Forum: Public Forum

so whom are you not counting for the game? as there was six of us playing (keiren, adam, oli, cherry, you and me) but still not a bad score and a win unlike normal.

It must have been you whom I forgot to count. Nobody likes you.

Oh, I have also forgotten to mention that we played a couple of games of Fluxx last time. Some very silly situations but entertaining all the same!

Laurent,

Hi, I'll be making it to this evening boardgame session. I'm planning on bringing Carcasonne and the Bridges, Castles and Bazaars expansion for it.

The expansion adds an additional rule for each of the three parts of its names. Perhaps not advised for first time players.

Bridges allow you to continue roads by bridging over other roads, grass or certain castle pieces. They are useful for putting tiles where you normally can't and for opening up farm territory.

Castles are placed on small completed cities, (the little four pointer ones) you don't initially score points, but you score points for the next thing that is completed within a given area. Can lead to some high scoring cities, but can be counteracted with short roads, or small cities.

Bazaars open up a bidding mechanic. Once placed, the next N tiles are turned over (where N is the number of players). The player to the left of the player who placed the tile, selects a tile and states how many points he is willing to pay for it. If he is not outbid, he looses that many points and takes the tile. However, if he is outbid, the player who outbids him pays him for the tile. This can lead to interesting instances where if you require a certain tile how much will you pay for it. Also you can bluff, which adds something different.

I'll be there between 18.00 and 19.30-20.00 ish.

Fellow board-game players,

I have only realised yesterday that Fantasy Flight has released The Complete Arkham Horror F.A.Q. on December 5th last year.

This is a forty-three pages PDF about everything one can possibly ask about the game and every single one of its expansions, even those out-of-print like the first edition of Curse of the Dark Pharaoh.

Most of it is for situations that hardly ever happen and for nit-picking, but it does what it says in its title. For instance, there were some stray "official answers" that were collected on the Arkham Wiki, these are now all collected in the same place as the "complete" word implies.

See you tonight for an Arkham game.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

Last week we had two games going on, a short session of Carcassonne to start with, then the promised Arkham King in Yellow game.

Carcassonne.

Full complement of players, even too many, so we took turns.
Last time I played it, it was a great game. Since I lost every single one this time... 'tis not as good as it was!

King in Yellow.

We picked the "new" Yig from Arkham Nights 2012. I got it from this thread.
It is definitely tougher than the original version with the likelihood of being cursed going up with the number of opened gates.
Still, we won!
We ended up with 19 points, not 18, my character had finished a mission, so that was a +1.

Next week.

I have mentioned Pandemic and we have not played it in a while. I think Ian mentioned bringing Kettlers of Satan.

Laurent,

I'll be bringing Zombie Fluxx.

I've also got K2, but it seems like we've got enough this time so we probably won't get round to that.

Bring your game anyway. At times we get enough people for two or more tables. We never really know in advance.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

A very active session with three games on Tuesday, with six people in attendance we could have only very full games. One more player could have meant two tables.

Ticket to Ride.

Ian brought his copy of the game. 'twas a full five-players game with poor Kieran losing all his lines to others and surprisingly nobody going after mines! The game was very close up to the ticket counting time. We more or less all claimed one long route and we battled for a lot of low value ones. Then we counted the tickets: While my original draw was poor, my ticket collection improved a lot thanks to the stupidly high amount of small and medium length tickets I had gathered that somewhat fit my "Denver to Pittsburgh" main axis, which squeezed past all sorts of coloured train lines.

K2

Cherry brought this new game, well new for the Vague Connections grognards anyway. It was easy to learn the rules and send our two little guys each up the mountain to cheat death. Amazingly nobody died but the last two rounds became a scramble for lower altitude and the passable safety of the little camps. Apparently we played on the easy map, with the easy weather conditions. Considering that at least four climbers out of the overall ten nearly froze to death, with only one making it to the top, the tough map on the other side of the board must be "interesting" to play.
Playing it safe kept my little guys alive, if only just, but did not bring much rewards and I finished last.
A nicely designed game overall, with just the right amount of randomness.

The Red Dragon Inn.

We had not played it for a while, so I brought the original and the second box for a game with six players.
"Fiona the Volatile" in my hands had one drink contest too many, she won it, but collapsed facing a more sober "Deidre the Priestess", becoming the first casualty int the game. The last man standing was "Zot the Wizard and Pooky the Psychotic Rabbit" (this is only one character) played by Adam.

Next week.

Ian will bring Settlers of Catan and some small-box games. I shall bring Cuba and its expansion and maybe Red November.

And as usual we can play whatever people want to bring of course.

Laurent,

no i said i would bring citadels and mag blast. see you tuesday Laurent

Fellow board-game players.

With Matt showing-up for the session, we ended up with the dreaded number of six players. Not really enough to have two tables, and one too many for the planned game of Cuba.

Mag Blast.

Devious blasts and petty revenge fighter assaults... the usual game developments with the winner scraping by with heavily damaged ships. I arrived just too late to play, so did not lose!

Red November.

With Kieran on cooking duties, only five of us failed - twice ! - to survive the deadly problems developing on our Gnomish submarine. The first go saw us fail on a faulty missile launch. 'twas all Adam's fault whose little guy was technically the last one at the required time-count.
The second disaster saw us overcooked after many bottles of grog being drunk.

As usual a fun and silly game. It indeed becomes tougher with the number of players, as we get more events and events are usually bad. Maybe to win, without relying on luck, we need to follow a counter-intuitive plan. We know that fires cannot start in a room either already on fire or with a flooded token (high or low). There are also more fires than leaks. So, maybe if we decided to camp on the three critical control rooms, and just "wait it out", we could sail to victory in a sub that is on fire or sinking, or a combination of the two, except in those critical rooms. The hatches could also all be blocked for all we care.
Obviously that would kill all the fun of running around like mad as we are supposed to do!

Citadels.

The six of us got to play, with Kieran not always getting the Warlord and not always laying waste to other people's districts. He even built something!
Bluff and double-bluff led to some weird, but effective, choices of targets for the Assassin and the Thief. That greedy Wizard never saw that Thief coming did he? The same turn a totally surprised Bishop got stabbed too, whereas the more likely victims for that turn: The King and the Merchant lived happily.
With people concentrating on Adam's holdings, Cherry's early use of the Architect got her first to eight districts while most of us were merely on three or four.

One day, we will have to play with the advanced characters. We should have done so yesterday as we all had played the standard game before.

Next week.

Well... well... well... three weeks without a game of Arkham Horror, who would have thought it possible?

We could play a Dunwich Horror game next time as we have not done so for a while. I will prepare the decks for this one only if I think about it before Tuesday.

As usual, we can play whatever is brought, so bring it and announce it on this thread if you can.

Laurent,

Tonight, I'll be bringing along a late birthday present Gloom if anyone is interested.

I will also be able to stick around for some Arkham Horror, I'm allowed to stay out late tonight.

Fellow board-game players,

As usual, better late than never to report on the latest game session.

Gloom.

David brought this interesting and odd card game, odd in the sense that the cards are transparent and weird in the sense that one should try to curse and kill their characters in order to win the game.

This would need a couple of games to get used to the special cards and develop proper strategies as there could be a good game hiding beyond the transparent cards.

We played only one game of Gloom, as it is only designed for four players and Adam has just showed-up, so we moved onto the planned game of Arkham Horror.

The Dunwich Horror.

Another game of Arkham with five players, so two monsters per gate.

Considering the first game against Glaaki having been relatively quick. We had too many opened gates, so he showed-up and in typical Arkham Horror fashion, we came close to defeating him but lost.

The second game of the night went pear-shape pretty quickly with a lot of monsters spawning on the Dunwich board and awakening the Dunwich Horror. Abhoth woke-up due to the Dunwich Horror adding its doom token when "moving". So, this time, "it" showed-up. We had a daring attempt by Jacqueline Fine to rush to Dunwich and deal with the problem, but an Arkham Encounter sent her back to the Woods thus too far away from the rail-station and Dunwich.

Two games, two losses, back to normal then!

Next week.

Nothing has been decided yet, so drop a line if you have any preference.

Laurent,

mice nad mystics has been talked of being played, i am thinking of bring in catan, plus anything you bring. this shoud give us plenty to play

Fellow board-game players,

We had enough people for two tables.

Our table played on the ground floor while Kieran and his team played upstairs on his "home" floor.

City of Thieves

We played that game that I want to like, but somewhat cannot really thoroughly enjoy: City of Thieves. This time we got the rules right and played with the full complement of four players.
The game was fun, Ian decided to sneak away as soon as possible leaving only three teams to play against the clock to escape the district. He also won.

The "revised" rules are not really revised, nothing has changed in the mechanics of the game. From what I could pick-up only one line added about special abilities, but this was never an issue. The updated rules are available for free on the Fantasy Flight website.

Monopoly Deal card-game.

Ian brought this wonderful little game... I won mightily several times!
It looks complicated but is indeed very easy to pick-up.
Sure, luck remains a significant factor, but after a couple of hands, it is somewhat possible to guard against some special "forced deal" cards.

Mice and Mystics.

Well, we did not play it, so cannot say much.
I heard that the rules are a bit complex, but that they had some fun anyway.

Next week.

I would like to bring Arkham again, but will most likely carry Red Dragon Inn I & II.

Ian will probably bring Catan and whatever "small" game he wishes.

Any other request or idea?

See you all on Tuesday.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

I have been looking at the rules for the expansion to City of Thieves and have come up with some modifications I would like to try tonight. Fantasy Flight Games usually post the rules for their board-game online, which is nice, so I have had a look at The King of Ashes expansion and its rules, found here.

I shall also bring Red Dragon Inn I & II as previously announced.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

We did not have many people around last week, but we managed a four-player game of Arkham with The Kingsport Horror expansion. We had a tough draw, we played against Yibb Tstll with Ghroth as the herald and an ironically unhelpful guardian: Hypnos. Indeed, the Ancient One would have been stronger, had she woken-up, the more clue tokens were left on the board, so having a clue token generating guardian was not a good idea for this game! Still, through good strategy (or luck?), managing monster surges on high probability locations and sealing gates on slightly less dangerous places - thus less likely to get a gate burst - we managed a win on sealed gates. The board became "controlled" about three-quarters of the way. There were two very annoying Chthonians on the board, in fact these were the two available for the game. They caused us some stamina, and many trips to the hospital for Cherry's characters!

As most already know, I shall be moving home at the end of the month and I packed all my board-games except Arkham Horror, so I shall be bringing that game again tomorrow night.

Laurent,

Fellow board-game players,

I shall bring Curse of the Dark Pharaoh (revised edition) tomorrow for another game of Arkham Horror.

Laurent,

And for my last game at the shop, the Arkham Horror expansion I got last week: Lurker at the Threshold, with funny gate tokens and dark pact mechanics.

I could be a bit late tonight, so expect me closer to seven o'clock than six; one of those afternoon meetings at work that could take forever...

Laurent,

Not on tonight due to the store being closed due to kieron not feeling too good