What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

At home:

My daughter has been asking for Dixit for the past few weeks but it only comes out when decidedly non-gaming mum agrees to join in. Yesterday she said yes so we sat down as a family to enjoy this old favourite.

We like to play in the spirit with which it was designed, where we join our clues together in some form of continuous story. I gave up trying to play this with other gamers because it always descends into one word clues or obscure geek culture phrases that only one person at the table is expected to get, which is incredibly dull treatment given the wild imaginative fancy of the cards. It’s so much more interesting when you have to think up an actual real sentence to say about your chosen card that is broad enough to remain ambiguous yet specific enough that at least someone is going to figure out the connection. Trying to then link it to whatever the last person just said makes for a fun challenge.

We came up with a tale of waking from a dream to find ourselves stuck in a labyrinthine world where despite gaining the ability to fly and soaring over many different lands we could not find a way out. We met a charismatic individual who promised to help us and showed us the way to wake up out of this nightmare world; my daughter had hit the victory condition at this point but we wanted to close off the story so carried on and forced ourselves awake only to find that things were not as they seemed and we were trapped in yet another dream world.

We’ve also been playing a fair amount of Deus this week. I have a friend who is an unashamedly inveterate collector, not just of boardgames but of pretty much anything and everything, who manages to stay on just the right side of becoming a hoarder due to generous attic space and the overall tidiness of his house. Anyway, he has decided to get on a fix with slowing down and clearing out some of his games so recently held a firesale offering stuff up for peanuts. I passed my saving throw on almost all of it but had my interest piqued by Deus which I remember there being some bruhaha about a few years ago. Seeing as my son is really getting a kick out of tableau building games with combo card powers I figured it was worth a spin.

Given that it was available for less than the cost of a brace of cinema tickets, I joked, even if the game wasn’t any good it would still have been a better choice than going to see a terrible movie. When I went round to pick it up my friend slipped me a copy of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and told me that I could get the best of both worlds by watching a great movie after playing a terrible game, which I think was a little harsh but not too far off the mark.

Deus is a lightweight civ game where you play cards in order to put buildings out on a map and then activate all the previous cards you have used of that same building type. Every so often you have to skip a round to discard some cards to get more buildings into your dwindling supply, or the resources to pay for them if your card play has not earnt you what you need along the way. The cards combo together in some interesting ways so the onus is on choosing well the order of play and ensuring that you can keep things going without grinding to a halt.

The first couple of games were intriguing as we discovered the capabilities within the combos and the importance of positioning on the map. There is a nice thing here that many civ games miss, which is that you can do well by building a tall civilisation (i.e. high density in small landspace) and it is not just therefore a race to grab territory. After a few more games though we started to find it swingy as all get out, and once you get a feel for how to build the combos it turns into too much of a race to get the set of cards in hand that give you game-winning leverage and spam the hell out of it, which makes the game feel very shallow in hiding its shortcomings under a veneer of complexity.

There isn’t much ability for direct intervention with the other players as the cards you have in hand limit rather than empower what you can do. Sure you can play a soldier to steal something from someone but then you can’t do it again until you find another red card, and then when your military units eventually run out that’s the end of that because you cannot play cards without having the matching pieces. If you didn’t do enough to win in that time then there is a real struggle ahead for you.

With three players this proves to be a very different affair than with two, in the opening moves there has been aggressive competition with route blocking and using soldiers to extort coins and points. These aggressive cards have more value in a multiplayer game because the right positioning gives back multiple benefits when sacking more than one sucker at a time and so it is more profitable to play them. Even so, the limitation on the number of playing pieces makes it a brief affair that is easily shrugged off.

So the final scores are Jim Jarmusch 1, Sebastien Dujardin 0. The spawn wants to play a few more times to get it out of his system and then it’ll wing its way onto the sale pile.

Trashfest update:

I forgot to mention that I played the most recent Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn. Second time I've played this game and boy is it good. I love Clash of Cultures, I really do, but this game accomplishes much of the same goals with far less overhead.

I think it's probably the go to game for Civ building at the moment. Now I've only played a few times so I can say if it's got the juice for the long haul but as of this moment I'm willing to call it "Best in it's Class".

Michael Barnes wrote: 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.

The thing is, this is not interesting nor fun. It is not fun to beat an opponent because luck decided he couldn't do anything or because I had two I win buttons and he only had one counterspell. When that happens what I think is not "wow, this game is timeless", what I think is "this was a complete waste of my time".

And I've realized that Magic has been a complete waste of my time way more than any other game I've played. There are too many games in which I sat down, saw my opponent's turn 1 play and realized there was nothing he could do to prevent me from winning. In other words, nothing he did mattered, he wasn't really playing the game.

But back to the price question...the design is great regardless

I used to think like that, but I no longer agree. The issue is that this "great design" isn't the game that you and I are playing. It's not the game any of us are playing. The only people playing this great design are rich people. The rest of us are playing a crappy game where you must sell a kidney and gamble just to have a working manabase.

Of course, you can compromise. You can actively worsen the game in order to be able to play it. You can even play it for more or less free by limiting yourself to coasters and binder fodder. But that game isn't "the great design", it's a bad game that you play because you are poor and can't afford the good game.

I don't see this out of the blue, it's that I've been thinking "hey, it would be cool to see if I could build a Statis deck now that Black Vise is unbanned" and realizing that even this budget-concious deck would be far more expensive than any other use of my time. It is not possible for me to play the good Magic only lesser versions of it.

At least legally. I do own 3 handpicked proxy decks that are designed to be fun against each other and so on. But they are not real Magic cards, I just printed them off at a local store several years ago.

--

Here's the thing: I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated because every single game copies the worst part of Magic: the combat, and silly little spells instead of taking the really intersting stuff and making a more serious game with better technology with them. I would kill for a game with cards such as Donate, Smokestack, Icy Manipulator, Platinum Angel, Opposition. But there aren't any. The closest is still good 'ol Cosmic Encounter.

repoman wrote:

I forgot to mention that I played the most recent Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn. Second time I've played this game and boy is it good. I love Clash of Cultures, I really do, but this game accomplishes much of the same goals with far less overhead.

I've got a copy that I bought for (relatively) cheap, that I'm hoping to play at some point.

As for gaming, we had family gamers/new gamers over to our house last night. What got played was:

Love Letter - the new guy won. My daughter is no good at this.

Perudo - basically Liars Dice. My daughter, to my right, was busting my ass at this.

Codenames - four on four, men vs women. The men won 3-1, and I'm not really sure how because we all sucked. I like the original better than Codenames: Deep Undercover, because the 'adult' version tries a little too hard (no pun intended).

Cloud 9 - this gets played when we can't decide what we really want to play. It's a bluffing game - should you jump off the balloon and get points, or stay and possibly get zero points. You ask the balloon pilot if they're going to make it, and they either lie successfully or lose points. It's okay, not great. As I typed this I realized that this should have really been Cockroach Poker.

My Trashfest NE 2018 playlist. I'll write more when I can:

Crossing
Cogs and Commissars
QE
Civ: A New Dawn
The Thing: Infection ant Outpost 31
Heads Will Roll
Stoner Parking Lot
Camp Grizzly
Downforce (x 2)
Crossing (x2)

Had a great time with great folks!

Really glad we finally played some games together. I had a great time and Crossing is now a must own for me.

I played so many games I lost track. The Thing was really great, as was Galactic Enterprises. GE may be far from perfect and parts of it don’t really work, but man, with the right crowd it’s a riot.

Downforce was the game that was new to me and I completely fell in love with it. I picked it up on a whim and was so pleasantly surprised by it. Ordered the expansion on the spot.

Civilization: A New Dawn continues to impress. FFG’s recent output is their best output, full stop. I love how clean and forward thinking it is, separating itself from many staples long thought to essential to the genre. For as stripped down as it is, it still delivers on every level. Everyone should be playing it especially at the price it’s going for on Amazon these days.

Rattled through two games of Spirit Island this weekend. Absolute top of the line coop game.

Keyforge prerelease was this weekend and it was a riot. I taught a bunch of people because I've been playing since post-Gencon. Finally cracked a deck that I'll get to keep (Regitail, Fjord Sophomore). It's basically a MTG mono green deck, which I'm quite happy with. My wife's deck is absolutely monstrous on the board and she loves it.

On that subject, she intentionally avoided playing the game until now as she didn't want to learn/get attached to a deck she couldn't keep. Now that she's actively playing the game she couldn't be happier with it. She loves CCGs from a gameplay perspective, but hates deck building and responding to the meta. A game where she can just play "her" deck as well as possible is perfect for her. Helps that hers is, as I've been told by people running numbers, particularly strong.

We also played a game of Root after the prerelease (though more Keyforge was played throughout the weekend). Despite being the only return player I ended up with the cats, but everyone there plays a lot of games so I figured they wouldn't struggle. I was wrong-ish. The WA player ended up taking the game and our Vagabond player was in a position to win soon too, but the Birds player just ran them into the ground and ended up taking a Dominance to try and stay in it. It did not pan out for him. Everyone still enjoyed the game and wanted to play it again though. Root is awesome.

Went to the local Keyforge prerelease, which was quite fun. I picked up two decks one was a Untamed, Sanctum, Shadows deck that seemed to rely heavily on the Untamed section with Sanctum and Shadow just feeling like they were splashed in.

The second deck might be at the upper end of the power spectrum. It was Shadow, Brobnar, and Lumos and had almost no creatures (5 in Brobnar, 2 in Lumos, and one in Shadow). The Brobnar cards were stacked with "ready" abilities and direct damage, for board wiping. Shadow was all direct damage, splash damage, and stealing. It did not need anything on the board to generate amber, could steal additional amber from my opponent and could wipe creatures/artifacts easily. The only stall that proved effective against it was the card (Lumos or Dis) that could select what house I had to play on my turn, but that was only a limited stall. Obviously, everyone was new so maybe it would take some trial and error to overcome, but it certainly seemed more powerful. Most games other games proved reasonably close, but only in one game was an opponent able to forge even a single key against that deck.

Also played Exit: Mysterious Museum, which was on the simpler end of the series, but still pretty enjoyable. It was a linear one that only allowed you to go through one page at a time, but it was superior to Sunken Treasure (the other linear one, that happens to be MM's companion game). It had a little bit of a story and had some clever puzzles (including one that was an "oh that is awesome!" moment). The additional component puzzle was probably the weakest of the series and added simply because the other games have at least one of those.

I have also played a ton of Slamwich the past week. We picked up a copy for the mini-human and she absolutely loves it and has requested it everyday. She finds the sandwich combinations hilarious because it can generate ones she thinks are unpleasant.

A couple of days ago I played what might be the most complex game in the COIN series, Pendragon. I’ve got a friend who likes really complex traditional Euros. He has a PhD in Psychology, and seems to relish complex rulesets, so he learned the entire game and talked us into playing the introductory “Barbarian Conspiracy” scenario. I went into the game having down very little preparation, and although initially I had very little idea what was going on, by the end of the game I had a basic grasp of what was happening. It actually helped having played Root first. There are four factions, the Romans, the Britons, the Saxons and the Scottis, which are a combination of several tribes such as the Picts, who my son knows too much about because we have some Pict ancestry and because he has become an alt-right nut job obsessed with his European ancestry, his DNA, and his ability to drink milk.

The game is a little weird in its combination of strategy and tactics, in that there is an extended structure consisting of Epochs, and the shape and flow of the game change as you enter each epoch. You start out with loose alliances between the Saxons and Scottis, and there is an initial alliance between the Romans and their Briton subjects as well. Over time, these alliances break down as you start to crowd each other and compete for territory and resources (wait, did I just describe all of human history?). We didn’t finish a full game after four hours (in part because a professor friend showed up with her entire family who began playing loudly and climbing on the conference table) so we didn’t realize the entire glorious crumbling of civilization. Despite the turn structure of the game, a lot depended on individual dice rolls within an epoch. I was both blessed and cursed by the dice as I basically spent four hours trying to raid from the sea of Hibernicus. Another minor problem was that I was sitting across from the cards, and had to keep asking to see them, which kept me at a distance from the historical juiciness of the game (My back and hip were hurting, so I wasn’t jumping up and down a lot).

I’m sort of glad that I waited to write this for four days, because although the game has left me with a lot to think about and was fairly fun, in hindsight not much happened during those four hours. There were only a handful of key moves. I had some good dice roles and raiding incursions that were reversed the following turn by the Civitates. The Saxons played a powerful card and dumped a pile of cubes in the southern regions, etc. If the group commits and we play 3-4 more scenarios--well, there’s a lot of potential for some intense, enjoyable gaming. But I fear it’s not going to hit the table again, at least with this group. Playing Pendragon left me interested in playing a COIN game set in the Middle East that gets it right, or some lighter version of the game--perhaps Cuba Libre. I wish this group would play that MMP game Angola (How can they charge $75 for that?). It seems like less of an investment but just as much fun. Or we could play the next scenario, which Cfarrell says is more balanced, and starts things off In Media Res, with a knife at everyone’s throat. I wish I could have gotten the group to play Pax Pamir.

From Dan Thurot’s good review:

Ultimately, much of Pendragon’s appeal comes down to the way it evokes that lesson. Just as A Distant Plain was illustrative of how cultures cannot fully communicate even when they’re speaking the same language — and doubly so when they aren’t — and Colonial Twilight captured the bitterness of a nation boiling over from civil strife to civil war, Pendragon’s tale is about how base pettiness bends the arc of history toward factionalism and collapse. It’s a somber message, especially for a game that features coastal raids, prestige-earning military battles, and huge piles of ill-gotten plunder. For all the adventure, a darker age looms before you.

That’s Pendragon in a nutshell. At times it’s too complicated for its own good, and it won’t hit the table as often as its companion volumes. But each of its quibbles and peccadilloes serves a purpose, weaving a decades-long tale of collapse, ascent, and almost certainly more collapse. The complexity is worth it, if only barely.

spacebiff.com/2018/06/25/pendragon/





Cubes! It's a good looking game.





This demonstrates something about the turn order. I never really fully understood it, but basically if the person you were allied with made a particular turn choice it limited future choices.

Cran, my man, you seem down. Wish I could help out.

All the COIN games get progressively more convoluted. Stick with Andean Abyss.

If it makes you feel better, there is an auction on eBay for Angola with a current bid of $1.65. Still six days to go and the dude wants $23 in shipping which seems a bit douchey when all three of us now it'll fit in a flat rate box for $13.

Or you could buy a copy from the twit selling it for $100 plus shipping.

The real question regarding MMP is how do they continue to get me to buy all that ASL shit that I'll never get played? Like some form of hypnosis.

ANGOLA blows COIN out of the water.

fwiw, cranberries, my understanding is that the "20 turns of actions where little has changed at the end" is a common criticism of COIN.

I foolishly keep buying COIN games only to find them more and more convoluted and less and less fun. I also feel that Andean Abyss is still the best but too bloody long for anyone likely to play it with me so the only one I’ve held onto is Cuba Libre.

Now that we have Root out there I’m not sure I’ll ever get even that one to the table again. I’m also not sure that I even want to as Root scratches the same itch whilst being far more accessible to get into, from the perspective of both gameplay and setting.

I still haven't played a COIN game. I did back the new one about the Edsa Revolution in the Philippines. It's relevant to my interests, but no one else's apparently. It's been languishing for a while on P500.