What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

ratpfink wrote: Local meetup group had an "Epic Game Day" [...]

I like 2p Android for the sole reason that it keeps the game length in check. I like long games, but Android is one that suffers if it takes all day.

I can completely sympathize with the Clash of Cultures complaint. My only encouraging words are that with repeated play all those little advancement bonuses become second nature. It's a LOT to take on but experience gets you over the hump. I've also found, having played CoC a bunch, that I can key some of my attention in on the really important advances and help new players remember to use theirs when they apply. So if your only hangup is the advancement sheet then I say stick with it, but if you're not already having fun then thorough knowledge of the advancements probably won't change that.

Attack Wing tourney last night! The mission was crap, basically attack each other but if you got too close to the edge of the board then you get the attention of The Borg and you take a counter off your card...These counters are worth extra points at the end of the game.

I ended up brining a Super-Cube flew by Piccard - My blind ship was a Kazon ship which actually was a pretty stout one. I outfitted The Cube with Borg Missiles and Positron Beams, both of which drop Auxiliary Power Tokens onto ships causing them to lose their Action Phase. The Action Phase is where you activate a lot of skills and abilities that help modify dice or provide other perks so as the meta-game has shifted towards Decked-Out Dreadnaughts with Action Efficiency causing one to lose their action phase causes them to loose about have of the points they spent on the ship.

My first game was against a Voyager-Dreadnaught, ship pure. After a hit with the Borg Missiles then dropping three Positron Beams the start of the next turn it went down quick. Next game was against an Enterprise-E and Voyager but fewer upgrades. This guy had me down to just a handful of hull points left before I finished him off. Paying for the extra armor on the cube is what gave me the win. The last game was against one of the newer players, he has a Vulcan Ship and Enterprise-E. I focused on the other ships after dropping Aux Tokens on the E. 3-0 for me this time.

Me and the guy I've been playing in the second round have been playing some pickup games before or after the event and last night we played The Next Generation mission where Data is kidnapped and an Away Team is sent down to the planet to look for him. Meanwhile the Enterprise D and a The Borg Soong is having a battle in orbit around the planet.

At the end of every turn the Federation Player rolls a dice per member of the Away Team, for every Critical Roll you pull a Mission Token from the planet indicating that they are closer to finding Data. Once the 8th Mission Token is pulled the Away Team needs to be beamed back and then the ship leave the play area before being destroyed.

We played this mission twice, swapping sides. The frustrating part of the mission is that it all hinges on those planet dice rolls. And both of us couldn't roll our crits. I managed to evade long enough to find Data, beam him aboard, but the turn before I would have escaped the map, I was blown up.

After we flipped sides, I managed to strip his Enterprise of a lot of his upgrades but unable to get a shot on him. Eventually I managed to position myself behind him just before he got the last token and blew up the Enterprise. In both games if we would have rolled the crits needed just one turn sooner we both would have one as the Federation. As it stood, our Red Shirts were worthless and because of their lack of ability hundreds of Federation lives were lost.

Not sure where I was at when I last posted.

Recently though, did SPI's Sorcerer, Fire in the Lake, Ancient Conquest, and Megacorps.
All on vid for the insomniacs out there.

Tired of putting stuff up on BGG, so you'll find 'em either right on youturd
or (sorted by era/genre) at thegamebox.gamesontables.com/index.php?board=12.0

VonTush wrote: Attack Wing tourney last night! The mission was crap, basically attack each other but if you got too close to the edge of the board then you get the attention of The Borg and you take a counter off your card...These counters are worth extra points at the end of the game.

I ended up brining a Super-Cube flew by Piccard - My blind ship was a Kazon ship which actually was a pretty stout one. I outfitted The Cube with Borg Missiles and Positron Beams, both of which drop Auxiliary Power Tokens onto ships causing them to lose their Action Phase. The Action Phase is where you activate a lot of skills and abilities that help modify dice or provide other perks so as the meta-game has shifted towards Decked-Out Dreadnaughts with Action Efficiency causing one to lose their action phase causes them to loose about have of the points they spent on the ship.

My first game was against a Voyager-Dreadnaught, ship pure. After a hit with the Borg Missiles then dropping three Positron Beams the start of the next turn it went down quick. Next game was against an Enterprise-E and Voyager but fewer upgrades. This guy had me down to just a handful of hull points left before I finished him off. Paying for the extra armor on the cube is what gave me the win. The last game was against one of the newer players, he has a Vulcan Ship and Enterprise-E. I focused on the other ships after dropping Aux Tokens on the E. 3-0 for me this time.

Me and the guy I've been playing in the second round have been playing some pickup games before or after the event and last night we played The Next Generation mission where Data is kidnapped and an Away Team is sent down to the planet to look for him. Meanwhile the Enterprise D and a The Borg Soong is having a battle in orbit around the planet.

At the end of every turn the Federation Player rolls a dice per member of the Away Team, for every Critical Roll you pull a Mission Token from the planet indicating that they are closer to finding Data. Once the 8th Mission Token is pulled the Away Team needs to be beamed back and then the ship leave the play area before being destroyed.

We played this mission twice, swapping sides. The frustrating part of the mission is that it all hinges on those planet dice rolls. And both of us couldn't roll our crits. I managed to evade long enough to find Data, beam him aboard, but the turn before I would have escaped the map, I was blown up.

After we flipped sides, I managed to strip his Enterprise of a lot of his upgrades but unable to get a shot on him. Eventually I managed to position myself behind him just before he got the last token and blew up the Enterprise. In both games if we would have rolled the crits needed just one turn sooner we both would have one as the Federation. As it stood, our Red Shirts were worthless and because of their lack of ability hundreds of Federation lives were lost.

.

I don't play attack wing. What's the scoop on the random ship thing? Do they sell random boosters or is it just for the OP events?

The random boosters are just for the OP events. There's a block of 10 (2 each of 5 ships) that comes with the scenario kit.
The current setup is you build a 90 point fleet and then have to build a 30 point ship from the random booster.

X-Wing day at the game club. Started off with a free for all to teach/refresh the rules then a modified scenario with the Rebel corvette with shields down and no maneuvers for two turns. Much death on both sides with the Rebels winning a close victory.

So, I got into a meetup last Saturday, lasting from 2-11PM.

First, by request of the host I was asked to learn (from the rulebook) and teach Takenoko. Fun little medium game. Surprisingly random. 4 players, all newbies, 2 completely new to boardgaming. It went very well.

Then we got to played Pandemic. It's always fun (for me) to play this one. 4 players, introductory difficulty (everyone but me are newbies) and we won (unsurprisingly).

Then we tried Galaxy Defenders. Fun game, good ideas, a lot like Descent but with full AI. AI is funky and gamey. Tactical component is, like Descent, rather pedestrian. But I think the game's more frequent ranged attack even make it more so. Best played as a campaign. We finished the objective but 2 out of 4 agents were killed, so it was a failure.

Next we played Heroes Wanted. What a misleading game. Funny theme but calculating as hell. The one card per action rule makes it very restrictive and you have to plan 2-3 turns ahead.

For a cool down we played Kingdom Builder. I had the pleasure of playing with a friend who *gets* this game. It's priceless.

Then we tried Imperial Settlers. AMAZING game. Truly a Civilization game, with the snowballing effect. Can be very interactive, unbalanced (it's good in this game!), and everyone had fun even when losing since the building aspect itself is very, very fun.

Great time, great games, great host. Had a talk with the host after everyone else got home about opening a club. Arrived at home 1AM in the morning.

Saturday, I attended an all-day costume party that was about 50/50 boardgames/party. I was actually hoping for more party than boardgames, so I wore a costume that included out-dated contact lenses. This left me unable to easily read small print fonts, and eventually dim lighting rendered me nearly illiterate.

First up was a 3-player game of No Thanks that the owner had re-themed to be about infectious diseases. The theme matched up okay with the minimalistic rule set, but it felt very light and not very interesting. At some point, I decided to just go for it and grab any reasonably low value card in hopes of stringing together sets and reducing my point total. It almost worked, but the remaining gaps still left me devastated and losing by a wide margin. As a light filler, it didn't suck. I still would rather just talk to people than play it ever again.

Since it was a Halloween party, I managed to talk the same players into a 3-player game of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It was an unremarkable session aside from a very short endgame. The funny part was the theme of this particular scenario, involving a mad fiddler compelling us to dance until we die. At the same time that we were playing the host was trying to get enough people from his latin dance group to show up to do some dancing. So he and two other people sat around waiting for dancers while we played a scenario about dancing.

Then a fourth guy showed up and whipped out Five Tribes with a heavy sales pitch about how it was the best new game that he had played this year. By the time he was finished explaining the rules, I knew that I wouldn't like anything about the game, which was really more of a set of arbitrary and boring procedures that would yield victory points. So I bailed just before they started the game. After their game was over, I talked to the other two players, and they confirmed my perception of dullness. One gamer was meh, and the other guy, a hardcore euro player, found Five Tribes to be completely lacking in fun. Barnes and Charlest must have guzzled down a lot of the new Kool-Aid when they played.

Finally, I rounded up a full six-player game of Slasher: the Final Cut. It's a flawed but very thematic game about a slasher and some victims running about a small house. On your turn, you play a scene card (Diane finds a clue, or the Slasher attacks Bob with a chainsaw) and then everybody gets a chance to play a plot twist that modifies the scene. If one player gets enough clue tokens, he or she takes over playing the Slasher and now the other victims can fight back against the Slasher. Most players were unfamiliar with the game, and the game kept dragging due to the host wandering away for hosting duties, which interrupted each turn instead of just his own. The game attracted several watchers, a couple of which subbed in as players dropped out to party. A focused and experienced group could have played in two hours, but this game took 3.5 hours. This game ended when the Slasher finally killed the last victim.

Sunday, I hosted a day of AmeriTrash games, focusing on games with horror themes. F:AT's own Wadenels and his wife showed up for the first two games. They also brought the legendary Gothic Game, but time slipped away and we didn't get it on the table. Next time, for sure.

First, we played a huge game of Arkham Horror, with nine players. Yeah, I know that 8 is the limit, but we were playing with all the expansion boards, so I rationalized that it was like playing with 7 in terms of game balance. We played with Glaaki, the Lurker at the Threshold and Bast. Two of the players were kids, though intelligent, so the game took longer than usual. It ended up being a long but easy game, and everybody had fun despite the lack of extreme danger. We won with six seals, with Glaaki stuck at 3 on the Doom Factor. We got super-lucky with the placement of seals and the availability of Elder Signs.

Then I talked everybody into playing Slasher Flick: the Revenge of the Bogeyman, with ten players. This obscure piece of AmeriTrash was only published as in insert to Fantasy Gamer #1 (Steve Jackson) in 1981. Thirteen victims run around 13 locations on a map, hooking up for vp while running from and/or fighting with the Slasher. The theme is well-executed, but the game is fundamentally unbalanced in favor of the victims. The Slasher should probably get twice as many VP for killing victims, and that was even after we toned down the rules for the Charmed victims (-1 to hit instead of taking minimum damage from the Slasher's attacks). We played two hours and then the victims cashed in on their big VP lead by fleeing the map. Even with the vp penalty for early departure, the victims still won by a decent margin.

At the end, we played 4-player game of Fury of Dracula (FFG). Normal but entertaining game, nothing remarkable. Dracula won.

Slasher Flick was a lot of fun. I think a couple tweaks could balance it more but in the end the points are really secondary to the narrative, and my wife and I are still talking about it today. The "scene" concept is great.