Board Games!

[Ythan]

Dominion's fun!

[Tatsuya Kaname]

Dominion's good for its time, but almost every other deck building game after that ruined it for me.

Now I play games like Clank! and completed two campaigns of original Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle

[Mina]

This seems like a good place for this video:



I feel like I've played numerous iterations of both of these games.

[vonflare]

this new game Oath looks pretty amazing

[Ythan]

I've never seen this before and it's kinda brilliant.

[Spangled]

I've never seen this before and it's kinda brilliant.

oh, that is clever
I mean, not much more useful than just pairs of dice, but still very cool

[Gammagooey]

Had a great 2nd ever play of Nemesis (and 1st for every other player but me) with friends a few days ago! We super lucked out on the first game alien spawning hitting the 1 blank in the bag so everyone had more time than usual to figure out which of their 2 objectives they wanted to go for before having to throw one away with the first alien spawn, and even with that enough aliens consistently spawned that 3 of the 5 of us wound up dying (mostly from running out of ammo and being alone) before getting to hibernation/an open escape pod after doing their objectives.

It is complex enough with all the rules you need to check for rooms/intruder bag adjustment/etc that the first game will be AT LEAST half figuring out exactly how the hell it all works, but everyone enjoyed it and I'm excited to try adding in the individual character traits for the next playthrough to make the characters feel more unique! I think the fact that most of us play D&D together also helped, making jokes about the individual characters & playing up the amorality that good amount of the objectives lean to (even without anyone keeping a specific *kill player X* objective someone hit the self-destruct button to try to open the escape pods faster) made it interesting but also it's DEFINITELY not a game for everyone, you can be left behind to die from bad luck at any time.


Also since I forgot this thread existed for like 6 months, I've also been playing Arkham Horror LCG both with 1 friend in-person and on TableTop Sim occasionally with another and I've been enjoying that a ton! The new Edge of the Earth expansion got a ton of powerful cards and is on the easier end of the spectrum for Campaign difficulty, and I think by splitting up the first scenario into *up to* 3 parts depending on what things happen/what you choose in the previous parts of the scenario it's probably the best combination of the kind of sprawling feeling of the map/world similar to Eldritch Horror/2nd edition Arkham Horror board game with gameplay that is actually skill-based in Arkham Horror LCG. 10/10 will probably play the campaign again later this year.

[Ythan]

The Arkham Horror lcg looks neat, lots of less frequently referenced content packed in there.

[Chevre]

Hey y'all, I went to the Great Plains Gaming Festival in Lincoln this weekend, and wanted to report what I played (or tried to play) and what we thought. It was record-breaking attendance which was exciting to see!

Friday

• Aquatica
  - Aquatica was huge at the festival last year, but we didn't get a chance to play it. It's a neat card game where you're playing roles and chaining effects to get the best results. It wasn't like, the best experience I had during the weekend, but it was still very good. It definitely hit a point where it seemed like the game was ending and we had to make do with the turns we had left.
  
• Agricola
  - A big boy! My friends were shocked that we had never played Agricola before, but alas. It was the weightiest game we played, but I was shocked at how easy it was to explain. I guess all that weight comes from the breadth of what to do and the tightness. Will definitely draft the cards next time we play, as I think some lopsided hands contributed to the end score. Still very fun despite the tenseness. I would purchase but I'm really enamored by how the original version had like a billion cards, and the 2016 revised edition only has a few from the original.
  
• Chinatown
  - One of the biggest things I learned this weekend is that our group can't really grok with loose rules. I wanted a trading game on our list because we like
  Catan
  and
  Bohnanza
  , but the looseness of Chinatown didn't work. I should've seen it coming because we also don't like Cosmic Encounter. I also don't know if Chinatown really works at 3, it could've been better with more.
  
• Imhotep
  - I thought this would kind of be a slam dunk when I was researching, but I think we were too tired to appreciate it. It's maybe a bit too simple for our liking? It has a sense of Coloretto vibes but I almost think it's too random. It's very hard to think about maximizing your results for every location. I also lost this one pretty badly, so what do I know lol

Saturday

• Wordsy
  - I entered in the Wordsy tournament, which had for its prize a trip to the finals tournament at Gen Con. This was really a game I could research and almost practice beforehand, but I still didn't net the win. I think I actually really choked in the last two rounds of the finals game and just let the win slip by, as I lost on the tiebreaker. Any which way, it was really interesting and I actually got challenged on two words: PROSELYTIZING and KILLIFISHES, so that was pretty cool. (The eventual winner used BELTCHED as a word in his first game and I didn't challenge it and it wouldn't have affected anything but I'm SALTY ok)
  
• Burger Up
  - This is what my friends played while I was in Wordsy. It was a "play-to-win" which meant you could check it out from the library then have a chance to win it at a later date. When I made my way to the table afterward, it looked really neat. Pretty simple and I didn't think it was exactly innovating on anything, but pretty cool and a likable theme.
  
• The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
  - Maybe the defining moment of the festival, in a very bad way lol. As someone who does a lot of research into board games, I looked at The Crew and saw a neat coop game with a simple concept that was really going to work for our group. It did not. It turns out we hadn't had any experience with trick-taking, which led to a really bad experience when The Crew's first mission wants you to have ONE player win ONE specific trick. It's hard to know what to do with the other 12 cards in your hand! When I taught it and we weren't getting it, someone actually walked back and looked interesting and I asked them if they would teach to see if they could explain any better. They did, but it still didn't work for us. :/ I guess Hanabi was also very similar, so it's maybe just a thing with co-op games.
  
• Dune: Imperium
  - And then after The Crew, Dune: Imperium was lovely! I think going into the festival I was apprehensive that I really just liked dry euro-y stuff, but now I'm realizing that's firmly where we want to live (see: Viticulture next). Anyway, Dune: Imperium is a wonderful game and I love what it pulls from other games. Deckbuilding, worker placement, space ownership -- even the low point totals seems pulled from Catan. It was just very definite in all of it, which I think was welcome after the wishiwashiness of The Crew.
  
• Viticulture
  - We encountered some acquaintances at this point, and they taught us Viticulture, which was my most anticipated play but I'm very glad we had people familiar with the game to teach it for us. Wow. Viticulture is just such a brilliant experience. I had kind of looked at it and been like "ok but what it makes it so special?" and like, just everything matters in it without being stressful like Agricola. There's so many interesting aspects and every choice pushes you forward. Sometimes you feel like the game is completely out of reach but then you'll surge into the lead. It was a really awesome experience at 5. I've purchased it with Dune: Imperium as I feel these were really the biggest highlights of the experience.
  
• Libertalia
  - Like, obviously I know Libertalia but our acquaintances did not so we had to teach them. Libertalia is such an inviting game to teach, as it's easy to explain AND everyone has the same hand of cards so there's no "how do I ask you this question without revealing what I have." It's so charming and simple. I'll also take this moment to talk about the Stonemaier re-release of it, which I like but my friends are not into the animal-sky-pirates aesthetic. It also has some game choices that we're finding the original game, if not more fair, handled more elegantly.
  
• Echidna Shuffle
  - This was another "play-to-win" that everyone was giving a shot because it has great table presence with the big chunky echidna figurines. It's very much a kids game and a guy game by to tell us to play it VERY aggressively but we had none of that at like 11:00 p.m. lol. Cute but not for us in the long run.
  
• Dixit
  - Our group had never played Dixit before but it was a good way to cap off the night! Super simple concept. The biggest issue was that because three of us knew each other really well, there's a chance that we could easily reference an inside joke that we know about and quickly both score. I did that my first clue-giving round but stopped afterward because it just didn't seem as fun.

Sunday

• Dimension
  - Dimension was another Gen Con tournament I played in . . . and another one in which I got second lolz. This tournament was more complicated than the Wordsy one, having several prelim rounds that really helped familiarize me with play. There were also like, children playing and succeeding, which was pretty cool. The final round was really phenomenal in that all four players played pretty spectacularly, with the winner being pretty incredible at the game.
  
• Chronicles of Crime: 1400
  - This was the game my friends played with our acquaintances whilst I was in the tournament. I have the OG Chronicles of Crime but have not broke it out yet, so I'm glad they had the chance to try it out. They didn't love it, but I think we'd be interested to see how it goes just the three of us. It's also something I can play solo if I really want to, so I'm not super concerned.
  
• Codenames: Duet
  - While one of my friends was out getting food, me and the other friend played this. We had played original Codenames, so it's not really that different, but it seemed like a really good way to adapt the game for 2.
  
• Everdell
  - This is another one that caught our eye with its table presence. HOWEVER . . . it's a strange one. I like it's concept for seasons (not as much as Viticulture though), but if you have a rough start that means it carries with you throughout. I think the idea is that people being in different seasons really affects what spots are open, but it didn't. I leapt out to an early advantageous position with Occupied pairings and didn't look back. The score was closer than I was expecting, though, so I don't know. What I can say is that the table presence is cool and the components are very lovely, so if that gets you, maybe it's worth it!

That's it! I did also grab

Abandon All Artichokes

in the swap meet, and we got

BATTLECON: War of Indines

,

Stellar Leap

, and

Outlawed

as freebies. We'll have to see how those go!

[Ythan]

Masterpiece is fun.

[Isis]

That was a big family game for me growing up.. I would never play it again but don't wanna rain.

I like the tiny plastic easel

[Ythan]

I played the 1970 edition which sadly predated the little easel but I saw it while googling around yesterday and thought that addition looked very fun.

[Isis]

Oh my god power grid is even more miserable than I suspected who chooses to do this??

[VP Baltar]

Oh my god power grid is even more miserable than I suspected who chooses to do this??

Haha, really? I like Power Grid. What do you hate about it?

[Isis]

The numbers are wayyyy too big I need an abacus just to play.

I did play it five player and five player gaming is inherently bad.
Buying power stations is the interesting part and the game needs some amount of auxiliary noise to make that good but calculating a resource cost connection cost plus second to arrive cost then subtracting the income value to determine if you even ought to fully power is just toooo many excel spreadsheet cells

[Isis]

Its the first time I've seen someone pull out a calculator during a board games exempting endgame scoring for point salad games, that's more sequestered yknow

[VP Baltar]

I suppose I do not take playing it that serious where I try to calculate cost-benefit of all options. Definitely necessary if the goal is to always win, but I usually just try to make the best judgments I can on quick review.

Perhaps putting a time limit on power plant selection would give your group more fun and less number crunching?

[VP Baltar]

And ban the calculators!

[Infinity 324]

that's a style of playing that definitely makes some games more enjoyable, but it's really hard to go from trying really hard to win -> taking a game more chill. i suspect if that group banned calculators and implemented a time limit everyone would be frantically trying to do the math in their heads in the allotted time. it's like games that have revealed information (discard piles etc.) that you can't check at will, it makes us frustrated because we instinctively want to try to memorize all of it.

[VP Baltar]

Yeah, that's a hard mindset shift to make, especially if multiple people in the group play like that. You'd basically feel forced to play that way.

[Irrelephant11]

Has anyone here played King's Dilemma? I want to really bad but don't have a good group for it

[T3]

I love Monopoly but can never find anyone to play with.

My friends and I also play a lot of online Dominion.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

Has anyone here played King's Dilemma? I want to really bad but don't have a good group for it

I have, very fun.

[Isis]

I'm dating a board gamer whose family likes light board games. Imma just blog here about it. We've played a bunch the past few months. We play 2 player a lot I'll write the ones I've played 3+ first.

Ticket to Ride Europe

- this game still feels like bad Splendor to me. It does a pretty good job of accommodating 5 people. The Europe board allowed for lots of end runs if blocked. Blocking in ticket to ride kind of feels bad because your opponent didn't even know you had a route card, they just did it randomly because they also have a route card, it feels more meaningful to me if someone blocks me in another game where we both wanted something generically good, or my especial need for the resource was faceup.
This game does a great job of accommodating 5 people and having a low barrier to entry and not leaning on politics or commerce to generate gameplay and I like all those things. Splendor is just even cleverer at accomplishing those things, perhaps losing out on flavor.

Sushi Go, and roll, and party

- this game is fine. All the variants are fine. You draft cards and choose between cards worth a point or two outright or cards that are worth 5 as a set of nothing alone. It's blindingly light.

Calico

- you arrange color hexes on a board and score points for the shapes according to rules. You keep having to draft one hex from a pool of 3 in the center, forcing pivots.
This is one of those games where I feel like each player in each seat will think a bit about what they want to do and will all settle on the same decisions or decisions that would tie but they will have thought enough for it to be gaming. But that might not be exciting. The way the special bonuses work I have trouble believing the players who are forced to "make lemonade" can best a player who didn't. There's probably more agency than I'm recognizing. This is a step up from sushi go and ticket to ride for me. I do actually kind of prefer how you think things out and say "well, face up, I can't score any better than this" in contrast to punts due to hidden info in ticket and to a lesser extent sushi. I will write a lil negativish about anything light hehe.

Cascadia

- I usually win at this, I won at Calico and got wrecked at sushi go for bias checks. Anyway this is also building a hex map like calico but it's unbounded and spreads out whoa! Also you draft a token (but they're paired with the hex you pick) and arrange those on your board. The scoring rules are a little more complex.
You tend to be perpetually on the verge of playing a turn thats a +0 instead of a ~+3 and spend tokens to find a single thing that won't whiff you on that manner, but like Calico there's probably additional complexity of I tried to look at blocking plays more. There's a +2 bonus for having the biggest of a type of region so the interactivity in deciding whether to contest or "give up" is nice. It's funner than Calico, but much less cute.

Parks

- So parks is like. What if you had Candyland, then told every player they could stack the deck always, then put coin tokens of various types on each space and assigned a weak income to empty or full spaces. Do you go fast to get the good coins before the other players, or do you go slow to just farm a ton of weak money? I mostly did the second one and tied for first but it really feels like you're getting away with something. It plays really well with five people. There's also like little income improvement items you can buy giving you like the lightest possible amount of tableau building you can add to a game without adding zero tableau building. It's really reasonable to look at other people's resource pools and guess if they will leave the space you want open.
Wingspan - nothing about the flavor for this game would make you think it's a tableau builder, but, it's just a really good tableau builder. The money you pay for cards with comes from a dice pool. There's interaction in competing for goals and sometimes making sure to draw birds because good ones are available in the pool. My girlfriend loves this game to death and I enjoy it plenty enough to say yes every time. The length and tableau size makes you say "engine", but barely makes you say that, which is a good place to be with design. We mostly have played this 2 player. I would be tempted to say it actually suffers as you add players because it becomes optimal to ignore the contested goals and play synergistic point engines instead?
Ban the cards that let you discard one thing to get 2 food if you buy this game, they're inexplicably busted despite evenhanded balance everywhere else.
2s:

Clank!

- you build a deck that is good at generating move points to move you around, skill points to keep building the deck, and attack points to move into rooms blocked by enemies, then you grab some stuff then leave.
A deckbuilder with a board has been more enjoyable than the dominionlike deckbuilders because of the experience delta and also maybe because dominion is more often grinded out on a rapid online client.
The worst part of clank for me has been.. clank. Clank is cubes in a bag that randomly come back out at random times to represent a dragon attack, your actions can manipulate the number of unfavorable cubes in the bag. It constantly feels too abstract and unclear what the risk is or how the cards would manage the risk over the long term. It's not that I don't have agency it's just if you asked me how much I reduced my chance of getting damaged when I played sneak I'd probably be off by 20% when I answered and that doesn't set me up to have fun.
I don't know if I've ever won at clank at all, I've lost with strategies that both take lots of dragon damage and don't take much. I'm not filled with a desire to do better like when I lost 6 games in a row of Wingspan.

Innovation

- my cousin and a friend of mine love innovation, and I like the game, although I feel relative deprivation about the expansions I've tasted online and can't nudge my cousin into. My girlfriend is much more medium on it though! She dislikes the variance and/or the way that variance is presented. She didn't lose every single round or anything, because I can play 300 games online and still suck unlike some people on this forum. She's still interested in playing a game of it here and there. Maybe it will grow on her. I'm tempted to introduce echoes early to invert the logic of "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Echoes let's you tableau build inherently good stuff so it could improve her feeling of agency.
I bought 4 aetherworks marvel before it started top8ing so maybe I'm a variance tolerant person.

Heart of Crown and Tanto Cuore

- these are both dominion clones, the kind so close to Dominion DXV gets mad. My flavor preference is so strong I don't trust my biases in assessing mechanics very much. Heart of Crown is about supporting a princess's coronation and Tanto Cuore is about hiring a bunch of maids, complete with the first edition instruction manual saying that the winner is the "King of Maids", and I find Tanto Cuore a way less appealing concept.
Both games play with the concept found on "Island" in Dominion, the idea that the bad cards in your deck can maybe leave for scoring. If they 100% left for scoring it would be bad, but both games are clever about making it a mixture and leaving some dead cards in your deck and removing some.
Heart of Crown has a special mechanic where the first time you "buy a victory card" you toss some silvers/golds. It kind of makes that "super early 8$: gold or province?" moment happen in every game and I kind of like the idea. Maybe after working out a well understood formula for when to flip it is just kinda the same again, but I'd like to dream it interacts with silk-roadish stuff differently or something.
Mostly I win over and over at these games which reduces the fun some. I've played like over a thousand games of dominion. It's just so much.

Argent: the Consortium

: this is a worker placement game with a bit of tableau building and a special system for slowly learning what the point salad rules truly are.
I was excited to play this after playing online with scummers a little bit 2 player argent didn't go so well. My girlfriend doesn't really grasp building a strategy that meets the complex point salad rules and said so, and it is not very way to wrap your arms around it.
On my end, I was getting more out of it, but both defensively and offensively I was a little disappointed with how the attacking effects work in 2 player instead of 3 players. Sometimes the counters are too direct. Other times there's a queen of the hill contest to attack the same space over and over again which is not a game ruining dynamic but it's not as fun as other stuff I guess.

Ark Nova

you build a zoo and manage your reputation points fame points empty enclosures filled enclosures kiosks the cards in your hand your partner zoos your workers your action upgrades your ecology projects and your X counters. And the break track. And your cash on hand. And your special enclosures. And your research associates. And your endgame bonus card. And the sequence state of your action card queue. But other than that there is nothing to think about.
I read the rules, played for twenty minutes, felt a lot of cognitive load explaining the rules and going through the first few turns, then when I got to trying to resolve some kind of rule where the rulebook seemed genuinely ambiguous my headache started swelling stronger and I couldn't Google it like normal I just said I felt miserable and asked to abandon the game. I've never abandoned a game like that before. The breaking point was an ambiguous rule but I think all the other stuff put me on the precipice.
It'd be nice to have a different person teach it. My girlfriend wants to try the game again.

Everdell

- this is our collective second favorite duo game now, right after Wingspan. It's a worker placement tableau builder with cute mice. We house rule the husband card to not be heteronormative, recommend. There's lots of choices, lots of interaction in terms of blocking, and you can build little engines or also manage to forgo them and just point salad really well.

I'm surprised/confused by Chevre's take that you can't catch up from an early start in this game. The game has an income phase after your first two worker placements and after your first nine (or, next 7) worker placements. Generally it is only possible to get 1 resource point off income for the very first harvest, and you can reinvest that for the second harvest, but it is a pretty small snowball. I've had no problem whiffing that 1 resource point and setting up for a card combo or something instead and catching up. I supposed if you missed income for second harvest that could hurt you, but that one feels late enough to have that energy of "I'm willing to buy a province and draw it 3 times this game" if victory cards are what's on offer instead.

The modest income makes the game have that barely engine feel I like in birds. It's such a fun game and it feels fast.
We have a lot of house rules for base game:
1 VP instead of one card for second player (we tied twice with this rule, it is working well, previously first player was winning a lot)
Crane costs 2 stone
Innkeeper only reduces cost by 2, we haven't actually played with this yet.
Husband and wife always play as wife's text, then husband's text, also if you need to swap one of the cards with a card in the center to make sure your couple is gay you are encouraged to do that.



I'm sure I forgot a game.

[VP Baltar]

Big brain dump! You've reignited my interest in wanting to play Wingspan. I had initial excitement for that game and then I kind of forgot about it, and then when I thought about it again, it was like, 'eh, is this going to be good?' My partner and I play 2-player most often, so that's good to hear that's the best iteration of that game.

I just recently picked up

Beyond the Sun

, which has been fun the first few times we've played. You essentially invest resources into various technology trees that help you explore space and gain victory points. The space exploration piece has the potential to be a little competitive, but the tech tree aspect is a nice, non-competitive balance to that portion. Overall it's pretty fun and moves quickly once you get the hang of it.

We also played a few games of

Isle of Skye

this past weekend, and I just love that game (despite losing). I think it's because I enjoyed Price is Right so much as a kid and the psychological game of pricing tiles and bidding really takes me back to that. Trying to guess what the optimal market price is going to be is very fun.