What Board Game have you been playing? ARCHIVE

More lunchtime Duke at the office. We have 4 people playing now with a fifth interested. Fantastic game.

I was on the P500 for KoH but pulled out when it went a couple of years after making its number without printing. I just lost the fire for it.

Sounds like a mixed bag.

S.

Played quite a few games recently, one 4 player session with my fiancee and sister/brother-in-law, then one 3 player session with two friends of mine. In the 4 player session:

Ticket to Ride: Europe: I've only ever played the original TtR way back in 1st year university, and the other players hadn't tried it out before. Fun game which everyone enjoyed. I ended up making a path from Lisbon to Moscow, which completed all my Ticket cards and gave me the longest route. In the end I scored 108 points to my fiancee's 111, as she completed some high value tickets and she scored a 6 train tunnel RIGHT at the end of the game, which I was about to go for. Definitely a game I'll be breaking out again, not a brain burner and lets everyone chat while people are taking their turns.

King of Tokyo: A recent favourite of ours, I always play a very bloodthirsty King (I like the last monster standing aspect more than some wimpy VP victory). Annoyingly, last time we played everyone was very conservative and VP focused except for me, who was trying to beat everyone up. However I couldn't roll claws to save my life, so I lost out big time. In THIS session however, I went on a warpath and dealt enough claws while in Tokyo to keep everyone on the backfoot and constantly trying to roll healing (my poison counter power helped out quite a bit). I miraculously won the game as in the final turn my brother-in-law went for a hail mary, sitting in Tokyo with 1 Health (and 1 poison counter). He rolled three claws on his first go, while my fiancee was sitting at three health and myself at 4. On his next two attempts he couldn't roll another claw, which meant that he killed off my fiancee while my one poison finished him off. Great end to the game which I'll remember for a long time.

For Sale: We haven't played this one in a long time and we ended up getting quite a few plays in, including two at our pub before trivia started. The auction mechanic is very simple yet compelling, and luckily none of us were prone to overthinking our options so the games moved quickly. Fantastic small box game.

At my 3 player session, the first game I brought out was Coup. I've never played this one with 3 players before and it was like a knife fight in a telephone booth. Games on average took about 2-4 minutes, as most of them hinged on one crucial bluff or call. I think we played about 7 or 8 games. I think it still works well with 3, it's just far more... claustrophobic, if that makes any sense.

Our final game was Wiz-War, which we'd all played a few times before. We play with all the classic rules and it was as ridiculous as usual. I was in the middle, and made an early game run to grab blue's treasure and run back. He kept trying to stop me by creating walled off corridors to prevent me from leaving, but I kept playing solvents and wallivores. He ran to my sector to grab a treasure, and I figured I would try and kill him to grab one VP, then drop off his treasure and get a quick victory. However, for all the damage cards in my hand he had an endless supply of tricks to prevent himself from taking damage. Meanwhile the 3rd red player was going about his business unmolested, stealing one of my treasures and setting up to grab one more from blue. At this point blue and I called truce, as I needed to run and grab my treasure before dying from treasure loss, and blue ran to drop off my treasure in his home sector and go after red. On the way to my treasure I dropped off blue near my home square, grabbed my treasure from red (a turn before I would have died) and dropped it in my sector, then ran in to grab my final treasure from red. However just as I was about to get my last point red dropped off blue's treasure in his home square, and my yellow treasure was sitting in line of sight, so he grabbed it with his stretch arms. Since he was standing on his home square he dropped it for the point and won the game. Overall Wiz-war is exactly what I want from a deathmatch game: fast-paced, lots of variety every turn and really silly. I recently got the expansion, can't wait to add in those cards and see how they affect the game.

Let me tell you a story...

Mechwarrior 2 was released back in the mid-90s and I was a few years away from getting my first car (the vehicle that took me away from the serious videogaming that I used to do). I played a ton of MW2. Loved it. Hundreds of hours spent turning big formidable death machines into scrap heaps. I love the concept behind Mechwarrior/Battletech. But I haven't found a good Mechwarrior video game that gives me that same feeling MW 2 did, even though I've been keeping up and trying them as they come and go.

So a year or so ago I picked up Battletech 2nd Edition with the paper mechs on the cheap. Read the rules, perused the forums, and got what I thought was a good handle on the game. But it wasn't fun to play. I loved the concept and I could see how it could be fun to play with the right time investment, but what I really wanted was a mech game I could just sit down and play once in a while without the heavy ruleset. I wanted to spend my gaming time blowing stuff up, not triple-checking modifiers and small details. The newer Classic Battletech Rules were free to come by, but were basically the same thing, so I slowly backed away and sold the game.

Around this time I was hearing good things about the Mechwarrior Age of Destruction clix game, and Miniature Market has a ton of that stuff for cheap. I picked up a starter set and some extra mechs to try it out and... it sat on the shelf for a good long while. Fast-forward to this past couple weeks: the MechWarrior bug bit me again and I sat down with the rules. I read the rules thrice and decided that this game is not an improvement. I'm not going to debate whether it's a good miniatures ruleset, but it still just has too much stuff. Lots of modifiers and special cases, and it has that clix bug where you spend a lot of time peering at the model bases to check their current capabilities. I played a couple solo practice rounds, a few with the quick-start rules and a few rounds with the full rules. Fast-playing it was not.

What I really want is a Nexus Ops level of complexity with more mech-y goodness like hardpoints, armor modeling, and the ability to do custom mech designs. Why doesn't anyone make that game?

It turns out somebody does, and it's called Armor Grid: Mech Attack . The rules are dirt-cheap on WargameVault, and it comes with papercraft mech, infantry, and vehicle models. You get to put little papercraft custom weapons on your units when you design them too, so they look unique and you can tell at a glance what ordinance they're packing. Neat. It's a tabletop miniatures game so no hexes; you play with units,terrain, and rulers. Vehicles and mechs have an armor grid (get it?) and different weapons have different damage profiles. Lasers will penetrate deep into armor, machine guns do a sort of spray damage where they hit multiple locations but don't really penetrate, and so on. You mark off boxes on your grid corresponding to the hits you take, and once damage penetrates into your critical systems area you're at risk of getting limbs blown off or outright destroyed. You can penetrate deep into a mech's armor with a laser shot and, with a lucky die roll, hit the hole you made with a missle to blow out a major section of armor. Awesome! Mechs have basic heat management to deal with, but it's more of a consideration than a nuisance like it is in Battletech. Letting your heat get out of control is dangerous though, and the game strikes a really nice balance between usability and quick play for both heat and armor modeling. Building mechs is dead simple; you can pick a standard frame and use leftover build points to add equipment, and there are rules to go full custom if you want to do that. Troops don't have an armor grid; hits to troops cause a roll on the Troop Damage Table, which can be dramatic. Troops are surprisingly effective, and sufficiently squishy.

We set up a two-player AG:MA skirmish last night. Each side had two mechs, three infantry, and one vehicle. We then set out to pick and build our units, and we both settled on: 1x heavy mech, 1x medium mech, 1x tank, 2x light infanry, and 1x heavy infantry. We kept the terrain simple and only used forests and water. After a few rounds our lack of tactical forward thinking lead to the mechs pushing to the outward flanks and the middle ground full of infantry and vehicles. My wife's heavy mech made a couple lucky shots againt my heavy, doing exactly the kind of lucky armor penetration described above. An unlucky roll on the Crit Table dropped my heavy mech like a stone. I tried to stage my infantry in the forest areas for cover but her heavy middle infantry push cut through them anyway. With my middle and right-side flank weakened I tried to push in my left side flank with my medium mech and tank. I managed to take out her medium mech with heavy cannon and laser fire, but promptly overheated, allowing her infantry to close the gap and lay me to waste in just a few more turns. Altogether from setup to design to battle it took us about 90 minutes.

AG:MA is a solid game. It sacrifices a bit of realism to keep the game pace up and I'm on board with that.
Pros

• Armor grid and weapon damage profiles are a blast.
• Movement and combat are simple and quick.
• Heat management matters.
• You can proxy any other miniatures in for the papercraft stuff as long as you're willing to play loose with the scale and firing arcs.
• Anyone can sit down and play this game without an hour of rules explanation.
• Light rules means easy to house-rule and customize.

Cons

• No jumpjets! (That's going on the house-rule to-do list)
• Could use some more unit variety, but it wouldn't be hard to make up your own units.
• No formation movement rules/bonuses, but since you get to activate all of your units every round this isn't that big of a deal.
• Since everyone gets to activate all their units every round you really don't want to be the guy with 3 units left when your opponent has 5 or 6+.
• My wife kicked my ass at a mech game.

Seriously, if a lightweight mech miniatures game sounds appealing go get the (cheap!) rules at WargameVault . The Mega-Pack Bundle is a great place to start.

Sounds like they are using the grid-based damage modeling that was in Renegade Legion: Centurion, which I LOVED.

Looks really cool...how hard is it to put together?

The models look to be 2-D. Should be a breeze to put together. Cutting them out is the real pain unless you have a Cricut or something.

Michael Barnes wrote: Sounds like they are using the grid-based damage modeling that was in Renegade Legion: Centurion, which I LOVED.

Looks really cool...how hard is it to put together?

I've heard it compared to Renegade Legion when I was looking into it, and I think one of the designers made a reference to RL on the Armor Grid forums at some point. Haven't played RL though so I can't really comment on it.

It isn't hard to put together, some cutting and folding. A little tape/glue here or there. A mech frame probably has about 3 pieces of paper to cut, fold, and attach. Vehicles and infantry are I think 2 pieces each. Then each weapon is a separate piece with a slot to stick 'em on the units.

why use papercraft when CBT or Mechwarrior units are so cheap?

Sounds like a great Mech game. I used to play CBT when I was 12 or so, but it was too rules/chart heavy. This sounds like the winning balance

Find a photo and put this on the front page via blog please. Exceptional writing for what appears to be a very good, obscure game. It deserves some attention.

Very glad I stumbled across this this morning.

S.

Played Clash of Cultures again. A magnificent game, and it is so thematic with so few rules. I'll dig up the specific thread to talk more about it.

Unfortunately, even the cultural influence mechanic---change the opponents cities to yours, only for VP purposes---was too much conflict for my wife and she got huffy. No more Clash of Cultures with her, I think. It sort of survives taking the army battles with each other out, but I think taking out culture is taking out one mechanic too many. Bummer. I'll have to play it with my other friends who are fine with game conflict, hopefully they'll like it. If only I was super interested in bloodless worker placement games or something. I have Agricola but have never played it, maybe that's our best choice.

Strongly agree that the writeup of that obscure mech game needs front page coverage---the post is good enough to warrant it.

I finally got to see Vasel's review and it wasn't as bad as you were making it out to be. In fact I can't complain because I did something similar with one of my article here.

The game appears to be a cross between Monopoly and Stock Market Game, with the structure removed from each.

S.

Armor Grid is a good game. I followed its inception when it was in... One Monk forum I think? And the guy provides a lot of useful accessories.

I played a first game of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, 3 players. I ended up winning by buying host with like 16 ducats and slaughtering my opponent with Gannicus to make it to 12. The previous turn the 2 of us had smacked down our opponent who had leapt ahead to 11.

Overall, it was good. We had a couple fun moments during combat and a decapitation. I thought the market auction was nice, but our game had an odd mix of pretty boring auctions for low quality slaves and gladiators and then a huge OMG gladiator would come out. I would have liked to see more middle level stuff come out to keep us from blowing all our money on either a big gladiator or being host. The host mechanic is absolutely brilliant fun, while the combat is a bit of an odd change of pace I thought worked, though was maybe a tad long.

If there was anything that landed with a thud for me, it would have to be the intrigue phase. We played it right, there was lots of guarding and whatnot... but there were also a lot of cards that were just sort of "here's another influence for me!" cards. Since guards can't stop cards targeting other people, there aren't too many ways to foil that sort of move. It was underwhelming.

We'll play it again (it was my friend's copy), hopefully the wheeling and dealing quotient will go up as we're more familiar.

I played another game of War if the Ring. This time against Engineer Al. I was the Freeps and an excess of corruption led me to take the long way around to Mordor via Rohan. In the end, Al's all seeing eye was all too vigilant and he piled on the pain and the fellowship succumbed two steps from the Crack's of Doom.

On the military side, Al pursued a Northern strategy by wiping out Lorien and Rivendell. Then he was on his way to the Woodland Realm to finish off the elves but stopped by the Lonely Mountain to say hello as well. It was an unusual game in that Gondor didn't fight at all.

The Real Story though is Uba and Al's new game room. I've seen pictures but not until last night did I fully realize how awesome it's going to be. I mean, it's awesome already but when it's done it will be even awesomer. And once the secret door disguised as a bookcase is installed.....AWESOMEREST!

Four days at Gamestorm in the Portland, OR area. Here's the playlist...

Pandemic: In the Lab
Rampage (as I suspected, this was really fun to play, especially in a convention environment, but not something I feel compelled to own)
Citadels (x2)
Magical Athlete
Ricochet Robots (a giant sized version that my friend Andy brought there)
Impulse
Glass Road (probably my favorite of the Uwe Rosenberg games I've played, because it's lighter than Agricola and Le Havre and such)
King of Tokyo
Pandemic: The Cure (x3 A new dice version of the game that captures the feel of the original pretty well in a tense 20 minute game. We owned it pretty well on the basic difficulty, but lost the last game on the harder level.)
Fische Fluppen Frickadellen (using the 15 player, three table version of the game that my friend Tim runs every year... this is a pretty clever economic race game by Friedemann Friese, and if you get a chance to try this 3 table version sometime, give it a shot)
Robinson Crusoe
Mice & Mystics
Nations
Kemet (x2)
Can't Stop (x2)
Smash Up (with the new Science Fiction: Double Feature expansion. I was a little surprised how many people I saw playing Smash Up this weekend... I think it's grown into a pretty big hit. Granted, the new expansion just coming out helps with that perception.)
Hula Hippos (this is a little Gamewright thing that someone pulled out while we were having a snack in the food room... you spin a wooden ring and try to flick hippo meeples so they end up inside the ring when it stops spinning... so simple and dumb, but man, we were laughing like crazy and ended up playing four or five games of this)
Space Cadets: Dice Duel
Small World (this is the second time I've played this recently and I feel like it's become a sleeper hit for me... when it first came out I thought, yeah, it's clever and cute, but now I feel like it's a really amazing design and production and well deserves its success)

The best part was that my 9 yo daughter, Evee, was with me and we played many of those games together and had a really fun time overall. The only negative was that I had scheduled a game of BSG: Daybreak which 5 other people had signed up for, but only 1 showed up. This convention is one of the rare times in a year when I can play a game like that, and I've had some of the best BSG games in past years there, so that was a bummer this time. I was also glad to briefly meet with the great Zev of Z-Man, who was incredibly generous in awarding 5 of us, including me and my daughter, a sizable Z-Man gift-certificate for winning the Pandemic: The Cure tournament. I was hoping to get to hang a bit more and play something with him, but didn't see him again for most of the con until right at the end. He must have been in the special luxury suite where the convention glitterati hang out and play. :o)

There were one or two new games I'd have liked to try, but really, my feeling about this convention the past few years has not been to "play the new hotnesses," but mostly to just play things I already know I love for the sake of having fun with others who share the hobby. That was especially relevant with my daughter being there. Sure, she has some sense of appreciation and excitement for a new expansion coming out to one of her favorite games (e.g., Smash Up), but mostly she could care less about some need to play every new Essen release, or whatever. There's already a wealth of games that can be played and played and played again. She's always open to trying things that are new to her like Rampage and Hula Hippos, and really gets into the spirit of whatever she's playing, but she has the same enthusiasm for her numerous plays of things like King of Tokyo or Magical Athlete as for anything else.

I also didn't know they had several rooms on the second floor with computers and gaming consoles, or my other daughter (11 yo) could have appreciated that, though she had a school conflict/commitment this weekend, anyway. But next year, I think we'll all go.