The Board Games thread

Star Wars board games then, are there any particularly good ones? Looking for something that’s good for 2 players that doesn’t take a week to understand and a month to play. Rebellion looks interesting…

I really like Outer Rim

You're a trader and you take missions and fly around the outer rim doing things. It's a lot of fun and you can play either as a rebel, an imperial, a hut cartel member or a bounty hunter. There's a lot of FFG bits and bobs and I ended out playing Doctor Aphra as space delboy. It was good.

Outer Rim struck me a bit as a reskin of the Firefly game, is that remotely accurate?

I really like Star Wars Rebellion.

I've never had a board game experience quite like the first time I sat at the board as the rebels, with the full power of the Empire arrayed against me, and thinking, "…Okay, how the hell do I win this?"

Short version: each player starts off with troops and ships around the galaxy, and a selection of variously-iconic Star Wars characters as Leaders, who can be assigned to missions or used to move your forces around the board. The planets you occupy and missions you complete can be used to build new forces, recruit new leaders, or achieve other objectives.

The rebels have a hidden base, indicated by a face-down card at the side of the board, drawn from a deck of Probe cards. Each round, the Empire draws one of the remaining Probe cards, slowly narrowing down the possible locations of the rebel base.

The Empire wins by landing ground forces in the rebel base, and the rebels win by gaining enough political support to overthrow the Empire.

For the long version, you can download the manuals from the FFG site; I had a good read of those before I bought it.

Thanks for the recommendation, Ninchilla - I got Star Wars Rebellion in the end and after our first game I think it's pretty great. I always like good two-player games and this is particularly good in the way that both players get completely different experiences yet somehow it still seems to come down to the wire. It's also clever in that most of the variety and complexity is actually on the cards you draw which means the core rules are pretty straightforward (and the rulebooks, for once, are excellent).

Games are very long it seems but each turn provides a good solid 20 minutes or so of action so it's the kind of thing you can leave set up over a weekend and keep dropping into.

My only complaint would be that the combat is a little dull, simply rolling dice over and over - hard to see how they could do much else but it really slows things down.

After one game we are both plotting strategies for our next match-up, which is always a good sign.

Glad you like it! I really want to hang another go at it, once we finally get the front room set up and are able to leave things sitting undisturbed for longer than 3 minutes!

Expansion improves the combat a lot.

We’d misinterpreted the combat a bit, it turns out, rolling for each unit individually rather than the fleet or army collectively. So that speeds it up quite a bit. The expansion is good then?

S'alright.

It's still all Star Wars, all the time, in this house, and Star Wars Rebellion has had a lot of play over the last couple of weeks. It really is genuinely excellent, and astonishingly well balanced given how different each side is to play. However the kitchen table has been taken up with Lego for days now so we needed something smaller to play.

In an attempt to get a little bit of variety I've persuaded the boy to check out Star Wars Destiny with me, it's a collectible deckbuilder that's very reminiscent of the Pokemon Trading Card Game. As such it's pretty fun, the artwork is nice, it almost certainly gets hilariously unbalanced after you've bought a few booster decks, and it's nice to have something you can play in half an hour that doesn't take up an entire table. Not sure we'll end up buying too many sets for this as it is fairly slight (and also, I believe, discontinued) but it's a decent distraction.

I really want to play a bit more of Rebellion, now we have the front room approaching set up.

I love Star Wars Destiny. I got one of the booster boxes for xmas off the missus which was a pleasant surprise. We just play casually but it's great having the balance of cards and dice.

I love Star Wars Destiny. I got one of the booster boxes for xmas off the missus which was a pleasant surprise. We just play casually but it's great having the balance of cards and dice.

Yeah, we've not yet got to the stage of building our own decks which I imagine is the point at which it gets good. We've played with the Kylo/Rey starter box, and we've got General Grievous and Clone Wars Obi-Wan packs ready to open. Once we've played with those I think we're going to mix and match and get a bit more competitive.

When I go back to work I want to try and establish some lunchtime games. I know that myself and two others will be up for it but can anyone think of anything that would be appropriate to play at a slightly spaced outdistance and with not too much sharing?

Myself and one of the guys used to play Star Realms, I was thinking about just grabbing another two decks and just running them as individual piles, or cut your pile in half etc. But just wondered if anyone else has done any gaming with people not in your house or bubble?

Several of the worker placement games involve you having your own board and building stuff up on that, maybe taking turns to place your workers on a shared board which could be at arms length from each player. I think you could socially distance quite easily with that sort of setup.

All Creatures Big and Small would be my choice for lunchtime gaming in this genre, it's short and sweet and requires very little setup. Caverna Cave vs Cave is similar but doesn't seem to have quite the same depth to it from what we've played.

Cave vs Cave is fairly linear, and after a few games you'll have set build strategies (and even the expansion doesn't help). ACBAS is a little more flexible, however they are both 2 player games only. Worker placement games without a shared component or card pool would allow an element of social distancing, but you will probably find on a lot of these games that you won't be able to remove this entirely. Stuff that springs to mind perhaps might be games like Concordia (very quick, shared card pool but cards aren't returned) or Inis - but I don't think you'll be able to remove cross contamination entirely. Plus the detailed nature of these games mean you'll be needing to lean over the board a lot.

If you have say 6 upwards then the best no-contact style of games would be social deduction type stuff (Resistance, Mysterium, Avalon that sort of thing). Though you might consider something like Coup for a smaller group. No components need to change hands. Games are quick. Most of the fun comes from interaction and bluffing.

Another truly non-contact thing would be a roll-and-write style game. Ganz Schon Clever, Welcome To or Railroad Ink spring to mind. Non and casual gamers tend to love these (memories of Yahtzee in their youth usually helps) and they are almost entirely hands off (indeed you could play them over Zoom). Of all of them we really enjoy Welcome To the most - it has something really satisfying about it and while it's a bit heads down there's still a bit of banter between players as bad decisions come back to haunt you etc.

And a final suggestion would be a card game where you have your own deck. MTG Commander or double headed giant (if you know the rules of MTG) or pretty much any self contained card game (e.g. Keyforge, Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh) where you cycle your own deck and only interact in a shared space with card effects rather than touching their components.

I haven't played MTG in over 20 years but confident I would still know some of the rules, I looked at Keyforge whilst posting this as whilst I have never played it I remember reading they were self contained decks.

Everyone would be washing their hands on entry to the staff room and everything at work is pretty strict anyway, I was more thinking about not just completely flaunting the rules. We had been due to launch a break time subutteo league this year, and that was cancelled despite it being separate teams etc and the kids spending all day together anyway.

I will look into the suggestions posted, I haven't played it but dug out Tiny Epic Galaxies as think that could be okay as is a separate playing area for the most part.

TEG has (as the name suggests) tiny components and quite dark boards that require you to be sitting quite close together. It's also critically acclaimed but I'm not actually sure it's all that good (and I'd say that for all the Tiny Epic games - despite owning 4 or 5 of them). But if you've got it, it's as good a place to start as any….

I like Tiny Epic Galaxies. If you remove the victory points for advancing your civilisation it lasts a bit longer and feel a bit more satisfying.

Of the other Tiny Epics I've only played Kingdoms which was fine and Defenders which was not.

Yeah I have defenders and then Mechs. Not played Mechs yet although I like Defenders as a solo game, it does feel a tad weak as a 2 player.

I have backed the latest one though, that looks like a kind of tiny epic hero quest in some ways.

I really like Outer Rim

You're a trader and you take missions and fly around the outer rim doing things. It's a lot of fun and you can play either as a rebel, an imperial, a hut cartel member or a bounty hunter. There's a lot of FFG bits and bobs and I ended out playing Doctor Aphra as space delboy. It was good.

Finally got the chance to play this one. It's very much "Flavour Text: The Board Game" - a fun little Star Wars story generator but I'm not convinced there's much actual game there. Everybody trundles round the board separately, there's almost no interaction between the players, and almost everything that happens is random, from the cards you draw to the dice you roll. You basically just play out a series of little Star Wars vignettes then someone gets 10 Fame points slightly ahead of everyone else and is declared the winner.

I mean we had fun, for sure, but after a couple of plays when we've seen all the little character stories I think it will lose its appeal quite quickly. It's no Star Wars: Rebellion, but then again, what is?

I had a brief look at Outer Rim, but it just seemed like a slightly shallow Star Wars reskin of Firefly, and I already have Firefly.

The spelling mistakes complaint is a common one, but the review as a whole doesn't seem entirely out of line. Sherlock Holmes isn't the kind of game you play to beat, though – it sounds to me like they were maybe rushing things, approaching it like a time trial or score attack rather than the more sedate pace it maybe expects of players.

We played our first game of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective this weekend and it was great: surprisingly knotty and convoluted and requiring more actual thought than we'd expected. Really looking forward to playing more. Spotted one error in the Directory where one place we wanted to go took us somewhere else entirely - but then we were grasping at straws by that point so maybe it was just something we shouldn't have considered. Otherwise it was flawless, and actually very well-written.

The scoring system is awful, though, and absolutely is set up like a time trial or score attack. At the end of the case you get to hear Holmes rattling off his solution and how he solved things - which is basically by visiting a bare minimum of locations and making spectacular leaps of logic. If you want to beat his score you basically have to do the same: interact with as little of the game as possible and then wildly guess at the solution - and where's the fun in that? It completely misses the point of the whole thing, which is picking away at the complexity and trying to work out what the red herrings are. We've already resolved to completely disregard the scoring system, play how we like, and consider the game "won" if we've solved the case and answered all the questions at the end.

It has improved as versions have gone on. The first version(s?) contained so many terrible errors I think one of the cases was basically not solvable. It was also full of really bad French to English translations. There was a good thread on BGG that gave some pre-case spoiler free warnings for things to watch out for, but maybe it's better now.

I wish it was better than it was (some of the new Escape Room in a box products actually do what it does a lot better) but it's still a decent group game. The scoring system is a terrible idea though, 100%

I finally got a copy of the LOTR LCG Shadow In The East and the last pack, Fortress of Nurn.

That’s me nearly complete, except for some of the early POD scenarios for gen con and the Nightmare decks.

I foresee FFG announcing they are scrapping it all for a second edition.

Played some board games with real people over the weekend.

Vinhos- the game Vitaculture wishes it was. It’s another wine making game, but not at all like Vitaculture. It’s a fixed six round game, 3 turns per round, with a limited 8 actions that can be taken per turn. With a cost associated with you taking an action that someone already has.

There are three separate scoring systems that all add to VP - it’s complicated, but really fun.

We played the original version, but I understand the second edition has a clearer to read board.

Parks - wow. A walk through all the US national parks. Reminds me of Fungi/Morels, but for up to five players - the players take turns to move along a randomised track of actions and take resources to buy Park cards. beautiful cards, beautiful components and a scoring system that ended up being really close and a surprise winner. It’s on my list to buy next pay day.

I’m back early from CabinCon, the remnants of the Guardian Gamesblog Chatterbox people, the subset that play board games, rent a house for a week and we descend on Tutbury once a year to play board games.

last year and this year has been delayed until now, and there was a sense of socialisation shock for those of us who haven’t seen each other for ages, so a bit more catching up rather than games.

Unfortunately I had to come home early, Sally was diagnosed with cataracts on Friday, getting the news just as I was leaving home put a bit of a damp squib on the weekend.

I still got to play War of The Ring, Venice, Ganz Schon Clever, Calico, Streets and Battle Star Galactica as well as some party/drinking games, some RPG and For The Queen.

Of those I’d like to add Calico and Streets to my collection,

I had the intention to play so many other games - I usually stay Friday to Wednesday, But the delay means that next May’s event is only six months away!

Really considering getting the Hero Quest remake with my stash of vouchers, anyone else getting that?

I loved Hero Quest as a kid but even at 10 years old I could see that it wasn't a great game.

It's a nice starter set for TTRPG dungeon encounters though.

It's apparently got an app too that does the DM roll so you can play single player.

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion - I've always been a bit intimidated by Gloomhaven's reputation (and size, and cost) but this standalone prologue version is custom-designed to ease people into the full experience, with a streamlined set of rules and with the first 5 scenarios acting as a tutorial, gradually introducing more rules as you play.

A few scenarios in and it's pretty sensational so far, to be fair. I'm struck by how much it reminds me of other games we've played and enjoyed. The movement and line of sight rules are pure Super Dungeon Explore; the character levelling and item management are straight from Mice and Mystics; the tactical card-based combat is just like the Star Wars Rebellion expansion Rise of the Empire. It all makes what could be a very daunting game almost familiar, somehow. We're both really loving this and itching for it to take the training wheels off fully so we can get properly stuck in.

A shout-out, too, to the smiling serial killer over at Watch It Played, who's always our go-to for clear, concise explanations but who has really knocked it out of the park with this one. He's done one video for each of the five training scenarios and you can literally watch the video, open the box and play, with no further reference to the rulebook necessary. A masterclass in conveying information in a clear and memorable way.

As weird as is sounds I am keen to check that our purely from my role as an educator/online teaching 'specialist' - which I put in brackets as it still feels odd to be confident about one's self.

Have another game from these but that looks pretty decent, and know there are a few pirate fan types here.

Packing to move and we have far too much stuff board game wise, Loads unopened. Going to try and shift a lot of it I think.

However, is anyone fancying a go of Game of Thrones LCG? Got the core set and some expansions and it doesn't seem to have any ebay value so happy to parcel it up and post it to anyone that wants to give it a go. As probably better than taking it charity shop in the sense of being played by someone.

Think post move want to get back to just having like 5 or 6 games we actually play, rather than the two cupboards full of mostly unopened or barely used stuff I seem to have ended up acruing.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/contentiongames/slay-the-spire-the-board-game?ref=d69oa2

The Slay the Spire board game is finally up on Kickstarter.

My Mrs today decided that Ticket To Ride Europe looked like fun and would probably have bought it right there if it hadn't been the expensive special edition. Neither of us have played TTR before, and Seonaid doesn't like games with are complicated or fiddly. Is TTR: Europe a good choice?

Yeah TTR Europe was my wife's gateway game. It's pretty much normal TTR rules, with a smidge of extra complexity thanks to the tunnels. But you'll both grasp the rules after a five minute YouTube video.

It’s the best starting point. A slightly refined set of rules over the US base edition, a good map and it works with all the expansions. Great little game and it’s neither complicated nor fiddly.

Awesome. Thanks!

The one fiddly thing is placing the trains on the board - they're very small, and easily knocked over, at least in the versions I've played.

Yeah it's not a game to play if you have cats.

Yeah it's not a game to play if you have cats.

oh no

I’m not sure there are many games that are cat proof!

I had to set up the spare room to play Lord if the Rings LCG, we can just about get away with Magic on the kitchen table.

It has been a recurring problem over the years. I remember being very pleased when controllers got rid of their wires because one of my cats used to run through the sitting room straight through the cables and either yank the controller out of my hand or pull the cable out of the console.

We're playing our first game of less-complex-than-it-seems pirate adventure Merchants and Marauders, which the kids got me for my birthday. E decided she wanted A Sea of Thieves game that played like Thunderbirds, and honestly, that's not bad as descriptions go, though it has a bit of Firefly about it, too.

---

Each player is dealt a Captain, and starts on either a sloop or a flute. Each captain and ship type has different stats - seamanship, scouting, leadership and influence for captains, and toughness, cargo, crew, and cannons for ships. Depending on the combination, you'll tend towards being good at piracy or trade.

On your turn, you get three actions, choosing from Sail, Scout, or Port (if you're in a port). Scouting is how you find and attack other ships (players, merchants, or NPC ships), and Port let's you collect rumours, buy and sell goods, hire crew, and upgrade your ship.

Every round you also draw an Event card, which could be something like a storm (bad for players not in a port), the beginning or end of a war (which might restrict which ports you can enter) or bring an NPC ronto the board.

NPCs belong to one of the naval factions in the game - English, Dutch, French, Spanish, or Pirate. If you attack English ships or merchants, you get a bounty and become a pirate - naval NPCs will then prioritise chasing you if they have the option. Pirate NPCs attack non-pirate ships.

A bunch of things you do - completing missions, sinking ships, or having a particularly successful merchant raid - gives you Glory points, and the first to 10 wins.

---

We're only a couple of turns in, and playing in two-player mode at the moment, but it's good fun, and I can see it getting pretty chaotic with a full four, particularly once more NPCs enter the fray and inter-player piracy starts kicking off.

That sounds like Sid M Pirates the board game, so therefore excellent.

Since we moved we haven't played any games and worse still now had to move them all for various work. Need to get a better storage system and actually slim the collection down. Might just take the hit of listing them on ebay.

Played our first game of The King's Dilemma this evening. Took about four times as long as it should have, first with everyone agonising over their choice of (ig)noble house, and then I had to explain every rule about six times between four people. Still, once we got going, we started to fly through the Dilemmas, cajoling and bribing each other to try and get votes going the way we wanted. A couple of us are playing houses who don't - yet - have much skin in the game, but it'll be interesting to see how that changes as things progress.

I finished second for this round, which I think wasn't too bad, all things considered. Everyone has a much better idea of the thing in practice now, so hopefully next time will be a bit smoother.

We're about a dozen kings into The King's Dilemma now, but last night was the first truly fraught decision we've had.

Everyone has mostly settled into a tendency to play for points, but the outcome was particularly grim on this one, causing immediate regret on the part of the players who voted for it (I was the only one to vote against; the remaining two players abstained, gathering power in the hopes that we'd get another round to claw back some ground; but the king died and the game ended).

Mechanically, the upshot is that we now have an ongoing power sink that we need to keep on top of, or else the person with the most points at the end of each game gets shunted into last place. Whoever finished second gets the first place rewards, third gets second, and so on. Hilariously, one of the players who voted for this outcome did it in order to win the game, meaning she had the most points - and without any more rounds to play, couldn't pledge the required power - so ended up punishing herself quite severely.

All because she wanted Wealth to go down.

Bloody centrists.

I stumbled onto the SUSD review of Oath a couple of weeks back, and very quickly became fascinated, then borderline obsessed. I watched a couple of how-to videos, which were dry enough to almost put me off the thing, but the charm of the art and Tom's enthusiasm in that first review kept me looking, and then I watched Dicebreaker learn to play the thing with designer Cole Wehrle, and then I downloaded the PDF manuals (yes, plural) and then I watched the Dicebreaker video again, all 90 minutes of it.

Anyway, I bought it, and it arrived today.

I haven't looked through the box in much detail yet, just punched out the cardboard bits and that's about it. It's got a card-based setup to prep for the first game, and I want to go into it with a little knowledge as I can of what's in there. I do want to shout out the board, though.

It's got the best board ever. I never thought I'd be half this excited by a board - and not even for the art, though that is lovely. No, it's the material! It's a big, printed neoprene mat which is slightly squashy and makes picking up cards so easy, plus it just rolls up in the box and WHY DOESN'T EVERY GAME WITH A BIG BOARD DO THIS!?

It's gorgeous. I can't wait to make people play it with me.

Right, then.

Oath.

We played our first game with 3; ran the four-player tutorial rounds as recommended by the Playbook, then removed and discarded the Yellow Exile. I really enjoyed it, and so did one of the other players, but I think it suffered a little from just having the three of us.

Most of the game involved my Chancellor squabbling with Red in desperation to hold the Banner of the People's Favour, which Red needed to win; unfortunately, that left Blue kind of isolated, without much interaction. I think that's largely because of how the tutorial leaves things: Red and Yellow have fairly clear strategies to carry on with, while Blue has a bit of everything, but no major military presence and no obvious path to follow. In a game this complex (and with players as tired as we were) that was an issue. In hindsight, I think we should have discarded Blue and stuck with Yellow.

With Yellow - or a fourth (or fifth!) player - someone else would have been playing to take the Oathkeeper title, which means my Chancellor would have had to worry about more fronts, and others would have been able to get in Red's way to block her (eventual, inevitable) win.

I'm looking forward to playing more of it - by the end of round three or four we mostly had the mechanics bedded in, and I think next time we'll have a stronger, more confident start because of it.

I think we're coming up on the end of The King's Dilemma - we've finished all but one of the storylines, and there are only two dilemmas left in the deck to draw from. It's taken a weird turn, though…

Seriously, spoilers.

Spoiler - click to showIt's all started to get a bit meta - thanks to a cursed book, the King appears to have become aware that he's in a game, and has been yelling at us about how the choices we make are dictated for us. One of the cards also basically dared us to ignore the outcome?

From what I've seen vaguely mentioned online, I suspect it's unlikely to stick the landing.