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I’m bummed about Mansions of Madness. I bought it when it was released and was super-excited about it. I’ve played maybe 5 or 6 games with friends and a few more with just my wife, and overall I’ve been generally disappointed. As a rules system and a storytelling framework I think the thing is terrific. The scenarios just don’t live up. I’ve had one game where everything came together and the ending of the game had everyone on their feet literally cheering when one of the investigators made two insane once-per-game, perfect die rolls (a 10 and a 1) in a row to win. I know you can’t count on that every game, but a little excitement would be nice. Every other game has sort of petered out and ended with “well, that’s the end” whether the investigators or the keeper wins.

I was hoping the expansion would fix that, but seeing the problems I’m glad I didn’t order it. Will wait and see what they do to fix it. I’ll probably end up picking it up because I really want the game to be good, but I don’t have high hopes.

I did buy the Civilization expansion reviews-unseen because I think that whole game is brilliant. Just got delivered and unwrapped yesterday; can’t wait to play.

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Well, first off, it’s Munchkin

…

So whatever fun can be derived from it tends to do so when you have more players: it can lend itself to a sort of party-game atmosphere with the right group, and with more players there’s more going on with player’s tableaus and so you’ll have more opportunities for interaction/character improvement/strategery.

With just two, it’s more likely going to be decided by pure luck of the draw and can often have a runaway leader (I’ve played two player Munchkin/Munchkin Bites a few times with my nephew and only one of the matches was a tight, back-and-forth affair).

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Play against Keldon’s computer version of the game. It’s excellent, you can play a lot of hands in a short period, which will help you get a feel for the game, though it helps to have some vague idea of the general strategies or you’ll just lose. A lot, since the AI is quite good, and doesn’t have a difficulty setting. Watching what the AI plays and what actions it chooses may help.

The computer version supports any version from basic set to all expansions. Start with the basic set and try and learn how to win via produce / consume x2 cycles. In the basic set there are essentially 3 approaches to that: blue, brown, and varied color through Diversified Economy. Produce / Consume is a strong strategy in the basic set, less so with the expansions. Military is difficult in the basic set, but doable if you get the right combination of cards.

Are there strategies for getting more control over your hand? Like, I’m guessing, concentrating on exploration at the expense of development early on in the game?
Exploration powers are generally fairly weak in the basic set. They tend to be little extras you get while doing something else, like getting +1 Explore from an Expedition Force you played because it was a cheap +1 Military. More exploration-centric strategies don’t really become powerful until Rebel vs. Imperium, which adds the “Mix and Match” exploration power which lets you discard cards you already had instead of cards you just drew from exploration. Explore +5 with a Mix and Match card in play pretty much lets you discard your entire hand for a new one.

Race for the Galaxy is more like playing draft Magic rather than deck-building Magic like Dominion. You can’t choose your combinations, the game is largely about getting cards to flow through your hand and making the best use of what combinations you see. Exploration is largely about finding the one type of card you are missing from an existing setup, i.e. finding high-value worlds if you’re playing military, or an Alien world if you’re playing Alien Discounts.

For more general card flow to get started, you want card drawing. Card drawing is usually either produce / trade or windfall worlds. You don’t need production worlds for produce / trade, since you get to refill one windfall world for calling Produce. For example, you might lay down a green windfall world, sell the green good for 4 cards, and then call produce which gives you another green good. Obviously you don’t want to do this if the other players have a lot of production worlds and will benefit from Produce calls. You can also turn this around, drop a production world to leech Produce calls from other players, and sell the goods it produces for cards.

Military players tend to drop a series of free Windfall worlds and then sell the goods to get a chunk of cards. A mere 2 military lets you play cards like Robot Sentry for no cost and sell the good for 5 cards. Even if you don’t go full-out military, this is one way to draw cards. Alien Rosetta Stone lets you play Robot Sentry with no military, and refills Robot Sentry from leeched Produce calls.

This is important. New Race for the Galaxy Players look at their starting hand of 4 cards and think they’re going to play all of them. Experienced players know they’ll play 1, 2 if they’re very lucky, and the others will be spent to play those cards. Even with a full hand of 10 cards you’re selecting just 2-3 of them to actually play.

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Munchkin is a terrible game. I can think of hundreds games I’d rather play when there’s only two people. As Gordon mentioned, though, it is a good experience with the right group (the right group being lots of people with good senses of humor who don’t play Munchkin as a game where they care about winning at all). It takes just one serious gamer to let all the fun out Munchkin.

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Played Colonial again last night, and the rules just aren’t very good or very well explained. My co-owner wants to sell, so it’s a goner. I might acquire it again if the designer can ever come up with a fully tested, solid set of rules.

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Gaming with the Relatives

Generally speaking, playing with my wife and mother-in-law during holidays is about the only boardgaming I do. DeanCon 2011 was an exception, of course.

This has some serious drawbacks, since I’m limited to games they can easily understand, and to games without any real conflict. This Christmas, it was:

Caylus

I was pretty psyched about playing Caylus since I enjoy the mechanic of building the tools to build the tools. Caylus is largely about producing goods cubes and then trading those cubes to build better production buildings, parts of the castle, or for cash.

I don’t think we played terribly well, none of us took the “Build” royal favor track at all, mainly because the first space gives you nothing, and the economy is tight enough that a goods cube or money now looks a lot more attractive than easy access to construction later. The group bias against conflict also hurt, because my mother-in-law just doesn’t think about moving the Provost to screw up other players. “Why would I want to do that?”

I liked it a lot, but I think it’s joining the pile of games I think are great but which I don’t bring because they don’t really get the game.

Powergrid

Powergrid proved to be remarkably fiddly. It’s not just the constant twiddling of the power plant market, I found I was constantly referring to tables in different locations - the reference card, the back of the rules, and inside the rulebook. I managed without interrupting play too much, but I was very aware of how much more of this I was doing than with the other games, despite being significantly simpler than Caylus.

It seemed pretty dry to me. I get the impression that good players (i.e. not us) get a lot out of subtle tweaking of turn order by deliberately underproducing power. Going last at the right time can be a significant advantage, and the marginal cost when you’ve got a lot of cities is low. I’m not a big fan of games which are about gaming the mechanics of the game rather than complex investing decisions.

Chicago Express

I asked for this one for Christmas because it was mentioned in this thread. I’m a fan of train games, and after a few plays, I think this is a pretty good one.

The other players had some difficulty with the idea that the company pays for rail expansion, not the player calling the action. The way the game differentiates between players as investors and the rail companies worked fairly well, even so. We had 4 players for one game, and I’ve read that this often degenerates into each player running just one company as their “private” company, but we didn’t find this to be true. If one player is doing well with “their” company, there’s a strong incentive to dilute that by auctioning a share in that company, so you can get a piece or at least force them to pay out some of their earnings to defend control.

The way income rises by connecting cities or even mountain hexes is simple and works well. That part works better in my opinion than the much more complicated 18xx games, which give you much the same result with far more work.

Attika

This is the one returning game from prior years, because it’s my wife’s favorite. Most of my collection tends to fall into one of two categories: games I’m bored with (i.e. Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride) or games the group doesn’t get (Race for the Galaxy, Puerto Rico), which is why I mostly brought new-to-us games. I’m still enjoying this one, and 2 of the 3 games we played we won by connection, through the mechanic of drawing, laying a map tile, and then using amphora to get enough additional draws to connect.

While it’s a winning approach we’re all aware of, blocking it isn’t as easy as blocking a simple direct connection without laying map tiles. We had several situations which required expensive emergency play, i.e. paying full price for a tile and the surcharge for playing on a space not connected to your existing pieces.

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That would be me.

I can be pretty silly in person, so the theme isn’t the problem, but I do care about playing well, and playing to win. I’ve brought Bohnanza to Christmas a few times, since it’s something the younger kids can play, but it drives me nuts when my younger niece gives cards to her grandma because, well, she’s grammy.

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For Xmas I got THE AWFUL GREEN THINGS FROM OUTER SPACE, which I occasionally thought about buying for about 25 years. It’s fun, but now my chick says she gets to be the Green Things in perpetuity.

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A lot of people call Settlers of Catan a gateway drug for board games, because it’s easy to get into and there is quite a bit more to it than Monopoly or Life. It’s like the marijuana of the games world, because once you move on to the crack, cocaine, and heroin games it doesn’t really take you there any more.

If Munchkin were a gateway drug, it would be candy cigarettes. If you don’t know any better it seems cool, and you can pretend you’re playing a board game just like the older kids, but it’s just a novelty item. The audience for that game is children and man-children for which the concept of a card that says “Darth Maul” and has a picture of an actual maul on it is the most hilarious thing ever, and still evokes moronic laughter even the hundredth time they see it.

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If you like Chicago Express, I’d really recommend German Railways (although it’s purely a gamer’s game). It’s like taking CE to the next level.

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Thanks for the copious info, Gus. I’ve tried a few games against the RFTG AI, and I don’t know… there’s still just something about that game that rubs me the wrong way. (That didn’t when I first played it and liked it enough to buy it). I never feel like I’m in control of what I’m doing, but that I’m caught up in a machine.

Getting back into it after so long not playing it, though, I can definitely appreciate its depth. I’d been thinking that Eminent Domain was a nice simplification/streamlining of the basics of Race for the Galaxy, but it really stripped out much of what makes RFTG appealing. (I still like Eminent Domain, though, and am more likely to play it more often even though it’s not much more than a diversion).

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I read a review, and found the turn order mechanism really offputting. Yes, I get that the game is primarily about what you bid for stocks, not what actions you take, but I have a hard time imagining enjoying a game where I can expect to miss turns if I’m doing well.

I can’t really argue with your personal tastes, of course. A large part of what drew me to the game originally is that I love the theme. What hooked me for the longer term is the large number of possible interactions between cards.

For example, I just fired up Keldon’s program, and drew Damaged Alien Factory or Alpha Centuari as start worlds, and my initial 6 cards (of which I can keep 4) are Rebel Fuel Cache, Destroyed World, Deserted Alien World, Rebel Cantina, Pirate World, and Candestine Uplift Lab. Goals are “first to 4 colors,” “first 6 development,” “first to 4 goods,” “first to 8 cards,” “6+ military,” and “4+ production worlds.”

None of my cards particularly stand out for the goals, since (for example) “First to 3 alien cards” isn’t a goal. Damaged Alien Factory doesn’t particularly combine with any of my cards, but it’s a solid 4 card per turn engine by itself (not 5, because you have to pay 1 to produce on it). Alpha Centuari / Rebel Fuel Cache / Rebel Cantina is not too shabby, though. Alpha Centuari has +1 military for Brown, so I can play Rebel Fuel Cache without any military or even without using Rebel Cantina’s power, and Rebel Fuel Cache / Rebel Cantina lets me draw 2 cards any time anyone calls Produce. Whether I end up pursuing a Mining strategy, a Military strategy, or buy a bunch of rebel worlds with Rebel Cantina will depend on what I draw, but it’s definitely my decision, not something forced on me.

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Have you tried Agricola? Their are two versions - a light “family” version, and the real version. Its similar to Caylus as you’re putting together an economic engine - but that engine doesn’t really fully work until the end of the game usually, and it has a lot of cards that make it more variable.

The light version may be right up your families alley - it does away with the cards (which are fun, until you wait for everyone else to stop squinting at 14 cards every few minutes the entire game), and has a very Caylus-ey feel (though Caylus is most definitely better).

They might like Pillars of the Earth or Leonardo Da Vinci too.

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Yeah, I’ve tried this game a few times as well. I want to like it (because everyone else says it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread), but it ends up feeling like a maximization math puzzle.

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Yes, I have. Bought the Animeeples and Vegimeeples for it as well. It flopped mainly because the group simply could not grok how scoring worked, and how it rewarded breadth of development over depth. I like Caylus a lot better, frankly, even leaving out the weird scoring of Agricola.

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RFTG can feel a bit disconnected from the theme. Me? I think it’s the greatest thing since maximization math puzzles. ;)

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The RFTG discussion makes me want to try it. Been meaning to download the Keldon version for ages.

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Yikes, that seems overly harsh. I find it makes a great family game, and is much better than standard kid-based fare. It also helps the kids learn to lose gracefully, because of the luck-based nature of the gameplay (and the back-stabbity aspects). That said, if ‘giving the cards to grammy because she’s grammy’ bugs you, this is NOT your game. It can and will happen, and is even encouraged by the rules. I also can’t imagine play it with only 2.

I would consider Munchkin a gateway game for the completely uninitiated (ie., me and the kids). Because of my son’s love for Munchkin, I just got the LOTR LCG from Amazon today. He just helped me penny-sleeve the cards, even.

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I need to echo this. In my experience, Munchkin functions as a kind of loose gateway game for people who haven’t really explored the board gaming sphere at all, nor are inclined to. Often times with a role playing background, or some vague interest in whatever themed coating that game has taken over its iterations.

As a game, it’s just horribly lazy and holds so little afterthought behind the facade of paper cards and puns it’s almost embarrassing. I’m not saying you can’t have fun with it, but if you are, it’s probably a result of your gaming group rather than the game itself. And if you’re actually lucky enough to have one of said groups, you should definitely treat them to a better game. They deserve it. Your time deserves it. Your wallet deserves it.

:)

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Okay, I caved and ordered Mage Knight from CSI along with the last 3 expansions for LOTR:LCG plus its new deluxe expansion, which is due in stores next week. :D

I kept flip-flopping on Mage Knight, read every preview, review, and session report I could get my hands on, listened to podcasts, and even took to trying to make sense of its two rulebooks.

What did it for me was not only watching Paul Grogan’s excellent walkthrough of a round of Mage Knight, but particularly reading his in-depth previews of the game’s various components and mechanics. You really only get to see the macro game in the video and the rulebooks don’t list much of the information on the cards, so it was only once I learned the finer details that I was sold on the game.

Links to Paul Grogan’s fantastic previews:

Preview 1
Preview 2
Preview 3
Preview 4
Preview 5
Preview 6

I’m ashamed to admit that I’m one of the sorry saps that bought a metric ton of the Runebound expansions because I wanted a board game with that sense of exploration and adventure, but I quickly grew tired of the “go here, roll, now go here, roll” mechanics. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE dice. I LOVE randomness. But, I think there was a bit too much of it in Runebound. The expansion, Mists of Zanaga, made Runebound much more interesting (gave it an Arkham Horror feel), but the core mechancis were still present, so it doesn’t get played nearly enough as I had hoped.

Then comes along Mage Knight in all its magnificent adventuring glory. I had initially dismissed it because 1) nobody was talking about it and 2) the AP/downtime issues mentioned here. But, after A LOT of investigation, I think Mage Knight is going to find a nice spot in my collection (and eliminate Runebound all together).