Board Gamers?

[Fairy Nuff]

@KingODuckingham we started a game once, took it on holiday when 6 of us shared a cottage in Wales. But it was a loooong game and we didn't finish before we went home (note, we were not playing day and night, we just had it set up on the breakfast bar and dipped in and out)

It's good to see that I'm not the only one using Ikea Kallax units to hold games and game books Windy. In addition to our board game shelves, we have three other kallax units holding his Warhammer models, books, paints etc. etc. etc. Who am I kidding, we have a Warhammer room. I figure you know what that's like @Winddancer

[Winddancer]

The only place we dont have WH40K is bathroom and kitchen..

[KingODuckingham]

@Fairy Nuff that's what I was afraid of, I can't imagine how long it would take for me and my wife to play, and I don't know where we could leave it out of reach of little children so that we could actually finish lol

Oh well, someday

[Fairy Nuff]

Sounds familiar Windy!

Yeah, probably not one for when the kiddos are small Ducky :(

[KingODuckingham]

Just bought Santorini, Sushi Go! and Kingdomino, pretty excited!

[Wamba_the_Fool]

Niiice! If you love-love Sushi Go, pick up 7 Wonders - still drafting, still 3 rounds, just more meat on the bones.

[Winddancer]

HATE 7 wonders boardgame, with a PASSION

[Aethelu]

Sushi Go is one of my favourite games ever.

I've got a few quick card game type games - Unstable Unicorns, Love Letter, Fluxx (got a few versions of that), and a Star Wars card game called 'I've Got a Bad Feeling About This'.

[Winddancer]

If you want a quick fun and easy dice game I recommend Impact. Its more fun than you would think and young kids can join in as well. Good drinking game too! :P Though dont do that with the kid..

[KingODuckingham]

HATE 7 wonders boardgame, with a PASSION

why the passion? It was one of the first board games I ever played (in the modern sphere, anyway) and I still play it. Though the theme does a lot for me, I admit. What about the Duel version?

[Winddancer]

It's horrible, hateful piece of SH-BLEEP! Ahem.. Just hate it, its boring and so not fun and awful and terrible and I dont like it one bit.

Never done duel, never will :P

[Fairy Nuff]

I loooooove 7 Wonders. Possibly because among my friends who play regularly, I always win, haha!

[Elvheimdros]

It's horrible, hateful piece of SH-BLEEP! Ahem.. Just hate it, its boring and so not fun and awful and terrible and I dont like it one bit.

See I'm pretty sure the game you're describing here is Stratego.

[Winddancer]

[KingODuckingham]

And I would have thought it was Candyland or Monopoly or something.

[Winddancer]

We dont say the M word in our house..

[KingODuckingham]

So I tried Sushi Go! and I'm awful at it

Kingdomino I'm also apparently not so great at but it's fun enough that I don't even care.

Haven't gotten Santorini out yet, probably on the weekend. Looking forward to it!

[Elarith]

Monotony. My brother in law went through an awful phase a few years ago of making us play it,

I like Sushi Go and Kingdomino but only tend to win by luck not good judgement. Got Queendomino to try which looks like a slightly more evil version.

[Wamba_the_Fool]

The wife's copy of Dinogenics finally came in! Looking forward to dealing with PR problems as dinosaurs rampage out of their cages and eat tourists!

[Wamba_the_Fool]

Finished a game of GMT's "Imperial Struggle" over VASSAL, won as France after the 7 Years War victory point check (VP = 30).

I'm glad I won at that point, my opponent had India pretty much sewn up and could have come back strong in either the Caribbean or North America although probably not both at once. If the global demands had been Cotton and Spices (and pretty much anything else) for a couple of turns it would have been difficult to win. Britainnia ruled the waves pretty much uncontested; I don't know if my opponent didn't lean into that advantage or if it's just not as impactful as I think it is from the French point of view. We'll swap sides next go-round; I look forward to seeing how it plays from the other side.

@KingODuckingham , did you try Santorini yet? How did you like it? No cards / with cards?

[Fairy Nuff]

Dinogenics sounds interesting, not heard of that one before...adding to list....

[Wamba_the_Fool]

First game of Dinogenics last night, at 5 players. I like it, but I started as first player and never had it taken from me so maybe I'm biased. (Didn't win though, second.)

It definitely rates another several plays, especially at different player counts. Complaints revolved around the "swingy" manipulation cards, but I don't think swingy is the right word. More like they have a wide variety of effects, so you're either very happy to get one when you really want the effect, and very disappointed when you use an action to acquire a card that has an effect you don't value highly at that moment in time. But there are only 9+16 actions over 7 rounds and considering you're using workers to both acquire and then play them one can understand some sour grapes when one person's card straight up GIVES THEM A DINOSAUR what in the world.

Also there are some rulebook complaints: when "up to two" actually means "one or two but not zero" it's kind of a Big Deal. (What else have we been playing wrong because we had the temerity to read the rule as written?)

Got a couple games of Race for the Galaxy (first arc expansions) in, always a good time. Lost the second game by 2 points but it was like 66-64 so can't be sad when your score is north of 60 even when you lose.

Going to have to slim down the collection soon, so trying to harden my heart and cast off perfectly good games...

[Wamba_the_Fool]

Played some Dominion over the weekend. It's an evergreen title that still retains the crown of "best deck-builder," IMHO, and the expansions are wonderful. One of the games was particularly memorable:

We were playing 3p with the "Empires" and "Dark Ages" ( <-- best one!) expansions and used one of the suggested kingdoms for those two sets, "Tomb of the Rat King." SPOILERS FOR "TOMB OF THE RAT KING" FOLLOW! Now this particular kingdom had, among other goodies, three elements that my wife picked up on and her father and I did not - namely, Tomb, Fortress, and Rats (text from my memory):

Tomb - Landmark: "Whenever you trash a card, gain 1 VP token." <-- Landmarks provide additional ways to score points. They affect all players for the whole game.
Fortress - $4 - Action: "+1 Card, +2 Actions. Whenever you trash this card, put it in your hand." <-- A Village that goes back into your hand when you trash it, but it costs 4 vice 3. YMMV.
Rats - $4 - Action: "+1 Card, +1 Action. Gain a Rats. Trash a card that is not a Rats, or reveal a hand of all Rats. | When you trash this card, +1 Card." <-- A cantrip trasher that duplicates itself. What can go wrong?

Do you see it? Because I was distracted by all the other possibilities on the board, and did not. Having overrun many previous decks with a plague of Rats (I love trying, I can't help myself), I've since learned to use Rats in moderation and to have an exit strategy (i.e. something else that can trash them, especially with Rats' little trash bonus). The insight the wife had was that a plague of Rats is not a bad thing if you're getting 1VP for trashing something that just goes back into your hand over and over until you run out of Rats in your deck. Oh, and did I mention that unlike the usual 10 kingdom cards to a stack, Rats has 20? That's 20 VP per turn, for those of you playing along at home, as long as you have the right ratio of Rats to Fortresses (20:4 worked just fine, as it turned out). If you have to play Rats until you hit a Fortress, sure, that's a few potential VPs lost, but it's a five-card hand, so with a 1/6, 4/23, 4/22, 4/21, and finally 1/5 chance of drawing at least one Fortress, you're generally good to go anyway. And then your turn is "play Rats, draw card, gain a Rats oops I have them all anyway, trash a Fortress, look at that it's back in my hand, get a VP," and repeat until your opponents say "Just lay your deck out and take 20 VPs." Dad and I tried to rush Provinces (three-piling was out, even with the Rats already gone) but by the time we could, well, read on:

We started using Debt tokens as denominations of 20VPs:

Picture here.

Her total score was TWO-HUNDRED EIGHT. 208. CCVIII.

"NEEEEEW RECORD!!!!"

Some lessons-learned:

- Dominion is NOT "multi-player solitaire." You need to pay attention to what your opponents are doing, get ahead of them, and throw a hydrospanner in their hyperdrive intake if at all possible. Sometimes just having superior (more efficient) tempo and racing for the Provinces is the right call, but if we had picked up on the whole "1 Rats = 1VP/turn" thing and just bought a couple for ourselves we could have reduced her VP. (Probably not won though.)

- There are not "good" and "bad" ways to utilize specific cards or strategies, only "benefits" and "drawbacks." As humans we shortcut "this strategy's drawbacks outweigh its benefits" to "it's a bad strategy." Which is fine, as far as it goes, but if a strategy's normal drawbacks can be ameliorated or even removed entirely, it's not a "bad strategy" anymore!

- If the goodwife is cackling madly as she rakes in her VP chips at the end of every turn like a Vegas gambler, maybe, just maybe, you're playing for second place at that point.

In conclusion: 5/8, 11/10 with rice, would play again.



208... *shakes head*

[KingODuckingham]

I have always enjoyed Dominion, though I don't own any expansions. I'm terrible at shuffling cards, too, so I don't play it as much as I would otherwise. Often have to ask for help.

I love RftG even more.

Been trying to play as much Libertalia on boardgamearena as possible, only learned it a few months ago, and now I want a physical copy but it's out of print. Sad days.

[Dimcairien Luiniel]

That was certainly an entertaining game, but sad to hear that it's out of print.

I've been playing a lot of Villainous with my roommate. If you haven't heard of it, basically you play as a Disney villain and are trying to complete a particular goal and prevent the other players from completing theirs. Everyone has their own villain, board, and goal. For example, Prince John is trying to start his turn with 20 power (the currency), Cruella de Vil is trying to capture 99 puppies, and Jafar is trying to hypnotize the genie. Some cards are allies (various henchmen and the like) and will help you other cards are heros (the good guys from the films) and will try and thwart you. Still other cards will help your allies or heros by giving them extra strength. The rules are simple enough, but there is quite a bit of strategy and you will yell at the other players at some point out of frustration.

[KingODuckingham]

Bought Terra Mystica and Inis on some crazy sales last month and I am HYPED, but I think it might be a while before I can get them to the table. Still, got to play a round of Terraforming Mars and some Star Realms over Christmas, gotta be happy with that. I mostly won too (barely)!

[Lailyn]

Sadly I don't play many board games but I got Wingspan from the library and I absolutely love it! The basic idea is to collect more bird species and points in your wildlife refuge than the other players. It's very cute and chill though had a slight learning curve in the beginning.

Now I'm adding other games to my list to check out next. Seems there's a good list here, I'll have to look up some of these. I want to try Scythe next and Ive heard lots of good things about Ticket to Ride but I've never played it.

[KingODuckingham]

I went ahead and bought War of the Ring, 2nd Edition, pretty excited about that one too, seems pretty thematic to the story for a wargame!

[Wamba_the_Fool]

WotR is on my bucket list, along with SW: Rebellion.

The wife bought Scythe: Rise of Fenris for our anniversary! It's got various modular expansions (alt rules, basically) that can be added to a regular game of Scythe, or played through sequentially in a sort of "campaign" series of eight games that have flavor/story text to connect them. Only played the first one thus far, looking forward to see what's added in the future.

[Hanasian]

Don't forget VASSAL for playing online - wargames abound in the module lists but there are other board and cardgames as well.

Also Humble Bundle has TableTop Simulator at 50% off right now.

I was quite the board wargamer back in the day and my brother still has our combined collection of games at his house. I recently aquired the original Squad Leader games (SL, COI, COD, GI) and have used VASSAL. It's fun but there is something about sitting across the table from your opponent as you play.