What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Michael Barnes wrote: I don’t guess I’m breaking embargo by stating that Blackstone Fortress is SHIT HOT. Possibly better than Silver Tower. Probably better than Silver Tower.

.

JUST PUT THE GLASSES ON

Arkham Horror 3rd edition is a high quality game that's the best evolution of the Arkham Files systems to date. Still, it suffers from the fact that all of these games are so inbred now they lack strong identity.

I've played each scenario at this point and turning over my review. I like it quite a bit but I think I'm good with Mansions of Madness as my only FFG Lovecraft game.

We broke Gorechosen out last night after a year or so away from it. Totally awesome. I shredded with the two axe dude. At one point, I played crippling blow which is a 3 dice attack. Each 6 you roll is an extra critical wound beyond what would normally be caused, and they can't be dodged.

I attack my brother who was doing well as the flail guy. I roll 3 sixes. Holy shit. He ended up taking 4 critical wounds from the attack.

Another player (the dude with a counterattack and spiked guantlet) was the healthiest and I shifted focus to him. I got him in a nasty backstab and decapitated him. He sought revenge the entire time but couldn't come up with it. Tons of drama and carnage.

A couple of weeks ago one of the guys at Tuesday Knight Games (Two Rooms and a Boom/World Championship Russian Roulette) sent me their latest release, unsolicited. It's a design from Loter and has the wonderful title of That's Not Lemonade.

The idea is that everyone is running a lemonade stand and some punk kid comes and starts pissing in the lemonade.

Yeah, high brow stuff. None of that matters.

This is a dead simple push your luck game with some emergent cleverness. You basically take a hit and receive a card on your turn or bow out for the round. You're hoping for lemon cards as a "That's Not Lemonade" card causes you to instantly bust.

All of your cards are hidden from the other players except for the bust card, which is revealed when it happens and causes you to exit the round.

There are 6 single lemon cards and 2 double lemons cards, accompanied by 4 ice cubes (no points, neutral) and 4 That's not Lemonade cards.

The round ends when everyone has passed or one player remains. What's fantastic is that it narrows down to a couple of individuals and you need to decide whether to bow out and hope you have the most lemons, or stay in and push it. The other player hanging around weighs on you, and there's a nice instigated tension.

You play until someone wins 3 rounds, and the winner of each round removes a single lemon card from the deck and keeps it as a score marker. This is also interesting because the odds change game to game and the tension rises.

We were completely shocked. This won't dislodge Can't Stop or Incan Gold, but it's much quicker and easier. It's actually quite superb as a 10 minute game. I'm still kind of in awe and we played it twice back to back as it was so enjoyable.

We're almost done with Discover: Lands Unknown. I have one cooperative scenario left and then the final head to head thing that's in every box. We're digging this one. It's certainly not mind blowing but it's still smooth and the story in my box is relatively interesting. Oh, and I found a rocket launcher buried in the snow in the last game. I used it to kill a goat and another human being.

Lastly, we played Chronicles of Crime which is a new VR-based half-board game hybrid thing. It's a story telling game like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective but you scan different cards and locations with your phone to question people. Basically the phone works as the paragraph content, allowing them to endlessly expand with new cases and such.

There is a cool crime scene investigation mechanism where you use the VR set to look around a crime scene for evidence. This was the best part in the game.

Not a top-shelf experience but it was enjoyable and offered a couple of interesting twists to shake up the formula.

Oh, and we've been playing more KeyForge too. My deck which is pretty damn strong is still undefeated (4-0), with a newbie beating me last night with it.

charlest wrote: A couple of weeks ago one of the guys at Tuesday Knight Games (Two Rooms and a Boom/World Championship Russian Roulette) sent me their latest release, unsolicited. It's a design from Loter and has the wonderful title of That's Not Lemonade.

The idea is that everyone is running a lemonade stand and some punk kid comes and starts pissing in the lemonade.

Yeah, high brow stuff. None of that matters.

This is a dead simple push your luck game with some emergent cleverness. You basically take a hit and receive a card on your turn or bow out for the round. You're hoping for lemon cards as a "That's Not Lemonade" card causes you to instantly bust.

All of your cards are hidden from the other players except for the bust card, which is revealed when it happens and causes you to exit the round.

There are 6 single lemon cards and 2 double lemons cards, accompanied by 4 ice cubes (no points, neutral) and 4 That's not Lemonade cards.

The round ends when everyone has passed or one player remains. What's fantastic is that it narrows down to a couple of individuals and you need to decide whether to bow out and hope you have the most lemons, or stay in and push it. The other player hanging around weighs on you, and there's a nice instigated tension.

You play until someone wins 3 rounds, and the winner of each round removes a single lemon card from the deck and keeps it as a score marker. This is also interesting because the odds change game to game and the tension rises.

We were completely shocked. This won't dislodge Can't Stop or Incan Gold, but it's much quicker and easier. It's actually quite superb as a 10 minute game. I'm still kind of in awe and we played it twice back to back as it was so enjoyable.

Sounds almost exactly like the original Diamant with a new theme.

Sagrilarus wrote:

charlest wrote: A couple of weeks ago one of the guys at Tuesday Knight Games (Two Rooms and a Boom/World Championship Russian Roulette) sent me their latest release, unsolicited. It's a design from Loter and has the wonderful title of That's Not Lemonade.

The idea is that everyone is running a lemonade stand and some punk kid comes and starts pissing in the lemonade.

Yeah, high brow stuff. None of that matters.

This is a dead simple push your luck game with some emergent cleverness. You basically take a hit and receive a card on your turn or bow out for the round. You're hoping for lemon cards as a "That's Not Lemonade" card causes you to instantly bust.

All of your cards are hidden from the other players except for the bust card, which is revealed when it happens and causes you to exit the round.

There are 6 single lemon cards and 2 double lemons cards, accompanied by 4 ice cubes (no points, neutral) and 4 That's not Lemonade cards.

The round ends when everyone has passed or one player remains. What's fantastic is that it narrows down to a couple of individuals and you need to decide whether to bow out and hope you have the most lemons, or stay in and push it. The other player hanging around weighs on you, and there's a nice instigated tension.

You play until someone wins 3 rounds, and the winner of each round removes a single lemon card from the deck and keeps it as a score marker. This is also interesting because the odds change game to game and the tension rises.

We were completely shocked. This won't dislodge Can't Stop or Incan Gold, but it's much quicker and easier. It's actually quite superb as a 10 minute game. I'm still kind of in awe and we played it twice back to back as it was so enjoyable.

Sounds almost exactly like the original Diamant with a new theme.

Are those rules different than Incan Gold? There are similarities, but this feels a little simpler and the odds fluctuate a bit differently as you're not just trying to avoid a pair. I would say Incan Gold is a better game and a classic for a reason, but there's an interesting design space here that we found worthwhile.

Tried out Dungeon Degenerates last night (thanks Josh Look!), and found it pretty fun. I like how smoothly it plays once you get into it (and get past the rulebook, which makes it seem way more complicated than it is), I like that it's coop since the other adventure games I have aren't, and obviously I love the art and setting. The gameplay was pretty standard pull cards, roll dice, see what happens stuff, but well implemented and with a couple neat twists. I'm happy to have it, and it will be our go to fantasy adventure game now I think (if only because it was radically shorter than our other options), but it didn't really blow my socks off beyond how nice it looks and the vibe I guess. Looking forward to trying out a campaign, and trying to resist spending way too much money on the expansions.

Had a fantastic gaming day today. Lots of fun, laughs and interesting gameplay.

First I played one of these "roll and write" games called Noch Mal! (Lit: Again!). Not much to say about this one other than I played very poorly.

Then people arrived and we started playing Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. The table was 4 player and it went like this:

Giovanni Zombies deck (Big fan of the game)->Tremere Auspex deck (Me, lots of blocking)->Good cards Malkavian (Not as focused on bleed as usual)->Brujah combat deck (Newbie).

It was a truly great game. Both the big fan of the game and me were a bit worried about the game not clicking only to see the Brujah player chain one of Giovanni's Vampires into torpor in a complex combo on like, the second turn. Huge props to the guy, it's not easy to do that

My big worry in the game was keeping Giovanni in check, but it was difficult to strike a balance. The big issue is that they are very binary, they can demolish you with a few zombies but are very weak when pushed. I wanted to leave them on a point where they would not be a big threat to me but also able to withstand attacks and I think I ended up pushing them too hard. By the time I started bleeding Malkavian he could kill and kill Brujah and my small mostly 1-damage bleeds were a touch too slow to close the game out. We called the game after both Brujah and Giovanni went down, as the ranking would end up the same either way.

Something I realized in this play is that the game is actually quite simple, with only combat being a touch complex. You can play 1 card and then each your vampires can do one action: Play a minion card, bleed (attack your opponent) or regain health. Alternatively, you can leave them untapped and try to block other vampire's actions. I keep thinking about that line of games not being "Gamer's first CCG" but I don't think it would be a fair description here.

I'm pretty sure I want to get some cards to play casually sometime.

The next time was a very odd Martin Wallace game: Hit Z Road. It's an auction game where four "paths" open and you bid weapon, gas and adrenaline tokens to determine who chooses which path to take first. The funny thing is, we played it wrong and it led to a far more fun, if obviously broken experience.

Normally you try to survive and go through paths that get you victory points. You can use adrenaline tokens to prevent deaths, weapons to kill zombies and gas to skip an ecounter. Except we didn't know we could use gas to do that, so we went through the game fighting through every single encounter.

This makes the game beyond brutal! It's a death spiral where auctions go up, you have to fight hordes of zombies and half of the players will inevitably die. And this made it a ton of fun because it raised the stakes to player elimination and each die roll was much more important. I'm a bit sad we played wrong and the game can't really work this way because we'll never have this experience again.

The lst game of the night was The Downfall of Pompeii. I'm a bit sensitive lately and playing a game about a tragedy made me a bit uneasy, though it's fun in a macabre way. The game itself is ok. The main knock against it is that it's one of those early 2000s titles that were never too great on their time and now sit below the line of what you would consider playing. It is very second-rate, in a sense.

--

I've also been playing and thinking a bit of Magic, partly because I've been thinking quite a bit about Garfield's games and partly because I've been listening to the fantastic "Drive to work" podcast by Magic Head designer Mark Rosewater.

I used to consider this one of the best games ever made and I've defended it here and there and so on. But I'm increasingly uneasy with it because the amazing artistry of the game is brought down by shallow gameplay and very limited choices.

For example, I have a very old version of "The Rock" that uses Recurring Nightmare. And it's a very interesting card and very fun and really makes you think "wow!". But oftentimes you just combo it with something, ask if your opponent has a disechant and win if he doesn't. Magic as a strategy game stops when the artistry happens.

Part of this is the "Dominion problem" of actions. You have a set amount of mana. You look at your hand and see 1 or 2 cards you can play. You either play one or the other. You can't do more, you can't draw more cards or make cardless actions. And the more you play the less difficult it is to know when to play a given card.

I actually did something recently: I checked the actual win ratios in Magic. And, well, they are very low. A ratio of 70% victories is considered great and very high-level, which means you are dropping slighty less than a game for every three you play. There is a lot of luck in this game and it's the uninteresting kind of luck where you either have it or you don't have it.

To give an example. There's a deck that looks amazing and that I would love to play called Turboland. It's about playing a lot of lands. The concept is amazing and the cards and fun. But there's a card that says "Creatures deal no combat damage this turn" and you can get it back every single turn by sacrificing a land. So the fun of the deck is also paired with "lol you autolose for relying on combat to win".

Prices are also the elephant in the room. I used to excuse them by saying that the game is great regardless of how expensive it is, but that's just not how it bears in practice. For me and 99,99% of people, the price of Magic has a large negative effect in the play experience. It is a huge problem, no matter how much you play or how much you like playing the same deck over and over again.

Alas, the four player Theseus did not materialize. Instead, we played a game of Photosynthesis and one of Modern Art. I still don't like Photosynthesis. I don't think it's ever going to sit well with me. I like simple games. I dislike simplistic ones. I like Go. I don't like Photosynthesis which strikes me as simply too static to be enjoyable. (It is about planting trees, after all.)

OTOH, I love Modern Art. It's social and quick and has multiple strategies and engages the whole table on every turn. It's just a great game.

Played my first couple games of Conspiracy tonight, which is a bluffing game originally from 1973.

A brief rundown. There's a symmetrical board, 8 spies start around the outer perimeter, and each player has a base on the outer perimeter. There's a top secret macguffin in the middle of the board. If you move the macguffin into your base you win. On your turn you can do one of three things. 1) move any spy one space 2) secretly pay off one spy any amount (you start with $10k and a bank book to write down your payoffs in), or 3) if multiple spies are in the same space you can have a spy assassinate another spy. When spies are moved or assassinations are attempted the other players can choose to challenge if they want, at which point the challenger counts up in increments of 100 until they either name a number that is higher than the amount that the challengee has paid the spy in question or until they reach the amount that they have paid the spy in question. If the challenger has paid the spy more they cancel the move or assassination, if the challengee had paid the spy more the move goes through and the challenger loses their next turn. Either way the table has more information after a challenge. If you successfully assassinate someone you subtract $1k from the amount that you have paid the assassin, thus losing 1/10 of your total money in the game but also hopefully killing off someone else's key player or whatever. That's the entire game!

So, the game is all table talk and misdirection. Convince everyone that you've got a bunch of money on this guy and form temporary alliances to attack the other guy, then the shocking knife in the back etc. If you're into that kind of thing this one boils it down into a really fun and nasty package which holds up surprisingly well for being a Milton Bradley game from the 70s. Our games played out really differently, and I am looking forward to playing this one a bunch more and seeing how it evolves as people dig into it. I grabbed it for $2 and man it was so worth it. Plus all the spies have the best/worst pun names. Ms. Bea Haven, Mai Hem, Ahmed Carr... Yes.

Nothing like writing a big long post about all the games you've played at Trashfest and then deleting it when you mean to hit submit.

The Reader's Digest version:

Played lots of games so far. Won two. Met Andrew from the website for the first time. He was real fun to game with.

More to follow.

Re: Erik’s Magic comments...I was looking at some Vintage decks in play last week here in Atlanta and they were valued at $20k-$30k.

The luck thing is part of why the game is so popular and timeless. It’s that element of chance- you might have a $30k deck and it just totally bombs because you get mana screwed. Or you might pull off a turn 1 win. There’s drama, risk, high stakes, uncertainty...even at the very highest levels of play. Yet there is also a science to it, and an artistry that often does mean breaking the game.

At the peak of my “serious” Magic playing, I had a U/B deck (what the kids today call a “Dimir” deck) that I actually made a dude cry with. It was after Fallen Empires sometime, I had this probably completely not novel concept to make a player lose by following the rules. So it was mostly artifacts and enchantments that dinged the player for drawing a card, untapping, putting a creature in play, tapping a land for mana...I wanted the player to be killed by their own actions and cards.

For a while, at least locally, I was a terror. I had a couple of people actually refuse to play against that deck. But it could also fail spectacularly, so there’s that pendulum swing again.

But back to the price question...the design is great regardless, and it is still fun to play with “pauper” cards IF the playing field is level. If you roll into constructed Friday Night Magic with a $10 Battle deck, you are likely to lose and not have much fun because the power level AND skill level are so unbalanaced.

The reality of it is that Magic is as expensive as you want it to be. And it can be cheaper than boardgaming is these days unless you are playing Vintage decks or playing seriously in tournaments.

Had some friends over last night to play Rangers of Shadow Deep, the new co-op skirmish game form the guy who did Frostgrave. It's basically the Frostgrave movement and combat mechanics applied to a "story-driven" set of scenarios against an enemy AI with various objectives and random events thrown in.

We had a lot of fun with it despite a lot of vagueness in the rulebook. We've played Frostgrave a million times so I don't feel like we should have had to do so much guesswork and come to so many agreements over basic shit like climbing and swimming, what weapons we could equip, etc. The rulebook is laid out with rules that should belong together scattered all over the place. The equipment section feels copied and pasted over from the one-weapon-at-a-time henchmen in Frostgrave which doesn’t really work for Rangers who can equip multiple weapons and freely switch between them.

There's a also a lot of gamey "story" objectives like: "make a perception check to see if you can discover the nature of the strange tracks. If you succeed, you discover their nature and get +5 XP." That's it. It doesn't even tell you the result...until the next scenario. Which you'll learn at that time even if you failed the check.

There's a really fun game in there but it's no coincidence, I think, that this is the first Frostgrave ruleset he's published on his own. If this had gone through Osprey, I'm guessing an editor or playtesters would have helped iron this stuff out. I feel bad for ragging on it. It really is fun and I adore everything Frostgrave-related. I just feel this was rushed.

Ok, here's a rundown and brief blurb about what I've played at Trashfest. At least as much as I can remember:

Western Legends: A western adventure game with many options and a significant number of ways to attain victory. A bit more structured than Spurs. Very akin to Merchants and Marauders but far smoother without super convoluted combat. Plays much faster too. A real good looking game art wise. Story cards are fun but don't seem as organic to the game as the rest of the mechanisms. Higher player count is better. 3 may be too few.

Neon Gods: An area control game set in the 2006 as seen by futurists of 1984. The color pallet is either super awesome or a bit oppressive depending on how you feel about day glo green and pink. The game itself is competent and keeps things fairly simple. It has a deck building element which offers a lot of ways to cycle through your cards on any given turn. This was ok in that you never really get hosed by a bad card draw but is almost too forgiving so that there isn't much tension or suspense. Josh loves it and I didn't hate it so make what you will of that.

Ascending Empires: Still awesome. A Trashfest tradition. I got my ass handed too me. Also a Trashfest traditon. On a side note. Seeing how well the neoprene board works in Dino Dunk, another flicking game, gives me great hope for the new version of this game currently in the works. Don't miss out when it's re issued. This game is a classic.

Starship Samurai is a pretty light area control game with Giant Robots or mecha or gungdam or whatever you want to call them. It was fun and quick and the mecha sculpts are cool. Not gonna change the world but I've played worse games.

Ashes Rise of the Phoenix Born: I really like this game but man do you need to play it a lot to get the most out of it. Faction and card knowledge is key to playing well. I have neither and so got crushed. Wish I could play it more.

Warchest is by far my favorite new game I've played. I have no love for abstract games but this one just delivers. Can be taught in a few minutes, played in about 30. Tense and engaging. Played it with 2 and with four (two,teams) and liked it both ways. I might just get my own copy.

Star Trek Ascendency Never have I played a game of this where I have come closer to winning and still lost. It was so damn fun. Curse you Al Rose.

Innovation with 2 people who never played before. I tried not to be too brutal so they didn't get turned off but still won.

Other games that I saw being played include Cthulhu Wars, Camp Grizzly, The Thing, Spirit Island, Layzer Ryderz, The Mind, Rising Sun, Blood Rage, Innis and more.

I hope someone managed to covert Shellie to the greatness of Inis, it hurts my heart that she doesn't love it.

Ran a little Imperial Assault tournament today. Seven people came out, all of whom drove two hours to play. It was an alternate format where everyone brought their own maps not in the current official rotation and thoroughly studied for best openings. Prizes were original alts using photographs of miniatures painted by locals. I played whoever was on the bye and started up a four-player team match once we cut to top four. It was fun. It was nice to provide something fun for people willing to drive so far.