Every year the Bald Move boys go to some random US city to hang out with our far flung friends we've met through podcasting to chill and throw down on board games for a long weekend. This year's highlights:
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Dune Imperium
- Deceptively simple to learn, with surprising depth and replay-ability. Blends worker placement games with a bit of deck building to add elements of surprise to the strategy. You lead one of the Great Houses of the Lansraad, each with unique plusses and minuses. Do you focus on military might, amassing political power, or vast wealth? Curry favor with or earn the undying enmity with the Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gesserit, and the Fremen. Great board, great rules, attractive components, and an average game time of about 2 hours makes this a hit.
- Deceptively simple to learn, with surprising depth and replay-ability. Blends worker placement games with a bit of deck building to add elements of surprise to the strategy. You lead one of the Great Houses of the Lansraad, each with unique plusses and minuses. Do you focus on military might, amassing political power, or vast wealth? Curry favor with or earn the undying enmity with the Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gesserit, and the Fremen. Great board, great rules, attractive components, and an average game time of about 2 hours makes this a hit.
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Poetry for Neanderthals
- One of the best new party games I've played in a while. This supports basically infinite players. You divide the group into two parties, and you take turns drawing cards and trying to get your team to guess what's on the card. The trick? You only have 60 seconds to score as many as you can, and you can ONLY use one syllable words, or the other team bonks you with an inflatable club and you lose points. Hot sauce becomes "thing put in mouth, make warm" and beached whale is "huge sea beast, no swim". Absolutely hilarious.
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Skull
- Another great party game, it's hard to describe but easy to play. Each player gets 4 cards, 3 flower cards and 1 skull. Everyone lays one disk in front of each other. Then the first player decides to either "bid" by saying "I think I can score x)", or they can add one of their cards to the pile in front of them. If they bid, they are committing to flip over at least that many cards before they hit a skull. They can pick any player to flip over any amount of cards to get there, but once you hit a skull you lose, and lose a card. Then play passes to the left. As the players go around, the piles get bigger and the stakes raise, and players options grow limited.
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Empires
- You are one of the great European powers at the dawn of the 20th century. Compete with your peers economically and militarily to dominate. Each country has a unique setup in terms of starting assets and debts, and each country has a unique power that can be used throughout the game (and even traded away). You have populations. That can be assigned to work in territories. That can produce products. That can be sold at market for great gains, unless the market is flooded and no one gets anything. Now what? Great game, but you're going to have to be willing to pursue FAQ and errata from the bowels of Board Game Geeks and the like, cause there are a few key ambiguities in turn order and process that could use some hammering out. But, if you're willing to do so, you can enjoy a pretty deep empire building game, with extremely simple setup, that seats TEN PLAYERS and still plays in less than an hour! I feel like this game is going to be more enjoyed by groups of players that like to interact and make deals and trade, if you have a more co-op solitaire kind of group, the depths and strategies this game allows might not shine.
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Last Light
- 8 player expansion
- As the universe enters the final stage of entropy, heat death, the last great civilizations huddle around the few remaining stars burning ever dimmer. But a new white dwarf has been discovered in the center of the galaxy, leading all peoples to try to control this precious source of energy. You win the game by
collecting "light", the first person to 20 wins. This shares a lot in common with Empires, in that there is deep strategy, asymmetrical sides, short game lengths, etc. Some of the cultures specialize in fast expansion, some in research, others in resource extraction or battle. Where it differs is the game board is complex and a pain in the ass to setup. But it's worth it! Because at the end of every round, the board rotates, with the inner core spinning faster than the outer arms, constantly moving and mixing up your fleets, leading to disastrous alliances and desperate attrition wars for light. The game accomplishes this by having the board be several circular pieces stacked on top each other and pinned in the middle allowing the three dimensional star map to do it's thing. Each round consists of taking six different actions, build, command, research, extract, and refresh, the final one allowing you to pick your actions back up to play them again. Once the last player has "refreshed", the turn ends and the galaxy spins. Build massive fleets, bomb your neighbors mines and light extraction sites, and do what ever it takes to take and hold the center of the galaxy. And it seats EIGHT PLAYERS with the expansion.
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The King's Dilemma
- This is a legacy game (you play the same game over 10-20 sessions, and how you play the game changes how the game is played), where you pretend to be a Great House of a Great Kingdom (think Westeros). The turns consist of a king beginning their reign. Players draw from a dilemma deck. For example, spies from a neighboring kingdom have reported their merchants dumping vast quantities of grain into their harbors. Has the grain supply been poisoned? Or is this merely a ploy from your rivals to weaken your kingdom. Before you are two choices, to follow suit and dump the grain, or roll the dice to feed your populations? You have political power tokens that you can spend to lend weight to your "aye" or "nay" vote. The only way to get power back is to take a back seat on a few votes to "consolidate", but who knows what the other madmen around the table will do with you abstaining? Did I mention that each player's house has competing values, objectives, and win conditions? Also, with the "legacy" aspect, if you starve the kingdom, the people are going to remember it for at least a generation, maybe three? Or maybe an invading army will switch the political conversation to spare your house? After 5-6 dilemmas, the king will age and eventually die in office, and the house with the most success during his reign will get to decide the heir. Alternatively, if the decisions you make are disastrous enough, the king might be forced to abdicate early. Maybe that benefits you? What I love about this game is the natural role playing that develops from trying to just be your house, and maximize it's greatness. And the way that the game illustrates the path to hell is often paved with the very best of intentions. I will say that if your group ignored your house objectives and just tried to "win" the game as defined as what's best for your kingdom... I have no idea how that would play out. I think it's best playfully adversarial. We're 25% of the way through it, I'll get back to you in a few years to say if it was all worth it.
- This is a legacy game (you play the same game over 10-20 sessions, and how you play the game changes how the game is played), where you pretend to be a Great House of a Great Kingdom (think Westeros). The turns consist of a king beginning their reign. Players draw from a dilemma deck. For example, spies from a neighboring kingdom have reported their merchants dumping vast quantities of grain into their harbors. Has the grain supply been poisoned? Or is this merely a ploy from your rivals to weaken your kingdom. Before you are two choices, to follow suit and dump the grain, or roll the dice to feed your populations? You have political power tokens that you can spend to lend weight to your "aye" or "nay" vote. The only way to get power back is to take a back seat on a few votes to "consolidate", but who knows what the other madmen around the table will do with you abstaining? Did I mention that each player's house has competing values, objectives, and win conditions? Also, with the "legacy" aspect, if you starve the kingdom, the people are going to remember it for at least a generation, maybe three? Or maybe an invading army will switch the political conversation to spare your house? After 5-6 dilemmas, the king will age and eventually die in office, and the house with the most success during his reign will get to decide the heir. Alternatively, if the decisions you make are disastrous enough, the king might be forced to abdicate early. Maybe that benefits you? What I love about this game is the natural role playing that develops from trying to just be your house, and maximize it's greatness. And the way that the game illustrates the path to hell is often paved with the very best of intentions. I will say that if your group ignored your house objectives and just tried to "win" the game as defined as what's best for your kingdom... I have no idea how that would play out. I think it's best playfully adversarial. We're 25% of the way through it, I'll get back to you in a few years to say if it was all worth it.
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Challengers
- A lightweight and fairly short deck building / player vs player battle game. I didn't play it, but Jim liked it a lot. Seems like Speed Magic: The Gathering drafts?
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Bang!
- A very flavorful social deduction game where you're either the sheriff, deputy, outlaw, or renegade in a spaghetti western, and it's chief delight is being able to say you're "banging" another player as you take a shot at them. DO NOT BUY THE EXPANSIONS! The expansions all add new ways to avoid being shot, recover wounds after being shot, and draw more cards. This game's charm is it's short and fun, and goofy, when every player becomes immortal cowboys that cannot be killed the fun quickly wears thin.
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MTG Draft: Innistrad Remastered
- It's a Magic: The Gathering draft. If you've never done it, you should give it a try.
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Lovecraft Letter
- OG Love Letter
- These are all really fun and breezy but surprisingly deep social deduction / bluffing games. Try to get your love letter to the princess that everybody wants, but don't let the Wrong People find out about the romance, or it might all be over before it begins.
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Secret Hitler
- Simply the greatest social deduction game I've ever played. Endless hours of entertainment if your group likes shouting, theatrics, and scheming. The game is best played with 6+ players where one or two of you are fascists, one of you is Hitler, and the rest are liberals trying to forge a democracy. The fascists know who they are, Hitler knows he's Hitler but doesn't know who is fellow fascists are, and the game is won when either the liberals achieve their progressive aims in government and fascism is staved off, or Hitler is made Chancellor.
Video Games
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ANBERNIC RG40XX Retro Gaming Console
- ANBERNIC RG34XXSP - Game Boy SP form factor
- RG PO1 Wireless Controller
- Jackbox Games (all links are for Switch version)
- Party Pack 3 - Tee K.O., Guesspionage, Fakin' It, Trivia Murder Party, Quiplash
- Party Pack 5 - Split the Room, Mad Verse City, Patently Stupid, Zeeple Dome, You Don't Know Jack
- Party Pack 6 - Joke Boat, Trivia Murder Party, Diction-arium, Push the Button, Role Models
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Party Pack 8 - Drawful: Animate, Wheel of Enourmous Proportions, Job Job, Poll Mine, Weapons Drawn