What boardgames did you just play?

Played some Last Will the other day. I love the silly ideas you get in the game like taking your horse and your girlfriend on a boat trip. The mind boggles.....

Also there is a poll on the paradox forums about board games at the moment. I imagine its because they have recently brought White Wolf Publishing. Link is here.
 
Had a few more games of Dead of Winter. Definitely my favourite of the myriad of zombie games around, but after half a dozen plays of it, it's beginning to get repetitive - something rather inevitable for this kind of relatively structured game with set scenarios. Managed to get a win as the traitor without anyone else even realising there was a traitor until I caused a 5 point morale drop over a single turn, thus winning me the game before anyone had a chance to vote me out. Which was pretty damn satisfying.

Also played Panamax for the first time yesterday, and I enjoyed it a lot. The trade off between your company and personal funds, investing in other people, sharing ships, moving other peoples' stuff around and so on leads to all sorts of interactions that, as a first timer, I didn't foresee at all and I never put together any kind of coherent strategy, but I can see a lot of depth in it. Definitely one I'll want to play again.

And finally I suppose I must admit to rather enjoying playing Tanto Cuore recently. It's Dominion with anime maids, and suffers from the flaws of that game (most significantly, the fact that you might as well not be playing with other people), but said anime maids make up for much of that.
 
Got to play a medium length 3 player game of Archipelago at the weekend. One of the other players was the rebel and they ended up winning as we didn't realise soon enough and got rid of some early evolution cards that would have helped reduce the rebellion. Also the other non rebel play kept declaring wars that increase the rebellion by one and decrease the population by 1 (rebels need to be a greater number than pop to win). Still it was fun and I want to be the rebel next time!

Also the same weekend I drunkenly played a couple of games of Machi Koro. I won one and lost one then fell asleep on the sofa drinking a beer! Really colourful and fast to play but I got the impression there is definitely a best way to play (I'm looking at you mines).

Also slowly playing through more of Memoir 44. We have a nice hand drawn and coloured spreadsheet detailing our overall points from game to game. I'm losing but we need to play the second leg of the last match so anything could change! I do like the simplicity of this game but sometimes the order card system is very frustration!

Would love to try Panamax. Looks interesting but not sure if my usual game partners would be into it. I also really really want to play Twilight Imperium but again its having the players (and the game) as well as feeling that the first game will be a nightmare of rules and confusion and when a game is as long as TI then thats a problem!
 
I don't have the patience for ultralong games like Twilight Imperium--those really ought to be on the computer.

I'm still playing around with my recent three games of choice: Love Letter, Suburbia (with the first expansion), and 7 Wonders (with Leaders--can't get my playing group to try Cities yet).
 
Cities is much easier to implement than Leaders - you just add one black card per player into each age and then play for seven rounds, not six. It really couldn't be simpler.
 
I should note my current 7 Wonders group involves more casual gamers who get easily overwhelmed, and they won't even look at the rules because it appears too complicated.
 
I'm somewhat surprised you're playing with Leaders then, as I think that's more complicated by far than Cities.
 
I'm somewhat surprised you're playing with Leaders then, as I think that's more complicated by far than Cities.

I had to plead fairly hard with them to get them to try even one expansion, and since it was in chronological order we went with Leaders. There are some dependencies in Cities on the Leaders expansion as well, didn't feel like sorting that all out.
 
Finally convinced them to try Cities. I lost by one point, 58 to 59, but hopefully that encourages them to play with it again.

I don't think it was too overwhelming, but there was a greater random element to the game. I wasn't as able to pull off my Red-Green double punch because another player took the Militia, and my typical flow was interrupted by the new cards. I also ended up taking Ramses as a leader for free purples, but then I had a lot of other good buys for points so I took them instead, totally wasting a leader.

I will say, I like the leader who gives you 2 coins for purchasing yellow cards. Everyone else was cash strapped and fearful of the debt tokens. I was flush, and since I was Petra I could cash out 7 coins for 7 points on my Wonder.

It just wasn't enough.
 
I drew Merlin in a 10-player game of Avalon last night and immediately forgot who one of the bad guys was. Not my finest moment in gaming.

Played Dominion for the first time in over half a year. Militia makes for a really long, drawn out game. I probably won't use it with beginners any more.
 
Militia needs to have other power-drawing cards around, otherwise it can drag out a game. Also, some combos are near-brokenly powerful and will ruin the experience if one player pulls them off while newbies don't know what to watch for (like Chapel-Witch).
 
I drew Merlin in a 10-player game of Avalon last night and immediately forgot who one of the bad guys was. Not my finest moment in gaming.

I had a game as Perceval, where I mixed up one of the Merlin suspects with another person. That didn't help much either. :)
 
Militia needs to have other power-drawing cards around, otherwise it can drag out a game. Also, some combos are near-brokenly powerful and will ruin the experience if one player pulls them off while newbies don't know what to watch for (like Chapel-Witch).

So the Council Room or Smithy?
Chapel is powerful enough by itself. I don't play with it any more.

I had a game as Perceval, where I mixed up one of the Merlin suspects with another person. That didn't help much either. :)

I had the identity of the final baddie narrowed down to 2 people, and so deduced that the person sitting next to me HAD to be good and could be trusted. Turns out she was the assassin.
 
Did they realise that you were Merlin?
 
We just finished April of Pandemic Legacy and we're already exhausted. There are still eight more months to endure, and our once-foolproof crack team is on the verge of...well, I won't say anything. It's pretty flippin' great if everyone helps to buy this rather expensive package. Otherwise this game is Pandemic with a boatload of hidden surprises.
 
So the Council Room or Smithy?
Chapel is powerful enough by itself. I don't play with it any more.

Those work, also the Library or the Laboratory. Festivals + draw cards generally work too, although the hands can be unpredictable.

I like the Chapel because it completely changes the game and enables you to build some fine-tuned engines (and it only gets crazier with the expansions).
 
I got to play Lords of Waterdeep, Sylla and Reiner Knizia's Samurai. I won all three, but they were all pretty close, with no one particularly far ahead or behind.
 
Trickerion - This game is actually rather fun and easy to play, but its bits make Agricola look like a checkers set. I wasn't too impressed with the disorganization the cards came in, making set-up take a lot longer than it should have. Once the mess was cleaned up, the simultaneous order reveals make a basic worker placement something interesting, especially with the trick combos people were producing by the third round. It's different enough to be interesting, just a shame that the amount of components almost make it necessary to be a PC game instead.
 
I recently played some Bang! and BSG with my friends, but the new one at the table was this abbreviated Werewolf game that I forgot the name of. It has a companion app that you put on your smart phone, and everyone gets a role card. Then, the app tells everyone to close their eyes, and based on which role cards you have different people open their eyes and do stuff like peeking at and switch cards, etc. Finally, you have a five minute countdown to figure out and vote on who the werewolf is (or for the werewolves to finger an innocent villager).
 
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