What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

southernman wrote: 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 )

Nexus Ops is slated for a new edition from Renegade Games soon, along with Risk 2210, Vegas Showdown, and some other stuff.

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

Seems like a no-brainer.

Might be a problem if you are wanting the Buffy board game that was published by Milton Bradley/Hasbro in 2000, because there was a different Buffy board game that was published in 2016 and might still hold the board game license. I've played both games, and the 2000 game is always enjoyable, while the 2016 game was like a dry Arkham Horror, though with an attractive color scheme.

Played The Barracks Emperors for the first time. This was a Dan Thurot suggestion, since he's a huge fan of trick-taking games, but it's also by the designers of Time of Crisis (also by GMT) and based on that game, as well. It's a really interesting scenario wherein each round (of three) you're trying to win 13 tricks (emperors) but all of them are happening at the same time and you can only play cards to your side of the board but which might interact with as many as three other tricks than the one you're targeting. The need to see things from all four sides (quite literally) and think a couple moves ahead is massive here and it creates a really entertaining and competitive game for what is largely an abstract. There's an enormous amount of depth. I can see this one lasting for a long while on the shelf.

A local miniatures store, that has been 5 minutes from my house for 2 years and I did not know existed until a guy I played Blood Bowl with dropped me a message that a league was starting. So I've been getting in some weekly face-to-face blood bowl in my own town. I live about 50 miles North of Minneapolis/St Paul and was playing in a league down there, so it feels awesome to play in town!

Running Halflings as I have decades of experience over everyone else playing- current 1-1-1 and in second place in the league. Having a blast.

Deep Rock Galactic

Sag and I played Deep Rock Galactic this week with two of the younger guys in our group. Ed, the owner, is my neighbor, and mentioned having a copy from Kickstarter when we first found out we were both into gaming (we have kids the same age, so we hang out frequently). I looked it up, and assumed it was another plastic-bloat Kickstarter offering. We've managed to put off actually playing it for almost a year.

We pulled it out this week because we were meeting at my house (our primary host was out of town), we had 4 players, and Sam was interested because he is familiar with the Video Game that it's based off of. Sag and I were unaware of the Vidya Game. (^{get off my lawn!})

It was actually fantastic. Having come off a four week, five scenario Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion stint, I wasn't sure I could get excited about ANOTHER Scenerio-based Co-Op. But Deep Rock Galactic was actually fun. We blew through the intro scenerio and immediately went to the next.

We recorded an episode for the podcast, and the tonal shift between the Gloomhaven and Deep Rock recordings is very apparent.

We go into more detail for the show, but for the two games to be so similar, they achieve very different things. Really looking forward to playing it again.

edulis wrote: A local miniatures store, that has been 5 minutes from my house for 2 years and I did not know existed until a guy I played Blood Bowl with dropped me a message that a league was starting. So I've been getting in some weekly face-to-face blood bowl in my own town. I live about 50 miles North of Minneapolis/St Paul and was playing in a league down there, so it feels awesome to play in town!

Running Halflings as I have decades of experience over everyone else playing- current 1-1-1 and in second place in the league. Having a blast.

It has been around twenty years since I last played Blood Bowl, but league play stands out as a huge highlight of my gaming experiences.

Europe in Turmoil Two Pre Wehraboo Boogaloo

Chuck Krueger and I played this today. Its the sequel to Europe in Turmoil; the new one takes place in between WW1 and WW2 using the Twilight Struggle engine, with some useful tweaks. Most notably, the sucker, I mean player who has to play a Scoring card gets to resolve a ( usually ) 2 OP realignment check just before resolving, so you aren't effectively passing that round and you can obviously hope to impact the region being scored . Neither of us had played, but knowing the era many event cards are not exactly surprises thematically. I was the Right Winger, aka the Fascists so I was putsching and writing Mein Kampf etc . All for naught as I lost by a fair bit towards the end of Turn 9 when Chuck raised Tension enough to trigger end game scoring . We both enjoyed it enough to give it another whirl.

edulis wrote: Running Halflings as I have decades of experience over everyone else playing- current 1-1-1 and in second place in the league. Having a blast.

Pfft, Halflings are OP in the current meta.

At least you're not running Snotlings...

Cappster_ wrote:
Deep Rock Galactic

What he said. We've done a spate of this kind of game and Deep Rock Galactic set a new bar. The whole game just lifted the excitement/amusement level. Kick-ass game to have a couple of beers with.

This is like, 2 months late. For this year's Christmas holiday I visit my parents & in-laws (their houses are like 500meters apart). Since my daughter (10) started to play board games in the recent months, and my sister and her husband is also coming. I decided to haul some games 400km away.

My daughter's favorite game was Castles of Burgundy, which is a very playable game. Very pleasant, but nothing extraordinary.

Architects of the West Kingdom also quickly becomes her favorite. In fact, she prefers this one now, mostly because she gets to kidnap my workers. My opinion of this game has stabilized. I consider this Light-Medium, very quick game once you know what to do. The kidnapping mechanic is really not that significant because during my games you really don't need to get your guys back more than once or twice. The game ends quickly also once you wrap your head around the victory conditions.

The third one is an old favorite of my family, Concordia. I have the base game and one expansion, so there's a map for 2, 3, 4, 5 players. This holiday we managed to play all the maps. Dry, but always fun, engaging & pleasant. This is one of the games that makes us stand around the tables during the final rounds.

Finally, I had gotten my grubby hands on Brass: Birmingham. We had no stock sof it in the country for like... almost two years. But finally I got it. We played first half a game. And later a full game. And, oh my, I glad I was holding out for it and didn't get Nucleum. I really like the game, and while some people online pointed out its complexity on network & connections, I got the concept, and managed to guide others during the game. Aaand... it has to be said, the elegance is great. It's such a simple system with a huge payout. Not many games allow you to use other's people production. Great market mechanism. And, for me a lot of it makes sense. At least in my top #3. This is the only game my daughter didn't play.

(yea you may note all were dry Euros, but I'm at the phase where I prefer my games to be reliable instead of a few highs with lots of lows; if I want drama I turned to Netflix--or just play the peacemaker between my daughter and the wife)

It's time for Jen Con again; my friends' in-house board game gathering. As people filtered in, we were playing several rounds of Brawl, which is a card game that can be played either in turns or real-time (i.e. as fast as you can.) You're trying to pile up more hits on bases that are pictures of each fighter. Ties are decided by whose base it is and you can play several others types of cards like blocks, which prevent more hits; presses, which get rid of blocks; reverses, which means the one with the fewest hits wins; clears, which remove that fight from scoring; and so on. Each deck has variations in the number of the various cards with some having none at all of certain types or colors. We've played it before and it's entertaining as a very beer-and-pretzels type thing (mostly beer, as it becomes even goofier when you're a couple pints in.)

Then we split up to play more organized games. I taught a round of Villainous. Everyone had played at least once before, so they knew the gist of it, which made the teach easy. It was Pete vs Gaston vs Evil Queen vs Oogie Boogie (me.) Oogie is the only deck I hadn't played, since it was the last thing released by Prospero Hall before their unfortunate dissolution. Gaston was making real progress and the Queen was constantly complaining about not having useful cards while cycling through her whole deck. Pete accomplished one of his goals and I had a couple Impostor Sandy Claws out, but not before the Queen turned most of her power to Poison, found Snow White, and had her bite the apple. I'd like to try Oogie again because I'm not sure where he is on the difficulty scale (1-3) at the moment, but I suspect he veers toward the harder end.

After that, I went upstairs to join a game of Isle of Skye, as I'd never played before. It's a tile-laying game where you go through six rounds buying tiles from others and sometimes picking up your own to try to meet victory conditions that vary with each round. You also have to heed the terrain rules in your tile placement of your kingdom, much like Catan. I was left short early on because people kept buying my tiles, which meant that I was only placing the one I bought while everyone else was placing at least two. That gave them a pretty serious edge, which feels like a rather extraordinary flaw to me. You gain points for having the most money at the end and one of our conditions was having the most money, which I did in almost every round that it mattered, but the points for that pale in comparison to building a solid kingdom with various terrain types and scroll bonuses and so forth. I managed a distant third out of four, so I at least didn't finish dead last, but I can't say I'm really a fan of this one, in the same way that I'm not especially a fan of Catan. When it comes to tile-laying, I think I'll stick with T&E.

This week, Sag was the only taker for game night, so we pulled out a couple of two-player games.

First was Summoner Wars, the first edition. Sag played Frick of the Cave Goblins while I went with Selundar of the Shadow Elves. In the end, Sag's horde of Cave Goblins handily defeated Selundar. He had a lot of common units that cost nothing to summon (and a champion that was free to play) and was dumping more units on the board every turn than I could deal with. I went aggressive with Selundar, as he gets bonus attack dice for closing on targets (much like my favorite summoner/faction, Sunderved/Mountain Vargath). I didn't get to use his bonus effectively because Sag was successful in surrounding him, which led to his eventual downfall.

We then played Air, Land & Sea twice. We split the games one to one. It's a light 18-card game that has a few interesting concepts and decisions that can be made. The theme is paper thin, and Sag wondered why the units depicted on the cards were so inaccurate from their historical counterparts. I thought the "tactical retreat" mechanism was interesting, and I could see it being used in other applications to significant effect.

We did record on both games, so expect episodes in the near future.

Brawl is a blast from the past. I was hard into James Ernest and the Cheapass Games oeuvre for a good while. I loved the concept, and they were the only games I could afford.

Between my friends and me we managed to buy almost every character and would play on free days in band.

I still have my Crane and Nikki decks. I should see if my boys are interested.

On the second day of Jen Con, we started in the morning, but we were also short a couple people that we'd expected to be there (illness, life, etc.) so we had to reorganize a bit. I started with a three-player game of Favor of the Pharaoh, which is a Thomas Lehmann design that uses dice as its prime mechanism. You're trying to get increasingly powerful tiles that give you more dice or more rerolls or more reroll/buff tokens and so on. I'm not particularly a Lehmann fan, but I do like dice, so I was willing to give it a try and it turned out OK. I think he did a bit too much curbing of real chance in the game to appeal to his Euro audience, in that you can modify the dice in so many different ways that a lot of the risk is taken out of it and there's no real push your luck element at all, but it's interesting to build a tableau and see how you can get it to function. The tile system reminded me of Kemet, which neither of my opponents had heard of, which I thought was unusual, since they're both pretty experienced gamers. We played quickly enough that we got in two plays in our timeslot because other games were still (ahem) rolling. I won the first and came in a narrow second in the next.

Then it was time for lunch, over which we played two rounds of Green Team Wins. It's basically an exercise in groupthink, trying to predict the most popular answers to questions that range from oblique to obvious. It was OK, but I've played many better party games.

Then I was able to break out Wonderland's War for the first time. Because we were short people, the five-person game I'd been hoping for was reduced to three, but it was still the Mad Hatter vs the Cheshire Cat vs the Jabberwock. Learning it is a tall ask for a lot of people because there are so many little details (the powers on the Ally chips, the Upgrade abilities, the various Wonderlandians, the intricate combat system, etc.) But both of my opponents adapted quickly and started pursuing serious strategies, mostly oriented around Leader strength, which I, as the Cat, didn't engage in at all. That gave Jabberwock some big wins in a couple spots, but I kept shifting my supporters around and pitching enough Shards to them in the Tea Party phase that they both ran into madness problems later and I was able to slip by at the end 46-44-39. This was the best game I played on the weekend and I'm eager to get it back out on the table.

Then I finally acceded to my friend, Brad's (one of the hosts; his wife is Jen; hence, Jen Con) requests to try the new version of Sentinels of the Multiverse. I did not like the first edition at all, despite my fondness for the wonky superhero (aka non-Marvel or DC) theme. First off, I don't really like co-ops and, secondly, there was way too much tinkering with the cards and some heroes clearly outclassed others, such that one person would be the focus and be the real actor, while other people would just stand around and toss in a card or two once in a while. I had a similar experience the first time I played Marvel Legendary, when I was She-Hulk and me and Spider-Man largely did a lot of watching while Iron Man (the game's owner) did a dozen plays every turn and almost singlehandedly knocked out both villain (the Rhino) and scheme. This time, I was playing Fanatic, who's a high-risk, self-damaging hero to pull off big damage moments... which is kinda like She-Hulk, so maybe it was a mistake to play her. I was accompanied by Harpy, a villain turned hero, and Absolute Zero, basically another Iron Man. Both of those are far more complex decks than Fanatic so I ended up in the same situation: both of them would be playing 5, 6, 7 or more cards a turn and doing all kinds of actions that sprang from their tableaus, while I would play 1 card, use my power, and then draw a card. My turns took 30 seconds, if that. Theirs took 3 minutes, at least. So, despite my longstanding disdain for people who complain about downtime in games, I have to say that this was extreme enough for me to really start wanting the game to end, since I was mostly sitting there watching them play... just like the first edition of Sentinels. After some hairy moments, I finally got my character down to 10 or less life, which is when she actually becomes interesting and/or effective and we won against the giant plant woman or whoever. Not something I'm eager to play again.

Then we played a couple four-player games of Scout. I'd never played before, despite hearing about it from many sources (not least Dan Thurot.) I liked it. It's a very compact game with some interesting twists on trick-taking. The theme is the very definition of "pasted on", though. No one would ever look at this and consider for one minute that it was about recruiting to carnivals. That sounds like they just reached into a hat for a theme and drew out "carnivals" and tried to make it stick. I finished dead last because I just couldn't get anything out of my first three hands and only my last one rescued something for me, finally wiping out my negative score and leaving me at zero.

Then I taught three people to play Cat in the Box, as we were apparently comparing trick-takers. They all enjoyed it, especially one of them who never failed in his prediction for tricks and finished the game with the highest score I've yet seen, with 20. I was impressed.

In the end, another good version of Jen Con. And I might have even talked a couple people into playing Weimar with me...

Been obsessively playing Imperium: Classics.

I must be pretty basic, I find myself having a lot of fun even with the one and two star complexity factions. Keep trying to beat the Greek bot with the Macedonians, I had to take a break and try someone else because I kept losing. The Greek bot does a pretty huge fat deck turn after turn in empire and I can't seem to prevent it.