my neighbors were playing fluxx on the roof and asked me to and it took all my power to say ‘no thank you’ instead of going on and on about exactly this
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oh the big win was: the sheet of paper they use to mark a table as reserved has been laminated with our regular booking. we’re regulars now
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I’ve “upgraded” a few of my games, such as
- Aeon’s End (red dice instead of heath tokens)
- Arkham Horror: The Card Game (acrylic tokens from Etsy and neoprene mats)
- Brass: Birmingham (plastic trains and boats from Etsy)
- Dominant Species: Marine (wooden animal-shaped pieces from Etsy)
- A Gest of Robin Hood (approximately period-specific metal coins)
- Scythe (those official metal coins, but not the “realistic” resources because I prefer the basic wood ones)
- X-Wing (acrylic tokens from Etsy)
Even (especially?) with games I don’t get to play very often, this is how I look at it:
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I have so many wooden organizers for games
Do you have a wooden organizer for Ice Cool?
So…
I have a ding and dent ice cool? So it’s like hard mode cus the box is a little
crushed.
I have custom inserts for a few of my games, but no real “bling” as it is sometimes called. It’s all about functionality for me, if it makes the game easier to set up or get to the table more frequently or run smoother then I am all for it. I do get the appeal of other upgrades that aren’t just organizational and maybe just aesthetics and feel, but for now my money feels better spent on things like inserts, aids, bowls and things like that. These are the games I’ve got upgrades for
- Great Western Trailed 2nd Edition: I’ve got one of those laser cut wood inserts and a sliding tile dispenser thing for the hazard tiles which is both cool looking and actually useful.
- Maracaibo: Another insert, which is baseline a huge improvement because the box came enitrely without one and this one I got has a nice tray you can place on the board that holds the nation cubes in place.
- Arkham Horror the Card Game: By far the most customized and actually improved, I’ve got a insert that grants slightly more space, as well as some standees for the player cards, a tray to hold the agenda and tokens, and some arrows.
- Cacao: I have a lot of the expansions for this and found a genius insert that works both as an organizer for the different tiles and as table trays to hold pieces.
- I also got a cheap foam organizer that you glue together to merge both Lords of Waterdeep boxes into one because I was going to take it to a work thing, but I kind of hate that game so I’m not proud of this.
Anyone play Lost Ruins of Arnak with anyone? I got it during the Winter and have played it a handful of times now with my partner or her and her parents, and my feeling of it keeps changing. It’s a beautifully produced game. I think about it sometimes as Century Spice Road multiplied two or three times, because despite its appearance it really is just a change-breaking game about getting resources and turning them into other ones. But unlike any other game in my collection, I often find myself thinking in the last couple of rounds why I should bother doing anything. It’s the one game I can think of that I just reach a point where the fact that I’m just mathing out actions to turn into points feels depressing. Don’t know what causes that but it makes think maybe the lustre for this game has fallen away and I don’t think expansions are going to really change that.
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Tried some of the spirits from the latest Spirit Island expansion over the weekend.
I chose this spirit because it sounded a little confusing at first and I thought it might be an interesting challenge. It starts out weak, constantly losing powers and presence markers. But it eventually evolves, with some of its traits and innate powers replaced by different ones. Half of its starting card powers require blight.
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The new spirits are fun but for some reason what I’ve enjoyed most from the new expansion are the cards that slightly change the older spirits.
I’ve been playing a heavily themed single player game called Final Girl. You avoid and then eventually fight a slasher movie villain, hopefully saving other victims along the way. Each expansion is an homage to a different horror series. I enjoy it and the horror theme of the game is realized effectively. It’s easy to imagine a story within the game just from the hints of narrative they give you.
It’s pretty dicey. You can adjust your luck to the extent that it becomes more about hand and resource management rather than just blind rolls, but I think the bigger negative regarding the dice is that winning or failing rolls is where the variation in the game mostly comes from, whereas variation in something like Spirit Island comes from getting new powers and exploring a specific build for your spirit unique to that session.
Item cards and other abilities suffer from a phenomenon I’ve seen in other games where acquiring items/abilities are all balanced equally, but only cards that push you directly towards your win condition (doing damage in this case) are ever worth getting. Items that manipulate the game rules in interesting ways rarely seem worth the time or resources needed to get them.
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Very good deal on some digital board games, if you like that sort of thing:
I’ve brought Hansa Tuetonica to three events with three different groups, and last night was the latest with my fiancé’s folks. Just like those other times, almost hilariously at this point, we only managed to play about half the game before having to quit. Despite that, this was a long enough and serious enough session that I could finally get a grasp of the mechanics and actually tell that this game is good and something that I will hold onto and even bring back to play with the folks again. We all liked it and were compelled by what we managed to play.
One day I’ll play a full game!! I’ve been really into these uncomplicated but strategically depthful euro games like this, Concordia, Carcassonne, Castles of Burgundy, Navegador, and Grand Austria Hotel lately and kind of balked at more modern euro games which have systems in systems that are kind of the popular taste it seems.
Looks like Tikal has been added to BGA. It’s in Beta right now, but I bet that works well. Would anyone be interested in playing that sometime?
I would also be interested in playing some other games, while our Viticulture game continues. It’s lasting much longer than I expected 
I would still love to play Obsession with some folks.
I have a physical copy of Java and have always been curious about the other games in that series, such as Tikal.
I learned Obsession last month. It was a six-player game with expansions and it took forever but it remained fun for the duration. (It was at a board game meetup at a friend’s house and I taught some people how to play Eclipse and then played Obsession in the next room. Obsession ended up taking longer than even a five-player game of Eclipse with new players. And the joke was that they kept sending someone in to ask me an Eclipse question when it happened to be my turn in Obsession.)
In short, count me in for either game (or both at once).
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I fear a six-player game of Obsession! I’ve read the designer avoids six-player games and really only developed the rules mostly to appease requests from other people. But I love the game. Very enjoyable either way. I have the Upstairs, Downstairs expansion but haven’t been able to play it yet. Did you like playing with it?
Yes, that was included and so I have no idea what the game is like without it. But I definitely used some of the expansion characters.
After we finished the game we did say that we’d likely try to stick to four or fewer players in the future.
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Wanna join me and @wourme for Obsession @falsedan @Infernarl ?
I’ll bet Infernarl will play if you say it’s a Pride and Prejudice mod for SnowRunner.
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Ok bet
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Perhaps @Tulpa ?
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Sure I will play
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