What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I had a lot of fun with 3 player Nexus Ops.

Biblios, obviously.

Ingenious is a great choice.

Carc is great, but no more than three for me.

Knights of Charlemagne is a perfect 3-player game. Don't play it with just 2.

played a game of City Council yesterday. Having thought about republic of rome a lot lately i think City Council on some metrics might be a better game. It works better as a competitive coop despite its flaws. The main problem that Council has is you can just draw good objective cards (you get 1 per turn, and you want to score them by negotiating the construction of certain buildings, or allowing crime to build up or building cash reserves etc) that have already been fulfilled on the board qithout your input. The winner often is the person who pulls a couple of cards that just happened to be done on the board in the late game. However, it does work as semi coop without the players needing to agree a social contract. No player can easily sink the ship in one round, or even at all. The ship only sinks if players are persistently selfish over 5 or 6 rounds (this can and does happen). So there is the coop element but its not too harsh. Secondly, yo have to help each other to help yourself. You will sometimes support other players votes or building choices because it also helps you, or because you want their support for your proposal. You cannot lose score and victory cards are hidden, so there's no easy sabotage either. It's a game that delivers on the dishonest negotiations front.


Also played some more Bohnanza. This is growing on me. Definitely better with 5. You can get some good negotiating going and strike some deals. I like its simplicity and openness.

Hellenes, this is a block war game from GMT on the Sparta vs Athens Peloponnesian War. The third game I have played on this conflict. Its good, its got quite a lot of extra rules for sieges, attrition, sacrifices to gods etc over the standard block stuff. I actually like the extra rules weight. Many of the standard columbia games can get very samey, there's just enough here to make it different. Hellenes won't appeal to all though. Like the history fighting battles and assaulting city walls was very risky, pillaging countryside and setting up attritional sieges is the smart choice. It becomes a game of wearing down the opponent and forcing him or her to make risky attacks. Interesting and strategic but not really an action game.

Had good times with some GW Dungeonquest, Mahjong and Tichu too.

City council sounds like fun, I'll check it out.

Played The Castles of Mad King Ludwig this afternoon. A mechanical exercise in tedium.

The main attraction here is you can be creative building your castle layout. We all love minecraft, or building cities or bases in video games. Games like Caverna, or Castles of Burgundy tap this desire, as does this game. The issue i have with it is the arbitrary scoring, as the game from a competitive standpoint is entirely built around maximizing score. You score points for; placing rooms, putting other rooms at all the exits to a room, getting bonuses, hidden objectives, and end game bonus tiles, and your cash. This ends up being needlessly convoluted for a simple tile placement game, and it feels as though score is just meaningless nonsense than anything 'thematic'. Also it results in players miscalculating their scores and recounting, which slows things down and adds to the tedium. On one occasion i was sure a player scored themselves twice but couldn't be sure. You can never really tell who is winning or losing or whether there is a game. In one sense who cares you get to have fun building a castle, but then, if that's what we are here for, why bother with the scoring at all? Building things in minecraft or video games is fun because some ass doesn't come and tell us how many points its worth. In a boardgame it has to be judged for no other reason than that the game wouldn't work. There seems to be an evolution occurring in euro games. Scoring systems need to get more and more complex. Why, what does it actually add other than a false sense of depth?

Also there is a passive aggressive auction system for buying tiles.

To procrastinate studying I'll give a session report.

After many months of not seeing or playing games with really anybody, finally got together with a few of the other local MI FATies: Jackwraith, Stormseeker75, and Alastair. After quick catching up busted out GW's DungeonQuest which we were gonna play waiting for our fourth... who showed up just in time to join in on the fun. Brightflame and the elf chick died pretty early after getting really screwed in a room of darkness/trap loop, an instant kill spear trap (a wonderful death, btw) 1 room away from the treasure room befell the Ogre, a lot of failing at battles by Sir Roland, and an explosion trap to off an often berserk dwarf meant the game ended as it should with everyone dead. I will never get tired of DQ, off to try to buy even more copies...

Next up was Sons of Anarchy which I thought was fantastic. No one had played before so there was a bit of tip toeing and nice play from most of the table while we tried to figure out the actual worth of our actions and loot. As the One Niners I completely f'ed Stormseeker by taking his money he offered to not attack him then doing it anyway (it was the right move) to win a very close game. I look forward to playing this one again and will try to add it to the collection.

We finished with Gears of War, 1st scenario. Where we promptly got stomped out in less time then it took to set up, then played a second time which was much closer but still resulted in a narrow defeat to the COGs.

I really had a blast and hope we can get together more often, good times. Thanks for hosting Marc.

Actually, Steve did you get home safe? Must've been tough to drive with that knife in your back.

Da Bid Dabid wrote: Actually, Steve did you get home safe? Must've been tough to drive with that knife in your back.

But it was the right move!

No worries on the hosting. Anytime. Thanks for coming this far and for being the guide on Gears. Next time: The Hellgame, for sure.

We played APPLES TO APPLES with the grandparents. Disney themed, no less! I fucking hate Disney.

MARVEL DICE MASTERS finally came in--I waited, no shit--six months for CoolStuffInc to honor my May order. It came in, and it's a ton of fun! And I love the boosters--I can get my kid to do my taxes if I say I will send a booster his way afterwards. Things are $0.80!

Three games of CLUE: THE GREAT MUSEUM CAPER. My son wins as thief or detectives, it's a little freaky. He needed to roll high movement and scanners (1/6 chance) twice to catch us in the last one. So, of course, that happened.

I really like The Great Museum Caper.

Yeah, I made it home safe and told everyone what a douche you are.

Yesterday was awesome. I need more gaming like that in my life for sure.

Last night a friend came over and we played a round of Warmachine. He's a pro and I'm a total noob at it. I was kicking his butt for a bit, but then he busted out this earthquake spell that totally wasted me and he won.

I can tell there's a significant game under the surface of Warmachine; my issue seems to be that if you don't have similarly skilled / knowledgeable opponents, it's really not all that much fun. I suppose it's just very dependent on experience, which I'm not terribly likely to get.

Then we did 2 missions of Zombie 15', which we handily won. It was very tense and a lot of fun. That's a pretty damn good game. Actually... the "special abilities" of the various heroes are on the whole pretty lame and unthematic. Each character has a positive and a negative, and the choices the designers made are rather crazy. It's probably best to ignore them.

Played a solo game of FORBIDDEN ISLAND last night. It looks great (except for the pawns which are a bit boring) and I can see how it would be a very good gateway game. Not sure I'm gonna solo it much, though, since the story is not impressive and it didn't seem to be that difficult. But then again, I leant it at the local library, so I'm not one to complain.

I'm also digging in to some of the old Fighting Fantasy books. I got beaten very badly by House of Hell and eventually had to resort to a walkthrough to finish it. And that was even without doing fights and such. They are not great literature, but it's actually a lot of fun - especially the ones like House of Hell or Creature of Havoc that have some decent puzzles and not just dungeons.

Robinson Crusoe. Amazing game. Gets better the more you know it. Lots of subtleties that don't become clear till you play multiple times re: the decks.

Its already well known that in Twilight Struggle you WILL draw only the scoring cards that fuck you up at the worst time, usually 2 or 3 in hand is nice, thus ruining the entire round. Meanwhile your opponent will somehow squeeze out of a region which he would have got killed in if you'd pulled the card that round.

A new twist tonight. apparently if you have the french fucking surrounded, so you are rolling at +4 on a realign, it IS possible with a 4 ops card to roll 1-1-2-1 and not only NOT remove the USSR from France (where he could not enter later) allowing you your best chance to keep in the game with a Europe domination but you will actually INCREASE the fuckers influence in France and end up gaining ZERO points on the Europe scoring card now sat in your hand.