What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

We did the "Get Solid with 4 / Misbehave+ / Misbehave+" scenario. Started at 3, ended at 6:30, with basically no breaks. There's a little bit of a learning curve, on both the rules and the ship's crews.

After writing that up, I looked back the end of the game. Of the 4 players, 2 were neck-and-neck, and I was a step behind. I needed some decent die rolls to win, that I didn't get. That wasn't sound strategy on my part, but the alternative was, "Spend two turns running to X to get useful gear, and lose." The first game we played ended up like that too: 2nd and 3rd were on the winnner's tail. So we're looking at a 2-3 hour game, with a metric shit-ton of events, and it comes down to the wire. I'm not sure if you can ask more from a game.

Had the absolute worst game ever of Arkham Horror the other day, one that at least briefly made me reconsider my valuation of the game and the various Lovecraftian alternatives to it (Elder Sign and Witch of Salem, both of which I own and like, and Eldritch Horror, which I've shied away from out of fear that it would either replace or be redundant with AH). My wife and I hosted two new people, both of whom are fairly experienced board gamers (and gamers in general) but new to AH. The stars were probably not right, as we didn't get started till 4 p.m. (after a game of Castle Ravenloft -- and AH should never be the second game of the day for new players), and one of the guests was already pretty tired. But the chief problem was that we ran into the dreaded midgame slowdown that I had yet to experience. We'd been playing extremely efficiently despite having Cthulhu as the GOO, and had closed and sealed 4 gates, but then we just couldn't finish it. If we'd been fresher, we probably could've won fairly easily, but we were a bit worn out and fell into the trap of trying the same approach repeatedly instead of a different approach. The silly thing was that we had a character with five clue tokens and one with an Elder Sign item, and we still couldn't seem to get them all the way through one or another Other World to end the game. We weren't all that close to the final battle, either, with the Mythos cards fairly regularly either turning up sealed gates (we were playing base game without bursts) or locations with already sealed gates. Some of the characters also had piles of monster trophies, which should've been turned in for more clues, but we just glitched on that. We ended up calling it around 9:30. I almost left it set up to finish but didn't. Anyway, I'll chalk it up to fatigue, groupthink, and inexperience on some players' parts.

The Ravenloft game reminded me how good that game is. Wish WotC would've done a bit more to tie the system together and avoid the power-level imbalances that make smooth integration less possible. Adding a fourth base set isn't really going to help that, I don't think.

Not a board game, but we tried Fiasco for the first time. It was hilarious and I'd definitely be up for it again. The story involved drugs, hazardous chemicals, and polar bear maulings.

After that we played 3 Dragon Ante, which was okay, but not really the kind of game I prefer.

Beasty Bar: Playing the shit out of this. Love this card game. Love it!
Talisman: Using special rules to make things a little different
- Must have 4 completed Quests to gain a Talisman (at least, via the Warlock)
- Ice Queen ending
- Party Mode: Each player uses 2 people, can trade between them as a character encounter, and if they're on the same space they can combine Str or Cra against an enemy on that space (or the Sentinel, or the Portal); player can choose which character to move BEFORE the movement roll.

Rampage: Introduced my 6 year old to this. Yes, the REAL Rampage, not the fake ass re-branded one. Because monsters don't perform Terror attacks In Meeple City, they fucking RAMPAGE.

Nuclear War: Not nearly as much fun as I remember, but still OK. 2 Player really sucks.

Stone Age: Introduced my 13 year old and she wanted to play it a second time right after the first. I made her smell the cup, because I'm fucking evil. She said it smelled like chemicals. The transformation has begun.

Opened up Space Cadets Dice Duel but sadly my wife decided to go to our friend's bar so I couldn't get 4 players going.

@JPAT: Eldritch Horror will aBsOlUtElY replace AH. I couldn't ever envision going back to AH, especially now that they're making really good expansions for it.

jpat, just reading that made me relive what I dislike about AH. I've had a game or two like that and it's brutal.

There is a "fuck it" point in ARKHAM HORROR you should try to embrace. This is when I try to become sheriff. If you are playing with me and see me head to the Police Station, you should probably start packing up because I gave up and will be spending the rest of the game rolling around town in my cruiser shooting at Mi-Go pinatas.

Jeb, the thing that drives me crazy about Arkham Horror is that all of those awesome things, like joining the Silver Twilight Lodge and becoming Sheriff stand counter to doing what you have to do to win. In some ways the best game of Arkham Horror I ever had was my first, when I was too stupid to know what to do with it and how to play well, and I just went around and did goofy stuff. I'm sure the other players hated me, but it never was that fun after that.

I loved Arkham.. it was my favorite game for awhile. But after playing it a few too many times I kind of wished someone else would run it for me and I could just sit back and fuck around. There are a lot of good ideas in that game.. too many in fact and it bogs it down. But I think that as an app it would be killer. I'd play it on the iPad in a hearbeat... Elder Sign never really satisfied like that in app form. It just felt too abstract to me.

From time to time, I have pondered making a big homebrew Dreamlands expansion for Arkham Horror. I wanted to make a big Dreamlands board, and also use the existing Kingsport board for waking world stuff. One idea that I've had was to make this expansion focus more of a competitive game based on personal stories. Each character has an individual hope or fear crossing over into dreams or nightmares, and the winner is the first person to resolve his story successfully.

You could potentially play Arkham Horror the same way. An easy way would be to separate out those scavenger hunt cards from the Unique and Common item decks and randomly deal a couple out to each player. First one to resolve all of their cards would win. Alternatively, you make more customized cards. Maybe the politician wants to become sheriff, or the sailor needs to confront his heritage in Innsmouth, or the actress starts with a random insanity card and needs to get rid of it. This could give players a chance to interact with less commonly-used locations in Arkham and the other towns.

Just to clarify, in both cases, the usual gate and monster spawning would still be happening, but it would merely serve as a threat timer for the gamelength.

A friend of mine recently got his copy of Cthulhu Wars. And after our third player cancelled on us two weeks in a row, we decided to just do a two-player game to try it out. Unfortunately, two player is just each person controlling two factions, which didn't work well at all. The game just breaks when you have two factions working together as one, especially since you take your actions at the same time.

That problem aside, I can see it being pretty fun with 4 people. Not $150-$200 fun though. It is pretty similar to Chaos in the Old World, so I don't really think you need both. I'll report back when we get a real game played.

It's over-produced like crazy, but it's pretty to look at.

Those minis actually look pretty silly in a DOAM.

Went to a public gaming night last night. Played the following:

Court of the Medici - This is a game I bring with me to public gaming events now. Great game. I got a lucky 25-17 win by using my final card -- a 15 -- to create a conspiracy that brought down a mixed alliance of 30 that heavily favoured my opponent. (That will mean nothing to any of you but, trust me, it was a lucky win.) The guy I played with (Bixby from BGG) is also a fan of the game and, like me, gets more impressed with its subtleties the more we play it.

Roll for the Galaxy - Like Race for the Galaxy, it takes a simple game and makes it overly convoluted with symbology and exceptions to keep track of. Still, the game moves at a good clip and is enjoyable. Two people at my table had a very hard time wrapping their heads around how the dice assignment worked (though one of them squeaked out the win over me with the final action, so maybe he was playing possum) which made the game take a lot longer than I think it would under normal circumstances. I think I might like it more than the card game, though that admittedly might just be because I got to shake dice in a plastic cup.

Carcassonne - I entered a charity tournament in which we start with the base game and an expansion is introduced each subsequent game. By the final it should be a mess of expansion junk thrown in. (I've only ever played either vanilla or with the river.) I came in last place at my table. I couldn't remember how some of the scoring worked (meeples in the fields; cities) so wasn't putting much thought into what I was doing with my meeples.

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation - My deluxe edition has languished on my shelf, collecting dust since 2008. I decided I was doing myself a disservice so brought it along. BGG Bixby and I did the recommendation in the rulebook -- played back-to-back games, swapping factions, and counting the number of characters the victor has left standing each game to determine a winner. We each won as the forces of Sauron by killing Frodo, but I got the tie-breaker 4-3 for surviving characters.

Cthulhu Wars looks pretty neat. I think my friend bought it; we'll have to get it to the table soon.

I'm so unsure on Roll for the Galaxy. I liked Race, but it felt very Military dependent. This appears to take a confusing game and make it even tougher. I can't fathom teaching either. But I do love dice so I may just suck it up. I think I'd like to try before I buy.

I regret getting rid of Court of the Medici. They need to reprint that SOB.

stormseeker75 wrote: I'm so unsure on Roll for the Galaxy. I liked Race, but it felt very Military dependent. This appears to take a confusing game and make it even tougher. I can't fathom teaching either. But I do love dice so I may just suck it up. I think I'd like to try before I buy.

I regret getting rid of Court of the Medici. They need to reprint that SOB.

You felt base Race was too military dependent? General consensus (including designers) is that military was too weak in the base game so the expansions fleshed it out and made it more viable.

stormseeker75 wrote: I'm so unsure on Roll for the Galaxy. I liked Race, but it felt very Military dependent. This appears to take a confusing game and make it even tougher. I can't fathom teaching either. But I do love dice so I may just suck it up. I think I'd like to try before I buy.

I regret getting rid of Court of the Medici. They need to reprint that SOB.

You can have mine, I absolutely despise it.