Board Games!

[implosion]

Got magic maze and pandemic legacy season 2 yesterday! Played both today.

No real spoilers, there is a prologue in PL2 that you can play as many times as you like to get familiar (similar to how the original fresh out of the box could be played as vanilla pandemic as much as you wanted before starting the campaign). We played it twice and are itching to get to January probably in a week. Glad to finally have a game that my roommates are excited to play again after season 1 ended.

I think the most accurate way to describe magic maze is "amusing." It's just inherently funny having three people (we played with 3) nudging a pawn along a path from one spot to another, repeatedly internally going "is it my turn again? shit." And having situations like me pushing a pawn to what looked like the best path in the moment but was actually blocked by a false door, realizing my mistake, and internally being like dammit i have to wait to be bailed out of this and i'm going to look dumb. I also really love the piecemeal rule introduction. It works very very well for learning it.

Best moment though was a game where me and one other person were nagging at the third to do something, because he had the easiest way to flip the timer and we were about to run out. Instead he didn't notice it and explored, then noticed it. Unfortunately, the tile he explored had a timer symbol that the other player happily saw as the opportunity to take matters into her own hands, and so they both moved on to their respective spaces at the same time without realizing what the other was doing, summarily flipping our timer twice and screwing us.

[Chickadee]

I love magic maze. The no talking really makes things interesting. When I played it was really heated, everyone was banging on the tables and trying to get each others attention. It was hilarious. I would always be down to play it. I really need to get my own copy.

[shaft.ed]

So I've got a 9ish yo nephew I was going to buy some games or something similar for Xmas. I know he's super into Minecraft, but his parent/grandparents dont do it. My brother really likes boardgames/card games though. Is there anything meatworld that could bring their two interests together (like Minecraft FLUXX)? I haven't really found anything.

Also I wanted to do a smaller quick game as one of his gifts. I was thinking between Sushi Go, Love Letter and Welcome to the Dungeon. Any favorites among these? Or maybe other suggestions?

[Cabd]

Finished our first play-thru of Pandemic Legacy season one. Late to the party but hot damn was that good; and we can't wait to go again.

Spoiler: End of May Spoiler

Our CODA was red... We're probably going to do a just-us play-thru with Black Coda for the additional challenge, Red felt rather easy to contain (Only 6 roadblocks).

[PJ.]

We had coda black

[implosion]

Finished our first play-thru of Pandemic Legacy season one. Late to the party but hot damn was that good; and we can't wait to go again.

Spoiler: End of May Spoiler

Our CODA was red... We're probably going to do a just-us play-thru with Black Coda for the additional challenge, Red felt rather easy to contain (Only 6 roadblocks).

Spoiler: nothing additional

Roadblocks are still one of the most interesting things to me about season 1, in that it seems completely reasonable to me to either see roadblocks get introduced and say "oh my god, those are so strong, let's permaroadblock every faded city" or to go "oh my god, those are so useless." And I've heard of success with both.

We beat March a few weeks ago in season 2. Still going pretty strong. No idea what twists it's gonna take. I think others in my group have had a similar reaction but not as strongly as I have: season 2 feels so much more stressful than season 1, mostly (maybe entirely) because of some of the high-level mechanic reworks. Enjoying it so far but I don't have any impetus like I did with season 1 to ever play a second game of it in a day because of the stress.

[Chickadee]

Played Pandemic: Rising Tides tonight. I didn't like it all that much. We played twice and lost both times. I would play it again, but I feel like I need to sit down with the rule book myself and just pour over it. I don't feel like I really had a good sense of the mechanics to utilize them well and enjoy the game. It was taught well, it's just vastly different than any other version of Pandemic.

[inspiratieloos]

Finally got around to playing March of Pandemic Legacy, got 3 epidemics that immediately hit the cities infected, apart from that nothing really happened.

Still waiting for when things go crazy.

[Untrod Tripod]

got Mysterium for Christmas. Game is super fun.

[PJ.]

It really makes Dixie obsolete for me. Also kinda makes codenames obsolete for me

[Chickadee]

Love mysterious so much. It's still one thats on my wishlist, but I know tons of people with copies, so it's not a need at the moment.

I still love Dixit though. I just got an expansion for Dixit today. Was a belated Christmas gift. It was the Revalations expansion, and omg is ti beautiful. Not just beautiful, but inspiring. It lines up with a lot of thoughts I've had about art lately, and it's really put me in the zone to paint. And some of the cards are embellished with gold leaf, so they're shiny and pretty. It's seriously breathtaking.

[Untrod Tripod]

It really makes Dixie obsolete for me. Also kinda makes codenames obsolete for me

I think Codenames is better for a casual party-game type audience

[Faraday]

many many many hours later gloomhaven campaign 1 is kind of finished i guess.

still not unlocked all the characters.

still enjoy it immensely. absolutely amazing game.

3 months into pandemic legacy season 2. really fun so far, waiting for the story hook like season 1 had - but im sure it'll come. character creation option was a lot better though, very nice improvement.

[DeathNote]

I'm playing gloomhaven today!

[Faraday]

Enjoy! Set up is a bear but worth it.

[wgeurts]

Played Twilight Imperium with 5 friends a few days ago, brilliant game.

[Gammagooey]

Played Twilight Imperium with 5 friends a few days ago, brilliant game.

I played it with a group of half experienced players and half newbies including myself (also 6p). I liked it a lot but the owner of it thought it would only take 6 hours for some ridiculous reason and then we still weren't finished after 9 and the people who had to go home literally handed the win to the guy in the lead (there's an agenda that gives a victory point to either the person/people in the lead or the people in last) so everyone could go home

Tbf the other two newbies went real hard on trying to negotiate out any little advantage they could from a lot of the agendas (one was the trader space lions race and the other was peace turtles that can just replace an agenda) which made the game probably an hour+ longer by itself

The tech system and different ship options and different races all were real cool and I liked that it seemed like there were a lot of ways to try to win, but trying to go for a 'hold a big territory and smash anyone who attacks me' strategy, doing it pretty successfully (and even taking a home planet of the guy who was about to win to prevent them from getting a public objective) and then the game ending like that soured me a bit on the experience.

I do want to play it again but I think I'd rather do it with just 3 players since I really don't think half+ of the players that go round would be okay with it going that long again, and although I'd like it to be a little shorter than it was too artificially shortening the game felt p. bad.

[inspiratieloos]

Got to Pandemic Legacy April

Spoiler: Pandemic Legacy

2 lines into the update everyone at the table goes "Oh, it's a zombie virus."

We had a basically perfect run, we even almost got done without putting any 'verbleekten' (pale ones?) on the board, unfortunately we drew the one Coda city in the infection deck that we hadn't quarantined the turn before we were done.

[Chickadee]

Finally played Ex Libris. Beautiful, and quirky game. I loved it. It's definitely going on my wishlist.

[Cabd]

Got to Pandemic Legacy April

Spoiler: Pandemic Legacy

2 lines into the update everyone at the table goes "Oh, it's a zombie virus."

We had a basically perfect run, we even almost got done without putting any 'verbleekten' (pale ones?) on the board, unfortunately we drew the one Coda city in the infection deck that we hadn't quarantined the turn before we were done.

Spoiler: April Spoilers

They are called "The Faded" in the English rulebook, so that sounds about right. Nasty little buggers, too.

[inspiratieloos]

Spoiler: Pandemic April

For the moment they don't seem that bad, we haven't really had any outbreaks in Coda territory since we unlocked the quarantine specialist and they don't seem particularly more dangerous than normal Coda until you get outbreaks into non-coda cities, though there's always the joy of getting an epidemic hitting a city and then immediately drawing it.

[Cabd]

Spoiler: Pandemic April

For the moment they don't seem that bad, we haven't really had any outbreaks in Coda territory since we unlocked the quarantine specialist and they don't seem particularly more dangerous than normal Coda until you get outbreaks into non-coda cities, though there's always the joy of getting an epidemic hitting a city and then immediately drawing it.

Spoiler:

It really depends on what color of CODA you get. Players tend to find Red or Yellow CODA to be easy. Blue coda hard; and black coda nigh-impossible.

[Untrod Tripod]

we still weren't finished after 9

oh god why

[inspiratieloos]

Spoiler:

We have black, seems pretty easy so far, we have half a dozen cities at 1, mostly due to a few bad runs of getting a card from the bottom and then immediately drawing it again. The main problem is that we're at 0 funding so we can't use the special action cards that would allow us to deal with those, we put in the non-funded remove 1 disease cube card in March and that helped quite a bit, especially since the Quarantine Specialist and the Medic are rivals and I got it as the Researcher in my opening hand, so I gave it to one of them and they spent the entire April game passing it back and forth using it on hotspots.

I understand that we're just about to enter terror mode though. And we forgot to use our upgrades to put air-strike on a card.

Btw Rivals are really nice, "I'm taking a plane to Lagos" "I'm discarding Tokyo and another card to take Lagos" "Well then I discard two cards to take Tokyo and use it to cure the last disease"

[implosion]

Fun board game-filled day. In terms of raw amusing-ness the highlight has to be the realization that I was playing a game as a dragon bartering with the cave I was in (game was Vast: The Crystal Caverns).

Favorite game I played today though was Alchemists. Really interesting game and it felt more than I expected like I was really making interesting deductions; I got a hand with three of one ingredient and three other ingredients and mixed them all together, and was able to use that information to narrow four separate ingredients to 50/50s, and it came down to the wire with the last turn requiring me to sell a potion to the adventurer with no discount to get all the gold I needed to buy an artifact + publish, and it was clear that the player before me was going to give a discount of some kind and sell the potion that I had made before and had ingredients for, but I had two ingredients (the only two in fact) that I had believed I had narrowed down 100% in my hand that combined to a different one of the potions that they wanted, which just made for a tense moment of asking myself if I trusted my deductions enough to basically weigh the entire game on them, and I ultimately won by 1 point. Really interesting game that I imagine plays out very significantly differently each time depending on the kinds of reactions you get in early turns.