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Steve2911 posted:Question: Biggest thing about Pandemic is that it's definitely a cooperative game, and a pretty hard one at that. Even in cases where everyone at the table were experienced players, communicated freely about strategies, and weren't even playing on the hardest setting, we would still get our poo poo pushed in on occasion. This is a point in its favor, because it is seriously intense to sit there and watch the world go to poo poo, and there's a make-or-break draw coming up, and  Seriously, it does a great job building tension over the course of the game and getting everyone to work together. And this is just vanilla Pandemic, where if you lose you just reset the board and play another game. With Legacy, where you're altering the game permanently, and potentially removing some characters (and their unique, very useful powers), I can only imagine how downright nervewracking it can be. So yeah, if you like challenging co-op games with a persistent world aspect, it should be right up your group's alley. Only shortcomings I've noticed is that it can be prone to one player "expert" dominating the game's strategy and ordering other players around, which is less fun when it isn't collaborative, and sometimes you can just get a lovely setup with bad luck and lose on turn 2.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:16
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DarkHorse posted:Biggest thing about Pandemic is that it's definitely a cooperative game, and a pretty hard one at that. Even in cases where everyone at the table were experienced players, communicated freely about strategies, and weren't even playing on the hardest setting, we would still get our poo poo pushed in on occasion. This is a point in its favor, because it is seriously intense to sit there and watch the world go to poo poo, and there's a make-or-break draw coming up, and Yeah sounds pretty great. I might pick it up as a group Christmas gift then. Thanks. A couple of people in my group are way more competitively oriented (ie gloat when they get good dice, bitch when they don't), so I'm not sure how they'll handle a long term co-op game. Should be interesting.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:29
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Steve2911 posted:Yeah sounds pretty great. I might pick it up as a group Christmas gift then. Thanks. Be careful of someone taking over the game by someone overtly quarterbacking, in that case. It sounds like that's where the game could go astray.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:41
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Steve2911 posted:Yeah sounds pretty great. I might pick it up as a group Christmas gift then. Thanks. You'll definitely want to play a few 'basic' games without the Legacy deck before moving forward. You might even check the pretty good app for Android or iOS. I made sure that the group that I'm playing with were all pretty familiar with Pandemic to help alleviate the quarterbacking problem, which I really think would ruin the game. And it's incredible. We lost our first game with a series of chain reactions (outbreaks that spread) which has left us with a part of the board that's a real poo poo-show.
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Dec 6, 2015 22:27
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Hey, I have another question for anyone who can help me. When I was a kid I absolutely loved playing my dad's old copy of Mine a Million (I don't remember if I actually played it correctly, I just loved shipping colourful triangles across the board.) Basically everyone got a mine and had to sell their ore by taking it to the Port with either Lorries or Barges, or across to America on a ship. A trading game, pretty much. Anyway, I've been thinking about it and wondering if there are any modern editions or new games with a similar premise. I loved that game but haven't really come across anything similar since.
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Dec 7, 2015 00:19
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You might want to look at Brass or Panamax. Both feature shipping goods as a major part of the game.
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Dec 7, 2015 00:55
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Am I remembering correctly that Machi Koro is generally recommended around here?
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Dec 7, 2015 01:01
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cbirdsong posted:Am I remembering correctly that Machi Koro is generally recommended around here? Base game is serviceable, but the expansion ruins the game for most people here. A definite get for more "casual" players.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:14
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cbirdsong posted:Am I remembering correctly that Machi Koro is generally recommended around here? lol nah it's progress quest but other people are racing you. it's settlers but the player interaction is taken out.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:22
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I don't think Machi Koro is in good standing with The Goon Hive Mind  . It's not very good.On another note, played Warhammer Quest: the Adventure Card Game yesterday. I have to say, I didn't expect too much from the game beforehand but I was pleasantly surprised. It's a very fast playing co-op dungeon delve somewhat similar to LotR LCG. It follows the same basic quest structure as LotR: players travel to a location, find monsters there and must deal with the monsters while also working on exploring the location so they can move on. However, this is not an LCG and there's no deck building. Instead each player chooses a character and gets four action cards, those being Attack, Explore, Rest and Aid. Aid is the most interesting of those and the main driver of cooperative play. Aid targets another player, and gives them success tokens they can place on their actions which can be spent for a free success on that action. Each character also gets a special twist on every action. The elf ranger, for example, can disengage from monsters when Resting. The warrior priest heals both himself and his target when he uses his Aid card. The dwarf can decide not to trigger event cards when Exploring, and so on. Whenever you use an action, that action becomes exhausted and cannot be used again until refreshed. One of the actions (a different one for each character) has a refresh icon. Whenever you use that action, all of their actions refresh. Each character gets only a single action per turn, so using an action mean you might not get to use it again until 2 or 3 turns later. Planning ahead and looking at what other players are doing so you have the right actions available at the right time is one of the major parts of the game. For example, you usually want your attack action to be ready when you travel, because you want to be able to take down some enemies in the next location ASAP before they activate and start hitting you. Actions are resolved using dice, which might raise flags for some people, but the way it works is quite clever. You roll one or two white "good" dice plus one black "bad" die for every enemy you are currently engaged with. The white dice are genius. They are 100% positive and have no blank sides. Every side but one has at least one success symbol. This means that your actions are extremely reliable; you can mostly count getting one success per dice. If you play it safe, you almost never fail. However, the dice also have a double success side and a critical side which counts a success and allows you to roll another die. This adds a sort of push your luck element to the game. For example, it is usually most efficient to kill things outright, because damaged but not dead enemies can still hit you. You can roll your two attack dice against a 2 health enemy and be almost assured of success, but you can also target the more dangerous 3 or 4 health enemy and hope for some extra successes to kill it in a single blow. Black dice add risk to every action. They are half blank, but they also have attack symbols which cause enemies you are engaged with to hit you, as well as a nemesis symbol which causes nasty stuff to happen depending on the boss of the scenario you are fighting. These dice never make you fail your action or subtract successes, you just take incidental damage. So even though action results are dice based, they are quite reliable and not very likely to fail while still giving you a chance of rolling insanely well and having cool and memorable turns. The game has a timer in the form of the Peril track. Peril advances every turn and once certain thresholds are reached, nasty things start happening. Once you reach the end of the track, the last nasty thing starts happening every turn, which really encourages you to finish the mission before that happens. There's also a campaign system where you can become more powerful, upgrading your actions or increasing your capacity to equip items and such. It really is impressive how much they managed to pack into a game that is basically just 200 cards. All in all it was a surprisingly fast (one hour with 3 new players!), engaging coop dungeon crawl I quite enjoyed. The mission we played was a bit on the easy side, but the game's owner claimed that later campaign missions are much harder. It's FFG so likely we’ll get a bunch of expansions with more stuff. Ojetor fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 01:24
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I picked up Warhammer Quest: the Adventure Card Game this week because it looked somewhat similar to the LotR LCG but without the deckbuilding and LCG model. I'm glad to hear it's pretty solid, hoping to play it a bit this week.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:34
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cbirdsong posted:Am I remembering correctly that Machi Koro is generally recommended around here? I might recommend it over Catan as an entry game, but honestly there are still better entry level choices. I got suckered by the cute graphics and somewhat novel gameplay, but it's fairly forgettable/actively bad.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:35
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Dec 7, 2015 01:37
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Machi Koro is pretty solid for a family game or to play with kids around 7+. It's not amazing, but it's better than department store dredge.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:37
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Crackbone posted:I might recommend it over Catan as an entry game, but honestly there are still better entry level choices. I got suckered by the cute graphics and somewhat novel gameplay, but it's fairly forgettable/actively bad. I actually think Catan is better than it, mainly because (like I just stated) it's functionally the same game but Catan has trading between players. Also, the Catan expansions generally improve the game.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:39
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Broken Loose posted:I actually think Catan is better than it, mainly because (like I just stated) it's functionally the same game but Catan has trading between players. Also, the Catan expansions generally improve the game. Yeah, but like I said, there are better choices than both.
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Dec 7, 2015 01:43
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cbirdsong posted:Am I remembering correctly that Machi Koro is generally recommended around here? It's funny because I just played it for the first time and my only thought was "This game is fine and all, but I thought the Goon Hivemind recommended it highly, and it really doesn't seem like the kind of game that they'd recommend." I guess that makes sense now. I am also astounded that the game cannot properly integrate its own expansions and needs to be house-ruled to remain playable.
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Dec 7, 2015 03:30
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Being introduced to board games via which ones have ios ports first leads to some horrible lines of thought. "Oh, Dominions is like Tanto Cuore!"
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Dec 7, 2015 05:04
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Machi Koro came out while we were mostly still riding the SU&SD train, so there was probably a more positive reaction at the time than if it weren't reviewed by them.
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Dec 7, 2015 05:09
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Had some friends over tonight. Wife said, "hey, last time we didn't get to play [friend]'s game. We should play it this time. Ever heard of Smash Up? Does it come recommended?" No, it doesn't come highly recommended. So I endured my first game of Smash Up today. Let me give my short, honest review: The game itself was not that bad for the first 90% of it. The rules are hot garbage, written in a totally embarrassing meme speak affect. There's also zero clarification within the rules as to specific triggering order on abilities/effects or how the cards interact, and there's no FAQ. There's even an unofficial fan/apologists wiki that sets out some "house rule" variants to clear up the confusion in those stupid interactions. The game suffers greatly (like Munchkin!) from the kingmaker effect at the end game when it appears someone is close to winning, and makes the entire thing un-fun. Never again!
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Dec 7, 2015 06:18
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SynthOrange posted:Being introduced to board games via which ones have ios ports first leads to some horrible lines of thought. "Oh, Dominions is like Tanto Cuore!" ...but it is.
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Dec 7, 2015 06:23
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PRADA SLUT posted:Splendor Why would you recommend Splendor?
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Dec 7, 2015 08:15
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SynthOrange posted:Being introduced to board games via which ones have ios ports first leads to some horrible lines of thought. "Oh, Dominions is like Tanto Cuore!" Minus the awesome theme. PRADA SLUT posted:...but it is. Technically true.
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Dec 7, 2015 08:36
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PRADA SLUT posted:...but it is. In the same way that a blockbuster movie is like the Asylum knock-off.
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Dec 7, 2015 09:28
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The only good thing about Smash Up is that the Giant Ants faction from the sci-fi movie expansion has nothing but Queen song titles as their event/action cards.
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Dec 7, 2015 09:29
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I played smash up with a guy who owned the set. "Yeah pick any two factions, they're all fun" *secretly chooses ninjas and zombies for stupid synergies*
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Dec 7, 2015 09:52
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StrixNebulosa posted:I have a question, thread. My dad asked me to find a board game to play with him and mom - it'll just be three players, and we're looking for something fun and without a highly competitive element. We've played a variety of card games - Hearts and Spades are the most common ones, we've played Ticket to Ride (fun with 4+ players but when it's just us three we don't relax into it), we've had fun with Forbidden Island and Love Letters, but we didn't click with Pandemic. Fluxx was a fun experiment, but that worked better with two players. Carcassonne has been a huge hit with my parents and they play it together almost every day, it can be as relaxed or as viciously cutthroat as the players wish. Zveroboy fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 10:21
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Played 4 player Carcassonne last week and me and one other guy, both Carc veterans went head to head on everything while a newbie couple  'd their way through the game, helping each other build and staying out of the way and ended up beating both of us by about 3x the points. 
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Dec 7, 2015 10:27
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SynthOrange posted:Played 4 player Carcassonne last week and me and one other guy, both Carc veterans went head to head on everything while a newbie couple The argument that causes my girlfriend and I to break up will probably come about because with only a few tiles left in the game, I pop a Cathedral on the last open edge of her 20-tile city... Carcassonne is my most played game and with good reason I think. It's so easy to learn but there's an awful lot the game teaches you as you play more and more. Recently when playing with my girlfriend I've started to bait her into playing her fat meeple (counts as two for purposes of dominance) into a tempting field or city early on, and then either walling the meeple off in a lovely field or making the city it's in impossible to finish so it's tied up for the rest of the game. Her farmer game is a lot stronger than mine though, she's always got a least one down on the river stretch and any I place mid-game she'll inevitably link up the fields to snatch it away. Had a good weekend of gaming. It was my girlfriend's birthday on Friday and a friend of hers came up to stay for the weekend. We had two games of Carcassonne on Friday night, and then Saturday during the day got in Carcassonne again, Catan with both Seafarers and Cities & Knights expansions, finishing with a standard game of Pandemic which did not go well at all. I know Catan is much maligned (and with good reason) but Cities & Knights make it bearable for me (I'm still open to recommendations for the niche of "civilisations building and management game that lasts ~2 hours") and the game we played on Saturday was actually quite enjoyable. After going out for birthday meal and a private poker session in the casino, we were still in the bluffing mood at home and played a few rounds of Skull and introduced Codenames to the friend, which went down a storm. Some more Skull in the morning after breakfast and some Dominion which I haven't played in ages and really enjoyed playing again. Treasury was a popular buy, as was Farmland, but I bought a couple copies of Island early to get my Estates out of the deck which did help, and I managed a narrow win (40-38-36 points). Really want to play a lot more Dominion, and I mentioned doing a personal challenge to my girlfriend of us playing 100 games of it in 2016, which she's happy to take me up on.
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Dec 7, 2015 11:01
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Any of you connoiseur underground gamers managed to get theirhands on leaving earth? I really dig the idea of spergy Eklund games made by non crazy people. Just wondering how much of an actual game is there.
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Dec 7, 2015 11:13
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I've got Carc base + Inns and Cathedrals + Traders and Builders. Seems a nice level of complexity without it getting obnoxious. Could any more expansions be comfortably thrown on top of that?
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Dec 7, 2015 11:19
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Yes, but they're all bad. Maybe River is also ok for shaking things up. [edit] I mean, the ones you got are actually cool, so you unwittingly made a good selection.
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Dec 7, 2015 11:22
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Also I got sucked into the terrifying world of 'Sure the Dominions box stores cards okay, but could it be BETTER?'
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Dec 7, 2015 11:24
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SynthOrange posted:Also I got sucked into the terrifying world of 'Sure the Dominions box stores cards okay, but could it be BETTER?' At this point why not just dump the insert entirely?
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Dec 7, 2015 11:35
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Has anybody played Ancient Terrible Things?
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Dec 7, 2015 11:36
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Lichtenstein posted:Any of you connoiseur underground gamers managed to get theirhands on leaving earth? I really dig the idea of spergy Eklund games made by non crazy people. Got it, haven't played it yet though
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Dec 7, 2015 12:08
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SynthOrange posted:I played smash up with a guy who owned the set. "Yeah pick any two factions, they're all fun" I don't think it's a case of Zombies and Ninjas having stupid synergies, it's more a case of Zombies being significantly stronger than all of the other base game factions with the exception of Robots (making Zombies/Robots nearly unbeatable). The game has fuckall balancing.
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Dec 7, 2015 12:43
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Selecta84 posted:Has anybody played Ancient Terrible Things? Yes. It's monster Yahtzee. Does monster Yahtzee sound appealing? If so, you'll enjoy it.
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Dec 7, 2015 13:59
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SynthOrange posted:Also I got sucked into the terrifying world of 'Sure the Dominions box stores cards okay, but could it be BETTER?' How is that better? It looks non functional
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Dec 7, 2015 14:22
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Oldstench posted:Yes. It's monster Yahtzee. Does monster Yahtzee sound appealing? If so, you'll enjoy it. Ah, ok. Does it have any sort or manipulating the dice or something like that? Or other strategic elements?
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Dec 7, 2015 14:24
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