What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

After buying Omen: Reign of War [mandatory Space Biff review* for ten bucks and not quite enough sleeves for one dollar quite a while ago, I got in two games with my son. He created an Oracle machine for our first game and trounced me.

In our second game I had a row of Oracles bleeding his cards and grinding out money for me and was chugging along while he looked more and more glum. Then he got the look in his eye that I have learned to dread and played the "Tipper of the Scales"



It's like the end of Platoon when Charlie Sheen calls in an air strike on himself. My Oracle Engine was wiped out and he clawed his way back to a victory. It was a great story.

We still haven't gotten to the point where we are willing to flip over the City tiles and use the special powers. I am looking forward to more games of this.

From Space Biff:

*If I had a single caveat for my admiration for Omen (and my wife is very insistent on this caveat), it would be that the luck element can be devastatingly strong at times. In our last game, she played a Keeper of the Tide and a Corrupted Hoplite on her first turn, discarding three of my four starting cards before I had the chance to act. Of course, that did make revenge all the sweeter when my Masked Surrogate copied her Keeper’s ability and my warrior (“The Dreaded”) dragged her Hoplite down to heck.

Nonetheless, I don’t feel that this chance necessarily does the game a disservice. It’s true that sometimes one player is going to draw all soldier cards, or will fail every one of their oracles’ portent bonuses, or might be forced to discard an entire hand of beasts, but the game plays quickly and provides so many opportunities for swings in fortune that I don’t feel it’s a real problem.

A friend invited us out to her family’s lake resort for the weekend. There were over forty people, evenly split between between parents and grandparents and children no older than 10. Even managed to fit in a few games around the swimming, paddle boarding, tubing and jet skiing.

Just One was a huge hit in the after hours when brains were cooked after a day in the sun and a half hour of wrestling kids to bed. Apparently insisting that there are rules to the game and that ‘sink’ and ‘unsinkable’ are in the family makes you a bully. Other people don’t think ‘Vanities’ is a good clue for ‘bonfire.’

Mists Over Carcassonne was surprisingly popular with the kids. A few watched a teaching gaming between another adult and me, and they asked for another three over the next day. Never won a level one game, but they kept asking.

Also played less notable rounds of King of Tokyo and ICECOOL. Ra remains unfortunately unplayed, but I’ve been to enough of these types of gatherings to be happy any gaming happened, especially with the little ones.

Got a game of Cosmic Encounter in on TTS with a couple friends alongside Jack Reda and Bill Eberle. My friends and I met Jack at GenCon where we were going to play Cosmic there with him, but he had a 9-player Dune game run over so he set this up for us instead.

We played with the Moons variant alongside sticking to green alert aliens from base game and Cosmic Dominion. I was Spiff, my friend Jonathan was Lizard, my other friend Billy was Mutant, Bill was Trader, and Jack was Vulch. The early game started chill with Billy going first and being aggressive at accepting allies. Most of us hopped in and gained easy colonies while Bill dragged behind due to failing to close deals with Billy. Bill went next and drew destiny against Billy which led them clobbering each other while the rest of us got in easy colonies. There was one time I played a reinforcements on the other side to try and trigger my crash land to exclusively get a colony, but Jonathan played another reinforcement to stop that from occurring.

Jack's turn led to him doing a deal with Jonathan to trade colonies and then another win led to him getting to 4 colonies first. My turn, I drew Jack's system and proceeded to invade with no allies. Jack did the same. I held a 20 with the single 30 and 40 having already been played plus several tiny attacks, no negotiates. Based on Jack being solo and my card, I decided to play the 20 as I had bluffed trying to crash land. It worked so I was also now at 4 with another attack against Jack coming. Everyone joined him as no one else was at 4. So, I had a feeling they were anticipating my crash land, so I tried to be clever and play my then highest card, a 14, to sneak past what I thought would be a low ball. He did low ball, like a 10, but not enough for me to win or crash land. Plus I came to find that a couple of them had Cosmic Zaps. Dang.

Jonathan won an encounter where he gained one of the secret moons whose category, and thereby mechanics, aren't revealed until you land on it. He got a moon base with his 3rd colony, so he was also at 4 then. We bolstered the defense to stop him from getting to 5. Billy again, and he proceeded to go against my system with Bill joining in (both at 3) while the Jonathan and Jack joined me for defense. Johns vs Bills! My best bet was a morph card I got from some rewards alongside superior numbers but reinforcements could easily tip the scales, and so it did. Bill had a +4 with another +4 bonus from his moons so now everyone was at 4, then Billy and Bill proceeded to make a deal and share the win.

First game of Cosmic in at least 4 years. God I missed this game! Looking forward to more in the future.

I have never tried the Moons variant, or even read the rules for it. Is it recommended?

I'd love to meet Jack some time at a con. He and I were both just modders back in the day; he made fancy artscow versions of my Descent Quest cards. Descent Quest was my first foray into design.

Not a rush out and buy like the rewards deck, but they a good inclusion. They're similar to space stations with the main difference being other players can take advantage of the moons instead of just depriving someone else of a space station. You can put a ship on a moon if you win an encounter as a main player if that planet has a moon, offense or defense. There are 88 moons in several categories which do different things. Some have crazy one-time effects like getting all of the flares from everybody's hands. Others have minor effects that get stronger with another moon of the same type. Some give you an extra colony but put a handicap on you like not being able to use your highest attack card. Then there's cheesy moons which are just bonkers, like forcing you to speak in rhymes or sing about your alien's power when its your turn. Glad that didn't come up during the game, or they'd have to shut down the stream!

In terms of the general flow, it makes each player's system more unique and makes you consider which planet to go after rather than just the one with the least ships. You think you should obviously go after a moon but if you lose that encounter, you just strengthened your opponent. Also, occupying moons can be factors used when making deals to add even more spice to negotiations.

They're nice and if you liked space stations, you'll love these. Honestly, of the stuff in Cosmic Odyssey, Jack seems to be the most fond of Lux which makes me want to try them next game.

I’ve never tried space stations either. I have expansions to go to 8 players but have never done any variants. The game just doesn’t feel incomplete and I don’t play often enough.

I get that. This was my first time playing a variant that wasn't just the rewards deck. There's so much to Cosmic and I don't get to play enough.

You have Discord? Future Pastimes has a channel where people can coordinate games of Cosmic, Dune, etc.

Thanks, I don't much care for playing board games online though. At least with randos.

ChristopherMD wrote:

RobertB wrote: PR is kind of like multiplayer Scrabble, where the player to the left of the newbie wins.

Is there a solo option?

Might have had a slight brain fart there. 'Multiplayer' there meant > 2 players. A lot of new players don't play real close attention to the bonus squares, and end up feeding points to the player on their left.

Yesterday had a shortish 3p game day. Some unexpected classics got pulled out:

RA, 2006 Uberplay edition. Stone-cold legendary game, probably my favorite auction game ever. So simple and yet so great. The fixed bid tokens make it. I lost pretty badly -- I had the higher-valued suns and kept trying to build up big lots to win, but Ra tiles kept getting pulled.

IRISH GAUGE, 2019 (maybe not a classic yet). I am not really into the 18XX stock style train games, mostly due to their reputation as heavy, long, mathy, and opaque. (I've tried one or two and my impression was not changed.) This is short, lighter, straightforward, and slightly less mathy. Pretty happy to have this be my one stock train game. I lost badly again.

CAT IN THE BOX. Also not a classic, but managed to actually play well -- hit my bids, connected orthogonal groups for bonus points, took the win.

SAN JUAN, 2p. 2nd edition from 2014. This has quite a few new buildings that change the strategies around -- mostly by making production strategies more viable. Unfortunately I had the optimal strategies from the first edition burned into my brain. Lost.

I would argue that Cat in the Box is a classic in the making. It's probably the best trick-taker I've ever played (although I still haven't gotten a play of The Barracks Emperors in yet.) Congrats on the win.

We invited a couple over for nachos and they suggested we play games. They said they would bring a favorite and I pulled out Rummikub because our primary goal for the evening was to talk. They brought this Cranium game called Whoonu , which is like a simpler version of Say Anything, where everyone tries to guess how you will rank three activities that are handed to you by each player. We ate nachos, talked and learned that some of us like black licorice or prefer collecting sneakers over watching the World Series. I would have preferred Sushi Go Party but my wife said it would not have allowed us to talk much. We also violated TWBG protocol by not getting drunk.
That is all.

Over Labor Day weekend, a friend (kuhrusty) and I drove to Seattle for a house con there. Got there late Friday, left early Tuesday.

Games played (that I remember):

• Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game. Going against the grain by being a licensed game that is actually good. 2p only (although there's an official 4p variant which seemed highly janky); good guys vs. bad. Has Star Realms vibes, except instead of four factions there's three -- rebels, empire, and neutral (bounty hunters etc.). There's about three distinct strategies for each side, spread out amongst the cards, so you kind of have to pick one and focus on it. Empire, for example, has a strategy around lots of capital ships, or lots of ground troops, or lots of fighters. Rebels has a strong "make the opponent discard" angle, representing little sabotage actions, which is nicely thematic. Played three games of this against two different opponents, went 2-1. 4/5 stars.
• Endeavor: Age of Sail. A bit of a blast from the past. I think I mentioned this upthread, but this has been getting a lot of plays lately. I had the original edition (2009) back in the day; thought it was fine but Just Another Competent Euro. Flipped it after a handful of plays. Read a good review of the 2nd edition (2018), picked it up, and was pretty blown away. Either I've become less jaded (possible; I've been playing exponentially fewer Euros) or the tweaks to 2e, which are minor, manage to elevate it to something sublime. Got two plays of this, one 5p and one 3p, lost both. The thing this does well is provide a smooth curve of complexity. You start with two buildings and add one every turn, until you get to eight. Each building (mostly) adds an action. And the map starts with only a small section available, but then gradually opens up. So it's very easy to teach and for new players to wrap their heads around. The expansions add variable powers and lots of extra options, but the base game is so good that I rarely add them. This is my favorite middleweight Euro, maybe of all time. OF ALL TIME! I lost both games and still had a good time. 5/5 stars.
• Stationfall. Discussed in the Stationfall thread. 6p game, I lost pretty badly. I was the medic bot with the daredevil as a backup character. No one was attacking during the first 4/5ths of the game, so I had no one to heal, and thus no way to earn points. Tried maneuvering the daredevil around (his goal is to get the wingsuit and jetpack so he can freefall to earth) but the billionaire managed to get them first while I was still futzing around with the medic bot and trying to figure out how the game worked. Overall good but really needs another round or two of competent development, and a graphic design overhaul. As it is, it has a ton of rough edges that make the game look more complex than it actually is. 3/5 stars.
• Cat In the Box. Two games, one at 5p, one at 4p. Lost both. Not much needs to be said about this; it's one of the best trick takers of all time. As I Always Say (tm) one of the best metrics of game quality is profanity per minute, and this rates extremely highly. 5/5 stars.
• Desperation. Storygame of American gothic horror from the designer of Fiasco. Premise is a blizzard coming through rural Kansas in the 1880s. The game is a deck of cards, with subcategories. The subcategories are shuffled and then stacked in a particular order. On your turn you draw the top card, read it, and do what it says. The first category is town locations, then townsfolk, then the actual decks of events: Autumn, Winter, and Hell. The clever twist is that the events will describe a person doing or saying something, but it doesn't specify which character says it -- that's up to you. So the same events play out differently every time; maybe someone else is a cannibal in this game, and someone else is cheating on their spouse, etc. The event cards all end with "SPEAK YOUR TRUTH," which is an invitation to the active player to embellish the event -- either by narrating an extra bit of horror, speaking as the character, foreshadowing, or whatever. It's optional, so you don't have to do it if you aren't feeling it. The game ended with all but two characters dead, and the survivors broken by the experience. 4/5 stars.
• Feed the Kraken. A somewhat overwrought party/social deduction game. You're all on a ship. Each of you has a secret identity: some of you are sailors, some of you are pirates, and one of you is a cult leader. Sailors win if the ship sails across the board and ends up on the right half of the map, in civilization. Pirates win if you end up on the left side of the map, in the pirate isles. Cult leader wins if you end up in the exact middle of the other side, in the kraken's maw, or if he's thrown overboard. On each turn, someone is the captain, who nominates a lieutenant and a navigator. Then there's a chance for a mutiny -- people secretly bid a number of flintlock pistol tokens (concealed in fists and simultaneously revealed). If there's a mutiny then a new command crew is chosen, followed by another chance for a mutiny. But flintlock tokens are finite, so you can't do it forever. Once the team is chosen, they decide which direction to sail. The board is a hex map, so you're always going forward, but either straight-, left-, or right-foward. There's a deck of navigator cards; each card has a direction on it. The lieutenant secretly draws two, discards one, passes the other to the navigator. Captain does the same. Navigator puts both cards in a little box, shakes them up (this shuffles them), then looks at them and discards one. The remainder is played, and that's the direction the ship goes. Everyone gets to argue and accuse over who chose what card, etc. Each card also has an effect -- captain secretly looks at one person's role, or the cult leader secretly converts someone into being a cultist (everyone closes their eyes and extends their hands into the middle of the table; cult leader opens their eyes and touches someone's hand), that kind of thing. There's also one-shot powers that are dealt out. Pretty fun, kind of overcomplicated and overproduced, but it has a good table presence and a great theme. Played twice and lost both times, but had a good time yelling and accusing people. 4/5 stars.
• Quest For El Dorado. Never played this Knizia classic. Early deckbuilder I think? Variable maps make it seem like it has a lot of replayability. Race across the jungle to get to the temple first. Light and fun, don't know that I need to get it though. I guess some people love it. 3p, I won. 3/5 stars, okay but seems a bit dated.

Also played, but not by me:

• Shogun, which I think was called at about the halfway point due to lateness.
• In the Shadow of the Emperor. It was super late, I listened to about half the rules explanation, looked at the box and saw it took 45 minutes. Decided to go to bed and begged off, turning it from 4p into 3p. Next morning I learned that the game had actually taken three hours and ended in a 3-way tie, with no tiebreaker in the rules. Dodged a bullet.

The lateness was a recurring theme. I am an early riser; typically up before 6am and in bed before 10pm. These people are up at 11 or noon, and up until the wee hours. I probably could have played a lot more games. No complaints though.

Other observations:

* Kuhrusty rented a Tesla; he thinks they are really fun to drive. The host's negotiations with his spouse prevented anyone from getting there before 8:30pm on Friday (so as not to disrupt kids' bedtimes) so we looked up the driving time and left at an appropriate hour. Rookie mistake! Every 2-3 hours we had to charge the car, which took around 30 minutes. We got there, not at 8:30pm, but at 11pm. (It was about a 600 mile drive.)

* Holy crap there was a lot of booze. I was obligated to schlep up a bunch of local craft beers that are not widely distributed. Others did the same. Anything that was unusual was doled out in 2-4oz drams, sipped, commented on with a lot of chin stroking, and then logged in a beer nerd app. I think I drank enough to more than make up for Cranberries' violation of TWBG protocol, and then some. And I was the (comparatively) light drinker, only having about two dozen beers and a several fine bourbons (of a quantity I'd prefer not to think about) over the course of the weekend. I'll never get my temple recommend at this rate.

* Being in Seattle, there were nigh-infinite options for DoorDashing vegan food. That was a pleasant treat, which is not really available out in the sticks where I live. Upside of living in the sticks: I am not tempted to order expensive food delivery all the time.

Overall, a good time, looking forward to next year.

Sounds fantastic. Other than the ones I already know, like Cat in the Box (which I agree may be the greatest trick-taker OF ALL TIME!), the one that really spoke to me of stuff I haven't played is Desperation. Can't find it on BGG, though? There's a Desperation card game, but it's about trying to reach the North Pole.

Edit: Found it on the Googles from Bully Pulpit games. Looks like it's two games (Dead House and The Isabel) in one box, labeled Desperation. But no listing on the game database to end all databases. Weird.

As a storygame, it's on the RPGG side, not BGG:

rpggeek.com/rpgitem/381026/desperation

For clarity, I should specify that as you note, there's two games (or scenarios, if you like) in the box. Confusingly, "Desperation" is the name of the system, and also of the physical product. Dead House and The Isabel are the games; each one is self-contained and doesn't need anything else to play.

We played Dead House, which is the Kansas blizzard scenario. The "dead house" is the shack next to the cemetery where the town stores bodies of those who've died during the winter, when the ground is frozen and too hard for graves to be dug.

The Isabel is a different story with different characters, about a doomed Alaskan cod ship of the same name, its crew, and a handful of civilians who've bought passage on it. The deck of cards is a little different -- instead of laying out all the locations at the start, you start with four, representing areas of the Isabel: the foredeck, aft, the cabins, and the bow. The event decks aren't seasons. You start with the Whole Gale. At the end of that, the ship founders and is abandoned. Previous locations are removed and replaced with four lifeboats; surviving characters are moved into them. Then there's the "In Boats" event deck. At the end of that, the boats reach a desolate and isolated Aleutian island. The lifeboat locations are discard, and the Hell deck comes out as the castaways slowly starve, freeze, and go insane as they stare at the endless grey. Make it to the end of Hell and survivors, if any, are rescued.

There's also a system reference document on the Bully Pulpit website if you want to make your own scenario. My FLGS was able to get the game for me, so it looks like it's in regular distribution if you don't want to order it online.