Tabletop Game Talk, Anyone?

Hugs and Hisses Holy cow, thanks!

Powerthirteen -- you're welcome! 

As for Agricola, I rejected it for a long time based on the fact that it's a euro game.  Euro game + Hugs = disaster.  But I finally broke down and tried the ipad version and it's awesome!  I suck at it, but it's not like soda made from crops!  It's like fine wine made from little wooden cows and little wooden wheat and little wooden... people?!  Soylentcola is meeple!

The ski weekend wasn't everything I hoped, but I did get to play Pandemic for the first time. It's a good game! We lost, the world population died.

Also played were Guesstures, Cards Against Humanity (sigh), and a host of card games from ages past including Asshole, Bullshit, and Egyptian Ratscrew (my personal favorite). I also taught someone Casino, the game made infamous in my family by my grandmother being accused of cheating when she taught the kids.

I want to buy Caverna but it is so stupidly expensive. I mean I get it has lots of little wooden meeple but man... $100 is a lot for yet another board game that takes a lot to organize for.

Powerthirteen -- Yay!  I'm so glad to hear you liked them!  And I'll totally keep an eye out for Machi Koro.  Thanks for the recommendation!

we picked up Dominion and are loving it, except that we don't play with Chapel because it's either useless or it transforms the game from Fun Recreation into a cutthroat race to the finish.

I suspect my wife is soon going to ban Gardens because I constantly destroy her with it. 

Now I'm tempted to post the Dominion: Intrigue decks Wifemate and I made - "Black Site" and "Sex & Violence".

I played Sansoucci for the first time and really enjoyed it! It worked very well with two players, and was just the right level of thinkiness vs. just having fun laying tiles to make a pretty garden. It was also a very satisfying amount of bits and bobs to play with while also not being too much to set up and take down on a weeknight before dinner.

Black Site: Secret Chamber, Great Hall, Steward, Ironworks, Conspirator, Bridge, Nobles, Saboteur, Torturer, Courtyard (or replace with Shanty Town)

Sex and Violence: Harem, Torturer, Saboteur, Tribute, Minion, Swindler, Mining Village, Coppersmith, Wishing Well, Pawn

The former is just a good set with all useful cards (plus the Saboteur for spite), which means it's tempting to over-load with action.
The latter has every attack card in the set. If you were to replace Wishing Well with Shanty Town, it would be even more of a bloodbath.

Oooh, these sound good!  I think I've only played with Saboteur once, and Conspirator doesn't ring a bell so I probably haven't played with that much either.  I'm totally going to try these out this weekend! 

Powerthirteen -- if you're picking up more expansions for Dominion, Prosperity is so much fun.

The Walking Dead: All Out War game is pretty fun. It's a lot easier to play than the other Walking Dead board game that has like a million pieces that you need to keep in play. This one just has miniatures. It's rather old school in that you have a ruler to measure out distances. The first game day didn't go well since we were all learning the rules, but things were actually fun by the second time we tried.

You play as different teams and you start off with a points buy thing where you spend points to get characters and equipment. Then you're unleashed on the board to fight zombies and other survivors. You win either by gathering all the resources, killing the other survivors, or being the last man standing. The difficulty gets harder and harder with each turn so it's very much a game of survival. And in case it's not clear, I should state that this isn't an RPG. It kind of looks like one but it's very much a board game. You can't have conversations and roll for charisma and that kind of thing. It's all about moving pieces and claiming spots on the board.

Anyway, my partner and I stacked our team with a couple of hardasses and some expendable women and children. We cruelly sent the civilians to their deaths whenever the going got tough, set off a car alarm to draw zombies to our opponents, then after two hours of running around we ruled the post-apocalyptic wasteland. That wasn't a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Much needed game night tonight.

For Sale - A really fun and easy game for at least 3 using only cards in which properties are auctioned off, then used as collateral to make bids for cash. Whoever finishes with the most cash wins. It takes like 15 minutes, and I'm thinking about replicating it using two different-colored playing card decks and some cut-out coin tokens. (It's amazing that a lot of people aren't making counterfeit games instead of buying them, especially when they use nothing but printed cards like this.)

Resistance - Just another Mafia clone, like Avalon. OK, but not playable if one of the people in the group isn't very smart/much of a gamer and has already had a lot of wine.

Codenames - Also super fun. Playing in teams, so at least 4 people all together, the codegiver must get all teammates to choose their team's word tiles before the opposing team chooses their own. The codegiver will want to think of a one-word clue that links multiple tiles so that their team can cover a lot of ground in one go. Like other subjective matching games, this is a situation that requires cleverness, lateral thinking, and knowing your teammates. Highlight of the night: me successfully giving the clue word "orange" to get my teammate to choose from the word bank the tiles "pumpkin" and ... "whip".

Update - Two of the four players have made a point of mentioning every time they see me how excited they are to be able to play my RPG again, and the third who I've only seen once has agreed. (I have not seen or spoken with Player 4 as he was the one I had only met once before the game began.)

It's nice to be appreciated.

So yeah, we'll hopefully be able to start playing again in about a month, so I'm starting to prepare ideas again.