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Played FCM today It was awesome even though I got last place. Next play will be a lot better now that I understand how important initial restaurant placement is.
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Jul 16, 2016 21:58
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Tekopo posted:So me and tomdidiot (a wargames thread regular) played in a megagame today that's basically set around the time of Virgin Queen: Is this one of those proctored LARPs like the guys who do the Cold War simulations at conventions? Because I participated in one of those set around the Cuban Revolution and it was really cool.
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Jul 16, 2016 22:04
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Sort of, it is sort of LARPy but it has elements of map exercises there. We had cards that allowed us to do stuff. The same guys ran the Watch the Skies megagames that SUSD took part in, although Watch the Skies is much bigger and more freeform.
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Jul 16, 2016 22:12
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I got into the Watch the Skies event at Gencon this year, me and my group are really looking forward to that event. It was 56 bucks though! Ahh well it runs for 6 hours and I'll never get to do something like that else where.
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Jul 16, 2016 22:17
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$56 each?
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Jul 16, 2016 22:20
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I remember the name now, it's the National Security Decision Making Game ran by some of the most knowledgeable people on Cold War politics I've ever met. There's no actual board game aspect, it's just players controlling different cells of a nationality and using their influence to affect national policy. The proctors are really good about improvisation, maintaining balance when 40 people are running around trying to exert their dominance over each other. If you like political intrigue and live action role playing they attend every big board game convention and I can't recommend it enough.
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Jul 16, 2016 22:36
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CaptainApathyUK posted:As far as I can tell nobody has received either the game or a tracking number in the UK yet. Ideaspatcher have really dropped the ball on this one, apparently for no reason at all. I assume they haven't started UK shipping yet - Jamie did say that they might be arriving up until the end of the month.
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Jul 16, 2016 22:48
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thespaceinvader posted:I assume they haven't started UK shipping yet - Jamie did say that they might be arriving up until the end of the month. He did also say they would be dispatching everything by Tuesday at the absolute latest, and that figure includes rest of the world(I.E not North America East Asia or Australia New Zealand ) not just Europe
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Jul 16, 2016 22:52
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I ended up winning that 6 player Eclipse game I played. My strategy was all over the place, and had to adjust multiple times. My initial plan was to try to isolate, and try to gain a lot of money. I managed to do this quite well in terms of placing hexes so both of my adjacent opponents could not get to me easily. However, someone on the opposite side of the board did the same thing, but got much better tiles, and by turn 3-4 was winning on every single money/research/production tract. In response I bought up plasma missles the first time they appeared, and slapped on the alien tech for +3 targeting computers with no power requirements on my interceptor. This scared the hell out of everyone, who started spending all their actions defensively. Well I never even fired a single missile the entire game. I just placed about 4 interceptors in the one tier I tile that acted as my choke point to the rest of the universe, and then proceeded to never spend a single action on military again. I spent the next few turns teching up the entire bottom research tree, and then built 3 orbitals. No one ended up trying to stop me, because they were too scared of my 1 chokepoint tile with all the missle interceptors. Instead they used their newly bought military to fight each other. I won with 39 points. One strange thing that really turned my roommate off the game was that the person next to him ended up placing his Tier I tile, and essentially boxed him out of the game. I was on the other side of him, and built in a way that prevented him from having an easy connection to me. When he tried to explore outwards into his own territory, he quickly got 2 tiles with ancients, and then the tiles ran out. While he spent time fighting the ancients, the guy who placed his Tier I funneled him into a single chokepoint as his only connection to the rest of the galaxy, and then stuck 3 starbases with +4 damage buffs onto that tile. I guess the lesson is don't let other people place your Tier I tile? After 2 plays I like the game, but don't love it. There's just a bit too much randomness for my taste with the large variation in quality of the exploration tiles, alien techs, etc... Where one person could be surrounded by ancients, another could get a bunch of white plants + free discovery token tiles. Also any combat involving dice usually turns me off in general, although I will admit this game seems to handle it moderately well. I remember a while back people mentioning there was a game like Eclipse, but without dice for combat, and overall less luck. Can't remember the name though.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:14
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Sometimes on an explore it's better to place nothing rather than box yourself in with ancients
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Jul 17, 2016 00:25
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Rumda posted:He did also say they would be dispatching everything by Tuesday at the absolute latest, and that figure includes rest of the world(I.E not North America East Asia or Australia New Zealand ) not just Europe Yup. Everyone should have received their copy by July 29th. That was the original scheduled date, and Ideaspatcher are insisting they can manage it even after their cock-up. There are about 1400 backers in the UK alone, so I'll be surprised if they can manage that pace.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:29
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I have tons and tons of downtime at work, and an iPad... so any really good iOS ports of board games? I have Ascension and I've heard that the Twilight Struggle app is pretty good. Any other noteworthy ones?
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Jul 17, 2016 03:25
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im gaye posted:Thanks, thread, for recommending WHQ:ACG based on my enjoyment of Death Angel. It is brutally difficult. Glad you like it. We play a lot of cooperative games here and that one has been one of our favorites. GrandpaPants posted:We played Mystic Vale yesterday, and while I thought that the idea of a "cardbuilder" game was pretty interesting, the game itself felt very...basic? It was a first play, so take that for what it's worth, but I didn't really see anything resembling any interesting interactions or really any deep strategizing. It also has the dubious honor of being a market row deckbuilder, but at least there are like 5 different markets to choose from of 3 cards each, so that wasn't too bad at least. Also, the push your luck mechanic really encouraged card counting, which is one of those things that I find super tedious. Ah, man, I literally just bought the game a few hours ago and got it sleeved up and came to see if anyone here had played it. Was hoping for a better review.
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Jul 17, 2016 03:37
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MockingQuantum posted:I have tons and tons of downtime at work, and an iPad... so any really good iOS ports of board games? I have Ascension and I've heard that the Twilight Struggle app is pretty good. Any other noteworthy ones? iOS board games (not saying they're all good games, but decent app versions if you like the games): Agricola Tigres & Euphrates Puerto Rico San Juan Lost Cities Summoner War Ticket to Ride Ascension Carcassonne Galaxy Trucker Patchwork Pandemic Dominion Splendor Eclipse Twilight Struggle Le Harve Glass Road Lords of Waterdeep Small World Caylus Stone Age Neuroshima Hex Suburbia Castles of Mad King Ludwig Star Realms Warhammer Quest Galaxy of Trian Brass Scotland Yard Baseball Highlights 2045 Digital only games that I recommend for board gamers: New World Colony Polytopia Hearthstone Hero Academy Coming soon to iOS: Agricola: All Creatures Big And Small Through the Ages Tokaido Codenames Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Jul 17, 2016 |
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Jul 17, 2016 03:38
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MockingQuantum posted:I have tons and tons of downtime at work, and an iPad... so any really good iOS ports of board games? I have Ascension and I've heard that the Twilight Struggle app is pretty good. Any other noteworthy ones? As a System Administrator with an iPad, I feel that I'm qualified to assist you in loving around instead of working. I've been playing the following lately: BattleLore: Command - Pretty good adaptation of the board game, if you like command and color style war games. Elder Sign: Omens - Again, a perfectly adequate adaptation of the physical. Space Hulk - Claustrophobic and frustratingly difficult so basically it's Space Hulk Deathwatch - Another 40k game that isn't actually a board game adaptation but plays like one anyway.
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Jul 17, 2016 03:45
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Tekopo posted:Sort of, it is sort of LARPy but it has elements of map exercises there. We had cards that allowed us to do stuff. The same guys ran the Watch the Skies megagames that SUSD took part in, although Watch the Skies is much bigger and more freeform. One caveat to those sorts of games is that it needs a lot of structure going on in the background to make things run smoothly. I played a Watch the Skies game run by a guy who got really enthusiastic after hearing about it and watching it. It did not go well.
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Jul 17, 2016 03:52
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Shadin posted:As a System Administrator with an iPad, I feel that I'm qualified to assist you in loving around instead of working. I've been playing the following lately: I would argue the app is the only way Elder Sign is worth even bothering with. It's still pretty slight and not very well balanced but having pretty art and music and stuff makes it a modestly amusing alternative to solitaire. The Sentinels of the Multiverse app is pretty good although it's not at content parity with the tabletop version yet.
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Jul 17, 2016 04:21
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malkav11 posted:The Sentinels of the Multiverse app is pretty good although it's not at content parity with the tabletop version yet. Luckily there remains zero reason to ever play sentinels of the multiverse, because it plays itself with zero input from the player.
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Jul 17, 2016 04:40
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Sentinels of the Multiverse has worse art than Dream Quest
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Jul 17, 2016 04:47
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A friend made a copy of Tak and I walked away with a good first impression. He glued a gently caress ton of balsa wood together then used a soldering iron to scald the lines. He plans on staining it eventually. The pieces all came from a gardening store I guess and we used a loving beer cap as the center tile.  To run down the basics you have two pieces, a flat piece and a capstone. The objective is to connect two opposite sides of the board with your pieces. On your turn you can play a piece flat or standing in an empty space or move your piece or a stack of pieces you control (your piece is on top). Flat pieces stack, flat pieces can't stack on a standing piece, the capstone flattens a standing piece, nothing stacks on the capstone. Early game was kind of confusing as we sized each other up but once we placed about half our pieces it turned into a rather intense game of outmaneuvering each other. My opponent (playing white) was trying to connect the right edge of the board but he hosed up placing a standing piece in that line way earlier in the game which he couldn't win until he flattened it with his capstone. This gave me time to shuffle some pieces around until I suddenly won by moving an unrelated stack out of a key location and connecting a line to the edge of the board. Honestly I think this game benefits from making your own board. The guy I was playing with lamented not buying two of the Devi boxes so he could sell them as he was also impressed by a hand made board, even if the quality is nowhere near what the final product is offering there's just something rustic about it? al-azad fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jul 17, 2016 |
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Jul 17, 2016 05:31
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Can't find Brand New Colony on US App Store
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Jul 17, 2016 05:34
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malkav11 posted:I would argue the app is the only way Elder Sign is worth even bothering with. It's still pretty slight and not very well balanced but having pretty art and music and stuff makes it a modestly amusing alternative to solitaire. I would have mostly agreed with you with the base game and first expansion in museum mode (though the wife and I still enjoyed it for what it was), but the Gates of Arkham and Omens of Ice expansions are just exceptional and add a lot more meat to the game.
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Jul 17, 2016 05:35
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al-azad posted:A friend made a copy of Tak and I walked away with a good first impression. He glued a gently caress ton of balsa wood together then used a soldering iron to scald the lines. He plans on staining it eventually. The pieces all came from a gardening store I guess and we used a loving beer cap as the center tile. This is awesome. I might make this a weekend project. Lorini posted:Can't find Brand New Colony on US App Store Oops, it's New World Colony, fixing the post.
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Jul 17, 2016 05:43
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Malloreon posted:Luckily there remains zero reason to ever play sentinels of the multiverse, because it plays itself with zero input from the player. Yeah, this is just not true.
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Jul 17, 2016 06:52
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I got to try Phil Eklund's BIOS: Megafauna today. You're trying to build up as many starting animals as you can start starting from a fairly generic dinosaur/mammal. You'll pick up abilities from a Small-World style common queue, with money being fixed so taking the weaker cards for payment can be very tempting. (I forget if we had a better name for the payment-related common markets to distinguish them from others). The abilities will let you eat in more places, compete better for eating, or predate / fend off predators. Each turn you take only one action, which is usually a fairly small play so turns can pass quickly - except when the next person doesn't notice you're done. Over the course of the game climate will change and biomes will appear/vanish, so being too set in your ways can leave you in trouble as your food disappears. Theoretically you can have a catastrophe punishing you for taking too many abilities but we didn't have any come up in two games, which also caused the game to end sooner than we might have expected (there are the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, we never reached the latter and ran out of Mesozoic tiles). It reminded me of Evolution a little in gameplay as well as theme - you are using cards to grant abilities to eat more easily, and in both games having a species feed on another of your own can be useful. Your species are defined a bit less rigidly - it's nothing for a species to eat both background wildlife (plant/animal/insect) and other megafauna. Being fed off of hurts you much less here, it seemed. I only ever had two species, whenever I was thinking of branching a third it didn't work out (you pass on a limited amount of DNA/abilities so it can be tricky to make sure the new one can eat safely and survive to your next turn) or I lost some of my current ones and needed to rebuild, or the game ended. I did have two eating each other for a while (in one tile A was herbivorous* and B fed on them, vice versa in another tile) which led to a problem - since defences and counters to those defences are the same, if either species picked one up the other one would starve a little. Eventually one of my dinosaurs learned to hunt with projectiles  which let the other safely get a defence against my foes. Others started getting hit a little harder by biome shifts and general crowding and the game ended with me having a lot more animals in play (and a strong first scoring) for a win.Overall I enjoyed the game but I'm concerned about the random swing in catastrophe card distribution, there's no seeding of the deck. The rules are being revised and it would probably be worth looking into those if you play it - we took a couple of of simple changes from them, two queues for drafting cards in a 4-player game was great. I think they also suggest a variant of just moving into the Cenozoic instead of ending the game in our situations. The first game was around two hours including setup and rules explanation with nobody having played before (a very odd starting queue), the second was around three hours (using the dual queue system, which puts a lot more cards in play thus slowing the game down).
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Jul 17, 2016 06:57
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malkav11 posted:Yeah, this is just not true. Here we go again.
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Jul 17, 2016 07:04
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I'm going to play Eminent Domain + Escalation for the first time tomorrow. I've combined the expansion in from the get go as recommended by this thread. What are you feelings on scenarios both for first time players and in general?
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Jul 17, 2016 07:32
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It will be fine. The base game is really barebones if they're familiar with action selection games or deckbuilders. The expansion just adds on starting scenarios and makes the different ships matter as a currency. You could skip the scenarios for the newbies and give them to anyone that's played, but they're really fun and let you have a direction to build towards. I like the method of dealing 2 or 3 and choosing 1.
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Jul 17, 2016 07:37
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DonnyTrump posted:Any opinions on Empires: Age of Discovery? A little far back, but one I can help with. I liked it well enough. Only had three players though, and it'd be different (and probably better) with more. You really have to make sure you get colonists over since there's only so many spots. Strategies will vary highly depending on which options come up, and don't let one person hog all the merchant stuff or it'll pile up. It'll take a couple plays to really get a solid feel for it, but it's not a game that's going to hit the table frequently unless you have Hardcore friends.
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Jul 17, 2016 08:11
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Rumda posted:He did also say they would be dispatching everything by Tuesday at the absolute latest, and that figure includes rest of the world(I.E not North America East Asia or Australia New Zealand ) not just Europe Was that before or after the announcement that Europe would be a bit delayed?
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Jul 17, 2016 09:23
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thespaceinvader posted:Was that before or after the announcement that Europe would be a bit delayed? This was the last update last week.
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Jul 17, 2016 10:49
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How do you find out about MegaGames in the UK? My friend and I would love to do that kind of thing.
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Jul 17, 2016 10:55
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Fat Turkey posted:How do you find out about MegaGames in the UK? My friend and I would love to do that kind of thing. A local gaming group ran two instances of watch the skies last year, so i suggest checking surrounding cities as well as just googling UK MegaGames
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Jul 17, 2016 11:07
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Fat Turkey posted:How do you find out about MegaGames in the UK? My friend and I would love to do that kind of thing.
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Jul 17, 2016 12:15
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I got Galaxy Trucker as a birthday present from two kind friends today; is there anything you need to be aware of before playing the first time?al-azad posted:A friend made a copy of Tak and I walked away with a good first impression. He glued a gently caress ton of balsa wood together then used a soldering iron to scald the lines. He plans on staining it eventually. The pieces all came from a gardening store I guess and we used a loving beer cap as the center tile. That looks cool, I'm glad it's actually a fun game to play too!
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Jul 17, 2016 14:32
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Had a pretty bad experience at a boardgame meetup yesterday. I was excited to play Scythe with other people and one guy had read the rules and was ready to go. It took an exceedingly long time to teach the other 3. One player got attacked fairly early, which disrupted her strategy. She declared the game broken and threatened to quit. Later someone realized they had made a movement mistake and the complainer made us backtrack several turns. More complaining about how broken various aspects of the game were until we just wanted to end things quickly. Then as we were clearing up, she spilled water on the board. Lesson: gaming with strangers is a crap shoot. PS - After that, I played Splendor for the first time with perfectly nice people and it was fun. I know this thread is ambivalent about it, but it seems fine for a lightweight-but-not-quite-filler game.
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Jul 17, 2016 14:51
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I cannot imagine how whiny someone would have to be to roll back several turns on a game it sounds like most people were already bumming out hard on. It must be an extremely powerful technique.
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Jul 17, 2016 14:56
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House Louse posted:I got Galaxy Trucker as a birthday present from two kind friends today; is there anything you need to be aware of before playing the first time? Don't build cabins next to each other. Aliens do not go in life support modules, they replace human crew members in the attached cabin. In other words, if you have a purple module linked up to a cabin, that gives you the choice of putting two humans or a purple alien in that cabin before the race begins. Connectors link up one to one, two to two, universal to one or two, and nothing to nothing. That is to say, you can't have a connector go into the side of a piece with no connector, but you can have it go into an empty tile spot or into empty space. Also, note that everything involving weapons, energy and engines is color coded. If it has purple, it involves lasers. If it has brown, it involves engines. If it has green, it's either batteries or something that uses batteries. Don't forget to look at the adventure cards while you're building, so you know what to plan for. Other than that, don't feel too bad if you get wrecked your first time. The game actually has a decent skill ceiling even though it seems random, and half the fun is having your ship fall apart anyways.
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Jul 17, 2016 15:11
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Was chatting with one of my board gaming friends (and a fellow goon) about diving into the realm of sperg and getting one of the 18xx games. I've read here a nice long effort post about 18xx a while ago, but forgot who posted it, so could someone link that? Or in the very least, which 18xx game(s) would be the best as an introduction to the series?
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Jul 17, 2016 15:29
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CaptainRightful posted:Had a pretty bad experience at a boardgame meetup yesterday. I was excited to play Scythe with other people and one guy had read the rules and was ready to go. It took an exceedingly long time to teach the other 3. Were the other three just that thick or totally new to Euro gaming? It's a big game, but the concepts really aren't that difficult to grasp. Especially if two of you already knew the rules. CaptainRightful posted:One player got attacked fairly early, which disrupted her strategy. She declared the game broken and threatened to quit. Later someone realized they had made a movement mistake and the complainer made us backtrack several turns. More complaining about how broken various aspects of the game were until we just wanted to end things quickly. Early in the first play of a game new to her she had already locked in a strategy so tight she couldn't change course? More evidence that when people set their mind on a belief it's exceedingly hard to change that course. Congrats to her on making everyone else as miserable as she was. I may have pointed out that the game experience was directly impacted by the behaviors displayed. CaptainRightful posted:Then as we were clearing up, she spilled water on the board. While I'm sure the spilling of the water was unintentional, the lack of care/attention was. She didn't like the game and didn't assign it any value to treat it better than she did. I'm curious as to how the board fared. The components are all of pretty good quality and if you got to it fast enough it should have been fine, but cardboard is pretty absorbent. If it got to a cut edge, the damage was likely done. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't said something prior to this point I would have by then. Getting a stranger to pay for damage to something is nearly impossible, but I would have had some form or satisfaction even if only verbal. I'm borderline certifiable when it comes to setting up and tearing down my games. I just ask everyone to leave until I have it done because it's far easier to be mad at me for potentially damaging something than opening the box next time to discover unknown damage done by unknown persons. I own that that is nuts, but it has worked for me so far. CaptainRightful posted:Lesson: gaming with strangers is a crap shoot. To quote a friend: Bad gaming is worse than no gaming.
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Jul 17, 2016 15:52
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