Board games!

[Werthead]

Picked up Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. I hadn't been interested, as it was a miniatures wargame rather than a board game, but the base set was extremely cheap (much cheaper than the disappointing Fantasy Flight board game) and they did a really good job of making the base set work as a standalone board game if you don't want to spend loads on other miniatures. Will get this to the table next weekend and see how it flies. The miniatures are certainly beyond fantastic.

[RedEyedGhost]

Finally played Twilight Imperium (4th Ed.) today.  We started around 10:30am, finished around 11:00pm, six player game (all new to it).  Most of the game did not feel long at all, but going into the final round (7th of the game) there were two possible winners - Yssaril (myself) and Jal-Nor, so that definitely made the last round drag a bit as some tried last ditch efforts.  Nekro Virus was the perceived leader the majority of the game, but made an ill-advised attack that weakened him quite a bit.  He still had a very strong hold on Mecatol Rex, and I was speaker going into the final round with 7 VPs a known 2 pt objective I could score, so if I could get control I win - which seemed very unlikely.  I had a fleet size of four bring in four level two dreadnaughts, with one fighter and two infantry.  He had eight infantry and one destroyer.  I took out the destroyer, and bombarded three of the eight infantry, but was easily wiped out on the ground.  So nobody else could stop Jol-Nar from scoring a final public objective, Naalu with their 0 initiative tried, but came up short, and Jol-Nar had leadership and scored their final VP to win it. 

I played extremely poorly in round 4 or 5 (can't remember at this point, I think it was 5 though), where I was going after one public objective and the board state changed eliminating that possibility for me.  That poor play compounded into me forgetting to score another option that I was holding in reserve (two techs of two colors) as the state of the board couldn't cause me to lose it, and I just completely forgot about it when it was my turn to score.  If I had done that, I still don't think I would have won, because the final agenda phase would have played out completely differently.

Excellent game, and it seemed like everybody really enjoyed it and will be willing to play it again.

 

I played some other really good games lately too:  Teotihuacan (twice back to back nights two weeks ago), The Estates (three times last week), Founders of Gloomhaven, and Vanuatu.  Founders was good, but I'm not sure I loved it.  Vanuatu was sooooo good with its very aggressive action selection blocking.  And Teotihuacan lived up the hype - I really like the decisions as to when to increase the strength of your individual workers.

[Werthead]

Local games fair recently. Picked up BattleTech (4th Edition), the Cititech expansion and the 1st edition of the Doom boardgame, all under £20 for the lot, which was splendid. I might flip and sell on the Doom boardgame because yikes, it's old-skool and I'm unlikely to get it to the table in the near future.

I did pick up Axis and Allies and Zombies. Once you move beyond the "ha ha, zombies!" thing, it actually does really spice up the game by spontaneously creating threats on the home front (especially a big thing for the USA, which usually never has to worry about defending the homeland). I also liked the fact that it's a standalone game, it can be used to play a regular game of Axis and Allies 1941 (the beginner's fast game) and it has extra cards so you can use the zombie mechanics in Axis and Allies 1942 (the "standard" game). That should also work for Anniversary Edition, up to a limited point.

[Inigima]

I guess I never posted about this here. Huh.

You guys should all check out Spirit Island if you haven't. It came out in 2017 and was funded via Kickstarter. It's one of my favorite games ever; it's considerably more complicated than my usual fare, I don't much have the head for grand strategy, but it's worth it. There's a lot going on but I found all of it relatively intuitive.

Here's the elevator pitch: Spirit Island is an asymmetric co-op game for 1 to 4 players. There's an island and it's being explored by colonists. The twist: you and your fellow players aren't the colonists. You are the native island gods and you are trying to kill all the settlers or terrify them all into fleeing, whichever is easier.

Each player is a different spirit, and they all play differently: different playstyles, different innate powers that use different elements, different rules, etc. Different spirits gain different amounts of energy per turn, can use different numbers of abilities per turn, etc. I have just typed "different" far too many times, but it really is impressive how dissimilar the spirits are and how thematic their powers are. One spirit is super energy hungry and just slams out damage turn after turn. One spirit can make use of the oceans, which no other spirit can do, pulling and pushing settlers into the water to drown them. One spirit is literally incapable of dealing damage, but creates incredible amounts of Fear. The list goes on.

One big problem a lot of co-op games have is quarterbacking, in which one player essentially ends up dictating other players' actions. SI combats that by having too much going on to make it practical to track other players' stuff. That sounded frightening to me since I'm not crazy about very complicated games, but I find my own stuff very manageable. Mostly we play by telling the other players which situations we can take care of this turn and doing our best to cover as many of those problems as we can between us.

I would describe SI as medium-length in board game players' terms but pretty long for someone who plays games the way I do. You should expect this to take 90-120 minutes depending on player count, probably a little longer your first time.

There is a ton of replayability in the base game box. Besides all the different spirits, you can modify the rules for Blight, you can change from generic settlers to ones from specific nations (thus changing the "AI" rules for how the settlers progress), and there are Scenario cards that can even change what your goal is, like Heart of the Island, where your goal becomes to keep the settlers from progressing to the middle of the board. There has been one expansion to date, Branch and Claw, and there were two promotional spirits given as Kickstarter backer rewards. I did not back it, because I didn't know about it, and I am pleased to say that I was able to just buy the Kickstarter promo spirits from the company's web store. There is now a Kickstarter going for a second expansion, Jagged Earth, with 18 days to go at the time of writing. This Kickstarter was fully funded 14 minutes after launching. I believe there are additional promo spirits planned for this Kickstarter, and those will eventually be made available to non-backers as well.

SI is really great and I hope some of you will give it a shot. The theme does a lot of work for me but there is an incredibly solid game in there too.

[polishgenius]

27 minutes ago, Inigima said:

 

You guys should all check out Spirit Island if you haven't. It came out in 2017 and was funded via Kickstarter. It's one of my favorite games ever; it's considerably more complicated than my usual fare, I don't much have the head for grand strategy, but it's worth it. There's a lot going on but I found all of it relatively intuitive.

I'm not a huge game player, not having had much of a chance, but Spirit Island is the no.1 contender at the moment for me to pick up as the next game to add to my and my sister's budding collection - something a bit more involved, that can take up a day, can easily be played with 2 (since we struggle to get more players) but is also for more, and because you can pitch it as 'kind of Settlers of Catan in reverse, sorta', it's easier to pitch new people into playing than some other games. And it's a co-op which is something we don't have yet.

[RedEyedGhost]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell gets a board game.  Disappointed that Childermass and Vinculus aren't playable characters.

ETA: Still spending way too much time thinking about TI4...  I did play Vinhos the weekend before last, and that was fantastic.

[Werthead]

Two of my friends (and friends of the board) are opening a brand new board games cafe in Dublin in 2019. They're running a crowdfunding campaign to stock the place with a full games archive and are looking at different locations and venues now. Might be worth some look and support if you fancy it.

Crowdfunding campaign.

YouTube Video.

Syrio Forel from Game of Thrones voicing his support.

Blog post.

Facebook.

Twitter.

[Werthead]

Played Axis & Allies & Zombies. Wasn't expecting much as it seemed gimmicky, but I was impressed. The zombie mechanic really randomises the board and results in things that would never happen in a regular game of A&A, such as heavy fighting on North and South American soil as undead forces arose to pin down the Americans and stop them reinforcing the Pacific and Europe. Both sides tried tactically disengaging from large zombie hordes when they appeared, sacrificing territory to the undead as buffer zones between the different sides: this was particularly effective in Europe, where zombie hordes overran most of the territory between Germany and Russia, forcing Germany's army to split in two to try to take Moscow). Unfortunately we didn't realise how quickly zombies can gain IPCs (they can't spend them, but they become victory points) and we went from the zombies having 0 IPCs to 25 - the game's winning condition - in about 3 turns. The zombies won, destroying both the Axis and Allies. Really impressed with how it added some freshness to a game that, a few innovations aside, has remained remarkably unchanged for almost 40 years.

Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by the buzz for the Narcos board game. Seems to have picked up a lot of really good reviews. Am tempted to check this out as I enjoy the TV show.

[Werthead]

The Expanse board game: okay Eurogame with a good use of the theme, but it suffered from very poorly-explained rules and some iffy components. We really did not have a good time in the early running but by the end of the game when we understood how it worked (particularly the unorthodox scoring system) we had become moderately engaged with the game. Would be interested to play from scratch now we know what we're doing but yikes, the game needs a reprint with a better manual.

878: Vikings - which is one artwork reworking away from being The Last Kingdom: The Board Game - is a very good game. I liked the team play, 2v2 aspect of it, which feels oddly underused in board games (where it's usually every player for themselves or full team co-op versus a game mechanic like Pandemic). Having to take your team-mate aside and debate strategy is cool and the way you can combine armies into big team forces that both sides can order around is fun. I also appreciated how quickly the game played given it looked fairly daunting when you got it out of the box. My initial thought is that the English team has far too much of an advantage, but we hit a piece of luck when the Viking team got a reinforcement card on their first draw (rather than a second all-new invading army), which meant they had far fewer troops in England than you'd normally have to deal with. Given they had that bad luck they still came within 1 point of winning when the Treaty of Wedmore came into effect and ended the game. Technically it was an English victory but if felt much more like a draw (which it was in reality, so nice job).

Pandemic: Rise of Cthulhu felt a bit groan-inducingly gimmicky, but it ended up being a pretty good merging of the base Pandemic mechanics with a bit of Lovecraft flavour (a different Old One arising for each "outbreak" is amusing, and the effects they have on gameplay moves things away from the regular Pandemic style of play pretty quickly, along with Shoggoths randomly showing up). Probably unnecessary if you already have Pandemic (unless you're a major Lovecraft fan) but quite a bit of fun anyway. Also useful if you have a friend who insists on dragging out Arkham Horror every five minutes, as you can head them off with this which plays in about a fifth of the time.

[RedEyedGhost]

19 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Also useful if you have a friend who insists on dragging out Arkham Horror every five minutes

Sounds like somebody does.  Personally I have zero interest in any Cthulhu themed games, and limited interest in co-op games, but I did enjoy my one play of P:RoC a year and a half, two years ago.  I did like it better than base Pandemic.

I played a couple of new expansions for two of my top ten games recently.  Colonies for Terraforming Mars, it was alright but not even remotely as interesting as Prelude (that one is in the game every single time I play it from here on out).  Which is funny as I like the new maps better than Venus from last year, so they're two for two on the small expansions being better than the large.  Can't wait to see what next year brings which is also supposed to be the end of expansions for the game.  Also played the Great Western Trail expansion and loved it.  Changes the game quite a bit without making it more complex or changing the core feel of it.  Hoping to get it played again tonight.

Sunday will be game two of TI4, and I'm extremely excited.  L1Z1X (me), Hacan, Xxcha, Mentak, Saar, and Yin are who we're playing and I think that will be a very fun mix.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I played a couple of new expansions for two of my top ten games recently.  Colonies for Terraforming Mars, it was alright but not even remotely as interesting as Prelude (that one is in the game every single time I play it from here on out).  Which is funny as I like the new maps better than Venus from last year, so they're two for two on the small expansions being better than the large.  Can't wait to see what next year brings which is also supposed to be the end of expansions for the game.  Also played the Great Western Trail expansion and loved it.  Changes the game quite a bit without making it more complex or changing the core feel of it.  Hoping to get it played again tonight.

Great Western Trail has been on my radar for some time. Heard nothing but good things about it.

[polishgenius]

Between me, my sister and some christmas presents, we picked up a whole bunch of games recently (most of which are going to be for her to make use of- despite living in boardgame capital I still don't know anyone to play with).

The one we've spent real time on is Santorini, which is a delight for those who like strategy abstracts.


Also had a go at Western Legends but only really an exploratory few turns. Hoping to have the chance for a full game before I leave next week.

[RedEyedGhost]

56 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Great Western Trail has been on my radar for some time. Heard nothing but good things about it.

It's my #1 game.  Can't recommend it enough.

 

5 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Between me, my sister and some christmas presents, we picked up a whole bunch of games recently (most of which are going to be for her to make use of- despite living in boardgame capital I still don't know anyone to play with).

They have MeetUp where you are?  Best way to find other gamers if you're an introvert.  If you're an extrovert just hang out around game stores.

[polishgenius]

On 12/29/2018 at 2:34 AM, RedEyedGhost said:

They have MeetUp where you are?  Best way to find other gamers if you're an introvert.  If you're an extrovert just hang out around game stores.

I'm definitely an introvert so I'll have a look and thanks for the tip, but the main problem is that I'm still insecure about my German (I live in Berlin) combined with my epic commute meaning I can never be arsed to do anything after work.


Played a full game of Western Legends to ring in the new year. Was fun. I suspect it is a bit better suited for more people (was just the two of us) and we were still ironing out a few understandings of the scoring and rules, but it's fun and I can see how it'd get very hectic in a fun way once we get traction on it. It's very imposing- comes in a ridiculously huge box and the first-time setup took forever, but really once you get going it's not a particularly complex game, which seems to focus much more on narrative-creating opportunities than deep gameplay, so if that's your bag I recommend it.

Also this is definitely a game that if it takes off is going to see franchised versions. Westworld Legends. Star Wars Legends.

[RedEyedGhost]

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

I'm definitely an introvert so I'll have a look and thanks for the tip, but the main problem is that I'm still insecure about my German (I live in Berlin) combined with my epic commute meaning I can never be arsed to do anything after work.

I'm quite introverted myself, but through meetup I now have cultivated several different groups that I play with on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Going to the english meetup site and searching for Berlin shows me a group that has nearly as members as the one here in Denver, and the first group listed is for people wanting to practice German.  So that might be helpful, too.  The nice thing about the board game meetups is that most of the people attending them are introverts too, so they will be able to recognize your nervousness and be very welcoming.

[Guy Kilmore]

So have any of you tried the Broken Token organizers?  I got one for both Flash Point and Castle Panic and seem to be really nice and sturdy, I'm just curious at their longevity.  

[RedEyedGhost]

2 hours ago, Guy Kilmore said:

So have any of you tried the Broken Token organizers?  I got one for both Flash Point and Castle Panic and seem to be really nice and sturdy, I'm just curious at their longevity.  

I think I have one of theirs, and several from Meeple Realty.  I like them and don't think there will be any longevity issues (the oldest I have is < 2 years).  My main complaint about them is the weight. 

I have a bunch of Folded Space organizers that I'm trying to find time to assemble; I've only done the one for A Feast for Odin so far, but I am very pleased with it.  Their price is much better, quicker assembly, and there's no comparison in the weight category.  You can buy them through their webstore, or they have a kickstarter running right now with slightly better prices (but you'll have to wait until May/June to get them). 

[Guy Kilmore]

2 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I think I have one of theirs, and several from Meeple Realty.  I like them and don't think there will be any longevity issues (the oldest I have is < 2 years).  My main complaint about them is the weight. 

I have a bunch of Folded Space organizers that I'm trying to find time to assemble; I've only done the one for A Feast for Odin so far, but I am very pleased with it.  Their price is much better, quicker assembly, and there's no comparison in the weight category.  You can buy them through their webstore, or they have a kickstarter running right now with slightly better prices (but you'll have to wait until May/June to get them). 

I will have to check them out.  I really want one for eldritch horror and for betrayal as both are a hassle to sort.

[Werthead]

Picked up Battles of Westeros after seeing a copy going at a reasonable price. Quite impressed by it. It takes the Command & Colours system and adds a lot of logic and depth to it. The game design is surprisingly accomplished, which I was not expecting from a non-Borg C&C game, and resulted in some pretty solid battles and scenarios. After spending the day playing it I was impressed enough to pick up a copy of the Baratheon expansion, and I'll probably get the rest next month (for a game that's a couple of years out of print, everything still seems reasonably available).

The only downside is that the game won't use one token when 14 will do, but that's a constant issue with FFG. A bigger problem is that the mechanic of twisting the flags around seems like it will snap the flags pretty quickly and is ridiculously fiddly, so we substituted using the fire tokens instead to shown when a unit's moved or been activated, which was both safer for the models and far, far faster.

The other problem is that FFG stopped making the game, of course, and with the ASoIaF Miniatures Game from CMON its unclear if FFG can ever get it off the ground again. Which is annoying as although CMON's miniatures are clearly superior, the game rules of Battles are much stronger.

[Darth Richard II]

I vaguely recall there was some sort of mine pack that cane with (maybe) better flags for the minis.