I like Ursula the most because of the challenge of having no direct Vanquish ability. John is second since I just love that movie. The Queen won the second game, but is was again a tight one. A key Fate draw against me saw Ariel take the trident an area away from me and prevented my win. Foiled again!


I do enjoy this game and it will get better as people are better able to gauge how far along their opponents are in their own machinations.

So I'm in the Dino Dunk club. A buddy and I played a couple of games last night and it was great. There's quite a bit more strategy than in Zoo Ball, particularly with ball placement, and I think it ends up being a very different game.

We had a close match where I was down early but ended up coming back via free throws. My opponent won though on a brilliant shot. He also successfully dunked with the T-Rex, through a Stegosaurus.

Then we played Cryptid, a new release from Osprey that's basically a streamlined Tobago. I think it does the core mechanism of deducing a space better than Tobago (here, each player has a piece of information and you sort of go around questioning people to figure it out). I do miss the lack of ownership concerning a piece on the board. There's no cool little jeeps to drive around and the player is abstracted in terms of position and searching. But it nails the deduction aspect and gets to the point much quicker.

Countdown: Action Edition is a social deduction game that caught my eye due to the fantastic artwork and intense style. It's an 80s action movie paired with some roleplaying and wrapped in a social deduction framework. Unfortunately it's terrible.

The game is pretty much roleplaying your character with no concrete actions in the game allowing you to deduce anything. So disappointing.

My buddy is a big Factory Fun fan. He pledged for Factory Funner and has played it a couple of times without me. He finally roped me in and I was pleasantly surprised. It's better than the original and fixes a couple of the problems I had with it. I still don't love the game but did enjoy it, and find its spatial puzzle mechanism somewhat unique.

We closed out with a three player game of Root where I cracked skulls as the Eyrie. Didn't go into turmoil once and won with a score of 30-13-dominance card. The Marquise went for dominance but I shut that down with my army of beaked centurions. After half a dozen plays, this game is still phenomenal.

Oh, and I've also been playing Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions every single day since I've gotten into the electronic beta. I prefer to play in person, but it's so easy to knock out a couple of plays in 20 minutes that I find myself continually testing decks and competing online. I should hit triple digit plays by next week.

The level of strategy in Dino Dunk is so surprising. Love that game.

You really like those social seduction games, don’t you, Charlie? It seems that they strike a particular chord with you.

Good to see them getting some love, even better that people have finally gotten past Werewolf.

SuperflyTNT wrote: You really like those social seduction games, don’t you, Charlie? It seems that they strike a particular chord with you.

Good to see them getting some love, even better that people have finally gotten past Werewolf.

Oh yeah. They're entirely above the table, getting into other people's heads.

My favorite three remain:

Werewords
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Secret Hitler

With Resistance (Avalon really) coming in close behind. It's a wonderful genre of no downtime, constant interaction, and an evolving social dynamic.

Taught my 9yo nephew Zendo today, which he really enjoyed. He got my two easy rules pretty quickly, and liked playing the master as well (though i did give him a list of possible rules to choose from ad I was worried he would come up with some nonsense on his own the first time out). Then I taught him Martian Chess and I think it's safe to say he hated it. The fluid piece ownership and the implications of moves just didn't click for him. But hey, you win some you lose some. He said he was going to force his dad to come play Zendo next time so that's a win in my book.

Ah_Pook wrote: Taught my 9yo nephew Zendo today, which he really enjoyed. He got my two easy rules pretty quickly, and liked playing the master as well (though i did give him a list of possible rules to choose from ad I was worried he would come up with some nonsense on his own the first time out). Then I taught him Martian Chess and I think it's safe to say he hated it. The fluid piece ownership and the implications of moves just didn't click for him. But hey, you win some you lose some. He said he was going to force his dad to come play Zendo next time so that's a win in my book.

I just found something worth 3D printing.

www.yeggi.com/q/looney+labs/

I played my 33rd game of Cosmic Encounter today. I bought the game one year ago and quickly became one of my favourite games. I had dimissed it as a "good but not great" in my couple games before that but the more I play it, the more I love it.

Today we had Graviton, Explorer, Observer and Chosen. The latter two were newbies but they played well and we had a fairly calm game. Graviton (May make the ecounter use the "tens" or the "ones" in an attack card) is great, it combines the old "will he or won't he" kind of gameplay with some hand management. He makes allies and ships much more important because cards can't go beyond 9.

Observer is surprising me. I almost took it out because it's a terrible power and, yet, he was superuseful in this game and won another player the game last time we played.

We also played the prototype of a post-apocalyptic, Robin Hood themed game. It was ok, you go around the board picking up food and delivering it to places (Bad guys), stealing it from the bad guy's bases (Robin and friends) and so on. It's more or less an abstract game with a couple cards thrown in but it wasn't bad. Guy was very down to Earth, which I appreciate. I don't normally play prototypes because of that.

Went to a local mini game convention today. The highlights were playing three 5p games of Hoity Toity which is just a delight top to bottom, and watching my wife hate a 5p game of Dice Throne that I wasn't part of and then promptly win the copy of it they were playing in a raffle. It looks like it might be fun 2p I guess?

Hoity Toity, hell yes. All time classic. Woefully underappreciated these days. I have one of the Old AH Adel Verpflichtet editions.