i’m a little interested myself if there’s still a seat… don’t let me push anyone out tho
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A few weeks ago, I went to Walmart on a Friday night to look at Hot Wheels, but I got this bird game instead.
It was marked down to $30 and I had seen pictures of it and it looked pretty. I like the little wooden eggs and all the bird paintings on the cards are nice. I guess the game play is fun enough? I don’t know, we’ve played it one time, I don’t really know much about board games. I remember saying “tell me why you need the eggs” more than once while explaining the rules.
I will say though I also bought one of these $5 (the $5 ones seemed better than the $20 branded ones because on the $20 ones you need to press your finger all the way down and the $5 one you just pop the bubble, pop) fidget popper game things at Target around the same time and that thing has been a big enough hit that I went back and bought another and will probably get a few more to give out to people on a whim.
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Totally. Sent you an invite!
I played a sort of sequel to Wingspan last week that’s about dragons instead of birds. While I prefer the theme of real birds to that of dragons, the newer game seemed to be a little more elegant mechanically. And the art is nice in both games.
The eggs give you victory points or “Vickie P’s”
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have to pass on Obsession, I’ve played a few more games of it, enough to get my fill
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2 members of our group are away, so we meet at the board game cafe instead of the pub (which is usually vetoed for “it’s dank” but it’s cheaper and closer)
played Daybreak, Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 (that means expert game of the year, says the German tourist group passing by). work together (as different economic blocs) to stop global warming with green energy and lowered emissions
co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic), I immediately was reminded of his Thunderbirds game (market row of upcoming disasters, fiddly tag requirements, German tourist: “what do you think of it?” me: “it’s too hard”). it solves the quarterbacking problem of cooperative games by giving everyone simultaneous actions and limited interaction; sadly you need to be playing with someone very familiar with likely gamestates and probable future events to have a chance at winning.
I said when we played “it’s nice to see a game that has an intended message without strong moralising”, and missed that the US and EU blocs increase their (middling) energy demand by 1 per turn, and the Rest of World grows theirs by 3 & start with their track of polluting emissions already completely full, generating nearly as much CO₂ as EU+US combined. hmm
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Tabletop Scotland is on this weekend, and in a new location that’s a tram ride away (instead of Perth). I haven’t been to a con in years, so was amazed at the publisher & shop stalls
tons of tables set up for playing, and the youngest spotted a game they had been wild about for ages, so:
Minecraft: Portal Dash was extremely surprising, way better designed than I expected, fun components, and mechanically it’s Gloomhaven? hand of player actions + programmed mobs?? more inspired by Minecraft Dungeons than regular Minecraft
(pic is from BGG)
part of setup is to make this giant block of oversize cubes, which then functions as the game clock and as a source of special actions (refresh your actions, get a new/replacement action, add an upgraded action to the top few tiles of the action deck, heal, remove a terrain feature). Minecraft items represent your actions (sword, bow, boots, pickaxe, armor). you roll a mob activation dice and a cube dice at the beginning of your turn to see what the mobs do & which cube you lose from the block, then use those dice to mark the two actions you take on your turn.
win if you make it to the boss & defeat them, lose if the giant block runs out of cubes, or has an entire layer removed without filling the requisite resource trading tracks, or if a player runs out of health, in about 60 minutes.
youngest has already gone through all the components and is planning an enchantment expansion. I have no idea what any of the enemies are or do, have learned that Endermen are super annoying and tiresome to kill
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Concordia and all its DLC is available for $7 in this bundle, if you add another game.
https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-special-editions-bundle
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I played a couple notable new (to me) games recently.
Tyrants of the Underdark is by the same people as Lords of Waterdeep, but instead of worker placement it’s deckbuilding and area control. Someone in a local board game group once told me I’d probably like it, and I do like it from what I’ve seen so far after one play.
Unfortunately, the version currently in production went cheap on the components so you almost have to track down an older copy or get upgrade parts on Etsy. Looking forward to trying some of the other combinations of factions.
Distilled feels like one of those games that mixes a lot of elements from other games but does a pretty good job of it. The theme doesn’t do much for me but I had fun with the mechanics. Not a game I’d buy but I would definitely play it again.
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i normally hate area control (or at least, area control hates me, i always do terribly in those games), but i really like tyrants of the underdark
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I finally got to play Mansions of Madness for the first time and I . . . don’t think I like it very much. It took forever to set up (longer than Gloomhaven) and the game lasted way longer than it should have for what it is (not to say I found it boring). I will confess that I am automatically biased against a game that requires an app but I think I gave it a fair chance anyway.
The trouble is that I couldn’t help comparing it to the Arkham Horror card game, which I find to be a similar but much smoother experience (though admittedly not as visually striking as those room templates and miniatures).
As with the card game, I liked that the investigation was a single story, unlike the random unconnected pieces you get in Eldritch Horror. But I got the impression that you’re not really supposed to puzzle things out (the way you do in something like Time Stories, for example) but that you just have to reach a critical threshold of going through the motions before you hit the end.
And the story didn’t really hold together. For example, there was a point at which the storm subsided outside the airship (we were on an airship) but every mythos phase after that was still about the storm getting stronger.
Also, I found the slide puzzles and things obnoxious and out of place in a board game. The final push was pretty exciting, though, with a series events leading up to all the player characters falling into insanity with the end goal in sight. That, at least, fit the theme.
Oh, and another thing that’s weaker than the card game is the writing. Some real Garth Marenghi stuff there. Though that’s not a dealbreaker for me. It was actually amusing in places, such as one passage we had to read that used the word “dark” a ridiculous number of times, including in a description of lightning.
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some of my friends really like mansions of madness, but i’m not a big fan.
like you, i also don’t want to be fucking around with any kind of screen while i play a board game. and phone stuff aside it just feels like yet another iteration of the stereotypical american game that takes ages to play and is about surviving horrors.
in my opinion, the best of the arkham horror-derived games is elder sign. it’s quick and simple and somehow manages to be tense and atmospheric despite being about rolling dice with little pictures on them
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I also, coincidentally, bought this game from a guy on FB Marketplace for $35 last weekend, and played for the first time last night.
I had read/watched people recommend it, and I thought the room tiles in particular looked nice. I don’t care about Cthulhu monsters stuff, tbh. I bet you could make a fun Resident Evil game with the same setup (original idea do not steal).
I wanted something with little toys I can play solo, so the whole app-based GM thing seems neat; in-practice I kinda wish you…couldn’t see the map tiles on the app? Just make the rooms gray boxes, imo. Don’t love the whole ‘monster tray’ interaction method, but it seems to function well enough. Next time I’ll prob. use my phone instead of the ipad to discourage looking at the screen. But it is nice being able to play without self-spoiling the room layouts. I’d probably just hide all the app stuff, other than the touchscreen puzzle stuff I guess, from the others if/when played with a group. I even like that there’s music and sound effects, that’s fun, imo.
Also I think the little interaction ? search area tiles…are too big? Also the monster bases. Let me see them rooms, guys, stop covering up the tiles, guys.
I have my older brother’s copy of Hero Quest from when we were kids, that I take out once every decade or so. Relatedly, I noticed the people behind the 2021 re-issue made a GM Zargon app that may or may not be good after recent updates?, further reasearch required. There’s also this hQuestmaster open-source web-based tool, more advanced, etc etc, that seems neat.
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If you like Hero Quest and nice room tiles and somehow haven’t tried Gloomhaven, it’s likely you would enjoy it. There is some commitment involved in owning a physical copy, though. It’s better if possible to find someone else who owns it and has already come up with a good way to sort and store it.
When I played Hero Quest with my family many years ago, we eventually ran out of adventures and I took it upon myself to make up new ones with whatever new gimmicks I could think of.
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I think you’re probably right, I do want to check it out one day. League of Dungeoneers, Dungeon Universallis, print-and-play PDFs of Warhammer Quest, the whole universe of user-expansions and mods for Hero Quest, what a blessing to be living in the salad days of sicko sword grid games.
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Mansions sucks
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While I was in my exploring kickstarters phase, I had to work hard to sway myself from backing the second edition of this. It sounded really interesting, but ultimately I convinced myself it was not worth the cost for someone who was trying to just dabble in genres for now (and had already chosen some bigger cost games to check out). It seems cool but also a real commitment, and I still haven’t nailed down how I feel about boardgames that want you to really roleplay and imagine a narrative as you’re playing. It seemed real cool but also a fundamentally different thing from Gloomhaven, if Jaws of the Lion was any indication.
League of Dungeoneers is mostly by just one dude in this free time, right? It’s still wild to me how this is how most boardgames are. I was looking at some boardgame the other day called Catharsis that’s seems to be basically just combat yahtzee. So the box contains just a bunch of cards and some dice, and it costs like $100 (or $300 for all the expansions). Which sounded really crazy, and maybe still is, but I kind of understand it when it’s apparently just one dude (aside from contracted artwork I guess) who I guess had been slaving away on this thing after work and even packs all the shipping boxes himself (I’m sure the game’s 600 cards being extra large in size contributes to the price as well, to be fair to them). So I feel more understanding of where some of these higher prices might appear from independent creators, where they don’t have the economy of scale of the mainstream games.
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god loves a tinkerer
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I forgot to mention another game I was introduced to a couple weeks ago. Someone from a board game group I participate in texted me and told me that if I showed up that night I’d get to play Dragonmaster, a 1981 game that his friend was planning to bring.
For whatever reason I assumed that the game would likely be mediocre. Maybe I’m biased against games from that era, but some of them are pretty bad.
When I arrived I discovered that it’s a trick-taking game, which got me more interested. And then I saw the card art, which is charmingly reminiscent of old paperback book covers. And there’s a good reason for that, I would learn later that evening when I looked the game up online. The art is all by Bob Pepper. Yes, that Bob Pepper.
The person who brought the game had a copy that had obviously been played many times. The cards were well-worn. He explained that he played it endlessly with his siblings growing up. Just that one game. When his mother died, they found that in her will she had requested that at her wake everyone clear the room at one point and he and his siblings play a game of Dragonmaster right there in front of the casket. It’s a little longer than most trick-taking games, so they didn’t get to finish during the service, but he recorded the state of the game so they could continue later and he still brings that up when talking to them because thus far they never have.
I’m not sure I’d want to play the game as many times as he has, but I enjoyed it and between the art, the genre, and his story I decided I’d check the price of a used copy. Some were quite expensive, but I saw a cheap copy that appeared to be in very nice shape. It just arrived in the mail today and it is in fact in great shape.
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