What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

In my eyes, it's the ultimate game that suffers from the current "only play 1-3 times and move on" syndrome.

Yep, throw Starcraft on that pile with Archipelago...the tragedy of the underplayed...

Starcraft was BRILLIANT. It was big, sprawling, and heavy but it worked and it wasn't like anything else out there- and there's been nothing quite like it since. The mechanics were so cool, but yes, it was a PAIN IN THE ASS to teach to people. And very, very tough to come back to if your gang has moved on.

We played it quite a lot up through Brood War, my boys got familiar enough with it that we could dig into it with some depth but eventually it just fell off the table and was never asked for/touched again.

It's really kind of unfortunate that FFG squandered that design on the license because it should still be in print today. It's way better than TI3 and lots of other tentpole FFG titles.

Starcraft is for many reasons one of the best games I've ever played. But I honestly believe that fewer units and a streamlined build sequence (somewhat like what Corey later did in Runewars, for instance) would make it a better game.

What especially works for it is, I think, that it rewards board position. Going for Conquest Points is extremely important because they'll often end up being tie breakers between special victories. And since the game also favors the attacker to some extent, you can actually benefit from making a crazy move and taking an important area even if you can only hold it for a turn or maybe two.

mads b. wrote: Starcraft is for many reasons one of the best games I've ever played. But I honestly believe that fewer units and a streamlined build sequence (somewhat like what Corey later did in Runewars, for instance) would make it a better game.

What especially works for it is, I think, that it rewards board position. Going for Conquest Points is extremely important because they'll often end up being tie breakers between special victories. And since the game also favors the attacker to some extent, you can actually benefit from making a crazy move and taking an important area even if you can only hold it for a turn or maybe two.

Honestly, it pretty much has fewer build units as a large chunk no one ever goes for. Ghosts are stupid and you're like "Fuck, they have Nuke!" Then you're like "Shit, that's way too costly to get/setup and far too little impact". Same with Firebats, Queens, and all sorts of other units.


Barnes, I don't think the game would work nearly as well with another IP. The units, gameplay, techs, and interrelated mechanics work partially due to the Starcraft license. The connection is deep and effective and I wouldn't want to play it if it was Terrinoth or some shit. Everything works exactly as you expect it to and it evokes a similar feeling to the game. It does one of the best jobs in tieing setting to the mechanics in a natural and ingrained way. Last night I was sad I quit playing Starcraft II as the board game just gave me that feeling of upgrading buildings, probing the opponents territory, rushing people etc.

One last thing, if you ever have 5 or so hours to kill and want to have the time of your life, play the optional scenario where you play until people are eliminated (When you lose a base it's gone permanently, so you can only build so many). Because the game takes much longer, you have a lot more build and development freedom in terms of units and you get to see some amazing shit.

repoman wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: So jealous, I've had Starcraft on my forever shelf for *years* and not gotten to play it. Talk about coming into a lot of mechanics way before they were "cool." The deck building in it is a great example.

Sax,

Trashfest...this WILL happen. So let it be written. So let it be done.

It better or I'm taking back my ex-copy from you.

Started last night with a few 8 and 9 player games of Resistance. It was fun but people were fairly reserved so there weren't a lot of accusations flying like normal.

Then we split into two groups. One played Archipelago, which I really wanted to try, but since the other group was playing my copy of Dead of Winter and I was teaching, I couldn't. No big deal. I got everything set up (which can take a while!) and explained how things work. By the time a couple of people had taken their turns everyone got it. I was the betrayer but only met 2 of my 4 goals before our colony was decimated in round 2. Morale suffered thanks to some statistically improbable bite marks on the dreaded exposure die.

It was really funny because the first 2 crises both involved food, and the grocery store claimed at least 4 lives. No one wanted to go there.

hotseatgames wrote: Started last night with a few 8 and 9 player games of Resistance. It was fun but people were fairly reserved so there weren't a lot of accusations flying like normal.

Then we split into two groups. One played Archipelago, which I really wanted to try, but since the other group was playing my copy of Dead of Winter and I was teaching, I couldn't. No big deal. I got everything set up (which can take a while!) and explained how things work. By the time a couple of people had taken their turns everyone got it. I was the betrayer but only met 2 of my 4 goals before our colony was decimated in round 2. Morale suffered thanks to some statistically improbable bite marks on the dreaded exposure die.

It was really funny because the first 2 crises both involved food, and the grocery store claimed at least 4 lives. No one wanted to go there.

I played Resistance (Avalon) and Dead of Winter last night too. Same order. The 7-player Avalon game was pretty excellent: we were all pretty familiar with the game, so I tried out Mordred and the Lady of the Lake. (Percival/Morgana were in play too). I was Percival. Merlin confirmed my loyalty with the first Lady use, so for the rest of the game we were like-minded, but everyone thought we were both spies, and the bad guys just ran with that idea. It wasn't until mission 4 double failed that they realized we were telling the truth the whole time! On mission 5 I was waffling between picking two people at the end, and I tried getting Merlin to help me out, and he couldn't; I ended up sending Mordred. I apologize if you haven't played Avalon and none of this makes sense.

In our Dead of Winter game, we narrowly failed a crisis that put Frostbite wounds on 5 survivors. I already had two wounded survivors, and I was the last person to go that round, so I was second in the last round and those two survivors would die at the start of my turn. We only had 3 morale, and we were worried about starving and the garbage pile and possibly failing the final crisis. I begrudgingly agreed that the first player should exile me if the Colony was going to have any chance of winning (that way my two guys dying wouldn't trigger morale loss). So I packed up my stuff and drew the Vengeance objective, which meant I had to see 5 survivors leave the game. Three had already died, so when I lost my two (I had one more), I ended up winning despite getting exiled. Two out of three of the other players won too, with just 1 or 2 morale left.

We still have yet to successfully exile a betrayer.

I honestly don't know how you can win at DoW as a non-betrayer, and it seems all you have to do as a betrayer is sit back and contribute the minimum and wait for the game to do the legwork for you. It's a fun experience but I'm getting the feeling it's a flawed game.

I also don't even think the betrayer adds anything to a game that's so difficult in the first place. People talk about a betrayer, but it's not like a strongly suspected thing. They can't opt out of the game because they're then exiled and presented with a generally more difficult objective than kill the colony and have 3 medicine. So they help, not 100%, but probably 80%. Maybe in a fell swoop they turn and cause the game to end, but if played out to completion the players would probably lose anyway, they're just saving time by making the game shorter. I just don't know how I feel about parts of this design.

DoW normal scenarios aren't as difficult as everyone is making them out to be. Make sure to make good use of the Attract and Request actions. Those two were the ones people had the hardest time coming to grips with in our games so far. Your big hitters shouldn't have to run around much; make the Zombies come to them. Get hurt survivors together and use Request+Medicine to get them fixed up. There are other neat tricks you can pull, but they're fun to figure out on your own.

Bull Nakano wrote: I honestly don't know how you can win at DoW as a non-betrayer, and it seems all you have to do as a betrayer is sit back and contribute the minimum and wait for the game to do the legwork for you. It's a fun experience but I'm getting the feeling it's a flawed game.

That's exactly what I did as the betrayer. The colony only had to last five turns, and even then I just held back only a little and focused on my secondary objectives. They had no reason to exile me until the final round, when I showed my hand, and by then three of the other players were bored with the game anyway.

I also don't see the point in the Betrayer. It makes no logical sense. Have you formed some kind of an agreement with the mindless zombies? Unlikely. Do you think you're better off on your own? Then leave. Are you crazy? Yay, you're crazy, woohoo.

I really want to write a review for DoW that acts as a dissenting opinion from all the "OMG MOST INNOVATIVE GAME EVER" reviews, but if people dig this boring slog, let 'em dig it. It seems to largely be a difference of interest in the theme. I don't find zombie shit to be interesting at all, so an interest in the larger scope of the game isn't letting me allow smaller problems to slide. I don't find the Crossroads cards to be any more interesting than just having a deck of events. I don't find canned paragraphs that tell me what my character is like to be particularly engaging; in fact, quite the opposite. Even if I overlook the zombies and focus on post-apocalyptic survival, the gameplay itself is dull and repetitive. There's just nothing here that holds my interest at all.

Last night we had 6 players so after a couple of rounds of Resistance we played Spartacus. I hung back for basically the whole game and ended up with 11 guards but no one seemed to mind. It didn't matter anyway because someone else managed to call a Primus and win it, ending the game. It was fun but not a terribly exciting session.

We ended with one of my favorites, Betrayal at House on the Hill. I ended up as the betrayer, and had a good first turn attacking the heroes, but it just so happened that they had the right combination of what they needed and managed to defeat me on the second turn of betrayal! I still love the game for the experience it provides, but the betrayal portion of the game almost always hangs by a thread. I realize the challenge it must have been to even get it as good as they did, but I wish it came together more often.

I think I would actually be more interested in a game about the life and career of Sandra Bullock than I am in Dead of Winter.

Abyss is good...no "theme" as you people call it, but tons of atmosphere and an evocative setting. Simple gameplay with some subtle depth. Cathala might have two in the SDJ list next June.

Played some more games yesterday eve;

Rampage; second game, this time with three. The fun part is really throwing buses at each other. Destroying buildings for all its toddler glee wears thin pretty quick. This is a reasonable multiplayer brawl game though.

Dominant Species; First time playing this. Its OK. A bit dry for my tastes. Its a heavy worker placement that could turn into a teeth pulling exercise if players decide to try and calculate everything. With my friends a three player game took about two hours. There is plenty of opportunity to mess with your opponents, its a pretty mean game really despite its euro sensibilities. I scored something silly, 170 i think, the closest behind me got 100, and the third player got 60 something.

Alien Uprising again; We were on route to winning fairly handily but had to pack up early. I still like this for all its flaws. Drawing monster tiles out of the bag can get a bit tiresome after a while but the game does bring me into its fiction quite well.

Playtested last night...again...looking good. This is Game X.

Also played 2 games of Hoodrats, one with someone who had never played it before. The guy went right for the guns, foregoing jumping-in new Hustlers to get more feet on the street. He ended up putting 2 guys on a corner with 2 guns (which allow rerolls) and thought he was hot shit. I sent 2 Hustlers there, rolled 11 between them, and the guy couldn't roll better than a 3, even with 3 rerolls. Got sent to the ER with 2 beat-downs, but sadly his other dude had a gun and only one bag of heroin to rob him of.

Ended up that I had all my Hustlers on the board, dealing and scheming, and he only had 6. My wife quietly was going about her business, dealing, getting some decent Demand rolls, and ended up winning by a decent margin, by total surprise. I guess that's what happens when 2 gangs are warring and a third is just spending all their time dealing.

Best moment of the night was doing a drive-by on the wife's Hustlers. You have to roll a 5 or better, no rerolls allowed, and I put 3 of her Hustlers in the ground. After you do any crime, you have to roll special dice to see if cops are rolled, if you roll 2 cops, normally, you go to jail with 1 Warrant for each drug or gun you're carrying at the time of your arrest. Well, when you do a drive-by, only 1 cop needs to be rolled. I rolled all 3 cops (each D6 has 1 cop, and you roll 3) and all of my dudes were immediately taken out of the game (triple life for each of them...), which meant that she could go to the Funeral Home and go recruit the cousins of the guys I shot (Roll 1D6, 4+ gains a Hustler) where I had to go to the 'Hood and jump in some new guys (Roll 1D6, 5+ gains a Hustler), so while she lost some guns and drugs, it took me a while to get back to my max gang size...all the while being fucked with.

One of these days I'll post a video. Watching this guy (very much a lily white non-offender) pass this little bag of faux-weed (the first player token) holding it in disgust made the wife and I laugh big as shit.