Recent Board Gaming

Fun games with spooky jooky themes:

Arkham Horror: The Card Game
The Bloody Inn
Dead Men Tell No Tales
Dead of Winter: The Long Night
Ghost Stories
Legendary Encounters: Alien
Mansions of Madness 2e
Mysterium
Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu

I think the closest to Betrayal is Dead of Winter.

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I have dead of winter. It sits in my dead purchase box. We bought it and played it a few times and just… don’t really like it.

I like it best with the straight co-op variant. It makes it a lot harder and, with the stuff that comes in The Long Night, a lot more interesting.

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I still try to play Eclipse every once in a while. I’m still a big fan of Master of Orion 2 and really nothing else has captured that spark for me since. Eclipse is the closest, and it’s a board game. I kinda played MOO2 in the same way, I typically wouldn’t pick up a game I was already playing after more than a day, and eclipse hits that itch a bit. Probably going to go reinstall moo2 again here in a minute.

I really want to sit down and hybridize something you can quick play on your phone single player-style, but I’m in the middle of potentially changing jobs. Something in some ways similar to eclipse, but designed for that medium.

That dude that made the eclipse ios/steam game didn’t understand half of it. Still bugs me.

There’s a game called Horizons on Kickstarter which just finishd their campaign. I had the chance to play the game in Portland. It’s “Eclipse in an hour”.

If you want that MOO2 spark on a computer game, I recommend Endless Space (Possibly Endless Space 2), they redid Master of Orion as a newer game and looks pretty solid. Stellaris is what I’d recommend if you want the be-all end-all of Space Empire games.

I haven’t played Endless Space or Stellaris, but I absolutely LOVED Endless Legends, so when Endless Space 2 was announced, I was super excited for that. I’m going to wait and see what kind of expansions they release for that before I make the choice between Endless Space 2 and Stellaris. For me, one of the things I really enjoyed about Endless Legends was how good the narratives were for the various factions/races and I’m hoping ES2 is the same.

Not to completely drag this thread off-topic, but how would you compare ES 2 to Stellaris?

I played the first endless space and it just didn’t hit the itch. I have not played the second or stellaris yet, but they’re on my steam wishlist for some cheaper time.

Endless space was too simple in certain places and the areas that were kinda confusing (tech trees) lacked some meaningful heuristics to grab me. Like, playing MOO2 now or as a kid, I kinda can tell early on what it means to focus on say missiles or beam weapons or shields will do. Endless space had such a rock paper scissors thing going on that it felt more like some browser games I’m familiar with where you had to have a mixed fleet (or at least the ability to field each in turn to counter and counter counter). I’m not saying I mastered the game, but I played it enough that I could beat the ai and I was still pretty blah about the whole experience.

I haven’t played the original Endless Space, but like I wrote, I loved Endless Legend, the company’s second 4X game. Apparently a lot of people thought that EL fixed all the problems with ES, and EL was so good that it won a bunch of awards. Both ES2 and Stellaris are on my Steam wishlist as well, but if it’s cheap enough, you might want to give EL a try first.

I haven’t played ES2, but from what I saw it looked a lot more polished than the first game.

Let me put it this way: After playing Stellaris, I didn’t have a lot of interest in Endless Space 2, and I really enjoyed Endless Legend.

I’m interested in both, but I watched about 3-4 hours of a YouTuber playing Stellaris, and while it looked fun, it also just looked very bland and almost soulless, without any of the personality and narrative focus that Endless Legend had. It basically looked like Civ in space, but not as cute or charming. That said, I still might get it eventually.

The Rock-Paper-Scissors thing was why I didn’t get into GalCiv III. GalCiv2 has roughly the same mechanics, but the ship designer allowed for one type of weapon and one type of Shield/Armor/Point Defense.

Endless Space at least allowed you to have a mixture of tech types, you needed to know in what proportion to you the weapons.

If you have Dixit and plenty of expansions you could make sure just to include the spooky looking cards!

Sorry that’s a ridiculous idea!

As you explore in Stellaris there are certain quest lines you run across. There are late-game crisis that come and pound your empire into dust if you aren’t prepared for them.

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That does sound really cool. I always loved the idea of highly advanced “progenitor” races in scifi, races that went off to do their own thing and basically left the galaxy to fend for itself… until they decide to come back.

In the game a certain number of Empires are designated as “Fallen Empires”, they have tech levels much higher than your own, but they don’t expand. However you can irritate them to the point where they can awaken. Also one of the end game crisis is two empires awakening and going to war with each other. You’re given the option to ally with one or the other, or stay neutral and try to fight both.

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Very cool. I still think that the way Babylon 5 handled super advanced races was way ahead of its time, and still some of the best writing and characterization in scifi.

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Stellaris is a fun game but it can be a bit soulless at times. Paradox is doing the same thing with Stellaris as they did with EU4, start with a simple base and release a dozen expansions until the game is an insane mash of systems that takes a PhD to figure out. This is a good thing.

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Some friends taught me to play Scythe. I enjoyed it. Then I taught them Chrononauts, because we wanted something lighter after.

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My local gaming store is becoming less and less exclusive to Magic the Gathering, and so it happened that I played a miniatures game for the first time yesterday. The game was Massive Darkness. I am not super-familiar with these kinds of games other than knowing that they exist and there is a dedicated fandom to them. I had a lot of fun with it even though I felt kind of useless for a bit of it.

We were three players including the owner of the game (who had supported it during the Kickstarter campaign) and two newbies which includes myself and my friend who owns the store we were playing in. Store owner played a female nun/paladin type of character, I played a giant “bonecrusher” (read: berserker) and the owner of the game rouned out the party by playing a mage. I felt my role was engaging the enemy due to the ability of my character (automatically deals 1 damage to the enemy when engaging and later got a skill that lets also attack in the same action as moving in on an enemy) but I felt like I was having not the right gear for most of it and was taking a lot of damage and had bad dice rolls. The game owner had at the same time specced out his mage and was already doing tons of damage. A bit of this was also that I was doing damage but others got the final blow and thus the XP points for it. Thankfully our healer kept me alive for most of it.

Game was very dicey at some point because we encountered a ton of very strong roaming monsters, one of which almost wiped the party and killed us if not for a single health point. The game also relies on a “shadow/light” mechanic that changes what your character is capable of depending on a quality of the square you are standing on. Unfortunately at some point we had to do a lot of battles on a light square which also made my character weaker.

Later I had finally managed to level up so I could use the gear we had found. Then I was able to do a lot of damage due to an item set, but unfortunately that was then at the very end of the level we were playing, about four and a half hours after we started setting up. It probably didn’t help that we two newbies had to constantly check whether we were rolling the right dice for the situation. We called it a night but I had fun and want to play again to waste some mobs.

Edit: Apparently we also made some mistakes with the XP system while playing, as I found out after reading the rules myself today. For one we only awarded three XP points for killing a mob to the player dealing the killing blow, when every player should receive that. Also, during the story mode we played the game uses reduction of the XP gained by splitting it into five pieces. At least I counted it as a roll-over (so I would get one full XP whenever I would exceed the fifth point) instead of getting the full XP when I reach the fifth point. Basically I earned three or four XP points too few. Will address that during the next session.

Also after we finished it was quite obvious that we needed to get a dice tower or at least a dice cup if we wanted to play again because we had a tough time rolling due to the table space beign occupied by the game. The store owner said that he had one disassembled because he said he was too clumsy to put it together (apparently a promotional item he got from a dice vendor).

Anyway, I asked if I could take a look at it and promptly put it together yesterday. It’s kind of cheap but it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1JTQBWfHN8