What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

As I've been talking to myself about in its own thread here, been playing Voidfall all week, which culminated in a 3p TTS teaching game this weekend. That was my first try at the competitive version besides the tutorial. Once you know what you're doing and you are playing with people who are willing to satisfice, the game doesn't even take that long either. The tutorial is pretty restrictive but I think overall it does a really good job easing you into a very crunchy game. In all its flavors, Voidfall's 3 cycles are a pretty concise amount of time for this big a game.

I think there's a lot in the competitive version, it can be mean and conquering stuff is definitely a viable enough decision to make it recognizably 4x. Adding the unpredictable threat of real opponents really fucks up your economic efficiency puzzle in quite a desirable way, even if they choose not to invade and just stay at your doorstep. This play convinced me to go find a kickstarter pledge even if it cost a premium, I've cleared out a bunch of games at my local bookstore to make room. I think it's quite a well designed game in all its versions: solo, co-op, and competitive. I was surprised how well the competitive version stacks up, from a systems perspective it's definitely the shortest and most direct.

I also played Spirit Island this weekend, I used the simple defend tree spirit from Horizons. I tried the thematic boards which give a really uneven time since you can really be up against it if the boards are unbalanced in a way that disadvantages you. I was up against it because the thematic board I was on did not have almost any dahan and my primary feature was defend. This was a good game, though, as my spouse had a pretty easy/suitable board for her spirit and could come over and help me with my problems damaging enemies. So there's a lot to be said for the unpredictable setup of the thematic boards.

Played PROTON 2842 yesterday, 3p. It's ... fine I guess. Point salad sci-fi. Has a dice drafting system for actions, with an interesting balancing mechanism -- take the more powerful actions and you'll lose ground on either an income track or the initiative track (which determines turn order). Or take the weaker actions and gain on the tracks.

It's not really clear what the dice drafting is supposed to represent, or why my ship's movement is so inconsistent. And it has the Kickstarter feel of too much half-baked stuff crammed into the box. If a developer had removed 20% of the game and refined the rest, it would have been much stronger. Also, if a game requires a separate four-page manual to explain the iconography on each piece, then your iconography sucks.

Overall, 6/10. Okay, would play again, might request it.

Gary Sax wrote: As I've been talking to myself about in its own thread here,

I'd be more likely to Thank You in the moment if it didn't involve losing my place on the page. Hearing that they delivered on Voidfall and that it's actually kind of 4x-ish makes me wish they hadn't tabled Transhumanity. I'd be very interested in a "story-driven" game from Mindclash.

They're doing that insane dinosaur adjacent one that looks like 4 systems uncomfortably welded together. I think it's story driven/campaign?

Gary Sax wrote: They're doing that insane dinosaur adjacent one that looks like 4 systems uncomfortably welded together. I think it's story driven/campaign?

A grindy campaign game titled Perseverance sounds like a red flag to me.

Thought there was only going to be three at the Monday night group, so I brought Land and Freedom, which only plays three, but a rarely-seen fourth player showed up, so we had to play one of the host's games and picked Cosmic Encounter, because why wouldn't you?

First game was Anti-Matter vs Sorcerer vs Citadel vs Masochist. The Masochist player dove right in trying to enact their alternate win condition, but never quite getting the right circumstances. The Citadel player had never played CE before and I tried to encourage him to try his other option (think it was Hacker), since Citadel is kind of wonky, but he decided to go ahead with it. I jumped out to an early lead with Anti-Matter, as it often befuddles first time players who have just been told to win one way and then see Anti-Matter win the opposite way. I won a couple encounters on the subtracting ships part of that power. But people started angling against me and Sorcerer caught up until we finally ended up in an encounter against each other and both had nothing to play but Negotiates, so we did the shared victory deal

Next game was Filch vs Reincarnator vs Healer vs Vacuum. Reincarnator lost early and cycled through Philanthropist and Amoeba before landing on Virus, whereupon he began to lay waste to the board as Virus is wont to do. But Vacuum was kind of a menace and had his flare, which meant that he could target ships to get sucked. Healer protected us at times, but it was still turning into a real problem until Vacuum managed to suck up all of Reincarnator/Virus' ships on a couple more planets, leaving him with only one home colony and, therefore, no power. I had made some headway as Filch but was bogged down with a lot of Negotiates. Since Vacuum was starting to dominate, I Plagued him, which got rid of his flare and Reincarnator/Virus drew a new hand and had managed to win a couple battles against his own color to regain his power and which also gave him a Mobius Tubes, solving his problem. He then went on to take the win.

We are going on a train trip for the summer, so I've been hard at work finding family and train friendly games to bring. We'll of course bring Love Letter in several variants, Walk The Plank, and some other classics, but for the past couple of weeks we've been trying some new things to see what might work.

DRAFTOSAURUS is cute, fun, and quick. You have a handful of dinosaur meeples and each turn you place one in your zoo and pass the rest on to the next player. They come in six different colours, and your final score depends on how you place them in your dinousaur pens. It goes to five players so the entire family can play it, and it should fit on a train table, so I think it's a keeper.

SIMILO great little game about guessing cards. The clue giver has seen one card out of twelve and then has to give clues using other cards that might look like or not look like the one. Short and sweet, but I'm not sure the Fantastic creatures set which we have is the best one. Seems a bit easy since half of the cards are beasts and the other half humans/humanoids which means that it's pretty easy to rule out a lot of the cards.

DINOSAUR TEA PARTY is a remake of Who is it or whatever it's called, but this time for up to five players. You ask questions about the dinosaurs trying to find out who the other players are. The illustrations are wonderful and it has a couple of wrinkles (for instance you can be the dinosaur who always lies or always says "no"), but the core is still pretty much a deduction game. Also, since you lay out 20 big cards on the table, it's not exactly a train friendly game.

BEASTY BAR was an instant hit. It's a bit like the classic Guillotine, but not entirely. You play animals to a line and hope they end up in the front and can get into the bar. But they all have abilities, so there's a lot of chaos. The illustrations are great, and chomping up all the smaller animals with a hungry crocodile is a lot of fun.

Soon I'll be getting Abandon All Artischokes in the mail, and I'm also considering getting Dungeon Mayhem. We played the marvel version A LOT last summer, and the original is probably a bit better balanced. And then there's Solar Storm which looks like a fun little coop game. But on the other hand we also need to bring clothes and stuff.

I’ve played Beastie Bar, it’s great!

mads b. wrote: We are going on a train trip for the summer, so I've been hard at work finding family and train friendly games to bring... But on the other hand we also need to bring clothes and stuff.

Make the games work for you, buddy.

Kids have been at summer camp this week, so we’ve had alittle time in the evenings to play some games.

We stretched Merchant of Venus over a couple nights, which is always a favorite of my wife’s. We play FFG Edition, Classic Rules. She trounced me, getting to our target of 2500 Credits while I was still at 1700. Normally she plans her moves, but this time was much more open and loose with her turns. She ended up all over the eastern half of the board and picked up several relics that let her really fly through the various gates.

Last night we played Mint Imperium a mint-tin version of Star Wars Rebellion. Now…I love rebellion, both with and without the expansion. but sometimes you don’t want a 3 hour game. Mint Imperium takes it and condenses the experience both physically, into the tin, and time-wise into about 45 minutes.



The rules do kinda assume you’ve played Rebellion, so there are a couple gaps in how they present information.

So we played Monopoly for the podcast, and we had a really, really good time. Which of course presents a problem. Do you admit that you enjoyed playing the game that everyone reviles and speaks of as the ultimate evil?

One of us was in pretty significant disagreement with the rest in spite of what was clearly evidence that all of us had had a good time in a competitive game. So listening to the draft of the podcast proved very interesting today on my way home from work.

I think this could turn out to be the most listened to episode that we've produced simply because it is about a game with so much notoriety and so much exposure in the entire gaming hobby.

Prior to hearing the draft I was concerned that perhaps I would not come out sounding particularly sane or rational, but that is not the case at all. I think I'm really proud of what I had to say and I think it will appeal to a certain breed of gamer though almost assuredly not to all. But in the meantime I am very much looking forward to getting Monopoly back out onto the table again. Over the last half dozen or so plays this game has risen significantly in my opinion of it.

Monopoly is a solid capitalism-simulator if nothing else.

Got a couple of the regulars over today. We started with A War of Whispers, which I had just recently traded for. It's just the basic set, so cubes and tokens which is fine by me. I hadn't examined the cards too closely, so I wasn't really familiar with just how different each deck is. I liked that there's a real impact in that respect, so that sometimes it's really worth simply tossing an agent in whatever space you can take just to get a card, not only to fulfill discard requirements from some of the other decks, but also simply to take advantage of the main power that each deck provides (invading any empty space, etc.) There's a ton of strategy behind that option, which opens up even more possibilities than I'd considered when first looking through the components. There was a fair amount of competition early on over Lion Kingdom, which kind of established a level of awareness of the scoring interest there, but then one player really hit hard on the Horse Kingdom in the last round, which meant that he'd kind of slow-rolled it earlier and took the two of us by surprise, which is always a good approach with this game, I think. In the end, he won, 27-24-21. After just one play, I'm totally satisfied with this trade (Dune: Imperium.) I can see this one becoming a favorite in the same way that Battle for Rokugan is.

Then I tried to pitch them on Twilight Inscription, but they've both had a lot going on and are prepping for a big vacation, so I think they were a little too fried to learn that, so I switched to Ethnos, which is much easier to grasp. I still think this is one of the better games that CMON has ever produced and I own four of Eric Lang's minis extravaganzas (which are also fantastic games.) We ended up with Elves, Wizards, Orcs, Merfolk, Winged Folk, and Minotaurs. The latter got the least play, as they often do, since their function is occasionally hard to really emphasize, especially with two other races focused on cards, either retaining (Elves) or drawing replacements (Wizards.) One player kind of crushed the other two, 51-33-31, because we ended up with a very front-loaded First Age (10, 8, and 8 points in three kingdoms, compared to 2, 4, and 4 in the Second Age) and he managed to dominate two of those kingdoms with the Merfolk free counters, but it was still a good game, like always. If there was ever a game of CMON's that I thought would really benefit from either an expansion (more tribes) or an art upgrade, this is it and it's STILL one of their best. That was one of the better trades I've ever made.

Finally, they wanted to try The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, as they'd never played before. One of them is a very experienced euchre player, so she knew how to make it work right away. The other one took a couple hands to really catch on and we stalled on mission 4 a couple times, but then we clicked and played up through mission 9 before they had to take off. I haven't played in over a year and it's still an excellent game and, remarkably, still has a quite different flavor from the other version (Mission Deep Sea.)

Sagrilarus wrote: So we played Monopoly for the podcast, and we had a really, really good time. Which of course presents a problem. Do you admit that you enjoyed playing the game that everyone reviles and speaks of as the ultimate evil?

One of us was in pretty significant disagreement with the rest in spite of what was clearly evidence that all of us had had a good time in a competitive game. So listening to the draft of the podcast proved very interesting today on my way home from work.

I think this could turn out to be the most listened to episode that we've produced simply because it is about a game with so much notoriety and so much exposure in the entire gaming hobby.

Prior to hearing the draft I was concerned that perhaps I would not come out sounding particularly sane or rational, but that is not the case at all. I think I'm really proud of what I had to say and I think it will appeal to a certain breed of gamer though almost assuredly not to all. But in the meantime I am very much looking forward to getting Monopoly back out onto the table again. Over the last half dozen or so plays this game has risen significantly in my opinion of it.

Monopoly got its bad rep when Eurogames came out because that's what anyone who wanted to play Settlers of Catan had to argue people out of. Also, local rules (Free Parking, $400 on go, one lap around the track before you can buy anything) tended to make an already kind of long game even longer, and that didn't help. But I'd bet that there are more memorable Monopoly stories than the next 10 games combined.

My Wife and Kids were traveling for most of Father's Day weekend, so we made up for it a bit this past one.

Across the Spiderverse with some of the boys, which was pretty awesome.

My oldest son loves Oceans, so when a request for it comes up, I try to oblige. It is definitely 'nicer' than Evolution, and the combos are fun. My youngest son (6) wants to play, so we let him in...and try not to take too much of an advantage with having a partial player in. We help him just get big combos and cool animals.

Sometimes we play with the # of fish for a 2 player game, this time I forgot to adjust and had the # of fish for a 3 player game, so we ended up with very well-developed species. I had a great combo of a, apex predator and a deep sea kraken. The kraken lets you attack again, with every attack after the first going straight into points rather than population. My oldest put a Cthulu leech, which steals population, and forced me to give up on my kraken. Then he jumped ahead with 2 species...translucent, communicating, whale cleaning mammals, and translucent, schooling, filter feeders, that i could never create the right circumstance to attack.

Then we broke out Blood Bowl Team Manager. Yet another game I had owned in the past, then traded away. I found a F:ATtie selling this, so got a good deal on it + Sudden death.

I remember it being a 'middling' game, but it was worth more than I was paying for it. Oh man, was I wrong. We had an freaking awesome game.

3 players, Vampires, Elves, Chaos.

Early weeks, Vampires gained lots of fans. Chaos did okay. Elves had no fans, but lots of upgrades and star players.

Week 3, my elves thought they were in good shape, and had a chance to tackle and steal the ball. I had a 4 star player able to tackle (Aurora Silverleaf). She began my reign of terror, wherein I rolled 'X' 5 dice in a row. Silverleaf rolled double X's and tackled herself. A Wardancer tripped over her own feet. The following week Silverleaf ended up in my lineup again and somehow rolled double X's again!

Vampires figured out how to use their thralls to absorb some punishment, then feed on them to power up his vampires. Chaos was having great fun with cheating Beastmen.

in the Final week, The winner of the Blood Bowl was going to take it all. We threw everything at it. Each team ended up with 3-4 players in the bowl. My Death Roller (the Crushinator) ended up with 4 cheating tokens. the two other players I had were cheating as well. and we would have won it all! the Death Roller got through all 4 cheating tokens without getting expelled....then the other two players were ejected!

Vampires 36, Elves 35, Chaos 34. One of the boys actually exclaimed "This game is awesome!" which, I'm not sure I've ever heard before.