Monopoly So mainstream!

Recent BGN with HB, before and after the Witch Mountain/Castle show
-Smallword
-Dominion (with the latest expansion, Hinterlands)
-Carcassone
-Catan the card game
We were supposed to play Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but I was too tired, so we'll play it next time.

It was my first time playing Catan, it was pretty cool, but a bit complex at first, we played like 3 games and I was kinda destroyed by Hellblazer I'd like to play the board game too.

Also terrible. I hate that game.

Never played Catan the card game, but I really enjoy the board game. All my gaming friends moved away. No games no more.

+ this thread has been nothing but frustrating because of all the awesome games that could be played, but are just taunting me.

Grab Vassal and play online.

Whoah! Thanks! Definitely more into the game night experience, but I'll check this out. Reminded me of the D&D banter in the FFA. I hadn't even thought about playing over skype or whatnot, especially for conversation-centric games like that. I wonder .. I wonder .. Thanks for the heads up!

Went to a party last night and overheard a girl talking about Arkham Horror. Shoulda gotten her number.

Haven't you ever read "The Thing on the Doorstep"?!? Women who know too much about that sort of thing are baaaaaad news.

I bought the Illuminati board game this weekend and it's as fun as I remember it being. I've only played with 2 and 3 people so far, which sucks, but soon I'll try to get a real group together so we can all leave mad at each other. There's also 3 expansions, but I'm not sure how long it will be before I pick them up.

Oi! I'll sick Asenath on you.

I can never get enough Scrabble.

My first D&D campaign was awesome, I'm almost level 4 but I had to go back to the city, my cousin and his friends are gonna continue this week. I think I'll look for a gang in Montréal, maybe Hellblazer wants to play???

I played 7 Wonders last night, was decent fun, but a bit too chaotic for me, what with changing hands all the time.

We were gonna play Carcassone as well but didn't get around to it.

Went to a game club party later and they were playing that card game, We Didn't Playtest This. I walked up and drunkenly stated "I played this on acid and it made me want to kill myself." Wasn't well received, . Really not much fun though.

Nahsil, you're welcome to Montréal any time! 7 Wonders can feel a bit chaotic for the first games, it's quite faced paced.

I have a bunch of the books for that game, if it's the same one you are thinking of. I thought it was gone years & years ago.

7 Wonders looks pretty cool. I played Smallworld a couple weeks ago, except it was the underground version, and it was bitchin! Looking at the board and the races it is far cooler than the original, I would have been pissed to spend $80 or whatever on the first one only to see that come out. Also bought an Illuminati expansion already, had a good 6 player game 2 weeks ago that ended in yelling and many hurt feelings. The game works!

The game is like 40 bucks, but yeah. I looked at the races and the board for Underworld and it's more colorful, but I like the original a lot anyway. I'd like to try the expansions though, more races and powers.

Anyway, I was at HB's monday and we tried Betrayal at house on the hill. We were 5 so it was a full and complete game. It was quite fun. Basically, you're in a house which is gonna build itself randomly as you explore it and look for shit. You pick clues and you know there's an "haunt" coming. One of the player will be a traitor (it could be secret or known by all the players, the latter was our situation). We made fun of our traitor! Basically, he has a goal to achieve and all the other players are playing against him. In our case, the traitor was asleep and he was producing dangerous nightmares, we had to stop him before too many escaped the house and we did! Success! It's similar to Arkham Horror a bit, but it's not as long and it's not as complex, it's faster to install and there's not as many pieces to place, etc.... It was an enjoyable game and we'll play again.

We also played these games:
-7 wonders
-Carcassone
-Smallworld (first game with 4 players, very cool)
-Game of Thrones: the card game

Here's some pictures, the Smallword one is from another day
http://imgur.com/a/BvDI3#0

I'm bumping this thread because I tried one of the best board game ever yesterday (and hum, this morning...). I'm naming Twilight Imperium, it's a game of space conquest, trade and diplomacy and it's very fucking epic. The main thing I liked about the game is its racial diversity. There's 8 races you can play and it's maximum 6 players. They are all very different, some more combat inclined, some more trade inclined, etc. Good brief description of the races here. The game is very long, it took us 8 hours for our first one, it probably will be around 6 hours once we'll get used to the many rules. So you'll need to be patient, but it's always exciting and fun, I was getting irritated near the end because I was tired and I had an headache though!

To win the game you need to be the first player to get to 10 victory points, these points can be obtained through your "secret objective" card (2 points) or "secondary objective" cards that everyone could use too, they are revealed one by one by the Imperial card (one each round and I'll come back to this later). Something that I didn't much is the fact you can win the game even though you've been completely demolished on the board by the other players because your objectives were completed...It didn't happened in the first game, but the winner wasn't the one with the most units either. What's fun is that you really need to use the abilities of your race to win, I had the Mentak, so I had to play like a criminal scum!

Each round (a round was about 45 minutes to an 1hr15) every players are choosing one (or two depends on the number of players) of the 8 cards that are dictating the flow of the game. There's Trade, Warfare, Political, Diplomacy, Imperial, Iniative, Logistics and Technology. The Imperial card also gives the player 2 Victory points each time he plays it, something I feel is overpowered. The board is also always variable since we each place tiles at the start of the game to create the universe. I played it only once, but I can see that the game will always be fun, especially if I can finish ahead of Hellblazer again!

Hum, that's enough, I guess. If you like Sci Fi and board games, you'll LOVE Twlight Imperium

Yeah, Twilight Imperium looks sweet! Summer is fairly busy for me and my gamer friends, but once fall/winter comes I'm planning on picking up a copy of that and Arkham Horror. Oh and the expansion for Star Trek: Fleet Capatains comes out in the fall, which add Romulans, so I'm pretty excited about that!

It's a fun game- lots of variables, so after playing a dozen games or so they've all been quite different. Plus if you like Star Trek, the chance to blast around on the enterprise and do shit like beaming tribbles aboard an enemy ship is a lot of fun.

I'll remember that next time...

That Twillight Imperium game looks really intense!

I'll bring some cookies.

Played Power Grid ,7 Wonders, and Arkham Horror with Metantoine, Hellblazer and Morrigan (she only joined in on AH). Intense nerd day. I liked Power Grid quite a bit, it's a very balanced game. It was my first game and it gave me a feeling that one could get really good and strategic with it. It's relatively simple too for newcomers, nothing super daunting. If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 7.5-8/10. 7 Wonders wasn't quite as awesome. I wasn't entirely clear on some of the aspects and it's a fast paced game (like 20-30 minutes). Basically you get ressources and military strenght and you have to build your wonder. 6.5/10. Arkham Horror was the sickest. We had a 6 player game going but it never got chaotic, as the board is massive. The rules and objectives are quite complex so I won't get into them here but it's really fun (and took a little over 4 hours to complete). We even defeated Nyarlathotep himself. An aspect that I liked was how fights with most of the monsters are quite difficult and there's a definite risk/reward thing going. 9/10, for sure.

I used to play a lot of board games with my crew over beer. Lots of Arkham Horror, Talisman, Descent, Runebound and others of that ilk. I still play from time to time but I have gone back to RPG's for now.

As for RPG's - I played a lot of D&D (almost all editions and variants - one of my favourites is still the Beginner, Expert, Master boxsets or the the collected Rules Cyclopedia), Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, Runequest, Pendragon etc. But these days I have gone back to old school revival games that focus mainly on DnD-like rules but in the style of the simpler earlier rulesets. I really have no need for feats or even complex skill systems. They weren't in the beginning at yet everything still worked fine. Some of the stuff I play or am looking forward to playing is the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, Labyrinth Lord, Stars Without Number and so on. Recently bought Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea (I love that title and the fact the game comes out as boxset) and Runequest 6 for more complex, robust gameplay.

As for 3e and 4e DnD - 3e would be good if they stuck to the ideas presented in the corebooks and not overload the system with tons of idiotic splatbooks. Do not even get me started on 4e - I really have grown to dislike that game. It stands against everything I like in my fantasy RPG's as of now.

We fucking killed that cunt, man!

And they said it couldn't be done! Nonsense, we emerged nearly unscathed.

It's kinda silly that regular monsters are harder to fight head-on than Nyarlathotep himself though... this game has some balance issues, some of the Ancient Ones should be harder.

Now that I think about it, I'll give you that. Hellblazer was really not down to fight Nyarlathotep, but we beat him with relative ease. While when fighting against certain monsters, we got really screwed over. But when you think about it, you're fighting the monsters one on one, unlike the Outer God. I'm sure they'll release like 10 more expansions and you'll have to purchase two tables though

HB didn't want to fight Nyarlathotep for a different reason, though; not because he thought we couldn't beat him, but because he doesn't like winning that way. He prefers to win by sealing or closing enough gates rather than just letting the Old One awaken and fight him, which, in his opinion, makes the whole effort of entering and sealing gates and clearing out monsters from Arkham pointless.

I think he has a point, though in yesterday's case, closing gates wasn't entirely pointless: our gate trophies allowed us to purchase blessings, and our wandering around of Arkham allowed us to get a few clue tokens, and those were very, very helpful in defeating Nyarlathotep.

Still, the expansion monsters are a lot harder. Once we had Abboth (I think) awaken, and he was impossible to defeat, you had to sacrifice like gate/monster trophies and items/spells at every round and once you ran out of those you got devoured. We were never close to defeating him.

Yeah of course. It's quite a difficult game. The King In Yellow expansion in particular adds another layer of difficulty with the whole blight card dilemma. Good fun, that's for sure.

Some of the Ancient Ones' attacks are really damn lame, especially the ones from the core game can be pretty weak. Those ones are in general the easiest anyway, though Shub, Yog and Cthulhu are probably the best of any of the bunch: Tough, but not too random. We generally tend to play them so that we don't actually do the final fight against the Ancient One. If it awakes, we lose.

Yeah, MacMoney (damnit he replied while I was writing this post) said in #metal that he thinks that fighting the monster is the equivalent of losing the game. But fighting Nyarlathotep is way easier than fighting cthulhu and we were very well prepared to do it, I thought it was fun personally, to each Ancient One, there's a different strategy to adopt.

I'm glad that there's some activity in the thread \m/

MacMoney awakens Azathoth...and wins.

Haven't gotten to play Arkham in a while, always played with my ex and some friends.

Maybe I can find a new group.

Try the old, 2nd ed Call of Cthulhu RPG, and say ANY attack by ANY monster in that game is lame, and I'll give you an award... It's possible to fend off a few ghouls, and maybe a pair of Fungi from Yuggoth, and even a Nightgaunt (*giggle*) is something you could theoretically handle, if you succeed in the SAN roll. But anything else will make minced meat out of a character in seconds, no questions asked. The point of the game is avoiding death and/or insanity as long as possible, and maybe doing something good before the inevitable strikes.

An example: a character, fresh out of the sheet, has 3d6 x 5 Sanity. ANY Old One or Elder God will, on the average, drain 1d100 of it, upon first sight, and that's on a good day. No, it's not a game of survival. But it still is friggin' awesome!

That sounds pretty awesome. My character in AH was basically a tank and had very little sanity. But I did defeat a Nightgaunt!

I also feel like fighting the Ancient One is harder if you have more players which doesn't make much sense to me... Not only are you more likely to have more weak characters which don't pull their weight in the final fight but if I remember correctly the number of successes required remains the same after players are devoured. And they are damn likely to get devoured the more of them there are...

I do think this is a pretty difficult thing to predict happening and only gets noticeable from lots of playtesting with various players so it's understandably overlooked, but it does suck =( Admittedly though it could largely be because whenever I play big games it's with inexperienced people so perhaps we're just not as prepared as we should be come the final battle.

Also @Metantoine, thanks loads for recommending Small World! I ended up buying it recently and found it so unbelievably fun that I can't wait for the next game It amazed me how much strategy there was with so few action options on turns!

Glad you like it, man. It's a great game, very well balanced.

Hmm? Of course the number of successes required to damage them remains higher even if players get devoured during the final battle. It wouldn't make any sense if it went down. And you only have weak characters if you've had players who don't know and aren't instructed on what to do and how to get better. The characters only stay weak if you don't work on them. Or with bad luck.



Yes, there are some balance issues in the game, some Ancient Ones are really damn easy while others are really damn difficult. Some locations are pretty much neglected because they're really quite poor while others give out much better outcomes (*cough* Newspaper *cough*). And some characters are just overpowered with their special characteristics (that female Agent who can change her abilities at the beginning of every turn, the violinist who is a Clue Token bank, the martial artist) but fairly minor points and those can be avoided by choosing carefully. Don't take crap AOs like Yig or the too overpowered ones (unless you're really looking for a challenge) and don't take the overpowered characters. Or the underpowered ones.

But yeah, exactly because the Ancient Ones attacks are pretty lame and because it's mainly just throwing dice without much decision making, the final battles are pretty dull.

Yeah I do agree with you, I get that the fight shouldn't get easier when players die. It's just that we've always had a better squad with less people because there are fewer players for the really awesome weaponry to be split between. There are barely any players who are good enough to fight the Ancient One without insane amounts of powering up. I think it doesn't help that money seems to be so hard to come by in the game and the random nature of the buying couple with the fact that you can't back out of paying for at least one of the items (unless I've got this rule wrong) means that you often just can't get weapons easily and this gets more problematic with more players.

To be honest though, it's probably more that I don't play this game enough, or with consistent other players, to develop any decent strategies...

By the way, have any of you guys played Vanished Planet? I've been debating whether to get it or not. I think a few of the reviews were saying the resource-gathering and building can be a bit unforgiving and chancy. Not sure if this has been anyone else's experience?

Smallworld is a blast, i enjoy that game a little bit too much. Got the races expansions (I quite recommend it if you are looking to spice things up a little), 'Don't be Afraid' comes with a storage tray so you can accommodate extra races in there, which is REALLY useful.
Just got Smallworld Underground and Smallworld Realms. The latest you can create different scenarios from your imagination or play one of the already recommendations the booklet has. I'm looking forward in trying Dominion, though.

I'm starting a D&D 48 hours marathon tonight. We're still playing 4 but we're introducing some elements from other versions. I'll have a blast anyway, going to the grocery store to buy a lot of beer and food soon.