What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I should update what I've played:

New Knizia's

Blue Lagoon


This has been compared to Through The Desert but it really does have its own feeling - especially as a score pad is required at the end of each phase to keep track of the multiple scoring paths (dominance on islands, connections between islands, sets of resources etc.) Otherwise the game is straightforward - place a piece on a sea hex, or place a piece (or a hut) next to a previously placed piece. Repeat until all resources are collection or everyone runs out of pieces. Score. Clear all the pieces from the board, leaving the huts, reseed the board with resources, now settlers start from huts rather than sea spaces but you're still scoring the same way.

It's very smooth (on your turn you're just placing a settler or hut on the board) but there's a lot of room for bastardry (I got blocked from islands multiple times) and you really do have to think ahead.

It really does feel like an old school Knizia game even though it seems cobbled together from other games. But it's enjoyable. I can see it coming out a lot.


Lost Cities: Rivals

What happens if you let Lost Cities breed with Ra and you wind up with the spawn of Satan. So it's Lost Cities, but you're either drawing a card, or auctioning off the already drawn cards. So it's Ra as well. However you don't have to take all the cards you've won (as it's still Lost Cities, so the five suits of cards have to be played in ascending order) and you can throw one card out of the game (pick the one that elicits the loudest moans from the most players.)

The deck is divided into four, so spent money (from auctions) is distributed evenly back to the players once each deck is exhausted. Auctions get more ruthless the closer to the end of the deck, as players know money will be re-enter the supply.

There are bastard moments in Lost Cities by itself, but the auction mechanism from Rivals takes it to a new level.

Again, gladly play this again. With Yellow & Yangtze and the reprint of Stephenson's Rocket (declaration of interest - David Harding of Grail Games is a friend of mine) it's clear Knizia's back in the game (as it were) if people aren't too consumed with kickstarter games at the moment.

And speaking of Kickstarter:

The Brigade

This is an Australian Kickstarter that appears to have come out with production issues - though they don't really affect game play. Players are competing fire fighters in a fantasy town that is always ablaze because of the University of Pyrotechnic Studies at the centre. This isn't so much a fire fighting game as a fire management. You want to generate influence cubes which relate directly to the size of the fire you put out, so you want to let things burn a little so you can generate more cubes to distribute (as having the most influence in one of every type of district, or in the University itself, or in the most of one type of district is how you win.) It's kind of a competitive version of Pandemic, but it often takes longer to set up the fires than it does you play out your turn (you get four actions from a menu.) There are some good ideas in it but a lot of it is... why bother? There's no real tension in the game or rather - not enough for a game about fire fighting and advancing the fires and setting out new ones at the START of your turn (imagine Pandemic if, at the start of your turn, you had to resolve an outbreak instead of occasionally at the end of your turn) kills the momentum dead. It's not as badly developed as other KS games I've played, but I feel no compulsion to play it again.

finally

Reef

Draw a card or play a card. Cards are divided into two - the top half pictures two of the colourful solid plastic reef pieces you can place on your four by four board, the bottom half is the configuration (visible from above) that scores - multiple times if it can be made with different pieces each time. Hoard cards until you can score huge, take cards that others need so they can't score. Basically a very pretty drafting game, good for families. Not as cut-throat as Azul (it's from the same company) but much, much prettier. I prefer Azul because it's more gamerly but I wouldn't knock back a game of Reef. No reason to own it myself.

My wife has been begging to play Fields of Arle but because of the commuting I've been sort of too exhausted to set it up when I get home on the weekends (it's setup intensive). We played today and I am always shocked by what a good one of these (bloodless sandbox worker placement) it is. I haven't played the newest ones (Odin or Nusford) but I think this is probably Rosenberg's best for what I come to Rosenberg for... engine building and some satisfying turns of use of that engine.

I've had the expansion on deck forever but never played it, we'll have to put that in sometime when we play it.

I still like Agricola most of the Rosenberg games, and dislike many of them. Agricola isn't so much building an engine. It's more like shoving a car down a steep hill and slapping shit into the engine bay before you fall off a cliff. For this, and the vast number of cards, I consider it one of the better heavy Euros. My wife loves heavier Euros far more than I do, and I think her favourite of Rosenberg is Le Havre. That game frustrates me and has too many resources.

Speaking of heavy Euros, Ashleigh picked Terra Mysica for game night. Holy hell, it's something I do not like. It's brilliant in the way that German wax museum full of plastinated bodies is. Something I can respect from afar, but have no desire to be a participant in.

trif wrote: I should update what I've played:

New Knizia's

Blue Lagoon



Lost Cities: Rivals

With Yellow & Yangtze and the reprint of Stephenson's Rocket (declaration of interest - David Harding of Grail Games is a friend of mine) it's clear Knizia's back in the game (as it were) if people aren't too consumed with kickstarter games at the moment.

And speaking of Kickstarter:

Blue Lagoon looks really great. I'm hoping my wife will get me it for Christmas or something. Lost Cities Rivals looks quite fun as well but I already have a plethora of light Knizia auction games that fill the exact same niche so I found it hard to justify picking it up. I'd definitely like to play it though. I'm quite looking forward to picking up the new maps for Stephenson's Rocket, that game is incredible. I have an old copy so I didn't back the Kickstarter, but I'm planning on buying the expansion maps then they're for sale.

I'm hoping to teach my dad Gaia Project today, but we'll see if he's feeling up for it. I quite like that one, even though I didn't like Terra Mystica very much at all.

Buckeye Game Fest was this past weekend, which is a pretty decent-sized game convention. I spent Friday and Saturday there, and played...

Terraforming Mars - there weren't a lot of pickup games that I was interested in (which is kind of sad), so I ended up playing three games of Terraforming Mars. I played Tharsis Republic (3p), Phobolog (4p), and UNMI (4p), and ended up second in all three. The Tharsis and UNMI games lasted one turn too long; once because I'm an idiot and once because UNMI can run out of gas at the end. Those two I lost by 2 points each. The Phobolog game (not drafting) I'll blame on cards - I had a good startup set, and got shit for Space and Jovian tags.

Empire Builder - I haven't played a crayon rail game against real live humans in maybe ten years, so why not? I thought I did okay, but the winner was one of those hard-core Puffing Billy (yes, my inner thirteen-year-old laughs) players. Final scores were $250 / $220 / $170.

Azul - Got wrecked by these three Azul sharks. I got 60-some points and thought, "That's not bad." Looked up and I had lost by 30 points. I need to play more of that.

Tz'olkin - Got into that to wind up Friday night. I suck at it, but I like to literally and figuratively watch the wheels turn in that game. I finished dead last out of four, but I'll register that under protest - I think our newbie was undercosting his builds by a lot, but didn't get that corrected until the next to last turn. I started off good, but screwed up about 2/3 of the way through. In my experience, you screw a turn up in that game and you're basically dead.

Battle Line - I had to kill about a half-hour before my family joined me for dinner, so I played a couple of games with a gamer I know from way back when. We went 1-1. I should get a copy of this, because it's a good filler.

Villainous - I got into a three-player game, and the owner taught me. It was Red Queen (me) vs. Maleficent vs. Captain Hook. Hook (a 13-yr-old kid) jumped out to an early lead and attracted his opponents' attention. He got slowed up pretty good, dad guy got shit for cards (by his estimate), and I just sat there, scratched my head, and looked innocent until I could close out the game with the win. Kid was going to win the next turn. He was not pleased. I mentioned to him that you have to be careful if you jump out to a big lead. I might spring for a copy - it was fun.

All-in-all it was a good time. I didn't get a chance to play a lot of stuff I was interested in, but I have a lot of stuff sitting around at home and at work that I don't play enough. The venue was really nice, but you'll have to pay to park. I'm going to try to browbeat my gamer friends/relatives into going next time.

Blue Lagoon is great. It is prime Knizia. Like many of his games, it revisits and reiterates motifs he has explored previously. This time, he calls back to the two-era structure of Amun-Re, which isn’t something he’s really done much. It’s really well done, he is definitely in his post-Scary Monsters phase...like how Bowie went through that period where things were always “his best since Scary Monsters”.

Scarabya on the other hand...I’m kind of not feeling it.

My wife and I played four games between Saturday and Sunday.

Washington's War (2x). I pulled out this Mark Herman game from 2010 a few weeks ago, and Jenn and I had an incomplete refresher game before these two. Jenn was the British and I the Americans both times. In game 1, which went till nearly to 1783 (the game has variable ending years), Jenn pretty much crushed me, preventing me for one round (year) being able to place PC markers with ops cards and more than once dispersing the Continental Congress (which has a similar effect to the event card she'd played). I found myself focusing too much on battles, most of which I won while losing the war, and losing track of the political control markers in the Northeast, which are the real key to winning. Game 2 was just about the reverse, with the Americans winning control of most of the colonies by the end-year of 1780; it certainly helped that the French entered the war early in the second year(!) thanks to a series of fortunate events. I like this game as a game. The area control aspect is generally enjoyable, though the tit-for-tat nature can be annoying (I remove a marker, you put it back the next turn). The game certainly models political control (through the placement, flipping, and removal of political control markers) better than battles, which are speedy enough but kind of pointless except as ways for the Americans to advance the French alliance track and to remove other armies from spaces they're going to flip control of. The latter is something I haven't fully appreciated--as well as the viability of using armies to "isolate" PC markers--but that does feel secondary to the Go-like marker placement/flipping/removal.

Hyperborea. This was only our second game of this, and our first two-player. I like deckbuilders, and apparently I like bag builders too, but while this game is silky smooth once you get going, I've found it difficult to explain it conceptually. (And, yes, we are playing with the correct reset procedure.) It does analogize pretty well to a deckbuilder, but somehow it seems a lot less intuitive to, say, draw cubes at the end of your turn but not play them yet as you would draw a hand of cards at the end of a deckbuilder turn but not play them yet. I ended up winning by a few points. Two-player seems perfectly functional, but the BGG-recommended best at four players seems preferable.

Nexus Ops. All the talk about this one got me playing it again, and it is one of Jenn's favorites. She stomped me, 12-7. I ended up with most of my secret mission cards being about humans killing units or humans being in battle, which didn't mesh very well with what I was doing, but that doesn't take anything away from her kicking my behind.

Ah_Pook wrote:

trif wrote: I should update what I've played:

New Knizia's

Blue Lagoon



Lost Cities: Rivals

With Yellow & Yangtze and the reprint of Stephenson's Rocket (declaration of interest - David Harding of Grail Games is a friend of mine) it's clear Knizia's back in the game (as it were) if people aren't too consumed with kickstarter games at the moment.

And speaking of Kickstarter:

Blue Lagoon looks really great. I'm hoping my wife will get me it for Christmas or something. Lost Cities Rivals looks quite fun as well but I already have a plethora of light Knizia auction games that fill the exact same niche so I found it hard to justify picking it up. I'd definitely like to play it though. I'm quite looking forward to picking up the new maps for Stephenson's Rocket, that game is incredible. I have an old copy so I didn't back the Kickstarter, but I'm planning on buying the expansion maps then they're for sale.

I'm hoping to teach my dad Gaia Project today, but we'll see if he's feeling up for it. I quite like that one, even though I didn't like Terra Mystica very much at all.

The Reinerssance* is real!


*Sadly, I cannot take credit for coining this term (that would be QwertyMartin over at BGG), but I'm determined to spread it far and wide.

Also, let nobody forget, an expansion for Quest For El Dorado was just announced.

Speaking of Knizia I had a game of Beowulf: The Legend on the weekend where I finally got it. I'd picked it up cheap secondhand somewhere along the line but it never quite clicked. Weirdly my kids are the ones who got into it more than I did. They like reading the episodes as we go. You wouldnt think that would be enough but my kids are weird, so. Because I largely played it with them I'd always played the simple variant as I just thought it would drag with them otherwise with the extra auctions. But my kid picks it and I thought, OK, it's a lazy day, let's go, and it hummed along.

Ah_Pook wrote: Lost Cities Rivals looks quite fun as well but I already have a plethora of light Knizia auction games that fill the exact same niche so I found it hard to justify picking it up. I'd definitely like to play it though. I'm quite looking forward to picking up the new maps for Stephenson's Rocket, that game is incredible. I have an old copy so I didn't back the Kickstarter, but I'm planning on buying the expansion maps then they're for sale.

Despite its looks, I wouldn't call Lost Cities: Rivals a light auction game. We also played High Society that night - that's a light Knizia auction game.

If you can try before you buy, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by LC:R - it's more along the lines of Modern Art.

I should warn you about the Stephenson's Rocket maps. The components have been changed so there are no share certificates and no city goods counters - they're marked with cubes on the board. You may need to scrounge up some cubes in the player colours to mark the city investments. Otherwise they should still be compatible with the old version of Stephenson's Rocket.

Just saying I have Ra, Medici, Taj Mahal, Money, High Society, Katzenjammer Blues, Das Letzte Paradies and Medici Vs Strozzi in a not particularly huge collection. This is not to say I haven't almost bought Lost Cities Rivals numerous times, or that I'm not planning on buying the reprint of Traumfabrik when it comes out, or that I haven't almost bought Modern Art repeatedly, or that I haven't almost bought Strozzi a bunch of times etc etc

Also, I messaged the guy from Grail a while back and he said it would be compatible size wise. I'm not sure about the other stuff, but either cubes will be scrounged or we can still use the markers and whatnot from the old version in the old style. Have to see.

All this Knizia talk! It is the Reinerssance!

Beowulf is a better game than most took it for...again, it had a lot of classic Knizia motifs- there are echoes of Taj Mahal and LOTR in particular in it- but I think it really suffered coming from “peak” FFG and having that setting. Because everyone assumed it would be some kind of fighting or adventure thing rather than applying auction mechanics to telling the sort of “untold story” of Beowulf’s retinue.

The last time I played it about a year ago, I actually played it with the same four people I had originally played it with when it came out. None of them liked it before, but this time everyone agreed that it was better than they remembered.

Que Ameritrash whining about how there aren’t dice rolls and “ass kicking”...

I like Beowulf, I always thought it was neat. My collection has gone through a lot of churn over the years, but I still have Beowulf and don’t plan on getting rid of it.

I think it not only suffered from the theme but also from expectations of a Knizia/Howe team-up. It is not as good a game as LOTR for sure.

Beowulf just never clicked for me, sadly.

I enjoy the Kingdoms retheme a lot more.

Is Beowulf game before its time?

Quite possibly. Lots of Knizia designs seem to be.

Meh. I have nothing to add, despite enjoying Knizia games for the most part.

I'll just go whine into a pillow about "ass kicking" while waiting for my wet nurse to change my diaper.

Speaking of ass kicking, The chilluns and I acquired and played Dino Dunk this weekend. It's been a long wait since GenCon to get this bad boy in my grasp, finally. They liked it a lot and invited their friends over to play.

I like watching my kids enjoy themselves while playing games. It gives me hope that they will lack a tightly clenched ass while being social later in life.