Every time I’ve sat down to write about Game Night, there’s something else that I need to write about first. The Malifaux stuff. All the real and simulated MMOs around. Stuff I want to write about but can’t, just yet. Well, I suppose that last one isn’t preventing me from writing about Game Night, so here we are.
We’re finally beginning to find our way around In Too Deep, the game of psychic cops trying to prevent a big crime while helping supervillains commit smaller crimes. It’s a game where you can try to build a relation with a criminal, maybe collaborate to foil some big plots, but the psychic cop in the next chair over can just hook your criminal and then all your well-laid plots, er, plans, come to nothing.
This tends to make it hard to stay focused on the game when there’s really no point in watching anyone else’s turn — nothing you can do to influence the game when it isn’t your turn. It’s essentially a game where, every turn, the board is essentially random and you do the best you can with what you have at the time. We all are learning to boost our score, and the final scores were clustered around the same number; a Dilemma card of piece of evidence and it would have been entirely different.
The previous game night was Terraforming Mars. We’d gotten the upgrades — huge map made of mouse pad material with all the expansion boards printed on it. Domes for the 3D printed city tiles. 3D printed city tiles we already had. You can’t buy Terraforming Mars in the stores and get all this, but, we have been playing this game for many years and when you play a game this much, it’s worth the money to make it special.
Next time we play, I hope we bring in all the expansions. I’d even enjoy the Turmoil expansion — if we make a house rule that says you don’t lose megacredit production each generation. That made a game nobody liked.
I get to choose the next game we play. There were two I’ve been wanting to bring to the table — Tales from the Loop, a “Goonies in an alternate past” game inspired by the paintings of Simon Stålenhag, one of which is on the box cover. If you’ve ever seen his paintings, you know that his mashups of the fantastic and the mundane set a mood. The “Tales from the Loop” TV series was creepy enough. This game comes with painted robot minis.
Bardwood Grove is a game where each player chooses a bard, each with their own style, instrument, and panache, who work on telling tales and singing songs as they travel to the legendary Bardwood Grove, where bards the world over come to swap tales and buy the finest instruments made anywhere. It is a legacy game; each time you play, you unlock more things for the next play.
I put a poll up on the family text chat to see which one people want to play next. It’s one for each at the moment. I won’t vote except to break a tie, because I want to play them both. Secretly, I’ll admit I’d like to play Tales from the Loop more. Because robot minis.
Okay, back to the usual stuff next time.
Fun! I read a few of your board game posts, good stuff. We play much simpler games for our game night but I like the idea of some of these more complex titles. If you play a game over several months time, how do you manage to keep the game sitting out and ready to continue where you left off?
Ah, yeah, this was our most important purchase: The Game Topper. It sits on top of our regular kitchen table and provides a cool gaming surface, AND, we have the “dining panels” that sit on top so you can use the table for other things when not gaming without having to disassemble everything.
I backed it on Kickstarter, and it arrived about three years ago — the dining panels came months later, so for awhile we had to take it apart after using it. Since we got the dining panels, we’ve almost always had a game tucked safely beneath it, ready to play.
I wrote about it a little bit here –> https://chasingdings.com/2021/09/25/game-night-my-little-scythe-and-the-watson-game-topper/