What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I've become a bit jaded with new designs over the past year or so, so perhaps that effects my judgement of Sirlin's Pandante. A poker reworking themed on Pandas;

Its a bit like Texas holdem but with the betting notched down and the card play notched up. There are a few key twists;

You always bet 2 a turn, by raising you bet you will get a better set, i.e a four of a kind instead of the full house you bet last turn.

you can draw and discard a card each turn, but you have to pay if your bet is not highest.

This means essentially you bet that you will get a four of a kind, hoping know one else goes higher and then use the card draws in combo with the flop, turn and river to make that set.

The game has 6 suits each 1-10 and a joker. Combine this with the card turn over, and a special ability to add an extra post river card to the table and most games someone is going to get a really good hand.

Also when you call someones bluff, you just pay 5 if you get it wrong. In short this means its relatively low risk to call someones bluff.


The result is, this is a hand management game rather than really gambling. There is some bluff, but it basically boils down to making other players over bet their hand and failing to produce it, or making someone pay to stay in.

If you really like Poker you will probably hate this if you go in with poker expectations. Taken as a lighter (the rules are actually more complex) card game, its ok. It didn't really wow me, but i only played one two player game and i sucked at it.

we played shadow hunters. I split the roles up, but somehow mixed up which deck was the play deck and which was the extras. We ended up with 4 shadow and 2 hunters. well, at least it was fun winning.

Battlelore 2nd edition is good. Played to games the other day, and it's just better than the original in so many ways. Apart from it looking great, the main differences are the way scenarios are built, and the units.

Rather than setting up and playing a scenario, you pick your own mission (each army has a small set of possible ones) which also dictates the terrain on your side of the board. Then, after revealing, you build your army by spending muster points. It sounds slow and boring, but it really is neither.

The second big difference is the units. They all have cool special abilities, and some of them can be activated by what you roll. So for instance one unit can use a "hit" result to force a retreat instead. And the two armies included are very different, and even without the inevitable expansions there's a lot of replayability in it.

Yesterday I also got to play a couple of my own prototypes. Cults of Arkham is sort of a mix between Arkham Horror and Chaos in the Old World, and while I see stuff I want to change every time I play it, it's very much looking for a publisher. The other game is a dice game currently with a Fallout theme. It's entering the final development stage, I think, but on the other hand I've never seen it go as long as yesterday where we all played defensively. So more testing ahead to see if it was an acceptable fluke or a possible design flaw.

Played Fury of Dracula last night. Josh was the Count. He played a good game. Starting out in Galway of all places which was revealed on the second turn due to an event. He threw us for a loop by playing Hide before going to sea. We figured he embarked from Dublin which messed up our calculations as to where he came ashore.

We finally tracked him down in Northern Italy and the it was all about the violence. I, as Van Helsing was able to get to him in the late afternoon and brand a cross on his forehead with a crucifix. Drac got away before I could complete the job.

Night then fell.

The vampire sicked some wicked some gypsies on me who stole all my good stuff and left me a bag of junk. Then came the man himself. That night saw Van Helsing running for his life and hoping for his teammates to come to his aid.

It was on the coast of Spain with Drac 2 points from winning and Van Helsing at one health point that Doctor Seward, played by Al, finally arrived and put a steak through the undead's chest.

A great time playing a great game.

Escape From Hoth Campaign - X-Wing
We tore through this over the course of a week and it was quite excellent. Very good scenarios and FFG's team did a great job making the GR-75 the centerpiece.

Doing attack runs on the GR-75 is a hell of a lot of fun and adds a nice layer of strategy. This beast commands respect. Plan your maneuvers well because whatever this thing hits becomes space junk, friend or foe. So doing a head-on approach with your Ties is scary and getting into a really good position is trickier than you might think. Meanwhile, you're getting your ass shot off by escorts. Do you take out the escorts first or go for the primary target? Each mission is timed so you can't fuck around.

From the Rebel perspective there are also challenges because you generally want to stay in range of the transport while giving it a wide berth, simultaneously arranging good firing solutions. One of the funniest moments in the campaign - the GR-75 swung her stern into an undamaged Millennium Falcon. So you gotta watch that ass end too.

I lost an average of 1.33 fighters (to ramming) on each round. That might not sound too bad but in each instance they were factory fresh! Y-Wing with Ion Turrets are good escorts and they were making wreck of my Tie Bomber passes. I wanted to take them out bad but they have a shitload of soak power. Tie Phantoms were my MVP. Hot speed and fantastic ability to stay on a tight six feeding frenzy. For Rebels, the E-Wing was pretty sweet and anything with turrets a good choice. Skywalker and R2 were a nuisance, I made sure to fuck them up early on.

Scenario 2 was the best with Imperials coming in small waves from all angles and off map bombardment from capital ships and ground based Ion Cannons made it crazy chaos.

Played Clash of Cultures again last night with 2 players, me vs my wife. She never went heavy into military so I didn't press military much either other than to take out Barbarians and claim their settlements. I went into Trade Routes again (love Trade Routes) and went for Advances that helped me build up my cities and expand. I put an army or two in each city as I went, slowly pushing them towards my wife's cities just enough to keep the threat of military conquest alive to put a wrench in her planning. Near the end I had 5 cities sprawled across the little 2P map to her three cities. She held tight though and managed to build a Wonder near the end. Normally I don't go heavy at the Objective Cards but this time I managed to claim 5 or 6 of them due to not having to focus on military strength. I used Cultural Influence in the last two turns to swap a couple of her buildings for mine, which made the difference in points for the win. Took about 2 hours and I won by a measly three points.

Have a 4P game set up for Saturday. Can't wait.

Played our third game of Imperial last night, and the first game in which it felt like the game was opening up to us. We were more savvy about cash flow, getting into an "Acquire" mindset of valuing open cash and only buying bonds for explicit purposes. Four of the six countries changed ownership at least once (the two that didn't were on top of the power chart at the end; is that typical?). For the final half-hour one poor player (we were four) didn't have any country at all and I got the impression he didn't have much cash, either. Still very far from having a real good grip on the game, though; the power chart rankings at the end still feel very arbitrary (which is bad considering that they basically determine the final winner!), especially the breakpoints between 1x, 2x, 3x, etc., as well as simply the feeling like "if this country had one single more turn, it would be in a much higher position". Looking forward to playing it again next week!

Rowdy night last night. First was a game of Junta: Viva El Presidente (5p) which was fun, though it seemed like something was missing in the game. I have to play it again to figure out what's up. Then we played Cutthroat Caverns with 6p, which was a wild time full of backstabbery and laughs.

dragonstout wrote: For the final half-hour one poor player (we were four) didn't have any country at all and I got the impression he didn't have much cash, either.

Being without a country is not necessarily a disadvantage. Experience will show you.

Imperial 2030 introduces the Swiss Bank. If you don't have a country, you get the Swiss Bank token and you can force another player that is passing the investor space to stop there and force a payout. It's a really important change, and it's one you can implmement in "Old timey" Imperial pretty easily.