Board Games!

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lacking

You can play quite a few euro games through brettspielwelt (either on the website or by downloading the free program). I find the interface a little fiddly at times, but the game selection is pretty good: eg. Carcasonne, Settlers, Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Pandemic, Stone Age, and loads more. I haven't actually played any of that list myself, I've only used it for 7 Wonders.

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I recently played The Resistance for the first time, and I thought it was a really, really good game, I like it as much as (possibly a little bit more than) mafia, and that means a lot considering mafia/werewolf has been my most favourite game for the past ~5 years.

It doesn't have any player elimination; instead of gaining information from deaths, information is gained from the mission results, eg. 'one person voted to fail this mission, therefore there is at least one spy among these four players'. Of course it is never enough information as there are only five missions in the game, and several ways to interpret mission results, eg. a spy might not want to blow their cover by sabotaging that particular mission, and a group with multiple spies in risks giving too much information if they all vote to sabotage, and they have no method to co-ordinate. A single spy in a mission can cause it to fail (anonymously), and the winning side is the first to three points (ie. three fails or three successes), so there is a lot at stake every time, and a lot to discuss - leaders' suggestions and reactions, players voting to approve or reject a team, mission cards. The game is fairly simple, it moves quickly and gets more and more intense towards the end. I would recommend it to anyone who likes mafia.

On the other side, I also played Are You The Traitor for the first time, and was pretty disappointed with it. It also doesn't have player elimination, instead, the game is just like one massive Day 1, where the only information is from discussion, and a single player will decide the outcome of the whole game.

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Not as serious, but any new party game ideas to play at a non-alcoholic New Year's Eve party? Cards Against Humanity will definitely be played, and we got some Walmart-style party board games to play as well. I want to finagle some 1000 Blank White Cards and Mafia in there, but it might be an uphill battle.

My favourite game for New Years Eve (or any other party) is Celebrities. It's a combination of articulate, charades, and memory, but with the content more personal and modern, because you write the names yourselves - so it can be niche and nerdy, bawdy and broad, family-orientated and mainstream, depending on the tastes and interests of your players. It can handle larger and smaller groups, and is easy to understand for gamers and non-gamers. I'd say always divide into two big teams rather than more smaller ones (keeps everyone involved), and limit it to writing 7 names per person if you have more than ~8 players, or 5 names per person if you have more than ~12.

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7 Wonders is definitively like that, because everyone takes their turns simultaneously. There is no downtime.

A drawback to it (imo) is that it has a slightly steeper learning curve than some games - there are several different card types that you need to understand, and there's an element of self-policing, eg. knowing which cards you can legally build. Because of the simultaneous turns, it's a bit harder to guide newbies whilst playing. One solution is to have a non-player on hand to look over their shoulder to explain or clarify things as needed.

It also takes a little while to count up scores at the end. That said, it's a good game and I'm a fan.

It does play especially well online eg. through BrettSpielWelt, because then the computer makes it clear which cards you can play, as well as doing all of the scoring at the end of the game.

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Personally, I've only played Seasons once and I didn't like it. Too many complex rules and mechanics, and cards with lots of tiny text explaining what they do.

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Played what I think was called Ultimate Werewolf Inquisition the other night. Rather than being in a mafia game, it kind of has a smaller group of you (with one or two werewolf sympathisers) manipulating a game of mafia. I liked the attempt to do something different with the concept but I think I've played too much mafia to forgive some of the necessary thematic wonkiness (we won by making the last werewolf eat itself at night, so, y'know, don't think about it too much). Found it quite interesting though.

Oh, we also played this for the first time at games day last weekend! I actually thought it was pretty good. Were you following the rule about merging columns that only had one card left in them? Because I thought that would make it impossible to force the werewolves to eat the

last

wolf card; you could only do that kind of force if there were multiple wolf cards in a column and no villager cards.

And yeah, the theme makes it a bit awkward to distinguish verbally between the wolf/human players playing the game, and the wolf/human cards within the game; but I didn't see that as a major downside. I imagined us being some kind of wolf/human gods, controlling the players in a game (i.e. the cards on the table).

The wolves won both times when it was played in our group - even though by the end of the game it had become obvious who the wolf-gods were, the challenge still came down to correctly identifying where the wolf cards lay on the table, and ensuring that the human-gods had enough power to get them lynched. It's quite tough, as far as I could tell the six-player game only allowed for one mislynch.

I thought it felt like a much lighter version of BSG: more complex mechanics than regular Werewolf (the different actions that the players can take), and a similar kind of dynamic, discussing together as a group to decide which players will take which actions, who will gain different types of information/power - whilst knowing that some amongst you are traitors.

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The person teaching us the game said we only merged columns if there were two columns with one card left, but I didn't check the rules myself so it may be that we shouldn't have won.

Oh yeah that's true; so then it would be possible.

We also had both Seers in play at the start of the game but they got eaten fairly quickly, I think we managed to check about 4 or 5 cards out of the 12 on the table (all of them were Not Werewolf, although we subsequently got lucky picking a couple of werewolves-lynches at random from the remaining unknown cards). Also because the Seer checks had all been made by different players we suffered from a reasonable amount of suspicion that somebody had actually checked a werewolf and then lied about it, I think we 'wasted' a number of action points using the Sorcerer for this reason.

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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.

The replayability comment may be true, but to date I've really enjoyed Timeline - having played it on 6 or 7 occasions. I think it's more interesting than Chrononauts, which I've only played once but found pretty generic. Obviously your tastes may differ.

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).

Again, this is the opposite of my experience! I think the basegame works really well, there's so much more information to go on than there would be in a mountainous mafia game; whereas the plot cards make things a bit too zany imo.

Recent acquisitions here include:

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.

Rivals of Catan

, the 2-player card game, a bit more complex than Settlers, good depth and seems well balanced.

Agricola

on the iPad (£2.99, I think it's on offer right now) - well worth it imo, it's a fraction of the price of the board game, and takes away all of the administration hassle. Also, the Solo challenge mode is a lot of fun, and quite different in feel compared to the multiplayer game, as you can plan moves ahead and develop your farm more easily.

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I enjoyed Love Letter

immensely

, hooooooly shit. It was so good.

I like Love Letter a lot too. At the last mini-meet CDB created a Love Letter Mafia setup - every player has a role independent of their alignment, and the role abilities are taken from (or inspired by) the Love Letter deck.

Priest forces someone to show you their current role. Countess compulsively bodyguards a Prince or King if they get killed. I think one of the cards can vig people (under certain conditions) but I can't remember if it's the Guard or the Baron... probably the Baron? And what did the Princess do?? CDB should post the full details because I can't remember them now but I thought it was surprisingly good!

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I hated avalon due to the whole merlin thing, found it super unfun.

Yeah the roles seemed to be balanced primarily around cancelling each other out, so it adds a ton of time-consuming complexity for no gain. Plus IIRC a couple seemed very abusable. One of my game guys told me I was being too picky and that "not everybody's gonna try breaking the game," but I maintain that

someone

will, and in that game it'll ruin it for everybody.

Which of the roles do you think are broken, sthar? I can't think of any opportunities for 'abuse', although I've only ever played with [Merlin; Percival; Assassin; Morgana; Mordred].

I really like Avalon, even more than The Resistance, although I think Merlin is only actually balanced in a group of at least 8, so that there are 5+ Resistance players for Merlin to hide amongst, otherwise it's too easy for the Spies to shoot Merlin at the end. (But I still enjoy it enough to play it even in a smaller group where it is less balanced.)

Ironically, even though I love hidden role games and think that discussion is key part of what makes them fun, I actually like the fact that Merlin changes the dynamic of The Resistance in favour of less discussion, for me. I tend to hold back and play a little cagey in order to not give away how much/little I know. But there is still enough discussion to keep it fun and interesting. I also think the Lady of the Lake mechanic is good and offers protection to Merlin - after 2 or 3 ladies, everyone has some information to go by.

Edit: Also I've just remembered a nice moment from a game we played recently. At the start of the game I had an early gut-read on one girl as prob-scum. She got frustrated at my vocal insistence that she shouldn't be included on missions, and lack of explanation, eventually commenting that 'if you're Merlin you're playing it really badly!'

I should have taken this as a rock-solid scumclaim but, embarrassingly, I later went back on my gut-read and decided later that she might be town after all. But we still won the game, and it confused the scum in early game which probably helped.

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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!

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Today we finally got around to playing War of the Ring, CES' favourite game, a fairly complex battle with a playtime of around 3 hours.

45 minutes into explaining the rules for movement, types of actions and how to take them, combat, win conditions and various tracks, he gets out the event card deck.

"Oh, yeah. So, the event cards are all in Dutch. It's fine, I'm sure you'll manage."

(Currently my Dutch level is such that I can recognise the words like "of" and "in". "Actiedobbelstenenvoorraad" is a bit beyond my level…)

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"Actiedobbelstenenvoorraad"

My dutch is at the level such that I can't tell if this is gibberish or actual dutch.

Yeah, it's what inspie said:
actie = action
dobbelstenen = dice
voorraad = supply

They weren't all crazy compound words though, and I did learn some useful new vocabulary for every day situations, e.g.
leger = army
bevecht = combating
speel deze kaart als = play this card if

We've only just finished playing, haha; I'm not sure how long it actually was as we took many breaks. I won in the end as evil, although only because Wester gave himself a -50% handicap by starting from The Shire instead of Rivendell. It is a good game, even if it is long; and probably plays more easily if you're both fluent in the language you're playing it in.

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I love Space Alert and I love Galaxy Trucker.

Also that reminds me, a few weeks ago we played Galaxy Trucker with a kid who we assume to be Mr. Stoofer's son.

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I'm not a big fan of Galaxy Trucker, but I have been

loving

the iOs app for it. It may be the best iOs implementation of a board game to date.

Just looked this up. Is the turn-based version any good, or only the online/single-player modes?

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CDB i have Sherlock Hilmes Vonsulting Detectove! I actually brought it to the first April Meet but it didn't get played... it's not really a meet style game, is the thing. but I can definitely bring it to the next thing and you'd be welcome to borrow it. Oh also my copy Has no box but it has all the relevant parts.

Arg, phones.

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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.

I love Tales, but to me it is strictly a 2 or 3 player game, because of the time thing. I'd usually expect it to last around 1.5 hours when you are familiar with it. Also (you may already do this) I would always start heading towards the correct page before they roll the fudge die.

And I know what you mean about the feeling that some of the page-searching could be automated, but at the same time, I think that might take away some of the magic of knowing how many different encounters you could possibly have. Also a large part of the fun is in reading them out loud to each other, and the allure of knowing that if you'd had the Robe of Honour of the Magic Bridle or Storytelling or Wisdom, then your last adventure might have gone differently.

Also my house rule is that if Drink is ever an option in the reaction matrix then you have to take it.

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We just got

Galaxy Trucker

on the ipad and iphone so that we could play together. But we've just had two attempts at online multiplayer, and both times the game broke. Each time we set up a game for just two players and invited the other person. Building ships was fine, and the game was clearly interacting with each other, exchanging components and such. But as soon as we finish and get started on the mission, for some reason we it opens up a different mission card for each of us, e.g. I see Open Space and CES sees Pirates. And then we can't proceed because on my version it's waiting for CES to power up his engines, and on his it is waiting for me to choose which lasers to use.

Anyone experienced this? Any ideas why it's happening, and/or how to fix it?

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Snake Oil and Mad Scientist University are both easy to jump in and out of, and similar playstyle to CaH, in each round everybody has to submit an idea that they think will be the best. The themes are different and both games involve more talking than CaH - in Snake Oil you're a salesman trying to pitch your product to the buyer, in Mad Scientist you're displaying your wacky invention to the conference.

Also we've enjoyed a lot of One Night Werewolf recently, which isn't really the same, but it is really quick at about 5 - 10 minutes per game.

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Recently we've been playing A Fake Artist goes to New York over skype. It's good! The concept is a bit like Spyfall: all the players are told the subject of the picture they should be drawing, except for the spy (the fake artist), who is only told the category. Everyone then each contributes one line towards a group painting, in turn. After that, everyone votes to identify the spy. The spy wins if they aren't caught, or, if they are caught but then successfully guess the subject of the painting.

Here are a few of our drawings - you can play along at home!

(warning: This game is difficult and I don't think anyone could get all of these answers right - remeber the artists are trying to obscure the subject of the painting so the spy won't guess it, and the spy is trying to bluff that they know it)

Spoiler: A Fake Artist in New York

1) Category: Profession

draw order: green, purple, orange, blue, black
a) Who is the spy? (which colour pen)
b) What is the profession?

2) Category: Sport

draw order: blue, green, purple, black, red
a) Who is the spy?
b) What is the sport?

3) Category: Furniture

draw order: blue, orange, red, purple, green
a) Who is the spy?
b) What is the furniture?

4) Category: Artist

draw order: red, blue, purple, orange, black
a) Who is the spy?
b) Who is the artist?

5) Category: Scummer

draw order: black, orange, blue, purple, red
a) Who is the spy?
b) Who is the scummer?

6) Category: Animal

draw order: blue, yellow, purple, red, green
a) Who is the spy?
b) What is the animal?

7) Category: Toy

(draw order: purple, orange, black, red, green)
a) Who is the spy?
b) What is the toy?

8) Category: Mafia Role

draw order: green, blue, purple, yellow, red
a) Who is the spy?
b) What is the role?

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2/16!

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also I have Jackbox Party Pack 3 and Trivia Murder Party looks PERFECT for the occasion

What is this? It looks intriguing, but also kind expensive, and I couldn't find any information about how the game actually works.

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Yeah I gathered most of that from looking it up, but I was wondering more about the actual rules, how you play, etc..?

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I like Shadows over Camelot but it saddens me that I think the technically best play for a traitor is:
1. Go fight Lancelot, hang around a few turns putting cards in
2. Leave before completing to ensure tge Lancelot quest fails
3. Get accused and revealed as traitor
4. Spend rest of game sticking trebuchets on the board or stealing from people's hands.

Which is a shame because it's more fun if the traitor can be more subversive in their actions, it's just less effective.

My favourite co-op game is Space Alert... I think the best co-ops create a game situation that couldn't be solved by just one person, either by setting rules on how and what you can say (e.g. Hanabi, Witness, Mysterium) or by adding a time limit (e.g. Space Alert, Fuse).

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Lords & Ladies: I picked this up without testing it first because I really liked the generations-based mechanic where half the game is marrying your character, having kids, and then marrying those kids. I'd definitely love any recs for other games that form a similar family tree sort of thing.

Crusader Kings

has some marrying, making heirs, sending those heirs on crusades, dying and the heirs inheriting the throne. It also has a lot of battling, I don't know if that is your thing or not.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

is one of the most thematic, story-based, and overall best games I know. Good diversity of characters as well. The mechanics are pretty complex though.

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I think one of the roles I had, I was supposed to switch 2 players cards, but how is that a pro town move?

Example:
You swap 2 players cards
Tell them you've done so
One of those players was a wolf, but now the cards are swapped they are no longer a wolf
The other player is now a wolf
The original wolf can say openly that they used to be a wolf and that the new player is now a wolf.
Villagers vote the new wolf and win.

That's just a basic play, it won't always go exactly like that.

The point of the game is that you don't know what happened in the night and roles get switched, so you are trying to deduce out what your current alignment is, and who to vote to win as that alignment. Whilst everyone else is trying to do the same.

The game is built around claiming, so you definitely should be claiming, and the wolves can fakeclaim, unless they find out they are no longer a wolf, in which case they can tell the truth.