What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

dysjunct wrote: The Adrenaline phase is super gamey for sure; it's like Mario Kart where the player in last gets speed boosts and all the blue shells etc. I wouldn't have complained too much if it wasn't there. But, HEAT is a racing arcade game, not an F1 simulator, so I can overlook it pretty easily.

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Looking forward to the Games From The Cellar episode on the game!

(Re: Heat)

So, one of the things we frequently talk about in the podcast is how we would adjust the game to have it better suit us. This is the kind of rule that can be adjusted so easily, removed, doubled, applied below 3rd gear, whatever. Each group can decide how they want it to work without damaging the rest of the running gear.

Might be a ways down the road, as we like to be really comfortable with a game before we do it for an episode. We have three in the hopper already, and likely three or four more weeks before this one is fully cooked. But when we do it we'll give it a fair take.

(P.S. The Wings of Glory episode has been on a tear since Monday. Our strongest opening week episode since Ark Nova, and Ark Nova wasn't a 19 year old game.)

Sagrilarus wrote: My usual approach is read the rules, play the game, reread the rules. With practical play knowledge the reread of the rules is much easier to understand, and you know where you struggled and read those areas more carefully.

That's my ideal situation, too, when I have the ability. It really makes teaching easier, as you can see where and when the questions will arise. I was very fortunate to be able to do this with HEAT the night before teaching it.

I like the game a lot, and I expect my group will play it again tonight. But I have one nagging feeling in the back of my head-- is this just "multiplayer solitaire"? Without blocking like other race games have, it doesn't feel like anything a player does will have any impact on any other player. Someone please explain to me why I'm wrong about this.

Play/Counter play of positioning for slipstreaming in close races is extremely important. Also other players set the pace of the race, which determines how aggressively you are force to play to stay in contention.

Edit: it's not the most interactive game, certainly. But I wouldn't call it multiple solitaire personally.

Blocking still exists, but it's rare and/or mild -- someone gets to the inside line before you, and goes first next turn, or two people prevent you from moving onto a particular square.

After playing approximately a thousand games of RALLYMAN GT, I'm fine with the more open racing of HEAT. In the former, blocking is constant due to the rules around upshifting and passing -- you can completely prevent people from moving onto a wide open square next to you if you are two gears higher than them (or three if driving GT-5s). It's completely gamey and frustrating, especially when someone decides to secure their 2nd place finish instead of going for 1st, and you're trapped behind them.

The relative lack of blocking in HEAT is more thematic IMO, as a way to simulate the reality of high-speed simultaneous movement within the framework of a turn-based board game.

More Aeon Trespass: Odyssey for me. No fights today. Lots of exploring and adventures. Some teaching up. We also made a new pair of swords. We quit at right before our first lvl 2 monster fight. This is going to open some new tech avenues for us depending on which we fight. We decided to go for the Labyrinthtauros. It is likely a harder fight than the other monster. But for what we want it gets us to some combat tech faster.

Did not get to ISS Vanguard today. And won’t have a the time for another week. Still excited to get this on the table.

I don't know if the Labyrinthtauros is more difficult than the Hekaton at level 2, difficult to say. Trample is gnarly and can outright kill you, but there are ways to deal with it. It really depends on what gear you have and what interrupts you possess.

It's taking up all of my solo time. I'm somewhere around day 38. Level 3 monsters, multiple pursuer fights. Think I'm in the back third of the first cycle.

Nice. That’s about 20 days ahead of us.

You are likely right on the difficulty between the two. I feel like we are well set for the bull. We have one reach weapon, two spring harnesses for the tanks and two range weapons. Now it’s all about seeing trample in action.

We did just upgrade the Sirens teeth to the whale knives and that should be a huge boost.

Charles, what are your thoughts on the Siren shield vs ship breaker shield? I can see some corner cases where siren could be huge but I can’t see making one.

I crafted two Siren Shields but never got much use out of them. Their ability does seem like it could be good - and I did get a couple of memorable saves out of it - but the Shipbreaker is just more consistent and reliable with those re-rolls.

It's interesting hearing about your builds. I had one Titan with a Javelin for a long while, but have since moved completely away from range. Not necessarily by strategic choice, I've just sort of fallen into crafting two-handed weapons.

Three of my Titans have two-handed weapons. I have a shield made out of a Primordial hand (Knuckle Shield) and a pretty sick one hander sword. I don't want to spoil anything, but I also finally got a non-Dreamwalker Titan and it's absolutely amazing. Really altered my tactical play and how I approach certain turns.

I imagine every group's builds are pretty markedly different, particularly with the Mnemos abilities. My group is heavily resistant to Knockback/Knockdown, and has several options to interrupt and move out of the way of trample/knockback.

Not sure if you've looked at the level 2 Hekaton, but it can knock you off the edge of the map.

Level 3 Primordials are pretty scary, but I've focused on offense to a point that I can tear through most BP cards. Rolling black dice with every attack is nuts.

I have lost many titans of course, although I've been pretty good about saving named ones and replenishing my stock when possible. I have several patterns/strains in play and usually take a couple of un-named titans to try and screen or take hits where possible. I have retreated behind cover with a named titan or two when they've been in bad shape.

Have you taken advantage of any vantage points yet? I had a guy get on top of the Temenos and beat the hell out of it. It was pretty over the top and completely nuts.

Honestly, the battles are pretty fantastic. I'd say they're more enjoyable than my experience with Kingdom Death: Monster. But I think I'm actually more caught up in the narrative. I didn't expect the writing to be so strong.

I can see moving to two handed weapons. I have been underwhelmed by the ballista so far. The fate cost to shoot is harsh. The javelin paired with a ship breaker shield has been pretty stellar so far.

We are close to our next round of weapon upgrade options and I hope we replace our kopis and boat mace.

We have not yet had the option to bred our own titans. I can’t wait. We have one core so far. I hope to get more soon.

Level 3 stuff is pretty wild I imagine. I’m excited to dive into lvl 2. The peruser is 2 spaces away and we have not fought the Temnos yet. So we have stuff in our near future.

No vantage points yet. We have not spawned one in either bull fight. Some time .

In my haste to dash my last post off I neglected to mention the story. It’s been great. We are still only on the first story card (side so don’t have a ton of the main storyline advanced, but all the side stuff has been great. We are one encounter away from finishing The Plight of the People. I can’t wait. We have only done a little of other side story’s with so much focus there. But the others have been good too.

The writing is great. It feels like an adventure on a boat. I don’t mind that things are disjointed. That lends itself to the feel of we have no real idea what’s going on and we travel around o a boat and when we make landfall stuff happens. But it’s ok that it’s not all massively connected. For me it works.

We have ti travel ti a location for our main story event which lets us funnel all our progress into the inward odyssey. I’m quite enjoying that atm.

Have a gaming couple that are friends of ours who used to do a home-based "convention" every year called "Jen Con" (because her name is Jennifer.) COVID put a stop to that for the past few years, but it was restarted this year. I was on tap to teach a couple games between Friday night and Saturday, but it started snowing like crazy on Friday, so I was unable to get Cosmic Frog to the table like I'd been hoping. However, Saturday went forward.

We started with Cat in the Box (me teaching.) It was the first time I've played it with five players and it was great. There's a lot more variability with a larger group, as you might expect, but the wider parameters (more cards, more space on the experiment board) felt like it gave a lot more options than you would have expected from the standard scaling up. We only got in three of the five rounds before more people began arriving for other scheduled games, but I won the first round handily and didn't manage to score in the second and would have won in a rout in the third round (had my planned number of tricks and four tokens adjoining each other on the board) but someone else fell to a paradox and ended the game before that round finished, so two other players won in a tie 6-6-5 (me)-0 to -1.

Then I went to a three-player game of Fleet (Sentinels of the Multiverse and Awkward Guests were the other things offered in this timeslot.) I'd never played but it's a very mechanical game about fishing the Arctic Sea with a strange detachment between actual boats that you're fielding and the licenses you have to operate them. They count for points in distinct ways, which seems odd when your shrimp fishing license has nothing to do with your actual shrimping boats. It's an engine builder, but it also has very minimal player interaction other than the opening auction for licenses, which makes it feel like that element was tacked on once they discovered that they'd created a multiplayer solitaire game. I crushed the field, 81-54-47, once I figured out how the engine worked and just let it do its thing.

Then we played a game of So Clover over lunch. We had three groups, with the clue picker doing one group and then rotating to be one of the other players in one of the other groups. In my first two rounds as a regular player, we got the maximum of 6 points, guessing all of the spots on our board correctly at the first chance. Then it came to be my turn to put the clues down and I got some awful combinations. What word symbolizes "vampire" and "brother"? Vampires don't have brothers. The closest I could come to was Renfield, since he was so devoted to Dracula and they actually got that side right, but couldn't complete the rest of it in the two allotted tries, so they ended up with 0 points for my efforts. It's an OK party game, but might be too much of a brain-burner for at least the puzzle creator to be a true hit in that genre.

Finally, before we had to leave to go to another friend's Robert Burns party (another return after three years of absence), I joined a four-player game of Nidavellir (Tammany Hall and Clank! were the two other offerings. I really wanted to try the former but decided on Nidavellir instead.) I was a little put off by the theme, which is really odd. I guess you're recruiting dwarves to join your army or some such thing? I kept referring to it as "dwarf trafficking." It's an interesting tableau builder with a lot of twists and approaches to various point combinations. I lost narrowly in our first game, but we finished that one in about an hour in our two-hour timeslot, so we played again and we had gotten the hang of it so well that we finished the second game in 20 minutes, where one of the hosts crushed us with a maximum score on purple dwarves (150.) I liked it. It's not something I'd rush out and buy, but I'd definitely play again.

Tried out Atiwa solo last night. It's the new midweight Uwe Rosenberg worker placement game, and it's themed around fruit bats and reforestation in Ghana. I guess he even published a nonfiction book on the subject based on his research for the game?

The economy in the game is a kind of closed feedback loop that is fun to play with. You have wild animals, trees, fruit, families, and goats on your player board right. As you gain these things you uncover bonuses for things in the income phase, ie wild animals give you trees, trees give you fruit, fruit gives you bats. Families give you huge points, but also have a food cost associated, and goats give you a constant influx of food from milk. Milk maxes at 7 though and food costs go up to like 30, so you have to eat fruit and animals too. So you're constantly juggling these numbers and trying to min max like getting the specific amount of wild animals you need to feed your family and also get two trees, because the second tree will get you another fruit which will in turn get you another bat etc etc. There's more going on but that's kinda the heart of it.

So, it slots in nicely between like Nusfjord and Agricola All Creatures Big and Small. The worker placement is straightforward, and you're trying to maximize points through ever increasing piles of stuff you have to accommodate. I think it's a solid design, I do worry at first blush that it will start to feel samey after X games much like AACBAS did without the expansion buildings. But hey we'll see. For now it's quite nice.

Had a couple of 3 player games last night. First, a friend impulse bought a game called Mount Everest, solely because he is rather fascinated with mountain climbing. This is essentially a resource management game in which you use two invulnerable guides to try to ferry as many people up to the top of Mt. Everest and back down again with minimal loss of life. The amount of points you get for getting someone to the top is not as much as you will lose if they die, so it's a pretty risky proposition. You can stave off the cold by using a tent, oxygen, and basically just monitoring the weather.

The only element of this game that remotely constitutes player interaction is that spaces have a population limit. Even then, you can move through crowded spaces but just can't stop there. Technically there is also a "level of risk" comparison at the beginning of a round, in which each player chooses 3 cards from their hand of 6. These cards will determine how much upward mobility they will have that round, and the player who plays the most upward mobility has to take a "risk" token that can lower some of that movement. You can also spend it to hurt the people you are transporting if you don't want to lose the movement, but I really can't imagine ever doing that. It's kind of a nothing mechanic that adds... nothing.

The owner of the game was quick to set up a tent near the summit, but then he had some poor planning and killed his whole team of 4 customers before they reached the top. I actually got 4 people to the top, but they all died on the way back down. This took me from positive 15 points down to 4. The game has a set length and it was literally impossible for me to earn points by the next to last round. I think the way this game ends leads to a severe case of anti-climax. While the game was not entirely unpleasant, it had no drama whatsoever, considering the subject matter. An ameritrash mountain climbing game could be cool.

Next up was much more my speed, we tried my copy of Fast & Furious for the first time, playing the intro scenario in which you try to destroy a tank running down the highway. We all had a blast, performing ridiculous stunts, leaping on cars, etc. We played on easy and won with 2 rounds to spare. Good stuff!

DUNE: IMPERIUM with the Ix expansion, 4p. First play of this for me. It is ... I dunno, okay? I've never played the Dune by the Cosmic Encounter guys, but it sounds like a little more thematic -- uneasy alliances, hidden betrayals, that kind of thing. This was okay but felt a little rote. I will grant that if I'm going to play "deckbuilding plus worker placement" I'd rather it have a Dune coat of paint, than spice trading in the Mediterranean. Next up in the "combine two random popular mechanics" is "rondel plus legacy" I guess. I was a distant 3rd.

CAT IN THE BOX, 5p. Going by the reliable "number of F-bombs per minute" metric, this is a stellar game. Might be a little random, but if it's fun than I don't care. I came in a distant 2nd.

I'm with you on Dune: Imperium. Mechanically, it's very interesting and I think it's a well-designed package except for one fatal flaw: You don't really get to participate in the "deckbuilding" part because you can't easily purge starter cards from your hand and the game is often over so quickly that those cool cards you buy to use in later rounds only show up once or twice because you can't purge the chaff. Rise of Ix fixes this problem, I've been told, because I don't own it and have yet to play with it. But if you're advertising your game as a "deckbuilder" that would have stuck out to me as one of the main things that NEEDS to happen before the design can be considered complete. They essentially did a major patch to a core system with Rise of Ix, which means that to play said deckbuilding game as a deckbuilder, you need to spend more money, which kind of irks me. I still insist that Tyrants of the Underdark is the pinnacle game in this genre (outside of straight card games like Dominion) because the methods by which to remove starter cards from your deck are so plentiful, which means you get tons of time with those cool cards that you pick up later, which allows your deck to function the way you BUILT it...

I'm tempted to say that the randomness is part of the point in Cat in the Box (Schrodinger's central theorem, etc.) but what I love is that all of that randomness is the direct result of actions by each player once the initial deal is done. There's no card flipping and no dice. You have two opportunities to assess your hand (before the initial discard and when deciding on the number of tricks you think you can win) and after that, it's all about what you and the other players actually do during the game. I was a little hazy on it when playing a couple games with just three players, but having played with five this past weekend, I'm starting to think that it's really brilliant.