What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

hotseatgames wrote:

Msample wrote: NEMESIS LOCKDOWN. Five bbeleaguered employees of Weyland Yutani again tried to escape an alien infested underground bunker. My Xenobioligist succumbed after drawing out the Queen on like turn 4; I suffered one Serious Wound when I drew her, then another Serious Wound while trying to escape - and the Darkness Effect said that if you had 2 Serious Wounds, game over man ! So I spent the rest of the time watching Chuck's Survivor, James Hacker, Bill Ramsay's Janitor ( always bitching about the bonus situation ) and Chad's Sentry fight for survival .  Bill and Chad teamed up to take the elevator back up to the escape room after fulfilling their goals . They both exited, with Bill cleverly taking the Rover to avoid making a departing Noise roll. This left James and Chuck. Chuck needed to send the Signal and the Alert , but unfortunately an Alien popped up in the Alert room; and you can't set it off with an Alien there. After running out of ammo, Chuck had to resort to melee combat and combined with discarding a card as a distraction to finish off the intruder, set the Alert but was now sporting 3 Serious Wounds. A paper cut would kill him. After determing that the always sneaky James would beat him to the only viable escape pod, Chuck's only option was to crawl thru the tunnel to the escape room on the surface. He went into the air ducts, let out a scream and was never seen again as James blasted off into space as the facility blew up . My first time seeing 3 players live/win.  

Three survivors! That is amazing.

I think part of what lead to this was that despite playing co-op, nobody chose a secret Objective whose goal was to see one or more characters eliminated.

Jackwraith wrote: Blood Bowl Team Manager

IIRC, you played the Wood Elves in your first game. Which team did you play this time?

I was Humans this time.

Jackwraith wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: Got another play of Blood Bowl Team Manager last night, and won again!

That final rush of points can have even more impact if you include the first expansion (the game owner has at least one of them, right?) and bring Contracts into play. Those are won in Highlights and the bowls and represent TV deals that bring you more fans, but they're kept face down and so no one, not even the player who won them, will know how much they're worth until final scoring.

I wasn't able to stay and play, so they kindly saved the expansion for when I can.

Three-player Fortune & Glory. I was Duke Dudley, a British noble whose whole thing is that he starts with a bunch of stuff. Turn one I got shaken down in the London streets, and then on the same turn I got shaken down again at the Docks, so I lost everything I started with and rode the fuck barrel all game long, contributing one Fortune to our total when we won - literally one step away from defeat, when the new player (a Warcry regular) got the drop on some Nazi Elites carrying Nazi Gold to push our Fortune over the goal. Pretty awesome overall.

Should I be playing Fortune and Glory?

I for one immensely enjoyed my one play ten years ago and would definitely play again. But it felt more like something fun to do while tasting fine whiskeys, there was no deep thinking IIRC.

Edit: played Quacks of Quedlinburg a couple of times, it's VERY good. A lot of game packed into less than an hour.

Nodens wrote: I for one immensely enjoyed my one play ten years ago and would definitely play again. But it felt more like something fun to do while tasting fine whiskeys, there was no deep thinking IIRC.

I think I just got upsold.

Kickstarter copy of Beast

It's a Kickstarter from a first time designer, so there's some rules bumps and awkwardness, but it's a fairly simple rule-set, so i've seen worse. Only really minor hiccups during actual fulfillment, and some europeans getting frustrated when it was hitting retail shelves before kickstarters were delivered.

1 vs many, hidden movement. One player plays a mythical "beast" hunting settlers and animals, while the other players play hunters trying to track and attack said beast.

I really like the art and it's nice to have a fairly simple rule-set attached to it. There's nothing revolutionary here, but it does encourage aggressiveness for the 'hidden' player, which can be an issue in other hidden movement games. I like that rules are focused on movement and deduction, with combat mostly reduced to "do 1 damage, maybe with a bonus damage"

I'm a sucker for games with multiple characters that change the way it's played, so having several beasts with different foci really works for me. Fangir, the giant wolf, spawns wolves to work with, and her special abilities encourages moving with the wolves in a pack and attacking en-masse. While Hogbad, the giant boar, has abilities that push other creatures/settlers around.

Oh, and standees instead of miniatures. that's a plus for me.

I played Beast last week and didn't really care for it. There didn't seem to be enough breadcrumbs for the non-Beast players to follow. Part of that was because we didn't put our characters in the "right" turn order, but that seems like a weakness of the game.

Had a 2p game day over the weekend.

13 DAYS continues to be the Twilight Struggle killer. A third of the playtime, smaller package, doesn't have the randomness around the scoring cards. Doesn't punish you for not memorizing all the cards. Love it. 10/10.

RADLANDS. First time playing this; it's pretty fun but there's a lot of competition in the 2p dueling card game space. I like the variability provided by all the different camp locations. Seems a bit random though; some cards are just really good and if your opponent gets one of those you have to completely change course and take it out. I'd play it again. 6/10.

SKULK HOLLOW. A lot of wasted potential here. Cute design and concept; an army from the forest fox kingdom must fight a giant monster by climbing on it and taking out its various locations, Shadow of the Colossus style. Some problematic things here:

• Iconography of movement symbols is vastly confusing. Can I move orthogonally? Diagonally?
• Needing cards to do anything feels weird. For a lot of the game I was trying to get cards to let me do a thing.
• Action economy is weird; you get to do three things but some troops can power up and do more? Feels artificial.
• Narrative arc of the game is anticlimactic. Outcome was obvious, then it took 20 more minutes. The monster should power up as it gets closer to death and/or has its attacks disabled.

I do like the art, and there's a very large variety of monsters, but overall this is a big whiff. 2/10.

dysjunct wrote: 13 DAYS continues to be the Twilight Struggle killer. A third of the playtime, smaller package, doesn't have the randomness around the scoring cards. Doesn't punish you for not memorizing all the cards. Love it. 10/10.

I love this game. My girlfriend, whom I specifically bought this to play with but who's not as familiar with the history as I am and doesn't like sprawling things like TS, does not. I was so frustrated when she didn't even like it, to say nothing of appreciating it the way I do. I so want to pick up Watergate, which is so similar that it amazes me that it wasn't done by the same designers, but I know she probably won't like that, either. Argh.

Unmatched proved uninteresting.

Sagrilarus wrote: Unmatched proved uninteresting.

That's mean. I really enjoyed it. I think the issue was that the T-Rex kinda broke the Marmoreal Map.

I've played a few more rounds on Steam (no T-Rex) and maneuvering becomes much more important.

I came to the same conclusion as Sag re: Unmatched. The visual design is incredible, the decks are interesting and really evocative of the characters they portray, there's an interesting selection of characters across the different sets, the rule set is light and there's an apparent depth of play to master but at some point I realised I was just collecting for the sake of collecting this series while the gameplay itself felt kind of one note after repeated plays.

What sealed the deal for me is watching gameplay of the new co-op expansion and realising that the this was not a game I enjoyed sufficiently to stay on the treadmill. Anyone want to buy my Deadpool and Bruce Lee sets ?

Yes.

How many games did you end up getting played? We played it twice face-to-face playing teams, and I've probably played it about a dozen or so times on Steam against the AI 1v1.

UnMatched plays right into my wheelhouse. I love card battlers & hand-deck management. It feels a lot like what I wanted Summoner Wars to be - however, I do kinda miss the dice. I love that the strength/weakness of some of the characters is the ability/inability to get cards, and how the characters are different enough in how they play that the only balancing factor isn't their power curve. I also love how it is all done within the system, so that each character doesn't feel like it's a completely different entity, like the factions in Root who almost feel like they are playing a separate game.