Board Game Thread the Second

[Gerald Tarrant]

Rather than necro this thread here, I thought I'd try another one.

To quote from the original

This is a thread to talk about different board games. Favorites, ones you like, looking for suggestions on new ones, gifts, and so on. I'm mostly thinking of games along the lines of Carcassonne, Agricola, and Space Hulk, but I guess if you really, really wanted to talk about Monopoly, go ahead.

Fantasy Flight has been doing a lot of partnering with LucasArts lately and they've come up with some interesting stuff. Star Wars: Rebellion has been a very fascinating one for me. It's a very asymmetric game. The playing board is 30 or so systems representing the galaxy. There are a number of uninhabited systems (about 7) and the populated systems have loyalty, and resource production. The Empire is trying to find the Rebel Base and destroy it with a ground battle, or possibly blow it up with the Death Star. The Rebellion is trying to hold on to turn 14, although the Rebel Alliance can shorten the game by completing missions that increase popular support (the game ends if the popular support marker and turn marker are ever on the same space).

Both sides have very different objectives, the Empire is playing grand strategy, who owns what, how many ships and troops do I have, in order to explore every system and find the Rebel base, the rebels are just hiding and surviving and using their missions to delay, delay delay or fulfill objectives. The pieces are pretty sturdy plastic and well sculpted. The gameplay itself is pretty straightforward, the only two complaints I have are that 1) there's a pretty major learning curve for what the missions can do (The Empire can convert a captured character to the dark side, stealing an action from the rebellion for instance) and that can make the game initially frustrating, until you get a sense for what missions can do. 2) There's no draw acceleration for the mission deck, but there are some pretty important cards for both sides, that drastically change the game if you don't get (Rescuing prisoners for the Rebellion, for instance). On the whole I've had fun with this, but it's expensive. So far my game friends and I are 1-5 with the Rebels, the Empire seems much more straight forward and frankly easy, but I'm still enjoying myself with this.

[wautd]

Fantasy Flight is doing awesome things with the Star Wars IP lately. X-Wing and Armada are both looking great but I still need to play. I've finished the campaign of Imperial Assault and it was pretty decent. All in all, good times for fans of board games and Star Wars. (hell, even Risk: Star Wars was surprisingly good... and cheap!).

Rebellion looks awesome but as a 2 player game it's too expensive for me to purchase (yes I know it theoretically goes with 4 players as well but I doubt it'll be as good). I bought Forbidden Stars though, which is assymetrical too, goes up to 4 players and uses the Warhammer 40K IP.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Rebellion looks awesome but as a 2 player game it's too expensive for me to purchase (yes I know it theoretically goes with 4 players as well but I doubt it'll be as good). I bought Forbidden Stars though, which is assymetrical too, goes up to 4 players and uses the Warhammer 40K IP.

The rules as I understand them and for our two or three turn demo were not very good for 4 players. Which is really too bad since there are several fantasy flight games where the step from two to more than two players adds some interesting wrinkles, like hand management (in battlelore) and mutually exclusive victory conditions (in Fortress America for instance where the invading players are at best frenemies in one of the advanced versions).

There's an old LucasArts game that I wish they'd re-release, I just played it again this weekend, Queen's Gambit. It's the Trade Federation/Sit versus Nabooans/Jedi. There are 3 or 4 theaters war, and each side takes turn playing cards in that theater. The "Good Guys" win if at any point they outnumber Nute Gunray+guards in his throne room, if Annakin makes it to the droid ship he disables all droids and they no longer count as guards for Gunray. The "bad guys" win if they make that impossible, or kill the queen. Combat is fairly straight forward, you roll dice, count up successes, and the target roles defensive dice (if any) counting up shield icons (to cancel hits) or (lightsabers in the case of Jedi/sith to get a retaliatory strike). The trade federation has better units on the field of battle against the gungans, worse (but more numerous units) in the palace, and then Darth Maul who has more health and does in general more damage, against two opponents that have combined more health than maul does, but do less damage individually. The final field of "battle" is Annakin's flight to the droid control ship. He just dodges obstacles to advance through a stage (rolling dice which is probably the least thematic or satisfying part of hte fight), if he clears three stages the droid ship is blown up and the droids shut down, potentially winning the game. What's fun is balancing all 4 theaters to try to win. The Sith side generally goes hard on the outside field against the gungans, (allowing them to reinforce the palace, and get extra cards for every gungan formation wiped out), and tries to get a quick knock-out with Maul, allowing him to also rush to the palace slaughter the queen's guardsmen and blockade the throne-room door winning. Fun little game, sadly not in print, and old copies go for 500+

[wautd]

Rebellion looks awesome but as a 2 player game it's too expensive for me to purchase (yes I know it theoretically goes with 4 players as well but I doubt it'll be as good). I bought Forbidden Stars though, which is assymetrical too, goes up to 4 players and uses the Warhammer 40K IP.

The rules as I understand them and for our two or three turn demo were not very good for 4 players. Which is really too bad since there are several fantasy flight games where the step from two to more than two players adds some interesting wrinkles, like hand management (in battlelore) and mutually exclusive victory conditions (in Fortress America for instance where the invading players are at best frenemies in one of the advanced versions).

There's an old LucasArts game that I wish they'd re-release, I just played it again this weekend, Queen's Gambit.

Well the Risk: Star Wars game I mentioned is supposed to be a re-themed, lighter version of Queen's Gambit.

In other news, me and some collegues will be playing Food Chain Magnate for the second time this evening. It's an economic game where you are the CEO of a fast food restaurant. You can hire a whole range of employees like guys to make food or get drinks, managers to allow more people put to work, marketeers to brainwash convince people they need a certain type of food, trainers to level up your basic employees into better ones, etc...
It can be cutthroat (customers generally go to the restaurant that offers the cheapest food) and I love the Milestone cards, which give player(s) a super duper bonus for the rest of the game (as long as you were the first to do a certain action, so it's a bit of a race). Some people are turned of by the retro 60's artstyle but I think it gives it an original charm.

[irishmick79]

I played Rebellion with a team of 4, and it actually worked out pretty well. Basically what we did was we had one person running what missions the characters were doing, and the other was running the military and production. It didn't feel like any one of us got overwhelmed with the activity, with the possible exception of the player running the imperial military.

Anybody play any of the GMT COIN series games? They look like a new twist on your typical wargame. They have one about Vietnam called "fire in the lake" that looked like it might be interesting to try.

[Gerald Tarrant]

I just tried Lost Patrol. A very fun, and fast paced little game. It feels like Space Hulk lite. It's a two sided exploration game, one side plays the Genestealers, and the other side is the Space Marine scout squad. The board is a series of hex tiles representing the jungle. Tiles have paths that might branch or curves or go straight. If any space marine figure has line of sight to the end of a path, another tile is placed there by the stealer player. The Space Marine needs to dig far enough into the pile of hex tiles to find the drop pod, and then get at least one scout to the pod. Space Marines figures have two actions, moving, shooting, or a combination of those two. In a reversal from Space Hulk, shooting is very ineffective (6's to kill), and assaults by the Nid's are actually the best way to kill off any gene-stealers. I've played about 20 times (in a two hour sitting, did I mention it's a very quick to play?) and I've seen the Space Marine player get down to one tile left twice, but never win. So it seems a few house rules were necessary to even give the Marines a chance. The game is easy to learn and play, and true to its GrimDark roots, the good guys usually lose, but you always feel if you'd made one more roll you might have pulled it off. Components are pretty sturdy plastic, somewhere between table-top quality plastic, and the miniatures from Space Hulk, the artwork on the jungle tiles is pretty good, feeling like a death world jungle out to eat you. I liked all the playthroughs I got, and I'm picking it up. It's a bit pricey though, my games store had it for around 50, and while I love the theme and enjoyed myself immensely it felt like the game ought to be deeper for that price (for instance: For Sale, Innovation or No thanks are all under 20 and they seem to have more replayability).

[Bedlam]

Sounds a bit more like Advanced Space Crusade from the 90s rather than Space Hulk, although the two were rather similar. ASC was a squad or two of scouts wandering through a hive ship looking for vital organs to blow up while various tyranids tried to murderise them.

[wautd]

It's almost that time of the year again. Got a lot of research to do seeing the massive list of new releases. Anyone else going?

[fnord]

Played the XCOM (reboot universe) board game last week, with my semi-regular group of 4.

Much like its ancestral video games (both universes), the players have to co-operate to buy enough time to research enough kit, intercept UFOs, and put boot to X-Ray ass (ie, survive) until the final mission opens, then pull that off. Player roles are beancounter/commander (budget and dirtside interception), orbital defense/comms (funny how it helps ease pressure dirtside by LARTing UFOs in orbit - player also drove the app), ground pounder (boot to ass) and chief scientist (which I played - riffing off the 2012 video game as "Dr Vahlen, Moral Vacuum And Bar").

All of us initially WTFed at the requirement for the web/mobile app needed, but quickly got used to it. Offboarding a lot of rules-tracking complexity was (we found) a must - a given turn has two phases, one timed where the major decisions have to be made (and the pause mode itself has a timer) and the other untimed. Having the clock ticking helped short-circuit analysis paralysis and caused some entertaining-in-hindsight fuckups.

The timed phase forced a lot of individual decisions, while the untimed phase was more group-focused.

Resources themselves are tokens (budget, scientists, satellites) and cards (which are tapped, MtG-style, to track their exhaustion). Missions, crises, etc are drawn from their respective decks. We grew to hate those blasted crises - worst we copped was five in a single turn, which really hit us in the shorts.

Stuff cost money, and the overall trend of the budget was uncomfortably downwards - more so as continents/regions get more panicked. If two such collapse into total panic, game over. If the XCOM base gets destroyed as a result of alien assault, you're aboard the failboat as well.

The order of steps in a given turn isn't necessarily fixed - UFO jamming from orbit can and does frag things up (can't intercept if you have no deployed interceptors, frinstance), which the app tracked.

When someone rolls to resolve a task (eg combat, research, interception), you take a certain number of dice (d6s, hitting on 5+) and a single d8 (the *@$!$*!!!! Alien Die) and roll the lot. You can accumulate successes between rolls (the threat level bumping up by 1 per reroll, max 6 I think), but not beating the current-for-this-task's threat level on the alien die is ungood for the resources you were using (even if you completed your task). Scientists go on stress leave, orbital sats bluescreen, and interceptors/soldiers get murderised. Exhausted scientists and satellites untap on the turn after their exhaustion and can't be deployed until then (and you have to rehire interceptors and soldiers - latter gets annoying when trained veterans cark it).

Lots of fun, tension steadily ratcheting up with time, and sod-all AP (Yay!). I want to go another round.

The board game followed the 2012 video game close enough that I was able to apply a very similar research strategy (focus on soldier kit first, then interceptors, then as it comes up) as I did in the video game. I managed to research the arc thrower on turn 1, and the ground pounder promptly spammed it each turn of the game (no-selling one X-Ray's special ability per turn made her job a lot easier).