What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Over the last couple of months I've played a few games of New York 1776 . New York 1776 is a light (8 pages of rules) short (90 minute) block game.

Here's the link to my BGG review Review of 1776

Because I like to stay on the cutting edge of gaming, I played Alien Frontiers for the first time last night. It was pretty good. Certainly better than Kingsburg. I hear this game was bank rolled by the people through something called Kickstarter. I've got a feeling this "crowd funding" thing is going to be huge.

Seriously though, the game was good but not the ultra super fantastic pinnacle of games it was acclaimed to be at the time of its release.

I had a big response about Alien Frontiers, but then I kicked it to its own thread.

I had a terrific game night last night. I almost didn't go, because all of my plans to play Cosmic Encounter fell through, and I didn't feel like plopping down just anything. But I went anyway, and I'm glad I did. I had a chance to play some new stuff I've been wanting to try, and make some new friends too. I even have a tentative plan to get another game of Duel of Ages II in a couple weeks.

Here's what I played:

Origin - This is a new game from Matagot, where you take early man and evolve them from Africa to form tribes all over the world. It's like an EXTREMELY abstracted civ game, though it was able to find that same arc of people spreading all over the world. It was pretty simple, playable with non-gamers. Some people here might balk at the abstraction, but I think it actually falls into that Knizia/Sackson kind of thing where it still feels like the different elements of the game are driven thematically. So it's got the themes without a lot of the detail, which is something I enjoy. It also looks TERRIFIC. I liked it a lot, and I would gladly play again.

King of Tokyo - I hadn't realized it, but it's been ages since I played this one. Still one of the best games out there. I was especially impressed with how it adapts to how different groups play, and still manages to be really fun in the process.

Kolejka - After Sag and Legomancer talked about this one, I've been looking for a chance to play it. I really liked it, though it was a little simpler than I was expecting. It truly nails the theme, from back to front. It's a solid design too, with some good planning and screw-you moves to make. I question how great it would be after like 10 plays, since the variety seemed just a little thin. But 10 good plays is more than most games can manage.

The Resistance - First game of this one in at least three years. I was one of the spies, and though we had opportunities to throw each of the first two missions we let them slide through. It ended up paying off, as we dropped the last three missions to foil those dirty Resistance players.

I've had my eye on Origin for a while. The game looks so beautiful. I've been tinkering with a blind purchase as I haven't heard shit about it. Thanks for the positive impression!

Alien Frontiers has been an interesting story since it first came out.

It was the earliest Kickstarter game of any note, published by an average joe so it had that aura of authenticity to it.

A good game, it wasn't available for awhile which of course magically transformed it into a great game.

Then the designer went to the dark side by using Game Salute to publish, which apparently is like slapping every gamer on earth across the face in front of their children. A game that everyone had to have when it became unavailable became a subject of boycott when it became available.

Quite the journey.

S.

I'll second Origin. Just a nice, beautiful game.

Finally got around to Battle Beyond Space. Wish I had gotten around to it a lot sooner.

Things I like:

• Really rules-light and intuitive.
• Really bloody.
• Quick-playing.
• Nails the chaotic space dogfight scene.
• Really fun special powers.
• My wife, being a BSG fan, likes it because of the ship designs.

I've been looking for a space shoot-em-up for a while. Exile Sun wasn't it. Space Empires wasn't it. GDW's Imperium wasn't it (although that's a cool game in its own right).

The closest thing to what I was looking for has been Twilight Imperium 2E, but that game has a lot of overhead with politics and tech trees, building and research, planetary landings and leaders, etc. I really like TI2 but I don't play it often.

I intend to play Battle Beyond Space often. It's super simple to teach and a lot of fun. We had a lot of trash talking, pleading, cursing, and laughing. Carnage everywhere. Self-destructing fighters, asteroid-swinging capital ships, etc. Really wish I had found out about this game sooner. Why has this game been under the radar? What strange cloaking technology is it using?

I told you so...

Man, I want Origin...

My son and I played our first game of Theseus: The Dark Orbit. We played the introductory first game using Space Marines vs. Aliens. We made a few rule errors though that made the game longer than it should have been, but, our next game will iron these out--we should have read the rules more carefully. We forgot that in the pending card phase that when you play one of your cards and insert it into a sector slot you then also replace it with another of your cards in the pending card slot. Of course, we also forgot that you could place a card in any sector. This game is a lot of fun and so full of potential. I can't wait to try out the other factions and the advanced cards.

There may be something better than HeroQuest being played with painted miniatures on Dwarven Forge terrain, but alas, at the moment I can't think of it.

This is what my 12 year old and I are planning on, later. Sadly, I've packed up most of my miniatures, so the minis will likely be stock, unpainted models. Still, adventure awaits.

TONIGHT'S MAIN EVENT at the Circus Hangout: Tomorrow. I plan on annihilating Russia.

Played four rounds of The Duke with my girlfriend this afternoon. It was both our first time playing and I am very impressed! I really enjoyed how flipping the tiles adds a whole other level of strategy and depth. We played without the Oracle and Seer, but will add those in next time. I'm tempted to pick up the expansion tiles, but might wait a bit... although the Robert E. Howard expansion is really tempting!

played some games i ain't played before;

Caverna; Agricola in a cave. I'm not big on Agricola and i wans't blown away by this. I think its a fun activity/toy (i don't mean this in a demeaning sense). I quite liked just building farms and mines and my own little settlement with its beer production facilities etc but as a game about earning points it sucks. It basically comes down to knowing build orders and disrupting other peoples. Like Agricola I found my self at the table with some people who knew how to play the game properly and made most of the points and gave explanations as to what i did wrong etc. Yawn. Apparently questing is the gold path to victory points. I came 3rd out of 5 but i just don't find the game grabbing as a mental contest. It is more forgiving than Agricola.

Conquest of Nerath. I was fairly pumped about this due to the FAT talk about it. We called the game a little early but it probably would have only gone round the table once or twice more to get to the short game ending. It didn't do much for me. My main dislike is that it was a zero sum game, so things could go back and forth indefinitely for a while before someone rolled bad, or piled on the dragons. The event cards were interesting but too infrequent for my tastes. I prefer Nexus Ops for a dice fest and something with a bit more strategizing for this size of game.

One Night Werewolf; This is an alright deduction game. Like actual werewolf it descends into an arguement and lots of finger pointing and relies a lot on the metagame that develops in your group but it is fun. It basically takes the best round of werewolf and makes it a 5 minute game. We got a werewolf in about 2/3rds of the rounds which surprised me a bit.

My tryst with Heroquest went well last night. Pre-loaded the dungeon because my 12 year old needed to get her feet wet with the idea of the game, so I made it less "speculative".

Turns out that mamasan walks in just as we began, and I asked her to sit in. She was high as a kite, which made things much funnier, but the 12 year old just thought it was her because past 5PM, she's usually high.

Anyhow, the 12 year old plays the Dwarf and Elf, mamasan plays the Wizzy and Barbarian. Talk about taking the good characters, but she'd never played it and I didn't want to get her pissed off before we started.

I left all the doorways open but a few, just so that monsters would spawn and I could kill them all. Turns out that I'm not a "kind and gentle" DM, I literally would like nothing better than to TPK their asses.

Funny thing is that the 12 year old is rolling 2's and 3's all night long with the dwarf, which is funny as shit. Stubby little legs and whatnot. She only got to make maybe 4 attacks the whole night because while mamamsan is slaughtering the evil baddies, she's running into rooms that were vacated and searching for shit. Her magnum opus was casting the passwall spell, walking into the room with the Gargoyle, and then drinking her potion of badassness to get 2 extra attack dice. 2 hits passed through 5 defense dice. Almost killed him. Next turn she uses her "2 attack" spell (or was it potion) and whiffs on both.

They won, in the end, but they only started working together when the shit hit the fan. Ended up with maybe 200 gold between them, a potion in reserve. The 12 year old saw how much shit was in the center room and was like "yeah, the boss is in there" and went right at it. Should've hidden the rooms contents and whatnot, but c'est la vie. Was worth it.

Broke out El Grande last night and it was great and went over really well with the group. There is a good dose of gambling in this game, which I loved. Quite a lot to think about given such simple rules and quick turns.

I went to a meeting of my local game club yesterday and played stinker after stinker! We started with a really mediocre deckbuilder called Rune Age, moved on to a couple somewhat interesting games in The Bucket King and Gravwell, and then played two total abominations, Zombies Keep Out and Dungeon Run.

After this I left the games club and went to a friend's house where I demanded we play some good games. There we got in two quick games of Wiz-War, my first with the new FFG expansion, which I really liked the chaos school, followed by one kind of over the top game of Battlestar.

My friend is a chronic completionist and wanted to play BSG with some expansion stuff, since he had all of them. I conceded, even though I have a general distaste for most FFG big box expansion stuff, and after an overly long explanation of the modules we were using which made it apparent he had no concept of how they worked, we were off. we played with the Ionain Nebula scenario, the Cylon Fleet board, expansion skill cards, and expansion characters.

I'm of the opinion that the base game is tough for the humans, in the 10+ games I've played I've never seen a human victory, and it seemed to me like everything that was added was pro-cylon. The Ionian Nubula was awful. Basically when you jump 8, a bunch of Cylons shit all over you and you have a trial thing where someone can get executed and/or eliminated. It's probably good flavourwise, but it was pretty swingy. One cool aspect of the scenario, however, was the addition of NPC's wandering around the ship. This was kind of cool, it made the ship seem more alive, if you could use these somehow outside of the scenario I'd be interested.

The Cylon Fleet was cool, but added a lot of overhead in the form of new ship types, new rules for vipers, and a general feeling of confusion about what the Cylon icons on the cards did in relation to this board. Maybe if I'd read the rules myself I'd understand this, it seemed like it offered more options for an outed Cylon, which is good, since in the base game an outed Cylon doesn't have much to do, but to me that just kept folks wanting to hide more. I don't know, but I'd play with it again.

I was an expansion character named Cally, and this was the most fun character I've ever played BSG with. She can manipulate skill checks on her turn, and OPG execute a character. Now I'm not super into the airlock space from the first expansion, but just walking into a room and popping someone is cool, I nailed the second Cylon the first turn after the sleeper phase, he never saw me coming.

The expansion skill cards of 0 and 6 were too powerful. There was a 0 that could hurt morale, didn't like that one.

Overall it was a really tense game, we found the Cylons FAST and made it 8 distance in 3 jumps, but we couldn't beat that Ionian Nebula thing. I got executed at the trial which put the good guys down 10 skill cards and I wound up in the brig due to an event after I respawned. The Cylons won handily as soon as we triggered the nebula thing. I highly recommend against playing with it unless you just want to see what it's about, it adds too much and offers too little. Great game though.