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Poison Mushroom posted:I guess the point I'm driving at is that I don't trust SU&SD to review beyond the scope of their own personal tastes any more. Good look finding worthwhile reviews on anything if that's your sticking point.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:50
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Dirk the Average posted:Yeah, Roll for the Galaxy is a lot of fun. Most of my games end with someone filling up all 12 spots on the table, since it's easy to get those spots and sometimes harder to get a good produce/consume engine going. Reassign powers are amazing, and the right 6-cost developments make a huge difference in scoring. I think the thing pushing the game end shorter might be me. I'm a fairly aggressive player in general, so I start collecting VP (sometimes to my own detriment) and people freak out and start rushing to do the same.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:53
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Rumda posted:Good look finding worthwhile reviews on anything if that's your sticking point.
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Feb 7, 2015 20:07
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The End posted:http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-xcom-board-game/ Talking about the X-COM board game kind of made me want to try Final Attack. I guess it got me excited about co-ops, apps and yelling. (Where's the kickstarter?)
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Feb 7, 2015 20:10
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Gimnbo posted:the dice giving so many misses
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Feb 7, 2015 20:21
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PerniciousKnid posted:Talking about the X-COM board game kind of made me want to try Final Attack. I guess it got me excited about co-ops, apps and yelling. (Where's the kickstarter?) BL posted in the Kickstarter thread asking for critique, so I imagine the actual one will be up in a few days.
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Feb 7, 2015 20:25
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chemosh6969 posted:I thought games with dice were considered the devil in these parts because of the element of chance. Dice are just a mechanic. They can be used well or poorly. I actually might argue that this is a case where they're used kind of poorly (rolling for results) but when you're directly comparing your results against another player's it seems less aggravating than when you just roll the wrong number and the game says no.
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Feb 7, 2015 20:29
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General consensus seems to be that bad randomness makes your choices irrelevant, but good randomness makes your choices different. See: The big acceptance of "randomness applied before your actions".
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Feb 7, 2015 20:41
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chemosh6969 posted:I thought games with dice were considered the devil in these parts because of the element of chance. There's nothing inherently wrong with putting dice in your game. See: BSG and CitOW There is something wrong with making everything in the game based on the result of a die roll. See: Arkham Horror
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Feb 7, 2015 20:46
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X-wing uses dice well because it introduce the element of control and decision-making. I think games that use dice as part of a larger risk management scheme are usually good.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:07
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Some Numbers posted:There's nothing inherently wrong with putting dice in your game. See: BSG and CitOW The only thing in Arkham Horror that's dice-based are skill checks. (Well, and rolling for losing Blessings/Curses/etc.). Which are the primary method of action resolution in it, don't get me wrong, but there are plenty of parts of that game that aren't dice-based. Some of them aren't even card-based, like movement. A better example would be Talisman.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:29
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malkav11 posted:The only thing in Arkham Horror that's dice-based are skill checks. (Well, and rolling for losing Blessings/Curses/etc.). Which are the primary method of action resolution in it, don't get me wrong, but there are plenty of parts of that game that aren't dice-based. Some of them aren't even card-based, like movement. You are right, dice are only used in skill checks...which are used to 1) close gates, which is the central point of the game, 2) kill or avoid monsters, which is necessary to get to the gates, 3) resolve the majority of all encounters and 4) fight the Great Old One, if necessary. The only part of the game that doesn't require rolling dice is movement. Your stats are explicitly the number of dice you roll, with the sole exception of speed.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:33
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Some Numbers posted:There's nothing inherently wrong with putting dice in your game. See: BSG and CitOW Castles of Burgundy is the prime example of dice being used well by allowing you do roll them then decide your actions, not roll to see if your actions work.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:39
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malkav11 posted:The only thing in Arkham Horror that's dice-based are skill checks. (Well, and rolling for losing Blessings/Curses/etc.). Which are the primary method of action resolution in it, don't get me wrong, but there are plenty of parts of that game that aren't dice-based. Some of them aren't even card-based, like movement. That's true, not everything in Arkham Horror is rolling dice. Sometimes you draw a card to tell you whether you need to roll dice equal to your Luck or roll dice equal to your Lore.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:41
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thespaceinvader posted:Castles of Burgundy is the prime example of dice being used well by allowing you do roll them then decide your actions, not roll to see if your actions work. Quantum is another example of dice used well in a game, hell the whole game is D6's.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:42
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I actually sorta hate Quantum's combat, but the rest of the game uses dice well.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:44
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Some Numbers posted:You are right, dice are only used in skill checks...which are used to 1) close gates, which is the central point of the game, 2) kill or avoid monsters, which is necessary to get to the gates, 3) resolve the majority of all encounters and 4) fight the Great Old One, if necessary. Yes, I said that they are the primary action resolution mechanism. But that's not nearly the same thing as everything in the game being based on the results of a die roll. That's Talisman.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:55
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malkav11 posted:Yes, I said that they are the primary action resolution mechanism. But that's not nearly the same thing as everything in the game being based on the results of a die roll. That's Talisman.
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Feb 7, 2015 21:56
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malkav11 posted:Yes, I said that they are the primary action resolution mechanism. But that's not nearly the same thing as everything in the game being based on the results of a die roll. Yes it is.
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Feb 7, 2015 22:01
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Poison Mushroom posted:You are being incredibly pedantic right now. There are other ways to resolve actions in certain circumstances. There are mechanics that are purely player decision-based. A significant amount of the randomization is card-based, which is meaningfully distinct from using dice. Even when you do roll dice, there are ways to improve outcomes and the number of dice being rolled make the outcome significantly less random than in pure dicefests like Talisman. I know it's popular to hate on Arkham Horror here and I don't expect anyone to change their mind about the game just because the above things are true, but it's just not a good example to use in that context.
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Feb 7, 2015 22:13
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malkav11 posted:There are other ways to resolve actions in certain circumstances. There are mechanics that are purely player decision-based. A significant amount of the randomization is card-based, which is meaningfully distinct from using dice. Even when you do roll dice, there are ways to improve outcomes and the number of dice being rolled make the outcome significantly less random than in pure dicefests like Talisman. I know it's popular to hate on Arkham Horror here and I don't expect anyone to change their mind about the game just because the above things are true, but it's just not a good example to use in that context.
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Feb 7, 2015 22:14
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What's the goon opinion on Blood Bowl Team Manager? I love Blood Bowl but have no interest in getting into an actual miniatures game.
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Feb 7, 2015 22:38
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It's a deckbuilder with only a tiny amount of actual deckbuilding. It's more a game about tactically allocating resources. Winning is more to do with pulling cards from the various decks that give you additional point scoring opportunities than winning all your matches. It's inoffensive, but it feels entirely too random for my taste.
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Feb 7, 2015 22:45
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jivjov posted:What's the goon opinion on Blood Bowl Team Manager? I love Blood Bowl but have no interest in getting into an actual miniatures game. I played it a couple times, we had some fun with it, but overall everything about it felt kind of mechanically half-backed. You build a deck that gets reshuffled approximately once, half your players won't do anything but sit there and apply strength, most of the interesting combos are unlikely to happen, you buy abilities that you mostly won't have time to use, etc.
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Feb 7, 2015 22:47
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Do the expansions do anything for it? Or are they just more of them same?
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Feb 7, 2015 22:50
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Poison Mushroom posted:Talisman uses cards for monsters. Talisman lets you choose to go left OR right. Therefore, by your own rules, the only example is Chutes and Ladders. When playing Candyland there are a few basic principals to optimal play: *Be sure to draw Candy Hearts and Peppermint stick forest early for an initial boost. Leave them too long and they may bring you backwards. *Always draw the same colour, this ensures that you will travel the maximum of 7 spaces every turn! *It may be tempting to draw Ice Cream Floats early and win quickly but your chances of hitting another location card are high. Try and draw it later. *Be sure to count the cards. If you know how many blues remain in the deck you can adjust your strategy to take advantage of shortcuts. 
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Feb 7, 2015 22:50
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Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 23:03
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jivjov posted:Do the expansions do anything for it? Or are they just more of them same? The mechanical additions the expansions add are a little meh, but it's nice having more teams to choose from.
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Feb 7, 2015 23:05
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jivjov posted:What's the goon opinion on Blood Bowl Team Manager? I love Blood Bowl but have no interest in getting into an actual miniatures game. Fun but not heavy, plays much more off the IP than the mechanics, but I've still enjoyed it quite a few times and would play again. Not played the expansions (indeed, didn't know there was more than one) but nonetheless would recommend it if you're into the Warhammer world.
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Feb 7, 2015 23:11
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Yes it is. Not quite. Arkham Horror provides several means to manipulate the rolls; Blessings make rolling successes more likely, equipment increases the number of dice you get to roll (and in some cases makes successes count double), and Clues can be spent to re-roll dice. All these things can be obtained by spending limited resources, although they can often be acquired for free via skill checks. AH is also a cooperative game, so you will have several characters who can be allocated to perform the different tasks and the requirements for those tasks are as a rule known ahead of time. This gives the players agency in being able to pick the best character for any given job. If that character is occupied elsewhere or too far away you have to choose between waiting and wasting time or attempting the task with a character less likely to succeed. This adds a level of tactics to the game. Compare this to Talisman. Every player has to face the same tasks, and as the game is competitive you have to do it for yourself. All checks are roll a die, add stat and get a total, which some characters cannot achieve naturally. You can manipulate your stats to some small degree, but only at certain locations. Whether or not you get to those locations is the result of a die roll, and in most cases a second roll is required to improve the required stat. Both these rolls are entirely random and except in very rare cases have no modifiers. As a result, success or failure in Talisman is entirely at the whim of the dice.
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Feb 7, 2015 23:32
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jivjov posted:Do the expansions do anything for it? Or are they just more of them same? I wouldn't know. Having said that, it isn't exactly un-fun. But it does seem very shallow.
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Feb 7, 2015 23:38
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Jedit posted:Not quite. Arkham Horror provides several means to manipulate the rolls; Blessings make rolling successes more likely, equipment increases the number of dice you get to roll (and in some cases makes successes count double), and Clues can be spent to re-roll dice. All these things can be obtained by spending limited resources, although they can often be acquired for free via skill checks. AH is also a cooperative game, so you will have several characters who can be allocated to perform the different tasks and the requirements for those tasks are as a rule known ahead of time. This gives the players agency in being able to pick the best character for any given job. If that character is occupied elsewhere or too far away you have to choose between waiting and wasting time or attempting the task with a character less likely to succeed. This adds a level of tactics to the game. I don't think anyone is arguing that Arkham is more dice-centric than Talisman, but saying that you can accomplish things in Arkham without rolling dice is a gross exaggeration. Sure, you can move places and buy things without rolling dice, but to accomplish anything that means anything, you will be rolling a fuckton of dice and you will be their mercy.
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Feb 7, 2015 23:39
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"Arkham Horror isn't entirely dice-based. You can get items that let you roll an extra die."
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Feb 7, 2015 23:57
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Some Numbers posted:I don't think anyone is arguing that Arkham is more dice-centric than Talisman, but saying that you can accomplish things in Arkham without rolling dice is a gross exaggeration. Jesus loving Christ, did you even read my post? Yes, you will roll dice to do things in Arkham, and yes, to some degree you are at their mercy, but mitigating the effects of dice and choosing the best probabilities of success is the entire rest of the game. Sure, you can have a carefully prepared plan foiled by luck, but that's nothing that doesn't happen in any game with a random element. Castles of Burgundy, whose metaphorical dick is frequently found in the mouths of posters in this thread, suffers just as much from this - but for some reason nobody ever talks about the time their game of COB went to poo poo because they failed to roll a 2 or 6, do they? I think the reason for this is because Castles of Burgundy front loads its luck. You roll the dice, you see what your options are and you make the best plan you can from the result. That plan may not be exactly what you wanted, but it will always succeed. In Arkham the luck is back loaded; you can make and execute a plan without flaw, only to fail anyway on the basis of a die roll. Is that weaker design? I don't know. But what I do know is that it's better design than Talisman, where the luck is loaded both front and back: the actions you can take are random, and the results of those actions are also random.
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Feb 8, 2015 00:01
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I don't think you're wrong. Defining and restricting your actions based on your dice (and always being able to accomplish something) is vastly preferable to having the freedom to do anything except when the game says "well, you rolled 8 dice, but didn't get a single 5, so all that effort was wasted. Want to try it again?"
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Feb 8, 2015 00:09
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So we played Argent: The Consortium, 4 players. The first thing that I didn't realize was that the table footprint of this game is MASSIVE. Almost Arkham Horror-ish massive. You have three separate decks (Vault Items, Supporters, Spells, the last of which is Dixit sized cards), a tableau of tiles in lieu of a board, a board to put the Consortium voters/keep track of influence points, a bank of tokens (thank you, Plano) and everybody has their own tableau of spells + items + supporters + tokens. It's huge. It's hard to speak about the gameplay itself since it was a first game and nobody knew what the hell they were doing. That is, unlike other Euro games, there's no clear objective of "Get the most points." I guess there is, but the goal of the game is to get the most votes (out of 12 possible), and only one of those votes are awarded for most points. You start with knowing 3 of the voters, 2 of which are public, but that gives you some semblance of guidance. Still, that first round, out of five, is spent mostly gathering resources and trying to suss things out. It's not even that useful to know what other people are doing, since it may not make that much of a difference. You just sorta want more STUFF than the other players, regardless of what that could be. It's not quite as laser focused, say, Agricola, where your goal is "don't starve" and "get points." There's a lot of moving parts to this game. There are like 10 different resources or something, and each need to be juggled and balanced with each other. You have to sorta know when to abandon certain resources ("gently caress, Chris has a lot of Planar spells" = I'm not getting the Planar vote). It's a loving lot of interaction and a loooot to take in at once. Like I said, that first round was really hard since nobody knew what they were doing. Despite that, the game moved really quickly. The "buildings" don't change or anything, so once you know what they do, you have a vague idea of what you're going to want to do. You have additional options in spells, but action economy is tight enough that you don't have too much time slinging spells. But if you upgrade them, those spells make a HUGE difference. For example, I had a spell that destroys another player's level 1 spell, which I kept using whenever I felt my influence on a certain school was threatened ("I'm winning Nature mages, but Paul is too close. Burn his Regrowth"). If you're the type to love variable setups, holy poo poo does this game have it in spades. The mages/workers each have two possible powers, your starting wizards have two possible powers, each BUILDING has two possible sides, and there are more buildings included than you need. It's a lot. Overall I liked it, but I'm biased because I was the one who backed the Kickstarter. I like the variability, I like the powers, I like the flow of the game. Downsides is that it's intimidating and daunting as all hell, there's a lack of focus in the first few rounds, you literally have no idea how you're doing until the end, and wow did I mention how huge of a table you need for this? I can't even imagine what a six player game would be like. I think we finished in about 2 or so hours with explanations. Would totally play again, though.
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Feb 8, 2015 00:11
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Jedit posted:Is that weaker design? I don't know. I'm going with yes.
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Feb 8, 2015 00:11
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Jedit posted:Not quite. Arkham Horror provides several means to manipulate the rolls; Blessings make rolling successes more likely, equipment increases the number of dice you get to roll (and in some cases makes successes count double), and Clues can be spent to re-roll dice. All these things can be obtained by spending limited resources, although they can often be acquired for free via skill checks. AH is also a cooperative game, so you will have several characters who can be allocated to perform the different tasks and the requirements for those tasks are as a rule known ahead of time. This gives the players agency in being able to pick the best character for any given job. If that character is occupied elsewhere or too far away you have to choose between waiting and wasting time or attempting the task with a character less likely to succeed. This adds a level of tactics to the game. You are not giving Talisman a fair shake. It has just as much dice mitigation as Arkham Horror. *In Talisman many classes are spell casters and get a free spell such as Teleport/Hex/Steal A Item/heal/etc. You decide when to play this spell and who/what to target. *Several classes and a few items let players re-draw their adventure cards. A push your luck mini-game. *Everyone has a number of Fate points that can be used for re-rolls which are hard to replenish. Using them to gain power or saving them for the run to the Crown of Command is a resource management puzzle. *With expansion there are different areas like the Timescape/City/Dungeon/etc where you can travel to get more specialized encounters. Not everyone faces the same challenges. *Getting a Poltergeist or a Blizzard forces you to move one space at a time. This allows you to go where you want, even if slowly.
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Feb 8, 2015 00:13
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 It's like clockwork.
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Feb 8, 2015 00:15
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Some Numbers posted:
Yeah, if he stopped at least he'd be right twice a day.
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Feb 8, 2015 00:32
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