What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Legomancer wrote:

Jason Lutes wrote: Played Firefly the other night with the expansions, and was underwhelmed. All four of us were pretty much "meh" at the end, which is too bad for me since I was the one who shelled out for it. I think it may come down to the fact that 90% of the time these days, game night consists of one-shot RPGs, and most board games just don't hold a candle to them in terms of entertainment value.

It also could come down to the fact that Firefly is kind of a meh game, anyway.

Nah, Firefly is not a "meh" game. A-tall. I'm with Jason on his notion that most board games pale in comparison to a good RPG session; however, I got to play a great game of Eldritch Horror on Saturday and it was a lot of fun. It's very much an encapsulated RPG campaign you can enjoy over the course of 2 or 3 hours. If you haven't tried Eldritch Horror yet Jason I'd say give it a shot. Especially if your group likes themes or horror and investigation.

Jexik wrote: 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.

I made my own, one for Civilization Cards and one for Calamities. The player sheets I have for Stock and Treasury have the turn sequence on them. I have to fix a couple things on my player aids and then I'll link them again back in this thread. Stay Tuned...

wadenels wrote:

Jexik wrote: 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.

I made my own, one for Civilization Cards and one for Calamities. The player sheets I have for Stock and Treasury have the turn sequence on them. I have to fix a couple things on my player aids and then I'll link them again back in this thread. Stay Tuned...

...and done
LINK

Either print out a bunch or laminate them and use dry erase markers. Players can mark up the Civilization Cards sheet to better calculate prices for future purchases. It's basically the same as the chart in the Advanced Civilization book, but nicer.

Players don't need to read everything on the Calamity sheet, it's just nice to have some to pass around so players can follow along as bad things happen. The Calamity sheet also lists which Civ Cards can help or hurt the effects of each Calamity.

Played Wrath of Ashardalon today with 2 friends. All of us have played D&D 4e in the past so the game was very easy to get into. We played the intro mission where the goal is to kill 12 monsters, and the dungeon itself was comically dangerous, with giant bears charging in out of nowhere and darts and boulders flying all over the place. This game really is a distilled dungeon crawl, and since we've switched our RP to mostly character-driven story games (World of Darkness, Edge of the Empire) it was nice to hack'n'slash through some monsters. I think my major complaint was with how plain the dungeon tiles are. A couple of pieces of broken furniture and spilled bags of gold on the ground never hurt!

I like the D&DAS games a lot, but yeah it's almost like they blew their entire art budget on the minis and didn't have anything left for the cards/tiles/markers, etc.

Those minis are damn nice to look at, I'm practicing my mini painting skills so I can make them pop.

I played Talisman for the first time in more than 20 years. It was the french translation (bad translation...) of the 2nd edition.

I was a bit afraid to play it again... and was impressed how good it still is. It is very easy to set up, very easy to explain. This is THE introductory ameritrash game, you can make anybody play this game as it is so simple and intuitive, and yet so rich and surprising.

The game was rather quick (less than two hours for two players although i have not played the game in 20 years...) as the turns are very, very fast. The game is beautiful. Once it's set up, you want to play it as it is so beautiful and attractive, full of great details, crazy english humour. The boardgame by gary chalk should be framed and put in a museum ! This is just cardboard and paper but this is so nice : take that you mini-holichs !

Talisman still rules, I am very pleased !

Played Descent 2.0 last night, which was my first time playing Descent in any form. It was fun enough, moreso because of the group of friends, but also didn't seem like anything special, and ended up being kind of annoying in terms of the scenarios we played, which we seemed to have no chance of winning. Zombies surrounded some cardinal NPC who we were supposed to rescue, and he was dead before we really had a chance to get to him. I kind of feel like there's as much depth, and probably a good deal more character and innovation, with Mice & Mystics, for that kind of game.

Also played a 3p game of Eclipse, which I hadn't played in a while. I still love that game, but with 3p, and the particular construct of space tiles being the way they were, there was very little conflict between us. A bit towards the very end, but otherwise it was mostly multiplayer solitaire. Still pretty fun, but I do like the game a lot better with 4-5. As it was, after rules explanation, the game took exactly 2 hours, which is pretty cool for something of that depth. Of course, add another hour or more for 4-5 players, but still, it flows really well with almost no downtime.

After our weekly X-Wing game, I managed to convince everyone to play Blood Bowl: Team Manager. I had just gotten the Foul Play expansion so we were set with 5 players. Since 3 of the 5 players were new, I left out the new teams from Foul Play as I hadn't read the new rules for penalties and fouling, and didn't want to add too much to the teaching time. Everyone loved it, and I didn't find 5 players to be any different than 4. The final scoring was pretty tense, as we all had extra stuff to add, like my 20 extra points from Contracts. I managed to draw the 5 fan Contract right at the end as part of my payout for winning the Blood Bowl tournament. I ended up winning as Wood Elves with 43 points, followed by Undead with 41, Humans with 40 and then Chaos and Dark Elves pulled up the rear with points in the low 30s. So it was a close game. Always a great time.

Played Twilight Struggle today for the first time in more than 4 years. I'd previously played it 3 times, but not since then. We had a pretty even back-and-forth for a lot of the game. Then in turn 7 I wound up with the Asia and Central America score cards. I happened to be dominating Asia so I played that right off the bat and shot up pretty far, to about 15 points. Then I subtly set up some innocuous influence in Central America, followed by a hard push to grab Control. Next card play I would play scoring and win. Unfortunately, while I was setting this stuff in motion, I wasn't paying attention to Europe, where my opponent was taking over. Right before I was going to play my scoring card to win the game, he played Europe's scoring card to steal lot of points from me, making my next play a simple point increase instead of a win. Apparently if he had a few more cards with higher Ops numbers, he could have taken control of Europe and won the game with his score card play.
Later in turn 9, I drew the Wargames card, along with 3 cards that improve DEFCON, just to taunt me. But I had 9 points, enough to win by playing Wargames. But DEFCON was already at 5, so I basically did 3 Coups in a row to drop DEFCON to the required 2 to play Wargames and win the game. Good stuff. I can't wait for the digital version. I'd like to get some more plays of this in.

RA - Haven't played this in a while and as has somehow become usual we played it outside. This is definitely my favorite auction game. The push-ur-luck factor with timing when to start an auction really does it for me. Plus just the sheer simplicity of the whole thing so once you know how the scoring works its easy to get ani idea of what things might be worth to others, which again plays into the calling Ra decision.

Legend Of Drizzt - My first time really playing any of these. Same with the other two players who I honestly didn't think would like it. We all loved it. I had initially thought it would be too simple to hold my interest as I've played many types of dungeon crawls and hacknslash, but its got just enough going for it although it did feel kind of easy to beat.

Firefly - Played with all the expansions and the P&B scenario where you have to rescue someone from the alliance. I was the only one to do any Misbehaving and that was only for one job, but took me a few tries. The other two players were ready for the first goal a little ahead of me, but I screwed them both with the Reaver Cutter. Then me and one other completed the second goal at the same time and just had to race to Three Hills. Fortunately I had Jubal's ship and got lucky with Nav cards beating him to the win by three spaces. Each of us collected at least one Bounty, which as a mechanic worked out better and was more worthwhile than I though it would be. Bring on Blue Sun!