You know how people buy games from Steam to never play them? I’m at that stage with board games. Last thing I bought was Eldritch Horror, I think.
Was playing Sleeping gods for two weeks but put it away to make room for visiting friends. Haven’t pulled it back out yet due to some life stuff. Going on holidays next week so I’m looking forward to getting some SkyTeam going (maybe on the plane)
Gonna bring Dixit and Blokus to a kid’s party this saturday. Next week my purchase of Azul Summer Pavillion should arrive, making it a trio of games to “bring to places and get people hooked”
It’s always fun to make people realize just how much variety boardgames have. Now I just need to find or create a gaming group for friday game nights, since I’ve got enough stuff to keep a group busy for a few months
How old are the kids? :o
The kids are very small, ~3yo, so they won’t play, but the parents are 27+ 😆
Ahh yeah 3 is still a bit young to start indoctrination into the holy church of analog gaming outside of candy land. I’ve had great success hooking non-gamers in with pretty innocuous stuff like Just One and That’s so Clover! so if you’ve got those bring them along too! Harder to refuse a 10 minute experience with a 1 minute explainer :o
I didn’t know That’s so Clover, looks super interesting, will definitely go into my wishlist!
My dad has Happy Salmon, which would be a fun game to bring as well, but he’s living some 900km away nowadays
The White Castle - Been awhile since my brain burned this hard from trying to figure out all the interlocking parts of gameplay. Very interesting dice drafting mechanics that reward you for taking lower value dice. I thought you could go hard into one strategy (ie heavy farmers) and succeed but this game definitely seems to favor a more balanced approach.
Radlands - Hands down my favorite all in one deck dueler. Premise is simple pick 3 camps that give you a combination of special abilities and starting cards and blow up your opponent’s camps before they do the same to yours. The sheer replayability from being able to select your 3 starting camps really alters how your strategy will play out each game. I recently got the cult of chrome expansion that adds even more camps and updates some of the existing ones so I’m excited to try it out!
Tyrants of the Underdark - Great deck building area control game. Each game you shuffle 2 of 6 half decks together to make a market deck to buy from so that’s like 15 different combinations (some of which work better than others imo). I’ve never been a huge fan of pure deck building games like dominion but slap another mechanic onto it and it’s ON for me.
Spartacus - This game is always a raucous and wild time that is made even more enjoyable if you’ve seen the Starz TV show. The game consists of 3 phases that play including a munchkin-esqe schemes phase, bidding phase for slaves/gladiators/equipment, and of course the Arena phase where you duke it out with another players gladiators and make bets on various outcomes of the match. I love the wild swings of the combat system where a gladiator’s health and abilities are represented by dice that disappear as he suffers wounds. Highly recommended to play with the blue dice variant to fix some of the wonkiness that can sometimes happen with combat. I love this game.
Played Twilight Imperium last weekend. 7 players, playing to 12 points, about half the table using Discordant Stars factions.
Wrapped it up after about 12 hours and gave the win to the player in the strongest looking position because it was probably going to take another 2 hours to finish and we were all very tired.
I love TI. I’m currently playing an asynchrone game over discord, and a weekly “one round a night” game on TTPG. We’ve yet to try discordant stars but very possibly next game, how do you feel about it?
DS is great, factions are interesting and well balanced. There’s some pretty wild stuff in some of them but nothing that seems stronger than the top tier base factions.
We haven’t had any in-person game nights in quite some time (our usual crews decided to have kids and they are understandably exhausted), but I was able to introduce a remote friend to Catan this past week and she loves it. The app is janky and clunky but it gets the job done.
Kids are like a long term investment! Very costly at the beginning, but within 10 years you have yourself a permanent player at your disposal 😄 (that’s what I tell myself every time I decline a game night for being too exhausted 😅 )
Most of our game nights happen after 9 when everyone’s kids are asleep nowadays. Can still fit in most types of games but no epic experiences like Twilight Imperium tho :<
