What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yeah we played Bohnanza with 4 and i guess with most trading games it doesn't really heat up until people know what to look for in a deal. I enjoyed it and intend to play it more.

Storm over DBP is on vassal I believe. It is a very good dice chuckin war game and can play out in 90mins but often a little longer.

DukeofChutney wrote:
High Society; this is probably the best auction game I have played. IN part because it is short but also it achieves that fine balance between gambling and calculation. You can figure a few things out but ultimately the winner is the one who makes the right gamble at the right time. Awesome game. Two of us lost the 2nd game with 3mill left each.

Welcome to the High Society Appreciation Club! Your secret decoder ring is in the mail...

Bohnanza has instructions to remove beans from games with less people (I think you even remove beans with five players) to tighten up the spread a bit. No one ever actually does that as best I can tell.

When I talk about low-temperature I'm not talking about the temperature of the people as much as the temperature of the game itself. I'm trying to figure out an article on the topic and haven't quite walked it to its conclusion. Bohnanza is free-wheeling with plenty of room to watch a baseball game on the TV, or get a beer, or discuss whatever else is going on in the world. The game participates in the evening gathering instead of dominating it. Other light games (even Ra to a large extent) keep your eyes on the board and your thoughts on the game-state when you're playing, serving as the primary focus of the session. Each end of the spectrum has its merits, but Boh tends to run on the cooler side of things.

S.

Yeah, we always remove the beans, I just still think the 4p game is too tame. I like a ruckus.

Some good ones last night:

Timeline: This game is so easy and intuitive, it's amazing that it wasn't published 30 years ago. It only takes about 10 minutes, too, so it's a great warm-up for our group. We played Inventions and another one that was a hodgepodge, but I can't remember what they called it. Basically, Miscellaneous. I dominated both plays.

Impulse: Finally got to play it after reading so much about it. Five players, all basically new (one had played it a year ago). We made it through the rules much more easily than I expected, and were deep in the game pretty quickly. It took all of us a while to realize you just might not ever get to do what you want to do. We had a few hiccups here and there, but overall we all really liked it. I think five is too many, though. We were expecting four, but we had a late arrival. I'm really looking forward to trying it again.

Till Dawn: This was a Kickstarter game I had never heard of until my cousin gave it to me as a present. It's like a more complicated version of Diamant. Everyone plays vampires that stay out all night killing people for blood (points). You can choose to go into your coffin and bank your blood (blood bank! Get it?) by turning them into coffin tokens. What makes the game interesting is that unlike Diamant, each player has individual health points. You can lose (and gain) those in a variety of ways, so not everyone is in the same danger all the time. There's a "timer" for when the sun comes up that affects everyone regardless of their health. There's also player interaction (stealing blood, causing harm, etc.) which was nice. It wasn't a world-shaker, but I thought it was pretty good. My personal taste prefers the simplicity of Diamant, but if you're into the vampire theme or want a more "advanced" game, this one is worth checking out.

I think Impulse is best with 3, 4 tops. Above that and you're playing a different game, but one I'd like to try out because I think it would be nuts.

The team variant may be better for 4 or 6, you get a team impulse to work on so that adds back some strategy that you lose from the otherwise "one and done" impulse card actions with 4+ players.

This is kind of silly, but I just solo-ed Runewars. 2 players setup. Man, what an awesome game. Anyone who gets to play this regularly is lucky. Turns go so fast that sometimes I wonder... that's it? A lot of territories exchanged, and that New Recruit Spring Card is just riotous.

I had winter harvest, massive assault on super-strong Daqan fortress (with the +2 bonus) with 3 big daemons crossing the frozen lake normally inaccessible... freaking awesome.

played two games of Eklund's Greenland so wheres the scoop.

This is easily his most chaotic and anti euro design so far. At a mechanical level things are fairly simple. You have a bunch of hunters, you assign them to different province cards each with things you can gather or hunt or steal from other players. If two player send dudes to the same card they can negotiate or fight. Otherwise you roll 1 die per hunter cube. If you get enough 1s or 2s you get what the card offers (usually more people or resources sometimes a tech upgrade that helps you mitigate bad luck). If you roll 3 or 4 of a kind you sometimes get to claim the card as a victory points trophy. If you roll sometimes 4s or 3s you dudes can just die. Most of the strategy revolves around taking smart risks and trying to get cards that mitigate losses or increase your odds. As with all Eklund games there's a lot of symbols and bonuses associated with very specific situations. Finally theres an event card at the start of each round that kills lots of your stuff.

It is a good game but i wonder if it will wear thin faster than Pax or high frontier. Both of those games have a solid competitive game under the thick thematic sludge. Here there is a game but you are sort of along for the ride at the same time. YOu can just roll bad, or get screwed by events. Because Phil picks interesting topics and matches his mechanics to the theme pretty well the story is very vivid and engaging but that is what you are really here for. I would like to play it some more, i probably won't buy.

After that we played The Battle of Bushy Run from Com Ops mag 5. THis is a pretty good magazine war game with a single blind system. One side is british escorting a wagon, the others indians ambushing. The indian player can move units between his private map and the main map which is pretty neat. Otherwise it plays sort of similar to a very simplified Storm Over game. Pretty quick, not that complex, rather random, but sort of what you want in a magazine game.

Also played Pax, and High Society

Played games with Erdulis of F:AT last night, plus one more guy. First up was a long game of The Vesuvius Incident. Enjoyable game, except that the extensive amount of rules made it feel like a learning game. Things were curiously easy at first, with only one dead space marine early on. Late in the game, we finally had a good handle on the rules and then the game turned viciously against us. Ambushes, death, acid spray, a booby trap, weapon jams, and too many xenomorphs. We briefly nearly won the game, but that was snatched away by cruel fate. We threw in the towel in the final stretch with 75% casualties that were probably about to increase again. One funny moment early in the game was when Private Colovisto accidentally shot out a crucial hatch, and Sergeant Hernandez followed that up by accidentally shooting out a window in the command pod. That left a crucial section of corridor exposed to vacuum for the rest of the game.

Next, we played two quick games of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The first game was a complete rout, including Buffy getting turned into a vampire very early in the game. Game two was really close, but this time the Scooby gang pulled out a win.