What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Homeland continues to impress. 4 player game with no traitor (although accusations were softly thrown). We ended up neutralizing enough Threats to end the game and one of the Loyal Agents took the game. Scores were very tight in this one with winner having 17, Political Opportunist with 16, and then I tied with another Loyal Agent for 15. Tense and gratifying. People need to buy this game and not let it bomb like Sons of Anarchy. This design team is phenomenal.

Shiv - Shiv is a prototype I'm currently developing for the microgame design competition at Geekway in May. I told myself I'd never design a microgame but when I heard this competition announced my brain kind of started to toss ideas around almost subconsciously and I settled on a thematic microgame unlike anything else out there.

It's a three player where each player is running a prison gang and has a deck of 7 unique cards. Basically asymmetrical factions with each card having a couple stats and player powers. Each player takes a turn playing one of their cards face down to a location (there's three locations in the game - The Yard, The Cafeteria, and The Boiler Room), and then take turns performing actions. Eventually you Shiv a target, trying to eliminate higher value members of the other gangs.

It has some interesting deduction and buildup going on and the actual Shiving reminds me ever so slightly of Neuroshima Hex in how you build up and then release. I think it's pretty slick and has a real shot at winning, assuming I don't get punished for having an adult theme.

Anyway, we played it twice and it went very well, with some minor balancing tweaks coming out of the playtests.

Coconuts closed out the night. I can totally see this being one of my top played games of 2015 as I've already hit 10 plays two months in.

Charles - every time I see you post in this thread, I am sad that you aren't playing War of the Ring. After playing Battle of the Five Armies a few more times, and knowing how you feel about this, I think that you need to make this your number one priority.

Charlest wrote:

People need to buy this game and not let it bomb like Sons of Anarchy.

I ran into a few people that were really freaked out over SoA over the whole dope dealer thing. The rules say 'contraband', but those aren't bags of fake Gucci purses that you're buying and selling. I guess there's a limit to what a person can put up with in a game's theme (setting, for Mr. Barnes ), and that one was over the line for some folks.

Space Ghost wrote: Charles - every time I see you post in this thread, I am sad that you aren't playing War of the Ring. After playing Battle of the Five Armies a few more times, and knowing how you feel about this, I think that you need to make this your number one priority.

I think I'm saving my first play for Geekway in May on a buddy's Collector's Edition that has never been opened. I know I'll love it but thanks for reminding me. I need to hit him up about that again soon to make sure he's still on.

charlest wrote: I think I'm saving my first play for Geekway in May on a buddy's Collector's Edition that has never been opened. I know I'll love it but thanks for reminding me. I need to hit him up about that again soon to make sure he's still on.

You're in St. Louis right? Your negligence will force me to bring my non-Collector's Edition and remedy this oversight.

Yes, I know a couple people that have the regular 2nd edition, the time/length is the only thing making it not happen at this point. I've been too busy the past few months with reviews that I'd have to make time just to play WotR which is problematic as I'm limiting to about 4-5 hours of gaming a week. Having a queue of games to review is definitely a double-edged sword. I'm going to use Geekway/Origins/GenCon to get some much needed games to the table and to replay some favorites.

"$5 and I leave you alone", he says right before taking my money and screwing me royally. But I'm not pissed. NOPE.

If I buy Homeland, can we get Jack Wraith and some other jabronies to run through it?

Legomancer wrote:

iguanaDitty wrote: Somehow Glory to Rome remains the superior game despite that!

I've never really bitten on GtR. Or Uchronia. They both seem like San Juan except someone decided it needed more wheels within the wheels.

I found San Juan (vanilla edition) to be boring after awhile. GtR adds in insane combos and broken engines, which appealed to me. Innovation is probably straight up superior to GtR while providing much of the same feel.
Basically if a card game has combos in it, I want them to be more than San Juan's Euro-fied "ooh I found a combo that lets me sell an additional good!" Half the cards in GtR can break the game wide open. Innovation improves upon this by actually providing for comebacks from the seemingly doomed player.

YMMV, obviously.

San Juan got boring to me as well, which is why I'm glad the new edition includes the expansion buildings. They give some more tools without tacking on unnecessary extras.

I've only played GtR a couple times, but each time I felt like I was playing a San Juan type game that had a bunch of extra epicycles added to it for bonus depth. All they did was get in the way of knowing what the hell was going on and what my options were.

Innovation I liked at first, but the more I played it the less interested I was. It didn't feel like I was doing anything except moving cards around, just doing game mechanics.

Turns out we've been making a mistake with the starvation rule in Robinson Crusoé: we weren't losing 2 points like we should have, which makes our previous win in the Cannibal city scenario perhaps not so kosher. Don't know how long we'd been doing it that way.

We managed to beat the Robinson family scenario last night, on the second try (third if you count last week's attempt), with 4 players. 4's probably harder than three - more resources needed to build camp and shelter, more mouths to feed, less effective use of camp activity, for just 1 more action disk than the dog. Pretty brutal, especially because in every game we'd stumble on one of those rare cards which make you discard inventions - boooo!

Next up we'll tackle Darwin's voyage.

Played Cthulu Wars for the first time last night with just three players. It was surprisingly good, although not great. One of the difficulties I have with games like this is that you're required to learn on two different levels simultaneously: not only do I have to learn the rules of the game, but I also have to learn the "rules" of how to best play my faction. On that second part, I failed pretty miserably. I played the Black Goat, and I really didn't optimize my abilities well at all. I jumped out to an early lead, but I lost one decisive battle and I could never regain ground (seriously, rolling 8 dice and the highest was a single 4? Come on!). With both my opponents having at least double my victory points, I jumped at the chance to perform the 10th ritual that ends the game with a loss for everyone. Maybe not very sporting, but it was foolish of them to perform enough rituals to allow me to do it.

I enjoyed it enough that I'd be happy to play it again, and of course the giant toy monster pieces are just awesome.

After that, a quick game of Eight-Minute Empires: Legends. It made a pretty nice come-down from the complexities of Cthulu Wars. I lost this one, too, but it was a tight game the whole way, finally decided by tie-breaker between the other two players. As a whole, I don't like the trend of games being pared down to their bare constituent mechanics, but for some reason I like this one.

The interesting thing about Robinson is that the difficulty is balanced ok with different number of players but the game itself changes considerably. Think about gathering. If you have 1 or 2 players you rarely gather. Or hunting. Hunting is not that common in low player games. In many player games it is vital.

Columbob wrote: . . . our previous win in the Cannibal city scenario perhaps not so kosher.

If ritually slaughtered, you may still be ok.

S.

Gary Sax wrote: The interesting thing about Robinson is that the difficulty is balanced ok with different number of players but the game itself changes considerably. Think about gathering. If you have 1 or 2 players you rarely gather. Or hunting. Hunting is not that common in low player games. In many player games it is vital.

I'm not sure I agree that it's balanced okay... some scenarios clearly seem easier/harder with more or less players. But you're right that your approach will change depending on the number of players. Columbob, that's a common error... At one point I hadn't played RC for months and only dinged myself one health for not eating. It can be a little confusing between what you lose for not eating, sleeping outside and for weather effects. I considered that an unintentional difficulty handicap.

Speaking of which, I had an unintentional difficulty handicap in my 4p game of XCOM last night (and the other solo games I've played recently). I was the Squad Leader, and didn't realize that when an elite soldier is killed, they lose their elite status. Makes sense, but I didn't catch that or apply that until halfway through our game. We did win, just barely, and I'm not sure if that would have affected anything too much, as I think only 1 or 2 elite soldiers had previously died and kept their status, but presumably I got an extra couple of dice rolls where I shouldn't have. Anyway, super fun experience, regardless, and playing with 4 people, each in one of the roles, is definitely the way to go.

Two back to back games of Cthulhu Wars last night. My group really likes this, and we never play the same thing back to back if that tells you anything. Of course, we are really trying to make the guy who bought it (not me!) feel like he is at least getting some use out of his investment. He told me he also went in on all the expansion stuff that isn't out yet. I didn't ask him how much he spent, but that has to be like $400, right? Insanity, but he is a completionist.

But back to what matters. I've now played all the base factions. I'll point out that in our 3 games, Cthulhu has won every time. Nyarlathotep had a chance last night but he kept screwing with me (Hastur) so he let Cthulhu get too far ahead.

Hastur is the toughest faction to play. The game ended just as I was about to complete my spell book. Had I done so, it would have been the only time his book had been completed. I think it's just the kind of faction you have to play once to see how it all works.

We have all decided that this game is more streamlined than CitOW, and certainly looks nicer on the table. But I don't think I'd throw out CitOW... I think Chaos is for those times when you want it to be a little meatier. We shall see what the expansion factions bring to CW.