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Space Biff’s review of Arcs is glowing. https://spacebiff.com/2024/04/23/arcs/ “In a format that never fails to surprise me even after all these years, Arcs is one of the tallest peaks I’ve encountered yet.”
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Apr 23, 2024 23:50
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Sounds really interesting. I still want to play my copy of Oath a lot more before I pick up his next game, but I will keep it in mind to be sure.
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Apr 24, 2024 00:51
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I've heard nothing but good things about Arcs. I'm learning teaching it this weekend and I'm excited.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:43
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One thing that would move it up my list a good deal is if it plays well at three. That’s the main reason Oath doesn’t get much play these days, we typically have three players.
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Apr 24, 2024 03:32
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just got a copy of Coffee Roaster that's a real solid and also fun solitaire game
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Apr 24, 2024 05:10
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I don't know if Cole learned from Oath or he was reined in by the rest of the studio but I too have heard nothing but praise for Arcs. The map and seemingly rest of the game has changed drastically since the KS in ways that don't look great but apparently work well.
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Apr 24, 2024 05:47
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mikeycp posted:just got a copy of Coffee Roaster I rustled up a copy a little while back, after missing the point the first few times I saw it. It's solid as heck. Bag building with chips is just fun as heck, though I haven't gotten to try Quacks or Orleans. I should break that out again.
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Apr 24, 2024 10:07
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Magnetic North posted:I rustled up a copy a little while back, after missing the point the first few times I saw it. It's solid as heck. Bag building with chips is just fun as heck, though I haven't gotten to try Quacks or Orleans. I should break that out again. I like bag builders. The Cathedral of Orleans is an interesting co-op bag builder inspired by Orleans and much shorter and simpler. It's got a neat thing where you draw followers from one of two bags that are preloaded at the start of the game, but they can be placed on either side of the action board and the side they are placed on determines which bag they return to at the end of the round. I now really want to play Hyperborea again, though.
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Apr 24, 2024 12:59
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The Plague expansion for Orleans sounds promising.
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Apr 24, 2024 14:25
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Magnetic North posted:I rustled up a copy a little while back, after missing the point the first few times I saw it. It's solid as heck. Bag building with chips is just fun as heck, though I haven't gotten to try Quacks or Orleans. I should break that out again. yeah it took me a few rounds to Get It, and i still might not completely i think i need to be way more aggressive about developing my beans because some rounds i'm barely squeaking into the acceptable range
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Apr 24, 2024 15:09
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Speaking of bag builders has anyone played much Puzzle Strike 2? I really love Yomi and the Super Puzzle Fighter videogame so much, I want to throw my money at this as well. I've played Quacks twice and enjoyed it both times. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 15:34
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Magnetic North posted:I rustled up a copy a little while back, after missing the point the first few times I saw it. It's solid as heck. Bag building with chips is just fun as heck, though I haven't gotten to try Quacks or Orleans. I should break that out again. Orleans is a great game. If I played it more often, I suspect it would be top twenty for me. Usually, for me worker placement is sort of all right as a game mechanic (Dune:Imperium avoids this malaise by combining it with deckbuilding), but the building and pruning of your bag goes a long way to setting Orleans head & shoulders above, say, Viticulture.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:39
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I mildly disliked my play of base orleans, as while the bag building was fun, it seemed very linear and constrained with regards to what a winning strategy is and there was very little player interaction
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Apr 24, 2024 15:50
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I haven't played Orleans a whole bunch, only a few times (which I try to rectify any time it shows up at a Meetup), but I think you might not have gotten the best view from a single play.panko posted:I mildly disliked my play of base orleans, quote:as while the bag building was fun, it seemed very linear and constrained with regards to what a winning strategy is quote:and there was very little player interaction
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Apr 24, 2024 16:09
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you’re saying that your opinions of the game have been formed via exclusively playing with the expansion that’s supposed to be a massive improvement, which might have been useful to mention in your first post
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Apr 24, 2024 16:24
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I should probably check quacks out huh
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Apr 24, 2024 16:36
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panko posted:you’re saying that your opinions of the game have been formed via exclusively playing with the expansion that’s supposed to be a massive improvement, which might have been useful to mention in your first post I've only played the base game and your analysis is pretty close to my experience, as far as I understand it almost everything added by T&I encourages you to pay more attention towards what the other players are doing and gives more opportunity for (still mostly indirect) interaction.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:55
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The one time I played Orleans it didn't wow me. The bag building mechanic was fine but the game itself was a board of multiple one-way progress bars to fill in competition with the other players. At least that's how I remember it. Now, I happen to find that dull as dishwater to play so I never looked back, but I've also frequently heard that expansions really push that game to a new level.
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Apr 24, 2024 16:56
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I didn't care much for Orleans after my two plays of the base game but I really, really enjoy playing it with the expansion, the point where if I play it it's either with T&I or not at all. The rest of my group also went from kinda cold on it to asking for it constantly.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:36
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Quacks is goofy and fun but there’s not a huge amount of interaction either. However, if you play every round with the live drawing (and you should), it becomes a much more socially engaging experience.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:01
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Slay the Spire is such a perfect port of the game to tabletop. Many things are rebalanced, whether it's to translate to paper or to actually fix broken combos, sometimes both. My one complaint is what's with the making GBS threads cubes everywhere? You're supposed to put them on the enemies' health bars, but the cubes are bigger than the numbers and slide around easily, even on your player boards. There had to have been a better way. The production values in everything else is great; I can't tell you how cool it is to hold the cards from the game in my hand. The cooperative gameplay is great, too.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:13
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LifeLynx posted:Slay the Spire is such a perfect port of the game to tabletop. Many things are rebalanced, whether it's to translate to paper or to actually fix broken combos, sometimes both. My one complaint is what's with the making GBS threads cubes everywhere? You're supposed to put them on the enemies' health bars, but the cubes are bigger than the numbers and slide around easily, even on your player boards. There had to have been a better way. The production values in everything else is great; I can't tell you how cool it is to hold the cards from the game in my hand. The cooperative gameplay is great, too. Yeah I thought there were a lot of very clever and imaginative design decisions to translate the game to a co-op table top, so that it maintains the same feel (or even better) while minimising upkeep, keeping it fast moving and encouraging interaction between players. I played it with my whole family (wife and two kids) and it was great, my wife ended up addicted to the video game version as well after playing the tabletop which I think vindicates it scratching the same itch. I think I actually slightly prefer the tabletop (although I'm pretty burnt out on the videogame) just because it feels like the same experience but the co-operative elements make it feel far more worthwhile to play than just another run - you do need to help each other out. Especially when one of you gets an amazing card engine going or you hit one of the tough bosses. We just barely flamed out of the Act 3 boss last time which felt actually quite satisfying in terms of difficulty. The production quality is fantastic as well and the box is so well organised, I can get it out and be playing in five minutes. It handles the frequent upgrades (like the video game) - potions, relics, cards - really well. I like the dice mechanic a lot too for proccing relic bonuses and enemy intents. It's just very impressive honestly. I haven't been too bothered by the cubes - I'm most impressed that there is minimum cruft in terms of tokens etc compared with a lot of other co-op games (and what could have been with a more literal translation of the video game). They've been creative in how they streamlined it down.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:19
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Blamestorm posted:Yeah I thought there were a lot of very clever and imaginative design decisions to translate the game to a co-op table top, so that it maintains the same feel (or even better) while minimising upkeep, keeping it fast moving and encouraging interaction between players. I played it with my whole family (wife and two kids) and it was great, my wife ended up addicted to the video game version as well after playing the tabletop which I think vindicates it scratching the same itch. I think I actually slightly prefer the tabletop (although I'm pretty burnt out on the videogame) just because it feels like the same experience but the co-operative elements make it feel far more worthwhile to play than just another run - you do need to help each other out. Especially when one of you gets an amazing card engine going or you hit one of the tough bosses. We just barely flamed out of the Act 3 boss last time which felt actually quite satisfying in terms of difficulty. As we wrapped up, one of my friends grumbled "This is going to take forever to clean up". And... it wasn't. In two minutes everyone had separated everything into the appropriate decks. I've had deckbuilding games where setup and cleanup is so bad it singlehandedly stops me from wanting to replay them, but StS was a dream. I think I'd still rather play the video game than play this solo.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:28
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LifeLynx posted:As we wrapped up, one of my friends grumbled "This is going to take forever to clean up". And... it wasn't. In two minutes everyone had separated everything into the appropriate decks. I've had deckbuilding games where setup and cleanup is so bad it singlehandedly stops me from wanting to replay them, but StS was a dream. I think I'd still rather play the video game than play this solo. I don't play boardgames solo (as I have too many video games and not enough time to play them!) but I think if I had the option to spend an hour playing the video game or playing this co-op with family/friends I'd pick the latter. It's funny how much setup/teardown has become a major factor for which games get played for me - I guess I feel much more time poor than I used to. Rules simplicity/clarity, ease of setup (including how easy it is to get help from new players), play time - these all matter much more to me than they used to now. Eclipse second edition is a great example of where there are probably better 4x games but the included trays make it so easy to get started compared with many games of comparative length and complexity. I also really appreciate games like Unmatched which you can just grab and start playing almost instantly. There are better games like it but the less friction to getting it out and getting started, the more it gets played as far as my collection is concerned. Actually another good thing about the Slay the Spire boardgame is that anyone with even a little familiarity with the video game will barely need any rules explained, there are a few key things about the flow of it and how tokens/damage works but it's a 5 minute explanation. But even then, my experience with my kids is that it's one of the easiest co-op games to explain/understand rules wise as a lot of the complexity emerges gradually over the game run.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:39
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panko posted:I mildly disliked my play of base orleans, as while the bag building was fun, it seemed very linear and constrained with regards to what a winning strategy is and there was very little player interaction Player interaction in base Orleans is mainly in the form of blocking and limitation. The opportunities to score points are finite and you want to grab as many as possible while shutting other players out. Trade & Intrigue doesn't change this, it just improves it by making the Deeds board more appealing. This leads to a more heavily culled bag and greater competition over followers. The new events are also a great improvement, but being able to count events in the base game is part of the strategy there. If you don't see the event that gives cash for development level early then everyone fights for Scholars; if you get a couple of early Famines or Taxations then everyone races round the map for goods.
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Apr 25, 2024 08:42
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Blamestorm posted:
One of us had never played the game before and had the most rules questions. He's the type to have to look up everything, and when the two of us who had many hours in the PC game told him the rule without consulting the rulebook, we were always right. The part that concerns me about playing this with family and kids is the amount of shuffling and card flipping in and out of sleeves. Another good and/or bad thing about the StS board game - for the most part, you're concerned with your own row of enemies. Players act simultaneously, so many times instead of saying exactly what we were doing, we'd all kind of do our own thing, and then announce that one or more enemies in our row were dead, and "Oh, I have some leftover attacks, anyone want me to ping something?" It's messy, can't decide if it's more good than bad.
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Apr 25, 2024 11:39
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LifeLynx posted:One of us had never played the game before and had the most rules questions. He's the type to have to look up everything, and when the two of us who had many hours in the PC game told him the rule without consulting the rulebook, we were always right. We were playing it differently, we tended to burn down one enemy of line collectively at a time and focus fire to be as efficient as possible. We would start turns discussing who would take what damage and which enemies to take out as a group to minimise HP lose. We probably played slower but we definitely talked it all out, we would basically each say something like “I am going to either take four damage and put out fifteen or block and do two, which is better this turn” and work it out that way. None of us ever focused on our own line for dealing damage, just what we needed to soak that turn then who on any line was the biggest priority to get rid of as a group. Upgrades are fairly rare so it was never an issue for my boys who are 6 and 9, the 6 year old needed help with shuffling but not a big deal.
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Apr 25, 2024 14:57
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Played a new-to-me Martin Wallace last night, London. The theme is that you're one of 2-4 competing architects rebuilding the city after the great fire of 1666. City cards come in one of three different colors, and to play a card into your city to create a new stack and/or to play onto an existing stack of personal city cards, you have to discard a card of the same color to the central board, where it can be drawn by another player (or yourself at a later time, if it remains). Some cards cost money to play (or run, q.v.); because this is a Martin Wallace game, you can take loans at any time, but these are worse than most Wallace loans -- each loan gains you £10, no interest, but each costs you £15 to pay back, and you must pay them back at the beginning of your turn (so you can't pay back immediately after getting income from running your city, again, q.v.). Once you've played as many city cards as you can or want, you can choose to take a turn to "run" your city -- your choice of any or all of the face-up cards on your stacks resolve their effects, for good or ill, mostly good but some mixed, and then you flip all the cards you ran face-down. And because it's a Martin Wallace game and he apparently neglected to make a previous game brutal enough, it's time for poverty cubes. You gain a poverty cube for (a) each stack in front of you, regardless of whether it has a face-up card or whether it had cards played on it this round, (b) for every card left in your hand, and (c) every loan outstanding (hence the catch about not getting income from running your city to pay back loans before calculating poverty). At the end of the game (when the deck of 101 cards runs out, which takes longer than you think because players can draw from the central display and/or the deck), you add to the points everyone has scored through the game from instant-scoring cards: (a) points for every end-of-game point scoring card in their stacks, up or down, (b) a -7 penalty for each loan outstanding (though you do get a free chance to pay them off), and (c) a couple of other minor point adjustments (I think 1 point per £3 in cash, for example). Then you figure out who has the fewest number of poverty cubes, subtract that number from everyone's total, and consult a chart. Zero cubes = +0 points. If you have 5 or fewer left, then you average -1 point per cube. But it's -2 per cube for the 6th through the 15th, and -3 per cube above that, so ouch! Highest score wins. All in all, a solid Martin Wallace game, and of course I'm leaving some details out. (I didn't even mention boroughs.) It was two noobs and one person who had played once a few years ago, so there were some questions that we had to adjudicate through the less-than-helpful rulebook. It took us a while to figure out the ebb and flow of what a good turn was. I won primarily because I focused early on earning revenue (to allow big purchases later) and banking early points while doing a moderate job of plays to reduce my poverty cubes. (I was helped by a surprise 'take-that' card that required my opponents to pay money, and forced one of them to take a loan near the end of the game.) We got two out of three thumbs-up for it. Finished with a game of Cascadia. It was my second play and I finished respectably in the middle (100-91-90), but I'm not feeling the magic. Going to give it a few more tries before I think about dumping my copy and vetoing it when someone else's copy hits the table. I think if it were 25% shorter, it would be a much better game -- I don't mean deal out 15 tiles per player instead of 20, because that would mess up the scoring for the animal groups, but if it somehow just played faster.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:17
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Admiralty Flag posted:Finished with a game of Cascadia. It was my second play and I finished respectably in the middle (100-91-90), but I'm not feeling the magic. Going to give it a few more tries before I think about dumping my copy and vetoing it when someone else's copy hits the table. I think if it were 25% shorter, it would be a much better game -- I don't mean deal out 15 tiles per player instead of 20, because that would mess up the scoring for the animal groups, but if it somehow just played faster. Not here to stan for Cascadia, but I feel like the timing element is built into the complexity of the cards you choose. Using all the "A" cards should make for a snappy game no matter what, whereas using "C" and "D" cards (staring at Eagles) increases the AP. With that said, I have zero interest in the expansion for it for that exact reason - adding literally anything else just sounds like extra baggage. Oh, and scoring. Scoring is a chore.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:30
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I haven't played cascadia a whole bunch, only a few times (which I won’t try to rectify because I think it’s mid), but I think you might not have gotten the best view from a second play.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:34
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You're not missing any magic, it's a fine game, nothing special but entirely playable and approachable.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:37
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JoeRules posted:Not here to stan for Cascadia, but I feel like the timing element is built into the complexity of the cards you choose. Using all the "A" cards should make for a snappy game no matter what, whereas using "C" and "D" cards (staring at Eagles) increases the AP. With that said, I have zero interest in the expansion for it for that exact reason - adding literally anything else just sounds like extra baggage. I like Cascadia a decent amount and I did buy the expansion but I ended up not using the Landmarks at all. I don't think they make the game more complicated in an interesting way. I do like the additional scoring cards though. Looking at my BGStats my Cascadia games seem to be about 45 minutes with 3-4 players which to me feels "fine" but I guess I can see how people would think that's long for a "simple" game. Has anyone played Daybreak? It's come up a few times and I was a bit curious about it. I watched an overview video for it and it reminded me a lot of Pandemic... obviously since its by the same designer, but I was curious if it was more interesting than Pandemic (because tbh I bounced off of Pandemic a little bit despite liking co-op games a lot, I never even finished Legacy Season 1) where to some degree it felt like going through a bit of the same motions every game? ChewyLSB fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 20:19
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More like Asscadia?
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Apr 25, 2024 20:55
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I've played Daybreak a few times and it's fine, nothing special. Very little player interaction: everybody has a personal tableau that they fiddle with and run simultaneously, so nobody really plays attention to what others are doing. Very few abilities are even able to interact with other players at all. It's the most multiplayer-solitaire co-op game I've ever played. The actual game of it works like this: each turn, you draw five cards, and choose what to do with them. Either you add them to your tableau for their symbols, add them to your tableau for their abilities (which may require or get boosted by having symbols in your tableau), or discard them as payment for other abilities. Your abilities will either reduce your greenhouse gas production, or protect you from bad things. Once everybody does their abilities, you see how much greenhouse gas you produced, some bad things happen, and then you do it all over again. The puzzle of picking out how to use your cards effectively is reasonably interesting, although it might get old fast, as there don't really feel like there are that many fundamentally different abilities. But overall, not terribly impressed. I'm perfectly happy to play it if someone else wants to, but I'm glad I didn't buy it.
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Apr 25, 2024 21:00
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ChewyLSB posted:Looking at my BGStats my Cascadia games seem to be about 45 minutes with 3-4 players which to me feels "fine" but I guess I can see how people would think that's long for a "simple" game. We did play with mostly, if not all, A & B scoring cards. Maybe next time (I did say I was going to play a few more times before doing anything drastic regarding the game), I'll push for C-D scoring cards and see what that's like. Perhaps upping the difficulty will make it 'worthier' of the time and make it more of a puzzler, even though it'll probably go a bit longer. However, I didn't find scoring to be terrible or tedious. Over in <5 minutes, and I like games where no one knows for sure how they're doing relative to everyone else before the buzzer sounds.
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Apr 25, 2024 21:31
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I like Cascadia a lot! The puzzle of balancing the lands vs the animals is really good, and the interaction in the middle of the table can be pretty brutal with my group which is fun (kind of Azul like). Theres some puzzle style games I like more (Sprawlopolis, Cartographers, Next Station: London) but those are even more solo than Cascadia, Lol.
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Apr 25, 2024 22:08
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Well, I'm a big dummy. I just realised that my groups have been playing the bonus markers in Hansa Teutonica completely wrong. It's my game and I did the teach - for whatever reason, I glossed over/skipped the placement rules for new ones. We'v played about 6-8 games of it now  I assumed that they just go back on the tavern you'd picked them up from (at the end of your turn) but no, you can place them on any trade route that: - Doesn't have tradespeople on it already, - Has at least one free slot for a trading post and - Doesn't already have a bonus marker (including permanent bonus markers). The signs were there in retrospect: the rulebook keeps telling you about the arrow on it to point to the traderoute, which felt like superflous design in a very tightly designed game but I brushed it off. I also felt like something was missing, but I figured it was the group meta-play of wanting to see your prestige track go up during the game. Something really felt off in the Eastern Teutonic League board though, which is why I went back through the rules to check. Take note kids, if something feels off about a game, it either sucks or you suck.
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Apr 26, 2024 00:38
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one precious petal in the unfolding flower of a hansa group’s meta is setting up early offices in the cities adjacent to the 2-length routes and trying to spam out plates/force others to stop you from doing so 
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Apr 26, 2024 00:51
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panko posted:one precious petal in the unfolding flower of a hansa group’s meta is setting up early offices in the cities adjacent to the 2-length routes and trying to spam out plates/force others to stop you from doing so Oh I’m so excited to get this to the table now. It really felt like certain moves were being undervalued and now I know why. I could see the degeneracy potential but it wasn’t being forced upon us.
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Apr 26, 2024 00:58
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I finally got round to playing the Heroes of Might and Magic III boardgame! It's... not great, from first impressions. Production values are very high; the artwork is amazing, all the components are decent quality and the minis look fantastic (more on the minis later). The rulebook is dogshit. It's as bad as (if not worse than) the rulebook for Too Many Bones. For example, we encountered the phrase "search (2)" at least seven times before finding out what this meant, and there's nothing in the index or glossary to explain what this means. We guess that it meant draw two cards from a given deck and keep one, which turned out to be correct. This is explained in a single sentence in the middle of a paragraph. Nowhere in the game do you ever have a search of anything other than (2). Nothing in the rulebook explains when you're supposed to spawn enemies to fight - it turns out that whenever you encounter a hex with a roman numeral in it you have to spawn enemies. To find out how many enemies and what difficulty they should be you have to turn to a page in the rulebook, which is not labelled anywhere at all. There are player aid cards but they don't tell you any of these things that you'll generally encounter every single turn. To its credit, it does do a lot to emulate the video game very well. Not only is the artwork absolutely spot-on but most of the gameplay is, too. You have a limited amount of things you can do on your turn which will mostly involve moving your hero around the hex-tiles (which are dictated by the scenario but you also get a pool of tiles you can add in yourself to explore further), capturing resource generators and fighting baddies to find treasure. When you get into a fight you move to a secondary board, which is a 4*5 grid that you put your troop cards into so they can move about and fight each other (or you can put the minis from the kickstarter edition, which are entirely useless and make the game more annoying to play). Combat is swift and brutal for the most part, which I kind of liked. You can also upgrade your town (you can capture other towns to spawn from but they all count as having the same upgrades) so you can buy better troops and upgrade your existing ones. This is the most interesting part of the game: choosing how to spend the resources you've acquired to alter your home base to get specific units. The main non-combat board is made up of tiles consisting of hexagons that you traverse, and they look great apart from the fact that the aforementioned roman numerals can be difficult to see in some terrain types. Almost every hex has iconography on it that is not immediately obvious at all and you have to consult the lovely rulebook, which sometimes tells you to roll certain dice but it turns out that is wrong and you should roll other dice instead. Most combat tends to be against the 'neutral' NPC enemies (one of the other players controls them so it's basically PvP), but real PvP is there too and was pretty fun. Like the videogame, a large part of the strategy involves flipping resource generators so that you control them when a PC is distracted with something else. We're going to play it again now that we know the rules, and I can't say it's the worst game i've played but it takes up two entire slots of a kallax, most of which are minis that serve literally no purpose.
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Apr 26, 2024 01:07
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