What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played Sun of York for the first time today and I have to say it was more than a bit disappointing.

The biggest disappointment is that the main combat mechanism makes no sense to me. The game is very similar to Pocket Battles in that there are three rows (Rear-Middle-Rear) divided into three columns (Left-Middle-Right). When combat units fight they take hits equal to the amount of successes rolled on combat die. Each hit means the unit must pass a moral check or run away in which case the hits are cleared and the unit takes no damage. If however the unit passes all the morale checks those hits are not cleared but are converted into damage to the unit.

Now if the fighting is taking place in your opponents back area it sort of makes sense because routing units who flee from the rear row and thus off the field are eliminated.

If however fighting takes place in the middle it gets weird. If I do enough hits to a unit to eliminate it, all well and good. But, if I get a lot of hits on a particular unit but don't kill it outright, I have actually increased the odds of it taking no damage. Say a unit can take 4 points of damage and I deal 3 hits. If it fails any one of the 3 morale checks it flees unscathed and damage is removed.

So it turns into an all or nothing affair. If I can't deal enough hits to kill it outright (deal more hits than the unit has health) then I want to deal the bare minimum to increase the chances that the unit will PASS it's morale checks and thus be injured.

Does that seem right to you?

My other complaints are minor in comparison. Stupid errors like the title of the game being "Sun" of York and not "Son", the usual half baked rule book, poorly chosen terms for game concepts like "battle" which in this game means a particular column but could mean the conflict represented by the scenario or the combat between units in a space.

And why is there no play mat or board? Even if you made one of paper? It would help immensely.

This game gets the "Repo slow head shake of Scorn"

repoman wrote: Stupid errors like the title of the game being "Sun" of York and not "Son"

I don't know from wargames, but this is a Shakespeare reference. First line of Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this sun of York"

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Played a good game of Battle Merchants last night. I was playing against two newbs and only won by 2 points.

There are two "dig through the discard pile and grab a card" cards in the game that I'm thinking of ditching. I've come to despise that mechanism, though it helped me win the game.

Legomancer wrote:

repoman wrote: There are two "dig through the discard pile and grab a card" cards in the game that I'm thinking of ditching. I've come to despise that mechanism, though it helped me win the game.

Yes, I hate these cards. Twilight Struggle has at least one of them (The Kennedy Card) and if it wouldn't screw with the ops balance, I'd consider throwing them out. Worse is look through the deck for a card you like and then reshuffle, though I don't see those often.

I hate those kinds of cards like poison but I know why I hate them, two reasons:

1) I already suffer from AP a bit so when I trigger one of those types of effects, it takes me forever.

2) It is clearly done to reward good players. It is a MAJOR decision point in a game and good players can get the card that helps their situation the most and bad players will miss this opportunity and it will impact the game. Knowing this adds so much pressure to the selection of the card that it makes reason #1 even worse for me

Broke out ROBINSON CRUSOE last night for some runthrough of the rules. I got the little comic book thing and used that. Setup was fine, but there are a lot of things scattered about and it's not always obvious which ones are for which rules/moments.

I got the hang of the phases and was doing OK for a couple of turns, but then I rolled four failures in five attempts at various actions and things went sideways. Had a Frost event in the first round with weather (adds a snow) and then rolled two more snows, with three clouds. Given the earlier failures, all I had was a shelter with Palisade+1. So... Yeah, I got wrecked. Saw my five woods disappear, ran out of food, took two morale hits with my pile of wounds. Not the best month ever on a deserted island.

It was fun though. The game plays tight.

It's amazing how fast things can go downhill in Crusoe.

Last night, I taught Dream Factory/Traumfabrik to my wife and mom-in-law. I figured it's a really simple auction game that I've had good luck with before, so what could go wrong? Apparently my mom-in-law had a hard time grasping the rules, and managed to get serious AP going when trying to decide if she should raise the current bid by $1. Seriously, even when she'd bid earlier in the auction round and the bidding came back to her $1 higher than what she'd bid, it was "umm...hmmm" time for 30 seconds or so. It was pretty awful, and I really wanted to just abort the game.

Crusoe has legs, I came back to it a month ago and played it like 4 times in a row solo. And that was all just scenario 1. I've only tried a few of the other scenarios a couple of times, they prioritize completely different activity. The intro scenario is all about weather and surplus production. Neither of which are a big deal in many of the other setups.

Legomancer wrote:

repoman wrote: Stupid errors like the title of the game being "Sun" of York and not "Son"

I don't know from wargames, but this is a Shakespeare reference. First line of Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this sun of York"

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Yes, it is a Shakespeare quote but it is misquoted. The proper quote is below:

Richard:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Richard The Third Act 1, scene 1, 1–4

I have no stake in the matter one way or the other, but all the reputable-looking sites that purport to carry the entire original text seem to use "sun of York"...

just checked my copy. Alas, it is Sun.