The Board Game thread.

[Dexter345]

Yes, but it's so much easier on BGG, where it's already built in. Maybe I'll contact the admins here to see if we can get one put in.

[Godstar]

Yes, but it's so much easier on BGG, where it's already built in. Maybe I'll contact the admins here to see if we can get one put in.

Yeah, that would work.

[Dexter345]

So this past weekend was a small (only a couple hundred people) board game convention just a few miles from where I live. I played some of my standard games, like Battlestar Galactica, Race for the Galaxy, Werewolf, and Kingdom Builder, and those were all as good as I expected them to be.

I also played a new (to me) game called Shadow Hunters, and it was pretty great! It is another hidden team game (like BSG), except that the good guys have just as much reason to conceal their identity as the bad guys, and there are also neutral characters involved. The premise is that there are evil demon monster things (Shadows), and righteous humans who want to destroy them (Hunters), but there are also random people caught in the crossfire (Neutrals). The victory conditions for the Hunters is to kill all of the Shadows and the victory conditions for the Shadows is to kill all of the Hunters. The victory conditions for the Neutral characters are variable and secret.

Each character has a special ability that he can use only by turning over his character card and revealing himself. While the abilities may be powerful, the drawback is that everybody knows your allegiance at that point. It was a good game, and not too long.

Another new game I played was called Tales of Arabian Nights, and it was fun at first, but it went on for far too long. It's a storytelling game, where each player is trying to create the greatest story for his middle eastern character. You walk around and encounter random things, then react to them and something random occurs. One guy got turned into an ape and then was thrown off a building by an ifrit. That was entertaining enough, but my problem with it was that there was way too much down time. My turns didn't take long because so little happened to me, but then waiting between turns felt really long, and it gave me nothing to do but listen to the other players' stories being built. Also, even though we played to only half the normal victory point conditions, it still took several hours (I didn't count, but I think it was like four hours). It was fun for about the first hour, then it just dragged.

[Dexter345]

Ah, I forgot about Eclipse! I only just got my copy of the game last week (second printing, I hear it's already selling out again), and we played it on Saturday. It was also very long. It says that it takes 30 minutes per player, so with four it should have lasted two hours, but it lasted twice that. I asked around and people said that the 30 minutes per player figure is accurate, but only after everybody playing is experienced.

There are a TON of little bits and pieces too, so setup and takedown times are not negligible either.

That said, it was fun. It's a space exploration/civilization game. It's neat building up a fleet and customizing your ships, and the way it handles resources is pretty well thought out. You place population cubes on planets, and in doing that, you reveal a number on your resource tracks higher than you had before, increasing your production. Some people call it elegant, and I half-agree. It's elegant in that you can easily glance at your board and tell how much you product, and you can easily glance at the common area and see who has more strength in which area, but it's inelegant in that it requires so many damn wooden cubes! Once everything is set up it's elegant, but setup is so painstaking that I dare not say it is entirely elegant.

That said, it was fun. I won't play it again for awhile just because it was such a time commitment, but I look forward to the next time I have with it.

[Scroll]

The concept for Eclipse sounds pretty great. Almost sounds like a quicker twilight Imperium in a few ways but most things are quicker than that, yet I'm guessing with 6 new players it'd drag quite a bit.

Some games can get bogged down in cubes but it's quite a popular way to manage resources and such.


I'm currently organizing a game of Battlestar Galactica as it's been too bloody long since I've played it or any other board game, In fact I think the last thing I played was Last night on earth and that was... ok.

[Dexter345]

Ugh. I've played Twilight Imperium once and it was the most miserable board gaming experience I've ever had. It was two hours of the guy who owned the game reading the rules to us, then two hours of playing, after which we were done with two rounds of play and we had to leave because the shop we were playing in was closing.

Eclipse does remind me a bit of Twilight Imperium in theme, but there's much less complex rules behind politics and technology and combat (and everything, I guess).

[Scroll]

It's probably blasphemous to say it but something like Twilight Imperium should just be a 4x pc game. It just feels like something that can be done mostly better on a pc.

[Dexter345]

Nah, that's not blasphemous. Some things are better suited to tabletop, some are better suited to electronic format. I have a couple of ideas for games bouncing around in my head, and one I intend to be a card game, but the other would require musical interaction and way too much stat-tracking to do reasonably in cardboard.

[Scroll]

And of course the key concepts can still work quite well in most formats such as the Werewolf game which shows how solid the concept is.

[Godstar]

Nah, that's not blasphemous. Some things are better suited to tabletop, some are better suited to electronic format. I have a couple of ideas for games bouncing around in my head, and one I intend to be a card game, but the other would require musical interaction and way too much stat-tracking to do reasonably in cardboard.

I love that game but there are many problems to it. One is that you have to know all the rules which takes awhile if you're not prepared to go through it step by step (videos and turn break downs make this go faster). The other thing that kind of sucks is that
certain racial abilities requires players to be playing them, so playing someone who steals cargo doesn't help you unless people setup trades, etc. The other problem I found is that people just sit back and mass units till they can't build anymore. There's really not a lot of reason to go out and attack someone since the board isn't very open and you're stuck in a slice of a wedge, sometimes between two people.

I didn't hate my experience but it's one of those games you have to sit through a couple times before it gets fun I think.
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I've been playing a lot of Dominion, and have played a couple games of Small World. I don't know why but I love how easy Dominion is to setup and play and how deep it gets once you start getting your hands together. I decided to get Thunderstone just to see if it's a good variant.

[Godstar]

So just played a couple new Dominion/Puerto Rico like deck building games, one's called Citadels and the other is called Thunderstone. Really liked them both, and while the rules are vague, they're both pretty simple once you get the hang of it.

[Scroll]

Citadels has been around for a little bit. I quite like it for being super easy to set up and being in a small box. Oh and you can be a dick to other players once you know what they want to build and their general behaviours in the game.

[Godstar]

Citadels has been around for a little bit. I quite like it for being super easy to set up and being in a small box. Oh and you can be a dick to other players once you know what they want to build and their general behaviours in the game.

Yeah, I does have a few cards that can do that. Funny thing is I totally played it wrong the first time and didn't realize we were supposed to change up roles every round.

[Godstar]

So after liking Citadels I tried a couple new games. One's called 7 Wonders, and I've really liked it thus far. Very fun and engaging and doesn't take up a lot of time. Also tried Infiltration (Android Universe) and didn't care for it too much. Was fun, but the characters end up being very one dimensional and lame and I don't like how useless the card deck is during the course of the game. Also the setups can allow for some pretty sucky game dynamics. Much more excited about the Netrunner remake than Infiltration, but was worth trying.

[Dexter345]

I liked 7 Wonders a lot the first few times I played it, but started liking it less the more I played. Every game seemed to play out the same, and there's almost no player interaction. It's neat and I'll still play it when it's requested or when we have a large group (since it plays up to seven), but it's not nearly as good as I originally estimated it to be.

From what I've heard about Infiltration, it's pretty bland, which is a disappointment considering I'm a fan of Donald X. Vaccarino (Dominion is awesome and Kingdom Builder is pretty good) and I generally like Fantasy Flight's output. I'd still try it out, but I'd go into it with relatively low expectations.

[Quintillionkharts]

Settlers of Catan
Except at the end of the game, all my friends are pissed off at each other for the back stabbing and lying. xP

[Dexter345]

Settlers of Catan
Except at the end of the game, all my friends are pissed off at each other for the back stabbing and lying. xP

That is the best part. I have played games of Settlers where my heart was literally pounding toward the end, because I would win it if I got a turn, but somebody just before me did something unexpected to put that in jeopardy. I haven't played Settlers in a long time, but I have probably played it more than any other board game I have.

[Godstar]

So this weekend I played Thunderstone Advance which is a newer variant of Thunderstone, and I didn't like it nearly as much. Also played Runebound, and determined it was going to take way too long so sccrapped playing that for playing Ascension: Chronicles of the God Slayer. That turned out to be a great game and I really enjoyed it as an alternative to Thunderstone. It used some of the same ideas but the setup and cards were much less complicated. Finally capped it off with Blood Bowl Team Manager which was some sort of weird Warhammer American football game which was interesting enough, but not sure if I liked it or not. Could go either way on that one, but it didn't really WOW me.

[Dexter345]

I played Ascension at the last PAX, and I thought it was all right. I'm not really big on the generic fantasy setting in general, and as far as deckbuilding goes, I still prefer Dominion. The plastic crystal things in Ascension are nice though.

[Godstar]

I played Ascension at the last PAX, and I thought it was all right. I'm not really big on the generic fantasy setting in general, and as far as deckbuilding goes, I still prefer Dominion. The plastic crystal things in Ascension are nice though.

My problem with Dominion is namely the Province rule (esp. in 2 player games) where if you deplete it, the game is over. 99% of the games I play end up being mad grabs for them due to the value to card ratio that ends up in your deck. There's really no motivation to grab Estates or Duchies, and most the people I've played with skip them in lieu of Gold in order to fund the later purchases of Provinces. Seems like the 'end game' should either be 3 kingdom cards end, or all the estate/province/duchies get taken. Otherwise the games end up being pretty one-dimensional.

You ever run into that or played variants that go that route? That's kind of why I link Ascension, you never end up with hands that do nothing for you, nor in situations where you're simply going after one card to win.