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Played another game as Keeper. This one was really close. But again I couldn't keep track of all the investigator statuses and mostly lost because of ineffective use of Trauma / Mythos cards, though I played a lot of them. I had lots of threat near the end, but the investigators had one good tactic that thwarted my attempts of victory and just as I was eventually about to win anyway, they managed to beat me with the last die roll they had left. :tup:

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I recently acquired Tales of Arabian Nights. Have played only a few games, but so far I really like it.

I especially like that the rules are relatively simple. You move your character, have encounters, and decide what you try to do after you know who or what you encounter. Then one of over 2000 mini stories is selected to resolve the encounter, based on your choice of action and the encounter type from the Book of Tales.

There are also skills, statuses, quests and treasures/items, which make it a bit more complex. What can make things kind of too complex is when you have lots of statuses (I had 7 in a recent game: Blessed, Respected, Married, Vizier, Lost, On Pilgrimage, Robe of Honor). These affect your movement and other things and can be hard to keep track of, as some of these cards also have rather lengthy texts. But alternate rules suggest limiting the active statuses to one, discarding previous ones. Haven't tried that.

Anyway, the core rules are simple, and the mini stories are fun. It is probably best with more than 2 players as some negative statuses are over-amplified when there is just one 'other player'.

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I've got some recommendations from the last few months of games I've played with my board gaming crew.

Bacchus' Banquet - As mentioned earlier, scheming during a Caligulan banquet. Hilariously cleaned-up (ages 8+), content-wise. Might take a few rounds to get a hold of the mechanics, as some of the wording in the instructions can get convoluted.

King of Tokyo - Giant monsters slugging it out and trying to become "either the most famous or least dead," in the words of one friend. Fairly simple, quick to play, and fun.

Citadels - Players try to build the highest-value city first, strategically taking on the role of different important people (King, Thief, Warlord, etc.) each round in order to use special abilities to their advantage.

Betrayal at House on the Hill - 80's horror movies: the game. Players explore a random-tile-based spooky house, experiencing spooky things and finding spooky omens until one of them triggers the Haunt, one of the players becomes the Traitor, and it's a race between the Traitor and the rest of the Survivors to see who can complete their goal first. It comes with 50 different scenarios, so it will last you quite a while.

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I've noticed my enjoyment of horror-themed board games depends a lot on the other players. Well, more so than my enjoyment of other types of games. In horror I think theme is more important. Of course, nobody is going to have an Amnesia: The Dark Descent like experience playing a board game in a well lit room, but I'm still expecting the theme to be more prevalent in horror games than it turns out to be. If there are players who think/speak in terms of the mechanics or maths instead of the theme, I usually don't have such a great time. Some players even ignore the flavour texts completely and just read the stats/effects. The thing is, many of these games (Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness) have complex rules which necessitate the focusing on the rules, mechanics and maths.

On another note, I've played some good games recently that I'd recommend, but I don't have the words to describe them:

Civilization

Kingdom Builder

Battlestar Galactica -- this is really awesome. Being new to board games and used to licensed video games sucking, I'm amazed that many licensed board games are actually really good. The game creates a real atmosphere of suspicion -- who is a cylon and who isn't. I'm told that cylons win almost all games though, so perhaps it isn't that well balanced.

Ankh Morpok

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+1 for King of Tokyo, Ankh Morpork, and Citadels. All Brilliant. Really want to play Betrayal at House on the Hill, I keep hearing it's great.

I also picked up Lifeboat recently. Not only is the art lovely, but the game turns a desperately grim and horrific scenario into comedy. I've not seen one group of players fail to laugh at it yet :tup:

Basically, you have a secret love and a secret despised enemy on the lifeboat, and you get a bonus, respectively, for each surviving or dying before you get to land. For either or both of those, you might get dealt yourself, in which case you're a narcissist, a psychopath, or a narcissistic psychopath. You can also score by surviving yourself, and acquiring loot. Each character has a special ability, like being able to pickpocket, swim well, or a bonus for specific loot.

If you're a psychopath, you get a bonus for dying, but because someone else on the boat secretly loves you, it can actually be really hard to cause your own death.

Sometimes characters go overboard, and one of the items is a bucket of chum you can throw in to attract sharks. Another item is a painting, captioned "It's called modernism, you boob!"

In the case of one player becoming very powerful, it's almost always in the interests of others to gang up and depose them. Alliances and monopolies never seem to last long. It's a very elegant game; in all aspects players usually have influence but rarely control :tup:

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Just started playing Ticket to Ride on ipad - might get the board game version of it. Quite enjoy it.

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I recently picked up Gamma World. It's basically a Fallout version of D&D with randomness thrown in everywhere: character creation & stats and mutant powers and tech loot that can break down after an encounter. Excited to try it out this weekend.

Also, I can vouch for Ticket to Ride on iPad, it's fun, and the Europe Map of the board game was also fun.

I heartily recommend the Penny Arcade Board/Card game, it's awesome.

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Apparently the new Risk is pretty good:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01/22/cardboard-children-risk-legacy/

Also: Be careful Googling this game. Apparently there are some very big spoilers.

Yeah, I've gotten into board games very recently, and now I need to find a third person so I can play this! I've read a couple of good reviews but now I need to ignore everything about it until I have a chance to play it. If that ever happens. Sigh.

Also, Mage Knight is bloody amazing. As somebody who has only gotten into board games (other than Scrabble or Monopoly) only very recently, I can't recommend it highly enough.

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I wouldn't be able to play Risk: Legacy. Tearing up cards and writing on the game board? Those are things I cannot mentally endure.

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I wouldn't be able to play Risk: Legacy. Tearing up cards and writing on the game board? Those are things I cannot mentally endure.

The RPS review by Rab (that guy from Consolevania) makes a really compelling argument as to why it's actually the greatest idea ever. It sounds scary to me, too, but he makes a great point.

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Played a game of Red November last night with my board game crew. Buddy of mine just picked it up and we went through it for the first time. It's a co-op game (we had 5 players, I think it goes to 8?) in which your crew of soviet dwarves must survive for an hour while their submarine is exploding around them. We were unwittingly cheating pretty heavily for the first 30 "minutes" not realizing that as each new fire starts the asphyxiation counter is supposed to go up, so only the reactor heat, inadvertent nuclear missile launches, and engine room pressure were increasing and getting repaired for half the game until we figured out why the game seemed easier than it should be. As we were cheating, we won, though two of my friends did die on the last turn when putting out a fire in the engine room resulted in one of my friends passing out drunk (you need to take a shot to bolster your nerves if you're going to enter a room that's on fire without an extinguisher), the other accidentally blocking both exits, and the room flooding killing both of them. The other three of us survived and got out just as the kraken attacked. Needless to say, this game was pretty fun. Excited to give it another go. It's not Pandemic hard, but it certainly wasn't easy. Love me some co-op games.

While I'm on this thread: I've been thinking about next year when I'll be taking over a classroom. Living in Calgary, snow days happen. Some kids still make it in though, and the teachers don't get the day off as they need to be there for whomever arrives. Thing is, with only around 5 or 6 kids, you can't really have a regular class. What always used to happen back in the day when I was in school was that the day was spent playing Connect 4 or similar nonsense. I would like to stock my classroom with games that are actually good, don't treat the kids like idiots, but are also sturdy enough for frequent manhandling by 10/11 year olds (not a lot of vital lose-able bits, for example) and are pretty quick to pick up. I'm thinking things like Carcassonne, maybe. Yeah, there are a lot of bits, but you can learn it in 5 minutes and all the pieces are reasonably large. Does anyone have tips on some specific games I should be on the lookout for? I want to start picking things up soon so that I can have a collection ready to go by next September.

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The RPS review by Rab (that guy from Consolevania) makes a really compelling argument as to why it's actually the greatest idea ever. It sounds scary to me, too, but he makes a great point.

Yeah, I agree. I just need people to play it with! To be honest, I've just got into this and I already have a game that hasn't been played in ages (Castle Ravenloft). I also have plenty of games I happily paid full price for, played for about twelve hours of gameplay and moved on. If you got a good group together to play Risk: Legacy, those fifteen sessions would be worth it.

Also, I couldn't bring myself to tear cards though. I think I'd just put them in a baggie marked USED or something, or even put them in a box somewhere else in the house.

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While I'm on this thread: I've been thinking about next year when I'll be taking over a classroom. Living in Calgary, snow days happen. Some kids still make it in though, and the teachers don't get the day off as they need to be there for whomever arrives. Thing is, with only around 5 or 6 kids, you can't really have a regular class. What always used to happen back in the day when I was in school was that the day was spent playing Connect 4 or similar nonsense. I would like to stock my classroom with games that are actually good, don't treat the kids like idiots, but are also sturdy enough for frequent manhandling by 10/11 year olds (not a lot of vital lose-able bits, for example) and are pretty quick to pick up. I'm thinking things like Carcassonne, maybe. Yeah, there are a lot of bits, but you can learn it in 5 minutes and all the pieces are reasonably large. Does anyone have tips on some specific games I should be on the lookout for? I want to start picking things up soon so that I can have a collection ready to go by next September.

I wish I had tips but I'm so inexperienced. Maybe Dominion? People say it's good, and it builds skills in lateral thinking and the like.

I'm a bit of kid myself, I think; I love the miniatures but I'd love games that don't need too many cards and tokens and the like. I'm coming around to it now with the excellent Mage Knight, but it's been a bit of a barrier to entry for me.

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Yeah, I own and love Dominion, but I worry that it may be a bit complex for students. With how much reading is involved on each card and working out how they'll interact for each different game, it may be a bit advanced. Not to say I won't happily give them the chance to figure that out for themselves, I am more than willing to be proven wrong, but it may be something that gets deemed "too complicated" by the kids. It'll be there, but I worry it'll also end up abandoned. Especially if I work in expansions, as those only make it more complex.

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Edit: Ah, it might be a bit much for 10 year olds.

At the games night I run, we find that once new players have been shown how a turn works, Dominion is pretty simple at heart.

Sure, if you want to work out a winning strategy it's a very complex one, and likewise trying to balance your deck so it's not overstuffed with anything is really difficult, but even experienced players sometimes have trouble with that. The core mechanics are pretty simple and new players tend to enjoy it.

King of Tokyo is probably good for them. Colourful, funny, all about monsters stamping on cities and each other. They'd probably lap that up.

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Yeah, I own and love Dominion, but I worry that it may be a bit complex for students. With how much reading is involved on each card and working out how they'll interact for each different game, it may be a bit advanced. Not to say I won't happily give them the chance to figure that out for themselves, I am more than willing to be proven wrong, but it may be something that gets deemed "too complicated" by the kids. It'll be there, but I worry it'll also end up abandoned. Especially if I work in expansions, as those only make it more complex.

I got my dad to play Dominion and yeah it seemed a bit complex for someone who has mainly played games like Monopoly. But there was only one card that really had him stumped almost every time he used it (the one that had most texts). I think the fact that there are only 10 different action cards per game makes it much better for learning (than Munchkin or Ascension for example).

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King of Tokyo is probably good for them. Colourful, funny, all about monsters stamping on cities and each other. They'd probably lap that up.

That looks totally fun. I'll need to look into it.

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Why has Thunderstone not been mentioned in this thread? I had seen it when Quinns reviewed it on Rock Paper Shotgun, but I hadn't actually played it until during GDC when I played with the Desktop Dungeons team who were staying at my friends house. It's a deck building game like Dominion, but mixed with a dungeon crawler vibe. As someone who owns dominion, I always felt it was really passive, though I'll admit I haven't played with any of the expansions so they might address this, but Thunderstone always feels like you're actually doing something. You can go to the village to recruit heroes and buy things like weapons and spells or you can spend your turn going into the dungeons and attempting to kill one of the monsters, who then grant experience that you can spend to level up your heroes. There's a lot of expansions for it, though I think what I played with was only the Dragonspire set, and just a week or two ago they came out with the new edition called Thunderstone Advance which acts as a new expansion for previous players, a new starter set for those who haven't played yet, and it also revamps the rules into Thunderstone 2.0 from what I've read. I plan on picking this up as from what I've seen it's the best of the Thunderstone sets to date, and while as such I haven't actually bought my own copy of the game yet, there is also an officially licensed facebook game which is well done, although they want you to buy more cards with real money which I haven't done so playing with the same cards gets stale quickly.

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I've played many a board game since I last posted here. I'll just pick 3 to recommend.

:buyme:No Thanks! (we call it No Mercy, because of the French translation)

This a rather dumb game, but it's short and a good filler. Each player has a number of chits they start with, which give points at the end of the game. How many you have is secret (except in the beginning). Numbered cards are drawn from a deck. If you don't want the card, you put a chit on it. Why would you want it, they give negative points if you take them. But if you're out of chits you must pick it up. If you get a row (each number appears once), you only get negative points for the lowest card in the row. There are a couple of more rules, but that's the gist of it. At the end of the game, everyones cards + remaining chits will be summed up and the highest score wins (usually all are negative).

Warning: It's only good as filler, though.

:buyme:Kingdom Builder should be great if you like Dominion, Carcassone, or something else which allows quite a bit of variety with simple rules. The simplicity still allows enough strategy and variation to be interesting. It's a game where each turn you place some settlements on a hex map, and how well you placed them will determine your score at the end of the game. You must place on the same terrain type that is on the card you draw each turn, and you must build next to your previous settlements if possible. This means there's some luck involved, but it doesn't really determine the winner. What kind of placements give you points is determined by drawing 3 goal cards (out of 10) at the beginning of the game. For example, you might get points for every settlement in your largest unbroken settlement area, or the longest horizontal row, or by connecting city hexes on the map.

Games are short, about 30-45 minutes. So far I like it a lot, but I suspect it might get boring as the goal combinations start repeating (3 out of 10 goals = only 120 distinct combinations, and a lot of them probably seem quite similar). There is also some map variation, though, so that might help.

:buyme:Wiz-War is, as you might have guessed from the title, war between (four) Wizards, which is why I bring it up. I've only played it once (and won!) and don't know all the rules, but basically each player is a wizard in a maze. The maze is made of 4 sectors, each wizard's "home" is in the middle of one sector. You must steal treasures from other wizards or kill them. I won by stealing two treasures as two other players were trying to stop the fourth player from winning. Wizards cast spells obviously (by playing cards from hand, which can be replenished). I didn't see any Spectral Blades or Improved Spectral Blades, but I did manage to cast Featherweight just as a Fireball was about to hit me, and that meant I only moved further towards victory as it hit me, instead of taking damage. You can also rotate the maze sectors, destroy and create walls, and so on. I even ate a wall. It is fun! But not as simple rules as the previous two games.

Games seem short, but the one we played was more than an hour. I'm told an expansion allows a sextet of Wizards to partake in the Wiz-War.

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I'd heard of Wiz War, but hadn't actually seen it at all, but I just looked at a video of it on Youtube and need to buy it asap.

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I wish I had tips but I'm so inexperienced. Maybe Dominion? People say it's good, and it builds skills in lateral thinking and the like.

since Dominion was mentioned, I feel a compulsion to mention two alternatives to Dominion:

1) Quarriors. it's a deck-building game with one key twist: it substitutes dice for cards. this substitution makes the game less predictable -- you buy dice instead of cards, and every turn has a chance of being either really great, really terrible, or somewhere in between; and quicker to play through -- no more shuffling! the biggest drawback of Quarriors is probably the complexity of the lifecycle of dice, which can be "active" or "ready" or "used", and is a bit of a bear to keep track of without a playmat or something.

2) Ascension: something something of the Godslayer. it's quicker to set up than Dominion and more action-y. however, it is significantly more fragile to bad shuffling, somewhat streakier, and has a demon-summoning/demon-fighting theme that might not work great for kids.

edit:

I've played many a board game since I last posted here. I'll just pick 3 to recommend.

:buyme:No Thanks! (we call it No Mercy, because of the French translation)

This a rather dumb game, but it's short and a good filler. Each player has a number of chits they start with, which give points at the end of the game. How many you have is secret (except in the beginning). Numbered cards are drawn from a deck. If you don't want the card, you put a chit on it. Why would you want it, they give negative points if you take them. But if you're out of chits you must pick it up. If you get a row (each number appears once), you only get negative points for the lowest card in the row. There are a couple of more rules, but that's the gist of it. At the end of the game, everyones cards + remaining chits will be summed up and the highest score wins (usually all are negative).

Warning: It's only good as filler, though.

my local game shop plays this game under the more hostile name "no, fuck you." it's basically the best board game ever to spectate.

also, a couple of unrelated recommendations. (NB: I am predisposed to cooperative/competitive games where the goal of the game is trying to be the biggest possible backstabbing asshole while still acting like you're helpful.)

Tobago. it's like Clue collided with a bidding game like Ra or a couple of the phases of Power Grid. the core mechanic is tracking down hidden treasure on a hex map (hexes!) and trying to turn the clues you played into the largest possible shares of the treasures within, without getting cursed.

the sense of schadenfreude you get when you get out of the money right before a curse is basically the best thing ever, and planting clues to make people run all over the island while you quietly plot to sneak over to another treasure is amazing.

The D&D board games (The Secret of Drizzt, The Wrath of Ashardalon). they're pretty expensive and super complicated to set up, but make an excellent gateway drug to RPGs for people who don't play RPGs.

also, if you already own Pandemic:

Pandemic: On the Brink, in the Bioterrorist mode. basically, it's standard Pandemic, except one player takes turns between every turn and moves around the map planting cubes of a fifth color. where normal Pandemic is a game of triage and time-management, Bioterrorist Pandemic is a game of subterfuge and seeing through subterfuge, and it feels way fresher to be fighting a human opponent in addition to a mechanical opponent.

Edited by vogon

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