OO Boardgamers, what did you play this weekend?

[Chaosraven]

Received Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn for my birthday with a number of the expansions, hoping to play it soon.

Played an evening of Cosmic Encounter with kenetickid and our sons, won with my son.
Looking forward to 4-6 player Cosmic all day this Saturday...

[hepcat]

Ashes.

I would say it’s my favorite head to head card game.

By the way, two new characters are releasing this week.

[Chaosraven]

Ooh ooh

But I don't have all the other stuff yet!

[coopasonic]

I have all the other stuff and I think I have played twice. I really need to do better at playing my games...

Plaid Hat will be at BGG.CON so I will just get the latest straight from them, plus whatever promos they have handy... and maybe I will play it. Maybe. I loved the two times I played it. It's just beyond my kids. Maybe I can get somebody at work to try it. It's getting to be the season where sitting outside to read after lunch isn't really viable.

[Pyperkub]

Played a couple of games of Catan into the night Saturday

[coopasonic]

Legendary: Buffy is out. I haven't played it yet, but watched part of a playthrough and it looks interesting. It is not an Encounters game and I already have too much Legendary, but I ordered it anyway. It adds a Light/Dark track that has interactions with lots of different things and should make the game more interesting. I am hoping my oldest son (Xander... hmm, where did that name come from) will be interested.

I got the package today and went to sort the cards and... Upper Deck finally figured out how to ship a game with the cards presorted!!!

[Chaosraven]

Someone should make a game where you play as the person who lights all the torches and candles in dungeons.

[LordMortis]

Received Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn for my birthday with a number of the expansions, hoping to play it soon.

Played an evening of Cosmic Encounter with kenetickid and our sons, won with my son.
Looking forward to 4-6 player Cosmic all day this Saturday...

Bummer. I'd say "hey waddup?" but all these years later, I'm still burnt out on Cosmic. I can still remember the burnout moment. There was a never ending game in ConSuite we were playing on a Saturday night at a SiFi convention. I wasn't enjoying myself even a little but I couldn't let my boredom ruin 6 other people's enjoyment and so we played and played and played and played. And I resisted the burning desire to play king maker and set myself free and continued to contribute to prolonging the game. That's when you wish others would just concede a group win so we could be done, but nope...

[baelthazar]

Was this the FFG version of Cosmic? They did a pretty good job of putting in place ways to ensure the game would not be endless. It does not play as fast as the Hasbro version, but I have not had a game go past a few hours, even with 4-5.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Bummer. I'd say "hey waddup?" but all these years later, I'm still burnt out on Cosmic. I can still remember the burnout moment. There was a never ending game in ConSuite we were playing on a Saturday night at a SiFi convention. I wasn't enjoying myself even a little but I couldn't let my boredom ruin 6 other people's enjoyment and so we played and played and played and played. And I resisted the burning desire to play king maker and set myself free and continued to contribute to prolonging the game. That's when you wish others would just concede a group win so we could be done, but nope...

Given the almost infinite variety of play Cosmic Encounter provides, I don't see why one subpar game would necessarily put you off from playing completely. One of the primary reasons it remains such a beloved classic is that every game of Cosmic Encounter is utterly unique, and it provides a different, surprising game every time you sit down to play. Suffice to say, it's awesome space poker with a mindboggling array of deliberately-unbalanced alien races/powers, with a wicked sense of humour.

Granted, it's not for everyone, but with the right crowd? It doesn't get much better. The point being, you ought not let the fact that you once happened to play the game with a rather boring group dissuade you from playing such a great gaming classic.

[Zarathud]

You may underestimate the Detroit crew's ability to break a game. I find it amazing, and enjoy seeing it in action despite being unable to group up in the past few Octocons.

[Chaosraven]

Well we managed 5 Players at the gaming.

So we started with 4 player Magic Commander while 5th took someone to work.

The borrower used my Ob Nixilis monoblack and offered to buy it, he liked it so much. My buddy used his new Dragon deck, my other buddy used his new Vampire deck, and I used my new Cat deck (all three being the newly released tribal, each modified from the out of the box). Pulled off the win with Commander damage to the Vampire player who had nearly a hundred life.

Taxi guy returned and we played a 5 player Cosmic Encounter, 2 Powers and Tech Cards. Game won by the first time player by his Relic Power.

Second game we added Moons, using 2 Powers, Tech, and threw some extra flares in the deck. CoWin by myself and the winner of the first game (two in a row for him!)

Third game we went kind of crazy and used Moons, Space Stations (using Multiple and Conquest variants) and eon/mayfair Reverse Hexes.
One of the Moons was the eliminated ships get removed from game and remained occupied by a pair of players for every encounter of the game except for one. So the entire game but that one encounter every ship eliminated got removed.

At the end, I only possessed 6 ships, Taxi guy had 8, guy looking for a Hat Trick had 7, bugger on the moon had 9, and poor Six Pact player had 6, one on each of his planets.

I won thru The Claw by stealing planets.

Finished the evening with Ashes, where I discovered I am going to have to buy more dice.
The former Six Pact player won with the guy that uses 10 Charm dice, making HUGE birds.

12+ hours of gaming, good friggin' day.

[Chaosraven]

with a rather boring group dissuade you from playing such a great gaming classic.

To be fair, I will never ever play 6 player Munchkin for much the same reason.

Trying to get that final level against the powers of 5 people?

Ridiculous.

[hepcat]

Finished the evening with Ashes, where I discovered I am going to have to buy more dice.
The former Six Pact player won with the guy that uses 10 Charm dice, making HUGE birds.

12+ hours of gaming, good friggin' day.

That's the one thing I'm not fond of with Ashes. I dropped 20 on 4 packs of 5 dice for each resource. A buck a die. I also grabbed promos for two phoenixborn not in the base game that came with just a few summons each...and that cost me almost another 20. They overcharge for the small stuff in my opinion. But the full character packs are reasonably priced, so it evens out in the end.

Need to pick up the two new ones this week. I'm itching to play again after our great game at Octocon. I still chuckle over the final few minutes in which three of us killed each other in rapid succession, while the voodoo character fed off our deaths and won.

I also still have no desire to deck build with this game. I know it's built into the game, but the decks are so well themed for the characters they come with that I can't see breaking them up. Plus, I've got almost a dozen characters to choose from, so variety isn't going to be an issue.

[baelthazar]

Hep - Quick Gloomhaven question...

I am a compulsive card sleever. That said, I know that Gloomhaven is a "legacy" game and, thus, eventually limited in its use (even if that is 100+ plays). I also know that there are some 1500 cards in the box.

So, in your opinion - is it worth sleeving the game?

I ask because Mayday is having a sleeve sale and now would be a decent time to grab the sleeves I need.

[hentzau]

Hep - Quick Gloomhaven question...

I am a compulsive card sleever. That said, I know that Gloomhaven is a "legacy" game and, thus, eventually limited in its use (even if that is 100+ plays). I also know that there are some 1500 cards in the box.

So, in your opinion - is it worth sleeving the game?

I ask because Mayday is having a sleeve sale and now would be a decent time to grab the sleeves I need.

I'll give you my thoughts on it...

I am not a sleever. At all. The only game I have ever sleeved is the original Marvel Legendary.

That said, I have thought long and hard about sleeving the player power cards. Because you have the same cards in your hand for game after game after game, these cards are going to get beat up pretty quickly. The rest of them? I'm not sure how important those are to sleeve. They don't get a lot of handling.

[baelthazar]

Thanks! People said that the priority were Player action cards and monster cards. I am tempted to forego the usual "premium" card sleeves and just get their regular sleeves (which are 100 to a pack rather than 50). They are not nearly as good, but they do the job and will cost half as much.

[Isgrimnur]

with a rather boring group dissuade you from playing such a great gaming classic.

To be fair, I will never ever play 6 player Munchkin for much the same reason.

Trying to get that final level against the powers of 5 people?

Ridiculous.

It’s simple. Never be the first crab to try and climb out of the bucket. Let someone else do it and face the wrath of the group, who then have depleted resources to oppose the next guy.

[hepcat]

Hep - Quick Gloomhaven question...

I am a compulsive card sleever. That said, I know that Gloomhaven is a "legacy" game and, thus, eventually limited in its use (even if that is 100+ plays). I also know that there are some 1500 cards in the box.

So, in your opinion - is it worth sleeving the game?

I ask because Mayday is having a sleeve sale and now would be a decent time to grab the sleeves I need.

I’m like Hentzau, I rarely sleeve. I do on occasion when shoddy material demands it (Star Trek Fleet Captains), but Gloomhaven is pretty good quality. So I haven’t, and won’t.

But I do highly recommend using the Gloomy Companion app. It takes over the tedious task of getting the attack cards out for all the individual enemies. Once I started using it, I never looked back.

[LordMortis]

with a rather boring group dissuade you from playing such a great gaming classic.

To be fair, I will never ever play 6 player Munchkin for much the same reason.

Trying to get that final level against the powers of 5 people?

Ridiculous.

Can't play Munchkin since that game either. Not even a 3 player game. It's PTGSD, I think.

with a rather boring group dissuade you from playing such a great gaming classic.

To be fair, I will never ever play 6 player Munchkin for much the same reason.

Trying to get that final level against the powers of 5 people?

Ridiculous.

It’s simple. Never be the first crab to try and climb out of the bucket. Let someone else do it and face the wrath of the group, who then have depleted resources to oppose the next guy.

The problem is a world with 6 superpowers at a detente all wanting to be the supreme power. Even if a fourth or fifth person reaches for the ring in a row, they inevitably still get nuked.

[coopasonic]

I've played a couple games of Legendary: Buffy and... it's Legendary Marvel with Buffy characters and villains. We did come fairly close to losing the second game but that's more because my son left me to defeat the villain and we had some bad luck on scheme twist draws. The Light/Dark track does add some interesting variety to how turns play out, causing different cards to do different things and allowing for some interesting interplay with the bosses and schemes. I think it's worth owning in addition to Legendary Marvel, if you are a Buffy fan, but probably not otherwise.

[YellowKing]

In the continuing saga of FIRST MARTIANS:

Finished up the first campaign. The last scenario we used a house rule because we couldn't find the answer anywhere. It probably made the mission a touch too easy, but when we looked back on it retroactively we realized there was a high chance we would have won no matter what interpretation we used. Unlike the scenarios which tend to be hit or miss regarding difficulty scaling, the campaign does feel challenging on Normal and much more forgiving on Easy.

We then started the second campaign, this time deciding to just go through it on Easy from the get-go. We won it fairly handily and put ourselves into good position for the next scenario.

At this point I feel like I've played the game more than enough to give a solid review. My thoughts are that FIRST MARTIANS is a great game with some really good mechanics, but it requires a lot of patience (more than most people will have), to uncover it. If ROBINSON CRUSOE didn't exist, I think people may be more forgiving. As it stands, FIRST MARTIANS is a thematically inferior, less forgiving, and more complex version of Crusoe, and that's a bad combo.

That said, we certainly got our money's worth out of it, and I've enjoyed every game session. In a world where nobody has time to play all the great games coming out, however, I certainly don't fault anyone who decided to give this one a pass. This is a game that, like Crusoe, would benefit greatly from a second edition that clarifies the rules and fixes the scenario balance and app problems that rear up from time to time.

Our plan right now is to finish up the campaign over the next 2-3 weeks, then we'll have 3-4 weeks of free play before diving into PANDEMIC LEGACY: SEASON 2. Right now we're debating whether to stick with the Ignacy mechanics and blow through the Beagle expansion for Crusoe, or just use those 3-4 weeks to play one-off titles that we haven't gotten to yet (LEGACY: PREDATOR, BLACK ORCHESTRA, etc.)

[Anonymous Bosch]

with a rather boring group dissuade you from playing such a great gaming classic.

To be fair, I will never ever play 6 player Munchkin for much the same reason.

Trying to get that final level against the powers of 5 people?

Ridiculous.

Yeah, but Munchkin is an atrocious game. Sure, it's popular in a similar way to the Exploding Kittens card game, but they're about as far from 'great gaming classic' as one could possibly imagine.

[baelthazar]

I totally agree. I really detest Munchkin. My friends like to play it because it is quick and leads to silly stories. But as a game it has all the worst traits: Kingmaking, random screwage by cards and dice, mindless vengeance and vendettas. And it always goes far too long.

[Smoove_B]

Man, you guys are a bunch of Debbie-downers. I'm going to bust out RIck and Morty Munchkin this weekend for my annual basement gaming Thanksgiving dinner. I know we won't play it all the time, but as a themed one-off? It'll be great.

[coopasonic]

People that invite the unaware to play Munchkin are the real bad guys here.

[Ænima]

Munchkin is the worst. No wait, Card Against Humanity is the worst. But Munchkin is definitely second!

[coopasonic]

At least Cards Against Humanity ends.

[Isgrimnur]

Munchkin is the worst. No wait, Card Against Humanity is the worst. But Munchkin is definitely second!

No mention of Apples to Apples.

[Ænima]

Apples to Apples is a perfectly fine game... to play with my kids.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Man, you guys are a bunch of Debbie-downers. I'm going to bust out RIck and Morty Munchkin this weekend for my annual basement gaming Thanksgiving dinner. I know we won't play it all the time, but as a themed one-off? It'll be great.

Hey, whatever floats yer goat. Rick and Morty may add some novelty value, but pasting a Rick and Morty theme onto Munchkin won't make the underlying gameplay any less feculent.

[hentzau]

Man, you guys are a bunch of Debbie-downers. I'm going to bust out RIck and Morty Munchkin this weekend for my annual basement gaming Thanksgiving dinner. I know we won't play it all the time, but as a themed one-off? It'll be great.

Hey, whatever floats yer goat. Rick and Morty may add some novelty value, but pasting a Rick and Morty theme onto Munchkin won't make the underlying gameplay any less feculent.

You keep using words like "feculent" you need to play Shakespeare Munchkin...

[Anonymous Bosch]

Man, you guys are a bunch of Debbie-downers. I'm going to bust out RIck and Morty Munchkin this weekend for my annual basement gaming Thanksgiving dinner. I know we won't play it all the time, but as a themed one-off? It'll be great.

Hey, whatever floats yer goat. Rick and Morty may add some novelty value, but pasting a Rick and Morty theme onto Munchkin won't make the underlying gameplay any less feculent.

You keep using words like "feculent" you need to play Shakespeare Munchkin...

I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall.

[YellowKing]

This should be my next to last post about FIRST MARTIANS, so bear with me all those who have made the journey so far.

Last night was super-productive, as we knocked out three mission in the last campaign for FIRST MARTIANS. We did extremely well (we played on Easy), and should be in good shape to finish the campaign next week.

So some thoughts:

1. This is the so-called "Legacy" campaign, but it doesn't ask you to destroy anything. It just has one segment where it asks you to write in the campaign booklet. Instead of marking the book up, we just used a separate piece of paper.

2. There is one mission in here that illustrated everything I've hated about FIRST MARTIANS. Without going into spoilers, it basically lays out some objectives, then suddenly changes those objectives mid-scenario. If you were efficient in completing those first objectives (as we were), it essentially puts you in a position where you can't complete the second set of objectives, thus making the scenario unwinnable. We wound up having to house-rule a way to backtrack our previous objectives so that we could actually complete the scenario.

There are a couple of possibilities here:
- We misunderstood something, in which case the scenario rules should have been much clearer. Despite searching FAQs, reading the scenario sheet over and over, etc. we could find no solution to our dilemma.
- They just didn't play test this scenario properly, and didn't realize it can put you in an impossible situation.

Neither possibility should be acceptable in a game of this caliber. But yet we've run into both situations throughout the course of the game in other scenarios. The long and short of it is that this game was *not* thoroughly play tested and polished. It could have used another six months of development.

3. The frustrating thing is that other than that snafu, the campaign has been enjoyable and varied. This too, sums up my entire experience with FIRST MARTIANS. When it's working, it's really fun. But when you run into these preventable issues, it's table-pounding frustration. It's just too bad that it wasn't given that extra care to iron out these issues before it was released.

Next up will be the BEAGLE expansion for Robinson Crusoe. We figured we'd just stick with the Ignacy mechanics and blow through that one before starting Pandemic Legacy Season 2 in January.

[Isgrimnur]

Lost a game of Tash Kalar to coop by one point.

coop then failed to gun down Hitler in Black Orchestra, leaving us to end up splattered against a wall before the Soviets showed up.

Came in last, but with a somewhat respectable score in Noria, when my random flailing about failed to produce any synergies on my production wheel of misfortune.

coop bought Hunt for the Ring, missed several rules that severely hampered my Nazgûl from hunting him down effectively. A re-read this morning led to some corrections where I might be willing to play it again.

Whitehall Mystery was played twice in quick succession, a much faster alternative to Letters from Whitechapel with max 4 players/3 rounds. Might be worth picking up for a quicker taste that could hit the table more often.

coop taught three of us Azul. I managed a win with a coule rows, a column, and a color cover bonus to get me over the top.

Played a demo game of Aeon's End, a co-op deck builder that's like a combination of Ascenscion and Cutthroat Caverns. We managed to lose in like 30 minutes. coop liked it enough to pick up the whole kit.

Finished the night off with a game of Arctic Scavengers, a deckbuilder with a round of "combat" for a specific card every round, but blind to all but one player. More conflict than Dominion in most cases, but certainly not to Nightfall levels. I'd play it again.

Looked at:

Mistborn: House War - Appeared to be a cross of a Legendary game with a touch of BSG-type coop problem solving without the hidden betrayal mechanic. While coop loves Legendary, the negotiation part of it turned him off the idea of the game immediately.

Vikingar - I have a friend that's heavy into the Viking motif, and a game where you have the mythology and combat, plus the addition of rune throwing over dice leads me to believe that he weill eat it up. Unfortunately, it's in the shipping phase from the Kickstarter, so there's no telling when it will be available for general purchase.

Spynet - Richard Garfield card game where you attempt to complete missions in the intelligence world of one of four colors. Seemed light, didn't really grab me.

Echidna Shuffle - Up on kickstarter, already has it's goals hit, seems like a neat little movement game, but not something I'm interested in at the moment.

[coopasonic]

And now for my BoardGameGeekCon dump which may look very similar to Isgrimnur's...

I saw SpaceLordOO while we were in line Wednesday morning and he stopped talking about 7th Continent long enough to tell me about Hunt for the Ring. That night I did some research and there was very little info available. The vendor halls opened up Thursday and they told me the delivery truck with the game had been turned away at the hotel loading dock. They expected re-delivery later that day. A few hours later I went back and they got their delivery, but no Hunt and no expectations of any hunt. Cue sad Coop. Friday afternoon, Isgrimnur said he wanted to check out the smaller vendor hall again (where Ares games was located). Boom, they had just gotten another shipment, this one containing seven cases of Hunt for the Ring. I bought it and we headed out to find a table. I speed-read the rules and missed some key stuff, game was not impressive. Saturday morning I sat down with the rules and gave them a full read and identified three rules that I had missed, two of which would drastically change the game. A little later, before Isgrimnur arrived, I started setting up the game with a "Players Wanted" flag up and a guy came up with curiosity. We play a much more tense and competitive game and now I am much happier with my purchase.

The only new release I knew about going in was another Tash-Kalar expansion, Etherweave. I picked that up and managed to get it played. I also played a couple other games with the vanilla deck teaching other players. The CGE guys saw me teaching on more than one occasion and thanked me for my efforts.

The first day I played Dimension, a timed logic game about stacking balls with rules determined by a deck of cards that change every round. Then we played Finca, which is a fruit picking and delivering game. The mechanic for picking was interesting and the game was light enough for me to enjoy it. Then an oversized game of Kingdomino. My 11 year old and I play this together, but I wanted to play it with 3 or 4. It was pretty different from two player, as expected.

Then there was a pitiful loss at Black Orchestra. Isgrimnur was arrested multiple times. We never saw that on our first plays last year. Then Queendomino which adds some more complexity over Kingdomino, but still fairly light and quick. I got a couple plays of Azul and taught it a couple times as well. I played a couple demo games of Aeon's End. Both were tragic losses, but I finally talked myself into buying it and went all in with two base sets and two expansions and they threw in a couple promo sets. Saturday night I played a game of Aeon's End with some random folks to see how the other Nemeses worked. I was not disappointed.

As Isgrimnur mentioned, I will likely be picking up Whitehall Mystery as a quicker Letters from Whitechapel experience that still feels like Whitechapel.

[hepcat]

Aeon's End is a polished, fun game. It can be really tough, but that's what gives it legs. I backed the first edition and was impressed that they offered free upgrades to first edition owners when they decided to change all the art in the 2nd edition. That's fantastic customer relations.

[YellowKing]

Ok, here's my final post about FIRST MARTIANS.

We finished up the legacy campaign tonight, and boy did we end on a sour note. The finale of this campaign is by far the pinnacle of this game's flaws, an almost embarrassing clusterfuck.

Without going into spoilers, the game gave us two choices. One choice was so easy we literally won the scenario in one turn. The second choice was so difficult to be essentially impossible with the time we had left. Now, I fully admit that some misunderstanding of the rules on our part could have led to this wild swing in difficulty, but this goes with the running theme of this game - vague rules that don't need to be vague, leading to situations where you don't know if game balance is due to player ignorance or bad play testing. And no use searching BGG forums - nobody's still playing this game, at least not the campaigns.

I strongly believe in this case it was the latter. Much like the previous campaign, the game seemed to want to put you in dramatic situations. However, it did so with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer smashing you in the face while completely breaking game balance and mechanics in the process.

It was so bad, the owner of the game and its biggest champion, finally admitted defeat and expressed his frustration with the lack of polish.

I still stand by my assertion that the game is mechanically sound and is a lot of fun in terms of (most) standalone scenarios. However, this thing BEGS for a second edition that fixes the sloppy, hastily assembled mess of vague rules and game imbalance, and a complete overhaul of the app.

I haven't talked much about the app, but even overlooking the numerous grammatical errors, it attempts to put a simplified "one size fits all" interface over missions that are not one size. The result is just clunky and disappointing.

So I'm saying farewell to Mars, with little regret. We started playing the Beagle campaign for Crusoe tonight and that reminded me unfortunately what a much more polished game Crusoe is. Hopefully someday FIRST MARTIANS will see its kinks ironed out, but for right now it still remains as my biggest disappointment of the year.

[hepcat]

Original edition of Crusoe? If so, are you using the 2nd edition rules?

[Smoove_B]

Aeon's End is a polished, fun game. It can be really tough, but that's what gives it legs. I backed the first edition and was impressed that they offered free upgrades to first edition owners when they decided to change all the art in the 2nd edition. That's fantastic customer relations.

Currently $25 as part of CSI's Pre-Black Friday sales.