Board Games

I look forward to trying out Haggis when I get a moment.

Where card games are concerned, I had some games of Court of the Medici and Botswana yesterday. CotM may take more plays to fully grokk (now my favorite word, apparently), but Botswana was brain-burning Knizia goodness.

Court of the Medici surprised me as I wasn't expecting much and the design was deeper than expected. I'd play it a lot more if Haggis hadn't been invented.

And your new favorite word is spelled grok. :)

Not so much my favorite, then. ;)

grokk is like grok++, for when you really really get something.

Yeah, before I try to teach it to anyone I want to get some colored plastic tokens to represent the goods because I think it will just make that whole aspect of the game more intuitive. It's kind of weird they went that route since they've got victory point tokens, so it's already not a pure card game.

So Baker, had my first game of Omen today, and I'm a bit surprised. Is the game supposed to be all but over if the other player gets lucky and draws the Hades card? Reldan was able to basically reverse every bit of progress I'd made and take two cities as well as completely wiping my hand and gold by moving cards back and forth across the stacks while fountaining cheap cards from the discard decks. We moved on to Summoner Wars in short order.

So, is there no effective limit on what Hades can do? What does a game typically end on in terms of decisive moves? We followed your instructions closely but couldn't find a way to rule out complete domination from that point on. Is it the drafting variant you like? If so, what are some suggestions for getting that to work as a basic set? Are discard decks always communal in the non-draft base game?

I don't understand how he got that OP with Hades. Maybe it's not clear in my revised rules, but when a reward is played for an effect you only get to use that effect once. And he still has to pay for all the soldiers he places, do I don't get how he was able to place so many. What happened, exactly?

EDIT: Yes, there is only one discard pile in the base game. I've never played any of the variants.

Couple of days of board gaming for me.

On Friday Quacks and I went over to a friend's place for what she called a Sharing Air Conditioning party. She was excited to play six player Catan, but fortunately seven people showed and so we never bothered even trying with Catan. Instead we started with ultrafiller party game Anomia, which is all about paying attention to what everyone else has out and then screaming a lot. It helps to get drunk, so we got to work on that.

After we played two rounds of Anomia we decided to play the game I'd brought, Dixit. It combined the cards from Dixit Odyssey and Dixit Journeys. If you haven't looked yet, the cards in Dixit Journeys are by a new artist, but I really, really like them. They've got a smoother edge than the older cards, but they're just as imaginative and crazy. Everything else about Dixit Journeys is pretty inferior, though. Buy the set for the cards and toss everything else, since it's only for up to six people and has a somewhat simplified approach to voting. It's clear that it's the package meant to be sold at Target, which is where one can go to get it if one so wishes! This was the first time I'd ever explained the game to people and despite the fact that I fucked up the scoring and managed to sit on my box, tearing the edge, things went well. People really loved the cards and would agonize over what they would say on their turn. The only downside was that the name Dixit is ripe for jokes to a certain mindset.

When Dixit was done we considered what to play next for a while (with someone repeatedly suggesting Risk despite the fact that we had seven people and also no one had Risk) before deciding to play Taboo. Some games are just good party games and I'd forgotten how fun Taboo could be with the right people. What made it a little funnier was that it was a few years old, so when 'mobile phone' came up as a word it took forever for people to say it because they kept shouting 'cell phone, cellular phone, iphone, what the fuck do you want?!' Though I'd say immediate guess of the evening went to my friend Shar, who got 'beeper' and said 'drug dealers in the 90s had these'. As a goof every time someone started on my team I'd immediately shout 'PORCUPINE!'. Until the last card in the evening. When the guy looked at it, looked flummoxed and sputtered 'it's an animal that... that pokes other animals!' and I sat there for a second and said 'Porcupine?' Goddammit.

Tonight I went out for my biweekly reddit board game meetup. We were supposed to meet at local RPG/gaming/scifi shop, Pandemonium, but the place was living up to its name. And I don't mean 'pandemonium' as a synonym for 'chaotic', but as a capital of Hell, reeking with brimstone and flame and ruled over by gluttonous demons who feed on misery, pain and cheeto-farts. Wizards was there to run some events for the latest Magic release. The Pandemonium people had told us we'd be fine to come in at 6 since the tournament started at 3, but neglected to mention that a second tournament would start at 7. Also they told the people at meetup.com that they could come, too. Now, I don't want to be all us vs them, but the reddit people are actually a pretty normal looking group. God, those meetup.com people look like they just rolled in off of the short bus. When they realized that we were there at the same time they started ramming their padded helmets into one another while shitting their pants and shrieking to the manager that 'THETHE PEOPLE CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO TAKE OUR TABLETH!' So finally we just said fuckit and went to the bar next door. Given the cramped quarters, people mostly stuck with the same group all night. Which worked out well for me!

With a group of five we started with a quick game of Guillotine. I'm getting to a point where I can play Guillotine and not particularly care about winning or losing because it's such a nothing game. Still, two people had never played it before so they were all into watching people screw one another over and cracking up at the term 'piss boy'. After Guillotine we played a fast (and I mean fast) game of FlowerFall, which I'd brought. Everyone liked it, but by that point we were ready to move onto something heavier. And that we did!

Ora et Labora. I'd never played it before. My only exposure to an Uwe Rosenberg design, other than having DLed Le Havre but not play it, had been some pretty unpleasant games of Bohnanza years ago. Still, I've seen Agricola and Le Havre played, so I knew to expect lots of bits, lots of rules, lots of tough decisions and lots of fun scoring. We played the short game, which (from what I was told by the guy that owned the game) is a hell of a lot nicer to all players than the full game. Lots of resources to go around, making up for the compressed schedule during which you had to make your machine. Unfortunately I wasn't great at picking up on all the little details about how to build a workable machine from the beginning, so I stupidly wasted resources on a brewery with no easy way to get much in the way of malt. Whenever I wanted beer, I had to pay someone for malt. And then I misunderstood how many coins I'd get from beer, so in the end it wasn't worth as much as I thought it'd be. I frequently made bad calls which I realized a half turn later I shouldn't have (such as wasting a 5 gp token when I could have gone with something else) and I wasn't great at figuring out the importance of placing your settlements and buildings. That said, I still ended the game in second place and ultimately got the most points out of straight up settlements. I even beat out one of the guys who'd managed to build a Wonder.

It was a lot of fun and I'd love to play it again. I hope someone picks up the license (Codito? Playdek?) for iOS soon, cos I'd love to have a chance to blast through a few dozen games to figure out the best ways to approach things.

After that we played Space Alert, which I'd heard a lot about but never played before. We played a quick training mission before one of the guys pulled out his iPhone, loaded up an app which did all of the computer work for you and set it down. Then we went straight deep end and played through the full game. It was every bit as nerve fraying as I'd heard, but miraculously no one made any terrible mistakes (at one point I went up stairs when I didn't need to, but couldn't fix it as we'd moved on to the next stage, so I just had to walk back down) and we ended up destroying all external and internal threats. I imagine we didn't play the hardest mode, cos I can imagine them just stacking on the threats and having more 'no talk' moments. Still, when we pulled it off there was a moment of silence for 'whew' and then a cheer. Though not a loud cheer, cos we were in a bar and the Sox were losing.

To finish off the evening we played a silly game called Burrows that I'd never heard of before. It was a bit like Pipe Dream, in that you're making the longest tunnels you can, though in this case you're trying to match up vegetable colors in your tunnels so you can claim gophers. Then at various points in the game it scores and whoever is missing a gopher of whatever color comes up (there's one less gopher of each color than players) will then score negative points. In the end the person with the fewest negative points wins. Despite not really knowing what I was doing, I won this game handily.

That done, I went home. Board game satisfied. For now!

The wife is away at training this week, so once I get a few chores out of the way I may try to crack Dungeon Twister's single player. Or try a solo game of Gears of War.

I'm not sure what I'm explaining wrong, so I'll let him do it. But AFAICT if the only cap is gold, and you have a reasonable amount on hand, then with the cheap cards that allow you to pull more cards or get gold for shifting from one position to another or hoplite my cards away and cheaply employ my placed oracles towards the next turn and so on, it seems like it's a matter of who gets the reward first if there's a reasonably dense discard deck. To be clear this was probably about 2 feats in apiece, and we'd each probably won 1-2 battles. It just seems like the gap between the other rewards and that one is pretty substantial.

Is the answer that you're supposed to periodically drain the discard pile with that one card that lets you shuffle it all back in? Maybe it was just a perfect storm, but I wanted to see if perhaps we were doing it wrong by letting it continue to draw until gold or choice capped it.

The Hades effect is that for the remainder of the Surge you can play soldiers from the discard deck as though it were your hand. It doesn't have a usage limit beyond only lasting the one turn and still needing gold to fuel it, but that wasn't hard because I took 4 coins from the offering the previous turn and took 4 more for the Wealth phase, and then focused on reusing cards that effectively gave me money back. I think I ended up playing about 7 cards and left LK with pretty much no hand, coins, or board position, which was pretty much a GG situation.

The only thing that I can liken it to was going off with a Yawgmoth's Will deck, if that rings any bells if you ever were a Magic player.

Also, I think that gave you two more city victories, when all was said and done.

Ha, same thing happened to me. I picked up the six player expansion on Saturday, because we've had more than four players at each of our last couple game nights. But then there were seven people there so we just ended up playing 7 Wonders anyway.

Thanks to this thread, I played a couple games of Race for the Galaxy on the PC today. I'm not sure whether I like it or not. On the one hand, I enjoy the gameplay, but the game always seems to end really abruptly to me. I guess that's why they put "race" in the name, but it still just feels like I'm starting to build an awesome space empire and then the game is over and I've lost because I didn't get enough VP tokens down before somebody hit 12 cards. I think I want the game to be more like a 4X game, where it's at most 3 Xs.

That does sound like a perfect storm. We rarely accumulate that much gold to use on our turns, and there's never any guarantee there will be enough (or decent enough) soldiers in the discard pile to make a huge combo like that possible.

I have seen plenty of other huge combos, though. The game is chaotic and prone to wild swings like that, but I don't really mind because it plays so quickly. Summoner Wars is similar despite come-from-behind event cards that can mitigate bad luck a bit. There's no good way to include a mechanism like that in Omen.

I think of Omen somewhat like Gin Rummy, where most of the time you're playing competitively but once in a while someone gets what my dad calls an "idiot hand" and gins so fast there's nothing you can do but take your lumps.

It's funny how often game designers underestimate the potential power of card recycling abilities, especially if any of the recycled cards have effects that trigger when played.

If that bothers you in RftG, don't ever play Eminent Domain.

But do play Core Worlds. :)

I am uber-jealous of Bahimiron's ability to play so many games during a single meetup.

Our QT3 meetup saw just 4 people last week, and we got our first taste of Merchants & Marauders. I think we probably didn't play it very effectively - we all avoided fighting each other as the downsides seemed massive and I don't think we quite grasped the combat concept too well. Still a game I'd love to play again though.

As a group we've decided we'd love to see a drug trade boardgame based on The Wire. Map of Baltimore, major characters, corner boys, bribery, police NPCs. Go. Kickstarter anyone? :p

How often do you play with more than 2 players? I imagine that would do much to spread the pain (in a good way).

Don't be too jealous. Best case scenario this meetup happens once every other week. Worst case scenario I miss it several weeks in a row due to other plans. And I have no other friends who are interested in board gaming, so my copies of Cosmic Encounter and King of Tokyo sit unloved.

I've never played it with more than 2.

My experience with card games that feature a diverse range of cheap, powerful effects that allow for massive swings in a single turn is that they suffer with more than 2 players unless the game has a lot of mitigating features designed into it to limit targetting and ganging up. Winning the game is based on a race condition and the card effects are such that it's entirely possible to get shut down past the point of recovery, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to defend yourself when it's not your turn. This taken together doesn't really encourage spreading pain around as much as it encourages exploiting the weakest links to snag points for yourself.

I'm mildly curious about how multiplayer would play out, but my mental simulation of how it would work isn't favorable. The game as a whole reminds me of playing Vintage Magic where every third card played is a massive game changer and it's just a quick explosion of craziness that ends with whichever side got the better draw and went off first winning or locking the game up within a few turns. That never was everyone's cup of tea, but some people really get a kick out of feeling like they're "breaking the game" constantly with massively powerful combinations.

I think the vintage Magic thing you guys experienced happens far less often in Omen than it does in vintage Magic, but I honestly haven't played Omen enough to claim that definitively.

Multiplayer in Omen isn't true multiplayer, anyway. It's a mini-tournament where two two-player games are played simultaneously and the victors/losers then play each other. You never have a situation where more than two players are vying for the same cities or using the same deck.

From what I've read on the geek, drafting makes the game shine brightest. I'm barely familiar enough with the cards to attempt it, though, and none of the people I play with know the game as well as I do, so it'll be standard chaos until we get a feel for the deck.

Ah, that makes sense! I didn't see how there would be a way to reconcile the mechanics to allow for true multiplayer without it being either a radically different game or a complete clusterf*ck.

Vintage Magic is all about stacking your deck with bomb after bomb and having combinations lined up that can obliterate your opponent in a completely one-sided fashion. Sitting on the other side of the table, it looks like your opponent is playing a complicated game of solitaire that somehow results in your getting your ass kicked. Omen has the bomb cards and combination potential to allow for this, but with the base game it's a matter of drawing into them - a luck factor. Vintage Magic has gotten to the point that there's so many ridiculous cards that your 60 card deck is nothing but bomb cards - it would take a miracle for any random 7 cards to not have ludicrous potential so there's a consistent level of "brokenness" among all players.

The game does seem to lend itself to cube drafts as that format would split the availability of powerhouse cards more evenly between the players. Right now the problem I see is that the combined deck approach relies entirely too much on luck to distribute the powerhouses, which can lead to less than optimal game states. The problem with draft, though, is that it's quite a challenge for new players as drafting is hard enough already without the added complication of not being familiar with what all cards are out there to be able to quickly separate wheat from chaff. Drafting is a whole separate game and skillset which ends up being both the best and worst part about it (I absolutely love drafting and design and deckbuilding, but I know plenty of gamers who just get frustrated by it).

Shadowfist manages to pull this off and still work marvelously in multiplayer, and has long been my favorite CCG as a result.

Drafting was my downfall when playing Magic Online. I love how it's competitive deck building where everyone has access to the same pool of cards. With constructed play, Magic can often be about who spent the money for the right cards. Sealed deck construction is better, but you still might end up with a deck with little synergy between the cards, which is the fun part of play once you're done with building. Drafting means you can often build a strong deck with cards that are well matched, but everyone has more or less the same chance of doing so.

The problem for me was that drafting is damned expensive, since you are buying 3 booster packs every time you play, and not breaking even with prize packs unless you make at least 2nd out of 8 people. I dropped something like $1000 playing drafts, which is serious "you have a gambling addiction" territory.

This is incidentally why I like Ascension so much. It captures much, though not all, of the feeling of drafting without costing money every time I play. It's much better than Dominion that way because you're competing for cards, rather than building decks in parallel from an functionally unlimited pool.

A friend of a friend was telling me about the Star variant for MtG and it kinda made me wish I had a group of people to play Magic with. You have exactly five people playing single color decks (one of each color) and you sit at the table arranged in the same order the colors are arranged on the back of every Magic card. The two players at your side are your allied colors and the two players across from you are your enemies. The game ends as soon as someone has no enemies left. In addition to normal Magic multiplayer rules there's this thing about your creatures moving through territories, so if someone two seats to your right tries to attack you his creatures have to move through the territory of the guy on your right who has the option of blocking them.

Anyway, it sounds pretty neat. Especially when you consider that your two allies are always enemies of each other and each of your allies is allied with one of your enemies so there's lots of cool interaction and dynamic alliances going on.

Too bad I'd have to play Magic :(

I'm not sure what the point of making everybody play mono-color decks and forming alliances based upon that, but it's a good way to play five which would otherwise be an awkward number.

Do you know how global effects are handled? Does a Wrath of God kill all five player's creatures? One of the quirks of those formats is they tend to make global cards exponentially better than targeted effects (I kill all my own creatures but I kill all the creatures of BOTH my opponents as well) which tends to in turn disfavor colors that have few global cards (traditionally Green, Blue, and Red).

Game of Thrones does as well, although it's due to the game being designed for it with the Titles system and having cards that are written in such a way that they don't assume a single opponent by default.

We actually made a mistake. Entering port is a separate action to doing stuff in port, so people who were skimming from port to port actually wouldn't have been able to do so. I think as it was our first game we were a bit nervy- next time I'm going in balls deep. I think it'll be more fun to cycle through as many captains as possible. Well, I hope.

I'm sorely tempted to bring paper to the next meeting so we can actually think about that game, but that would take time away from 1) meaningless babble, 2) Accusing GM of being a Cylon and 3) meaningless babble.

We do tend to play longer games and don't have that much time (or that many games, to be fair) so playing a large number of games isn't really on the cards, I guess.

That mistake makes a big difference! Coupled with the number of storms we got early on (someone needs to learn how to shuffle damnit) I really couldn't see any down side to port-hopping.

That'd sure make being a merchant easier!

After days of coming up empty on D--Day Dice, a mysterious package arrived in the mail today. It turned out to be copies of Scripts & Scribes: The Dice Game and Biblios I'd pre-ordered ages ago and promptly forgotten about. They are now in stock all over the place, and worth a look.

Welp, I'm expecting a CSI gift certificate here fairly soon in exchange for an auction I set up on BGG. So hopefully I get that by the time the bastards run out of stock on Biblios, since it's been on my want list for a while.

Made it to the Descent 2nd Edition Demo last Saturday @ my location game shop. Ended up playing the intro scenario with a full group of 4 with the store owner sitting in as Overlord and teacher.

I saw enough to pre-order it after we were done. As a bonus, the group has decided to try and run an ongoing campaign every other Sunday (once the game comes out). They seem like a group of good guys with good senses of humor so I'm hoping for the best :)

Awesome. There's been so much doom and gloom about it on BGG that it's nice to hear that it might not be the worst thing ever or whatever the current forum worry is.

I am such a sucker for dungeon crawls.

This weekend my goal is to get Claustrophobia out on the table.

That is always my weekend goal and it never fucking happens.

CROC has okayed a release of a VASSAL version, but the guy who made it refuses to respond to PMs. So he's a jerk.

I need to play more Claustrophobia.

Star Trek Catan is getting an American release but will be sold only at Targets.

I'm not sure just how weird I find that. I know Target is getting into board games. I've seen the obvious hits like Catan and Ticket there (though no Carcassonne, which surprises me) but also The Hobbit and Rune Age. I think the new Dixit, Dixit Journey, is only available through Target. Still. Kinda weird.

Then again, I'm not sold that the Trek theme works with Catan anyway.

A friend who I've managed to get addicted to Warmachine looked at the Claustrophobia box last time he visited and said it looked awesome, so I'm hopeful there. I mean, once we're already over the "yes, we're playing a tactical game of toy soldiers" hump it shouldn't be too complex, right?

I dunno about weird, but retailer exclusivity pisses me off regardless of the product. I don't want to have to go to Best Buy to get the version of a videogame with the pack-in DLC I like best, and I don't want to have to go to Target (or whoever will have it in Canada) for a board game. If this is how big box retailers plan to get people in the door and stay in business then they need to just die already.

Not that I care about this, specifically. I've never understood the point of reskinning a board game. There are a dozen different themed versions of Monopoly from the Canadian edition to Cat-opoly but they all just play exactly like Monopoly. Why do I need that? At least with something like Ticket To Ride, the board is different in more ways than just a different name for Park Place and they tweak the rules slightly to keep it interesting.

The best way they could do Star Trek Catan would be to have the characters on the holodek playing regular Catan.

Dixit Journey is available from other boardgame resellers as well. Catan purchasers deserve whatever they get.