Which board games have you been playing? (to 4th September)
Hi everyone,
It's been another week and it's time again time to share what you've managed to table over the past week.
Personally I had a two player game of Barrage, the first time I've played the game in a year or two. I completely forgot just how stressful Barrage is.
I tried to screw my opponent over by adding a conduit to a basin that was his main energy source and he responded in kind by tapping mine. Thus the game became very centred on turn order and he kept beating my production and securing it each round. Whilst this happened I amssased a huge number of concrete mixers and excavators and thought I'd be able to pull his lead back by outbuilding him, but it never really happened and he ended up winning by a very comfortable margin. Great game, but very stressful to play.
We followed up with a couple of games of Santorini.
Also, participation has been a bit lacklustre the past couple of weeks. I'm wondering if this weekly thread is actually enjoyable or just annoying?
It's enjoyable but I figure people play boardgames at a much slower pace considering the time required to get players together and sit down for a couple of hours.
On that note, I'm finally going to meet up with a group to play Axis and Allies again. It took months to get everyone ready to play, especially since A&A is such a long game. I'm very much looking forward to it.
I don't know what side I'll play, but either is fine with me.
We're not people that look up strategies or practice in between so I find that balance and bids for sides don't take much of a role. I've seen everyone improve and play into each other over time but there's still a lot of mistakes and suboptimal play to exploit thus mitigating the rather imbalanced power levels of the axis. If I'm being honest, having everyone roughly at the same skill level is what makes it better.
If you ever are in a game of A&A where the players have different skill levels, I've found it's best to let the most experienced player play Germany and the least experienced play USA. It will likely tip the scale in favour of the Axis powers, but it's the best way for new players to learn the game, and more fun than Germany fumbling into defeat too early.
That's not bad advise, the new player will probably lose whatever they play. Balance be damned.
We often play as sides rather than countries, allowing us to discuss as a party, significant lowering the barrier of entry for new players. I've been starting to favour an approach where we do this, but one player has the final say over a specific country. That allows for teamwork but not those endless discussions that go nowhere.
Also, your username is very close to mine!
Cheers!
Is there a story behind yours? Mine's a nickname from college, based on a semi-obscure Disney villain.
It's the main character from an originally German book, that I read a Dutch translated version of when I was young.
Called "De 13½ Levens van Kaptein Blauwbeer". Same specific spelling of Kaptein too!
I think mine is only obscure outside of Germany. The captain was even represented on the German flag on Reddit's /r/place.
Edit to add: perhaps I should also post something on topic as I ended up playing that game I mentioned in my first post. I'll do that too.
I ended up playing Axis and we obliterated the Allies.
My opponents had more bickering than discussion and while I know they're good players, they weren't this time. Unforced error after unforced error and we just rolled them.
The only stiff opposition was the USSR, out of all Allied countries I expected that one to be the least trouble. But when Japan was coming up through Persia, China, and Siberia the curtains fell quickly for Russia. They had to split up their troops to defend the east, after which Italy could open the Belorussian can allowing Germany to ride home free into Moscow with a blitz.
The UK was ineffective due to some German submarine and aircraft use that I planned out. One of the rules of the game is that subs can't target air, and air can't target subs (if there's no destroyer present), so my subs automatically hit their carriers and transports. While my airforce lost against theirs, the loss of their three transports delayed them by at least three turns causing any danger from the west to immediately diminish into irrelevance.
Great game for the Axis, but I do think it'll be awhile before the other players feel up for a rematch. It's a long game when played normally, it's especially long if you're on the losing end from the start.
I didn't post last week so I think this is fair, this is a game we played about two weeks ago.
We got Spirit Island to the table. It's usually just me and my spouse, so the two-player board. It's been a while, so we had to review the rules, and those first couple of turns felt super stressful. Once we got going though it got a lot easier. The end of the game felt as if it snuck up on us. "Oh wait if we take out that last town then we win, I can do that now." I think we need to figure out a way to make the game harder. Or play a three player board with two players, maybe.
I seem to remember the Shut Up & Sit Down review had a similar thought about the endgame, in that it just kind of happens without much fanfare. I've not played Spirit Island myself (although I'm desperate to give it a go).
If you like your cooperative games, and want something a bit more challenging, I find the Forbidden series (Island, Desert, and Sky) are almost punishingly difficult at 2 players. Every time I play those games as a part of a duo it feels like everything is constantly on the brink of collapse, and the win rate is currently about 20%, even on lower difficulties.
I finally found time to dive into Tales from the Red Dragon Inn and I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I like it. I'm a pretty huge dungeon co-op guy and this is very much on the lighter end of the spectrum. It is pretty basic, but it's got a good pace and I'm enjoying how it feels to play thus far. If nothing else, the giant folding paper maps that I can just slap down, pull out a character since everything levels together, and go really makes it something I can get to the table much faster. So far, my brother and I have made it through the first four scenarios and we're really enjoying some of the decisions to be made even in the earlier stuff. It's nothing hard, but it's certainly fun.
I also tried it solo and found that it works quite well. You can play it with two characters, like most of these style of games, but it also has the ability to take a little robot or murder bunny with you and just use a single character. I really liked it quite a bit more than just running a team myself like usual.
I love the original Red Dragon Inn game and never knew about this! I will have to check it out.
I finally found a group to play my copy of deep rock galactic: the board game with. The moment to moment gameplay is actually quite manageable and understandable, but the board setup does take a while.
We only did the introductory mission at haz 1, but even then, the turn before we all got into the drop pod had an oppressor spawn, so we ended up having 1 player finish the mission with a single health cube remaining. It will be interesting to see what the higher difficulties are like.
I have been playing an absolute ton of Go. My girlfriend has been teaching me to play, and it's utterly brilliant. It's a deceptively simple set of rules, but the sheer depth of the game is almost overwhelming. Each game I feel like I get less and less of a battering, but I'm still losing consistently. There's a proverb among Go players that you should lose your first 100 games as quickly as possible, and I can see why. Each defeat is a learning experience, and I'm discovering something new about the game and what moves to play when and why every time.
I've been playing a bit online as well, but it's a very different experience. Partly because I think I have more of a handle on my girlfriend's style of play, which is considerably less aggressive than the players which the matchmaking on OGS seems to give me. I'm getting better at adapting to those more aggressive plays, however. Another striking difference is how much easier it is to read the board state on a physical board, rather than online. I would have thought it would be the other way around!
I really struggle to visualise moves and outcomes though, as a result of aphantasia, so I think there is a hard limit to how high I can manage to get my ranking before I'm just constantly beaten by people who are able to predict and see outcomes much better than I can. Regardless, it's a great game, and I recommend it to anyone who is into their strategy.
If there are any Go players kicking about on Tildes already, hit me up for a correspondence game on OGS! My username is the same over there :)
I used to play a ton years ago. It's a quite brilliant game with oodles of depth. I don't play much nowadays because I've come to realise it's a lifestyle game that you have to truly to commit to to get good, like chess. I really enjoyed exploring it though.
I used to play on Dragon Go Server (slow games) and KGS (live games). Not sure if those sites are still about, but I found some amazing people on KGS who would rewind a game and explain where I had gone wrong.
I enjoyed both the 9×9 games for their scrapiness and quick playtime and the 19×19 for their war of many battles feel. It's quite amazing on the 19×19 how it simulates a war, with tenative early pieces loosly securing areas, aggressions punching through defenses and battles merging into larger ones. It's a remarkable game.
As usual, my friends and I have been playing Romanian Tile Rummy (just "remi" in our language) - this game just doesn't stop being fun. It's one of the very few games where I don't mind the luck element. If I get dealt a bad board, that's life, I can win the next round (since the game only ends after enough rounds have been played in order for someone to reach 1000 total points).
Besides that, Istanbul remains one of my favorite games. It's so complex that every single game turns out very different from the last, yet it's easy to remember the rules after just a couple of games.
Lastly, Exploding Kittens made a very brief comeback.
I'm sad about this one - it was my SO's favorite game, but we both got so excited about buying all the expansions that it killed the game for us. The deck is very bulky, there are too many cards, and the game is now just "draw until the deck almost runs out, then play cards to avoid the Imploding Kitten, the one with the worst hand loses".
We tried shuffling the deck and removing 2/3rds of it without looking at the cards so games get shorter and we can't accumulate as many cards, but then it feels like we don't get the full experience.
We tried Recipes for Disaster, personally I love it, it's very fast paced and the game modes are fun, but I didn't get the same reaction from my friends.
Our last attempt was by ditching all the expansions for Zombie Kittens, however the revive mechanic feels very weird when playing as a group of 3. And the urge to assemble Zombie Apocalypse (Zombie Kittens + all three original expansions) still remained, but that'd bring us right where we started.
Recently we gave the original a try again, the same issues resurfaced again so we played once and then stopped. It's sad, really.
Habani
You can see everyone's cards except your own, and cooperate with the other players to play them in the correct order. It's a bit like The Crew turned on its head. Quite fun, but as it relies very heavily on remembering things others have told you about your cards, I can never get very good at it.
Mists over Carcassonne
Carcassonne, but cooperative! Work together to score enough points before the ghosts overrun everything. It's a neat game, and a lot friendlier than the often cut-throat original, but I'm not sure how much staying power it will have, and I suspect it's more vulnerable to quarterbacking than most other coop games.
Origins: First Builders
A dice placement game where aliens help early humans develop civilization. A fun concept for a game, with some cool game mechanics, and the most satisfying spinners I've ever used. Finishing it took us almost 4 hours, but I expect it to play significantly faster once everyone are familiar with the core mechanics and basic strategies. I've only played it once, but I'm aching to play it again and try out some new strategies.
Trails of Tucana
Draw roads on a map to connect villages to sights and each other. One difference from other [game mechanic] & draw games I've played is that every player's map is slightly different, so players are more likely to make completely different decisions from the beginning. Seems like a pretty good filler game; easy to learn, quick to play, works with any number of players.
I'm slowly working through my Gen Con back catalog. Last week, I’ve played through