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

Last night was the debut of Nemesis: Retaliation, which my friend purchased at great expense. He also went in for the acrylic token set, and they are quite nice, although the images on the Intruder tokens could be bigger in most cases. He also got the neoprene mat which is definitely not a requirement but did provide some convenience.

I own the first two Nemesis games, and shrugged this one off immediately as "something I don't need". At that point my completionist friend jumped in and bought it for himself, even though I told him many times not to do it since he was quite on the fence. He did it anyway.

Preamble over, so how is the actual game? I'll start by saying it's quite different from the previous two games, which admittedly were very similar to each other. This has refined a lot of rules, but most importantly has empowered the players to actually fight back. If the first games are survival horror, this one is more action.

Intruders spawn frequently, but dealing with them is far easier than before. You can even blast bunches of them in corridors all at once. In this game, intruders count corridors as spaces but players do not. You can also secure corridors so that they will never produce noise again, which is great. In fact, our mission in this game (you draw a random mission at the start, of which there are several) was to secure a complete path between the landing zone (where you start) and a life support room somewhere in the base.

Backstabbing and being out for yourself was a prominent feature of the earlier games, but that aspect seems like it has been toned down quite a bit for Retaliation. There are certainly opportunities for fuckery, but at least in our game it seemed much simpler to go for victory by trying to be a team player.

I was the UAV operator, and I was hoping that my drone buddy would be super helpful. It wasn't, and I barely got to do anything with it. It can go pick up eggs from the nest, but with researching weaknesses no longer being in the game (! one of my favorite parts of the former games), you'd only want to do this if you had to destroy the nest or something. My goal was to make sure that the mission objective was met.

"Command" level is important in this game. Certain cards let you command lower rank characters to take an action that they get to do for free. This could hurt them or help them, so here is an opportunity to screw people if you want.

We had a 4 player game, and things were going really well until round 4 when everything turned upside down and we started getting hammered. One of us (the game owner) died, and the Queen was kicking the shit out of me until I could finally get away from her. A note on the Queen... she seems so hard to kill that it would hardly be possible. I'm guessing she would take somewhere around 30 hits.

A lander was coming to pick us up, but the path to it was dicey so we opted to try to all rest in the Hibernatorium. Two of us made it there and successfully hibernated, but the third was a bit of a ways away and was getting their ass kicked by multiple intruders. Somehow they ended up making it there and hibernating... so it was on to checking contamination. The Officer got chest bursted and died. The Bio something or other specialist was infected and died... and I miraculously lived in spite of having a larva inside me. I had also completed my mission objective and became the sole winner.

That's two game nights in a row that I've been the winner... truly a dark portent.

So.... my final thoughts after one game of Retaliation. It does not replace the first two games at all. It is a mostly different game set in the same universe and could easily not have been called Nemesis. It's far easier, mainly because you don't feel so helpless all the time. I think if someone had Lockdown and this they would have all the Nemesis they need. Nobody needs all three.

That's interesting that they opted for the "new kind of gsme" approach when the success of the previous two would seem to indicate that "more of the same" would be the way to go. You could argue that it's a way to expand the audience into those who wouldn't appreciate the rigors of the first two, but the cost would seem to indicate that they're hoping for the completionists, like your friend.

I passed on Retaliation because it seemed too similar.

Back to Elder Sign after a break of a few weeks. The complaint we had was that the game overall was simply too easy and we could just slowly (and occasionally quickly) plod our way through it and always come out victorious. The word around BGG was that Gates of Arkham "solved" that problem by making the climb much steeper via the gates mechanism. What this means is that every time a gate is opened (sometimes by the Mythos deck, sometimes by the new Event deck, sometimes by a Doom token being placed on the GOO's track, among other ways), an Outer Worlds card is drawn and a gate token is placed on it and a matching token is placed on an Adventure card somewhere out in the streets of Arkham. At that point, you can't resolve that Adventure until you first resolve the Outer World and remove the gate token. Not only that, but all Adventure cards are now placed on the board face down (except for 3 of the starting 6.) There's a color code for difficulty (green, yellow, red) but you otherwise don't know what the Adventure card will require, meaning that you'll often end up in situations that the methodical planning of the original game would prevent. Plus, many of the Adventure cards of the new deck (which you use exclusively, since you're no longer in the museum) are pretty tough (and draw Event cards, which are alternately a boon or something dire) and the eight Outer Worlds cards that it adds are brutal.

That last point is key because we decided to dive in on Atlach-Nacha and thought we were only supposed to use the new Outer Worlds, so we had to close the gates through them and were getting crushed. She jammed right through her Doom track, emerged into the world, and slaughtered us (like a GOO should...) Then we realized our mistake and I also looked at the back page of the rules to find that she was Hard difficulty, so we decided to downshift to Yibb-Tstll, who's considered Easy. Well, three Investigators from me and two from my partner later, we finally defeated him. That's more people getting devoured in a single game than we'd had in all of our other games combined. It's, uh, far more difficult and some of the cavalier methods of playing that we did in the base game and Unseen Forces just won't work here, which is what we kinda wanted. Also, moving the game out into Arkham proper meant that a lot of the familiar locations from Arkham Horror showed up, like Hibb's Roadhouse and the asylum. You also get the chance to become members of either the Silver Twilight Lodge or the Sheldon Gang, which gives you a leg up on some Adventures and greater rewards from others. The three later expansions (Omens of the Deep, Ice, and Pharaoh) also use the face down Adventure cards mechanism and alter the gate mechanism into something tied to each of their themes (south Pacific, Antarctica, Egypt) so I know that moving into those will be the level of challenge that I think works better, too. And if I have players that don't like that much rigor, I can just switch back to the different card set that is base plus Unseen. This game was a good pickup and still tons to explore (and GOOs to face.)

I have been enjoying Marvel Champions lately. I played an average of two games a week all last summer because a close friend was in town for the summer and I got him addicted to Marvel Champions a couple of years ago. But I didn't always enjoy playing, for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that my friend's play style started to get on my nerves. He almost never taps his hero to defend against an attack, and he also dislikes chumpblocking with allies. So he ends up getting hit hard for two or three turns and then going to alter ego, all game long. He is usually good at thwarting, so he can play catch up with all the scheming the villain did while he was in alter ego, but sometimes it isn't enough and we lose.

The other reason was that I didn't enjoy most of the Wave 9 hero decks that I was trying out. Black Panther (Shuri) offers more meaningful decisions than the base set Black Panther, but still felt underpowered. Silk has a clever card tucking mechanism that feels completely non-thematic. Falcon feels very thematic, but underpowered. Winter Soldier is quite effective but a bit boring and repetitious. Nick Fury is sort of cool, but his stealth suit makes the game more mathy and less exciting. Maria Hill was the only enjoyable one to play, as she commands a small fleet of helicarriers and some other neat SHIELD stuff. I don't think of these hero decks were objectively bad, but most of them needed some deckbuilding and I just haven't had the time. All that said, the new Enchanteress scenario was good, but we never even got around to trying the new Loki scenario.

I recently picked up the Cycle 10 campaign box, Civil War. Both of the new heroes are fun to play. Even though I actively dislike Hulkling's name, it's fun using his shapeshifting powers to take on different forms at different times during a game, to meet the current challenges. Tigra is even more fun because she is a terribly efficient minion whacker with the capability to draw several extra cards each turn. I haven't played the new scenarios yet, but they should be exciting because the villains are actually heroes ("leaders") with an agenda that you oppose. It all makes sense if you saw the third Captain America MCU movie, or read some of the sprawling comic book even from 2006-7. This new campaign also offers a new player vs player mode and 16 (!) new modular sets. Each side picks hero decks to play, as usual. Then each side picks a Leader (Iron Man or Captain Marvel if playing Registration team, or Captain America or Spider-Woman if playing Resistance team), then add some modular sets to make an encounter deck. Then each side tries to be the first to defeat the Leader deck created by the other side. This is potentially a very big deal, because it could lead to organized play and tournaments that wouldn't normally work for a strictly co-op game.

n815e wrote: I passed on Retaliation because it seemed too similar.

LOCKDOWN and the original game are fairly similar, mechanically. RETALIATION is different in a lot of ways, but the core mechanics make it easy to learn if you know the other ones.

Played Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein tonight. I was the only first-timer of the four that were at the table and at least one of them (my friend, Jim) described it as probably his favorite game, at the moment. So, I figured it would be something of an uphill climb playing against guys that were that experienced. It was my other friend, Kevin, who brought it and the third player was a guy I know from the gaming group, Brett, who talked disappointedly about having to play the "short" version (the Igor variant) but Kevin insisted that we wouldn't be able to finish the full game before The Corner, the once-monthly alternative to the Alehouse on Tuesday nights, ended up closing. He was right because we wrapped up the "short" game four hours later with the chairs being put on tables as we were packing up.

On the one hand, it's bog-standard worker placement. You're taking up various tasks to try to assemble body parts, put skin on them, and then activate them with the 19th-century magic known as "electricity" to score points and eventually bring the game to a close. OTOH, there are several methods of winning... but in the end all of them are still kind of the same thing. That style of game is really not suited for me. I do own a number of worker placement games and some of them are brilliant (like Tiny Epic Western) but they're brilliant because it's not just putting your dudes out and assembling your point salad while you're also assembling the corpse you're hoping to reanimate. You score points for how many parts you complete and reanimate, as well as in-game goals mostly centered around being the first to max out your Expertise, Reputation, and Humanity. You gain points for what levels you achieve in all of those, too, and can also repeatedly score for building the same body parts over and over when the electricity you use to animate them damages them beyond function, which seems kind of unthematic, but that's point salads for you.

But this game does lean into both theme and atmosphere with an Event deck that has the player being stalked by Frankenstein's monster who accuses us (accurately) of making the same mistakes as his creator. Those Events can often be detrimental in kind of a random fashion while they're directing you to the game's choose-your-own-adventure story based on the responses of whoever the first player targets as the focus of this chapter of the story. I had to relay one of those Events because I'd taken the space that gives you the first player token so that I could try to pick up the last achievable goal (maxed Reputation) and the Event instead took the first player token from me and handed it to another player. With that, said goal went to Jim, while I went on to be the first to fully animate my corpse and end the game. In the end, I finished 3 points behind Kevin with Jim one point behind me and Brett some distance behind. That Reputation goal? 10 points. So, robbed of the win by the very precise and mechanical Eurogame. (It has dice, too, so it's not completely stuffy.)

Meh. Not my thing.

I played a game of Vantage solo over the last three days or so... it was one of those magical plays of the game that really went somewhere epic and unexpected (when I got a mech suit in the first couple locations, it was on). It's a pretty brave and bold decision to make a design that I've played maybe, like 10 times and have had 2 very epic legend worthy games and like 8 very humble and fun little adventures. Your tolerance for 1-2 hour romps with a *possiblity* of pretty wild stuff is going to be an issue.

Vantage has some issues which pretty much people elsewhere have dialed into but it has so many unique characteristics enabled by its format. I think it's definitely by some distance the best low mechanics adventure game I've played.

Has been quite a slow burn with me.

Had some of the regulars over today to give a couple things one more try. The first was Molly House. So, I've only played twice before this, teaching both times, and the last time was a few months ago. Each time I've come away from it thinking: "Now I understand and next time will be more intuitive!" and I'm having that feeling right now as I sit here, but I know that when I do get back to it, that won't be the case. I just think this game is not for me. Not only does it have a vestige of The Root Problem™ where the game is probably much better with not only an experienced group but the same experienced group, but there are also still so many tiny details that are, in fact, clearly presented in the rulebook, but presented in a manner in which you have to read the whole half page every time in order to remember many of them. So, we keep tripping over things like discard to Safe or Gossip, Threat presence at Parties, and so forth so often that it's always an exercise in asking oneself when it's over: "Did I actually have fun?" Granted, I've done a teach with three (or four) complete newbies every time I've played, so maybe it'll be better playing it with people that have at least played once before. Or, for that matter, maybe it'll be better if I found a decent player aid that maps out the progression of each turn in detail so that I can be the one to keep checking that things are going right on the spot, rather than a turn later? I don't know. I love the concept of the game. I love its immersion in theme. I think it could be great with people knowledgeable enough to have a sense of strategy in it. But it's just not grabbing me after three plays, so I think it may be set for the purge pile.

Speaking of which, we played my fourth game of Fate of the Fellowship, which was everyone else's first, again. This time, as Charlie suggested, we did indeed mix up the three objectives to go along with destroying the Ring, in which a random draw produced Avenge Balin, Oathbreakers, and the title I can't remember that requires turning Minas Morgul into a haven. Those are all very military-oriented objectives, so we took teams of Boromir and Gollum, Frodo and Legolas, Gandalf and Galadriel, and Aragorn and Gimli (me.) That's two free Musters (Boromir and Gimli) and two combat machines (Gandalf and Aragorn), and two that can remove dudes without fighting (Legolas and Gollum.) The only character that wasn't extremely effective was Galadriel, although I'd argue that Gimli was kinda "less than" as well for much of the game, in the same way he was in my previous try with him. All the others did serious work and we reached 8 Hope for a while and slammed through turning Moria and Minas Morgul into havens in successive turns and had Frodo in Mordor and were just about to win with one more Frodo turn... when our Hope disappeared from the Eye being present on a Skies Darken and one dude walking into an undefended Erebor. We looked back at what we thought might have been a key mistake here or there, but couldn't see anything obvious, other than leaving one dude in Erebor but we got caught by a successive run of Rhun cards moving that one dude along. This game was probably the best of the four that I've played, but even in contrast to the others, with it only taking a couple hours (again, all experienced gamers), it still felt like it outstayed its welcome to me. It's possible that that was because we'd all kind of bent our brains on Molly House prior to. Or I'm just getting old. Maybe both.

Finally got a chance to try Escape from New York. It showed up in an Amazon sale a few months back for like $20, including the small expansions, so I snagged it since I am a diehard fan of the film as the best B-movie of all time. It's also a Kevin Wilson design and I still have fond memories of things like Descent from his FFG glory days. From 1 to 4 players play Snake, Brain, Maggie, and Cabbie trying to rescue the president (and the tape) and escape the prison on either a bridge (with a map), the police helicopter (which for some reason has landed again in Central Park), the Gullfire glider on top of the WTC, or a raft, a few of which show up on coastal spaces on the board. It's a semi-co-op, since you can all win together if you're in the same space with all of the required things and take a move action across a bridge. But, if you accomplish your two personal objectives that you're handed at the start, you can get a solo victory, leaving the others behind as long as someone has rescued the president ("President of what?")

After each player turn, the city/prison of New York ramps up the difficulty with prisoners moving around or various events happening. Plus, you have no idea where the president is and you have to find the Duke's camp, and probably the two other bosses (Slag, the big guy in the arena) and Romero, since you're not sure who will have the tape. Each player has a unique set of action cards that you spend to do things (and make noise, which causes the prison to react as noted above) and you can't get them back unless you're willing to spend a Timer card, which means the clock is running. It's very thematic and, if you're a fan of the film, I think you'll like it. It's not mind-blowing, mechanism-wise, but the question of winning together or winning solo creates a different kind of tension than typical hidden traitor games. That did play into our game, since we had dropped to the last three timer cards, any of which could've been "The End. You lost." and so Brain, Cabbie, and Snake (me) decided to all run to the 69th St. bridge, since Brain had the map and Cabbie had the president and Brain also had the tape. But Maggie had the fake tape and a raft objective, so she skipped town on us and won the game solo.

So, it's a game. Again, I think it's a lot more fun if you're a real fan of the film. I'm going to give it a couple more tries to see if it will stay.

I've been really curious about that game. One thing I was wondering is... is it fun to be anyone other than Snake? I've seen in some licensed games that there is a tendency to have the character choices be "You can be Rambo, or NOT Rambo", or "Conan, or NOT Conan".

It totally is. All of them function pretty differently. Our Cabbie player was having a blast plowing into spaces with prisoners and mowing down a couple of them with his cab, which is the only car in the game you can do that with. Also, Brain had all kinds of tricks (literally, Tricks in the game, where you can send prisoners out of your space and they're effectively stunned for the rest of the turn) and Maggie was the only one who could move without making noise, which can be very important at later stages when the Timer is ticking down. Plus, she carries that hand cannon from the outset and comes with more ammo for it than Snake starts with(!) Just like in the film, they're all very important (and fun) in their own ways. I ended up with Snake as a last pick because the other three players wanted to be the others.

I literally had this in my cart on minature market a few weeks ago for the 20.00 you mentioned. But, real life hit and I never pulled the trigger. Sounds promising though.

Sornars and I played a game of Trickerion again, my second. It's a lot going on and a lot of terminology (it's a Mindclash heavy euro game) but boy is it a good one if you like euros that are more focused on long term planning. Surprisingly for this sort of long term plans style euro, it's so intensely interactive, the worker placement is brutal, your economy is incredibly tight, and the margins are insanely slim. The whole thing really comes together nicely after a couple games to understand all the subtle but very important interactions. This game was all about realizing the power of moving your prepared tricks around the various auditoriums, which can be an incredibly mean thing to do.

It also plays well with 2 which is unusual, though playing with 3 or 4 would add a lot more of riding off of other people's performances which is a very interesting shared incentives aspect of the game potentially.

I'm moving out of the area soon, and last night hosted my final game night in this house. We played:

Spartacus - 5 players. Only one player was new, and also had not seen the show. The game was over way too soon as one player really walked away with it, and it was not nearly as backstabby as I like it to be. I tried, but never really had the funds since on round 1 I lost a couple of wagers and also since I was House Batiatus, I started with less cash than everyone since I started with 3 gladiators.

Highlander. My one friend who always goes overboard bought this game and its expansion, and then painted all of the minis. This was the debut of the game, and frankly, I hope There Can Be Only One... time I play it. It took way too long, and is pretty fucking boring, frankly. You go around to one of 2 "locations" and draw cards, hoping to get boosts for your stats. You can also end up in the arena dueling. I was the Kurgan, and literally spent the first several rounds only fighting because I kept tying for initiative (ties make you duel to resolve them). You can force people to the arena through other means, and it basically is a lose your turn for them. Very little of what you do in the game really matters. Each character has a power, and my sole power was only useful during the Gathering (the final battle). I was beheaded just prior to the gathering even starting. Fuck this game.

The Gang - previously we had played with 3 players and found it to be way too easy. This time we had 6 players, and it switches to being impossible. My guess is that 4 players is where you want to be with this one. Disappointing!

Mini Game Party - frankly this was the only game of the evening that went the way I intended it to go. Lots of chaos, interesting team mixups, etc. A good one.