What board games have you played this week (to 26th June)?
Hey tabletilders,
It's been another week. Let's share what we all played this week!
For me it was a single play of Pax Renaissance with a promo expansion that changes the starting state of the board. I completely dominated the trade routes and accumulated a huge stash of cash, but was unable to get the comet out to activate the win condition that would leverage it. My opponents then mowed down my commissions, so I had to pivot quite heavily. But I wasn't too worried as I had so much cash, so could nab any card I wanted, including the next comet.
Unfortunately two of us took our eyes of the ball and our third player managed a sneaky protestant victory. Annoyingly there was an apostasy I could have bought that would have nixed this, but I totally didn't see it coming. Great game.
After that we wound down with a quick game of Scout. Fun little game that makes me want to explore the trick-taking space a bit more, but it seems all the highly praised ones I read about are out of stock. I might see if any of these can be played with a poker deck.
So what have you all been playing?
tibleders*
I've been enjoying Cryptid a lot lately.
I also for the first time played Carcassonne with the city expansion, and i ... needed time to get used to it. I didn't enjoy it, but I think I could enjoy it -- it actually encourages players to finish each others' features, which is pretty cool in theory.
Mists Over Carcassone is pretty great if you want carcassone with cooperative building
I found it pretty hard though, still haven’t made it past level 2
Cryptid is so much fun! It has quite simple rules, it doesn't take long to play, but it is so satisfying when the location of Cryptid clicks for you.
Anyone that hasn't played it, I highly recommend it if you like puzzle-style games.
The pandemic got me very into solo boardgaming, to the point solo is probably how I play 90% of my board games these days. On that note, I've been playing:
Rove: Very cute and tight little tile-pattern-matching game. I always feel like I win by the skin of my teeth.
Skytear Horde: Tower defense-ish card battler. Scratches that Magic itch with the gameplay, but with a solo mode. I backed the Monoliths expansion recently - looking forward to that coming in.
Red Rising: This one I got my wife to play with me! This one for some reason doesn't get a lot of love online, but I love it for what it is - a colorful set collection game that's all about optimizing your hand and reacting to an evolving game state. Plus I enjoyed the books it's based on too.
Red rising is a fun book series and I enjoyed the connection to all the cards. I think the lack of interest is twofold first it’s based on a franchise so you’ve probably lost anyone not interested in the books and probably more importantly there’s so many cards that I felt it would take a large number of plays to get used to how good various cards actually are.
I’ve only played once so I could have misjudged the game but it had the feel of a game where an inexperienced player would be at a significant disadvantage and could easily throw out a great card inadvertently compounding in the inexperience.
There was a store-wide sale at a comic book/board game shop near me so I got all the expansions to Eldritch Horror and have been playing it by myself on my office store. I also got a 1vMany game called Beast that I'm looking forward to playing with friends.
I really like cooperative games that are thematic so I own a decent amount of Lovecraft games.
My family does a thing where we will play one game all the time until I hate it. We are currently working on ruining (I say this mostly tongue in cheek) Wingspan, which is a brilliant and beautiful worker placement game featuring birds. We typically play two or three players - me, my wife and one of our kids - but my brother in law and his wife came by yesterday and we played a five player game. I think the game is great at 2-3 players, but starts to get a bit slow with four, and was a bit of a slog with five. It was still as pretty good time. In the first round there was an interesting interaction where my brother in law was addressing a card (it was a raven, which allow you to discard eggs for food) and said, "well that's garbage" and I almost let it go, but explained to him that the card was great, and is an automatic pickup for me anytime I see them; be then took that bird and eventually won the game.
Yeah, I've a few games that we've overplayed. Funny how that happens.
I love the Oceania expansion - I think it's one of the best additions to a board game, right up there with Cities and Knights of Catan - for all the reasons you have listed here which are excellently written and succinct. I am looking forward to playing the Asia expansion at some point in the relatively near future, for the flocking and I think there's a different 2 player set up that's possible as well?
Are there any other games you are currently into? Just from the fact that you wrote out how I feel about the expansion better than I would have indicated to me that I'd definitely appreciate any other suggestion you have.
Wow, I've played Carcassonne, but didn't realize there were anywhere near that amount of expansions. I love a game with some options on how to play and this one has the added benefit that my wife has played before so we might be able to get over the "it's a new game" hurdle. I'm going to put this right on the top of my list! Thanks for the recommendation.
At last week's boardgames meetup, I played
Betrayal at the House on the Hill An old favourite. I got to play it with people who'd already played it before, so we didn't have to stop and explain everything all the time, which was nice. And I got to be the traitor! 'Betrayal' is so much fun when you're the betrayer.
Mariposas One of the other players in my group selected this from the venue's library of games. None of us had played it before, and we all had fun learning. Pretty butterflies! But we failed dismally at getting them back down south by the end of the third season. Nice artwork. And an interesting game mechanic, which I haven't encountered before. I would play this again.
Oh man, I love Betrayal - we have Betrayal at Baldur's gate (which is basically the same game with a more dungeons and dragons vibe) - and I wish we played it enough to not have to explain it every time we play. My middle kid loves it and wants to play more, but all the other players here won't play it because of the drag of learning a new game.
I'm not a fan of the theming of Baldur's Gate, but that's just me.
I play with a gaming group, with an ever-changing attendee list. Most times I'm playing a game, there's at least one person who hasn't played it before. I'm used to having to explain the rules every single time we start a game. That's why it was such a noteworthy occurrence to end up in a group where we didn't have to do that.
It's a pity you don't have people willing to learn. It is a fun game.
I prefer the House on the Hill theme as well, but my brother has that version and we try not to overlap on some games (ie. games that our wives don't want to play, so we mostly just play with each other twice a year).
Just played a few rounds of Wingspan tonight, just 2 of us. All 3 rounds were really close. We played with just the basic game and man did we miss the depth the expansions bring - the nectar and end of game bonuses they added in the first expansion add so much to the game - but we were borrowing this copy.
Our typical 2-or-3 player is with both the European and Oceanic expansions, and I really like having both; it makes it so that every game is pretty different. We like having wildly different bonuses every game, and having whole games with different birds is pretty great too. I also think the Oceanic board is a better overall board.
But the base game is still good, and I don't mind it either, unlike, say, Catan, where the base game just feels slow now and I would be fine with never playing it.
We usually play with both expansions and I agree, it really makes playing every game very different. And as you said, the different birds are great - all of us are into Birding at different levels so it just adds another nerdy dimension. We have a very active board gaming group of friends - Friend 1 has the base game and Friend 2 has all of the expansions (including Asia that we haven't gotten to play yet - really excited for the new birds). Since there are already 2 copies of the game we can easily access, we don't have a personal copy. Friend 1 wasn't using their copy since they also have Other Friend with the game and all expansions, so we borrowed it to get a couple games in on a rainy weekend.
Fortune and Glory with the Treasure Hunters and Rise of the Crimson Hand expansion packs.
It’s an out of print massive pulp adventure (think Indiana Jones) board game that takes place in the 1930s.
Still waiting for Nature Incarnate (the new Spirit Island) expansion to arrive.
However, just yesterday I had a friend over who I hadn't seen in a while. We ended up playing a few games I hadn't played in a while, notably Meeple Circus and Railroad Ink (sidenote, dies anybody know where to buy replacement pens for that?), which I both still enjoy thoroughly and would really recommend!
I'm waiting for Nature Incarnate too! Which spirits are you looking forward to most?
Scans of the aspects have been posted (https://imgur.com/a/LqtnKig), so I've played a few games with them - I just put the aspect card on a tablet as I played. Ocean Deeps was as much fun as I expected.
Apart from that, I played some Gizmos; and a first play of Paint the Roses on Board Game Arena. Found the latter a bit dry.
Oh I have not yet played with emulating any of them, but I am most-excited for Violence, because that mirrors how I already play Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares in groups most of the time, as the heaviest hitter around the table, only of course without actually hurting anybody. At least not directly.
And sure it might end up being boring, because it's what I do even more so. But it also sounds exciting to try out just what a fear-machine he can end up being.
I played D&D for the first time ever, and it's a blast. I don't think I could be able to DM ever, though, the creativity the guy needed to put up with my friends' antics was vast.
Besides that, I played Istanbul. This is one of my favorites, the 2 bundled expansions make the game complex enough that each match is completely different from the last, but it's not tough to grasp for a beginner. It took my friends 2 matches to understand the game, and after that it's been incredibly even, we basically have tied winrates since we keep taking turns winning. :)
Also, I'm a big fan of "remi", or Romanian Tile Rummy. I used to think it's an old men's game, but we've been playing regularly for the past 2 years. I even made my own custom score counting app for it so we can move through matches faster.
I very rarely have an opportunity to pull out a solo game but managed to get through an entire game of Paperback Adventures recently, and I must say, I liked it quite a lot! I just barely won with 1 HP left. I think it recreates some of the feeling of roguelite videogames like Slay the Spire fairly well.
Binding of Isaac Four Souls: Immensly fun while being both simple to learn with complex situations that can rise up. Example: our game felt like it would never end and then I suddenly got three souls in one turn because I got the right item combo. If you've ever wanted to play a game that feels like a competitive roguelike video game, try it!
I got in my first play of The Castles of Burgundy dice game. We were able to get in a quick game after putting our kid to bed. It was a nice to play a version Castles of Burgundy without having to track and sort all the tiles. We’ll see how I feel about it after some more plays in the coming weeks.
Had an afternoon with friends playing Sagrada, Space Base, and the very silly Abducktion (with expansion pack). Abducktion is proving to be a great quick startup game, a nice one to throw together when you're waiting for burgers to be grilled.
I haven't played Sagrada for years but I remember having a great time with great company!
I've played many games of Cubitos recently. Pretty fun push your luck dice building game.
I played Top Secret Spies (german Heimlich & Co. ). An older german game, with very simple rules. Bluffing and not revealing your color are important parts of the game.
Dice Miners and Betrayal at Baldurs Gate have been my go to favorites recently!
Our playgroup finally got to play Cthulhu Wars. We had a lot of fun with it, played 2 3-player games back to back.
The spell book unlocking was by far my favorite aspect of the game.
Only gripe with it was during later turns someone may have a large power gap, which leads to them taking extremely long turns while the rest of the table twiddles their thumbs waiting for them to finish.