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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.

http://www.amazon.com/Gamewright-317-Forbidden-Island/dp/B003D7F4YY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332391086&sr=8-1

if you don't have Forbidden Island, buy Forbidden Island. it's like Pandemic but simpler, faster, better-scaling, and more kid-friendly. it's one of my favorite games of all time, ever.

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I tried Quarriors out briefly on Sunday, it seemed good. The game I played ended pretty quickly, but I think that was because we had one experienced player teaching three completely new people. We're also all used to Dominion, so expected it to sprawl in a similar way.

I got hold of Cyclades, and it's every bit as good as Robert Florence said. It looks a lot more intricate to play than it actually is, and the game hinges on three systems: Monsters, bidding on the gods, and player actions. They fit together beautifully, and set up some really tough decisions. The best thing is that it has all of its complexity without ever needing a load of arbitrary feeling and difficult to remember sub-rules to manage it. The cognitive load of playing is mainly in thinking about whether things will or won't happen, not whether you can or can't do something :tup:

The god you really want on a given turn might be dealt to the end of the turn order, so it can become more important to bid on one you don't want just to take your turn ahead of another player. Sometimes you find yourself with your heart in your mouth over whether a plan is going to work, without ever feeling like you're going to be relentlessly bummed in the gob by random chance.

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Yeah, Cyclades is good. Again, only played it once, but seemed like fun. The bidding part starts to get really interesting in the middle of the game.

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I haven't yet started it, but I just picked up a copy of Risk: Legacy. I've been able to resist the urge so far, but I'm trying to decide whether or not to open the box and take a look at some of the pieces prior to my actual game night. If I heard right, Famous mentioned it during a recent progresscast, and I'm excited to hear Thumbs stories, too.

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Just played a 12+ hour session of Twilight Imperium. The game is quite good, liked it better than Civilization, but made a horrible mistake in the middle of the game so the last 5 or so hours was just hopeless :(

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Here's the question I've always had about long games like TI: So I can see like games being fun and how a game that lasted a whole day or took multiple sessions would feel more rewarding than something that takes an hour to play, but do you feel like you would have a better time if you spent those 12 hours either playing multiple rounds of a shorter game or even playing a couple of different games?

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but do you feel like you would have a better time if you spent those 12 hours either playing multiple rounds of a shorter game or even playing a couple of different games?

Yes

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No, but I've heard a lot about it and I know someone who played it and he really liked it. It's definitely one of the games on my list of games that I need to buy when I don't have 0 money.

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AFAoS was covered in the most recent episode of Shut Up and Sit Down, a board game review show made by Paul Dean and Quintin Smith(former Rock Paper Shotgun writer). It's a great show, very entertaining and well produced.

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I started Risk Legacy with a regular group yesterday. For board gamers, the feeling of writing on the board and ripping stuff up is so good :tup:

I think we're going to aim for a game a week. Non spoilers: The objective is to get four red stars. Your HQ, and any you capture, count as stars, and you can trade four territory cards to get one too. Each player starts with their HQ and one red star in the first game, so you only have to get another two to win it.

I won with a rush, quickly occupying all of Africa and South America near the start of the game, then used the reinforcement bonuses to pick bits of Southern Europe off, making sure I won a fight every turn but stayed defensible. I timed it so that on turn five, I took a weakly placed HQ in Europe as my fourth territory that game, and obviously over extended in the process to make myself look like a target. The other players thought I was nuts, but I knew none of them could get to the two HQs I now had, and I could buy my fourth red star to win at the beginning of turn six. Another player pursued a similar strategy with Australia, and would have won next turn if I hadn't.

It was *very* short compared to the games of Risk I remember playing as a teenager. Given some of the conditions for opening other stuff in the box, I'm assuming later games will have rule changes that prolong it a bit and mitigate rushes.

As winner, I got to

found a major city, which I called Megaton and placed in Central Africa. It was a pretty good starting location, and now only I can start there, for good, unless someone else gets to place their HQ first and is adjacent to it

. All the other players survived, so they got to

place minor cities

. During the game, we all got to

place scars, which are excellent. A couple of choke points now have permanent defence bonuses on one or both sides, and Kamchatka currently gives the biggest reinforcement bonus, but has weakened defences making it harder to hold onto

.

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I played some board games through the entire Easter weekend. The ones that were new to me and left the biggest impression were:

:buyme: Fortune & Glory - it seemed like something I would love before I played it. It's still somewhat fun, but it's a complete dicefest - almost nothing interesting happens without rolling a few. Even as one who contributed the most Fortune to the winning team in the only game I played, I don't really want to play it again. :tmeh:

:buyme: A Few Acres of Snow - this seemed really interesting. British vs. French fight over who controls more of the North of North America. Dominion combined with eurogame combined with wargame. Unfortunately I misunderstood one of the victory conditions and was baffled to find out the game was over when I thought it was only starting. :tup:

:buyme: Pacific Typhoon - card game where each round is a battle in the Pacific Theatre of WWII, and you play some cards either for Allies or for Japan. The player who contributed the most power to the winning side will divide the spoils among that side. :tup: Unfortunately the game can be ruined when overcalculating players don't even bring the other side into the battle for several rounds. :tmeh:

:buyme:Tulipmania - I don't like economic/market games where you have to calculate a lot :tdown:

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I played a few new games on Friday as well.

:buyme:Takenoko - it's a game about building and tending a bamboo garden and trying to complete your secret objectives before anyone else by manipulating the layout of the garden and the movement of the pieces. I like it a lot, but it seems like you can do pretty well at it without really exploiting the depth of the rules; I'm not sure that it's a game that ends up being particularly deep if you play it regularly.

:buyme:Gubs - it's a lightweight card game about protecting the cards you have in play and fucking your enemies over by stealing their cards. it seems OK but really swingy; and with four people it's cutthroat in a way that reminds me of Coloretto. bitter rivalries spring into existence instantly and then dissolve in the face of a mutual enemy.

:buyme:Agricola - we played this game with the five-player expansion. only one of us kind of knew the rules. it took three hours. I never ever want to see it again.

(actually I guess it was pretty good. I still don't want to play it again for a while.)

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:buyme:Agricola - we played this game with the five-player expansion. only one of us kind of knew the rules. it took three hours. I never ever want to see it again.

(actually I guess it was pretty good. I still don't want to play it again for a while.)

I've only played it once and loved it. It did take 3-4 hours though. I guess it's best to play this game (and most other board games) with someone who already knows the rules well.

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Finally got around to buying(on-line) myself a Metagame deck. Looking forward to giving that a go with my friends when it gets in. Anybody else picked up a deck?

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I've wanted to try Agricola after hear a lot og good things about it and I own Stone Age which is another worker placement game. Has anyone played both and can compare them? Agricola seems a lot more involved than Stone age and I'm not sure if I would like it more or less as a result.

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I've only played it once and loved it. It did take 3-4 hours though. I guess it's best to play this game (and most other board games) with someone who already knows the rules well.

yeah, definitely. the core problem with agricola is that it runs super, super slowly if people take a long time to decide on their moves, and if you're playing with people who don't know the rules well, or people who suffer from analysis paralysis, turns take forever.

to top it off, the scoring system is complex enough that it's difficult to hold it all in your head at once, which leads to a lot of second-guessing and uncertainty about how good a move is, and the presentation of the available moves is super, super daunting at first.

it would be a great computer game. as a board game, I see its merits but I'm not sure I want to play it on a regular basis.

edit: also it's worth mentioning that we were playing with the simpler "family" rules, which omit professions and minor improvements.

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Played some Warhammer 2.0 role-playing over the weekend with some friends. I haven't played much role-playing, had a D&D 4.0 stint a couple of years ago that I enjoyed very much.

Friend here in town played the original Warhammer a lot. We looked into the new Fantasy Flight version but didn't fancy it (too many weird dice and party mechanics) so we just played 2.0, which is very close to the original version.

It was fun! Rolling characters took for-bloody-ever, but the system is kind of cool once you get used to it. After D&D 4.0 (and video games) I was kind of locked in to the idea of having a rogue/healer/fighter kind of combo. Our group had a coachman, a priest (me) who can't heal to save his life, two bounty hunters and a... knife throwing dude. I forget the last class.

But yes, lots of fun, reminded me what a blast it can be. A little bit goofy to begin with but after a few beers people were having a blast.

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I love WFRP 2nd edition. It's the sweet spot in that line for sure.

The original game has a lot of charm, but it's old and therefore overly fiddly, and the new one is too weird.

I ran a fairly long-running campaign in 2nd edition, and had a ton of fun doing it. It's a fast system with a decent amount of tactical choice, and the sort of Discworld-meets-Cthulhu setting is great for adventuring.

The critical hit tables never stopped providing entertainment… extremities and entrails everywhere are a crowd pleaser.

I imagine a lot of people overlook it, because they assume you'd have to be a big Warham to appreciate it, but that's not the case at all. Some of my players had a passing familiarity with the setting, but most knew nothing about it, and it was fine.

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The critical hit tables never stopped providing entertainment… extremities and entrails everywhere are a crowd pleaser.

Yes! That was a blast, the GM was really enjoying himself. Any take on the career system, as someone a lot more experienced with the system? I had hoped to establish my character as a cleric/healer type character but I'm not sure how that's going to work. However, it feels a little like I'm being forced to be flexible, and that's actually proving to be quite cool. Very early days of course.

Yeah, the new one looks... weird. Which is a pity. If they had just hung on to percentile dice and abandoned these weird notions of party cohesion mechanics, it would have been more interesting to me personally.

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played a new board game today.

:buyme: Vlaada Chvatil's Dungeon Petz, winner of the "worst board game title of 2011" award. it's apparently a followup to another game called Dungeon Lords, which has a far more promising name.

the flavor: you are a minion that escaped the dungeon formerly ruled by the Dungeon Lord, and you decide to open a magical pet shop with the help of your team of imps. it's a worker-placement game somewhat similar to Agricola in its flavor and some of its mechanics.

the core of the game occurs in two stages:

first, you bid on your turn order during the placement phase, by dedicating imps and gold to action slots; the more you spend, the earlier in the worker-placement phase you go, and the better the raw materials you have for the second phase.

next, you satisfy your pets' needs with cards drawn from decks based on its personality, while not letting them get angry enough that they knock the walls of their cages down and escape, magical enough that they vanish from existence, sick enough that they die, etc. your pets get needier over time, so you're forced to decide between satisfying their increasing demands and selling them for more money and reputation, or getting them off your hands early.

if the game has one flaw, it's how mechanically dense it is. all of the worker actions are available from turn one, not meted out over time. in the late game, you might be trying to map 20-25 different actions onto 3 or 4 separate pets per turn in such a way that none of them get out of control and ruin your reputation as a pet breeder. instead of an end-of-game tally-up, points are awarded through three different systems based on sets of (positive and negative) criteria which change every turn and are identified primarily through Race For the Galaxy-style glyphs on the board.

our first game took over three hours with four players.

that said, it was a really fun three hours, and I'd recommend at least checking around to see if any of your friends have it, and playing it if so.

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Nightfall launched on the Apple store last week, and after banging my head against the tutorial 5 or 6 times, I fell completely in love with it. So much so that I bought a physical copy of the game and will be playing it with my game group tonight. Hopefully I'm a better teacher than the app tutorial! Or maybe my friends are smarter than me?

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So I've decided to start playing Go again. I was super into it when I was 10-14 and read books and stuff, but haven't played it or really even though of it since. I remember a lot less about the game then I feel I should for how much I read about it, which means I remember nothing except for the most basic stuff.

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So I've decided to start playing Go again. I was super into it when I was 10-14 and read books and stuff, but haven't played it or really even though of it since. I remember a lot less about the game then I feel I should for how much I read about it, which means I remember nothing except for the most basic stuff.

I also fell in love with Go, anybody would, used to play/live on KGS. Even went to the community center in china town a few times. As the only (unwelcome) white guy there I got rocked so hard, in a hateful discouraging way, I retreated back to on-line only play after a few weeks (slow learner). As a member of the community center club, I got invited to a tournament at the Japanese embassy. I showed up planning on observing the tournament, only to be told it was a players-only type of thing. Like some sort of super-idiot I signed up, I really wanted to see a tournament go down for some reason, and proceeded to thoroughly embarrass myself versus some of the best players from the Ottawa/Montreal/Toronto scene at the time. I kept playing, but played less and less over time. Still think its one of the best games ever made, but haven't played a match in years.

Long story short...

We should play!

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