What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Legendary - heroes from X-Men and Civil War. X-Cutioners Song, which puts a hero into the villain deck to be 'rescued'. so we stuffed Old Man Logan in there, imagining there was some timetravel/alternate universe shenanigans going on with him. Arcade was the villain, and he relies heavily on taking civilians captive and using them as human shields. He's only 3 strength, but when he's got 7-8 3 strength shields in front of him...things get out of hand in a hurry. He has several 'trap' cards that go into the villain deck, and they can be pretty nasty.

My wife focused on Magik, who recruits tons of sidekicks. We've never been through the whole sidekick deck before. I worked with Vision, who's "phasing" ability, then the ability to 'guess' the top card of the draw deck allowed for fun combos. Daughter stuck with Hulkling, who is just a brute.

I know legendary isn't a great game objectively, but the combinations of cards and characters just works for me and the fam. The real joy of Marvel Legendary, is how the combination of villain+scheme changes how each game is approached.

We also played Disney Cranium. we played boys vs girls (always a bad idea...young or old) and let me tell you, playing with 3 boys who can't read sure makes the game difficult. still, superior dice rolling won the day.

lj1983 wrote: I know legendary isn't a great game objectively, but the combinations of cards and characters just works for me.

Me, too!

I was wondering what the hell woke me up last night.

*TWAT ALERT! TWAT ALERT*

I think True Believers should stay as the moniker for a variety of reasons, but mostly, because that is a fully legit club name.

I want to see Shellie and Al decked out in leather “TRUE BELIEVERS BC” biker vest with “Ameritrash” rockers more than anything now.

Apropos of Eldritch, we played Arkham Horror for my wife's belated birthday Arkham. We drew Golub or whatever and it was a fun game, I've never fought him. I think it's a pretty good GOO. As always, the game delivered, with us winning on a nailbiting mythos pull and then gate seal roll. My wife fucking loves this game. I must admit I enjoy it too after all these years. My wife made some sarcastic derogatory comments about EH while we played when we all lost some health and later when she lost a turn. She considers it basically the lose a turn game.

Rolling Bones. Probably my 3,900th play.
Barely swueaked by a win on my “last gasp” turn where I get one last turn because mama went first. 108 to 114.

Hive. Wife hates this game. Won by 1 move. Think my youngest will like it more.

Desolate. Love this game. Buying the two expansions for it. Barely won by getting fucking MAD lucky (1:15 chance, nailed it).

Pandemic: The Cure. Love this game more. Played thrice. Won the first on Standard, lost on Heroic, then lost again. LOVE.

Jur’s Game X: Rulebook needs some clarification on setup, and where the shit is Richard? FATTIES are going to like it,
Maybe love it. Cube pushers will hate it. I’m still awaiting a third play to judge.

Red Motherfucking November: 20,000th play. We lost the first time due to a shit Pressure event we didn’t have tools or time to beat, thanks to the engine room being on fire, and neither of us having any booze or fire gear. Second play, I took ONE DRINK and failed a faint test...and then a fire erupted in my room and I got murdered. Wife breezed through and won. This is NOT a 2p game (as designed) but fuck them. We bought it, we’ll play how we like.

Bed.

Two first-plays this morning....

My girlfriend and I played Fantasy Realms, twice in a row, because it's awesome! This game is from the creator of Betrayal at House on the Hill, and more people need to know about it. Charlie reviewed it here: playerelimination.com/2018/04/30/144/

It's only 53 cards. You draw cards off the deck or pick them up out of the discard pile, trying to build the biggest point value out of a hand of 7 cards. All of the cards have interactions that can help or hurt your points, and it can be an agonizing decision to drop one card vs. another. For example, you might have the Beastmaster, who gets a bonus of 9 points for each Beast in your hand, but some other card might penalize you for having beasts. It normally plays 3 - 6, but there is a 2 player variant that works perfectly well.

Next up was our first attempt at Room 25 Escape Room. This is Room 25, but fully cooperative and with various changes to the room layout. You now have to discover 4 puzzle rooms and 8 "ephemeral" rooms that allow you to collect clues to solve the puzzles. Once you leave an ephemeral room, it transforms into a potentially more dangerous room. Time is a huge factor since you start out with barely any turns. Every time you solve a puzzle, you get an extra turn. For most of the game, I didn't think we were going to make it, but things started going our way, and we solved all 4 puzzles AND made it to Room 25 with our entire party, with 1 full turn to spare. We both liked it as a new way to enjoy Room 25.

It's worth noting that the Escape Room expansion does include some new rooms that just go into the base game modes, so completionists might want to check it out.

Played my copy of catacombs 3rd edition. Lot of fun, but my wife still hates lose a turn mechanics, which this has. She lost in the last room, with the sorcerer at 3 health.

Finally got to play Twilight Imperium 4th Edition. I was the Nekro Virus and I managed to keep up with points despite not engaging in much combat. I got some Secret Objectives that weren't too bad and I was able to fulfill all three. I ended up tied for second place at 8 points.

I do like the changes that 4th Edition brought.
- The Agenda phase is particularly nice since it makes the political aspect happen every round.
- I wasn't sure how frequent the promissory notes would be used, but they ended up getting plenty of use, and it was nice to have some extra leverage for making deals.
- I didn't get any experience with the new tech acquisition, but it seems pretty simple.
- To be honest, I don't think I really disagreed with any of the changes made.

That being said, I still don't know if I can justify getting 4th Ed. when I already have everything for 3rd. Maybe if I can sell my 3rd Ed. set for a decent price I would be okay with dropping $120 for the new box.

Gary Sax wrote: Apropos of Eldritch, we played Arkham Horror for my wife's belated birthday Arkham. We drew Golub or whatever and it was a fun game, I've never fought him. I think it's a pretty good GOO. As always, the game delivered, with us winning on a nailbiting mythos pull and then gate seal roll. My wife fucking loves this game. I must admit I enjoy it too after all these years. My wife made some sarcastic derogatory comments about EH while we played when we all lost some health and later when she lost a turn. She considers it basically the lose a turn game.

It's been a while since I have played either Arkham Horror or Eldritch Horror, but I do recall that AH made characters "delayed" with some frequency. Isn't that a glorified "lose a turn" mechanic?

Yes, totally. She just feels like it happen more in EH. And you have fewer turns in EH because you spend a lot of time traveling across the world.

Also, just looked into the catacombs thing I posted above. Looks like they changed the stunning rules (and a number of other things) when they reprinted the 3rd edition (the one I kickstarted). So I guess they heard the complaints.

One of my most vivid Arkham Horror memories was a buddy who worked for the store we were playing in going to the location he needed something out of, drawing an event that made him miss a turn, then drawing an event and missing a turn, and repeating that for no shit four more times. After that, he said "fuck this game" and bailed to read a magazine behind the counter. I...don't think I blamed him?

Played another game of Talisman with my son, this time with the new Cataclysm board and the Sacred Pool expansion. Like Arkham Horror, I think that Talisman functions best if you pick one big and one small expansion. That way you get a good feeling for the settings of the expansions, and the deck doesn't get too watered down with non-monsters. I am sure there are all kinds of balance considerations that went into the design of all of the FFG expansions, and I am thankful for that, because that means there aren't any of them that I would really want to NOT play with. But I confess I never think about them when I pick which ones. Actually, these days my son picks which big expansion we use, and I grab one of the small ones to give the game a little extra push.

We had a really good time. I started with the Barbarian and he had the Arcane Scion, both Cataclysm characters. The Barbarian kept losing battles, and then promptly died within like ten turns. I came back as the mutant, who from a design standpoint is probably somewhat...I guess lopsided. It rolls a die all the time to see if it can get some bonus stuff, and stands a decent chance of leveling up really fast. My son played a decent game, and we made it into the Inner Region on consecutive turns. However, he got launched across the board by the Mines, and I was able to make it through the Crypt without any problems. I ended up winning while he was still trying to get back to the inner region.

Having played a lot of D&D lately, I've been thinking about how our conception of the fantasy genre has changed so much in the last 35 years since Talisman came out. It definitely is a more sword-and-sorcery kind of fantasy game, where the goal is to fight monsters and get treasure. This is of course opposed to the more epic good-versus-evil kind of thing that defines modern fantasy. I like that kind of thing, but I think part of Talisman's primal appeal is because that more old-school style is the emphasis.

I dunno, I still love it, and I love that my son loves it.

Played Samurai for the first time in forever last night. Unfortunately, "forever" was long enough for us to forget how disappointing it usually is with only 2 players. (We thought we were going to have 3, but our third backed out at the last minute.) It becomes a much more static game in 2-player, because the board is so much smaller and there are only so many advantageous positions. Once those are gone, you have the opportunity to change the board twice with the 0 and switch tiles but, again, with the board being that small, the ability to use either of those for a truly game-changing move is limited.

My girlfriend had never played, but quickly realized that establishing positions right out of the gate with the Fast tiles was the way to go. She ended up winning 2 castes to 1, when I couldn't get anything set up properly that wouldn't get knocked over by a 4 tile she had left. In the second game, I paid a bit more attention to caste placement and set up a couple dual resource spots that I could exploit with my Fast tiles (keeping 3 of my 5 opening tiles as Fast.) In the closing stages, I played a denial game around those areas, knocking out the 4th religion and military pieces so that she couldn't actually dominate in either and I had already won the commerce caste a couple turns earlier. She wasn't overly impressed. Have to try again with 3 or 4.

san il defanso wrote: I came back as the mutant, who from a design standpoint is probably somewhat...I guess lopsided. It rolls a die all the time to see if it can get some bonus stuff, and stands a decent chance of leveling up really fast.

Sounds like the 2nd Ed Chaos Warrior, who was brrrrroooooken. Just for performing basic tasks (killing monsters, etc.), you got to roll to see what bonus you could get from the Chaos gods, which was almost always good. Plus, you started out with an excellent strength already. Compare that with someone like the Orc, whose power was to not get lost in the Crags. Of the couple hundred times we played, I think someone didn't win with the Chaos Warrior once. We eventually banned him.

I think you're right about the more freewheeling, hack-and-slash nature of Talisman. I confronted that recently in reading a couple short story collections. George RR Martin has been editing and/or participating in a few over the past decade, usually to include a story about the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. They're occasionally kind of a trial to get through, as people often write even their short stories from the perspective of EPIC FANTASY(!!!), with sprawling worlds and a pace that makes it obvious that this is only one small window onto a much larger tale, rather than a story unto itself. In contrast, another one he participated in was The Book of Swords, which is explicitly part of a subgenre known as "swords and sorcery". It's adventure fiction and even when you have some detail about how the world functions, the focus still stays on the small tale being told right here. I think that's why I like games like Talisman and Runebound. They're both mainly about cruising around the world and seeing what trouble you can get into.