What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I taught a guy Fury of Dracula 3e last night. I had fun, he didn't end up liking it. Too long, too many hunter turns spent kinda blindly floundering around while grabbing items. Fair points, both. I really enjoy FoD but it's not a game I feel the need to play all that often. Usually once or twice around Halloween, maybe another time somewhere throughout the year.

Ah_Pook wrote: I taught a guy Fury of Dracula 3e last night. I had fun, he didn't end up liking it. Too long, too many hunter turns spent kinda blindly floundering around while grabbing items. Fair points, both. I really enjoy FoD but it's not a game I feel the need to play all that often. Usually once or twice around Halloween, maybe another time somewhere throughout the year.

Have you played 2nd edition? I haven't played 3rd edition, but the consensus around here is that 3rd is definitely better than 2nd edition. But I have never had a bad game of 2nd edition.

Shellhead wrote:

Ah_Pook wrote: I taught a guy Fury of Dracula 3e last night. I had fun, he didn't end up liking it. Too long, too many hunter turns spent kinda blindly floundering around while grabbing items. Fair points, both. I really enjoy FoD but it's not a game I feel the need to play all that often. Usually once or twice around Halloween, maybe another time somewhere throughout the year.

Have you played 2nd edition? I haven't played 3rd edition, but the consensus around here is that 3rd is definitely better than 2nd edition. But I have never had a bad game of 2nd edition.

I've never played anything but 3e. I personally have enjoyed all my games of it, but a lot of people I introduce it to aren't so enthused by the end of it. And I only need a couple super long hidden movement games every once in a while to carry me through I guess. If I had some regular opponents who loved it and wanted to play it more I wouldn't be opposed, but only one guy I've taught it to has loved it so far and our schedules don't line up that often.

Speaking of spoooooky games, I tried out Monster Crunch with me brother and a couple of his kids yesterday. That is a surprisingly solid family card game. It's quite light, as befits a family card game, but if you have a niche for that style of game in your rotation it's well worth checking out. The art is great too.

I've played many games of 1st and 2nd and only one game of 3rd. 2nd was definitely an improvement over 1st in terms of rooting out the paint-oneself-into-a-corner habit of GW designs back in the day. ("Whattaya mean it's not exciting to grind through an unwinnable situation for two hours?!") The improvement from 2nd to 3rd is much lighter and seems mostly centered around the somewhat unwieldy combat system of 2nd. However, the investigators are also a more significant threat to Dracula if he's found. In the one game I played, no one caught up to Dracula so we didn't get to engage in it, but it's still basically the same game as 3rd and still a lot of fun. I was playing as Dracula (like usual...) and I had some very close calls and was found once running around Catalonia but managed to slip away and mature enough vampires for the win.

Played Western Legends last night with three. Here's what I wrote:

"Sandbox" games are a tricky thing. If the players can do whatever they want, there's a chance that none of them will want to do the same things, which means there's little interaction, or that a few will try to do the same thing, causing competition in that space so that other players go unhindered. It can make the games very fragile. Nevertheless, it's a space I enjoy, to the point where I worry it's becoming over-represented in my groups. With Fallout, Merchant of Venus, and Merchants and Marauders already in the mix, and Xia on its way, how many of these do we need? So while Western Legends was interesting to me, I was able to back off.

Fortunately, Matt was not!

Western Legends is a lot of fun. There's a lot to do, and a clever mechanism involving scoring as an outlaw both makes it a nice risk-reward AND incentivizes Marshall players to come after you. Each "thing" you can do is small and short, so if you want to pan for gold, you can go do that and don't have to set up any kind of long-term plan you're locked into. Just go do it and then do something else.

There are some downsides. The "story cards", awarding things for completing small goals, are a lot of copies of a few different ones, making those dull real quick. The outcomes are a complete unknown, so they aren't so much story as just random events. There's a middle space between "Marshall" and "Wanted" but there's nothing in that space for everyone. This pushes players to choose a path, sure, but why not have a third option? The limit on carried money is weird, since carrying a bunch of cash should be its own punishment. Instead you can find yourself in a situation where there's no point in doing something until you clear out your money. That's just kind of odd. There isn't a whole lot of character differentiation. They have different special abilities, but that's pretty much it.

But there are a lot of plusses for gameplay. The biggest one is that unlike other games of this type which bog down with more players, this one seems like it gets better with more. More players means more and more interesting poker games, more player fights, and more competition in spaces. That's a big plus. And, as I said, it's a lot of fun, rules overhead is low, combat isn't as much of a hassle as in Merchants and Marauders, and the theme is nice.

If you can find people that don't play slow, it's fantastic with 5 (6 is pushing it just a bit). It's the only adventure game that hinges on interaction and attacking each other all game.

The money thing is weird. It's obviously there to stop you from just dropping tons of money at the Cabaret for points (like stashing in M&M). It doesn't feel like a smooth way to handle that though.

The poker, fighting, and prospecting all feel bang on in my opinion. They're simple mechanisms but each unique with just enough flavor to feel right.

Love how they included an option to go Marshall instead of leaving it solely up to NPCs like M&M.

Is this the game Spurs wished it was?

SuperflyTNT wrote: Is this the game Spurs wished it was?

Yes.

One thing I should point out. My dude was a historical African-American deputy marshall. The character card had a pic of him and some biographical info and that was really neat. But in the pic, he's not wearing a hat. There was no miniature that was clearly this guy, though my friend playing Billy the Kid seemed to find one that matched his card, and the person playing Annie Oakley did as well. There's supposedly a miniature for the NPC sheriff, but we couldn't find one and just chose one. For bandits, you just put the gray bases on six of the remaining figures. The minis aren't great.

I don't care about minis (and in fact realized after the fact that I had brought over my copy of Fallout and should have opened it up and been tromping around the old west in power armor) but for those who do, this might be a rough bit, especially given the cost of the game. The player aids, printed on just glossy paper, are not great (physically; they provide really good info, though). People elsewhere have complained about other components but nothing else really raised a flag for me.

I don't know anything about Spurs so I can't comment on that.

Played a couple games at the club:

Battle For Rokugan is a streamlined, euro-like variant of Game of Thrones the Boardgame, itself a chrome-heavy Diplomacy-like variant. It is unusual because it is the opposite of the typical FFG game: It's lean, it's short and it's considerably constrained. There are very few cards and controlling a whole territory (like a continent in Risk) gives you one card out of a total of two. There are no big decks of effects or anything of the kind.

The result is a very good, very tense game that is probably superior to GoT and other similar titles, but still not brillant. The core mechanic is good, the game flows very well, it's tense and it has quite a bit of thinking into it which is good, but there's nothing that stands out as particularly smart or particularly interesting.

There's something I did not like, though, and that's the "remove one order from the table" cards. They have a disproportionate effect on the game because you can remove an opponent's order and then place your own, they make turn order very critical and each player gets to fire one of these just for being the start player. I don't know what they add to the game, but they seem very centralizing.

My impression of it is that this is a game I would like to put repeated plays in but not a game I would like to own or push to the table.

Then we played Chicago Express. This game is just brillant. It's very short and very simple and yet dabbles in some extremely multifaceted concepts. In my game I killed a train company by investing on it and making sure nobody could ever hold a majority on it. I sank another player by issuing stock on his main company and lost to a player who aggressively bought shares in a poor company because they had something I couldn't have.

Made me wish I could play 18XX again.

Finally played a solo game of Big Trouble in Little China, since I haven't managed to get people over for a co-op game, which is what it is. I still want to play a couple more times before I do a full-blown review, but...

There is a A LOT of chrome. This is explicitly described in the rulebook as a storytelling game, so if you were expecting something elegant, think again. This is Arkham Horror, except without as many cards to draw. There are a lot of cool ways to build your character (Jack, Wang, Gracie, Maggie, Eddie, Egg) and ways that emphasized individual achievement or group efforts. The quest system that tells a lot of the story feels a little limited, in that a lot of it is "Go here and roll these dice." But they were making Arkham Horror, not Descent 2nd Ed. Overall, it's also quite challenging for the heroes. There's a built-in clock that shifts you from Chinatown to Lo Pan's lair and it feels like it's quite possible to end up in the latter too early on a fairly regular basis (i.e. without having had the chance to upgrade your hero a couple times to deal with the sterner threats in the lair.) One of the biggest restraining factors on the heroes is movement. There's a lot of ground to cover for quests, side quests, shop items, and possible healing and there's no way to do all of that AND tune your hero up to take on the Three Storms. This is where you rely on splitting the effort among either other players or Companions, right? Maybe. More plays needed.

All of that said, it is quite fun and is positively drenched in BTiLC theme, so they hit all the high notes there. Plus, the minis are quite cool. For those thinking about the "gold" level of the Kickstarter campaign, I'd say don't bother with it. All of the extras are ancillary (campaign play booklet, cloth bag for a variant, etc.) and don't reach the level of "expansion" that you'd otherwise expect.

Jackwraith wrote: Finally played a solo game of Big Trouble in Little China, since I haven't managed to get people over for a co-op game, which is what it is. I still want to play a couple more times before I do a full-blown review, but...

There is a A LOT of chrome. This is explicitly described in the rulebook as a storytelling game, so if you were expecting something elegant, think again. This is Arkham Horror, except without as many cards to draw. There are a lot of cool ways to build your character (Jack, Wang, Gracie, Maggie, Eddie, Egg) and ways that emphasized individual achievement or group efforts. The quest system that tells a lot of the story feels a little limited, in that a lot of it is "Go here and roll these dice." But they were making Arkham Horror, not Descent 2nd Ed. Overall, it's also quite challenging for the heroes. There's a built-in clock that shifts you from Chinatown to Lo Pan's lair and it feels like it's quite possible to end up in the latter too early on a fairly regular basis (i.e. without having had the chance to upgrade your hero a couple times to deal with the sterner threats in the lair.) One of the biggest restraining factors on the heroes is movement. There's a lot of ground to cover for quests, side quests, shop items, and possible healing and there's no way to do all of that AND tune your hero up to take on the Three Storms. This is where you rely on splitting the effort among either other players or Companions, right? Maybe. More plays needed.

All of that said, it is quite fun and is positively drenched in BTiLC theme, so they hit all the high notes there. Plus, the minis are quite cool. For those thinking about the "gold" level of the Kickstarter campaign, I'd say don't bother with it. All of the extras are ancillary (campaign play booklet, cloth bag for a variant, etc.) and don't reach the level of "expansion" that you'd otherwise expect.

I really enjoy how chaotic and rushed that first half is. It mimics the feeling of the film where things are just odd and all over the place. It finally comes together when they infiltrate Lo Pan's lair.

It also has the added benefit of keeping the content fresher upon repeated plays as you'll visit different locations and see different sidequests.

charlest wrote: I really enjoy how chaotic and rushed that first half is. It mimics the feeling of the film where things are just odd and all over the place. It finally comes together when they infiltrate Lo Pan's lair.

It also has the added benefit of keeping the content fresher upon repeated plays as you'll visit different locations and see different sidequests.

Yeah, I don't think it's bad, per se. You're right that it will keep people moving and force them to focus on different areas of the board. I just wonder if it crosses the line that we were talking about in another thread, where if you make one wrong move at the start, you're screwed. OTOH, this is a co-op that's supposed to be a challenge to encourage those replays, right? Otherwise it becomes Pandemic: once you figure out the puzzle, the game is dead. But, then, it can't be just a puzzle, because you're not playing just to win but to tell a story, right? So, yeah. More experience needed, I think.

I don't think you will be screwed, the second half of the game is easier if you do worse in the first half and more difficult if you perform better. I've found the game to be a little too easy at 2 characters and pretty solid at 4.

I solo’d it a few times and found it hard to level up enough to make headway on the second map. Theme wise it nails it and it plays pretty fast .