Re: What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

On Rally the Troops I'm KingPut and in the words of King George in Hamilton "I will kill your Friends and Family to remind you of my Love". Washington's War, Hammer of Scots, Maria, Frederick I know and love. Other games I'm willing to learn or re-learn. Send me message to kick off a game.

Lords of Baseball - SuperFly Pete if you're going to WBC, Game On. I can get 3-4 players for fun game at WBC with you. I really enjoyed playing of Lords of Baseball last summer at WBC.

I got Batman: Gotham City Chronicles for a pretty good price back in January (which was maybe a bit extravagant since my large Conan kickstarter order was due to be delivered in February ) but it was a good price and it had the Versus mode, that I didn't (for some reason) order with Conan, so I had planned to use it mainly with one mate who could only make days no one else could.

Anyway, excuses out of the way, I finally got it out yesterday (Conan still to come out) and played another mate with him running the Villains and me running two Heroes, Batman and Red Hood. It was a very slow start, just trying to understand the very unclearly endgame/victory conditions was an effort and then the constant looking up of skills and traits from the icons on the cards and then the rulebook on how to implement some of them. It also has quite fiddly/busy LOS and Elevation rules but Monolith have, since it was originally released, created an online and downloadable app that dynamically shows LOS for all maps from any point taking into account elevations - I have to say that this is one of the most remarkable boardgame assistants I have every seen.

So on with the game, I made the rookie mistake - that I told myself not to do before the game - and used too much energy up so that by the end of round 3 (of 7 or 8, depending on what the villain did) I was only going to start the next round with four cubes for both Heroes so was forced to make a full Rest the next round, luckily my opponent didn't have too many characters nearby with a cheap enough activation to punish me much. But I still appeared behind the 8-ball for what I still had to do and was pushing Batman to near energy exhaustion each turn - but with Red Hood providing ranged batarang covering fire and some good (for me) dice rolls I seemingly was still in with a chance.
Also my mate made a few gambles in his strategy that didn't quite come off so gave me some breaks but for the last couple of turns it appears all he had to do was crowd the alley with villain figures to make a too big of an energy cost for Batman to get to his objective.
But a combination of him not moving all available villains to block me and a tsunami of batarang attacks from Red Hood (i.e. the dice had forgiven my nasty words to them from earlier in the game) Batman managed to release the antidote into the aeration system with a turn to spare.

I was a bit wary of this game after reading more than a few reviews/opinions on the mess all the iconography and elevations made of the game but Monolith have created a lot more player aids in the recent releases that I had printed out plus the astounding LOS app and with these the game seems very manageable, especially as I was running two Heroes - and it was definitely fun for both of us.
But I will admit it is pretty hard for the Heroes, we played using one of the suggested difficulty modifiers of getting one extra energy back each turn (so 3 instead of 2) and we don't think the heroes would have got close without that.
Also, after watching a few play thrus and with our experience, the game seems a bit too weighted towards ranged characters - there is no range modifiers apart from having LOS and villain ranged figures can decimate the Heroes, while I'm pretty sure without a ranged hero in the party the Heroes with struggle having to biff-wallop-kapow their way thru the villain hordes, I definitely would have failed without Red Hood thinning the herd with his constant ranged attacks.

My Tainted Grail (slowly as two guys have life-interrupts gaming issues) and Etherfields (3 week hiatus) campaigns are going on well, Etherfields is just a brilliant and different game while on my second play of the equally great Tainted Grail and finding a lot of the story I never saw the first time round.
And been filling in other sessions with Machina Arcana, Maximum Apocalypse (this is a great game that did not get the limelight it deserves), and D&D: Legend of Drizzt.

Edit:
Just for anyone interested in that Monolith here is Gaming Rules! showing it:

And you can find it here:
companion.the-overlord.com/Batman/#maps

Shellhead wrote: I have great respect for Cole Wehrle for designing games that are very different from the vast majority of the shovelware being published these days. However, I don't actually enjoy playing his games because there is a definite disconnect between subject matter and mechanics that makes the rules difficult to learn and the gameplay less immersive.

However, Molly House was designed by Jo Kelly (initially) - Cole Wehrle did enough development on it to get a co-designer credit on BGG.

Had a game day yesterday with the usual suspects. This time, my wife was available to play with me and Nate.

First game we played was Galactic Strike Force, a ship buildery, deck building type game. We played against the rules' suggested BBEG, the Thareeg Syndicate. I was flying the Vigilance, Nate was flying the Space Ork Dakka Machine, and Jo was flying the Infinity Bombs! LOL! ship.

Playing it was an exercise, as I was the only one with any experience with how the game ran. It truly is a Co-Op game, and with that, the downtime is somewhat daunting; as you are trying to come up with the best way to deal with enemy ships, and that takes time. Nate loaded his ship down with dakka and was merrily blasting away vessels left and right, while my wife was Mad Bombing every other ship in sight. My ship became a one shot ship destroyer. But, it was never enough, too few of us and way too many ships to fight. We lost when all three sectors were overrun. We didn't even get to fight the Flagship.

We next played Metal Adventures a space pirate game with 18th century trappings. This game went by waaaay quicker, because the game was very straightforward. I expected more cutthroat dealings, but it never really happened. Nate ended up with the runawawy victory once he had enough money to buy upgrades for his ship and even with my wife and I joining forces (despite the fact she never would have agreed to join forces, as she becomes anti-spouse when playing games with me), it was delaying Nate's inevitable win. We called it and went to Red Robin to eat.

When we got there and met in the parking lot, I remarked, "It's the glorious Space Pirate King! Surely, he will pay for us all!"

Nate looked at a non-existent watch on his wrist and went, "Well, would you look at the time!" and feigned going back to his car to escape.

Anti-spouse

southernman wrote: Anti-spouse

WELL, IT'S TRUE!

My wife is 100% loving human being.... Unless it comes to screwing me over in games.

And I love her for it.

My wife has always insisted she get to sit to the left of me during games of King of Tokyo...and she always picks up non-claws for her re-rolls.

Played a 5 player game of Nemesis on Friday. I like this game a lot, but have never manage a win. On Friday, I was playing the scout, and my chosen goal was to send the signal and have the alien corpse weakness exposed. A different player was trying to explore all rooms (they died in the process), so the COMS room was found quick, I stuck close to the soldier as both of us had to send a signal - got there no problem (well we did get slimed) and sent the signal.

The scientist was pinned down by monsters in the lab- soldier and I went in there and killed the monsters with minor damage and I was able to have corpse in the lab and boom- goals done. The soldier had a chest burster due to event card, but I was able to make it to the escape pod and eject.

The scientist got eaten by the queen, leaving only the pilot who revealed his goal was to make sure I didn't survive! HE insisted on playing out his turns until he got into an escape pod, even though he couldn't win (I was off ship) and everyone else was dead, but whatever. I was so happy to win and as we cleaned up, I realized I had a contamination card in my deck (toally forgot about it). --- and of course infected. So the pilot ends up winning!

That is some Mario Kart end of game victory denial bullshit. Nemesis is great but must be enjoyed for the experience as opposed to seriously trying to win. I was in a game once in which a player extended the game by double just because he insisted on trying his hardest to win. He did win, but everyone hated him by the time it was done.

Four of us got together last night to play Time of Crisis by GMT. Everyone's first game so we fumbled a bit but I think we got about six turns in. I got to go first and ended up rolling into Rome with a fair army. I think I still prefer Republic of Rome but Time of Crisis does scratch a similar itch and plays a lot faster.

Supposedly there is a company doing a rework of REPUBLIC OF ROME and I think if done correctly, it could really rejuvenate the game. I played it again after a very long gap and....it hasn't aged well IMO. Takes far too long for what it is. Fiddly in places as typical for an early AH game. Like each province has a separate income dr but they are all different. One might be dr-1, another dr+1, etc. Just make it a fixed number FFS. The end game can devolve into mass assassination carnage. But the bones are there for a solid game.

There is a small group of die hards that play it at WBC, but the GM stupidy allows 6 hours per game - and that's just for ONE of the three eras. Fucking insane.

Cole Wehrle has mentioned it as inspiring JOHN COMPANY, I'd love to see him take a crack at it.

edit: found a Q/A with the designers here: boardgamegeek.com/thread/3382678/q-and-a...-spiel-in-essen-2024

"Q4: Do they plan to make any significant changes to gameplay or will it largely be the artwork?
A4: No, Yes."

Ugh. Oh well, one less thing to buy.

I have lots of love for RoR. It came out when I started having an interest in Roman history and the information in the game lead me to look to learn more. The game was a big departure from the other types of games I was playing and expanded my ideas of what games can be. My friends and I had loads of fun playing it. It’s a great early example needing to balance working together and against each other.

But in the 20-25 years since I played it last, I have changed, what I want from games has changed and I don’t think I could find friends who would still want to play something so rules heavy (even though the people I play with are often the same ones). We no longer play most of the same games we did in high school and college (no more Star Fleet Battles, ASL or similar).

I would love a spiritual successor to RoR that keeps the core experience and ideas, but in a more updated and easily playable package.

This has me thinking about the evolution of our gaming in college. When we started it was largely DOAM, hex/counter and Magic. By the end it was DOAM, 40k and German games.

We played the new pandemic-adjacent Lord of the Rings design. Pandemic is a good game, especially for mass market players, but I honestly don't need to play it again. I thought this was good! It felt very thematic, Leacock really cared about invoking Lord of the Rings and it has some of the pandemic edges filed off in a good way. We had some dramatic, thematic moments in our play and won after a good roll at Minas Tirith where Eowyn saved our bacon and then we charged into Mordor and dunked the ring with 2 hope left after the final roll---meaning the hold in Minas Tirith had proved decisive.

It's still got drawing two cards, needing a particular suit to do something combined with slightly less restrictive card passing. You can at least bank cards now as tokens to get them out of your hand and its limit, but I mean that particular unwelcome pandemic bone is still here. I don't know if I really need to own it? I'd play it over pandemic every time and I could see a world where it's good with normie players, but it also felt a little heavy for them?

As we discussed on the Discord thread about it, I don't think the game is targeted at long time DOAM/AT players like most of us here - nor is PANDEMIC for that matter. Your comment about the rules/overhead being heavier than the original PANDEMIC are on point. Will the interest in the IP be enough to overcome the lift for normies ?