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Wow have played so much Waterdeep the past couple days. I'm visiting my sister and her boyfriend in Portland and there's an awesome board game store here where they have a bunch of games you can just play either inside or there's a small garden in the back, and there's a bunch of games you can rent ($5/3 days) which is cool cause it's a ton of work for the guy who runs the shop since he counts all the pieces each time to make sure there's none missing for the next person. So ya we rented LoW, and it's great. We also played Village at the store and the owner helped teach us how to play, and then the second game he played with us. It was super fun too.

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I don't have a group to play this, but on the pen & paper role playing front, I recently discovered Eclipse Phase which is available in PDF form for free.

http://www.eclipsephase.com/

License details: http://www.eclipsephase.com/cclicense

Downloads for most stuff: http://robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs/

It's a science fiction rpg that lifts the idea of cortical stacks and sleeving from Richard Morgan's Kovacs novels (but the setting is pretty different otherwise).

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Eclipse Phase is interesting. I think I have all the printed books, but never got around to playing it. The setting is a bit of a mish-mash with some cool hooks, and the books are pretty. The system didn't grab me, but you never really know how it's going to work until you play.

If you like the sound of Eclipse Phase, check out Transhuman Space if you haven't already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman_Space

http://www.sjgames.com/transhuman/

It's well-written, and it's well-thought-out speculative fiction. It's more grounded in reality than Eclipse Phase, but still offers an intimidatingly broad palette for an RPG. It's hard to know where to start with these games in terms of coming up with a reasonable party and a motivation for them to go on adventures!

Transhuman Space was made to work with GURPS 3rd Edition, but there's a PDF called Changing Times which updates it to 4th if you prefer.

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Has anyone played this new X-Wing: Minatures game? It seems like a lot of money for what you get (1 x-wing, 2 TIEs), (with add-ons that cost a fortune), but also reviews as pretty fast and fun. So - for those who have played it, is it worth it?

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So with boardgames and Neptune's Pride being recently discussed, what are some good games in the same vein, as in working together and also screwing people over at the same time?  The only thing that comes to mind for me is Battlestar Galactica and The Resistance, but these are also more about hiding a secret agenda that is set by the game and dictated to you rather than freely making alliances and betraying people because you want to. Gormongous mentioned Shadows Over Camelot which seems cool.  Also regarding The Resistance, has anyone played the new version of it, also related to Camelot?

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I want to make clear, I'm not necessarily recommending Shadows over Camelot to anyone besides the betrayal-obsessed Thumbs. Much moreso than Battlestar GalacticaShadows over Camelot is a pretty inferior game made okay/good/great by the traitor mechanic, in that you're basically playing Old Maid with a medieval theme. It can still be really fun with the right group and even with the traitor mechanic removed, unlike Battlestar, but it's a definite try-before-buy.
 
On the other hand, the last couple Battlestar Galactica expansions have added a lot of nuance to the base game's traitor mechanic. There are now friendly Cylons and independent Cylons as well as hostile Cylons, plus random agendas for each Human player, so it's become less about finding out who's suspicious in the long term and more about finding who's trustworthy in the short term. Then again, one of the great things about the base game is the lightweight gameplay, which allows the interpersonal shit to take the fore, so expansions distract from that a lot. I haven't played enough of them to really say for sure, though.
 
I mentioned this in one of the episode threads, maybe when we were discussing Neptune's Pride mechanics, but the Avalon Hill Dune board game has a really great diplomatic model. Each of the six factions has several unique powers, one of which they can share with up to two allies, so there's a strong incentive to form alliances, even if they're with people that you don't plan to support over the long term. Meanwhile, most of the other game mechanics are built around hidden information (resource gathering, card powers, unit movement, and combat resolution), so the few games I've played have had this great sense of massive power blocs ready to blow apart if certain information ever comes to light. If you're not willing to sink a few hundred dollars into one of several desktop publishing kits, Fantasy Flight has a rethemed reprint called Rex: Final Days of an Empire. It's hard to recommend it, if only because the Twilight Imperium universe is bland as hell and spoils several of the better mechanics, but it's the easiest way to play one of the best multiplayer board games ever made, so...

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what are some good games in the same vein, as in working together and also screwing people over at the same time?

 

I haven't played Neptune's Pride, but do you mean something that has explicit co-operative stuff but is also competitive?

 

If the co-operative stuff doesn't have to be that explicit, then Game of Thrones (2nd ed) has probably my favourite board game during the past year -- you have up to 6 sides, and you basically have to make an alliance with at least one neighbour in the beginning or you are screwed. And of course, the alliance has to be broken at some point for you to win. There are not a lot of mechanics for exercising the alliance though -- you just agree to not attack each other and your partner can agree to support you in combat if you happen to fight with someone else right next to his/her land. Some manipulations might also be possible during bidding for power, but you generally don't want to give any advantage to your neighbours even if they are allied with you.

 

I guess many other strategy games where you take control of territories also have similar possibilities for alliances and backstabbing, whether explicit or not.

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I'd play board games more often if I actually had anyone willing to play them with. :[

 

Granted, the funnest part of must board games is opening the box and admiring the pieces/cards anyway, so I suppose I'm not missing that much. :P

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Yeah I've gone through so much effort trying to get my friends to play them.  They think I'm super obsessed with them, but it's just a result of how much I have to keep hounding people to get them to play. 

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I'd play board games more often if I actually had anyone willing to play them with. :[

I'm sure there are some local board game events you could go to? That's how I got into them: I bought a game from an online shop that turned out to be ran by some acquintances of mine, and they invited me to a local weekly board game event, and now I've been going almost every week and found some new friends.

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So with boardgames and Neptune's Pride being recently discussed, what are some good games in the same vein, as in working together and also screwing people over at the same time?  The only thing that comes to mind for me is Battlestar Galactica and The Resistance, but these are also more about hiding a secret agenda that is set by the game and dictated to you rather than freely making alliances and betraying people because you want to. Gormongous mentioned Shadows Over Camelot which seems cool.  Also regarding The Resistance, has anyone played the new version of it, also related to Camelot?

 

Game of Thrones is a good recommendation, and I'm speaking as someone with zero interest in reading the books/watching the TV show, I enjoy it purely for its board game mechanics. Archipelago is a recent game that came out that has sort of novel mechanics that involve balancing cooperative/competitive elements that I don't believe entirely work, but could be a fun game depending on your group.

 

A very different sort of game, but one that I enjoy quite a bit is Inca Empire. It's purely competitive, but there are some interesting opportunities for negotiation. You take control of one of the four provinces, and set on building roads and expanding the empire, and then the game ends when Pizarro shows up. But there is a phase of each turn called the Sun Phase where players place cards down on a board, and then reveal them. The cards have either beneficial or harmful effects but the key thing about them is they will only effect two players. So you have to decide who to help out (besides yourself), and who to screw over, and that creates some really fascinating dynamics.

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Yeah I've gone through so much effort trying to get my friends to play them.  They think I'm super obsessed with them, but it's just a result of how much I have to keep hounding people to get them to play. 

 

Out of curiosity what games have you had the most/least success with your non-board gaming friends? My own experience seems to be for that audience the perfect combo is strong theme, short playtime, and little down time between turns. Of which King of Tokyo is the example that has hands down been embraced by my group (& which even gets a fair amount of play when only the core of the group is around as a nice warm up/filler game).

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For me the game I got my friends to play with he most enthusiasm is probably Citadels, and as dumb as it sounds it's probably largely because of the small box.  For context I'm about to recap the story of getting a group of my friends to play it. 

 

So probably around a year or two back there was a period where me and a bunch of friends would usually meet up at a nearby Starbucks most nights and just sit outside talking and what-have-you.  After a little bit it turned in to mostly talking and playing card games.  Around this time Shut Up & Sit Down started and the first episode (I think) had Citadels.  I was started to get interested in board games and it seemed like a perfect match, simple and you could play it with a group of up to 7 people.  I bought it and suggested it to them and they instantly laughed and said no, I think because the box described it as a game about "fantasy" and "intrigue" and they thought that meant it would be dorky or something.  Every night we met up I would bring it and they would refuse to play it and it became a running joke.  I would suggest it to other friends of our when we would hang out in other places, like when people not in the area were back from school, and the people who knew about it would start laughing and make it impossible to get people who weren't already against it to play it.  One night we met up at Starbucks and no one remembered to bring the cards and jokingly one of my friends said "Well, I guess we'll have to play Citadels now." and I had it with me and managed to stick my shoe in the door before it was closed and get the game on the table.  We played one game where I sort of explained it to them but we weren't really playing it seriously and maybe half way through people wanted to just stop and play a game for real.  We played it and instantly everyone was having a ton of fun and laughing about how much time and effort they had spend to make sure we didn't play it and now whenever we're around the other people who they previously turned off of the game they'll tell everyone how wrong they were to dismiss it and get them to play it. 

 

For me the #1 factor in getting them to play games was how small the game box was, I can fit it in my pocket and that's what I did every night.  If the night that I finally managed to get them to play it I had to go to my car and get a box and set up a board on the table I am confident it wouldn't have ended up happening.  The fact that I already had the game with me and it's just cards and some plastic tokens is what made it work.  Because of this I've been trying to find other games that come in small boxes and don't have a lot of pieces, which is why I'm curious about the new Resistance game as it seems like I might have similar luck with it. 

 

The other way I've had luck is finding cases where I or someone else can try and give games some credibility.  For example I have a friend who used to play Magic the Gathering with his two brothers probably 10-15 years ago and is starting to get interested in it again, mostly for collecting/deck-building.  He mentioned Ascension because some of the people who designed it are MtG pros and I said I had Dominion which is the same sort of game and managed to get him to play it after he saw it was ranked very high on Board Game Geek.  I have another friend who I had tried to get to play Dominion, but he didn't ever want to (he's of of the main people who didn't want to play Citadels).  His cousin is one of the three guys at QCF Design who are making Desktop Dungeons and when they come from South Africa for GDC they stay at his house.  They brought Thunderstone with them and he liked it a lot.  Because of this I was able to get him to play Dominion because it's a similar type of game, though I liked playing Thunderstone more and we ended up mostly playing the Facebook Thunderstone game after his cousin left.  An easy one is Catan because it's usually not that hard to find at least one or two people who have played it and if you can get 2-3 people who are willing to play and vouch for it it's not that hard to convince someone who doesn't really want to play games normally to agree to at least try it.  A lot of it for me is waiting for the right opportunities to arise, so whenever I think there might be a chance I can convince people to play something I try. 

 

This was a really long and not very good answer to your question.  I guess the short answer is that for me the main problem getting people to play a game has nothing to do with the actual game, but just that it's a "board game".  Once they understand that board games as a medium can be a fun form of entertainment the hard part is over. 

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For me the #1 factor in getting them to play games was how small the game box was, I can fit it in my pocket and that's what I did every night.  If the night that I finally managed to get them to play it I had to go to my car and get a box and set up a board on the table I am confident it wouldn't have ended up happening.  The fact that I already had the game with me and it's just cards and some plastic tokens is what made it work.  Because of this I've been trying to find other games that come in small boxes and don't have a lot of pieces, which is why I'm curious about the new Resistance game as it seems like I might have similar luck with it. 

 

This was a really long and not very good answer to your question.  I guess the short answer is that for me the main problem getting people to play a game has nothing to do with the actual game, but just that it's a "board game".  Once they understand that board games as a medium can be a fun form of entertainment the hard part is over. 

 

If you have a big group regularly and want a really small and simple game there's Werewolves of Miller's Hollow which is basically beermat size, and is good if perhaps a bit to close to being 'role playing for the way you describe your group (perhaps better for playing at someone's house where no one feels self concious)', or similarly sized there's Skull and Roses which I haven't personally played but which got a reasonable review on eurogamer.

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Citadels is indeed awesome and a great gateway-type game. The only problem is that I can't resist spending the whole game assassinating and stealing from my significant other, which never ends all that well. 

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A friend used a deck of playing cards to introduce me to Skull and Roses recently, which is very simple to learn but ultimately extremely complicated. In a good way. Few games create such tense moments with such regularity, but when someone has put the bidding up to ridiculous numbers and is about to flip their last card, no one seems to breathe. Before I bought it a bunch of people said to me that it's expensive for a bunch of coasters in a box, but I wanted to support the designers and it's nice to have a proper set.

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For once, everyone in my department is staying in town for summer vacation, so I've been able to get a weekly board game night going on. For the most part, it's been Battlestar Galactica and Arkham Horror, since most of the regulars consider themselves non-gamers and are very adverse to competitive play. I've sold Pandemic a couple of times, but the guy who hosts the nights prefers the chaos of Arkham, so it doesn't come up as often as I'd like. For my part, I've discovered King of Tokyo and Galaxy Trucker. The former's a fun and chaotic dice-rolling brawl that takes no time at all, but I've really fallen for the latter.
 
So, Galaxy Trucker! You have a spaceship-shaped grid in front of you and a pile of face-down tiles in the middle. Someone says go and you all start flipping tiles, one by one, revealing spaceship parts. Each part you either place on your grid in a way that connects to all the other parts, Pipe Dream-style, or you put it back in the middle face up for someone else to take. When someone's satisfied with the ship they've built, they flip a timer and everyone has thirty seconds left to finish their design. Then everyone sends their theoretically perfect but practically broken ships on a cargo run, simulated by a deck of random challenges. Whoever makes the most money from three such runs is the winner, although the rules are keen to point out that everyone who made any money is a winner, because you were being fucked from the beginning.
 
This game is never not hilarious. You build these flying masterpieces of crossed fingers and compromise, then congratulate each other as the game shakes them to pieces. My friend built an amazing Starship Enterprise-shaped ship for the third round, then a rogue meteor hit it at the joint between the saucer and engines, sending his cargo, his batteries, and all his engines save one drifting into space. He limped into the docks at third place with one cargo, but still pulled out a win! I went home and bought the all-in-one "anniversary edition" that very night. I can't recommend it enough.
 
 
EDIT: Shut Up & Sit Down! has a decent Let's Play of Galaxy Trucker, which I'll embed here. Keep in mind that both guys are kinda terrible at it (but aren't we all) and the game is not nearly so hard (but every bit as fun) as it looks:
 

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Galaxy Trucker is a staple at my weekly game night. I can confirm it is rad as hell.

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I should give that another go. I played it once and it seemed okay, but frustrated me in one aspect: As the rounds went on, it was easier to make mistakes in the build, and then have to live with them for longer in the space part too. Someone pointed out that if you make a catastrophic mistake, your ship gets smaller and harder to hit, but it was obvious how the game was turning out about ten minutes before it actually ended, so that last bit felt like going through the motions.

 

Other games I've liked a lot recently:

 

Cosmic Encounter: It's almost entirely negotiation. We played enough that we started using the flare deck (which adds extra powers to races. If the flare you draw corresponds to your race, it gives a much more enhanced power), and didn't realise that one race had a controversial early version and an updated one included, so accidentally put both in. I drew the new one corresponding to my friend Jay's race, and felt safe in the fact that he wouldn't have an absurd power. In fact though, he drew the old one, which:

was quite controversial and broken, because it says the player of that race can cheat at will, and if they get caught they just have to turn the card over so people know they're going to cheat for the rest of the game. He was good at cheating, and managed to steal cards from the table for about 3 turns before any of us caught him.

Cosmic Encounter surprises us in most games of it we play.

 

 

Lifeboat: Wrote about this about a year and a half ago, and am still immensely enjoying it. A bit like Cosmic Encounter, it uses negotiation to compensate for asymmetry. It has all kinds of subtle and not so subtle viciousness to it, but always seems to make everyone laugh rather than get tense. I think it's because many of the ways to attack people are quite indirect, and partly to do with environmental hazards. Character size makes a difference in fights, and alliances combine size. In one game, I was the first mate (huge), and the tiny kid was the deciding factor in a confrontation I'd started. The other players were trying to bribe that player with all kinds of riches they looted from the provisions chest, and after letting them do it for a while, I said "Look kid, you can side with me, or I can mug you every turn for the rest of this game". It does a fairly good job of evoking a boat full of people who hate each other but don't really have the energy to fight. In another game, we fought at every opportunity, then in weakened states were all swept overboard and killed within a few turns.

 

 

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre

I hate that the title obviously comes from somewhere on the internet, but this has a nice combinatorial magic system and is pretty good for goofing around.

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I should give that another go. I played it once and it seemed okay, but frustrated me in one aspect: As the rounds went on, it was easier to make mistakes in the build, and then have to live with them for longer in the space part too. Someone pointed out that if you make a catastrophic mistake, your ship gets smaller and harder to hit, but it was obvious how the game was turning out about ten minutes before it actually ended, so that last bit felt like going through the motions.

 

There are a couple of mechanisms to combat what you describe that my group overlooked at first. The biggest is that most new players in Galaxy Trucker build too fast. It's what sank both Quinns and Paul in the video I posted. There's no time limit until one player decides that their ship is far enough along to flip the timer, so you really only need to build fast enough to make sure you aren't being shut out of certain components. I just try to ensure that my ship is as close as possible to spaceworthy with every tile I lay, which has gotten me at least second place four games out of six.

 

There's also a rule that you can hold up to two tiles in your discard square for later placement. You can't put them back and they count against you if you don't place them, but it's useful if you find a tile you know you want but just not yet.

 

 

I love Cosmic Encounter so much in theory, but I'm abjectly terrible at it. I think I just have a way of phrasing my arguments that makes people want to be contrary?

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I've only played a few games of Galaxy Trucker, but it is quite good, especially when you just accept that your shit is fucked from the outset and just go with all the terrible things that happen to you.

 

I recommend the game Love Letter. Its 16-card deck and minimal rules are deceptively simple, but ends up being quite strategic and occasionally tense.

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I've only played a few games of Galaxy Trucker, but it is quite good, especially when you just accept that your shit is fucked from the outset and just go with all the terrible things that happen to you.

 

Oh yeah, acceptance is essential. You don't go in expecting to win. My friends and I informally call it "Die in Space." I think it only gets referred to by its actual name when we're talking to someone who's never played it before.

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My friends and I informally call it "Die in Space." I think it only gets referred to by its actual name when we're talking to someone who's never played it before.

 

"Galaxy Fucker" to me and mine.

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Just played a game of Tales of the Arabian Nights. It's a sort of competitive choose-your-own-adventure board game that can be weird and hilarious, though some of the systems in it seem unnecessarily complex at times. One of my friends had an encounter with a talkative barber who kept pursuing him after his haircut was finished, and eventually drove him clothes-tearingly crazy.

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Just played a game of Tales of the Arabian Nights. It's a sort of competitive choose-your-own-adventure board game that can be weird and hilarious, though some of the systems in it seem unnecessarily complex at times. One of my friends had an encounter with a talkative barber who kept pursuing him after his haircut was finished, and eventually drove him clothes-tearingly crazy.

The game is simple except for the various statuses. Especially if you have a quest and many statuses, it gets kind of complex. There's a house rule of playing with only one status at a time, but that will make less sense story-wise.

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