What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

When it came out I thought Force of Will was the greatest thing since beer in a can. It still puts a smile on my face, and I haven't played Magic for 10 years.

RobertB wrote: 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).

My issue with it is that it's not an interesting question.

For example, this comes up a lot when I'm playing Vampires or Mono Blue Aggro. They start the game with a Llanowar Elf. I reply with a one-drop. And then they drop this. What am I supposed to do? It's the second turn and I cannot block it. So it becomes yet another "if it goes unaswered I win" card. And the answers suck, too, because they are on the level of Shock. You need Cast Out or something like that that costs two mana.

And it's true. The card forces you to play Green Stompy which is not a great archetype. And I dislike that. I don't think you should give a bad archetype overpowered cards to compensate. Because it's not fun and it doesn't lead to interesting games.

Of course it's not that bad. It's more than debatable, while I would fight a bit when it comes to Niv Mizzet and probably wouldn't need to when it comes to Eldrazi.

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Regarding Vintage, I agree that the format has improved a lot. It used to be more about being degenerate as fast as you could but then decks started to take a slower, more balanced approach

Played some Catacombs tonight. I like it but it's a real attritional game. Sucks some of the drama out of things. STF is definitely a better game. Catacombs does deliver a compressed old school dungeon crawl experience though. Reminds me of a 70s D+D challenge module or whatever.

More Theseus: The Dark Orbit because, at the moment, it's the greatest game ever and it works really well as a three-player, which is what we seem to have most often. So it was me as the Bots vs Aliens vs Greys. The Greys were somehow allowed to fill up all five slots in the Corridors board, so even though the Aliens and Bots wanted to go there to trigger Assaults with their fully upgraded units, it was a bad idea, since there was a Downgrade card and a Life Drainer for whenever one of the little psychic bastards landed there. Oh, and a Control card and Chamber, which not only meant double Data points but the ability for them to toss people all around the station... like right into the Tech Bay, where the Aliens had planted both a Parasite and a set of Tentacles.

My cards were victimized most often in the pending slots, since I was the game owner and had played the most, so I fell behind rather quickly, but managed to catch up somewhat with a couple Smart Bombs and some Plasma-assisted Lesser Assaults. But the Greys were still 1 Data point from the victory when the Aliens got the kill and the win. I actually hadn't realized before that killing just one faction ends the game. We played to last man standing in our 4-player, but I think ending it with a kill both adds more tension and keeps people from being left out. This is easily my favorite game of the moment. I really want to try the Bots again.

Erik Twice wrote:

For example, this comes up a lot when I'm playing Vampires or Mono Blue Aggro. They start the game with a Llanowar Elf. I reply with a one-drop. And then they drop this. What am I supposed to do? It's the second turn and I cannot block it. So it becomes yet another "if it goes unaswered I win" card. And the answers suck, too, because they are on the level of Shock. You need Cast Out or something like that that costs two mana.

You guys are making me smile, thinking about this. Playing that bad boy on turn 2 would have made my day. Heck, they made a Green Ball Lightning! Turn 2, Steel elf guy. Turn 3, here comes 11 damage.

Tonight was supposed to be a grand 4 player introduction of Millennium Blades to my group, but 2 canceled due to snow / illness. So again it was just a 2 player game.

I was not a fan of my starter deck, and I failed to ever construct a great deck strategy. I made a few bone-headed plays, for sure. But that's kind of what this game is... it even explicitly calls out in the rules how it is set up to strain your mind with so many threads that you will invariably make mistakes, and you just need to move on from them.

My opponent made mistakes as well, but he made less than I did, and he handily beat me. He enjoyed the game and is up for trying it again.

Had a GREAT day of games yesterday with Uba and Al.

First I ran them through Spirit Island. Low complexity spirits, easiest settings, but we managed to win. It was long but it didn’t feel long.

Then we did another game of Monster Slaughter. I’m liking this one more and more all the time. Once you get over the idea that though the game is telling you want to guess the order in which things happen, it’s not about that at all, it’s about making things happen in the order you want them to. It’s still pretty light but man is it FUN.

Then Al and I played with a project I’ve been working on and I am SO. EXCITED. I’ve got some work to do, but what’s there is really fun. Can’t wait to iron some of the wrinkles out and start talking this thing up.

Played Arkham Horror w/2 characters each, my spouse's favorite game. Not much to say but Hail to the King, still the best adventure game I've played. Don't regret sending off EH for a second. We had a good run of draws and managed to beat Cthulu on seals, but not before we had to sweat a gate draw at 6 gates open. We both had a chance to actually use a corner niche item, a big highlight of any AH game.

These days I play AH/DH board/mythos together with nothing else and it's pretty perfect. All the rest of the decks keep their additions from my billion expansions. I'm vaguely tempted to get ahold of that final expansion expansion love letter to AH.

Yesterday I played 1870: Railroading across the Transmississippi. It's a fantastic game and the more I play it, the more I think it's insanely underrated and one of the best 18XX titles.

The reason why it's great is balance. It hits a very good middle ground between the stock market and the building and the train rush is compelling while not being overbearing. Its main drawback is its lenght but I don't think it's an issue if you use a moderator (We took 4 hours with several newbies at the table).

My new players got a bit lost as the game went on. They felt they didn't know what to do or what to aim for and I had to remind them quite often of what you can do during the stock round and so on.

It seems to me that I should print out player aids with the basic actions in the game. Why? Because when players are lost, they do not seek high-level advice, they look at basic "what can I do" things and focus on them. In that sense, my good advice may have been counterproductive. Sure, they didn't play poorly or "ran companies well" in a game very much not about it, but I may have harmed their basic understanding of the game.

I have found that overwhelmed people need to be given their bare options with only a relatively limited amount of strategic information. I think *most* people need to play their way into goals rather than be told them.

That said, I could see this being a *big* problem for 18XX games, because others' moves do depend pretty heavily on newbie erratic moves. It's what makes games like that so intimidating to new players, imho. It's like an extreme version of the Puerto Rico "you ruined the game by doing the inefficient move when I told you what your most efficient move was" thing but with 5 hours of time investment instead of 1-2.

Thank for your thoughts Sax. I think the issue is that, well, there is no goal. The 18XX series is not goal-oriented, it's about tools and how you can use those tools against your adversaries. And I think that's fairly unintuitive.

Regarding newbie moves, I think the biggest issue is people not doing anything or not buying trains. These games end when the bank runs out of money and if people just buy 1 train per company that's going to take centuries. On this regard I think things are good, because when I do something like trashing stock or shuffling money and trains between companies all other players start doing the same.

For example, our game ended with a bankrupcy caused by a player not investing his money. When things got tough he saved and "played it safe" which only made him more vulnerable. That's a tough nut to crack.

My biggest fear right now is people liking the game but not wanting to repeat due to being lost.

Gary Sax wrote: I'm vaguely tempted to get ahold of that final expansion expansion love letter to AH.

There is nothing essential about the expansion expansion to Arkham Horror, but it does offer even more variety for every existing aspect of play. You get the most bang for the buck if you play with all the board expansions like I do, but then the game becomes a little too hard. I haven't tried it enough, but I think one way to return the full four-board game to playability is to remove the rifts from Kingsport. Keep using the rift tokens, but only as a supplementary source of clue tokens.

My older daughter came over on the weekend before she starts college again--though she's just going to school down the street--and we played Marvel Legendary for the first time in quite a while--long enough, in fact, that I'd forgotten I'd gotten the Deadpool cards. So we played with Deadpool and some generally grimy heroes such as the Winter Soldier. It probably would've been a slog had Zola, the Mastermind, not have been pretty easy to beat, as we kept not having enough recruit points for the high-cost cards that kept coming out or, in the early going, enough attack to defeat the Abominations that kept playing off of the high-cost cards in the HQ by adding those cards' attack strength to their own. My daughter said that ML is her favorite game of the ones we play, which was nice, as was her coming over in the first place.

I did figure out that the bend/warp in the Deadpool cards I had--which I'd forgotten about--didn't lessen over time, even with the cards in premium sleeves, so you can definitely tell when you're shuffling and drawing whether there are cards from that set in there. Should've asked for replacements way back when, I guess.

In another string of poor luck from across time and space, I found out (a) a copy of Empire of the Void II that I'd traded for had a missing card (and one duplicate in its place), which Red Raven is replacing; (b) a copy of Star Trek Frontiers that I just bought had two missing cards (for one of the starting decks, which is not a huge short-term issue, but I have to wait to report it till I inventory everything else, including the tiles, some of which are scuffed up or otherwise marked, because WK gives you one and only one shot at replacements), and (c) a copy of Academy Games' Strike of the Eagle, which I had in shrink from 2011 to 2019 (!), was missing three blocks (and a few were a little rough, as long as I needed to get some new ones anyway). If it weren't for bad luck ...

I decided to take an screenshot of what I've been complaining about in Magic. Opponent plays Niv-Mizzet. I cannot deal with it the turn it hits the table. Note the difference between the starting situation and the end result.






Was this fun or interesting? Did I have fun when the game was reduced to "lol you didn't answer my bomb, gg"? Did I play so wrong I deserved to lose right there just because my opponent played a six-drop? No, and had I been the guy on the other side I wouldn't have had fun, either. It's bad design, regardless of what Mr Rosewater says.

I'm assuming that we're seeing the result of Niv-Mizzit/Curiosity, or something else that starts a "Deal damage to draw cards to deal damage" combo. And a combo going off on turn 7 doesn't seem all that broken.

"What do I use for creature removal?" is a question that your deck has to answer. The answer can very well be, "I don't care, because I can do more damage than they do." Stompy and mono-Red (a personal favorite) have answers like that; they don't GAS about your RRRBBB combo finisher because you aren't going to be around to play it on turn 6.

You night not like that question, but Wizards has been putting combo pieces and high-cost game-ending creatures out there for 20+ years now, and I doubt that they're going to stop soon.