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Tuesday board game night trip report, and things...actually went pretty good! Only two games this night but both of them new (to me anyway). First up I finally got a chance to try out my copy of Summoner Wars, having only bought it last week to give myself a two-player game to bust out whenever there weren't enough free players for anything else (like Kemet). While a bunch of people played through a game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill in the background (after the traitor was flipped the other players won almost instantly due to having the right combination of items, such is Betrayal), me and the other free player in the store took turns reading over the rules while I inhaled a sandwich wrap and a couple of Red Bull Italian sodas to wake myself up because fuuuuuuck this work week. Just reading through the rules I wasn't sure how the whole deal with the Magic Pile would work in play, but it turned out to be fairly intuitive once we started and things proceeded briskly. It was Phoenix Elves (him) versus Tundra Orcs (me), and he took a quick lead out of the gate by going first and zapping a couple of my dudes off the mat and into his Magic Pile. This would characterize the general course of the game where he generally had the better resource flow and could afford to summon more units including champions while all my champions wound up getting chucked for mana, but I was able to get my walls out in a way that funneled his advance into a chokepoint which I then proceeded to bring my summoner up through and start beating face. The Tundra Orcs are billed as more of a "high risk, high reward" faction and it shows in play...my Fighters never got their bonus attacks off and my Shamans whiffed shots that would have been clutch, but my Smashers worked well as a tarpit of sorts...they were easy to kill but powerful enough that I could force him to waste turns dealing with them. Although sacrificing your units does fuel your opponent's Magic Pile so there are tradeoffs to consider. I eked out a win that came down to the wire, both of our draw piles exhausted and with our respective summoners both bloodied. He had the greater numbers but I'd managed to force his summoner to retreat to a corner where I could summon a Fighter and rush him. His guy had one hitpoint left so it all came down to the roll of a die and it swung my way, but it didn't feel like the bad sort of random where he did everything right but the game went "nah, gently caress you buddy." If he had moved his summoner differently, if he had summoned units to a different location, it might very well have gone to him (it probably would have). All in all it seems like a fun, fast game (took about 60 minutes once we stopped reading rules and/or eating and started playing) and I'd definitely play it again. Then once some more people arrived everybody got rounded up into playing Avalon for the rest of the evening. The first game of Werewolf I played was, honestly, not that great as far as first impressions go, being immediately lynched on the first round of voting and getting to sit on the sidelines watching everyone else have fun. I mean, I can see why people play it, but I think it's kind of a glaring downside that you can have a person, any person, get immediately excised from the game and have to find something else to do for the next however long it takes to resolve things, and since you can have really big games of Werewolf that can take a while. So I enjoyed Avalon a lot better because everyone's in it until the end. It's got the same dynamic of intrigue and bullshit but, surprise surprise, it's designed so at the very, very least everybody gets to stick around and participate no matter how long or how short the game goes. I actually got to do intrigue stuff this time! The first game left a bit skeptical after one of Arthur's loyal servants hosed up and played the wrong quest card on the final round (a strictly illegal move, loyalists can only vote to seek victory) which means what should have been a win became a "????????????" thanks to someone not paying any attention. "Here we go again," I'm thinking to myself...but the next three games we play all go much, much better, everybody gets into the swing of things and it becomes much better organized. The longest and most tense game we played I wound up as Merlin and nearly guided Arthur's knights to victory but the bastard Mordred managed to sway the king's assignments and I couldn't go "hey gently caress that guy" without tipping my hand and getting assassinated, it was very well done on his part. So I now have an intrigue game that I actually like.
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Feb 25, 2015 08:34
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You should see the hissy fit being thrown in the wargames forum on BGG. In the past they had some semi-understandable complaints like Risk Legacy being wargame of the year but this year it was Fire in the Lake. Now, it probably should have been something genuinely innovative like Unconditional Surrender instead of the nth COIN game but it's not a terrible selection. Cue the grognards calling it a eurogame with pasted on theme. Wargames have the Charles S. Roberts awards and I'm pretty sure Consimworld does awards, too so it's not like BGG is the only outlet for praise. They don't even vote in the BGG awards and then comes the whining. Basically awards are something for people to throw manchild tantrums about and maaaaaybe for publishers to put on boxes. I guess some people like to get all fanboy-warrior and vote, too. They're essentially meaningless.
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Feb 25, 2015 09:41
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cenotaph posted:You should see the hissy fit being thrown in the wargames forum on BGG. In the past they had some semi-understandable complaints like Risk Legacy being wargame of the year but this year it was Fire in the Lake. Now, it probably should have been something genuinely innovative like Unconditional Surrender instead of the nth COIN game but it's not a terrible selection. Cue the grognards calling it a eurogame with pasted on theme. Wargames have the Charles S. Roberts awards and I'm pretty sure Consimworld does awards, too so it's not like BGG is the only outlet for praise. They don't even vote in the BGG awards and then comes the whining.
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Feb 25, 2015 11:10
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I've managed to break my mother's almost daily Instant hit. It ticks all the same boxes that made my parents love Splendor, like minimal setup, simple rules with room for different tactics, and short playing time. Can't believe it's taken me so long to add it to my collection but since the new edition came out recently I suppose I did myself a favour. There's something just nice about laying out the tiles and building up the countryside, yet the game allows you to be massive dicks to each other with stuff like joining cities together so you can steal them from another player. And holy poo poo, when you get a tile that was the exact one someone else needed to complete their massive 20+ point city...
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Feb 25, 2015 11:51
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Kai Tave posted:Summoner Wars Always remember that you can attack your own units. Occasionally you'll want to pick off your own heavily wounded beatstick to gain the mana yourself and deny your opponent.
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Feb 25, 2015 13:39
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Zveroboy posted:I've managed to break my mother's almost daily I know Carcassone is well loved, I just never got it. They game just feels so random to me, even when I am winning I never feel like it was because of my decisions that I won or lost. edit-don't take this as me bad-mouthing or hating on you for playing it, it definitely is a step up from the typical Monopoly-esque game that families typically play. Splendor though is my preferred 30 minute time filler game, and I love it for that. Madmarker fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Feb 25, 2015 |
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Feb 25, 2015 14:14
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Kai Tave posted:Summoner Wars This is one of my favorite two player games. There is a lot of content out for it, so if you enjoy it and want more, I highly recommend the recent Summoner wars alliances. It just became available on CoolStuff. Even without the eight new armies, the sturdy box, dividers, and fabric playmat are excellent upgrades to your little box and paper mat. You could also play 3-4 players with the two mats. The eight new armies are mashups of the existing sixteen factions. For instance, the Fallen Phoenix faction is a mix between the Phoenix elves you are familiar with and the fallen kingdom, who like sacrifice and other things. After you play through the armies in the box, you'll have a decent idea about all the factions strengths and weaknesses so you can get whatever you want from there. Note that you might want to take my opinion with a grain of salt because I was a playtester on Alliances. I think it is safe to say that if you like summoner wars and want more, it is the best next step.
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Feb 25, 2015 15:51
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Anyone have any words for Cheaty Mages? I'm a sucker for Seiji Kanai games, but I'm wary of any game that has a less than 7 score on BGG. What's wrong with it? It looks like it could be a bit too Munchkin-y, in that victory is determined solely by the take thatedness of the game.
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Feb 25, 2015 16:29
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I umm own it but have never played it. Those are my shameful words. I'll try to play it soon and report back
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Feb 25, 2015 16:32
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Great (short!) video review of Argent: the Consortium. I hope this guy continues to review games like this.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:04
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unpronounceable posted:What would you say is most innovative? I'd say Tragedy Looper, but I don't play nearly as many games as others here. Honestly, I haven't played most of the games on their shortlist either. If I had to pick one, I guess I'd say Alchemists? It's kind of eh to play but it integrates the app in a pretty smart way, and I'd be interested in seeing some more games do that. I'm mostly saying that Dead of Winter is pretty much the least innovative game I can think of, basically all of its mechanics have been done better in other games years ago
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Feb 25, 2015 17:18
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Sup board game thread. So I've often found in this thread and elsewhere that some of the best advice when it comes to board game suggestions isn't a link to long-rear end reviews describing game mechanics in depth, or a list of a dozen games that people have to go and research themselves, but a few paragraphs where people try to objectively say what a game's like and what aspects are good/bad, and why. To that end I've started a blog where I'm aiming to do just that for a wide range of games, called Tea and Board Games I have a list of about 100 games I want to write 500-word summaries of, to cover a broad base of games and (hopefully) help people decide whether they'd be interested in a particular game, and I'm about 30 in already. The current list of games I've done is here. Comments/criticisms/abject insults welcome! Unless it's about my UK-style spelling because I give precisely zero fucks about that.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:18
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GrandpaPants posted:Anyone have any words for Cheaty Mages? I'm a sucker for Seiji Kanai games, but I'm wary of any game that has a less than 7 score on BGG. What's wrong with it? It looks like it could be a bit too Munchkin-y, in that victory is determined solely by the take thatedness of the game. It's not particularly take-thaty, since your vote is secret, and most of the cards you play are secret. There's some luck in the cards, but in general it's a game to outsmart and misdirect the other players into hurting the fighters that you didn't vote for. There's also enough variability in the set up that it doesn't get too samey. At $15 it's a buy if you need another light game - I don't think anyone loves the game but it should go over well with most groups.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:27
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bobvonunheil posted:Comments/criticisms/abject insults welcome! Unless it's about my UK-style spelling because I give precisely zero fucks about that. The way you've designed your entries is pretty concise and even just scrolling down the front page lots of names/articles that I am interested in reading stood out to me easily. The quick/concise nature of your reviews is appreciated, too, but without your explanation here in the thread I would have thought they were too short to get any momentum going. In other words: for those of us here, they're probably fine, but people from the wilds of the internet might not be impressed. Depending on your target audience (which might also just be yourself, which is fine), you may or may not want to adjust. You have a lot of extra whitespace all over, at least in Chrome; you may want to consider reducing it a bit, as the disconnect between your blog title, article title, and the article is a bit much, i.e. lots of scrolling involved. The takeaway: I like your blog, maybe tweak it a bit visually, but please keep it up. 
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Feb 25, 2015 17:29
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Lorini posted:Great (short!) video review of Argent: the Consortium. I hope this guy continues to review games like this. Now that's a board game review. And now I have to add Argent to my wishlist.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:30
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Baron Fuzzlewhack posted:The way you've designed your entries is pretty concise and even just scrolling down the front page lots of names/articles that I am interested in reading stood out to me easily. The quick/concise nature of your reviews is appreciated, too, but without your explanation here in the thread I would have thought they were too short to get any momentum going. In other words: for those of us here, they're probably fine, but people from the wilds of the internet might not be impressed. Depending on your target audience (which might also just be yourself, which is fine), you may or may not want to adjust. Yeah I'm not a fan of how much white space there is, the wordpress theme I've chosen isn't too flexible. That'll come later when I've got more of the content fleshed out, and ideally the 'links' section at the end will contain info on tutorials etc instead of just a link to BGG. I should also say that I've designed a huge-rear end flowchart that'll become an image map with links to all those pages once I've written all the summaries. But that's to come!
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Feb 25, 2015 18:01
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bobvonunheil posted:I should also say that I've designed a huge-rear end flowchart that'll become an image map with links to all those pages once I've written all the summaries. But that's to come! This is the part I'm most looking forward to, so I've bookmarked it and will keep up with it!
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Feb 25, 2015 18:07
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Lorini posted:Great (short!) video review of Argent: the Consortium. I hope this guy continues to review games like this. Will play if it shows up at game night, but it will have to wow me to make it a must buy.
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Feb 25, 2015 18:15
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bobvonunheil posted:Sup board game thread. I like the idea and I'm looking forward to it. I'm also glad it isn't in more videos format 
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Feb 25, 2015 18:21
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Serioustalk: I have been off and on kinda-maybe interested in BattleCON and figured I might just have to buy and try. Well I learned more useful info to help me make that decision so far just from the header + first paragraph + first two pictures of https://teaboardgames.wordpress.com/battlecon-devastation-of-indines/. e: Ditto for Dixit, and more I expect. This format and content is so ridiculously relevant to me. The Eyes Have It fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Feb 25, 2015 |
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Feb 25, 2015 18:37
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The developer of Argent is going pretty Broken Loose on Splendor in the Golden Geek awards thread, heh. Shampoo4you posted:
Shampoo4you posted:
quote:
So is Splendor pretty broken in terms of viable strategies?
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Feb 25, 2015 20:15
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Wait, does LL99 guy hate Love Letter too? Maybe I was too quick to judge him as a dirty scrubcasual funhaver after all. e: oh wait I missed the last one. Oh well.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:19
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fozzy fosbourne posted:The developer of Argent is going pretty Broken Loose on Splendor in the Golden Geek awards thread, heh. For some reason this kinda makes me like him/Argent more. Maybe just general props to go against the general circlejerkish nature of BGG while not sounding like an outright angry gamer stereotype. Splendor is fine for what it is: A light, casual, filler type game. I would put it at the same game weight level as like, Love Letter, but without the benefit of being 5 minutes, which makes it substantially worse than Love Letter. Like any other game with a market row, victory has a tendency to come down to topdecking, since the game basically comes down to "who can be the most economical/lucky." I'm not sure if I'd call it a broken strategy, but it's definitely not very broad in its strategic depths. There's no real way to do anything else but be as efficient as possible. The top row is mostly useless, except to get like 1 card, maybe 2, to jump you to victory, but it basically just serves as a VP grab at that point (that, again, may be gated through luck). I wouldn't say it's actively BAD, but it definitely doesn't deserve that much recognition. I imagine at least like 50% of the affection for the game comes form the fact that the chips feel really good, which just means more games need more heavy chips to drive the price of the game.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:22
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Archenteron posted:Always remember that you can attack your own units. Occasionally you'll want to pick off your own heavily wounded beatstick to gain the mana yourself and deny your opponent. I did not know that! This could be very useful in future games and I'll be sure to mention it. I don't think it would have made a difference during the game we played because his Phoenix Elves were capable of precision striking the units he wanted dead off the board before I could have taken advantage of this...but at the same time I was willing to trade one Smasher to soak up two attacks, and I was able to use Freeze (the event card that locks one of his units down until he pays 2 to unfreeze it) to blunt some of his resource superiority. If this were Magic: the Gathering that would be a terrible tradeoff in terms of card advantage, but here it seemed to work fine since the resource flow works differently. Rusty Kettle posted:This is one of my favorite two player games. There is a lot of content out for it, so if you enjoy it and want more, I highly recommend the recent Summoner wars alliances. It just became available on CoolStuff. Even without the eight new armies, the sturdy box, dividers, and fabric playmat are excellent upgrades to your little box and paper mat. You could also play 3-4 players with the two mats. I saw some Alliances stuff on the Plaid Hat website, yeah. Question, what kind of playmat comes in the other big box set, not Alliances but the one with the basic factions like Shadow Elves and Benders? The box says it contains a "premium playmat" but the store also carries a separate shrinkwrapped Summoner Wars board made out of heavy boardgame stock...except we checked the dimensions and that one is too big to even consider fitting into the big box, so I'm not really interested in buying it even if I do think the little paper playmat is kind of eh.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:23
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He's a different guy then the BattleCON guy, too
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Feb 25, 2015 20:25
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Yeah, Splendor really unimpressed me on its first showing. Seemed like every time I dare to buy a card, the guy after me in order got exactly what he needed and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:27
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GrandpaPants posted:For some reason this kinda makes me like him/Argent more. Maybe just general props to go against the general circlejerkish nature of BGG while not sounding like an outright angry gamer stereotype. ... except he's still arguing with awards, which is the biggest joust against windmills in modern entertainment. So far this is my favorite pair of posts on that thread: xpiredsodapop posted:Just one more thing to take with a grain of salt here now. The BGG rating system and now the Geek Awards. xpiredsodapop posted:Only started paying some attention to the Golden Geek awards last year.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:28
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Kai Tave posted:I saw some Alliances stuff on the Plaid Hat website, yeah. Question, what kind of playmat comes in the other big box set, not Alliances but the one with the basic factions like Shadow Elves and Benders? The box says it contains a "premium playmat" but the store also carries a separate shrinkwrapped Summoner Wars board made out of heavy boardgame stock...except we checked the dimensions and that one is too big to even consider fitting into the big box, so I'm not really interested in buying it even if I do think the little paper playmat is kind of eh. There are 3 different kinds of playmats available for Summoner Wars. I guess the Alliances one is a cloth playmat, or whatever "premium" means. I dunno, I don't have it yet. The one in the Master Set is two halves of the board, made with cardboard. It's pretty good. The last one is a paper playmat in the "starter" sets with 2 factions (Phoenix Elves vs. Tundra Orcs, for example). It is crap.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:28
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My bud who backed Exploding Kittens texted me this morning asking about Dead of Winter. These awards do matter and they do raise visibility.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:31
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fozzy fosbourne posted:So is Splendor pretty broken in terms of viable strategies? I really like Splendor but the game isn't super deep. If you don't know what to do, go for the middle row exclusively, without regard to anything else and you should do well. Theres some more strategy beyond that, when to reserve cards, when to horde chips, when to actually build towards the third tier cards, but its not much. I like it because it is a great filler game, and a great stepping stone game. The game generally lasts 20-30 minutes, which is perfect for when one table gets done early while another table is in there last turn of Dominant Species or Agricola. Gamers who aren't much beyond the munchkin level can understand the rules quite easily and is much more likely to grab their attention than a stronger economic game like Power Grid. It isn't God's gift to gaming, but it serves a large and growing niche, middleweight designer games, and serves it quite well.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:37
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:My bud who backed Exploding Kittens texted me this morning asking about Dead of Winter. These awards do matter and they do raise visibility. It's time to have The Talk.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:38
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GrandpaPants posted:For some reason this kinda makes me like him/Argent more. Maybe just general props to go against the general circlejerkish nature of BGG while not sounding like an outright angry gamer stereotype. His use of the word “blame” to describe an increase in the size of the community plants him pretty firmly in that camp.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:39
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:My bud who backed Exploding Kittens texted me this morning asking about Dead of Winter. These awards do matter and they do raise visibility. And that's bad because he might buy and enjoy a game that your community groupthink has decided is suboptimal?
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Feb 25, 2015 20:43
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admanb posted:And that's bad because he might buy and enjoy a game that your community groupthink has decided is suboptimal?
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Feb 25, 2015 20:44
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admanb posted:And that's bad because he might buy and enjoy a game that your community groupthink has decided is suboptimal? You do note that nowhere in his sentence did he say, "And therefore is a horrible, horrible person who has wrong opinions on everything." edit-They are both poo poo games..............I'd Say Dead of Winter is a step up from OMG MONKEY CHEESE RANDOM CATS, not by much mind you, but still a step up. Madmarker fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Feb 25, 2015 |
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Feb 25, 2015 20:44
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GrandpaPants posted:The last one is a paper playmat in the "starter" sets with 2 factions (Phoenix Elves vs. Tundra Orcs, for example). It is crap. Yeah, it kind of is. Me and the other player chatted a bit about that and how it felt kind of cheap to have this cheap paper playmat going on...but on the other hand, part of the appeal of a starter set is getting something to players as a cheap impulse purchase, and also the dimensions of the starter box sort of limit what you can really pack in there since the thicker and glossier paperstock you use the harder it's going to be to fold it. We agreed that for a game that requires a play area to function it was probably one of the best of a spread of bad solutions available to them. I'm at least glad that the damage tokens are solid punchboard and the cardstock they use for the decks isn't super flimsy. That said I definitely wouldn't mind a nicer cardboard playmat, but I'm gonna hold off on getting the master set until I've played a few more games. Fifty bucks isn't bank breaking but I'm trying not to just throw money around unless I know I'm gonna get a lot of mileage out of it. Though speaking of cheap impulse purchases, I'm considering picking up Coup next time I'm in the store after that Tea & Board Games capsule review.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:45
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How good is the Farmers Expansion for Keyflower? Pretty sure I'm gonna grab a copy of Keyflower soon and my FLGS has a copy of Farmers for a mere $17. e: Also speaking of filler I really enjoy No Thanks -- the pokeresque bluff-bidding simplicity with a healthy dose of strategy + the shittalk it creates is lovely T-Bone fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Feb 25, 2015 |
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Feb 25, 2015 20:52
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T-Bone posted:How good is the Farmers Expansion for Keyflower? Pretty sure I'm gonna grab a copy of Keyflower soon and my FLGS has a copy of Farmers for a mere $17. The Farmers isn't necessary but for $17 it's a no brainer, grab it if you like Keyflower. Adds even more variablity and the wheat is nice in those games where there isn't a lot of transport.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:55
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Tippis posted:Oh I don't know… It makes him powerful.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:20
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Madmarker posted:You do note that nowhere in his sentence did he say, "And therefore is a horrible, horrible person who has wrong opinions on everything." What he said isn't true. Plus, anytime something like this or hivemind is brought up, one of the thread regulars always rushes in for the kill. It's also why someone might mention playing Munckin but they have to throw out the line about how it wasn't up to them.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:38
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