What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played a 4 person game of KaosBall. After this, I'm pretty certain that this game was always intended to be a 2 player affair. I don't think we'll be doing that again. Too slow.

Then a 3 player Neuroshima Hex!, which hadn't hit the table in over a year. I was the dancer. Got my ass beat and was out in only a few rounds. I got ganged up on and was powerless to stop it.

PLayed ARKHAM HORROR this AM with the kids, and got wrecked. So wrecked! The worst beating I have taken in years in that game. We didn't close a single gate--not sealed, mind you--CLOSED. Monster surges kept bumping the terror level, which would make Servants of Glaaki appear, who would take our shit, so we couldn't...anything. Ugh. In the Final Battle it took me two turns to get the focus on fight high enough for me to roll a die. (I had a broken arm, and the last Servant that awoke Glaaki took my spell).

It was still fun though.

Warriors of God against myself on Vassal. The English are up eight at the end of turn three but the French are due for their big mid-game leaders. The next initiative roll will be interesting, and the English have no king which is an overall advantage. I'm putting it at dead-even right now.

S.

An old friend of mine was in town tonight and we got to play three games of my newly acquired copy of Attika at a table in a hipster sandwich joint, drinking cocktails and eating soy chorizo sliders..I think that game may be one of my top 10 favorite games of all time. I don't know what was wrong with me when I sold it before. So, so good with two players. And it can get really nasty with the blocking plays and sudden sweeping combo turns. So underrated, it's ridiculous.

Saturday, played

Tzolkin: I enjoyed it, although there was more micromanaging going on at the table than I care for

Salmon Run: Very meh, race game with FISH! and it is a DECK BUILDER! But not really. Just nothing there really.

At the end of the night, when there were two left: Dragonheart. Finally got to play this little gem, and it reminds me of the Kosmos two players from years ago only better. Don't know if Fantasy Flights' influence helped it, but nice filler game.

#rekt #napoleOWN

I didn't have any plans for gaming this weekend, just a lot of yardwork. And yet somehow I managed to get in 7 hours of gaming yesterday at two different locations.

#1: Old friend happened to be biking through the area and called to see if I had time to hang out. We ended up grilling some burgers and corn, then playing The Vesuvius Incident. This was the fancy 2nd edition that I got through Kickstarter. Basically, a Dudes in the Hallway kind of game. We had a tough game but a solid victory. Five of our 12 space marines survived, plus we rescued 2 civilians and the Recon Bot. We also accounted for 15 other civilians. My favorite was the berserk crew member. He missed with his pistol and we seriously wounded him with a rifle shot. Then hauled him out of there because we aren't allowed to voluntarily leave any humans behind. Just before escaping out the airlock to our shuttle, we got jumped by three more xenomorphs. We killed all three handily, and one of them splashed acid on three humans. The armored marines were unscathed, but the crazy crew member got splashed good and died. He still counted for VP, just not quite as many. Then my friend headed home because he had just worked an overnight workshift as a security guard before heading over to my place.

#2: Midway through The Vesuvius Incident, I got a text from another gamer that I hadn't seen in a while... three years, I think. He was hosting boardgames, and already had dozen people but invited me anyway. I watched some of them play a few early turns of Chaos in the Old World, then watched 2 others play Netrunner. After they finished Netrunner, we pulled in two more people to play Spartacus. As I had long suspected, five-player Spartacus is awesome! Due to a bad shuffle of the deck, everybody got good gladiatiors within the first three turns of auctions. Few slaves in the early rounds of auctions, though, so at one point I was able to sell a spare slave for 4 gold. Then we started getting equipment cards from the auctions. Wasn't until late game that more slaves turned up in quantity.

So the skewed auctions made for a very exciting arena phase. I got the auto-decapitation guy and racked up a couple of early wins, partly because other players hadn't caught on yet to the importance of winning the auction for Host. I also was very lucky at the gambling throughout the game, and I was betting the limit most rounds. Of course, around the time I hit 6 influence, the table turned against me for a while, allowing another player to pass me by and keep going. They also picked on my brutal gladiator, so he missed something like five consecutive turns due poisoned wine and pissed-in porridge.

Late in the game, I finally got the chance to call a Primus, and it was fun. Everybody sent in a well-equipped gladiator, and I set up the teams so that the treacherous gladiator was on the opposite team. She gleefully betrayed her teammate on the second round of the fight, and I made sure to thumb his guy down at the end. In the final turns of the game, I caught up with the lead player, but the rest of the table kept slapping us with Intrigue cards. Finally, he pulled out ahead for the win. Even though the outcome was moot, we still played through the final arena fight, and everybody enjoyed it anyway. Everybody had fun that game.

Played my first board game with my 3-yr old daughter, Emily, this weekend. We played TUTTI FRUTTI (in English I think it's called FRUIT BASKET) by Ravensburger.

a boardgame spliced with Memory, basically. It was good fun and she would shriek with joy everytime she remembered where the blueberry tile was hidden. It's hilarious seeing her try to roll a die. In a casino, they would throw her out at the craps table I think.

Anyway although I beat her, it actually was quite close. I was rolling terrible at the end and she was catching up big time. Plus she kept rolling blue and the blueberry tile was the only one she had memorized completely so it was almost unfair, lol.

I wonder if I can go straight to Twilight Struggle or War of the Ring from Fruit Basket now that she has the fundamentals of basic board game play down...

Sunday gaming at my place. None of you showed up

The Great Zimbabwe - This is such an odd game in that, being a Splotter game with a million bits you assume it's a long haul, but it's very quick. Our group went from being disappointed that it ended so quickly to being disappointed that it's supposed to end quickly to enjoying it as is.

Fury of Dracula - I'd never played this classic. It's fun and exciting, but not nearly fun and exciting enough to justify the length. The card that lets Dracula just go anywhere on the board is some bullshit, too. This is most definitely a game from the 80s, and I can see playing it every now and then, but the experience just isn't worth the time.

Flash Point - scratch another one off the ultimatum list. I understand that most co-ops are junk and that's why a lot of gamers are turned off towards them in general, but I really like this one a bunch. It's a solid game, with a lot to make it very different each time. We played twice, and in the second game I literally never left the fire engine, spending all my time moving it and the ambulance around and shooting the water cannon all over the place, and I was still engaged in the game. It was great. I need to push harder for this to hit the table more.

I think the next step is teaching forcing her to play Puerto Rico. All whimsy and joy in playing games must be quickly snuffed out.

her mom and I both love Puerto Rico so I imagine she'll like it when she eventually plays. What age is good for that? 8? 10? 12?

The best is if I'm the abusive Puerto Rico table captain as we play. "haha! I can't believe you picked Mayor again, you IDIOT! Thanks for manning my big building for me! It's like playing against retards!"

...or something like that.

Your daughter's tears are just liquid ignorance leaving her body. She'll thank you for them some day when she realizes they were for her own good.

I got a good amount of gaming in this weekend. A lot of lighter stuff, but at least it was lighter stuff I enjoy.

Friday started with a game of China while we waited for our 4th to arrive. I love this game, a strong mix of El Grande's area majority with Ticket to Ride's card drafting, and it's own little scoring quirks thrown in. If you've never played it I highly suggest giving it a try.

We then moved on to a 3p game of Galaxy Trucker using the print and play expansion Rough Roads. I just love this game, I love building my ship up and I love watching it burn. The Rough Roads cards were cool, we botched the game though because we all forgot you could "give up" and basically just played until we died. So the game was a wash but I don't care really, we all had fun.

After our 4th showed up we played a game of Kingdom Builder. I like the way you work through your turns in this game, the powers you can get are cool and the ways they combine can be crazy, such as one player building "flying boats". I got crushed as I lost the early game rush to grab powers, so I had a hard time manipulating my settlements.

Frank's Zoo was next, I just got this maybe a month ago and I love it, it's simple, deep, and quirky. I remain terrible at it though, I'm always focused on shedding I never end up with any hedgehogs (and so, I lose points). Also my partnership always seems to have the last player in.

We ended the night with a round of The Bucket King. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot for this game, because the last couple time we ended up playing 4 hands and it just took too long. I want to figure out how to play 2-3 hands, but not make the winner obvious. Given how I'm already playing with house rules, this game could have used more work before it was published, but it's fun, and not terribly different than Galaxy Trucker.

On Sunday we got together again, opening with a round of Hanabi, after two aborted starts. On the first start I just looked at my hand after it was dealt, and it was four 1's! I was pretty bummed about that, but oh well. We did pretty bad in the game we did play, probably the worst I've ever done. My team was never giving me any information so I was just discarding but I kept discarding things we needed. The fireworks were acceptable at best.

Next we played two quick games of No Thanks. This is a game this group and I played to death a couple years ago, we're finally coming back around to it, it's fun, worth a couple plays a month.

Following that was ANOTHER game of Frank's Zoo, this time with 5, the best player count. My hands were insane in two of the three hands and I came in dead last. I still don't understand this game, but this was my 5th or 6th play in a month, which is an achievement for any game you dig.

Finishing off the weekend was a game of Letters from Whitechapel. This is the game that really triggered me getting into the board game hobby, and I love games with deduction, but this was likely my last play of this with this group ever. It just took too long, I'm talking over 4 hours. They're so over-analytic and there's nothing in the game to prevent it. I played Jack and by the end one of the inspectors was basically clocked-out and another was annoyed his teammates were going so long. It just isn't interesting for me with this group, which is a shame because it's a really fun game. I also won, and a couple of the players were pretty sour about it, rationalising why they'd lost. You lost because you didn't play better than me, I wasn't dancing around the room (though I was glad it had ended), just take your medicine. RIP Whitechapel.

Bull Nakano wrote: Finishing off the weekend was a game of Letters from Whitechapel. This is the game that really triggered me getting into the board game hobby, and I love games with deduction, but this was likely my last play of this with this group ever. It just took too long, I'm talking over 4 hours. They're so over-analytic and there's nothing in the game to prevent it. I played Jack and by the end one of the inspectors was basically clocked-out and another was annoyed his teammates were going so long. It just isn't interesting for me with this group, which is a shame because it's a really fun game. I also won, and a couple of the players were pretty sour about it, rationalising why they'd lost. You lost because you didn't play better than me, I wasn't dancing around the room (though I was glad it had ended), just take your medicine. RIP Whitechapel.

Seriously fuck people like this. I hate AP in general, but the thing about AP no one realizes is that it almost never makes you better at games. But the tendency is for these fuckers to think they're so god damn good at games because they take 19 hours over every move. I'm sure there are some people who are made better because they take so long, but it is fucking *rare*. Yeah, I beat you. I didn't take very long over my moves but I still played better than you did. Deal with it.

There was a guy whose ass I would routinely whip at Railroad Tycoon. I was drinking, talking, having fun and immediately playing my moves. He would hunker down over every move and brow furrow for minutes. At the end he was always secretly annoyed that I was beating him despite my apparent lack of effort. But it isn't lack of effort---if you're paying attention, normal people quickly satisfice down to 2-3 best moves using a general feeling, then debate between them internally before deciding. And that doesn't take long. Not explicitly considering irrelevant moves makes me better, not worse, at games.

I hate the AP players, too. Maybe analysis paralysis stems from insecurity. They are worried that losing at games could be indicative of mental inferiority. But I think that AP is fundamentally selfish. As in, "I will take my turns as slowly as I want, even if it ruins the game for everybody else."