I played a lot of games this weekend. My friend, who like me is a avid gamer, celebrated his birthday by inviting people over to his house Saturday for an all-day gaming marathon. We played for twelve straight hours except for a pizza break.
I personally played Tiny Towns, Century: Spice Road, Clank!, two games of Whirling Witchcraft, and HEXplore It.
To recover, I played three more games with my regular Sunday group; Atmosfear, Circadians, and Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria.
Over the weekend, some friends and I had a Halloween-themed get-together with costumes and board games. I was a BPRD field agent/tactical combat mage; we also had an urban fantasy sorcerer, a tiefling warlock, a dragonborn sorcerer, an arcane trickster, and a black cat (it was totally uncoordinated and we just happened to accidentally be a party of spellcasters - and a familiar).
First, we played King of Tokyo: Dark Edition. KoT in its various iterations is a favorite of the group - light, fast, and fun. I was way behind in Victory Points and not doing too well in health, but strung together a series of clutch dice rolls with a synergestic Upgrade Card/Wicked Ability combo, for my best turn I’ve ever had playing that game, and defeated all of the other monsters to become King of Tokyo.
Next, we played Mansions of Madness: 2nd Edition, using the big screen next to the gaming table for the app. We got some clutch puzzle-solving moves, solved the murder mystery, and defeated the Mythos-infused murderer. And only one character went insane! This is another group favorite, that we don’t pull out too often because of the setup and time required.
We finished up with Horrified. We cured the Wolfman, but the Mummy and the Invisible Man kept getting ahead of us and killing villagers. We were one turn away from defeating the Mummy and probably only a couple of turns away from defeating the Invisible Man, but the Invisible Man was in a Frenzy and drove the Terror marker over the limit, and we lost. Kind of appropriate for Halloween to end with Terror overtaking the Town…
We’ve been playing Gloomhaven, as a legacy game. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not a casual game. There’s little room for error.
We’re totally loving Spirit Island, still. We tune it to a level where we don’t have to play perfectly to win. Gives everyone the space to play creatively. We have the two expansions ready for Christmas.
Picked up Mariposas on the weekend.
It’s a lovely theme - the migration of monarch butterflies to and fro across North America. The artwork is fittingly floral and delicate so the general aesthetic of the game is very pleasing.
The gameplay seems nicely complex - the key point is that no one butterfly will make teh round trip to and from Michoacan so as you progress you have to devote some time and effort to letting your butterflies breed.
You mainly score for the number of 4th generation butterflies that you get back to Michoacan so this is your overall goal. However the game is split into seasons and in each season there are sub goals to encourage you to spread your wings, so to speak, and progress further across the continent.
The balance of managing breeding resources across multiple generations of butterfly, scoring seasonal sub-goals and ensuring you have enough of a flock to score points by the end is clearly going to be quite challenging to achieve, but it’s a good fun game (and designed so that it never plays the same way twice) so overall very happy with the purchase.
(Also, it’s the type of game where you are playing vs the board and comparing scores at the end, which is good because while I relish the crushing of my opponents through dastardly stratagems, my wife vastly prefers games where we still like each other afterwards.)
I played The Crew for the first time yesterday. It’s a game I thought was interesting and I’ve been wanting to play it. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s a cooperative trick taking game (which is the unusual concept that interested me). All four people playing are trying to collectively manipulate the way the round is played so certain individuals will end up with particular cards.
But I found myself way over my head. I’ve played trick taking card games but not at the level the other three people at the table had. (One person actually plays bridge professionally.) I could see them picking up their hand and figuring out what cards would be played and in what order. And I had no idea and was just fumbling along. So I would play a card, almost by guess, and they would all look at me in confusion because it was not the card I should have been playing.
I also played Quacks of Quedlinburg, Villages of Valeria, and Taj Mahal. Those went much better.
Yes, imbalance in experience is one problem with The Crew we didn’t anticipate (we had the exact same situation, except we were the experienced bridge players). Lots of games do best with similar experience levels across players, but I didn’t think The Crew would be that way, though in retrospect it makes sense.
Oddly, we had the same experience with Hanabi.
As for what we’re playing, with the kids gone our options have shrunk radically, so a fair amount of Code Names Duet, Port Royal, that kind of thing.
That just means their tactics were not robust against variations. The best co-op games let players take a variety of approaches and players need to adjust their strategies to account for that. It also discourages “quarterbacking”, where one player directs everyone else’s plays.
If you’re looking for a good two-player card game, I highly recommend Mandala.
No, I have to be honest. They were all playing better than me. There isn’t a lot of variation in this game. The goal is clear; either the right people end up with the target cards or you all collectively fail.
I agree quarterbacking can be a problem in co-op games but The Crew addresses this by prohibiting players from talking about what cards they have. The only information you can share is to place one card from your hand face-up in front of you (you still play it as if it’s in your hand). So in the game I was playing, somebody would do something like put a green seven down in front of them and everyone else would look at it and nod their head in understanding. And I would be thinking “What does that mean?”
I have that game and have played it a couple of times. I’m not sure there is a real strategy to it; the illumination mechanism means you are at mercy of shadows created by opponent’s trees, so winning is a little random, but I need to do some more to figure out if there is an optimal placement or sequence strategy.
I received the 2nd Edition of Who Goes There? about a month ago but haven’t even had time to unbox it, and just got Unsettled this week, both Kiskstarter campaigns. So, that will be the bulk of my weekend.
Stranger
The Crew is very very popular in Board Game circles but I know it wouldn’t be for me. My experience with Hanabi has taught me I find limited communication co-op games very stressful and not the good, fun kind of stressful press your luck type games can have. Just stressful stressful.
Yeah, I agree. We simply ignore rules limiting communication. If it makes the game too easy, then we make it more difficult some other way. Quarterbacking falls under the “you’re not the boss of me” general rule.
My main gaming group just had a big board game weekend/micro-convention, something we usually do once or twice a year. This year’s games:
Betrayal Legacy: The OG Betrayal at the House on the Hill is one of my all-time favorite board games. I thought the Legacy version was also really well done. We’ve been playing this Legacy campaign for, I think, two years now, just occasionally sneaking in a scenario or two in between other games. This last weekend was our last scenario. The Traitor (not me) won, Fenrir escaped, and the House on the Hill is now forever a portal to Hell.
A Touch of Evil: 10 Year Anniversary Edition: I’m a big fan of Flying Frog’s big box minis games (they were one of the pioneers of this format at the beginning of the current board game renaissance), and A Touch of Evil was, I think, their second game, and still one of my all-time favorite board games. The 10 Year Anniversary Edition cleans up a few rules, and adds more minis and scenary, and a whole new game mode, the Epic Villain. We decided not to try the Epic Villain Mode (everyone in my group enjoys the game, but we have a couple of players who get upset at losing and always vote for the easiest/simplest mode of any game). It was fun, and the final Showdown still felt Epic. With two Town Elders dead and one a minion of the Villain, and with three of our six Hunters KOed, the last Hunter of the round and the Headless Spectral Horseman struck each other down, and we (as a group) were victorious, and Shadowbrook was saved! (The base game is supposed to be competitive, with an optional co-op mode; I’ve never played the game competitively, which seems weirdly anti-thematic to me).
King of Tokyo: Dark Edition: The various editions of King of Tokyo are a group favorite for a fast, light game. I think I prefer the original with the Evolution deck, but Dark is still fun. This time, I got clobbered fairly early on, but the game moves fast enough that an eliminated player doesn’t have to sit around too long waiting for the next game, and it’s still fun to watch the other monsters clobbering each other.
A Touch of Evil: Dark Gothic: A deck-builder set in the same universe with the same characters (and with a lot of the same art assets) as the board game mentioned above. This is another group favorite, and I really enjoy it, but it can be a bit unbalanced. As sometimes happen, this time Shadowbrook was overwhelmed by Shadows pretty quickly, and we didn’t have much of a chance to play before we lost. Oh, well.
Maximum Apocalypse: A sort of co-op tile-builder dungeon-crawler (where the dungeon is the post-apocalyptic landscape). I really enjoy this game, but its one of the few game I really enjoy but don’t own, which makes me enjoy the opportunity to play it even more. This time, we fought a Cthulhu cult, and destroyed the Altar, and what was left of the world was saved…for now.
Formula D: A car-racing board game, which I think everyone in my gaming group enjoys a lot more than I do. I don’t mind it, but…meh. Not my first choice. Every game, I always seem to make some critical miscalculation. This time, coming out of a curve in the first quarter of the track, everyone ahead of me shifted up to fourth gear (which involves rolling a die for how many spaces you move), so I did too without thinking about it. Unfortunately, they had all rolled low, and wound up three abreast, completely blocking the track, and I didn’t realize how little room there was ahead of me compared to the range on the fourth gear die - I rolled high and had nowhere to go, so I wiped out, and sat there watching everyone else for 3/4 of the race.
Cartographers: A sort of elaborate pen & paper Tetris with Eurogame scoring. Another one everyone in my group likes a lot more than I do. In general, I don’t particularly care for abstract Eurogames, and I don’t enjoy drawing and coloring (fortunately for me this game doesn’t actually score those), but everyone else in my group does, so this is a favorite of everyone but me. I always feel like I’m missing some vital element of gameplay when I play an abstract Eurogame like this, and I often find out when we score at the end that I was, in fact, missing a vital element of gameplay, and that I was playing a different game than everyone else, and wind up with a dismal score. This time I was a solid middle of the pack, but…meh. By the way, there are a couple of other players in my group that also often miss vital gameplay elements in games like this, but they like drawing and coloring as fun activities in and of themselves, so they have fun playing and don’t even really care about the score. Since I don’t enjoy drawing and coloring, and spatial reasoning takes a lot of cognitive bandwidth for me, I wind up feeling like I’m working, not playing a game, and not doing a particularly good job of it.
The Captain is Dead: Dangerous Planet: The OG The Captain is Dead is, I think, kind of a second-tier game for my group - everyone enjoys it, but it’s not on the top of anyone’s list. Still, since it’s something everyone enjoys, it sees a fair amount of table-time. This is the first time we played Dangerous Planet, a stand-alone expansion. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the OG, but it was still fun and quick. Early on, it seemed like we were breezing through, but once the Orange Alerts started hitting, we wound up nearly being overwhelmed, and just barely managed to repair the shuttle and escape.
Clank! with the Adventuring Party expansion: This is another one that I think everyone in the group enjoys more than I do. I don’t mind it, and I usually have fun while I’m playing, but it’s just not something I would specifically choose to play given other choices. Part of the issue is that this is another game where I always feel like I’m not quite grokking it, and I can’t quite wrap my brain around the push-your-luck balance. Somewhat ironically, this time I won, and by a fairly healthy margin.
Overall, I had a good time with the games, even if several of them wouldn’t have made the list if it were entirely up to me. Of course, just spending a whole weekend with a group of good friends was the best part.
We got Incohearent yesterday. It’s easy to learn the game and funny. Incohearent: Family Edition | Board Game | BoardGameGeek
From the link.: Each card has a combination of words on the front that looks like nonsense, but when recited out loud, they sound like the hidden phrased on the back. Try reciting “check kin vin grr sand fur eyes” out loud. Can you hear the hidden phrase? Listen closely…you’ve been saying “Chicken fingers and fries!!” Compete to decode the hidden phrases before the time runs out.
We played Mysterium Park, a streamlined version of Mysterium that doesn’t require the ghost to work so hard. Same basic idea, though.
Played a newer game recently that was really fun with quick and easy rules: Sheepy Time.
It’s a push your luck/race game where you are the sheep someone is counting to go to sleep. You race around the track trying to avoid nightmares. It has very cute art (it looks like a kids game but it isn’t) and was very fun.
I’ve played Gugong before and like it, but didn’t buy a copy as someone in my game group has it. But then there was a “TMG is going out of business” sale and copies were only $20 so I got a copy. Last night I played my copy.
Recently I played Snowdonia and Thurn & Taxis on yucata, planning a virtual game day on the 2nd with some college friends who live far away.
Brian
Snowdonia is such an odd duck, a traditional-appearing worker placement game with a couple of nice twists (weather, and the linearity of the track building). We like it every time we get it out and play it, and then we forget about it for a couple of years.
We’ve been playing a roll-&-write (or really flip-&-fill) called “Welcome To” lately, one of my Christmas gifts. A fun filler game.
My son got Forbidden Island for Christmas, and we’ve been playing that almost daily since. Fun collaborative game.
I’ve played the first three chapters in Expedition to Newdale. It’s part of the Longsdale series with Tyber the Builder and Oh My Goods, which I have played in the past.
I also played Streets, which I got last week. It’s a follow-up to Villagers, which I like.