What boardgames did you just play?

The biggest strength of Catan is (imho) the player interactivity. It is one of the few games that promotes consistent trading between the players in a friendly way.
...at least until the first meany abuses the bandit (or robber, or whatever it's called in the english version).

Also played another game of Through the Ages last week - pretty much a disaster. We ended up with a Napoleon player with Classical Army who also got served an airforce right at the start of Age III, so it was impossible for the other players to defend against his military (even with house ruling that Airforce+Nappy only triples tactic power). Didn't help that he drew into 3 of the late game wars either - we had 2 players concede just to prevent him from winning the game. Not really fun.

Android: Netrunner continues to be 4w3s0m3. I splurged on the Genesis cycle and "Creation & Control" so that I can start experimenting with deckbuilding. I played a practice game with a couple prebuilt decks online...a lot more fun once you know what you're doing. And the rulebook isn't THAT bad! It's just written to be more thorough and precise. Maybe that takes away from it being a speedy read, but oh well.

Everything in this game is balanced so well between being thematically and mechanically interesting. Big kudos to the artists for keeping a consistent, cool, and humorous look at what should be just a Blade Runner rip-off. Instead, it's expansive and even immersive. That's right, a tabletop card game is immersive. Sometimes I look up from my deckbuilding and realize I wasn't watching a movie.

My big weakness as a Corp continues to be not knowing how to spend my money very well. I'm usually down to a couple credits while my Runner opponent just racks up the cash. I have to figure out how to keep my economy going while having enough credits to rez ice and perform traces. I squeaked by with a win the last game as NBN only because the Runner wasn't bothering with running at all. Looking forward to jumping into a meta very soon.

I played King of Tokyo twice on Thursday night. We rattled through two games in 40 minutes and I even won one of them!

Ah, King of Tokyo. I want to play that more often. It's just too much to throw those dice.

Played a couple games of The Captain Is Dead tonight. You're part of a spaceship crew trying to repair the engine before the rest of the ship is pummeled to bits by random events. From the flat Photoshop layers alone you can tell it's a Kickstarter game. It's a decent enough co-op that doesn't stumble at what it does, even if it's not exactly original. Like Pandemic, players wander around the board, collecting cards, using those cards, trading cards, yadayadayada. There is an impressive number of roles in the game, no doubt due to stretch goals, but like Pandemic, you're going to find some games harder when you lack certain synergies.

So it's like Space Alert, it's like Pandemic...is it worth playing? Almost. The random events fire after every player turn and get progressively harder to deal with as the game goes on. They're doable enough, I suppose, but this might be a case where the difficulty might need to drop a bit if the players are to accomplish even one thing. Because event conditions can stack, it can be aggressively difficult without necessarily being fun. If you want a spaceship co-op with tight tension, I highly recommend Legendary Encounters instead.

After that, I played in the local Netrunner meta for the first time! I lost twice, of course, but hey, at least I scored as the Runner. I'm still too stingy about making actual runs when I'm building my economy instead. I think what I learned tonight is to take advantage of that small window of opportunity when the Corp has installed ice but is still too hesitant to spend money to rez them. So of course I bought the rest of the expansions so that I can keep up with the other players.

CivCube said:

It's just too much to throw those dice.

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You left out the key word there. I presume you meant something to do with 'fun'.

Subconsciously intentional. I apparently have no motivation.

CivCube said:

Android: Netrunner continues to be 4w3s0m3. I splurged on the Genesis cycle and "Creation & Control" so that I can start experimenting with deckbuilding. I played a practice game with a couple prebuilt decks online...a lot more fun once you know what you're doing. And the rulebook isn't THAT bad! It's just written to be more thorough and precise. Maybe that takes away from it being a speedy read, but oh well.

Everything in this game is balanced so well between being thematically and mechanically interesting. Big kudos to the artists for keeping a consistent, cool, and humorous look at what should be just a Blade Runner rip-off. Instead, it's expansive and even immersive. That's right, a tabletop card game is immersive. Sometimes I look up from my deckbuilding and realize I wasn't watching a movie.

My big weakness as a Corp continues to be not knowing how to spend my money very well. I'm usually down to a couple credits while my Runner opponent just racks up the cash. I have to figure out how to keep my economy going while having enough credits to rez ice and perform traces. I squeaked by with a win the last game as NBN only because the Runner wasn't bothering with running at all. Looking forward to jumping into a meta very soon.

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Netrunner is sweet, a buddy and me play every weekend. Still cant quite get the hang of playing Corp

Spidernova said:

Netrunner is sweet, a buddy and me play every weekend. Still cant quite get the hang of playing Corp

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Yeah, I'm still very green when it comes to, well, both sides, so I'm still learning the ins and outs. One thing that seems to pop up for me is timing your runs and agendas. If you're the Runner, it's good to get aggressive with the runs early before the Corp has a chance to erect ice. Even after the Corp has a ton of ice installed, it's good to make at least one run to force him or her to spend credits for rezzing. Keep the Corp poor so that you can put your obviously well-constructed deck into action.

It's a different game for the Corp but timing must also be considered. Because you always get to go first, you have a chance to set the tempo for potentially the entire game. This allows you to play mind games with the Runner if you're really good--"Oho, look at that remote server! It might have an agenda! Or a Snare! Go on!" Decks with newer expansions also have faster draws that affect your hand size and let you scour your R&D for what you need (*cough* Jackson Howard *cough*). But even if you don't have newer cards, your first priority as Corp--from what I can see so far for myself--is to present the Runner with more options than he/she has confidence considering, then exploit that hesitation ruthlessly.

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of playing Power Grid with six players. We only got halfway through before the coffee shop closed, but oh man, I want to do that again, especially now that everyone knows how to play. Like one of my friends said, "It's straightforward but very good."

I used to play monopoly before all the time.. I no longer play and no one wants to play anymore. My uncle even showed me a game of life board game once but no one was there to play.. it was sad. We sometimes used to play up to 8 player monopoly games vs being solitary with a board game and have no one to play with.

Cards Against Humanity for the 2nd time (3rd if you count playing an online version last month). I can easily see all the complaints people have about it becoming easily overplayed and repetitive, and a lot of the cards do suck, but when it works and you have a group that loves that kind of humour it's great.

Maniacal said:

Cards Against Humanity for the 2nd time (3rd if you count playing an online version last month). I can easily see all the complaints people have about it becoming easily overplayed and repetitive, and a lot of the cards do suck, but when it works and you have a group that loves that kind of humour it's great.

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Oh yeah, it's great as:

a) A party game to be played once every so often
b) A game that can be played with alcohol/weed where people inevitably getting bored/distracted isn't such a big deal.

In that sense it's a great game. It's usually able to hold my attention for like 30-45 mins. It's just really easy to get burned out on when all of your friends have it and you end up playing it at every party you go to.

Gosh, Las night I had a weird dream of playing scrabble with some mentally handicapped person who simply got over excited for ages every time he placed a single letter on the board.

'No no no, try to make a word'
Places 1 letter on the board 'Look, look, look, GLEEEEEE!'
NOOO, ok look, just try to place all your piece's on the board ...
Places 1 letter on the board. Appears to be having a permanent braingasm.

Why are my dreams so weird?

Alas, I don't think I was in a good spot to learn Madeira the other night. I'll have to read the rules before watching Rahdo...

Valley of the Kings might have perfected the deckbuilder without needing a single expansion. There are just enough contrasting elements to keep your head busy: Should I switch some cards on the pyramid to delay someone else? Should I play an action? Should I entomb a card in my hand? Argh, don't forget the colored set collection in your tomb! And the historical flavor text is just delightful. Play it! You won't be gypped.

Played Keyflower for the second time. Like Race for the Galaxy, it's taking a while for me to learn this one, but I think I get it. I wish I wasn't learning games at 8:00 pm sometimes.

Has anyone played the new X-COM board game yet?
I am somewhat inclined to buy the thing, but I am not sure if it has enough replay value for the price. Would be looking forward to get a user review on that one...

Small World - I started playing without knowing a blasted thing. Five minutes later, I was smiling on the inside. What a perfect little gateway game. You have all your choices lined up next to the board, with enough randomized humor to pull in anyone. Wealthy Orcs! Bivouacking Ratmen! Mounted Humans! (Uh...don't think about that too much.) It's probably not worth buying the thousand expansions, but for what it is, it's another good introduction to boardgaming.

Last Will - This game is funny. Spend all your cash to get matched by your deceased uncle's estate! So you end up with ridiculous situations where your huge mansion depreciates down to nothing, the consort lives in a carriage, you take your horses with you on boating trips, and your old friend stops by to help spend the dough...you know, he's a good friend. I want to try the expansion, Getting Sacked, where you have to quit your job because you're making money. And yet, the real currency is time. The more actions you have, the more opportunities for spending. I imagine it's a lot harder to do with four or five players, since they're blocking all the potential numbers of actions you can choose from.

Alchemists - I gotta say. This is a dorky hobby, but this game is really dorky-looking. Huge player screens + phone app to read hidden cards = a ridiculous sight in the coffee shop, especially if you're playing on a smaller table. It's a good game, though! You have to deduce which ingredients belong to which compound. You can also ride off of other players' guesses and make enough points to win as well, if deduction isn't your cup of tea. Its appearance is just over the top, though.

Anyone else knows "Arimaa"?

It is an abstract-strategy-game that can be played with chess-pieces on a chess board but has a completely different, easy-to-learn, hard-to-master ruleset.

Instead of simply "killing" the opponents pieces by moving onto them, you can push, pull and freeze them.
You can kill a piece by moving it in an unprotected trap but that takes quite a lot of planing and is quite rare as most games end with about 80% of the pieces still alive.
Also It is impossible to draw the game.
The player to either get a pawn to the other side or eliminate his opponents pawns first wins.
There also is a smart way to counteract the first-move-advantage:
The second moving player get's to adjust his initial piece-setup to his opponent.
According to official statistics this results in a win-loss-draw ratio of:
50.7% - 49.3% - 0%
Chess on Grandmaster-level has:
27% - 17% - 56%

So it is quite well suited for competative play. Unfortunately very few people know how to play and those who do so for a longer time are just as unbeatable for a newbie as in chess so it's easy to get discouraged.

That actually sounds really cool. I'll have to try that out next time I'm doing a 2-player thing.

Played YINSH and ZERTZ again for the first time in a while, this time with someone new to the GIPF Project. What classics. ZERTZ was especially intense in the second game, as we were removing just the right tiles to cause a potential chain reaction. Kris Burm has somehow expanded simple move types from chess and checkers into these masterpieces that can scale incredibly fast with skilled players. I already placed an order on GIPF...I'm drooling for the full six-game meta-experience.

Played Core Worlds (with expansions) on Saturday. Overall, a pretty good sci-fi themed deck builder, although it suffers from the same issue that almost all Dominion-alikes suffer from, in that there's very few way to actually interact with the other players. You can take the cards you think they might want, and theres a couple of things that let you (re)move their counters on the "Galactic Order" tiles (you get counters there for playing certain cards, and can either take them off to get a 1-time bonus, or leave them there for the possibility of VPs), but thats about it. I didn't come across any way to interfere with my opponents hands or their board state, or the actions they're taking.