What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

OhBollox wrote: Pleased with Undaunted: North Africa so far. It's got what Normandy should have had, asymmetry, and it has it in spades. The rules are sharper, so you avoid long stalemates and the playtime is kept short, and the sides and objectives are very different. Can't see us ever going back to Normandy, playing US/German forces that are identical in composition and performance after so many wargames depicting them as different, however slightly, just feels odd.

Thank you for this, it articulates what was on my mind with Normandy but couldn't quite identify. I admired the design but the playing of the game didn't live up to the premise for us, it just felt like a rush to reach an objective point and the player whose deck could best withstand the attrition would get the win. Hunkering Down is a neat mechanism but then if you do this and the other player is aggressive you quickly lose ground, lose the objective, lose the game. Playing it felt like driving a sweet ride with a stuttering engine, pretty and clever but not quite working. North Africa sounds like it might do things better, although I wonder what the next in the line will do and if there is more of the 'full' game design that we still haven't seen?

mads b. wrote:

Ah_Pook wrote: My wife and I played Lost Cities wrong for like 2 years lol. Only one discard pile instead of one per color?

I've always played with just one discard pile. In fact I was so sure of it that I checked the rules both online and in my box to see if multiple discard piles is a new rule. It isn't. But the weird thing is I remember playing LC online some years ago on a page dedicated to that and Schotten Totten, and it too had only one discard pile.

I imagine it changes the game quite a bit.

Yea it really opens up a lot of space in the game tactically. You can discard a few cards of a color and pick them back up later as long as that color discard pile doesn't get so juicy that your opponent starts grabbing it, etc etc. I'm glad we weren't the only ones lol.

Gary Sax wrote: tfw you've been playing a rule totally wrong in a game you've played like 30 times. Nate, my spouse, and I played a game of Merchants of Venus on tabletop simultor and I was playing the multiple demand tiles pretty wrong.

When Caylus first came out we played it incorrectly, making money extremely tight. The game was intense as hell, very difficult to make progress and we were enjoying it. Then we figured out our mistake, started playing correctly and lost interest in the game. Six months later we wanted to go back to the way we played it wrong, but we couldn't remember what it was. So we kind of shot ourselves in the foot.

mezike wrote: Thank you for this, it articulates what was on my mind with Normandy but couldn't quite identify. I admired the design but the playing of the game didn't live up to the premise for us, it just felt like a rush to reach an objective point and the player whose deck could best withstand the attrition would get the win. Hunkering Down is a neat mechanism but then if you do this and the other player is aggressive you quickly lose ground, lose the objective, lose the game. Playing it felt like driving a sweet ride with a stuttering engine, pretty and clever but not quite working. North Africa sounds like it might do things better, although I wonder what the next in the line will do and if there is more of the 'full' game design that we still haven't seen?

There's an expansion coming next year that allows for 4P. Not sure if it's just combining Normandy and NA or what. I'm holding on to Normandy for now, but if I have to sit and remind my opponent several times that just getting into the best cover possible and shooting it out leads to a stalemate that doubles the length of the game, I'm just not going to play it much. I really like the design, and even some small differences in the forces could have saved it for me. I should give Normandy a try with some of NA's rules and see if that shakes it up. Infantry in Normandy need some sort of powerful 'Assault' action when targeting an enemy unit on their tile as an impetus to get close and take objectives.

That's how Band of Brothers handles it. Assault actions are super lethal, most infantry used guns mainly suppress.

I think that's one of the things BoB gets really right; if you can suppress the enemy successfully and then assault, you win that fight. It's almost procedural.

I still think Combat Commander is the king, but Undaunted you can knock off in about 45 mins and never worry about LoS.

Pan Am - After a few plays I've decided that I like it a lot. You have to play a little smart, but it's not a Terra Mystica-style brain burner. It's a game full of cards, and there's no way to search the decks, so be prepared for swings of luck. I don't think any of them are bad, except in that they can sometimes be really good for your opponents. It also has dice and they can roll your way, or not. It reminds me of old-school Parker Brothers games, like Dealer's Choice or Masterpiece, that I played as a kid. Except that Pan Am is better. Its setting makes it easy to sell to your mother-in-law, VPs aren't a thing, and getting whipsawed by luck isn't that big of a deal in a game that takes a little more than an hour.

The Chameleon - All but one person knows the secret word, then everyone gives a clue a'la Codenames. If you didn't get the word you have to fake it. Then everyone votes on who the chameleon is, and the chameleon guesses. If the chameleon gets it right, they get a point. If everyone picked the wrong person as the chameleon, the chameleon gets 2 points. If the chameleon gets it wrong, everyone else gets a point. This puts the non-chameleons on the hook for trying to give meaningful hints without making it easy for the chameleon to guess. The chameleon has to make their clue look real so they can sell someone else as the chameleon, or guess right if they can't.

I thought it was okay. I've come to the conclusion that I like the idea of traitor-based party games better than the actuality. For me, the real enjoyment in Chameleon was making fun of the Chameleon's wrong clues.

RobertB wrote: . . .and there's no way to search the decks

Whoop -- hidden feature no one has mentioned!

My thoughts on Catan. Only played it a couple of times, and despised it.

mc wrote: Is Catan second only to Monopoly in terms of being dumped on? Monopoly is like the poster child, all the other MB/Hasbro type affairs seem to get skipped, too obvious I guess, and then it's Catan.

"trading makes it unfair"
"dice rolls make it unfair"

I was going to say I wished I understood the obsession with fairness in games but I really probably don't!

I guess for many people it was that game that got them started, so all of their adventures in gaming since (if you can call a gravitation towards no-luck medium -> heavy euros an adventure) feel like some kind of excursion into everything that is "better".

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Got hold of Treasure Island and have been playing it with the kids, it's quite fun.

OhBollox wrote:

mc wrote: Is Catan second only to Monopoly in terms of being dumped on? Monopoly is like the poster child, all the other MB/Hasbro type affairs seem to get skipped, too obvious I guess, and then it's Catan.

Munchkin is probably equally despised.

Yep. And I LIKE Munchkin.

Have played two games of Tiny Epic Dinosaurs in the last couple days. (Am waiting to get a third in before I write a review for the site.) It's interesting. Most worker placement games are dominated by opportunity cost, i.e. if you place your guy here, you're losing the benefits of placing it there, etc. But TEDinos ramps that up in a number of ways. You want more dinos to fulfill more contracts. But having more not only drains your resources (food, either plants or meat) but also inhibits your collection of those resources in successive rounds. You can ameliorate that with some Research cards, so that you're not having drastic swings in every round, but it also often involves placing your dudes on the Resource spaces that feel very, very underwhelming when compared to wrangling dinos, building fences, and doing research. It's a necessary evil to get some of the big payoff rounds (or to simply keep your dinos from escaping because you haven't fed them...) As with most TE games, there's a lot going on here and the scores seem to stay pretty tight. Last night's game was 77-69-66-63.

Also got a game of Neuroshima Convoy in last night. Despite hundreds of Hex games, I'd never played Convoy. Pretty cool. Moloch vs Outpost, with the latter trying to exhaust Moloch's deck and destroys all the Robots in New York before that final city is destroyed. (I suppose they should've called New York with their Rocket Launcher...?) It mirrors the Hex game pretty closely, in that Moloch has legions of powerful machines that seem overwhelming and Outpost has spectacular movement capabilities and precision fire. I played the humans and lost to a couple Annihilators with modules attached that I simply couldn't remove (I had two "direct kill"-style cards in the last 4 of my deck that would've helped.) It's definitely something I'd like to try again.

So, in what is arguably my only stupid purchase of this pandemic, I bought Republic of Rome. New copy, reasonable price, felt I had to at least try. Currently muddling through a solo game in an attempt to learn it properly. Have set the rulebook aside and have covered the room in summaries and rewritten rules from BGG. Sweating like I'm on trial. My group can handle Dune, Westphalia, etc, but I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

I played a lot of Republic of Rome in high school and college. This was the early to mid nineties. Back when we used to also play Star Fleet Battles regularly. Expectations were different, the amount of time we had was greater.

But Republic of Rome was a different experience that I don’t think has really ever been emulated. I’ve reacquired it twice since losing my original in a move. Each time I end up trading it because I can’t get it to the table any longer.

It’s a special game, though.

OhBollox wrote: So, in what is arguably my only stupid purchase of this pandemic, I bought Republic of Rome. New copy, reasonable price, felt I had to at least try. Currently muddling through a solo game in an attempt to learn it properly. Have set the rulebook aside and have covered the room in summaries and rewritten rules from BGG. Sweating like I'm on trial. My group can handle Dune, Westphalia, etc, but I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

Don't bother with the solo game, it's a silly variant that won't teach how the game plays. Just play all sides and see how things work. You also shouldn't have any problems if your group plays Dune and the like.

RoR isn't too complex. You just have to know what you can do. If you know what you can do, that you can start an agrarian law or send someone to war. All the actual information is on the board, no need to know exactly how to assassinate someone if you can just look it up.

Feel free to hit me up with any questions you have, I'll be glad to help.

It's a shame it's only available in Spanish because "Republica de Roma para Dummies" is the best way of learning the game.

Played a few games of Glass Road recently, which is an Uwe Rosenberg game cut from a slightly different cloth than his larger worker placement games. It's super tight, taking place across only 4 rounds. It's centered around simultaneous card play, where you play a card that has two actions on it and if no one else played the same card you get to do both actions, but if anyone played the same card you each get to do one of the actions. Plus there are resource production wheels that are interesting, but that would be hard to describe in text so I won't. Anyway, 4 rounds is brutally little time to do things and you need to have a solid line from the first action you take. You try to set up a little engine of getting resources and converting then into points somehow. This one packs a huge amount of crunchy gameplay into 30-60 minutes depending on player count and if you like tight euro puzzles I highly recommend it.

Also played a few rounds of Bullet on TTS. I backed this one on Kickstarter but it hasn't manifested physically yet. It's themed around bullet hell shmups, and the gameplay is a pattern building puzzle kind of survival challenge. Each round you get X amount of bullets coming at you, and you have to place all of your current bullets to survive a round. The number of bullets you get is equal to the current Intensity (which goes up each round) plus the number of cleared bullets that the player to your right sent at you in the previous round. Your current bullets are face down, and when you draw one it's color and number indicate where it gets placed on your bullet grid. A yellow 4 would go in the fourth spot down in the yellow column, and you skip over and don't count occupied spaces. If a bullet would be placed off the bottom of your grid you take damage instead. You have a deck of pattern cards that let you clear bullets arranged in specific patterns off your grid and send them to attack the player to your left in the next round. You have various ways of manipulating bullets to help you make patterns. So yea basically it's an ever increasing barrage of bullets that you eventually drown in, and you just need to drown last. Also every time a player is eliminated the Intensity for the next round is bumped, so the remaining players die that much faster. It's really fun if you like that kind of pattern puzzle stuff, and like the feeling of barely staying ahead of inevitable destruction. Plus, in the physical version of the game each round of the game is on a 3 minute timer to really ramp up the intensity. If you haven't finished when the time runs out the only action you can then take is placing the rest of your bullets and hoping you don't die.