Boardgaming in 2017!

My friends turned out to be free this evening so they came over and we played another scenario of Gloomhaven, this one being the boss fight of the previous scenario, basically. This one went a lot smoother, both because we were more familiar with our ability suite (although we all mixed in a X-level card or two in place of something in the default level 1 set) and because we didn’t get ganked by a turn one six-enemy charge right off the bat. Just cursed.

We opened with a round of disabling effects on the first set of enemies, whittled them down quite a bit, and then dared the central chamber. We proceeded to gang-tackle the boss as best we could while his archer backup pinged first our summons and then eventually us over and over and he let out rooms full of slow but dangerous zombies. I finally managed to tag him with a Wound status (which does damage every turn) and that finished him off right before he would have opened the final room. Then we did our best to focus down the archers while picking off zombies from range, and on the very last turn I darted in and nabbed the map’s treasure chest. Very satisfying.

At this point it became clear how you’d have multiple adventuring parties working the campaign, because we have three different scenarios available to us next and I imagine options only multiply from there. It also took probably an hour less overall and we still haven’t quite gotten it organized (although I have some zipper bags coming in the next day or two that should help), so we will hopefully get that down further. We could have pushed for another scenario but one of my friends had some other stuff he wanted to do with his evening so we packed up for now. I am sure we will revisit on Wednesday.

Played an epic game of The Colonists yesterday. Era 1-4. Took almost 8 hours with 4 people.
Very fun game, but I can’t see sitting down often to do that. The Envoy Colony I think caused some time delay as well since we had 3 people with dual stewards clogging up the board from Era 2 on…

Final scores were 350, 327, 301, 250. The Cards were just killing it for the winner. He went heavy with improvements that just provided so many shortcuts to get things done.

I just finished a game of The Colonists. 3 people, Era 1-4, took us just over 7 hours. Final score was 287,280, 278 (me). I necer really got any sort of engine going, but I did just put a couple of pubs and theaters out right at the beginning, and their steady 7 points per turn across the whole game kept me competitive. Good game, but you’re right it’s just too long to play the whole thing too often.

Man, I’m impressed by your guys’ boardgaming stamina! Just thinking about a 2-1/2 hour game is enough for me to start questioning myself. I could fit a Roll for the Galaxy, a Villages of Velaria, and a BANG! the dice game in there! 8 hours?? That’s a once-a-year event for me! Like a boardgaming smorgasbord!

I mean, sure, you could get more than one short game in during the playtime of a longer game, but for me the enjoyment I get out of longer, deeper fare far exceeds the enjoyment I would get out of a few fast playing but simple games. It’s one reason I started hosting my own game evenings instead of doing the Friday night gaming party I used to attend regularly. The emphasis there became increasingly about quantity over quality of experience.

I’m pretty much right where @malkav11 is. I tend to enjoy the meatier, brain-burner sorts of games, so I arrange time away from my normal tuesday night group to make them happen occasionally. A day like Superbowl sunday when everyone is otherwise occupied is perfect.

Normal game nights are usually a couple ‘filler’ games (Splendor, 7 Wonders, stuff like that), followed by a solid medium-weight sort of thing (2-3 hours max), and then a couple of us retire to the bar to play a round of Tichu.

Yea the longer games tend to be more scheduled affairs with time to mentally prepare for a day of non stop gaming.
Almost like binge watching a movie series. You plan a whole day around it, meals, etc.

This play-through was less organized though. I brought the game, someone suggested it, and then we kinda agreed to play through all four era’s. I warned everyone that the suggested playtime for that was going to be 7-9 hours. No one cared, so we jumped in.

To speak for the games staying power, I setup a solo game the next day and just fiddled around with various strategies I had learned the day before. I see this one staying in my collection for a while.

I should say that I generally don’t get to play games longer than maybe 4 to 4.5 hours or Mage Knight would hit the table a lot more. But I would rather play a 4 hour game once than 4 1 hour games, generally speaking.

Anyone try Hero Realms Deck Building Game yet? I might have jumped the gun a bit on that one, but I wanted something with more flavor than Dominion but less movie theme than LOTR and Harry Potter. This one sounds… promising with different styles of play.

I agree, though I’ve got plenty of games in the one hour frame as well.

Realistically getting a 2-3 hour game to the table only happens a few times a year for me. That’s why New Year’s Day where we played 3 2+ hour games was an exceedingly rare treat

I backed Hero Realms on the kickstarter but have not had a chance too try it.

I like the shorter games…Pandemic: the cure, Hostage Negotiator, things like that.

But, I love longer games. I have a large family but I spend 2-3 hours quite often with games like Mage Knight and Robinson Curuso. My wife works early hours so she hits the sack at 8, the kids are in bed around that time…I can then play till 11 every week night if I want to … and I want to quite often.

uh, oh. I just got a mail from Amazon that instead of being delivered on March 1st, my copy of Gloomhaven will be here on Feb 14th. So I have to decide whether I want it or not, tout de suite. Hmmm.

That’s easy: you want it. :)

Has anyone ever played the Epic Card game by the same creators of Star Realms? They have announced a kickstarter for a digital version. You buy once for all platforms like Star Realms.

You also get alpha access in about a month when kickstarter ends, two expansions and some other goodies. Not sure if it is worth the 25 dollar tier as I have never played it.

This is pretty disappointing. I still haven’t even received a shipping email for my Kickstarted version of Gloomhaven from almost a year and a half ago and yet pre-orders are going to be delivered early next week.

Huh. That’s weird- I thought the original 3/1 date was to make sure all the KS copies had time to get there. I figured when I got the email tonight that it meant y’all had gotten them without a hitch, and so he gave Amazon the go-ahead to start shipping earlier.

I know he’s having some shipping problems with Amazon with one of the three containers of games, just not sure what’s going on. Something about really slow shipping for a group of them. No idea when it’ll be resolved though.

I seem to recall hearing that they were getting tied to the regular release somehow so maybe that’s why he pushed it up. But hey, even if you end up getting it after regular preorders, you still paid between $40 and $56 less depending on whether you got minis or not.

It’s…not good. It’s reductionist Magic in the same way the release version of Divekick is reductionist Street Fighter: “hey, how about we remove most of the nuanced design and balance and just let everyone do lots of dumb stuff every round?” There’s very little variety in how matches play out, in my experience: one player plays a big creature, the next player plays removal, continue until someone doesn’t have removal in hand to stop the big creature or someone plays one of the big creatures with haste. The game’s core gimmick, the simplified mana system (everything costs zero or one mana and you get one mana per turn), hurts it a lot, since the best play is almost always “play a big creature” starting on turn one, and there’s no sense of building up resources to make big plays.