The Big Thread of Board Games

[wautd]

The Manhattan Project is a euro-style worker placement which stands out with its a-typical theme (building nukes), atypical artwork (which looks great) and because it even has some conflict (you can launch airstrikes against your opponents). Comes highly recommended.

[madd0ct0r]

Finally got around to playing Dominion - didn't like it much, not a fan of games were the better you play the slower it goes and the less interaction there is.

Ad Astra was great fun - not a very fast game, but a fair bit of depth lurking in there. http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/944991/ ... h-the-ages

[Zinegata]

Manhattan was only "okay" for me, but maybe because I've played so many damn worker placement games.

Ad Astra is a fantastic game that doesn't get enough love.

[wautd]

Man RoboRally is such a blast.

It's a bit like Galaxy Trucker where you have to design your next moves in a limited amount of time, after which you'll see it all blown to hell in short order. When you're under time pressure, you can be sure to fuck things up. And when your robot gets damaged, the real fun begins.
Just a good game of pure chaos and good laughs when your friends/yourself do something horribly wrong.

[Bedlam]

Man RoboRally is such a blast.

It's a bit like Galaxy Trucker where you have to design your next moves in a limited amount of time, after which you'll see it all blown to hell in short order. When you're under time pressure, you can be sure to fuck things up. And when your robot gets damaged, the real fun begins.
Just a good game of pure chaos and good laughs when your friends/yourself do something horribly wrong.

Ah, the game where you really learn if you can tell your right from your left, and start doing the RoboRally dance when you try to figure out what way you'll be facing with your body.

[Gandalf]

Could someone in here please help me out with the name of a game?

It was a hex grid game where one paid to place tiles, which all generated resources. The idea was that they all had dots at the edges, and thus they only generated resourced when they were adjacent.

[Zinegata]

Gandalf->

It's "Wealth of Nations".

[wautd]

Some new things I tried lately:

Lords of Waterdeep is a good looking working placement game. I like it because it's light enough to be a gateway game, but also complex enough for the hobby gamer to enjoy.

Boss Monster: Master of the Dungeon is a nice (light) Tower Defence like cardgame. There's some luck involved with the cards you draw, but enough interection that allow you to harass the king of the hill. One of the best looking games I ever seen (if you're a sucker for 80's videogame nostalgia). It has adorable 8-bit artwork and even the box looks a bit like an old NES videogame.

The palaces of Carrara was a decent, relatively abstract euro game. You need to buy marble (possible action 1) to build buildings (possible action 2), and buildings give you points or money when evaluated (possible action 3). The trick is to choose which action when, because the prices and availability of the barble changes constantly, buildings are in limited supply and you can only evaluate each building once. All these dilemma's make up for a fun and easy to learn game.

[Vendetta]

Man RoboRally is such a blast.

It's a bit like Galaxy Trucker where you have to design your next moves in a limited amount of time, after which you'll see it all blown to hell in short order. When you're under time pressure, you can be sure to fuck things up. And when your robot gets damaged, the real fun begins.
Just a good game of pure chaos and good laughs when your friends/yourself do something horribly wrong.

If you want something to melt your brain under time pressure, try Ricochet Robots.

Essentially, you have a board with five coloured robots and various walls and a few objective squares in four colours, you turn over a counter that shows an objective square, and you have to move that robot to that square. Everyone looks at the board and as soon as someone has a route they say how many steps they can do it in and turn over a timer, all the other players have one minute to try and underbid the first player (who can bid again, but only lower, the minimum valid bid is 3).

Once time runs out the lowest bidder tries to complete their route, if they've miscounted then it passes to the next player up, etc. (In the case of a tie the person on the least points goes first).

There's almost no randomness other than which square is the objective, the robots move in a straight line and must move until they hit something, and can't go back along the same path they just took unless another robot moves in the meantime.

Despite that, the fact that you can move any robot at any time in your route (because they must move until they hit something, using them to block each other to turn where there isn't a wall is a major part of refining routes) means that there's a lot of variation in the board layout, so the game is brain bending, staring at the board trying to figure out just how the hell someone can bid 5 when the shortest you can see is 14.

Fun game.

[wautd]

Snowdonia is a fun worker placement game where each player needs work on the same train route (clearing rubble, building stations, laying tracks,...) and by doing so, earning points.

Doesn't sound too original except there's a nice mechanic on the weather track (bad weather forecasts will make building actions less efficicent).
Also, there's a lot of possible options, but you're extremely limited in available actions during each round so you really want to get to the best spots first. That's not to forget that the order at which you place your workers can be a big deal as well;
say you really want to build that station in phase D, so you'll need place your a worker there. However, you'll also need some materials to build it, which are only available in phase A. So you could place your first worker at D, and hope there's room and/or building material left when you get to place your second worker. Or you could place worker 1 in A first, but then you risk that phase D will already be full. Believe me when I say this can get pretty tense.
Then there's things like contracts, action cards and unique trains that can give bonus actions/income to add some additional flavour and replayability.

All in all a fun, meaty game that doesn't take too long to play either. For a euro-game, the theme gets through pretty good as well.

[wautd]

Finally got to play 2 games that were in my cupboard for a long time.

Castles of Burgundy was a typical Feld game. Points grabbing in an abstract setting (as in, no theme) but very well done. It's a tile laying game with dice where the dice define which of the possible actions you're allowed to do, and the trick is to find the kickass combos that give you the highest rewards. Pretty deep gameplay despite the relativly easy rules. I prefer this to Bora Bora which was a bit over the top for me.

Stronghold was mentioned before in this tread. I liked it, although we did a few rules wrong during our first game, so I might not have won with such a large margin if we played everything right the first time. Hope to get a second game soon.

[madd0ct0r]

just wrote and uploaded simple PnP filler game:

Blob Wars - engulf them before they eat you!
2 pages to print, including rules.

http://imgur.com/a/nt6TB