What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Wife went off to do grocery shopping so I figured I could get a quick game in so I rounded up my eldest daughter and her boyfriend for a quick game of Kemet. Just the base game, no teaching this time,gloves off, let's do this.
In typical Kemet fashion, Her boyfriend bought the tiles I was going to build my engine upon in the very first round when I opted for "Charge" and he went with "Crusade." I love that a plan can go tits up the first round in this game.
We went back and forth in a very close game with my daughter getting sulky when she lost her favorite temple (Sacrifice 1 troop to gain 5 prayer) in round two. This temple became the focal point of most of the battles.
With her boyfriend building his engine around gaining PP with battles, I held off attacking him, leaving him with zero PP for two turns, effectively letting him do nothing. I teleported into Sacrifice two troops to gain one perm VP temple (Temple of the all gods) on my second to last turn of the day phase, moved 3 troops and my scorpion on my last turn (leaving two at the first temple), hit him with Initiative to kill two troops before the battle, then beat him head to head to earn me a battle VP. Night phase started, I sacrificed my two troops in the temple for another VP, earned a third for holding two temples. Gaining three VP in a single "turn" gave me the victory. One of the more epic Battles of Kemet so far and all over in about a hour and 15. Still absolutely adore this game.

Michael Barnes wrote: Yeah, I think that one is going to have the “Black Fleet Effect”...IE it goes on clearance and everybody is like WTF we slept on a really good game.

Space Freaks is now $22.89 shipped on Amazon Prime!

www.amazon.com/Stronghold-Games-8029SG-S...tiveASIN=B073XW72C4&

Keyforge hot take- There is definitely a game here. And it does feel like Garfield intended, like playing sealed deck Magic and kind of feeling out what works and doesn’t, little eureka moments when you figure out a combo or a synergy.

There are multiple ways it feels like a massive reimagining of Magic. Core concepts are there. But streamlined. For example, there is no toughness, monsters just deal damage to each other and if they have Armor, there’s a reduction. Creatures also only fight directly, no face damage. All creatures have a tap ability to gain aember so you almost always have access to a VP path.

The suit-based activation is -brilliant-. I think it is just as much a stroke of genius as abstracting territory/power as land cards/mana was.

I do kind of wonder if it is going to require buying more and more decks to stay fresh and interesting though. I didn’t get any of the racism decks or 4 Horsemen, whatever and mostly got the common 2 rare decks. So I can’t speak to balance yet. So far the two games I played felt like the decks were on equal footing but that was also with completely new pilots.

But yeah, there is a game here. Possibly a very good one, possibly a significant one. Once the hype dies down we’llstart to see if it’s viable in the long run or if it’s just a cool novelty around for a year or two.

Marketed correctly, it could really pull in the Hearthstone crowd in particular.

At home:

Spirit Island with Lightning, Thunderspeaker and Sharp Fangs up against Sweden lv.3. We probably would have been comfortable going for one or two levels higher on the adversary as we had plenty of options to nip off towns in the fast phase, or to gather explorers and put in low level defence, both of which made the additional damage less scary. We focused on this as our main strategy, allowing a couple of cities to blight until we had built up our capabilities high enough to start taking them out. A couple of events and fear cards went our way in clearing out lone explorers which allowed us to easily isolate the invaders into a small number of strong encampments. Despite having plenty of push/gather powers to mitigate Sweden’s stage 2 effect of converting Dahan into towns we didn’t feel the need to focus on it and just resigned ourselves to losing a couple of mushroom huts here and there as there were always better things to do.

Thunderspeaker then reached a point of roving the land with a hoard of Dahan, systematically putting the invaders to the torch one by one against the terrifying backdrop of prowling wild beasts and lightning strikes picking off anyone who dared to make a break for it. We won on the last stage 2 card with a single lonesome explorer left on the island, who no doubt sailed home in a state of madness with some hysterical tales to tell.

Darling of the moment however is Tavarua, a lightweight, fun and accessible game about a surfing competition. Since this arrived about a week ago the kids have been asking for it every day and it also went down very well at the club. What I like most about this is that the design represents what it feels like to participate in the sport instead of attempting to be a mechanical simulation. As of such you stack up various trick moves on your board and encourage each other to become more daring in your attempts to impress the judges, right up to the point where you start wiping out. There is also this neat victory condition thing where you compete for two different trophies but only the winners of those trophies are eligible for the grand champion prize which is measured on their success in the other discipline. It therefore isn’t enough just to focus on working with just one of your boards, and each time you go back out into the water you have to make a tough decision on whether you’ve done enough and it’s time to switch out your board or if you have to go back because of how well someone else is doing.

Best moment so far was my son racking up a huge score that was big enough for him to take one of the trophies but the opportunity of riding an extended barrel wave and clocking a perfect score was too much to resist. I had to applaud his chutzpah at shooting for the moon and we almost brought the ceiling down with our cheers when he managed to cut through the collapsing pipe balanced precariously on the very tip of his board. What a great game, definitely a keeper.

At the club:

I really wanted to play Western Legends this week but couldn’t quite make it happen as the opportunity to try out Tavarua with gaming buddies was too good to resist. So instead of one long game I ended up playing several smaller ones, including yet more new stuff that was still hanging around from the convention.

Roll to the Top was an inoffensive roll and write game. You chuck a bunch of dice and can either use the numbers rolled or add the together, what you write on your sheet has to increase as you ascend the page. The sheets have some tricky spaces to navigate so the challenge is all about knowing when to ignore some of the dice rolls in order to be as efficient as possible and not put yourself into a corner. It’s not going to set the world on fire but I’d play again as a quick filler.

Shadows: Ansterdam is best described as a mash-up of Codenames and Mysterium. The real time element of two competing teams creates a lot of chaos and makes for fun times, plus it clocks in at around twenty or so frenetic minutes. I liked it because we had a good and very competitive group who don’t mind bullshitting each other but I can see this potentially going very wrong depending on who is playing. Our team were suffering from a case of the stoopids and going in completely the wrong direction, but we eventually got back on track and hoovered up our three goals in quick succession. We were just pipped to the finish spot though as I couldn’t for the life of me find decent enough cards to navigate them past the bogey spot that would have outright lost us the game.

Fool was a bland trick taker where the loser of each round sits out the next trick. It seemed pretty pointless and got a big thumbs down from the table. I unintentionally won without having any plan so it was all a bit flat.

Blue Lagoon I enjoyed the first half of this but the second part felt largely pre-programmed. I also found that the players can get out of synch in that sometimes you know exactly what your next three or four moves will be (excepting any interruptions where you just have to drop a tile that is under threat) and at others you grind to a halt to revise your strategy. As this is happening at different points for each player we found the pace of the game to be all over the place. It was okay but I didn’t find it particularly special.

However if you do want to see Knizia on top form then I can recommend Kartel, where he does what he does best in leveraging a simple mathematical conundrum into a fun interactive experience. You have a bunch of tiles that you put in a ring, each of which are either a crime boss, a bribe from that boss, or a gang of their minions. You roll a dice and move a pawn around, choosing which tiles to collect in the process. When you take a boss they go to jail and their minions score but their bribes don’t, keep playing until five of the six bosses are in jail, nice and simple. The magic is in the alliances that form between players as you begin to collect similar or opposing sets and I think that this plays better with a big group as fewer turns increases the need to influence others to do your bidding.

Fine Sand, more of this with some of the legacy cards swapped in. The new cards don’t do much and it’s still pretty much the same game, still enjoyable to play and still think that it will wear thin very quickly.

Played a bunch of games:

Badass Riders: This is quite literally Candyland with some badly designed "take that" cards thrown in. As in, this game has a lot of "go back X spaces" and "you lose your turn" effects. It is one of the worst games I've played in years and I don't understand how the owner, which I played so many great games with could have bought this one and liked it. Kickstartered to all hell, though, custom-minis and all.

Western Legends: This is a well-made game where you do cowboy stuff. But well-made doesn't mean interesting and this game goes along with little tension because everything gives you points. I think the game needs to be meaner and tighter, probably played to few points but also making it so that each point is a big ordeal.

Terraforming Mars Colonies: The only expansion so far that is an actual expansion and not "more stuff". However, I don't think it really makes the game more interesting, it feels a bit adjacent and both I and another player felt lazyness when it came to interacting with it.

Unlock! Tombstone Express: I liked the other two Unlock! scenarios I've played but I didn't like this one. First it dumps a lot of cards at the same time, which means you spend more time getting them out and reading them than actually playing. Second, there are actually few puzzles and they are of questionable quality. Third, there are "real time elements" that are complex distractions that don't work well and don't add much. Fourth, the ending violates real-world common sense. Not a great scenario.

Keyforge: Really liked this one. It's a much, much better and more complex game than I expected. Not when it comes to rules, but when it comes to reading the battlefield. This is a subtle, complex, non-obvious game with tons of possible actions and strategic paths. It is, quite literally, a battle between two Aggro-Control decks in Magic except with some very interesting things going on for it.

The first is that you draw as many cards as you can play (as in VTES) but you can only activate one faction per turn, which means that if you play a lot of Dis cards you won't be able to activate the Mars creatures you have on the table. This is very sharp and very deep. Cards don't have a cost, either, which I think is amazing on a design-level. Yes, you can dump your whole hand in a turn and the game works.

Really, it's one of the most practical, strategic parts of Magic (creatures, board contro) but without Magic's poor economy system and with a prolongued playtime. You can play over 40 cards in a game, which for me is a great sign.

These are some positive signs on Keyforge. Especially hearing that Erik likes it. It's not my lane but I love hearing that innovative games work.

Did Mega Civilization on Saturday. Not too Mega as we only had 5 players, but it was fun!

As we were going into the final rounds I discovered that the app I was using to track and purchase advancements was calculating them wrong and I had been overpaying the whole game. I came in 4th. I'm not sure the app would have significantly changed that, though. I was hit pretty bad with calamities. I bought the "Regression" calamity 4 times off the 9 stack. Twice I was able to get it discarded, but it hit me two times. It can be nerfed with advancements, but once you've gone back on the AST there really isn't much you can do to catch back up except hope that everyone else gets hit with something.

Great couple of weeks of games coming up. Had weekly game night last night, doing Twilight Imperium 4 on Black Friday, and have an all day game event for my birthday in a couple of weeks.

Some other people picked up KeyForge decks in my group and brought them, so we split and did two simultaneous games. One guy who was skeptical on the game really enjoyed the deck he snagged, and was loving it. We've already played quite a bit, but this seems to have legs around here.

We then moved on to a second play of Fate of Fantos. This Vampire: The Eternal Struggle influenced design is interesting. It's a tableau builder card game that feels like a full game in terms of its robustness and the experience provided. It checks a lot of boxes - direct conflict, lots of drama, big reversals, gnarly setting/art.

My problem after the first play was that downtime was somewhat significant. In this play we had a better grapple on some of the strategy and we saw a lot more war. This was entertaining and proved interesting, but it also meant the game went longer (variable end time based upon an action of harvesting, this action was taken less often here).

The downtime issue wasn't as bad, only particularly rearing its head during the single new player's turn.

I dig this game quite a bit. It helps that it feels very unique and operates in its own space to some degree (V:TES comparisons notwithstanding).

Got Modern Art back to the table as well and tried unsuccessfully to argue that most people were overbidding. Still one of my favorite Knizia's.

I haven't gotten Fantos back to the table since my first play but it seemed really cool and worth exploring. I've been trying to get it back ever since but it's not a game most of the people I game with are interested in, so lining the right people up has been a challenge.

Ah_Pook wrote: I haven't gotten Fantos back to the table since my first play but it seemed really cool and worth exploring. I've been trying to get it back ever since but it's not a game most of the people I game with are interested in, so lining the right people up has been a challenge.

Yeah, lots of screwage and unpredictability. Certainly takes the right crowd.

Fate of Fantos? Hrm. Seems like a marketing hiccup. I can't say that I'm particularly compelled to discover the destiny of the heroic... Fantos. Or the mysterious... Fantos. Or the ominous... Fantos.

I played a game of Tzolkin with 5 (utilizing the expansion). It's my fourth game, and I'm pretty shocked at how much I'm enjoying playing it. I lagged pretty behind for most of the game, but ended up buying a monument that gave me points for the numbers of crystal skulls on the board which was enough to slingshot me from last to first (by one point). Everyone was within six points of each other, so it was a pretty close game. It was also the first game that I lost and that my friend who owns the game lost.

Tzolk’in is really great. You totally don’t need the expansion, but man does the expansion add some cool stuff.

I play Tzolkin online, and I like it but I suck at it. If I win a game of it, it's by accident.

Oh good, I'm not the only one who likes Tzolkin. Those gears are both cool as hell, and also make the whole worker placement thing super interesting. I really dig that it's a worker placement game where you can do well with the starting workers only, and it's not just a race to buy more.