Boardgames, anyone?

Say what you will about CMON but their single mold minis are excellent.

Incidentally they’re getting massively into licenses for Zombicide now. The Boys, Supernatural, Batman and Thundercats are all coming as add-on packs.

Would buy Batman Zombicide

You can give it a try on boardgamearena if you need to scratch that itch. I was all for it but found the actual gameplay to be a little flimsy.

I think the merge mechanic is actually quite genius as it removes one of the biggest issue with area control / dudes on a map games, where there is always someone who gets the snot beaten out of them, has a bad time and then ends up being a bit of a king maker. By forcing the two lowest scoring players together and giving them a bit of a boost, it keeps everyone in the game until the very end. It’s massively different but kinda cool.

Going to our local board game cafe tomorrow evening for birthday beers, pizza and board games with the wife. We play board games together and with friends, but nothing too geeky (otherwise I'd have her playing Arkham Horror, Games of Thrones, Dark Souls etc) and I'm trying to put together a list of potential options for a decent 2 player game that won't take too long to get into, so far thinking of:
Patchwork
King of Tokyo
Disney Villainous
Ticket to Ride
Codenames Duet

Having not tried any of them myself though be good to get some fellow forumites views? Or recommendations for other options please.

Our fav for a long time was San Juan, no set up and easy enough to learn once you grok that the cards in your hand is also currency.

Carcassonne is top notch heads up, it’ll get very cutthroat once you’re both up on the scoring strategies, but there’s probably a good few amicable games before that happens. No set up, plays fast.

Azul has been good heads up as well. Such nice, tactile, tiles.

Wingspan is also neat but a lot more faff to get started, and games last longer than those I mention above.

Codenames is sooo good, I wonder how the duo version plays!

I ll add that I’ve played a good amount of patchwork against AI, and that was very good and hard at first. I imagine it plays well with a human!

I normally only play two player board games, as only really get a chance to play with one pal semi regularly. Should have some recommendations, although we do generally favour card games that are normally a bit geekier.

Recently played Watergate for the first time, which is an excellent, straightforward and tense two player game. If you have played Twilight Struggle, think of it as a very much simplified version of that, where your cards are shuffling evidence pieces along a track in a tug of war fashion. Nice and quick too, with games lasting less than an hour. Can be very competitive though and, as I say, gets pretty tense.

Also always enjoy a game of Whitehall Mystery. It can be played with 4 people, but I've found 2 works excellently (playing with more would likely end up with someone not having much to do). It's a hidden movement game, with one player playing as Jack moving around Whitehall, trying to reach locations on the map before the other player, who is controlling 3 cops, manages to find them. Very simple to pick up and you likely will quickly develop your own strategies as either Jack or the police. The theme is a bit macabre, but it can essential be viewed as cops and robs, replacing the locations "Jack" has to reach with places to rob instead of places to drop body parts. Again, pretty quick one to get going with and games don't last too long. Probably a good cafe game, as you can almost be straight back into another game when one is done.

If you don't mind a little bit of geek, Aeon's End is a good co-op deck builder of fantasy heroes battling monsters. As deck builders go, it is pretty straightforward and has some nice mix of strategies on offer depending on what makes up the shop. Bit more tricky than the others though and has quite a bit of set up time.

Edit: oh and you mention Dark Souls. If you don't already own it, don't bother. It isnt very good. Spent too much on the Kickstarter and now have a whole bunch of bits for it that I likely will never get around to, as it was really quite dull. A real slog to play and has too much randomness, very much at odds with its source material. Some house rules can improve it, but they can likely only go so far. Should really look at selling it; I should at least eBay the expansions.

It looks lovely and clearly a lot of love has gone into the models, but the game itself just doesn't work. You spend all your time grinding to level up before you can hope to fight bosses. You have to repeat the same encounters over and over again, with them playing out much the same way each time. Attacks and dodging rely on rolling dice, so often up to chance. You can negate that by some of the gear you use adding extra die or different types, but that just ends up making the easy encounters incredibly dull to go through constantly. Getting new gear is just a matter of working through a massive pile of items, the majority of which will be irrelevant for your character.

As I say, there are house rules you can do (such as a shop for items or faster experience gain are pretty common), but unless you can come up with a way to vary enemy behaviour and eliminate some of the random elements it just isn't that interesting to play and isn't particularly Dark Souls like.

To be fair, I haven't played it that much (maybe a couple of times with someone else and once or twice solo), but my thoughts seemed to reflect common consensus.

There is a card game that I believe is a bit better and the Bloodborne board game has quite a bit better score on BGG, so could be worth looking at (6.5 vs 7.9).

Bloodborne is definitely the better game. The only challenge is the base game doesn’t have a lot of content and you really need a couple of expansions to flesh it out, especially the Chalice Dungeon and Hunter’s Dream to add mini bosses and more randomization.

I’m hoping they eventually ship to the UK. Looks great and I really want a copy.

Aaaand I found this today.



Good day.

Played Catan.

Kids seemed to get into it, especially the trading. But ran out of time before dinner so had to stop before getting a proper winner.
I might need to search to see if there are any Speed Catan rule variants out there.

why is there never any bloody wheat???!!

Not come across this line of games before, what is the Legendary line and whats it about? Is there an explainer out there?