Board Games

I think the best part is that the game is $20 and from the box picture you'd think the board was grooved (like in the Tile Lock Scrabble that's $18) but it's not - it's just flimsy cardboard and has the classic (and solved) Scrabble problem of a bump to the board screwing up the tile placement.

So even going past the obvious questions as to why this even exists, it's a more cheaply made knock-off being sold for more than the real thing.

The guy I generally play brain-burning Euros with came over last night and in a surprise move suggested we break out X-Wing, so we set up a 100-point game. I didn't use obstacles the last time I played, and they ended up getting arranged in a line that resembled The Frontier in The Last Starfighter. He wanted a ton of firepower and ran an 8-TIE swarm, while I loaded up Wedge (he was 40 points with all his accouterments), paired him with Biggs to draw fire, and threw in a generic Y-Wing with an ion cannon with thoughts of running him around the fringe and taking potshots at whatever came into range.

Hilarity ensued. Biggs hit an obstacle or an enemy ship nearly every turn, preventing him from taking actions (or firing, some of the time). He also lost his shields to close encounters with the asteroids. I managed to get myself surrounded while extracting my ships from the asteroid field and figured it would be over soon, but all the bad dice luck I've had lately ended up being repaid with interest last night. I only completely missed the TIE's twice during the entire match, and most of my hits were criticals. They went down like womp rats back home. In the meantime, my opponent was having the most frustrating game of his life. His TIE's kept getting plastered by the ion cannon and smacking into asteroids.He fired and fired and fired at Biggs but only got three hits through in more than a dozen attacks. It was the reverse of my last match, where the TIEs were untouchable.

Between his self-inflicted damage and the hits Biggs did eventually explode, but by that time I had a full-strength Wedge and full-strength Y up against two wounded TIEs and a resignation was tendered and accepted.

I almost felt bad about that win, but those damned dirty Imps deserved it. Also, Wedge is a demi-god who will likely achieve full god status when Wave 2's upgrades hit. Stealth, Engine Upgrade, Shield Upgrade, Expose, etc. are all going to make him even more deadly. I put Marksmanship on him last night and he went crit-crazy with it.

This just makes me want to play some X-Wing over VASSAL to see how well it works.

That answers my question then, which was going to be "How is this legal?"


I did a fair amount of gaming (for me) over the holidays. Got Ticket To Ride Europe and Small World for Christmas, played two games of each plus Puerto Rico (at a friend's house), San Juan (which I bought for the two-playeriness) and Agricola.

Ticket To Ride is my family's favourite game, so I asked for another version to leave at my mom's house. I like the station mechanic a lot better than the passengers in the Marklin edition, and am trying to think of something I can use as stations to add to my Marklin game. When I was a kid we had a Monopoly knock-off that had different colored houses, but I'm pretty sure we threw it out.

Small World is kind of fun but I'm not sure how I feel about games with a turn limit. I realize without it the game would never end but the fact no one will ever conquer the homeland makes it even more like the Middle East. I guess I just want a little more genocide in my genocide game, because at the end of both games the board was more-or-less divided into thirds just like at the beginning and it didn't really feel like we'd accomplished anything. Perhaps it's better as a commentary on sectarian violence than as a game. I like the fact it comes with four different maps though, that should keep it fresh.

I have discovered the limit of my girlfriend's interest in strategy games and that limit is Agricola. This was our second time playing, first time with the full rules. I thought it was fun, she got more and more aggravated as the game went along because I was taking too long thinking about my next move and she had no idea what she should be doing. And at the end of the game I beat her by 20 points. The silly thing is, I don't feel like I played especially well, just some basic "what do I need to do to accomplish _________?" reverse planning, but I guess even that is more than she's willing to do. Great game, but I don't know who I can play it with. May try a solo game next.

Conversely, she liked San Juan even though it is the exact same game as Race For The Galaxy, which she hated. Women. I implemented my plan from RFTG and used the plastic cubes from Fresco as goods instead of putting a card on top of a card, which I found unintuitive. I think it helped. The game itself is as solid as everyone always said and I don't know why I put off getting it for so long.

Agricola is the limit for me as well, though it's more because I hate themes that are slapped on fancy mechanics. I don't really find it fun, just hard. I want more fun in my strategy games! I get a certain glee out of things like Twilight Struggle, where I'm shaping the world in wacky, tense ways, but it NEVER feels like I'm playing mechanics.

Yes, I'm an Ameritrash/War Gamer.

Agricola is not really that hard, and in my view its pretty darn thematic. Granted, I replaced all the cubes and disks with meeples, tiny wooden building resources, and adorable little animals. Everyone will have their own opinion, of course, but for me Agricola has one of the best marriages of theme and mechanics. I found Twilight Struggle vastly harder.

I'm a sucker for euros though!

Agricola, to me, isn't fundamentally a strategy game (re: Shadarr ) . It's fundamentally an optimization game. The difference is subtle at times, but there's a whole set of games that are basically about building processes efficiently first and foremost. What's unusual about Agricola is how deeply those processes are layered across turns (as opposed to another game in the genre, Le Havre, or San Juan/Puerto Rico), which is a good thing if you're into optimization per se and don't mind having a huge disadvantage relative to people that want to learn the decks and crunch the probabilities thoroughly and will take their sweet ass time doing it. It's awful if those are simply things you tolerate, though. It's very similar to Race, in that sense.

That the depth is buried in such a singularly unappealing theme is just a bonus reason why I avoid it.

After encountering many similar failures with RFTG I suspect that the iconography really throws certain people for a loop, and my guess would be that the people it doesn't throw for a loop have played a lot of computer games. San Juan is just really good though, it still offers plenty of victory paths despite being leaner (and playing quicker!) than RFTG so I've come back to enjoying it more than RFTG despite the lack of options. Maybe if conquering worlds in RFTG was even remotely adroit ...

I picked up a lot of games over the holidays and have been playing a lot more of late as well. Some thoughts:

Through the Ages. This is really really good. Much more of a traditional Euro than most of Chvatil's games but it does have a pretty strong theme and always feels more clever than I am.

City of Horror. I really don't have the right group for this at the moment. I imagine it could be good but I don't play with people ruthless enough or I play with ones who fall too much into the "what should I do next?" category which really doesn't work in a game like this.

Zombicide. Another board game as rpg replacement that I like, as I am fond of them. I imagine the variety will eventually cause my desire to play it to break down but it's fun for now and it does go over well with those more lukewarm to the boardgaming experience. That it has pretty direct goals helps a lot, and I at least like how well it does of amassing zombies so that they always remain dangerous. Plus, somehow, everyone isn't as sick of the zombie theme as I would have guessed. I'll go back to Arkham Horror eventually though.

Quarriors: Eh, it's decent filler but too complicated to explain to really work as filler.

Runewars: Seems too sloppy to me but I did play soon after Through the Ages which probably didn't help it much. We probably got a ton of rules wrong too. I'd play it again if everyone really wanted to but it's not something I'd push for.

Alien Frontiers: I also like my dice games as they do well as equalizers for certain groups. I enjoyed it but I've only played it once. Has anyone tried the expansion? It sort of feels like unexpanded Kingsburg in that it's a little bit bland but could get a lot a better with the right tweaks.

Dominion, Dark Ages: In which I learned I'm pretty disinterested in Dominion still.

Of course I still have Eclipse, Sentinels of the Multiverse:EE, King of Tokyo, Core Worlds, and some Lord of the Rings LCG Expansion/Adventure packs that I'm sadly going to end up having to play by myself in all likelihood.

San Juan is kind of broken. There are a few cards you can use to great effect and eventually for me the game devolved into fishing for them and seeing who got a bite first and went on to win.

Until you figure out exactly how it's kind of broken it's a fun damned card game, so play and enjoy (and stay away from the iOS version, as you can play so many games so fast that you'll quickly run into the winning strategies).

Where did you get that? The game pissed me off by showing pictures of cute little cows and pigs in the fucking manual and then giving me a bunch of cubes whose colors don't match the description. Stone is grey? Ok, that's super, now which shade of brown are you calling grey?

Of course, since I'm unlikely to get to play it ever again, I probably shouldn't go pouring money into aesthetics.

I'm not sure I see the distinction. But I lump pretty much everything we're talking about here under "strategy", to differentiate from party games, word games, trivia games and so on.

Meeples!

In addition to Meeplesource I know Mayday had a set of animeeples and the like a while back. I bought mine with a package of mini plastic animals that my dealer picked up in bulk in a Target sale, but when I gave the whole thing away that went with it. And, of course, there's the official expansion which was never released by the US publisher. Regardless of what I think of the game overall, I think it's substantially improved as an experience when the blocks are replaced with more lively bits.

Well, that would be why. Strategy is something I use to characterize either outright war games that function at that level or boardgames that involve managing a number of different tactical avenues towards strategic goals. Like I said, it's not a hard and fast distinction and there are always going to be problems with the categories, but they are useful to me in organizing "impressions" of what the defining characteristic of a game is in order to compare it to others that may be superficially similar but play very differently. The reason I brought it up is because what you are describing relative to your SO is not really a "woman" thing so much as a significant split within even avid boardgaming communities as to what works for them as a fun AND challenging experience, because then it's sometimes possible to find compromise games that deliver things you like (optimization, for instance) and things she might enjoy more (different theme, more "on the board" planning rather than in your head, and so on).

So basically we're coming at classification from opposite ends, since party games etc are tiny categories to me in terms of the interesting distinctions within them, relative to the massive, heterogenous clot of things you're putting under strategy.Does that make sense?

LK, would you consider Ghost Stories a Strategy game under that definition? As opposed to the review that was linked either up-thread or in a different post that describes it as an actiony puzzle board game.

The "women" comment was specifically about the fact she liked San Juan and hated Race for the Galaxy, even though to me they're practically the same game. It had nothing to do with Agricola. I understand (now) that she isn't interested in a game where you have to think multiple turns ahead rather than deciding what to do right before you do it. I just found it weird that she would focus so much on the theme, to the point where it completely ruins a game for her, and then love the same game with a different skin.

If we're breaking down genres, I would lump all of these together as "resource allocation games" with San Juan being the simplest and Agricola being the deepest and most complex. Which is why I bought it. I had just assumed, erroneously apparently, that she would be as willing as I am to give the game a couple play throughs to learn how to play it.

I don't know the game well enough to say. With coop games I tend to see the coop aspect as the defining trait, from which you subdivide into the bits of other genres that it includes. I would then crudely lump the ones I know well into coop/traitor, coop/puzzle, coop/random (bullshit) and coop/information restriction in terms of how they fundamentally address the central existential problem of coop games (why doesn't the best player take everyone's turns for them?). In traitor, you have the traitor undercutting trust (Battlestar, Shadows over Camelot); in puzzle you have problems that can presumably be tackled differently according to your particular skill set and character (Ghost Stories maybe); in random you have chance as the key variable in success making the pro player less effective (Ravenloft); in information restriction you have the game controlling table talk or hiding hands or what have you, or appending a time limit (Space Alert, Space Hulk Death Angel).
Of these, I find information restriction to be the most versatile in adapting to different themes and core mechanics and still making the coop feel genuine, and traitor the most interesting when it's done right but really hard to do and sometimes bad luck can make a significantly worse experience even in a soundly designed game. Puzzle is fine but tends to have a lot of overlap with random (bullshit) so it's hard to decide which is the key variable (as in Arkham Horror), and it really tends to be carried by the theme. Alternately, you have the "fair play" puzzle coop like Pandemic which totally gives up on neutralizing the best player advantage and settles for being relatively transparent to the whole group and satisfying because it feels like a fair puzzle.

I don't know if I can really think of a coop game that I would primarily define as a strategy experience, as that seems like something really difficult to coordinate. YMMV.

What I was trying to explain is an alternate rationale than simple whimsy because the feedback she gave seems very familiar to me across many discussions with boardgamers, and I thought it might be useful to consider it with the same benefit of the doubt you might give your own "first impression dealbreakers". Clearly that's unhelpful, so carry on.

Based on what I bolded above, it sounds like you might not be playing correctly. After you put a race in decline and select a new one, the new race must enter the board via a region that boarders either the edge of the board or a coastal region, just like your first race. It sounds like you're only conquering regions that are adjacent to regions your in-decline race occupies.

If you are playing it correctly, then carry on! :-)

7 is probably pushing it. On the one hand, as long as you know the rules it doesn't matter so much if she does because you can guide her. The real issue for my 9 and 10 year olds is the attention span. It doesn't move all that quickly and they seem to get distracted even if they're not doing something for 30 seconds :(

Yeah, we played correctly. I just mean that on a turn-by-turn basis, most of us were in control of around 10 provinces from the second turn till the end, and the guy who won had managed to rack up some 12 point turns right after putting his first race into decline but was not in the strongest position at the end of the game. It makes it feel kind of arbitrary and unsatisfying. Like if you awarded Germany the win in WWII because they held the most territory the longest.

Speaking of RftG, I just spent a very humane half-hour playing two games of RftG with two strangers from another gaming site, and we did that here: http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!welcome The interface is by and large fantastic, with prompts and timers, etc. They have Seasons and a bunch of other games of note. http://www.yucata.de/en/ is another popular site, as most of you know.

This. Actually had a massive blowup about this in one of my groups. One player kept insisting that the game was impenetrable and confusing (this is a person who plays gamer games regularly), the other kept insisting that no, it was really simple and easy. They eventually came to shouting at each other, and we've never played RftG in that group again.

If you're willing to learn the icons (or use the reference guide a lot), the game is straightforward If not, it's utterly inscrutable.

Also, for the Agricola animeeples, I totally second those, as it makes the game massively better in ways that it really shouldn't. I like the Animeeples and the Euro token set (both links go to Coolstuffinc). They also have a set to replace the farmer discs with farmer meeples, but that doesn't seem like such a big deal to me, for whatever reason. I think the big thing is, when you're looking at a board full of piles of colored cubes, it's boring, but when you're looking at a board full of cows and pigs and carrots, it's visually interesting and thematic.

Yep. And for me, it's all about the Consume/Produce powers. For some reason, my mind balks at those, even after a frightening amount of games. Shame that an error of iconography should have pushed away so many gamers.

I've played Agricola a bazillion times (as my mom looooves it), and while it seemed that way at first I must disagree...

There's obviously an optimization aspect, and it totally trips up new players, but ultimately that angle boils down to "get extra people quickly". Once you get past that it's all positioning and strategy though as you try to get extra people first but without paying too much. What you do very much depends on the other players and what you think they're aiming for. I'd even venture that it's fairly aggressive and nasty given how effective it can be to screw over others -- "Oh, did you need that food? Sorry, I was just stocking up for next turn".

Anyway, I definitely wouldn't compare it to Race for the Galaxies or Puerto Rico, which grew old very quickly. I have to agree that's it not exactly my favorite theme though. ;-)

Oh, and yeah it's definitely not a gateway boardgame for non-boardgamers. Gonna have to ply them with something first else for sure.

Right, that's where the card memorization and sequence of game familiarity come into play, but it's still fundamentally streamlining your process over and over against progressively evolving options. I completely agree that it's aggressive and nasty, it's just aggressive and nasty in a way that favors instinctive optimizers who know the game back to front, moreso than the other optimization titles regardless of how old they get. Like many games, less experienced players have their hands full just planning their own processes even though it's meaningless without considering your opponents' best moves first and foremost, so it's going to really favor people that are born with a double entry ledger or two in their brains.

A small part of that is in how some people consider memorizing everyone's amounts of cash turn to turn in Power Grid (and thus having it as "secret" information) as an integral part of the game, and others (like me) won't play it without poker chips because that whole aspect makes it feel like work instead of play.

Again, the categories I'm describing aren't hard and fast and they will only hold up to a certain degree of scrutiny. The reason I find them useful is because I feel they provide meaningful distinctions between how different kinds of people experience the game beyond falling back on "people who have different tastes are emotion driven and I am rational" or what have you.

Oh, I get those things and agree there's a fair amount of looking at opponent's resources and calculating what they mean, and totally see how it can turn people off (e.g. I hate the analysis paralysis of players counting cash in Power Grid too).

What I'm getting at is just that there's more strategy and variety there than it at first seems (the Moors expansion helped this greatly), which is just not the case with many optimization games. It's one of the reasons Agricola has such legs (the other being the variety of occupations and improvements). So many similar boardgames lose my interest after a couple of plays as what to do becomes so obvious.

Agricola's successors for example (Le Havre and Ora & Labora) both leave me cold. I've played those maybe 2% as much I've played Agricola and I'm already mostly done with them.

So, got out to a boardgaming meetup today (resolution: ACHIEVED). I played two games.

The first was some game called Courtyard, which is an abstract from the '80s that's all checkery. It was, y'know, a game. It served to pass the time until more people were open for another game. But meh.

The second was Martin Wallace's Aeroplanes. I ended up really liking this a lot. It's a transportation game, obviously, where you build airports, get planes, and transport passengers. But the board geography, scoring systems, and some other gameplay mechanics all combine to make the game better than it sounds in generic outline. There's a lot of different things that you're trying to optimize, and optimizing for one almost inevitably means you're going to be worse at the other. Compared to the other airplane game I've played, Alan Moon's Europe, this is definitely the Steam to its Ticket to Ride. Which, y'know, makes sense, given the designers involved.

So yay for new games. Now I just have my annual problem that I always feel all super-wargamey in January and I basically have zero outlets for wargames other than my son's intermittent desire to play one. One of these days, I'm going to have to get serious about looking into VASSAL...

I was tempted by Aeroplanes when I saw it in the store, but hadn't read anything about it so passed it up. I'm definitely curious to hear more about it; how would you compare it to Steam?

Congrats on the Wallace "find." His games are always worth a play, no matter how good or bad they are.

I've played a good few games on VASSAL over the years, but somehow my mind balks at learning the system. However, I've just noticed that I can successfully play through mp games of Dom 3 and Solium Infernum without a hitch, and it's not that much more complicated. I'll be starting a game of Ted Raicer's Reds! with a grognard friend this month...maybe that will be the impetus I need. It would be great if we could get a small group together for VASSAL wargaming. I'll help people learn VASSAL games if they teach me Crusader Kings 2... ;)

Despite the part where I mentioned it, I haven't actually played Steam. I have played Railroad Tycoon and Age of Steam, so I figure I've "bracketed" it and have a pretty good idea of what it is, but it hasn't actually hit the table. (I hauled it to my New Year's thing and it sat there unplayed, for the second year running).

Overall, though, I'd say Aeroplanes was less punishing than Age of Steam, and arguably even Railroad Tycoon. A big thing is, you can never run yourself into debt; if you can't do any moves with the money you have, you're forced to just take free extra money (the taking of which eventually ends an era). So whereas the feel of the Steam-style games is about trying to balance your liabilities with the advantages you can gain from them, the feel of this is much more optimizationy. But there are still plenty of tradeoffs and decisions to be made around expansion and passengering and taking special "advantage" tiles" and what-not.

I don't think I had a real problem with this although it took a while to learn to recognize the icons without checking the manual, my main problem with the game is that it's too short to be satisfying. There are lots of cards that could potentially interact with each other in ways that would massively benefit you about ten turns after the game ends. I never felt like I "finished" a game of RFTG, I always felt like it just ended abruptly in the middle, like the power went out in the middle of a game of Space Empires IV and I hadn't saved.


In other news, my girlfriend says she's willing to give Agricola another go, so yay. I'm not placing an order for Meeples just yet though.

I've found that you can ease new players into Agricola with the following pointers:

- Occupations that make you food/resources, or reduce the cost of building rooms are great.

- Avoid Farming! It's very action intensive and unless you have a ton of related occupation/improvement cards it is very difficult.
- - Farming is easier with the optional rule to draft your initial card hands, as you can stack up on the Farming cards everyone else is passing.
- - The Moors expansion also makes Farming easier by letting you Plow via "Slash and Burn" without using a worker.

- Animals on the other hand are great -- get them breeding and they're free food every harvest with a Fireplace.
- - Getting 2 Clay early lets you build a Fireplace then safely watch those tasty Sheep build up, at least until someone else can eat (or pasture) them too.

- Population growth obviously is key, which means getting enough Wood+Reed, and then going first on the turn when Family Growth is first available.
- - Getting 2 Reed early is huge. Be wary of the turn ending with someone else going first and the Reed space not empty!
- - You can do fine without Family Growthing first -- just make sure you don't let someone else get it cheap and that you get something sweet in exchange.


Oh, and the Moors expansion amends the rules so the first revealed turn card is always "Minor/Major Improvement -- do this even if you don't have Moors!

My kickstarted copy of The New Science arrived last week with Einstein etc as the stretch bonuses in tow. Of course, this arrived right in the middle of a gamefest that I can't attend, so I can't say much except that the components can be described as incredibly restrained and functional, like a more tasteful Dominant Species. Unlike DS, it's a worker placement game that is apparently med-heavy thematic for a Euro in the specific manifestations of its key mechanic. I am cautiously optimistic based on how simple and light the instructions feel vs the description of the flow of play and number of meaningful decisions.

I saw some folks playing The New Science at said gamefest this past weekend. Looked... interesting. It's not every day that Leibnitz is a playable character in a game. I didn't really get a chance to see how it played but it did catch my eye, so glad to hear you've got a copy.

I am temporarily broke, so I'm not entirely upset I forgot to Kickstart it, but: Fuck, I forgot to Kickstart that.

I just wanted to add that the Power Up expansion for King of Tokyo is awesome and fits into the game so well it almost doesn't feel like an expansion but more like they finally found the missing pieces from the base game. What it does is provide a small deck of 8 cards unique to each monster, which adds some flavor to each character. You get to draw one of these cards by rolling 3 or more hearts, which in practice fits in with the existing dice/reroll system seemlessly and adds more interesting decisions. Hearts no longer necessarily feel like wasted rolls just because you're at full life or because you're in Tokyo. With the base game there were situations where getting 2 hearts on your initial roll would have been groan-inducing, but now they tempt you to press your luck instead of being no-brainer reroll fodder.

So far every time I've had King of Tokyo presented to a new player one of the first questions inevitably is "So what's the difference between the monsters?", because honestly the game begs that question and then gave the disappointing answer that there really wasn't any. That's no longer the case, but instead of feeling tacked on it actually fills the void. It answers the question. Of course Gigasaur would play a bit differently than Cyber-Bunny. It's a positive change that adds very little complexity to a game that's already quick to grasp - if you were going to just be getting into the game there's no reason you shouldn't just add the expansion to the base game and start from there.

I bought KoT back when it was still hard to find and sold it after playing it a half-dozen times and finding it pretty dull. Ultimately it wasn't a bad thing, cos its rarity meant I sold it for about 50% more than what I paid. But reading the above makes me wish they sold sort of a 'complete' pack, with the game and the expansion. It sounds like a much more enjoyable experience.

Unfortunately, 'gold' editions or 'game of the year' editions aren't exactly something board games do.

I actually just picked up King of Tokyo the other day and loved it apart from the sameness of the monsters and the heart issue you note, so the expansion sounds perfect.

Too bad it seems to be sold out pretty much everywhere.

Damn it, I knew I should have picked up the King of Tokyo expansion for Christmas! Now that I've spent all my marital karma it will have to wait. :-/

And yeah, that game (fun as it is!) has been sorely missing differences between the monsters.

I got that after playing twice and being shut out of both games. Genuinely do not know what the fuss is, and I think Garfield is amazing.

The movie? The comic strip? Just how seriously are you afflicted?