board-games

Baseball Highlights 2045 #

• 1 play with 2 players
• New to me

I had high hopes for Baseball Highlights 2045, I had seen such good reviews of it over the past few months and while baseball isn’t something I watch often now, there was a bit of nostalgia from my childhood of playing and watching baseball. In addition to the theme, the game looked generally good, with an interesting play structure and a relatively short game.

For the past few years, I’ve played a increasingly larger number of new games each year as I grow more and more infatuated with board games as a hobby. With 58 new-to-me games, 2015 was no different.

What is different is that I feel like I should be slowing down. I’m to the point where I roughly know my tastes and I’m playing new games just to get them played when I’d rather play games I already own. Put another way, I’m buying games faster than I can reasonably play and evaluate them. Mind you, I’m not judging others here, this is for me and me only.

Abyss #

• 1 play with 3 players
• Played before

Abyss is one of those games that plays really well, but unremarkably and that makes it hard to get to the table. It’s mechanics aren’t terribly new and there’s no big hook to pull people in, but it is smooth and easy to teach. Then there’s the art: beautifully illustrated underwater scenes and sea creatures. I just received Abyss: Kraken for Christmas and I can’t wait to see how it changes the game.

Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization #

• 1 play with 2 players
• New to me

A while back a few, I played a game of the original Through the Ages online with my co-workers. It was a memorable experience to say the least, with a back and forth swing of power as we would all ebb and flow with power through the ages. I wanted the game, but avoided it due to its length and age.

Castles of Mad King Ludwig #

• 1 play with 4 players
• Played before

Castles of Mad King Ludwig replaced Suburbia in my collection a while back and looking at it now, it was certainly the correct decision. It’s a little faster, especially if the players have played Suburbia before, and it has a lot less bookkeeping. Also, a city of regular hexagons doesn’t have a ton of variety or story, but a fully built castle with different rooms always tells a funny story (my castle’s owner was clearly an evil villain with his torture chamber, underground grotto, and train room.

Lords of Waterdeep #

• 1 play with 3 players
• Played before

I enjoy worker placement games and I have a good number of them. In general, none of them are revolutionary or groundbreaking. Instead they just have slight changes from one to another. Lords of Waterdeep is definitely an iterative design and nothing here is mind blowing, but it is very smooth and well designed. The rules make sense and the game is easy to teach. In fact, you’d be able to teach this to almost anyone who’s willing to pay attention to you for a few minutes

Flick ’em Up! #

• 1 play with 3 players
• New to me

I’ve always wanted to enjoy a dexterity game, but both of the previous games that I tried I really didn’t enjoy: Catacombs and Ascending Empires. Both were too long and fiddly with lots of little rule problems caused by the odd flick here or there. However, I didn’t like the idea of playing what I felt should have been a light game for over an hour, it just felt dragged out.

Cosmic Encounter #

• 1 play with 5 players
• Played before
• Part of my 10x10 Challenge

I seem to only be able to win this game jointly, which is probably a factor of teaching the game to new folks most of the time, but I still love the stories this game produces. In this particular game I had surged to a pretty early lead with three points versus some folks with two, one, or zero points. However, that’s never a good sign in this game and everyone started ganging up against me as the destiny deck dealt my color or wilds repeatedly. Sitting firmly with three points and everyone else but one person has four points, I’m now in last with one other person. Well, as I said before, we ended up winning due to a 40 point encounter card while allied with the other person in last and then I drew one more encounter card and it was his card. I said, “want to negotiate?” and, we both had the right card and that was a win!

Forbidden Stars #

• 1 play with 3 players
• Played before

My first play of Forbidden Stars was pretty abysmal, resulting in something of a rage quit. However, my second game went much better—thankfully.

The general gist of the game is you’re one of four Warhammer 40k factions attempting to recover enough objectives to win within eight rounds. You’ll do that by conquering certain planets which will require some movement (and combat), upgrades, building/recruiting, and domination (extracting resources). Most of these actions are straightforward—with combat being an exception—but the way you plan your turn is very interesting: you have eight order tiles (two of each action) and you play the tiles face down on the sector tiles and resolve them from the top down. If there are other tiles already there, you play on top, so you can now prevent that person from using that action for a bit. The game ends in eight rounds, and the person with the most objectives wins, in case of a tie you use planets, if that ties, you use units.

Quantum #

• 1 play with 3 players
• Played before

Every time I play Quantum, I’m reminded of why I’ve purchased this one twice and I sold myself for having sold it at any point. Quantum takes a normally long and unwieldy genre—4x (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate)—and compresses it down into a simple to teach, simple to learn, and hard to master game. I love a lot of the clever bits: