What Board Games are you playing?

The Game Room
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We just discovered this on BGA and are really liking it. It has a kind of Feast for Odin feel without dragging on, and the midden mechanism is clever.

I had bought Barcelona for my wife for Christmas and we learned it and played it, and will play again today. It is thematically in no way like Unconscious Mind, but the gameplay is finding action intersections on a main board, while also occasionally generating resources on a side board, so it’s mildly reminiscent. It’s also very pretty!

Finally, I picked up ArchaeOlogic on sale for $10 and we played it - kind of like The Search for Planet X (but solving for polyomino placement instead of finding celestial objects). It’s okay.

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One of our favorite newer cooperative games just Kickstarted its 2nd edition, along with a new expansion: Defenders of the Wild 2nd Edition & Critter Moon expansion on Kickstarter. BGG link for the original: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/372649/defenders-of-the-wild

It’s like a lighterweight, cooperative version of Root (you have four “gently asymmetric” animal factions working together to stop the bad evil robots from taking over the forest). Its learning curve is far more beginner-friendly, but it still has enough complexity and balance to make it interesting for seasoned board gamers, too. The different factions are only a little different from each other, while the underlying gameplay rules are the same for everyone (so players don’t feel like they have to learn 4 different games, like they do with Root).

The art is gorgeous and it’s easy to pick up and play. I’ve played it with a few different groups and everyone’s liked it so far.

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We have been playing our shelves recently but I did play one new game and it was pretty good: Etherstone.

It’s a card driven engine building game that reminded me of Ree Arcana in that you draft a hand of seven cards from a giant deck and that is all you have for that game.

It has a pretty interesting art style that reminded me of Aeon Flux (if you know that reference your back probably hurts) and played much quicker than I expected at two players. It had a lot of positive buzz and I liked it but I didn’t love it but it does make for a good weeknight game for us.

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This month I’ve played All In Predictions, Century Spice Road, Explorers of the North Sea, Flip 7, Hamlet, Just One, Moon River, Oaxaca (three times), Oh My Goods, Paris New Eden, Secret Societies, Trailblazers, Tzolkin, Villagers (three times), Virus (twice), and Wondrous Creatures. Which is pretty good considering I was out of town the first part of the month.

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Some games we played recently:

A new Kickstarter that delivered: World Order. It’s like a world politics simulator created by the people who made Hegemony and it’s an area control game that actually works well at two players. Only minor gripe is I was looking forward to playing the EU vs. The USA because my wife is from Europe and I am from the US but at two players one has to play as the EU or the US and the other as China or Russia unless you use the advanced solo bots which I have not learned how to use yet. Still, a really fun game.

I finished the main campaign of Earthborne Rangers after 22 in game days and really enjoyed. So much so that I made two knew ranger decks to try the specialties and backgrounds I didn’t play with and started just exploring the map to finish missions I missed the first time around. I also got one of the new Valley expansions to give my two Rangers that finished something new to do.

Played the recent Underworld expansion to Clank Catacombs. I was a little hesitant because the first expansion kind of left me cold but it turned out this one is great. It has a new separate map you can enter and leave to explore. It is very fun.

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Dave Beck of Paverson games visited our game group in May. I played a hot off the presses copy of Ringyo – You bid with card numbered 1-6 – each card can only be used once, the game is 5 rounds. You get first choice of a bonus and first go for fulling demands. But the core of the game is simultaneous worker placement. You have your own board and play workers on a vertex of three forest tiles. Different workers can activate a different number of areas, and only some can do actions (only Samurai can do forest research)
You can cut down forests as you need the wood for various things, but if you leave it empty you can get flood damage. If there were not multiple folks in my group getting this would seriously consider backing it (Kickstarter stats July)
Also played “Project Daquiri” which is like Distilled combined with San Juan. Someone picks an action and everyone does it, but the picker gets a bonus. In addition, the actions are on a conveyor belt ala Ark Nova so they get better the longer time before using them again. They are typical Distilled actions (gather ingredients, gather equipment/experts, play equipment/experts, sell spirits, distill, etc). This was an early prototype (first physical copy). Not sure when this is planned. Nice that it plays about the same amount of time regardless of the number of players.
I also recently played Shackleton Base. I was excited about this when it was released, but kind of forgot about it then someone in my group brought it.

Brian

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That is cool to get a sneak peek like that. I have their game Luthier and enjoyed it.

We also played Shackleton Base recently and I just got the expansion. Will try it soon.

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We just got Shackleton after playing the first two rounds at a convention. Excited to play it!

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I got that this week but haven’t had a chance to play it yet. How do you feel it compares to Hegemony, if you’ve played that?

The KS I received which I have played is Grinivil. My quick review is “a really good game with really bad art”. It’s a tight city builder with a lot of player interaction. Its central mechanic is a rondelle but you set it up differently for each game and this changes the way each game plays significantly. A strategy which works in one game will be useless in the next.

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I really want to try Hegemony but it feels like that one is not ideal at two players and most of my gaming is at two. This one worked well at two even with the basic bots controlling two factions.

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We just watched a how to play on Hegemony, with the idea we’d play 2-player on Board Game Arena to get the general process, and then find a bigger group at a convention.

Alternately, if you’re on BGA, at some point we could cook up a 3-player or 4-player game. :slight_smile:

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We’re back from a convention, the one we go to annually to try to get in heavier games with a grew we met there. We missed last year, but two years ago we played heavier historicoreligious games (Ierusalem, Ezra and Nehemiah, Hadrian’s Wall, and Golem), this year we found our way into a Japanese theme. Most of the games we taught ourselves on the spot, though one of our friends Instagrams board games and he had played a bunch of them at least once.

Let me know if you have thoughts on/experiences with any of these!

Our first day we got in a bit late, so

Tenby - a light set collection game where tableau cards create a Welsh seaside town. I’d try it one more time, but meh.
Lairs - a cute 2-player game where you each (behind a screen) set up a little physical dungeon on a grid using little walls, monster and traps, and then you take turns going through whatever your opponent concocted. Fun.
Nidavellir - a set collection game themed around collecting together a dwarf army. Meh.
Container - an economic game with set collection goals where everyone is building shipping containers, setting prices on them, selling them, also buying them from others, auctioning them, & collecting. Interesting, not sure yet if I like it.
3 Chapters - a filler game with a bunch of different Grimm’s characters that everyone liked (just not our group). It needs a large group though.

Day 2
Nippon Zaibatsu - a heavier worker placement/area control game, it has mechanisms that require thought and we liked it, plus I always like games with interaction, and this had some via that area control.
Ostia - another heavy game, maybe my favorite of the con? Mancala action that drives a shipping race to benefits and resources. Very clever.

Day 3
Speakeasy - or maybe this was a favorite. Sometimes theme and mechanism don’t match, but they did very much for this. You’re bootleggers trying to get into a Manhattan-like city with neighborhoods, fighting cops, established Mafia, and occasionally each other. Really intricate, and after trying at 7:30 each morning to get the library copy we finally got it. Took more than 4 hours, and people constantly wandered by to check it out.
Hansa Teutonica - we taught this one, one of only two games we played that wasn’t new to us.
Pax Pamir 2e - I don’t even know how to describe this game properly, but it’s the Brits/Russian/Afghanis fighting it out on a simple board with a lot of complex possibilities, and VERY interactive. I need to play it again.

Day 4
Iki (co-taught this) - wandering through a Japanese market collecting goods, building sets, and avoiding being burned to death.
Falling (fun resource collection/engine building) - cute, I’d play it with a group, but just okay.
National Economy - an economic card-collecting/worker-placement engine builder. Okay as filler I think.
Ra (had never played before, loved it) - the most famous auction game among board gamers? Came out 25 years ago.
Jisogi: Anime Studio Tycoon - yeah, you’re building anime films. Mainly fun because we kinda roleplayed as we did it.
Railway Boom - last game and we were fading, and I got a bunch of the rules wrong as we learned it, but absolutely fascinating game in which everything happens by auction. I think there are more than 20 auctions in the game, and they make it work.

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I really like Speakeasy. Just replayed it recently. I missed out on Nippon Zaibatsu but late pledged to the expansion/reprint. It looks great and good at two players.

We have set up on our table for today World Order. A nice long game to get us through the Yom Kippur fast

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I see you and I overlap a lot on a lot of games we like, what counts are you typically playing at? We are mainly 2-player, and a lot of games that are 2-4 or 2-5 have been just okay at 2…and I’m wondering about Speakeasy.

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95% of my gaming is two player (me playing with my wife). The remainder is me sometimes playing solo and once in a while meeting with game groups we have here in the city.

I have only played Speakeasy at two. I could see more players make the game feel different for sure but I enjoyed it at two.