What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played over the weekend:

Runebound - Soloed this one again. At this point I've played most of the characters and I really love how they all feel different from one another, which was a big complaint of mine about Second Edition. Battles in this game are pretty dangerous, and I like that. The game isn't really about a big ol adventure or story. Sure it has story beats based on the deck you shuffle into the game...but really this is a game about developing your character's abilities/skills and solving the puzzle of the scenario. The box has a TON of value/replayabilty, but I'm really curious to see where FFG takes the game. Also, I lost the game because I spent too much time trying to get one last weapon to slay the dragon. So while I was running around a village delivering some goods to earn some petty cash...the dragon went all Smaug on Tamalir. Oops.

Spyfall - At one point during early 2015 this was THE party game of choice. People who scored a copy of it would gloat and say how awesome it was. Then Codenames came out and nobody gave a shat about Spyfall any longer. I played this with my brother and sister in-law (and my wife). This game is a tough sell because it almost always falls flat for the first 3-4 plays. Once people start figuring out the nuances of the game it gets much better. You feel really clever you answer a question with a perfect response that clears you of being the spy without giving away any vital information. On the flip side, when you win as the spy it really feels satisfying. With only four of us we used the variant that forced you to answer the question as a specific role on the card. This seemed to level the odds for the spy. We just played it for a while and didn't keep score or anything. We laughed quite a bit and enjoyed some good food n drink. Can't ask for much more than that.

DungeonQuest - Sweet dear lord did I have some shit luck in this game. I was playing as Hugo, the Armored Dipshit. Each pull of a card was some sort of catastrophe that chipped away at my health. Scorpions, Giant Centipedes, Demons, Ferrox...all sorts of deadly shit. Meanwhile, my wife was playing Brother Good Luck who was having a lovely little jaunt in the dungeon. He would randomly come across gold, easily escape danger, drink a potion that DIDN'T murder him. Sure he got lost in the catacombs, but he was able to escape with a few hundred gold and some cool stories to tell his brothers. Meanwhile, Hugo made it to the Lair of the Slumber Wyrm. Against all odds the beast remained asleep. Hugo snatched some treasure and got the fuck up outta there. He of course hit a dead end. With 2 HPs left, he risked it and searched. Much to his delight he found a secret passage that would get him back to an explored path! Then his clanging armor attracted a skeletal archer that shot him in the head from somewhere in the dark. He died a miserable death. I swear Hugo could feel the draft of the entrance. I love this game.

With holidays and stuff I've been mostly offline and away from my usual weekly group, but I was able to attend this weekend and play a few games.

Elysium- A fairly interesting tableau builder/set collection game. It has that "collect suits or collect straights" thing going on, and the "use it or score it" on the cards, both of which reminded me a lot of Valley of the Kings. It took way too long to play for what it was, and I think that VotK fills the same head space in a better, faster game.

Champions of Midgard- Soulless eurosnoot that is not Lords of Waterdeep, which is the main thing it has going for it. I am relatively OK with being stuck playing this instead of LoW.

A Study in Emerald- Two of us knew the game already, and two were new players but smart ones at that. It was a really nice session for a learning game. Factions were effectively determined fairly early on, and a lot of my game was spent countering the other experienced player's actions. He had Lestrade, which usually makes games miserable, but it did not feel like a problem this time around. The green minions of evil won this time.

I pulled out my Crokinole board and started practice shooting, and the noise drew the kiddies out of their lairs like moths to a flame. "Are you playing Crokinole?" they asked, rubbing their eyes at the bright light in the kitchen. I said yes and that I'd love an opponent and that they're free to pull down the board anytime they like and play without me. It sits on a shelf they walk past 25 times a day.

In short order I had given it over to all four kids and they were shooting away happy as clams at high tide.. Got in two more sessions over the week.

DS3s are nice, but there's something oddly captivating in the noise that actual physical components make in a game like Crokinole.

S.

Egg Shen wrote: Runebound - The game isn't really about a big ol adventure or story. Sure it has story beats based on the deck you shuffle into the game...but really this is a game about developing your character's abilities/skills and solving the puzzle of the scenario.

So, a bit like Mage Knight in terms of narrative?

bfkiller wrote:

Egg Shen wrote: Runebound - The game isn't really about a big ol adventure or story. Sure it has story beats based on the deck you shuffle into the game...but really this is a game about developing your character's abilities/skills and solving the puzzle of the scenario.

So, a bit like Mage Knight in terms of narrative?

Actually yes. I've found that the narrative that matters is really the development of your character. I sort of keep thinking about Mage Knight when I play it. It feels like a lesser version of that game mixed with a tiny bit of DNA from Runebound 2nd Edition. There is still the FFG standard, "cards with quests n' flavor texts". You might flip over a purple card with a story snippet which gives you two choices. These don't really provide much other than fluff. Sure you can expand upon the fluff and what happened to your character, but in a solo game I don't focus on that. Though I like how some of cards are pretty dumb and ridiculous...the game doesn't take itself too seriously.

It's not nearly as abstracted as Mage Knight...or as deliciously deep. In Runebound you'll only acquire a few skills and items each game. That coupled with the scenario specific stuff is really what fills in the story. It seems like a focus of the design was to really make it about building up your character in an interesting way. Afterwards, they added the typical "flip a card and see what happens" stuff so as to not completely alienate previous Runebound fans. Seems like a decent compromise.

How good is 3rd Edition? I have everything for 2nd Edition, so it would be quite the overhaul -- as is, I am thinking of just keeping 2nd Edition.

I finally came to understand how good Cthulhu Wars is. I played with my two daughters about a week ago, with the older taking Black Goat, younger Cthulhu and me Crawling Chaos. The older daughter didn't understand how to play the Goat and clumped together, and the younger one raised Cthulhu and wiped out my Nyalothotep just after I raised him, and romped to victory.

A few days later a friend came over and we played the same factions with him replacing my younger daughter on Cthulhu and the same thing happened. I kept saying to my daughter that she needed to spread out more but she just didn't get it. After discussing the Yellow Sign faction and the fact that we hadn't played them because they were very different, she decided she liked the idea of wandering around desecrating areas (or pooping on them as she decided to call it), and so we immediately played another game with her as Yellow Sign and me switching to the Black Goat as I have never quite got Crawling Chaos. IN the end the game was brilliant as she used her faction appropriately, and I was more able to utilize the Black Goats strengths. I won with a score of 36 to my daughter's 33 and my friend's 30, and this was because my daughter had chosen me to receive the 3 doom points for her spell book. If she had chosen my friend we would all have tied on 33 points.

When you have all players using their factions appropriately it is a thing of beauty in its asymmetry, yet simplicity. Now the second wave of expansions can't arrive soon enough so I can play this 5 player.

Ancient_of_MuMu wrote: I finally came to understand how good Cthulhu Wars is. I played with my two daughters about a week ago, with the older taking Black Goat, younger Cthulhu and me Crawling Chaos. The older daughter didn't understand how to play the Goat and clumped together, and the younger one raised Cthulhu and wiped out my Nyalothotep just after I raised him, and romped to victory.

A few days later a friend came over and we played the same factions with him replacing my younger daughter on Cthulhu and the same thing happened. I kept saying to my daughter that she needed to spread out more but she just didn't get it. After discussing the Yellow Sign faction and the fact that we hadn't played them because they were very different, she decided she liked the idea of wandering around desecrating areas (or pooping on them as she decided to call it), and so we immediately played another game with her as Yellow Sign and me switching to the Black Goat as I have never quite got Crawling Chaos. IN the end the game was brilliant as she used her faction appropriately, and I was more able to utilize the Black Goats strengths. I won with a score of 36 to my daughter's 33 and my friend's 30, and this was because my daughter had chosen me to receive the 3 doom points for her spell book. If she had chosen my friend we would all have tied on 33 points.

When you have all players using their factions appropriately it is a thing of beauty in its asymmetry, yet simplicity. Now the second wave of expansions can't arrive soon enough so I can play this 5 player.

It's less fragile with four as well. I think the more players you have the better it is, although it can take quite a bit longer with 5 than 3.

Space Ghost wrote: How good is 3rd Edition? I have everything for 2nd Edition, so it would be quite the overhaul -- as is, I am thinking of just keeping 2nd Edition.

There is a lot to chew on in that 3rd Edition box, but so far what I've played has been damn good. Though I will admit that this wasn't a game that I immediately liked. In fact, my first two plays I was convinced I hated the game. For some reason I kept trudging on and the game kept revealing its secrets to the point where I'm sort of in love with it.

I'm a big fan of Runebound 2nd Edition. I have no plans on getting rid of my 2nd edition stuff at this point. Thankfully these games barely share the same DNA. If FFG decided to release this under a different name instead of Runebound...nobody would have complained. Honestly, this new edition shares more in common with Firefly or Merchants and Marauders than it does with it's own namesake. I think both games can safely co-exist in your collection as they each scratch a very different itch. One is a trashy adventure dice chucker. The other is smartly designed, high fantasy, hero simulator that happens to use Runebound's movement dice and a variant of its gem system.

It's also a bit unfair to properly compare them since 2nd Edition got so much better with all of it's expansion content. I will confindently say that if you were comparing the base game of each edition...hands down 3rd Edition is the better designed game. Once you add in all the cool shit from Runebound's expansions though...it's a different story. I think after FFG releases expansion conent for 3rd edition it will make more sense to compare the two properly. As for now I'd recommend keeping 2nd edition and see where 3rd edition goes.

Gary Sax wrote: How'd like you Forbidden Stars and Fief, Southern? A very good game... any more thoughts?

Fief:1429
I enjoyed the game as I enjoy similar types - Warrior Knights, old school Blood Royale and Kingmaker, Game of Thrones - but it was just our first game trying out the rules and two of the four of us, who still really enjoyed it, are probably more euro orientated (well more than me) took a bit longer to understand it so took a bit longer. But I feel that when future games have players affected by some of the very random and very punishing disaster cards it may temper some peoples current opinion.
In the end it is just a area control fight game, as the 3VPs you need will come from grabbing 3 of the 6 fiefdoms, with a bit of diplomacy possible as two people ally to get an extra VP as King or Pope for a joint win - but I find that this, seemingly direct, import from Dune (controlling 3 objectives or 4 for a team) does not feel like it fits.
I think, apart from the random disasters/fortunes, that the week part of the game is the VP victory requirement as they have this voting system for Titles assigned to nobles but then it is all for just 1VP for the King or the Pope - it just seems a waste of two mechanics, they could have added more political content to make the Titles and votes a bit more varied to earn a VP a few different ways or just removed VPs entirely and have the win on a combination of Titles or similar.
But need to play it a few more times to make any of these comments justified.

Forbidden Stars
We had a great 3-player game of this and I managed to pinch the win in the 8th round by grabbing two planets (with the help of strategically placed Warp storms) after one player who started fast got blocked going for his 3rd objective and the other was also blocked but he had not managed to bring enough units up.
We play many similar games including Runewars and the other two do Warhammer minis so it went down very well. The order system from Starcraft took a while to get used to and was often frustrating but we enjoyed the combined dice/card combat system (attack/defence dice mechanic from many similar games, combat cards from games like AGoT and Horus Heresy, and Morale to win the combat as an upgrade to the similar strength count used in Runewars) and I think having just the four Order types (and with Upgrade cards beefing them up) as opposed to eight in Runewars makes the game flow a bit better. The only moan from my mates was that Ships were a bit of over-rated since they couldn't be involved in land combat, I just pointed out that they were still required to provide bridges (and blocks) between planets as in AGoT and also if you coordinate you can play two Advances to Orbital Strike first and then invade next hopefully with less defenders.
All in all a very positive response from all of us, possibly FFGs best explore & fight boardgame yet.