In my mind it does not.

However they game mechanics answer is you roll 2 six sided dice and add numbers to the barrier roll based off of materials. Straw gets no bonus (should get a penalty honestly) wood gets +1 and stone gets +2, if the lava roll beats the barrier roll the barrier goes, it if does not the barrier stays.

Ha, it´s always nice when this specific scenario happens:

You - the board game buff - have set up some heavy, optically appealing game to learn the rules while playing against yourself.

A friend comes over.

Friend: "Hey, thanks for xyz, I just wanted to-OHHHH! What´s THAT!? *walks over to table, takes a look at the miniatures* Is that...?"

Me: Yep, the thing I told you about the other day.

Friend: It´s smaller than I thought overall...

Me: Yeah but that means we can play it on your table too

Fiend: Oh, cool! You gotta teach me sometime!


That´s how it´s supposed to go :)

And I´m back after having had some kind of malfunction in my inner ear or migrane or something...basically I couldn´t walk straight for about a week, feeling like I was being moved to the right all the time. Fucking annoying.


Anyway, I FINALLY got the Summoner Wars Master Set. I guess now I´ve got all the games I ever needed :D

Games I bought or played recently include

Kingsburg: Strange but true, there is indeed 2 player rules for this game. I was happy about that.

Dice Town: Kind of a yahtzee meets Kingsburg kind of game where you are competing to win various prizes each round in an old west setting.

Eminent Domain: Deck Builder that reminds me of a simplified Race for the Galaxy

Smalworld Underground: I like it better then the original because the territory markers and relics add a new element to what you want to capture

Sounds good Pentegarn, I love Smallworld, always thought about getting underworld...is it worth it if I have the original?

I also got Eminent Domain a few weeks back but I´m not really sold on it yet, it seems a bit too solitary for my taste...

After testing the new factions from the Master Set, I again marvel at how different these factions play. One focusses on formation, another on magic, yet another is a speedy rush-faction which could go up against a faction with wall-manipulating powers...it´s just great :)

Underworld is stand alone, it is not an expansion. You could in theory use the classic races but they would not get benefits on an underworld board that they would on a classic one.

I am surprised you feel Eminent Domain feels solitary-ish. Every leader action you take can also be done by the other players so you have to be careful you aren't helping your opponents when making your moves

Yeah but ED is really passively interactive, you cannot interact with your opponents AND you attack your own planets to make them count points which is a really strange feeling, gameplaywise (I know that you attack neutral planets inside your sphere of influence ;)).

I don´t really mind games like this but many of my friends do because the level of interaction is so low...I should try to get them to play Cosmic Encounter with me, that game has NEVER hit the table so far. People saw it and went "ugh that´s a lot of english text on those cards, let´s play something else"...Uch...

That reminds me, I played Dune in some foreign language but the person who owned it had translated rules in english. We just had to cross reference the cards every time we played them

Of course it is annoying to play a game in a foreign language, I can understand my friends to a certain extent...but the only thing they need to memorize is what the different races do which is really not hard and it´s not like they can´t understand english, they just start to go defensive when somethings not immediately clear :D

And I´d love to play Dune but I guess I have to wait until it´s being republished next year or whenever it´s supposed to come out...sadly without the Dune-License...

It was a wild game. Lots of negotiation and back stabbing. I was the guild and won because the guy who was aligned with me and I kept the guild's winning condition maintained for 15 turns

I really have to play that game sometime.

Some games I DID play this week were Shadow Hunters and Humans!!!.
While Shadow Hunters is another excellent Partygame like King of Tokio, Humans!!! is sadly about as bad as Zombies!!! was though with a little less randomness to it. Still, it´s not a very good game.

Also, I finally got my hands on a copy of Galaxy Trucker, can´t wait to try that one out on the weekend :)

I've been wanting to play Galaxy Trucker for a while now. I love the hastily build your ship concept

Though it can take any ammount of time if I understand the rules correctly. People have at least 3 minutes to build their ships in phase 1, more if no one flips the timer fast enough.

Still, I love the concept of being forced to build a piece of trash and then somehow keep it together while trying to make at least a bit of money on your trip :) Should be a lot of fun. I also like how the rules state that whoever wants to be first can just snag the #1-Token whenever he wants (he has to stop building of course) :)

Part of my gift to Dimnos this past Christmas was Nightmare: The Board Game.
It looks pretty fun and I noticed there's 3 more games in the series under the name Atmosfear.

Anyone on here played any of them? I'm wondering if they are worth tracking down as I've never played any of them.

The VCR/DVD games were a bit of a fad. Haven't seen many hardcore boardgamers playing them though. Whenever CABS has raffles and giveaways they are always the last ones to go regardless of the type of vcr/dvd game it may be,

I think the reason is most people find the necessity of a TV and vcr/dvd player a bit cumbersome

Ah, okay. I had to transfer the VHS to DVD and I thought the Gatekeeper guy was great. :lol

I also liked the idea of game that only took an hour at most to finish, because most of my friends don't like board games that much.
Oh well.

Yeah, thats the old problem

"but these things take soooo long to play...!"

And they don´t even KNOW long games like Twilight Imperium or Runewars (though one of my friend really loves RW :))

Yeah it is kind of a rabbit hole thing.

The normal person thinks of board games like a Monopoly or a Risk or a Clue.

If they try other things. like a Chrononauts, or a Quarriors! and they find they like them. They move on to a Dune or a Battlestar Galactica which can eat 3-5 hours. The really hardcore move onto the marathon games like the previous 2 OxBlood listed

Though some games, like Runewars, seem to grab peoples attention once you start explaining how the game is played. I still have a revenge-match to play against a friend :D

The same friend and I decided yesterday that 1 in the morning is no time to be sleeping so we played a bit of Memoir44 and a match of Summoner Wars.

He really liked Memoir and he should cause he beat me but then again, when do the Germans win in the first scenario.

The Summoner Wars match was even better. His Jungle Elves really struggled against my Shadow Elves but it was his very first match so that was to be expected. BUT. He won. Fair and square. I had his Summoner surrounded by weak Units and was poking him to death cause he couldn´t both get away and kill them off and his deck was empty too.
But he had one last Lioneer and he got really lucky and finished off my slightly unprotected Summoner hiding behind a wall :D

It was really cool and you know a game is good when you start analysing the turns afterwards :) As I´ve said before, Summoner Wars is a game that just keeps on giving :)


Also got 6nimmt and 11nimmt from the store, apparently 6nimmt was kinda popular overseas but you couldn´t get it or something? Every moderately stocked store here has is...weird.

So the more I play Dice Town, the more I realize how cool it really is. There is an underlying screw others quickly and often element to it that the game does not openly advertise.

That one´s still on my list :)

Friend and I played through the second scenario of the GOW-Game, which is basically "Kill the Berserker"...it was quite fun, running from it, luring it to smash through the walls to get to the Hammer of Dawn...nice game.

I´m still waiting to pick up my copy of MageKnight, seems to be an awesome game :)

If you are going to play Dice Town it is the most fun with 4-5 players, 5 preferrably

a week ago i bought risk legacy (know as revolution over here) at first i thought it was a limited edition version of risk with different factions and robots but is much more than that, every faction has special abilities and every match has an impact on the next

I'm trying to major in games and game design, specifically board games.

Multi-disciplinary studies - that sort of thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Study-Games-El.../dp/0898740452

Anyone know any other books that would be helpful?

There's a few good "x best board games of all time" books worth looking into. But to get really into how to design a great game you have to learn what works by playing them. Watching the trends is a good thing too. Like right now the co-op games and deckbuilders are scoring huge. Going to both Gen-Con and Origins is a must as well. You can talk to a lot of game developers there and see the nuts and bolts of how it all comes together if you find the right peeps to talk to. Demo anything and everything, not just to see what works, but to see what does not so you don't repeat the mistakes of a poor game design with a pretty finish,