NG.com board game thread

Lagduf said:

I still really want to try Formula De

I have heard it takes too long for what it is and it doesn't exactly invoke any sense of racing or speed.

I thought it might be interesting as a game since it's essentially about risk management (wear points, deciding what speed to go) with a little bit of pushing your luck type dice rolling.

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It is just as you describe. I thought it was awesome at first. You should read the first couple of paragraphs of Bobak's Super Spy review: http://www.neo-geo.com/reviews/neo-reviews/super_spy/superspy2.htm

That's a pretty good way of putting how my feelings changed very quickly on Formula D.

I was on one of my nerdy Wikipedia-photo-scavenger hunts (for lack of a better term), and I ended up snapping a photo of Fantasy Flight's HQ. I didn't go in, but I thought of ya, 'Duf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009-0610-007-Roseville-FantasyFlight.jpg

Bobak said:

I was on one of my nerdy Wikipedia-photo-scavenger hunts (for lack of a better term), and I ended up snapping a photo of Fantasy Flight's HQ. I didn't go in, but I thought of ya, 'Duf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009-0610-007-Roseville-FantasyFlight.jpg

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Nice. Such a plain building for one the largest board game publishers in the world. The disparity in size (and profits) between the number one publisher and the rest in the top five is pretty amusing. But Hasbro is such a giant.

GunstarHero said:

It is just as you describe. I thought it was awesome at first. You should read the first couple of paragraphs of Bobak's Super Spy review: http://www.neo-geo.com/reviews/neo-reviews/super_spy/superspy2.htm

That's a pretty good way of putting how my feelings changed very quickly on Formula D.

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LOL.

Is it wrong that I now want to play The Super Spy?

Got some new stuff:

• Descent: The Tomb of Ice
  - The 4th Expansion to Descent, this one has some pretty cool new heroes that sort of break the mold in terms of character design. The hero characters are pretty far out there including a Yeti and a gnome or child (or something) riding a wolf. I think that's awesome though.
  
  Also adds some cool new mechanics to the base descent game such as "feat" cards for the heroes and a "stealth" die. Basically stealth characters are really hard to hit.
  
  Also introduced some nasty new monsters, 6 new scenarios, and of course a bunch of badass new treasure cards.
  
  
• Wings of War: Famous Aces
  
  -Ok so this game has been out for awhile and I just never went and picked it up. It's great. Super simple, super awesome and all using cards (though they have miniatures of the planes now!) This is WW1 Air combat. Super simple, fun and action packed. I really like how you have to plan your planes move three "cards" ahead and that movement by all players is simultaneous, leading to you trying to outguess and outmaneuver your opponents.
  
  This is published by Fantasy Flight Games in the USA but was actually developed by Nexus the wonderful guys behind the fantastic War of the Ring and other titles.
  
  I definitely see myself picking up the 2 other box sets and the booster packs, though I think i'll stay away from the miniatures for now.

I also sort of want to pick this up:

Call of Cthulu Living Card Game (LCG)
- I enjoy CCGs and other Card Driven games. Though in terms of CCGs and other collectible games they eventually devolve in to a money pit and power creep starts to slide in to the later expansions in order to keep players hooked.

Fortunately this is an LCG - meaning you buy the boxed set and get everything you need to play. Then a few times a year the publisher (in this case FFG) will release a series of fixed expansion boosters - meaning you make a single purchase and get all the additional cards. No need to buy dozens of random packs, because there are none. And they're suppose to keep the balance pretty good too.

This game intrigues me for some reason even though I already own Arkham Horror. Though I feel Arkham is best suited for more player (4 ideally?) while this is a 2 player game. It seems neat and I like how you battle it out to "win" the story cards. It almost seems like it is a very tactical game in terms of what cards you should play.

He is completely right about many mass market games such as Candyland and Life! Probably even monopoly too because all that is is an exercise in buying strings of properties where it's most probable a player will land on.

Lots of meaningful decisions there.

This was the chaser:

Lagduf said:

I also sort of want to pick this up:

Call of Cthulu Living Card Game (LCG)
- I enjoy CCGs and other Card Driven games. Though in terms of CCGs and other collectible games they eventually devolve in to a money pit and power creep starts to slide in to the later expansions in order to keep players hooked.

Fortunately this is an LCG - meaning you buy the boxed set and get everything you need to play. Then a few times a year the publisher (in this case FFG) will release a series of fixed expansion boosters - meaning you make a single purchase and get all the additional cards. No need to buy dozens of random packs, because there are none. And they're suppose to keep the balance pretty good too.

This game intrigues me for some reason even though I already own Arkham Horror. Though I feel Arkham is best suited for more player (4 ideally?) while this is a 2 player game. It seems neat and I like how you battle it out to "win" the story cards. It almost seems like it is a very tactical game in terms of what cards you should play.

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that looks pretty fantastic.
I'm a lovecraft fan and the art for it looks great, do these games kind of have story
to it or is it just playing against other folks?

rarehero said:

that looks pretty fantastic.
I'm a lovecraft fan and the art for it looks great, do these games kind of have story
to it or is it just playing against other folks?

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Call of Cthulu probably doesn't have much of a story too it, unless you consider the action of the players and the cards they use to be the story.

Arkham Horror, on the other hand, has a bit of story too it. It's more narrative than Call of Cthulu LCG is. Arkham Horror is a cooperative game (meaning it's a number of players playing together to win vs the "game system.")

I think in this case Arkham Horror is a little more pulp action than dark Lovecraftian. Or at least that's my feeling. I'm not really a Lovecraft fan at all, I just like a good game and an interesting setting.

You can download the rules to both games at Fantasy Flight Games' website.

There was already a Call of Cthulhu card game. It was called Hecatomb and it was really awesome.

I've been waffling back and forth on whether or not Wings Of War is any good. I'll look it over once in awhile and get interested, but promptly always find something else I want 'first'. It's just one of those games I keep putting off.

I've made a few trades this week. I traded Formula D and Dominion for Stone age & Pirate's Cove.

Funny, I traded my Formula D track pack expansion for Dominion a few weeks back. When I opened Dominion I was at a total loss for enthusiasm after looking at the cards. I can't freakin believe how highly ranked Dominion is at BGG, I mean it's seriously unbelievable. It's almost a complete joke of game design, and I can only conclude that it's extremely low difficulty level is one of the reasons it's so highly regarded.

I suppose some of it is my fault, as I didn't realize the term 'deck' has changed to mean a pile of the same card 10 times. It's absolutely laughable, you look through these 'decks' and it's seriously the same exact card 10 times. That's what constitutes a 'deck' of cards in Dominion. Could be the most liberal use of a noun I've ever seen. There's more variety in a pack of Bicycle cards for pete's sake. I really hated this game from the moment I took a look through the box and put it up for trade the same day I got it. I didn't even bother playing it and my game group didn't even have any interest as we all looked through it too.

Anyone try the Age of Conan boardgame yet?

Looks pretty good and the guys at the Conan.com boards all seem to think its great.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27848

GunstarHero said:

There was already a Call of Cthulhu card game. It was called Hecatomb and it was really awesome.

I've been waffling back and forth on whether or not Wings Of War is any good. I'll look it over once in awhile and get interested, but promptly always find something else I want 'first'. It's just one of those games I keep putting off.

I've made a few trades this week. I traded Formula D and Dominion for Stone age & Pirate's Cove.

Funny, I traded my Formula D track pack expansion for Dominion a few weeks back. When I opened Dominion I was at a total loss for enthusiasm after looking at the cards. I can't freakin believe how highly ranked Dominion is at BGG, I mean it's seriously unbelievable. It's almost a complete joke of game design, and I can only conclude that it's extremely low difficulty level is one of the reasons it's so highly regarded.

I suppose some of it is my fault, as I didn't realize the term 'deck' has changed to mean a pile of the same card 10 times. It's absolutely laughable, you look through these 'decks' and it's seriously the same exact card 10 times. That's what constitutes a 'deck' of cards in Dominion. Could be the most liberal use of a noun I've ever seen. There's more variety in a pack of Bicycle cards for pete's sake. I really hated this game from the moment I took a look through the box and put it up for trade the same day I got it. I didn't even bother playing it and my game group didn't even have any interest as we all looked through it too.

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I never played Dominion but based on what I read about it I I didn't see what the fuss was. But then again my primary interest is most definitely not in Eurogames.

I heard Hecatomb was good, but it's a CCG and now out of print. The only out of print CCG's i'm really interested in is the Middle Earth CCG by ICE and I still want to pick up a two player starter set of Wizards of the Coast's Netrunner which is supposedly a pretty solid and balanced game with the two deck starter set.

I think I felt like you with regard to Wings of War.

It was an impulse purchase - something i'd wanted but i'd been spending my money on other games I desired more.

duf you need to get in on some online Brass to get you into the euros.

I finally made the purchase but haven't received it yet.

My friends are tryin to get me to play Twilight Imperium. You have any knowledge on that one? I hear its long as hell. Like 6 hours.

I hope your friends are experienced at Twilight Imperium as I hear it can be quite long unless everyone knows what they are doing.

Are you playing with or without the expansion?

I've heard it fixes some things people didn't like in the base game but of course opinions on this vary.

I've read the rules and I'm interested in playing it but I never got around to because if I wanted to play it i'd have to buy it.

The only new Euro i'm interested in at the moment is Steam.

I tend to favor games featuring direct conflict something that not all Euros have.

I hope the rerelease of Railroad Tycoon ["Rails of the World] hasn't been put on hold, I was looking forward to it. The Rails of Europe map was great.

Lagduf said:

I hope your friends are experienced at Twilight Imperium as I hear it can be quite long unless everyone knows what they are doing.

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I think they've only played twice now and that may be why it took so long for their games (I know the first was at least 6 hours).

Are you playing with or without the expansion?

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I'm not sure. I'll let ya know I think we're going to be playing next weekend along with some euros im bringing over (I think we'll play the euros first since they take max 2 hours usually).

The only new Euro i'm interested in at the moment is Steam.

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I've been reading up on this one as well. It will probably be my next purchase...either that or Automobile (another Martin Wallace game).

Six hours doesn't actually sound too bad.

I would have been worried if it was in the neighborhood of 8-10 hours.

Yeah, it's basically a monster of sorts.

I really don't mind spending an entire afternoon on a game, as my friends and I used to do with out Descent: Journey's in the Dark sessions.

It just takes regular play and planning to get things done.

We'd always have a preset meeting time, we'd play at my apartment, and I would have everything set up and ready to go before I arrived.

Playing some games does require some planning as it's really akin to planning a mini-event. Some titles you can't just play out of nowhere.

Helped of course that we all more or less knew the rules inside and out.

Got 6 new games this past week:

-Toledo
-Royal Palace
-El Capitan
-Chang Cheng
-Talisman 4th edition
-Tomb

I've been hosting a regular board game night every 2 weeks at my place. Met some pretty cool dudes on BGG, and have a regular group of 4-5 players. Last night we played Age of Empires III. I liked this one a ton, I'll be looking to add this to my collection in the future, but not right away since a guy in our group owns it.

I've said this before... But I really wish that somebody with all this shit lived near me...

Allow me to secretly engage in pure geekdom...


I think I am just going to have to have like 3 kids all within 4 years of eachother, wait 14 years and hope they turn out to be geeks.

I'm currently bidding on my "grail" game. It's not something exceedingly rare, or expensive. It's just something I never bothered to pick up as it has been OOP for some time:

The Legend of Robin Hood.

It's an old school Avalon Hill game. One player is Robin and his Merry Men and the other plays as the Sheriff of Nottingham and all the other traditional goons.

The board looks like a wargame map on a really small, abstract scale. Movement is done via areas with a number off oddly shaped areas representing farmlands, a few towns, and Sherwood Forest, etc.

I forget exactly what Robin is trying to do, but I know he can rob rich wanderers in the woods, and marry Maid Marian [though i'm pretty sure he doesn't need to in order to win.]

Being an old school AH title all the playing pieces are of course Cardboard counters. Definitely a cool title, and something that I wish a company like FFG would pick up a retweak. It just screams perfect family title.

Unfortunately HASBRO essentially owns all of Avalon Hill's IPs, so it's kind of hard to get access to their stuff with respect to small companies wanting to redo old AH games.

One side note, don't confuse this game with a more recent game [though still older] called Legends of Robin Hood. That one is a card game.

Lets hope I win this auction. If not, i'll just keep an eye out as it comes up fairly regularly. I've just finally made the decision to get it.

You guys need to play more direct conflict games, or wargames!

Here is a pretty solid review/overview:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/419928

And lets get another topic going:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42964

Railways of England and Wales.

An expansion map for Railroad Tycoon/Rails of the World.

This is news to me, and sounds awesome. Railroad Tycoon is my favorite boardgame, hands down.

So far there has only been one official expansion called "Rails of Europe." It is an official expansion, but they had to drop the name of "Railroad Tycoon" as the developers no longer retained the license to that name, and frankly the game had nothing to do with the PC Railroad Tycoon titles other than the fact that both games [PC and board] were about trains.

Anyway, it looks like the new base game for the "Rails of" series is coming out this year [FINALLY.] It will be called "Rails of the World" and feature two maps, a map intended for introductory play featuring Mexico and a map of the Eastern USA. I'm not sure how the Eastern USA map will be tweaked from the original RRT map, but there are some places that could use improvement.

RRT is pretty low in complexity so you won't be needing a calculator to figure out the financials, but it's a pretty damned fun game. It's basically a resource gathering/economic engine building game.

There are some random bonuses [via card] that can sway the game in base RRT, but Rails of Europe eliminated this by making the bonuses fixed and allowing every player to compete for them right at the begining. In base RRT they would just "pop up."

This is a Martin Wallace title, btw.

I'd also like to get his Age of Steam derivative known as Steam, for some more middling complexity train action.

I'd love to play an 18XX title, but I've sort of just given up on getting one unless I can get my hands on 1830.

As it stand if it's a EURO it really has to have a theme or some mechanics that i'll enjoy.

Just ordered a new game you'd probably hate duf. Automobile by Martin Wallace.

It's a supply and demand type game based on the 1896-1930 US car industry.

cannonball said:

Just ordered a new game you'd probably hate duf. Automobile by Martin Wallace.

It's a supply and demand type game based on the 1896-1930 US car industry.

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Uhm, I just stated above my favorite board game was a Martin Wallace design

Economics, as they are represented in board games, can often lead to quite conflict driven games. Especially when you are fighting over resources.

Generally though I like some sort of building associated with my economic games.

As for the theme of the game, I think it actually sounds quite cool. Unusual, and a particularly cool era to boot.

I'm checking out the rules now, and i'll then post what I think based on reading those.

Is this a full release or one of those limited releases from his Treefrog line?

I'll always play any game once, except 1960: The Making of the President, which I refuse to play to because playing as Nixon would be unbearable, and losing to him even worse.

Have you played Tinners' Trail?

Lagduf said:

Uhm, I just stated above my favorite board game was a Martin Wallace design

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ya I just wanted to give you a hard time

Lagduf said:

Is this a full release or one of those limited releases from his Treefrog line?

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This is one of his 1500 copy Treefrog releases. But, as with Tinner's Trail, it will probably be licensed out for a 2nd edition once the initial stock is gone.

I haven't played Tinner's Trail but I've read the rule book and it looks really fun. I like some randomness in a game to some degree and it seems to pull it off without making the whole thing be about luck. It's getting a reprint by JKLM. New artwork which I'm not really sure I like more or less. But an original is big bucks right now so this will probably do when the time comes.

cannonball said:

ya I just wanted to give you a hard time



This is one of his 1500 copy Treefrog releases. But, as with Tinner's Trail, it will probably be licensed out for a 2nd edition once the initial stock is gone.

I haven't played Tinner's Trail but I've read the rule book and it looks really fun. I like some randomness in a game to some degree and it seems to pull it off without making the whole thing be about luck. It's getting a reprint by JKLM. New artwork which I'm not really sure I like more or less. But an original is big bucks right now so this will probably do when the time comes.

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Nice to see a 2nd printing of many of these Treefrog games are coming out.

Tinners' Trail sounds cool. I wonder if there will be any upgrade to the components as well (not that I really care.)

Do you play any Train games? I wanted to also try Wabash Cannonball/Chicago Express.

Same game, different names from different publishers.

Canonball needs a game with more killing.

Seriously though, that will be the next board game I purchase. I'll be putting in a pre-order soon I imagine.

Conflict of Heroes is a great tactical WW2 series. It's not very complex, but it has an elegant ruleset that I really like. It allows for both players to be engaged during a game turn. This is accomplished through its sort of action-reaction system where you can essentially respond to any action your opponent takes by taking an action of your own (to which the opponent can then respond.)

Also has a little bit of resource management via "CAPS" which are command action points. You can spend these to basically let your units do more/extra stuff in their turn. You have a limited amount each turn, so use them wisely.

Plus it's uh, WW2, which clearly by default means it's pure awesome.

This is the second game in the series, it's stand-alone (meaning you don't need the first game.)

Some expansions are already in the works (that will require this game and/or the first game) which i'm excited about. Particularly the Polish expansion. Polish campaign is awesome, because the Polish are awesome.

Enough rambling, just thought i'd show you want my latest acquisition will be.