The Boardgame Thread

[Ingmar]

I always find non-conflict a weird way to define euros. Sort of implies Agricola is Ameritrash while Arkham Horror is Euro - which is clearly crazy. As far as I'm concerned, if the fun is in the mechanics rather than the theme, it's a euro.

You think Agricola has a lot of conflict? By my definition it has almost none.

[Samwise]

Love Letter is great because you can fit it in your pocket and play it on a tiny table with as few as two people.  Definitely get that one IMO.

[Hawkbit]

Especially for $6.00.  There's no real reason not to buy it.

[schild]

I'm considering picking up several games using some stashed Amazon cards -- mostly a mix of "for family trips -- in laws and such" and "for gaming friends" sort of stuff.

For family:
1) Love Letter
2) Carcassone
3) Masquerade
4) Dixit
5) Pandemic
6) Bang

For the more gamer focused:
1) Galaxy Truckers
2) Cosmic Encounters
3) The Resistance: Avalon
4) Game of Thrones
5) Tales of Arabia.

I don't like that list of games other than Love Letter.

[eldaec]

For your family list.

Carcassonne is great, but pick up the first two expansions (traders and builders, inns and cathedrals) at the same time. They improve balance tremendously. Carcassonne plus my bag o' expansions is absolutely my go to game for families, the ability to tune complexity to the group, and flexibility from 2 to 6 players is great.

Mascarade I suspect most family groups would struggle with. But Avalon is fine (so long as you have 7-10 people in the group).

Pandemic I've also struggled to make work in a family group, it really needs players of equal skill to be fun for all. I'm still looking for a really good family co-op to be honest. Mysterium (dixit/cluedo coop) works pretty well, but hard to get in the US.

 

[eldaec]

I always find non-conflict a weird way to define euros. Sort of implies Agricola is Ameritrash while Arkham Horror is Euro - which is clearly crazy. As far as I'm concerned, if the fun is in the mechanics rather than the theme, it's a euro.

You think Agricola has a lot of conflict? By my definition it has almost none.

In 2 player especially I found the blocking feels about as conflicty as headbutting your opponent every other turn. But you don't have to play it that way ofc.

Interestingly I find the fact that you can choose an action that conflicts or one that doesn't, makes it feel more of a conflict than a game that is exclusively about shooting each other. Playing Risk I have no choice but to attack you. Playing Agricola I don't have to take the sheep you clearly need to make use of your improvements and not starve, but I'm going to. Ymmv.

[lamaros]

I don't think Mascarade works at all and wouldn't buy it. If you lived in the same country I'd send you my copy.

Love letter gets played by people who normally don't play games and enjoyed, its a decent and fun game (its no For Sale though).

Dixit I find really boring. There are better party games for family groups that use just pen and paper.

Pandemic is a puzzle that is made more annoying/fun by having to solve it as a group. How much you enjoy it might come down to how much smarter you are than other players and how frustrated you/they might get about not letting that ruin the game.

The Resistance is a great game.

Game of Thrones is ok but takes too long for what it is and has a lot of shit all going on when players are at all good. Rex is better IMO.

I don't quite enjoy Cosmic Encounters but others love it...

Agricola has some interactivity for me, just not really enough. I dislike games with individual boards per player as a general (but not absolute) rule.

[eldaec]

For the gamers list, if you are looking for one game, cosmic is where I'd start - like Carcassonne  it is incredibly flexible, can be made more or less complex, does not go on too long etc. But also like Carcassonne, buy the expansion with the reward deck from the outset (incursion? Dominion?).

I like Game of Thrones, but playing it is an all day/evening strategy game project. At least 3 hours for 4 players, maybe 5 hours for 6 players, or longer if your group really enjoy the diplomatic/negotiation aspect.

Galaxy Trucker and Avalon are both fun but 1 or 2 in most random groups won't like them - so I wouldn't build an evening around them, Avalon is best as an end of session wind down game.

Arabian Nights is a very different sort of animal to the rest of your list, very much a story generator, barely competitive and certainly not a strategy game.

[Rendakor]

I like Game of Thrones a lot too, but eldaec is right that it's time consuming. Less so if you can do the setup before everyone arrives, as that's a decent chunk of it. It's a deeper Risk with asymmetrical factions that benefits a lot from the players being into the source material.

[Morat20]

Thanks. That's pretty much what I needed. :)

[dd0029]

I just bought Imperial Assault, mostly because I want to paint the miniatures.

My group has played this a couple of times. It's mildly entertaining, but there's a fair bit of setup. The Space Hulk like board can be more than a bit tedious. We had trouble matching up pieces for one of the missions before we realized some of the colors on the pictures were not what we were looking for on the tiles. There are also many counter and cards of this that and the other thing, which is all pretty standard for a Fantasy Flight game in our experience. Once you get all setup though, things are fairly quick and easy. In our who kills whom first test games, the Rebels have always won. I'd chalk that up more on the Imperial player going easy on the rest of us though, rather than saying the Rebels are just that much better.

[Ingmar]

I always find non-conflict a weird way to define euros. Sort of implies Agricola is Ameritrash while Arkham Horror is Euro - which is clearly crazy. As far as I'm concerned, if the fun is in the mechanics rather than the theme, it's a euro.

You think Agricola has a lot of conflict? By my definition it has almost none.

In 2 player especially I found the blocking feels about as conflicty as headbutting your opponent every other turn. But you don't have to play it that way ofc.

Interestingly I find the fact that you can choose an action that conflicts or one that doesn't, makes it feel more of a conflict than a game that is exclusively about shooting each other. Playing Risk I have no choice but to attack you. Playing Agricola I don't have to take the sheep you clearly need to make use of your improvements and not starve, but I'm going to. Ymmv.

I don't think I've ever played it with fewer than 4 people so that might explain the different view somewhat.

[lamaros]

I like Game of Thrones a lot too, but eldaec is right that it's time consuming. Less so if you can do the setup before everyone arrives, as that's a decent chunk of it. It's a deeper Risk with asymmetrical factions that benefits a lot from the players being into the source material.

It's much more like diplomacy than risk. Risk has a lot of combat and dice fun, Game of Thrones is much more measured and calculated.

[Morat20]

It looked very Diplomacy like.

So the term "euro trash" -- what's that mean, in context?

[eldaec]

Usually 'Ameritrash' means a game built almost wholly on theme and rolling dice. Often sells itself on the sheer number of plastic bits.

'Euro' means a game built around mechanics, for some reason often involving farms and/or trains. Usually doesn't involve conflict in the sense of shooting each other, just starving other players out by taking all the corn or whatever.

Not sure what 'eurotrash' would mean. A dice game about pig breeding possibly.

[Morat20]

So, where would something like Ticket to Ride fall? A blend of the two? Settlers of Catan? (I'm not being judgmental -- I'm just trying to sort criticism so I know what people are talking about. Trying to move some of my gaming to more social -- some family, some gaming friends looking for something other than D&D).

[Rendakor]

TtR is very Euro. The only conflict comes in preventing people from finishing routes, which is often just a byproduct of making your own routes.

[Samwise]

Eurotrash would be a game with hexes and wooden tokens, all of them kind of ugly and brown, where each player has their own board, and it's about growing sorghum or something.

[Morat20]

Gotcha. I don't mind games that aren't directly competitive (some comic or cartoon talked about boardgame nights should often be called 'Whose the competitive asshole?'), and found Ticket to Ride to be quite fun.

But yeah, token proliferation and separate boards would get problematic. I don't think I'd enjoy that much at all.

[schild]

Euro design emphasizes mechanics. American design emphasizes theme. When the latter is dripping with theme and nearly devoid of meaningful interesting mechanics (or an abundance of randomness - see nearly every Lovecraftian game) it evolves into Ameritrash.

Eurotrash is uhhhhh, the Dr. Who board game. Or the fans that play it. Dealer's choice.

[Sky]

I love random factors in board games. Because tears. I love them.

[eldaec]

Random factors in general I don't mind, but dice specifically I have some kind of mild allergy to.

[Morat20]

Random factors in general I don't mind, but dice specifically I have some kind of mild allergy to.

I don't mind random, as long as the game is "fun to lose". If I'm gonna get screwed by a random factor, it's got to be fun. Galaxy Truckers seems to fit that bill -- random stuff is going to screw you, but it'll screw everyone equally. It seems like a good part of the 'fun' of that game is, you know, when the random stuff happens and seeing who suffers -- and it's fine, because next round it'll be you who gets screwed in a funny way.

Random factors in strategy games or longer games? That's..different. I don't want some random out -of-the-blue factor invalidate an entire game. Either it's built around being randomly fucked (and thus fun) or it's not. If it's not, the random element needs to either be absent -- or be containable by skill and planning.

If that makes sense.

[lamaros]

I like dice, especially in battle games Eld plays blood bowl. He really likes dice too.

Card combat, like in Kemet, leaves me cold.

[Ruvaldt]

Eld plays blood bowl. He really likes dice too.

To me, Blood Bowl is more about making your opponent roll for as many of their actions as possible while reducing the number of times you have to roll to do what you want to do.  I love a good three-die block as much as the next guy, but attempting to score while rolling for the fewest actions possible to achieve that goal is the surest path to victory.

That said, there's nothing more satisfying than seeing that little red cross or skull pop up over an opponent after a block in Blood Bowl...

[eldaec]

The best thing about Blood Bowl is the great pains it goes to so you can manage the dice.

Playing well means shifting the dice odds so far in your favour that it never feels to me like the dice decide much in the game.

Blood bowl on a board has other issues, specifically the amount of fiddly bookkeeping required to process those dice rolls. Which is why you should play blood bowl on a PC in the f13 Blood Bowl league.

[Jeff Kelly]

We've recently played a lot of the Pathfinder card game. It's decent but the mechanics are so limited that it gets repetitive early on and stays that way.

We've also played a lot of the Legends of Andor expansion. I'd consider that expansion to be eurotrash. Turned the core game from a hard but fun cooperative game into a 'holy shit are you fucking kidding me' one.

[Jeff Kelly]

Randomness also serves as a tie breaker.

Take Diplomacy for example. If you have a group of people that all know how to play the game then it will never end. I've literally played single campaigns for a whole weekend where all we managed to achieve were stalemates.

In the case of Diplomacy it's the whole point of the game but usually you want games to end eventually. That's why most mechanics heavy games have fixed victory conditions - certain number of turns or certain number of points for example.

[eldaec]

We've recently played a lot of the Pathfinder card game. It's decent but the mechanics are so limited that it gets repetitive early on and stays that way.

We've also played a lot of the Legends of Andor expansion. I'd consider that expansion to be eurotrash. Turned the core game from a hard but fun cooperative game into a 'holy shit are you fucking kidding me' one.

Andor was a strange one. I loved the system (despite dice), but a combination of being too easy and being story based meant we hardly ever felt we wanted to replay a scenario.

And like Pandemic it only really works with players on the same level.

[Jeff Kelly]

The difficulty of Andor ramps up quite a bit in later scenarios. By the time you flip the board over and get to the dwarven mines the game has become quite a bit harder than the first quests. The final scenario before the dwarven mines where you have to find and escort the kind gives most people a lot of trouble, actually. Take the 'level of difficulty' of the dwarven mine and double that and you have the expansion.

The problem is not necessarily that the game becomes hard or harder because it doesn't. It's that you have to deal with even more quest based stuff and lots of unexpected bullshit that you can't plan or prepare for but that will screw you over nevertheless. It's difficult because the game is intentionally obtuse and withholding information from you not because the scenarios are hard. You generally tend to play scenarios twice. Once to encounter all of the unexpected out of the blue bullshit that you fail and a second time to actually complete the scenario knowing what will happen on the way.

The game generally won't tell you what the real objective is until you've completed an entirely different objective. Most interim goals are on a timer and have to be completed by a certain turn but the game will only tell  you that you've failed the goal once you've reached the fail condition not before. They added lots of randomness that will screw you out of winning. (e.g. gems in the dwarven mine that burn up during the fire blasts, making it impossible to win. Storm cards and flotsam and jetsam events in the expansion) and they gimped characters in the process (the expansion no longer uses the three magic gems making the Wizard essentially useless since he can no longer use the white die in combat). And so on.

They on the other hand added lots of new pieces of cardboard and cards to put on the board and keep track of most of which you'll only ever use in a single scenario.

[eldaec]

Hmm.

Playing it as a puzzle game, counting out all the moves for this turn and next, rather than steaming into combat like a dungeon crawler, I can't really see where the difficulty is. I've had a couple of people ask if the game is maybe aimed at kids (which I doubt since the legend track is neat but not entirely intuitive).

Where I agree with you is that as it runs to later scenarios you have to map out more and more elements, and rather than being more difficult it just got more fiddly and time consuming. What I couldn't decide is whether that was because of limitations in the system, or in the imagination of the scenario designers. Either way, sounds like they haven't solved it in the expansion.

[Jeff Kelly]

Maybe hard is the wrong term. We are an experienced group and we finish most scenarios first try and most of the scenarios we have to replay fail because of some random bullshit or because of something we should keep track of but didn't even know existed until the game tells us that we failed it.

I wouldn't consider it to be easy though either because, as you said, you have to keep track of a lot of things and how those things affect the board and the legend track. Easy for an experienced group of gamers maybe. I won't consider it to be "casual-friendly" though in the same way the original Lord of the Rings board game is not.

Either way, sounds like they haven't solved it in the expansion.

No they just piled on more stuff to keep track of.

[Teleku]

Euro design emphasizes mechanics. American design emphasizes theme. When the latter is dripping with theme and nearly devoid of meaningful interesting mechanics (or an abundance of randomness - see nearly every Lovecraftian game) it evolves into Ameritrash.

Eurotrash is uhhhhh, the Dr. Who board game. Or the fans that play it. Dealer's choice.

Ameritrash has evoled into being the catch all phrase for any theme based game, regardless of its mechanics (thats how I'm hearing it used by the majority of people at least).  So I think people are just naturally starting match it by saying 'Eurotrash' as the catch all to any kind of euro/econ game.

[Jeff Kelly]

My first reaction would be to call that label unfair because the boom the 'Euro-style' games have created revitalized an already dead business. A business that consisted almost entirely of obtuse nerd games with book-sized rulesets and limited appeal you'd need an advanced level math degree (and a weekend) to play or licensed shovel ware or reissues of the same old board games like Risk or Monopoly.

On the other hand there's such an insane amount of games coming out today - most of which is crap - that the label is entirely earned.

[Yegolev]

Recently played Cash N' Guns, Lifeboat, Panic Station, and Intrigue.  Cash N' Guns was quick and easy fun.  Lifeboat was too much work for the fun, plus we have multiple sociopaths in our group so we were never going to make it to shore in the first place; First Mate kept fucking me in the ass.  Panic Station is one I'd play again.  Intrigue was interesting but I'm too much of a gentile to be good at it.