Recent Board Gaming

I bought this game… almost 10 years ago? And I’ve never played it. I really want to, but I want someone to play with who knows the rules. Otherwise it’ll just be a shitshow I think, in exactly the same way @pence just described.

It wasn’t a shitshow, but I’m used to plowing into games and figuring them out at this point. You have to break a few eggs etc.

Just don’t go for a 6 player game, get 2-3 close friends and play. You don’t even have to finish the game, just set the expectation that you’re all going to learn.

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Playing games fast is what we do.

Take your god damn turn, I’m dyin’ here.

Enthusiastic: 2x Arkham Horror The Card Game, Pax Pamir (new)
Suggest: Würfel Bohnanza, Twilight Imperium 4 (new), Roll Player, Fantasy Realms (new)
Play: Carcassonne: Amazonas, 1775: Rebellion, Marvel: Legendary

I already talked about my Twilight Imperium adventure last week; we had fun with it. The length of our game was comparable to an 18xx game - TI has a reputation for games that last an entire day. Most of my playgroup would expect to get through a short/medium 18xx game in 3-ish hours, so maybe our 3 hour TI4 game says more about us than the game.

On Friday I ended up helping Brian, Ed, and Anthony fill out a game of 1775: Rebellion, which ended in a tie. According to the rules, this results in the annexation of the colonies by French Canada. Maybe a compelling alternate history right now. I also played Fantasy Realms - never even heard of it, but it punches above its weight. The default rules are a rummy variant - draw a card from the discard or the deck, then discard a card. Repeat until 10 cards are in the discard and score. Every card scores relative to the properties of other cards in your hand (the beastmaster likes beasts, the empress likes armies but dislikes other leaders, etc.) There’s a variant where you play like Pit. Deal out the entire deck and open trading for a set amount of time, I would love to try it once.

Pax Pamir is nuts. If Pax Porfiriana is a “knife fight in a canvas bag”, Pamir is the same knife fight but you are honor-bound to keep handing your opponents more knives. Every card creates new opportunities for your opponents, but edge cases are minimal and all the cards use consistent icons. You start with 4 rupees each and money only sloshes around between the players. It also has a spatial aspect that’s completely missing in Porfiriana. Great first impression.

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Enthusiastic: 2x Arkham Horror: The Card Game, 2x Bios: Megafauna (new), Indonesia, Spy Club (new)
Suggest: 2x Pax Pamir, 2x Peak Oil (new), Kingdom Builder, Elements, Ticket to Ride: New York (new), Container (new), Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger (new)
Play: Ganz schön clever (new), Fae (new), Fabled Fruit

Eight new games? An eventful two weeks, for sure.

We’re 7/8 of the way through Arkham Horror: Dunwich Legacy and loving it. We’re not well-equipped for some of the scenarios (only having a single character with a decent Will attribute slammed us pretty hard) but overall a great improvement over the core set campaign.

I’ve been swimming out into some deep water with Sierra Madre games recently, starting with Pax Porfiriana and John Company and more recently Pax Pamir and Bios: Megafauna. The Pax games seem to quickly collapse into an accidental win among unskilled players, which is fine as long as you’re ready for it. Bios: Origins is a different experience entirely, but has been fascinating from the start. In our second game Dan took the option to cook off all the offshore carbon into the atmosphere and end the game with a Venus-like runaway greenhouse - but the fact that it was a player-directed choice and not a random event feels significant. Our paleozoic multicellular life had a good 100-million-year run (with about 300 million years of runway to go)

Peak Oil - fascinating and severe, a tiny constraining box where all the small adjustments you make end up pushing a little too far. Want to play this some more. Container is much more freewheeling and open, but I’ve only played it once so far. It would be a good candidate to review on the show, but it would have to be a local game so I don’t have to fly with this tremendously heavy box.

Ticket to Ride: New York is aggressive and hard, on the smallest map. Very worthwhile.

Still forming my opinion on Spy Club, but very positive initially, a cooperative risk-management game. It’s easier to overlook exactly where the game is squeezing you until it’s too late, compared to Pandemic etc. where your doom is front and center the entire time.

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I want a big gaming coffee table. Shopping for them online I havn’t found a ton appealing. Maybe I don’t know the right words. Kinda considering just building one.

I saw this online and played the free digital solo web app. A very fancy yahtzee. I think solo really doesn’t give me the core aspect of the game, which is other players taking your unused dice. Also, I didn’t fully understand the bonuses, other than the fox. I don’t think I even used all the ones I earned, because the UI is far from ideal. Would love to play multiplayer, though.

This is the gaming table I bought about a year or so ago:

https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/pdp/lark-manor-becquets-extendable-dining-table-lrkm4206.html

Granted, I bought it on sale and didn’t pay $1,600 for it. Fully collapsed, it’s only 54", so it’s still manageable, but when extended, it’s a whopping 72" long and 54" wide.

Additionally, because it’s a pedestal table, there’s plenty of room for chairs around it since there are no legs at the corners.

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This is the dining table I have. Normally I only have one leaf open and tuck the other end into the “bar” / kitchen island, but fully open it’s totally big enough to play 8-player Captain Sonar on. My coffee table is basically the same design scaled down, and is big enough for something like Eclipse.

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I almost went with that first table, but wanted something a bit wider.

Yeah, that’s the only downside. It’s a long table, but pretty skinny. Good for a NYC apartment, but I think it exactly fits one of the El Grande boards.

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Yeah, I did like it, but I don’t know if I’d pick up a copy - except Anthony liked it even more, so maybe it’ll happen anyway. Our friends made a copy out of some dice, the laminated scoresheets, and a thrifted silver platter while we wait for the English printing.

Yeah, I feel like this is a game you don’t need to buy. Just play it with the dice you have. If you don’t already have enough colored d6, and don’t want to hit up the Chessex booth, I’m sure there are other games that come with enough dice to play. Sagrada immediately comes to mind.

I raised some options with some friends and I’m thinking like… 3 feet by 5 feet is the minimum. Currently I use some cheap folding tables, but they are tall and I kinda want something nicer. I have a TV stand that’s built kinda exactly how I want, but they don’t make anything properly big.

So not so much playing a game, but related:

I’m divesting myself of my Warhammer 40k collection, because it’s time. It’s been more than 10 years since I played a game, and my collection is in the way in my garage, so it’s going.

I made all the excuses every WH player who stops playing makes, and I accepted that it was time to go, but didn’t really want to. Right? Like I maintained in the back of my mind that if only I had more time, I would dive right in.

Anyway, so I’ve been repairing and reassembling models for shipping out this week and you know what I realized?

Fuck that noise.

I made the time, and I realized I don’t want to. It’s…liberating.

I still want to do minis gaming, but like, low-model-count compact skirmish games, not “oh fuck I have to paint 200 models and oh look those assholes put out another new unit and now I have to remodel shit ugh.”

So in conclusion, fuck you Games Workshop, you no longer have a hold on my soul, and I feel fucking great.

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I think the best way to play minis is to sign up for pre-arranged mini events at cons.

Ehhhhhhh, I do enjoy the creativity of modeling my own stuff. It’s an outlet for artistic impulses, and it creates a strong bond among players.

It’s really about density of experience for me, honestly. A game of 40k takes hours, on top of hours and hours of modeling. Too much investment and too much of a pain in the ass to actually do.

You could play a tighter skirmish game that takes less energy, and play it way more frequently. I own MFZ and have been jonesing to play it forever, but stupid Warhammer has occupied that brainspace.

Honestly, I could’ve signed up for 40k tournaments at a million cons, and I just haven’t bothered because it’s straight up too much work for the payoff. That was a clue that I filed away ages ago, but now it really stands out to me.

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I don’t play 40k (yet), but I believe the skirmish game is called “Kill Team”.

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I’m surprised you still even had them. I too have been able to get rid of most of my old unwanted and unused stuff. Still got a pile of board games that is going to go soon if @Coldguy or someone else doesn’t take them first.

I have been cleaning house for reals, and it is great. Life is better with less stuff.

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Yup, and they’re releasing a Kill Team box. I thought about holding onto a handful of Marines to play, but I figure if I ever really want to get into it, I can just buy a Kill Team later.

But like I said, I own Mobile Frame Zero, and it’s exactly the level of streamlined skirmish game I’m after, so that’ll be my focus. Also, since I can buy knockoff LEGO on AliExpress, it can be had for mad cheap.

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