Board Games and Tabletop!

So I just spent way too much money on Dice Throne and Dice Throne preorders. I have a problem.

What have people been playing of late?
 
kvetcha said:
So I just spent way too much money on Dice Throne and Dice Throne preorders. I have a problem.

What have people been playing of late?
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I also have everything and have preordered/kickstarted everything Dice Throne. It's a fun and surprisingly balanced game. I keep my Season One and Two at Work as it's a good go to for pretty much any level board gamer. I'm looking forward to adventure mode.

I recently played New York 1901, which is just Ticket To Ride with buildings instead of rail lines, but it was fun.

I'm still playing Gloomhaven almost every Monday (Holiday season is rough on plans) and I'm both jazzed and daunted by the announcement of Frosthaven, the full sized sequel.

I try and play Keyforge at a shop a couple days a month, if not after work with friends. I still enjoy it.

I gave the new Transformers TCG a try and bought a bunch of cards, it's fun, but it's a "Build your own deck" kind of game, which I've never liked. So I get a friend to help me.

One party game I've played recently that I highly suggest is CrossTalk. It's a team based word/phrase guessing game, but the format makes it interesting. I've played with a couple different groups and even with complete strangers and it seems to work pretty well.

Astro Trash is a super fun and fast paced game for up to five players. It's frantic and silly, but a good palate cleanser between heavy games.

I have a ton of Kickstarters I'm waiting on, Dice Throne Adventures, Battle Con, Hero Realms, Escape the Dark Sector, Etherfields, Dwellings of Eldervale, Wavelength, and Streets of Steel. But I realized after I backed all these games I still have close to 100 board games I've yet to even play. So I've stopped buying and i'm going to start working on my backlog. It's going to be my New Years resolution.
 
I love, love, love Gloomhaven but it's so hard to get my group together to play that I'm guessing we're only 1/4 of the way through the campaign, if that. I have no idea how I'm going to finish it before Frosthaven.

Also been playing Terraforming Mars with some friends, and though I'm late to the party...wow, what a game! Rumors of a legacy variant coming 2020/2021, and I am totally on board.
 
kvetcha said:
I love, love, love Gloomhaven but it's so hard to get my group together to play that I'm guessing we're only 1/4 of the way through the campaign, if that. I have no idea how I'm going to finish it before Frosthaven.

Also been playing Terraforming Mars with some friends, and though I'm late to the party...wow, what a game! Rumors of a legacy variant coming 2020/2021, and I am totally on board.
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I've heard nothing but good things about Terraforming Mars, but have yet to try it. I love the idea of Legacy games, but between Gloomhaven and trying to get people together for D&D, the idea of another static game night is anxiety inducing.
 
Max Sterling said:
I've heard nothing but good things about Terraforming Mars, but have yet to try it. I love the idea of Legacy games, but between Gloomhaven and trying to get people together for D&D, the idea of another static game night is anxiety inducing.
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I highly, highly, highly recommend Terraforming Mars. We've been having a blast, and it's not nearly as dry or complex as it first appears.
 
Max Sterling said:
I've heard nothing but good things about Terraforming Mars, but have yet to try it. I love the idea of Legacy games, but between Gloomhaven and trying to get people together for D&D, the idea of another static game night is anxiety inducing.
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kvetcha said:
I highly, highly, highly recommend Terraforming Mars. We've been having a blast, and it's not nearly as dry or complex as it first appears.
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Second Terraforming Mars. We had some trouble the first couple of times but after that the games go smoothly, even if they're still a little long
 
I've never dove deep into those RPG (?) card games that are in comic shops and have every storyline/genre imaginable or classic stuff like D&D...but my wife did get Hive this year and we've really enjoyed playing it.

Also the Blockbuster game is actually surprisingly fun with a group.

I played the Bob Ross Art of the Chill game with my siblings and it was OK but weirdly convoluted and complicated (at least for me, a basic board game novice).
 
kvetcha said:
I realize this is not a super active thread, but I've got a few board games I'm looking to re-home and I thought I'd check here in case there's interest. They're free + shipping costs.

Thornwatch (includes unopened Dark of the Wood expansion)
Mysterium
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I've never heard of Thornwatch, but I got Mysterium for Christmas.

I'll vouch for Mysterium, it's a neat game, Cooperative, solving a mystery with one player a silent ghost simply giving you images as clues.
 
Just found this thread! I play Gloomhaven each week with 3 friends and we have dinner together (i bring cheese, crackers, and wine or sour beer, another person brings fresh baked bread and/or homemade dessert, and the couple that hosts provides dinner). We decide on the scenario/set up/choose cards/buy items/donate/do events while we eat and then start playing the actual scenario. It’s also fun trying to choose a playlist as the soundtrack for the different scenarios from week to week.

I email everyone each week a list of the currently available scenarios along with how we unlocked them and any relevant backstory. It’s funny to see how all the different storylines weave through the game and things that happened a year ago will pop back up. This is the only legacy game I’ve ever played, and I was nervous about committing to play each week, but I look forward to it now.

I also really liked Scythe but havent played that in a while. Dead of Winter and Betrayal at House on the Hill are good, too.

Other than that, I just played Unstable Unicorns and it was really fun. Similar to exploding kittens but a lot more variety in the special abilities. It’s pretty silly overall though and gets a little frustrating if you’re really trying to win haha.

Another simpler game is called Hanabi - it’s cooperative but basically the hook is that you can’t look at the cards in your hand but everyone else can. So you’re trying to work together to help each other play the cards in the right order and relying on each other to give you clues about what you have in your hand so you know what to do and when to do it. Obviously, you’re restricted in what information you can share and how much you can share at one time. It’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it, but it’s pretty funny watching each other struggle to remember the clues they’ve been given and there’s something fun and weird about a game where everything you’re doing is flying blind and relying on others to give you good information. And sometimes the game works out so you just have to play cards completely blindly to keep going. It’s kind of stressful but also pretty funny haha.
 
I just got back from a nerdy cabin weekend of board games, drinking, karaoke, and hot tubs.

We played Penny Lane, Thunderstone, Sushi Go Party, Wavelength, Seasons, Ship Shape, What Do You Meme?, and a home brew D&D one shot where we had to drink if we failed tasks and our DM's had to drink if we succeeded.

I had WAY too much fun and now I'm depressed to be home.
 
Woob_woob said:
I finally got a Gloomhaven party together and ordered a copy of the game. I'm very excited.
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I highly suggest an organizer of some sort, even if it's just a home brew thing like THIS ONE

I have this one from Laser Ox and it works great but it was a job to put together... I enjoyed it, but it may not be your cup of tea.

Setup and break down are by far the most annoying parts of the game, having everything easily found is essential.
 
Max Sterling said:
I highly suggest an organizer of some sort, even if it's just a home brew thing like THIS ONE

I have this one from Laser Ox and it works great but it was a job to put together... I enjoyed it, but it may not be your cup of tea.

Setup and break down are by far the most annoying parts of the game, having everything easily found is essential.
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Thanks for the tips! Any and all words of advice are more than welcome in helping this first time Gloomhaven party.
 
Woob_woob said:
Thanks for the tips! Any and all words of advice are more than welcome in helping this first time Gloomhaven party.
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A rule my party somehow missed and played a bunch of scenarios without: you can choose to lose a card from your hand rather than take incoming damage, making characters with larger hand limits fundamentally more durable.
 
Max Sterling said:
I highly suggest an organizer of some sort, even if it's just a home brew thing like THIS ONE

I have this one from Laser Ox and it works great but it was a job to put together... I enjoyed it, but it may not be your cup of tea.

Setup and break down are by far the most annoying parts of the game, having everything easily found is essential.
Click to expand...
Yeah our friend made his own storage trays for all of the game pieces - makes it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for.

We also found it helpful to track our relative initiative for each round on a little flagpole thing that sits on the table. We each have a colored clothes pin to represent our characters and then they have a different color for all the clothespins for the monster classes we’re fighting and just write the name of the monster on the clothespin. They sprayed something on the yellow ones so we can use a dry erase marker and erase it to reuse them depending on who we’re fighting. Makes it so much easier to keep track of the sequence of everyone’s turns each round - once they’ve gone, we flip their clothespin to the other side. Mine is the Green one!

You don’t necessarily need one of these, but they had fun making it and it’s fun to use. Some people use apps but we try to avoid using any screens while we play so it feels less like we’re working lol.

We also use tiny dice to track the monsters’ health on the enemy mats (rather than the health tokens). I think the game recommends that you add tokens with each attack to count UP the damage done on each enemy until they’re dead, but we give them full health when they appear on the board and remove it to count DOWN til they’re dead - makes it easier to see how close you are to killing them.
 
Woob_woob said:
Thanks for the tips! Any and all words of advice are more than welcome in helping this first time Gloomhaven party.
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kvetcha said:
A rule my party somehow missed and played a bunch of scenarios without: you can choose to lose a card from your hand rather than take incoming damage, making characters with larger hand limits fundamentally more durable.
Click to expand...


One thing my party didn't realize until we were a few scenarios in, is you only need to track rounds if the mission objective states "Finish in X Amount of Rounds" We "failed" a couple thinking we ran out of time when we were just artificially kneecapping ourselves.

We only use dice to track certain monsters HP, as they can be a little too much to track with tokens.

Don't forget about your Road and City events.

Without getting into any spoilers, certain things happen when you do certain things, like once you retire your first character you open the town records, and when you gain levels of prosperity and reputation things also happen, so try and pay attention to the rule book and town records book.

Your cards are your only timer in most cases. If you spend all your time in one room, you may not have enough moves for your character to make it to the end. I've never failed a scenario because everyone exhausted, but I've absolutely been the last man standing at the end of a scenario because everyone else exhausted.
 
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