What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

POWER GRID

Power Grid is fun! So put that in your socket! Not a big fan of many economic euros but I'll play Power Grid.

And Thirstyman may not give a fuck about the American Revolution but the Whiskey Rebellion on the other hand....well that's right up his alley.

Michael Barnes wrote: POWER GRID

Power Grid is so boring it that surely it makes the AmRev look like a trip to Disney.

So, just so I am clear on this Power Grid > Washington's War.

Right?

ThirstyMan wrote: It may be, as I've suggested before, a class thing. I'm just not interested in who won these conflicts as the result was important really only for the rich.

Nevermind that the AmRev led to the rapid dissolution of English estate inheritance law/primogeniture in America, destabilizing the concentration of wealth among the elite, radically altering the worker/employer relationship and directly spurring the rise of a nascent middle class*. But, whatever - details, right?

*unless you were black and in the South.

Anyway, Power Grid. I remember when it was still a crayon game with a funny name. It was one of the sleeper hits at the '02 WBC, which I don't really remember clearly because I was drinking (illegally) the whole time. I love it.

DukeofChutney wrote: So, just so I am clear on this Power Grid > Washington's War.

Right?

IMO:

Hannibal: RvC (O.G. AH edition) > Power Grid > Washington's War > Eating calcified bird guano > x Stefan Feld game

RobertB wrote: ldsdbomber wrote:

thanks Nate, I was hoping for this (the stuff I snipped out of the quote from your reply, I did get the extra deck, but I guess I will give the original deck a run first before, what, swapping? or mixing together? I guess I will go read and find out

I don't think mixing the decks is kosher. If you tried to keep the same number of plants in the deck, the world wouldn't end, but it might make for weird situations. Too many high-efficiency plants early would turn the game into a pure maximization contest. Not enough late, and the game becomes a bidding war for the only game-winning plant. They're kind of balanced, so that all the folks who played the game right have a fighting chance to win at Step 3.

San is correct about Power Grid, though. The game devolves a little bit at the end, where you have to do some Tikal-like counting on the last turn so you can maximize your score. The sharks will generally end at the same powered city score, and have to win by cash.

There are a lot of ways to play with the extra deck. I've used it as a replacement and as a combined deck, and both were perfectly good ways to play. Mostly it throws off the tendency for groups to rally around specific plants. For example, my group always liked the 25 plant, and the extra deck broke that metagame a little.

As for the extra maps, I only have two extra boards and I haven't kept up with them for several years. My favorite by a country mile is China/Korea. The China map has a planned economy where the first 25 plants or so come out in numerical order, and there is always one less plant than there are players. It's basically a planned economy, and while it removes the chance of getting a good plant early, it does make for a very cut-throat game.

Korea is a different animal entirely. There are two separate resource markets, and you can only buy in one of them in any given turn. The trick is that the North's market has a lot of cheap coal, but once that's gone the price goes up really quickly. It also doesn't have any uranium (yeah, right), so if you have a nuke plant you need to buy from the South. Of course both markets are roughly half the size of the regular game's market, so the competition for resources is much tighter.

Those two maps introduce the most drastic changes to the game. A lot of the other maps make you play on little narrow strips of land like Italy or Portugal. There are some other vagaries too, but I generally find that the other maps don't offer way more in terms of variety than what you get from just the two maps that come with the game. Germany and the USA are both fine ways to play, and they both have a different feel to them. Anyway, since you never use the entire map in any game of Power Grid the map always feels different.

I never knew there was so much dislike for Washingtons War here.

black inferno wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote: It may be, as I've suggested before, a class thing. I'm just not interested in who won these conflicts as the result was important really only for the rich.

Nevermind that the AmRev led to the rapid dissolution of English estate inheritance law/primogeniture in America, destabilizing the concentration of wealth among the elite, radically altering the worker/employer relationship and directly spurring the rise of a nascent middle class*. But, whatever - details, right?

Fleeing Loyalists at the end of the war made the new elite the richest in the world, it was a great opportunity to parcel out land to small farmers to create a buffer between the elite and the dispossessed. The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established. The employer worker dynamic was not changed it was simply a swap from old to new elites. Not just the black dispossessed either but also women, Indians, white servants in fact there were more indentured servants than ever at the end of the war.

Details, interpretations, who cares about that, these days, in the struggle to prove your historical credentials?

Damn it, I didn't come to a boardgame website to have a Redcoat learn me things!
Less three syllable words - More expletives. That or I'm walking.

Maybe the ERP can salvage this before we are at loggerheads.

Tonga Bonga rules. Stupid, simple and fun. You put up money to hire crew (die rolls). Other people put their die rolls on your ship to take your payment offer and make your ship go. Travel around and set up money making camps. Roll the vomit man and you're fucked.

Um Reifenbreite is REALLY good, we just played through the advanced rules (not pro) and there is a LOT to like. Thunder Alley is definitely derived quite a bit from UB. The drafting and breakaways are almost the same. But there are road types and FALLS. We had six bike pile up- after this one bastard kept a whole line back on the cobblestone before he crashed. You can roll 2D6 or spend energy cards to move. Get A 7, draw a chance card. The pro rules add cheating (grabbing the photo car). Absolutely hate the art though.

Played a game (2P) of Fucking Reef Encounter, not sure what to think. It’s undoubtably a great game in many ways, and well deserving of its moniker as a complete brain fuck, but by the same token that means it can’t really be played casually, and I’m still not sure it doesn’t have a bit of a problem in that it just feels like an impossible task to really try to control everything in the game you need to do well, like it’s just not possible, and on top of it all there’s the throw in tile at the start which can easily be the difference in the final score.

I don’t doubt that playing it frequently will let you grok some basic strategies and tactics, but it still feels like maybe there’s a disconnect between the amount of control the game is trying to make you exert and the amount you can reasonably expect, which is not necessarily a problem (the latter), but you’re not really left with any options BUT to furrow your brow and think what the flying fuck am I going to do here with the mix of tiles, the flipping and locking of colour dominances, the tactical blocking and eating of tiles. On the plus side, I think it looks great, and has a cool theme (though even though the game was supposedly designed off the back of, doesn’t really grab you by the balls or make you feel engaged with), and at least includes scope for properly getting in on top of each others shit, but I just wonder if it’s worth persevering with since I don’t think it works for casual play, but with fun murdering analysis style play, I’m not sure the control is even there

Maybe I want to like it more than I actually do, or maybe I just need to get it on the table a good few times in a short period to see if just needs to click. (PS I have played it before and think came to a similar conclusion)

Not a popular title here I imagine?

I like Power Grid a lot, and fuck a war game.

Played a game of Pax Porfiriana. Lost, my Hungarian friend managed to get down 3 command point giving troop cards extorting peoples stuff by the 1st topple card and took the win. Still love Pax. The cards bring so much of the story to life for me.

Then beat them all at Ascending Empires. They'd never played so despite my terrible flicking over the first half I caught up for a massive win in the second with the battleship. New players are never aggressive enough.

I ought to try Pax sometime but honestly I cannot be fucking arsed to read his shitty rulebooks, like I start reading and just think fuck this. It's not like every single fucking game they do have shit rule books written by mental people and then release weekly living updates. Hire a fucking editor or rules writer or some shit.
Also, I might be one of the few nerds that think this is the most boring ass theme imaginable. yeah, yeah, my loss I know..