What Board Game Are You Currently Playing?

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Yodaking

Unfortunately that is what has happened to me with Rum and Bones. I still have not played the second addition rules or figures, I think the first addition rules issues just pushed it into the back burner. Well that and the fact that I jsut buy too many games so the list of options now is pretty long. Blood Rage and now Rising Sun have both proved popular with my group and seemed to have earned a regular spot in the rotation. The nice thing about both is the 3 Ages/Seasons and you are done aspect of it. Even though is still takes us several hours to play a game, it is nice knowing when the end is coming.

The rules for Rum and Bones second tide are great. I've got in a many games with that one. It goes fairly quick too. I also have too many games to get on the table. I'm just not sure which is better. A couple of beloved games or a bunch of cool games that don't get played. We played a CO-OP frostgrave vs a never ending spawn of monsters tonight. It was fun, and lasted a couple hours. I got my butt kicked by the monsters. Another game night and yet still didn't play any of my new games.

[chas]

Yodaking,

I think all of the Rising Sun clans have potential, but some are more difficult to figure out than others. Fox is easy to do well with. But Lotus and Koi have been winning the most of our games. Different players with different clans and different rules mixes with different season cards sets and different Kami (diferently positioned) seeing different player counts make it hard to generalize, and spice up any one game.

Not to mention the different strategies available...

T-Rex,

Why not start an Organized Play Thread for you area on Boardgamegeek? It worked for me.

[Gurei-Ornery]

Played a ton of 7th Continent this weekend. I am hooked. It is like a free form Robinson Crusoe with accessible rules. Started with a friend Saturday and continued the same game from a "Save" point with my daughter yesterday. She loves it. I probably put in about 11 hours this weekend and still have not finished removing the first curse. It really stinks that this isn't coming to retail. I don't understand why because it is just cards.

[TREX]

Originally Posted by chas

Yodaking,

I think all of the Rising Sun clans have potential, but some are more difficult to figure out than others. Fox is easy to do well with. But Lotus and Koi have been winning the most of our games. Different players with different clans and different rules mixes with different season cards sets seeing different player counts make it hard to generalize, and spice up any one game.

Not to mention the different strategies available...

T-Rex,

Why not start an Organized Play Thread for you area on Boardgamegeek. It worked for me.

Not a bad idea. Ive got quite a few players already. Just a matter of getting them to try new games.

[Hahma]

My friend Zack just got his Kickstarter reward for Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters, and we gave it a try last night. And of course, Zack being Zack, he got the totally blinged out version with the plastic buildings instead of cardboard and some other neat upgrades.

This game is really fun. You start out by putting together a deck of 25 cards. I believe you have like 50 available, so you have several options, with each player having their own unique deck to choose from. There are a few different primary weapons to choose from, and you get to choose 1 of them, but take all 5 cards that belong to that weapon. Then there are several different types of secondary weapons, and you choose 2 of them and the 4 cards of each chosen type go into your deck. So you start with 13 cards just from weapons. Then there are 5 deployment cards that you should include, because they are the way to get your smaller robots onto the board for only 2 energy instead of 4 without those cards. After that, you have reaction cards that can help against certain attacks or do other neat things.

You shuffle the cards and then draw a hand of 6. Then you have deployment phase, where people choose to deploy a smaller robot within 2 hexes of them or not. You start with 5 energy each round and it cost 2 energy to deploy with a deploy card or 4 without. You can go negative energy, but for each extra energy you use, you have to discard a card from your hand or top of draw deck, into the damage discard pile. That is your damage and only certain things can bring those cards back. Once you lose all 25 cards, your giant robot is killed and the game ends. Then you have movement phase, then combat phase. For Combat, you choose which cards you want to play for attacking and place them. Then everyone reveals and you must pay the energy for each weapon that you played, even if things change and you can't use them. The attack cards have numbers at the top in the hundreds, so they get activated by highest number first, so you don't shoot all of yours at once, but everyone goes back and forth based on the number order. You have to hit a certain number to hit an enemy and they roll defense based on the number of damage the weapon does.

The smaller robots are a combat one, repair one and recon one and have 3, 2 and 1 life respectively. These each have their own attacks and don't require cards from hand to play. They can also allow for the the big robot to use their LOS to shoot a target.


After combat phase, you have tagging phase. For each robot next to a building, you get to place one of your player color markers on top. Once you have 4 of your color on a building it gets destroyed. The other game ending condition is to have 3 buildings destroyed by one player. But then after the tagging phase, you get to get a sponsor card for each tag you placed, and these cards are neat ways to modify attacks, defense, or hack other players systems or whatever. Very fun.

Then you start the next round by drawing back up to 6 cards and going back to 5 energy.

[TREX]

Looks neat hahma. Thanks for the descriptive read and pics. You are responsible for making me a wargamer and going off the grid.

[kolakoski]

Well met!

Originally Posted by Hahma

My friend Zack just got his Kickstarter reward for Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters, and we gave it a try last night.

This game is really fun.

It sure does! Would it be possible to get the Rules/Cards and play this using Heroscape terrain/figures?

[Hahma]

Originally Posted by TREX

Looks neat hahma. Thanks for the descriptive read and pics. You are responsible for making me a wargamer and going off the grid.

Ha! I knew I had to be good at something

Originally Posted by kolakoski

Well met!

It sure does! Would it be possible to get the Rules/Cards and play this using Heroscape terrain/figures?

I don't know how that would be possible, short of buying the basic, non-blinged out game, as that would be the only way to get the cards anyway. I don't know if the rulebook is posted online somewhere.

There are like 50 cards per faction, plus the endorsement/rewards cards that you get for tagging buildings. There may be 25 of those. Also, I forgot to mention in my original post, that there are a lot of pilot cards to choose from at the start of the game. Each player chooses one pilot character to have for their giant robot, and they each have one special ability.

There is alsothe matter of having color coded pieces to use as tags to place on the buildings, in order to keep track of how many tags each player has there and when it hits 4 from one player, the building is destroyed and no longer offers cover bonus.

There is also an achievement track. When you do certain things, your piece moves forward and after it lands on certain spaces, you unlock an ability, which is generally making it easier to hit certain size robots.

There is one little robot that can fly over things, but other than that, there isn't anything in the rules that would account for moving up terrain like in Heroscape.

So in conclusion, I don't think you could get away with not buying the game, and even then, you may have to make some houserules to work on Heroscape terrain.

[Hahma]

I had a blast at ArctiCon today, demoing The Walking Dead All Out War. ArctiCon is a local convention in northwest Indiana that raises money for veterans, because sadly, 22 veterans commit suicide every day. The convention is pretty small, as in only a couple hundred people, but it's been growing from year to year. After taking last year off and with this being kind of a fresh start at a new location, they did pretty well in raising close to $1,000 for the Project 22 group for veterans. This amount, is after paying for the site of the convention, as well as having money to pay for next year's event site. The convention went from 8am to 10pm. I was there from 9am-9pm.

I had set it as a co-op for 2 players. After explaining the rules, I'd have the players choose from the 6 pairs of survivors that I put together, each pair being 74 or 75 points worth of characters and equipment. So it would be a total of 150 points for both players, thus having 10 walkers start on the board.

The goal was to enter from the edge of the road (opposite of the car and truck), and get into the diner and grab the 2 food tokens, and get off the board via the corner area that they entered from.

I had 4 different pairs of people playing this, so 8 people got to play and all had a blast.


The first two guys had chosen Morgan and Duane, and Derek and Liam. They were funny, because the one player, had Liam with a low nerve, and he really wanted to keep making sure he didn't panic, so he made sure to remind his buddy not to forget to try to Hold Nerve to try to reduce the threat. They also were the longest at playing, as they kind of wanted to try to search for a lot of supply tokens that they really didn't need to, but wanted to for fun.

The next pair also took Morgan and Duane, and Derek and Liam. They were fun and took to it well. But both had to stop short of finishing because of commitments to Catan and an RPG.

The 3rd pair were a brother and sister that were maybe 12 and 13? They were an absolute blast, as they had so much fun and it was rewarding to see them have fun and hear their comments. The girl took Dale and Andy, while the boy took Sandra and Patrick. Poor Dale got bit early on, as he got advanced a little further than he should have and him being a marksman with a rifle, he is pretty weak in melee. So he got bit and that means that at the end of every round, you roll the 50/50 die to see if he takes an additional wound. The kids had a good system, as the brother was good at rolling shields on the 50/50 die, so he would roll to try to keep Dale from taking an additional wound, while his sister was better at rolling blanks on the 50/50 die, so she would roll when rolling to see if prone walkers would stand back up. Well Dale did get weaker over time and they decided to have go out as a hero so that the others could get food for their friends back at camp. So Dale killed a walker with his rifle but it was his last bullet. He wouldn't give up, so he ran toward the dumpster area and drew a walker into melee, and this time he killed it. He again moved toward the dumpster and got engaged by another walker, but this time his luck ran out and he got killed and came back as a walker. But, he drew enough walkers away from the south side of the diner, that the others were able to get in, take out the 2 walkers inside and get the food back to camp. Lots of fun.

The 4th pair were a couple friends of my nephew Tyler. Actually, one of them was his roommate down at Purdue. They took Patrick and Sandra, and Rick and Carl. They were really fun too, as Dakota with Rick and Carl was hesitant to have Rick use his pistol, which he is awesome with, but he didn't want to risk causing Mayhem and draw a lot of walkers to him. But he did near the end of the game at the south side of the diner, as he was on a rampage, shooting, killing and knocking some walkers down. Carl then would follow up and headstomp some of the prone walkers left in Rick's wake. Meanwhile, Mike did good with Patrick and Sandra, as they got in the diner and took out the 2 walkers within, and Sandra was able to get both food tokens. It was fun, because she is a Runner and can climb over obstacles without having to roll the 50/50 die for success, so she hopped over the counter and took out waitress walker while Patrick took out cop walker in the dining area. After Sandra secured the 2nd food token, she hopped over the counter by the kitchen area, squeezing under the menu board, and made her way out. Oh yeah, before Rick went on his shooting rampage, he was outside the front entrance of the diner while Patrick and Sandra were inside. He was board so he went to search the pickup truck and a lurker was in it. Rick rolled poor defense against it and took 2 wounds. So perhaps that's what triggered his rampage

Lots of fun for me seeing others having fun with this game. Part of why I had ordered the 6 neoprene mats from Deep Cut Studios was for being able to demo it at this convention, as well as more versatility otherwise and for me at home. So it's extra rewarding to see it come to good use.


Here's some pictures I took from the 4 games played.



















I had bought $10 worth of raffle tickets, as the money was going to the Project 22 cause and I didn't expect to win anything. But low and behold, I won a copy of Rumbleslam and a couple superstar characters for it. Each team in the core box has 5 players, there is the team with humans, halflings and an ogre, and the other team with goblins, orcs and a troll. I've seen some playthroughs before and it looked fun, so I was happy to get this. Sadly, I don't know if they have a U.S. distributor for it, as it comes from TT Combat out of the UK, and I haven't seen it on Miniature Market. But anyway, I think some of the figures and accessories can be gotten off of Amazon, but I didn't see the core set, so maybe it can only be gotten from the UK. Either way, I'm thinking the stuff I got would have easily been $70. So it's cool to have. Heck, last fall I demoed Frostgrave at a fundraiser near Chicago and ended up winning the base game and some boosters for The Walking Dead All Out War. I'm going to have to remember to keep buying raffle tickets at events that I demo games



About 10 guys from my game group showed up to host an open game area for people to come up and learn some games. That was really successful too.

My nephew Tyler and his business partner Thibault had a lot of people showing up to their area to demo their game Cube Hog, that they just launched a kickstarter for on March 1st. They were pretty busy throughout the day, as there is a quick 10 minute quick play version of the game where you only play 1 round and that worked out great for people to pop in an learn it and come back later on. The game has a normal mode where you play several rounds, similar to Love Letter in that regard. I had suggested a while ago for them to make sure to have rules for 2 players, and I got to see it in play and it works really well. At first it was going to be just 3-4 players, but I told them that people would want 2 player rules and that it would help get it funded.







There was a big Settlers of Catan tournament, where the winner is going to be able to compete at Origins in Columbus, which is a nice sized convention. There were several other tournaments for miniatures games, other game demos and some vendors. Painting contest and cosplay as well.

[Yodaking]

Sounds like you had a really great time. Really love that diner map, very cool. I got in a good day of gaming yesterday as well, 2 games of Rising Sun (my first 5 player game and then a 4 player game) and 1 game of the Batman: Gotham City Strategy game (3 players).

For Rising Sun, the Lotus Clan is the one that seems really good with the option to choose which tile they play and starting with 7 coins. It makes everyone want to ally with them, the starting location is a bit of a hindrance though. Still not unbeatable or anything, as I'm learning more about how to make the other clans shine too. I ended up with the Bonsai Clan again and this time I really worked the cards, focusing in on Virtues, Upgrades, and War boosts rather than taking any monsters. It helped that the one god was in play that allowed you to buy a card too. At the end of the first round I had 5 cards and had settled into a plan to just try and die everywhere instead of win the battles. As a result I was piling up VP's at a very fast rate. I just knew I needed a 20-30 VP cushion at the end since others would be getting the bonus. Unfortunately one player had to leave suddenly at the start of the Fall season so I didn't get to find out if I could have won or not with that strategy. I was certainly in the mix for the win though and will try it again.

[chas]

The Rising Sun monsters are fun, but its coins and cards that win the game (usually). I'm about to start a 'second cycle' of plays this month, having played 8 games, wherein I got to try each clan once.

New things to try: 6 Player, both Sun and Moon in the same game, and Kami Unbound.

Future variations: Changing up the Season Card displays by mixing the sets (suggested by Eric M. Lang), and varying the starting provinces!

[Matthias Maccabeus]

Had a weekend away with several friends including @EternalThanos86 and got some gaming in:
Maximum Apocalypse x 2
Bang the dice game x 2
Shadows Over Camelot
Massive Darkness x 2
Dragon Dice
Age of Rebellion RPG
Avalon x 3
Ashes
Star Wars Destiny
Hero Realms