What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yeah, you kind of have to. I've never played with this guy I'm referring to, I'd be interested to see what the hell it is he does.

Disappointed in the abstractness of Samurai Spirit. Fine mechanically but bland and completely sits atop the accomplishments of Kurosawa without properly evoking the material.

I'm like 5 missions into SC:AM now and still digging it. The mission variety does feel pretty strong in the early going.

I did some gaming with a couple buddies on Friday. More Blood Bowl:Team Manager, this time with both expansions. I really like the game, but the cards do not like me. It is rough drawing a full compliment of human lineman on the last round of a tight game. No freebooters, so I couldn't trim the deck.

I introduced them to Legacy of the Unconquered Sun. I picked it up for 25$ a couple years ago at B&N. A big-box, adventuring, dice-fest that is brought low by a terrible rulebook. It is a pain to slog through. Overall, the mechanics are easy. As this was the first time teaching it to new players in a long while, it was pretty elementary to teach. I do enjoy the co-op and PvP aspects of it, but there are also fun screwage elements to it. It is possible to arrive at a dominion(province) ahead of another player and steal the quest they were going for. Or fighting a different person's rival to steal the rewards. It can be picked up super cheap. I like it as much, or more than Runebound.

Two games of Risk: Mass Effect yesterday and it was fun. It is a shameless copy of the Star Wars Original Trilogy Risk so if you missed that one I'd recommend getting the Mass Effect clone. It's a great three player game with a different victory condition for each player. Cerberus wants to claim ten of thirteen strategic planets, the Alliances must find the catalyst or destroy all Reapers (good luck), and the Reapers win if they wipe out the Alliance. The components are nice with a colorful and effective galaxy map. Cards for each faction allow for some unexpected and powerful tactics to confound your enemies and Harbinger is roaming the board devastating planets, shifting the momentum of the war to exterminate those pesky humans. Pretty cool stuff all around.

Still playing the moonbase assault in SCAM where you have to rescue thralls and find schematics. I think I've tried it four times without winning. I play with only two rocketeers, but does more good guys make the game easier?

I play with 3 solo and it works well. That is a rough mission though.

It also helps that I usually fail to roll more than one or at the most two successes, though.

mads b. wrote: Still playing the moonbase assault in SCAM where you have to rescue thralls and find schematics. I think I've tried it four times without winning. I play with only two rocketeers, but does more good guys make the game easier?

Bringing more Rocketeers along on the mission tends to make a mission BIGGER but not always easier. With more aliens being scanned, there can be a lot of firepower coming in at a single Rocketeer. Then again, a few Rocketeers working together can create some very effective combinations.

The Moon: Boarding Action scenario is a pretty elaborate one, and the pressure doesn't let up. The schematics & rescued Thralls are objectives, but they're also very useful tools. You'll need every trick in the book to succeed.

The trick is WHO you bring. I found it easier with 2P, bringing Mr Strafe and the Professor or the Doctor and Professor.

Prof is great for healing and Dethrallifying, Strafey is good for killing shit

I need to get Buonocore on the horn and beg a copy of SCAM off him...and 504 for that matter.

I had a buddy over last night and we played some BattleCon...I had not played this since it was first out, Brad Talton sent me the two most recent releases (Fate of Indines and a "remastered" War of Indines). I forgot how much I really like it. It's less mind-gamey than Yomi, but in reflection I think I may actually prefer it to Yomi even though I still think that was a great design. BattleCon is more fun to play, and it's easier to dig right into. The pairing up of attack styles and bases is a great idea, and having a limited hand where the decision points are in making (and timing) these pairs is a good gameplay concept. We did a bunch of matches over about 90 minutes, he had never played but he was up to speed with it pretty quickly despite a couple of timing speedbumps. I got some of the promo characters, so we had Bruce Lee in the mix, which was fun. I think I have, between the two sets and the promos, something like 38 characters to choose from. And they're all pretty unique, most have special mechanics, unique cards or tokens that set them apart.

We were just picking stuff at random, mostly, but it does seem like the kind of game where you will get the most out of it if you really focus on learning just a couple of characters and their match-ups. Just like in a fighting video game.

Kids are all up into Cube Quest...which kind of sucks, because I really want them to play Battleball with me instead.

Michael Barnes wrote: Kids are all up into Cube Quest...which kind of sucks, because I really want them to play Battleball with me instead.

LOVE Battleball. Love it.

Yeah, my recent infatuation with Blood Bowl 2 on the PS4 got me to dig it up again, I haven't actually played it in quite some time but I've had it for something like 12 years at this point- making it a "lifer", more or less. It is really freaking good. It's so simple, my 5 year old picked up on the rules right away although he's still struggling with the idea that you don't want to just move one guy every turn...he hasn't quite sorted out the strategy of having blockers, runners, brutalizers, etc. He figured out passing over the weekend to get the ball down the field and it was like a major breakthrough. Except that now he wants to pass every time.

Scarlett (just turned 4) doesn't really get it yet but she plays as my teammate and does all the die rolling and sometimes player selection.

The last game we played was actually pretty good even though I was sandbagging to give him a chance. He wound up doing this amazing four or five turn run where he rolled ones and twos versus every blocker and just left a trail of destruction all the way to the touchdown. This morning when I took him to school he was talking about it.

It's really too bad that couldn't have been a product line...as it is, it's kind of perfect but it's hard to not want there to be extra teams, new abilities and so forth.

Bloodbowl is a great design... but without a player's league to maintain interest & action, it tends to bog down under its own weight. I enjoy the Team Manager card game well enough, but I always prefer to push pieces on a map.

Battleball is just a perfect example of "less is more".

It also has the single coolest "die shape" of any game (the incredible 6-sided football die).

superflycircus.com/2010/07/battleball-th...at-style-fatalities/
If you don't own Battleball, you have failed at this hobby. It's really that simple.

Cube Quest was fun the first 2 times I played it (and I mean for 5 minutes). Then it was obvious that it's a very kid-friendly game and is really not great for adults. On balance, I'd much rather play Crossbows and Catapults.

I tried a 5-player game of Magic: The Gathering - Arena of the Planewalkers on a large map (6 foot by 6 foot) with plenty of substantial elevation changes. SOOOO much more fun than my first game (which was 2-player on the map that comes with the base set). The cards can have some interesting interactions with each other, which create some major turns. In one example I was being attacked by a swamp monster dude who ended up rolling 11 dice (!) against my planeswalker in a single attack. In another example, another one of my opponents played one card to basically teleport his planeswalker to the top of a castle where one of my squad members was planted on a glyph, then played a card that pushed my squad member off the castle (which ended up costing him two health) and then he finished me off with his ranged attack.

Hopefully Hasbro supports this game. The fact that there weren't expansions for this game on store shelves day one is bonkers.