Lost Cities is enough to get him the thumbs-up from me. I love that game.
BSG fans without a lot of time on their hands might want to have a look at the fanmade BSG Express. I’ve already ordered myself some indented blank dice.
I downloaded the full-size board file someone posted. Costco will print it on a 20x30 poster for $10. There are few enough cards and other components that everything else will be a breeze to assemble relative to most other print-and-play projects.
The board game version is also great and can be taught in about two minutes.
Taj Mahal is not only my favorite Knizia game, but my favorite game ever. Just thought I’d wee a bit!
Ahem…have you saddled the dragons, yet?
I’m less than thrilled about trying to figure out what I want to do with all the tokens. Live with cardstock or try to get them on something a little more permanent?
One of his most overlooked, sadly. It’s too bad he didn’t give it a wild west theme to go along with the poker mechanism.
I print them on photo paper and use spray glue to affix the whole sheet to some artboard or chipboard (you can also get self-adhesive stuff, but you have to heat it). Cut it with a metal ruler and a utility knife and you have some nice, thick counters.
High five!
Yeah, the auction deal in Taj Mahal is the best I’ve ever seen. So tense.
Vesper
4912
Have you tried Space Alert? I just got it for Christmas and am trying it next week. From reading on BGG, it sounds like the time pressure and hectic pace add a lot of tension that is sorely needed in a lot of co-op games.
When Knizia announced the last expansion (Battlefields?), I thought I knew exactly what it would be: Gollum. One player is Gollum who basically plays as a Hobbit but if he can get possession of the Ring he alone wins (I’m sure it’d have to be more complicated than that). I still think that would have been a much better expansion than those crazy-ass battle boards.
By the way, isn’t the Sauron figure pretty much the best boardgame piece in the history of boardgames? It’s actually… intimidating.
Definitely. FFG is so expansion-oriented that it was sad to see how forced Battlefields and the Sauron expansion were relative to Friends & Foes, which was a natural fit.
An elegant abstraction of the theme, just like the rest of the game. Best boardgame piece in the history of boardgames, though? Gotta go with Dark Tower, as Dark Tower, in Dark Tower.
Kazad-Dum showed up today, and I can’t wait to dive into Moria!
That said there are very few player cards in Kazad-Dum (about as many as an AP) and two heros. While the cards are very good for a Dwarf deck, if you are looking to bolster your player card count I suggest looking elsewhere.
On the bright side there are loads and loads of encounter cards. :)
My copy of Mage Knight showed up today too, so I can’t wait to dig into that as well. Think I’m gonna run through the tutorial for that this afternoon. Sometimes delays at work are a good thing. :)
It’s definitely boiled down, but I think The Resistance is a pretty darn fine BSG Express as well. (Obviously without the theme, which is certainly a big part of the appeal.)
I played A Few Acres of Snow on yucata.de and was so amazed by Wallace’s twists on the deck-building mechanism that I bought a copy. He did a terrific job of getting cards to model the major aspects of that conflict without using the typical deck-building theme of creating dozens of different cards that break a simple set of core rules. Instead there’s a deeper set of core rules with tons of actions that can only be activated by the right combination of cards. The way your colony development slows in direct relation to your deck getting bloated with cards is also brilliant.
Some people say it’s broken, but I don’t read strategy threads at BGG so I don’t care.
Lorini
4920
As long as you don’t play deck builders, you’ll be fine.
