Friday Night Survival

Has it really been a whole year since I posted about our Friday night game sessions? It's a case of out with the old and in with the new: we finished 40K: Martyr, got tired of the long loads of 40K: Space Marine 2 and got a bit tired out with Helldivers 2, which has a pretty good run!

We did try Elden Ring: Nightreign where and beat the first tri-wolf boss (and I soloed the sleepy flying ooze) but it runs too poorly on DL's machine so that's been put on the back burner for now. 

Mechwarrior 5: Clans has pulled majority of the time for us with good gameplay and an interesting story on top of the usual optional customization of everyone's mechs. We've won it now, including the Ghost Bear and Tukayid DLC expansions because it was that much fun! Definitely recommended for co-op sessions, but solo might feel a bit grindy and long.

We've also sailed on Void Crew which is a pretty neat "fly your customized spaceship through an array of roguelike challenges that include enemy ships and multiple space walks into space ruins for salvage". It's also a bit repetitive and I think there are only three bosses currently but we might go back into that in a bit. It's lack of story lets it down.

Green Hell is what we're hitting hard at the moment. Nice graphics, easy enough controls, and a story to boot have sucked us into this jungle survival game that includes hostile natives, deadly jaguars, and cool lessons on why not to drink untreated river water. It's not a style in our usual wheelhouse, but its very fun so far. Again though, seems it would be a drag in single player but three person co-op is just fun. For a tiny sized game it's got a pretty big map, so lets see how long it keeps us lost in the jungle!

Keep the Heroes Out!

This cooperative board game has players each taking control of one group of dungeon denizens (all of whom are cute) as they try to do what the title says: keep the heroes out! Especially from the treasure room, because if they loot the treasure, the game is lost! This is a campaign style game, so the dungeon tiles are arranged based on the scenario you are attempting (20 provided). 

On your turn you have five cards in front of you from your own deck which you can then use to command your things around. Move, attack or action which means use the room's special action like get a gold coin from the treasury or use your group's special power. The mercenary gnolls can attack more, the imps can just pull traps out of their butts, the singular dragon can regenerate HP and the ratkins can spawn more ratkins as an example.

After that, you pull hero cards which determines who spawns where. Each hero type has one special power that only applies when they first appear, afterwards they all behave the same which keeps it simple. Rogues disarm a trap where they spawn. Warriors destroy resources. Archers shoot towards the treasure room. Wizards wake up people in the prison. What? Prison!? Yes, on your turn you can "push your luck" and draw three more cards for the low cost of putting a "tired" hero in prison. Unless you pull a wizard in which case, they all wake up!

Managing tired heroes is all part of the game. After the special spawn move any active hero will first try "wake up" all tired heroes who then all get to do stuff! This will be try kill a monster on their tile or try open a chest on their tile. If they do any of those they get "tired" and are basically dormant until another hero (or special effect) wakes them up. Active heroes with nothing to do all advance to the next tile leading towards the treasure room and repeat this process.This can cause a hero cascade if you have too many dotted around the place which is dangerous. At the same time, the only way to win is to go through the ENTIRE hero deck 2-3 times (depending on your difficulty level).   

It's a pretty fun game, though you might only have a few turns depending on the player count and not all the monsters are equal, both in complexity and usefulness. 

Menara

Cooperative temple building.

This simple cooperative dexterity game has players rebuilding an ancient temple. To start, put three random temple floors (cardboards in strange shapes) as the "base" with each piece only touching another with one point - load up some random pillars (pulled from a bag) for the camp space, and every player gets a handful of pillars too. Then, on your turn you can trade your in hand pillars with the camp ones if you want, then pick what "difficulty" card you want to try complete and then do what it says. 

Usually its just put x pillars which is just placing pillars on spaces that match their color. Afterwards draw random pillars back to your hand and that ends your turn. If you run out of places to put pillars, get the next "temple floor" and balance it on top to go one floor up! If this reaches your floor quota (which starts at 3/4/5 for easy/medium/hard) that's it, the players win!

If you can't put x number of pillars because you don't have the colors or just can't do what the your chosen difficulty card says, the required floor quota increases by one. And if the temple collapses at any time its game over! So yes, its a little bit like reverse Jenga and its easy to teach, easy to setup and has a fun amount of tension while playing. Definitely recommended! 

Sky Team

A two player coop.

In Sky Team you take the role of a pilot and co-pilot who must land airplanes. To do this you need to roll your pool of 4 dice (secretly) and without discussing after rolling, place the dice in the proper spots to clear traffic ahead of you, lower landing gear, activate flaps, prep the brakes and possibly make coffee (which is hilariously quite important as each lets you modify a die result by 1). 

There's a whole checklist of things that need to be done before you reach the airport, and there will always be two dice from each player spent on balancing the airplane and handling the engines. Run into air traffic, spin too far, land too early or land too late and its game over. 

Later difficulties also have you dodging mountains, handling high winds, watching your fuel tank which might be leaking and training an intern (who must be trained by landing or you lose) just because. It's a good game, but the initial (one time) setup if finicky, and the hard requirement of two players might make it less appealing than some other choices.

Helldivers 2: Ten Super Credit Farming Tips

If you're like me and just want to unlock all those warbonds in Helldivers 2 without opening your wallet then here are some quick tips to farm super credits! Note: While the tips are quick, the farming is going to be a bit of a grind... :P

1 - Desert planets yield more opportunities. More land space = more chance for points of interest on the map. My regular ones are Choohe and Vernen Wells against the automatons and Grand Errant against the terminids. 

Stars in the red circles give an approximate location of these three worlds.

2 - For the same reason above - illegal broadcast and drop pod data missions are the best ones to do as space isn't "wasted" with enemy bases or other facilities. If those aren't available, do one of the others types on the same planet to let them show up again - ideally an eliminate [single target] one as those are faster than flag raising, activating fuel pumps and sabotaging supply bases.

3 - Difficulty wise level 1 trivial missions are the best for super credits as you don't get "samples" in the pool of RNG treasures when you open up a POI. 

4 - If you have friends or allies, try do some farming with them as the locked bunkers that need two people to open have lots of chances for super credits. Anyone picks up super credits or medals, everyone (regardless of where they are on the map) gets the full amount.

5 - Regardless if you have friends the first warbond you unlock should be the "Control Group" to get the warp pack. Having this lets you teleport into those two button bunkers by yourself, improving your solo grinding immensely! If you find its "bouncing" you out instead of teleporting you in, stand back a little and/or crouch before warping. When warping out, always aim angled left to avoid exploding the potential fork lift outside which might kill you.

6 - Pick a load out for speed: Light armor, sprinting bonuses, the warp pack when you have it. Explosive grenade or weapon to open containers. You might even find such a weapon on planet. Treat it as your "lockpick" with a preference on fast fire / open rate.

7 - Even if my "green" common samples are full, I still pick them up at each POI so that the map marker changes from a white diamond to a regular gray pointer. It takes a little more time, but it lets me not worry about remembering where I've been. The sample count also gives me an idea of how many more spots there might be.

8 - I still do the mission and extraction because I'm interested in leveling up my weapons for customization, but if you have no interest in that and don't care about your win record feel free to just quit the mission as soon as you've hit all the POI's as any super credits and medals picked up are immediately "safe". 

9 - In every warbond, except the premium HALO one currently, there are 300 super credits to unlock which is great. 

10 - To retain your skills and sanity, after every unlocked warbond or two go into a few random super helldive missions (at least one against each faction) and spread democracy!

Space Marine 2

In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war... and grinding?

Thanks to its three player co-op mode my brothers and I were playing this as a Friday game for awhile now, where playing as Space Marines you fight armies of Tyranid and Chaos forces in glorious and bloody combat which focuses on key press timing to excel in. While the graphics and game play are certainly fun, there are some HUGE negatives. Firstly is that it takes 5 minutes for me to start the game, 5 more to join the lobby and 5 more to enter the mission. If there was an award for longest load times, this would certainly be winning it.

Secondly, improving your marine and weaponry is a severe and lengthy grind. You'll only gain XP for the marine class and weaponry you use, unlocking abilities necessary to do well in the higher difficulties. Then once you max out, you get to pick one ultimate bonus and... drop back down to level 1 to do it all again (up to four times if you want to max out fully). There's a small selection of maps to play on, but the designers thought of this and included a PvP mode to make players the content to save them some work. No comment on that part since it holds no interest for us.

So yeah. Despite that we still were putting up with it because it's just so freaking cool, and despite now taking a break to try other co-op games we'll probably end up playing it again sometime in the future. Where there is only war... and grinding...

Dodo

One for the kiddies. 

In this cooperative game there's a cardboard "mountain" atop of which a giant dodo lays an egg. Said egg (which is an interestingly constructed ball) slowly then makes its way down and its the players job to attach the ramps that will let it gently fall into a waiting boat below. Of course, you can't just attach the ramps...

On a players turn you roll the die which will show 1 of the 6 resources available on scattered face down tokens. If you flip up the correct token great, it goes towards building the next ramp piece and if all the "token spaces" on the ramp are filled then it can go onto the mountain and the used pieces discarded "into" the mountain. If you picked up a mismatching token, flip it back down and hopefully everyone remembers what it is. Then its the next players turn!

Very simple, very fast, and easily scalable where the ramps can need more resource slots to complete and the villager "wild card" resources are removed from the random pile to make it harder. Can get pretty exciting for such a simple little game. :)

The Art Project

Stylish and colorful.

In this 1-5 player cooperative game you are trying to retrieve boxes stolen art across 6 different maps. Each round is pretty simple: everyone gets 2 cards and must play one which usually costs "something", puts bad guys in one or more cities, gains "something" and establishes a clue for one of the cities. Three matching clues spawns an art crate on the respective city (so 3 music clues makes it appear in "music" city) then going there (costs fuel currency), fighting the bad guys (dice roll supplemented by gun currency and radio currency). If the city has no baddies then you are free to collect the crate and get one step closer to victory (which in all maps is filling a line of crates)!

Of course its not that simple. There are only 6 of the fuel, gun and radio currency and you cannot gain more than there are available in the game. If you need to spend something you don't have it costs a heart, and if someone runs out of hearts its game over for everyone! Same if you run out of bad guy tokens or "lost city" tokens. The latter happens when 5 bad guys are in a city and survived the combat round. This seals off the city entirely and prevents movement through it which again can lose the game. 

That said its very simple once it gets going, and is fast to setup and take down and the artwork is pretty nifty too. Thumbs up!

Across the Obelisk and Mortal Shell

Games that expect you to die a lot.

Across the Obelisk

This cooperative fantasy rogue like has you control a group of heroes as they quest across a multi-path map and run into loads of combat that plays out like Darkest Dungeon - albeit with a merrier colour scheme and more humor, and action card decks per hero which eat up a variable number of "action points" to use (if you get lucky enough / built your deck well enough to draw them in the first place). Team wipes are guaranteed as that's the only time you get to upgrade things with currency you earned from the previous run. The result is a whole lot of repetition and not a whole lot of fun. Check points were invented for a reason!

Mortal Shell

This grim fantasy action RPG has you play as a thing that can take control of specific corpses ("shells") and plays a lot like Dark Souls, except there's a lot more bad guys in a lot less space making combat tricky and slow. The shells each have their own perks that you unlock as you get "familiar" with them. That is a cool system actually, as it covers consumables as well. Use a poison shroom the first time and you'll probably die (and lose your "tar"/exp/souls) but use it the next time and it makes you immune from poison. The third time and poison immunity lasts longer and so on.

Alas going is super slow especially at the start when you have no upgrades because of the packed environments and unforgiving combat. In Dark Souls you many more options of where to go and what to try where as here is mainly - run past these guys or fight well? Repeat because said guys are everywhere  and respawn when you "rest". With every direction feeling like a brick wall I still think there's a decent game in here somewhere, but I'm not patient enough to get to it.

Fridays IN SPACE!

It's been a minute since I've talked about our Friday night game sessions and they all seem to be taking place in space at the moment! The early night staple is Helldivers 2 continues to be fun and crazy with all the updates in both terms of gear and story. The Illuminates are back on the map now and there's a black hole eating planets as it slowly makes its way to Super Earth. Lol.

We've also recently finished Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr that plays a little bit like Diablo, just in the Warhammer 40k universe with DL going full sword marine, Jim running a psyker, and myself the stock standard Space Marine specializing in bolt guns. It's quite funny that the warp gets angry if Jim uses too much power though, as it starts sending tornadoes and demons after him! Lol. The story is not bad, and there are loads of enemy types "add on" mechanics and game modes that could potentially keep you playing this for a long time after finishing the campaign but alas the game play is very repetitive and dull.

Now we've just started Space Marine 2 which is set in the same play space but this one has higher graphic demands with the over the shoulder camera while fighting swarms of tyranids. We definitely need to be more on our toes here for timed button presses mid combat and so far it's been really great - apart from that I can't see the cut scenes since it doesn't like my graphics card and the exorbitantly long loadings times. Not that it matters, the missions play well enough and give enough info as to what's going on. So far it's a very entertaining game.

Pandemic: On the Brink - Bio-Terrorist Mod

It's funny that after owning all these other versions of Pandemic (Rome, Iberia, Warcraft :P), I decided to revisit the original and my first expansion of On the Brink where we never actually get to use the hidden movement variant of the bio terrorist 1 vs many PvP mode. Well, here's an easy mod I came up with to integrate him into a cooperative game - and really you don't need On the Brink to do it, you just need another marker or something to indicate where he is. Play with all the events available to have a chance.

During setup put his marker on the first infection deck city you pull (so the first of the 3 cubes).

Players get a new action: If they are in the space with the bio terrorist, you can spend one action to arrest him and put him beside the infection deck.

While he is locked away the game plays as normal, but when he's on the loose you simply do this: on the first draw of the infection deck, place the bio-terrorist there and add a cube of the appropriate color if allowed as per normal (eradicated diseases or characters that prevent cube spawns will also stop his cube from spawning). Obviously if this makes it go over three cubes in a single city, "explode" the disease as normal.

If an epidemic card is drawn then he escapes captivity (if he was captured) and will again appear on the first draw of the infection deck.

This makes him move around a fair bit but after an epidemic card his movements will be more predictable (and dangerous) since he is visiting cities that already have cubes!

Barely won our trial game with him so I think I'll try put him or his counterparts into my other Pandemic things to see how they go. Warcraft in particular is way too easy in normal mode.

Update: The Warcraft one reaches a suitable difficulty level if all the scourge cards are in the deck. No need for any adjustments there now. :)

Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion

An amazing game about making wines!

Prelude: The base game of Viticulture is a competitive one which we didn't play but is required to play this cooperative expansion. Made by the same people who created Wingspan, Viticulture World is a worker placement game with differing actions per season, across a time limit of 6 years (and differing "world" event cards change the flow drastically). By then each player must be at 25 victory points (or more) and the influence token must also have reached the "full" end of its track.

I won't lie, this was a bit complicated to get started with and the rule book could have used a full cheat sheet of symbols somewhere so expect your first game to be a really long one (especially if like us, you haven't played the base game) but once you've got it it's actually pretty simple! Simplified per season its just:

Spring: As a team you place your rooster on the "time" clock which determines what bonus you get right now (might be a card, money, extra worker or 1 VP) and what order you will be placing workers down for this year.

Summer: Place workers to get seeds, plant them, give tours, construct buildings, develop new tech (important if you want to win), and use summer visitors.

Fall: Move your roosters to the inner part of the time clock and either gain a card, money or age a grape.

Winter: Harvest grapes, turn grapes into wine (very cool), use winter visitors and fill wine orders to gain VP!

In addition to the main board each player gets their own player mat to keep track of their buildings, fields and most importantly grapes and wines, both of which get older each year to a max of 9, and turning grapes into wine makes retains their age (eg 3 year old grapes make 3 year old wine, unless you don't have a "3" slot which makes it reduce to a "2" slot etc).

Orders usually ask for a combo of wines at around 4 or just one of the 7-9 rank ones and having a discard down to 5 cards rule at the end of each year makes it important for you to trade with your friends to make the most of each turn. There's way more to it than what I've written but that's the gist of it.

Now buying the base game AND this expansion is a bit pricey, but if your cooperative group likes tough games with not necessarily a lot of combat (like the cooperative mode of Wingspan) then this is a good investment for you. If your group isn't cooperative then just the base Viticulture should do, but I can't comment on how good or not good that is. :P

Stardew Valley: the Board Game and Mysterium

Board games where you need to communicate!

Stardew Valley: the Board Game

Much like the digital game in this cooperative board game of 1 to 4 players, you have inherited a run down farm from your grandpa and must restore all the rooms (by completing random quests) and fulfilling his life long goals (more random quests) all in the span of one year (tracked by event cards)! On your turn you can  move (and collect nearby resources which replenish each season) or do an action based on where you are. 

Buy seeds, water plants, make friends, dig in the mine (need to find those stairs!), fish in three different spots etc. One player can get more moves by getting a spouse (some NPCs are marriageable) who can get you an extra action and you'll probably need it because right from the get go, you need to plan carefully what you're doing and work as a team. This does make it susceptible to quarter backing but as each player has a "job" they're good at it's usually an easy plan: the miner mines, fisher fishes, etc. Good quality components and a pretty good game! Thumbs up!

Mysterium

There's been a murder and as everyone knows the best way to solve it is with a seance!? In this 2-7 cooperative board game one player is a ghost who knows all the answers but can only communicate by giving out awesomely illustrated but often useless picture cards which they randomly draw while the rest are psychics who each need to interpret said cards to correctly identify THEIR three things - suspect / location / weapon in 7 turns. If even one fails, everyone loses at this point. 

If they all made it then the ghost picks which set of suspect / location / weapon is the "true" one and gives 1-3 more cards (depending on "psychic power mechanic", and if players aren't gaming the system this will likely be 1 card) for everyone to secretly vote for it. If the "true" one gets the most votes, everyone wins! Yay! This is a really interesting one to play, and the hardest role is that of the ghost who will likely be cursing each turn with the garbage cards he or she can use as clues. Expect to feel mentally exhausted after a game or two of this one. :P

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (board game) and Uno No Mercy

Games of wrath!

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

In this 1-5 player cooperative game, each player is a character from the World of Warcraft setting out to stop the Lich King who is spawning stationary ghouls and up to three abominations who actively pursue players. He also wanders around making things hurt more if he's in the region. To win, the team must complete three random quests (out of 9) and then complete a final quest at the Lich King's castle by rolling dice and maybe having cards with the right symbol to help push the progress tracker along. 

Combat plays much the same way. Players lose if the despair marker reaches the end of its track: moving twice for any player "killed" and once for each figurine you needed to spawn but have no more of. But how does the game actually play? Almost exactly like Pandemic. 7 hand card limit, do four actions per turn, ghouls spawn in location cards drawn, bad cards wait in player card pile to make things worse. I do quite like that you don't need to do the five of the same cards business this time around which makes it different enough to be interesting for me, but I also think it makes it much easier than any of the other Pandemic games in my collection thus far. :P

Update: Playing will all the scourge cards puts it at an ok difficulty level, always go ahead and do that!

Uno No Mercy

This competitive card game is just like Uno in that you want to be the first one to get rid of all your cards and have to say "Uno" once you're down to one. The no mercy bit comes from all the +plus cards in the deck, like +2 means the next player draws two and loses their turn - BUT the +plus cards stack, so if you have a plus card you can just put that on, and on, and on, until someone needs to pick up a +32 or something. Also, if you ever get 25 or more cards in your hand, you're out which opens up another path to victory: kill all your opponents. Expect tears if played with younger kids. Not the type of game for me.

Empyrion - Galactic Survival

Scavenging everything to make everything!

Do you like things that are complicated? Was Bear and Breakfast too simple? If so then by golly this first person survival game for you. Just from the tutorial mission where you begin on a space ship to get your bearings on how food, medicine and anti radiation showers work which are then followed by short space walks to mine an asteroid followed by the ship blowing up so you have to claim ownership of the ship to use the teleporter which puts you on a remote planet where you can kill wildlife for food and disassemble pretty much everything, claim and build buildings and manufacture hover bikes for 5 stones while working towards creating another spaceship with warp capabilities... WTF? Information overload.

But on the flip side, you can do all that stuff. And you can do it cooperatively if you have a server to play on. Gameplay wise (excluding the crafting bit) it reminds me a lot of Project Entropia: beautiful environments and structures coupled with odd looking people and insects. Not one for me but I'm sure this would fill the building/survival itch for someone.

Sword and Sorcery: Immortal Souls

Slay many bad guys and make a few choices.

In this fantasy dungeon basher up to four players take the roles of long dead heroes who have been revived to stop a threat that, at least initially, involves gremlins, bandits and orcs? Guess the general populace got really weak and overweight or something. The campaign has seven quests of which one is optional / will be skipped based on choices and each mission takes a bit of setup time, getting all the cards and the map tiles and what goes on them ready.

After that, its all the good guys do things then all the bad guys might do things and then time ticks on. The time thing is driven by an event deck which determines what spawns where and any thing extra that happens while also serving as a time limit, and combat is done with customized dice for the game with some interesting rules like, holding majority on the tile is instantly and extra hit, focusing an attack is an extra hit, and knockout/knockdown is freaking amazing.

Bad guys only activate if the encounter card says so, which is good because otherwise you will get wiped out easy especially early on but does have the odd effect of some guys just standing around doing nothing sometimes and most of your gold will be spent "sharpening" your gear per mission so that you can still use the better "polished" side of the item card instead of the not so great basic side.

Leveling up is done through spending souls (of enemies you've killed) and getting killed makes you lose levels and turn into a ghost who needs to wander back to a shrine to respawn basically. There's a bit of a learning curve to it but overall I think its better than the D&D adventure system games where the bad guys ALWAYS get the drop on you and you are usually rushing to just flip tiles (but its a faster setup). Here you can rush if you want, or tactically clear the map. Thumbs up!

Fast Foursome

Four Epic games that didn't manage to hold my attention for very long.

Wild Card Football

This is all about American Football (not soccer) and presents well with some nice music and cool cartoony but stylized characters (because its football with super powers!), and obviously was designed with head to head play in mind. The downsides for me are that there are a LOT of controls. It doesn't help that I don't really know football either.

Super Crazy Rhythm Castle

This party game (for up to four) is basically guitar hero with side tasks to annoy you while you do it. Some cool songs in here though but man is the villain really annoying in that he talks way too much. Probably a better experience if not solo. :P

TOEM

A very relaxed black and white game about casually wandering around and taking photos of things to earn enough stamps to buy a train ticket on to the next zone to do it all again. There is some humor in the odd ball characters that give you your tasks but some of the targets are quite annoying to find.

Rugrats

Easily the worst of this set that seems to be relying on the nostalgia factor from the TV show. Yes you get to play as the titular rugrats to collect... things through very simple levels. The silly theme and lack of tutorial doesn't do it any favors.

Back 4 Blood

How to take a good idea and then make it garbage.

This four person coop first person zombie horde shooter tries to emulate Left 4 Dead and sort of does it... until they put all of their own (mostly bad) ideas over the top of it as well. Lets start of with the good bits: good choice of characters (even though some are innately "better" with their passives than others), good reusing of maps to fit the story, and good range of "special infected" - especially the big ones.

Onto the bits we didn't like: the graphic for one special critter might be slightly altered to mean its a different special critter. A spidery spitting thing might sometimes shoot fireballs and other times shoot a slow moving swarm of bugs. A big armed thing might just use it as a club (which means you need to shoot its arm) or use the big arm to grab people (which means you need to shoot its head).

These minor differences are spelled out in the oh so stupid "card system". Each character can assemble a deck of 15 cards to build their guy up. More stamina, more damage with shotguns, whatever. You can buy these cards as you find them at random while playing levels, using currency you also have to find. Grind inserted!

The enemy deck shows what special creep you will run into as well as how fast the regular mobs will moving but there are times where it just puts absolute BS cards on like "hunger" (you are all hungry and are constantly losing health) and the like where it forces you to play fast and loose. This removal of player agency in deciding if they want to move fast or slowly and strategically is ABSOLUTELY STUPID.

The only worse design decision beyond that is not letting players start on a mission they failed. So yeah, if you have a limited amount of game time you'd better win all the way to that next checkpoint maybe 3 or 4 missions away or you are going to be starting again. These made an otherwise fun game, absolute garbage. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

Klask and MicroMacro: Crime City

Been awhile since I reviewed board games!

Klask

This competitive two player game is very simple. It has a raised wooden board and using the power of magnets each player controls a woefully thin pillar that they can move on their half of the board as a wooden blocker beneath prevents you going further. You both have a sunken "goal" to defend and three little white magnets along the center act as the "net". You can score in any of these four ways: if the little yellow ball falls into your opponents goal, if your opponent falls into their own goal, if your opponent falls (they lost magnetization), or if your opponent gets two of those white magnets in the middle stuck on them. First to six wins! Very straight forward and definitely generates a lot of laughs.  

MicroMacro: Crime City

Do you like Where's Wally? If so, this cooperative game is for you because in it is one gigantic line art map filled with tiny little details with loads of hilarious (and violent) things happening. A small magnifying glass is provided but it might be wise to bring out more if you are playing with others. The same characters appear in multiple locations so that you can deduce where they were going or where they came from and a deck of 16 cases is included for you to solve and each card asks you a question that you have to answer BY SPOTTING IT ON THE MAP. It's not enough to have an educated and probably correct guess, you need to find proof which makes questions like "what was their relationship?" (lots of infidelity in this city lol), "what was the motive?" and "where is his corpse?" things you need to find. Despite the cute art this obviously is not for kids, is a "one and done" game, and with three of us playing we finished 9 out of the 16 cases in one sitting.

Gloomhaven: Voice of the Mountain

[Part of the Party Time journal] 

After wiping out a Gloom cult gathering (complete with zombies and demons) at their ritual chamber with only DL getting KOed, we visit the Shrine of Strength to try get stronger by standing on pressure plates while being attacked by monsters... an interesting training method for sure! I'm the one that drops in that mission while Juris gets through all the doors to get the final chest. We then go up a mountain to investigate rumors of a dragon and instead get ambushed by Inox and elementals which knock Juris out, but are in turn wiped out by the three brothers. Jim's pretty good with his heals, disintegrating ray and spider bots!

While up there we hear a strange, beckoning voice and follow it into a cave system crawling with enemies, but as the mission this time is simply to open all the doors I use my rat-ninja skills to sneak through them all while the others basically hold the first room. Once all the doors are open the voice booms and disintegrates the remaining enemies, then asks us to free it. Suuuure, before doing that we return to the city to rest up and try learn more about it. Hail suggests the knowledge we seek is in the Shrine of the Depths, so we go there next and retrieve a chest from giant crab monsters and laser shooting eye stalk tentacles. At this point we're all pretty tough now, each having maxed out  at level 9 through the course of these adventures.