What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I gamed three nights this week after work which I'm paying for now. Gaming keeps me up too late. It was a mixed bag.

Tuesday night we played Steam at my meetup group. I hadn't played it in about 3 years ago and remembered really liking it. I still do, but not as much as Railways of the World. I remember being torn between the two and ended up buying Railways. Glad I made the choice I did.

Wednesday night was Coolstuff boardgame night and I got to try Evolution at 5 players which is probably 2 too many. I might like this at 3 but I don't think it was great, just good. I don't particularly care for keeping track of multiple traits between players that change quite often. If they get more than one species going it can even be more to remember. I went the carnivore route early and thought it was really hard to score points compared to the other species. It was ok, but I'm not excited to play again and I'm fine if I never do.

Last night was Acquire, which was my 2nd play, albeit a different version. I think it was the Avalon Hill version. It was fun and really tight. I won by a difference of about $1400.00 and we couldn't tell who was winning right until the end. I really like this one for something that's so abstracted, which I usually hate. I don't know if I'll ever own it, but I certainly wouldn't mind if I did.

The wife and I have played three games of Arkham Horror this week. I have three big and three small expansions mixed into that behemoth of cards and tokens. I've tried playing with it all at once but, meh, too convoluted. My new preferred method is pick one expansion, include every option it adds, and leave out the options/boards from the remaining expansions. When drawing cards, I now skip Mythos cards from the left out expansions but use all cards for every other card type for convenience sake. Works well, and is a pretty easy way to season the dish to taste rather than just stirring in equal parts of every fucking spice on the rack. We just finished a great Innsmouth Horror flavoured session; tasted fishy, as it should.

airmarkus wrote: Wednesday night was Coolstuff boardgame night and I got to try Evolution at 5 players which is probably 2 too many. I might like this at 3 but I don't think it was great, just good.

Funny you mention this. I'm halfway through EuroQuest, with ~7-8 new games under my belt, and this was my clear favorite. But we only had 3 players, so it was possible to track the powers of the different species without blowing a processor. I don't think I'd play more than four, and that would be pushing it unless you play completely from the hip.

Anyway, I started with a carnivore, which I completely maxed out by the end of the game - huge population, huge body size. It was unstoppable, and had a fantastic herbivorous support team.

I will probably buy this, as eating others goes over well in my group. I'm only hoping that broken trait combos aren't identified too quickly, which might spoil the game.

PS Not a fan of Evo. This works.

PPS My recent 'new to me' list from most to least favorite: Evolution, Qwixx, Blood Bound, Tiny Epic Kingdoms (better than 8-Minute Empire), Panamax, Mythotopia, Machi Koro, Imperial Settlers, AquaSphere (Feld nightmare), The Abyss (pure junk). In the future, I'll avoid anything below Panamax, which I only want to try again because I did so poorly.

Blood Bound is great wkover. It holds up long term.

Played Evolution a second time, but it wasn't as much fun. Dangit. The first time really is the best.

Peaceful players discover that fielding a herbivore-only team isn't terribly exciting. And if no one goes carnivore at all, the game falls into a dull groove of fighting over scraps of plant food. But the game doesn't make it easy to be a carnivore, either, since many improvements are anti-carnivore - which can lead to quick extinction for new meat-eaters.

I will continue to enjoy this game in small doses, but this is no longer a definite purchase. As ponies go, this is strictly a one- or two- tricker. If I can score a cheap copy used or in trade, though, I can see using this as introductory gaming material.

Regardless, I did get in some quality gaming on the final day of EuroQuest, including Middle Earth Quest, Of Mice and Mystics (1st play, was fun), and Red 7 (decent timekiller). Also Alhambra, which I still enjoy occasionally.

Been playing some solo Mage Knight, which is fantastic, and tonight I finally got to teach someone else the game. Went through the learning scenario and I won by a few points. I look forward to trying a full scenario MP, and I ordered the Lost Legion expansion which should be awesome.

Today I met up with one of my Star Trek: Attack Wing buddies to play the D&D iteration. The first game was a scenario out of the rulebook - I had the Blue Dragon he the Copper. His goal was to beat me up a bit and escape off the map, mine was to kill him. The downside to these scenarios are they can end quickly and this one did...A good dice role from my breath attack which ignores his armor and the Copper Dragon was down.

We then played a generic Meat Grinder type mission with 120 points per side, the goal to kill the other side. He had an Elf Mage, a Green Dragon and a Ballista. I had the same Elf Mage, Lord Maximillion the Wraith and a unit of 6 Hobgoblins. Being my first game I just wanted to get a feel for stuff and more specifically how the troops and ground units functioned compared to the space based counterparts.

Lord Maximillion used his icy claw of undeath and ripped the heart out of the Green Drgaon. While his Ballista and Mage took out half my Hobgoblin unit. The Hobgoblins shot back though and finished the Ballista. Eventually my Elf Mage fell leaving a duel between my Wraith and his Mage and my Wraith eventually re-died.

I had a really good time seeing how the rule tweaks effect gameplay. Some of the changes I thought were good like the way Target Lock changed to Targeting and the slight mechanical changes. There were others though like no longer being able to pre-measure anything that, and I realize it is early on for me still, I just don't like - Basically it creates a situation where you can game a bit sneaking in measurements when you can. For example, I found myself measuring for stuff that I normally wouldn't measure for just to check distance because I could at that point but couldn't later. Maybe my mind later will change but right not I'm not a fan.

Otherwise though its very good iteration of the Flight Path System. The mixture of ground and air units has made me excited to once again explore a system that I'm well versed in, so I'm already setting up my next plays with the same dude as well as the shop owner.

hotseatgames wrote: Been playing some solo Mage Knight, which is fantastic, and tonight I finally got to teach someone else the game. Went through the learning scenario and I won by a few points. I look forward to trying a full scenario MP, and I ordered the Lost Legion expansion which should be awesome.

I'm so jealous. I've been craving a game of mage knight but I don't own it. The lost legion expansion is fun and quite a challenge.

Last Saturday got a full game of 2 players Runewars again. Had good time. I don't know if I would ever play this 4 players due to play time, but seems like a lot of the cards & dynamics only really shine on the full complement of players.

Four of us at my regular meet had agreed to play Mage Knight on Saturday. Starting at 2pm, including rules explanations, we played for a bit over five hours- teams playing up to sacking the first city. Even with the time it took, I never felt like the game dragged, and I enjoyed the tough decisions that the hand management brought. One of the guys on the other team kept using his skill that hit everyone else for wounds if they used mana not of a given colour. He mostly just screwed his team mate with that, as I had the character who could burn a wound once a turn to boost actions. I would play it again for sure. I'm tempted even to buy it, but with the price I am going to see what the new year brings.

We played some Tichu initially to kill time because one of us was supposed to have to leave "soon", after over an hour, I ducked out. I'm getting more comfortable with the game, but I don't want to play it all night (in a "woodsman's axe" kind of way, that table played Tichu for the rest of the night).

Two people wanted to play Tobago and I had no real reason to say no, so we did that. It's a pretty neat little game, but I felt that one of the other players gifted the win to the other by leaching off a treasure she was going to make a haul off of. The game needs more than two curses in the deck, I think, or either two or four players maybe.

After that nobody had any better ideas so I convinced five others to play some Roman Bingo (Augustus) which, for me, was a fine way to waste some time. I had warned people against choosing starting objectives with rare tokens, but a couple got hosed. My own game was crushed when one other player scored their bingo with a higher priority card and "stole" two bonuses out from under me, which I thought was great.

On Sunday, I went to a different group in Suwanee, which is a little further out for me. It turned out well, though, as we got to play one of the guy's copy of Sons of Anarchy, which was a lot of fun. Between the economics, the conflict, the trash talk and the bullshitting we all had a good time. I won with a last turn black market. The second place player would otherwise have tied me for points and he had the patch. He did a great job with selling guns to other players.

After that, back at my friend's house we played some Ascension (A mix of Apprentice and Darkness Unleashed). In spite of complaining that I was taking almost all of the energy shards all game, he still beat me by seven points.

Played a little yesterday: Valley of the Kings, Pandemic: The Cure, and [/b]Eight Minute Empires: Legends[/b]. All two-player.

PtC was new to me, and this is what I had to say about it:

I'm a big fan of Pandemic and consider it to be just about the best co-op game out there. I think it does its thing remarkably well. I'm also, theoretically, a fan of dice games, though more often than not I'm disappointed by them, as so often they're just "roll a bunch of dice and see if ultimately you did better than someone else who may as well not even be in the same time zone as you." So I was curious yet wary of The Cure, despite liking most of the singles I've heard from them. Turns out, The Cure is a great distillation of Pandemic into dice form, with a lot of neat touches thrown in and great components. The fact that you can re-roll your dice as much as you want is offset by the very real threat of the biohazard side, and there are parts of the game it's easy to overlook at your peril. It's a great implementation of the same basic idea in a different format. The telling part: we lost our first game and immediately tried again (we lost that one too; it's tough with only two players!)

Dallas Games Marathon, leading into BGG.con. Went to the first two days on Friday and Saturday and then played a couple games last night with family I'm staying with...

Here's the list so far:

Sheriff of Nottingham
Legendary Encounters
A Study in Emerald
Imperial Settlers
King of NY (x5)
Gravwell
Black Fleet
Hanabi

King of NY is great... adds some nice new wrinkles to the KoT system, with buildings to crush and army units that attack you, and the decisions about how to mess with everyone else are more involved now. That being said, though still firmly in the "light" game category, it definitely is not as widely accessible as KoT. In the game I played with family, there were repeated questions almost every turn, like "what do the skull symbols do again?" and "when can I move?" and "what happens when the army units attack?" These are things that as hobby gamers we would pick up in a second, but it showed me that with an audience of people who like to play games but aren't really hobby gamers, King of Tokyo is the better choice.

Black Fleet was really fun. A simple pirate game where you're trying to max your money intake, and control one merchant ship and one pirate ship and need to balance earning money with foiling others. Nice components, simple to learn and play, but with some decent, though very light, tactical play. This should become a hit.

A Study in Emerald ended up being the shortest game of that I've played... maybe 45 minutes. I had developed a nice foundation as a Loyalist with vampires and the zeppelin, and I was about to make my surge over the next several turns, but an opposing Restorationist had gleaned who we all were and successfully killed the main agent of his fellow Restorationist to end the game and win at the right time when he was tied for the lead but won the tiebreaker. I was bummed but had to admit it was a great opportunity that he seized.

Legendary Encounters is still holding up really well for me, after 20+ plays. We got creamed badly... the game definitely doesn't scale as well for 5 players... but it was still a lot of fun.

At least 6 more days of gaming coming up. Yikes. That almost seems oppressive right now. I expect to be fully burned out after a few more.

Holy shit, killing his fellow restorationist's agent is a completely fucking awesome move. Gotta play my copy!

I think that's one of the reasons games like PAX PORIFIRIANA and EMERALD are so great. There are so many different ways to trigger the end game.

Last night we played several games of Eon Cosmic Encounter. I keep feeling the need to upgrade to the newer FFG version.