What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yeah, I dug it a little more on my second play. The rondel decision space reminds me of Troyes which is a modern Euro I actually really enjoy.

While Beta Colony is an efficiency game, it's one that's not point salad, or too heavy, and pretty enjoyable overall. I'm ditching my copy soon but I think it's a solid release for that type of game.

Someone recommended playing Fucking Reef Encounter this Sunday, which opened wounds I forgot had existed. And maybe still do. If I see that box open I’m likely to spit froth and have a fit of some sort.

SaMoKo wrote: Someone recommended playing [Potty Mouth] Reef Encounter this Sunday, which opened wounds I forgot had existed. And maybe still do. If I see that box open I’m likely to spit froth and have a fit of some sort.

I played Reef Encounter online once and it took months, and I never did really figure the game out.

Trains and Trains: Rising Sun
After talking about buying the game for a long time, I finally picked up a copy of Trains and Trains: Rising Sun for about $60, along with some spare maps, and through coercion, guilt and bribery compelled my two daughters (15 and 17) and my second oldest son who actually likes games (19! When did that happen?) to play it. I also convinced my son to read the rules and set it up, and it wasn't even Father's day.

I thought my daughters would love it because they like all things Japanese and Korean (anime, manga, k-pop, k-drama), and who doesn't love trains? Plus, my wife and I went to Tokyo in April and experienced the competing train lines firsthand. I was slowly building a Jenga tower of self-deception in order to buy a game that looked cool to me.

My youngest daughter played out of duty and drew in her sketchbook between turns, but started to get more engaged as she figured out the game. My son immediately camped in the center of the Nagoya map, in a cluster of three cities. We kept it simple and didn't use route bonuses, so your primary scoring avenues are placing station tokens in cities. With each token you place, the cost of laying track and placing additional tokens increases. My oldest daughter, the one who gets straight A's, games her schooling like a Power Grid strategist, really likes Model UN and want to be an environmental lawyer--I saw a scheming side of her I didn't know existed, but that shouldn't have come as a surprise. She started buying more expensive, revenue-producing trains, then acquiring big ticket skyscrapers but drop 4 VP during final scoring. This is a strategy that supposedly breaks the base game. Then she started loading up on station expansion cards, preparing to throw down some major points.

Unfortunately, the game ends when either you deplete four decks or build 30 expansion stations. Every deck builder feels like it ends too soon. Because we had combined decks from both games, our basic card piles were huge. We did figure out that we were combining two bags of stations, so when we culled the pile down to 30, it became apparent that we were almost done playing.

This frustrated Machiavellian daughter, who swore she would never play again. I told her that it was like childbirth, and the pain would fade and she would eventually come around. I also tried to guilt them into a second game, saying "Hey, I got this just for you guys! It's Japanese! Look at the art!" Bot daughters quickly chimed in that the boards were gross looking, while oldest daughter held up a waste card and said, "What is Japanese about this?" She has a point.



My son told me he thinks he prefers Dominion. Maybe I can talk the local euro-heavy group into playing it, if the choice is between this and Lisboa, and we throw in the attack cards and route bonuses. I may be able to convince my son to play the two player maps if my daughters .

One of my other selling points is that once we learn the game we can knock it out in 40 minutes, which probably feels like a lifetime to their young, social-media-damaged brains. There is hope for my youngest. She has enjoyed Citadels, Settlers, and Innovation.

There is some online debate about whether the first game is slightly imbalanced, and fixed by cards in the second game, or vice versa. Cfarrell suggests using the Trains: Rising Sun VP cards, and since he is smarter than me, I'll probably go that route:

Really nicely-done expansion; minimal extra rules, but it fixes a significant core problem with the original (the fact that the straight VP cards were a bit too strong). I now just always use the Rising Sun VP cards, and use random cards from the basic game and Rising Sun.

--stolen from BGG

I swore I already wrote this session review or a version of it, but maybe I just wrote it in my head so many times that it became real to me.

Here is Matt Thrower's review from four years ago

CFarrell is right - the way to win Trains without the expansion is to only buy money making cards and turn it into buildings. I'd like to try the expansion (there's a copy here at work), but we haven't got around to it yet.

There's a couple of guys at my club who are mad keen on Trains so every now and then I'll play. I definitely prefer the Rising Sun stuff, it seems to better support the board element which was the initial point of differentiation when it was released however the base game is definitely easier to win if you just focus on the cards. The tourist train always seemed to be the most broken deck in the game, twice over I saw someone win just by buying those cards exclusively until they ran out and then switching to express trains and buildings. I'd even go so far as to say that Rising Sun is the real game and the original is some expansion stuff you can add in if you want.

At home:

The arrival of Hellapagos last week caused much excitement amongst the brood and I awoke on Saturday morning to find it set up and ready to go on the breakfast table. After rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and downing the first coffee of the day I was ready to go and we ploughed through a handful of what turned out to be very quick three player games.

They are at an age where they don’t mind dishing out the conflict but still have a bit of a tough time accepting it in return so I gave them many warnings that it would likely end up getting very mean at times. My son was the first to fall as daughter and I high-fived our way onto the raft without him and I could tell by the look in his eyes that my ticket had just been punched. It set the scene for successive horrors where in all honesty we weren’t even attempting to get everyone off the island, the urgent question being who would be the first target for suffering which of course in most cases ended up being me.

In one game he brought out the club and took great delight in using it to bludgeon me into submission, forcing out cards from my stash to stay alive until I eventually succumbed. In another he went desperately searching for bullets after finding the gun with the express intent of offing me right then and there, but alas he passed out from dehydration before it came to that eventuality. The most memorable game for me was when I lucked into both the club and the plank and enough food and drink to get myself off the island. I deliberately encouraged my daughter to give up her secret food to help her brother, and with him having a water bottle in hand we felt secure on the next round and I promised to go fishing and to put in my own food if needed. Naturally I reneged on the deal and put out the club to take control of the voting. Daughter was most indignant at dying of thirst and then I clubbed Son in order to take his water and steal the single remaining food out of his mouth. With the secret food and water that I had in hand I was able to float away on the plank laughing maniacally. Good clean family fun all round then.

The interesting thing with three players is that it is effectively the same as the endgame with a larger group except you don’t have the preamble that leaves you with some raft spaces and cards in hand but with little time left to make your preparations. I found that it made things a bit more aggressive as offing someone early means that you can share their cards and move quickly to building a smaller raft. It’s dangerous on the voting though as the first player will always have the casting vote unless both the others go against them, then when you are at the final two they have all the advantage. Some of the cards change context too; the club is almost overpowered with smaller player counts which I guess means that you probably wouldn’t want to play it early in a multiplayer situation, and as demonstrated the plank can be a game winner if you are brutal with your fellow castaways.

Later that day my son and I played some Terraforming Mars with everything all-in. I just scraped victory by spamming colonies and seeding cities which I then filled in with greenery so yes, it is viable to do these things and remain competitive. I had the corporation that lets you increase your lowest production and I used it to help me pay the cost of cards that were reducing power. I ignored thermal completely and when I got space mirrors online I used the power I was generating to move my trade fleets instead of allowing it to roll over, and used the world government to keep raising the temperature to deny scoring opportunities to my opponent. I had one of the abilities in play that allowed me to raise the income track before trading and later in the game picked up the card that allowed me to have more than one colony on one location. With three fleets in play this allowed me to turn three power into ten or thirteen money via Lunar and to collect useful stuff like metals or greenery production from the other locations.

The lad had a lot of thermal going on and was also drawing up a huge pile of steel that he couldn’t always use as the card draws weren’t going that way for him. He diversified into floaters and had a tiny engine going where he was building and selling floaters for some extra income, plus he had the corp that raises income when new tags are played, so he had an early lead over me on wealth. It was short-termist though and when I refused to hurry along the terraforming until I had caught up with him he ran out of steam with too many cards and not enough options.

There’s been some grumbling about it here but I am more than happy with Colonies. There are some useful exploits there and I think it is vital to fix on a clear strategy early on and to work out which if any of the colonies will support that. Relying on blind draw from the deck is too much of a risk for me so I like to have a plan with the visible elements of the game and then adapt those plans based on what I draw. In many cases the Colonies provide micro-advancements, e.g. trading with Lunar just to get an extra three money or paying three Titanium to get four or five in return, but the game is full of this sort of thing so it is a fundamental consideration when playing. I also think that the expansions have had a welcome dilutive effect on the dominant strategies that used to surround Ecoline and Tharsis which in turn requires a new way of interacting with the board itself. Building can still be used to generate points but it needs to fit in with the rest of your plans rather than being a pedal on which you stand full-on.

We also played a whole bunch of other stuff over the weekend: Tsuro, Dice Hospital, Star Wars Risk, an antique favourite called Plus Minus, Yogi, Dream Home, so it ended up being a mini-convention of sorts.

At the club:

Tried out Treasure Island which is a box filled with interesting bits and pieces that you use to draw stuff on a map in the search for treasure hidden by the overlord player. We fluffed it a bit with misunderstanding some of the clue cards and the hunters were far too co-operative so two of them effectively gave the game to the third. I was Blackbeard and felt disassociated from proceedings for most of the time; on some rounds you literally have nothing to do other than to confirm whether or not a circle that is eventually drawn on the board contains the location of the treasure so at times I was almost nodding off to sleep. It also suffers from being one of those games where you have to sit through three other players expertly dissecting your every action so just isn’t that much fun as the overlord. I think it would have gone much better if the hunters had been less co-operative with one another and they certainly felt that was a mistake on their part, so I’d give it another go but I’m not exactly champing at the bit for it.

Sherlock: Last Call is a deduction game in a single deck of cards and was quite delightful. I’d actually compare this to escape rooms games as it’s something that you can really only play once, or at least only as often as it takes for you to have forgotten the resolution. Gameplay involves choosing to either play or discard a card from a selection of three with some strict rules on how much information you can share, and then you go through a list of questions at game end that determine how much you figured out correctly. You score points for having relevant cards in play and lose points for ones you should have discarded so it is very involving all the way through on what you decided to keep. There are, of course, a bunch of red herrings in the mix but I cannot say any more in detail other than that I found it more fun than most escape room games I’ve played. One of my friends is eager to buy more from the series so I’ll get a chance to try some of the others, which I am looking forward to.

And then, of course, more Hellapagos, this time with six. Once again I get asked the question “so is this a co-op?” and once again we descended into debauched bloodshed on the beach. I found a gun fairly early on and stole a bullet from someone by using the pills so decided to keep that quiet and to ask around if anyone had any bullets in order for us to lighten the load. The first guy to offer tries to stiff me with the underpants and I was compelled to spend the stolen bullet to teach him the error of his ways, but at least now everyone is breathing easy as I no longer have any ammunition. Or so they think. When the next fool tries to trick me the same way for the second time the fallout goes the same way as I had also picked up some ammunition whilst searching and now everyone is on edge with the capricious maniac in their midst.

That wasn’t the end of things either, and I ended up as some crazed Travis Bickle figure standing on the beach in a pair of tighty whiteys waving my gun around and dishing out both orders and rough justice. Having all the power allowed me to lazily search the wreckage every turn and every time they tried to starve me I always had a plentiful store of food and water to keep me going, especially having twice shot one of my neighbours and taking half their cards. At the end of it we were just shy of escaping with three of us left and one more bullet floating around, but the owner perhaps rightly refused to hand it over to me. So instead I play the club which I had kept back in hand and I used it to force him out on lack of water. He shuffles up his cards but alas I did not get the bullet which would have allowed me to be the sole victor, however he did hand me enough water for the remaining pair of us to make the journey. Naturally I gave the dirty water to the other guy, such was my privileged position as lord of the beach, and we carried on the story that I would likely have given him a kick off the raft at some point while he was vomiting over the side. Everyone had a riot playing this so I think it’s definitely a keeper that will run for some time.

Finished off with Tempel Des Schreckens which is another great multiplayer social game. A fun night.

Naturally I reneged on the deal and put out the club to take control of the voting. Daughter was most indignant at dying of thirst and then I clubbed Son in order to take his water and steal the single remaining food out of his mouth. With the secret food and water that I had in hand I was able to float away on the plank laughing maniacally. Good clean family fun all round then.

Ha ha ha, so excellent!

This Hellapagos game is sounding better and better by the day. I may have to seek it out.

Been playing Western Legends. I got it for christmas and in some way I feel its totally overrated. Its lightweight and sandboxy. It relies on the players to narrate the action and in such a manner make for epic/legendary stories. But the actions and stories that unfold don't feel all that epic to me.

In a way it's a bit like Tales of the Arabian Nights without the resolution book, or Fallout without the quest cards. While Western Legends does put you more in the drivers seat, it fails to engage. I saw the kickstarter for Ante Up, but it didn't seem like it adressed any of these concerns. I want to like this game. It's theme, timeslot, player interaction. It looks so good on paper. Maybe it's these expectation that made it such a let down.

It very cool to see a stupid game like Hellapagos getting some plays. I'm glad to hear that it's actually winnable as co-op, maybe with a smaller number of players.

I've been playing a lot of Lincoln. 6 plays in January. It's tough on the Union but I finally won a game as the Union on my last play. I build the blockaid and followed Grant and Sherman's strategy and marched to Atlanta for the win.

Tonight we played Hanamikoji and Exit: The Sunken Treasure. Not got a lot to say about either of them. Hanamikoji was one of the biggest disappointments I've had in gaming. The Sunken Treasure was my first Exit game... my first co-op game! It was ok but I was glad when it was over. 90 minutes of riddles and puzzles isn't really my thing. Actually it didn't even really feel like a game, but I don't wanna start up a debate on what makes a game a game I hope I play some good games tomorrow.

Went to a game day mini con thing today, took my copy of Cthulhu Wars looking for a game. Walked in, a guy is setting up his copy of Cthulhu Wars and has one player and is looking for more. Great! As soon as the guy starts teaching the other guy I know I'm in trouble, as he barely goes over the rules (while getting some wrong the few he did mention) and the other guy barely is following what he is saying on top of that. Trouble on both ends. Long story short, I played blue and crushed them both so badly that they both conceded about halfway through. I've never played blue, and this was the second time I've actually played multiplayer CW, but I think I was the only one at the table that actually had any idea how to play the game. The round before they conceded they both cashed out their power while I had 10 left, and I went and captured 5 of their cultists off the board and stole like 3 Gates. Was going to have 22 power to their 11 each next round. Took a loooooong time getting there too. So, not the best outing of CW.

Sometimes you just gotta crush some fools.

I was sad because I just wanted to play Cthulhu wars! I'm bad at it having only played once before, but I really like the game. I was expecting to get beaten but hopefully learn more along the way yknow. I was trying to help the guy learning the game along but he was taking like 5 minute turns just staring at stuff and then eventually deciding to recruit a cultist or whatever. It was not a super enjoyable game to sit through (again, the guy who's copy it was was playing rules wrong and teaching the other guy stuff wrong, or failing completely to tell the guy important rules or mechanics), so eventually I just went for the throat to try to get it over with asap. Still took about 2 hours to get through like 4 rounds.

Thats a rough game of CW. Most of my games are about an hour long. And getting the rules wrong on that is...super bad given how easy it is to teach the basics. Crawling Chaos is pretty awesome at aggressiveness.