What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I put this on social media already, but here's the photo from the aforementioned game. You can see the victory star destroyer about to melt the mis-maneuvered Corvette in a single shot. We played no upgrade cards.

I have some other thoughts that came out of the game but I'll put it in the dedicated thread.

That looks incredibly one sided.

It was. I killed a single tie fighter. He killed the frigate, all my fighters, and the corvette. I conceded on turn 5, but he wouldn't have killed the mon cal ship but still...

Ha ha! That C90 is about to get RUNT OVER! "We're doomed."

The smaller Rebel ships have got to make the most of that "behind the lines" manuvering...they just can't go toe to toe with ISDs. You want to use orders to tweak speed and movement to keep them out of optimal arcs/ranges. But I know how it goes...you wind up sitting in front of an ISD by accident sometimes.

The new Rebel ship is supposed to be much more of a direct, head-on attack thing.

haha, I'm imagining the smash cut to horrified, doomed corvette bridge crew if our game had been in an actual star wars movie.

I keep thinking Ackbar is screaming "It's a trap!"

After a long hiatus we finally got a couple games in last night.

End of the Line is a post-apoc nuclear family survival game. It's last man standing, which means there is player elimination. There are five lines - Water, Fuel, Food, Ammo, and Black Market - that you queue your five family members up in. The first person in line gets two of the good, the middle folks get one of the good, and the person in last gets nothing. One person in line is also the last person in line so they get nothing. One of your five family members is your dog, who always gets nothing, but can act as a buffer in a line to help your other family members get something. Why do you want goods? Because the game is packed with mean n' nasty cards. Lines can have Law cards played on them face-up or face-down. Laws permanently change how the line works, although sometimes they can be removed. On top of that there's the line resolution phase, where everyone in the line gets to play Event and Now (instant or interrupt) cards. To do so everybody in that line picks up their hand, organizes/programs what cards they want to play followed by their Pass cards, and puts their entire deck on the table. This way you can't tell who is actually playing cards or how many, because all hands are face-down on the table. A few Now cards can also be set aside as a defensive hand from which you can play interrupts, but there are a lot of cards that do bad things to defense cards. In player order players draw the top card from their deck and resolve it until they hit their Pass card. Then pick their hand back up.

Things that happened: A line had a Law that made it so dogs could collect goods also, so the line filled up with dogs. In the card play phase I played an Event that killed all the dogs in the line. A player who was second in line had an Event card programmed to kill the first player in a line, but before it resolved a different player had already killed that person so the second in line became first in line and their event killed their own family member. I got into a line that was full of the other players' family members so that I could play a card that would basically kill everybody in the line, but I kept a defense card to flee the line when I played it. Massacre. This stuff happens regularly.

As family members are killed they go on a side board, and for every four killed a line closes. We ran out of access to Fuel and Food about mid-game. That was bad, because the game has a Calamity card drawn every round that often requires Fuel or Food to keep your family alive. People started dropping like flies when those two lines closed.

Fun game.

We followed that up with Marrying Mr Darcy, putting on our best awful period nobility accents. Everybody ended up an Old Maid except one player who accepted a proposal from Mr Wickham. Of course we all scoffed at accepting that proposal, as being an Old Maid was surely better than lowering ourselves to such a man as Mr. Wickham. The wife of Mr. Wickham did win the game, but at least the rest of us had our pride.

Played about half of the Spanish period of Navajo Wars. Well designed game with an engine that is much tighter than it looks or initially plays. Among many bits, I really like the orders system for enemies QUITE a bit. Let's you do fun stuff---I saw a big raid was building so I had time to push a high ferocity family who had been burning Spanish missions back to Sante Fe into Shiprock backcountry and I had some firearms... ambush city.

Big question is if it's so procedural it's just too exhausting to play. My first instinct is that the gameplay is flavorful enough to get through procedure but the jury is still out.

The AI system is brilliant...and the sense of setting and theme are a lot more profound than just about any "dripping with theme" game you could mention. There's lots of subtleties, a lot of sensitive touches that really illustrate the Dine, their way of of life and the impact that the Europeans had on them.

It is highly procedural and it is a little hard, I think, to get right. In some ways it is like a super advanced States of Siege game but with way more mechanics going on.

It's a great game, worth the work...but it is also something that you can't really play casually.

Libertalia started off Saturday's gaming. I like the game (I have a copy myself) but every time we play this it seems like there's always one person who sits there for two minutes agonizing over what card to play, which ultimately sucks all the fun out of it by the third round. I thought I did well winning with 80 points to 75 after taking -18 points on a brutal second round full of cursed idols/captain combination. Last round Monkey shenanigans did not occur which I was grateful for, as I had the weakest colour deck (white, if you're interested) because the Merchant was also in the hand and people were happy to cash in their tokens with that card instead of passing them on.

Next was Blood Rage with the same group- a full five player game, as one of the other players has the retail copy and really wanted to play a full fiver to see if he would want the expansion. It was a decent game, with some nice combos coming out- one player was playing the battle card that gives you three rage, in combination with +5 worth of Heimdall (additional + cards) each battle, using the gained rage to buy them back with his clan upgrade. It was a great tactic, but strategically did nothing for him as he finished in last place. I also got tired of having to explain every time why I had three strength with two warriors through the whole game. The game was quietly won by another player who would milk some points losing battles, drop his warrior back in after pillaging, then use his "repillage" power to farm those regions when the other players moved out. It's a solid game but Chaos in the Old World is better in every way. I may have to sell this one on.

The Others: 7 Sins in which I took Greed against three of the four from the Blood Rage group. This was difficult for the team because one of the players- a great guy, and fun to play with, has zero, and I mean zero, team spirit. So he ran off and got his characters killed, the team didn't coordinate their tasks enough and- to be fair- I rolled a good amount of exploding hits and corruption on them. They made it as far as the appearance of the avatar, but one tried to run through fire and I got three exploding hits on him to run them out of characters. This might be better with two or three players.

Shadowrun Crossfire was the final game of the day. We got hosed in Scene 2, but only because we let the Crossfire level raise too high by ineffective first Scene play- if it had been one lower (ie if we had cleared the first scene faster) we would have avoided everything that killed us. I still love this game, it does everything Lord of the Rings LCG does for me with more allowance for clever play.

Played La Granja on Friday night, about which I said this:

"Very much by the numbers game with resources that can be turned into other resources that can get you valuable prizes. Pigs turn into meat, grapes turn into wine, and wheat or olives turn into "a pot of whatever" which is a rare glimpse of the exact moment the designer stopped caring about his own game."

It's ranked 88 on BGG right now, which is insane.

But that's okay because on Saturday I played ANDROID.

Goddamn, what an incredible game! It's a mess, it's all over the place, it'll hose you for no good reason, it's full of Theme Text I don't read, but holy cow it's such a good time. I can't think of anything else like it. Played with two people who were new to it and who did something that bugged me right off the bat.

Me: Those are your plots. For maximum fun, don't read ahead in them.
Both: I'M GONNA

Anyway I was Floyd and was obsessed with one suspect but it's tough to get that moving when someone else is obsessed with a different one. I shoulda killed that other one. My plots went well but I didn't realize that Floyd gets sca-rewed on favor tokens late in the game. Shoulda been converting those to Jinteki and Haas tokens. I ended up in a distant third place, but honestly who cares? It was a lot of fun.

There really is nothing like it. The game kind of messed me up initially because the idea of literally framing a suspect was kind of behind-the-scenes in my mind, so it took a long time for me to realize that's what was going on.

Once I realized that the object wasn't so much to solve a crime as create a narrative that pins the crime on someone, then it became an abundant source of awesome.

La Granja is excellent. It's also the only euro game I care to play, because it's the Greatest Hits of them all.

The first game we played was Lord of the Rings with the Sauron expansion. In order to make it fair, I gave them The Watchful Peace and The One Ring. I even had Sauron start at 15, rather than the default position.I played Sauron, Nathan played Merry; Trish played Pippin, Eddie played Frodo and Jo played Sam. The Fellowship blazed very quickly through Mordor and Helm's Deep, with me trying to throw up roadblocks at every turn. They were halfway through Shelob's Lair, when Nathan fell to Sauron. The Fellowship was then quickly overtaken by events and they were thrust into Mordor with a man down, and little support. It went south, then further south for them when I took out Frodo and Sam in one turn, leaving a recalcitrant Pippin to carry the ring. Trish did her best, but it was too much at the end. I won the game, and the game score was 56.


We next played Exploding Kittens, a game that my son, Noah, loves. Noah blew up first, followed by Eddie, and then Nathan. It was down to me and Trish and 2 cards left in the deck. I thought I had won, but Trish had a defuse, sending the cat my way and into the defeat pile.

Being the winner, Trish chose Illuminati: Deluxe Edition. I played the Barvarians, Nathan played the Servants, Trish played the Gnomes, Eddie the Network, and my wife played the Bermuda Triangle. Initially, Jo and I were freaking out because at the onset we tried getting groups and kept failing. It became a bit steady once everyone had a group and next to no chance of neutralizing. Trish could hardly keep money in the bank, but it didn't matter, as she easily went to going for a standard victory. In the grand scheme of things, I was pretty much in last place, having a bunch of groups with little to no power. Eddie was Gnomes lite the entire game. He had the IRS, Multinational Oil Companies. He also played event cards early on that gave him gobs of money. Nathan was about 40% of the way to his special victory. My wife was 4 alignments away from winning. IN the end, I assisted the Gnomes win their regular victory by aiding them take two groups for the final win. Did I throw the game? Yes, but for good reason. We were all hungry.

After eating our fill at Red Robin, we came back for the final game of the evening, Cults Across America. At the onset, Nathan had the CDC director. I had the President and the Marching Band. Trish had the Ambassador, and Eddie (being hella Catholic) had the Pope. I pushed Nathan out of DC, but he fired off a plague bomb, which cost me my High Priest and forced me out of the city. It didn't help, as the goddamn thing kept spreading to cities I occupied. Then, Eddie summoned Hastur. I was in the bathroom at the time and came back to the table; and was then informed that Eddie summoned The One That Should Not Be Named. Taking a line from Munchkin Cthulhu, I promptly blurted out, "Hastur, Hastur, Hastur." To which everyone at the table burst into hysterical laughter. You see, if you say the God's name out loud, you have to pay 2k to the controller. I picked up the card and read it aloud, saying the Elder God's name AGAIN on accident. 8k down the drain. For the rest of the evening, the other players poked fun at me and goaded me into saying Hastur's name again. To which I referred to the God as either "Godzilla" or "Booger".

Unfortunately, we had to call the game due to the late hour, but the joke was on them. I eked out a VP win of 2 points.

i'd like a review of your Red Robin experience too please. I hate that I don't have any of those near me