The Boardgame Thread

[Rasix]

Do you have an off switch?

[ghost]

Looking for suggestions for a cpl of new boardgames:

1. Good ones that can be played solo. I must admit I love Pandemic.

2. My daughter, who is 7, also wierdly enough loves playing Pandemic (even though she doesn't get all the rules) and we are now playing Rebel Assault. Looking for games, not kiddie ones, that we can play together..probably more of the co-op/adventure style. (She doesn't lose well).

This is a little different suggestion, but Memoir '44 is a great game that kids can grasp, and it will incorporate a little bit of cool history.  It is a 1 v 1 game, but I haven't found it to be super competitive with my son who is 7.  I help him along and it's cool.  Now he can beat me at times by himself.

[jgsugden]

Seafall Update (more above):

Prologue + 3 games into it.  My succinct thoughts:

1.) There are a lot of rules to learn and ingest.  They're not well written.
2.) The game can get ugly - don't play with the thin skinned.  A backstab at the right time can be felt for the rest of the campaign.
3.) Games are running surprisingly long.  We set up, play 30 to 40 turns - and it takes 3 hours.  We've seen turns take more than 15 minutes when there were complexities in an exploration.
4.) Each game has been more enjoyable than the previous ones.
5.) I recommend the game only to experienced gamers that love the idea of Legacy.  You need to invest time into the game before it will feel like you're getting a good return on your investment.

[Soln]

Good Miami Dice Seafall final review (spoiler: they gave up after prologue+6 games for 21 hours): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJoZA_V9b5I

edit: I'm still kinda interested, maybe for a v2

[Hawkbit]

Looking at the thematic horror explorer games, is there one that stands out? I'm looking at Eldrich Horror, Mansions of Madness 2ed and Betrayal at HH now, are there others that are more worthwhile?

I need to keep it somewhat rules-light, my group gets bored when things get bogged down in rules. Story is important, so is cooperative play.

[Goldenmean]

Looking at the thematic horror explorer games, is there one that stands out? I'm looking at Eldrich Horror, Mansions of Madness 2ed and Betrayal at HH now, are there others that are more worthwhile?

I need to keep it somewhat rules-light, my group gets bored when things get bogged down in rules. Story is important, so is cooperative play.

I can't speak to the new edition of Mansions of Madness because I only have first edition, and they've supposedly changed a fair amount, but I've played the other two plenty.

The fact that you use the term "bogged down" makes me think that Betrayal at House on the Hill might be more your speed. Eldritch Horror is a faster play than Arkham Horror was, but it can still run for four hours or more, especially if you're new to the game. BaHH plays quickly, and has pretty simple and intuitive rules. I always have a problem reviewing BaHH because so much of it depends on which scenario you end up with (and that's determined in the course of the game, so it's not like you can just pick a good one in advance). Some scenarios end up being pretty excellent and thematic, and I've had some where both sides just run to two separate rooms and just sit rolling dice until they get sufficient successes to win. *yawn*

One downside for your group might be that it's only semi-cooperative. The first chunk of the game is completely cooperative while everyone explores the house but at some point the haunt will begin and at that point one of the players is revealed as a traitor. This is completely random. The traitor doesn't know they're the traitor until the dice fall, so it's not like they've been secretly sabotaging the group all along. At that point you will determine which scenario you're playing and the remaining good guys will read their book and the traitor will read his book and you'll each find out what you're meant to be doing now. It's still a pretty collaborative experience, but if you're going for 100% coop, this isn't quite that.

They're all pretty decent games though. If you want to err on the side of more role-playing story based stuff, MoM is probably the game for you. 1E was essentially a limited Cthulhu RPG game session in a box. 2E is much the same except they automated the GM portion of it, so it's entirely cooperative.

[eldaec]

Looking at the thematic horror explorer games, is there one that stands out? I'm looking at Eldrich Horror, Mansions of Madness 2ed and Betrayal at HH now, are there others that are more worthwhile?

I need to keep it somewhat rules-light, my group gets bored when things get bogged down in rules. Story is important, so is cooperative play.

Eldritch horror is ok, but you really need some or all of the small box expansions. The large box ones with extra boards just gum up the game, but the small boxes add enough design to the basic system to create interest.

As pointed out above, it is a 2 to 3 hour game.

Also I wouldn't play it with fewer than 4 characters. With 2 plauers you need to be able to run two each. With 3 you can get away with running the guy who is good at buying shit as a bot to distribute loot.

[ghost]

Arkham Horror base set would be okay, but I think it's a little bit over the top for a non-gaming group.  Too many rules and pieces and whatnot.  Might check out horror at house on the hill first.  I'm actually surprised someone hasn't come out with a Resistance or Werewolf style game with a  Cthulhu style theme.  You could also consider some of the Flying Frog Productions stuff.  Some people hate their games, for various reasons, but some love them.  Could fit the bill for what you are looking for.

[lamaros]

Played a few games of Triumph & Tragedy this week.

I've not really played any wargames before, and though this one is allegedly more 'euro' in some ways I enjoyed it a lot.

I've ordered a copy from GMT of the second edition.

[schild]

Played a few games of Triumph & Tragedy this week.

I've not really played any wargames before, and though this one is allegedly more 'euro' in some ways I enjoyed it a lot.

I've ordered a copy from GMT of the second edition.

Does something make it less neckbeardy?

[Sky]

Whar ar teh WARLORDS

[Ard]

edit:  nevermind, wrong game.

[lamaros]

Played a few games of Triumph & Tragedy this week.

I've not really played any wargames before, and though this one is allegedly more 'euro' in some ways I enjoyed it a lot.

I've ordered a copy from GMT of the second edition.

Does something make it less neckbeardy?

Depends what you think the neckbeardy bits are.

[luckton]

Amazon is running a buy 2 get 1 free sale.

Grabbed Lanterns, Catan, and Castle Panic. Some other really good pics in there, but I figured I needed to flesh out on some of the basics for the fam. Also, I needed to get my geek card back for not having Catan in my collection.

[ghost]

Ran through Star Wars:  Rebellion a couple of times the other day.  It's really, really good.  I'm always a little dubious about the high production FF stuff, but it's really well done. 

Played a few games of Mr. Jack with the boy.  It's a great little deduction game that takes just 15 minutes or so to play. 

Ra:  the Dice Game is something I picked up quite a bit ago but haven't played because I've decided that I just don't like all of the Yahtzee variants.  This one isn't quite a Yahtzee variant, but it certainly is much more fun to me than D-day Dice or King of Tokyo/New York.  I still dig Elder Sign okay. 

Blood Rage is another one we've been playing a lot lately.  It's totally bad ass.  I'm a big fan, even if it's overdone for what it is.  It's a great game. 

[Goldenmean]

Lots of good stuff lately, especially with Essen releases starting to sneak in.

If you're at all into Uwe Rosenberg stuff, his new one, A Feast for Odin is probably the best of the bunch. Adds back a lot of the variability that was missing from Caverna in the form of occupation cards, but without them feeling broken like many of Agricola's did. It's got some interesting twists on the formula, but it's still a worker placement game. If you hate those, this isn't going to change your mind. The thing that most differentiates it from the rest of his harvest games is your personal board which you fill with the goods you acquire from the worker placement spaces. Your board includes several spaces that generate income for you, or give you bonus goods every turn if you manage to surround them, and a boatload of negative points that you just need to cover any way possible to not get dinged at the endgame. There are specific placement rules that make for a really interesting minigame as you try to optimize placement on these boards "Hrm, if I craft this item, then I can use it to cover up those -6 points, but maybe if I place it here instead, then in a few actions, I could be generating free ore every turn, or maybe if I place it there, I can increase my income. No wait, I can't place it there, it's adjacent to another green good. Maybe I should try to take one of those trading spaces and upgrade it to a blue", etc. It's an interesting puzzle that's only going to get more interesting as people play more and optimize paths to early bonuses/income spaces.

Another game I've been playing a lot of recently is Lorenzo il Magnifico. This was an Essen pre-order for me, but I think it should be showing up at retailers pretty soon. This is another worker placement game, but it's a really tight, constrained one, and it's the WP game I've most wanted to strangle the player ahead of me for taking the space I wanted. Workers in this game have varying values and some action spaces require a minimum strength before taking them, or produce better results depending on the strength of the worker entering them. Three workers are set via die roll for all players every round and one is base value 0, though one of the resources can also be spent to increase their strength to enter a space. Most of the worker placement spaces will be filled with a card every round, and the action in that space will be acquiring that card. Cards are broken into four colored types. Generally speaking, green cards are provinces and produce resources, yellow cards are buildings and consume resources and have some sort of action on them, generally "Consume these resources to produce other resources, or VP, etc.", blue cards are people and provide either consistent bonuses or very powerful one time only effects, and purple cards are projects, and are generally VP at the end of the game and a large single use influx of resources. Other WP spaces are used to run the actions on your green/yellow cards, varying on the strength of the worker you use, or to change player order, or some spaces which just give you a modicum of resources if you have nothing better to take. I said it before, but this is a really tight WP game. In a 4 player game, there's 16 workers in play and only about 24 spaces to place workers, many of which are "Well, I guess I have nothing better to do with this 1 point worker" sorts of affairs. Lots of people dislike WP games because they feel like multiplayer solitaire. This is not one of those games. If you are not paying attention to your opponents and gauging what cards they're going to take or how best to block them from things they want for their engine while still benefitting you, you're going to lose, badly. There's a lot more to this game that I haven't covered, but if you like euros, highly recommend taking a look at this.

In a very different direction, Clank is pretty good fun as well. It's a deckbuilder game in the Ascension "Shared central deck" style, but it plays out on a board. Cards generate boots to move between spaces, or swords to prevent yourself from taking damage from goblins and the like (or to kill monsters that show up in the central deck) or generate resources to buy more cards to build your deck. Many cards also generate "Clank" which are little cubes that go into a pool to represent how much noise you've been making moving around the dungeon, because occasionally when refreshing the central deck, you'll trigger a dragon attack, at which point all the clank goes into a bag with some neutral cubes and you draw to see which one of you (if any) pissed off the dragon and gets a chunk taken out of them. This is a sort of hybrid race/points game. You're going for treasures of various value. Easy ones are towards the top of the dungeon, but are worth fewer points. More valuable ones are at the bottom of the dungeon. Game end accelerates once one person gets out with dragon attacks coming faster and faster until everyone is out or the people still inside are dead. This is a fun, quick little game. It's got some random elements, but is still pretty heavily skill driven, and there's more approaches to victory than you might think, because in addition to the treasures you're going for, there are also cards worth VP in the deck, so you could focus most of your efforts on building up VP that way and just duck in and out quickly to get the cheapest treasure and still win. I really like the idea of a deck building game driving the mechanics for something else instead of being the game in and of itself. Trains did this as well though with a Dominion style deckbuilder and a blander theme, and I enjoyed that as well. Hoping to see more of this in the future.

[eldaec]

Note sure what you did there but your links come out like this...

url=http://"https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/177736/feast-odin"

[Goldenmean]

Note sure what you did there but your links come out like this...

url=http://"https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/177736/feast-odin"

That's... interesting. I think the initial problem was that I put quotes around the url, and somehow that got mangled even further by the system trying to correct for that. Fixed now.

[Soln]

Anyone have any experience with Tabletop Simulator.?  It's on Steam with many free Workshop apps.  I've been too lazy to learn VASSAL, so this seems superior.  BUT I'm hoping there's a lobby somewhere for casual play.

[eldaec]

I've tried it, I'm not a big fan.

Far better production values than vassal, but generally Vassal modules are better structured so long as you are willing to learn the keyboard shortcuts and genuinely understand the rules of whatever you are playing.

Neither are a great way to learn or try out new stuff.

Vassal is great for getting in practice in anything you want to play competitively. Not sure I'd recommend either product for casual knockabout.

[Shannow]

I actually preferred Cyberboard, but again it's for games that you already know the rules and mechanics of. Just felt cleaner and easier to use than Vassal.

[Soln]

I need a lobby, somewhere with open servers.  Tabletop Sim seems to have that (just a list of open servers).  Does Cyberboard and Vassal support that?  I always thought they were exclusive 1:1.

[eldaec]

Played some Feast For Odin. I am a fan.

It is tighter than it looks and nice to be doing something other than growing pumpkins in a Rosenburg game.

[Sky]

Kingdom Death Monster reprint and rules upgrade KS is live: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15

Exceeded the original project's total in dollars and backers in less than two hours. 43 left to go.

I'm in for the upgrade plus all the expansions, promos and pinups. No regerts.

[Teleku]

In for the upgrade pack plus chest/expansion.

Wish they'd offer a tier to get all of the previous expansions along with the upgrade, and not a another full box.  I only got the base box before.

edit:  Having said that, I see they have a sale for half off on all the previous expansions.  Anybody have suggestions on the best ones?

[Goldenmean]

edit:  Having said that, I see they have a sale for half off on all the previous expansions.  Anybody have suggestions on the best ones?

TLDR version, I would say Dragon King, Sunstalker, and Gorm are generally considered top three. More detailed rundown of all of the options follows:

Depends on what you want out of an expansion, really.

Personally, the ones I like the most are the ones that change the game the most. Dragon King and Sunstalker both have variant campaign options that can change up your game quite a bit. Of those, I think the consensus is roughly that DK has the better variant campaign, but SS is the better hunt. if you have to choose between the two, I'd vote DK. Flower Knight also has a variant campaign, but it's pretty minimal compared to the other two. FK also has some ridiculously good equipment on a pretty easy fight. If you're looking to notch down the difficulty a bit, FK is a good choice.

After that, expansions either come in alternate monsters to hunt, or alternate nemeses to face. I feel like you get more use out of additional monsters to hunt, because you'll be facing more of those.

Gorm is generally regarded as the best of the hunt expansions. It replaces the lion, and adds interesting variant progression to your settlement. Spidicules replaces the antelope as a tier two hunt monster. Spidicules doesn't get a lot of love because there's some nice gear on the antelope that you're locked out of, and not a ton of great gear on it but it's an interesting fight. It's also one of the spendier expansions though, so if you've got limited money, this is probably worth giving a miss. Dung Beetle Knight is a mid tier difficult hunt expansion with some interesting alternate ways to progress your settlement. Lion God is the most difficult hunt quarry. I saw a survey on BGG geek that seemed to imply that a vanishingly small percentage of people had actually beaten a level 3 lion god. If you want nightmare mode, this is the expansion to grab.

Of the alternate nemeses, lion knight is a sort of comedic option that's easily slotted into any campaign. If you're getting sick of the grimdark, he's a good choice. Slenderman is a super creepy option that replaces one of the events in the base game that most defines how you build out your settlement to survive, so he's a good choice for jumbling things up. Manhunter is an extremely punishing option that you can plug in anywhere for added difficulty.

And then there's the lonely tree, which is, uhhh, a tree. It's a cool model, but it's widely regarded as being the worst expansion and for completionists only with terrible cost to content ratio.

[Goldenmean]

Oh, I guess this still counts as an expansion, but there's also the green knight armor expansion. That's a special set of armor crafted from pieces from Flower Knight, Dung Beetle Knight, Lion Knight, Gorm and Manhunter. I thiiink that's all of them, but I might be missing some. It's basically some brokenly powerful gear that's also almost impossible to craft in a single campaign even if you are actively trying for it to the exclusion of everything else.

This is another one of those things where unless you are being a nutso crazy completionist, there's not much reason to have it.

[Goldenmean]

Oh, and since we're plugging new editions of games on Kickstarter, there's a new edition of Vast up right now as well

Vast is one of those things that got a lot of praise from board game nerds, but I don't think really made much of a splash with anyone else, mostly because it was basically a kickstarter only deal unless you grabbed a copy at a con this past year.

The most notable thing about Vast is that it is probably the most asymmetric board game you will ever play that still somehow feels elegant. Lots of games have variant player powers or some sort of hero/dungeon master duality, but in Vast, all of the different players are playing completely different sorts of games on the same board and all interacting with each other in fairly clever ways. The setting is traditional fantasy, and the original game has five different characters you can play as. It looks like the new edition is looking to add some, but I don't know how they work, so I'm going to skip describing them.

The knight is your traditional hero. Her ultimate goal is to kill the dragon, and to go about this she spends most of the game running around exploring the cave, completing quests, and collecting treasures and gaining levels by doing various things until she's powerful enough to do so. The knight's playing a pretty traditional pseudo-RPG like Descent or the like.

The dragon has been asleep for millenia and is just waking up. It is trying to shake off its slumber and eventually escape from the cave to go pillaging the countryside. It does this by hoarding treasures, eating goblins, and revealing certain areas of the cave. The dragon is playing a strange sort of hand management game. You get a random selection of cards every turn, and you can spend different combinations of those cards to use different powerful dragon abilities.

The goblins are trying to kill the knight. The goblins have three different tribes, and so unlike the knight or the dragon have three different pieces to move around the playing area, except half the time they're not going to be on the play area at all. Goblins are basically playing a population management/guerilla warfare sort of game. They're goblins, so the knight or the dragon can more or less effortlessly kill them in a fair fight, which reduces the population of that tribe and knocks them off the board for a while, but goblins are good at sneaking around the unexplored sections of the cave, building up their population and then making surprise attacks to whittle the knight down.

The thief is trying to break his curse of eternal life by carrying a certain amount of loot out of the cave. He's immortal, but he's easily (temporarily) killed, and he drops what he's carrying when he dies (and most of the other players have uses for what he's carrying), but he's not really anyone's primary target, so he's playing a sort of risk vs. reward game. He can be basically invisible and untargettable, or very fast, but not both at the same time, so he's got to carefully balance how much of a threat the other players see him as at any particular time. He's also got a sort of leveling up system similar to what the knight has

And then the final role is of the cave itself. The cave is trying to collapse. That's right. This is the only game I'm aware of in which a suicidal cave is one of the possible character choices. The cave, as you might expect, is weird. Other characters can move through the cave area, placing new tiles down by entering unexplored areas of the map, but the cave on its turn can place new unexplored tiles and sort of indirectly shape the game. The cave also collects omens which it can use to power certain special abilities. It's kind of playing a weird set collection game, but mostly it's playing the other players, by indirectly nudging them to complete its goals for it, or by hampering the progress of a faction close to victory. Once a certain number of a certain type of tiles have been placed, then the cave can begin collapsing, and instead of laying tiles every turn, it's removing tiles every turn. Run out of tiles, and it's game over everyone else. Victory for the cave.

I should note that this is not a five player only game. It is possible to play with any combination of players from two to five (or possibly seven in this new edition). There are variant cards so that every possible combination works, so even if you're playing with the knight and there's no dragon to kill, there are other options.

This is a really, really clever game. It's also more than any other game, one that you will not entirely grok the first time you play, because your opponents are literally playing a different game than you are. I'm really not kidding about that. The rulebook has like one page of shared rules and then the rest are all character specific. About halfway through the first game you'll probably have a pretty good idea of how the other factions work, just enough for you to figure out all of the ways in which you really screwed up earlier in the game, and you will probably think "Oh man, I'm going to play one of them next time. They seems brokenly good" and then you will do so and realize all of the limitations they've been working under, and you will rinse and repeat that until you have cycled through all of the factions once, and then you will be ready to properly begin playing the game. More than most, this is not a game for dabblers.

[Teleku]

That's ok, half of the shit I was looking at (and what you just mentioned) already sold out before I could buy.

Guess I'll see if they add in some more tiers in the kickstarter, or maybe I'll just do the Ancient Gold Lantern tier and sell my current box.  A big part of this is to get nice miniatures to paint/display, so kind of want to get everything.

[Sky]

I was really tempted to do the Satan pledge and sell off my v1.0 box, all the expansions, pinups and promos. It would actually end up cheaper than the Gambler pledge but I hate the hassle of having to sell off all the stuff.

Mostly I just wanted the Satan shirt 

[Soln]

Thanks GM for the recommendation about Vast.  I think I had heard it was good, but I wasn't tracking it. Just pledged. 

Will KD ever be more widely available?  I kind of monitor KD like I do with Dwarven Forge. 

[Goldenmean]

A while back Poots made a post about some of the things he was working on with the KD franchise, and one of them was a more retailer friendly PVC game called Kingdom Death: Quest. I think that's probably as close as you're going to get to a wider release of KD:M, but there's been absolutely no details on it, and it was on a list of more than a dozen other things, so who knows when or if it will ever materialize.

[schild]

I messaged Poots asking why there wasn't an Upgrade Kit + All The Expansion + Gambler Box option. He said because most people already had the expansions.

I was like "you are wrong."

[schild]

He opened up more of the Devil's Tier.

In other news:

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Twin Satan's Lantern

Kill me.

[Rendakor]

Kingdom Death seems kind of interesting but way too pricey. If any of you guys are buying the new one and want to unload the original at a discount, let me know.