What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Wade - Did they bring back the "Attack" "Run" "Wait and See" Option? I know there's a few tweaks and changes from 3rd...But to be honest I haven't followed that close.


Today was a day of new games.
Sushi Go. A drafting game which I found boring. Not a fan, the art is cute and that's about all I thought it had going. One of those activity games that fills time.

Battue which Uba liked if I recall correctly. It wasn't a bad game, basically a city is filled up with tiles which represent buildings. These are dealt out face down, you move in with your Mongol hoard, flipping tiles then rolling a dice adding your number of raiders to your dice roll and the defender adding the defense number on the tile to their roll - Highest roll wins. One where I'd play again because it is light and fun, one guy at the table bought it instantly, not one I feel like I need to own though.

Downfall of Pompeii which I really enjoyed. Very much that lighter Euro style game. I don't know if this was a fluke or common in this game, but of the four three tied at the end with the most survivors so it went to the tiebreaker and I lost with 8 in the volcano to the other two's 7. Does it come down to tie-breakers often? I really enjoyed the game though, score one for the ERP!

Warhammer 40,000: Conquest which was my first LCG, so I don't know how it compares to the others. It was a learning game so my opponent and I were more just experimenting with stuff learning the flow. The game was pretty good and to be honest and I'm wondering if I can stretch the core set into a nice stand-alone game without getting trapped in the subscription product line. Deck building doesn't appeal to me, nor does a bunch of purchases. I wonder if I can slap two factions down into a deck for each side and have a fun and interesting game.

VonTush wrote: Wade - Did they bring back the "Attack" "Run" "Wait and See" Option? I know there's a few tweaks and changes from 3rd...But to be honest I haven't followed that close.

There's an optional rule that sort of implements that. A hero can attempt to escape prior to combat by rolling against their Agility. If they succeed the hero gets to escape to an adjacent tile (retreat).

Heroes can also attempt to escape after a round of combat, but usually the Monster gets one last fixed attack on the hero as a penalty. The penalty is printed on the card though, so the hero won't know in advance how much damage they stand to suffer for running away.

There's one other change I forgot about that I liked in the revised edition: Monsters stay on the board. When an monster is encountered a Monster Token is placed in the room. If the hero escapes or dies, or the Monster isn't killed for any reason, the token stays in the room. Next time a hero enters the room a new Monster cards is drawn. The only thematic disconnect is that the Monster probably won't be the same type of Monster next time a hero encounters it, because of the new Monster card draw. It works though, and you can easily play without the Monster Tokens if you choose to.

Conquest really interests me but I'm 100% just going to wait a year or two and buy someone's huge lot of it at a cut rate price.

Just got my first shot at Fading Glory this past week with Wkover (thank you very much sir) and it was very good, very accessible. GMT announced yesterday that I could buy it and another game for 50% off regular price since I had P500'd Thunder Alley. So I'll likely pick it up as a Christmas gift for myself, especially since I can run two games out of the box simultaneously with the kids group. A nice catch at $30 plus shipping, perhaps making the trip along with Combat Commander Europe.

A very small chit count on the board, very simple rule set with a few things that pop up from turn to turn to implement weather, nightfall, that kind of thing that you look up on the spot. It has a remarkably intuitive move and attack action that allows you to press influence, to control chunks of the battlefield, to lock up enemy units in combat in order to pursue longer term goals on the battlefield.

We started at 10:45pm and I had an hour on the road to get home so we didn't get to finish Waterloo, but I certainly got to see enough to put a recommend on this title. Great little game, likely plays in two hours.

S.

I do like fading glory.

I lost 4 games of Rommel in the Desert over the weekend. Came close to winning one, but generally failed at this game. It is awesome.

Went to a local meetup this past weekend and enjoyed some new games.

Alien Frontiers - I've never had a chance to play this dice allocating mash up. The game is like a combination of Kingsburg and Yahtzee where you need certain dice combos to utilize spaces. I really dig the retro sci-fi art and the gameplay is very easy to understand. One of the guys we were playing with didn't really seem interested and just bought alien tech cards. He didn't focus on colonies at all (which is how you win the game). It made for not a whole lot of tension as me and another player vied for victory. I ended up winning by stealing a couple VP cards and then utilizing the space where you turn a spaceship into a colony a few times. It's enjoyable enough, but not something I'd run out and buy. The latest editions components are really well done though.

Automobile - I didn't really want to play this game, but I figured what the hell. I'm not into mathy, heavy Euros and Automobile is very much a mathy, heavy Euro. It's got quite a bit going on and I was lost for probably 3 out of the 4 game rounds. I didn't know when it was a good time to produce cars, or shut down factories etc... By the end it all made sense, but Automobile isn't something I'd ever like to revisit. I will concede that it's an interesting and well designed game. It's just not something I really like. It'a a bit too long and it's very dry.

Aerial Assault - Afterwards we sat down and played a proto-type of a game about high school robotics competitions. It's a team vs team card game that is currently being kickstarted. Each player has a hand of standard cards mixed with a few special cards that we took turns drafting. Problem is you don't know who is going to be on your team prior to the draft! So if you get paired up with a person that doesn't match well with the cards you drafted...well you're screwed! Apparently this is the way that it works out with real robotics competitions which I found fascinating. Afterwards you're paired with a teammate and you go off trying to shoot a ball into a goal by playing cards that let you move, shoot the ball, pick the ball up etc... The game somehow captures the awkward feeling of these robots trying to move up and down a court throwing a ball into a goal. You get points for successfully scoring a goal, catching a pass, etc...The game last 4 or 5 rounds and you tally up the points. This was a neat little card game and I had plenty of laughs playing. You don't see a lot of team vs team games. I also like how everyone plays and reveals a card at the same time. Zero downtime and the game length is just right. Cool game, with a really neat theme.

Game day started with Rails of New England, which turned out to be not as intimidating as I feared. A different kind of train game, and I liked it. We played with three, and I think four is probably a little better.

Then Splendor, which is a serviceable mild filler that somehow has enchanted the crowned heads of Europe. I don't hate it -- I don't think there's enough there to hate -- but I genuinely don't get the hype.

Then Impulse, my first time with more than two (three, to be specific, and that may be optimal). I am loving this game more and more each time I play it. I had a great combo by my base: Plan and Draw, so I built a swass plan. I then Researched a Sabotage as one of my techs, which was equally sweet. In one turn I leapt up, between sabotage, a battle, and my plan letting me score some big points and putting me within reach of the win. But I was lacking Build tech, so one player took out my transports and a cruiser and the other killed the remaining cruiser, knocking me out of the game. Boo! A lot of fun. This is on my short list for top games of the year.

Finally, Valley of the Kings. Star Realms should be glad it has that app because this is a much, much better game.

Gary Sax wrote: Conquest really interests me but I'm 100% just going to wait a year or two and buy someone's huge lot of it at a cut rate price.

The game has a really neat flow with a defined Hot-Spot and some forward thinking/planning needed. I think it could work as a stand-alone cardgame with a few tweaks. There's an ally wheel where an army can ally with other races next to them in a wheel, I'd do away with that and just mix whatever like Smash-Up. One would be the Core army so it'd be their Warlord and the Warlords 8 signature units. The Ally deck is everything else except the Warlord it's signature units. That would provide a deck a little less than 50 cards (the minimum per the deck-building rules). There's a deck of 12 Neutral cards, those would be shuffled and added randomly to the decks to hit that 50 number.

I think that would give 100's of unique pairings just out of the core set. Sure it means no deck-building aspects, but I wouldn't be getting into the game for the deck-building.

Now that would also give some odd pairings like Tau/Orcs against Space Marine/Chaos...But that's not a big deal to me. Even sticking with the Ally Wheel that'd give dozens of unique pairings.

The only thing that could get sticky is game balance. If they designers balanced the game with an eye toward only those fixed alliances, which seems likely, it might not work.

We played RUMMIKUB (twice!), ZOOLORETTO, CALIFORNIA, and CITIES & KNIGHTS OF CATAN this weekend. And got another game of ELDRITCH HORROR in last weekend.

Finally won that last one with a lucky draw on an event while I battled the DUNWICH HORROR. I was marking time, mostly, I was not equipped to defeat it,but I was hoping to chip at it while Shai worked his way across the map to support. Then the Mythos card let us destroy any Monster, and we double-checked that Epic Monsters = Monsters and that solved the final mystery! Golf claps all around.