I can't answer the first, but as for the second, it needs to be recast after each combat round with the Ancient One. It refreshes, but you need to make the roll again and spend any sanity required to re-cast it.

I played Lords of Water Deep over the weekend.

Lots of fun. I look forward to playing it again. It's very similar to an Agricola type game, where you send your people to gather certain resources and what not, but with some new twists that allow you to be a little more active against your opponents.

Good game.

Gotchya - after the battle we looked at each other and said "that was a lot easier than we thought" I was rolling 9 (spell) plus 4 (fight check) -3 (AO's modifier) every round. ;)

Since I got the final factions for Summon Wars I decided to restart my tournament of factions. Jungle Elves vs. Cloaks was everything I love about the game. It went completely down to the wire with both decks emptied and three total creatures left. I did Vanguard vs. Fallen Kingdom and I finally felt the brunt of the possible randomness of the game. Vanguards drew two champions in their opening two draws. Fallen Kingdom drew two Magic Drains. The Vanguard never had a chance to get going, and the Fallen Kingdom don't need that much help in getting stuff played. It is likely the only time the game can be random enough to where a player is screwed from the get go. I could have played the Vanguard better, I likely need to edit the deck, etc, but still. My guess is Magic Drain won't be part of second summoners. It's not an overpowered card, but it's just rather difficult to overcome in that particular situation. I could see house ruling it to one magic versus 2.

I'm working on getting The Castles of Burgundy down.

After doing to some research on FF's board you are able to collect and spend clue tokens as re-rolls vs. the boss.

Went on a splurge and ordered the following (but have yet to receive them)...

Carcassonne
Catan: Junior
Blokus
Forbidden Island
Flash Point: Fire Rescue
Castle Panic
Ticket to Ride 1910 Expansion

We enjoy games but as far as modern games go, all we really have is Ticket to Ride. I've heard good things about all of these and am looking forward to trying them out.

Own it as well and my group enjoys it. Need to play it more :)

Lots of good co-op/2 person games in there. If you have kids, Forbidden Island is a very good "gateway" co-op game and Catan Junior is also really fun. Blokus is a game I need to play more of to feel competent in terms of strategy.

OK, so I'm having a bunch of guys over for a game of Risk in a few weeks. First time attempting to do something like this. Does anybody have suggestions for house rules? More importantly -- what the hell do you do when the first few guys are knocked out of the game and the rest still have hours to go? I'd love to make this a somewhat-regular get-together, so I'd like it to go smooth.

Thanks for any and all tips.

We used to have risk sessions of 5-6 players and would sometimes form co-ops/alliances between 2 or more players. We could call in our allies to help if things went bad, plus there was also the inevitable backstabbing, which is always fun.

For keeping everyone in the game, if you have 6 or 8 players

We played with 3 teams of 2 a couple times, so only 3 different armies in play and 2 people splitting the 'fronts'. This was actually pretty fun as you had to strategize together and it kept everyone in the game until very close to the end.

If you have 8 players I imagine it would be even more fun with 4 teams.

Added Clash of Cultures to the wishlist. After looking at reviews and posts it seems to hit the right amount of depth while being streamlined for me. Even people who said they like Through the Ages better said CoC will hit the table more often. The manual did seem incredibly short for this type of game so that's a plus.

Genius. Thank you!

Played Kingsburg and Smash Up. Kingsburg felt rather good for most of the game but then I started to analyze the game more. I think having 18 different places to place your dice feeds into the randomness of the dice roll although more plays might need to be done to confirm. It just felt like you still needed the good rolls to get the best return for your placement of dice. Even the guy who won in a landslide said the strategy for the game is to roll high. It is still a game of a march towards VP even if the monster attacks help balance it a little bit and the best place to get VP on your player board is the top row and it goes lower as you go down your board. I liked it enough to keep my rating around a 7, but I honestly don't see a ton of replay coming from it.

I played one game of Smash Up. There were enough mixed reviews I didn't hold out much hope. Early on it felt fine. Later one I felt like I was fighting my deck since the wizards give you so many ways to draw more cards and the robots offered additional options. I felt like I couldn't play my hand fast enough. I got to 8 VP and started to plan out what I was going to do in terms of going after bases and when a base when down one player said the game was over, and I was like, "Wait, what?" I'm to blame from this as much as anything, but the game felt done way too quick. I think I would need to play it more so I can get a better working combo or just see how much the various decks do or don't work together. I'm guessing the future expansions will help it out. I can see more replay in Smash Up, but I felt like Kingsburg was the better game although not by much.

Any suggestions for a game that works well playing solo? I've been playing Arkham Horror solo lately but the length of set up is too damn long for an evening of play.

Also, anybody play(ed) Risk Factions? Looks interesting...

What length are you looking for? Pretty much any co-op works solo.

I would say around the 1 - 3 hour range... Any thoughts on Mage Knight for solo play?

I would think Mage Wars works well enough for solo, though selection paralysis could be an issue depending on how deep you want to get with it. Summoner Wars seems a better bet to knock out in a quicker time frame.

On a tangentially related note, just got to play Sentinels of the Multiverse and I have the base + 1 expansion arriving tomorrow. Love the theme, love the game play, excited about both soloing it and playing with wife+daughter

Outside of wargames, it's likely the best for solo play.

Mage Knight is fantastic for solo play. However, it is not short. I got it for Christmas and I've played about 4 times, each session was 2-4 hours.

My latest game was a couple nights ago, and here was my experience:
- I spent about 15 minutes setting up (this could be shortened if I played more frequently and could remember everything better).
- I then played for just under 2 hours, getting through approximately 55-60% of the game (this would be shorter if I played more frequently and could remember things better). At that point I knew I could not win, and it was getting late, so...
- I packed up (that took another 5 minutes).

Overall I love the game, but I don't play it super often because it takes so long, and I also am not substantially faster because I don't play it that often. It's sort of chicken-and-egg. I'm guessing eventually I will commit enough information to long-term memory that I will be able to play through an entire game in 2.5-3 hours, but I'm not there yet.

Mage Knight works very well solo.

After like 10 games, I -finally- beat Ghost Stories on my ipad

Kudos.

That is no small feat. I've tried a number of times with the board game itself, and have NEVER won.

You are the wind beneath my wings! Well for the next hour or so.

Castles of Burgundy moves into #3 for me behind Summoner Wars and Cosmic Encounter. That's just a beautifully designed game. I did a play through for a two-player game, and I can kind of see where two-player is better than the max of 4. I definitely can play the basic boards a couple more times before moving on to the others, and I even have the expansion boards as well. I'll have to get the expansion tiles too.

By all accounts my gaming group should have died at various stages but I and another person kept coming to it even if it meant it was only us. After having something like 7 of the 9 times having only 1-2 people show up, it looks like we will have roughly 5-7 playing twice a month.

Minature Market has Dominant Species as their deal of the day. This is being considered one of the best games out there. Great mechanics, interactive, war gamish, euro gamish.
The reviewers all love it.
It is lengthy. 3-4 hours.
$40 today only, marked down from $79.

And my Federal refund came last night. Coincidence?

Im on this one.

Here is the link:
Dominant Species

That's a great deal. I wish I had more people to play it with or I would be all over that.

I've thought about adding it, but I'm still not sure. I think I need to play it first. I went and planned out my collection as far as I could trying to hit as high of a number possible to see if I went beyond what I would consider a max sized collection, and I still have room but games are also still being made. :lol:

Game group is tomorrow and going to see if I can finally see if I can get Glory to Rome played. Long story short, Ed, the guy behind CGF, lost enough money through GtR's KS and went without a contract job long enough the company had to shut down and is only recently starting back up now that Ed has a new six month contract job. There are people still without their KS copies of the game, even in the US, and I still don't have replacement cards. The estimate now is another black box reprint doesn't happen until the fall so I might have to wait a full year to get replacement cards.

Interesting, since none of this has been communicated on the KS updates. Heck there aren't even any complaints there.

I'm going to be playing some games tomorrow as well and am really hoping to play Tammany Hall for the first time after getting it last week.

When we last played a couple weeks ago we played Letters from Whitechapel for the first time. I loved the mind games you can play as Jack the Ripper and had the police pretty well fooled the first two nights, but got a bit careless and got caught the third even though I had them off base as far as where my hideout was. If I'd played it a bit safer I would have easily reached my hideout the 4th night.

I played Last Night on Earth with some co-workers the other night. It seems like a fun game and we had a good time, although I've never been a fan of the whole zombie thing that seems to account for 50% of all game themes lately.

Overall though it's certainly a game I'd play again, as the 'us vs them' teamwork was a lot of fun and the dice-rolling added some epic "oh SHIT!" moments. If you like zombies, even better.

I have a buddy I am really trying to recruit for some gaming. He loves Zombie themes so I was thinking of either getting LNoE or Zombicide.

Crap. Waited to long. Dominant Species is sold out.

ED is posting an update on the 25th. I'll assume people have moved on from complaining on KS. There's just some minor stuff on BGG at this point. Any person communicating with backers on BGG have been gone from the company since around October at the latest. Even CGF's Twitter account has been silent. The company has as few of people running it as possible.


I waiting for the reprint/new edition of this.

I wouldnt buy a cambridge games factory game, definitely wouldnt kickstart one. I bought a copy from boards and bits to trade though and ended up getting dunwich horror and smash up for it.

I purchased 'The Walking Dead' board game last night to play solitaire. Will post my impressions after I give it a whirl, but was curious if anyone else had played it.

Are you talking about the Cryptozoic one or the ZMan Games one? I own the ZMan version, and I enjoy it. There are several event cards that play mind games with the group, for example one has everyone decide whether they are going to fight or flee. If everyone says 'fight,' everyone gains one resource. If everyone says 'flee,' everyone takes 1 damage. If there's a mixed result, the people who said 'fight' take 1 damage, and the people who said 'flee' gain a resource. So if you have just one guy (or girl) who's selfish, he/she can screw the whole group out of benefits. Which makes you rethink what YOU'RE going to answer...

The game is somewhat luck based - the randomly chosen encounter cards each have different rewards, and some (specifically gaining an extra follower) are far more valuable than others. Gaining an extra follower or two early is a huge advantage that can be difficult for other players to overcome. It's also not the shortest game in the world, and if someone falls behind early, there's a tendency for someone to lose interest and feel like they have no shot to win. I've actually come from behind by a lot to win (if you die, you have the option to start over as one of the remaining unused characters...I died about halfway through), so that's not at all the case...but it can definitely seem that way.

As a solo game, I'm not sure that it would be that great - the best parts of the game are the social interaction cards such as the one I described above. Without those, the game is slightly above average at best.

Dola

Any tips (Ping: H_B) on turning people on to Arkham Horror? I love the heck out of the game, but it's so gosh darned hard to get people into the game. A lot of confusion and a slow moving game at the beginning, and people are usually ready to give up before we get halfway through the game. Tonight we tried a 6 player variant. Three of us were familiar with the game, two had played it once before but it was a while back, and the last one was coming in cold. These are all pretty avid gamers (we play [and love] Eclipse regularly in this group), and by about the 5th turn it was clear that all three of the new people were no longer interested in the game. I'm familiar with the rules and am pretty good at explaining things, but it hits our table so infrequently that even I have to look back to the rules to clarify things occasionally.

When the game fell apart tonight, we opened up Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2nd Edition) to get a taste for the action. There are an awful lot of pieces for the game, but it seems to be fairly straightforward for what it is. We dove right in to the campaign's first mission to try learning the rules, and all of us ended up with a pretty decent grasp of things within the first half hour or so. Curious to see how the game works in campaign mode, with the characters leveling up as we go.

I am not sure if I have any tips to make the game more engaging. It can be a pretty complex and challenging game. There are so many rules, cards, tokens, etc. I have found it easy to get people to enjoy it because it's a co-op game. It makes teaching the game easier, since you're all in it together, and helping someone learn the rules doesn't hurt you or someone else.

The group I tend to play with is not all that competitive. We pretty much all prefer to play co-op games as opposed to competitive games, though we do play a few.

I think if a game is going to be a bigger undertaking you kind of preface that aspect before getting into the game. I try to give people a feel of the game and not just the rules of it. Plus, some people aren't simply going to like certain games. I think AH given its intensive epic nature is going to have a love it or hate it kind of nature with people. Even with my group I try to plan out games based on who is coming.

I played Glory to Rome. I think I need to rephrase saying the game swings to say it avalanches. :lol: Opening hand I got the card that would allow me to win instantly, but I had to play the card as a building, build it, and then complete two sets of cards in order to trigger the effect. Needless to say it's a pain to complete. The other person played a more normal hand and after slowly getting past the initial learning curve really started to combo stuff. At one point there was only one material left to be grabbed but she couldn't pull it off despite having numerous cards and clientele. I eventually was able to pull off my victory condition, and I'm glad I did since I had zero chance of ever catching up to her.

I give it an initial 8. I need to play it more for that to go up, but there's a definite learning curve that prevents it from going higher right now.

It's a very good game, and it is balanced, however, skilled players who know the deck will beat unskilled players every time.

Yep. Both in our initial play took some time playing early on. I can see once you get the hang of it you can ride the avalanche aspect of it as where new players have to go through that whole process. Since my games tend to be on the strategic side and I own them, I'll likely tell new players don't be surprised if I win a number of games by default, and it's more about them getting better and having fun. I really should have lost that one but again it fell just right for me.

Just got done playing a couple games of Last Night On Earth: Timber Peak stand/alone expansion. We played the same scenario twice (blow up the town) and zombies won both times. The objective is to search for explosives to plant in certain buildings. Easy enough - only problem is there were only 5 explosive cards out of 40 (I think) so it was just a matter of luck where the cArds land in the hero card pile. We both lost because we would have pretty much had to go through 90% of the deck to get the fourth explosive. Next time we may make a house rule where we take out some of the item cards to make it a little more easier for huge hero to win. We both had a good time playing LNoE over a couple of beers and watching 1st season of the Walking Dead :)

Michael's has another 40% off sale so I went and grabbed a 8x10x2.25 shadow box picture frame and now I have a dice tray for just over $10.

Had a lot of fun playing Tammany Hall. There was a great deal of negotiation and scheming that goes along with the very simple actions on your turn. Nearly won after controlling an immigrant population (the Italians loved me) and two of the bonus coastal regions all game along with being elected mayor twice, but someone else did the same and beat me by two points. Was cursed by winning the first election for mayor which feels like it sets you back quite a bit.

I posted this on the WW game I was playing, but it wasn't appreciated there lol. I did a quick change of lyrics to go along with a game auction I am running at BGG title "Some Games That I Used To Know: Auction"

Now and then I think of when we were together
Like when you made me so happy I could die
Told myself that you were right for me
Gave all my other games some company
But that was love and it's an ache I still remember

You can get addicted to a certain kind of buying
Like resignation to CSI, always CSI
Playing by myself did not make sense
So told myself that I could make some friends
But I'll admit that no wanted to come over

Then my credit card cut me off
My bank account was empty and I had nothing
Now I don’t even need your love
But I never even played you and that feels so rough
I hope your value didn’t drop too low
Have paypal collect your funds and reduce my collection number
I guess that I don't need that though
Now you're just some games that I used to know
Now you're just some games that I used to know
Now you're just some games that I used to know

Still havent gotten my copy yet. :(