The Big Board-Gaming Catch-All

I love Shogun but BGA won't let me join your game. Says I don't qualify as a "reviewer".

Boudreaux wrote:

I love Shogun but BGA won't let me join your game. Says I don't qualify as a "reviewer".

Oh right, I need to manually invite people to alpha games. Will do that!

Joined!

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:
Boudreaux wrote:

I love Shogun but BGA won't let me join your game. Says I don't qualify as a "reviewer".

Oh right, I need to manually invite people to alpha games. Will do that!

This is Knizia's Shogun, correct, not Henn's? I'm always in for either.

Natus wrote:
Dreaded Gazebo wrote:
Boudreaux wrote:

I love Shogun but BGA won't let me join your game. Says I don't qualify as a "reviewer".

Oh right, I need to manually invite people to alpha games. Will do that!

This is Knizia's Shogun, correct, not Henn's? I'm always in for either.

Or to the layman, is it the low-brow Gamemaster version (that I love) that was renamed Samurai Swords or the other one?

For more pedantry... isn't the Knizia game actually called Samurai

The only Shogun I remember was the Milton Bradley Shogun that tried to draft off of Axis and Allies.

Carlbear95 wrote:

For more pedantry... isn't the Knizia game actually called Samurai

The only Shogun I remember was the Milton Bradley Shogun that tried to draft off of Axis and Allies.

Yeah, that's the Gamemaster one.

This is the Shogun published by Queen games, designed by Dirk Henn. It was originally published as Wallenstein.

Carlbear95 wrote:

For more pedantry... isn't the Knizia game actually called Samurai

The only Shogun I remember was the Milton Bradley Shogun that tried to draft off of Axis and Allies.

Oh, you're right! My bad! I got confused! There's also a GMT samurai. Gah!

jonnypolite wrote:

This is the Shogun published by Queen games, designed by Dirk Henn. It was originally published as Wallenstein.

I think they are two different games on two different maps and time periods using a similar system. That's WILD that it will be on BGA soon!

Over the past two weeks a group a friends and I have embarked on the ridiculously long quest to plough through the mountainous content that is Frosthaven. Apologies if this has been posted about before, but I did run a search and could not find a thread about it on these veritable forums, so here I am. What I am about to say is spoiler free, so do please read on without fear of something being inadvertently revealed.

My story starts on the afternoon of 20th January 2023, whereupon a courier dropped of a life threateningly heavy box on my doorstep. I hefted it into my living room and placed it carefully onto my dining room table. Amazingly it did not groan as I did so, which I was expecting it to do so. The following Sunday I got up in the early morning and set about unpacking it, with the view of getting everything ready for the first play session that was due to occur on 28th January. It took 4 hours to decant the contents of the rather large box and pop out the 27, yes twenty seven, cardboard sheets filled with tokens, monsters, and map tiles. I then filed everything away in accordance with the guidance documents contained within imposingly sizable box.

The 28th January arrived and my friends and I embarked on our Frosthaven quest. All of us were mercenaries, seeking our fortune in the frozen northern extremes of the empire. What would we encounter in the frozen wastes that surround Frosthaven? Well I won't say, other than it's certainly challenging as much as it is cold.

Unlike Gloomhaven, it's younger sibling boasts a macro game of world building, where resources are used to construct buildings to assist the mercenary company to gather yet more spoils while benefitting the people of Frosthaven. It's a remarkable system that gives players agency in the world the characters they are controlling.

We have so far played 3 scenarios, so it's very early going. The rules are similar to Gloomhaven, but are sufficiently altered to make for a very different experience. The tight action economy remains in place, but there is more for players to do. I shall not venture why this is for fear of spoiling content, but let us just say they are not alone in the icy climes of Frosthaven.

Are there any other GWJ souls venturing to this frigid cut off region of the empire? If yes, what are your spoiler free thoughts on it so far?

I haven’t even opened my Gloomhaven shipping box. The kids aren’t ready.

(edit: shipping box, not shopping box)

I'm not waiting on anyone to get older on Gloomhaven. We just haven't gotten to it...

We got Frosthaven last Tuesday. We're not very far, and we're off to a bad start. We decided to use the X Haven app to assist and we messed the mission level so the first two scenarios were harder than they needed to be. My wife and I also chose some harder characters. Gloomhaven had one very obvious 'start here' character, the Brute. Frosthaven's starting 6 seem a lot more nuanced. Part of me wants to bust the Brute out of the GH box to give us a rock to build our first party around.

But we havent really gotten started so we'll probably just try a few more now that we have the basics down again and arent playing on Hard Mode.

polypusher wrote:

We got Frosthaven last Tuesday. We're not very far, and we're off to a bad start. We decided to use the X Haven app to assist and we messed the mission level so the first two scenarios were harder than they needed to be. My wife and I also chose some harder characters. Gloomhaven had one very obvious 'start here' character, the Brute. Frosthaven's starting 6 seem a lot more nuanced. Part of me wants to bust the Brute out of the GH box to give us a rock to build our first party around.

But we havent really gotten started so we'll probably just try a few more now that we have the basics down again and arent playing on Hard Mode.

We have not used the app at all, I shall have to investigate as it may help with all of the admin one has to do when playing.

The characters are somewhat more nuanced with a heavy use of a specific mechanic that was not so embedded in Gloomhaven. I am certainly enjoying it though!

We got our copy of Frosthaven on Saturday, and are having our first session tonight. We've played through all of Gloomhaven, Forgotten Circles, and Jaws of the Lion.

I looked into a few apps. I've not tried these in game yet obv. but I spent a few hours looking at them. Will report back.

The official Frosthaven app: Oof. Basically not usable. UI is clunky, which might be forgivable, but there are real bugs that make it not practical to use. Monster decks missing cards, section links that are just plain wrong, loot deck can't assign cards to characters, etc. This needs a lot more time in the oven.

X-Haven: Very nice. Has lots of options, and native clients for just about every platform you could imagine. Seems like a solid choice.

Gloomhaven Secretariat: I think this one edges out X-Haven. It's just a little more polished. There are a few Frosthaven features missing yet (like the campaign sheet) but nothing game breaking. Only down side is that it's web only. But still works well on an tablet. We will try this one tonight.

For anyone who missed the Kickstarter for the Moonrakers expansions last year, you can now pre-order them at the official website. It's a negotiation game with deckbuilding and a sci-fi theme. It owes a lot to Cosmic Encounter, despite sharing no mechanisms with it.

I've played it three times and enjoyed it each time, although it does share the issue with Cosmic that dealmaking slows or stops as someone gets close to victory. Still, in my advanced age, I more and more take the attitude that games are more about the fun along the way than who won, so if the end is a bit anticlimactic, that doesn't ruin the game.

One spot for It's A Wonderful World on BGA turn based.

Pretty easy to learn. Very similar to 7 Wonders in mechanics.. in some ways easier, in other ways more complex.

Play It's a Wonderful World for free with me: https://bga.li/t/344778679

Played the new Uwe game Atiwa a couple weeks ago. Brilliant!

Really lovely theme integration into a euro game.

Bubblefuzz wrote:

Played the new Uwe game Atiwa a couple weeks ago. Brilliant!

Really lovely theme integration into a euro game.

After falling for A Feast For Odin, I have to play every Uwe game, even though I have yet to be charmed by Agricola.

Natus wrote:
Bubblefuzz wrote:

Played the new Uwe game Atiwa a couple weeks ago. Brilliant!

Really lovely theme integration into a euro game.

After falling for A Feast For Odin, I have to play every Uwe game, even though I have yet to be charmed by Agricola.

I love Nusfjord it is one of my favourite euros.

A bit of an update on the whole Frosthaven experience. I managed to take the advice of Polypusher and try out X-Haven app. I have to say it was certainly an eye opener. Table clutter reduced by half, tracking of conditions and damage simplified, and initiative order easily displayed and understood, to name but a few of the advantages to using the app. I cannot fathom how it is free quite frankly.

I do have a large screen on the wall near my dining room table, which was used to mirror the output of the iPad I was using to control the app. This allowed for all the players to see what was going on and when.

We sadly were not successful in tackling the scenario we are on, for reasons I will not go into for fear of spoiling content. I will, however, say we were at the mercy of the action economy that is extremely tight in all of the 'haven games.

This weekend I'm playing Europa Universalis - The Price of Power for the first time and I have been warned it will take quite a while to complete just one era. I shall report back here on how it played.

Frosthaven seems very challenging, requiring more of the player than Isaac's previous games have. Even low complexity characters wont let you sort of muddle along playing ok actions. You have to get the character, or those incoming level 1 'Attack 4 / Range 5' on like mission #2 are going to end your game fast. We've done maybe 8 attempts at scenarios and 4 of those have been successful.

This week we're dropping down to the easier difficulty.

After playing the character in Gloomhaven Digital I decided to get Jaws of the Lion just to import the Voidwarden. They're a really cool character with some powerful moves like getting all the enemies in the room to attack each other and tossing out Blesses and Curses like candy. I may dip back into the well for some other old characters too, like the Lightning Bolt from Gloomhaven which I never unlocked in the old game.

I am excited! So excited! Why? Because Devious Weasel is going to be releasing, at GenCon, an expansion of my favorite game of theirs; Cosmic Frog. I read through the rules and it seems like it addresses everything that I think was lacking in the vanilla (if there is such a thing as vanilla Cosmic Frog) version. Especially the rudimentary combat as well as not being able to do much when you are booted out into the outer dimensions. Look! Just look at it!

IMAGE(https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/517aa705e4b0d87d082f0ab2/bf7566f4-6138-47b5-99b1-1435f80ca809/Tuck+Box+Front.png?format=500w)

Aeoringas wrote:

This weekend I'm playing Europa Universalis - The Price of Power for the first time and I have been warned it will take quite a while to complete just one era. I shall report back here on how it played.

Four friends of mine spent nearly all day finishing one age. They really liked the game, but if they/we play again, we'll try to schedule weekly sessions.

Got my copy of Tiny Epic Vikings last week and got a chance to play it a few times with my wife. We're really enjoying it so far! It's mostly about board control to steal runes from other players, but each time that's done the "gods fury" for that rune increases, making it more valuable. You get runes by taking control of islands, and also get runes by winning battles.
IMAGE(https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/037/175/004/f272e56b7f1f08f0a251f375300c96bc_original.png?ixlib=rb-4.0.2&w=680&fit=max&v=1651554318&gif-q=50&lossless=true&s=169465f10e1063047f3c176e1816b7be)
The expansion is neat as it brings in frost giants, which are the 3rd way to get victory points. It also introduces valkyries which are brought in when you lose a battle, so it gives even more reason to go into battle regardless of whether you know you can win or not (as valkyries are needed to help take down the giants.)
All in all another very successful tiny epic to add to the collection!

My kid has started taking an interest in card games. We have been playing a lot of Trash, Gin Rummy and 21. I decided to look up the rules to Regicide and we gave it a try. We really like it! A few simple rules, but oh so difficult. It's a cooperative card game where you are trying to defeat, in order, all four jacks, then all queens followed by all the kings. You defeat them by playing cards from your hand to lower their health. Each suit has special powers which activates when you play a card against the royals, but the suit of each royal protects them against the suit powers of that suit. I hope that made sense.

It feels more like a boardgame than a card game. I can highly recommend it if you are looking for something a bit more different than regular card games.

Awesome !! Regicide is so great, I love to introduce it to gamers and non gamers. Can use any deck of cards for it, nothing else needed but rules. That said, I recommend the official iOS app for it, it keeps track of the bosses health and the game state, helps organize and move things along for newer players. Free app unless you want to play it solo, which is also a great way to play.

Fired up a game of Imhotep on BGA for anyone interested: https://bga.li/t/349586054

Also if anyone is interested in playing Yspahan, it's in alpha on BGG. I'm happy to fire up a room and invite you! It's been stuck in alpha forever due to licensing issues but it's still available to play.

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:

Fired up a game of Imhotep on BGA for anyone interested: https://bga.li/t/349586054

I'm in! Just bought the game and had forgotten it was on BGA.

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:

Also, if anyone is interested in playing Yspahan, it's in alpha on BGG. I'm happy to fire up a room and invite you! It's been stuck in alpha forever due to licensing issues but it's still available to play.

Ys, please! I'm a big fan of Yspahan. That is such good news!

I just started playing Obsession on BGA, too. So slick!

I need to give Obsession a go. Not sure I'm quite sold on it but I'm interested enough to give it a shot for sure.