Re: What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

With my regular 2-player friend back in action, I knew there was one thing we definitely had to try: 2-player Ankh: Gods of Egypt. I've played a bunch of games of Ankh, but always at four or five players. I've read so many accounts on BGG (and from Charlie) about how 2-player is such a different animal that I really wanted to try it out. Charlie, as usual, was totally right (oh, and those other randos, too.)

I wasn't really interested in using the Great Flood scenario because I didn't want to close off 1/3 of the map for an intro game to someone who's a very experienced DoaM player. So, we played the 2-player setup for Old Kingdom. He took Anubis and I played Horus. I immediately started playing from my multiplayer perspective which was the wrong way to go in so many instances. Maximizing actions is still quite key but you don't have to worry about 2 or three other people and their own play rhythms. You just have to focus on the other player and the timing of their events. I only snapped out of my usual approach about halfway through the game and by then it was too late. He had two of my guys sitting on his board and a significant follower advantage that made any attempts to clear space with Plague a non-starter. Plus, with Old Kingdom not having any pyramids, trying to cover so much space just one dude at a time (no Pyramid Attunement without a lot of effort) with the game playing that much faster because the action tracks are so much shorter, I dead ended myself and he won the Devotion track handily with me just having entered the blue zone. The Guardians were a random draw of Sekhmet (kinda meh unless you can actually win fights), Bes (not helpful at all on a map with no pyramids), and the Scorpion (again, monument-light starting situation.) I tried my usual frustrating prevention with Horus, but I couldn't stop the purple tide and lost at the fourth conflict.

So we set up a 2-player Middle Kingdom game, with him taking Sobek and me with Set. Now, Set is one of my favorites, largely because he's so annoying and everyone has to literally play around him. The Guardians were Wadjet (super useful in two player, where he would often be the lone figure in a fight), Pharaoh Mummy (always good), and Bennu (who never got taken.) We also used Petsuchos, which he kept basically throughout the game, as I got an early lead by outflanking him with Set that I never relinquished. You have to be careful about where you move, especially when Set is in the delta area and has access to so many central spaces, even with Sobek drowning some of them. Wadjet was also a bad draw for Sobek, since he could be in so many regions at once, which usually meant that Wadjet's power was being activated on the regular, which means more Devotion. And also having to figure out how to position the advantage of Petsuchos and not have him stolen by me was something of a headache for him. I got a significant monument advantage and, like the previous game, won at the fourth conflict with him having just cleared into the blue zone.

I didn't want to overwhelm him with Pharaoh, but that's definitely happening the next time we play.

The agency I work for is one of the overflow sites for warming centers for the homeless in the area, so for one week every winter, we have a couple dozen people sleeping in our front room. That means that we need staff to volunteer to help and since turnout was kinda mild this year, I ended up picking up the overnight coordinator slots for last night, tonight, and Saturday. There will be other people there, so I won't have to be awake for three nights straight (not sure I could do that anymore), but it's still a lot of time that has to be filled. So, last night I was there with two staff members from our reentry program and one of them is an avid board gamer, so we brought some small stuff.

I taught them to play The Crew. It had been well over a year since the last time I played, but it's not that difficult to get the hang of it again. The gamer picked it up right away and the other person was a little slower on the uptake, which was a perfect example of the difference between "gamer games" and non-. It's a thing that I think a lot of us forget, at times. We made it up to mission 14, which is pretty good for first-timers and then decided to switch to something else.

The gamer person had brought Escape from Iron Gate, as he's a big fan of puzzles, riddles, and the whole Escape series. You're all playing prisoners trying to find a way out of jail and to do so you have to gather Common and Rare items as rewards for either solving puzzles or getting the other players to properly guess something you either act out or draw. First one to collect the right combos of items to get through all four rooms escapes prison and wins. I'm not a huge puzzle gamer, but it was fine and as the night wore on and people were getting punchier, the acting routines and so forth got funnier, so it was a good time.

Then we pulled out Knizia's LLAMA. It's not one of his best designs, but it's hilariously fun while drunk and/or wobbly because people have been awake too long. You're supposed to play to 40 points (the loser) but with three people, there's more room to be the last person standing and dump your whole hand, such that what might've been a crushing defeat with 5 or 6 becomes more of a path out of that trouble. One player had 22 points and then won four successive rounds and cleaned up his whole space. The other two of us were down to 1 and 3 points, respectively, so we were clearly going to be playing much longer if we wanted to end the game by the rules, so we put it down. Still a great time.

Lot of good gaming recently. Played Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor with sornars today. We had a good co-op game moment where we were looking at like 5-6 legions/hordes and it looked like absolute curtains but we squeezed through with placements that made them fight each other. Sornars also dialed in a crazy item combo with archery items that had him rolling crazy strong archery dice in every fight. He had to pay resources for them though, so it wasn't all sunshine.

Cannot recommend that game enough to people here who like ameritrash. The balance is a little bit off, ah pook has talked about this, but otherwise it's so so good if that's your thing. The fighting and the dice rolling is top without being too complex. It's perfect high stakes AT, the special powers, the powerful units, the wild mercenaries, the weird lore, the enemy legion and horde special powers are like A+++ tier ameritrash. Uprising is a game that knows that toys should be strong and fun and you should feel like you're up against a wall, even if it's a VP scoring game.

It's just designed better than most of that old ameritrash.

I remember when some people here were hyping up Reign since it was decent and on discount. Uprising is kind of like that but reasonably well developed (and very much not on discount).

Had a couple of the regulars over for a couple games. We decided to play episode 2 of season 1 of Cthulhu: Death May Die. Since we'd played episode 1 twice, once with Cthulhu and once with Hastur, I decided to bring out Yog-Sothoth for this one. The talk around BGG indicates that Yog is considered the easiest of the GOOs, but that was fine since we weren't looking for an ardent challenge or something like that. We took Ian, Sister Beth, and Adilah, so we were the Brawling mf'ers. Consequently, both keeping the areas clear and keeping Yog's gates off the board wasn't that much of a problem. What turned out to be the complication was the Sanity loss. We were killing machines (the Cthonic entity never came back through the Mythos deck once we'd cleared the first one) but we were going-insane-killing-machines. We got the ritual disrupted by finding two of the tomes and, when Yog appeared, smashing through his levels happened pretty straightforwardly, as well. But all of us were 1 or 2 steps from insanity (death) within a couple turns of his arrival. Finally, Ian attacked and went mad. Then Beth attacked and went mad. He had 4 health left when I stepped up and managed to put him away, sitting one away from going mad with them on that final roll. I appreciate this game, not just for its theme and using the rules from another favorite, The Others, but also because every scenario we've played so far has come right down to the wire. If it had gone another turn, we'd have lost in each one.

Then we pulled out a hoary, old favorite in Firefly. I hadn't played in ages and the two of them had never played before, so it was an arduous relearn/teach for a bit, but they got the hang of it pretty quickly. We had Marco, Zoe, and I went traditional with both Mal and Serenity. Marco decided to stay straight-laced, at first, and stuck to legal jobs while I went full-on criminal and did almost nothing but illegal ones; grabbing jobs from Niska as soon as it was feasible. The reward of those is what convinced Marco to be more opportunistic, shall we say. Zoe never really got started, having underestimated the difficulty of the Misbehavior deck and stalling on her first few turns. They also both kind of ignored the power of the ability to move the Alliance and Reaver ships until I introduced them to it, by dropping the Alliance cruiser right on top of Marco one space before he was going to make a big delivery of contraband and, one turn later, a couple fugitives. After that, they started moving both ships aggressively toward me whenever the opportunity presented. However, I was swimming in cash by then and, with a couple crew members and my Shiny Tie, managed to get through the goals and win the game. It took over three hours, which kind of surprised both of them, but I told them it CAN get better as they get more experienced. They were both interested in playing again. I'm still using my 2013 copy, for which I have everything but Kalidasa, so if anyone has the latter for trade or sale (at something less than $100), I'm interested.

We had 3 players last night, and took a crack at some stretch goal nonsense from Nemesis Lockdown. Despite now owning the game for... 4 years? We had never tried the Mars surface map, or the Chytrid intruder race (basically a fungal organism that spreads around the base).

The Chytrids are not intended to be used with the Mars surface map, as it makes them easier to deal with. I figured this would be offset by the Mars surface map being overall more difficult, and it didn't matter anyway, because the challenge level was plenty high.

One player ran afoul of the Queen. They had no weapons, so they ran away, which was the smartest thing they could have done. It's usually easy to escape from the queen since they have less attack cards (I think) but wouldn't you know it, a queen attack card was drawn, and this card is straight up bullshit, because it hits you based on how strong the Queen is at that point. The Queen happened to be at full strength, and he went from one light wound to DEAD based on the flip of that card. There was nothing he could have done, and it was only round 2. The game went on for 6 more rounds!

One player survived, we thought, until I verified a rule question on BGG after the fact, and we found out he really died as well due to the Contingency plan, even though he was safe in the Bunker. I know it was only one play, but I don't think the Mars surface or the Chytrids are going to be hitting the table again.

After that we played Fast & The Furious. We took another run at mission 2, which is stealing cargo out of a semi-truck. There are two ways to win this mission:

1. Get 2 cargo in each player vehicle, and all player vehicles have to drive to the far edge of the board
2. Take over the semi truck with the final Stunt in the game. Once the final stunt comes out, you have 4 rounds maximum to achieve this, or you lose.

Now that I have played this mission twice, I believe victory condition 1 is functionally impossible. There are many ways that enemies can get on top of your car, and there are many cards that will remove cargo from your car if you have an enemy on your car. This results in a push / pull that frankly doesn't feel great, and I just don't see how anyone could actually manage to keep their cargo long enough to get off the board.

That leaves taking over the semi, which demands pretty exacting timing, but is far more doable since the game itself can't undo your progress with it. And on the very last turn, we did just that, winning the scenario. For $20, you can do a lot worse than Fast & the Furious.

We played the Chytrids once; they reminded me a bit of the Protomolecule from the EXPANSE in that they are more passive spreaders than active attackers. But if you let them spread too much….thats bad.

Msample wrote: We played the Chytrids once; they reminded me a bit of the Protomolecule from the EXPANSE in that they are more passive spreaders than active attackers. But if you let them spread too much….thats bad.

This totally sounds like a side plot from a Rick and Morty episode.

I busted out the old copy of Gulo Gulo and played my 3 year-old granddaughter's first full board game. Those little grubby hands are really good and pulling out the eggs! She mostly played by the rules, but kept switching which Gulo was hers.

We were joined by her 14-year-old auntie, who won the game .

Friend drove down for a game weekend. Joined two of my regular group for a couple games.

MAYAN CURSE. Some Kickstarter passion project I guess, didn't grab me at all. You're trying to move through a temple to grab relics but (for some reason) can't just walk; you need to draw tiles and then move board pieces around to form a path of symbols that matches your tiles. Temple of Chac or Sub Terra II are vastly better for tomb raiding. 2/10.

POWER VACUUM. Weird trick taker, played on BGA a few times but it's pretty opaque there. Makes way more sense in person. The suits are on the backs of cards, so you can see if people can follow or not, but one suit lies and claims to be a suit they're not. Thinky and fun and subverts a lot of normal trick-taking tropes to very nice effect. Not a game to play with non-gamer fans of Euchre or Oh Hell etc., but I'm looking forward to playing this again and might pick it up. 8/10.

THE GANG. Finished with this one, co-op Texas Hold 'Em where you are trying to accurately rank the hands of everyone at the table with very limited information. Like with regular Hold 'Em, there's four rounds: pre-flop, flop, turn, river. In each round you take a chip that represents how strong your hand is, 1 star for the weakest up to N stars, where N is the number of players (up to six). You can take a chip either from the middle or from in front of another player. You can put your chip back into the middle, but you can't give a chip to another player. That's the only communication allowed. Once the chips settle in front of people, you flip the next community cards and do the next round (with different color chips for each round, so you can track how people thought their hand improved or worsened over the course of the game). After the last hand you reveal your hands from (claimed) worst to best, and see if you were all correct. Win three hands before you lose three hands, and you win the game. Very fun, has a bit of an issue of really needing familiarity with poker to do well, but there's cheat sheets for people that need it. Very fun. Has advanced rules that make the game harder or easier. 8/10.

Went home and my kid joined us for a 3p game of SLAY THE SPIRE. This is a great implementation of the video game, maybe a little too close. They constrain the math to make things more manageable, e.g. instead of resting healing 30% of your HP, it heals 3 HP (and your health is 9-10 max instead of 70-170ish). They made the game a coop instead of single player (although of course there's a solo mode for some reason). Scales very smoothly for player count. Fun deckbuilding combat game, basically. Tune your deck around various upgrades and get better and better, hopefully getting farther than the last time. It does run a little long, but you can "save" the game in between stages with some included baggies and card dividers. We made it through Act I, saved the game, and then it was time for the kid to go to bed. 8/10.

2p for the last two of the night. BEAST, a one-v-many hidden movement game that I think is probably better than Fury of Dracula. Shorter, more focused, nice dark fantasy theme (but not edgy grimdark, more melancholy). It really wants to be a 3p game -- 2p means the hunter plays two characters. I was the beast and killed enough settlers to win. Has a really nice variety in the box: two maps, four different "contracts" (victory conditions and custom parameters), six different beasts and six different hunters, all with different powers and strategies. 6/10.

IMPERIUM. My second play of this; he was the vikings and I was the Celts. I got completely rolled; he more than doubled my score. I couldn't figure out how to get going and then the game was over. Ran very late but was otherwise engaging. I think I like the system, and how many different nations you can play; dunno how much I'll like it as an entry in the over Civ game space. 6/10?

This morning the kid joined us again for a 3p game of DEAD CELLS. Playing this after Slay the Spire the previous day was an interesting study in contract. STS is a vastly more tactical game, and really outstrips DC in having meaningful and hard decisions, but DC is faster and has a greater of a sense of exploration and progress. The unlocks in DC are also more meaningful; unlocking a card in STS doesn't mean you'll even necessarily see it in your next few games. The kid and I played a bunch of DC right when the Kickstarter delivered (she loves watching me play the video game) but it got pretty hard and she wasn't interested in going back and grinding the earlier levels to unlock the stuff we needed to get farther against the last boss. So this was a fun return to form and I enjoyed getting back to it. We'll see if the kid is similarly inspired. 8/10.

Power Vacuum is by the same designer as Roll, Camera! I thought I was on his mailing list, so I'd know when he was doing something new, but apparently not, so I missed the KS. Would definitely have been in for this one, both for the interesting mechanisms that you describe, but also because of the theme, which is totally up my grew-up-in-the-Cold-War alley. And, of course, I love Roll, Camera! Keep waiting for it to show up in his site for sale, but I think he's still fulfilling KS orders.

I'll chime in regarding Power Vacuum, as I actually played two back-to-back games of it last week. I found the decisions really interesting, deciding if you go for winning the control of the board (playing low cards) early to get things established the way you want, or to save them for late to ensure you get some of your predictions (where the majority of your points will typically come from). Because winning tricks just give you a single point (just OK) or lets you save a card for next round (absolutely key in the first couple of rounds). It's also fun to set things up so you can only benefit. At the end of one round, one player was forced to choose to give either me or the other player 8 points, which is a lot. I really enjoyed it, but I also won both rounds. My only complaint regards those predictions, which you can reveal early to get more points. Without going into any real detail, I never found a compelling reason to not just reveal on the first turn (maximum points) and just work towards it. Only two games with the same people, could just be the meta, so we'll see how it goes with future plays. I'm pretty happy with it so far, lots of small but consequential decisions. And thematically it's quite good, as the trump suit represents "Violence", very apropos.

A great 4 player game night last night. We started with Damnation: The Gothic Game. Two of us had played before. I find this game a bit difficult to teach, mainly because most of the rules are "gamey". I can attack you in the hall, but not in the room. The Power of Adjacency. How the Vampire works...etc.

That said, once we got going, everyone loved it. They also raved about the art and the components, which makes sense because they are all top shelf. This game plays to 8, which would be great because honestly it's hard to have conflict with 4 players. The vampire is easily outrun in most situations, and the map is large so conflicts were few and far between during the early rounds.

The Moat was the star of the show, and 3 of us all spent time in it. One person died in it, but managed to resurrect. I was the Professor, and as such could lay claim to any deaths that weren't specifically caused by someone, so when the person died in the Moat, I took his cards and a Soul token, which I then used to enter the Dark Tower. There, I obtained an event card that completely immolated another player who was unlucky enough to happen to be in the Courtyard. He never got to come back because the Fall (the last stage of the game) triggered shortly after that. The timing was all very good for me, as I had just become the Vampire prior to the Fall, so my character didn't take any damage for several rounds while the remaining two players slowly died. And due to that, I was the Last Villain Standing. This game is fucking great.

Next up was Rock Hard 1977. This was ironic because this game should have opened for the Gothic Game. Three of us were new to it, with the owner (not me, for a change) teaching. He had played a few times, but only 2 player.

The components are very nice. I love the speaker player dashboards. The game itself is... fine. It's really a bog standard worker placement game, with the meanest thing you can do to someone being taking a space they wanted. Having drugs (candy) in the game is an interesting wrinkle, and while I led in score the entire game, I wound up 3rd after end of game scoring. I only took drugs one time, and I think I should have taken more.

I'd play it again, but I'm not going to ask for it.

hotseatgames wrote: I only took drugs one time, and I think I should have taken more.

Can't argue with that.

Went to a local-ish game con -- two hours each way. Nice little operation for a small town; got some sponsors, rented the Elks Lodge, had some vendors, a cosplay contest, signups, the whole nine yards.

Met a friend there who signed up for a game of Classic Traveler, but the table was short one player so he asked if I could join. Never played, but sure. Game was scheduled for 11am-3pm. We sat down at 10:55am. GM started explaining the setting. And kept explaining the setting. At 11:20am a guy walked up and asked if he could join. "Sure," says the GM. The new guy and the GM proceed to talk about how much they love Traveler, having various dick-waving contests about how big their collection is, new guy pulls out books from a bag and they ooh and aah over how nice they are. At 11:45am I walk over to the table where my friends are; they are playing Daybreak. I mention to Kuhrusty that the game hasn't started yet and he responds (appropriately) in shock and horror. I return to the game and debate dropping out. The new guy wants to know how old our characters are. They have birthdates on their character sheets but not age, so it depends on the setting year. The GM proceeds to look up the current in-setting year. The new guy starts showing the table fun stuff from his half-dozen books. There's an NPC who's a thinly-disguised version of Luke Skywalker! And over here is a thinly-disguised version of Paul Atredies! I am pretty positive I am feeling one of the geek social fallacies, whichever one doesn't want to make waves with someone who is earnestly trying to run a game on his own time and effort. At noon I finally tell myself "fuck it," lean over and ask the GM if it would be overly disruptive if I dropped out. With the new guy there's a full table. "Sorry," I say. "I don't think this is for me." He looks surprised but says okay. I leave, 25% of the way into the allotted time. I feel like a weight has dropped off me.

Daybreak wraps up and I set up the newish Ascending Empires: Zenith. Sci-fi 4x but you have to flick your ships! Surprisingly fiddly and I got a bunch of rules wrong but it was pretty fun. The dexterity element is a nice counterweight to the thinky parts so you can be good at one but not the other and it is okay. One guy is good at both and crushes us.

My friend who played Traveler walks over. The game apparently actually started and they did a few things before time was up. I regret nothing.

My friend joins the board games, along with a Jedi with a skullet.

We then play the dungeon-crawl themed trick-taker Torchlit. A weird game, feels random but is it really random or do we just suck? The guy who won the last game wins again, 19 points. The other four players tie at 16.

A sixth player joins and we many rounds of The Gang. The guy who won Ascending Empires and Torchlit is also apparently a poker savant and pegs everyone's hole cards almost immediately, but this is a co-op so it's okay. It's actually fun hearing him break down the odds and so on after each hand. My friend is not good at poker so he's hard to read.

We cut out at 6:30pm and go to a nearby Tolkien-themed brewpub. I try to go there every time I'm in town. They have great beer and great food, but the food takes forever because they have a small kitchen so they are basically making one meal at a time. I had a Rohan Red (double red ale), a Goldberry (strawberry blond ale), and a King Under the Mountain (imperial stout). Normally when we go, we sing shanties, but there was an actual musician playing.

I napped a bit on the way home. Pretty fun, I'll go back next year.