|
How the hell did you guys store Millenium Blades in a way that resembles sanity? Don't make me sandwich bag all of these packs 
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 09:25 |
|
|
EVGA Longoria posted:Anyone else playing the Tiny Epic games? I've been picking them up and they're super fun. Tiny Epic Galaxies came in today and I gave it a go with the solo rules. It's fun. Galaxies is good but the other two are really drat bland. Like you finish the game and "yup, that was a game" kind of thing. They hit a stride with TeG where they actually put a full game in a tiny box, and that's much better. Western looks good as well, and seems to blend in Poker mechanics well.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:09
|
|
|
So Twilight Struggle came out on Steam, and even aside from the bugs, it's hard to believe this was considered the Best Board Game In The World for so long. Seems like you have to memorize the entire deck before you can develop a meaningful strategy. It was cheap, so I'm going to stick with it until I grasp the core concepts, but can any of you explain what makes this so legendarily fantastic?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:23
|
|
|
CaptainRightful posted:So Twilight Struggle came out on Steam, and even aside from the bugs, it's hard to believe this was considered the Best Board Game In The World for so long. Seems like you have to memorize the entire deck before you can develop a meaningful strategy. It was cheap, so I'm going to stick with it until I grasp the core concepts, but can any of you explain what makes this so legendarily fantastic? Keep playing it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:28
|
|
|
CaptainRightful posted:So Twilight Struggle came out on Steam, and even aside from the bugs, it's hard to believe this was considered the Best Board Game In The World for so long. Seems like you have to memorize the entire deck before you can develop a meaningful strategy. It was cheap, so I'm going to stick with it until I grasp the core concepts, but can any of you explain what makes this so legendarily fantastic? You have to memorize the deck before you can play perfectly. You can't play perfectly, so don't worry about that. To play meaningfully, you need to know which decks the scoring cards are in, and about a few key events. Sadly that is easier to do IRL, an opponent can show them to you at deck transitions (Wargames, some DEFCON suicide stuff comes to mind). It shouldn't take _too_ long to get through them the hard way, at least not if the games reach Late War. I can't explain why it's fantastic, even though I've enjoyed it each time I've played. The history/atmosphere is very hit/miss thanks to the high degree of abstraction. And even if you know that such-and-such area shifted towards one side, you don't know if that is represented by adding influence, removing the other side's, or both.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:43
|
|
|
T-Bone posted:Noted Interesting and Good Game Container may be getting a reprint next year which is swell because I don't want to drop $250. How much more can I get with the expansion?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:45
|
|
|
GrandpaPants posted:How the hell did you guys store Millenium Blades in a way that resembles sanity? Pretty much. I did a bag for each type of set ie core, expansions, masters, etc. People on bgg mentioned using an Ultra Pro 180pt top loaders for each individual set as well.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 06:58
|
|
|
CaptainRightful posted:So Twilight Struggle came out on Steam, and even aside from the bugs, it's hard to believe this was considered the Best Board Game In The World for so long. Seems like you have to memorize the entire deck before you can develop a meaningful strategy. It was cheap, so I'm going to stick with it until I grasp the core concepts, but can any of you explain what makes this so legendarily fantastic? There are probably not that many people whose favourite game is TS, but it was no 1 on bgg because pretty much everyone who has played it thinks it's pretty darn good and not many people think it's bad. Being two player also somewhat self selects for people who like it, I suspect. Basically I think it is extremely balanced and evocative of the theme, and stands up to many, many plays. You can run a tournament of it and reasonably expect the best players to win. It's true that you have to have a pretty good understanding of the cards before you get good, but that only matters if the skill levels of the players are really out of whack. One or two plays and players will be generally know what they need to, like when the scoring cards come out and what tends to happen where. As mentioned earlier in the thread there are a few traps (quagmire/bear trap, Olympic Games and other defcon cards) but mostly learning the game is about how what looks like a bad hand can actually be a really good one (eg lots of opponents events means you get lots of ops and can decide what order they come out, which is often better than if they are in your opponents hand, as you can often fix them immediately with ops or otherwise play them so they have less impact).
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 07:07
|
|
|
taser rates posted:Pretty much. I did a bag for each type of set ie core, expansions, masters, etc. People on bgg mentioned using an Ultra Pro 180pt top loaders for each individual set as well. Can you sleeve those cards before top loadering them?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 07:18
|
|
|
The General posted:Can you sleeve those cards before top loadering them? I don't think so, that was just for unsleeved. I'm not even going to consider sleeving MB though, the store deck is already ridiculously big and difficult to shuffle as it is, feels like the box would collapse into a black hole if sleeved.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 07:29
|
|
|
Twilight Struggle was number one because it let normies taste the divine majesty of modern wargaming. It`s the Diablo to Mark Herman`s Rogue, it` the League of Legends to Ted Raicer`s Dota, It`s also a prety baller game.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 07:38
|
|
|
Banana Man posted:Broken Loose do you have any games you would consider terrible that you love to play? Yes, actually! Kill Doctor Lucky is a very bad game which I absolutely love. There is heavy politics, rampant kingmaking potential, ridiculously high RNG both pre- and post-decision, an incredibly fun but incredibly unfair turn order system that basically requires players to chain actions in a specific manner, and the whole thing takes way too loving long. The only thing missing is player elimination. KDL is playable and enjoyable primarily through its strong theming (a strong theme alloy supplemented by a fair amount of dripping theme layered on top), very unorthodox but abusable turn-order system (basically, turns go clockwise until somebody positions the Doctor in a way as to intercept the current turn), significantly tense bluffing mechanisms, high amount of individual true choices, and the severity of its climaxes. All of these are why I like the game, but they do not make up for the fundamental issues the game has compared to better, newer games.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 07:57
|
|
|
Having just recently begun to play TS, I think the key concept is you spend every second of every game sweating bullets, trying to guess what your opponent is doing and how to counter it. Even when you're at 18 vp and everything seems to go swimmingly you're only a couple steps away from losing your hold on Europe, and oh god the communists have begun to take over Africa again, and I can't let them score it, but I'm losing my hold over Asia, and why am I holding a bunch of 2 ops cards and lovely events that will utterly break me if I play them for ops points. Oh, crap, defcon two again, better bin my plan of launching a Coup to regain influence in Africa. Oh gently caress me, I bet they have score middle east, and I've only got a tenuous hold of Israel, if they play that stupid war card I may as well give up on holding it. Then it turns out they didn't have a scoring card and all they have are crap cards too, but that's fine because you're both scrambling to make things happen, and you stop paying attention for a minute and there goes central america, better dedicate resources to getting it back. It somehow captures the feel of the theme too, you can see yourself trying to stop the domino effect, and well, you have to accept some bad things to keep things going, and yeah, defcon two is dangerous, but I can't let *her* call the shots with the coup attempts. And sure, you can found NATO, but that's a big commitment to europe, maybe you can't put out that fire right now. I can't really capture why it's a good game exactly, but it really really is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 07:58
|
|
|
TheCog posted:Having just recently begun to play TS, I think the key concept is you spend every second of every game sweating bullets, trying to guess what your opponent is doing and how to counter it. Even when you're at 18 vp and everything seems to go swimmingly you're only a couple steps away from losing your hold on Europe, and oh god the communists have begun to take over Africa again, and I can't let them score it, but I'm losing my hold over Asia, and why am I holding a bunch of 2 ops cards and lovely events that will utterly break me if I play them for ops points. Oh, crap, defcon two again, better bin my plan of launching a Coup to regain influence in Africa. Oh gently caress me, I bet they have score middle east, and I've only got a tenuous hold of Israel, if they play that stupid war card I may as well give up on holding it. Having only started playing since the Steam version came out a couple of days ago, this sounds right. I really enjoy how it captures the paranoia between the two superpowers. All that influence getting placed in South-East Asia COULD mean they have the scoring card, or maybe they're just trying to make you think that so you'll waste your ops there, or maybe they think you're making a play for South-East Asia, or... There's a nice sort of widening out of the game as you go from early to mid war, too. As the US, the Fidel/Fall of the Portuguese Empire and other cards are an annoyance, but you're too busy in Europe/Asia/the ME to put those fires out right now. Which of course bites you in the rear end in the midwar when there's commies everywhere. It's a nice push-and-pull of brinksmanship as you use coups to further your agenda and lock out some regions with DEFCON, but if you get too close you have the potential of blowing everything up. Boycotting my opponent's Olympics card to hit DEFCON 1 and lose the game for them was also a hilarious way for the cold war to go thermonuclear hot 
The Narrator fucked around with this message at 08:20 on Apr 17, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 08:18
|
|
|
Lichtenstein posted:Twilight Struggle was number one because it let normies taste the divine majesty of modern wargaming. It`s the Diablo to Mark Herman`s Rogue, it` the League of Legends to Ted Raicer`s Dota, Ok this is much better than what I was trying to say and 100% accurate. It's like someone who loves the Wild West but has never seen a movie before seeing the start of Once Upon a Time in the West.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 08:44
|
|
|
Blamestorm posted:There are probably not that many people whose favourite game is TS, but it was no 1 on bgg because pretty much everyone who has played it thinks it's pretty darn good and not many people think it's bad. Being two player also somewhat self selects for people who like it, I suspect. Basically this. I've heard this exact sentiment from most people I've played it with.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 09:06
|
|
|
CaptainRightful posted:So Twilight Struggle came out on Steam, and even aside from the bugs, it's hard to believe this was considered the Best Board Game In The World for so long. Seems like you have to memorize the entire deck before you can develop a meaningful strategy. It was cheap, so I'm going to stick with it until I grasp the core concepts, but can any of you explain what makes this so legendarily fantastic? It's worth noting that the AI is apparently not that strong. I've played a total of two games now (once in real life, once against the computer), and I feel like I'm a lot better than the computer already. I just finished an absolute destruction of AI USSR; he kept wasting ops securing Africa (which I was happy to just take presence in via Algeria) and breaking control in random countries with influence (which I'd then fix more efficiently). Meanwhile, I built out control of Europe, Asia, South America, and Central America, and domination of the Middle East, eventually winning on Europe scoring control. It feels like I was able to coup battlegrounds in CA/SA way more than I should have - he'd just kind of durdle on his first action round and let me have control of Defcon. On one round he played a very early Five Year Plans (I think? and I think Defcon was at 3 so I can't imagine what he could have been thinking) and ended up playing Containment off it (this round didn't go well for him). Perhaps they're harvesting game data in a way that will help them build out the AI a bit stronger, but buyer beware if you're expecting to buy this as a compelling single player game. But still, the game itself is great I think. Edit: my only complaint so far is that some of the events don't seem, uh, right; it feels like they're balanced around game states that are unlikely. Like, the event on NATO would make sense if Defcon was likely to sit on 5 for any length of time. As it stands, it feels hyper-terrible, and its only real effect on the game is to reward whoever had the skill to draw it. I realize balance here must be a nightmare, and that it's fine if some events have specialized use cases - but I'm surprised the balance isn't better given how beloved the game is. jmzero fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Apr 17, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 09:09
|
|
|
jmzero posted:Perhaps they're harvesting game data in a way that will help them build out the AI a bit stronger, but buyer beware if you're expecting to buy this as a compelling single player game. According to the backer updates, this is what they're doing. I can't imagine writing AI for this game is an easy job.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 09:43
|
|
|
Yeah, NATO is really only good for protecting Italy from a Brush War, and the rest of Europe from an upgraded Glasnost. Also, while DEFCON naturally improving to 5 is basically impossible, it's not uncommon for a losing player to use How I Learned to Stop Worrying to move it to 5, or the missile treaty one to improve it to 4, just before the end of the turn. Also yeah, I've seen the US AI put a point into Cuba and then THE NEXT ACTION ROUND playing Fidel. There have also been reports in the Steam forums about it committing DEFCON suicide--not through screwing up with cards, but by couping at DEFCON 2 and stuff like that.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 09:54
|
|
|
Yeah, the AI is not terribly strong, so it's good job you have the option for a handicap system. The only game I lost is where is casually played Duck and Cover at DEFCON 2 and I got the game over screen  It feels like the designers need to take a look at Twilight Strategy and implement some of the stuff in there, like AR1 coup for the USSR and the AR7 play for the USA. Maybe in the future they will be able to implement different difficulty levels or something. NATO is a bad event, I have never seen a USA player play it for the event.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 10:23
|
|
|
NATO-less Europe can sometimes get sniped by virtue of soviets having the first action in a round. So they can headline a DEFCON improving event and rush in before you have a chance to react. Still, you probably can let it reshuffle until the soviets draw it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 10:26
|
|
|
Lichtenstein posted:NATO-less Europe can sometimes get sniped by virtue of soviets having the first action in a round. So they can headline a DEFCON improving event and rush in before you have a chance to react. Yeah, it has its uses but its never worth passing up those 4 juicy ops. The other weird thing that the AI in this does is obsessively try to break control of countries by placing influence. While this play has its place (usually as part of an action round 7 play for US or using China Card to take Thailand) doing it all the time just hands you ops, since it takes 2 ops to break control and you can just spend 1 op to get it back.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 11:06
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:Yeah, it has its uses but its never worth passing up those 4 juicy ops. I assumed this was the AI's way of being paranoid about the scoring cards you might have.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 13:44
|
|
|
GrandpaPants posted:How the hell did you guys store Millenium Blades in a way that resembles sanity? You want Plasti-bands. I'm on mobile, look them up on Amazon
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 14:55
|
|
|
Objectively bad game: Me and you take two six sided dice. We roll the dice until one of us has rolled 10,000. That player wins. This game epitomizes many objectively wrong mechanics in games.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 14:57
|
|
|
Lorini posted:Objectively bad game: Me and you take two six sided dice. We roll the dice until one of us has rolled 10,000. That player wins.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 15:03
|
|
|
GrandpaPants posted:How the hell did you guys store Millenium Blades in a way that resembles sanity? I used some Hugo's Amazing Tape. I banded them by type. Expansion, Master, Expert, Promos, and setup stuff like the starter decks and meta cards. I then did the store deck and promos for my store separately. The unused cards are on the left, the store deck and money on the right. Trade tokens and chips got bagged.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 15:42
|
|
|
Lorini posted:Objectively bad game: Me and you take two six sided dice. We roll the dice until one of us has rolled 10,000. That player wins. You didn't specify that you take turns. You have created a cool "Rapid Dice Rolling" dexterity game, which would be awesome.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 16:35
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:You didn't specify that you take turns. You have created a cool "Rapid Dice Rolling" dexterity game, which would be awesome. If you rolled only 6s on all rolls and could roll every three seconds on average, the game still takes an hour and a half. Is this "awesome game" called Carpal Tunnel?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 17:29
|
|
|
OK, I think I'm getting the hang of Twilight Struggle. What was most annoying was not knowing whether I was running up against a rule I misunderstood or just a bug. For an example of the former: I didn't realize at first that DEFCON level disallows coups and realignments in different regions. The interface doesn't make that clear: you can highlight an ineligible country, the click doesn't work, but the game doesn't tell you why. For an example of the latter: frequently, after placing influence but before commiting the move, the game will hang with a "Waiting for opponent to decide" message, even though there's nothing for the opponent to decide. Zooming into a region seems to clear this bug, but it's still a pain in the rear end. After figuring those issues out, I just beat the AI by dominating Europe and Southeast Asia; holding more of Asia, Central America, and South America; and letting him have the Middle East and Africa. I was up by 11 when I was dealt Wargames.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:It feels like the designers need to take a look at Twilight Strategy and implement some of the stuff in there, like AR1 coup for the USSR and the AR7 play for the USA. Maybe in the future they will be able to implement different difficulty levels or something. Yeah - at this point I think a reasonably tuned rule-based engine might outperform what they have. But I sympathize with what they're doing; I don't think they want to seed in behaviors like this. I think they want to allow their AI to grow more naturally out of observation/experiment. In the end this will probably result in a better/more-natural agent - but in the meantime maybe they don't have something terribly satisfying. And yeah, it is a challenging game from an AI perspective. The fashionable approach - neural networks for policy and position valuation, then Monte Carlo out some moves - is hamstrung by all the hidden information (the approach would still likely work pretty well, but it might be easy to bully via bluffs, putting a cap on its performance). Meanwhile, the game has too much state to approach it like you'd approach Poker (ie. with composite strategies corresponding to classes of states or something). I don't think it's some kind of extra-extra special game this way (ie. I'm sure a concerted effort by Google or something would break it pretty quickly), but it's definitely on the harder side. Edit: lastly, we're being hard on the AI - but in general I think this implementation has a lot going for it. The art and presentation style is really sweet, and the interface just has a few oddities. jmzero fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Apr 17, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 17:52
|
|
|
http://www.polyhedroncollider.com/2016/04/dark-souls-board-game-preview.html Wowee, look at this! Somebody played a preview version of the Dark Souls board game! quote:At Salute 2016 I was had the opportunity to play a demo of the new Dark Souls board game. It was a shortened version of the game, concentrating on an end of level boss character, but I can tell you now, it manages to capture the feel of Dark Souls in board game form. quote:During each player’s turn, as you can play this game cooperatively, you move and attack. Each action requires the spending of stamina, and this is the main mechanical deviation from the video game. Stamina and health are all taken from the same pool, crossed off on your card with dry erase marker. Stamina is removed from the left hand side and health from the right, if ever the entire bar is depleted then your character dies and returns to the bonfire. quote:Speaking of the boss, his actions are controlled via a small deck of cards. Each card is an attack and shows the boss’s movement, damage and where he will be exposed next round, allowing a bonus to your attack. Once these cards are depleted they are reset and played through again. The sequence remains the same so can you remember which attack is next? Don't get me wrong. The idea doesn't require that, but the tone and execution of the game hints that it will be the case. It reads like you won't have an idea of what a boss is capable of or how to counter it until you force it to deplete its actions, which from the designer's perspective reads like losing to the boss repeatedly but to my perspective reads like encouraging players to never engage the boss until they have farmed its deck. You know what game does that? T.I.M.E. Stories. quote:And it's hard, bloody hard. The aim of the demo was to reduce the boss down from 30 hit points and I managed to knock off only 8 before losing both characters. Part of the problem was that the dice have blank faces, meaning an attack can do bugger all damage if you’re unlucky. ffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrttttttttttttt quote:The other issue is that although the combat is perfectly mimicked I cannot see at this point as to how the board game is going to replicate the exploration and sense of wonder that Dark Souls evokes. FFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT lovely board game adaptation misses the entire loving point of original IP, news at 11. Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Apr 17, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:09
|
|
|
Broken Loose Was Right Again, 2016 (A story in 5 words.) "the dice have blank faces"
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:10
|
|
|
homullus posted:If you rolled only 6s on all rolls and could roll every three seconds on average, the game still takes an hour and a half. Is this "awesome game" called Carpal Tunnel? I don't know if I would play that, but I would certainly watch 
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:17
|
|
|
Broken Loose posted:Broken Loose Was Right Again, 2016 (A story in 5 words.) That just means you can put whatever you want on those sides.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:29
|
|
|
Broken Loose I saw the same demos, I was there, just check one of my previous posts 
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:29
|
|
|
Tekopo posted:Broken Loose I saw the same demos, I was there, just check one of my previous posts Yeah, based off your description and the article, the game looks like T.I.M.E. Stories with dice and overproduced miniatures. Memorize all the poo poo to do in the order you're supposed to do it, and that somehow qualifies as a game. Making choices is so 2015.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:47
|
|
|
What other games have dice with blank faces? All I can think of is Betrayal at House on the Hill
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:52
|
|
|
Scyther posted:What other games have dice with blank faces? All I can think of is Betrayal at House on the Hill Descent has X on the main attack dice (for straight miss) and blanks on defense dice. X-Wing has blanks. I'm going to assume ImpAss is the same way, since that's also FFG.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 09:25 |
|
|
Scyther posted:What other games have dice with blank faces? All I can think of is Betrayal at House on the Hill
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 20:54
|
|