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SWNomad posted:I just tried [b]Shadows over Camelot[\b] as well with 7 then 5 people Thursday night and I agree with the intensity of having to make bad choices. In my experience, I find it best to just play the game normally as the traitor. Try to win, be helpful, and work together. This really frustrates and confuses my group and they begin accusing each other falsely. If there are five black swords down then go ahead and accuse someone else to claim the win. In the end, if everyone wins and you're the traitor who cares? You still played a good game. I like getting the traitor card for this very reason. It's not like Battlestar where there can be multiple traitors who unknowingly work against each other.
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Feb 11, 2013 05:32
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Gabbleduck posted:I really, really enjoy this game but feel that I'm getting the hang of it. As far as war games go, I've been interested in getting Chaos in the Old World but I think it'll probably have players at each others throats a bit more and lack the scumbag alliances that occur in GoT. It seems like you've already decided against it for other reasons, but I just feel like I should point out that Chaos in the Old World really isn't a war game except by the loosest definitions. It's actually a lot more euro-inspired than it looks at first glance, and there's no real concept of movement since your pieces can be picked up and moved around. Three of the four players in any given game will also be actively avoiding combat most of the time. Still a great game, just not really anything like GoT or similar games.
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Feb 11, 2013 06:11
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Hearing a lot of talk about AP and I'm wondering what it is. Is this some board game term? The only things that a quick google is showing that seem relevant is something related to high blood pressure and Autistic Psychopathy - which, not gonna lie, seems pretty boardgames relevant.
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Feb 11, 2013 11:13
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Analysis paralysis, the inability to quickly come to a decision between a limited set of decisions.
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Feb 11, 2013 11:24
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It's usually accompanied by people leaning on their fist and going "Hmmm..." Think on everyone else's turn, and act on your own, is really the only way round this.
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Feb 11, 2013 13:03
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Android mixed with AP is a horrible experience (Outside of the normally somewhat underwhelming and confusing experience). EDIT: Also it looks like Galaxy Trucker Anniversary Edition is no where in stock at all. 
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Feb 11, 2013 13:50
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Yoshimo posted:It's usually accompanied by people leaning on their fist and going "Hmmm..." In the case of my AP prone wife, it's usually accompanied by her staring at a hand of cards and say "poo poo" over and over again.
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Feb 11, 2013 14:00
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Fox of Stone posted:Has anyone here tried Kingdom Builder? It's a new game I saw in the LGS just last week and apparently won ~Spiel des Jahres 2012~. It says it's a zone control and map/tile-laying game and my friends and I love dicking each other over Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride so will it be similar to those? Most people (including me) would say SDJ award was probably not deserved. That being said, I'm a big fan of Kingdom Builder. It's reminiscent of Carcassonne, TtR not so much. I'm a fan of light Euros, and KB does it well. What I like about KB: - It's very simple to explain. - It's got varied maps, powers, and winning conditions every game, which prevents memorized "optimum strategy" plays. - It's very "turn-centric". By that I mean the game limits where you can place your settlements each turn, which means you can't plan out 15 turns in advance, and instead focus on making the best of each individual turn. - Personally, I like it as a 2 player game as well as a 3-4 player game. As for dicking over other players, that really only happens in 4 player games of it, and even then the dickery is limited even compared to TtR. A lot of people don't care for it, citing a relative lack of depth. I'd agree it isn't a "deep" game, but I like that. I think it's an interesting game each play, despite not requiring repeated plays to understand nuances. Crackbone fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 14:10
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Yoshimo posted:It's usually accompanied by people leaning on their fist and going "Hmmm..." Ah, so my brother, who will insist on taking at least a geological age on any decision while there is usually one painfully obvious course of action available and he will sit there and think while I get madder and madder and end up trying to take the move for him. On the other hand, he wins like 90% of any board game we play, so he must be doing something right.
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Feb 11, 2013 14:25
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Doodmons posted:Ah, so my brother, who will insist on taking at least a geological age on any decision while there is usually one painfully obvious course of action available and he will sit there and think while I get madder and madder and end up trying to take the move for him. On the other hand, he wins like 90% of any board game we play, so he must be doing something right. I'm of the opinion that, if he's harming the enjoyment of the other players, he's doing something wrong. But that's just me; I admit to be the impatient type when it comes to games.
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Feb 11, 2013 14:35
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Kingdom Builder is an easy, short game. It's pretty decent but not amazing. You can try it out at Brettspielwelt against friends or pubbie Germans that are way too good at it. I actually ordered it for my group recently as another filler game along Carcassonne. We only played it online a few times so far and nobody hated it.
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Feb 11, 2013 14:36
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Doodmons posted:Ah, so my brother, who will insist on taking at least a geological age on any decision while there is usually one painfully obvious course of action available and he will sit there and think while I get madder and madder and end up trying to take the move for him. On the other hand, he wins like 90% of any board game we play, so he must be doing something right. A friend who's good at boardgames is like this. If we start talking amongst ourselves while he's thinking, he'll sometimes get distracted and it'll take even longer. When we played Twilight Imperium yesterday, he brought his tablet with him so he had something to do while we were taking our turns. Thank god he forgot his charger, so he was forced to pay attention to whatever we were doing. It does show that he only really starts planning his turn when it's time to take it, instead of planning ahead like everyone is tries to do. On the other hand, it would have been hilarious if he missed something crucial and started whining about it. About once/twice a game he forgets something and tries to wriggle into retro-actively having done it, cause it was obvious at the time. Too bad it wasn't obvious enough to have actually done it!  Yet the guy's the only friend I have who is crazier about boardgames than I am, so we still play a lot together.
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Feb 11, 2013 15:17
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We have one guy like that and the only reason why he wins is because other people tell him what to do at the expense of their own strategy. It's pretty frustrating and I don't play with him anymore.
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Feb 11, 2013 15:46
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Tekopo posted:We have one guy like that and the only reason why he wins is because other people tell him what to do at the expense of their own strategy. It's pretty frustrating and I don't play with him anymore. Threw a guy out of my meetup for this. Told him that he needed to play games that were less complex and didn't require everyone to play the game for him. He got mad and left. Then came back six months later and apologized. Realized that he was too concerned about winning and needed to relax some and let the game come to him. People somehow think they should fully understand every game they play; had this happen this past weekend. It's fine not to understand how to play a game well during the first play!!!!
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Feb 11, 2013 15:53
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Tekopo posted:We have one guy like that and the only reason why he wins is because other people tell him what to do at the expense of their own strategy. It's pretty frustrating and I don't play with him anymore. I don't mind some of that as long as it's not always the same person. Learning games is fun, and sharing game insights is fun. The first playthrough in particular is a great time to share. It's not cool to have that on an ongoing basis with games people know, though. "Relax and let the game come to you" is a great way of putting it, too. I can tell a game is a keeper for me when it comes to me even when I'm not playing it.
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Feb 11, 2013 16:12
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Managed to finish a game of Dominion with one player at a negative score through early and constant use of Witch/Saboteur keeping their decks thick with Curses and removing any actual valuable cards faster than they could be purchased. No one wanted to play after that game.
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Feb 11, 2013 16:48
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homullus posted:I don't mind some of that as long as it's not always the same person. Learning games is fun, and sharing game insights is fun. The first playthrough in particular is a great time to share. It's not cool to have that on an ongoing basis with games people know, though. I don't mind newbies and we often try to introduce 18XX to new people, but he would do this for every game: at some point maybe he needed to realise that either complex games weren't for him or that he needed a different hobby.
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Feb 11, 2013 16:59
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zerox147o posted:Managed to finish a game of Dominion with one player at a negative score through early and constant use of Witch/Saboteur keeping their decks thick with Curses and removing any actual valuable cards faster than they could be purchased. No one wanted to play after that game. I had a particularly miserable game the other night, playing with Dark Ages. Started with a 4/3 split, took Marauders for the 4... one of the opponents started 5/2 and took Rogue for 5. Hit my Marauders before I could play it (while missing everyone else). Bought another one, but she managed to get her Rogue twice before I could draw it, first picking up my first Marauders and then, wouldn't you know it, hitting my second one. Meanwhile, someone else had bought Witch. So between losing most of the cards I'd managed to purchase and getting spammed with Curses and Ruins from my own loving Marauders, I was doomed from the start.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:03
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I was looking over my collection of games recently and realized something. I don't play enough of my older games. You would think board games have a very extended ability to be replayed. To compare, it's hard to go back to a 20 year old PC game--good luck even getting that to run on a new OS! A board game, on the other hand, can be visited after 20 years and still keep its integrity. Yet I find too often that I'm shelving games that I got less than a couple of years ago and not returning to them. I haven't played my copy of Caylus in a year or more. Some games have been left behind even longer than that, despite my affection for them (a few great Dungeon Twister expansions come to mind). I think partially to blame for this negligence is the the constant rush of shiny, new games out there. Not only the ones coming out each year, but even moreso the thousands of good games out there that wait to be explored. With so many games, it's hard to sometimes focus in on a few great ones. So lately I've started wanting to revisited some lesser-played titles on my shelf. Does anyone else have thoughts on, well, having so many games out there that only a few get repeated plays? It's kind of a silly thing to bemoan, since it does signify how great of a selection of games are out there. Still, it seems like there's a school of thought ("Cult of the New?") where games are played only a handful of times before getting shelved or sold. With board games' potential for timelessness, it seems a rather odd way of thinking.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:12
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Played Twilight Struggle for the first time last night to see what the hubba-loo was about and got my rear end handed to me by the 4th turn  I can see why people like it, but #1 seems a stretch. I want to read up on some strats and play again though, because it seems like a game where you need to know the deck to really shine. I went heavy in Europe and that didn't work out too well for me. Also played my 5th game of Mage Knight and finally got to see a city defeated! Wish the turn timer hadn't run out to see if I could have taken on that rear end in a top hat blue city.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:22
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Trynant posted:I was looking over my collection of games recently and realized something. I don't play enough of my older games. You would think board games have a very extended ability to be replayed. To compare, it's hard to go back to a 20 year old PC game--good luck even getting that to run on a new OS! A board game, on the other hand, can be visited after 20 years and still keep its integrity. There's a group at the store I go to where everyone splits the cost of games, plays until they're bored, then donates the game to the shop. It works well considering they're mostly middle-aged men who can only play a few times a week at the shop. At the most the six or seven of them spend $10 a month each on a new game.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:25
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djfooboo posted:Played Twilight Struggle for the first time last night to see what the hubba-loo was about and got my rear end handed to me by the 4th turn For strategy, I learnt all I know from Twilight Strategy. Also, what side were you on? It's usually never a good idea to go too heavily in Europe as the US although it can work for the USSR, but only if you have the right cards at the start. The real battleground in the Early War is Asia, I feel, although the Middle East is viable for the US if they get lucky (although it turns into a trainwreck for the US in the Mid War period).
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Feb 11, 2013 17:27
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Everybody's guilty of it. I think part of it is games are relatively inexpensive - at ~$40 a game, it's easy to justify getting something new and shiny. Realistically, you should ask yourself why you're not playing your old games? Is it because you're always buying new stuff? Is it because you're just not having fun with the old game? Is it because your group isn't interested in the genre? You touched on something we talked about earlier, which is games have really become treated as disposable products, and as a result you see a lot of games that just aren't tested or developed for long-term play. Kickstarter isn't helping either when you can bypass the traditional gatekeeping methods and poo poo out something that's shiny but a gameplay disaster. In a way we've been trained to expect a half-dozen plays max out of something before moving on. Crackbone fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 17:29
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djfooboo posted:Played Twilight Struggle for the first time last night to see what the hubba-loo was about and got my rear end handed to me by the 4th turn Knowing the deck is useful, but going heavy anywhere if it can't secure a win is a mistake. Europe is 1 of 3 scoring regions in the Early War, so neglecting >=2/3s of the potential points is going to cause a loss no matter what.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:30
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Trynant posted:So lately I've started wanting to revisited some lesser-played titles on my shelf. Does anyone else have thoughts on, well, having so many games out there that only a few get repeated plays? It's kind of a silly thing to bemoan, since it does signify how great of a selection of games are out there. Still, it seems like there's a school of thought ("Cult of the New?") where games are played only a handful of times before getting shelved or sold. With board games' potential for timelessness, it seems a rather odd way of thinking. I kinda have this problem, but sometimes you just outgrow certain games or else other games are out there with the same design niche but more satisfying gameplay. Like I would never play Stone Age when I could just play Caylus instead. There's also the issue of games that you personally like but nobody else does, which in my case would also somehow be Caylus, so they never get played even though they are not, by a personal estimation, "bad games." Then Netrunner came out and the only games I've played since have been Netrunner and Resistance: Avalon. Oh, and like one game of Blood Bowl Team Manager, which is a fun game but holy hell does it suck being first, and it sucks that the first player has to be first again during the Blood Bowl. Is that a legitimate balance concern or was it just my first impression experience with the game?
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Feb 11, 2013 17:34
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Tekopo posted:Also, what side were you on? It's usually never a good idea to go too heavily in Europe as the US although it can work for the USSR, but only if you have the right cards at the start. I was  I will look into that website, for my first game I didn't have a clear goal since I was mainly interested in learning mechanics, not strategy.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:36
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Yeah, I can't see how you would make inroads in Europe as the US: the rule of thumb usually is that unless you are using an event to help you gain control of an area, you don't want to get into influence wars with people because it'll always cost you more to break influence than for the opponent to get it back.
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Feb 11, 2013 17:38
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Crackbone posted:Everybody's guilty of it. I think part of it is games are relatively inexpensive - at ~$40 a game, it's easy to justify getting something new and shiny. I've been thinking more about this and I think that learning curve and availability of experienced opponents are issues too. For one thing, people like getting better at things, and most games have learning curves that make it easy to get much better at a game over the first few plays as you work out the basic strategy... but once the low-hanging fruit has been picked, subsequent gains in skill come more slowly. So while you could keep playing the same game and getting incrementally better at it, if you want instant ego gratification, buying a new game lets you enjoy that rapid early acceleration again. For another, skill at a game is only useful in as far as you need it to beat your opponents. When you own a game, you end up playing it more than most of the people you have available to play it with, since you probably play it with multiple different people, and they only play it with you, unless they know someone else who owns it. As time passes, then, you pull ahead of your group, and at a certain point, you're sufficiently far ahead that you win most of the time anyway, and don't enjoy much benefit from further improving your strategy - you may not even notice that you're getting better. So, for most games, the situation becomes one where you've become a the equivalent of a 1200 Elo chess player while your friends are all still between 1000-1100, so you can beat them all most of the time and feel like you've "mastered" the game, because without any examples of stronger play to look at, you've neither got the incentive nor the opportunity to press on much further. So you stick your chess set on the shelf and take up backgammon instead because at least that way you and your friends are back on equal footing again for a while.
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Feb 11, 2013 18:13
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Tekopo posted:We have one guy like that and the only reason why he wins is because other people tell him what to do at the expense of their own strategy. It's pretty frustrating and I don't play with him anymore. My guy is a lot better then, cause he knows how to play the games as fast as I do, just sometimes loses focus of small matters. It's annoying at times, but we're used to it and it's still fun to play with him.
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Feb 11, 2013 18:19
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I'm probably going to play Dominant Species tonight, any general tips and first time mistakes to watch out for. I'm guessing most of the people I'm playing with have played it already.
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Feb 11, 2013 18:53
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systran posted:I'm probably going to play Dominant Species tonight, any general tips and first time mistakes to watch out for. I'm guessing most of the people I'm playing with have played it already. Don't pull out all of your hair.
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Feb 11, 2013 18:55
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quote:So while you could keep playing the same game and getting incrementally better at it, if you want instant ego gratification, buying a new game lets you enjoy that rapid early acceleration again This is certainly the case for me, though it sounds unflattering when you say it. I find a lot of joy in figuring out the basics of a new game and quickly improving. Some of the fun is about this kind of personal skill growing, but it's also about group discovery of the properties of a game - in a lot of ways we feel like we're exploring new space together. We all remember the clear-in-retrospect blunders - the times where a certain tactic gets an instant, crushing rebuttal and we think "well, that'll never happen again" (or, conversely, a strategy is so effective that everyone thinks "well, guess that's what we're all aiming for now"). Your first plays are more spectacular, varied, and interesting. I still like, say, Eminent Domain, but at this point we've established pretty well what an effective strategy looks like (and doesn't look like), and too often it feels like everyone's going for exactly the same thing. It's like the difference between UFC 1 and UFC 417. In early MMA, everyone has their own idea of what fighting looks like - and most of them are very, very wrong. Some of the best fights were between two "wrongs", who were pretty much working out how to fight while doing it. In modern MMA, the standard of competition is absurdly higher - but the fights are also much more similar and predictable. Lots of modern games don't really work at that higher level. Too often, the kinds of things that distinguish between two good players are uninteresting skills like memorization. Or, even in low-politics games, you'll find politics deciding too many games once everyone is "pretty good". Or everyone will groan when a lucky card draw decides a close game, again. This is a negative for a game, but doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad design I don't think. Lots of players will never see that kind of play anyway - and in the interim there's often lots of fun to be had. If a game only really lasts 10 plays... at this point that's OK with me. quote:...he knows how to play the games as fast as I do... AP issues... etc.. And this, unfortunately, is often the other side of the sword. If a game "works" at a high level of play, that often means it rewards careful and extensive consideration. I love Tigris & Euphrates, but every time we have a run of it I remember why we quit playing the last time: the game really, really rewards taking a little more time thinking out your turn. Sure the game is decided by strategy and tactics and reading players and other good stuff - but in practice it feels too often it's decided by "who took the most time thinking"... and that really doesn't lead anywhere satisfactory. If we try to rush things, it feels like we should just play something else instead - but if we dig our teeth into each move, the game is horribly boring with more than 2 players. jmzero fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 19:08
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In Chaos in the Old World, if Slanesh casts Perverse Infiltration to put a corruption token in a region (and it's Slanensh's only token), and Nurgle then casts the spell that deletes a corruption token to remove it, and the region is then ruined, do you say Slaneesh gets the ruiner's point bonus? I'm kind of inclined to say yes because the errata just say anybody who placed a token in the round gets the ruiner's bonus. Doesn't say the token has to be there at time of ruination.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:10
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systran posted:I'm probably going to play Dominant Species tonight, any general tips and first time mistakes to watch out for. I'm guessing most of the people I'm playing with have played it already. The main thing is to understand that the 'score' is not the score, the board position is. So no panicking if you see someone way ahead in the middle of the game, they'll come back to the middle of the pack.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:17
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systran posted:I'm probably going to play Dominant Species tonight, any general tips and first time mistakes to watch out for. I'm guessing most of the people I'm playing with have played it already. I've only played once, but the event cards (or whatever they were called) are absolutely murderous. Try to prioritize getting these, and then spend the rest of your actions to not get hosed by them in return. It very much feels like a 2 steps forward, 1d2 steps back sort of game, but that is some of the appeal. Speaking of AP, this is a game that really gets hurt by it, since it can stretch the game out to like 4 hours. It's a good game, but if any of the players are prone to AP, find something else to do because it is just not worth sitting through.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:28
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GrandpaPants posted:Oh, and like one game of Blood Bowl Team Manager, which is a fun game but holy hell does it suck being first, and it sucks that the first player has to be first again during the Blood Bowl. Is that a legitimate balance concern or was it just my first impression experience with the game? It's definitely concerned my group when we play, but it also opens up plays on the ball before anyone else which can be useful if your opponents aren't holding a bunch of two pass icon players. Plus you can cherrypick the best highlight for fans in the Blood Bowl round and have an outside chance to get into three/four highlights if you don't care about winning the Blood Bowl, so I don't think it's inherently a horrible position. You just need to take full advantage of what you get out of being first and understand that you can easily lose important matchups unless you overcommit.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:29
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GrandpaPants posted:I've only played once, but the event cards (or whatever they were called) are absolutely murderous. Try to prioritize getting these, and then spend the rest of your actions to not get hosed by them in return. It very much feels like a 2 steps forward, 1d2 steps back sort of game, but that is some of the appeal. My favorite memory of Dominant Species is taking all five or so domination stages on one turn, then ending with domination in only one area. Then the cards let me claim domination on other areas and it just cascaded into one glorious turn. I still lost, of course, but it was one hell of a turn.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:34
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systran posted:I'm probably going to play Dominant Species tonight, any general tips and first time mistakes to watch out for. I'm guessing most of the people I'm playing with have played it already. One big actual rules mistake I made was not seeing that you score every tile at the end of the game. It's a little rule that is somewhat easy to miss by a fool like me.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:36
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jmzero posted:Too often, the kinds of things that distinguish between two good players are uninteresting skills like memorization. This is what kills games like Scrabble for me. I love words and know more than most people, but I'll lose nine times out of ten to a Scrabble fiend who's memorized the lists of obscure currencies formed with two letters.
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Feb 11, 2013 20:13
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SuperKlaus posted:In Chaos in the Old World, if Slanesh casts Perverse Infiltration to put a corruption token in a region (and it's Slanensh's only token), and Nurgle then casts the spell that deletes a corruption token to remove it, and the region is then ruined, do you say Slaneesh gets the ruiner's point bonus? I'm kind of inclined to say yes because the errata just say anybody who placed a token in the round gets the ruiner's bonus. Doesn't say the token has to be there at time of ruination. The game is all about phases. During the normal phase where things happen and corruption gets put out things like that can happen. However it wasn't the resistance/ruination phase yet so that's not important. It doesn't matter that there was a token there. If his token was taken away you don't put a mental note that his corruption was there since that'd basically make Nurgle's spell pointless if you did. If it was removed before the resistance/corruption phase then it was removed. For instance if there was just enough corruption to ruin a region and somehow a token was removed putting it below the ruin requirements then it wouldn't be ruined since that phase hasn't come up yet even though it went past the threshold. Only the resistance/ruination phase is when you actually catalog and book keep the numbers for corruption and resistance. Also Blue is probably the best Chaos power. The Rats from the expansion are kind of horrible but they're good in that they're sneaky as poo poo. edit::Played Shadows over Camelot recently and man is that a weird game. Maybe we weren't playing it right but we were actually forcing black swords to pop up just so that we'd fill up the round table since we already have 7 white swords on there. Really ruins the theme since we actively wanted to lose things like Lancelot armor. Does jousting really take a full 4 turns to complete? It's like a rudimentary form of BSG and Pandemic. Buckwheat Sings fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 20:27
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