The game is mechanically much better when the card drafting rule is used, but that easily adds another hour of playtime, which is why I never bother with it.

The last game of monopoly I played was very much by the rules, and took 4 hours where the winner was statistically certain after 30 minutes.

I had a Tuvix joke, but the captain killed it.

Let’s be honest: Catan does not have nearly enough narrative substance for a cookbook. So unless every dish is hexagonal in shape, this is just a random cookbook (although not necessarily bad) with the Catan name arbitrarily attached to it.

Aeon’s End and Deep Rock Galactic immediately come to mind here. Both are great games, but the instructions are terrible.

AE somehow manages to extend fairly simple rules into very long paragraphs, making it seem way more complicated than it is in practice.

DRG lacks icons for most effects, which decreases readability. It’s also sorted in a way I can never look something up quickly without reading entire pages to find the relevant paragraph, with some explanations being in the scenario book instead to make it worse.

Had some friends over on Saturday and played a bunch.

Taverns of Tiefenthal is pretty good, although I think noone really had a good grasp of tracking points. We played the base game (module 1) only, looking forward to the advanced modules.

Then we went for a classic round of Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate and got really lucky on the survivor side in terms of both stats and locations. Which is a pretty common thing in this game, I guess.

We ended with a round of Aeon’s End, which started off extremely brutal (the keep was down to 13/30 HP after 3 turns or so), but was fine as we got into the mid and late game.

Hidden Leaders has a fairly large box, but there’s not all that much to bring. The cards and 2 tokens fit into a medium sized ziplock bag.

The board is slightly more difficult, but there’s a copy of it printed into the bank of 5 explanatory cards, although I believe those were part of the Kickstarter exclusives.

Fully agree.

The dice game completely eliminates the early game of everyone just hiding, waiting. You have to start shooting if the dice say so. You can stall a bit by immediately giving someone a beer after sitting them, but there’s more shooting than beer on the dice. Also, the arrow mechanic puts a timer on everyone’s head.

Finally, something has to be said for the dice themselves: they are super heavy and hit the table with an audible Bang! which is really neat.

Good suggestions.

Although Frantic might not be elderly friendly due to the card design being quite hard to read at times. Huge Roman numerals with tiny text in front is just a terrible design choice.

Deep Rock Galactic is pretty good imo. Maybe a bit on the easy side, although I haven’t tried the higher difficulties yet.