Okay, I've been on a board and card gaming kick recently. Say, the last six months or so. I know some other Gladers have talked about their non video/RP gaming on occasion, but there haven't really been any regular discussion on the subject outside of two or three threads where, say, Foamy's talked about a specific boardgame or two, or Nitefox and LK have brought up their rediscovery of Magic: the Gathering.
So let's open this thread as a place to share our current loves, maybe?
I've been playing a lot of Android: Netrunner from Fantasy Flight Games, Puerto Rico from Rio Grande Games, Disaster Looms which was Kickstarted by Break From Reality Games. I finally took a deep breath and dove into Space Alert! from Czech Games Edition, and have found that to be a blast (a really stressful blast, but still a blast), too. Oh, and to round out a top 5 recent games, I suppose, I'll throw in the X-Wing Miniatures Game from Fantasy Flight, as well.
So, now that I've tossed out some titles, I figure it's only fair to give a brief rundown of what each game is so my fellow gamers can decide if it's up their respective alleys.
I've already
made a thread about
Android: Netrunner, but it's come out with the first two packs in the first expansion cycle now, so it's worth adding that they've been very canny and creative in expanding the Core set. They've done an admirable job steering clear of power creep, while offering additional options to help you make more tightly themed decks and new/expanded combinations for you to build around. I've seen that decks I've played against and talked about have gotten much more diverse very quickly, and I haven't seen any runaway decks that MUST be countered in construction etc. I was looking forward to the evolution of the game before, and I'm even more excited now that it's gotten off to a good start.
Moving on,
Puerto Rico is a game that's been around for several years, now, but I only got exposure to at Dragon*Con last year. It's a Eurogame through and through, with an abstracted theme that dresses up what are essentially economic gameplay elements and little direct competition until it comes time to score up points. The premise of the game sets you up as the manager of a small colonial agricultural empire whose goal is to exploit the New World's natural resources and ship goods off to Europe. Each turn is broken into multiple phases, and for each phase, each player takes his turn before everybody moves on to the next phase.
The catch is that the phases have no specific order, nor will all of them be used in a turn. Instead, players take turns choosing which phase to do next in the turn, gaining extra efficiency in that phase for being the one to choose it. The phases are, briefly, the Settler phase (in which you choose a new type of field to plant in your plantation), the Builder's phase (in which you may purchase buildings for your village -- these are processing facilities that allow your fields to be productive, or other buildings that offer bonuses or special abilities), the Craftsman phase (in which your fields that have a matching processing building produce usable crops), the Trader phase (in which you may sell crops for money), the Captain phase (in which you may ship crops off to Europe for victory points), the Mayor phase (in which you may ship in colonists to work in fields and buildings to make them productive), and the Prospector phase (in which the person who chose it may earn a token amount of cash and nobody else does anything).
The game becomes very interesting as you plan whether to focus on monopolizing one of the five crops (corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee) and using your massive production of that crop to block other people from making a profit off it, or to diversify in order to be more flexible, and then gaming the player order and strategic choices of phase to ensure you profit most.
Disaster Looms! is an excellent game hampered by a rather lacking rulebook. Once you figure out how it's meant to play, however, it becomes a fun game of exploration, hoarded technological licensing (no, really, this is fun!), and occasional hostile takeovers to steal your competitors' colonies out from under them. The premise of the game is that each player heads a big profit-motivated corporation that seeks to take advantage of the recent discovery that Earth is ecologically/cosmically doomed to leverage profit and a continued future for the company by attracting customers to evacuate and populate new colonies on the corporations' behalf. The game uses a hex-based tile exploration mechanic and demands that you research new technologies to give your spaceships new actions and capabilities, then forces you to choose whether to hold onto that technology (garnering either exclusive free access to the technology and the profit any license fees it attracts will gain if others want to make use of YOUR technology) or sell it off into the public domain (where anybody can make use of the technology for free) in order to reduce further research costs. Since these technologies are often more powerful exploration options, whether to research, license, or sell off technology becomes an important and fun decision. This was actually the first physical product I've received from a project I Kickstarted, and I couldn't be happier with the final result. The games often come out close when it comes time to score it up, and everybody I've introduced it to has had a good time.
Space Alert! is easily the most bizarre game I've ever played. And it's loads of fun for its uniqueness. It's more than a little bit intimidating, which is why it sat on my shelf for a year before I got brave enough to try it out. It's also not going to be a game that everybody will have the patience to learn. It's a cooperative game, and practice makes perfect. Once you decide to try it out and learn it, though, it *does* have a pretty good set of introductory missions that do a great job of introducing the complexity one or two layers at a time, ramping up to the full game.
The way it works is like this: You and your friends are the crew on a spaceship. When you come out of hyperspace, it takes 10 minutes for the computer to calculate a new jump. In those ten minutes, you must manage your shields, power, and weapons to fend off any incoming threats as you sit otherwise helpless in the dangerous wilds of space.
And it's all done in real-time.
That's right. You play by starting up an audio track from the provided 2 CD's (or downloadable as .mp3's from the publisher's site), and listen to the voice of the computer sounding alerts about incoming threats (flip over a card from the appropriate shuffled deck!), counting off the passing time, and notifying you of time-limited opportunities to do things like trade cards or draw new ones.
Then, each player has a board with 12 spaces on it in front of them. Each of those spaces represents the time it takes to do one action or move one space around the ship. Your cards list actions and movement that you have available (one movement and one action per card). The ship is divided into 3 sections, each with an upper and lower deck. Each of the resulting six rooms has a weapon, which is fired with the "A" action, each of the 3 rooms on the upper deck houses shields for that sector which can, by playing a "B" action, draw energy from that sector's reactor, each of the 3 rooms on the lower deck houses said reactor, and playing "B" actions there will manage the power flow between the reactors. The "C" action varies by room, and then finally, there are "Battlebot" actions that control the use and deployment of defense robots that can help combat internal threats and invaders.
So as time ticks by, you and your fellow players seek to coordinate your actions to destroy, neutralize, or simply survive the incoming threats. Timing is important, as energy is a limited resource, so you need to ensure that, for instance, the reactor has power available when you go to fire the associated weapon, or else you'll click the "A" button, as it were, and nothing will happen. Similarly, coordinating attacks from multiple rooms upon the same enemy is more efficient as it minimizes the impact of the enemy's shields...
Then, once the 10 minute audio track is over, each player is finished playing actions. At this point, you reset the board state to the initial starting setup, and walk through the player's actions and game events in the strict order in which they must occur. Here is where any timing slip-ups or miscommunications come to light, and things often go disasterously wrong as you discover whether the actions you took successfully staved off death in the cold void of space, or resulted in your ship's destruction in a fiery explosion before it could escape into hyperspace.
This game is amazing. I've never played a board game like it; it captures the frenetic decision-making of multiplayer video games and creates all kinds of tension as the time ticks away and more and more enemies are being thrown at you, soaring ever closer and firing upon you with each passing action as you realize you're on the opposite end of the ship from where you need to be, and don't have the right movement cards to get there. You and a crewmate are frantically trying to figure out what you can do from where you are or can be, then the voice of the computer calls a data transfer, allowing you to trade or gift cards to each other, and a third crew member saves your bacon because they had that move you need. You frenetically slap down 4 different actions, counting out the turns it'll take you to be where you need to be to do what you need to do, checking with everybody to make sure that you'll be restoring power before they need it, and then breathing a sigh of relief.
And then realizing, halfway through the resolution phase, that you have no idea if there will be any fuel left to pump that power into the system.
The biggest downside to this game, however, is that it's very hard to introduce a new player into the more complex missions. So unless you plan to play it with the same people every time, you may find yourself playing the first several introductory missions long after you've grasped what's going on in them, until you get all your gaming friends up to speed on the game.
The
X-Wing Miniatures Game, to cap this off before opening the thread up to others' favorites and such, is another home run for Fantasy Flight Games. It's a great wargame-lite for board gamers. In it, you typically control 3-8 starfighters from the Star Wars universe (currently, X-Wings, Y-Wings, TIE Fighters, and TIE Advanced) against another player doing the same. At its most basic, you will simply run a deathmatch-style dogfight. Each turn, both players plot movement for their ships in secret, then reveal the movement and perform the movements on the table with their pieces. Then, ships take turns shooting each other before each side plans movement again.
The component quality is pretty impressive. The detail on the models is excellent, and the pre-painted paint jobs are more than passable. They're an attractive size, and are, for a change, to scale with each other. FFG's cardboard tokens are, as always, the best in the business.
Each ship has different types of movement options available. Those movement options are represented and measured by way of 17 movement templates which are quite intuitively labelled. Each ship has a movement dial, which depicts the dozen or so of those templates that are available to that ship -- in this way, fast, maneuverable ships perform different from those which are less so.
In addition, there are actions, which give consumable bonuses to dice rolls or special end-of-movement maneuvers that can help tweak your final position or facing a bit.
When it comes to attacks, the game comes with custom d8's that you roll to determine hits and evasions. Roll more hits than your target rolls evasions, and you score damage equal to the difference, essentially.
The game is very approachable, which is why I call it a "gateway wargame." It doesn't involve tape measures, and the stats for each ship are boiled down to a playing card size easy reference, which have 5 numbers and some icons on them. Each ship comes with multiple pilots, who have different points values assigned which are used in creating forces of comparable power.
My only gripe about this game is that I wish the single ship expansion packs were about 20% cheaper. This is, for the most part, remedied by ordering online, however. It's still way cheaper than any wargame I've seen, and provides a lot of fun and a surprising amount of tactical depth.
So, what about the rest of you? Who else loves board games, and what are your guys' most recent discoveries, or current go-tos?
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