Board Games!

[Faraday]

Unknown is kinda sucky too, I find!

W/r/t desert vs island. Island is a good introduction game, desert a p big challenge on the higher difficulties tho.

Haven't watched tabletop yet but hope they did the game justice. They've had some stinkers this season (geek out, mmade sherriff seem boring etc)

[diginova]

Sheriff is boring

Also, Unknown is worse if everyone assumes you're it, as nobody will hand you Hermit cards.
(What's in the Shadow Hunters first aid kit anyway to deal 7 damage?)

[Porochaz]

After watching Dead of Winter on Tabletop, it feels like a subpar version of BSG, although still super thematic and super fun. It seems to be a bit fiddly with a lot going on(now, mind you, there's a

ton

going on in BSG all the time as well, so that's not necessarily a problem).

The concern I have is with having separate win conditions besides just surviving. With everything that you have to worry about, surviving seems hard enough anyway, let alone fulfilling an arbitrary objective. It feels like an inelegant way to incite conflict within the group.

Will admit out of all the videos I've watched, I've only ever seen one person win so far, and he was a betrayer. Tabletop failed to do a number of things in their episode, despite Wil Wheatons protests there was a lot of mistakes in there. But I do feel it is a bit BSG-lite. Thats no bad thing though.

[wgeurts]

Any other people play the civilisation board game?
The fantasy flight one based of Civ IV?

[diginova]

I played the AH version (from the 70s I think), but I've never played the Civ IV one.
Hopefully they simplified the tech tree.

[Thesp]

Any other people play the civilisation board game?
The fantasy flight one based of Civ IV?

I've played all three of the Civilization boardgames. =P The Fantasy Flight one is my favorite of the bunch, though I recall not being fond of Russia's ability to gain techs at an advanced rate. I've heard great things about the expansions, but I haven't been able to play with them (and it's been several years since I've played any of the Civ games).

[Faraday]

Haven't watched tabletop yet but hope they did the game justice. They've had some stinkers this season (geek out, mmade sherriff seem boring etc)

thought it came across p well actually!

[Porochaz]

Dead of Winter Playthrough

Spoiler: Game 1

Inexperience shone through, focus on killing zombies, on non dangerous areas and a lack of resource gathering made this very difficult in later turns, we underestimated the morale hit, deliberately failing one crisis so we could focus on getting the resources. Whilst it wasn't looking bad and we were about half way through, with half of the main goal done (collect 15 sample from zombies), unfortunately an unfortunate bite took out the resident nurse in the hospital, and spread to poor Sparky. Which left us crippled. The next player decided to be ultra scummy, not doing a single thing to help our failing group, focusing on his secret objective and ignoring the main one. Feeling vengeance for my lifelong friend and knowing there was another who was already baying for his blood. I pushed for an exile, which narrowly went through 3-2, sadly he was not a betrayer, he just really liked medicine. Next turn, a nasty crossroads card and a shitty diceroll meant that we were doomed.

In the end, there was a betrayer. A very quiet one, who was one food off the 6 food and 0 morale he needed.

Game end: No winners.

Spoiler: Game 2

Game 2, we knew what we were doing, and we made a plan and set out. Food, Weapons and Fuel were the order of the day, choosing 2 searchers in my team. I immediately went off to the grocery store and the library. Thankfully to no flack. Thanks to some noise making, I got my 2 books and my secret objective. However in trying to travel to my main objective, I got bit and died alone. Down 1 morale. The rest of the turn went by with little incidence and all was going well until a second bite dice roll. 2 morale gone. 4 to go. The weapon collection was going well, food collection not so much. However we had plenty of time...

Half way through, medicine was desperately needed for the crisis, 2 players had to find 1 more, should have been easy, then the 3rd bite was rolled. What happened next will forever be known as the "Hospital Massacre of '15" desperation reigned and sadly 3 deaths ensued, my books were burned, no medicine was found and all my characters lost.

What came next was a sad state of affairs, Sparky the wonder dog came back from the dead and was promptly exiled to pass the crisis, no humans wanted to feed the dog or give it medicine at the expense of themselves, Sparky, who sadly only knew loyalty went under a transformation and turned into Sparky the historian handyman wonderdog with hypothermia, a pistol and a human trucker pet, and despite their cruel rejection managed to help the group a lot in exile, the group, still not done with cutting down numbers, decided to kill off the drunken mall santa, who noone really liked anyway for a morale boost and we were still hanging on by a thread. 1 more bite roll (seriously it was a 1 in 12 chance but fuck me did it screw us) and not enough food in a crisis sealed our fate.

Game end: no winners.

Spoiler: Summary

In an apocalypse noone wins.

Also, hospitals suck.

Poor dice rolls and uber hard main objective - 10 non starter foods stored separately from everything else and a weapon equipped on a survivor for every player, it was always going to be nigh on impossible. Especially for a first time playing. The game 1 objective (every time you kill a zombie, gain a sample on a dice roll of 4 or more, 15 samples wins you the game) was a lot easier, it was inexperience that let us down.

It was fun, but slow to begin with whilst we worked out how to play. I found it to be a slightly inferior BSG if Im honest, and others found it quite similar to Pandemic, (which Ive not played so can't give an opinion on), I feel there were times when it was just never going to go our way and that takes some of the fun out of it. As does having a secret objective that is too difficult to complete. (mine were fine, game 1 - 3 fuel, I got two to begin with... game 2, get 2 books, which was easy although I lost them, my exiled goal was just to complete the main objective and once I had convinced the others they should cure my hypothermia that was easy enough as well)

The game where we had the betrayer made it more fun, the betrayer added an extra element which gave the game more depth, also surprisingly for my group the role playing aspect of the game was only just there, I think we needed to get into it a bit more, but as we were still trying to understand all the rules (that rulebook isn't as useful as it first appears) I think thats understandable, but that may have made it slightly less amusing than it could have been.

(I think there is an optimum compromise between the normal game and betrayer variant, where the betrayer is more likely to appear, but not almost guarantee it, which would make the game a lot better)

I've been quite negative, but that shouldn't put anyone down. It was good fun, and I would honestly say it was a good buy, but you do need some actors in the group and you need to have more than one person watch a tutorial online beforehand or have at least a few experienced players. There is a lot of stuff going on and you do have to juggle and explain A LOT, there is a lot of strategy and I had a good afternoon. (despite my horrific losses at 7 wonders later on and the 4 hour game of Settlers - Cities and Knights, which was fun but I had never played that expansion before, and was not prepared for the length of time)

I did feel exhausted afterwards, as I say, a lot of thinking, it kinda reminded me of that stupid long game of Diplomacy at the UK meet, except without the urge to cry non-stop or sleep or hate everyone around me or to burn every board game in existence. So nothing like that, except the frazzled brain. The others, liked it, in my group there are some who hate co-op games, and whilst they weren't shouting on the rooftops about it, they were saying they enjoyed it and would play it again. I, for one, liked it also and am looking forward to playing it at the UK meet (I do desperately want to see a town win, in my research I've only ever seen a single betrayer win) but Im looking forward to stepping onto Galactica more

[xRECKONERx]

gamma ordered Doomtown Reloaded today :3

that game looks fun as fuck

[ChannelDelibird]

gamma ordered Doomtown Reloaded today :3

that game looks fun as fuck

I've only played it once but I really, really like it. As someone who really, really can't get into the theme of

Netrunner

, not to mention the terrifying money investment that it now requires,

Doomtown

's pretty ideal. If I hadn't just spent more than my games allowance on other stuff, I'd be all over it. The poker-hand mechanic is inspired; it feels incredibly thematic for a wild-west scenario. This is probably my next big buy when I can afford it.

Played a few new things today:

Hyperborea:

Played this with six and there was way too much downtime. That's not its only problem (there's not quite enough that you can accomplish on one turn to make it satisfying enough and the endgame mechanic can screw some players out of a turn for no good reason, for examples) but I think I'd probably enjoy this quite a bit with three or four. Some area-control mechanics mixed with deck/bag-building and fun minis. Definitely try before you buy, but worth trying. I'm interested to play again.

Greed:

No idea how I hadn't heard of this before, but it's a drafting game

a la

7 Wonders or Among the Stars by the guy who made Dominion, only MUCH more portable than those two cousins and a lot of fun. This was a definite hit.

Spyrium:

An interesting twist on worker-placement that didn't make me want to slit my wrists like many in the genre. Spent the first 40% of the game still not totally sure what I was trying to do and was annoyed by some often-unintuitive iconography but ended up winning thanks to falling back on the staple twin worker-placement strategies of RECRUIT ALL THE MEEPLES and dickery. Very interesting and well worth trying even if you're not normally keen on its ilk. I do wish the colour scheme were less dour and brown, though (Victorian steampunk flavour is not a good excuse).

[ChannelDelibird]

Also I played two games of Dead of Winter back to back. The first game, we forgot to place the zombies at the start of the game and still struggled massively, losing on round 3 to a betrayer.

Second game was even worse. Drew the secret objective of 'win + have more survivors than anyone else' then succumbed to a first turn in which my two survivors immediately died as well as somebody else. We rolled the exposure die 12 times and got five bites. Lost in round two. I'll have the scars for a while.

[Faraday]

I also lost a game of dead of Winter! It was the 'kill them all'. Ultimately rolling three death symbols in 5 turns on the exposure dice WILL kill you. It was still fun though!

[quadz08]

So the Tabletop ep of

Dead of Winter

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

[Nexus]

Come to the UK meet

[diginova]

Come to Seattle!

[Faraday]

Come to Ireland!

[Porochaz]

Come to Skype when they finally make a VASSAL module of it. Also, Id imagine it wouldnt be as good as f2f.

[Faraday]

Yeah, probably not. Surprised there hasn't been one yet, tbh.

[Sudo_Nym]

There's a vassal for Dead of Winter. I'm assuming we mean the civil war game.

[Narninian]

Just played Dead of winter on Tabletop simulator. I see potential here, but I'm not sure I like the secret objectives. We played with 4 people - 3 people had objectives to have the most people (1 traitor, 2 non-traitors) and I had the objective to collect 3 medicine. I was a little unlucky - I rolled 3 exposure die during the course of the game (2 frostbite and 1 bite).; but I spent as many actions as I could searching for medicine, later in the game I was in the hospital and making noise. After we killed the zombies we needed; I added extra to the crisis because I know my place was going to get overrun with zombies and needed to cover for the morale loss as I searched 3 times for medicine and made 4 noise. Even with my farmer's ability early (drawing a lot of cards from grocery store) - and putting 5/6 cards on the bottom of the hospital deck and drawing as many. I wasn't able to get my 3 medicine, and I never used any (I was able to get some from other players when my guys were injured with frostbite)

I understand the concept behind the mutually exclusive objectives from the other players, I'm just not sure I like it to this extreme. One of the three others (that needed the most survivors) had a survivor that was able to scout the deck each turn to add survivors -- this made going after their objectives normally for the other 2 players impossible. I guess the idea is they needed to kill that guy early or get exiled, but it very difficult for new players to see that the need to immediately sabotage one of their own objectives on turn one to fulfill the other one. In my case, I was stalling and searching as much as I could - I had an ability to kill 3 zombies at once (with medicine so I had excuses for searching for medicine all the time) and was suggesting we pile up the zombies to kill in one last ditch effort on the last turn - unfortunately, lighters took out mass amounts of zombies at once and there was nothing I could do about it.

[Thesp]

...and the 4 hour game of Settlers - Cities and Knights, which was fun but I had never played that expansion before, and was not prepared for the length of time...

4 hours is extraordinarily atypical for Settlers in any version, including Cities & Knights (which is my favorite way to play). Yuck!

[Sudo_Nym]

So we did another family game night, and I managed to get a pair of my aunts in the game. The one figured out trading, but not board control, and the other aunt seemed more interested in just collecting resources. Every turn was "Ooh, I have a five right there!"

Taught them Ticket to Ride as well, and they got ~130 point on a first try.

[Narninian]

We had 2 people play Regular catan last night in 20 minutes.

[Reina]

Feel like I should point out that if you just do the base set then doomtown: reloaded isn't actually a big buy- it's $27 on coolstuffinc and amazon right now.

won't be getting it in the mail til probably next week given LOLMORESNOW but I am exciteeeeed

edit: I'm gamma

[Porochaz]

...and the 4 hour game of Settlers - Cities and Knights, which was fun but I had never played that expansion before, and was not prepared for the length of time...

4 hours is extraordinarily atypical for Settlers in any version, including Cities & Knights (which is my favorite way to play). Yuck!

Yeah considering my usual Settlers games last an hour roughly at most, I was a bit meh by the end. Also it was yet another of those games I was close to winning (although being one road off longest road, wouldn't have been the best win in the world) and failed at. Which always hurts after 4 hours.