The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

replace 0 with o, 3 with e

Request sent

did you kickstart ogre, spencer

I did not. By the time I heard about it they were like 9x over target and growing. I hope the response encourages them to create an app. 'OGRE' is really one of the purest and best hex based strategy games ever.

Ugh at games where you can fall behind early on and are just sitting around reading ILX waiting for it to end

See: Catan, or, right now, El Grande.

Owen, plz move to Philly so we can play board games together + talk about NetHack strategies.

started playing risk legacy yesterday

it. is. awesome.

shit that sounds cool

yeah it’s p.good; and they’ve altered the rules from standard risk so games don’t go on for an age. good fun writing stuff on the board

we’re only two games in so haven’t opened any of the packets etc yet but by the sounds of it they’re all pretty :O

no spoilers

played pandemic for the first time this week. was the only person to really 'get it' so just ended up directing people as to how to most efficiently win. felt like i was being kind of tiresome.

This game called ECLIPSE is pretty wonderful. Really beautifully designed euro-feeling space epic, just the right length, with gorgeous art. Like a more elegant (compact) take on Twilight Imperium or Rex, and even a little reminiscent of Cosmic Encounter (but much more cerebral).

directors are p.tiresome... some light coaching can be helpful though

eclipse looks good but /complicated/... is it?

Has anyone on here played Mage Knight? Going to try this out tomorrow with some work pals. What should I expect?

won my first game of legacy last night and got to [spoiler redacted], with all nine minor cities established we also got to [spoiler redacted]

game's a blast, and can be quite quickfire too if you get the right conditions

Eclipse isn't complicated, from a broader boardgame perspective - simpler than Caylus or Age of Industry, I'd say, and nothing like a wargame, Arkham or Twilight Imperium. Maybe on par with Power Grid? (but more fun!) There are lots of components but they come together very elegantly, rather than piles of cruft; I've played two games, and in both games the first-time players were basically fully bossin' by the halfway point.

Sean remind me to remind you to invite me next time I'm near you ok?

sure! we are a good-mood boardgames gang: fun of the game, boo to win/lose chafing.

My friend has Mage Knight, I haven't played it but it looks super complex – expect a long game, I think.

I think I may be getting in over my head

Sean remind me to remind you to invite me next time I'm near you ok?

haha would you seriously be interested in playing eclipse? i have a bunch of credit at 401 games and really want to buy it but i only really know one other person that will play it with me...

anyone tried the 2012 SdJ, kingdom builder?

Yeah, it's fun. There are randomized win conditions and bonus tokens, so you need to use a different strategy every game. It is one of those games where a player can get a decisive lead in the first two rounds and then it becomes a race for second, though.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because that's what happened the last time I played, ha ha. For the most part, it is very well balanced, and you can catch up if you play well. As with any of these games, though, luck plays a part.

I own Kingdom Builder! It happens to be designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, the creator of Dominion. I like it a lot. It does definitely have the potential for someone to get a serious advantage in the first couple of turns, but that can be related to everyone being inexperienced. After a couple plays it becomes more clear what the relative strengths of the special powers are and how important it is to claim them and use them as quickly as possible.

Yeah, last time we were playing with the expansion, which adds a couple really crazy new powers (like one that allows you to place "rocks" on the board back in block off your settlements, which is super useful but whose utility I didn't realize until it was too late) and a new mechanic with one time use powers. Still, the guy in the lead lucked out with his first couple territory cards and so he was able to get a bunch of special powers, while another guy kept getting caught in one little corner and wasn't able to get any of the powers.

7 wonders is legitimate

card game chrononauts is a lot of fun

got arkham horror!

now need people to play with :-(

We have Arkham Horror,the Dunwich Horror expansion, and Mansions of Madness. All are good but they've been largely neglected this past year because the games go for so long.

I'm at a place where I just want a game to end after 30 minutes or so.

Gauntlet of Fools is a fun little game by Donald X. that is also very fast, once you know how to play you can probably play twice in 30 minutes.

Have I talked in this thread about how I can't stand playing Arkham Horror? It might just be the group that I've played it with, but man I find it just overwhelmingly boring.

i have a responsibility-free day so i'm playing by myself with three characters, i've played six or seven full turns so far over the course of two hours. right now my positions is nailbitingly tense - a shoggoth in the outskirts, two monsters on each gate, including a starspawn. there's also a wandering dhole in there. on the other hand, everyone has blessings and harvey walters has a magic lamp that's like +5 to combat. basically i have everyone in position to close the three open gates and everyone is buffed so i'm either about to be in position to close all the open gates at once - though a new one will definitely spawn - or i'm about to get my ass handed to me. this is alternately boring and awesome.

the dhole ate ashcan pete's dog though which kind of sucks because he's short in the sanity dept anyway

i would take the researcher and pete to church first but that would be two more gates to make six total by the time mandy and pete can get to any open gates.

finished! only took four hours.

I played a By Forum game on BGG the other week and it actually works pretty well.

(Short version - we were playing vs Abthoth, looked like a lost cause as the Doom Track had shot up really quickly. Then for two turns gates started opening on players and they got spat out early which means we sealed something like 3 in two turns and then had another stroke of luck as two turns on the trot the new gate opened on the location of the existing, keeping the doom track stalled. Then one player through, Find Gate, Elder Sign, done.

My highlight was not once, but twice, sneaking through a pack of three monsters which included a ghost both times. They're -2 and we had -1 environment as well.)

recent faves:
Kingdom Builder
Summoner Wars
Lost Cities
Descent

Good:
Yggdrasil
Goa
Android Netrunner

Not so good:
Phoenicia
Memory of 44

I have been exploiting the warehouse finds uncovered by BoardGameGuru and have lots to look forward to in the new year like Singapore, The Road To Canterbury, Upon The Salty Ocean and London.

This Sunday...MAGE KNIGHT. My friend just bought it and we're both looking over the walkthrough/rules right now.

also, yeah Kingdom Builder is great! Only had a chance to play once but would play again.

Sean by Memory of 44 do you mean Memoir '44? If so, that games is pretty awesome, I thought, although I played the online version.

Yeah, Memoir of 44. I bet it would be more fun on a computer.

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.