What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Josh Look wrote: I can't help but feel that the designer, clearly a smart guy, knew the short comings and decided to try to distract you with these awesome, giant miniatures. Yeah, this does sound like I'm being harsh on it but I don't dislike the game as much as it sounds. It's just the honest truth and I unfortunately think this is a case in which the positives do not outweigh the negatives, especially when the game it's referencing is almost perfect.

CV was cool. It's kinda weird. It's a decent enough game and we had some laughs over it. What more could you ask for?

A friend summed it up best: a $40 game in a $200 box.

Or Chaos in the Old World for Dummies.

I dated a girl like that once

Got Space Cadets Away Team. Seems simple enough.

Thought the brain jars would be bigger.

Lots of options, maybe overwhelming at first, but can't wait to get that laser sword and start cutting bitches

SuperflyTNT wrote: Got Space Cadets Away Team. Seems simple enough.

Thought the brain jars would be bigger.

Lots of options, maybe overwhelming at first, but can't wait to get that laser sword and start cutting bitches

Away MISSIONS. Bounacore didn't spend $500,000 on marketing research to have you butcher the name.

Guess SCAM was a better choice than SCAT.

Need to see if Buonocore will send me one...Pete, maybe you and I ought to head to head it for MM.

Or "spit roast" it, if that is more in tune with your manner of speaking.

Jeff: maybe if I got it before the wankers at GenCon, since I paid for it before them, I'd remember the name better...since I'd have been playing it for 2 months now.

Game is fucking BRUTAL. My 7 year old Yeoman has kid luck and is rolling quad over kills while I'm rolling 9's and 10's.

Only regret is not being rich and having the cash to get the painted set.

Just lost big as shit because I got a little surrounded after fucking up the Jar Brain. A little kind-of-nebulous rules for some shit but we winged it.

1. Card doesn't say whether bugs can go through hatches. Doesn't seem logical that they can so we NOPED that shit.

2. Brain Jars' card has 2HP, says you can dominate it and/or remove mind control after it's been hit but it doesn't say what happens when you kill it. Seems to me that just blasting it is the only reasonable thing, so Ray Gunning that mother fucker at point blank makes more sense than trying to remove mind control.

I just finished two solo games of SCAM. One was the intro scenario and the other the one where you have to rescure two thralls, complete two schematics and then escape in the elevator - both with two cadets. The intro was easy enough, but things rapidly turned worse. I was lucky with the tiles and quickly discovered both the elevator and the thrall control. But the number of enemies kept rising and things suddenly looked bleak for the yeoman and the professor. I lacked firepower and I apparantly also lacked the ability to roll overkills to open doors and stun saucermen.

Nonetheless I survived for a couple turns more than expected - especially thanks to the teleporter I managed to complete - and I spied a chance of making it since there was a schematic in the elevator I could assemble. But alas, after having managed to avoid being hit by around 18 dice, Cookie Hannah finally succumbed to the alien scum.

There seems to be a lot to like in the game - apart from the cool plastic dudes. Overkill is a great concept, and I like how you can usually do a lot more on your turn than you anticipate. Also it was obvious that being better at choosing teams and starting equipment would have helped a lot - as would, I think, snatching stuff in the first three turns or so rather than trying to gun my way to a win. It also seems like the missions can be very different which is nice. Only bad thing so far was that setup was a bitch. Sorting through numerous small counters is a pain in the ass and though it didn't take a lot of time, it felt difficult and overly fiddly. On the other hand the different counters offer a nice sense of exploration and it's also obvious how the sorting makes different scenarios possible, so I'll learn to live with it.

One last thing worth mentioning is that the multitude of items and overkill abilities give you a lot of options each turn. So you don't - I think - search for the optimum move, but more for one that might work which is much more interesting.

I tried a couple games of Wiz-War since I've moved to Texas, and I've not yet found a group down here that really "gets" it. It really does have this quality of "let's see how this works" that you need to embrace. Most successful games have 6-8 big laugh moments, like when someone drags your body over a rose bush until it kills you. Those moments are what makes the game, and I think that there are some people who want the game to be generally smoother overall. If you aren't interested in a game that is made up of moments more than one made up of an overall feel, it can feel really underwhelming.

SuperflyTNT wrote: Jeff: maybe if I got it before the wankers at GenCon, since I paid for it before them, I'd remember the name better...since I'd have been playing it for 2 months now.

I turned my laptop upside down to see what game you were talking about.

SuperflyTNT wrote: 1. Card doesn't say whether bugs can go through hatches. Doesn't seem logical that they can so we NOPED that shit.

2. Brain Jars' card has 2HP, says you can dominate it and/or remove mind control after it's been hit but it doesn't say what happens when you kill it. Seems to me that just blasting it is the only reasonable thing, so Ray Gunning that mother fucker at point blank makes more sense than trying to remove mind control.

Glad you dug the game! hope I'm not killing the buzz with a couple of rules notes.

Bugs can ignore hatches (they crawl through the crack under the door). I see that's not mentioned on the damn Bug card, but it's covered in the rules. Sorry about that.

Whenever you Overkill a Brain with an attack, you have the option to cause a Psychic Burst. If you Overkill a damaged Brain when you're subduing it, you can Dominate it. But nothing you do to a Brain gets rid of the Mind Control that it caused you the previous turn.

mads b. wrote: Only bad thing so far was that setup was a bitch. Sorting through numerous small counters is a pain in the ass and though it didn't take a lot of time, it felt difficult and overly fiddly. On the other hand the different counters offer a nice sense of exploration and it's also obvious how the sorting makes different scenarios possible, so I'll learn to live with it.

One last thing worth mentioning is that the multitude of items and overkill abilities give you a lot of options each turn. So you don't - I think - search for the optimum move, but more for one that might work which is much more interesting.

Yeah, setting up those scenarios that call for specific tokens can be a pain in the ass at first... but we hope that after a couple sessions, familiarity with the components will speed things up. We tried to color-code things to make sorting easier.

And you're right: since you can never count on getting Overkills, it's hard to optimize a perfect move. But if you plan your turn to take advantage of all windfalls, you'll come out ahead.

I thought setup would be terrible but I found it surprisingly brisk. When I punched tiles I just sorted the named ones which makes that portion brisk.

I put all the cards in one deck box, sorted by type, so that was fine too.

All the bits are in a small plano box, and I've found that dumping all the tiles face up is a quick way to locate the throwbacks. Maybe took me 4 minutes to set up scenario 2 which is kind of specific in its setup.

Ok, have lost this post twice now so here's the short version. Two new-to-me games recently: Theseus is awesome, Brew Crafters is not.

Theseus is exactly what I like in a 2 player game. Lots of tension/struggle to both deal with your random deck and against the other player. Have to think ahead and also pay a lot of attention to how your opponent is going to fuck you up. This game gets a lot of praise here so I don't have much to add at this point that hasn't already been said. The second game of this was so exciting we spilled beer all over the bonus cards and alien deck. Oops. How does this play with 3 or 4?

Brew Crafters is a worker placement JASE about beer. And I really like beer. Here your resources are just beer ingredients and your VPs are beer reputation. Boring. I think it purports to not be multiplayer solitaire based on the description trying to relate it to Puerto Rico, but other than racing to be the first to sell an "advanced" brew it doesn't matter what other players are doing. I mean other than taking the resource spaces of course. What fun! This game is nothing like Puerto Rico... The last turn of the game sums it up for me. It's a "winter" turn, so if you have the tech you get a bunch of "before the turn do these things" - so I made a bunch of beer and because of that, for the actual last turn of the game I could make no progress/points on anything. When's the last time you played a Knizia game where it didn't matter to your score what you did with your last few actions? On the bright side, during the game I had a bourbon-barrel scotch ale(Central Waters brewery) that is fantastic. Beer is a 10. Game about beer is about a 4.

I got two more plays in of Argent over the last week. One game was at 3 player and one at 4 player. I think the sweet spot is 3 players so far, followed by 2 and then 4. I don't think I would want to play it at 5. Also, in the 4 player game we used the "B" sides of the rooms and the mage cards to shake things up. Every game of this feels different with the way the rooms can be setup and different mage powers did so even more. I'm really impressed with this game.

On Saturday I got in a game of Ad Astra and Lords of Waterdeep. Lords of Waterdeep was pretty good and it was nice to play it again after a long hiatus. Ad Astra was pretty bland to me. I remember having liked Ad Astra when I first played it a couple of years ago, but I think my tastes have shifted quite a bit. I didn't really enjoy it and I think a big part of that was the pre-programmed action selection, which I think is a mechanism I just don't get.

I'm really glad to see so many people on here like Theseus. It's a stellar game that deserves attention.