What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

How did he get the new stuff!???

I guess it was wave 2 from the original kickstarter? He also got Ithaqua but neglected to bring him. He complained it was too much stuff to drag around.

Being the good friend that I am, I offered to let him keep Cthulhu Wars at my house. He declined. Ungrateful prick.

For Valentine's Day one of my local gaming stores had a Two Headed Giant (2 player teams) Magic the Gathering tournament (because the new set is designed for 2 headed giant and well Valentine's day). My 12 year old daughter and myself entered, because she likes 2 headed giant (as then she doesn't have the stress of playing alone against adults, plus having a team member often makes tournaments more fun) so she wants to play at every opportunity. We regularly play casual sealed tournaments with 4 rounds at set pre-releases, and average 2 wins out of 4, so we aren't bad, but not world beaters. Last time we played in early January we had a dreadful run, losing all 4 games, and at least one was to some very poor players, which was completely unlike us. So a couple of weeks later we had a post-mortem and thought about why we failed and had a bit of a practice, and set out to enter this tournament to redeem ourselves. Of course then we had my wife's cancer diagnosis, and mentally I was no longer in the zone. After some discussion, we decided that we would still go to the tournament, to try to bring some normality and happiness back into our lives.

So we opened our sealed pool of cards, and we were slightly happy as we opened the most expensive card in the set (apart from some super super rare cards called expeditions that are only in the last two sets and go for $100 minimum), and by far the best card in the set for the format for 2 headed giant, "Fall of the Titans". And to cut a long story short, there were 16 teams in the tournament, and we won all 4 of the games to win the whole damn thing. There was a fair bit of luck in that we drew "Fall of the Titans" every game, with it single handedly winning 2 of them (one we won without it, and the fourth I think we would have won without it), but then with our skill level we were always going to need a bit of luck.

The final bit of the story came at the end when we went to see if there was a prize. It was a casual tournament so you just won a booster pack each for each win, so we did end up with 8 booster packs, but was always hoping there might be a promo card or something for the eventual victors. As we walked out of the store we opened our final booster packs for winning the last game, and my daughter asked me what this weird card was in her pack. Those super super rare cards I mentioned earlier, yes, it was one of them, so she ended up with a $100 card as her prize for winning the tournament. We are thinking of framing it with a little note saying how the card was won, because while she could sell it as she will never use it, having a little trophy celebrating winning a tournament is even better, particularly when you are only 12.

It was one of those weird days because we came home so happy but then felt guilty for having fun when our family situation is so distressing.

Ok, I'm a total Runewars convert.

So, my brother visited, and the wife suggested I invited him for a day of gaming while she stayed with my toddler at my sister's house with my mom.

I taught him Runewars, and we played in 15 minutes (I just taught him what's on his player board and what each order card does). So it became a game of discovery with him. He was blown away each time something unique happen.

For long I thought cards are the greatest kind of component since they bend rules, with the unlimited potential of words (instead of symbols, icons, etc). And in the recent years, I've become disappointed in the lame ass tameness of FFG's games. Yes, there are cards, but usually they do not do much. Not in Runewars though. There's a reason why the tactics cards deck is so thick. In this game we played tactics cards like crazy (because he started to hoard it!), but the climax was when I acquired a reward card that allows me to teleport my army to one of my heroes who was in an empty space.

At one time he assaulted my army that was behind a mountain with a Teleport and Mountain Passage cards, but was crushed in a counter-attack since he had the mountain against his back.

So he attacked a choke point, leaving his forward stronghold with a single unit garrisoned. I used a Call Lightning card to decimate both armies, and then a Tactical Retreat card to draw my army from that area. The next season, I attacked the stronghold he had left through the mountains with the Secret Passage card. I also teleported an army right into his home realm. This both trapped his marauding army right between two strongholds and caused disturbance around his home realm. His "supply lines" was practically broken in 2 places. I had claimed having enough runes for victory. His marauding army managed to snatch a rune, but after sending my heroes to spy the runes around his home realm, the army I previously teleported managed to get a replacement for victory.

I then taught him Ticked to Ride. We also played Warhammer: Conquest and Agricola with Farmers of the Moor, but really, Runewars was the highlight of our gaming that day.

I then taught him Ticked to Ride.

Great Magic story, Ancient. Congrats on the win!

craniac wrote:

I then taught him Ticked to Ride.

Hahaha! My lil bro is special because I sort of his tutor in gaming. From Nintendo to Skyrim! He finished Battletoads without a scratch! So I game with him on all kind of games.

My pal Matt met two guys at his daughter's school, both fledgling gamers (and both named Br*an, though one is Brian and one is Bryan). Both wanted to learn Twilight Struggle, so on Saturday we met up at Matt's place and played two simultaneous games. I got to bust out my DELUXE copy finally.

I love TS but have never been particularly good at it. I've lost in the middle of turn 4 before. Matt played against the Br*an who had never played before. Their game ended on Turn 5.

My game with the Br*an who had played once before (against Matt, about two months earlier) was much tighter. B was a good player and even though I got some lucky killer combos in, he kept me on my toes. We went nearly the whole 10 rounds, and he won with the "War Games" card. (Two more action rounds and we would have done final scoring, which I'm pretty sure he would have won. I had some regions but I wasn't in a position to really move the needle much.) The most I ever had (I was USSR) was 12 or 13 points but two really awful hands in a row, coupled with devastating plays from B, drained all my lead away. He got a card out of my hand which forced me to play one that killed my position in Central America. He followed with Central America scoring and then the US card that just gives him a shit ton of points, can remember which one. My broad lead vanished just like that, and the next hand for me was garbage as well.

In addition, we both did shitty space race rolls (the Marshall Plan got shot into space twice but alas, Margaret Thatcher was unable to get airborne) but he did less shitty than me and got all the VP bonuses.

More importantly, I'm starting to finally get a handle on the game and play more intelligently. Part of it was having an opponent more my level, who didn't crush me before I got my head together. And more importantly than that, both the Br*ans enjoyed the game a bunch. So hopefully we'll get more games of this played relatively soon.

Sounds like fun. Getting better at TS, once you learn the cards, is about using actions efficiently. Any time you can accomplish more than one goal in a card play I think you've come out ahead.

My opponent and I have been thinking hard about getting rid of CIA created and Lone Gunmen entirely from the game. I hate these cards, the way they can make you lose is not especially strategic or thematic (Defcon loss), and it's all because they are 1 op so can't be space raced. I have gone 3-4 turns with Lone Gunmen as my "extra" card, praying that my opponent does not decide to play something that makes me discard a card randomly from my hand or anything=automatic loss.

hotseatgames wrote: My spendy friend brought over some of the new Cthulhu Wars stuff last night. We had two different 3 player games.

First I controlled the Opener of the Way. This faction's GOO is more powerful with more players, so with only 2 enemy GOOs he was not that great. Their ability to spawn monsters out of any gate is pretty awesome. They have some other good abilities, but I was unable to capitalize on them because the other two players completely ganged up on me and took most of my gates. I came in dead last by a long margin. Incidentally my opponents were the Sleeper and Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep won.

For the second game, we set out two of the neutral GOOs that you can summon. No one even considered doing it. I controlled the Sleeper, someone else was the Opener of the Way, and the third player was the Yellow Sign. Of course, Yellow Sign having two GOOs made Yog Sothoth (the opener) now more powerful. This was yet another reason no one wanted a neutral GOO, since he would be that much stronger. I led the game for the majority of the time, but Yog Sothoth completely focused on wrecking my plans during the late game, and he ended up beating me by several points thanks to his one-time ability to double the reward for a ritual of annihilation. When I was that faction, I never got a good chance to use that ability because I spent practically the whole game with only 3 gates and no GOO.

General thoughts:
1. The new plastic gates are awesome.
2. The new heavy player boards are great. I'm still amazed they were never there from the start.
3. The lowest monster for Yog Sothoth is a lame sculpt. It's actually smaller than a cultist.
4. The sleeper has a monster called a Wizard, and its sculpture is just plain weird; and for this game, that's saying something. Imagine a hunched over bearded man surrounded by demon wings, and spreading open his giant fanged vagina.
5. 50% of the Sleeper's spells suck. His power is cool though; he gets one of his cheapest monsters for free every round.

Sleeper is one of the scariest factions in my opinion. He lethargies until everyone's out of power and then he can go around capturing Monsters. Fucking nuts.

When the guy who owns the game was the Sleeper, he used lethargy a lot. I never used it even once. It's not my style to sit back.

Last week, a friend and I won pretty decisively in Risk: Star Wars Edition to the grousing of the Empire, who felt the game advantage was to the rebels. This week we switched places (with one of the opposing players subbed out, to be fair), and we took the Empire. We spawned almost all our ties while keeping our baby maker out of harm's way, and used the tie swarm to sweep across and wipe out every last rebel scum ship. We barely used the death star after the rebel ships had evacuated the fleet. Terrorist threat neutralized, and order established through the galaxy.

DC Deck Building Game: Heroes Unite which was the usual mindless fare. Then Blood Rage which was nice to play with all of us having already played it and knowing the basic ideas. I was doing pretty poorly in the first two ages, but I scored two quests with Odin's Throne in Age 3 for an 18 point swing, which also got me +20 points from stat boosts, to sweep the win. Not too shabby.

Dragon Tides
Man this game is neat but a little rough. It's a one vs. many like Descent, but with the Bruce Lee license and a coherent story as you play through a "movie". So you play out linked scenes with a story and there's some choose your own adventure elements, such as "Do you want to sneak into the warehouse or go in guns blazing?" This branches to different scenes you play through.

Very neat and fun. The central mechanism is a rock/paper/scissors style simultaneous reveal like WWE Superstar Showdown. However, winning this card reveal just gives you bonus dice and a move up your Super track. You both still dice off to see if you accomplish your Strike/Grapple/Throw. It's quick and fast and stupid fun. The writing for the scenes is pretty good with stupid 80's cheese and bravado. You can't help but smile.

There's also something about literally playing as Bruce and Brandon Lee and roughing up a bunch of henchman before taking on Dolph Lundgren (whose name they had to change).

The game also has some really cool bits like interacting with the environment by tossing around crates, picking up sewer lids, using a chair as a weapon, etc. Fun stuff.

What's flawed about the game is that it's got that Kickstarter unfinished scent. The rulebook is missing key elements (like how far Henchman move), and has some ambiguities. The two movies that ship with the game are in separate books and there's some issues there. I noticed the scene where they confronted my Sub-boss outside that warehouse that they stormed didn't have the usual "remove x number of henchman if you're only playing two players." We didn't know if this was intentional or not (it appears not after posting on the forums).

It's also very random. You can totally get smacked around and beaten down in a single roll against one of the bosses if you're unlucky.

Still, fun overall and very unique.

Shit, I didn't even remember you could do those types of shenanigans in Runewars, I haven't played in way too long. I'll try to get it back to the table when we're 4 or less, it's doable on a week night even if it ends up going 4 hours.

I soloed Leaving Earth twice yesterday afternoon and while the kids were eating supper (we had a romantic dinner planned for later when they were in bed), an easy game and a normal one, and it's lots of fun, not too long either. Not too mentally draining and I even managed all the math in my head. First game my astronaut burned up on reentry. Sending a probe to the moon is Saturn rocket to get to orbit followed by 3 Junos, got to learn that by heart after I had 3 crap Saturn rockets (two blew up) in my second game. A couple of those Junos were duds too, so that mission needed lots of tries and retries. I still finished all the missions by 1970, although the Venus lander turned out impossible due to astmospheric conditions.

I wasn't sure about sending an astronaut in suborbital flight: if you want to send him to orbit, must you stop by S-O flight first (so need at least 2 different rockets, the first to push you to S-O flight, then the rest of the way) or can you still explore S-O flight on your way to orbit in a single operation?

It's interesting, but I suppose after a few games in, most missions will have been tried and tested and a feeling of redundancy could set in. That's where multiplayer or an expansion (outer planets) will come in if it comes to that.

I played Ferox twice. For those who don't know, Ferox is a 2P card battle game that Doc Mabuse will be reviewing. The setting is in a jungle; one side plays 4 cannibal tribes, one side plays 6 film crew members who crashed in a chopper and need to escape the jungle (preferable un-nibbled).

I love the presentation. LOVE. It's something Nate Hayden might have done. Even the "Be Kind Rewind" sticker on the box is perfectly executed. Gameplay is really fast and the gameplay, from a 10,000 foot perspective, is amazing. Unfortunately, we didn't like it very much. It's way, way too long, and while I love the fact that it's asymmetrical, the Filmies' cards have a much higher percentage of attack cards (or so it seems) whereas the Tribals have more cards that are utilitarian and fewer attack cards. So, when you start with the "starter decks" that are provided, it's a bit of a slog shuffling through the cards to get to the few attack cards. When you draft, however, you have a better chance, and that's when it becomes more interesting. There's still not enough attack cards, at least from what we've seen.

Maybe our opinion will change. I want to LOVE it, but I don't. I have a hard on for 2P battle card games anyhow, they're my least favorite of any kind of game. But setting goes a long way, so I figured I'd at least like it. And my partner has no such hatreds, and she hated it more than I did.

We'll see.