Be Excellent To Each Other

All the more reason to sack it off and come cottaging!

Yeah, but I like having a job.

HMMMM.

(Also: Pod - How can you all have played Cosmic Encounters and not posted about it. Pictures of peoples game collections or something please)

Holy crap there's a boardgames thread!

I've gone boardgames mental over the last couple of months. Our Monday RPG nights have been disrupted around the holiday period by people having social lives and families and stuff, so it's been out with the boardgames! We've played a fuckton of Dominion (base set, Intrigue and the highly-bloody-recommended Prosperity expansion), a lot of Ticket To Ride: Europe and Pandemic. Oooooh, Pandemic. Pandemic is SO FUCKING GOOD YOU GUYS. It's so good I got it for Christmas, played about four games then ordered the expansion with my Chrismas money.

Why Pandemic is ace:

a) It's co-operative. Everyone wins or everyone loses. So it's a great game to play with your kids or people who're turned off by the dog-eat-dog viciousness of, say, Cosmic Encounter.

b) The theme is great. You're playing a team of specialists rushing around the world trying to cure four diseases before The End Of The World As We Know It. Everyone can get on board with that. So it's a great game to play with people who've got a natural and understandable aversion to elves.

c) It's fast. Depending on player numbers it probably averages an hour from opening the box to wrapping the game up. So it's easy to play a few games on the bounce. Which you'll want to do when you've seen a combination of bad luck and incompetence cause the Apocalypse for the third time that evening.

d) It's easy, but it's hard. Each turn players are drawing from a Player Deck containing city cards which allow them to travel to or from whatever city is on the card. If you ever have to draw cards and there aren't any left to draw, you lose. Each turn, players are drawing from a separate Infection Deck and adding a disease cube to whatever cities they draw. If you ever have to place a disease cube but don't have any left to place, you lose. If you have to add a fourth disease cube of one colour to a city, instead you add one cube to every city connected to it in a process called an "Outbreak". This is quite bad. Outbreaks can chain - if you have two cities next to each other both with three disease cubes on them, if either Outbreaks it will cause the other to Outbreak right along with it. This is really very bad indeed. Over and above the fact that this can very quickly clear your supply of disease cubes (which, as above, will cause you to lose), if you suffer 8 Outbreaks in the course of the game, you lose.

e) It's tense. The threat of outbreaks or running out of disease cubes means you want to get people to disease hotspots as quickly as possible, and the easiest way to do that is often to play a city card and fly directly there. HOWEVER! The only way to win the game is to discover cures for all four diseases, and the only way to cure a disease is for a player to "hand in" five cards of that disease's colour. So right away you're having to weigh the pros and cons of getting triage to a trouble spot quickly vs. not wasting cards you're going to need to actually get cures made and get the game won. And guess what? Those places you really want to fly to are generally the same colour as the diseases you'd really like to get cured as soon as possible. DECISIONS OMG. And then there's the Epidemic Mechanic Of Genius.

f) It's got the Epidemic Mechanic Of Genius. Remember the Player Deck where the players were getting the cards they needed to cure the diseases? Well, that deck also contains a number of Epidemic cards at semi-random intervals. Whenever you draw an Epidemic, you take a card from the BOTTOM of the Infection deck and immediately add three disease cubes to it (this can cause an Outbreak if that city already has one or more disease cubes already on it, which can generally only happen as a result of an earlier Outbreak. This is another reason why Outbreaks are really very bad indeed). Then you take the discard pile of cities that have already been infected, shuffle it and put it back ON TOP of the Infection deck. So, yeah. From that point on you're pretty much only drawing cities that have already been infected which makes things a lot more intense and a lot more dangerous and gives the game a beautiful natural rhythm where the action gets tougher and tougher and faster and faster as it goes on.

g) It's the only boardgame that my wife actively asks to play.

h) The expansion comes with little petri dishes for you to keep your disease cubes in. ENOUGH SAID.

Is this it?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Z-Man-Games-702 ... 253&sr=8-1

I think so. Wil Wheaton was gushing about it on twitter recently.

That's the kiddie. Come on, Wesley Crusher and I can't both be wrong.

Pandemic. With a monkey. For reasons that are unlikely to make sense even if I explain them. Yesterday.

That sounds amazing.

I thought about it, then bought Munchkin instead. now I feel I have made a mistake.

I hope you have bought this to play on Sunday night at midnight.

Hmm, I'm more than happy to do that.
Can I get it delivered to your house, Cras?

This could be a clincher.

Hrm. You can, but there's a fair chance there won't be anyone there to receive it.

Huh. I don't really want to lug it around London, as you can probably imagine.

Suggestions?

Deliver to Craster's work, and he can carry it home during the week. Or to yourself of you think you can get it by Wednesday to take to the quiz.

This would work better if I was going to the quiz.

Come to the quiz.

Great write-up! Sounds excellent fun.

Re-reading this thread, we really ought to sort put a board games meet this year. Just so I can thrash you all at 'Ticket to Ride'.

I have a 'Played: 1, Won: 1' record at this game. I should probably quit while I'm ahead.

I'd love to make a boardgame, But On The Internet. I'd really like to make a copy of the Zombies! game - it's pretty much perfect because there's no need for AI, the rules and things like movement are simple, but that's not fair on the makers.
There are many disadvantages of doing it online, but there are some advantages too (no need to all be in one place, as many pieces as you like without it costing more, play over a few weeks without worrying about tidying the game away, keep track of scores). So, er, if anyone has a great idea (and ruleset) for a game, let me know

As in make up our own game, rather than copy one out there?

Yeah.

How about some kind of Chaos type battling game?

I must confess I don't know what they are, but if it's anything to do with GW I'd be avoiding it like the plague. They go after their IP very aggressively.

Ah, that's a point. I forgot it was a GW thing. Maybe you could just take the idea and have a different setting like Greek Mythology or something.

Ha - a certain special someone is mentioned on that page

That's pretty much precisely what I've been trying to recreate as a forum game - though as a team effort, rather than adversarial as Zombies! currently is. What I've been struggling with is replacing the random chance that currently governs combat.

Utter bastard to get balancing correct.

If you want the forum to roll a die I could happily do that for you.

I think it'd be quite simple to make Ludo. Do Ludo.

Challenge accepted!

Nah. I want consequences to be based on decisions, not dice.

I suspect I wouldn't be the first.

You could have combat nearly always hurt to attacker as well as the defender, like in Advance Wars. Or Space Cows.

Hurrah!

Ahem: I wish I could draw pictures to go with my online board game...

Or have a fixed attack (due to weapons or whatever) + a bonus that comes from a card the player plays.

The card comes from their hand of 6 or whatever, and the hand doesnt get replenished until they are all used up.

Therefore players need to size up when they think they can get away with playing weaker cards or something.

Or something.

This is intended to be a forum game though, from my side - so I want consequences to be based on decisions, not numbers so much.

Could I put another player on top of my head when I get to the other side of the board?

Hmm, how about a system where each player (hidden from others, via pm or some code magic) commit to helping the "gang" in the battle or "look after themselves". The former let's the group win but you may get bit, and the latter keeps you safe, but you appear to be helping.

Different challenges need greater commit numbers.

A coop game where you are out for yourself.

Only if he is small, like Gaywood and Alberto.

Damn. I was wanting a proper kingly hat. A Mr Russ maybe.

What about a light character (Mr Dave)

And do you not need to pick up the ceremonial headress beforehand (and is that possibly a couch which would be designed to fit an unusual edge of a room?)

Can you make it about zombies and superheroes so I can call it Zomgbies?

Can we make trooper in charge of design, and not rules? ;-)

I fear my server would run out of RAMS almost instantly.

OH NOES! HE'S HERE! MORE RAMS!

So Craster, Riles, Curio and I tried Pandemic.

It was... Okay. It would have been better if we'd got the rules right. We need to try again - and we'll have to have Roda there to tell us how to play properly.

As it was, we "won" in about twenty turns.

Hadn't spotted this. Yeah, played Pandemic before, Nice idea, but somewhat lacking in execution. Generally all seems a bit easy

It's a lot less easy if you read the rules.