What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Sadly I've got you beat at 108 new to me games in 2014 so far. Around 40 of them I'd like to play again, and most of those are getting backlog from my collection played.

So tonight...something happened.

I was forced to play Reef Encounter. And I have lost part of my soul, and I don't think it's coming back. The horror.

Luckily a game of Elder Sign made me feel a little better.

Two games of Clash of Cultures 2 player. First game my opponent pushed war while I was going culture. I started building my biggest city right on the front line before I realized where he was going, but he was at Siegecraft and had gotten some extra resources from conquering a barbarian city so he was able to cancel my bonuses and take my biggest city. I capitulated because I only had two size 1 cities left after he took my size 3. Second game was similar, he pushed war, came right up the middle. This time I placed barbarian settlements in his way and prepared a little better, going trade routes while building up my army techs. When he took the barbarians I had placed between us, I bought steel weapons and came at him, taking the barbarian city he had captured and his fortress city behind it. He capitulated after that, but I didn't feel like he necessarily had to.

Both games, same story because of my opponent. He plays civ on computer the exact same way, which is army first. I think it's actually a losing strategy because the defender has a big advantage in this game of a) fortresses and b) not wasting so many actions on movement. The 2nd time I stayed wary about what he was going to do and he didn't disappoint. I was way out ahead on tech so it never really made me nervous, even when he had a 4 dude army 2 squares away. My economy was significantly better because I hadn't been wasting time on war besides basic techs like tactics.

Two player CoC does incentivize a strategy, rather than a contextual tactic, of war. When your opponent is down you can afford to continue attacking. By contrast, in 3-4 players, you take a city for tactical reasons but you're not going to push on and try to take out the rest of his cities because the 3rd player is around, racking up points or building up economy.

I played games last night. I would like to do it more often.

First up was a few games of One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which is stealthily becoming one of my favorite games of the year. I like that if shuffles some knowledge around the table while still preserving some ambiguity about who knows what. And if we're talking about games that utilize smartphone apps to make the game function? This one does it as well as any of them.

Next I played a prototype a guy was working on, called Suit Up. Usually that's bad news, but this one was surprisingly polished and actually pretty lighthearted for as Euro-y as it was. He's prepping it for a kickstarter so I won't mention much else here. I thought it was pretty fun though.

Next was a four-player game of Impulse. I really like the game but I think it's the weakest of the last three Chudyk titles. It's a little clunkier than either Glory to Rome or Innovation, not having the same flow. Then again it's trying to do something a little more complex, an interpretation of an entire genre of games. And yes it's a fun game, if you enjoy finding card synergies and seeing an entirely fresh way of viewing the space 4X genre. So I like it, even though three of the players were new, and the game kind of bogged down as the new players felt their way through the steps of every turn.

Sail To India is a game that's in that Love Letter size box, but it's actually a good deal more involved than that. There's a line of cards that represent a passage to India. Each person has a pile of cubes that can represent trade goods, or boats, or buildings, or even trackers for points and money. So you're flipping new cards over to continue exploring and your supply of cubes is spread out over the table. The victory point and money tracks only go to five spaces each, so to count above those totals you need to commit more cubes as counters, which means there are fewer cubes to use as more important things like resources and ships. So it serves as a kind of upkeep. It's not a particularly surprising game, but the constraints of the upkeep keeps things interesting.

We ended with Tigris and Euphrates. Everyone knew how to play, and I realized how long it had been since I had played a game that didn't need to be explained to anyone. Oh to go back to those days. And also, it's a terrific game.

Sail to India and Valley of the Kings are both quite intriguing to me. Wondering how they play with 2...

Valley of the Kings plays just fine with 2.

We got a last minute invite to some friends for dinner so we brought a few games and ended up playing Coloretto with five people and my kids played the Bullet Edition of Bang! which my son compared to the fake video game in that one episode of Community. I am so starved for game playing that I was excited to play Coloretto.

Sail to India is for 3-4 players only.

I had one of my worst results at a Netrunner tournament a couple days ago. I won one match and it was against a dude who was so new to the game he didn't even have card sleeves. Geez!

But I liked the decks I brought with me. I made an Iain Stirling deck, which is a Criminal that not only isn't geared towards early-game aggression but actually rewards slow play by giving you two credits per turn if you have less scored points than your opponent. So I built this deck filled up with pressence cards and focused on gaining control of the game. Sure, the Corp may easily score one or two agendas but it's of no use if the Runner gains control of R&D for the remainding of the game.

It's also funny because people think you'll let agendas slip past just because you can trigger your ability. They probably don't realize that "you start the game with two scored points" is better than your ability, though

I also took a Jinteki PE deck which I didn't design but is incredibly fun. You have very few ICE and practically no economy to speak of but you have fear. Dropping a triple-advanced card is just so scary that you can gain control of the game almost purely on it and even good players may find themselves making tons of mistakes. Really fun deck and faction to play.

This weekend I had the first playtest of version 4 of my latest design, City of Lycans. It went okay, but the game has some rough edges that I need to smooth over as soon as possible.

Then we played Cards of Cthulhu. It was my first time. This game is extremely mechanical; the theme really isn't represented in the mechanics, imo. We got steamrolled, which seems to be the normal outcome.

Next was Battleball, which was awesome. It was my first game that went into overtime. Really thrilling.

Tonight my sons and I played another campaign mission in Zombie 15'. We came up about 8 minutes short, I'd say. You really have to move your ass in that game, and it's frantic. A hell of a game and if you have any interest in real time games, check it out.

I played the newer version of Betrayal at the House on the Hill for the first time in years. I guess one rules change is that you can only use the stat-boosting rooms once per game. Aside from that, it definitely feels pretty random and clunky now, but I like what it was trying to do. It was pretty late so that may have been part of it.

We played The Resistance: Avalon after that and had a good time. When teaching it, you've got to play more than once. It never makes sense in that first game, but by two and three, it starts to click. One guy said he'll probably buy it to play with his extended family. I've played it with my cousins too, and it went over well.

We tried playing a 4p game of the Resident Evil deck builder, and it kind of broke. With four players, we ran out of the 20 ammo cards (think Silver in Dominion terms) pretty quickly* and some people were locked out of getting a good economy going. Once one of us saw Wesker and lost, which puts him to the bottom of the deck (but beating him is the win condition), we packed it away and watched the host play Destiny. We tried it again two player today with the partner rules (which are stowed way at the back of the rulebook even though tons of cards refer to partners), and it still didn't feel that great. It felt long, clunky, and repetitive in the same way that Thunderstone has for me. When I won I was kind of just glad it was over and I could say that we gave it a shot.

*There are only 15 in the box. So that's less than 4 for each player.

Someone at Atlanta Gamefest mentioned to me that, as a fan of Blood Bowl Team Manager, I'd really like Dogs of War. I bought it blind, after missing the chance to play it that weekend, but I got to play it twice this weekend with different groups (4, then 5 players). It's one of my new favourites now, and the comparisons to BBTM are valid. It feels like a lighter version, though with a few more options tactically. It made me wonder about how BBTM would work if multiple teams could play each side of highlights...

I also played Bruxelles 1893. It didn't look appealing, but I gave it a shot, and won my first game with the area control track. I enjoyed the game, but after talking to another guy who said that the game shows everything it has after 5/6 plays, I can see where he's coming from. I;ll play it a few more times, though. For a Worker Placement game, it has some interesting interactions.

I missed out on playing my copy Thunder Alley which would have been my preference (I wanted a lighter game that didn't take too much explaining), but I wasn't going to turn down the chance of a five player game of A Study in Emerald. The game ran a bit too long, I think due to one of the problems it has with certain types of players. It needs a mature approach from the players, as there's no mechanism to really force people to do anything.

I also got to play Yedo three players. It's a tight game at three, but I prefer it with more (or with two, as a different, more relaxing experience.)

What do you mean force people to do anything in A Study in Emerald? Do you mean that people just hovered forever getting cards instead of declaring for a side?

He sat at zero points and just played a Munchkin kind of game; dropping Cthulhu on a city "for the lolz to dick someone over" rather than for any purpose, that kind of thing. You can stay protected from attack if you haven't scored any (potential) points, which he hadn't for two hours. He was new to the game, but turtling on zero points will never win you the game. His ally did win though, after he eventually scored. That was more thanks to some brilliant play by the ally than anything else.

In theory, everyone could spend every turn doing nothing but place influence, and retrieve influence (not even collecting cards). It would make no sense at all, but the game would last forever. Ankh Morpork has a similar issue in terms of players playing the game "correctly" but that game has an end game timer that will close it (running out the deck).

Doesn't sound like fun. On the other hand I believe the collaborationists are the ones who win from a long game since empty stacks give green points. But if cards aren't being bought, that stops that.

You can get into some real dick sequences with the blocking discs too.