Pretentious Board Games

On Friday I played another game of Skye Frontier with my dad (also Mike), brother in law (Dave), and nephew (Logan). My dad and nephew play games sometimes, but are not super big into the hobby, and my brother in law is moderately a gamer (he buys games and brings them to my game nights, but he doesn't play all of the newest games). Logan started the game (and picked the blue castle), Dave was white, my dad was yellow, and I was red. My dad and I ended up contending over the lakes, while Dave focused on building mountain regions, and Logan built some of everything. I couldn't get a shipping empire set up because boats were hard to come by, and Logan (and Dave) started grabbing cash at an alarming rate, so I instead focused on building up points using scrolls and by closing regions. With a 1 point per sheep scoring tile out there, we all tried to get sheep, and the build for free action was used a lot. I capped off my regions just in the nick of time, and Dave ended the game (wh...

I just played a work in progress by Seth Jaffee, so I thought that I would post about it here. The game called Skye Frontier right now. It is an Isle of Skye and The King of Frontier mashup. Since The King of Frontier seems like a Carcassonne/Puerto Rico mashup, this is a second order mashup. Anyway - the game was totally playable, and allowed for strategic decisions to be made. Alison went all out in combining multiple synergistic goals with building a good kingdom. I just went for a degenerate strategy of building the biggest lake possible and then producing and consuming in a cycle. After the game end we summed up our scores using the remaining money tokens, so you can see that I won by 6 points (78-84), so my strategy didn't seem too overpowered, however perhaps it should be nerfed a bit, since it was pretty powerful, and degenerate strategies (in my opinion) should be less powerful than well-thought-out ones. Here is the end state: the reasoning behind my strategy - spelled ou...

 I have a brief respite from my masters program, and decided to make a game for the 18 card RPG contest that Button Shy is putting on. The game needs a better name, but it is currently entitled "G-rated movie role-playing game". It is a rules light game where the players basically generate a classic musical animated kids movie, and then play the characters from it. The rules are here . We have played one session so far, and the game is quite playable. I made Jason - a reluctant barbarian hero that would prefer to geek out over magical people and creatures, and Alison played Conina - a braggart warrior girl that was turned into a bunny. She ended up as my sidekick, because I have to go on a man-quest and kill something (though I am not sure what), and she said that if I could turn her into a human again she would help me to kill something impressive. The villains that we are facing are Mrs. Earwig - an evil witch that who is always annoyed because people mispronounce her name ...