What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Josh Look wrote: TI3 is not about fighting. Most games I play of it are about agreements you arrange with the other players. If you're fighting because "DERRP!!!! It's a space game and I have space ships and they need to fight!!!" you're playing it _all_ wrong.

I've only played four games of TI3 so far, so I am definitely not an expert on the topic. But it seems like half the objectives involve taking and holding Mecatol Rex, making it seem like the game has a large element of King of the Mountain. Once somebody takes Mecatol Rex, they can deny people VP just by holding onto it for a few turns.

I like TI3, but I feel like I end up in the same boat that Superfly is in. In most of the games I've been in, we'd be too scattered to fight early, and too scared to fight late.

Shellhead wrote:

Josh Look wrote: TI3 is not about fighting. Most games I play of it are about agreements you arrange with the other players. If you're fighting because "DERRP!!!! It's a space game and I have space ships and they need to fight!!!" you're playing it _all_ wrong.

I've only played four games of TI3 so far, so I am definitely not an expert on the topic. But it seems like half the objectives involve taking and holding Mecatol Rex, making it seem like the game has a large element of King of the Mountain. Once somebody takes Mecatol Rex, they can deny people VP just by holding onto it for a few turns.

Ahh, but knowing when to make that move is key. It's unlikely you'll hold Mecatol Rex all game or even half of the game. It's the one place it's ok to attack without hurting your position so people will attack you there. Otherwise TI:3 is a cold war game with some combat scattered throughout. Sure, if you want lots of combat go for TI:2 but in all honesty there are tons of games that do that. TI:3's uniqueness is in that cold war feeling that few games give you. Sometimes you want to build up an empire and not have people constantly fucking with it, sometimes you want a big game like that where the combat happens rarely but with surgical precision when it does finally happen. It hurts to make a poor combat choice and I like that. Several other games, like TI:2, are much more forgiving in that regard. TI:3 is not one of those games. Attack too early or too late and you've lost the game. You need to watch your opponents and plan things very carefully.

This happened.

Da Bid Dabid wrote: This happened.

Atlanta area LEGEND, WIll Kenyon, would look at that table then say to everyone In his vicinity, "It's just for show. They're only making that much noise to make you feel like they're having a better time than you."

He would then go back to taking pictures of his junk.

I hate it when one of my friends gets shitfaced drunk at game day. This happened to me yesterday. I don't care if dudes want to drink or smoke, whatever. I'm totally down with that. I mean this is like guys "poker night" for us so it's all good. But slosh-assed drunk, I can't stand it. If the premise is that we're just going to shoot the shit and get fucked then that's fine with me. And I can go with the flow, too. But FUCK. Whatever. Anyway, by dinnertime I had set up GoW and he was already hammered. GoW rules are like fucking play a card and roll dice. That's the whole game. But that was just mind boggling at this point. And I missed the damn blood moon/eclipse. /rant

n00b alert!

What's the deal with the Loopin Chewie video? I haven't played yet so I don't get it.

Not to turn this into a TI3 thread, but the last time I played, I literally got wiped out entirely - home planet and all because I badly miscalculated an attack AND subsequent turns after making that mistake. I was gambling on staying in the lead and fishing out the Game Over objective via Bureaucracy and this forced another player to take over my home system to prevent. I was in PAIN because of my misplay and poor reaction to that misplay, but a lesson was learned that day and the game was still fun as I held on to the sliver of hope that I could squeak it out. But at the end, even when other players are involved, my lose was mine alone.

You gotta play the players first and the game second. I had the players down this time, but slipped on the game.

Dammit now I want to play again so bad.

Green Lantern wrote: n00b alert!

What's the deal with the Loopin Chewie video? I haven't played yet so I don't get it.

It was just to show the childlike fun that 11 adults aged around 30 years can have playing a child's game. The last shot is not particularly spectacular, but it was a comeback and everyone was rallying against the person who ended up losing... hence the large reaction.

Three player game of the new version of Moongha Invaders, which showed up in the mail today...wow, I did not like it nearly as much as I remember from playing it five years ago. It's kind of weirdly paced and oddly restrained. There are some brilliant ideas (I love "charging up" for attacks), but I am just not nearly as taken by it now as I was. My buddies both commented that it seemed way too slow to get going and I agreed.

The new production is _awful_...the minus are cheap, gaudy and actually interfere with gameplay because they are so big. The illustrations are OK, but the old black, white and red look was so distinctive.

Interesting that the two player variant is actually a completely different game with a different board and everything. It's a grid-based, light skirmish game with a monster player battling a hero player controlling five heroes from the main game. It looks kind of fun, will check it out.

But overall, so far, I'm giving it a mehven.

Played a 6 player Spartacus with all expansions tonight, starting at 4 up to 12 points, Varinius was the house not being played.

Seppius went very strong early, but topped out at 10 influence after a failed scheme to rig a primus and was battled back down into the 7 point range as the table ganged up against him. Most of the other houses had decent all around stables and it was a very close game. A highlight was Caburus and a slave going toe to toe vs 2 mid ranged gladiators in an early primus and just barely losing what was basically a 2 v 1, the great fighting spared Caburus from being thumbed executed despite no in game reason not to do it.

The final turn's intrigue phase saw 2 players (including myself as Solonius) get to 12 only to be knocked down to 11 and a third player be foiled by reactions in his 3 bids to get to 12. During the market our Glaber player who had the most cash was able to win host. After an invitation refusal by one of the lower VP players, the Seppius player decided to accept the invitation sealing the win for Glaber as an act of revenge against those who ganged up on him early game, feeling he would rather allow Glaber the win than let one of the 3 other houses hovering at 11 points fight out for the game.

Definitely the closest game we've ever had as the last turn came down to a failed guard roll to prevent my win, and after that just the right amount of foils to push the game into the arena phase. While some people complained about Seppius' decision to allow Glaber the victory rather than choose 1 of 3 others to fight him for the win, even as one of the potential combatants for the victory, I thought it was fitting nasty end to the game session and will be a good meta builder moving forward.

Ultimate Warriorz continues to impress enough to ignore its stupid spelling. There's this thing in the game though where people tend to gang up on the larger creatures since they're easier to hit and I've yet to see a big guy win a game because of it. They've come close though.

The card play here beats the yahtzee dice of King of Tokyo hands down. I don't think it will replace KoT in my collection though as it's a bit less confrontational and a better gateway game I believe. What's funny though is that UW is actually probably simpler and easy to teach AND has baked in asymmetry which is awesome.

After that we moved onto Don't Turn Your Back which was impressive. Felt very smooth for combining worker placement/deck building/area control. The least experienced gamer in the group ended up winning, beating me by a single point. I would be raving about this game if each player had a unique deck instead of everything being symmetrical, but as it is it's pretty good and definitely unique.

We played the intro scenario to Apocalypse Chaos and it was fine but unspectacular. Reserving judgment for full blown missions but I wish there was a bit more drama in the design. It kind of emphasizes the mental wrangling of the resolution of Neuroshima Hex as a main mechanic that's key to planning out your turn.

I'm talking about the "This guy's attacking there, then moving here and attacking again, this other guy will attack too but after Jeremy goes and then move here." etc. It's like untangling the web of Space Alert but in turn based slices. Not the biggest fan of that kind of planning but I do really like the dice allocation system and the unique character boards. The 3D board setup is cool too.

We closed out with this game called Love Letter.

Two games of Camp Grizzly. I think it's awesome. Super fun "hope for the best and see what happens" kind of game. You're probably gonna die, but you know that going in. Love the comic book style art work, I feel most publishers would have gone for something darker, but this works well and isn't too cute. Barnes says that LNOE is mde by people who think they know what the genre is like, and he might be right, but these guys TOTALLY get slasher horror. They're also really good at theme without flavor text. The game should be totally dumb, but they made a lot of good choices that save it. I may not _love_ the slasher genre, but I do find it entertaining enough and it's nice to play a horror game that isn't about zombies or Cthulhu.

Awwww fuck...I was doing so damn good NOT buying Camp Grizzly!

Got in my first game of Firestorm Armada. 800 point game (as if anyone knows what that means). Superbly designed space game. A few gripes but those rules will be ejected into space.

The factions don't feel all that different, to be honest, but on balance, it's really not that big of a deal. That said, I only have a few factions so far. The biggest differences revolve around the types of attacks/defenses available. Terrans have shields which blocks hits, and rely quite a bit on torpedoes/missiles. Dendrazi are basically big railguns that happen to have an engine and a shit-ton of armor.

Really intuitive. Really.