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Chill la Chill posted:I would enjoy a zombie game with worker placement and role selection. You'd think it's p obvious as a "civilization re-builder" genre but nope. Think walking dead with the prison or woodbury. Role selection (maybe with bidding?) might get you killed since all the leftover roles are grunts who have to do a supply run for that week. Might be hard to do since you wouldn't want to kill players off and have them sit around - bad game design. I think the old joke on that is that someone could reskin Dungeon Lords as that and nobody would notice.
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Oct 24, 2015 17:57
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unpronounceable posted:I'm going to teach Dominant Species in a little bit. Anyone have some things I should be aware of going in? I know how to explain the difference between Domination (the action), and Dominance (cubes * matching symbols = cone). Just point out that being behind in points doesn't really mean you're losing, and emphasize how important end game scoring is.
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Oct 24, 2015 18:40
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Linko is a great filler. I need to buy all the German card games.
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Oct 24, 2015 18:51
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T-Bone posted:Linko is a great filler. I need to buy all the German card games. Yes! Join us. I made a post earlier, I have a bunch of these. There is that geeklist: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/197080/german-card-fillers Rutibex, you need to get in on this too. Definitely try Tichu, and I think you might like Linko and Frank's Zoo
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Oct 24, 2015 19:08
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Archenteron posted:I dug too greedily and too deep in a game of Codenames and tried to combine vet, river, bridge, and pistol by using the clue Colonel Bogey March. Thought my agent was versed enough in old music/movies. This is a great clue. Your agent was a fool and deserved whatever miserable fate met him. But now I have that whistling stuck in my head.
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Oct 24, 2015 21:52
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Beffer posted:This is a great clue. Your agent was a fool and deserved whatever miserable fate met him. I wouldn't say it's a great clue. Aren't you only supposed to use one word?
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Oct 24, 2015 23:34
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One of the optional rules is treating a full proper noun (e.g. 'Martin Luther King') as a single word for the clue.
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Oct 24, 2015 23:38
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At today's big Essen extravaganza meetup I played 3 new games: Porta Nigra is a fairly straightforward Euro worker placement game. The unique mechanic is that you have 4 districts in which to build towers, using pieces from 5 common piles in the center. Each district has different scoring and endgame bonuses. Each player has a master builder on a horse that circles the 5 piles. You can only buy from the pile corresponding to the district your builder occupies (or the central pile) and you can only build in the district your builder occupies. It costs money to move to a different district. You have a personal deck of cards, from which you draw a hand of 2 each turn. Each card has a number of actions you can perform (buy, build, collect money, etc.). You choose one of the two cards each turn and a round ends when everyone has worked through their entire deck. A game consists of 2 complete rounds. Of course, there are lots of other purchasable cards that affect this basic setup--bonuses for building in a certain district, extra workers, ability to buy from a different district, etc. It was a lot of fun and easy to grasp and remember all the rules despite the point salad nature of the game. Because of the common resources and the limited number of building spaces, it felt more interactive than similar games (e.g., Trajan). Between Two Cities is a coop-with-competitive-scoring game with a short playing time. It took almost no time to learn. This was simpler than I expected and I'd have to play again before I could evaluate how strategy would work. Obviously, you want to maximize the value of both of your cities since you only score for the less valuable one. But the complexity comes from the 7 Wonders-style passing of unselected cards. It wasn't quite as great as I hoped, but my expectations were pretty high. Manhattan TraffIQ was one I hadn't heard anything about. Despite the stupid name, it's a clever variation on Carcassonne. You place your taxis and delivery trucks on the intersections between the tiles. Each turn you can place tiles, draw tiles into your hand, and/or move a taxi/delivery truck. It played very quickly and was more short-term tactical than Carcassonne (no farmer equivalent), but had some interesting back-and-forth since you can remove a player's vehicles from the board by outnumbering them along a specific street. Not quite as luck-driven as Carcassonne, because there was also no monastery equivalent. Edit: Forgot to mention that Manhattan TraffIQ had some annoying IKEA-style skimping on the components. You get different numbers of vehicles in a 2, 3, or 4-player game, so it comes with 7 red and 7 yellow, but only 5 blue and 4 green. We thought the box was missing the others, but nope. CaptainRightful fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 01:16
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Zark the Damned posted:One of the optional rules is treating a full proper noun (e.g. 'Martin Luther King') as a single word for the clue. Yeah, my group vetoed that rule pretty hard. They just jelly of how good I am... at finding the assassin.
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Oct 25, 2015 02:52
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Played a game of Coup Rebellion G54 today and...kinda underwhelmed, really. Coup with more role cards sounds great, but five of the twenty-five cards are the same as base Coup, and many of the others are just slight variations here and there. It's not terrible, and I'd recommend grabbing a copy if you don't already have original Coup and your group loves games like The Resistance, but you're not really missing that much if you already have regular Coup. Also the box is 90% empty space and the insert is dumb. One Night Revolution isn't too shabby. Essentially a combination of The Resistance and One Night Ultimate Werewolf, it plays a lot more like a latter but tries to fix some of the flaws. For instance, roles and identity are separate and what your role does can vary depending on whether you're a good or bad guy. Also, instead of doing things in order of roles, each player in order does their special thing, which simplifies things a lot and makes things a lot quicker than ONUW. The first player also gets to double-check their identity card and now all players are forced to claim a role before you get to yelling at each other. There's still some crappy situations here and there and a couple of the roles seem weak (though obviously that may change as we play more), but overall it's enjoyable and my group got some mileage out of it. Not as good as The Resistance, but better than ONUW. Also got to try Between Two Cities, which was pretty simple and worked out well (five of the six cities were within two points of each other, the other being ten points ahead), and Ginkopolis, which got pretty drat cutthroat by the end with the top three players all only a few points apart. Good stuff.
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Oct 25, 2015 03:28
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One Night Revolution takes a lot longer to play at higher player counts because every single person has to take time to do their action. ONUW at least combines actions for people of the same role. It's alright, but doesn't really improve on ONUW at all. The theme is also not as easily graspable for most people.
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Oct 25, 2015 03:55
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Yeah, I feel like I want different things out of One Night and Avalon/Resistance. My group likes both, granted. One Night is raw chaos and arguing, Avalon is more measured and immersive in how the deduction works. Speaking of which! One Night Ultimate Vampire is great. The mark mechanic is really interesting and I like how there's a variety of allegiances that win and lose differently. Took us a few games to get it, but we really liked it and I'm quite looking forward to trying it out more. The Assassin is probably one of the better roles to be added, having a third party who can just outright say "Hey, help me kill this person and your side wins too" is great. Echophonic fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 03:59
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Same. I like ONUWW because it's a nice quick exercise in on-the-fly bullshitting and it's random enough that silly things will sometimes happen (read: "it's fun"). Avalon's always fallen flat for me because I don't find the roles that interesting and it's super metagame-dependent (with no randomness to offset) as well as really easy to have implode with new players. It's not a bad game, but it's fallen flat basically every time I've played it. ONR seems like a combination of the worst of both worlds :\
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Oct 25, 2015 04:01
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I've played two games of ONUW where no one was a werewolf, but I was a minion. Absolutely the worst situation to find yourself in. I have no idea how I won that lottery twice.
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Oct 25, 2015 04:42
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Finally got to play Codenames. We played it for like 5 hours. It's awesome, everyone loved it. It's pretty sweet because it feels really skill testing but for a different skill set than most games we play. I also like the risk management aspects to the game. And of course occasionally someone comes up with some thing creative but really out there and a mind melding thing happens and it feels great and is hilarious. I want to buy like 4 more copies when it's in stock again for other folks and one to leave at work. I wonder what Vlaada's next game will be like 
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Oct 25, 2015 04:51
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At least baseline Monopoly has a clear, straighforward board. Also Codenames chat: "weapon" is a decent clue for "Shakespeare", right?
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Oct 25, 2015 06:03
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Krazyface posted:Also Codenames chat: "weapon" is a decent clue for "Shakespeare", right? quote:Re: One Night WW / Rev / Vamp Discussion 1. The variable powers based on ID/Specialst combinations are decent, but some combos just plan suck depending on the random distribution of cards. 2. The forced "Everyone Claim a Role but No Talking About It Yet" phase is really strange and I don't understand why the designers felt it needed to be there. Maybe it was just how we played it, but I think people felt inclined to be more honest during this phase, especially as a non-Informant (the blue "good guy" team; the Resistance, is it? whatever they're called), and led to most all of our games being pretty well solved by the end of actual discussion. 3. The lack of a 3rd "faction" role like Werewolf has with the Tanner really hurts it and makes it really difficult to win as an Informant. In ONUW (assuming you're always playing with a Tanner, which you should be or you're wrong), Werewolves have some plausible deniability thanks to the possibility that their potentially shady actions/lying could be them TRYING to get targeted, so players have to actually take time to feel out the situation more. In ONR, once a player has been determined to be lying or just simply figured out/called out by a knowledge gaining role, there's not really any recourse for them. We tried with smaller groups and larger ones (I believe we even did some 9 and 10 person ONR games), and never ended one with a particularly good feeling that either A) the blue team had done any particularly substantial deduction to identify the Informants, or B) that anyone really felt like it was nearly as enjoyable as ONUW. Super disappointing, I wanted that game to be awesome.  As ON: for Vampire, I haven't had a chance to play my copy yet as I was travelling all week when it was delivered, but my group had a copy and played some without me. Initial feedback is that the Mark system is really interesting, but can lead to some auto-lose situations due to random luck, a lot more than the normal role changing shenanigans potentially would in regular ONUW/Daybreak. I'll get a chance to try it myself in a few days and see what I think!
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Oct 25, 2015 09:07
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Codenames chat: First clue of the game was "round". I picked Revolution without even looking at the other words and immediately lost the game.
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Oct 25, 2015 10:39
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Krazyface posted:Also Codenames chat: "weapon" is a decent clue for "Shakespeare", right? Not when you can use "Hamlet", no. Unless, as Merauder says, it was "Weapon: 3" and you had other things in mind.
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Oct 25, 2015 10:59
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The Supreme Court posted:Codenames chat: Your clue giver was at fault for that, not you.
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Oct 25, 2015 13:22
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Bottom Liner posted:Your clue giver was at fault for that, not you. Not necessarily. If the clue was "round 2" and the intended words were Ball and Circle, then Revolution should not have been picked.
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Oct 25, 2015 14:07
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As a clue giver your number one concern should be giving clues that can in no way relate to the assassin. Sometimes that can be tough but you should never give a risky clue unless absolutely necessary for the win, and especially not for the first clue.
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Oct 25, 2015 14:11
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CaptainRightful posted:At today's big Essen extravaganza meetup I played 3 new games: This fired Palaces of Carrara for me. I just think it's a more interesting, interactive implementation of that system.
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Oct 25, 2015 14:37
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Lol there's an article on Polygon about Pandemic Legacy that calls it a worker placement game.
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Oct 25, 2015 15:46
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Lorini posted:This fired Palaces of Carrara for me. I just think it's a more interesting, interactive implementation of that system. Interesting. I quite enjoyed Carrara, the couple times I played on bga. I'll have to keep a lookout for this one!
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Oct 25, 2015 16:52
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I may need to introduce a Wikipedia house rule for Codenames. "Tenochtitlan:2" (Aztec, Pyramid) got me "Beijing" because "It sounds like a Chinese word", and later "Raytheon:2" (Missile, Contract) to win the game instead got the assassin, "Superhero" 
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Oct 25, 2015 17:48
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Foehammer posted:I may need to introduce a Wikipedia house rule for Codenames. "Tenochtitlan:2" (Aztec, Pyramid) got me "Beijing" because "It sounds like a Chinese word" I couldn't not read that line with a Southern hillbilly accent.
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Oct 25, 2015 17:55
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Foehammer posted:I may need to introduce a Wikipedia house rule for Codenames. "Tenochtitlan:2" (Aztec, Pyramid) got me "Beijing" because "It sounds like a Chinese word", and later "Raytheon:2" (Missile, Contract) to win the game instead got the assassin, "Superhero" Military contractors might be stretching it for most people, but Basic Aztec History should have been learned in school at some point. Saw a game where "Velodrome:2" successfully got Cycle and Stadium, and a game where "SINISTAR:2" drew blanks (Satellite,Cabinet)
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Oct 25, 2015 17:58
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Gimnbo posted:I couldn't not read that line with a Southern hillbilly accent. Boy what in tarnation is this Quetzalcoatl business all about??? I don't speak no oriental tell you hhwat.
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Oct 25, 2015 18:01
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Archenteron posted:Military contractors might be stretching it for most people, but Basic Aztec History should have been learned in school at some point. 
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Oct 25, 2015 18:11
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Obscure and clever are different things goddamnit
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Oct 25, 2015 18:46
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Got two games played yesterday at a local meetup with Essen games brought over from the organizers. Would have liked to have gotten more games done, but there was a raffle, brunch, etc. First game up was Burano, the city-building, area-control, set-collection, power acquiring, tableau-building, pyramid-having game. Something that hasn't been highlighted about this game is that there is a good deal of passive-aggression baked into the game, despite the fact that you can't really block someone from carrying out an action. When you take a lace action, you can place ladies from your tableau on to color coded lace workshops in a grid. It's very easy to push people out of your lace workshop or even to block off a part of the workshop if you work at it. Whenever you fish you automatically push people off of islands as you place workers on them. Having majority workers on color coded lace workshops or on islands is how you score points when building roofs. You can also build your houses in such a way as to prevent an opponent from laying out their roof tiles in a way that would help them to score. However, it seems doubtful to me that there would be as much player conflict in a the 2-player game as there was in the 4-player game. If you like conflict in your colorful Euros and usually play with one other person, Burano may feel a bit too spacious. The pyramid gimmick of building up your actions is really not a big deal. There are always two colors for any action. You are pretty much just calling out what your first and second actions are likely to be by how you build your pyramid. As long as you build in such a way as to give you options, it is doubtful that you would need to spend more than a minute building your pyramid. One guy at our table AP'd quite hard on the pyramid building, but he never quite got that you should build your pyramid for flexibility, not for a master plan. The fishing set collection and power acquiring / point getting cards worked well. Every submechanic of the game does just enough to keep you interested in what's going on, but not enough to overtake the game. End of round scoring is particularly interesting in Burano. Most euros simply have you add up point during scoring, but there are decisions to make here, too. You can send cubes back to the stockpiles for 2 VPs per lace worker on matching colors. (That is, you can send a pink cube back if you have laceworker on a pink workshop.) However, you get even more points if you can send a bunch of cubes together that are all the colors of connected laceworkers giving you a "union bonus" that increases exponentially. Of course, cubes you send back can't used to take actions. So you're constantly weighing the options between getting points and staying flexible with your actions. (And other players can use a privilege, which is a bonus gained through certain actions, to boot your laceworkers and replace one with their own on their actions to prevent you from scoring large unions.) My impressions after one play is that Burano is a game made of very strong subcomponents that manages to be just as good as the sum of its parts. I am especially fond of the way that you can spend money to take additional actions on a given turn, and the fact that there are three major things to think about in every round of Burano, which are: 1. Competition for spots on fishing and lace. 2. House Building. 3. End of round scoring. It is hard to tell after one play though if these systems will work together to a complex and compelling game where you have to continually struggle to stay afloat in all three subsystems, or if you can afford to ignore one of these to just score many points through the others. I hope that the first is true - if the game allows players to specialize too much it would make Burano much less interesting. Game two: Diluvia Project This is a city-building, tableau-tracking worker placement that just does a lot of things right. You are building a city in the clouds and are competing with other players to have the largest population on the cloud island. Principally, you do this by building buildings, which all have an option to be set to manufacture goods for you, increasing the resources or money you get during the income phase, or set to function as prestigious gathering halls, which makes them generate prestige points for you. This is important, because having many buildings means that you gain more population every time your prestige marker hits a multiple of 10. So at the beginning of the game, your prestige marker may make its way to the "10" spot eventually and give you like 2 population points. But by the end game, you'll be sending your prestige marker through like 40 points in a round and will gain up something like 5 or 7 or 10 population points per multiple of ten your prestige marker goes through, giving you 20 or 28 or 40 points. This is not a "point-salad" euro. Many things you do in this game get you prestige points, but they are nothing without many buildings on the board to make that multiplier worthwhile. Each round of the game consists of three phases. In the first, a 5x5 grid of market tiles which have super powers or one-time bonuses or just piles of resources on them are randomly laid out. Players place their zeppelins on anywhere adjacent to a row or column, and can buy things closest to them for 1 coin, and further away for 2, 3, or 4 coins. In the first turn of the market, players in turn order place their zeppelins, then in the second turn, they buy in turn order. Any tile that has already been bought by another player in your column or row gives you a 1 dollar consolation prize. This alone gives you a huuuge incentive to go first or second, as all types of the market tiles are very powerful during specific parts of the game. Then you have the action phase, where players take turns placing workers. This is standard euro stuff, but there are two interesting wrinkles. The first is that players get a special worker that gives them a bonus if they are the first special worker to go in a space. Either an extra resource, or some points, or a discount on buying land to place buildings on, or the option to construct another building with just one worker. The second is that the priorities in this phase change dramatically from the beginning of the game, where players are struggling for resources, to the end of the game, where they will be focused on slamming down as many buildings as possible. Finally, there's the income phase, where players get prestige, resources, and money based off of buildings they've placed. This is all tracked on a little player-board that is technically unnecessary but really saves on time calculating all of the little bonuses your buildings provide. Here's the thing about the game: It is incredibly tight(-ly designed.) It looks like it scales well for 2, 3 or 4, and there are a lot of subtle ways to interact with other players. For example, one action space lets you build a garden, which provides a one-time bonus at the end of the game in the form of extra prestige points. You have to use land you've claimed in order to build it, but it can help anyone. You can purchase the rights to maintain the propellers that hold the city up, paying a lot of money for a lot of prestige points, but you have to have a building next to them first, and there will be tight competition between players to lay down tile fast enough to claim those bonuses. Somewhere in the middle of the game, you need to start slowing down your economy by switching your buildings to produce prestige points instead of raw materials, but if you do this too early you'll hamstring your ability to continue to produce tiles. If you do it too late, no one will care about your dumb cloud factory and people will not live in your houses. There are less mechanisms in this game than in Burano, but the mechanisms here force tactical trade-offs. One example of this is that there is a type of building that is relatively easy to produce, and is available from the beginning of the game, that gives you an extra worker on subsequent rounds. You can have up to three of these, which can be huge for out-producing other players. However, during the beginning of the game, where it would be most useful, there is another building you can build that will give you two free population points for building it and money on subsequent turns, which is really important for making your actions efficient. (There is a Terra Mystica-style track where building the newest, best type of building gives you two free points.) The choices will rarely ever be obvious, but you will have the opportunity to, through a combination of the tiles you acquire in the market and the buildings you produce, to generate a strategy for building a lot of buildings and keeping control of the cloud city. I liked Burano enough to buy it and try it a few more times to figure out if it actually is good, but I know Diluvia Project is good after just one play. If you're interested in it, keep an eye out for it to go on sale, because it is a Speilworxx game and it will likely become very hard to find in the States after the first print run. Impermanent fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 19:10
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Wait, is the new Fury for Dracula out already? My FLGS updated their website to say they'd have it in tomorrow.
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Oct 25, 2015 19:25
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Thanks for the rundown on Dilluvia Project, Impermanent. It's on my "must get" list now. e: insulting spelling ETB fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 19:31
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Yeah great write up for Dilluvia. I don't mind the huge amount I spent to get it. I'm playing Burano later this afternoon.
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Oct 25, 2015 19:56
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I got introduced to code names but I didn't get a chance to play it very longt, but I do t think I was playing the same game as everyone else and maybe they just told me it was code Ames it had roll and move and you guys do not sound like you are rolling and moving
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Oct 25, 2015 20:46
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Is there a list of words used for code names? Seems like I could just play it using a stack of index cards and the timer app. I would pay $20 for it, but not current eBay rates of $50.
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Oct 25, 2015 21:11
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Has anyone played Codenames with Dixit cards yet? How about Mysterium cards? Also, how good is Mysterium?
Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 21:24
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Is code names some goon variant of Codenames?
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Oct 25, 2015 21:29
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Bottom Liner posted:Has anyone played Code Names with Dixit cards yet? How about Mysterium cards? Why would you do this? Don't do this. Bottom Liner posted:Also, how good is Mysterium? Actually pretty good, it's incredibly light which means the rules explanation can be done in less than 5 minutes. Easy to understand and it'll hold your interest for the 30-45 minute playtime. It could replace Dixit in a 'starter board game catalogue', but I wasn't really hurting for a dixit killer? It's co-op though, which can be a plus. If you want more Dixit, or a co-op dixit with a twist [guessing if other people are right or wrong!!] then go for it. The compnents are really nice too which helps drag people in if you're going to be taking it to meetups where new people might be. e: The gist of it is, you can play it with people who still think Board Games = Monopoly and have a good time on both ends, so I think it's a fine intro game, even if it's relatively shallow. Also, a high player count too! Play with all your normie friends! AMooseDoesStuff fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 21:46
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