Afriscipio posted:

What do you mean by "take that?"

djfooboo posted:

I am so stoked to be graduating in May! Means I get to devote much more time to boardgaming/Netrunning.

Rutibex posted:

I think you will actually find that leaving college severely decreases you ability to boardgame. Sorry for your loss.

Misandu posted:

Dark Souls is NES hard, basically. Once you know something is there and how to handle it, it's no longer threatening to you. The whole game is just tuned so that recovering from mistakes that you make is hard/resource intensive. So instead of fighting a boss and getting badly beaten up before you figure out the pattern and win, you'll just die and have to run back through the less threatening enemies you've already encountered. This makes the game about memorization and caution, but leads to it feeling super satisfying when knowing how to handle an enemy lets you chump it really easily. Instead of your resource exhaustion being tied to something like Character Level (though that still factors in) it's, in theory, tied to Player Skill. The first time you fight the boss maybe you got there with half health and one healing item, but having already encountered the stuff between you and the boss you'll likely show up better prepared this time.

The real secret to Dark Souls is to play like you're playing 1e D&D with an rear end in a top hat DM who's going to murder you if you don't carefully inspect everything. Personally I feel like Monster Hunter hits most of the same notes but wastes my time a lot less.

Taran_Wanderer posted:

One of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson, is having a board game made based on one of his series. I'll probably just get it regardless, as Mistborn is pretty cool, but I don't have high hopes as for quality.

taser rates posted:

Honestly, once you find the bosses, you can basically skip past like 99% of the intervening enemies anyways since they don't really chase you. Despite what you always hear about the games being so difficult or whatever, there's an equal amount of fun for me in just exploring the world and uncovering secrets and lore.

T-Bone posted:

"Maneuvers that directly attack an opposing player's strength, level, life points or do something else to impede their progress, while usually providing the main engine for player interaction in the game."

Pax Pamir is non stop loving your neighbors, if your group likes that, they'll probably like Pax Pamir (assuming the theme isn't too weird for them, and they can handle a somewhat fiddly ruleset).

Although the rules really aren't that bad. The base actions are really simple, and even the special actions aren't bad, they just have some small exceptions/reactions that are easy to forget (the living rulebook on BGG is way better at highlighting them than the paper manual). Also get the game board, it's so worth it. It's sold via Sierra Madre (and it also comes with the Pax Porf deluxe version).

Oldstench posted:

Can we please not poo poo up another thread with Dark Souls vidya-game talk?

Please take it here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3771816

Broken Loose posted:

The Dark Souls board game description of "prepare for the hardest board game ever! you ain't never played a game this hard!" is a huge series of red flags. Dark Souls (Dark Souls 2 in particular, which focused heavily on the THIS GAME IS HARD marketing) is full of bad hard and poorly implemented difficulty. It's trivial to make a hard game, especially a hard board game. Making a possible, engaging, and rewarding board game that is also extremely hard is much more worthy of praise.

Besides, I doubt it would exceed Vlaada's games in difficulty. Space Alert Red Alert Double Actions missions are absolutely one of the hardest feats in gaming. Dungeon Lords gets up there. Galaxy Trucker with Rough Roads gets up there. I can only imagine the DS board game will interpret "hard" as "you can only damage enemies if you roll a 6! " which of course wouldn't result in a consistently hard experience to even a fraction the degree Vlaada's games do.

StashAugustine posted:

Speaking of RNG I just won a TS game online because my opponent got stuck in a six-round Quagmire.

Broken Loose posted:

Space Alert/Dungeon Lords were never marketed on their difficulty and the whole "git gud" meme never flourished in their wake, even though they are the epitome of hard but fair games. You have advance notice for every threat, you have enough resources to beat them, and no RNG exists between player choices and the outcomes of those choices. For a company (who isn't terrifically versed in board game design) to advertise their game's difficulty warns me that they're probably about to make a shitload of bad design choices.

Shadow225 posted:

I agree. There isn't a single boss in Dark Souls that is more difficult than reading a Vlaada rule book.

Bottom Liner posted:

Anyways, can I get thoughts on Onitama and Knitwit? They're the only two games on my radar right now, it would be nice to get something new to the table because all we've played for 3 months is AGOT LCG 2.0.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/160477/onitama

Onitama looks like an interesting mix of Chess, The Duke, and Tash-Kalar

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/191982/knit-wit

Knit Wit looks pretty silly but in an endearing way.

Broken Loose posted:

The example I brought up, Dark Souls 2, had shitloads of unfair enemy placements including instant death enemies in locations where they were impossible to react to. It also relied heavily upon mobs of enemies with huge life bars and lengthy combos, resulting in fights that were incredibly tedious but not actually difficult (as the main difficulty was trying to get the camera to cooperate and trying not to be so bored during the fight that you did more than a single attack when said enemies left themselves open). Megaman Zero (1) was another game that was marketed heavily on its difficulty, and it was full of similar poo poo like blind platform jumping and grinding (2-4 fixed these problems but coincidentally stopped advertising themselves as insanely hard despite still being very hard).

Mister Sinewave posted:

For me, it's kind of in the same bucket as Trump games (or whatever the more correct term for those is.)

al-azad posted:

They're also board games which market to s completely different crowd and the difficulty isn't a component of reflex and perception. Dungeon Lords is "hard" because you can't take all the actions you want, play a solo variant and you find it's quite simple when you can predict what the AI will take. Space Alert as well is the human element adding to the difficulty, the core game is quite simple.

I don't know why you're hung up specifically on them advertising a hard game. Dungeon Lords may not have it plastered on the box but final scoring and event cards remind you it's a "hard" game. The company's history is worth criticizing but advertising your game as difficult is just playing into the marketing.

Merauder posted:

To be fair, with the announcement of the DS board game, it's pretty reasonable to expect people to discuss the brand and what it entails here, in the board game thread, if nothing else for the sake of informing those unfamiliar of what the board game might consist of thematically.

But to turn back to actual BG discussion: I finally picked up the first expansion for Istanbul from Rüdiger Dorn/AEG. If you haven't played the original, it came out in 2014 and won the Kennerspiel des Jahres award. It's often considered a worker placement game, but has a unique mechanic of moving a stack of tokens around and leaving one where you end your movement to take that action. When you're out of tokens, you have to stack back on top of tokens you've left behind, or you don't get to do any more actions until you reset your stack at a predetermined location.

I already really, really liked the original game as a light-to-middle weight euro style game, but the Mocha & Baksheesh expansion makes it even better. Adds another row of game board tiles expanding the distance between spaces and in turn increasing the need to be strategic in how you move around since you're at greater risk of running out of actions and needing to spend a turn resetting. The new coffee resource you can collect adds a bunch of new interesting options for strategies to earn the game-winning rubies, and various other really cool new strategic mechanics (such as a barrier you can place which prevents other players only from moving through, or new special tiles that grant you new movement options, or various financial bonuses, etc.). There's a new card type called Guild cards which, when played, take your entire turn (no moving your stack at all), but are basically amped up versions of the other locations of the board (for example, sell 3 goods for $15, which is a far better ratio than either of the traditional Market spaces normally offer). A couple of them are really powerful so I'm considering relegating the Guild Hall space with these cards to a corner location of the modular board only in the future, but it is a random draw, so probably not THAT important.

All in all it doesn't ramp up the complexity much, I think it still sits comfortably in a middle-weight category at it's heaviest, but if the base game was a 7 or 8, I think the expansion easily brings it up to a 9 for me. Definitely recommend.

Hot Dog Day #42 posted:

StashAugustine posted:

The real Trump game is Eminent Domain

Mister Sinewave posted:

I played my first game of Twilight Struggle last night. I kind of dig the whole system of push and pull and the central idea being to manage and mitigate having and playing cards that are good for your opponent, but I didn't really like the game much overall. Quagmire felt like it took me out of the game since I lost basically an entire round to it and was forced to play only a scoring card that I couldn't do anything about - it obliterated my lead and handed a huge lead to my opponent. Also, it really makes me feel like I can't really play the game properly until I've played it several times and seen/memorized most of the cards. I was continually running into "oh poo poo, there's a card that does that?" moments. Those are not dealbreakers exactly but neither one of those are my, well, we'll just call it my "thing".

Like I said I kind of dig the whole push-pull concept as well as the central idea of mitigation and damage control, but overall I didn't really enjoy the game much. It reminded me of Wir Sind Das Volk but with shitloads of die rolling to resolve stuff.

OneDeadman posted:

The solution is obviously to just make Mage Knight but with Dark Souls

StashAugustine posted:

The real Trump game is Eminent Domain

al-azad posted:

Something like Agricola with its near perfect information and inability to outright lose is a challenging puzzle, not a hard game.

Bottom Liner posted:

Speaking of Wir Sind Das Volk, I accidentally joined an open game of it on Boardgamecore and ended up playing for 3 weeks with some guy. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but I kept playing things that would make the various tracts move towards him, as I assumed that was good. I ended up losing because of getting too many unrest cubes built up in one area or something, but my little policeman marker was very close to his side.

Misandu posted:

Dark Souls is also only hard because you can't take all the actions you want. Limited Stamina, Estus Flasks, and the length of animations all exist to prevent you from doing what you want to do in a given moment. You can't move the camera to see down that corridor, so you have to wait until you're much closer to potential enemies.

So how do you make a board game hard without relying on random elements? I think true fans of the series would consider it a failure if at any point in the DSBG you have to roll dice to determine success. You could give players limited resources that they have to spend to take actions, or maybe they're limited to what actions they can take by cards but that would feel pretty random a lot of times. Maybe each enemy has a small script of attacks you can follow along with, but how do you make that hard if it's just printed on them?

I think there's plenty of good conversation to be had about how you could faithfully translate Dark Souls style game play into a board game, and how you would give it the series characteristic challenge. I also think we're more likely to get Descent with a Dark Souls paint job than anything else.

Broken Loose posted:

The example I brought up, Dark Souls 2, had shitloads of unfair enemy placements including instant death enemies in locations where they were impossible to react to. It also relied heavily upon mobs of enemies with huge life bars and lengthy combos, resulting in fights that were incredibly tedious but not actually difficult (as the main difficulty was trying to get the camera to cooperate and trying not to be so bored during the fight that you did more than a single attack when said enemies left themselves open). Megaman Zero (1) was another game that was marketed heavily on its difficulty, and it was full of similar poo poo like blind platform jumping and grinding (2-4 fixed these problems but coincidentally stopped advertising themselves as insanely hard despite still being very hard).

Space Alert/Dungeon Lords were never marketed on their difficulty and the whole "git gud" meme never flourished in their wake, even though they are the epitome of hard but fair games. You have advance notice for every threat, you have enough resources to beat them, and no RNG exists between player choices and the outcomes of those choices. For a company (who isn't terrifically versed in board game design) to advertise their game's difficulty warns me that they're probably about to make a shitload of bad design choices.

Broken Loose posted:

Space Alert ... no RNG exists between player choices and the outcomes of those choices.

SirFelixCat posted:

13 Days is TS the filler game and gives a similar feel, but in 45 mins. Def recommended. Obviously not as epic as TS, but does a helluva job fir what it is.