What Board Game have you been playing? ARCHIVE

Soloed Pathfinder ACG this weekend. Having a great time with it. I'll have a full report tomorrow, but I'm really glad I got this one.

Played a bunch of games yesterday but the highlight for me was GW The Fury of Dracula. I was Dracula. All I wanted to do was spread corruption and advance vampiric culture in Europe. Was that really to much to ask?

Three hunters thought it was. Dracula managed to elude them for about the first quarter of the game, but didn't manage to drop many new Vampires at first. Soon the hunters closed in on the fair Count and they stayed one step behind his Grace for the rest of the game, slaughtering his newly risen Vampires with stake or knife at every turn. Eventually, cornered in Eastern Europe, Dracula set to sea. But a dastardly storm forced him to port in Athens where he was slaughtered with a stake through the heart by Professor Van Helsing, who smells bad, wears unfashionable garments, keeps a horrid hair style, and isn't any fun at parties anyway.

Another weekend of being "on call" for work. So in between tow jobs it was solo games. I played Mage Night twice using the conquest scenario and the Torvak character. I decided to keep score over several plays to see if I get any better. I failed to conquer a city in either play and scored a 79 in the first and a 72 in the second. So with multiple plays my skill actually decreases.

Today it was learning and playing Field Commander Rommel. Just one learning game so I decline to opine on its overall worth. I will say it has the thickest counters I have ever seen. The delux version that is. Oh, the British destroyed me...sorta goes without saying.

Had a game day with a couple friends over the weekend. Good times for sure. Wish we could do it much more often...

Finally got around to playing Chaos in the Old World. Even with just 3 people this game floored me. God damn! It's so good. We played with Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch. Things started off slowly as everyone was getting used to the rules. I was Nurgle and I quickly hopped on a couple of the Populous territories in hopes of corrupting them for big points. In the meantime I put a lockdown on 3 regions and continued to dominate them with little harassment from the other players. I grew a decent lead in points doing this. Slaanesh and Tzeentch were fighting on the other side of the board and kept doing things to earn dial ticks. Eventually they saw me as a threat and tried to impede my progress. I foolishly didn't pay close enough attention to them as they both finished their dials on the same turn! Tzeentch won the tiebreaker by having more VPs. There is so much depth and different strategies to try. We all felt like we were just scratching the surface of this great game. I can't wait to play it with a full compliment of four people. I'm totally enamored with this game at the moment.

Next up was a game of Lords of Waterdeep. Hot damn. Another great game that I've been missing out on. I love how simple the game is. Within 10 mins I taught everyone the rules and we were off. Some people say there is zero theme in this game, but I'd disagree. It gives you the feeling of being a shady political figure pulling the strings in a grande scheme to take over Waterdeep. I dug it. Also, for me the meat comes from that deck of Intrigue cards. It gives you this slightly uneasy feeling every time someone draws one. You just know that it's going to fuck you somehow. The game was incredibly close, but in the end I won thanks to earning 16 bonus points from money and left over adventurers and 28 from completing my quest types. The game was tense and exciting with plenty of friendly banter and table talk. All of us agreed it was a big hit.

After dinner we settled in for some King of Tokyo with the Powered Up expansion. This was my first time using the expansion and I think it kicks ass. Thankfully it didn't make the games any longer and it was thrilling to roll those 3 hearts. Shouts of 'UPGRADE!' filled the room each time it happened. It adds very little to the complexity, but helps give each monster their own unique twist...which is something I felt was missing from the base game. I think we played 3 or 4 games and we each won a game or so. Great game. It's easily one of my favorites from the past couple years. This is a game that I'm going to buy every little thing they make for. I fucking love it. Halloween Costume expansion here I come.

We stepped outside to enjoy some cigars on a crisp autumn night in New England. With our heads slightly spinning from the cigars we cracked open a game of Kingsburg. I'm not a big fan of the game, but it's fairly brainless and a decent time-waster to close out the day. Using the expansion we each had a unique player power and some new buildings to use. I still stuck to my strategy of obtaining the farms (gives you an extra die to roll) and building defense. In the end I failed thanks to some truly shitty rolls towards the end. It was close with the game being determined by a single point. However, at that point I was toasted and needed to go home. It was damn good day overall though.

Did 3 games of Agricola with the wife's cousin.

Agricola is a truly, truly easy game to teach, thanks to its excellent interface. However, it makes teaching the game's strategy truly, truly hard. Playing the game is so easy that people seem reluctant to study the strategy. Why pick stone when you're not planning to use it? Why eat sheep if you have food? Why pick 3 woods if you're ensured to have 6 next turn? Why do you have 7 food at the end of the game?

This is not just about the cousin though... several other non-gamers I taught also suffer from this.

Played half of a game of Merchants of Venus with my wife. This was our first playthrough. I decided to go with the new FFG rules because I like the supply/demand better.

I think we both really like it! That's a pleasant surprise. My wife was bit intimidated at first but she got the hang of it. I'm definitely liking this game. I think there's a lot more to it than we are seeing in our first play.

Legomancer wrote: Soloed Pathfinder ACG this weekend. Having a great time with it. I'll have a full report tomorrow, but I'm really glad I got this one.

Agreed. It was a little hard for me to get into playing solo. My wife was out of town last week, so I kept meaning to play at night, but I kept getting stuck late at work and by the time I got home, got something to eat, took the dog out, talk to the wife on the phone, etc. It was like 9:30-10pm and I didn't have it in me.

But I did play some yesterday in between bouts of cleaning the carpets. It was still fun, and a challenge, but you miss out on interacting with other players. Part of the fun of playing with my brother was formulating the actions of the game into a goofy story. That approach by yourself makes you feel a little crazy.

I played Lords of Waterdeep at the local boardgame club this weekend. Unlike Egg upstream, I just don't feel any theme from it. I still really like to play it, though.

Afterwards, I played a couple of games of Wrath of Ashardalon. I got to be the rules teacher for a couple of new players, and we won the second scenario. Then the other players wanted to beat up something big, just before they had to go, so we played the very end part of some scenario or the other in there. I should play it or Legend of Drizzt more often.

Here's an account of my solo Pathfinder Adventure Card Game weekend.

I was looking through the images over at you know where and it seems that some people feel that the problem with this game is that it doesn't take up enough table space.

Finally got StarCraft (+ Brood War) to the table for a 2-player learning game. I've been meaning to do this for a while but haven't gotten around to it.

Takeaways:

• It's big. Everything about it is big. There's not enough room for the minis on the spaces despite the planets being about 4 inches across, the player sheets are a full page, and FFG didn't use any of their "mini" size cards.
• It's a wargame. Moreso than anything else I've played from FFG, anyway.
• The basic turn structure and the basic actions are really pretty easy.
• Combat is really pretty easy to comprehend too.
• There are a bunch of effects and abilities that make things not easy.
• It's not as long as I thought it would be. We cycled through the Event Deck pretty quickly.
• It doesn't exactly shine with just two players, but we did a lot of "action denial" by placing our order markers on top of each others'. Much bitching ensued.

Overall I really liked it. Can't wait to try it with more, and if it comes down to it there's a 2-player assault/defend-type scenario in the back of the expansion rulebook.