Board Games

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If you play the BSG base only with a 5th player, there will be even more shuffling because another person will be holding cards. Each expansion ads a few skills cards so that swings things back towards reduced shuffling.

Like Reldan, I feel that Exodus is a must solely for the Cylon fleet mechanics which solves some of the pacing issues of base game. Also it feels to me that the base game is skews a bit towards the human players while Exodus seems to balances things out back towards the Cylon side.

Also Exodus introduces a character that lets you shoot a player in the face which is the best power ever if you end up being a cylon.

Finally got a chance to play the Core Worlds expansion. As Baker said, it's very much what the original game should have been -- more choices to make and more opportunity to play. Or rather, it's clearly what the original game always was, and they just split it up for marketing and risk reduction purposes.

Better game now and should have more legs, though it does play a bit longer as players think their turn through more.


I also picked up one of the Netrunner expansions. The game itself is great, but in dire need of several more expansions to increase the variety. The expansion helps, but a signficant number of the cards in any given deck are still pretty well predetermined, especially when it comes to Ice and money making cards.


Still waiting on a chance to play Eclipse with the Expansion, which I'm excited to play after reading through it.

I expect that's going to be the case for a while - it's been that way with every LCG that FFG has released. I'd give it a year and see what the environment looks like.

I am curious as to whether the release of a plethora of solid ICE options will substantially affect the balance of the game between Runner and Corp. The limited card pool currently gives experienced Runners a practical bye on the innate mechanic that the Runner does not know what danger is posed from running against any given piece of unrezzed ICE. Because the card pool is so limited right now it's entirely possible to just memorize all the possibilities given the Corp's current credit pool and know what the worst case scenario would be (thereby planning around it). This gives the Runner an artificial degree of control (and advantage) because it's entirely possible to just know that there's no ICE in the game that would be a threat in a given game state simply because no such card currently exists. As the card pool doubles or triples we should see some interesting changes to how the game is played in general.

BFer going to Unity next Saturday?

Well, this is just dangerous as hell.

I'm going!

And I just bought 2 more X-wings, a Y-wing, and one of those Plano organizer cases like you have. I want another Y-wing, but they only had one on Amazon. I'll wait a day and some other reseller will have them.

I will win as the Rebellion! I will!

I just got the Eclipse expansion and it's looking pretty damn good. I'm hoping it will hit the table on MLK Day, but just from reading through the additions I've got pretty high hopes for this one. They've added more ways for diplomacy to function, more creative options to go with ship design (including fairly hard counters to missile boats that were missing in the original), and new techs that I think will shut down the "place tiles the right way and never worry about getting attacked ever" strategy. My read is that it will be a more dynamic game but won't necessarily take any longer, which I think is perfect.

We had our regular board game meet-up today. Everyone was delayed a bit because of the snow, so we only got a couple of games in.

First run-through was Fortune and Glory and despite the flaws, I actually like it. It's pure Ameritrash and playing it relies on you letting go of any rules-lawyering instincts and competitive lust. You cannot take it seriously, you've just got to bathe in the theme and enjoy the silliness. It's light and has more pieces than an FFG release, but it's good game to have a bit of banter over and chug through. I hear the co-op is better than the competitive game, so we might try that in the future.
Do not even attempt to play this if you have any really nerdy or grognard types in your group. It won't work, it's too random a game. You should also be prepared for absolutely nothing to happen to you or the dice to completely screw you. It's infuriating and will sour you on the game; everyone else is out punching Nazis and jumping out of planes to race through temples and grab treasure, and you're getting repeatedly rough-housed by a mobster or failing to move more than one area per turn. Then you get to the adventure and you get lost in a pitch-black maze ending in a cliffhanger that resolves next turn and, oh look, you failed that too and now you're back in your home-town missing some of your hard-earned cards, Glory and Fortune. It's part of the flaws of the game, and the game has many flaws which make me curious as to why I liked it so much. I guess it's because we don't have many pure theme games, so something that throws the mechanics out of the window (pretty much everything relies on rolling dice) is refreshing.

Then we played Game of Thrones for the first time ever. I think we went six hours and we had just finished turn eight when we had to stop as people had to go home. As we left it, Jam won.

FFG games, first time through, can be a bit of a slog it seems. It's got a few quirks, I think, that we might house rule (like attacking a province containing only routed units). Some we'll have to live with. I feel Wildling attacks should have been far more punitive or rewarding, for example.

Personally I think it's a great game but it's verging on overly-complex with the layers and systems in place. I'm not certain how our group feels about it yet. It's hard to say with something like this. Our first game of Eclipse was similarly slow but the second was lightning in comparison.

I didn't actually win - I just had a couple of potential winning moves available to me and the Tides of War could easily have screwed me over. But I was definitely in the best position before we called it. I think my major disappointment with it is that from what I can gather from the TV series, the two "impending doom" scenarios are a) dragons (which aren't reflected here) and b) wildlings/northern monstery things - and the wildlings turn out to be almost a joke at times in the game. So you're left with a lot of houses that don't differ a great deal and nothing to really shake it up beyond the cards + influence mechanics.

The houses are fairly different, I think. The starting position and the cards you have are enough that which house you play varies your options hugely. Attacking Tyrell can be a bit of a tricky move if you haven't drawn out the Queen of Thorns, as Martell found out. The fact that Stark and Greyjoy allied in our game and some of my Eddard Stark decisions might have hidden those differences a bit.

The Targeryn armies aren't an issue within the timeframe of the series, and I'm led to understand that they're still not a major issue for Westeros specifically in the timeframe of the books. That might be why the dragons are left out.
I would guess that the Wildling army and the White Walkers aren't fully modelled for a couple of reasons. The first is that it would completely bugger the Stark player, and the second a bit more annoying. GoT is quite clearly a fairly hardcore strategy game which is why the Tides of Battle feel a bit odd (I like the idea but I understand the objections). Making the Wildling Attacks a serious threat or adding the White Walkers would start to add a bit more randomness and detract from the actual core game of politicking and manoeuvring. I'm all for making the Wildling Attacks more threatening as it would make the Night's Watch an actual concern for players, tying the theme in a little more closely. Adding in full-scale invasion threats is probably a step too far.

I suppose one way to model it would be to have a threat counter or something similar, and houses have to sacrifice power tokens to represent the Watch taking more people to the Wall (rather than the closed-fist bid system). It's tricky to fit the mechanics in.

Both the Wall and the Free City goings-on have a separate concern in that all the events take place beyond Westeros itself, and as such are ancillary (save the toll the Wildlings take) to the Game of Thrones taking place therein. I don't know if that's the case in the books.



This is where I admit to the forum that my experience is basically the TV series plus a pair of brothers who've read all the books thus far and can't help explaining stuff to me. The cads.

There's a reason the Tides of Battle are an optional variant. I personally don't play with them.

I got a chance to play Eclipse (plus expansion) with my son and a couple of his friends today:
- The new factions are well done and fun.
- The rare technologies are a great addition, adding much more variety while making some of the established strategies less certain.
- The handful of developments that everyone has the option to choose from make for nice variety and competition. Those that let you convert 2 resources to the 3rd seem simple but can definitely mix things up as you can't so readily count opponents' resources.
- Doesn't take any extra time to play, yet the game is better.

- We didn't play with the Alliance mechanics, so I'm not yet sure what to make of those.
- We still played with a house rule that turn order is determined by who passes first, and so didn't try the new turn order mechanic.
- I'm keen to try a game with more players and use the semi-simultaneous "two players play at once" mechanic to speed things up. Not sure I'm quite willing to move up to the full nine players though!

Anyway, it's well done. I'd be surprised if anyone who likes the base game doesn't think it's improved by the expansion.

Got a chance to play a 5 player game of Eclipse today, but due to one of the players leaving we had to end it after the 5th turn so didn't really get into the nitty gritty (although there was quite a bloodbath with neutron bombs and cloaking devices and homeworlds being destroyed).

We ended up having 2 alliances at the table and my wife was the odd one left out. She ended up winning, although I think the blue alliance would have gone on to take it if the game had continued as they had a stronger military and a generally better position. It really sucked having to end early as even though I didn't have high hopes of winning I was greatly enjoying it.

Overall I find the expansion to be a solid addition. I like pretty much everything it adds to the base game. It's Eclipse, but better and with more incentive and capability to exert military force between the new Alliance mechanics and new ways to bypass bottlenecks. I mean, there's now a discovery that can give ships a Jump Drive that let's them ignore wormholes altogether, Wormhole Gates that can connect any two sectors, a Cloaking Device that lets you basically fly past enemy ships, and one of the aliens can get a free Wormhole Generator by turn 3. You are probably not going to be able to sit back and win off of just exploring your backyard and building monoliths and only guarding a single choke point with your entire fleet.

I enjoyed it, in retrospect, although it's a tough system to love. I really liked the change in the strategic dimension that the alliances added; while I knew going after the "soft" new player to my right (a human) would be easy in the short term, I also knew that he was not the main threat against me and if I did beat him it would be as a result of his inexperience. So I allied with him, as I needed the money anyway, and it ended up making sense since their gambles failed and ours more or less succeeded. I wish it had finished as I thought I had a decent shot at the middle on the next turn, but overall I was pleasantly surprised with Eclipse 2.0. I don't really know what to make of the simultaneous turns, though.

I'd probably want to try simultaneous turns in an experienced group if we were to play with 6+ players, as otherwise you'd be approaching a 3+ hour game. I'm not foreseeing that situation coming up any time in the near future so it may be a while before trying that particular feature out.

I did like the mechanic where the person who passes second gets to choose the turn order (clockwise or counter clockwise) while the person passing first still gets first action. Even if you don't own the expansion I think that rule would make sense in just the base game.

I've tried that simultaneous turn schtick as a house rule in other games, many years ago. I've always been fond of it, as it makes a game faster and puts some pressure on taking your turn (lest someone snipe your favorite tech), but I recall many thinking it was too complex. For one thing it can also exert pressure for players to stall, and you essentially have to collectively agree to not try to game it like that. I'm holding off on using simo turns until we have ~6 players that have all played enough times to be comfortable with the game. Same thing for the alliances which feel to me like they'd fit better with 6+ players, though I'm a bit uncertain how the score averaging plays out.

Got a chance to play again today with my son and some of his friends. The new players were over cautious, while my son played the Altar race (which benefits from stalling) and zipped ahead, and I was stymied by a slow start and him walling me off from coming after him. So it was a bit of a slow game with only a bit of contention at the end; Didn't help that the new players found the jump drive and connofield drive!

I think they now see how they could have been aggressive earlier and done well (doesn't pay to draw things out against a player with more research!), so hopefully it'll be more chaotic next time.

For the base game we had used poker chips to track what order players passed, with that order becoming the turn order next turn.

This time we used the direction of play switching mechanic, which I think I like better: simpler so people aren't always missing that it's their turn, and not quite so rigid in practice.

In our game the score after 5 turns was me with 15 points and my partner with 17 (average score of 16), the other alliance summing to 42 (average score of 21) and my wife scoring 22 on her own for the win. With some better dice rolls on the last turn It's not improbable that I could have picked up 6-7 more points and that my partner could have ended with about 3 more himself, which would have made the end score rather tight (20 vs 21 vs. 22) despite the game having been a 2v2v1.

The simo turns rule for tech is that only the "primary" player can use the research action, so you shouldn't have a sniping problem.

FWIW in the simultaneous game only the "primary" player gets to buy tech, as I understand it, not both. I could be wrong, though.

Edit: yeah exactly.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. I've been planning to suggest tossing that bit out, and consciously make it a race -- if you want a certain tech you better play fast!

Maybe give which ever turn order pawn was passed last priority for research? Or maybe simply whoever says "Research" first? I dunno, probably such a tweak isn't worth it, but I like the idea of adding some pressure to keep things moving.

3 hours+ is some sort of amazing pipedream for our group when playing a game like Eclipse. This is the problem with an all-day event - no-one gets a bloody move on!

I think our last game, four players, clocked in around two-three hours. We do have some pacing issues, although I normally try and get my turn over with quickly in most games. I hope I actually succeed.

Part of the problem is that we've got so many games that we've only played the starting game for most of them. BSG, Merchants and Marauders, Blood Bowl and Eclipse are the only ones I can think of where we've got more than one game played (save CitOW where half of us had and half had not), and that first game can be slow.

No way was it 2-3 hours. Then again you thought we'd only been playing GoT for a few hours when it was gone 9pm! :)

I can believe 3 hours. We got a 4 player game in ~4 and half hours, but that was including a break for lunch and explaining the rules.

Five is a few! I lost track of the time in GoT because I was trying, and failing, to keep the wheels on the bus.


I would have pegged the last Eclipse game around three hours, as I seem to remember that we played several games that day. I think that was WizWar/BB/Express day but I'm not sure. I'm not disputing that we can be slow sometimes, I just think that our first-playthrough count is very high and that's exacerbating the issue.

I don't see how that works, either that or it removes the benefit of having the turn markers move asynchronously and provides a completely random benefit to be the person who happens to be sitting across from the person who goes first rather than the person who passed second in order to control the turn order.

Are you saying that you'd have both players take their turns and only move the turn markers once both had completed? Or do it like it's laid out in the instructions and have the pieces move as fast as the players are playing with the rule that one marker can never skip past the other? Because in the latter situation you could be sitting next to the first player guy who is taking forever, and the 3 other people on the opposite side of the table have all taken their turn and somehow you're getting 4th or 5th pick of a tech instead of 2nd simply because another player was taking his sweet time.

Yeah, what I've suggested has a few... flaws. Can't say I've thought it through yet, which is why I haven't suggested it (edit: for actual play) so far. ;-)

I have the suspicion there's some way to make it work, but keep running into edge cases that hose it. Probably easiest to only allow one player to research and just rely upon general goodwill to keep things moving.

I've also been considering breaking out the clock, though mine only handles 4 players. That does a good job in keeping players aware how much time they spend -- it's surprising how often the players who most bemoan others "being slow" are actually the ones who take the most time.

Apparently there's an upgraded version of the clock that I assume you have (I have the pyramid one thanks to Reldan and I like it a lot). I guess it depends, since I imagine the speed eclipse version of the game is something altogether very different. With games that have larger numbers of players I think the key thing is everyone knowing the rules, at which point Eclipse becomes a very efficient game in terms of your actual move time. It's the explaining stuff that gets messy.

Oh hey! Yeah, I've got the pyramid version of that, or at least something remarkably similar. Not sure I'm up for spending $45 on an upgrade just yet though, as the pyramid already doesn't hit the table as much as I'd like.

As for "Speed Eclipse", I'm not really seeking to change the nature of the game, just to limit the amount of time that people don't take their turn when it is their turn, either because they're BSing, or because they're not aware it's their turn. Such a goal is pretty fuzzy too, as BSing during boardgames is half the fun!

I'd dearly love to get together 9 players (who already have the rules down pat!) and see how long it'd take. Can't be any worse than playing 9 player Civilization back in the day...

Managed a six player game of AGoT 2nd Edition last night. I must admit the game moved relatively quickly, but the design just doesn't work for me, from the limited orders to the random events to the house cards (we did not play with the variant). This is my second game as Stark where I have been effectively bottled up in the north and pounced on by a Greyjoy naval attack. I was saved by a very dynamic Tyrell, who gave Greyjoy fits, but I was still blocked from expanding, and the resultant lack of maneuver made me recognize how much of the game is dealing with the interface. With FFG, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line (although that seems not to be a problem with their horror titles.) Lastly, the lack of any substantive negotiation or diplomacy makes AGoT for me, as a multiplayer strategy game, useless.

Pity. It's a work of art to look at.

Getting pretty hyped about Unity this weekend. Definitely looking like I'll get to play some Netrunner, some X-Wing Minis and some Spartacus and I'm hoping to sneak in some Dungeon Petz and maybe a game of Homesteaders in there as well. On top of that, the auction went well and I'm offloading four things I either played until I was done with (Onirim, it took about six games and then I was done fucking shuffling) or that just didn't work (my wife didn't like the random screwage in Archaeology) or that I had high hopes for but ultimately just could never bring myself to actually play, much less spend a fortune getting expansions for (Lord of the Rings TCG, and the guy is getting a bargain cos the guy's getting a laminated Headless Hollow game aid and a reall nice storage solution for the tokens.)

Through a bout of poor planning, I've ended up with two copies of the Deathwing Space Marine Pack for Space Hulk: Death Angel.

Since I don't need two of 'em and it's not worth the eBay hassle, does anyone want the extra one?

If you do, PM me your address and I'll drop it in the mail.

EDIT: It's been claimed.

Due to a windfall of finding an old box of Magic cards (ok, semi-old, not "fund my retirement" old, but anyway), I ended up with quite a bit of store credit at my local board game store.

I decided to pick up:

Spartacus
Discworld: Ankh-Morpork
Battlestar Galactica

I haven't had 3 new board games at once for a very long time. I generally cant afford buying games like this.

Hit up my first Unity Games today. Overall had a lot of fun and wish it wasn't just once a year.

Got there before anyone else I know so I set up my area with the games I brought. Core Worlds, Netrunner, Homesteaders, Claustrophobia, the three Pocket Battles games, Flowerfall and Biblios. While waiting some guy was walking around looking for someone to play a game called Tweeeet with him. I'd never heard of it before, but he said it would only take about a half an hour, so I figured why not and joined in. The pitch he gave us was that it was a team race game where everyone played birds and you needed X amount of energy to move, but always needed to move to pick up more food which gave you more energy. The point was to get across the map (which was randomly generated by adding map pieces as you moved across the board) to your nest. Once one member of your team got to a nest, everyone else on the team had to go to the same one. To everyone else playing, including those on my team, it was a game about trying to get across the map as fast as possible. To me it was about fucking everyone else over by blocking key paths and making certain you reduced access to food to yourself and your teammates. I kept pushing my teammates to help block spots and force the other team to spend lots of energy (which, at the end, acts as your victory points) and they decided I was being unsportsmanlike. In the end the opposing team had a total of 21 points. My team had 35. 27 of them were mine. Fuck you, peacenik teammates. The game was meant to be played like Nixon would play it. Anyway, it's worth looking it up on BGG just to see how overproduced the thing was. All of the bird pieces are little painted wooden birds, except the red birds look the same and their tail colors (brown, orange and red) are way too similar. And then the foods are all little food models, which is cute, except that the strawberries and walnuts end up rolling all over the place.

Once Dean showed up, he and I set up a 100 point X-Wing minis game, with me splitting Imperial duties with one of Dean's friends. It started out looking pretty rough for the Empire, with Dean doing a hell of a job bullying us around with his ion cannons. With luck though the game came down to a real nailbiter with Darth Vader blowing up Luke Skywalker, then getting blown up in turn by some random Y-Wing pilot. In the end it was one Y-Wing versus two TIE Fighters who just couldn't get the Y-Wing in their sights, so it ended up destroying them both. A great game.

After that we played a game of Spartacus with Rob O'Boston. I did not do well in this game. Not well at all! I blew a lot of money early on, then lost whatever I had left on bad gambling decisions. It was my second time playing the game and while we only played from 4 to 10 influence, I still really enjoyed it. It's a great game and I'd love to play it again any time.

Then we played something else new to me, Lords of Waterdeep. I didn't like it was much as a lot of people seem to. It seemed very slight. I was surprised at how quickly we were done. That said, I took the lead early and while a couple of people would zip ahead of me now and again, I always retook and ultimately I won the game with 120 points, the second place player coming in 115. If I had a chance to play it and, say, Belfort or Dungeon Petz, I'd definitely pick either of those. Still, I did like the stories you could figure out from the quests. My favorite had to be Domesticate Owlbears, which required two wizards and a cleric (someone's gonna get hurt!) and rewards you with some gold and a free fighter. After that a number of people took off, so we played Citadels. The two people who came into the game knowing how to play ended up doing the worst and the two new players did awesome, with Dean winning with a 30+ score. Bastard!

Since everyone else was leaving at this point I decided to take off. I'd seen some of my reddit friends but none of them were out at the moment so I figured I could just get home early. When I went back one of my Pocket Battles boxes was missing, so I ran around looking for it. After I found it I headed home. 40 minutes later I realized that I'd left Android Netrunner behind, having totally missed that it was being played thanks to my being distracted by Pocket Battles. Yes, something I've picked up two expansions, got specialty player mats for and sleeved was forgotten while I ran around looking for an $8 filler game. Blerg. So I drove back, found my Netrunner and ended up playing Core Worlds with the expansion before I left. I really wasn't expecting much from the expansion until people here started raving about it and now I totally see it. There's no way I'd ever play it again, nor would I teach it without the expansion. It's just such a natural part of it it wouldn't make it any simpler to teach without the expansion. Though if it was someone's first game I'd probably pass on the draft and discard events when they came up.

All in all, a fun day. Now I look forward to Pax. Maybe I'll finally get to play Netrunner!

Edit: Oh, also I may have stolen Dean's X-Wing rangefinder. THE EMPIRE GETS ITS REVENGE!

Your backlog begins!

I actually think that it typically works better to buy games onesie-twosie than in a big pile, because then you kind of focus on a game for a while before moving on to a different game. If you've got a stack of five new games, and you're not loving one of them early on, it's easy to say "enh, let's try another one" and then ten years later you'll find that you still haven't played El Grande (true story).

But free shipping policies and my pathological fear that games are going out of print[1] have pretty much kept me from following my own advice...

[1] This seems to happen a lot less these days, outside of MMP, but was very common for a while, and I'm scarred from that.

I spent a chunk of the day printing out and cutting/gluing little custom faction-themed dividers for my Netrunner deck boxes and I still have not managed to actually get a game of it on the table.

It's a sickness.

Interestingly enough, the designer basically admitted that they knew the game was so much better with the expansion (although they designed it prior to the core release as I understand it). Raises an interesting dilemma for them.

http://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/14775/designer-diary-core-worlds-galactic-orders if you're interested.

Sounds like I'll wait for the GOTY edition.

So, I noted above that one of the new games I purchased is Battlestar Galactic. I hope to introduce it to a group of people who have never played it before this weekend. I played it once, several years ago, and I remember enjoying it, but I know there are a few people here who have a lot of games under their belt.

Is there anything I should know or do to help a group of new and inexperienced players (myself included) have a good first game?

Five people is the best game of BSG. Get rid of the the sympathizer, it sucks. Make sure everyone knows that the Cylons should reveal themselves before they're brigged, preferably right in the middle of a huge attack for maximum damage.