What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I was, in fact, the first to procure the monolith. But another player, who had a lot more mines than I did, got the first dragon out and he stomped me.

Re-wording what I posted...might fix it later, might not.

Got in some good old fashioned wargaming today with The Nemesis.

Combat Commander was first. We played a scenario where the Germans (he) were defending a block house against an attacking force of Belgians (me ). I divided my force into two elements. The first was to creep forward in a frontal advance with the help of a smoke screen laid by a mortar team. The second element was to swing around to the right and assault the flank. It was a decent plan but a combination of a mortar team that spent more time figuring out how to operate the weapon than actually laying smoke and the flank team not moving fast enough defeated me. Game ended due to time. Playing with the French deck is interesting. That 1 card discard limit can be brutal.

What Price Glory was next. I was the Central Powers to his Allies. You really need to put the pedal to the metal in the first two turns as the Germans which I didn't really do. Add several blunderous offensives where I spent lots of cards for little result and my defeat was assured. My second play of this game and I like it a lot. I just wish my brain could grasp how to construct an effective assault a little better. The key is right there in the corner of my mind, I just need another play or two to bring it into focus.

repoman wrote: What Price Glory . . . You really need to put the pedal to the metal in the first two turns as the Germans . . .

. . . and don't leave any Belgians behind you! My last game I left a couple of territories behind for "later cleanup" which of course I never really got to, and they plagued me at the end of the game.

Need to get this one out again. Repoman plays all the games I want to play.

S.

Today it was either going to be Imperial Assault which one of my friends just bought and I figured he was bringing or Arcadia Quest which I just received via a trade. True to form my buddy had IA with him but hadn't gone through the rules yet. Thought I did get to poke around at the stuff in the box and the game looks amazeballs. Soon...Very soon...

So onto Arcadia Quest. This game is on my short list for Game of the Year. For perspective though others on that list would be Dice Masters, D&D:Attack Wing and Rivet Wars.

Arcadia Quest is a campaign based system which is very light on rules. You play as a group of three heroes from one of many guilds attempting to retake the city of Arcadia back from the evil beasts that conquered it years prior. But you also want your guild to have the most successes and prestige at the end of the campaign so your guild has the most influence in the New Arcadia.

Each mission comes with a preset map with monsters, objective tokens and exploration tokens (which give you goodies) when you get one. There are also portals around the map to zoom your characters around with. The maps end up being very claustrophobic and pretty packed, especially with all four guilds on the board.

The monsters act more as an environment, they have reactionary AI where they'll attack you back and also attack when a character moves out of a space next to them. On your turn you either move one hero and attack or attack then move, your other choice is to rest your team. At the beginning you're dealt a hand of five starting equipment cards and each time you use one to attack you exhaust it. When you rest your team you remove all exhausted tokens from your equipment, respawn any of your killed heroes and move any of your equipment cards around.

The object of the game is to complete three quests which are either Player vs Player or Player vs Environment Quests. Player vs Player is basically if you kill an opposing player you've completed a quest. Player vs Environment are specific things you do on the map...Ones I saw tonight were "Killing a Minotaur", "Kill 3 Monsters", "Claim Objective Token and Get a Prize" and "Visit and claim four objective tokens or claim the same one five times". And in order to win you have to have at least one PvE Quest completed.

We didn't bother to play the campaign so we played the two easiest scenarios. The first one was over in about 30 minutes. It really surprised us how quick it went. As we were all feeling things out we weren't paying as much attention to what the other people were doing so suddenly a guy beat down an orc, claimed an objective token which completed a third quest and gave him the win.

Our second game the winner dropped out to sleeve his Imperial Assault cards so we went down to three. We didn't do any of the campaign steps, just kept the same heroes and setup the next mission. This one was very interesting because what we discovered is sometimes you have to work with other guilds to prevent someone else from completing an objective, but then the very next move might be against the person you allied with to stop that other player.

It's also very hard to one-shot characters, also since you can't interrupt your move and attack there's a lot of times where it is hard to not make opportunities for other people to take advantage of. For example if you attack a hero chances are you're just going to weaken that character for an opponent to come in and gain credit (and potentially complete a quest) for the kill. Or open up a spot by killing a monster on an objective token only for someone else to swoop in and steal it. So there's a lot to take into consideration on a turn and trying to get your opponents to help you out without them realizing that they are.

Now, all the scenarios setup the same way where the map changes, the enemies change, but it looks like there'll always be the "Kill (color) Character" and the objective is to complete three quests. The Environmental Quests seem to all be "Kill ____ Monster" or "Collect ____ Objective Token".

So the game is going to be variations on a theme, but the theme is very solid. The rules melted away to the background very quick, in fact one player had to drop during the second game and we had a step-in player up and running in two minutes. And it has Exploding Dice so there were a lot of exciting moments. We had an Orc attack with 3 dice and end up with 6 hits. In the second game I had a Hail Mary attempt with my basher who moved into a space with an orc, kill him which if I survived the retaliatory attacks I would have won the game, but alas, I couldn't roll a success on my lone defense die.

Great game though, a very solid core with quick and intuitive gameplay and a surprising amount of options on a turn. Next time I hope to get a campaign going, and the best part about a campaign is it can be completed on one long session or just over a few couple hours long sessions (6-8 hours I'd guess).

Back to Warriors of God after a long break, finishing up my Vassal game. Joan d'Arc is on the field and no one has laid a glove on her, but the English appear poised for a win in spite of her, this after the French were up by 20 at the half.

This game is being reprinted. Do yourself the favor of finding a copy. I'll wager it sells out again, and expecting lightning to strike THREE times is true folly.

S.

I don't know much about Arcadia Quest but it looks interesting and I kind of want to check it out. Do you think the game is "thinky" or "deep"? I really want something that is strategically interesting, not just fun.

Played Imperial Stars II by Victory Point Games last night.

Let me cut right to the chase...If you have someone that you play games with that can't get into the theme in historical war games but you're sure they'll enjoy the game play, pick this up. It's a very solid system with a really simple but brilliant way to amp up the tension as the game goes on. Not only does it do a great job of introducing standard war game mechanics but it has some fun, satisfying space exploration going on, too. It is a VPG release, so expect paper maps ( more like card stock), but they're production values have improved quite a bit since I first played their games.

I think I really love this one. I'm concerned about the last player having too big an advantage on the last turn, but I need to play it again with the knowledge of what to expect before I'm willing comit to that. Initial opinion is that this game rocks.

Sag, I owned Warriors of God once and actually played it twice! I loved it, but I couldn't get anyone to play it with me. This time, I'm buying it for the (probably) Forever Shelf.

DungeonQuest Revised Edition last night to introduce my girlfriend to something other than Euros. She really liked it. So much that we played two games. She really got into waiting for hot death to come her way. I'm going to start another thread on this game because it deserves some discussion about differences in versions and the whatnot.

Erik Twice wrote: I don't know much about Arcadia Quest but it looks interesting and I kind of want to check it out. Do you think the game is "thinky" or "deep"? I really want something that is strategically interesting, not just fun.

Not really.
When you put together your guild (you get three characters) there is a bit of strategic planning with how you want your guild to function and what roles you want characters to fill. In game the Player vs Environment Quests often give you either a Title or Equipment as a reward for completing it before other players. The game moves fast so there is the strategic choice of which one to go for first because shooting for both doesn't seem very possible to achieve. Then there is the strategy of gearing up your characters to try to achieve your goals.

Now, I'm not a slow player but yesterday I did find myself getting pressed a few times to make a decision about my turn and to take it. It usually takes a few turns for your plans to pan out so if you need to shift gears and have a few options those points are few, but often very big.

It's a tactical game though and any strategic choices, with the exception of how you as a group go about picking your guild and what equipment to buy when you have the chance, are pretty short term.

Josh Look wrote: Played Imperial Stars II by Victory Point Games last night.

Let me cut right to the chase...If you have someone that you play games with that can't get into the theme in historical war games but you're sure they'll enjoy the game play, pick this up. It's a very solid system with a really simple but brilliant way to amp up the tension as the game goes on. Not only does it do a great job of introducing standard war game mechanics but it has some fun, satisfying space exploration going on, too. It is a VPG release, so expect paper maps ( more like card stock), but they're production values have improved quite a bit since I first played their games.

I think I really love this one. I'm concerned about the last player having too big an advantage on the last turn, but I need to play it again with the knowledge of what to expect before I'm willing comit to that. Initial opinion is that this game rocks.

This looks really cool, thanks for bringing it to our attention! Let us know how future plays go...

Played Imperial Stars II again tonight, this time with a different map. Yup, this game really is great. Better than I thought it was.

The map we used tonight had a bunch of singularities around the center and a couple around the sides. As you can imagine, you can't actually fly ships into the singularity hex, but each adjacent hex is an event horizon hex and ships don't spend their movement points to enter them. So what you get are ships doing slingshots around the map, particularly around the center where you can zip around one singularity into another one. This seemed really crazy to us at first, though we realized that it balanced itself back out due to the rules stating that you can't build Base Stations (which is where you spawn new ships from and are great for holding down planets) within 2 hexes of a singularity nor can damaged ships use the event horizon hexes. So you could colonize planets around them, but you couldn't properly reinforce them and if any of ships took damage, they were pretty much stuck out there. This caused a whole lot of back and forth over the center of the board and if you could sneak around the sides and establish a foothold closer to your enemy home planet, it felt like a major victory. Completely different experience from the map I played last night, which was fun for entirely different reasons.

I think this is handsdown my favorite VPG release (others I've played by them are Nemo's War, Forlorn Hope, Astra Titanus, Bulge 20, and No Retreat). How tight everything is in the game, with your OPs points, your blind buy reinforcements, the way that you weaken yourself by expanding your empire but need to expand in order to do more in the game, the planetary exploration tokens...every decision feels important. You never feel like you're doing something just because you have the ability to it. Every thing you do has a reason for you doing it, and once you have a good grip on the game, you realize things things you could have done instead had plenty of reason as well. This is certainly not a game that's held back by the limitations of it's components, and I mean that in a quantity sense more than a quality one. Hell, it benefits from it.

This, along with Theseus, makes up my favorite games of 2014.

thanks for the tip on Imp Stars.

When I see AP chit pulls though I always wonder why everyone by default doesnt use the Tank on Tank system for free added "fog of war".

make the OPPONENT pull the chit with the AP and only reveal it as the player counts out the last AP worth of stuff. That way you add a whole level of risk management if you want to play cautiously and keep things out of harms way or dare to push out a bit more hoping you have enough AP to get support into position as well.

Josh Look wrote: This, along with Theseus, makes up my favorite games of 2014.

Theseus? I would not have guessed that.

Yeah, I really like Theseus. I was a big fan of NH, too, but I think I like Theseus a whole lot more. It's a truly unique game that's enjoyable without having to make excuses for it. I feel that with games that are doing something so totally different, you often need to preface praise for it with, "Well, it's doing something that's really outside the box," and you're willing to give what doesn't work a pass. That's not the case with Theseus. It's a tight design, no doubt about it.

Other stuff I played that came out this year left me a little mixed. I like Warhammer Discwars but I don't play it nearly as much as I like. I went on a little tear with it a couple weeks ago and I probably like it better than the Flight Path system games. Last time I played I got completely trounced by Chaos and I'm not sure I could have done anything about it, so who knows. It's a good game, I know that. I played Dead of Winter, which is good but the whole "spirit of the game" thing is a turn off to me. If you have invoke that then the problem is with the game as much as it is the people being dicks about stuff. I also played Thunder Alley, which I like quite a bit, I just feel like something is off or missing from it. It's probably me not knowing what the hell I should be doing.

That Star Wars retheme of Cold War: CIA vs KGB has gotten alot of love in this house. My wife and I were playing that every night for awhile, several times in a row (I'd say something about it only taking 15 minutes, but this sentence sounds dirty enough as it is). Super good game, and Star Wars > Reality.