13
votes
Which board games have you been playing this week? (to 30th July)
It's been another week, party people, and it's time to share what you've been playing.
It's been another week, party people, and it's time to share what you've been playing.
We played Terraforming Mars at last week's gaming meetup, which I enjoy.
We started with a warm-up game of Tsuro, which is a fun easy-to-learn quick game for up to 8 players.
Tsuro is a great quick game, and if you have an opportunity, check out Tsuro of the Seas, which adds a mechanic to remove tiles from the board mid-game, which can extend the gameplay slightly
We helped Kickstart a board game cafe right up the road from us and I got to go for the first time. My SO and I played King of Tokyo and Trash Pandas for the first time. I'm not sure we got all the rules completely right but it will be fun to bring the kids to play next time.
We broke out Dominion this weekend and really enjoyed playing it. My daughter picked a configuration with a confluence of Kings Court, Bazaar, Sea Witch, Tiara, and Moat that resulted in my drawing my entire deck during one round and emptying the curse card deck. It was epic.
I picked up Summoner Wars on prime day and finally got around to playing a few rounds. Was surprised how much I enjoyed it, although as a fan of tcgs I probably shouldn't have been. Having a board you actually move around with your cards added a whole new fun layer to traditional card battlers. The set I got came with
5edit: 6 decks so I'm looking forward to trying them all and eventually building my own.One of my group was away this week so we ended up playing some two-player abstract games that my friend had found online in some forum.
The most of interesting of these was a game played on a chessboard that I missed the name of. The rules were basically:
It's a fun little game, as you're basically trying to get your opponent to move their king around so that it become unwieldy to move.
Other than that I didn't get to play much else: just a game of Decrypto, a game of Codenames and a game of Patchwork.
That game sounds quite interesting, it sounds like a variant on Death Stacks, but not quite, because there is no king mechanic in that game. I'd be quite interested if you can find out the name/full rules of the variant that you played.
Apparently it was Lielow.
I recently purchased Beyond The Sun and was super excited to break it out on Saturday. Unfortunately I couldn't get anyone to play with me :(
I have that problem, too! One of the other organisers of my games meetup event says that I'm no good at promoting my games. It's ironic, because people give positive feedback about my games after playing them. However, I'm no good at convincing people to play them with me before they've played them.
Thats why I've recently started getting into tabletop simulator, wanting to play a game and no one you know having interest sucks. I'll always prefer physical over digital but sometimes it's the only option if you want to actually get some playtime in.
Ooh... how do you cope with Tabletop Simulator? I found it extremely difficult to use. I played my favouritest game of all time on that, and I hated every moment of it. It actually broke my brain!
It's clever in how it tries to simulate playing on a tabletop, with 3-D pieces, but the cleverness is wasted when you want to pick up a piece and place it on the board, and it takes a few minutes of fiddling around to achieve that simple act. Multiply that by the number of pieces you pick up and place during a typical game, and it stops being clever and starts being frustrating.
During the pandemic lockdowns, when we couldn't run our boardgames meetups in person, we used BoardgameArena for our events. It was less clever and less 3-D, but it was much simpler to use.
I definitely get it being hard to use, still getting used to it myself, but I think growing up with video games and also playing some with stupid key binds (arma) has made the transition easier. Personally I prefer the simulation aspect over the basic 2d of arena but that's just personal preference.
I joined a couple discords for finding games in tabletop sim so I'm looking forward to playing more and getting better at handling the controls. I also really appreciate being able to try before I buy and getting some semblance of how it'll actually feel to play.
I used TTS during the pandemic and found it enjoyable mostly because there was no other option, I'd rather play video games than TTS. Though maybe if I find a local community I could use that as a gateway to later get people to meet IRL.
I introduced a new group to Flamecraft, they loved it and one immediately went online to buy a copy. Such a cute game.
Space Alert last weekend and solo Spirit Island this weekend.
Played a game of Earth at a meetup recently. Bit of a learning curve, but quite enjoyable.
Finally had a chance to finish up our 4-player Night of the Zealot campaign in Arkham Horror the Card Game last week. I've had the game for a while, but mostly played solo. We started playing Night of the Zealot in the spring, but haven't had the chance to finish it until now. It went surprisingly well, and everyone enjoyed it. We'd like to play a full campaign now, but we'll have to figure out a more consistent schedule to actually finish it.
Visiting family in the Netherlands, randomly stumbled upon the Ticket to Ride Poland Map Collection (Number 6 1/2), which I had never seen before, and looking at the BGG page for it, was only ever actually released in the Polish market in 2019.
We broke it out, and it only has a small difference between the base game rules, but it adds a lot of complexity to the playing of it. You can connect to countries outside of Poland, and if you connect countries to each other, you get to claim the top card of a bonus card pile for each country you connected, which can add a significant amount of points if you're savvy enough. (Scores in our 5 player game ranged from 41 to 100)
My partner and I have been playing a lot of two player Hamlet. It's such a fun little game
At tonight's games meetup events, only 2 of us showed up. That meant we got to try out a few 2-player games (and played one game in 2-player mode).
Royal Visit is an interesting tug-of-war game, with a king piece being pulled between two players' chateaux; the player who gets the king into their chateau is the winner. It's a linear board, with only 17 spaces, in a single row. We got this game out, and thought it was a bit of light fun. However, despite the rules being quite simple, it was more strategic than we expected. There are limits on where the king can move; it must always be between the two guard pieces, which means you need to get one guard down to your chateau before you can even consider moving the king your way. Meanwhile, a wizard and a jester allow some special powers - but even they have limitations. It was quite challenging.
We played Orléans with only 2 players (it takes from 2 to 5 players). Unlike most games that can take up to 5 players, it actually worked quite well with a small number of players. It's a worker placement game, where you place workers to gain... more workers... which you can later place to gain resources that are worth points.
Finally, we played Targi again. The two of us had played this before, so after a quick brush-up on the rules, we were ready to go. It's a worker placement game, but the workers are placed around the edges of a 5x5 grid, and you get to use the spaces your workers are on plus the spaces inside the grid where the rows and columns of your placed workers intersect. You place workers to gain resources, which you use to buy tableau cards, gaining points at the end for the combination of tableau cards you have. We were evenly matched both times (he keeps records!). Supposedly, last time, he beat me by 1 point and this time I beat him by 1 point - but he says our scores in tonight's game were significantly higher than in the previous game we played. We both enjoyed it.
Targi is a great game.
I played Deception with some relatives. It was the first time for me and it was quite fun. We also played Nertz which was a new game for me as well. I enjoyed the chaotic fervor.
We played perudo, tsuro, and catan last week. This week I’m hoping we bust out 7 Wonders, Evolution, and Pirate’s Cove. Possibly Scythe depending on who shows up this week.
I got to play a round of Keyforge using one of my new decks, one of the newest set printed after the company changed hands. It was a lot of fun! My friend played using one of his best decks (as ranked by a website that assigns an SAS (Synergy & Anti-Synergy) score to every card in the game and can look up a specific deck's contents to calculate the SAS of the full deck) and I played using one of my best ones. The game took over an hour, which was somewhat due to me needing to relearn the mechanics, but mostly because it was a very tight duel, even when he blew up my best combo on his first turn.
All in all, I'm quite excited that Keyforge is back and I'm looking forward to getting the chance to play more!
I had a couple of decks when it first came. I heard the furore with the algorithm but hasn't realised they'd started selling it again.
Yeah, they had a crowd funding campaign about a year ago and finally started delivering decks recently, there's a new set officially out! It's stronger than previous sets, so if you want to play against someone with a newer deck, I'd recommend picking up a new one yourself. I think the power creep will be a factor in how they keep selling new decks, but in theory you should be able to play decks from the same set against one another relatively fairly.
We played Munchkin last night with the kids. At our meetup this Friday, we'll probably play King of Tokyo and Terror Below.
Munchkin and King of Tokyo are beloved classics and we play them often.
Terror Below is pretty much the Tremors board game. It's really fun, but takes a bit because you can't exactly plan out your moves until your turn because the board always changes so much, so it's not brought out as much.