Peter Wocken

I recommend playing this House Rule with people who have already got a few games of For Sale under their belt.

Toxic Assets
What’s worse than getting a zero dollar payout on a property? When each $0 = negative $2000. Watch players squirm and over play their hand to avoid loosing money on a sale. I’ve see a space station (30) get played for a $4000 paycheck rather than grabbing a zero.

I recommend playing this House Rule with people who have already got a few games of For Sale under their belt.

Blind Bid
Everyone chooses a property to sell before the checks come out. There tends to be even more bluffing, although less strategy, but it’s a nice way to add a bit more variety into the game when there are requests for a fifth or sixth game in a row.

Rodney Smith created a comprehensive How To Play video that covers the entire rulebook from end-to-end. It’s a great way to learn the rules and then hop into the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAETWCuYgmU

There are a couple of really solid iOS apps that have a VERY similar feel to Space Hulk, Hunters and Hunters 2 (#2 obviously being the more polished version). It’s a top down, turn based campaign with a variety of team members and enemies. You can play a hammer wielding “Hunter” (not a marine *wink*) with heavy armor that only has three action points or a fast moving lightly armored shotgun specialist with five+ action points per round. All your Hunters gain XP and can level up and upgrade different specialist talent trees. It’s also tactical in that there’s fog of war with lines of sight and facing really does matter, especially in overwatch mode. I would certainly recommend Hunters 2 to anyone who wants to play Space Hulk with zero setup time, no assembly required!

http://rodeogames.co.uk/hunters-two/

I recently played this game on a camping trip, and it worked out quite nicely. It’s an easy game to teach (we had five players, and three didn’t play many games), very portable, and it scales well enough for larger groups. Throw it in with a game of The Resistance, and you’ve still got plenty of room in your pack for actual camping equipment.

Years ago I purchased Dragon Dice, not for the game, but because they were hanging out in a bargin bin, and two, for the components.

Dice Bag:
Really nice dice bag included (black with red drawstrings and the red TRS logo screen-printed on the front). It holds at least four sets of dice for D&D/Pathfinder, which works for me.

Dice:
I use the dice (orange and green ones) in my copy of Incan Gold. Rather than revealing the card to stay or leave (which look fairly similar), the colors of the dice easily shows your intention to plunder or flee to the rest of the table.

As with many of the digital games, I’ve found that those companies which add more achievements really are adding more replay value to their product, and Neuroshima Hex is no exception. Right now with all the armies unlocked, I’ve got 89 more reasons to keep on playing the game. I think that achievements tap into my inner competitive gamer and give a lot of incentives to keep NH on my phone. It’s a lot of fun to play with games taking around 5 minutes, and the achievements help keep my eyes on the prize (right now I’m going for “Pandemic: Use venom 100 times.” Let’s go Nightshade!)

If you’re like me, when you bring a pile of games over to a game night, you don’t always stack the games flat, you shove them into a bag. FITS does have a nice little plastic cover for each of the players boards, but sometimes they’ll pop off a bit and you’ll have a bunch of pieces all crowder together at the bottom of the box. I’ve found that using a rubber band to hold the cover on helps diring transport. Or, you can just have four little ziplock baggies, one for each cover. It will make clean-up much faster post game.

One of the great things about this game is the use of dry-erase markers… until they run out of juice. Go out and buy a multi-color pack of dry-erase makers and add them to the box. That way people can choose more colors and if one marker dies, you’ve got another to take its place with no down-time.

If you’re playing with your family, the included cards are safe and generally fairly easy to translate from drawing to guess and back.

If you’re playing with friends, have people write their own word or phrase. It’s generally more difficult to guess and I’ve seen far funnier outcomes with this method.