What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yesterday was our monthly meeting for miniatures at the IU Memorial Union but we had also discussed bringing some board games as alternatives. Little Mike had emailed me the day before that his son was requesting that I bring my copy of the old Arkham Horror. Brady still remembered a game from the '90s when he was playing Joe Diamond and he beat a vampire to death with his fists. I still have nightmares about the games that ended up with a monster conga line in the streets so I said I would bring Eldritch Horror instead.

We ended up with three players. Lost when the White Ship sailed away. We concentrated too much on gates and not enough on the mysteries and rumors. But everybody had a great time and I think Brady and Little Mike are going to pick up their own copy.

I played XCOM for the first time with a friend. Using the app was interesting, but I thought it worked pretty well. We ended up losing to our base getting blowed up, but we weren't doing so hot on panic either, with North America already fallen. We had some ability timing questions and we must have been doing missions wrong because we got fucked so hard on missions so they seemed impossible. Time to dig through the rules pdf to straighten some stuff out. I'm not the biggest fan of co-ops, but overall I enjoyed it. I'd really like to try it with 4 players though.

Edit: looks like we played missions correctly, our strategy was just terrible.

Wiz-War - 5 player, two newbs. thought it was going to be a boring game, I quickly ran out and took one treasure, and was on the way back with a second. Then it clicked for the two new guys, and they threw everything in my way to block me. walls, firewalls, thorn bushes, snake totems. Game ended with me hanging around at 2 life for three rounds and avoiding attacks, until someone threw a prismatic storm at me to kill me(it ended up killing him too, except that he won). I did manage to block another person in with a stone block, so he was closeted for three turns. so that was nice.

Batman Love Letter its love letter. with batman.

Glory to Rome - 5 players. I have never won this game. my wife won...again...with a merchant/vault combo. I tied for last place, despite jumping out early with some buildings. I try to do to much in this game. two groups of new players now, had nearly the same thing to say about this game - "no idea what was going on for about three rounds, then it clicks and is awesome"

lots of X-wing on Vassal. Lots of losses. tried a Scum-Y list, ended up getting Ion Torpedoe'd to death (who takes those?). my new favorite generalist list - 2 FCS b-wings, Tarn+r7, y-wing with stressbot and BTL-A4 got destroyed by a double IG88 list. stressbot is my only chance against those guys. I miss-judged a block opportunity, and there went stressbot. Vader + X1 + ATC, Soontir Full, Buzzsaw shuttle. against 2 Awings and an E, 2 PS 10 ships and something else. sooooo painful to have an arcdodger list, and to not be able to arc dodge because of losing the PS battle. everybody died quickly, except soontir and corran. then literally another hour and a half of soontir taking shots and evading everything, and corran taking hits and regenerating them.....eventually I just gave up.

Valley of the Kings - What the actual fuck....this was boring as shit for 2. Is it better with more? Just completely meh.

Mars Attacks Dice Game - This is a great 30 minute lunchtime game. I love it. Simple enough to teach new peeps.

Had an amazing game night last night. Invited a new guy from work I discovered was a gamer last week and he had a great time, said he'd come back next week.

First we introduced him to Wiz-War with a 4 player game. We threw him to the wolves leaving in both expansions. This was our first play with Bestial Forces and I was able to summon a minotaur early. Love the creatures. Unfortunately I ended up dying pretty quick due to the deadly treasures variant (both my chests were captured) and the game itself only lasted about 30 minutes due to a speedy treasure snatch from an opponent. Great time.

Then we moved on to One Night Ultimate Werewolf with the Daybreak expansion. The new guy had played Resistance before but not One Night. He ended up enjoying it quite a bit and man, the expansion is excellent. I heard some mixed things about it, but I really loved how it felt like we were completely rebuilding our metagame. The PI and Witch are awesome. We played about 8 games total and could have kept going.

Escape was next, again with both expansions and some promos mixed in. We beat the hell out of this one, winning two games. Second game we even added two extra gems but still destroyed it.

To close out the night a buddy requested A Fistful Of Dinero. The new guy really dug it and asked where he could buy it a couple of times. I ended up barely winning, with just me and the new guy left standing. Won by a single chip. Had an awesome moment just before the end where the Dynamite came out and was poorly thrown, blowing up the wielder and killing them. This softened up the adjacent player who I ended up putting down with my Peacemaker, taking one of his chips and claiming the Bounty I placed on him earlier. That would be the deciding factor in the game, giving me 4 total chips.

This covers about the last week or so.

Played Eclipse again, a full 6 player game and my second time playing. After my intro game I wans't keen on playing again but it was a birthday request. I tried to go as military as possible this game, had an alien race with alot of money to start and raced up on attacking techs. One guy failed to protect his border and another player basically wiped him out on turn 2 of the game. I attacked a bunch of people but they all subsequently caught up on tech and made me pay for it. The winner maxed out 2 of the 3 tech rows and had a bunch of points from building monoliths (I think).

Again I'd rather not play this again. It is too much of a Euro game for me. Even with my focus on war this game I still don't find it fun. At all.

Got a first play of Julius Caesar in. Loved the game. I was Pompey and we both blundered learning the rules. My opponent stole my full strength elephants at one point just after I built them up, but I got them back the final round. By the end of the game I had Rome and had lost Alexandria and most of Spain, but had one more VP city than he did. Pretty easy game to learn and some good decisions on where to attack, raise troops, and move every round. Completely dice reliant combat - coming from Sekigahara much less control of the outcome of combat. But it happens frequently enough like in Nexus Ops, it should even out.

During lulls in the NCAA tournament I taught a couple non gamers Quantum. Both of them liked it alot. Great intro game, plays in an hour, has combat, and has the cards to modify your strategy as the game goes on. I only won 1 of the 3 games we played and normally against new players I can cruise to a win unless I get teamed up against.

Also picked up Caesar's Gallic War for pretty cheap. Even after reading the reviews and criticisms I wasn't prepared for how seemingly difficult it is for the Germans to win. To be fair I've only done a couple of solo games, but still if Rome wants to slaughter the Germans or pin them early the Germans don't have a great shot unless they draw the right one card in a deck of about 30. Also a dice reliant block game. Some cool ideas, like tribes/territories revolting, so I'm still optimistic that it can be a 60/40 outcome which is all I ask for.

My friend picked up Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game and brought it tonight. It's great as a pure co-op and we had a lot of fun, except for our host who got eliminated early during the second game. We played and beat the first two scenarios (Alien and Aliens) with 4 players.

I really like how it feels different from the Marvel version while using the same engine. When I play Marvel I feel like a dickish ubermensch who, while doing his part to save the world, still wants the most glory for himself. In the Alien DBG the Coordinate mechanic encourages cooperation (simply put, some cards have a Coordinate effect that allows you to discard it to add Attack or buying power to another player's hand during their turn, and you can then draw a card to replace it) to the extent that after a few turns cooperation becomes second nature and players are offering to help without being prompted by an alpha dog.

I went heavy with Sergeants (Cost 3, +2 Buy, Coordinate) in both games so I usually had plenty of buying power to spread around. Late in the game if I had a bunch in hand and I didn't want to buy anything I'd Coordinate them with the other 2 players in order to get 2 free discard/draw between turns. In the Aliens scenario we got down to one card left in the Hive (enemy) deck and three left in the Barracks (heroes) deck before we killed the Queen. There are a ton of little cool touches in the scenarios (heroes from the Barracks deck being cocooned and having to be rescued, setting up the sentry guns in the complex, finding Newt, blasting the Alien out of the airlock, etc.) that set the mood and really bring the game to life. So much so that I'm actually looking forward to playing the Alien 3 scenario, and I haven't anticipated anything Alien 3-related since before I saw that piece of crap movie.

Imperial Assault

Very fun time. A definite improvement over Descent 2ed. at least Descent without the expansion.

It was the usual F:AT Thursday gang with special guest star Egg Shen. We played the intro scenario and had a damn good time with a very close ending. We did manage to complete the mission in the nick of time.

The Star Wars theme is strong even if you might have heard otherwise.

Played Eclipse for the first time. Hopefully it's the last time. Zzzzzzzzzz

Someone needs to slap around all you Eclipse haters.