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Sherrard posted:I... I.. I don't have PMs What is your email?
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Nov 20, 2012 17:36
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PaybackJack posted:To those of you that have played Suburbia and have also played City Tycoon how do you compare them? This probably only applies to Lorini as City Tycoon seemed to have slipped under the radar in the U.S. Nope, I looked at City Tycoon a bunch of times but never pulled the trigger, so I can't compare them, sorry. Have you played City Tycoon? If so, what were your impressions?
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Nov 20, 2012 17:39
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Lorini posted:Nope, I looked at City Tycoon a bunch of times but never pulled the trigger, so I can't compare them, sorry. Have you played City Tycoon? If so, what were your impressions? Haven't played it. Remember watching Vasel's review a year ago and liking what I saw. There is a severe lack of SimCity-esque games and that one looked pretty good. Suburbia looked like it could fill a similar niche so I figured you'd be the one to ask. Maybe I'll add it to my CSI order because I also wanted to grab the new Dungeon Command set that just came out on their page and the rest of my order is waiting on the Netrunner expansion.
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Nov 20, 2012 18:13
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If you have an American Express card, you can allegedly spend $25 at coolstuffinc.com on Saturday and get $25 back if you enroll your card: https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/Shop-Small/ You can even just get a gift certificate for later if you don't want to make an order.
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Nov 20, 2012 19:09
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Lawen posted:I've been playing and enjoying Race for the Galaxy lately. The iconography is a bit confusing but otherwise it's a pretty stellar (pun!) 2-player game. What's the consensus on the expansions? Do they add anything meaningful to the experience? How well does the solitaire variant in the first expansion work? The solitaire works really great, and I cheer lead it any chance I get. It plays as close to an actual opponent of any game I've tried so far. It's not 100%, but it's close enough. There are also multiple personality types for the robot that have different play styles. Who ever thought up this system is brilliant, and would kill for other game designers to work something like that into their games. That said, it's REALLY hard. I've only beaten the robot a handful of times. People keep track of hundreds and hundreds of plays and even the better players can only get around 50% wins.
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Nov 20, 2012 19:59
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Harlock posted:Forbidden Island on Ipad is fantastic. Yeah, it really is. Thanks for the reco. Only thing I could possibly ask for in that app is a setting to speed up some of the animations. Once you are used to the flow of the game it isn't really helpful to watch those deliberate shuffle animations whenever a Waters Rise! card is drawn. All in all though a great recreation of the tabletop experience.
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Nov 20, 2012 20:06
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I've played three games of Android: Infiltration recently and I'm ambivalent about it. On the one hand I like the cyberpunk Michael Mann theme, but I've been bugged by some of the ways it's executed. I do like it better than Android itself, which was pretty much a "how bad could it really be?" purchase. Has anybody else had any experience with it? It could be that I'm on a string of bad experiences with Fantasy Flight products and I'm just bitter. Other games lately have been most of Plaid Hat Games catalog, I love all of them. Summoner Wars is just a beautiful game in so many ways and Dungeon Run is a really fun competitive crawl. I feel like Dungeon Run's missing a few elements, like having a more compelling reason to work together, but it looks like the standalone expansion it's getting early next year will fix at least some of that. I'll probably pick up Mice and Mystics in a Black Friday sale, I really enjoy the D&D Adventures games so I figure it'd be up my alley. And thanks to this thread, Space Alert is on my watch list for when it becomes available again in my area.
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Nov 20, 2012 23:01
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Kiranamos posted:If you have an American Express card, you can allegedly spend $25 at coolstuffinc.com on Saturday and get $25 back if you enroll your card: I asked them on Twitter and they said that the online store isn't taking part in that.
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Nov 20, 2012 23:14
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LordZoric posted:I've played three games of Android: Infiltration recently and I'm ambivalent about it. On the one hand I like the cyberpunk Michael Mann theme, but I've been bugged by some of the ways it's executed. I do like it better than Android itself, which was pretty much a "how bad could it really be?" purchase. Has anybody else had any experience with it? It could be that I'm on a string of bad experiences with Fantasy Flight products and I'm just bitter. Our big problems were that a) there isn't really a lot of player interaction and b) the choices that you make are generally quite simple. Especially towards the end of the game, you are generally either out or heading that way, or plowing forward in the vague hope that there is a special exit. It makes the end a bit anticlimactic because rarely has it come down to the count, it's usually one guy having tonnes of chits having escaped and everyone else resigning themselves to going deeper in the vain hope of some massive motherload of data and a way out. It's not terrible, but it just hasn't led to any really great story moments. Compared to, for example, Drakon which is literally just an engine designed for griefing each other all game until you do it so effectively that no-one else can stop you winning.
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Nov 20, 2012 23:24
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Miniature Market will have a Black Friday sale from Friday (23) to Sunday (26). 8% off their inventory, which are already pretty dang cheap, plus 4x the reward points, which sorta kinda works out to 12% off if you want to do easy math. They won't have anything specific on sale that isn't already here: http://www.miniaturemarket.com/clearance/board-games.html?limit=80 They're a really good vendor that has wonderful customer service, so I really encourage you guys to open your wallets and spill the money out. As if you addicts needed an excuse.
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Nov 21, 2012 01:49
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MissMarple posted:I bought it because it seemed ideal for our work lunchtime boardgame group. We are generally a big fan of "screw you" games that fit into less than an hour. It sounded like nice risk reward with the ability to ladle risk on the other players. That's what I thought. Yeah we've had the exact same experiences. It's kind of sad that a game that's supposed to be about luck and randomness always ends up having the exact same endgame every single time. Fantasy Flight games always seem like a gamble on their overall quality. Speaking of which, I was one of the many that got their heart broken by how shoddily put together Mansions of Madness was. I was honestly surprised to see that it listed people's names under "playtesters" it had such bad rules holes and instant win scenarios. Not wanting to have wasted like sixty or so bucks, I looked for any house rules or fixes for it and I came across this: Fully Revised Scenarios. I've played three out of the five scenarios with the revised rules and wow they made a difference! A lot more tense and down to the wire, the Keeper has to actually think and plan out their moves to win and the players are beefed up too. Yeah, I know, it's from the same guy who did Razor Cut(Razor Cut!!!!) but he hit on something good this time. If you are a disgruntled MoM owner, I'd recommend checking it out. GrandpaPants posted:Miniature Market is awesome What he said! Miniature Market has always served me well, and they have amazing customer service.
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Nov 21, 2012 03:01
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We don't talk about Razor Cut. I'm living in quite possibly the middle of nowhere in a literal jungle, so when I head back to civilisation I was hoping to find a new game to bring back with me. Can anyone suggest some good 1-2 player games? I've got LOTR LCG with me, but I mostly end up playing that solitaire to kill time. Are there other games with solo scenarios and are relatively portable?
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Nov 21, 2012 04:26
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Gravy Train Robber posted:We don't talk about Razor Cut. Onirim is super portable is 1-2 player coop. It's cute and comes with like 3 or 4 expansions to spice up the game as needed.
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Nov 21, 2012 04:29
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Gravy Train Robber posted:We don't talk about Razor Cut. I've enjoyed Mage Knight single player but it isn't very forgiving from the setup/teardown perspective. It has the advantage of being very customizable in terms of difficulty and having a decent scoring system, and the expansion is looking to only improve on this. Or there's the Race for the Galaxy AI which can be downloaded. That's purely for PC though, and has the disadvantage of destroying the tabletop game for you as you get such a good understanding of all the cards and how they interact after playing games in 1/10 of the time of the tabletop that your friends won't want to play with you. bobvonunheil fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Nov 21, 2012 |
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Nov 21, 2012 04:32
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Gravy Train Robber posted:We don't talk about Razor Cut. Friday is a pretty fun solo game in which you are helping Robinson Crusoe escape the island he is stranded on. It's quick (30 minutes) and has multiple difficulties for plenty of re-playability. It's also very portable (6"x6" box) and doesn't require much space to play, and very few pieces that could get lost.
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Nov 21, 2012 04:32
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LordZoric posted:Speaking of which, I was one of the many that got their heart broken by how shoddily put together Mansions of Madness was. I was honestly surprised to see that it listed people's names under "playtesters" it had such bad rules holes and instant win scenarios. Not wanting to have wasted like sixty or so bucks, I looked for any house rules or fixes for it and I came across this: Fully Revised Scenarios. I've played three out of the five scenarios with the revised rules and wow they made a difference! A lot more tense and down to the wire, the Keeper has to actually think and plan out their moves to win and the players are beefed up too. Yeah, I know, it's from the same guy who did Razor Cut(Razor Cut!!!!) but he hit on something good this time. If you are a disgruntled MoM owner, I'd recommend checking it out. Would you say it's worth purchasing with the revised rules? I really like the theme but I don't want a bad game.
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Nov 21, 2012 05:09
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It's really not a bad game even with the packed in rules. There's a lot of poo poo in there thats unbalanced and the like. Some of the scenarios have exploits and 'bugs' sure but so long as you're playing with Humans with brains and poo poo, you're fine. Its a nice game. The revised rules work pretty well too, and I suggest using them. I'm just saying its totes worth getting I guess.
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Nov 21, 2012 05:28
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Ramsus posted:Would you say it's worth purchasing with the revised rules? I really like the theme but I don't want a bad game.
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Nov 21, 2012 05:36
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That's a good point Pierzak, but maybe if I see a used copy I'll pick it up.
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Nov 21, 2012 05:48
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I'd have to agree, I'm getting really tired of FFG releasing games with such shoddy rules and playtesting, not to mention their infamously bad instruction manuals. Used is a good way to go, it is a fun game and the revised rules are really fun to play. I'd also recommend Betrayal at House on the Hill, it scratches the same itches in about 1/3 of the playtime.
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Nov 21, 2012 06:17
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Session Report: Tonight, my girlfriend Kelly found a diamond ring in the Carcassonne bag as she was pulling out the last tile. After saying yes, she played the tile, and insisted I count up the score so she could brag about how much she beat me by, but I still think I won.
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Nov 21, 2012 06:52
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The Call of the Wild expansion to Mansions of Madness seems to do a lot of things right that the base game did wrong (or at least the first scenario previewed at Arkham Nights does). It feels better balanced without a lot of the base game's obvious exploits, changes the objective system so you don't have the one-in-three-objectives-is-unplayable problem, and does things like adding NPCs and ditching the stupid linear clue chain that should have been done from the start. (Considering that the Forbidden Alchemy expansion was just more-of-the-same garbage and actually seemed to have worse playtesting than the base set, it's good to see some improvement.) If you already have a copy of Mansions of Madness, or can get one used for cheap, then CotW might be worth checking out when it's released.
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Nov 21, 2012 06:56
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LordZoric posted:I'd have to agree, I'm getting really tired of FFG releasing games with such shoddy rules and playtesting, not to mention their infamously bad instruction manuals. What frustrated me in particular about Mansions of Madness was the printing issues. First edition of the base game had several misprinted cards, and more importantly, several errors in the setup diagrams that would make several scenarios unplayable if you didn't catch it. Then came the POD mini-expansions, which have different colored card backs (thus making them easy to differentiate from base cards). Their solution? Each one includes duplicates of the relevant base cards needed; nice of them to do, but it makes setup, teardown, and storage a nightmare. And then there's the big box expansion, Forbidden Alchemy, the first edition of which had a scenario that wanted you to use map tiles that were printed on a two-sided tile piece. They were quick about getting replacements out, sure, but the point is these are things that could have been caught with a single playtest run. St0rmD posted:Session Report: Congratulations! (Not on losing at Carcassonne, of course)
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Nov 21, 2012 07:01
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St0rmD posted:Session Report: Couldn't have put it at the end of a game of Twilight Struggle or Risk (complete with Fortress Australia)? Gotta make her feel like she's earnt it.
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Nov 21, 2012 07:28
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I played the first three training levels of Space Alert tonight and boy was that frantic. I think if we had a little more time we'd probably have beat one. The only problem I had really was the jump in hardness from the test run to simulated mission felt a little too much. The putting cards down blind felt a lot better, but stuff like not being able to swap between levels in the same space of another player and the addition of third phase kind of really hurt. We definitely weren't ready for the third phase we burned through energy carelessly and barely survived the second. We kept going after we failed and ended up with like ten additional damage tokens in the white zone, but were able to take down two of the threats. I'm really looking forward to playing it again soon, but I fear training new people will annoy me more than anything.
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Nov 21, 2012 08:38
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Evil Vin posted:I played the first three training levels of Space Alert tonight and boy was that frantic. I think if we had a little more time we'd probably have beat one. The only problem I had really was the jump in hardness from the test run to simulated mission felt a little too much. The putting cards down blind felt a lot better, but stuff like not being able to swap between levels in the same space of another player and the addition of third phase kind of really hurt. We definitely weren't ready for the third phase we burned through energy carelessly and barely survived the second. We kept going after we failed and ended up with like ten additional damage tokens in the white zone, but were able to take down two of the threats. I'm really looking forward to playing it again soon, but I fear training new people will annoy me more than anything. Yeah, training new people seems like a hurdle to me. It seems like it'd demand quarterbacking. I think a major drawback of the game is that it's only as good as this thread/BL purports if you have a cohesive group that all like it and are equally okay/good at it. My group had two people who are luke-warm about it, 2 who really like it, and one who doesn't like it at all (and being my gf she has a rather large say in what I'll push to play). I'd recommend just telling them it'll be sheer chaos a game, try to listen and figure out what you're going for as it happens, and just lose a moderate 3-phase game with the newbies. The replay should illucidate just why you were doing what you were doing, and how to play better the next game.
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Nov 21, 2012 15:25
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St0rmD posted:Session Report:
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Nov 21, 2012 15:25
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Congrats sir! While you may have lost Carcassonne, I think you won the bigger game.  InShaneee posted:What frustrated me in particular about Mansions of Madness was the printing issues. First edition of the base game had several misprinted cards, and more importantly, several errors in the setup diagrams that would make several scenarios unplayable if you didn't catch it. Then came the POD mini-expansions, which have different colored card backs (thus making them easy to differentiate from base cards). Their solution? Each one includes duplicates of the relevant base cards needed; nice of them to do, but it makes setup, teardown, and storage a nightmare. And then there's the big box expansion, Forbidden Alchemy, the first edition of which had a scenario that wanted you to use map tiles that were printed on a two-sided tile piece. They were quick about getting replacements out, sure, but the point is these are things that could have been caught with a single playtest run. Ugh, I haven't bought any of the PoD expansions because I heard they were all fairly uninteresting and/or unbalanced. Nice to know they also manage to make a game with a horribly long setup and teardown time even longer. You could seriously play a complete game of Betrayal at House on the Hill in the time it takes to set up and take down MoM. And Forbidden Alchemy was a complete fiasco on their part. It went off the market almost as soon as it came out because of the ridiculous printing problems, and even then I heard it suffered from badly designed scenarios. What's other folks' experience been with Descent 2E? Our group unanimously chose to end our game mid-campaign because the Overlord had won only one scenario and it had just become really boring. The heroes steamrolled through every encounter while the Overlord flailed around ineffectually trying to stop them.
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Nov 21, 2012 15:44
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You kinda picked an awful time to stop. Throughout the first half of the game the Overlord is pretty weak, and the heroes will be doing awesome if they have an even remote sense of tactics and a good leveling plan. The trick is to just keep throwing endless cards down and use your monsters abilities over and over again. The second half things change, the Overlord gets more powerful stuff every session and the heroes start feeling a lot more pressure in those big long maps. I say give it another try. Its a really fantastic game.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:03
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We got two scenarios of Act II done, and the heroes just got stronger while I as the Overlord got a few more cards of dubious usefulness. They even let me "respec" and choose new cards to see if that helped. The Warlord cards seem way more powerful than the other two, though Web Trap is pretty useful. I even had all of the conversion kit monsters available, but it still didn't help. I want to play it again sometime, as I'm not a big fan of wasting 50 bucks and I like the dungeon crawly feel of it. I have heard a lot of encouraging things about it from other sources. Sometimes if I find myself hating a product by FFG it turns out I was missing something in their rules. I'll give a look through it again and see if we were doing anything wrong.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:17
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It's difficult to say you're going wrong or something with this game, but plenty of people have a similar issue with the Overlord/Heroes power difference, so you're at least not alone. The only other thing I can say is try being much more aggressive with your units, but I suspect you're already doing that. Just remember your dudes are super expendable for a reason. It really is a really good game, one that perhaps has some balance issues between the two sides, but they got ironed out for us as we played.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:23
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I quickly got burned out on Descent 2, surprisingly because it seemed to offer a lot more (mission-oriented scenarios, campaigns from the get-go, monster skills, unique hero abilities) than the first edition. Maybe it got less dungeon crawly (gently caress roleplaying, I bought D1 for vanilla hack&slash fun), maybe some insane rules that FFG supports provoke too many arguments in our group since realism/common sense is no longer an official option, maybe it got too FFG (yeah, that from someone who bought all the expansion for the first one). One way or another, I'll either go back to D1 entirely, make a 2 -> 1 conversion kit, or translate the good things to old rules and make Descent 1.5.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:24
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:The only other thing I can say is try being much more aggressive with your units, but I suspect you're already doing that. Just remember your dudes are super expendable for a reason.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:31
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nelson posted:I've had success as overlord by concentrating on mission goals rather than combat. Not that I didn't fight, but if I had a choice of doing more damage or slowing them down so they couldn't reach their goal, I chose the latter option. For example, I really liked abilities that tossed the target to a location of my choice. Yeah this is the other critical thing that I just assumed he was already doing. You're goal as the Overlord isn't to Beat The Heroes, its to accomplish whatever your goal is ASAP, the heroes should be playing eternal catchup to you.
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Nov 21, 2012 16:51
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The one scenario I did manage to win was Castle Daerion, the one where you can have your master Ettin just toss the guy you're trying to kill down the hall and pummel him in your spawn room because he's apparently incapable of locomotion. The heroes didn't have a chance on that one. But from what I've read that scenario is totally weighted towards the Overlord anyway. So we were doing something wrong. A rest action only restores fatigue at the end of the turn and not, as we thought, immediately. Now I really want to try it again and see if that helps. I wish Rodney would do FFG stuff on Watch It Played. He's really good at explaining the rules and catching any rules errors he makes. I think he said he'll be doing Descent 2E sometime in the future.
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Nov 21, 2012 17:18
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For what it's worth, having played only three encounters (intro, both halves of A Fat Goblin) I really like Descent 2nd ed. They fixed a lot of my problems with the first game: 1. Enormous setup time. I timed myself when setting up the intro for the second time. It took me seven minutes. Games like Mansions of Madness and Descent 1e took an hour. 2. Enormous game board coupled with millions of bits means it takes up way too much table space. The game board got smaller, though there are still a fair number of bits. 3. Focus on killing the player characters meant the Overlord simply picked the most worthwhile player to kill and dumped everything on them constantly. I really missed some kind of D&D "marking" mechanic where tough characters could protect weaker ones. This problem is gone since player characters are functionally immortal, though the overlord does get rewarded for taking them out. So far I'm really liking the game. For those who think the Overlord doesn't get good cards as he levels, check out the "Reinforce" card. Resurrect an entire group of monsters. (The last encounter I played had 3 groups of monsters, so we're talking about bringing a full third of the dungeon back to life) That's a game-changer.
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Nov 21, 2012 18:30
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Gort posted:For what it's worth, having played only three encounters (intro, both halves of A Fat Goblin) I really like Descent 2nd ed. They fixed a lot of my problems with the first game: Oh yes, Reinforcements is the most powerful Overlord card there is pretty much. Compared to the other two "ultimate" cards, it's the obvious choice. Unfortunately I hadn't gotten enough experience yet to actually buy that card.
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Nov 21, 2012 18:42
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LordZoric posted:Ugh, I haven't bought any of the PoD expansions because I heard they were all fairly uninteresting and/or unbalanced. Nice to know they also manage to make a game with a horribly long setup and teardown time even longer. As for balance, though... the first time I played keeper was in The Silver Tablet POD, and I was meant to stall the investigators. But that proved too difficult because the stall tools the game gives you are too limited and the clue chain is too short compared to the event deck. However, there was also an altar, where I could buy cultists for only one Threat, three spaces away from a central choke point, which was also the Start space. They killed everyone. I've never even come close to seeing all eight base-game investigators killed in one game before, but it happened here in only sixteen turns. Players would spend their turn spawning as a new investigator, only to be immediately be killed by six cultist attacks without getting a proper turn. Abuse the cheap firepower, and the keeper can't lose; don't abuse the cheap firepower, and the keeper can't win. Some "balance". I'll vouch for the Yellow Sign POD as being interesting and balanced, as well as the only scenario (pre-Call of the Wild) where I don't know of at least one broken objective, but I'm biased there so take that with a pile of salt.
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Nov 21, 2012 18:46
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Lottery of Babylon posted:As for balance, though... the first time I played keeper was in The Silver Tablet POD, and I was meant to stall the investigators. But that proved too difficult because the stall tools the game gives you are too limited and the clue chain is too short compared to the event deck. However, there was also an altar, where I could buy cultists for only one Threat, three spaces away from a central choke point, which was also the Start space. They killed everyone. I've never even come close to seeing all eight base-game investigators killed in one game before, but it happened here in only sixteen turns. Players would spend their turn spawning as a new investigator, only to be immediately be killed by six cultist attacks without getting a proper turn. Abuse the cheap firepower, and the keeper can't lose; don't abuse the cheap firepower, and the keeper can't win. Some "balance". I love that keeper action card. It's so weird and thematically comical to think of about 10,000 cultists ducked behind an altar just waiting for their chance to jump on the investigators four or five at a time. The one scenario from the base game that uses it is similarly "use it and win" or "don't use it and don't". The revised rules I posted earlier limit the card to only being used once per turn and it helps out a lot to make the scenario a tighter, tenser experience.
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Nov 21, 2012 18:57
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LordZoric posted:I love that keeper action card. It's so weird and thematically comical to think of about 10,000 cultists ducked behind an altar just waiting for their chance to jump on the investigators four or five at a time. The one scenario from the base game that uses it is similarly "use it and win" or "don't use it and don't". The revised rules I posted earlier limit the card to only being used once per turn and it helps out a lot to make the scenario a tighter, tenser experience. I mean, the base game scenario with it is more "don't use it or don't do anything at all because every other card requires cultists", but yes, Summon Worshippers gives too many monsters too cheaply in any scenario where it appears. Personally, I think the problem isn't that the cultists are too cheap but rather that they're too strong. The idea behind them seems to be that you use them like tokens to pay for other effects. The problem is that they kill things too quickly themselves. I'm planning on testing a version of Summon Worshippers with "All cultists have -2 health value and -1 damage value" as a constant effect, to see if that helps. (The Yellow Sign uses a massively nerfed version of Summon Worshippers. Instead of costing 1, cultists cost 1 + the number of cultists already on the board. Much more reasonable.) Bleached Lizard's fixes have a lot of good ideas in them, but they also make a lot of changes that are unnecessary. Fall of House Lynch is a pretty good scenario whose only real flaw is that 1C doesn't require you to find Clue 1; why add Raise Dead and Pyromaniac to turn it into a completely different scenario? I prefer to keep as much of the original scenario's flavor intact as possible and only make necessary changes, and to be honest most scenarios can be fixed by changing one keeper action (usually Pyromaniac or Summon Worshippers) and some of the objectives.
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Nov 21, 2012 19:06
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