Board Games!

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I need to try these co/op board game thingies.

I feel as though I am severely lacking in geekiness.

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Holy crap I'm watching it just for Felicia Day

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When we played Galactic Encounters at the Reckoning, I really enjoyed it. It moved a tad too quickly for my liking (game was over after everyone had 1 turn), but I think we had too many players to really get the fullest experience out of it.

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I'm not familiar with that game and can't find it on BGG. Is that Cosmic Encounters?

Assuming yes: After a few games it should very rarely happen that someone wins before everyone has a turn because people will start to figure out when to ally with defense vs. attack, not to mention people will more naturally keep track of how many bases are on which worlds. With more experienced players, games can often last quite a while. Quick games generally involve as much inattention as they do skill or luck.

Assuming no: sorry for talking about a game that you didn't mean.

Yes, it is Cosmic Encounters. I r smart.

Well, the weird thing was that the first player's turn ended up having them attacking me both times, and pretty much everyone hopped on with the attack, so I got clobbered and everyone else ended up with 3 colonies or some madness like that. There were I think 7 (or 9?) of us playing; by the time it got back around to player 1, literally everyone in the game had 4 colonies.

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Right. But players should have plenty of control over this. When someone has 3 colonies, you do NOT ask them to help you on offense.

The way cosmic encounter kinda balances despite having such different roles is that it leans HEAVILY on balance of power ala Europe 19th Century. But that can only really work when people know at least kind of what they're doing.

Still, there are certainly times in CE that a power or luck simply allows one player to win quickly. But those aren't the norm.

Fair enough. I think it was the first time everyone had played, so you may be right.

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The Commune definitely needs some boardgames for >4 people. >_>

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I would possibly be /in for board games via the interwebs

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Played Cosmic Encouter at BaltoMeet again.

I fully intend to buy that game soon. It's fucking brilliant, and with so many races, you'll never get the same game.

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Hugging to victory?

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That depends pretty significantly on them having negotiate cards in their hands AND attacking one another (which is usually completely random). Them winning with that strategy, while not impossible, seems unlikely to happen consistently.

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I am fully aware that I am terrible at Risk.

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Quarriors

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cosmic encounter is AMAZING

I was going to purchase it then found out how expensive board games are >_>

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holy heck I love smallworld.

^5

also, Forbidden Island, Tsuro, and Ticket to Ride made positive impressions on me in the past week. Lords of Waterdeep as well.

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sounds like I should play it

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sounds like I should play it

remember that misaktonic school for girls game we kept looking at? I played it with nikanor and it kiiiiind of sucked.

somehow I am not surprised

was it as bad as 51ST STATE

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As mentioned in the Reckoning thread, polyhaus got the GOT board game, GOT card game, and Legendary (Marvel card game). Thoughts on any/all of the above?

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I quite enjoyed Lords of Waterdeep as an intro to worker placement games, as a note.

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So, Legendary is Really Awesome. Glork and I played 3 or 4 games last night and had a blast.

It does seem a tad easy, but that might be because there were only two of us. (Although, the game booklet has some suggestions to increase the difficulty, and we've come up with a few cards we could conceivably remove from play to up the difficulty.) It might be a different story with 4 or 5 players, though. And regardless of difficulty, it seems very well-designed, and is both fun to play and has billions of replay value (and lots of built-in room for expansions as well).

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Glork and I have been playing a good amount of Legendary the past few days. We lost our first game yesterday. We were playing the Superhero Civil War scheme (scheme twist KOs the HQ, and you lose when the hero deck runs out), and we added an extra twist to the deck and gave Loki an extra strength point to bump the difficulty. The heroes we drew weren't great at punching things (Gambit, Iron Man, Cyclops, Captain America (I think)), so we never got enough attack to actually fight Loki at any point. >_>

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Forbidden Island, have enjoyed many games of this already, it totally lives up to the hype. Reminds me a lot of Pandemic, but lighter and quicker. We've only lost once though, and that was on Legendary difficulty.

you only lost once? on legendary?

teach me your wayyyyyys

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Maybe I just suck at forbidden island, but I'm pretty sure we never won when you played with me, Faraday.

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Huh. Maybe we just had bad luck, then

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That haunt

was

bullshit. Poor CDB.

I enjoyed the bit of Hanabi I got to play. It's a strategic / memory / co-op game that I felt fairly relaxed while playing, despite there being some fairly tense moments.

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LEGENDARY EXPANSIONS GET

Got the Fantastic Four and Dark City expansions. We're waiting on some more sleeves to come in, so we can't play with dark city, but we had enough spares for FF. WOOOOOOOOO. Masterminds look much more difficult, which will be interesting.

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So we've played 4 or 5 games with both new expansions now. The fantastic four villains and schemes are absolutely brutal, which is a fairly pleasant change (as we've generally found the original ones to be generally pretty easy.) There are some interesting new abilities / mechanics in the game. Both expansions highly recommended, IMO.

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I don't really know why it matters if ticket to ride is technically a train game or not?

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smallworld is the shit

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Guillotine is a pretty great game.

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Tsuro of the Seas is also slightly more complex than the original Tsuro. Probably more worth a standard board game price tag?

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Forbidden Island is currently $15 on amazon

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is it any better than Pandemic for people who hate co op games

I'm going to say 'probably not'

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Cheery getting one shotted on turn 1 was priceless

That shit was hilarious.

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

We played True American for tabletop day. That counts right? Also some mafia.

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She's one of the Joss Whedon & Friends gang.

Mostly internet-famous, though, for things like The Guild and her work on Geek & Sundry.

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Forbidden Island / Forbidden desert is a solid Co-Op game. Pandemic is along the same vein, though it is frustratingly difficult to win.

Polyhaus has a mild obsession with Legendary, which is co-op but flexible enough to be played with some competition too if you are interested in such things.

In other news I have literally just copied faraday's post apparently

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I mean, I've never won any of the above, but I had more fun losing Forbidden Island / Desert. I don't feel like I'm completely screwed from the start in FI/FD, whereas Pandemic feels like you're just destined to lose from about the first turn.

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Betrayal is definitely pretty fun.

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thesp if you wake up one day to find all of your board games missing it is because i took them all

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xtoph, if there are consistently only 5 of you, I suggest Legendary (particularly if you guys like Marvel / the recent Marvel movies). CAN YOU TELL I AM A FANBOY YET.

Reck informed us via facebook that the next expansion is Guardians of the Galaxy, which I am just obscenely excited for. >_>

ALSO Glork discovered that they came up with a companion game of sorts called Legendary Villains (I think), which is the same format rules, but you play as the villains, and the heroes are NPCs. They could (probably?) conceivably all be played together if you don't mind the flavor getting all sideways and wacky.

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Probably going to pick up Suburbia + Kemet soon. Was going to grab Hanabi as well... any other cheap micro games anyone can recommend? We have Escape! Curse of the Temple, Love Letter, Skulls & Roses, and obviously mafia/werewolf.

Tsuro!

I want to come back to something from a while ago…

Forbidden Island, have enjoyed many games of this already, it totally lives up to the hype. Reminds me a lot of Pandemic, but lighter and quicker. We've only lost once though, and that was on Legendary difficulty.

you only lost once? on legendary?

teach me your wayyyyyys

So, uh… it

might

be the case that we recently discovered that in our many games of Forbidden Island (including variants, such as Multi-character Forbidden Island, or Silent Forbidden Island) we've been playing it wrong. And this

might

be the reason that we found the game so easy.

Turns out we'd missed the rule about removing location cards from the flood deck if that location sinks, so there was no reason to waste time saving places that we didn't need (e.g. coastal areas) and the 'dead' cards would pad out the deck making it less likely that we'd draw the cards for locations we did need.

I'm looking forward to playing it with the real rules and finding out what it's actually like!

Yeuuup that'll do it. lol.

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On the other hand, I was not a huge fan of Kemet. I feel like it's difficult to understand all of your options, because there are so friggin' many of them, and I'm not particularly interested in playing a 2-hour board game 3-5 more times to get to a point where I'm comfortable in my knowledge of all the options. (Plus, the detail Reck mentions is great on the plastic figurines, but makes the tiles and cards somewhat difficult to understand at a glance.)

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That's fair, which tells me that I don't dislike this

type

of game, but instead I dislike Kemet specifically!

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Fair enough, you'd know better than me.

I think dislike might have been a strong word; 'ambivalent' might be better. It's not my first choice, but if the other 4 people I was hanging out with really wanted to play, I wouldn't turn it down, I guess. Similar to Seven Wonders in that way for me.

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This is good

I have playtest pdfs if anyone wants to check it out. My friend Grant is the designer, and it's fucking hilarious.

oh man, please can we find time to do this

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How long do you expect each session to run?

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I will pop in to make my semi-regular plug about how great Legendary is

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Reck, what about Tsuro?

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Reck, what about Tsuro?

I love Tsuro, I adore Tsuro, but the price tag doesn't sit well with me for being a "light" game (plus, I'd probably get Tsuro of the Seas).

Cash & Guns looks very interesting.

Ah, right I remember that conversation happening now.

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Cosmic Encounter is super fun, but be careful not to play with too many people. My first game of Cosmic encounter took probably 2 hours and everybody got 1 turn.

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Could Cosmic encounter work on forum/Vassal/BSW?

I think my first playthrough would be like 3-6 players, probably more likely lower numbers. But it's literally $46 and that would be the most I would have ever spent on a board game. (I know, I'm fortunate/cheap. The most I've ever spent is like $41 for

Stone Age

, which never gets played. :'( Anyone wanna trade?)

Speaking of which I woke up this morning and Amazon sent me mail telling me

Felix the Cat in the Sack

was on sale but it was still $35

I rather intensely dislike

Stone Age

... so that's a no.

I guess I would run cosmic on forum if people really wanted it, it would be fun to mod, but it's a very component-friendly game (you get 20 little UFOs that are a big part of the game). Best option is to find a gamestore with a library, and test it there.

Would play forum-Cosmic

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I've never played, but would be willing to give it a shot if you'll take a newbie.

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I am interested in that product and/or service based upon that description

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If he likes logicky things, you might try Love Letter or Hanabi. Not specifically marketed to kids, but I think(?) they're both simple enough for a kid to pick up and have fun with.

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omg betrayal

I

might

be available tonight for betrayal (or maybe something else), though I don't have VASSAL

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right, but tonight is when I'm most likely to be free

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Oh, also got the Guardians of The Galaxy expansion for Marvel: Legendary. Can't wait to try it. Thanos!

ahhhh we need this

also, Villains

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SEAFARING TRITONS

good lord that sounds broke as fuck

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Sheriff of Nottingham was great, can confirm.

I half-watched reck and singer try to learn Mage Wars. Was pretty funny.

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canada, obv

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you could always go with GILL

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Played Cosmic Encouter at BaltoMeet again.

I fully intend to buy that game soon. It's fucking brilliant, and with so many races, you'll never get the same game.

quadz

so expensive, reck

so expensive

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Some of the commune-ists played

Legendary Villains

last night!

It was fun - it's basically a re-skin of the original

Legendary

, where you play as the villains, and are trying to defeat the heroes. As you might expect, this version puts a lot more emphasis on the players being competitive / dickish. A lot of the villains gain strength by doing things that actively screw other players over. Still fun, but I expect it to see less play than standard Legendary from polyhaus at least, as we enjoy the co-op aspect more than I think some other board gamers do.

The new board that comes with it is beautiful - It's a roll-up playmat, rather than a "board." I think it's far superior in terms of quality and ease of use / storage, and it's got some extra spaces for twists and strikes that the original board doesn't have.

The game is advertised as being either standalone or playable in combination with Legendary. I'd caution against playing it in combination, because they've changed all of the terminology in order to make it make sense playing from the villain side and a lot of the mass card groups (wounds/bindings, shield officers / madame hydra / new recruits, starting decks) get weird and almost certainly weaker if you were to combine the games. I'm sure you can make it work, but it would be... complicated. And weird.

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We got that expansion, but haven't had a chance to play with it yet. How do you use Hero Artifacts - do you only draw them out of your deck once, and then they sit in front of you for eternity?

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it seems like infinity gems would be a weird villain group to have in a non-thanos game

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So the Tabletop ep of

Dead of Winter

is really spectacular - I am super-interested in playing this game.

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site so borked

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it's faraday shhhh

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I'd rage at Grant Imahara so hard.

if you know what he's talkin about

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The commune are bad Coup players because we take wayyyyy too long and talk wayyyyyyyy too much

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I still have not played keyflower so it is not my fault that people won't play it

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Smash Up is pretty fun!

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smallworld is not particularly simplistic, IMO?

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I picked up a copy of Forbidden Island from B&N while I was picking up a book yesterday.

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Polyhaus just picked up copies of

Shadow Hunters

and

Love Letter

. Both excellent games we've all played before and like a bunch, and figured it was time to pick up our own copy.

Also got one of those boxes of d6's for Liar's Dice and the like.

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fun use we discovered tonight for our new box of D6 - placemarkers for D&D!