What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yes, A Storm of Swords is a great expansion. However, we always play with a small variant in which you need one extra Claim to win, but can gain temporary Claim by holding both sides of a river crossing (fords or bridges). It makes the action on the board a bit more important, I believe.

The leaders from ASoS should not, however, be used with the base game. The extra moves they grant do not fit on a relatively smaller map and makes everything quite chaotic

Played Thunder Alley twice yesterday. The first time was with five and the second time with seven. Five was okay but seven was a lot. It is a strange but not unexpected dynamic that the more players you have, the faster the race goes but there is a long wait, relatively, between your turns with 7. I did think the super crowded nature of the track with that many cars made for some interesting situations where you had to do a lot of rubbing to get anywhere.

It was super chaotic with that many people but was still fun.

In between races, I taught and we played a game if Impulse. Another high player count with 5. With that many, not every player gets to play every card put on the Impulse track as the oldest Will age off before his turn comes up again. Not sure how I feel about that. However there was much more combat with five as people scuffled over sector core points. I really like this game but I'm a Glory to Rome/Innovation fanboy so take that for what it's worth.

VonTush wrote: One you'd recommend over the other? Or is the system similar enough between games its just a matter of picking the setting/conflict I like best?

Seems like its a great series, they're Out of Stock all over!

EDIT: I should add I'd likely be doing solitaire first before I could drum up people with enough interest to play.

Google "Rockin B Games". They have it in stock. I keep telling you lot about this site yet nobody remembers. Fucking hidden gem.

Amazon has Cuba Libre and Andean Abyss in stock

Finally got a play in of Stronghold. My opponently wife played the Defender and enjoyed it a bit more than I did as the Invader, which is widely recognized as having a steeper learning curve. A quick perusal of BGG strategy/variant threads confirmed my feeling that the game is actually shorter for the Invader than the listed 10 turns (more like 6 to 8 turns), given the Invader's difficulty to impossibility of overcoming the Defender's steadily increasing VP total generally at the Invader's expense. I do want to give it another go or two for sure, and I understand that the game is basically a race; I just thought the race was a little longer than it functionally seems to turn out to be.

We had one of those hideous "kid's birthday parties" weekends where we had invites to like four. I begged out of them ("I really need to get the chicken pen cleaned up, cut the grass, fix the downstairs toilet, etc."). So after an hour or so of house work I got some of my semi-gamer buddies to come over for an afternoon of forlorn FFG Eurogames. Deadwood and Black Gold

Total cost of the games on the table (not including shipping) $30.

I had played Black Gold as Giganten like 15 years ago and I remembered liking it but thinking it was repetitive and sort of screwy. That was kind of dumb, because the game is awesome. It really reflects that kind of style the late 1990s Eurogames had, sort of that transition between the simple family game era and the more complicated BGG/post-Princes of Florence era. There's three oil companies looking to buy your crude, and they have a fluctuating market price they're willing to pay based on a die roll. You draft an action card that gives you a number of sales licenses and movement points, maybe a special bonus. Then you use the movement points to drive around and survey face-down oil tiles. If you see something you like, you stick your well on there and each turn you get one oil off of it to try to sell. The catch is, the deeper you go into the countryside (where the better deposits are), the further along a track your train has to be to be able to haul the oil back for sale so you have to spend movement points to abstractly increase your rail capability. Then you take all the oil you made and put it in your color of tank at the oil companies. Everybody at each one secretly bids a number of sales licenses for the right to sell the oil. Catch is, some licenses are ones, some are twos. And you can legally overbid just to drive the price up, but you're penalized if you win and can't pay.

There's quite a lot going on- prospecting, drilling, production, transportation, auctioning, etc.- but it's pretty simple. I had three other guys who had never played it up and running in about 15 minutes, and everything in it just makes sense. It's also a great looking game, with lots of fun pieces like these oil blobs you stick in the top of your wells.

Great game. I didn't notice many changes other than some variant rules and the addition of a fifth player. But then again I havent' played it in 15 years.

Deadwood was really good too, Von Tush was mostly right about it. But I can see why it didn't register with some folks. For one thing, it was sort of mismarketed. It wasn't really clear what kind of game it was. It's a light Euro with shooting. Most would call it worker placement, but it doesn't really feel like that. It really kind of has some resonance with Doomtown in a way, the idea of various criminals walking into town and running things and so forth.

There are some interesting things going on. There's no production at all. There's not really anything to do on your turn other than to put a cowboy out on a building tile and take its action, which is usually to make a dollar and then do something else. If there's already cowboy there, you can try to shoot him if he doesn't flee on a horse or shoot you first. If you don't want to place a cowboy or they're all out (or dead), you have to withdraw your dudes.

My guys were REALLY aggressive and totally bought into the shooting thing, even though the incentives to fight are actually quite low unless you've got a man on the undertaker and get a dollar whenever somebody dies. But I could see where some groups wouldn't really go balls out and get into that particular spirit so it wouldn't be a rootin' tootin.

I somehow won the game even though I thought for sure I was done for since I only had like two men left at the end. One of the guys thought he had it in the bag so he built the final railroad piece (the train station) but he came up short. I kept robbing the bank (+$5 but a wanted poster each time) and doing things to lose the wanted posters to avoid the end-game fines for them.

I think the bank might be overvalued at $5. That's worth five plays elsewhere, and money wins the game. So as long as you can clear the wanted posters (not too hard with a laundry and the church in play), you can just keep shooting the place up with a 3-ranked cowboy and a couple of bullets (+1 dice) in hand.

I really liked it though, but I felt like even with four it would be better with a fifth. You just want as much friction as possible.

There was an ad in the rulebook for that Knizia Hobbit game no one in the world has ever played, I checked on eBay and found a copy for $10. We'll see if it's another great forlorn FFG Eurogame.

Hey everyone I played board games on Saturday night! It's my effort I try to make at least annual so that I'm still allowed to come on here and troll really good podcasts and such.

So it's my buddy's birthday party Saturday so his g/f thinks it would be funny if we all went to watch a Roller Derby championship. So frickin' boring and I don't understand any of the rules or what's happening. Also it turns out Roller Derby matches are apparently community events for young lesbian couples. There were almost no men. I felt like Heston in Omega Man.

So we then go to one of these relatively new pubs where the idea is that you grab a table, grab one of their 2,100 board games they have over several floors and go to town with your friends. Costs 5$ to play there and then you just buy drinks and stuff.

So we played a game of 7 WONDERS where I sort of intentionally gave my buddy on the left four complete sets of the science cards. It was funny how everyone looked at me. I don't like that game.

Then we played KING OF TOKYO for the first time which I also didn't like. People that knew the game were intentionally giving me bad tactical advice to increase the odds of them winning. Once I realized what was happening, I pulled out the smartphone and started playing a game by myself to pass the time.

Then I drove home! Yay, boardgames!

Michael Barnes wrote: There was an ad in the rulebook for that Knizia Hobbit game no one in the world has ever played, I checked on eBay and found a copy for $10. We'll see if it's another great forlorn FFG Eurogame.

WHICH Knizia Hobbit game? There have been several (both of which Chris Farrell has at least capsule-reviewed):
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hobbit

THe one he gave a 9 and said something to the effect that if you like Knizia's more artistically thematic games, you'll love it. It's from 2010, not the movie tie-in thing. Has John Howe artwork.

Deadwood is an awesome game! Scaling for players by removing buildings and/or plots would have been very welcome.

The Bank, being as powerful as it is, I feel is the catalyst that drives the value and usefulness of the other buildings in the game.

That feeling of lacking identity is a trait all the Dust Games have had once FFG acquired them. Every one that I have played h as been above average but none ever really commit to being a fully thematic or a fully mechanical experience.

I didn't find Black Gold very interesting beyond a few plays. Got it out of the budget bin at a FLGS which was good, because I would have been annoyed had I paid MSRP.

I don't get the love for 7 Wonders or King of Tokyo either.

Well, I'm not surprised. The problem with that game is that it's a touch too long to hit that family game spot and its constituent parts are too capricious to warrant the length. And it does seem like the kind of game you wouldn't want to play every week. But with those expectations in place, I think there's a lot here that is really a lot of fun. That's waht got me the most about the game, it was just fun to play. And really quite different than other games in its class. It's definitely got a touch of McMulti in there...which has exactly the same kinds of potential issues.

I think I figured out what I don't like about 7 WONDERS. There's this tendency in all the games I've picked to try to explain why the winner won. So it's not enough that the losers lost but they then get nailed by the other players for king-making. In the last game I played, I did it intentionally just for fun but I think that's a bad thing that happens after these games. It removes accountability from the winner for actually playing really well, and it rubs it in the face of the losers.

BLECH


Earlier in the day, there was supposed to be a Magic draft at noon. I didn't want to go and play with some people I barely know so I skipped out saying i couldn't go (I never said I'd go anyway). They ended up being 5 which is a crappy number to draft. So when I got to the boardgaming part of the evening, people said, "too bad you didn't show up, it was really fun and would have been better with you since we were only five". So shortly after the 7 Wonders match, soemone asked, "so did you spend the day with you kid?" and I said I just sat around and played Magic on my iPad.

....ouf, this anecdote seemed better when I started typing it. It's actually not that good. I'll have a better one next time. Maybe something about the time I was folding coldcuts and they kept falling into my footbath.

Blah, I found the robot ketchup dispenser more entertaining than your anecdote.


Also, quit the not playing board game shit. Just knock it off. Stop being a dick, round up Mabuse, JJ, and Zavos and come to WBC. No whining about having a family or a job either. Don't wanna here it. Just get on the buckboard or whatever it is you lumberjacks use for transportation up there and get moving.

I'll begin constructing an appropriate transportation device immediately!

I already have 4 wood cubes saved up.