What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Legomancer wrote: This is the third game I've played, and Caroline has won each of them. I think she's overpowered and needs to be nerfed.

If you do in fact nerf her please draw a giant mole on her face or something to indicate so.

I hosted a Friday night game night. All together it was 9 of us so we broke into 2 groups. Unfortunately, I couldn't clone myself because I wish I could have played in both group. We started out with 2 games Coconuts (my game of the year 2014), next up 1 group played a close game Mansions of Madness - Sign in Yellow and Thunder Road while 5 of us played Struggle of Empires. I ended up winning a close game of Struggle of Empires by making sure I took government reform 3 turns in row and ended up with 7 unrest vs. 8 and 9 for the top 2 players in unrest. We finished up with a 9 player game of Shadow Hunters. Shadows won thanks to having the Unknown staying hidden most of the game and the Shadow revealing himself and taking 3 turns in row while possessing a machine gun and hand gun.

Played Evolution last night with four players, twice. Everyone really liked it. I liked that the carnivore route is trickier than the herbivore route and can really backfire on you. In the first game I went straight herbivore and finished second. The second game was tighter; I came in second, but only barely, and a foolish last-round play of mine (starting a 4th species instead of beefing up my existing ones; the 4th one died right away) possibly cost me the game. It's well-designed, fun, and has a lot of different things going on. The guy who won both games got some great card combos going.

Last week I played a convention copy of Evolution twice. Really enjoyed the first play, and mostly enjoyed the second. There are ways that it can be fun and not fun, and I do question its long-term replayability with gamers. Still, I think it's a cool intro game for nongamers, and everyone should try it at least once. I would trade for a copy, but (for now) it isn't a purchase.

One rule that we screwed up is that, when a species goes extinct and its cards are discarded, its owner gets to draw cards equal to the number of discarded trait cards. That rule makes species extinction much more forgiving.

Last weekend at a local con I picked up a bunch of train games for between $2-5 each, not sure if I'd be trading or playing them, but figured either way it'd be worth it. In those was the 1982 edition of Empire Builder, which I got to the table last night. Three new players and it took us maybe 3.5 hours to finish, which is pretty close to par, and this edition only had 1 player aid included, which is kind of mandatory. I really dug this. We put on Destroy All Monsters and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows and had dinner and played this fairly non-competitive route-race game. Thoughtfal but not so much that it demands your attention, turns could take a few minutes sometimes but a few seconds others, and it was very fun puzzling out how to link up deliveries in a way that you weren't being inefficient. I totally get the appeal of this system and am glad that a few of the games I picked up were from this series. Hopefully we have some more 3p game nights because this would never make the cut for a 2 or 4 player gamer's game for me.

After this we played a game of Bottle Imp to 300 points. For those unfamiliar this is a very odd and somewhat complex (in strategy) trick taking game for 3 or 4, but exceptional with 3. The short description is there are 3 suits in a deck of cards numbered 1-37, the 19 is removed from play and is the "bottle price". To take a trick, if all cards played are above the bottle price, the highest card wins the trick. If any cards played are below the bottle price, the highest card BELOW the bottle price takes the trick, the bottle, and that becomes the new bottle price. If you end the hand with the bottle you score a small amount of negative points, while your opponents score positive. This is a really clever game, the strategy of what to play and when seems incomprehensible sometimes, but I was able to play an insane hand sticking one player with no tricks and the other with the bottle, that put me about 50 points in the lead and I won after being last for the first part of the game. Very fun, possibly the best 3p trick taker.

Got in another game night with the same folks +1. While waiting for our 4th we got in a game of Race for the Galaxy. I really don't get to play this enough. One player ran away with it, I came in dead last with 21 points.

After this we dived into a 4p learning game of Planet Steam. I'd read the rules previously, and I was really confidant this sort of heavy economic market game would work with these folks, but it REALLY took a minute to get going. This is a heavy game with a lot of stuff going on. Generally I prefer to learn a game through playing it, I can usually grasp how it plays and basic strategy after a round, in this game it took me 3 (of 5) turns to get my head around it. Despite this we were having a fun time joking about how we were bumbling through this game, and my score of 675 was bested by 20 freakin dollars! Pretty fun ending and by the end of the game we were enjoying it. I'm really looking forward to going at this again now that these folks know the rules. If you're into heavy economic games you might want to grab it from the FFG sale, if you're not into that sort of game you should absolutely pass.

That took a good chunk of the night, to unwind a bit we played a few games of The Hobbit The Card Game by Martin Wallace and FFG. This is a trick taking game that's played in one or two hands. It's in the all vs one format, with 4 (imo the best number) the players are Bilbo, Ghandalf, Thorin, and Smaug. There are several ways each side can win, it's a really unique trick taking game. It almost always ends on the first hand, so it literally takes 5 mins to play and I find it to be way more fun than stuff like Love Letter. We played three games and I was the only Smaug victory!

We finished the night with one game of Good Cop, Bad Cop. This is a new hidden role game that crosses Bang with Cash & Guns while playing in ten minutes. Four is the minimum player count so I wasn't sure how it'd go but it seemed fine. The concept is you have three loyalty cards and whichever side you have majority in determine if you're the good cop or the bad cop. You can look at people's cards, reveal your cards to draw action cards, and point guns at people. I'm going to need a bunch more plays of this to figure it out, but the first few plays at four and five have been good.

Movie playlist included Hell Comes to Frogtown, Escape From The Bronx, and 1990: The Bronx Warriors.

Played a 4 and then a 3 player game of my prototype last night, which highlighted many things needing improvement, so it was very productive. It's also a fun game, which is of course great.

Then had a 3 player game of Neuroshima Hex!, with Neo Jungle vs. Hegemony vs. New York. I was Hegemony (my favorite army) and had a very poor shuffle early on. Ultimately the game was boring because we had bad mixes of units coming out and I think when you have too many melee-based units the game suffers. I think ideally you should only have one melee-focused army in a 2 or 3 player game, increasing that to two in a 4 player game.

clash of cultures: civilizations 2 player Vikings vs Phoenicians. Does the expansion hugely change the game? Not really, but the civs definitely add some great flavor. Vikes and Phoenicians both get a special start tile with water on it, and the Vikings have a tech that allows them to change land units to boats and vice versa. Combine that with their leader "Erik the red". Who allows land units on board ships to land as a free action and there was no safety along the coasts. My normal habit of leaving a couple units in the rear for emergencies while the rest of the army is out campaigning didn't really work. He was able to pretty consistently threaten my home cities, and escape from my armies enough times that I ended up having to station large armies in all my cities to defend from random Viking incursions.

Elephants and cavalry are nice, and a good way of injecting some strength with the small stacking limit, but are fairly minor compared to the civs. The civs do increase the difficulty of teaching the game to new people, just with different rules/ability interactions with each civ specific advance.

It was funny that for a turn or two the barbarians had the most 'advanced' armies on the field, with cav and elephants vs our infantry only armies.


Must buy if you love clash, not if you don't.

Got in a 2-player game of Relic, Callidus Assassin vs Ogryn. We played with Corruptis, the demon lord who makes you draw Corruption whenever you have an Omen symbol on a Threat card and have less than 4 Corruption cards. The Callidus decided to jump right up to the Inner level and try to finish her mission, counting on her auto-evasion to get her through. That didn't work so well, as the Ogryn jumped ahead in terms of level and gear quite quickly. However, the assassin made good progress later in the game and finishing that early Mission led to both of them scoring a relic at the same time and entering the top level on top of each other. However, the Ogryn was better prepared and skipped three spaces while the Callidus started from the bottom. Failing the Willpower space and getting two more Corruption ended the game for the assassin and handed it to the Ogryn.

We followed that with two games of Confusion, which is still one of the best two players I own. I won the first game by letting my opponent carry the briefcase right to my back row... with the Double Agent. I think I put up just enough of a fight to not raise suspicions. I won the second game on a quick "queening" of my 4-move guy and could then wreak havoc on the side of his board where all of his diagonal-only moving pieces were.

Confusion is an amazing game. Pure brilliance. It's pretty much overlooked though.