OO Boardgamers, what did you play this weekend?

SpaceLord · Post by **SpaceLord** » Fri Aug 21, 2015 1:51 pm

hepcat wrote:Played some more Ashes: Rise of the Phoenix Born on Wednesday at an open game night at our local FLGS. About 3 turns into the game, an observer to our game who actually had studied the rules beforehand noted that I was playing it wrong. Instead of everyone taking one turn, and then going to the recovery phase; everyone is supposed to go around the table taking turns until everyone has passed consecutively. That made a HUGE difference in the game and made resource management so much more vital. I liked the game while playing it wrong, but now I love it! Can't recommend it enough!

Were you trying to use 10 dice in 1 action?

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Fri Aug 21, 2015 7:01 pm

Yup...but not trying to use 10 dice so much as trying to figure out why you needed that many. I had watched the Rodney Watch it Played video and I could have sworn that that is what he did. But as I said, the game is MUCH better now!

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 2:40 am

Code 777 - a deduction game similar to Hanabi. I did okay, but did not win.
Letters from Whitechapel - Teaching the game, I was caught on the second night by taking too straight a route limited by how far I was from home.
Nightfall - Teaching the game, I was out metagamed by the young girl of the family of three, who whines enough about being picked on to capture the win
Firefly - Pirates and Bounty Hunters expansion and a quick start of strip mining a deck. Race to five goal tokens, I didn't complete one. The last turn before the game ended (in just 2 hours), I loaded 9 passengers into my cargo ship, and then was immediately hit by the reaver card. I was not the only one hit by brutal luck, but I have been consistently ineffectual at that game on every attempt to play it. At least it went by quickly.

Chrisoc13 · Post by **Chrisoc13** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 4:14 pm

Some decent gaming this weekend.

1. Lewis and Clark- I like this game a lot. Played it twice now. You play explorers racing across the U.S. to try and be the first to make it to Oregon. It's a bit of a deck builder mixed with some worker placement. The race at the end is very enjoyable and quite tense. While I enjoy it it does get a little thinky with some analysis paralysis. Fun though. I don't need to buy it, but I have enjoyed it.

2. Hive- Always heard a lot about give, finally got around to trying it. Great 2 player game. Quickly became a must buy for my collection. So I picked up the pocket version, which is even better! Same great small game, fits in a small bag. Likely will be a go to travel game for me since it's also almost impossible to hurt.

3. Homesteaders- Kind of meh for me. The game is simple with different buildings you can build each turn and you bid to determine which building you get to buy. Every turn one person doesn't get to buy any buildings. I enjoyed the auction mechanic but it felt a little dry overall. Fun still and I would play it again.

4. X-wing: Still my all time favorite game. My imperial raider with the new tie advanced arrived this week so it had to hit the table. I managed to play an epic game with epic ships on both teams (a first since finally two factions have epic ships) and I really enjoyed it as always. Just a great game. I also played a regular tournament game featuring the tie advanced. I wrote up a bit in the x-wing thread so I won't repeat too much, but suffice it to say I love the epic ships still, and the Tie advanced is a serious threat now. Really cool.

I also picked up the expansion for five tribes. Haven't had a chance to play it yet but looking forward to trying it out.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 4:16 pm

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 5:00 pm

You know where to find us.

baelthazar · Post by **baelthazar** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 5:39 pm

My wife and I played Rum and Bones today. I was, I have to be honest, a little disappointed in the game's length. I was expecting a quick, fast-paced, and light hour-long affair. It took us 3+ hours! Now this was our first game and we did not have the strategy down (one strategy we did not take advantage of was using rigging to get heroes in proper places to focus on objectives rather than trying to plough through mobs and other heroes). Still, that is a bit excessive. There is a lot of downtime between turns as well, given all the stuff you have to do with deckhands, bosuns, hero prep, deck gun firing, card drawing, and Kraken summoning.

The theme makes the game very appealing to me, but so far the gameplay was not as strong as I hoped. It is early to tell, but it certainly did not dethrone Arcadia Quest and Hyperborea.

Chaz · Post by **Chaz** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 7:43 pm

Got to play Forbidden Stars with two other guys today. Took about four hours and change, but that was with everyone being new, a rules explanation, and two of them not having used this order system in Starcraft before. If you haven't tried it, you basically have to plan your turn out in reverse order, with other players very able to screw up your plans. It made the first couple rounds go pretty slow. Even at four hours, it didn't feel long.

Weirdly, it seems like it's a much more deliberate game than you'd think from it being Warhammer. Attacking with equal or only a slight advantage can go either way, so building up and focusing on fewer, decisive strikes seems like the way to go. At the same time, you have to move with a purpose, because units can only move so fast, and getting the right numbers where you need them when you need them takes some planning.

I definitely want to play it again. I suspect that once people know what they're doing, it'll come out to about an hour per player, which is reasonable for this kind of thing, I think.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 8:30 pm

I played D&D. At an alpaca farm.

Ralph-Wiggum · Post by **Ralph-Wiggum** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:14 pm

I didn't know that there was an expansion for Five Tribes already. That might be my favorite game although I don't get to play it as much as I would like. Please post your impressions of the expansion once you've had some time with it!

Ralph-Wiggum · Post by **Ralph-Wiggum** » Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:23 pm

Who am I kidding - I'll be surprised if I can hold off buying before tomorrow afternoon.

Ralph-Wiggum · Post by **Ralph-Wiggum** » Mon Aug 24, 2015 9:48 am

Already ordered. I am so weak.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Mon Aug 24, 2015 11:17 am

hentzau wrote:I played D&D. At an alpaca farm.

I did not realize you spoke alpaca well enough to take them through an adventure module.

TheMix · Post by **TheMix** » Mon Aug 24, 2015 2:37 pm

hentzau wrote:I played D&D. At an alpaca farm.

That is dedication.

Lordnine · Post by **Lordnine** » Mon Aug 24, 2015 11:39 pm

Played another round of Forbidden Stars. This was, I think, my 4th game now. Three players seems like the sweet spot for this one. With four players it runs too long but three keeps the map interesting and also gives you an extra person to manage tokens during battles.

I pulled off a pretty decisive victory as Chaos. The early game resource advantage they get from their special ability seems HUGE. In future games I think people are going to be a bit more vigilant about curbing worship of the dark gods…

Chrisoc13 · Post by **Chrisoc13** » Tue Aug 25, 2015 8:09 am

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:Already ordered. I am so weak.

I understand this. I do.

Played Hawaii yesterday. After Tom vassal had such a ridiculous review I wasn't expecting much, but it ended up being ok. There is a bit too much math type garbage going on but generally I liked it.

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Fri Aug 28, 2015 4:27 pm

Managed to get in a few rounds of Bolt Action last night and I'm really liking how quickly it flows. With this very basic setup (we were using a provided scenario), there was a surprisingly significant amount of strategy. As the Americans, most of my guys are inexperienced and much easier to kill. The Germans are all Veteran units so they are much harder to kill. It might not look balanced, but it actually was. I've learned that I can't really outright kill German soldiers so I need to pin them mercilessly and render them ineffective - that's what the little discs are next to the units. Once that happens, they lose their ability to outright cut me to shreds, but I still can't kill them very easily.

We are still learning the basics and playing in a very small area (again, based on the scenario), but we're looking forward to finally using a full-sized field (6'x4') and having a real battle. I can honestly say this is the first time in 3+ years I'm enjoying everything about a game -- assembling the units, painting them, learning some history with learning the rules and then actually playing the game. Usually one of those elements is a pain, but everything so far has been great. It's disconcerting.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Fri Aug 28, 2015 9:15 pm

Smoove_B wrote:Managed to get in a few rounds of Bolt Action last night and I'm really liking how quickly it flows. With this very basic setup (we were using a provided scenario), there was a surprisingly significant amount of strategy. As the Americans, most of my guys are inexperienced and much easier to kill. The Germans are all Veteran units so they are much harder to kill. It might not look balanced, but it actually was. I've learned that I can't really outright kill German soldiers so I need to pin them mercilessly and render them ineffective - that's what the little discs are next to the units. Once that happens, they lose their ability to outright cut me to shreds, but I still can't kill them very easily.

We are still learning the basics and playing in a very small area (again, based on the scenario), but we're looking forward to finally using a full-sized field (6'x4') and having a real battle. I can honestly say this is the first time in 3+ years I'm enjoying everything about a game -- assembling the units, painting them, learning some history with learning the rules and then actually playing the game. Usually one of those elements is a pain, but everything so far has been great. It's disconcerting.

My buddy Tommy has been threatening to drag me kicking and screaming into Bolt Action for a couple of years now.

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Fri Aug 28, 2015 10:10 pm

I was very, very against it because I didn't want to do war gaming. But I'm enjoying it tremendously now, the painting in particular. It's not a hardcore war game -- it plays much more like an action movie than a war gaming simulator (which I know some people don't like). The focus is on action and easy resolution. Without question the best part is the random activation each turn based on pulling dice from the bag. That adds a huge amount of randomness and variation. Really, I think the biggest downside is the cost as the figures are not cheap. But if you have a friend that's trying to get you to play? Totally do it.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Wed Sep 02, 2015 1:57 pm

Played another game of Heroes of Normandie on Monday night, continue to really enjoy this game. We hadn't played for about 3 months, so there was a lot of rules and iconography relearning going on, but we got a full game in in about an hour and a half.

The scenario we were playing was a "capture the landmark" scenario. if you have the only infantry unit in one of four landmark spaces in a square and the end of a round, you are the winner. I was playing the Germans, Tom was playing allies. I had a couple of scout units, that are allowed to deploy a certain number of spaces outside of the deployment zone, as long as they are in cover. So I put my first scout unit in a hedgerow that was 2 spaces away from the objective. He apparently didn't have any scouting units, because all of his units remained in the deployment zone, well out of reach of the objective.

During the activation phase, various units moved, no shooting happened, but he did bring up his tank and parked it on top of the objective. During the supply phase (where you can move any unit that didn't get an order) I moved my scout unit up into the objective zone. Only infantry unit on the objective. Game over, I win.

We paused, and looked over the scenario objectives again. Sure enough, with me having initiative and him having activated his tank early (so he couldn't push any of my infantry units out of the space with it) he lost in the first turn. We scratched our heads, said "Well, that wasn't very fun," and then played the full six rounds to a VP win (which I also won.)

Really great game, and you can get a hell of a lot of play out of the base set. $50 on Amazon. Prime Shipping. Hentzau says "It's a must buy!"

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:02 pm

I played the base game at Origins and I'll be honest, it didn't really click with me. I think I'd rather play Tide of Iron or Conflict of Heroes if given the choice. However, (and I think I mentioned this before) they're releasing a Cthulhu themed version of the game set in WWII that makes me want to check it out again at that time.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 11:20 am

Played my first game of Starfleet Battles last night. 3-player game of Fed, Romulan, Klingon searching an asteroid field for a Tholian nifty. I managed to get lucky and pick up the correct asteroid early, and had a 2/1 lab advantage over the others. Unfortunately, through two turns, all six of my marine parties got massacred trying to retrieve it. The shooting started between myself and the Klingon player, which the Romulan took advantage of, retrieved the artifact, and made a run for it. The Klingon hammered down his left rear shield and took out a couple officers. I was able to maneuver into position and continue to drill holes in him and finish off everyone but the Doc and the head Marine. The Klingon player took some heavy damage from a cloaked mine. Given no ability to drive the ship, the Romulan player cracked the mag bottle and blew himself up with the prize.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 11:35 am

Isgrimnur wrote:Played my first game of Starfleet Battles last night.

Whoa, that came out of left field! I grew up on Starfleet Battles, but I rarely hear its name these days, let alone read about someone playing it. I have so many fond memories of hours spent adjusting my power and assigning my damage with a dry erase marker. What version did you play? The original Starfleet Battles? Or the streamlined Federation Commander version? I have the latter and keep trying to get myself to sit down and peruse the rules for a game night.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 11:46 am

Afaik, it was SFB. Power allocation was done pre-turn, which Wiki suggests is a key difference. The game runner had a different damage table that was a 6x6 grid with a 1/36 chance of critical hits doing more systemic damage. He's a former Navy airedale with a deeeeep wargaming background.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 12:55 pm

If you continue down this road, be prepared to own rules that are spread out over a dozen or so books.

Seriously though, it's a wargamer's wargame. I remember playing the Orions because they could double their engine output at the cost of damaging their warp cores each turn. So they struck fast and hard, but had to make it count. SFB is really a great game if you can get around the steep learning curve.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 1:08 pm

The guys I game with are good about being Game Operations Directors and keeping me out of the rulebooks and answering the appropriate questions when asked. It really helps, as we tend to jump around from space to sea to air battles between sessions.

RMC · Post by **RMC** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 1:57 pm

Having a game day Saturday at my house. Your all invited of course.

But just picked up the latest expansion for Spartacus, so I might have a 7 player game of that to report on. Not sure what else we will play. I think I have 6 coming over right now, so we should get in a bunch of games.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 2:01 pm

We're doing a small get together on Sunday at my place. Hoping to play some Arcadia Quest and Emergence Event. I also picked up the latest Spartacus expansion, so if we get more, that's always a fun alternative for a large group.

RMC · Post by **RMC** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 3:02 pm

hepcat wrote:We're doing a small get together on Sunday at my place. Hoping to play some Arcadia Quest and Emergence Event. I also picked up the latest Spartacus expansion, so if we get more, that's always a fun alternative for a large group.

We tend to shout out the names of the cards... There are some combos that make us all giggle like little girls. Of course, since I have three little kids in the house, I have to always ensure the kids are not around for that aspect of the game..

Shouting out "Take Jupiter's Cock" Followed by someone else playing "Ramming it Home" always makes me giggle.. I am a child, what can I say..

Moat_Man · Post by **Moat_Man** » Fri Sep 04, 2015 8:27 pm

Isgrimnur wrote:Played my first game of Starfleet Battles last night.

I have a duffle bag of books and boxes somewhere.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Sat Sep 05, 2015 3:51 pm

I have such fond memories of many an evening spent going through those rulebooks as a kid.

Zenn7 · Post by **Zenn7** » Sat Sep 05, 2015 9:02 pm

hepcat wrote:

I have such fond memories of many an evening spent going through those rulebooks as a kid.

Me too! Only ever got to play a few half-hearted attempts with my cousin and one game through in the basic duel with a guy I met online in 1996. Wished to heck I could find people to play that with! I had tons of rulebooks for it, Federation Space (the first grand strategy covering the General War) and Federation and Empire and some of the xpacs for that (the second and much better grand strategy game covering the general war). Was thrilled to death when the Star Fleet Command computer games came out.

Zenn7 · Post by **Zenn7** » Sat Sep 05, 2015 9:08 pm

I had my monthly gaming day today:

Codemasters - kinda fun word game. 4 of us, we played 6 rounds, trading out every combination of partners and each team switching who the clue giver was. Thought my wife might actually play this one.

Can't remember the name of the next game - had a bamboo farmer, a panda bear and lying out tiles. The farmer grew bamboo shoots, the panda ate them. You had 3 types of objectives - farmer getting bamboo shoots of certain color so high, panda eating right number of the right color of bamboo, and getting the right combination of tiles laid out. Completing the objectives gave points, whoever had the most points won. 2 games of that, won one, lost one - that was fun enough, would play again, but wouldn't rush out to do so.

Coup - first time I've every played. Loved this game! "I'm a captain, give me 2 money." Next round, everyone was able to block the captain... "OK, now I'm the duke, take 3 money from the middle!" "NOW you are the duke???" "Yeah, wanna challenge?

" We played several games (it's very quick play), only won once. Still, most fun of the day.

Pictomania? (probably not quite the right name). Everyone has to draw something randomly determined from several lists, at the same time, and try to guess what everyone else has at the same time and take a bonus point token when they're done. 1 less bonus token than players, so when the last one goes, you're done and the last person may not get to put a guess in for everyone else's. Wasn't too bad with the easy clues, but we tried a couple rounds with insane difficulty. One card was things like WHEN, WHY, HOW (each a separate thing, I got HOW - how the heck do you draw that???), another was NOUN, VERB, INTERJECTION, CONJUNCTION, ADVERB, etc One of the other players got NOUN. That was just crazy weird, didn't care for that.

Quick game of One Night Werewolf, always an enjoyable game.

And Guillotine - decently fun card game of off-ing all the French people! Lost badly, but it was silly, reasonably quick and fun.

Great day!

baelthazar · Post by **baelthazar** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 11:11 am

The Panda game is Takenoko. I always wanted to play it, but it sounded a bit too dry to pull the trigger. My wife would like the panda, but she prefers dice rolling and randomness.

Chrisoc13 · Post by **Chrisoc13** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 3:36 pm

baelthazar wrote:The Panda game is Takenoko. I always wanted to play it, but it sounded a bit too dry to pull the trigger. My wife would like the panda, but she prefers dice rolling and randomness.

I've also slays wanted to play it but haven't gotten around to it. It looks intriguing to me though.

Zenn7 · Post by **Zenn7** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 8:19 am

Chrisoc13 wrote:
baelthazar wrote:The Panda game is Takenoko. I always wanted to play it, but it sounded a bit too dry to pull the trigger. My wife would like the panda, but she prefers dice rolling and randomness.
I've also slays wanted to play it but haven't gotten around to it. It looks intriguing to me though.

We played 4 player, played 2 games. Did not think it was dry (personal opinion) and a lot more randomness than you might expect because of random objective cards, 1 die that gives you a random action, and then reacting to whatever the other players do. Don't know about long term fun factor, but short term, it was fun, would play again.

hentzau · Post by **hentzau** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 10:42 am

I enjoy Takenoko. It's a fun, quick game.

Played about a dozen games of Tumblin' Dice at our church rally day yesterday. Was a hit amongst the kiddos.

YellowKing · Post by **YellowKing** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 11:50 am

We played Legendary Encounters: Alien last night in an attempt to beat the Aliens scenario.

The first two times we had bad luck with our roles, and just could not generate enough firepower to make it through the second objective.

The third time we managed to draw a Gunner and a Scout, and we were really holding our own. First objective was a breeze, and we managed to scrape through the second objective with 3 hit points left each.

It's now time to kill the Queen, but we can't do so as long as there are cocooned prisoners on the board. We have 6 or 7 prisoners to free, but somehow we are managing to keep enough aliens killed that the Queen can never make it down to the strike zone. We are at a precarious equilibrium, with just enough firepower to keep aliens at bay while feverishly trying to scrounge up enough recruit to free prisoners.

At long last my buddy draws an epic hand, frees the last of the prisoners, and has enough attack left over to kill the Queen. We high five excitedly, then he looks down at his card. Reads it. Re-reads it. His face gets pale and he says, "Umm....I've been playing this card wrong the entire game." The card read that he could discard a card and draw two, but he was never discarding one. In addition, he misunderstood that he had to play a card of a certain symbol before activating that special ability. Our entire hard-fought victory was null and void.

TheMix · Post by **TheMix** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 2:11 pm

I hear that. That seems to be my problem lately.

Played a round of Galaxy Defenders with Tao and gilraen on Saturday. Since the last time I'd played with Tao, we were not drawing the Encounter cards after every agent turn, I made sure we did that. However, I also played an Event card after every agent turn.

Which caused us to get horribly inundated with aliens. It did help a bit since we were trying to save the scientists, and the extra Event cards caused the signals to move more.

So we burned 5-6 Event cards in the first 2 rounds. We caught onto "our" (i.e. my) mistake, and finished off the game correctly. But it was rough with the screwed up beginning. I ended with my Infiltrator in a room with 5 Aliens and a teleport point. I was Bleeding (but not dead) on the start of the 11th round. So... Victory!

One of these times I will have played enough to actually get every rule correct. Maybe.

Our two games of Sentinels of the Multiverse went better.

Ralph-Wiggum · Post by **Ralph-Wiggum** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 9:03 pm

For those of you that have played Ascension, is Legendary more or less Ascension repackaged/themed?