What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Please tell me they call it an Expanseon.

They do not, I'm very pleased it's called "Expanse - Doors and Corners", a kinda-but-not-really obscure reference to a quote in the source material.

charlest wrote: 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.

Oooo, really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this. I want an excuse to force my group to play it again...

Subway Cafe is still here. Or at least there is a subway cafe. There are some decent places to eat depending on what you want. But yeah, Harrisburg is pretty boring for sure.

Finally cracked open the New California expansion for Fallout: The Board Game. Here were my thoughts:

2017's Fallout game was a rare instance of an IP I was willing -- eager, even! -- to buy a boardgame of. It sounded like it captured not just the look and feel of Fallout, but a lot of the same ideas that I enjoy in the video game. My playing style in the game is slow and cautious, so an adventure game seemed a good fit.

I enjoy it a bunch, but the competitive nature seemed a bit off. I could do a thing which would cause something to pop up elsewhere, and then my opponent can go do that thing and get credit for it. It was odd. I would have bought New California anyhow, but hearing about co-op rules was a definite incentive.

Turns out, the co-op rules aren't really great (or as expansive as they seemed.) There's a single co-op scenario in the box. We jumped into it.

The co-op rules aren't bad, but at least two of us walked away thinking that, as wonky as it was, the competitive game just worked better. There wasn't much gained by co-op, as the major benefit (we could all take on different things) meant we weren't near each other for purposes of sharing resources.

New California adds other stuff, which is welcome: new items, characters (not an NCR soldier???), and such. Some new starting cards, which is nice. It adds tiles and ways to "extend" the original four adventures, though I don't think anyone complained that they were too short. People did complain that many times the game ended before the storylines concluded, but that's a different complaint from "game is too short". The problem there is that it's often too hard to advance the storylines, and FNC doesn't really change this.

There's a lot to like in Fallout but FNC doesn't really address some of the sticking points. While I have no problem playing the game as is, I think there's an even better one in there that the right fix could unlock.

ADDED: One big thing the game needs is an easier way to get gear. No one has ever played a Fallout video game and thought, "golly, when will I come across some kind of weapon?" There needs to be more gear. Sure, junky gear that breaks, or whatever, but it is intensely frustrating to play this game for 3 hours and never get a gun of any type. Also gear is fun!

I agree with a lot of what you say about Fallout. Although I think if you check again, New California does in fact include a NCR character.

My complaint with the cooperative scenario is that it is too long. My possible fix for this, that I have yet to test out, is that ANY time you get an agenda card, you can use it to advance the star no matter what is on it. The shield still advances when the agenda deck cycles.

I've grown to realize that much of what I dislike of Magic are concious design decisions. Autolosing because your opponent plays Niv-Mizzet or you didn't answer a planeswalker the turn it comes into play is the game working as intended. There's a very clear "oh you deserve to win because you played your crowd-pleasing bomb" ideology in the game that actively worsens it and that it's actually a quite modern development.

This is not a secret. Mark Rosewater and Wizards of the Coast have been very open about selling planewalkers as the "face" of the game and they are one of the big proponents of the most toxic idea in all gaming which is that "everyone should be able to win regardless of what his opponent does" and there's no easier way to do that than to create cards that win you the game on the spot if not answered immediately. Oh and they have also made these cards hard to interact with, because if little Timmy gets his big card countered he won't gamble his mothly allowance away anymore.

They have also been pushing harder and harder on what they call "Timmy" cards, resulting in big effects that aren't necessarily competitive but that fulfill the same "if it goes unaswered I win" category. The Eldrazi, which have the awful "When it attacks, destroy 4 or 5 enemy permanents" mechanic are the best example, but it's everywhere these days. There's a 6-cost Dinosaur that lets you play 2 free cards from the opponent deck whenever he attacks. It's a bad card, but it just wins if you don't answer it immediately. They have been experimenting with mana costs, too, so if a card has a complex one like RRRUUU they make it much cheaper than it should.

For example, for three mana, you can have a 5/4 creature that cannot be blocked by creatures with strenght 2 or less. In other words, on turn two your opponent can play this 5/4 that you can do nothing about with your own. Truly great design here. And then there's hexproof, which is repeatedly abused.

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Anyways, let's rant about Planeswalkers which are the worst addition to the game since release. They are terrible designs which, to put plaintly, don't truly work.

For those not in the know, Planeswalker are a new type of card which represent a character. Not interesting ones, mind you, but typical, dull superhero-like characters with less depth than the cardboard they are printed on. They are all flawless power fantasies designed to appeal to teenagers and that try to copy an edgy Marvel that was abandoned long ago and for good reason.

They all work the same, with some variations. They enter the game with a given number of counters representing life, say 4 or 5, and you can choose different effects that increase or reduce those values:

First effect (+1 or +2): Draw a card, create a token or other +1 Card Advantage often with heavy filtering.
Second efffect (-3): Get rid of a threat
Third effect (-8): Win the game. They don't quite say that, but they very well might.

There are many issues with them. Far too many. In fact, the more I think about them the worse they come across as a piece of design.

1) They are one-card solutions. They draw you cards, they get rid of threats and they win the game. You don't need anything else. You don't need to attack, you don't need to play creatures, nothing. As long as they remain on the table you win. Everything else is secondary.

2) You always get value from them. Imagine a game is fairly even matched and one of the players casts a planeswalker. They drop it, draw a card with its ability and pass turn. Let's analyze this situation.

The best case scenario is that you play a card and kill it. Congratulations, you now have one less card than them. And cards that kill planeswalker are as expensive as planeswalker themselves.

The second best scenario is that there are no creatures and you smash your own creatures into it. Since they have 6 life points, you must attack with several creatures, probably most of them and you only damage the planeswalker. This often means you do nothing with your creatures other than kill the planeswalker, turning the planeswalker into a Time Walk.

From there things just get worse and worse.

3) They snowball. If you don't kill the planeswalker the turn it comes to the table, it's even less likely you'll be able to do it on the next turn because the position is going to be the same except your opponent has two more cards in hand.

4) Being able to attack them is not a real weakness: The fact that you can shoot them or attack them is not a real weakness because it's very easily palliated by playing your own creatures. If the opponent has to suicide into your wall of creatures to attack them, you win. If they don't, you tick your planeswalker up and then win.

In fact, that you can attack them makes them better. Why? Because it allows them to be more aggressively costed. They can be more powerful in exchange of a weakness that doesn't matter. It's the "My barbarian has low intelligence" drawback. Yeah, like you would care.

They are also very hard to kill with burn spells, because there are few cards that deal enough damage to finish them off.

5) Splitting attacks benefits them. Here's the thing: When you attack a planeswalker you decide which creatures attack him and which creatures attack the player. Which means you hve to split your attack and it's much easier to block the relevant creatures. So you either don't attack at all or overcommit and see most of your attacks go wasted.

This is a recent development, by the way. Originally you just attacked the player and then split the damage as you liked. But they decided to switch to this because it was "simpler".

6) They are very hard to interact with: There are very few spells that target planeswalklers. You have lots of ways to kill creatures, bounce them back or the like but there are very few cards that kill or bounce planeswalkers and less than are actually playable. And it's super intentional too, it's not a Battletech problem where they forgot the danger of introducing a new card type, no. They just don't want planeswalkers to be killed, they want them to wina nd become the start of the show.

7) They never do their cool thing because the opponent concedeces. The "ultimate" ability says "I win". It doesn't matter if it destroys everything the other player has, if it makes your life total 1 or any other nonsense. It just says I win, so you click it and you win. Cool thing doesn't actually happen.

8) They make the game about them, not you: When you win like this you don't feel like the powerful wizard who defeated his opponent. You feel like the guy hanging out with the cooler-than-you Marvel reject who won the game for you.

I have never played with Planeswalkers...they seem like a terrible idea for all the reasons you listed. I am guessing you play Arena mostly, so I think you are experiencing the game differently than I am...I’m just playing with battle decks and guild decks...and NONE of your justifiable grievances are an issue. There are no auto-win cards, the decks have fun but not unbeatable combos, and would probably be considered low tier or even entirely non-competitive in a constructed environment.

Your Magic sounds terrible LOL

It is indeed mostly Magic Arena which plays a bit into it because it's basically Standard.

But really, at this point I'm mostly playing to get coins so I can draft. I'll build a cube or something and really, that's it for me.

I'm tempted to build the super cheap Mono Blue Aggro deck youc an play in Standard right now or attended a draft in real life but eh.

Jesus, that was so convincing now I don't like plainswalkers and I haven't played MTG in 20 years.

Erik Twice wrote:

For example, for three mana, you can have a 5/4 creature that cannot be blocked by creatures with strenght 2 or less. In other words, on turn two your opponent can play this 5/4 that you can do nothing about with your own. Truly great design here.

This guy: Steel Leaf Champion

Putting on my old-timer M:tG hat, that's GGG. If you're not playing mono-Green, that GGG can be a problem; you're going to be staring at GG and that guy in your hand a lot. I would play it in Sealed, but 1) I wouldn't count on it landing early, and 2) I kind of suck at Sealed. But as the thread above says, It's custom made for a mono-Green Stompy deck.

It's a question you have to answer in Constructed - how do I deal with pure aggro decks like Señor Stompy (the original I got to play/had to face back in the day).

At home:

Not a great deal going on at the moment as I’ve recently started a new job so have been travelling a lot and generally freakin’ exhausted by the time I get home. Still, my arm was gladly twisted into playing a couple of games. Harry Potter card game with my daughter and Sentinels with my son so low-wattage card games which was just perfect. Forgot to mention that we tried out the Oblivaeon game over Christmas and it wasn't the trial that some people are making it out to be. They've done a good job in reigning in the multiple persistent effects so it isn't like the awful mess that was the Vengeance format and you get to pick up some awesome allies and special weapons that are fun to use. My only criticism is that the shtick here is that the Thanos-like big bad guy destroys entire decks of cards so you cycle through a number of heroes and environments during the game which means that you spend little time with each one, sometimes only a couple of rounds. That's pretty crappy for heroes that take some time to set up potential so we tended to default to the less interesting ones that simply come in with guns blazing.

At the club:

Everybody was already stuck in to various things when I arrived so myself and the other spare wheel filled in the time with having a go at Timeline Star Wars. Guess what? It’s Timeline, with Star Wars, whodathunkit. Because we’re all tremendous geeks and more familiar with these films than the faces of our own families it’s far easier than regular Timeline so the game actually runs comparatively long until someone accidentally puts a scene slightly out of order. However, it is a lot more fun because you find yourself re-living the movies in your head as you play.

A dear friend and long-time club member was attending his farewell night before moving to another part of the country so many of the old crew were out in force. This meant that we got to play Tabletop Curling which was someone’s find from a few years ago at Essen. I’ve seen cheap and crappy versions that use a roll-up mat but this is the more premium folding version from Noris Spiele. In the box you get exactly what it says, a Curling sheet with a house at one end and two sets of ball-bearing based stones. The action on the folding board is really smooth and with a little practice you get used to how much force to put on the stones and how to get a slight curve on them when needed. From a tactical standpoint it does a good job of representing the real-life sport as you do well from setting up your position on the outside of the house and short-placing stones to block access for your opponent. It’s a really great game, I think that I actually declared it as my goty a few years back as it is so much fun.

Flamme Rouge with six and the fairly recent Meteo expansion. It’s a lot more fun to play with more players as it makes the meta game more vital and as good as the bots from Peloton are I still prefer more predictable real life competitors. I ended up in one of the breakaway spots and myself and the other player managed to co-ordinate quite well in taking turns to go ahead and pull the other along in slipstream; I think it helped that it was my Rouleur and his Sprinteur so we were more likely to play cards with a slight difference in values. Then one of the other players raced to catch up and started putting pressure on us so I pushed out ahead as a lone wolf.

The thing that the Meteo expansion brings to the game are weather conditions that affect the long straights, and the final one of these was for slippery conditions that can cause some nasty crashes. It also happened to be on a straight that involved a small hill so I could see in advance that it was going to be a bit of a nightmare and therefore vital to be at the head of the pack. So I burnt my way through my deck to keep pushing ahead and was riding almost entirely on exhaustion cards by the time I crested the rise with a short lead. As predicted, I was followed by a scene of carnage as riders slowed and stalled on the hill and the sharp breaking of following riders led to a tangle of crashed bicycles. This gave me some breathing space, however I was barely moving at this point so the pack managed to right itself and started to catch up. Somehow I managed to pull out my final remaining six, which was my only card that wasn’t a two, which was enough to get me over the line just before the fresher-legged riders behind came steaming through. My original intention was to bring my Sprinteur up from behind and I still had one of my nines in hand after using the slipstream to gain lots of free movement over the course to stay with the pack. That would have been enough to get a one-two finish but with the reshuffle it ended up in the bottom half of the deck and so I just missed out on the perfect finish.

Overall I don’t think that Meteo adds much to the game, the slippery road was fun but the real impact is that it changes your perception of where you want to be in the peloton at that particular stretch which is something that is already in the game. The other weather conditions do very little of note and I think that I would always want to force the slippery road into the game as it’s the most interesting one.

There was much insistence to play Azul and as I hadn’t tried it before I agreed to give it a whirl. The scoring wasn’t really clear to me and so I found out halfway through that I had been scoring incorrectly and cheating myself out of points, but in any case there were a bunch of other rules that were taught incorrectly so the game was a bit of a mess by all accounts. It was okay, I didn’t particularly love it although I did enjoy the element where everybody is actively trying to screw each other over which is kind of unusual for a game like this which I though would be a lot more passive.

There was a big enough crowd with enough interest to bring out old favourite Nanuk, which we played the ‘right’ way with a litany of broken promises and untrustworthy exhortations. Players are a bunch of Inuit hunters who are bragging about how great the hunt will be if they are the leader and you go around the table boasting harder and wilder until someone calls bullshit and then those two players try to persuade the others to side with them. Then you play the hunt, which either succeeds or turns into a turd or you all get eaten by polar bears, and the winning side splits the trophies for the end score. At one point literally everybody at the table did exactly the opposite of what they said they were going to do which was hilarious. Somehow I managed to leverage all of this to my benefit and won for practically the first time ever.

Then we finished up with a very quick couple of rounds of Kartel. I am shit at this game but still like it, it’s a five minute distillation of Knizianian tropes so it’s easy to fall in love with.

Magic is generically flawed by limiting the deck to 60-cards and allowing 4x. With, what 3,000 cards in Standard and 1000s more in other formats, there will be juiced outliers and decks will be built to exploit them. Every game is a race to broken bullshit. For some folks, this is still fun--there are a lot of Vintage games decided on turn 0 when players see their opening hands. But if you want a grindy affair, it's going to be tough to track down.

That's why I made that switch to 250 (5Color, what have you) twenty years ago. Bulk out the deck. Require a mix of colors. You need to spend time and energy on mana fixing and maintenance instead of just waiting for turn 5 when you can jizz $900 in singles on the table and win. The decks still had themes, but you saw a lot more toolboxes than you did plain aggros, plain control, plain combo. Added elements like ante maintenance made things even more interesting. Goddamn that was a good game. Yadda yadda, you're going to tell me about EDH and blah blah, but it's not the same.

I don't have a problem with planeswalkers as a design. I think it's thematically interesting in some ways, but they are undercosted and too hard to kill out of development. Why they get this special treatment compared to other permanents seems like a way to sell more lore instead of producing healthy card game.

I still primarily play Vintage (and I don't think it is as bad now as it used to be as Jeb claims -- where games could be decided on Turn 0), and Planeswalkers are just fine. They definitely don't just win the game; namely, because in Vintage (still hard not to call it Type I), any single card could be the one that is the linchpin for just winning the game. They aren't too hard to deal with and rarely do the get their "third" condition that allows them to fire off the big effect. Thematically, their nice because it is basically another wizard that you have coerced to follow you into battle. Also, at 4 mana (usually) they are on the high-side of what you will played in Vintage. I have a "Jace" deck that uses 4 or 5 different Jace planeswalkers to do irritating stuff to the opponent -- but, I also can easily win without any of them showing up; they just add a layer of depth and other possibilities to the deck.

The Eldrazi indestructible annihilation bullshit is much worse design than Planeswalkers.

You've definitely got more background on Type I/Vintage, to be sure. I'm glad to hear it's back in form. There was a time when it was neat. Fish vs Stax vs Burn what have you. But I still think too much of the game is dedicated to drawing Force of Will and another blue card.

I concur though, on the Eldrazi front. Resource denial strategies are the death of fun in MtG. Mana is already a fragile thing, and letting your opponent blow up all your stuff is miserable. There should be a place for it, but I vastly prefer a lockdown effect like Winter Orb or a costly maintenance like Stasis/Glacial Chasm that can be disrupted and blow the game open for the opponent when finally bested.