What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

A couple of plays of Ra with my family. Teached my son how to use low valued suns. Was worth it if just to see 6-yo utter "You're so naive" to his mom after a succesfull bluff.

Knizia is a well respected designer in our house so we also played Whoowasit?. Wife was feeling like she needed a challenge so we went for the hardest difficulty level. We play this a lot because kid loves it so imagine my suprise when near the end the voice from the box announced that after taking some misstep I've been eliminated. It has never happened to us before through so many plays so you can imagine the moment of silence and then a sudden burst of laughter that followed. Now I know how my son felt when he used to freak out when that ghost announced his movement.

RULES QUESTION

wasn't sure if I should have started a thread for this. But in ARENA OF THE PLANESWALKERS it says that a planeswalker can summon up to two figurines to the board before action 3 (moving units). Action 2 is selecting the army you want to use during the turn. Does this mean that I can summon 2 units of the same army and move/attack with them the turn they come into play? Or does "Before Action 3" mean after Action 2 (which is where you select the army). Say, Nissa was on the board by her lonesome elvish self, and I wanted to summon two archers. Could I select in Action 2 the Archers even though they're not on the board yet, then summon then before Action 3, and then use them that turn?

I'm trying to figure out if by "Before Action 3", they're purposely making it after action 2 to account for summoning sickness (which I don't even know is in this game).

This rulebook sucks so far. Still not as bad as Power Grid.

Thanks fatties!

I have bad news.

Cthulhu Wars is pretty great. I think.

Out of all of the things I expected out of that box, I have to say that the thing I _least_ expected was a shockingly lean, terrifyingly streamlined DoaM game that moves at a breakneck pace. Despite the miniatures (more on them in a minute), the size, and the cost CW is almost a _minimalist_ design. There is no fuss, barely any administration...no cards, no heart counters. The only thing you really have to keep track of is what is on the board. You get a player board, two markers for power and doom and your figures. And there aren't many of them, unit density is low. There are some Elder Sign markers, gates and desecration markers for the Hastur/King in Yellow player. It sets up in about five minutes.

What follows stunned me with how quickly it got to the point. You get power for cultists, gates and a couple of special conditions. You use that power to do one action per turn- generally putting pieces/gates on the board, moving stuff, or fighting. There are couple of twists, like the ability to abduct cultists. Everything co-exists in the spaces until someone takes a battle action. Everybody totals up combat values and rolls. Sixes kill- even a GOO, but you can just resummons later. You don't have to track HP on them or anything like that. Fours and Fives cause monsters to be "pained", basically forcing a retreat. That's pretty much it.

The only real "gamer's game" element is that you earn faction-specific spellbooks for achievements specific to your GOO. Black Goat gets some for putting a bunch of stuff out (the 1,000 Young, yo), Hastur/King in Yellow needs to desecrate certain areas, and so forth. But these are generally not too difficult to accomplish. The order you choose the spellbooks seems like it may be a significant strategic concern.

At the beginning of a round, you can pay power points (thus limiting your flexibility in the coming round) to commit to a ritual of annihilation, which basically doubles your doom points for controlled gates. So ideally, you set up for a big, gate-claiming turn and then do this.

Tons of fighting, all the DoaM trimmings. It feels like it's about 20 minutes per player because the game just MOVES. No turtling, no protracted "cold war" or setup for later turns. It's quite vicious. No hidden information other than the points from the Elder Signs, which also help to accelerate the game (it ends when someone has 30 points on the doom track).

Production- OK, the miniatures actually impressed me. They aren't miniatures, they're more like sculptures. The sculpts are outstanding, they look friggin' awesome on the board. Even the lowly cultists look great. I seriously just started laughing when I saw that big yellow Hastur figure.

They come in this hard plastic tray that I'm already thinking about recycling, even though it is big, heavy and probably added dollars to the production cost. The box is HUGE, and actually quite nicely illustrated. The rulebook is nicely printed on better-than-usual stock and the rules are really well-written.

But it's unavoidably disappointing that a game that doesn't really have much stuff has some corner-cutting stuff in it. The player mats, the doom track and all are pretty flimsy. This is a review copy so I'm not entitled to complain, but if I opened a $200 game and saw that the paperstock doom track had some dinged up corners I'd be sort of ill. The dice are plain ol' 6mm D6s. The board is fine, but it seems terribly plain.

Very excited to play more...there is definitely a good out-of-the-box game here, but I can't lie and say that I'm not now interested in seeing what the expansions do..

Also, to get this out of the way, the game isn't really anything like Chaos in the Old World. It's cleaner, more chopped down and slicked back. Some high level concepts are the same, but at no point did I feel like I was playing a $200 version of CitOW.

I'll give you 50 bucks for it.

I'll send you this plastic tray for $50, that is probably about retail for it.

Just listened to Charlie's podcast interview with Petersen. Now I want to play again... but Blood Rage is the next big game night.

If you pledge at the $1 level for the Onslaught 2 Kickstarter they will send you thicker doom track. You can buy thicker player mats for $10 I believe (includes all player mats for that price).

I still think the game is definitely comparable to Chaos in the Old World, at a high level as you say. I never contested that the details were different. It did consistently make me think of Chaos when playing, despite those differences that you, and Pete very eloquently in the other thread, pointed out.

Talking to Sandy made me want to play it again as well. The way he described the asymmetry and his design process in the interview was fascinating and refreshing.

I still feel its a stripped down version of Chaos, and its still an inferior game to Chaos, and that's before you throw in the price.

Definitely disagree on the stripped down version of Chaos idea. I'm a huge fan of Chaos but CW is very very different. For reference I own both and have played both about a dozen times in the past year. The similarities lie mainly in that its a dudes on a map game. Like Kemet or Blood Rage you are given a limited amount of actions each round you can take. You summon/place/move guys and get into fights and points mainly relate to controlling areas or killing stuff, like Nexus Ops. Yes it is similar in that sense, and it has a sort of demonic theme to it. Thats it. In CW I can feel like a badass even with a non-combat focused faction like Black Goat or Yellow Sign, unlike in Chaos where Khorne has all the fun and the other gods mostly run. CW lets you react alot more to the other players moves as opposed to Chaos where each faction has a target that they mainly aim for, regardless of the other players. Khorne being the exception in Chaos the other gods are happy to sit and play a kind of euro about having the most tokens in an area to score. CW doesn't fuck around with that mechanic and is a straight DOAM game about controlling point locations and looking for weaknesses in everyone else. Chaos has fiddly tokens about dominance, corruption, nobles, and an event deck that fucks up the map randomly for 2+ turns that only half the board remembers is a thing. CW is straight your dudes vs. my dudes, no event deck no temporary rules for this round. I really like both games alot, but at this point I don't compare the two games any more than I compare Kemet to Chaos or Blood Rage to Chaos. CW is far easier to teach and run also but still has the depth due to the spellbooks and the unique units and abilities for each side.

I've played Twilight Struggle twice in the past week. The first game was the first I've played in a couple of years, and probably my 4th game overall. I was the USSR and after reading up on the basics of the opening moves, I managed to pull off a win around turn 5. My opponent had as much experience as I did. We kind of stumbled through the game, but it was fun.

Last night I got to play again, this time with a player new to the game. Once again I played as the Soviets and managed to win on Turn 8 by headlining the SE Asia scoring card. The whole thing really clicked during this game, and I really got a feel for the cards and to not really worry about playing my opponent's events. I also able to focus my attention at the right areas at the right time. The new guy really liked the game, so I should be able to play more often.

Last night I played Rum & Bones with my friend. He got it on Kickstarter so he has all sorts of extras. Basically each player has a pirate ship and a crew. The crew is made up of cannon fodder and heroes. The heroes have special powers that can be triggered by spending gold (sometimes for free). You march your crew forward to destroy key points on the other guy's ship and have to wade through many dudes to get there.

At some point during the game it's likely that a kraken will appear and mess with everyone. It definitely added some variety to the proceedings.

The game is not unpleasant, and I'd play it again. It moved rather slowly but this was a first game. It's very.... mechanical. Most of your turn is going through the motions and I wouldn't say there's much in the way of interesting decisions to be made. However, it's attractive and like I said, not unpleasant. But I'm glad it was his money and not mine.

Last night we played Merchant of Venus using FFG's version with the classic rules. Even though I was teaching some folks, I thought we'd play to 3000 credits to give the infrastructure a chance to breathe a little. The guy who won was able to take advantage of demand tokens to really make a killing. I tried to pursue a freighter strategy, but I think I started a little too late to really make it work. I hadn't played in over a year, and it's been even longer since I've played the classic game. Merchant of Venus is such a terrific game, and it was good to get back to it.

We followed it up with Five Tribes + expansion. I know it's not really an F:AT kind of game, but I really enjoy that one. You wouldn't know how experienced I am by how I played last night. It might be because it was so late, but I played a terrible game and got a distant fourth. Still really like it, but I don't think I was up to the task last night.

Merchants of Venus is awesome.

San Il Defanso wrote: Last night we played Merchant of Venus using FFG's version with the classic rules. Even though I was teaching some folks, I thought we'd play to 3000 credits to give the infrastructure a chance to breathe a little. The guy who won was able to take advantage of demand tokens to really make a killing. I tried to pursue a freighter strategy, but I think I started a little too late to really make it work. I hadn't played in over a year, and it's been even longer since I've played the classic game. Merchant of Venus is such a terrific game, and it was good to get back to it.

While I think the FFG edition is a little over cluttered graphically ( if only they had used the artwork on BGG from Dardekasomeone ) I like what they did. I haven't played the FFG "new" rules , at first glance they look more random and prone to runaway leaders.

The game was ahead of its time in a lot of ways; it doesn't seem to have gained much of a wider audience despite the new edition.

It really is awesome. It has a great balance between exploration and that race to get to the victory threshhold. It also has just about the perfect level of randomness. The first person to go through a tricky area runs some real risks with the nav circles and the encounter tokens, but then everyone knows exactly what they'll need to do. And then the dice-based movement makes it really difficult to plan precisely, but it's not so random that it throws the experience. You can always plan for the next turn or two, but there are always some things that might delay you.