I just got Agricola Advanced Edition for my birthday, and I’ve been playing a version of it with my wife and 8-year-old. Our first game was without minor improvements and professions. We added those in on the second play-through. Both times, we’ve played cooperatively, trying for the highest combined score that we could, while letting our daughter just jam out on raising animals.
Which worked fine, until I told her she could turn the animals into meat, and she looked at me like I’d personally just eaten our pet cat. I backtracked and told her that maybe she was just raising the animals as pets and giving them to neighbors as pets, and they were giving her food in thanks, and that worked for awhile. Until it came time for her to do so, and she burst into tears thinking about how much she was going to miss those animals.
Christ almighty, kid. I love your big heart, but I just wanna play a game.
My “animal friendly” explanation is “I’m sending these to the petting zoo and they are giving me food in exchange” (note this a joke explanation, I don’t seriously contemplate it)
I do often go the bake bread option – esp if I have a occupation/improvement that makes it more attractive.
Personally I have no problem eating meat.
Brian
(some folks in my game group knick-name the game “Misery Farm”
The original Milton Bradley game of “Life”. Just for the fun of filling a car with pegs and moving it over plastic mountains. It also had one of the best “spinners”.
The original had a choice of two paths at the beginning. (as the game’s TV commercial said) “…you could go to college just to get a lot of knowledge…” or proceed right to a career. Everyone figured out that the college path increased your chance of winning the game. So a whole generation grew up with this impressed into their subconscious.
A while ago I played a more modern version and was surprised to see that there was also a “celebrity” path.
We’ve been playing Star Wars: Outer Rim. It’s a character-based adventure game where you take on the role of Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, or others and complete smuggling runs, bounties, or other jobs. You gear up yourself and your ship while you fly around to different planets trying to get stuff done and avoiding trouble.
It’s well balanced. There’s no one best way to win. Being flexible and managing your risks is helpful. It’s fairly easy to come back from behind. Players can’t usually directly attack each other, but it’s possible with certain cards. First-time play-though is tricky, but once everyone understands the basics it goes fast. Length of game can easily be tuned.
You can get some great emergent story lines while playing. (Role playing is optional, but great fun if you do.) Playing as Jyn Erso, I committed some sabotage on Lothal. Later on the same turn, Imperials were looking for some criminals. I “helped” them out, they paid me well, and I left with their gratitude. :trickster:
This weekend was Formula D. Not one of my favorites, but everyone else in my group really enjoys it. The race was similar to most of the times I’ve played. One player got lucky early, and took an insurmountable lead. There was a lot of jockeying back and forth for positions 2-7, and the last place car in the first couple of rounds, who seemed to be in an almost hopeless situation, came from way behind to come in third. I took some reckless gambles because I wound up so far behind the leader, and crashed and burned. Still, vroom, vroom, kinda fun.
We also enjoy Star Wars Outer Rim. What’s funny is to me it is essentially a role playing game where I pretend to be whatever character I am playing but to my wife, who barely cares about Star Wars, it is a game of cards, dice and modifiers yet we both like it.
I played A War of Whispers a couple of times this week. It’s a game I was very interested in playing but I got it last summer so I’ve had to wait a year to play.
We just bought Photosynthesis at our house. Anyone else play this? It’s a game where you…grow trees. They grow faster as the sun (which rotates around the board) shines on them, and as they’re planted in richer soil. It’s more fun than it sounds. We’ve only had time to play it once, and we were all trying to figure out strategies, so we need to play it a few more times to really get it. It’s definitely unlike anything we’ve played before, and we all (two adults, a 12 y.o, and a 10 y.o.) had a positive response to it afterward.
We’re also big on Dominion, TTR, and I’ve been teaching my kids poker over the past year or so.
ETA: On TTR, my wife and I love it, as does my 12 y.o. son. He can’t beat us yet, as he’s still working on strategy. He’s the kind of game player, however, that enjoys the experience almost more than winning. He gets lost in the story of it. My 10 y.o. daughter hates it. I think it’s because she’s super competitive, loves to win, and like my son, hasn’t figured out a good strategy for winning. I think she’s frustrated that she can’t pinpoint a path to winning, and so she just sits out whenever we play. It’s definitely a game for older kids, as there’s just so much you need to do to win.
I kickstarted a bunch of board games during lockdown. Finally got a chance to play one last night: Who Goes There? It’s the licensed version of the short story the movie The Thing was based on, which basically means its a licensed version of the movie The Thing, except none of the character look like the guys from the movie.
Really cool game. Obviously, there’s a major traitor mechanic. You spend most of the game running around collecting resources, ultimately hoping to gather enough to survive the helicopter trip back to the mainland. You absolutely need to cooperate with other players to get everything you need, but cooperating means potentially exposing yourself to an infected player. At the same time, the infected players can’t win by just infecting everyone, because they also need resources to survive the helicopter trip, and one of those resources is, “someone to eat.”
We played it twice, which was surprising, because this group usually doesn’t play past 11 or so, but when we finished the first game around that time, both of the other players wanted to go again right away, and we ended up playing until 1:30. It was fun with three players, which is the minimum. Officially it goes to six, but there’s enough parts (if you’ve got all the expansions) to do an eleven player game, with each player in control of a unique character with their own special ability and personal deck of resources.
The theme is the reverse of Settlers of Catan–you’re trying to stop the colonization of the land. Each player takes the role of a powerful spirit with its own idiosyncratic rules.
Mechanically, it’s vaguely like Seven Wonders and Settlers of Catan. Your spirit has distinct rules for operational details. You have cards to play and pieces to move about the board. It’s purely cooperative; you have to defeat the semi-randomized invader pieces as a team. It’s at the sweet spot of predicable vs random; you can see where things are headed, but not exactly.
The difficulty level and complexity is easily tunable, which is great for learning and matching our skill level. The documentation of the game is excellent. It explains how to tune the game for beginners, making it both easier and less complex. And then adding in complexity and/or difficulty.
We’ve only just started into it, but it feels like there’s a lot of replay value. Every spirit plays differently. And the powers you develop will be different each time. I see there’s some expansions which add even more varieties.
We also have Gloomhaven staring at us from the high shelf, but I think it’s going to have to wait a bit before being unboxed.
Some of my friends bought Gloomhaven for “me” for my last birthday, and have been bugging me to break it out ever since. We still haven’t finished our Betrayal: Legacy campaign that we started months before that, and I’ve been very firm with them: no new legacy games until we finish the one we’ve already started. We’ve only got one more scenario to go in that, though, so Gloomhaven is on deck.
We haven’t done any legacy games so Gloomhaven will be our first. Any general advice for how to handle them? Worthwhile trying to keep things in reusable conditions? Or just go all-in on never replaying?
For my group, we went all in. So many torn up cards and tiles…just, so many… . But that’s sort of part of the fun.
And, here’s the thing for me. I’ve got just, so many games, it’s hard to get them to the table. I’ve got quite a few that I’ve never played, and several that I don’t really ever expect to. I’ve got several campaign games that have seen some play but never a full campaign. If I think logically about it, after I play through a full campaign with a game like that, I’ve already gotten more gameplay out of it than most of my games, and if I get a chance to play another full campaign of something, I’m probably going to want to try one of my other campaign games.
But, that’s assuming you’re confident you and your group will actually play a full campaign. I’ve started any number of campaign games that fizzled out. And we’ve been playing Betrayal: Legacy for over a year now, off and on, and that’s not even a very long legacy campaign.
If you are concerned about the length or complexity of the Gloomhaven campaign may I suggest that you try out Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion first. It is very similar to full Gloomhaven but is streamlined a bit and starts off with a few tutorial scenarios that make the complex rules easier to learn.
I love heavy games but I think full a full Gloomhaven campaign would have been too much for our gaming group without the training wheels mode.
. But that’s sort of part of the fun./pic4060782.jpg){kind=link}