The Big Thread of Board Games

[Zinegata]

Kingdom Builder is best with at least 3 players. With two it's... problematic and way too "multiplayer solitaire".

[Gerald Tarrant]

Rex The Final Days of Empire was fun, apparently a re-skinning of an old Dune board game, the story is that Fantasy Flight got permission to use the old rule set, but didn't get permission to use the Dune title for the game. It's an area control game, the object is to control 3 out of 5 major power centers on Mecatol Rex, the center of the collapsing Lazax Empire from the Twilight Imperium series. Spice blows Influence piles pop up all over the map based on a random event draw. Sandstorms The Terran bombardment fleet moves around the map killing troops and destroying influence piles. The Influence will be payed to allow you to bring more troops back from your casualty pool,and then paid again to deploy them. Influence can also be used to play various event cards, bio-weapons, las guns, and the shield that explodes when it comes into contact with a las gun (although they're renamed to something from the Twilight Imperium series). There are periodic Cease Fire cards that allow allied victories. Several races have special victory conditions, and each race has special rules, for instance the Hakan (re-skinned Guild) are paid every time someone except the Sol (Fremen) deploy to the board. Plenty of interplay, interesting racial powers, and a quick play time, my group played several five player games going about 2 hours. Also plenty of Backstabbery possibilities, everyone is dealt a secret "betrayal" card that allows a solo victory (when certain conditions are fulfilled) in the event your coalition wins.

Manhattan Project was also fun. The goal is to build a certain number of victory points worth of Nuclear Bombs. Worker placement with a fun little twist, you can add player buildings to your own board. You place one worker on the shared board, and then as many workers as you have spots for onto the buildings on your own board. You start with a small pool of workers, money, and yellowcake, no scientists, and no engineers. There are buildings you can purchase that will train new workers, mine yellowcake, or refine your yellowcake to Plutonium or Uranium, or give you income, there are also buildings on the shared board that do the same thing, though they are in general worse than ones you can add to your own board. All buildings need some workers to activate. During your turn: you may place workers or retrieve all the workers you have on all your building and from the center board. The goal is to get enough money, scientists, and U or P to build bombs which give victory points, different bombs are worth differing numbers. There's board spaces that allow you to bomb opponents buildings, and an espionage space that will allow you to place your own workers on the owners spaces. The game is much better with the nations expansion (a custom building for each nation that grants some special ability that the country starts with). Without the custom nations it feels to be a bit more of a race, with much less interplay, that could also just be a beginner mistake (as we played with the nation cards on our second and third games).

[Zinegata]

Wow, Rex can play in just 2 hours? It usually took us a twice that long to play the original Dune. How was it streamlined?

[Gerald Tarrant]

I haven't played Dune, I just read the rumors about the making of Rex; so some of the things I mention may have been in Dune. The biggest difference I heard is that Rex has 8 Rounds instead of the 15, that IIRC Dune had. You're only allowed to move one group of units a turn as well, I'm not sure if that came from the original or not. Also the battle setup seems pretty straightforward. Both sides get a battle board with a dial (indicating how many units are committed to a battle) and then a slot that a leader tile can fit into, which indicates what types (if any) of cards you'll play that turn. Battle results are simple arithmetic, we had our battles going at about 2 or 3 minutes to resolve. As a result, except for the first game, our Rounds were running at 25-30 minutes. If some of your game members are more prone to Analysis Paralysis it might stretch an extra 30 or 40 minutes, but I think the decisions are simple enough that it should be doable in 30 minute for round time frame.

[Gerald Tarrant]

As a result, except for the first game, our Rounds were running at 25-30 minutes. If some of your game members are more prone to Analysis Paralysis it might stretch an extra 30 or 40 minutes, but I think the decisions are simple enough that it should be doable in 30 minute for round time frame.

Uh, after re-reading my post that's actually double the round time we got, and I'm outside the editing window. We had some heavy rounds where there was plenty of thinking and battling, but that usually left all sides low on forces, which meant the next rounds were easy since you had very little left on the board. So we'd have a 30 minute battle royale round followed by downtime as everyone tried to consolidate or rebuild, then the cycle would repeat, of course modified by event cards and bombardment/sandstorm.

[Zinegata]

The original Dune had more rounds but we generally had a winner by the halfway point. What usually took up most of the time was the diplo aspect - there's usually a lot of politicking and planning involved per battle when everyone is using their powers.

[Gerald Tarrant]

The diplomacy in Rex only comes up occasionally, there are several cards that allow alliances to form. Until one of those comes out of the event deck it's a free-for-all. The latest we finished a game was round 7, the earliest was 5 someone would get wealthy enough that it was clear that whoever was in their coalition would be the winner, so there was a scramble for people to set themselves up as the best allied choices; and then if the Cease Fire card came out of the event deck that turn or the next would decided things. Our games ended before turn 8, since there are a few I Win! on round 8 race powers, people had incentive not to let that come up. Playing with the Betrayal cards made the coalition building aspect more prone to Analysis Paralysis, but our gaming group plays a decent amount of shifting alliance and betrayal style games so we didn't take forever in setting up and switching coalitions. If this type of thing is new for people you're playing with, I could easily see adding 10 or 15 minutes to any round where a Cease Fire card comes out.

[Zinegata]

Alliances can also be only formed or broken in Dune when specific cards come out (namely the Worm card) too, and there is actually a similar scramble to be part of what I call "The Upper 3" (the 3 most powerful players allying vs the 3 weakest players in a full 6 player). I suspect it may have to do with group composition then; we have a number of AP players.

Did they still retain the Bene Gesseret special power - which is that you can write down a prediction of who will win the game and on what turn. And if the prediction comes to pass, they will (solo) instead of the actual winners?

[Gerald Tarrant]

Did they still retain the Bene Gesseret special power - which is that you can write down a prediction of who will win the game and on what turn. And if the prediction comes to pass, they will (solo) instead of the actual winners?

Yeah, that's still in the new version.

[Zinegata]

Edit: Ack, sorry, posted in wrong thread!

[Gerald Tarrant]

Pizza Theory is a good two to three player game. The goal is to place all of your ingredient tokens on the playing area (A pizza). Each turn you're allowed to place an ingredient on the pizza, and then all players secretly select a number on the dice which represents where on the pizza you'll slice. The slices are thin, colored dowels. When all 3 dowels are down the are between them forms slices whoever owns the most ingredients in an area wins the slice, and replaces all the other ingredients in the area with their own. There's an expansion where in addition to competing with each other, the players are also competing with neutral ingredients (anchovies) in the even that the anchovies win an area, they replace all player ingredients. If the anchovies are ever all on the pizza all players lose. It's fast, about 15 minutes, and the theme is very funny, the game comes in a fake pizza box. The good: fast paced 10 or 15 minutes/game was what we got, chaotic (there's a lot of ways the game can change, so it keeps you on your toes), and simple rule set. The bad: About the only real complaint I had about the game was that it couldn't play more people.

Quarriors is a "Deck building" game like Dominion. Except instead of cards, you buy dice. When you draw, you draw sight unseen from a dice bag, and then roll your dice. Most dice you buy have "money" on 50% of their sides and then some effect on the other sides. This means that when you buy dice you're never really sure if you get the effect you wanted from them on any given roll. The other big departure from Dominion is victory point scoring. The things that score victory points are creatures that you buy, then roll, then pay to summon. If a creature manages to stay alive through an entire turn you score some points based on how expensive that creature was. When you summon creatures they do damage to all other creatures on the board, so the game is more interactive than most games of dominion.

The good: a big departure from Dominion with still a deck building feel, It takes about 30 minutes to play, it's more interactive than Vanilla Dominion.

The bad: price it's $40 ish (probably that expensive because of the price of customized dice) not much variability for the price. There are only 10 different monster dice, and even with different cards for each type the monsters are still pretty similar. With dominion you get 25 different action cards to choose from so there's much more variability in any given game.

On the whole I liked it. Dominion is excellent, but this is different enough while still having the core mechanics of Dominion that I picked it up.

[Zinegata]

Quarriors is nice in concept, but my main issue is that the Dragons are just too damn powerful.

Replayability isn't too bad though - the different cards may seem similar but the subtle differences are actually important in a lot of cases (at least as long as the damn Dragons aren't in play - then everyone should just race for them OR for something that copies a Dragon's firepower)

[Gerald Tarrant]

Quarriors is nice in concept, but my main issue is that the Dragons are just too damn powerful.

Replayability isn't too bad though - the different cards may seem similar but the subtle differences are actually important in a lot of cases (at least as long as the damn Dragons aren't in play - then everyone should just race for them OR for something that copies a Dragon's firepower)

The Dragons are the big problem, all the games where there are dragons feel the same. We've house ruled up the expense of summoning them and had some success, we also did a different variant where the dragons were level capped, i.e. if you roll a level 3 dragon you still pay the higher summoning cost, but it's only a level 2. It actually worked surprisingly well, even when we had them capped to level 1, which is 4 health and 4 attack. That's still difficult enough to kill that you have a decent of scoring with them even then.

I agree on the Replayability, I just wish that the card differences were a little more dramatic, although that slime frog is very different from card to card. The expansion (which I have but haven't had the chance to play) adds a wrinkle that may have enough variation for me. It adds a new "corrupted" version for each dice, so there are 4 (iirc) versions of each critter, and the corrupted version is impacted by how many corrupted dice are in your pool, or in an opponent's pool depending on the card. Some corrupted critters hit at +1 for each corruption in your own combined pool, and some do the same for all the corruption in your opponents' pools. It looks like it adds a completely different flavor to every monster version. And corruption is a set of dice that are inferior to the basic money dice; 3 sets of 1's 2 0's and 1 symbol that adds another corruption to your bag. And then of course it adds a DemonLord who is superior to the Dragon, but that doesn't really solve the problem of having one creature type that's too powerful.

[wautd]

the game comes in a fake pizza box.

Yeah, saw it played the other day. Really nice detail


I'm thinking of buying Quarriors. Nice concept, Dominion with dice. I'm just afraid I'll want to have every future expansion as well (and there will be expansions)

[wautd]

Played my first game of Caylus last night, regarded as somewhat a classic of quissential eurogames (hate it or love it). I loved it tough, so I'll add it to my collection someday, but I don't think I'll offer it to my regular board game friends though. (probably a bit too dry for their liking). Pillars of the Earth is probably a lighter alternative.

[wautd]

After a fairly long restraint of buying no games at all, I went into a shopping frenzy. Long story short, games that arrived today:

- Caylus
- Civilization the board game
- Rex: final days of an empire
- santiago de cuba
- Quarriors!
- Mansions of Madness
- Dungeon lords (sadly, turns out to be the German version and it's rather language dependant )

And games that are expected to arrive soon:
- Stronghold
- Last night on earth
- attack! + expansion
- Risk 2210
- Shadows over Camelot
- Space alert

Sigh... time for another restraining period. The danger at buying at multiple webshops is that you quickly loose the overview on just how many guys you've ordered .

[Gerald Tarrant]

Primordial soup is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but has some interesting interaction possibilities. Your pieces represent Amoebas, that are swimming around in a grid that's seeded with colored cubes. In order to stay alive, your Amoeba needs to eat one of each of the other colors, and then it excretes 2 of its own color cubes onto the board; if an Amoeba doesn't get enough food it takes a damage, two damage will kill one off. Dead Amoebas are replaced with food cubes of each color, preventing the board from becoming a total wasteland. Players can spend some of their currency to spawn new Amoebas (up to 6 IIRC). The currency can also be used to move your amoebae around the board, or to buy Mutations. Mutations are what introduce the most chaos into the game. There are things that allow you to steal currency from other Amoeba's (in lieu of food), or to eat other Amoebas when there's insufficient food in the square, or to eat less of all cubes, or eat your own excretions. At the end of the round after players have taken any damage for food scarcity, everyone scores points for all the Amoebae, and mutations they have in their hand. Then a new "Environment" card comes out which changes the direction of the natural drift all amoeba experience, as well as the maximum number of mutations you can hold. Players need to discard excess mutations or pay currency penalties. The environment cards offer a good catch-up mechanic when someone grabs all the "good" mutations. There's lots of interesting combinations of mutations, which is where the game really shines.

Pros: The rules are straight forward, if you can't feed your amoeba, you're damaged, if your damage = your health you die. All mutations break the rules in some way, but are written clearly, exceptions and odd interactions are all covered in the rule book, I've never needed to check any online FAQ for anything. There are some very cool interactions that are possible for the mutation cards, and with something like 25 of them there are plenty of combinations.

Cons: Kind of a steep learning curve with regard to the Mutations. If you've played before you can have a pretty good idea of what combinations will work well together. Newer players may flounder a bit and have some Analysis Paralysis at the mutations step.

[wautd]

Wikinger (Vikings) was fairly interesting. A mix of a bidding system which reminded me of Glen More and tile/meeple placement which reminded me a lot of Hawaii. Fairly light that can be played in an hour of so, so might be a good gateway game.

[wautd]

Dungeon Lords is great fun (or with 4 players anyway, with less, you get dummy players). Not only do you get competition from the other players, the game itself constantly tries to kick you in the balls. But hey, you're a beginning Dungeon Keeper Lord and nobody told you it's going to be easy.

[Bedlam]

Does anyone have small world underground?

Is it worth getting on top of small world apart from the ability to combine the sets?

From the box it seems like the same game more or less with difference races abilities. Are there different rules / strategies to it or is it a glorified expansion?

[Zinegata]

I've seen it in action. Only worth it if you're a huge fan of Small World in my opinion, it's a good expansion pack (like all the ones before it) but doesn't radically change the gameplay to be revolutionary.

[irishmick79]

So what's the biggest board game you guys have ever seen? I think I have to nominate This Hallowed Ground. It's a regimental level treatment of the entire Battle of Gettysburg. This monster has five maps, with hexes representing about 110 yards of terrain, and each strength point being about 50 individual soldiers or 1 artillery piece. I haven't seen it on sale for less than $125.

[Gerald Tarrant]

So what's the biggest board game you guys have ever seen? I think I have to nominate This Hallowed Ground. It's a regimental level treatment of the entire Battle of Gettysburg. This monster has five maps, with hexes representing about 110 yards of terrain, and each strength point being about 50 individual soldiers or 1 artillery piece. I haven't seen it on sale for less than $125.

Well the biggest I've ever played is the combined Axis and Allies Europe and Pacific maps. I'm just going to steal a quote from the BGG page on it

This game is designed to be joined with Axis & Allies Pacific 1940 to create a six player game on a map measuring 70 inches wide by 32 inches high (178 x 81 cm). This variant of the game is described in the Europe 1940 manual as Axis & Allies Global 1940.

Our first game took a combined 32 hours to play, but we tend to have a bit more Analysis Paralysis, and it was new; we've gotten it down to 20 hours or so of game time, but we've got no places to leave it up, so there's a lot of setup. I like it but it's had to go through several rules and setup revisions to get to the point where both sides have a roughly equal chance. And if we're comparing costs, the two games (Europe and Pacific) that make up the whole board each cost around $90 (when it was in print).

I've seen EastFront played, but never been willing to hop in on a game. Here's a link to an image of a 150% expanded board. The game has something like 120 division/unit blocks combined fighting in the east. I've only watched it get played. It was also designed to be combined with "WestFront" which had similar amount of units and scale. That might meet your requirement for a big game.

[wautd]

Speaking of big board games, my Crokinole board has arrived today (think of a huge wooden disk of nearly 80cm diameters). I had a Oh Shit moment when I held it in my hands, but luckely it still fitted in the Ye Ol' Cupboard of Games.

Of the games I have, Eclipse takes up the most room when actually playing though (with 5-6 players anyway).

PS. Can this topic be stickified? There's only one BG-topic here anyway.

[Zinegata]

So what's the biggest board game you guys have ever seen? I think I have to nominate This Hallowed Ground. It's a regimental level treatment of the entire Battle of Gettysburg. This monster has five maps, with hexes representing about 110 yards of terrain, and each strength point being about 50 individual soldiers or 1 artillery piece. I haven't seen it on sale for less than $125.

Proud Monster. Operation Barbarossa. Divisional scale. Counter count in the thousands.

It is seriously the only Barbarossa game I've ever seen where you will see 250K - 500K Russians killed or captured in one battle. On a regular basis, multiple times in one playthrough.

Also on the same scale is "Great War in Europe", which is a Divisonal scale treatment of the First World War. A bit less awesome from a history perspective than Proud Monster though, as a competent French player will never attack Alscae-Lorraine and the Russians will have to be playing brain dead to lose Tannenberg.

We've also done a couple of epic sessions, with a couple of modular boardgames that can be put together. We've done a Third World War game that includes the Central Europe and Norway games, and we're planning for a full version that also includes the Med and Persian Gulf.

Most fun though was a massive session of Europe Engulfed + Asia Engulfed that covers all of World War 2.

Since the Europe portion starts in early 1941 while the Pacific portions starts in late 1941, my friend (US-Pacific commander) and I (Japan) got impatient and decided to play Asia Engulfed while Europe was still in mid-1941 and Barbarossa was in full swing. We just told the Europe players to retroactively apply any results of the Pacific War when it finally becomes relevant in Europe.

As it turned out... Japan was decisively crushed at Midway and failed to take Singapore, so I ended up with no oil and no carriers. Japan surrendered unconditionally in June 1942, driving the poor German player (who was now in Dec 1941) nearly to tears as he had failed to take Moscow and would have to fight a fully focused America in six months (and thus he surrendered unconditionally too).

Albeit at least the German player got to play the game. The US-Europe player never even got to play a single turn before "winning".