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OmegaGoo posted:I just bought Mage Wars. Enjoy having no one to play it with.
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Mar 8, 2015 07:10
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I'm crossposting this from the DIY projects thread - I just finished painting the last pieces of my Catan board. Everything was made from scratch - the wood hexes, the board itself, the clay sculpts, even the number tokens, which were made from some cut down nails, wood circles, and generous dollops of clear-drying superglue on top. My phone camera isn't great - everything looks much more vibrant in person, but I'm still drat proud of the whole thing. In retrospect, the only problem is that the board is actually slightly smaller than a standard catan board, so the cities and roads just barely fit - still, if it ever becomes an issue I guess I can make some customs pieces for those as well.   And closeups of the individual pieces. Now to break the drat thing in with it's first game! Shouldn't be too hard to wrangle a few people.      
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Mar 8, 2015 07:31
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Nice arts and crafts. Pity people always pimp out Catan and not something like Twilight Struggle.
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Mar 8, 2015 08:06
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The detail and sculpts look amazing. I saw your original thread; Thanks for the tip about the glue!
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Mar 8, 2015 08:10
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No real interesting games but what the hell, let's do a game night report. Carcassonne: a nice appetizer. Easy to learn, easy to play, not deep but it can stay interesting. Snake Oil: My first time playing this one. I think it's my favorite of the word salad genre because I can do something instead of playing a card and silently hoping for the best. Unfortunately it has the same problem as all word salad games: For a castaway customer I can sell a Future Cloak and spin a tale of how it will allow them to travel through time until they're rescued (not mentioned: the travel rate is one second per second), then the next player plays Fart Diaper and giggles their way to a point. King of Tokyo: Fun enough until I got eliminated, at which point I got to sit there cuddling a cat for an hour (the two people I killed at the same time left and the rest were bound up in San Juan for what felt like a month, so no chance of starting a new game) while the last three players circled endlessly. The cat was the best part of that hour, she was loving the attention and I've learned some tricks over the years. Back to the game, I'm definitely not a fan of player elimination stuff. Anyway, then things got crowded (it was a double birthday bash), people were talking about 8+-player Arabian Knights (I like the game with small numbers in the right mood) or Cards Against Humanity (Hell no), so I made my excuses and escaped.
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Mar 8, 2015 08:30
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dishwasherlove posted:Nice arts and crafts. Pity people always pimp out Catan and not something like Twilight Struggle. Behold
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Mar 8, 2015 08:36
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Ubik_Lives posted:Quantifying luck is always an interesting concept to me, because while we can all accept that the odds getting the result we need on a die roll is the same between us, we also accept that statistically speaking, some people will exist higher or lower on bell curve of the results distribution. Some people have just been shafted time and time again by random chance, just as some people have won the lottery multiple times. There may be no reason to believe that what happens in the future will be affected by your past luck, but for someone who's had a run of bad luck, that's a pretty lovely consolation prize. Mister Sinewave posted:Some "unlucky" people are - oddly enough - actually in the habit of expecting to be lucky and when they're not they figure it's because they're getting screwed. Richard Wiseman did some interesting research on what makes people feel lucky and unlucky.
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Mar 8, 2015 09:15
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A while back I played a game of Alien Frontiers and was really impressed at how much it grabbed my group. I can't imagine it's something that would go over entirely all that well with this thread, but I figured I'd ask anyway. I seem to have three options for more of that sort of thing, Back the Alien Frontiers Big Box Kickstarter : Downsides here are :that the publisher apparently sucks at kickstarters and still hasn't completed the previous Alien Frontiers one two years later; the chap who owns it is somebody I play with about 50% of the time, so I should probably avoid overlapping with his collection; I'm not actually how much the expansions really add Troyes: The theme is a loving French medieval city. It would have to be pretty spectacular to overcome this. Euphoria: The theme here makes me smile, but from looking into it I worry that it's not as elegant as it could be (then again this is something I'm horrible at judging) Has anybody got any thoughts here?
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Mar 8, 2015 09:48
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Mojo Jojo posted:Troyes: The theme is a loving French medieval city. It would have to be pretty spectacular to overcome this. Let's be frank, Alien Frontier's theme is completely pasted on and none of its mechanics relate in any way to its theme. If you're the kind of person who gets excited that the territories are named after classic scifi authors instead of the names of medieval territories, then more power to you, but in terms of the gameplay it ends up being equally empty and meaningless. Troyes is much, much better than Alien Frontiers. In Alien Frontiers, I've never felt the need to adapt too much to other people's strategies since so much of the game revolves around throwing down the dice. After a handful of games, each game of Alien Frontiers just feels the same as the last, since your decisions are almost entirely gated through your dice roll results (pending a few of the technology cards) and the routes to victory are clear as day. In Troyes, you get enough options to manipulate the dice (and steal them from other people) that it's generally more about the KIND of dice you care about. As a result, it becomes more of a resource management game, since you not only need to care about the number and type of dice, but you also need to care about the ways to manipulate them (and potentially screw other players at the same time). Also, the setup is variable with a rather large number of combinations, so each game won't feel samey at all. A big part of the skill is almost Dominion-esque, in that you need to identify the big scoring combos and either get there first or hamstring the gently caress out of the person who actually goes for it. I also really like the threat system since it's another thing to make decisions around. Do you spend your resources pulling a thorn out of your side and let it fester and hope it doesn't become infected? Another nice bonus is that Troyes feels like a faster game since you can actually think when it's not your turn, since everyone rolls their dice at once. Basically, Alien Frontiers is to Troyes as Lords of Waterdeep is to Caylus. GrandpaPants fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 10:06
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Any good games that are both co-op and competitive at the same time? Like you're cooperating for a common goal against the game, but there are also individual goals, and only one of you is the sole winner at the end rather than all/some of you.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:20
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Marvel Legendary is the only one I can think of, but the competitive aspect of it is probably the weakest part.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:24
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sticklefifer posted:Any good games that are both co-op and competitive at the same time? Like you're cooperating for a common goal against the game, but there are also individual goals, and only one of you is the sole winner at the end rather than all/some of you. Archipelago. Dead of Winter does it, but does it badly.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:26
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tarbrush posted:Dead of Winter does it, but does it badly. New thread title, please.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:34
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Anyone have any opinions on Medina? I saw it today at my local shop and it looks pretty neat. Not sure if it's worth picking up, though.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:43
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sticklefifer posted:Any good games that are both co-op and competitive at the same time? Like you're cooperating for a common goal against the game, but there are also individual goals, and only one of you is the sole winner at the end rather than all/some of you. Escape may work for you. In theory everyone has to get out for it to be a win, but we all know that the first guy who gets out is way cooler than all the losers still inside. Mage Knight is also an option, even though you don't have "goals" as such.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:52
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sticklefifer posted:Any good games that are both co-op and competitive at the same time? Like you're cooperating for a common goal against the game, but there are also individual goals, and only one of you is the sole winner at the end rather than all/some of you. Already said but Archipelago is what you're looking for.
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Mar 8, 2015 10:58
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CaptainApathyUK posted:Was somebody here trying to get hold of Age of Soccer recently, or did I imagine it? It's currently £20 on Amazon UK and is Prime eligible. Thanks for keeping an eye out but the game I'm buying is the similarly titled Time of Soccer and its quite different. Cheers though.
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Mar 8, 2015 11:00
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CodfishCartographer posted:Anyone have any opinions on Medina? I saw it today at my local shop and it looks pretty neat. Not sure if it's worth picking up, though. I played it once, a 4 player game. I liked it, its an abstract piece-laying point scoring massive game of chicken (in the sense you're collectively making bigger palaces, if you claim a palace of a certain colour, you get that many points but are locked out of claiming against that colour again when it might get bigger). I would need to know I would have other people who like an abstract brain teaser to pick it up though. Or someone who likes building conga lines.
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Mar 8, 2015 11:06
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sticklefifer posted:Any good games that are both co-op and competitive at the same time? Like you're cooperating for a common goal against the game, but there are also individual goals, and only one of you is the sole winner at the end rather than all/some of you. Cutthroat Caverns should work for that. You need to cooperate to not get killed by monsters, compete to get last hits for prestige, and outlast to be the living person with the most prestige at the end of the game. Mage Knight is also in the ballpark. I've only played against Volkare from the expansion once but I vaguely remember that he basically forces a coop mentality while leaving room for competition. The straight coop scenario from the base game also works. And seconding Archipelago so hard. It's the perfect fit for those criteria. If you don't cooperate, a rebellion happens, the game ends, and no one wins. If you don't compete, you'll never scrounge enough points from victory conditions to be the eventual winner.
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Mar 8, 2015 11:15
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Anyone have any thoughts on Shadowrun Crossfire? Birthday coming up and I'm looking for something new to grab with what is basically "found money" Videos runthroughs I've seen make it look pretty cool, but I'd be interested in hearing goon opinions.
CaptainApathyUK fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 13:30
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OmegaGoo posted:I just bought Mage Wars. I wish I could say I expect to eventually get Mage Wars to the table, but realistically there's no chance in hell. It's way too obtuse with all the keywords on the cards, and y'know giving new players an entire book's worth of spells to figure out rather than one handful.
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Mar 8, 2015 13:37
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Bruceski posted:
I cannot imagine what three people were doing to make KoT last an hour+. Usually I give it a pass on player elimination because it goes so fast once people start dropping dead.
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Mar 8, 2015 13:48
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McKilligan posted:I'm crossposting this from the DIY projects thread - I just finished painting the last pieces of my Catan board. Everything was made from scratch - the wood hexes, the board itself, the clay sculpts, even the number tokens, which were made from some cut down nails, wood circles, and generous dollops of clear-drying superglue on top. My phone camera isn't great - everything looks much more vibrant in person, but I'm still drat proud of the whole thing.  I love arts and crafts, this is a thing of beauty to me! When I end up making a game I usually go for function over form. I wanted to try making a Catan set entirely out of ceramics (I have a friend with a pottery studio I could use). It would be a good way to show off interesting glazes, and making tiles is like the easiest thing to do in ceramics. Scyther posted:I wish I could say I expect to eventually get Mage Wars to the table, but realistically there's no chance in hell. It's way too obtuse with all the keywords on the cards, and y'know giving new players an entire book's worth of spells to figure out rather than one handful. Mage Wars is like when you where 12 and tried to play Magic with your younger sister. She didn't quite understand most of the cards and wasn't really into it but maybe she humored you and played a game or two because she was bored and you insisted. You quickly gave up on this and started playing at the local game store. Not an option with Mage Wars, with Mage Wars everyone is your younger sister. Rutibex fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 13:52
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Got to try Thunderstone Advance and Shadowrun Crossfire last night Ended up really enjoying both surprisingly. I've heard Thunderstone is a lot like Dominion and I'll go so far as to say its better. The ability to go to the Dungeon OR the Village added just enough extra to the game to my liking. We ended up in some odd situations where we had REALLY high monsters in all 3 areas so we would just through our corpses at it to take em out, that seemed to be the only real complain anyone had with the game is the way they have you handle monsters, but overall great game Shadowrun was told to me as....you like Ghost Stories, games that hate you and are hard, will this is like that except with clear rules! Fun overall game where the game really does kinda beat you into the ground slowly, or depending on starting flips horribly brutally. Would play both again. Will buy Thunderstone
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Mar 8, 2015 15:09
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Rutibex posted:Mage Wars is like when you where 12 and tried to play Magic with your younger sister. She didn't quite understand most of the cards and wasn't really into it but maybe she humored you and played a game or two because she was bored and you insisted. You quickly gave up on this and started playing at the local game store. Not an option with Mage Wars, with Mage Wars everyone is your younger sister. Then nobody will play again with me for ages. The "no homework" thing is why I didn't get Android: Netrunner instead, and why I'm not gunna pick up Doomtown:Reloaded, and thought having the whole spellbook there would be easier. Why can't Mage Wars just not be so.... it's like, the whole thing is great, and complex, and probably balanced well, just designed for two best friends who live together and do nothing but play Mage Wars, and nobody else.
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Mar 8, 2015 15:10
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Tiny Chalupa posted:Got to try Thunderstone Advance and Shadowrun Crossfire last night Thunderstone, sadly, is kinda trash. There's a whole lot that can be said about it, and it's great you enjoyed it (as it is possible to enjoy many games, good or not), but it's really not a well made game, and it is certainly not better designed than Dominion.
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Mar 8, 2015 15:53
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sticklefifer posted:Any good games that are both co-op and competitive at the same time? Like you're cooperating for a common goal against the game, but there are also individual goals, and only one of you is the sole winner at the end rather than all/some of you. You should look into Homeland. Rundown: each player is secretly either an agent, politician, or a terrorist. At the start of each round, a crisis will come out for each player. Then players take turns taking the "lead" on each crisis and secretly contributing cards, either good or bad, to two crises. Each crisis has an urgency level that goes up each turn until it resolves. What makes the game great is how crises resolve. The secret cards are revealed and compared to the crisis's strength. If the cards win, the good guys get closer to winning, and the lead investigator gets a number reputation tokens. If it fails, the terrorist gets closer to winning, and everyone gets political clout points. However, only one person can win the game. Agents get points for reputation, politicians get points for clout, and the terrorist can win by blowing up the world or just not getting caught. This leads to interesting dynamics where the politicians end up with the incentive to tank crises for clout. If the good guys are doing too well, the agents have to worry about other agents getting more reputation than them, which can make them tank each others's crises as well. I played BSG for the first time last week, and it seems that Homeland is a modern, streamlined version. I recommend it. Prairie Bus fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 15:55
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JoshTheStampede posted:I cannot imagine what three people were doing to make KoT last an hour+. Usually I give it a pass on player elimination because it goes so fast once people start dropping dead. I've had a game like this, the Evolutions and some keep cards were really dragging it out - after a Cheerleader costume rushed the first eliminations in a 6-player game it slowed down a lot.
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Mar 8, 2015 16:03
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silvergoose posted:Thunderstone, sadly, is kinda trash. There's a whole lot that can be said about it, and it's great you enjoyed it (as it is possible to enjoy many games, good or not), but it's really not a well made game, and it is certainly not better designed than Dominion. We can agree to disagree. I feel dominion is eh. Way too much bloat for a really basic game. It's a good "hey let's show someone the basics of a gaming" then don't touch it again. That's mine and my gaming group thought on it overall. We aren't new to gaming, we easily have 100 plus games between us of every type, we just feel there isn't enough there We did all quite enjoy thunderstone and I recommend whose burned out on dominion to try it
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Mar 8, 2015 16:21
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Tiny Chalupa posted:We can agree to disagree. I feel dominion is eh. Way too much bloat for a really basic game. First time I've heard Dominion called bloated! What makes you say that? I actually am burned out on Dominion, and found Thunderstone to be worse in every single way mechanically.
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Mar 8, 2015 16:28
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CaptainApathyUK posted:Anyone have any thoughts on Shadowrun Crossfire? Birthday coming up and I'm looking for something new to grab with what is basically "found money" Videos runthroughs I've seen make it look pretty cool, but I'd be interested in hearing goon opinions. Shadowrun: Crossfire is an ok game that does co-op really well and deckbuilding kinda lovely. Random market, random threats, a very slow draw mechanic, no trashing, and customizable characters (that last one is actually a good thing). Interesting, and you will definitely get your money's worth out of it, but not great.
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Mar 8, 2015 16:28
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Tiny Chalupa posted:We can agree to disagree. I feel dominion is eh. Way too much bloat for a really basic game. That's a really strange word to refer to Dominion as. I'm curious why you think it's bloated as well. I got to try out Dead of Winter last night, like many others I don't feel like the betrayer option really adds anything, in addition to some goals seeming to be just as bad as a betrayer character. My 'secret' objective was to kill off my characters and only control one guy. But this has all been gone over quite a bit. I also played Dungeon Petz with some random guys who didn't have much exposure to worker placement types, had a great selling of a pet for 33 points (I haven't delved into the multi-need advanced option yet). I got super lucky with the Farmer buyer that wants different color poop. (I happened to draw all 3 colors and had an imp on the platform) I also organized, stickered, and read through my Dungeon Lords Anniversary edition stuff. The box insert looks and works great. That TableTop show has spawned some international tabletop day or something on April 11, and i'm going to use that day at my FLGS to spread the joy of Space Alert. Sloober fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 16:45
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Tiny Chalupa posted:We can agree to disagree. I feel dominion is eh. Way too much bloat for a really basic game. Thunderstone is a not a good game. It's got a lot of flaws, I'll just link this review which I think covers it pretty well: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/713323/i-wanted-love-it-it-left-me-disappointed if you're burned out on dominion there are several better alternatives - - Puzzle Strike is essentially "Dominion with theme/player conflict". It's also one of the few after-Dominion deckbuilders that understood what Dominion did right (or didn't and just blatantly copied it). - Star Realms is not a great game, but it's cheap and plays quick so if you must play a center-row market deckbuilder this is probably the best option - Paperback is a really neat variation on the genre - Eminent Domain gets some tenative thumbs up from people on this thread, but I haven't played it
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Mar 8, 2015 16:53
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I enjoyed Thunderstone for several plays, but it eventually became a slog (much longer than dominion and not trying to offer anything more, just something a little different). The Advance rule where you can optimize your hand for a turn is a good one. So I'm glad my roommate bought it and I didn't...and now that he's moved out of town I'm fine with not playing it again. Basically, if you're fine with getting some good plays out of it (provided you enjoyed your first game) before it (probably) becomes too much of a slog you'll be happy with the purchase. Pascallion fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 16:54
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Crackbone posted:- Paperback is a really neat variation on the genre Problem is I'm ok at word games, so there's only so much changing up of strategy i can do before you run up against my vocabulary limit.
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Mar 8, 2015 17:00
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It's a fun filler-length word game and a great gateway game, but it's not a lot more than that. But for the price, and the size, it really doesn't need to be.
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Mar 8, 2015 17:12
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Tiny Chalupa posted:We can agree to disagree. I feel dominion is eh. Way too much bloat for a really basic game.  I think you might have been driven mad by playing to much Thunderstone. How can a game be both bloated and not have enough content?
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Mar 8, 2015 17:25
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Rutibex posted:
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Mar 8, 2015 17:28
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Poison Mushroom posted:If all the bloat is chaff? Like (for everyone else) Talisman. Talisman is the Icecream sandwich of games, lots of calories and zero nutrition.
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Mar 8, 2015 17:32
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Dominion is bloated. Now I've heard everything.Rutibex posted:
So you're saying he's played it once? 
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Mar 8, 2015 17:32
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