The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[Thunderplex]

Bought a load of games when I was in the states a few weeks ago, and a few in the sales.  Just starting to go through them now.

First up, Marvel United.  Cracking little game.  I started to collect Legendary, but felt something missing from the fun, same with Marvel Champions.  This is great though, and I get the feeling it’s a keeper.  Minis are of the chibi variety that I’m not mad on, but the gameplay is very smooth and intuitive.

[Thunderplex]

Today’s offering was Healthy Heart Hospital 2nd Edition.  Bought Dice Hospital a few years ago and could not get into it for some reason.  HHH on the other hand is a delight.  You are looking after 5 wards plus waiting rooms and have to allocate Doctors and admin staff to get them well.  If too many die, games over.  It’s a case of picking cubes out of a bag to match up with the patients needs and hitting staff to modify this.  Cracking game.

[Onyx2]

13 hours ago, Thunderplex said:

HHH on the other hand is a delight

This season has been about Love Letter. I'm sure everyone has played it, but it's a simple card game of working out what's been played and what's remaining in the deck to nobble your opponents. Charming. 

Made a start on Ticket to Ride legacy and it's a delight. Quick games and fun twists. 

[Jazzy G]

We played Santa Banter a couple of weeks ago, which is a special Christmas themed version of Obama Llama. We only played a few rounds, but had started to get the hang of how the game worked, and how the clues are set out. I have suggested we play some regular Obama Llama at a future date. I've got a few more games ready to play as well. Incohearent, Joking Hazard, and So Wrong It's Right. They look like they could be fun.

[Thunderplex]

I wish I had a gaming group for TTR Legacy, TTR is my favourite lightweight game.

[Onyx2]

5 hours ago, Thunderplex said:

I wish I had a gaming group for TTR Legacy, TTR is my favourite lightweight game.

If you can find a group, pull the trigger. Lots of twists on the OG formula, a neat box per player like Charterstone, unusual scoring and good rubber banding bonuses for losers. Haven't finished it mind so it could go to shit 😂 

[JNLister]

First new plays of the year:

Vindicated has some sort of theme that plays virtually no role in the game, which is a very smooth "move round board, get stuff, do things" mechanic. It's somewhat reminiscent of Istanbul and Yokohama in that the positioning of the tiles (which is random) and the fact you can block spaces means a lot of the game is reading the board and being ready to switch plans quickly. One of the main features is that on your turn you can take three main actions (each of which you'll virtually always want to do) and a range of bonus actions (which depend on your situation), but you can do them all in any order you like, so there's a lot of planning to optimize your turn (which overcomes the downtime between turns.) Definitely looks like a lot of replayability as what cards you pick up and when can make a big difference to your strategy.

Trial by Trolley is a very fun party game where winning is really not the point. It's based on the old philosophical question of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem. In the game you have one player each round as the trolley operator choosing which track to send the trolley down, killing everything in its path. Everyone else is in two teams and you get three "good" cards (eg God, a taco truck, a lifeguard saving a drowning man, a talking dog) and pick one for your track to try to dissuade the trolley operator. You then pick one of three "bad" cards (eg reanimated Osama Bin Laden, a doctor who is secretly poisoning patients, the only person who saw you do the worst crime of your life) and pick one to go on the opposing track. You then get 30 seconds to argue why the driver should pick the other team's track. As said, it's really not about winning but about the comedy/arguments/surprising revelations about character that ensue.

Edited February 3 by JNLister

[JNLister]

Had a weekend away with my games group so plenty of first-time plays:

 

That’s So Clover (sister to the maths game That’s So Clover) is a bit of a mix of Just One and Codenames. It’s cooperative and you are randomly assigned four square cards on a two-by two grid. Each square has a word on each edge, meaning each side of your grid has two words. You have to write a one word clue on the board on each side of the grid to connect the two words.

Once you’re done, you take off all the cards and add in a fifth card (that you didn’t use). The other players have to recreate the board, meaning they figure out the four cards you had, where they were placed, and which way round each card was. At this point you quickly discover your clues are considerably less obvious and unambiguous than you thought!

Deathwish is a very silly card collection game where you are trying to contract diseases, which you do by collecting a disease card with a colour and a varying number of skulls. You also need to collect a “how I contracted it” card and the relevant number of symptoms cards, all of the matching colour. However, you have hand limits for both the contraction and symptoms cards, so you run the risk that somebody else gets the disease you were targeting before you have enough cards. It’s pretty thin, undemanding gameplay, but works because of the very juvenile card contents (poonomic plague, LOLera, Radioactive Poop, etc).

Endless Winter: Paleoamaricans is themed a bit like a post-Ice Age variant of Stone Age but is a full-on mix of different game mechanics. You build a Dominion-style deck of cards and your turn is choosing one of five sets of actions, each of which has “do this as many times as you like/can afford” then “do this once” and then “do this if you were the first person to choose this action during this round.” All the actions work and get you towards scoring points very differently, eg some are set collection, some are area control, some are building your deck, some are “get points if you’ve taken particular actions.” I’d play it again as it’s quite neat once you get the hang of the mechanics, but it’s definitely one where your first few turns on the first play leave you with no idea what to do.

Don’t Get Got isn’t a board game as such but instead each player gets a series of secret challenges to perform over time such as a weekend gathering. You have six challenges, first to three wins, but if you attempt one and somebody correctly accuses you of trying to complete the challenged, you fail it and can’t complete it. It’s a wide range of stuff from “get somebody to look inside a toilet cistern” to “offer to show somebody a picture of you and a celebrity on your phone but it’s actually a picture of this card” to “make somebody discover one of their own items inside a jelly.” If nothing else, it’s very revealing to see who gets competitive and takes it seriously.

Stationfall was basically a disaster. It’s set on a spaceship that’s about to blow up and has a wide range of characters that each have their own goals, some of which involve escaping the ship, while others involve uncovering military secrets, blackmailing people, carrying out a secret research project, while some characters want to protect the ship or cause chaos or damage stuff.

The main mechanic is confusing because you are secretly playing as one of the characters and trying to achieve their goals. (You get a reward/power/benefit for revealing your identity but then leave yourself open to everyone else trying to stop you getting the goals.) However, you can control any character on your turn by placing from your limited supply of influence cubes. The idea is that it’s about navigating the chaos as different players do different stuff to the characters and you have to try to figure out what other people will do with them and if that will get you towards your goal.

Problem one is that there’s just way too much info you need to know, so I suspect it’s the best part of an hour’s teach in good circumstances. Problem two is that we had a player who would not stop interrupting and asking questions (usually stuff already covered or that the teacher planned to cover later on in a logical order) so it wound up two full hours teaching, by which time no game could overcome the resentment we’d built up. Problem three was that you only have around 12-15 turns, some of which are literally “move a character one space”, so there’s very little feeling of control or any intentional action being achievable. It’s the classic game type where if you play it 10 times with the same group it’s probably great, but that’s never going to happen in a world of thousands of games.

Finally Magnate is a twist on the familiar city building game with the usual residential/industry/shops/office options and the various effects such as people wanting to live next to shops but not factories, shops wanting to be near houses and offices, etc. The twist is that you are a property developer and all you care about is making land more valuable by adding buildings and tenants and selling it at a profit.

There’s a lovely market mechanism by which the actions people take each round (such as buying, selling, attracting tenants, advertising, etc) affect the speed at which the price of land goes up (as it becomes more scarce), the likelihood of a market crash, which is measured on a tracker, and the increasing scale of the inevitable crash. As in real life, the increasing risk of a crash means its sensible to sell your land, but than in turn makes the crash even more likely. When the crash happens prices drop and everyone has to sell at the new prices, then whoever has the most money wins. It’s a lovely mix of calculated risks and timing the market and even has a tutorial mode that might make it a good gateway game as “a bit like Monopoly but not shit.”

[JNLister]

Played Marine Worlds, the first expansion for Ark Nova.

Short version is that it adds a decent bit of variety and asymmetry so there's more of a challenge in figuring out the situation in each game and the best order to do things. It's definitely one for experienced Ark Nova players only but I'd say after your first game with the expansion it wouldn't add any extra playing time. 

Long version, the new stuff is:

* You replace two of your five action cards with new versions (there's about half a dozen variants for each card) that offer slightly better powers in both standard and upgraded variants. For example, my association card in basic form gave me an X-token every time I used it for a lower action than the slot it was in (eg used it for the 3-power 'get a zoo association' when it was in the 4 slot.) When upgraded, I could make donations at a £1 discount for every X-token I had. There's a draft to get these cards, so picking ones that work together well with each other, your map special rules (if you're using variable maps) and your bonus cards is a big part of the challenge.

* There's a new category of animals, namely sea creatures. They're a bit fiddly as you need to put them in a new special enclosure, an aquarium. The benefits are that you can have multiple animals in an aquarium so they are more efficient for space on your board, and some of them have a reef feature. This means that every time you put a reef animal in your zoo, you get to repeat the placement bonus of all your other reef animals. It's a nice touch, but you really need to go all in on an aquarium-base strategy to make it worthwhile.

* Some cards have a wave symbol which means when they come out into the display, one of the existing cards gets removed and everything moves along. It's basically a thematic way to make sure you get through more of the deck in each game and to introduce a little more jeopardy in waiting to take a card in the display.

* There's now an extra type of university that you can take instead of one of the normal three (two research icons/one research and two reputation/one reputation and increased hand limit). The new one means you can select one of six tokens which are one research and one animal icon (one of each type, first come first served.) When you take these you also get to hunt through the deck and take the first card of that animal type. How useful this is depends on if and when you are chasing a conservation project or end game bonus that's about collecting a particular animal icon -- I wound up just taking the normal three universities.

* There's also some upgraded player pieces - mortar boards for the reputation tracker, tickets for the appeal tracker, something not very obvious for the conservation tracker, and animal pieces in place of the cubes you use to mark conservation project achievements (and thus unveil a bonus on your player board.)

[Thunderplex]

I’m looking forward to this.  Love Ark Nova, never get bored with it.

[JNLister]

Played The Wolves which is somewhat thematic but basically a strategic area control game where you each have a pack of wolves. Your actions are fairly simple: move your wolves around, build dens, upgrade dens to lairs, and "persuade" other wolves to join your pack.

All fairly simple but with a brain-burning core mechanic. The spaces on the board are each a specific terrain type. You each have a set of five two-sided terrain tiles, plus a unique one per player that's a particular terrain on both sides. To do an action, you need to have one, two or three terrain tiles (depending on the action) matching the space where you want to do the action. You then flip over those tiles, leaving you with a different set of tiles for your next action. It means you have to think quite hard to plan ahead and keep your options open, particularly as you do two actions on your turn.

It's an enjoyable if not groundbreaking game, though the rulebook is not great and some of the placement rules are ambiguous and fiddly (though make sense with better wording). We're playing a follow-up game on Board Game Arena to make sure we properly get to grips with what moves are and aren't legal.

[JNLister]

Played Shipwrights Of The North Sea Redux, which is a complete remake/rules change of what was the first in a long series of games (including the more successful Raiders of The Lost Sea). It's a pretty basic format of "get the right combination of resources and workers to build a particular ship for points" which you do through a combination of card drafting and worker placement. With each card you can either pay the required resources to keep it permanently, put it in your shipyard to use later (which is free but space is limited and you lose the card once it's eventually used), or discard it for resources.

It's a simple game that can still be a bit overwhelming as you can do a lot of stuff in any order, and resources are exchangeable in several ways, so in the last turn in particular you're trying to figure out a lot of possible combos to try to get the outcome you want.

It's not always intuitive and takes a couple of rounds to get to grips with, which is a bit of an issue as it's only 5 rounds, so definitely a game that would improve on a repeat play. There's effectively no player interaction so it's not one for people who like screwing over opponents. 

Edited March 22 by JNLister

[JNLister]

Played Wyrmspan which is somewhere between a (fully authorised) remake and a spinoff of Wingspan. It's themed on dragons rather than birds and uses many of the same mechanisms, but with a few rule changes. You now have two types of card, cave excavations and dragons, and you need to play an excavation card in a space before you can put a dragon there. Meanwhile laying eggs and getting new cards are no longer actions in themselves and instead you can only do them as a benefit of playing a card.

There's also a little "quest" tracker that you can move up as a benefit of some cards. Each space on the tracker gets you something (a resource or card or extra go) and going right rounf the tracker lets you claim an end game bonus, most of which are limited.

The upshot is that it's slightly more streamlined than the original and less likely to fall into the "last round is just laying eggs" trap. I wouldn't call it better however: if you like Wingspan, this doesn't significantly improve it, and if you don't like Wingspan this probably won't make much difference.

[NeverYield]

Played a bit of Magic lately with my brother, we do have physical cards but have played on Arena mostly, and I'd like to start getting back into Yu Gi Oh.

[Jazzy G]

On 2/2/2024 at 3:10 PM, JNLister said:

Trial by Trolley is a very fun party game where winning is really not the point. It's based on the old philosophical question of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem. In the game you have one player each round as the trolley operator choosing which track to send the trolley down, killing everything in its path. Everyone else is in two teams and you get three "good" cards (eg God, a taco truck, a lifeguard saving a drowning man, a talking dog) and pick one for your track to try to dissuade the trolley operator. You then pick one of three "bad" cards (eg reanimated Osama Bin Laden, a doctor who is secretly poisoning patients, the only person who saw you do the worst crime of your life) and pick one to go on the opposing track. You then get 30 seconds to argue why the driver should pick the other team's track. As said, it's really not about winning but about the comedy/arguments/surprising revelations about character that ensue.

I saw Smosh playing this. It looked like a lot of fun. I managed to get a copy of Joking Hazard for £9 on Amazon, but haven't had chance for a proper playthrough of it yet.

 

The last one we played was First World Problems, which is one of the millions of Cards Against Humanity adjacent games available at the moment. It's your typical "prompt/response" game with prompts such as "I had to go to therapy because..." or "my girlfriend dumped me because... ", and such responses as "My ripped jeans got ripped, so I had to buy some new ripped jeans." it's not too bad. A couple of naughty cards in there. One of the prompts just says "Fuck...", and I almost won a round with a response of "*sigh* another dick pic" when the prompt was "I came home today to..."  With the right group of people I have no doubt it could be a great game.

I've got a copy of Funemployed on the way, which looks like it plays similarly to Apples To Apples. I also have another Big Potato game I haven't had a proper play of yet with people. I'll find the right friends ro have a crack of that as well at some point. I also managed to get one of those among us/mafia/secret werewolf type games in Blackburn's new Autism charity shop for £3 when a brand new copy was going for £25 in Waterstones. 

Finally, I suddenly seem to own a shit load of Top Trumps cards, and have more in the way. Some old, some less so. The most "interesting" ones are probably the "The Queen" set, the Harry & Meghan Royal Wedding set, and two sets called "the ultimate deck" which are ostensibly Top Trumps Top Trumps. Each card is a previous Top Trumps set, with the usual kinds of numbers (rarity, age, how informative they are etc). I also have the limited edition NHS hospitals ones, and the Key Workers ones which were both presumably rushed out during Covid. If ever I was going to make an interminably dull video series for YouTube, it would possibly be reviewing these.