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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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08 Jan 2019 06:44 #289403 by san il defanso

san il defanso wrote: 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.


Played Game 4 and suffered our first loss. The way Villains, Dark Arts, and Hogwarts cards come out has a drastic effect on the difficulty. I don't mind this, because it's super common with cooperative games. We still enjoyed it, and we look forward to trying again.

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08 Jan 2019 09:47 - 08 Jan 2019 11:48 #289409 by lj1983
This past Saturday was my birthday-game day. Buddy from out of town drove up from Cheyenne, X-Wing opponent came by, and my regular game day friend came in. Smoked a pork butt for 16 hours, made some pies and we were on. No Castles of Mad King Burgundy for us.

Forbidden Stars I picked up during the GW-pocalypse. I've played it once before, and we got the combat rules embarrassingly wrong on some key parts. So I was determined to get it played again. 4 players, I was the Eldar. I divulged all the strategy I knew for the various factions. Eldar likes voids. Orks like planets next to each other. Space Marines likes defense/morale/bastions. Chaos does chaos things. I spent time and money teching up to the Warlord Titan. My event cards were the 'buy a city cheap' card, multiple times. so it wasn't that hard. I should have bought the Eldar battleship instead, but I wanted to fight with a Titan. The Space Marine player was the only one who hadn't played StarCraft:TBG previously, so the order system was alittle bit of a headache for him to get a handle on. The Ork player skirmished with all 3 other factions, but also latched onto the objective system first. He realized quickly that small strikes into lightly defended areas with just enough forces was better than building up. As long as you win, of course. We only played to 3 objectives, and ended up with Eldar, Marines with 1, Chaos with 2, and Orks winning with 3 objectives.

Archipelago - First time playing this for two of the players. with the focus on 'conflict' today I used the War and Peace expansion. So, two things happened. There was a ton of money and resources this game. and there was a distinct lack of easy cooperation. Oh, we helped and discussed when we had to. but there was a ton more bribery and coercion. We had a lot of money due to things like the Rum Dealer, who sells pineapples for money and reducing rebellion. There was a colonial lottery, which injects 10f into the game every round, to someone. We jumped on the export market faster, selling resources for big money (and being lucky with the export crisis keeping that cleared fairly regularly). Especially 1 player, who we dubbed the pineapple baron for jumping on that quickly. I tried to block the pineapple baron with a port blockade, but he just used that rum dealer to supplement his income. We had two instances of people sneaking into someone else's territory and 'stealing' it, by building a town....then charging the original owner 'rent' to harvest those resources. the trend card was fish, and I ended up 1 turn away from using the illuminati to change the trend card to churches. This would have pushed me to the win. Instead, the game ended and I was last. with a 3 way tie for 1st, and money deciding it. the pineapple baron ended up in one of the lulls where his money was depleted and so ended up third.

Risk: Europe - This is a very good version of Risk. In that, there is very little Risk in it. I was purple, with 2nd choice of picks. Orange started in Berlin, Me in London, Blue in Constantinople, and Green in Madrid. I landed a token force in Normandy, while Orange and Green started to fight over Paris. I immediately turned around and started moving through Scandinavia towards Russia. We all ignored Blue, who was spreading through Eastern Europe like a plague. Orange and Green keep clashing over France. Green speads south to Africa. Orange Creeps south to Rome. But pays attention enough to cut off my ginormous taxation grouping by attacking Denmark/Stockholm and breaking it into to. By the end, I was clashing with Blue in the Kiev/Warsaw region, but Orange was disrupting my taxation enough that I couldn't push that war hard enough while also defending Ireland from Green. We ran out of time, with Blue having to go to a Hockey game in the evening. Green won, having taken Dublin from me and bought 1 crown to be ahead by 1 of everyone else.

being 1 down and staring at the end of the day, we opted to for Forbidden Stars again. This time I was Chaos(w/ Orks and Eldar played). and after using the weak 1 hp Aspect Warriors of the Eldar, the ground forces of Chaos are a revelation. Long story short, I used the 'move through warp storm' event to attack an unsuspecting Eldar backwater for my third objective. I really liked Forbidden Stars. The StarCraft order system is one of my favorite little bits in gaming. It is probably not as deep StarCraft...but that can be a plus. the tech/upgrade system is not nearly as overwhelming as the multi-building system as StarCraft. The combat cards regain some of the depth and difficulty that is lost in the unit reduction. The only thing I truly missed were the 3D planet 'connections', since in the 4 player game, I really didn't interact much with the person sitting in the corner across from me.

and with that, everyone had to go home. It was a good day.

Sunday, my daughter wanted to play some stuff. So I pulled out Battle Line which is one of my favorites. I had purchased one of the "Rolands Revenge" 100 years war copies. It really is gorgeous. We played without event cards, without the battlefields alt-rules. Just plain, which is my favorite way to play this. I won the first one by break through, and my daughter won the 2nd game by realizing she held the last '9' I needed to win the 5th spot.

Then Nexus Ops, which she's played before. the random tiles ended up with all the Rock Striders on my side, which means a large army and weak economy. Luckily the rock plains were placed in such a way that I could pick and choose my battles. and she didn't have enough soldiers on the front lines to defend every where. and so she made the mistake of trying to defend everywhere. NO and Risk:Europe are similar weights....if I had to choose, I'll still pick NO 8/10 times I think.

Then last night we played Talisman: Legendary Adventures. This is super-light. Not really anything to do with Talisman at all, other than it includes little widgets called Talisman. Still, its an adventure game that my 5 year old twins can play. Pure co-op with bag-building. you roll a dice, move around a modular board. flip adventure tiles up. pull tiles out of you bag to determine how much combat strength you have to defeat a monster. Each character has a different starting mix of tiles in their bag, as well as a special power. After defeating monster you get a reward which goes into your bag for future pulls. no real punishment for not killing the monster, but there is a time limit and there are tiles in your bag that move the time forward. The fairies had been enchanted and hid a talisman. We gathered herbs to cure them. The dwarf went to the fairy queen and had to defeat a wizard that was guarding that spot. He had to draw 4 combat power(2 magic, 2 Fight) off of 3 tokens. he drew his two fight, then drew a token that let him pull from another person's bag. so he drew from the Wizard, who had a magic hat that generated 1 magic and another pull. Another pull from the wizard and the dwarf had enough. Rescue the Fairy queen, rescue 3 more fairies who told us where the talisman was hit. then a race against the clock to the location. the elf was 1 space away. time was on 15 of 16. The elf had to roll anything but a '4' (which moves the clock forward). and of course he rolled a 4. They wanted to try again. Super light, but the kids had fun with it.
Last edit: 08 Jan 2019 11:48 by lj1983.

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08 Jan 2019 10:34 #289412 by Gary Sax
lj achieving Gary Sax gaming arete out here.
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08 Jan 2019 11:04 #289414 by Michael Barnes
LJ why you gotta troll these boards by making up an Archipelago session report? That was pretty creative though, lots of detail. It’s almost as if you actually played it.
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08 Jan 2019 11:21 #289416 by SuperflyPete
Unlike that lout Barnes, I’m not going to comment on your obviously false report and will just say Happy Birthday!
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08 Jan 2019 11:27 #289417 by Vysetron
The report is obviously fake because it was positive. Archipelago is awful. Nice try though.
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08 Jan 2019 17:28 #289436 by Erik Twice
Played a couple games:

Brass Birgimham is great and I now heavily lean towards it being better than the original. At first I thought the old game was more tense but there's plenty of tension here thanks to the beer mechanism. Quite simply, you either take a risk and provide it or you take a risk and rush to get it from the board or someone else. Alternatively, you can take a risk by avoiding beer and hence not building a lot of rails. This is much better than the narrow "not enough seats for everyone" tension of the original.

I surprised myself by running the whole game with barely any income and relying heavily on the two times I asked for loans and selling iron. This is a completely viable, very solid strategy but it requires a lot of care: I scored a lot on the first era but struggled to make big moves in the second and ended one point behind the winner.

I can see this being a game that you can put a lot of work on. You can make your actions better on a micro level but you can also play better when it comes to timing, knowing what to build, knowing what to invest...Really think it's a great game.

Cryptid. This is a deduction game and I'm pretty bad at them because I have no memory. I just can't keep all the possibilities on my head and my usual broad strokes approaches don't work. I relied heavily on reading the table and other player's actions and came close to winning both times but I'm not good at this.
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08 Jan 2019 19:16 #289447 by Ah_Pook
So I picked up Twilight Struggle recently to play with my dad, who I thought would appreciate the historical theme and the card mechanics. We play a lot of Through The Ages and Terraforming Mars and such, he generally is in for interesting card games. We haven't had a chance to play it yet, but I did learn the rules in anticipation. So, long story short, I wrangled my sister in law into trying it out with me today. She likes traditional card games and traditional dice games, and very occasionally something Pandemic/TTR complexity level. She's a huge history/politics buff though. I thought she would like to read some cards and just kinda get a kick out of it theoretically, but she jumped into it enthusiasticallyand we played through the early war in about 2 hours (including rules and setup). I don't have much to add to the conversation about the game, but we both had a lot of fun. Goes to show how much a good thematic connection gets you in getting someone invested in a game.
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08 Jan 2019 22:05 - 08 Jan 2019 22:10 #289455 by repoman
I am away in Harrisburg PA for some corporate training at the moment so I played two solo games.

The first was Buffalo Wing Roulette where, when you are in a strange city, you do an on line search for the best local wings. Google directed me to Boulevard Pizza. Google lied. In what backwards assed land of savages do they not separate the damn wings? You know, break them apart into drumstick, non drumstick, and the weenie pointy bit (which gets thrown in the trash). Apparently that Land of the Lost is Harrisburg. The sauce was average and the wings were not crispy at all.

So I lost that first game.

Then I finished up my 1943 season of Skies Above the Reich. I needed 20 VIP to win and at least 10 not to lose. I had 6.

The situation report looked good. The bombers were outbound from their target so they had taken some damage already and they were far from the protection of fighter escort.

I had plenty of fuel and ready pilots. My pilots came swooping out of the sun from 12:00 o'clock high. Man they hammered the lead bomber. 8 damage markers, but that bastard kept flying. Meanwhile, all my fighters had been carried into the heart of the formation by their momentum. All but one took hits.

I had 2 guys in reserve and sent them in. Figuring one hit was all that one bomber could stand. Again 12:00 o'clock high out of the sun....one guy missed and one guy hit a piece of debris and aborted.

Only two undamaged planes left and I spent some time getting them in position. The escorts arrived on the scene and I took one last desperate attack. Whoever flew that one wounded duck surly deserved whatever medal they gave him because he refused to give up.

Out of all my hit planes, only one crashed. 2 pilots were wounded but were able to land. Alas, still only 6 Vp so a loss. But not by excessive pilot death this time. So an improvement.
Last edit: 08 Jan 2019 22:10 by repoman.
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08 Jan 2019 22:18 #289457 by Sagrilarus
20 years ago there was a restaurant in Harrisburg up by the community college that served killer soul food and barbecue. Was in an old firehouse. But I think it went out of business because I can't find it on Google anymore. Great wings and ribs, but doesn't help if it's gone.

Harrisburg is not a hotbed of haute cuisine. I grew up in Harrisburg and used to know some decent places, but they've all gone away save one -- Subway Cafe and I have no clue if it's still the same place with the same menu. Likely not, I moved out in '87.

Let me know if you're ever laying over near Annapolis. I'll buy you a beer and help you shoot down B17s.

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08 Jan 2019 22:33 #289459 by Gary Sax
Is your skies above the reich opinion firming up overall?
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08 Jan 2019 23:20 #289466 by repoman
Yes, over all it's very positive. I'm going to write a proper review of it but I want to play a late war season first. The formations in late 44 are terrifying but there are many more types of weapons available to break them up. Jets, rockets, armored cockpits and such.

I thought I was beginning to see a pattern in attack results. They are card drawn and my first 3 attacks tonight were identical. Take a hit and deal a hit. But then my next two were from the same angle and disposition but were both misses.

So my theory was flawed which is good. I don't want same criteria attacks to always have the same result.
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09 Jan 2019 09:15 #289652 by charlest
Skies Above the Reich was on my radar, glad to hear it's going well.

We kicked game night off last night with this Wizkids game coming out soon - Chiyo's Secret. It's a real oddball. I'd probably describe it as social deduction but that's really a disservice since it's more about deducing game state and cards at locations than players (although deducing secret loyalties does help).

Really, it reminds me of a Jim Felli design. It's a bit obtuse and more complicated than these things tend to be, making learning and navigating strategy a challenge for a first play. It had some decent player aids but we were really hurting for a reference of what all the victory conditions are for each of the loyalties.

The story is pretty interesting. It's some Akira Kurosawa-esque material with a Geisha betraying her Daimyo and having an affair with a Samurai who is then outcast and becomes a Ronin. They had a child 20 years ago which was just discovered, and now the Shogun has been called to arrive in town and learn of this web of secrets and get the kingdom back in order.

One player is in a bit of a moderator role playing that 20 year old (I took this on), but you're not a moderator like Werewolf. No, here you can actually win and have agency in the game. Your goal is to prevent others from winning and delay things until the Shogun arrives, in which case you win.

There are players who are allies of the Daimyo, a Betrayer, and a Usurper. Those three, combined with the moderator/illegitimate child, make up four teams at the table. We only had five players which is the minimum, it would have been better with more.

So the Geisha and Ronin are disguised and hidden among all of these patron cards. Cards are at different establishments (large location boards) which are co-owned by players they are positioned between. The goal is to deduce which patrons are the fugitives (Ronin/Geisha) by questioning them and flipping them faceup.

There's side benefits of getting certain high influence characters at your establishment (it allows you to have a higher initiative and possibly go first in the final act -- which is super important). So it's a game of moving faceodwn and faceup cards around and manipulating who's where. All the while you're trying to prevent others from assembling the right combination of characters at their location to win.

No one can win until the fugitives are revealed, but that triggers the final act. At this point, if the Geisha, Ronin, Daimyo, and any loyal patron are at the same location, then an ally wins. The betrayer wants Ronin, Geisha, and Daimyo at one of their specific locations (this supersedes the allies condition). The Usurper wants the true assassin (one of three assassin cards and only they know which one is the true one), along with the Ronin and Rival (another character) at a location together.

All of this is happening while the moderator person plays cards every once in awhile to move people around and push the game towards completion.

It was kind of fascinating but play was dominated by slowness and trying to grok this byzantine game. It's hard for me to imagine Zev approving this without more streamlining as it's so difficult to slip into. It's the type of game you won't really appreciate until your second or third play minimum (and maybe fourth or fifth for some people), something almost no major publisher would greenlight now.

I enjoyed this awkward web although the rest of my group was majorly perplexed. They said they'd play it again, but they weren't sure it was really fun or the fun was worth the trouble.

I have Geekway mini next week and I"m determined to get a 6-8 player game going.

We also played Hail Hydra which is perfectly fine, but nothing great. For a mass market social deduction game it's decent, but it offers nothing new beyond setting and I'd always choose Secret Hitler or One Night Ultimate Werewolf over it.

Western Legends was the larger game we played and it went pretty well. Most players bitched about down time with five and said they'd prefer four, but otherwise it was great. We did have a weird lopsided thing where no one went Outlaw until end of game. I was Bass Reaves and shoved towards the Marshall track, so I pushed that as hard as possible to max it out on my very last turn (I lost by 1 VP). The player who won actually was in last for nearly the entire game and had a huge swing in the end. Very entertaining.

Closed it out with a couple games of No Thanks!.
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09 Jan 2019 09:49 #289658 by Vysetron
Chiyo's Secret sounds in line with a lot of the recent Wizkids output, in that it's been straight up bizarre. Who Should We Eat was a social game with shifting goals and teams where you can't win without eating each other. Time Barons was a 2p worker-management dueling game. Maiden's Quest is a solo/drop in coop card game that you play without a table. All of these are in the same product line, even. It's wildly inconsistent and I kind of love it, even if not all of them are good.

They even published some big box SWAT team flicking game. Zev is a madman.
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09 Jan 2019 10:02 - 09 Jan 2019 10:03 #289660 by charlest
Absolutely true, I look forward to each Wizkids game now simply to experience this bizarre unpredictable quality. STF and Sidereal Confluence are two of the best games of the past few years. Marvel Strike Teams, considerably less wonky, is also really owning our group right now. We almost played it for the third straight week last night.

I have Geoff's expansion to the Expanse on deck as well. Would have played that last night if we only had four. Excited for the new protomolecule effects as well as all of the upgrade options for each faction.

Hopefully Zev contributes to this hobby for many more years.
Last edit: 09 Jan 2019 10:03 by charlest.
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