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BeefyTaco posted:Those are great ideas! I've been hearing good things about Ludwig, and a dexterity game would be a good idea too. I don't know much about Ra, so I guess I'll have to look into that one. It's a more pure auction game that's about set collection and evaluating how much a group of tiles is worth to you. It can lead to some really tough interesting decisions which is why I like it. But there are tons of auction games (knizia alone has designed hundreds), including some where auctioning is a mechanic alongside other stuff, like princes of Florence or power grid
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Jul 1, 2015 05:26
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burger time posted:It's a more pure auction game that's about set collection and evaluating how much a group of tiles is worth to you. It can lead to some really tough interesting decisions which is why I like it. But there are tons of auction games (knizia alone has designed hundreds), including some where auctioning is a mechanic alongside other stuff, like princes of Florence or power grid That sounds interesting, and I think I should definitely have an auction game of some kind. I may compare a few others, but Ra is sounding like a good pick. Would you say it's at least your favorite by that designer?
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Jul 1, 2015 05:32
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Oh my loving god Thunderstone sucks so much, how is a game so bad, this is unreal.
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Jul 1, 2015 06:06
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Poison Mushroom posted:So, aside from Mage Knight, and me being the only person on the planet who likes Robinson Crusoe, what are some other solitare games that the goonmind enjoys? Nero's War TAL D-Day at Omaha Beach/Tarawa
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Jul 1, 2015 06:15
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Like, I'm genuinely kind of staggered that something with an elevator pitch like "dungeoncrawling deck-builder game" can manage to be so aggressively tedious and unfun. I have no idea if the guy who brought the game out set it up badly or what but it was two hours of "well I don't have enough power to kill any monsters this turn either, I guess I'll attempt to curate my deck some more. Oh look, another summoner in the part of the dungeon where you need three loving torches to hit anything, meanwhile there's some bullshit with 15 strength camped out at the front that nobody wants to fight even if it sends them back to the bottom of the deck because why make anything easier for your opponents?"
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Jul 1, 2015 07:32
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Navajo Wars is probably one of the better solitaire games out there.
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Jul 1, 2015 07:42
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burger time posted:You also don't have any dexterity games. Whether this is a hole you want to fill is up to you but I can recommend Rampage/Terror in Meeple City, and the new edition of Catacombs that's coming out soon looks pretty good. Dexterity games?  Bandu is a game I have never regretted buying, it's been great fun for all ages and gamer types. It is a dexterity game that comes with many different ways to play, each of which emphasizes different aspects. Really well done.
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Jul 1, 2015 07:57
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StashAugustine posted:Fire in the Lake Wait, Fire in the Lake plays solo? Does this go for all the COIN games? Are they enjoyable solo? Will I not have to convince my girlfriend to read a bunch of rules to enjoy this?
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Jul 1, 2015 07:57
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BonHair posted:Wait, Fire in the Lake plays solo? Does this go for all the COIN games? Are they enjoyable solo? Will I not have to convince my girlfriend to read a bunch of rules to enjoy this? All COIN games have solitaire flowcharts for all the factions, although Andean Abyss excludes the government and Cuba Libre/A Distant Plain are balanced around the humans being Government or M26/Coalition or Taliban. Fire in the Lake has, in my not-an-expert opinion, the best AI and it allow you to play anyone. The flowcharts can either be used to play solitaire or to sub for a human in case you can only make do with 3. (I also kinda wanna do FITL as a semi-coop) AI is a little exploitable and its obviously not as fun as humans but it's pretty decent. I recommend checking it out on VASSAL and seeing if you like it. FITL or ADP solitaire on my laptop is what I usually do on long bus rides.
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Jul 1, 2015 08:02
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I played a bunch of solo games of FitL while I had no internet on a cruise and it was a lot of fun. Which you would think would make my performance in the PbP game not be a series of endless pratfalls and embarassing oversights, but you would be wrong.StashAugustine posted:(I also kinda wanna do FITL as a semi-coop) Make it a participation LP, everyone plays Congress and the White House trying to run the US by committee.
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Jul 1, 2015 08:11
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Bubble-T posted:Tragedy Looper won a dice tower award which is cool. Because now we have Official Proof that it's terrible?
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Jul 1, 2015 08:20
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Jedit posted:Because now we have Official Proof that it's terrible? Goddamn All this wargame talk has me interested, especially since they can be played solo. What's a good intro game for someone that's played zero war games (and can still be played solo)?
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Jul 1, 2015 08:26
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Bottom Liner posted:Goddamn
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Jul 1, 2015 08:39
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Bottom Liner posted:All this wargame talk has me interested, especially since they can be played solo. What's a good intro game for someone that's played zero war games (and can still be played solo)? Onward Christian Soldiers has a nice solo campaign, I'm told.
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Jul 1, 2015 08:43
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Tekopo posted:Cuba Libre but good luck getting it. TAL and Navajo Wars are pretty easy solitaires as well. Go order Cuba Libre! It needs a push for p500
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Jul 1, 2015 08:46
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Bubble-T posted:If you're not back in two days I'll make a new thread in your honour.
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Jul 1, 2015 09:47
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Jedit posted:Onward Christian Soldiers has a nice solo campaign, I'm told. It does not, really. It's got a 2-player and a multiplayer campaign (of different crusades), you probably overhead someone talking about chit pull mechanic being somewhat solitaire-friendly.
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Jul 1, 2015 09:49
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I would P500 Cuba Libre if GMT didn't screw international P500 customers on shipping 
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Jul 1, 2015 10:02
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Lichtenstein posted:It does not, really. It's got a 2-player and a multiplayer campaign (of different crusades), you probably overhead someone talking about chit pull mechanic being somewhat solitaire-friendly. The solo play option is printed on the box. It's the only reason I was looking it up.
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Jul 1, 2015 10:13
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MikeCrotch posted:I would P500 Cuba Libre if GMT didn't screw international P500 customers on shipping With surface freight, it's still cheaper than buying the games local after release in Australia at least
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Jul 1, 2015 10:14
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Jedit posted:The solo play option is printed on the box. It's the only reason I was looking it up. Huh, I'll check it more closely when I get back home then.
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Jul 1, 2015 10:53
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EvilChameleon posted:To people who actually own Galaxy Trucker, how often do you get to play it? It seems like the sort of game you need to have some regulars who want to play it, and not really a newbie friendly sort of thing, but I have no idea. I run a board gaming soceity in my Uni, and after I bought Galaxy Trucker it became so popular that I was the one who tried suggesting other games, becuase I was burnt out of it. Maybe it'd be easier if someone else would've offered to explain the rules, lord knows they'd played it enough to know them. But usually there'd be a couple of newbies who wanted to give it a try. Atop of avid fans. I only got the first expansion to let it play up to 5 mind you, just tossing boh expansions in might makes the rules even more unwieldy?
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Jul 1, 2015 12:54
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Tekopo posted:Navajo Wars is probably one of the better solitaire games out there. Haha. How the hell did I forget to mention this? Also, Mosby's Raiders is a lot of fun.
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Jul 1, 2015 12:58
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EvilChameleon posted:To people who actually own Galaxy Trucker, how often do you get to play it? It seems like the sort of game you need to have some regulars who want to play it, and not really a newbie friendly sort of thing, but I have no idea. Played it nonstop when we first got it, but these days hardly at all. Still love it, but it only comes out once or twice a year for the following reason: - Played it to the point of burnout - So many goddamn games - Too lazy to set aside the expansion pieces at the end of every game - Too much effort to set aside expansion pieces to teach the game to newbies - Hard to play real-time games with an 11-month old clamoring for your attention or poking around looking for things to slam into full-force.
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Jul 1, 2015 13:56
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BeefyTaco posted:That sounds interesting, and I think I should definitely have an auction game of some kind. I may compare a few others, but Ra is sounding like a good pick. Would you say it's at least your favorite by that designer? Yes, it's my favorite, though Modern Art is also pretty good. Don't know how available either of them are right now.
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Jul 1, 2015 14:03
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Kai Tave posted:Oh my loving god Thunderstone sucks so much, how is a game so bad, this is unreal. Because the designer thought 'hey, Dominion was cool I bet I can do that' then proceeded not to playtest it enough.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:34
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Kai Tave posted:Oh my loving god Thunderstone sucks so much, how is a game so bad, this is unreal. I only played it once, and maybe it was just that the card mix was perfect, but it only took about 1 hour and change for 4 of us to play a game and it wasn't so bad. Maybe certain combinations are just hellacious? I don't really have any interest in playing it again, but I can think of a hundred games I'd rather play less.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:50
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PuttyKnife posted:Been doing a ton of playing of games lately. It's been an incredible month. Woo, War of the Ring! I love that game so much, but it can be tough finding the time to play it with people. If you get a chance to pick it up, the Lords of Middle-Earth expansion is really good. There's also another expansion coming out later this year, Warriors of Middle-earth. They'll be reprinting both the base game and the first expansion at that time, too. I wasn't as fond of The Battle of Five Armies, as like the epic scale of War of the Ring, but it is a good bit shorter then War of the Ring, so I actually get a chance to play it more often. The LOTR LCG is also excellent, and is my favorite co-op game. Also a pretty good solo game. We've got a thread for LCGs, including LOTR, if you have any questions. As for the Star Wars CCG, the complexity is not to everyone's taste, but if you like it, check out the Star Wars CCG Players Committee for more information about the game.
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Jul 1, 2015 18:41
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Jedit posted:The solo play option is printed on the box. It's the only reason I was looking it up. Ok, I checked and it's bullshit. The game has no solitaire option, as in providing a bot to throw opposition at you. The 1-7 player range is just Richerd Berg feeling the mechanics lends themselves well to soloing in a way soloing a co-op game or goldfishing a Magic deck can be fun.
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Jul 1, 2015 19:07
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Oldstench posted:I only played it once, and maybe it was just that the card mix was perfect, but it only took about 1 hour and change for 4 of us to play a game and it wasn't so bad. Maybe certain combinations are just hellacious? I don't really have any interest in playing it again, but I can think of a hundred games I'd rather play less. With the benefit of sleep here is an actual breakdown of my Thunderstone experience instead of me just whining. For those who don't know, Thunderstone is a fantasy adventure game deckbuilder. You have a setup of purchasable cards ala Dominion in the "village" area that represent things like adventuring heroes, gear, spells, etc. Then you have a dungeon area with three monsters spawned at a time from a separate deck. Monsters and some rare village cards are worth VP like in Dominion. Somewhere in the dungeon deck is a "boss" monster who ends the game when you kill him. Cards have dual use, they can be played on a trip to the village as money in order to buy stuff and they can also be played when you go to the dungeon to try and kill a monster (you can go to one place only per turn). So a Longspear functions as a Copper when you go to the village but in a dungeoneering context it adds +1 attack power when equipped to a dude and lets you immediately draw and play one card from your deck. You start with a basic deck of scrub dudes and cheap gear and, ostensibly, you level them up via XP you get from killing monsters, build your deck with gear and hired adventurers, etc. etc. Okay so here are the problems that we had. The primary A-number-one problem that I encountered with this game is that there was essentially no loving way to make any sort of engine. The thing about a game like Dominion is you start with a barebones crappy deck and then, through purchases, try and build yourself something that allows you to regularly Do A Thing. Along the way you'll try and trash crappy cards, draw stuff, get extra actions, create a money-making engine, etc. This game had no way to do that, at least with the set of cards the guy who brought the game was using, which was apparently an official layout the game provided as an option and not just some homebrew poo poo. So imagine a deckbuilder full of poo poo that requires you to combo it with other cards to even use. For example there are weapon cards that require you to play them on an adventurer in order to use them. Oh, but did we mention that gear has a minimum strength requirement? Yeah that's a thing too. And every purchase you make of something is causing your deck to grow. You can attempt to curate things by voluntarily trashing a card, but doing so takes your entire turn. You can also take a turn to discard however many cards from your hand and put the rest on top in an attempt to stack the deck, but if the gear you want is in your hand and the adventurers you need to use it are in your discard already then get hosed nerd. The whole "adventurers use equipment and enhancements to go fight monsters" is very Magic: the Gathering in sensibility, except the difference is that in Magic you get to incrementally build your way towards that...you can play some creatures, then play some more later, play some enhancements, etc. But in Thunderstone you have Dominion-style "discard your hand every turn" but there was no way to effectively build an engine to allow you to reliably combo the poo poo you'd want to combo. Turn after turn after turn was wasted trying to pair up dwarf fighters with the heavy weapons only they could use or get enough stuff together that you could purchase and/or fight anything successfully. Then there's the whole dungeon area itself. The way fighting monsters works is every monster has a defense value. You go to the dungeon and play your hand, if your hand's total power equals or beats the monster's defense you defeat it, the monster goes to your discard pile, you get its VP at the end of the game and its XP immediately, and you slide the other monster(s) down and draw a new one. If you fight a monster and lose then the monster goes to the bottom of the monster deck and a new one is drawn, bringing the boss lurking in the bottom ten cards of the deck closer to being drawn and triggering the endgame. Except there's another layer of dumb bullshit here in the form of light and torches. Every "level" of the dungeon is dark! So dark that unless your hand contains a certain number of Torch cards you take increasing combat penalties! There are three levels of dungeon, and each level has a cumulative 1 Torch/-2 Power penalty, so the very last level of the dungeon can impose up to a -6 penalty if you have no torches. You start with three in your deck and aside from providing light and some token money they're otherwise trash. Now imagine that there are no other ways to gain light sources, not even buying other torches. Now imagine that the chances of drawing torches steadily decreases as your deck grows because, again, there's no way to curate a drat thing. Now imagine that all the monsters have stupid-high defense values like 11-15, which only become even higher when you take into account the light penalty. Well you could just go plink off the monsters and cycle them to something easier, right? Except doing so wastes your turn, which means if something easier DOES pop up then congratulations, you just fed one of your opponents VP. After two hours of play we weren't even a little bit close to having drawn the boss monster. I don't know if there are other end-game triggers ala drawing out X number of stacks and I frankly don't care. The last time I had such a miserable, joyless experience playing a game was Steve Jackson's FRAG and that at least had the decency to come to a definitive end. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 19:16
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There is a way to make an engine in Thunderstone but the cards are not as synergistic with each other as in something like Dominion. I've seen villages that were absolute garbage (sounds like you got one here) and I've also seen villages that had one incredibly ridiculous overpowered combo that everyone rushed to buy and the game ended quickly. Rarely, I've seen villages that had a couple of decent, viable strategies. Mostly they just have a hodge-podge of poo poo and things just drag on and on. It's pretty bad. Edit: yeah the more I read this the more I think you just got a junk village, there are heroes that let you ignore darkness, items that add power and help with darkness, cards that let you peek at the top of your deck, etc. etc. etc. Torches, like food and militia, exist to be trashed eventually as you get something better. I'm not defending this game - I don't like it - but it's my wife's favorite so I've had to play it a lot. The best thing to do is to curate the village somewhat. Don't rely on random chance, the game is not strongly designed enough to make that work. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 19:30
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:There is a way to make an engine in Thunderstone but the cards are not as synergistic with each other as in something like Dominion. I've seen villages that were absolute garbage (sounds like you got one here) and I've also seen villages that had one incredibly ridiculous overpowered combo that everyone rushed to buy and the game ended quickly. Rarely, I've seen villages that had a couple of decent, viable strategies. Mostly they just have a hodge-podge of poo poo and things just drag on and on. It's pretty bad. I'm willing to believe that we had some godawful village layout but A). the guy setting it up told us that this was an official setup listed by the game itself (Thunderstone comes with a random deck of layouts that you can draw from) so if he was telling the truth this was something the designers themselves looked at and went "good enough to print," B). even a better village wouldn't have actually made the underlying game's issues (like the lovely monster fighting system) any better, you'd still probably be running into a lot of "well I can't fight these monsters without wasting my turn and potentially giving my opponents easier victory points on their turns, so I guess I'll just waste my turn doing nothing instead."
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Jul 1, 2015 19:36
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I didn't really care for the game and wouldn't ever suggest playing it. I definitely feel like I lucked out and got a good layout that made the game go nice and quick. Our dungeon monsters also had good abilities where after the fight was over if you didn't beat them with at least +X strength, you had to trash an unequipped hero. We were all purposely losing fights to trash our poo poo 0-level heroes and push them back to the bottom of the deck making the boss come out really quickly. Again - lucky experience on my side. Reading your tale of woe makes it really clear that it's Not A Good Game(TM). There simply shouldn't be that much variability in how the game plays out and the experience the players receive.
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Jul 1, 2015 20:15
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For the record I'm not, like, a deckbuilding master or anything so I fully admit that some of this could simply be me sucking, but I'm at least aware of how a game like Dominion is supposed to go even if I don't always win. For instance, you identified something with the whole "fight an overpowered monster that trashes your poo poo" thing. Like, hey, that's a way to curate your deck some, right? It looks like a "bad" thing but maybe you're supposed to do that more than I did. On the other hand, fighting a monster like that to trash a dude takes your whole turn and cycles the dungeon, potentially giving your opponents easier pickings. Or you could spend a turn "resting" which allows you to trash a card directly from your hand and doesn't cycle the dungeon. So it doesn't look like there's a lot of incentive to amusingly fling your level 0 scrubs against the Dreadgore Facesmasher in order to thin your deck when you can just...thin your deck. Both ways are as agonizingly slow as the other but one doesn't risk handing your opponents an advantage in the process. Game design!
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Jul 1, 2015 20:24
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Kai Tave posted:For the record I'm not, like, a deckbuilding master or anything so I fully admit that some of this could simply be me sucking, but I'm at least aware of how a game like Dominion is supposed to go even if I don't always win. For instance, you identified something with the whole "fight an overpowered monster that trashes your poo poo" thing. Like, hey, that's a way to curate your deck some, right? It looks like a "bad" thing but maybe you're supposed to do that more than I did. Just to play devil's advocate here, wouldn't your worry about the "slow" play be the same for all players in the game and therefore effectively giving everyone the same (dis)advantage?
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Jul 1, 2015 20:40
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Oldstench posted:Just to play devil's advocate here, wouldn't your worry about the "slow" play be the same for all players in the game and therefore effectively giving everyone the same (dis)advantage? I'm pretty sure this is why the game I played took like two hours and we never got close to the boss monster. Every now and then someone would assemble some lucky combo of just the right number of heroes plus Dwarven Ale plus yadda yadda and kill a monster. More often than that were turns spent trying to kill Summoners in the deep dark without torches and bouncing off of some secret defense 9 monster that Cursed you that you couldn't beat because you were at a -4 penalty or whatever or simply looking at your hand and going "welp, not gonna kill anything, can't afford anything good from the village, I guess I'll try and Prepare by discarding these cards and saving the others and hoping I draw a good combo, oh I didn't draw a good combo this time either" rinse repeat. It got to the point where we needed to start passing around an "Active Player" token because all of us were checking out so much that we were losing track of whose turn it was. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 20:46
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Nah Kai, you got it right. Thunderstone is Not Good.
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Jul 1, 2015 20:49
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Nah Kai, you got it right. Thunderstone is Not Good. Agreed. It was an acceptable activity while I did it for the hour I did it in, but have little to no interest in playing it again.
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Jul 1, 2015 20:51
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So in "not endlessly bitching about Thunderstone" news I also played my first two games of Tash-Kalar. Actually, I am gonna bitch about something else...dude, when you say you'd like to play a game, please let me at least try to explain the loving rules before burying your nose in the summary sheet for an awkward and wordless 15 minutes because we're not using that, we're using the intro game booklet, and also I can't tell whether you understand anything or not. That out of the way, Tash-Kalar is a Good Game. I can see how some people might get frustrated by the sudden reversals of fortune that seem prone to happening when a couple of clever summonings wind up smashing their carefully laid plans to bits...but none of it feels arbitrary so much as a thing the actual ebb and flow of the game, you can't get so wrapped up in one specific goal or objective that you can't shift gears when you need to, which you will. The second game I played wound up a bit like this where I started out getting stomped, my pieces destroyed left and right, but the guy doing it wasn't taking enough advantage of that to secure any of the objectives and so I was able to flare a couple times, rally, and wound up winning when he triggered the endgame by running out of cards and he couldn't come back in time. I haven't played with the full rules (legendary creatures, all the objectives) yet, nor have I done any team games, but I'm definitely interested in doing so. I can see how this is a game that might lead to analysis paralysis as the board becomes more crowded and plays become more complicated, but at least the game is designed to bring itself to a natural conclusion so it's not that bad.
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Jul 1, 2015 21:01
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:There is a way to make an engine in Thunderstone but the cards are not as synergistic with each other as in something like Dominion. I've seen villages that were absolute garbage (sounds like you got one here) and I've also seen villages that had one incredibly ridiculous overpowered combo that everyone rushed to buy and the game ended quickly. Rarely, I've seen villages that had a couple of decent, viable strategies. Mostly they just have a hodge-podge of poo poo and things just drag on and on. It's pretty bad. The major problem I had with Thunderstone is that it has two different goals to be good at that usually antisynergise with each other. You have to be good at fighting AND good at buying stuff, at different times, and there's very little that makes you good at both. So if you get an unlucky hand of 'buy' when you want to fight, you're hosed and vice versa. And worse, if you get a sequence of mediocre hands for both, you're double-super-hosed, beause you just can't do anything much of use at all. It's the same problem Legendary has. Sure, if the whole thing conspires to give you an amazing set of cards, you can do decent stuff, but if you're playing on random, that's quite unlikely. Again, a similar problem to Legendary, where the more you add, the less likely the game is to work, because so many things depend on synergy with other similar things, and you've just stuck in a whole bunch of new, different things.
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Jul 1, 2015 21:24
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