OO Boardgamers, what did you play this weekend?

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:10 pm

Love Letter. Takes 2 minutes to teach and can fit in your pants pocket.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:26 pm

We've been having a lot of fun with the Shadows Over Camelot Card Game over lunch recently. Small box, easy rules, a bit of a brain burner at times, and a traitor element as well.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:30 pm

Army of Frogs? It's sort of like Hive for more than 2 players (hey, I said sort of).

SpaceLord · Post by **SpaceLord** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:33 pm

RMC wrote:So I am going away on vacation in a few weeks with my kids and a bunch of nongamers. I have Carcassone and forbidden island that are more lite. But not that many others.

I was thinking of getting Settlers of Catan, but does anyone have any ideas for other lite games for nongamer type games. Also, they have to be semi-small, and easy to teach and play quick. <sigh> And after typing that, I am not sure that the above games will fit all that either.... Hmm...

Well any suggestions?

Hanabi is in a tiny package of 60 cards, and a few cardboard tokens.

It takes 20 minutes to play, is cooperative, and has very few rules:

On your turn, you can either attempt to play a card onto the board, give a clue to another player, or discard a card to regain a clue token for the players.
When playing or discarding a card, you draw a replacement. When giving a clue, you point to cards in another player’s hand, and tell them the number or colors of those cards.
You do not see your own cards, but you see the cards of the other players, the cards in the discard, and the stacks of cards in play.
There are five colors, each with the numbers 1 to 5. The goal is to play, consecutively, each color in order from 1-5. The game ends when the players play correctly 25 times, or make 3 mistakes(and lose), or the deck of cards runs out.

That’s it!

I’ve *never* played with new players who didn't immediately want to play it again. It will be released in the next couple weeks in the US, and costs less than 15 dollars. It’s the best cooperative game in existence, in my opinion. It fixes the main problem with cooperative games: one player cannot “run” the whole game for the other players. Sublime.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:35 pm

Gloom, Zombie Dice

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:35 pm

I've only played it the one time SpaceLord taught it to me, but I agree it's a really interesting logic puzzle disguised as a card game.

Note: that was about Hanabi. Isg

ed me.

RMC · Post by **RMC** » Mon May 20, 2013 1:46 pm

Awesome! I am going to look into getting some of these. Just what the Dr. ordered.

EzeKieL · Post by **EzeKieL** » Mon May 20, 2013 2:39 pm

RMC wrote:So I am going away on vacation in a few weeks with my kids and a bunch of nongamers. I have Carcassone and forbidden island that are more lite. But not that many others.

I was thinking of getting Settlers of Catan, but does anyone have any ideas for other lite games for nongamer type games. Also, they have to be semi-small, and easy to teach and play quick. <sigh> And after typing that, I am not sure that the above games will fit all that either.... Hmm...

Well any suggestions?

Dragon's Gold
Zombie Dice
Love Letter
Air King
Quarriors (because sometimes the look of the dice is enough for them to want to play ^^)

Montag · Post by **Montag** » Mon May 20, 2013 7:53 pm

Ticket to Ride is classic crack. I would take that over Settlers.

MythicalMino · Post by **MythicalMino** » Tue May 21, 2013 10:36 am

played my first full game of Mage Wars yesterday (actually, that is not completely true, as I have played about 2 or 3 games with my 10 year old son, but it is still a bit much for him to really grasp comletely).

I played as the Wizard, my buddy played as the Beastmaster. Both spellbooks were the starter books...

I won. But I am thinking it was mostly because I have played it some, where he had not (he did read through most of the rule book, though, so he had a decent understanding of the game). My wizard basically shut him down, though, with the lightening spells.

He was able to look back on the game, though, and see different things that he felt that he could have done instead of what he did. So that is a good thing. I have read that Mage Wars has that, where you can look back and see what you had done "wrong" and what you should have done differently that may have helped you.

Fun game...

Now I am torn between either Agents of SMERSH, Mage Knight, or Sentinels of the Multiverse for my solo gaming through this week.

And, not sure what we are going to play this coming weekend...

RMC · Post by **RMC** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:05 am

I played Eclipse over the weekend a four player game. And I was really out of the game by turn 4. <sigh>

I pissed off one of my friends by buying the tech, he "had" to have. So he responded by attacking me and ensuring he and I lost the game. A little bit of a let down, as the tech I took was advanced Mining, not a game changer. But oh well.

So one of the other guys won, and I spent the game defending myself from him, with little tech and little resources, as he attacked me on turn 2. I had found a power source for free tech for one of the explored areas, so I loaded up my ships with missiles and lasers, but he had a little more resources than I did, so it was a grinding war, and no one else jumped into attack him. He even had to take the traitor card to attack me, really ensuring he was going to lose.

But the game was still fun, even though I had no hope of winning from turn 2 on. The other 2 had a great time building up fleets and exploring the galaxy and watched the two of us blow up each others stuff and not gain any ground on anything.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:08 am

RMC wrote:
I pissed off one of my friends by buying the tech, he "had" to have. So he responded by attacking me and ensuring he and I lost the game. A little bit of a let down, as the tech I took was advanced Mining, not a game changer. But oh well.

You gotta love those kind of gamers.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:23 am

Got in another game of Merchants and Marauders last night. This time, since we all had the rules fresh in our brains, we were able to finish up a 3 player game in just a bit over 2 hours. It ended up being a really close game.

I was the lone "privateer", since I was very deliberate in never attacking my country's ships. Stuart and Tommy were both merchants, plying their trades on the sea. This 2:1 ratio made for a very different game than the last one, because as the lone merchant, once we got 2 pirate ships and their ships out on the board, I had to be very careful about avoiding everyone. The Caribbean got very crowded in a hurry! With this game, it didn't seem as crowded, but I guess that was helped by all of the ships getting bunched up on the east side of the board.

I was very worried about Tommy's merchant running away with the game, because on the first turn he picked up a mission that gave him a glory point every time he would deliver a cargo of wood to Old Dominion. That seemed like a very easy way for him to turtle going from port to port, getting wood and delivering it for both good money and VP's. But he ended up not being able to capitalize on it because the wood cards were not showing up for him, and he ended up moving further and further away from Old Dominion and only using that card once.

Stuart seemed to jump out to a pretty early lead in getting money, and he was the first player to upgrade his ship to a galleon, but he was having a hard time getting 3 of a kind together for delivery to a demand point, and he fell behind in glory points pretty quickly.

I was having a great time as a privateer. I never failed a single scouting roll (scouting of 3) and had some amazing luck with the merchant raiding. Soon I was at 4 glory points, I had a good bank of cash, an upgraded frigate, and took a final merchant for 12 gold, which gave me 5 glory points and 57 gold, enough for the game.

The other players getting a final turn, Tommy pulled into a harbor, and sold 3 in demand cargo for a glory point and 18 gold, bringing him to 5 glory points and 68 gold...a tie! Stuart played out his turn, also getting another glory point, but that only brought him to 4 plus 40 some gold, bringing him up 2 shy of 10. So going through the tie breaker, we were both at the same non-gold glory points level, so we were still tied. Then, the final tie breaker was money in your stash, of which I had on the second turn of the game dropped 10 gold into my stash, and Tommy had none, so I barely squeaked out a victory.

Such a fun game. I'm surprised I don't play it more often than I do.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:27 am

It's a favorite of mine, that's for sure.

RMC · Post by **RMC** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:38 am

hepcat wrote:
RMC wrote:
I pissed off one of my friends by buying the tech, he "had" to have. So he responded by attacking me and ensuring he and I lost the game. A little bit of a let down, as the tech I took was advanced Mining, not a game changer. But oh well.

You gotta love those kind of gamers.

Yeah, if he can't win, he get's pissy and always has an excuse about why he didn't win. I beat him pretty regularly in most games, but he will tell you he always wins. <shrug> As long as I have fun, I could care less who 'wins'. Which I why I like losing to Hepcat so much.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:48 am

Ummm...you DO realize you won almost every game we played during our holiday soiree, right?

RMC · Post by **RMC** » Tue May 21, 2013 11:55 am

hepcat wrote:Ummm...you DO realize you won almost every game we played during our holiday soiree, right?

hehe... Details details.

baelthazar · Post by **baelthazar** » Tue May 21, 2013 1:22 pm

Is Merchants & Marauders good for five? I have a gaming day planned soon and I will have 5 guys (and probably eat at Five Guys). We never have gotten to try out M&M. Normally we just resort to Twilight Imperium or BSG.

Chaz · Post by **Chaz** » Tue May 21, 2013 1:49 pm

Pretty sure M&M only plays four. I might be remembering wrong.

EzeKieL · Post by **EzeKieL** » Tue May 21, 2013 2:02 pm

Chaz wrote:Pretty sure M&M only plays four. I might be remembering wrong.

Only plays four idd.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Tue May 21, 2013 2:36 pm

There's no reason you couldn't play with 5. You'd have to come up with copies of the captain board, and ships. It would be a more chaotic game, for sure, because the caribbean just ain't that big a place. Downtime would be an issue, though, especially if everyone isn't familiar with the game.

What would be an interesting variant would be to have the 5th player control the NPC ships. Instead of using their programmed movement, you actually run them around the board trying to cause as much mischief as possible.

baelthazar · Post by **baelthazar** » Tue May 21, 2013 9:04 pm

For our first play, I think we should go standard. I may only end up with 4, so that would be better, I assume? We may just end up with the old standby, TI:3, I don't have to teach as much and we can jump pretty well in.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed May 22, 2013 9:38 am

City of Remnants is the coolstuffinc.com sale of the day. I couldn't resist.

Chaz · Post by **Chaz** » Wed May 22, 2013 9:44 am

$39 shipped is testing my resolve. I do not need more games...

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed May 22, 2013 9:50 am

Yeah, I shouldn't have considering how much I dropped on a kickstarter recently and all the upcoming conventions, but this game HAS been on my amazon wishlist for a while.

baelthazar · Post by **baelthazar** » Wed May 22, 2013 12:01 pm

I really enjoy City of Remnants. I think you will like it too!

The Rocketman · Post by **The Rocketman** » Fri May 24, 2013 10:54 am

Though I haven't touched LOTR: the card game for about a year, I've been reading about the upcoming expansions again lately. Mainly it was the recent article about the new "easy-mode" which has been introduced, which I'm keen to try out.

But when reading about it, I kinda got sidetracked into other LCG reviews, so now I've ordered Star Wars: the card game. The main draw about it, is that deckbuilding should go fast: you don't select cards, but you select 10 'objective sets' which consist of a couple of cards, some good, some bad. This sounds like an excellent idea for someone like me, who just doesn't have the time or energy anymore to build a deck from scratch.

So now I'm impatiently awaiting my copy, hoping it'll be a fun game as well

Any thoughts here from people who've played it?

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Fri May 24, 2013 11:16 am

I've had it for a few months but have yet to get it to the table. Next time I'm only down to 2 players on game night I'll press to try and get it played.

killbot737 · Post by **killbot737** » Mon May 27, 2013 9:23 am

My friends and I played Fortress America yesterday. We had all played the original so we were barely familiar with the rules. It's really similar, so much so that we couldn't identify any specific glaring differences between the two.

It's definitely well balanced. I was America (I got assigned to be America because it's my game

) but I had mostly only glossed over the rules before we played. There were four of us so that made for 3 human invader players. As expected the invaders swooped in on the lightly defended coastal cities (because there's not much America can do about that in the first turn). Tampa put up a surprisingly effective defense, though. By about turn 3-4 we were getting into the flow of the game and I had America turtled up pretty good. We went back and forth between 16 and 19 cities gone - Invaders need to capture 18 and hold them until after America's actions in the overall turn sequence (America always goes last, home team advantage). I had to sacrifice Salt Lake City to save Colorado Springs and Denver, sorry Mormons. Boston put up a ridiculous defense and SF made an excellent comeback, but in the end it was a combo of the Eastern invaders taking Minneapolis (left myself wide open by accident) and not expanding my forces enough. I ended up too bunched up in the midwest and I couldn't take back enough cities at the end of turn 8.

It's a lot of fun, there are a few rule ambiguities that we made up reasonable house rules for (and those situations may have answers but we didn't look anything up online.) Total play time was about 3.5 hours, but if we knew how to play already we'd probably have been done in 2.5 or less.

One funny bonus to the location was that we were playing at my friend's dad's house, and hid dad invited about 10 people over for a Memorial Day party (same reason we were there). His dad's friends were very interested in the game, there were a lot of vets! They kept asking how America was doing, "stop picking on America!", etc. The background commentary definitely added to the fun of the game.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Tue May 28, 2013 9:27 am

Got some x-wing minis for my birthday... Slave I, Falcon and Tie advanced. Sadly no base game, whatever is a guy to do?

I've been forced to buy the game. Forced I say.

Now because I am a little nuts I already have a CSI order in for the next Android: Netrunner Data Pack that includes the x-wing base game to pad the order out to get free shipping... but that could be weeks! I have lots of amazon credit from a recent coinstar visit and eventually it would be good to have 2 base sets, right? Right?!

Oh, my wife also got me a Game of Thrones card game. It is Fantasy Flight, but apparently it is not the LCG. I know nothing about it, but I guess I'll be learning.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Tue May 28, 2013 10:49 am

Happy birthday.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Tue May 28, 2013 11:10 am

Happy Birthday C Everett Coopasonic!

baelthazar · Post by **baelthazar** » Tue May 28, 2013 11:50 am

Happy Birthday Coop! Mine was earlier in the month, 20 days ago. Nice to see more Children of May!

Decisions decisions. I have 5 players coming this weekend and I haven't had a game day like this since last year. That usually means that I dust off the old Twilight Imperium for its annual epic war and space opera fest. On the other hand, I have a nice copy of Descent: Second Edition that has had very little play and this would be a perfect time to have a full party in the dungeon.

That being said, I am not sure if Descent plays well with five. I'm assuming it does, given that would be one of each class in the party (or some redundancy). But I wanted to make sure from the OO hivemind before putting that on the table. The good aspect of Descent is that we could play several quests and possibly another game in the time it takes us to play one TI (we regularly hit 9 hours in TI, because we are slow players).

I think a Descent + Merchant of Venus or Risk: Legacy day might be equally as fun... but the call of TI is so strong.

Seppe · Post by **Seppe** » Tue May 28, 2013 2:31 pm

EzeKieL wrote:
RMC wrote:So I am going away on vacation in a few weeks with my kids and a bunch of nongamers. I have Carcassone and forbidden island that are more lite. But not that many others.

I was thinking of getting Settlers of Catan, but does anyone have any ideas for other lite games for nongamer type games. Also, they have to be semi-small, and easy to teach and play quick. <sigh> And after typing that, I am not sure that the above games will fit all that either.... Hmm...

Well any suggestions?
Dragon's Gold
Zombie Dice
Love Letter
Air King
Quarriors (because sometimes the look of the dice is enough for them to want to play ^^)

The Timeline series is pretty good to play with kids (or adults). We have the Invention one. You have a hand of cards with inventions on them. You have to place them into the play area (timeline) in the correct spot, if you are wrong you draw another card. First one to empty their hand wins.

Boudreaux · Post by **Boudreaux** » Wed May 29, 2013 10:30 am

Finally got to play Kemet over the weekend, and it might be even better than Cyclades. They're not kidding when the rules recommend attacking immediately and often. I had thought that the power tiles would be much more prevalent throughout the game, but each player only ended up buying three or four of them before it was all over. Makes planning out your strategy much more interesting when you're only going to get a few of those. Really looking forward to playing this one again soon.

Also got in a couple more games of the LOTR Deck-Building game, and my kids have enjoyed this enough that I picked up my own copy. This is probably going to replace both Rune Age and Dominion, neither of which ever really grabbed us. Surprisingly fun.

Lorini · Post by **Lorini** » Wed May 29, 2013 2:09 pm

Kemet doesn't have the turtling issue we had with Cyclades. I like it a lot better, a nice clean multi player conflict game.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Thu May 30, 2013 4:10 pm

MythicalMino wrote:I have played a couple games of War of the Ring (solo)....

I want Omens, but it is not available anywhere....

Keep watching this page.

This will be a two player only version of the game (honestly, i've never tried the 3 to 4 player variants that came with my copy...nor do I think they'd be much fun) but other than not having enough extra cards to cover a third and fourth player, it's the same as what everyone else has. Including expansions.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Thu May 30, 2013 4:23 pm

My Savage Worlds session this past weekend got cancelled, as one of the players ended up having to work.

A couple of the others still came over and we ran through quite a few games - Wrath of Ashardalon, Castle Panic, Zombie Dice, and Munchkin all made an appearance. While they are roleplayers, none were really board gamers, but everyone seemed to have fun.

Wrath of Ashardalon went a little too well. Since neither had much experience with the game, I put in one of the house rules I use with the kids and ended up making it a little too easy - we won with two healing surges left over.

Munchkin was a blast, even if I inadvertently caused someone else to win by not noticing the monster I was helping (at level 8) was a '2 levels' monster.

Castle Panic has really impressed me. I've only played three games, and the players won all three, but every time it was down to the wire. Every time we were at a point where we were convinced we were going to lose, and every time we pulled it back in the last few minutes. That's good design.

Zombie Dice was Zombie Dice. Three of us played three games, and each of us won once, one fellow having the nerve to go and get 19 brains in one turn.

Daveman · Post by **Daveman** » Thu May 30, 2013 5:25 pm

So I picked up the PDF version of the Memoir 44 Campaign Book vol.1 and really like it, so I decided I'd get it printed up real nice from some office center somewhere. I'd never done so before, but my wife gets our photos and albums done online all the time for cheap so I didn't think it would be all that big a deal. It's about 60 pages, double sided.

Looks like $75 is the cheapest I can find.

I had no idea, unless I'm just looking at all the wrong sites. Does this sound like as good as I can get, or does anyone know of anywhere else I can try? I can just print it out myself, but I just might use that much money in ink anyway if I do.

Daveman · Post by **Daveman** » Thu May 30, 2013 5:32 pm

Blackhawk wrote:Castle Panic has really impressed me. I've only played three games, and the players won all three, but every time it was down to the wire. Every time we were at a point where we were convinced we were going to lose, and every time we pulled it back in the last few minutes.

I don't recall if you have it or not, but if you like Castle Panic get the Wizard Tower expansion. I think it's one of my favorite game expansions. You'll probably find you win fewer games, and those you do will be hard-fought.