The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[Rey_Piste]

I enjoy exploding kittens, but I would like to play Imploding Puppies the sequel game which hopefully removes a few of the problems with the original. Also the Rick and Morty game Total Rickall looks like a great laugh.

[ReturnOfTheMack]

Do you mean Imploding Kittens? It's just an add on, a few new cards with a couple of extra rules on them. Plus a cone of shame.

[Carbomb]

Got Pandemic last week and had a great time playing it at the weekend. Was overjoyed to see there's a Cthulhu & The Old Ones expansion. Really like the mechanics; makes for a lot of variation, and the "AI" means there's always the threat of defeat even if you play your absolute best. 

[Chest Rockwell]

Yeah, the game mechanics are really well balanced to give you hope pretty much all the way through, and then snatch victory away cruelly right at the end.

[Thunderplex]

Pandemic is the one I always go back to.  Just a wonderful, frustrating game.

[Rey_Piste]

20 hours ago, ReturnOfTheMack said:

Do you mean Imploding Kittens? It's just an add on, a few new cards with a couple of extra rules on them. Plus a cone of shame.

You're correct, I got my wires crossed. I thought it was an exandalone game.

[cobra_gordo]

Picked up We Didn't Playtest This At All the other day and finally got round to playing it yesterday. It's very silly and good for killing 10-15 minutes. We played it with three of us and I reckon it'd work better with more players.

Has anybody played Smash Up? Looks interesting, just after some first hand opinions before dropping £35 on it.

[Thunderplex]

Love Smashup.  Quick, fun game but I'd keep an eye on Amazon, often plummets to around £20, wouldn't pay much more than that.

[cobra_gordo]

I've seen it second hand on ebay for around £20 which I'm way happier paying, especially as I'll end up buying a couple of expansions if we like the base game.

[Onyx2]

Played Exit: Pharaoh's Tomb at the weekend. It's a "one and done" boxed game, where you can play it the once and then you pretty much have to chuck it away as you've ripped up cards, folded and bent things etc. It's marketed as an escape room in a box. The puzzles are great and just tricky enough, although it's difficult to play with more than four because the cards are so small. I didn't buy it so it doesn't bother me but £13 for a one-time use game doesn't strike me as great value, but if a mate suggests you play it definitely give it a go.

[Rey_Piste]

4 hours ago, cobra_gordo said:

I've seen it second hand on ebay for around £20 which I'm way happier paying, especially as I'll end up buying a couple of expansions if we like the base game.

If you buy it and some expansions it's worth picking up the big geeky box for it. It's basically a really good storage box with card inserts to keep the factions separate and you get the exclusive faction of geeks. I would avoid the Munchkin and Cthulu expansions though.

[Thunderplex]

5 hours ago, Onyx2 said:

Played Exit: Pharaoh's Tomb at the weekend. It's a "one and done" boxed game, where you can play it the once and then you pretty much have to chuck it away as you've ripped up cards, folded and bent things etc. It's marketed as an escape room in a box. The puzzles are great and just tricky enough, although it's difficult to play with more than four because the cards are so small. I didn't buy it so it doesn't bother me but £13 for a one-time use game doesn't strike me as great value, but if a mate suggests you play it definitely give it a go.

I'm 50/50 about this kind of game due to the one and done thing.  The only way I can justify it is that it would cost a good part of £40 for four of us to go to the pics for a couple of hours, so at least it would be cheaper than that.

[ReturnOfTheMack]

Drunk me backed Unstable Unicorns on Kickstarter, sober me is fine with that.

[Astro Hollywood]

On 20/08/2014 at 4:32 PM, Astro Hollywood said:

Talking of Scrabble, what's the most extraordinary feat of gaming you've ever witnessed in person?

A couple of Christmases ago, my cousin -- an incredible gamer -- used all his tiles on a word twice in a single game of Scrabble, both times across a triple-word tile. I can't be exact, but I think he finished with about a billion points.

The next game, he did it once more. I've never seen anything like it.

Bumping this because I have just seen something almost exactly like it, in the latest of my weekly series of games against the same cousin.

Let me further set the scene. We've been playing weekly for about a year now (and many times in the decades before that), during which time, around the end of last year, after getting within 1 or 2 points on a couple of occasions, and once losing only when my leftover tiles were deducted from my score (as is house rules), I finally beat him. Since then, it's been pretty back and forth, and we've gotten so outrageously good, that all the other players who've dipped in to join us have been scared away by our Olympic-level Scrabble. I got my first, and only ever seven-letter word back in May, complete with the juicy 50-point bonus. Today, however -- and prepare yourselves, because I'm about to drop a bomb here -- I did it twice. In a row. All my tiles. Twice. 146 points in 2 turns.

For years, the high benchmark of incredible gaming achievements has been the story quoted above; told among family, among friends, among gaming groups; told so many times, his wife put a ban on it; the day 2 seven-letter words were used by a single player in a single game. BUT NOW IT IS I WHO IS THE KING! Now there's a new story, a new narrative, and it's about how great I am. Not only twice in one game, but twice in consecutive turns! History has been rewritten, and in my name.

But like I say, we are good. This is where the big boys play. We're so good, that one can never relax, never drop one's guard. And so, my first 7-letterer was countered with a 60-pointer. And after the second one, a string of 40-something pointers. I played hard, with 30s of my own, but incredibly, I could feel it all slipping away. The game. The new story. History.

We walked away from the table with indeed, a new narrative. No more, will we talk of the day he got two seven-letter words in a single game. No. We will talk of the day I got two seven-letter words in a single game, and he still beat me by 8 points.

Edited August 31, 2017 by Astro Hollywood

[FLips]

Board Game Nights have become a regular thing in the FelatioLips household with my partner and I playing Dead of Winter: The Long Night and Pandemic/Pandemic State of Emergency almost nightly either with just us or with a few friends. We've also became addicted to TableTop, Wil Wheaton's Youtube series I think was mentioned on here once.

Dead of Winter is class, once you get past the long and arduous setup and understanding of all the rules. One of our mates came over for a game the other night and was putting on voices for the characters and really getting invested in it. When I made a selfish mistake that caused three deaths and the Grocery Store to be over-ran, killing his leader it turned the game into chaos and the three of us couldn't stop laughing at how bad it got.

The other half has got hooked on Pandemic (and bought an expansion), and when we had an old Uni friend and his other half visit over the weekend, we got his girlfriend hooked on it enough to place a bid on Ebay the next day. 

We've seen a Dungeons and Dragons starter kit in Waterstones for £19.99 but as much as we're enjoying the tabletop games, we're both put off by the vast amount of rules and the investment of time and money needed to really get anywhere with it. If anyone knows any board games that combine the roleplay of Dungeons and Dragons but with a more basic and easy to play setup, that'd be good.