What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

It was great

Played two more games of Battlelore, 2nd. Ed. I was still on the Undead, since I hadn't played any games with the Banshee, while my opponent went with the Uthuk for both games. I went with the Terrors of the Mists list: 3 x Reanimates, 3 x Bone Horrors, 3 x Necromancers, 1 x Barghests, Banshee, while he defaulted to the Warband of Scorn for the first game: 2 x Blood Harvesters, 3 x Berzerkers, 2 x Blood Sisters, 2 x Grotesques, Doombringer.

1st game was the Undead Taming the Twin Vipers to the Uthuk's Veil of Secrets., which made for a really weird terrain setup, with the Vipers adjoined rivers abutting the Veil's massive area of hills. Veil calls for a pretty aggressive approach, since you can spend 2 lore every time you eliminate an enemy to gain 1 VP and you gain 2 lore for holding the building in the midst of the hills. But Vipers has 2 banner hexes, allows any friendly unit on a banner to counter with an extra die, and gives you 1 VP if you control fewer banner hexes than your opponent. So it's ideal for a slow attrition-and-hold force like I had and that's pretty much what happened, as I gained a minimum of 2 VP/turn right up to 16 and the win. The fact that my opponent lost the Doombringer on its initial attack didn't help. I've never been really impressed with the beetle and this kind of drove the point home. The Banshee and a Bone Horror unit wiped it out and then the former just gummed up that side of the board for a few more turns while the Necros cast Raise Dead a couple times to regenerate the minions and the game was over, 16-7.

2nd game was the Undead Widow Stone to the Uthuk's Staking a Claim. My opponent kept the same list but switched out the beetle for the Chaos Lord and I stuck with the Terrors list, since I still wanted to see what the Banshee could really do. The map arrangement put the only 2 banner markers on my left side within 2 hexes of each other, which meant that if someone piled on that area, it would be tough to catch up in the VP race. Staking a Claim has the more challenging alternate condition, since you have to leave units in all 3 types (clear, forest, hill) of terrain, while Widow Stone just requires you to keep all units off the central hill, but my opponent spread out nicely and I lacked the pushing power to clear him out. Also, he moved the Chaos Lord up aggressively on that left side, probably knowing that a bunch of Reanimates and dice-dependent casters would have trouble rousting him. So he moved in on the Banshee at my banner marker and did a glorious total of 1 wound, while the Banshee countered with 4(!): 2 Cleaves, 2 Strikes. On my turn, the Banshee finished off the Lord with two more wounds, but the Uthuk were still a point ahead in the VP race and a good chunk of my force was trapped in the center behind the river of Staking a Claim. We both puttered around the edges for several turns until the Uthuk, trying to finally establish dominance over both banners, moved a Berzerker unit off their hill... and lost the alternate scoring condition. I quickly ran my Barghests over and secured that hill while clinging to my banner marker with a unit of Necros. He had made good use of his Blood Sisters to clear out most of that side, but all of his units on that side were now Bleeding, which meant that he couldn't use their power any longer, and I'd kept up Drain rolls with my Necros so he didn't have Lore to spare in order to clear the Bleeds on them. With the loss of that one point, I won a turn later, 17-16.

Edit: Forgot that a key topdeck of Morbid Grasp (6 lore; play after your opponent's Command step. Choose 2 enemy units. Those units can't move in your opponent's Move step.) led to the securing of that hill by the Barghests, since the two closest unit were frozen and two past them were unable to march around them and reclaim the hill. A Runic Siphon (1 lore; play after your opponent plays a Lore card. You either counter your opponent's card or gain Lore equal to its cost.) on the previous turn against a Bone Spurs had given me the Lore to play the Grasp. Card draw. Fer reals.

This remains one of the favorite games in my (now much smaller) collection. I really wish I got the chance to play it more often.

He had made good use of his Blood Sisters to clear out most of that side, but all of his units on that side were now Bleeding, which meant that he couldn't use their power any longer,

Spheres of Influence. I backed it on KS based on the wide player range and the promise of a more strategical kind of Risk game. It delivers on both fronts.

First the positive: It really does play alright across the player range. The low-player-count concept is the old standard where you control multiple factions. The game handles it better than most as you're allowed to have one hand of event cards for all your factions, and your factions have a special Annex action that lets one of your factions take territory from another of your factions without having to do the whole "battle with yourself" thing. It also is a more strategical Risk type game. There's a production track, oil resources, and very sensible victory conditions that aren't "take over the whole world". It also plays in a limited number of rounds, so you know what you're getting into. There's a neat balancing dynamic that lets factions in the lead get more units and take more turns, but players lower in status get to place their units last. This works pretty well; the players without high production output (reinforcements) get to react to the other players' reinforcement positions. There's a turn deck so you don't know which faction's turn is coming up next that does add some tension and "gotcha" type stuff. The battle mechanic is also interesting and quick, and there are variable start positions that lend themselves to allying with your neighbors to take down that guy who got a favorable starting spot.

But the negative: It feels like a more sensible and strategic Risk type game. The sensible is really the downer for me. There's definitely more room for strategy, some really cool event cards that played at the right time can turn the tides of battle, and the game is very refined. But refined Risk type games aren't hard to find. I'm at a point where I enjoy the unpredictable and sometimes the unbalanced. Don't get me wrong, this is a good game that I think will do well, but it isn't the particular brand of excitement I'm looking for any more. Games like Quartermaster General give me opportunities to do the unexpected and put my ass on the line because of the card-driven nature and being in the right place at the right time to take on a gamble. Spheres of Influence has a way of making you feel clever because you had the right event card for the right time, but the truth is you weren't clever. Failing to use the right cards at the right time might make you look like a dunce, but using them is just the right move most of the time. Too sensible. Player alliances are really what make the game interesting, but again there's no shortage of games that provide that same experience.

I don't want to sound too negative; I really feel that Spheres of Influence is a well-designed game. I just don't find it very exciting.

Taught my daughter Orleans via a 2p game. But mostly I wanted her to learn the system so we could try the co-op scenario from the Invasion expansion a few days later. The expansion is excellent and I think makes a very good Euro deck-building/worker placement game into something great. There are a number of goals that players need to accomplish cumulatively, but each player also gets a character card with some specific things they need to fulfill. It's really challenging to balance all of that, though we did come pretty close to winning. Closer in that game, actually, then either of the times I tried it solo the next day.

The expansion also comes with three specific solo scenarios, but I think for that, just playing 2 characters of the Invasion co-op game is a better solo experience. There's also some general expansion stuff for the base game and a 2 player scenario that I haven't tried yet.

If you haven't played Orleans, I'd recommend it as a Euro with a good mix of things going on, and with a halfway decent thematic structure, where you get at least a vague sense of using your different types of workers to accomplish different things.

Played the intro scenario for Heroes of Normandie. A few hiccups with checking the rulebook, but ultimately was easy to learn and we both liked it a lot. Looking forward to playing more.

I only play Arkham Horror 2-3 times a year these days. We always play with all the boards, because I have table that can handle it. But the setup/takedown time is so long that it never sees casual play, just a planned event that I host. A couple of new friends that I made within the last year have boardgame experience but never even heard of Arkham Horror. So we had a six-player game, with three veteran AH players, 2 rookies, and a reluctant girlfriend.

Eihort was the big bad, and he's the one that infects you when kill cultists, seal gates, or face him in final battle. We did a terrible job for most of the game, sealing only two gates. When the doom factor hit 10/12, we decided to switch tactics and gear up for final battle. Amazingly, we had another eight turns before final battle, so we were well-prepared. We steadily whupped on Eihort, but just before the end, one of his special cards came up. He would have gotten a free attack on every player, but we easily smacked him down. Just for laughs, I had everybody roll dice as though we were facing that special attack, and 4 out of 6 of us would have died, giving Eihort a big boost in hit points. So it was actually a very close win.

All the new folks left, so we veterans sat down to play Camp Grizzly. It was my first terrible game of Camp Grizzly. One player lucked into both a knife and meat cleaver right away, and Otis kept attacking him and losing. We easily escaped, but that turned out to be a mini-adventure involving fighting a small gang. We won anyway.

So we had to play Camp Grizzly again immediately, though one of our players would need to leave early. We chose a more difficult level of play, and that helped keep things challenging. The guy who needed to leave early tried to escape, but got the same street gang final encounter. Our guy has a chainsaw, but he rolls low and instead gets killed by a spiked baseball bat. That left Scott and I a chance to win. A few turns later, we ran for a different exit, and made it out. Much more fun at the higher difficulty level.

A Study in Emerald 2nd Edition with four players. One had played 1st ed a few times, the other two were new. Clarifying rules and such was relatively straightforward, though still some confusion around the green/pink/black points and the nebulous concept of potential points. Schrodinger's Points we jokingly referred to them as. I got a lot of agents out, including pinching two from another player, who I had assumed was a dirty loyalist. Luckily, the player who pushed the score to the end game (by killing that dirty loyalist's last agent, who turned out to be restorationist) had also been standing on the neck of him team mate the whole game, lost half of his assassination points as a result, and after deducting the track points (I had pushed Resto pretty hard after blatantly outing myself with two royal murders) ended up back on 15 points with me. As the restorationist, I won the game due to the tie-breaker rule.

I think people enjoyed it, it should play smoother the next time, and there were still interesting things happening. Not as fascinating as the original, but very tactical and certainly faster to play.

Blood Rage with four players. This time I went with mostly ignoring quests, focusing on getting figures on the board. This set me up for a nice third age, and I used Thor and Heimdall cards to deprive card powers and win battles. I was worried during the A3 draft that I kept passing great Loki cards to the player who was already going Loki, but it turns out that all the points he could make, would still not be enough. Age 3 came down to stalling tactics, I kept placing warriors anywhere on the board just to keep from having to pass, which choked out the board and forced an opponent to pass on six rage. That left me with enough rage to march to Ygdrassil and call a pillage. With my mystics, fire giant and leader in there, plus almost all warriors, maxing my tracks for +60 points meant a solid victory. This was the first game I really tried to focus on winning battles and holding board position, and it worked really well.

No Thanks still kind of random, but some good laughs had.

Condottiere with 2nd edition rules (plus spring). Bad game for me, I just lost cards in bad plays. The game ended in the second round after my gambit failed. I put the pawn in a region that would win the game for a player if she won the battle, hoping the other two players would shed cards to stop her. They both passed... I had garbage in my hand all game anyway.

Lord of the Rings Deck building Game I was in the game of No Thanks when a friend asked if I wanted to play this. He knew I've played (and enjoyed up to a point) the DC Deck building games so I said sure. After I sat down, I saw that the guy who owns the game, had added ALL THREE together. Two and a half hours of cerberus deck building later, the same conclusion arrived that could have been done in 45 minutes. Total fucking nightmare. On the positive side, my friend might give the DC villains game another shot after that. I think the villains is the most interesting, and has the best options for pulling back the snowball leader.

Played two games yesterday:

Blood Rage: This is an explosive variant of Chaos in the Old World. Whilein CitOW was slow and strategical this is fast, bloody and extremely combat-heavy. Units come and go all the time and killing your own units is an in-built strategy. The cards are fun and quickly introduce assymetry while being much more interesting and balanced than those of CitOW.

The only problem I have with it is that it's moderately inflationary, you get significantly more resources as the game goes on and the numbers of points that can be scored increases as well so any player being set back significantly will be out of the game. This is mostly an issue because combat is very high-risk, it uses the same system as Cosmic Encounter and if you get out-bluffed you are dead.

In the first game, I had a lead of over 100 points over my next opponent and in the second I had...25 points. I got outguessed twice in a row, realized I had no troops, no upgrades and barely any resources and accepted the game as a loss.

I also played a bit of Lords of Waterdeep. I'm slowly getting better at it, I think getting the right quests and minimizing the risk of not having them is vital. And if you can't get them, you should get resources for when you do, not flail around trying to get something now.

Played Concordia yesterday, which is a not-bad more or less standard Euro.

Then played 7 Wonders for the first time since August 2012. We played the shit out of that game when it first came out, and then pretty much everyone I know dumped their copies. For me the issue was that it lives in a weird place on the spectrum. It's a little too quick and unsatisfying to be considered a "main" game, but it's too fussy and annoying to set up to be a "filler". The expansions (we played with the Leaders one) add length and faffery without much of a good payoff.

In my group it's a good representative of a game that went from hell of popular to absolutely nowhere in a short length of time. 31 plays between Nov of 2010 and Aug of 2012, then 1 in the four years that followed.

I'm not sure how general this trend is for this game in general, as mayfly-like popularity lifespans seem to be the norm now.

Another game of Merchants & Marauders tonight, this time with a couple of additions from the Seas of Glory expansion: all the extra cards (except contraband), the basic expansion special weapons and upgrades, and the brig. M&M has definitely rocketed up my list of "will play at any time" games, right behind Twilight Struggle at the moment I think.
This one again came down to the wire - all three of us were within a turn of winning until a storm card prevented me from selling 4 in demand goods in my home port and banking the 3 points I needed to win. The other two needed a merchant raid to go their way, the first trying the second turn in a row to chase down squirmy merchants in a Galleon with a spoiler which of course didn't work out for him despite adding/replacing 5 cards, leaving the win to come down to the final merchant raid made by our third, which succeeded.
I spent the majority of the game in a Brig, which ended up working out not too bad for me, despite a very slow start (stuck at 1 glory for about a third of the game). I managed to get Long Guns and an extra cannon mount on it, which made the difference in the highlight of the game: my one NPC battle against a pirate frigate where I lost all my cannons and had to go for boarding with 1 crew vs the pirate's 2 crew...and managing to win on a tiebreaker when our last crew members simultaneously ran each other through.
I don't think I've played a game where combat is so damn intense - mainly because if you lose a combat anywhere from halfway on you are pretty much fucked.
Oh...close second highlight was pulling the rug out from under my friend as he was about to win by finding a rumour to be true which let me steal 10 gold from his stash....muahahahaha

I blew off going to Conncon to go to Malloc's gaming birthday bash Saturday. For all of you who know Malloc, you probably guessed it that Ti3 is a birthday tradition at Malloc's birthday bash. This year wasn't the big 6 player game but a light 4 player, 3 1/2 hour Ti3 filler game. At the table was 2 time WBC champion Malloc the Mindnet, 2 time champion KingPut Sol, 1 time champion Gbubs the Sardakk N'orr and an experience player Nerfyou who played Hacan. On the very first agenda the warring races, the Mindnet and Sardakk N'orr passed an agenda item that broke Hacan and Sol's lucrative trade agreement disallowed us from trading the rest of the game. That cost me 3 trade goods per turn which was really painful. I jumped out to an early lead by claiming objectives each of the first 2 turns but nothing could go wrong for the birthday boy with the Mindnet. He had an easy preliminary objective (attack a player you have a trade agreement with) and than had a pretty easy secrete objective (6 tech planets). Meanwhile, he played the Nerfyou, the newest player like a fiddle. In the end, he ran away with the game easily. This was are first game of Ti3 since last August and we were all rusty. Triumph and Tragedy been our go to long game over the last 6 months. I can't imagine what people go through trying to play Ti3 after more than a year.

Other games we let Malloc win include an 8 player Baseball Highlights 2045 which was fun and slightly more strategic than slapshot. Malloc also won 2 games of RIsk Legacy. Luckily, he didn't win Bucket King or King of Tokyo. While we were playing Ti3, Wkover and others were playing an epic 5 player game of Space Cadets Away Missions. The good news was they won the game even if it took them longer to play SC:AM than our game of Ti3.

Well, I did not blow off Conncon and, as it turns out, Malloc did not win a single game. Coincidence?

Triumph and Tragedy with Flimflam and his buddy Russel. We had some dude who claimed to be a play tester kibitz on the game and explain what each of our optimal moves should be and he also made sure to point out rules that did not exist or were wrong. We had two choices; break for lunch or commit red red murder. We chose lunch and picked up the game when we got back. Mr. Know-it-all was gone and thus he avoided a shallow grave. Russ won as the Soviets by narrowly avoiding my last ditch attempt at a sneak attack on Baku and St. Petersburg. Flimflam as the Germans was belligerent and aggressive but accomplished little.

Mysterium with Josh, Uba, Egg Shen, Mrs. Shen, and Matt Loter. We won. I like the game as a distillated and grown up version of clue but I suspect that the role of ghost, which I have yet to play, is far more fun than that of investigator.

I Hate Zombies with Octavian and five other suckers. What a terrible game. Rock/paper/scissors but with a twist...zombies! Fucking awful.

Cornerstone the build a tower out of wooden Tetris pieces and have a meeple climb it game. This game is awesome. It is a tragic that the company that made it is long gone. But should you ever come across a copy, snatch it up quick. One of the best game purchases I ever made. Played with Engineer Al and Dutch. I forget who one but I know who toppled the tower and thus lost....me.

Junta with Al, Dutch, Josh, Egg Shen, and Mrs Shen. Al won this game of bribery and deceit but I did manage to start a blood feud with Mrs Shen which Egg assures me she will persecute for years at the very least. So hey, I got that going for me.

I only got to be there for Saturday but as always a fun time with great peeps.

I think you could do a fancier version of Codenames using Mysterium or Dixit cards... Being the ghost has that stressful thing where you hear the players talking themselves down some (to you) nonsensical logic while you sit passively and say nothing.

Zombicide: Black Plague which is Just More Zombicide. The plastic player trays are pretty cool, but I prefer the regular Zombicide game just on aesthethics. We lost, which seemed inevitable with the increased fatty spawns and the necromancer interstate running on one side of the map.

Francis Drake with four players but with some house rule to add the ghost/bluff token to all players. Also apparently a few other house rules by way of getting a few rules wrong. Still, it was good fun with the Tokaido style Plymouth section and the bluffing/second guessing mission disc stuff.

DC Deck building Game because people can't get enough Cerberus. I won with Wonder Woman, even with the player on my right grabbing all the villains he could. It was a pretty close game overall, which made a nice change. I didn't even have majority in super villains.

Sons of Anarchy four players with the base game gangs, and this time using the gang powers sides. I was the 1-9ers and found that "leave a prospect hanging out and call in the entire gang for free" strategy worked out, even with the black market shut out for a turn, and another turn making only $1 per bag of MLP trading cards (which I hoped for, as my bags were easier to get than my opponents') and in the end I won with $52, which I think is the most I scored yet. Not a lot of horse trading in this one but still a good group.

Over the weekend it was my yearly birthday/Dune gaming day. Pre-game the five other dudes kicked in and bought t-shits with an image of the poster I did on the front and individual faction on the back. They looked amazing!

This year I decided to try out the double spice blow/ advanced combat as well as a couple of Fremen variants to give them some teeth. in the 5 or 6 years we've played the Fremen are usually the last faction to ally with and have not had a single win. There are a few variants floating around BGG so I tried a) the Fremen do not spend Spice during combat b) the can use Worthless cards as Cheap Hero/Heroines and what proved to be controversial c) Fremen allies do not spend Spice during combat.

It ended turn 9 with a Fremen/ Bene Gesserit win. Everyone one liked the advanced combat, liked the Fremen ability but there was a long discussion as to whether the Fremen alliance ability was too strong. I think it may be so (i was the Fremen). Playing once a year makes it hard to say if it that would be like that for every game or not.

Great birthday and game nonetheless.