What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I hated the new online Dominion version when it was released. Never went back to it. I miss Isotropic very much.

Gary Sax wrote: Sounds like a good eurogame!

I'll take this as a vote of sympathy.

I bought the game Sabotage for a dollar at the thriftstore after seeing it got a 7.5 on BGG, and talked my wife into playing it. It's a capture the flag game where your pieces can move as many spaces as there are other pieces in your horizontal row. My wife beat me four times in a row. I just looked it up again and the 2019 version gets 7.5, and this version actually got a 5.19. If we play it about three more times I think we'll actually solve the game. We definitely got a dollar's worth of fun out of it, but I have no shelf space so maybe someone on the local FM game trading group will take it.

I'm going to sell Wingspan and buy Cosmic Frog, knowing full well that I'll never play it.

The Making Fun version of Dominion was good and worked really well even on tablets. Only one person needed to buy the digital expansions.

That version eventually went away and it was replaced by the current version, dominion.games/ This version is functionally the same as the Making Fun version except for two things. One, everyone now needs to buy the DLC. Two, you have to subscribe to a monthly service that lets you play the game similar to paying to play WoW.

A surprising run of non-Arkham games lately.

My wife was suddenly gripped by the need to teach me 31 or, as I prefer to call it, bad Blackjack. With a small bidding addition, it’s a favorite in her family. She told me her grandmother made her cry by not letting her drop out of a game while she still had money. I don’t understand why she thinks on it fondly.

We’re also trying something new to play more games. Each month we’re going to pick one game as our go-to. That way we can attain some mastery and not need to waste twenty minutes relearning rules. First up is Splendor. We split our two games. We’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks, but it just feels like it’s missing something. The buildup and blocking is fine, but sometimes the draw just stalls you out.

The Director’s Cut expansion for Vengeance arrived, so I popped that out again for Shadowman’s solo missions. Still not terribly good at the game but still a blast and so very evocative. I might be playing him wrong. He might be better as an assassin; in to kill the boss and out rather than knocking out every minion on the way.

I think the expansion for splendor really helps it. We never play without the module that adds more cards per each level. They're sightly more complex effects, and they add 2 cards per tier to open up your options slightly. Not a big change, but it made me enjoy the game more personally.

Splendor is for me the ultimate game that plays better as a mobile app than an actual board game. In person I've always felt like it was a little TOO speedy and clean for its own good. I'm the chit-chat guy at every table, and Splendor moves so fast that there was literally no time to do anything else besides play.

I started a great campaigns of the civil war campaign, first bull run (All Green Alike), and played a couple turns. It's such a stunningly heavy lift to start but the activation to activation gameplay is really dynamic and not hard to wrap your around at all. It's a good absolutely mindless thing to do that is nevertheless complicated enough to keep my mind from wandering too much.

I would love to play Dominion on my phone but the monthly fee model is abusive.

After losing many many times (10+) with beginner spirits on small islands without invaders, I finally won my first game of Spirit Island last night. I was perplexed by the rave reviews this game was getting and persevered through the system without really enjoying it before I started to see myself improving (maybe after 5+ games?). I'm playing the digital implementation by Handelabra games, which is very well implemented and suffers none of the problems I faced when trying the game out on TTS. One thing that made the game enjoyable was abandoning the progressive power decks and just playing the regular draft system. I get why it exists but I think the progressive deck is a bit underpowered and made the game more frustrating then it needed to be. In the end I won as Vital Strength of the Earth. I'm blown away that such a difficult game managed to do so well commercially; if I was playing a physical version there's no way I would've powered through enough sessions to break through this game. Let's see if I can replicate my success again soon!

Played Ticket to Ride: Nordics with mezike and had a good old time. I know much of the hobby has moved past TTR but I enjoy myself every time I play it and most importantly, it gets out of the way and provides enough space for a real conversation to occur above the table rather than focusing just on the game.

Afterwards we ended up playing Carcassonne: The Castle. I'm not a big fan of Carcassonne but this version turned out to be rather fun. I really liked the constraint of the castle walls and the conflict it forces. I'm kind of iffy on the bonus tiles which seemed like a case of the rich get richer but I'm not going to question Reiner Knezia's ability to balance a game after only one play. Happy to give this one another go soon.

Speaking of the rich getting richer, I also recently played Blood Rage. This game reminds me of a Marvel (specifically an Avengers) movie. It's a pastiche of mechanics executed competently (drafting, area control, bluffing, etc.) that come together to produce a movie that neither impresses nor disappoints, a solid 7. My favourite part of the game is the drafting, my least favourite the combat but none of it was particularly memorable. My first time with the game I destroyed everyone by going all in the Loki cards that reward you for losing combats. As this was a learning game for all involved, nobody was hate drafting to keep me in check which brings me to my biggest complaint - I'm not a big fan of requiring hate drafting to (exclusively) balance strategies. For our second game, we were aware that letting someone go all in on a god would be bad so we all ended up with vaguely mixed hands that didn't excel at anything. Most folks ended up pursuing 2 or 3 quests per age so doubling up a quest in the same region made accomplishing your quests much easier; another instance where hate drafting seems essential. I ended up tied with the winner on the VP track at the end of the game but their clan upgrades pushed them over the top to beat me by 30 points. I'd play it again but I'd almost certainly never request this game.
Other impressions: monsters seem pretty situational and generally overpriced unless you have a plan for them. Ships getting trapped at sea if there's no-one to fight seemed pretty gamey. The doubling upgrades in the third age also make it feel like the first two ages are really about positioning more than points so 2/3rds of the game is just build up to the final round. A four player games involves three ages meaning one player doesn't get to go first which isn't a balance issue but the lack of symmetry bothers me.

Are you playing Spirit Island with one spirit & one island board? Because that is already raising the difficulty quite high. In my opinion the game is best with three spirits & boards, good with two, and four or more creates heavy head havoc with too many interlocking discussions happening at the same time. The interactions between different spirits really adds something notable to play. Agree that the TTS implementation is a pale shadow of what the game has to offer, it just doesn't feel as interactive as it does in physical play.

Nordics I think is at its best with three because it puts additional pressure on the centre crossing spaces of the board and it becomes super-cutthroat as a result, but even with two I still prefer it over other versions of TTR.

mezike wrote: Are you playing Spirit Island with one spirit & one island board? Because that is already raising the difficulty quite high. In my opinion the game is best with three spirits & boards, good with two, and four or more creates heavy head havoc with too many interlocking discussions happening at the same time. The interactions between different spirits really adds something notable to play. Agree that the TTS implementation is a pale shadow of what the game has to offer, it just doesn't feel as interactive as it does in physical play.

Haha, that is indeed what I'm doing. It's the default flow when setting up a game so I assumed it was standard but it makes sense that it'd make the game harder. For learning the game, I'm glad I wasn't two handing but now that you've mentioned it, I might try that out and see if the game is easier (and more interesting!) after that.

Erik Twice wrote: I would love to play Dominion on my phone but the monthly fee model is abusive.

Monthly fee ? Wow, that's nuts. I remember there used to be an excellent free Android implementation.

Gary Sax wrote:

I started a great campaigns of the civil war campaign, first bull run (All Green Alike), and played a couple turns. It's such a stunningly heavy lift to start but the activation to activation gameplay is really dynamic and not hard to wrap your around at all. It's a good absolutely mindless thing to do that is nevertheless complicated enough to keep my mind from wandering too much.

Thanks for clarifying that this was historical and not current events.

Still a bunch of Twice as Clever. We're just now starting to break 180-200 more regularly. It seems harder than the first game or we're just still figuring it out. Our main takeaways so far are to take yellow early and often, and to not be too picky about starting out with a high blue number- 7 or 8 is okay, really.

Picked up Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and played the first two scenarios, with two players. Red Guard and Hatchet seems like a decent combo so far. We realized after we played the first scenario, which is likely supposed to be easy, that we had accidentally played as if ALL the monsters were elites. It was still pretty easy, but I'm sure the game ramps up as you add more and more rules and complexity. The slow rollout is nice though. Girlfriend likes it, but is a little iffy on the whole legacy concept and *only* getting 25 scenarios or whatever. We had laminated the last score sheets of That's So Clever and Twice as Clever to allow us to keep playing with dry erase markers...