What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I'm going to throw in "asshole who leaves mid-game." I've had that happen twice; person was losing and just quit. Not in a rage or because of anything said at the table, just, "I'm losing, so this isn't fun anymore. Bye."

If you’re going to quit, at least flipthe table. It’s basic etiquette. Like how a move stands if your hand leaves the piece

Michael Barnes wrote: Everyone is waiting for Holiday Sale ‘19.

HA! My local game store just had a buy one get one free to clear out their dusty Legion stock.

edulis wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: Everyone is waiting for Holiday Sale ‘19.

HA! My local game store just had a buy one get one free to clear out their dusty Legion stock.

Depending on their relationship with Alliance that could be more than cost, even if they sell for MSRP. Ouch.

Played through July in Pandemic Legacy Season 2 yesterday. It took us awhile to set it up because it had been nearly 5 months since we last played. It didn't grip us the same way that the original did, and it feels less like Pandemic, but still kind of interesting and more of an exploratory feeling, just based on the way the game works. I was reading a pretty basic rule about moving with cards and I'm worried that we did something wrong this last game, and possibly all others too. I'll have to re-read the rules. If I'm right it's a pretty big departure from the rules. (In base pandemic you can fly to any city by discarding a card matching it, or fly from a city to anywhere else by discarding the card matching your current city. In this version it says you have to be connected to a "sea lane" and I wonder if that means you can only use cards to travel to and from coastal cities).

It makes me wonder what the core of Pandemic is. 4 actions per turn. Slightly varied characters. Draw 2 player cards at the end of your turn. There's an infection or bad deck that relates to the locations. If really bad things happen 8 times or you run out of cards in the player deck you lose. Overall I was impressed by how Season 1 gradually adapted the mechanics and gave you things to do with "bad" cards as the game progressed.

Jexik wrote:

In base pandemic you can fly to any city by discarding a card matching it, or fly from a city to anywhere else by discarding the card matching your current city. In this version it says you have to be connected to a "sea lane" and I wonder if that means you can only use cards to travel to and from coastal cities

IIRC, it can be used to and from cities on sea lanes only.

ETA: My take on Season 2 is similar to S1. It was okay, but not nearly as cool as S1. My wife flat-out refuses to play S2 for some reason, but is up for playing S1 again, making it #4.

At home:

The week revolved entirely around Dragonmeet, which was held on Saturday in the romantic kebab-strewn streets of Hammesmith. We had a great time which I started writing about but it got out of hand so I’ll post it separately when I get around to it. The new games we brought home were Yogi (an absurd party game where you wrap yourself into pretzel-shapes by holding or balancing cards at awkward angles, a big hit with the kids), Dice Hospital (which as Matt described in his review is a perfectly pleasant family-friendly game with almost zero interaction), the Colonies expansion for Terraforming Mars (discussed a few posts back in this thread), and Civ – a New Dawn (which I plumped for after reading so much positivity about it on these forums). We’ve played all of these a few times since the weekend.

Not a lot to say about Dice Hospital, it does exactly what it looks like it will do. The add-on pack, which we didn’t really want but had to buy as part of the package, is mostly chaff with a few tiles and cards that make it a little more ‘gamer-friendly’. The base game is very straightforward whereas the additional bits allow you to be somewhat tricksy in doing unintuitive things like changing the colour of a die or manipulating them in ways that require you to focus on the broader picture rather than thinking about your patients as being in simple segregated blocks of colour. The wooden tokens are pointless as they do not match any of the card art, the plastic ambulances are superfluous and actually harder to use than the cards they replace, and the dice tower is too small to be of any use so you end up rolling without it anyway. It’s just a box full of crap stretch goals that are drowning out the really useful mini-expansion.

There is one very trashy combo worth noting that you can make with two of the specialists in the add-on pack. If you pair the Medical Student, who heals two patients at the cost of harming another, with the Pathologist, who can convert body-bags in the morgue into blood supply tokens, then you have the sinister story of the deranged couple who are killing off patients and carving them up in order to sell body parts out of the back door. Creepy stuff for a family game!

We’ve had two games of Civ – a New Dawn, one of which was just a learning game, and it all seems to be as good as trumpeted. I was surprised at the pace of it, with two players we were done in about an hour even with some referencing into the rulebook slowing us down. You really advance quite quickly across the board and in your tech upgrades. We were playing a fairly passive expansionist game with Japan versus Egypt to get us started so I think that when we switch into some of the more aggressive Civs there will be a great deal more rattling of sabres and flying of nukes making for longer games. So far this feels like it is focusing on the board positioning and control side of Civ games, which makes for an interesting counterpart to Through the Ages which is all about technology and resources. I initially thought that one would replace the other but they really sit nicely together as two very different takes on the same subject from specific angles.

Yogi. Well, the kids have been playing this a lot but once or twice every now and then will be enough for me. It really is an absurd game that is funny for a short period in a Happy Salmon kind of way, something that will make the awkward and self-conscious run a mile - so perfect for taking to game nights. You draw cards that tell you to make a pose or hold/balance the card somewhere awkward like under your chin, which you have to keep doing for the rest of the game. Keep drawing cards until you fail to keep performing all instructions or develop chronic cramp and drop out, last Yogi standing wins. Could be anywhere from stupid to brilliant depending on your mood and company.


At the club:

Shadows: Amsterdam as an ice breaker, I was driving the moped this time and my clue-giver and I had an amazing rapport that saw us hoover up our destinations very quickly with only one bump along the way. The other team struggled without a single score and ran afoul of their third strike just as we had reached the winning spot so about as wide a margin of victory as possible. Definitely easier with a smaller team as there is less room for misunderstanding when you take out the misinformation that comes from debating the meaning of the clues, but I don’t think that is necessarily a good thing with a game like this!

So many people had been asking for Dice Hospital that it was inevitable we would play it. I built a strategy around curing yellow finger-herpes or whatever the colour is meant to represent, with specialist staff and treatment rooms geared up for it along with my administrator giving me a bonus score on yellow cures. In the later game I took some of the options that change dice colour so that I could keep spamming my combo even when my opponents cottoned on to what I was doing and started spreading the yellow dice out in the ambulances as much as they could. It was a slow start for me though and even with some big scores I couldn’t quite catch the leader and, with patients remaining in my wards on six pips, just one more blood bag would have been enough to get me there. What was their strategy? I honestly have no idea, and I don’t think it mattered much.

There was also more call for Tavarua, but this week was a really frustrating experience. The two other players struggled to pick it up and were constantly bombarding me with questions as well as requiring my intervention which made it hard for me to concentrate on my own game. The stress then made me want to rush things along which made it all a bit overwhelming for everyone, definitely not in-theme with being laid-back surfer dudes. We got into the swing of things about half way through and it all calmed down a bit, but by this time I had already thrice fallen off my board with one occasion annoyingly being due to misreading the direction that the wave card was going to shift us. Despite it looking like a lost cause I managed to come back with two massive runs, cutting up my closest competitor at one crucial moment, which was a sliver enough to take the champions trophy.

Finished up with Now Boarding, which would have been a very dry and uninspiring game if it weren’t for the genius inclusion of a brief real-time element that throws all of your carefully laid plans out of the airlock without a parachute. It makes such a difference that it’s a wonder that other water-biscuit co-ops don’t make use of the same technique to introduce a dose of chaos into the proceedings.

Each player has an aeroplane that can carry a single passenger over three spaces, with some flight paths blocked for their exclusive use. Every turn an increasingly large handful of passengers start piling up at airports and will gain what we referred to as ‘pissed off’ tokens if they aren’t sat on a plane instead of a terminal at the end of the turn. In order to cope with the escalating stakes players can add more seats and faster engines to their planes or buy the rights to fly in the other’s exclusive paths. There are also weather tokens that randomly move around that make journeys faster or slower.

All of this is fairly pedestrian as it’s all perfect information and easy to plan for, however there is then a very large spanner thrown into the works. When new passengers are introduced you know where they are but not where they are going. As soon as those cards are flipped over you have a mere fifteen seconds on a sand-timer to actually take your turn, which is suddenly compromised when you realise that your flight plans will leave behind a passenger that will be costly to return to pick up before they finally blow their tops. You inevitably have to change things around under an immense time pressure, or ask another player to hold their flight for a few seconds that feel like an eternity against the draining clock. This one pivotal moment turns everything into a hurriedly reshaped shambolic mess which you then have the fun of planning around for the next turn, knowing full well that it is all only going to fall apart again. It's a fun take on injecting some drama into a co-op puzzle and this ultimately is what the game is all about, dealing with your best laid plans ganging agley.

Played Spirit Island. I hate most new games. I am bored by most Euro-like co-ops. The only ones that stand out as interesting are Space Alert and Robinson Crusoe. But I liked Spirit Island.

Maybe it’s the varied player powers and procedural player upgrades, because the firefighting aspect seemed fairly similar to Pandemic. But all the upgrading? Man that was fun, and sort of reminded me of a condensed Mage Knight.

I realized lately that most co-ops throw me off because the turn-to-turn decisions are generally dull; the fun is in coordinating and defeating threats before they spiral out of control, but the path to get there is boring. Spirit Island has all the apocalyptic tension, but the decisions, upgrades, and combos make each turn awesome. It felt like a mashup of Mage Knight and Pandemic, and I love it.

I think I may pick this game up.

I actually played Dice Hospital today too, Mezike. I had fun but this is a good quote:

What was their strategy? I honestly have no idea, and I don’t think it mattered much.

I think what makes the game fun is that you can go "aha, I'll use this to do this and then THIS to do that and I'll get a lot of people cured!". It's fun to try to fit everthing together and I liked being a force of good for once. I don't mind a game being nice when it's about nice things.

It would be cool if there were shared incentives, though. As in, the pool of patients is shared and you could specialize in a kind or something. But it would be difficult to keep it nice. I would enjoy a cutthroat satire of for-profit healthcare systems, but I feel sensitive right now and would prefer a happy, non-evil game where you do good things.

Anyways, one of the interesting things about Magic Arena is that you can play drafts and drafts are pretty much the best way to play Magic. The reason is that they reduce the flaws inherent to the game because the power level is lower, decks are less focused and you run more "general good stuff".

Dominaria is grindy. It's very intentionally old-school in that it's very much about smallish creatures with some sort of ok ability duking it out under the protection of spells. It might not be obvious at first glance, but creatures in this set tend to have two tricky features:

1) Their toughness is higher than their power and hence can't hurt each other. Lots of creatures in this set are 1/3, 2/3 or the like.
2) Their toughness is 2 and hence are very frail. There are lot of "trap cards" like 4/2s whose power doesn't matter because they end up trading as if they had less power.

By the way, flavour text and flavour in general is strong in Magic. I know it's something that has been focused on lately and I approve.

Played a interesting games this weekend

1) Stephenson's Rocket, aka Knizia's assholey no luck Acquire. Only my second play with more than 2p, and I'm pretty bad at the multiplayer game I think. It's really interesting though. The brutal action economy, the importance of timing, the importance of instant yourself into everyone else's plans and smartly vetoing moves all add up to a tricky game that I really want to explore more.

2) Tulip Bubble is a pretty, nasty little stock speculation game. Buy low, sell high, get out before the bubble bursts. Kinda like a way more streamlined Black Friday with auctions? Quite enjoyed this one.

3) Teotihuacan , the new "spiritual successor" to Tzolkin by the same designers. It doesn't feel much like Tzolkin, and it doesn't have anything nearly as unique or interesting as the gears in Tzolkin. It does seem like a solid crunchy puzzly euro efficiency kinda game, so if you like that is probably work checking out. Get things, turn things into points better than everyone else, basically no player interaction, you know the drill.

Edit: that came across more negatively than I meant it to I guess? I do like a well executed one of those, and puzzling out a winning line from the many ways you can go based on the random setup is interesting, but it's definitely one of those yknow.

edit edit: Also, its a snow day here so my wife and I have been playing some games. The highlight was a fantastic game of Dungeonquest. We played it for the first time on a snow day however many years ago, so its one we nostalgically pull out to play on snow days. My wife was Rohan. She got entirely turned around by the rooms she drew, and was savagely put upon by a variety of monsters. She barely limped out a few turns before the sun set, never having seen the dragon's fabled treasure. She did manage to scrounge up 230 gold from some corpses she looted. I was Ulv, and my trip in was a breeze. Empty rooms, corridors pointing me on, dodged traps, no sweat. Made it to the dragon, stole a ton of treasure, and figured I'd traipse back out and call it a day. Well of course my torch then goes out for 7 (!!!) turns in a row, and I get hit by a poison gas trap and lose 3 turns, and ended up being one tile away from the exit when the sun set and killed me. So good. God I love Dungeonquest.

Also I took this picture which i kinda like

Played Flamme Rouge for the second time with my wife tonight. It's fine. It's a bike racing game where you control 2 different types of cyclist - one is a sprinter and the other is more balanced. There are a few interesting aspects to this game. First is that you have to make it to the finish line with a fixed hand of movement cards, and once you use a card, you lose it for the rest of the game. The sprinter could potentially move 9 spaces but only 3x total in a game. You never have access to your entire movement deck, but rather 4 cards at a time. Another interesting aspect is that if you ever position yourself at the front of a pack, you have to introduce low value exhaustion cards that clog up your deck. Finally there is slipstreaming - if you pull that off you can gain additional movements and make yourself feel slightly clever. Oh, the angles of the road for mountains can modify the cards you play.

I picked this one up given that my wife loves watching bike races on TV (I do not). It's just fine. It is better than watching the bike races on TV. I suppose I wish there were more meat on the bone though. I know there are some expansions that add complexity but I haven't bothered to read up on them yet. If anyone has an opinion on them, I would be interested to know whether they flesh this out to something better than fine as I currently feel I should just cull it. I also wonder if playing with additional people would improve the experience.

You can play it like a real race. You use your normal racer to be ahead of your sprinter early race, always taking the exhaustion cards and the sprinter holds back, always trying to slip stream off the normal racer. Of course the randomness of 4 cards and other players keeps this in check/, can block your actions.The depth is sort of there in the base game, but luck plays a big role. Haven't played with expansions and more players make it harder to plan but more rewarding, imho.

Played Terraforming Mars w/Colonies. Right now, with two whole plays under my belt, it feels like it pushes the game more towards card-based points than TR rating. I think that's more due to the 40 or so new cards than it is the colony mechanic itself. A lot of them boost floaters, and a lot of them boost the colony mechanic itself.

Then I played in a small KeyForge tournament. Since I had next to no experience with KeyForge it worked out about as well as I'd expected. It was a small tournament, with three rounds of Swiss. I finished 1-2, with my win coming against the friend who I went with (he had less experience than I did). There's a lot of nasty stuff out there that I hadn't seen yet. If I learned a lesson it was, "Try the decks that have the word, 'Steal' in them".

I played a few sample turns of Fireball Island last night, just to get a feel for it. I think this game will be a hit not only with my kids but with my game group. It is simple to understands, has a ton of table presence, and just the right amount of chaos vs. control.

You can try to make the marbles go after a particular player, but you never really know if it will work out that way, which is great.

Knocking a figure over with a well-placed marble is very satisfying.

My initial comments about components:
1. the minis are smaller than I anticipated. At this scale, it's 'yellow figure' as opposed to any real detail.
2. The box is flimsy beyond belief
3. The vacu-form island is nice, although the colors are a bit muted, which means the icons and other markings don't really jump out at you. It's not a huge deal, and that just might be how things have to be with this kind of production.
4. a weird thing to bring up, but the marbles are not terribly consistent in size. I actually got a marble stuck in Vul-Kar once. It came out very easily, but it was surprising.
5. Cards are VERY nice, high quality

Mark, there are two different kinds of Marbles, the orange embers are not supposed to be dropped through Vulkar. They're just slightly bigger and that may be why you had one get stuck.

We played it this weekend and has a great time. Lots of insults and trash talking when three attempts to knock over my dude results in him just getting spun around slightly.

I played the copy of Nemo's War that I got from Barnes.

When I was sorting pieces, I left to go get baggies and my dog pulled up in the table and ate a Treasure token. VPG is sending me a replacement, but I fear Sally is doomed to roam the seven seas waging war on mankind's greed and destruction. Even more so than before.

Anyhow, despite the handicap, I played it this weekend. It looks a lot more complex than it is, rules-wise. It plays great. Great theme, great art, great action and decisions. I played on teensy babby level and still died, because I didn't sink enough ships. It's Nemo's War, you dipshit, get out there and make some widows and orphans, even if your main goal is just to Explore.

Great game, and I went ahead and ordered/backed the expansions just to have some more options in the deck, even though I think what's there will keep me happy for some time.

I don't usually play solo games, since if I'm doing that I'd rather just play a video game, but Nemo's War could change that.