At gaming group recently I have played Gorechosen, Dixit, Skull; Dice Throne, Skull, Star Fluxx, Ingenious.
Gorechosen simulates a gladiatorial combat with figurines on a board marked out in hexes. Each figurine represents a distinct character with their own attack pattern and basic actions, and the players draw cards to gain special actions (moving further in a single turn, attacking more strongly or more cunningly, etc.). Goes with Epic Spell Wars under the heading of "I appreciate the mechanics, but the theme is very much not for me".
Dice Throne simulates a combat with dice and cards (and more cartoony art and less gore than Gorechosen). Each player chooses a character with their own unique set of abilities and their own unique set of dice to activate them. An interesting mechanic is that if there are more than two players in the game, the attacking player has to roll a die to determine who they're attacking instead of making a deliberate choice (although there are cards that will let them influence the die roll). I was first out, but I enjoyed it enough that I'd be willing to try again sometime.
I have actually started winning points in Skull, though I don't think I've won a full game yet. I'm not sure if this is a good development or not; I was enjoying being no good at it.
My sister has come along to several sessions of gaming group in recent months, but we haven't managed a game together. She arrives separately, when I'm already in a game, and after that for the rest of the session when one of us finishes a game the other is already in the middle of another one.
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There was a day when all of my siblings happened to be in town at once, and one of my brothers had a new board game he wanted to try out, so we got together for an afternoon and played Azul, Animal Upon Animal, and Once Upon a Time.
Azul is a new game, this year's Spiel des Jahres winner. Players try to acquire tiles in the colours they need to fill in a mosaic. You can only add one colour of tile to a row at a time, and only if you have all the tiles of that colour you need for that row; if you don't have enough, you can't add anything to that row that turn, and if you have too many, you lose points for each leftover tile. The acquisition phase is partly about getting the colours you need for each row and partly about cornering opponents into having to take too few or too many of the colours they're after. You score points each time you successfully add to the mosaic, and at the end of the game there are bonuses for each complete row, each complete column, and for each colour that you've added all the tiles of that colour in the mosaic. I enjoyed it, and would play again.
Animal Upon Animal is a stacking game with small wooden animals, which we played with our young nieces.
Once Upon a Time, the fairy tale telling game, was my suggestion; I've played it before and always enjoy it. We played two games. The first ended up as a fairly straightforward story about a prince who was cursed and broke the curse by rescuing and marrying a princess.
The second story was about a pair of tiny children (it was later established that they were tiny
giant children, and therefore about normal human size) who were kidnapped by a witch. The sister was rescued by their father, while the brother went on an adventure and rescued and married a princess... at which point we discovered that none of us had a suitable ending card to stop the story there, so we had to keep spinning it out with further adventures as the brother was blinded in a fire, kidnapped again by the witch and turned into a tree, rescued by his father and the princess, restored to human form (incidentally curing his blindness), caught in a storm, lost his memory, had his memory restored with the help of a passing cook and a dragon who was actually an enchantress (or vice versa), until I was eventually able to shoehorn in my ending and everybody lived happily ever after (except the witch, who got pushed down a well). So, a pretty authentically plotted fairy tale, in other words.
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I have been trying out the electronic version of Mysterium that I got in the Digital Tabletop Humble Bundle. It's not a bad implementation, but whether it's any fun depends heavily on finding a good group of people to play with, which is difficult with time zones. (Playing a game like Mysterium with the AI characters is just weird. One is never sure just how much they understand of what is going on.) I was about to give up on it entirely when I happened to be on at the same time as a really fun group of players and had a few good games. But I've never managed to get my time lined up with theirs again, and in the interim I've had some disappointing games with less fun players, and I think I might be about to give up on it after all.
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