What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Advanced Civ. 6 players. 7.5 hours. Not obsolete.

Last weekend got into a meetup.

Played Kingdom Builder, and tried Dixit & Forbidden Desert. Fun stuff.

Game day at the shop today. Just two of us at first and we started with Marvel Avengers Slide Strike, my $10 Target purchase. A nice surprise, both myself and my opponent liked it a lot. It is random but there is a bit of room for clever play with the character abilities. The sliding of pieces plays a bit like an abstract and you're usually trying to position your characters to their strength being attacking from the front, right side or left side. It isn't anything close to what I'd call the best game ever but for $10 and in a mass market store it is pretty darn good. Same publishing house as that Axis of Villains DC game that is a variation of Castle Panic, so they're starting to get a few games that I solidly like under their belt.

After a pair of games four more showed up. We played Sidibaba which has been on my list to play for a very long while and one of the other guys expressed interest a week or so back so I brought up my copy. We were just kind of learning while playing and I was surprised with just how fast it moved, just how simple and straight forward the game play was and just how enjoyable it was. I played as the Master Thief (the DM) as I was teaching the game and reading the rules as we went along at a good clip, I did miss a lot of what I could have done to mess with the adventurers. And my treasure placement was a little easy, but a great fun little game.

Next up was Formula E where you're racing elephants in India. This is a Game Salute product and it falls in line with just about every other Game Salute game which is...Meh. Not bad but not great...Bottom line is I'd rather play Ave Caesar. There's a deck of cards which have a number showing how many spaces you move. Intermixed are special cards that allow you to do things like move or charge through the sacred cows, move over pieces via a flying carpet, play tigers on people that make that player miss a turn or move a mouse causing the elephant to be scared and move back a few spaces. A solid Meh...Light and pretty easy once you figure out the special cards, but having played Ave Caesar, I'd rather just play that.

I wrapped up my stay with Magical Athlete. We has this interaction of the Philosopher, Troll and Ghoul causing a lot of havoc one race. Great time as always.

Magical Athlete never fails when I have anyone even halfway entertaining around.

Tried out the classic version of Merchant of Venus today with 3 players. It was definitely a learning game but everyone enjoyed the experience, and we were all very close to the 2000c goal when my brother-in-law won. I was somewhat surprised at the incredible number of tokens and chits everywhere. Is there a good way to place your demand, passenger, and relic tokens without obscuring the home system? Another semi-related topic: I have both this game and Merchant and Marauders. How does Firefly compare with them? I always enjoyed the show and I keep hearing great things about the boardgame, but I've also heard there are lots of similarities.

I can't speak to M&M. But Firefly is like a less racey, much more random and narrative MoV.

I'm trying to decide right now if Firefly has a place in my collection. At first I thought it dislodged MoV, but over time I'm starting to think MoV is a better design and much, much tighter. It all depends on if the extra narrative is worth it.

Of course MoV is the better pu&d game, because it's a great game and that's literally all it tries to be. Firefly is similar, but has more narrative to it. MoV's variability comes from the random arrangement of planets, where Firefly's comes more from the different goals listed on the story cards. The story cards combined with the travel system of drawing cards as you're flying to see if you have encounters give Firefly great variety.

They're comparable games, but I don't think one is better than the other in a considerable way, they're just different styles of the same theme.

Compared to M&M Firefly is much easier to learn/play and in the base game there's very limited ways to hinder other players, you mostly just have to race them.

wadenels wrote: Advanced Civ. 6 players. 7.5 hours. Not obsolete.

How reasonable is it to get into on your first play? I bet I could find people nearby who'd want to play it, but I generally prefer much shorter games. I did play Junta once, and enjoyed myself more than I expected to. I know the games are quite different, but it's the best example I can come up with for me playing an old, long game.

I played the PC (well actually Mac) Civilization a lot when I was 7 and never got into the sequels. It actually got me really interested in studying foreign alphabets.

Jexik wrote:

wadenels wrote: Advanced Civ. 6 players. 7.5 hours. Not obsolete.

How reasonable is it to get into on your first play? I bet I could find people nearby who'd want to play it, but I generally prefer much shorter games. I did play Junta once, and enjoyed myself more than I expected to. I know the games are quite different, but it's the best example I can come up with for me playing an old, long game.

I played the PC (well actually Mac) Civilization a lot when I was 7 and never got into the sequels. It actually got me really interested in studying foreign alphabets.

Not hard, as long as one person knows the rules really well. Player aids are essential for new players though. There's a lot of modifiers that come into play once people start getting a lot of Civilization Cards and knowing them or having them written down clearly makes a huge difference. We had one new player and 3 that had played Civ but not Advanced.

Are the player aids the kind of thing you'd find on BGG somewhere? It seems like games didn't have as many reference cards back then.

Legomancer wrote:

Jason Lutes wrote: Played Firefly the other night with the expansions, and was underwhelmed. All four of us were pretty much "meh" at the end, which is too bad for me since I was the one who shelled out for it. I think it may come down to the fact that 90% of the time these days, game night consists of one-shot RPGs, and most board games just don't hold a candle to them in terms of entertainment value.

It also could come down to the fact that Firefly is kind of a meh game, anyway.

Nah, Firefly is not a "meh" game. A-tall. I'm with Jason on his notion that most board games pale in comparison to a good RPG session; however, I got to play a great game of Eldritch Horror on Saturday and it was a lot of fun. It's very much an encapsulated RPG campaign you can enjoy over the course of 2 or 3 hours. If you haven't tried Eldritch Horror yet Jason I'd say give it a shot. Especially if your group likes themes or horror and investigation.

Jexik wrote: Are the player aids the kind of thing you'd find on BGG somewhere? It seems like games didn't have as many reference cards back then.

I made my own, one for Civilization Cards and one for Calamities. The player sheets I have for Stock and Treasury have the turn sequence on them. I have to fix a couple things on my player aids and then I'll link them again back in this thread. Stay Tuned...

wadenels wrote:

Jexik wrote: Are the player aids the kind of thing you'd find on BGG somewhere? It seems like games didn't have as many reference cards back then.

I made my own, one for Civilization Cards and one for Calamities. The player sheets I have for Stock and Treasury have the turn sequence on them. I have to fix a couple things on my player aids and then I'll link them again back in this thread. Stay Tuned...

...and done
LINK

Either print out a bunch or laminate them and use dry erase markers. Players can mark up the Civilization Cards sheet to better calculate prices for future purchases. It's basically the same as the chart in the Advanced Civilization book, but nicer.

Players don't need to read everything on the Calamity sheet, it's just nice to have some to pass around so players can follow along as bad things happen. The Calamity sheet also lists which Civ Cards can help or hurt the effects of each Calamity.

Played Wrath of Ashardalon today with 2 friends. All of us have played D&D 4e in the past so the game was very easy to get into. We played the intro mission where the goal is to kill 12 monsters, and the dungeon itself was comically dangerous, with giant bears charging in out of nowhere and darts and boulders flying all over the place. This game really is a distilled dungeon crawl, and since we've switched our RP to mostly character-driven story games (World of Darkness, Edge of the Empire) it was nice to hack'n'slash through some monsters. I think my major complaint was with how plain the dungeon tiles are. A couple of pieces of broken furniture and spilled bags of gold on the ground never hurt!

I like the D&DAS games a lot, but yeah it's almost like they blew their entire art budget on the minis and didn't have anything left for the cards/tiles/markers, etc.