What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Saturday was quiet what with the gamefest going on, but that was fine, as we had a good group for some great games.

First out was Blood Bowl Team Manager three players, in which I took the dwarves against the hobgoblins and skaven. We did the abbreviated season rules so we all got to draft two star players, staff upgrade and team upgrade and went for four rounds. I'd heard that the dwarves can be tricky to win with, and they are kind of inflexible in terms of what they're good at. Still, even while failing to win many matchups I was able to come in second place, only three points behind the winners (skaven) who had that four point card.

After that we were joined by another player who likes Terraforming Mars and we got into that. All of us had played before- one hadn't used the non-beginner corporations yet but knew the game enough to go with it. I thought about the timing of actions in the game and decided I would try to wait as long as possible before doing anything much. The game does fight against you in that respect as I found out, because I never got my Terraforming Rating above 25 (while everyone else was on 30-37), I didn't get to lay any ocean tiles, and I was struggling for money in the early/mid game. However I did have a card that increased my income for each city tile laid, and cursed that I went third in the first round and both players ahead of me placed cities before I could play that card out. Still it paid for itself in the end when another player sponsored the Banker award, and failed to notice I was racing ahead in income.

Anyway, I was able to set up a nice city/forest system in the south of the board (where there are few/no tile laying rewards), I sponsored the last reward (Landlord) which I won handily with 17 tiles, to add to the gardener milestone and the Banker award. With the final scoring, I went from 25 points to 78, winning by two points over the player who sponsored that Banker award. We terraformed all but two tiles on the map, one being an ocean spot anyway. The player who was crushing it with Terraforming Rating during the game lost massively with very few tile points, but everyone else improved their scores over previous plays.

I had cards I had paid for that I didn't get to use (which is a waste of money, as they cost $3 to buy, but you can sell for only $1) except that I did find a side-benefit. By using the "sell a card" action I was able to take a turn doing essenstially nothing, to see what people would do (in this game, if you pass, you are out for the rest of the round). In a couple of crucial rounds that allowed me to react and play out a stronger two-action turn later in the round to benefit from other players' actions.

After that, our fourth player for TM left to do some other euro stuff, and another guy who seldom gets to come to the meet joined us to play Chaos in the Old World. In this session we used the original cards, because that's the version he owns. It was a great game (I was Slaanesh), and Khorne won in round five* after we saw he had only to make one more dial tick to win, and it would be impossible to deny even one. The original game is so much tougher, and we had Tzeench splitting his cultists over multiple regions- in one round Khorne snagged four counters, and got double ticks in two rounds. We could have called the game as soon as that happened. I almost won (46 points) but realized I scored too much and should also have pulled pieces away from Khorne more than I had. Still, I was not part of those initial bloodbath rounds that essentially gave the game to the blood god (having marched my guys down to Kislev to get away from the fighting). I prefer the game with the expansion cards, but nobody else has them, so we may need to stick with the originals.

*The game was cut short one round by a world event card, much to the annoyance of eventual winner, Khorne.

In celebration of the blood god's victory three of us decided to add more skulls to the skull throne with Gorechosen. It played really well with three- one player got good use out of his special ability to swing his anvil at both of his enemies, but I won because he killed the other guy first, and the other guy is Italian, and makes his game about pure revenge if you ever attack him. So he was rolling his spite dice every turn to hurt my opponent until I was able to finish the job. It played in about an hour with two new players (one of which is a... thoughtful... player) so that was a great way to end the evening.

Played my first game of Dice Town, 4-way and won. It was OK. Queens seem pretty powerful

God damn JEM another fine game day (and report).

Also, my feelings about Eldritch and Arkham go back and forth, so I think there's a place for both. I don't think there's a consensus on these forums about which is best.

Played a game of Warhammer 40k for the league on Sunday. Still 1,500 points, I played the guy who played Dark Eldar last time and he ran the same force. This time I only lost 7-5! If my last remaining Slaanesh prince had managed to not die for one more turn, I like would have eked out a 7-6 win. Slaanesh would have had a second chance at eliminating a Kabalite warrior who was the sole survivor of his squad. The first attempted kill shot was thwarted by a very lucky cover save roll and then he was able to bring most of his forces in range of the Slaanesh prince and brought him down. He had something like 80 shots and only just barely managed to kill off the prince.

I have most of what my force can do memorized now and have a better feel for the gameflow. I had a fun time, which is a good thing. The game is still more enjoyable to me as a socialization activity than as an actual "game".

This weekend was Fal Con in southern Connecticut. Pal Ron and I went down for Sat and Sun. It was a nice space, good crowd, and a lot of different things being played. I saw Octavian there but no other FATties I was aware of.

Here was my dance card:

Terraforming Mars - This was everywhere at the event, and seemed to be well regarded by most. There was a place selling games there and apparently they blew through their copies in the first couple hours of the con. I brought my copy and taught it to 2 or 3 others (can't remember how many of them hadn't yet played). They were very impressed with it. There isn't much challenging this for GOTY for me.

Rome: City of Marble - This is a lovely old-school game. Could have come out ten years ago, and I mean that in a good way. No senate tracks, no tacked on auctions or worker placement, just a straightforward, clean game. And it has rhombuses, which are always a plus for me.

New Haven - This is an odd one. There's a big ol board, but it's only used for gathering resources. The other action happens on individual player boards. It seems like it would be low-interaction, but it actually does some interesting things I've not seen other games do. Only issue is that it exists in that nether realm where it's not quite meaty enough for a main course, but it's a little long for a filler. That may not be the case, though, as two players in this game were extremely slow, and one of those had to keep being told how the game worked.

13 Days - I really like this distilled political CDG, and find it interesting and tense. Pal Ron, my opponent, wasn't too crazy about it.

Athos - Extremely old school game of monks trying to climb a mountain. Looks like a pleasant lark until the game begins, at which point the monks become huge jerks to each other, calling on their divine powers to block or unblock paths. Reminds me of That's Life, another Kramer game that looks cute and then devolves into a knife fight.

City Tycoon - This is a Polish game I got years ago. After a couple plays it seemed like my group wasn't too crazy about it, and I wasn't either, so I traded it away. Gave it another try here and enjoyed it so much I ended up buying a new copy of it. Will it be better received this time?

Vienna - Friday night I got a bout of insomnia, so I only had about 2 hrs of sleep before leaving for the show. By this time it was about 10pm Saturday and I was feeling that lack of sleep. So I wasn't completely on point for this one. Dice placement game, sort of like Kingsburg but with some more interesting angles to it. I'd like to try it again, well rested.

Mystic Vale - The idea behind this game, using sleeves and clear cards to create cards for a sort of deckbuilding game, is interesting and novel. The game itself, a little less so. It's the usual generic lite fantasy whatevers. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not particularly captivating and I think it probably gets old pretty quickly. If this trend takes off, it'll probably be for me like Dominion, where I'm more interested in what other people do with the idea than I am in the original.

Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis and Clark - Affable dice game with some neat ideas but not particularly compelling.

Key Harvest - I played this years ago and remembered little about it. More recent games in this series I've played I wasn't too crazy about, but I enjoyed this one.

And that's it! What I didn't play were any current-style euros with tracks-within-tracks and over-busy boards and what-not, though there were a few of those in evidence. I saw some trash in evidence: a few minis games, someone looking for Kemet players (I was playing something else at the time), and I turned down an offer to join in on Cosmic Encounter. It was a good time.

JEM wrote: *The game was cut short one round by a world event card, much to the annoyance of eventual winner, Khorne.

We used to remove that card from the game when we played. I don't think it adds anything to the game and wrecks the game's balance. For example, the corruption powers get their higgest amount of points during the last two turns of the game as that's when regions finally receive enough tokens to be corrupted. Taking away a turn is, de facto, taking away a third of their points and that sucks.


I finally bought A Most Dangerous Time: Japan in Chaos 1570-1584 and woha, it's a great game! It's incredibly tense, one of those games in which even players in a good position struggle and suffer. It felt like one of those big, euro brainburners, except with a component of fear because it's far less tightly regulated. This is a game that takes guts to play well and has to be played passionately in order to win.

However, my (first) opponent didn't agree. After only a couple turns my opponent threw his cards on the table and quit. Like that, bam! He hated the game, hated it, because everything required a die roll to win and he felt luck was screwing him over. He didn't like the lack of control or the fact that I survived attacks or that his cards were "useless". Of course, the real reason he quit was an hour long-row with a consumer service representative he had prior to the game but it shows he had a problem with the game:

Gamers have the wrong expectations.

I could tell that my friend was growing frustrated because he expected to win battles. Not win in the long term, not win as in increase the expected delta between him and me but win as in "going there with more troops and killing you in one or two turns". That is, he expected to win like he expected to win in the vast majority of games. Similarly, he grew frustrated by low results on movement rolls not because they are particularly bad in AMDT, but because he assumed a 2 or a 3 were very bad or very unlikely results.Each time there was a siege, he expected to win almost instantly, and not for the defender to hold up for months and years is both unrealistic and the worst mindset possible to tackle on the game.

Unlike the vast majority of boardgames, AMDT gives huge bonuses to the defender. Castles are extremely difficult to take, even with armies twice the garrison's size and loses are easily recoved thanks to several chits being revived each turn. You cannot go and "win" in this game. You are not going to win based on power moves or pure attrition, you need to play it smart and work around the game's design.

For example, it is indeed true that everything in this game requires cards, chit pulls or a dice rolls. How much movement you have, how much damage you deal, who goes first in the turn, who will participate in each turn, negotiating...everything, really. And they matter a lot. But...you can just wait. If you are in a bad position...you can wait. If you need to attack two times in a row...you can wait. You don't need to go and attack everything and rely on big numbers. So you should not.

If there's a game in which it's easy to play it wrong. It's this one. But I really liked it.

Erik Twice wrote:

JEM wrote: *

However, my (first) opponent didn't agree. After only a couple turns my opponent threw his cards on the table and quit. Like that, bam! He hated the game, hated it, because everything required a die roll to win and he felt luck was screwing him over. He didn't like the lack of control or the fact that I survived attacks or that his cards were "useless". Of course, the real reason he quit was an hour long-row with a consumer service representative he had prior to the game but it shows he had a problem with the game:

Gamers have the wrong expectations.

I could tell that my friend was growing frustrated because he expected to win battles. Not win in the long term, not win as in increase the expected delta between him and me but win as in "going there with more troops and killing you in one or two turns". That is, he expected to win like he expected to win in the vast majority of games. Similarly, he grew frustrated by low results on movement rolls not because they are particularly bad in AMDT, but because he assumed a 2 or a 3 were very bad or very unlikely results.Each time there was a siege, he expected to win almost instantly, and not for the defender to hold up for months and years is both unrealistic and the worst mindset possible to tackle on the game.

.

So in short he's a whiner .

Msample wrote:

Erik Twice wrote: However, my (first) opponent didn't agree. After only a couple turns my opponent threw his cards on the table and quit. Like that, bam! He hated the game, hated it, because everything required a die roll to win and he felt luck was screwing him over. He didn't like the lack of control or the fact that I survived attacks or that his cards were "useless". Of course, the real reason he quit was an hour long-row with a consumer service representative he had prior to the game but it shows he had a problem with the game:

Gamers have the wrong expectations.

I could tell that my friend was growing frustrated because he expected to win battles. Not win in the long term, not win as in increase the expected delta between him and me but win as in "going there with more troops and killing you in one or two turns". That is, he expected to win like he expected to win in the vast majority of games. Similarly, he grew frustrated by low results on movement rolls not because they are particularly bad in AMDT, but because he assumed a 2 or a 3 were very bad or very unlikely results.Each time there was a siege, he expected to win almost instantly, and not for the defender to hold up for months and years is both unrealistic and the worst mindset possible to tackle on the game.

So in short he's a whiner .

My oldest (13) started doing this in recent games and I'm trying to parent that tendency away. Not only is it bad sportsmanship but it degrades the experience for everyone else playing the game. Stop describing the water you're drowning in and start swimming, damn it!

i got a buddy who instantly quits the moment he realizes he can't win. In a 1v1 game, that's fine (i guess), but in multiplayer games it's AWFUL.

We haven't played together since and that's no accident.



Good for you, Frohike, for parenting this away. Cuz it sticks to them if you don't do anything.

Black Barney wrote: i got a buddy who instantly quits the moment he realizes he can't win. In a 1v1 game, that's fine (i guess), .

I think this is actually expected behaviour in many abstracts. Not all, you can certainly still learn something by playing it out sometimes.

Certainly agreed in multiplayer games it is shitty.

DukeofChutney wrote: some games were played this weekend - this is what i though of them;

Ice Cool - a flicking game about penguin school kids stealing fish. Quite fun, the main thing this has going for it is that the rather than flicking disks you are flicking weighted wood bits that behave a bit like spinning tops. So the physics are a little different to most other dexterity games giving the game a different feel.

We also really enjoyed Ice Cool - But the Notable Feature (tm) is the nesting-box playing board. That is such an amazing and well executed idea.

I soloed mission 4 of Betrayal at Calth tonight, and this is the first mission to use every unit in the game. It's a pretty interesting battle, involving two separate maps with two separate forces. The Ultramarines have an edge here, but it's not insurmountable. They ended up grabbing victory, but if a single unit had an extra activation, it could have gone an entirely different way.

A Most Dangerous Time sounds like a great game to me- is it playable solo? Even playing both sides just to enjoy the game. I know that my usual opponents don't enjoy games where each move can/will be blocked or negated or responded to in some way like that, but I love those games where you're poking and prodding and trying to find a way to make a move happen. Maybe that's at the core of what defines a war game? I can solo my COIN games and Pax Porfiriana, but AMDT would end up on the shelf.

Yeah you could solo it. The cards are the only hidden info, and while that makes soloing normally difficult, the chit pull activation more than balances that out IMO.

Mechs vs. Minions is really good. It's simple programming that sort of cascades in complexity as you add more and more cards to your slots. It reminds me slightly of Twin Tin Bots in this regard, a relatively ignored game from 2014.

The way you can stack cards of a similar type on top of each other to power them up is fantastic. It leads to a great arc of starting out and doing very little, to flying around and blowing tons of minions up.

Just like Rum and Bones, I do slightly get annoyed with the fiddlyness of moving a whole bunch of little minion minis every turn, but at least this is spaced out relatively well and multiple people help.

I really dig the psuedo-Legacy element as it adds a campaign feel without the commitment. Opening a new scenario and finding out the goodies that are inside is great. Little slice of Christmas.

The game is pretty simple and I dig the timed phase and trying to coordinate under duress. I wish the game was slightly harder, although I've only played the first two missions at this point.

I'm a big fan now but my only concern is after the 10 envelopes, will I still want to play it?

Codex: Card time strategy is very different than MvM but it's just as good. This is a combination of many disparate elements from different card games. It's a bit of Magic, a bit of Dominion, some Mage Wars, and even Hearthstone.

It's a deckbuilder like Dominion where you draw cards each turn, these usually consist of units or buildings you deploy to your personal board, upgrades that give permanent benefits, or Spells that can either be short term or ongoing.

The goal is to destroy the other person's base WarCraft/StarCraft style, and to do so you 'll need to kill all of their patrollers first. Each player can either attack with units or deploy them to their patroller section of their board each turn. Patrollers have to be targeted first if able.

Some effects will of course let you get around that, there's a simple flying/ground thing where you can ignore patrollers you can't attack, etc. It's relatively quickish at 60 minutes and it's one of those games where you have much more than will use each session, making it very deep and giving a sense of exploration with a lot to dive into mechanically.

It accomplishes this by having you add cards to your deck from a custom set of asymmetrical decks. So you pick a hero (a unit you can put out and fight with) and you get access to all of his cards in your "Codex". You place his cards in your binder and every single turn, at the very end you add two cards of your choice to your deck. You can add the strongest ones if you want, but most have tech requirements so that you have to tech up your base by spending resources first.

This automatically add two cards for free every turn is really crazy and defines the strategic space the game operates in. Sometimes you'll test out different combinations of cards, sometimes you'll add cards to counter the opponent's build. It's nuts.

Also, the full game has you running three such heroes, each with their own large decks of additional cards you can add. When you tech to tier 2, you need to pick one of your heroes to commit to and can only add tier 2 and tier 3 cards from that hero from now on.

It's crazy, there's nothing like it as a whole although each element is found elsewhere. It does have an RTS feel with some minor base building, teching up, and sending units on patrol. It has a real nice power curve as you get much stronger during play.

My only problem with the game right now is that it's very hard to determine how great this is. So much to explore and depths to plumb.