So I had played board games sporadically for a long time and then last year after moving up here to Sacramento, have been gradually increasing my play through a variety of gaming Meetups and other gatherings. Highlights of what I’ve played in the last year:
MegaCiv - the 18 player version of Advanced Civilization. I’d played some all-day games in the past, most notably a couple of 12+ hour sessions of Twilight Imperium with Tom et. al. when I was in southern CA. Last year, I played in a 16 player game of MegaCiv and it was pretty excellent, but also exhausting. The MegaCiv experience is similar in duration and intensity but with more people, more bargaining, etc. It was a good experience but too exhausting for regular play. We have another game scheduled next month and I’m looking forward to it. I think MegaCiv is a good once a year game.
Eclipse - got into a game of this a few months back and it is as advertised similar to a streamlined version of Twilight Imperium but with more 4X. Streamlined is relative as a full game of Eclipse can easily take 3 to 5 hours. I love this game, especially with the Ancients expansion (the base game is badly unbalanced with those damn Plasma Missiles) and I bought my own copy plus expansion but have only had a couple of opportunities to play it due to duration. I took it to the Tuesday night meetup in midtown and everyone basically blanched, fearing the length. I still drag it out for the weekend meetups but only occasionally do I find a table of souls willing to hunker down with Eclipse. In the weekend meetups I attend, there are plenty of heavy game players who would play a game of this length but they tend to prefer the Euros like Feast of Odin and dislike the dice games. This is still one of my favorites and I’ll keep looking for games.
Scythe - After I told some folks I liked the mix of Euro scoring and map control / exploration of Eclipse, several people recommended Scythe. I played it, loved it, bought it, taught it badly the first time, and since then it’s become one of my staples that I’m happy to play and/or teach at any meetup. I love the theme, the artwork, and the integration of the engine building, map control and combat mechanics. This is a game, like Terraforming Mars that is great b/c of synergy: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is my favorite current game, although I’m probably overplaying it as last Saturday when I suggested a second game of Scythe in a day, one of the meetups vets basically went home in a hurry, later posting on Facebook that when he heard we were playing Scythe again, he thought “Oh god, I can’t play this again!” Perhaps I should ease off a bit. But it’s so good!
Champions of Midgard - I didn’t see this discussed in this thread although I confess I didn’t read every one of the 891 posts. It’s a very good worker placement game with dice IMO, with some elements of both Stone Age and Lords of Waterdeep. I really love the dice combat system. It basically uses dice-as-warriors in place of Waterdeep’s cubes-as-adventurers. Like Waterdeep, it has elegant worker placement with most selections only having one slot (making turn order a big deal) and has a good mix of resource, combat, and journey-across-the-sea mechanics. I prefer it to Waterdeep as I find it plays more quickly and is more elegant (which is saying something as Waterdeep is pretty elegant.) This is a very good 1 hour game, and appeals even to people who don’t normally love dice or combat games. One of my current staples.
UnFair - Another one of my current favorites, which starts out as an apparently conventional Euro style building game simulating building an amusement park and then develops into a game with a lot of social interaction, player attack and defense and a bit of backstabbing. I like to say when teaching it, “The game starts out Fair, and then gets very very Unfair.” With new players or “deliberate” players, this can be longish at up to 2 or 2.5 hours but can also play out in 1 to 1.5 hours with swifter veteran players. I find this is one of my favorite 5 player games. It also lends itself to some emergent storytelling. A couple games back, we had this whole “Saga of the Ice Cream Man” where the Ice Cream Man gave one player a huge money edge and then got fired, rehired, discarded, recycled from the trash, disabled, re-ennabled and so on about 5 times. We also had a game recently with “the battle of the Offshore Accounts” (the guy with the Casino ended up losing, shockingly to me.)
Clank! - my newest purchase, only played once but I enjoyed it. As Tom mentioned upthread it’s a deck builder with a stealth/dungeon crawl aspect. I like this more than Tom as I think the mix of elements is quite good, especially sneaking around the map and the very cool dragon attack mechanic. Of course, I’ve never liked Ascension as much as Tom; tastes vary.
One specific thought for Tom, who I know likes deck builders with interesting mechanics: has anyone here played Xenon Profiteer? I played it once and was very impressed with it’s design. It’s a deck builder where you are also building up your atmospheric craft and also fulfilling contracts to deliver rare gases. It also has a very interesting “reserve” mechanic that adds to the deck building IMO. I’m going to see if I can get my hands on a copy.
