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 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-04-23 05:21pm 

I've never seen it myself, but the most monstrous wargame I've ever heard of is Campaign for North Africa. It includes rules for tracking logistics all the way down to water consumption, and assumes that each side's commander essentially has a staff of four working under him; with ten players working the game, the developers estimated that the full campaign's runtime would be on the order of 1200 hours. In other words, if you played for eight hours a day, every day, you might finish after five months.

The Europa series has some big ones in it, but my understanding is that many of them are intended to be interconnectable - i.e. that if you were to assemble all the games together, you would be able to fight out the entire European theater of World War 2. That would probably be a titanic slog of a game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-04-24 03:02am 

I went well above my gaming budget this month, but I couldn't resist when I saw Cosmic Encounter the other day. I'm really psyked with all those praising revieuws of this particular reprint of this ancient game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-04-27 12:50am 

No Thanks; is a nice little time filler. There's a deck of 33 cards (numbered 3-35) from which 9 have been removed. Each turn you flip a card and then either take it, or drop one of your limited supply of chips on it. Some cards will be passed on until there are ten or eleven chips on them. If any one takes that card they get all the chips on the card as well as the card. When tabulating end game points you only count the lowest card in any run (2 or more consecutively numbered cards). You add up the total value of all your cards, subtract off any chips you have and the lowest total wins. A game takes about 10 minutes and plays up to five, a good light game while we're trying to figure out what to play next, or sometimes we let the winner pick the next game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-04-27 03:00am 

Played a printed test version of Ground Floor yesterday. A good economic game where you need to run a company, put people to work, produce, market, sell your stuff... and with sufficient interaction with your other players (eg. when supply is greater than customer demand, the customer will simply buy the cheapest goods. Though luck if you hoped for some extra $ when another player undercuts your prices

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-04-28 11:18am 

Nefarious was a fun card game. Kind of a hybrid between Race for the Galaxy and 7 Wonders but you get to play as an Evil Genious. Pity I didnt bought it at Essen because it's hard to get and twice the price now (the components are rather too flimsy to pay 50€ for)

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-04-30 04:12am 

Tried 2 more games last night:

Santiago de Cuba: a bit of a worker placement/trading game. Pretty light but it's fun so it's a good family/gateway game. Only played it with 2 players, but I think it really shines with 3.

Cartagena: don't judge a book by its cover because this turned out to be deceptively fun. One of those relatively short games you end up playing a few times in a row.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-02 04:17am 

I noticed Memoir '44 in your collection. What is your opinion? Worth getting? I ask because I like the Ticket to Ride series a lot and was wondering what you thought of Days of Wonder's take on a war-type board game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-02 09:47am 

Got my first game of Risk 2210 this Monday. I liked it, dispite the large downtime at times (we played it with 5 players, but I suppose it's best with 4).



I haven't actually got the chance to play it yet (Stronghold will get priority if I get the chance for a good 'ol 1vs1), but I went trough the rules and it looks like a good one. It reminded me a bit of a light version of the old Panzer General games on PC. It's nice that additional scenarios are free to download on their website, and that the game can be further expanded with a fuckhuge amount of expansions in case you really like the game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-02 12:21pm 

Short answer: It's fun but it doesn't have a lot of tactical or strategic depth.

Longer answer (and brief explanation of the game): The game has a bunch of plastic models representing: infantry, tanks, artillery, and a few (German) super tanks. The map is a hex grid that's divided into 3 areas that are also subdivided into a left and a right. There's a victory point track for both sides (and both sides usually have the same points goal, barring scenario included handicaps). Each side also has a set of custom dice, and a deck and hand of cards. Your turns consist of playing a card then doing what the card tells you to. Cards will generally have some flavor text and then tell you a section that you can activate, and how many units you can move in that section. I.E. "Scout" move and attack with one unit in both the left and right section of the center zone. Attacks are straight forward. Infantry rolls three dice (iirc) when attacking units adjacent to itself, it rolls one less dice for each hex the target is away from you, and one less dice if the target is hiding in certain types of terrain. Tanks roll 3 dice for all hexes in range (minus a dice for terrain considerations). Artillery rolls 3 dice for the first four spaces, 2 dice for the next four 1 dice for the last four and ignores terrain. Assigning wounds is easy, if the symbol of the target unit comes up that unit takes a hit, there's also a wild symbol (grenade) which counts as a hit, and finally a flag (retreat) that forces the target unit to move backwards one space. Infantry symbols appear twice on each dice, so (including the wild) there are 3 hits when shooting at infantry, tanks have 1 symbol + 1 wild on the dice, and artillery only get hit by the wild. Super tanks are the hardest to kill, as you need to re-roll any hits you get, and only grenades count for the second roll. Your units are represented by between 1-4 plastic models of their type, casualties are recorded by removing a figure from the unit, when all the figures in one group are gone, the entire unit is killed and the player who killed it place a figure on his/her score track to record a point for the kill. The game is an interesting combination of hand management and tactical combat, terrain concerns, hp left things of that nature. It really shines if you get the extra board though. There's a "Supreme Commander" variant, where one player plays each of the three zones, and the supreme commander selects cards for each zone. It can be a bit painful if you're not getting very good cards for your zone; but it's still a lot of fun to have 3 other people razzing you or cheering your dice rolls. Game time was about an hour to an hour and a half. Complaints and quibbles I have,when a unit you own is damaged it still rolls the same number of dice in the attack; also the cards in your hand drive most of your decision making.

It's a good game for people that don't do a lot of wargaming, but veterans of many a table top game may find it too simple for them. It's very easy to get new players into this, teaching time was about 15 minutes. Most of the rules are pretty simple, and after a game or two I didn't even need to reference the rule book.

I prefer Tide of Iron, which has a bit more wargame-y feel. The rules are a more complicated, and when you take casualties your units' shooting profiles change. There's also valleys and ridges and all kinds of interesting terrain effects that Memoir 44 doesn't have. The unfortunate thing about tide of Iron is how long it takes to learn, as a consequence of all the rules. It took me 2 play-throughs as well as a 30 min rules explanation to really get it.

So back to Memoir '44 it's a very good game for beginners to the wargaming genre. It's light, I've never needed to check the rule book, the player aid cards that come with the game are good at covering most rule interactions. You can actually play with more than 2, in some variants (you may need to have gotten an extra board? In battle lore you needed one in Memoir it may come with enough). The downside is it's very luck driven, as opposed to other wargames, where you have various sorts of armor, or infantry saves. Memoir is very approachable and easy to learn, but it removes some of the interesting choices that sometimes come up in other more complicated war games. I had the medieval version of this (Battle Lore) and it got plenty of plays until I got Tide of Iron, now Battle Lore only comes out when I'm teaching people that are new to the genre. So my opinion on getting Memoir, as a game it's quite fun, but as a War Game it leaves a bit to be desired, and if you aren't a war gamer (as I wasn't for a long time) it's really got very few downsides.

[After preview but before submit;] after looking around, the expansion that lets you play with more than two is called Operation Overlord and doesn't come with the base set. The place where I found that /http://www.daysofwonder.com/memoir44/en/ also has an online play function so you can get a feel for the game.[/Apbbs]

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-03 02:45am 

Notre Dame gets 2 thumbs up from me. Easy to learn yet a lot of ways to win and pretty exciting what with rat epidemics and all. And sharply priced at that

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-03 05:33am 

It's a Stefan Feld. They're all awesome.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-03 12:43pm 

Wow...Proud Monster sounds absolutely epic. How long did the playthrough take?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-06 09:28am 

Finally got to try Stonage Age with the expansion. An easy to learn gateway to worker placement games.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-06 02:18pm 

I guess Steve Jackson decided he wanted to do a new edition of OGRE and put up a modest Kickstarter to make sure there would be enough interest to justify a print run...

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-07 05:05am 

Our latest Proud Monster game, hilariously, took 1 hour to setup but only 45 minutes to finish.

The reason this happened is because the Germans can automatically win the game if they capture a certain number of VP cities by a certain turn. On turn 1, they need to capture 4 cities. If they fulfill this objective, Stalin basically loses all heart and shoots himself.

The German player essentially risked an all-out attack that captured the 4 VP cities required on Turn 1. The Soviets (which I played) had a chance to take back several VPs with our Turn 1 counter-attack on the over-extended Germans, but the dice hated us and the Germans won.

It would have otherwise been a "good" turn for the Soviets though - we "only" lost about 250,000 men and two tank armies on the first turn, after the Germans chewed through three defensive lines that made attacking Kursk look relatively sane.

=====

My first playthrough took six hours though. It ended after a massive battle at Smolensk. Essentially, the situation was like this:

1) A Soviet infantry army was surrounded inside Smolensk by a ring of several Panzer Armees

2) The ring of Panzer Divisions was in turn surrounded by a ring of Soviet Armor and Infantry

3) The remaining armies on both sides were involved in a massive furball outside the double "ring", trying to relieve their surrounded troops or maintain the ring around the enemy troops.

It was essentially Alesia, except with 15,000 tanks and about 2 million men involved.

The German side (which I played) eventually won the battle after we systematically destroyed all of the Soviet Armor Divisions and relieved our Panzers. We had to strip our other fronts to do this (Army Group North was essentially reduced to one infantry army and no Panzers at all), but it won us the big battle at Smolensk. Faced with the prospect of facing multiple intact Panzer Armees with no armor remaining, the Soviets conceded.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-12 05:33am 

Finally got to play El Grande. Already with some expansions, so it was rather meaty but now I know why it's regarded as a modern classic. Beautiful game.

Pastiche was an interesting tile-laying game. You score points by painting paintings, to score points you need a certain amount of colors. To get colors, you need to lay tiles to get the right color combinations (eg. blue and green gives you green paint, yellow and 2 red give you scarlet etc...)

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-13 07:53am 

I recently played Battlestar Galactica for my first time, but I apparently had a very unusual game; We had zero cylon attacks for the entire game. It was (for me) incredibly boring since we got to 4 on the jump counter and I was revealed to be a cylon sympathizer, so I just futzed around the cylon ships doing fuckall while all the other players stayed alive and the two secret cylons ended up doing not much.

I also played 'Heroes of the Multiverse', a collaborative superhero-based card game, but I think we had some bad luck on deck/boss choices. We did a 3-man game against the alien warlord guy, but got overwhelmed with minions. Then we tried to fight a mad scientist on mars, but we were all tech-based heroes and the environment kept destroying our equipment.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-13 11:15pm 

There should be some enemy ships in the initial setup though. And you really need active Cylon players or the humans can simply walk over them.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-14 03:15pm 

The lack of Cylon attacks in the mid game, and therefore very little for the pilots to do, is one of my greatest frustrations with the original game, but it was really fixed in the Exodus expansion Cylon fleet option.

For those that haven't seen it, all Cylon attack cards are removed from the crisis deck and instead when Cylon ships are activated they are placed on a separate board and a track increased. When the track gets to the end the whole cylon fleet jumps in to surround Galacitca, so the players can get a sense of being chased and it really does keep the pressure up.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-14 11:07pm 

I'm personaly kinda okay with the original setup because the card distribution tends to insure that there will be Cylon attacks; but I do get that overly peaceful games do happen. Can't comment on Exodus yet though since I've never played it.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-14 11:21pm 

I just discovered This on Think Geek, I really, really want to play this....

so those of you playing Battle Star Galactica? does this mean I can smash toyko?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-14 11:31pm 

(Wait, never mind, I think I clicked on the wrong link)

Looks like Monsters Menace America, cool.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-14 11:51pm 

rodan vs mothra, vs godzilla well you get the idea...

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-15 12:01am 

Yeah, hence my mention of Monsters Menace America (basically King Kong vs Godzilla vs other monsters). The destructible buildings are interesting in this one though; it's promising even if it's just for the components alone.

Can't vouch for the mechanics as I don't know the designer or the company well enough.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2012-05-15 02:22am 

I guess it's about karma because last time I played, we go one cyclon attack after the other
Exodus sounds good, but I never got the chance to play it yet.