What boardgames did you just play?

[CivCube]

Played Mission: Red Planet a couple times, then Tigris and Euphrates. Just about everyone on the MRP card art is sneering or being smug about something, as you board the rockets that may or may not get to Mars, and you may or may not be seduced into oblivion. Both plays saw me get stomped, especially the second, where I scored 2 points compared to the top player’s 55.

I’m still trying to decide whether the randomized point areas reflect a better mix-up from El Grande or an artificial creation on top of the players’ developing conflicts. It seemed like my opponents were too invested in some territories to go after some potentially higher scoring areas. Perhaps the astronauts sitting on the rocket ships that failed to take off can sometimes stall the pacing. Worth playing again.

Of course, Tigers & Pots continues to be great, and I got another hard thrashing from my opponents, particularly one who had been playing continuous 2p games for a long time. Placing six like-colored tiles definitely seems like an unbeatable threshold in conflicts and one I will need to watch out for. It’s certainly one heck of a reason to not turtle!

 

[CivCube]

Played my first TI game evar withTwilight Imperium 4th Edition. Another player in our D&D group is a longtime TI3 player and was itching to bust out his new copy. The three of us played through the new-player map setup for about five hours before it was clear that the owner was going to win regardless of what we did.

The game works! It’s a fun beer-and-pretzels dudes-on-a-map where the pretzels are bought in bulk from Costco. Despite its reputation, the rules are noticeably tighter than other games like Eclipse. TI4 plays faster thanks to a sensible limitation on actions you can take–sure, there’s plenty of intrigue, loads of trading one can do even with the generic commodity system, but your moves are never going to be that opaque. Some design choices are undoubtedly due to the amount of stuff you can put into one box under economic constraints, but they led to a game where what you do actually represents what you’re doing. Want to advance in tech? No need to look down a big tree, just flip through your deck until you find something cool.

Maybe with more players, the complications in situations pile up, and I’d be interested in playing with six, even eight if an expansion comes out. Everyone’s goals are effectively spread out across the map so you’re never lost for something to do. It will take time to balance those secret agendas with the usual action cards that FFG likes to make, but if you’re looking for a light-to-medium game that’s more social in nature, it’s hard to look past this one. It’s not going to be the monolith of gaming that you keep hearing about, but it’s a nice introduction to streamlined longer gaming sessions that your Risk-playing friends might take a gander at.

 

[Till]

I've been playing Dominion a lot, which is a fun deck building card game. Depending on which cards are in play, it can lack interactivity with the other players, however.
I've also started to dabble with table top Blood Bowl, a turn based football/rugby game with orcs, elves, and whatnot. Playing in person is a lot of fun, but the rules can be a bit overwhelming. The computer game version is much easier to play.

 

[Quintillus]

Is Twilight Imperium the one that is guaranteed to finish in something like 6 - 8 turns, the turns just tend to be fairly long? I think one of my friends was telling me about that one recently.

Although more of a social than board game, the one that's taken center stage at recent board game events among my group is Spyfall, a fresh take on the spy genre where only one person is the spy, and they're trying to figure out information about their location before others realize who the spy is; while the rest are trying to tease out who is and isn't the spy, while not sharing so much information the spy can learn about the location. It's a pretty funny game, and even though a round is 5-10 minutes, we've always wound up playing it for 2-3 hours at a time.

 

[CivCube]

Depends on the players, I think. It's like Cyclades in that the endgame is rather conditional.

 

[CivCube]

Back into games today after a longish drought. The Princes of Florence is one of those early-BGG-era games that is still fun to play, thanks to its reasonable combination of tetronimo buildings and auction rounds. You have to be careful about the threshold for scoring, which rises every round, so you can’t just spam scoring cards without actually meeting more optional objectives. So you could just spam Jesters and build up some insurance, but there are, as usual in a Euro like this, more objectives to meet than actions to spend. I’d play again, even with my bonehead bid for a Prestige card that did nothing for me.

Played Azul for the second time, and with experienced players. Hoo boy–this is one you’ll want to play with different people every time, since the game changes so much between plays. This time around, there were more pile-ups of tokens threatening to crash into someone’s floor, and I wasn’t havin’ it. I somehow scraped through, scoring two more points than second place! This is like the GIPF series where I can see this being a great introductory game for newcomers–great components, fast play, fun for people who like to think ahead, colorful, and it looks different for passerby. We were getting people who would stop to stare at the table, wondering what it was we were playing. This one will stick around.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I won a game of Risk. I didn't achieve my mission, but after playing for almost four hours all the other players agreed that I was the closest to victory. My mission was to conquer South America and Asia, while everyone else had just as difficult missions. I had all of South America almost from the start of the game. One player was so obsessed with taking North America that they almost destroyed themselves. When everyone agreed to finish the game, I had all of South America, North America and Africa. Within another two to five turns, I might've conquered all of Asia but it was so late at night that everyone just wanted to stop playing. I already had half the world, eliminated one player, close to eliminating another, and the next two players had one continent each, Europe and Australia, another player holding onto a central part of Asia.

 

[AmazonQueen]

This week we played Vikings 878. 2 players command the Great heathen Army, 2 the Anglo-Saxons. Quite interesting. The Vikings get hordes but very few reinforcements, the Anglo-Saxons are thinly spread across England and have to hold onto their cities to get reinforcements. Very close game, lost on the last go.

Current favourites are Powergrid and Inis, we've been playing them quite a lot.

 

[Sarin]

Friend got Civilization: A New Dawn (at least I think that's the original titile, different language...) for Christmas, so yesterday we tried it out and been figuring out the rules. Quite fun,and once you get into it it becomes much faster paced...initial turn could take five minutes each as we figured out the consequences of some actions...

 

[civvver]

Has anyone played Code Names? It's a fun party game. It's a word associate clue game. It's really simple to pick up but a little more strategy/cleverness than a game like Taboo.

You lay out card tiles in a 5x5 grid that have one word on them like Circle or Pizza. Then two spy masters look at a card that shows a 5x5 grid with blue and red dots on it (red team, blue team). Those are your spies' codenames on your team. The spymasters then give clues to get the team to guess, but the catch is you can give a clue for more than one name at a time. So if you had spy names circle and pizza you could say Round, Two and your team knows there are two spy names that associate with the word round and hopefully the guess oh pizzas are round, and so is a circle. Once you get one wrong the other team takes their turn. Also there's an assassin somewhere on the board and if you guess his name your team loses so sometimes you have to be careful, like if the assassin was Wheel, then round wouldn't be a good clue cus they might guess that.

There's also an adult version called Deep Undercover if you want to get more raunchy, with sexual words and drug and alcohol references.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Played Azul last week. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230802/azul
Its a tile-laying light family game but theres a surprising amount of strategy to it and its very quick to learn and play.
1st time any of us had played it and we played 3 games in an evening. Good one to play with family/non-gamers.

 

[Till]

Yeah, I played Azul with the family over Christmas and everyone had a blast. I'm also enjoying Everdell, which falls into the same category of being easy to learn, having beautiful art, and enough depth to keep things interesting.

 

[Akropolis24]

D&D till I die.

 

[Berolsaurus]

Just played Castle Panic with the family tonight. Decided to make it a bit harder and tried the variant were you start with no walls. We promptly drew giant boulder on the first 4 draws. That promptly destroyed 4 out of 6 towers. The third player drew "Draw three more monsters" and "Draw four more monsters". One of the fastest games of castle panic we ever lost.

Tried an easy game of the classic scrabble next. Got to the end of the game and I draw the "Z" tile. With the game almost over I just toss it on a "Double word score" with an "A" on the bottom and an "A" to the right of the tile. So a nice 44 points if it's a word, though I figured the word "Za" wouldn't exist. My wife was quite annoyed when "Za" was in the scrabble dictionary

 

[Jeanette Radke]

Cats and uno are my favorite one in the board game to play.

 

[Moff Jerjerrod]

Twilight Imperium 4th edition is a great game. Took me about 8 hours playing a 3 player game solo. I'd love to play against some human opponents but there aren't many people in my area who like board games such as this.

I also have two games from the COIN series; Liberty or Death and Fire in the Lake. I've played a little of Liberty or Death but haven't unboxed Fire in the Lake yet.

And the game I really want to play but again haven't unboxed yet is GMTs 'Paths of Glory'. I've played it on Table Top Simulator but not the physical copy. Great game about WW1.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Twilight Imperium 4th edition is a great game. Took me about 8 hours playing a 3 player game solo. I'd love to play against some human opponents but there aren't many people in my area who like board games such as this.

I also have two games from the COIN series; Liberty or Death and Fire in the Lake. I've played a little of Liberty or Death but haven't unboxed Fire in the Lake yet.

And the game I really want to play but again haven't unboxed yet is GMTs 'Paths of Glory'. I've played it on Table Top Simulator but not the physical copy. Great game about WW1.

My brothers a big fan of the COIN series and GMT games in general but we've not managed to play them in our gaming group as they take too long. We are planning to play Colonial Twilight when the 2 of us have a free weekend as its designed for 1-2 players.

 

[sherbz]

I went to a games con this weekend and played Scythe. Its a very in depth strategy game set at the end of WW1. If i were describing it i would say its like Risk only with added layers of complexity on to it. I really enjoyed it, and it is definitely one i would like to play more of. I can see myself enjoying it over a number of years. Unless you are a complete pro when it comes to deciphering instructions though, i suggest that you either go to a convention or a games shop for a demo - as it is not easy to get into without first being given a helping hand.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169786/scythe

 

[topsecret]

I went to a games con this weekend and played Scythe. Its a very in depth strategy game set at the end of WW1. If i were describing it i would say its like Risk only with added layers of complexity on to it. I really enjoyed it, and it is definitely one i would like to play more of. I can see myself enjoying it over a number of years. Unless you are a complete pro when it comes to deciphering instructions though, i suggest that you either go to a convention or a games shop for a demo - as it is not easy to get into without first being given a helping hand.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169786/scythe

Scythe is an amazing game. My brother owns it, and we play it as often as possible.

If you want a really good rules explanation, check out this video:

 

[sherbz]

Scythe is an amazing game. My brother owns it, and we play it as often as possible.

If you want a really good rules explanation, check out this video:

Good video - and just goes to show - you need someone to explain it - 32 mins long lol