What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Tried out 2-person Guildhall last night, since we'd only played with 4 prior to that. It works fine. My girlfriend finished up a chapter of Dancers quickly, but didn't feel like cashing in yet (there were 3 fours with actions, a 5, and a 9 among the scoring cards.) I had four different chapters at 4 cards for a while before she started using Assassins to trim them down. I eventually cashed in two to take the 9 card and had also accumulated 5 coins off my Farmers and eventually got a chapter of Traders turned in for a 4 card, putting me at 18. But then I just couldn't draw a card that didn't match what I already had on the table until... she Assassinated my green Farmer (I'd needed yellow to close it out) and I had two of them in hand, so I played one on the next turn for two more coins. Game, 20-19.

Two players works, but it's definitely not as fun as four. With more players, you can't focus on what everyone is doing the way you can simply focus on the opponent across from you in two-player. That makes Assassins somewhat less useful in multiplayer, but far more useful in two-player, where it's worth it to simply unload a couple of them and set your opponent back significantly, which is rarely the case in the 4-player games we had. But it was a really close game, which either of us could have won on the next turn or two, which made for some good tension.

I really like this game. Contrary to my usual predilections, I don't feel any compulsion to get the fantasy version with its half-dozen expansions at all. I like that this is just simple and straightforward and does just what it says on the tin.

Jexik wrote: As much as consumers recoil at CCGs in theory, no LCGs have done as well as Magic. Even Hearthstone has random packs, and you don't even open anything real.

Well, yeah, but what is as successful as Magic?

I agree that LCGs do have a lifespan, though Fantasy Flight is experimenting with ways to make them more affordable for new players years after launch, but I think there’s a middle class for LCGs whereas you’re either Magic or Pokemon or nothing in the CCG model. Looking at defunct CCGs, most of those are dead two years after launch. The only Fantasy Flight LCG that short was Conquest and not for sales reasons.

I admit all of this is conjecture and feeling. I am happy to be proven wrong on any of these points.

bendgar wrote: Question. What's a good way to dip back into Magic after a long separation? Is buying a couple cheap 1000 card lots off ebay viable for family play?

Do not do this whatever you do. It just does not work.

The Battle Decks you can get from Card Kingdom are by far the best way. They are basically precons they build based around concepts, mechanics, themes, or archetypes. They are far more thoughtfully made than most of Wizards’ precon product. There are like 50 of them, $10 each. They are also great for catching up on keywords and mechanics you might have missed. I have 20 of them across a wide range and they are perfect for the prodigal player.

The other option is the Guild Kits Wizards just put out. There are five, each corresponding to a Ravnica guild (two color factions, basically) with five more coming next year. For $20 you get a 60 card deck, all the tokens you need, and some dumb swag (a pin, a D20, a deck list). But the cool thing is that the decks are very keyed to the themes of their guilds, and it is all Ravnica cards going al the way back to the original Ravnica release. Lots of fairly expensive reprint cards, but you aren’t getting 4 card playsets out of it. I have all five and they are really fun to play.

A third, cheapest option is t get the Explorers of Ixalan board game that came out last year. It has four tribal precons (Merfolk, Pirates, Dinosaurs, Vampires) that you can play with. They aren’t great decks, but they are still better than the 1000 card lot route and with a few tweaks they could be good. The board game has an interesting thing- you spend extra mana to explore an island by flipping over hex tiles and getting bonuses or penalties. This can be found for as low as $25. It is all Ixalan cards, which I really like because it is an uncommon Mesoamerican-flavored setting.

DarthJoJo wrote:

Jexik wrote: As much as consumers recoil at CCGs in theory, no LCGs have done as well as Magic. Even Hearthstone has random packs, and you don't even open anything real.

Well, yeah, but what is as successful as Magic?

Arkham Horror seems like a decent LCG, but who knows how long it will last.

Someone who 'wasted' thousands on MtG in the 90s can now play Vintage and/or buy an Audi, while someone who has everything for Summoner Wars can buy it for 70% off from FFG.

Whatever happened to Summoner Wars? Did they just do what they always do and introduce unbalanced cards that broke the game?

Shifting discussion a bit, we received and played Monster Slaughter last night. This was one the wife backed as the theme and presentation was right up her alley. For the unfamiliar it's Ankama's new joint, which means it's got amazing minis and art but the quality of design is a total wildcard. It's basically Kill Doctor Lucky with a ton of dice and plastic, only there's multiple Doctor Luckies and they die really easily.

You play as a family of monsters competing to murder teenagers at a cabin in the woods. You get points from wounding them, finishing them off, smashing doors, and successfully guessing what order the victims are going to die in because, you know, horror movie. You're chucking dice to do most actions. By default the teens don't defend themselves but other players can play a card to give them a weapon, hence the KDL comparison. Unlike a Munchkin or KDL though, the game's on a timer and actually runs pretty short.

I need to play this more to really get a sense for it. The game knows exactly what it is and what it tries to do it does pretty well, but I'm not entirely convinced it's going to find an audience just because of the grandiose-ness of it all. It's not balanced, that's for damn sure, but I don't particularly care about that. I just want to see how it plays with max count before I judge it.

mtagge wrote: Of course my favorite card game apparently wasn't too popular, Babylon 5 CCG. You started the game with 4 influence, an Ambassador, and four cards max one of each type (character, fleet, agenda, event, aftermath, conflict, etc.) picked by you. You could spend 3 influence to build one up to a max of 10, past 10 you had to win conflicts or get them some other way. Victory at 20 power (influence + raw power) or by completing a major agenda. There were ways to build to 10 fast, but you had to sacrifice other things to get there (a variant Londo started at 7 but had no card hands, one weak ambassador built two the first round, some agendas would help you build faster but agendas are really valuable and you were sacrificing that slot).

B5CCG was my favorite too.

CranBerries wrote:

DarthJoJo wrote:

Jexik wrote: As much as consumers recoil at CCGs in theory, no LCGs have done as well as Magic. Even Hearthstone has random packs, and you don't even open anything real.

Well, yeah, but what is as successful as Magic?

Arkham Horror seems like a decent LCG, but who knows how long it will last?

Arkham is probably a perfection of the LCG model. The monthly and regular deluxe expansions make sense when built around scenarios, and new can buy a core and start on the most interesting campaign without worrying about buying everything.

And it’s not going anywhere. From what I’ve heard from Fantasy Flight employees, it’s probably their second bestselling line after X-Wing. One of the Sadlers was brought in to design the Return to Dunwich Legacy, and they pulled the Thrones designer to help on future scenarios. That’s not something Fantasy Flight does. Destiny has just one designer.

Played The Climbers last night and found it a bit boring. Like a thinking man's version of Rhino Hero Super Battles where it's more puzzle and less trash talking.

That's all well and good because we played Cthulhu Wars next, our second game including The Ancients. I played Opener, others were Yellow Sign and Crawling Chaos. Base map and nothing else added in.

The Ancients are still neat in terms of how they work, but damn, they're pretty powerful too. They've won both games they've been in and we're still trying to figure them out. They don't feel as ridiculous as Tcho-Tcho (which we've played with several times and actually really hate), but they still feel top tier. I think they felt a bit stronger due to the faction mix.

Yellow Sign wasn't going to keep them in check. CC was loathe to mess with them because they wanted to fight Great Old Ones with Nyarly for Elder Signs/Power. I was fearful because the Ancient player put their citadels in very defensible positions and he could auto destroy a GoO if you fight him (at the cost of a Citadel).

I tried to mess with him a bit by moving his gates around, but the problem was that I took a nice lead mid-game by ritualing and doubling the points with my big spellbook. This caused some other players to mess with me and I couldn't thwart the Ancients. Ancients won by 1 point and I had 29.

Then I broke out the new version of Condottiere. This was my fourth or fifth play of this game, and I love it more with each experience. It's just such a fantasticly explosive game that feels tight mechanically while still offering dramatic swings. Still prefer the original rules over the new ones. Nothing like a bishop wrecking the entire battle.

charlest wrote: That's all well and good because we played Cthulhu Wars next, our second game including The Ancients. I played Opener, others were Yellow Sign and Crawling Chaos. Base map and nothing else added in.

Le sigh... I so want to try Opener but I just can't find it for sale anywhere.

Michael Barnes wrote:

It would be interesting to look back at past CCGs and see which of them might have been more successful as fixed, LCG style products.

Netrunner? It had the rep as a CCG of being "the best game that you're not playing." As an LCG I thought it was pretty successful. Word on the street was that FFG didn't drop it, but that WotC didn't renew the license. Right?

Space Ghost wrote:

I agree with this 100%. Midrange/control is what I find the most interesting.

You're making the old geezer talk. Way back when, I had a Standard (Type 2 back then) deck (shamefully enough, a netdeck) that had every counter in the game, four Disks, and a Rainbow Efreet to kill you with. People hated playing it or playing against that thing, but it would kill everything but mono-red, on mono-red's good day. It would definitely make you think, because you had to judge what to counter and what to let stay until you could get that Disk down. If you were playing against a creature damage deck, you'd win with 1 or 2 life a lot. I liked playing mono-red more, because who doesn't love Ball Lightning, but that deck would win more.

Jackwraith wrote:

charlest wrote: That's all well and good because we played Cthulhu Wars next, our second game including The Ancients. I played Opener, others were Yellow Sign and Crawling Chaos. Base map and nothing else added in.

Le sigh... I so want to try Opener but I just can't find it for sale anywhere.

Opener is a very fun, interactive faction. You can gank other people's gates, summon at their gates, have a huge turn with extra power, and have a huge ritual. Also, your monsters upgrade by simply surviving fights. They don't have a huge win rate in our group, but they're much more fun IMO than Sleeper.

CranBerries wrote:

Someone who 'wasted' thousands on MtG in the 90s can now play Vintage and/or buy an Audi, while someone who has everything for Summoner Wars can buy it for 70% off from FFG.

Whatever happened to Summoner Wars? Did they just do what they always do and introduce unbalanced cards that broke the game?

Nothing really, it just never took off BIG. It's still probably in Tom Vasel's top 10 of all time though... It was enough to launch Plaid Hat Games as a successful-for-indie company, but not big enough to make those Mice and Mystics or Dead of Winter $$$ when they got acquired by larger companies. There were a few powerful mercenaries released (which were my fault), but if there was any large design flaw it was releasing too many different factions. I think had we/they stuck to 8-10 it would have been more manageable, and just release more for those existing factions rather than make entirely new decks. This is why I'm kind of curious how Keyforge will do, especially whether the game is as deep as Summoner Wars is.

The competitive scene eventually semi-took-off on the app, but there was a problem and a disconnect then between live and online play (which had mostly the older and less well balanced decks).

Another half dozen plays of Terra Mystica.

Ok, so I hated this game like dental surgery at first. For a while. But I’m glad I stuck with it (I was forced to lol). I was wrong about this game, but it’s a damn ordeal to get to the point where it’s fun.


I’ll redact what I said about this game being solitaire. It’s not directly aggressive (often), but it’s impossible to plan out more than a turn in advance without careful consideration of opponents. The magic pool, upgrade costs, where (not) to build, cult track progression, and damn near every decision in the game banks on the plans of surrounding players. If I see a player saving coins, I know to anticipate of a big magic surge and go broke on upgrades.

Race selection has taken a big role, with picks and counter picks shaping the game before turn one. We are likely to start a bidding system soon.

This game has somehow become fun as well as clever. It just takes more patience to hit this point than I have unless forced.

Other than that, more Cosmic! I never win as the Sniveler.

ChristopherMD wrote:

mtagge wrote: Of course my favorite card game apparently wasn't too popular, Babylon 5 CCG. You started the game with 4 influence, an Ambassador, and four cards max one of each type (character, fleet, agenda, event, aftermath, conflict, etc.) picked by you. You could spend 3 influence to build one up to a max of 10, past 10 you had to win conflicts or get them some other way. Victory at 20 power (influence + raw power) or by completing a major agenda. There were ways to build to 10 fast, but you had to sacrifice other things to get there (a variant Londo started at 7 but had no card hands, one weak ambassador built two the first round, some agendas would help you build faster but agendas are really valuable and you were sacrificing that slot).

B5CCG was my favorite too.

I played very few different CCGs, but I loved B5 too.