The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[Chest Rockwell]

Ah nice. Coincidentally my brother and I dug out my MtG cards last night to try to make some simple starter decks to introduce the kids to it. 

Edited December 22, 2025 by Chest Rockwell

[JNLister]

Played Yokohama with a group which has played it countless times.

Waited till the owner had put all the cards out.

Told her she'd messed up the set-up.

Told her she'd only put five tech cards out rather than six.

Ignored her protests and pointed to the cards one by one, counting to five.

Ignored her protests that I'd missed out one of the cards when counting.

Waited until she realised she'd fallen for the same thing I do EVERY SINGLE TIME WE PLAY.

[JNLister]

Played The Fox Experiment which is about breeding foxes to have friendlier traits. You start each round by selecting a male and female, each of which have different colour dice that correspond to traits. The rolls of those dices (plus a wild card dice and some wild card tokens) lets you create a fox with its own traits and earn some points. You have "study cards" which have a particular combination of traits and you have to complete each stage of the card by making a fox that meets that requirement.

The male and female then get "retired" and the created fox goes into the pool for the next generation, so it scales up and each generations scores higher for the various traits (ie has a shit load of dice on it). Then there's various points on offer for objective cards and upgrades.

It's a bit complex at first but plays quite smoothly and once you know the drill, a lot of the admin can be done simultaneously so it runs quickly. The main problem is that it feels like how lucky your early rolls are creates an advantage that escalates in later rounds so it's hard to catch up. It's also got the feeling of a game where an analytical player will figure out there's a specific strategy that will almost always win.

[ReturnOfTheMack]

Ran a DND one shot tonight, my first since the 90s. 

I basically dumped the party into the poem Beowulf, but made sure there was a language barrier so they saw Grendals mother as an injured, frail woman. Yeah, I managed to get a good aligned party to massacre a village, kill the hero, and refuse an old man a chance at Valhalla, whilst saving the antagonist. I felt a bit smug by the end

[Chest Rockwell]

Played a really novel trick taking co-op card game recently called The Crew. You have to try to complete a shared objective, but you're not allowed to talk about what cards you have, but there's a mechanism by which you can communicate clues.

I really enjoyed it, it was very different from anything I've played before in the way it plays out.

Also a late thank you for the Flip7 chat in this thread as I picked it up in Dec to have around as a good party game for the Christmas season and it did the trick well. Also comes in handy for days out as we can play it on the train, and it's tricking my kids into doing maths at the breakfast table.

Only minor annoyance is that stupid box it comes in. I have an old mtg deck box though so I just need to dig that out and put the cards in there. 

[SuperBacon]

@Chest Rockwell (and all those with small children* really) I forgot to say me and the kids played loads of turns of Six Second Scribbles over the Christmas period and it was a really good laugh and well worth picking up for a tenner.

Nothing fancy, you get a card, have to scribble the clues and your opponent guesses, there are 3x levels of difficulty. 

Some of my scribbles were appalling, I really should've posted some.

*mine aren't small anymore so it's good for everyone really

[JNLister]

Played The Druids of Edora in which you move through different clearings in a forest and place dice to take actions. (Three different actions in each clearing, you can only take one of the spots, but once a spot is taken that action is done.) 

It's got a crunchy balance of "lots of different things to do and you can't do them all" and some scoring options that make tough choices. For example, you have to spend what's effectively in-game money (which is finite) to place dice and higher value costs more. However, at the end of the game, there's some big points for whoever placed the highest value die on each clearing.

Similarly, you get points for being first to connect specific pairs of locations on the edge of the board with your dice, but its one point for each die in the connection. So you can go for the shortest route to try to be first, or take a risk on making a longer route for more points but having more chance of somebody else beating you to it.

The big downside is that every component/rule/scoring type has a druidy name and associated runey icon, none of which are intuitive or memorable, so there's a lot of looking up what stuff means.

[JNLister]

Played Village Green, a quick and light card game that's basically Britain In Bloom. All you do on your go is take either a plant/flower card (which goes to build up a 3x3 grid) or a prize category card (which you place above a column or beside a row). The prize category cards each score the column or row in a different way (eg points for specific sequence of flower colours, point for pairs of the same tree). You can choose to overlay a prize category card to replace an existing one, but the moment somebody has the 3x3 grid you finish that round and end, so it can be a gamble hanging on and potentially not having a full set of prize category cards. Very simple, but a good filler.

[Jazzy G]

my DM messaged me yesterday and asked whether I wanted to join his Sunday campaign. He said I could play as my Bard, or a new Bard character, but I had the idea for a different character. At first I was looking into a way to integrate tarot reading into a bard, but realised the best character for that would maybe be a wizard from the school of divination. Then I got unnecessarily creative with it and so the idea I'm going with at the moment is that of a female rogue who's been conning people by doing dodgy tarot readings. However, one of the readings led to somebody important dying, so she's trying to lay low by disguising herself as a male wizard from the school of divination and has fallen in with this party. If I play as an elf it'll help with the disguise, and by going with Arcane trickster I can take some wizard spells to help with it. Obviously we just let the rest of the party know that I'm a wizard, and I do a lot of sneaky rolls for deception etc and see how long I can keep the pretence up for. If nobody else speaks Thieves Cant I can pretend they're my magic words etc. I've got it planned, I hope.

The person who fills in if our DM can't make it on Thursdays was talking about running some shorter quests rather than one shots as well, and suggested we make chaarcters for them. The idea for that one was a Platinum Dragonborn (radiant breath) paladin who has taken the Oath of the Ancients and so looks all menacing, but actually has the personality of a scout master as they seek to spread the message of how beautiful the world and nature is. In the manner of the "high" characters from the Red Dwarf episode Demons And Angels.

[JNLister]

Played Molly House, in which you are part of the gay community (*) in 18th century London, trying to create joy through illicit parties without attracting enough notoriety/attention that the police raid the venue. It's semi-cooperative as you want to have the most joy yourself while raising the community joy above a certain threshold before all the houses get raided (in which case only informers, aka traitors) can win, or you complete five rounds, in which case the community falls apart through apathy.

It's from the same developers as Pax Pamir and is the kind of game that looks very simple (it looks like a cross between poker and Monopoly with only 12 spaces) but is fiendishly complex to develop the winning strategy. The major mechanism is a sort of cooperative poker of trying to build a winning hand together (aka have a super fun party), but you're also trying to make sure you do it in a way that means you contribute certain cards that score you points and/or ditch bad cards (undercover police). The catch is that you might actually want to tank the party (which costs the organiser points) or trick other people into bringing wrong'uns to the party and being penalised.

There's also a big tension in that you build up a reputation at each venue and that can be good for getting points at parties there, but bad when it's raided because you are first in line to get indicted (which leads to a trial at the end of the game where very swingy dice rolls can mean your points lead disappears.)

It has to be said it's a tricky learn/teach, not so much because any of the rules are complicated but because there's just a lot of rules to remember and a lot of the terminology is not intuitive (eg your "reputation" is both a physical area where you play cards and cubes, but also is the number of cards/cubes you have in that area). However, it really comes down to being less about the rules being complex and more about the fact that figuring out how to play and win is not obvious and is the real meat of the game.

(* Hi, AJ.)

[ReturnOfTheMack]

Second one shot done. A time loop where each time they were more prepared for the next villain, but ultimately couldn't win as the last blew up the entire village where it died.

The only way to escape was to walk backwards through the portal that brought them. Took until the 8th cycle before they figured it out.

[Jazzy G]

Last week a guy walked out of our D&D campaign. He'd never really fit in for the small number of weeks he was playing. Our campaign is pretty role play heavy, and he wanted loads of combat. Anyway, we went for our brew break mid-session, and I overheard the lady in charge of where we play on the phone to somebody looking stressed out. Turns out he'd told his mum that our campaign was all just about shagging and we were ignoring him, and she'd rung in to complain. He also moaned that he didn't get to have a sausage sandwich when our DM had ordered some to eat and then lost his appetite and offered them to the rest of the party before him, but that was based purely on where he was sitting. 

We do have a very bawdy sense of humour, and one of the running jokes is that our female barbarian sleeps with traders to get out of us having to pay for stuff, but out of character she'll keep saying things and completely forgetting that it can be turned into an innuendo. 

Anyway, this week we had a new player join, a Tiefling warlock. She brings an interesting dynamic to the party. It'll be interesting to see what happens when everybody is here. 

Sunday campaign is interesting. My rogue/not wizard is a changeling so has no gender. I found my D&D Tarot cards in storage, which I'm going to be using as part of the character. We're doing a one shot this weekend as some of the party are on holiday so I'm making a new character for that, and in a few weeks time my DM and I are going to meet up for a learn to DM course which I'm looking forward to. I think it's the finer points of world building and the likes, but I have a friend at Uni who has grown up kids who'd like to try a campaign which I'd like to try and start over the summer. I know some of the members of the Autism group I'm a member of wanted to try and get a campaign going as well. 

[JNLister]

Played Alma Mater, in which you run a university. It's worker placement though apparently looks like Coimbra (which I've not played). It's pretty simple in concept but a lot of planning/adjusting/thinking needed. The main mechanical "gimmick" is the currency. You have money, which you spend on books, and then you spend books to get students and professors (which are the key driver in getting points, achievements, etc).

There's a different colour for each player and you keep most of your coins available to spend, but you can put coins of your own colour in a store, which lets other players buy them at a discount (compared with just getting them from the box); coins in your store also get you income (money) at the start of the round.

How much people want particular colours of book (and thus whether you can sell them) will vary during the game because the first person to buy a particular professor will determine the combination of colours needed for anyone else to buy it. Meanwhile there's an achievement track where you have to meet a certain threshold (eg an amount of money, a combination of students, a number of points) to move up each space. The order of players on this track at the end of each round affects the combination of book colours needed to get particular students.

It's quite headscratchy but manageable (certainly compared to some of the games people are our group play) - you can fairly easily set yourself a goal and plan out a series of turns for a round, but you have to be thinking about what books you will need for the next round and how the cost is going to change.

[JNLister]

Played Railway Boom, which is an auction game disguised as late 19th century Japanese Ticket To Ride. Straightforward but detailed structure where each turn is auction for trains and carriages (which have different capacities and bonuses)/auction for rights to put a station in the city and then expand your network/auction for technology (aka special ability cards)/income/run your trains/auction for an end game bonus (winner gets the most points per whatever the bonus is for). Repeat four times, points for leftover stuff, points for your biggest cluster train network.

It's very neatly integrated as its all based around resources (coal/money/technology/wood/victory points), all of which except for points have a per-round income. It all fits together so you need wood to bid on trains, coal to run the trains, technology to get technology cards, money to bid on cities and so on. That means you have to be careful bidding too high and then not having resources you need to use later on. Then you can get stuff from running the trains and expanding the cities. Hard to describe, but it all feels very natural and connected. Definitely one I think would evolve nicely over multiple plays as you get more experienced with what's a good score/what options are worth pursuing/what cards are valuable when, which would make the auction process more informed and competitive. (There's also a neat "whoever bids lowest gets first bid in the next auction" setup and a For Sale like rule where the two highest bidders pay their bid in full, the next highest only pays half, and the lowest bidder doesn't have to pay anything, which creates a bit of psyching out.)

Edited March 27 by JNLister

[Jazzy G]

Went to a DM learn to play yesterday with the guy that runs the two campaigns I play. One of the people I play with donated half the price of it because she thinks I'd be a really good DM. I was moved by that. 

I found it really interesting. There was a lot of food for thought, and I started coming up with an idea for a campaign, or at least a setting as we were asked to do as "homework".