What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

stoic wrote: I continued the Board Game Design Merit Badge with the scouts. Last week, they finished up basic Dominoes, Card, and Dice Games (Farkle, Yahtzee, and Kismet).

I misread Kismet as Kemetand actually restarted reading to try to decide which of the basic designs it was. LOL. You know, Dominoes, Card, Dice, Dudes on a map. Just the basics.

Great game night tonight. Three players, and we started with Street Masters. We played the scenario that involves the Mayan Necromancer faction, so there are zombies all over the place. We decided to give ourselves an edge and each take an Ally. Allies are characters that can act on your turn, sort of like specialized, weaker fighters. I played as Natalia, who is kind of a support brawler. Her ally was Chan Chan, the fighting panda. We got stuck at the bottom of the board for most of the game, while my partners battled the boss at the top of the board. They got the boss down to 5 health, and they were going to die on the next turn. Luckily I had the cards in hand that allowed me to get to the top of the board, adjacent to the boss, and totally beat her ass in one move. This was our first victory.

Next was The King is Dead. This is the second time we have played, and man does this game nail the tension. It is balanced on a razor's edge, and right to the end it can be anyone's game. I ended up losing, but this game is cool as hell. Highly recommended with 3 players. I have not played it any other way, and I don't think I'd want to.

Yesterday was an Extra Life event at a nearby game store and I went to take place in a low key Terraforming Mars tournament. I'm not any kind of expert on TM, but I came in second in my game to the guy who won the tourney, so that was neat.

Played other stuff while I was there. T&E (still tops out over Y&Y but both are great), Paper Tales, Welcome To, Decrypto, and Cryptid. Let me tell you about Cryptid.

In theory, Cryptid is a game of deduction. A mysterious creature is lurking somewhere on the board. The players each have one clue pertaining to its location. They must try to figure out the other players hints in order to narrow down the location. Only one spot on the board meets all the requirements, and you'll have to do some clever deduction to spot the creature.

In practice we played this game three times and in each game someone found the creature through pretty much blind guessing within the first or second round. In our first game, the person who went second (who was utterly uninterested in the game) plunked her token down, somehow, on the exact correct spot. Figuring this was a weird fluke, we played two more times. While we didn't replicate the second-turn-win, the other games didn't take much longer. One player got a total of one turn across all three games.

Maybe we're the Master Cryptid Finders. Maybe the Stars Were Right. We verified that only one spot qualified by all the rules in one of the games. I don't know. All I know is, I wasn't bowled over by this.

CATACLYSM : So far I suck at the game, but I like it. Its VERY high level, you aren't going to be doing a lot of detailed offensives a la Third Reich et al. We played two games, resetting after my Soviets collapsed due the Japanese making a very early push to clear out the Far East . Each power players very differently. I get the frustration people can have over struggling to do stuff - that's what happened in our second game as my Russkies had to spend too many actions building the Trans Siberian so the Japanese could be dealt with. I didn't end up doing much fighting . The Axis looked unstoppable in Europe, but James made a lung thru France to Italy and even thought only took one space, the Italians collapsed and that not only ended the threat in the West, it took out the need to have him help me declare war .

We will play again and rotate sides. There is a high amount of replayability and certainly variability . It reminds me of UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER in how it accomplishes a lot considering a pretty light rules load . Particularly interesting is the idea of provocations, in that for every action there is often a reaction. When you do things, your neighbors react . Something you don't often see in games at this scale. This makes you weigh your actions a little more carefully.

Legomancer wrote: In practice we played this game three times and in each game someone found the creature through pretty much blind guessing within the first or second round..

It sounds odd but in the basic game your odds of blind guessing can’t be more than one in a couple of dozen. Depending on how much information people are giving away you can also figure out some clues with relative certainty even in the initial placement. Probably not a sustainable game plan in the long term but I can sure see it happening.

I went to a Keyforge prelaunch event yesterday and got to play three games with my deck. So far I really like it. The basic choice of which house out of three to play is so simple that even my six year old got it, but that doesn't mean it's all that simple. And while I had one match running a bit long, the pacing of the game is great. I definitely want to play more with my deck and get to know it, but I also really like that if I want to try something else, I can buy a deck for 10 bucks and start playing without deckbuilding and all that.

We - my son and I - also played Diamant/Ican Gold which was great, Attila which was forgettable, a ton of Love Letter and a game of Dungeon Roll which he loves. All in all a pretty good day of gaming.

I had the kids yesterday so in a bid to avoid yet another game of Apples to Apples (a favorite of the six year-old) I tried the DC Deckbuilding game with all three kids and myself. She sat next to me so I could shuffle for her and help her play her hands, but she just started reading in the last year so she was very interested in reading all the cards.

I let her pick Wonder Woman and for the rest of us I dealt three heroes to each of us and we chose one: I was Batman, the eldest was Aquaman and his little brother was Superman. Aquaman's power (place any purchased cards of cost 5 or lower on top of your deck instead of your discard pile) ended up being huge as he was able to leverage that special ability into some big swing turns. Batman and Superman were hamstrung by the fact that either the lineup was full of heroes/villains on their turns, or the best Equipment or Super Powers would be purchased before it came around to them. My personal favorite bit of bad luck was how I always seemed to draw Robin (he allows you to fetch an Equipment card from your discard pile) when my discard pile was empty.

Aquaman won with 56 points, Wonder Woman was second with 29 (she basically just bought as much as she could from the lineup every turn and she was happy as a clam doing so), Superman had 26 and I, Batman, came in dead last with 23. Despite how wonky the luck can be in this game it's saved by how quickly it sets up and tears down. It's kind of like the Betrayal at House on the Hill of deckbuilders where the occasional crazy, broken session is part and parcel of the experience.

At home:

Met up with a friend who I haven’t seen much of recently due to work commitments (he’s a teacher so horribly overworked during term-time and also a doting father so never free during breaks either). He popped over for the evening with a bag of games so we spent some time catching up while playing a few of them.

The elder spawn joined us for Roll for the Galaxy which he chose out of the bag as the one he most wanted to try. Spawn the younger turned her nose up at Outer Space Stuff and went to read a book instead so just the three of us.

We gave the lad a mix of Sparta and whatever the complementary tile is that gives you money if you have red dice in your citizenry, and offered a little guidance that exploring and settling were good things for him to focus on. He also had a tile in his opening draw that would allow him to settle worlds more cheaply so it looked like a shoe in for a race to fill his tableau, however as soon as he got his first production world down he decided it was more fun to try different things and went left-field into production and shipping. Both myself and my friend were going hard on a VP race with him leaning toward a mix of development and attempting to graze on my churning the handle on my engine. I had the Alien world that you can only ship from for VP and the starting tile that give bonus money for doing exactly that so was pretty much bound into that routine from the get-go. We didn’t go far before the chips ran out, and in the count-up we ended on a tie. Playing is more important than winning for us so we didn’t bother with the tie-breaker. My son liked it despite being all at sea, this particular play felt a little flat to me but was probably because I’ve always been more of a fan of going down the militaristic route than tinkering with boring little consumption engines.

I find it odd that in their desire for brevity on the player aids they actually make the game seem a lot more complicated than it is. Quite frankly, if they just used proper English on those player shields you wouldn’t even need the rulebook to play. The expansion was lurking in the box but I really don’t like what it does to the game so we let it sit there in a sulk.

Bedtime for little ones, so we moved onto two player for the rest of the night. My friend was keen to get me to play Unfair which I disliked enough on my one previous play not to be in a hurry to go back for more. He’s keen on it and plays it at home with his wife so I was happy to give it another chance because the notion of marrying a quirky theme to backstabbing gameplay is something that appeals to me. What I disliked on my first try was that it was governed by too much random chance and the kind of unappealing ‘bully’ play that passes for conflict in Euros – you know, when someone takes or breaks something and there is no defence, no comeback, no risk, it’s just a really passive approach to confrontation that is lazy and unsatisfying. The random stuff is fine if you have a way to mitigate and accept the risk but I just find this game a bit much in that you can draw up an ‘insane’ difficulty blueprint that you happen to have all the cards in hand for and bam! that’s fifty or sixty points without having to make any effort. Couple that with the random mean-kid stuff and the game ends up all over the place without any control and just becomes more Unfun than Unfair.

Anyway, we played with the Vampire and Jungle decks mixed together which was certainly less swingy than whatever I had played before, but it still had all the same problems for me and just felt really frustrating and annoying to play. Even when I got a super-magic combo into play it was almost entirely by luck rather than judgement so I couldn’t really get into any pride at the resultant stacks of cash that were coming in. Then my friend broke some stuff on one of my rides without really knowing what he was targeting or why and it put me into a loop because he had randomly taken out the most important element that I needed for my blueprint scoring and so I had to grind out the rest of the game trying to fix it rather than doing anything that would actually be enjoyable or meaningful. That might have been a fun situation if it was all done intentionally but… nah, give me pretty much anything else with direct conflict instead please.

Speaking of which we then rounded off the evening with two rounds of 51st State Master Set. He had recently picked up the new Scavenger expansion deck but had left it at home so we just went with Winter as that was what was currently mixed in. He took Texas against my Hegemony and surprised me with going hard on VP acquisition when we normally play Texas as a slower build with lots of card draws and production. That forced me to get into gear to keep up the pace and I had to invest heavily in red arrows to clip off a couple of his buildings, which then set him into a cycle of upgrades that pushed the scores even faster toward the endgame. As he was constantly threatening me with easy capability to take out my production buildings I ended up doing a lot of deals instead. When the Action card that lets you repeat three of your deals landed in my hand it was the booster that I needed to restart my engine into producing and consuming goods for VPs, upgrading over my more warlike buildings in the process so that I could push as hard as possible into first place. We had roughly the same number of buildings out so it was all about who could get ahead on the scoreboard, and my late surge was enough to take a convincing victory.

We reset, this time I took Texas against his Merchants. I went down what I would consider a more traditional route with Texas which is to use their flexibility to focus on workers, ammo and card draws, going after a mix of razing, deals and builds in the most efficient way to push that engine. As a result I started very slow and slipped quite far back whilst he pounded out a big stack of deals that provided ever more dizzying production rounds. In the meantime I was drawing cards like crazy and plotting out build chains that would allow me to exploit them with maximum efficiency. Then my engine hit critical mass and all of a sudden I was able to spam out a lot of buildings in my production row which I then used my ammo tokens to upgrade into anything I could find with scoring options that then in turn consumed all of the goods I had made along the way. It was a perfect storm and I rocketed up the scoring. Despite my just pipping him past the endgame trigger he still had a lot of capability stored up and was able to jostle with me for a while before I ran out of steam and he continued to pile on the points for a few more rounds. However, he was grinding out scoring from what he had available in his empire without expanding any further and my sprawling nation gave me the satisfaction of delivering a sucker punch to take the honours by a single point.

Barenpark and Four Elements with the kids at the weekend. I don’t quite know whether to describe Four Elements as a flicking game or a smash ‘em up so I’ll play safe and refer to it as the second best flix game after that far superior effort involving a well-known US military unit. What Four Elements does well is simple and raw gameplay; you have a boss piece and some warriors and the aim of the game is to flick them into your opponent’s pieces in order to knock their boss off the board. Added to that are some barrier pieces that cannot be moved directly and which work in unique ways dependant on which ‘element’ you are playing. Earth can literally bury herself inside her barriers and use them as offensive weapons as well as a shield, Air interlinks to create long barriers that are difficult to get past, Water has the fewest pieces but they are big and heavy and stack together into intimidating columns, then there is fire who slots together to create the kind of structures that would not look out of place on a Normandy beach.

On my first move I made a crazy fluke shot that spun and skimmed up in the air off the first piece that it hit, leaping over Earth’s defences and knocking their boss right off the board on its crash landing. After a moment of stunned silence we pretended that didn’t happen and respawned Earth. The following turn I went after Water and took her out in similar fashion after causing her stack of barriers to teeter and collapse. Which also didn’t happen after all. I was chuffed though because I am usually terrible at this game and have a habit of sending my own pieces into the void with misjudged ricochets.

51st State is one of the best large-box card games I've ever played. Every time we break it out it just makes me want to play it more. So good.

Things we played this weekend: Zimby Mojo, Don't Mess with Cthulhu, and Conan!

Zimby Mojo is just a riot. This session took a weird turn because the post-king phase was shockingly short. The cannibal king's ziggurat was an absolute clusterfuck when he went down, and it immediately got worse as everyone flooded in. One guy spawned a zombie that tore through loads of zimbies, my wife threw vines everywhere so the crown carrier couldn't leave, and I basically sat there and watched the 3 of them go at it. When they exhausted each other I managed to run two zimbies in, eat one to guarantee a fight, kill the crown carrier, and sprint all the way back home in the same turn. It was mildly anticlimactic but pretty damn funny. Gonna review this one.

Don't Mess With Cthulhu is my favorite social deduction game. It's always great. Moving on.

CONAN! We played half a game last week to learn the rules and did an actual scenario this time. It's honestly kind of wonky. I love the energy system and how it plays with sunk cost with the rerolls/defense rolls, but I dunno about the rest of it. At its best both sides feel ridiculously strong and get to roll buckets of dice at each other while yelling. At its worst you're wrestling with stupid rules like "oh the doors take an extra movement point because we're not smashing through them in this scenario I guess" or "ehhh I think you have line of sight there, the board kind of sucks". Need to play more.

Conan had potential but the scenarios are all over the place and the whole affair was pretty much ruined by it being on Kickstarter. It also suffered from the heroes being Conan and a whole bunch of Not Conan.

I don't have confidence that the Batman version will be any better.

We kind of expected it to be a mess, but the wife and I both enjoy the Hyborian setting and it was weirdly cheap so we figured why not try it. Gonna give a few more scenarios a shot before deciding whether we keep it or not. Pretty glad we waited as long as we did because I'd be a lot less forgiving of the weird shit and awful rulebook if I spent some stupid amount of money on the KS.

It's still weird to me that the designer's other major game is Timeline.

I really love Conan. We've played 6 or 7 times and it's wonderful every play. That energy system and the contrasting Overlord book of Skelos thing are fantastic. The minis are great, the pacing is good, and the visual presentation of the game is excellent.

The LOS difficulties are definitely the biggest pain point.

I had high hopes for it. I was in on the KS. But when we played that scenario in which Conan starts out in prison and literally can't do anything until he is rescued.... what a horrible idea. As the Overlord, I stopped the heroes from rescuing him, so that player just sat there, doing nothing. It sucked. I sold it after that.

I unexpectedly played Power Grid after many, many years of playing it like once or twice and never thinking much about it and I have to admit, I'm changing my tune quite a bit.

Here's the thing. All the complaints are true. This is very much a game of manipulating turn order and everything else is either secondary or irrelevant. You can dissmiss the game based on these grounds and you wouldn't be wrong. The question is: Is the turn order a flaw or actually the interesting part of the design?

Something that caught my eye is that the game was much simpler than I remembered. The actual buying of power plants and resources is much smaller and the building is pretty straightfoward. It's not really like Steam, which I always compared it to. In other words, there's not a big game covered by a turn-order mechanism, the turn-order is the game.

And taken like that, it's an interesting game. There's a lot of tension in buying Power Plants because you don't want to have the highest one and go first in the turn order, but there's also a certain need to buy certain tiles or to not end up in a crowded market. These are all cool, interesting things. The luck of the market is a bit of an annoyance, but I can live with it.

I think I should play it again and try to see it from this perspective.

Then we played Alien Frontiers. The game took way too long but, ultimately, it's not interesting. I'm also increasingly convinced that the popularity of area control is owed in a great part by designers making games that are artificially close.

I ran some demos of Keyforge this weekend at the FFG world championships.

My opinion of it has grown since GenCon. There is some neat techniques available to the decks that make it interesting. Namely the three factions of each deck and how they swing in and out of importance.

The victory conditions are reminiscent of Knizia's scarab/Minotaur lords games from an aeon ago.

I have no idea how this would be a good competitive game, as a metal would need to develop to determine that. But as a casual game, almost filleresque, it seems to be a quite solid product.

I got steam rolled in one game by a very hyper intelligent chap who played hard and fast and expected the same from me. The entire game took 10mins, which is abnormal. He was playing on a vastly higher level than me, and I imagine this guy's intelligence is the sort that wipes their booty with guys like me before breakfast. No envy, just staggering awe.