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

I have Maximum Apocalypse (no idea what edition, I thought there was just the one) and it's a great bit on fun. We usually play 2-player with two characters each with me always taking the 'Vet and his Dog' (my game my first choice), usually paired with the Gunslinger, and work through one of the sets - I have the core with the Kaiju Rising and Gothic Horror expansions so a good selection.
And for a simple game it does seem reasonably balanced, with the Difficulty rating of each apocalypse also reasonably accurate, and you can make some pretty horrible maps with the tiles if you really want a challenge - it's one of those games where I didn't know what I was getting and now it won't be traded away, it's just always fun when we play it.

Is it more managementish, or more pressyourluckish? I always get concerned when I see Hand Management listed as a feature, because they end up being games played by committee.

Sagrilarus wrote: Is it more managementish, or more pressyourluckish? I always get concerned when I see Hand Management listed as a feature, because they end up being games played by committee.

Well you have a 30 card deck that you must draw from each turn, and that you can also choose to draw from, and one of the ways (you also have HPs and a Hunger track) your character is defeated is from running out of cards.
But the deck has different types of cards including weapons so it really is a bit of both - hand management not using all your weapons (especially if some of them aren't drawn due to being in the bottom few cards of your deck), plus push your luck by using what you do have in your hand and hoping that when you draw cards following you have the right ones for the next few turns. We also play hard mode in that we lose as soon as the first character is defeated (rather than all).

I'll say again that it is a well designed game - the hidden map tiles have assists or dangers on them, the enemies come out randomly and range from easy-ish to nasty, the weapons/abilities/enemies have a simple but clever range mechanic that means you need to be close to each other (especially playing our Hard mode) to support anyone who gets into trouble.
And for those allergic to dice they are only used in this game for which tile to spawn monsters at and for your Hunger counter

15-20 years ago this game would have been rated on this site with Nexus Ops and similar as a well designed Ameritrash game.

Sagrilarus wrote: Is it more managementish, or more pressyourluckish? I always get concerned when I see Hand Management listed as a feature, because they end up being games played by committee.

It's a bit of both, but more attention needs to be paid to the character deck. There are no reshuffles for your character deck, although some cards allow you pull stuff out of your discard pile. This is important, because if your character deck is empty...you die. Since you are drawing a character card every time it's your turn, it makes you focus on objectives keenly. Besides that, you have to keep from starving and kiting beasties that follow you around until killed, and they damage you every turn.

Teamwork helps, and certain scenarios tell you DON'T SPLIT UP. Then, there's the kaiju expansion that basically says, "yeah, about sticking together.... RUN!"

So, it's not game played by committee, but it may appear as such.

Another Game Day concluded with my friends yesterday. Since it was Retro Game Day (we play games that we've played in the past), we pulled out one that had not seen the light of day in over a decade-Battlestar Galactica. We played the core game with the Cylon Fleet option only. My wife was Gaeta, I was Lee Adama, Kelly played Cally, and Nate played Roslin.

What can I say, that has not been said before about this game? It's brutal, it's tense, and nobody gets what they want...And it's beautiful. We started off strong, with me ending up being in a viper the entire game, acting as a glorified traffic cop; telling civvies to get off the board, only for them to come back on due to the Cylon pursuit track. Kelly fixed a few Mark VIIs, but not all of them. Nate upped morale...Once by using a Quorum card. Then, a particular crisis card came up with Politics being negative. When the check came to be resolved, a BIG OL politics came up. My eyes immediately shot to Nate, who did his song and dance. HEY it could be the DESTINY DECK!

Kelly, as it being her first time playing, wanted to ask what would happen if she used her Execution ability on Roslin. I explained it to her and she understood. Then promptly did nothing. All the while we were making running jokes about her ability, "Cally, keep your hand off the gun. Cally, why are you pointing a gun in my face?, etc." It came to a crescendo when Kelly went on a hilarious rant about having the ability, and really wanting to use it, BUT NO ONE WAS ON THE GALACTICA TO USE IT ON. My wife was laughing so hard, it made her face hurt. I couldn't be targeted, because Vipering, Jo's character was in the Brig due to a Crisis card (and stayed there for the majority of the game, with me becoming the Cagmiral), and Nate was in Colonial One most of the time.

Sleeper phase comes up and Jo gets the Sympathizer card. Since we were not in the red, she was a Not A Kool Kid Cylon, NO SUPA CRISIS FOR YOU! She mainly stayed at the Caprica location, trying to get the Fleet as many jump crises as possible. By this point, nearly all the raiders and basestars were on the board, and we were barely holding them back. Civilian ships started dropping like flies due to lack of Viper coverage. The dials started going into the red and we we running out of fuel, but at Distance 7. We could make it!

Then, Nate revealed he was a Cylon (Leoben version) and then made our lives a living Hell. Cally was trying her best, being the ONLY one on the Galactica, and I was trying to stem the Cylon tide outside. At the end game, I was in the Portside rear sector in a Mark VII, with a basestar, three civvies, and NINE raiders. I said, fuck it, no one's getting out alive... and fired a nuke into my sector. Yes, I was hoping for a complete wipe... But all I ended up doing was fucking up the basestar. Hey, at least the thing couldn't shoot nukes and was easier to hit.

Roslin's turn comes up, and while Passacaglia is playing, drops her Super Crisis Card... Fleet Mobilization. Neither Kelly or I had the cards to beat a 24. So, then the Activation carnage begins. the other basestar damages the hangar bay. 2 raiders double team an unmanned Mark II and kill the civvie, loss of Pop. Then, five raiders did the dance with me, eventually the fifth blew the viper out from under me. The remaining 4 ate the last three civilian vessels Reducing our pop to zero. Nate did a gregarious bow and my wife did the cabbage patch to Human genocide.

It was an amazing 6 hour ride.

Went to a game night at the local library tonight. The theme was card games. First I was in a 4 player game of Exploding Kittens. I don't enjoy this game and don't know why it's popular.

Next was 2 rounds of Taco Cat, at least I think that's what it's called. Not much going on with this one but it's better than Exploding Kittens.

Next was LOOT, which I had heard of but not played. You try to use your pirate ship cards to take over as many merchant vessel cards as you can. I thought I was doing horribly but came in 3rd out of 5. Not a bad game.

We ended with one I brought, The Gang. We failed as expected but on the last round we very nearly got a vault secured. It was well liked and I'm pretty sure I sold at least one copy of it tonight.

The people were fun and I'll go to the next one, with the theme of cooperative games. I thought about bringing STF but I think that might be a bit heavy for this crowd.

Played a 4 hero game of Guards of Atlantis II with my son, each of us running two heroes. He has a lot of League of Legends experience, but has only played Guards a couple of times. I have no League experience but have played Guards many times. That said, I still have characters I've never been, so I took two I had never used. I do not remember anyone's name.

My team was the giant bird warrior and some sort of foxlike scavenger character. The bird has all sorts of abilities that let a friendly hero do things if they are in radius, and my heroes were literally never within radius, so he was largely a waste. The scavenger / mountaineer / whatever she is, was actually pretty awesome.

My son had a guy that can spawn rocks on the battlefield, which he used to great benefit, shutting down a lot of my bird hero's movement. He also had Bain the Bounty Hunter. If he marked a hero with a bounty, and someone killed that hero, the owner had to spend an extra life token to revive the hero.

We went back and forth at the beginning as it usually goes, and then each of us killed an enemy hero. The game can end 3 ways: 1. you push to the enemy base 2. someone has to spend a life token and they have none / can't pay enough 3. the lane pushes enough that there are no more wave counters.

An interesting thing happened: On the last turn of a round, I pushed the lane, finally. But we pushed to his side of the battlefield, which gives him 1 more minion than I do. So the minion battle immediately pushed back to center, essentially burning 2 wave counters at once.

This meant the next push would end the game, and I was SOOOO close to doing it. If both my hero actions went off, I'd win the game. But he thwarted me and neither went off, prolonging the game. Unfortunately we ran out of time and had to call a tie. It could have went either way.

UPDATE: turns out I actually lost. You lose the moment you spend your last life token, NOT when you have to spend and can't. My son had used his bounty hunter to put a bounty on one of my characters and that character got killed, accelerating my loss. Oh well.

Of my eight Stormbringer players, two were at Origins, one was in the hospital awaiting gall bladder surgery, and one was too worried and sad about the gall bladder situation and didn't feel like playing. We decided that 50% wasn't a quorum and played a board game instead. Five players (counting me) is a great number for many board games, but my players were seeking novelty so I got out Escape From 100 Million B.C. Although I had a couple of music mixes of songs that referenced time, I instead played a couple of discs of rainforest sounds: bird calls, gentle rain, rumbling thunder, and insect humming. It was ideal.

Escape looks like sandbox game, with the highly variable terrain hexes to explore, but the building pressure of the paradox threat tends to keep everybody focused. Our group was very careful to avoid killing dinosaurs, except that I was playing the soldier and I didn't have the speed to run away or the non-lethal options for scaring the dinosaurs off, so I killed some. We also had some bad luck in the early part of the game, with five different accidental visitors from other points in history running around the board. Three of them had unusually high Distrust stats, so corralling them was not easy. By the time we got all those refugees sent home, we had most of our time machine parts. However, paradox was in the red zone, and we still needed to find a bunch of our gear. Any gear cards left behind when we returned to the future could potentially cause more paradox.

Our research assistant found our replicator that was programmed to make spare time machine parts, but each attempt cost three pieces of gear. We brought her some stuff and she made a part. Then we had a weird rift open that dropped out a death ray device (worth 5 paradox) instead of the usual accidental time traveler. Like the others, we should have brought it back to the matching rift and sent it home, but that was going to be really tough since a couple of carnivores were hanging out nearby. Plus that rift was in the swamp, so movement was going to be difficult unless a character had a machete and some spare willpower tokens. So one of our players had the ingenious idea of using the death ray as one of the three items for the replicator. It worked, but we didn't even need that time machine part anymore. Even worse, destroying the death ray meant that we had no way to close that rift, so it was going to continue to generate paradox. Then Abraham Lincoln popped out of a different rift, and we were already hoping to escape to the future.

We managed to dump Lincoln back in his rift and met back at the time machine. There were only four spaces left on the paradox track and we happened to know that one of the three gear cards we were leaving behind was worth 2 paradox. We made the jump, and there was only a total of 3 paradox points in the 3 abandoned gear cards, so we just barely won. Then we consulted the final chart to see what kind of future awaited us. The new future was ruled by sentient dinosaurs, and they put us in a zoo. The end.

Went to a small gathering last weekend; played a number of the usual suspects plus some new ones to me:

SETI. I have seen this played at the last several cons but was always busy. From a distance, it seems long. We played 4P; two new players including myself and two that had played it before; the guy teaching did a good job. Mechanically its not too hard, but there are some subtle things it took me a while to grasp, especially the fact you can trade in two cards for $1; the first part of the game I was cash poor due to both playing expensive cards and not realizing the card for cash conversion mechanic. I failed to exactly grasp the data/signal mechanic and focused on exploration and fulfilling missions related to that. I finished third and not too far behind one of the experienced players. The game was unfortunately marred by the other new guy going into full fucking AP Euroweenie mode; he probably consumed 40% of the game time. Based on that, I'd say 3P is the sweet spot and I've heard that from others as well. 


WONDERLAND WAR. Theme wise this game doesn't really grab me. It's Alice in Wonderland where each player is a character from the book with asymmetric powers. There are three turns. The first part is players going around the Tea Party table drafting cards that buff abilities and add chips to the combat bag. You can also pick up quest cards that earn you VP for fulfilling the conditions . You do this four times, then comes combat which is fought in one of five different areas. Every player in the area draws chips in a press your luck mechanic til everyone passes - or goes bust from losing all their pieces. You can also voluntarily stop if you feel you can't win, or your marker stops on a Forge space which allows you to trash a chip and place it on your power mat unlocking abilities. The combat mechanic reminds me of QUACKS OF QUECKENBERG. 

Theme wise I am not wild about it, but mechanically the game is pretty clever. If you like DoaM games, it's worth playing someone else's copy. 

NEMESIS RETALIATION. 4 player semi co-op. We had a helluva time finding the Life Support rooms which turn on the oxygen. To boot, the hallway/exploration resulted in a strange bisection of the ship where there was a straight horizontal hall across the midpoint of the board but only one path to the Hibernation chamber. My character, the Drone Operator, had to find an alien egg and bring it home. This was easy - I could stay out of the Nest and send in the Drone to pick it up. However, almost running out of air meant I had to go back to get more oxygen canisters at the Landing Zone and then the Queen showed up. We spent several turns reloading ammo and shooting her til she died. Meanwhile the Lander got shot down by the facility anti aircraft guns and one character fulfilled his objective and used the one man escape shuttle. The rest of us, with too little time to get to the Hibernation room due to the corridor layout, perished. I really like this version - they have cleaned up some mechanics. Especially useful is that there is no longer a limit on how many items a room has - this was an issue at higher player counts in the other games. 


BALTIC EMPIRES. We played 5P with only one having played it before. Mechanically pretty easy. The hard part is what you actually need to do. You're basically improving your territories to produce more resources to buy improvements and units to expand. It was OK; the graphics are....not great. It LOOKS good, but looking period appropriate comes at the expense of a map that is lacking contrast and the borders are especially hard to parse. I suspect this was tested mostly on a computer where the contrast is more pronounced than on a physical copy. 

CROWN AND CRESCENT. This is an upcoming game from MMP - its ANGOLA goes to the AmRev War in South Carolina. Looks to be coming out probably early next year. If you like ANGOLA, check it out.


DUNE IMPERIUM UPRISING(x2), CABANGA (x2), LORD OF THE RINGS DUEL FOR MIDDLE EARTH, TERRAFORMING MARS (base plus Prelude), MOON COLONY BLOODBATH, 4P WAR OF THE RING CARD GAME, and WAR OF THE RING plus KINGS OF MIDDLE EARTH (x2) were also played. 

Went to another public game meetup at my favorite brewery last night. It's a holiday weekend and hot as hell, so there was only 5 of us at the peak, with there being 4 of us for most of it.

Space Base - I was the only first timer. It wasn't "bad", and at least had minor things for you to do on someone else's turn, but I just don't get a thrill out of games with zero player interaction. This is another one of those "you bought that before I could buy that" kind of things. I came in 4th out of 5.

Time to Panic - a cooperative card game in which you have to assemble a row of numerical cards in ascending order with as few mistakes as possible. It was....fine. We won, and they said it was the first time they had ever won with a perfect score.

Hot Streak - I brought this. Only one other person had heard of it. It went over okay but I think it was hindered by an abysmal shuffle that overly favored Hurley and Queen Mum. Hurley won EVERY race, which I have never seen happen before because he is normally such a colossal dipshit. Side note - NONE of the players had heard of Magical Athlete, which I also brought. It never ceases to amaze me how I think something is famous, and it is definitely not famous. ONE of these people had heard of Cosmic Encounter. FUCK.

Trio - several rounds of this lightning quick card game. This one is pretty decent, but it's basically just competitive memory.

All in all an okay night, but I wonder if I will ever find people to actually play good games with.

A while ago, CRYO was being sold off for next to nothing everywhere, and after reading Dan Thurot's piece on it and with that artwork, I bought it for like 15€. Have played a couple of times now.
It's such a good game. Basically you have your worker placement Euro thing going on, trying to have enough resources to set up some pretty involved chains of activities, never having enough time or space to do everything you want to do.
It's very tense, there's a lot of take that and the occasional blowing up of the other players' frozen dudes. The game doesn't seem to have any fat, turns sometimes take 3 seconds. It's really refreshing.

I tried Death May Die. Cute little dice chucker, felt so heavily railroaded systematically to make a tight finish. At least in our scenario, Toughness felt like such a laughably better option to spend XP on than any other of the (cooler) abilities. Fun game, though, I see the appeal and it doesn't wear out its welcome.