During the past three days I've played a lot of board games with family and friends.
Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear 2nd edition took some time to get into but I had a blast playing the first scenario even if it took like three hours, On the computer I often play turn-based strategy games and CoH really scratches that itch for me. I expect to play this almost weekly now.
We played The Resistance with 10 players, some people in their 30s and some in their 60s, and this worked surprisingly well. The game scales really well between 5 and 10 players but I really do like it better with as many players as possible.
The next day I was playing Sentinels of the Multiverse with my brother and a friend of mine. I had already played this game once so I thought I knew the rules but after a while we found out that I made a mistake with the environment deck, I was replacing environmental effects each time we had to draw a new environment card. This watered down the difficulty significantly as you can imagine. Still we had a great time and I might actually buy the other expansions. That's how much I enjoy the game.
The next game we played was Escape: The Curse of the Temple and this might well have been the last time I played that game. It's just really not my taste. We added all modules that come with the base game and still we won three times without breaking a sweat. If there's one game in my collection I might sell it's this one.
Then, I introduced the same players to Love Letter which I hadn't played myself yet either. The game's even much easier to play than I had anticipated, it's nowhere near the complexity of Citadels or Mascarade but for the same reasons it's very quick to play and still a lot of fun. I might actually prefer it over Citadels because the thing I dislike about Citadels is how the winning condition depends on the cards you draw rather than the roles you pick and deduct. I'm looking forward to the next time I can play Love Letter, although the maximum of 4 players prevents it from being a party-game IMO.
And finally, yesterday we played another game of Battlestar Galactica with the Pegasus, Exodus and Daybreak expansions. We included the Mutineer, Exodus Cylon Baseship, Daybreak Cylon Baseship, Pegasus, Demetrius, Personal Goals and all skill cards (except the Pegasus Treachery cards) and Crisis Cards, but took out Final Five, Cylon Leaders, Trauma, Crossroads, and Allies, One player was a (hidden) Cylon player from the start but he didn't get any opportunity to rig skill-checks and the Human players were doing really well. Halfway the game all resources were still almost full, I recieved the Mutineer card and this is where we expected things to go wrong but it was really easy to get rid of Munity cards and we just gained resources from them. Meanwhile the Cylon player revealed himself while the humans still had to jump 4 distance and then one last time. The very last round was the only exciting one in the game because morale was at 1 and fuel at 2, so we couldn't afford to lose morale.. but we didn't and we one. I think I might shelve BSG for a while since the last couple of games were so uneventful that most of us want to move on to another game for now.
