What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Started a 2 player game of Duel of Ages II tonight. I was teaching the game, and I myself have very little experience but we are now in the swing of things. Hopefully we can continue it tomorrow.

It's a great game, but it does have a steep learning curve.

i love Eldritch Horror.

Stan Leer wrote: I have two games of Ticket to Ride Europe under my belt. My opponent is my 8 year old daughter. Its a good game for us to play but with only two players some of the tension is gone. She's probably not up for Study in Emerald. I have to look that up now...

If you buy the India map pack for TtR, it is more conducive to 2 players (much more cutthroat). It also has Switzerland on the back which maxes out at 3 players, so it's also good for two.

Bull Nakano wrote: Another game was Lords of Xidit. This is a reworking of the decade old game, Himalaya. This is a programing game that has you programming 6 moves per turn, traveling around Xidit collecting people to help you and then feeding them to monsters for two of the three types of VPs. Now I guess that sounds rather mechanical, and maybe it is, but this game is a lot of fun. Often I'm cautious of praising euros after one or two plays, but I was pretty impressed with this game and don't feel it'll fade. The biggest trick is the scoring, as I said there are 3 different VPs, at the end of the game you total up VP1 and the player who's in last place for VP1 is out of the game, then the remaining players total VP2 and again the lowest is eliminated, then of the remaining players, the highest with VP3 wins. It was really clever and like nothing Id seen before. There is a negative that two of the three VPs are public information, which make it maybe a bit too calculable toward the end, but I didn't see this happen in my game. This game also plays fast. Four players, one with very heavy AP, got this done in 90 minutes. I'm not sure this is for everyone, but I think members of the ERP should take a look at this one.

This is on my 'to buy' list. Reprint of an award-nominee (SdJ) older game, but with the gorgeous art of Seasons. It's stood the test of time.

Sheriff of Nottingham appears to be another reskin of an older ERP game - Hart an der Grenze from 2006.

We've been playing Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which I love. It only has ten cases, but you're basically issued with some fake newspapers, a map, an address book, and a brief description of the case... You cooperate (or solo) to solve it in fewer moves than Holmes. Needless to say, you never do. We average 10 points, out of a maximum 100.

Puzzle Strike (Third Ed) is our game of the fortnight. We've played seven times and I don't feel I've scratched the surface. This is a game that can stand hundreds of plays. It's also the best deckbuilder no one's heard of and, like Rune Age and Nightfall, involves direct attacks. It also avoids card shuffling by having chips in bags. And it's based on a fighting game so you have special characters. I love this thing, and am desperate to get to fifty plays as fast as possible.

We spent Sunday afternoon doing the Myth walkthrough. Myth is a cooperative dungeon crawl designed (accidentally) by extreme visuo-spatial thinkers for other extreme visuo-spatial thinkers. The rulebook is easy to understand and memorise, if you delete all the text and rely on the pictures. I can remember whole pages of the rulebook because of the VS-friendly layout - something I rarely do. Unfortunately, some necessary information has to be in words, so we spent the afternoon flicking through all the FAQs and auxiliary material released after the game. Once I get past this problem, this may be the most memorable game I own since it's structured visually, and designed to be played by people who find rules scary and wish they had *permission* to improv board games. The component quality and graphics are, of course, beautiful. Yes, they should have playtested with non-VS thinkers, but it's nice that it exists. It's also the exact opposite in design philosophy to Year of the Dragon by Stefan Feld, which is simply wonderful.

I played Knockout by VPG yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised. Uba had picked it up at WBC but this was the first chance I had had to play it.

It's basically a card game simulating a 1890's boxing match. It also has a spacial element with a small board representing the ring and a couple standees to represent your pugilists. There are attack cards like punch,jab, and move and cross. There are defense cards like parry, move and counter. You take turns playing cards taking damage, avoiding it, or dishing it out. You can also "rest" and draw a couple cards into your hand. The more beat up you get, the smaller your hand size gets and eventually somebody gets knocked to the mat and the game is over.

For such a simple game that plays in about 10 minutes, it really has an ebb and flow. You're punching and punching and your opponent is throwing out defense cards and eventually you're fatigued and need a second to catch your breath and rest. But your opponent has a few cards left and you've just given him the momentum and he comes in with right cross...etc...very cool.

The artwork on the cards is just great. I really like it. It's not the same artist but it reminds me a lot of the art on Omen: Reign of War. The art on the board is a bit muddy but who cares.

For a quick 2 player game it really delivers. It seems every match ends with someone saying "Ok, one more time..."

That boxer's feet make no sense. Love the style, but the cover drives me crazy.

S.

veemonroe wrote: Puzzle Strike (Third Ed) is our game of the fortnight. We've played seven times and I don't feel I've scratched the surface. This is a game that can stand hundreds of plays. It's also the best deckbuilder no one's heard of and, like Rune Age and Nightfall, involves direct attacks. It also avoids card shuffling by having chips in bags. And it's based on a fighting game so you have special characters. I love this thing, and am desperate to get to fifty plays as fast as possible.

I think PUZZLE STRIKE was the F:AT Game of the Year a couple of years ago. Very well liked and respected here. I prefer the swingy Jaina-style games myself, where I feel like I am always on the edge of losing. My son prefers Setsuki, and playing like 6 chips a turn, I swear.

Pretty good game day yesterday. Started out with Ingenious while we waited for our fourth, and that's always a nice treat. I don't own it anymore myself, but I'm happy to play it from time to time.

He arrived and we played King's Forge, which I guess is some Kickstarter thing that's been massively delayed? It's a dice-placement game where you're building up a pool of different colored dice in order to craft objects that require certain rolls on certain dice to create. It could be a pretty decent game, except for a game with a ton of dice it's terrified of them, and when you finally do get to actually roll them, there are so many opportunities to manipulate the results that you really don't have to deal with the actual random element of dice much at all. That always drives me up the wall. It's also one of those games where the winner is the first guy to craft 4 objects, so if someone has 3 and you only have 2, it's really hard to feel like there's much point to doing anything. I don't think anyone was loving this one, including the guy who had to wait like seven months for it to ship.

After that was Battle Merchants, which I had ordered after playing it at Gen Con. I like this one a bunch. It's a game in which four fantasy races are fighting but you don't care about who wins, you just want to sell everyone weapons. You craft and sell weapons, and then eventually battles take place. The defeated weapons go to the players who beat them and all the surviving weapons get cash for their creators. I think it's a neat twist and the artwork and design is great. The other guys seemed to like it okay except for one who didn't do very well and wasn't sure why, but I think he'd try it again.

Then Imperial Settlers. I've been big on this lately and wanted to try it as Egypt, which is the current rumored "TOO POWERFUL MUST BE NERFED WAY UNBALANCED" champ. I did win, but I was also the most experienced player at the table. Rome, which is usually a huge threat, just did not get any kind of engine going and when he finally got his Engineers built he killed the wrong building of mine. Likewise, the Barbarians player wasn't razing as much as he should have. Still, people enjoyed it except for the Rome player, but that guy gets sour on a game if he doesn't win or at least get a huge lead in the first ten minutes.

Two folks left then and me and the remaining guy played Valley of the Kings, a small deckbuilder from AEG. I like Star Realms a bunch, but this one deserves to be getting the attention that one is getting. Like SR, it packs a lot into a small package. But it's even more confrontational, plays excellent with two (and, I suspect, three and four), and has some neat things going on. Instead of filling your deck gradually with VP chaff, you are getting ever more powerful cards. However, to actually score them at the end you have to entomb them -- set them aside where they can't be used. A deck full of powerful, high-scoring cards is worthless at the end; only your tomb counts. So you have to gradually pare down your own deck, and the cards you want to get rid of are also the ones that will help the most. Definitely worth checking out, even if you're sick of deck builders.

Sagrilarus NEVER wrote: I love this game and everything about it.

Legomancer wrote: Two folks left then and me and the remaining guy played Valley of the Kings, a small deckbuilder from AEG.

I really liked VotK as well. There's a tightness where it does feel like every turn there are decisions to make and it's not always about buying the most expensive card you can. It also doesn't feel like there's going to be a need for a train of expansions, it feels complete out of the box. And I really like the entomb mechanic because it allows you to keep your deck tight without waste so you can put together some nasty combos, but towards the end you have to decide when to break that combo up in order to bank the points. Very good game.

SuperflyTNT wrote: i love Eldritch Horror.

Loving Eldritch Horror too, Supes. I always enjoyed Arkham Horror well enough but always found my actions useless or wasted, so always felt impotent in AH. Not so with Eldritch Horror. On top of that I love the cleaned up rules and think it does a much better job in telling a cohesive story.

Oh yeah, got to play Firefly earlier with both expansions. First time with the new Pirates and Bounty Hunters though so it was good to see the new material. I played Jubal Early with his interceptor and found the ship was nice in moving around the Verse but that lack of cargo space was a real bitch. Also, for some reason the Alliance was on my ass the whole game. Despite that I was able to pull of the victory by narrowly outrunning a rival firefly captain who hit a few more snags on the story goals. Nice and tense game with a few players cashing in on bounties. We didn't have anyone try out any piracy jobs and had no showdowns but I can sense them coming in the next game.

The new piracy jobs are cool but I love just having the threat of them to keep all the captains on their toes. Now you really have to watch the other players and what type of crew/jobs they are going after. Get too close and you might be their next victim.

I'm not sure about the S.S. Walden as a good alternative to a firefly. The extra cargo is good but man, it's slower and has NO STASH. I never noticed that until we sat down to play today. No stash is a real drawback with all the pirates and Alliance ships flying.

Josh Look wrote:

Sagrilarus NEVER wrote: I love this game and everything about it.

I gush on Wings of Glory here on a regular basis, hosting a thread on it. I think El Grande is a perfect game. I call Heroscape the single best board game ever printed without near equal. Warriors of God, Maria, Settlers of Catan, heck, I even defend Monopoly here. My first article at this place gushed on Junta and Struggle of Empires. This past weekend I told a guy that his pickup of BattleTech Second Edition was a great catch and that he had everything he needed to play.

So next time you should consider rebutting the content of my post in the tradition of Fortress:Ameritrash instead of taking it to me personally with trolly bullshit like a nine-year-old in his mom's basement. I used to have a pretty high opinion of what you had to say.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote:

Josh Look wrote:

Sagrilarus NEVER wrote: I love this game and everything about it.

I gush on Wings of Glory here on a regular basis, hosting a thread on it. I think El Grande is a perfect game. I call Heroscape the single best board game ever printed without near equal. Warriors of God, Maria, Settlers of Catan, heck, I even defend Monopoly here. My first article at this place gushed on Junta and Struggle of Empires. This past weekend I told a guy that his pickup of BattleTech Second Edition was a great catch and that he had everything he needed to play.

So next time you should consider rebutting the content of my post in the tradition of Fortress:Ameritrash instead of taking it to me personally with trolly bullshit like a nine-year-old in his mom's basement. I used to have a pretty high opinion of what you had to say.

S.

It's called a joke, Sag.

Josh Look wrote: It's called a joke, Sag.

Aren't they supposed to be funny?