What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Techno Bowl made me truly understand that my wife has absolutely no framework for American football. Like, not just not what the positions are and such but things like how one scores. Suffice to say, it's been sitting in the basement forlornly. Maybe the solo rules would work for me, cuz, man, I was really stoked for this game despite not being anything like a football fan and not having that much framework for it myself.

Played a couple games of our favorite no conflict busy work worker placement, Fields of Arle. I added the expansion for the first time today. It is wild how extreme 1,000 random bits and paths the base game and then the expansion are. Someone watching us play this thing would think a couple insane people sat down in front of a ton of random mounds of cardboard tokens.

It was still fun. Expansion seems to be trying to open up the option space by jump-starting your early game with temporary resources and action advantages.

jpat wrote: Techno Bowl made me truly understand that my wife has absolutely no framework for American football.

Your wife is part of the world's majority on that, then.

Over the last couple of years, about every other month, my wife and I have met up with 3 other couples to play some games. Typically, we meet up at somebody’s house on a Saturday night and we’ll all bring some food and drinks and we’ll socialize for about a hour. After an hour of chit-chatting we’ll break out few games. With a group this size of very causal gamers we tend to revert party games like Secret Hitler, Room and Boom, Code names, Tellistraction, Wits and Wagers, Coconuts, etc.
So last week we met up the Friday after Christmas and Dan, the Dad had brought out a couple of new Christmas games. One of the games he brought out was Hellapagos . Hellapagos which he described as a “Family” “Co-op” game similar to Forbidden Island that plays in about 20 minutes for 4-12 players. He said his family had played it 4 times and lost all four times. So, I rounded up the 3 the drunk wives, 3 husbands and 4 spawns for a total for 10 players to play Hellapagos Dan, the Dad explained the rules and we started to play.

In Hellapagos, players have crashed on a deserted island. Each player is given 3 or 4 random cards from the sunken ship. Some of the cards are useful, like food or water bottles, some of the items are really awesome like a fishing pole or water flask and other items could be total useless like keys to a luxury car. The object of the game is to work together to build rafts and collect enough food and water to survive 2 days at sea. Each day, each surviving person will eat 1 food and 1 water. On players turn, you have a choice to go fishing for food, to collect rain water, to collect wood to make rafts or to go diving for random stuff on the ship. At the end of the day, you don’t have enough food or water the players will have to vote players off the island until you have enough food to survive.

In the first game, we played it like a “family friendly” co-op and we all worked together to build rafts and collect food and water. In the end, we all died a miserable death. However, everyone was ready to try it again, as we thought we could beat the game. I realized Hallapagos was a truly evil game and it wasn’t a “Family Friendly” co-op but instead it was really a game of life boats and people were going to have to die.
The 2nd game started similar to 1st game with everyone working together. I drew some food and water which I decided to hoard rather than to donate it the group. Best of all I drew the Flask. The Flask let me collect double water each turn and once I started using the Flask it could never be pasted to another player even if I died. After about 4-5 days on island we had a few rafts made but we were short water and one player would have to be voted off. I quickly formed an alliance with one of the teenage girls who had the fishing pool (double food when fishing) that was sitting 2 seats away from me. We agreed to vote off my wife, Queen Put who was sitting in between us. We convinced the rest of the tribe to vote off Queen Put. Me and the teenage girl with the fish pole were rewarded stealing my wife’s cards. I got a bullet and the cannibal bbq card in the deal.

The next day only 3 more players were going to be voted off the island. I formed an alliance with all the teenager and to vote off the other 2 drunk wives and one of the other guys. Then I used the cannibal bbq card to which provide the survives 2x the number players who died in food. Eating the bodies of the drunk wives would give us enough food to get off the island. The only problem was that we were one raft short. I quickly yelled to my daughter, who I knew had the gun “I’ll give you a bullet if you promise to shot Dan the Dad and then the rest of us can get off the island”. She took the bullet and shot Dan the Dad and me and teenagers celebrated victory. Dan the dad was in shock like a deer in the head lights. How could this innocent family co-op game turn into cannibal feast with him bleeding out on the beach watching his friends and kids sail away in the sunset.

On the one hand, this was one of my most satisfying victory of 2018. On the other hand, I felt shitty and dirty like I had just finished a 3=day bender in Vegas with plenty of hookers and blow.

That's one if those sessions where 1/3 of the players never play a board game again, 1/3 don't care, but like 3-4 of them start becoming much more interested in tabletop gaming forever. You did good.

My girlfriend and I got in our very first game of Millennium Blades today. Normally this is 3 to 5 players, so we used the "duel" variant in the back of the rule book. It's essentially the same game, but with 2 players you aren't really bound to have any player to player trading.

This game is fantastic. It simulates being wrapped up in the competitive trading card game scene, but without the huge expense and hanging out in the back of the FLGS on a Friday night.

You start with a few cards and some money. You can buy cards blindly, sell cards you don't want, "fuse" junk cards into hot promo cards, or discard "sets" of cards for victory points. All of the collecting is in service of preparing an 8 card "deck" for tournament play. After the timed collection phase, the tournament begins. You play 6 of your 8 cards, in any order you want. For the most part, you are maximizing the point generation capabilities of each card. The order, placement, etc. Sometimes you are playing cards in order to fuck with other players.

There are 2 collection phases and 3 tournament phases. The player with the most VP at the end is the winner. The game takes about 3 hours and is fairly deep. I loved it and am hopefully trying it with my regular group next weekend.

Steamrolled my wife and daughter into playing Civilization: A New Dawn. Not sure if they having a crummy time or just concentrating. Either way, I still love this game.

Taking a break for dinner. We'll see if they punk out after intermission or not.

Later: Yes they punked out but Peggy said she liked it and would like to play again soon while the rules are still in her mind.

I'm hoping to play Millennium Blades soon - someone else in my games group wants to play it.

Played boardgames last night with Delobius of F:AT, his wife, and another guy.

Chaos in the Old World: my first time playing Khorne, so I was spending too much on playing cards and not enough time on killing folks. I also rolled poorly at key moments, and the game started out with too many heroes and maxed out on heroes on the second turn. For a while it looked like nobody would win, but Slanesh managed to pull out a surprise win on the final turn.

Battle for Rokugan: just 3 players, with Dragon, Crane (Delobius), and Scorpion (me). My secret objective was to control six coastal provinces at the end of the game, and the Crane lands are mostly coastal, so we clashed early on, while Dragon went on a landgrabbing spree. By chance, Dragon was first player on turns 2, 3, and 4, so I had the minor advantage of going last each turn. In turns 3 and 4, Crane and Scorpion teamed up on Dragon. On turn 5, I was forced to go first, just as Dragon and Crane united against me. I managed to hang on to my secret objective, but they took away several high-honor provinces from me. Final score: Dragon 42, Scorpion 24, Crane 21. It was a decent game, but probably would have been better with four players or five.

Saltlands: We played a four-player game in co-op mode. By chance, we didn't find enough rumor tokens until very late in the game, so we didn't know where to go or how to escape. Other than that, we were in good shape, with good vehicles and useful gear. We also had killed much of the opposition, especially in the map sections near us. But our fourth guy had misjudged the length of the game and his Uber ride showed up, so he missed the last turn of the game and we ran his turn for him. After careful strategy discussion, we figured out that if the final rumor card put the blue goal or the red goal into one of two map tiles, we could maybe just barely make it. We lucked out and the last rumor gave us an option that put the blue goal within our reach. I didn't even need to take an action on my turn, and the missing guy's obvious play was just to kill one enemy as he arrived at our location, for the win. It was an awesome win considering everything had looked hopeless since turn five.

I played personality poker with my wife, a game I got for free when buying some old books at a campus surplus sale. You play it like poker, but the winning hand is the one that best describes the owner. We got in some discussions about how we both perceive ourselves as much more creative, adventurous and flexible, basically, than we really are. I argued that you can't say "I used to be spontaneous but now I have a family" You're either spontaneous or not, but my wife argues that our personality is constructed by our social context. In that case I'm really relaxed, easygoing, and hard working.

I then talked her into playing Tzaar, and I started building a big stack and hunting her like a wild dog. She caught on and the game ended when she ran out of pieces to attack. I always make up stories about the game while I'm playing it. "Here comes the tower of pain..."

My gaming buddy says he prefers Yinsh (I bought my copy back from him) but I have never played it. It looks like Yinsh allows for more planning. This is the only GIPF game that has survived multiple purges.

I got together with Egg Shen, former site regular, yesterday. We went into the day with the intent to play more Euro stuff since we’re both kind of digging them more lately. We played Quacks of Quedlinburg (which was a blast), Haven (which is like Battleline with a board element and was pretty good), but the main event was Gaia Project.

I’d played before, usually solo (which is excellent). Both of us were no fans of Terra Mystica, but both of us came away from GP really loving it. It’s been too long since I’ve played TM to make a fair comparison as to why this game hit where its predecessor didn’t. The obvious area is the difference between the cult tracks and the tech tracks. Where the cult tracks were really unexciting, the tech tracks give rewards at every step and is well integrated in other mechanics that the whole thing really feels more satisfying. I don’t remember why, but TM felt like its systems were very disparate, I don’t get with GP.

I’m not sure if its true of both games, but I think what I like most about this game vs other modern Euros is this: Modern Euro designs want to give you 20 different ways to score points, none of those avenues are really all that connected. Gaia Project and Terra Mystica do that as well, but they do it in an organized, timed fashion. Each victory path only matters for a short period of time, and I really like having to set up big scores and taking the risk on letting one go to get something later.

I’m really earning that “Heretic” title I’ve been given, but I really do adore this game. I wasn’t sure how Egg would respond to it, but he definitely had a great time and we made plans to play again soon. Great afternoon!

I played Bunny Kingdom with my two kids last night after that ridiculous travesty of a Chicago Bears playoff loss.

The game starts with a card drafting phase, which ended up being our favorite part. You get a hand of 12 cards, keep 2, and pass the rest to the next player. Everybody plays their two cards, then you repeat with the remaining 10 cards, and so on. There are some fun, agonizing choices as you try to balance cards you want, cards you can pass up in the hopes that maybe they'll loop back around to you, and taking cards purely as "defense" to keep your opponents from taking them. This part is really fun.

Then there's a short phase where you can upgrade various spaces on the board with cities or farms or mines. These make spaces more valuable.

Then comes scoring, and this is where the game bogs down a bit. The board gets very busy and can be hard to parse. Your little bunny "fiefs" score based on "strength" (number of cities) multiplied by "wealth" (types of different resources being produced). We found ourselves having to check and recheck our math to make sure we'd counted correctly. Counting "strength" is pretty simple, but making sure you've correctly counted the resource types is tricky, as you're trying to spot tiny little icons scattered on the board. This part reminded me a lot of the old Klaus Teuber game, Domaine. Like in Domaine, you're carving up this grid into enclosed territories, and trying to discern the boundaries of those territories as the board gets more and more hectic and cluttered can be frustrating.

The game looks great. It does drag on a bit (our 3-player game took 2 hours, which felt long by the final round). The scores are crazy and swingy, but that can be a pro or a con, I suppose depending on how you feel about that sort of thing. Overall, we liked it a lot, despite the somewhat tedious scoring phase. I'm not sure that the bunnies really add anything thematically to the game, other than to make it stand out from a typical medieval or fantasy setting.

As mentioned elsewhere, I've been playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle with my son a lot. He's been neck-deep in the Harry Potter books (the audiobooks specifically) so he has been really enthusiastic about playing this one. We've made it through the third game.

I know the whole thing opens up considerably in the last few games, so I'm reserving final judgment. However I do find its simplicity refreshing. It's direct and intuitive, and I think that it is better for it. The new wrinkles it keeps adding are just interesting enough to up the ante, but never so much that we have much trouble with it.

It would be nice if the different years had different goals, rather than the same goal made progressively more difficult. There's abstraction everywhere, but I think the abstract nature of "controlling" locations is probably the most egregious. Still the stakes feel higher each time, and the new mechanics introduce feel right.

So just a few games in I am enjoying it. The biggest factor has been how much my son wants to play. Already I have another game of it penciled in after school today.

Yes! We really enjoyed the base game even though it never really challenged us. Barnes' review from way back is spot on. Great family game.

Well, I picked up a copy of Agricola. This is not my bag really - worker placement often makes me mad, although I knew this is at the more acceptable end for me - but I knew the rest of the family would probably like it. Good hunch that. I can count the number of hours it's been in the house and it's been played half a dozen times already. Kids and farms eh. It's just the cubes version as well, and it's somehow gratifying to see that this doesn't matter to them in the slightest.