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Broken Loose posted:There's nothing irrational about it; Puerto Rico is a solidly-designed game for the most part. Two of the buildings are miscosted (not a typo, just bad playtesting, the designer later admitted he hosed up, also most fan redos of the components switch the costs as they should be), seating order matters a great deal, it's partially solvable, and game-to-game variance is very lacking, but the only game that does role-taking as well is Eminent Domain. Even if you don't plan to buy it, it's absolutely worth playing, and you can play it for free online at Board Game Arena. Never read online about PR much but I do have the game and we do enjoy it. What two buildings are these?
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Sep 20, 2015 15:31
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lordsummerisle posted:And Voyages of Marco Polo will be more like 60-90 minutes? Seems way easier to teach. At least much easier for me to wrap my head around the rules than Key. Not played it, couldn't say. Keyflower isn't too complex.
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Sep 20, 2015 15:53
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thespaceinvader posted:Not played it, couldn't say. Doesn't seem too complex, but I find it very hard to find a "hook" to latch an explanation on to. With regards to Codenames and 2v2, that is the only way I have tried it. It is awesome 2v2. End of discussion.
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Sep 20, 2015 16:12
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Bubble-T posted:The first expansion has a scenario that uses a (semi-random, face down) preset board which you have to explore in one direction to power up and then backtrack to stop the Big Bad from entering the portal you started at. It's really cool. I like that one - I usually play Volkare's Return though despite the game-y aspect of being smart about timing the reveal of the last tile for maximum effect.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:06
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lordsummerisle posted:Doesn't seem too complex, but I find it very hard to find a "hook" to latch an explanation on to. You will like it even more when you have 3v3+
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Sep 20, 2015 17:09
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Bottom Liner posted:You will like it even more when you have 3v3+ I've played it both ways, and 2v2 was not appreciably worse.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:10
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lordsummerisle posted:Any tips on how to teach Keyflower? It is a little tricky, I've found it works decently to explain the conecpt of building your village first and how you do this by bidding for the tiles, and explaining how bidding works. Then explain why they want certain tiles such as for producing goods and what those are used for, which is almost always to upgrade other buildings or sometimes end of game points. At this point you can explain upgrading if you feel it's necessary, it's possible to upgrade your home tile in the first round but new players may not care or catch onto it right away. Transport can be explained in the second round when players actually have tiles in their village. Lastly just go over the end of season boats, and then winter tiles, pass around the book where it says what the tiles do. If you feel it necessary, each season is generally themed around certain things like Spring has the majority of goods production, Summer has some goods production and boats that let you break rules, Fall is a little bit of production with some point scoring tiles, and then Winter is obviously all points.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:10
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Chill la Chill posted:Never read online about PR much but I do have the game and we do enjoy it. What two buildings are these? The University totally isn't worth $8, so some people like to swap its price with the Factory, which is occasionally a little too good at $7.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:18
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Catacombs finally arrived! Spent the better part of the evening putting stickers on wooden disks and grinning like an idiot. One of the kickstarter-exclusive heroes is extremely strong, but it seems like she was intended to be played in the included extreme-difficulty scenario. Maybe I'll only allow her for groups with new players or who don't also use the Wizard. Unfortunately the box is bonkers huge, so lugging it to work for our happy hour gaming session this week is probably out of the question. I guess we'll just have to follow up Libertalia with ol' Codenames instead. Ohhhh well. (This is an amazing season for board games)
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Sep 20, 2015 18:03
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I love how the hot discussion for Codenames isn't about the quality of the game, but the player requirements. That being said, it works with 4/6/8 players really well. I think 10 starts diluting the experience a little.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:16
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Any gamer-goon recommendations regarding Jerusalem or CO2? They're up for trade or sale by gamers local to me, and wondering whether this thread had any opinions about them?
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Sep 20, 2015 18:19
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Poopy Palpy posted:The University totally isn't worth $8, so some people like to swap its price with the Factory, which is occasionally a little too good at $7. Oh thanks. Friends and I actually kinda realized this too but never thought to just mess with the numbers. Glad the designer agrees.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:19
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Fat Samurai posted:You have found that problem with Ascension. Counterpoint: when the end game approaches, buy as many 1cc cards as possible because they're the best ratio of VPs to resources, they give you more flexibility for buying the cards that appear and you're probably not going to draw them. Also 1cc Artifacts are usually worth buying anyway because they don't (usually) come back after you play them.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:34
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Yeah, it's similar to knowing when you ought to flip into Duchy mode in Dominion
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Sep 20, 2015 20:13
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If anyone is interested in trying out a pretty heavy weight Card Driven war game, sign up here
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Sep 20, 2015 21:05
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Voyages of Marco Polo was great. We immediately played a second game with expert setup. The different powers and board elements really made the game a different puzzle each time. Really loved how ridiculously overpowered all of the characters are.Bottom Liner posted:You will like it even more when you have 3v3+ Then I will like it......A LOT.
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Sep 20, 2015 21:57
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Zveroboy posted:Any gamer-goon recommendations regarding [...] CO2? I'd like to know about this one, also. I think Vital is a good designer and this game has a good concept but I don't know much about this game. Having said that, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Vinhos because man, what a game.
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Sep 20, 2015 22:24
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EvilChameleon posted:I'd like to know about this one, also. I think Vital is a good designer and this game has a good concept but I don't know much about this game. Having said that, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Vinhos because man, what a game. I've played CO2 once, and nobody at the table was particularly enamored with it. I can't even remember much in the way of details for the game, to add to the wholly useless opinion, but I do note that I don't think anyone at the table actually properly wrapped their head around it, so it's probably not a fair assessment of its actual quality. I would have been up for playing another game at some later point, but the person who owned it sold/traded it away so... Despite the vagueness of my memory of the game and its mechanics, Archipelago is likely the superior semi co-op game.
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Sep 20, 2015 23:48
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Chill la Chill posted:Oh thanks. Friends and I actually kinda realized this too but never thought to just mess with the numbers. Glad the designer agrees. Yeah, here's the citation: quote:By the way, Andreas confessed to me that today, he would indeed decrease the cost of the university by 1 doubloon and increase the cost of the factory by 1 doubloon. Hence, he would exchange the positions of both buildings on the Puerto Rico board. I think that he should try. I would like it better. More words on the topic: quote:The following changes may be made to the official rules in order to create a more balanced game and one which gives each player an equal chance of winning:
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Sep 21, 2015 04:20
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I just cracked open the Shades of Tezla expansion. Ill sized rulebook crammed in aside, the content seems OK so far. The Braevalar figure is hilarious though. He doesn't look imposing at all, nothing like the other player figures. Dude looks like a shepherd turned starving highwayman or something.
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Sep 21, 2015 06:44
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I finally cracked open Star Trek: Fleet Captains for a practice learning game today, and wow that is one lovely rear end rule book. Very imprecise language. Unnecessary and repetitive verbiage. Poor examples. Lots of unanswered questions on minor details. Player turns have no structure or flow to them. The components are also pretty poor in terms of card and tokens. Very thin. The space tiles are like nothing. I wish there were sleeves to fit them  but being hexagons there is likely nothing. The dice are an absolute joke. I've never seen such pathetic excuse for dice in my entire gaming life. The ships are okay-ish except the clix stuff which is dumb and cumbersome, and I'd rather just track that stuff on the ship card.Rulebook and components aside, the game delivers a VERY Trekkian theme and experience. It was cute and as fan I ate it up. I look forward to trying it again in a more serious effort a few more times before inevitably swearing it off as garbage 
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Sep 21, 2015 07:38
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Cocks Cable posted:I finally cracked open Star Trek: Fleet Captains for a practice learning game today, and wow that is one lovely rear end rule book. Very imprecise language. Unnecessary and repetitive verbiage. Poor examples. Lots of unanswered questions on minor details. Player turns have no structure or flow to them. The components are also pretty poor in terms of card and tokens. Very thin. The space tiles are like nothing. I wish there were sleeves to fit them Also the Romulan expansion is super rare which will drive the completionist in you insane
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Sep 21, 2015 08:13
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Cocks Cable posted:I finally cracked open Star Trek: Fleet Captains for a practice learning game today, and wow that is one lovely rear end rule book. Very imprecise language. Unnecessary and repetitive verbiage. Poor examples. Lots of unanswered questions on minor details. Player turns have no structure or flow to them. The components are also pretty poor in terms of card and tokens. Very thin. The space tiles are like nothing. I wish there were sleeves to fit them Isn't that the "Mage Knight in Space" game?
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Sep 21, 2015 08:15
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Jedit posted:Isn't that the "Mage Knight in Space" game? It doesn't have much in common with Mage Knight. You're probably thinking of another entirely different Mage Knight Star Trek game in the works called Star Trek Frontiers which is sure to also have a lovely rulebook and lovely component quality. Zombie #246 posted:Also the Romulan expansion is super rare which will drive the completionist in you insane Already own it. 
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Sep 21, 2015 08:26
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My group is a big fan of Lost Legacy. We picked up the new decks and, well, they actually seem pretty bad. The Staff of Dragons is all about cards that modify your investigation speed, on most turns there isn't much to do aside from play the card that will get you the best investigation speed at the end of the game. The 3 and 4 eliminate all other players who's discards sum up to a number divisible by 3 or 4, respectively, but you don't really have a way to set this up. The 5 wins you the game if you have the 3 and 4 in your discards; a number of cards in the set let you manipulate discards, so this is possible to set up, but we never actually saw it happen over a dozen or so hands. The winner tended to come down to whoever drew their way into a better investigation speed. The Sacred Chalice is a bit more complicated. It's gimmick is, if you play card that is the same or higher value to your previous card, you must play that card face-down for no effect. The 1 and the 5 are the only cards that break this rule; the 1 may be played face down, if the player wishes, and the 5 must always be played face down. The goal here is to hide cards in your discards, potentially revealing them to be the 5 in the investigation phase. In addition, the 1 can make you instantly win if you find the 5, the 3 can steal that win from the 1, and the 2 can instantly win if it finds the 1. All of this sounds interesting, unfortunately the 6, 7, 8, and X are all nearly useless, so if you don't draw one of the low cards you basically don't get to play the game. Our consensus is the Vorpal Sword is still the best set, with the Starship a close second. The Flying Garden and the Whitegold Spire are both solid, and these two are not very good. We also picked up Dogs of War and, man, that game is really unforgiving for new players. The game is a fairly complex economic puzzle, but on top of that it's incredibly political. The games we've played have felt very swingy, with huge disparities in final scores. It seems like that's just because it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot early on by investing in losing battles and losing factions, that the strategy will be about trying to anticipate these bad choices before they happen, but we don't have enough experience with the game to tell.
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Sep 21, 2015 09:32
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Played two games for the first time yesterday. The first was Intrigue. It was a really interesting, brutal negotiation game where you lie and bribe your way to gaining the best jobs in order to make the most money overall. There were some interesting issues with the turn order - I had the first turn, which seemed an advantage early in the game but then by the end of the game it ensured I had very little bargaining power. The opposite was also true, with the last player seemingly holding a lot of power at the end of the game. Not sure if this is an actual issue with the gameplay or was just how it played out given that it was the first time any of us had played. Either way, it was a lot of fun (although clearly also had the potential to be horrific if we had anyone easily offended by treachery in our group.) The second game was Betrayal at House on the Hill. Seemed arbitrary and pointless, and when the haunt happened, it was basically just one of the good guys and the bad guy rolling dice for five minutes until one side lost. The set up phases seemed a bit creepy and then suddenly we were playing against an alien and its spaceship and gently caress none of it made sense.
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Sep 21, 2015 13:44
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Intrigue is old (20 years old) and... okay. It's a "classic" that people keep around mainly because it's possible to do really mean things, like Diplomacy or Lifeboats. It's incredibly political and action economy isn't very well balanced; there are a bunch of ways to just end up with no choices, empty turns, or more bizarre issues. Betrayal is just bad. It's from 2004 (pre-Golden Age, post-Twilight Imperium, during the Era of Ameritrash) and it's inexplicably popular while being terribly long and terribly designed. There's nothing more for you to get other than what you got. Half the game is a glorified setup phase, and then the whole thing is arbitrary and random. Sometimes it'll end instantly. Sometimes it'll be impossible to win or impossible to lose. Sometimes it'll take forever. You're not missing anything.
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Sep 21, 2015 14:08
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Jedit posted:Counterpoint: when the end game approaches, buy as many 1cc cards as possible because they're the best ratio of VPs to resources, they give you more flexibility for buying the cards that appear and you're probably not going to draw them. Also 1cc Artifacts are usually worth buying anyway because they don't (usually) come back after you play them. I have yet another counterpoint: Void Initiate should be one of your first buys. It costs 1. In fact... I have a list that I use to order what should be purchased. While the list is slightly different than the one in my brain, this will be a good "starting point". e: I should also mention that because of the way the AI is programmed, it will never buy Arbiter of the Precipice, which is one of the better cards in the game. OmegaGoo fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Sep 21, 2015 |
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Sep 21, 2015 14:12
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Broken Loose posted:Betrayal is just bad. It's from 2004 (pre-Golden Age, post-Twilight Imperium, during the Era of Ameritrash) and it's inexplicably popular while being terribly long and terribly designed. There's nothing more for you to get other than what you got. Half the game is a glorified setup phase, and then the whole thing is arbitrary and random. Sometimes it'll end instantly. Sometimes it'll be impossible to win or impossible to lose. Sometimes it'll take forever. You're not missing anything. On the other hand Betrayal is pretty light, easy to set up in a few min, simple to teach, and just plain fun  You shouldn't say things are "inexplicably popular", every popular game is that way for a reason, and figuring out what that reason is can make you a better game designer.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:42
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Some of the reasons why they are popular might not be something that is actually worth emulating though. I'm not saying that popularity within itself is a bad thing, but there isn't a link between quality of product and popularity, either in a positive OR negative way.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:52
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Tekopo posted:Some of the reasons why they are popular might not be something that is actually worth emulating though. I'm not saying that popularity within itself is a bad thing, but there isn't a link between quality of product and popularity, either in a positive OR negative way. He is saying there is a link between a quality of a product and its popularity.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:53
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Tekopo posted:Some of the reasons why they are popular might not be something that is actually worth emulating though. I'm not saying that popularity within itself is a bad thing, but there isn't a link between quality of product and popularity, either in a positive OR negative way. Even so, "inexplicably popular" is short for "I'm too stupid/obtuse/unimaginative to guess why it's popular". Bad games are usually popular for entirely explicable reasons.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:57
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Some of the things that lead to popularity are not qualities that you necessarily want to emulate, though. I guess I agree in the end: everything is popular for a reason.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:58
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lordsummerisle posted:Any tips on how to teach Keyflower? I usually take a different tack than EBag and get going as fast as possible. I can explain what tiles do as they come up each season, so the game boils down to: "On your turn, you can do one of 2 things: Bid on a tile in the middle to (usually) add it to your village OR use a tile anywhere on the board." Then I follow up with how to use tiles and what happens to the meeples, which leads into why you want tiles in your village (recycling of meeples & points from upgrades). Hey look we mentioned upgrades how do you? Explain that because everyone starts with that tile and it's not obvious like "get a wood". Finally, I cover the boats and bidding for them and then off to the races.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:07
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Tekopo posted:Some of the things that lead to popularity are not qualities that you necessarily want to emulate, though. I guess I agree in the end: everything is popular for a reason. Why wouldn't you want to emulate them? If your goal is selling games, you have to give the people what they want.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:07
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Rutibex posted:every popular game is that way for a reason, and figuring out what that reason is can make you a better game designer. Slap Cthulhu onto everything. Rutibex posted:Why wouldn't you want to emulate them? If your goal is selling games, you have to give the people what they want. Slap Cthulhu onto everything.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:13
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Rutibex posted:Why wouldn't you want to emulate them? If your goal is selling games, you have to give the people what they want. Farmville is popular for a reason, clearly this is the desirable future of video games. e: ^ Alternatively, anime titty miniatures for all.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:14
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Anime titty ninja Cthulhu dice-rolling card game.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:25
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Well it largely depends on what kind of game you are making and the kind of market that you are trying to access. There is popularity born out of an established fanbase/familiarity which isn't possible to emulate easily. There is negative popularity, where your popularity is born out of catering for certain subsets by creating controversy. Some products become popular because of rather predatory viral campaigns/kickstarters. There is popularity born of conformity which stifles innovation and just produces continually rebranded products that are all more or less the same. Popularity means that something needs to be almost instantly accessible, and there is a large subset of games (many of which I love) for which this isn't the case. Using the phrase 'giving the people what they want' is meaningless, because different people want different things. If you meant 'what the majority of people want', then complex games that aren't easily accessible shouldn't exist, by your metric, because they aren't catering to 'what the majority of people want'.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:25
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Betrayal has really strange non-standard dimensions for their cards and for that reason alone I hate it. As for game play, it's just kind of eh there but often terrible too. I keep thinking it's a game better geared to new hobbyists but then no, it's got a lot of wonky and imprecise rules, especially when you factor in all the different possible haunts.
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Sep 21, 2015 16:32
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