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

Which edition of Dungeon! were you playing? It sounds more fun than the Dungeon! I have played in the past. I played a friend's copy of second edition back around 1980, and I own the 2012 WotC edition with the pretty cover art.

Shellhead wrote: Which edition of Dungeon! were you playing? It sounds more fun than the Dungeon! I have played in the past. I played a friend's copy of second edition back around 1980, and I own the 2012 WotC edition with the pretty cover art.

1981 edition. Roslof cover. I hadn't played the game in over 40 years, and the instant we started playing, it felt like I was in elementary school again.

Gary Sax wrote: I played some Captain's Chair in person last week with a friend at a brewery. There's just no way around that it's a) a longer game of this type (2 to 2 1/2 hours perhaps) and b) there's a lot of fiddling with your own stuff even

Minature Market has a captain chair promo for free on thier website. No idea what it includes.

And, since I'm writing so much about it, it's back to Cthulhu: Death May Die. This time, it was Season 2, Episode 4: Shootout at the HP Corral. I decided to take Amelie, whom I'm not especially fond of since her Gate Influence is tied to the map, but this is a pretty small map, so being within 1 space of a gate to get a reroll wasn't going to be especially challenging and it wasn't. She also has Arcane Mastery so, yeah. Alongside her was Bruno. who is kind of ideal for working alongside someone with Marksman, since he wants to be in the action room and she'll want to be outside it. His Vicious only activates in the first couple levels if he's alone, so that seemed like a good pairing. I decided to take on one of the toughest GOOs, though, in Nug and Yeb. When they arrive on the board, you have to kill both of them to advance their phase (i.e. 24 wounds instead of 12 and in two different places after their initial arrival), which is what makes them most difficult. Thankfully, they don't do a ton that's really trying when one of them advances on the Summoning track, but the other one is on their Influence track, which has effects every time it advances AND when the Influence symbol appears on a Mythos card, you also get a Trigger effect from that track. It's these game-long effects that make them challenging but also make them really interesting. Also, among their Influence effects and Mythos cards is moving the farthest gate closer to you, which only helped Amelie keep her signature useful.

Bruno had Fear of Crowds which was incredibly appropriate and Amelie had Kleptomania which was less so and kind of deleterious, since they were rarely going to be in the same room together, which meant that she would almost always be taking 2 Stress when her madness was activated. Bruno, OTOH, would regularly be healing all of his. Just like with the last couple games I've played, one character (in this case, Bruno) was rocketing up the Sanity track while the other was just kind of plodding along, rolling their three black dice for the first half of the game. I made good progress on putting Dig tokens down to increase my chance of finding the artifact and managed to kill the starting Hunting Horror and Bokrug pretty handily but, unlike as is occasionally the case when a big, lone monster is part of the opposition (like the Shoggoth), Bokrug was repeatedly resummoned. With 5 wounds and having to take two Stress to attack him, he's a bit of an annoyance. I managed to remove him multiple times, but I was constantly out of Stress and resting to get it back. Bruno was fortunate to find Gold early on, which let him Rest for 4 healing, rather than the usual 3 and both found either Dynamite or a Molotov to clear out clusters of enemies. We found the Artifact and promptly dispatched it, but the attacks of a Cultist and both Nug and Yeb had Amelie on the verge of death, so Bruno had to pile in, got Nug close to death, but then went insane. Amelie managed to dispatch the two of them and, with her AM maxed out with the help of a Companion and Marksman and Gate Influence both advanced, got them to their final stage with Yeb dead and Nug needing to be hunted down before she fell at the hands of a trio of Cultists. Rematch coming tomorrow night, I think.

Was waiting on my wife and sister in law to drop off one of my Nieces friends so we had a quick three player game of Hot Streak with my daughter Piper and her boyfriend Quentin (who is a gamer). By the time we had it set up, they arrived back home so it became a 5 player game. I hit a two risky side bets early (A racer will be DQed and Mum would finish in the top two) and broke out to a good lead. This is the loudest game EVER. I try to tell everyone that Hurley would never fail to disappoint but they kept thinking he would win. Piper was the mascot mover and did the trips, falls and tramples justice. I tried to roll it up and move on but Q insisted to play again and, hey, I'm not going to say no. Dangle was my fish in the second game and Hurley disappointed everyone, per usual. I ended up winning both games but you wouldn't have been able to tell by how much howling everyone was doing when Gobbler dominated the last race.
Then Piper wanted to show off Big Baby so we had a six player Magical Athlete . I drafted Blimp, Banana, Baba Yaga and Cyphlsis (sp?). I lost the first round with Cyphsis but never rolled a 6 say, hey, four VP. It was then a trip fest for the next two races with everyone flying around with Banana and Baba Yaga. My wife saved Legs for the last round but on Wild Wilds, every 5 move she was offered was a trip or go backwards space. Big Baby ended up bullying its way to a win and Mouth didn't eat anyone. A great night of insanity and everyone laughed every few minutes.
Tomorrow looks like Wroth and the Thanksgiving Western Legends. But we will see how that plays out as my Father is law is coming and he's was a lifer at TWA so, Pan am might me in the cards.

Was that English?

This family has been playing The City of the Dancing Carp for days now, about 15 hours in total and it keeps getting better. It's for kids probably age 7 and up, but I have seen it make grown ass dudes shriek with joy.

It's a book with riddles/stories/tasks and you put a sticker in it if you solved something. More info here .

I just checked and wow, it's not even out in English yet, but that should only be a matter of weeks. Serious recommendation (if you're into that sort of thing).

Sagrilarus wrote: Was that English?

Some assembly required. Prior knowledge of characters from Hot Streak and Magical Athlete required as well... and drinking of adult beverages may have influenced the post.

I played Wroth to my daughter Piper and Quentin before Thanksgiving Dinner. Took about 5 minutes to teach and exactly 60 minutes to play...and this was a teaching game with two new players. Quentin took The Guild (Thieves), Piper took a expansion clan of witches called Venna and I took Koda (Sort of Rangers who have Grizzled and Trappers as elite). Piper broke out to an early lead due to her feat that was a persistent power. I lagged behind the first two rounds, sort of on purpose because the player in last place gets to draft a extra action dice. Round Three I used my Feat which allowed me to deploy up to six Trappers (these are elite troops that "go off" when anyone enters a region and can be either damage, deploy two troops, gain Corra) to any area that I was NOT present. So, that put me into every area on the board and gave me dominance in two regions including a 2 VP one. Me and Quentin fought over a Three VP area and ended up tied there for two rounds, so no one got the VP so Piper inched closer and closer to the win.
However, I moved two of the Grizzled (who deal one damage to any troops when they move into an area) and then used my All Seeing dice to do a double attack to the area me and Q were fighting for, destroying all of his troops in that region. That gave me 2VP for the area, 1VP for dominance and 4 VP for having my elites in that area and having a majority. I'd love to say I planned it that way but I sort of backed into it. This gave me exactly 30 VP during end of round scoring, which just inched me past Piper who had 27 and Quentin who had 24.

After Dinner was a four player game of Pan Am which my wife has been wanting to show her dad since he was a life long employee of TWA. I ended up in dead last with Quentin taking first with FOUR "Get a free Pan Am stock" cards, with my wife taking second only due to the fact she miscalculated and thought she had one more Three route she could claim and ended up wasting an action in the final round.

Went up to a friend's place two weekends ago for a gaming weekend.

1. Regicide x2, 3p. Lost horribly the first time, then pulled it off and actually won. This is maybe the second time I've beat the game in 40 or so plays. Feels good man.

2. Bohnanza, 3p. Haven't played in a few years and forgot how great this was. It's a little quirky to play with non-gamers or it'd see more play I think.

3. Magical Athlete, 4p. New version. Chaos and hilarity generator.

4. Cthulhu: Death May Die, 4. My first play of this. My buddy has the whole thing painted, with the monsters in especially disgusting and putrid color combinations. It's your basic dungeon crawler but pretty clever. I'm kind of over Cthulhu as a theme, but maybe I played too many sub-standard games with a Lovecraftian veneer trying to make up for it. I like the modularity. We ending up winning against Cthulhu, but it was close.

5. Fate of the Fellowship, 2p. Dunked the ring for the win. I also love the modularity of this. Leacock's designer diary was very interesting to read; the whole process was iteratively simplifying everything. Getting rid of the ability for other people to take the ring, getting rid of equipment, collapsing all hit points and other harm into a single despair track, moving anything thematically required but fiddly onto one of the cards (mission cards or event cards), any one of which has a small chance of showing up in any particular game. I also really like the doublebacked Shadow cards; they make it so that any particular Shadow card has about a 50% chance of having either its military effect or its hunt for the ring effect occurring when it's flipped, and it might be different after every reshuffle-the-discard-and-put-back-on-top.

Last weekend was:

1. Trio x2, 3p. For a game that is basically Memory plus Go Fish, it's way better than it has any right to be.

2. No Loose Ends, 3p. I'm still not sick of trick taking games. This is an exact-bid game where you take turns bidding by playing cards from your hand before the trick-taking phase. You need to cover up your bids by winning tricks, but you can only cover up a bid if:
- your winning card matches a bid's suit
- your winning card matches a bid's rank
- the lead card matches a bid's suit (in case you trump)
Get points for every bid you cover up, lose points for every bid you don't manage to cover, lose points for tricks you win that don't cover up bids, win extra points if you cover up all your bids with none left over. Great game, very fun, being able to see others' bids lets you guess at what they have and play accordingly. Super tense.

3. Fate of the Fellowship, 3p. Managed to win somehow by getting to Mt. Doom and making the final Search roll at 7 dice. We could get no more than 2 despair. I rolled six blanks and a despair. Pretty lucky, but you don't argue with cheers of triumph from around the table. In addition to what I said above, the "4 actions with one dude, 1 action with the other" is another great design element that makes every turn fraught with opportunity cost.

Last night me and the wife played Through the Desert (new all play version) and it went like expected (my wife telling me to get the hell out of "Her" area). I lost the first game and won the second with my wife exploring "what happens when I just dominate this one color.

After we finished the game around 10pm , Quentin came to visit my daughter and said "I have a box in the car I need to get" which turned out to be his Kickstarter Wonderland's War. We spent about a half hour unpacking and fawning over it but decided it was too late to teach/begin a game. (Everyone seems to say that 3 hours is the normal game length) and Q had work in the morning.
Overnight, Mother Nature dumped 3 inches on snow on us and my road never gets plowed. So, when we got up, Q wasn't able to get to work and was itching to break out his new game.
I played a Jabberwock, Q was Cheshire Cat and Piper was Alice. Q was the game explainer which was a nice change for me. Took about 1/2 hour to teach and we were off to Wonderland.
What can I say, it was a hell of a lot of fun. I've been avoiding it because of the 3 hour commitment but even with all new players, we finished in 2 hours.
If you have played the game, I forged the crap out of my bag, so I had all my castles deployed and worth 6 VP each. I ended up with five completed contracts with one fully fulfilled. I spread out too much and busted twice in the final battles but came out on top by 3 VP with Q is second and Piper a more distant third.. Good thing Q bought it because, otherwise, I'd put this next on my must own list.

I played The Fellowship of the Ring the Trick-Taking Game with my crew this past Monday. It's good. It's a cooperative trick taking game, though I imagine most of you are familiar with The Crew, which is the game this is descended from.

I have hundreds and hundreds of hands of trick-taking games in my past going back to when I was a kid. So an awful lot of the underlying logic is burnt into my brain, in those deep back parts that just seem to come out when they are needed but otherwise stay out of the way. Almost like muscle memory gaming.

We were in what the other three players thought was a pretty sticky spot, and granted they didn't know what my cards were, but it was clear to me that we had a path to success so I took charge and three tricks later we closed out the challenge and had a trick to spare.

I really like trick-taking games, and it's not just because I've played them so much. Whether it's cooperative with everybody at the table or cooperative in pairs or fully competitive there's a kind of mathematical construct that happens in trick-taking games where you can work angles to either stay out of the business or get yourself neck deep in it, and I find it very rewarding. I'd say this game is about the equivalent in gameplay quality as The Crew. It has just a couple of differences, plus a completely unrelated theme that I don't think adds much of anything to it. One of the characters is Bill the Pony for God's sake. But the trick taking brain burn is there, and I really enjoyed getting another chance to sit down and play such a thing.

Wonderland's War is, indeed, a great game.

And Sag, I have a review of the Fellowship trick-taker puttering about in the back of my head. I agree that the theme, while starkly present, doesn't impact the gameplay overmuch, for good or ill.

Thanks for the word.

I'm due to do a little more game writing. I've applied to the new local newspaper (which frikkin' rocks) and I need to put some stuff back up on here. Situation-Normal has returned at home and I have time to do it again. Always enjoyed it. I'll lay off of The Crew and its cousins. Plenty of other topics.

Quentin requested a game of Western Legends , riding high on his last win. After writing my Expansion review, I wanted to try Isom Dart, So Me, Jessica and Quentin started a game with Piper "playing" the shop keeper (complete with southern accent). I was surprised to see Isom starts with the Workhorse (carry up to 2 cattle tokens) and at a Ranch. Quentin was Doc Holiday and Jessica was Belle Star. In the first round we completed a "End your turn outside of town" goal which I had assisted in and we got upgrade a Horse/Gun for free. So, I had a fully upgraded Workhorse (4 movement) and, after dropping off Two Cattle, stopped at the general store and picked up the Peacemaker (1LP for each time you Wrangle) and upgraded it right away. At the beginning of Turn 4, I had 5 LP and my bonus power kicked in (If you start your turn with a cattle token, you can take an extra action but must discard the token at the end of your turn). Jessica was mining away and when Q noticed my "engine" he decided he had to turn Outlaw and try to rob me. I was holding 3 aces, so that didn't go well the first few times he tried it. I ended up sprinting past 20 LP with 7 LP in one turn to trigger end game. I managed all of my Goals, as did Jessica, with Q only getting two of three because he turned outlaw to try to stop me. With my extra turn, I ended with 39 LP and Q had 25, and Jessica 24.