What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Msample wrote:

wkover wrote:

Mr. B - banish him to the local Barnes and Noble meet up group. Basically he wants to play party games. Fuck that shit.
Mr. E - tell him to tag along with Mr. B.

When playing TtR with Mr. B and Mr. E, I sub-optimally train rushed the end game, meaning I forced the end game about 2 turns earlier then anyone expected leaving Mr. B. and Mr. E. with unfinished tickets. I love doing that kind of shit to watch people groan in agony. Ms. X won, I came in 2nd but it was worth it to watching Mr. E in pain thinking he had the game in the bag.

Just finished up a couple of games of Terraforming Mars - great fun even though I'm not a euro fan. Getting mightily sick of the TOSsers whinging about the thin player mats, over two 5-player games we had one occurrence of someone brushing their board with their sleeve, even then it was easy to reset their board. I can only assume that there are a significant number of players our there who play while blind drunk or are suffering from Parkinson's.

wadenels wrote: I haven't played Mailfaux, but Puppet Wars Unstitched is pretty great. Same publisher, card-based combat, etc. But self-contained and played on a hex-grid. It also plays pretty fast.

PWU had me checking out Malifaux for a while, but I like PWU enough to just stay with it rather than buy into a true miniatures game. Although PWU does have fantastic miniatures. Some of them were tricky to assemble but I managed fine.

Agreed. Puppet wars is a good game. a very novel thematic concept that is criminally underrated. Sadly it never sold well enough to expand it.

Went to BGG.con last week. Played a bunch of games, had a great time, blah blah blah, etc. I'll only comment on a few things I hadn't played before or that would probably be of more interest here...

First of all, I've already mentioned it twice, but Adrenaline deserves another plug. Just a top notch game and production that should be a F:AT favorite once it's widely out there. Yeah, it's a FPS type skirmish game with no dice and Euro-ish scoring, but who cares... It's brilliant and the weapons are cool and it's just a blast.

I can't remember if I mentioned Clank! here before, but it seemed to be a hit at the con, with all three library copies always out, and I managed to get in on two games. It's a basic deck-building game, but there's a board where you're also moving into a castle dungeon and trying to grab loot and get out in time before you die. The push-your-luck and scoring elements of this, combined with a tight deck-building system, make it really fun.

I played an hour-long demo at the FFG booth of New Angeles. I really want to play a full game before deciding whether I want it or not, but I did like what I played. It's a pretty sharp negotiation game, semi-cooperative, where you're all trying to collectively deal with resource demands and different gang factions, while also trying to further your own company's interests. Seemed like some good ways to manipulate things in your favor, and I'd probably put it between Homeland and BSG in weight.

Darkness Comes Rattling is a Kevin Wilson co-op game that is reminiscent of Ghost Stories in theme and gameplay style. I liked it, but it was long with 5 players, and I'm not sure there's a whole lot to see beyond what we did in our game. Good to try out, though.

Speaking of Kevin Wilson, I got in on a late prototype test of his new TMNT game (TMNT: Shadows of the Past), and that was fun. I'm not really a TMNT fan at all, so that connection didn't do anything for me. But it's a scenario based game with a good dice-selection action system, and some cool moves and attacks your turtles can pull off as they fight the bad dudes. Not super complex or anything, but also not light. More for gamers than casual TMNT fans.

Watched half a game of Mechs vs. Minions. Looked fun enough, but I'm just not a fan of timed programming, so even though there is more to it than that (and it's a beautiful production), I didn't really have any more interest.

I played and enjoyed the new Pandemic: Iberia variant. Eh, it's another Pandemic wrinkle. Not sure I need to elaborate more. But I love Pandemic and it had enough difference to be interesting enough for me (moreso than the Cthulhu version was), so I was happy to try that. I bumped into Matt Leacock briefly and one of his main playtesters, and the playtester divulged that yup, there's more Pandemic coming. Fire up the motorcycle, Fonzie.

I was hoping to play Inis, which had some good buzz as a tight Kemet type of game. But I wasn't able to time it right to get in on a game of that.

Also played Fury of Dracula, Mage Knight, A Feast for Odin, and various other fillers and forgettables.

I'll second (or third?) the recommendation for Adrenaline. We sort of stumbled through the first game due to learning the rules, but still had a blast. I image that once you have all the interactions internalized, then it will really clip along.

I picked up Inis, but managed to never get in a game. Really looking forward to it, though.

Somehow, I also managed to get in an abbreviated game of Dune. Every time I play that game I kick myself for not playing it more often. The rules really aren't that hard, at the core, but struggling to remember them when it's been a year since my last play always drags me down.

What's the abbreviated game? Just 10 turns instead of 15 or more changes?

I'm surprised you guys liked Adrenaline so much, I fond it toothless and not meaningfully different from the average euro. It reminded me of 51st State in that it has this cool, violent theme but when after playing a couple of turns you realize it's all about efficiency and that attacks don't actually harm other players. Call me a wet blanket, but I felt that picking up weapons was equivalent to using a space in a worker placement game and that the map didn't actually exist as a space, but simply as a resource. That one really dissapointed me, since controlling space is the central skill of Quake and Unreal Tournament.

I also played Xia again and...I'm not sure there will be a next time. The game itself isn't what I would call great, but what makes me not want to humour it again is the lenght and the massive amounts of downtime. It takes half an evening to play, at least three or four hours, and out of those three hours, two will not be spent actually playing. You cannot do much during your opponent turns, and even if you could, I don't think that's what anyone looks for in Xia, It's supposed to be played "for fun", not as an endurance run.

On other news, I think I'm going to print out Dune. My playing group is now one person larger and seems like it could work out!

Vlad wrote: What's the abbreviated game? Just 10 turns instead of 15 or more changes?

An abbreviated game of Dune is often an early win by Harkonnen.

Vlad wrote: What's the abbreviated game? Just 10 turns instead of 15 or more changes?

We planned a shorter game of 10 turns, but we also ran out of time and had to give up the room after just 5. The Guild (myself) and the Harkonnen made a bold play for the victory, but it collapsed upon us.

Spent early morning playing Dungeonquest in bed with my girl while the kids were playing Disney Infinity downstairs.

We've been on a Lego bender lately, so we decided to substitute our pawns for Lego minifigs. She was the gothtard, and I was the bananaman. The dragon couldn't be bothered to show up for the game, since he was out of town having thanksgiving dinner out of an entire local village, so he had Pedro El Mariachi watching his place in dragonfire dungeon.



But Pedro is a lazy Mexican, so he decided to have a siesta while playing mariachi music in the background so if the dragon came home early, it looked like he was working.

Guided by the frenetic sounds from south of the border that echoed down the halls, we crept in on the sleeping Pedro and absconded with loot under his lazy bushy mustache.

Sadly, the traps did us in. We both failed to escape twice.

Faced with failure, we decided to be winners and have sex instead.

Olé!

A couple of days off this week (using up holidays owed) so a couple of gaming days.

First day had my two AT mates show up for, First, our second play City of Remnants where this time as the scrapping gang I couldn't work out how to get cash or cards and got left waaaaay behind the other two guys. The winner won because we let him buy the three Forbidden Knowledge cards that we didn't realized how they scored (basically having all three gave him 12VPs instead of 3, in comparison my total score was 48). - this is a well designed, fun game with a lot in it Second up was another play of hot fave Eldritch Horror. This was a great game against AOO Sygyzy that went all the way to the end, us winning by completing the AOO's final mystery just before Doom was going to hit zero for an insta-loss. It was very deadly, I had two investigators defeated and a third devoured by the AOO and the other two each losing one investigation to defeat.

The second day planets aligned somewhere and we had a fourth person for AT games so out came games that I refuse to play with less than four.
First up was our first play of recently bought Homeland by GF9. Along similar lines to BSG and (apparently Dead of Winter) but shorter with much less fluff and just game this went down really well again. I pinched the end right at the end as the Terrorist Mole - both tracks had three spots to go to end the game and first threat up was a 3 impact, it was just failed and as the other three looked around for ways to add extra 'blue' intel to it I said I'd burn one of my assets to add +4 intel to it, then I mentioned i was adding the +4 to the red (terrorist) side. Just as well as I had made a few tactical errors in my first game and at least one of them was going to finger me as the Mole in the accusation round if the Agency had won instead. But I do see this has being hard for the Mole to win in future games with all the different abilities all the asset cards can bring that we didn't use that well (me on purpose).
Second up was Spartacus, I expected this to go long but after me initially getting an influence lead and then being pulled back one of the guys suddenly surged ahead to 12 after sharing a collaboration scheme with me then playing schemes that just showed up at the right time and finally discarding a combination of active cards to gain influence from his house ability. I brought him down to 11 with a scheme that I had to ask for gold from the others to be able to pay for it (I was that broke) but he had the most gold so was therefore able to win Hosting rights and gain the influence for the win. We had the flimsy satisfaction of killing him in the Primus fight at the end.
And to finish off a quick game of Cosmic Encounter, and it was another quicker-than-normal game as we were being a bit too nice and allowing each other to ally often and three of us were quickly onto four each. I was the Parasite so could ally without being invited and attempted to do so with all three of them - two of them threw the encounter and the third decided he would go for a shared win but we were defeated by the defense. Then my turn but all three defended against me, so finally the next guy grabbed the solo win when destiny gave him me to encounter so he was able to attack without having me ally with him.
A good couple of days of great AT gaming - warming up for Christmas (hopefully).

Brought something from the forever shelf for Thanksgiving, Argent. Played a two player game with my wife. Ended with me very salty because I forgot to take my 1 influence and lost influence tie... losing the game easily. Would have been razor thin if I had taken it and won influence.

People are way underselling this game as two player. It is really fucking nasty and takes away a lot of the chaos people complain about. Awesome game, sometimes it's like "why did I stop playing this game and pick up new games?"

How cryptic.

Gary Sax wrote: Brought something from the forever shelf for Thanksgiving. Played a two player game with my wife. Ended with me very salty because I forgot to take my 1 influence and lost influence tie... losing the game easily. Would have been razor thin if I had taken it and won influence.

People are way underselling this game as two player. It is really fucking nasty and takes away a lot of the chaos people complain about. Awesome game, sometimes it's like "why did I stop playing this game and pick up new games?"

Gary, to what title do you refer?

Sounds like Argent?