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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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12 Apr 2016 13:14 - 12 Apr 2016 13:15 #225737 by Grudunza
Speaking of TIME Stories, my daughter and I had played the original scenario (Asylum) a few months back and really liked the experience. We finally played The Marcy Case and A Prophecy of Dragons this past week. After Marcy Case, my daughter (who is 11) loudly proclaimed, "This is the best board game ever!!" I wouldn't say that, myself, but her enthusiasm does make me eager to play this more than I think I might, otherwise. It is a pretty fun RPG-ish puzzle-y experience, and the idea of exploring through the different locations and trying to uncover clues and items and fight off enemies and figure out what to do is all very appealing.

There is a point each time that I start to tire of it, as you have to repeat your way through each scenario 3-4 times (with better information each time) in order to finish the story, but in a couple of incidents we've fudged some dice rolls and such in order to succeed and not have to repeat something yet again. As long as she's okay with me doing that (she is), then I'm good. As scenarios go, the original Asylum is still the best, but the other two were both fun as well. I've heard that the next one about ancient Egypt (Under the Mask) is particularly good, and I should be getting that soon. There's been some bitching on TOS about "proper" 2p rules not being included, but we love it as it is by controlling 2 characters each, which works fine.
Last edit: 12 Apr 2016 13:15 by Grudunza.

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12 Apr 2016 13:56 #225744 by Jexik
My Kingdom Death group faced a Phoenix on Sunday. It does some seriously weird shit. The only way we won was by getting our last guy caught in a certain spot with a weird loop going on. I don't want to say too much because I don't want to spoil the fight, but it's totally different than what comes before it.

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12 Apr 2016 14:32 - 12 Apr 2016 14:32 #225751 by jeb
Played CALIFORNIA on Friday night, but I was in a bad mood and the family decided to sandbag and help out the 4yo (he still lost) and the game went into a death spiral for me. Wife and I had a little tiff afterwards as I thought this was not fun--I play the kids for real and she doesn't. Our eldest, now 12, used to thump me routinely in this game when she was 6/7/8. I think she won like 15 in a row or so. I'd rather we played and had fun, then the little one wins and we don't have fun.

Did a Winston Draft with some Innistrad MtG packs. My son ended up with a really top heavy 3-color deck, but made it work. I left some obvious plays out there to see if he found them. He did and was able to come back and win. This seems like sandbagging now in hindsight, but I was more interested in him seeing the plays than the actual game. We kept the decks together so we can try again.

We made it through April (4-0 now) in PANDEMIC LEGACY. This was a squeaker. Spoilered discussion below, do NOT read this if you haven't played PANDEMIC LEGACY.
Warning: Spoiler!


Good game of SURVIVE. It was really tough to get rescued--I think I had the most with 5. Game ended with a tie at 16 points--tough out there for a swimmer.

PICTOMANIA rounded out the weekend. I was again not in the best of moods, and was getting really frustrated with the other players showing their cards, saying, "I'm not telling you what animal I am drawing," or drawing early and stuff. I should have recused my self, just wasn't into this one.
Last edit: 12 Apr 2016 14:32 by jeb.

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12 Apr 2016 19:18 #225776 by san il defanso
This weekend I played Shadows Over Camelot for the first time since 2009. BSG completely killed that game at the time, but it was good to revisit it. I actually got it in a math trade. I put it on my wantlist because frankly BSG just doesn't have the pull it had five years ago. The license doesn't draw people, and although I still really love it the window where I enjoy it has gotten pretty narrow. Returning to Shadows was really interesting. It's definitely in DoW's wheelhouse, and the individual quests don't do much to hide their "get a certain kind of poker hand" seams. But it was actually really good to play it again. Even if stuff felt abstracted, it still serves to generate the right kind of emotions and paranoia that should be there. The traitor doesn't have quite as many options, but the game is so much more streamlined than BSG that it will probably have its own niche on my shelf. It's a little like how I can justify owning both Merchants & Marauders and Pirate's Cove.

We followed up with another four-player game of Argent. We used the "beginners setup" in the rulebook, which is actually really light on research, so spells were pretty rare. The guy who got the most spells won pretty decisively, though having the most influence probably helped him too. The strength of influence is considerable, as I've not see the influence leader lose yet. I'm kind of thinking of it as "most money" in Power Grid, not the actual victory condition but one that will push you over in any close game.

Also I think having a lot of spells with a variety of abilities is a big deal. That allows you to accomplish a lot more with fewer actions, though mana flow might be an issue.
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12 Apr 2016 21:57 #225781 by Gary Sax
At first, most influence will be the winner most of the time. Maybe even later... but once everyone knows the influence matters so much everyone has to fight for IP, so it balances out a little bit because someone not competing on IP can get a lot of stuff cheap and easy without being torched by sorcerers, etc.
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13 Apr 2016 09:37 - 13 Apr 2016 09:37 #225791 by san il defanso
Yeah, I can see how that would work. We were talking about it some last night, and it's obvious that it's an incredibly deep game. I was expecting something kind of chaotic (which would be fine with me) but I've been pleased to see that for all of the insane combos it still has that Eurogame tendency to give strong actions a high opportunity cost. And even though it's a VERY cutthroat game, you can almost always do something valuable, unless everyone is really tackling you.

Last night we played two games of Pandemic Legacy. The last one was our first game in September, and it was dire.

We then followed it up with a game of Samurai, which I also got in a math trade. I have played my copy twice now, and it's playing much better for me now than it did in like 2010, or whenever I last played it. It definitely has the feel of a "classical" kind of game, something that's been in existence for many years. I also think this is probably one of the nicest reprints I've seen in a while. The black pieces aren't quite as fetching, but everything else looks terrific. I like it a lot more than the reprints of Tigris & Euphrates and the upcoming one of Ra.
Last edit: 13 Apr 2016 09:37 by san il defanso.
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17 Apr 2016 09:03 #225989 by Legomancer
Mega Civilization - Game 3 in 2016. We're loving it. Only five players, which is the minimum, but we played with the advanced AST, which requires a lot more diversification than the standard one. It worked really well and the game was fairly tight. I came in second. It took about 10 hours, though we'd all played a couple times before. I did not expect to enjoy this game as much as I do.

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17 Apr 2016 15:45 #226007 by SuperflyPete
I drove up to my buddy's house on Friday and played like 9 games of Seal Team Flix to work out some complaints the publisher had. We not only did that but made some minor balancing changes that made the game better in many ways

Then I proceeded to decimate him at Theseus using the Hunters faction which we both feel is probably overpowered.

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17 Apr 2016 16:39 #226009 by Gary Sax
Hmmmm, I have the first Theseus expansion but not hunters... sounds rough.

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17 Apr 2016 19:06 #226019 by hotseatgames
And here I was just about to post about how Pete kicked my ass at Theseus.

What he left out was that we both knew that I would beat his ass so badly at Mortal Kombat X, that we didn't even need to play it.

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18 Apr 2016 08:16 #226023 by Legomancer
Pandemic Legacy - we finished Season One. We did...poorly.

Let me tell you, anyone who is still all "OH BOO HOO HOO THE GAME CAN'T BE PLAYED FOREVER AND WANTS ME TO HARM MY PRECIOUS THIIIIIINGS" is denying themselves a huge fun time. We had a blast. I would happily buy another copy and play through it AGAIN, even knowing what's coming. They did a great job with this.

You can see a spoiler-riffic look at our final board state here: SPOILERS

The group that did it: me, my wife, my pal Matt, and his wife, are going to try Robinson Crusoe next (which Matt and I like). We're going to play the base game and if the wives go for it, then do the Voyages of the Beagle campaign. I plan to order Seafall as soon as preorders open at Plaid Hat (Rob says that's the channel that puts the most money in his pocket) but that may be a tough sell to my wife.
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18 Apr 2016 08:53 #226025 by charlest
Ooh boy Rebellion is good. I'm still riding the high of my close as nails Rebel win on Saturday night. I won the first combat against my base and accomplished an Objective that let me win in turn 9, my opponent would have taken my base on the next action with a mission he had. Tense the entire time.

The combat was take it or leave it. I don't think it's bad but it's not good and doesn't live up to the rest of the game. We only had like 4 battles the entire game though, which felt good.

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18 Apr 2016 08:53 #226026 by JEM
Codenames, I forget which team won in the end. I don't think that's the point anyway.

Millennium Blades which is going to take some repeated plays to learn effectively, because right now it feels like you can be shut out of finding good combos for the tournament phase just due to reasons.

Isle of Skye with three new players, who all seemed to grasp the rules well enough. The trading phase maybe bumps the complexity higher than a similar game like (base) Carcassonne or Cacao, but that's what I like about it. That and the randomized scoring options each game. I was pursuing a rectangle strategy but had cut off my roads, and the player who won had nicely cornered the market in end-game scoring tiles.

Shadowrun: Crossfire with four of us who had all played the game at least a couple of times. We won this one, got a couple of breaks on crossfire effects not landing as hard as they could have, but also we ran well as a team and had resources to spare. Two of us have 5pt upgrades and ~20 karma now so at some point we'll either have to get others to build characters or halt our progress and just play the game.

Zombicide solo testing out a downloaded mission. I'm skeptical when missions offer the ability to shut down empty spawn points because in this one mission, two of the four active spawns could be shut down in turn one on the empty board. I would have to tweak this one to get a challenging game out of it, but I like the toolbox the game provides.

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18 Apr 2016 10:00 #226030 by Columbob

Legomancer wrote: Pandemic Legacy - we finished Season One. We did...poorly.

Let me tell you, anyone who is still all "OH BOO HOO HOO THE GAME CAN'T BE PLAYED FOREVER AND WANTS ME TO HARM MY PRECIOUS THIIIIIINGS" is denying themselves a huge fun time. We had a blast. I would happily buy another copy and play through it AGAIN, even knowing what's coming.


You really can't replay it with your copy? Honest question.

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18 Apr 2016 10:03 #226032 by SuperflyPete

Gary Sax wrote: Hmmmm, I have the first Theseus expansion but not hunters... sounds rough.


Their "signature move" is that their cards almost entirely allow you to break movement rules. So, if I land on a space, I can then move a different guy to any space. That second guy doesn't get to do anything, but I ended up creating these loops that allowed me to control my normal movement better, which got me the extra turn space and greater onslaught more often, as well as triggering lesser onslaughts more often.

I think he had 13 life and 15 data and I won with 20 data and 20 life.

He was playing Greys.

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