What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yesterday I went to my first real game night in two years. The guy running the group is a friend who likes Euros, and everyone is an academic. We started off with Colt Express, which was pretty fun. Then we had a choice between Eldritch Horror and Archon, but one guy had to leave in about two hours, so we played Archon. It reminds me of about fifteen other games. It's worker placement, and there is a trace of deckbuilding. It took me several rounds to even get what was going on, while one of the players who works in Institutional Research immediately grasped everything and crushed us. It wouldn't be my first or second pick of games, but everyone I played with was cool so it was still pretty fun.

Our board:

Aaaargh, what a mess! I hope it's better in person.

What. The. Fuck.

Do you win when you find Waldo?

Ok. Archon is on my never even look at list.

Our Wednesday group lives again. We got to play Undercity and Dark Tales. Dark Tales is basically Fluxx with a much better theme, a lot more going on, and is oddly compelling. Much of the game hinges on the two scoring cards and opportunistic playing based on cards on the board. It is oddly compelling in a brain dead way.

Undercity is quite good. It doesn't look it from the rules. Spawn a guy, Move. Hit things. The details are nice, area movement similar to Arcadia Quest, and a LOT of character flavor. These come in the form of several special abilities per character PLUS a deck of one-shot Feat cards PLUS abilities you can buy in the campaign mode. It is ultimately a very simple game made crazily complex by all of the options. Which you have to use, or you will die.

The game feels a bit more like a tactical RPG combat system as well. That you are rolling 2D6 plus stat for a lot of things, going in initiative order kind of lock that feel. The campaign system is tightly integrated as well. Atypically, you also don't fully heal between scenarios.

It is quite good. It lacks the addictive story and capriciousness of Brimstone, but it FAR more tactically interesting. Still holding out for Kingdom Death. I've been following it closely and it looks absolutely amazing.

Think about it, Adam Poots wanted to make a game with minis. So he starts a minis company and figures out a new process for making very high quality resin minis. Then spends a year adapting that process for plastics and sells out everything he can make. He's been working on this game for perhaps 5 years obsessively, and it sounds like a massive hardcore sandbox with its of monster hunter and Actraiser.

Played in the past week:
Risk 2210
Risk Godstorm
Risk LoTR Trilogy Edition

I had fond memories of all these games but haven't played any of them in a very long time. So I declared Risk Week and Risk was played. Unfortunately they're all going on the sell pile. I like Risk and I'm definitely not enough of a game snob to be over Risk, but I just don't see a situation where I'd bust any of these three games out over Nexus Ops, Classic Warlord, Queen's Gambit, or something like that.

LoTR Risk is just regular risk with adventure cards and a game timer. It isn't bad, but it takes me just as long to play as regular Risk because I know precisely jack about Middle Earth geography and can never find the territories, strongholds, or other little icons on my adventure cards. I don't even know the names of most of the damn regions. Would I learn the lay of the land well enough over a few more plays? Sure. Will I? No.

Risk 2210 is pretty solid with the sea and moon zones and leaders that roll D8s. I impressed myself with my ability to roll 1s on a D8 just as well as my well-honed skill of rolling ones on a D6. It also adds cards that you can draw and play to give you advantages or reign chaos (Nuclear Cards are the best). The leaders primarily let you draw and play their card type and they roll D8s in their specialized zones. The 2210 radiation zones are just areas that are out of the game. The problem is, although the different options in 2210 give you more strategic choices, that the overall game of 2210 isn't really all that much more interesting or exciting than regular old Risk or Castle Risk.

Risk Godstorm has always been my favorite and is still the best. The leaders are weak and don't count as units or roll any dice, but they give more interesting abilities than the 2210 leaders. Godstorm leaders are gods, and can get in big god-pounding fistfights with other gods on the board. The Godstorm equivalent of 2210 rad zones are plague zones, and you can still move through them, albeit at great loss. There are fewer leader and card types in Godstorm than 2210, but card play works basically the same way and Godstorm's 4 card types feels about right. And you can sink an entire continent. Godstorm has much larger swings of luck than 2210, but since there are only 5 rounds I quite enjoy the swings. Unfortunately Godstorm suffers the same problem as 2210: by the end of the game you don't get much more out of it than you would have gotten out of playing Risk or Castle Risk.

So I've decided to sell the above three and slim down to one true Risk game. I haven't decided if I'm going to keep my old long-box Risk + Castle Risk or if we're going to pick up the new Game of Thrones Risk. The GoT Risk has the classic game, a 2 player game, the revised Risk style objectives game, and some GoT character cards that give little bonuses. It also looks great and comes with two boards. Unfortunately the price is a little high.

We need to coin a passive-aggressive pejorative for euros like Archon. Something like "cube salad", or maybe call it a "euro salad" because that make my brain hurt to look at.

Our weekly game group's host decided to pick up Descent 2nd Ed. a few weeks ago. We've played about 5-6 missions so far and I like it far better than first edition. Getting rid of first edition's wonky spawning rules and the mid-mission town trips help the atmosphere immensely and I also really like the hero leveling system. On the other hand, I don't like the missions where you have to run like hell to get anything done, and it's also apparent that the OL is underpowered compared to the heroes.

Our heroes are Tomble (gnome thief), Avric (me, paladin), Syndrael (elf fighter) and the Necromancer. We're loaded up with a lot of the best gear - including the Shadow Rune and Dawn Sword as quest rewards - and even the stoutest enemies go down in no more than 3 hits. I've read that the lieutenant packs include cards to make the OL more dangerous, but it's sad to see that Descent is the latest in a long line of unbalanced dungeoncrawlers. It doesn't bother me too much, I just feel bad for the guy who's been stuck being our OL punching bag for all but one mission. I'd be all for alternating OL's - like in Siege of the Citadel - but I don't know if my group will go for it.

So I looked at BGG. Archon looks involved and everything, but the main thing that is making the game look horrifying is the insanity that is the graphic design on the board and pieces.

Archon is a Eurovomit game. It has now been coined.

Archon is a great example of a game that needs to be deciphered before it can be played. I'll also avoid that one if it's offered. But like you said, Craniac, it might still be fun if you like the other people enough.

I relished my opportunity to play Advanced Civilization back in January, but I find that people in my normal friends circle and age bracket prefer much simpler games. Played a bunch of rounds of Coup with my girlfriend and her friend. After playing it pretty straight we started calling BS and lying a bit more. We opened by playing Attraction, which is just a bag full of magnets that you spread around the table. On your turn, if you don't have a magnet take one from the table and then flick it at other magnets trying to get them to stick together. Take the biggest stack you make; if nothing stuck together, you just lose the magnet. If a magnet flies off the table, someone can catch it with their stack of magnets and get the points. When all the magnets have been picked up, most magnets wins.

Two games of Dark Moon, the new version of the print-n-play dice game, BSG Express. I would still rather just play the full BSG with a willing group, but Dark Moon really does a great job of providing a similar experience in half the time, and in a more dynamic and interesting way than some other BSG-lite games like Homeland. The production is great and I think this will be a hit for Stronghold.

But...but... I played two games of Dark Moon on the weekend too!

The first game was over in two turns (as the leader was also infected) but the second game took over two hours and ended on a die roll (the infected won by shutting down all the systems.)

I really like the dice mechanic. You secretly roll dice which mostly have negative numbers and have to give at least one up to fix something, or help with a task, etc. So you may be human, but constantly contributing negative dice and therefore casting suspicion on yourself. Furthermore, you may burn through too many dice on your turn to vote effectively in a voting round (as you're using the colour of the die to determine whether yay or nay.)

All though I'm rather over hidden traitor games - I could easily play it again.

Triumph and Tragedy the new block game by GMT clearly draws heavily on Europe Engulfed and by extension the Fast Action Battles games but it strips out some things such as the special action tokens, almost all of the chrome rules, and most of all the heavily scripted nature of play (deviate too much from history in Europe Engulfed and you are sure to lose) and adds in a card driven aspect to play.

During a turn players gather war-bucks (the wargame equivalent of the universal gaming currency of space-bucks) based on which of three tracks is at the lowest value; industry, population, or (when at war) resources. These war-bucks are then used to buy units, heal up damaged units, or buy cards (no draw your hand limit. The only way to get new cards is to buy them). The cards come in two varieties; action cards which allow for political actions and for movement of units on the board and development cards used for expanding industry and developing technologies.

The first part of the turn is the political and development stage where cards are played to influence neutral countries to be your friend or not be friends with your rivals and to play cards to increase your industry. The second stage is moving on the board and perhaps fighting using the same but slightly modified combat system from FAB and EE.

The political aspect is simple but interesting in that with enough influence the neutrals will become satellite states and grant you their population and resource points. This brings you closer to victory. So it's a tug of war between sacrificing tactical options for diplomatic opportunities and also between the three factions not wanting their rivals to get too strong.

It is perfectly possible to win the game without starting World War 2 but what fun would that be? It seems to me that once somebody gets close to the levels needed to win (if war-buck value reaches 25 it's an auto win for that faction) one of the other two factions will almost certainly declare war in an attempt to stop the leader. Once war is declared there is no going back. It's fighty fight time all the time.

Combat is fairly simple using a slightly modified system found in most other block games. Units fire in a specified order and have a target number on a D-6 to hit which varies based on what type of unit is being targeted. Land combat lasts one round until next "season" (each main turn has 3 phases called seasons when fighting and maneuvering can take place) so the fighty bit doesn't cause a lot of down time. Capturing two of your rivals three main cities will win the game as well so your objectives are clear.

I found the game quite enjoyable. The vastly more open nature allowing for peaceful victory and for no set path for which factions must fight if they do allows for lots of freedom to try different things. The board is smaller and combat is simpler so the game moves at a brisk pace. It's still long by conventional standards (3+ hours for our game) but no where near the two day affair Europe Engulfed is.

In our game we were all a bit timid at first, developing our industry and using diplomacy but once somebody let slip the dogs of war things went to hell in short order. In the end, England made an aggressive move into Germany but in what will be forever remembered as "The Greatest Military Bungle in History" left the back door open for the Spainiards,who were a satellite state of Germany, to waltz into Paris and knock France out of the war. The West's forces were effectively cut in half and Germany herself was able to stage an amphibious landing and took London. With a bullfighting ring built on the Champs de Élysées and a Biergarten in Picadilly, the war was over and Hitler was triumphant.

All Uncle Joe Stalin could do was yell "When I said I wanted a second front, I didn't mean it like that!"

It was my birthday, so I got the kids to play a game of Fury Thunder Road. They were complaining at first about the slow pace, but then got into it and were screaming and yelling as they rolled the dice by the time we finished. Lots of sending helicopters after the leaders and praying for double sixes to bring back flipped vehicles.

Lots of Fury Road conversions and scenarios over at BGG.

craniac wrote:

(!!!)

This may be the greatest picture of minis I've ever seen!

Where's it from?

EDIT: Ok, I snooped around BGG. Someone also made some wicked cards using the classic Critchlow Dark Future art:
boardgamegeek.com/thread/1415240/wip-thu...rds-additional-rules

Almost makes me wish I still had my copy of Thunder Road. This is exactly the sort of thing I was attempting to do with my copy. The game as is is just a step too light, IMO.

EDIT EDIT: Remember Battle Machines? Prepainted 'car wars' cars:
www.battlemachinesrc.com/products?scale=1:64

Man, in an ideal world we'd get some Fury Road game with prepainted vehicles like x-wing. Battle Machines proved it could be done. That said there's just something about doing personal conversions. Kudos to that dude!