What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Argh, it is a tempting one. Maybe I'll start a thread, I did searches here and there was some disagreement about it.

Played a couple TMG micro games that came in the mail. Two 2-player games of each.

Coin Age is pretty decent. There's not a lot to it, but I didn't expect there to be. You place coins on a little card-sized map and figure out who wins. You start with coins ranked 1-4, with 1 being the smallest size and 4 being the largest. You take one of each rank of coin you have left in your pool, shake them up, and slap them on the table. The number of coins with your side (heads or tails) determines which action is available to you. You can potentially place coins, move coins, and/or capture coins from the board. You can place coins on top of already placed coins if they're a lower-numbered rank, so board regions will get little pyramid-shaped stacks of coins. The game ends when either the board is full or somebody has placed all their coins. Then you score the coin values on top of each stack, with bonuses if you control an region. That's it. It's a pretty interesting design, but it isn't something I'd ever bring to a game night as it's a 10-minute game that only supports 2 players. Might be fun for a little tournament in a pub setting or if you're packing light for a camping trip or something like that.

Verdict: PnP it, grab some change, and give it a shot. You only need to print one little card to play it if you don't need to print the rules, which are also really short.


This Town Ain't Big Enough for the 2-4 of Us has a silly name, but is a decent game. It's similar in a lot of ways to Carcassonne but plays in a fraction of the time. The basic game has you drawing a tile and playing a tile, just like Carcassonne, but you don't have meeples to place. Players' icons are already printed on the tiles. Each tile has fences that you use to extend or complete corrals. When a corral is completed the player with the most icons scores the number of icons of the second-place player in the corral, who scores the number of icons of the third place player, and so on. This means you can't just keep a corral all to yourself because without a valuable second-place player you'll score crap for points. Some tiles have a silver bar, and if you complete a corral with a silver bar you can relocate a tile somewhere else on the board. There are only 24 tiles, so it plays pretty quick.

The mini-expansions in the box include 3 different tokens you can place on the board that give varying effects. Two of the 3 tokens help you score/control corrals better, and the other one lets you steal the silver bar action if another player completes a corral with your token in it. They add a fair bit of strategy and increase the game length some.

Verdict: Carcassonne is the better game, but if you're looking for a quicker game with a similar feel, simpler scoring, and a smaller footprint you could do a lot worse than This Town.

We had eight folks at our usual four-person game night.

For the first games, we split into two fours. In my foursome, I broke out Sons of Anarchy, that I bought at GenCon. We played the basic rules, without the variable partners or the red Anarchy cards. Here's a tip: do not run out of guns in this game, or you are well and truly fucked. I wasted a whole turn flailing around, and never recovered.

Then everyone was at one table, and we played 7 Wonders + Cities + Leaders. 8-player 7 Wonders turns a half-hour game into a two-hour game. There's always someone who has to think their cards through for a few minutes. That isn't a bad thing, but with eight players you don't ever seem to get a turn where the cards get played fast. To slow it down more, Cities + Leaders cranks the euroglyphics factor up to 11. At the leader draft, we had eight people trying to figure out what the Leaders did, all simultaneously, and it took us a half-hour to work through a four-card draft. I ended up tied for second. I'd play it again, but I'm not sure about it with seven or eight players.

I liked the story A Study in Emerald, but the boardgame offends my eyes. Too busy, and the bad color schemes only make it worse.

Last night Dead of Winter hit the table for the first time. I was the only one who had played before, teaching 4 new players. I also ended up as the betrayer for the first time. Unfortunately for me, any time there is a betrayer I'm always suspected to be him...

Beyond that, my victory requirements were so steep that we ran out of morale before I even came close to meeting them. So everyone lost, but we had a great time. This game has the ability to churn out those memorable moments, and get everyone talking and laughing about crazy situations. We had 4 survivors die from bite rolls. Those are some bad odds.

Continuing the zombie theme, we broke out Run, Fight or Die!. This belonged to a friend of mine and again we had 4 new players, myself included. Going in, I was under the impression that it was a replacement for King of Tokyo, but that is not the case at all. It's much more involved than KoT.Zombies advance across 3 different "zones" in front of each player, and if they get all the way across you take wounds. It's pretty cool managing your specific zombie threat. The game ends the moment someone dies, which happened woefully quick. I would have liked to play again but we moved on.

We ended the night with several rounds of Resistance, and this time we included the additional 'plot thickens' cards. I had never even looked at these before. They just tweak a few things, but they were worth the extra trouble. We had a particularly good game in which my traitorous self and my partner managed to avoid detection right up until we had the game in the bag. Good times.

Spartacus - 3 player. first time playing, feels like it would be better with 4. kinda fell flat, but people were really just figuring out how important each piece was.

Firefly + pirates and bounty hunters expansion. played the story where you have to break a guy out of jail on the alliance cruiser. pretty neat how different it makes the game feel. I broke my guy out 2nd, but had the cash to cover my tracks first. so technically I won, but another guy was able to board me and recapture the guy i broke out of jail and send him back. so technically I won, but we all agree that I failed to keep him out of jail.

Cosmic - 2 aliens each, 4 players. one player had the filth+warhawk as a combo. he was the freaking annoying alien. a hazard came out that forced me into an alliance with him. due to that, there came a point where I literally I couldn't win, even sitting at 4 colonies, attacking, and having a 40 in hand. either I could attack a colony that had filth on it (meaning I couldn't land) or if I attacked a colony w/o filth, he'd ally (forced to include him due to hazard) and kick me off the planet...to another planet where I already had a colony.

The Attack Wing event had three cancel so we didn't have the bodies needed to run an event, so one of the guys and I played some Marvel: Dice Masters. I really like the game because it is basically a quick playing Quarriors duel. I like the Quarriors system for a deck/dice building game. If I were to have one complaint it is that it takes the typically Wizkids tact of not worrying about balance, throwing whatever idea out there and figuring that it'll all balance out in the end. I'm short a few cards to have a nice playset of the Avengers vs XMen and from there, I'm just in a wait and see from here on out.

After MDM we played a few hands of Coup, which much like Love Letter, it is a game sort of. I don't mind lighter games with low component counts, but really it is getting to a point that some of these strip so much out that it goes beyond just making it efficient and, to use a term I really hate in boardgames, elegant. So much gets dropped that it feels more like a structured activity than a game.

Then we played C'thulu Dice...Which is LCR with a C'thulu theme...So...We rolled dice a lot and just saw what happened.

VonTush wrote: So much gets dropped that it feels more like a structured activity than a game.

I really like that description, "structured activity." It completely describes certain very un-fun games that I have played over the years.

Shellhead wrote:

VonTush wrote: So much gets dropped that it feels more like a structured activity than a game.

I really like that description, "structured activity." It completely describes certain very un-fun games that I have played over the years.

I call that "mechanistic".

Shellhead wrote: I liked the story A Study in Emerald, but the boardgame offends my eyes. Too busy, and the bad color schemes only make it worse.

I had the same initial reaction, but you get used to it pretty quick.