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

We were back to Weimar and not just because the Nazis are an evergrowing threat in these United States. I called dibs on SPD, continuing my path to the left (First DNVP, then Zentrum, now SPD, next KPD.) It was the same group as last time, so everyone was familiar and we dove right in. The communists made huge strides in the streets, getting a second Council out and with multiple Uprisings over the course of the game. But DNVP couldn't get any traction there at all, so they went heavy into parliamentary seats, at one point being two seats short of the majority they needed to win. With that in mind, I left Zentrum trying to battle the KPD and I focused heavily on attaining and retaining seats in the Reichstag. We did pretty well, knocking out a couple Councils and generally keeping the monarchist tide at bay, as well. I also had a juicy play of the Timeline card that makes people discard all of their remaining Party cards. That dumped two out of DNVP's hand and three out of the KPD, but it also caught Zentrum with two cards, so not a complete victory. We were in round 4 when the KPD, with two Councils already extant, made a Hail Mary move to get a Council in Berlin and they made the roll and got the win. We were really stable, government- and economy-wise at that point, which meant that I had a good feeling about making it to the end of the game, at which point I was in a really good position to win, since I had 42 VPs and I was pretty sure no one else had more than 20, which turned out to be correct. This is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorites.

Then I talked my wife and our son/stepson into a game of three-player Unmatched while we were waiting for dinner to finish cooking. I originally thought it was just going to be me and our son, but my wife sat down ready to play something (a rare instance) and he pointed out that "it says 2-4 players." Internally, I was like: "Yeah, it does, but..." Unmatched is a 2-player. More than that just makes it kind of drag for a lot of people. I'm fine with those longer battles, but both of them were of the opinion that the maps needed something more or there should've been some scenario objectives... like Funkoverse (!) Anyway, we played all Legends, vol. 3 characters, with me on Loki and the two of them on Chupacabra and Pandora. It was a tight game, as Pandora was down to 2, Chupacabra down to 3, and I was down to 3 at one point, before Pandora had to play a couple of my Tricks to save herself and got me back to 9. But she gakked herself on the box (drew the 2-feather and then a 1-feather right away) and then I played the scheme that put Chupacabra right next to me and hit him with an attack that gets +3 for every Trick in the opponent's hand. My wife had been holding on to them to try to frustrate me and that was the end. It's not quite Funkoverse, but still a great game in its own right.

I liked Normandy, but I don’t think it translated well to Battle of Britain. I have three or four other games that are better for that battle.

They’re following the standard pattern of battles, each with about 300 titles associated with them. So Midway should be coming then Iwo Jima or Okinawa, but not both. East Front too.

The system could translate to any era. Move this to Seven Years War or American Independence and I’d be all over it.

My buddy Stephen and I did a podcast ep on this and I liked Normandy a lot. He understood the deck building, I understood the terrain, and the result was that I would steal wins from his perfectly honed deck. We gave it a great review.

Oh and I’ve been playing the Lord Of The Rings cooperative trick-taking game and realizing each time how much I miss double-deck pinochle with teams. My brain’s 400-500 hands of trick takers, in spite of a 40 year lapse, kicks right into gear and I’ve been banging through each level with them. I’ve even returned to the bad habits of flinging next lead card as I pick up the trick I just won and laying down the last two or three cards when I know “the rest are mine”. It’s 23 year old John coming out of a 61 year old’s body and it’s catching my buddies off guard.

Need to buy a couple of P-decks and get these guys broken in. Just a great game.

The other thing we’ve been doing is playing all the Gloomhaven clones, one game after another where you cooperatively walk around and kill things. We’re on about our fifth title, all in huge boxes, and they’re all more or less the same,. We’re currently on Valheim, which is pretty damn blah. Might have been good if it had been our first. I don’t have the heart to tell the guy that’s spent the better part of a thousand dollars that he’s bought the same game over and over. I’m looking forward to this era coming to an end.

Sagrilarus wrote: My buddy Stephen and I did a podcast ep on this and I liked Normandy a lot. He understood the deck building, I understood the terrain, and the result was that I would steal wins from his perfectly honed deck. We gave it a great review.

So... a 7?

I checked — I gave it a “sterling 7”.

Ah Pook taught me Mage Knight yesterday, I had never tried it before and liked it quite a bit. It makes a ton of smart decisions that make adventure games more interesting---single round combat, short but impactful turns, the tension of the single deck cycle turn card system. It's definitely on the extreme puzzle end of these games, so I can see why it rubs some people the wrong way. I can't imagine playing with more than 2 players, I'd have to see about competitive too. We played co-op.

I think the most interesting part of it is that it's a deck builder that is super uninterested in traditional deck cycling/tempo that Dominion and everything downstream of it is super interested in.

I don't know that I need to go get a copy for myself for solo or anything but I don't think I'd ever turn a game down or turn a cheap copy down.

Mage Knight is really cool! I ended up selling my copy prior to the "big box" or whatever coming out. It just never saw the table due to the time it takes to play. One house rule I always played with was throwing out the whole bit about fire enemies needing ice attacks and vice versa, something like that. It just made a tough game seem impossible, and certainly didn't add any fun.

Last night we played Hot Streak for the first time, 3 players. This game is a blast, and I already like it more than Ready, Set, Bet. They are different enough that I can see owning both, and I do. Watching these idiot mascots bumble around the field is a lot of fun, and I can see it getting much better with more players.

Yeah, I like Mage Knight and have a complete set of the latest edition (the "big box") but it's definitely a "these specific circumstances" kind of game. I like the competitive version but, yes, more than two players makes it start to grind, kind of similar to Imperium. Not sure if it's making the move with me or not.

Played some Ticket to Ride Legacy 5 player, almost finished with the campaign. If you have played it, It was cool to see my prediction/wish from the very first game come to fruition when California was revealed.
More Hot Streak because every time my kids have a friend over, they beg to have me show this off. I had a huge payoff after my typical slagging of Hurley and him getting DQed in the first race. No one touched a bet for him in the second race, and I was last in the snake draft so I took TWO risky Hurley tickets and he blazed to first place like his weiner was on fire and his bun was catching.

My little guy asked for the Tetris board game for Christmas, mainly to play with the pieces, but we convinced him to try the game and it was a family hit. It’s pretty much what you would expect from Tetris, with a way to mess with someone else’s grid. Light and quick.

I have played Cthulhu: Dark Providence and,,, Bottom line, this is a game that needs four or five players. I mean, it was a first-time play but the way the allegiance system works, there are only four possibilities for three people and if one of the main roles is left out, which it was in our case, the game can seem kind of slanted. We ended up with both Dissidents and an Investigator (me), which meant that we weren't really threatened by everything the Cultist(s) would normally be doing. So, we had sealed gates all over the map, courtesy me and the Dissident Investigator, which also led to a not-particularly-overwhelming feeling of the "Cthulhu" theme. It could have been any kind of theme, other than seeing De Vermis Mysteris show up in the Mythos cards. Otherwise, our cards were quite mundane (J. Edgar Hoover, Nikola Tesla, etc.) and we didn't even see a GOO until Dagon appeared right near the end. Mostly it was Influence contests over cities and grabbing agents who didn't really have a lot of theme attached to them, either. But, again, I think part of that was the card mix and part of it was the fact that we just didn't have enough people working at cross-purposes, even subtly. I'm playing again with the Tuesday group which means there should be five, so we'll see how different it is.

Other than that, it's still a pretty smooth game, the same way A Study in Emerald 2nd Ed. was but that, of course, was drained of a lot of thematic elements in order to fix the mechanical issues of first edition. So maybe this made it to a happy medium? The presentation is really nice, except for the horrible player markers. Since all Investigators can be assassinated and potentially turned into revenants, there's a revenant side to each marker (both Main agents (players) and Recruited agents.) So, instead of putting them in clips so they could stand up to move around the board, everyone is resting in these sleds so that you can see the appropriate face of the marker. But the sleds are unwieldy and really need to be glued together to keep them from coming apart during play. They also necessitate a really awful insert in the box to keep them from either falling apart or being crushed by other components in the box. It's just an incredibly poor design choice that could have been solved with less cardboard by simply printing two markers for each agent: a human and a revenant. This is to not even mention the fact that the ability to make revenants is based on a single card in the 24-card stack of Mythos cards of which you will see 6 or so in the average game.

In the interest of meeting new people, I attended a weekly board game group that meets every Sunday at a Dayton suburb FLGS. As a side note, the store actually had a copy of SEAL Team Flix on the shelf, which amused me to no end. Only the second time I've ever seen it in a store, and the first time was in 2019!

All of the people I met were friendly, and I don't regret going, but they are a very euro-focused crowd. Here's what I played / was subjected to:

Planet Unknown - this is a Euro polyomino affair in which each player tries to fill out a tech track by placing tiles on their own personal planet. No interaction whatsoever. SNOOZE

Mojo - a light card game in which you try to shed as many points as possible. I think I have played either this or something very like this before. I did horribly.

Trio - A set collection card game that actually has some meat on the bones because you have to remember who has what and where you saw certain cards in a face down communal pile. We played this twice, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. The high point of the day.

Harvest - This is a goddamn farming Euro and I'd rather slam my dick in a drawer than play it again. We played 4 players, the guy who won was REALLY trying, and I came in second by 2 points without trying at all.

I'll go back, but maybe I'll bring something so I can try to convert some of these people to the dark side.

Yeah Trio is good. Planet Unknown isn't half bad either for a polyomino game.

Yeah it was "fine", but the game would have been virtually identical had I been playing alone in a room.

Jackwraith wrote: I have played Cthulhu: Dark Providence and,,, Bottom line, this is a game that needs four or five players. I mean, it was a first-time play but the way the allegiance system works, there are only four possibilities for three people and if one of the main roles is left out, which it was in our case, the game can seem kind of slanted. We ended up with both Dissidents and an Investigator (me), which meant that we weren't really threatened by everything the Cultist(s) would normally be doing. So, we had sealed gates all over the map, courtesy me and the Dissident Investigator, which also led to a not-particularly-overwhelming feeling of the "Cthulhu" theme. It could have been any kind of theme, other than seeing De Vermis Mysteris show up in the Mythos cards. Otherwise, our cards were quite mundane (J. Edgar Hoover, Nikola Tesla, etc.) and we didn't even see a GOO until Dagon appeared right near the end. Mostly it was Influence contests over cities and grabbing agents who didn't really have a lot of theme attached to them, either. But, again, I think part of that was the card mix and part of it was the fact that we just didn't have enough people working at cross-purposes, even subtly. I'm playing again with the Tuesday group which means there should be five, so we'll see how different it is.

Other than that, it's still a pretty smooth game, the same way A Study in Emerald 2nd Ed. was but that, of course, was drained of a lot of thematic elements in order to fix the mechanical issues of first edition. So maybe this made it to a happy medium? The presentation is really nice, except for the horrible player markers. Since all Investigators can be assassinated and potentially turned into revenants, there's a revenant side to each marker (both Main agents (players) and Recruited agents.) So, instead of putting them in clips so they could stand up to move around the board, everyone is resting in these sleds so that you can see the appropriate face of the marker. But the sleds are unwieldy and really need to be glued together to keep them from coming apart during play. They also necessitate a really awful insert in the box to keep them from either falling apart or being crushed by other components in the box. It's just an incredibly poor design choice that could have been solved with less cardboard by simply printing two markers for each agent: a human and a revenant. This is to not even mention the fact that the ability to make revenants is based on a single card in the 24-card stack of Mythos cards of which you will see 6 or so in the average game.

A STUDY IN EMERALD was the same - it needed 4 or 5. I haven't played Dark Providence yet, will probably play it at a small gathering in Marh but nothing I've read suggests it supersedes ASiE.