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electrigger posted:So I guess I'll post this trip report on Diskwars. Finally pulled the trigger on this one since I'm such a big fanboy for the Warhammer fantasy universe. It's pretty satisfying. Plays in about 1-2 hours once everyone knows the rules. It is essentially the tabletop wargaming experience stripped down and made to be able to fit in a tube of pogs. Have played two games so far, one where I closely beat one of my gaming friends and another where I lost horribly like 31-5 against my wife who managed to somehow pin 1/3 of my army under a Bloodthirster. Don't let 1/3 of your army get pinned under a Bloodthirster btw. One of us, one of us And yes, it is virtually incredible in an organized play setting, but like I said: you just need to lure in a few friends and convince them to play different armies, and you can be playing two games simultaneously without issue. And that's enough to get a little tournament or a semi-regular meetup league going. Getting a theme helps. And yeah, shooting is a bit... hit or miss. But I think that's okay, if you have a reasonably balanced army, bad shooting rolls won't do you in, and if you have a ranged-based army, probability dictates you will eventually hit a bunch. The upside of that is that as long as you are well-positioned, you're hardly risking anything in exchange. In melee, trades happen more often than not. In ranged combat, you instantly know the results, and don't really get hit in return.
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Dec 23, 2014 10:15
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Does anyone in this thread have a write up for Sentinels of the Multiverse. I'm tentatively curious about the fact that it's a many v AI it but feel like all I've heard is mixed things.
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Dec 23, 2014 10:42
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jivjov posted:Anyone gotten their hands on Mountains of Madness for EH yet? I know I'm gonna pick it up since I love the hell out of Eldritch...but I'm wondering just how awesome it is and if I need to run and get it as soon my FLGS gets it in or if I can wait til New Year. I only just got it but it looks pretty good so far. My main group would rather ditch the sideboard if they can avoid it and just treat it as another Forsaken Lore, and it seems like it can do that pretty easily! I'll post a trip report once I rustle up the players, but that might be after Christmas. 
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Dec 23, 2014 11:08
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Anniversary posted:Does anyone in this thread have a write up for Sentinels of the Multiverse. I'm tentatively curious about the fact that it's a many v AI it but feel like all I've heard is mixed things. I'm sure someone could give a much better write-up, but Pros: Harder to quarterback than most co-ops, good theme that stands out from other co-ops. Cons: Bad art, there's not much decision making since it's usually obvious what card to play, some characters aren't as interesting to play as others. I thought it's a decent game, probably best as a beginner game to ease people in, but it does have some big flaws that keep it from being a great game, and as far as introducing the game to others the theme and simplicity may be canceled out with the terrible art. Don't know how much the expansions fix/alter the gameplay though.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:21
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Mega64 posted:I'm sure someone could give a much better write-up, but Sadly, expansions made it worse. We enjoyed the base game, with all its faults, so I bought everything else. We hated "the everything else". Took me a couple of years, but I finally managed to sell it last week, so glad to be gotten rid of it. My group was okay with the art, but as mentioned many times earlier, Sentinels plays itself. Hero decks have an engine they try to set up while villain cards try to disrupt those engines and while those two compete with multiple hero decks trying to assist each other, you only do the book keeping. And oh... that book keeping, a billion tokens going up and down, up and down all the cards every round. echoMateria fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 11:35
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Anniversary posted:Does anyone in this thread have a write up for Sentinels of the Multiverse. I'm tentatively curious about the fact that it's a many v AI it but feel like all I've heard is mixed things. It's a bad game. The game is very reliant on top decking, with there rarely being more than a couple of worthwhile tactical options for each hero. You spend large amounts of time milling the deck while waiting for the right circumstances to arise, all the while doing mundane mathematics over and over (This guy does x damage, but is modified by this +1, which is affected by that -1, which feeds this other cards +1). Whilst there are a bunch of possible permutations of scenario in the box, suggesting brilliant value, the gameplay runs dry very quickly and all that's left is a dull dull game.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:42
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It's also worth pointing out that the "simplicity" of the system is faked by just moving a lot of the rules to specific cards. It's a game that would have been significantly streamlined with a proper keyword system. Wouldn't make it any less dull, but at least it'd be more consistent.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:51
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Poison Mushroom posted:It's also worth pointing out that the "simplicity" of the system is faked by just moving a lot of the rules to specific cards. It's a game that would have been significantly streamlined with a proper keyword system. Yeah, there's little that couldn't have been done with icons, which would make it easier to 'read the board' and remember modifiers too. However, it wouldn't remove the fact that by mid game, there's a crap tonne of interlinking modifiers in play, and as a result, much boring maths.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:52
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electrigger posted:One, shooting seems like for lack of a better phrase: a crapshoot. Either you make good rolls and you manage to snipe key units off the board and secure a good position, or you roll bad and don't. One thing that really helped me step up my elf game is realising that the ranged troops (maybe except for the dwarven ones) are meant to support melee damage-dealers rather than mop up poo poo on their own. Rolling to kill is rather hard, unless you're aiming at some puny 3 toughness cavalry, but getting a hit at all is rather dependable and very often those 2-3 damage points are all you need for melee/impact troops to finish the enemy on their own. Getting a critical and stopping a bloodthirster is just gravy. Also, don't treat medium range units as ranged troops, you can't really control area with them, just stick them right behind the frontline as a close combat support.
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Dec 23, 2014 12:12
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Any idea why Warhammer: Diskwars died? Outside the shameful treatment it got by SU&SD, I don't see any reason for it to rise and fall so much in such a short time. It was such a neat idea. Wonder if we can blame GW somewhere, like if they didn't like their share of the profits and pulled their license or something. I love blaming GW, they deserve every bit of it.
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Dec 23, 2014 14:06
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Probably the fact it looks really, really stupid and it's somewhat hard to convince people to take it seriously.
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Dec 23, 2014 14:21
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Stelas posted:I probably won't be able to play it until Wednesday - I'm off to binge on Imperial Assault today and see how that's like - but I will be able to take a look inside the expansion. From what I've heard it's solid, I just don't know if it's enough to justify buying a big box expansion or if it risks ruining the things that make EH more desirable than AH. I got it and played it a couple nights ago. The new stuff related to the antarctic board can be cordoned off and kept separate if you really don't want the sideboard. It's easy to get there as you can just roll for assets and if you get 2 successes, fly directly to the first area on the new board. You only use the sideboard if you're fighting the two new gods or draw a particular prelude card, which is an extra setup step to add some additional flavor or another goal that you can pursue. All new adventure cards can be used to advance the active mystery by 1 - which is basically put one of whatever the progress token on the mystery, or reduce the epic monster you have to kill by 2 stamina. 8 new investigators with some deceptively useful abilities, a new resource (focus) which can be gained as an action and used as a reroll or on various encounter cards. New spells including "Get a clue" and banishment to let your spell casters just cast banish and remove up to X success worth of a monster token(more as a flip effect). I feel like it was fairly worthwhile myself, but I really enjoy the game so I may be biased. Sloober fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 14:38
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echoMateria posted:Any idea why Warhammer: Diskwars died? Outside the shameful treatment it got by SU&SD, I don't see any reason for it to rise and fall so much in such a short time. It was such a neat idea. Wonder if we can blame GW somewhere, like if they didn't like their share of the profits and pulled their license or something. I love blaming GW, they deserve every bit of it. I pitched the idea to a friend and he immediately asked me if I wasn't too old to be playing with tazos (Pogs). It's kinda hard to convince someone to play.
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Dec 23, 2014 15:29
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Fat Samurai posted:I pitched the idea to a friend and he immediately asked me if I wasn't too old to be playing with tazos (Pogs). It's kinda hard to convince someone to play. Your friend sounds like kind of a dick, honestly. Sentinels is one of those games that could be a lot better than it is. It could definitely use a keyword system and to move more rules to the rulebook from the cards. I will say that the expansions help it a bit, even if they are more of the same. Shattered Timelines has some neat ideas in it. It's still overlong and finicky as hell, though.
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Dec 23, 2014 15:53
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Echophonic posted:Your friend sounds like kind of a dick, honestly. Sentinels is the only game on the market that really captures the feel of working together in a supergroup, like the Justice League or whatever. This statement includes both Legendary and the DC deckbuilder. The mechanics themselves however are lackluster, and so much of the information is exported to the cards that an experienced player IS going to dominate the team and quarterback. That being said, its a game I can usually get the Munchkin crowd into, so it certainly has a use.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:02
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Fat Samurai posted:I pitched the idea to a friend and he immediately asked me if I wasn't too old to be playing with tazos (Pogs). It's kinda hard to convince someone to play.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:15
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I think that Sentinels is a fine game with a few troublesome villains. Some villains play cards or combos of cards that reset any progress you make against them or create buffers that make damage literally impossible if you're not playing certain heroes. Overall, for the price point, I'd say grab it.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:18
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Anniversary posted:Does anyone in this thread have a write up for Sentinels of the Multiverse. I'm tentatively curious about the fact that it's a many v AI it but feel like all I've heard is mixed things. You will hear a lot of complaints about Sentinels along the lines of "there are very few choices to make" - maybe those people just need to try using a different hero? Some of the heroes are dead simple; some, not so much. You will hear a lot of complaints about Sentinels being "too random". This is true - with some heroes. Someone like the Wraith has Tutor cards, so she gets to look through her own deck; and she gets to manipulate the villain deck. Plus she has a silly amount of card draw, so you'll end up with half of your deck in your hand. You will hear a lot of complaints about Sentinels involving too much bookkeeping, with all the counters and such. This is very true; this is also why you should just play the app instead. You will hear a lot of complaints about Sentinels having bad art. I can't help you there. At least it's better than Munchkin.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:32
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Schizoguy posted:You will hear a lot of complaints about Sentinels having bad art. I can't help you there. At least it's better than Munchkin. Talk about damning with faint praise.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:38
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Fat Samurai posted:I pitched the idea to a friend and he immediately asked me if I wasn't too old to be playing with tazos (Pogs). It's kinda hard to convince someone to play. Tell him you don't want to play tazos, you want to be the master of Tazo Libre.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:51
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Sentinels is the best game for killing any lingering childhood desire to grow up to be a superhero, since it makes you realize it's basically the same as being an accountant.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:58
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I think I broke less than six player Euphoria with the viticulturist. Accumulate some oranges, get a mix of materials from icarite and or tunnel when it becomes linked so that without specific collusion of ALL other players or doubles you get to star every market. Now just go oranges into cards til you win. Is there a name for low interaction games where all players use approximately the same strategy as one another regardless of mechanics? Splendor, Euphoria, Taj Majal, and Vineta all feel like the same thing to me just the first two have better mechanics.
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Dec 23, 2014 17:27
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I enjoyed sentinels but I sold it to get a better game.
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Dec 23, 2014 17:30
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Even playing Sentinels on the app, controlling the maximum number of characters by yourself, there's practically never an interesting decision to make. The mechanics feel incredibly archaic, and almost everything revolves around spitting out or manipulating or nullifying damage numbers. That is, when you're not sitting around waiting for your deck to throw you the card you need to do the one trick your hero does.
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Dec 23, 2014 17:46
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Sentinels was good in one way: it was the game that solidified my goal to know about the content and mechanics of games before purchase rather than simply knowing them to be popular. (Yes, I ostensibly already knew that, but this was a real shock as to how terrible it was.) I played more than a dozen games at PAX this year, and Sentinels was by far the worst despite being the highest ranked on BGG. (I also played Splendor, which is much-more deservedly well-liked, but I don't think it was ranked yet.) I think the unspoken assumption to remember is: board gamers like some terrible crap. e: vvv I looked at games catagorized Super Heroes on BGG, and it's surprising how few there are of merit. Maybe it's just market starvation that make fans like SotM? Magnetic North fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 17:56
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BGG rankings are just as vulnerable to the whims of nerd tastes as anything else. It's important to remember that themes like zombies or Lovecraft or Firefly will significantly inflate the ratings.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:11
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Gumdrop Larry posted:That's kind of a specific facet of the overarching games though. Barring the fact that they're totally different genres, Catan is basically decided at the start of the game. You come into it knowing what the bell curve of 2d6 looks like, and once the board is set up you can fairly easily point out what are basically the objectively best locations for your two starting settlements. After that initial decision though, you're still just at the whim of the dice. So ultimately what you've got is an immediate obvious choice at the start of the game, and then it's luck all the way down after that point. Neither of those are good design elements. I have to say I totally disagree with your assessment of Catan as nothing but luck. Playing from behind is fun in Catan. People will give you favourable deals and you can certainly make comebacks. People will be happy to let you have longest road if you're in third and keeping it away from first. Play smart, and make deals to slow down the winner enough to get back into contention. If you can say "well, I was behind all game, but if that one dev card had come up road-building at the end, I'd have won," or maybe "One more turn and I would have had a shot," then you can feel good about your play. On the other hand, while the luck in Dominion is less obvious, if you are going for the same cards as somebody and you fall behind because of a bad shuffle, you are probably hosed. Now it's true that once in a while in Catan you will get SO screwed that you are obviously done. It happens a lot more in 4-player than in 3-player. That sucks and no doubt about it. That happens in Dominion, too. You get a slow start, your hand gets full of curses, and the only trashing is too slow to fix it. Sucks in both games. Dominion has the advantage that it is a shorter game so you are not screwed for as long. I think the political stuff that some people here don't like is effectively a catch-up mechanic in Catan. Dominion's catch-up mechanic is basically structural, with green cards slowing you down. My overall experience is that you're more likely to get screwed badly by luck in Dominion, but it matters less because it's faster and you can just play another round. Both games have a ton of luck amongst players of equal skill. Dominion definitely has more strategic depth, though. A newbie in Catan will have a shot if they get good advice and good luck, while any newbie in Dominion is going to get trounced, luck or no luck.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:20
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echoMateria posted:Any idea why Warhammer: Diskwars died? Outside the shameful treatment it got by SU&SD, I don't see any reason for it to rise and fall so much in such a short time. It was such a neat idea. Wonder if we can blame GW somewhere, like if they didn't like their share of the profits and pulled their license or something. I love blaming GW, they deserve every bit of it. I playtested this for FFG. The PT rules were an undecipherable pile of paper. The game mechanisms worked better for space (I think the original was star trek). It was a slog to get the group together to work on it as it was not exciting. Props to FFG they did have good back and forth and reached out to us, but ya, our feedback was not of a overall positive nature, and looking at it now, not much changed from the rules we received.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:22
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This is in no way meant as an insult, but if luck is genuinely screwing you over in Dominion as much as it would have in Catan then you and your friends are probably new to Dominion. Your example about getting a slow start and a hand full of curses before you can meaningfully trash means that you either A: ignored important attack cards B: ignored important defense cards or C: ignored important trashing cards at the beginning of the game. There is no round 1 and 2 of Dominion where you don't have a shot at purchasing either a 4 - 3 or a 2 - 5 card set that could help you meaningfully counteract someone else's buys. I have personally experienced slow dominion games where everyone bought thieves (I know, scrub tier) and slowed the game to a screeching halt, but those games stop happening once people understand the game better. There's no counteracting that kind of scenario in Catan. The deal about luck giving new players a shot in Catan is that it also can sink their ship terribly. The political stuff gives players a chance to catch up, but at the cost of drastically increasing the time it takes for the game to actually end as no one wants to give Steve the last brick he needs to win.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:43
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So what's the verdict on Star Wars:Imperial Assault? My brother was really excited to play this (mostly for the AT-ST's and AT-AT's) but we've both never played Descent before so i'd rather not drop that amount of money on something i'm not sure i'm not going to like as well.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:45
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Jimbozig posted:I think the political stuff that some people here don't like is effectively a catch-up mechanic in Catan. This is one of the two (main, valid) objections to Catan, though. Yes, the political thing is a catch-up mechanism in Catan, but A) it's the same catch-up mechanism in every political game, to the point that B) the political game is what Catan is about, possibly even more than any of the rules the game itself has. Why play--or recommend--Catan when it is the same political game as any other political game? Prettier pieces, maybe? Being able to finally really get "I have wood for sheep" jokes?
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Dec 23, 2014 19:13
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:So what's the verdict on Star Wars:Imperial Assault? My brother was really excited to play this (mostly for the AT-ST's and AT-AT's) but we've both never played Descent before so i'd rather not drop that amount of money on something i'm not sure i'm not going to like as well. First impressions seem pretty unanimously positive, with Descent vets citing positive changes to some of the mechanics, as well as ImpAss offering a two-player skirmish mode where players have a point buy system for squads, similar to a full-scale miniatures game (minus all the hobby work of assembling models). There's another thread here for talking about FFG's Star Wars games (except X-Wing which has it's own big thread) that is pretty much just ImpAss discussion right now if you want more info: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3658006
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Dec 23, 2014 19:40
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Impermanent posted:This is in no way meant as an insult, but if luck is genuinely screwing you over in Dominion as much as it would have in Catan then you and your friends are probably new to Dominion. Your example about getting a slow start and a hand full of curses before you can meaningfully trash means that you either A: ignored important attack cards B: ignored important defense cards or C: ignored important trashing cards at the beginning of the game. There is no round 1 and 2 of Dominion where you don't have a shot at purchasing either a 4 - 3 or a 2 - 5 card set that could help you meaningfully counteract someone else's buys. I have personally experienced slow dominion games where everyone bought thieves (I know, scrub tier) and slowed the game to a screeching halt, but those games stop happening once people understand the game better. There's no counteracting that kind of scenario in Catan. If luck is really screwing you over in Catan then you played poorly (or overly riskily). Aside from politics, the core goal of Catan is optimizing your expected return on a roll of the dice. The naive strategy is to maximize your return on high-probability numbers (5-9, usually) and basically ignore the rest. The problem with that strategy is that it often leads players to make bad choices on their initial placement, like playing both settlements on a 6, or on both 5/9/10 points, rather than putting one of their settlements on "bad" numbers. Those plays can work out really well if your game happens to see average or better rolls of those numbers, but Catan is just as willing to short the numbers you doubled up on—it's a high-variance strategy, and it's extremely frustrating when it doesn't work out. The only problem here is that players don't always recognize that they are playing a high-risk, high-reward strategy and blame the game if they played on "good" numbers but the dice are not in their favor. A much more consistent strategy is to start on a lot of different numbers and make it your early-game goal to expand to numbers you don't have access to. Even starting on or expanding to 3s and 11s early on can pay off quite nicely—if you only don't get resources on 2, 12, and 7 you are never poor and it's much harder to hurt you with the robber. In any case, Catan can't be "too random" because the whole point of the game is to manage/mitigate the randomness. I rarely play it any more, but that's more because of the politics and general Catan fatigue than anything else.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:40
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so this started as me responding for info about Sentinels and ended up giving a full overview of the expansions while I was at it. Feel free to page down and skip if you're uninterested. But, since my roommate bought the game and all these expansions, I figured I might as well put my knowledge to use since most of the other posters around here seem to not know much about it.Anniversary posted:Does anyone in this thread have a write up for Sentinels of the Multiverse. I'm tentatively curious about the fact that it's a many v AI it but feel like all I've heard is mixed things. Sentinels is a great game for when you just get home from work, are tired, but want to hang out and do something, but have no problem if your hanging out and doing something involves a lot of fiddly bits. If that sounds enjoyable, then you'll likely enjoy Sentinels. The theme's great and every hero/villain/environment combo presents its own puzzle, although some are nice interesting puzzles with hilarious interaction, and some puzzles are composed entirely of the spite-filled ghost of Professor Layton stabbing your brain with a molten ice pick. Pretty much all of the complaints above are accurate, to be fair. SotM is a game with some stuff to enjoy if the flaws don't bug you, but it's not going to win any awards. The Munchkin comparison is actually fairly accurate. No, seriously. They're both games that get by a lot on theme as opposed to substance. Sentinels has the advantage of having a much stronger theme with more solid gameplay, but they're both in the realm of "casual dick around game". SotM being co-op helps a ton too, because then at least everyone has fun or not at the same measure. The expansions help things some, as long as it's not the first one. The heroes are generally more interesting to play with villains and environments who find more of a middle ground between "pushover" and "you get no fun ever", but seriously, don't get Rook City, not first. If, for some reason, you're still reading this and you want to know which expansions to get, then hey, my roommate has bought all this stuff, might as well put my knowledge to use. Rook City: Comes with two heroes, Mister Fixer and Expatriette, both considered to be fairly weak. They both have a mechanic of needing two differing kinds of cards to line up in their hand in order to excel or even really function beyond boring damage, but are saddled with low amount of draw and search. It's a real shame, because when they do work they actually have genuinely fun and interesting decisions to make about which cards and powers to use. The rest of the set, though...Of the four villains, The Matriarch and The Chairman are ball crushingly difficult, with both of them sharing the concept of having a card that pops out their entire discard pile to murder you, Spite is extremely boring, as his endgame involves him no longer drawing cards but doing repeated effects, and Plague Rat is interesting, as he infects your heroes, giving him and them a power boost but causing them to self damage. Both environments, Pike Industrial Complex and the eponymous Rook City have a tendency to ruin your fun at the drop of a hat through either mass unavoidable damage or just plain stopping you from playing. Skip for a long time. Infernal Relics: A massive step forward. Contains easily the two most interesting and fun heroes to use in the entire game. Argent Adept is basically like playing a mini game of Dominion where you're trying to figure out how to best line up the cards in order to execute massive combos to support your team, while Nightmist uses both her hand and life total as resources to handle a bit of everything, with ways to control both. If all you've ever played is the base game, these two are a giant breath of fresh air. The villains are pretty good, too. Akash'Bhuta is like a JRPG boss fight slugfest, with minions constantly popping out, and killing them eats away at her massive life total. The Ennead are a mirror match, an opposed team of villains whose effects all work together. Apostate is a little unfortunate, as his gimmick involves pulling a bunch of artifacts out and abusing their effects, but his fights vary from "I got a +1 damage toy at the start" to "I get a free card every time you draw a card" without much inbetween. Gloomweaver is an otherwordly zombie lord who I'm not sure has ever been lost to. The two environments are great. Realm of Discord is filled with a bunch of actually interesting random effects, while Tomb of Anubis is a minigame all on its own, with traps to defeat, treasure to grab, and a big bad to be afraid of. Definitely pick up. Notably, Infernal Relics almost always comes as a bundle with Rook City now. It's worthwhile and you can always use the moderately interesting Rook City heroes and skip the villains and environments until you feel like tackling the unfun stuff. Shattered Timeline: Is somewhat between the first two expansions. The two heroes are Omnitron-X and Chrono Ranger. They've both got some interesting ideas going on, but they suffer from being almost but not quite actually compelling to play. Chrono Ranger puts out bounties on enemy targets and then guns them down with a bunch of different kind of guns, while Omnitron-X assembles robot components to fire off a bunch of effects each turn. Trouble is that both of these heroes work towards a sort of ideal state to play in, leading to a low amount of diversity going on. The villains are where this expansion is at...ish. Kismet throws around a bunch of luck themed card and puts jinxes on the heroes, but has the defenses of a wet paper bag in a blizzard so her gimmick gets ignored for violence. La Capitan steals your cards and summons crew from across time and space in what should be an interesting fight against a mob with a strong leader but actually results in the board game version of gear-checking an FPS player on if both a shotgun and an assault rifle were brought (But not actually, of course. The hero with those cards is hosed massively by La Capitan). The Dreamer is actually interesting, functioning as an escort mission where you have to keep a little girl safe from the environment while she summons all sorts of nightmares to kill. Iron Legacy is what my roommate and I term the JRPG bonus boss. He's almost exactly like the PC Legacy with a lot of his cards being dark versions of the player cards, with a lot more punching tossed in. He hits hard and fast and brutual and ignores a lot of the common tricks heroes can use to win. If nothing else, he's an excellent lesson in why Superman is not a boss in video games. The environments are The Block, this game's version of Arkham Asylum, with infighting prisoners and agents, and the Time Cataclysm includes a card called Surprise Shopping Trip. Worthwhile, but not at first Vengeance: If you're still reading for some reason you're probably noticing a pattern. Vengeance is Good, and this starts off by having five heroes instead of the usual two in an expansion. On top of that? They're all fun. K.N.Y.F.E. is all about blistering kill before dying offense. She's the most boring in the expansion, but she's a damage dealer that's not too dull or overly complex to play and I can appreciate that design space. Setback is all about deliberately causing bad things to happen to yourself, building up a pool of unlucky tokens, and then expending those tokens on powerful effects. The Sentinels are a team of four heroes who support each other. They're a bit straightforward but have some cool ideas in them. The Naturalist is a shapeshifter who can shift between three different animals at will depending on the needs of his cards and the game going on. He's always got something to do and contribute with. Parse is a pure support character who specializes in controlling the opposing decks and setting everything right for the rest of the team. Vengeance only has one villain but it's a cool one. The Vengeful Five are a set of five teamed villains, each with their own deck. They all work together and lead to some fun fights. Unfortunately, they can be easy for people with functioning brains (players can focus fire reliably, the villains can't, you do the math). The environments are also a little easy. Freedom Tower is the hero stronghold and as such is mostly benign with a little bit of help mixed in. The Mobile Defense Platform should be dangerous with a card that states that everyone dies if it goes down, but that's only due to HP damage so instead the deck just kind of sits there and does nothing. Excellent, but almost entirely due to the heroes. So what's the final view? Sentinels is a flawed game with some neat things in it. I enjoy it because of the cool ideas thereof, not because of the finished product being a cohesive whole. Since I've been making video game comparisons this whole time I'll continue with that. It's the Final Fantasy X-2 of board games, a product with some neat ideas and executions littered about brought down by a lot of not so exciting side stuff. I would love to see a game with the basic gameplay concept of Sentinels (everyone gets a deck representing a Thing that all play differently, no building or customization required) but writ in a way that wouldn't bring it down. Having a player play the opposing side would help a lot, and providing more options than "draw a card, play a card, use an already played card" at the core would help a lot. As it stands, Sentinels is at its best when the players can overcome its passivity to go and do what they want, and it's at its worst when the players are compelled to follow the game engine's dictating instead. It's still a better comic book game than Legendary or DC, though.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:50
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Yeah I'll agree with pretty much all of that. I like Sentinels a lot, I love the art and I think it pretty much nails the aesthetic, but I've also gotten pretty bored with it and I'm going to be selling mine as soon as I can find someone to buy it.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:00
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Thanks for all the write ups on Sentinels! Sounds like its a little more flawed than I expected and has me putting it in the do not purchase category; but maybe play if someone has it.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:13
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Impermanent posted:This is in no way meant as an insult, but if luck is genuinely screwing you over in Dominion as much as it would have in Catan then you and your friends are probably new to Dominion. Your example about getting a slow start and a hand full of curses before you can meaningfully trash means that you either A: ignored important attack cards B: ignored important defense cards or C: ignored important trashing cards at the beginning of the game. There is no round 1 and 2 of Dominion where you don't have a shot at purchasing either a 4 - 3 or a 2 - 5 card set that could help you meaningfully counteract someone else's buys. I have personally experienced slow dominion games where everyone bought thieves (I know, scrub tier) and slowed the game to a screeching halt, but those games stop happening once people understand the game better. There's no counteracting that kind of scenario in Catan. It's quite possible for your opponent to have purchased two witches and given you two curses before you get your first chance to buy one. On a board without trashing, that's basically impossible to come back from. It doesn't happen very often (and yes, you could always just veto boards with cursing and no trashing), but neither does it happen very often in Catan that you go half an hour without rolling a 6 or a 9. I've seen both. On a smaller scale, both games usually come down to luck one way or another. I can't buy the last province this turn, but I pick up my next hand (with no shuffle), see that I could, only to watch my opponent grab it. If those hands were reversed, I'd have won. If a 5 or a 10 comes in the next three rolls, I get my wheat and I win. Otherwise I lose. Those are absolutely the typical endings of those games. Now I'm thinking about what Dominion would be like if you didn't have to shuffle but could always arrange your cards in the order you want. Very slow, probably. Chancellor would be completely broken. Would you like Catan better if it was played with a pack of 36 cards with a 2d6 distribution that got reshuffled whenever they ran out? I've seen that done and it totally eliminates the worst case scenarios luck-wise without eliminating all luck. You'll get your 9's eventually.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:14
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Nothing you have said addresses the central problem with Catan. In most games, both bad luck and bad choices can result in you losing. In Catan, bad luck and bad decisions can result in you being unable to play the game.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:30
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Anniversary posted:Thanks for all the write ups on Sentinels! Sounds like its a little more flawed than I expected and has me putting it in the do not purchase category; but maybe play if someone has it. Smart choice. If you're still jonesing for something superheroey, Villainy and Heroes Wanted are two recent games that actually have potential to be good games about superheroes. They're too new to have a real consensus on them, but I'd certainly give them a whirl.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:58
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quote:If those hands were reversed, I'd have won. If a 5 or a 10 comes in the next three rolls, I get my wheat and I win. Otherwise I lose. Those are absolutely the typical endings of those games. But it kind of ignores how we got there. Personally, the big problems I see in Catan: 1. The initial settlement placement draft thing is incredibly swingy - and often person C, picking last, will essentially be choosing whether person A or B will start with a big advantage (by having lots of space, or being trapped without good expansion options). Often this decision is going to be hard to predict, but will have a huge effect on the game. 2. The randomness creates a lot of hard thresholds through the game. 1 more brick and you can build a town... but don't get it and someone else wins the race to a spot and you're screwed. In many other games, randomness makes for smaller swings (eg. I have to buy the 4 cost OK thing instead of the 5 cost thing I wanted). Here they're big, and... 3. ...those thresholds are magnified through snowballing. People in the lead get more income, and drastically more options on what to buy and where to expand. You don't get the kind of trades you see, in say Agricola where buddy got to grow family first, but at least that meant I got the big pile of wood or whatever. Winners "take all" way too much in Catan - and don't get any real extra pressure except via... 4. ...politics! Because the deck is so stacked in leaders' favor, for the game to work at all people have to play politically - and that leads to wanky VP hiding, n-way ties at 9 points, and all the other boredom of a political game. What would I change in Catan? 1. Some different way of managing expansion. As it stands, especially as you add players, the game quite often becomes a land-grab race, and those thresholds (which are often completely out of the players control... you just have to hope you get wood) dictate far too much of the outcome. Lots of games have found a way to manage this kind of resource conflict in area based games (eg. you can build past me, but for an extra cost or something). 2. Tune down the politics. Change to a Glen More market-based-trading sort of model. Trading can be fun... but it slows down the game and distracts from the part of the game that's not a political screwfest. Have the robber be less localized screwage and more about changing the game for everyone - eg. when the robber is on this spot, that means everyone pays more to build roads (or whatever). People being able to tune the environment is fun interaction. Deciding to screw Bob is lame in a multiplayer game. 3. Move purchases to some kind of market/auction or something - or limit players to one purchase a turn and always have "something" available. This means players way behind aren't completely snowballed out of existence - they have options; maybe they don't get what they wanted, but they at least get a dev card or something. (eg. Look at how Machi Koro, a game with many similar mechanics, functions here). If the intent is to have this game be about risk management, then let that actually work by giving trailing players the kind of "Hail Mary" options that might luck them back into the game. Catan was a very important game, and a lot of the innovation in modern games can likely be traced back to people looking at Catan and seeing what worked and didn't. But I don't see much reason to recommend it in this day and age. quote:Nothing you have said addresses the central problem with Catan. In most games, both bad luck and bad choices can result in you losing. In Catan, bad luck and bad decisions can result in you being unable to play the game. Well yeah, this. jmzero fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 22:04
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