What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

mads b. wrote: I really want to try Warcry, but I don't see us buying into a new system.

Basically it all started when I bought a lot of Underworlds cheap. We like it. It's great, even though I'm not really into deck building and that I definitely want to play it more than my kids for the time being. Then a couple of years ago, my son gave my the birthday present of going to a shop to try out warhammer age of sigmar. So I had to start learning the rules, finding more troops and so on. We then went to our first tournament in January, and it was loads of fun.

But still, Warcry becons. I do hope, howeever, that the new Spearhead format can give us a shorter game where we still get to use the minis we also use for the main game.

If you have enough models to play AoS, you have more than enough to play Warcry. Rules and stats are completely free from GW's website, and you can find all the campaign stuff (the reason you would need a physical copy of the rulebook) at warcrier.net. It is NOT AoS-lite, as Kill Team is to 40k, which is a massive strength for the game.

I’m a little disappointed the thread didn’t break upon hitting page 1000.

Virabhadra wrote: If you have enough models to play AoS, you have more than enough to play Warcry. Rules and stats are completely free from GW's website, and you can find all the campaign stuff (the reason you would need a physical copy of the rulebook) at warcrier.net. It is NOT AoS-lite, as Kill Team is to 40k, which is a massive strength for the game.

Nice! I was under the impression that I needed som special models for Warcry which weren't compatible with the new edition of AoS. Will definitely take a look.

Had a couple of the regulars over today for some games, highlighted by the opener: another round of Cthulhu Wars. We decided to go back to the plain, old Earth map, but I was trying to encourage this group to fight more, so included a passel of neutral monsters/terrors that were all combat-focused: the Dhole (5 dice, post-battle ability), Quachil Uttaus (1 die, post-battle ability), the Voonith (1 die, post-battle ability), and the Hound of Tindalos (4 dice, can reach basically any spot on the map where there will be battles (aka gates.)) A couple of our games have ended up slanted toward the "doom engine" factions because people won't get out and fight. This game was Black Goat (fighty faction), Crawling Chaos (fighty faction), Bubastis (engine), and Daemon Sultan (engine; me.) Unfortunately, the two people most reluctant to fight were playing- you guessed it -both of the fighty factions. It was only my second game with Sultan and I think I made a mistake in the first round by creating my first gate too early. I should have spent a couple more actions driving humans insane and making them my cultists (Psychosis) and placed it in a better spot. Crawling Chaos ended up accumulating piles of power and appropriately summoned Nyarlathotep in round 2, but then spent the rest of the game summoning every monster in his pool and not doing anything with them. The Hound and Quachil did make an appearance, but not enough was done about the plague of cats and Bubastis won handily, 35 to my 27, followed by Chaos at 26 and BG at 21. The latter never finished her spellbooks, either.

Then a fifth player joined us and we switched to a non-DoaM, by request, so I pulled out a Knizia we hadn't played in an age-and-a-half: Taj Mahal. It's one of the good Dr,'s more complicated efforts but I love it. There's a ton of interaction between players and a lot of good push-your-luck elements to the card play (much like poker, where you have to consider how far the other players will go and what their (and your!) outs are.) It is kind of difficult to convey, though, especially after you haven't played for a number of years. I printed out a better rules summary from BGG for next time, if you we don't play again for some time. In the end, the yellow player landed the Princess prestige card in the second visit and then kept it for the next 7 straight, earning an extra 14 points, which put them so far ahead that no one else could make it up. Gotta get this one out more often, but one person in my other regular group doesn't like it.

Two people had to take off soon, so we went for a "quick" game that was in theme with our first: Lovecraft Letter. My girlfriend came in from her gardening to join us for this one. The "quick" game ended up being the longest game of LL I'd ever played, with two people being on 1 Sane token and 2 Insane tokens (i.e. next round win of either type wins the game) for four more rounds, which led to two more people having 1 Sane and 1 Insane and another with two Insane. I, OTOH, somehow failed to win a single round... My GF finally took the game with two Sane wins. I still love the game and it's always a hit, but it was starting to drag after a while.

Just got back from a small convention in Columbus. Was weak at the consignment store but that's for another post! Finally, FINALLY got El Grande played after owning it for 4 years...yeah it kicks ass. Every decision has multiple trade-offs between building up troops for later turns, getting initiative to grab great powers, sabotaging your opponents, filling the Castillo for a surprise play come scoring, or actually getting cubes on the board. Rules were simple but carried such weight, probably what reviewers mean by "elegance." What I didn't realize was how much table play was involved. I got to an early lead for the first half of the game off of several early scoring cards, but then the ire of the rest of the table starting to slow me down from weakening the scoring of my regions to moving the king far from my built up territories. Cannot wait to play more.

I followed that up with a 3-player game of Inis. Nothing too crazy to say here as it's already my favorite, but I won off the back of focusing hard on the victory conditions. The two other people were completely new to it, but managed to have several cool plays.

Finally, I ended my time with 3-player Cosmic Encounter. Uhh...I was hoping more people would hop in as 3 really isn't enough to keep a lot of rounds unpredictable or exciting. It did get into a fun, brutal grind at the end with 8 or so rounds of all of us at 4 colonies each. We were all down to about 7 ships each. A defense with a Morph card when I played a 40, followed a close save with me on defense thanks to a flare that took everyone else down with me. I had just enough left in my hand with my opponents spent to finally clutch. Not an ideal count or situation, but still a good time.

My two favorite “moves” in El Grande is to move the king where I’m doing well and to aim to score second or third in many provinces instead of first in fewer.

Another 2p game day yesterday:

SEKIGAHARA: THE UNIFICATION OF JAPAN. Great game, I managed to win by surrounding Ishida and killing him. First time for me. I'd be all about this if I had a more reasonable chance of getting 2p games to the table.

TRICK SHOT. Revisiting this one. The abilities for the arenas are turning out to be a real mixed bag. The player abilities give you fun and cool things to do, which opens up your options, but the arena abilities generally limit you, closing your options off. This is less fun. We ended up ditching the arena ability and just playing with play ones. I won 3-1.

The last weekend in April I attended GMT East; it was moved to Schenectady NY after two decades in Westchester county due to that areas utterly insane hotel prices. The new venue worked very well and it looks like 2025 will be held there as well.


Games played in no particular order:


WEIMAR THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY. We had pre arranged a game, NH ( me and James Terry ) vs Bob and Chad  repping NJ but the morning of the con, James texted us letting us know he had woken up feeling sick and couldn't make it. So we convinced Chuck Davis to join in, gave him a quick primer and we were off and running. The core mechanics are not hard IMO; Chuck caught on quickly . The difficulty is figuring out what to do with each of the four very different factions. Bob was SPD with Chuck as his Zentrum lapdog; on Turn 2 Chuck had more seats and set about trying to fix the Unrest and Poverty running rampant. My Commie KPD was not having much  luck setting up Councils but Chad was quietly spreading his DNVP Regimes and on Turn 3, placed his 4th one for a sudden death win. 


PAX PAMIR - after dinner, Chad Bob and Chuck and I played this - Bob hoarded money most of the game and most of the game was on the outside looking in as his British were way behind the Russians. However late in the game he switched and triggered the game end for double points and beat out the rest of us. 


DUNE IMPERIUM UPRISING x3  - basically this is a reboot of DUNE IMPERIUM. If you know DI, you can learn this in less than 5 minutes. I think it's a big improvement over the DI base game; probably on par with DI plus IX. It also has an interesting 6 player mode that I've played once and want to try again. About my only complaint is there are only 9 leaders in UPRISING; you can def use some of the leaders from the original series that don't have abilities unique to IX or IMMORTALITY although I don't know how balanced some would be. 


ANGOLA . Me ( Yellow ) and Grant ( Red ) vs Jeff Burdett ( Green ) and Greg ( Blue _) . Greg was new to the game but we taught him and he picked up the basics pretty fast. He drew probably the best opening I've ever seen - he had the entire road from the south board edge to Novo Lisboa ( including NL ) in his initial draw. However I was able to distract him by infiltrating a few units behind his lines and chew up his activations. Jeff cleaned out Cabinda and hacked his way onto the board on only his second attempt. However several times the starting player sequence was in our favor; we also stonewalled them along the southern coast for several turns. Finally in the late game, a sort of dance of death was created north of Lucala - Grant and Jeff each had kill stacks next to one another; both had compromised retreats and the first to retreat would be hosed - Jeff came up on the short tend and his death star stack evaporated; they threw in the towel on turn 9 for a rare late game Commie victory as we sent the capitalist back dogs packing. 


SWORD OF ROME. Five player game; I randomly drew Carthage. I spent the early game quietly building up, snagging a coastal Etruscan VP space at the end of turn 2 for a quick VP. Meamwhile Bill Coopers Greeks were also building up. Mid game he came at me, and I thought I was well prepared with the Sacred Band ( roll 4 dice instead of 3 ) and he had Elephants ( +2 ) . He rolled 6, 6, 5 and I rolled - much lower, even on four dice. When the dust settled, he had taken over Sicily, reducing his need to pay off his generals while I was down to 5 cards, pretty much knocking me out of contention. I did try to return and liberate the island, only to be turned back by a Greek response card.  He proceeded to bank 2VP for several turns, which in turn drew some unwanted attention from the Samnites and Romans, who descended on southern Italy - Thurii changed hands like 3 times. When the game ended, he narrowly lost to the Romans, I had ZERO VP. Ouch. 


I stumbled into a game of IMPERIUM CLASSICS, a deep ancient civ building deck builder with each deck having  very asymmetric civs. I took Greece and proceeded to weed my deck of Unrest but spent too much time playing heads down and not paying attention to my opponents; they were buying Fame cards and triggered the game end about 2 turns before I ideally would have done so and probably won. I was pretty rusty. 


SPACECORP VENTURES Another game I stumbled into; we taught a new guy ( who had HIGH FRONTIER experience so the rules here were a breeze ) . I had ALLIED TRANSIT, which allows you to build Spaceports on any planet, as well as letting you relocate to planets in the same system after building a base. Between that and getting an early edge in Progress cards, I started to build a good lead that grew to about 20 points by game end. 


CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD with the HORNED RAT expansion. After a brief rules review we were off. I was Nurgle, scoring dial tokens for placing 2 Corruption in Populous regions. I got the double click on the first turn, and able to prevent anyone from getting 2 clicks most other turns; I was able to auto win with 2 more clicks on about the 5th turn. I really like the expansion; not only does it add the Rats, but the four base powers get new Chaos decks which feel more balanced than the original which had some OP cards IMO. 


ROMI RANI - Chad taught us this set collection card game. I think Foley won which is a clear indication of the game's inherent flaws. 

So after getting home from GMT East, four days later I was back on the road for STACK ACADEMIE, the excellent con Marc Guenette holds in Montreal. We had the traditional big meal at AU PIED COCHON on Thursday, earlier than usual due to lack of available reservations. Friday the con started.



Games played at Stack Academie in no particular order:



DUNE IMPERIUM UPRISING x 3. Yes I really like this game LOL. Plus we usually had 4 players looking for something to play. Again missed out on a six player game; WBC for sure will see some 6P action.



WAR OF THE RING CARD GAME. We taught this to Andrew Kiefte and randomly drew sides. I was Elves/Dunedain; Michael was Mordor; Andrew was Hobbits/Wizard, Jeromey was Saruman/Monstrous. The early game was close; however Andrews hobbits were like eating seventh and eighth breakfasts and were nowhere to be fucking found while I was desperately looking to unload the various hobbit only items clogging my hand. We did use Strider and Gandalf the Grey to fast forward thru the middle paths. However by the time the hobbits finally trickled out, there were tons of Shadow units waiting to greet them; it looked like it would be a blowout but we only lost by 21-15 somehow. This game continues to impress esp in terms of how much theme comes out of a pure card game. Can't wait for the 5/6 player expansion, hopefully out by WBC .



INNOVATION x2 . Jeromey and I taught Michael how to play. Jeromey won both games; the second game I had only 3 colors most of the time, all of which had Leaf generated Dogmas that actually held up pretty well to Jeromey and Michael's much more advanced tableaus; I was able to steal cards out of their score piles and got 3 out of the 5 Achievements needed to win. But then Jeromey got a powerful engine going based on Industry and pulled away.



WEIMAR FIGHT FOR DEMOCACY x 2 First game I was SPD vs Jeromey Zentrum, Michael KPD and Andrew DNVP. Jeromey and I cleaned up Unrest but had a harder time grappling with Inflation; that said we racked up a fair number of VP and soon were ahead of the other two on VP. Like turn 4/5 I played card that gave me 5 VP for having 10 cities with no Poverty and that lead proved too much to overcome as the game went the full 6 turns.



Second game I was KPD, Jereomy SPD, Michael DNVP and Andrew Zentrum. The government cleaned up inflation early by passing the Rentenmark ( sp ? ) issue but was a little less successful in stamping out the communist trouble makers; I got up to 3 Councils and at one point. However Berlin was cleared early and a large police presence deterred either KPD or DNVP trying to place Council/Regime markers. Both of us were falling further behind in terms of VP and had a lot of units in the dead pile. This forced us to turn to ....some unsavory tactics to try to get a sudden death win. You know, using Nazis to supercharge some card plays. Some were optional, some were not. Michael played 2, Andrew played 1 but placed a DNVP meeple, I played the fourth and fifth one, then Michael had to play a mandatory one that auto lost the game for everyone, much to Jeromey's VP leading SPD faction. So we blamed Michael/DNVP for the Nazis coming to power.

Wow. So jealous. Weimar and Pax Pamir, two of my current favorite games, combined with Sword of Rome and Chaos, two of my long-time favorite games. Guess I need to find more time for conventions.