What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Sagrilarus wrote:

Grudunza wrote: Discover: Lands Unknown

So do you have any clue what terrains you're getting when you purchase? It would suck to buy a second copy (or your buddy buys a copy) and discover that it's largely a dupe of what you already have.

Is there any indication on the outside of the box, or is it completely hidden?

No indications. Getting an identical set of terrain does not mean everything in the box is identical, however. Characters are randomized, as are projects, events, and other miscellaneous bits. Interestingly enough, small subsets of cards are shrinkwrapped individually, as are single sheets of tokens/tiles. So it's a mix of randomly generated content.

Still, you'd probably rather have an entirely different type of terrain.

Picked up the Batman the Animated Series Gotham City Under Siege game and played a few times with the wife and kids. It's a lot better than I expected. It's basically a dice allocation game where you're balancing the need for completing story cards vs fighting off villains. Each playable character has a set of unique skills you can allocate dice towards to activate along with a special ability that can only be activated twice per game and they're actually very thematic.

We got wiped out both times so the difficulty is very satisfying and there's some pretty cool things at play with the 3D buildings that you need to prevent from being destroyed and can climb on to access all areas of the city (but leave yourself vulnerable to other types of attacks). I kind of like the way it addresses the alpha leader issue of most co-ops by just embracing it and making it part of the game instead of pretending like it's not a thing. In each of the 4 phases a different player is the team leader and has full authority over many of the final decisions.

It's definitely not going to be a top 10 ever for me but it was a hit with the family which makes it a great game in my book.

The Spousal Unit has been putting the beatdown on me in Terraforming Mars + Prelude. I've lost 5 in a row. I think I just absolutely shouldn't play the points game with her, and just run TR up as fast as possible. I had the optimal setup last night, UNMI with the $3 rebate on standard projects card, but decided I'd try to build too many Greeneries and got burned. I R DUM.

RobertB wrote: The Spousal Unit has been putting the beatdown on me in Terraforming Mars + Prelude. I've lost 5 in a row. I think I just absolutely shouldn't play the points game with her, and just run TR up as fast as possible. I had the optimal setup last night, UNMI with the $3 rebate on standard projects card, but decided I'd try to build too many Greeneries and got burned. I R DUM.

UNMI with Standard Technology is brutal. But it's true, it's hard to grab the Greenery/Awards points.

Played The Estates a few times so far, and can't wait to play it more. The closed economy and massive potential for screwage makes for a razor sharp auction game that is targeted directly at my gaming pleasure centers. I'm really glad this one finally came back into print, as it had been on my list to play for years but I never ran into a copy before.

Also finally got a couple rounds of Schoko & Co played, which seemed quite interesting. The actual flow of the game is quite smooth, and aside from the lack of useful information on the board and the focus on extreme number crunching it really didn't feel like a 30 year old game. We didn't play far enough in to see how it goes once the wheels fall off, but even just from a couple learning rounds it's easy to tell that it's a game where total finical ruin is always near. Really like to get a 4p game of this one together, as the cocoa auction was kind of lackluster 2p, but man if ever there was a game with a lack of crowd pulling selling points this is it

Eh, I may have jumped the gun on Discover... Played some more today, and after two more scenarios I’m feeling like I’ve seen about all it has to offer. Pretty thin, after all. Oh well.

Fun day today at the club.

The Great Dalmuti is another Richard Garfield game so why not give it a whirl? It's a pretty fun game and I like the hand management of it. It reminds me of Cosmic Encounter in that you'll eventually play all your hand and hence have to think about when it's a good idea to play certain cards and when to pass. It's interesting how it's a clear variant of a traditional game (We call it "Culo") but made significantly more interesting just by changing how the deck works.

Viena is a dice euro, apparently a simplified version of Kingsburg, which I haven't played. It's not really interesting but it's simple, short and undemanding which means it never triggered my disdain. Will probably forget about it.

Now, I actually forgot I played Virus!. This is not a good game. I'm not sure there's any real strategy. You either play cards on yourself or play take-that cards. That's it. I remember thinking that it was like Munchkin, except without the jokes, the negotiation or, well, anything. Uno is probably a better example. Yeah, UNO. No, thanks.

Then one player left and I suggested Chaos in the Old World because I noticed it on the shelf and I thought one of the players would love it. And he did! He said that, after just one game he liked it better than Blood Rage. The other two players also liked it a lot, though one struggled a bit with the rules.

I think that there are a couple small details that really enbiggen this game. For example, making people tie when it comes to wheel advances is really important, as is focusing down on areas that might get ruined so you get points. There's a lot of potential denial in this game which doesn't exist in other Eric Lang games.

I got roped into a second game of Scythe. Just not a pleasant experience.

If you ever get the chance to play My Little Scythe with a couple of competitive 9-12 year olds, I highly recommend it.

It is short & fun and the 2nd half flies by.

My Little Scythe is one of the best kid’s games I’ve ever played. Everything about it is just right- it’s almost a miracle that it’s so kid-friendly yet it hits almost all of the layers of Scythe’s design. It’s really quite complex if you step back from it, but playing it is extremey accessible and FUN. I get the complaints that everything you do gives you some kind of advancement, but that also impacts the tempo and length favorably- it reliably plays in about 45 minutes because there’s no dead air so to speak.

And it also totally works as a light adult game.

I’ve been playing Rise of Fenris sporadically and it’s very good, but it won’t convince anyone not already interested in Scythe. But I find myself wishing that it was an expansion for MLS.

As best I can tell Scythe is really a case of the emperor's new clothes. It just seems so procedural, with two-dozen little esoteric corners in the rules that are hard to explain and just add complexity for complexity's sake. We have one guy that just creams us, always seeming to have some interpretation of the rules (that the designers have confirmed on the Internet by the way, so they're real) that give him options that the rest of us aren't aware of. He's playing a different game than we are. In Monday night's session he got to place his little wooden stars anywhere he wanted by doing the same thing over and over again. In theory that's not allowed, but he was allowed to do it. When a couple of people at the table said he wasn't playing it right he got citations from the designers. I got joking mid-game about "is this the special rule for your character?" because each character in the game has a special rule, and he seemed to have a dozen special rules up his sleeve that the rest of us didn't know about. I probably used the phrase four or five times before figuring I had made my point. He's a nice guy, and he's not one to pile on, but he was playing against children for all intents and purposes, and three of the players at the table had about as much experience as he did.

And, frankly, combat where you don't lose any pieces. What the hell is that? Your pieces go back to start? That's just retarded. Combat in this game is the stupidest I've ever seen, where there is absolutely zero back pressure to putting your guys into a combat situation. The big guy would show up someplace, beat someone on the head, and then place his star on the "finished my upgrades" category for it. Really weird.

I was on a part of the field where I couldn't move anywhere very easily. There was only one place where I could cross a river because . . . uh . . . because apparently rivers are uncrossable unless there's people or food waiting for you on the other side. Don't know why, but that's the rule. Clearly explained by two small icons on my one little cardboard sheet. So I took a turn that was illegal, someone caught it at the very end and I had to revert and start over after prepping to take that option for a couple of turns.

So I focused on building shit with what I had. Didn't get any of the campaign chits though, because the guy that could grab any chit he wanted by doing combat over and over beat me to them.

A friend explained late in the game when me and another guy were clearly mocking the absurdity of parts of this game that getting to the factory means you have a teleport command for the entire board, and that we should have done that. Here's hoping that I don't show up to find the board set up a third time. Once SpaceCorp shows up I'm stepping away from Scythe and playing it solo (or with the other guy that was mocking Scythe) instead.

Here's the funny part. After failing miserably for the entire game to accomplish what I was trying to accomplish, I came in third in a five player game. No fucking clue how I did that.

I appreciate that a guy in my group dropped some serious buckazoids on this "Big" game with its custom art and plastic pieces and thick wooden chunks. So he wants to get it played. Fair enough, it's his new baby. But damn, honestly, I'd rather play Risk. Swear to God, I'd rather play Risk on the shitty old blue map with the cheesy plastic caltrop pieces.

How was he getting any star he wanted for winning combats? That sounds completely made up.

When he looks up the citation on his phone, are you sure he's not just staring at a blank page and ad-libbing?

After nearly a decade of being on this site and who knows how many more years of lurking I’m trying to make a commitment to be more active on here, so this seems like the best way to start

At the club:
Cryptid with five, which I am sure I am about to be banned from playing for having some kind of weird innate ability to figure out the location way in advance of anyone else. This time around was the closest so far with both players on either side of me jumping up and down in excitement that they had figured it out. I was confident that the player to my right was going to be wrong because he clearly had another players clue wrong and hadn’t a chance to see them say no to his previous guess because he had been given another “no” earlier in the player order. My friend to the left clearly did know because he was giving it away by staring intently at the correct spot on the board! So I played it cool like I was sad to finally lose a game of this, the player to my right put down his guess and got burned on the final “no” and my friend is almost doing a victory jig in his seat and trash talking me all the way through. So I say that I might as well take a wild guess, circling my hand around the board anywhere but the lair, before dropping it down on the right spot. Cue much cursing and my own victory jig. There’s something really satisfying about the moment when you figure out exactly where the lair is.

High Society twice with five, we had one new player who heavily overbid on the first two cards but then two of the specials came out in a row so we were caught in a race to grab any kind of scoring card with the clock ticking. Our newbie took great delight in inflating every auction as much as they dared and with the end card buried right at the bottom of the deck things spiralled out of control with most players only having two or three cards left in hand, and one with just a single card. But which ones did they have? I ended up being the rube by a single wad of cash and our newbie won despite his early game indulgences.
The second game was equally fun with one poor sucker stuck on the x2 /2 combo and no scoring cards to multiply with plenty of money left in hand. Despite his constant braying that shelling out more than 4k per point was too high we managed to string him out all the way to the end where he ended up paying 12k to take the two point card just to hit the bottom of the scoreboard, after which the game promptly ended.

Root with five, two Vagabonds in play rather than braving the expansion factions. It was interesting to pit the two Vagabonds against each other and highlights the fragility of that faction; one of them was starved of teapots by the other and really struggled as a result, whilst the tea drinker gave away too much to the Cats and got stepped on hard at one point as he was noticeably racing into the lead. I’ve seen negative opinions here about the Vagabond but it really hasn’t been an issue for us, we either keep back the teapot cards or leave him to the Birds to satisfy their need to battle, which is hardly an inconvenience for them. If anything it’s the Woodland Alliance that are proving tricky for us as beating them down only makes it cheaper for them to come back again whilst giving them the resources to do so in the process. Getting the timing right with your battles seems really crucial. I think the truth of it is similar to COIN games in that all the factions are closely interleaved in striving for victory and it’s the manipulation of that balance between them that makes the difference.

In this game the Birds suffered after a miscalculation on their builds meant that they collapsed in what transpired to be the final turn of the game. They would have won in the next round but then again both the Cats and the tea-drinking Vagabond were also well positioned to snatch the win; another constant in our games so far have been that there are usually two or three factions poised to seize victory at the same time so there is much groaning and gnashing of teeth when victory is declared. This time it was my Woodland Alliance who won again. We were shafted by one of the Vagabonds, then recovered by putting a lot of threat on the Birds home roost and the Cats centre of production. Both the flappers and the scratchers then focused on hitting me back hard and I was overjoyed to see them feed me enough cards to spread three more presence, then I crafted for a couple of points and bombed a warrior to spread another presence for the win. In fact I could have carried on going and would have topped out close to forty points if I could have, so a big mistake from the other factions in essentially handing me the capability to score big when we were in sight of the endgame instead of accepting a bit of a beating in order to stretch the game out for one more opportunity for themselves.

Flamme Rouge with seven, technically more than the game can support so two people buddied up on one team. Something about this game has just clicked with us and it’s been a constant on our tables for nearly two years now. I love how it presents the feel of being in a race rather than trying to be a mechanical simulation; your concerns are pacing and timing, trying to gauge when the pack is going to break and how you can best place yourself in the peloton, which is so much more satisfying than the mechanical act of fussing with gear changes and the like. I also love that it can be explained in less than a minute but has a whole lot more game to it than that brevity suggests.
Anyway we had a blast, with both breakaway riders failing to make the most of their head start and being caught after the first punishing hill slowed them down to a crawl and filled their decks with exhaustion cards. I managed to emerge from the back of the pack right into the lead but due to the peloton stretching out and slipstreaming pulling us out of position I was stymied on the final small hill which I had to take in two turns instead of the possible one-shot it could have been. This allowed the fresher riders an opportunity to move up the pack and catch up in the final straight. I had three cards that would get me over the line that I could draw up and so of course I picked up precisely none of them and slipped on the pedal right when everyone was starting to make their final sprint. Somehow I managed to wind up in third place behind two riders that had surged up from the back at the very end.

At home, lots of gaming during school half term week:
Spirit Island with proxies of some of the new spirits. My son went for Many Minds and I took Vengeance as a Burning Plague. I’ve seen people talk about how Many Minds 'should' be played in a cycle of placing and consuming beasts but my son went a completely different route and just used it to flood the board with beasts which he then used in the late game to inflict some serious casualties. I found plague to be in need of some tweaking because it was just too easy to exploit its innate abilities. It has this thing where you can place more presence when your presence is destroyed and you can then use destroyed presence as a means of doing damage, plus it is really easy to move your presence around on the island. So I simply pushed into the opening lands and allowed them to build and ravage, in the process enabling me to become super-charged really early on and having a stack of destroyed disks that I could then use to enact my revenge. It was far too easy from that point to turn the entire board into a safe zone and we then just picked off the invaders at our leisure until we finally raised the terror level and smacked the remaining buildings off the board in one fell swoop. Think I might wait for more stable versions of these spirits to appear as I don’t much care for playtesting.

Risk Star Wars aka Queens Gambit, the Rebellion emptied their carriers early on and then saw an opening to take down Darth which gave them a big boost. The Empire were too focused on attacking with Ties and missed the opportunity to block progress on the shield generator until it was too late. For the first time for us the Falcon made it to the end of the game yet the glory went to a fleet of B-Wings that had been lurking out of range for just such an opportunity to strike.

Gaslands, painting and modelling rather than playing. It’s been a matter of decades since I last did any of this so I must admit that I am actually enjoying it more than playing the game itself!

Sushi Go! Party because that’s how we roll, it did its thing and my daughter stomped us all as usual, then we followed up with TTR Europe and Rattlebones both of which she also kicked our butts in. Also played Through the Ages and managed to clock in under three hours for the first time. I kind of like this but it feels like it’s turning into a bit of a repetitive activity so might cut it loose and get a copy of the second edition Sid Meier Civ game instead which looks more fun.

Lastly I pulled Shadows Over Normandie out from storage at the request of my son. We tried out the Heroes System a couple of years back but he wasn't quite ready for it at the time. He's been pestering me recently to have another shot at it and handled it much better this time, still a little too young to really get to grips with effective tactical positioning and managing risk and he was too rash in some of his decisions. He still wants to play so I'm thinking about slipping an additional hero into his team to give him a boost but I also kind of don't want to let him learn bad habits by making it a cakewalk for him. He's learnt to play a mean game of TTA so I don't think he needs his hand held to much in something like this.

(Scythe)

He's a pretty straight-up guy. But the other player that was very frustrated at the table was checking him because it seemed so unbalanced. I think it was some card he had gotten. Maybe from the factory thing in the middle of the board?

As you can see, my command of the game is pretty thin.

I'd never accuse Sam of cheating. He'll work the rules thoroughly, but in the end he'll ask for a decision for all to agree on and live by it. Apparently this particular subject has had more than a bit of discussion on the web.

I don't know, I just don't like games that are big for the sake of being big. That's the feel I get from Scythe, where it's almost approaching a lifestyle title. Britannia does the same thing without all the bling, most others are minis games or CCGs.

I personally wouldn't call it 'procedural', but that Russviet Factory Rush strategy is straight out of Scythe 101.

It is big, but I think that's to give you more playstyle options. In theory you're supposed to be able to try a little bit of everything as far as strategy goes, and you're not railroaded by your faction and your player mat.

I bought the ginormous Kickstarter version, because I must have been drunk.