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

Shellhead, if I'm understanding your card correctly, that dice slot you're talking about means when taking a test that matches one of the colors/keywords in the box, you can place a die result there and it heals one health.

A sword, for instance, may have a box with a red action saying "Cleave" in it. This means you can place one die there when rolling a Cleave action (the Cleave action would be on the location card or another card in your inventory).

Had Game Night on Sunday. Wifey made a fuckton of chili for everyone, then she drew a level of exhaustion and needed a long rest. Kelly, Nate, and The Boy (who's been going through a lot recently and needed something to cheer him up) joined us.

First game we played was Munchkin: Cthulhu. Yes, yes... Stop booing. It was simple and fun. I was nowhere near in contention of winning. Nate's first draw was .... CTHULHU. We all laughed and he died... Then later, he drew Ozathoth... and died again. Kelly was a cultist from the beginning, then Nate joined her in culty shenanigans. The Boy was a Professor and did get some levels from running away, then switched to a monster whacker. Everybody helped everyone, except me. Kelly is a troll when it comes to me and she had to explain that to The Boy that it's not that she doesn't like me, it's just for fun. I also seconded that, but did state that there was one time where she and my wife went too far. Since then, they've dialed it back. Nate then had a good run against some low level monsters and ended up winning.

The Boy gained a level of exhaustion and also needed a long rest, so he retired to his room. The next game we played was Xenoshyft: Onslaught with the Hive and Game Night Kit #1 expansions. Nate played the Barracks. Kelly played the Tech Lab. I was Med Bay. Wave 1, we lost 6 points to the 45HP base. I think we averaged 2 Boss monsters a wave, sometimes more. When those popped up, we went ham with the grenades, pulsar bombs, and gun emplacements. I was med kitting and mediking every soldier available. The game was fricking tense, mainly because we kept entertaining worse case scenarios of the bugs that could possibly pop up.

In the end, it was just us psyching ourselves out. We demolished the opposition and the base ended up having 33 HP remaining. By far the best run of the game we've had.

charlest wrote: Shellhead, if I'm understanding your card correctly, that dice slot you're talking about means when taking a test that matches one of the colors/keywords in the box, you can place a die result there and it heals one health.

A sword, for instance, may have a box with a red action saying "Cleave" in it. This means you can place one die there when rolling a Cleave action (the Cleave action would be on the location card or another card in your inventory).

The Frying Pan card shows a rainbow bar in the upper left corner, similar to the ones on the lower right corner of the vantage cards, but it is smaller, and there were four bars, three red and one orange. One of the red ones said Fishing, another said Hunting. Each bar had the matching color skill symbol before the verb, and immediately right of the color bar was a single arrow pointing to a full-sized heart symbol. Not a dice box slot with a heart, just a heart symbol. I couldn't find a comparable example in the rules, but it seemed clear that I would select one of those four actions in order to gain back a point of health. But there was no matching entry in either the red or orange books. And it later seemed plausible that the skill symbol meant that I had to pay a skill token of that color to do the action.

I will attempt to post a scan when I get home, but I find it extremely difficult to post scans on this forum. Maybe I will upload the picture to a site where I store photos and post a link to that photo.

Ah, in that case I would guess that whenever you perform one of those listed actions you also gain a health. To initiate the action, you'd have to have another card that allowed you to do it

I haven't seen this card and that function sounds unique, but I imagine it provides a bonus when cooking or something similar. There are lots of similarly thematic linked abilities in the game, even if I haven't seen one with those actions listed like that outside a die slot.

I'm positive it doesn't function how you think it does, as the game just doesn't work that way.

I see what you're saying and it makes sense. It sounds like I need to already be in the process of performing one of those four actions, like Hunting, for example, and I would receive one Health in addition to other benefits specified in the red book (in this case) for that entry #. The number for the Frying Pan card doesn't lead to an entry in the red book because I would be using the number of the card that allowed Hunting.

It still annoys me that the medkit card doesn't allow for any healing or even a slot to place a health die result.

Thematically that makes sense and is consistent with the game's logic---it's giving you an extra bonus to taking actions that would potentially involve cooking is my read, though I havent' seen a card templated that way yet.

Just to come back to the game, after cleaning up an Uprising game---I don't need to talk more about that, it just fucking absolutely owns, moved it up to a 10---I got Vantage out. As a solo game I want to echo something Charlest has been talking about. For me it's a perfect little vignette generator solo, even if I never really get far in accomplishing anything. You set the "health" to 3 or 4, then start a game. Two games in like maybe 40 minutes later I had a few fun little jags with the marine and I just quit out when I got down to 0 and was totally happy with it. Saw some weird cards, saw a location again from like my first game, then I was done.

By contrast, multiplayer I feel like I'm trying to accomplish the mission and get to the bottom of something. But in single player I feel no real need to get to anywhere or end at a proper "ending." It's a purely internal thing but it's a distinct difference.

Played Fellowship of the Ring Trick-taking Game. I like trick-takers and that's why I enjoyed The Crew, since learning to play cooperatively in both versions was a good test of reading other people (as in poker) and could keep you going for a while. Fellowship borrows more from the first version (Mission to Planet 9) in that it's a series of tasks of mounting difficulty that don't vary in the chapters. However, the inclusion of new characters whose goals have to be achieved and then the ability to bring those characters back as options in later chapters creates both an interesting variation in gameplay, as well as embeds you moreso in the progression of an actual story, as opposed to the basic frameworks (missions) that were present in The Crew. At the same time, it felt a little less dynamic than that game, in that a certain rhythm inhabits most plays of The Crew that felt more awkward here. It might've been the fact that it was a first play. We made it to Chapter 9 (The Black Riders on the hill), which took a couple hours to play through all 9. I'm definitely interested in finishing the story, but I can't say that I was blown away by it.

Frying Pan: www.flickr.com/photos/152016303@N05/5476...n/dateposted-public/

Yes, when you perform a test with those listed keywords, you gain a Health. The die slot is nice too, effectively allowing you to use it as a weapon.

I haven't had time for much outside of my program, but I'm still hobbying for GW's Warcry almost every day. There had been radio silence since last September and a lot of folks thought it might go the way of Mordheim, but then out of nowhere, GW released a massive FAQ this month with the promise of more content when the Chaos Dwarfs are officially released this September.

I bought a copy of Warangel from Nate Hayden because I've wanted it for over a decade; otherwise, I just don't have the time to cut through all the noise of board game releases.

God, it is taking a lot of my willpower not to buy Warangel when he sends out those email blasts. I 100% will never, ever get it played. It's just…there is such a stron drive to honor 12 year-old me by buying things that would have made my life feel complete back when I had the time and friend group to play a game like that as much as it deserves.

I felt this exact way about the Duel of Ages reboot game.

Cambyses wrote: God, it is taking a lot of my willpower not to buy Warangel when he sends out those email blasts. I 100% will never, ever get it played. It's just…there is such a stron drive to honor 12 year-old me by buying things that would have made my life feel complete back when I had the time and friend group to play a game like that as much as it deserves.

You and me both.

I recently made a list of all my games, then marked off the ones my group have never played before. 101 is the total. Some are short, nearly all the the others are medium to long, and a handful are LONG + (Titan, Magic Realm, etc., Nemesis: Retaliation).

I've put myself on a moratorium until this imbalance is corrected. We average a bit of 2-3 games per Game Day. So, I'm looking at 3 years to get through the backlog.

Back to Elder Sign. We added in the Unseen Forces stuff, not because we really needed the variety, but because we were thinking about ramping up the difficulty and its instructions declare that adding all of the base game's Mythos cards to the Unseen Forces ones (i.e. not using one stack or the other) is a way to make it tougher on the investigators. Not sure I quite believe that. We decided to take on Mother Hydra, who drains you of either 1 Stamina or 1 Sanity every time you take a trophy. We had Jenny Barnes (Can discard a Common item, Clue token, or Spell to add the red and yellow dice to her pool) and Bob (Leeroy!) Jenkins (Every time he gains a Common item, he gains a second one.) We weren't especially threatened by the Doom track, as I don't think she ever got past 5 as we never drew any of the Mythos cards that simply adds two tokens to it, but her constant ability did slow us down some, such that we had to take a turn to sit in the First Aid station at least once each. One change to the Entrance rules is that you can't turn in trophies to gain Elder Signs anymore, either, which I think is a positive change, but you can also buy more than one item at the Souvenir Shop. So, it took us a bit of doing, but we kinda rolled through it and decided to play again.

We didn't shuffle any of the decks, especially the Adventure and Mythos decks, and kept playing through them because, again, I was thinking about that whole 'card frequency' thing. This time we took on Abhoth, who simply adds another of his Children at midnight. If you ever get to a point where you have to add a Child and there are none left to place (there's three of them), you lose. Each of them is a resource drainer (-2 Sanity or Stamina) and also Curses you for defeating them. (They're not trophies, either, so they just go back to Abhoth.) Being Cursed means you include the Curse die with your rolls and it makes you discard all of the symbols that match it when it's rolled which, y'know, really sucks so we made some effort to not try Adventures while being Cursed, the best way to remove that being to be Blessed. Being Blessed, in turn, gives you the Blessed die which is just like an extra green die. We had Agnes Baker, who lets you change a die to any face if you secure it on a Spell card and Mark Harrigan,, who can complete tasks in any order, even if they have an arrow. Mark only starts with 3 Sanity, though, and duly went insane under the heavy Sanity cost of failing Adventures that we drew from the deck. Replacing Mark was Patrice Hathaway, who gets an extra Clue token whenever she gains them and allows other Investigators to use her Clues. We had two Children of Abhoth on the board more than once, but never got to the limit of three before knocking one out (one time with the Map of the Museum, which is a really cool item (lets you discard an Adventure and all monsters on it.)) Abhoth was three Doom tokens away from waking up before we closed him out.

So, while we did lose an Investigator and the Doom track was becoming noticeable, we still felt like there's a little more challenge needed somewhere. Our turns do have tension and there is dismay when we lose what seemed like a shoe-in success on an Adventure, so it is fun. But next time we're going to use Gates of Arkham and see if what many people on BGG says, that it "completes" the game means that it does so by making it even more challenging. I keep feeling like the clock striking midnight should be even more ominous than it is but I can't think of a way to do that without overwhelming the players in higher count games.

Played 878 Vikings tonight for the first time in... I really don't know how long. Not since the 9th century, maybe? Anyway, there were two kinda experienced but hadn't played a in while people and two newbies, so we split them up and I took the Highcarls alongside the Thegns and the other semi-veteran took the Berzerkers alongside the Norsemen. We did decently in stymieing the Heathen Army in round 1 and then played Saxon Navy at the start of round 2 (Pick 6 coastal shires. The Vikings cannot move into those shires this turn.) But the Thegns constantly ran away in battle, which let the enemy make serious progress and then they played the shrine card in Mercia which wipes out any English forces there and lets the adjacent Vikings at the other shrine move in. That put them at 13 control markers in the middle of round 3, needing 14 to win. But they had stretched themselves thin to try to go for the win and when all those Thegns came flowing in off the Fled space, the map totally turned around. We played Religious Conversion to swipe a space in East Anglia that they thought was safe and then slammed through Wessex and Mercia, reducing them to 5 control markers. By round 5, all 4 Treaty cards were out, which meant that the Vikings would win with 9 or more markers on the board and we would win if there were less than 9. In the last 6 battles we fought, the Thegns didn't score a single hit and 2/3 of their forces ran away, which basically means we crumbled before the dice, rather than the opponent (Alfred had some bad dice (and Thegns running away!) and ground to a halt in Scotland with a single Housecarl in his army) and they secured the win at 10 control markers.

A great game. I traded for an edition with all of the little expansions, but I'm not sure they'll ever get used, since we just don't play it often enough. Now that I'm a regular at the Tuesday gathering, maybe that will change.

My partner suggested Vantage last night, so we played for like an hour and a half. I ended up getting beat up in an alien fight club and lost my last health. She did some more interesting stuff in the fire part of the world. Had a good time, saw new stuff. She has specifically been working on just ending the game and seeing it as a vignette and not feeling like she has to see every mission or thread through and just let the game tell her when it's over. The game lets you continue mechanically but I think its suggestion to just end is a good one unless you're quite close to going over the top on a mission.

I don't know what you even do with this thing at like a proper normal game night situation where people who are mainly game night friends come together.