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Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Board games to play

As we creep slowly towards playing in person, I've been eyeing some board games I'd like to get to play again . . . or the first time.

Vampyre (TSR). We played this back in 2015, and I enjoyed it . . . although it did need some fixing when it comes to movement.

Trogdor!! The Board Game. I got this from the Kickstarter but I haven't been able to get a game in, and I'm not thrilled playing solo with no prospect of a playing partner.

Boot Hill. Okay, it's an RPG. But let's face it, it's a board game at heart. It plays like one, anyway, and you can't get too attached to characters because they'll die in droves if you engage in any non-backshot assassination gunplay. I'd have to put the pieces together but I have the rulebooks . . . and some Boot Hill minis, even. We could probably play on Roll20 if people knew the rules at all. Besides me, I mean.

I have some games I like but I may never play again - Deluxe Illuminati, Junta, sadly probably Car Wars (Deluxe Edition and earlier) . . . Panzer Blitz probably fits here, too, although with a little open space I could get in a short game. I just lack a good open space and stable gaming table so I can set it up and play as a please.

Of course I want to play Third World War again, even after the last time. I just no longer have room to play.

I have to get back to playing Shogi, actually. I've played some Doubutsu Shogi just to help familiarize someone with the app, but the full game is fun. Tough, but fun. I need to brush up on my stylized kanji reading, anyway.

Anyone have board games they are hankering to get back to?

1 comment:

  1. I'm hankerin to get some "non-message board" rpgs in, but since my group only does boardgames, I've settled for the boardgame life.

    Speaking of Trogdor!!, I've got it as well. It's fast and lite, not very fulfilling as gameplay goes, it's mostly filling the nostalgia for StrongBad niche, so you and your group's mileage may vary. We played it once and I relegated to the shelf along side my Power Puff Girls game and the Adventure Time Card Wars boxes, the shelf of 'these games exist for pure nostalgia sake'.

    Only half my group met last night so we two dusted off the Legendary Encounters: Predators* game and played it (as well as three quick rounds of Machi Koro) to refamiliarize ourselves with the rules. We'll be inflicting Legendary Predators and Aliens on the group over the next few weeks (they're fun games, but after you've played each Location more than once you pick up the patterns to making winning easy, so it get's stale. It's best played every so often, just spaced apart enough to have kinda forgotten how the Locations and Objectives go, but not so infrequently you forget all the rules).


    Machi Koro is a lite, fast game "building" card game that some will enjoy and others will hate. It has a feel like if one person gets a tremendously good run of luck early, especially with the expansion rules, that they will dominate and win (kinda like Settlers of Cattan, too much luck with the dice is unbalancing). But if it's only //luck// and no strategy, that lead can evaporate fast.

    * Legendary® Encounters: A Predator™ Deck Building Game and Legendary® Encounters: Alien™ Deck Building Game. They are both strongly cooperative, but have competitive versions. Of them the Predator competitive version is the best, the "traitor" and "alien vs humans' competitive versions of Alien aren't particularly good. Always wished they'd have made a Predators vs Aliens variant, or now that they have more Predator movies, some more Predator scenarios.

    The scenarios and characters are drawn from and follow the movies, so you have the Val Verde Jungle, with Dutch, Blain, Dillon, etc, from Predator and The Streets of LA from Predator 2. For Alien you have the Locations and Characters from the four movies, so you can get slightly more play out of it. Unlike the Marvel Legendary games though, the different characters and locations do not mix-and-match well.

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