Board Games

[used44]

I know we've had some board game and tabletop game topics before but I just got a couple new ones and I wanted to see what else you guys have been playing lately.

I just got Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert. These are my first ever cooperative games.

I had played Island before on my iPad but it's much better with 4 players obviously. We won on the very last possible card. We needed to draw a helicopter lift after reshuffling the discard deck and it was like a 1-in-40 chance or so. I think the game is engineered to always end in a nail-biting fashion. I really love how the board physically sinks as the game plays on.

Desert is essentially the sequel to Island so it is a bit more complex. We played three times on Normal and never won, though our first two games we played a little incorrectly as we were still learning the game. Adding and stacking stuff to the board instead of sinking it like in Island made it feel a bit cluttered. I thought about it for a long time after and I really want to play way more.

Not my photos, by the way.

 

[intoTheRain]

Holy shit, clean and organized house. That you or the wifes doing? Mirin'

 

[used44]

Not my photos, just stuff I found online. I'm assuming that the white wire cage houses a ferret, because people who play board games always own ferrets.

 

[Green_Lantern]

The extent of my collection is Twilight Struggle which I can't ever find someone to play with, Ticket to Ride, Dominion, and Carcassone.

 

[Bretimus_v2]

Hojeez. You're catching me on a video game slump and that means that my free resources (since the CEO of Bretimus Enterprises halved my budget for a PS4) instead have been redirected towards board games recently.

So let's start! I've heard good things about both of those games. I like the compactness of it too. What's the game play like and do you work toward the goals separately or do you team up to accomplish things.

Plus, Matt Leacock has another great game, Pandemic. It's another great co-op game. That I've owned for awhile.

But just recently I bough two games. Legendary and Mice & Mystics. Legendary is a Marvel license deck building board game. You pick a villain Mastermind and a scheme and then give him smaller villains and henchman to back him up. After that you choose a group of 5 heroes to fight him. You do it by recruiting heroes with stronger powers and then fighting a constant stream of opposition. The best part, it has a deep system that is intuitive to pick up within the first round but deep enough to learn the in's and out's of synergizing those heroes' powers. You work together to defeat the bad guys but at the same time, you can add up victory points to see who carried the most weight...like a douche.

Plus, fantastic art. Think Dominion but more BAMF (Nightcrawler is in the expansion Dark City...which I also own).

Next, Mice & Mystics is a simplified board game campaign-based dungeon crawl that is very similar to Descent. Instead you have pre-made characters that are different mice and you're fighting rats, spiders and roaches to save a kingdom from a witch's plans. Here is the cool thing...it's built for 7 and up and my kids get it and my adult friends enjoy it too.

This one is a little bit more intense, but I've been surprised by how quickly my kids have picked up the concepts of objective, leveling up, initiative order, etc. I blame teh vidya gaims.

Anyways these are the more recent purchases.

 

[used44]

Twilight Struggle

I've only recently heard about that and it sounds great. Can you share your thoughts or experiences with it?

I can't ever find someone to play with

This is a constant problem for me. The bulk of my tabletop-gaming friends live in a different city, and the few near me are always flaky on meeting up.

 

[Bretimus_v2]

Same

 

[Longo_2_guns]

Apparently they do game nights at a store near me, so I'm going to go to one of those with one of my childhood friends. No clue what games they do, though.

One of the ones I played recently that I loved was called Betrayal at House on the Hill. It's basically a combination of D&D, Carcassonne, and Scooby Doo. It's hard to explain, but it's worth checking out.

The other one I like is called The aMAZEing Labyrinth. You have a maze and shift it around in order to move from one place to another. It's both really dumb and really fun. Mostly I just love the name.

 

[MattAY]

I've only ever played Warhammer tabletop game as a kid. I thought it was awfully boring. But that was the time when I was young and brash! I'd probably give something like this another go.

 

[WickedLiquid]

Last board game I played was Scrabble. Using the words "As" and "Ion" on the board I was able to spell "Asphyxiation". It was the smartest thing I ever did in my hole lyfe.

 

[used44]

We played Blokus tonight

It's like Scrabble - letters + Chinese checkers. And the pieces look like Tetriminos, obviously. Each player starts with 21 shapes and takes turns placing them on the board, diagonal adjacent to their own pieces only, attempting to empty their hand. Any pieces left in your hand at the end get added up and the lowest score wins. It's very simple and quick. Pretty fun though! The version we have (I think pretty much the same as in the pic) is very well-made. Little plastic molded pieces that snap satisfyingly into the board with no wiggle.

I would recommend it highly. It won't keep your attention all night but it's a nice gaming appetizer that everybody can get the hang of instantly.

 

[Bretimus_v2]

I remember getting absolutely hosed in a game of that. It was a really easy game to pick up, but my friends went out of their way to block me out. Lots of fun though.

 

[LinksOcarina]

I've recently been playing a ton of boardboardgames, many of those you have shown before too. a few to recommend I would say are coup, cosmic encounter, and mage wars.

At work so no images for now, ill quickly talk about coup. Its a bluffing/mind game made by the creators of the game resistance. Instead of teams its every man for themselves, and your given two roles to play with special abilities. The goal is to knock out the other players by forcing them to reveal their cards when caught in a lie, through assasination, or by couping them. thefirst person to outlast the competition basically wins

 

[Green_Lantern]

I started playing Hearthstoke last night and its pretty fun. It's not technically a board game, but basically is since its based off of all the card dueling games out there. Only problem I have is how luck of the draw based it is.


Also, if you have an iPad, there's TONS of board games that have been ported to the app store and most of them work really well. It's a good option if you don't have friends to play with you like in my case.

 

[used44]

Catan! This actually is my pic this time. I lost but it was a close game. 10-9-9.

Catan Bros, are any of the expansion sets worth getting?

 

[Longo_2_guns]

Not really, no. There is one that is like the Great River that adds in three new hexs, and it is terrible. Avoid it.

 

[used44]

Like new resource types?

I only have the 5-6 Player Expansion but I've never had the opportunity to use it. The extra rules regarding the in-between-turns building phase seems neat though.

 

[Longo_2_guns]

Well that one is a cheap expansion that raises the score cap to 12, but offers the ability to get bonus points for every road built along the one river.

And the rest are really only if you have played so much that you are bored with normal Catan.

 

[Bretimus_v2]

Seafarers is fun. You can avoid getting blocked off completely on one island and either go to a new one or sail around the shore.

I have never liked the Cities and Knights one though. It complicates the game with unnecessary complexity.

The card game is a fun but different take on the game.

 

[Master_Craig]

We haven't done so in a few weeks now, but every Friday night a few of my friends and I usually meet up at a mate's place and we play the board game Zombicide.

Here's a picture of the board game, since I can't attach it here for some reason - https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/1 ... 1333465428

For those who don't know, Zombicide is a two to six player cooperative board game that originated from Kickstarter. The game is set in a zombie apocalypse, where players play as survivors/characters in search of weapons and items, fighting and escaping waves of zombies and completing set objectives on the customisable map to win the game. There's a bit of a learning curve involved but it really is a lot of fun.

I bought my Zombicide (Season 1) off an Australian gaming site, but then I Kickstarted Season 2 plus its expansion pack, "Toxic City Mall".

My friends and I have finished Season 1 and we're about half way through Season 2.