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Games I Have Played: Catch-Up Edition
I tried, for a while, to keep track of board game plays at Board Game Geek because I like tracking stuff and statistics, but it turns out I am entirely too lazy to keep up with more than the library aspect of it. (And even that's sometimes iffy.) It would be cool to know how many times I've played various things, but, hah, it's not happening. I do like writing entries about my various thoughts on things though, so we'll see if I can keep up with that. Most of these are either from Gen Con 2018 or a board game weekend a friend put on a couple months ago.
Ninjitsu: Ninjitsu is the game I got Husband as his present for Gen Con this year. It's a relatively simple card game where the goal is to have twenty-one or more points down in front of you at the start of your turn. (So you take your turn and then hope that no one else messes with your cards such that when your turn comes around again, you still have your twenty-one+ points.) On your turn you can play a card face up as a treasure, play a card face down as a secret, play a card for its action, steal someone else's secret, or draw two cards. There's a lot of choices but because you can only do one thing, it never gets overwhelming. Also the art is super cute, which is always a plus for me. (How to get me to look at your game: have a sea theme or cute art or better yet both.)
I really like this one! I'm always a fan of games where a large chunk of the rules can be explained as "and then you do what the card says" so you don't have to remember lots of specific rules. There's some thinking involved but overall it's pretty light. I think the game takes longer than the 5-10 minutes Board Game Geek says, but that can also depend on who you're playing with. Husband and I have fairly short games with just the two of us (probably in the 5-10 minute range), but when we played with two of our friends that one lasted a while because anyone who looked like they might have enough cards on front of them had to last through three people trying to foil their plans. We even ran out of cards and had to reshuffle the deck at one point. I think games like that are the exception more than the rule, but I don't think they're that out of the norm.
Root: One of our friends got this at Gen Con (I believe he backed it on Kickstarter and then picked his copy up at Gen Con as opposed to having it shipped to him.), so we tried it during some downtime. We had five people playing, which meant someone had to be one of the expansion factions. Which ended up being me, and I chose otters because who wouldn't want to play as otters. The game is an asymmetrical war game with some of the best art I've seen in a board game. Each faction does different things, but with the exception of the wanderer/raccoon mostly everyone is trying to use their abilities to take control of the forest.
I love the art, but this game is pretty much the opposite of the type of game I like to play. The game was new to everyone, and because it has variable player powers, it was tough to figure out what you were supposed to be doing, never mind what everyone else was doing. Which made my otters pretty ineffectual since their entire shtick is trading with the other players. To the game's credit, it really does try to make the game as accessible as it can be for newbies from the start. Maybe if we had more people that regularly played asymmetrical war games it would have been smoother? I'm game for lots of things, and I'll try my best but man it was very obvious very quickly that I was not accomplishing a whole lot. (To be fair, Rob and Noah, two of the other people playing, did try to trade with me some so I could do something on my turn.) I didn't hate the game, but my initial assessment of "not really my thing" was 100% accurate. If someone does like these sorts of games, I'd highly recommend it!
I did get a laugh at the board game weekend when Rob, who enjoyed the game enough at Gen Con to go out and buy it, came up to me and said, "I've played this game a few times since that first game, and I still don't get how the otters work." And I was like, "Oh, good, so it isn't just me then."
5-Minute Dungeon: Husband and I bought tickets to demo this game. It's a cooperative game where everyone plays simultaneously to defeat the monsters/obstacles/traps/boss. You have five minutes for each dungeon and have five dungeons to complete to beat the game. It plays very fast, but man. We were unable to ever get past the second dungeon and frequently failed the first one. We played for an hour and I had fun, but I feel like if we owned this game we'd house-rule it so that actually winning is possible. It didn't help that we played a couple games with the rules wrong (one wrong rule that helped significantly, and two wrong rules that hindered us). There's been a Marvel re-theme of the game, so maybe the rules for that version have been tweaked to allow two-player games a chance at winning.
Too Many Bones: Another game Husband and I demoed at Gen Con. Too Many Bones is an RPG board game that uses dice rather than cards (like every other RPG board game I've played). There are...a lot of options for stuff. You could go really wild with customization once you get a handle on the game, but it is not beginner-friendly at all. So I have to give massive, massive props to the company running the demo because they managed to streamline the game enough so that we could get a true taste for how the game plays. Turns out that the game is complicated enough that I have no interest in owning it, but I had a blast paying it thanks to the demo leader! We even managed to complete our campaign, and we got a nice metal pin as a souvenir. We both chose the pin of the character we'd played, Boomer for Husband and Tantrum for me. It probably helped that Boomer and Tantrum are the character types we prefer to play in RPG-type things.
Red Dragon Inn: I've played Red Dragon Inn a couple of times, but Husband never had and I thought he'd enjoy it, so we played it at Gen Con. Red Dragon Inn is the bar adventurers go to after adventuring and the last one standing/not passed out/not kicked out of the inn is the winner. Everyone gets their one deck of cards, and each deck is based around a particular character so while they'll often do similar things no deck is exactly the same. There's a ton of flavor to each deck, so I have a lot of fun playing my deck in character. (I don't think I'm great at character role playing, but I try!) And I was right that Husband would enjoy it, so we got the base set. I just wish that getting more character decks weren't so expensive.
Pathfinder: Oathbreakers Die: Our friend Rob and his girlfriend tried pathfinder last Gen Con and had so much fun that was all they did for the rest of the con, and this year they convinced us to join them for an adventure. I played a half-orc brawler named Jaz; Husband played a halfling rogue. I adored my character and came up with a whole backstory for her, which is what's happened the two other times I've dipped my toes into the tabletop RPG waters.
We had a ton of fun, but it turns out that our group of friends is a bunch of murder hobos. We stopped the bad guys, but everyone on our side not in our party ended up dead and none of the bad guys died. Whooooops. We tried! It probably didn't help that our DM was nearly asleep at the table. Like, it was an 8am session, but we shouldn't have to ask you to speak up so we can hear you multiple times. And on more than occasion someone would try to do something and he would just...ignore them while asking us to hurry up and do something. And Husband needed a bit more hand-holding for his first tabletop RPG, which the DM failed to give. So we mostly had a ton of fun in spite of the DM, but that's okay. We still want to do more Pathfinder next year.
My personal highlight of the game: Jaz "lightly punching in the stomach" an NPC who was foaming at the mouth after swallowing poison to try to get him to vomit up the poison. Turns out I killed our venture-captain with that move but he was pretty much dead at that point anyways.
Magic: The Gathering: Husband's been into Magic for decades at this point, but we originally decided pretty early in our relationship that I would not play Magic as him trying to teach me would just end in tears. I've picked up a fair bit of the game just from being around him though, so we decided maybe we'd try teaching me Magic!
First try, he built me a Burn deck to go against his Tron deck because he said Burn was good against his deck, and Burn's relatively simple to play. Which sort of worked? Except I lost way more than I won, enough that I made a Springer meme image about it ("You said Burn was good against Tron / My 1-8 record determined that was a lie"). And Burn is simple enough that it was actually tough to learn on it? I kind of just got into a pattern of do this or this without really thinking things out or trying to strategize, which...does not make for good Magic playing. But there were no tears, so we counted it as a success!
The next thing we tried was a pair or those pre-made decks they sell as a pack. And that actually worked pretty well. The win/loss was more balanced (though still in his favor); I got to try to reason out strategies; I actually had decisions to make for battles, which he helped me sound out. It was fun but not something I'll probably keep up long term. I do not have the energy or patience to devote to Magic like he does.
Now Boarding: Now Boarding is a co-op game where you're trying to get all the passengers to their destination, which gives you money you can use to upgrade your plane. If passengers don't go anywhere in a round, they get angry, and if they go three rounds without going anywhere, they file a complaint. Too many complaints, and game over. At the end of the game, everyone who's not at their destination files, like, half a complaint so too many passengers not delivered means you lose. Everyone plays simultaneously during a round, so you can plan ahead but then everything goes real quick once that timer is flipped.
I played this at the board game weekend, and we had a lot of fun! We had only three players. Brad, who ran the game, said they found it very easy when they played before with four people, but we did not do nearly as well with just three. We managed to keep afloat with moving people but ran way out of time at the end. So many people just stuck in a random city or in the middle of the sky when the day ended! So we super lost, but I'd love to try it again at some point. The art's neat too; it looks simple, but it really gives a great immersive feel to the game. I was glad I was already comfortable with IATA airport codes from before the game though, haha.
Werewolf: We also played Werewolf with everyone at the board game weekend. Werewolf is a social deduction party game where you're a bunch of villagers trying to find out who's a werewolf before the wolf kills everybody. It was my first time playing this sort of game; I've played Coup before, which is similar, but Coup has more defined game play whereas Werewolf there's a lot of random debating and then a vote! And then maybe something happens! I had tons of fun with it, but I don't think I'd like to play with all strangers.
I think the reason it feels so different from other, similar games is because, like, on the first vote you have to vote with literally zero information aside from what everyone's said which almost by definition has to be all baseless accusations. Unless, I learned, if you are playing with Rob because Rob is always a werewolf. He was a werewolf all three times we playing, and the previous time he played he was a werewolf all four times then. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but that just ended with him and his fellow werewolf eating everyone, haha. It was great.
Catacombs: I played this during the board game weekend because it looked intriguing, not because I thought I'd be any good at it. Catacombs combines role playing board games with shuffleboard. Your characters are little discs that you flick at other little discs representing the monsters to defeat. You can have teeny weeny little arrow discs to flick at enemies if your character has a bow. Brad DM'd for us, and the other person playing and I got to choose two characters to play, so there were four adventurers on the board.
This game is a blast! I was so bad at it! (Dexterity is my dump stat.) Haha, no, I wasn't horrible at it but I wasn't great at it either, although I did manage to flick one disc so awfully that it jumped up in the air and landed on the other side of the monsters for a perfect back attack. The game's difficulty depends a lot on how mean the DM chooses to be since they're the one playing all the monsters. Brad said he normally goes easy on people when he DM's this game because he's played it a lot and is pretty good at it whereas his opponents typically have not and are not. But a fun game is more important to him than an perfectly played game, and a fun game doesn't end with him killing all the adventurers in the second of five dungeons.
We managed to get to the final dungeon, through a combination of skill, strategy, luck, and Brad not hitting us as hard as he could have. (Brad was great. It never felt like he was going easy on us or that we hadn't earned our wins, more that the difficulty level had been adjusted to our skill level.) We didn't win, but it was real close. It was good times! I definitely do not envy Brad putting all those stickers on all those little discs, though. (Apparently the game came with special instruction just on how to put on the stickers. Because once they're on, they don't come off again.)
Ninjitsu: Ninjitsu is the game I got Husband as his present for Gen Con this year. It's a relatively simple card game where the goal is to have twenty-one or more points down in front of you at the start of your turn. (So you take your turn and then hope that no one else messes with your cards such that when your turn comes around again, you still have your twenty-one+ points.) On your turn you can play a card face up as a treasure, play a card face down as a secret, play a card for its action, steal someone else's secret, or draw two cards. There's a lot of choices but because you can only do one thing, it never gets overwhelming. Also the art is super cute, which is always a plus for me. (How to get me to look at your game: have a sea theme or cute art or better yet both.)
I really like this one! I'm always a fan of games where a large chunk of the rules can be explained as "and then you do what the card says" so you don't have to remember lots of specific rules. There's some thinking involved but overall it's pretty light. I think the game takes longer than the 5-10 minutes Board Game Geek says, but that can also depend on who you're playing with. Husband and I have fairly short games with just the two of us (probably in the 5-10 minute range), but when we played with two of our friends that one lasted a while because anyone who looked like they might have enough cards on front of them had to last through three people trying to foil their plans. We even ran out of cards and had to reshuffle the deck at one point. I think games like that are the exception more than the rule, but I don't think they're that out of the norm.
Root: One of our friends got this at Gen Con (I believe he backed it on Kickstarter and then picked his copy up at Gen Con as opposed to having it shipped to him.), so we tried it during some downtime. We had five people playing, which meant someone had to be one of the expansion factions. Which ended up being me, and I chose otters because who wouldn't want to play as otters. The game is an asymmetrical war game with some of the best art I've seen in a board game. Each faction does different things, but with the exception of the wanderer/raccoon mostly everyone is trying to use their abilities to take control of the forest.
I love the art, but this game is pretty much the opposite of the type of game I like to play. The game was new to everyone, and because it has variable player powers, it was tough to figure out what you were supposed to be doing, never mind what everyone else was doing. Which made my otters pretty ineffectual since their entire shtick is trading with the other players. To the game's credit, it really does try to make the game as accessible as it can be for newbies from the start. Maybe if we had more people that regularly played asymmetrical war games it would have been smoother? I'm game for lots of things, and I'll try my best but man it was very obvious very quickly that I was not accomplishing a whole lot. (To be fair, Rob and Noah, two of the other people playing, did try to trade with me some so I could do something on my turn.) I didn't hate the game, but my initial assessment of "not really my thing" was 100% accurate. If someone does like these sorts of games, I'd highly recommend it!
I did get a laugh at the board game weekend when Rob, who enjoyed the game enough at Gen Con to go out and buy it, came up to me and said, "I've played this game a few times since that first game, and I still don't get how the otters work." And I was like, "Oh, good, so it isn't just me then."
5-Minute Dungeon: Husband and I bought tickets to demo this game. It's a cooperative game where everyone plays simultaneously to defeat the monsters/obstacles/traps/boss. You have five minutes for each dungeon and have five dungeons to complete to beat the game. It plays very fast, but man. We were unable to ever get past the second dungeon and frequently failed the first one. We played for an hour and I had fun, but I feel like if we owned this game we'd house-rule it so that actually winning is possible. It didn't help that we played a couple games with the rules wrong (one wrong rule that helped significantly, and two wrong rules that hindered us). There's been a Marvel re-theme of the game, so maybe the rules for that version have been tweaked to allow two-player games a chance at winning.
Too Many Bones: Another game Husband and I demoed at Gen Con. Too Many Bones is an RPG board game that uses dice rather than cards (like every other RPG board game I've played). There are...a lot of options for stuff. You could go really wild with customization once you get a handle on the game, but it is not beginner-friendly at all. So I have to give massive, massive props to the company running the demo because they managed to streamline the game enough so that we could get a true taste for how the game plays. Turns out that the game is complicated enough that I have no interest in owning it, but I had a blast paying it thanks to the demo leader! We even managed to complete our campaign, and we got a nice metal pin as a souvenir. We both chose the pin of the character we'd played, Boomer for Husband and Tantrum for me. It probably helped that Boomer and Tantrum are the character types we prefer to play in RPG-type things.
Red Dragon Inn: I've played Red Dragon Inn a couple of times, but Husband never had and I thought he'd enjoy it, so we played it at Gen Con. Red Dragon Inn is the bar adventurers go to after adventuring and the last one standing/not passed out/not kicked out of the inn is the winner. Everyone gets their one deck of cards, and each deck is based around a particular character so while they'll often do similar things no deck is exactly the same. There's a ton of flavor to each deck, so I have a lot of fun playing my deck in character. (I don't think I'm great at character role playing, but I try!) And I was right that Husband would enjoy it, so we got the base set. I just wish that getting more character decks weren't so expensive.
Pathfinder: Oathbreakers Die: Our friend Rob and his girlfriend tried pathfinder last Gen Con and had so much fun that was all they did for the rest of the con, and this year they convinced us to join them for an adventure. I played a half-orc brawler named Jaz; Husband played a halfling rogue. I adored my character and came up with a whole backstory for her, which is what's happened the two other times I've dipped my toes into the tabletop RPG waters.
We had a ton of fun, but it turns out that our group of friends is a bunch of murder hobos. We stopped the bad guys, but everyone on our side not in our party ended up dead and none of the bad guys died. Whooooops. We tried! It probably didn't help that our DM was nearly asleep at the table. Like, it was an 8am session, but we shouldn't have to ask you to speak up so we can hear you multiple times. And on more than occasion someone would try to do something and he would just...ignore them while asking us to hurry up and do something. And Husband needed a bit more hand-holding for his first tabletop RPG, which the DM failed to give. So we mostly had a ton of fun in spite of the DM, but that's okay. We still want to do more Pathfinder next year.
My personal highlight of the game: Jaz "lightly punching in the stomach" an NPC who was foaming at the mouth after swallowing poison to try to get him to vomit up the poison. Turns out I killed our venture-captain with that move but he was pretty much dead at that point anyways.
Magic: The Gathering: Husband's been into Magic for decades at this point, but we originally decided pretty early in our relationship that I would not play Magic as him trying to teach me would just end in tears. I've picked up a fair bit of the game just from being around him though, so we decided maybe we'd try teaching me Magic!
First try, he built me a Burn deck to go against his Tron deck because he said Burn was good against his deck, and Burn's relatively simple to play. Which sort of worked? Except I lost way more than I won, enough that I made a Springer meme image about it ("You said Burn was good against Tron / My 1-8 record determined that was a lie"). And Burn is simple enough that it was actually tough to learn on it? I kind of just got into a pattern of do this or this without really thinking things out or trying to strategize, which...does not make for good Magic playing. But there were no tears, so we counted it as a success!
The next thing we tried was a pair or those pre-made decks they sell as a pack. And that actually worked pretty well. The win/loss was more balanced (though still in his favor); I got to try to reason out strategies; I actually had decisions to make for battles, which he helped me sound out. It was fun but not something I'll probably keep up long term. I do not have the energy or patience to devote to Magic like he does.
Now Boarding: Now Boarding is a co-op game where you're trying to get all the passengers to their destination, which gives you money you can use to upgrade your plane. If passengers don't go anywhere in a round, they get angry, and if they go three rounds without going anywhere, they file a complaint. Too many complaints, and game over. At the end of the game, everyone who's not at their destination files, like, half a complaint so too many passengers not delivered means you lose. Everyone plays simultaneously during a round, so you can plan ahead but then everything goes real quick once that timer is flipped.
I played this at the board game weekend, and we had a lot of fun! We had only three players. Brad, who ran the game, said they found it very easy when they played before with four people, but we did not do nearly as well with just three. We managed to keep afloat with moving people but ran way out of time at the end. So many people just stuck in a random city or in the middle of the sky when the day ended! So we super lost, but I'd love to try it again at some point. The art's neat too; it looks simple, but it really gives a great immersive feel to the game. I was glad I was already comfortable with IATA airport codes from before the game though, haha.
Werewolf: We also played Werewolf with everyone at the board game weekend. Werewolf is a social deduction party game where you're a bunch of villagers trying to find out who's a werewolf before the wolf kills everybody. It was my first time playing this sort of game; I've played Coup before, which is similar, but Coup has more defined game play whereas Werewolf there's a lot of random debating and then a vote! And then maybe something happens! I had tons of fun with it, but I don't think I'd like to play with all strangers.
I think the reason it feels so different from other, similar games is because, like, on the first vote you have to vote with literally zero information aside from what everyone's said which almost by definition has to be all baseless accusations. Unless, I learned, if you are playing with Rob because Rob is always a werewolf. He was a werewolf all three times we playing, and the previous time he played he was a werewolf all four times then. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but that just ended with him and his fellow werewolf eating everyone, haha. It was great.
Catacombs: I played this during the board game weekend because it looked intriguing, not because I thought I'd be any good at it. Catacombs combines role playing board games with shuffleboard. Your characters are little discs that you flick at other little discs representing the monsters to defeat. You can have teeny weeny little arrow discs to flick at enemies if your character has a bow. Brad DM'd for us, and the other person playing and I got to choose two characters to play, so there were four adventurers on the board.
This game is a blast! I was so bad at it! (Dexterity is my dump stat.) Haha, no, I wasn't horrible at it but I wasn't great at it either, although I did manage to flick one disc so awfully that it jumped up in the air and landed on the other side of the monsters for a perfect back attack. The game's difficulty depends a lot on how mean the DM chooses to be since they're the one playing all the monsters. Brad said he normally goes easy on people when he DM's this game because he's played it a lot and is pretty good at it whereas his opponents typically have not and are not. But a fun game is more important to him than an perfectly played game, and a fun game doesn't end with him killing all the adventurers in the second of five dungeons.
We managed to get to the final dungeon, through a combination of skill, strategy, luck, and Brad not hitting us as hard as he could have. (Brad was great. It never felt like he was going easy on us or that we hadn't earned our wins, more that the difficulty level had been adjusted to our skill level.) We didn't win, but it was real close. It was good times! I definitely do not envy Brad putting all those stickers on all those little discs, though. (Apparently the game came with special instruction just on how to put on the stickers. Because once they're on, they don't come off again.)