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Dulkor
Feb 28, 2009

Madmarker posted:

So, whats the goonsensus on Argent? The idea of having each of your workers have special abilities in a worker placement game seems really nice, and the artwork and component quality seems very good. Does it play well? Does the hidden victory point condition make the game to random, or is the deduction element well placed?

I don't think there is a goonsensus yet, but my own opinions are:

1) The game is fiddly, AP prone players should not apply

2) Hidden objectives mitigate 'gang up on the leader' somewhat because no one is honestly sure who the leader is at any given moment.

3) It's huge. Plan for table space you'd need for something like TI3 or Arkham

4) I feel like it has a lot of interesting decisions to make (spending actions on finding out about voters vs. focusing on objectives you know about, rushing actions and running the clock down vs. taking your time to consolidate and giving up the bell tower rewards, etc.)

I need to play it a couple more times to fully get my head around it, but I like it a lot so far.

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Single Tight Female
Jan 17, 2008

Rumda posted:

I managed to get it from board game guru back in November.

Yeah I remember that being on, but I feel like it either said it included the upgrade or it was priced higher than it is now? Either way I've emailed them to see what they have. Fingers crossed.

Big McHuge
Feb 5, 2014

You wait for the war to happen like vultures.
If you want to help, prevent the war.
Don't save the remnants.

Save them all.
The ability to look at games in a critical light has turned me into "that guy" and I need to learn how to enjoy myself during bad games.

We have a regular group of people that gets together on Wednesday evening, and they're all good folks. Super friendly, willing to try new games, but a few tend to get stuck in ruts and will cycle through the same 3 or 4 games week after week. Also the group as a whole doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between good and bad games, leading to people being just as enthusiastic about Dungeon Lords as they are with Red Dragon Inn.

This week, half the group played a rather lengthy game of Legacy: Gears of Time (which I actually kinda liked the first time I played), and the rest of us played Alhambra. This was my second time playing Alhambra, and I really enjoy it, though I do think that the expansion with the diamond cards might be a little bit overpowered. What worried me the most is that some of the other people didn't really get why I was paying such close attention to their boards and counting tiles towards the end of the game. The whole point of the game is to have more tiles in each color than your opponents, and it says right on the player board how many of each color there is. So yeah, it's kinda really important to pay attention to how many of each color is left so you can plan accordingly. These aren't dumb people I'm playing with, but it made me think that they're just blindly moving towards the end of the game, vaguely aware of what the scoring conditions are.

Anyways, after that was a quick game of Sushi Go which isn't amazing, but is fast and cute and perfectly acceptable as a filler game. Then, it was decided that we were gonna play a 4 player game of Castellan, and things started to go south. In this game, you play cards from your hand, take the bits of castle that are indicated on the card, and try to add those bits on to a central castle, forming enclosed spaces that you can then claim for points. I really believe that this should only be played as a 2-player game, despite the fact that it is suggested that buying two copies with different colors will allow you to play 4. The game dragged out well past what it should have, and it's rather difficult to plan your turn in advance as each player is changing the layout of the castle during their turn. Also, no matter how many cards you play, you only draw 1 at the end of your turn, unless you played a card that allows you to draw an extra one. Of course, if you got one of these "draw an extra" cards on the bottom of your deck, it does you absolutely no good. It's not a good game, and it has questionable design decisions, but the most frustrating part to me is that it had the *potential* to be a good light filler game.

It was pretty obvious that we weren't having a good time with it by about midway through, but apparently it really showed on my face or in my voice, because I was accused of being a sourpuss afterwards. That I should enjoy the company and be happy to spend time with them, rather than worrying about the quality of the game. This seems absurd to me. There's plenty of awesome games out there that I can "enjoy the company" as well as enjoy the game itself.

I've been trying to keep myself "in check" the past few months, too. I try to limit any criticism I have, I've stopped making comments that could be viewed as "negative" towards some of the games that are regularly played. I've been trying to keep an open mind and be willing to try out games that I know are going to be bad. And I've really stopped trying to help them understand the difference between good and bad games. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.

But I'm willing to, painfully, acknowledge that maybe it *is* me that is the problem. Maybe I just am a game snob and I'm turning into someone that I myself wouldn't want to play a game with.

Madmarker
Jan 7, 2007

Big McHuge posted:

The ability to look at games in a critical light has turned me into "that guy" and I need to learn how to enjoy myself during bad games.

We have a regular group of people that gets together on Wednesday evening, and they're all good folks. Super friendly, willing to try new games, but a few tend to get stuck in ruts and will cycle through the same 3 or 4 games week after week. Also the group as a whole doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between good and bad games, leading to people being just as enthusiastic about Dungeon Lords as they are with Red Dragon Inn.

This week, half the group played a rather lengthy game of Legacy: Gears of Time (which I actually kinda liked the first time I played), and the rest of us played Alhambra. This was my second time playing Alhambra, and I really enjoy it, though I do think that the expansion with the diamond cards might be a little bit overpowered. What worried me the most is that some of the other people didn't really get why I was paying such close attention to their boards and counting tiles towards the end of the game. The whole point of the game is to have more tiles in each color than your opponents, and it says right on the player board how many of each color there is. So yeah, it's kinda really important to pay attention to how many of each color is left so you can plan accordingly. These aren't dumb people I'm playing with, but it made me think that they're just blindly moving towards the end of the game, vaguely aware of what the scoring conditions are.

Anyways, after that was a quick game of Sushi Go which isn't amazing, but is fast and cute and perfectly acceptable as a filler game. Then, it was decided that we were gonna play a 4 player game of Castellan, and things started to go south. In this game, you play cards from your hand, take the bits of castle that are indicated on the card, and try to add those bits on to a central castle, forming enclosed spaces that you can then claim for points. I really believe that this should only be played as a 2-player game, despite the fact that it is suggested that buying two copies with different colors will allow you to play 4. The game dragged out well past what it should have, and it's rather difficult to plan your turn in advance as each player is changing the layout of the castle during their turn. Also, no matter how many cards you play, you only draw 1 at the end of your turn, unless you played a card that allows you to draw an extra one. Of course, if you got one of these "draw an extra" cards on the bottom of your deck, it does you absolutely no good. It's not a good game, and it has questionable design decisions, but the most frustrating part to me is that it had the *potential* to be a good light filler game.

It was pretty obvious that we weren't having a good time with it by about midway through, but apparently it really showed on my face or in my voice, because I was accused of being a sourpuss afterwards. That I should enjoy the company and be happy to spend time with them, rather than worrying about the quality of the game. This seems absurd to me. There's plenty of awesome games out there that I can "enjoy the company" as well as enjoy the game itself.

I've been trying to keep myself "in check" the past few months, too. I try to limit any criticism I have, I've stopped making comments that could be viewed as "negative" towards some of the games that are regularly played. I've been trying to keep an open mind and be willing to try out games that I know are going to be bad. And I've really stopped trying to help them understand the difference between good and bad games. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.

But I'm willing to, painfully, acknowledge that maybe it *is* me that is the problem. Maybe I just am a game snob and I'm turning into someone that I myself wouldn't want to play a game with.

Honestly, if you are with a gaming group, and they pull out a game you have no interest in, you can suggest alternatives or go do something else. I have a regular gaming gaming group and there is one game they will regularly pull out that I have no interest in. Now objectively it is a good game (Agricola), but I have never enjoyed that game no matter how many times I play. So rather than subject myself to it, I will either break off with another disinterested party to play some other game, or I will volunteer to go on a snack/cook out run, or just be honest and say, "Nah, this one isn't my speed, y'all go ahead though, I'll get in on the next game."

Dulkor posted:

I don't think there is a goonsensus yet, but my own opinions are:

1) The game is fiddly, AP prone players should not apply

2) Hidden objectives mitigate 'gang up on the leader' somewhat because no one is honestly sure who the leader is at any given moment.

3) It's huge. Plan for table space you'd need for something like TI3 or Arkham

4) I feel like it has a lot of interesting decisions to make (spending actions on finding out about voters vs. focusing on objectives you know about, rushing actions and running the clock down vs. taking your time to consolidate and giving up the bell tower rewards, etc.)

I need to play it a couple more times to fully get my head around it, but I like it a lot so far.

1)Annoying but unsurprising, there are some people I will opt to play other games with.

2)Good

3)Not an issue, we played TI last weekend so we'll be set

4)Excellent, that almost sells me on it in and of it self.

Thanks for the input, I will probably end up purchasing this game sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Madmarker fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Feb 20, 2015

Tree Dude
May 26, 2012

AND MY SONG IS...
I'm looking at the Galaxy Trucker Android app. Worth my 5 bucks?

ChiTownEddie
Mar 26, 2010

Awesome beer, no pants.
Join the Legion.

Timett posted:

I'm looking at the Galaxy Trucker Android app. Worth my 5 bucks?

Yes.


Unrelated: Rio Grande already shipped out a new tile bag for RollFTG to me. Talk about customer service, drat!

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Timett posted:

I'm looking at the Galaxy Trucker Android app. Worth my 5 bucks?
Very.

The Narrator
Aug 11, 2011

bernie would have won

Timett posted:

I'm looking at the Galaxy Trucker Android app. Worth my 5 bucks?

Definitely worth the money

Trynant
Oct 7, 2010

The final spice...your tears <3
Re: Argent: The Consortium

  • I pitch it as "Hogwarts Simulator 2015: Worker Placement Edition." The chancellor of a magical university is stepping down and you as a professor are trying to win votes from a secret council (the titular Consortium) via casting magick spells and sending your student mages to do errands. This theme is important for another bullet point.

  • The game has a lot of open information and moving parts to keep track of. So yes, Analysis Paralysis to a heavy degree (almost as bad as BattleCON).

  • The game eats tables.

  • I wouldn't say Argent is fiddly as much as it has a lot of moving parts. As in, yes you have a lot stuff on the board, but its all mechanically relevant and there are very few moments where you're moving pieces without a decision being processed as a result (i.e. what I'd say "fiddly" means).

  • Victory in the game is a nice twist. Sure there's a "influence track" which is the closest thing to generic victory points, but that's only one of twelve scoring conditions. Two are open (influence and a certain card type), but then the other ten are secret (at the start) and require a certain action to be able to inspect them. The result is that engine optimization is not really a thing. That being said, influence points do break ties on votes and that's incredibly important.

  • The biggest deviation in Argent is the actual placement of workers. The gist is that when you place a worker what you place actually matters: there are five (six with expansion) different types of mages (i.e. workers) each with different powers. Powers range from being able to wound other mages, immunity to wounding, being able to place as a bonus action, etc. Oh and there's beta sides for each mage, giving them different special abilities.

  • The even bigger twist is that in lieu of placing a mage you can use a card you've acquired during play. Perhaps a spell that banishes a mage back to the player's pool, or call on a Supporter to grant you some extra gold.

  • The cool part about this action economy is that it doesn't break under a player with a ton of available cards and mages because another main action is taking a one-time benefit Bell Tower Card. After all of a small set of these cards are taken the round automatically resolves; a player can either rush to end a round early, or a player who ran out of actions early will be forced to take Bell Tower Cards while the other players scramble to get as much of their cards played as they can.

  • Oh hey the worker placement locations has a neat twist as well; each game there are different rooms laid out to play. Each room has a few worker spots and will do varying effects. While three rooms are guaranteed to be in the game, the other five to twelve rooms are randomly selected. With each room having a simpler alpha and a more complex beta side, you'll never run out of game layouts for Argent.

  • The kind of whatever part of the game is that the cards you take are from market rows. While there's some degree of luck mitigation here, there definitely are some powerful cards that a player could just snag from chance. At least almost all the cards are useful, with the only useless ones are easily avoided and planned around.

  • There is importance in that this game can be pitched as "Hogwarts Simulator 2015: Worker Placement Edition." The big draw I can see for Argent aside from being a solid tactical-thinking worker-placement is that it has an attractive theme for people who would otherwise only touch Lords of Waterdeep when placing their workers. I'd recommend this one as both a good game and one that can be easier to get to a (big) table because it has a cool narrative premise.


Overall I'm digging Argent a lot and want to play it a lot more. I don't think it's as mechanically brilliant as some creme de la creme worker placements, but it's drat close. AP vulnerable, yes, but if you can get past that hurdle, the modularity and nigh-endless content makes this one a really good buy.

GrandpaPants
Feb 13, 2006


Free to roam the heavens in man's noble quest to investigate the weirdness of the universe!

Trynant posted:

Re: Argent: The Consortium

I can agree with this statement with pretty much everything here, especially the part about Influence breaking ties. It wasn't something I realized on my first play, but it earned me like 3 votes because I just tied on a bunch of things.

The one thing that may give people a bad first impression is that I noticed the other players were really grabbing the Planar spells, since it lets them poo poo out their workers (I placed 4/6 mages on my first turn, for example), which in a normal worker placement game, would be extremely powerful. It's no slouch here, either. However, normal worker placement games don't have the same options of aggression this does. You really, really need to be aggressive in this game, and I realize that sort of direct confrontation is offputting for some people. However, if you don't, then the Planar and/or Mystic mages will carry the game. Absolutely kick people out of a room, lock it, then laugh as you're the only one able to reap the rewards (this is incredibly useful in the Council Chamber since Supporters are hard to get otherwise). Unless they had Divine mages in there, then gently caress.

Possibly the fiddliest aspect of the game is that whenever a new spell comes up, everyone has to read it. There are symbols that help and are often super clear about what a spell does, but it never hurts to read what it actually does. On another note, the use of both symbols and words are really, really helpful. Like, really.

Probably one of my favorite new games. I just hope the shininess doesn't wear off and there's some underlying mechanical failure that I haven't encountered yet. Although I probably won't get to play it that often since it really does require a huge amount of table space.

GrandpaPants fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Feb 20, 2015

gutterdaughter
Oct 21, 2010

keep yr head up, problem girl

Kai Tave posted:

Re: BattleCON, it sounds like my best bet is to wait for Fate then, I'm assuming that the fighters in that set aren't redundant with any of the others (sort of like how Summoner Wars does it I think), and then go with Devastation if that turns out to be a good pick.

Actually, your best bet is to go here. Find the one marked "BattleCON: PNP Demo Game." Download it, print it, try it.

(To answer your question, there are no redundant fighters between Fate, War, and Devastation.)

ashez2ashes
Aug 15, 2012

So is Dead of Winter a good game or have I been dazzled by Tabletop once again? lol The fact that I'm going to wait until the game is back to a reasonable price again notwithstanding.

Impermanent
Apr 1, 2010
Goonsensus is that it's terrible and mechanically inferior to BS:G while also being thematically inferior to everything that isn't a zombie game.

Rumda
Nov 4, 2009

Moth Lesbian Comrade

ashez2ashes posted:

So is Dead of Winter a good game or have I been dazzled by Tabletop once again? lol The fact that I'm going to wait until the game is back to a reasonable price again notwithstanding.

No it v bad.

Madmarker
Jan 7, 2007

ashez2ashes posted:

So is Dead of Winter a good game or have I been dazzled by Tabletop once again? lol The fact that I'm going to wait until the game is back to a reasonable price again notwithstanding.

Its a bad game with a well done theme. Unless the traitor is a friggin moron they can easily tank the game with almost no effort.

ashez2ashes
Aug 15, 2012

Madmarker posted:

Its a bad game with a well done theme. Unless the traitor is a friggin moron they can easily tank the game with almost no effort.

Could it be a better game if you left the traitor card out? Or would it be too easy?

BS:G just seems too hardcore to have anyone realistically willing to play. I'm jealous of the people that do.

chemosh6969
Jul 3, 2004

code:
cat /dev/null > /etc/professionalism

I am in fact a massive asswagon.
Do not let me touch computer.

Big McHuge posted:

The ability to look at games in a critical light has turned me into "that guy" and I need to learn how to enjoy myself during bad games.

But I'm willing to, painfully, acknowledge that maybe it *is* me that is the problem. Maybe I just am a game snob and I'm turning into someone that I myself wouldn't want to play a game with.

Enjoy the time you're spending with other people if you don't care for the game.

Otherwise you're going to be the guy in their stories of "we were all having fun playing this game but the one guy didn't like it and was being an rear end the entire time" and "we talked before he showed up and all wanted to play this one game but we knew he didn't like it and would start complaining and want to play some other game he says in superior but none of us care for".

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!

Timett posted:

I'm looking at the Galaxy Trucker Android app. Worth my 5 bucks?

gently caress. Yes. Mine.

My collection of droid games grows.

it's a shame the Suburbia app is only on bigscreen devices.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea

ashez2ashes posted:

So is Dead of Winter a good game or have I been dazzled by Tabletop once again? lol The fact that I'm going to wait until the game is back to a reasonable price again notwithstanding.

I have enjoyed every game of it I played but I also like Betrayal At House On The Hill, so maybe I just enjoy it as an Experience Generator.

I've played maybe a half-dozen games and we haven't had an issue where the traitor has tanked the game too easily. Either we haven't found the degenerate strategy yet or goons who haven't played it (much?) are exaggerating its effect.

rchandra
Apr 30, 2013


Making the team lose is pretty trivial. Doing so while winning is tougher, I think I'm 1 for 3 as traitor because of that (the other 2 were group losses). I enjoy DoW much more than BSG but as you've already seen this is not the consensus opinion here. See if you can try the game before buying (and definitely don't pay hyperinflated prices, Plaid Hat keeps making more as long as it keeps selling out).

ashez2ashes posted:

Could it be a better game if you left the traitor card out? Or would it be too easy?
There is a pure co-op mode, you should ramp up the difficulty in other ways if you do that (I think the rules say to play the scenarios in hardcore mode, and it's not a win unless everybody gets their objective?). I haven't tried that mode yet.

rchandra fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Feb 20, 2015

Echophonic
Sep 16, 2005

ha;lp
Gun Saliva
Got to try out XCOM: The Board Game. I really enjoyed it. We did the tutorial, but once we got through it, we used as few pauses as we could.

I really like the segregation of duties and the way the various roles all have to communicate in amidst the chaos. I was the Chief Scientist and the research process is kind of neat, but it's similar enough to the way the other roles have to pay for and complete tasks that I won't be going into another one blind. I focused on key techs from the video game and it seemed to work. out. Xenobiology is a clutch early game tech in both, so that was a good opening bit of research. As were the ones that let our commander rescue killed troops and stuff that let our squad leader murder the living hell out of mutons. Our Commander did a good job keeping us on-budget, too.

Overall I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It's not too fiddly and the roles all seem like they'd be fun to play.

Gort
Aug 18, 2003

Good day what ho cup of tea
Dead of Winter chat:

There's definitely some jank involved with victory conditions, and some stuff you have to come up with a house rule before the game for.

For example:

Non-traitor players have two objectives - achieve the team objective, and also do something else. (EG: Get a bunch of guns)

Well, what happens if the team's probably going to win, but you've no way of doing your "something else"? Is it better for you to lose alone, or is it better for you to tank the game for everyone so everyone loses with you?

I just straight-up talked to our group before the game and said that if you reckon you've no way of doing your personal goal at all, it's better to end the game with it half-completed than to get everyone killed by zombies, and everyone agreed. It is a house-rule though, rules-as-written it's perfectly fine for someone to play that way, but you could say that about human players playing like cylons in BSG because they're holding a grudge or something.

-----

Another example:

Some victory conditions are really easy, some are really hard.

I had a team objective to build a bunch of barricades, and a personal goal to build a bunch of barricades. It was not a difficult game for me. Maybe a house rule that you take the "too easy" personal goals out of the deck before you hand them out is in order for these?

-----

I wouldn't say I've run into any problems without an obvious solution with the game yet, though, and it's been good fun each time, with some of the cool traitor-hunting of BSG with less playtime required.

Mayveena
Dec 27, 2006

People keep vandalizing my ID photo; I've lodged a complaint with HR
My copy of Argent will finally get here on Monday. I've already made my son promise to play it with me at least twice, can't wait.

Yeah, I'm the picky one in my play sessions as well. The thing is to be able to recognize what you might like and what you are not likely to enjoy and bow out from playing the latter. And yeah once you are playing, work hard on not being negative. I fall into that trap sometimes as well. A couple of weeks ago we played Clinic and it just plained sucked and I just plain complained way too much. I then finally realized it and apologized profusely. I just have to work on being a more pleasant player to be around.

parasyte
Aug 13, 2003

Nobody wants to die except the suicides. They're no fun.

rchandra posted:

There is a pure co-op mode, you should ramp up the difficulty in other ways if you do that (I think the rules say to play the scenarios in hardcore mode, and it's not a win unless everybody gets their objective?). I haven't tried that mode yet.

This seems a bit weird since the game is full co-op anyway more than half the time (between 54.5% and 60% depending on player count).

fozzy fosbourne
Apr 21, 2010

Lorini posted:

My copy of Argent will finally get here on Monday. I've already made my son promise to play it with me at least twice, can't wait.

Yeah, I'm the picky one in my play sessions as well. The thing is to be able to recognize what you might like and what you are not likely to enjoy and bow out from playing the latter. And yeah once you are playing, work hard on not being negative. I fall into that trap sometimes as well. A couple of weeks ago we played Clinic and it just plained sucked and I just plain complained way too much. I then finally realized it and apologized profusely. I just have to work on being a more pleasant player to be around.

Yeah. I think of board games as sort of being like fictional novels in this respect; we can all agree on some stuff being really awful, but beyond that individuals can have wildly different taste in games. You need to scratch your fellow ludologists back every now and then so they will reciprocate when you want to bring some experimental game to the table. Just make the best of it!

edit: for example Ascension is kind of a bs game and I play with some people who house rule it sometimes to make it even less balanced; I could get frustrated by the luck when I feel like I've made consistently better plays, but I found it slightly salvaged if I spent time analyzing each other player's mistakes heh. "it's ok fosbourne, you won the real game, concentrate on your breathing.. <starts literally mindfully meditating in between his turns>"

edit 5-6 player expansion edition: Also, I think some of it depends on whether you are playing games with people you like, or playing games you like with strangers. My advice applies more to the former

fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Feb 20, 2015

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

ashez2ashes posted:

Could it be a better game if you left the traitor card out? Or would it be too easy?

BS:G just seems too hardcore to have anyone realistically willing to play. I'm jealous of the people that do.

BSG is waaaay less complicated than it looks. Your turn consists of "go to a place, do a thing, draw a card and do what it says on it. There will probably be a color-coded secret vote in here somewhere, and the colors present in the resolution are how you try to guess the cylon(s)"

The enemy ships operate on a really, really basic algorithm that consists of "always fly toward the closest target, unless there are human ships already in the sector".

It's a little more complicated for the cylon, but generally your best bet is "keep it on the down low until the fleet is already having problems, then reveal yourself to gently caress them over more."

The game doesn't get very complicated until you add the expansions with stuff like Cylon Leaders and mutiny poo poo.

Man I really fuckin love BSG. The other day we had a person who was already both President and Admiral (due to revolving door on the brig) become a cylon during the sleeper phase. There was nothing anybody could do once they figured it out because the other cylon revealed and there was only one human player left outside of the brig. She whittled down the last of the resources for the human fleet just by choosing bad outcomes for the last couple of jumps and crises. I lost as the Cylon Leader because I banked on getting another Cylon Victory agenda while I spent the first half of the game loving with the human pilot, but my end state was 3 human agendas and 1 cylon. The game is swingy as hell, but everybody has a lot of fun.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Yeah, my first BSG game ended up with me as the President Admiral Cylon and I messed up about three different ways to kill everyone because I was unfamiliar with the rules and didn't know what or how I could do things. It didn't help that anyone who asked to see the rulebook was immediately called a cylon (since everything else was pretty obvious on the board).

Mojo Jojo
Sep 21, 2005

The only complicated bit of BSG is piloting Vipers because then you get an extra action. Or maybe you don't. I can't remember, but the manual wording is vague and I keep forgetting to check the FAQ

Also, Homeland is apparently a reasonable BSG-lite if you really do need that kind of thing.

Dead of Winter is a bit of a mess, but the Crossroads cards mechanic is fun. Fortunately they said they'll make more games using that mechanic so maybe one won't be a mess.

fozzy fosbourne
Apr 21, 2010

A subtle thing about BSG is when you play with new players they don't really know how to cylon/detect cylons very well. So it's not very hard to learn but it's not one that I want to teach new people all the time either. The other problem I have is I have the expansions because I kind of got tired of the base game but now I have this pile of rules that I have to sort through and determine what's best and .. :effort:

It was a very cool thing for a while, though. I'm hoping that something more refined comes out and takes it's place.

also the ending of the show kind of sucked and killed a lot of the enthusiasm for the brand, I think I actually prefer even zombies now :ssh:

DirkGently
Jan 14, 2008

Mojo Jojo posted:


Dead of Winter is a bit of a mess, but the Crossroads cards mechanic is fun. Fortunately they said they'll make more games using that mechanic so maybe one won't be a mess.

I really wanted the Crossroads cards to be a cool set of difficult decisions but they really just didn't do anything for me in the couple of games I played.

First off they just failed to happen very frequently because we just didn't have the right combinations of characters or actions (I am fully willing to admit that maybe we were playing them incorrectly). Too often it was just 'did something cool happen on your turn?' and except in very rare instances, the answer was 'nope, sorry.'

I realize that it would kind of be a mess if they happened every turn but there has to be a way of making them a little less rare. When I put on my 'game designer' hat, I imagined a scenario where everyone draws a Crossroads card at the start, the conditions are a little bit more general, and if you fulfilled anyone's card except for your own then that event happened (and unless an event happened, you never drew a new card). In theory, I think that would mean you would have events firing more often while still leaving some of the intended randomness. Not sure how it would work in practice though...

Second, when Crossroads cards did happen the effects felt like they could almost always be boiled down to 'risky but interesting' and 'safe but boring' (there were a few exceptions). Regrettably, there is very rarely a reason to take the risky option over the boring but safe route -- especially in a (mostly) co-op game where other people are counting on you to play well. I much preferred the few cards where both options were risky but interesting (in different ways).

Countblanc
Apr 20, 2005

Help a hero out!
How "take that!" is Argent? Obviously playing it 2p it isn't a problem, but people have said there are directed attacks and I wanted to know how common/damaging those tend to be.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Countblanc posted:

How "take that!" is Argent? Obviously playing it 2p it isn't a problem, but people have said there are directed attacks and I wanted to know how common/damaging those tend to be.

I haven't played it - anime plus Harry Potter? How can I resist reaching for the matches - but from Rodney's Watch It Played video they seem to be fairly common but limited in how damaging they are. There are banishing attacks that send a worker back to its controller's pool, teleporting attacks that can move a worker to a different space, and wounding attacks that stop a worker doing anything that turn but its controller receives compensation.

GrandpaPants
Feb 13, 2006


Free to roam the heavens in man's noble quest to investigate the weirdness of the universe!

Countblanc posted:

How "take that!" is Argent? Obviously playing it 2p it isn't a problem, but people have said there are directed attacks and I wanted to know how common/damaging those tend to be.

It really depends on the players and stuff that comes out, I think. Our game had a ton of Planar (worker placement) spells come up, and not so much in the way of Sorcery (wounding) or Nature (control) spells, which made things pretty chill, and the one guy playing the Sorcery candidate wasn't being aggressive at all (he ended up in last, of course). I also had some Divine (protection/healing) spells and Nature (defense) reaction spells to protect myself in case someone tried to do something against me, as well as one mage of each Nature and Mage (Nature can't be wounded, Divine can't be affected by spells) to protect on more valuable slots. I also had a Mystic (spellcasting) spell that people had to play around, since casting it could remove any Level 1 spell they owned. I used this to make sure nobody competed against me in certain magic schools rather than as any sort of targeted offense, though.

That being said, there is a consolation prize to getting wounded (but not if you are moved or if you return to your worker pool). It is a lovely consolation prize, as all consolation prizes are, but at least it doesn't mean you're completely assed out if someone goes against you. If you're super concerned about it, the B side of the Hospital gives much BETTER consolation prizes, so as to further discourage dickery. But things could go very, very badly for you if you place your vulnerable workers in highly coveted spots and they get absolutely devastated by spells or Red mages (pay 1 mana to wound a dude before placing). There is also a "limit" to the number of spells you can cast, since you need A) Mana and B) Actions to cast spells, and if you're spending an action to cast a spell, chances are you're not spending an action to place a dude down too (Mystic mages notwithstanding).

It's conceivable that people dogpile on someone, but all throughout the game nobody had any idea how they were doing except in influence points, so there was never a clear sense of "Oh poo poo, Chris is winning, gently caress his poo poo up." Theoretically we could have AP'ed it out and calculated each possible vote condition to see who was winning, but nobody cared enough, so that level of laziness helps to protect against the dogpiling. If you're also REALLY concerned, you can draft more Nature and Divine mages to protect yourself.

It's definitely more take that than your average worker placement, but I never felt like there was much a reason to be a vindictive rear end in a top hat unless you're just a vindictive rear end in a top hat. Could vary, though.

Edit: As a point of comparison, I didn't feel it any more or less dickish or take that-y as Theseus: The Dark Orbit, which is sort of a lovely point of comparison since I don't think anybody has actually played that.

GrandpaPants fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Feb 20, 2015

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
Dead of Winter has some cool stuff lifted from other games and is very thematic, but it's also really lazily designed in a lot of critical ways - most notably the victory conditions. I can imagine it being kind of fun if you don't care who wins or loses and just want to make a Collaborative Zombie Apocalypse Story, but in that case why aren't you playing a pen and paper RPG?

The Eyes Have It
Feb 10, 2008

Third Eye Sees All
...snookums
^^^ because pen and paper RPGs are for dorks of course, everyone knows that :coal:

Gort posted:

Dead of Winter chat:I just straight-up talked to our group before the game and said that if you reckon you've no way of doing your personal goal at all, it's better to end the game with it half-completed than to get everyone killed by zombies, and everyone agreed. It is a house-rule though, rules-as-written it's perfectly fine for someone to play that way, but you could say that about human players playing like cylons in BSG because they're holding a grudge or something.

If your group agrees to role-play the game (you each represent a group/clique of like-minded survivors in a colony) and think of it as a DM/Referee-less short RPG then it'll be fine and even pretty fun.


e: The instructions do warn that not all victory conditions and such will be equally difficult/fair, and that if this bothers you then the game's probably not for you. Honest disclosure, or hand-waving away of questionable design? You decide.

The Eyes Have It fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Feb 20, 2015

Scyther
Dec 29, 2010

If I want to sit down and play an experience generator game where everything is bullshit and the points don't matter, I'd rather play Tales Of The Arabian Nights than Dead Of Winter due to infinitely more interesting theme, guaranteed text encounters every turn, and the sheer volume of different text encounters. I mean, yeah, it's still a bad game, but at least it doesn't half-assedly pretend it's a legitimate game with player agency and solid mechanisms and systems.

Incidentally here's a thing I made a while ago about Dead Of Winter:

fozzy fosbourne
Apr 21, 2010

Seems like this is always a possibility in games where there is an "everyone loses" condition.

I wonder how the prisoner's dilemma two player variant from the dev plays. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fYAkm-SE_9BV3cXI19h4h2YxQBWZ6ZHMs00MHycZ9XY/edit

jmzero
Jul 24, 2007

quote:

Seems like this is always a possibility in games where there is an "everyone loses" condition.

Well.. just like the prisoner's dilemma, these "semi-maybe-coop" games might be more interesting if you had more than one iteration of the core game somehow? I mean, the dominant strategy for one round of Prisoner's Dilemma is DEFECT all day. The strategy for 100 rounds with repeating players is much more interesting.

fozzy fosbourne
Apr 21, 2010

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Some sort of ante mechanic and currency and variable rewards would help a lot.

ONUW and BSG can still get degenerate when people are playing multiple rounds in a way that's similar to the everyone losing problem, except in this case it's "everyone won wee who gives a poo poo"; some people only seem to be motivated when they are werewolves or cylons and so they play too counterproductively when they aren't to make it potentially easier the next time when they get the "real objective"

I get that it's a legitimate strategy to keep a poker face whether you have the goods or not in order to make future bluffing viable, but it all falls apart if the player doesn't put much or any value in the collective win.

Basically some games need money or something to keep maniacs from defining their own win conditions

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Impermanent
Apr 1, 2010
I agree, and this is my central problem with group bluffing games. It's why poker doesn't work - people want to be the cool guy who bluffs everyone out of the pot, or who challenges a ridiculous bluff with their own double bluff because it feels cooler than doing statistically good play.

These types of games always introduce to players an element of roleplaying or of meta gaming that naturally destroys reasonable play. It takes everyone in a group having a very particular mindset in order to enjoy those kinds of games, and that group is too rare, usually, to keep that up.

In fact, there's only one game I can think of that doesn't fall prey to this, and that is Coup. IT's still vulnerable to "challenge everything" suicide runs, but since getting knocked out early of a larger round spells having to sit out for a bit, people are more attached to actually playing well.

People love winning in a risky way and it's a psychological problem that is very hard to design around in bluffing games around. Poorly-designed games like ONUW exacerbate the problem, smarter games like Coup mitigate it, but it always exists.

Even money doesn't really help or there wouldn't be gambling addicts. People love to feel vindicated by dice rolls. That's why there are some people who don't even want to play Catan with the cards, because it isn't "truly random" and makes the whims of the cards or dice feel like like god giving you a thumbs up.

fozzy fosbourne posted:


Basically some games need money or something to keep maniacs from defining their own win conditions

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