What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Imperial Settlers: A reasonably light engine-building Euro with some decent screwage. I like it.

Cyclades: First time playing this... Have wanted to for a long time. But it was disappointing, in that all three of us were new to the game and didn't get a good sense of things. One player quietly won after about 50 minutes by getting a 4th philosopher, and the other two of us were like, oh crap, didn't even see that coming. So it felt insubstantial, but wasn't the best example of a game, I'm sure. I can also see where 4-5 players would have more interesting interactions. So I do want to play this again, but as much as I love Kemet, my gut feeling is this won't compare to that.

Played my first game of Cyclades this weekend too, without adding in Hades. Played for about an hour and a half and slightly ran out of time, the end was pretty close for 2/4 players. I loved the game. The auctions were great as you have to adjust your plans if you cannot get the god you really need and when someone goes all out on a bid you know some serious shit is going down that turn. Looking forward to adding Hades next time.

Played Tammany Hall also. I liked the game alot but the constant counting of immigrant population every turn was a real turn off. I'm a big fan of Chaos in the Old World and really prefer that game for an area majority mechanic. Play time with four and two new people clocked in at a bit under 2 hours so that was perfect. By the end though we really needed a spreadsheet before every placement.

Cyclades is one of my top ten games ever. I'm a fool for trading it.

Played a bunch of shit this weekend since the wife's Aunt is here, and my 13 year old can con her into a "game night".

Ticket to Ride
Zooloretto
Elfenland x4
Love Letter x2
Journey to the Center of the Earth x1

Good times.

I've had a lot of gaming the past two days.

Saturday, I soloed Pandemic: The Cure. Loved it. Brilliant use of dice.

Sunday - Played with Geof G. Got in another game of Pandemic: The Cure.

We also played Dice Masters. I'm a big fan! Picked some up at Geof's FLGS. It's not super serious and I like that. They definitely improved Quarriors. It just needs a way to cull your basic dice.

While there, he taught me Impulse. Fucking brilliant. I don't think anyone has ever done more with less.

Then we played Machi Koro. I haven't had so much fun with such a simple game in so long. It's amazingly entertaining. But it needs more cards, and soon. It would get a bit boring after a handful of plays with the limited card pool.

Saturday night was our ST:AW tournament. In this scenario you had to bring two fleets, one Rebel (basically not-Borg) and the one Borg fleet. Turnout was low with only four and the new wave came out so there were a lot of similar builds.

There were two Borg Super-Cubes, a Dual Borg Sphere build, A Romulan Assimilated Warbird. The Rebel fleets saw three Simitar builds (from the new wave) and then a Enterprise-E with a Kazon Raider in support. Three people went 2-1 and the last went 0-3...I ended up winning on points. Which in turn put me in the lead for the Grand Prize in this three event arc.

I should have lost my first game but my opponent's Scimitar blew up on a Warp Core Breech. During the last game the person leading with points was able to pick their fleet and at the other table that person picked their Rebel fleet...Not sure why though. So that decision gave him the loss and was the reason I won the tournament. All in all, not a great showing on my part and were it not for the Warp Core Breech and the decision to not fly the Borg I might have dropped to 3rd.

Yesterday I went to the shop and a dude and I played Kinzia's Age of War which is a retheming of Battleship Express I understand and the chassis used for Elder Sign. My opponent and I were just looking to fill time and roll some dice. We were joking back and forth, laughing and drew in another person who was enjoying watching the game. I lost bad, but it didn't matter because all were enjoying themselves.

We then switched to Splendor which was described as a Kinzia-like game in that it is a well designed mathy-type game...And we proceeded to play two games in silence. Everyone was looking down thinking about what was available and what they had. The first game was a learning game for me, the second game I won.

I thought Splendor was a fine game, well designed and inoffensive. I can't say the game or design was bad...It's just I would rather have played three or four more games of Art of War with joking and laughter than the two games of Splendor we played.

Driving home I realized that the Kinzia title we played was loud, full of jokes and a jovial atmosphere. The non-Kinzia we played was silent and really I didn't look at or care about what my opponent's were doing. I couldn't help but chuckle at that.

Saturday at my usual weekly meet started with a Lords of Xidit five player game. I felt it was a good game, but there was too much going on for me with the board state with so many players. I would play it again with three players maybe, to see how that goes, but it wasn't my favourite.

Then I had food coming (we have a large group that meets in a pub) so I ducked out of the next game with that group, which would have been Sherrif of Nottingham. I had eaten my meal and they were still going through the rules, so I ended up playing Istanbul with two other guys. I felt a lot better about this game. It still has that turn by turn blockage going on, but I felt at the end of the game (I lost, obv.) that I knew what I should have been doing. I would definitely play that again.

After that, four of us set up a game of Red Dragon Inn, which used to be a staple of the group, and it was nice to get back into it, as it's the kind of game you can chat a lot while playing. I was playing one of the new decks (Ozrik) and found it pretty weak, though I survived enough to second place, mostly through the meta-game, (Hey everyone Chris is totally winning right now.)

Last game of the night for four of us was Red7, which I really enjoyed. It has enough interesting challenges in each hand to give a lot of game in 5-10 minutes.

Sunday was 7 Wonders, with every expansion and promo thrown in. Not the best way to learn a game, and I felt screwed through the whole game because neither of my neighbours generated resources (they had other ways to leech/gain them). I'm now 4 for 4 with Antoine Bauza games that leave me feeling either cold or utterly wretched. I think I'll just ignore him from now on.

The final game of the weekend was a four player session of Thunder Alley on the Super Speedway. Two of the players were new, but quickly grasped the concepts, and in fact the game came down to a fight between those two for the win. I looked strong with a front running pack with my four cars in it after two turns. Nobody believed me when I said that this wasn't as good as it looked, and sure enough I got passed around to finish a pretty distant third overall. Everyone enjoyed it, and even the new guys corrected a couple of spectators who were sneering at the "NASCAR game." I feel like the game would work if it were about a shoal of fish trying to out-swim a shark.

Had some family in this weekend from out of town including a 14 year old and an eight year old so it was family game armageddon here.

Schloss Schlotterstein
Micro Monsters
Coconuts x2
Click Clack Lumberjack x4
Sorry Sliders
Villa Paletti
Hey, That's My Fish
Rampage
Midnight Party
Niagara

And ample time spent with Mario Kart 8.

JEM wrote: . . . the new guys corrected a couple of spectators who were sneering at the "NASCAR game."

What part of the country are you in that people were sneering at a NASCAR theme?

S.

Atlanta, Georgia. Hah!

Atlanta is not a NASCAR town, Atlanta Motor Speedway notwithstanding. Jem lives ITP (in the perimeter), as opposed to OTP (out of the perimeter)...outside of the I-285 loop you get into the wilds and that's where you might find pockets of NASCAR fandom. But even still, it's not much of a big deal here.

Actually, Atlanta Motor Speedway is like 45 minutes out of Atlanta going south so it's not even in town.

Jem, you should really submit an application for a guest pass to the Hellfire Club. The screening process is quite rigorous, but it is the best gaming venue in Atlanta. Extremely exclusive, no random weirdos or smell-bads allowed.