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We’ve been playing Carnegie a bunch. The game works great at all player counts but I really like it at 2-players. It’s highly interactive so it’s easier to keep a close eye on a single opponent and the neutral discs you add at lower player counts help guide early game strategic decisions. Very cool action selection and I really like the worker “lifecycle” and the route building too. Great BGA implementation.
Yesterday, played Citadels and Secrets. Secrets is definitely one of my favourite party games.
This week, Spirit Island (best board game ever imho) and some Marvel Champions on tabletop simulator.
Last week also played some Radlands and Watergate for some one vs one fun.
Haven’t played Brass in a while, should set up a group for that at some point.
Radlands is spectacular. They also recently announced a camps expansion to the game too!
I love me some Spirit Island. I still need to play with the newest expansions I got.
Talisman, and desperately awaiting 5th edition in July.
Made me look up the edition I had played before; turns out it was 2nd. Didn’t realize there had been so many…
And I love them all.
The last board game I played was the World of Warcraft board game. Apparently they didn’t make very many of them and they sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. We found it at the thrift store for cheap. It’s actually a very good game. Lots of fun, good strategic gameplay, and plenty of WoW game lore.
Before that we played Odin’s Ravens. It’s a neat and easy game for 2 players, and the artwork is calming and well done.
Yeah, it was very novel and did some new and interesting things compared to other board games of that time. Played it again for the first time in 15 years a few months back (on tabletop simulator). It holds up okish compared to modern board games, which is pretty high praise for a game designed that long ago.
If you ever stumble across the Battlestar Galactica board game in a thrift store like that, that’s a lottery win. Still played even today despite being out of print for ages, and if it’s mint condition with all the expansions would easily sell for €1,000+.
Nice! I’ll keep my eyes open. This WoW game was actually unplayed. Everything was still in bags and cardboard flats. We thought about trying to sell it, but ultimately we really wanted to play and own it, so we kept it.
Actually tried Carcassonne for the first time this weekend. Was a lot of fun but we had too many expansions for a group of mostly first timers so it was a little information overflow.
Just got the void seeders expansion for Nemesis though so looking forward to play that this week!
Yeah base Carcassonne with like the river expansion is pretty much all you need imo. All the other expansions just add more rules without a corresponding amount of fun
Yesterday we played Terraforming Mars with the excellent Customizing Mars modular map. The map ended up pretty weird, with several peninsulas and such, but it was a welcome change to the classic maps we’ve played a million times already.
Finally picked up Boss Monster recently. Tried out with a buddy on Saturday and we had a great time. Game came down to the wire with a couple of sharp moves on his part snatching a win after I’d been in the lead for most of it. It’s definitely a much tighter, smarter game than I think the aesthetic suggests.
Gloomhaven: Bugs and Buttons. In the beginning of full sized Gloomhaven, before any rewards for retiring characters, etc., Gloomhaven is hard. Bugs and Buttons is like that on normal. It’s a lot of moving parts for a small game, but keeps the flavor of its big brother but lacks much of a story. Picked it up for a travel game for my partner and I without realizing it’s one player.
Sleeping Gods seems interesting narratively. Mechanically, we’re getting our asses handed to us. It’s a lot of what I like in a game: coop, separated turns so one person doesn’t effectively take anyone’s turn by giving them advice (like what I saw when recently observing Castle Panic).
A buddy of mine makes games and he did one about becoming the next king that’s a card game and you can either win by influence or by murdering everyone else. I’m having trouble finding anything to link to that’s not a page for buying it and I don’t want to spam it. It’s called Succession but isn’t any of the games by that name on bgg. Backstabby games aren’t usually my thing, but I did manage to assassinate most of the people between me and the crown, which is not easy to do.
I really dislike games where it’s easier to make others lose than it is to make yourself win (e.g. Munchkin). Goblin Breakfast was no exception to that. No thanks.
Heat - Pedal to the Metal. Really fun game.
Dune Imperium: Uprising - It’s crazy how much better it is than the base game.
Acquire - Its nuts that this game was made in 1964. The game is so elegant it feels like a modern design.
Radlands - Outside of lifestyle games like MTG or Netrunner this is hands down my favorite card dueler. Slick and clever AF. Really pumped about the recently announced cult of the chrome camp expansion to the game!
Interesting that you think Uprising is so much better than the base game. I’ve combined the base game with Rise of Ix and Uprising with Immortality and I find the two games equally good, and surprisingly different in terms of strategic options.
What do you find so much better about Uprising?
Uprising encourages a lot more combat participation imo. The base game combat rewards were often heavily tilted towards the 1st place winner. There were a lot of combat rounds where if you didn’t have a shot at 1st you’d probably be better off with just a token participation or just to not show up at all.
The spy mechanic is pretty nifty and adds a way you can maneuver around turn order screwage.
The spaces/cards have overall more card draw so deck building choices have more of an impact and lessens the chance you’ll be handcuffed by what spaces you can take on a given turn.
The flow of resources feels a bit more balanced to me. The base game I always felt I was often flooded with too many resources by the end. With Uprising the resources are pretty tight throughout the game and spending them feels a lot more impactful even towards the end of the game.
Also what’s a Dune game without Shai-Hulud? :>
Again this is just my opinion but my play experience with Uprising felt overall less frustrating than with the base game.
Also want to know, as a base game owner
There were two things in the original game that needed tweaking, in my opinion. The first was the over-powered “big money” strategy, which became almost a standard opening with which the starting player could open up an early lead. However, that was largely fixed by Rise of Ix. The second problem, in my opinion, was the original Imperium deck. It had too many weak cards, not enough opportunities to trash cards (or at least cycle the deck more frequently), and a relatively low frequency of combos. The relative weakness of the card deck compared to the huge point-generating strength of the phase 3 conflict cards made combat pretty much mandatory in the original game. These two issues led to some strategically-repetitive game play, which was only partially mitigated by Rise of Ix. (Side note: this weak, low-combo, low-cycling, low-trashing deck style is also characteristic of Paul Dennan’s other big game, Clank. He could learn something about interesting deck-building from Dominion, in my opinion. Then again, Dune Imperium is a more mechanistically complex game than Dominion, and it is harder to create a good deck that is also well-balanced with the other game mechanics.)
In Uprising, there are more steps involved in becoming a dominant combat-based player and there are fewer points to be had directly from conflict cards. This means that it takes more specialization and commitment to pursue a successful combat-heavy strategy. Also, especially with the Immortality expansion, there are better cards and more combo possibilities, which creates additional viable non-combat strategies. On top of that, they made the Spacing Guild more powerful in Uprising, putting it more on par with the other factions. All of this is great, but having more viable choices also makes the game more complex and can sometimes lead to less interaction and direct competition for key worker placement spaces if people are pursuing quite different strategies.
So, overall, I think Uprising is a more strategically balanced game that is less “on rails” compared to the original game. However, the original game is, on average, probably a little more tense and directly competitive because there are fewer viable strategies.
Take everything I said above with a grain of salt because I play both games with expansions. So I’m not really comparing base Imperium with base Uprising.
Just because I didn’t want to spam the same message again:
