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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?
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Hopefully it goes for another 6 years.
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- ChristopherMD
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- Road Warrior
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Legendary Encounters: X-Files One of the pure co-ops in the Legendary line, now including Firefly, Predator, Alien, and this. X-Files is by far the most random and chaotic, as all cards must be scanned to be revealed (including the player cards) and there are random informants, evidence procedures, scenario cards, and major villains. I like it, but this is tough and nutty. Like a cancer-ripened walnut, except I hate walnuts. And probably cancer.
Side note: Legendary Predator has a free-for-all mode in which you advance through the storyline, while also being able to attack (Duel) each other. As soon as someone dies or the Ultimate (human) Prey is defeated, points are counted.
Legendary: James Bond I have no business liking all the Legendary games, but I do. At one point I thought I hated deck-builders. Turns out I like most of them, and it was the progenitor Dominion that I despised. Have to say, if you treat LJB like a competition, you will almost definitely lose. These scenarios are tough, so cooperation is almost a necessity. Bonus points for card flipping, poker hands, and the Duck Snorkel.
Pandemic: Fall of Rome: Pandemic with legions, barbarians, dice and push-your-luck event cards. We like this.
Quest: A terrible and dopey adventure game from 1978. But the flavor text is awesome, and we haven’t laughed harder in years. Tears of joy and a 3-day layover in the princess’s chambers are the best medicine.
Oceans: I like this a lot, but so far the guys in my weekly group avert their eyes when I suggest we play again. (I keep winning, which may not help.) People outside the group are game for a repeat, though. If it helps: More easily missed rules .
I keep pushing for someone to try the 3-game Power Grid: Fabled campaign, but no takers yet. I’d like to try it with the deluxe version. I’ll resort to a 2-player game with the Robot expansion, if necessary.
I also have Clank Legacy (Amazon blowout) locked and loaded for when my kids come home for spring break and the summer. I’m not a Clank! enthusiast, but my family eats up legacy/campaign games and deck-builders are a favorite.
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AE has really taken my group by storm. I possibly bought the Legacy one for more cards, and a box large enough to store all the things in. Looking forward to trying it the campaign, but even without that I honestly don't remember the last time we ran a game back three times in a row at game night that wasn't like The Mind or Insider. We started out 3p with a pretty handy win over Wraithmonger. Followed up 4p with a pretty brutal loss to Magus of Cloaks, not figuring it the strat in time. We ended up without enough small spells to stop his shields to then have our big spells actually do anything. We rerandomized our mages and the market and tried him again, and this time eked out a win with 2 cards left in the Nemesis deck (also with 3 chargers left on the MoC card that says "you lose the game when this card triggers"). I think he's my favorite Nemesis thus far, since he requires an actual different strategy and also is just generally a huge pain in the ass. I need to go back soon and replay some of the easy big bads on apocalypse difficulty and see what that's like.
Then Sanctum aka Diablo the board game. This game seems pretty awesome, but we beefed the rules for the finale pretty hard so obviously we need to play again soon. TBF the finale rules are very poorly/confusingly written imo, and also by that point it was 1230 so maybe not the best time to try to be learning things on the fly All that aside, the loot and leveling and push your luck/race aspects of the game structure all were suuuuper fun, and left everyone wanting to try it again. I have worries about the replay value, but we'll see if they actually become true.
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- Michael Barnes
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- Mountebank
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The Shining is -great-. It is very minimal and inevitably you are going to hear the fucking “no meaningful decisions” shit takes and the harrumphing disappointment that it’s not Mansions of Madness or whatever with the Torrance family. You get two face down vision cards with a range on them but you can’t see the value. You move around the hotel and collect Willpower tokens, hoping to have more than the sum of your cards when the round ends. Weapons have high values...but if you crack, you must attack the nearest player and those weapons make you more deadly. There is a “Corrupted” variant, which is the secret traitor thing. I’ve not played it yet but the co-op version is atmospheric and it captures a survival horror flavor with minimal effort.
Wonder Woman is also -great-. An outstanding co-op, beautifully presented with taste, class, and dignity. Unlike every other comic book game ever. Nothing terribly groundbreaking, but it’s so well done and if you play with Cheetah or Circe, it 100% passes the Bechdel Test. This is an excellent “next step” from Pandemic.
The new Funkoverse stuff rules. The Jurassic Park sets are really fun. Ian Malcolm and the T. Rex are my favorites, but having Alan Grant deliver a KO with a Menacing Speech is a treat.
Ray Arnold was quite a surprise, his self-KO ability that lets you use an exhausted figure again is pretty damn good. Kool Aid Man is a hoot- you’ll bust through walls just because you can, and you will say OH YEAH every time. Aggretsuko may be my favorite- she is BRUTAL with that wee little chainsaw. A team with her and the two dinasawas is a force to be reckoned with. There is now NO WAY to effectively organize this game because there is so much of it, like 22 huge figures, and I don’t even have the Golden Girls.
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I felt that way with Horrified almost instantly. It was neat and worth a play, but nothing really demanding j really dig in and attach emotionally.
Villainous, however, feels like it will stay around due to the wealth of expansion content and strong asymmetry, there's plenty to come back to. Funko probably the same.
I also feel like Jaws really elevated the hidden movement genre, but that seems to be a richer experience than some of their other games.
But Top Gun? The Shining? What are the chances you play one of those even a month from now, a year?
I dunno, just an observation as there seems to be too many of these light-ish games coming out from them to really stick.
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- Michael Barnes
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- Jackwraith
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Then we got into a game of Rising Sun with Lotus, Bonsai, Turtle, Fox, and Dragonfly (me.) I picked last and decided to go with the clan that I'd never played before, but I kind of had Koi stuck in my head because I proceeded to play as if I were Koi for the first few mandates, picking up Path of the Shogun (get 3 coins in the War phase) in the first Train and so on. Since I was the game owner and teacher, I was also the only one who didn't get an alliance for the first two seasons, which I understood, but it made it more difficult than previous seasons, especially with my card approach being kind of scattershot. We played with the Torii set plus two random monster cards and we ended up heavy on the Oni, with Blood, Souls, Skulls, Plagues, Hate, AND Spite in play at the end, plus the Fire and River Dragons and a couple more monsters, like Yurei.
Fox jumped out to a big lead, going virtue-heavy and racking up points for every dead, orange dude. But then he allied with me out of sympathy, I think, in Autumn and I promptly betrayed him to replace a couple of his sacrifices. I made a misplay on a bid for Edo in the last War phase or I would have had 5 province tokens and 10 more points. In the end, Turtle won 63-56-47-39-28. She went heavy on end-of-game bonuses and they pulled her through against the Fox "Loki" strategy. Everyone really liked the Turtle strongholds (Thanks again, Bendgar) and I was kinda thrilled that the two people I expected to not like the game, as they're not DoaM players, really enjoyed it.
Then two people left and we finished up with a game of Guildhall. We stuck to the original set, since we were teaching a new person. Didn't matter. I won with 5 in coins and 4 VP cards. I keep trying to tell people that the trick is to use the Weavers properly and they just don't want to listen, as everyone dumps or ignores them at every opportunity. I remain undefeated in that game.
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- hotseatgames
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Last night I had my first game night of 2020. I have been too busy working on game designs (I have 3 active at the moment) and I have also been frustrated with turnout. And rightly so, as one player bailed 20 minutes before game night was to start. That left us with 3.
Game 1 was Root, on the Mountain map and using the new deck of cards. I was the Corvid Conspiracy, and others were the Cats and the Lizard Cult. No one had ever played their respective faction before.
Cats of course started out ruling the Pass, but I set out immediately to try to slow them down. I knew the Lizard Cult would be of little help for at least a while. I was able to place a Snare plot there, and ended up ruling the Pass for the remainder of the game, with the Cats only ever earning 2 points from it.
Lizards did indeed get moving slowly. Comparatively, they are quite complex. Until playing the Corvids, they were my favorite. I was able to understand exactly how to make the Corvids work (luckily) and was holding my own against the cats, only trailing by a few points. Unfortunately, I had a couple of plots destroyed (no one ever tried to guess them, they just fought them instead). Losing those plots really hurt my points gaining ability, and I ended up in second place, trailing by 7 I think. Lizard Cult was way back at 15. All in all I think it was my favorite play of Root to date! I found the Corvids to be great fun. I also think that if we had that fourth player, enough attention might have been diverted away from me to allow me the win.
Next up, we tried Nemesis in full co-op mode for the first time. With only 3 players, subterfuge isn't very compelling, so this was an obvious choice. It turned out to be a ton of fun! We had many challenging goals to achieve. The most challenging was to either kill the queen or blow up the ship. We decided to start down the path of blowing up the ship, and thus never bothered to check coordinates. We also foolishly started to unlock drop pods way too late. The Queen actually did show up and we killed her. At that point we switched our direction and decided to save the ship and hibernate. We had to fix engines (one of which I had deliberately broken earlier), and then realized we never checked coordinates. I had to trudge all the way to the front of the ship, and by the time I got there, an event card dropped the final malfunction on a room, and the entire ship blew up. Game Over. Checking the card, we were bound for Deep Space the whole time, so it's a good thing I was headed that way. The game was great and we will definitely do that again.
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- hotseatgames
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We will hopefully get to 10 early April unless we are quarantined.
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- Disgustipater
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In a game I played last night, a player who was considering attacking the plot would always guess Raid before attacking so he could then destroy it without consequence.Gary Sax wrote: I think the Corvid guess thing is simple but interesting. A lot of times you just need to make sure it isn't the bomb in your clearing.
You get a VP for correctly guessing the token, since you are removing it from the board. The Exposure rule on the faction board does not mention this, but the rule book does remind you.hotseatgames wrote: I think perhaps that they actually forgot that they could try to guess them, but it's also quite possible that they just wanted the VP for destroying them.
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