What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I played Dice Stars last night. If you like Ganz Schön Clever, you might like it. It’s cheap, comes with a quarter million pads, and 13 dice. The rules are clear/ish and will take a sec to absorb, maybe, but once you ‘get it’ it’s a very clever Knizia.

So I played High Frontier and I liked it a lot, despite being an unshamed optimization excercise and multiplayer solitaire.

It is just fun to put the work and send your rockets around. There are enough limitations (money, time, weight, cards you have) to make things interesting but the game is very open otherwise and it's fun in a very work-for-it-way. Sure, you are counting and crunching more than deciding, but I did not think about that while I was playing, I just thought it was fun and didn't raise my eyes from the table in the three or four hours we took to play the game.

The huge mapboard of the 3rd edition actually helps. It gives a real sense of distance and weight, I like that you have to get up, look at the other side of the map and follow the lines, it feels right.

It was also much eaier than I expected, it's actually a fairly simple game with little chrome. The whole gist of it is that it works like a typical "roll and move" game with many, many different paths and no actual rolling: As long as you can count, you know how much money you need to get anywhere.

I would like to play this solo, interestingly enough.


I also played a couple games of Food Chain Magnate and lost both because I'm surprisingly terrible at it. Here's the thing, the reason why I'm pretty good at most games is my strong game sense. I tend to have a very clear idea of how the game works, how it's won and how players work towards that goal. I can easily tell who is winning or losing or when the game will end, at a glance, which are all great things to know.

But game sense only gives you a very general idea of how to win and Food Chain Magnate requires a very focused strategy. It punishes mistakes very harshly and each action has a large impact on the game, so you cannot just play "well" in order to do well, you need to focus and think about each role very carefully.

SuperflyTNT wrote: I played Dice Stars last night. If you like Ganz Schön Clever, you might like it. It’s cheap, comes with a quarter million pads, and 13 dice. The rules are clear/ish and will take a sec to absorb, maybe, but once you ‘get it’ it’s a very clever Knizia.

Not Knizia. That's Criss Cross you're thinking of. Dice Stars is Bruno Cathala, I believe.

I hit a hole in one in Mars Open last night and yelled loud enough to scare my dog.

I also played a game of Western Legends, Kolossal's first release. This is an open world adventure game in the vein of Merchants and Marauders and Xia. It runs close to Red Dead Redemption the board game.

I'm a sucker for a good western and this is the best western game we've seen, by far. It offers everything I wanted out of Spurs, but does so with more entertainment and more variety.

Much of the game is do what you want. You can prospect for gold, rob banks, rustle or drive cattle, play poker, shop for items, and take out bandits. The game can be pretty short too compared to its peers with a Spartacus like victory point limit that the group decides upon.

The design work here is pretty smart. Nearly everything in the game has an immediate and short reward cycle. Turns feel great because you continually improve. Much of the action is resolved through playing "Poker" cards from your hand. High card wins and weapons tend to lower your opponent's card.

This means you can have a reasonable prediction going into a fight what will occur, but there's still a bit of drama. These poker cards are awarded frequently when you fail at tasks and they also are dual-use, often including actions or bonuses on them. The highest values tend to have the best action, so you're stuck with choices like "Do I save this King for a gunfight, or do I play it for the +3 actions right now?"

Perhaps the best aspect of the game is that it seems to want a higher player count. It works with less, of course, but the game doesn't shy away from player interaction. If you start a game of poker at the saloon, all nearby players can join. If a player is doing a little too well repeatedly mining for gold, you can attack them and steal their nuggets/cash. If a player has gone off to a life of crime and has a high wanted value, you can go the law route and arrest them.

One of the reason the confrontation works is because the game isn't harsh on losing. Damage merely makes your hand size smaller (which is a significant penalty at times), but you can't die. I'm torn on this as a western game without death seems wrong. Very wrong even. But it does lead to a playability and a state of conflict where players are willing to engage much more frequently than in M&M or Xia. I think I'm ultimately ok with eating that cost due to the increased amount of interaction.

It definitely feels more of a hybrid Euro/AT game than the outright loseness of Xia.

Anyway, pretty excellent game that allows you to forge your own story although you play one of the legends of the old west, such as Calamity Jane or Billy the Kid.

Western Legends sounds neat. Two questions... are there dice, and is poker really playing a game of poker, or is it abstracted?

Last night I started another solo game of Street Masters. I really like the way the turns flow in this game. I'm still very new to it though. I ran into a weird situation with my current scenario setup that has the boss wanting to attack my fighter on his turn, but the stage wants him to track down objectives. So he gets pushed and pulled around in weird ways.

Also, he is supposed to move towards the nearest inactive objective, but my fighter was actually standing on it, so I chose to have the boss move towards another one. The rule book does say that if there is ever a question, do what you think is in the best interest of the villain. That rule book.... it's wordy as hell. I'm not saying I'm not guilty of that too. But man.

The best part of my very brief time with Street Masters is that it has me much more excited about Brook City.

Yeah on a couple of the maps you can have some gamey stuff like that happen where a boss yo-yos. It's not super common though and a small niggle. I need to get back to that game as I still haven't beaten the majority of the bosses.

The only dice in Western Legends are for prospecting. One side is a failure/nothing, three are find a gold nugget, one is gain $10, and one is gain $10 and roll again. So not very punishing.

Combat is all just pick a card from your hand and high card wins, no dice.

Poker is close to legit. You create a three card flop from the deck of poker cards, then each player tries to make the best hand possible with two cards from their existing poker cards. Someone plays for the dealer if no one else is involved.

These are simple mechanisms like you'd see in other games, but the fact that the cards you're playing for the game of poker are cards you'd otherwise save for a gunfight or another action (or their benefit on the card) means your decision space is pretty interesting.

Further nuance is that if the player intiaites poker on their turn and wins, they gain a Legendary Point (VP). So you're incentivized to try and get in on the game if possible to take the pot, as well as keep the player from earning a VP.

stormseeker75 wrote:

SuperflyTNT wrote: I played Dice Stars last night. If you like Ganz Schön Clever, you might like it. It’s cheap, comes with a quarter million pads, and 13 dice. The rules are clear/ish and will take a sec to absorb, maybe, but once you ‘get it’ it’s a very clever Knizia.

Not Knizia. That's Criss Cross you're thinking of. Dice Stars is Bruno Cathala, I believe.

I know who made it, but I was saying that it feels Kniziac...Knizialike....Knizi?

Knizian? San Deigons?

I played the Wizard of Oz Unlock! last night. They really upped their game for the third "season". Art is great, new "additional materials" are great. It's all bad ass.

Sunday saw me finally have just enough players (4) to commit to going right through Risk Legacy, only took me six years to find three more players, so we played the first three games of it - everyone won one except me, not looking good, my Risk skills were very poor. But it is set up for a very interesting next twelve games.
We followed that up with the first two missions in Space Crusade, only taken me fifteen years to get this to the table with a full compliment. We got one rule wrong, secondary mission only read out when the event card for it comes out (incredibly this is not mentioned in the rules) and we think also the rule where the maine player doesn't get the mission points if his squad is wiped out (still not sure if they get the kill points though).
The second rule question came up in the second mission when the Fists player didn't like that the other two commanders had come up to try and finish off the Dreadnaught after he had done all the damage so he did his best to deliberately place his two plasma weapons marines ina position that he also hit my commander (he couldn't get the Blood Angels commander) - and he succeeded in killing my commander. After a quick check in the BGG forums to see if directly targeting other marines was forbidden (not it seems) my remaining four Ultramaines went on an honour quest and chased the Fists squad down and killed the commander and two other marines, their vengeance quenched they went back to their docking board leaving the Alien player to finish off the one remaining marine of both the Fists and the Angels. I quite enjoyed that mission.

In SC if your commander dies you lose all badges and promotions.

Played some top secret SEAL Team Flix last night, and even had time left over to get my ass beat in Street Masters. I'm interested to see how Street Masters fares with more than one fighter / player.

On Tuesday we played The Big Score. It's a heist game broken in two halves. The first half you're drafting and passing cards a la 7 Wonders and then using them to try and complete jobs splayed out in the middle. You get rewards for succeeded and you can do them alone or try and send folks on jobs so that you can leech some rewards without doing all the heavy lifting. These are done blindly and you're penalized for failing a job so you have to be careful and read your opponents some. The second half is a blind token grab from a big overproduced (in a good way) cardboard vault where you're trying to get money and get out before the fifth police token is drawn (that bit feels very much like Ra, there's even a police track to put the pulled tokens on.)

It was fun. The two halves felt a bit disjointed but the theme is cool and the production values are solid. Van Ryder Games have come a loooooooong way since the early days.


Taught two folks Lords of Hellas at lunch yesterday (one was my brother who had received an improper rules learnin' session at Dice Tower Con.) We did not finish as there was a lot of set up time but more importantly a lot of teaching. We did get to play through all the systems--and see a successful hunt, an unsuccessful hunt, lots of praying and stat buffin' ("Dear god, please give me bigger biceps, thank you"), a couple of blessing drafts, some temple building, a smidgen of combat.

What a damned fine game this one is. Takes some of the best-in-class mechanisms from other games but also does some cool and unique things I haven't seen often in other games. It's also a rare game that's unafraid to have the victory conditions not be "the most VP" but rather "achieve one of these four victory conditions, how you do that is up to you, but there is no second place."


Also played Megaland the night before last with one of my daughters. It's Incan Gold-style press your luck with video game trappings and a Machi Koro-esque card market (with a unique set collecting element for buying more hearts and buildings that give you powers.) It's theme is video game characters running levels and collecting these treasures they use to get buildings with powers that will in turn give them coins.

It's cute, and it's actually fun. And damn, that insert, man. This is a $25 game found in a mass market store, but it includes an insert for individual stacks of cards, a plastic labeled Game Trayz for organizing all the games tokens, and even some foam that you are immediately told not to throw away as you lay it over the stacks of cards to keep them from spilling all over if you tilt the box.

Plus, in true video game fashion, there's an easter egg if you lift the whole insert up, a bonus pack of cards for "Above and Below".

Turek wrote: In SC if your commander dies you lose all badges and promotions.

Yep, we got that right, but afterwards I wondered (after reading the semi vague rules - it is a 1990 kids game) if a Marine player gets their mission points if their whole squad was wiped out. I ended up starting a thread on BGG to discuss it and by the end I had done a 180 and decided that points were earned at the time and not lost. It doesn't mean anything for that Marine player since they lose all rank and badges at the end but it does mean the Alien player doesn't get them as a mission uncompleted.

Yes, points are scored but posthumously. And in next mission you have new sergeant.