What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Those minis are damn nice to look at, I'm practicing my mini painting skills so I can make them pop.

I played Talisman for the first time in more than 20 years. It was the french translation (bad translation...) of the 2nd edition.

I was a bit afraid to play it again... and was impressed how good it still is. It is very easy to set up, very easy to explain. This is THE introductory ameritrash game, you can make anybody play this game as it is so simple and intuitive, and yet so rich and surprising.

The game was rather quick (less than two hours for two players although i have not played the game in 20 years...) as the turns are very, very fast. The game is beautiful. Once it's set up, you want to play it as it is so beautiful and attractive, full of great details, crazy english humour. The boardgame by gary chalk should be framed and put in a museum ! This is just cardboard and paper but this is so nice : take that you mini-holichs !

Talisman still rules, I am very pleased !

Played Descent 2.0 last night, which was my first time playing Descent in any form. It was fun enough, moreso because of the group of friends, but also didn't seem like anything special, and ended up being kind of annoying in terms of the scenarios we played, which we seemed to have no chance of winning. Zombies surrounded some cardinal NPC who we were supposed to rescue, and he was dead before we really had a chance to get to him. I kind of feel like there's as much depth, and probably a good deal more character and innovation, with Mice & Mystics, for that kind of game.

Also played a 3p game of Eclipse, which I hadn't played in a while. I still love that game, but with 3p, and the particular construct of space tiles being the way they were, there was very little conflict between us. A bit towards the very end, but otherwise it was mostly multiplayer solitaire. Still pretty fun, but I do like the game a lot better with 4-5. As it was, after rules explanation, the game took exactly 2 hours, which is pretty cool for something of that depth. Of course, add another hour or more for 4-5 players, but still, it flows really well with almost no downtime.

After our weekly X-Wing game, I managed to convince everyone to play Blood Bowl: Team Manager. I had just gotten the Foul Play expansion so we were set with 5 players. Since 3 of the 5 players were new, I left out the new teams from Foul Play as I hadn't read the new rules for penalties and fouling, and didn't want to add too much to the teaching time. Everyone loved it, and I didn't find 5 players to be any different than 4. The final scoring was pretty tense, as we all had extra stuff to add, like my 20 extra points from Contracts. I managed to draw the 5 fan Contract right at the end as part of my payout for winning the Blood Bowl tournament. I ended up winning as Wood Elves with 43 points, followed by Undead with 41, Humans with 40 and then Chaos and Dark Elves pulled up the rear with points in the low 30s. So it was a close game. Always a great time.

Played Twilight Struggle today for the first time in more than 4 years. I'd previously played it 3 times, but not since then. We had a pretty even back-and-forth for a lot of the game. Then in turn 7 I wound up with the Asia and Central America score cards. I happened to be dominating Asia so I played that right off the bat and shot up pretty far, to about 15 points. Then I subtly set up some innocuous influence in Central America, followed by a hard push to grab Control. Next card play I would play scoring and win. Unfortunately, while I was setting this stuff in motion, I wasn't paying attention to Europe, where my opponent was taking over. Right before I was going to play my scoring card to win the game, he played Europe's scoring card to steal lot of points from me, making my next play a simple point increase instead of a win. Apparently if he had a few more cards with higher Ops numbers, he could have taken control of Europe and won the game with his score card play.
Later in turn 9, I drew the Wargames card, along with 3 cards that improve DEFCON, just to taunt me. But I had 9 points, enough to win by playing Wargames. But DEFCON was already at 5, so I basically did 3 Coups in a row to drop DEFCON to the required 2 to play Wargames and win the game. Good stuff. I can't wait for the digital version. I'd like to get some more plays of this in.

RA - Haven't played this in a while and as has somehow become usual we played it outside. This is definitely my favorite auction game. The push-ur-luck factor with timing when to start an auction really does it for me. Plus just the sheer simplicity of the whole thing so once you know how the scoring works its easy to get ani idea of what things might be worth to others, which again plays into the calling Ra decision.

Legend Of Drizzt - My first time really playing any of these. Same with the other two players who I honestly didn't think would like it. We all loved it. I had initially thought it would be too simple to hold my interest as I've played many types of dungeon crawls and hacknslash, but its got just enough going for it although it did feel kind of easy to beat.

Firefly - Played with all the expansions and the P&B scenario where you have to rescue someone from the alliance. I was the only one to do any Misbehaving and that was only for one job, but took me a few tries. The other two players were ready for the first goal a little ahead of me, but I screwed them both with the Reaver Cutter. Then me and one other completed the second goal at the same time and just had to race to Three Hills. Fortunately I had Jubal's ship and got lucky with Nav cards beating him to the win by three spaces. Each of us collected at least one Bounty, which as a mechanic worked out better and was more worthwhile than I though it would be. Bring on Blue Sun!

The wife and I played two games of Elder Sign and we made the GOO's our bitches. These were the easiest two games of ES we've ever played. C'thulu and Yig, but never got out of their first row of Doom tokens. Both games saw a lot of Otherworld Cards and Elder Signs on the base adventure cards.

It was nice when the wife said earlier in the day that she wanted to play a game and mentioned ES because I was thinking about that game lately and craving a play.

Played a game of Andromeda on F:AT Thursday. I guess it falls into the ERP as it is a euro and it was out out in 1999. It has a couple good things going for it. It's set in space. It has a lot more depth than the simple rules and board would have you believe and it uses a thing called "the cosmic ashtray" for random cube pulls. Otherwise it's an area majority game that in no way equals or surpasses El Grande. Other than being set in space.

Then we played Coconuts aka The Monkey Poo game. I want you to get a hammer and smash your copy of Loopin Louey, which I have never been very impressed with. This game is now THE go to game for the close out to a drunken night of board games. Stupid fun has gone to a whole new level.

Two games of Eldritch Horror yesterday, lost one and won one. I'm loving the game and appreciate how streamlined it is compared to Arkham Horror. Play time is shorter and I don't feel as impotent, and the icing on the cake is it plays much faster than Arkham.

Last night I got a game in of something I've had on my shelf for a while, Wolfgan Kramer and Markus Lübke's Colosseum. This was a strange experiance, the theme of the game is you're show promoters in ancient Rome (?) and have to book the best events at your colosseum. The weird part is that this game revolves around auctions and trading, I didn't think it did either very well, but still I enjoyed it.

The auctions were very weird because how money works in this game (it's not that tight). So auctions typically went for $8 (the min bid) or $20+ if 2 or more people needed the lot. It wasn't bad, but the dynamic of auctioning lots as opposed to single tiles made them less attractive.

The trading was really hard, because usually you didn't have much to trade with. Over the course of the game you gain 15 tiles but lose 4 from putting on shows, so these resources were VERY tight. I see why the trading is here, it helps smooth out the lot dynamic, but usually in a turn 0-2 trades might happen and they were pretty obvious ones.

I really need to get this back to the table to figure it out, because I thought playing it was fun, but I can't put my finger on why.

I know you guys were skeptic about it, but when I put Steam again on the table, my buddies liked it far more than the first time. They understood the auction and quickly jumped on Locomotive when they did win, eager to take its power. They built more track and weren't afraid of getting into someone's else areas. They were, at last, playing the game.

It seems to me that to play Steam well you may need three games of it. The first one will just teach you the rules and will probably make you feel bad if your network gets blocked. The second one allows you to play without huge mistakes for the first time and the third...the third is when you discover bidding and blocking and start trying to ruin everyone else's game.

I should try to get my expansions again, I'll probably get rid of some redundant ones and make better adaptations for Age of Steam maps.


I also played Mascarade, which wasn't too fun with three. Since you have two roles and you can easily keep track of at least one of them the amount of power the players have over the game is very high and there's a huge incentive to run into lose-lose situations instead of bluffing your way through which I thought went a bit against the ideas of the game. Playing with three will probably be interesting if you are a very good player but for newbies like me, it's probably better to play with more guys.


And after a very long time I went to another Netrunner tournament, expecting to do well and then crashing spectacularly. I took two very strong decks, a Superserver HB deck with two copies of the recent Midway Station Grid and my old but trusty Parasite Kit and I went to win.

My first opponent was playing Jinteki RP and took a long time to stabilize, enough that I had my Datasuckers, my Yog and a bunch of economy on the board. I plopped down my Atman, broke the Inazuma in front of R&D and...I got my rig, my brain and my resources blown up by an Ichi because I was dumb and put five counters on the Atman instead of four. After that, I didn't really recover. I hit R&D but he had all the agendas in his hand. For shame.

But do you know what was worse about it? Our game took so long I had less than 5 minutes on the clock when I started as Corp. He stole a single agenda and took one point once time was called.


My second opponent was also fairly slow-playing and it took him longer to beat him as Corp as it should have. Second game went to time and I got just one point. At this point my chances in the tournament were very slim.

But nothing made them slimmer than me because again I lost because I made a huge mistake. Match point against GRNDL, he plays an agenda behind two pieces of ICE. One of them is Shadow, which I can pass for free. The other has a strenght ranging from 0 to 6. I have four Datasucker counters and an Atman at 5. If I drop the one I have at 0 I should be able to win.

I don't and I'm kicked out. I'm an idiot.

But it was fun.

good to hear about Steam as I'm hoping to try that one again soon. The official expansion maps seem kind of expensive though so I will hold off until I know its a keeper, or maybe the free fan made ones work? Also curious, I saw a thread about getting Steam out of Age of Steam, but is it possible to play the other way, i.e. can you use (or cheaply supplement) the stuff in the Steam box to play the Age of Steam rules? I know the AOS tracks are single sided and more limited, and the goods work differently, but it seems like if it works in one direction it should probably work in the other, right?


Also up for a re assessment is Power Grid. Any PG enthusiasts want to comment (or dissers for that matter). Do the games play out a bit samey pretty quickly or is the divergence caused by who buys what and when and how the market fluctuates keep it interesting in the long term. It seems to have a lot of legs so I am assuming theres something to it, but am a bit worried that it just results in sitting down and evaluating the best of 3 maths products over and over.

played Lewis and Clark

I continue to not be in to modern euros for the most part. I had a brief period where I convinced my self to enjoy some, that seems to be over. In games where i build something I can distract my mind enough to get some enjoyment out of creating as long as things are not too competitive at the table. Here, you are simply getting points (movement) as efficiently as possible. To me it felt like an exercise in calculation. Also, and this is a bias statement that I don't apply to other genres that I do like, but worker placement games are really starting to blur into one for me. I feel like im playing a twist on a game I'm already bored with. Maybe its the subject matter. Whilst the game does excrete (better word than drip) its theme to an extent, its not that immersive.

DukeofChutney wrote: I continue to not be in to modern euros for the most part. I had a brief period where I convinced my self to enjoy some, that seems to be over.

To me also, there are very few that are worth playing, and among those that are often have root in the German family game scene.

Yeah, the overwhelming majority of my favorite Euros (and I have many) are of the old school German family game variety. I've been working on a list of fave Euros for my personal ERP quest, and I don't have a single one newer than 2005.

The only way you'd get me to play something like Lewis and Clark, Agricola/Caverna, a Stefan Feld game, etc. is if you strapped me down Clockwork Orange-style, and even then I'd prefer to just knock my head into the table repeatedly until I conked out. It'd have the same net effect on my brain as actually playing the dumb fucking thing.

Im not as in to the ERP as some (i do find it funny), but i prefer that era of european designs. Largely because the buy in, mentally, and time wise is so much less. For me, if I am going to have to think hard about a game, or learn rules or systems, there has to be a solid immersion or thematic pay off. War games give me this, as do some of the complex AT games, euros don't. I just get thinky mechanics that are 'clever'.

The older school german games, don't really give me a great thematic immersion payoff, but they are so effortless to learn and play. Beowulf, Modern Art, T&E, Tichu, Chinatown, require so little effort. They have tough decisions and strategy, but they don't require me to mentally tally lots of resources, actions, turn orders and how they all fit together. In each of these older games I'm really only trying to manipulate one to three things to my advantage, not ten.