What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

FWIW Lee, I think Pax is HUGELY overrated. And boring. I usually like their games despite themselves.

On the other hand, Barnes is a huge fan of Fucking Reef Encounter. So obviously he is quasi-retarded.

Pax is THE best tableau building game going, bar none.

The rule book is absolute shit. But the game itself is pretty darn simple to play. If only I could find a way to explain the Victory Check to novices that didn't make me sound like a mush mouthed idiot.

"Take the sum of the two lowest totals of the current active victory point and add 2 and if you have more VP then you are in the running to win but may lose due to money."

You see what I'm saying.

No excuse for the rules, but the game is amazing. Only thing that really doesn't work componentwise is glancing around the table at who is winning. But I can see that if you're smart you make a tracker for it.

Gary Sax wrote: No excuse for the rules, but the game is amazing. Only thing that really doesn't work componentwise is glancing around the table at who is winning. But I can see that if you're smart you make a tracker for it.

Please note the item in the upper right of that stack of stuff I brought to WBC. Makes it so much easier on the brain to keep track of what's going on.



The end of the board not shown has a tracker for each flavor of VP. I just need to find some meeples with sombreros to use for markers.

yeah, but you guys also dig the theme right? I'm just not sure I could get interested in what's going on narratively and for that kind of game I think I would need to. But I will definitely give it a try sometime, loads of people over here have it, but I appreciate the opinions (on both sides) here. The other thing is I quite like Race but probably would put Innovation as one of my favourite games, and there I can appreciate the mechanics and theme equally, so I'm not sure I need another card game really (but again a lot of people who I know also love Innovation rave about Pax too).

I'm going to give fucking reef encounter another go again tonight, the main reason it's on the shelf to be honest is because Tigris is one of the greatest games of all time, but fuck that game for 2 players, and FRE (best with 3), at least works OK with 2. It's such a long way down from Tigris with that kind of game (even though I think FRE has more in common with something like Acquire even- another awesome game thats totally not a 2P game).


What you lot like for deep 2P tile games with a bit of depth and meat? I've tried most of them I think, but interested to hear without prejudice of naming them what you would recommend. If you don't recognise Tigris as one of the greatest games of all time, we're probably not going to be on the same page though.

I dig FRE. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of interlocking shit going on, but I dig the lack of control. In my head, it's not so much strategic as tactical. "Okay, I've got this random assortment of bullshit tiles that are all in the wrong colors. What can I do RIGHT NOW that will make this situation suck a little less, preferably while screwing over everyone else?"

Is that one of your thongs in the pic on lower left?

I bet you'll say "No, it's a shoelace" when we all know your thong fetish thing but I have outed you now, you pole dancing pervoid.

repoman wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: No excuse for the rules, but the game is amazing. Only thing that really doesn't work componentwise is glancing around the table at who is winning. But I can see that if you're smart you make a tracker for it.

Please note the item in the upper right of that stack of stuff I brought to WBC. Makes it so much easier on the brain to keep track of what's going on.

The end of the board not shown has a tracker for each flavor of VP. I just need to find some meeples with sombreros to use for markers.

IMO many games are greatly improved with trackers. I want to expend my brain energy on thinking about the strategy or important decisions or the narrative, NOT on recounting a slew of numbers every turn.

Connected to this, I've been playing Innovation every night with my wife. It's a neat game, BUT the tracking is just absolutely, completely horrendous. There are...6 different categories of icon (I know, it's really more like four, given the time segmentation) where it is ESSENTIAL to keep track of the totals for you and your opponent, which both change, both up and down, every turn??? And not only that, but egregiously, there are frequently times where it's necessary to look at all the icons on the cards UNDERNEATH the cards, to see how those icon totals will change if you do this or that. The game sometimes arbitrarily makes you care about usually-nitpicky things (like, what do all the cards in my score pile do?). That all might be a dealbreaker to me. The possibility for overanalysis encourages a wing-it, "I'll play this card and see what happens, too hard to keep track of the opponent" approach, which I dislike.

I like how wild it is, though, it reminds me of Cube or Legacy (MTG, of course).

Repo, I'm the one who named it Fucking Reef Encounter. Zev never got around around to changing the boxes. That's a game I just do not get at all. Don't accuse me of liking it.

Pax is a St. Petersburg-style card-drafting/tableau game but with a bunch of complexity laid on top of it all that I don't think really makes it a compelling game. It's not really much fun, despite the high level of interaction and direct conflict. The theme does not help, I don't really care much about the subject matter so I just completely fail to engage with it. It's one thing when you don't care for the subject matter of a simpler, 45 minute game. It's nother when it's a pretty complicated 90-120 minute one. At that point, I need to be able to connect to it.

I am interested in Pax Renaissance (whatever it's going to be called) because I like that subject matter more. I would also be willing to take a look at this supposed overhaul that is coming out for Pax that is a complete graphic design redo from the ground up. That would probably help the game's case quite a lot.

One of the problem with Mr. Eklund's designs, across the board, is that he assumes that the player is as obsessively interested in the subject as he is. And that everyone understands the nightmare logic of how he presents information both in the rules and visually.

My main group has all but banned Eklund games. Every single time I've played one with them, it's completely crashed and burned. From that Pirate game he did a couple of years ago up to Pax. Kriegbot, High Frontier, Origin...all of them.

ThirstyMan wrote: Is that one of your thongs in the pic on lower left?

I bet you'll say "No, it's a shoelace" when we all know your thong fetish thing but I have outed you now, you pole dancing pervoid.

A brother has gotta earn a living somehow.

I almost never analyze what icons will be revealed if I do a splay in Innovation. The game is just too unhinged to plan that much I think. I also win a fair percentage of the time.

Fair point about tracking all the different icons that are showing though.

Speaking of Phil Eklund, somewhere in a storage box, I have a "game" that might be one of his earliest design efforts. Something about Sierra Madre, and I was never quite sure if it was a playable game or an incomplete prototype that accidentally found itself on a retail shop shelf. The production quality was crude, a random assortment of charts, rules, and sentences on heavy stock pastel paper. It seemed to conceptually exist in an odd space between a mid-'70s rpg and an underdeveloped wargame published in a magazine.

Shellhead wrote: Speaking of Phil Eklund, somewhere in a storage box, I have a "game" that might be one of his earliest design efforts. Something about Sierra Madre, and I was never quite sure if it was a playable game or an incomplete prototype that accidentally found itself on a retail shop shelf. The production quality was crude, a random assortment of charts, rules, and sentences on heavy stock pastel paper. It seemed to conceptually exist in an odd space between a mid-'70s rpg and an underdeveloped wargame published in a magazine.

Ha! Same here. One that seemed so promising.

Great post Dragonstout, I own and love Innovation too but that is what I *hate* about it.

Actually, Nations has some of this too for different reasons---another otherwise good game that really needed more tracking components.

Keep at it with Innovation, I do think it gets easier, and you get used to knowing which icons are important in which stages and having a feel for the counts you need. Or at least I do. Have you tried the online version? no need to track there but it can make F2F feel a bit sluggish. I tend to use the downtime on her turn to scan the icon count, and since I'm doing it each turn and seeing the cards played I mentally update, a lot of the time its obvious who is on top, and you play your cards with that in mind, like an attack based on factories for example. I never feel like I worry about accounting, but then my wife is quite a slowish player so maybe I have time to keep track, the Asmadi version is definitely cleaner and easier in that regard.


Agree on Eklund, he seems a bit of a dick at times but I think hes just manic and on the spectrum. He confuses complexity and chrome with "intelligence" a lot, like High Frontier is not really rocket science (ba da boom) - hilariously rocket science is one of the more straightforward sciences, the game itself isn't that hard, its the sheer amount of rules and terms (that are just stuff that rely on you being interested and reading up on) and the shit way its presented (like all his rulebooks), so it fucking annoys me when on his website he goes on about his games being for the "intelligent gamer", fuck that, its just for people who, as Barnesy says, are equally obsessed about the details of the game (and I mean, the roll of a fucking d6 plays a pretty big part in High Frontier. Hardly avant garde mechanics). Had a gander at "Greenland", looks interesting but again, its not like his game designs are "intelligent" or above anyone else (he couldnt sniff Knizia or Sacksons crack), he just adds shit loads of detail and chrome - which is OK by the way, but don't confuse that with you having designed some fucking amazing game design

which by the way, brings me nicely onto fucking reef encounter. It is a pretty amazing game, I just don't like it. I think tonight I got to the root of whats wrong for me, its not the lack of control or the overwhelmingness of it all, its just theres a disconnect between the interesting bit, which is the interplay between colour dominance, and their values, and the on board bit with the shrimp and the parrotfish, I actually think it would be a lot better game if he'd done away with the the fish, shrimps and "guarding" bollocks, and all the shit like needing a cube to play those tiles, and the 4 tile limit to add (plus the front of screen ones) and the shrimp blocking rules and the only eating at the start...It just leads to a much too cramped and limited style of play, nibbling, waiting, poking around, its just not got any balls, as it were.

he should have gone for a Sackson/Knizia design style instead

keep the interesting bit (the colour dominance board and tiles), open it onto a proper full size board (dont use it all for lower player counts), have players drawing tiles or auctioning for lots of tiles in groups, and then being able to just lay big wodges of tiles down on the board, picking up any and all tiles your played ones "eat", that being based on the colour dominance tiles, the cool bit being that, say theres a pile of white tiles on the board, you do some in game action to flip the dominance tile so now pink eats white for breakfast, then you lay a big pile of pink on that white and you take those white tiles as points. ONly they're worth less now cos you just made them pinks bitches. Keep the possibility to flip dominances on your turn, and lock them at some point, so you could then realise that your opponent might have a stash of orange behind his screen so you lock pink over orange so he cant just wade in and take it, maybe you could add some cuteness like how many same colour neighbours a tile has represents how many "attacking" tiles it takes to eat that space so these patches of colour bump uglies and swell and fall

Obviously thats hand waving and undeveloped and has about 0.1% or less merit than FRE, but I just feel like a more dynamic, swathing, "less limited" style more in line with Tigris, the greatest game of all time, would have worked better. Maybe I'm just trying to Tigrisify FRE and really all I'm saying is Tigris is way, way better than FRE, despite its clever design.