What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Michael Barnes wrote: But Josh, there is also the fact that Fireball Island is awesome. Super fun. And I actually like that it rather boldly flies in the face of what modern gamers expect. The reality of it is that it is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the “beloved” original game in every respect, including box quality.

The first game I harumphed a little when marbles stuck or someone tipped over, when we couldn’t sort out of there was an extra space to move on on whatever and then I realized I was being a gamer ass about a game that should not be taken seriously in anyway.

Frankly if you are worried about the decisions in it...it’s not really the right game for you.

Regardless, I do wish it were produced a little better given its price and profile. I bet if they do a 2nd printing there will be some cleanup of the board- brighter colors for the treasure spots and caves for example.

I'd be perfectly fine with it if it functioned as the toy it claims to be. It doesn't. The trays, tree-flippers, and all the expansion gimmicks just don't work right. They didn't work in the prototype I played when they went on tour, and they don't work in the finished product. Maybe I'm 0 for 2 on finding functional copies, but if that's the case that brings the entire production and price point into question.

I'm glad people are enjoying it. I just don't understand how if they're having the same experiences I did.

The trees are...kind of crap. We’ve pretty much not ever seen a case where they make a difference and they rarely get turned. But it is still fun to block off a path in hopes of safety, or to turn one away. But out of the games we’ve played there may have been one time where they stopped a marble.

They are a great idea but...yeah. There is kind of a sense that they wanted to make this more of a dexterity game, but it’s just not. There is zero skill, it is all goofy capriciousness and luck.

I think disaster games need to be highly interactive. The gold standard being 'Survive!'.

You have a plethora of hazards to contend with, controlled by your opponents. A veritable gauntlet of poop being thrown at you on your way to your goals.

The 'Hangry' cards that are only available as a KS exclusive are a step in the right direction for some "Take that!" action. The snakes less so due to being so fiddly. The tiger is a neat gimmick and kinda fun, but getting to use it is rare, and being effective even more rare. The bees... Eh. They're alright I suppose, I just don't personally enjoy them on a subjective level. The Crimson Cutlass is a fail. Do not buy.

So that leaves only the fireballs and cinders being a force of agency by the opponents against you. The tree roots are a lackluster attempt to give a player agency against opponents throwing a wrench in the works. The trees do make the board look cool though. They are the dolphin analogue, yet not nearly as good.

I feel for the game to be better, there needs to be more content as seen in the Hangry cards. Because the rest of the expansion content, while novel in creativity, fails to be much fun.

I know comparing it to survive isn't completely fair, but I like these sorts of games a lot, and the more you can mimic the light schadenfreude agency of survive, the better you will be able to pull off making your particular gimmick in a game seem like a relevant design choice.

Fireball Island is a lot of fun, but it still firmly rests in Forbidden Bridge caliber of ameritrash.
Which is not a bad place, but it still doesn't compete with Survive. And I think with more development, the marble gimmic here could have made it to that point.

I’ll agree that expansions are not very good and entirely unnecessary. Hell, I think I even heard that on a podcast once.

Josh Look wrote:
I’ve only managed to play two games in the last 2 weeks or so. One of them was Spring Meadow which is a newish Uwe Rosenberg Tetris-style jam. It’s not deep, could possibly be more of an activity than a game, but it is oddly satisfying an addictive. It prominently features animals that look an awful lot like the ones that live under my shed, and I like them so I like them in this game. I’ve had the game for a week now and we’ve played it 8 times already. I like it.

This. Was pleasantly surprised by Spring Meadow after the horrible scoring/last quarter of the game/ in Cottage Garden. Look for a review of this in the next few weeks from me.

Spent New Years' Eve doing the only civilized thing possible: drinking and playing games.

I got my girlfriend a copy of Azul for Christmas, since it's the kind of game she really enjoys. We had two friends hanging out with us for the evening who had played before, so we tried a game of that. I'm lukewarm on it at first glance. I appreciate abstracts to a certain degree (I love Go and was a fan of some of the GIPF Project stuff) but have found myself veering away from them recently. I'm not a fan of Photosynthesis and Azul strikes me as that kind of thing with even less theme. I'll try again.

Then we moved on to the long-awaited four-player session of Theseus: The Dark Orbit. Holy shit, was that awesome! I've rarely seen players get knocked out of a game and both the Scientists and the Aliens were killed off in this session. The Marines were at one Life and the Greys were at two, but had a pile of Data points and two Control cards installed, which let them move the Marines all over the station. But they moved them one step too often, as the Marines installed Fire and the Greys had no choice but to walk into it on their next move, one step before the game would have ended. It was the best Theseus session ever and I totally disagree with people that say it's best as a two-player. I think four may be a bit too crazy and it finds its real level at three, but I'm definitely going to try to a four-player game again.

After a break to celebrate the midnight hour, we tried what we'd hoped would be a quick game of Guildhall. But all four of us are pretty competitive gamers, so it took over an hour to finish.. A turn-in of a Trader set for a 5 card and one last Farmer for a coin took me from 14 to 20 and the the win. I remain undefeated in that game at 2, 3, and 4 players. Maybe we need an expansion....

Happy New Year, everyone. Here's to more exposure and success for the site in 2019.

Mmmmm, Theseus.

Played a few more rounds of Keyforge live against a friend. I dig it. Don't think I'll spend a ton of money on it unless I find a store that runs events nearby, but it's fun.

My girlfriend got the Carnies expansion for Bloody Inn for Christmas, so we played a game with it yesterday. We didn't do the event deck that is included; we simply added the carnies to the visitors deck. They mix things up in a variety of ways, but one of the most interesting ways is that some of them let you build trailers that will house a guest as long as there isn't a body buried underneath. Another carnie forces you to bury its body in someone else's building, so you get to try to shut down their trailer, for example.

This game is a lot of fun, and features a lot of player screwage. We have only ever gotten to play it with 2... I think it would be great at 3 or possibly 4.

Also, my girlfriend punked me by around 30 points. She had a ton of buildings that made actions cheaper.

I had forgot this game on my Santa list - my daughter gave me Pantone: the Game. You have to get the other players to guess a specific person or character using color swatches (15 colors, 4 per color). If nobody guesses them, hints are given that make it a little easier, but worth fewer points. If someone guesses correctly, the 'drawer' and the guesser both get points. In the first round you can use all the swatches for the 'drawing'. In the second round you can only use one color per swatch. In the third round you can use only three swatches. Most points wins after three rounds.

My family gamers like it, but I suck at both guessing and drawing. We played three games right before toasting in the New Year, and I came in dead last in all three. The games had scores that looked like 22-22-19-8, with me bringing up the rear. There are games that I like, but suck at. This is not one of them. But I guess I'll grit my teeth and play some with the family before getting something else out.

Got in a five player game of NEMESIS the other day. It's obviously "inspired" by the alien franchise, but it's also pretty damn good. You wake up in a spaceship and have to fix the engines and fight aliens ... I mean, intruders. But all characters have individual goals, so you have to survive, but you also have to maybe escape with an egg, kill another character, send the ship to Mars, or something else. This makes for a dynamic game with a lot of fun stories and potential mistrust.

I've soloed the game a few times (it also works quite well), but it still took about 3,5 hours with five players. That is too much, but I think it can be played quicker when people know the game.

Tried KINGDOMINO yesterday and I can see why people like it. And I've been playing a lot of KEYFORGE online at thecrucible.online and it works like a charm.

Scythe was pulled out again lol. This time people seemed to get the rules and play their turns quickly. What was a pair of 6 hour ordeals were abandoned for lack of time was instead completed in under 2, which is a huge improvement. I can finally assess what the game is like now that I don’t want to suction my eyes out.

It’s alright, nothing special. Fairly dry resource shuffling game that rushes towards a few turns of frantic area control and combat to close. There were a few scraps throughout, maybe because we are aggressive players. Far more combat than I was expecting, but it only seemed viable for a few factions.

As at as Euro conflict goes, I’d rather pull out Vinci, Dominant Species, T&E or even El Grande. As for an interactive engine builder, it’s not even close to Terra Mystica in depth, but seems to carry the same rules overhead. It gets a few points for being a very pretty game (the owner has all the money, counter, and map upgrades), but it hits a strange funk for being too complex as a light game and too shallow as a heavy game.

It’s a game that tries to appeal to everyone, but fails to be anything but perfectly adequate at anything. Maybe it would be fine as a gateway game, but we just aren’t the market for that, leaning instead towards heavy conflict or heavy economic games.

seems like i get about 70% of the boardgaming I do done on nye these days. Went to see some friends up in Leeds during the day and played;

Heros of Terinoth - We won the 1st mission. This pretty much exactly matches my memories of WHQ the card game just with more heros but each hero's upgrades being slightly simpler. Cool game, the engine works well and for me, whilst I do prefer GWs universe to Terinoth slightly the difference in this game is negligible. WHQ the card game didn't really bring out any of the slightly unique aspects of the Warhammer world so nothing is missed.

Pandemic: Fall of Rome. I played Rising Tide a few weeks ago too. Both are much better than baseline Pandemic and better than Legacy Season 1 (not played 2). I don't like vanilla Pandemic but this is pretty decent. At abstract level the game represents the history reasonably well, the only thing that seems a little off is the character that can teleport around the map.

Falling Sky - I was Caesar and I over aided the Aedui to a first winter card win. I knew from previous games that If the Romans come out swinging from the off it usually ends badly for them, so instead i concentrated my entire force chased some of the Gauls and Belgians around for a bit but could not quite engaged them and strengthened the Aedui. My plan being if I put the Aedui in contention for the win it would distract the other Gauls and allow me to draw them in to battle, or set about pacifying their lands. Unfortunately neither of them reacted to the Aedui and they just won.

I then went to Huddersfield and played a hex and counter war game followed by some naval minis games. GMTs At Any Cost Metz 1870, is a pretty good Franco Prussian wargame slightly undone by and overly granular tactical system in an operational game. It uses chit pull but with loads of random event chits mixed in. This worked really well in the designers previous lower scale smaller US civil war battle games but here it just felt a bit off. Most of the time the event chits were just tedious rather than interesting and the whole game felt about 2 levels more complex than the resulting payoff deserved. Still fighting Mars La Tour is pretty fun despite the games limitations.

In recent years, I have hosted a day of sci-fi boardgames on New Year's Day. This time, we had only four players. Three of us were veteran gamers, but the fourth was new to AmeriTrash gaming.

We started out with a game of Forbidden Desert. We were a bit screwed from the start because all three potential oasis tiles started in one corner. We managed to acquire three of the four machine parts before our explorer died from dehydration, bringing the game to an end.

Then we played Paranoia Mandatory Fun Bonus Card Game, which is like playing an entire campaign of the Paranoia rpg in one sitting. As the game owner, I started out as Team Leader and at Orange security clearance, while everybody else was Red. We decided in advance to play for 90 minutes, but went a few extra minutes to finish the fourth mission. The first three missions all succeeded, though there were some casualties along the way. The fourth mission ended in amusing failure, but I still won because I was the only person who made it as high as Yellow. Fun and funny game, as always.

Finally, we broke theme because somebody wanted to play The Gothic Game. I couldn't find any weapons, so I became the vampire. My first victim killed me instead, with the hammer and stake. Everybody else survived for quite a while. Then somebody else became the vampire a few times, but failed to kill anyone and didn't get back to the crypt in time. So she was dust. In the final stretch, one guy was desperately trying to get to the Tower for fresh air while choking on prunes. But another player stepped out of the lavatory and killed him with the choking necklace, for the win.

All three games were fun, and the new player was surprised and thrilled by how much fun she had.

We got the Last Adventurer expansion for Fireball Island. It’s junk.

The fifth player is nice to have, but that is a one cent plastic figure and a half of a cent’s worth of cards. The idol is good but that’s another penny worth of plastic. I like the T-shirts, about 2 cents worth of cards. None of the above are anywhere near essential.

But the big adds are CRAP. The rubber boulder looks fun but it’s way too big and barely rolls at all. It usually gets about 2 spaces and stops.

Snakes are horrible. The spots you put them in are already printed on the board, badly aligned and the divots are so shallow that you can barely get them to set up. Then you wind up resetting them pretty much anytime someone breathes on the board. The poison mechanic is lame- the one time I got a poison token it helped me way more than it hurt me.

I don’t think we’ll get anything else in the line...it’s probably one of the worst expansions I’ve ever seen. There is zero reason the fifth player and even the t-shirt cards couldn’t have been in the $80 base game. And they should have just scrapped the boulder and viper because they are so badly implemented.