Yeah I need some boardgame legends to play it with, from the sound of things. I got Imperium and have hopes that will go over better after I introduce my friends to Ticket to Ride.
But, yo listen. I played Letters from Whitechapel with some friends last night and had such a wickedly good time. I fricken love it, I was eating it up. It’s a hidden movement game that starts on the night of the first Jack the Ripper murder, with the cops ambling about Whitechapel with no concept of a serial killer in their heads, when Jack makes his first kill in public and flees the authority to kill again, and again, and again – five times across the next three nights. Up to five players control five cops (with fewer players, some might control two at once) and move from London intersection to the next either investigating adjacent locations for traces of Jack’s activity to form a trail of where he has been, or they will arrest him at a specific spot. Jack, meanwhile, is trying to get from the location of his murder back to his hidden base.
Each night is split into two phases, the first is a stalking phase where Jack eyes possible targets and the cops put up patrols across the board. Some targets might be fake just as some cop patrols may not be active. When Jack begins stalking but after cops have set up their patrols (and possible starting locations), he will reveal which of the targets are real and which are fake, clearing the fake ones from the board. But before Jack kills anyone, he can identify where one cop is for every hour he spends waiting, possibly revealing a real cop or one of the fake ones. When Jack decides to kill a target, or if he waits times and is forced to kill one out of bloodlust, the hunt begins and it’s his job to flee and the cops job to close in on him and find the trail.
It is sooooo good. The theme and mechanics are really intertwined, which is great but makes things a bit dire when you’re talking about “placing down the Women tokens” and all the cops and Jack are have explicitly male pronouns in the manual. It’s clearly engaging with the gnarlyness, but that may not be your cup of tea, and at times I found it kind of hard and was rephrasing things to be less gendered when reading aloud.
visit Etsy for new idea of box organizer and found a perfect tool for mounted map better than 3M blu tack
After 30 minutes research, learn it called ‘Isolation Sneeze Guard Board Holder’ from my local shop, used for positions for holding board with different types (cross, line, T-shape), very cheap. I ordered 10 of 2.8mm-3mm line shape ones online. Hope it will slove the mounted map bending issues perfectly like the product picture on Etsy.
btw, for taking better photo in my after action reports, I also order 2 new desk mat, one is 600x450mm for smaller map and the other is 1390x690mm for the normal A1 size.
It recommended by a Japanese wargame blogger who has pleasing map photoes in his post, the most impressed feature of this mat is anti-reflection, according photo from the blog, it looks very mild under the fluorescent lamp.
I am buying a lot of boardgames. But I’m playing a lot of them too and they’re not like all trendy stuff so I think it’s cool. Boardgames are maybe more worth the money than videogames, I’m learning.
Dumping Dixit for Mysterium.
Picked up two neat small games called Raptor! and Nuns on the Run.
I have settled on two (Pandemic-style) co-op games, the more immediately stressful and deadly The Captain is Dead, and the lushly thematic and approachable Horrified.
I’m waiting for the right time to break out this logic puzzle game called The Search for Planet X, which seems very cool, and still waiting to try Dune Imperium.
I have Ticket to Ride arriving soon, and I’m excited for that, as middle weight friendly competitive games are something I am definitely lacking in the games I have right now. Cascadia and Parks are a bit light but still good. I got Century: Spice Road to supplement this niche a little!
I am really immersed in this stuff atm.
Edit: have to post about Nuns on the Run. The art immediately sold me. I can’t place exactly what it reminds me of but it gives me a sleezy 80s comix vibe that I just love. It’s kind of Venture Bros? Something gross and horny at the same time even though the game theme is not very edgy at all. The guard nuns have big asses which I think is just great.
Genuinely shocked this isn’t a co-op game because that would both be less ethically fraught and actually thematically tie into things well. You gotta work together to get through a brutal system grinding you down.
I agree. It seems like there are very few people who would learn about this game and play it that would not already understand that the logic of systems is often (always?) indifferent and brutal. So as a pedagogical tool, teaching the history or approaching some idea of a felt experience of the struggle for gay rights from 1960-1990 in the form of this kind of game just appears to me as not very promising, and then, as a designer, not very interesting either.
This looks like a solo game, good-old State of Siege track pushing. I’ve played them (A Cruel Necessity), they’re fine explanations of “what happened/why” but also brutally hard. This game seems squarely in favour of a victory for the Pride player.
thank you, no, I will not imagine that
games are pretty crap at teaching the facts, great at the mindset: why didn’t Pride just take the most-obvious, best action to win? ah, they were constrained by balancing these conflicting responsibilities.
For history, read a book.
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We played Endeavor: Age of Sail (why misspell it) last week. A weird combination of Puerto Rico and Ticket to Ride, with various regions of the world set up for Europeans to expand into and draw from their asset deck, plus Europe’s own deck + a Slavery deck (which is generally cheaper versions of the other assets). The final card of the Europe asset deck abolishes slavery, and I ended up in a precarious position of promising to end slavery (and turn all slavery cards into points penalties) if only people would abstain from attacking my European presence (so I had control of 5 locations, the requirement to draw the card). Naturally, no one believed me and I was kept on 4 locations until the final move of the game.
The pacing is very weird, 7 turns and the half-way point is around turn 5-6. Our first game, we went from barely half the board available for conquest to every track full in about a turn.
Art design is a mess, everything is mid-contrast comic-book-background style illustration. Does the player on the other side of the table have a spot free in a Harbor or a University? difficult to say without getting up and leaning over.
I didn’t read the rules but they obviously choice one side in their art and make the game only propaganda left, instead of offer their argument for propaganda after historical research .
I did read the rules. there’s a stylistic choice to make The Man cards grey, faceless, and unnamed, but that’s a presentation choice. the cards are accurate about the establishment’s methods of denying rights to LGBT+ people.
propaganda is a strong word to use here, implies deliberate falsehood and mass manipulation.
I picked up Brass: Birmingham in a Black Friday sale a few months ago. Now I just need to find people to play it with.
A game I’ve played several times recently is Troyes Dice. The original board game is one that I like a lot, and this reimagining is very good, too. It’s a roll-and-write. It’s also on Board Game Arena, but I’ve never tried the digital version. (I also have not played anything on Board Game Arena lately.)
This weekend was full of fun times with boardgames.
Saturday my girlfriend and I had a friend of mine from college over and we played Century: Spice Road which was a counter-recommendation when I started looking into Splendor. It seems like a really fast and delightful strategy game of card drafting and economy building. It’s actually the first in a trilogy of games, followed by Eastern Wonders and New World which can all be mixed together to form a vultron euro game, or combined together in whatever pairing. Crazy. I can recommend Spice Road at least. It would be an easy game to teach and probably make it back to the table.
And I finally got to play Raptor! This is maybe my favorite game that I’ve barely heard anyone talk about. It’s a two-player game where one player controls a group of scientists who have cornered a mother raptor and her babies in the jungle, who are controlled by the other player. Every round, players select a card from their hand and reveal them to each other at the same time. The player who reveals the card with the lowest number gets to perform the action of that card (raptor: disappear off the board, reappear anywhere, and get to see the scientist’s card next round; scientists: start forest fires that obstruct raptor and scientist movement). The player who draws the highest subtracts the number of the value of the lowest drawn card from their own, and then takes that many actions during the next round either moving, shooting/chomping, capturing/waking sleeping babies. It’s quick and there is a ton of variety to be generated just by rotating the six tile that comprise the board, orienting the obstructions in different ways; and there is even a different theme on the backside of the board. Plus the art is so so so good. It really feels like the dinosaur craze of the 90s.
And last night I got to play Horrified with five people and actually won this time. I have already mentioned this, but I’ve been testing it. I think this is my favorite co-op game to introduce people to boardgames with. It has amazing theming with lots of comedy and potential for generating story, and the boss monster mechanics are immediately exciting and usually quite challenging to manage. It’s not a perfect game or a game with a huge depth of strategy to discover, but it’s enough for a really fun and challenging time with mixed company. I really recommend it over Pandemic or any of the Forgotten Island/Desert games. There is a new version of it called Horrified: American Monsters that is basically the same exact game, but with more potential to be expanded than the original since it isn’t based on any IP like the original is with Universal monsters. But the original is so cool looking. It’s hilarious to imagine the Mummy battering a child in the street, sending him to the hospital, where Frankenstein is already beating up all the patients.
All three Century games are fun, though my impression from limited plays is that the first one has the most lasting appeal. I like how you can combine the games, though I’ve only tried that with two at a time. I’ve never liked the series quite enough to purchase any of them myself, but I’ll play them when they come up.
I happened to be in a physical store recently (Tuesday Morning) and noticed Broom Service: The Card Game in a clearance pile for next to nothing. (I didn’t know it was the card game or even that there were two different games at the time.) I’d remembered hearing something positive about the game and I figured it was worth a try. I’ve played it once so far, and it’s a fun little press-your-luck thing with cute art on the (tiny) cards.
When I was checking out, the cashier commented on the game (she thought it was a puzzle) and on something else I was buying in a way that made it obvious she remembered me as a customer from the last time I was there like 6 months ago. I was impressed, as nothing particularly notable happened the last time I was there and I imagine that store gets thousands of customers.
I’m a very big fan of the other Broom Service, the full board game. I think it’s genuinely one of the best board games I’ve played. I’ll bring it to the next meetup! It’s an area control game with role selection and an element of bluffing.
One of my all-time favorite board games is Tales of the Arabian Nights, due largely to how fucking absurd each person’s story ends up being. One player will become ensorceled by Allah into beast form, then get married to a djinn, then have their gender reversed, lose everything in a bet, then enter into a spirit realm and get killed. One guy could fuck up a negotiation so bad they’re thrown in jail, and spend 70% of the remaining game trying and failing to seduce the guard into getting out.
The book of 1001 different scenarios and events makes for a wild-ass game.
Anyone know of anything like it, that leads to similar crazy stories? I get some of the biggest laughs out of the developing story of each game of Arabian Nights.
I fucking love that game. there’s a rule that you can’t win if you are currently sex changed or whatever way they describe it in the book and we did a house rules game where you CANT win unless you change your sex
1001 odysseys is apparently similar but I haven’t got to try it yet
oh yeah i rememebr reading about agents of smersh before it came out but i never played it either!!! i was just super into arabian nights for two years and then PLANNED on putting time into similar games to scratch the big book cyoa itch but never bothered
Broom Service seems really fun, it’s the same designer as Great Western Trail. I think that I am starting to wind down from trying new games (or at least buying new games to try, I still have a number I’ve purchased I have not got to play) and will instead be playing games I’ve already played more times. I feel like I needed to expose my friends to games so that they could develop a preference, and now that’s starting (just starting) to form among them, which will lessen the need for me to bring in new stuff.
Still, there’s always more stuff to try. I actually really just like learning and teaching board games a lot. It tickles me in the same way that teaching classes did. I will come home from work and learn how to play one of the games I got, setting it up on my coffee table with something on in the background and reading the manual, googling things I get stuck on or inventing/researching solutions. It’s really exciting for me. I think I could have fun being one of those people at conventions who just teaches games.
Anyway, I got to play Mysterium last night with some people and thought it was really cool. I was the ghost. It was cool to see people shift from confused and disengaged to curious and involved as the goal and mechanics seemed to form a cohesive picture in their head. Early on I was nervous (it’s kind of a lot of set up) but things ended up being quite cool. The theme is strong. I fucking hate the setup though. There are so many parts in the English version box, and I the used copy I got is missing one of the tokens you use to reveal the true answer at the end of the game. I know a lot of people don’t play with the insight tokens, and the original may not have had the final voting round thing at all, and I could see why this is as that stuff does feel a bit bloated. But it’s still really cool and dramatic, so it seems worth doing to me.
I stick by the original pre-english rules because I dont think the added mechanics contribute enough to the experience vs the extra setup burden they produce.
