In recent months, board games have nearly dethroned video games as my main hobby (I still probably spend more time on video games [I play them every day, whereas I'm lucky to get in more than two BG sessions a week, as their prime draw - live, face-to-face interaction with other players - is also their biggest inconvenience], but I'm sure I've spent more money on board games), thanks largely to being back home and reconnecting with old friends who are also lifelong nerds. I thought since I haven't been on much lately, I'd take the time to share some info and opinions on some of the tabletop games I've been playing lately:
Road Kill Rally - love this game. Basically it's Death Race 2000: The Game, minus the license. (This seems to be a common thread among the really great boardgames - take the concept of some popular movie, adapt it to game format, then make up your own fiction because you can't afford the license for the real thing unless you're Hasbro. See also: Space Hulk (Aliens), Android (Blade Runner), Last Night On Earth (Romero-style zombie movies), Battlestar Galactica (well, obviously in that case they actually DID get the license)). Each player drives a tricked-out death mobile along a track made up of randomly shuffled tiles, so the layout's different every time. Crossing the finish line first will get you a bunch of points, but that alone doesn't determine victory, as you also get points for shooting the other players' cars (and for running over pedestrians!). This game offers a great mix of dice-chucking action and tense strategic decisions, as you have to constantly monitor your speed (so you don't wipe out on a sharp turn) and carefully manage your hand of rally cards, which you use to attack but also take damage from - when you're hit, you have to give your attacker cards equal to the damage they dealt you. Don't have enough? Here's a -20 point wipeout token, kindly drop your speed to 20mph (1 space/turn) and trash one of your mounted weapons. Feel free to watch in dismay as I sail past you. Of course payback can be a bitch, especially in a game like this where nastiness is so strongly encouraged; I hit a guy for massive damage early on, he spent the rest of the game fucking me over any way he could. Even after he'd taken three wipeouts and thus lost all his weapons, he still managed to pull shit like blocking my route or getting between me and the guy I was trying to shoot.
Betrayal At House On the Hill - in this game, the players are a group of horror movie stereotypes exploring a haunted house for no apparent reason. At the start, everybody's on the same side, but over the course of the game they unearth omens, and eventually somebody finds the one that triggers "the haunt" to begin. At this point, one of the players becomes a traitor against the group and uses whatever means the house offers them to try to kill the others. Depending which omen triggers the haunt and where it is found, one of 50 different scenarios play out. One time, somebody found Frankenstein's diary and decided to recreate his experiments, so we had to run from an unkillable monster we could only hurt with torches; another time, I turned out to be an escaped mental patient who thought I was Julius Caesar (this was made even funnier by the fact that I had chosen the "creepy little girl" character) and the others were the senators who murdered me. I got some crazy servants to help out, and they were able to keep the others busy while I ran around the mansion grabbing every stat boost I could find, so that when they came for me the fight was heavily stacked in my favor. When I won I stood up, spread my arms and cried, "Veni Vidi Vicci, bitches!":D (Note - this game is very fun, but there is an issue with the recent reissue; the room tiles are printed on thin, flimsy cardboard which tends to warp in shipping. WotC is aware of the issue and offering replacements, but the wait is expected to take a few more months. :\ )
Summoner Wars - a great little game I haven't gotten to play nearly enough. It's a semi-collectible card game (there are various faction decks to buy, but each one is self-contained - no random booster packs like a true CCG, you just buy the decks for the races you want to be able to play and you're done) from one of the designers of HeroScape, which I saw some love for earlier in this thread. It plays out like a tactical miniatures game with cards instead of figurines, and each race has a different mechanical theme - the Goblins are weak but low-cost, the Orcs have high risk/high reward special abilities, the Elves are glass cannons, etc. Unfortunately you have to have either exactly two players for the basic game (which takes about half an hour), or exactly four for the team game (which takes about two hours). When I get together for games with my friends, there's usually either three of us, or 5+. :\
Arkham Horror - oh man. This game is EPIC. If you like Lovecraft, you have to give this a try at some point. The stars are right, the Old Ones are stirring in their slumber... and it's up to you to stop them, or die go insane trying. Lots of games have the players against one player, or everybody starting out friends until somebody turns traitor (BSG, Betrayal), but this one's pure co-op. The players as one united force against the board. You might think that would destroy the tension, but it's still there, it's just coming from how balls-hard the game is instead of from competition. You run around Arkham, collecting clues, fighting or running from monsters, and getting whisked off to other dimensions, all in an effort to seal the gates before too much otherworldly bullshit invades the town and Cthulhu (or Yog Sothoth, or Yig, or The Goat With A Thousand Young, or...) shows up; if you fail to prevent the Old One from awakening, your last hope is to face it in combat - a grim proposition to say the least. Along the way you get to read encounter text that just oozes with flavor - this is what makes the game so enjoyable. (Bonus points for playing while listening to Darkest of the Hillside Thickets.) The only problem with this game is the absurd playtime - it frequently clocks in between 4 and 6 hours. That's right, you're looking at a Monopoly level time commitment, but at least this game's fun.
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I just put in an order a few days ago for some more stuff I've had my eye on, which I thought I'd tell ya'll about too. I haven't gotten to play these games yet, so I can't personally vouch for them, but they seem like they'd be of interest to people here.
Resident Evil Deckbuilding Game - now this is something I would never have expected to exist, let alone be good, but my most trusted reviewer showered it with praise, so I'm giving it a shot. If you're not familiar with the deckbuilding game concept, it started with a game called Dominion that came out about 2 years ago now. The idea is to take the deckbuilding meta-game of CCGs like Magic the Gathering, and make that into a game in and of itself. So everybody starts with a small weak deck consisting of just a few low-value resource cards, which they use to buy other cards to add to their deck (from a common pool mind you - it's important to note that this is a one-box purchase, not something you buy boosters for) as the game progresses. In Dominion, the theme is ruling a medieval kingdom, so it's all about building an efficient economic engine - you want to get action cards that give you more actions per turn so you can play more cards, so you can play other cards that let you draw more, so maybe you'll draw more money cards, so you can afford to buy BETTER money cards, so you'll be able to buy those nice big estates that are worth lots of victory points at the end of the game. The RE game, in contrast, is far more action-oriented, as you would expect based on the source material. Each turn you see what you drew, buy stuff, then decide whether to risk exploring the mansion by turning over the top card of the mansion deck. This will probably be a monster you have to fight, but it could also be a rare card to add to your deck (healing herb, rocket launcher etc.) If you draw a monster, you see if you've got enough guns and ammo in your hand to kill it; if you do, you score its victory points, if not it damages you and stays in play for the next player to have to deal with. The game ends when somebody finds and kills the big bad boss monster. In addition, there's a versus mode where instead of running around the mansion, you're just trying to kill each other for no story-based reason. :D Oh, and there are character cards complete with unique powers for 10 different RE heroes and villains, and who you're playing will affect how you want to build your deck. Jill for example favors grenades - normally they're one use and then you return them to the store, but she gets to put them in her discard pile to be shuffled back into her deck instead. Leon can double-load handguns for extra damage, and Wesker can force other players to explore whether they want to or not. In all, I'm really looking forward to getting this one on the table - the deckbuilding mechanic in Dominion makes for great fun, but I'm excited to see it done in something with a more exciting theme.
Merchants and Marauders - I actually ordered this to trade to a friend who bought one of the expansions for Arkham Horror when I didn't have the money to do so. It sounds pretty exciting though. It's supposedly the best pirate game ever. You sail around the Caribbean getting into crazy adventures trying to make the most gold by means fair or foul. You see, you can choose to play it safe and be a legitimate businessman, ferrying goods from port to port, or take the high risk/high reward path of the pirate, and raid NPC (or other players!) ships for booty, which calls down the wrath of the various navies patrolling the region.
Death Angel: The Space Hulk Card Game - supposedly this captures the feel of its big brother in a much smaller, faster-playing package, and supports up to six players instead of exactly two. Whatever, I'd be buying it even I didn't already love the original game, because it's designed by Cory Koniezska, the man behind the BSG, Star Craft, and Game of Thrones board games - so basically, he can seemingly do no wrong.
