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OmegaGoo posted:Thunderstone combines a standard market with a market row (huge red flag right there). Each card has one or two currencies (another big problem) that lets you go to one market or the other. Additionally, the cards that are worth points can also do other useful things (the third badness). But he had fun. His friends did too. Check mate grognards!
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:19 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 07:17 |
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Chomp8645 posted:But he had fun. His friends did too. And you picked my post as your target?
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:20 |
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oh hey I read the op maybe I should be more explanatory The first hand I every played I felt like I already had interesting tactical decisions to make, and there definitely seems to be a nice challenge in the way you transition your deck from economy to combat but also trying to manage deck bloat It's the first deck building game any of us have played at all, as far as I know, and we also don't have a ton of games under our belts. I like the modularity of the system, and generic fantasy works well for flavor, but I also like how the system easily lends itself to re-skinning or other customizations. On a mechanical side, you can easily add or subtract game elements from a scenario and end up with something totally different.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:22 |
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OmegaGoo posted:Thunderstone combines a standard market with a market row (huge red flag right there). Each card has one or two currencies (another big problem) that lets you go to one market or the other. Additionally, the cards that are worth points can also do other useful things (the third badness). E- or the previous post, thanks something.apk
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:23 |
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Being "fun with your friends" is the price of entry to being called a game, not the ultimate form of praise. EDIT : being your first deckbuilder, I can see why you think it's cool. But go play dominion.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:23 |
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Chomp8645 posted:But he had fun. His friends did too. mea culpa
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:25 |
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My buddy just got Coup but we haven't played it yet. I looked over the rules real quick. Seems kinda bad honestly but maybe it will surprise me. At the very least maybe it will be some fun with my friends!!! e: I'm being an rear end in a top hat but the facts of this post are true. I don't know why he's excited about it, he's usually a pretty groggy eurogamer who poo poos anything Ameritrash. Doesn't seem his style.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:26 |
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Captain Foo posted:oh hey I read the op maybe I should be more explanatory Dominion's incredibly modular. It's basically the tightest and most modular deckbuilder, while also being the first and best. It's fast (faster than Thunderstone), it's balanced (more playtested than literally any other deckbuilder), it lets you be creative (there are less dead cards than most other deckbuilders), and if the pictures on the cards don't have enough zombies or whatever there are fan-made rethemes out there but honestly the gameplay is so tight that there's no real need for it. Eminent Domain is another deckbuilder that's really amazing. It requires an expansion to be "complete" but it has really cool asymmetric starting positions and it's really dynamic as far as shifting strategies to counter opponent strategies midgame. Also, it has spaceships for the people who hate castles. Puzzle Strike is another deckbuilder, and it's really good. It's Puzzle Fighter, so you can pick characters and crash blocks at people and counter-crash gems sent at you, etc. It's less modular but the concept is cool and well-executed. Essentially every other deckbuilder out there is not worth mentioning except for maybe Deck Building: The Deck Building Game which just came out at Gen Con.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:29 |
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Broken Loose posted:Dominion's incredibly modular. It's basically the tightest and most modular deckbuilder, while also being the first and best. It's fast (faster than Thunderstone), it's balanced (more playtested than literally any other deckbuilder), it lets you be creative (there are less dead cards than most other deckbuilders), and if the pictures on the cards don't have enough zombies or whatever there are fan-made rethemes out there but honestly the gameplay is so tight that there's no real need for it. I will look into this stuff, thank you
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:31 |
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Chomp8645 posted:My buddy just got Coup but we haven't played it yet. I looked over the rules real quick. Seems kinda bad honestly but maybe it will surprise me. The trick of Coup is to lie early and lie often. It's really amazing, especially in 2P with the 5-card-deck variant rule. Once you break 3P you need Reformation for it to really shine. Coup is basically high speed Hold'em with no bad hands.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:31 |
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Broken Loose posted:It's really amazing, especially in 2P with the 5-card-deck variant rule. Once you break 3P you need Reformation for it to really shine. lol well he only got the base game and is absolutely intending to play it with 4-6 people so I guess we're in for a wild ride!
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:35 |
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Captain Foo posted:I will look into this stuff, thank you np, chomp was kind of a dick but in his defense "i had fun" is a common tactic shitposters will do when they drop by here to vent their useless opinions without having anything to back them up or bring into an actual discussion, whereas this thread thrives on using discussion to determine, compare, and discover what cool and new stuff is worth spending our money on now that we're in a golden age of designer board games
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:37 |
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Captain Foo posted:I don't know what any of this means but I did fill out my actual likes of the game on the last page Market row = only X cards are available to be bought during a turn. These cards are randomly drawn from a single deck containing all the cards shuffled together. The problem is you can't rely upon a strategy that depends on any specific card, or even any type of card, because you don't know if you'll ever have a chance to buy it. Two currencies = there are two ways to "buy" things, with gold and with attack. This makes it hard to create a deck that can reliably buy things, which is most of the strategy of a deckbuilder. (The other main parts are how fast you can create that deck, and when to stop going after things that make the deck function in favor of victory points). cards that are worth points can also do other useful things = The guy with the most points is currently winning. If the cards that give you the most points also have the best abilities, then it's near impossible to catch up to the current winner. This means the game is decided well before it's over. Also, pretty much all the things you liked about it are true for Dominion, but better. EDIT: The problem with "I had fun" is that I have friends who had fun reading Twilight and reading War and Peace. Fun covers so many activities that "I had fun" is a statement with no informative value. It should be erased from serious decisions for the same reason "the fact that" should be erased. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Aug 3, 2015 |
# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:37 |
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Coup owns with 4-5 players even without the expansion. The expansion just makes it own harder.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:37 |
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Chomp8645 posted:lol well he only got the base game and is absolutely intending to play it with 4-6 people so I guess we're in for a wild ride! oh gently caress THAT, play it once to learn the rules, get reformation, and never look back. it's like $8, there's no excuse edit: i mean it's still good but reformation is so much better it's not even funny
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:38 |
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An important thing to know about Thunderstone Advanced is how the "Advanced" got there. You see, after the designers had played 4 rounds of Dominion, they decided it would be better if it had more theme. "More Theme" is code for "more murder". They hastily threw something together and it wasn't very good because they didn't really understand Dominion, but they published it anyway. After a bunch people who had payed to playtest their game, they learned a few lessons and released a patched version. It still wasn't a good game.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:40 |
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Poopy Palpy posted:"More Theme" is code for "more murder". Just like how Star Realms is more interactive, even though life points in a 2 player game are just negative victory points. For many people, it's not really interaction unless there is destruction.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:44 |
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Here is a great reason to play Thunderstone/Ascension/Star Realms etc over Dominion: If you play in a group with a wide sill differential, they spread the wins out due to the market row. People who are game-breakers (like the people who post in message boards about games at 11:45 pm on Sunday night) hate this because it takes the victory condition further out of their hands. Dominion is great to play with 2-3 other people who know what all the cards do and are capable of forming a loose strategy before they even turn up their first hand. Market Row games are great for groups who want to keep less-developed players interested and able to squeak out a win here and there against a group of good players. tldr; I win 90 percent of Dominion games against my wife and only 60 percent of Ascension games. Guess which game I play more often.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:44 |
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golden bubble posted:cards that are worth points can also do other useful things = The guy with the most points is currently winning. If the cards that give you the most points also have the best abilities, then it's near impossible to catch up to the current winner. This means the game is decided well before it's over. it's super worth noting that in dominion, victory points are represented by completely useless cards that bloat your deck by design. the first thing bad game designers usually do when cloning dominion is "fix" this and end up making a terrible game where the first person to score is usually the winner (example: how monsters are worth gold in thunderstone and give you exp to level up your heroes) the coolest and most elegant part of dominion is using that simple idea, that points are just cards, to create interesting choices in terms of engine building, deck design, risk-taking, and turn planning, all while making all players feel like they're involved in the game until the end
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:44 |
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Huxley posted:Here is a great reason to play Thunderstone/Ascension/Star Realms etc over Dominion: If you play in a group with a wide sill differential, they spread the wins out due to the market row. well, the issue is that the game makes your decisions arbitrary by handing victory to a player without you getting any say in the matter. i can see how if you're screwed into a situation where you have to constantly play a game against somebody who refuses to improve then you'll want the game to randomly hand them free victories or they'll get mad, but while it's a point of recommendation that is still a symptom of a bad game. just the same, taco bell is delicious but terrible food.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:47 |
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Huxley posted:
In other words, Dominion is a deep game where different levels of skill really stand out. It has some luck, so a weaker player can beat a stronger one some of the time. Dominion has less depth and more luck than Chess or Go, where a beginner has zero chance against an intermediate player. But unlike Thunderstone/Ascension/Star Realms, skill regularly triumphs over luck, instead of barely being better than a coin flip. For reference, a 90% win ratio is the difference between a national level MTG player and MTG scrub.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:52 |
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Broken Loose posted:well, the issue is that the game makes your decisions arbitrary by handing victory to a player without you getting any say in the matter. i can see how if you're screwed into a situation where you have to constantly play a game against somebody who refuses to improve then you'll want the game to randomly hand them free victories or they'll get mad, but while it's a point of recommendation that is still a symptom of a bad game. Hey man, that's just the way it goes. Gotta have something for the scrubs. When I get my Real Gamer Crew together we all know something with minimal randomness is hitting the table like Kemet. When the Scrub Crew gets together it usually means dice. Thems the breaks.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:54 |
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^^^I have had a ridiculous amount of success introducing people who probably couldn't be described as "hardcore gamers" to Kemet, the lack of random dice rolls in no way seems to detract from the experience for them.Huxley posted:Here is a great reason to play Thunderstone/Ascension/Star Realms etc over Dominion: If you play in a group with a wide sill differential, they spread the wins out due to the market row. Dominion is a perfectly fine game to play with people who don't strenuously study board games all day long, I say this as someone who posts in message boards about games and who somehow doesn't manage to crush-dominate every single game I play while being smug about it, suggesting that it's only a good game when everyone at the table is super up to spec on their pro Dominion strats is ridiculous. Meanwhile as someone who'd never played Thunderstone before and knew nothing about it going into it my introductory experience with the game was an agonizingly boring 2.5 hours of accomplishing fuckall and desperately wishing that I was playing another game, even something like Bang! Dice because at least Bang! Dice is polite enough to end in about 30 minutes. Put another way, even if I had won that game of Thunderstone and not thankfully had to leave because I had work the next day, I still wouldn't have wanted to play it again just because I somehow stumblefucked my way to victory. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Aug 3, 2015 |
# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:56 |
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Chomp8645 posted:Hey man, that's just the way it goes. Gotta have something for the scrubs. eh. sushi dice, click clack lumberjack, pictomania, dixit, ugg-tect, ca$h 'n gun$ (1st edition), rampage, and resistance tend to be more inclusive across skill groups without diminishing the importance of my decisions and actions. i don't have to make skill:scrub compromises in TYOOL 2015
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 04:58 |
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Broken Loose posted:well, the issue is that the game makes your decisions arbitrary by handing victory to a player without you getting any say in the matter. i can see how if you're screwed into a situation where you have to constantly play a game against somebody who refuses to improve then you'll want the game to randomly hand them free victories or they'll get mad, but while it's a point of recommendation that is still a symptom of a bad game. Not totally arbitrary, but admittedly more arbitrary. You still have to make good decisions and there's room for mistakes to matter. Ascension isn't a game of war, just like Dominion isn't a game of chess. But I, like most people, have formed a boardgame group around criteria other than the players' skill at boardgames, and any game that feels like, "Huxley beats on us for two hours" is going to end up at the bottom of the stack. As similar as Dominion and Ascension are, they are both designed elegantly to different ends. Ascension is a deckbuilder party game. Dominion is a deckbuilder euro game. Nobody is ever going to be like, "Hey guys, should we play Sulls or Dominion?" "Hey guys should we play Ascension or Caverna?" I just meant, know your crowd and there's a deckbuilder for it. Kai Tave posted:Dominion is a perfectly fine game to play with people who don't strenuously study board games all day long, I say this as someone who posts in message boards about games and who somehow doesn't manage to crush-dominate every single game I play while being smug about it, suggesting that it's only a good game when everyone at the table is super up to spec on their pro Dominion strats is ridiculous. Meanwhile as someone who'd never played Thunderstone before and knew nothing about it going into it my introductory experience with the game was an agonizingly boring 2.5 hours of accomplishing fuckall and desperately wishing that I was playing another game, even something like Bang! Dice because at least Bang! Dice is polite enough to end in about 30 minutes. Oh, I have a friend group who crushes me at Dominion, just like I have the friend group I crush. I suck at Dominion, but it's a game that rewards good play more heavily than some others. My actual point was that people who care enough to argue like this on a work night are the try-hards of the world, so our opinions are going to lean toward try-hard games. I've never played Thunderstone, honestly. That's why I kept using Ascension as an example of a more casual deckbuilder. I do really like Ascension a lot.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 05:02 |
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The best part of Dominion is how it manages to be such a varied and replayable game while also managing to be simple as dirt to learn. The original game anyway, still don't have most of the expansions yet.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 05:26 |
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I'm glad my wife's response to being beaten in a game is to Get Good.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 05:33 |
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Lord Frisk posted:And if they made the politics deck more interesting. And fixed the racial powers. And cut the time down to a realistic frame. And like a million other things. Politics is pretty fun if you play with the expansions. The base game isn't too hot. What would you change about the racial powers? More variation? The time length isn't bad with a group that's played before. We get our games down to 5 hours by doing tricks like ending people's turns while they handle their ship purchases and such. Maybe there's an app to handle ship combat? We currently use one for handling tech which makes things loads easier for remembering things. I mean they already use an App for Xcom. It makes Twilight loads more approachable.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 08:34 |
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Have a One Night Ultimate Werewolf question. If there is a game with a tanner, and both werewolves end up in the middle, and the villagers kill the tanner, do both parties win? I see two ways to intercept this scenario: 1. Both parties win. The tanner always wins if he dies, and since he's his own team, and not on the villager team, this is a situation where no villagers died, and the villager team also wins. This would essentially be the same as a no kill. I think of it as a similar scenario as the one listed in the rule book under the description for the tanner: "if the tanner dies, and a werewolf is killed, both the villager and the tanner wins." That rule sets up a precedent for the Tanner not being on the villager team, and for a simultaneous win. 2. Some people think the Tanner would count as being on the villager team, and thus the village loses for killing him, and he alone wins. They say the only 3 viable outcomes would be Tanner dies and only the Tanner wins, A no kill situation occurs and only the villagers win, or Tanner ruins the no kill by killing a villager, and everyone loses. Which is correct?
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 09:04 |
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Played Star Trek: Attack Wing with a friend the other day. At first it seemed like a lot of work and a little convoluted but I eventually got the hang of it and wrecked him with the Romulans. There's a poo poo ton of little pieces and confusing little rules, but I think with an experienced play group it could be fun violating the poo poo out of the Prime Directive. However I still think I'd rather play Star Wars Epic Duels.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 09:12 |
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Megasabin posted:Have a One Night Ultimate Werewolf question. If there is a game with a tanner, and both werewolves end up in the middle, and the villagers kill the tanner, do both parties win? I see two ways to intercept this scenario: I don't have it in front of me but IIRC the rulebook explicitly mention it, and that it's option 2 - the tanner counts as a regular villager and wins if and only if there is no kill.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 09:13 |
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DontMockMySmock posted:I don't have it in front of me but IIRC the rulebook explicitly mention it, and that it's option 2 - the tanner counts as a regular villager and wins if and only if there is no kill. This is kind of dumb because the Tanner is pretty much going to ruin the no kill everytime, and force everyone to lose.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 09:20 |
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Diosamblet posted:I think it's going to be a small box expansion. There are 3 vs 2 enemy groups, but there are no heroes or class additions, and it has "a full one-act campaign" so 6-8 adventures. That was my thought too. I definitely prefer Descent to IA and I hope they do carry on with it. I did kinda assume that the heroes would be announced later but looking at the box cover it does look like a rogue and a fighter which would be weird to release. Still - they need a new mage class and a healer class! Especially since even now there's really not a lot of choice for mage classes. I find them all pretty rubbish. Taear fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Aug 3, 2015 |
# ? Aug 3, 2015 09:34 |
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Megasabin posted:This is kind of dumb because the Tanner is pretty much going to ruin the no kill everytime, and force everyone to lose. Yes, but the scenario where there is a Tanner and no Werewolf is very rare. It also can only realistically happen if you're playing with less than seven people and include the Tanner, which you probably shouldn't do.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 09:42 |
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I had some fun with Thunderstone cause all 3 times I played it. I won as the runaway leader while my friends struggled to do stuff. I didn't enjoy Imperial Settlers as the runaway leader, I felt bad for my friends. Ergo: playing Thunderstone makes you a dick
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 10:56 |
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That reminds me I quite enjoyed SU&SD's review of Imperial Settlers/Nations. On that note I've been watching Tabletop and it's pretty entertaining (I love all the effort that goes into the show's editing) but Wheaton's perfectly rounded cheeks weird me out. I also had no idea who Wheaton was.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 11:05 |
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I'm playing some Flash Point tonight which means I get to be a fireman. Yay.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 11:30 |
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Santheb posted:Played Star Trek: Attack Wing with a friend the other day. At first it seemed like a lot of work and a little convoluted but I eventually got the hang of it and wrecked him with the Romulans. There's a poo poo ton of little pieces and confusing little rules, but I think with an experienced play group it could be fun violating the poo poo out of the Prime Directive.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 11:33 |
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Megasabin posted:Have a One Night Ultimate Werewolf question. If there is a game with a tanner, and both werewolves end up in the middle, and the villagers kill the tanner, do both parties win? I see two ways to intercept this scenario: Pretty sure only the tanner would win. Re: TI3, I don't have the time or the will to look through the book and game to point out the imbalances, but there's more than a few. And a 5 hour game time is still way too long for what it is. How many goals are "control Mecatol Rex and also n canooters"? If every goal is control Mecatol Rex, they could just bake that in. Anyway, I don't think it's a terrible game, in fact quite the opposite. I just don't think it's anywhere near the king of board games.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 12:17 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 07:17 |
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I think now is the perfect time for FFG to slim down TI with a fourth version like they've been doing with so many other games recently. It has some great ideas but is just overly bloated and full of FFG relics of design from 10 years ago.
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# ? Aug 3, 2015 13:19 |