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 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-12-23 07:58pm 

Coincidentally, I got Blue Moon and 5 or 6 expansions dirth cheap today. It doesn't get that high scores in revieuws but seems nice enough for a 2 player game and for that price I couldn't say no.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-12-23 10:21pm 

Lost Cities is a very good 2 player timefiller from Reiner.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-12-24 12:54am 

Yesterday I was introduced to Baltimore & Ohio, an economy-building game about railroads. It took us a bit of time to learn it, and at the beginning we joked that if it took 3+ hours our friend would have to give it a negative review, but as the three hour mark approached we were all utterly riveted by the game and wanted to keep playing.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-02 08:05pm 

Ow yeah... I've finally got Eclipse* in my possession. It looks complex, but the rules are very well written and everything seems very intuitive. Can't wait to give it a go.

*good thing I didn't buy it at Spiel 2011. That's one heavy box.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-03 03:32am 

Ditto on the weight of the box. They made all their tiles and hexes very thick. Another of my Christmas games had all the hexes printed on the cheapest and flimsiest cardstock ( which was bad for: durability, shuffling and the pieces of the board keep moving around, screwing up gameplay).

I played a quick Eclipse game with my brother; more of a learning thing than anything else. An excellent game. Setup was a chore though, placing those 150~ ship tiles on the tech board was annoying. Sort of the downside to all the customization you can do. But it's got some good payoff; the customization of your ship types is much better than Twilight Imperium. We got to try very different design philosophies; missile spam vs. an all around good ship. 'Twas interesting. The only downside is that the fleets just don't get big enough. Oh and the ships are really low quality compared to everything else in the box.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-03 03:50am 

Played a game of Alhambra the other night. Definitely need to get a few more games of that in before I can decide how much I like it, but it's certainly an interesting combination of mechanics. Think Carcassone, only everyone is trying to buy the pieces for themselves, and you're restricted on how you can place them on your individual little villa/map. It was a snap to learn, too.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-03 07:01am 

The character sheets are a bit thin though, but I guess you can't have it all. I had a hard time getting back everything back in the box as it was because.



I used a fish box tray for that (somethinglike this). One compartment for each upgrade sorted like they are ordened on the board.



Get the special anniversary edition if you can. It comes with a much nicer board and one expanion.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-03 07:13am 

Smallworld was nice to give plastic trays in the box. I wonder if you could buy them seperatly.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-03 10:41am 

Alhambra is far superior to Carcassone because it gives you much more choice on what to do.

I would suggest getting the big box, as it has all the expansions which adds greatly to its replayability.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-03 06:32pm 

Yeah, my friend's copy was the anniversary edition. What was the expansion?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-04 01:11am 

I don't think the Anniversary edition comes with an expansion; just a nicer board.

This is the one you should get if you love the game though:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/ ... ra-big-box

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-04 03:53am 

Mine had the 1st expansion with it.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-04 04:08am 

Ah, the one with the currency color changer? That's always a good one.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-05 10:34pm 

I had a thought while browsing through this thread. Sometimes the description of a game doesn't really capture the "essence" of the game; and to truly catch the vision you need to play it. I was wondering if anyone would want to do some Let's plays with one or several of the games mentioned in this thread?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-06 01:31am 

Let's Plays are a bit time consuming to write, but if people request it for a game that I particularly like I can probably do one.

Also, I just realized something. Nobody has yet mentioned Here I Stand.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-06 09:03am 

Most of them are already on youtube just search for them.

Then just pop over to
http://www.brettspielwelt.de/
and you can actually test them out by playing them online. They usually have volunteers which will go through how games work with you and their english is decent.

Mind you lots of games are not as good online as they are IRL (the dippy type ones). But some are better online than IRL (the bookkeeping ones).

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-08 08:12am 

Troyes is another good 'un. It looks like a dice fest but there are so many ways to manipulate dice, buy dice or use "bad" dice, the luck factor is minimal.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-11 02:44pm 

I played these at the Friendly Local Game Stores game night, last night.

Confusion. A bit chess like, instead of capturing the king however, your goal is to deliver a neutral briefcase to the opponent's back line; or eliminate all of your opponent's pieces. What's fun is that at the start of the game, you don't know which of your pieces can move in which manner. So on your turns you'll simultaneously be trying to beat your opponent and figure out which of your pieces are which. I've gotten bored of Hive, so this might be my new 2-player competitive tile game.

Epigo. It's got a Robo-Rally style programming aspect. You and your opponent both start with 7 numbered tiles and one dummy tile on the board. You select 3 tiles to activate and choose which of the 4 directions you're going to go with the tile. Then you each reveal your orders one at a time. Orders are executed from lowest to highest; if both players try to execute an action for the same numbered tile than the action is discarded. The goal is to push off 3 of your opponents tiles. What amused me was how carefully both my opponent and I planned our moves only to have the moves screwed up by the way priority executes.

Flash Point Fire Rescue. Cooperative fire fighter game. You need to keep the fire from spreading and bringing down the building long enough to rescue 7 people from the building. You play on a 6x8 floor plan of a building. At the end of each turn you roll a dice which sparks a new fire. If there's no fire or smoke in the area you place a smoke. If there's already smoke in the area it turns to fire. If there's already fire, you get an explosion which will damage walls and create fires all around itself. If the fire ever reaches a Point of interest (which could be a person or a decoy) that point dies. If too many actual people die you lose. Also if too much damage is done to the building it collapses and kills everyone, and you lose. The firefighters each have different specialties that affect how they move and act and how many actions they get per turn. It's pandemic re-imagined into a firefighter game. It's well made plays reasonably quickly, and every firefighter matters; a good co-op game for when Pandemic's been played to exhaustion.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-13 05:27am 

The other day I played a game but I can’t remember the title. (something with Hansen or something similar in the title).

It was a game setted during the Middle Ages where you have to claim roads between various cities in Germany/Holland, place merchants into cities, etc… Each player has a limited amount of actions in his turn, but he could unlock more by claiming certain areas on the map, again by claiming certain roads on the map. Needless to say, everyone wants to go for the best roads, but to claim a road you need to control it 100% so it’s back and forth blocking/removing other players, which makes it a fun game if you like that kind of game.
Easy to learn but a deceivingly complex game (I wouldn’t recommend it with more than 4 players because the downtime was quite long, although I played it with notorious long decision makers).
Oh yeah, there were several ways to end the game, like when the first player reaches 20 points. That doesn’t mean this player has won the game though, because there are a ton points hidden in final scoring (to give you an indication, the scoring track goes to 100). So in a way, you can deliberately give points to another player as a strategy when you know you’ll have more points in the end counting of points. (or the other way around, do delaying tactics when one of the end conditions is close to being triggered).

Anyone knows which game I’m describing?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-13 11:44am 

[edit]
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Hansa Teutonica

If you add it to your collection I'd recommend picking up the Eastward Expansion as well; a completely different map, as well as a few bonus scoring rules for your old map. As to the scoring; I haven't had any of my games go much past 40, mostly since if people know they're falling behind they have an incentive to run someone's score up to 20 to end the game before they fall too far behind.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-13 03:18pm 

I just got a new game called Kittens in a blender, I saw it in the shop and just knew I had to get it

Basically its a card game where you have to keep your kittens out of the blender and safe in a box while sending other players kittens to the blender. Players turn the blender on when they think its best for them but other players can block them.

One of the rules is that you have to appoligise to any real cats you have when the game is over

Not got a chance to play it yet (maybe tomorrow) but it seems quite simple, fast and fun.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-13 03:59pm 

Okay yeah the anniversary edition of Alhambra does come with an expansion, the money-changer cards and the Vizier's Favor tokens. He'd just set them aside the first time we played.

We all think the game is better with the expansion, though.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-13 06:17pm 

Yeah that's the one, thanks

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-23 05:54am 

This one is probably hard to get, but if you see it on sale, get Shogun if you like conquering games. It comes with a neat dice tower, but there are no dice so the luck factor is more or less acceptable. It's a pretty complex game yet I found it easy to learn. Hope to get a rematch soon.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-01-23 06:15am 

I've played Shogun two or three times. It's been a while, but the dice tower mechanic was pretty nifty.