What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Periodically, we get Roll for the Galaxy out and play two player. Somehow, I always forget how pure and good that game is---engine building combo-creation with some randomess that times itself almost *perfectly* so as to be satisfying but not overstay its welcome.

Gary Sax wrote: Periodically, we get Roll for the Galaxy out and play two player. Somehow, I always forget how pure and good that game is---engine building combo-creation with some randomess that times itself almost *perfectly* so as to be satisfying but not overstay its welcome.

I like all 3 RftG games, but the pacing on Roll is the best. I don’t know why so many engine building games in general feel the need to end as soon as you get something going, but it’s always a let down. You also don’t want to go to long, so yeah, Roll is right at that perfect spot.

I always thought it was kinda odd when people talk about the shelf of shame, unplayed games on the shelf. Last night I found my copy of Tournament of Camelot, which I forgot I owned. Had a great teaching 4 player game. A few too many fiddly cards for an ultra slick trick taking experience but overall I really dug it.

Met up with Delobius of F:AT and his pal for our 7th quest in Silver Tower. I played the Slaughterpriest with the big sword, Delobius played his Stormcast knight, and the other guy played the necromancer and the war priest with the gryphon dog.

Before we started playing, I expressed disappointment that we hadn't fought the Gaunt Summoner yet. We fought too many Khairic Acoyltes. Sometimes we rolled them as room encounters, and sometimes we got them from random events, to point where our third guy demanded that we ignore that encounter the result the third time we got it, and roll again. I jokingly started calling them chiropractors, and eventually said that we apparently invaded a chiropractor convention. We also randomly encountered the Gaunt Summoner twice, and to the annoyance of my normally more competent teammates, both times I got in the killing blow with my critical hit skill.

There was also some odd challenge to grab magic items before they slipped away, where each player was competing to roll 4d6 until they matched up with our initial roll. In the first round, I got rolled the exact match the first time. The second round of competition, I rolled the exact match the second time. Due to the poor design of the respite/rest rules, this was the first time in a few quests that we had a chance to gain magic items instead of getting slammed by random encounters. We still enjoy the basic gameplay of Silver Tower, but are getting burned out on the limited selection of monsters. We're looking forward to Hammerhal and the upcoming 40k one.

Then we played a three-player game of Gorechosen. Delobius had played a fair number of games, but the other guy and I had only played once each. And in each of those games, Delobius had killed us early on. I got decapitated on turn one when I played. The other guy got pushed into a firepit on turn two when he played. So, we double-teamed Delobius and eliminated him early when the other guy decapitated him. Then the two of us fought a very close fight that I managed to win. The other guy kept maximizing his wrath score so he would get more actions, but I let my wrath drop to the minimum and fought with better tactics and more surgical strikes. Khorne was probably unhappy, but I won anyway.

After Gorechosen, Delobius and I played a game of Blitz Bowl. He was the orks and I was the humans. I was tired, so struggled a bit with the rules at first, but eventually got the hang of it. It was moderately fun.

All games designed by James Hewitt. That's a good trifecta.

GKR: Heavy Hitters. Overproduced but the arena deathmatch analog of Cthulhu Wars kind of. It’s beautiful and simple but allows for complex plays. Really streamlined for Ameritrash and die rolling galore.

SCOTT Pilgrim magical card game or some such shit: atypical deck builder. Very unique and opaque as fuck rule book. I figured it out and it was OK...probably better if you like Deck builders. Asymmetrical, too

this weekend's games:
Pandemic Legacy S2 (lost early April by a single card flip :disappointed: )
Die Baumeister des Colosseum
Jump Drive (x3)
QE (a WILD game of it!)
Welcome To
Guillotine
CVlizations
Yellow and Yangtze
Space Base

I'm enjoying PLS2 a lot. It's very different so far from vanilla Pandemic.

Was curious about Jump Drive, as I like RFTG but it never gets played. Jump Drive is fun and a lot easier to learn, but I fear it too would never get played.

Hadn't played Guillotine in 13 years. Light, silly fun. We took out the Callous Guards card.

Yellow and Yangtze is really good. I may like it more than T&E in many ways. I need to play the old one soon and refresh my memory of it.

Managed to get in two games of X-wing 2.0. It was my first time trying ships with turrets under the new rules. For my turreted ships I flew a Decimator and TIE aggressor along with a inquisitor TIE.

I played two games against a dual-firespray list. The Firesprays are way more maneuverable on the new medium base and built-in boost and with a smaller base they no longer have nearly as large of a blind side spot. My buddy managed to use the new seismic charges, which blow up a rock and then hit everything with in range one of the rock for damage, extremely well.

I had some tough choices for actions - a GNK droid on the decimator, but with needing to use an action to rotate the turret and needing actions to repair so many critical hits, it felt like the choice was either rotate the turret to get a shot off or skip shooting and try and repair some damage. I got better choosing my firing arch as the games went on, but almost felt the dual ach on the firespray was better than the turrets.

I managed to win both games, but they were both very close nail biters. I am loving 2.0.

Wiz-War--My son and I played our monthly game of bash-the-wizard and laugh. The usual exchange of spells and interruptions occurred--we play with the Big Book of Spells variant. For some reason, this game involved a lot of melee strikes. My revenge was sweet and he was eventually crushed, breaking his spirit until he recharges his manna for the next time where he'll likely crush me.

Kingdomino--I recently bought this one thinking that it would be simply enough and quick enough to interest my wife. I like it, but, she hates the simple spatial puzzle-like problems presented by tile laying in a 5 X 5 grid. My son enjoyed it and we spent three more games calculating the odds of the different tile types coming out to maximize our tile selections. I like the light tension between choosing a tile versus the initiative/turn order.

Glory to Rome--Somehow I ended up getting in on a Print-N-Play copy of of the Black Box edition which had a narrow window before it was shutdown. I originally traded away my copy of GtR cartoon edition for a copy of Cosmic Encounter, but, I couldn't have anticipated that it would go out of print. I'm glad to have it back in the lineup. I just love the chaos of this game and the massive engine building. I like Carl Chudyk's games and I own all of them. My favorite one is Innovation.

Red7--I broke out Red7 and taught some of my son's friends how to play this simple game. It has interesting decisions--it's now in my camping back pack to take on hiking and camping trips.

Werewolf--I'm teaching the Game Design Merit Badge for the Boy Scouts to 10 scouts. I taught them to play and moderate Werewolf. They loved it and the psychology of it was awesome to watch. Tonight, I'm teaching them how to play Mexican Train and Chicken Dominoes and several ordinary card games, mostly so they can have something to do on campouts in their tents when it rains. This group of kids, all raised on video games, is the first group that said that they had never played card games or simple board games before, even with their parents or grandparents; what's going on here?

stoic wrote: This group of kids, all raised on video games, is the first group that said that they had never played card games or simple board games before, even with their parents or grandparents; what's going on here?

Yikes. To be honest, I'm a little surprised this is the first group that hadn't played traditional games. Even though we in the hobby keep the specialized games going, I know very few people who play any card or domino games.

So I've been playing a lot more Gloomhaven this week, mostly solo, trying to worm my way deeper into the mysteries of the campaign. And while I'm enjoying the slow drip of reveal and opening envelopes and boxes, I also find rummaging in the box for event cards and stickers and stuff a huge pain. The real fun of the game, for me, is the brilliant tactical combat.

And it struck me: I wonder if there's a market for a "lite" version of the game? Strip out all the legacy stuff and just offer the six starting classes and the random dungeon generator. Could probably market it at half the price and players could still chain scenarios together into a short campaign if they so wanted.

MattDP wrote: I wonder if there's a market for a "lite" version of the game? Strip out all the legacy stuff and just offer the six starting classes and the random dungeon generator. Could probably market it at half the price and players could still chain scenarios together into a short campaign if they so wanted.

For me, yes, the most fun is in the challenge of each scenario, but still, it’s a huge draw to be working toward opening up the new characters and discovering how cool and different some of them are, and then using those characters in the tactical scenarios. So I don’t think a “lite” version would do justice to that, at least as you describe. Maybe just cut it all in half, so there are still 40-50 scenarios (instead of like 100), and maybe 6-7 new characters to unlock instead of 13.

It’s possible that the upcoming PC version will be something more like that... stripped down a bit.

Snow fell hard and fast on Saturday...so that means 1 thing.


Met up with some buddies at the college veterans center.

I've been banging the drum on Argent:The Consortium for a looong time with these guys, and so I just set it up and told them they were playing it. and of course, I screwed up setup. usually I play 4 players, so I have that ingrained in my mind. So I looked up the setup for 3...and used the 5 player setup. 3 players uses 8 rooms I think, and 5 players uses 12 rooms. so we had tons of room to place mages.

But in argent, blocking is only 1 way to attack and interact. We still had a good time zapping each other and using spells to manipulate board position. Overall, they liked it and want to play again sometime.

Triumph & Tragedy- with X-Wing 2.0 release and the end of fall (hunting/camping seasons) it's been hard to get together for a longer game like this.

Same 3 as last time, rotated all 1 spot. I took the West this time. I managed an economic victory in 1944. It was interesting, Axis built up some units along the low countries, so I expected an invasion into france...that never came. I had placed a handful of 1 CV units into france, so maybe it looked really strong. We've also yet to have a really aggressive axis player. Russia spent a lot of income on diplomacy in eastern Europe, just blocking the Axis in there. and then in 1940 attacked the axis powers in the Baltic states....which went back and forth several times. and kinda half-assed the attack. he put more blocks in than the germans had, but was waaay overmatched as the german units were all 4CV vs the multiple 2CV units that Russia put in. Russia also ended up stripping the Baku/Persia frontier of all but a token force. Pretty sure russia spent too little on units, too much on diplomacy here. probably true for all 3 of us, which I think benefits the West more than anything. Persia stayed an associate of mine for several years, but eventually the Axis stripped my influence there. which gave me cause to march through Afghanistan-Tehran-and eventually DOW Russia to take Baku to get me above the 25 vp line.

We've got another game scheduled, rotating seats again, so I'll be in for Russia. Pretty sure I'm going to ignore most diplomacy and just build up, and force the issue in Poland and Persia/delhi earlier. Our Russia player is clamoring for the Axis, and I think he's planning on being aggressive. Still, it was a good game and we had fun, even if Russia thought it was annoying that no-one would attack.



Space Base with my kids and my wife. fun game, though the early part is alittle boring. it gets better later on when you have more powers to manipulate which ships go where and what your dice affect.

Spy Club with just the oldest 2 kids. I've had this for a month now, and for some reason every time I'd sit down to read through the (fairly short) rulebook, something would come up. but we played two games last night, and the kids just loved it. its mostly a hand-management game, so as stated in the reviews here, not really a 'mystery' game. still, we had fun trying to figure out the story of how Cashier-Key-Fame-Ice Cream Parlour-Lying all tied together.

the 2nd game we started the 'mosaic' campaign. which, when you walk through it is simple to do. just reading through the rulebook its alittle opaque. that's because it jumps from rulebook-card-rulebook-card...which when you don't open the card pack until later can be slightly confusing. They loved how the aspect you pick drives the next case you are working on. so there's a story through the 5 game campaign that we'll put together. by the end of this game they had really picked up on the power of the 'teamwork' actions, and were planning for those over just having a good turn for themselves.

Kingdomino was great. the older kids loved it. the younger kids (age 4) have a hard time scoring well...but just putting the kingdom together for them is a ton of fun.

I remember a quote about Francis Tresham's Civilization that went like this:

"The game is better without the additional trade deck. But it's more fun with the additional trade deck"

I was reminded of this quote today while playing Heroes of Land, Air and Sea. It's certainly not a a great design. In fact, it's a rather pedestrian one. On a critical, intellectual level it's not a great game. But it's fun. And it's fun because you get resources and you play your units and you can be a little bit tricky and it reminds me of Warcraft III.

I can't really offer much of an analysis. You get resources by placing units around the map. You spend these resources to build units and then you fight using a handful of attack cards that mostly counter each other in a rock-paper-scissors manner. The game is very well designed. You don't have too many actions, you cannot snowball and those attack cards cost resources to use. Units have fun, meaningful abilities, too.

Of course, deep down it's an eurogame. But I like the fact that you can actually starve people off and block their resources. We kept one guy without food turn after turn and he suffered because of it. This is a good sign.

The issues with the game are more practical. First, this is a 4-player game. It's ok with 3 (it's how I played it) but the map is 4 islands so it's obviously not optimal. You can play with 6 but downtime would be huge. ANd it's also long. I think we played for at least 3 and half hours and while I was slow, the win conditions actively prolong the game.

It seems to me that the game, left to its own devices, would never end. Hence the designers added a bunch of win conditions to make sure the game can reach a conclusion: Building X buildings, placing all workers and soldiers on the board, capturing the opponent's capital and exploring all possible tiles. It's weak design, but it works.

And hey, it was fun. I played the goblins and quickly expanded to an enemy island. I used a spell to hit his workers and then camped, denying him economy and resources while racking up victory points and fighting against the third player. I would like to play again.

Heroes of Land, Air and Sea looked neat. It also looked like it's good, but not great, and I'm already waiting on the interminably late Lords of Hellas.