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Archenteron posted:I haven't played it in years so I can't actually give an opinion, sorry. That worker-wheel mechanic is called a Rondel or Rondela or something like that, so you can use that word to search for other games like it. Or just search for Stephen Feld, most of his games feature some sort of rondel.
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Apr 20, 2015 01:41
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Lorini posted:I've played four games of The Voyages of Marco Polo and really enjoyed them. It's by the designers of T'zolkin but it's nothing like that game. Basically there's a travel around the board component and a contract component, both of which compliment each other. The interaction is the usual "I'll take this before you do to make you pay more" that you often see in Eurogames. With experienced players it should last about 20 minutes per player. I like it because there are a lot of choices, the travel component of the board will change significantly every game and the character tiles are certainly powerful. I will be getting Brew Crafter tomorrow and Elysium on Wednesday/Thursday so I'll have more to report next week I hope. I saw this one on BGG recently and it looked really interesting. What is the dice play like in it? I couldn't really get a good sense of how it all works but it seems like it should be pretty good.
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Apr 20, 2015 02:15
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Goons, I have a confession to make. I just played Tash-Kalar for the first time today. Holy balls. Why do people even bother with other 2p games? I also played All Creatures Big and Small because I wanted to see what it was like and it was a lot funnier before we realized we had to count the number of animals we had to come up with our final score and not just the numbers on the side of the box + 4 for a full extra tile + buildings. We also played Troyes and it was my first time playing a physical copy. It felt really good, I liked it and so did the other guys even though they only sort of knew what was going on. One of the online stores nearby has a French copy that I think I'm going to pick up because I like this as a 2-3 player game that feels hearty but doesn't take too long (assuming people know it). Also it feels right that it should be in French. As per my dilemma for game(s) to buy, some friends are willing to pitch in and buy stuff on Amazon.de also so I'm gonna pick up Keyflower from there. I'm still on the fence about the others: Dungeon Lords (a bit costly to get the anniversary edition, even though it's nice, not sure it's exactly what I want, still might get it), Le Havre (only played it once so not sure if I'll like it the same with more plays), Dominant Species (possibly too long a game for my regular board game nights, especially for the cost), and Viticulture (still just hasn't grabbed me). But I'm definitely going to get Keyflower even though I have to get it from goddam Germany, and most likely Troyes in French and I'm going to have to get Tash-Kalar at some point. The version that is currently out is the redone edition with the expansion built in, right? silvergoose posted:Yeah, stone age is a quality entry worker placement game, a sub genre of board games including such luminaries as Agricola, dungeon petz, caverna, and many more. Do you mean entry-level or a quality entry in the echelon of worker placements?
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Apr 20, 2015 04:10
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EvilChameleon posted:Tash-Kalar at some point. The version that is currently out is the redone edition with the expansion built in, right? The new version does not have the expansion, but it has much better components than the Z-Man version.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:16
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EvilChameleon posted:I'm going to have to get Tash-Kalar at some point. The version that is currently out is the redone edition with the expansion built in, right? If by expansion you mean the new decks, no. The new edition has upgraded components though, with redesigned graphics and thicker cardboard.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:18
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^^^ Should I be getting the currently existing expansion, or will it be being updated, or is there another one coming, or basically tell me all about Tash-Kalar please. 
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Apr 20, 2015 04:35
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EvilChameleon posted:^^^ Should I be getting the currently existing expansion, or will it be being updated, or is there another one coming, or basically tell me all about Tash-Kalar please.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:39
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EvilChameleon posted:Goons, I have a confession to make. I just played Tash-Kalar for the first time today. Holy balls. Why do people even bother with other 2p games? Because Twilight Struggle's also a 2p game
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Apr 20, 2015 04:45
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If you can find people who are actually down playing 2p games there's tons of great ones, probably more than any other player count (and many larger games play in completely unique ways with 2p). Unfortunately I've found it's actually pretty difficult to do that since the best places to find people for games are large public meetings or board game nights, and people generally want to play with larger groups for those.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:47
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The Everfrost expansion for Tash Kalar is cheap and cool, I'd get it if you already know you like the game.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:50
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Bubble-T posted:The Everfrost expansion for Tash Kalar is cheap and cool 
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Apr 20, 2015 04:53
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Countblanc posted:If you can find people who are actually down playing 2p games there's tons of great ones, probably more than any other player count (and many larger games play in completely unique ways with 2p). Unfortunately I've found it's actually pretty difficult to do that since the best places to find people for games are large public meetings or board game nights, and people generally want to play with larger groups for those. I feel like the market is a bit oversaturated because given the choice, I want to be playing a game with more than just one other person. But maybe most people are just couples and play at home all the time, what the gently caress do I know? I do know that gently caress you Seth Jaffee for your stupid 2 player Eminent Domain instead of making more expansions to the main game top priority.
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Apr 20, 2015 05:11
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EvilChameleon posted:Do you mean entry-level or a quality entry in the echelon of worker placements? It's a bit of both. It's light, but there's still some strategy there and some decision making to be had. It's really a great way to get someone to transition from Catan to something more interesting.
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Apr 20, 2015 05:52
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I played an interesting little deckbuilder the other day called Design Town. It had a couple farily unique gimmicks that made it stand out. For one thing, there are only 5 different cards. The cards are double-sided, so effectively 10 different cards, and you can pay to upgrade them and flip them to their advanced side. Also, you don't have a hand, instead you play cards one at a time from the top of your deck. You do this until you decide to stop and move to the buy phase, or until you've played 3 cards with unhappy faces, at which point your turn ends. You can always see what the next card in your deck is, since the cards are double-sided, but certain cards (Residential Areas) will force you to play them if they're on top of your deck and give you unhappy faces, and the Shopping Mall provides a lot of money but also forces you to play the next card, so there's a push-your-luck element to your turns. You can buy new cards from the market or upgrade cards in your discard pile to their advanced sides. Advanced cards in your discard can be downgraded in order to give you a bonus for one turn. Each card has a lot going on, and while the effects on them are individually pretty simple, keeping track of their different applications and those on the flip side can get complicated. The other unique thing about the game is that the win condition is just to play, in a single turn, 8 victory points worth of cards, or to play a total of 18 cards in a single turn. Effectively that means buying VP cards like Parks or upgrading your cards to Power Plants/Shopping Malls, as well as getting rid of enough unhappy face cards from your deck to be able to play your vp, or increasing your unhappiness limit with Churches. There's a lot going on, it was definitely a clever twist on deckbuilders. I'm not sure what the replay value is considering there's only 5 cards and no setup variation, but it's definitely worth a couple of plays at least.
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Apr 20, 2015 07:36
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Got to play Argent twice today. We played music from the Harry Potter soundtracks while we were playing. It was a good day. There is definitely an information overload with this game though, and I had some lovely luck. All of the early marks I ended up getting in both games were for things I got knocked out of contention for pretty hard. Guess I just gotta play way more of it and git gud. The actual systems in place are pretty great, but the rulebook needs a glossary and some of the rooms have some questions that need answering...
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Apr 20, 2015 07:39
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Played a totally rad five player game of Game of Thrones last night. Five hours and the game hung on a knife's edge the whole way. Web of Lies popped up in the last turn, effectively making it every man for themselves (no support orders can be played.) I've previously stated in this thread that four player GoT is fun when houseruled, but five player was way better. Lots of shifting alliances. Looking forward to the day we finally manage to crack it out with six players.
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Apr 20, 2015 07:56
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elgarbo posted:Played a totally rad five player game of Game of Thrones last night. Five hours and the game hung on a knife's edge the whole way. Web of Lies popped up in the last turn, effectively making it every man for themselves (no support orders can be played.) Your avatar clearly approves. Got in a bit of gaming over the weekend when staying with my girlfriend and her family. Mainly Port Royal, which is rapidly becoming the bets value for money I've ever bought, a couple games of Pandemic: Contagion and even a few rounds of Skull when out in London with friends.
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Apr 20, 2015 08:59
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My wife finally beat me in Le Havre last night, discovering in the process that 11 loans is nothing to stress about. So proud.
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Apr 20, 2015 09:08
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The game of Eclipse ended bad for me. lovely luck when exploring and fighting my first Ancient led to my one neighbour expanding without pressure to keep him in check (his other neighbour is a known passive player). In turn 4 I manage to pin half his cruisers with dreads, then say that if the player on the other side of me can pin his other cruisers in the galactic center we can start to catch up. She doesn't like doing something that someone else mentions, so just about throws the game by letting my neighbour consolidate his ships back into one fleet. I luckily only lose one dread before retreating, but he lost neither ships nor planets anywhere else. Managed to end up second place after we spent the last 3 turns ganging up on the leader (who couldn't be dislodged from the center since turn 3). I need to start taking diplomatic lessons to be able to subtly coerce people into doing what is in their own long term interests. Gameplay wise, I'm on the fence for Eclipse. The combat is a bit too swingy, as is exploration. But I think this is mainly due to the fact that it took us 6 hours to play, for which I could have just as well played Twilight Imperium. Sorry for ranting, I get too involved when games take over 5 hours and it feels like someone threw the game.
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Apr 20, 2015 09:30
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6hrs is obscenely long for Eclipse
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Apr 20, 2015 09:36
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Yeah, how many players were in the game?
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Apr 20, 2015 11:07
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nimby posted:The game of Eclipse ended bad for me. lovely luck when exploring and fighting my first Ancient led to my one neighbour expanding without pressure to keep him in check (his other neighbour is a known passive player). In turn 4 I manage to pin half his cruisers with dreads, then say that if the player on the other side of me can pin his other cruisers in the galactic center we can start to catch up. She doesn't like doing something that someone else mentions, so just about throws the game by letting my neighbour consolidate his ships back into one fleet. I luckily only lose one dread before retreating, but he lost neither ships nor planets anywhere else. What place did the person that "threw" the game end up? Just because attacking the other guy would have been good for you doesn't mean it was a good idea for her as well. Maybe she didn't want to see you win? You came in second place, so her decision must have made the difference between you winning the game and not. Would helping you have put her in second place?
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Apr 20, 2015 11:25
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Gort posted:Yeah, how many players were in the game? If it was nine players it still took too long. I've played Eclipse in under three hours with five players including three newbies.
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Apr 20, 2015 11:41
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Eclipse pretty solidly runs 30 mins per player for our group. Once we worked out the rules and sorted the ship components into a plano box of course.
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Apr 20, 2015 11:44
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We played with 5 people, I don't know how it exploded to around 6 hours. We had a big-ish battle every turn starting round 5, could that be it? We have an AP guy who probably took too long planning and studying ship designs.Rutibex posted:What place did the person that "threw" the game end up? Just because attacking the other guy would have been good for you doesn't mean it was a good idea for her as well. Maybe she didn't want to see you win? You came in second place, so her decision must have made the difference between you winning the game and not. Would helping you have put her in second place? She ended up in a shared last position between the 3 other players, all on 24 points. The winner had 33, I had 26 because I'd taken 5 points worth of systems in the winner's 'home' territories. I managed to do this over the last 2 turns because my right hand neighbour sacrificed himself to stop my left hand neighbour from completely running away with the game by attacking on turn 7, leading to her attacking on turn 8, meaning I had no pressure to defend against in the end-game, letting me run rampant. If she attacked when I had those 2 cruisers pinned, she'd stood a good chance to take control of the galactic center herself, leaving her with a glut of resources to defend herself and a board presence. Instead she went after an ancient ship that was 4 tiles away from the center, thus unable to react for 2 turns. I also apologize for being a bit too bitchy about it. I just needed to vent some frustration.
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Apr 20, 2015 13:11
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dishwasherlove posted:Eclipse pretty solidly runs 30 mins per player for our group. Once we worked out the rules and sorted the ship components into a plano box of course. My first Eclipse session lasted a really long time too, but every one of us was new and I totally botched up the rules so much that we were basically playing a different game. Normally I'm very good at teaching new games and make very few rules mistakes, but I didn't just mess up rules, I messed up the whole flow of the game. Sadly we haven't played it since. It's going to take some diplomacy on my part to convince my friends to play Eclipse again!
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Apr 20, 2015 13:37
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drat Dirty Ape posted:My first Eclipse session lasted a really long time too, but every one of us was new and I totally botched up the rules so much that we were basically playing a different game. Normally I'm very good at teaching new games and make very few rules mistakes, but I didn't just mess up rules, I messed up the whole flow of the game. You may lose them as friends after playing Diplomacy. 
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Apr 20, 2015 15:33
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ETB posted:You may lose them as friends after playing Diplomacy. If it takes them five hours to play Eclipse, I suspect nothing of value would be lost.
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Apr 20, 2015 16:43
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EBag posted:I saw this one on BGG recently and it looked really interesting. What is the dice play like in it? I couldn't really get a good sense of how it all works but it seems like it should be pretty good. It's like Kingsburg except lower die rolls aren't as productive. They aren't totally bad, but they aren't as productive as higher rolls. You get compensation if your total initial roll is less than 15 (from five dice) and you can use camels (which aren't hard to get) to help with die rolls.
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Apr 20, 2015 17:03
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Mysterium looks rad.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:40
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We only managed to play babies first Game in Galaxy Trucker but it went down really well. Galaxy trucker is good, y'all.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:41
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AMooseDoesStuff posted:We only managed to play babies first Game in Galaxy Trucker but it went down really well. I love Galaxy Trucker. It's usually a hit when I bust it out at the local game store. My only beef with the game is that there aren't a lot of meaningful choices to make during the in-flight phase of the game. It's even worse the further back in line you are. If you're not the first player you have very few choices at all. I feel there should be more ways to jump forward in the caravan.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:55
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AMooseDoesStuff posted:We only managed to play babies first Game in Galaxy Trucker but it went down really well. I just played through my first full game of this, too, and loved it. There's something super fun about a game where you spend a few frantic minutes effectively drafting a spaceship then get to sit back and watch things go to hell. Do people have any other suggestions for good games where you actively make a bunch of strategic decisions and then basically sit back and see how well what you did fares against the bullshit the game throws at it? It seems like a really hard thing to make fun, but Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert both manage to nail that transition super well.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:55
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OtspIII posted:I just played through my first full game of this, too, and loved it. There's something super fun about a game where you spend a few frantic minutes effectively drafting a spaceship then get to sit back and watch things go to hell. Dungeon Lords is the other major one. It's no coincidence that they're all by Vlaada.
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Apr 20, 2015 23:05
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thespaceinvader posted:Dungeon Lords is the other major one. It's no coincidence that they're all by Vlaada. You don't sit back as much in Dungeon Lords. You have to effectively solve a puzzle at the end of each round to minimize damage. It is fun though.
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Apr 20, 2015 23:42
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jeeves posted:Mysterium looks rad. It's rad.
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Apr 21, 2015 00:20
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Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:It's rad. It makes me want to spend way too much on a foreign import version.
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Apr 21, 2015 01:06
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Archenteron posted:I haven't played it in years so I can't actually give an opinion, sorry. That worker-wheel mechanic is called a Rondel or Rondela or something like that, so you can use that word to search for other games like it. silvergoose posted:Or just search for Stephen Feld, most of his games feature some sort of rondel. Thanks guys, I learned a new word today 
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Apr 21, 2015 01:15
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You should also check out Mac "Rondels 4 Lyfe" Gerdts
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Apr 21, 2015 01:47
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OtspIII posted:Do people have any other suggestions for good games where you actively make a bunch of strategic decisions and then basically sit back and see how well what you did fares against the bullshit the game throws at it? It seems like a really hard thing to make fun, but Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert both manage to nail that transition super well. I mean, this is kinda Dominion sometimes. Ri..right guys?
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Apr 21, 2015 02:52
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