Board Games (catch-all thread)

[VictorViper]

This will get reposted in the Ascension thread for targeted Merlin notification, but as a heads up, a card game called Hardback I've been eyeing for months now is available digitally. This is the second game in this series from Fowers Games (the earlier release was called Paperback), and it's a deckbuilder cum word game - and it's excellent.

No monsters, characters, etc. Just pure spelling action with a traditional deckbuilding mechanic. Cross-platform online play too! $6.50 and worth every penny, though watch for sales otherwise.

Wishlisting this without knowing much else about it. How much Scrabble is it (i.e. how much is it just about spelling words)?

It's a perfect mix, I think. Jen and I have been playing it non-stop since we got it and we're finding careful deckbuilding is definitely the name of the game. You do benefit from longer words, insofar as they'll *generally* give you more scoring opportunies (each card/letter scores in some way), but making smart use of your acquired cards is usually your main priority.

Because the cards are just letters, it takes a bit of additional effort to learn the quirks and strengths of the different "factions" (genres, in Hardback), but it really gets fun once you start to understand how best to pick and play your cards.

As far as the actual spelling - it is all you do. Each turn you draw 5 cards and must spell a word of at least 3 letters. You may make any card wild but that negates its points benefit. As the game progresses you buy cards and/or ink. Ink allows you to draw more cards - these cannot be made wild. Bought cards have special abilities and often pay bigger rewards than their equivalent generic versions. That's the core loop, and it's a pretty good one.

[VictorViper]

At Kong's request, I'm posting my current board game collection, which recently underwent a major cull. A few victims in the purge were painful to let go, but never saw the light of day, so they got the axe too. Here we go:

VictorViper's Game Collection (updated 20-6-2019)

Link to Doc Here

- Wildlands - w/ Unquiet Dead, Adventuring Party & Map Pack 1
• 2-4 players, Tactical Wargame (Skirmish), Hand Management
- Catacombs - w/ Caverns of Soloth & Wyverns of Wylemuir
• 2-5 players, Dexterity, Adventure
- Gaia Project
• 1-4 players, Empire Building, Light Area Control, Heavy Euro,
Point Salad
- Container - Jumbo Edition
• 3-5 players, Closed Economy/Market Simulation
- Ticket to Ride - USA
• 2-5 players, Route Building
- Flamme Rouge - w/ Peloton & Meteo
• 1-6 players, Racing, Hand Management
- The Captain is Dead
• 1-7 players, Cooperative, Strategy
- Fog of Love
• 2 players, Relationship Simulation
- War Chest
• 2 or 4 players, Abstract Wargame, Hand Management
- Teotihuacan
• 1-4 players, Action Selection, Tile Laying, Set Collection,
Point Salad
- Space Gate Odyssey
• 2-4 players, Action Selection (w/ Shared Actions), Tile
Laying, Set Collection
- Tiny Towns
• 1-6 players, Simulataneous Action, Spacial Puzzle, Bingo-like
- Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space
• 3-8 players, Hidden Role/Movement, Deduction, Cat-and-
Mouse
- Architects of the West Kingdom
• 1-5 players, Worker Placement
- Cryptid
• 3-5 players, Abstract, Pure Deduction
- Space Base - w/ Shy Pluto
• 2-5 players, Dice Rolling, Tableau Building, Engine Building,
Push-Your-Luck, Strategy
- Getaway Driver
• 2 Players, Asymmetric, Tile Laying, Cat-and-Mouse
- Tiny Epic Galaxies - w/ Beyond the Black
• 1-5 players, Portable, Dice-Rolling, Tableau Building, Area
Control, Shared Actions
- Fugitive
• 2 players, Asymmetric, Pure Deduction, Card Game
- Skull
• 3-6 players, Bluffing, Card Game
- Lost Cities
• 2 Players, Set Collection, Card Game
- Cockroach Poker Royal
• 3-6 players, Set Collection, Bluffing, Card Game
- Railroad Ink - Red & Blue Editions
• 1-12 players, Roll & Write, Route Building
- Magic Maze - w/ Maximum Security
• 1-8 players, Real-Time, Cooperative, Modular
- Decrypto
• 3-100 players, Simultaneous Competitive Deduction,
Codebreaking, Teams
- Bottom of the 9th
• 1-2 players, Dice-Rolling
- Onitama - w/ Sensei's Path & Way of Wind
• 2 players, Abstract, Strategy
- Hive Carbon - w/ Pillbug
• 2 players, Abstract, Strategy
- The Lost Expedition - w/ Fountain of Youth and Other
Adventures
• 1 player with multiplayer variants, Survival, Hand
Management
- The Battle at Kemble's Cascade
• 2-4 players, Strategy, PvE (competitive)
- Unearth
• 2-4 players, Set Collection, Auctions, Dice Rolling
- The Ancient World 2nd edition
• 2-4 players, Worker Placement, Empire Management
- Mice & Mystics - w/ Heart of Glorm
• 1-4 players, Cooperative, Adventure, Narrative, Tactical
Wargame (skirmish)
- Nagaraja
• 2 Players, Tile Laying, Dice Rolling, Bidding

[Kong Wen]

Vic, with the past year of culling and refining, do you still consider Tiny Epic Galaxies a must-have? My local shop finally got a copy in, months after I went in looking for it. Considering picking it up for winter holiday shenanigans with the fam.

[VictorViper]

I've sold that one on, but only because we have other games that were being picked ahead of it. It's still an excellent pick, especially for a group. Fun dice chucking with a surprisingly competitive streak to it. Yes, I absolutely still recommend it.

BUT. Space Base happened. It's impossible to ignore that. Space Base is another dice chucker (Craps to Tiny Epic's Yahtzee) where you buy cards to flesh out a long tableau of cards in the hopes of rolling your numbers and scoring best, fastest. It has significant "off turn" action just like Tiny Epic Galaxies and several routes to victory. The only major sticking point is that a few of the card types can be tricky to teach at first, but it's otherwise a very lightweight game.

Honestly you can't go wrong with Tiny Epic Galaxies, but Space Base quickly became one of my favourite games overall and it fully supplanted Galaxies as my go-to for light strategic dice games.

[Ouenben]

During lockdown me and my friends have been playing a lot of Catan, Carcassonne and Pandemic. I've got ticket to ride coming Monday too. We occasionally play Cash n Guns when there's enough of us too.
I'm considering picking up some new games but don't even know where to start. None of us are BG geeks so thought it'd be better to start with the above and they've been going down well.

[Kong Wen]

During lockdown me and my friends have been playing a lot of Catan, Carcassonne and Pandemic. I've got ticket to ride coming Monday too. We occasionally play Cash n Guns when there's enough of us too.
I'm considering picking up some new games but don't even know where to start. None of us are BG geeks so thought it'd be better to start with the above and they've been going down well.

War Chest. Plays kind of like a tactical video game. It's strategic without being too heavy on resource management. Instead, you have a few units, and they have abilities, and you conquer. Two players (one-on-one) or four players (two teams of two).

[SkyPikachu]

Family played catan last week was very interesting. Found it to be like a way better version of monopoly kind of.

We also been playing the card game monopoly deal which is also a much better version of monopoly as it doesn't take 3 hours to play.