The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[Thunderplex]

I know it’s a straightforward games, but 4?  Kids impressive.

[Merzbow]

I picked up the Zeon starter deck for the brand new Gundam TCG, now I just need to find people to play.. like all modern card games they seem to get scalped by scummy traders but luckily Forbidden Planet had decks in store as online was dead.

It looks like a pretty cool little game though, I just know when the booster packs come out it's going to rinse me dry.

[Onyx2]

I might've posted about Flip 7 before. It's an excellent evolution of Blackjack with no bidding, just a push your luck card game, very family friendly. Draw cards one at a time, hope you don't go bust, get 7 cards to get a bonus. Super simple. 

Stupid Asmodee got AI to write the rules on their blog and they are absolute gibberish. Lots of made up but plausible rules ("the player with the fewest 7s wins") and just goes to show the peril of unchecked AI content hallucinations:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250725183753/https://www.asmodee.co.uk/blogs/news/how-to-play-flip-7

Edited July 27, 2025 by Onyx2

[JLM]

Yeah I like that it sort of does card counting for you as well, so you can make an informed-ish decision and then STILL go bust on two threes because the universe is cruel. The makers of the game probably owe me money as I have sold three copies of it by showing it to people once. Has managed to rope in family members and my few outlier friends who rarely board game as it takes minutes to explain and is consistently hilarious. 

Edited July 27, 2025 by JLM

[cobra_gordo]

My 13 year old son invited three of his mates round yesterday for a light, casual game of Hero Quest, with me running the game. Two and a half hours later, with what I hoped would be a fairly simple quest resorting to utter fucking bedlam, it finally came to an end and I retreated to the living room where I promptly fell asleep watching Mission Impossible 2.

Game was a good laugh, we've played it before as a family but always with his two begrudgingly involved older brother and sister, so for him to have three of his mates with similar senses of humour involved really elevated it. They wanted to initially play D&D but I'm not confident enough with the rules yet to DM a game so I did allow some leniency/ silliness. A couple of turns in the one playing as the barbarian asked "Can I use an action to chuck the dwarf a couple of spaces", I said sure, if you can roll a four or above. Much excitement and disappointment when he rolled a three. Towards the end, and for reasons I cannot fucking compute, two of them were getting obsessed with wanting to check under the various bits of in-game furniture and scenery for treasure/ traps/ whatever and asked if as part of their escape from the dungeon could they could take a table each with them. I said yes and they could add it to their items but it would half their movement. Everything else played normally, it got pretty tense at one point when they realised I was flanking them with half a dozen orcs and goblins. Genuinely looking forward to him inviting them around again, just hopefully for not as long. It proper wore me out.

That leads me on to how I spent my evening after watching the football- working out if I've got the energy to paint up the whole set of miniatures. I'm reasonably competent at miniature painting but I get distracted and bored quite easily so I'm terrified of starting and not finishing and having a half painted set knocking around. There's 36 bits of furniture alone and that's before you get to not ruining the hero models themselves by getting eyeballs wonky. I've left the set out on the dining table so it's not out of mind. Will update later when I undoubtedly end up buying primer tonight from Halfords. 

[Thunderplex]

I’m doing a shit load of painting at the moment, I feel your pain!

[Jazzy G]

The D&D campaign ended last week for a treat we all levelled our characters up to 20 and had a massive fight with some monsters our DM picked. When he saw the spells I'd picked he started to get worried. It was a lot of fun. New campaign with a different DM starts this Thursday. I have to roll stats for my Harengon Ranger character today. 

[JNLister]

Played The Staufer Dynasty (you're trying to win favour with Henry VI by wangling your followers into his royal courts as he travels round Europe. The game itself is good enough: it's area majority (whoever has the most people in an area gets the points) with the twist that you don't always know for certain which area is going to be scored in a round, so manipulating that (without making it too obvious) is a key part of the game.  There's also another good twist in that you have secret end game goals which score only based on the final positioning, so you have to weight up whether to tank the last round and concentrate on that, or take advantage of everyone else doing that and leaving that round's points open. Plus, again, going to set up your end of game goal too early in the last round risks making it too obvious what you are doing and people can then sabotage you.

The downside is the terrible rulebook. From what I can tell, it was a German game which a fan imported and made their own translation and it seems as if the manufacturers then just re-released it with that translation rather than getting it tested or done properly. You wind up with all sorts of stuff that is ambiguous or poorly ordered. A few example off the top of my head:

* There's a two page explanation of how you score the areas at the end of the round, only after which does it tell you how to decide which areas are being scored.
* There's a card with a vertical line with arrows at the top and bottom and the number 1. The manual calls this a movement discount card. You are probably thinking that means using that card means movement costs one less than normal. Wrong. It means movement costs 1, regardless of the normal cost. I would suggest "discount" is not the clearest name for this.
* In the end game scoring instructions it tells you to first remove all the player pieces in non-scoring areas to reduce clutter and potential confusion. We (and I expect most people) just took back our own pieces and put them in front of us ready to pack up after scoring. Only later does it tell you that the tiebreaker for the game is pieces in front of you, ie the ones you didn't have on the board at all at the end of the game.

[Carbomb]

Forgot to mention that, at the weekend, I met up with a couple of mates to play at the new branch of Bad Moon Cafe on Holloway Road. Nice little place - much smaller than the main one in Borough, and smaller selection of games, but still plenty 

Played Wavelength, which we've played before - that's always good fun, and I highly recommend it. A big part of the entertainment factor is trying to figure out how well you know your friends' opinions on things.

Tiny Towns is fun, but infuriating. 

The big one we played was Fate of the Fellowship, the LOTR game that's based on the Pandemic system. It's really good. They've done a great job of working in detail without making it too dense and crunchy. All the different characters have good special abilities that fit the mechanism while staying true to the story, and I also liked that they worked in Gandalf going from grey to white by fulfilling his starting quest of facing the Balrog. Strongly recommended.

Edited October 1, 2025 by Carbomb
Gavin Peacock

[Chest Rockwell]

Picked up Meeples & Monsters for my son's birthday. We've had a few games now and we are really enjoying it. It's a nice mix of a fantasy rpg theme with leveling up your characters for fighting monsters, some worker placement and bag building a-la Quacks. I don't think it's super deep, but that's fine. It's still a lot of fun as there's a decent variety of things you can do. 

[JNLister]

I played Marco Polo 2, which is well-regarded but pretty much a generic "worker placement but the dice are the workers". First go was terrible as somebody taught it having only ever played it online, so didn't know the rules as well as they thought, which turned it into a game that lasts four hours and then the first player wins. Much better when we replayed it, though it's not really got anything special other than a rule where some spaces aren't restricted to one player, but if you're not the first to claim them, you have to pay money based on the die value. So you get a bit of tension between "high dices get you more stuff/movement/benefit from the action and "low dices are much cheaper to play, especially in later turns.

I also finally played Flip 7 which became the big filler game when I was away from my regular group (which just hit its 10th anniversary). It's a very simple push your luck card game where your choice is literally "take a card" or "stop taking cards". The deck is made up mainly of number cards: twelve "12" cards, eleven "11" cards and so on, down to a single "1" plus a zero. Your score for the round is whatever the cards you take add up to (with a bonus 15 points if you draw seven number cards), but if you get two cards of the same number you bust and score nothing. You keep playing rounds till at least one person has passed 200 points and then it's highest wins.

What makes it work is partly the balance of "the higher the cards you've drawn, the more likely you are to bust if you continue" and partly the additional special cards which are:

Various ones which add a set number of points to your total but don't count as number cards.
A 2x card that doubles your total for the round.
A freeze card that you can play on anyone (including yourself) that immediately ends their round, meaning they score whatever they currently have.
A card that means you must draw three more cards immediately.
A second chance card that means if you take a card that would have busted you (ie matching one you have), you discard both it and the second chance card, then draw again.

Very simple to teach and I can definitely see the appeal for repeated play.

[JNLister]

I played Evolution: New World, a remade/adjusted version of the original Evolution from 2015. It's a simple enough idea: you are creating creatures and giving them adapative traits like speed or burrowing or being poisonous. Each round you add some more traits (or use a trait card face down to make a new creatures), then take food or shelter tokens from a limited supply (the latter protect completely from attack). Some beneficial traits such as being larger mean animals need more food, and there's even some negative traits you can apply to your opponents' cards like a parasite that means they need even more food.

Non-predator animals without enough food die, while predators without enough food must attack a suitable target (ie one without shelter or any defensive traits the predator can't overcome.) The target dies and all its cards go back into the deck. The predator could also die (eg if the target is poisonous) or be forced to attack one of the player's own animals.

After six rounds, any surviving animals score, with points for animals, traits and some bonuses from better traits.

While it's thematic, you can kinda see under the skin and it's clearly all about which cards counter which cards and your approach to risk (eg do you go all in on a megatraited animal and hope it survives). But I won, which makes it a great game, and I enjoyed being rewarded for the realisation that I could just create new animals specifically to feed my own predators!

[CavemanLynn]

Can anyone recommend any tools or guides to building a small Warhammer 40k army?

A thousand years ago, I used to play Warhammer (Chaos Dwarves - got them because they reminded me of a psychotic music teacher we had; lost every game I played because despite being billed as artillery guys, their artillery was dogshit) and 40k (Dark Eldar - sexy space pirates, middling but dead easy to paint with black undercoat). It's recently got back into my radar so I fancied putting together a basic 1000 point Space Wolves army. I drew up a quick list of what I thought it'd look like based on my old understanding, I downloaded the core rules and codexes, and maybe it's the new unit-based system banging against my legacy knowledge of points allocations, but I'm finding it a frustrating disjointed mess of jargon and dependencies. The actual game rules seem straightforward, I can't get a clear idea of how many types of troops I'm allowed/need to pick, what enhancements they can get, etc.

Any help?

[Thunderplex]

There’s a dedicated wargaming thread, you may get more answers there.

 

[Retro Red]

4 hours ago, CavemanLynn said:

Can anyone recommend any tools or guides to building a small Warhammer 40k army?

A thousand years ago, I used to play Warhammer (Chaos Dwarves - got them because they reminded me of a psychotic music teacher we had; lost every game I played because despite being billed as artillery guys, their artillery was dogshit) and 40k (Dark Eldar - sexy space pirates, middling but dead easy to paint with black undercoat). It's recently got back into my radar so I fancied putting together a basic 1000 point Space Wolves army. I drew up a quick list of what I thought it'd look like based on my old understanding, I downloaded the core rules and codexes, and maybe it's the new unit-based system banging against my legacy knowledge of points allocations, but I'm finding it a frustrating disjointed mess of jargon and dependencies. The actual game rules seem straightforward, I can't get a clear idea of how many types of troops I'm allowed/need to pick, what enhancements they can get, etc.

Any help?

Best thing to do when starting is get the Space Wolves curated army box called Combat Patrol, it’s built to play a scaled down version of the game using what’s in the box (against other faction’s combat patrol boxes) and can then be built on as you expand up to proper 1000/2000 point armies. If you have access to a local Warhammer shop they’ll run starter sessions designed to help you into the game as well. Otherwise a local gaming shop/group could do the same if you have that as an option.