Having fun playing through The Dunwich Legacy finally. Was able to snag the Path to Carcosa campaign before it goes out of print. But I am sad to discover the two pulp adventure themed campaigns, Edge of the Earth and The Forgotten Age are out of print and likely won’t be printed again 
1 Like
I have now spent more money than I was expecting acquiring a few campaign expansions (Carcoas, Forgotten Age, and Hemlock Feast), two which were out of print and one that I heard good things about. I think I managed to do so without really spending all that much money, luckily. I figured this could be the last time I could have that opportunity, knowing the little I do about FFG and how ready they are to make things truly out of print and cause everything to surge in price.
3 Likes
You won’t be disappointed with Carcosa or Forgotten Age (though you might consider some very light spoiler-free guidance going into Forgotten Age because it can be extremely punishing if you approach it entirely blind). I have yet to try Hemlock Vale (though I have used the player cards from it a lot).
I finished The Drowned City the other night (four players). I was a little wary of that one because Cthulhu is overdone these days and because I felt there was a distinct lack of horror in the cover art. But it ended up being fun, overall, even if I’d rank it last among the campaigns I’ve played so far. I’d decided to recommend it for this group because we had a brand new player and I’d heard it didn’t do anything too complicated, which was true.
Making progress in the Bloodborne campaign and it continues to impress me.
2 Likes
Speaking of the Bloodborne AH campaign, the same designer has been working on another one for a long time and it was just “released.” I’d like to get it printed one day.
As with Bloodborne, the designer didn’t use generative AI for anything but found all kinds of great art, crediting the artists.
3 Likes
That sounds awesome. Did you just use a service like make playing cards to produce your bloodborne expansion? Curious how hard and costly it is to get everything made.
1 Like
Yes, it’s very easy to do it with MPC using this site.
Easy doesn’t mean cheap, though. Printing a campaign costs about as much as buying one, if not more. (I haven’t done it in a while and I assume prices have gone up in the meantime.)
1 Like
Thanks for the link. I assume tariffs apply at this point, too.
1 Like
I might write a post to introduce the PNP method someday, but overall I gain knowledge and methods from links above. Most of the cost of PNP comes from the error in the early trying stages. Once you find your way, it’s super cheap.
2 Likes
Thanks for these resources! I have been wanting to do what seems to me like a small PNP project to make one of the expansions to the Reiner Knizia Lord of the Rings game, which, for the version I own, was never produced. But someone’s made all the files and I just need to manufacture the cards and boards. So this should help!
2 Likes
I never shared how I cleaned up over Thanksgiving break, beating both my boardgame-loving brother and brother-in-law in games of Agricola and Clank Catacombs. Agricola was great. There was a really funny leadup to our full game where my niece wanted to play all week. She tried to set up a game without her dad and did a decent job of explaining the rules. Then we all felt too tired and she declared herself the winner.
When she came back to play the next time, she flitted from the board to watching YouTube and was making some pretty great 5-second-turns for the beginning. Unfortunately, her strategy of all cows, no children didn’t work out on the end.
2 Likes
The primary goal in Agricola, like in life, is to fuck.
2 Likes
The other day I played a rousing game of:
I got the edition that packs in 3 expansions, but so far I’ve only played the base game. It’s great! I love deck builders. They’re a great chillout genre. This one has a lovely theme: you’re a druid and your goal is to play magical nature cards to clean up a poison swamp.
It switches up the typical deck builder formula with a weird and compelling card drawing and upgrading system. Your cards are all transparent plastic in sleeves, and rather than buying new cards, you’re buying upgrades for your cards that you add to the card’s sleeve to give it new effects. Rather than drawing a fixed number of cards every turn, you’re drawing until you’ve hit a certain number of blight symbols on the cards. At that point you can gamble by drawing an additional card and hoping it doesn’t have another blight symbol. If it does, you bust and have to skip your turn. This push your luck aspect is exciting and also gives you something to do between your turns so you’re not just waiting for the other players.
Base game was fun and breezy, but a bit simple. I’m excited to see how the expansions build it out.
8 Likes
A while back, I decided I wanted to try the G.I. Joe deckbuilding game. It had good reviews and it was by the designer of Xenon Profiteer, a favorite of mine.
Took me a couple tries to figure out how to play the game correctly, in part due to a mediocre rulebook, but I think I’ve got it down now and it seems to be a pretty good game.
I’ll also admit that I have some nostalgia for G.I. Joe. My neighbors and I used to collect and play with the toys when I was a kid. My favorite action figure was Mainframe and my favorite vehicle was the Snow Cat. Both are in this game.
Now do I take the next step and start reading one of these ridiculously huge comic collections? (Each contains more than 1000 pages.)
2 Likes
Played the new Twilight Imperium expansion, Thunder’s Edge, recently. TI has been my favorite board game for years, so I was pretty jazzed! It’s good.
The previous expansion, Prophecy of Kings added tons of new actions players could take, and tons of new passive and active powers to differentiate the asymmetrical factions you can play as. Each new bit was very cool in itself, but taken in aggregate I felt they became a bit too overwhelming. Like, at any given time there are so many different things you can do and so many different abilities you have to remember that it’s impossible to hold it all in your head at once. It’s sort of an interesting game design direction – overwhelm the player with so many variables to account for that they’re never bored between turns because they’re so focused on the advanced calculus they’re running to try and decide what to do next and make sure that they’re not going to accidentally trigger some other player’s obscure ability. I still like it, but woof, it’s so complicated.
I was terrified that Thunder’s Edge would add even more actions and powers and finally push the game so far into galaxy brain territory that it’d be tiresome and tiring to play. Luckily, this expansion took a different tack. It only added one new power to keep track of. Otherwise, it just added a greater variety of modular bits and random things to encounter: New factions, new cards, new stuff that can happen to the game board. All of this is fun and doesn’t increase the moment-to-moment complexity by too much.
It also added a new game mode where you’re sort of building your own faction with its own abilities from scratch over the course of the game. Sort of like adding roguelike deckbuilder elements to a dudes-on-a-map light 4X game. Seems fun! I’m gonna try it out tomorrow night because what could be better than New Year’s Eve board gaming?
4 Likes
I’ve played the G.I. Joe game I mentioned above a few more times now, and I like it. Seems a little unfair at times but somehow in a way that just makes me want to try again.
This weekend I got to try Black Friday, a game I was curious about but wasn’t sure I’d like. It’s a pretty bare-bones stock market crash simulator by the creator of Power Grid. Not sure it will become a favorite but I think it would be a fun one to introduce others to so they can be annoyed by trying and failing to time the market.
I also played the Egypt map for Concordia for the first time. The special rules for that map weren’t as significant as I’d expected, but it was different and fun.
I also played Railways of the Lost Atlas for the second time. It was the “micro” game again, but this time with three players. I like that there are several options for how long you want the game to be, and again the shortest version still felt like the full experience (but I’d like to try one of the longer options next time).
1 Like
I got Quacks for Christmas and now I love Quacks. If you ever played Party House in UFO 50,you know how it feels.
5 Likes
Quacks is so fucking good, I love pushing my luck, it is such a thrill, no gamble no potions no motherfucking life
2 Likes
Colin Taylor
@ColintheFlea
Hold on, you did 3 of these in 2 hours? Are you just feeding the rules of each game into AI and asking for a suggestion? If not, how is this done?Colin
Fair question, Colin. It sounds impossible, but the speed comes from a mix of my professional background and my specific neurobiology.
If you’ve played Bullet︎ , I coded the original character-integrated music player. I also built the Set a Watch companion app and the original digital tools for The Isofarian Guard (the precursor to the official ones used now). I’ve spent my life translating complex game analog data into streamlined digital logic.
Regarding the speed: I have high-functioning autism, which in my case manifests as hyper-processing. Clinical testing confirmed that my brain “shortcuts” synapses differently. I don’t “read” a rulebook the way most people do; I scan for pattern recognition. I can look at a 60-page manual and immediately see the “mechanical skeleton” and where the friction points are.
For the past year, I’ve been training a private, proprietary logic model—a digital mirror of my own processing style. It isn’t a public, off-the-shelf AI; it’s a custom engine I built to act as a “force multiplier” for my own brain. I immerse myself in the setting as a “lone wolf” to find the vision, and the engine helps me output the text as fast as I can think it.
I still manually vet every post and refine the flow to ensure it respects the designer’s spirit. This project is me finally finding a “calling” for my diagnosis—taking a brain that never shuts off and using it to help people get their games off the shelf and onto the table.
Thank you and I hope I didn’t over share too much.
wow, feel like I’m watching a B-movie. I will try some of it later.
4 Likes