What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

The only real difference is the tight pants. Beowulf is a superhero, or was in his day. We make it all classy because it's old, but it's no different than modern day comic book stories.

Who is/was 'Sir Dice'? The fella just dropped this here four years ago, then walked away...

fortressat.com/forum/13-eurogames/79468-...the-legend-revisited

(at the time, I remember thinking it was Weeks. Not sure why I did, though.)

That is really crazy. Dude was saying some of the exact same stuff, four years ahead of time. Could have been a Eurogames Reclamation Project agent sent from the future?????

Only four posts, two of them about web site addiction (?) and another about BGG Secret Santa.

I think it might have been Weeks, actually. Maybe he started on a character and just never did anything with it. I don't know.

Beowulf is really quite good. My only problem is that it really needs at least 4, but 5 is optimal. Just like Taj.

Yeah, a lot of what was written in that post has been revisited and validated recently. Maybe others read it unawares and it stuck in their subconscious, but they were too busy caught up in weeks 'trolling' to pay it any mind?

Anyway, Sir Dice is F:ATs very own unsolved mystery...our own "The Circus' cell phone lady" if you will.

Unfortunately, my favorite bit in the post may reveal that they are not from the far flung future of some gaming utopia:

However, much like an artist who is not dead yet and his paintings have no value, "Beowulf the Legend" must complete its cycle. It will go out of print and then hailed by a few that still play it, this will generate interest as copies begin to go for crazy prices. It will then be reprinted with some changes, and then discredited for the changes but regardless of this it is a great game.

Almost poetic with the "living artist" and "complete it's cycle", but If Sir Dice were from the future, they would have known that no Beowulf reprint will be forthcoming. No demand will be there. The modern gamer of the 10's is not looking for classics of their childhood, or games from the past. Too caught up in the hype of the deluge of KS projects to spend the energy refocusing on lost classics.

In an ironic twist to the narrative, F:AT will be the final champion of Beowulf The Legend...




EDIT: For more Beowulf From The Past, here are two links from Mr. Farrell that may be of interest:
Long Review
Ra v Beowulf

This Sunday was Attack Wing: The Arena OP. This is your Secrete Wars scenario from Star Trek where captains are being transported down to the planet where they have to find resources and culminate in a battle to the death. The captain's battle takes place after turn three where the board is cleared and captains dice-off. The winner gets to setup the remaining ships and then it becomes a battle to the fleet-death (or time).

It presented some very interesting fleet build challenges balancing a force that had strong captains to help with the action on the planet but also leaving you a strong enough force to still do some damage even without a captain. I went with Voyager with Picard and a few upgrades, Enterprise-D with Kirk and a Miranda Class with GenKahn at the helm.

The first game I went up against a Bjorn ship, a Bjorn scout ship, a Vulcan ship and one other ship I don't remember. He went ship and captain heavy for the captain's battle. He avoided me successfully the first three turns so all seven captains were on the planet. The combined skills of Kirk, Picard and Kahn managed to kill all his captains without loss. I placed his ships and went on to win the game.

The second game was a heavily outfitted Voyager with Picard and an Enterprise-D with Kirk. My Voyager and His D ended up blasting each other away on Turn 3. I won the captain's battle and proceeded to have my naked D and Miranda Class slowly picked apart by his supped up Voyager sans captain.

The last game was a four ship Klingon build built for the Captain's battle. Kirk, Picard and Kahn were no match. But he did have to leave Koloth on the planet as his ship was blown up. I ended up beating the remaining three ships and only lost my Miranda.

Overall 2-1 and what was interesting was with this OP I enforce a ship pure, but mixed fleet, and there wasn't a single Borg ship. Where the first time around with this we saw 11 people and about half the people had at least on Borg.


Then yesterday I had a buddy come into town who I haven't seen in a year or so, and haven't games with in longer. This was kind of an impromptu gathering so I ditched work early and we met at a local game store. He wanted a few solo games since some shit went down in his life and he's now found himself with some time on his hands.

Though not solo, I pushed him to Rivet Wars just knowing he'd love the game. We played the first scenario and he did. True to fashion since this is the learning scenario he went first and ended up winning. He really loved the game and we're thinking up ways to do Play-by-Email now since the grid does lend itself to that play.

The second game I recommended was Flash Point: Fire Rescue. We played the Family Scenario first to let him get a feel for the game. We ended up saving all seven without much drama. The second game though we just changed it to a random setup and this had to have been the most dramatic game I've played in a long while.

My buddy ended up getting caught up in not one, but two explosions killing the person he was carrying. Late in the game all three Points of Interest were in the south half of the building, the north was pretty FUBARed. So Don goes running along the outside of the building working to get to the south. We had very few damage cubes left, and about the same amount of fire tokens, so this place was going down. We caught a break when the fire spread killing yet another female member of the house and as the house was about to come down, out comes the family cat who I scooped up and ran out, just as the last damage cube was placed and the house came down, with Grandma in the bed still.

I forgot just how much it is to game with a really good friend, one that I've known for decades. All the jokes that I wouldn't normally tell, I was able to tell...And we were cracking up the majority of the time. One of the best sessions of gaming I've had in a long time...Ranking right up there with The Great Kansas Power Outage of '14 at San's place.

Got my ass kicked at RoboRally last night with the kids, in spite of jumping out to what looked like an insurmountable lead. As in all things Roborally, never assume that things are going well.

My one son had the howitzer that knocks you off your current position and as I was going for the final flag he managed to tap me out of position on two separate occasions and twice I rolled myself right off the edge of the board because of it. So in spite of being three spaces away from the win I lost two lives and kept going back to flag two. I went the other direction the third time (to avoid being rammed off the board on my first turn back, jeeze!) and this third time I ended up getting rammed out of position into one of the on-floor lasers that just chewed me up for three more damage, including locking three of my registers. I was dealt two cards, a forward and a backward, neither of which would get me out of the laser's path. I was one turn away with one damage and three lives, finished DFL by being the only one not to survive.

I've come to the conclusion that my older boy can make any game last three hours. We put the timer in play on this one, but as luck would have it his special ability was to redraw his entire set of cards. So even when forced to move quickly he was slow. The other three of us came to mutual agreement that he's not allowed that special card anymore.

RoboRally is truly a game where no lead is insurmountable.

S.

I lost at Nexus Ops to my wife last night. She took the monolith early even though my exploration yielded better mines. I had the income but I'm entertaining the idea that "Buy ALL the Rock Striders" may not have been the best strategy on my part. She put together one killer turn where she started a battle in just every place she could, won most of them, and laid out 7 VP in Mission & Secret Mission Cards. That turn hurt, and put the game at 10-5 in her favor. The only good thing about losing all those battles was I got a handful of Energize Cards and came back the next turn to make it 10-11, but there just wasn't any way to get that 12th point. She managed to play out her last Secret Mission card and win the game on the next turn.

Afterwards she suggested we get a black light just for Nexus Ops, and I suddenly felt better about losing.

wadenels wrote: Afterwards she suggested we get a black light just for Nexus Ops, and I suddenly felt better about losing.

Awesome.

I really need to try that Flashpoint game, it sounds like a blast.

wadenels- just to make sure, you know you can only play one "battle" secret mission per turn, right? Not per battle.

hotseatgames wrote: I really need to try that Flashpoint game, it sounds like a blast.

Flash Point is awesome. Of all of the Pandemic style coops (four-ish actions a turn relentless waves of negative shit being thrown at you) it's by far the best.

Friday I played a shitload of Splendor, I lost count, I wanna say maybe six games, all of them two player. It's really, really good, but I'm not sure how long it will hold up without some minor expansion, although I can't really see where the design space is within the game to add it.

Saturday I played Caverna, Betrayal at House on the Hill and Core Worlds with the expansion.

Caverna is a game I suspect most of the FAT crowd will hate, but it's a really fantastic game in the Uwe Rosenberg style. Probably his best big euro-resource game (though I've never played Ora Et Labora.) It's better than Agricola in almost every way possible. Although I miss the minor improvement and occupation cards, by not having them you don't risk getting screwed with a bad hand and your hand doesn't lock in your strategy early on. We played with five, and five, quite frankly, is too many, it took too damn long, but as a 3 or 4 player game it will rock. It's certainly not for everyone, but for people who like this type of game, and I do, it's awesome.

Then we played Betrayal. After what I said about Caverna I'm only going to lose more AT cred here, but I hate that game, and this was no different. I'm ok with flip a card and try to roll X games. I love Arkham and Merchants and Marauders is one of my favorites, but there don't feel like ANY meaningful choices in Betrayal until the haunt starts, then the game gets reasonably fun for the last 1/3rd or 1/4th. I'd much rather play the criminally underrated Dungeon Run. Does most of the same things, but does all of them better.

Finally, Core Worlds + Expansion. This, folks, is the best deckbuilder and I might even go so far as to say best card game, possibly being edged by BB:TM. It fixes or does away with all of the stupid bullshit that normally goes into deck builders. You can trash frequently, you can gain so many extra actions and extra resources, and because you can keep as many or as few of your cards in your hand from turn to turn as you like, nothing feels wasted by a bad draw. You have all of your resources on every turn because they're laid out tableau style, your ships and infantry stay in play until you use them to conquer a world, and the power curve in cards is perfectly balanced.

The expansion adds some really chaotic events to all of the decks, as well as six "orders" which you get to place a token of your race on whenever you play a card with a symbol that matches the order, then, any time during your turn you can pull a token off to take the action associated with the order (buy at a discount, draw turns, get extra actions, etc) but you get to do that without spending an action, and there's no limit on how many times you can do it.

VT - looking forward to this coming Sunday - all I ask is that get in a game of Rivet Wars...

hotseatgames wrote: wadenels- just to make sure, you know you can only play one "battle" secret mission per turn, right? Not per battle.

My AH rulebook says one per battle for missions and secret missions.

doh... I double-checked the FFG rules. It says the same thing. The first time I read it I thought it said per turn.

Went over to the F:AT Cave beneath Look manor yesterday and played a couple of games.

Truth be told I was in a pretty shitty mood when I arrived and was in no state to try and learn something new. So, instead, we played Marvel Dice Masters again.

I remain impressed. Having played three times or so now, I have the basic mechanics down without having to worry too much about them and I can start to actually try strategies rather than just walk trough the game...which resulted in my Avengers being squashed by Josh's X-men team both games.

Storm and Spider-man's abilities are just plain brutal.

Afterwards, we were talking about Sun of York, which I had brought over but decided against playing because we'd both be learning it. I said that it was very reminiscent of Pocket Battles by Z-man which I had played once a long time ago. Josh said he had a copy but had never played it so we gave that a shot. It was the Elves vs. Orcs variety.

It had been so long since I played that it was sort of learning game for both of us and I must have played horribly because I was just flat out steam rolled. Not just a loss but a humiliation. Maybe we were playing a rule wrong but I don't think so. Anyway, it's good fun, fits in your pocket and has a lot more depth than one would suspect for something in so small a box.