Board Games!

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I find Settlers mildly amusing enough to play it once in a while, Carcassonne is pretty junk in my opinion, but I'm a huge fan of 7 Wonders which I have yet to tire of and recommend highly; I'm intrigued by the expansion(s) as well but haven't gotten it yet.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I find Settlers mildly amusing enough to play it once in a while, Carcassonne is pretty junk in my opinion, but I'm a huge fan of 7 Wonders which I have yet to tire of and recommend highly; I'm intrigued by the expansion(s) as well but haven't gotten it yet.

I enjoy 7 Wonders: Leaders a great deal and recommend it for those who like 7 Wonders. It won't make you like the game if you didn't already, but it adds a bit of variety to an already great game.

There are people who don't like 7 Wonders?

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Never heard of Space Alert.

I think my biggest problem with Ticket to Ride comes from downtime. You only do one thing, really, on your turn... so turns go by quick, but downtime takes a long ass time. Putting down the train pieces, flipping and shuffling new cards, waiting for people to select tickets... there's just not a lot of constant shit to be paying attention to. You know where you're going to put down your train, so I always feel like my turn comes and goes and then there's this massive amount of time in between where nothing interesting happens.

Sounds more like a problem with your friends than the game; because things flow quickly around here unless Vi is playing in which case you get the equally fun scenario of everyone plays quickly into Vi's turn; everyone makes fun of Vi for being slow and then Vi panics and makes a bad decision.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

My brother picked up Lords of Waterdeep this last week, I only got to play one game on Tuesday but I see a lot of potential in it.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

yeah we played a ton of 7 wonders this christmas. A great game for a medium size group too. Played with my sister's new puppy:

What looks like an illegal science build, she's lost war twice, and she didn't build the first part of her wonder in the first age? Oh, this is a disaster, that puppy is not very good at 7 Wonders.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

i dont' think that's an illegal science build, but this was also her first game of 7 wonders. losing war twice isn't particularly bad though.

It looks like that the first age has been played out completely and none of the second. That means the only Tablet card in play is the Scriptorium and given the identical cost for the two science cards that seems like it's likely anyways. The illegal part is you can not have identically named cards in play (an easily overlooked rule). First game, common mistake, etc, etc. (And you're right about war in 4+ player games, in 3 player games it seems to me that you have to get involved in some war or you will lose).

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

i've played both leaders and cities. i think cities is the far more interesting expansion.

I wouldn't play with just Leaders anymore but I think Leaders & Cities together is the best option. Then Cities then just the base game and then Leaders.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Blood Bowl Team Manager (aka Blood Bowl: the card game) might work for your purposes, though i think it tops out at 4 people.

I haven't thought about RftG and I own/hate Munchkin. Ony things I've really considered so far are Lords of Waterdeep and Letters from Whitechapel

Blood Bowl Team Manager and Lords of Waterdeep are both good choices, I'd say BBTM is a quicker play but it maxs out with four players and the teams feel a little unbalanced (which is good in that they play differently, bad in that some teams are better than others straight up) while LoW is slower but it goes to five players and is better balanced, not a bad choice between them.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I was going to go with LoW but the YouTube "how to play" video I saw made it seem super boring.

I didn't think I'd be a fan of it as a worker placement type game but it's flavored well; it's no 7 Wonders but I'd rather play it when compared to Smallworld.

~

Anyone else play Sentinels of the Multiverse?

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I found Legendary to be alright but if I'm playing a co-op Superhero game I think I prefer Sentinels and if I'm going deck building them I prefer competitive and Ascension, worth having around but not something high in the rotation.

Galazy Trucker on the other hand was a whole lot of fun and in our second playthrough I beat a bunch on Engineers in the ship building game so that was also a positive.

Finally, we finally got Eclipse added to the collection, as expected the first playthrough was immensely long as we figured out the nuances of the game but it seems like the top end game it's supposed to be. Only issue is that like Power Grid it takes so long I'm not sure how much regular play it'll see which could be a shame.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

That's understandable. Any cooperative game is basically a single-player optimization experiment with the joy or frustration of dealing with other people. Maybe I haven't hit the point where it loses its fun.

I think it's because it's much more malleable than many other co-op games; Pandemic might change which cities are in the danger zone but it's mostly the same structure but Ra plays rather different to the Argent Adept and Citizen Dawn plays different than the Ennead who plays different than Spite so the gameplay can be tuned to difficulties and preferences. Also having your own hand makes it so that we trend against optimization via consensus/discussion when we play unless things are dire because you do have some "hidden" information.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Yeah, I was just about to post what Flay said, they might not be obvious enough but very clearly they are marked in more than just color.