The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[JNLister]

Played the original Brass (Lancashire, not Birmingham). Mixed feelings. I get technically why it's a good game and I can see it being great if you have played it a lot and know it well. However, it's very fiddly, not thematically intuitive, and you spend a lot of time trying to do stuff and then being reminded of a rule that means you can't. (For example, you can build a cotton factory but once it's sold it's first load of cotton, it effectively closes. Meanwhile there are four places that will buy cotton, but they will all randomly stop at the same time and presumably nobody in Britain wants cotton any more. Until trains get invented and then they do want cotton again.) Because the theme isn't really used, it's also quite difficult to figure out the best way to earn lots of points.

The real problem (which I also had with Birmingham) is that if nobody knows the game very well, it can be slow and frustrating trying to figure out the rules and exceptions. However, if some people know the game well and others don't, the result is pretty much a foregone conclusion. 

[Carbomb]

On 9/21/2023 at 12:24 PM, Carbomb said:

Got this for a tenner on eBay. Mixed reviews, but one reviewer also detailed some house rules that can improve it, so thought it'd be worth a shot. I've wanted some small-box games for some time that you can just bust out with mates at a pub at any time if you feel like it. Hopefully will be able to play for the first time this weekend.

So I played this with friends for the first time yesterday, and I think the mixed reviews were sort of on target. As a game in itself, it's fun, but very limited, not least in the player interaction department.

HOWEVER! The simplicity of it means that it lends itself very easily to house rules to enable a bit more engagement and competition. As a game to just carry around and take out in a pub on occasion whenever you feel like it, it's not bad value for about a tenner (which included postage).

[Jazzy G]

I kind of bluffed my way through how the card game Grimwood plays yesterday. It's pretty simple, but I get the feeling it'll be better with more than 2 players. I'll take it down to the next Autism meet up. I'm waiting for a copy of Fluxx as well. 

[JNLister]

Played Dice Forge, which, following on from card-builders being a spinoff of deck builders, is a dice builder.

It's 10 rounds of one turn each. You always roll your two dice regardless of whose go it is, which will give you some combination of victory points, gold and moons/suns. When it's your go, you get to spend moons/suns or gold. The former lets you choose a card (that you can afford), which give you victory points and a new special ability. The twist is that spending gold means you can buy a new die face that replaces one of your existing faces and gives you something better (more points/gold/suns/moons, a multiplier of whatever's on the other dice, or the ability to copy somebody else's die). 
 

It's definitely fun, though you probably wouldn't want to play it too many times in quick succession. It's definitely a tactile experience as playing it online would probably expose the gameplay being quite barebones.

[Jazzy G]

I got LOADS of Cards Against Humanity from Temu, Vinted and Amazon. I've got the glow in the dark add-on to the family edition, the main proper one, and the first six expansions. I also have the "written by kids" expansion. We're possibly having a game on Thursday. I'll pop piles of each out. 

I also picked up Shot In The Dark today from Waterstone's. It's a lot of questions that you're probably not expected to get the answer to, and I think the aim is to be the closest. 

Picked up Colour Brain mini as well, reduced from a tenner to £2.50. Plenty of options. Fluxx is the bomb as well. 

[Jazzy G]

I visited a friend last night and I played a few new games for the first time. One was a touch educational, the other was nice and simple, so good for those 'Keffers with younger kids (6+)

First up we had Maponimoes, which is a similar concept to Dominoes, but all the cards have a country on them. So you place your country, and the next player puts theirs down, but it can only be a country with a land border on a country that's already down. So if Germany is there you've got a lot of options in any direction (Netherlands, Czechia, Poland, Denmark etc, but if Portugal, Andorra or San Marino get played you have fewer options. Fortunately there's a card called a Transit card, which enables you to play any other card next to it, which can be helpful when dealing with places like Iceland or the UK. Each country also has all the neighbouring countries listed on it to make it easier, but for extra challenge there is a little egg timer to pop a time constraint on things. 

The version I had was the Europe edition, but there are editions for Asia, África, The Américas And Oceania. What's also handy is that nations on the boundary of a continent have neighbouring countries in other continents on them, ie Russia had Kazakhstan, China, etc on it, Turkey has Iran, Syria Israel on it. So theoretically it's possible to assemble a whole global edition. There is also a version that deals with the counties of the UK on it, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a US States one in the works. 

The other game we played was called The Muddles, and is so simple. There are 7 types of Muddle, and several different types of animal cards. The animals are a pig, a frog, a cow, a worm, a slug, a bee and a jellyfish. These combine to become Muddles with little portmanteau names. The Muddles are Pog (Pig and frog), Wow (worm and cow), Wee (worm and bee), Frug (frog and slug), Plug (Pig and Slug), Jellycow (jellyfish and cow), and Bellyfish (Bee and jellyfish). Both the animals and the muddles appear in different numbers, and each muddle has a point score based on how many there are. 

One of each muddle is laid out, and 8 others dealt at random. Each player gets 3 animal cards face up. Each animal has a handy guide to which muddles it can help create. If on your turn you have two anmals that can combine to create a muddle that's available you pop them on the discard pile, claim the appropriate muddle, then draw two cards and it's onto the next player's turn. 

If you can't make a muddle from the card you have there are two options. You can either discard two of your cards and draw 2, or if you have two matching animals you can discard the non-matching animal and draw one, then it's onto the next player's turn. If you end up with three matching animals you can discard all three, claim any muddle in play, and then draw three cards. 

Once all the muddles have been claimed their scores are totted up and whoever has scored the most is the winner. It's really simple, and a nice short game for the younger players, or for when you're sleep deprived at 3am but still trying to do things to keep yourself awake. It's from Big Potato games, who publish some great games. 

 

[JNLister]

I remember somebody brought Maponimoes to our games group and we assumed it was a little kids game for teaching them geography. Turns out it's a proper brainburner, particularly because it's (literally) disorienting when all the countries end up in the "wrong" place on the map. If you were playing serious strategy rather than as a bit of fun/relaxation, you'd have to pretty much strip out any association with the real world and just view it as an abstract strategy game.

Please to say our weekly game group is doing really well, to the point that we even had to send some people to a different pub as an overspill a couple of weeks. We're regularly getting 25-30 people signing up and the pub we play in (in the skittle alley/function room) is so happy to have the extra business that they've installed better lighting and even built extra tables for us.

[Jazzy G]

My friend and I played by trying to layer the countries over each other to see how it'd look as an accurate map of Europe. With a few other expansions it might be a goer with the Autistic Social group, assuming we can make it past Cards Against Humanity. I still want to try Colour Brain and Sounds Fishy. 

[JNLister]

Played Bunny Kingdom which is a good light strategy game with a very thin theme. You're drafting cards which can let you place a bunny figure in a specific space on the board, place a building (with 1/2/3 turrets) on a space where you have a bunny, do a special action, or get an end-game bonus. You then score at the end of each round for each continuous area of your bunnies, with the score being the number of different types of terrain times the number of turrets. You then score end-game bonuses.

It plays very smoothly and doesn't last too long and it's got just enough complexity of gambling on whether you'll connect up an area and which cards to draft. There's also a good gambling element where you can use a special scout card to place a bunny on any empty space, but you can be kicked out if somebody later takes the card for that space. I pretty much got most of my points with a massive area that would have fallen apart if my squatter had been moved on.

The main downside is that it appears simply taking as many end-game bonus cards as possible gives you a decent shot of picking up enough points to make the main scoring almost irrelevant. 

[Dai]

Forgive me if it's been talked about in the thread before, but I've gone back a good few pages and can't see anything. Does anyone have any good recommendations for board games that are good to play on the PC? Any two player ones which people can play if you're hooked up to the TV to show it? There seems to be a load of choices on Steam, but seeing if anyone here have any go-to's for 2 players. Thanks. 

[JNLister]

Three new ones:

High Society is a simple auction game (bid for 'luxury goods', winner is the one with the highest total value) with three neat twists:

• Your money is in varying denominations (one each of 1 through 10, 15, 20 and 25) and you can't get change. So the more you spend, the less flexibility you have in your future bids.)
•  
• There are some negative cards (half your total, throw away the next good you buy) where you are bidding to not take it. First to drop out takes it and gets their bid back, everyone else pays their last bid.)
•  
• Whoever has spent the most money at the end is poor and shunned by society and thus cannot win, even if they have the most valuable goods.)

Definitely replayable, though it's quite easy to get to an impossible position to get out of.

Deep Dive is a pretty standard push-your-luck with a dolphin/food/predators theme. Plays quickly, easy to learn, but does nothing you can't get in dozens of other games.

HMS Dolores is a "splitting up treasure" take on Prisoner's Dilemma (both agree to share, both get half; one shares, one steals, stealer takes all; both steal, both get nothing.) It has an extra dimension where you can choose "pick first" which expands the combination, including the possibility that you both get nothing *and* lose some stuff you already have. It's simple enough, but a little overengineered and the way its scored (treasure is in different colours, you only score your highest and lowest colour, but if you have multiple colours tied for highest or lowest you score all those colours) means it's pretty much too complex to really be in control of winning.

[Thunderplex]

On 11/8/2023 at 9:55 AM, Dai said:

Forgive me if it's been talked about in the thread before, but I've gone back a good few pages and can't see anything. Does anyone have any good recommendations for board games that are good to play on the PC? Any two player ones which people can play if you're hooked up to the TV to show it? There seems to be a load of choices on Steam, but seeing if anyone here have any go-to's for 2 players. Thanks. 

Sorry, just seen this.  Not sure what’s available on Steam, but boardgame Geek have a few geek lists about them.

[JNLister]

No new games for a while but replayed Obsession (strong Pride & Prejudice/Downton Abbey theme) and it really stood out how it's not just thematic, but thinking about the them actually makes some of the more unwieldy rules make sense.

The cards you've build up in your deck -- that's your social circle of people who know you and might come to your event.

Need to persuade an uncouth person to stop coming to your events -- either the mother of the house uses her diplomacy to have a firm word in their ear, or you need to take them out to the paddock and tell them where they can't make a scene in front of others.

Don't have the social reputation to attract particular guests -- wait for the national holiday where they'll be prepared to slum it for a fun day out,

Built a new facility but not used it yet -- not very social, bit of a new money thing to do, lose some reputation for now.

[Thunderplex]

I do fancy Obsession, might buy with some Christmas money.

[Just Some Guy]

Dipping a toe back into RPG territory tonight.

Acting as Keeper (GM) for a Call of Cthulhu one shot.