What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

MORI, an interesting trick taker. Four suits, 0-10 each, plus some "X" cards. Instead of bidding, points are given by symbols on the cards -- each leaf symbol is +1 point; each skull symbol is -1 point. Higher cards have skulls, lower cards have leaves. So you can win tricks with those 10s, but lose points. Trump suit varies depending on what color suit is led -- if red is led, then purple is trump. So maybe you can trump with a 0, which has a whopping 3 leaves on it.

You have to follow suit if possible, except that you can always play X cards. Those automatically lose. At the end of the hand, if you have captured the most Xs, you lose -1 point per X. But if you are in second place, you get +1 point per X. Xs are public knowledge, so you can see how many everyone has and try to maneuver yourself into 2nd place and/or try to push someone else into first.

Then there's one final wrinkle: A whole bunch of d6s. There's two Xs, then one symbol for each suit. These are all rolled and placed in the middle of the table at the beginning of the hand. Every time you win a trick, you select a die and put it in front of you. On your turn, you may always play a die instead of a card -- another exception to the "must follow suit if possible" rule. Dice have a de facto value of -1 -- if any other card of their color is played, they will lose -- but occasionally you can win by using it as a trump.

The hand ends when all the dice in the middle are gone. Any cards in your hand go into your captured cards pile, and you score leaves and skulls as normal.

Play a number of hands equal to the number of players, and that's the game.

Overall, it's a very clever treatment of the genre. No bidding, but a ton of manipulation of the game state to try and help yourself, or screw your opponents. Despite looking fiddly, it plays smoothly. It's probably worth it to capture a trick early, even if it has a skull or two, in order to grab a die -- every die you play is one less card you have to play, so you can hold onto those high point cards in hopes of them falling into your score pile at the end of the hand.

TAIWAN NIGHT MARKET. Forgettable auction game of building stalls while customers walk on deterministic paths through the market, looking for their preferred food. You bid on locations for stalls, then (if you win) can build one of four types of stalls (ramen, kebab, etc.). Every round some new locations become available. The bidding is very limited; you can make two bids, plus an extra one if you are not winning any auctions. It's very easy to get outbid but not be able to do anything about it because you are winning at some other location. And then the customers that wander through are mostly random, so a lot of the time you're hoping that someone wants to go to your donut shop. Fiddly and unthematic. Pass.

Had another 4 player game of They Live - the card game, all new players except for me. This time I was a human, and we ended up with 2 invader players again. They quickly ganged up on me, killed me, took my two city districts, and then gathered the remaining two districts for an easy victory.

Everyone liked it, it's an easy teach, and plays quickly. I think this kind of game shines best with max players, but I have yet to get more than 4. I also think once everyone at the table knows what they are doing, it will get even better.

Had another semi-successful Game Day yesterday. Semi, meaning that a lot of people dropped out (no transportation, partner ill, overslept), but Nathan showed up. We only played two games, but it was fun.

We first played HeroQuest. The first go round was an all around TPK with Jo and Nathan. They played the Dwarf and Elf only, and I forgot to give the Elf their spells. I also then realized that the 1st quest was a mean drunk with only two heroes. So, we restarted and tried again. This time, spells were distributed and Nathan and Jo played 2 heroes each.

It went better, and then went to Hell in a handbasket, primarily because Jo kept searching for treasure and Orcs popped on her faster than Jehovah Witnesses knocking on your door. Jo played the Wizard poorly and he died. Since they had meta knowledge from the previous quest, I switched up the monster population. The next one to go down was Nate's Barbarian. Down to two, with the dwarf being the most hurt and the Elf out of spells.

They found the Gargoyle, and Nate kept declaiming, "What the shit?!" as I kept putting down miniatures in the room. Needless to say, they ran from the room, and the monsters followed. They did their best with what they had. One of the best vignettes from the game was the Elf "tripping on a flagstone" (rolled a 3), had enough movement to turn the corner, attack an Orc and kill it. I described it as the Elf tripping, turning the corner unbalanced, and accidentally skewering the Orc in the throat, with Nate going, "Oh, shit! I'm so sorry."

The real tense moment was when they were facing off against the gargoyle. Jo's Dwarf got an initial lucky swing, and nicked the monster, with the Gargoyle returning a point of damage in return; despite having alllll the attack dice. Nate wasn't able to score any hits.

Then, Jo made the grand slam, two hits, and the Gargoyle whiffed. Much like beating the Asshole Game (Planet of the Apes), it was a great sense of accomplishment for them.

To end the evening, we played The Rise and Fall of Anvalor. My wife played Order Serpentis, Nate played The Hammers of Sigmar, and I played the Anvils of Heldenhammer. Our enemy was the Skaven.

The ratmen were no real threat, despite fucking up two of my buildings due to a warp cannon attack. Jo kept beating the Skaven with her War Hydra and her other Leader. We kept being Onslaughted because the board was full and the enemy couldn't even get a chance with attacking, as Jo's units by in large attacked and stomped them.

The final charge was nothing more than a whimper. Jo won with 41 influence, I had 21, and Nate had 9. However, Nate forgot to gain influence from one of his buildings each turn. When we did the calculations, he still could not keep up with Jo.

Rliyen wrote: It went better, and then went to Hell in a handbasket, primarily because Jo kept searching for treasure and Orcs popped on her faster than Jehovah Witnesses knocking on your door.

I once lived for seven years about 500 yards from a Kingdom Hall, which was right on the edge of our subdivision. Never had a Witness show up at the door even once. I told people it was because we were obviously inside the blast radius.

Jackwraith wrote:

Rliyen wrote: It went better, and then went to Hell in a handbasket, primarily because Jo kept searching for treasure and Orcs popped on her faster than Jehovah Witnesses knocking on your door.

I once lived for seven years about 500 yards from a Kingdom Hall, which was right on the edge of our subdivision. Never had a Witness show up at the door even once. I told people it was because we were obviously inside the blast radius.

.

I've seen more Mormons than Jehovahs in our subdivision (Mormons looted our house after Katrina), but since I have an arch window in my door I can usually tell if it's someone I know or just a solicitor. They leave their weird ass pamphlets and I never interact with them.

Played The Thing: The Boardgame in a group of seven last night. When I read the rules before in the weekend (and confirmed with a couple of decent Youtube videos) I saw one problem with the game, especially in comparison to my fave Battlestar Galactica, - an alien player, usually the original one, can sink the humans right at the end by being the perfect human during the game (never doing anything dodgy and agreeing with everyone all the time).
If the humans do actually get to the end then the game is all dependent on how much 'testing' of players is done, test everyone and a no-brainer at the end, not enough testing and russian roulette at the end. In our game I was the Alien from the beginning and my character was Macready who's ability let them draw an extra card from the armoury when searching, so I told everyone I was going there to try and find the Flamethrower quickly (needed for testing and fighting the Alien) while little needing repairing and they all agreed. I found the flamethrower straight away and, or course, that got buried on the bottom of the deck (taht wasn't coming out again), and kept a firearm for myself and that turned out to be a boon and a bane for me.
A firearm stops you having to do an encounter (where you both check a selection of each others human/alien tokens and is the main way of being infected by an Alien) with other players when you meet in a room - so this allowed me to say, and I did do it for the rest of the game, that I could now go and help people at a location without risking an encounter. But, as I realised about half an hour later, is that I could no longer do the fun part of being an Alien of infecting people because as soon as I didn't use my firearm to stop an encounter that would have been a flashing light that I was an alien - that then meant I was either going to have to play the backstabber long game or come out bltantly as the Alien, neither which I really wanted to do.
It didn't help that the human's testing was severely hamstrung, after two initial tests found two humans, by unlucky test token draws and the flamethrower not being found (for some reason ) but then the pressure was taken off me when another player, who had had an earlier encounter with a dog, suddenly showed up (unplanned) with someone else to force an encounter - so there was no definitely one, possibly two, Aliens and players slowly forgot that neither may have been the original thing.
So I used my firearm to good effect, joining pplayers at locations without risk of infection to help the humans - I was throwing in unhelpful cards but it didn't really matter as if the humans did manage to escape it would come down to who trusted who.
And so it nearly did, unfortunately on the last turn of the game (before we froze) we couldn't get enough non-sabotage cards out to repair the chopper and fly out ... proud to say one of my sabotage cards helped the disaster eventuate.
The humans wanted to do an Escape sequence anyway to see if they/we could guess the right people to let on the chopper - the 'tested' humans got on first, then it was my turn to get on, they conferred and decided I shoudl be allowed on .... and the look on their faces when I mutated into a Thing.
So, a pretty fun game but I don't think it is as balanced or interesting as BSG. In BSG any unrevealed Cylons still have to actively try and win the game, unlike inThe Thing where the Alien can just sit and be very helpful and hope that enough Tests aren't made to out them.

While that can certainly happen, it's actually what I would consider one of the game's strengths in comparison to both The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, and Who Goes There?

The former has testing as well, but it's rare and infrequent and hard to come by. So playing it straight is by far the optimal move. Who Goes There? has almost no testing, so it's almost exclusively trying to read people. The end is a total crapshoot.

The Thing improves upon both IMO, by allowing you to farm bloodbags. In our game, Blair plus at least or or two others (depending on player count) collect bloodbags as much as possible. There's a lot of discussion on who to vote for to raise their suspicion. I'd say this is like 40% of the game when we play, with the rest being trying to discuss who should go where and whether we should heavily repair, who should go to the weather station, who should prep food, whatever.

I'm a big fan of that game as a competent version of The Thing compared to the many other attempts (including Panic Station and others). BSG is definitely the better game, but one aspect The Thing has that separates it from BSG is that the infection spreads organically. For me, there's much more paranoia in The Thing as you don't want to get infected. This leads to a lot of discussions about being left alone versus using the support rules for better actions.

Neat game.

I got rid of Outpost 31 because I did not like how an Alien player was basically encourage to play it straight the whole game. It is boring. And past 6 players it's not good, because if they suspect you, they can very easily leave you out of all missions.

I did not pledge for the other Thing game because in looking at it, it seemed like the bulk of the gameplay is a bunch of busy work that you could get forced into... for example if you are Nawls you would have to spend the whole game cooking. Maybe it's not that way?

It's a little that way, for sure. But having Nawls cook every round isn't probably the best strategy. There sort of too much to do and not enough time so you have to triage actions. So sometimes Nawls will need to go and help with bloodbags or make a repair.

But players do sort of congregate towards their characters proficiency early.

charlest wrote: ...
The Thing improves upon both IMO, by allowing you to farm bloodbags. In our game, Blair plus at least or or two others (depending on player count) collect bloodbags as much as possible. There's a lot of discussion on who to vote for to raise their suspicion. I'd say this is like 40% of the game when we play, with the rest being trying to discuss who should go where and whether we should heavily repair, who should go to the weather station, who should prep food, whatever.

Yeah, the people who had played the game before were doing this - both farming blood bags (unfortunately for them after a couple of good pulls they drew five false ones in a row and by then one guy was outed, the guy he encountered under suspicion, and me forgotten about) and arranging the accusations to put one player up at a time to test. The former is a good strategy but I think the latter is gaming the game and completely takes the accusation round out of the game, you may as well just make a list of what order to test players in and save 5-10mins a round - another meh mark for it against BSG.
I haven't played Outpost 31 but have seen a video on it (watched it by mistake before I realised it was the wrong The Thing) and it looked pretty average.

charlest wrote: ...
I'm a big fan of that game as a competent version of The Thing compared to the many other attempts (including Panic Station and others). BSG is definitely the better game, but one aspect The Thing has that separates it from BSG is that the infection spreads organically. For me, there's much more paranoia in The Thing as you don't want to get infected. This leads to a lot of discussions about being left alone versus using the support rules for better actions.

That paranoia is a bit of a pain, a good mechanic but with the wrong group (like the one I played in) it can hamstring you as any suggestion of going to assist has direct accusations of being the Alien - but the player interaction and threat of infection is the main flavour of the game and removing that and replacing the open accusation round with a premeditated testing regime makes it feel more like a sterile scripted game.

I think this kind of game is incredibly difficult to pull off, and as far as I know, the perfect version of it does not yet exist.

Introduced a friend to Borderlands - Mr. Torgue's Arena of Badassery last night. We started the Skags at the Gates campaign. He had Mr. Torgue and Zane. I had Athena and Nisha.

It quickly became obvious that Athena fairly sucks, and Nisha is fantastic. She gets a "BadAss" token every time she activates, and can spend them to do extra attacks, which would be handy for bosses or other hardy foes.

We beat the first mission fairly easily, although it occurred to me afterwards that I messed up a rule that definitely made it easier for us. If enemies take an Attack action but they can't reach any targets, they do a Move action. I forgot that.

During the mission, we drew a Bounty token from the Loot bag (you draw from the bag after every enemy you kill). We decided after the mission to go on the Bounty, which are basically short side missions that don't affect the campaign but are guaranteed to get you a Legendary if you succeed. The game includes a TON of them. We beat that as well, which involved us defeating some BadAss Psychos and a Boxing Claptrap that would hit you three times every time it attacked. Nisha ended up absolutely kicking ass, for another victory. I am going to keep our progress recorded so we can hopefully make our way through the whole campaign, which would likely be 5 more missions.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 3p. I was the Sawyers. First play so I wasn't too efficient and both trespassers escaped. I should have been more aggressive about raising the Panic Meter at every chance to get the additional Sawyers on the board. I got out the hitchhiker near the end; he and the old man were desperately slashing away as the trespassers repeatedly tried and failed to start the car. Finally it started on the 3rd attempt and they drove off -- three injuries on one, and one on the other.

STARTUPS, the stock/drafting game from Oink. A tight little design that plays really smoothly and quickly. I came in second.

The aptly-named PROJECT L, drafting Tetris pieces to make patterns. No attempt at a theme at all, and as an abstract there's way better ones.

My partner and I played like 5 days of Earthborne Ranger's campaign on Christmas Eve, so basically played all day. Haven't done that with a game for a while.

I played a round of Masters of the Universe solo to get a feel for it. I used the AI system, which works quite a bit differently than when you actually have a human "controller" (the game is 1 vs. many). It was still helpful to see how the game works, and I must say the AI system was very enjoyable; it felt a lot less procedural than AI systems generally do.

He-Man, Orko, Ram Man, and Stratos were tasked with finding Prince Adam (I guess in this version, Prince Adam and He-Man are not one in the same). Skeletor, Beast Man, and Mer Man were tasked with stopping them, or killing Prince Adam. There are four possible locations for the Prince, and Ram Man got lucky and found him on the second try. Unfortunately, you then have to escort him off the map, but by that time, Orko had been killed once, Stratos had been killed once, and finally Beast Man put the smack down on He Man, killing him for the final KO needed for Skeletor to be victorious.

A cool game and I look forward to playing with humans. I also may paint the characters; the miniatures are really nice, and I don't think painting them would be all that difficult.