Boardgaming in 2017!

KALLAX all day.

Me too. Kallax with a couple vertical separators never installed per shelf for double box width goodness.

I got my Gloomhaven yesterday as well. I had already bought and assembled the Broken Token organizer for it. Punching everything out and getting it all packed away still took 3 hours. Very excited to figure out what all of this cool stuff does!

Only 18 hours to go until our second Gloomhaven session. We’ll return to town and do some stuff there, before moving on to Scenario 3 or a side dungeon we unlocked. Weee!

I played Descent for the first time last night. We played with 4 players, using the app as the DM. It started a bit slow, with some downtime getting the board set up as we explored, and our group didn’t really work together properly at first. But it picked up as we went along, and although we “won” the map by running away from danger like little children, it ended up being quite a bit of fun. At the end, we gained exp and gear, which is all saved in the app, and now I’m looking forward to playing it again.

So, my Kingdom Death Campaign came to an end on year 6. Some bad luck on a certain encounter forced me onto an early fight with the Kings Man. While I had a full antílope armor set, he hits like a truck and slowly my characters were dying. Got him to 3 HP, but the last character standing hadn’t learnt the necessary fighting art yet and could not overcome the challenge.

After that I was left with only three alive survivors, so I tries to get back on foot by hunting a level 2 lion, which I almost achieved, but again got killed at 2HP left (had I had a fourth character I would have killed it).

So I’m really looking forward to starting a new game and going a better job of going for useful gear early on (specially support items).

Big amazon sale today. I bought a few of the D&D premium games…

Link no workee.

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=13548845011

Copy/paste it, don’t click it.

It’s the forum software mingling links.

Attn @tomchick

Munging

Finally got in another play of Time of Crisis. Wow, what a game! There is so much to love about this game:

  • Everyone starts on their own until someone gets the emperor, and then it becomes an all-against-one game to depose them. Shifting alliances is one of my favorite mechanics.

  • Building a deck and then choosing which cards to play from it. This gets rid of the random element of deck-building, and adds in more interesting decisions and planning.

  • Barbarians constantly threaten your provinces, throwing a wrench in carefully-laid plans. Not only do you play against the other players, but also against the game. Of course, towards the middle of the game you can start to recruit them, and they can actually help you too.

  • You get lots of points for being emperor, but usually only for a turn or two (and then you’re deposed). If you build provincial upgrades early, you can make just as many points – even if you’re never emperor.

  • Though you can get screwed by the dice, but it is in the other players interest to keep you moderately strong. The emperor is much easier to depose with three players working together than two.

  • Getting votes to take over provinces is usually pretty easy (2+ on each dice is a success, plus exploding 6s), but its not guaranteed.

  • Speaking of exploding 6s – there are exploding f**king 6s! One of the best dice mechanics ever.

  • The crisis roll at the beginning of each turn draws in all the other players and keeps them engaged throughout the game. This almost always results in cheers and groans every turn.

  • Plenty of mechanics to counter turtling. Add mobs to a players provinces to wear them down, start pretender empires to remove support from the emperor, or even use praetorian guards to bypass all defenses and assassinate him.

Even though I have only played this game a couple times, I think it is one of the best of the year. The three hours we played went by really fast, and we probably could have played again if we had time. Don’t be turned off by the bland art and theme – this game is really something special.

If you like shifting alliances try Junta!

We had the second session of our Gloomhaven campaign, and it keeps improving. We did scenario 3 and 8 yesterday. We’ve had some, err, luck, in drawing road and city events that fit and reinforced the story of where we were heading and what we were planning on doing.

Since we’re still quite new to the game we’re making some mistakes, and it has been close to failure on a couple of the scenarios. We’re level 2 now, and the perks and new cards really work for customizing the characters and focusing the builds.

I picked up Smash Up a month or so back. It seemed pretty gimmicky—ninjas! robots! dinosaurs!—but I figured I’d give it a shot, gimmick or not.

Only just got around to playing it. Boy, it is an inexact game. It’s taking the approach of something like Magic the Gathering—simple rules systems made complicated by the cards that override them—and throwing out all the precision in describing those systems. There was a lot of ambiguity we had to interpret on the fly, and this was only the base game with one expansion.

Still, with the right two or three people I can see the appeal of the gimmick. As long as no one’s taking things too seriously or personally, the absurdity of the game is kind of fun, and some of the factions are pretty funny.

Good news, Forbidden Island arrived!

I’ll add it to my growing collection. Thanks all for your guidance so far!

BG collection by Sam Posten III, on Flickr

Left side is new stuff, right side are christmas gifts from family, kickstarter rewards, and redditgifts exchanges.

Gloomhaven has landed…almost sent my back out picking up the box.

OGRE deluxe was the enemy of my back. Needed my luggage dolly to move it around. Alas, I sold it when we downsized to an apartment (my back is happy about it along with my wife not having to look at the big box anymore)

Same. And…same. Sheesh, what a hefty box!

Hmmm…I was getting a bit worried about the lack of news about my gloomhaven arrival…

So I checked Amazon, which is where I buy pretty nuchal all my boardgames.

Apparently I never ordered the game…😕😮