What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Looking at the rules for Cthulhu Wars, it looks like something you could make up with an old copy of Risk, some card and a sharpie.

[double post]

Shellhead wrote: For $62, you can probably buy both Chaos in the Old World and the Horned Rat expansion, and have roughly the same game as Cthulhu Wars.

I actually already own CitOW and the expansion, and love the game. (Cue jackiechanwtf.jpg)

They are very similar and I would never buy Cthulhu Wars because of its price and similarity, and that's why I passed on the KS at the time. I do not regret that decision. But having access to the game anyway has clouded my judgment, but I think I'll probably not go in on this thing. Maybe I'll buy the new T&E instead.

A friend of mine bought Roll for the Galaxy and X-Com, so we played those and also some Cube Quest and Dice Masters. Heres the scoop;

X-Com is a GOTY candidate, base on one game it was the most satisfying coop session i've ever played. For me this is largely due to the App. Usually the suspension of disbelief in a coop evapourates once i understand how the ai flow chart or deck works. I i have to move all the little ai dudes i sudden feel its man vs flow chart rather than man vs sinister AI. The App hides the AI so i assume there is something clever going regardless of whether there is or not. Secondly, it seems a pretty solid design to me anyways. You spend assign units to task and then throw dice in a push your luck fashion to complete those tasks. To do research you spend scientists, to shoot down ufos you assign interceptors etc. You can keep throwing dice to get successes but you also roll a d8 and each reroll increases a threat track by 1. If the d8 roll is lower than the threat track you get hammered really hard. So it has a great gambling on the clock thing going on. It also splits up team responsibilities pretty well and the app is easy to use. We played 2 player and won by the skin of our teeth but made a few rules errors on the first turn (they should have that much effect though). The time pressure and clock system is a bit like space alert but this game is far superior imo.

Roll for the Galaxy. If you took race for the galaxy and crow-barred it into being a dice game in order to sell off the popularity of the old game, this is what you would get. I'm not a massive race fan but it's a fairly clean design that offers clear and quite challenging decision points. Roll is anything but that, or at least that's how it appears. Race was always thematically a bit tenuous, Roll is a game who's theme is another game. If Race didn't exist i'm not sure Roll would make any real sense. Having said all this i might prefer it to Race. In Race it seemed to me that the most important skill in the game is knowing the card deck really well, the presence of the dice here make the game less predictable and for me a little less prescriptive. The major downside is that the skill of guessing what action your opponent is going to choose is diminished. In Race you would look at what your opponent was doing, guess what action they'd pick and profit from it feeling clever. Here they might do something else based on what dice results they get, so the player interaction is even less meaningful.

In play the cards have been replaced by a bag full of tiles. You roll some dice freely assign one to one of 5 actions and put the other dice next to the actions you rolled. Actions are then done in sequence that allow you to get more tiles, discard tiles that you don't want, or build them (colonise, develop), and then you can produce goods and ship them for vps. Unlike race you have to put your tiles into two stacks and go through them in order, which is a bit lame. In Race you can look at your hand and in theory build anything, here you have a choice of one planet and development at a time. Getting tiles gets you more dice (dice building) the ability to use one die as another type of die result and some other special abilities. You get vps for goods and the tiles.

I'm not really sure who this game is for. Serious race fans will probably not like it anywhere near as much as race. It is more garbled and makes less sense. It will seem weird and arbitrary to people who have never played race. The only thing i can think of is that its for BGG crowd who play lots of 5 modern mechanics thrown in a box style games and need a new hotness to play and then shelve. It seems to be a game very much for people who are in the hobby. Its not terrible, and i will probably enjoy a few more games of it before i switch to hating it.

Cube Quest is awesome. Its a dubmg game about flicking cubes at each other and trying to knock the opposing sides king off the table. A lot of fun in an almost slapstick sort of way.

I lost 2 won 1 in dice masters. Can't work out how to use the 2 value Mystique card at all but the shadow cat that can't be blocked when first deployed is great. I tried to build my strategy around defending whilst rinsing the shadow cat for an attritional win. It worked eventually but first two games i didn't get a defense up.

DukeofChutney, how much English listening is required by the X-Com app?

EDIT: Just opened the app by web... and God the music...

I didn't run it in our game, so i cannot be sure. It seemed to just ask very simple questions (yes no sometimes) and be largely based on diagrams but i could be wrong. It doesn't do vastly more than the CD in Space Alert.

Played a quick solo game of XCOM to relearn how to play before bringing it to my group this weekend. It's definitely great with 4p, and probably works well with 2 or 3, but it is pretty unwieldy for just one.

Barnes, for the triple post.

I don't know -- I mean, if you are going to pay $200 on a game, what difference does it make whether you buy 3 games or 1 game? What is your personal threshold for "that is too fucking expensive and I'm not going to pay it"?

Similar to the "how many hours would I have to work to for this?" decision rule, I think that I would be ok with setting my game budget at X and I would be willing to pay how ever much my budget is for a single game. I don't know -- I never really thought of it, but I do find it interesting to think there are arbitrary hard limits.

VonTush wrote: I own and played Steam Park quite a bit with one group before it broke up. Honestly though the speed element is crap. I hate it. That alone is the reason why I don't get it to the table as much as I could or should.

This killed it for my wife, as well. I'm not sure I'll get her to play it again. She can only handle time limits/speed in co-op games, not in competitive games.

Also, the Casino is fucking over-powered and the Security Booth (I think) is under-powered. I came up with a house-rule after two plays to fix this (though not tested) that makes the Casino allow you to make a blank die act as any other die and make the Security Booth allow you to draw additional goal cards to select from. That might fix the rush to Casinos and the Security Booths sitting unbought at the end of the game.

Space Ghost wrote: Barnes, for the triple post.

I don't know -- I mean, if you are going to pay $200 on a game, what difference does it make whether you buy 3 games or 1 game? What is your personal threshold for "that is too fucking expensive and I'm not going to pay it"?

Similar to the "how many hours would I have to work to for this?" decision rule, I think that I would be ok with setting my game budget at X and I would be willing to pay how ever much my budget is for a single game. I don't know -- I never really thought of it, but I do find it interesting to think there are arbitrary hard limits.

For me I think it's the diminishing return. I'm always extra careful when getting expansions because they're always relatively more expensive and I have to weigh that against the additional fun. For example I just considered getting Farmers of the Moor for Agricola. But for less than that, I could have gotten Flash Point.

Received XCOM on Monday and got a 4-player game in that night (I had gone through the Tutorial with the app prior to receiving it in preparation). We stuttered through two rounds before I realized I had goofed on the main dice mechanic (I was cancelling successes when a loss was rolled, which was getting us killed) and we decided to start over. We proceeded to squeak our way to a skin of our teeth victory. Let me describe the last bit of the game. To win the game the final mission has to be unlocked and then you must complete it. Things were turning south for us when the final mission unlocked. We only had 3 troops alive and 4 interceptors, and the app unloaded about 8 UFOs onto the map. We put all 3 troops on the final mission, sacrificed the base (which fortunately had enough damage left to survive), and I, as the Central Officer, manipulated the fuck out of the UFOs such that, when all was said and done, had 3 continents one spot away from panic and the other three right behind them. This was the last turn, as we had something like 6 or 7 UFOs on the map and maybe one interceptor alive. So there they were, the three lone soldiers on the final mission. Because of a crisis, we had to defeat the first enemy task twice. Odds were against us, and our Squad Leader's early rolls sucked. They picked up some, and with the use of some tech, we got to the final task. Our threat was maxed out and we needed two successes on the final task when the roll comes up 4 successes and an '8' on the threat die (which didn't matter but just made the roll more incredible). Hadn't seen a roll like that all night. Much hootin and hollerin followed with high-fives all around. It was a very satisfying experience, and I'm still thinking about it. In fact, talked to the Science Officer this afternoon, and he said he was still thinking about it, as well.

Will this hold up to repeat plays? Hard to say, but I've already seen a huge delta between game rounds that make me think it will. I think our first round we got 5 or 6 crisis events, which SUCK. Next round, we got 1. We got more enemies and UFOs instead. The app adds quite a few variables, and that's only with the single game mode I tried. The game feels like XCOM, too, just maybe with more UFOs and less missions.

What I think might turn some people off is the obfuscation around the app. I have since fiddled around with the app to understand it better. I learned I made things harder by rushing to press Done instead of letting the time drain down to give people more time to communicate. There's no reason to ever hit Done with more than 5 seconds remaining. If you hit Done with more than 4 seconds in non-enemy actions, you get 2 seconds of extra pause time (less than 4 seconds, you just get half of the remaining time added). I was sometimes pressing done with 15 seconds left, when I could have waited. That was never really explained, I simply figured it out through experimentation.

For those that call this a "video game", you are wrong. It never felt like we weren't playing a board game. Each time I hit Done, it was like I simply drew a new card and had to relay the instructions (with a timer/soundtrack to keep the pace). It's even fun to get in the part, as all I had to say was "Crisis, Commander!" to get that action going. And I won't play a co-op without either a time element or lots of randomness, and this one has both.

I personally can't wait to try it again. You haters can continue to hate, but after one play this game absolutely rocks.

Egg Shen wrote: Then people got pissed that they couldn't get those stickers for their meeples.

Yeah, count me one of them. But they're back in stock now from the TOS store if anyone's interested...

DukeofChutney wrote: In Race you would look at what your opponent was doing, guess what action they'd pick and profit from it feeling clever. Here they might do something else based on what dice results they get, so the player interaction is even less meaningful.

The only issue with this is that it's so easy to get techs that let you ignore dice. Right at the start, not looking at any other techs, each player can use any die to choose any action and it becomes that action. In addition, all players start with the ability to give up one die in order to make another have any face they want. PLUS, some dice have wild symbols on them. By maybe two or three rounds in you're not even playing a dice game anymore because you're free to ignore the symbols on half of your dice.

That's the 100% biggest thing about RollFTG that pisses me off. It cater to the weak-ass Eurobabies who can't fucking handle anything random happening in a game, but presumably need a dice game to "fill a hole" in their collection. So they make a game with dice in it and then literally derandomize them so that the dice are essentially just -- wait for it -- colored cubes.

The thing is, we already HAD a shitty dice game from Tom Lehmann -- To Court the King, which is also about turning dice into not dice.

I'm not ready to write off RollFTG yet, because I think there may still be something to it, but it's not what I was hoping for. Pandemic: the Cure and Ra: the Dice Game are still quite safe on my shelf.


(Edited to credit Bull with the To Court the King bit. He reminded me elsewhere of the existence of that jank-ass thing.)

Yeah, you can take any action based on your die results, but if you roll 3 develops it might sway your choice to opting for that over something else. I agree the game tries hard to make the dice not really dice. The whole thing reeks heavily of BGG design culture.

JEM wrote: Looking at the rules for Cthulhu Wars, it looks like something you could make up with an old copy of Risk, some card and a sharpie.

Nonsense.