Board Games!

[Iecerint]

Spoiler: BSG session report

Helena Cain LOL

I was her one time. It was fun.

[Sudo_Nym]

I like the idea of the Blind Jump, but I think you generally lose less from destroying two civvies than you gain from eliminating a whole jump cycle from the game. I don't want to exclude her from future games, but something needs to be done.

[ChannelDelibird]

The next time I'm at some kind of MS meet, I'm gonna bring Tragedy Looper. More people should play this game. I know I talked about it before, but I honestly miss playing it now that I'm not in Seattle.

I've played

Tragedy Looper

once and enjoyed it well enough, though our game ended in a bit of a fizzle as our evil player (or whatever they're called) gave away a little too much early on and it was a bit easy to foil his plans in the late game. Really liked how different it is, though.

Just got back from my first gaming night in a little while. Tried out

Witness

, which is an interesting mix of brain teasers and Telephone. You each get four individual snippets of a clue which you then have to whisper around the table, while remembering everything that's already been whispered to you and passing that on as well, without being able to write anything down before the end, where you put it together and hope that everyone has enough information to answer the final questions. It's nice and breezy (about five-to-10 minutes per case) although the flavour comes off a little bit too much like the sort of puzzle you'd get in a school textbook at times. Won't be for everyone, but worth trying if you like a puzzle. Some good laughs.

Got to try out the

Last Will

expansion, the name of which escapes me, as well as my first time playing the game proper in a while and it held up very well despite my playing badly and losing. The jobs in the expansion are good at forcing you to be a bit more diverse in your approach rather than just hit the same cards over and over again, although actually going bankrupt in the available time is definitely harder to do and almost certainly not going to happen to everybody. Marriage is a fun little twist as well, giving you some satisfying mini-blowouts. Recommend.

And got to give

Sheriff of Nottingham

a test run before I buy, which I will definitely be doing. It's as much fun as I'd hoped.

Then a couple of rounds of

Snake Oil

. Still a great party game.

[GreyICE]

I like the idea of the Blind Jump, but I think you generally lose less from destroying two civvies than you gain from eliminating a whole jump cycle from the game. I don't want to exclude her from future games, but something needs to be done.

57.1% of Crisis cards have a jump icon. It takes 4 icons to auto jump, so on average she saves you about 7 Crisis cards. This improves significantly if there's revealed Cylons, as the Cylon-picked Crisis cards are less likely to have a jump icon, and the other stuff the Cylons do inhibits you without potentially revealing jump icons.

Destroying a Civilian ship is about as bad as a bad Crisis card, so we can call her ability roughly "skip 5 crisis cards".

Everyone's Miracle is pretty good, and her drawback can be nasty, but that is way past the power level of most miracles.

[diginova]

My LGS finally got in some more copies of

Dead of Winter

.
BSG, you've had a good run, but I don't think I'll ever play it again. Dead of Winter takes the BSG formula and improves it in so many ways.

[Faraday]

Played

Bang: The Dice Game

last night. Lots of fun. Very quick, and everyone enjoyed it. Except for that time when the deputy killed me, his sherrif, because he had no other target to shoot with his [2] Dice >___> Oh well!

Played more

Mysterium

and other than a small spill, it was great again. (Luckily no lasting damage was done, so everything is okay). Still getting lots of replayablity as the characters/locations/weapons come out with different combinations of the Ghost deck. Lost on Hard, though

[ChannelDelibird]

PSA: Don't play

Virgin Queen

.

[Sudo_Nym]

Experienced Queen

is more fun anyway

[ChannelDelibird]

It might be, if I were still capable of imagining what 'fun' might be like. I'm trapped in this stupid fucking game.

[xRECKONERx]

FUCK

FUCKING FUCK

DEAD OF WINTER JUST CAME BACK IN STOCK ON COOLSTUFFINC BUT I DON'T HAVE MY PAYCHECK UNTIL TOMORROW FUCK IT ALL FUCK FUCK

[Thesp]

Is there any reason I shouldn't just go all in on the

Dungeons & Dragons Dice Masters

set? I've not played Dice Masters, but enjoyed Quarriors, and everything about Dice Masters looks fantastic. CSI's sale game tomorrow is

Kingsport Festival

, so I'm thinking of ordering it and preordering D&D Dice Masters (along with an expansion or two for other games).

[ChannelDelibird]

FUCK

FUCKING FUCK

DEAD OF WINTER JUST CAME BACK IN STOCK ON COOLSTUFFINC BUT I DON'T HAVE MY PAYCHECK UNTIL TOMORROW FUCK IT ALL FUCK FUCK

You know where else it's in stock

[xRECKONERx]

fuck u cdb

[Porochaz]

I want to play as well!

[xRECKONERx]

great

Got paycheck today, Dead of Winter is sold out

FUUUUUUUUCK

[Sudo_Nym]

Retrying Battlestar Galactica, after the last game was lost in a hard drive malfunction.

[Narninian]

playing battlestar galactica for the first time in years; I have all the expansions -- I'll be playing with people who have only played the base game a couple times or not at all.

Any recommendations for what to include?
I know for sure I'll be playing with Cylon leaders + Daybreak Agendas as an option
I'm kind of lukewarm on final five+personal agendas - if I include them I'm going to limit how many for sure.
I'll be using treachory from daybreak and mutineer depending on playing counts
I don't really like the idea of player elimination so am ruling out Ionian nebula.
My instinct to to *not* include the cylon fleet board, I like the panics and lulls from Cylon attack cards.

but I've really only played with cylon fleet board once, and pegasus once, daybreak zero times so would welcome advice.

[quadz08]

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.

[xRECKONERx]

Yeah I don't see how you would really play Villains with the core stuff. It's too bizarre and it absolutely ruins the flavor experience.

[Faraday]

The guardians of the galaxy expansion is really good! Thanos + the forge the infinity gauntlet scheme is very fucking difficult! The new artifact cards are cool - they're basically cards that stay there every round.

[quadz08]

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?

[Faraday]

Yep! Star-Lord has quite a few. They're certainly cool, not sure how strong they all are (like the one from Drax that gives you +1 fight every round for a cost of 3 is nice, but it's not like super great - still fun though!) The infinity gems villain group work the same way once you defeat them (but with the scheme I talked about, every scheme twist means one player loses one, so it's hard to get enough power up to beat thanos)

[quadz08]

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

[ChannelDelibird]

playing battlestar galactica for the first time in years; I have all the expansions -- I'll be playing with people who have only played the base game a couple times or not at all.

Any recommendations for what to include?
I know for sure I'll be playing with Cylon leaders + Daybreak Agendas as an option
I'm kind of lukewarm on final five+personal agendas - if I include them I'm going to limit how many for sure.
I'll be using treachory from daybreak and mutineer depending on playing counts
I don't really like the idea of player elimination so am ruling out Ionian nebula.
My instinct to to *not* include the cylon fleet board, I like the panics and lulls from Cylon attack cards.

but I've really only played with cylon fleet board once, and pegasus once, daybreak zero times so would welcome advice.

If you're playing with people with limited experience, then you probably want to avoid most of the non-mandatory expansion elements. I'd take Kobol as the destination, leave out the final fives and personal goals, use cylon attack crises rather than the fleet board. Between the Pegasus board, Mutiny, Daybreak Treachery, Cylon Leaders and a mountain of new skill cards and characters, they've got enough to which to acclimatise.

[ChannelDelibird]

Also, man, this page reminds me that I don't get to play

Legendary

nearly as much as I'd like.