What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Michael Barnes wrote: We had a hell of a game of Arena of the Planeswalkers last night @ Gaming by Michael. .....

I think I'd prefer if the game used your names. Am I interpreting this correctly, that a player can keep going if his planeswalker is killed as long as he has summoned creatures still alive? That seems odd.

Man, that is a hell of a post, moofrank. I'm sifting through the photos of Guns & Steel on BGG now and loving the stylized, minimalist look. I gotta snag this one. I'm growing intensely curious about this new wave of minimal Japanese games so I'd love to read more about them here.

I don't have any interest in Shadows of Brimstone, but it is the first Flying Frog game that doesn't assault me with feelings of residual embarrassment just by looking at the box, so props to them for ditching the cringeworthy small town community theater aesthetic.

Got a lot of gaming in this weekend.
1. A 2 player game of Duel of Ages. Had to freshen up on the rules, and I was teaching a first-timer. It was fun but this is not an easy game to teach.
2. Theseus, again 2 players. I've still not gone past that, and if I do it will probably just be so I can try out Pandora. This was Xenomorphs vs the Grays. My first timer friend was the Grays and I stomped him, unsurprisingly. This game continues to be fantastic.
3. We must have played at least 12 games of Cube Quest after that. A great little game for drinking and screwing around.
4. Today was a 3 player game of Neuroshima Hex!. One first timer, one who had played once, and me. I was New York, against Borgo and SMART. I tied for the win against SMART. It was great, as it usually is.
5. Then we played quite a lot of Epic Spell Wars, base set only. I'd have been happy to move on to something else but it was getting late and I didn't want to teach anything.

12 glorious hours of 6-player BSG yesterday with all the expansions. Every game was tense and came down to the wire.

One game my fellow Cylon and I were busting our ass to push back the Jump Prep track and keep the Cylon ships flowing as the Humans were ridiculously low on all resources. The game starts at 10 Morale and the Humans managed to lose at least 13 during the game, but some passing some critical Crisis Cards and a string of amazing Inspirational Speeches somehow kept them away from a loss on Morale. The Cylon Leader was playing both sides and couldn't be relied on to support either team at any given point. A couple well-timed Super-Crisis cards pushed them the Admiral into some really difficult jump Destination choices, but the Humans made the final jump with 1 Fuel, 1 Food, and minimal Population as Morale as well. But they lost due to an end-game Personal Goal reveal that cost them one critical resource.

Another game I was a Cylon Leader but had a full hand of Cylon Allegiance cards. Three of them were end-game conditions so I was really trying to work the players into specific situations. It was really looking iffy if we could pull out a Cylon win at all, and even less probable I'd be able to fulfill 3 Allegiance Cards and join the Cylons in victory. We were playing the Ionian Nebula ending though, which can really swing the game either way. Right before the Crossroads Phase I managed to get the Conditions on the 3 Allegiance Cards I needed to win. As long as I could finish the game with a Cylon victory and keep 3 Treachery Cards in my hand I was golden, but it wouldn't be easy. Then the Crossroads Phase changed everything. It put the Humans in a serious bind and I was sure we could end the game in Cylon victory in a few short turns if things played out right. Well, one Cylon got Boxed (permanently killed) and although the other Cylon made it through relatively unscathed I was forced to discard two of my cards. I couldn't win anymore unless the game got back around to my turn so I could redraw Treachery for my Allegiance card! Unfortunately that didn't happen and a couple wicked Crisis Cards forced a Cylon win before I could join them in victory. Between the other Cylon being Boxed and my not fulfilling the necessary Allegiance Cards it was a solo Cylon win.

There were a bunch of other ridiculous situations where the Cylons barely pulled out a win or the Humans barely held on. The last game was brutal, though. Again the Humans were struggling to maintain all their resources and every single turn was a "How do we not lose?" situation towards the end. This time I was Human and were were headed for the Earth destination, which is a lot of distance to cover. Lee Adama and Anders worked the Demetrius ship for us though and got the bonus distance cards out, which was critical. One of the Cylons was not only a pilot, but our CAG, and put us in a real bind when she decided to go full Cylon on us. So many times the Humans should have lost but we kept pulling out small miracles and slogging on. We got whittled down to almost no resources and had to risk an early jump using FTL Control, even though a bad roll and the population loss would have killed us outright. We probably couldn't have survived losing on even one Crisis Card. But it was Anders' turn and he used his once-per-game to save us the population loss! The groan from the Cylons was so thick you could taste it. Then came the sinking feeling that any single non-Morale resource loss on end-game Personal Goal cards would kill us all. One at a time every single Human player revealed two vanilla non-special-effect Loyalty Cards. Humans win.

I played X-Wing 100 pt. Scum fleet. lost a close game against the Imperials.

Played Infamy which might be one the better new Euros I've played in long time. It has some similarity to Lords of Waterdeep in that you collect resources to complete futuristic missions on Mars like stealing data or doing cartel or militia work. Just like Waterdeep there's enough theme, interaction and screw-age to keep things interesting. Solid BGG rating of 7.0.

Played a couple two-player games of Viceroy, a new release most recently published by Mayday. Viceroy is yet another tableau-building victory point salad game, but it's a pretty tasty salad, with the cost and reward of playing various cards to the tableau largely determined by what level (of five) a given card is played on. There's also a nice resource tension in that you need gems to pay for the placement of cards, and you can get more gems (often) by taking them as a reward, but that's at the expense of getting other things you need or want as rewards, like extra cards beyond the one you're (probably) going to get in each of the 12 auction phases. The playmat Mayday sold in the Kickstarter is absolutely not necessary, but it makes for a nice addition even though it creates some storage issues (which I have temporarily addressed by wrapping the mat around the insert). The Kickstarter plastic gemstones help with color-blindness (since the shapes and cuts are different) but somewhat reduce functionality (since at setup some random gems must be discarded; I used the tokens at start and exchanged them for gems afterward). This isn't a world-beater, but it seems better and more interesting than some of its ilk. I think there's a little more going here than in, say, Among the Stars, which I also like.

Played an "advanced" game of Through the Ages hoping that having just played last weekend would help my wife get the rules down. Unfortunately, she continued to struggle with them, and I made a major gaffe in exceeding my urban building limit without even thinking about it. At this point, I'd really like to play again (and I know there are online options for this), but it's not likely I'll subject her to the game again, and I'm guessing she won't request it. (She did this last time, to be clear. I'm not trying to push it, and not all games are for everyone. She beat me in both Viceroy games, for instance.)

jpat, did you play the beginner and intermediate versions with her first (of TTA)? Going right to advanced tends to turn lots of people off (same with War of the Ring)

Couple games of Shadows of Malice. Good game, Barnes covered it quite well in his review... posted more thoughts in the dedicated thread but I strongly suggest you play at least 3-4 heroes if you play, 2 per person might be a good idea.

I played four hours of boardgames last night! It's a Festivus miracle!

Went to a really cool gaming pub called Randolph on St-Denis in Montreal, where you can drink cider (or beer or anything), order some awful grub and choose from theri hundreds upon hundreds of boardgames to play. We ended up being 9 guys (well, 8 guys and a gal) in the end.

Now this will probably be super annoying cuz I don't know the names of any of the games I played but maybe that'll be part of the fun of figuring out what the hell I'm talking aboot. Anyway, it's not a Black Barney post unless it annoys somebody.

So we start off playing this game where you take turns casting spells that are broken up in 3 pieces and you have to make a spell out of your hand of 8 cards. You roll dice, you get treasures and such. The wizard that was the last one standing twice wins. The game is just way too long and it only works if everyone is paying close attention to everything going on. My friend asked me if I thought it was worse than Munchkin. I told him, "of course not."

Then we played a game I think was called TURTLE UP? Where you roll dice and can't go over 7 using 1,2 or 3 dice. Your perfect roll is to roll 7 over 3 dice. If you land on another turtle, you jump on their back and when they move, you move, but you're the one picking up all the treasures. And you can tell the guy underneath you how many dice to roll. The game's not bad. It's basically a gambling game. There were 7 or 9 turtles that came with the game and I had set them up in pairs of turtles mating with each other (mounting them from the back) and then the odd man out turtle was lying on his side alone. I proudly pointed out that the lone turtle was me

Then we were 9 people so we had to play something bigger and we came to the best game of the night that we played 3-4 times. It's some Werewolf-clone. Someone is King Arthur (the position moves each turn) and before the game starts everyone finds out if they are one of the 3 bad people or one of the good guys. One of the bad guys is an Assassin who's sole role is to try and find out who is Merlin, and one of the good guys is Merlin who actually knows who the 3 bad people are. So King Arthur sends 3, 4 or 5 people on a quest and everyone votes to approve or reject the proposed quest party. Once approved, the questing party votes secretly if the quest succeeds or fails. Good people HAVE to vote Succeed, but bad people can vote either way. It's best out of 5 quests. So once 3 quests succeed or fail, that team wins. If the good guys win, the assassin reveals himself and has one chance to choose who Merlin is and kill them. If he's right, the bad team wins.

I was Merlin in the first game and stayed quiet for most of the game but eventually got involved in deciding who should be going on quests. I thought I was subtle enough but apparently not and got assassinated. The second game I was a minion and got chosen for the very first quest to go with another minion and a good guy. I spent so much time choosing if I should vote success or fail that I got outed immediately as a minion and we got swept. Couldn't figure out who Merlin was either so we lost.

In the 3rd game, I was just a regular good guy and decided to really get involved making decisions to try and give the impression I might know who the bad guys are (to give the illusion I was Merlin). I got totally blindsided by this one guy who I was 100% sure was good. I kept insisting this guy goes on the quests and the quests kept failing. i was so mixed up. We ended up winning in the end, I don't know how. Mostly because the girl that played Merlin totally ran over the minions and because she was so obviously Merlin, they never put her as being Merlin.

Tons of fun. The one problem with that game, is that some of the good guys were rejecting parties "just for fun" which makes them look like minions. There is no advantage to doing this cuz the minions know who the minions are at all times. So they're basically skunking the good guy chances. This is why I hate co-op games. I can't control other players playing badly and it drives me nuts. Still, thematically the game is totally on point and I was pretty emotionally engaged in each match. Lots of fun.

It's Turtle Cup.


Concerning your last point if you're at all serious, as a good guy you should be voting down teams most of the time unless you're on it.

Black Barney wrote: So we start off playing this game where you take turns casting spells that are broken up in 3 pieces and you have to make a spell out of your hand of 8 cards. You roll dice, you get treasures and such. The wizard that was the last one standing twice wins.

Barney, sounds like Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards.

King Arthur game is The Resistance: Avalon.

charlest wrote: Concerning your last point if you're at all serious, as a good guy you should be voting down teams most of the time unless you're on it.

Wouldn't that make the game drag on forever?

The quests AUTO FAIL if the quest group gets voted down 5 times in a row. That's why I see blanket rejections as a really suspicious vote. It's in the minions' interest to vote down as much as possible.

Yes but everyone knows that so if it gets to the 5th vote everyone votes approve and that's the team you're stuck with.

Voting down is not in the minion's interest except to blend in with the Knights. If you're not on the team what incentive do you have to vote yes? As a regular good guy you have no information except that you are good. If everyone else is voting approve for the team that means the Spies voted yes and the team is likely going to fail.

Additionally, if you are picking teams in that 5th position you have a huge incentive to vote no on every team until it gets to you.

Other people should realize this and often times it comes down to choosing between the last couple of people that build the teams. "You better vote yes for my team, otherwise you're going to have to vote for Jimmy's and he's definitely shady."

By voting NO on most teams you allow for more votes to happen. More votes mean more information. Play a game or two where 80% of the votes are approve for a mission. Good guys will never win.

the 5th forced vote is a disaster because King Arthur might be a minion.

as for your last point, that was not my experience so far. I called out REJECT votes as being shady and it got all the good guys on board immediately. We won twice, but one of the games was close (and the other merlin got killed).

You have a point though. With more votes, you're basically playing MASTERMIND.

Still, at the beginning only the minions know who the minions are. So they're the only ones that have a reason to reject a group (when there isn't a minion in the group). If everyone approves, I agree that a minion is on that group, most likely. I think the default of the good guys should be to approve groups.

,,,the more I think about it, the more I don't like this game