What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

4 player game of Powe Grid, which is a somewhat bland economic game but very intuitive to teach and develop basic strategy for. Useful because 2 of the players were new!

As a result, two more people have been pulled into the hobby lol

+1 for Hoity Toity. What a great game.

Tons of board games this week, since I had a two-player evening with a buddy, and a Filipino game day at a gaming lounge in Manila.

Castles of Burgundy - Played a two-player game. Somehow I had avoided this for seven years, probably out of a general antipathy toward Stefan Feld. I usually find his games well-designed and pretty boring, sometimes a little punitive. This one also generated a kind of mild reaction, but it was at least mildly positive. I liked that the dice kept the whole thing from being scripted, and it was harder to optimize. It still is afraid of bad luck, so there's no such thing as a bad roll. That avoids one of the most interesting design elements of dice to me, so I'm not wild about that. I also thought it was a bit too long for what it was. Still, I liked it alright.

Shadespire - My Secret Satan gift finally gets to the table. I did enjoy this one a lot, especially with the way the missions worked. It reminded me of Nexus Ops in that way, how you can do some pretty great stuff in the moment while still leaving room for long-term plans. It's a very tightly-designed game, which is kind of weird from GW. I always expect their games to have a sort of shambolic charm to them, and this one feels better developed. After one session I would say I liked it a lot, but I'm not over the moon for it. I will likely get a couple more factions at some point though, or maybe the new core set that's coming out.

Omen: Reign of War - Two games of this one. I have the second edition (in the long box) but I have it converted to the makeshift Olympus version, where there's spirit and hero cards, and a single copy of each one. I think I prefer this version slightly, because it allows you to get a feel for the individual cards and their personalities much faster. The new hand and money limit also forces you to cycle cards more quickly, meaning hand management is now a factor. I won both games easily, partially out of experience. Really great to get this game played again, it remains one of my favorite two-player games out there.

Felix: The Cat In The Sack - This is one of the best of those light auction games that were all the rage 10-15 years ago. I like the ability to bluff heavily, or to just screw a single person and leave them paying for a bag full of garbage. My wife has never liked it for those very reasons, but it remains one of my favorite 20-minute games. I won easily.

Rhino Hero: Super Battle - I have the original Rhino Hero, which is a fun idea that I only kind of like playing. This, however, was a hoot. I liked that it was more possible to build a really impressive structure, and I like how it changes the game to be more overtly PvP. The ability to climb the tower, and therefore win, is entirely left to a die roll, so it's still basically elaborate Candy-land in its level of strategy. But it doesn't matter, it was really fun.

Dimension - This is a timed spatial game where you need to stack balls in a specific pattern within a time limit, while adhering to certain requirements, like white balls can't be on top of the pile, or orange and green can't touch. It's the sort of thing that I'm naturally good at, and I think it appeals to non-gamers a lot. I did enjoy it, but I wouldn't play super often.

Birds on a Wire - Here's another oldie I never managed to play. You have to make little patterns of colored birds of different sizes. You can also zap other peoples' birds with lightning bolts. That's basically necessary for the game, because otherwise it'd be pretty darn boring. It was already kind of boring. Didn't do much for me.

Saint Malo - This is a medium-sized Alea game, and one that completely missed me. I had never even heard of it. It's a roll-and-write dice game, basically a bog standard Euro where instead of using tokens and wooden pieces, you draw them on a dry-erase board. It sounds kind of middling, but it cleared my expectations easily. You get a Yahtzee-style three roll turn, and you pick one of the die faces to resolve to get stuff like getting resources, new town citizens, what have you. There's also some attacking barbarians that are actually pretty challenging as the game goes on. I dunno, it was nothing special, but I found myself kind of taken with it. Maybe it was just drawing on a nice Alea board instead of shuffling components around. Probably wouldn't work for most people here, but it worked for me.

Erik Twice wrote: 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.

I love Observer. He's one of the most obvious when describing the game as "every alien breaks the rules in some fashion" because he breaks one of the cardinal ones: being sent to the Warp. He also makes for an even more social game than CE normally is, since it becomes very easy to pick up allies, only to run into trouble later when you're obviously on the verge of winning and have to resort to social engineering to convince people to do what was easy, earlier in the game. Plus, you often have more freedom to experiment with cards and with extra rules, space stations, etc. simply because you don't suffer the one major downside of taking risks in the game (barring a Cosmic Zap.) He's kind of a one-alien definition of the game: seems simple, but the potential depth is enormous.

I played my first game of Scythe. Unless I'm missing something, it was pretty standard middle of the road eurogame. Didn't see much conflict or interaction between players. I'd play it again, but I am not going to be clamoring for it. From what I was seeing online, people were arguing it gets more aggressive with experienced players. Is that the case? Not sure that would help with excitement, however.

Count Orlok wrote: I played my first game of Scythe. Unless I'm missing something, it was pretty standard middle of the road eurogame. Didn't see much conflict or interaction between players. I'd play it again, but I am not going to be clamoring for it. From what I was seeing online, people were arguing it gets more aggressive with experienced players. Is that the case? Not sure that would help with excitement, however.

In my experience some players posture some in the mid game, while someone sits in the corner churning through their actions as efficiently as possible and then makes a big move to drop 2-3 stars at once and end the game in a kinda unsatisfactory way. Maybe high level play isn't that but I've sure seen that happen a lot.

Played Pandemic: Legacy for the first time tonight after the wife picked it up. She likes co-ops, they aren't my thing. But whatever, I'm a gamer and will generally have fun with what I'm playing. So far I'm enjoying this, but more as an overall experience than as a turn-by-turn game. Defacing the board and pieces to customize the game is a blast, as are the suprises and overall changing gameplay. Pandemic itself I still find dull, but I love the Legacy system and look forward to it being attached to games more to my taste.

We will undoubtedly play the whole campaign and enjoy it. The idea of an evolving game with persistent effects certainly predates this game, but it's been done smoothly here and feels like an overall great shared experience.

Wiped the dust off the box from 7th Continent and got it to the table tonight. Up to today, I read through the rulebook 3 times and watched the official video maybe 4 times. That might sound ridiculous, but my primary gaming partner is my wife, and while she seems to enjoy most of the games we've tried out, she has never once taken on the task of being the teacher. I don't know what this says about myself, but whenever I teach rules to her, she is yawning in 60 seconds. After several minutes she'll start shaking her leg to stay awake. For Brass, she claimed she was on the verge of getting up to pace so that she wouldn't collapse. We were going to try to play last night and I made the mistake of putting on the official rules video. I turned it off 5 minutes in because she was asleep, so at least I know it's not just me. Bottom line, I have to have the rules down pat and be quick about it.


So... I'm pleased. I am interested in new experiences and this one certainly fits the bill. I feel like we are sharing an engaging puzzle and a decent narrative. Fairly quickly we got into some trouble that properly set the scene that this is a dangerous land with some weird stuff going on. I am very excited to get back to it and see where things head. There's a fair amount of content to look forward to, though I cannot imagine there's too much room for many similar games on the market unless someone comes up with better mechanics beyond resource management, probabilities and kicking down doors.

I have played more Ticket to Ride, this time with my 7 year old daughter. It was awesome having her best me at Nordic Countries. Today we played the USA map with the 9 year old neighbor that has adopted my fridge. My daughter noticed what I was was trying to do and whispered to her friend to block my route. To have her be ruthless at 7 makes me proud.


Took the newer release of Brass for a spin twice as well. From my experience I would highly endorse it as a two player game. The strategy seems quite meaty and I quite enjoy the polish that's been added to total package.

Yesterday, I was the tournament organizer for my fifth DreadBall tournament in 2018. To keep numbers even, I got to play!
Four games, and I went 2-2. And yet, I was ONE DICE ROLL from winning the tourney. THAT's how tight the spread was with the top three Coaches.
I needed a single 5 on a D6. I had three dice to do it. I rolled a 1, 1, and a 2. GOD DAMN DICE.
But I loved every second. Risk management, dice chucking probability at it's finest for this sports nut.

And so. I retire my bug team (Z'zor) from DreadBall tournament play. The same team just wrapped my private league's season seven. They'll see the pitch once more in two weeks when we play a post-season All Star match. Then, I get to pick a new team to begin our season eight!

Here's a picture of my DreadBall Z'zor team getting ready to play D against some space dwarves.

Count Orlok wrote: I played my first game of Scythe. Unless I'm missing something, it was pretty standard middle of the road eurogame. Didn't see much conflict or interaction between players. I'd play it again, but I am not going to be clamoring for it. From what I was seeing online, people were arguing it gets more aggressive with experienced players. Is that the case? Not sure that would help with excitement, however.

You didn’t miss anything, it really is that dull. I never heard that it gets better, but then again, I didn’t go looking for it. I’m a firm believer in giving any game more than one play before passing judgment, but you’ve got to give me SOMETHING to come back for. Sythe left me with nothing.

Scythe - nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

I played a few 4-player games of Azul this weekend, with my family. I liked it, they liked it. I won two of the games, but I suspect I still don't know what I'm doing. I'm interested to try it two-player, to see if there's more screw-your-neighbor in it.

Most of my Azul games are 2 player. Yeah, I’d you know what you’re doing you can set up some real dick moves.

Count Orlok wrote: I played my first game of Scythe. Unless I'm missing something, it was pretty standard middle of the road eurogame. Didn't see much conflict or interaction between players. I'd play it again, but I am not going to be clamoring for it. From what I was seeing online, people were arguing it gets more aggressive with experienced players. Is that the case? Not sure that would help with excitement, however.

No, I think you got it. On paper I should really like this game, but boy does it not click with me. It's simply not fun. Consequently just last night I handed over my collector's edition with lots of upgrades to my friend who didn't want me to sell it. Still haven't figured out how many lunches I'm going to make him buy me...

Played another game of Root last night, this time I was the birds. I didn't think I would find the puzzle of the Eyrie that interesting, but I was wrong. That was actually a lot more fun then I thought it would be. I pushed hard to get roosts out quickly and planning for turmoil, which worked out mostly to plan, though the Cats came in and spoiled it a turn early. I then decided to start aggressively attacking, while the Vagabond teamed up with the Cats, who was doing a good job at making an army and disrupting me, but not a good job at scoring points. Meanwhile the Woodland Alliance screwed up early and trapped himself in a corner. He eventually got into the center of the board and action. Consequently we left him alone for much of the game. I should have won on the final turn, but made two really dumb mistakes, which let the WA to come in next turn to victory. Everyone wants to play it again. As I was leaving someone in the other game (Gaia Project) asked if this was my new favorite game, and my response was I don't know about favorite, but I want to keep playing it to see more of it. I really think that's where this game's strength lies.

I think getting past the "everyone is learning the rules" part of Root or the Pax games is the key. Once you do, there's so much strategic interplay to explore. Until then, it's vaguely agonizing.

cdennett wrote:

Count Orlok wrote: I played my first game of Scythe. Unless I'm missing something, it was pretty standard middle of the road eurogame. Didn't see much conflict or interaction between players. I'd play it again, but I am not going to be clamoring for it. From what I was seeing online, people were arguing it gets more aggressive with experienced players. Is that the case? Not sure that would help with excitement, however.

No, I think you got it. On paper I should really like this game, but boy does it not click with me. It's simply not fun. Consequently just last night I handed over my collector's edition with lots of upgrades to my friend who didn't want me to sell it. Still haven't figured out how many lunches I'm going to make him buy me...

Believe it or not I've associated it emotionally with Nexus Ops, which is much simpler, much more straightforward, and much more fun. I appreciate that Nexus Ops is a whisper of a game compared to Scythe, but it has a spirit that Scythe didn't reveal when I played it. To some extent, Scythe feels like a game that's big for bigness' sake. I like some big games, games that seem to justify the biginess with a bigger play. But Scythe didn't hit me that way. I'll likely be playing a few more times as it's on heavy rotation with my group right now.

I'm concerned that Biginess is becoming an issue for a lot of new games (for me at least.) Kickstarter seems to nurture it, so I suppose I need to get used to it.

S.