I’ve been working my way through the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child on Audible. Currently I’m on Never Go Back (which was made into the second Jack Reacher movie starring Tom Cruise).
However in A Wanted Man the previous Reacher novel there was what has to be my favourite quote from all the books so far. That quote inspired the following picture.
I’m half tempted to get this made up as a tee.
Like a virus or allegedly funny meme the hashtag #mytop9boardgames is doing the rounds on social media.
So jumping on the bandwagon in a way. Here are my current top nine played games since I began recording game plays.
I chose to use my top played games because it’s measurable and I can explain why they are there.
Once the pairwise comparison ranking has completed I’ll be able to do this list and then tell you where they fit in my rankings. Plus I’ll be able to do my #mytop9boardgames and know that they are exactly that, and the list is not entirely subjective and potentially influenced by what I’ve just bought and playing.
I am curious to see where these nine games end up in the rankings. I suspect they will end up being high up in the list. I’m calling it all top twenty.
So what are your top nine played games?
Last night six fool hardy investigators bravely attempted to stop the rise of Yog-Sothoth.
Despite delaying the Ancient One by pushing the doom track back three times early on, three investigators making the ultimate sacrifice, Yog-Sothoth crossed dimensions to start their rule of the planet.
The first mystery card drawn spawned an epic monster called Dunwich Horror. This was one tough mother fecker. It’s health was the number of players plus two. So eight in total. I spent all of the game trying to take out the beast with bits of help from the other investigators.
Because my investigator was Diana Stanley the reformed cultist, her ability meant instead of a horror score of three to defeat using a single dice, it was reduced to one. So if I failed I was only losing one sanity. While my fellow investigators would lose between one to three sanity depending on how cruel the dice decided to be. On the combat side I could cast my wither spell to pump Diana up to negate the minus two inflicted by the Dunwich Horror. Still thanks to hateful dice I wasn’t inflicting great amounts of damage. One or two points at most in an encounter.
By the time Yog-Sothoth appeared there were six points of damage inflicted on the epic monster. Which I had done the majority of. Two fellow investigators had been driven mad.
I just knew that one of the other investigators was going to come along and claim the credit for its defeat. But on our final round before defeat I inflicted another point of damage before another investigator went insane in their skirmish with the Dunwich Horror and ended the game.
We had lost and not even completed a single mystery.
It had taken us roughly two and a half hours to fail the world. All the setup had been done before everyone had arrived. So for six players I thought that was pretty good. I don’t think I’d like to play the game with more than that.
Despite losing we had fun. And that’s the point really, enjoying the journey as you hurtle to certain doom!
Wow FFG or Fantasy Flight Games as they are known, part of the Asmodee Borg Collective made one or two Star Wars related announcements yesterday.
The first one I’m interested in is the first expansion for Star Wars Rebellion, Rise of the Empire.
“…Rise of the Empire enhances your games with eight new leaders, thirty-six plastic miniatures, five target markers, two attachment rings, three new dice, and more than one-hundred new cards. You’ll find U-wings, TIE Strikers, Nebulon-B frigates, and the Interdictor.”
Rogue One is basically coming to the game. So despite having not played Rebellion yet (and I do own it now), I’m still pretty stoked about this.
You can read the full FFG news post HERE.
Next up from FFG and their big announcements was news about their next big box expansion for Imperial Assault, Heart of the Empire and new villain packs.
Heart of the Empire naturally means the campaign side of the game visits Coruscant. And naturally that means two new skirmish maps. We can tell which characters are tokens in this box because we are also getting two villain packs and an ally pack along side it.
I’m excited about Maul. Vader,Maul and Palpatine skirmish team up against a Jedi one?
I have to face up to the fact this may be the last wave for Imperial Assault for me. It’s just not getting to the table. I love it. But to justify the expense it needs to be played.
FFG are saying third quarter for these.
You can read the two stories HERE and HERE.
On a related note the Star Wars Destiny Spirit of Rebellion booster box finally arrived this morning.
Sadly I can’t open it until Monday! Dale and I bought this together. Fifty fifty split. So we do that at work, blind drafting booster packs.
On a totally unrelated note, Days of Wonder are releasing the third (?) expansion for Five Tribes, Whims of the Sultan next month.
Jonathan likes to point out, and I’m sure many others have done also, Five Tribes only plays upto four and not five. Plus if you add in the expansion The Artisans of Naqala it’s technically six tribes!
So this expansion allows a fifth player. How it plays with five I don’t know. Would I want to play with five players? These sort of addition player addons make me nervous. If it was meant to be played at that player count or was any good they would have released it that way in the base game. This strikes me as pandering to demands (by who I don’t know). New tiles and options are always good on the other hand.
So yeah this will be added to the collection. If I’m really really lucky it’s at UKGE. But in reality more likely Origins in the US.
You can read the full announcement HERE.
Last night saw three like minded souls yearning to throw dice, play cards and push round cardboard, meet up and play games at the weekly Fenland Gamers meet up “Friday Evening Gaming @ The White Lion”.
While waiting to see if anyone else was going to turn up, we started off with a game that was quick to play so that any late comers weren’t hanging around bored. The game we chose that fitted that profile perfectly, and at the top of my small games box was Mint Works.
While setting up I was “entertaining” Charlie and Diego with my previous play of the game of how I crushed Scott, with a record breaking 18 points. Ok it sounded more like boosting. But 18 points is an incredible score in Mint Works. A winning score is usually 7 – 9 points. So yeah I’m boosting about that play.
But they say pride comes before a fall. And I did fall. I managed to get a massive 4 points to claim last place. Diego and Charlie drew on 7 points a piece. But just like I have been in the past on a couple of occasions, Charlie was denied a victory by the tie rules for the game. Diego had the smaller neighbourhood so was given the technical win.
No one else had turned up during our game of Mint Works. So it was time for a heavier game.
After a little indecision Imperial Settlers was hitting the table. I haven’t played this game in a longtime. Which is shameful really. This is a great game. Luckily I have it well organised. Which you have to with all the expansions. It was easy for me to just pull out the core games faction and common decks.
Charlie was playing the Barbarians, I was the Japanese and Diego was the Egyptians.
Naturally with such a long time between plays mistakes were made, rules referenced.
But after the five rounds and the final tally of points I managed to claim the victory by a single massive point.
To be fair to Charlie I don’t think the cards were kind to him. And they were very kind to me. Diego they were ok with.
Charlie rocks at Perudo. He totally owned Diego and me in our two plays of this classic bluffing game.
Our final game of the evening was Love Letter: Batman. Ok I’m a Batman fan, so it has me there. But it’s funny how a simple rule tweak elevates this version above that of the original. It’s so simple, play the Batman card, guess correctly and get a token. It gives another way for players to score, can shorten the play time. Genius.
The BG Stats app will show I won our game of Love Letter: Batman. It won’t show the fun we had. The multiple times I got The Joker as my first card, and knocked out early. Or the bullet I dodged when Diego played the last Poison Ivy on himself when I had The Joker that gave me the game.
A great evening of gaming. Thank you guys.
The Fenland Gamers have their monthly meet up next week, followed by the usual FEG@WL. Hope to see you there.
I think when I was boring you with pseudo techie speak about how I was going to write this matching engine to allow me to rank my games, I threatened to write posts about some of the match ups. Sadly for you I’m carrying through with that threat at least once.
Our first match up in this series (more threats I’m afraid) is Kodama: The Tree Spirits vs Odin’s Ravens (second edition).
The winner of this match up was Odin’s Ravens. So how did I arrive at this choice?
Both games are very attractive to look at. Both theme wise are completely different. Racing ravens verses growing trees and tree spirits.
Odin’s Ravens is a two player only game. While Kodama plays two to five players. Although I have only so far played Kodama as a two player game.
Kodama is the more “complicated” of the two games. And probably the harder of the two to pick up and play after a long gap between plays. Looking back at the post I wrote when I first played (and only time at the moment) the game there was confusion over how the scoring worked. And I feel that may be the case again when this hits the table next time.I have played Odin’s Ravens more than Kodama (not by much). But even so it only takes a minute to refresh the memory on how to play after a gap between plays. And that refresh is mainly on the setup.
I think what swung it for Odin’s Ravens was it has a take that element. Using the Loki cards it is possible to interfere with your opponents progress. However doing so has repercussions for yourself (potentially) because you too will have to negotiate the hurdle you threw in the way of your opponent. It’s not much interaction but it’s there, which is more than there is in Kodama.
There you have it. That is how I chose Odin’s Ravens over Kodama. Which would you have chosen and why?
It would appear that Dale and I were the only ones taking what should be a national holiday seriously.
We had our Star Wars tees on, and played a couple of games of Star Wars Destiny.
We are awaiting the arrival of our booster box of the Spirit of Rebellion set. It’s in the post at the moment. So it was starter sets only.
Our first game was won by me. I got upgrades out, so had more dice to roll and utilise. Whilst Dale was struggling to draw upgrades to install. Oh I was playing Rey/Finn (but two dice on Finn – had to borrow the extra one from Dale). While Dale was Kylo and First Order Stormtrooper.
The second game we flipped sides. This was a far closer game. Which saw Dale facing defeat by having a single card left in his hand. While I was holding on just with the Stormtrooper who had a life point left. I was undone with some great rolling of the dice for Reys staff that saw three melee damage hitting me far too often.
I can’t wait until we are able to deck build once we have some boosters.
When I got home there was a great birthday present from my brother waiting for me. Aptly thematic for the day.
So this may not look much. BUT I have a ranking engine for my game collection!
Yep I now have a python script that creates match ups from my collection, and records the results. As you can see the script also gives me the depressing information that in total I will have to do a lot of pairwise comparisons. 23005 to be exact, based on a game collection of 215 games (it’s a couple more than that now, but that updated list hasn’t been imported into the database yet). The formula I used to work this out was totalNumTests = N(N-1)/2.
So two thirds of the way there. I now need to create my lists/stats engine. Or get an initial version done. But considering how many pairwise comparisons I have to do, it’s going to be a while before you see the fruits of that labour. However you may see the odd post that discusses one of the pairwise comparisons. Why did I rank game A better than game B, and asking for which one you’d choose?
May the 4th Be With You – Happy Star Wars Day.
As we remember our princess and droid that left us for a galaxy far far away, we also celebrate our love for all things Star Wars.
I have plans for the day which includes Star Wars themed gaming. But all that will be discussed in the next post.
Are you planning on playing any Star Wars games today?
Yep my birthday weekend celebrations are over. It’s back to work, and the business end of the academic year is kicking in as we work to get students through to completion of their course.
But in the midst of all that the UK Games Expo is fastly approaching.
I’m all set for the three days.
The Expo is a low key event for me! I don’t wonder round stalls self promoting. I never mention the blog. I’m not there trying to get free stuff. I’m there to enjoy myself.
I am planning to have a lucky dip of the spare promos I have. So if people spot me they can grab a random promo.
I’ll talk more about the Expo over the coming days.
Have a great rest of the day.