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Lottery of Babylon posted:The game's approach to balance seems to be to just include so much stuff that nobody can actually figure it out. All the rooms, base spells, and worker colors have A and B versions, so there's enough variation from game to game that it's hard to figure out if anything in particular is broken. That being said, after our first game we all drafted pink and black mages (using the A versions) super heavily because action economy is important enough that being able to place them for free made them seem significantly better than the other colors, especially blue/green. I don't know if they're actually stronger, but we haven't been proved wrong yet. The downside to heavily focusing on purple and black mages is that as action-efficient as they are, they're also the most vulnerable to being hosed with as they have no inherent defenses against being wounded, banished, shuffled around the board, etc. When we were first playing Argent after the first few games a number of players went "oh man, I want all the purple mages, gimme those, black mages hell yeah." The next couple of games after that several other players focused heavily on red mages and aggressive spells and the infirmary was packed to bursting with purple and black mages. So it's a bit of a balancing act, if you're too eager to throw your action economy workers out there then they become easy targets, especially if you're squatting on stuff that's going to be highly contested. Blue and green mages are better for securely holding a spot, but if someone's already rushed to claim it then you need a way to make them move.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:28
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I like Argent a lot!!! But Kai said everything I was going to say about it and then some, so just read that post.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:32
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Kai Tave posted:So I had a weird, possibly dumb idea the other night to turn Argent: the Consortium into a drinking game. Some friends of mine are excited by the prospect so I think we might actually be giving this a try. The obvious go-to is taking a drink every time one of your students winds up in the infirmary but I'm also going to try to come up with a few more conditions that hopefully won't lead to alcohol poisoning along the way. We used normal rules and replaced the word cards with Dixit cards.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:38
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Kai Tave posted:The downside to heavily focusing on purple and black mages is that as action-efficient as they are, they're also the most vulnerable to being hosed with as they have no inherent defenses against being wounded, banished, shuffled around the board, etc. When we were first playing Argent after the first few games a number of players went "oh man, I want all the purple mages, gimme those, black mages hell yeah." The next couple of games after that several other players focused heavily on red mages and aggressive spells and the infirmary was packed to bursting with purple and black mages. So it's a bit of a balancing act, if you're too eager to throw your action economy workers out there then they become easy targets, especially if you're squatting on stuff that's going to be highly contested. Blue and green mages are better for securely holding a spot, but if someone's already rushed to claim it then you need a way to make them move. Fair enough. In particular last time we played we had Infirmary B as the only source of gold on the table, so nobody was scared of being wounded at all (and in fact would sometimes deliberately wound themselves). I might be rating blue/green mages too low because of that experience.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:39
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^^^You don't get infirmary bonuses for wounding your own mages though, so that bit doesn't actually work. It's a fair point that Argent has A Whole Lot Of Stuff At Once, but personally I've never found that I've needed to try and internalize the entire boardstate from round to round in order to play effectively. "Get a lot of Influence, get a lot of other good stuff" is just good advice in general. Even if the Most Mana voter isn't in play mana is still a good thing to have, ditto gold or items or whatever, so it's not really the case that even if it turns out you don't get a vote for getting a lot of X that you're just wasting your time. Don't get obsessive about hoarding unless you know for sure that a voter is on the board, buy stuff that can help you at the moment rather than "stuff that will maybe help me at the end of the game if I guess right." The thing I keep track of most closely are my opponents' workers and yeah, another very valid criticism is the readability of the game. At some point I want to get some nice paint and paint the figure bases so that people can just plug their workers into the appropriate colored bases and make things a lot easier to tell at a glance who's who.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:39
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Yup. Argent. Game state perpetually obscured. Victory conditions exactly as evident as you are willing to give up better actions to reveal for yourself. Attempt to advance based on what little you understand about the game state. Still pretty fun in my opinion.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:40
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TastyLemonDrops posted:I did win that game though. The card draws are so random as to whether they'll be useful to you that it seems better to go for the sure but slow and steady route. The Essential Edition and the expansion Tuscany both make the rule that you may not receive a VP for giving a tour unless you have a wine token in a cellar, which delays that strategy enough that it's difficult to keep up. Even without the rule you're dependent on getting an early construction-related visitor card to get the economy to buy the tasting room on turn 1 or 2. Slow and steady is competitive, but it costs a lot of econ early which your opponents may be spending to get better winemaking engines.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:41
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As far as not knowing what voters are out there goes, there are rooms that give out marks plus other choice prizes instead of just "a mark" so if you're finding the victory goals too obscured and too costly to try and uncover then you can always try designing the school with an eye towards opening up the number of desirable marks.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:43
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Kai Tave posted:Also for those of you who've done the Codenames/Dixit crossover, how exactly are you doing it? Is it just "Like Codenames, only using Dixit cards instead of words?" Do you allow Dixit-style clues or stick with Codenames' stricter guidelines? Folks at Tuesday boardgame night were interested in trying this next week. Use Dixit cards instead of words. Then shuffle and give the Spymaster a hand of seven(ish) Dixit cards. For each clue, the Spymaster plays a card from hand and says a number, then draws a replacement card.
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Jan 27, 2016 23:29
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Why wouldn't you put out 25 Dixit cards but still have the spymaster give one-word clues, as in Codenames? I can see using your version if the players didn't have a language in common, but somehow knew the rules to both games... Doesn't Dixit have you associating words with cards, and not just cards with cards, anyway?
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Jan 27, 2016 23:53
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Gutter Owl posted:Use Dixit cards instead of words. Then shuffle and give the Spymaster a hand of seven(ish) Dixit cards. For each clue, the Spymaster plays a card from hand and says a number, then draws a replacement card. So, more like Mysterium than Dixit?
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Jan 27, 2016 23:56
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Mortley posted:Why wouldn't you put out 25 Dixit cards but still have the spymaster give one-word clues, as in Codenames? I can see using your version if the players didn't have a language in common, but somehow knew the rules to both games... Tbf I can see both versions working out fine and we might very well give both a shot. It's fun that you can sort of mix-and-match both games like that.
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Jan 27, 2016 23:58
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Mortley posted:Why wouldn't you put out 25 Dixit cards but still have the spymaster give one-word clues, as in Codenames? I can see using your version if the players didn't have a language in common, but somehow knew the rules to both games... The problem is, the Dixit cards are waaaaaaay too easy to indicate with codenames-style clues. It's so much easier to point out a visual connection between three or four images than to find a connotative connection between three or four English words. It's been goon-tested earlier in the thread, and the verdict was Boring. See, in Dixit, the Storyteller wants to be opaque, because you don't score if everyone guesses your clue. That's what makes the obfuscation game work. In Codenames, though, the Spymaster wants to be as clear as possible, given the communication restriction. So there's no reason not to draw obvious connections between images.
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Jan 28, 2016 00:05
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Cool, gotcha. I'll have to give it a shot myself.
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Jan 28, 2016 00:35
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TastyLemonDrops posted:I did win that game though. The card draws are so random as to whether they'll be useful to you that it seems better to go for the sure but slow and steady route. Every game of Viticulture we've played has ended in year 5 or 6. You can't get 20 points solely from tours, planting and grape selling in that time; you need cards as well. Heck, you said yourself that you got 10 points in the last turn because you had cards. So how is your "slow and steady" strategy better or less random than any other strategy?
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Jan 28, 2016 01:11
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T.I.M.E. Stories ChatBottom Liner posted:If you don't mind, I'm going to share this with a board game Facebook group full of 8,000 members that won't shut up about how great the game is and collect their responses. Please do. Applewhite posted:At least all of you got to bond over how terrible you thought the game was. Scyther posted:Like hell, I bet all the other players thought it was the second coming of board gaming Jesus. I played both cases with the same group of four. At the end of the first case we were pretty fed up; we knew the solution, but started just flipping over the cards as we wanted rather than playing it out by the rules. Nobody walked away having hated the experience, but after discussing it we all agreed it was pretty bad. Going into the second case we were all fairly excited, but knew to expect the same stupid dead-ends and run around that we got in the first game. I called some of the dead-ends ahead of time, got a few good "why did you have to be right?" looks and then all four of us would laugh. At the end of the second case the consensus was that we wanted to like the game, it's an interesting idea, it makes a great event; but it does everything it can to poo poo up that experience. So the long and short of it is, yeah, we did have fun; but it was definitely in spite of the game. The owner of the game said he was on the fence about buying the next one, but he probably will because  , so expect a review eventually.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:06
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parasyte posted:The Essential Edition and the expansion Tuscany both make the rule that you may not receive a VP for giving a tour unless you have a wine token in a cellar, which delays that strategy enough that it's difficult to keep up. Even without the rule you're dependent on getting an early construction-related visitor card to get the economy to buy the tasting room on turn 1 or 2. Slow and steady is competitive, but it costs a lot of econ early which your opponents may be spending to get better winemaking engines. We did play the essential edition, and I started with a papa that gave me 6 funbux and the yoke. I had more than enough money to build a tasting room early and make use of it because of my start. I'd played Viticulture before without the mamas and papas, and I have to say, I really don't like them at all. Some bonuses are very clearly better than others in every way. I only made use of the smallest field and sold the others (which I also think is really dumb). The essential edition did some good things, like that tour thing you mentioned, but adds a whole mess of stuff that makes it worse. Jedit posted:Every game of Viticulture we've played has ended in year 5 or 6. You can't get 20 points solely from tours, planting and grape selling in that time; you need cards as well. Heck, you said yourself that you got 10 points in the last turn because you had cards. So how is your "slow and steady" strategy better or less random than any other strategy? If you're trying to fulfill orders, you first need to luck into good vine draws, then get orders that actually make use of those grapes. It's not hard if you knew what orders were coming (maybe a future orders pile should be in the game?) and could plan and fight the other players for it, but you're drawing visitors that may or may not help you at all, drawing grapes that may or may not help you at all, and drawing orders that may or may not help you at all. The visitors are okay as is, but the last part is by far the worst. The guy in last place had basically no chance to win at all because all his fields were red grapes (not a single white grape drawn the entire game) and all his orders were white wines and blushes. The other players in my game were drawing such good visitor cards that they were basically forced to compete for the play card spots, which let me do my thing. They got all their workers out before me because of teacher/educator cards, which incidentally let me get workers cheaper because suddenly there was no demand for the spot. TastyLemonDrops fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 06:44
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The thing with the mamas and papas isn't the bonuses its the fact that not everyone is competing for the same space in the first summer.
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Jan 28, 2016 08:44
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Got my second play of Concordia in today and had a lot of fun with it. I really enjoy that the game goes exactly as quickly as people play it and there's no end of round step or other thing that resets during the game. The players dictate when bonuses reset and when hands refresh, and it all just feels really elegant. I'm bad at the game, but I have a lot of fun playing it and building up an empire. Looking forward to playing it a few more times with the same group to get better at it.
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Jan 28, 2016 09:50
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TastyLemonDrops posted:If you're trying to fulfill orders, you first need to luck into good vine draws, then get orders that actually make use of those grapes. That's only a problem if you draw nothing but high value white orders and no white vines beyond your initial Pinot. You mentioned someone having a problem with getting no white vines at all; that is an issue specific to the Mamas and Papas and it should probably be house ruled that the first green card you get in setup is always a Pinot.
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Jan 28, 2016 12:16
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My copy of FCM finally came in. The packaging was terrible...basically a box surrounding the game box with less than a mm of space between the walls and the gamebox. They did put cardboard corner bracing in though. Luckily it somehow made it across the Atlantic through two customs houses without any damage, but yeah...
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Jan 28, 2016 15:37
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Dirk the Average posted:Got my second play of Concordia in today and had a lot of fun with it. I really enjoy that the game goes exactly as quickly as people play it and there's no end of round step or other thing that resets during the game. The players dictate when bonuses reset and when hands refresh, and it all just feels really elegant. Salsa is really good as are the expansion maps if you're a degenerate completionist. Salsa in particular adds Forum Tiles which add a nice wrinkle to the Tribune action. T-Bone fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 15:45
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I just want to say thanks again to anyone who offered suggestions for me. This is a cool thread filled with good people. I picked up a couple that were put forward, and I added a few others to the wishlist. Unrelated to the previous request, how are people's feelings about Mafia de Cuba?
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Jan 28, 2016 16:07
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I've played quite a few games of it but nobody quite yet understands the lies they're meant to be telling.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:08
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Mafia de Cuba is busted. There's a degenerate strategy loyalists can use to win pretty much every time. Also, because so much attention is focused on the mob boss, it is entirely possible that some players simply won't have an opportunity to contribute meaningfully in a round.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:09
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Mafia de Cuba has wonderful components and an interesting idea, but yeah, it is almost completely busted and I don't have the time or inclination to fix it. Even when it works it is a boring game for a large subset of the people playing.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:12
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Oldstench posted:My copy of FCM finally came in. The packaging was terrible...basically a box surrounding the game box with less than a mm of space between the walls and the gamebox. They did put cardboard corner bracing in though. Luckily it somehow made it across the Atlantic through two customs houses without any damage, but yeah... Still don't have mine =/ Did you need to sign for it? It looks like a few people in the BGG thread did.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:24
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T-Bone posted:Still don't have mine =/ Yep.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:42
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Next time I play Argent I may house rule the number of voters, something like # of players * 2 (plus the starting voters). Maybe cut down on the chaos a bit.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:53
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Morpheus posted:Next time I play Argent I may house rule the number of voters, something like # of players * 2 (plus the starting voters). Maybe cut down on the chaos a bit. Oh aye, I'm a big fan of # of players + 2 for the voters. 3 voters at 2, 5 at 3, 7 at 4 and 9 at 5. I think I read somewhere the Dev said he intended on putting a variant like that in the rulebook but decided against it? I did and I read it here.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:11
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Durendal posted:Would the deluxe version of Hanabi work? I actually had a question about this. I know that there are two different versions of Hanabi Deluxe, one from Abacus and one from R&R. Does anyone have experience with both of the sets that can recommend one set over the other?
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Jan 28, 2016 17:29
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I feel like reducing the number of voters in Argent wouldn't end up a great plan, because it seems fairly easy to become AMAZING at one single thing. Picking up the right Spell, Supporter, or Item can make acquiring a ton of a single resource pretty trivial which is usually offset by players ignoring whatever you've focused on. 2+(Players*2) would probably be fine but I think 2+Players would feel like a completely different game. At the very least I would think you'd have to remove the free Marks at the start to keep from players getting too hard of a head start on a single resource, maybe even removing the Most Influence and Most Supporter voters. If you want to reduce complexity I would try playing one fewer turn, and maybe altering what characters start with. Something like starting everyone with a spell from their department, maybe three mages from the department instead of two and draft one fewer, and everyone gets to draft a vault item in reverse first turn order (so last player drafts first). That way you get a good idea of everyone's capabilities at the start of the game and there's less time for them to get out of control.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:51
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Misandu posted:I feel like reducing the number of voters in Argent wouldn't end up a great plan, because it seems fairly easy to become AMAZING at one single thing. Picking up the right Spell, Supporter, or Item can make acquiring a ton of a single resource pretty trivial which is usually offset by players ignoring whatever you've focused on. 2+(Players*2) would probably be fine but I think 2+Players would feel like a completely different game. At the very least I would think you'd have to remove the free Marks at the start to keep from players getting too hard of a head start on a single resource, maybe even removing the Most Influence and Most Supporter voters. Another good way to teach the game is to use the 6-round summer break scenario from the mini-expansion. Basically, you start the game with just two mages of your own color, then at the end of each of the first three rounds, you have a mage draft. At the end of round 4 you can switch one of your mages with a mage of another color, then at the end of round 5 you have another draft for various bonuses, then the 6th round is just a full normal round.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:55
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Thanks for the advice a few pages ago. Picked up a few of them and waiting to hear about a reprinting of Robinson Crusoe. Another question, is Roll for the Galaxy better then Race? Will be played primary with gf or with small groups, some have board game experience some do not.
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Jan 28, 2016 17:59
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Kamikaze Raider posted:I actually had a question about this. I know that there are two different versions of Hanabi Deluxe, one from Abacus and one from R&R. Does anyone have experience with both of the sets that can recommend one set over the other? I like the art more on the R&R tiles.
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Jan 28, 2016 18:01
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Unknownmass posted:Another question, is Roll for the Galaxy better then Race? They're so different it's difficult to say really
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Jan 28, 2016 18:02
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Roll is easier to get in to and much easier to teach newbies and the dice have a fun tactile aspect, but Race has a lot more variability and I would say depth due to the much higher amount of different planets/developments available. It really depends how much you plan to play them though, if you're only going to play Roll a few times a month or so there's still plenty of content to keep you happy, there just aren't as many options available.
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Jan 28, 2016 18:19
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taser rates posted:Another good way to teach the game is to use the 6-round summer break scenario from the mini-expansion. Basically, you start the game with just two mages of your own color, then at the end of each of the first three rounds, you have a mage draft. At the end of round 4 you can switch one of your mages with a mage of another color, then at the end of round 5 you have another draft for various bonuses, then the 6th round is just a full normal round. That's a really cool way to teach the game! I'll have to pick up Summer Break sometime. That also reminds me that I was going to make up a "Rush Week" Scenario after someone brought up Argent as a drinking game, I'll have to work on that later!
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Jan 28, 2016 18:22
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Unknownmass posted:Thanks for the advice a few pages ago. Picked up a few of them and waiting to hear about a reprinting of Robinson Crusoe. Another question, is Roll for the Galaxy better then Race? Will be played primary with gf or with small groups, some have board game experience some do not. Race for the Galaxy is the better game, it certainly comes with a lot more content. It's also a lot cheaper, and a lot more portable. You can carry Race for the Galaxy around in one of those bigger Magic deck boxes for EDH decks. Roll for the Galaxy has fewer cards, and costs about twice as much. Unless you really love dice you should get Race.
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Jan 28, 2016 21:16
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Rutibex posted:Race for the Galaxy is the better game, it certainly comes with a lot more content. It's also a lot cheaper, and a lot more portable. You can carry Race for the Galaxy around in one of those bigger Magic deck boxes for EDH decks. This is all accurate, actually.
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