Which board games have you all been playing this week (to 2nd July)?
Hi boardtiddlers,
It's that time of the week again already. Another opportunity to discuss what you've been playing this week.
Personally I've only managed a single game of Hegemony, this time as the middle classes, with my opponents playing working class and state, and with a robot for the capitalists. It was a bit of a crazy game: capitalist automaton managed to open companies across all three rows of the board. I, as middle, had a fair number too, so production was massive and there was little unemployment. We actually ran out of unskilled middle class workers and influence cubes. Working class managed a comfortable win with state and middle coming joint second some twelve or so points behind. I really think we need to work out how to nix the working class, because they've been strong in every game so far.
So tell us about your sessions this week.
I played Concordia for the first time this week. I thought the mechanics were interesting but I kinda wasn’t taken by it because I fet like there wasn’t much decision making to be made. I think part of why was I mistake that I made. We played two people on the full Europe side of the board.
Could anyone provide insight if my mistake could’ve been why it didn’t feel fun or interesting? I know this game is pretty high on a lot of peoples lists.
I have a similarly luke warm feeling about Concordia. I'm not entirely sure what it is but I always come away feeling a bit unsatiated by it.
I love Concordia. I've only ever played the digital version. I play on my phone and on my desktop.
I didn't get into it untill I did both the tutorial and finished a game against the AI. I've been playing games with my friend of it async for months now.
I don't know how to sell people in the game. It just feels like anything you do has the potential to make lots of things better for you in the future, as well as for other players. The systems are pretty simple, but combine really well.
You might have to enjoy the "Oh no, he just build a city where I want, so now I have to pay a bit more for it". Or "Ha-Ha, I'm in his region now, so when he makes goods, I too will get a good."
I understand your pitch. I think that’s why playing the whole European map with just two people made it too easy(idk if the digital version has two map options). It was too easy for each of us to just spread out in opposite directions and have zero interaction or competition for cities/zones
I think Concordia is mostly interesting when there are more people and I find the team aspect in Venus more interesting. It adds another dynamic into the game trying to align with your partner and in a 2v2 or 2v2v2 situation you will have competition between cities quite quickly.
Santorini - a cute strategy game where you build towers and use powers of your character to try to win by climbing to the top of a tower before someone manages to cap it. It's a great game to play with kids, and is pretty good for 2, 3, or 4 players.
I got massively addicted to Santorini over covid. Played over 700 games of it online on Board Game Arena. Absolutely love the game.
My wife and I have been working our way through Arkham Horror LCG. We are on the Path of Carcosa campaign and we have just made it to the midpoint. I'm really enjoying what we've played so far - the scenarios have been well put together and the story is more original than Dunwich. The game is expensive, but we are getting good value out of it so far. I have The Forgotten Age on order to play next..
I've been playing Eldritch Horror. There was a large sale at my local comics and board game store and I got all of the expansions. I've been mostly going at it solo and playing with pairs of two characters and going through the expansions. I was a big a Arkham Horror 2nd edition fan and while it doesn't quite scratch the same itch I'm really enjoying it.
Played one of my favorites again this weekend: Lords of Waterdeep. It's such a solid, balanced game. Even playing with newer players, the scores are usually tight and everyone is usually felt in control throughout the experience.
Lords of Waterdeep is a nice simple worker-placement game. It's a good game that I use for not-quite-newbie players who are willing to try something a bit more advanced (for them).
And it's a bit of a favourite of mine. It's nice for when I don't really want to think too hard.
I kind of replaced my copy w/ viticulture, i have more wine drinking than D&D friends, so maybe that's it. But love the expansions, metal coins, and quality
I just got home from a boardgames meetup event.
We played a game someone brought: Planetarium. I've never heard of this game before now. It turned out to be a very fast game. The two of us who hadn't played it before weren't quite prepared for the end of the game to arrive so quickly! It's a resource-gathering game, with an interesting mechanic where you move planetesimals in their orbits around the sun to acquire matter tokens (the theme is that these planetesimals are colliding with smaller chunks of matter and accumulating mass to become planets). You then use the tokens to play cards that, basically, give you points. When you look at the board and read the rules, you think it's going to take forever to trigger the endgame, but it arrived very quickly. I won that one... almost by accident.
Then we moved on to Wingspan, which I usually enjoy playing. But the guy who brought Planetarium is one of those people who is hyper-focussed on points. Every move is aimed at maximising points. Me, I play to make clever moves, and to enjoy the process of playing. He's only focussed on points. Even though I don't play to win, watching people like him treat games as mathematical exercises reduces the fun of playing for me.
Betrayal at House on the Hill 3e. One of my favorite games ever. Just played the 3e for the first time though, and it really seems to address some balancing issues. It made an already great game better.
My two kids aged 6&8 love the game munchkins.
I feel like I am maybe trying to prep my kids for D&D. Kinda selfish, but they love the idea of equipment and leveling up their character.
Maybe One Deck Dungeon would be good. Or possibly Clank!
I play with my 3 when they're in pre school using "hero kids" a simplified version on DriveThru RPG.
Also look at "Dice conquest", looking to get that for my 9yo to play solo, co op, or let him "DM" by improving scenarios to go along w/ the cards, or build it out more
I think it will be some Jaws of the Lion tomorrow. We've been playing it when we can't get the whole group together for game night. It's not my first choice but I do like the dungeon crawl, rpg aspects of it.
Does DnD count?
Sure, why not.
One of my fellow PCs just had us run a one shot in a crazy world inside of a mimic.
It was pretty fun, but it's back to our Strahd campaign next week.
Played Blank Slate and Scattergories with friends and family.
Blank Slate can be a little more difficult with elementary school kids in the same mix with folks in their 40's and 60's, but it's a blast if they're into it!
Scattergories, like many word-based games, is fun assuming that you don't have contrarians in the crowd who enjoy pushing the rules to the breaking point.
Carcassonne is all wife and I have time for these days
Well there could definitely be a lot worse choices than that. Been a while since I've played it but it's a great game. Never played it 1v1 though, does it play well at 2?
Yeah, we both like it because it's very chill and not too long.
I'm going to give Ironsworn: Starforged a shot. I don't have a very active imagination sadly, so I'm hoping to get something out of this
Our board game group played Hickory Dickory for the first time last week and will be playing it again this week. A small fun meeple placement game with a decent amount of strategy.
Got in a game of Roads & Boats this weekend, at two players. For those who don't know, R&B is a very wild and big game about moving around resources and building the infrastructure for said movement, with one of the big twists being the only things that belong to you are what's on your own transporters. That means any buildings you make for converting goods to higher tiers, or producing base tier goods, can be used by anyone, and anything you leave behind can be stolen.
I had previously played at 4 and 5, and at those counts we found the game rather ruthless, whereas this two player game was a little more solitary, which was also fun but in a different way. Almost feels more like a factorio race!
It's very hard to track down a copy, but if you're a logistics puzzle enjoyer (especially if you're into factorio or openTTD), it's worth trying to play!
I've played this just the once, at four player, at it was a bit nuts. I don't feel like I even scratched the surface of the game. It's very interesting how you don't actually own the resources on the board, I really liked that aspect.
Yeah it's certainly got a lot going on - in all the games I've played I've only seen one person build a truck (and that's not even getting into the expansion!)
But one of the great things about it is that even the early game stuff is a fun puzzle - it doesn't suffer from the somewhat common issue of the early game just being a push to get to the fun midgame that some games have, so even if you never get to experience the high tier tech stuff it's still a great time. Long, though!
Had a boardgame day with friends on Saturday. We played Root for the first time, it was great fun but we definitely learned the lesson of "someone needs to keep the Vagabond in check". The cats player was pretty passive, which actually caused both me (alliance) and the birds player issues - birds started to run out of warriors to recruit because they didn't get attacked, and I was missing out on a lot of supporters due to the cats not marching around enough. Still, was a blast and I can't wait to play it again.
After that we played Mao for the rest of the day, that's always fun.
Whipped out Imperium (Classics, but I own Legends, too) to play solo, but damn, I'm terrible at it. I seem to be very bad at deckbuilders in general.
This sunday we played one of my favourites which is Tyrants of the Underdark with the expansion pack. I love how simple and approachable that game is for people who are new to deck builders, but still being entertaining and exciting for people who have played before. It's also a game where it's really difficult to predict who is going to win, even down to the last round, as territory control is only one of the ways to gain points. It's an excellent game and I can highly recommend it to others looking for a new game.
Blood on the Clocktower. I've always had a lot of fun with Mafia/Werewolf/Resistance type games, but was quite suprised at the depth and complexity this variant had even with only a small number of players.
Just got the Turing machine and have worked through about a dozen of the problems. So far it's been great. Quick and easy setup and tear down. Games are short and sweet.
Just started up Gloomhaven and I can say it deserves the hype. We're also into the Star Wars deck building game and cockroach poker lately.
I finally played Terraforming Mars: Ares yesterday. Wow, that was a lot of fun!
I stayed away from TM because these types of resource management / worker placement / high complexity games don't appeal to me. I heavily dislike the format where you kind of do your thing, nobody cares, and at the end of the game you find out someone else won via some resource or mechanic you didn't pay attention to.
But a friend finally pushed us to try TM: Ares and that's… well, actually it's exactly what happened last night! But, it was fun. I engaged with the game's mechanics a lot. The complexity level felt just right: Fun cards, interesting mechanics, etc. I'm still digesting the game, but I really want to replay it.
Played The Game & The Crew: Search for Planet Nine over the weekend. Both played with 3 players in this particular instance. Similar games in that they are co-op card games (my wife loves co-ops - if you have any recommendations feel free to send them my way), and both were new to our table.
Would say in our group The Game was more popular as despite the “limited” nature of the communication mechanics there was still a lot of energetic table talk (following the rules prohibiting precise reveals of cards, but the game still encourages quite a bit of vague table talk and it gets quite dramatic), whereas The Crew felt a bit dull after a bit since there really isn’t any table talk encouraged or much opportunity for it at all.
I’d say we’re a chatty bunch around our games lol.
I'm not a fan of co-op games but I do like The Crew. Have you played Hanabi?
We have not played Hanabi, hasn’t crossed our path before. I take it you would recommend as a co-op?
It's quite a fun little game. Pretty cheap as it's just a tiny card game. I don't play a lot of co-ops so don't have many good recommendations.
It's interesting because you have a hand of cards you can't see.
Thanks, we’ll have to check it out!
Been in a bit of a gaming drought lately, but this week on vaca, I got to introduce some card games to the fam.
The ones that went over the best were 535 and Don’t LLAMA. The kids joined in the latter, and there were lots of laughs.
My personal fav was Yokai Septet, a trick-taking game. Such an interesting balance between needing to capture points while avoiding busting due to winning too many tricks.
We just realized that my son is old enough to understand and enjoy Uno. We've been playing the Zelda and Mario variants, though he dislikes something about the Triforce cards in the Zelda one, so mostly the Mario one, which has a fun card that lets you make up a rule. His favorite was one I made requiring him to stick his tongue out until he played his next card.
This is a pretty big change, because up until now, the only games we've played together are ones that are really only fun for him. Uno is simple, but still pretty fun for adults (at least ones who like kids). I got a pretty sweet combination of skip cards in one of our last games that let me win the game in one play. It's also super fun to see him do playfully vengeful things toward me. It's been a lot of fun playing it one-on-one or with my wife, too.
Here's some games my kids liked when they were little:
Finally started having people over my apartment last weekend. I’ve been into getting some Kickstarter games. I had everyone play verdant, which my wife and I play a lot. Next up we’ll probably let play Winterhaven woods as a group.