The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[Thunderplex]

Sadly not.  One year hopefully!  Will start looking at the prices of hotels next year.  That card game looks excellent, and there is an ECW expansion to it.

[Just Some Guy]

That reminds me that I've always meant to do a rundown of wrestling games I've played solo.

You all remember Champions of the Galaxy from the Apter mags right?

It's the shitest game ever. You roll a dice for an offensive move and roll a dice for the defensive wrestlers reaction.

If the dice roll wrong you could be there all night.

So why am I still playing the bloody thing? Because the characters and lore are amazing. 

Go Fight Pow looks to have similar mechanics (ugh!) with equally fun characters and setting. There's also a rather sweet irl story behind the games creation.

The Squared Circle takes us into real world historical wrestling. The designer claims to have worked out an accurate representation of how often each wrestler would use a certain move.

Fine and dandy but like all the games above the tables don't take context into account. For example, Ric Flair could slap on a Figure Four with one roll and then apply a side headlock with the next. There's no begining, middle and end like in a real match.

BTW, there are two games called The Squared Circle. The other is an RPG I've not played.

Downey Games Ultra Quick Wrestling is quite cheap and fun. Unlike the games above, you aren't rolling back and forth in a match but a few rolls are required to tell you who won and how.

They had a lot of sets out that were fairly comprehensive in the wrestlers covered but nothing new for a year or two now.

Finally, Plaay.com Face To The Mat is like a reversed Champions of the Galaxy. The gameplay slickly takes you toward the conclusion of the match at all times but the characters are paper thin. And that's being generous.

What I really want is a table top version of EWR that's more about creating great matches and feuds than having to roll out an entire match.

[Onyx2]

1 hour ago, Just Some Guy said:

You all remember Champions of the Galaxy from the Apter mags right?

I remember the advert vividly. That Bishop Hellfire artwork still lives in my brain. 

[Thunderplex]

Would love to know how this played.

[Onyx2]

Instructions are right there bro. 

[Jazzy G]

You're not allowed to wear shoes if you're playing as Kevin. 

[mim731]

8 hours ago, Thunderplex said:

Would love to know how this played.

Presumably there's only one player left at the end. 

[Just Some Guy]

9 hours ago, Thunderplex said:

Would love to know how this played.

From Board Game Geek.

The Official VON ERICH FAMILY World Class Championship Wrestling Game is a fast paced exciting game where the players seek victory by pinning the opponent after having weakened him through various holds, blows and take downs. You play cards that reduce your opponent's endurance while at the same time move your wrestler playing pieces on the game board to gain the greatest advantage of the ropes and turnbuckles. This movement becomes critical in Tag Team matches. Once your opponent's endurance is reduced you may attempt a pin. Your opponent can try to break the pin once for each count, if he doesn't you've won, proving you have what it takes to be a VON ERICH FAMILY World Class Champion!

COMPONENTS: The game comes with everything needed for play: a pair of dice, a gameboard, a scoreboard with four sets of scoring pegs, a deck of action cards, eight wrestler cards describing the abilities of the eight wrestlers, eight matching wrestler playing pieces with four plastic stands and a complete, easy to understand set of rules.

4.3/10 so I wouldn't bother if I were you.

[SuperBacon]

2 hours ago, mim731 said:

Presumably there's only one player left at the end. 

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Jazzy G]

D&D was heaps of fun last night. I'm fully leaning into my unhinged chaotic neutral side now. I was away for last week's session, but a few of the other players had done some serious drinking and were nursing hangovers, so I was using my minor illusion and starry wisp can trips to conjure up bright lights and loud noises to mess with the. Then when we were trying to sneak around under cover of darkness I kept asking when we get to set fire to things as a way of causing a distraction, and whether we could bring any of the animals back to the ship. 

The DM is starting to figure out how my brain works as well. At one point we rolled for some loot in a farmhouse and he misread the roll, telling us we'd found a bag of flour and a live chicken. I started getting really excited about the idea of a pet chicken until he reread and saw that it was two bags of flour or a live chicken, which he immediately ruled was the bags of flour. I hope he likes how I've become a law unto myself, but I'm also worried it might turn into some main character syndrome so I may just rein it back to throwing out pithy remarks for a bit. People were having fun, though. My character really does feel a bit like me turned up to 11 with lots of inappropriate jokes and mischief. 

[MungoChutney]

When I worked in youth work around 15 years ago, I designed a wrestling card game for the group, which is very similar to one that I've seen marketed through a Kickstarter and wished I'd taken further as it was a solid idea. 

Essentially you pick a character (based on the fictional ones in TEW for ease of getting pictures back then) who has a set number of points across various attributes (power, speed and the likes). You start off with x amount of hit points and each player draws a move card which deducts points off of their opponent. When your opponent was down to five points you started to draw 'finish' cards which could say thinks like '1...2...kickout. Opponent fires up +6', which could end the match or switch momentum back to your opponent. We had loads of fun stuff in it like steel chairs, ref bumps and other stuff I've probably forgotten. I'm sure the files may be on an old laptop at my mum's house but the laminated cards and game board are probably long gone. 

[JNLister]

WWE Superstar Showdown is actually a great game for the incredible niche venn diagram group of people who like WWE, like modern board games, and are happy with a light/minimal strategy game. It's basically a card game with strike/manoeuvre/grapple in place of rock/paper/scissors and then stun and finisher cards, but it's realistic to "real" WWE because each of the characters (Cena/Danielson/Big Show/Reigns/Big E/Orton) has a deck with a mix of cards that matches their in-ring style. There's also some nice official variants like tags, six mans, elimination matches and last man standing. There's also a neat mechanism where a pinfall attempt involve the defender having three chances to draw a card and hope to get a kickout card (as you suffer damage, you lose cards.) The problem is that non-gamers don't always pick up the subtleties of gameplay ("He's Big Show and mainly does strikes, so I'll do lots of grapples, but he knows that I'll do grapples, so he'll do manoeuvres, but hang on, he's lost lots of manouevre cards so on") and gamers don't really appreciate the "realism" of the wrestling content.

[Thunderplex]

Bought Carnegie the other week but only just been able to get it to the table.  Very highly tested and the solo mode is supposed to be one of the best, but I just could not get into it.  Found it over complicated despite watching several videos and it just did not click with me.  Opening my copy of Skyrim the Adventure Game this afternoon, hoping that’s a better experience.

[Thunderplex]

The Skyrim Adventure Game is excellent!  Really has the flavour of the video game version from the quests, sub-quests, combat, levelling up and the vast map.  A lot to think about and the tutorial confuses things by referencing cards that don’t exist, but it goes smoothly enough once you get going.  Love it!

[JNLister]

I played Arborea, which has some sort of eco/fantasy theme that I didn't quite get, the gist of which is that you are building a landscape of different terrains and then attracting creatures to live in it. It's got some interesting mechanisms in an unusual mix. One notable one is that (like in Tzolin's wheels) your workers move along a track each round (and potentially more often.) The quicker you activate them the quicker you get the benefits, but the longer you leave them, the more powerful the set of benefits you get. The other is that generating resources (used to create your terrain) and making the creatures available are both communal effects. If you do something and can't use them straight away, another player could use them and benefit before your next go. But you'll never generate/recruit enough just acting on your own, so you have to be working alongside other players while making sure you are the one who steals/claims the benefit. Finally, the terrain itself involves arranging cards (including overlaying new ones) as the scoring depends on which terrain types the creatures are besides and which other creatures they are near, so it's a minigame in itself.

It's a tough learn but quite enjoyable when you get to grips with the flow of play/. One big problem is that your turns can vary from very short to having multiple stages, plus you need to be aware of the board state, meaning you need to be paying attention all the time, even though nothing exciting happens and you could have long periods between your goes. The other issue is that although it technically looks pretty, it's visually not good for playing. The iconography is not intuitive and colour is a big part of the board, but you have a lot of very similar colours (orange and yellow, purple and pink) and to make things worse, some of them are in three differing shades depending on whether they are on the board, on a card or on a component. We relied on a printed sheet which shows what each of the routes you can take actually does on each space, so it's pretty flawed.

Edited June 27, 2025 by JNLister
(game title bolded)