Basically if you need the same logic in two places instead of copying it to the second place you make it into a function and use that function in both places.

That way if you need that logic to change you only need to make that edit once regardless of whether you use it one time or one thousand times.

Tuesday our group met. First we played some weird memory game about being an orchestra conductor which was really bad. Then we tried the 5th mission in Port Royal Big Box… twice… in vain. We ended the evening early because:

On Wednesday we met again to play DnD. My character had an emotional reunion with a lost family member and we encountered our first gelatinous monster.

On Friday there was a public game night in town which I attended. The group I landed with first played two rounds of Frantic - a domestic UNO alternative but for some of them it was too chaotic so we cut the game short. We then played Ricochet Robots and the ladies at the table completely trunced me out of the gate. But after about 4 rounds I got up to speed and managed to race ahead after all. From this we moved on to X-Code where we managed to win the 4 basic missions and the first mission of the blue box. At this point we believed that the evening would wind down soon so we snuck in a quick game of Shark Attacks - where I finally did not come in in last place! Only to then learn that the game night would go on a bit longer this time. So picked up Las Vegas as well. I hadn’t played so many different games in one setting in ages and really enjoyed it. The evening also served as a nice way to cap off the organizer’s 5 year run in hosting these game nights.

Glad to see Terraforming Mars getting some love…

Regular boardgame nights returned from summer hiatus. The full group assembled for 5 player coop Great Wall. The game has amazing table presence and pretty interesting mechanics but absolutely no balance.

• Some leaders are just vastly better than others (pay a chi to make one additional damage vs get a massive discount when you recruit.)
• Missions have massively different difficulty levels and some are nigh on impossible for 5 players.
• Events are just ridiculous. Their immediate effects are ok but their ongoing effects are just way too punishing. Still the basic gameplay loop is compelling and we’re probably gonna play this on occasion.

On the weekend my sister also hopped over for a visit and we played:

• Thanos Rising - I basically had one decent turn, the rest was all a wash and with only two players pulling we had no chance.
• Earth - First time for my sister but she quickly took to it. This was the first game where I dared to take one of those terrains that forbids you from taking a particular action (growth) and I got by quite decently. Getting another card on every plant action was well worth the tradeoff. With enough card draws, I could fuel a lot of compost actions and on top of it I got lucky and drew the terrain that gives VP based on composted cards. All in all I won with a commanding lead. But after initial confusion over the common scoring cards (fauna) it was nice to see that everyone ultimately got the hang of it and scored at least 3 of them.
• Würfel Ligretto - Early morning we decided to wake ourselves up with someting frantic. So frantic in fact that one of the dice tumbled off the table and somehow into the kitchen installation. But we were ultimately able to find and retrieve the bugger and complete the game.
• Moving on from that we played Shark Attacks - a push your luck game where I consistently have less luck than everyone else. At least this time I lost to my sister instead of my GF.
• Pharaon - We capped the visit off with this game that I had kind shelved for a while. GF wasn’t in the mood for something heavy and just watched leaving it at a 2p setup. I must say I vastly preferr this game with less players. While I apprciate that it does go to 5 players and works it just becomes soooo much thighter. Spots per player are 7.5, 5, 6.25, 5 (from 2 to 4 players) and more importantly with 5 you might not even have the opportunity to go in a particular sector if everyone else prioritizes it.

I grew up with the Ravensburger box of classics so, board games were always a part of my childhood. They quickly captured my imagination and I began to draw roll and move boards, explaining to my mom what should happen on each space.

When I got older the whole family got into games and that turned into a nice sunday tradition.

Eventually I got sucked into BGG and never financially recovered…

Thanks! I have Galaxy Trucker too.

In my current draft you can basically say “here is what one player get’s to do in their turn” and tell the framework to make a machine that let’s every player run through that in some kind of sequence. For now the sequence is fixed. But ultimately all that GT needs is a recalculation of the order after every card. That’s relatively simple to add with a post-action trigger.

It’s kinda crazy that this still needs to be said. I remember TB railing against it and he’s been dead for 5 years now. So it’s been what? A decade?

That’s what I’m currently doing. But I’m not yet sure if a straight FSM is such a great fit. There’s not good mapping for the concept of turns in a single level FSM. You can do it of course but if you have multiple such models or nested instances where each player gets to react to specific actions on each player’s regular turn, each of them is gonna push the the properties needed to manage that into the shared state.

So I’m currently at nested state machines. This way the implementation details for alternating between players can be hidden from the higher level states.

Thanks a lot for those examples! Totally forgot about those “extra turn” effects. That’ll be fun.

I had already considered a bunch of concepts about how a phase can end but not that it might be completely independent from any player action.

The Gloomhaven scenario probably is the easiest of these since it is merely a variant of the general “player actions result in change of player order” case

Great example! Thank you!

There’s a portal 2 board game?

Spirit Island is probably our biggest mainstay at the moment. One of our group has most of the content and I’m still only about halfway through playing every spirit we have. The replayability is just amazing and the pacing is beautiful, hitting you hard in the early game and then slowly you turn the tide. Not to mention some of the spirits are just so doggamn satisfying to play.

We’re also pretty big into Aeon’s End. I completely hated this game in the beginning because I couldn’t see how you could possibly win. Once it clicked and we began to get better, it became a lot more satisfying to play.

We also played through and enjoyed all Legends of Andor, all Pandemic Legacy, Mechs vs Minions and Gloomhaven.

Yeah definitely get the Atomic Bonds expansion. The competitive basegame is ridiculously broken. For example there are quests that send your all over the map. But the silly thing is if a quests needs to be “picked up” in one location and “turned in” in another then once it is picked up ANY player can just snipe the rewards if they’re close to the destination. Also many exploration options are hillariously random. This makes the competitive version little more than a crapshoot. It’s frankly mindboggling how anyone actually greenlit that design.

In coop all that is still the case but instead of being frustrated when another player gets an extremely lucky pull in the exploration, you cheer each other on. Sniping different quest stages between multiple players becomes a cool strategy instead of a braindead design choice. Most of these anoyances fall away and you can revel in the setting of the game.

The point is to tell an exciting story - there’s no right or wrong definition of what that means for you.

The dice’s purpose is to take you down paths you might not have chosen deliberately but the goal is still to have an exciting story. If the DM wants to be like “I recognize the dice have made a decision but given that it’s a stupid ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it” then he has my full support.

Maybe a cleaner way would be to decide up front: which outcomes am I ok with? and simply cap the roll at that. You know the paladin only has 17 HP left and you don’t want the paladin to go down so the maximum roll you want is 16. So if you have roll 4d6 damage. You do: roll 3 roll 8 roll 12 roll 18 16.

Probably the bridge. DM crafted such an amazing puzzle and the paladin being a good boy learned it perfectly. Group was like: You know it’d be fun to see what the DM does if I accidentally put my foot on it.

Also the five questions. You could see that coming from MILES away but it was still hilarious.

• Bohnanza is a good recommendation. It’s very easy to learn and doesn’t fall into the usual brackets of shedding or trick taking.
• Scout is my favorite combo shedding game (ie. you’re shedding multiple cards at once). The way you’re always either drawing or shedding keeps the play much more dynamic than in Daihinmin or the Great Dalmuti
• Frantic from GameFactory isn’t widely available but in the EU you can probably get it. UNO on steroids. More exciting special cards and you can play them against any player, not just the one following you.
• Tichu a team based trick taking game that has a lot of fans around here. I personally have never really taken to it. It’s fine but I don’t get the rabid fandom some have for it.
• The Crew is ridiculously difficult with 5 and cumbersome with 2. Would only recommend it in between. But there it is a very clever game.