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Magnetic North posted:Fixed that for you. Saw this happen in college. Started at 10 or 11 or so. Took the spot of a player that had to leave at 6PM. Game had to end because they were closing the building around 11, IIRC. This might have been only 7 players, I honestly don't remember. Suffice it to say, it was boring as poo poo. I had a six player game that followed this exact pattern. We gathered at my apartment and started at 10, one player left at 6 and our seventh filled in. The game ended about an hour after that.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:10
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homullus posted:Maybe it was just beginner's luck, then. In the Spring, I was able to acquire the Miner (iron then gold + iron) and the Gold Mine (gold then 2 gold), while my opponent got the Keystone Quarry (1 then 3 stone). In the fall I was able to acquire the Stone Yard (1 then 3 points for each stone there at winter's end). I already had some gold sitting around and could easily get more, and could also use my opponent's Quarry to get 3 stone. We had all the transport tiles come up and get taken, too, so there was no shortage of resource transport. I got a LOT of points from that upgraded Stone Yard, since I got 3 points each for every gold and stone I had. There was basically no way for him to win when winter started as long as I played the game at all, and so he chose to lose by a little rather than by a lot. He offered to call it at the end of Autumn, and normally I'm all for that, but I wanted to see what a "normal" score might look like. I won 87 to 62. You can also do stuff like blocking particular tiles by working them with three dudes immediately that you guys might not have been aware of.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:39
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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FISHMANPET posted:How well do you guys think kids are able to grasp deck building games? I've got a sort of nephew who's 13 and I think really smart, but not really educated (it's complicated) who also likes trains. I've got the game Trains that says ages 12 and up but I'm wondering if you guys think he'll be able to grasp the concept or not. I was playing tcgs in 6th grade and only didn't play them earlier because they were still new at the time, I'm sure plenty of people start in late elementary school. 13 is definitely fine.
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Jan 3, 2016 20:34
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Countblanc posted:I was playing tcgs in 6th grade and only didn't play them earlier because they were still new at the time, I'm sure plenty of people start in late elementary school. 13 is definitely fine. Yeah late elementary school is when magic tends to take hold, or did back in the day at least, and pokemon, and w/e. Or just teach them chess when they're 5, or go when they're 3 (since otherwise they'll never be any good)?
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Jan 3, 2016 20:36
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I played Tactics II in sixth grade.
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Jan 3, 2016 20:50
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I was kindly required to play Dead of Winter last night. I said I'd hold my criticisms until after the game was done so everybody could enjoy it. It took until about 2 rounds in before half the players at the table were like, "I can see where you're coming from." Highlights:
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Jan 3, 2016 21:55
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Broken Loose posted:I was kindly required to play Dead of Winter last night. I said I'd hold my criticisms until after the game was done so everybody could enjoy it. It took until about 2 rounds in before half the players at the table were like, "I can see where you're coming from." "[Cosmic Encounter] is one of three games that I rate a perfect 10. I've played about 130 games of it on the FFG version, and enjoyed almost every single one tremendously. That being said.[sic] It's somewhat player dependant. If you have a player who takes it too seriously, or gets offended when they get ganged up on, it can take out some of the fun. I think the complexity and replayability are really stunningly designed. [Cosmic Encounter] Was a huge influence on me for the initial designs for Dead of Winter, and continue to influence me as a designer." - Jonathan Gilmour
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Jan 3, 2016 22:01
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Broken Loose posted:I was kindly required to play Dead of Winter last night. I said I'd hold my criticisms until after the game was done so everybody could enjoy it. It took until about 2 rounds in before half the players at the table were like, "I can see where you're coming from." To be fair, even if you won it's not like a group of hookers would have shown up and given you all celebratory blow jobs; but I understand your point.
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Jan 3, 2016 22:08
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Indolent Bastard posted:To be fair, even if you won it's not like a group of hookers would have shown up and given you all celebratory blow jobs; but I understand your point. Yeah, can't really say that it really counts as an Experience Generator when everybody hated every minute and the narrative makes no logical sense at any point.
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Jan 3, 2016 22:18
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Broken Loose posted:Yeah, can't really say that it really counts as an Experience Generator when everybody hated every minute and the narrative makes no logical sense at any point. Understood. Time wasted enjoyably is about 5000% better than time wasted miserably. Also if you want an experience generator play a one shot RPG, faster easier and if you pick the right system virtually no rule looks ups. I really don't understand why people defend "experience generator" board games. Playing a game just to make it end is insufferable and I wish more people would just be willing to pull the plug even if one player is having a "great time" while everyone else wishes they could phase through the floor and disappear.
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Jan 3, 2016 22:31
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I like Cosmic, with the caveat that: -I almost always win; -Fun is not had by everyone. So I only break it out like, annually, to test out the 450 different character classes.
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Jan 3, 2016 22:31
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Broken Loose posted:Dead of Winter stuff Are you sure the app was third party? I know Plaid Hat released an official one that handles it the same (you choose then find out the consequences) which is even more hilariously stupid.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:03
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Wait wait wait, no one spotted the obviously made up bit. You rolled dice, and they *didn't* gently caress you???
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Jan 3, 2016 23:23
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Bottom Liner posted:Are you sure the app was third party? I know Plaid Hat released an official one that handles it the same (you choose then find out the consequences) which is even more hilariously stupid. I'm definitely not sure of it! They said it was third party but they also said it cost money (and it looked really official, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a 3rd party "companion app"). I wouldn't be surprised if it was the official one. silvergoose posted:Wait wait wait, no one spotted the obviously made up bit. You rolled dice, and they *didn't* gently caress you??? Yeah, it was seriously some Dante's Inferno ironic punishment poo poo. I get to enjoy statistical normalcy but only while playing loving terrible games.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:33
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Broken Loose posted:Yeah, it was seriously some Dante's Inferno ironic punishment poo poo. I get to enjoy statistical normalcy but only while playing loving terrible games. This must be tested in the name of science! Get your Catan on.  Last game of Catan I got roped into because my deluded housemate somehow enjoys it a lot (going to tournaments and poo poo) and I thought 'maybe I'm misremembering it and it isn't all that bad', I ended up placing early and getting an ok-ish spot with an 8 (prior player took a 6 spot). Not one 8 was rolled that entire game. I got more resources out of the 12 tile I was forced onto. Anyway, never again! I gave my copy away (I bought it like decades ago when I was new to the hobby and thought it was a good game) and with luck shall never have to endure it again.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:43
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Zark the Damned posted:This must be tested in the name of science! Get your Catan on. I was similarly forced into Catan because my niece is starting to get into games, and we played with the cards which normalize the distribution heavily, and...huh. I actually didn't *hate* hate it. I still dislike the game, and will strenuously argue to play something else, but it's...closer to playable?
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Jan 3, 2016 23:47
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My group met yesterday and I finally got to play a bunch of my games that have been unable to reach the table so far. We started out with Tzolk'in. It took a while for everyone to get in the groove, but after that it went pretty smoothly. One guy kept trying to take workers off the gears and put them on during the same turn, but eventually I think he got it too. The 1st player spot on the board is what confused him most since you automatically take it back at the end of the turn. I don't think we messed up the rules that badly. Only thing I can think of is the crystal skulls. During setup I put them all on the blue gear because that looked like where they went... Yeah. After the first turn I realized what I did and we let anyone that put their dudes there move them if they wanted. One guy regretted moving his dude later in the game when I bought the last high value spot when he was one space behind me. All in all a good time. I'm sure next time we play it'll be even better since everyone knows what to expect. I know I didn't get any tech upgrades till near the end of the game when I moved the blue gear tech up twice so I could nab that last spot in time. Most everyone else didn't bother with buildings other than farms either. I got a triple farm as soon as they came out at the halfway point since I was hurting for corn and also the 8 VP building. Oh another rule that was missed til later in the game: You can spend corn to use a gear spot that you've already passed; paying one corn for each spot you wish to go back. That would have been handy that one time the 1st player moved the gear 2 days to make someone skip the blue skull spot. Plus I accidently forgot to take my guy off once also, so he rode past the slot I wanted. After that we finally played Argent. I bought it back in freaking May 2015 and just now got them to play it with me. After such a long wait I really hoped it would be good... It was actually great! Everyone enjoyed it and at the end of the night it was selected as the favorite of what we played. It seems really huge and complex when you first look at it, but really it's not. Don't get me wrong, you have just a massive amount of options of what to do, but it's not as bad as it seems. For one thing, no one starts with a Merit badge, so all of the Merit slots are usually skipped during the first round. I think I was the only one to use them. My default spell and the bell tower card game me the 2 IP I needed to unlock it. Today I was looking at the Errata FAQ and noticed that we did mess up a couple of rules. The Infirmary (which we kinda forgot to give people compensation for being put into for a while) is emptied out at the end of each round. The tile doesn't say that and not sure if the rulebook does either, so we had mages stuck in it for a while at times. I know I ended up using the bell tower card to heal my guys at least 3 times when they would have been out already. The red player was sending his guys to the Infirmary with his spell on purpose and relying on the healing potion items to return them to play all at once, so our mess up might have actually been to his benefit. The other rule was mainly for the gray player. The actual power card for gray says you can freely place a gray mage after the first time you cast a spell. So he was only freely placing one of his mages. That's an actual typo. Might print out a sticker and apply it to that card to fix it. Oh and last one, we weren't refilling the tableau when something was bought or drafted. I swear the rulebook said that it wasn't refilled except for at the end of the round. Mainly that limited options. I know once someone picked the 3 buys slot and bought every vault card and I then couldn't draft one. Plus after I got the spell that gave you 2 research I ran out of spells to get very fast. Other than that it was pretty good. It can be pretty cutthroat at times when everyone wants the same room slots. We went with the recommended tile setup and a few of the rooms are just much, much better than the others. I don't think the top left room was ever used at all. Anyway, the myself and 2 of the other players used marks early in the game to check out many of the voters. I looked at 5 and then stopped bothering and focused on those 5. One of them was second most influence and I knew I couldn't get the most supporters, so I didn't bother with the 2 revealed voters either. The other two players kept getting marks until one guy used all 12 and the other had like 9, but they didn't have a focus. The last player never got a single mark, instead just went for a ton of everything; spells, items, supporters, gold, mana. I swear by round 3 she had a huge amount of stuff and her turns started taking forever. She was also green and had reactions, so doing anything to her was a problem. Even though she only saw one voter, she knew gold and mana were voters since another player started stockpiling them way too much and gave it away with no intention to spend any of it. He only researched one spell and never bought any vault items. That was just much too narrow of a goal and he ended up in last with only 2 voters I think. Most influence and most gold. She managed to barely snatch most mana by using all 3 mana giving slots in the last round and a mana granting spell. In the end the mark crazed player got most marks and most supporters I think. I seriously thought the more everything player would end up winning, but she spread herself too thin. She had the lowest IP also otherwise we would have tied. I was able to win all of the voters that I'd used marks to see: 2nd Most Influence, Most Divinity, Most Sorcery, Most Diversity, and Most Intelligence. We were tied on diversity, but I had more influence so I won that and won the game. Otherwise it would have been a tie... Well actually I guess if the voters are tied you still win if you have more influence, so I guess it wasn't that close. It might have ended differently if we were doing the Infirmary and refilling the tableaus correctly, but not in the 2nd place player's favor I don't think. She was very aggressive and sent most of the people in the Infirmary there with her huge pool of mana and spells. Next we played a couple of rounds of Coup Rebellion G54. Eh... It's okay. The first round was a dud to me. There was only one attack role: the General. Plus two defense roles: the Peacekeeper and Treaty. So basically it was down to Couping and that usually causes someone else to win if you Coup first. No one could really lie convincingly since they didn't know all of the roles very well and there's no cheat sheet. Just role cards in the middle of the table. Why are you looking at the role cards before you take your turn? Cause you want to lie? K. Fell pretty flat. Second round was better, mainly cause after everyone was down to 1 role each and one guy was Coup'd out, I hosed with the other two players. I had the Judge because I'd used it on the out player. Both of them had roles that steal money, so there was no way I could use my Judge power on two in a row without them stealing my money every round after, making it impossible to win. So instead I just took income each round while they stole each others and my money every round. I was slowly adding money to the pool until both of them had 7 each. Then they had to decide on using Coup on me with my 3 money or using it on the other player that had 7 also. They didn't know for sure that I had the Judge since the player I used it on the first time didn't challenge since he had 2 roles at the time. So they ended up using Coup on the other player and I was able to Judge them for it. But still just like regular Coup, when it's down to 3 players usually whomever knocks someone out with Coup will lose. They just get to pick who wins. Next we played Valley of the Kings: Afterlife. Myself and one other player had played it before once. We have both played the original game a couple of times also, only once with 4 players. So the other guy that had played before was bragging that he was going to destroy the two newbies. He had a strategy in mind and it was just going to wreck us! Well, his strategy was pretty good, but he never transitioned into Entombing his set cards. He ended up coming in 3rd. The 4 player game ends much quicker than you think since 4 cards are leaving the stockpile each round. He'd played it with me in a 2 player game the first time. He bought the card that allows you to let another player TAKE the lowest value card while you TAKE the highest value card. Since he had 3 opponents he spread it around. Oh, he also got the card that let's you return a card in play to your hand. So on one turn he played the TAKE card 3 times in a row since he had 2 of them and gave us all a card, while gaining 3 of the best cards. But yeah, his deck was amazing, so I guess he didn't want to give up that great combo. One of the newbies Entombed only blue set cards and base cards. She ended up in second, so not bad for a first timer. One more blue card and she'd have won. I ended up winning, but I thought it was a pretty messy win. All of the cards I really wanted ended up being taken or bought before I had a chance to get them, then I got behind the gold curve and couldn't afford to buy new cards. Ended up with only 3 level III cards by the end of the game. So instead I just Entombed everything! By the end of the game I had 1 card left in my hand. My best sets were only 2 each, but I did have 3 of them, plus a unique card and all of the starter cards. Sling blows if you're cash poor btw. Using it to Entomb a base card left me with 3 cards in my hand and nothing to do; wasted a whole turn. Next time we play with 4 players I might see if they want to use both decks to make the game last longer. Last up we played Keyflower. Holy crap that's a good way to end some friendships! Sure, I screwed up a bunch of rules and it probably was a bad example, but during the winter bidding phase things got...heated. We had one player with 2 different winter tiles that revolved around gaining a bunch of resources and sets of resources. Obviously I read the scoring rules wrong and he wouldn't have been able to use both with the same resources, but we didn't know that at the time. So he had like 5 sets of stone, iron, and wood ready to go and a freaking army of red meeples to bid on the tiles with. He went last and I was sure that someone else would go for the resource sets tile. They did...with a single red meeple. He responded with 4 of his own. At the same time another player completely shut down my end game scoring strategy by throwing out green meeples to block me. I still had hope with 2 of the 4 boats. Of course I'd made the mistake of showing an example of how one of them was scored by pointing out how well it would do in my own town.  Yeah, figured that one would be a goner after I did it. Still had hope for the other one and bid on the second choice. We went around and around. Finally the player with the bid of 4 ran out of stuff he wanted, so we went ahead and upped his bid to 5 on the resource sets tile just to use his last meeple. He'd already used 3 other red meeples to create another 2 sets of resources. Followed by another player dropping 6 reds her following turn. gently caress me, I thought he was going to kill her then and there. After getting him to sit and calm down he took his 5 reds and put them the only place he could, on the second choice of ship tiles. Yeah... Both ships that were good for me were hate drafted away to people that couldn't even score with them. I got stuck with the 3rd choice that was worth 4 points to me and came in last place. Of course we totally screwed up the scoring rules. I knew you couldn't use gold twice when scoring, but didn't realize you couldn't use anything twice. So not sure who actually won. Plus I screwed up how the winter tiles are chosen for bidding anyway. Instead of everyone picking two to add to the auction and shuffling them before putting them out. I just shuffled them all and put out the top 8. Plus we didn't notice that some of the autumn tiles only score with resources that are located on the tile, not all of your resources. I pointed that out as we were preparing for the winter phase after rereading some rules. Btw, why didn't anyone mention how bad the rulebook for Keyflower is? I really don't like it. I watched this video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=via0ElmJ7S4 today and realized how many little details we got wrong. The rules are great as a tile reference, but not great for a breakdown of the rules or trying to look up a specific rule. In setup, don't tell me about summer and autumn, just tell me about spring. It mentioned you draw and place the meeples and skill tokens in summer and autumn but doesn't say you do it for spring. Eh, anyway. We'll get it right next time. But seriously, watch that video before you play, you don't have to even touch the rulebook. I lied. After that we played Mysterium and Bottlecap Vikings. We played Mysterium several times last week at a bigger gathering, so it wasn't a new game for anyone. I got to be the ghost finally and honestly I didn't think it was that hard. True, we lost..but barely. For one thing, not sure if it's allowed in the rules, but I took my 3 suspect, location, and weapon card sets and tried to come up with a theme for each. I had the cook in the lab using a frying pan. The archaeologist had a nice study and a treasure chest. Finally the old lady with the yarn had the room with the dress...and a barbell. Nothing I could do with that one. Stupid iron was one of the red herrings, so that sucked. The players got hung up on two of those guesses and we ended up losing in the end. For the cook I gave out a bunch of clues (3 or 4 rounds) with either food or an animal on everything. Maybe the shark clue I gave out first was stretching it too much, but it had nothing to do with a cop, mailman, or nun. Mushrooms, apples, and finally cheese got it. The barbell was what made us lose. He got through his first two clues very fast and it came down to guessing every single weapon possible, except the barbell. I was trying to give him clues related to it, but yeah. Apparently I should have saved an hourglass clue I used earlier in the game just for that. I was giving him things to make him think strength. The bear mountain, knights, muscled dude riding a sea serpent (no not stool, wtf?). I threw out the one with an archery target and a bunch of arrows for "training". Yeah, he didn't get it. Oh well. We still did the final guess and they all got it easily, even him with only 2 cards to look at. Theming the cards really helps. Plus I had a clue with a big pile of treasure for the treasure chest and several with boats and water for the study with a model boat and painting of the ocean. Nothing that fit well with the archeologist, but it didn't matter. One thing I did do that I thought made the game more enjoyable for me was drawing a card whenever I gave a card. Always have 7. Sure, that makes the game easier, but eh... We didn't play on easy at least. Plus instead of doing thumbs up or thumbs down to people or talking to tell them if they were right or wrong; I gave out cheese puffs to correct answers. When no one else had a correct answer I gave them a look of disgust and ate one myself. It was a fun addition and everyone enjoyed receiving an actual reward for guessing correctly. Pro-tip: Bring snacks as rewards! Bottlecap Vikings. Eh, it was a $2 addon to my Orleans Deluxe KSer order. It's about worth that. I dunno, just was kinda bland. Of course we spent most of the day playing mostly really excellent games, so I guess it might look worse in comparison. It was mostly just a filler in between other games, but not really worth the time spent. At least it came with promos for much better games, cheaper than buying them later too. Next time we'll stick to Codenames as filler. Even though it usually turns into a 4-6 round "filler". Heh. All in all a pretty great game day. Most of those games I had never played at all or at least never with this group. Didn't get a chance to play Orleans, but they were pretty burnt out on worker placement games for the night. Also took Archipelago, which I have played, but not with a good group yet. Again, just too many games to fit into a single day. I need to stop buying worker placement games.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:54
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I'm truly enamored with the Galaxy Trucker android app (pirate boss escort mission is a bitch, though!). Any other pro board game adaptations the thread would recommend?
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Jan 3, 2016 23:56
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Lichtenstein posted:I'm truly enamored with the Galaxy Trucker android app (pirate boss escort mission is a bitch, though!). Any other pro board game adaptations the thread would recommend? Suburbia app is pretty great. I'd rather play it than the actual board game.
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Jan 4, 2016 00:03
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Suburbia is good, Kingdom Builder is good, Carcassonne is good, Galaxy Trucker is good, Androminion is good, Dominion Online blows rear end do not play it. If you're not averse to using the internet for games, BoiteaJeux.net has tonnes (including Dungeon Lords and Dungeon Petz) and is excellent.
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Jan 4, 2016 00:20
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I just got the deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle, anything I should be aware of going in as neither of the players have played before?
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Jan 4, 2016 00:21
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Ryoshi posted:I just got the deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle, anything I should be aware of going in as neither of the players have played before? Read the rules, read the example of play. Make sure each player knows how they can spend ops (which is present on the player handout) and the requisites for presence domination and control. Check out twilight strategy.com for more newbie friendly stuff.
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Jan 4, 2016 00:26
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Russia will be strong early game (generally) and US comes back in a big way late game. Russia's goal is to establish a dominant position early (maybe even snatch an early win) while the US needs to weather the storm, then drop the hammer.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:37
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I feel like anyone who plays Settlers of Catan willingly/repeatedly needs to own a pair of casino dice since Mayfair Games' die-making machine is consecrated in the name of Eris Discordia and produces cubes that make a laughing mockery of the laws of probability.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:56
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Ryoshi posted:I just got the deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle, anything I should be aware of going in as neither of the players have played before? Reading twilight strategy is an excellent idea but that's a weighty document and not practical to reference during the game so a couple of key things you should know for your first game: DEFCON suicide and the related cards: If DEFCON ever drops to 1, the phasing player (ie the person who's go it is) immediately loses the game, regardless of whether or not they were the one who took the action that caused DEFCON to degrade. The obvious result of this is that cards that unconditionally degrade DEFCON can't be played at DEFCON 2 if their event would trigger. The more important part that's easy to miss at first glance is that any card that allows your opponent to conduct ops or perform a free coup is similarly unplayable unless you have no influence in any midwar battleground (this may sometimes be the case for USSR but almost never for US as they start with influence in South Africa and Panama) since they can coup a battleground and win the game . These cards must typically be spaced or otherwise creatively discarded. When your hand size is attacked by discard cards, or the ops values preclude spacing these cards (namely CIA Created/Lone Gunman but also others when under the effect of Red Scare/Purge or after spacing too many cards) you can be forced into an autoloss by being made to play one of these cards - note also stuff like UN intervention which can save you from a bad event but still drops your handsize by a card, don't accidentally force yourself to play a card you thought you were going to hold this turn. Much of the game revolves around managing these cards and occasionally you're going to eat a loss because of it so don't sweat it as long as you're not just throwing a game by unthinkingly playing a DEFCON suicide card you didn't have to. Also keep in mind the order in which headlines resolve if you plan to degrade DEFCON during your headline, unless you know for sure your event will go first it is a risk you shouldn't take. Being aware of the most important cards for each side for early/mid/late war is important. You'll probably not go to late war in most beginner games but a few to watch out for: As US early war - Be aware of Blockade (if at all possible always hold a 3 ops soviet event to discard until it's accounted for). De-Stalinization and Decolonization are unplayable for you early war, and even when spacing them if at all possible hold until turn 3 then space so they don't come back in the turn 3 reshuffle. These cards (and any like them later on that give access to a region they otherwise don't have access to) are critical. Moving into mid war be mindful of Lone Gunman and We Will Bury You as DEFCON suicide cards. As USSR - CIA created shows up before its mid-war USSR counterpart Lone Gunman, and Duck and Cover will also unconditionally degrade defcon. Five-year plan can cut your handsize or outright force you to play one of these if unlucky. Beyond this really the only genuinely scary US event early war is marshall plan which is unplayable. Defectors exists so don't headline a critical card like de-stalinization or decolonization until it's accounted for. In mid war grain sales to soviets apart from being a suicide card is just the best event for US and as such is unplayable in any circumstance, with Voice of America not far behind. Also there is next to no reason to divert from the generally accepted opening setup and none to do so while you're learning. USSR go 4 E. Germany 4 Poland 1 Yugoslavia (overcontrol your europe battlegrounds and threaten italy even though you probably won't coup it. US wants 4 in West germany and 3 in Italy (again overprotecting critical battlegrounds). Turn 1 AR1 USSR will coup either Italy or Iran to drop defcon, I vastly prefer Iran for a number of reasons but couping a battleground and degrading DEFCON is the most important thing. Most of the game is going to be stuck at DEFCON 2-3 and the initiative is with the soviets, you don't want to give up battleground coups to the US where at all possible. There's a poo poo ton to learn but this is already a bit wordy for a first game primer. Dive in, causing nuclear armageddon a few times, you'll do fine. Ayn Randi fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 02:01
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QnoisX posted:Oh and last one, we weren't refilling the tableau when something was bought or drafted. I swear the rulebook said that it wasn't refilled except for at the end of the round. This might be because the rules are different for spells/items (refill immediately) and for supporters (refill at end of round).
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Jan 4, 2016 02:51
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thespaceinvader posted:Suburbia is good, Kingdom Builder is good, Carcassonne is good, Galaxy Trucker is good, Androminion is good, Dominion Online blows rear end do not play it. Have people had success teaching Suburbia to board game newbies btw? I've played it a few times and I've considered picking it up as an exhibition piece- I enjoyed playing it, it's relatively simple, and it's relatively easy to get the idea ('use these buildings to build a city with the most people' is easier to intuitively grasp than, say, Dominion's path to victory.) I do worry about the potential to death spiral if you raise population too early though.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:02
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here is a tip about Twilight Struggle for new players: explain when scoring cards might be coming up and then have each player try to do things with ops/cards to get points in the region scoring is occurring, so like if european card is coming up why are you even looking at central america, etc then, for the next game, they'll get a feeling on how the game flows and what it should take to win it sounds obvious but i've been people get into the game and wonder where to actually use ops
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Jan 4, 2016 03:08
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Most games that use numbered dice do so in one of two ways: Some use them as a weighted coinflip, in which there are only two outcomes, pass and fail. "Roll a 5+, you hit; roll a 4-, you miss." Others use them as a gradient of success, in which the higher you roll, the happier you are. "Roll a die and deal that much damage." Both of these are simple enough that, over the course of a decent-length game, things have a decent chance of averaging out. Roll for damage enough times, and your average damage per hit over the course of the game will probably be, well, close to average. The reason Catan's dice seem so cruel is that they don't use either of these approaches. In Catan, an 8 isn't almost as good as a 9, it's an entirely unrelated thing. This makes it much harder for the law of large numbers to smooth things out. Any individual number isn't too likely to come up an unusual number of times, but there are 10 distinct totals not counting the robber, and the odds of at least one of them showing up unusually often or unusually little are pretty high. And it only takes one total behaving unusually well or unusually poorly to make or break the game for a player, so when it happens, it's very noticeable.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:17
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A decade ago, when I got roped into Catan kicking and screaming, the dice only rolled 4s. The gently caress. Somebody made out like a bandit, and everybody else got hosed. But in the end, who gives a poo poo, it's Catan. I can see why it would be a "classic gateway game", just a shame it has some large problems. The biggest in my opinion is the ability to block somebody in so they cannot win. Still have to roll dice, but can't win or do anything meaningful for an hour or so.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:24
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Most games that use numbered dice do so in one of two ways: Some use them as a weighted coinflip, in which there are only two outcomes, pass and fail. "Roll a 5+, you hit; roll a 4-, you miss." Others use them as a gradient of success, in which the higher you roll, the happier you are. "Roll a die and deal that much damage." Your doing some serious gamblers fallacy here. There is no board game in existance where enough dice are rolled for the law of large numbers to come into effect.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:24
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sonatinas posted:here is a tip about Twilight Struggle for new players: explain when scoring cards might be coming up and then have each player try to do things with ops/cards to get points in the region scoring is occurring, so like if european card is coming up why are you even looking at central america, etc This is a good point, broadly there are only two divisions - early war scoring cards (Europe, Asia, Middle East) which are present from the beginning, and mid war scoring cards (Africa, South America, Central America, South-East Asia) which are shuffled in from turn 4 on. But be aware of which have been played in relation to reshuffle turns. Each early war scoring card will be appear at least once somewhere between turn 1 and 3 for example, however it could be played turn 2 and immediately appear again after the reshuffle. If it's played on turn 3, you know it's not coming back until at least turn 7 and you don't urgently need to sink ops into that region. That said it's still important to consider access and an eye to future scoring grounds, for example if you're playing destalinization turn 2 it's still utterly essential to use that influence to get into south america (and or africa if decol hasn't come up) regardless of whether it's going to be scored in the immediate future. And South-East Asia scoring is a starred card, it is scored only once before being removed altogether and isn't scored during final scoring. Ayn Randi fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 03:25
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Rutibex posted:Your doing some serious gamblers fallacy here. There is no board game in existance where enough dice are rolled for the law of large numbers to come into effect. It's a seriously long game of Catan.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:30
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Rutibex posted:Your doing some serious gamblers fallacy here. There is no board game in existance where enough dice are rolled for the law of large numbers to come into effect. While you're not going to get the laws of large numbers, you can be likely to end up close enough to expectation depending on how you define "likely" and "close enough". Flip a fair coin 20 times and you're unlikely to get exactly 10 heads, but you have a 75% chance of landing in the 8-12 range, so you're unlikely to be stuck with only two heads. If you roll a d6 for damage 10 times, your total damage may not be exactly 35, but it has a 95% chance of landing in the 25-45 range, so you'll virtually never deal a total of 50+ or 20- damage. And 10-20 trials isn't usually many for a game. The binomial case settles down pretty quickly because there are only two outcomes. The gradient case smooths out pretty quickly because a lot of the outcomes are very similar to each other -- dealing 4 damage is pretty close to dealing 5 damage, and you probably won't care whether your first two attacks deal 3 and 5 damage or 4 and 4 damage. But Catan's mechanics go out of their way to make the outcomes refuse to settle down. Rolling an 8 and a 10 isn't close enough to rolling a 9 and a 9, it's completely different. And with ten buckets for marbles to fall into instead of just two, it's much easier for one bucket to end up with significantly too many or too few.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:48
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Gutter Owl posted:This might be because the rules are different for spells/items (refill immediately) and for supporters (refill at end of round). Ah, that could be it. That also makes sense, considering you have 5 supporters and only 3 each of the others. I thought I knew the rules pretty well since I've had the game for so long, but it's always hard to get everything right on the first try. We'll know better next time and it's very likely it will be soon since everyone enjoyed it. StashAugustine posted:Have people had success teaching Suburbia to board game newbies btw? I've played it a few times and I've considered picking it up as an exhibition piece- I enjoyed playing it, it's relatively simple, and it's relatively easy to get the idea ('use these buildings to build a city with the most people' is easier to intuitively grasp than, say, Dominion's path to victory.) I do worry about the potential to death spiral if you raise population too early though. If you want to teach the game using the app; it's very easy. The app does all of the calculations for you and even gives you a preview of the results before you buy and place a tile. The board game itself? I dunno. I played it with my group for the first time at Gencon. Granted it wasn't just the base game; also included the 5 Star expansion. But one of my group did exactly that. He raised his population growth too early and didn't boost his income nearly enough. Once he hit negative income it became a death spiral. Didn't help that 5 Star tiles in general are more expensive. Very shortly he hit the -5 cap and his game was over. He bowed out and we took over this city so he could go do something else instead of suffering through it. His city developed a very impressive lake with the last tile each turn. That way his city didn't affect us so we no longer had to track his stuff. QnoisX fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 04:13
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StashAugustine posted:Have people had success teaching Suburbia to board game newbies btw? I do worry about the potential to death spiral if you raise population too early though. It's a simple enough game to teach, but you should definitely explain to them that a good beginner strategy is to invest in income for a while and slowly add in rep while trying to keep income up.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:38
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Has anyone here played Catan with the deck that smooths out the probability of the dice rolling? Does that noticeably improve the game? This thing?
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Jan 4, 2016 04:49
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foxxtrot posted:Has anyone here played Catan with the deck that smooths out the probability of the dice rolling? Does that noticeably improve the game? This thing? I literally mentioned it today in this thread.  Yes, it does, though not enough to make it a good game.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:51
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We tried a 4-player game of Eminent Domain last night, with a lot of confusion. I had been playing according to my own perceived adjustments I read on BoardGameGeek, and nobody else had played before who could say otherwise. I spent most of the game trying to keep everything straight with everybody and blew my score horrifically. A noble sacrifice. I am also pretty sure I screwed up all the adjustments too. As I understand it, when you take a warfare or colonize role, you pick one particular aspect of that role to do. So you can either make fighters/take over a planet for warfare, or tuck in colonize cards/take over a planet with colonize. You can't, say, use 3 warfare cards to make fighters and then use a 4th in that role to take over the planet. Where it gets goofy is the leader bonus. I was lead to believe that despite all the card crap, people could choose to follow you in that "subrole." So if you play the warfare role to attack a planet, other people could then follow and attack a planet if they had one. If the followers wanted to instead, say, produce fighters, then they had to dissent. Does this seem correct with current thinking? I ask because I know it is not written that way, but some discussions made me think this was correct. I also got completely mixed up at the end on what happens with boosters from cards--particularly colonize boosters. If somebody had a card with a colonize boost on it, and a planet needing 3 colonies, then I presumed they only needed to use 2 colonize cards on the planet. The third could implicitly come from their extra, although they'd still need one more colonize card to actually settle the planet in the settle role. Or is that wrong? If so, what good are those colonize boosters? It's not like warfare boosters were you can just point at them when making more fighters and go to town. Some more trivia: one of the players got the colony drop ship scenario, and we realized we completely hosed that up afterwards. He was taking a colonize card from the stack each turn. I probably would have one then because the game ended right when Rocko's death machine was spinning up. However, he was taking a colonize card per turn until they depleted. Meanwhile, we also decided the rules for Carcassone: Hunters and Gatherers are a little goofy. The rules at mention scoring for, say, the fisherman is the player "who alone controls" the river gets points. It implies if you wind up with two fishermen on one river by connecting separate rivers that nobody scores, but we assumed from seeing some other Carcassone stuff that was wrong. Finally, we suck at Pandemic: The Cure. We've played 11 times, and won twice. Each time, we had a scientist role, and one of the times was at supereasy. We normally play at what we thought from directions was the normal difficulty; one epidemic in from the start. We also lose to outbreaks. I read up on this and saw that we should not reroll much. It did not help. We also would regularly buy cards if we didn't necessarily need one, but just wanted a cured/less disruptive cube go back in the bag and help our odds. Outbreaks are just so much more powerful in this game than the board game because there aren't really played cubes can get dumped an get ignored. Half the problem is researching cures would take upwards of three turns. The scientist could start rolling with just two, but we'd have situations with four cubes, and we'd roll 3 hospitals and a single dot.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:54
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 15:39 |
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Trynant posted:This reminds me how much I love Ora & Labora of Rosenberg's designs (though Agricola is slowly becoming my favorite), yet I yearn for some fantasy where it's reprinted with a far more ergonomic design (i.e. better boards and larger cards that can actually be read at a glance on other player boards like the game requires). One can dream Oh god this.
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Jan 4, 2016 05:00
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