We used to play a lot of Settlers of Catan around here. I mean a lot. One of the best parts of the game is that the map is different every time. The hexes that make up the board are mixed up at the start of the game and distributed randomly.

One of the drawbacks to this is that the hex pieces are easily disturbed. There’s nothing hold them together, and without a single, unified game board anything can mess things up. Bump the table? The hexes move. Roll the dice on the board? The hexes move. Don’t nudge the edge of the assembled board, or you’ve got a miniature fault line on your hands.

Enter Mayday Games’s YuCatan game board for Settlers of Catan. Made of thick cardboard, the YuCatan board is designed to hold the Settlers map hexes firmly in place. Mayday was smart enough to only leave room for port tiles around the edges, so you don’t have to waste your time with empty ocean tiles.

I used the board one time about two years ago and it’s sat on my gaming book case until last week.

I was very surprised to learn that the board isn’t built to withstand use in a humid state like Virginia. I keep the house at 43% humidity, and apparently that is too much for the board to handle.

Observe:
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I received Zombie Fluxx as part of my 2009 Ars Technica Sekrit Santa gift. I had some limited, prior exposure to the original Fluxx game several years ago when I worked in Maryland and remember not liking it. I wasn’t entirely sure why I didn’t like it, and in fact I don’t remember if I played it or just watched it being played. However, I think it had something to do with all of the rules and that it seemed confusing.

Now, we all like zombies out here, and most of us like games, so I thought Zombie Fluxx would be worth a try, despite my reservations. We gave it a shot on the tail end of Christmas break, and have run it a few times since with different groups of gamers. Here’s what we thought.
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We love board games at the Den o’ Gibberish. I prefer to play games that are partly competitive, partly co-operative. If a game isn’t truly co-operative, I like games that allow for “isolated group” play, wherein every person in the game can still do something, no matter how far ahead or behind they are. Games like Settlers of Catan, Dominion, and Carcassonne get a lot of play. Recently we’ve been playing a lot of Power Grid by Rio Grande Games. Power Grid is a nice blend of city building, auctioning, resource management, and tactics. It can be played by a wide range of ages and a wide range of player skill, all at the same time.
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Mental Floss has a really sweet quiz on matching Monopoly Chance and Community Chest art to the right card. It’s a twelve question quiz. Unfortunately the usability of the quiz sucks, and I had to write down 1 – 12 and cross the numbers off as I made my answers.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/quiz/quiz.php?q=739

I got 9 out of 12, how did you do?

Thanks to Jumbotron for showing me this at work last week.

I love board games. Love love love them. I grew up playing Parcheesi, backgammon, chess, and the “usual” family games at my house growing up. It was a big deal in my life when I beat my father at chess for the first time.

I have tried to keep gaming since, and I always have a soft spot for board games. There is something special about sitting around a table with your buddies and rolling some dice and moving tiny pieces around. The amount of smack talk that occurs always makes me laugh. I never knew so much about Stilt’s mother until we started playing board games together (love you buddy).

So, I was anxious to try out Smallworld, a board game designed by Philippe Keyaerts and published by Days of Wonder. Days of Wonder makes a lot of bad ass games board games, I am particularly fond of their game Ticket to Ride. The premise of the game is simple: control up to two races at a time (usually) to take over as much territory of Smallworld as possible. You earn one coin (usually) for every territory you hold at the end of a turn. Whomever has the most coins wins. The game combats staleness and default strategies by pairing race cards (humans, orcs, ratmen) with special abilities (merchant, flying, stout). The game designer Keyaerts seems to have put a lot of thought into play balance. True, there are some races and abilities that are more useful than others. Dragonmaster Ratmen are a brutal pair, for example. Hard to take “wealthy dwarves” over a ton of angry rodents and a pet dragon.
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With H1N1 (“swine flu”) still making the headlines, I thought it was time to write up Pandemic, a co-operative board game that pits up to four people against four diseases that threaten to take over the world.

Made by Z-Man Games, Pandemic requires at least two people to play. The game starts out with all players in Atlanta, GA (presumably at the Center of Disease Control). Twelve randomly determined cities throughout the world have been infected by the four diseases. Game setup determines what cities are “sick,” but each disease will infest three cities. One unit of disease is represented by one cube. The more cubes on a city, the more infected it is. When a city gets four infection cubes the disease jumps to a nearby city, thus spreading across the globe.

The game is lost if there are eight outbreaks, or if there are no more cards to draw, or if all of the disease cubes are used.
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I play a lot of games: board games, video games, card games, role-playing games, reindeer games, you name it. There are several factors that determine what game I play, including number of people, the amount of time we want to spend per game, and the relative skill level and interests of the players. Another very important factor in deciding what to play is the mental state of the gaming group. At the end of an evening, normally razor-sharp minds have been reduced to dull sporks by titles like Race to the Galaxy (buy at Amazon) or fifty rounds of Dominion (buy at Amazon).

Black Sheep is a quick board game for two to four players. The game play is simple, and perfect as either a warm-up game or a last-game-of-the-night before everyone starts drooling on themselves.
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I have only won like twice in my whole life, but I like the board game Clue. I think it was one of the first games I played with a lot of pieces. I can still remember the pistol clearly; it was a pepperbox-style hand gun with a rounded grip.

Anyway, I was searching for some new games to play at the office. So far we have really liked co-operative games, but we have burned through Hoopla and Cloodle many a time over and were due for a change. I saw Clue Express at Target on sale for $10 and thought I would give it a shot.

The game promises to take twenty minutes or less, and that seemed about right with the amount of time we could devote to play. Would it be as fun as the full-blown version?
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Two thin men face each other in a dusty street. Residents peer from around corners, atop overturned carts, and through thick window glass. A lone tumbleweed hops down the thoroughfare. No sounds can be heard except for a slight desert breeze. The Arizona sun glares directly overhead, forcing both men to narrow their eyes into slits.

“Draw.”

I rolled two six-sided dice, hoping to earn an advantage over The Accountant™ by scoring a hit before he had a chance to return fire. Unfortunately, I am playing the role of a young cowboy, full of guts but low on experience. I miss.

The Accountant™’s grizzled gunslinging veteran unholsters his Peacemaker and cracks off a shot. He gets a +2 on his combat roll, which allows him to score a hit. I slide my health meter down by one. Three more hits like that and I’m dead.

I don’t know if I should move or keep shooting — the rules don’t allow me to do both — and if I make a break for it and get shot again I’ll definitely be too wounded to win. What would a gunslinger do? I think, rolling the dice in my hand. Stand and fight.

Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll … I’m dead. But I died with my boots on, and that is what Cowboys: The Way of the Gun is all about.
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I wrote a review about zombie board game Last Night on Earth this January. I praised the production value of the game, but disliked the ambiguity of the rules and felt that the humans were very over-powered. I found the humans to be unstoppable with their fast movement and higher combat rolls. Even if a zombie player could corner them, it was nearly impossible to hurt a human, let alone kill them.

The good thing about a blog is that people eventually find out when you bitch about stuff. A few people responded to my negative post about LNoE and suggested I was playing it wrong. Despite their efforts explain it, or say that the game was really slanted towards the zombies, I kept my nose pinched shut and shelved the game for about four months.

Luckily, my friend The Accountant™ was in town and we gave LNoE another try. We read the rules for EVERYTHING, even if we felt like we already had a grip on what to do.

Turns out I was wrong on a very fundamental but game-changing issue: humans roll, but do not add their 2D6 combat dice. They just choose the highest die. G Ramon Gomez tried to tell me, but it bounced off of my thick skull. Sorry Ramon, you were right.

Suddenly the game became a challenge. Humans weren’t wading into zombies unarmed or searching a two-space building while five zombies were knocking outside. That isn’t to say the humans were defenseless; The Accountant™ stumbled upon a nasty combo that allowed one of the characters to roll four combat dice: one for the chainsaw, and one for a hero event card that also killed zombies any time she won instead of when doubles were rolled. The headshot: she was also “lucky,” and could make a zombie player re-roll any one die. I attacked her with about ten zombies and she killed them all without a single bite.

The rules are still unclear in parts, particularly for some scenarios such as the Manor. We decided to draw a different scenario altogether after trying to discern a particular scenario rule. This game needs a real FAQ, forum, or examples of combat, none of which Flying Frog has readily available.

I liked playing LNoE so much that I am considering buying their Growing Hunger expansion. Now if I just had a large enough tabletop gaming group to play it consistently ….