The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

Yeah, I observed the real life version once and it seemed like a ton of work to actually make it work. If you're still curious, you should check out the online version. It's pay to play (you purchase tokens), but they give you a bunch of free tokens to get you hooked at first, and if you're like me, you'll get enough enjoyment out of those 15 or so games that you'll never want to play again anyway.

Two "adventurers breaking into the pyramid" themed games I played over the holidays:

The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus is pretty sweet - you have reasonable incentives both to linger and hope for a bigger haul of treasure, or to hurry back out since each round another cube of stone "falls" from the ceiling, potentially sealing you in forever. Also a nice mechanic where damage, inventory slots, and how much you can do per turn are all linked together so you don't have to keep track of them separately. Makes it really clear that, okay, it might be worth it to open this treasure chest, but it'll slow me down next turn when I need to dodge out of the way of the mummy. Pretty cool. Only thing that sucked was the cards were badly shuffled so on my first turn I ended up getting a whole spree of injuries and was sort of hobbled for the rest of the game. But cool.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple is a somewhat gimmicky high-speed cooperative game where everybody is trying to escape the temple by making the correct dice rolls, while a CD soundtrack raises the tension and bangs gongs when it's too late. Cute enough, though kind of just a bunch of chaos going on. Would be pretty sweet for a twelve-year-old's birthday party if everybody's patient enough to get the mechanics of it down (and not cheat).

My group's latest obsession is Galaxy Trucker, where you first race to assemble a space rig, grabbing parts from the center before your opponents can get them, and then watch your ship slowly get destroyed by asteroids and pirates. There's a good amount of luck but this is one of the few games I can think of where losing might be more fun than winning.

Kingdom Builder was really interesting the couple times I played, and my friend picked it up for Xmas, so we should be playing that one some more soon.

That Pyramid of Horus game looks pretty good, and I was vaguely looking at Galaxy Trucker in the shop about an hour ago, but I'm currently on a self-imposed ban after having picked up a pile of clearance deals at boardgameguru over Christmas. When I say a pile I mean a pile too - Road To Canterbury, Shipyard, London, Tinners Trail, Upon The Salty Ocean, Pergamon, Heavens of Olympus, Industry, Singapore, Power Grid Factory Manager and Forgotten Planet for CHEAP.

Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert (both by same guy) are both really fun, i love the format they use of timed/fast-paced setup followed by helplessly watching everything go to shit when you play it out

This place opened near me recently called the Edinburgh Game Hub. Basically some guy bought a cafe with a huge 'basement' area that he transformed into rooms for wargaming and board gaming. They have over 200 board games apparently. Spent some time there last week and played Zombicide (which is pretty good, albeit all-too-often vague about specifics of rules), tried out 7 Wonders (I have no idea what is going in this game) and some quick Japanese (though possibly just "Japanese" rather than authentic) tile game. I expect I'll be more of a board game geek as time goes on.

"Tsuro" is that Japanese one, apparently

tsuro is a fun simple game

7 Wonders is good but it's more for the min-maxing resource game types (which is me sometimes admittedly), i never figured out all the proper strategy so i just go for all the blue cards every game

played pandemic for the first time this weekend. rented from a board game shop, played about five times the first night and three times last night. super-fun, nail-bitingly tense, though extremely difficult to win in our experience (we only won once out of about ten games). perhaps we're doing something incorrectly. really liked how it had the feel of watching disease outbreaks spread across the world.

also played cosmic encounter for the first time. it was fun but i think it lacked some sci-fi flavor. a lot of the game felt very generic - spaceships might as well have been poker chips and different attacks might as well have been uno cards. still, i liked the negotiation element a lot (even though nobody i was playing with ever really wanted to negotiate) and i liked the open-endedness and simplicity of the game.

I've played Cosmic a few times and I keep thinking that there's a pretty rad game there but I haven't found it yet. Game always seems to end before anything particularly tricksy can happen with the special powers and flares.

How many people are you playing Cosmic with? It's pretty weak with 3 or 4.

It's really at its best with 5 - you REALLY want time for people's crazy abilities to come out, people to fuck over eachother with flares etc. Make sure you remember that flares stay in your hand after use!

It's a silly and crazy imbalanced game but can be very fun.

legacy is ridic good, though it eventually gets pretty SPOILERS

played more of the resistance last week; that game is heaps of fun though I think I suck at it

The bewildering magic of the boardgamegeek MATH TRADE.

Giving (to someones) my copies of DIGGING, 1960: THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT, and, er, an Oliver Stone DVD set.

Receiving (from someones) ARKHAM HORROR, SETTLERS OF CATAN, and PIT. Hurray!

So my wife and I are seriously considering buying a gaming table from these guys:

http://geekchichq.com/

They have lots of very nice stuff, although none of it is particularly affordable.

I preordered a Geek Chic table (the "Portal"). I figure it'll be my one piece of very expensive furniture. Literally everything else is from Ikea.

Has anyone on here played Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer? I'm thinking of trying this out. Looks like a cross between Dominion and Magic: The Gathering.

It's way more Dominion than M:TG. Think of a game of Dominion where you can potentially buy any card from any of the expansions but only six random cards are available each turn. I don't like it as much, but I do find it fun to play once in a while. There's a little more player interaction which is nice. I guess the flavor is close to M:TG.

aubrey plaz is a bgg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jWK45NJNTM&feature=youtu.be&t=5m45s

at 5m45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jWK45NJNTM

Ha, lucky for her not to have played Risk. BSG is my favorite! But I'll probably never play it again bc I don't know anyone anymore. Have the ppl from upthread been liking Mage Knight? I was thinking of getting it, mostly to have something to play solo.

I don't even play that many board games, but man, I want one of those tables.

Totally! Also I don't have any comics but I wanted one of the card-catalogue-drawer-style storage units for comics and game trinkets.

(and then a time machine to go back to the 90s and order even more fanzines and not lose the ones I did order, so I can put the A5 ones in the comic drawers, if they even fit)

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-board-games-that-ruined-it-everyone/

I usually hate Cracked, but that's a pretty great article. All those games are so mind numbing and yet so well love, it's a travesty. My son has been coercing me to play Battleship a lot lately and I'm ready to end it all. Luckily, he's also been trying to get me to play more Ticket To Ride - Europe, so I suppose there is light at the end of the tunnel.

that's a fun article. it's made me want to look for board games to play on my iphone. i have settlers of catan and ticket to ride as actual board games (though sadly not where i live) so not those, i'd like to try a new game. looking around i saw that puerto rico was on sale (2.99 instead of 7.99 or something like that) but it's ipad only. anyways, any particular recs?

Well there's a bunch of Reiner Knizia's games with iOS versions. I just got Tigris and Euphrates for my iphone, it's great.

Has anyone ever played this particular strategy/war game? http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/62227/labyrinth-the-war-on-terror-2001

Andean Abyss looks soooooo good but may be too complicated game-wise for a beginner.

there's a 4700 post discussion of it here: http://talk.consimworld.com/WebX/.1dd44a7e/0

The designer chimes in on the first page. But, no I haven't played it. It can be played solitaire which i find interesting.

not sure i want that much detail before i try it myself! just wondered if anyone here had played it.
the solitaire option does seem pretty neat as an intellectual exercise.

my 2 brothers, a close friend and i used to play risk all throughout our childhood - so we just picked up risk legacy and plan to play this weekend. reviews are great, so i'm pretty excited

tell me about it when you do im intrigued

what i play when i play:

7 wonders
pandemic
puerto rico
agricola

my bro also got citadels (card game) which we'll probably play at some point

has anyone played android: netrunner (living card game)? it looks really cool and i'm interested in trying it...

have u played saboteur, teh card game, its fun

My son and I got my wife Love Letter for Mother's Day. The three of us played a couple rounds today. It's surprisingly entertaining considering that the entire game consists of a 16 card deck and some counters for score keeping.

how do you beat pandemic? i found it really tough going with two people ... really only manageable w/ the researcher / project manager combo.

>has anyone played android: netrunner (living card game)? it looks really cool and i'm interested in trying it...

I played it when it was a CCG in like 1995! It was vg.

how do you beat pandemic? i found it really tough going with two people ... really only manageable w/ the researcher / project manager combo.

― the late great, Monday, May 13, 2013 1:49 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

make every move count!

3 ppl seems the optimum number of players. 4 is almost impossible.

quarantine specialist is a really useful role when things get hairy.

Played Metro last night with my dad & his wife. Not a good game for people with poor eyesight. To them it was like looking at a plate of spaghetti.

I played the new Netrunner once, but was very into the original game from the 90's. It seems like they kept the concept and gameplay very similar but the cards are different. Which is good - the one knock I had on the original game was that it was a bit unbalanced in favor of the corporation. If they've rebalanced the cards, that would make the game great.

Let me second the love for Love Letter, that's a game we've been playing a lot lately. Really simple game, almost no strategy, but surprisingly fun all the same.

my 2 brothers, a close friend and i used to play risk all throughout our childhood - so we just picked up risk legacy and plan to play this weekend. reviews are great, so i'm pretty excited
― Mordy , Sunday, May 12, 2013 10:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tell me about it when you do im intrigued
― we're up all night to get (s1ocki), Sunday, May 12, 2013 10:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it is amazing; you should def get a copy slocks, esp. if you can get 4 others to commit to a regular session

think we've played about a game a month, with five, and are up to our 9th game now

it gets... TENSE

the one knock I had on the original game was that it was a bit unbalanced in favor of the corporation. If they've rebalanced the cards, that would make the game great.

i was talking to a friend the other day who has played the new version. he said that there's a way to play online, and it keeps overall stats of the results of each game, and apparently 51% of all games have been won by the corp (or 49%, can't remember)

Ha, awesome. Maybe I need to investigate the new game more thoroughly.

my copy of risk legacy is still in its original packaging :/

I remember the original as being corp-advantaging too, but I wander if that was a result of my misguided-to-nonexistent deckbuilding thought at age like 11, and in fact the runner was just always meant to be running four copies of Mouse or whatever. I guess in any case a fixed-deck variant solves that problem.

a few board games on the app store are on sale - ra, tiger&euphrates, le havre. they're all under a buck. any thoughts about these games?

I bought all four for going on holiday because of the pricing. We probably played Medici more than any of the rest, a great little filler game. Ra is very much in the same boat, although if you're playing solo against the AI it's very slow because it still 'thinks' about every move.

Le Havre looked good when I ran through the tutorial but it seems to be one of those games where you have to remember what the bonuses for a lot of different buildings are, so I reckon it's a good implementation for people who already know how to play it but I never got in the mood to play it.

Played through the tutorial for Tigris & Euphrates, didn't like it. Area control game where you use war as a destabilising technique on other areas, but with an odd scoring mechanism where you notionally have points but don't get them until you do something else and sometimes you score them, sometimes not. I might have another go and see if I enjoy it more.

Tikal was cheap for a while too, and that's definitely worth it.