What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Venmo me $10 and I’ll send you a private email with what I think.

Actually we did record. But I’ll save you the wait and the hour of your youth — it’s good, close to great. I have a few reservations on some items available, in that they are very powerful and worse, they’re exclusive, and that has thrown the game off whack when we played. But I think a couple of house rules could fix them and lift the game into legendary status. Honestly, a civ game that plays in three hours is a pretty neat trick.

We speak to some usability issues in the podcast, but that is likely easy to overcome as well. My buddy Stephen has a grand plan for an additional display to bring some attention to the point salad options not apparent on the table.

Had two people over tonight for a couple of games, and in a rare turn of events, I won both of them.
One person was late so I taught the other one Neuroshima Hex!. I kept things simple, taking Borgo and giving them Outpost. They grasped the rules well, but my experience still allowed me to defeat them by several hit points of damage on their base.

After that was a 3 player game of Lords of Waterdeep. This was pretty entertaining and quickly got into the whole "I was going to go there, you motherfucker" type of stuff that can make worker placement fun. I was fortunate enough to score TWO 25 point quests, giving me enough of a lead that they were not able to catch me.

Was surprised to play a filler gambling game at the end of Thanksgiving with my dad's side of the family. The game was called Left, Right, Center, and featured 3 specialized d6s with sides that were marked Left, Right, Center, or a black dot. The black dots were on 3 sides of each die.

Each player starts with 3 dollars. On your turn, you roll the dice. For each Left or Right that you roll, you pass a dollar to the player on your left or right. For each Center that you roll, you put a dollar in the center of the table. Black dots do not move your dollars anywhere. If you have less than 3 dollars, you roll dice equal to the number of dollars you have, which could include zero. If you have more than 3 dollars, you still only roll 3 dice. Nobody is completely eliminated until the end, so you might just sit for a while as the game continues, and then suddenly the player on your left or right is forced to pass you a dollar and you are back in the game. Play continues until there is only one player left, and that player keeps playing turns until they roll all black dots. If that player succeeds, they get all the money. If they instead lose the last of their money to the center, nobody wins and everybody gets their three dollars back.

After my second roll, I lost all my dollars. Later in the game, I got a dollar and immediately lost it. Our host and owner of the game eventually won. It was a tolerable filler game. No decisions to be made, but rolling dice to win or lose money has a certain baseline entertainment value. It would probably be more fun as a drinking game, but I am a few decades too old to play drinking games.

You're close: www.amazon.com/LCR%C2%AE-Left-Center-RightTM-Dice/dp/B003I64OT6 :)

You've probably passed them a dozen times in gas stations or convenience stores and not even noticed them. The cheapy package is a plastic tube with the three dice and some wafer-thin chips. Usually priced at $2.99 on the impulse buy shelf next to the checkout.

Oh man, LCR! Wasn't that one of BGG's original whipping boys? You have about as much control over the outcome of an NFL game, which makes it perfect for that post-holiday meal fugue.

Next time we have a big family get-together (Thanksgiving was a bust this year) I'm teaching everyone to play 10000 and telling all the kids it's a gambling game they play in prison

My wife plays that with her coworkers during their downtime.

She even bought a collapsible dice tower to use in their games.

Virabhadra wrote: Oh man, LCR! Wasn't that one of BGG's original whipping boys? You have about as much control over the outcome of an NFL game, which makes it perfect for that post-holiday meal fugue.

Next time we have a big family get-together (Thanksgiving was a bust this year) I'm teaching everyone to play 10000 and telling all the kids it's a gambling game they play in prison

You are right about LCR getting lots of BGG hate. I'm now tempted to get a copy just to fill that slot you're talking about, where you just shoot the shit and brag or bitch about your luck. It'd be no fun at all unless everyone threw $1 in a pot or something.

The version of 10,000 that I played back in the dawn of time had a push-your-luck component. You rolled until you quit or if you didn't increase your score. If you busted you got 0 points. If someone passed 10,000 everyone else had one last do-or-die turn.

Just finished a solid afternoon with one of my regular groups. We started off with Tiny Epic Dungeons because they've never won a game with me. It was Sir Gamelyn, Wyn Keleas, and Evelynn vs The Gorgon. We found the Troglodyte quite early and killed him, followed by the Wraith, but couldn't find the third Minion's room. We ended up finding the Lair before we finally found the Minotaur. We were also having some trouble keeping the Goblins under control but finally lured the Gorgon out to an Altar room so we could get farther into her 24 health, but couldn't finish her off before we had our Karen Allen moment ("Indy! The torch is running out-!") So, still no win for them, but we had a good time fighting through it. Sir Gamelyn managed to assemble the complete set of the Bear, too.

Then we tried Shamans, since a member of another group thinks the game is slanted too heavily toward the Shadows at five players. Since we'd picked up a fourth, I wanted to try with four players to see if it went any better. I think it did, although there's still an easier path toward the Shadow winning the round if the Shamans aren't willing to talk. We had a lot of Moon Shard tokens show up, which meant that one Shaman or another was going to be scoring two extra points, which meant that a couple players tried knocking them out simply to keep them from scoring... but that also means the Shadow marker moves up for every card left in their hand. In the end, the Shadow won three of our five rounds before someone scored the eight points to end the game. I think this is one of those games that, like Root, will only improve with each play, but you have to be willing to play several times (and preferably with most, if not all, of the same people) in order to really get the hang of it. I like it because I can see the depth in it. Two other people liked it, but my girlfriend is kinda meh on it because I think it's too nebulous for her.

We finished off with Pan Am. One of this group is not a train game fan at all and, while it isn't a train game, it shares a lot of properties with them. I don't like train games, either, by and large, but I still think Pan Am is really interesting because of the variability created by the Event cards and Pan Am simply buying up the routes that you worked to build. You have to be flexible and know that that snowball is rolling, so I've gotten into the habit of simply landing routes and then promptly discarding the Destination cards to land other routes and moving on as rapidly as possible. It lets me build up a stack of cash and means I don't stay too attached to any particular path. That let me win the stock battle 15-11-10-8. They were in a pretty serious bidding war for airports in every round but the last. I only bought one in Tokyo that I barely used except to leverage a couple routes which I then promptly sold when the Pan Am symbol came up on the die. I don't think it was a huge hit, but I have another group that loves it, so that's fine.

The more I play Mosaic (three times now) the less interested I am in playing Mosaic. It has a lot going for it but needed some more cooking time to really make it. There are a lot of things that just don't make sense and there are some things I have issues with. And production-wise, it's clear the emphasis was on kickstarter nonsense and not actual functional production. (The retail version doesn't come with the metal coins, plastic bullshit, or wooden resource tokens. It comes with cardboard resource tokens. And not enough of them. And no score sheets or scoring track. Just clownshoes effort all around.)

There were questions about Block by Bloc: Uprising elsewhere, so I'll report here. I've played it three times now and won twice (lost the first game). I got a rule wrong in the first two games (it was a change from the 2nd edition that I didn't notice) that made things harder, but I think we still would have lost that game.

First things first, if the idea of resisting cops and looting stores make you uncomfortable, just keep on walking. This is a game by leftists and for leftists that isn't concerned with preserving the feelings of mainstream liberals and conservatives. But it's okay, y'all got plenty of other games that will make you feel good.

That said, it's not just a game where you play the "pronouns" card and everyone cheers and you score points. It's a meaty co-op game with tough decisions and risks. The pressure is constant. We won my third game mostly because the cops ended up getting pinned in a corner of the map and we were able to take advantage of that. Those opportunities are not common.

The idea behind the game is you have a five by five grid of districts connected by roads. You are trying to "liberate" districts by clearing them of police and having twice the number of cubes on it as the district's difficulty level. Building occupations on liberated districts is how you win the game, but liberation requires a mass movement -- a district has to either be a Public one or adjacent to an already liberated one to be liberated, so you can't just pick and choose your targets; you have to start somewhere and spread out.

Occupying liberated districts can satisfy goals, but to get goals out you have to send people to meetings, which is a hilarious addition to this 3rd edition. How do you get progress if you don't have meetings?

Along the way you'll fight cops (contrary to rumor, the game says nothing about "killing" them), loot shops, and build barricades. The police are constantly pushing against you and wrecking your shit and it takes a lot of work to keep them at bay.

As a wild-eyed knife-between-the-teeth leftist, I've no problems with the game. The theme appeals to me and although I think it's mechanically solid, I'd be less interested if it had some dumb zombie theme. It's possible to play it semi-coop, where players can have hidden agendas that give them solo victories, but I'm not even a little bit interested in that. Let me have my fantasy of socialist solidarity. I already have enough games where someone wants to fuck that up for personal gain, and I also have reality.

I don't remember a lot about 2nd edition, but Uprising feels a lot more streamlined. Nothing feels forced or clunky, and rules lookups have been minimal. The random layout of the city presents different challenges each time. The only difficulty scaling is how many "Heavy Reinforcements" cards -- one to four -- are put in the Police Ops decks. These cards raise police morale, return destroyed vans to the board, and generate more cops. They definitely are a pain in the ass. So far I've only played on Easy, one Heavy Reinforcement card. Nothing else changes to make things more difficult.

Legomancer wrote: The more I play Mosaic (three times now) the less interested I am in playing Mosaic. It has a lot going for it but needed some more cooking time to really make it. There are a lot of things that just don't make sense and there are some things I have issues with. And production-wise, it's clear the emphasis was on kickstarter nonsense and not actual functional production. (The retail version doesn't come with the metal coins, plastic bullshit, or wooden resource tokens. It comes with cardboard resource tokens. And not enough of them. And no score sheets or scoring track. Just clownshoes effort all around.)

Mosaic is our next podcast release. It's a strange civ game. It's good, but it's different in ways that feel off for the genre.

The metal coins are a pain in the ass. Don't stack, difficult to pick up off the table.

Our conclusion is similar to yours but more about facets in the game, some pieces that are way powerful, and exclusive. I think this is a very good game, but needs about half a dozen house rules to make hum. Oh, and needs another board! My buddy Stephen spoke to that.

By the way, Acquire dropped today. cellargames.com .

Started dating someone new recently. She is really smart and very easy-going. I only halfway planned our third date, because I wanted to stay flexible and also offer her some options for after dinner. We took a walk in a park because it was unusually nice out, then an early dinner. One idea that I offered was to pop over into the nearby shopping mall, maybe for a movie or at least some pre-holiday window shopping. Most women that I have ever dated would jump at the chance to go to the mall, but my date surprised me by admitting that she was lukewarm about the prospect. We were also only a couple of blocks away from Christian Petersen's GameZenter, formerly known as the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center, so I tentatively mentioned that and she surprised me again by saying yes.

So there we were at GameZenter at 7:00 on a Saturday night. It was a slow night, probably due to the holiday weekend, with maybe 30 gamers present. I showed her the big bookcases full of games that we could play for free, except that the shelves were half empty. There was also a smaller display of newer games that were under lock and key, where you had to get permission at the front counter to play, possibly by securing it with a drivers license or something. We were both wearing contacts and didn't bring readers, so we realized that text-intensive games were going to be a problem. Also, my date advised me that she didn't have a long attention span, which is why she has not seen a lot of movies. So some of my favorites on display were out of the question, like Arkham Horror and Marvel Champions.

We played two light, filler games that she picked out. I forget the name of the first one, but it involved flipping a couple of cards covered with small clipart style pictures, and the first player to identify matching pictures (in different colors) would get the cards. If there were no matches, we flip another card, and possibly another and another. She beat met soundly, 35 to 20. While looking for another game to play, she found a completely different game with the exact same rules, which is part of the reason why I can't remember the original game.

Our second game was Mr. Jack. Due to limited eyesight, we struggled through the rules and then agreed to ignore the special abilities of the characters. The game lasted three turns, ending early because she decided to take a guess after narrowing it down to three characters. She guessed correctly. The game seemed pretty lightweight, but maybe offers some depth with replay.

The local game club has an After Turkey Day Fest, and my daughter and I went there last Friday.

At first we got into a couple of 6-player games of 7 Wonders. She had played once before, and with a little rules refresher she was on her feet. The first game I went a little bit of everything and came in the middle of the pack. The second game I committed hard to science, but the cards kind of dried up and I ended up tied for last. My daughter came in second in the first game, and tied with me for last. The first game was close, with scores of 57-56-54-54-52-49. The second one was much more spread out, with scores ranging from 61 to 35 (me as dead last). I like 7 Wonders fine, but you can get hosed early and end up just going through the motions after the halfway point.

Then we went out to eat supper (bulgogi, mmm), and came back to meet my brother for more gaming. We played two sessions of Pan Am. The first game I won by building routes in the Far East and letting Pan Am come to me. The second game I built all over the map. I got lucky and was able to upgrade my 3-plane to a jet in the 5th round for extra $$$. It's pretty close to being my favorite game now.

After that my daughter had to run an errand for her boyfriend's crazy mom, and my brother and I played Clank in Space. We had played Clank before, but not this variant. It turned into a two-hour slog, and he won 105-94. I think I liked the original better, or possibly that it's not nearly as much fun with two players as it is with four.