What Board / Card Games are you playing right now?

[Summon666]

Revive

This is a very cool little game that is well within my wheelhouse. It is basically its a hand management system combined with engine building. The blurb calls it "deck building" but it really isn't.

Every card has many actions and you sort of cycle them back into your hand and through resources buy and apply modifications to the cards so the variety of card plays is actually pretty huge. The entire design is all about combos and combos always feel great. You work towards them, and play them, and as they go off you feel a real progression of the engine of your player board. Turn 1 vs Turn 3 has a strong feeling of progression.

The game looks complex, but it really isn't There is a cool little helper card that shows your action list, but you also have a bunch of free actions that are part of the combo system. It is a Euro at heart and plays like one but like a good euro the rules explanation is dense, but the actual flow of the game is intuitive and very easy to run after a few turns. Like any euro though, there is no real theme. I mean the game has a theme, but it is just a veneer used as a guide to some of the ideas in the design. This is a good thing. The point is that mechanically this game is super fun and interesting. Particularly with the player interaction.

The game has a campaign and a single player rule set. This is something you see a lot in games nowadays and I do not think it is a good thing. The single player variant is lame AF and the campaign is basically just a feature culling system. Forget all that. Put all the stuff in on turn 1 and play with 3-4 people.. your good.

Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition

Interesting trick taking game with a super neat theme, and of course cats.. and cats are cool. Like all trick taking games you have trumps and in this case it is a card high to win the tricks. The hook of the game though is that it uses "quantum states".

Basically, there is a something in physics called "quantum super-position". Where the act of measurement defines the physical properties of the thing being measured. There is a famous thought experiment called "Schrödinger's Cat" I will not go deep into this, but the crux of it is that while the box is closed the cat is both alive and dead. It isn't until you open the box that the cat becomes alive or dead. So while the box is closed, the cat is in two states at once. This is a very hard concept to wrap your head around as it is counterintuitive to how we experience reality, but the theory is robust enough that we have now built ever-increasing in power computers based on quantum state bits that can be 0 and 1 at the same time.

The only takeaway you need is that "until you measure something, it is all states at once". So the hook of this game is the idea of super positional states. It is also why the game is cat themed, because of the Schrödinger's famous thought experiment.

How does all that relate to the game? Well like any trick taking game you have suits, value and a trump suit, but in this game you decide the suit of your card yourself. All the cards are just numbered and black and you have a small player board where you define if you are "out of cards of a certain colour".

Each card you play needs to follow suit, if possible. Just like a normal trick taking game, but here you determine what suits you have. You can even define the absence of a suit in your hand without playing cards.

There is a board that marks what suits are used. Red is trump, btw. So while there are 4 cards with the value of 1, there is only 1 card with the value of 1 in each suit. So as a player defines the suit, that card is marked on the board and can no longer be played.

For a better explanation in detail, check this video

This is a fascinating game with a unique card system. It is a trick taking game, so it is superfast and easy to play. The "quantum" rules are not actually complex at all, but I do envision some difficulty teaching it to some players as the entire idea is pretty wild. The game has put a lot of effort into providing some tools, like the card counter and the suit counter, for each player to help visualise things.

[GhostNinja]

I got the Sniper Elite Board Game because I Love the video game.

Haven't gotten a chance to play my game, though I played it when Rebellion Unplugged beta tested it at Pax Unplugged.

[Baron]

We were supposed to try Star Trek Ascendancy tomorrow, but the plans fell through. Supposed to be like a quicker Twilight Imperium (another game I haven't played yet, although I bought the fourth edition), with Trek trappings.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/193949/star-trek-ascendancy

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233078/twilight-imperium-fourth-edition

[Spinachcat]

THUNDER ROAD VENDETTA
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/restorationgames/thunder-road-vendetta-0

We repeatedly played the basic game with 4 players because how much crazy fun we were having. Easily the best Car Wars / Mad Max boardgame I've ever played. The multiple expansions promise lots of customization and advanced rules, but we're loving the basic game so much right now because of its fun and speed.




Each player gets 3 cars with machineguns & a guncopter.
You roll 4 dice and assign speeds to cars & 1 special action per turn.
Base game special actions are Activate Copter, Repair, Avoid First Slam, Use Nitro
The lowest roller goes first, then play goes to the left
Each player activates one car and moves / shoots / deals with hazards.
There is LOTS of slamming into other cars - it's an Automotive Mosh Pit! 
We race across 5 boards full of hazards and difficult terrain to the finish line.
First across the line or last man alive is the winner.

Gameplay was 25-45 minutes. We played 4 players x 4 times in 2.5 hours and we were all newbs to the game.

[Ratman_tf]

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/twilight-imperium-fourth-edition/

I got Twilight Imperium 4 after watching the review on Shut Up & Sit Down.

Luckily, my X-Wing Miniatures group had a couple of players who were interested, and we've since put together a monthly TI session with a group of regulars. About 4-6ish? Something like that.

The game is damn fun. The crazy politics is what makes it so amusing and worth spending 8-12 hours out of a day to play.





Hell, this thread reminds me, I've got to put together some 3-D stand up markers for the Wormholes.

[Ratman_tf]

We were supposed to try Star Trek Ascendancy tomorrow, but the plans fell through. Supposed to be like a quicker Twilight Imperium (another game I haven't played yet, although I bought the fourth edition), with Trek trappings.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/193949/star-trek-ascendancy

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233078/twilight-imperium-fourth-edition

Ooh. I've seen Ascendancy on the store shelf. If you ever get a game in, let us know your opinions.

[KrisSnow]

Last night I played "Camel Up", a card game about betting on camel races. Enjoyed it. The gimmick is that you don't control any one camel, so you're competing to push your favorites forward while also being the one with the biggest bets on those.

Recently I played "Cosmic Frog", a bizarre game about giant frogs trying to devour the world and disgorge chunks of land in specific patterns. Took some explaining, due to the unfamiliar context and confusing rules about what arrangements of land give you points or energy. https://boardgamegeek.com/image/5276037/cosmic-frog

Played "Zombicide: Undead or Alive", the Wild West version of "Zombicide". It's all right if you like killing hordes of monsters, but I was frustrated at feeling I was being ordered around by other players, and it's easy to make the whole group lose. (Also the fat zombies are now "Brutes" rather than "Fatties". Wouldn't want to offend them.)

Tried to play a game called "Nemesis" which was billed as similar to "Zombicide" with some of the story elements of "Dead of Winter". It's set in an alien-infested space base. I sat there listening to the rules for about half an hour, and the alien monster minis were so gruesome I was physically queasy from looking at them, and I ended up walking out before we could start.

Not too long ago I got to play the "Conan" adventure game again. I got a copy cheaply. This is based on the original stories by people who respect the source material, and pits an evil overlord against 2-4 heroes with varying objectives.

What else? Recently played "Century: A New World" which is a worker placement game about a 1600s colony, and which can be combined with either or both of the other "Century" spice-trading games. Enjoyed that. And "Tiny Epic Quest" which tries hard to be a "Legend of Zelda" game but really isn't; it's more of a press-your-luck game about moving to dungeons and magic sites to score points on dangerous die rolls.

[GhostNinja]

A card game I have and enjoy is Guillotine by Wizards of the Coast.

Guillotine is a simple card game with a simple objective – collect the most points. Players gain points by 'beheading' important nobles.  You have cards that you can use to move the nobles around to gain more points or to screw over other players.

Its a lot of fun

[Thornhammer]

Tried to play a game called "Nemesis" which was billed as similar to "Zombicide" with some of the story elements of "Dead of Winter". It's set in an alien-infested space base. I sat there listening to the rules for about half an hour, and the alien monster minis were so gruesome I was physically queasy from looking at them, and I ended up walking out before we could start.

That had to be the Carnomorphs expansion, the regular Nemesis bad guys are just serial-number-filed-off Xenomorphs. Carnomorphs are all skulls and bones and exposed innards and such, nasty.

[Trond]

I've been getting back into card games using tarot cards. These games have long traditions in Europe. Here's a book I found in Danish (which I thankfully can read, this one is from 1988).  Rules for Danish Tarok are also on pagat.com.

[Greg Bruni]

I've mainly been playing Fallout Shelter, and the Forbidden Series.... Desert, Island and Jungle.  I really like Forbidden Jungle the best out of the three.

[yosemitemike]

Command Post Games Little Bighorn 1876

[Ratman_tf]

I've mainly been playing Fallout Shelter, and the Forbidden Series.... Desert, Island and Jungle.  I really like Forbidden Jungle the best out of the three.

My nephew got that for christmas, and we played a game. I was impressed. Those "tin box" games didn't seem appealing, but Forbidden Jungle was pretty fun.
A part of me wants to bust out some sci fi minis for the characters. We joked that this could easily be set in 40k, with the jungle monsters and sci fi elements.

[Cathode Ray]

[hedgehobbit]

Star Fleet Battles. AKA fun with old games based on dead franchises.