What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Got to try out two new games out of Essen:

Nations the Dice Game was up first. They actually did a pretty good job of getting the feel of its big brother into a quick-playing package. There is a display with three rows of tiles, with increasing costs, either in gold or swords. Tiles are upgrades that give you more or better dice, wonders that give you various stuff, colonies, and leaders. You buy colonies with swords. All the other stuff requires gold.

At the start of your turn you toss your dice (initially 5 basic white dice), and then can do an action. Most of the time this will be purchasing a tile from the display, but may also be re-rolling, or using architect dice to build a wonder.

Keep going around doing an action until everyone passes. Then if you still have unused swords or food you may get a VP bonus. Plus you accumulate books and get a VP bonus for players with fewer books than you.

No direct player conflict other than grabbing stuff before they can get it. War is abstracted by the end-of-turn sword bonus.

Overall enjoyed this one and would try it again.

Also tried Dungeon Bazar. This is sort of an area-control game set in a dungeon. You move your 'merchant' around the dungeon and can leave 'goblins' behind (cubes actually) in an attempt to gain cards representing swords, armor, potions, etc, that you then sell to adventurers.

There's some interesting stuff going on here, but it's marred by the graphic design and a really bad production snafu (backs on two decks are reversed). Plus there are several rules ambiguities. I would try it again, but I don't think it really has legs.

I can totally see Nations working abstracted into a dice game.

It would certainly result in a box 90% smaller than the stupidly behemoth sized one that exists for the original game ( with teeny printed cards, WTF ) .

Some more pre-game impressions from SoB. I started punching the cardboard and I read the rules and here are some more impressions:

Unless you're a maniac, don't buy both boxes. The value in the second box is greatly diminished. There are overlapping enemies, cards, tiles, scenarios (all the mine scenarios are the same in both games) and all the basic stuff like the town boards and tokens are very repetitious.

The second core offers 4 new characters, new enemies, and new scenarios (though only half are new, either the swamps or the city). For another $100/$70 price tag base game, I'd wait until more stuff came out and size it up. New PCs and enemies are very welcome, but that's the majority of what a second box gets you.

The box inserts are different between the games, and the one in Swamps seems to not properly hold the books or tiles. I might be missing something, and I'd probably toss them anyway, but I just found this odd.

The rules and adventure books read great. If you know WHQ you'll feel right at home. There are some things that are more modern though nothing from reading was a red flag. I found them well written, however lacking an index or a glossary. Here's a link to the rule book if you want to see for yourself:http://ffpgames.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/sobs_rulebook_web_publish.pdf

I actually just went through the cards for both sets to see how they combine and there's a very small amount of redundancy between the cards, only a few dozen out of a few hundred that aren't useful.

I'm jealous. I'm still waiting on mine to show up. Like you, I'm a huge WHQ fan....the wait is nearly killing me.

I wrote up a review of Impulse.

Impulse: It’s Called Impulse For a Reason

The gist is, it's not a 4x game, and it's not a boring thinky exercise.

SoB = Shadows of Brimstone

Sagrilarus wrote: SoB = Shadows of Brimstone

Not where I come from.

wadenels wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: SoB = Shadows of Brimstone

Not where I come from.

Not where anyone comes from. "DoW" is killing me right now because it's been Days of Wonder to me for the last decade or so. My brain drops that in place without asking and I have to go back and reread the sentence with "Dead of Winter" inserted instead. Can we at least make it DofW so it has its own space? I know you guys are typing on phones so you want to abbreviate.

I'm not a play-everything-new kind of guy so I have to read back through the thread to figure out what games people are talking about. I only know Shadows of Brimstone exists because I read it here. This thread in particular is tough because you have three different games being discussed simultaneously, and the original reference may be three pages back because there's only ten responses to each page.

My most recent plays are SofG, MM:E, FG, CnG (new version) and LW by the way. Thoughts?

Had 6 at my weekly group on Wednesday which is an abnormally large number for us lately. We started off with the recently released Psycho Raiders. I played as the Flamethrower raider with 3 others, the 2 remaining players took the three teenagers. We made quick work of the Randy and Dawn, but the third one got away after a sneaky game with the player running up the left side of the map, repeatedly hiding and making great use of the once per game abilities. It didn't help that our Van got a flat tire early on and we had to basically abandon it to keep up.

I don't think Psycho Raiders is a great game from the perspective of balance or gamesmanship. It's cruel, it can eliminate you early, and things can swing wildly. However, the atmosphere is at 110% here as it does a great job of simulating its events and hitting you with an engaging and unpredictable story. I believe it comes through on its promise and delivers, but you have to want what it's serving and not try to make it be something it isn't. This isn't as great of a game as Cave Evil but it's worthy of shelf space and it's interesting. I'm glad I have it.

We then moved on to Cash 'n Guns, Coup, and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. It's been a little while since we've played some of these more social games and it was nice to get back to them. The Reformation expansion for Coup made for some interesting decision points in one of our game as we kept flipping people's teams to kind of protect ourselves. It was interesting and better than previous plays with the expansion that I've had.

Cash 'n Guns was the new version and I liked it. Didn't really miss the Bang! Bang! Bang! cards and the new drafting mechanism for loot is great. So much easier and more natural and adds a bit of nuance to what you take. I wish the artwork wasn't worse though.

One Night is a favorite of ours, not much to say about it really. I have hit around 70 games of it though and it's still firing on all cylinders. I was Troublemaker in first game and tricked the Wolves like a boss, giving us the win. I was Insomniac in second game and I think we lost due to some confusion with the Minion. The third and final game I was Drunk and ended up taking the Doppelganger from the middle. We won barely, as the table trusted a Wolf who claimed he was the Troublemaker but I was able to yell loudly enough and with enough authority to get them to vote for a suspicious and quiet player and we ended up winning. Fun times.

Tonight I'm getting in a game of Gumshoe, rare Friday gaming.

charlest wrote: Tonight I'm getting in a game of Gumshoe, rare Friday gaming.

Would very much like a review on that one, either impromptu here or something bigger as a blog or article. I've played Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective a few times and really liked the nature of it, but I've heard Gumshoe is the better of the two.

S.

Sag, I think that Gumshoe is the better of the two. I might even venture to say much better.

It is better but it's also more obtuse, aggravating, and awkward. I plan on reviewing it formally Sag when we finish it, which honestly may take 6 months due to infrequently meeting with that group.

No argument there. The point of entry is much higher for Gumshoe. And it is just harder to handle on the shit that comes with the game, in terms of logistics and kind of categorizing it all in a mental conceptual space.

To me, it is like Fields of Fire or Magic Realm -- well worth the payoff if you devote the time to learn it.