The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

it's this one:
http://www.gmtgames.com/p-630-gandhi-the-decolonization-of-british-india-19171947.aspx

on two completely different notes

excited to see one of my favorite games from childhood (early 80s) is still in production

http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/

definitely considering picking up a copy

i got the lovecraft pandemic game for christmas and i'm finally going to play it this weekend w00t

i've been playing dead of winter lately and it's fun. the first game we played there was no betrayer but i was the only winner bc the other 3 players didn't fulfill their personal objectives before the colony completed the primary objective. that was kinda lol. i'm really hoping i get to be the betrayer sometime soon it seems like a lot of fun.

yeah i played that awhile back when i was visiting a friend, i am pretty over the zombie genre but i really loved dead of winter

as an eldritch fan i really liked the crossroads cards

https://s4.scoopwhoop.com/anj/sgfsf/281429724.jpg

Basically I'm with Mordy and Lech. Games on historical conflicts (really, any game attempting to abstract a real-world topic from history to science) in game terms are also a kind of dense data compression. You unpack the insights of the designer through understanding the rules, components and how they interact through play.

RL rocket scientist Phil Eklund is a cult figure among some board gamers for designing games from turn-of-century US-Mexico border business/conflict (Pax Porfiriana) to solar system colonization (High Frontier) to Meso/Cenozoic evolution (Bios: Megafauna) to Paleolithic cultural evolution (Neanderthal). His games used to have reference lists longer than the rules, and be about as dry in play, but he's gotten considerably better about streamlining things after retiring a few years back. I'm trying to unpack his Bios: Genesis (assembly of life from competing chemistries) now.

If you would like to read about Volko Ruhnke, designer of many of these COIN games, this is a good starting point

The fifth man in the room, a CIA national security analyst named Volko Ruhnke, called us here. The palpable discomfort among us brings him joy. It means he has done his job.
<3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/in-the-world-of-role-playing-war-games-volko-ruhnke-has-become-a-hero/2014/01/10/a56ac8d6-48be-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html?utm_term=.81ad894e5411

Puts our misgivings about casualties of war in perspective:

We’re hours into our war and no longer strangers. Jeff Gringer, known to us as the Taliban, stands and thrusts a hooked finger in my direction while declaring he’s going to “pop those Coalition troops in Helmand.” The Taliban is using a car bomb to ambush my men. I rock back in my chair, resigned to my fate.

Robert Leonhard, pulling the strings for the Warlords, is in real life a national security analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a retired Army lieutenant colonel. He has been sitting in mostly quiet concentration but finally speaks up: “I hate to hear you say that, Jeff. My oldest is in Helmand province.” He pauses, moving his glasses from his nose to the top of his graying high-and-tight. “I think. He can’t tell me exactly where he is.”

I think this ends up unappealing in both directions, for me. Like, a) palpable discomfort isn't a state in which I'd ideally be spending my limited leisure time, but also b) the people who were actually having to make the decisions you're playing a simulation of were no doubt feeling something way beyond palpable discomfort, and to sit around a dinner table drinking wine and telling yourself you're increasing your understanding of what they went through feels naive at best, and maybe disrespectful?

this coffee shop i go to has copies of the korean board game 'INTIFADA: FREE PALESTINE' and always i don't know what to make of it

https://tumblbug.com/intifada

https://tumblbug-psi.imgix.net/eb663c81ddd2d3fd2824f755e800244404371d1a/0f5006aa45d951881877d36570448640bd59acc2/7976c04a194f1b20e6501cc6d571cc1c2ccf8978/ad4f2a9ed6d8524ea683a6173245f4fa914ce2b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&w=620&auto=format%2Ccompress&lossless=true&ch=save-data&s=54b4dd301c9117201e14be8d2c54432b

i would be interested in playing the above but my schedule is weird enough without trying to arrange transpacific electronic gaming

sorry, by 'the above' i mean the VASSAL stuff. i would also play intifada, though my korean is in no way, shape, form up to it

i mean it's just kind of baffling that it exists

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ci3-WaGUgAA0dKx.jpg

to sit around a dinner table drinking wine and telling yourself you're increasing your understanding of what they went through feels naive at best, and maybe disrespectful?

fwiw i don't think playing these games gives you any insight into what it's like to be a soldier on the battlefield. i think it gives some insight into the strategic considerations that led to that soldier being there. these aren't about simulating the chaos and fear of battle.

played Dead of Winter again last night. again no Betrayer and this time everyone fulfilled their win conditions. somehow it's less satisfying to win when everyone else wins too.

in the middle of a COIN game (Falling Sky). playing as the Arverni. it's... okay. the mechanics still take some getting used to and it's not always clear what moves would best move me towards my win condition. especially since my win condition depends on removing legions from the board, which means i'm somewhat reliant on Rome spreading thin so i can pick them off - i'm kinda waiting around and marshaling my forces. it's also not my ideal theme - tho hopefully after this i'll understand the system well enough that i can jump into, eg, andean abyss, without much trouble.

also terra mystica port to ios news

Ordered Tokaido from amazon this weekend. Hoping it gets my family excited about gaming again.

i have tokaido and haven't taken it out of the box once yet. i keep intending to but never seem to get around to it.

My son and I tried the two player variant a while back and it was pretty fun. A pretty chill and somewhat counterintuitive gaming experience. I'm sure it will be improved with more players.

played terra mystica again last weekend and i'm still so bad at it - i always get caught up in some macro strategy and do a poor tactical job of getting points from the round objective. i'm also bad at planning out what i'm going to do on the map so i rarely get the 'most connected' bonuses which are a lot of points.

Above and Below is cool - a worker placement with fun and unusual Fighting Fantasy-esque side quests.

one thing i've found with eurogames is that i tend to most enjoy the ones that have a fixed game length rather than a point-based ending condition, especially when there's a very visible progression built into the game e.g. Keyflower or Tzol'kin. my group was playing a lot of Scythe recently since its the hot new thing these days and that game just always seems to end very abruptly and it feels bad/wrong

otm

Played scythe once, it felt overstuffed and opaque

Haven't played Scythe, but really didn't like the guy's previous game (Euphoria).

Yeah, agreed - always a drag when you think you have more time to carry out some plan and then kind of suddenly someone draws the last Grain Card or whatever and oops, if that stack is empty and there are fewer than five locomotives left on the board then that means the game is over after this turn! Much prefer games on a 'clock' - they may also feel a turn too short but you at least know it's coming, and are scrambling to get your ducks in a row and deal with what feels like a more tightly planned scarcity of available moves/actions.

AFAICT, Scythe sold purely on the artwork.

i don't think it's a bad game, it just doesn't stand out over other area control euros other than the production value. people lose their minds over miniatures for some reason

Played some good ones recently -- Scythe, Networks, Burgle Bros, Flashpoint Fire Rescue, Churchill. Churchill was the most notable of the bunch.

Played Inis the other week which I loved.

I'd really like to try Churchill

have heard good things about Inis, i'm always wary of "dudes on a map" games though since i haven't liked most of them that i've played

Twilight Struggle is on Steam but y'all probably know that already? I've played it a little and I totally suck at it, but man you'd have to be SERIOUS to play it on an actual board..

It's not that bad really.

I was dragging into participating in a game of Grand Europa (maps, for scale) decades ago. I think we made it to 1941 in a year of Sundays. To this day, people set up rooms to play World in Flames. I've little to fear from games that actually end in an evening.

i tried twilight struggle once or twice on vassal and the guys on there were so quick and knew the game so well. irl it's easier to find ppl with comparable skills to mine (i.e. non-existent) tho games are long enough that it rarely gets played. i tried the steam release but didn't love the UI in general i find it easier to see the entire map at once instead of having to scroll around to take all the information in.

i played the US side a bunch vs a friend and never made it past the halfway point without dying

i'm always wary of "dudes on a map" games

Oh I tend to like them.

keyflower update: keyflower is still the best eurogame

Colt Express a hell of a lot of fun!

Just bought Jaipur and Duel. Jaipur is a 2-player token/card game with a charming but rather orientalist visual design. It's basically 7-card whist with extra gubbins, but it's a nice, fun quick game.

Duel is the 2-player version of 7 Wonders. It's supposed to be great but it has one of those long manuals you can never be fucked to read, so we haven't played it yet.

Jaipur is great, pretty much a classic at this point

Duel is good - worth learning. Me and my girlfriend overdid it a bit though and haven't played for a while - there's not huge amount of variety to the gamplay.

yep colt express, cottage garden and camel up are the best i've played recently
feel colt express suffers from some characters being overly more powerful than others
the apps p good tho

some stuff i've been playing lately:

Keyflower - this is still my favorite board game. it's a really clever synthesis of auction and worker placement mechanics, where each player is building their own village out of hex tiles and you use your worker meeples both as currency to bid on the tiles and as workers to activate tiles for resources & various other effects. because of the auction and the ability to use and block your opponent's tiles, it's much more mean and cutthroat than other eurogames of this style. you also only use around half of the tiles in a 3-4 player game, so the games can play out wildly differently depending on what comes out.

Concordia - this was out of print for a couple years and built up a considerable amount of hype during that time - it just finally became available again and i picked it up and i'm glad i did. it squeezes a really rich resource management/hand management game out of a very simple ruleset (the rulebook is just 4 pages, and that includes full descriptions of every card in the game). it's probably the easiest middleweight eurogame to teach to the uninitiated, without sacrificing any amount of depth.

Terraforming Mars - i didn't really like this. as a drafting game, it reminded me of the MTG sets with 'tribal' themes where once you decide whether you're the elf deck, or the goblin deck, or the wizard deck, it just becomes a routine set collection exercise - here it's the microbe engine, or the electricity engine, or the plant engine, but it's the same deal where the strategies are clearly delineated and prescribed, and after everyone plants their flag in one, the game feels very scripted. with MTG you still get to play games of magic after the draft, but here choosing the cards you want is pretty much the entire game. i'm willing to play this again, since it is incredibly popular and maybe i'm missing something, but i wasn't impressed - it felt almost like it was halfway between a eurogame and an 'experience generator' game.

Great Western Trail - finally got to play this last weekend and unlike Scythe and TMars, i think this one lives up to the hype. the rulebook is kind of scary, this game has a lot of 'side dish' systems in it, but the core gameplay loop of building a deck of better and better cows while doing laps around a growing action board is surprisingly fun and intuitive, and the folks i taught it to went from apprehensive to engaged after the first lap. the game is nicely tuned to always give you a manageable number of options every turn, so even though it's a long game, it didn't feel that long since no one got frozen up. really want to play this again, there's a bunch of cool stuff that we barely touched in our first play since the random setup didn't favor it.

Anyone played mad king Ludwig? I kind of want a carcasonne-type game that isn't carcasonne

Xpost - ok! duel! i'll try harder! we took about two years to bother reading the RFTG rules and that was definitely worth the effort in the end...

I love Mad King Ludwig! Deceptively hard.

It's more mathy than I remember Carcasonne being (only played the latter once).

xp i think Isle of Skye is a better game than Mad King Ludwig, it's got almost the same tile-pricing mechanic but it plays a lot faster due to everyone setting their prices simultaneously rather than waiting for one person to do it at a time. it's just as dry as carcasonne though - if the theme / wacky tile shapes of Ludwig is what appeals to you then go for it, it's still a fine game.

Favorite plays in the last year: Chicago Express, my favorite "build a railway across America while not going into too much debt" game, Mississippi Queen with the "Black Rose" expansion, a good step up from Sorry! for those who want a race and some bumping people around; Shadows Over Camelot, a co-op with a lovely theme and (possibly!) a secret traitor, as you run back and forth putting out fires and watching everything go to hell, and very little space for players to try and make everybody else conform to their personal plan of action; Stone Age, the best worker-placement game I've tackled despite some visual clutter and serious need for individual plastic organizers to keep your tableau under control.

Stone Age is great fun, I don't know whether it's that it's just gateway enough (always being able to farm food for example) that it becomes less of a points salad that makes it such an attractive default option when you don't know what to play.

Sagrada is maybe the thing I've played the most this year - dice pool rolling and placement on player board, quite nice action card modifiers, relatively simple scoring. Better than the filler descriptor some might give it, but short enough to feel that way.

Kodama is still very entertaining and the thing people seem to want to play as filler. Is it just the cute factor? There has to be a more game-y reason why I think but I'm struggling to think of it.

Shem Phillips' North Sea trilogy have reached Expansion stage and I haven't even managed to play them as RuneSaga yet. I thought he was in with a fighting chance for Spiel but the judges didn't agree.

Deep Space D-6 is the most fun solo game I've got and the forthcoming expansion looks great. Reprint soon to be available for those that missed out on kind of a dicey worker placement rpg-ish cheapie.

Dwar7s Fall is top of my to be played pile, with Manhattan Project: Energy Empire below it.

I appreciate this really makes me look like a worker placement guy.

Recent stuff:

Roll Player: fluff, but clever and the dice are pretty
Shadows of Malice: A+, cannot recommend enough
Nemo's War: looks great, plays great, not sure how many times you can play it though