That sounds. Awesome.

The new expansion to Chaos in the Old World is really fun. Adds a lot to the game. A 5th God and revisions to every god's playstyle to make them much more active and aggressive vs each other.

Today I've played 7 Wonders and it's an awesome 30 minute - 1 hour game. Easy to learn, very nice artwork and up to 7 players. It plays a bit like Kingsburg in the way that you need to build for more recources, victory points, biggest army, etc... but instead of dice you need to pick and choose a card out of a small deck of cards and pass the rest to you neighbour, so you get a lot of dilemma's (should I buy card X which I can use, but than card Y will get to my neighbour etc...).

I just added Hansa Teutonica to my collection. Good game. The game map is a set of interconnected cities trade posts connecting them. You score points by having the most connected cities (although there's a multiplier that you can improve). At the start of the game everyone has the same number of actions per round, and all players' actions are equally effective. But as you complete routes with cities you can either situate a merchant in that city or take a special action associated with some cites (some cities will let you take more actions, some let you move more of your pieces around the board per action, some increase your endgame scoring multiplier). Within a few rounds the players start improving their capabilities in very different directions. It's a neat route building game, I usually can finish in one and a half to two hours.

Stronghold is a last stand war game. 2-4 players. One side takes on the role of the pillaging orkish hordes, and the other side is the heroic human defender. It feels a bit like Helm's Deep the board game. The Orc side pulls some number of cubes out of a bag, and those are it's reinforcements for the round. Then every action the orcs take has a time cost associated with it, the cost is paid to the humans who can use it to shore up walls, move defenders around, or take special actions (upgrading their troops, sniping enemy figures, building siege defenses etc). At the start of the game the orks have 10 victory points and the humans zero, each turn the orks lose one point to the humans. Combat is straight forward when both combatants are fighting over a wall, they add up the combat power of both sides (defenders can add wall sections that increase the defense by one). Whoever has the lowest combat power loses troops that have a combat power equal to the deficit. If the defenders ever have a deficit that's larger than the combined defense power on the wall, then the wall is breached and the game ends. At the end of the game both sides compare their number of points and whoever has the most wins. There are a few tricks the orks can do to get some more points, likewise the humans can earn a few extra points in exchange for losing some men. What's fun about this game is both the asymmetric nature, and the urgency you feel as both sides (Defender oh crap I'm losing on two of my walls, Attacker: oh crap i'm running out of time, I need to breach next turn or it's over.).

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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

I played the game with DP and some of his family and confirm that it is indeed an excellent game and I hope we can find some more open 3-4 hour slots so we can play it again. I enjoyed it thoroughly even though I ended up getting second-to-last place.

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DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!

SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.

Did anyone played Imperial 2030? I had a short look at it and it looked mighty interesting. Conquer the world with poltics and money.

Clue can be an immensely fun game to play if you have some decent players. I would (and still occasionally do) play that with my cousins, and it's fantastic because we're all trying to trick each other as well as figuring out the Whodunnit. We'd do stuff like asking queries where you already have two of the three components, to find out who has the third and so forth, and make the other players think you have a certain card when you don't (or vice versa). I remember one game in particular where my brother pulled off this good deception (although he was a bit lucky as well), managing to hide a certain card long enough to get two of us knocked out for making a wrong accusation.

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"You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean that tin is worthless."
-Jon Snow, A Game of Thrones

"I prefer my history dead. The dead sort is written in ink, the living in blood."
-Rodrik Greyjoy, A Song of Ice and Fire

I've played both Imperial 2030 and the original Imperial. Conceptually, they are both very unique games. Instead of being a world leader, you're an investment banker. And by giving the Great Powers some loans, you gain control of the said Great Powers and can have them attack each other for fun and profit.

It is a rather evil game however. The game mechanics encourage you to not stay loyal to any particular country - since the player with the most money wins and it's relatively easy to raid a country's treasury dry while lining up your own pockets.

Just a minor quibble though: The original Imperial is less balanced, but it set around 1900. Thematically, it's a very appropriate period.

Imperial 2030 is basically the exact same game with a slightly different map, but set in the near future. It's more balanced, but the seeming lack of a "nuclear option" in 2030 just strike me as weird.

But there are much better games out there with better meta-game mechanics and improvements such as actually knowing if you are the bad person or not.

My group of friends got into Monopoly (official rules-style) fora while right after college, but it lead to too many shouting matches so we moved on to the Monopoly Deal card game, which is superior in every way. It goes much more quickly while still maintaining some of the cutthroat themes of bankrupting your friends or screwing them over with shady deals.

Also, we're big fans of the Munchkin series, particularly Munchkin Cthulhu. Too many people makes the game a bit unwieldy, though.

Other favorites include Space Hulk and the Buffy board game.

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"Gunslinger indeed. Quick draw, Bob. Quick draw." --Count Chocula

"Unquestionably, Dr. Who is MUCH lighter in tone than WH40K. But then, I could argue the entirety of WWII was much lighter in tone than WH40K." --Broomstick

"This is ridiculous. I look like the Games Workshop version of a Jedi Knight." --Harry Dresden, Changes

"Like...are we canonical?" --Aaron Dembski-Bowden to Dan Abnett

The circumstances for it to happen were pretty miniscule - you had to be on the last leg of the race, you had to suffer a fatal wound on a movement that would have otherwise carried you to victory, and you had to be fortunate enough to get tangled in the chariot when you fell off. All in all, a pretty unlikely set of circumstances. I've seen it happen once - a race came down to the wire, and the the corpse essentially stole a win out from under another player on the last turn. Understandably, the loser was quite livid.

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"A country without a Czar is like a village without an idiot."
- Old Russian Saying

"What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this."
Steven Schmidt, chief strategist for the McCain Campaign, you FAIL.

Small World gets another thumbs up from me. You have to conquer land to get points with all kinds of fantasy races (each with their unique bonusses). Each race also gets a random bonus for some extra flavour. The expensions (which I havn't tried yet) promise even more races to play with.

Small World's mini-expansions add enough variety with the new races and powers that it's almost never the same game twice, although it also means it takes a long time for some races to ever even see play.

Yeah, I ordered the 3 mini expansions as well as the ones that brings event cards to the table

Got to play it last night. Truly an epic game, and very unforgiving when you loose combat (I've learned that the hard way). The way how we played it, was that you don't restart with any gold at all (well, 10 gold but you need that to buy a new ship). Not sure if that was the correct way or not though.

I tried Space Empires 4x (which came out a little less than two weeks ago). It's fun, has more ship types than Twilight Imperium, more customization than TI, hidden information, and battles occur more often than in TI. I'm not sure it's going to completely replace TI in our games rotation, but it can be completed in a reasonable time frame (the box suggested 1-4 hours, we managed 5 1/2 with 4 people playing) whereas TI requires careful planning to complete in one play session (like start at dawn, and turn off all the cell phones so there's no surprise errands that interrupt the game). A decent game, on an aesthetic note though, cardboard counters for chips don't thrill me, about my only complaint with the game although some of the bookkeeping wasn't fun either.

The Lord of the Rings Card game is fun. Your goal is to pass through a series of locations from the LOTR setting and then complete some task at the final location before all your characters die or various in game timers run out. The replay value stems from trying to build slightly better decks for completing the given quest. Characters and monsters behave like Magic cards, with defense, and total health. The game has it's own rules for how the monsters attack, so it's like a Solo Magic the Gathering adventure. Fortunately there's only a few expansions and they contain a pretty generous amount of cards so you can get plenty of variation off of only a few sets.

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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

The Decipher CCG? I think that's out of print. I do think I still have a FotR deck around, but it would be in storage.

Didn't really like it for the most part. The Fellowship was shoehorned into following the general path of the movie, and the best characters followed the story pretty closely.

Of course, it had (Radagast?) the Brown as a playable character, which I think is unique amongst all LotR games.

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Saving the Earth by Trying Not to Blow the Shit Out of It:
Let's Play UFO:Alien Invasion (v2.3.1)

No. There's a new Lord of the Rings Card game that got published earlier this year.



Yeah what I was reading is that it was out of print, although my description of the current version did sound a bit like the blurb I found on the Geek about the old version.



The New Lord of the Rings Card Game

The Old Lord of the Rings Card Game

The new one only has about 3 expansions out. And you don't really have more than 4 characters out at a time. So you don't actually play the fellowship, or even complete the events of the fellowship, it's mostly just a series of peripheral characters doing stuff in the Lord of the Rings Setting (although you can have Gandalf-who is awesome- out for a whole round). If you played Death Angel it'll feel a bit like that. You try to manage the number of monsters on the field so your characters can progress through a set number of quest areas.

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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

Has anyonen got any suggestions for rebalancing Battlestar Galactica (just the original no expansions) for 7 players? I have a game on Thusday and it looks like there's going to be seven of us.

I was thinking of having two of the players not draw from the 'are you a cylon' deck in the second half of the game but does anyone have any other changes they think I should put through?

Tried a game of ancient Elfenland last week. It's a pretty nice filler game. Doesn't take too long and easy to learn.



I think there shouldn't be much issues as long as Baltar and Boomer aren't selected.

From here:



I hope to have another game of Battlestar Galactica this weekend. There's a gaming club near me and I heared they play it regularly so fingers crossed.

And speaking of BSG, I now have all 3 expansions but I'm still figuring out on how to fit all the stuff in one box. Any tips?

So next to BSG (easy victory for the cylons = me ), I also got to play Bang! which was an OK card game and also the translated German version of Shadow Hunters (original = Jäger der Nacht). The latter was a pretty awesome game. It's a short game (about half an hour per game) but very tense (you can die very fast) and we ended up playing three games in a row.

A heads-up that Treefrog Games' Discworld game "Ankh-Morpork" is due out this month. The site has the rules up for reading and information about the collector's edition. Having looked the PDF over the rules seem pretty simple, but it's got good Eurogame worker placement/card interaction going on to make strategies more complicated.

Take out those cardboard 'step' dividers that it comes with, and use rubber bands to seperate all the decks, and little baggies for all the other pieces. They'll all fit. Personally, I kept most of the Exodus Stuff and left the New Caprica stuff out of the game. Works better.

Fuck, as a Discworld fan it looks like I have to buy this.



Yeah, I've removed that annoying inlay as well. It was barely enough to contain the basic game.
In the mean time I've liberated some little plastic cuvet boxes (something like this) which are perfect to separate all these tokens + they seem fit nicely in the box (I can store 4 or 5 in a row without much empty room to spare)They would also be perfect to store the bigh and small cards in, but since I'm planning to sleeve them I'm going to check out if some plasic tubs may be an option (I'm not really a fan of rubber bands).

I also got to play it for the first time last night (German map). A wonderful strategy game (in an ugly box) that I would recommend to everyone.