What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

It's technically a video game but I've ben playing Masgic: The Gathering Arena the last couple days and even streaming it and it has been fun. Some random thoughts:

1) The game is more creature-based: This seems obvious at first glance, but the reason behind it is not so obvious. Here's how I see it: Creatures are the core of Magic as a game system. They create the most complex, most interesting situations and have both the highest posibble number of moves and the most ways to interact with them. You can attack with them, you can kill them, you can block them, you can deal damage to them...This is a marked improvement over the spell-based game of testeryear because there are only three ways to deal with spells: Discard them, counter them or race them to the finish line before they are relevant.

2) There are clear attempts to shore up Magic's weaknesses: There's more draw, more filtering and far better lands in the game. Effects such as searching for lands are more common. It's not enough to move the game to the next tier, but I think it's better design.

3) The game feels more on rails: I think there's a direct correlation between how interesting a concept is and how broken it proves in practice. That is, the more rules and concepts a card breaks, the most likely it is to be overpowered. This is why Urza Saga is such a powerful block, you can look at the card list and juse see card after card that can be built around or that turned out broken in a way the designers couldn't anticipate. Now the game has a much narrower focus, there are more clear leads and interactions are more obvious. This results in a "better" game but also one that feels more limited.

4) The main problems of the game still exist: I still play a game and think "Did I win, or did my opponent just not draw what he needed?" You can still win with a handful of spells, simply because the other player got nothing. You can still drop a bomb and win because the other player didn't draw the right card. The game is so heavily limited by how few cards you draw and how each one can decide a game. Run the numbers, how many non-land cards do you play in a card of Magic? Then consider, how many cards do you play in other card games, the difference is staggering.

5) The game is more "diverse". There are more women in the cards and it has a lot of black people in it, probably to US demographic standards. I've also noticed women in positions of danger, though I'm aware of the controversy one of those depictions caused.

So far the only thing I don't think is a marked improvement are planeswalker. The reason is simple: They are one-card threat that also wins you the game if left unattended. Even better, they are all aggressively costed and often provide long-term advantages.

The fact that they feature this awful, power fantasy-type characters also makes me dislike them. They have very little personality and what there is I dislike them. And they are repeated over and over, there are 9 version of Jace Beleren. 9 versions, I kid you not. And even if they were likable, they are still this big flashy story characters that take the focus away from you, the player and into them. You are no longer a powerful wizard, you are now the guy who tags along with Luke Skywalker.

Chaz wrote: Oh good, I'm not the only one who likes Tzolkin. Those gears are both cool as hell, and also make the whole worker placement thing super interesting. I really dig that it's a worker placement game where you can do well with the starting workers only, and it's not just a race to buy more.

Agree on the additional workers part, I feel strongly about that mechanic. In fact, I generally hate the mechanic because it's almost always the superior strategy which makes it uninteresting. Rosenberg designs where you can buy another worker almost never do it for me. Like, say, Agricola where everyone's strategy has to be centered around getting those extra family members.

I think Argent does this best, since turns last until someone runs out of workers. So there's absolutely a trade-off and often getting more workers just wastes actions bc they'll never be placed.

I’ve never minded the race for extra workers in Agricola. A central, shared victory path that branches off based on card mix is what makes the game engaging for me. Games without that single, shared route tend to lack competition and turn into solitaire. And Farmers of the Moor can mix up the family growth race substantially.

I really need to pick up a few Ketforge decks. It’s cheap and sounds like it fixed my issue with many CCGs, so I’ll give it a whirl. If it works I’ll grab another 4 packs

Boy Howdy is MTG more creature based than it used to be...creatureless decks could be viable in days gone by, now I think it’s impossible. It’s seems like there are tokens all over the place. I guess that started with Fallen Empires, but now you’ve got like 5/5 Wurms and all kinds of monsters in them.

Good point about lands too- lots of Mana fixing. I remember when dual lands were like whoa...now, virtually every deck has guild lands. Many of which are better than the classic duals.

Rails, I think that depends on what,
how and who you are playing...that is definitely the case at very high level play where the deck archetypes are predictable as are the appropriate answers to tactical problems.

I don’t like the Planeswalkers either...all the junk with loyalty and all that just seems like a needless layer of not very interesting complexity.

I do really like the guilds though...the Guild Kits are excellent and I like that guild decks have a strong sense of narrative coherency.

The sideways cards thing is still blowing my mind though...

I don’t know, I think the race for more workers is what ultimately killed my desire to play Agricola, which I _LOVED_ for quite some time. Despite all of its variability, Agricola is still asking you to do a little bit of everything. You’re not going to do that without more workers, but worse, you need to prepare for getting more workers. Sure, once that’s out of the way you can really get your engine firing off, but that doesn’t make the first half of the game feel any less scripted.

I’m actually a pretty big worker placement fan, as the Thursday night crew can attest to, and I think I’ve seen enough games now that handle getting more workers differently and doing so greatly improves the game. Tzolk’in and Champions of Midgard, makes it very optional Feast for Odin makes it automatic yet is what ramps up the difficulty, even Lord Of Waterdeep gives you that one freebie to keep up with the late game pacing, and all of those games feel by far more open than Agricola and none of them are any more or less interactive that Agricola. No, to avoid what you’re talking about the game just needs to not reward victory points for doing any of the available actions in the game. That right there is the absolute worst trend in Euro games.

Yeah...when your choices result in X, X+1, X+2, or X+3 points and the game is mostly in identifying the latter option...not much fun.

Michael Barnes wrote: Boy Howdy is MTG more creature based than it used to be...creatureless decks could be viable in days gone by, now I think it’s impossible. It’s seems like there are tokens all over the place. I guess that started with Fallen Empires, but now you’ve got like 5/5 Wurms and all kinds of monsters in them.

Good point about lands too- lots of Mana fixing. I remember when dual lands were like whoa...now, virtually every deck has guild lands. Many of which are better than the classic duals.

Rails, I think that depends on what,
how and who you are playing...that is definitely the case at very high level play where the deck archetypes are predictable as are the appropriate answers to tactical problems.

I don’t like the Planeswalkers either...all the junk with loyalty and all that just seems like a needless layer of not very interesting complexity.

I do really like the guilds though...the Guild Kits are excellent and I like that guild decks have a strong sense of narrative coherency.

The sideways cards thing is still blowing my mind though...

I don't know....

- I think that there is definitely a dominance in creature decks right now, but I tend to not like that. I hate green, generally, so I have never been fond of creatures.

- I have never been one to think that mana has been much of a problem. It was really fixed in Onslaught with the printing of Fetch Lands. Usually, people are just trying to play with too few lands (I know that is my problem). As for current lands being better than the classic Dual Lands, I think that is a hard argument to make.

- Standard does seem to "play on rails"; however, I think that isn't the case for Vintage or Legacy. I mostly play Vintage, and you see some really weird shit that isn't what you are expecting. There are still some common things that work well, but nothing is guaranteed. The possibilities of lines of play that exist with a well-crafted Vintage deck are truly amazing -- I don't think there is better card play in any game.

- At first, I didn't like Planeswalkers; however, over time, I have grown to appreciate them. In terms of narrative of a game, they really tie into the fact that you are a Planeswalker and you have teamed up with another one and you guys are doing stuff. This is bolstered by the legendary sorceries that have been introduced -- spells so powerful, you need legendary creatures (usually planeswalkers) in play to help cast them.

- I agree on the Guild Kits; very nice.

Jackwraith wrote: Fate of Fantos? Hrm. Seems like a marketing hiccup. I can't say that I'm particularly compelled to discover the destiny of the heroic... Fantos. Or the mysterious... Fantos. Or the ominous... Fantos.

Potential sequels:

Mate of Mantos
Date of Dantos
Mentos: The Freshmaker

Jackwraith wrote: Fate of Fantos? Hrm. Seems like a marketing hiccup. I can't say that I'm particularly compelled to discover the destiny of the heroic... Fantos. Or the mysterious... Fantos. Or the ominous... Fantos.

The name reminds me of this:

So Nisei, the fan organization which has vowed to continue Netrunner, has released its "Code of Conduct" and it's kind of a mess. It has its heart on the right place, but there's plenty of stuff in there that is questionable and claiming jurisdiction over all the "community" and all "adjacent communities" is kind of an overreach.

Most notably, saying "crazy" (as in, "this deck is crazy") and complaining about cards or certain strategies are now both considered "unacceptable behaviour" that can get you banned. And according to the CoC itself you can also get punished just for voicing your disagreement so yeah. The document actually uses the word "punishment", even.

It's annoying because it's impossible to discuss it. For those in favour no objection of any kind is acceptable. Either you agree with it, or you want to give space to the Gamergates. And, of course, those assholes popped up and briggaded the discusion.

It's a choice between accepting everything like god's will or being a "facha franco", like they say in Spain. Needless to say, I'm not happy.

Michael Barnes wrote: Boy Howdy is MTG more creature based than it used to be...creatureless decks could be viable in days gone by, now I think it’s impossible. It’s seems like there are tokens all over the place. I guess that started with Fallen Empires, but now you’ve got like 5/5 Wurms and all kinds of monsters in them.

Tokens are indeed everywhere. Apparently Rosewater loves them, but the guy has been in Magic for almost 25 years and he didn't really go into it as much as he is now. I think it might be a way to prevent removal from being a straight 1 for 1.

Funnily enough, I always joked about a friend because he loved Thallids and there were only like 2 of them and they sucked only for them to come around and become a tier 1 deck. Crazy.

Space Ghost wrote: - Standard does seem to "play on rails"; however, I think that isn't the case for Vintage or Legacy. I mostly play Vintage, and you see some really weird shit that isn't what you are expecting. There are still some common things that work well, but nothing is guaranteed. The possibilities of lines of play that exist with a well-crafted Vintage deck are truly amazing -- I don't think there is better card play in any game.

For me it's not so much the play as it is the interactions. You know, you have a Vampire, you add stuff that makes Vampires good and you get a deck. It is much more constrained than some of the crazy stuff in old expansions.

Erik Twice wrote: So Nisei, the fan organization which has vowed to continue Netrunner, has released its "Code of Conduct" and it's kind of a mess. It has its heart on the right place, but there's plenty of stuff in there that is questionable and claiming jurisdiction over all the "community" and all "adjacent communities" is kind of an overreach.

Most notably, saying "crazy" (as in, "this deck is crazy") and complaining about cards or certain strategies are now both considered "unacceptable behaviour" that can get you banned. And according to the CoC itself you can also get punished just for voicing your disagreement so yeah. The document actually uses the word "punishment", even.

It's annoying because it's impossible to discuss it. For those in favour no objection of any kind is acceptable. Either you agree with it, or you want to give space to the Gamergates. And, of course, those assholes popped up and briggaded the discusion.

It's a choice between accepting everything like god's will or being a "facha franco", like they say in Spain. Needless to say, I'm not happy.

Knowing some of the people who are involved in the Nisei project, I'm not surprised. It was always going to be more about them than Netrunner itself. Was a great game until the last couple sets. RIP.

At home:

More Tavarua, of course, with a back-to-back double competition. The lad is single-mindedly determined to land a perfect score every time he plays and made good again but the time investment in doing so left him too light on his other runs. He took the short board trophy in style with a six turn ride including another double barrel wave that broke the scoreboard, but despite having the ride of the day his long board was lacking and ended up just out by a single point on the championship. The rematch was much closer with both of us hilariously unable to stay upright for long and some pretty poor scores from the disappointed judging panel as a result. It was a tight result on both trophies and only half a point in the final reckoning this time.

Deus was dragged out with a pretty muted reception. I think that it may have met its death already, we’re going to a convention next weekend so at this rate will likely try to ditch it in the bring and buy. The game was won with a heavy lean on production draining the resource pool for the other players, then interleaving with soldiers stealing VPs from encampments and using trade to recycle goods into cash and back into goods again. I find it interesting that every part of the game can be leveraged into a winning strategy, there is definitely good stuff here in the design it just suffers from looking like crap and not being much fun to actually play.

Looking over the games shelf I challenged my kids if they were still interested in the Thunderbirds game that we used to enjoy but has turned into a toad. We’re all massive fans of the show so it was a no-brainer to get this when it came out a few years back. We like the logistics puzzle that the game presents in that you need to get the Tracey brothers to multiple locations and have to work out the most efficient way of doing so whilst keeping your odds of successfully resolving disasters reasonably high. The expansions however are really problematic in that they dilute all of this and turn the game into one where you are instead aiming to courier different people in different vehicles to awkward places; the neat route building is replaced with a tangled mess that is unsatisfying to plan for and your chances of success become very susceptible to random chance as a result. According to the inside track, the expansions were part of the original submitted design but were trimmed out during development so I find this proof in action of the importance of a good developer providing good editing.

We played twice with everything included and both games went out of control and blew up on us very quickly, and I was reminded that we stopped playing it for this very reason. I’ve resolved to hold onto it for a while until we’re ready to try it again but next time we’ve agreed to play just the base game in an attempt to recapture what we used to like about it.


At the club:

We kicked things off with some ladder stacking in Catch the Moon which is one of my favourite dexterity games because it is decidedly unfussy in allowing you to poke, prod, and move stuff around so long as you keep your fingers out of it. It also opens itself up wonderfully to banter with lots of hoots, howls and heckling going on. We had a really mean-spirited go of it too, with plenty of placements that were laid down barely hanging onto the structure. Things kept falling down really easily and we were only halfway through the box before the moon had cried itself out.

A few people were straggling in late so a quick bout of The Mind with six. The game isn’t rated for that many players but we figured what the hell, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. We got up to level five which was remarkable given that we had one player who just seemed to keep being just a tad too late. There’s lots of tells going on when this gets played, I wonder if there really is anyone out there staring unflinchingly into each other’s eyes. Even the time you wait before putting down cards is a tell in its own way.

Root with four was the big game for the evening for us and I tried out being the Cats for the first time. The way I’ve seen people play them before is to focus on builds, to just keep churning out VPs like an unstoppable machine, which was just too boring for me. Instead I made a quick withdrawal from the border with the Birds and put down recruitment offices right on the front line with the intention of building up an army and violently realigning the views of any errant critters. I have no idea if this is even remotely viable but it seemed like fun and with two dominance cards in my opening draw I figured it must have been in some way valid.

The Alliance decided to start right next to the Bird’s home roost so the two of them went right at each other and I figured I would stay out of it for the while and build up my troops ready for future insurrections. The Vagabond was roaming around freely in Catland digging through the trash which was helping me to drop sawmills up in the safe corner and I just let the wood pile up with occasional big build actions.

Things never work out as planned though, and a mistake from the Birds saw them take an early collapse. Smelling blood in the water I gave them a good kick when they were down along with the Alliance also piling on, enough to pretty much put them out of the game. This was my first tactical blunder as I should have encouraged the Birds to get back up and face off against the Alliance, and pressured the Vagabond to give them the cards to do so. Instead the early game animosity between the beaked bastards and my fantastic felines led me to just sticking the boot in rather than building bridges against the more dangerous foe.

The Alliance then dropped a base right next to my border and piled in a stack of warriors, and with the Birds on a revenge mission I found myself fighting on two fronts against enemies that were gaining in strength just at the point where I was starting to slow down. I started working on the Vagabond about being an ally on a tilt at domination and when I spotted that the Alliance were maybe two turns away from inevitable victory I finally dropped a Mouse dominance card. I had big armies stacked in three areas with one of them under heavy pressure from my opponents, there was no way that I was going to make it on my own but it was my only option. All I needed was the Vagabond to join me and put the Alliance army to the sword and there was a good chance that we would come through together.

The turn order moves around and he moves down to the danger zone, we’re all set for the big showdown, but then the ragged git starts spending his swords on completing quests in a rush for VP. The ratbag completely stabbed me in the back and I couldn’t save myself from being crushed by the two armies that burned through while he stood back laughing. It was a poor move on his part though as there was no way he could keep up the pace and sure enough the following round the Alliance swooped some martyrs in for a sudden victory.

My second blunder at this point was moving some troops up in a futile gesture to retake the lost territory but getting my build action in the wrong order and location which left an open space for the Alliance to blow up my staging reinforcements with a base. It didn’t actually make any difference to the result but I kicked myself for making such a silly error even when all was lost.

A shift in pace with Tavarua with four and a really competitive game with lots of snaking. It was the sort of competition that in real life would have been met with lots of catcalls from the beach as we were all a bunch of villains. The game came down to the final viable wave with the active surfer in line to take the top trophy away from me if they could make it all the way in to shore. I tried twice to cut them off but couldn’t quite manage it due to the stack of Stoke tokens they had accumulated allowing them to safely play big cards each time I came near. The waves were also working in their favour in continually pushing them to the back of their board and allowing them more space to play those big numbers. I even managed to encourage one of the other players to do my dirty work for me, alas to no avail. I guess that I ended up the bad guy who was booed off the beach after all of those repeated attempts to spoil his ride!

Finished off with a very quick Epic Spell Wars, which I recently dug out of it’s hiding place and threw into the bag as it’s been ages since we played this. It was typical ridiculous fun, but we had to cut short as time had overrun and the pub needed to kick us out. Think I’ll try this again next week as it is a nice and silly and deeply puerile way to end the evening so long as you keep the player count down to three to stop it dragging.

Played Networks with the family last night. My son asked for it as a birthday present and he taught us the game.

It’s a euro-ish set collection game dressed up in an American TV-land business builder. I’m sure there are better, more streamlined and iconic games based on this mechanic but… this one has goofy art and humor so. Perfect.

You basically have to fill up your network’s prime time schedule with shows, stars and ads generating viewership and ad revenue. The cards are thinly veiled jabs at existing shows and celebrities and that’s part of the fun. Were it not for this element of the game my wife and younger son would have lost interest.

Will the game’s allure persist after a couple of plays and you’ve seen all the funny cards? Not sure. There are some interesting mechanics and you have to compete for resources which makes it challenging. When somebody buys a show there is usually a moan of dismay from someone else who already mentally constructed a plan around that card. But other pieces like these special Network cards feel like they were included only to create some sort of dilemma, and the path to victory seems singular and straightforward. We will see.

It was a great gaming experience. The Mrs. won, the younger one didn’t rage quit, and the older one learned that it’s not uncommon to lose when you teach a game… it’s actually good.

We’re quite fond of The Networks here, it’s easy going and whimsical. There are some alternate ways to play in the Telly Time and Executives expansions that change the strategy a bit and give you some more things to do so you aren’t just chasing the same shows all the time.

Being able to buy viewers on a five show genre bonus is removed in the Executives which I think is a good thing because it can be abused in the base game if you just go headlong for money and one type of show regardless of time slot.

Got in the first play of Heroes of Terrinoth. It's basically Warhammer Quest ACG. Surprise! I did really appreciate that there were both multiple heroes and different upgrade routes for all four roles, though. We waltzed through the intro quest and my girlfriend was a little hazy on it (she's a Euro player, for the most part) but I think I can convince her to try some of the more difficult scenarios.