What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

OMG. I wasn’t even looking at Missile Command. That looks like a perfect storm for my main gang. $17 on Amazon, that got bought.

charlest wrote: Empires of the Void II is an odd one.
...
I like it quite a bit, although five players was too much. A little too slow (although not unbearably so) and I suspect it's best with three. Looking forward to trying it again and seeing if I can get my head around some more of the game.

I've played this twice, once at 5 and once at 3...and I'm torn. With 3 it moves more smoothly, but there's sooooo much room on that map that's it's really easy to avoid folks. Sure they block off planets, but the map doesn't shrink and it's still the same distance to get from one side to the other. With 5, I saw a lot more conflict, but it was also bit long. I agree with the length...you don't want it to take much longer, but it does seem to end just as you get the map filled out and get upgraded. I enjoyed my plays, but I'm still undecided on this one, personally.

I'm not sure the lack of conflict in a three player game matters much, as it doesn't seem to really want to be a game with lots of back and forth. It wants that adventure game feel where you may run into a player once or twice and seize their stuff, but for the most part you want to keep on the move and not get bogged down in trying to lay down territory lines.

That variant sounds lame Gregarius. I do indeed like the tight decisions and not being able to completely explore your faction or build up your empire, I just wish harming someone's VP total was a little more viable, which is difficult if you're constantly in rush hour trying to get somewhere.

Two starter decks of Battleground Fantasy Warfare made their way into my game collection an age ago. I was a busy dad with a very little kid and zero prospects buying, building, painting and playing a Warhammer Fantasy army. I fiddled around with the decks and stowed them.

Last night they finally got played and the little kid (now 15) won.

The game lives up to its promise. With two starter decks, you can enjoy 3000 pts of miniature warfare on a table in your room at the Residence Inn.

The kid played the Orcs and I was the Men of Hawkshold. His warg riders swept around my flanks to get at my longbowmen but my militia were sacrificed to absorbed the blows. Meanwhile my spearmen and swordsmen moved on the orc front lines like a bitch. That was a mistake. His best units - Trolls and Orc Marauders - broke and then defeated my units.

The system offers a lot of game play with what would seem like a low barrier to entry. But the barrier just doesn’t seem quite low enough in terms of cost and game play.

Your Move Games is still a going concern. The game was published in 2005 and he some expansions and updates the following years. While there has been nothing new in quite some time, you can still buy the decks and they are $30 each. In addition to the armies above you can invest in armies of the undead, elves, dwarves, Chinese and African war tribes(?), and big monsters. There’s even a historical version of the game covering the Punic War.

While $30 is ridiculously cheap compared to a real miniatures army, it feels a tad overpriced. At the end of the day you really would rather be playing with minis. Plopping down $30 on a deck puts you further away from that goal.

Also the system is a real game system with rules for morale checks, LOS, unit facing, wheeling, charging and more. Another investment - of time - that might be a bit high if you want to just move guys and chuck dice for a couple of hours.

These investments may be why the game was never as big as it could have been. It is neither a Bud Light nor a hazy IPA with notes of pine and citrus. It’s sort of a Killians Red.

As for me and the kid, we’re eager to play again, but will think twice about growing our armies. 40K and other board games are higher priority.

charlest wrote: I'm not sure the lack of conflict in a three player game matters much, as it doesn't seem to really want to be a game with lots of back and forth. It wants that adventure game feel where you may run into a player once or twice and seize their stuff, but for the most part you want to keep on the move and not get bogged down in trying to lay down territory lines.

Well, it does matter when one guy is winning the card draw battle and is running away with the game. It's much harder to affect them when things are less crowded. That was my experience as not being that guy in the 3 player, but being that guy in the 5 player. Though, for the record, I still won the 5 player by being, in my own words, a "space jerk." So maybe it doesn't matter, though I was getting picked on somewhat, but I just kept moving forward and taking new territories. Regardless, the action selection is not enough interaction, even if combat is mostly toothless.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed my plays and I'm not planning on getting rid of yet...but we'll see if anyone asks to play it again.

I guess that's my point, that even if people can hit you it doesn't hurt much. Take my planet, fine, I'll just grab another. There's no real catchup mechanism at all and it pushes too far away from area control so players can't knock each other down a peg by taking your turf.

I had a runaway lead in our game and everyone was trying to gang up on me, it didn't do much.

Of course - these opinions are based on one game so I don't know if this will hold up. I just don't think the game has a reliable way to knock someone down, tight map or not.

Interesting that all 3 of our experiences involved a run-away leader (though in my 5-player, I was firmly in the lead, but another player was threatening me at the end). And yes, based on my experiences, it was nigh impossible to slow someone down. And it's so sensitive at the beginning to what cards you draw or a lucky a die roll.

This discussion is not encouraging me to pull this out again, but I guess we'll see if your future plays look the same.

My Gloomhaven-loving friend got Founders of Gloomhaven.

This is a Splotter-like game in some regards and kind of soft point salad in others. I wonder how similar it is to The Great Zimbabwe, which I haven't played. The gist of it is that you use Puerto Rico-like actions and reactions to build and link VP buildings to the raw materials they need but whoever provides the materials also gets points.

I enjoyed the game but I walked away with the sour feeling that my actions had very little impact on the actual outcome. It feels like you are winning or losing or that a certain action is better but by the end the difference in points was extremely small. Both times all players were within 3-5 points of each other despite one of them being actively disengaged and me winning our first game by picking whatever gave me more VPs at the time.

I would need to play more to tell but it seems to be one of those games were you just can't play much better nor much worse. You are always going to be within a few points of victory. This gives me a sour feeling because it means most of the choices you make are meaningless and won't actually affect the outcome. And it also means the vast majority of the game is irrelevant and will be decided by a small part of it, like the surprisingly impactful turn order or the blind bid to decide which VP buildings come into play.

I'm not sure if the game has actual depth or only an illusion of it. Only time will tell.

Hadik wrote: Two starter decks of Battleground Fantasy Warfare made their way into my game collection an age ago. I was a busy dad with a very little kid and zero prospects buying, building, painting and playing a Warhammer Fantasy army. I fiddled around with the decks and stowed them.

Last night they finally got played and the little kid (now 15) won.

The game lives up to its promise. With two starter decks, you can enjoy 3000 pts of miniature warfare on a table in your room at the Residence Inn.

The kid played the Orcs and I was the Men of Hawkshold. His warg riders swept around my flanks to get at my longbowmen but my militia were sacrificed to absorbed the blows. Meanwhile my spearmen and swordsmen moved on the orc front lines like a bitch. That was a mistake. His best units - Trolls and Orc Marauders - broke and then defeated my units.

The system offers a lot of game play with what would seem like a low barrier to entry. But the barrier just doesn’t seem quite low enough in terms of cost and game play.

Your Move Games is still a going concern. The game was published in 2005 and he some expansions and updates the following years. While there has been nothing new in quite some time, you can still buy the decks and they are $30 each. In addition to the armies above you can invest in armies of the undead, elves, dwarves, Chinese and African war tribes(?), and big monsters. There’s even a historical version of the game covering the Punic War.

While $30 is ridiculously cheap compared to a real miniatures army, it feels a tad overpriced. At the end of the day you really would rather be playing with minis. Plopping down $30 on a deck puts you further away from that goal.

Also the system is a real game system with rules for morale checks, LOS, unit facing, wheeling, charging and more. Another investment - of time - that might be a bit high if you want to just move guys and chuck dice for a couple of hours.

These investments may be why the game was never as big as it could have been. It is neither a Bud Light nor a hazy IPA with notes of pine and citrus. It’s sort of a Killians Red.

As for me and the kid, we’re eager to play again, but will think twice about growing our armies. 40K and other board games are higher priority.

Sounds like you don’t need this since we live in a world in which Warhammer Disk Wars exists.

After buying Warhammer Disk Wars I went from very excited to very meh. I felt it wasn’t miniature-like enough.

I’ve given up on the “alternative miniatures” games...there is not really much there when you have thousands of points (and dollars) in actual miniatures games.

I finally played Azul. It is excellent. Really good. It is very much in the vein of a Sid Sackson kind of design sense, which I really love. It almost feels like an old 3M game. There’s a timeless quality to it that is just lovely. It is puzzly, but it’s a pleasant kind of puzzly with some really satisfying outcomes if you make good picks. The hate drafting/dumping is fun. There is no way this game is not SDJ 2018. I don’t think it is a generation-defining masterpiece, but it is an extremely well written and well presened concept that anyone can enjoy.

Playing through House of Danger, will review it when we are done. It’s cute. Not sure it flies as a multiplayer offering, but we’ve made it work.

My kids have been wanting to play Zooloretto so that has been out a lot lately. Still a fun game. Really needs a few of the little expansions to get more interesting.

I have Sword & Sorcery in the review queue. It’s OK. It seems like Galaxy Defenders was the smoother, cleaner design but this is good hack and slash. The problem is Gloomhaven.

As the resident Defender In Perpetuity of Zooloretto, I suggest getting the following:

New Enclosures
Restaurants
Petting Zoo
Polar Bear

Basically, these add the really important stuff, strategically. And, they also happen to be in one pack.

Yeah, we have those- they really transform the game. Thought about maybe getting some of the others.

Michael Barnes wrote: I have Sword & Sorcery in the review queue. It’s OK. It seems like Galaxy Defenders was the smoother, cleaner design but this is good hack and slash. The problem is Gloomhaven.

I haven’t played Gloomhaven, but comparing Massive Darkness and Sword & Sorcery since they came out near each other, I found SS to be deeper, but MD to just be more fun and less of a slog.

Played the old Puzzle: Strike Shadows expansion again with two players. It might just be my favorite deck-builder. Two games, where we'd see the puzzle chips (like the kingdom piles in Dominion) before we'd each get dealt two characters randomly and pick one simultaneously. The game is somehow the most like Dominion (visible piles that you can always buy from, action economy and combinatorics abound where you consciously try to form a strategy) and the least like Dominion - it has lots of take that and no Victory Points in sight, and the theme, such as it is is well executed. It gets kind of miserable and sloggy with more than 2 players, but it's excellent and I don't think I'll ever trade it. It's pretty hilarious to me that he never caved and just released a printed card version. The whole bag + poker chips + bidding shields thing is just so hilariously overproduced.

We also played some 2p Small World for another cutthroat game that I think also gets kind of goofy with more players. If you play by the rules with the hidden but trackable scoring, it becomes a game of negotiation and "not me, he's the threat," which is fine, but probably the reason it became less popular over time with the BGG-heads-down-until-the-next-new-game-pops-up crowd. I also think they may have released too many expansions for their own good.