Board Game General - /bgg/

not actually played it desu, just thought it was the best halloween game

each player is a necromancer and you all reside in a connected cave system. you gather resources to build minions and the winner is the last necromancer left alive

not OP but I own Cave Evil, got the absolute basics of it down

each turn you draw from one of four decks and you can either immediately discard for one resource type that is required for casting the card or keep it (variant rule in rulebook allows for discarding at will, which I greatly prefer) and can do a variety of actions such as moving squads, summoning creatures, casting spells, digging tunnels, combat etc.

when you summon creatures you can either attach them to the squad or create a new squad. you can have up to six squads (necromancer squad and five other squads) where you can generally have a max of three small units, a medium and a small unit or a large unit per squad. each squad manages resources individually, so in order for your necromancer to be able to summon creatures your other squads will need to pick up and trade the resources to your necromancer, unless there's spellcasters who need resources to cast spells

units have six attributes which are all outlined around a hex (see boardgamegeek.com/image/1903774/cave-evil for an example) and combat is determined by the aggressor choosing an attribute for the entire squad and comparing it to the same attribute for the opposing squad and each player rolling a D12 for total value, then the defender chooses an adjacent attribute to the first attribute then the aggressor chooses the other adjacent attribute if it's still alive, you can subdue neutral units to join you or kill them for resources, while enemy units are always killed for resources

after a while there'll be a massive neutral boss unit that will appear and will generally fuck shit up hard, so you either need to kill everyone else before they murderhobo you or somehow defeat it if you have a big enough squad. you either win by killing all players, destroying their home base crystal or killing the neutral boss

game is amazing and is in my top 3 of all board games, shame it's OOP and expensive as hell

thanks mate

also each card has unique artwork which really adds to the theme, I've pre-ordered Cave Evil: Warcults which is a stand-alone expansion and I'm looking forward to it. shame it wasn't released before Halloween

played a four-player game a couple weekends ago, I recommend it if you have a group that doesn't get salty about the constant backstabbing - the expansions give you so much content (105 encounters with base+expansions when you only need to create a deck of 9 encounters, not to mention relics and events which aren't in the base game) with a lot of crazy rules that it'll never get boring

From a bit of browsing online I figured that if I will buy the game, ill get it + Relics & Ruins.

Its just that it feels like a bit to much of an RNG fest to be actually able to do something.

The whole idea is cool, you need the others to get far, but the further you get the more you want to get rid of them.

Is it actually fun or does it feel a bit lackluster?

the only RNG fest is the initiative order that is resolved at the start of every turn in an encounter, that's the only real potential issue I can see with the game as when I had played it last, a friend had mentioned that he felt that dealing the initiative cards each turn had added too much length to the game

meanwhile, we started the same time as five other people playing Betrayal with the new expansion and we had finished over a hour before they did

I definitely find it fun, I've played it with several different people and let a group of people borrow my copy and I've personally never heard of anyone being salty about it, one person had went super deadpan to the same friend who commented about dealing the initiative cards and he didn't pick up on it, which made him upset but he got over it quickly enough, no other incidents otherwise. I came across it due to a recommendation here on /bgg/ - if there's one thing I can trust on it's that a good portion of people here have legit good taste

>Did I play any spooky games?
No :/
>Plan on playing any?
Only if my one group that never meets anymore somehow meets, then I'll introduce them to Mansions of Madness. Otherwise we'll just pretend this nice holiday never happened
>Favorite game that elicits despair?
The Grizzled, for entirely different reasons
Good choice of expansion. It's definitely random, but my friends and I managed to have fun with it. While you rarely draw the perfect cards, most cards you get are good enough to beat your friends to the prestige with some strategy. You have to be in the random backstabbing mood I guess
>More chaotic
Don't know what would give you that impression. There's plenty of opportunity to plan several moves ahead in Onitama

>dealing initiative cards each round added too much length to the game
I actually agree. I use Random.org's app where I have a special profile set up for determining initiative

ooh that is actually neat, thanks for that

Hey, I am looking for a game similar to Catan, best with 4 people and strategy based. Any suggestions?

>similar to catan
In what way?
I'll have to say Terra Mystica, there's no trading and randomness, but there's a lot about placements, ressource management, best with 4 people, very strategic as there nothing random once the game starts (the setting is somehow random).

It's certainly more complex and long than Catan.

...

I love interaction between players, strategic placement and resource management. I will take a look to Terra Mystica, any other recommendation maybe less complex?

>each turn you draw from one of four decks and you can either [...] game is amazing and is in my top 3 of all board games
:)
> shame it's OOP and expensive as hell
:(

youtube.com/watch?v=ifBe4t_tPRw

Opinions on this? Looks pretty cool imo.

Any of my abstract strats brothers here?

So I was at a french sf-con recently and it mostly meant playing board games I couldn't afford or wanted to try before looking at the price tag. We played a fairly non-memorable but cute card game about trees ("kodama" iirc) and we proceed to forget a critical rule which made it much funnier but completely unbalanced... non-memorable anyway.

And we were dragged by one of our friend into playing Blood Rage... and oh boy was it a bad game (well not so great at least) and pompous at that. I think it's nicely described as similar to the French language, there is a lot of important rules that are badly explained and they don't really matter in the end because there are so many exceptions that will ruin your fun that you should focus on the unlikely scenario. It's a terribly balanced game with one or two cards per age that are absolutely overpowered, which make the draft much much more critical than what is presented. And then the opposition between player is such a non-issue for like 90% of the game that the theme simply doesn't play out that well. Fighting in itself isn't really that rewarding since losing and playing Loki cards and from the Valhalla is a much more potent strategy. So basically by the end of the game, we had four players who didn't really tried to fight each other as it would mostly help two of them, nobody was trying to win against the other and we simply were pillaging regions by ourselves. Quests are completely overpowered (valhalla and drakkar ones especially), meaning there is little sense for actual pillaging and fighting, this coupled with stuff like the quest point doubling card meant that what was happening on the board wasn't much of an issue.

Content of course if very pleasing to the eye, yet the board in itself is pretty unremarkable. Figurines are fantastic but we ended up not playing much of the biggest creatures as they were simply too costy and not worth it.
Cont...

Cont.
The fact that they charge a lot (90€... seriously) for an utterly basic game with nice figs is just ridiculous. At this price, I'd rather by an actual figurines based game. Gameplay was just non-compelling, at the end of the second age, I was just so bored I pushed everyone to hurry up and everyone was in the same state of mind. It really was a terrible experience, I guess it's good to play a mediocre game once in a while, and this one was my yearly experience.

Meanwhile, I finally played 8min Empire Legends (stupidly titled 18min Empire in French) and it was simply great! It's stunning that this game did area control better than Blood Rage when it's the only actual mechanics of it. Don't know how the regular 8min Empire is played but I've heard that Legends was basically a better game on all points. It certainly felt nice, there is multiple sensible strategies, content is nice and the package match the scope of the game. It was certainly the highlight of our days and all of the company agreed it was a great little game, which is revealing I suppose.

Damn you guy should play 7wonders if you want to just do your things alone.
Game is pretty good and you prolly missed a few things if you just stuck to pillaging villages on you own while the other were doing another zone.

>(stupidly titled 18min Empire in French)
Does turning the eight to eighteen make it rhyme or scan or something?

>co-op
It's shit.

>Damn you guy should play 7wonders if you want to just do your things alone.
You don't say... Problem is that it seemed just too easy to lose pillaging on purpose to fuck people up with special card and relying on clan boost and valhalla quests to make points. It grants perhaps even more points and you can simply abuse some particularly powerful combo of loki cards. The very fact that a handful of cards are enough to completely unbalance the game is dreadful and it's not only something that we came up with, it's something the two guys who introduced us to the game noted as well, thought they could have fun with it nonetheless. The thing is, there is little to win and plenty to lose in opposing pillage, you can do it here and there, but in the grand scheme of things, it's quite hard to rely on it.

Now of course I'm purposedly harsh, it's not such a bad game, but it's awfully expensive for something that is mediocre or at least unoriginal. Only the figs seems to be of some value, even the board isn't particularly notable. Don't know if it was the french version, but rules were pretty badly explained as well.

Also, wasn't it funded by crowdfunding? If so it's just terrible, it's not like Edge needs to develop games like so.

Not really. I don't get it, but it's quite common to have needless translations here so...

Yeah, blood rage is a simple card drafting game with a bunch of nice figures. The "battlefield" is more an abstraction of the point scoring and little economy system than anything resembling area control.
I like the game but you have to realize what it is, which is not a war game, not area control, and not the typical "dudes on a map". It's a pretty light card game with tons of production. If it were less fiddly it would be a great gateway game.

>Unoriginal
That's Eric Lang for you

Is it ok for the expansion to cost more than the game itself?
I mean the game is 30$ while the expansion is 40$ (with shipping).

Any insight/opinion on gloomhaven for those who watched the previews/played it?
Im tempted to get it when it comes out but i dont have enough experience in many boardgames to form an educated opinion on it to decide a preorder.

From what I've seen it seems like an MMO in a box. Don't know much about it. It's got a high price.

Concordia might scratch that itch.

How was Chaos in the Old World so good.
It's like Lang is Avallone, who made the amazing Planescape: Torment and then a series of derivative shit forevermore.

>best with four people
I like how cutthroat the road to three cities gets with 5.

Hi STEEV

Ad Astra is basically Catan without dice and in space.

Try Castles of Burgundy
great game, some similarities, easy to learn

>t. someone who needs to feel superior to his friends at all times

Thank you, I've been looking for a game that's basically Catan without the dice FUCKING ME

Archipelago might be worth a look.

I've met quite a few board game designers that claim to have had a hand in the creation of CitOW, like a ridiculous amount. I think that success may have been less Lang's doing and more of a design by committee stroke of luck with a very heavy dose of editing the game down to its bare bones.

Redpill me on this shit gentlemen

I love 7 Wonders Duel but I'm afraid this is one of those expansions that ride on the popularity of the original game, adding a lot of unnecessary shit without any real game depth

It's not a spooky game, but Ascended Kings has Revenants with some spooky art.

>I think that success may have been less Lang's doing and more of a design by committee stroke of luck with a very heavy dose of editing the game down to its bare bones.
> I think that success may have been less Lang's doing and more of a design by committee stroke of luck
> I think that success [...] design by committee
No.

We played it only once, content is nice, God cards are ridiculously big (as usual with 7wonders goofy card size), game takes now lots of space, artistic style is as great as it already was.

The nicest thing is the ability to cancel what was the most annoying part of the game: being forced to pick a card, meaning you could well be always the one to reveal cards, this pretty much always at your detriment. Now it's possible to pick a Divinity card in order not to reveal a new card (plus obviously the effect of the divinity card, which are usually very powerful). This much is great.

Now... some divinity cards are obviously broken (steal a wonder, build a wonder twice, steal a ressource card, etc) but both players have a shot at getting them, so there's always that.

imho, it fixes some issues, maybe there are some more now, can't say yet, but overall content is great, some divinity cards are great (didn't played all so...), new green token can be used with base game. It looks very nice, after a single game, we have a pretty good feeling of it, might change in the future but so far so good.

Thanks for the input. I didn't get in on the KS, and I think I'm glad - I've got enough card (drafting / deck building) games to last me for a while. The price tag is just painful even if it does have nice production values.

God-damnit user! I was eating a pretzel when I read that and damn near shot it out my nose from laughing. That shiz is painful! You've got to warn a bro-ham before firing off weapons grade snark! ;)

You might also give 'Roll for the Galaxy' a look. It does have dice rolling. However you roll the dice first, and then make choices from the resulting rolls - rather than 'here's my strategy' only to have the dice go 'lol - nope!'

Hey, it's almost like you didn't read what I wrote and instead just focused on a term that makes you angry.

>Did you play any spooky games this weekend?
I didn't play any games, period. Just one of those times where I was inbetween meetups.
>Do you plan on playing any spooky games in the upcoming days?
Might bring Enter The Nightmare to tomorrow's meetup - it's a quick card game I backed on KS by the guy who made 404: Law Not Found
>What's your favorite game that elicits a sense of despair?
K2 - you play a team of climbers trying not to die on the second-largest mountain in the world
>How do you set the mood for spooky games? Dimming the lights can be detrimental to the gameplay experience for many games
I know one guy who plays spooky music whilst running Betrayal

I'm just saying that it's implausible.

Anything done by multiple people (especially artistically) goes to shit.

> Did you play any spooky games this weekend?
Fury of Dracula and Last Night on Earth. In both cases the powers of darkness were crushed.
> Do you plan on playing any spooky games in the upcoming days?
Does CitOW count?
> What's your favorite game that elicits a sense of despair?
Munchin.

Ah wait favorite. Never mind.
> How do you set the mood for spooky games? Dimming the lights can be detrimental to the gameplay experience for many games

I thought about using candles but decided against it. So the only thing I have working is putting on climatic music.

I've played RollFTG, it's on my list because my friends love dice-building even though I thought it was a very high meh.

>Anything done by multiple people (especially artistically) goes to shit.
As a general rule, but exceptions do happen.

Nah, I post occasionally as this guy.
I tend to lose my games, I just like conflict.

I also post as the guy who can't get his fucking phone pictures to post right, even after putting them on the desktop and rotating them.
Let's try this one more time.

Anyone get a chance to try the Bloodborne card game at one of the earlier cons?

I was the Harambes, btw. The Robocops ended up winning.

>Did you play any spooky games this weekend?
Fury of Dracula in the week and Lost Patrol on Saturday (its a stretch)

>Do you plan on playing any spooky games in the upcoming days?
I plan on playing the new Betrayal expansion

>What's your favorite game that elicits a sense of despair?
Watching my family toil and slave, only to then be denied food and forced to starve by my own hand in Agricola

>How do you set the mood for spooky games?
Dramatic reading of flavour text, though there aren't many in my group who go for theme unfortunately

As a Uwe Rosenburg fan (or not) which of his two new games looks more funs?
A Feast for Odin or Cottage Garden?

>Did you play any spooky games this weekend?
Not really. Still working on Pandemic: Legacy, though.
>Do you plan on playing any spooky games in the upcoming days?
Nope. Too busy working.
>What's your favorite game that elicits a sense of despair?
Ghost Stories. HUGE uphill battle that seems almost impossible to win.

FLGS has tons of copies of it in stock.

>mfw Cry Havoc has been sitting completely set up on my table for a week because friends keep bailing at last minute.

We will now discuss this gorgeous motherfucker right here.

I wanted to get this game because I get the urge for m:tg at times but bailed when reading more about it.

I fear that nothing will beat m:tg at it's own game. I'd like something that has a similar feel like m:tg, deep mechanics and customization but with a much smaller format.

What exactly did you read that put you off Ashes?

I think that, despite the obvious differences, this game is similar enough to Magic to scratch that itch. And the customization will get even deeper as more cards are released. Plans for 2017 are to expand the cardpool by 20-40 new cards every season or so.

I read that the mechanics/rules don't seem to account for anything non-obvious and heavier interactions need house-rulling.

Look up Codex, been hearing good things about that from friends of mine who play Magic; downside it means giving money to Sirlin.

You are kinda right about that, this is PHG's first game intended foir competitive play. As designers they have always gone for the less rules-heavy, more narrative approach and it shows. They are working, though, on numerous clarifications which should streamline and clarify the weirdest interactions.
The game might be in its infancy but it has room for growth nad a lot of potential.
Oh yeah fuck Shillin, man. I pirated all of Puzzle Strike by downloading pics from his site and I am actually proud of that.

Yeah I ended up with Trains instead of Puzzle Strike as the deckbuilder in my collection because AEG is less awful than Sirlin; but Codex does look solid and his games are generally well balanced.

>order mechs vs minions on imulse
>waittaminit
>i don't like co ops
>or league
>what did i dooooo
>friend from the meetup really wanted it and missed out
>sold it to him for a c-note
All worked out in the end.

It's been sitting on the shelf unplayed since I bought it. One day I'll get to it.

I'm jealous, you dodged a bullet. Even for a coop game it's just flat out bad.

I've heard it gets better after like the fourth mission where enough rules have been opened to introduce interesting decisions.

I'm looking at my box right now. Haven't played it, so I dunno how good/bad it really is. I did play League for the first couple seasons, but I'm over it, so not a lot of memorabilia points for it. Box has the best production value of pretty much every boardgame ever produced. Should at least be worth something in the long run.

I might end up selling it to some League fans eventually, I just wanna see if Riot makes another move soon, and how the resale prices change after the second printing is shipped.

It gets better but it's still the lightest of the light with incredibly shallow gameplay. Think closer to smash up when it comes to strategic decision making. It's also incredibly fiddly and has fairly little game to back it up.

Is Shadows over camelot a good game? Im just looking for a game similar to pandemic that is the players vs the game kind of deal and Shadows sounds good.

It's a pioneer of the "comp with potential hidden traitor" genre

In this case, it means it's very basic and you can do a lot better by looking at more recent games that built on that premise. Shadows gets easy after a couple games unless the traitor plays perfectly, and if there isn't one it's trivial.

If you don't mind putting in a hour or so of gameplay more, I'd recommend Battlestar Galactica. Dead of Winter is quite good too. Pandemic too has an expansion where one player can turn traitor, though I don't know if it's hidden.

For a similar experience to Pandemic I'd recommend Forbidden Desert from the same author.

Thanks, I'll look into them.

>Pandemic too has an expansion where one player can turn traitor, though I don't know if it's hidden.
It's from the "On The Brink" expansion: the infector. Plays kinda like you'd play Drac in Fury of Dracula.

That's the buyers remorse talking. It only gets more monotonous.

Thinking of preordering the second wave and sitting on it for a few months.

The eBay prices are crap and no one is going to consider this a classic note that the paid reviews are as transparent as a piece of glass. You'll be lucky to break even and do your REALLY want to give Riot money? They're worse than EA.

You've convinced me.
I'll spend the money on GW/FFG speculation instead.
There's an LGS by me still selling that syuff for MSRP.

still haven't gotten mine played. MTG Commander is taking the spotlight at game night with my friends right now, and I got to the meetup too late yesterday to justify lugging it out.

not unhappy with the purchase though. One of my friends bought 2 LoL collectable figures at $25 each whilst attending an esports thing in MSG 2 weeks ago (tickets >$100), the other bought a $65 League World Championship hoodie, a $25 Worlds tshirt, and who knows what else. They both balked at the purchase of a board game--based on a game they clearly like--because it's too expensive.

I know it's stupid to compare disposable income purchases but it helps me sleep at night. As for the game, it'll get played one way or another

I popped open my copy with some friends this weekend.
It was pretty fun since its my first foray into a programmable drafting game.
My guests really enjoyed it too despite noone not knowing shit about LoL besides the one DOTA player who wouldnt shut up about LoL being shit.
/v/ made me experience buyers remorse at first with all the shitposting but this play session quickly changed my mind.

They're probably surprised you paid that much for a huge pile of future garbage. At least the figure and the shirt were what they advertised. This is not even a game.

What are some good games for 6 players?
I already have
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Catan
Dominion
7 Wonders
Flashpoint
Citadels

Rex

Cosmic Encounter

Go to bed, Tom

I mean, it comes with 4 painted figures that could've easily been $20 each. Then 100 minions... which could be $1 each. Hell 50 cents each. If selling this game piecemeal is the only way dumb LoL players will buy it, then I should go into the merch business
this

Fuck, meant to say "this, but you need an expansion for the 6th player" (Cosmic Incursion probably)

For Sale
Incan Gold
Survive (with the $5 expansion)
Dixit
Deception Murder In Hong Kong/Mysterium
Resistance/ONUW/ONR
Ca$h n Gun$
>spared no expense mode
Memoir '44 with Operation Overlord rules

For the anons who wanted info on the new edition of the Doom board game.
fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/10/31/not-your-average-soldiers/

Battlestar Galactica