What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Last night I hosted a last-game-night-before-Christmas deal, and we had a great time.

Magical Athlete - This is a newer group for me, so I wasn't sure how they would respond to something like this. I thought it would be a good litmus test for precisely how stupid a game they would tolerate, and I got the impression that "tolerate" was about as far as it got. Still, they were good sports and we had fun with it.

Cosmic Encounter - We had six people, two new ones. We had Mite, Amoeba, The Claw, Void, Leviathan, and Oracle (me). The Leviathan was able to go most of the way alone, but then he failed to get his fifth colony after everyone dogpiled on him. I was up next with three colonies, and I had an 8 and a 23 in my hand. I was able to win my first encounter by inviting a few allies and getting that 8 to win it. But then The Claw revealed that their "claw" was the Attack 8, and they took one of my home planets for the second time in that game. Since The Claw had also received a foreign colony for helping me win that encounter, they got to five before I was able to use my Attack 23 to get my fifth. Truly a Nate kind of loss at Cosmic Encounter. It was a big hit and I shouldn't have any problem getting this played with this group.

Dixit - Great six player game. It truly has come alive for me with a lot of expansions, because I'm still being surprised by some of the cards.

Spyfall - This is a game that everyone else played at BGG.Con, but we didn't play the published version. We actually played a version through our phones using a website that essentially organized the game for us. It's a neat twist on the Traitor genre, especially since you can basically play it for free on your phones.

The idea is that everyone is given a role in a specific setting as given by the game. One player is a "spy," and is only told the range of possibilities for the setting. Everyone else is told specifically where they are. The players then take turns asking questions of each other. The Spy has to learn where everyone is based on the questions being asked, while everyone else needs to figure out who the spy is based on their answers, since vague or nonsensical answers would be a dead giveaway. In our one game I was the Spy. It's a fascinating game because it really puts you on the spot and forces you to play a role if you're the spy. If you aren't it forces some deduction that is highly dependent on social cues. The endgame felt a little weird, in that it kind of broke down and it was a bit ambiguous how to actually win, though this may have been because we were being taught from someone's memory based on what they played at the con. Still, worth checking out.

We finished up with Citadels, which interestingly enough was the first time playing for everyone except me. I was able to snatch the win using the Magician to build my eighth district, and I was the only player to have all five colors. Good to get it played again.

repoman wrote: It's not the hybrid nature that's the turn off in Eclipse. It was the feeling that every game tends to play out the same. Turtle and build up until last two turns followed by big fight in the middle. Your luck of the draw in tiles as you explored out the back side of your home system determined how well you'd do in the one big fight. The alien races sucked and those last two turns took FOREVER.

To be fair, Kemet made a good impression at first but didn't really have any staying power and I grew tired of it quickly.

Everything here. The other big downside to Eclipse is that it not only had the appearances of a 4X game to rival TI3, but the designer diaries supported that notion. They spent a lot of time talking about how they were looking at TI3, thinking about how they can cut through the "kitchen sink" nature of TI3 and deliver the game many people have always wished TI3 was...and what they delivered was a boring economic game. What interaction is there is bullshit. The point-draw system is frustratingly stupid and its intent is undone by fighting the non-player ships you find in space, and as Repo stated, it's far too easy to just build your little space tunnel backwards from your home planet and hide out. How much of a shitshow Eclipse is deserves its own thread, but the bottom line is what it looked like and how it was sold to everyone turned out to be a total farce. I get downright pissed when I think about how many people drank the Kool Aid and are still saying it's the TI3 killer, or that it's really a 4X game at all. Sure, it's a 4X if your 4 Xs are eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and Microsoft eXcel.

And yeah, Kemet is total balls, too. After a few games it becomes abundantly clear that the only way it will ever not turn out to be the same game every time you play it (which Eclipse is guilty of, too, BTW) is that if you took a really long break from playing it and forgot which techs are the best.

Today we played a few three player games of Condottiere. There's a lot of game in that small box.

Josh Look wrote:

repoman wrote: It's not the hybrid nature that's the turn off in Eclipse. It was the feeling that every game tends to play out the same. Turtle and build up until last two turns followed by big fight in the middle. Your luck of the draw in tiles as you explored out the back side of your home system determined how well you'd do in the one big fight. The alien races sucked and those last two turns took FOREVER.

To be fair, Kemet made a good impression at first but didn't really have any staying power and I grew tired of it quickly.

Everything here. The other big downside to Eclipse is that it not only had the appearances of a 4X game to rival TI3, but the designer diaries supported that notion. They spent a lot of time talking about how they were looking at TI3, thinking about how they can cut through the "kitchen sink" nature of TI3 and deliver the game many people have always wished TI3 was...and what they delivered was a boring economic game. What interaction is there is bullshit. The point-draw system is frustratingly stupid and its intent is undone by fighting the non-player ships you find in space, and as Repo stated, it's far too easy to just build your little space tunnel backwards from your home planet and hide out. How much of a shitshow Eclipse is deserves its own thread, but the bottom line is what it looked like and how it was sold to everyone turned out to be a total farce. I get downright pissed when I think about how many people drank the Kool Aid and are still saying it's the TI3 killer, or that it's really a 4X game at all. Sure, it's a 4X if your 4 Xs are eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and Microsoft eXcel.

And yeah, Kemet is total balls, too. After a few games it becomes abundantly clear that the only way it will ever not turn out to be the same game every time you play it (which Eclipse is guilty of, too, BTW) is that if you took a really long break from playing it and forgot which techs are the best.

Most of the complaints with Eclipse (beyond the economic aspect just not appealing) seem to be stuff I see with groups that haven't played it much. For instance, tunneling backwards is a horrific tactic. The third ring sectors are the weakest and offer the fewest Economy (orange/money) which is the most important element. It also prevents you from having any effect on your opponents which is important if you are not winning as you should be attacking the leader.

You also won't be fighting enough to gain victory points if you tunnel backwards. Finally, if you do that with the intent to turtle and don't research military tech, it's astoundingly easy to get fucked in the ass via Wormhole Generator which comes out pretty much every game.

The expansion also has native warp spaces that connect to each other, furthermore linking people (expansion totally isn't needed for this game though).

I'd love to offer a counterpoint to the interaction is bullshit claim but there's no detail there to refute. I will offer that Eclipse is one of my most played games and my group - we all enjoy TI3 as well and don't even see them as related as they offer different experiences. Eclipse is smooth and amazingly easy to play. It's a game we can pull out once every few months and don't need to re-read the rules due to the excellent iconography/graphical reminders. It's overall structure is very simple.

Also, concerning interaction, I've actually been eliminated in Eclipse in the first turn. Seriously, that happened 2 or 3 plays ago (and I'm a pretty good player). Several of the races excel early game and should be pushing on their neighbors. The Red aliens that start with a shitload of money but less discs can take the center hex by the 2nd turn (they should if they want to win).

We often see the center hex taken about half-way through, not usually the last couple of turns. The last couple of turns do see a lot of action, but usually only one or two players are driving action around the middle, while the others are pushing the flanks of neighbors. Neutrons bombs are scary as hell.

I've actually found Eclipse far more interactive than TI3 (in terms of quantity of actions taken that affect or influence another player directly). I'm not dissing TI3 as I enjoy it, although we don't get to play it much due to the length.

I also don't get the excel spreadsheet/math complaint. I dislike spreadsheet games built on optimization but Eclipse is not dense or difficult at all. All you have to do is max out your orange (money) as much as possible and grab what other resources you can. The action discs and cubes do the adding for you, it tells you how much you produce (in a far more elegant way than TI3) and all you have to do is not reveal the disc which has a higher cost than your number showing next to Orange. That's comparing two numbers.

Sure, in high level play you can get crazy and force multiple bankruptcies to perfectly optimize your turn but that's not tied to an unbeatable win rate or overly successful strategy.

I do agree with the flaws of the early turns being scripted but this is a flaw in TI3 too so I'm not getting that.

Nice post/conversation from all of you re: Eclipse

Gary Sax wrote: Nice post/conversation from all of you re: Eclipse

It is, and this is the kind of thing that could go front-page and generate a lot of conversation. I think in-depth analyses, follow-up reviews and strategy guides are some of the best content we get here, the stuff most likely to keep me from getting to work on time in the morning.

S.

I don't think ECLIPSE needs more defenders, as charlest does an awesome job up there. But I love this game. And he's right--I think a lot of it has to do with the mindset of players around the table. If they are playing to win, you will have a hell of a game, if they are playing to not lose, you will have a staring contest as everyone minmaxes their little sector and sets up stardocks to hold off enemies. ...and I love the economy! Dang, I think it's a supercool way to represent overreaching. You can do it, but it's going to hurt. I haven't played CLASH OF CULTURES, and I keep hearing how awesome it is, but ECLIPSE is plenty of game. ps: if "passive" players aren't chasing Planta, they are going to fucking tear you up with their power and suck up all the good chits.

This whole conversation reminds me of the folks dissing WALLENSTEIN as boring because there's no fighting--there's fighting galore if you fight.

This weekend we played MONOPOLY, which the kids get obsessed with every now and then. I know the rules, so it's a bloodbath. Mom and elder daughter out within 90 minutes, younger daughter held on for for another hour with four railroads soaking up rents, but couldn't develop with no monopolies. She busted out to back to back visits to Park Place and Boardwalk with three houses a piece ($1100 + $1400 I think). So just the older son and I, he with purples, magentas and greens, me with dark blues, reds, and (eventually) yellows. We played for another 45-60 minutes, and he got closer and closer to busting out. He'd ended up selling off his houses, mortgaging some jank, but was hanging on. I wagered he couldn't make it around the table one more time, but he did, so he won. The game is still long, about 4 hours we played, and making it longer with Free Parking money seems insane.

We later on played SLEEPING QUEENS, and that's a fun little game. Great art, and good math shit in there for the six year old. Our younger son is some kind of Rose Queen savant though, and first picked that thing four times for his mother.

I don't care for Eclipse. I think the way VPs are distributed is dumb, and I think a space exploration game that ends with people buying a bunch of tech they don't care about just to get a few more points is boring. Honestly, I don't see much of any comparison between Hyperborea and Eclipse.

In other news, played Core Worlds with the new Revolution expansion. Here's what I had to say about it:

Core Worlds is a strange beast. I've gone back and forth on whether I want to keep it a million times. It doesn't get played too often, but when it does, I really like it, so it stays. But then I start to wonder about it again. (I originally grabbed Star Realms as a possible replacement for it which, hoo-boy, Star Realms is not.) So I was a little reluctant to pick up an expansion, especially since I was iffy on the previous expansion.

Revolution doesn't add much that's revolutionary to the mix. The biggest things are Heroic Tactics, new cards that give heroes special powers to use, and Enhancements, upgrades you can buy for your planets that give them special powers. You also get "revolution" tokens which we only saw a use for once in our game and didn't do anything too special. Neither the Enhancements nor the Heroic Tactics add much to the game, other than two new decks you have to muck around with, in a game that already takes up a lot of physical and cognitive space. I don't know that I'd consider this expansion essential.

What I'd like for Core Worlds, and what would, I think, help solidify it for me, is to see an expansion go deeper, not wider. Instead of adding new mechanisms to the game, I'd like to see it plumb what's already there a little more.

Also I'd like if the next expansion came in a box small enough to fit all the current stuff without all the empty space.

Had a very successful 3 player test of my prototype last night. I now think all I need is to polish the rulebook, add some clarifications to the board, and write some more story cards (I have 17 done and I want to have 40).

After that we had a 3 player game of Nexus Ops. I was rubium poor the entire game due to most of my easily explored hexes being rock striders. That was great initially until they were dead. I got beat.

hotseatgames wrote: Had a very successful 3 player test of my prototype last night. I now think all I need is to polish the rulebook, add some clarifications to the board, and write some more story cards (I have 17 done and I want to have 40).

After that we had a 3 player game of Nexus Ops. I was rubium poor the entire game due to most of my easily explored hexes being rock striders. That was great initially until they were dead. I got beat.

Get those fuckers on top of the Monolith by turn 3, fool!