3301

Mr Popov, consider Mansions of Madness. It kind of stands between board games (mechanics) and RPG (the Keeper player is basically a story teller who sets the mood as well as an adversarial player). It’s superbly made and the board game mechanics will keep your players in check. I think it might make a good transition for you guys.

Wendelius

3302

Hmmm…that might be a better solution than my “suck it up you wusses” suggestion.

3303

Best pirate boardgame yet, imo. If you’ve ever played Sid Meier’s Pirates!, is basically transposes that on to the tabletop and makes it multiplayer. I think it’s a really fun game, but it does have a degree of randomness that allows fortunes to turn quickly, and there’s nothing to keep someone who rolls poorly from never being able to come back from a losing position early in the game. if your group is cool with that kind of gameplay, I would highly recommend it.

3304

Awesome game dripping with theme and top-of-the-line production quality. If you have any interest in being a pirate and/or enjoy Sid Meier’s Pirates!, purchase M&M yesterday. It will take you a couple plays to wrap your head around the mechanics (the rule book explains everything in detail, but it’s not organized optimally), so it may take longer to play at first, but the turns zip by as the mechanics become second nature.

Oh, and to address your inevitable future concern: for a pirate (as opposed to a merchant), a Galleon is not better than a Frigate. :-)

3305

I’ll second Jason’s comments. It’s a big hit with my group- everyone who has played it has had a good time.
Like many games that I introduce to people, it’s usually by the fourth game that I play that I finally get the rules sorted out. Some of the rules that we missed that had a huge impact were:
a) It costs an extra action to move into or out of a port and an extra action to perform a port action. My initial games had people almost teleporting about the Caribbean. This slows down much of the game and prevents merchants from avoiding pirates completely.
b) Moving through a space with an NPC ship allows them to scout for you during your movement phase. This also slows down much teleporting.
c) Read the combat rules carefully. Many things we presumed weren’t the case.

3306

Just played FFG’s Runewars for the first time.

We were playing the variant where you need to capture 7 dragon runes to win. I had 4 when the guy in the lead with 5 tried to take one away from me. he had overwhelming force.

I had the command card that gave me +2 in vexes with runes and another card that added one more strength.

Two elven swordsmen hung on at the end, and that was enough to kill all his units outright.

I waltzed in and took his now empty stronghold, which contained a dragon rune and an additional token representing a permanent rune in that hex.

I then spent 8 influence to activate my secret order to buy a rune with my influence, giving me the 7th rune and the win. Good times.

3307

Merchant and Marauders is fantastic and I concur with the above statements.
Did anyone pick up a copy of Fortune and Glory?
I think I’m going to bite the bullet on it, but wanted to hear some more reviews.

Also Star Trek Fleet Captains is supposedly…wait for it… amazingly great.

3308

I’ve played Runewars twice and there’s a fun game hidden in there somewhere. The base game just ends too abruptly and the way heroes work is completely detached and not much fun.

The 7 runes is good. I’ve also heard the option of you can’t hold more than 1 rune in your base 3 territories when declaring a win. That still leaves some way to fix heroes.

3309

Yeah, Runewars feels like something very close to being a great game, but never delivers that experience. I’m considering selling my copy though, I can’t honestly think of when I’d break it out again, and I’d play Chaos in the Old World over it most any time to scratch that itch.

3310

I’ll second that, but it is a game played on a board. Your friend may recognize it as being a “boardgame” and flip the table. It’s got light RPG elements, but the game mechanics are almost all board-game and not very much like a P&P game.

It’s another game I’m considering selling, because after a few plays through the scenarios my current group would typically prefer to play Arkham.

Another option would be to look into a card game. For multiplayer I recommend AGoT LCG. There’s quite a deep rabbit hole of depth to be had designing and playing decks with a group, and it’s nothing like a board game.

3311

So play a game where that’s appropriate. Do they still make Feng Shui?

3312

A Game of Thrones LCG looks good. Does the expansions expand the number of players or is it only 4 players max?

3313

No shit. How about Hong Kong Action Theater RPG? I mean, sure, youbplayed the ‘big 2’ (D&D, WoD), but perhaps the problem isn’t with RPGs, but that you don’t realise the breadth of RPGs that are available. Find one that actually works for what you and your friends want to do.

3314

You can play the game with up to 6 players, as the way multiplayer works is that each player gets 1 of 6 different Title cards at the start of each turn, and those Titles provide a benefit and may name another Title card you cannot attack during the turn and a Title card you score more points for attacking. You cannot be eliminated from the game, as winning is a matter of accumulating points (for which at worst you can have 0), so this tends to result in people not ganging up on the worst player since winning is a race condition instead of an elimination condition.

If you want to play with six you’d most likely want to pick up 2 Core Sets and the Lords of the Sea and Princes of the Sun expansion boxes, as that will allow for some decent sixty card decks to be built for all six houses. (The two expansion boxes provide the starting cards for the Greyjoy and Martell houses which aren’t represented in the Core Set).

Note that the game does not in anyway require that every house be represented, and there are very different builds for decks for each house that make them play quite a bit differently. However, having access (I.E. the cards) to building decks for every house is a good starting point.

3315

Well, I’ve been very pleased with my purchase of Rune Age. That despite the fact that I haven’t really loved any deck-builders post-Dominion (Ascension, Thunderstone, etc.). Less thrilled with Quarriors, but I need to give it another try or two.

I haven’t gotten a chance to try it, but my co-workers have already played Junta: Viva El Presidente several times. Great lunchtime game, sound like, which is perfect. (But can it ever replace Shadow Hunters? Probably not unless it gets expanded to support 8 players!)

Last game of the recent batch is Jab: Real-Time Boxing and despite deep curiosity, I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Anyone got it?

3316

On Saturday Rob and I played Washington’s War. I’ve read the rules, but it was a couple of months ago (the first time we were supposed to get together and play), and I’d played We the People (the game this one is based on) a bunch. I didn’t have time to reread the rules before playing, and I don’t think Rob’s ever read the rules.

We made a whole bunch of rules mistakes. There’s even a thread on BGG for WW called Rules are Terrible!.

I played Americans and Rob played British.

First off, for some reason I thought I had the French Naval Blockade from the start of the game, instead of once the French entered the war. Oops. On the other hand, Americans should be able to move 5 spaces to the British 4, but for some reason we thought that only American generals alone (without an army) could move 5. We figured these two mistake kind of balanced each other out.

And we got all the rules for flipping political counters (PCs) wrong. The British should only be able to place PCs adjacent to their own. This pretty much has them moving out from the ports. They can only flip a PC that has a general and an army, so changing hearts and minds is really through the iron fist of the military.

Americans can place on any empty space, and can flip on any PC that has a general on it. This gives them an incentive to bring out all those crappy generals they have.

I also made a huge mistake because I didn’t realize that attacking armies had to retreat to the space they came from, but if you attack from a town that isn’t loyal to you, you can’t retreat there. I had Washington attack Cornwallis without a viable retreat route because I thought I could retreat to one of the other, American-held towns. This led to Washington’s capture, which is devastating for the Americans and would have cost me the game. Rob was gracious and allowed me to keep Washington.

We were just placing and flipping wherever based on our OPs cards, and this was still a nail-biter, although the last few turns, where we realized that victory didn’t really depend on the military, but on the will of the populace, we pretty much abandoned the military game. We laughed that everyone stopped fighting and started printing pamphlets.

In the end, Rob won by one PC flip that gave him 7 colonies to my 6. This wouldn’t have been possible if we’d actually followed the rules, but we had a good game anyway.

3317

The player guides that come with Washington’s War are OK but I thought this one was much more helpful, especially for the ops cards and movement.

GMT has a magazine they sell that’s pretty damn expensive but really good if you’re into war games. You can buy the single back issue of the Washington’s War edition for $20. It includes that player’s guide I just linked printed on nice card stock as well as replacement state PC control markers (the markers that go on that small cutout of the states on the right side of the board) because the markers that came with the game were misprinted (they were supposed to have US on one side and England on the other but instead most of them have the same front and back).

I like Washington’s War. I could definitely see it being a very fun, fast-paced light war-game if you just got a few plays under your belt but so far the one friend I’ve showed it to has not asked to play it again since :(

3318

Rob is a Vassal fanatic, so now he wants to play WW again over Vassal.

Vassal makes me sad, because I bought this cool game with all these pieces and I only use the rules book and I don’t get together with my friends to stare at them while making decisions, I just listen to them breathe over skype.

We both agreed that it was a good game the way we played it, but it would be a better game using the actual rules.

I’ll probably end up playing it with Rob on Vassal within a week or so.

3319

Yeah HKAT and Feng Shui immediately come to mind. Paranoia might be an option. This group might also work really well for one of my personal faves, TORG. I’m not as familiar with newer stuff (last 7-8 years).

But I agree with the general approach, find a game that plays to the stengths of the group you have…it will be a lot easier than trying to force them into a mold they don’t want to be in. For instance, with TORG you could do a pulp-themed game where the one-liners and pulling off ridiculous stunts were things players actually got rewarded for.

3320

It’s four players maximum. The expansions allow for more deck customisation.