What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Blood Bowl Team Manager came out of the bag this weekend, and we played a four player, four round game. It took a bit over two hours even so, and again the player who got that "fans for downed players" card won the game. That's a tough card to deal with especially when another team is spree-ing goblins to a tournament (ie cheap hits.) I still enjoy the game, but more and more as a 2-3 player game. For the crowd we had I'd rather have played the DC Deck Building Game - Forever Evil as all of us knew that system, but one of the players had her son with her and hoped to play one of those later. It turns out he wasn't interested and wanted to play Sentinels of the Multiverse anyway, but that's how it goes sometimes.

Paperback was next. We had a new player come to the group who only really played Scrabble and other more traditional card games. This one was pretty straightforward and went over pretty well with the group. It's a likable game, but I don't know if I'll keep it. I see it being a good fit for "non-gamers" but I'd rather play something else (except Dominion, which bores me.)

I recently got the Tigris & Euphrates app, so I was happy to get into a four player game of the real thing. We apparently got some major rule wrong around external conflicts, but played through anyway. I like the game, though I am hopeless at it. I'm looking forward to playing it again.

A couple of friends were enthusing about playing the new Jolly Roger printing of Kremlin. I knew this was an old 1980s game, and had a hunch that they might struggle with the rules, so I asked to join them as we were almost done with T&E. Sure enough, the rules were a headache, with some crucial information apparently missing. We eventually figured out how the influence worked (really, rule book, just tell us "Take your sheet full of politicians, and write the numbers 1-10 against 10 of them to assign influence.") Well, maybe the rules said that somewhere, but I was squinting at an edited PDF on my phone while another player scoured the book.

We did eventually figure out how to play the game and got into playing it, and much fun was had (we were still playing it wrong, but it was moving at least.) We called it after five rounds because it was getting late, but I think it'll work a lot better next time when we all know how to play properly.

More Firefly at home, and losing again with those runs out to the Blue Sun.

Edit to add stuff:
Egg, it's interesting how different groups work. My wife and I find Flash Point to be pretty easy to deal with. 1) Drag out hazmats, 2) put out fires, 3) rescue goldfish, repeat 2-3. Libertalia the last time I played with six took over two hours, it was wretchedly painful because we had three "AP" players, one of whom needed answers to questions like, "Why does my graveyard go after the week, do they dig up the graves?" every ten minutes. I really like the game, but pick your group for sure.

On Smash-Up I've read that the Cthulhu decks are OP if played vs the other decks. If someone had grabbed two of them in a non-Cthulhu only game then that might be part of it. The last time I played, someone had dinosaur/zombie combo, and literally played the same three cards over and over to win the game. Total bilge.

JEM wrote: Egg, it's interesting how different groups work. My wife and I find Flash Point to be pretty easy to deal with. 1) Drag out hazmats, 2) put out fires, 3) rescue goldfish, repeat 2-3. Libertalia the last time I played with six took over two hours, it was wretchedly painful because we had three "AP" players, one of whom needed answers to questions like, "Why does my graveyard go after the week, do they dig up the graves?" every ten minutes. I really like the game, but pick your group for sure.

On Smash-Up I've read that the Cthulhu decks are OP if played vs the other decks. If someone had grabbed two of them in a non-Cthulhu only game then that might be part of it. The last time I played, someone had dinosaur/zombie combo, and literally played the same three cards over and over to win the game. Total bilge.

Ugh...that game of Libertalia sounds brutal. I can see how the game can cause AP because you're struggling which card makes the most sense at any given time...but thankfully that didn't happen too much in our 5 player game. The stuff about the graveyard...sheesh. That's what it would be like playing with my 4 year old niece who questions everything in the world!

I've heard the Chthulu decks don't mesh well with other decks outside that expansion...due to the reliance of madness cards. So maybe that is a way to make them a bit less powerful. In Smash Up you sometimes find a combo that is silly good. I'm cool with it as long as the game doesn't drag on past an hour.

Egg Shen wrote: Tried my first game of Flash Point: Fire Rescue. I'm not the biggest fan of co-op games, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Well after sitting through some guy drone on (FROM THE FUCKING RULEBOOK) we were off. ...

Played a three player game of Smash Up.

Weird, I also played Flash Point and Smash Up this weekend at my brother's house. You're not secretly my brother, are you??

I like Flash Point quite a bit, moreso than Pandemic. It's fun and chaotic, but mostly I think the rules just intuitively make sense. Stuff works the way you think it should. It also lends itself to some hilarious moments. We were playing a three-story building, and found a dog in the basement. For whatever reason, we left the dog there to tend to some other issues. Several rounds go by, and the dog's just sitting there patiently, waiting to be rescued. Eventually we roll that space, and it starts smoking. No big deal. Just a smoky dog. My brother (NOT an animal person) finally decides to go downstairs again to rescue this dog. He's two steps away ... and he rolls that space again. The dog bursts into flames right in front of his eyes. Poor puppy.

So, my brother extinguishes the fire and moves on about his day. On the next player's turn, we roll that space again, so now it's smoking again. At that point, we figured there was some kind of portal to hell on that space, and that the charred corpse of the dog would be bursting forth as some sort of fiery hell-hound. Nobody ever went back down in the basement after that because fuck that. I'm not paid to deal with hell-hounds.

Played Firefly with the coworkers again. This time we took out the expansion, to see what the 4-player base game played like. The conclusion of two of my coworkers was that it played like shit. The combination of a relatively long playing time, coupled with the ability to get hosed pretty good with the pull of a card, didn't set well with them. "The next time you want to play that game, don't include me." And he was the winner!

My take was that you really have to squeeze as much time out of the game as you can. Since a lot of the time is spent in solo activities that aren't going to affect the other players much, make sure that you are all multitasking when you can. Your neighbor moves while you shop, sell, or select new missions. As for getting hosed by random fate, it's there. Suffer through it or play something else, I guess. I'll play it again.

The base game (if you mean the race to $12,000) shouldn't take more than 2.5 hours for four people. The card screwage can be mitigated pretty strongly if you're familiar with the game, but that does make it difficult for someone who is new to it if nobody explains how to reaver-proof your ship etc. The Breakin' Atmo card expansion helps a lot with adding useful things to the decks.

We did the "Get Solid with 4 / Misbehave+ / Misbehave+" scenario. Started at 3, ended at 6:30, with basically no breaks. There's a little bit of a learning curve, on both the rules and the ship's crews.

After writing that up, I looked back the end of the game. Of the 4 players, 2 were neck-and-neck, and I was a step behind. I needed some decent die rolls to win, that I didn't get. That wasn't sound strategy on my part, but the alternative was, "Spend two turns running to X to get useful gear, and lose." The first game we played ended up like that too: 2nd and 3rd were on the winnner's tail. So we're looking at a 2-3 hour game, with a metric shit-ton of events, and it comes down to the wire. I'm not sure if you can ask more from a game.

Had the absolute worst game ever of Arkham Horror the other day, one that at least briefly made me reconsider my valuation of the game and the various Lovecraftian alternatives to it (Elder Sign and Witch of Salem, both of which I own and like, and Eldritch Horror, which I've shied away from out of fear that it would either replace or be redundant with AH). My wife and I hosted two new people, both of whom are fairly experienced board gamers (and gamers in general) but new to AH. The stars were probably not right, as we didn't get started till 4 p.m. (after a game of Castle Ravenloft -- and AH should never be the second game of the day for new players), and one of the guests was already pretty tired. But the chief problem was that we ran into the dreaded midgame slowdown that I had yet to experience. We'd been playing extremely efficiently despite having Cthulhu as the GOO, and had closed and sealed 4 gates, but then we just couldn't finish it. If we'd been fresher, we probably could've won fairly easily, but we were a bit worn out and fell into the trap of trying the same approach repeatedly instead of a different approach. The silly thing was that we had a character with five clue tokens and one with an Elder Sign item, and we still couldn't seem to get them all the way through one or another Other World to end the game. We weren't all that close to the final battle, either, with the Mythos cards fairly regularly either turning up sealed gates (we were playing base game without bursts) or locations with already sealed gates. Some of the characters also had piles of monster trophies, which should've been turned in for more clues, but we just glitched on that. We ended up calling it around 9:30. I almost left it set up to finish but didn't. Anyway, I'll chalk it up to fatigue, groupthink, and inexperience on some players' parts.

The Ravenloft game reminded me how good that game is. Wish WotC would've done a bit more to tie the system together and avoid the power-level imbalances that make smooth integration less possible. Adding a fourth base set isn't really going to help that, I don't think.

Not a board game, but we tried Fiasco for the first time. It was hilarious and I'd definitely be up for it again. The story involved drugs, hazardous chemicals, and polar bear maulings.

After that we played 3 Dragon Ante, which was okay, but not really the kind of game I prefer.

Beasty Bar: Playing the shit out of this. Love this card game. Love it!
Talisman: Using special rules to make things a little different
- Must have 4 completed Quests to gain a Talisman (at least, via the Warlock)
- Ice Queen ending
- Party Mode: Each player uses 2 people, can trade between them as a character encounter, and if they're on the same space they can combine Str or Cra against an enemy on that space (or the Sentinel, or the Portal); player can choose which character to move BEFORE the movement roll.

Rampage: Introduced my 6 year old to this. Yes, the REAL Rampage, not the fake ass re-branded one. Because monsters don't perform Terror attacks In Meeple City, they fucking RAMPAGE.

Nuclear War: Not nearly as much fun as I remember, but still OK. 2 Player really sucks.

Stone Age: Introduced my 13 year old and she wanted to play it a second time right after the first. I made her smell the cup, because I'm fucking evil. She said it smelled like chemicals. The transformation has begun.

Opened up Space Cadets Dice Duel but sadly my wife decided to go to our friend's bar so I couldn't get 4 players going.

@JPAT: Eldritch Horror will aBsOlUtElY replace AH. I couldn't ever envision going back to AH, especially now that they're making really good expansions for it.

jpat, just reading that made me relive what I dislike about AH. I've had a game or two like that and it's brutal.