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Werthead

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4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Wait, it's still being made? Or was this from eBay? There was a complete set going a few weeks ago, but it ended up selling for about three times my budget.

I bought a used Hero Quest set in very good condition on eBay.  Still pretty expensive, but it was a fun memory from my childhood that I wanted to share with my son.  Some sets in good condition arrive on the site in time for Christmas each year, but there's plenty of interest to keep prices high.   It's up to you if you want to compromise on sets with some minor damage or missing pieces.  I may go back for one of the expansion packs, or it may be better to just explore new games.

I remember playing Escape From Colditz too as a kid, but there was less strategy nuance to that game.  Lots of fun for a kid who read WW2 comic books (are they graphic novels now?), but not interesting enough to search out an old copy.

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23 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I'm taking notes here for ideas.  I bought Hero Quest for my son a year ago (then 9) and then added Catan this past Christmas.  We have some other simpler board games, but these are the only two in the right direction.  We like chess, scrabble, etc too, but the interactive strategy games can be the most fun.

There's no question of me sacrificing family time to play board games with strangers so I have to nurture my own board game crew at home.  Only problem is that I'm much better at strategy than my wife and son, so I have to find ways to level the field until Invan coach them along. 

I don't know if he's ready yet for Risk but he did enjoy his first and only (so far) game of Civ2 last summer.  There's potential there.  

I would give Small World a Look over.  Simpler rules, but lots of strategy involved and the game always kind of changes.  It also has a fairly short play time of usually around an hour, so easier to get a game in.

https://www.amazon.com/Days-of-Wonder-DOW-7901/dp/B0024H7OF6

Also, Will Wheaton does a youtube show called Table Top where they demo games, your son might appreciate watching that and seeing games he might enjoy.

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Also a board games person. Pandemic really is very good but it's very vulnerable to quarterbacking, where one person ends up basically making all the decisions.

Machi Koro is one of our best small-group successes. Fun, cute, easy to learn, not too long at 30 minutes or less per round.

We've had party success with Codenames and The Resistance.

2P we like Patchwork a lot. Hive and Jaipur are good too but I don't know if the strategy is as intuitive. I do absolutely love the solid feel and clinking together of Hive's bakelite pieces. You wouldn't think it would make that big a difference, but it does. Quality components really elevate a game.

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2 minutes ago, Guy Kilmore said:

It's the one where you are taking a Pilgrimage in Eido Japan.

 

Aaaaaand I miss with both guesses.  Hangover...

 

Takenoko is the panda game, where you're a gardener and need to grow bamboo to make the royal pandas happy.

The other is Lanterns: The Harvest Festival.  Both are quite fun, though I didn't purchase either after giving them a trial.

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We played our first game of Pandemic last night. We won, but only just. We kept forgetting to use our city cards to directly fly to those cities rather than holding onto them to cure viruses.

We were also rubbish at cleaning up the viruses once we cured them, so we had to go for a victory by curing all four viruses. We just about scraped it.

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On 4/17/2017 at 1:49 AM, Werthead said:

We played our first game of Pandemic last night. We won, but only just. We kept forgetting to use our city cards to directly fly to those cities rather than holding onto them to cure viruses.

We were also rubbish at cleaning up the viruses once we cured them, so we had to go for a victory by curing all four viruses. We just about scraped it.

Wow - you won your first go at it?  I think it took us two or three chances to really get the hang of that game.  Utilizing the special abilities of each character as often as possible seems to be the key - even the seemingly weaker ones need to be maximally applied.

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On 16/04/2017 at 7:49 PM, Werthead said:

We were also rubbish at cleaning up the viruses once we cured them, so we had to go for a victory by curing all four viruses. We just about scraped it.

Is there another victory condition in regular Pandemic? I thought you always had to cure all four regardless of eradications?

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On 4/8/2017 at 9:49 PM, Werthead said:

Also worth mentioning The Game Pit, a UK board gaming podcast run by several Bwbers :D

 

I'm guest starring on the most recent episode in which we cover Gloomhaven, Empires of the Void and Octodice. There are 82 episodes so I hope you'll give 'em a listen.

huge boardgame enthusiasts in this house. Ser Sean and I have a lot of games and Ser Sean runs (along with Ser Barry) The Game Pit mentioned above.

We're a mixed household, Seany likes your standard Ameritrash games like Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft. Any kind of dungeon crawler/co-op type extravaganza.  Gloomhaven is the newest one to make it to the table. I'm not normally a huge fan of these games but I liked this. There's a interesting mechanic whereby not only do you have hit points but your action cards are also linked to your health and exhaustion levels. I don't believe it's an actual legacy game - you can easily reset. This is very much unlike Pandemic Legacy where the nomenclature of Season 1 and Season 2 is right on the money.

Wert: I would say that if you enjoy Arkham Horror up don't like the upkeep/set up you should try something like Elder Sign or the new edition of Mansions of Madness (there's a app with it that does all of the upkeep for you). If co-ops are also your thing you should give T.I.M.E Stories a go - it's truly a co-op without having an alpha player problem that so many co-ops do.

I'm more into Euro type games - favourites are Lords of Waterdeep, Aquasphere, Great Western Trails. Oh, and how could I forget, Terraforming Mars - the sleeper hit from last year's Essen. We just about managed to get our hands on a copy - they are like gold dust right now. Ser Barry saw a copy in Australia for $120.  

We also play a lot of boardgames with our son - he's just under five and there are some fantastic games for his age group: Spinderella, My First Carcassone, My First Stone Age, TTR: First Journey.

I could go on and on and on. We are going away to the London on Board gaming weekend on 28th in Eastborne. It happens twice a year and we go every time. Highlight of the calendar year with Essen a close second.

We do love us some boardgames (we bought a house with a garage so that we could hold all of our games collection :) )

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oh shit, I forgot we just backed Brass: Birmingham on Kickstarter yesterday - so excited.

And two more boarders are coming to spend the weekend and play games this weekend.  And we will definitely be playing Zombiecide.

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2 hours ago, Chaldanya said:

oh shit, I forgot we just backed Brass: Birmingham on Kickstarter yesterday - so excited.

And two more boarders are coming to spend the weekend and play games this weekend.  And we will definitely be playing Zombiecide.

I saw that on KS yesterday, so I watched SU&SD's review of the original Brass... Quinns definitely talked me out of backing it.

Not looking forward to the Zombicide Black Plague sequel hitting KS in a month and a half...  Those CMON KS's are too damn expensive, but at least most of their games don't really interest me.

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43 minutes ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I saw that on KS yesterday, so I watched SU&SD's review of the original Brass... Quinns definitely talked me out of backing it.

Not looking forward to the Zombicide Black Plague sequel hitting KS in a month and a half...  Those CMON KS's are too damn expensive, but at least most of their games don't really interest me.

I think the only CMON game I have is Blood Rage, which I bought at retail cause I missed the Kickstarter. I love that game and I've always regretted missing out on the extras that the backers got, so I'm sorely tempted to do the late pledge for Rising Sun. 

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Oh, I want to try Lords of Waterdeep as well. I've heard only good things about it.

We played Descent for the first time this week and lost both halves of a scenario, the first time because the guy we were escorting got killed and the second because the guy we'd been escorting previously and was killed came back to life as a possessed undead and wiped out half the party whilst a bad guy flew past us to the stairs with the magical thingamgig we were supposed to be recovering.

After playing the game I asked a question that I don't think went down very well: "Why the hell would you play this game rather than D&D?" I get the impression you're not supposed to ask that in Descent circles.

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I think the only CMON game I have is Blood Rage, which I bought at retail cause I missed the Kickstarter. I love that game and I've always regretted missing out on the extras that the backers got, so I'm sorely tempted to do the late pledge for Rising Sun. 

I'm not a fan of this Kickstarter approach. It's caused quite a lot of division in the Conan fanbase and the new Terminator game is going down the same road: people who back the game early and with more money get shitloads more stuff and people who buy the game after release can't get any of it. Ever. Which is more than slightly annoying if you are poor or simply never hear of the game during the Kickstarter phase and pick it up three years later.

That's even more annoying for Conan which relies on fans making new scenarios, and of course the hardcore fans who make the most interesting scenarios make them involving the Kickstarter-only figures and items which everyone else who bought the game after release can't use. It seems both elitist and rather unfair.

At least with video games the extra stuff is irrelevant or you can buy it as DLC after launch instead. Preventing people from getting content seems an odd move.

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15 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Is there another victory condition in regular Pandemic? I thought you always had to cure all four regardless of eradications?

There is not. I think he just meant curing-only, vs. actually eradicating them.

I played my first game of Yinsh today. Neat game.

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16 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I saw that on KS yesterday, so I watched SU&SD's review of the original Brass... Quinns definitely talked me out of backing it.

Not looking forward to the Zombicide Black Plague sequel hitting KS in a month and a half...  Those CMON KS's are too damn expensive, but at least most of their games don't really interest me.

I was always going to get it being from Birmingham :)

N

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Anyone else see this on Kickstarter? A card/board game called Maximum Apocalypse. I'm not as well-versed in the world of board games as the rest of you but it looks like it could be fun. Thinking about backing it maybe.

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On 4/16/2017 at 1:49 PM, Werthead said:

We played our first game of Pandemic last night. We won, but only just. We kept forgetting to use our city cards to directly fly to those cities rather than holding onto them to cure viruses.

We were also rubbish at cleaning up the viruses once we cured them, so we had to go for a victory by curing all four viruses. We just about scraped it.

As you up the Pandemic cards the game gets tougher and trying to clean up cured viruses can sometimes be a mismanagement of time because it doesn't actually get you toward the win condition.

It sounds like you had a pretty decent game, we either usually just win or just lose.

ETA:  Lords of Waterdeep is pretty fun

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