What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I've always called that kind of game, going back to Schotten-Totten/Battle Line, as "contested card" games. There are a TON of these kinds of games. Omen is probably one of the better ones, actually.

I've been playing Shadowrun: Crossfire more...at first I really didn't like it, but it has started to grow on me. There is definitely a game here, but I am still not pleased with the wildly random difficulty of it.

I tried to interest a couple of friends in it- who didn't really know about Shadowrun other than vaguely remembering that there was an SNES game- and they were just not interested in it at all. So it's mostly solo on this one. At first I was doing two characters, but it seems like the game is really tuned for four so I switched to that and it made a difference. I also realized that I was playing a couple of things wrong that made it harder, so that helped too.

There's an interesting design proposition here. It may be the first board game I've ever played that has grinding. Unless you get really lucky, you will lose the first couple of games. When a character goes critical, the whole run is aborted and the game plays out this final round. If at least one survives, it's a successful abort even though the mission fails and there is a consolation prize amount of Karma/XP given. So yes, if you continue to fail, you also continue to inch toward leveling up and getting new abilities even if at a slower rate than if you win.

But when you do win, it is really satisfying...and then you start putting those stickers on the cards and the balance starts to get into shape.

The cardplay can be really interesting for solo play- I say that because with more than one, it could get into 10 minutes of if-then conversation and slow it down. Alone, you work it out between the four hands how you are going to keep a character from going critical this turn or how you are going to deal with a nasty Crossfire card that has crippled your chances of clearing a scene.

Another thing that helped change my opinion is that the intro scenario in the base game wasn't working for me ("Crossfire") and definitely not with less than 4. High Caliber Ops comes with a different one "Against the Ancients" and I think that played out a lot better for 0-level characters. Since elves are the opposition, I ran a lady troll and a lady Ork and after two tries I beat it. That kind of felt like a break even point for the game.

So yeah, I like this one and I'm glad I did't just ditch it straight away. It isn't often that I'm four or five sessions deep into a game and I'm still iffy about it, but I think the way the progression works in this one is so different that it's easy to write it off as badly balanced/badly designed if you don't buy into the concept of grinding.

I think it's probably better than Legendary and all of the other co-op deckbuilders where you collectively play cards against adversary cards and AI. But I would also say that this game is a tough sell against Warhammer Quest ACG, even though the gameplay has significant differences.

I've never felt that grinding was anything more than a stalling tactic to mask a lack of content. But I associate grinding with video games; I'm not sure how I'd feel about it in a boardgame. I'm in for some more elaboration on what that really means.

I've been playing a bunch of Talisman using the PC/mac game. I want to love the game but I can't quite. I bought the Reaper expansion with it on all your advice. It has some moments of brilliance in terms of the of the permanent stuff hitting the board... but progression is so brutally slow and frustrating. I read all your variants about parsing the decks to make more monsters and that makes good sense to make the game go faster. Anyway, it's an interesting game. PC/mac game on steam is a very good implementation too.

I'm glad you're giving Crossfire more time, Michael. I have a feeling you will see the apparent randomness lessen as your group becomes more familiar with the typical ways to lose. Speaking of which:

Shadowrun Crossfire + High Caliber Ops We had an epic game of this on Saturday. We were fighting tooth and nail- typically I feel we need to wipe a scene within two Crossfire cards (meaning only one is added to the level for the next scene, as the second is wiped), but it took us three rounds to clear. The second scene brought out four magic users which proved challenging, but we got a break with a nice Crossfire event which kept us going into the third scene, when everything went crazy. We got hit with discard attacks, discard crossfires, then two of us went staggered in one turn. Hilariously, the next Crossfire healed half damage for everyone, but hit for 2 at the end of the round. The two of us healed out of staggered but our street samurai got beaten down and lost a 7+ damage hand. We had a shot, even so. Some decisions were made in earlier rounds that came back to bite us. By the end of the game, our Crossfire Level (which triggers worse penalties as a punishment for taking too long) was at 9, the highest I've yet seen by some margin. It was a tense, running battle, and this game continues to be one of the most thematic story making games I've played.

Getting a 5 Karma upgrade each can help with the difficulty for sure- I have shopping agent (+1 black market card) which helps the group a lot vs random distribution of available cards. I'm interested in playing one of the expansion games as an easier option next time, just to see how it goes.

Blood Rage A fun four player game. I made many mistakes and couldn't get my strategy to play out, but still scored decently. The game was won by the new player at the table, who was able to both win battles and score points for his guys dying in the third age. I still prefer Chaos, but I have been able to play Blood Rage for three consecutive weeks, which would never happen with that.

Codenames which nobody seemed really into this week. Usually I'm happy to play it for the three rounds but it wasn't clicking this time.

Tarot Storia still not 100% on the rules for this light solitaire/co-op but it's pretty. Maybe not worth the cost over a deck of cards unless you like the art.

Rococo I probably need to sell my copy as someone else always brings his to the meetup. We played three player, which is one of the tighter numbers (five is the other, on the other side of the board) because you can get pushed out of more. I got pushed out of the good row on the fountain, but I did pretty well with deputing, keeping control of first player and grabbing points during the game to come in second by one point (80-79) so I was happy with that. I do like this game, it's charming as euros go and doesn't feel as passive-aggressive as many.

Libertalia with five players. Lots of laughs when four bosuns came out in one turn. I thought I made some bad mistakes and was lagging during the first and second rounds, but somehow nobody noticed me grabbing maps in the final round and I won- top three scores were 75/74/73 with fourth on 70.

Spent the weekend in a State Park yurt with my wife. It was a good mile or so hike in and we bought and brought Morels to give it a try during the leisurely afternoons, Bought it more on theme than on reviews. The wife and I actually met in a college class entitled "Mushrooms, History and Culture". The game was pretty fun, reminded us of gin, which we play pretty regularly. The only issue we had was it is possible to for you to have no legal plays. Also got a game of Innovation in, which I won... which is pretty rare.

Michael Barnes wrote: I
I've been playing Shadowrun: Crossfire more...at first I really didn't like it, but it has started to grow on me. There is definitely a game here, but I am still not pleased with the wildly random difficulty of it.

THIS is my major complaint. It's definitely set up so that you lose the first 5+ games or so. And then after that, you could win or be totally fucked, all based on card distribution. When a game's success rate comes down to the shuffle, there's a problem. Same gripe I have with Ferox, although not as bad.

There's an interesting design proposition here. It may be the first board game I've ever played that has grinding. Unless you get really lucky, you will lose the first couple of games. When a character goes critical, the whole run is aborted and the game plays out this final round. If at least one survives, it's a successful abort even though the mission fails and there is a consolation prize amount of Karma/XP given. So yes, if you continue to fail, you also continue to inch toward leveling up and getting new abilities even if at a slower rate than if you win.

Seriously, I literally JUST wrote this same thing in my review. This is the only game I'm aware of besides Strange Aeons where grinding is part of the balancing.

But when you do win, it is really satisfying...and then you start putting those stickers on the cards and the balance starts to get into shape.

I agree, but we've won far too seldom, and the stickers don't really make a huge impact until 15 Karma.

The cardplay can be really interesting for solo play- I say that because with more than one, it could get into 10 minutes of if-then conversation and slow it down. Alone, you work it out between the four hands how you are going to keep a character from going critical this turn or how you are going to deal with a nasty Crossfire card that has crippled your chances of clearing a scene.

Totally agree. Playing 2 runners solo is way better than playing 2 live players, because the conversations and AP slow it down.

Another thing that helped change my opinion is that the intro scenario in the base game wasn't working for me ("Crossfire") and definitely not with less than 4. High Caliber Ops comes with a different one "Against the Ancients" and I think that played out a lot better for 0-level characters. Since elves are the opposition, I ran a lady troll and a lady Ork and after two tries I beat it. That kind of felt like a break even point for the game.

See, I think they realized they fucked it up pretty significantly with the difficulty and had to make it easier to gain levels in order to play the Dragon scenario. I can't see you winning that without at least 50 Karma.

So yeah, I like this one and I'm glad I did't just ditch it straight away. It isn't often that I'm four or five sessions deep into a game and I'm still iffy about it, but I think the way the progression works in this one is so different that it's easy to write it off as badly balanced/badly designed if you don't buy into the concept of grinding.

I'm still very iffy, and I'm a huge fan of the setting. I think it's very badly balanced, for sure, and I think that the grinding was sort of their way of developing the game and saying "Well, eventually they're going to be tough enough to beat it more often than not". Sloppy.

I think it's probably better than Legendary and all of the other co-op deckbuilders where you collectively play cards against adversary cards and AI. But I would also say that this game is a tough sell against Warhammer Quest ACG, even though the gameplay has significant differences.

It's certainly more dynamic than Legendary, but I don''t know if it's more fun, or "better". I'm like 15 games in now and I have no desire to play again. I think JEM is our resident apologist for this game, and I'm just glad someone who paid it found it fantastic, because I found it really iffy. At best.

Nice big game day yesterday. Played Evolution and San Juan, which are always a good time, but also

The Bloody Inn - This is a game about murdering people staying in a hotel and hiding their corpses from John Law. That alone makes it something special, but there's a lot more going for it. The artwork is great, the choices are interesting, and the game play is fun and funny. It's a really good little dark game.

The Golden Ages - I love the look of this game, and I'm always interested in "distilled" civ games. The gameplay, however, wasn't great. One player, with a single card purchase, got into what seemed like an insurmountable lead, and there didn't seem to be any way to close the gap. I'm not a hater on randomness, but the seemingly unbalanced leaders and wonders, along with their random distribution, looks like it can really tilt the game towards one player and away from another for no good reason. (I also hate hate hate the random-chit-draw-for-victory-points mechanism here, in which the same action is randomly worth 2-6 VPs for, again, no good reason.) Most the the parts of this game aren't bad and are even clever, but as a whole it seems to fall apart. That said, knowing now how things unfold I would try it again.

But for me the big event was playing my very own copy of El Grande, the new Z-Man Big Box edition. Love the game, and I won, but here's what I had to say about this edition:

El Grande is a great game and a classic, and I am glad for this reprint to finally give me a chance to have it on my shelf. However, I have to say, this edition is kind of a disappointing representation of a great game.

First, there are the card typos. Not a huge deal, but good grief. In a prestige release, this should be caught.

The meeples. Meeples instead of cubes is an aesthetic choice, and there will be people on either side of that divide. Personally, I prefer cubes, but I can live with meeples. The ones in my box, however, varied in thickness, some were malformed, and generally seemed like they came from Joe's Discount Meeple Closeout Shop.

The wheels. The plastic pins that hold the wheels together aren't that great, and if you take them apart (to put in the thin plastic "washers" I overlooked the first time) you're severely weakening them.

The tower. El Grande is the Castillo. But this Castillo is small and puny, made of thin cardboard. It works, but it just feels flimsy.

In short, this edition feels like every possible corner was cut in production. None of these things would be a big deal in isolation, but all of it together does a disservice to a classic game. El Grande has been out of print for a while, and the last printing also had card issues, so many people, including myself, were really looking forward to this opportunity. I have the game, and I'll play it, but there's still a bit of sad trombone about it.

Furthermore, I just don't care about the expansions, and I don't know anyone who does. They'll likely never get touched, as the game is just fine without them. So they're just taking up space, embiggening the box, and jacking up the price.

I had thought about trying to trade this edition to someone who has the original, someone who might want the expansions and meeples and such, before I'd really dug into it, but now I don't think I could do so in clear conscience without revealing these issues and thus pretty much tanking the interest.

Like I said, it's playable, and I'll be playing it, but I'm really disappointed in the quality here.

SebastianBludd wrote: I played Caverna for the first time recently with my game group. I'm not a big fan of cock-blocking AKA worker placement games since I struggle with coming up with a long-term strategy. Especially when I'm usually the least-experienced player at the table and somebody took my spot and, oh great, now someone's bitching at me to hurry up. Anyway, I didn't know how scoring even worked the first game and after getting a ton of penalties for non-developed spaces I came in a distant fifth with 27 points. Anything over 70 is decent, so that was really, really low.

In the second game I came up with a semblance of a plan and came in third with 70 points but I'm still not that big of a fan. My game group is hyper-competitive and always looking to exploit, if not break, a game; and doing that with Caverna seems like more effort than it's worth.

You might be happier playing Sons of Anarchy. It is a worker placement game that lets you directly attack a cock-blocker. Also, instead of a bunch of boring cubes, you get to play with plastic guns and biker dude figures. And you hide your stuff behind a screen that looks like a big leather biker wallet. Scoring is easy... whoever has the most money at the end wins the game.

We made it through March in PANDEMIC LEGACY, three for three now. We have 0 funding, but who needs it? I'm kidding--we've had some crazy close games. We needed some serious topdecks (and... bottom..not..draw...cards? we needed to not draw certain cards) to pull these last two off. We got a little scatterbrained in this last one--folks were just running from place to place putting fingers in dikes, and we needed to end the game. My wife calmed us all down and we looked at our options to Eradicate this, or eradicate that, or build some stuff. Only three turns were left, so we thought them all through and executed.

The game is great family fun--better than RISK LEGACY for the folks that don't want to hate each other week over week.

Shellhead wrote:

SebastianBludd wrote: I played Caverna for the first time recently with my game group. I'm not a big fan of cock-blocking AKA worker placement games since I struggle with coming up with a long-term strategy. Especially when I'm usually the least-experienced player at the table and somebody took my spot and, oh great, now someone's bitching at me to hurry up. Anyway, I didn't know how scoring even worked the first game and after getting a ton of penalties for non-developed spaces I came in a distant fifth with 27 points. Anything over 70 is decent, so that was really, really low.

In the second game I came up with a semblance of a plan and came in third with 70 points but I'm still not that big of a fan. My game group is hyper-competitive and always looking to exploit, if not break, a game; and doing that with Caverna seems like more effort than it's worth.

You might be happier playing Sons of Anarchy. It is a worker placement game that lets you directly attack a cock-blocker. Also, instead of a bunch of boring cubes, you get to play with plastic guns and biker dude figures. And you hide your stuff behind a screen that looks like a big leather biker wallet. Scoring is easy... whoever has the most money at the end wins the game.

One of these days I'm going to record a tutorial for Hoodrats.

Gary Sax wrote: I've been playing a bunch of Talisman using the PC/mac game. I want to love the game but I can't quite. I bought the Reaper expansion with it on all your advice. It has some moments of brilliance in terms of the of the permanent stuff hitting the board... but progression is so brutally slow and frustrating. I read all your variants about parsing the decks to make more monsters and that makes good sense to make the game go faster. Anyway, it's an interesting game. PC/mac game on steam is a very good implementation too.

I bought the PC versions of Talisman and Talisman: Horus Heresy. They really underline how boring and subject to chance the design is when isolated from a table full of real live players. Playing Talisman with real people who can kvetch and trash talk and laugh at each others' misfortune is the only way to play, imo, but even with everything firing on all cylinders it's a slog.

Shellhead wrote: You might be happier playing Sons of Anarchy. It is a worker placement game that lets you directly attack a cock-blocker. Also, instead of a bunch of boring cubes, you get to play with plastic guns and biker dude figures. And you hide your stuff behind a screen that looks like a big leather biker wallet. Scoring is easy... whoever has the most money at the end wins the game.

I have Sons of Anarchy and both club expansions (yes, I know the base game comes with the Grim Bastards card but I wants the little orange dudes and the d6) and I can attest that I am much happier playing SoA. SoA is an amazing design that plays smoothly.

Too bad my game group really gets off on Caverna's min/maxing point salad. They all have RPG backgrounds and it makes me wonder if this sort of game taps into that part of their brain that likes trying to come up with an optimal character build. I prefer SoA because I'd rather play against my opponents rather than an arbitrary turn limit and a scoresheet.

I guess I enthuse a lot about Crossfire now because initially I felt exactly the way you guys are writing now. It was frustrating and difficult, and I was arguing hard with Rahdo on BGG about how random and unfair it is. Then the developers got involved with a community vs dev play by play, and it showed the kinds of mistakes everyone was making, with input about why move X or Y is the wrong call even if it looks right.

The new, easier scenarios are less about fixing the difficulty as fixing the lack of a stepping stone to the right difficulty. Still, nobody is going to call the board gaming police if you hand yourselves some karma upgrades. It's your box of cards, after all.

It's not too difficult, it's maybe too opaque. But I find it fascinating, and exciting, and highly thematic.

I'm being told over on BGG that I'm full of shit about this edition of El grande, so maybe I'm just mis-remembering and over-romanticizing the old one.

FAR WORSE could beset you.

With that said, the old version is pretty sweet. I'd trust your instincts on this one.