The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

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

I had totally missed Shadows of Malice but it looks a lot of fun (and interesting to see a game on BGG where solo is the recommended number of players).

recommended of 1 on a co-op game usually just means 'this game has nothing in it that prevents quarterbacking' which is only an issue if you have That Guy in your crew

after playing Great Western Trail some more, I think it's now my favorite board game. there's a lot of rules overhead even for a eurogame, but once you get everyone on board it plays fast and is just magical.

sounds good, will check it out

enjoyed incan gold recently
only just saw yesterday 'camel up' is now an app game too and plays pretty well as a multiplayer pass n play!

A Feast for Odin: fun, and fun to look at, but I wonder how many times you can play it. There seem to be a few obvious "best" ways to proceed.

We played the first game of Seafall about 8 weeks ago and haven't managed to get together for a second session yet (the first doesn't even count as part of the campaign really, it's just a tutorial). So at this rate we'll be wrapping it up around 2020.

cottage garden is now out as an app!
plays pretty smoothly, if a little slow, hopefully it's just down to the speed i set it at

This morning I recieved Alien Frontiers as a birthday present from my girlfriend. I'm not generally the biggest fan of worker placements, and I've yet to play it obviously, but it would appear to be a beautiful game. Perhaps the clearest rulebook I've ever read.

Anyone played Mansions of Madness? I'd been idly contemplating it as a fun holiday game for the family and then I was suddenly surprised to find it significantly marked down over the weekend (its MRSP is fairly $$$) and so, well, now I own it and hope I don't regret owning it.

It's very atmospheric and immersive but I'm not sure I'd describe it as a fun family holiday game! It's long, fiddly and (deliberately) frustrating. But maybe your family's into that. I'm sure you'll enjoy it with the right group, at its best it can be gripping and tense.

nb, I take it you mean the second edition, the first is even moreso.

Yeah, second edition. I was wary about a board game with a required app component until I read the reasons why it was added.

I think my family will be into it, as we usually engage in a long board game sesh or two during the holidays and they're into the dark n' spooky. I was thinking, though, about also picking up a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill, as it sounds similar yet less demanding.

I'm not that into board games apart from TTR which I play as an app, but I'm trying to buy the Polish game M/S Batory for my bf for Christmas. Amazon.co.uk has it but for an insane amount of money! Trying to get it directly from the manufacturer, Granna.

http://thegameshelf.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-game-shelf-reviews-ms-batory.html

You might poke around this thread's namesake website ( https://www.boardgamegeek.com ) to see if anyone is selling it or could provide you with the means of procuring it for less than an arm and a leg.

MS Batory looks fun.

Fam was into Mansions of Madness. For the first couple of hours, anyway. We started what was supposed to be the introductory game (60-90 minutes) and it wound up taking the entire night, and then we paused it at 2am and it's just waiting for us downstairs. My sister has almost certainly tapped out at this point. It's fun, but goddamn it would've been nice to have a more realistic idea of what we were getting into.

codenames

a horse is not a " vehicle "

any mouse guard players here? it's a RPG about mice.

if it's realistic most of the mice get eaten

it's not realistic at all but i'm sure some of the mice do get eaten

I'm going to try get dominion back in my group's rotation.

we're currently working our way through (the very fun) pandemic legacy season 1. dominion would be a good palette cleanser/aperitif I think

Went round to a friend's house the other day and he considered introducing me and our other friend to Mansions of Madness but in the end settled for Citadels, which turned out to be an excellent game that I won

My friend then played MOM on his own with a computerised dungeon master and lost

I'm doing Pandemic Legacy at the moment, excellent but difficult. I think we've won 3/8 games or something like that.

Shout out to Citadels as well. Always takes ages when my group plays as everyone starts doing different stupid voices for the different characters.

ha, we played pandemic legacy and kept failing until the value of the dispatcher became clear
the ending of that game is cool though - try to stick it out!

Oh we will for sure - it's an exciting exprience even if you lose. Co-ops should be tough.

Got my partner Azul for Xmas, which is proving great fun. And I bought my brother Galaxy Truckers, not least because I wanted to play it. He's not a huge board games fan but I'm hoping this could sucker him in. Also, my daughter is a big fan of Rhino Hero, but I might like it even better than her.

Also I have really gotten a taste for Shut Up And Sit Down, even though their delivery feels like they've watched every episode of Top Gear multiple times (also what is up with that Quinn guy's eyebrows?)

I missed out on games totally in 2018 because of personal circumstances, not least my inability to go cold into a games cafe and pick up a game with strangers.

I am going to Marie Kondo my games collection this year for sure.

plz marie kondo your games collection to me

i have decided i really need to track down a copy of the early 80s battlin' bugs hex map game Chitin. I used to list for it in the pages of Dragon at the time, completely forgot about it til last week.

speaking of early 80s hex games, i have been itching to get copies of steve jackson's OGRE and GEV ... anyone remember those?

and on another early 80s note, anybody played "twilight imperium lite" aka REX by fantasy flight games? supposedly a re-skinning of an old dune boardgame that was supposed to be the shit.

They got taken over by the version of OGRE that got put out a couple of years ago which was the size of a small car* and so the prices are ridiculous afaik. He's also been trying to whip up enthusiasm for a similar giant box Car Wars without progress despite desperate pleas.

*Not necessarily an exaggeration

i'm seeing very good condition copies of ogre for like $40-$60 used. is that ridiculous?

i collect early 80s roleplaying games and $50 is pretty much the going rate for a good condition box set by TSR or FASA or GDW or chaosium

i actually recently paid more than that for a shrink-wrapped star frontiers *module*

i had no idea about the new ogre! looks pretty sweet, and easier to foist on my group than gloomhaven.

what's the diff between the "designer's edition" and the "sixth edition"? just a pile of minis? or extra rules too?

I would have thought $40-$60 for a game with paper maps and 1mm cardboard chits was a bit steep, but then I'm not as connected to the market as you. Also Britain might be a slightly different market - I got the smallbook Traveller box + about 6 extra books for about $20 a couple of years ago and a beaten up but complete Top Secret for $10 about 3 weeks later.

No idea about new OGRE, sorry.