Board Games!

[Mr. Flay]

Pandemic gets MUCH harder at 4-5 players though, and has the risk of new players getting steered around by the veteran(s).

TTR is good for that number of players. Dominion is good. Oasis is good if you have it, though it's hard to explain.

Blokkus us amazingly entertaining for such a simple game. Good for all ages too.

[Mr. Flay]

Orbiting just bought us 7W for Yule, not realizing that the 2p version was a hack. Is it as bad as it looks? We're going to have friends over tonight to play it with 4, but had hoped to be able to play just among the two of us.

[Mr. Flay]

Exactly. TTR may not speak to resource-management junkies, but it's a perfectly enjoyable game.

[Mr. Flay]

It's not like there's a single progression tree for experience in games. Catan may be "basic" compared to Puerto Rico, but TTR's gameplay is different from both. If anything it might be more like parts of Risk or Twixt, it's mostly board control with a smattering of random resources.

[Mr. Flay]

Bang! has worked well for our group of casual gamers.

Also yeah, Resistance/Conspiracy may work better.

[Mr. Flay]

Got a friend with a 3D printer?

[Mr. Flay]

But it is one of those games where if everyone else doesn't want you to win and that becomes their primary goal, you'll lose.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

[Mr. Flay]

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28292/deluxe-weed

[Mr. Flay]

Oasis handles up to 5 I believe, and while it's not simultaneous, it's pretty rapid.

[Mr. Flay]

Yeesh. I am lucky if people at our games night will play something for an hour, except RPGs and Cards Against Humanity.

[Mr. Flay]

I fail to see how that's a problem.

[/hides his Axis & Allies box]

[Mr. Flay]

Alea iacta est...

[Mr. Flay]

LOTR Risk is actually a lot of fun, for the reasons you mentioned. The board being only one continent also helps speed things up.

[Mr. Flay]

Well, maybe breaking is too strong. But there are definitely cities and chokepoints on the map that are more valuable than they may initially appear, and once your group learns what the best routes and tickets are, it can turn the game into a race of "who can build there the fastest"

I think that's kinda-sorta the point, though? Any territory-control game with a non-random map is going to have that characteristic to one degree or another.

Also, just played the Switzerland variant. Interesting because it trades shorter routes for more interconnectedness. That's one of the few times I've won.

[Mr. Flay]

Except I almost always win playing my way, so I have no incentive to change. If I were playing on like BSW with high quality players, I'd certainly want to upgrade my play.

Sounds like your monotonous playstyle annoyed your friends out of playing before they could develop an effective counter. *shrug*

[Mr. Flay]

Seriously considering The Resistance off that list.

[Mr. Flay]

Power Grid is annoying because endgame has fuckall to do with what you've been doing all game. I hate that kind of 'strategy' game. Also, it takes too long to be that swingy.

[Mr. Flay]

So, we

might

be writing an unofficial sequel to Love Letter... anyone played the original? It's a fast, fun little card game.

[Mr. Flay]

What kind? We (Orbiting and I) have a couple of functional prototypes under our belts now.

[Mr. Flay]

mtg/heartstone/soulforge type. Key features being:

A hand of cards giving you options of what to play
Some cost for playing cards
A split between immediate effects and effects that develop your board position for later benefit.

More specifically I'd also likely include some sort of 'vanguard' system ala magics vangaurds/heartstone/and net runner.

I'm torn between heartstones 'everything happens on your turn' design feature, and magics you always need to be paying attention one. Heartstones method really simplifies magics priority and allows people playing it on the computer to more easily mulitask while playing the game, on the other hand simple isn't always a good thing and the reduced options for interactions really shows in heart stone.

Haven't played Magic in years. Never played the other two. That said, it kinda depends on your target audience. In general we find that making players pay attention for the entire game is helpful to the game (multitask is just a polite way of saying 'this isn't important to me').

Path of Exile is a good (ARPG) example of 'simple doesn't have to mean boring'. Mechanics are easy, details get complex and allow variety. Go is another. Given a choice we will pretty much always choose simpler mechanics to increase buyin and decrease training time, allowing people to get into the game quickly, even if they won't always have a good chance to win right away.

[Mr. Flay]

There's a Gormenghast board game??

[Mr. Flay]

Saw Gormenghast today, anyone recommend it/tell me what its about?

BGG is, uhhh, nonplussed.

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1076187 ... ormenghast

[Mr. Flay]

Orbiting got me The Resistance for Giftmas. Will see if we can get five people together over NYE to try it out...

Coincidentally, I got her Mr. Jack and Smash Up. They have not arrived yet.... :edit: tonight they have!

[Mr. Flay]

Smash Up

is fun, but holy SHIT are the rules written terribly. Too much emphasis on being 'hip', not enough on things like clarity. Once you play a game or two it goes fast and is fairly intuitive (especially if you've ever done something like Magic), but I kinda wish the winpoint was set at 20 rather than 15. Seems a little random and kept taking us off guard that the game was already over (especially since there are 16 bases to smash, and the most we ever saw was 6).

No one has won

Mr. Jack

as the Ripper yet... we screwed up and cleared one too many players Turn 1 in the last game, but overall it seems difficult for Jack to win. I could have gotten out Turn 3 if I'd been able to get away from being observed, but I was stuck by a lightpole, 2 squares away from the exit...

Got

Timeline

and

Timeline: Historical Events

for giftmas, but going to try to exchange it for

Chrononauts

(based on the excellent time we had playing it at the Portland minimeet, thanks Sudo). Timeline looks like it will suffer badly in replayability.

Also we played

The Resistance

finally last night, after having enough people present. Definitely a better game with the Plot Card expansion, it's nearly random in the basegame).

[Mr. Flay]

As an unrelated pet peeve, it's completely unplayable in my group because we have a colorblind player and it makes zero attempts to respect that color blindness is even a thing (would you like to build on the red route or the green route? How about the middle finger route?). Literally none. I have very rarely seen a board game that makes so little acknowledgment that color blindness is even a thing (and it would have been very simple to do).

Except that EVERY route color has a separate and distinct symbol? On both the card and the route, last I checked (we only own the American version).

I mean, I get that it's cool to hate on TTR, but let's at least hate on it for things that are true.

[Mr. Flay]

Okay so later (in a new edition of the game I'd have to give them more money for) they added... an invisible dot to the center.

I greyscaled it. Anyone wanna play this game?

It's not invisible in person, your image is pretty small. Also notice how Red is much darker than Green? (Riga/Wilno, Wilno/Warsaw). I don't think your suggestion of making the 'tracks' different shapes would work, that would be an even smaller difference than the symbol currently, and harder to see. Plus you have the Locomotive/Tunnel mechanic in some later versions that already uses the track edge to convey information.

I will concede that I did not know that early versions didn't have the symbol. Sounds like they ARE paying attention to the problem, then.

[Mr. Flay]

http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.ph ... 1#p5710517

[Mr. Flay]

Bipolar, if you liked Smash Up you should definitely try Smallworld.

[Mr. Flay]

Yeah, the concept is great but really it's a race to somebody's loss, not your win. I agree with zor that it's likely better with friends (we've never played with more than one acquaintance in the mix).

Tsuro is a lovely $15 game. It just usually is marked at $30 or more.

[Mr. Flay]

So yesterday was International Tabletop Day, I guess because Wil Wheaton is famous? idk.

Anyway, I got to watch my friend who is ga-ga over Last Night On Earth play, and I finally understand why she loves that game and I hate it to pieces. She's basically houseruled and custom-charactered it into something much easier and less annoyingly luck-based.

After that I got to play/watch Betrayal. Being Avalon Hill, it is WAY overcomplicated (we rolled the Hidden Traitor haunt, which is really more like Saw with the numbers filed off). We lost miserably with five players, three dead necks by Danger 5. Both of us felt on the way home that Hidden Traitor would work better to just have no traitor at all in that scenario, it was hard enough to get keys and the mess of extra rules were hard to remember. On the other hand the board progression, the Omen/Haunt mechanic, and the character card-balance was quite good. I don't know what scenario we watched at first, it had a Cursed Weapon research thing going on, but the Traitor didn't understand how to use her new role and died too easily.

[Mr. Flay]

Because Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day are famous. DUH FLAY.

Yeah yeah, I'm sure I'm not a Real Geek^TM because I've never seen FD in

anything

.

[Mr. Flay]

Seems appropriate here:

[Mr. Flay]

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemecha ... ative-play

[Mr. Flay]

Played Asteroyds the other evening. It's like Robo Rally on crack. REALLY hard to learn (ok we were drinking, but not that much), but once you get it it's kind of entertaining. I'd definitely want to play with more than 2p next time though (it supports 6), because I won by default of my opponent having bad spatial reasoning and smashing into her 6th asteroid in like 8 turns while I only had 2 of 4 gates completed... I did complete the others anyway to prove I could do it, but rolling dice by yourself sucks.

Also, fuck 'Haggis'. It wants to be a quick trick-taking ditch-your-cards game but it's vastly overcomplicated. Not even linking it, it's that bad.

[Mr. Flay]

I fucking hate Savage Worlds. It's so BORING to miss/fail all the time.

SciFi RPG... it's setting-specific, but I like the Cortex Plus system that's being used in the BSG RPG.

I liked the old West End Star Wars RPG, but its system may not have aged well (d6 basis).

[Mr. Flay]

Yeah, a friend just sent us AW, and I've been hearing lots of good things about it.

FATE also does well with the "succeed at a cost" aspect, of course.

[Mr. Flay]

Thinking about arranging another game of Battlestar Galactica on Vassal - Saturday October 4 would be the next convenient day that I'd be free; anyone else fancy it? Relevant information on how to play on Vassal here.

I miiiight be free. What time(s) are you thinking?

I can never get anybody local to play BSG, so it'd be a good option.

[Mr. Flay]

My other thing that 'day' is in the evening (6:30 Central US), so if it can be in my afternoon (European evening), I am almost 100% in.

I am not obligated to it though, so if everyone else wants to do evening, that's fine.

[Mr. Flay]

Sunday I'm busy, but I can catch next time, no big deal.

[Mr. Flay]

Got the

Bear Cav

Awesome Level 9000 expansion for

Smash-Up

, and

Boss Monster

for Giftmas. Both look hilarious.

Speaking of Civ-like games (which you guys were two months ago) I got to play

Machi Koro

the other night. Very fun, quite fast, pretty self-explanatory. Pitched at kids but the adults (who were all bigtime Civ veterans) enjoyed the hell out of it too. Once we knew what we were doing, it was probably a 20m game. Good icebreaker/intergenerational game.

Got

Tales of the Arabian Nights

for my birthday last month. We've now played twice... it's pretty enjoyable, but

good gods does it take forever

for a relatively simple game. 2400+ 'stories' in the book, each one with multiple options that vary based on your skills or treasures or statuses... this thing REALLY wants to be a video game. Without all the number crunching and page flipping, it would probably take an hour. As it stands, a 3p game took us about 2 1/2 hours (while learning it) and a 5p game took almost 3 1/2 hours. Doesn't scale well. Only other real complaint is that the player tokens are much too large for the board, obscuring your travel routes/city name/etc.

[Mr. Flay]

If you enjoy that style of game,

Agents of Smersh

is the same, but co-op, and with a tongue-in-cheek James Bond spy theme to it.

Interesting. How long of a play is it?

[Mr. Flay]

Evil Hat Productions (FATE, etc) is almost done with the Kickstarter for

Don't Turn Your Back

. This is a boardgame (resources/worker style) set in the same nightmare world as their RPG

Don't Rest Your Head

. It looks like it's about to fund in the next 48h and they've just reduced the threshold on some stretch goals, so if you want it, get it. The art is amazing and I absolutely love the setting, plus I trust Fred Hicks to make a rock-solid product.

[Mr. Flay]

I thought everybody knew Pooky was GI.

[Mr. Flay]

Power Grid is a three-hour game that basically comes down to the last turn as long as a given player wasn't knocked out of contention a long time ago. If you're remotely close to the lead, going first on the resource buy will probably win you the game if you've saved up for it.

Yeah, that's why I gave up on it. The end game is so disjoint from the rest, and the time investment is purely insane.

[Mr. Flay]

A note about Argent is that you will absolutely go over the advertised game length unless everyone playing has played a couple of games before. I've played several games with people from my department (and lost every one because of silly Astronomy Tower abuse on the part of one of the others/heavy gambling on schools that didn't count) and it was easily over half the gaming session every time.

Related note, are you saying it goes 150x2?? Jesus.

[Mr. Flay]

Sadness. Our game group usually balks at 90m games, and everyone would be 'new players' the first time...

[Mr. Flay]

Code of Nine looks interesting. We're big fans of Mysterium and Code Names of late.

[Mr. Flay]

Quite pleased with the repaint job on BSG: Exodus's new Vipers.

[Mr. Flay]

Finally got to play BSG with 5p the other day - it's fun but brutal (we usually play with 6p - NoSymp variant, which gives the Humans twice as many actions as the Cylons). I got a weird pull...not only was I a Cylon from the outset (Gaeta), but at Kobol I also pulled the second Cylon card! Never even went over to the Cylon Fleet board, as it was more fun to pass on that second unrevealed loyalty card to Helo and watch the humans play WIFOM. After AdmiralPresidentHelo revealed himself, the humans died a couple of turns later with three boarding parties on the board. Ugly synergy there!

I really like the Cylon Fleet and Personal Goal options from the Exodus expansion... they even out the game considerably. Also a friend of mine 3d printed some diemnsional Basestars for me, which help the visual of the board a great deal (especially since the expansion with plastic Basestars is now out of print). Apparently Asmodee Games has bought Fantasy Flight and might be reconfiguring the entire game for re-release...?

[Mr. Flay]

So we played another 5p game of BattleStar Galactica last night, and saw something new: 1 Cylon!

The Exodus expansion adds some fuckery to the Loyalty Deck, so it always contains 1 more card than you'll actually play. So a Deck of 11, +1 for Baltar, +1 for Sharon, +1 for a resolved Personal Goal (the other two didn't get resolved, and almost took Fuel to 0), +1 for Cally executing Sharon and me having to reroll as Gaeta.... and the card left on the table was the other YAAC card!

We were paranoid as hellllll. The (revealed) Cylon was pissed at everyone trying to find his incompetent scumbuddy. When it was all over we laughed, the Cylon laughed, the toaster laughed, it was a good time.

::edit:: Assuming I can still do math, that's 7/13 (Initial Loyalty) * 1/7 (Sleeper Loyalty) * 1/2 (Execution) * 1/2 (Personal Goal) = 1/52, or about a 2% chance.