What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Why don't you sell it on back to me? I've been wanting to play it again.

You know, if you had asked me like 6 months ago I might have.

Two more games, one win but one close loss. Close loss was with green and yellow, they seem to have the weakest special marines---lightning claws and thunder hammer/shield. If you know me, you KNOW I want thunder hammer/shield to be good.

Gary Sax wrote: Legomancer's post had me revisiting the copy of Space Hulk: Death Angel I got from Barnes with all the expansions. First couple games were frustrating and overly mechanical, took too long. Got to the last game I stacked the deck a bit in my favor by taking my favorite squads (Psyker with the skull cascade power, autocannon dude, and power sword counterattacker (what a wrecking ball that dude is) and it was a lot more fun, a win. The way the game essentially gives you one really special power per squad and asks you to work with it... solid. I started to grok the game when I realized it is really just a game of keeping your positioning and that the game starts with you in probably the worst possible positioning of 3 L 3 R.

Good game, probably moving my score up from 6. And I'll say it again, with almost no components. Like, it has maybe a slightly bigger footprint than solitaire but not much bigger. And it is a fully featured game. I still haven't played the expansions besides the extra squad expansion (guy with missile launcher IIRC).

If you want to ease the difficulty curve a bit, play with four teams instead of three. I read (and later verified) that it tends to smooth things out and give you more options. I've started making that my norm when playing it.

I've only ever played SHDA with 2p, which means each player controls two squads. Even without any other knowledge that just seems ideal.

Gary Sax wrote: I still haven't played the expansions besides the extra squad expansion (guy with missile launcher IIRC).

Don't forget Skullface the chaplain.

I've mostly played it 3 players, so a full 12 marines squad, and we've had more success than failure - yes, even with the Deathwatch. I think there's more jostling about with movement and positioning with such a long formation and often some guys are left shooting at shadows. We discuss our options at length and see if the plan works out or not (luck of the dice).

Deathwatch rely heavily on support tokens, but they have some great complimentary skills and some outright powerful special skills and attacks. Maybe you need all 12 to make it work right.

Dollar for dollar, card for card, the best expansion to Death Angel is that little Mission pack. New rooms, new terrain features, and several new endings to the game, each with a different final boss situation. Death Angel is one of my all-time favorite board games, and it's amazing how it delivers the same theme and setting as Space Hulk, only in a much smaller game that is actually more fun.

Egg Shen wrote: Played a game of Merchants and Marauders.
The other massive bugaboo in this game is the combat. Holy ****, I remember it being bad, but this is some show stopper type stuff. It's just too ****ing convoluted for what it is. For a game that still whistles along pretty smoothly the combat certainly shows its 2010 era game design heritage. This is just an unwieldy mess of little rules and things to remember. Yes it's very thematic, but it's not something that I would call enjoyable. In a way it reminds me of Fury of Dracula 2nd Edition combat rules. Very cool, but ultimately not worth the effort for the end result. These things could be streamlined. It's a shame that the designer didn't try to address this with a combat module in the expansion.

I mentioned this on BGG and everyone assured me that the combat was just fine, and that the problem was with me.

Nearly flipped my own table after three solo games of Defenders of the Last Stand.

I was excited to get this to the table... the setting is great, and some of the changes from Realm seemed good, and it was indeed fun at first playing with this system again for a while... but it only took that first game to remind me of how much I had grown to resent DOTR for the boss battles.

First two games, 2p, same exact thing happened... both rangers have a bunch of cards/dice for one of the bosses, and I'd whittled down the boss by a few points before the fight (which would be a good new ability, if only it made a difference). But oh crap, I didn't quite roll well enough and failed to kill it by one health point. And then both of my guys are wounded, so I can't do much the next turn. The boss gains back a couple of health. And a big chunk of those color cards have been played/discarded, so it'll take me too long to get enough of them again to go back after him.

Third game, 3p. Had 14 dice to get 8 successes at 3+ to kill a boss. Rolled almost all 1's and 2's. Failed miserably. Immediately put game for sale on BGG. ($80 and it's yours, including shipping - US only.)

Yeah, uh, hmmm, I guess there's something about this style of game that I can't stand anymore, where you can invest so much time and effort to get to a crucial point in the game and then just get totally hosed by the dice rolls and by the penalty for failing. Heck, it's not just the in-game effort, but just setting up the damn thing each game takes enough time and effort. (This might be my example of getting angry in my older age, per the other recent thread.) But I think this is why I'm appreciating thematic Euros and hybrids more in recent years. I've had some really fun games of DOTR back in the day, and presumably would with this if I kept it, but there are also super frustrating games, and I don't have the patience for that anymore (especially when it kicks me in the nuts three times in a row).

Production is a step up from DOTR, but only by comparison. The graphic design still isn't great, and there are several typos I noticed. I'd give it a C+, which is a leap up from the D- I'd give DOTR, but still not in the league of anything by FFG, as far as that goes.

Had a miserable (for me) game of Mega-Civilization yesterday. Western map, 6 players, advanced AST, I was Iberia.

I was doing okay. My strategy was going to be calamity mitigation. That is, I was going to buy advances based solely on nerfing calamities. This was ironic.

In one hand I got dealt FOUR calamities, two non-tradeable. Since the calamities were my 7, 6, 5, and 3, that also meant I had nothing to trade. The ones I suffered weren't ones I could nerf yet, so they absolutely wiped me out, leaving me two cities and a tiny sliver of land. One was Tyranny, so the places I had were not just empty, they now had to be fought to be regained.

It took me a long time to claw my way back up, because I was so far behind in cities and everyone was trading like an asshole. "Oh, you have fish? All I really want are pearl-encrusted gilded butterflies trained to sing opera by only the fairest virginal maidens." I never had anything anyone wanted, as they were pretty much ignoring anything less than 5 cards. I couldn't trade, couldn't buy advancements, only barely kept moving on the AST.

Finally I had regained my ground and wham, another handful of calamities. Again, all my highest cards, and non-tradeable. I was able to mitigate them a little now, but again the biggest blow was to my trading. By the time I recovered from this one, I was three steps behind everyone else on the AST, still unable to trade with anyone except out of pity, and everyone else was headed for the endgame.

I ended up with barely over 100 points. On the final turn I was able to buy 4 advancements, for a total of 8 points, while everyone else was grabbing fists full of them.

I was effectively out of the game at 5:30 (when the second round of calamities hit.) We were done four hours later.

I'll still play again but man, that game can fuck you over bigtime.

^I was watching your game occur to you on twitter, it was cracking me up.

Grudunza wrote: Yeah, uh, hmmm, I guess there's something about this style of game that I can't stand anymore, where you can invest so much time and effort to get to a crucial point in the game and then just get totally hosed by the dice rolls and by the penalty for failing. Heck, it's not just the in-game effort, but just setting up the damn thing each game takes enough time and effort. (This might be my example of getting angry in my older age, per the other recent thread.) But I think this is why I'm appreciating more thematic Euros and hybrids more in recent years. I've had some really fun games of DOTR back in the day, and presumably would with this if I kept it, but there are also super frustrating games, and I don't have the patience for that anymore (especially when it kicks me in the nuts three times in a row).

SuperFlyTNT was lamenting a similar issue yesterday when he and I were playing my latest prototype for my game City of Lycans. My werewolves were happily chewing on his werebears, and he was saying that he felt it was too much work to build up his forces, only to have the dice quickly strip them away. He may have a point and I will look at this... but I also think this sort of "sacrifice to the dice gods" is suddenly not a problem when the dice go your way, or at least YOU are the one doing the crushing.

But on the OTHER other hand, if a game can make you feel good even when you LOSE, that would be especially good.

Last night we had a 4 player game of Mansions of Madness, which went okay, although my character never got an opportunity to do much. We ended up calling it for time, although we could have potentially won. I do like the game, but how it shakes out is almost as volatile as a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is kind of bad considering the increased time investment.

At another table, SuperFlyTNT was being exposed to Scythe, which I know he didn't care for , but I didn't get his full assessment. From what I saw, it looks pretty, but there was a distinct lack of dice.

We ended the rather late night with a 6 player game of Spartacus. At one point I had a shred of a chance of propelling Glaber to victory, but couldn't make it happen. That swine, Batiatis, managed to impress Rome the most.

hotseatgames wrote: this sort of "sacrifice to the dice gods" is suddenly not a problem when the dice go your way, or at least YOU are the one doing the crushing. But on the OTHER other hand, if a game can make you feel good even when you LOSE, that would be especially good.

You're absolutely right. And I know that I won several of the DOTR games I played back in the day, defeating all four bosses. So there is clearly the ability to do so. But other than in rogue-like games where you expect to die early and often, it seems like an unfortunate design for a co-op when nothing but dumb luck can repeatedly lose you the game before you've even gotten 1/4 of the way into it. At least let me experience a little more of the game (for all the time it took to set it up!), or lose early because I was foolish and unprepared and made stupid choices and jumped into a boss fight before I was ready, not just because I rolled badly.

In this particular case, I think it has a lot to do with the penalties for losing against the bosses, not so much merely losing against them. I'm sure there was a game of DOTR (possibly more than one), where I went up big against a boss and failed, and then still came back to win, but it really seems like that is unlikely to ever happen. It's incredibly unforgiving. You need to coordinate so much in terms of cards and abilities, and often need some very exact and fortunate timing for more than one hero to meet where a boss is, and then if you fail to kill it, it fucks you so hard. The boss heals a few points, you are wounded and need the next turn or two to recover, and all the cards you built up for that color are gone (and are less likely to come up in the deck if you've been gambling for them). And, for all you know, that boss will move closer to the center or into the center by the time you have another feeble chance to fight him (not to mention the other bosses gaining on you as well, and minions spreading causing more trouble during the time you spent working to defeat that boss).

Conversely, if you fight a boss and happen to roll well enough to beat it (luckily or not), then sure, he's gone and you get some bonus cards and the ability to kill his minions easier, so life is better, giving you a stronger chance to kill the next bosses. It's a rich get richer type of situation. So I feel like there could have been a better way to scale things, so that it's not quite so much that each boss has its own bonuses/penalties for winning/losing, but that those bonuses/penalties scale up from the 1st - 2nd - 3rd - 4th boss. To me, that would make this game better, and I would want to keep it. As it is, knowing how often and badly that first boss can end your game, no.