What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played the first 5 cases of Micromacro Crime City with my wife today, and it's just delightful. If you like the concept it delivers fully. The art is great, theres all kinds of fun stuff to find on the map, the cases are fun... I mean there's nothing bad to say about it really. I'll be sad when we get through all the cases, just because I don't want it to end.

charlest wrote: I just have a retail core set of Ancient Chronicles. I'm honestly kind of terrified of the amount of tokens a full Kickstarter set must consist of. There are already about 75 different varieties in just this one box.

Yeah - cardboard token metropolis are S&S games - but the real scary part is working through the AI of the enemies, they are all well designed and complex, the ones in the Arcane Portal expansion buff each other and are a real pain in the arse .... but such a rewarding game when you finish a quest.

Got in a great 5-player Cyclades game tonight. There were three newbies, one second-timer, and me, so I stuck with the basic game. Everyone still loved it. Both of the non-DOAM players liked that there were multiple options for victory that didn't necessarily involve combat. Everyone liked that the creature deck had real impact throughout much of the game. In the end, we had two metropoli out and I was a fortress away from completing my second, but the second-timer had conquered one island with the other metropolis and then had two philosophers and enough cash to both outbid everyone on Athena and pick up the second philosopher in one move... one step on the bidding track before I could take Ares and get my fortress. Dammit. I explained what some of the expansions can do and everyone was really geeked to play again, so I think this one will be an easy repeat play with this group, which is teh awesome.

Then we tried another game of Vampire: Rivals and... Yeah. I just don't think this is going to work. No one that I've introduced it to has come away feeling positive and almost everyone has immediately identified the glaring flaws (Doesn't feel like your actions have impact; It's possible to just ignore the other players and kill citizens to win, which takes forever; Conspiracies and Schemes are seriously underwhelming; etc.) This seems like an earnest attempt to translate an RPG system that already required a very particular mindset and group dynamic to work in the first place... and it doesn't work any better here. Great setting. Solid art. You feel like there should be a game there, but it's just not worth taking the time to find it.

Games played at game night last night

Lost Ruins of Arnak (3 way tie for first, also I played)
Hoity Toity
The Crew (bunch of hands, made it through mission 8)
The Mind (multiple games, no wins)
Ghost Blitz

First time playing Ghost blitz, which is a speed grabbing game sort of similar to Spot It. There are 5 wooden objects in the middle and you flip a card that has two of the objects pictured in it. If one of the pictures objects is the correct color, grab it. If neither of the objects pictured are the right color you need to grab the thing that is not pictured and that is not the same color as one of the two objects pictured on the card. It's really fun/silly, assuming you like that kind of thing. Good 1am game for some laughs.

A nice return to gaming, now that people are vaccinated. Probably 16 people total, bunch of returning regulars but a bunch of new faces as well. Very excited to have my game group back on the table.

jason10mm wrote: Building a MAME cabinet is high on my list once I get the new house in order. That would make for a nice series of blog posts if I had a blog (and if a dozen folks haven't done it already). I wonder if they have digital pinball machines....they must, right? With a little motion detector so you can hip check the machine on occasion?

Building an arcade cab is pretty easy and quite fun. All I recommend is not to go overboard and add games as you want to play them. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of jank!

There are indeed some high-quality pinball emulators and you can add tilt detectors very easily. Sadly emulation of physics is not as easy as emulation of old video games


This reminds me my project to connect my PC to my monitors so I could play on a CRT and stream at the same time didn't pan out

A friend and I got together for a couple days of gaming recently. Here is a recap of what we played:

IMPERIAL STRUGGLE: a random draw resulted in me playing the cheese eating surrender monkeys while James played the warm beer guzzling British. Early on James snagged the Advantage tiles in the Caribbean and used them to hammer my markets with Conflict Markers; after the first turn I decided to write off that theater and focus elsewhere. Just about every turn that seemed to be worth the most Award VP. While I don't proclaim to be an expert by any means, my handful of plays has imparted upon me that you can't be everywhere. I focused on Europe early, grabbing the Debt reduction tile after some back and forth. India I had a good position as well . North America seesawed back and forth although I was able to get three of the four forts which made my position strong. Overall James did better in trade than I did and while most wars were fairly inconsequential ( only two Territories were taken via Conquest the whole game - even the AmRev was a tie despite both of us maxing out War tiles ) I did win both Jacobite Wars . Between the VPs from those and the Jacobite Ministry card, I got 10 VPs from them, as well as forcing James to take the Ministry card that discards the Jacobite one. Slowly but surely I edged the VP marker towards maxing out and while we got to the final turn, the French prevailed.

Next up was CAESAR ROME VS GAUL. Another random side determination resulted in James donning the purple while I took the ancestors of the cheese eating surrender monkeys. The first turn was fairly dull as both of us got hands consisting mostly of the other sides events. James did smash two of the three tribes I started the turn with. We didn't fight a ton of combats, as I focused on spreading influence and blocking his Governance as best I could. The Germans activated , but in each case one player moved them then immediately other guy played his own card to move them. By turn 5 the Celts had done a pretty good job building up a hornet's nest of fortified towns and Caesar decided Belgica offered more opportunity as he squashed several tribes up there. He ended turn 5 by playing a card that evaporated six of my PC markers ( adjacent to Caesar ) . But he only had 7 VP headed into the final turn. I had a 3/5 chance to draw the tribe that controls the crossing to Britannia but the gods were not with me. Undaunted, he marched across the English Channel, subduing the Brits. Then he went over to Germania and did the same, as I had positioned my forces too far away to interfere. So even though the Celts were running wild , those 4 VP plus just enough Governance - secured in the final card play - snatched victory.

After a fine dinner of local BBQ, we played an RSG scenario from COMBAT COMMANDER PACIFIC. Random side selection resulted in James taking the Sons of Nippon ( elite ) while I had the British ( Line ) . Set in 1942, we both chose company size OOBs and the engagement was set as Recon vs Recon. This meant no Defender red actions and no additional Support rolls. It also meant the Japanese had no Sighting Markers/Infiltration. The board was the one with the hill taking up 2/3 of the map overlooking the edge of the Airfield with a building set back from the crest. I was set up just behind the hill and was able to move in quickly to take up positions while James edged a large force around the flank out of LOS and shielded with Smoke from his numerous knee mortars. Using this cover he was able to move into Melee with one of my leader hexes with a squad and Mifune, the IJA Hero. He started at a +5 advantage and an Ambush. But my two Bayonet Actions as well as his roll of 4 doomed him. The rest of his forces on that flank made a run for the board edge and while some got off, several more squads succumbed to plunging fire from above. The exited troops returned as well as an OBA module that rained down on my concentrated troops in the building area but it wasn't enough and the British managed the historical rarity of a victory in 1942 vs Japan.

Next morning we cracked open COMMAND AND COLORS SAMURAI . We played Scenario 22 ( can't remember the name ) which features both sides edging up to a river crossing. We played twice, switching sides. Both games saw pretty much all the action on one side of the board as sides took turns lunging at one another aided by Dragon cards for extra punch. James prevailed in both games, as each went to both sides needing a single flag to seal the victory. We really like this iteration of the CC system. In Ancients, which I still like a lot, there is a lot less uncertainty, relatively speaking. Other than First Strike, no card the other player may be holding can seriously derail your plans. With CC Samurai the Dragon cards make play much more dynamic and unpredictable.

Back to COMBAT COMMANDER, we went to Europe for the RSG so we could use the iPad app for a faster start up ( it did lock up several times, I need to ask Michael Kiefte about that ) . This time James' Line Russians were defending in 1940 against my elite Finns. While my troops were quite good, and can Discard as well as play Orders at the same time, they are still using the rather uninspiring Italian Fate Deck. I only had a thin woods line to start off in and not enough cover to shield my troops, so several platoons had to rush across an open field to a woodline near the big objective, a two hex building near the middle of the board. Meanwhile the bulk were skirting the far side where James had the bulk of his forces dug in on a wooded hill. One Russian squad , set up in a Foxhole next to my initial line, definitely earned the Hero of the Soviet Union ( posthumously ) for fending off what must have been a dozen high FP attacks before falling in Melee and opening the way for my advance. As the Russian dead pile started to grow after a string of Melees it was not looking good for Uncle Joe's boys. But an Infantry Howitzer reinforcement popped up and started blasting away , killing a recently promoted Finnish 6-2 leader . Along with a large firegroup James had amassed in and around the farm, he smartly proceeded to unleash 6-8 Fire attacks per round with one Fire card, burning through both our decks. Towards the end of the game my deck finally started to show its true colors as my hand slowly but surely clogged with Command Confusion cards and other dreck. By stubbornly clinging to the Initiative even as his Militia died in droves, he was able to wrap up the game even though half his troops were dead or fleeing.

The final game was COMMAND AND COLORS TRICORNE JACOBITE REBELLION . I had never played Tricorne but the rules and charts for vets of the other games in the series, make getting going fairly easy. Like Samurai , each side has a separate deck of tactics type cards . Unlike Samurai, they don't cost anything, they just appear less frequently. The scenario we chose had one side's troops strung out along a road while their commander "entertains" a local woman at the end of the road column; he starts alone and if killed, is worth three of the four banners needed to win. Forces were rather sparse on both sides - James had six Highlander units ( basically the best foot units ) while I had a mix of Highlanders and....lesser troops but a whopping four leaders . The big wrinkle in Tricorne is that if you get a flag result, after taking losses you must see if your troops flee the battlefield. You roll one die per surviving block; a flag result ( 2/6 chance ) means they stay; otherwise they rout off the map. So I start off by going after his lone leader and whiff. Jame's response kills one unit entirely, routs the other off the map and sends my surviving unit running for cover. I manage to parry by killing some of his units so that we are now tied 3-3. Janes sends several Highlanders towards my questionable Militia in hopes of either killing them outright or Routing them. Miraculously they hold, but a nearby hex has my leader with a lone Highlander block in a vulnerable position. James rolls three dice needing a single hit or even a Flag to finish the job but whiffs. My lone block, aided by the Leader and a Bayonet Charge card ( 2 bonus dice ) rolls four dice and wipes out the Highlander for a desperate win. This is only my first play of Tricorne but it interested me enough to try again, perhaps with artillery and cavalry as well.

Hi, guys. I'm a newbie here, but as I see you are not at all. I have read the last couple of pages of this thread and it seems to me that you are playing some super difficult games lol. The hardest thing I played was monopoly
Recently, we started getting together with friends every weekend and playing board games. What games do you recommend for beginners?
And I have always been interested in table football, but I still haven’t figured it out. Who can tell me the rules of this game and should I buy it for a company of 6 people? (Does this also count as a board game or not?)

Hi, John. Honestly, I think you may be underselling yourself and/or overselling some of the games recently mentioned. Cyclades, for example, isn't that much more complicated than Monopoly. Both of them involve bidding and acting on good cards that show up, for example, so if you're able to play one, I certainly think you could play the other. I can't say that I'd recommend much for "beginners", per se. I'd just look for games that you think you might enjoy, regardless of presumed complexity.

Played Underwater Cities for the first time today. I'm not normally a fan of process games (I'm mildly notorious in my extended group for disliking Terraforming Mars enough to have traded it away) but this one was OK. I think what bugs me about them generally is that they're removed enough from multiplayer solitaire because you actively compete over board spaces (as with Cities) but you're not actively competing in a strategic sense. You can certainly create a strategy of your own, but your opponents won't possibly have the brain space to both develop theirs and actively interfere with yours, such that your nice strategy may earn you X points, but they can come screaming from nowhere to surpass you with Y points and there was basically nothing you could've ever done to prevent it because you can't keep track of all of that and still enjoy yourself. What makes certain process games like John Company stand out to me is that not only can you actively trade blows with your opponents on a strategic level, but you're also working to keep the whole game (company) from collapsing, which brings more of an "actively playing games with others, rather than by yourself in the same room with others" scenario. You know their strategy because what you're doing together on the board reveals it, rather than having to keep track of everything they're also doing on their board(s), as with Cities.

So we played Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective for Father’s Day. My oldest daughter is in Ukraine and my oldest son lives thirty miles away and is not that responsive so it was me, teen daughter, wife and 21 year old son. It lived up to every session report I have ever read. You basically read paragraphs, chasing leads around, and take notes. It was way harder than we thought, and after 2.5 hours we decided on a possible suspect. Our general suspicions were on the mark but we totally got the murderer wrong and I then remembered everyone saying that the game is a brain burner. Daughter loved it, everyone said they would play again, and I think it has potential. I was a little adhd tonight and this is not a fast paced game. Anyway I’ve had it for at least two years so overall it was a good evening.

In other news I got in a fender bender on my wife’s car and our amazing new infrared grill broke. One week left in summer semester and then I enter indentured home repair servitude.

Next time we are using a cork board or a laptop to keep track of clues.

johnheg wrote: Recently, we started getting together with friends every weekend and playing board games. What games do you recommend for beginners?

Games may seem difficult from the outside, but the vast majority of them can be played by anyone, regardless of experience. I would simply note down any games that seem appealing to you and then filter down or ask for recommendations.

How many players do you usually play with? That's going to be an important factor. And even if you play only, say, Risk and Monopoly, that can be a clue into something you might like. What are you playing lately?

johnheg wrote: Hi, guys. I'm a newbie here, but as I see you are not at all. I have read the last couple of pages of this thread and it seems to me that you are playing some super difficult games lol. The hardest thing I played was monopoly
Recently, we started getting together with friends every weekend and playing board games. What games do you recommend for beginners?
And I have always been interested in table football, but I still haven’t figured it out. Who can tell me the rules of this game and should I buy it for a company of 6 people? (Does this also count as a board game or not?)

I'd recommend Settlers of Catan for four.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf plus the phone app works well for six. Codenames is also a good game for six.

Foosball - 1v1 or 2v2. 1v2 if the solo player is a better player than the team players. I wouldn't count foosball as any more of a board game than darts or ping pong are, but crokinole is discussed here so I guess it's allowed.

ETA: As to game difficulty itself, Monopoly + all of its corner cases is hard. BGG has given it a bad rep, but as far as difficulty is concerned, it's harder than Power Grid (6-player Power Grid!). It just that a lot of adult beginners don't want to look bad stumbling through unfamiliar rules. I'm no longer afraid of looking like a goofus when I'm learning a game, because I don't have the 'pick up the rules of a game immediately' gene.

Ah_Pook wrote: First time playing Ghost blitz, which is a speed grabbing game sort of similar to Spot It. There are 5 wooden objects in the middle and you flip a card that has two of the objects pictured in it. If one of the pictures objects is the correct color, grab it. If neither of the objects pictured are the right color you need to grab the thing that is not pictured and that is not the same color as one of the two objects pictured on the card. It's really fun/silly, assuming you like that kind of thing. Good 1am game for some laughs.

I played Ghost Blitz with a friend and his two kids yesterday. The 5yo didn't quite grasp the rules of which object to grab, but he still has fun grabbing stuff. The 8yo I think had a transcendent religious experience playing this game. I've never seen her be into anything else to this level. She was like hyperventilating and had tears in her eyes from how intensely she was enjoying this game. So... I guess that's a win?

We also played a few games of Dragomino, which is the kids version of Kingdomino. Imagine Kingdomino with 90% of the rules taken out, which is impressive since I didn't realize there were that many rules to take out. It was a fine kids game, but not much interest there for adults. It's basically matching colors on dominos and then drawing a token that might have points on it.

After the kids went to bed we played a 4p game of Survive: Escape From Atlantis, which is a stone cold classic. We played without the points on the bottom of the guys, as no one felt like remembering stuff. It was carnage, as it always is. I won 4-3-3-3 but only because the volcano tile was the first rock tile that got flipped. All the rest of my guys were dead, and I would have been hard pressed to kill everyone else to preserve my lead.

Good gaming weekend, played Arkham Horror lcg twice, spirit island once. I got pretty frustrated with spirit island because it was one of those games where I was getting literally none of the elements I needed.

We played the same games over the weekend! By contrast we had an awesome game of Spirit Island where we went with the deluge option of River + Ocean + Downpour. Along the way we acquired Powerstorm and another card (I forget the title) that allows a spirit to repeat their lowest cost power. This led to some crazy combos where, along with Downpours abilities, we were repeating several powers every turn as well as having energy sloshing around like crazy due to all the luckless invaders being fed into Ocean's maw and gifted back out to the other spirits via Powerstorm. Downpour reached a point where it was nuking several towns every turn, which was helpful as we were playing against mid-tier Prussia. The final turn saw Downpour repeat Cleansing Floods three times over doing fourteen damage at a time to clean out the final invader stronghold cities at a whopping cost of fifteen energy. Seriously awesome to see these three spirits working together.

More Iron Helm. I really love this game but it just pulls us short in a couple of areas. This is a game that absolutely needed a developer, it being a one man Game Crafter thing really holds it back from being one of the all time greats.. With a proper development cycle and a more thoughtful way of expanding the game, it could be one of the greats.

The problems start with tbt rules- to put it bluntly, they are stupidly written. There a little “appendix” book that had absolutely critical rules in it. Why aren’t they in the core rules? Who know! There is that lack of consistency of terms and cases that is a key hallmark of an amateur design. Does “draw a treasure” mean the same thing as “draw a loot card” and/or “draw a potion card”? There are important rules that just aren’t written in either the rulebook or the “appendix. It’s obnoxious. I expect better.

The adventure packs are a great idea- little $6 boosters that give more of everything. But the “theme” of each booster is barely there and there’s a pointless attempt and making it seem like the game is somehow different by replacing 10 cards in the main game. There is no storyline, and it’s dumb that it tries.

When you get through the first level and beat the boss, you can move on to a level 2 pack. But by that time you are likely tooled up so much that you just plow through the 2nd level casually throwing away treasures left and right because you simply don’t need them. I got to where I didn’t even bother with the skill upgrades. I was blocking 6 damage per attack...and the monsters were doing like 3-8 damage if they hit. The only threat becomes exhaustion or starvation.

Then I realized I was actually playing a level 3 pack and destroying it straight from level 1. Ha!

So I’m going to try just mixing it all up together, fuck the “levels” and just play it straight roguelike rather than in a graduated campaign. I think it will be harder but better overall. Its really a missed opportunity that the game doesn’t expand on the Dungeon cards that drive the game, that would really push it out a little more as well. But knowing the 16 cards is part of the game and making good decisions depends on it.

The core gameplay is great, and it’s really fun...it’s just a file upload away from being something special.