What Board Game have you been playing? ARCHIVE

repoman wrote: I have the expansion and I think the minions are pretty intriguing and certainly for the Balrog at least it looks like it's a better implementation than 1st ed./Collector's Ed.

The problem is, I haven't painted the damn expansion figures...and I'm still burned out from painting the base game.

Stupid I know.

Not at all, Repoman. If anyone shows up to our game sessions with unpainted figures they catch hell for it the whole day. Of course, most of it's tongue-in-cheek ribbing but most of the folks I game with do indeed prefer fully primed and painted toys (I mean MINIATURES).

Josh Look wrote: I'm about to say some shit that is blunt and to the point.

Man, with this intro I was expecting a whole lot worse than what came after!

Josh Look wrote: So yeah, the length is fine. I don't feel like it's too long for what it is, and given building and outfitting your crew is the most fun part of the game, I certainly welcome that it takes as long as it does. Once you have your shit together the games starts to move at an exponentially faster pace. Even with 4 players, I don't think my games have gone past 2 hours (but then again, I might be a supercomputer).

We had four players, myself and one other new to the game. With rules, it went about 3.5 hours. I actually felt like we were moving at a pretty good clip: Players helped each other with decks, we all frequently planned or even made our purchases during others' turns. One player is notoriously slow in his play, but we all prodded him along gently.

It's interesting that you brought up the BGG bias towards shorter games. We discussed that after playing Firefly. I like short games, but I like long ones, too. I have no problem losing track of time in Die Macher, Dune, Clash of Cultures, or Wealth of Nations. It's not the length by itself that's a problem, it's how the length is used.

Michael Barnes wrote: Some games need to be four horus, some games need to be forty minutes. Depends on the content. Neither is necessarily superior. But it is undoubtedly true that shorter games sell more these days.

As for where the fun is, I really enjoy rounding up crew, planning the jobs and figuring out where and when to take risks. I don't think it's repetitive at all, not more than any other game.

That says it pretty well.

Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for it-- that can color the experience of any game. Like I said originally, I'm not even sure why I didn't like it, as all the elements seemed to indicate I would.

DukeofChutney wrote: Im yet to use any of the lords expansion stuff either. I read Matt's review of it, am always interested in other opinions. Which is the easiest mix of stuff to use?

LoME has basically two parts to the expansion. The first is the minions/lesser action dice along with a half dozen additional event cards for each player ( plus one that swaps out for an original card ) . That is what we used. It offers plenty of variety to the base game.

The other part is more a variant where the Free People can secretly select at start if he wants one or more Fellowship characters to start in an area native to their people. To balance this, the Shadow gets some additional one time use Actions to offset the Free People being able to mobilize faster .

I don't think that the justification of length is exclusively up to what the game is doing. Like Michael said, Firely is a game with room to shoot the shit. It's a perfect game for F:AT Thursday since, in addition to playing fun games, we drink a few beers, catch up with each other, talk movies and TV, and hatch ideas for Star Trek podcasts (get back into the bag, cat!). I'm past the point in my life where I need to game and will settle for playing with randos at a game shop, but I certainly not play Firefly with anyone but close friends.

If only we could get Repo to be any good at the game. He did get me a plastic Stegosaurus for Christmas, so that's cool.

It's a game about being a business man, I suck at that in life, I suck at that in games.

Now if we played a game about being a clown...

So yeah, played Gears of War for the first time last night. For some reason I wasn't expecting to like it quite as much as I did. The health as cards mechanic worked great and the gameplay was smooth once we got it down. But the learning session was a bit of a shambles. No-one really had the rules down and it took us a full hour to really get going. We made a few small rules errors which is to be expected, but one of them blew the game length out far longer than it had any right to be. Despite all this, the quality of the game shone through the hassles and I'm looking forward to playing this again when we will be capable of of forming some coherent strategies.

Death and Taxis wrote: So yeah, played Gears of War for the first time last night. For some reason I wasn't expecting to like it quite as much as I did. The health as cards mechanic worked great and the gameplay was smooth once we got it down. But the learning session was a bit of a shambles. No-one really had the rules down and it took us a full hour to really get going. We made a few small rules errors which is to be expected, but one of them blew the game length out far longer than it had any right to be. Despite all this, the quality of the game shone through the hassles and I'm looking forward to playing this again when we will be capable of of forming some coherent strategies.

GoW for me is on my permashelf. I think the video game license sold so the future of the boardgame is a bit unknown not knowing how that impacted FFG's license. I think it just came out in a stacked year, hampered by some early negative reviews and just got overlooked and overshadowed.

For my money it does the hack and slash dungeon crawl better than any other. Better than any of the D&D games and does their style system much better.

Picked up Quantum on a whim today - really fun dice game with sort of a 4x feel to it. It's sort of like a mishmash of Eclipse and King of Tokyo. There are some component issues in this run, but the publisher has been good so far about replacements for the dice, which are admittedly kind of crappy. But overall the gameplay is tight and confrontational, and it plays fast - I ran two games with my son in less than an hour. Good stuff.

Played a solo round of Death Angel. It had been a while. I got butchered in the 3rd room. Typical. What a great game, though.

hotseatgames wrote: Played a solo round of Death Angel. It had been a while. I got butchered in the 3rd room. Typical. What a great game, though.

Death Angel is really one of the best solo games ever created. I'm not a huge fan playing it with others, due to the limited decision making, but as a coop it is brisk and fucking intense. The insane difficulty is a big reason for this. It's also quite varied if you pick up all of the POD expansions. Really love that game.

madwookiee wrote: Picked up Quantum on a whim today - really fun dice game with sort of a 4x feel to it. It's sort of like a mishmash of Eclipse and King of Tokyo. There are some component issues in this run, but the publisher has been good so far about replacements for the dice, which are admittedly kind of crappy. But overall the gameplay is tight and confrontational, and it plays fast - I ran two games with my son in less than an hour. Good stuff.

I'd like to find out a bit more about this game. Seems pretty fun. I tried to watch that Shut Up and Sit Down dude's review of the, but I couldn't get through it. They're starting to sound more like carnival barkers and As Seen on TV Pitch Men. They're starting to lose the quality in favor of quantity it feels...But I veer from the topic.

I did read a review that made the game sound like it was pretty abstract. How well does the theme come through for you? Overall it does sound really fun and thanks for putting it on my radar.

And yeah...Death Angle F-ing rocks.

VonTush wrote: I did read a review that made the game sound like it was pretty abstract. How well does the theme come through for you? Overall it does sound really fun and thanks for putting it on my radar.

It's themed in the same sense that Alien Frontiers is themed. It's not an AT classic in the making by any means, but the mechanics do make sense in the context of the theme. There are some smart design choices too that make it work. Your dice are your ships. When you place your ships on the board, you roll them to determine move and combat, which are inverse - a six move ship is weak in combat, and vice versa. Attacking is very simple - both ships roll a die and add the ship value, lower total wins. Winning battles will increase your dominance, which will let you put cubes on the map. You can also place a cube by orbiting ships totaling a certain value around the planet. First player to place five cubes wins.

The box bills it as 60 minutes - I think that's overstated. If you're not overthinking it, it's an easy 30-45 minute game, which falls into the heavier filler category for me. But it's fun enough to want to play a couple games in a row too.

charlest wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: Played a solo round of Death Angel. It had been a while. I got butchered in the 3rd room. Typical. What a great game, though.

Death Angel is really one of the best solo games ever created. I'm not a huge fan playing it with others, due to the limited decision making, but as a coop it is brisk and fucking intense. The insane difficulty is a big reason for this. It's also quite varied if you pick up all of the POD expansions. Really love that game.

Yeah, I love this game too for solo play. It's compact enough for me to take with me on campouts with the scouts. I don't play WH40K, but, have read many of the novels. I'm been thinking about getting some older WH40K space marines and gene stealers miniatures to put on the cards.

Played a game called Krackades last night at a birthday party. Was a review copy I got specifically for a certain group. It didn't exactly fall flat, but it was utterly reaching. It's like charades-meets-Cranium; you can draw, sculpt, or act things out on the cards and the winner is the team that has one of each card captured, which is done by guessing correctly what the player's trying to do.

Here's the rub: The cards are "naughty". One of the cards has you sculpting a "Big Penis Vein". One is a "third nipple". An acting card has you act out "Premature Ejaculation", and another "Gaydar".

It's just not a funny game. It tried to be funny, and it tried to go Emo Williams/Chevy Chase and not subtlety. I think the designers were playing Charades and then played Cards Against Humanity...then decided to mash them up. The worst part is that the artwork is the best part...the text isn't that funny. Also, once you've all read the cards you know what the cards ask of you, and it limits the guesses to what people know are in the deck.

All in all, it's a shitty game in my opinion. It will probably end up as a 2/5 stars based on the polling at the end of the game, but the one "OMGROFLMFAO" person will invariably fuck up the scoring, which is their prerogative, but I think it will inflate the score from what I think it should be, a 3/10.

Good news is I played 10 games of pool and got wasted.

Five-player game of El Grande.

Bitches.

S.