What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played four rounds of The Duke with my girlfriend this afternoon. It was both our first time playing and I am very impressed! I really enjoyed how flipping the tiles adds a whole other level of strategy and depth. We played without the Oracle and Seer, but will add those in next time. I'm tempted to pick up the expansion tiles, but might wait a bit... although the Robert E. Howard expansion is really tempting!

played some games i ain't played before;

Caverna; Agricola in a cave. I'm not big on Agricola and i wans't blown away by this. I think its a fun activity/toy (i don't mean this in a demeaning sense). I quite liked just building farms and mines and my own little settlement with its beer production facilities etc but as a game about earning points it sucks. It basically comes down to knowing build orders and disrupting other peoples. Like Agricola I found my self at the table with some people who knew how to play the game properly and made most of the points and gave explanations as to what i did wrong etc. Yawn. Apparently questing is the gold path to victory points. I came 3rd out of 5 but i just don't find the game grabbing as a mental contest. It is more forgiving than Agricola.

Conquest of Nerath. I was fairly pumped about this due to the FAT talk about it. We called the game a little early but it probably would have only gone round the table once or twice more to get to the short game ending. It didn't do much for me. My main dislike is that it was a zero sum game, so things could go back and forth indefinitely for a while before someone rolled bad, or piled on the dragons. The event cards were interesting but too infrequent for my tastes. I prefer Nexus Ops for a dice fest and something with a bit more strategizing for this size of game.

One Night Werewolf; This is an alright deduction game. Like actual werewolf it descends into an arguement and lots of finger pointing and relies a lot on the metagame that develops in your group but it is fun. It basically takes the best round of werewolf and makes it a 5 minute game. We got a werewolf in about 2/3rds of the rounds which surprised me a bit.

My tryst with Heroquest went well last night. Pre-loaded the dungeon because my 12 year old needed to get her feet wet with the idea of the game, so I made it less "speculative".

Turns out that mamasan walks in just as we began, and I asked her to sit in. She was high as a kite, which made things much funnier, but the 12 year old just thought it was her because past 5PM, she's usually high.

Anyhow, the 12 year old plays the Dwarf and Elf, mamasan plays the Wizzy and Barbarian. Talk about taking the good characters, but she'd never played it and I didn't want to get her pissed off before we started.

I left all the doorways open but a few, just so that monsters would spawn and I could kill them all. Turns out that I'm not a "kind and gentle" DM, I literally would like nothing better than to TPK their asses.

Funny thing is that the 12 year old is rolling 2's and 3's all night long with the dwarf, which is funny as shit. Stubby little legs and whatnot. She only got to make maybe 4 attacks the whole night because while mamamsan is slaughtering the evil baddies, she's running into rooms that were vacated and searching for shit. Her magnum opus was casting the passwall spell, walking into the room with the Gargoyle, and then drinking her potion of badassness to get 2 extra attack dice. 2 hits passed through 5 defense dice. Almost killed him. Next turn she uses her "2 attack" spell (or was it potion) and whiffs on both.

They won, in the end, but they only started working together when the shit hit the fan. Ended up with maybe 200 gold between them, a potion in reserve. The 12 year old saw how much shit was in the center room and was like "yeah, the boss is in there" and went right at it. Should've hidden the rooms contents and whatnot, but c'est la vie. Was worth it.

Broke out El Grande last night and it was great and went over really well with the group. There is a good dose of gambling in this game, which I loved. Quite a lot to think about given such simple rules and quick turns.

I went to a meeting of my local game club yesterday and played stinker after stinker! We started with a really mediocre deckbuilder called Rune Age, moved on to a couple somewhat interesting games in The Bucket King and Gravwell, and then played two total abominations, Zombies Keep Out and Dungeon Run.

After this I left the games club and went to a friend's house where I demanded we play some good games. There we got in two quick games of Wiz-War, my first with the new FFG expansion, which I really liked the chaos school, followed by one kind of over the top game of Battlestar.

My friend is a chronic completionist and wanted to play BSG with some expansion stuff, since he had all of them. I conceded, even though I have a general distaste for most FFG big box expansion stuff, and after an overly long explanation of the modules we were using which made it apparent he had no concept of how they worked, we were off. we played with the Ionain Nebula scenario, the Cylon Fleet board, expansion skill cards, and expansion characters.

I'm of the opinion that the base game is tough for the humans, in the 10+ games I've played I've never seen a human victory, and it seemed to me like everything that was added was pro-cylon. The Ionian Nubula was awful. Basically when you jump 8, a bunch of Cylons shit all over you and you have a trial thing where someone can get executed and/or eliminated. It's probably good flavourwise, but it was pretty swingy. One cool aspect of the scenario, however, was the addition of NPC's wandering around the ship. This was kind of cool, it made the ship seem more alive, if you could use these somehow outside of the scenario I'd be interested.

The Cylon Fleet was cool, but added a lot of overhead in the form of new ship types, new rules for vipers, and a general feeling of confusion about what the Cylon icons on the cards did in relation to this board. Maybe if I'd read the rules myself I'd understand this, it seemed like it offered more options for an outed Cylon, which is good, since in the base game an outed Cylon doesn't have much to do, but to me that just kept folks wanting to hide more. I don't know, but I'd play with it again.

I was an expansion character named Cally, and this was the most fun character I've ever played BSG with. She can manipulate skill checks on her turn, and OPG execute a character. Now I'm not super into the airlock space from the first expansion, but just walking into a room and popping someone is cool, I nailed the second Cylon the first turn after the sleeper phase, he never saw me coming.

The expansion skill cards of 0 and 6 were too powerful. There was a 0 that could hurt morale, didn't like that one.

Overall it was a really tense game, we found the Cylons FAST and made it 8 distance in 3 jumps, but we couldn't beat that Ionian Nebula thing. I got executed at the trial which put the good guys down 10 skill cards and I wound up in the brig due to an event after I respawned. The Cylons won handily as soon as we triggered the nebula thing. I highly recommend against playing with it unless you just want to see what it's about, it adds too much and offers too little. Great game though.

2 games of Battlelore, 2nd Ed.: I played Daqan for the first time, as I'd been the demon-lovers for my first three games. Won the River scenario where I have to keep him out of the towns vs. him having to occupy three different types of terrain. I was swimming in Lore and got both Assault and Runeblade off in the same turn and just crushed the board there and broke open what had been a tense game, winning 16-12. Second game was my Barrow Mounds vs. his Cursed Glade, so I needed to keep one unit type on a hill and he needed to occupy three different forests. I'd won both of his scenarios with the Uthuk before, so the game strikes me as really dependent on list design. He went heavy on Rippers and Obscenes and didn't have enough boots on the ground to fill his VP condition. He also kept forgetting to advance into won hexes. I won 16-10.

Then we played 3 games of Blue Moon, which I haven't pulled out in ages. I won with Pillar vs. Aqua, but then lost with Khind vs. Aqua and Buka vs. Mimix. He played the Mimix Shaman cards perfectly and always had a pair of 10 or 12 to knock me over. Meanwhile, I still think the Buka are way too draw-dependent if you don't have an opponent willing to engage you on the bluffs or you have a deck like the Mimix which you really can't stall against in order to fill your ships. It's a fun idea for a deck, but needs more ways to manipulate it.

Played the latest version of City of Lycans last night, and I've finally got the playtime down to 90 minutes, which is fantastic. It still needs some extra work though, which I'm putting in tonight.

Then we played a round of King of Tokyo. I couldn't roll claws to save my life, and I think that game really kind of sucks once it gets down to 2 players. Which it did, quickly, and then drug on and on.

Played Wings of Glory with the Hanriot DH.1 that I got for my birthday yesterday. I hadn't purchased an Italian plane and this one has a great little maneuver deck. Great S turns, very good turning circle in either direction.

I got shot down by my son's Aviatik but it was a good time either way.

S.

It was an afternoon of fillers today.

A game of Cheaty Mages. Fun game but a very math guy was playing and drug the game out because he kept running numbers. Last round it took him a very long time knowing that I placed one bet and then running all the calculations on how payouts could resolve. Going into the last round I had an awesome combo planned, but the person in the lead played a card that busted it and I came in second. I like the game but so far I'm zero for two with the groups I played it with. Both drug it out causing it to overstay its welcome, for me at least.

There were two games of Love Letter which of course were inoffensive.

Then a handful of games of Bang: The Dice Game. We played a game with 3, 4, 5 and 6 as people filtered in and dropped out. Had Bang not already been fired for being a game I greatly dislike The Dice Game would have fired it. This ranks up there as a top tier dice game for me.

Had a great game day yesterday, partly because it was at my place instead of the regular place and the main table toad wasn't there. It was also fewer people, which I think helped.

Nations, with three players. We are now playing this 100% correctly and it's finally really clicking for me. My initial concerns about it have diminished. I'll probably write about it today on my blog and will repost as a topic here if people want to talk about it.

Clash of Cultures (3p). Only my second time playing this and I'm just not sure how best to approach it. This play felt very gamey, where I was doing things that I didn't otherwise care about just to score objective cards. There was no PVP, not even cultural, which is okay with me somewhat, but there wasn't much of anything else. I came in close second, I had four cities, and none of them ever got above size 2. It just felt kind of hollow to me. I think there's something here, though, and I'm looking forward to more plays.

Acquire (4p). Always a great time, even if I did super shitty. I just didn't focus enough on anything, spread myself around too much, and ended up always being behind everyone else as a result. We played on my really crappy AH edition which I love the artwork on but the components are just embarrassing. I need to inventory the old AH box version I have and make that my playing copy.

Steam with California: 2090 (From Map Expansion 2) (3p). I adore Steam, and I finally pulled out the expansion maps I've had for a while. We were absolutely not prepared for how tight it was , economically and geographically. But we all clawed out of that hole soon enough. I enjoyed the map a lot and it added a great dimension to the game.