Be Excellent To Each Other

Noice, I love that game.

I've got the Firefly version, too.

Excellent, I watched a review of Firefly and they were gushing in their praise.

In unrelated catering news, it seems that Sheffield is getting its own board game cafe

https://www.facebook.com/treehousesheffield/

Which will be round the corner from Sheffield's cat cafe.

Had MrsA's maye come over wth her plus one tonight and we played Power Grid. Power Grid is amazing. Stupendously brilliant. Then, we played Ticket to Ride India, which was also good. I will resent the children returning.

Game 2 of Power Grid. Some thoughts: This is stereotypically German. It is a game driven by efficiencies. And those are driven by superb resource mechanic where, for example, there are only 40 coal in the game and it replenishes 3 a turn, and players are using 9. As coal gets scarcer, the price increases, so should you switch your power stations and run on oil instead at capital cost? It's tight, quick and super fun. You buy power stations that can supply X cities using resources, then expand your influence in cities (at a cost) and purchase resources (you can stockpile a turns worth to drive prices up for others). You can also manipulate the turn order, but not powering stuff, to gain a slight advantage in buying things first.

Put simply, it's brilliant.

Please bring it to Cottage.

Yo,
I've made some rules for a miniatures based game for at the Cottage.

In.

I highly recommend these guys for your bits.

Does that link take you back to the vasectomy thread?

Cheers grim - I'll need a few tokens and that saves printing and sticking

Another humble RPG bundle - this time for Doctor Who :

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/doctor-who-rpg-books

Star Wars Rebellion has shot into my top five, and might be my number one game after my first two plays this weekend.

Played most of our second game yesterday. I tried to build a stronger rebel force early in the game and expanded quicker. Unfortunately, I was playing against my wife and despite it being her first game she managed to:
•capture Chewbacca
•turn Chewbacca to the dark side.
•Capture Luke
•Torture Luke to find out the location of the rebel base (narrowed down to three systems)
•release Luke and capture Wedge
•attempt to freeze wedge in Carbonite, which he managed to resist against heavily stacked odds
•discover the rebel base by round five

I'd managed to make it look like the rebel base was on one of the other systems so if it wasn't for the empire tying off loose ends I wouldn't have been discovered, but luckily she only landed one AT-ST because she thought it was a nothing planet. I took them out, and had started the turn by playing the card that lets you relocate the rebel base so I just had to try and wait it out and luckily she'd committed most of her forces toward the other system. I decided to try and get a minor victory out of the round and launched an attack on a star destroyer, but she retreated before I could destroy it. Then, she retaliated by coming to me with the Death Star! I survived the first space battle, played the Death Star plans and succeeded in the final turn of the round. As the Death Star explosion was lighting up the sky in one system, the rebels were relocating to another system. I ended up winning one turn before the Death Star under construction came online. Which was a lucky escape, because she was constructing it in the new rebel system with the intention of blowing up Tattooine which would have won her the game.

LOVE this game!

Ooh!

I've heard nothing but good things about it, but the price!

£80 is a bargain for that.

Absolutely worth every penny. I was excited for it but then the shut up and sit down review was muted with some criticisms and I held off. Was given it as a leaving gift from my team at work and it's blown me away. It's tense, fun, epic, thematic and just all round awesome!

Picked up 'Mysterium' in a sale just now (£25 marked down from £40). I played it a while ago but thought it'd be worth playing again and seeing it how works with different combinations of friends. It's basically 'Dixit' meets 'Cluedo'.

I am happy curio was killed.

I think a second game would have worked better, with a greater understanding of the rules. Like those guessing counters aren't reuseable!

Bring it again!

This is good. Bring to cottage

No point us BOTH bringing it!

Always have backups.

I bought 'Bärenpark' at the weekend because bears are cool. The positive review on 'Shutup/Sitdown' probably helped too. The rule book is in German. Just downloaded an English set but quite tempted to try to read the original first.

The box came with a set of dividers to help organise things but couldn't understand the diagram so everything just went into bags instead.

Looking forward to giving this one a go.

Has anyone played 'Istanbul'? Someone recommended it to me the other day. It seems to ring a bell but I dunno.

Yes, on a few occasions. I quite like the 'drop your minions across the city' mechanism, and there are various ways to get victory points so if one area is not looking promising you can focus on something else. I usually never seem to get the right rolls in the gambling den.

Tell me about it

Why do you hate my son, Karl?

My board game collection has stabilised at approx. 100 games. I'm trying now to either trade or sell games to make room for new ones. Some of my most recent new ones include one I think MaliA would be interested in, Flamme Rouge. It's a cycling racing game for up to four players. Each player controls two riders, one sprinter and one roller and each rider has a slightly different deck of cars. Each card has a number which represents the movement possible that turn. On your turn, you select which rider you want to activate first and then draw cards from that riders deck. You choose which card to play and play it face down, the put the remaining cards from your hand face up underneath the draw deck. You then do the same for the second rider.

Once everyone has selected, you all reveal your cards at the same time and starting from the lead rider, each rider moves their programmed amount. After movement is finished, starting at the back, any bunch of riders with only one space between them and the next pack automatically move up to meet them as part of the slipstream action. Then any riders left at the front of a pack take an exhaustion card, which has a movement value of two and clogs up/slows down your deck.
There's a couple of extra rules for ascent/descent but that's about it and there are various map layouts to try.



I really enjoy it, it's fairly light but with interesting decisions and some strategy required. Almost no downtime, high levels of player engagement and an exciting finish. Plus there's an expansion due soon which introduces another couple of game elements (cobbles!) plus ups the player count. I'd recommend it, great game. Think it's about £30 on Zatu games.

Another game that may be relevant to interests; Formula D. I've been aware of this game for ages, and it was the subject of a particularly enjoyable Tabletop episode with Grace Helbig and Hanna Hart. I worried it would be too much of a light game for me to enjoy it though.

Luckily, a friend was able to lend me it to let me try before I buy. I really enjoyed it. It's more than roll and move, you also have to figure out if you should shift up or down a gear which determines the size of dice you roll. This is important, including looking two or three turns ahead to decide the best tactic. Corners mix it up by making you stop a certain number of times in each one and you also have wear points that you can be penalised if you brake too hard or shift down more than one gear at a time.

Very accessible, my mother in law played it with us and had a great time. Components are great, the wee gearbox is really neat and fun. Big game board and cute wee cars. Overall, very happy with this game and I've now bought my own copy. I won't plan a game day around it like I would with Eclipse, DoW or MoM but it's great for pulling out over drinks and having a laugh, with lots of excitement and tension at the end.

Bring this to cottage, please.

Thanks for these SDG. 'Formula D' is great with loads of players and cars crashing into each other all the time.

Formula D looks almost as good as Formula One.

Cycling one looks good too. Just bring them to the cottage.

Not technically a board game, but Jem and I played Quiplash over the weekend, and it was a lot of fun. Would be ideal for Cottage funtimes.

Bring that to the cottage.

And bring Gilly too.

Bärenpark. Bears are awesome. I've seen them roam free in Yellowstone, saw one maul Leonardo di Caprio at the cinema, and watched countless animal documentaries just to see our ursine friends. I'm such a bear fan I once felt extremely distressed seeing a chained up dancing bear in Moscow's Gorky Park. So, would I go to bear park to watch bears in captivity? Probably, if they were well cared for.

'Bärenpark' is a simple tile-placing game where players build their own internationally renowned ursine pleasuredomes. Tangrams seem to be the big fashion in game design at the moment, and the parts you need for the park are all different sizes and shapes for you to place on your board.The mechanics are quite simple: take a piece from your hand, place it on the board, then do whatever the icons you've covered up tell you. These are either about taking pieces for various parts of the supply or taking another board to connect to your park (up to four). Complete one of your board tiles, and get a bear statue for more points. And that's it.

It was light, but very enjoyable with enough tactics and 'take what I need, or take what the other player wants' decisions to keep people interested. I also liked how the rules contained an explanation of why they included koalas in the game ("everyone likes koalas") despite them not being bears, just to appease the pedants. Most likely, I'll host a bear night at Cottage.

We then finished the evening with a round of 'Sheriff of Nottingham', but I played abysmally and lost badly. Once I got the app working, scoring was quicker however.

Obligatory board shots:

http://www.flamesofwar.com/gf9online_st ... ryID=13463
Top left

Very casual mal, heh

This is totally going on my Christmas wish list! I would like to play at the cottage please Kern.

There's an animal park near the Grand Canyon called Bearizona. That is all.

Fun article on 'The Campaign for North Africa' . A game we are most certainly not playing at Cottage.

Four and a half stars on Tripadvisor, no less.

It's very good!

UTFY

Ursified That For You?

Superb

Yep!

Good work

So, I have been slack and done eff all with the Battlefield Beex Company thing, until two days ago, when feverish preparations restarted. Terrain and stuff. There is an outside chance I might have a workable game for the Cottage.

I played some more Heroquest last night with 3 friends. It was great as usual.

I've thought of something this morning though and haven't checked the rule book. Would anyone know if the characters are allowed to backtrack on squares in the same move? For example, roll 12... walk forward 6 spaces and then walk back 6 on exactly the same spaces.