For Munchkin, our group's common tactic was to help the guy who goes before you get near the chance to win, but just underneath you. This way when he is about to win, the other players use up all their fancy winner-killer combos on him, leaving you free to win the game. Of course, you need a few winner-killers just in case the guy before you is strong enough.

We played with 3-5 people, so our experience could be different than yours.

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Space Tycoon RP thread
Space Tycoon Rockets, Spaceplanes, Space Vehicles, and Landers
Space Station components and IASA rockets
Ground bases, Derivative tech, and Orbit Transfer Costs
Research chart
(Max of 5 links allowed)

I'll have to give Frag a closer look, if you say it's different from Munchkin and suchlike.

In the meantime, I'll continue waiting for Late November, when Risk Legacy comes out. God I want to play that.

I nominate Risk Legacy for having the worst designed mech ever on the box

Prêt-à-Porter was on the last night agenda. Don't let the theme fool you, it's a pretty brutal economic strategy game, especially when played with people who play almost nothing but these kind of games (long story short, I got creamed :)
Sunday will be an attempt for revenge.

A couple of really light games I've been playing recently.

Roll Through the Ages is a very quick little dice game with a bit of civilization building aspect. You get one dice per city you have and the dice faces show; resources, money,food, workers or a disaster. You can build monuments (victory points) and cities with workers. Cities give you more dice but also require more food, more dice mean more resource but more chances of bad disasters. You're allowed to re-roll all of your dice (except for disaster dice) twice. Resources and money let you buy developments that give you special abilities and points. The game ends when all the monuments have been built at least once, or when someone completes 5 developments. It's fast; not much more than 4 minutes per player. And it's simple; one of the guys in my gamer group loves it 'cause it's one of the few boardgames he can get his kids to play with him.

Mu and other things is a neat collection of trick taking games. My personal favorite is Mu. Players take turns bidding cards face up. Whoever bid the most becomes chief and picks a partner, the second highest person and the remaining players are the opposing team. The vice picks a trump suit which can be a color or a number. The chief also picks a trump which can be a number or a color, the chief's trump pick is higher than the vice's, but they become one new color. Then, based on how many cards were bid and which trumps were chosen the chief and partner have a goal for a number of "triangles" they need to capture there's a rough each card can have 2,1, or zero triangles on it, so there's a slight relation between tricks taken and triangles taken. At the end of all the hands the chief gains or loses points on how many triangles s/he's taken, and whether or not the bid was met. The partner doesn't get penalized if the bid is not met. Similarly each opposing team gets points for each triangle they personally took, and a team bonus if they prevent the chief from reaching his/her goal. The fluid partner switches are a fun change from other taking games like bridge or spades, and the fact that there's so many trump variations and combinations can be fun too.

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The rain it falls on all alike
Upon the just and unjust fella'
But more upon the just one for
The Unjust hath the Just's Umbrella

Roll Through the Ages is AWESOME. Get the Bronze Age expansion to make it more epic - you just need to print it out!

I've recently gone through a couple of worker-placement games.

Caylus is the original of this genre where you have 6 workers, and take turns placing them on actions which happen in sequence.

Dominant Species is a newer game that features a wargame-esque hex board, and then a worker-placement grid that allows you to change your critters or the world.

I was also introduced to Glory to Rome which is a building themed cardgame. Each card represents an action, a building, and a material for buildings. Wonderful mechanics.

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Ogrek is beyond strategy.

<- Avatar from Dr. Roy's List of Stomatopods for the Aquarium

Glory to Rome is great, I'm waiting on my FLGS to get a copy of the Black Box edition, which was unfortunately delayed until early next year.

You haven't played worker placement games until you've played Agricola .

Agricola is a favorite of mine, oh yes.

Glory to Rome is a deck-building game, only you don't have a deck. (Think more like 7 Wonders.)

I've played Glory to Rome too. Not bad, but combos can get sickening. I kinda like Innovation more.

If you like deck-building mixed with Glory-To-Rome you may want to try Emminent Domain.

Innovation is a real mind-bender. I'm waiting on my FLGS to get some copies so I can have one to call my own.

Speaking of worker placement games, last night I got to play Dungeon Petz. Basically you're a family of imps who're buying, raising and growing and showing off/selling monsters to dungeon lords. It's a complex game but the theme and artwork are pretty nice.

Ascension: Chronicle of the godslayer is a really fun game. It's very simple, and the box + expansion lets 6 players basically compete in a resource-grab deckbuilding game that's more mutually interactive than Dominions. The main concept is that the cards you are attempting to acquire to build your deck (and to delete unwanted elements of your deck) are competed on, so that one player may purchase a card before another can get to it, thus resulting in a denial element.

It's pretty darn good. My group's been having loads of fun with it.

Trajan gets another thumbs up from me. It has a very neat system to replace the dice and there are tons of different strategies/ways to score points.

Found the name: The Princes of Florence

Went to a convention last weekend which opened my eyes to a few new games.

7 wonders probably turned out to be the hit of the event, there was at least one game going on all the time.

My favourite was a game called 'Beananza' (I think) where you trade and plant various types of beans. When it was first explained it sounded quite boring and like it was going to last forever and most of my table thought the same but once we got into it it was fun, engrosing and quite quick (about an hour for a 6 player game).

On the oposite end of the spectrum was a russian game called 'Potion Practice' (again I think), it might be that we were playing it wrong in some way but it seemed to be very difficult to score anything, it might work better with fewer players and more cards but as it was we finished in less than half an hour with a high score of about 15 when the score counter goes up to 150.

A somewhat simpler game than those already mentioned, but hy housemate is a big ST fan and yesterday acquired hrough eBay a pair of three-dimensional chess sets.

Should be interesting to play. Requires an extra set of thoughts to usual Chess. Should be fun.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

I believe you're thinking of Bohnanza (IIRC Bohn is German for Bean). That one is quite fun. There's another similar trading game called Oltre Mare that I prefer to Bohnanza. The order of the cards in your hand isn't important in Oltre Mare, instead you have to manage all the bonus and penalty symbols on the cards you put down. Also the last card you play tells you how many cards you are allowed to play next round, and your max hand size. Excess have to be discarded into a penalty pile (-1 point per card at the game end). I prefer Oltre Mare to Bohnanza because there are a few more things to manage than just hand order, and there's a deception aspect in Oltre Mare (you're allowed to lie about symbols on your cards). It's a little deeper of a game than Bohnanza so play time is about half an hour longer.

Panic station is fun. You all start on a space station that's got an alien parasite Hive on it. Your goal is to find the hive and then burn it with gas tanks you pick up by exploring. While searching for items someone will draw a card making them Infected. Their goal is to infect or kill everyone else. Every time you enter a room with another player's pawn you have to trade an item. This is when you can potentially infect your teammates. They can protect themselves from infection by passing one of their gas tanks, but that'll leave them less items to resist infection in the future. There's a lot of fun in calling out other people's suspicious behavior and trying to be as innocuous as possible as the infector. It's faster than BSG the board game, clocking in at 20-40 minutes a game when my group played it.

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The rain it falls on all alike
Upon the just and unjust fella'
But more upon the just one for
The Unjust hath the Just's Umbrella

7 Wonders is the big hit in the local (Philippine Boardgaming) scene this year. I think it's good, but it's strictly a light filler game for me.

Getting the leaders expansion (with Rome) has lead to some retarded 80 point games though...

Risk Legacy is incredible. It truly does things that no other board game has done before.

If you have a dedicated group of friends that you play board games with regularly, you should definitely check it out.

My modest collection since I got stung by the boardgame virus (man, looking back I spent a lot on games this year)



Stone Age and Eclipse are on the way as well.

Needs more Reiner Knizia games; specifically Lost cities (the two player card game is my favorite two player game, the board game is merely adequate).

Which version of axis and allies was that in the bottom right?

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The rain it falls on all alike
Upon the just and unjust fella'
But more upon the just one for
The Unjust hath the Just's Umbrella

Spring 1942.

New games I've played:

Glen More
Fun game where you lay tiles to grow your city (kinda like Alhambra) and where you produce goods to build stuff or brew whisky for extra points. Player last on the board always gets to choose first, so it's good fun with more players: "should I get the best tile but loose my turn for the next 5 turns or should I sit on the fence a bit longer?"

Last Will
Worker placement game + cards with the goal to spend as much your money as possible in 7 turns (a la Brewster's Millions) on real estate, parties, etc...

Both games got my thumbs up

Oh yeah, also a game setup in china where you had to build castles, house workers and fight another crisis at the end of each turn. It was pretty good but I can't remember the name.