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Tiny Epic Galaxies has the best goon reviews, Defenders and Kingdom not so much. I've bought Galaxies on account of thread recommendations and being a fan of space themed games, haven't gotten it to the table yet. I've been sort of keeping up with Western KS, but I don't think I'm going to back it. There are some (p)reviews on BGG that were not very informative (rules overview, followed by a paragraph that came down to "I like it!") so I think I'll wait until it hits retail and I've seen some actual reviews. There's a Print and Play for download so if you want to put in the  you can try it for free.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:12
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So someone just mailed me this game called Kensington and I haven't got to play it yet but I think its cool already because it basically comes in a LP.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:40
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The General posted:I'm a huge TtA fan and I say pull the plug. The new edition is fantastic and almost everything I wanted it to be. It fixes all the issues with the base game, military getting a serious nerf. Leaders have been changed up, yellow cards are now more generically useful. New TTA is great, go for it. It seems very likely they will be doing official extensions later, I think.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:51
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PBS Newshour posted:So someone just mailed me this game called Kensington and I haven't got to play it yet but I think its cool already because it basically comes in a LP. I remember Kensington. It's basically Nine Men's Morris on steroids. Got recommended at Spiel des Jahres 1982, but that says more about gaming in the 1980s than anything else.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:10
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Brass is a game of supply and demand, and you as the player need to know when it's the best time to cash in. The game has two phases: canals and rails. After the end of each phase you score points based in links between cities, and flipped over tiles. More on this later. You begin the game with 8 cards (Make sure you've take. The correct amount of cards out of the deck for the phase and player count!) that will have towns from across Lancashire or the Five types of industry: coal mines, cotton mills, ports, ship yards, and foundries. These will be the tools you use to interact with the game. You also begin the game with six stacks of tiles: one for each type of industry, and your canals/rails. On these tiles will be. Number 1-4 which denotes it's tech level. Level ones can only be built during the canal phase and are removed when switching to rails. Some may have a rail icon on them, this means they can only be built during the rail phase. There is also a cost in £ which you have to pay, and some of them require coal and/or iron to build. Coal mines and Iron Works have numbers in a box that denotes how many cubes the start with. On the backs of the tiles you will see a pink hexagon and a coped circle, both with numbers. The hex is vp it's worth at the end of the phase and the circle is how much you increase hot income by. Each player also starts with £30. Each phase consists of several steps: Intial cards, player actions (where the majority of the game takes place, calculate vps, and progress to the next period or game end. Once everyone has their Intial 8 cards you start player actions. First you collect income from the tack on the bottom and left of the board, second you play 2 cards (Only one of the first turn though!), and fourth you refill your hand from the deck. So you are finally ready to play. Starting with the start player he plays a card. Since no one has anything on the board he can use the industry cards to build that industry at any location on the granted it has that type of industry and its not In Birkenhead or Barrow-in-furness. Those two cities can only be accessed durin the rail period. Or a town card to build any industry In that specific town as long it also has a spot for it. Once a player builds their Intial building, they pay the costs to their color box on the board. Whoever spent the least goes first, second least second and so on and so forth next round. Keep in mind that in the canal phase a player can only own one building per city! Now the game really begins. So what can you do with your cards? Tou get two cards, think of them as actions. You can take a loan for one card which drops your income marker 1-3 colored sections on the income track. Each section dropped gets you £10. You can build links (canals/rails) from your adjacent links or buildings. You can build industry with a matching industry card in a town connected to your network, you can use town cards to build industry in that town, you can develops technology (you discard 1-2 tiles from a stack for the cost of 1-2 iron. This also the only way to build shipyards), and you can sell cotton. So what does each industry do. Cotton Mills when linked up to distant ports or a port built by a player can be flipped by taking the well cotton action.  Flipping tiles is the only to get a steady incom and score major points When selling to the distant market you draw a demand tile and drop the demons marker down that many spaces (0 to -4) then if it hasn't bottomed out you flip the tile and get the income listed on it and what is listed on the demand track. When selling to a port you can sell to any player's and you flip your mill plus the port. This will be your best way of getting income early. Let's talk about coal and iron. Coal needs to be transported across links if you need it, iron does not. There is also a marker on the board where you can buy either for the price listed, but to get the coal you need to connected to a port. When you build coal mines or ironworks you get a set amount of cubes. Anyone can use these cubes, and if there are empty spots on the market when you build them, it takes your cubes automatically and pays your market price. This only. Happens when you build something. For coal players must take coal from the closest connected mine. Iron can be taken from anywhere. Once all the cubes are taken, the tile flips and you get your income. Lastly are shipyards. There are only 3 ship spaces on the map, you need to develops to build them, and they cost a fuckton of cash. They are worth a boatload of points though and automatically flip. So what you want to do is see where there are holes in the market and capitalize on them. Lots of unflipped cotton mills? Build ports. No iron on the market? Build an ironworks. Lots of cash? Build a shipyard. Another way of scoring points are links. You will need to build these anyways hi they are super cost effective points if you can spare the card to build them. Links score to every orange circle in both cities it connects. This basically means every flipped tile, but there are some filler cities trust just give you two circles for connecting them. Once the deck runs out and everyone plays their last two card, you count up vps. I start with links for each player then move on to builds. Here all level one buildings and canals are removed. You still keep their income but you won't get anymore points. Any level two or higher stay and will be scored again after the rail phase. So now your start the rail phase. You can not build level one industry and must develop them if you want to. You can only build rails which require coal. If you have nothing on the board you do the same thing as when you started the game. And demand track is reset. You play until you once again run out of cards. Then you do another round of scoring and whoever is the highest wins.w Durendal fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 12:13
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Durendal posted:
I wanna get this game on the table but everytime another game gets the vote. I really think the art scares people away. I bought it in Essen an account of liking Keyflower and Richard Breese but I doubt it will see play any time soon. Am I missing out?
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Jan 24, 2016 12:15
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Some tips: before you sell cotton for the first time take a £30 loan, don't let someone get all the shipyards, coal is huge in rail period so having level 2 coal mines built before the phase change can be a life saver, you can no loner take loans when the deck runs out In the rail period, and the when selling cotton you can flip as many mills as you can granted there is enough ports or the demand doesn't tank. Pro-tip: you can use both your actions In a turn to build anything anywhere. Durendal fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 12:16
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Selecta84 posted:I wanna get this game on the table but everytime another game gets the vote. I really think the art scares people away. It's not Keyflower good, but it's definitely worth playing.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:19
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Durendal posted:It's not Keyflower good, but it's definitely worth playing. That's good to hear.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:39
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Durendal posted:It's not Keyflower good, but it's definitely worth playing. Few things are.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:49
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Durendal posted:Some tips: before you sell cotton for the first time take a £30 loan, don't let someone get all the shipyards, coal is huge in rail period so having level 2 coal mines built before the phase change can be a life saver, you can no loner take loans when the deck runs out In the rail period, and the when selling cotton you can flip as many mills as you can granted there is enough ports or the demand doesn't tank. All that and the rules I got. I'm just not sure how to get the ball rolling.
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Jan 24, 2016 14:16
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Thanks for the TTA opinions guys. Now I just need to figure out what to get to round out my $100 order from CSI.
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Jan 24, 2016 15:34
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Finally got to play one game of 504. It was 183 - I play with pretty advanced people so I figured I'd introduce the whole game at once instead of starting out with a game without residents. (729 also seems like it's going to be pretty interesting when we get there.) Everything went pretty well, but a decent amount depends on the random privilege you draw for purchase and somebody got screwed by only pulling the VP ones from the deck. Not sure how you fix that, or if (in this case) 27-to-1 odds are worth addressing.
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Jan 24, 2016 16:10
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Jedit posted:All that and the rules I got. I'm just not sure how to get the ball rolling. Selling cotton to the foreign market can give you a real quick boost in cash if you can get 2 mills in before the demand tanks. Combine this with te loan trick for tons of cash.
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Jan 24, 2016 16:46
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Hey, we almost played inhabit the earth yesterday too, but ended up with Alhambra for something lighter. Having only played one game of it now, what are other peoples' thoughts on it? In some ways I liked it more than carcass one, but it also lacked any sort of direct action/interference. Note we were only playing with like 2 or 3 of the 20 odd expansion bits.
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Jan 24, 2016 17:36
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Played Mombosa last night and really enjoyed it. It's a political point salad with metaphorical blood diamonds and colonialism, which made me feel good about losing but bad about thinking how cool some of the actions are. Imagine a mix of action selection and worker placement, and four companies with progress tracks. The company's value is dependent on how much territory they control on the map, and having shares in companies will garner many points at the endgame. Add on a diamond track, a bookkeeping track, an interesting discard/collect system, it's a very interesting mix of mechanics in a solid game. I'm excited to play again.
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Jan 24, 2016 18:07
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I wasn't terribly impressed by Mombasa, partly because of how point-salad-y it was. I won a game by doing some stock buying and maxing like crazy on books because there wasn't a great way for people to compete with bookkeeping, but it felt like the actions didn't really integrate all that well together - everything comes down to stock-buying, but stocks aren't that hard to buy (lategame people can buy a lot of stocks very quickly if they've been upgrading their goods cards) and the area control is very zero-sum so if two companies start to dominate it snowballs from there (people buy into those companies and they just eat everything). The only incentive to push people towards specific companies is the particulars of diamond merchants, which results in a pretty small delta (one diamond, maybe two) for slight differences in control. The discard/collect system worked pretty well, though.
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Jan 24, 2016 18:55
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thespaceinvader posted:New TTA is great, go for it. It seems very likely they will be doing official extensions later, I think. I ment pull the trigger. I'm often high... And they will? That's awesome.
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Jan 24, 2016 19:19
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My copy of Food Chain Magnate arrived  and I'm reading the rules. I like the bank reserve concept. For those who don't know, in FCM players do not begin with money and the game ends when the bank runs out of money twice. The first time the bank runs out the reserve notes are revealed and resolved. The second time it runs out the game is over. The reserve notes are chosen by the players - one each - secretly at the beginning of the game. Notes are in different denominations and also modify the way you'll be able to do actions. The notes chosen make a longer or shorter game. The winning strategy depends in part on your chosen tradeoff between growing your capacity/potential and actually doing stuff. The correct time to shift those gears depends partly on the game length. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
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Jan 24, 2016 19:33
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The General posted:I ment pull the trigger. I'm often high... I don't think it's been officially confirmed anywhere (though I have a vague feeling that a CGE employee said they were considering it) - but I'd be shocked if they don't given the demand for the game, and there's something to suggest it given that there are tactics with obsolescences written on them which only make sense if they have units which currently don't exist...
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Jan 24, 2016 19:44
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ETB posted:Played Mombosa last night and really enjoyed it. It's a political point salad with metaphorical blood diamonds and colonialism, which made me feel good about losing but bad about thinking how cool some of the actions are. Mombasa is real good, although suffers from groupthink with the way the pseudo stock market aspect of the game is laid out.
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Jan 24, 2016 19:45
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A friend of a friend is running a survey of people who play modern board games for a project, I thought I'd share it here in case anyone feels like contributing. It's from the people who run the (relatively small, probably unknown to most) review blog Daily Worker Placement. Takes 5 min or so. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Zjx8Hf4ET3a7GyuDi-jVWK3fqR_fINkQrVKIaFYPBRg/viewform?c=0&w=1
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Jan 24, 2016 20:10
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Merauder posted:A friend of a friend is running a survey of people who play modern board games for a project, I thought I'd share it here in case anyone feels like contributing. It's from the people who run the (relatively small, probably unknown to most) review blog Daily Worker Placement. Takes 5 min or so. I filled this out, but I have a couple of nitpicks. The first is that I don't really consider most of the games I play to be Euros in the modern sense of the word, but I had to check it off because it was the only strategy game choice. I think you would be hard pressed to say that 18xx, and other finance games are what most people think when you say Euro to them. I know that's part of a larger debate about terminology but I think dropping the Euro part from the strategy games would make sense. Secondly, it's nice that you can check wargames as a choice here and there but the favorite mechanics section is pretty much devoid of any wargame mechanics. No card-driven, hidden unit deployment, or hex and counter options. Also stock holding is nowhere to be found. I know there's a field for other, and I used it, but I had to type in a few things.
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Jan 24, 2016 20:35
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I bought the digital version of Talisman, and I actually like it a whole lot. Should I hate myself for this?
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Jan 24, 2016 20:42
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COOL CORN posted:I bought the digital version of Talisman, and I actually like it a whole lot. Should I hate myself for this? Yes. I bought it, and found the animations and constant clicking on poo poo I shouldn't really have to click on means that it didn't appear to play faster than the IRL boardgame. I was kinda excited to get my speed talisman on, but somehow, they made it a chore.
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Jan 24, 2016 20:47
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COOL CORN posted:I bought the digital version of Talisman, and I actually like it a whole lot. Should I hate myself for this? Yes, probably. As someone who still owns bits of the first, second and third editions and expansions, and who still has fond memories of playing it c. 1994, all the digital edition did for me was highlight all of the horrible design choices present and emphasize how much game design has progressed in twenty-odd years. The digital version literally feels like Progress Quest to me.
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Jan 24, 2016 20:51
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Talisman is the game you keep on your shelf to remind you why you have all those other games.
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Jan 24, 2016 20:58
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Yeah, I think I spoke too soon. After about an hour of playing, I thought "man, I really wish this were a digital version of Mage Knight", and then sent Steam a refund request.
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Jan 24, 2016 22:11
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Alright, ordering the new TTA from CSI and I'm looking to add on either Viticulture: Essential Edition or Argent to round out the order. I already have and enjoy Dung. Lords and Dung. Pets for my usual worker placements. Either of these give a unique enough experience to warrant a purchase over the other?COOL CORN posted:I bought the digital version of Talisman, and I actually like it a whole lot. Should I hate myself for this? I got that gifted to me during the Steam winter sale holiday gift train on these forums. I passed it off to another unsuspecting sucker...
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Jan 24, 2016 22:13
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I've played a handful of Talisman digital games, despite thinking that it's a terribly designed game. It's an interesting way to help you to understand why a bunch of its core mechanics (luckfest, getting 'toaded' and taken out of the game, snowball leader position, roll to move) are lovely.
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Jan 24, 2016 22:14
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Radioactive Toy posted:Alright, ordering the new TTA from CSI and I'm looking to add on either Viticulture: Essential Edition or Argent to round out the order. I already have and enjoy Dung. Lords and Dung. Pets for my usual worker placements. Either of these give a unique enough experience to warrant a purchase over the other? Argent is my vote. You get the ability to knock other people off of spaces you want, move people around, lock down rooms so that they can't be messed with, etc. On top of that, the votes are a really neat victory mechanic since just about everything in the game has the potential to contribute towards a vote, but may or may not contribute towards a vote. There's a lot of guessing, second guessing, going for marks, and other things where you have to do the best you can with very imperfect information. With the right group, it's probably my hands-down favorite game.
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Jan 24, 2016 22:34
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Radioactive Toy posted:Alright, ordering the new TTA from CSI and I'm looking to add on either Viticulture: Essential Edition or Argent to round out the order. I already have and enjoy Dung. Lords and Dung. Pets for my usual worker placements. Either of these give a unique enough experience to warrant a purchase over the other? Get Viticulture. You're much more likely to get it on the table.
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Jan 24, 2016 23:00
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So I'm really enjoying Puerto Rico, it's a great mix of mechanics, gameplay and causing screams of anguish as you load up the last boat with all that corn you've been stockpiling or grabbing that building someone's been eyeing all game. What else is out there with similar levels of interactivity and gameplay?
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Jan 24, 2016 23:43
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Merauder posted:A friend of a friend is running a survey of people who play modern board games for a project, I thought I'd share it here in case anyone feels like contributing. It's from the people who run the (relatively small, probably unknown to most) review blog Daily Worker Placement. Takes 5 min or so. Holy gently caress that took way longer than 5 minutes, but I made it through!
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Jan 25, 2016 00:01
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theroachman posted:Holy gently caress that took way longer than 5 minutes, but I made it through! On the other hand, I finished in like 2 minutes (because I basically said N/A for half the questions and got to skip entire pages since I never actually get to play games anymore).
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Jan 25, 2016 00:07
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If you liked the passive aggression of Puerto Rico, you should try Keyflower, Caylus, Agricola, and Dungeon Lords. If you liked the Tableau building aspect of Puerto Rico, you should try Castles of Burgundy, La Granja, and Caverna. If you liked the theme of Puerto Rico, you should try Mombasa, Archipelago, and Cards Against Humanity.
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Jan 25, 2016 00:09
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Yeah there was this question, "On average, how often do you play games in your collection?" with possible answers ranging from 1 to 10 times. I think I'm in the < 1 segment. 
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Jan 25, 2016 00:13
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Impermanent posted:If you liked the passive aggression of Puerto Rico, you should try Keyflower, Caylus, Agricola, and Dungeon Lords. Keyflower has by far the most aggressive passive aggression of any game. I guess the only reason it's not outright aggression is that you're headbutting your opponent as you crush all their hopes and dreams.
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Jan 25, 2016 00:26
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Best Mage Knight starting position & hand ever. Any guesses on my first move?
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Jan 25, 2016 00:30
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The End posted:Keyflower has by far the most aggressive passive aggression of any game. I guess the only reason it's not outright aggression is that you're headbutting your opponent as you crush all their hopes and dreams. Excellent. Oh my god it has a million meeples and the player screens are little houses 
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Jan 25, 2016 00:39
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