What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Another session with Hoodrats.

This time we threw in the Pills, Prostitutes, and Pimpslaps expansion. As it turns out, pimpin' ain't easy, but heading to Mal-Mart to get baking soda and pseudephedrine is. Managed to pull out the win by heading over to Mal-Mart 3 turns in a row and buying supplies. My lab exploded once so I had to hire another cook, but still, turning 2 Coke tokens into 4 crack tokens which can be sold anywhere (everyone loves crack) was awesome.

My hookers all got stolen by the wife, though, so I gave up on trying to be a pimp and stuck with the dealing and killing.

I'm still not sure that the girl meeples from Rampage are cool with being repurposed as cheap whores. Think I need to buy some pink meeples.

Also played Galaxy Defenders for the first time this weekend. got it in the big back to school math trade on BGG. I really like it, light enough to sit and BS around the board while still playing, but just alittle more going on with the characters and alien AI to keep it interesting. We played three player, Hulk, Marine, Sniper and random devices. we really messed up by not having any sort of healing on the board.

X-wing on friday, turning into a regular thing, having a matchup of xwing friday after work. tried a class wave 3 matchup, Imperial aces (two tie interceptors and vader) vs Firespray and a mini swarm. down to the wire, 2 hp left on the Firespray before vader bought it.

2nd matchup was some rebel aces fun. adding crew to the Bwings is pretty awesome. Gunner+HLC+FCS+Bwing/E2 is a ton of points, but point those babies at anything and watch it die. two of the above setups on Blue squadron pilots and a gold y-wing vs a classic howlrunner swarm. hang back at range 3 as well as possible and just chew 'em up and spit them out.

my first store tournament is next week. thinking loaded up whisper + 4 TIEs.

lj1983 wrote: Also played Galaxy Defenders for the first time this weekend. got it in the big back to school math trade on BGG. I really like it, light enough to sit and BS around the board while still playing, but just alittle more going on with the characters and alien AI to keep it interesting. We played three player, Hulk, Marine, Sniper and random devices. we really messed up by not having any sort of healing on the board..

Our table talk consisted of something along the lines of "Hey we got this won, we can't loose, this was pretty easy...wait the alien drags me where and that activates what And the...oh my god....noooooo!"

We played the second scenario which was significantly harder.

I liked it better than Omega Protocol and the D&D adventure games

Working my way through a turn of Lincoln's War in Vassal in preparation for a game with King Putt. Oddly enough they have a short scenario to showcase a round of combat, which may be the simplest part of the entire ruleset. (I managed to get Jeb Stuart killed off on the first round when the Union played the "Stuart is Late" card in a battle featuring only Stuart.)

A lot of moving parts, but everything is compartmentalized. I think we're going to need to screw up a turn or two to really get the hang of things.

This weekend's gaming:

Battle for Souls: got this in a math trade after hearing it talked up here. A great game despite the usual terrible Kickstarter rulebook (which includes a hilariously overwrought section on what to do if someone wants to backtrack on his turn). Reminiscent of Battle Line, but more thematic and fun, with a lot of nasty potential. Glad to have gotten ahold of this one.

Impulse: First play of this I wasn't that sure of it, but now with a second (2p) play of it I'm digging it a lot. Maybe it's different with more players, but I think the biggest mistake you can make with this game is going into it thinking it's 4X. It's not. There is not long-game strategy here; the action is deliberately fast and steep. In our first game neither of us every had any Plan cards; in the second game my Plan won it for me and we did no refining. In our first game ship combat ruled the day; in our second there wasn't a single fight, and instead we Sabotaged each other. It's not completely tactical, but you can't rely on seeing every action in every game. Eager to try it with more than two.

Valley of the Kings: continues to be a delight. I've yet to teach it to anyone who didn't like it.

Nations: A really weird session. A lot of high-famine event cards and hardly any blue buildings at all (at least half the rounds had exactly 1 blue building available for purchase). So food was extremely tight, which made everyone have to scramble for it. I felt like I was flailing around the whole time and was certain I'd lose bad, but ended up only 2pts away from the winner, as I think all of us kind of felt that way.

Cyclades: The game itself isn't bad, but holy shit, the endgame becomes Munchkin: the Boardgame. I had a shot at winning with getting two cities at once, but shitty die rolls kept one of them from happening. At that point we were in the situation where everyone had a shot, so each play was slapping at whoever you could currently stop. This went on for at least 40 tedious minutes until finally everyone had slapped as much as they could so whoever happened to be in position at that point won.

I finally got a chance to play my copy of Twilight Imperium 2nd Edition that I got in trade. It was a 4 player game and all of us were playing it for the first time. We all placed planet-bearing systems on the periphery such that there was a big ring of nothing around Mecatol Rex and most of the action took place on the edges. We settled in for a cold war where everyone used trade agreements to build up for several turns, with the odd skirmish here and there. The tension that built up as the last few planets were colonized was palpable, and I initiated hostilities by taking out one of my neighbor's systems with my +1 movement carrier fleet when I realized he hadn't noticed that I'd researched them.

Then hostilities broke out in earnest and it was glorious. The game does a great job of evoking the feeling of a galaxy-wide conflagration as we were all trading haymakers and trying to hit people where they were weakest. Two players basically cannibalized each other and it eventually came down to me and the other player for the win. Then the game turned into a game of Munchkin where he and I were thwarted a total of 5 times, I believe (me 3 times, him twice), by other players to keep us from winning. After the third time I was denied victory at about 12:30 AM we called the game.

It's an amazing game. It's got enough going on to be interesting strategically while not so complicated that you can't pick up the rules quickly (aside from a few corner cases, that is). I don't think I'd like to go any more simple and/or abstract like Impulse unless I was playing with casual gamers, especially after a few of them at the game night saw the setup and balked at the perceived complexity of the game.

Legomancer wrote:
Nations: A really weird session. A lot of high-famine event cards and hardly any blue buildings at all (at least half the rounds had exactly 1 blue building available for purchase). So food was extremely tight, which made everyone have to scramble for it. I felt like I was flailing around the whole time and was certain I'd lose bad, but ended up only 2pts away from the winner, as I think all of us kind of felt that way.

The game can go into really niche game state directions occasionally. I don't mind during the game because the next deal is just around the corner and maybe *it* has awesome buildings, but when you look back and no buildings came out... it feels like you spent a lot of time maximizing a very strange equation. And the more cards you have in the game, the more potential for unusual deals there is.

I got to try Xia this weekend but but have been struggling to get my thoughts onto paper.

La Granja is a really solid resource conversion game with Agricola-like development cards with Glory to Rome-like multiple uses and many places to score points, dice usage and tile tracks that are similar to Castles of Burgundy. So yes, there are a mish-mash of mechanisms from other games but they work together fine and are reasonably thematic. It feels and plays like a Feld game but you won't be scoring 200 points in this and so don't have all the marginal point calculations. The lifeblood of the game is the cards ability to let you craft a strategy between fulfilling contracts, extending your farm, increasing your income and getting special abilities that make the game come alive.

The game takes a little bit to get to grips with the flow of the game but comes together in a pretty easy to play manner and should play quite quickly with a little experience. The exception is the last round which gets slows as everyone carefully calculates exactly what they can deliver. I can see the game starting to feel a little repetitive over many games as you go through the same steps and your engine grows without much effort. This really depends on whether the cards have enough variety in them. I can't say as I didn't have time to look over them all.

By first impressions this is a fantastic medium-weight euro. It was supposed to be available at Spiel but I believe it is already sold out.

Sagrilarus wrote: I managed to get Jeb Stuart killed off on the first round when the Union played the "Stuart is Late" card in a battle featuring only Stuart.