The Big Board-Gaming Catch-All

Wow, only two things on the list not from Canada so far?

Great list. Oh man, you have LNOE.. me want!

I'll check at home what I feel like putting up.

Just wanted to post a cautionary note. I picked up Starfleet Captains recently. I have yet to play it, but it looks really good. The issue came with the 30 or so HeroClix pieces. Two of them arrived broken off their base stand posts (ie, just below the ship). They had been improperly place in the box, I believe, and had come loose in shipping. So I went to the WizKids site and found out that they are seeing a *lot* of damaged starships for this game. They offer to replace two with no questions, or more with pictures and explanations.

I registered my problem - they have a form just for broken pieces - and they shipped me the two new ships. Great! However, when the package arrived, one ship was in it's plastic shipping tray, fully intact and ready to go. The other one was crammed in the box next to it with a twist of bubblewrap around it. Needless to say, that one was broken.

Luckily, unlike the originals which had broken off in such a way that the pieces could not be matched and glued properly, this one had a sort of rippled break and could be pressed back together without sliding apart. I superglued it and it's fine.

But WizKids really, really needs to rethink their packaging for the game, and for their replacement shipping. The latter seemed to be really thoughtless.

Still, the game looks fantastic. I'll post a short review after my son and I fire it up.

edosan wrote:

Wow, only two things on the list not from Canada so far?

Haha, that was my thought as well. That's good though, Canadians shouldn't have much trouble participating. High quality games in the list too.

oilypenguin wrote:

Start a thread for it?

I was wondering if I should. Done

Where do i need to go to post some games to trade?

Robear wrote:

Just wanted to post a cautionary note. I picked up Starfleet Captains recently. < broken stuff >

Yup! The BGG forums for Captains have been rife with quality/shipping complaints since day 1. Not only are ships breaking off the bases, but some of the clix bases are too tight to turn, so there are threads on how to fix that too. It's definitely buyer beware.

I picked it up via coolstuffinc despite the warnings because the reviews really intrigued me, and I saw it would be right up the alley of some of my friends. I also got it at a deep discount + gift card. at that price I wouldn't mind re-gluing pieces or mucking with bases. Lucky for me, I got a perfect copy! However, be sure that you always, always pull a ship out from the base first. NEVER pull a ship out by the ship. When Rob was over checking out my copy, one broke off the base as a result of picking it up by the ship side. Still, it was a very easy fix with super glue.

The gameplay however is wonderful! If you like trek (and I'm a marginal trek fan at best -though I am now watching the shows) then this game is for you... Provided you can get it at a deep discount. I woldn't pay full price for it unless and until WK can address the manufacturing + storage issues.

I'm playing Fleet Captains with a friend this Friday, first time for both of us (his copy). Any pointers for a first play? I've read the rule book, and it seems a bit all over the place.

Chabuda wrote:

Where do i need to go to post some games to trade?

If you don't have a boardgamegeek.com account, create one and go here: http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/12...

Stilgar Black wrote:

I'm playing Fleet Captains with a friend this Friday, first time for both of us (his copy). Any pointers for a first play? I've read the rule book, and it seems a bit all over the place.

Don't be afraid of discarding your mission cards or combat cards, you can discard one per turn, so if it isn't immediately useful, consider getting rid of it.
Only go aggressive if you have missions to be aggressive.
Don't underestimate the power of multiple ships combining fire.

It's a great game. I have a lot of fun with it.

drdoak wrote:
Stilgar Black wrote:

I'm playing Fleet Captains with a friend this Friday, first time for both of us (his copy). Any pointers for a first play? I've read the rule book, and it seems a bit all over the place.

Don't be afraid of discarding your mission cards or combat cards, you can discard one per turn, so if it isn't immediately useful, consider getting rid of it.
Only go aggressive if you have missions to be aggressive.
Don't underestimate the power of multiple ships combining fire.

It's a great game. I have a lot of fun with it.

Download this, print out the final pages, and let me know if it needs enhancing.

The first two pages are for viewing on an iPad/android tablet.

Nice work HedgeWizard! They should include those in the box.

Stilgar Black wrote:

Nice work HedgeWizard! They should include those in the box.

Thanks! I was never really into much Trek, but for some reason I've decided to get into it lately. When I picked up the game, I thought it would be fun to create a sheet in the theme of star trek. I had no idea what LCARS was, but after looking up Star Trek UI, it gave me some ideas. Also, despite never doing anything quite like that (graphic design/layout) I think it came out pretty good.

If you dig it, feel free to thumb it up on BGG to help others find it. And do let me know if something needs clarifying or tweaking.

Good gaming!

Played a game of Ninja last night. Aside from getting a few rules wrong — which will make the game a better experience for the guards — it was a lot of fun. Now that we're up to speed with it, I'm looking forward to playing it again.

Added some games to the math trade geeklist.

How do I specify which games I want in return? I'm a little concerned because there's not a lot on offer that I'm interested in so far.

lostlobster wrote:

Added some games to the math trade geeklist.

How do I specify which games I want in return? I'm a little concerned because there's not a lot on offer that I'm interested in so far.

I'm going to answer you in the math trade thread so all the info is in one place.

Played Blood Bowl Team Manager again tonight. Really can't recommend the game more. It's only $26 on Amazon which is an absolute bargain.

Dysplastic wrote:

My biggest problem with deck building games like Dominion or Race for the Galaxy is the "multiplayer solitaire" issue, where I don't really feel like I'm interacting with my opponents. I think A Few Acres of Snow does a great job of combining an adversarial game with a deck building game, but it's only 2 player. At the end of the day, I much prefer card games where attacking your opponent is necessary in order to win - my current fave is the Game of Thrones LCG, because the 4 player balance is fantastic, though I'm still looking for a great out of the box (ie, non CCG or LCG) mutliplayer, adversarial card or deck building game.

Just wanted to jump back to this.

So Friday night my friend and I introduced another pal to the ResiEvil card game, and then we played during the Super Bowl today with two other newbies (it's supposed to be 4 players max, but we fudged it a bit for five).

Today my friend was Jill Valentine, whose character gets bonuses to grenades, so naturally he started buying up grenades. The other players and I should have been smart and hoarded the grenades ourselves. No. Instead, he nabs a bunch, and each turn he's dealing 10 to 15 damage to me and my other friend because we're the players adjacent to him and grenades have splash damage.

So I think it is safe to assume that even the default game mode has player interaction.

Tanglebones wrote:

First playthrough of War of the Ring Accomplished!

Only downsides: it's a Female Doggo telling the different free peoples armies apart

I spent some time this weekend painting the bases so I could tell them apart. My last game got really screwed up by not being able to tell armies apart easily.

Today is the last full day to get your games in on the GWJ Math Trade list.

Once again, I must address Dysplastic directly about the Resident Evil deck building game. A friend of mine and I decided to break the plastic on the cards to the Nightmare expansion (which requires the base game or the Alliance expansion in order to play, unfortunately totaling it up to a $60 base cost), and the cards were designed to be played differently than the base pack.

The first interesting change is all the Action cards in Nightmare are more or less designed for larger inventory decks. This means my habit of hoarding cards in a larger deck pays off in the expansion while my friends' mathematical refinements to just 5-10 cards is a detriment. The magnum adds 20 damage for having 10 or more cards in your inventory, one card allows you to draw a card for every five cards in your inventory, and another adds +5 ammo and +5 gold for every five or ten cards in your deck. So instead of whittling your deck down, you want to pad it. This allows for different play styles based on what sort of cards you'd like to use.

In addition, there are cards that focus a lot more on fiddling with other players' decks. The Rifle in the Nightmare expansion, when in your hand, allows you to force another player to send one card in their hand to the discard pile. Between just two players, this became a rather frequent occurrence each round.

So I don't really know much about Dominion or Ascension, but the Resident Evil deck building game, aside from its versus mode, does certainly allow for players to interact with each other. It is a whole lot of fun, the game is easy to learn, and it looks as if you can mix the cards from the Expansion easily with the base cards (though I'd still keep the Mansion decks separate, so as to avoid having a whole sh*t ton of monsters to wade through. Unless you want to play a long, long, long game).

I also picked up the Penny Arcade deck-building game, as I found it at a good price at a board gaming store I discovered in my area. If it's just as easy to pick up and learn with other friends, then I might have found myself a new favorite genre of game.

ccesarano wrote:

I also picked up the Penny Arcade deck-building game, as I found it at a good price at a board gaming store I discovered in my area. If it's just as easy to pick up and learn with other friends, then I might have found myself a new favorite genre of game.

It's pretty easy to learn. It might actually be the most simple of all the deck building games I've played.

Speaking of card games, we picked up the Lord of the Rings card game a week ago and I like it a lot so far. We like co-op games quite a bit so YMMV. I want to pick up some of the expansions now to do some deck customization.

edosan wrote:

Speaking of card games, we picked up the Lord of the Rings card game a week ago and I like it a lot so far. We like co-op games quite a bit so YMMV. I want to pick up some of the expansions now to do some deck customization.

I've been really struggling with this game. I think it's because I play solo most of the time (every time with this game) and I'm finding the difficulty to be overwhelming. I'm pretty sure I like the game but it's so hard to tell for me right now.

gregrampage wrote:
edosan wrote:

Speaking of card games, we picked up the Lord of the Rings card game a week ago and I like it a lot so far. We like co-op games quite a bit so YMMV. I want to pick up some of the expansions now to do some deck customization.

I've been really struggling with this game. I think it's because I play solo most of the time (every time with this game) and I'm finding the difficulty to be overwhelming. I'm pretty sure I like the game but it's so hard to tell for me right now.

I hear the two-player game (which is what we did) is quite a bit easier but then again, I have only played the introductory scenario. I will probably give it a solo play in the next week or so.

ccesarano wrote:

Once again, I must address Dysplastic directly about the Resident Evil deck building game. A friend of mine and I decided to break the plastic on the cards to the Nightmare expansion (which requires the base game or the Alliance expansion in order to play, unfortunately totaling it up to a $60 base cost), and the cards were designed to be played differently than the base pack.

I also picked up the Penny Arcade deck-building game, as I found it at a good price at a board gaming store I discovered in my area. If it's just as easy to pick up and learn with other friends, then I might have found myself a new favorite genre of game.

Thanks for the heads up about the RE deck building game. Good to know there is something out there with that kind of player interaction that isn't an LCG. At this point, though, my friends and are are DEEP into the Game of Thrones card game, which is absolutely fantastic, so we're kind of path committed.

Funny that people are talking about the LOTR game, as it's Fantasy Flight's other big LCG. I'd be curious to try it, but I think I'll still wind up preferring AGOT because I prefer competitive to coop, and because, well, Game of Thrones > Lord of the Rings

I did pick up Eminent domain, mostly because I thought the design was great, and look forward to trying that out too.

The RE deck building game sounds pretty fun. I'm really addicted to deck building games at the moment but haven't yet found one I like quite as much as Dominion. With the RE game, while the gameplay sounds kind of fun I don't know if it's something I'd like to invest in because I'm not a fan of the theme. Shame they don't come out with an iPhone version of it so I could try it.

I found Eminent Domain kind of underwhelming, partially because the art and theme was so bland. I picked up Core Worlds, which fits a similar niche of "Deckbuilding + Race for the Galaxy" and liked it much better.

Dysplastic wrote:

Funny that people are talking about the LOTR game, as it's Fantasy Flight's other big LCG. I'd be curious to try it, but I think I'll still wind up preferring AGOT because I prefer competitive to coop, and because, well, Game of Thrones > Lord of the Rings :)

Thinking about it, Game of Thrones being competitive and Lord of the Rings being cooperative is thematically accurate with the source material. Nifty.

Demyx wrote:

The RE deck building game sounds pretty fun. I'm really addicted to deck building games at the moment but haven't yet found one I like quite as much as Dominion. With the RE game, while the gameplay sounds kind of fun I don't know if it's something I'd like to invest in because I'm not a fan of the theme. Shame they don't come out with an iPhone version of it so I could try it.

I found Eminent Domain kind of underwhelming, partially because the art and theme was so bland. I picked up Core Worlds, which fits a similar niche of "Deckbuilding + Race for the Galaxy" and liked it much better.

You mean Resident Evil itself? To quote my friend Luke...

"...aside from Resident Evil 4, that's the best damn Resident Evil game I ever played!"

He's been vocal about hating all of the Resident Evil games made, with 4 being the only he has ever enjoyed. So ultimately, the theme doesn't have much to do with it. In fact, my friend Stephen and I, the only two in my crew that have played most of the RE games, keep joking that if you need fifty rounds for the Magnum to kill one enemy, or forty rounds for the shotgun, then you really, really suck (especially since I'm not even sure you can find fifty total magnum rounds in the first game).

To also quote my friend Luke...

"...it seems like they had a great idea for a game, and then just attached it to a license to it would sell more."

Which is true in my case, as I tend to lean towards properties I'm already familiar with (I've never played Jenga, don't care about it, but damn do I want Donkey Kong Jenga).

I don't know how much you guys would like it compared to Dominion, since I haven't played it yet (and truth told, might not unless I can try someone else's copy since it's pretty pricey in comparison), but for $30 the RE game was one of my favorite impulse buys, and judging by how much my friends have enjoyed it, they think so to (poor Mall of Horror and Munchkin Quest were totally ignored during the Super Bowl).

Ah, so your group thinks it plays well with someone who isn't a fan of RE? I don't hate RE or anything, I'm just not a huge fan of zombie or horror games, but I will play games with fun mechanics even if the theme is not the best. How does it play with two?

Shame that BGG doesn't have the rules uploaded for this game. Reading over the rules on BGG is such a nice way to determine whether I'm interested in a game.

As for the price of Dominion, get a friend or two over to dominion.isotropic.org to try it out, with all expansions, for free. Just don't play the local denizens because they will stomp you into the ground if you've never played before, and maybe set up a game with only the base cards to begin with since the amount of expansions is potentially overwhelming. There's also supposed to be an iPhone app out soon.

Anyway, this weekend I played Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries which I enjoyed better than the standard game, especially for two people. The board is so pretty...

For trying Dominion for the first time I actually recommend www.boardgamearena.com purely for the better graphics. The UI is slower and maybe a little clunkier too but I think it's a closer experience to the actual game. Once you understand the basics though, Isotropic is a much better place to play.

It's from 1 to 4 players, though during the Super Bowl we tried to hamfist it to fit five. It was a dumb idea, but it didn't take long for it to not matter.

The general goal of the game is to earn the most decorations by killing more monsters of higher powers. A lot of the time will be spent at the start preparing your deck until you can safely assume a decent amount of damage dealt to kill anything you encounter when exploring the mansion (though when I played with my friend Luke the first time yesterday, I explored my first round just to see what would happen, and the top card was the strongest monster in the game).

The real trick is getting a set of action cards that allow you to draw more cards into your hand AND add how many actions you can perform. Early on, you'll want action cards like The Merchant, who increases amount of gold in each round, allows you to draw one card and allows you to buy two resources instead of one. Later it is better to have cards like Reload, which allows you to draw one card, you gain two extra actions, +20 ammo and get to go through your discard pile and add one weapon of your choice to your hand (for me, this is usually the magnum, but the game during Super Bowl we had one card left which we knew was the final monster, and I used Reload to pull the Minigun, a kill-all weapon that doesn't have an ammo requirement, out of my discard pile and defeat the monster).

The other trick is based on your character's specialty. One character specializes in knives, which are a free buy and don't require any ammunition. There is also a special knife in the game called the survival knife. This character has an ability that allows each knife, a +5 damage weapon, to deal an additional +5 damage, making each knife a +10 damage weapon. If you have the survival knife, which deals a base of +15 damage, then you also get to add another +5 or +10 damage to each knife, meaning you get to deal +20 damage for the survival knife, and then +15 or +20 for each knife after. Since it requires no ammo, you can then reduce your inventory to nothing but knives, or throw in action cards that focus on drawing more cards into your hand, to increase the number of knives and thus boost the maximum potential damage.

Of course, if the other players are smart, then they'll start trying to scoop up the weapon that your character specializes in...though at the cost of making their deck less efficient to their own specialized purposes.

It really is a game that has little to do with its property other than the characters or images. Hell, it's even forgiving. If you die, you just reshuffle your cards and reduce your max health by -20 (which you'll need if a player selects Jill as their character and manages to grab all the grenades, and oh yeah, you're sitting next to who plays Jill).

The more I write about it, the more I want to play the game again. This is all your fault.