What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Your last post nailed it. The problem with die rolling in DOTR is you realistically only get one chance against bosses because they almost instantly regenerate and you don't get any hard won cards back you used. So losing even once is basically something you cannot afford, and properly preparing and losing can happen with (realistically) no 2nd chance.

Played Pax Pamir for the first time and Ashes: Phoenixborn on Saturday. Drove almost three hours round trip to play and it was worth it. Quasi-session report posted in the Cantina.

Argent, Argent, Argent. My wife is a fucking wizard at this game.

Gary Sax wrote: Argent, Argent, Argent. My wife is a fucking wizard at this game.

The F---ing Wizard--what is their special ability, exactly?

Ah, from Amazon:

Peter Harrison is not a f---ing wizard. He’s never cast a spell. He’s never even had sex.
But when a case of mistaken identity leads to a white van coming to take him to wizarding school, he figures it’s better than living in his uncle’s basement.

The school is not so bad. All the teachers are beautiful women, so that helps. But they seem to be taking a sexual interest in Peter for no reason, and his secrets are dangerously close to being discovered. These wizards have a dark secret of their own, and getting kicked out of school will be the least of Peter’s worries if they find out he’s been fooling them as he fools around with them.

Friday was Shadows of Brimstone in which we did the Cynder version of "find three ( ! ) tokens". More encounters with dangerous rooms than attacks, though we did get to fight the new Tredderan Raiders. We won and were rewarded(?) with cursed artifacts that we can't sell fast enough.

Saturday started with some lighter games- Codenames, Wurfel Bohnanza and Cockroach Poker. We were all terrible at Codenames, which balanced the game out and was a good time. One of my friends had bought Star Realms, the newer set with a bunch of those booster packs. I got soundly drubbed by a red trashing deck.

Chaos in the Old World came out again, with a full five players. Four of us had played before so there was not too much explaining to do. We went with the expansion decks this time and so far I think I prefer them. If I'd played the game 100 times with the original decks I might feel different. I took the skavens, and most of the game had Tzeentch harrassing and moving in on me. I got lucky with the region ruination order a little, with my upgrade allowing me to decamp all my ratties to the next area to fall. Khorne started slow but was winning the game with 52 points until we did dial advancements and found that my next dial reward was 5 VPs, giving me the game by four points.

A slightly truncated five round game of Sons of Anarchy was the last game of the night. Sometimes the setup can be weird and in this game the board had no options for gaining guns, thanks to a first turn anarchy card that replaced the usual starting locations. Gun locations did show up in rounds three and four, though. It was still fun, except maybe for the SAMCRO player who kept losing all his dudes to gunfights (and really he should have been the one with all the guns with his gang ability), and the Mayans were able to exploit a nice skim location with an additional nine cash temporary location to cruise to a win.

Saturday was Dreadball League day at the house (my Zee are in first place after two games!), and Sunday was board games with the kids.

Last week was my wife's birthday and so after making some killer pineapple/strawberry sangria, our small celebratory group sat down for one of our favorites - Cranium.

Hard for me to think of a better party game as it has everything. And the teams were randomly decided with me and my sister in law pitted against my wife, wife's best friend and sister in law's boyfriend. After this was determined, my wife then said that she had just been thinking that despite the teams being uneven, that the only combination that would be ridiculous would be if me and her sister ended up on the two person team. We are both "love of the game" type competitors and the other three are varying degrees of die-hard competitors. So of course, sister in law and I engaged in massive trash talking. Long story short, we won (close game) by answering from the dreaded Red (trivia questions) box of doom and it made for an awesomely-hilarious end to the evening.

If you wanted the long story longer, then we learned important things:
-humming "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" is damn hard to DO, but when attempted, it was guessed within 5 seconds
-perceived ties when both teams are competing in charades or drawing must always necessitate a do-over #maintainsocialorder
-no one knows what the skyline of Shanghai looked like, but how many skylines could you identify from some tiny picture?
-trivia is only easy if you know the subject area - luckily we knew original SNL cast members.
-trivia is always harder if you overthink/second guess
-people make the game, every time

FINALLY played Livingstone. Wife nearly rage quit. Shit was hilarous. "DONT ALWAYS PICK A 6 FIRST!!!!" we all shouted. The shithead ended up in close third place, I lost due to not giving the Queen her due. Fuck that bitch..."I ain't that nigga holl'n cause I want some head, I'm that nigga holl'n cause I want some bread" ~50 cent

I really like the game. It's light, simple, fun, and highly strategic.

Over the weekend I went with my wife to one of her friend's house for a game night. I was told to "bring games". In the past when given this statement I would usually grab 3-5 games of varying genres, but with mostly family level rules. I've discovered that sometimes this can completely overwhelm people or split the group with what they'd like to play. So instead I just brought a single game, Jamaica.

Being in the dead of summer makes me want to play games that fit the season. Jamaica, with it's lush, tropical settings and pirate/nautical trappings was a clear choice. It fit the 6 players we would have, and the rules are easily digestible. Plus, when you set the game up it just looks so DAMN pretty on the table. Man, for a game that came out almost 10 years ago, it still looks terrific today. Everyone was commenting out how beautiful the board and card artwork was.

Jamaica is a race game where each player is a pirate boat trying to complete a lap around the titular island. With this simple goal in mind we all set off. I'd sort of forgotten how enjoyable this game is. It was one of the first games I purchased back in the mid 2000s when I started really getting into boardgames. Back then I played it ALL the time. However, I went on to more complex and heavier designs and sort of left this game in the dust. Still I never sold it and I'm glad I didn't. It's not the most entertaining game off all time. But for a game that can comfortably play 6 players in 90 min with very little rules overhead...it's worth it's weight in gold. THe game went over very well and the guy that finished in last place actually won because he stashed the most gold. Fun game, with lots of combat and people making terrible moves. Plenty of laughter was had which is always a joy of any game night. Glad to finally get this one back to the table after a several year hiatus.

Afterwards the person's house that we were at had a copy of Bohnanza so we cracked into that. This game never fails to entertain with a big group. Haggling for beans is so damn ridiculous and trying to convince people to not trade with others is always a hoot. Bohnanza is a classic in every sense of the word and one of my favorite straight up card games to play.

We finally lost in PANDEMIC LEGACY. We were 6-0, and got smoked in July.1 when hit with back-to-back Epidemics, both intensifying neighboring blue cities. Wiped out the blue cubes. We were probably two/three turns from winning. It'll be nice to have a Funded Event though, we haven't seen those in a dog's age, and it'll slow down the Epidemics at least a little, I hope. Such a great family game. We probably spend as long setting up and plotting as we do playing now.

Nail biting game of two player Argent, one of the most competitive we've played. Down to the last decision. It also featured the person who lost influence win the game, which is rare in the 2 player version. More in the dedicated thread where I talk to myself about Argent.

Last week we had our most decapitation-filled game of Spartacus yet, heads were rolling left and right. Our previous game had lots of cash, and so did this one: the bank was almost empty at one point.

After 2.5 hours the game was almost over and I thought that was pretty short, yet we managed to (cock)block the leaders and Calavius came back from a major early setback (boasted Spartacus was decapitated in a Primus where he teamed up with Eddie the starting Numidian) to win 1.5 hours later - he'd managed to get his hands on Theokoles, who easily dominated 2 more Primus.

I had arranged an online sale at BGG of Defenders of the Last Stand, but didn't have a shipping box the right size (the game box is huge!), and was traveling after that point for a few days, so I ended up cancelling the sale. Probably pissed the guy off. But anyway, I figured I'd keep it for a while and maybe try to sell it locally. Tried it again today and had a much better game. Very nearly won, maxing out on ammo/oil fields right as I was about to attack the final boss.

As I described the other day, if you can make it past the first boss, that means SO much. If not, then you're terribly hosed and probably lose and may as well quit... but if you do, then you're set up pretty well to continue on from there. But to me, getting past that first boss is absolutely essential to my enjoyment of the experience. If I lose after that point, fine. But otherwise, it feels like a waste of the setup and the hour or so of play to get to that point and lose from dumb luck.

And other than that terrible negative feeling I had after three bad first boss losses last week, it is a really cool game. A lot of fun flavor and a cool system to play around in, with the post-apoc setting working much better for me than the generic fantasy of DOTR. So at this point, I'll keep it and should enjoy it well enough for a while. And I may end up house-ruling that first boss battle, so if I lose it, it's not necessarily the end of the world.

For the first time in a long while, I actually played games I'd been looking to get to the table. I played my first proper full game of Amateurs to Arms, which was terribly long in the the typical first-time-playing-this-wargame way, but it was really outstanding. I'm impressed by the depth of choices and control it gives its players.

Monday night was the first return to Game of Thrones in months. It was a very tense game that went the full 10 rounds. We had no new players, no kingmaking and every house had its shining moment in a very close game. I pulled ahead too early, but my three neighbors quickly pounded me back into place. When that game is at its best, nothing touches it.

More recently, I played Churchill and had an opportunity to try Scythe last night. Opinions after one play aren't typically very insightful, but I was ambivalent about it. The artwork and components were great, but mech miniatures hint at a type of play experience this game doesn't really offer. The pedigree of the designer's other games reads like a demon's resume to my mind, so I was pretty skeptical. Overall, it lacked interaction, and the river setup seemed to enable turtling in the early game. I'd prefer that players be empowered to choose between early expansion or taking someone's stuff. The random player boards seemed like baffling touch given that your factions are locked into a starting region with varying access to materials. The encounter cards are in step with the trend of foisting pointless narrative elements into a game that doesn't leave enough of an impression to paint a narrative of its own. I joked that this game might has well been Mech farmers aggressively harvesting vegetables at each other, but that may not be too far off. It wasn't bad, so I apologize if it sounds that way, but it did seem like an over-chromed Euro that takes its aesthetic cues from other games that have been successfully on Kickstarter.

Part game impression part rant so more readers can feel my anger. Went to a random meetup recently at a game friendly bar, about 15 people total were there on a week night from 6-9/10ish. Been there before and mostly guys my age, 30ish. I rarely go since the games they gravitate towards are pretty awful for me, but thought I would give it another shot.

I'm not a regular but am kinda recognized and brought Study in Emerald, Impulse, and Dune since one of the comments on the webpage for the meetup mentioned the rip-off game TI:Rex. There is already a game of Automania going on when I arrive, a game I've never heard of but it looks generic. One of the players used the words efficient and optimal multiple times when explaining the game, the theme being producing cars. I sat down randomly and one of the guys said he had a 20 minuted game to offer until everyone starts organizing. I forget the name but it was a co-op where you are stuffed animals defending a child from monsters by rolling attack and defense dice. I immediately regretted sitting down and I'm pretty sure the guy playing it sensed my regret; he asked several times if I was having fun (I answered "its interesting" with a furrowed brow). Once it was over he asked me what I thought and I admitted I hated co-ops and left his table. At that point I should've sensed the signs and gone home and played Twilight Struggle or Duelyst online.

After that wrapped up finally everyone started deciding what games to play. A core group was pushing Dead of Winter, another group set up for Eldritch Horror, one guy pushed Quadropolis, I offered Impulse and Study in Emerald. My games were viewed pretty skeptically as being too difficult. Final offering of games: Marco Polo, Eldritch Horror, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Quadropolis. I fucking hate co-ops. I played Quadropolis. Euro themeless tile selection game with four rounds and scoring points for collections and arrangements of buildings on your player board. As usual the only interaction is by taking a spot another player wanted. Hated that for the entire 90 minutes it took. One of the guys asked me what I thought afterwards and I couldn't hold it in and said it was another bland multi player solitaire point crunchy game. The response was what do you want to play then?

Well that is the fucking issue. We spent 30 minutes at the start playing dumbass filler games, then another 90 minutes on this POS and its already 8pm. Dune was a dream in the first place, Study in Emerald takes 2 hours if nobody but me knows how to play, and Impulse will likely take that long too with four players and teaching and that is too late for the other 3 players. So my next options were Manhattan Project/Alien Frontiers/7 Wonders/ or a playtest game one guy is working on. I asked if I could attack people in his prototype; he said no, its more of a worker placement game with a twist. Jesus Christ I'm in the wrong fucking universe. Funny thing is I originally owned both Manhattan Project and Alien Frontiers but grew to hate them very quickly. They have decent themes but after a few plays MP is another multi player solitaire game and AF deserves to burn for the down time between turns when you can't plan your actions bc you didn't roll your dice yet. 7 Wonders was my choice and we spent 45 minutes drafting cards to get points and nobody was offended at anyone and the scores were all close.

Finally I called it and drove home as quickly as possible and bitched to the wife. She says they probably just want to play games and relax and not struggle with anything too complex. Fair enough, I can understand the desire not to be stressed outside of work. But I won't ever go back to that group. Yes I was hoping to get one of my games played, but realistically didn't expect it to happen since nothing I brought was new or shiny and I wasn't a regular. Fine. But the overall selection there really made me question whether I'm ridiculously picky about the games that I like or whether I'm in the right hobby in the first place. The real kick to the balls was a lot of these guys are about my age and lack spouses/children, so I would expect them to be a little more partial to deeper more involved games with conflict when just the opposite turned out to be true. #hateeuros #hateco-ops should be the custom shirt I order for all random meetups I go to from now on so I save time at the start. Rant complete.