What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yesterday, my thirteen year old son and I played Wiz-War. This has become his most requested game. This time, I won. After an exchange of epic magical attack spells, counter spells and whatnot during the game, we eventually were each reduced to two life points. In the end, I got lucky, transformed into the werewolf, and seized victory. My son immediately demanded a rematch. To me, that's the best sign of a good game--you just want to play it over and over again.

I think it probably depends what you play AH for.

Eldritch Horror is a fantastic game. It just does a LOT of very cool things that any future adventure game designer should look at and/or steal. The only problem about it is that it's not Arkham. Arkham in Arkham Horror feels like a place. When you meet people and then hear about them again in some other encounter, you get the feeling that you are in a real town - and the three very different expansion boards work the same way and feel like real places. The world of Eldritch Horror has some of this, but doesn't feel as real.

I'm still gonna play it and will most likely also buy every expansion. But at the same time it has me itching to bring out Arkham Horror again which has been on the shelf for a while.

I know Eldritch Horror is fantastic. Or at least I'm heading toward that opinion. I played it with 2 newbie girl gamer and it went smooth, and we had great fun. It's just I don't know if I want another co-op and another game that need 2-3 hours to play.

I'm not sure about Eldritch Horror doesn't feel like real world. It did for me. I especially liked the town encounters.

Core game is boring as fuck (test, test, and test), but conditions and spells really spice it up.

What I meant about a real world was more that it does not feel like a place. Arkham is a place. You can explore it, you can see how a monster is blocking the streets you want to walk on, experience how the weather affects you, and feel the special mood it has. EH does this to some extent and I also appreciate how it tells a different, global story. But it simply does not feel the same way, and that's a shame. Or, not really a shame, but more a matter of while I think EH is the better game by far, I think AH is the better story.

But then again it could be nostalgia talking since it's been years since I played AH.

The lack of money and shopping and that whole aspect of resource management is one of the reasons (among several) that I prefer Arkham. I wanted to like EH but as Sevej says the core game seemed boring and very luck-driven... when there are fewer moving parts to streamline things, then the luck factor overall is increased. And like others have mentioned, I really love the localized detail and flavor of Arkham. That being said, I've been thinking of giving EH another shot with the expansion stuff included.

Some of the things EH does really well are:

1. The clues. I like that you have to fight to get one and only get a few during the course of a game. Makes them seem more important (because they are) and makes the choice of using them to reroll a die much harder.

2. Specific clue encounters tied to the GOO. This adds a lot of story to the game, I thin, much like the small box expansions did in AH.

3. No skill sliders. I've always hated that part of AH.

scissors wrote: Played Imperial Assault with my son, who is six, today. Not in any recognisable form, no rules We punched the tiles, my son made an Empire base, I built what looked like a rebel cave. At first, things were antagonistic. I generally don't want my son to play shooting games, other than cops & robbers type kids games, so we established all the weapons were at worst sleeping or stun guns. Second there was very little using them. Third, my son eventually sent over a 'good' stormptooper called Jon who broke the ice, asking Luke and the female Jedi (who we called Elizabeth) if they wanted to be friends. Before I knew it, all the empire guys including Vader had come over to the cave for a party. The ST-AT 'cranked out' Call Me Maybe and Firecracker and everybody danced for a while. After that my son played for a while, making some adventures of his own. Whatever the games failings, if there are are any, I know he'll get a kick out of this for years

That scenario would have made a better prequel trilogy.

This weekend I got to teach and play A Study in Emerald, as someone at the meetup likes Wallace games and was interested. Four of us played, with three being new players. However, all were good game players and understood the rules well (as much as my explanations made sense). There were a lot of "rookie" plays in the game from my experience, but I was happy to let it all play out however it played out. In the end, one of the players cycled his deck with two freemasons* to push the revolution track six spaces in one turn to end the game... And lose it for himself, as the guy with most points was actually on his side. It turned out it was 3 vs 1 with myself as the lone Loyalist. I felt like I had a shot, even so, and really enjoyed the game. I know there's at least one more player who is interested in playing it some more, too.

*letting anyone get two of these cards is akin to throwing the game.

Next was a full five player Yedo in which we had a new player, but even so, I left all the full-fat "Samurai" options in. Warnings were given about events causing calamities, and the need to mitigate, not just optimize for points, but sure enough when the earthquake struck, so did the cries of "randomness!" from the corner. It was still a close game by the end, with the first three places covered by three points. I tried a different strategy but could only make fourth, though with a decent score for that. The good news is that it's a game that's getting popular- someone played my copy last week and bought his own. Getting five mature players into this game should be fantastic.

Someone wanted to play Sentinels of the Multiverse with the Vengeance setup, so I joined in with that. It turns out that it's a co-op where one of you can just be picked on to get damage dumped on until you're out of the game. Still, it was OK, but I was fairly glad to be out of the game sooner than later. I will probably sell my copy of Vengeance when I get the chance. I'd rather play Shadowrun: Crossfire than this.

Last night was Firefly which is my wife's current favourite. This time she won but only by $6,000. We played one of the more advanced stories: it's still a race to $12,000 but with havens, and more alliance difficulties in the early game. We'll play again tonight as we left the board set up.

Continued to explore AEG's black box. MY wife and I played three games of Trains. She won 2 of the three.

Basically it is Dominion with a board. You build train routes in Japan as you build a deck of train-themed cards. I don't really like trains, but the game was quick and fun with unfamiliar cards to explore different strategies, plus there was a lot of cheap wine to be had.

Anyway when the game is over you get points depending on how many cities and how many stations you have connected by rails. My big complaint is that there were no 'attack' cards or really any shared cards, so not much interaction during a players turn. There is some blocking and point stealing on the board as it is more expensive to build on a space where someone else has already built. So not much interaction in the card play, but some on the board.


Also I just hit 200 posts (in like 5 years)

The thing I like about Trains is that it's got just enough "interaction" to feel friendly, while not being basically solitaire optimization game, which is what base Dominion feels like to me.

On the subject of Eldritch Horror, I'm keen to know what the Mountains of Madness adds. In the base game my sadness was limited to being stuck in wilderness locations with no actions to do, or being detained and missing my actions that way.

Forsaken lore added the excitement of being literally excluded from playing the game for one (or three, in one game I played) turns. What thematic and dramatic ways does MoM offer for me to go to the bathroom for 20 minutes?

Played a couple of games Greed over the weekend. I've always been a fan of drafting cards as a central mechanic. The most popular games in the genre (besides Magic) seem to be 7 Wonders and Seasons. Neither one really excites me all that much.

Greed on the other hand is a very quick, mean little game. The 1950's gangster theme is nice even if it's not particularly strong and you can explain all the mechanics in about 5 mins. Nothing is confusing and any seasoned gamer will grasp what's going on very quickly.

There are so many good cards that you will see...and that fear of waiting for the deck to get back to you is great. Since you only play 10 hands it feels like each card is incredibly important. It's got a nice mix of one time action cards that can screw your opponent or help you, plus thugs and locations that give permanent bonuses. The most money at the end of the game wins...so you're trying to quickly get a little engine going and figure out how to make bigs gains quickly.

I feel that, much like the recently discussed Temporum, this Donald X. Vacarrino design will quickly become a lost footnote of 2014. It's actually a damn solid little card game. Fans of the drafting mechanic would be wise to take note of it.

A friend had a big birthday party on Saturday night, featuring smoked goat and homebrew mead. I knew there would be a lot of geeks there who weren't particularly into boardgames but could learn one easily enough. I also knew that people would be drinking, so I brought games that were easy to teach but had a lot of direct interaction: Cash 'n Guns, Paranoia Mandatory Fun Bonus Card Game, Mall of Horror, and Nuclear War. So we played an epic game of Nuclear War.

I hadn't played in several years, so when two extra people sat down to play during setup, I just dealt them, without reducing the quantity of population cards per player. That made for a longer game, as did frequent mistakes by inexperienced and inebriated players involving card sequence. And everybody was doing that bullshit multi-player thing where you randomly attack people so as to not give offense. Eenie-meennie-miney-mo was used by more than one player. And people randomly dropped out of the game after a while, with bystanders happily taking their place. Even Skippy the Super-Virus failed to move the game along, as the Super-Serum shut him down after a few turns.

So what should have been about a one hour game became a three hour game. One guy got eliminated after 90 minutes, but his retaliatory strike was too weak to finish off his slayer. Gradually, everybody was getting whittled down pretty far, so I started deliberately misplaying my cards, while hording some brutal combos. I did that to deflect attention, and also so that I could at least do a hellish retaliatory strike if I got eliminated. Gradually, the other four players fell into two pairs of grudges, trading damage while ignoring me for the most part.

Skippy showed up again, and this time I pointed out that we could kill the disease if we killed off his current host player. So everybody turned on the guy who currently held him and we managed to waste him. His retaliatory strike eliminated his old foe, and that guy's strike took out another player. As the dust cleared, there were two of us left, and I had a 100 megaton payload in my space station and another lined up with an MX missile on the launch pad. I dropped the big one from the space station, and spun the spinner (because my cloud die was missing), and got Triple Yield, for 75 million dead! My opponent had just 6 million people at that point, so he was gone. His final strike was weak, and left me with 2 million survivors. Everybody said they enjoyed the game, despite the long mid-game.

I had a chance to play Mysterium recently. It's really pretty great, but at the same time I don't see it having much staying power.

The game is a weird mash-up of Clue and Dixit. One player acts as the "Ghost," who was killed in a specific room, with a specific weapon, by a specific person. Everyone else plays psychics, who are trying to interpret their visions to help solve the crime. So, on the table are all these cards (three more than number of psychics) with intricate pictures of the locations, weapons, and people. The Ghost can then hand each psychic a number of image cards (that look a lot like Dixit cards) to try to convey a meaning. If the psychic player interprets it correctly, that card is removed from the pool. Eventually, you narrow the pool down to three complete sets, and the Ghost gets one last chance to communicate which is the correct set and help you solve the murder.

The key to the game, what makes it both fun and difficult, is the complex imagery on the cards. For example, one room is an attic. It's filled with everything you'd expect to find, which is pretty much a lot of junk, bicycle tires, trunks, pictures, etc. What card does the Ghost use to convey that? He's limited to what image cards he has in hand. Maybe one has a bicycle on it, but it could be a tiny bicycle in a giant field of enormous flowers. Or there could be three or for location cards that have bicycles or wheels or transportation on them. So it's easy to misinterpret images. Sometimes the clue is just based on matching colors or shapes, regardless of what the actual image is.

I thought the game was very interesting, and I really enjoyed it. However, I could also see it getting "played out" fairly quickly. You would absolutely have to rotate the Ghost player frequently, and establishing any kind of set code would totally kill the game.

So, a pretty great game, but one that I don't really have any desire to own.

I was at someone's house last night and Mysterium was on offer to play but boy, it didn't sound like anything but tedious to me. Instead for people played Castles of Mad King Ludwig and I and two others played Pandemic: the Cure.

If you are ever playing a dice game against Rob Daviau, try to put money on it. He is a terrible dice roller.