What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Lots of games, mostly pretty casual.. A retreat to a little beach resort with our staff here provided opportunities to play lots of games with non-Americans.

Bang: The Dice Game - I regret all the years I didn't get this because of how spent I was on Bang in its original form. I only find it pretty good, but it's length is so much more managable, and it runs so smoothly. We played with a wide variety of ages and it was really good.

Nexus Ops - Hadn't played in a long time, and it was fun to get played again. It's curious how people continually need to be reminded that they need to be bold and just stick their necks out. If you get a two-point mission even though you got wiped out, that's totally worth it. This is not obvious to most combat game veterans. I won after a slow start.

Cockroach Poker - This was such a hoot. We had a Filipino, a couple Americans, two Koreans, and a Canadian playing this game. It was so funny to see how different people would try to bluff, fool, and manipulate others. It got funnier after we played it three times in a row. What a delightfully stupid, wonderful game.

Azul - Azul might be my holiday MVP. It has proven very appealing to a wide variety of people, and I am becoming more enamored with it myself. It provides a lot of fun decision points, where you need to balance accomplishing something now with a future payoff. I really like how the tile mix forces light interaction between players, because even though it feels like multiplayer solitaire it is easy to assess other people's boards and to screw them accordingly. It is gradually becoming one of my best-loved abstract designs, and I'm glad I plunked down the money to get it.

Duhr: The Lesser Houses - Opinion here is very preliminary, because I made a hash out of the rules explanation. The game has so much common DNA with Bemused that I was getting details wrong all over the place. However my initial thought is that it is the better game. Duhr seems much more dynamic, and it better emphasizes the deal-making nature of the design. Bemused does have a more creative theme, but the medieval skullduggery of Duhr is more approachable, and the design reflects that theme much more strongly. Initial play suggests no one needs to own both, but we'll see.

Roll Player - A friend wanted to trot this out on New Year's Eve, and since I force lots of games on others I thought I would humor him and play this one. But God help me, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I felt like the different ways to score points felt largely balanced, which is always nice in designs like this. The way the traits and skills interact with alignment felt on-point, and the classes were very well reflected in the design as well. The art is pretty stupid, and it's still a bit fussy as a design. But I would gladly play again. I am amused by games that are essentially about metagaming other game genres. Millennium Blades comes to mind, and Roll Player is in that tradition.

I picked up Innovation on the cheap and have been playing it a bunch, mostly solo because I just want to play this thing. This game directly targets my current gaming interests. I've had a thing for card combo nonsense lately, and this is that cranked up to 10. It's real swingy and chaotic playing noob style but it looks like once you hit the skill floor the ceilings going to be real high. Not sure I'll get there but man I'm enjoying this game right now.

Last night we played Android: Netrunner. It had been 4 years since I left the game, but I'm back.

Before game night began a buddy and I ran through a tough bout using the revised core set. I was Criminal and he was Weyland. No Scorched Earth in this set motherfucker.

I ended up jumping out to an early strong lead, getting to 6 agenda points by mid-game. It took me quite a bit to get that last one though and my buddy got up to 5 as the Corp.

Later in the night two of the other guys went home early so we busted Netrunner out for some more cyberpunk action. This time we decided, what the hell, and just opened up Terminal Directive. Our first play of that was pretty good. We took the same factions we had just played to help with familiarity but of course the new IDs and cards.

I won the first Terminal Directive game as I got my rig up fast and had good money early. I did stall out late game and nearly lost due to running low on cash and having to deal with massive chunks of ice.

I stickered lots of shit getting to my second set of cards after the first game and it was a great time. The plot is basically Bladerunner but it at least has my attention at this point.

With the rest of the group we played Beta Colony. This is a new Euro from Rio Grande and Matt Riddle/Ben Pinchback which is alright. I do enjoy certain aspects of it, including an interesting central action rondel that everyone's moving on. It's an economic/efficiency game of course, but it's a better one amidst the modern Euro crowd. Still, nothing I'd really want to play repeatedly.

Then Marvel Strike Teams came back out for our second play. I had a better grasp on objectives and did much better as the Villain this time. Our objectives this session lead to a narrative that had Iron Man, Quake, and Black Widow all breaking into the Hydra base and looking to destroy my powerful artifact of destruction. They found it with barely any time remaining.

Once it was discovered they realized I was using its power to mutate my Hydra henchman, buffing them a bit. They proceeded to take out my mutated goons before Baron Strucker could make an escape to live and fight another day.

This is the second game in our campaign (of procedurally generated missions), and after getting blown out in the first mission it was nice getting 4 objective points, although the good guys got 5 and technically won. I took out Black Widow in the first turn and Quake in the second, but man Iron Man is tough to crack.

I really dig this game and am looking forward to our third play. The randomized mission elements and the way you build the enemy forces from a larger pool (similar to building an army in a miniatures game) is really enticing. As mentioned previously, TMNT: Shadows of the Past is probably the closest analog although there's a decent amount of unique mechanisms here. It does a great job of making you feel powerful and heroic in a similar fashion to Conan (save up your action points for big rounds).

I've also been messing around solo with Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr. It's an emotional game and I'm interested in the ups and downs of Billy's life, but the gameplay is a bit monotonous and I've found the mechanisms aren't pulling me back in at all. Disappointing a bit as I really love these types of games that seek a higher level of art.

Shellhead wrote: I understand that solitaire and co-op games should be hard, but sometimes the Vesuvius Incident feels impossible. I've had games where we never got anybody out to the ring section of the ship. The rules are a little too fiddly with details, but overall it works as a great approximation of Aliens.

Oh, don't mistake it, I was laughing most of the time at my misfortune, though losing my Hacker on basically the first attack of the game SUCKED. This game is not about winning, it's about losing as best you can. It's not like we'd call the marine's mission from Aliens any sort of success, and that's the kind of experience you are going for there. The rules aren't too bad, but picking up the game once a year means you basically have to start over learning. There's a great flowchart someone over on BGG put together that I highly recommend (though it has a couple of small mistakes, maybe from the older ruleset).

SaMoKo wrote: Double post!

The only old game I’d be unable to resist picking up again is Circus Imperium. That game was fantastic, but I may the only person on earth who remembers it lol

Futuristic chariot racing game with space lions. You could ram other players, fight them, customize your gladiator load outs, smash yourself up from cornering or whipping the beasts too much....great stuff with rules for everything. Some games were won by speeding through the race. Others turned into a gladiator match because everybodys rides were smashed up!

I would love to have that game again and pimp it out with a proper arena board. I remember, Samoko, I remember.

Scott, what dominoes scoring rules are you using? I learned in the Army with the multiples of five scoring, but your scoring doesn't stat until you come out on 15. It is very satisfying to slam that domino down when scoring 20 points.

I wish Grand Rapids had a domino culture like some cities.

san il defanso wrote:
Cockroach Poker - This was such a hoot. We had a Filipino, a couple Americans, two Koreans, and a Canadian playing this game. It was so funny to see how different people would try to bluff, fool, and manipulate others. It got funnier after we played it three times in a row. What a delightfully stupid, wonderful game.

I'm completely down with this. We've played this at least 30 times since just before Christmas. I've taught it to my Father in law, my daughters boyfriends, all my kids, sister in law, everyone loves it when they win and hates it when they lose...and want to play again right away. One memorable game had me, my youngest son and my cousin all passing my sister in law cards and everyone claiming that every card we passed her was a cockroach. She ended up losing by accumulating four cockroaches, which was an utter riot because all she had to do was pass them on to keep herself in the game but she kept saying "It's not a cockroach." I bought the Royal version of the game and we haven't even tired of the base game enough to break out the Royal cards and rules.

These are the games we played over the winter break (I get about two weeks off for a company shutdown, and the kids have even longer!) These games were all played with kids aged 14, 13, 10, and 7.

• Lots of HARRY POTTER HOGWARTS BATTLE. Not the expansion, which apparently is a major shit show. The youngest loves this game, and we all had at least a game in there, aside from the 14yo, who couldn't be bothered with this one. It's a good time, and gets easier with more players, so I recommend playing with at least three characters, even if you only have two players to manage them. The game "expands" internally, adding more cards and rules across seven games, which align largely with content from the books. We are capped at Game 5 right now, until we get the youngers done with those books.
• ECLIPSE. Played once on the table and couple more times on the iPad, handing it off. Getting control of the Core is the most important thing, and I totally blew one game by blowing someone out of there and not having Neutron Bombs to clear all their planets (1 pop was left after bombardment). That left them as Defender the next round and they fucking rolled me with a dreadnought that was almost entirely made of +2 Computers and Plasma Missiles. If I could have built Starbases I would have thumped them so badly. Ugh.
• AZUL. Good title, everyone likes this one. My 10 yo is a goddamned shark at this game. She takes the 1P hit almost every turn and it doesn't matter, she just tools everyone. I lost by twenty in second place.
• TICKET TO RIDE: NEDERLAND. This is the 14yo's go-to game. This map makes things really weird. Point values are really high, but the bonuses for having toll tokens at the end are even bigger. The only TTR I have ever played where I didn't build on the last turn, even though I could have. The tokens really matter.
• CALIFORNIA. ZOOLORETTO and COLORETTO get all the praise, but I like this Michael Schacht design more. Lots of planning and take-that tough choices as you play, but without hard feelings, because you aren't so much taking someone else's stuff as taking a chance for them to get extra points. It feels better, some how. Contrast to ZOOLORETTO, where you don't do shit, basically.
• ACQUIRE. Miserable game, because one kid (14yo) broke the cardinal rule: Never Get Cash Poor In ACQUIRE.™ She complained endlessly as we trounced her. It is better to not buy shares and try to set up a later windfall then to get poor and lose every single merger for the rest of the game. I made some less-than-awesome plays to get her back in it, at least a little; which assuaged her, but she was in a sour mood.
• WALLENSTEIN. Big contrast to the previous game, here she made a huge swing to win in Year 2, going from 24 pts in Year 1 to 31 in Y2. Every player did better in Year 2, which is cool, but her differential was just enormous and took the lead from me. Came down to one massive 10 v 8+farmers fight. She set it up and knocked it down. I couldn't keep her at bay, despite seeing it coming. Great game.
• TERRAFORMING MARS with PRELUDE which is VERY IMPORTANT. Man, what a great addition. It makes like five shitty generations go away. Bigger scores, more interesting turns, better strategies. I'm never playing this game without PRELUDE again. It should be packed in the box. We had to talk the 10yo into playing and she slayed us with this crazy Plant/Heat ramp that we couldn't keep up with.
• CRY HAVOC. Man, this is such an awesome DOAM. What are the go-to asymettric DOAMs out there? Am I missing anything better than this? I love the quasi-deterministic combat, the vastly different player strats, and the components are really nice. Humans won (14yo again), her airfields let her access cheap points for free, while I had to set up complicated turns with the Machines trying to soften targets before taking them. She had this interesting strat of starting shit in lots of Trog territories, but not taking prisoners/attrition, so she could plant Trog War Parties all over the place as they "retreated." Then she could airfield into those and have Control and get points without fighting for them. The other player as Pilgrims ended up not holding quite enough territory to exploit their Crystal harvesting/scoring engine.
• THROUGH THE AGES. I like this game a lot but it is a pain in the ass to play. There are so many little rules everywhere. We play every couple of months just to try and keep the rules fresh in our heads. I feel like this would be goddamned amazing with a regular game going. I'll see if I can set that up, the 7yo can't get enough of this one. He beat me in a 2p game, his Wonders put him over, and I desperately needed another Government to be revealed, but didn't luck out.

If you buy one Terraforming Mars expansion, it should be Prelude.

jeb wrote:

THROUGH THE AGES. I like this game a lot but it is a pain in the ass to play. There are so many little rules everywhere. We play every couple of months just to try and keep the rules fresh in our heads. I feel like this would be goddamned amazing with a regular game going. I'll see if I can set that up, the 7yo can't get enough of this one. He beat me in a 2p game, his Wonders put him over, and I desperately needed another Government to be revealed, but didn't luck out.

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If y'all haven't, try playing on the app. Most people I know won't go back, going so far as playing on their phones when they're playing face to face. I still prefer the cardboard version, but the app is super super good. Also there's a thriving online scene, which will help with playing more often. TTA is probably my favorite game. My dad and I play it weekly face to face, and I finally got him hooked up on the steam version so now we can play online as well.

Scott Rogers wrote: Pantone the Game: Full Disclosure, I designed this game. It gives me great pleasure to see people enjoy a game I made. However, I never get to play anymore because I wrote all of the clues. So I just kept score.

Congratulations! I really like that game.

Dominoes: I never came from a family that played dominoes so I've only played it a couple of times during my life. This trip I realized I really don't enjoy playing dominos. However, 2 out of 3 of my family members REALLY do. I guess I'll be playing more in the future. If any one can suggest interesting variants than just plain old "lay it down and score" I'd appreciate it.

Down here in Texas, it's required education to play 42, which is basically Spades played with dominoes. It offers some good decisions and partnership play, while not being too heavy to interfere with your beer drinking.

Gregarius wrote:

Scott Rogers wrote: Pantone the Game: Full Disclosure, I designed this game. It gives me great pleasure to see people enjoy a game I made. However, I never get to play anymore because I wrote all of the clues. So I just kept score.

Congratulations! I really like that game.

Dominoes: I never came from a family that played dominoes so I've only played it a couple of times during my life. This trip I realized I really don't enjoy playing dominos. However, 2 out of 3 of my family members REALLY do. I guess I'll be playing more in the future. If any one can suggest interesting variants than just plain old "lay it down and score" I'd appreciate it.

Down here in Texas, it's required education to play 42, which is basically Spades played with dominoes. It offers some good decisions and partnership play, while not being too heavy to interfere with your beer drinking.

I like Muggins.

Gregarius wrote: Down here in Texas, it's required education to play 42, which is basically Spades played with dominoes. It offers some good decisions and partnership play, while not being too heavy to interfere with your beer drinking.

I played a lot of 42 in college, but once I left I could never find anyone that knew how to play (outside of my college buddies). You're the first person I've heard mention outside of those circles. I miss playing that game, brought table-talk to a whole new level. It is the ultimate beer-n-pretzels game, as you can spill your beer and not worry about it.

My wife and I played a few things over the holiday as well. We had some time but not quite as much as in some other years.

No Retreat! The Russian Front. This was actually just me, playing or trying to play this solo a couple of times. I *feel* like I understand the rules, but then the practical application of supply and counterblow sometimes messes me up or causes me to second-guess myself to the point where I want to stop. It's mostly just me; I have a mental block about supply rules, for one thing. The rulebook's pretty decent but could certainly use a full going-over since there are a lot of traces of edits and updates (and at least one error long ago identified in the example of play persists). It's quite possible Absolute War, the successor, even more streamlined game on this topic from the same designer coming out later this year will be better, but I feel like I don't want to abandon my hard-earned gains on this one.

Godfather: Corleone's Empire. We played this as a four-player with some friends. I continue to quite like this game, despite it not having the richest Godfather-specific theme. It's pretty lean and mean and plays well even down to two.

Chicago Express. I really like this game but probably ruined it for our friends (Jenn bowed out) by not making a bigger deal about the potential downsides of spending all one's money in the initial stock offerings. I really just need to find some people to play economic games with rather than foist them on the unsuspecting.

GWT with Rails to the North. I was anxious to add this expansion if for no other reason that it contains Columbia, MO, where I did my undergrad work, as a destination (though you don't really want to go there), but after one play I'm kind of wondering whether my wife isn't right in thinking that this expansion maybe adds one or two more things to think about in an already scattered game than is maybe good for it. Not giving up yet, though I may give it a break.

Fortune and Glory. I don't claim that this is a clean, tightly designed game or even necessarily a "good" one--Eldritch Horror, to take an obvious point of comparison, is objectively a better game--but I hadn't played this with Jenn before and had only played it once with another friend. After an extended period of reading/rereading the rules (the so-far "complete" rules on BGG) to try to smooth out the eccentricities in my mind, our game turned out pretty well. We played on the same team and ended up losing to the Nazis just before we would've won (because Vile Organization victory is instant whereas player victory is only checked at the end of a round). The game really could've gone either way because we goofed on enough of the rules that we might have won earlier or lost by more, and I actually gave Jenn some bad advice on sticking it out in a combat when she didn't need to, so I'm the one to blame in any case. We had fun playing this, despite its warts.

Empires of the Void II. I was really hoping on this. I'd read the rules and watched some gameplay before buying, but I'm not sure it isn't just a more layered-on Islebound with horrendous set-up time. I'll give it another go, but I've probably bought my last Red Raven game. (Plus it looks like I need to get RR to replace a missing card for me.)

Marvel Dice Masters. Jenn suggested we pull this out, as we hadn't played it in a long time. Since it's so quick, we played five times. It remains "OK." I would probably like it more in app form, as I did like Quarriors that way, but as an analog game (and without a competitive angle), it feels like there are too many areas, too much sliding dice around, and not enough engaging gameplay.

Hammer of the Scots. We played this twice. Jenn one once as the British, and I won once (our collective first time) as the Scots, though we weren't really playing all-in on that game. This remains one of the better Columbia-style block games, where the rules weight is a good match to the limits of the ABCD/rotating blocks system.

At home:

The dominant game over the holidays for us was Crime Hotel which we played a lot. I introduced it to a friend who is a developer for an established up and coming publisher, he loved it but thought that it might not be possible to produce it cheaply enough to keep the price point keen whilst covering royalties. I don’t know how much of a chance Happy Baobaob will have of getting this into wider distribution which is a shame as it’s really good.

Also tried out the automata rules for Techno-Bowl, although it is part of an NFL retheme some legend has put up a file that converts it for use with the teams that come in the box. The setup and premise are good; there are several different versions of a handful of offensive styles and you mix up a deck depending on the team. Each card varies slightly and without knowing exactly which ones have gone into the deck there is the necessary amount of fog-of-war needed to reduce predictability whilst retaining some sort of strategic cohesion for the AI. The problem I found with the cards is that there are only five fixed activations on each one so it’s likely with free activations to run out pretty quickly at which point you then draw random player cards and kind of have to free-wheel it on behalf of what the AI seemed to be trying to do. A few more would strengthen this and make it more viable as a ‘truer’ AI.

I found it a little too easy to play against and managed to turnover twice in the first half with a TD and a safety, the AI failing to make it past the halfway line. There is a bit of a hole on this as the AI doesn’t have a way to react to turnovers, a key part of which is positioning to cut down channels and force the opposition into difficult places which is difficult to do double-handed. The game also ran long as you have to manage both sides and with the hour getting late I didn’t have the appetite to get stuck in to the defensive deck for the second half. So not a full play yet but there is some promising stuff in there if you cannot find regular opposition, probably not so great for testing out new strategies though.

Got Dropmix as a last minute present for the kids seeing as it has gone into clearance pretty much everywhere and we played it until we were sick of it. I thought it was nice that the playlists in the box cater for different musical tastes however they don’t all work together harmoniously and so listening in while other people play is a discordant mess that you don’t otherwise notice while in the thick of a game. Combined with the lack of real variety in the cards this means that you really need to add in more packs which are quite pricey, although we got one each of the big and small packs included obtaining more has a price barrier for the amount of use this is likely to get. As a result it has been propped up in the corner for the last few days and I doubt it’s going to see too much more action.

More Tavarua again, hooray, and more Spirit Island. We learnt a lesson in the latter that the ancient relics scenario is an awful mess when you combine it with Prussia. That particular adversary spreads really quickly and as a result the invaders scoop up most of the relic tokens in short order. Even with Thunderspeaker doing her best to martial the Dahan we ended up completely hosed by something like the third turn. We threw in the towel when we calculated that the invaders were going to drop fourteen blight tokens in a single round and that the following rounds ravage would blow up the entire board. So we tossed aside Prussia and started again and the game pretty much went the other way. I also finally learned how to use forbidden wilds – it just hadn’t occurred to me how powerful it is to generate energy as part of growth and then to immediately spend it, churning cardplays and presence without having to worry about reclaiming until fairly late in the game. I’m a big fan of this one now, even if it does take a bit more brain power to figure out exactly what to do each round to keep the ball rolling whilst still helping to protect the island.

My son surprised me by asking for Flash Point out of nowhere. We haven’t played it in ages and it’s become more of a toy that they roleplay with rather than a game, but I was pleasantly surprised at being reminded of how much fun it can be when dialled up to the more extreme levels of difficulty. We had everything under good control until a hotspot in the basement flared up out of control and caused the supporting walls to crumble and collapse – where we fell down was that we had switched to a combination of the CAFS firefighter and structural engineer to hold everything together and then swapped back out to other roles to rescue the final few people just when everything went from serene to pear-shaped.

At the club:

An odd night where we just couldn’t seem to all agree on what we wanted to play. Root was discussed and then vetoed so we ended up playing Pioneer Days which I was assured is an update or reprint of another game I had not heard of called Oregon Trail, and was fine if a little dull. I think that feeling came from the way I played, you pick stuff up as you play which either gives you VP later and can be used to protect your cargo, or which you can swap at the end of each round for favours from townsfolk that are also VP. I was selling off almost everything to gain favours at the towns so my individual turns felt very muted in comparison to the others who were piling their wagons high with all kinds of stuff. I effectively ran a high risk boom-and-bust strategy without realising and it turned out to be enough to win if not being particularly stimulating to enact.

Quacks of Quidlingburg which was not at all what I was expecting. It’s a bag-building push your luck game where you are pulling tiles to move around a track, which both score points as well as allowing you to buy more tiles that have special powers. If you pull enough of the bogey tiles then you bust out of the round and only get one of the two rewards. It was quite fun to play but, despite the catch-up mechanism and the ability to make some interventions, it definitely has a problem in that it is totally a game of random chance where victory is determined by who had the shittiest draw in the final round.

Finished off with more Crime Hotel before I reluctantly handed it back to my friend.