What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Advanced Civ. 6 players. 7.5 hours. Not obsolete.

Last weekend got into a meetup.

Played Kingdom Builder, and tried Dixit & Forbidden Desert. Fun stuff.

Game day at the shop today. Just two of us at first and we started with Marvel Avengers Slide Strike, my $10 Target purchase. A nice surprise, both myself and my opponent liked it a lot. It is random but there is a bit of room for clever play with the character abilities. The sliding of pieces plays a bit like an abstract and you're usually trying to position your characters to their strength being attacking from the front, right side or left side. It isn't anything close to what I'd call the best game ever but for $10 and in a mass market store it is pretty darn good. Same publishing house as that Axis of Villains DC game that is a variation of Castle Panic, so they're starting to get a few games that I solidly like under their belt.

After a pair of games four more showed up. We played Sidibaba which has been on my list to play for a very long while and one of the other guys expressed interest a week or so back so I brought up my copy. We were just kind of learning while playing and I was surprised with just how fast it moved, just how simple and straight forward the game play was and just how enjoyable it was. I played as the Master Thief (the DM) as I was teaching the game and reading the rules as we went along at a good clip, I did miss a lot of what I could have done to mess with the adventurers. And my treasure placement was a little easy, but a great fun little game.

Next up was Formula E where you're racing elephants in India. This is a Game Salute product and it falls in line with just about every other Game Salute game which is...Meh. Not bad but not great...Bottom line is I'd rather play Ave Caesar. There's a deck of cards which have a number showing how many spaces you move. Intermixed are special cards that allow you to do things like move or charge through the sacred cows, move over pieces via a flying carpet, play tigers on people that make that player miss a turn or move a mouse causing the elephant to be scared and move back a few spaces. A solid Meh...Light and pretty easy once you figure out the special cards, but having played Ave Caesar, I'd rather just play that.

I wrapped up my stay with Magical Athlete. We has this interaction of the Philosopher, Troll and Ghoul causing a lot of havoc one race. Great time as always.

Magical Athlete never fails when I have anyone even halfway entertaining around.

Tried out the classic version of Merchant of Venus today with 3 players. It was definitely a learning game but everyone enjoyed the experience, and we were all very close to the 2000c goal when my brother-in-law won. I was somewhat surprised at the incredible number of tokens and chits everywhere. Is there a good way to place your demand, passenger, and relic tokens without obscuring the home system? Another semi-related topic: I have both this game and Merchant and Marauders. How does Firefly compare with them? I always enjoyed the show and I keep hearing great things about the boardgame, but I've also heard there are lots of similarities.

I can't speak to M&M. But Firefly is like a less racey, much more random and narrative MoV.

I'm trying to decide right now if Firefly has a place in my collection. At first I thought it dislodged MoV, but over time I'm starting to think MoV is a better design and much, much tighter. It all depends on if the extra narrative is worth it.

Of course MoV is the better pu&d game, because it's a great game and that's literally all it tries to be. Firefly is similar, but has more narrative to it. MoV's variability comes from the random arrangement of planets, where Firefly's comes more from the different goals listed on the story cards. The story cards combined with the travel system of drawing cards as you're flying to see if you have encounters give Firefly great variety.

They're comparable games, but I don't think one is better than the other in a considerable way, they're just different styles of the same theme.

Compared to M&M Firefly is much easier to learn/play and in the base game there's very limited ways to hinder other players, you mostly just have to race them.

wadenels wrote: Advanced Civ. 6 players. 7.5 hours. Not obsolete.

How reasonable is it to get into on your first play? I bet I could find people nearby who'd want to play it, but I generally prefer much shorter games. I did play Junta once, and enjoyed myself more than I expected to. I know the games are quite different, but it's the best example I can come up with for me playing an old, long game.

I played the PC (well actually Mac) Civilization a lot when I was 7 and never got into the sequels. It actually got me really interested in studying foreign alphabets.

Jexik wrote:

wadenels wrote: Advanced Civ. 6 players. 7.5 hours. Not obsolete.

How reasonable is it to get into on your first play? I bet I could find people nearby who'd want to play it, but I generally prefer much shorter games. I did play Junta once, and enjoyed myself more than I expected to. I know the games are quite different, but it's the best example I can come up with for me playing an old, long game.

I played the PC (well actually Mac) Civilization a lot when I was 7 and never got into the sequels. It actually got me really interested in studying foreign alphabets.

Not hard, as long as one person knows the rules really well. Player aids are essential for new players though. There's a lot of modifiers that come into play once people start getting a lot of Civilization Cards and knowing them or having them written down clearly makes a huge difference. We had one new player and 3 that had played Civ but not Advanced.

Are the player aids the kind of thing you'd find on BGG somewhere? It seems like games didn't have as many reference cards back then.