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

I have tried Pitchcar and... it's OK. It's just a racing game and, frankly, I like Heat better because there's more to think about in the hand management. We played a couple elaborate tracks and there were five of us (John, Joe, Nick, and Worm), so a lot of action on the table and plenty of bouncing off of each other. I came in third in the first race and fourth in the second when I couldn't manage to get out of one of the narrow curves for a while. Joe won both races and Worm came in fifth in both.

Then we played Bausack, which I'd also never played before. It's a collection of geometric shapes in the box, with the white ones being easier (blocks, columns, a fair number of square edges and flat sides) and the brown ones being more difficult (rounded faces, spindles, etc.) There are multiple rulesets and we played one where each player starts with five gems and someone starts by picking a piece from the box for people to accept or pass on along with one of their gems. If you run out of gems, you're knocked out. If you accept a piece, you get it and whatever gems come with it but then you have to place it on your starting block so that your sculpture doesn't fall over. If it does, you're out. John was knocked out early and Worm followed soon after. I easily had the most elaborate sculpture but I couldn't accept any more pieces. At one point, I had the most gems, too, but then Nick managed to squeeze one more piece on that had come with three gems and he passed me in number. Joe was knocked out and I couldn't pass as many times as Nick could, so he took the game. It's kinda cool. Makes a good party game, since it plays up to six and plays quickly so people can swap in and out easily.

Quentin wanted a game of Wonderland's War and with my daughter back at college and my wife busy with christmas projects, we had a two player game. I took Red Queen and he took Mad Hatter. Which, especially in a two player game, is not a good match up for the queen. Her ability to place a follower when you pass someone at the tea party was impeded by only one other leader there and Mad Hatters head of the table ability. I tried a more bag building strategy since 2 player makes it more difficult to get castles out and there are only 4 regions. My bag pulls were awful the final round and I missed out on plenty of VP (literally at least 25) from story cards that I should have completed. Even with decent pulls I would have lost but not the 112 to 61 beating I took.
Lessons were learned, new strategy discarded, and it's better with more players.

Yikes! I think that would be the last time I played 2 player.

hotseatgames wrote: Yikes! I think that would be the last time I played 2 player.

Would never be my first choice, that's for sure. It also took 2 hours, which was not unexpected. Now I'm interested how they are going to do the duel version. Granted, I failed spectacularly to do anything I wanted and this was more for Q to play his new kickstarter again before he plays/teaches a five player game tonight.

Been a long time since I've played Imperium. I've had Classics and Legends on the shelf for a while now and, since I just picked up a copy of Horizons on the cheap (I was never going to pay $80 for it), I figured I'd give it a go again. Since it was just me tonight, I decided to do a refresher game of the classic battle between Romans (me) and Carthaginians. One of the cool things about Horizons is the new bot guide cards they've included for every faction in the game, which means you can just keep the card out and flip it over when they've ascended and don't have to keep flipping through pages of the rulebook (or keep it propped open) and lose track of which table you're looking at. Like usual, the bot dumped a bunch of standard cards into its history, rapidly thinning its deck and reached ascension before me. However, once I got the Roman Glory engine running, including two Unciv cards that would give me Materials every turn based on the number of moneybags Regions I had and then a VP for getting those Materials, it was basically over. I built up a ridiculous pile of VPs by constantly swapping out Regions with Glory and then got the Qin as a Tributary, as well as the Fame card that also expands your hand size, so I was drawing 7 every turn. Once I tallied up everything, Carthage had 28 and, even with the ridiculous amount of Unrest they had dumped into my deck by playing Tributaries (the game ending condition), the Republic had 70. Still a solid game. I'm eager to try out some of the new civs, now that I have a rules refresher.

The bot cards and rulebook are an enormous upgrade to your old stuff in Horizons. I really appreciated them putting some balance changes to old cards in Horizons as well.

Yeah, that was a surprise! I didn't even know the revised cards were in there and I pulled out this thick stack of them and was all: "WTF?" And then I saw that it was like a total overhaul to the Scythians(!), among other things. Love the brackets for player areas, too, not necessarily for me, but for introducing new people to the game ("This is where your draw deck goes. This is where your Development cards go, so you know when and what you're looking at when that stage comes up.") It's the little things like that that I think will smooth the path to getting more people into it.

Also, the huge box for Horizons has allowed me to pack all three of them- cards and tokens -into the Horizons box. I had to pull out their fancy frames, but the frames in Classics and Legends don't work especially well with sleeved cards (and, given the amount of shuffling, all mine are sleeved) in that they were bending the corners of the sleeves, which made shuffling more difficult sometimes. I have each civ and each card category for the three games bagged separately and alphabetically, so if I want to use the Mauryans and Atlanteans with the Legends Civ, Horizons Unciv, and Legends Regions, I can just pick each one out and put them on the table as easily as if they still were in those fancy frames.

Played a bunch of small box, filler type stuff that I'm going to review over the weekend. Did play a three player Concordia. I might have forgotten how great this is. I wonder if they realized what they had when they were developing it, because it IS built for repeated play and for a different experience every time.

Believe it or not, I've only played Concordia once. A couple friends that we just don't see anymore but were once regular gaming partners brought it over and we played a three-player which me, being the new guy, somehow crushed. I thought it was great and was hoping they'd bring it again some time but they never did. Guess I should try to trade for a copy.

So, we have joined the Star-bellied Sneetches by winning at Fate of the Fellowship. We had three, so we took Frodo and Gollum (me), Aragorn and Gandalf, and Eowyn and Faramir. Our three quests ("Answer me these questions three!") were Aragorn moving to Erech and eliminating Shadow troops in Gondor, having no Shadow troops and at least one friendly troop in every location in Eriador, and changing Dunland to a haven. We accomplished the Eriador one pretty early, which I thought was going to be one of the more difficult ones and then accomplished the Dunland one. By that time Frodo and Gollum were sitting in Minas Morgul, waiting for the Gondor quest to be complete, but it was taking some time because the Shadow had conquered Dol Amroth (putting us to 1 Hope, BTW) and the only army nearby was Faramir in Minas Tirith. So, he moved there and cleared it out, but then Gandalf had to run down from Rohan to use the three Valor cards to switch Dol Amroth back to a haven. So, Frodo sat in Mordor for a couple turns with 5 Rings (tokens and cards) and enough Stealth cards to get to Mount Doom. When he got there, there were 5 Nazgul in Mordor but, of course, Gollum reduces Searches by 3 and with two Friendship tokens, we could ignore the 2 Hope that we lost and we'd gotten back to 4, anyway. There were seven cards left in the player deck.

The key to the whole progression was Frodo ending up with two Friendship cards early on and taking the ship from the Grey Havens down to Dol Amroth. Wiping out all of that traveling and searching that normally happens by taking the path through Moria or through Rohan was incredibly helpful, even if it did stymie us a bit because of the problem of losing Hope with Gollum walking into friendly troop spaces. In fact, we got caught by a Skies Darken once and ended up reducing our Hope to 2 early on to make that move with Frodo, but it turned out to be worth the risk, even though Frodo and Gollum were frozen in place for a couple rounds because Frodo couldn't take the risk of moving without Gollum and they couldn't move anywhere useful in Gondor because there were so many friendly troops around. It was tense, but finally getting a victory makes me at least interested in trying again with someone finally playing Galadriel, since she's the only character that hasn't been used so far.

Got in a game of Tiny Epic Cthulhu with the Tuesday night crowd. It was me, John, and Kevin playing the Cultist, Doctor, and Historian, respectively and taking on the fish god, Dagon. I have a vague memory of there being a difficulty rating for the eight GOOs that come with the base game and expansion. I know Dagon isn't at the annoyance level of Yog-Sothoth, for example, whose ability removes translated Necronomicon pages. But I know he's tougher than Nyarlathotep (the suggested first-time opponent), who just adds more Shamblers. Dagon instead removes one color of tentacles from his control area, which can be devastating because they're often the ones you want to pick up in order to translate pages and then they just get swept away from you. But it's also occasionally a shrug of shoulders because there's nothing there for him to steal. Anyway, it was a first time play for the two of them, but they're both veteran gamers so I knew they'd get the hang of it pretty quick. I hadn't played in a few months, though, so as intuitive as it began to seem the last time I played (which was the one that changed my outlook on it and convinced me to keep it), I was still checking the rulebook to remind myself what went where when tracks became accursed. We had a good selection of runes by the time we translated the book and flipped Dagon to the second phase, so we managed to seal the red and green portals fairly quickly, but then started running into draw problems when trying to seal the blues. There were enough Shamblers on the board to be killing us with the extra tentacle draws. John narrowly escaped going insane (he was one step away, whereas Kevin and I were both two steps) and then if Kevin and I could have made decent rolls, we probably would've won, but we drew too many Eldritch tentacles and Dagon advanced to the last space and invaded our reality. Next time...

It was Unmatched Day today. I'd recently picked up Legends, vol. 3, the latest set with Blackbeard, Chupacabra, Loki, and Pandora. So I brought it to one of the local bars to meet up with my regular Unmatched partner. Brad. We started with two games of Chupacabra (me) vs Loki (Brad) on the new Venice map. In the first, I tried to emphasize the all-offense, all-the-time nature of the character (Moves 3, no sidekick, every time he attacks you may draw a card) but Loki has so much defense that, in addition to the Tricks (cards that, when he plays them, go in the opponent's hand; when the opponent plays them for offense or defense, the effect is a boon for Loki (often healing!) and then they return to his hand) and he eventually wore me down But in the second game, I kind of cornered him and unleashed ridiculous offense, with successive strength 5 attacks that went undefended and it was over quite quickly. In the second round of games, we flipped to the other board side: Santa's Workshop(?) which not only has one way paths on some spaces, but also has an assembly line that moves fighters forward one space at the end of each turn, before dumping them in the giant toybox. Speaking of boxes, Pandora has one (she has to open the box at the start of each turn and gains bonuses, but runs the risk of accumulating too many feathers (3), at which points she takes damage for each card she drew.) Still in Chupacabra mindset, I charged forward with Blackbeard and his two Sea Dogs and somehow forgot a main aspect of his, which is taking extra actions with doubloons (when you use them, they go to the treasure chest, where your opponent can spend them against your cards to keep them from having their full effect.) Pandora ended up doing more damage to herself with the box than I did to her and Blackbeard went down to ignominious defeat. But then I started playing him correctly and he's quite the powerhouse. Being able to take as many as five actions in a single turn can be insane and some of your cards play out quite well when your opponent is reluctant to give you back those extra actions (when they use the doubloons to cancel part of your cards, you get them back.) In the second game, I had the upper hand from the very beginning and, again, kind of cornered my opponent and then dealt out enough damage to take her out.

The tiebreaker was two older characters, me on Hamlet and Brad on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We both had a sidekick (Xander for him, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for me) and we were playing on the disco map that has two hallways kind of sectioned off and a catwalk above a dance floor so it's a weird one. I switched back and forth frequently between To Be (draw two cards when you Maneuver) and Not To Be (gain +2 strength to all attacks, but begin the turn by doing 2 damage to one of your fighters.) It was a slugfest, with both of us diving in and dealing out serious damage, which resulted in Xander's death in my second turn. In the end, Buffy was down to 3 health and Hamlet was down to 1. R&G had sacrificed themselves to enable us Not To Be and I got in one more attack that knocked off Buffy. If she had had enough defense, the After Combat effect of the card she played would've killed me. Then we switched to the co-op version of the game, Tales to Amaze, and Brad took Willow and her sidekick Tara (also from Buffy) and I took the Wyrd Sisters from Macbeth, as I'd never played them co-op before. It was us against The Mothman, The Ant Queen, and The Jersey Devil and... we got krushed. We took out the Devil and the Queen, at the cost of one of my Sisters (Howley), but I was down to 1 card in my deck and three in hand, all defense, and he was down to 2 and 2 and The Mothman still had 17 life, so we called it. Not quite sure how we both burned through our decks so fast, even with the Devil in play (he frequently makes you discard for being in his zone at the end of the round.)

Finally, we played one game of Neuroshima Hex, where he took Uranopolis and I tried the Sand Runners again. I got a huge advantage, drawing a Secateur (2 ranged attacks) and a Chieftain module (extra attack) in my first 3 tile turn and then following that with two turns drawing Sandstorms (Battle tokens) plus an Officer II (+1 ranged strength) in the first one. That was a quick 10 damage to Uranopolis HQ. Then he set up a circuit with the Drill (ranged attack on 3, 2, and 1) plus a Power Generator (+1 ranged strength) AND a Gauss Generator (ranged becomes Gauss attacks) and started burning my HQ through its armor for 3 every time we had a battle. Sand Runners don't have enough high Initiative units to really respond and he got a Transport in there that allowed him to keep rotating his Infernos to keep it covered. So over the course of the game, I managed to do another 5 damage to him and he did 13(!) to me, in true Uranopolis fashion. At the end, my HQ was set up to get burned down, but I'd managed to draw both my Caravan modules to move my HQ from horrible fields of fire to only awful ones a couple times and then my last draw was a Push Back to move one of his Infernos out of a key spot and that meant the Final Battle didn't change our situation and I won by 2 points after leading by 10. Still one of the greatest games ever.

Sounds like an amazing game of N Hex!

Yeah, it was great. I think I might've gone in too hard with the Runners, since they're one of those factions you should try to play slowly. It would've been better if I'd drawn at least one of my Quicksands at some point other than the the 3rd-to-last and 2nd-to-last of the game, so that I could've interrupted his positioning in some way, but it didn't happen so I had to take my shots when I could, quite literally. But it was still thisclose to him making a massive comeback and getting that elusive first win with Uranopolis. It's something I've only done a couple times, since they're so hard to play.

Despite the raves over it, I'd never actually played Undaunted. I'm not much of a WWII guy anymore because I played a lot of Avalon Hill games in my youth and I know a lot of wargamers who still sing that war's praises for being everything that a war "should be", which is a mildly deranged statement, but I don't want to get too far off on a tangent here. So, since I was snagging a copy of Imperium Horizons in Osprey's recent half off sale, I decided to grab a copy of Undaunted Normandy, too, just to try it out. I know that SU&SD regard it as one of their favorite two-player games. One of my regular two-player partners, Brad, isn't really a fan. He said that he liked Battle of Britain, but when it came to ground combat, he was a Memoir '44 guy (another game I've never played because WW2, but I know that it's essentially the same system as Battlelore, 2nd Ed. which is one of my all-time favorite minis games.) Anyway, another one of my 2-player regulars and I sat down tonight to play some Normandy and... it's pretty good. It's better once we started using the revised rule that lets you control a space with an enemy unit present as long as they haven't already controlled it because otherwise I can see how scenario 2 (Montmartin-en-Graignes) would get ridiculous for the Americans. Anyway, we set up, me with the Yanks and him with the Krauts and played the first three scenarios.

Right away, I appreciated the deckbuilding aspect to it. I'm a little less keen on the combat system which seems awfully blunt, but I understand that if it were more vicious, games would get one-sided quite quickly. In scenario 1, La Raye, I moved down to multiple VP spaces and secured a couple, but my opponent made effort to Conceal me quite often and I managed to not draw enough Scouts with my Fog of Wars (or vice-versa) and my deck was pretty clogged, which allowed him to progress across the board and eventually secure the 2 points that he needed (since the Germans start with 3.) Then we moved on to Montmartin-en-Graignes and I just got abused. I got close to the east side objective and on top of the west side one, but in both cases he had units in place and we weren't playing with the revised rule yet (after this is when we looked it up) and he just shredded me with machine guns. First squad B's Riflemen were gone and shortly thereafter Squad A's departed for the hereafter. I was kind of demoralized after that one, but then we looked up the mild changes they made to the rules with the Reinforcements box and moved on to Raid Across the Canal, which is much more dynamic. I had better draws and managed to secure both 2 point spaces (far east and far west) and had also spent serious effort on Reconning with my Scouts to get the Fogs out of my deck. I spent the last three turns having four dudes in each hand and, thus, getting plenty of actions and the initiative. I finally secured the 3 point canal spot that he had been sitting in along with one of my Scouts for a few turns and hadn't drawn the Riflemen B that he needed to control it, so I strolled in with a Riflemen A and took the game.

I like the system and I'm even more attracted to the idea of North Africa (vehicles) and Battle of Britain, especially because the latter's systems (that I've seen on YouTube) remind me of the old Dawn Patrol WWI wargame, where direction of your plane determined which way you could fire. We'll see where it goes from here.