What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Msample wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: That (the different types of non-geographic spaces) sounds very 1989 by Ted Torgerson, which I never tried but heard was pretty decent.

1989 is great, better than Twilight Struggle IMO.

It absolutely is, but the subject matter interests me even less than TS, and given that I’m not a history guy in the least, that’s saying a lot.

Warriors of Japan

In the recent MMP sale, I ordered a copy of Warriors of God. I played it years ago when it first came out and I remember it being pretty fun. The lemmings at other sites began to bemoan that it was too random and that their precious and perfectly worked out plans were often ruined by the unexpected death of their leaders. I, however, had no problem rolling with the punches. Maybe because I really don't care that much if I win or lose, maybe because I lose so often I'm used to it, or maybe it's because in a game representing a 100 year conflict it's logical to me that your leaders should die at a rate relative to the time frame.

All that is to say that I got to play Warriors of Japan which is by the same designer and uses the a lot of the same mechanics. Of course it's set in feudal Japan and not 14th century Europe but this is a plus to me as I like that setting/theme a lot.

It was pretty cool but you really do have to have the right attitude. You have to go with the flow and know that you are at the mercy of the dice. It's not a war game for the beard scratching grognard. It's a war game for the gambler, the risk taker, the person who gets a thrill out of winning a battle you deserved to lose based on all tangible factors.

It's been so long since I played Warriors of God that I can't make any meaningful comparisons besides those.

In my game vs. The Nemesis we screwed up a rule where we forgot the limits imposed on the number of guys that could cross a boarder in any given turn and the result was a huge battle that could never have happened and we didn't catch the mistake until a turn or two later so we decided to end it as it really was a game deciding battle.

The Nemesis claims it was a draw but I prefer to say he surrendered.

Brought some games to annual Friendsgiving potluck hosted by one of my old goth friends. Gaming didn't start until around 8 PM, and the apartment complex has a firm rule about shutting down the party room at 11 PM, so I only got one game on the table. We played The Gothic Game with 8 players. One poor guy lost half his hit points on his second turn due to the Devil, and died several sad turns later by falling in the moat and then drowning. The second death happened when somebody fell into the Oubliette. They just happened to be exactly two squares between both the Oubliette and another player, and rolled a two. Another player made a beeline to the Crypt and spent the majority of the rest of the game as the vampire. The only black guy in the game, my friend TJ, kept drawing racist cards, like burning cross and the rope that can be used to lynch another player. TJ got his leg cut off, fell in the moat, and limped around until the vampire picked him off. I killed someone with a hypodermic needle. The vampire girl eventually won and was responsible for killing half the players. I put up a mighty effort in the final stretch of the game, surviving a roomful of rats, food poisoning, catching fire, and falling in the moat. But at the end, I was running to the tower for fresh air while choking on prunes, and the vampire caught me. Everybody enjoyed the game.

I actually have been playing board games quite a bit this week - which is a rarity because my regular gaming group is about an hour commute away from my house.

Vegas - played this with my family. A nice quick dice and betting game.

Uno - My family loves Uno. I do not. The things I do for my family...

Sagrada - I enjoy this game, although I could tell that my kid's patience was wearing thin at this point.

Was going to try to play The Great Dinosaur Rush with my wife but TV pulled them all away. One day I'll actually get to play it.

Pantone the Game - full disclosure, I invented this game, so I have been banned from playing it. Although my mother MIGHT have gotten some help from me while playing...

Betrayal Legacy - I have a regular group (fingers crossed) and we play every Monday. Looking forward to tomorrow night!

Western Legends - I actually quite enjoyed this. Pretty thematic (we didn't play it with the personal objectives) and fun once things got going. Looking forward to playing this again.

Take This To Your Grave - My regular play group is a Publisher (Breaking Games) so I got to preview this interesting dice betting game. It's pretty easy to break it however and I hear the edible paper tastes terrible!

Tokyo Highway - Another silly game of stacking things although I think I still prefer Meeple Circus to this.

WOW! 8 games in one week! That might be the most I've played in awhile!

Played the first half of a game of Techno Bowl today. It had been a while for both of us, and we ended up tied. The best moment: my girlfriend has a player intercept a pass from one of my receivers. She then proceeds to march it all the way down the field, in the wrong direction. I laughed my ass off when she finally realized what she had done.

You're running the wrong way Jim!

What a great Techno Bowl story. I've thrown the ball direct to the opposition before after switching teams for a rematch so you can tell her that she's not alone in the MFL blunder reel. Unfortunately the game has toaded for us, much to my dismay. The complete strategic freedom, which is what makes the game so special, proves overwhelming for the people I normally play against. There's a guy on BGG who is putting together some AI decks that I think would be useful for giving people hints on how to set up and play that I might try. I can't let go of this one, it's too good.

Yes, it can be a bit hard to teach, and there are lots of chrome rules that frankly we have always ignored, like the read and react. I'm sure they are great at high level play, but it's just not necessary.

I bought the legacy rules. I wonder if I will ever get to use them. It's such a great game. I have bought and pimped out 2 sets.

I picked up the legacy rules too but outside of a solo play format they'll realistically never get any use, and it's not the kind of game that I want to play solo even if there were a decent rules set for it. Playing a sports game solo just feels kind of wrong. For me it was more a case of tipping the designer a couple of dollars and getting a PDF with some extra print and play stuff on it.

For somebody tied to a particular NFL franchise I can see how it would be great to use them to custom build a team in 'your' colours, but I have no such association so there is more than enough variety in the box to keep me happy for pretty much forever as it is. Not that its getting played anyway for that matter.

Tried another game of Scythe, but we again abandoned it after 4 hours because it was too confusing for one of the players. I dunno why, but they didn’t seem to get how the bottom actions work. They have a mental block stopping them from ever understanding that you get a set action. Instead, they keep thinking that you get to upgrade, recruit, or build on the section you played the top action from. Dozens of times it was explained, but it was an impossible concept. Turns would take upwards of an hour because of this.

I don’t think I’ve ever loathed a game so much lol. I think this nightmare has finally been buried forever, but I will just sit out next time. I’ve never seen a game so thoroughly derailed by rules questions in decades of gaming. It was impossible to even form a thought between bombardments of questions.

Another player was insistent that a worker is placed every time a production action was taken. And another didn’t understand that flavour text was not instructional on exploration cards, so we had to get rid of exploration altogether to end the derail. Scythe seems to cause endless confusion for reasons I will never understand, and I’m glad it’s dead.

Scott Rogers wrote: Pantone the Game - full disclosure, I invented this game, so I have been banned from playing it. Although my mother MIGHT have gotten some help from me while playing...

Congratulations! Pantone is an excellent game.

Finished up my holiday of actually having some days off to play games last night.

Champions of Midgard: with Dark Mountains expansion. With the exception of adding Black as a player color, I'm less and less impressed with it every play. No one wants to fuck with the mountains when every freaking other travel card seems to be pay X or give up/die. I was the only person who went to the mountains and only because I had a card that rewarded me for having the most victories there. My wife won this and loves the game but hates the blame tokens which she keeps saying we should house rule but I'm pretty sure that would narf the game.

Evolution with the Climate expansion. Still my Son's favorite game and thank the gods for Climate, it actually makes me NOT dread playing it again. Nothing like a sudden cold snap that reduces the food from the watering hole by -25. Totally shredded my plans but it certainly thinned the herd.

Due to having to use or lose days off before the end of the year, I took four Mondays off in a row starting yesterday. A buddy stopped by and we played Lincoln, which I've had on standby for awhile.

We were both very impressed. I adored A Few Acres of Snow but became disenchanted with the whole Halifax Hammer fiasco. So Lincoln hit the spot. I really dig how you don't hand pick cards to add to your deck, instead the majority of play has you burning cards and shrinking your deck. However, it does grow when you reshuffle as you add a pre-determined chunk of cards into the mix. This helps simulate some of the logistics of the ongoing war (such as Confederacy resources waning) and it's very interesting.

The game is a tense back and forth CDG-ish affair that was pretty excellent. The system is pretty light but full of meaningful choice. The rulebook is pretty awful as is widely commented on at BGG, but we figured it out I think.

Both of us are looking forward to playing it again. We, of course got in a couple games of KeyForge after. My deck that I fear is really damn good won again. It's currently 5-0. We talked about maybe adding a couple of chains to it next time.

I also have played two games of Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles Ares Games' new BSG Wings of War game. This was so good that it got me to start re-watching BSG from the beginning.

It's a pretty interesting take, especially from Ares. It's still that same general style of game where you're picking a maneuver ahead of time and then placing a card as a template to complete your maneuver. Much of it is simultaneous and it doesn't have the upgrade/list building weight that drags X-Wing down in casual play.

I was surprised to see them include a dice mechanic to shoot. You hit pretty often (6+ on two D6), but it adds another layer of slight uncertainty to the chit pull, which is very similar to Wings of Glory.

The big draw here, besides the most detailed and well painted prepainted models I've seen (seriously, better than X-Wing 2.0 stuff), is the inertia movement system. This is totally fucking rad.

You can turn the nose of your ship and keep drifting along your previous vector. This means you can fly by a cluster at high speed and do a drive-by while still on the float. You can also do incredible maneuvers such as completely flipping around with a 180 and shooting at the Cylon Raider on your 6. It's interesting, not terribly complex, and adds a whole tactical layer to maneuvering.

The end result is a more cerebral and cinematic experience than X-Wing/Wings of War. It perfectly mimics the television series and the feel is spot on. The best part about these types of games is maneuvering, and this greatly enhances the nuance there. I'm just running with a starter at the moment, but I'm definitely keeping it and looking to get more ships.

Just like WoG, the starter set feels a bit more complete since it includes a larger swathe of optional rules and advanced options than X-Wing, and the game also feels fully realized when you control a single ship. X-Wing never quite feels as good if you're just piloting one ship and it's assumed you typically run your entire side, my experience with WoG has not been this way, mostly because there's more cards and stuff to handle turn to turn and the overhead of multiple ships gets a little crazy.

The one iffy thing is the non-ship components. You program your maneuver with a deck (similar to WoG), but you also use this plastic control panel thing to set your rotation, speed, and track your inertia. It's kind of neat as it feels a bit like the controls on a cockpit, but the sliders are difficult to move and it can be a little frustrating.

Also, the paper asteroids are incredibly thin. I partially suspect this may be on purpose since ships overlap them, but I still would have preferred they go with X-Wing's style and just had the ship slightly tipped when overlapping.

Oh, and if you hate the hexagonal/cut corner look of paper/cards in the show, stay away. Everything here has that, including the cards.

Roll Through The Ages: Bronze...

They are incredibly optimistic about how much you'll like their game. It has a pad included with about a thousand double-sided score sheets. Suffice it to say that with 2 and 3 it's fun. It's not a 333 plays with 3 players fun. It's not 250 plays with 4 fun. It's maybe half a hundred or hundred plays fun.

Lost Expedition...
Could have been named "How to die in horrible ways and never win". It's almost unfairly hard, which I appreciate quite a bit. Still no win. Art is awesome,but not Ferox awesome.

If someone wants to trade or sell me Ferox, LMK.

charlest wrote:
I also have played two games of Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles Ares Games' new BSG Wings of War game. This was so good that it got me to start re-watching BSG from the beginning.

Is this out? I have about a million dollars in store credit and I'd like to pick this up for Christmas. Estimated release date lists November 2018.

Love the movement concept in this one. I'm a much bigger fan of the movement aspect of these games than the ship-building aspects. And the movement in this one looks kick-ass.