What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I've been slow to crack open some of the KS stuff that arrived years after I shut off the tap. For some reason, I decided to tackle the Witcher: Old World game I'd backed a few years ago and had arrived in all of its "wtf-was-I-thinking-all-in" volume a few weeks ago. Here's my journey with it so far.

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Based on a few plays of the core game. It's a decent start, but I suspect the designers took the weird approach of arriving at the full game with expansions that were funded through the crowdsourcing campaign. This is like awarding a video game purchase with full features *only* if you buy into the season pass. I can't tell if this is a cynical move, or just the result of this particular designer's process.

6/24/23: A few more plays of the core game under my belt. I'm not crazy about it, but I'm willing to tack on the additional stuff to see if any of it ameliorates... anything. If I hadn't looked up the designer, I would have guessed this was their first game. It's got a bit of a "kitchen sink" feeling to it, like bits and pieces of contemporary design ideas (Tainted Grail for the hand management and chaining, Dead of Winter for the adventure cards, Runebound for the adventure game framework mixed with the race aspect) were melded together but not quite as smoothly or surprisingly as something like a Red Raven title.

The deck/hand management in particular is irritating. It sounds good on paper but isn't balanced in a way that makes most decisions around the cards all that pleasurable. You'll have some moments, but they're much too fleeting for the time it takes to complete a game, and these feel like singularities that happen *in spite* of how the game is forcing you to operate.

The rules lead you to believe that you'll be "building a deck", complete with deck thinning & combo chains. But you'll be constantly at the mercy of the card river, where you'll make a mandatory purchase at the end of every turn. This river is often largely cluttered with 0-cost muck, peppered with a few potentially useful cards. So you'll inevitably *bloat* your deck with trash just to get the terrain icons needed for traversal on the next turn, or weigh that against purchasing a card for its combat utility, knowing that it won’t surface until a couple of turns later at the earliest and, even then, will need to come up at just the right time in combat.

Want to get at useful combos faster? You’ll need to traverse, traverse, traverse, to get coins, to level up combat (which lets you draw more cards during a fight round) and hope it doesn’t get randomly lowered in a quest or battle. In a race game, this feels tedious.

But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. You’ll need to cull those weak cards you were forced to pick up too. The only culling mitigations are 1. go for the KS-exclusive advanced cards that let you trash something (but these don’t come up often), 2. travel to *one* specific location on the board (to trash a card and get an upgrade), or 3. earn a victory point (this lets you trash a varying amount, but will only happen 3 times per game). None of these options feel great because they often come at a traversal cost (in a race), or are dispensed as a reward for a battle where you could have used the cull *before* the fight.

So... smooth & pleasurable deck management, not so much. To me this feels like a lot of work to wrench some amount of control which seems almost futile since you won't really have enough time to do it, like pulling as hard as you can on the yoke of a plane in a nosedive. And in my experience with the game, no one does this fully anyway because they’re too busy scrambling for trophies with the chaos deck they’ve got. You’re basically just choosing between mitigating RNG and massively slowing yourself down in the process or rolling with the risk, and I can think of a simpler, faster mechanism for that...

Sure, there are moments where you feel clever & rewarded in maximizing the utility of your hand in combat, but there's so little control leading up to it that it basically feels like capitalizing on a lucky roll. There's a distinct lack of strategy or specialization in the deck "building" here that makes me wonder why this wasn't just distilled down to exploding dice. If I'm going to get my deck or combat chain polluted by a seeming roll of the die, why not just take it all the way and remove the deck entirely? The card management feels like an artificial way to seem "Red Raven different" from other adventure games, without fully or smoothly capitalizing on its basic ideas.

6/27/23: I've played Monster Trail and some Kickstarter extras and these add a few more options, but at the cost of more traversal for weakness tokens (i.e. a longer game). The additions try to add freedom, but end up feeling like they're struggling against the straitjacket of the core game in the interest of balance by constantly nerfing themselves.

Decent game so far, but it could have been so much more if some of the kitchen sink contrivances had been a bit more honed or discarded entirely in favor of the old reliable tools in the genre. Onward to some of the beefier expansions (Legendary Hunt, Wild Hunt, Skellige) to see if they pull a Houdini & escape some of the straitjacketing in the core game.

Last Saturday thru Tuesday a group of friends got together at a game store in Greenville SC owned by a friend ( we start Saturday to avoid Fri night Magic ) . Games played in no particular order:




7 Wonders Architects ( x4 ) . Typically played first thing in the AM when you're waiting for the late arrivals like Winslow stumbling half drunk  after his typical late night antics. Sure its not deep but its fast and accommodates a wide range of player counts. 




Command and Colors Samurai Battles ( x2 ) . Stein and I did the usual play a scenario and switch sides. Unusually for this module, there was no river in the center of the map. Instead, one side is hobbled by having a half dozem units frozen along their rear board edge, only being able to be moved by an Activate one unit action for that sector. In the first game, I got my lone cavalry unit off the board edge and while he made some headway, the center guys got whacked pretty good and I lost 5-2 . We switched sides and Stein again only was able to activate that lone cav guy, but his did a lot more damage and he won again 5-2 




Dune Imperium ( x2 w/Ix, x1 with Immortality ) .  The most interesting was the game using both expansions - I had Leto as well as several faction access cards allowing multiple bumps per activation. By the end of the game I had maxed out 3 of the four tracks. However my combat always came up a bit short, and I had a couple late game turns with either crappy draws ( once I had Grafted but drawn 2 cards w/no available spaces to go ) so my engine petered out. This was the final game of the con and certainly one of the better ones.  I did win an Ix game with the Baron and two end game Intrigue cards that gave me several VP. 




ANGOLA . My Blue faction was paired with Bryan's Green vs Jeromey ( Yellow ) and Justin ( Red ). The early game saw my forces walk into a vacant Novo Lisboa and secure the road leading from it all the way off the southern board edge. Bryan did the usual Cabinda thin, not only clearing it on turn 3 but the hacking out of the jungle back onto the Zaire box on his second try . The following turns saw Red/Green trade blows along the coastal road north of Luanda for many many actions, along with a slashing attack from Green that briefly took Cabinda, only to see it taken back the same turn. While this resulted in no VP tokens for either side, the fact that the Luanda counter was face down meant no fixed recruitmemt for the Commies. This was especially bad for Yellow, who early in the game saw a decent column of 4-5 units completely vaporize on an attack into Novo Lisboa . Jeromey did a good job resorting to guerilla warfare in the south, moving forces off road and threatening the coastal cities I held; going into turn 8 the VP markers were at 11 ( Commie ) and 12 ( good guys ). However the declining yellow forces finally caught up to them and we won via auto victory that turn - yellow in the last few turns having lost columns before they could activate resulting in several "pass" impulses as a result. Great game as usual. 




BRASS BIRMINGHAM: Terry ( local Mafia , shark in this game ) gave Andy Maly a brief refresher and we  were off. After the canal era all four of us were within a few VP; Justin and I had decent income . However in the rail era Terry obliterated us with rail connections - I think he scored about 55 points in connections in the second era alone. Final score was like 155 for him and the next closest was at least 30 points behind that . The beer must flow....




Ecos The First Continent : aka Animal Bingo. This was the second to last game played of the con; by that point Tuesday it was down to just me, Bryan "Have I Won a Conflict ?" Collars and Andy Maly. Andy jumped to an early lead with me close behind; Bryan was lingering somewhat further back. All my cards were tile plays; I never placed a single animal . Andy kept his lead and triggered the game end about 6 points ahead of me; then Bryan jumped over both of us and then all of a sudden Andy was in last. We all got some mini scoring bumos as we awaited the game ending wild tile draw; but before we drew it Andy plopped down a shark that munched a bunch of hippos and that gave him the win. 




Glory to Rome: As we were refreshing the rules for a few players, Rob saw the much hated Bacchanalia card and related how the last time he had played with me, I had used the card to win the game - it allowed me to draw one card for each influence which in that game was about 30 !! So of course when Rob shuffled and dealt opening hands, I got the Bacchanalia card and my course was clear. This game I played it relatively early and it only gave me about 12 card draws, but it was enough of a boost eke out a win over Pete's vault strategy and Rob's building that gave him 1 VP for each 2 cards in his Stockpile. The look on Robs face when I played Bacchanalia was worth the entire 2100 mile drive . 




Here I Stand: a 3 player game; I was Pope/Hapsburg, Jeromey was Englad/Protestant , Justin was France/Ottomans. Jeromey's early game Protestant dice were utter shite; when I got the mandatory Schmalkaldic League on turn 3 he still didn't even have 12 electorates .Meanwhile his English were bogged down in their Stalingrad of the north, Scotland. My Papal empire had grown to include Genoa and Florence, albeit w/o an appearance by the Master of Italy card, these didn't yield as many VP as they could have . Jeromeys one saving grace was that England got a healthy Edward on his first attempt, freeing up his Home card for other uses. Meanwhile Justins Ottomans fended off several foreign wars and were very quiet on the piracy front. My early game debates were pretty meh, but as Jeromey was forced to commit weaker debaters to catch up via their bonuses for reformation and Bible attempts, Eck sprang into action and pretty soon the Papal BBQ was in fulll swing; by the end of the game I had burnt 4 debaters for 5 VP . Alas my Papal VP lead ( I was at or over 25 VP several turns in a row ) was for naught as the Hapsburgs were too far behind ( in 3P the lower scoring power has to be within 5 ) . In particular their Conquistadors after a good opening turn starting rolling like shite; I missed the last four turns in a row. Justins Ottoman piracy started up as well as the Ottomans seizing Papal controlled Venice and those two gave him the game on Turn 7. I hadn't played 3P in quite some time - Diplomacy is almost non existent which really speeds up play. 




Kremlin: I've only played a few times; most of the other 4 players were very experienced so I was basically along for the ride. I picked which guys to spend influence on in almost random fashion then sat back and watched the carnage. The guy controlling the KGB head for the first few turns was purging like it was 1939 and in fact this caused the end game to trigger on only turn 5 ( out of a possible 10 ) due to too few non Siberia/dead guys being available to fill offices. Only 1 Party Chief even got a wave and Sean ended up with control of the Party Chief the last turn for the win. 




Quacks of Quedlinburg. An entertaining press your luck game I recently learned. Not like I'll ever buy it but will play when looking for something mindless. I think I blew up my pot about half the turns; Pete was drowning in rubies while I think I got one the entire game. Don't remember who won other than it def wasn't me. 




Skull with 8 players. Most if not all the early rounds featured the starting player commence bidding with only one tile placed; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Jeromey and I were down to one tile each fairly early, giving the other players two known safe bets til of them won. 




SpaceCorp: Sean had been wanting to try the game so after a brief tutorial we were off. Amazingly Stein didn't find all the bad tiles, but what he did find, and repeatedly so, were lifeless rocks - I don't think he found water or any signs of life til the third era. First place yo-yo'd back and forth between all of us til thru all three eras. Then in the last era Bruce started spamming Production actions at 9 VP per and that was enough to pull him ahead of the rest of us; Charlie Brown, I mean Stein's rock strategy not panning out .




Terraforming Mars : four player base game with one of the expansion maps. I picked Invetrix, the corp that allows cards to be played plus or minus 2 requirements as my 10 start cards didn't offer much synergies with the other corps I drew. Andy Maly, as in other games I've played with him went building light but TR/event heavy. He jumped out to an early lead he never lost, even though I funded and won the only Award ( building tags ) . 




Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition . I was Ecoline, the plant corp. Which in this game is safe from asteroids. This game plays faster than the board game which I like . I think I won, can't remember LOL. 




War of the Ring - my hardy hobbits started the trek to Mordor; unusually other than Gandalf no other companions died before getting to Mordor. Due to being somewhat event card and character die poor, I didn't split anyone off either so I entered Mordor with a horde of meat shields, I mean companions. Meanwhile Jeromey did the popular "DEW" strategy - Dale, Erebor, Woodland Realm and then took Lorien, Pelargir, and Edoras for his game clinching 10th VP while the Fellowship, thinned out considerably by then, slumped over 2 spaces from the lip of Mt Doom with about 7 Corruption . While he only drew 6 Hunt tiles the entire game, crucially 4 of them were Reveals - the dice required to hide the Fellowship perhaps being the difference between winning and losing. 




War of the Ring Card Game: my Dunedain/Robs Hobbits vs Sean's Morder/Jeromeys Saruman. If I had the other side pick the order of my deck it couldn't have been any worse. Aragorn ( card draw ) and Galadriel ( who has several items that can attach only to her ) were the bottom 2 cards in my deck. Meanwhile Rob had been forced to discard/cycle both Frodo and Sam - neither came out the entire game !! Coupled with several turns where my entire starting hand was all items that had no eligible characters to wield them...it was incredible we even made it to Round 8. Despite some craptastic luck I still like this game - it does an excellent job at capturing the theme in a fast playing, compat format. 




About the only downside ( besides the 2100 mile drive ) was that I missed several games of STATIONFALL, which I really wanted to try. I am sure I will get in a game at WBC in three weeks.  

When my son was young we had him tested for stuff, and learned that his spatial skills were really high. Guess which Patchwork board is his?

It’s a fun game!

Also, posting with images from an external site, using an iPad, is a puzzle in its own right.

First game of HERE I STAND since 2017. Wow, it has been that long? It's almost like riding a bike. Everyone has played before but it had been 6-10 years since the last game for anyone, and I think no one super-refreshed on the rules so I had to rely on a lot of muscle memory for rules questions. We wanted to try the 500th anniversary edition stuff that doesn't really add to much as it turns out.

One huge fuckup: we were rolling "full dice" for assaults. I played ENGLAND, turtled and went marriage route due to not great attacking cards the first two turns. So I didn't notice everyone had been screwing up the assault dice until about turn 4, and at that point that was the house rule for this game. England though... if you don't go attacky out of the gate, it's so fucking boring. Doubly so because I just took Scotland in T2 with Diplomatic Marriage instead of the harder way. The boring was good for me in this context because I was stepping away a lot to deal with preparing lunch for everyone and also telling the religious powers how many dice to roll in reformation attempts(only because if I left it to them their turns took 10 minutes). But still... it's probably my one negative in this game is England ends up doing 1/3 of the stuff as Hapsburgs and is out of cards 1st most often.

Hoping to get another game scheduled later this summer, it's still so good/best ever.

Two plays of Here I Stand on the same page?! That's a bucket list game for me. I've joked about doing it if/when I have a bachelor's party.

My buddy at work has expressed interest in Gaslands. Typical me, I purchased a bunch of stuff for it a couple years ago and let it sit un touched.

pulled it out to re-read the rules and the boys wanted in. Well, they wanted to paint first. So we had all of them paint their own car and glue some machine guns (and spikes...so many toothpicks died that day). I also have a 3d printer now, so finally some terrain that matches.

All the boys painted their own cars, just needing a little help with glue. My youngest (6) painted the batmobile and it's pretty impressive.

so we had a race. one of the kids had a monster truck to use, so things weren't "fair" can-wise, but who cares.

Right after this image, the Red Truck rammed the monster truck. which caused a wipeout of the monster truck, who spin forward past the green buggy. Purple Cherokee moves forward and flamethrowers both the bug and the monster truck.

After turning round, Monster Truck runs over the green buggy and crushes it. Batmobile power slides around the corner and zips to victory.

I was the Green Buggy

The eldest whooped me in his first game of Can’t Stop. Cleared the 2 and 12 columns in a single turns each and finished 7 before I got a single marker on the board. Turns out purposely busting your first turn to teach what happens and then busting two turns in a row on your third roll is not a winning strategy.

Riftforce is absolutely legit. There are barely more rules than Lost Cities, but finding the synergies in the draft and working your opponent is delicious.

Extremely pure and good gaming content, lj, thank you for posting.

There was some uncertainty about the Monday night group because of the holiday happenings, but three of them got back to me and said they were available so it was on. Since I hadn't played in forever but was interested in playing a DoaM but NOT a full-fledged thing that would have a million rules to follow (and me to explain...), I pulled out Battle for Rokugan. It was Crane vs Crab vs Unicorn vs Scorpion (me.) I, of course, forgot that Scorpion was dead center of the map (I think it's been a decade since I've last played?), which means I was going to be taking heat from everyone, as was Crane. I probably should have picked Dragon or Phoenix and just competed with Unicorn in the north. Crab and Unicorn immediately dove for the Shadowlands to get the territory cards, while Crane and I kinda slugged it out in the first few rounds in the middle of the map. Crane did take the island early on but Crab came over to contest that quickly. There was fairly liberal use of Raid (I used mine to blow up the Lion capital province to take it from Crane) and Crane ran into a draw issue, where on the round he was reduced to two provinces, he drew both Diplomacys from his pool.

In the end, Crab and Unicorn were slugging it out for supremacy, with both of them having multiple boosted provinces from successful defenses. They tied at 43 points and had the same number of territories and with Crab just edging it out in number provinces by one. I thought it was a good game and both Crab and Unicorn agreed, but the Crane player was kind of dismayed by his draws and I highly doubt this one is going to be voted for next time.

I'm very fond of Battle for Rokugan. Nobody ever asks to play it, but it is attractive enough to get played if I put it on the table. The rules are clean and easy to teach, especially with the handy screens that summarize most of the rules. But it really wants either four or five players, though I came up with some house rules to allow for up to seven players. I wish there were a couple of more games using the Rokugan setting, especially some sort of courtly intrigue game, because I have fond memories of the L5R card game and rpg that have both faded away.

Yeah, the screens are awesome. Not only do they explain every token you can play, but they also give the count in each of your pools, so you know the odds of pulling something more than once, if you're that kind of gamer. It really is a remarkable production for a small box game. Everyone is always amazed at how huge the board is for a box that small.

Dragon Clan forever.

Had some three player games today. Started with Thunder Road Vendetta. This was vicious from the start; even though no one is allowed to shoot in the first round, I still got a car bumped into a chopper which was on the board and got my car eliminated.

One person took off to an early lead so he was the target of multiple chopper attacks, eventually getting taken out and completely eliminated. My opponent and I were both down to our small cars only, and I got lucky and took him out with my chopper for the win. It was great and everyone loved it.

We then tried Dead by Daylight. This was my second try and everyone else's first game. I explained what was going on, but it's kind of tricky to keep it all in your head until you start playing so that you can really see it. The killer said he didn't really know what he was doing, but he knew well enough to have us on the ropes for most of the game, eventually filling up his doom track for victory when we still had 1 generator to repair and then the exit to repair.

It was enjoyed, I don't think it blew anyone away. This strikes me as the kind of game that would absolutely be best at 5 players who all know what they are doing.

Got together with my regular 2-player partner today. We started with Funkoverse, with me wanting to try out a combination that I'd been thinking about for a while: Thanos, Doc Brown, and Sophia. The idea is that Thanos with his 4-cost abilities, plus Doc Brown and his ability to switch the cooldown track making those 1-cost abilities, plus Sophia and her ability to give both of them extra moves, would be devastating. Plus they all use Gray tokens, which means there's a reliable pool to play with (like with Thanos' Merciless (4 Gray: Knock down a rival)) and then one yellow, one blue, and one red token to put the finishing touch on somewhere. Combine that with Fog Juice to give you an extra gray token and, if using two items, the Shovel, which turns whoever uses that into a serious combat threat (which Doc and Sophia really aren't) snd also shifts things down in whatever direction Doc can exploit and you can do some wrecking....

But not if the dice abandon you, which is what happened to me. We played Territory on the Supermarket map (because I thought it was funny) and Brad took Oogie Boogie, Hermione, and Batman and pretty much just held firm to the scenario goals and beat me, 10-5. For all of the magic that I was trying to create, it doesn't work if you can't get the rolls on Thanos' big attacks or Doc and Sophia's small ones. I knocked out Oogie and Hermione to get two points, but Batman hung out in the scoring area for three or four turns, without me being able to remove him and Hermione kept him there (allies can't be knocked out if she's adjacent to them and standing) so my wonderful plans just kind of fizzled. I think I could have talked him into taking two items so that I could use the Shovel alongside the Fog Juice but maybe that's for next time. Probably would have helped if I'd remembered Sophia's Picture It more than once to actually execute the plan, too.

Then we continued with our Hero Realms campaign, made it past the next-to-last boss (a priestess) without too much trouble, to finally make it to the Final Boss; a fleshcrafting demon of some kind, whereupon we got slaughtered. Slaugh. Tered. Like, there was no chance. It kept creating Flesh Armor with the best cards in our market stack, which meant that it wasn't taking damage AND we couldn't buy those cards to try to get into a position to do damage to it. It was a complete reversal of every step up to that point, where we were challenged, but did work through said challenges and eventually moved on. We hit the wall and it was made of flesh armor. Brad kept thinking he had read something wrong or we missed a key rule somewhere, but digging into the game books for a few minutes afterwards showed nothing. It's really weird. He said he was going to look into it again to see if we somehow missed something.

The disappointment continued on my end as we played his second game of Neuroshima Hex. I had given him Hegemony last time, as the best rookie army, IMO, against my Sand Runners, with whom I'd played all of twice before. Now I handed him Outpost (the second-best rookie faction) against my Pirates; the first time I'd gotten the new army to the table. Pirates are very, very weird, because they use the outer ring of the board that's normally only used for 4-player games (which no one ever plays) for any of their units that have Drift. They only use 12 of those outer ring spaces with the rest of them closed off by Water Adjacency tokens that make you shift to the next block of two hexes on that outer ring if you move into one. The Adjacency hexes are at the points of the big hexagon that makes up the board. You know what that means if you can't sit in those hexes? You can't target the middle of the board. That means that if the enemy's HQ has been placed in the middle hex of the board, you can't shoot it with what is primarily a shooting army, including your own HQ which has only a single shooting attack in one direction. You. Can't. Shoot. It. I didn't even touch his HQ for the first dozen turns of the game. He had a tough time targeting mine because it kept moving after every battle, as Drift units are required to do. He finally landed some multi-hits on mine and that pretty much sealed it. I went diving in to try to extract some damage late on and in the final battle, which made the game seem much closer than it really was, as I lost 15-11. but that just strikes me as a huge flaw. If you're playing Pirates and your opponent takes the center hex with his HQ, 2/3 of your army, which MUST be placed in the outer ring (anything that has the Drift ability) won't be able to damage it. I'm not going to say that you might as well give up at that point, but I'm tempted. He didn't do it intentionally so we were both kind of mystified by it but I have a hard time understanding how that glaring issue made it through any kind of playtesting at all. Definitely a motivator for more games with that faction, but really a frustrating moment.

Played three games of Ticket to Ride: New York today. I chose it because I thought it would be a quick entry into the series for my wife and father-in-law.

And yeah, it was quick. The map is very small, but not as tight as you would initially think. Each player only has 15 cabs (trains), so you really have to keep an eye on them as you won't be able to complete destinations if you aren't efficient with your routes. Which leads me to my main complaint - taking extra routes becomes less viable because you typically won't have enough cabs to complete them, unless you've already done so.

It was fun enough. My wife is now interested in giving the regular Ticket to Ride a shot. My FIL want to play again later. So it's a win.

But unless you're using Ticket to Ride: New York as an intro to the system, or gaming in general, there is no need to seek this one out.

7/10 - Solid entry game, would play again.