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Malloreon posted:I assume you're not going to read the rulebook with the whole group there, right? You're going to teach them the game and then play? I've never played. I've just seen it done play-by-forum style a few times. It's not my game and not my house. I'm just trying to mitigate the disaster. Thanks for the link.
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Jun 13, 2015 19:45
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Countblanc posted:Die by my blade, normies.
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Jun 13, 2015 20:09
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DumbparameciuM posted:That's a very full weekend, minimum. I've actually played 8 player TI with newbies. It took all day, I can imagine with experienced players it could take 8-9 hours.
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Jun 13, 2015 20:24
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golden bubble posted:I really enjoyed Keyflower, and am thinking of getting one of the expansions. Which is better, the Merchants, or the Farmers? Neither. They work at different player counts; I think Merchants is best with less players and Farmers with more, though someone may correct me on that.
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Jun 13, 2015 21:41
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Merchants has alternate boats which is nice to change up some of the end game scoring and offers more flexibility for upgrading, scoring and getting resources. Farmers has a lot more tiles that it adds, alternate turn order tiles that give you resources which are great, wheat to make it easier to transport stuff, and of course the animals which add some nice variety. I think the rules overhead of Farmers is higher as the way animals work adds a bit of complexity to it while the contracts and upgrades in Merchants are pretty straight forward. Aside from that like Jedit said Merchants is a bit better for lower play counts and Farmers is better for more, both are good for different reasons.
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Jun 13, 2015 21:49
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Eminent Domain players - how have you solved the technology market sprawl/pain in the arse to browse problem? It's especially bad with Escalation, so I'm curious what has been successful for others?
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Jun 13, 2015 23:37
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We've just been passing round the rulebooks recently, but BGG has some decent cheatsheets as well I think.
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Jun 13, 2015 23:56
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Elyv posted:I've actually played 8 player TI with newbies. It took all day, I can imagine with experienced players it could take 8-9 hours. With all the expansions though?
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Jun 14, 2015 02:16
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The End posted:Eminent Domain players - how have you solved the technology market sprawl/pain in the arse to browse problem? It's especially bad with Escalation, so I'm curious what has been successful for others? There's some logic to it, which you can explain to players, but the rest is just practice and having people browse through the rulebook to see what cool goodies exist. The logic is: Metallic = survey/warfare, Fertile = produce/colonize, Advanced = trade/research. You can find this out by looking at what symbols planets in the planet deck can produce for your empire. What this means: Improved "X" doesn't exist (until Escalation, where they add in the corresponding symbol + 1 fighter) for the corresponding planet type. Improved warfare doesn't exist for metallic, improved colonize for fertile, improved research for advanced, etc. The symbols that go along with the primary improved X depend on the planet type, so improved research for Fertile planets is 1 research symbol + 1 colonize or 1 produce; improved research for metallic is 1 research symbol + 1 warfare or 1 survey, etc. The action cards tend to be "super" versions of the focuses of the planets. So the 2 metallic actions tend to be better warfare or better survey. The 2 advanced actions give you bonus points for trading goods or stronger research style actions, and the 2 fertile planets tend to give much stronger colonizes or points when producing goods. There are other special cards which break the mold, especially the permanents. Those need to be approached on a card by card basis, but they tend to stick to the same themes where they boost one of the two roles that the planets are based off of. The diversity technologies are more of a mixed bag, but double times are easy to explain (1 of each symbol, 2 per planet type, symbols correspond to primary planet symbols). They also can let you do more roles per turn, but really you just need to let people look at these. Explain this to people slowly over the course of a few games and they'll quickly see the patterns of which technologies allow what.
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Jun 14, 2015 03:38
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I really wish there was some sort of tray that came with the game that would stand up all the cards so you don't have to take up so much table space just laying out the different cards. I just sort them by planet requirement, but that is still a ton of space.
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Jun 14, 2015 06:28
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EvilChameleon posted:I really wish there was some sort of tray that came with the game that would stand up all the cards so you don't have to take up so much table space just laying out the different cards. I just sort them by planet requirement, but that is still a ton of space. I grabbed something like this for Eldritch Horror, saves me a ton of table space for $5.
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Jun 14, 2015 06:35
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Played Clash of Cultures. Game is pretty rad, feels like early Sid Meiers Civ computer games. Did feel like it went on a little bit too long though. Everyone's first play so should be a bit quicker next time.
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Jun 14, 2015 06:47
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I played my second game of Viticulture today and it took closer to two hours. Is this sort of a normal time people experience? 4 completely new players and myself playing it for the second time, there wasn't much AP, it just seems to take a while. Maybe if everyone knows the rules I could hit the 90m mark the box says but I dunno.Soothing Vapors posted:I grabbed something like this for Eldritch Horror, saves me a ton of table space for $5. Oh yeah, that'd work, but it wouldn't really fit in the box I don't imagine.
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Jun 14, 2015 07:07
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Played Clash of Cultures. Game is pretty rad, feels like early Sid Meiers Civ computer games. Did feel like it went on a little bit too long though. Everyone's first play so should be a bit quicker next time. Got a longer review? I've been looking for a game that's kinda 4X-y but focuses more on politics/diplomacy/warfare than economic enginebuilding like TTA
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Jun 14, 2015 07:09
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StashAugustine posted:Got a longer review? I've been looking for a game that's kinda 4X-y but focuses more on politics/diplomacy/warfare than economic enginebuilding like TTA I've played it a couple of times. It's a problematic game for me, because while it certainly does pack a bunch of civ-esque systems into something that can play in 3-4 hours, you don't really accomplish much. You have a very small number of actions in a turn, and each round takes longer and longer, so progression is slow and on the border of unsatisfying. You go from a one town bronze age village to a 3-4 village iron age civilisation, with a handful of military units. It's a good design, it doesn't seem unbalanced, but it just doesn't excite.
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Jun 14, 2015 07:39
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Played 1860 for the first time with fellow goon Ilthe01 and another friend tonight. Ilthe managed the train rush better than we did and I wound up with two companies in receivership for a rather long time. It was fun but it took like six hours due to a ton of rules look-ups. I'm sure it will be faster next time. Pic from kind of early on 
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Jun 14, 2015 08:03
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DumbparameciuM posted:With all the expansions though? Can you play 8 player TI without all the expansions? We had all of them, but we didn't play with all the modules of course. if memory serves we did distant suns, guardians of mecatol rex, mercs, and a couple of others I think.
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Jun 14, 2015 08:06
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StashAugustine posted:Got a longer review? I've been looking for a game that's kinda 4X-y but focuses more on politics/diplomacy/warfare than economic enginebuilding like TTA I love Clash of Cultures enough to have tried to run it twice. It's a Civ style game but it's very cut down - there's only so many actions you can take overall in the game, but that's balanced out by a simplified tech tree and simplified armies. The goal is to try to accomplish several Objective cards you receive through the game, while also grabbing for the biggest and best civilization possible. It's playable in a couple-to-a-few hours while still capturing a very Civ 5 sort of feel. As The End says, though, there isn't a lot of replay there and once you've learnt what the best techs are there's nothing to really stop you gunning for them as soon as possible, so you need to have players who are willing to build their excitement through invasions and conflict - and this will pretty much have to be done by the players themselves, since the only thing that really pushes you to go warmonger are the Objective cards and VPs involved. The expansion, Clash of Cultures: Civilizations, adds civilizations that modify and improve your tech tree in specific ways, along with a couple of sideways upgrades for army units (elephants! cavalry!). It looks rad as hell and I really want it, but haven't been able to source it yet. I'm hoping it will provide players with enough intersting options and alternate technology routes that it helps balance out the game.
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Jun 14, 2015 08:08
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Elyv posted:Can you play 8 player TI without all the expansions? We had all of them, but we didn't play with all the modules of course. if memory serves we did distant suns, guardians of mecatol rex, mercs, and a couple of others I think. The bits for 8-player are in the first expansion. You could play base rules and just use the extra ring of hexes (I think you have enough to play without space station hexes or the like)
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Jun 14, 2015 08:38
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StashAugustine posted:Got a longer review? I've been looking for a game that's kinda 4X-y but focuses more on politics/diplomacy/warfare than economic enginebuilding like TTA I found Clash of Cultures really bad, to be honest. I've tried to play it several times, tried to like it several times, and just found myself getting beaten into death spirals every time because the tech tree doesn't lend itself easily to focusing on a given strategy, and because like so many similar games, it's very easy to death spiral and very easy to do the inverse (runaway victory) due to luck of terrain draw. If you get a good draw and can immediately place your cities in decent locations, you're doing really well, those cities give you extra actions or more stuff, you get to do more things on your turns, whereas if you get unlucky and run into poorly-placed water or barbarians or whatever, you have to stop your plan to deal with them, and by the time you get it back up and running again, everyone else is probably ahead. Plus, die-roll combat ugh. I'd say the newer Civilisation boardgame is actually better, and that's saying something, tbh... I wasn't wowed by the expansion, either - it just exacerbated the imbalance by making already-bad tile draw worse by adding pirates. Like Eclipse, it's a game I really want to like, because I enjoyed 4x games on the PC, and I like the theme of them but... the combination of lovely combat mechanics, death spiralling/runaway victors, and deeply political gameplay just killed it for me.
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Jun 14, 2015 09:39
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Among the 4x types, I always thought that Patchistory was a bit underrated. I only played it the once, but I liked that most of the meat of the game was auctions, rather than economy management, along with the whole spatial element of the patching system, where you can literally build yourself into a corner and not have any good places to expand without ruining your previous patches. Wars/battles tend to have a lot of warning (unless they don't, but that's a hell of a tableau for you to get there), so you'll never really be caught off guard, and it's generally a good idea to have some defense anyway. The one thing I kinda didn't like about the game was the way voting worked, where you get 1 point per vote. It essentially just turns your votes into VPs, which is somewhat dull. I'd have probably much preferred if it were a set number of points for 1st, 2nd, etc, but maybe that would have also sucked. I dunno.
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Jun 14, 2015 09:56
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EvilChameleon posted:I played my second game of Viticulture today and it took closer to two hours. Is this sort of a normal time people experience? 4 completely new players and myself playing it for the second time, there wasn't much AP, it just seems to take a while. Maybe if everyone knows the rules I could hit the 90m mark the box says but I dunno. How many years did it take?
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Jun 14, 2015 10:48
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Jedit posted:How many years did it take? 0.00022831
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Jun 14, 2015 11:40
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My and a a friend of mine are going for a three-day hiking trip soon. In-between gawking at the majesty of mother nature, we would like to have some kind of game to play because we are huge nerds. Do you have any suggestions for a game where:
Mechanically we are into all kinds of things. I'd prefer good games, but given all the other restrictions I can't be too picky, as long as it's not really bad (haven't been in the thread for a while, are we allowed to diss Munchkin?). I was thinking that it would be a good opportunity to buy Dominion, but I am kinda worried about the surface required to put all the decks.
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Jun 14, 2015 15:29
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Rexides posted:My and a a friend of mine are going for a three-day hiking trip soon. In-between gawking at the majesty of mother nature, we would like to have some kind of game to play because we are huge nerds. Do you have any suggestions for a game where: Just bring a deck of Magic Cards you nerds 
Rutibex fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jun 14, 2015 |
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Jun 14, 2015 15:43
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Rexides posted:
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Jun 14, 2015 15:51
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Rexides posted:My and a a friend of mine are going for a three-day hiking trip soon. In-between gawking at the majesty of mother nature, we would like to have some kind of game to play because we are huge nerds. Do you have any suggestions for a game where: Hive, No Thanks!, Hanabi or any of the multitude of Yahtzee clone dice games...
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Jun 14, 2015 15:54
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Rexides posted:My and a a friend of mine are going for a three-day hiking trip soon. In-between gawking at the majesty of mother nature, we would like to have some kind of game to play because we are huge nerds. Do you have any suggestions for a game where: What about Star Realms or LoTR: The Confrontation? Or, better yet, take a quarter ounce of shrooms with you and enjoy nature as God intended, you nerds.
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Jun 14, 2015 16:03
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Arkham horror with expansions
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Jun 14, 2015 16:21
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Rexides posted:My and a a friend of mine are going for a three-day hiking trip soon. In-between gawking at the majesty of mother nature, we would like to have some kind of game to play because we are huge nerds. Do you have any suggestions for a game where: My go to 2 player games in small boxes: Jaipur Agricola: all creatures great and small Revolver
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Jun 14, 2015 16:27
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Poopy Palpy posted:You're trying to list bullet points to describe Hive, you can't fool me. Second. Hive is ridiculously portable, and ridiculously durable too. You're not going to ruin it if you drop it in a puddle. And if you really, absolutely need to squat down on a patch of dirt and play a game RIGHT NOW, you can just wash the dirt off the pieces later. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jun 14, 2015 |
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Jun 14, 2015 16:31
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Pretty much any card based game works well in tents. Outside of tents you don't want any cards because of wind/durability. I really like Carcassonne for camping trips. Small box, tiles that won't blow away, fun game.
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Jun 14, 2015 17:15
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You should learn how to play Bao Mancala. All you need is some holes you dig in the dirt and some rocks! No need to bring anything with you but your knowledge of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPg_0Mb-BUU
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Jun 14, 2015 17:54
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Rexides posted:
Portable chess set you nerd v  vMaybe Hanabi? I've never played Hanabi with two.
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Jun 14, 2015 17:58
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Elyv posted:Portable chess set you nerd v You people keep describing Hive in different ways. It's still Hive.
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Jun 14, 2015 18:20
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StashAugustine posted:Got a longer review? I've been looking for a game that's kinda 4X-y but focuses more on politics/diplomacy/warfare than economic enginebuilding like TTA It definitely provokes a ton of politics/diplomacy/deals but it's all unstructured and created by the players. You can freely trade just about every resource, even including hidden objective and "ace in the hole" combat/action cards, but the game does not implement formal game mechanisms that enforce alliances, voting, U.N., trade agreements, etc, like in some other games. So we made things like 1 round non aggression pacts and deals, including some late game objective trading, but didn't elect a leader of the U.N. or king of the iron throne or anything. There IS a game mechanism for trade routes but it's more of a leaching kind of mechanism where if you have a ship or settler within 2 areas of another city you can gain a one-way profit. We were playing a 3 player game, so it had the Cold War feel 3p thing. There were some early game threats and skirmishes mostly provoked by barbarians springing up in tactically awkward locations but the looming threat of the third player either exploiting the conflict or playing world police was always there and kept things from escalating. I think close to halfway through things started to get to a boiling point when someone was threatening me with some armies on my underdeveloped border and asking for resources, but I went Cuban Missile Crisis on them and set up a navy prepared for amphibious assault on their coast within striking distance of a few key cities. This later became a militarized trade fleet.The way ships and exploring with them is implemented in this game is really great, probably my favorite aspect of the game so far. We played with the variable end game turn rule where you roll a dice at the end of each turn after round 5 to see if the game ends our not. This helps prevent a bit of the Kemet thing where the table collectively solves who will win once they get within striking distance of the end of the game. We still went bonkers with reckless attacks in the final rounds though, trying to take swipes at the leader and sieging cities with Wonders built in them. But fortification is pretty powerful in this game so it was mostly limited to taking less pivotal cities. We didn't really know what we were doing and probably could have built a better siege force though with the right cards and advances. Regarding the luck of the draw with early game exploring, we didn't really find that to be that swingy in our game. One player did end up with barbarians on their first exploration tile and this elicited a bunch of groans and sighs, but they used a couple soldiers to overcome them which in the end wasn't really a setback. It cost 4 more resources to deal with the barbarians, but they were paid back with a gold (1 wild card resource), an angry settlement (typically costs 2 resources), and 2 armies now closer to the middle of the map which were able to do more barbarian hunting and were scary enough to encourage the other players to fortify with their own standing armies which negated the action disadvantage for the early militarization by the other player. The barbarians are cool and really provoke everyone into developing some standing armies which helps get the military escalation going. The barbarians will not attack unless you push your luck with event cards so you can take your time to react to them, generally. Related to that last point, exploring doesn't have as much surprise as 4X games on the PC because there aren't little caves with free technologies or unknown civlizations and the like. There is just different terrain, which does have some interesting impact but it's subtle, and then there is the element of surprise with barbarians, which is pretty fun IMO. Exploring the coasts was pretty neat, though, since the location of ports is pretty important. Combat is kind of eh but typical I guess; you roll a dice for each army you have and sum them up, divide by 5 to get your hits. You and your opponent can each play a hidden action card but these can vary wildly in effectiveness so it's less calculable than other games where you play hidden cards. Various technologies can give you the edge, including navy, siege and amphibious assault. The expansion has calvary and elephants that serve as force multipliers. There is a little bit of reparations mechanic in that the person who loses a town gets a settler that will let them build another town; if all that was lost was an angry underdeveloped city then this can actually be profitable. Player elimination triggers the end of the game. Trade routes seemed really powerful in our game and definitely should provoke war if someone gets out of control with trade routes and you don't have trade routes of your own. Really, they are a disguised form of aggression and need to be treated as such. A common tactic in our game was to put a settler with an army or navy and place it on someone's border to trade with and threaten them. The expansion has a new building that lets you counteract trade a bit via your own profit. Cultural influence is another sort of disguised form of aggression, where you can steal vp from player's cities by spreading your culture to their city. This is done by having a city within range of their city and spending actions to convert parts of their city to your culture. It doesn't actually let you control their developments, but just gives you points and can fulfill objectives. Similar to trade, this leads to fortified frontier towns that leech points off of people and pressure them to either fight back or suffer. The tech tree is pretty fun, but has that overwhelming feel of something like EmDo or Kemet where it is all laid out in front of you at once. You can't build the majority of it right away so you can ignore it to some extent, but you need to have an idea of what to build towards since there is a minor amount of prerequisites that you need for later game advances. It wasn't until the end of the game before we were really familiar with the different advances, especially the governments. Downside for me would be that it's pretty long and that it doesn't really do anything radical to overcome the Dudes on a Map typical issues. King making, collusion as catchup mechanism, zero-sum conflicts (with minor amount of reparations in the form of settlers as mentioned above, at least) are still things. So it doesn't do anything innovative to mitigate these weaknesses of these types of games but it does do everything else pretty great in my limited experience so far. The play group's behavior will definitely have a big impact on how this game is received. It's actually a lot like the early Civ PC games in all of these respects. I'm really excited to try the expansion. It introduces asymmetric player factions which have enhanced versions of particular technologies and access to unique leader units that have a tactical presence on the map and can aid cities and armies. This would break up the canned approach to researching technologies that could develop in the base game and break up group think. It also introduces pirates which sounds fun since ships and barbarians are two of the coolest aspects of the game IMO. Rexides posted:My and a a friend of mine are going for a three-day hiking trip soon. In-between gawking at the majesty of mother nature, we would like to have some kind of game to play because we are huge nerds. Do you have any suggestions for a game where: Have you considered playing The Most Dangerous Game? 
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Jun 14, 2015 18:57
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So the group Mage Knight day was fairly successful. We had 4 games going, and most of them took about 6-8 hours, with one that had to be called at the 10 hour mark. My table was the only one that did the Full Co-op scenario, with the other tables doing competitive with no PVP. We won on the third and final night, but I (as Tovak the mother-fuckin Destroyer) was pretty far ahead of the other two people in our game, which was somewhat frustrating for them. We actually took a few minutes in the middle of the game to discuss what they could be doing to better their position and ability to kill things. I felt bad because I had kind of tunnel-visioned and wasn't really looking at challenges from a group perspective. Overall it was a great time, and I really feel that if we played the game more often and became more comfortable, it'd go a lot faster and we'd see more competitive scores. For example, I know that the next player should be starting their turn as the previous player is doing clean-up, but when you're new to the game you can't help but pay attention to what other people are doing. Towards the end we were able to pick up the pace a little bit. Also looking up specific rules is a god drat pain in the rear end. I've loved every Vlaada game I've played, but gently caress man, make the rules better. Also for some reason I had to keep looking up the way elemental attacks and resistances worked, which was odd. Normally I'm pretty good about grasping those sorts of mechanics but for some reason it was confusing in this game.
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Jun 14, 2015 19:29
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oh gosh, how did games of mageknight take so long. my longest 4 player game was like 4 hours
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Jun 14, 2015 19:35
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LemonAIDS posted:oh gosh, how did games of mageknight take so long. my longest 4 player game was like 4 hours Most everyone was new to it and it's a complex game with a lot going on?
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Jun 14, 2015 19:55
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Hive and Hanabi seem exactly what I needed, thanks!
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Jun 14, 2015 20:13
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