Board Games!

[Gammagooey]

Okay, so I bought Quarriors today.

It's the best fucking "board" game I've ever played.

It's Dominion, but with dice. And I just spent five hours playing it and it felt like two. Google it, look it up. Buy it imeidately.

I've never had this much fun with a game.

Dat end of Maypril

[Gammagooey]

So I got Risk Legacy a bit before Baltomeet and just finished the 4th game tonight with grimm+reck+fate+ythan and I am actually to the point where I can't sleep because I'm obsessing over it that much. We've opened a secret packet with more minor game pieces after every game through a combination of luck and wanting to do things that open stuff and the most recent one is amazing and I want to play it SO MUCH.

[Gammagooey]

Galaxy Truckers is pretty fantastic

I think the most fun I've had with it was when I messed up how many cards were supposed to be in the deck and had twice as many of the highest level encounters as there should have been and everyone's ships got demolished to being tiny clumps of what used to be the center of their ships

[Gammagooey]

most negative things have a reward if you can beat it though? the only stuff i remember being just bad are the few little special round cards (lose a speed for every not-connected-thing and stuff like that) and then asteroid fields

also reck did we never play it where you can look at some of the cards while putting the ship together? the normal rules do have that for all but the last little pile of 3 or 4 cards as long as you're not doing the startup thing for newer players

[Gammagooey]

yeah shut up and sit down are pretty fantastic

also they have their older videos on vimeo with big theme episodes that cover several games, but they didn't want those on the main site since some of them have copyrighted music they don't have rights for
http://vimeo.com/shutupshow/

[Gammagooey]

yeah a lot of the time you only need one to three good rolls to do something important so having more players to do that makes it a lot easier and punch things better, one of the earlier ones i played was a rat spawning thing that was borderline literally impossible for the good guys with only 3 players

also betrayal is just not amaaazingly balanced in general

but it's usually pretty fun for me at least

[Gammagooey]

yeah the newer versions have the symbols like a cross on white and a swirly thing on blue like on axxle's picture

Spoiler: USA version with symbols

[Gammagooey]

Is anyone on the east coast going to GenCon? It seems like a pretty awesome thing to go to but I really don't want to do a solo 10 hour drive there and back.

[Gammagooey]

sheriff of nottingham is great and definitely good with four and probably 3 people (2 might be good or might be shrugs)

suburbia & galaxy trucker are both great for 2-4 too, galaxy trucker you need to be okay with everyone getting blown up and comically limping to the finish sometimes though.

oh actually you probably want it in-browser more than them 2-4 players given phrasing

uhhhh dominion's online and I think is a little dated when I think Trains is basically the same game but with the board making the competitive element better imo (but dominion is still a pretty solid game)

[Gammagooey]

We've been playing Pandemic Legacy, we messed up the # of cubes to put on the board for normal infection card flips the first two games and got screwed pretty bad but we're now several games in and I think the Legacy mechanic(s) is my favorite thing that a board game can do. The cycle of improving on what we didn't do well last time -> getting shiny new things to play with or new abilities to use -> oh shit we have to deal with this now too -> repeat is Really satisying to play, and I'm really excited to play the next game where

Spoiler: very minor spoilers

we know something's going to happen midgame that we'll have to deal with on the fly, and now that we've started winning more we're getting less funding cards in the deck to deal with emergencies than we've had in any other game so far.

I think the legacy mechanics work better here than in Risk Legacy- since it's co-op instead of going against each other, everyone's invested in the upgrades and bonuses that everyone gets at the end of the game more than they would be if they're just choosing them for themselves, and the way they've made the months work (1st loss->try that month again, win or 2nd loss->go to the next month) means that at least every other game will likely have some minor addition to continue the story of the game and to change how you need to play it, where Risk Legacy could have pretty decent sized gaps between new things unlocking after the first few games, though we stopped playing Risk Legacy right around when I think one of the bigger unlock gaps was starting.

Oh, and once we fixed our rule error all of the games except 1 that we blew out of the water with early card luck have been close- it's really well-balanced imo.

So yeah it's great and if you like co-op games you should definitely consider getting it. Only drawback in my mind is that it's only a max of 4 players, which you may have more of in your particular gaming group.

[Gammagooey]

Pandemic's a 2-4 player co-op game about moving little pawns with abilities around the globe and trying to keep 4 diseases under control while trying to find their cures, which is done by drawing or trading to get 4-5 cards of one disease's color and then heading to a research station.

Risk legacy at the start is basically just risk with a few choosable faction upgrades except you need to take people's capitals to win instead of the whole board.

The legacy part is permanently modifying the board with every playthrough- in Risk legacy they did it mostly with stickers making certain regions weaker or more powerful in varying generally minor ways, and the faction upgrades that give a few different advantages and make that faction lean towards particular playstyles or tactics. For example, the first game starts everyone with either an ammo shortage sticker or a bunker sticker to place on a country on the board midgame to make it weaker or stronger for the player holding it, and at the end of every game the winner had a few special bonuses they good choose from like making a Major City only they could start in, while the surviving players got smaller bonuses like making minor cities that nobody could start in but would make the country count as 1 extra for calculating the amount of troops you should get each turn.

Pandemic legacy uses stickered 'panic levels' for the cities as its main carry-from-game-to-game aspect; that makes it more difficult to enter those cities as disease outbreaks occur in them and they continue to get worse, but it also has the same type of upgrade system for its characters and a deck of legacy cards, flipped one by one as the cards say to do so. Since it's a co-op game, they can make the entire game change bit by bit by changing your goals and the diseases that you're fighting against, which is much, much more difficult to do in a way that makes sense in Risk when everyone is going against each other and the major battles of the game might not have had much to do with the recent changes to the world as a whole.

(The context-sensitive events are also a huge reason of why I really like Dead of Winter)

(this shit is my jam)

[Gammagooey]

I have a theory that mafiascum people are really bad at only sharing information when it's actually beneficial to them in 2roomz&boom because we want to figure out everything, but unless you can eke out the information in a way that everything only comes together in the last round, it does usually go to outguessing the other room's leader. Games with less than 12-15 people tend for that to happen even sooner, especially if you do the monopoly-esque *let's change the rules and accidentally make it worse* of doing 5-4-3 minute rounds instead of 3-2-1 with 10 or less players.

I do think that for it to be really good you need enough third parties for them to matter in choosing a leader in at least one of the rooms though.

[Gammagooey]

UT and I played so much Catacombs last weekend

A new version with big 'ol wooden obstacles instead of the current disk obstacles is supposedly being shipped in November (I'd guess December/January in reality) and it looks aaaaaawesome

[Gammagooey]

UT and I finished Pandemic Legacy on Saturday and I'm still trying to think of ways to tweak it - it's REALLY really good but they way they designed it has it take a pretty sharp turn from mid to endgame that almost fucked us over: we lost one game by a single action, but that actually wound up saving us by giving us another chance at the month to do more on the map before it immediately went into the endgame months.

Spoiler: OPENING THIS WILL SPOIL THE LAST BIG CHANGE OF THE GAME AND AN EPILOGUE ELEMENT

So basically to get to the final portion of the game you have to find people/things in midgame, and once you find all of them it unlocks the final things you need for endgame. The issue is that the searches "go cold" and have to be found next game instead after a given # of epidemics (usually 4), and the last search you're given is on the last month before the endgame months, so if you don't/can't find it and win by doing the other possible objectives, they hand you everything you needed anyway at the start of the next month (to make sure groups that aren't doing well actually have a chance at winning the final months) and that really heavily penalizes you in the endgame epilogue.

IMO One extra month of time between the final search and the game just handing you the endgame stuff would have been really nice, but it would be really hard to keep the endgame balance right if everyone potentially had another game or two with the endgame materials, and an earlier month would have to be messed with to keep it at 12 and all that. Given that one of the endgame win bonuses is misprinted to give the option of searching even when there's nothing to search that month, I'd guess it was changed from allowing the players to continue searching that month after they realized it was too difficult for people who fell behind to win (especially if they did the last search as one of the last objectives that month, going straight from that into the month after would screw them over even more). It'd be nice if they gave the option of letting the players choose whether or not to keep searching or if they need the help but I also don't think many teams would want to give up on it unless they were REALLY far behind, and that would screw play experience for some groups even worse.

I think what I'd do if I could change the game for a group is add in an extra card with the win bonus for the

October

(the last search month), saying "Scratch this if you won the FIRST game this month AND you won after a search became a cold trail", giving the players the option to play the month over/a special mission in between that month and the next in exchange for a drop in funding and/or giving up the game-end upgrades they would have gotten. It's still a bit messy and inelegant since all the rest of the game is win->move on/lose once->repeat/lose again->move on but considering that legacy games already tend to change and break their own rules for the betterment of the game I still think it'd be a slight improvement.

>_> that was a bit of a rant i guess. The game is so good though and that's the one thing in the game that feels like it unfairly punishes you for succeeding despite long odds.

The gameplay changes and twists and story throughout the game range from good to fantastically great imo - the tools you're given in the last couple months to fix things feel a bit clunky and by the end there are SO MANY PIECES and actions to choose from on every turn by the end, but that doesn't stop the game from being really satisfying and interesting to play. I think UT and I lost 2 games total, one around March/April where we lost by running out of cards in the deck, and the mid/late-game border month we lost where we got a setup with tons of red cards, hit two epidemics with only one turn between them, and that ultimately wound up with one red city becoming Fallen and another Collapsing. (Beijing and Shanghai I think?) I feel like most of the people that would consider buying it already have, but it's a TEN OUTTA TEN game and you should play the hell out of it if you have a small group that can get together consistently and enjoy co-op games.

Also,

Spoiler: September/October Spoilers

DAMN YOU YO'LISHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[Gammagooey]

and that ultimately wound up with one red city becoming Fallen and another Collapsing

How are you so good at this game?

RED, as described above, kept outbreaking and causing chain reactions so about 80% of the Pacific Rim was fallen (except Australia of course). We literally had to

Spoiler: July/Augustish

permanently roadblock the entire Pacific Rim

in order to survive the middle months because the game enjoyed screwing us over.

Spoiler: Jan Spoilers

Red was our Coda too

Red didn't get named, Blue was Nuclear Bronchitis, Yellow was SUPER AIDS (capitalization is important), Black was Deathcock

We got pretty lucky - I don't think Red got more than 2 cards in our initial setup in most of our games before July/August, and I don't think it was at 3 more than a couple times either. That one late game we lost was partially because we finally had a setup with 5 of the initial infection cards being red, and we put starting research centers in Sao Paulo and Baghdad that let us get to most of the other diseases pretty quickly in most cases.

Spoiler: Feb? maybe March Spoilers

Yo'lisha, our quarantine specialist, also did FUCKING WORK with the 'look at the top 2 infection cards' and increase hand limit by 1 upgrades, with us having so few Coda cards coming up we almost never had to actually go into coda territory until past the half-way point of the game, being able to just plop down a quarantine on either one of the two/three "bad" coda spots for that game OR something that just got epidemic'd OR something that was about to be drawn from the infection deck felt god-like.

That one March/April loss we had was a four-chain of red cities with Beijing being one of them, and there were some other rioting red cities later on. Aside from red I think the only other place that even started rioting were two cities in Africa, though there were definitely some close calls and it looked like one of the African cities might start collapsing if we didn't win that game soon, and some hairy looking potential chains in North America during one or two games that we didn't hit.

Spoiler: Through September

I don't think we ever roadblocked anything except with game win bonuses or when we drew the "Put 3 roadblocks anywhere on the board" unfunded event. That lategame loss that wound up saving us was because we had a spare action the turn before we'd win the game but forgot about the self-sacrifice option. We finally used it I think once in November and then twice on the final two non-winning turns of December.

[Gammagooey]

Yeah, if you can get into Raleigh for a day though you could maybe call gamer's armory and see if they still have a demo copy you and <Raleigh people> could play during one of their open board game days.

[Gammagooey]

I posed this question to LLD, but I wanted more of a sound off because one of the games she mentioned immediately jumped toward the top of our list.

So me and my girlfriend have recently been getting into games, the ones we currently own are Machi koro, Patchwork, Jaipur, Pandemic, and Munchkin. We've played a number of the mainstream party games as well and stuff like parcheesi and monopoly, obv. Also, I've played MtG but not really interested in teaching her that. But the question is, what games should we look into/add to that would give us even more variety to what we have and open us up to more themes/mechanics? LLD suggested a hidden movement game and it appealed to us and it's definitely on the list.

The requirements would be: 4-5 players max but probably best played with 2-3 people and preferably not to much more complicated than pandemic(anything rated above a 3.25 on board game geek for complexity is probably going to be a hard sell).

Catacooooooommmmmmmbbbbbsssssss

(it's a lot longer and more of a pain to set up than IceCool but it has pretty much infinite replay value and it works with all of those player counts. Do learn the symbols and put all the stickers on before your first game though, maybe even start with her as one of the stronger Catacomb lords instead of the heroes since without any expansions the catacomb lords are definitely a bit stronger than the base heroes given all the rooms they have to go through.)

[Gammagooey]

150 tho =((((

mm, could have sworn I saw it for around $40 on board game geek or something but I guess that was just the expansion

You can get the new version (Catacombs and Castles) that's more 1v1 in a single big room (each player gets 2-4 heroes each) for around $75 USD being a late backer for their kickstarter and get that in March/April, but yeah if it's not $40-$60 it miiiight not actually be worth it for you for a while.

@reck- tbf we did play the stun monsters pretty wrong. i basically stunlocked one or two of you when I wasn't supposed to be able to do that.

[Gammagooey]

My board game group has been playing Catacombs and Codenames and Masquerade and Shadow Hunters recently and they're all great

We also do Pit as the last game of the night usually and it's almost always a <10 hilarious mess, I don't think I recommend keeping score since it means you basically never finish unless you set the total to win pretty low or play with 5 or less people, but I did get to win with the lowest scoring commodity (oranges) 5 games straight and laugh for about 20 minutes straight about joking that I'd win with oranges again and then doing it that many times in a row

[Gammagooey]

THEY ANNOUNCED SEASON TWO TODAY.

i'm actually quite hyped.

I will go from zero hype to OFF THE CHARTS as soon as it has an actual release date instead of 'this fall' because I'm expecting that to be a dirty lie and for it to really come out around December/early next year

Played a scenario of gloomhaven with my arkham horror lcg group when someone couldn't make it and I still think it's great and both of the people who basically killed themselves by running out of cards right at the end liked it while the player who had a slower-burning character was disappointed by it even though we managed to finish off the last couple enemies on our own.

It is a little odd having the 'game' of it really just being hand management for the most part rather than 'make sure to not die by running out of hp' but it's still my jam personally

Also I'm probably trying burgle bros for the first time tomorrow, I've got high hopes

[Gammagooey]

Burgle Bros. was good but we were a little greedy despite the first two floors being a little easy and the first turn someone went in the top floor they triggered two alarm tiles on their last two moves and got stomped on

I do think that the dunwich campaign for arkham lcg is better than just the core set campaign but it's also a fuckton more expensive to get all the packs with it and a big time commitment aaand some of the packs are a pain in the ass to find anyway. It and Pandemic Legacy are the only things I've ever played that bring you to a point of "you're 80-95% completely fucked, do you want to try to pull a win out of your ass, or run the hell away and do your best to leave your future games/scenarios in a better position?" and my god I love that mechanic for actually letting you get invested in your characters/game/etc like that

[Gammagooey]

I do think that the dunwich campaign for arkham lcg is better than just the core set campaign but it's also a fuckton more expensive to get all the packs with it and a big time commitment aaand some of the packs are a pain in the ass to find anyway. It and Pandemic Legacy are the only things I've ever played that bring you to a point of "you're 80-95% completely fucked, do you want to try to pull a win out of your ass, or run the hell away and do your best to leave your future games/scenarios in a better position?" and my god I love that mechanic for actually letting you get invested in your characters/game/etc like that

I love Arkham LCG so much. One of my group is in Europe for most of this month, so the rest of us are doing "Operation: Umurderhoth", trying to finish the Core campaign by murdering the final boss instead of one of the other resolutions. The Dunwich campaign is great, though it seems like the difficulty isn't perfectly tuned. It has some fantastic flavor and mechanics though. What a great game.

I actually tried to solo the core set through this week with Agnes - did really well up to the final scenario (got the 4th cultist in masks with my final action) but then wound up having to discard one grotesque statue, having three straight actions of rite of seeking fail, and losing the chance to use blood pact+arcane initiate before the first agenda turned over because an Ancient Evils mythos card came up

Have still never got the 'ritual stopped' resolution from the core set, my sister and I made some really lucky chaos bag pulls with roland and a machete on our first playthrough and managed to win with a dynamite blast followed by passing something like 5-6 straight attacks on him where anything worse than a -1 would have screwed us, still haven't quite topped that I don't think. My sister and I started a dunwich playthrough and have done really well on the first two scenarios, and UT and finished the 3rd (museum) last time I was in Greensboro where we're doing...not terribly but definitely not great either.

I'm really looking forward to Blood on the Altar, but I hear Undimensioned and Unseen is a lot of people's least favorite scenario of dunwich so I might hold off on playing that until I can get all the rest of the dunwich packs so I can blitz through the last 3 scenarios in a weekend or something like that.

[Gammagooey]

If you're just playing with the core sets I'd recommend starting with a HB corp and either criminal or shaper runners, they tend to make the most intuitive sense as to what you're doing and why I think. Maybe start them with corp but show them your runner hand on your turn and explain what you're doing and why, and what other possible things you could do (running on HQ vs R&D vs Archive, which icebreakers you're playing and how they work, etc)

[Gammagooey]

Guys, I finished pandemic legacy

Just in time for season two! It comes out soon.

I think they're previewing it at gencon.

speaking of

GET HYPE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oyihkl ... e=youtu.be

[Gammagooey]

Looking for a suggestion for my family's yearly week long vacation. Need to add a

5 player game

(6 players is also great, but 5 is our most normal number of players). We play a lot of board games while on vacation, but it's been sort of particular on what games have found major success.

Here have been games that we've ended up playing a lot of:
1. 7 Wonders. By far our most played game, it involves strategy, the concurrently playing mechanic works nicely, it never feels too much like any individual player is "out of it,"
2. Ticket to Ride. We don't play this one any more because we overplayed it, but it was a good match.
3. Castles of Mad King Ludwig. In particular my wife likes this game.
4. Dominion. We've had fun with this, but even with 4 players it really moves too slowly.
5. Five Tribes. Inexplicably doesn't have five players.

We've played a lot of games that have been enjoyable but haven't really caught on like Smallworld.


Types of games that won't work:
1. Cooperative games. If the game ever risks having a quarterback, it won't work, with or without a traitor.
2. Thematic games (games that rely on their theme, story telling, etc. to make the game fun.)
3. "Silly" games like party games. It has to have some element of strategy.
4. Games that last longer than 2 hours, and it'd preferably be 60 or fewer minutes though it's not required.
5. Non-repeatable games. Likely goes along with thematic
6. Preferably no games with shifting alliances. I don't want to hear my father and his brother try and convince us to gang up on the other the entire game (e.g. no cosmic encounter).

I've thought about adding a worker placement game, but not sure that's the best road to go down.

Maybe Kingsburg? It's light, it's sort-of-worker-placementy but you use dice as the 'workers' you're placing and you need them to add up to whatever you're getting, and you can have a strategy from the start (or after your first die rolls at least) you're planning to work towards while changing it around based on what dice you get and what other people are going for, around 90 minutes long. I vaguely remember that some people really like the expansion or only like the game with the expansion or something like that but I've forgotten what it adds and I'm sure someone else around here has an opinion on that.

I'd recommend Trains too since it's basically Dominion smashed together with Ticket to Ride, but it only does 4 people.

[Gammagooey]

Libertalia too....

oh also this is great too as far as light and strategic goes

[Gammagooey]

Flying out to this for the weekend!

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/n ... ghts-2017/

I'm very very hyped for the new arkham horror LCG Labyrinth of Lunacy scenario (heard it's saw-esque with the big version being 3 different 'normal' 1-4 player playgroups playing side-by-side and helping/hurting each other to progress), hoping to try a 'normal' game of Eldritch Horror (probably just with the new expansion that adds personal stories) since I haven't tried that yet, and I might want to try the enormous arkham horror To the Barricades game but it seems like that'll have so much downtime so I'm not completely sure about that (it's basically just original arkham horror with custom rules to make it work with 9-18 players)

The new mansions of madness expansion looks fun to play through a scenario or two there but with only 3 new scenarios (and not liking the only 'outdoors' scenario in the base game and the new expansion being Streets of arkham) I really doubt I'll want to buy it, though I could be wrong given that they're based two of the 3 on the university campus and a speakeasy instead of the just 'wandering through some streets and buildings' theme that the base game scenario I didn't like was.

[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.

[Gammagooey]

If I was going to upgrade from GOT Board Game, is this the one to get? I heard there were a couple others that were like it and good as well.

It is the most obvious successor to GOT imo

there are other games that do the area control mechanics better

but this feels like they took at look at GOT (which is like 7 years old at this point holy shit) and said "huh, this game feels dated" and streamlined a lot and dropped the theme

my biggest issue with it is that upon reflection, the clans you play as all feel too similar. they all have the same pool of 26 tokens, but each clan gets one special token that only they can use, and then they all have a minor passive ability

the variance comes in drawing combat tokens each round. you don't know when you're going to draw your "big" moves, so each round feels fresh and different. which removes the analysis paralysis that came from GOT, where you want to plan 10 moves out

It's certainly not bad but if I had the time to play a bigger wargame I'd personally prefer that over Rokugan - if you only have 2-3 hours to play though then it's pretty good. Also go print out the FAQ from fantasy flight's site because the rule book being small was theoretically nice but there are a lot of edge cases that we wound up guessing at because we couldn't find an actual rule/example for it in the rulebook.
(coastal tokens being placed on the coastal borders you're attacking and you not needing an actual coastal province to attack from, replacing a peace token with a scorched earth token from a territory card wasn't actually supposed to happen, if the bluff token gets bounced by the first player card they're not supposed to use it again that round, etc.)

[Gammagooey]

replacing a peace token with a scorched earth token from a territory card wasn't actually supposed to happen

didn't we look that up and you actually could raid a peace token?

We looked it up for you and reck's thing on like the last or second to last turn and reck couldn't raid your peace and it looks like that was right going by the faq

but also I shouldn't have been able to burn brock's peace province with my territory card earlier

[Gammagooey]

I'm like 90% sure he moved it to a new location that wasn't the peace location after you looked it up

[Gammagooey]

Shut up and sit down just did their review of it

It's interesting in that the storyteller has some leeway to actually affect the game and that players still get to talk+play after they die

But I can't justify grabbing it for the mayybe once or twice a year I'll both have enough people around to play it and those people will actually want to play something like that, esp. when I've already got two rooms and a boom

[Gammagooey]

I've only gotten to play Root once, but reviews I've seen (particularly the one from Shut up & sit down) mention that it tends to be better when everyone's still figuring out how their race/faction interacts with everyone else's as opposed to when everyone's got a solid grasp on the game - since it's first to 30 points wins the endgame can come down to just knocking down anyone who's particularly close until someone manages to shoot through the 30-point line. Playing with different player counts or new/unusual faction combinations w/ the expansion (and using the other side of the game board) seems like it would help a lot with that too though and I would definitely play it again if given the chance.

[Gammagooey]

exactly what it needed?

Why settle for 10 hours when you can do 14?

the cheapest "lifestyle" game

I mean you could probably just chuck in some new alien races without using any other part of it and it probably wouldn't increase the game length (though people who would want to do that are probably like me and just own cosmic encounter instead)

[Gammagooey]

Ti4 only takes 4-5 hours now. Ti3 was the time sink.

The only time I played TI4 I we started at 12:30 and basically decided to give the victory to someone by giving them their final victory point through an agenda card around 8/8:30 b/c I stopped them from winning that turn by taking their home planet and people had to leave

oh hey nvm it's just me from the past

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.

[Gammagooey]

Okay, guess I have to use it at a game night sort of thing eventually. It is a minimum of three players, but I think a max of 5, and we generally have 6 players at any function, though.

The first 3 expansions (Cosmic Incursion, Cosmic Conflict, and Cosmic Alliance) all add pieces to add another player in - I wouldn't recommend getting all of them and going all the way up to 8 players (With that many everyone tends to only get 1, mayyybe 2 turns), but I think 6 players still works very well. Cosmic Incursion giving a special defender bonuses deck makes defending more enticing too in case people that you play with tend to glom onto every attack to get colonies, I highly recommend it.

[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.