I'm Saddened... (Board Games)

I’ve got a friend who loves to play Twilight Imperium and begs me to bring it out for boardgame nights, he always swears “It’ll only take two hours!” No dude, it takes two days because you can’t help but throw in all the expansions I have.

Eclipse scratches that itch for me now a days, at least you can play that in two hours.

Exactly! I think the shortest TI game I played was 4 or 5 hours. They usually go for 8+ hours. Especially when we have the full 6 people or a new person.

One of the best gaming experiences I ever had was an 8 player game of TI that lasted 14 hours. We were all exhausted afterwards, but it was an absolutely epic game.

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So I went to Target and found out a few things:

4 player version of Captain Sonar exists

The Orgean Trail game has an expansion/standalone box

Both where in the World is Carmen Sandiago and Legands of the Hidden Temple have a board game adaptation

Klask is a big hit

Also went to Target recently (bought nothing), and learned those same things.

I read the rules to the Hidden Temple board game and HOLY SHIT IT IS TERRIBLE

Klask is getting a sequel that is very Crossfire-esque.

I’m in the midst of an 18 day vacation with only Kingdomino, Bohnanza: The Duel, and the Tales & Games Aladdin kids game. Making good use of them.

I’m also wrapping my head around the Essen shopping for Unplugged and… whoah. It’s a daunting task to wrangle all this info. BGG tool and GeekLists are my savior. Starting to get preorders in where they are needed.

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So I just got an Amazon Fire HD8 for my birthday and realized I can use this when I do my board gaming events. So besides watch it played is there a good video tutorial channel that teaches people how to play board games.

Magic Maze and Tiny Epic Quests are the best new ones I’ve played recently. Really liked MM. TEQ is a nice little puzzle. And it’s so tiny! The meeples get itty bitty swords and such that snap onto their hands.

Magic Maze is really good, but I wonder how much replay value it has. Feels like the fun goes down once you get good at it. I do remember there being some increased difficulty options we didn’t try, though.

I have not played it yet, but a lot of my friends have been absolutely raving about the 7th Continent, a kickstarter game that finally came out. One friend described it to me as a Choose Your Own Adventure Game plus Tales of the Arabian Knights, but with actual real gameplay. It’s going for stupid amounts of money on ebay right now, but next week or so, the company that made it is kickstarting an expansion, and will be also offering the base game. I’m probably going to back at least the base game.

Yeah, there’s several different things that can ramp the difficulty. We played on basic, and then on the one after that, where you periodically pass your card to your neighbor (iirc every time you reset the timer). The next one had doors that only the dwarf can go through. Idk how many settings there are in total, though.

I feel like if skilled people keep playing, they will quickly need to use ALL of those options.

Can’t argue with that.

The primary thing that the new options do to increase the difficulty is nearly double the number of tiles in the deck, when you’re still looking for 8 specific tiles to complete the game.

Seems doable if we just flip the timer more. We flipped about once per game in the basic mode.

Playing with even one less experienced player solves that. It’s a game you bust out rather than play to group mastery.

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Played the Master of Orion game. It’s a “build a tableau representing a space empire” game trading on the Master of Orion Licence. What separates it from most is there’s a “punch other players”-mechanic.

It’s Cryptozoic so it has that baggage, it’s not outright terrible but I feel like I have that niche covered by a lot of better games.

Compare that to Horizons, where I went and kickstarted the game after playing it.

Also played the cites expansion of Splendor, which breathes some new life into that game.

Bohnanza: The Duel is still solid after a few plays.

Tiny Epic Western completely fell apart for us. Too much randomness, unique player powers, etc., for a worker placement game. It is a miracle that the game even works, because it is a very unique design. There is some genius at work there. But it overshot.

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