The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[JNLister]

I played Inferno in which you are an evil family who accused people of sins, gets them executed, them sends them through the circles of hell. Which is a bit of a dramatic theme for moving some miniatures down a board with a lot of rings. It's a lovely mix of mechanisms where doing something might help other people so you have to plan stuff out. The main two things each turn are moving a sinner down the circles of hell and getting points if they reach the one for their sin, and then doing an action which is restricted/determined by an icon on whatever space you move the sinner to. So getting a sinner into the space you need for your desired action might mean they are now in the right space for somebody else to move them to their final doom, or to a space which helps them get a useful action.

Similarly, you can move along a scoring track for each of the sins, but every second accusation in the game triggers a process where whoever is ahead on a particular track gets to lock it in so that only they can score points on it at the end. And then the points available for that track are reduced if there are any empty spaces on that circle (ie no dead sinners). So you have to time everything well and after a certain point, moving sinners might only help your opponent.

It takes a bit of a while to get the flow and it's a bit like Brass where the main way you learn is trying to do stuff and being told it's against the rules, but once you get the hang of it it moves quickly and is a nicely balanced headscratcher.

[Jazzy G]

Our DM at the Thursday D&D session has been struggling and taken on some other things which means he can't keep running our game. We have 5 weeks left and then my character will be getting retired. I levelled up to level 5 and have been 

However, the guy who originally ran this campaign is starting a new campaign and has insisted we create new characters different from the ones we've been playing so I've created a Harengon Ranger. I look forward to it starting in August. 

[JNLister]

Played Lost Ruins of Arnak, which is currently ranked 28th on BoardGameGeek. Bit of a tough one to rate as I enjoyed playing it, but it doesn't really play into the theme (exploring, erm, lost ruins to find stuff) and what makes it work is a little too obvious. It's deckbuilder (very heavily Dominion) plus worker placement/general Eurogame get stuff-use stuff-move up track. It's very well done and works, but there's no real wow factor because it's so clear what they've done that it obviously should work as well as it does. I'll need to play it some more to see if it has any depth and becomes compelling. I did play it with the expansion (which is basically each player has a special ability/way to break the rules) and got the impression it could be a bit bland without it.

[JNLister]

Two new shorter ones yesterday. MLEM Space Agency is a push your luck game based on sending cats into space. Each player picks a cat, the captain rolls dice to move you on (only certain dice results count on any particular set), you can get out before any roll and get some points for the moon/planet you're on, and if the captain doesn't roll any usable dice the mission is abandoned and anyone left on the ship doesn't score. It's a bit more complex than that and is a good game in its own right, but is very reminiscent of both Celestia and elements of Deep Sea Adventure, so it doesn't feel that fresh. Also worth noting that though the theme is used for pretty artwork, it's literally meaningless to the gameplay. 

Walking in Burano is a short and simple card drafting game where you're trying to build a street of houses. It's a bit more thematic as its based on an island in Venice which has  Instagram-friendly different coloured houses. Here you have to make sure each house is the same colour on all three levels, and adjacent houses are different colours. When you complete a house you pick a card with a tourist or resident who scores at the end of the game based on their particular tastes (different types of shop on the ground floor, flowers in windowsills across the street, different types of chimney if you pick Santa). Easy to pick up and a nice mental workout without being too taxing, though I suspect if you played it a lot it would quickly turn into a strategy of hate drafting (picking cards to stop other people benefiting from them.)

[Jazzy G]

We picked up something called GalaDuckXy, which it turns out is a rip-off of a game called Abduction. It's to do with getting space ducks in a row. We haven't had a proper look yet but I hear that in order to avoid too many similarities to the original the rip-off merchants have changed some rules and ostensibly broken the game. 

More chaos ensued at D&D last night, in no small part due to me. One of the party is undead and decaying, so uses disguise self to make himself look more human, and perfume to hide the smell of rotting corpse.

I merely said to the party that it would be quite the jape if somebody who knew dispel magic cast it while he was in the middle of a negotiation. The druid turns to me. 

"I know dispel magic." she says, while we're in the longhouse of a nobleman negotiating a price for the extermination of some owlbears that have been bothering him.

"Why don't you cast it now?" I ask quietly, and she refuses. The DM hears this discussion and makes me roll for persuasion against her intimidation roll. I win: the spell is cast. 

While discussing this matter our undead self-appointed negotiator hears a mumbling from behind him, then sees a look of horror descend over the nobleman's face. Realising what's happened, he turns to see me laughing uproariously. 

"What did you do?" he asks, incensed. 

"I didn't do anything except make a remark about dispelling your disguise for a laugh. SHE'S the one who did it." comes my reply. 

"Do you have any questions?" asks the nobleman.

"Do the owlbears have any babies?" I ask, thrilling at the idea of raising an Owlbear cub. Horror descends over the DM's face as he realises my intentions...

It turns out there was one, and his name is now Bearthowlemew. The druid also almost threatened to kill the whole party by calling down lightning when our fighter and party leader tried to feed the cub some meat which had been cut from another Owlbear.

It was probably the most and best roleplaying we've done so far. There are three sessions left, and only two party members I haven't done anything cruel to. I'm really leaning into chaotic neutral, off doing my own thing for my own amusement stuff. I'm going to miss my bard, I was going to take a few levels in Arcane Trickster Rogue so I could get up to even more mischief, but I'm not going to get the chance now. We'd decided Weerdal was just a moniker given to him by the people in the village he grew up in because of his not warlike leanings, and he was actually named Istvan Mokar. 

 

[Thunderplex]

Played Undaunted Normandy solo with the Reinforcements expansion.  Beating in mind that you are using 4 separate rule books to work out the rules it’s surprisingly straight forward when you get started and is not one of my favourite games.  The AI is excellent and really plays like a person.  Loads of scenarios to get to do will take ages to get through it.

[Browser Brady]

What are some fun easy to play 2 player board games. 
 

My wife and i played a lot of sequence and enjoyed it a lot, anything along those lines ?

[stumobir]

22 minutes ago, Browser Brady said:

What are some fun easy to play 2 player board games. 
 

My wife and i played a lot of sequence and enjoyed it a lot, anything along those lines ?

Azul (not exclusively two player but best played with two, in my opinion) and 7 Wonders Duel are the big hitters in this household. We’ve played both for years and still enjoy them every time.

If you do pick up 7 Wonders, make sure it’s the Duel version and not the original as that’s minimum three players.

Edited July 13, 2025 by stumobir

[Nexus]

2 hours ago, Browser Brady said:

What are some fun easy to play 2 player board games. 
 

My wife and i played a lot of sequence and enjoyed it a lot, anything along those lines ?

My go to is always Jaipur. It's easy to pick up but quite in depth in places. 

[FLips]

Yeah Jaipur is good, as is Schotten-Totten and Tea for Two.

[Nexus]

Oh yeah, Odin's Ravens is another good 'un

[Thunderplex]

On 7/13/2025 at 6:31 PM, Browser Brady said:

What are some fun easy to play 2 player board games. 
 

My wife and i played a lot of sequence and enjoyed it a lot, anything along those lines ?

Pandemic, Carcassonne, Takenoko are all easy to learn and play.

[JNLister]

We played Saltfjord, which is a relatively new Euro game in a Norwegian fishing village. It's based around rolling a load of dice and using them for actions (think Troyes or El Grande) but rather than claiming spaces on a board, you use the dice on your own player board which has a six by six grid. Depending on the dice colour, you move down the column or row of the dice number and take all the actions, leaving the dice on the last action you take (which blocks that space if you then come to it the other way, eg column on one turn and row on the other.) During the game, you can add extra buildings to the board, thus adding more actions to rows and columns.

Plays very smoothly (and even survived us getting three different rules completely wrong on first play) but it's definitely one I'd like to play again now I understand it. The way the actions rack up means it feels like very little happens in the first round, but it then escalates quickly.

[Jazzy G]

Next week is the final week of our current campaign, and one of the other players said she was going to level her character up to 20 afterwards to see what might have been. The DM heard this and said next week we're going to be put into a dream state with all our characters made up to level 20 and a lot of monsters to fight as a good send-off for our guys. We've been told to just level our characters up to their maximum and not worry about multi-classing, so the 6 levels of Arcane Trickster Rogue I was planning on taking for some super stealthy role-playing shenanigans won't be relevant to this. 

[Chest Rockwell]

My son requested to play Slay the Spire today and we actually sat and played the whole of act 1 and it help his attention completely. He even gave up his screen time to continue playing it. He's only four ?.

He's always been a fan of games but didn't expect that. Over the moon. Act 2 tomorrow!