Board games!

[A True Kaniggit]

For Christmas last year someone was kind enough to buy me the Risk: First Edition reproduction. Finally got a couple people together to play it a week ago.

Our game had an anticlimactic ending though, when my attack on North America was stopped cold (about turn twelve I think) by 2 armies in Kamchatka. I lost 10 units to their 0. With the extra five from NA (and not having to expend troops retaking the continent) the player was able to take out the other opponent (who was based in Africa), thus receiving their 3 cards. Seeing the writing on the wall, I sued for peace. I kept Australia while they got the rest of the world.

[RedEyedGhost]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Tried out Zombiecide: Black Plague, which started out fun and rapidly got tedious as the game massively weights things in favour of the players so winning is a formality (the Inferno spell is so OP I assumed we were doing it wrong, but nope). Annoying, as the levelling-up mechanic is excellent (far better than Fallout's) and there was a huge amount of potential here. The noise mechanic is also great, but they really don't do enough with it. Fun for a little while but lacks depth and massively overpriced.

Did you just play the base game?  It's easy to ramp of the difficulty by adding more necromancers and abominations.  The Wulfsburg expansion also makes it much more difficult as the wolves and wolfbomination get three moves/attacks per activation.

Have I talked about how awesome Anachrony is in this thread yet?  What an amazing game that is, and it incorporates the theme so well.

I played Arkwright the other night for the first time, that was really good too.  We played the basic game, because the two guys I played with had tried it twice before and got several rules wrong each time.  They wiped the floor with me, because even playing it wrong they had a massive leg up on me.  If you do try it, three different factory types seems to be the sweet spot.  Looking forward to trying it again, especially the full game.

FunAgain had Antiquity on sale for the cheapest I've ever seen it ($82.59 is what I paid after their $13 shipping).  Looking forward to playing it, but definitely not looking forward to punching it.  I have glut of new games that I really need to get to the table first including: Root (the hype for this is getting insane), Founders of Gloomhaven, Vinhos (I'm extremely excited to get this to the table), Brass - Lancashire and Birmingham, and Lowlands (I've only seen one bad review for this and that was from a reviewer that only plays at two).

[Werthead]

14 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Have I talked about how awesome Anachrony is in this thread yet?  What an amazing game that is, and it incorporates the theme so well.

The new board game cafe near me has this, so I may give it a whirl.

I must admit, this establishment has been a godsend. It's allowed me to check out a large number of games without spending obscene amounts of money on them.

[Werthead]

Tried out some new (to me) games at TitanCon and the board game cafe.

Exploding Kittens is a big Kickstarted card game which I'd avoided, but Amazon Prime reduced it to a fiver in a sale so I thought I'd give it a go. It's a really fun, fast-moving game that has some interesting tactical complexity. I enjoyed it enough to buy the expansion (complete with cone of shame for when you mess up a rule).

Horsemen of the Apocalypse, designed by fantasy author Mark Lawrence (with flavour text provided by other fantasy authors, including Robin Hobb and Wesley Chu), was also fun, but seemed a bit let down by production quality: the game is about three times as expensive as Exploding Kittens but the card quality is significantly worse.

BattleLore was a fun miniatures game similar to Memoir 44 but a lot more involved. That means it loses Memoir's strength (getting through a battle in ~40 minutes rather than 2 hours) and it has, of course, Fantasy Flight's love of needlessly vast numbers of token and faff, but the miniatures are spectacular and the modular setup allowing for a vast number of scenarios without having to constantly buy or download scenarios is very clever. It also feels like a very chunky and impressive amount of game in a single box for a reasonable price, which is excellent but I gather is also what killed the game (the base game sold well but the expansions didn't do great because they simply weren't really needed).

[Darth Richard II]

Battlelore and Memoir 44 are based on that one system of Richard Borg's that's been used in like a million other games. There was a Got themed one, and there's Battle Cry, and then Command and Colors(which I think is what the system is called) and tons of others. Or maybe it's called the Battlelore system now. If you like it thought there tons of others you can check out and hey I should just link it hold on while i google

 

https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Command_and_Colors_system#

[HokieStone]

38 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Battlelore and Memoir 44 are based on that one system of Richard Borg's that's been used in like a million other games. There was a Got themed one, and there's Battle Cry, and then Command and Colors(which I think is what the system is called) and tons of others. Or maybe it's called the Battlelore system now. If you like it thought there tons of others you can check out and hey I should just link it hold on while i google

 

https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Command_and_Colors_system#

Yep, the Command and Colors system.  I'm sure Richard Borg has made a mint off it.  Interesting thing, is that most of the games are from different publishers.  The GOT game was pretty different from the rest - I have the base game and most of the expansions, but I've never really gotten it to the table except once or twice.  I'm in the midst of trying to be ruthless about a game purge, and that one has a target on it.

 

Haven't posted in here in a while - glad I saw this thread pop to the front page tonight.  Some random thoughts on some games from the last few months:

- The Isle of Skye expansion really transforms that game from a light-medium weight game to a really thinky pretty heavy game.  I like it, but I can't recall another expansion that so dramatically changed the game. 

- I was a bit disappointed in the 2nd "Century" game - "Eastern Wonders".  It's basically the same game as "Spice Road", but adds a pick up and deliver mechanic.  It doesn't add a lot in terms of complexity, but it does add a lot in set up and tear down, so I'd just as soon play Spice Road.  I've not played the combined game yet.

- My group keeps trudging our way through our "Seafall" campaign.  The four of us can only seem to get together once every 3 months or so, so it's slow going.  We're 9 or 10 games in.  It's not a very good game, but we're trying to stick it our for the story.  I am astonished that they let it get published in it's current form.  I think they let word slip, and the buzz got so high, that they felt they had to release it.  The rules are just very unclear, particularly as you start unlocking new things.  I've never referred to BGG FAQ pages so much in my life.

- I've been playing "Gloomhaven" with my family.  For all the praise it gets, it falls flat for me.  It's simply a very long, "legacy" style dungeon crawl.  If it was up to me, I would sell my copy.  But my 14 year old loves it.  I guess there's worse problems to have.  But I think part of the problem is that we're not playing very strategically.  He just wants to run in an kill, and my wife - a moderate game at best - isn't really that into it either. 

- One of the more exciting pieces of news recently was the announcement of "Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig" by Stonemeier Games.  It's an unweildy title, but I like both Between Two Cities and Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so I'm looking forward to the mashup of the two.  I also know the two designers - Ben Rosset and Matthew O'Malley personally, so I'm happy for them - but they can keep a secret well...I had no idea they were working on this.

- In personal news, I've had a 2nd game signed to be published.  It's called "Magnificent Marvels", and I co-designed it with my friend Paul Owen (he did the Dice Tower News podcast up until about 6 months ago).  The publisher is "Hexagram 63 Games Studio".  They're a new publisher - founded by the guys from the "Cardboard Jungle" podcast.  Their first game is going to be one called "Superluminal" by Jeff Fraser.  I don't know much about that one - but I hope they iron out their first publisher mistakes before getting to our game :).  We still have some development to do on our game - I expect it will hit Kickstarter at some point next year, for a 2020 release.  I'm looking forward to working with these guys, and it will be interesting to see how different it is than the process I went through with Rio Grande for "Santa's Workshop".  Going through a Kickstarter campaign will be interesting, I'm sure. 

[Darth Richard II]

Yeah I need to do a game purge myself.

Never understood the whole Legacy appeal, but these days I just look at the BGG top 20 or so and think about what it was say in 2003 and just get confused.

[DaveSumm]

I’m sure everyone who wants to know already does, but it seems weird this hasn’t been discussed on this forum:

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2018/8/3/mother-of-dragons/

Very strange to wait so long for an expansion, but it looks exciting. I barely play the game anymore but the vassal system sounds like it’ll fix the awful player count problem.

[Werthead]

10 hours ago, HokieStone said:

Yep, the Command and Colors system.  I'm sure Richard Borg has made a mint off it.  Interesting thing, is that most of the games are from different publishers.  The GOT game was pretty different from the rest - I have the base game and most of the expansions, but I've never really gotten it to the table except once or twice.  I'm in the midst of trying to be ruthless about a game purge, and that one has a target on it.

I'd certainly be interested in acquiring the GoT game and the expansions - you can't get them new any more for a reasonable price (Amazon's best deal for it is four times the price of Memoir 44) - but I suspect shipping costs would be impractical. Might be worth a look though.

Yeah, I'm aware of the Command & Colors system. I was looking at the Kickstarter for the Red Alert space warfare version (which is cool, but not massively different from M44 and BattleLore). It's a very good system, but I'm a little wary of getting too much into it because I don't really want 5 or 6 games with slightly different rules. The GoT one (Battles of Westeros) I'd be into for the theme though, and it'd much more likely to make it to the table than the Game of Thrones FFG board game (which we've tried five or six times, but the rules seem unnecessarily complex).

One thing that's disappointing is that both Battles of Westeros and BattleLore itself have been killed off in favour of more generic miniatures games (A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures and Runewars Miniatures Game). I had a good look at the box for ASoIaF Miniatures yesterday and although it looked awesome for the amount of miniatures and content (£95 is steep, but there's over 100 miniatures and as they're designed by Dark Sword, they're amazing), the game itself seemed a bit generic in comparison to the scenario-based approach of the C&C system games.

[Slurktan]

12 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I’m sure everyone who wants to know already does, but it seems weird this hasn’t been discussed on this forum:

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2018/8/3/mother-of-dragons/

Very strange to wait so long for an expansion, but it looks exciting. I barely play the game anymore but the vassal system sounds like it’ll fix the awful player count problem.

I also think it's weird that they are doing this now and it's not even an expansion that would deal with show stuff.  Just weird.  Very welcome though as currently GOT is basically unplayable with less than 6.

[RedEyedGhost]

I spent the entire weekend at B-Con here in Denver.  I'm pretty well wiped at this point, and I'm very happy that I have the day off work for Labor Day tomorrow.  Highlight of the weekend was playing Brass: Birmingham for the third time in the past two weeks.  I also played Brass: Lancashire twice the week before that (wanted to experience the "original" before moving on to the sequel).  They are both simply fantastic, and are rocketing to the top of my favorite games list.  Also played Terraforming Mars with the new Prelude expansion.  That was wonderful, as it speeds up the game quite significantly.  We were done on generation seven.

I did also get my first win in Great Western Trail, one of, if not my very favorite game.  Got in my 4th play of Orleans, which is just so much better than Altiplano (with the new BGG character upgrade tokens, they are just lovely).  

Last weekend I also got to play Madeira which I've really been wanting to try, and it easily exceeded my very lofty expectations for it.  When the second edition hits kickstarter it will be an insta-back.  And I was able to get in another play of The Gallerist; this one's definitely a top five game for me right now and I can't see that changing any time soon.

 

On 9/1/2018 at 6:49 PM, Werthead said:

Exploding Kittens is a big Kickstarted card game which I'd avoided, but Amazon Prime reduced it to a fiver in a sale so I thought I'd give it a go. It's a really fun, fast-moving game that has some interesting tactical complexity. I enjoyed it enough to buy the expansion (complete with cone of shame for when you mess up a rule).

I mean, I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I also now feel that I can never trust your opinion about anything ever again.

 

On 9/1/2018 at 8:46 PM, HokieStone said:

- The Isle of Skye expansion really transforms that game from a light-medium weight game to a really thinky pretty heavy game.  I like it, but I can't recall another expansion that so dramatically changed the game. 

Which expansion, Journeyman?  Or do you have an advanced copy of the new Druids?  I played the base game a couple of months back and thought it was quite fun little game.

On 9/1/2018 at 8:46 PM, HokieStone said:

- I was a bit disappointed in the 2nd "Century" game - "Eastern Wonders".  It's basically the same game as "Spice Road", but adds a pick up and deliver mechanic.  It doesn't add a lot in terms of complexity, but it does add a lot in set up and tear down, so I'd just as soon play Spice Road.  I've not played the combined game yet.

I'll probably get that played the next time my parents come to visit.  I'm most looking forward to the combined game, and probably wouldn't have kept Spice Road if it weren't for Eastern Wonders and A New World being in the pipeline.  I would much rather play Splendor or Majesty for the Realm in that same vein of games that my mom prefers.

On 9/1/2018 at 8:46 PM, HokieStone said:

- One of the more exciting pieces of news recently was the announcement of "Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig" by Stonemeier Games.  It's an unweildy title, but I like both Between Two Cities and Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so I'm looking forward to the mashup of the two.  I also know the two designers - Ben Rosset and Matthew O'Malley personally, so I'm happy for them - but they can keep a secret well...I had no idea they were working on this.

Stonemaier Games seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their upcoming games underwraps.   That will definitely be a play before I buy it one for me.  I like Between Two Cities, but haven't had any interest in trying Mad King Ludwig.  The combo looks kind of annoying in its graphic design for a game that with have such a large footprint in an up to seven player game.

I did play Euphoria at the con this weekend and like it.  It was good, but I don't think I liked it enough to buy it.  I'm trying to only buy games that I love (or light games to play with family).

On 9/1/2018 at 8:46 PM, HokieStone said:

- In personal news, I've had a 2nd game signed to be published.

Congrats, Keith!  Let us know when it hits kickstarter.

[HokieStone]

14 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Which expansion, Journeyman?  Or do you have an advanced copy of the new Druids?  I played the base game a couple of months back and thought it was quite fun little game.

Yep - Journeyman - I didn't even know there was another expansion called "Druids" coming out, lol.

 

14 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Stonemaier Games seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their upcoming games underwraps.   That will definitely be a play before I buy it one for me.  I like Between Two Cities, but haven't had any interest in trying Mad King Ludwig.  The combo looks kind of annoying in its graphic design for a game that with have such a large footprint in an up to seven player game.

You bring up a good point about the footprint.  B2C was limited to it's 4x4 grid.  This one is much more flexible in that regards...so we'll have to see how that works out.

[Darth Richard II]

I think Runewar miniatures was a response to Games Workshop fucking FFG over by pulling all their licenses.

There's been weird stuff going on ever since Asmode bought FFG, too.

[Werthead]

16 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I think Runewar miniatures was a response to Games Workshop fucking FFG over by pulling all their licenses.

There's been weird stuff going on ever since Asmode bought FFG, too.

Games Workshop would argue that FFG fucked them over by getting the Star Wars licence and immediately moving their primary focus over to Star Wars games at the expense of the GW games, but that's highly debatable. It does mean we're not going to get any Forbidden Stars expansions, which is a shame.

Runewar Miniatures is definitely replacing BattleLore, which is annoying as the miniatures game is considerably less interesting as a game (it's a bit odd they're using a derivation of the X-Wing rules for it).

[Guy Kilmore]

29 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Games Workshop would argue that FFG fucked them over by getting the Star Wars licence and immediately moving their primary focus over to Star Wars games at the expense of the GW games, but that's highly debatable. It does mean we're not going to get any Forbidden Stars expansions, which is a shame.

Runewar Miniatures is definitely replacing BattleLore, which is annoying as the miniatures game is considerably less interesting as a game (it's a bit odd they're using a derivation of the X-Wing rules for it).

That would be an interesting argument to make, if I remember right, Games Workshop pulled their stuff out before they went into the Star Wars Miniatures and from talking to employees there, them developing the line in Star Wars minis was, in some ways, a response to Games Workshop pulling out.  

Anyways, I know I have said this, but if you ever find yourself in Minnesota, Fantasy Flight Games has their own Cafe/Bar/Game Center place where you can sit and play and all that fun jazz.  It is really nice and spacious.  

[Darth Richard II]

I remember the Star Wars LCG as huuuge for a while, along with X-Wing and Armada. Don't remember when the 40k LCG launched...I thought ti was after the Star Wars one but man I can't keep track. It's crazy.

[HokieStone]

Made it out to Washingcon this year - first time I've been able to do that.  Did some playtesting of my game, and playtested some other designers - and got pulled in to be a substitute speaker on a game designers panel, so that was fun!  But I also got to play a few new (to me) games, as follows:

- "Gizmos" - this is a fun new release, that is centered around this mechanism that drops marbles out of a slot.  Think "Potion Explosion", but just one row of marbles.  You use those build "gizmos", which then start creating an engine for you, where the gizmos will start triggering, which could trigger other gizmos, etc.  I came in last, but it was a fun game.

- "Clank" - this one has been out a while, but I hadn't played it - partially because I don't really like deck builders.  I had fun with this one though...while I'm not going to rush out and buy it, I'd play it again.  I didn't have to thin out my deck to do well - and that's one of the reasons I don't like deck builders.

- "Istanbul Dice" - I'm a big fan of the regular board game "Istanbul".  The dice version is lighter, but retains some of the feel of the original, and kind of like "Gizmos", above, is kind of centered on building a engine with the tiles you can collect, all in the name of being the 1st to collect 6 rubies.  I liked it...but not sure I loved it.

[HokieStone]

New edition of Stone Age coming out...with double sided components, one side being winter art.  And a few mini-expansions inside as well.

https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/81189/new-game-round-stone-age-and-camel-get-refreshed-a

 

[Guy Kilmore]

1 hour ago, HokieStone said:

New edition of Stone Age coming out...with double sided components, one side being winter art.  And a few mini-expansions inside as well.

https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/81189/new-game-round-stone-age-and-camel-get-refreshed-a

 

I really like that game, I never get to play it enough.

[RedEyedGhost]

3 hours ago, HokieStone said:

New edition of Stone Age coming out...with double sided components, one side being winter art.  And a few mini-expansions inside as well.

https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/81189/new-game-round-stone-age-and-camel-get-refreshed-a

I really like the look of the new stuff, but the price is way too high.  If they offer the new stuff on its own I will get it, but I'm not going to rebuy the entire game just to get the minimal additions.  No matter how much I do like the idea of making the game more difficult.