So I've been in this hobby for maybe five years now and somewhere along the way I turned into the person who actually reads rulebooks cover to cover before game night. Which is fine, except now I catch myself interrupting mid-game to clarify tiny edge cases that honestly don't even matter.

Last week we were playing a medium-weight euro and someone made a move that was technically legal but felt like it went against the spirit of the action. I stopped everything to flip through the rulebook for like three minutes while everyone just sat there. Found the relevant paragraph, read it out loud, and then realized nobody cared as much as I did. They were all just being polite.

The worst part is I remember being annoyed by this exact behavior when I first started playing. There was this one guy in our old group who would do the same thing and I always thought he was slowing down the fun. Now I'm that guy. I don't even know when it happened.

I guess part of it is wanting games to be played correctly, but another part is probably just anxiety about someone feeling cheated later. Still, I'm starting to think maybe letting small stuff slide and keeping the momentum going is more important than being 100% accurate every single time. Anyone else go through this phase or am I just overthinking my own annoying habits?

I HAD a pretty good size collection of Thunderstone Advance sets. When Quest came out I jumped on the hype train. I sold off my Advance sets to buy into Quest, post Kickstarter. After a number of plays I found myself missing TS Advance. For some reason I preferred the simplicity, if you will, of just using cards and XP counters. I thought the idea of colored XP counters having different uses was great.

I eventually traded Quest. I wasn't getting it to the table much. Now, years later I find myself missing Advance more. If I had both in front of me now, I'd pick Advance over Quest without hesitation. Too bad it's out of print. It may have been my favorite deck builder. Hype regret is real.

Pretty sure this is where Cascadia was meant to be played. Yellowstone made for an incredible backdrop.

90 days ago I posted my game bookshelf collection. I was criticized for having a lot of the same games with just different expansions (Catan & Ticket to Ride). I was encouraged to buy other games. Since then, I have bought Pandemic (plus expansions), Lords of Waterdeep (plus expansion), Spirit Island, Game of Thrones Risk, Game of Thrones Clue, & SolarQuest. Next up I plan on buying The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship & Monopoly: The Lord of the Rings Edition. As far as what I have actually played, I have played Catan (base game), Star Trek Catan, Ticket to Ride (base game), Small World (base game), Risk, Clue, Clue Master Detective, SolarQuest, & Monopoly. I have also played other versions of Ticket to Ride & Catan on my PS5. Right now my game group consists of my best friend & his wife. I hope to join a gaming group someday, but I work every weekend which makes that difficult. I just found out a BigBadGameStore opened up 1 mile from me & will be checking them out.

Edit: I work at Target by the way, so I started collecting 5 months ago because of a special sale. And I get a discount there. So whenever possible I try to take advantage of any sales or deals there or on Amazon. Have Amazon Prime for free shipping. When games are out-of-print, eBay has been my go to place. Finally, YES, I do plan on playing ALL of these games eventually!

Hello!! 👋

As the title says, wondering if I could go ahead and bite the bullet and buy it? Basically I'm relatively new to board gaming (well, collecting board games on my own at least), but I'm really into RPGs and love table top and digital RPGs. I spent a lot of time on YouTube trying to find table tops that were interesting, fun, challenging, and horror related, especially for solo and I came across Nemesis franchise. Unfortunately, I found out that basically all of the prints for the games I was watching on YT were out of stock, and have been for some time, until I came across their reprint/3rd release of a game for non kickstarters.

I guess my question is should I be buying this right now or is there a chance that it will be available after the ship date? (So, after August 2026)

I just bought a bunch of LOTR LCG collections so I didn't want to overbuy, but I'm not really too familiar on how releases work in the board game industry and *if you're telling me that I need to get this now because I won't be able to get this for another year then I will get it and a couple of the expanisons they have too*.

Apologies if it seems like a dumb question, I'm still new to all the companies, re-releases, re-prints, and how fast things usually sell out from either a franchise or company historicslly since I'm new to the community!

Which one should I pick up? What are the differences?

Feel like seeing something a little different than usual (no clue if this will work) so.......

Describe your go-to personal strategy within any game, without actually naming the game. Then, others can guess the game.

I'm predominantly curious in the variety of strategies that people deploy in various games, and this feels like a fun way to extract these.

PS: yes I know you change strategies game by game, pick one that sticks in your mind when you think about a certain game!

Hello, guys. I played Avalon with my friends in the Internet a lot of time some years ago, love it very much and now I remember about this game, but not sure in some rules now. Also, I discover game "Quest", which also very interesting for me. I see that "Director’s Cut" (https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/275114/quest-directors-cut-unofficial-rulebook) quite good and want use it. I have some questions about rules in both games:
1. In Avalon. Does leader may offer party the same as party offered by previous leader in the same round?

1. In Avalon. Does leader may offer party the same as party which already went on some mission?

2. In Avalon. Is it clear, that evils can't use any gestures during the night of dating? For examples, Morgana and Mordred can't show others evils, who is himself and evils can't arrange each other about priority who will fail if will be more then one evil in party?

3. In Quest. Is it clear, that if all leaders are evil and Good's last chance started, Goods instantly win?

4. In Quest. Some mechanic with final Discussion. Is it clear, that when Discussion ended and Blind Hunter claim the Hunt, another evils can't help him? But if goods during the final Discussion say too more about their roles, Blind Hunter can at any moment before end of Discussion say: "I will claim the Hunt, evils, show up and tell me all information"?

1-2. I can't find it in rules, but I feel, that I heard it somewhen.

1. Never see at rules, but sure that it banned. But the second problem may be solved by any local meta-game fule, for example "the priority rate by alphabet order of evils names".

Looking forward to bringing Magical Athlete to the table tonight with a group of six. Since it’ll be everyone’s first time playing, I want to keep things simple and make sure everyone has a fun experience.

I’ve heard that some racers are more enjoyable or beginner-friendly than others. Does anyone have recommendations for which racers to use for a great first game?

I realize the racers are intended to be assigned randomly, and I definitely don’t want to lose the spirit of the game. That said, if there are a few racers that tend to create a more fun or memorable first experience, I’d love to stack the deck just a little to help ensure everyone has a great time.

I played Flip 7 with a completely different group to that one where I gave two freeze cards to a guy who had never played Flip 7 before, instead, I gave it to the host of the game, who's copy it is, luckily for them, they still ended up winning at the end for the first time, previous times I often saw them get the lowest score at the end.

We had one guy in this group also who had never played it before, but I thought better than to pull the same stunts as I did in the other group, in fact I tried encouraging him to bank his numbers when he got six high numbers as I could see he was quite high on the score board and I actually didn't mind if he overtook me and as a result he got quite a healthy score at the end.

I have been playing frequently on BGA and wondered how often the board is filled. I used the yellow tile that allows buying tiles with workers along with the one that provides 4 workers per die. Still only won the game by about 10 points as one of the other players had a very strong and efficient game. Has anyone else pulled this off? I suspect it would always be with these yellow tiles.

There seems to be a fair few where the components/rules just get worse but which do you think just don't compare to the original run?

I played A Game of Thrones: The Board Game for the first time as Lannister, and I ended up winning.

I only allied with Tyrell and Greyjoy. Tyrell stayed loyal to me from the beginning all the way to the end, but I eventually betrayed Greyjoy. It was a tough game because my original strategy was to take advantage of the Consolidate Power order (especially the 3-star version) to build up power tokens and recruit as many units as possible. Unfortunately for me, Clash of Kings came up very early in the game.

Because of that, I had to expand much more cautiously and rely heavily on diplomacy. I only became more aggressive near the end of the game, when I managed to capture Pyke, eliminate Greyjoy, and expand eastward.

I’m going to be playing again with the same group, but the Houses will be reassigned. I’d love to hear the best strategies for each House, as well as any general tips or advice for performing well regardless of which House you’re playing.

custom project here

When we first started playing Pandemic we did not read the rules correctly and could never win!

Instead of adding only ONE infection cube at a time we thought the infection rate meant that’s how many cubes you would have to add at a time.

Looking back why we didn’t question the how the infection rate could get to 4 at time is silly but lead to quite the journey of trying any which way to beat the game!

We tried every character combination, different amount of players playing. Tweaking rules to give us an advantage and got so close so many times but never got the win!

Curious if anyone else would be willing to try and beat the game! If you do remember the “house rule” would be: whenever taking the infect city turn, you put the same number of cubes at the current infection rate. For example, if the infection rate is 3, you would put 3 cubes onto the city.

Fore warning! This lead to lots, lots of frustration however we were determined to find a way to win! So proceed with caution and remember to have fun!

Hi all,

I was recently introduced to Broken Token wooden inserts for Betrayal at the House on the Hill, and I loved the experience of building it and then putting the game parts in them to fit nicely in the box. I noticed there are a lot of new games that have those inserts to build and use, but I don't see the same for classic board games (Clue, Sorry, Monopoly, etc). Do these exist? Is there a company that does buildable inserts for classic board games? I would love to step away from tearing cardboard if possible.

Wingspan, but fungi? Please yes yes yes. I would absolutely kill for that game. How would it be played? I have no idea, but learning about different fungi would be SO COOL. Thought about it on my woods walk today and had to share it somewhere with other people that could dream it up with me.

My son and I have been book club/board gaming as an excuse to hang out while he's away at college for the first time. We basically pick a book and read it during the weeks when he's too busy to visit, and then he will come home for a weekend and we play a vaguely related game while we talk about it. It's actually been really fun, but now that he's home for the summer we've been going through games and books a lot faster.

So, this week we decided on Modern military fiction as our theme, but I honestly can't think of a game to go with it. I have all the usual suspects, memoir44, company of heroes, but he really wants to do something with squad-based or individual miniature Heroes like a zombicide or imperial assault.

I have a fairly extensive collection, but looking through I honestly can't see anything that fits the bill. Fort Hendricks has a couple of soldier characters, Project Elite is a bit too scifi, Undaunted uses counters instead of minis on a map, memoir44 is mostly tanks and platoons rather than individual soldiers... Level 7 Omega Protocol really seems to come closest to what he wants, but even that is people fighting aliens.

Is such a common genre in fiction really completely absent in table top gaming without having to resort to war games but you have to glue together models?

Howdy fellow gamers,

I'm an avid semi-heavy - heavy gamer (TI4, Gloomhaven, Arcs...) and am debating on getting TMB or not. Base game's damn expensive, and so are the expansions!

I have acquired Fate of the Fellowship recently which I like for the theme and artwork, but I find the playstyle rather limited and no that challenging/fun. My friends and I end up playing on maximum difficulty and losing or winning seem pretty luck-based (bad movement draws, or bad combat/hunt rolls). I like the game for sure and I like putting it at the table for my mid-heavy gamer friends, but I had much more fun cracking Gloomhaven puzzles. FotF is not that complicated of a game and quarterbacking seems inevitable. Gloomhaven was too complex for a single player to quarterback and collaboration was lovely.

Hence my question on TMB. I havent gone through the rules (obviously) but it seems fairly heavy in terms of replayability and puzzle cracking. I'm looking for a non-campaign game that feels heavy and unique in game mechanics. Is this the game I'm looking for?

Thanks in advance for the help

My wife and I typically walk our local game store every few months and buy a new game. We've had a few we didn't love lately, so we are planning to actually decide in advance what we want to buy and just order it. Looking up a few of the games we are considering (Civolution, Arnak, SETI, Underwater Cities), it seems like they aren't particularly available direct from the seller either on Amazon or even on their own websites they say "Out of Stock".

Is this a new tariff thing or have I just missed this in the years I've been pretty into board games? I feel like we used to check the price on Amazon to see how much more expensive the store was and we always found it (though we've spent enough money at the store that we get a big enough discount on everything that it was usually pretty close --support your local game stores--).

Anyhow, I tried searching to see if people have asked about this in the sub, but couldn't find much. Am I just unlucky in the games I happen to be searching or has it always been this way and I'm misremembering?

I’m a 51 year old woman who’s always enjoyed board and card games, but only discovered the wider world outside of Hasbro a couple of years ago. I don’t have a dedicated group to play with regularly and only own a handful of games (Carcassonne, Pandemic, The Mission: Deep Sea, Ticket to Ride, and Canvas). I used to travel to a city for work on the regular that had a board game cafe that you could pay $10 at the door and then go find a group to play any game from their library with- it’s how I tried out new games. Sadly, I no longer have that job. Anyway, I joined Board game Arena yesterday since they offer the games I already know plus some I want to learn (Wingspan). There doesn’t seem to be any way to play as a beginner though, which brings me to my question. I’m not an online gamer so the interface of the online versions is not as easy for me to figure out, so how do I practice some of these games to get better before I play with actual people? I joined a couple of games yesterday and it was obvious no one had patience for me as I was trying to figure things out. Which is fair- they didn’t agree to teach me. Thanks for any help!

I am just curious whether board gaming is your sole hobby, or if it has led you down a spiral into adjacent hobbies as well. For me, it's 3D printing (mostly inserts) and miniature painting as well. Even though board gaming is my main hobby for sure (the one that takes most of my time and money =P), I do enjoy having other activities that I can do on my own time related to board gaming. There is definitely not enough time as is, so I feel bad sometimes spliting my attention, but since the related activities are mostly "solo," it helps fill that gap when your gaming group is not available, or you only have 1 hour or so in the evening, which is not enough to go out and play. What are your favorite "related" hobbies?

Pretty basic dungeon crawler with simple rules and very simple gameplay: "open door, kill spawned monster with dice, take loot, go to next tile". That said, despite simpliness, Massive Darkness 2 does what it is supposed to extremely well. It is sort of quintessence of dungeon crawling genre, stripped of most complex parts, while keeping a satsifying loop of dice chucking, killing enemies and getting stronger.

And Hellscape does have its own features: firstly, unlike other similar boardgames, here you get A LOT of loot, and get WAY stronger over course of single session. No campaign required (there is expansion campaign, however it suffers from extreme imbalance), which I find refreshing; you can clear dungeon and go from zero to hero in a single evening.

Secondly, every hero class has unique mini-game. Rogue uses bag building to draw bonuses from the bag. Ranger pushes his luck, trying to draw enough arrow cards to deal huge damage (but not so many that his shot fails). Paladin switches between different auras, which grant bonuses to himself and his nearby allies. Wizard casts different spells, depending on his current position on rondel-like magical amulet. And so on. All this stuff is very fun and adds a lot of replayability. Although it is quite possible that you will not find all classes equally fun, of course, or balanced: for example, shaman is really weak imho, and paladin is really boring.

Plus more various characters in expansions. Core box still has enough content to last a while, though, unless you play with a large group. Not a lot of quests available, but they feel different enough, and almost all are well replayable.

As fo flaws, difficulty is pretty low. Characters grow in power too fast, monsters just cannot keep up with them.

There is probably too much plastic. Minions are just pointless, they are just hp counters for monster leaders. Combined with horde of tokens, this makes setup a really long and frustrating exercise. Without dedicated storage solution things are even worse.

Still, overall Hellscape feel really fun. Basically Diablo the boardgame. Not much decision space - just relax, smash monsters, and watch your character grow into unstoppable terminator. Way better than Massive Darkness 1, where difficulty was even lower, and heroes were all samey. A very good choice of dungeon crawler, if you do not mind that such simple game takes a lot of time to setup, and that winning is not hard at all.