The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[ReturnOfTheMack]

25 minutes ago, Thunderplex said:

Osprey have got a 30% off sale at the moment.  Got myself Gaslands, Last Days+ the expansion and When Nightmares come.

So Osprey can sell then!

[Thunderplex]

6 hours ago, ReturnOfTheMack said:

So Osprey can sell then!

Indeed!  Cracking games company, not the biggest name but the quality is excellent.

[cobra_gordo]

We're currently obsessed with the game Tonks in our house. You each play as a small tank on a 2ftx2ft surface with a few bits of terrain. The rules are dead straightforward (the plain text version we started with is only 4 pages long, before extras and campaign rules, but the fancy version of the rules is gorgeous- plus both are free to download) and the only extra kit you need other than the tanks is a tape measure, a few dice and some tokens.

The reason it's become so popular with us in the emphasis on scratch-building and kit bashing. I bought a set of cheap pull back tanks and then we added bits to them using old Warhammer bits, beads, wire, just stuff we had laying around and painted them up. I've been painting miniatures forever and took this way too seriously but it was great getting my wife, who hates this sort of thing normally, to not only paint a model and enjoy it but be annoyingly good on her first try.

The rules really pushes for creativity, giving ideas for scenarios, encouraging house rules and to make up your own rules and scenarios and share them to their socials. The first picture is a rule my son made up where at the start of each round we roll a D8 dice and the number corresponds to one of eight grid squares on our board, a big ol' bomb that lands in that square and if you're in it you take damage. Simple but really added an extra dynamic. We're planning on starting a campaign soon.

 

[JNLister]

Played the Upstairs Downstairs expansion for Obsessions. It's a bundle of optional stuff and rules including milestones (points for first players to achieve a certain goal), 5 and 6 player and team options and a "minimal luck" variant that's a majorly different game.

However, we stuck to the main new thing which is "supplemental service", four new types of servant who don't count towards for the mandatory service for the events/characters, but instead you can use as a sort of power-up. For example, the cook lets you use characters whose reputation is two levels higher than your family, the hall boy gets you £100 extra when you have a character who brings money, and the head housemaid lets you screen new characters (ie take a card becomes "take two/keep one").

As always, it all plays very thematically and adds some depth and complexity as you need to plan carefully about when to use the supplemental service and when you'll get them back in play again.

[JNLister]

Played Happy Little Dinosaurs. It's a quick card game with a simple theme (Dinosaurs try to avoid potential extinction events) and very simple gameplay (everyone plays a points card then optionally plays modifiers/reversal/sabotage cards). Fine for what it is, but not for anyone who is concerned about winning a game with their skill and judgement.

[JNLister]

Pulled off an absolute heist last night. Played a 5-person game of Argent: The Consortium, which makes for a lengthy, somewhat heavy affair.

Quick version: the game is themes around trying to become the new head of definitely-not-Hogwarts. You spend the game doing a bunch of stuff like researching and casting spells, attracting supporters, getting money, etc via worker placement with a lot of options. There are 10 people on the selection panel, each of which has a criteria (eg most supporters from a particular faction, second-most money). Most of these are secret at the start of the game and finding out a person's criteria is an available action/reward during the game. There's an influence point tracker that acts as a tiebreaker.

Which is all a bunch of theme that boils down to some basic maths. Towards the end I was last in the influence track and I'd completely screwed myself by running out of manna (the "currency" you need to cast spells). So in the penultimate round I managed to get on the "get as many influence points as there are people ahead of you on the track" spot and thus picked up four points. I then spent the entire final round getting onto spaces/actions that gave me influence points and managed to get to the front by a single point (something like 27-26.)

That got me one of the 10 panel members. On seven of them I was nowhere close to having the most of whatever the criteria was. On the remaining two I was in a multi-way tie, meaning I took the card on the influence point tiebreaker. And on the final count of panel members, three of us had three each, meaning I took the overall win on the tiebreaker.

tl;dr: I won a complex 4 hour game with the absolute lowest level of achievement possible to still come out ahead.

[JNLister]

Played Dog Park, in which you acquire dogs in an auction (technically you pay in reputation rather than money so it's less iffy than it sounds) then take them for a walk, making sure you have the right treats to keep them happy. It's very much got the air of "decided on the theme then tried to make the mechanics fit it" and the instructions have some ambiguities, but once you've figured it all out it's a fun enough game. Fairly light on strategy so not too taxing (and the advertised 40-80 minute game time feels accurate for 2nd and subsequent plays), but enough there that if you really wanted to play ultra competitively and strategic, there's still some challenge.

Edited June 11, 2024 by JNLister

[Thunderplex]

Bought Hallertau a couple of months ago from Amazon when it plummeted in price, but only just got chance to play it.  Usual Uwe Rosenberg theme and gameplay but I found this a lot more straight forward than previous games of his.  Great engine builder, easy to learn and play but the decisions are mind bending.  Brilliant game.

[JNLister]

Played The Herb Witches expansion for Quacks of Quedlinberg, which is a push your luck game where you are drawing "potion ingredients" from a bag to try to make the bets potion without exploding your pot. I think we only used a couple of the elements of the expansion. There's an overflow bowl where you go past the normal limit and keep racking up points but without the individual chip benefits (so basically expanding the push your luck). There's also a selection of one-time use powers of which you pick three for the game. We had "your money counts double in the buying phase", "you get to draw six chips at once and use them in any order" and "you get points for all the coloured chips left in your bag at the end of the round." Doesn't transform the game but does add a bit more skill and judgment in deciding the best time to play the special powers, which reduces some of the luck for people who find that too much.

[Thunderplex]

On 5/11/2024 at 1:37 PM, ReturnOfTheMack said:

So Osprey can sell then!

After 7 months, that joke has finally sunk in with me!  I’m getting old…..

[FLips]

Animal Crossing Monopoly is only £8.24 in Tesco. They must have some deal with The Entertainer now as their toy section now is all TE branded, so this deal may be in both respective stores.

We had a go of it last night and it's good fun. It's got a changed rule set similar to the other Nintendo Monopoly games so you're ideally not going around the board more than a few times each. All the properties are replaced with islands that you visit and automatically mark if you land on them so you collect fish/bugs/fossils whenever you or someone else visits it. Chance is still there and is themed with familiar situations (you bought fake art, you got stung by wasps, etc) but now you also have Nook Miles cards that give you challenges to complete before the game ends that either earn you or lose you a specified amount of Nook Miles which are needed to win the game.

You roll 2 dice each turn, one standard d6 and another d6 with logos for fish/bugs/etc on them giving you permission to sell as many of that type on your turn. When you pass Go you can use the money you've earned selling resources to buy up to 3 Furniture from Nook's Cranny that are worth Nook Miles at the end of the game. When one player has 7 peices of furniture they stop and the other players keep playing til they reach Go themselves, buy furniture and then the game ends. The first time you pass Go you can also pick one of four Skill cards that give you buffs, like extra bells when you sell or collecting extra resources.

Whoever has the most Nook Miles from doing Nook cards and furniture win.

Has some really nice miniatures, barely takes any time to play and is faithful to the Animal Crossing theme. Also easy to amend the rules to prolong or shorten the game. Well worth the £8.

Edited July 14, 2024 by FLips

[Thunderplex]

Nice to see Tom Nook screwing people over in a boardgame!

[Jazzy G]

We did this escape room in a box tonight. Set everything up in our gazebo, and cracked away at it. Some of the clues felt a bit "moon logic" in places, but we managed to get through it after a fashion. It may have been our tired, autistic brains overthinking everything. There were some spelling mistakes in the materials, but it was a fun enough distraction. We've got MacroMicro Crimes to have a look at, possibly over the weekend or one day next week when we're back home. We're both looking forward to that. 

[JNLister]

Played Telestrations, which is pretty much the drawing version of what, in my day, was called Chinese Whispers. You get a word, draw a picture, pass it on, the next person looks at the picture and guesses the word and passes that on, the next person looks at the word and draws it, the next person looks at the picture, etc etc until it gets back to you and then you all laugh at how badly the process is gone.

But the real story here is that beforehand I played my greatest ever game of Ark Nova in which, in the entire game, I only played one card that wasn't directly monkey (or technically primate) related. And that was a lizard which I managed to release into the wild before the end. I had a whole group of primates in a primate enclosure and funded projects for having primates, having primates from a partner zoo, and releasing primates, plus a sponsor card that rewarded me for primates. Annoyingly I wasn't even trying to play the game properly once I realised the monkey cards were coming my way but I wound up with the most environment points, the most reputation and the most money, but came last because my zoo had the least appeal, possibly because it was just monkeys. Really annoyingly I probably could have either won or come close if I'd not been so obsessed with the monkey that I completely forgot to spend my horde of money on environmental donations.

[JNLister]

I played Earth, which has been not unfairly described as Wingspan with plants. The actual gameplay is quite different but a lot of the mechanisms/point scoring is very familiar. The big difference is that whatever action you choose, you get to do it and get the relevant benefits, but everyone else gets to do a scaled down version (eg pick draw cards/keep one/play a card vs draw a card).

Also, most of the cards you play (into a grid) have a bonus action that activates whenever somebody chooses a particular action. They activate in the order of your grid, so there's some thought required in building up your grid and building up your engine (eg its better to have "draw a card" activate before "play a card".)

Overall, plays very smoothly and lasts a good length, though it does require consistent attention (alternatively put, has no real downtime.)

Also played Ecosystem which is a lovely short card drafting game. All the cards are animals or terrain types and you're simply taking a card, placing it to build a grid, and passing the rest on. Repeat until your grid is done. Every type of card scores uniquely, eg meadows score based on how many you have connected, bees score based on how many meadows surround them, bears score by being next to bees or trout, trout score by being next to rivers, longest river scores most, etc. Not sure how much replayability it has, but quick to pick up.