What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

iguanaDitty wrote:

aaxiom wrote: There's a comment from the designer that you stop at each card.

Misread: step.

Who designed this thing, Phil Foglio?

Maybe, it's almost an anagram: Joe Fatula.

I played 3 more solo Leaving Earth games last night on Hard difficulty. Those hard missions really are, and I definitely needed my pen+paper for calculations. You'll never manage to do every available mission and you need to plan them out early, as you can only buy 1 Saturn rocket a turn and you need quite a handful of them for nearly every blast-off. So many things can go wrong and screw up the best-laid plans. I lost the first two games (most of the time due to catastrophic failures - I seemed to be a magnet for failures, drawing about 1/2 cards despite a 1/3 distribution) and managed to eek out a win on the third, but only because some of the easiest "hard" missions came up and many missions were complementary. I learned a lot at least, saw many different possible missions, and it's a pretty fascinating game and subject matter.

Columbob wrote: I played 3 more solo Leaving Earth games last night on Hard difficulty. Those hard missions really are, and I definitely needed my pen+paper for calculations. You'll never manage to do every available mission and you need to plan them out early, as you can only buy 1 Saturn rocket a turn and you need quite a handful of them for nearly every blast-off.

I think I'm going to start staging assets in orbit in future games to be used later. I've been somewhat lazy in failing to fully exploit that approach (I've been brute forcing many missions and have never won a game -- but have come very close on several occasions).

That approach has its own drawbacks, I'm thinking... but I can't say that definitively yet.

I played Snowdonia this weekend. I guess it's supposed to be about building a railroad over a mountain or something, but it's really about cubes. You draw cubes out of a bag. You turn gray cubes into black cubes, or brown cubes into gray cubes, or sometimes orange cubes into black STICKS! Oooh, sticks!! Everything about this game is gray. The board is gray, the cubes are gray, the cards are gray. It's got some worker placement bullshit going on, but there's no tension in it, because each action has multiple slots, meaning you can't really dick someone over by taking a good action. There were times when I had the option of placing an extra worker, but I chose not to even bother because there was literally nothing that I wanted to do and I just wanted the game to FUCKING END. This game is the poster child for soulless Euro.

Thankfully after that was over, we played King of Tokyo (awesome as always) and a really feisty game of Machi Koro. I've been ho-hum on Machi Koro, but with the Harbor expansion, it gets a LOT meaner, and a lot more fun. Money was flying around the table. After the life-sucking grayness of Snowdonia, that was a very welcome change of pace.

SuperflyTNT wrote: As an aside: that's the first time I've ever been accused of delivering platitudes, false or otherwise LOL

You are very welcome. I was shocked to see it come from you too. You almost never do that, which I admire.

A brief progress report:

• My 4yo is an UNO shark. He is setting up the Skip-Skip-Draw 2 "UNO"-I-win stuff now.
• MAGE KNIGHT: LOST LEGION is fucking hard as balls. We did Blitz coop and the big bad conquered thew sitting (a loss condition) by turn 2 of the first night. This is a two-day/two night scenario. We just got rollllled.
• PANDEMIC LEGACY (Feb, 1st attempt, funding: 2). My daughter shuffled the player deck, and goofed a little, as we hit four of five epidemics less than halfway through the deck. It was rough, and I thought impossible, but we won! We cured three diseases in three turns, bing bang bong. Needed to dodge outbreaks for just two cards (we'd done some ordering with a funded event to keep things at bay). Heading into March with 0 funding should be a treat.
• Played NIAGARA with the kids rules (no stealing, pickup and dropoff cost 1). Four players: three winners! and the other one was two paddle points away from joining us. Never seen a game end that closely. I had 7, another had 7, and two had 5 uniques. Crazy.

Joebot wrote: I played Snowdonia this weekend. I guess it's supposed to be about building a railroad over a mountain or something, but it's really about cubes. You draw cubes out of a bag. You turn gray cubes into black cubes, or brown cubes into gray cubes, or sometimes orange cubes into black STICKS! Oooh, sticks!! Everything about this game is gray. The board is gray, the cubes are gray, the cards are gray. It's got some worker placement bullshit going on, but there's no tension in it, because each action has multiple slots, meaning you can't really dick someone over by taking a good action. There were times when I had the option of placing an extra worker, but I chose not to even bother because there was literally nothing that I wanted to do and I just wanted the game to FUCKING END. This game is the poster child for soulless Euro.

There's a fair bit of tension in which slot you take in order, trying to hedge against who is going to get the benefit of the dug out track or the station or whatever and second-guessing the other players on all of that. Sometimes you want to place in the third spot to let one and two do the scrub work etc. Plenty to think about but I can't argue with your final summary.

My kids are over the moon with Pokemon Master Trainer (thanks again, Brewmiester!). It's on track to replace Talisman in our house and I'm A-OK with that. I'd much rather the kids have the games of their generation to play rather than me hoisting my childhood onto theirs. They love telling me about the regions we're in or background on these Pokemon as they get collected. I dig it.

Anyway the game itself is a lot of fun. You never know what Pokemon you're going to find as you explore the map, plus you can trade with other players, along with battling. It really does a fantastic job of encapsulating the hobby: the surprise of pulling a random Pokemon, the ability to trade and customize your squad, challenging other players, etc. You get bonuses if you have the different evolutions of a given Pokemon so there is an impetus to trade and explore. Plus, adding the Talisman like adventure and events while you travel the region on your way to becoming a master trainer. Simply a great implementation of the Pokemon theme. Well done!

Looks like there were three iterations of this game, but none in print. With this year being the 20th anniversary of the line (from what I'm hearing) I'm not sure why there isn't some form of mass market game on the shelves.

EDIT: Thinking about it though, maybe that's where Pokemon Go, the videogames, cardgame, etc come in. I doubt they're thinking, "Oh! a _boardgame_ is what we need..." It's a shame though because this one is the real deal.

Last night, I played the starter decks for Codex, and to summarize, I don't think I'll be getting this game. Granted, I only played one game, but I think the issues I had with it won't really go away with more plays.

First of all, it seemed like there were a lot of things to keep track of and think about almost immediately which just made the game feel a bit clunky. It didn't quite have that feeling of just building up gradually that you get from other CCGs. That kind of natural flow to a game does help. Maybe over time, this might get easier once you become familiar with what to do, but the question is how long would that take especially if you see yourself playing maybe once a week for about 3-4 hours? What if you play even less often and you tend to switch up opponents and decks often? It seems like playing casually isn't going to help this game out in the short term. Also, since your normal games will have 3 heroes, a lot more cards in your "deck", and some additional things to think about such as more Tech Buildings and things called Specs, it'll just add to the amount of things you have to think about in game and outside of the game when you're trying to build decks. I always thought that the "open deck" mechanic in Mage Wars caused the learning curve to be way too steep in the beginning, and I think the same for Codex using the same mechanic.

Second, it seemed like things bogged down for both of us pretty quickly with both of us putting beefy guys in the squad leader (I think that was the name of it) position. So, after getting a couple of quick small hits on your opponent's base, you were spending most of your turns dealing with their patrollers until one of you basically won the tug of war and started whittling away at the base. We actually called it at that point because we couldn't see how the other player was going to make a comeback without a major effort involving stabilizing somehow and then breaking through again and then coming back. I'm sure there are ways this can happen in the game, but the questions are how often does that happen, what amount of skill and luck would that involve, and most importantly, how much longer would the game go on if that were to happen? It felt like there needed to be some kind of decking mechanic or fatigue mechanic where you can't just go back and forth forever.

Third, I think there are some quality of life type of things that might help with the game. For example, too many cards had to move back and forth on the table while having tokens and/or dice on them. Just that physical awkwardness of trying to pick up and move cards without dropping the tokens on them was a bit off putting. There's something satisfying with just picking up a card to tap or untap it which is lost if there are a bunch of things sitting on the card which you have to try and balance all of a sudden. Maybe if there weren't designated spots to put the patrollers, that might help things? Also, the generating money and moving money back and forth seemed a little busy. I'd prefer a counter type of things similar to Mage Wars.

There are some other things too, but I'm not going to go into them too much. Mainly, it summarizes to us thinking the game tried to maybe fix certain aspects of other games, but it just ended up feeling like the game was trying to do too much all at once. Also, $200 for everything seems a bit too high to me especially considering that it seems like a fairly difficult game to balance, and I wouldn't want to drop 200 bucks only to have a new "fixed" edition come out like 2 years later...not that Sirlin has ever done anything like that

Picked up a Barnes hand-me-down copy of Healthy Heart Hospital in the last math trade and played a few solo games of it recently. I like it a lot, maybe better than any other Victory Point title I've played. The thing about VPG is that I like a lot of the ideas for their games, but when I end up playing them they're kind of just okay. and I'm usually done after a play or two. With HHH, I'm four games in and could see playing this at least a few more times to try to improve my scores (and even last to the end in some cases).

It's a basic sim of a hospital, where you have patients of different types coming in and getting worse, and you have to treat them, and also try to improve the hospital with upgraded ORs and staff and such. It uses a pretty clever cube system to represent the patients; as you draw colored cubes from a cup to try to treat them, you're weighing the odds of which colors you know you're more likely to get against the urgency of the different patients. The cube drawing does get a little bit tedious at times, but not really too much. I found that mechanic to be a good one and fun to play. There's a goofy sense of humor to some things like the character names, but it's not obnoxious or overt, and the game holds up on its own aside from that (unlike say, Munchkin).

The other thing about VPG is that their games are just a notch above being print-and-play. And even with their upgraded production and printing as of a couple years ago, it's still pretty low-end. And the rules have some ambiguities, but are mostly okay. I could see this title doing well with some more development and with a company like Z-Man giving it some polish.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record or delivering a false platitude, I am ready to proclaim my opinion on Ferox:

It's a good idea executed semi-poorly. Playing with the starter decks sucks. Drafting is better, but iffy because it can end up worse than the starter decks or way better.

I don't hate it, and the system is brilliant, but the card distribution just fucks it all up.

That said, it gave me the opportunity to come up with a 'Blaxploitation Playlist' so it wasn't a total loss.

I played War of the Ring for the first time yesterday. As someone who isn't a huge fanboy of LotR, I enjoyed it with some reservations. Will need to play more to see how legit concerns about scripted plays, the race mechanics, and payout of fun versus time involved. The tactical decisions with the dice pools and positioning are fantastic, hopefully there is a nice deeper strategy layer underneath that will manifest itself. For me, the game really felt like it hit the notes that Twilight Struggle does and will be looking for something about it to stand out or I don't see it lasting with so many other incredible 2 player games in the rotation.

I did manage to win with a Free People's military victory but was off a huge rookie mistake by my opponent in leaving things open so it seemed hollow. Better idea of the whole picture after the second play I'm sure.

Make sure you switch sides for the next match. It's not liking switching colours in Risk. It's a totally different experience.

Are you playing with the beginner rules for your first two games?

#jealous

Black Barney wrote: Are you playing with the beginner rules for your first two games?

What are these?

Ok, I have had an older version of the game so maybe the new one doesn't have them. But my version had two sets of rules. Beginner and advanced. You didn't really play with the cards in the beginner version and the location of the Ring was public.

I've known people that have tried the game using them and not using them and EVERYONE that didn't start with the beginner rules never played more than one or two games of the advanced version. I'm guessing it was just overwhelming. With the beginner version, you really are focusing on the military side, mustering and movement more than anything else. No Witchking and stuff either, no activating nations going to war and such.

I found it a great way to introduce this fantastic game. Then when you taste the full version for the first time (after two games under your belt), you appreciate the nuances of Isengard and all that.

love that game.

I've played WotR twice, I own 2nd edition, but the card stuff was really heavy. I think the comparison to TS is right on, I don't think on initial approach I thought how much cardplay I needed to think through.