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Poison Mushroom posted:In solo play, I've actually used the card trashing once or twice to get rid of a skill card that was just dead weight in my hand more often than not. Your deck is your timer, but sometimes you can do more with four good hands than five that are only decent. I can see trashing movement cards being a useful strategy in the base game, movement is pretty useless for anything but actually moving around. Movement cards are a lot more useful with the expansion though; with mazes, and monsters that require movements to fight, and abilities that turn movement into attack, trashing your movement cards isn't such a great idea. I am curious though, I have tended to avoid trashing like a plague. I am going to set up my Mage Knight set and try it out to see how it works.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:19
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What were the aliens' goals?
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Apr 5, 2015 17:22
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Poison Mushroom posted:What were the aliens' goals? Abducting humans increased their research track and their eventual goal was to ensure that we couldn't get off Earth, because if we did, we would conquer the galaxy. So they tried to get us to disarm, or at least, halt scientific advancement. The UN actually convened and told the press they were going to try to halt the advance of science and when the scientists heard that, the response was "gently caress the UN." But they did talk the US President into letting them land in DC and build a hospital that ended up altering us and pacifying us, so they won. Sort of.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:31
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Some Numbers posted:Abducting humans increased their research track and their eventual goal was to ensure that we couldn't get off Earth, because if we did, we would conquer the galaxy. So they tried to get us to disarm, or at least, halt scientific advancement. How "gamish" was it? Like did you have dice, and cards, and wooden alien artifact cubes, and predefined mechanics, or was it more like a big game of D&D?
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Apr 5, 2015 17:41
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Rutibex posted:How "gamish" was it? Like did you have dice, and cards, and wooden alien artifact cubes, and predefined mechanics, or was it more like a big game of D&D? Everything the countries did was based on abstracted resources that they gained each round based on their Public Opinion, which could go up or down based on other factors. We rolled a d6 for most things and had roll less than the resources allocated to make the thing work. Military operations were carried out on a big map in the center in a sort of Risk-ish manner. Everything else was player driven. We brokered deals between nations, the UN was all player interaction, the science meetings were all player interaction. All of our research was based on cards we found in various ways and successfully researching them gave us print outs that said "you now have this" which we could share with other scientists.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:00
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After almost three years, my name finally came up in the DTG queue. Picked these up: 18GL 18EU 18US 1817 18MEX 1846 Now the fun part of trying to get them to the table.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:31
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Played some games: Shinobi WAT-AAH! is a set collecting game that ranges from medium-light complexity to medium depending on the variant you play. In Grasshopper mode: On your turn you choose to draw 1 card or flip over the top card of the deck and draw the value of that card +2 (cards have a value of 1-8), doing this gives you negative points equal to the value of the card. Next you can play a ninja clan in front of you, add a ninja to an existing clan, or pass. A clan must be 2-4 cards and they must be of the same clan, if you play 2 or 3 of the same clan they usually have powers they activate like destroying another clan, trading hands with an opponent, or getting you more cards. Playing 3 cards gives you a stronger effect than playing 2 (for example, playing 2 of the spider clan destroys 1 card from an opponents clan where playing 3 destroys the entire clan.). You can add cards to an existing clan instead as long as they are the same color or they are a special character. Special characters have a range of values and their power is a copy of a clan in the game. At the end of your turn you discard 1 card. Once a player plays their 4th clan they end their turn and the game is over. Most points wins. Ninja Master Mode is the same but instead of playing the 4th clan being the end of the game it is just a round in a game of 3 rounds. Inbetween rounds you carry over whatever hand you had to the next round and you get ninja tokens based on how you placed in the previous round. You can spend these ninja stars to get cards that give you special abilities, attacks against the boss, or to look at Boss Decoy cards. The person in last place gets the option of a free look at a decoy card or a free power card from a different deck. At the end of the game you will face a boss card, there are 5 in the game, 1 of them is removed, 3 are decoys, and the last is the one you will face. If you can look at the decoy cards to get a good idea of what the boss card might be by process of elimination. The boss cards provide a large range of positive to negative points depending on how many ninja stars you have on them, you also get points for ninja stars used to look at decoys and to get cards. Most points wins. It is a good 20-30min game and once you play Master mode you won't really want to bother with Grasshopper mode unless you want to play a shorter game. Certain strategies formed in my group like people not playing clans that can destroy other clans until the clan that copies powers was already out and playing the clan that trades hands right before a round ends to get an advantage in later rounds. It is one of those games that you could autopilot through and would be a fun way to pass the time but if you really pay attention to what is going on in what players discard and keeping an eye on the decoys it gains a fair bit of strategy. It is something that we'll play when the game shop only has a little time left. Played Wiz-War (eighth edition), it feels old. Really really old. The newest edition didn't change it enough to make it feel like it wasn't from the 80s. You move around a board ( you get move points so at least you don't roll) and attack each other with spells while trying to kill each other (permanently) or steal each others books. It sounded fun until you realize how ponderous the action turns out to be. In a game where you need to run around and take victory points people don't spend a lot of time shooting each other with spells. If they decide to slog it out it ends up with one of them escaping more often than not because they realized the other player out-drew them on better attack or cancel cards. It is a cute game but at no point did you feel like you were in control of more than 1.5 of your turns. Pandemic: The Cure is the dice equivalent to pandemic. It is less complicated, more random, more action, and faster. No matter what you do a dice game is a dice game so it will always have that threshold of complexity and predictability. If asked I can break it down more but here's the short summary. 6 areas can get disease, you have actions that let you send cubes back in the bag or capture cubes to find the cure (then you must roll at least 13 with the dice collected). At the end of your turn you roll dice from the bag to infect areas. If too many dice get in an area they outbreak, too many outbreaks or not enough dice in the bag and you lose, find the 4 cures and you win. There's more to the game than that when you start actually playing it. The characters all have their own dice and special abilities that make them all very different from each other and there are event cards you spend dice to use. The game takes any nervousness that you would have felt in Pandemic when you hope that 1 card doesn't get drawn but it is amped up because the dice could all roll the same and turn a place that was A-OK to a disaster zone. The group all agreed that we'd rather play this over vanilla pandemic now because of it being faster to the core of the game (the parts of Pandemic we like) and each character/team feels very different. There are some clever ideas in the game and as far as dice games go this fills any need I ever had for a co-op.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:13
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Playing Boss Monster a few nights back. It was a fun game, but I can see it not standing up for the long term. The package is really cute.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:52
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ashez2ashes posted:Playing Boss Monster a few nights back. It was a fun game, but I can see it not standing up for the long term. The package is really cute. I played it a couple weeks ago, and felt it was basically a less bad Munchkin. Less bad in that it ends in a shorter time, but still too long.
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Apr 5, 2015 20:32
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Just in case you guys want to cut to the chase and find out why Boss Monster is terrible, here is my previous post on it. E: VVVVV If I recall correctly, the rules allow you to mulligan if you draw only advanced rooms, but honestly, it should let you do it if you draw more than two, maybe three of the things. Not even in a "This is why Boss Monster sucks" way, but a "Even a bad game should have a mechanic like this, it is clear no human beings playtested this thing" way. Magnetic North fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Apr 5, 2015 |
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Apr 5, 2015 21:38
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My experience with Boss Monster was drawing an opening hand of 4 advanced rooms, a basic room that didn't match my advanced rooms, and two useless spells. I spent the entire game in topdeck mode playing whatever room I just drew because there was nothing else I was allowed to do. Then I died. Meanwhile, one of the other players was drawing an extra spell every turn because they had a room in their opening hand whose text read "Congratulations, you are allowed to actually play the game."
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Apr 5, 2015 21:51
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Some Numbers posted:Just got back from playing a megagame and holy poo poo was that amazing. Oooh, which one?
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Apr 5, 2015 22:03
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New-ish article up from Fantasy Flight Games about their latest theme-drip masterpiece, Tigris and Euphrates https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2015/3/30/martial-laws/
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Apr 5, 2015 22:09
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Aw man is it to late to get a free avatar? I want Betrayal at The House on the Hill please  Anyway for content i will say i finally got my tax refund back so i got plenty of money which means there will be many new board games in my future 
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Apr 5, 2015 22:34
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tarbrush posted:Oooh, which one? It was Watch the Skies, the same one that SU&SD played in their video last year.
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Apr 5, 2015 22:36
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Some Numbers posted:It was Watch the Skies, the same one that SU&SD played in their video last year. Cool! I did the one on London a couple of weeks back. Interesting how different your alien objective seemed to ours. Have you watched their video of the second one? It's even got my gormless face in a few times 
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Apr 5, 2015 23:00
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Wikipedia Brown posted:Played Circus Maximus for the first time last night, with 5 people. Holy poo poo it was so fun! The old Avalon Hill game? Yeah it's fun with a group, I played it ages ago at a board game meet and promptly bought it at the swap meet afterwards
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Apr 5, 2015 23:10
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Some Numbers posted:Last Sunday, a good friend of mine contacted me on Skype asking if I was interested in attending a megagame Thanks for taking the time to write this up, I get a lot more out of "hands on" type reports than promo or overview videos.
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Apr 5, 2015 23:31
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Poison Mushroom posted:In solo play, I've actually used the card trashing once or twice to get rid of a skill card that was just dead weight in my hand more often than not. Your deck is your timer, but sometimes you can do more with four good hands than five that are only decent. Yeah, Rutibex is just wrong on this one. Mage Knight is in large part about squeezing as much power as you can in to a single hand for the end of the game when you're killing dragons and taking cities. The main ways to do that are increased hand size, stronger cards, skills and hiring units (which are effectively 'stored' cards you can add to a hand), but concentrating your deck by trashing can be pretty strong too as long as you're simultaneously picking up good cards. You'd have to try really hard to make a deck that was both thin and too low quality to compensate.
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Apr 6, 2015 03:51
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quote:Yeah, Rutibex is just wrong on this one. Mage Knight is in large part about squeezing as much power as you can in to a single hand for the end of the game when you're killing dragons and taking cities. I think it depends on the game mode you're playing. We usually play the blitz co-op mode (2 days, 2 nights) and I wouldn't normally want to trash more than a few cards. In that mode, you really feel the "deck as resource" constraint. The dummy isn't terribly aggressive, and quite often you can get a lot of stuff done by nursing a few abilities and a spending some "not useful for a tough fight" cards to eke out an extra few easy combats or mine visits or whatever. Even when you're trying to be very effective, you often end up in a situation where you wish there was one more card - any card - at the bottom of your deck so you could maximize a round. Again, to an extent dependent on the mode, it's not like Dominion where you need to maximize your odds of hitting 8 on a single draw. You can manage your hand over time (lots of times I end up sitting on an "Expose" spell or something for a few turns), so if you hit a few "Copper" type cards, you can often get use out of them without disrupting your target hand. If you're ahead of the dummy player, you can take a turn or two to clean up a marauder camp or something using mostly just abilities, while also setting up a strong combat hand, while also sneaking in the movement you need without spending good cards (especially if you have a movement ability). But yeah, it's different in competitive (where you want to be applying some time pressure) or in scenarios where you need to be hitting big stuff more regularly (in Blitz co-op, you really only need a couple "big turns" to take the cities, and can otherwise still be having effective turns with basic cards).
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Apr 6, 2015 04:20
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My wife and I tried to play Brewcrafters this afternoon, and it devolved for my wife into a game of fourth-dimensional chess. I feel like it's because I'm the homebrewer and she feels like in this case she's playing a war game with a general or something. For our efforts, our scores were something apparently ridiculous like 83-60, but I am pretty sure we scored myself too generously; I was making GBS threads beers out of my brewpub, and I think those don't count for reputation. My wife went quickly for a two-bottle setup, then got her face kicked in economically for being unable to utilize it with the large staff she had. I wound up being able to pick up advanced ingredients at a pittance, and could pretty much guarantee myself a lambic a turn. So I became the sour beer specialty shop, making 5 rep a turn + 1 bonus for hop infusers + 1 bonus for having the brewing breakthrough research level. That being said, I'd probably throw up IRL if I drank a hop-infused lambic. We are having a hard time wrapping our heads around all the possibilities in the game. It's hard to figure out strategies because there's so much going on. Neither of us got any farms, for example. I'm also trying to figure out how the variation really comes into play with a 2-player game. The recipes are not wildly different, so it smells like there's a exploitable, consistent strategy in there, but I don't know what they might be. I'm hoping there isn't. I also did insist on getting Space Alert. Aren't there supposed to be cards that have the missions written down on them? I thought that was for figuring out how you did after the 10 minutes of terror. All I can think to do is replay the drat audio track to figure out how we did, and that would get annoying real fast. In a play-through, I saw them working through from that, so I feel like something isn't right with what I got. Beyond that, is there a helper sheet or something that just lists all the subsystems? My wife and I decided to try to crawl through a contrived run to try some of the stuff. We bring in a threat--a meteor--and immediately ponder firing the pulse cannon at it. But we didn't know how much energy it needed, how much damage it could do (5, IIRC), and whether or not it could target blue zone (yes, we think). I'm not really interested in an answer to that specific question in the thread, but rather if there is something that quickly summarizes all the ship's subsystems. I'm thinking if we're struggling at this so much after our 4th dimension Brewcrafters, other people with which we'd play are going to be despairing.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:04
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You shouldn't need to go through the mission text/audio again after you finished the real time bit, since the only thing you need to know is what threats come in at what time under each track and the actions that the players do. As for the subsystems reference, to be honest it shouldn't really be necessary, because everything you need to know is already on the game board. Whenever you press A, you always use one energy, with onl the lower blue and red sections using their own power supply (this is shown by the wires on the board). The guns always show you on what track they fire (for example the pulse cannon fires on all tracks) and the distance that they fire at. B always creates/moves the most amount of power possible. C is always a special action.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:18
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I also did insist on getting Space Alert. Aren't there supposed to be cards that have the missions written down on them? I thought that was for figuring out how you did after the 10 minutes of terror. All I can think to do is replay the drat audio track to figure out how we did, and that would get annoying real fast. When you flip over a new threat, you're supposed to put one of the yellow chips on it to tell you when that threat appears. You use that information in the resolution phase when reconstructing what happened. The resolution phase doesn't care about when things like communications down or you drawing more action cards happens.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:23
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jmzero posted:I think it depends on the game mode you're playing. We usually play the blitz co-op mode (2 days, 2 nights) and I wouldn't normally want to trash more than a few cards. In that mode, you really feel the "deck as resource" constraint. The dummy isn't terribly aggressive, and quite often you can get a lot of stuff done by nursing a few abilities and a spending some "not useful for a tough fight" cards to eke out an extra few easy combats or mine visits or whatever. Even when you're trying to be very effective, you often end up in a situation where you wish there was one more card - any card - at the bottom of your deck so you could maximize a round. Blitz compresses the game a lot, I don't like it but trashing would definitely be significantly less impactful. Is Training any good in Blitz mode at all? I already don't like taking it after the second day.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:32
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Trashing is great if you want to force the round to end, otherwise it's just good for getting rid of cards that are crappy in the late game. I lost a solo Volkare scenario on the higher difficulty levels because I was prepared to kick his rear end but he took too long to get to me. If I had trashed I just would have lost faster. Mage Knight is highly situational.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:56
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Jabor posted:When you flip over a new threat, you're supposed to put one of the yellow chips on it to tell you when that threat appears. You use that information in the resolution phase when reconstructing what happened. Hmm okay good to know; that makes it a lot more concise.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:02
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Earlier in the thread, a few people were talking about "vaselification" or something similar. I assume it has to do with Tom Vasel and/or The Dice Tower, but I couldn't follow it beyond that. What is the big worry?
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Apr 6, 2015 06:02
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Earlier in the thread, a few people were talking about "vaselification" or something similar. I assume it has to do with Tom Vasel and/or The Dice Tower, but I couldn't follow it beyond that. What is the big worry? Without digging into the thread (if you could link a post that'd probably be helpful), I'd guess that it's about very shallow criticisms where tastemakers are basically just plowing through as many games as possible and saying "Wow!! What a game!! Definitely spend dollars on this, unless the name confuses me for very arbitrary reasons" to everything that gets mailed to them.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:09
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The review industry should have a calendaleization
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Apr 6, 2015 06:13
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quote:Blitz compresses the game a lot, I don't like it but trashing would definitely be significantly less impactful. Is Training any good in Blitz mode at all? I already don't like taking it after the second day. I don't think I've ever taken it in a Blitz game; it certainly feels like something you want to take early in a long game (but I also might not be valuing correctly). Overall I wish I had more big blocks of time to play Mage Knight; I enjoy blitzes enough, but I think the game is better geared towards longer play sessions.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:50
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Some Numbers posted:Last Sunday, a good friend of mine contacted me on Skype asking if I was interested in attending a megagame that was happening less than a week later. On Friday, I received my dossier, explaining the (poorly written) rules and that I was the Chief Scientific Officer of China and that China must prevail at any cost against the imminent alien invasion. Apparently every country has known about aliens for at least 50 years, but the aliens have just recently become much more aggressive and now we actually have to do something about them. Edit: Forget it I saw that this is Watch The Skies, this sounds really awesome to play though KomradeX fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 07:33
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Earlier in the thread, a few people were talking about "vaselification" or something similar. I assume it has to do with Tom Vasel and/or The Dice Tower, but I couldn't follow it beyond that. What is the big worry?  poo poo like this.
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Apr 6, 2015 07:39
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Durendal posted:
It involves people hating the Firefly game, so it can't be all bad.
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Apr 6, 2015 07:48
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Jedit posted:It involves people hating the Firefly game, so it can't be all bad. If it wasn't to recommend Xia, a game that uses a worse mechanic in every possible place, because it's prettier, then maybe.
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Apr 6, 2015 07:50
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To be fair to those posters the OP mentioned liking "Alien Frontiers, Quantum, etc. I also love HP Lovecraft games like Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror" so if anything Space Alert is the outlier in that discussion.
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Apr 6, 2015 08:12
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:My wife and I tried to play Brewcrafters this afternoon, and it devolved for my wife into a game of fourth-dimensional chess. I feel like it's because I'm the homebrewer and she feels like in this case she's playing a war game with a general or something. For our efforts, our scores were something apparently ridiculous like 83-60, but I am pretty sure we scored myself too generously; I was making GBS threads beers out of my brewpub, and I think those don't count for reputation. My wife went quickly for a two-bottle setup, then got her face kicked in economically for being unable to utilize it with the large staff she had. I wound up being able to pick up advanced ingredients at a pittance, and could pretty much guarantee myself a lambic a turn. So I became the sour beer specialty shop, making 5 rep a turn + 1 bonus for hop infusers + 1 bonus for having the brewing breakthrough research level. That being said, I'd probably throw up IRL if I drank a hop-infused lambic. I've played it twice, 4 player. You do get points for the brewpub beers, no worries there. Some of the point powers don't work without the regular barrel stuff, like the oak barrel point one I think. In terms of variation, I've not seen a double barrel setup work well yet, I won both times with the brewpub. I did use a farm, they're handy when there's lots of competition for resources. I agree with the thought of a hops infused lambic.
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Apr 6, 2015 11:32
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Space Alert is awesome but it's kind of like the Sonic Youth of board games. I know a few people who love it but no one wants to actually play it much these days Also, Jaipur sure is a chill rear end game. fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 11:42
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greetings fellow ludologists and dead of winter fans, I've been reading a bit about game design recently and I re-read Mark Rosewater's attempt to establish several magic player archetypes by their motivation for playing the game. This really fits Magic (especially if you add some of the fringe archetypes added later like Vorthos). It's easy to evaluate Magic cards on their potential appeal to Timmy, Johnny, or Spike players. Can the same be done with boardgames? It's easy to imagine which board games Timmy and Vorthos like.. Eldritch Horror, Dead of Winter, Descent, Cosmic Encounter, etc. Games with spectacle, story telling, hyperbolic power balance, world-building and lore, etc. Johnny and Spike are a little more interesting. Dominion seems like a Johnny game with some Spike, too. Big Money is Spike as hell. I'm having a hard time coming up with other primarily Johnny board games. I think maybe big open epic games like TI3 are Johnny/Timmy games. Maybe traitor and bluffing games too like BSG and Resistance. X-Wing if you run rogue lists, and of course other LCGs like LotR and Netrunner. COIN games, maybe? Spikes in Magic generally pour hours and hours into playtesting their deck and mastering the game at high levels of play. Not sure how many non-2p, non-gambling, designer board/card games stand up to that. I'm thinking something with minimal luck and targeted player interaction, like a nearly equally skilled game of Puerto Rico. Maybe Caylus? Beyond that, I think a lot of Euros would count as casual Spike games; more emphasis on the purity of competition than the demonstration of mastery. Although, the online implementations of board games seem like they might provide for an environment where a Spike's hunger for challenge can be perpetually nourished. There are other niche 2p "board" games that Spike just fine like X-Wing or Yomi, etc. Gambling games like Poker get Spike as gently caress even though they have relative limited individual control, which is interesting. There is another article that collects a bunch more of these player motivational profiles here:https://makeagameofthat.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/extended-player-psychographics/ Maybe some of these will fit designer board games better, because the lack of mechanics like deck construction for innovation (Johnny) and generally lack of a high level opponents and suitability of games to repeated high level play (Spike) make them sort of an awkward fit to the majority of board games, although I feel like they apply here and there. E:euro games are pure Melvin fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 15:56
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I think you've got Timmy and Vorthos reversed, or at least, you don't have down what Timmy wants. Timmy wants to feel big and powerful. To command great armies or be a giant monster. King of Tokyo, Munchkin, these are Timmy things. Vorthos wants things dripping in Flavor. Arabian Nights, for example.
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Apr 6, 2015 16:01
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Toshimo posted:I think you've got Timmy and Vorthos reversed, or at least, you don't have down what Timmy wants. Timmy wants to feel big and powerful. To command great armies or be a giant monster. King of Tokyo, Munchkin, these are Timmy things. Vorthos wants things dripping in Flavor. Arabian Nights, for example. That's not actually true. Timmy wants to experience something. Often, that results in playing big, splashy, cool spells. Your game types for Timmy are still correct though. King of Tokyo is literally the Timmiest game.
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Apr 6, 2015 16:06
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