What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Great to see Buffy hitting the table, after sleeving all my cards (had to buy larger ones and then carefully cut them all down by about 5mm) I haven't had the opportunity to get it out, and Nexus Ops (I sold mine off a few years back in a moment of 'must sell games that aren't getting played' madness , never going to get it back at a non-stupid price )

Buffy got rave reviews from new players, multiple plays two nights in a row. Always delivers a good time.

I'm still surprised there has been no movement from Restoration Games concerning Buffy.

Seems like a no-brainer.

IP rights are often both expensive and a pain in the ass to secure.

I can't imagine Buffy is that expensive, plus they have already gotten those rights for Unmatched. So they at least have a relationship in place with the rights holders.

Cappster_ wrote: I can't imagine Buffy is that expensive, plus they have already gotten those rights for Unmatched. So they at least have a relationship in place with the rights holders.

You’d be surprised. Years ago a designer contacted Hasbro to try to obtain the rights to an old Avalon Hill title. The price quote he got back was laughably high compared to what the new edition might have sold; he sort of took it to mean “ yeah we got the files/paperwork etc buried here somewhere, but you gotta make it worth our while to even bother to go look for it “.

The eldest finally prevailed upon me to attempt the cooperative crisis mode of the DC Deck-Building Game. That’s two hours of my life I’m not getting back.

It’s the same game but with pumped super villains that can’t be defeated before a crisis is overcome which can’t be finished if any villains are in the lineup. It’s an absolute drag. The challenges aren’t fun or interesting. The wrong combination of villain and crisis is crippling. The wrong crisis at the too early is crippling. You never feel clever. You’re just at the mercy of your draw and market flip because sometimes every player needs to destroy a five-cost plus hero from hand on the same turn.

Not that it matters to my boy. He played himself two-handed an hour later.

It’s too bad. There’s a kernel of something fun when something gonzo happens like you lose your deck and gain a new character. Or when we abused the White and Black Lantern Power Rings to recur the best characters and then recur the rings with Star Sapphire. Maybe with extensive organizing of crises into early and late piles and a reduction in total villains it could be a tolerable game.

It is really something to earnestly play something with a child who is having a great time and you're thinking but not expressing "why is this game designed so badly?"

...and Marvel Champions, Sentinels of the Multiverse, or something similar that is competently designed is RIGHT THERE.

Marvel Champions is definitely too much at this age, but we do have Sentinels and have played a few times. It’s a lot more stressful for them because they can see their health drop, and the longer playtime makes it harder to fit in.

oh no doubt, if they're having fun that's the point, but it's a weird moment.

Normal Saturday group, followed by a community game day. Some old stalwarts and then a few new-to-me:

ZOO VADIS. Reprint/retheme of Knizia classic QUO VADIS, which I'd never played. The animal theme is fine-ish but it doesn't really make much sense. Animals competing to be in the fanciest cage in the zoo, ugh. Could have just done a "king of the mountain" get-to-the-top style since it's already full-on fantasy with animals wearing hats and stuff. The special powers are very odd; you can let other people use your special power, but you can never use it yourself. And there's NPC animals that you can bribe for votes to advance. Both of these were not in the original (apparently) and feel bolted on. The NPC animals might be good; I guess in the original people could shut down the game by never making deals for votes (like people who never trade in Catan) so this is a way around that.

SILVER SCREEN. A lost Knizia; a company was all set to print it and then went out of business. The rights were never cleaned up for some reason, and Knizia didn't fight too hard for them as he felt the game's themes were better addressed by some of his other designs (primarily Traumfabrik). A few months ago a former employee posted some low-res scans of all the game components. A guy in my group downloaded them, photoshopped them into an acceptable resolution, filled in the parts that were lacking (illos for the card backs, rulebook, box art) and had the whole thing printed in China. From what I can tell his copy is one of about five in the world.

The game itself is really good. It's an auction game where you're bidding for lots of movie folk in the golden age of cinema -- directors, stars, supporting cast, composers, effects people, and cinematographers. You assemble them to "make a movie," i.e. claim a card for points. Movies have a minimum talent level to make (e.g. total value on all the people involved) and while directors and stars can be in any movie, the other people have specialties (horror, drama, comedy) and won't work with people not in their specialty. The economy is completely closed -- everyone starts the game with $X; when you win an auction your bid is distributed evenly among the other players (remainder staying in the pot). So there's an interesting push-pull aspect where going in big can fuel your opponents for the next auction, while you're broke.

I don't know if it's better than RA but it's very close. I'd say "run out and play this" but that's not really possible. It cost my friend about $60 to have it printed and shipped (plus all the photoshop time) -- new, it'd probably retail for around $35 as it could sit into a San Juan box pretty easily. A real shame that it's not more widely available.

I won a prize for making the worst movie: Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a comedy.

Just FYI: the new aspects to Zoo Vadis (unique powers and peacocks) were added in (bolted on) by the good doctor himself.

I really like the sound of Silver Screen (and have a vague memory of having heard of it before as one of his "lost" games.) If you're interested in the theme, I can recommend Roll, Camera. It's a co-op but I thought the interweaving of mechanics and theme was done really well.

Went to visit some friends and played three new (to me) games today. First up was the worst of them, thankfully, called Seasons. It's a completely mechanical Euro about tableau-building and generating points with only the vaguest attachment to theme. You know how Knizia used to get tagged with the label that his games had pasted-on themes? Aside from the fact that that's mostly bullshit, as the vast majority of his output have clear thematic ties to every mechanism that he creates for them, his stuff also pales in comparison to some of these creations that seem far more like someone liked a theme and had a mechanical design in mind and simply decided to lay the former over the latter. In this case, you have magic items and familiars; the former mostly help you, the latter mostly inhibit or penalize your opponents in one way or another. The latter is present sufficiently that it isn't entirely multiplayer solitaire like Race for the Galaxy or something similar, but it's not too far off that, as you spend most of your time simply staring at your own hand and the cards on the table in front of you and looking up only when an opponent points out that something you did earned them a point (crystal) or something like that. But it's entirely like wiring an old-fashioned circuit board, but one subject to the whims of the initial draft and the rolls of the dice. At one round per player, it also suffers significantly from a massive advantage for the first player in the first round, who has the ability to get their initial tableau set up much more to their liking (first pick of each roll of the dice for as long as the round lasts), which basically sets them on their way while others are left to pick through decreasingly helpful dice and find themselves behind. It's supposed to be ameliorated by subsequent players going first in later rounds when you've presumably been able to set up a functional engine. Needless to say, that was not my experience. I would gladly never play this again.

Then we switched to Clank!, which I'd never had a chance to play before. Again, not a huge interaction game, since you're all basically trying to solve the same puzzle without dying, a la Dungeonquest. But far more enjoyable for me, since I like board-based deckbuilders, largely because they seem to present much more agency to players both in terms of where you move on the board, what you pick up from the market, and how you can properly execute your hand. I've seen it written that Clank! in Space is the better overall version, since the options for movement are more plentiful, but I'd gladly play the original again. I went the risky route and grabbed the 30 point artifact and was easily leading in terms of points with other things I'd found (dragon eggs) and killing the goblin repeatedly, but I'd also gotten trapped behind a locked passage and I couldn't find my companion card that would let me teleport for multiple hands. By the time I got past that, the other two players were either out or very close to it, which meant that I was the one suffering from repeated dragon attacks and I died, still in the Depths. Nevertheless, a great time.

Finally, we tried the DC Deckbuilding game. Given the option of heroes at the start, I chose to Always Be Batman, facing Green Lantern and Superman. The latter and I are on parallel paths, in that I was constantly looking for Equipment and he for Super-powers. Problem is, most of the Equipment cards are pretty cheap, which means that other players, if they have an average or lesser hand, can easily sweep them up for a couple points of Power and deny them to you. They're all better than Punches and, if they have no other options, they're still useful to pick up. Meanwhile, Super-powers are usually pretty expensive, so a lot more of those got left in the lineup for Supes. But Green Lantern knocked out Ra's Al Ghul and, consequently, got the jump on us in terms of a big impact card early on. They then took down Darkseid and that gave them an edge in terms of purging starter cards of which there seemed to be very few (a pet peeve of mine with deckbuilders.) So, in the end, based on Equipment I was able to compile, I managed to beat a couple of the 9 villains and Supes also got a couple, but GL got all the rest and slaughtered us in points. It's still something I'd be willing to try again, although both of them asserted that Flash is near broken with the base set, just based on card draw access.

Seasons used to get a ton of praise. I've always hated it.

Many people compare the 2023 darling Vale of Eternity to Seasons and claim they are similar. It's the main reason I haven't checked out Vale yet.

TIGER & DRAGON. 2p, then 3p. Really good, such a simple concept but has a fun mix of thinky strategizing, playing the odds, and sometimes going all-out. My favorite Oink game now.

13 MINUTES, x2. Trying to distill the Twilight Struggle experience down even more than 13 DAYS. It's pretty good but so short it will feel random until you get a bunch of plays in. You only get five turns so you have to make each one count.

FLOTSAM FIGHT, 3p. A lesser Oink. Fine, but I don't need a copy. Kind of a climbing game.

TROIKA, 3p. Another lesser Oink. No need for this to be tiles instead of cards. Bogothematic set collection with some arbitrary rules about what you can take and when.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 3p. I might need to stop being the Sawyers when playing with noobs; it's getting too easy to steamroll people. A couple lucky injuries (halving carrying capacity) and saving up my fear to increase panic level, and then murder away. Fun game still.