What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Going back to Magic Realm. There's a guy name of Jay Richardson did some excellent ASLSK tutorials on pdf.

This guy has done a massive tutorial pack on MR. Tons of examples of play split into 16 chapters for each of the characters and explains in detail how to play each character with graphic examples.

If that weren't enough he has also written a massive quest pack for MR to give more focus on a goal in MR. Both of these are really professional and the MR tutorial is excellent. You can find both on BGG.

How do people have this much time and ability to concentrate on producing this kind of material?

ThirstyMan wrote:
How do people have this much time and ability to concentrate on producing this kind of material?

Can't speak for them but my job the last few years involves running a robot. When it is going well, I pretty much stand and watch it go..for 12 hour shifts. Whatever my current obsession is usually benefits. I've written pinball fx2 faqs, taught myself coin magic via videos, written reviews, etc.. 12 hours a day is a long time to fill with anything.

Recent exposure to Arkham Horror LCG and Talisman led to my wife stating that she kind of liked questing games. So I had been thinking of games we could play that would fit in with this trend.

Today we played Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and she dug it and we played twice. We played the intro adventure from the initial release "Dangers of the Wild Coast" or some such. She played as the monk and I played as the cleric.

In the first scenario we just barely managed to defeat the bandit leader before running out of time. That was a lot of fun. The second scenario, she ran into a mercenary she just couldn't beat. I, for my part, had a bad string of luck by not pulling any of my divine cards and so could not heal her and get more cards back into her draw pile. She just barely managed to defeat him on her third try but only had just enough cards so that any damage at all would end up in death.

We walked the tight rope for a turn or two but Pillbug the poisoning psychopath beat her up when she ran into him and that was the end of that.

We called it quits but she wants to give it another go.

I know that this game was initially loved and then got all kinds of shade thrown at it. Repetitive, long set up and tear down, alpha dog etc. I played it mostly solo and on "iron man mode" meaning that if I got a character killed they were out for good. And I enjoyed it. Two player moved really fast once she got the rules down.

It was good to blow the dust off this game and give it a whirl.

I think if my wife had had any interest in the Pathfinder ACG, I would have played a lot more. My problems with it, its length and repetition, would have been much more tolerable in that case.

I still think Pathfinder is pretty good too, I think I sent my copy of the first set to san? It's really the repetition that is its biggest problem. It also has a lot of competition in the co-op space.

We played a game of Fief for my buddy's birthday on Saturday (he requests this every year), and in hilarious fashion, he was eliminated in turn 2. I've never even seen someone eliminated before. Technically, he could have placed a new lord on the map, but he opted to bow out instead. Appropriately, on the next turn the bishopric suffered from heavy rain and famine as he reached beyond the grave for a semblance of revenge.

We played Seal Team Flix later and he loved it. It also just happened to be the best performance I've seen on the first mission. The only fire we took was a single reaction shot which missed my SEAL.

Mission two was the opposite. We were slaughtered in the lobby and could never really push out. Saw some awesome sniping from a newbie though.

Jade Sparrow significantly ups the difficulty. That lobby is brutal. The mission itself isn't bad unless the Mastermind ends up in a remote location. Prism Lens is a good introductory mission.

I played a lot of games of late. Had a buddy over and we played for 5 solid hours:

Elder Sign
Red November
Splendor
Quadropolis
Pandemic Cure
OctoDice

The only newish one is Quadropolis. I really like it despite it being kind of a fiddly ass game.

Gary Sax wrote: I still think Pathfinder is pretty good too, I think I sent my copy of the first set to san? It's really the repetition that is its biggest problem. It also has a lot of competition in the co-op space.

Yeah, you sent it to me. It didn't survive the move-to-the-Philippines purge. I ended up giving it to a bunch of college students who I knew would have more time to dig into it. They were pretty excited about it.

SuperflyTNT wrote: I played a lot of games of late. Had a buddy over and we played for 5 solid hours:

Elder Sign
Red November
Splendor
Quadropolis
Pandemic Cure
OctoDice

The only newish one is Quadropolis. I really like it despite it being kind of a fiddly ass game.

Quadropolis~Basic or advanced rules? Picked it up super cheap on a clearance. We've played it about 6 times, always at least one new player, so always the basic rules.

Basic. I’ve only played twice or thrice and always with the same 2 people who own it.

friend of mine had his schedule change, with a Tuesday-Friday schedule. Hey, I work Tuesday-Friday. Kids don't have school yet. Gameday all afternoon-evening sunday! Also, perfect chance for a 16-hour hickory smoked pork butt. mmmm....butt

we played some filler games with the kids (Ice Cool, Rhino Hero). I made fun of his wife for beating up on little kids.

he wanted to play some 4 player X-Wing (after being introduced a couple weeks ago at the gamestore). built some fairly basic 150pt lists. My wife and I did horribly and got wiped 150-0. We played imperials, and she rolled 16 dice (over a couple attacks) and rolled 3 focus symbols out of those dice. Of course, she had no focus tokens. Still X-Wing and Y-Wings vs Interceptors and Fighters is always good.

1775 - Guys were the British/Loyalists, with the Girls the Patriots. they miscalculated their final turn and ended up tying the game in turn 5, making us all South Canadians.

Argent! It has sat dormant for a while...a year? I dunno, but this is the first game I've had since the upgrade kit. The little rings are a million times better than the headstones/stand thing the first edition had.
We played with the beginners setup, since it had been so long since we played. This was a little bit of a mistake. I had grabbed the 'Summer Break' expansion with the kickstarter, so we played that scenario, which slows down the information overload a bit. This was also probably a mistake.

I say mistake, because really, at its heart, Argent is fairly a simple game...with tons of stuff. so by the 2nd round, everyone was back into it....and wanted to do more each turn. Summer Break you start with only 2 mages (vs 5 normally) and has you draft more mages over the first couple rounds. Which would be great for a learning game I think. But between the limited # of mages and the 'simpler' board, the choices for mage placement were kinda....boring? Either there was less conflict at the beginning, or the choices weren't really interesting at the end.

It is still Argent and still has crazy shit going on with the spells (we had legendary spells come out!) but overall it felt like the power level of things was slightly lower than I remember it being at the end. It might have just been the combo of voters/spells didn't work right, so people weren't necessarily upgrading some of the more chaotic spells. I won with 4 votes, breaking the Tie by being higher by 1 influence.

Then Codenames at midnight. and since we're all usually in bed by 9/10, means we kept throwing clues out that matched the wrong set, or other peoples cards. That moment when you throw a clue out, then realize it easily ties into the Assasin card. all you can do is stare at the floor to keep from giving anything away while your partner goes for the extra guess and your team loses. Girls wiped the floor with us, 4-1. Codenames base > Codenames Disney.

A good day.

So what's the consensus on 1775? I have it, and enjoy its swingy nature, but I know that doesn't settle well with some people.

I'm trying to decide if I should get 1754 instead.

lj1983 wrote: I say mistake, because really, at its heart, Argent is fairly a simple game...with tons of stuff. so by the 2nd round, everyone was back into it....and wanted to do more each turn. Summer Break you start with only 2 mages (vs 5 normally) and has you draft more mages over the first couple rounds. Which would be great for a learning game I think. But between the limited # of mages and the 'simpler' board, the choices for mage placement were kinda....boring? Either there was less conflict at the beginning, or the choices weren't really interesting at the end.

It is still Argent and still has crazy shit going on with the spells (we had legendary spells come out!) but overall it felt like the power level of things was slightly lower than I remember it being at the end. It might have just been the combo of voters/spells didn't work right, so people weren't necessarily upgrading some of the more chaotic spells. I won with 4 votes, breaking the Tie by being higher by 1 influence.

God I love this game.

Yeah, I could see this being a drag. I'll have to rethink my recommendation about summer break based on what you're saying here... I get why people say this game is complicated, etc but the complication isn't mechanical. It's the card sprawl. Which, for my gaming tastes, is what makes the game a blast (best worker placement!) but also why others hate it.

In my experience, spell power level is always going to be determined by how much mana is on the board imho. Spells will almost always come out in solid numbers no matter what, there are enough research mechanics that don't depend on the board to ensure that. But actually being able to power those 3-4 mana spells (and therefore incentivize their research) *depends* on having some of the higher mana tiles out on the board. I have been in some serious 2-player wizard duels but also some 2-player item contests without even enough mana on the board to power much more than wizard starting spells.

Also, crucial, crucial rules change in the new edition. Hope you used it/caught it: tiebreaker *starts* with whomever has marks on a wizard and *then* moves to influence. This is a good change.

oh yeah, used the marks as tiebreakers for individual voters. the only time IP came as tiebreaker was for overall # of voters, we had a 4-4 Tie. I also use, I think it was your recommendation, to just mix in the 'most Influence' voter in to the pile. Influence is still strong, especially since it drives merit badges, but I like making it more on par with everything else.

It felt like had plenty of Mana out, we were pushing back and forth for the 'most mana' voter. I think we ended up with 25/24 mana each at the end.

It may have just been the mix of spells that came out. The green legendary spell(Ice Comet) was used, and pretty effective. I had the orange (Golem-something). That one is powerful, but not really flashy...just letting you place a mage after the bell tower cards are gone. We also played 1 rule wrong, that would have probably changed things up quite a bit. We simply refreshed vault/spells cards as they were purchased. we didn't wipe and draw new cards at the beginning of the round. This would have brought more spell options in, and probably have some that were alittle more applicable. That's pretty big, and would account for it.

I think summer break + beginner setup is fine for a learning game. We have all played several times, and I think the combo of all three (SB, beginner, +experience players) was the problem. Still a good session, its just that around round 5, we commented that it felt like there was a lack of good choices on the board.


1775: I've only played twice. Not any of the others in the series. and both times, the last play felt really gamey. It's probably just us, and keeping fairly large groups clustered around the coast, but it felt like there weren't enough troops to hold all the western areas of the colonies with any strength. So unless you were good about locking up the north or south, to give you a 'front lines' feel, then it was fairly easy for the last player to play a truce card and drop just enough troops around to break control and play for the win on that last turn. Probably if we play again there will be more emphasis on keeping all those areas occupied with more troops.