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

Hotseat -- have you tried the Director's Cut rules for ALIEN? Supposedly they make the game more challenging.

No, but my friend (the owner of the game) mentioned there were some house rules out there.

Played a "test" game of Townsfolk Tussle to see if we want to try it for the weekly campaign game group. It's a 1920's cartoon (think long noodly armed) themed characters in a game which my friend called it Kingdom Death Monster Light with a quirky theme. Never played KDM. Anyway you move around the board, interact with objects, attack the baddies that appear. You can improve your gear, health, movement etc and upgrade your weapons.

It was fine. Good enough we'll give it a try to see how it goes. My friend is a big kickstarter and he wants to get it played. We have just finished all 3 Imperial Assault campaigns from the FFG app so trying something else for a change. IA was such a great time. I highly recommend it.

My friend bought all of Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps so we checked that out tonight, doing the first mission, which is just to rescue Newt.

Some component comments: The cards are very nice. Good stock, glossy. The minis are a mystery... why did they choose to make people assemble them from sprues? Most of them are not so complex to require such a move. At any rate, they are fine, but nowhere near the quality you would expect when faced with sprues.

The boards themselves are nice.

The game's chief mechanic is managing a deck of cards that acts like the team's resources. Time, ammo, etc. You peel cards off this deck to attack, or sometimes game effects make you take cards from the deck. Certain actions can restore cards, and you will need it. Many times we found ourselves forced to Rest just so we could have enough cards to use the flamethrower or the smart gun. Speaking of which... based on one mission, NEVER play without a flamethrower. That weapon kicks much xeno ass.

We rescued Newt pretty handily, but the extraction process is where things go wrong in mission 1. One of the xeno spawn points is right by the exit, and we were constantly delayed in order to clear out aliens. Eventually we got everyone out safely. My opinion after one game is that this is a fine game, it will not change the world, but I'm happy to play it again.

Next we did a 2 player game of Worms: The board game, which I got from Kickstarter. This game is a lot of fun, I have yet to play with more than 2. It is absolutely a "more the merrier" game. It plays up to 6. My friend won after I threw a cluster bomb that killed literally every worm on the board other than one, which was his. Good stuff.

hotseatgames wrote: Speaking of which... based on one mission, NEVER play without a flamethrower. That weapon kicks much xeno ass.

Memories of Space Hulk...

Sat down with Dave Townsend, the designer of Wings For The Baron, and played a game. This was second publish, the Victory Point Games edition, but he had a copy of the original edition, and that was cool to look at too.

Just a great guy. Super easy-going and patiently answered my several hundred questions about designing the game that you have deep inside you trying to get out.

Sagrilarus wrote: Sat down with Dave Townsend, the designer of Wings For The Baron, and played a game. This was second publish, the Victory Point Games edition, but he had a copy of the original edition, and that was cool to look at too.

Just a great guy. Super easy-going and patiently answered my several hundred questions about designing the game that you have deep inside you trying to get out.

Sag buried the lead here, but we did a recording for the show with Dave. I expect it to drop in January as an early episode in Season 3.

Necromolds: Monster Battles is the Saturday morning cartoon of board games. From the bright secondary colors of the Spell Clay to the hordes of molded Mudmumps and Batadactyls to the simple delight of smashing a defeated Veggitoad and leaving behind a mound of clay marked by your lobster Caster Ring, the feeling is the same as watching an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles between spoonfuls of Cap'n Crunch. The ruleset that limits a turn of actions to what you roll on four command dice; reduces measuring movement and range to the short, medium and long sides of a triangle; and eschews health points for immediately flattening any monster that rolls fewer defense than attack doesn't take much more brain power than aforementioned episode of Turtles either.

It's not a tactically deep game. A single lucky roll can swing a round fast, but that's not the point. It's not a game of careful positioning and hours of list building. It's a game of smashing. The rules get you there as fast as possible.

Before today I would say there were three perfect games, games that achieve every one of their goals. Necromolds might earn a place among them. The unity of aesthetics and rules and physical presentation in achieving the feeling of playing on the carpet with your action figures can't be topped.

I am planning to finally do a big game of Firefly with that monstrous 10th anniversary set, on New Year's Day. Past experience for hosting games on that day indicates that my turnout could be anywhere from 1 (just me) to 9 players. Don't know if making the invite for a specific game will hurt turnout. Anyway, to refresh my memory of the rules, I set up a four-player game to play by myself. Set up takes a while, so I only had time for two turns per ship last night.

Firefly has a bad reputation for being too long, but it's definitely pleasant as a solitaire game without time pressure. Aside from vanilla delivery jobs, each of the four actions (Buy, Fly, Work, Deal) offers a mixture of both choice and chance. For example, if you are Buying, you get to look at all the cards in the discard pile for that location, and pick up to three of them to consider. If you picked less than three, you get to draw one or more cards from that deck to consider. Of the three cards that you consider, you can buy up to two of them. So you choose what to consider from the discard pile and what to buy, and the cards you draw are left to chance.

The challenge of playing with four or more players will be to minimize downtime. So I am going to play this solitaire game slowly and look up every relevant rule as I go, until I have all the rules down. Then I am going to make cheatsheet cards for each of the four actions, one set each for up to ten players. Third, I am going to put all the contact and supply decks at a separate card table, and encourage people to look at the discard piles that interest them whenever it isn't their turn, in order to speed up all Buy and Deal actions.

And finally, I have three dinosaur tokens, so we can break up a big game into two or three separate turn rotations that are all using the same board state. For example, if we have six players, A, B, and C can take turns using one dinosaur token, while D, E and F can take turns using a different dinosaur token. But all six players will competing in the same game, so B might buy a sniper rifle from a discard pile that D had his eye on. And F might attempt a piracy job against C's ship.

On a previous solitaire play with this set, I noticed that the new Councilor captain has a special ability that is somewhat broken. She can borrow an item from any discard pile for a turn, then put it back in the discard pile. The only way to prevent her from exploiting an expensive, high-quality item repeatedly is to buy the item. Might be good to restrict her ability to only supply points within a certain radius of her ship.

Reading that post reminds me just how much of a pain in the ass it can be to host a game night for a complex game.

Went up to Cleveland to spend the weekend with some friends from college and had my first decent amount of board games played since August. Some of my more casual gamer friends showed up early so we started with Dodos Riding Dinos. It's a silly little game that is basically a physical version of Mario Kart where you have it to toss any items you get in weird, awkward ways to try and hit other racers. Bought and played it back at GenCon and it is once again a big hit. I am running board game event this week at my public library, and this will definitely come out for that. Next, we had a couple rounds of So Clover which was new to me. Any game where I have to twist my brain to tie very disparate words together is always a treat. I will now always think of restaurants as a "Feed House!" To end the night, I taught my group Cosmic Encounter, and it went very well. I mean, I got my ass beat in a massive dogpile when my destiny color was 3 of the 4 last ones, but everyone immediately got into the habit of taking advantage of their powers, backstabbing, haggling, and negotiating. I love the game, but I know it isn't for everyone, but thankfully it is for this group. Hopefully, I can get this played with them enough that I can start incorporating some of the more complex powers or the other variants like moons that I haven't tried yet. Finally, the next morning I got a game of Dwellings of Eldervale in. I have taught the game almost 2 dozen times thanks to running GenCon demos, but this was the first time I actually participated in a full game myself. It does not surpass Argent for my favorite worker placement, but I do enjoy the snappy turns, overall variety of options to strive towards, and the little bit of dice chucking chaos where a small force can overcome immense odds to lead to memorable moments. It was all a great time for me and everyone else, plus I got gifted a late birthday gift of Quantum! Another holy grail obtained.

Played Acquire yet again, just because it's so old school. It just delivers. Another memorable game, because one new(ish) player tried to stall the inevitable - he flat out refused to play any tile that helped other players more than himself. This of course made for a game that was too long, considerably slowed overall progress as well as the cash flow and didn't change the outcome. He was in agony for most of the time, so at least we had some fun.
Finished the evening off with a new (to me) filler game called Knarr. You do set collection for half an hour and there is always options and possibilities to advance. Basically it's just a race for victory points with colours and symbols, but it there is a lot of decisions and action and it's really quick. The art is nice to look at, lots of viking ships and norse people, that helps even when there is no connection between the theme and the game. Definitely want to play that one again. If you are into card games, maybe check it out.

Acquire is an impressive game. One page of rules and a theme that is just barely there, but such a solid game. I don't even like most games like Acquire, but my dad was a huge fan so we played at least once a month for most of my childhood. I probably wouldn't even be posting here if not for Acquire.

My Firefly event is three weeks from now. So far, I have three definite players (counting myself) and five maybes. That is going to be a dramatically different experience depending on whether I have 3 or 8 players. We are going to play for six hours (minus teaching time for new players), so an 8-player game might only allow players about 6 turns each if we just played by the rules. If we split the game into two groups of four players each sharing a turn token but all using the same board, people might get 12 turns, which is not as terrible. Maybe if we are lucky, it will only be a 5-player game.

My two definite players are an old friend that I lost touch with after high school, and his girlfriend. They both are very light on modern board game experience, but the girlfriend is a Firefly fan. So far, the longest game that they have played with me has only run about 2.5 hours. Hope they handle a six-hour game well. They are both doctors, so I am confident that they can handle the rules. The maybes include one big fan of the board game and four people who have played once or twice.

My son and two neighbors have kinda started a campaign group separate from my normal gaming group. We did several months of Imperial Assault over the summer, Mandalorian Adventures for a couple sessions until we could decide on what to try next. MA was ok. We didn't open any of the envelopes with new content yet. My son and I might try it over the winter with just us two.

Anyway, we started playing Townhouse Tussle. Think 20-30s cartoonish heroes with long noodlely arms and legs or even Cuphead vibes. Anyway it's a boss battler where you go around the board cooperatively and battle. You can interact with the terrain, and level up. I enjoy the story arc it tells and the bosses so far have been unique. This will probably take us through February as we play once a week.

Played a 4-player game of Dreadball on Saturday, which I didn't even know was a thing, since the three times before that I'd played had all been 1v1. It was the humans vs the dwarves vs the robots vs the giant, honorable lizards (Tectonics; me.) In contrast to the 1v1 game, not only are there goals in each team's sector (which can score you 1, 2, or 3 points, like usual) but there's also a goal in the center of the field which only scores 1 and in which you run the risk of getting clocked by the launched ball after you score. There are also two balls in play during the game, so everyone isn't clustering around one of them. Most of the balls ended up being launched toward me, so I ended up getting an early 3-0 lead. Instead of the zero-sum scoring of the 1v1 game (where when the other player scores it reduces your point total, if you have one), you only lose points if they score on your goal, not the center one. But my lead didn't endure and I ended up dead last, 4-3-3-0 when the 7th round was over. Even though the Tectonics have no strikers, meaning they have only the largely disdained jacks as scoring units, their skill tests are all on 3+, so I did decently with them and would play them again.

Then we played a game of Magical Athlete. The second race was the longest one I've ever run, as it was the Siren, Centaur (me), Pirate, and Demon. By default, everyone was rolling -1 because of the Demon, I was kicking everyone back as the Centaur, the Siren would also drag everyone back (and occasionally forward), and the Pirate would grab anyone who actually managed to separate themselves from the group. It was this awkward gaggle staggering toward the finish line, but the Pirate and I did finally manage to win. In the end, I snuck into second place on the last race with the Druid and came away as the overall winner, 9-8-8-7.

On Sunday with a different group, we started with a 3-player round of the DC deckbuilder, Villain version, while we waited for others to arrive. I played Black Manta vs Bizarro and Black Adam. Manta's ability to put bought cards at the bottom of your deck, rather than discard pile, came in really handy, as I knew that I'd be able to use new cards much sooner and with some knowledge of when they'd be arriving. I ended up creating a really good cycle of destroying cards (much easier than in the regular hero version) and also snagged four(!) locations that gave me bonuses for playing heroes, villains, and equipment, as well as being able to destroy Punches in my deck for VPs. I won handily, 76-52-39.

Then our latecomers showed up, so we played a 5-player Cthulhu Wars. Two of them had only played once before, so we stuck with the standard map. I let them choose whatever factions they wanted, though, and we ended up with the most passive/non-combat collection of factions ever: Opener vs Bubastis vs Demon Sultan vs Ancients vs Tcho-Tcho (me.) I played Leng Tribe to try to get some combat going but, other than Opener and some brief flurries by the Cats to get position on the board, not a lot of fighting happened. The board was almost literally covered in plastic. I had a slight lead four rounds in, at 19, since people were more willing to pay me Doom than lose any themselves. Finally, I did the evil thing with Fulmination, diving in on Opener in the Arctic, with two Protos and a 9-strength Ubbo-Sathla. Four casualties later, including Ubbo, I'd drawn six Doom in Elder signs to go with the 5 I had already to take the win at precisely 30 points.

Then we tried a round of Cthulhu: Death May Die, since the hosts owned a copy that they hadn't cracked open yet. We played Episode 1 with Hastur and had The Kid, Rasputin, Fatima, Ian, and Adam. We made pretty short work of disrupting the Ritual, getting Hastur out by the time he'd made 3 steps on the track and then largely demolishing him over a few attacks, but also almost running out of Yellow Sign tokens, which were going to wreck two of us if we hadn't finished him off.