Re: What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

A bit of a Red Raven Games two-fer here.

First up was their new one that just shipped from their Gamefound campaign -- Creature Caravan. It's got a dice-as-worker-placement mechanism, very similar to their older game Artifacts, Inc. You roll some dice, use the dice to trigger some actions, all while trying to move your caravan across a map. You can add fun, goofy creature cards to your caravan, which give you more possible actions to spend your dice on. The creatures themselves have interesting combinations that you can try to exploit.

The first time I played with the whole family (four of us), it went pretty slow. You take your turns simultaneously, but even so, there was a lot of waiting for my wife (who is very analysis paralysis-prone) to parse her growing collection of cards and figure out how to spend her dice. The hardest part was simply the newness of it, and not knowing how to properly value the different cards and their options. There are a LOT of cards, and they do a lot of different things. I played a second time with just my son, and it went a lot faster, and things really clicked for both of us.

Because the turns are simultaneous, it does have a "multi-player solitaire" vibe to it, where you're just heads down, doing your thing. There is a market board and a combat board, where you compete for spots. Those boards do create some interaction, and you have to really keep an eye on those. My only other complaint is that I wish there was some player interaction on the map itself, like maybe you could cut off another caravan and force them to take another route. But there's nothing like that at all.

Overall, I think there's a good game in here, but it takes a few plays to get a handle on the cards. Also, it probably goes without saying for Red Raven Games, but the production / artwork / components are all really great.

And then I played a solo game of Sleeping Gods: Primeval Peril. My family bounced pretty hard off the original Sleeping Gods. It was just too big and too complex. We tried it as a campaign, but didn't get to play it very often, so we'd have to relearn the rules every time we pulled it out. I ended up getting rid of it.

So then when Red Raven came out with this stripped down, simpler, two-player version Primeval Peril, I thought that might have more of a chance of getting played. My and son and I tried it a few months ago and we got our ASS KICKED within like 20 minutes. My son was so frustrated, he swore never to play it again. I finally broke the game out again this week and played it solo, and I had a great time. The thing I learned that first game is that combat is absolutely punishing, and sometimes it's best to avoid it if you can. The game has a built-in timer, and I lost when I ran out of time.

I don't know how much replayability there is. I know there's a big chunk of the map I never explored. I would guess there's at least 3 or 4 games worth of content in there. I definitely plan to try it again, and take a different route. Also, I think the game works better solo than 2-player, as you don't have to fuss about with who's the "active player," and which characters do you have access to. It just gets rid of all that. Good game! I'm anxious to try it again.

Sleeping Gods has enough rules overhead as it is, and there's no reason (open to being told otherwise) to hamstring yourself by only having access to half of the crew on your turn with the multiplayer rules. My partner and I use the solo rules and make decisions collectively; it works so much more smoothly.

Stayed with friends while attending BusterCon, the fan convention for the Arkham Horror LCG. That way I could take a break from playing games all day by playing games all night.

I don’t know if there’s a game in the world I’m worse at than Master Labyrinth. At least half of my points came from the player before me setting me up such that I didn’t have to move a single piece to grab the token. On two of my turns two other players found scoring plays that I couldn’t see with another two minutes of staring. It just escapes me.

Donald X. Vaccarino’s Greed is best with larger player counts. Even though you see each hand less, you see more cards and can feel better about making some sort of strategy work. Still I enjoyed some three-player games. Not surprisingly, my friend who was able to play three extra cards by recurring his Seance twice won. Second game was crazy. Two of us tied at $195k and the third came in at $180k.

I’m glad my friends were willing to give Ra a second shot after I screwed up a rule regarding the Ra tiles because it is quickly working its way into my all-time top five. First game my friend took a solid win despite having only single-digit sun tiles in the second and third epochs. Same friend won the second game after winning only a single auction in the third epoch before the Ra tiles ended it. Seeing the strategies emerge is amazing. High-value hands can be bullied into overpaying by mid-range tiles. Bids on empty auctions just to transform a 1 into a 7. Such a great design.

Two games of Hansa Teutonica demonstrated the flexibility of the play space. Won the first by building trading posts on the routes to the action upgrade city and blitzing to 20 points before anyone could get use out of their five actions. Won the second by playing the long game and building a huge network off the back of my five actions. Screw variable starting powers. Replayability comes from having to adapt to other players.

Half of my Call of Cthulhu group was running late yesterday, so I got out This Game is KILLER for a quick 3-player game. It was very quick. On turn one, I was on the bridge and played a card that would allow me to survive if another player did something that could kill me. The alien showed up on the bridge and killed me. One of the other players vented the airlock, removing it from play. On turns two and three, the other two players kept going to different rooms, while the alien went to a third room. On the fourth turn, the alien cornered one of the players, but his action card allowed him to KO the alien, take a tissue sample, kill the alien, and win the game. The end. Although three players is the minimum number of players, I think that it would be better to start with at least four or five players.

Tried some new stuff lately. Bought my second kid MicroMacro: Crime City for his birthday. He’s a big fan of escape-room-type games and books with picture mysteries. I figured this would scratch the same itch and have been right so far. Only two stories in but have been charmed by the illustrations and temporality.

Surprised by how well my wife has taken to Battle Line: Medieval. Cooperative game are more her speed, but she thinks games like this and Riftforce are tolerable because they’re quick enough losing doesn’t feel as miserable. She won our last two games handily by playing more aggressively and taking locations when the best I could do is tie. Classic Knizia’s: a very solid design with a lot to think about despite a minimal ruleset.

Taught a friend Claustrophobia. The word that came to mind during play was ‘clean.’ Kind of a surprise considering it’s absolutely a dungeon crawler with all the room types and keywords and unique cards, but it moves. Turns just click along. Game was pretty well over by the end of the second turn. His troglodytes absolutely swarmed me on a low defense turn, and that put me too far behind to threaten much of anything for the rest of the game.

The game shelves are creaking after COVID and aftermath, then old group disbanded, then building work on house kept games off the table for a long time but didn't stop me picking up new ones (I have been selling as well but the shelves are still slowly filling rather than emptying). So my answer to this was to start multiple sessions amongst the gamers I have around playing multiple campaign games - the current itinerary is:
Mondays - 5 player Betrayal Legacy
First Wednesdays - 4 player Tainted Grail
Second Wednesdays - 3 player Sword & Sorcery
Fridays two-Weekly - Gloomhaven: JotL
Sundays - Machina Arcana 3e

The problem with campaigns though is when people can't make a day you have to break from it and do filler games, and unfortunately one guy has had a bad run with his employees messing him around and his own health and another also has had employee issues and, of course, they are always different weeks. The other challenging part is keeping all the different rules separate in my head (usually requires a refresh the day before). the last 10 days has been interesting with two sessions of Jaws of the Lion and two of Machina Arcana with their similar but differing Line of Sight rules ... but still great fun.

And there is purpose behind it all - I have already done campaigns of both Sword & Sorcery and Tainted Grail and have the follow-up games for both to play but decided to have the new guys play through the original campaigns first so they appreciated the the new ones more (plus I loved playing both games previously so had no problem playing thru them again). And the other long-term purpose is getting enough of them used to both a high narrative game (Tainted Grail) and a pretty complex tactical combat games (Sword & Sorcery) so they won't fall out of their chairs when I pull out the monstrosity called Aeon Trespass: Odyssey

Wow, you've got a lot of patience and ability for campaign games. My feeble group is down to playing maybe 5 times a YEAR at this point. It's to the point where I often don't even bother sending invites.

I've got the time on my hands and space to host these days, and just lucky to sift through the new club members and find some who - so far - are happy playing the weight/type of campaign games I have (helps that they all have active rpg backgrounds so nothing new to them).

Rommel in the Desert in all its 1982 glory. I am not a big wargame guy personally, but I tend to like -- or at least appreciate -- this Columbia block games for managing to do a lot with a little. This has a very surprising amount of luck though -- you need to play cards in order to do things, and to keep your opponent guessing, some cards are dummy cards that don't let you do anything, other than possibly bluff your opponent into thinking that you have a plan. At one point I ended up with a hand of 10 dummies and two actual cards, and was mostly helpless as the Brits drove around me, attacked me again and again, until I was cut off from my supply lines and half my forces died immediately.

It has some interesting things but could really use a second edition and a designer who isn't immersed in wargame tropes for their own sake. 2/5.

I got to play 5-player El Grande this weekend. I haven't played El Grande in ages, and that game still holds up. Especially with 5, where it is chaotic and mean. I got the 8-point mobile score board out in the first round, and managed to hang onto that damn thing for the entire game. Everybody else was fussing about trying to get bonus points from the king, or from their Grande, and I just kept banging out that 8-point region. I ended up winning by about 10. Such a great game.

Then we played 4-player Railways of the World (eastern US map), which is never going to be my favorite game. I don't do well with games that force you to go into debt. My brain just doesn't work that way, even in a board game context. We ended up with a runaway leader, and it definitely was not me. My friend upgraded his engine to level 8, then just started cranking out 8-link shipments in all those closely-packed cities in the northeast corner. I think he only built like 20 tracks in the entire game, and just blew the rest of us away. I ended up in a distant 3rd place, only 3 points behind 2nd place. I missed out on my 6-point end-game goal (play the most track tiles) by ONE STUPID TILE. It's an okay game, I enjoy the track-laying aspect of it, but it ends up being pretty dry and mechanical.

Friend from out of town came up for the three-day weekend.

Friday night:

Daybreak, 2p. Lost pretty badly. Still enjoying this; there's a nice mix of group talk, but also head-down optimization on your board that prevents quarterbacking. 8/10.

13 Days. I won as the US. Reaffirms my view of this as the best of the CDGs -- manageable playtime, still tense, avoids the TS traps of needing to know the decks so you don't accidentally lose. 10/10.

Horrified: World of Monsters. Haven't played any others in the series. This one has Cthulhu prominently on the box, and then bizarrely adds a Yeti, the Sphinx, and a Chinese hopping ghost. What? Anyway the gameplay seemed fine but forgettable, and it was getting late, so we abandoned it halfway. 4/10 for gameplay, 2/10 for dumb theme of random monsters that have nothing to do with each other all showing up.

Saturday:

1960: The Making of the President. I was Kennedy and lost. Not a blowout, but not especially close. I had this back in the day, when I was enthralled with Twilight Struggle, and it was disappointing. It had the "I do a thing, then you undo it" loop that has been leveled at the style of game before, but it seemed especially prevalent, so I ditched it after a few plays. I liked it better than I remembered, but it's still a game I could take or leave. I do like the theme and the (as seen through a fuzzy historical lens) quaintness of the politics of the time. 4/10.

We then went and joined some people from my normal Saturday group, after swinging by a pop-up kitchen where another friend and his wife were doing Pakistani food. Delicious, although I couldn't tell you how it's different, in practical terms, from Indian food.

Joraku, 4p. Came in dead last. First time playing this 4p instead of 3p. Very chaotic, hard to plan. Still fun. 8/10.

Art Robbery, 4p, came in third. My friend made the comment that he feels that Knizia has a closet full of fillers that he pulls out when he needs to publish something. This sure is one of them. LLAMA is still my favorite in the space, but this is fun. I like how the end of the round is controlled by the group -- do you steal from someone else and prolong it, or bring it to an end to lock down your loot? 6/10.

One guy left and we were three.

Arcs, 3p. I played this 2p last weekend for the first time. Loved it, but my opponent thought it was just okay. This time my friend hated it and wasn't having any fun, so we called it after three rounds (of a max five). My other friend liked it okay. I was out in front by 20 points or so -- having even one play under your belt gives a huge leg up on the game. Still love it but it looks like it's going to be a hard sell for the people I actually play with, ugh. Haven't introduced Leaders or Lore yet, just the base game for now. 10/10 for me, sigh.

Furnance, 3p, second place. I like this; it's a fun little auction/engine optimization game. Not amazing, but solid and has good choices and some screwage. 6/10.

Went back home and were joined by a (different) third.

Black Orchestra, 3p. We failed to kill Hitler, more's the pity. This was basically over about an hour in, but we played another hour (to the bitter end), because what are you going to do, give up and let Hitler win? This is a very good co-op, with a lot of variation with different characters you can be, that give variety in the approaches that are viable and how you'll go around trying to bring down the Reich. There's some highly questionable whitewashing of some of the resistance people you can be -- many of them were (historically) trying to take down Hitler, but only because they thought he was a bad leader, not due to any moral qualms with his policies. But there are a few heroic figures -- Bonhoffer and Sophie Scholl, among others. 8/10 for the gameplay; I can mostly ignore the revisionism but it's unfortunate.

Sunday:

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, 2p. My friend and I play this every time we get together. He started keeping a log of victories. We do the "play two games, switching sides" and using number of living characters as a tie-breaker. This time I started as Free Peoples, and squeaked out a victory with only Frodo and Legolas left. Then he played FP and just wrecked me -- Gandalf was a whirlwind of Maiar terror. I screwed up by trying to be sneaky with the Balrog not being in Mordor, it didn't work, and it went downhill from there. He won with six characters left. 10/10.

Trick Shot, 2p. Cartoon hockey, runs a little long if you play all three periods. Fun though. I lost 3-1. 8/10.

A friend came over.

Beast, 3p. I was the beast, they were hunters. They kind of screwed up (or maybe we did) by having the seer character sit to my right instead of my left. This meant she could discern my location, but then I could move before the other hunter could do anything. I managed to win but it would have been harder had they sat in the opposite order. I think this is basically better than Fury of Dracula in every way. 8/10, knocked a bit for a bunch of unclear rules.

Return to Dark Tower, 3p. My friend is a total nerd for this game; loved it as a kid and went all-in on the Kickstarter a few years ago. Has everything painted. It's fine but kind of goofy and overwrought. I don't have nostalgia for the original but I'm happy to play with him to support his nostalgia. 4/10.

Daybreak, 3p. US, Europe, Majority World. Again lost horribly. Still 8/10. I'll win eventually.

War Story: Occupied France, 3p but only technically. You are a team of British special agents, infiltrating WWII France to make contact with, and aid, the French Resistance. It is very similar in feel to Legacy of Dragonholt -- glorified CYOA, the group is making decisions as a team. It is better than LoD; there's more gamey elements -- tactical puzzles where you have to decide how you're going to assault an enemy hideout, or defend your hideout against an enemy assault. There's some errors in the paragraphs though, unfortunately, so maybe wait for the second printing/edition. 8/10.

Monday:

Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War. Fancy Stratego. The legal moves for your pieces are printed on the back, so your opponent can see them but you can't. You make a move, then your opponent tells you if it's legal or not. If not, then you replace your piece and lose your turn. There's a dry-erase board where you can track what you've tried, and by process of elimination figure out what your pieces can do. The goal is to pick up a briefcase from the center of the board and then escape through enemy lines. I managed to win, as I figured out what a piece could do, and then saw that he couldn't stop me if I went on a particular path. 4/10, it's fine.

Ghostbusters: The Board Game, 3p (my kid joined). Very generic co-op, seemingly designed to extract maximum Kickstarter dollars out of middle-aged nerds who loved the movie as kids. We played the first scenario and it was trivial. Supposedly they get harder but I can't imagine sticking with it enough to find out. 4/10.

Endeavor: Deep Sea, 2p. I lost. I like the series a lot; I don't think this is quite as good as Endeavor: Age of Sail, but I love the theme of deep sea exploration and science. The tweaks to the system help reinforce the theme in some unobtrusive and clever ways, and the dynamic maps make me think it will scale very smoothly with more players. Like the earlier game, there's a whole bunch of very small expansions that seem mostly not worth it. 8/10.

A good weekend.

Am also a fan of 13 Days. I think it has that excellent balance between piling in for short-term points vs long-term threats to the DefCon level that makes it really intriguing. Have you tried Watergate? It's so similar in its approach that I'm surprised it wasn't designed by the same people.

I'm an Arcs fan, too. I think it has a lot going for it right now and even more to explore. Unfortunately, the opinion on the Discord (mostly Gary Sax, Not Sure, and Sornars) is resoundingly negative.

I didn't like LOTR: The Confrontation enough to keep it around (I was also lacking a regular 2-player partner at the time that I traded it.) It felt too snowbally to me. In contrast, I really like Confusion and still own it. Might just be my attachment to Cold War thematics over LOTR.

I like the sound of both Beast and War Story (never heard of the latter, saw a fair amount of talk about the former complaining about the same rules issues as well as overproduction, post-KS.) But I really don't need anything else at the moment.

Jackwraith wrote: Am also a fan of 13 Days. I think it has that excellent balance between piling in for short-term points vs long-term threats to the DefCon level that makes it really intriguing.

Great point; I think the DefCon tracks are what introduces enough asymmetry to prevent the "you do a thing, then I undo it" loop in TS and similar games. I might want to undo your thing, but it might make me lose on an Agenda card!

Have you tried Watergate? It's so similar in its approach that I'm surprised it wasn't designed by the same people.

I played one game on BGA but didn't bother to learn the rules -- CAFO, as my group calls it; "click around and find out." Since the website enforces the rules, sometimes you can learn a game without needing to invest time in reading the rulebook. Watergate wasn't one of those and so I played randomly, then the game ended. But if it's close to 13 Days then that's worth checking out again.

I'm an Arcs fan, too. I think it has a lot going for it right now and even more to explore. Unfortunately, the opinion on the Discord (mostly Gary Sax, Not Sure, and Sornars) is resoundingly negative.

IIRC that's mostly because of the amount of info on cards, which is both important to know, printed in a small font, and often on the other side of the table? If that's correct, then it hasn't bothered me yet. It seems that the powers from court cards are mostly minor, so I only have to keep track of one or two. And those tend to get stolen in raids.

I like the sound of both Beast and War Story (never heard of the latter, saw a fair amount of talk about the former complaining about the same rules issues as well as overproduction, post-KS.) But I really don't need anything else at the moment.

This is my second play of Beast (first time was as a hunter) and first time teaching. There's definitely some rough edges in the rules but some of that is due to organization. The core gameplay loop is really good, so I think a good player aid would close the gap.

Forgot to list a game above:

Knaves, a truly stellar 3p trick-taker. It has all the essential elements, wrapped up in a very streamlined package -- get tricks, but don't take the bad cards (the jacks), must follow suit, there's a trump suit. There's also no bidding, which makes it ideal to teach trick-taking to new players. And there's tons of screwage; always nice. At 3p I'm torn between this and The King Is Dead as the best-in-class choice.

Jackwraith wrote: I'm an Arcs fan, too. I think it has a lot going for it right now and even more to explore. Unfortunately, the opinion on the Discord (mostly Gary Sax, Not Sure, and Sornars) is resoundingly negative.

All my opinions of this are on here in the thread on these forums, fwiw, it's just that people don't read the game specific threads here mostly.

dysjunct wrote: IIRC that's mostly because of the amount of info on cards, which is both important to know, printed in a small font, and often on the other side of the table? If that's correct, then it hasn't bothered me yet. It seems that the powers from court cards are mostly minor, so I only have to keep track of one or two. And those tend to get stolen in raids.

Not entirely. They've all had various issues with the way the game plays out and the requisite motivation to keep going in longer sessions. I think the complaints are valid, as it is kind of an odd beast. I just haven't had the same negative experiences that they have so far. I will say that the number of abilities to keep track of when you go full Legends and Lore does get fairly daunting. But I came to a realization that trying to encapsulate all of that in some kind of strategic or tactical approach is more effort than it's worth, so I tend to play by just rolling with the punches and trying to make other people nervous about what I'm setting up, rather than trying to keep track of all of the coups that others could make with this or that Court card. Haven't yet played a campaign, either, which adds a whole 'nother layer of stuff to remember and changes to the game and so on.