What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Very cool!

In the Davis Mountains, I did a solo run up a run-off. Not a trail at all, but looked challenging. Near the top were two out croppings of rocks with plenty of small caves and nooks. Combined with the mountain lion warnings posted at the front gate it weirded me the hell out. I opted not to run between them and headed back down.

I've camped and hiked all over, but have never seen a black bear or mountain lion..doesn't mean they haven't seen me. I'm not so worried about the bears, but I get the heebie-jeebies thinking about crossing paths with a mountain lion.

A buddy and I are doing the South Rim next spring staying up there a few nights. I'm thinking...axe, large knife...?

Right to be more worried about mountain lions than black bears. Mountain lions are not a worry if you have more than one person. So the only time that there's almost any chance of being attacked is by yourself, but an adult is extremely unlikely to be attacked even then. There's no real reason to carry a weapon if it's a mountain lion you're worried about. They are silent ambush predators so you will never see them if they attack and kill you. If you see it, it wasn't going to attack you.

The only legit worry you should have re: mountain lions is your little ones. You need to keep them with you and not have them run off on their own by themselves. Mountain lions will consider attacking a child by him/herself backcountry.

Dune last night, Automobiles tonight.

Learning game of Dune for five players. Lots of rookie mistakes all around but people had fun and will play it again. I taught Automobiles to the family. I'm kinda surprised that everybody liked it. There's more downtime than I imagined.

My dad had one start shadowing him in the mountains around San Jose. He was a big dude. If he didn't have his shotgun shit might have gone sideways.

The student has become the master.

My son's Ada Lorna went up by 4 over my Corporation team this morning.

I played my first solo round of Zimby Mojo today. I won, although technically I lost because I forgot the solo rule that if a Thug returns the crown to the blood mist, you lose. In multiplayer, that creates a new Cannibal King, and that is how I played it. I highly recommend trying the solo game just so you can get a handle on some of the game mechanics. The rule book is dense and there's a lot to keep track of until you get it all down.

The components and artwork are all great. The board is gorgeous. Hopefully you like stickers, because you will be putting on a lot of them. In fact this is the only minor component complaint... the sticker sheets were scored too deeply, making it harder than it should be to get the stickers off of the paper. But it was not terribly difficult.

I'm really looking forward to trying it out with other players. I think there are a couple of people in my group who will cringe at the random nature of the game but they will just have to deal.

The Others: 7 Sins finally showed up, and that was the first game I played on Saturday. With four players in total (myself plus three on the Faith team) the game took three hours. One of the players was having real trouble making any decisions. The team won- I was not playing amazingly well as a new Sins player, and we played some rules too loosely that gave them advantages. Despite that, and the time it took, I really enjoyed the game. "Oh you're playing Zombicide" said one guy as he wandered over to see what we were playing, and there's an element of familiarity about it- moving around city tiles and rolling dice to kill plastic figures. The strong theme in the game is sacrifice, and it's utterly opposed to the central hook of Zombicide, in which your character gets more and more powerful. In The Others, your characters are already badasses, but they need to die, and be replaced with fresh ones. What's nice is that when your team decides to throw you under the bus, you get to take a new character and keep playing. Compare to a game like Sentinels of the Multiverse, where it's time to go find something else to play.

The miniatures are amazing*, and also largely superfluous. Each sin (there are two in the main game, another five to get) has a bunch of figures- abominations, a controller and an avatar. But... I tipped all the figures into the main box and there is no way I could tell you which Sin a given abomination or controller is for. There may as well just be a generic figure for each, though obviously more figures is more stuff. Really you only need the small (literally) deck of cards and the reference sheet for each sin- you're buying a lot of plastic for $20 if you buy expansions. The acolyte (corrupted city folk) figures make sense, but again, for any given session of the game, you're not really looking at the sculpts, just the colour of the plastic.

I'm not a fan of the choice to go with a white-backed graphical style for the tokens. It seems detrimental to a purportedly horror themed game to brighten up the components (and they look kind of cheap with it). I'm also not really a fan of the Shadowrun-esque futuristic city conceit either, and would much rather have seen some kind of Penny Dreadful style art direction, even if Gothic Victoriana is played out.

I really enjoyed the game and hope to play it again and again with the different missions, Sins, acolytes and heroes. I did not back any optional addons and really don't see the need for more than I have right now.

*AMAZING.

A Study in Emerald!!! With four of us. Two were new to the game, but had played Mythotopia before, so I was able to reference the similarities. I was able to obfuscate my allegiance fairly well, and was happy to let another player push the War track (which ended the game). It transpired that there were three of us on Team Green, and one on Team Pink, which you might think unbalanced, but that lone Restorationist was only just behind the lagging Loyalist, and would have won the game with one more point (as Restorationists win ties, and he would have eliminated the Green team from the game). I won, mostly thanks to the other leading Loyalist gambling on me not being on his team. Bwah ha ha!

Quartermaster General with some added air force expansion. This was a six player game, two of us had not played before, and we were both on the Allied side. The game ended on turn 10 due to the mercy rule, as we were having our necks stood on for the entire game. It was a truly miserable experience from beginning to end. I had one tank in Blighty at the end, having drawn my second Build Army card on turn 10 of the game, even after shedding 15+ cards.

Don't Turn Your Back was a great game to finish the night on. Two new players but I almost surprised myself with how brief the game/rule explanation was. "And that's it, that's the whole game." I lost by four points to one of the new players when she hit a juicy 16 candle score in the last round in District 13- four of which I gave to her by playing in there (according to the law we drew for the round). I stayed back in points during the game and relied on end-game encasing points, which jumped me 25 for a surprise second place, if not victory. Fantastic game, and very fast playing.

Finally got to play Among the Stars. Really enjoy it a lot. Tons of diversity in what and how you play. I got the base and two expansions in that Math Trade a while back. Really fun little building game. We played the non-confrontational version because my wife tends to lose her shit when she gets attacked in any way, or if you take shit she wants.

Neat little setup like Sushi Go so that you pick a card to play, lay it in front of you, and pass your remaining cards to the left. Lots of strategy. Really fun, cheap game.

Played Vast: The Crystal Caverns this weekend. This is an asymmetrical game of exploring a cavern. One player is the Knight, who wants to kill the Dragon. The Goblins want to kill the Knight. The Dragon just wants to leave. And one player is The Cave, which wants to grow and then collapse and kill them all. So that sounds like a good time! (There's also a Thief, but we didn't play with him.) Each player gets their own set of rules and is playing their own game in the shared space.

Unfortunately this requires a lot of design and rules-writing chops and this team doesn't seem to have them. The provided rules are plain terrible, and we had to go to a FAQ to answer some basic questions. There's no consistency of terminology, things aren't explained clearly, assumptions are made that shouldn't be, and so forth. I can't imagine this was blind playtested. I wish Kickstarter people would learn the importance of an editor and not just an artist.

Beyond that the game itself could use some editing. It's super fiddly and fussy, with all kinds of exceptions to rules and bits tracking things and stuff. There's a lot of mental clutter, and this adds to the problems of the rules being poorly written. When there are 20 things that need to happen each time a player takes action, hat's a lot of points of possible rules failure. A pro could have tidied this up a lot more.

The asymmetry is clever, but me just getting the rules for the Dragon and being told to play my game means I can't play intelligently in the first game. In our game the Cave won the turn before I did. If I had known more clearly the Cave's goals and how it achieves them, I could have prevented this, but I didn't, and I don't see any reason the Cave should have told me. That works for now -- the next time I will know this -- but it's kind of annoying in the first impression play.

It's a game that might be a lot better if there's a second edition, but no company should have let this go out as-is, and I'm glad someone else in my group paid to play-test it instead of me.

I'm a little higher than you are Dave but generally agree. Our first game was five player at Gen Con reading the rules aloud and took us about 3 hours. I played a couple two player games later on and enjoyed it more, understanding how other positions work.

It is a bit fiddly and complicated, like five games intersecting, but I thought it hangs together pretty well once you understand it. It seems to scale nicely and how each role interacts is pretty neat. From my limited experience balance seemed pretty good too (although it does rely on players keeping each other in check with tools to do so).

It's almost like it wants to be a COIN dungeon crawler or something. I also get a bit of a 504 feel to it where it seems like all this stuff was chucked together and somehow works.

But yeah, not great as is and maybe better down the line with a second edition.

I remember being intrigued by that one when it was on Kickstarter, but fearing its chances for a successful outcome. I'd still like to try it, but I'm glad I didn't pledge.

Pat Leder's a friend, and we had talked about the game a lot over the years. I never saw the rules, but I do know that his games that I own had some questions that remained a little unanswered. I was going to back it but with the money situation as it was/is, NOPE. I figure he'll revise the rules and send them to backers or post on BGG.

It's just me, but the #1 sign of a game that's going to be well-designed is the inclusion of a player aid that truly works well, which is a skill that some folks (myself included) have struggled with. I don't know if that's in there, but he did really well with Five Fingered Severance and Trick or Treat.

I played a 5 player solo game (IE I played all roles myself) the other night, and I didn't think the rules were that bad, though it is obvious there was no blind playtesting done (something that annoys me to no end). The rules were...terse. Still, I got through the game without having to go to the forums, though I had watched his videos previously.

I was going to post a more complete overview, but despite the Knight getting decimated on turn 2, the game ended with the Dragon winning, and a guaranteed win by the cave on its next turn, with every other character poised to win on their next turn, as well. So effectively the Knight and Goblin were a turn behind, but the game seemed really balanced (rather, self balancing). I really enjoyed how the Cave played the role of helper and spoiler, spending most of the early game trying to keep the Knight alive, and the second half trying to slow down the Thief and Dragon. I thoroughly enjoyed the interplay, even playing all the roles myself. Looking forward to a real game. I think the game is fine, just need a better rule book. My only concern is the Goblins, they really are a challenge to play and are really easy to disrupt.

Can't beat a classic.


And since this is also the mountain lion thread...
www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/idaho-mount...4ccce4b0863b02846ee0

Thank goodness she's ok. I couldn't even imagine.

Played the first couple turns of FAB Golan. It's smaller than bulge and especially Sicily. It's a bit more complex, though, with most units armor. Overall, it's like a smaller version of the first volume, you surge across s geographical boundary (AT trench) and try to get unchecked into the Golan Heights before getting pushed back by elite Israeli units. Still adore the system.

Errata on setup, trust the map basically.