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James The 1st posted:Only ever play Innovation with two. It's also a game where you need to know all the cards. Players that know the cards will usually trounce those that don't. In place of this post, please imagine I posted an image from the film Memento of the Polaroid photo that says "Don't believe his lies."
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Aug 8, 2016 21:52
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James The 1st posted:Only ever play Innovation with two. It's also a game where you need to know all the cards. Players that know the cards will usually trounce those that don't. I was going to mention the latter point before realizing that every 2p game I like aside from, like, Carcassonne, gives significant advantages to the player who knows more. Our at the very least gives them opportunities to show off.
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Aug 8, 2016 22:05
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Just throwing in my two bob on a couple games asked about : Rex - It's very much the speed version of Dune. If you want get it over and done in around 2 hours, Rex makes it possible. A lot of the elements are complete and intact, but the limited turns and tiny amount of actual actions that can be taken mean that it's a very tight game, with almost no margin for error with troop movements if you're not the Lazax (Emperor), Sol (Fremen) or Hacan (Guild), who get free stuff and can vomit troops out. Dune is meatier and a better fit for the theme, but it's bloody long. Argent - I'll be the voice of dissent here and say that it's well designed, but fiddly and granular as fuuuuuck. It's a point salad worker-placer with a Harry Potter theme, and playing it once was enough to tell me that it's a good, well-designed game that I never want to play again in my life. Don't be fooled by the whimsical exterior, inside beats the heart of a Stefan Feldian 'move up the tracks to win' dry euro. Trickerion left me cold for the exact same reason. Scythe - It's not the best game ever made. That out of the way, it IS a really interesting, beautifully put together mashup of Terra Mystica and Kemet, but the resultant game doesn't play out like them. Like many other 4x and 3.5x style games, it's a game of building an economy while simultaneously trying to sprawl out on the map and mess with the economies of your opponents. Combat isn't constant, but more of a fencing match - you probe your opponents empire and work the angles until you find your one main opportunity to try and jam a spanner into their machine. Sometimes it breaks out into tit-for-tat exchanges, other times it's there to stop builder style players from feeling completely safe. It competes in an interesting space: Hyperborea has a more interesting action economy. Romolo O Remo has a more interesting resources economy. Clash of Cultures has an actual tech tree. Out of all of those though, Scythe is the most accessible and the most varied. It does also have the advantage of playing well across it's player count. Time will tell where it finally sits in the stack, but it's a good game, and easiest to come back to out of all of those.
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Aug 8, 2016 22:18
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Council of Blackthorn, the legally distinct totally not Game of Thrones Small Council Game of Thrones game was a surprise treat and the only board game I picked up at GenCon. The players are all vying for control of the kingdom under the watchful eyes of the puppet king. Your victory points and TREASON (cards you earn from others or by doing big power plays) are hidden information, which leads to a fun ending: the player with the highest VP wins, and the person with the highest treason loses their head. The trick is 50 percent of the treason cards are worth 0 treason, so there is a lot of bluffing and table talk trying to deflect targeting.
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Aug 8, 2016 22:24
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Shadin posted:I'll never understand people paying huge money to get a board game a little early. I wish they wouldn't because I can't prove how many things sold at Gen Con are sold to scalpers but I feel like the percentage is high enough that it makes me not want to go. This year was my first gencon and I had an absolute blast. Went primarily for RPGs but I did pick up Scythe and an expansion for Arctic Scavengers on the cheap. Pretty much everyone I talked to was buying games because they liked them. Don't let internet scalper jerks stop you from going, it was an amazing time.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:11
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Shadin posted:I'll never understand people paying huge money to get a board game a little early. I wish they wouldn't because I can't prove how many things sold at Gen Con are sold to scalpers but I feel like the percentage is high enough that it makes me not want to go. "Buying brand new stuff" is generally so miserable at Gencon that I never fret over my wish list. Hell, after my first year, I started making sure I was in events actually playing stuff for the first several hours after the doors open just to avoid the crush and ridiculous lines. I don't know how many of those people are scalpers, but standing in line for hours to buy stuff is not why I go to Gencon. Didn't go this year though for various reasons. Hopefully next year.
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Aug 9, 2016 01:10
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What's the goonsensus on Rum & Bones? I am not a fan of MOBA games, but...this looks pretty good?
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Aug 9, 2016 01:36
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Innovation is as shallow, random and stupid as Fluxx but takes 3 times as long to play. I cannot imagine how anyone can like it.
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Aug 9, 2016 01:39
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Tulpa posted:Innovation is as shallow, random and stupid as Fluxx but takes 3 times as long to play. I cannot imagine how anyone can like it. With 2 players, it's just fun.
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Aug 9, 2016 04:48
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Carteret posted:Council of Blackthorn, the legally distinct totally not Game of Thrones Small Council Game of Thrones game was a surprise treat and the only board game I picked up at GenCon. The players are all vying for control of the kingdom under the watchful eyes of the puppet king. Your victory points and TREASON (cards you earn from others or by doing big power plays) are hidden information, which leads to a fun ending: the player with the highest VP wins, and the person with the highest treason loses their head. The trick is 50 percent of the treason cards are worth 0 treason, so there is a lot of bluffing and table talk trying to deflect targeting. Council of Blackthorn is a quality game, fits nicely in that "get drunk and yell at your friends" niche. If you are the kind of person that gets just as exited about pretending to be an interstellar diplomat in Twilight Imperium as the actual empire building 4x stuff, then this game might be for you. My only complaint is that I wish I could have a travel version of it to make it easier to play out at a bar or wherever.
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Aug 9, 2016 05:36
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My Gen Con haul. So much to play! Less than half of this was actually "on my list", and a couple things I wasn't able to pick up (namely Seafall; even as an exhibitor I didn't get it. Crazy how few they brought.), but stuff just kept being available to me! Can't complain too much. 
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Aug 9, 2016 05:40
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Rum and Bones is Ameritrashy as hell, and can run a little long, but it nails the moba feel. 2nd ed rules should sort out playtime variance a bit as well
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Aug 9, 2016 06:07
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I've always been kind of curious about Nefarious. The premise reminds me of the old Cheapass Games' Before I Kill You, Mister Bond which I liked.
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Aug 9, 2016 06:17
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Clanpot Shake posted:This year was my first gencon and I had an absolute blast. Went primarily for RPGs but I did pick up Scythe and an expansion for Arctic Scavengers on the cheap. Pretty much everyone I talked to was buying games because they liked them. Don't let internet scalper jerks stop you from going, it was an amazing time. Good to know. Maybe I'll make plans for 2017 since that's the 50th hoorah.
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Aug 9, 2016 06:26
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Can we talk more about Fields of Arle vs. Agricola Creatures Big & Small w/ Expansions. I've heard that the Agricola CB&S base game is fairly simple, but that when you add the expansions it becomes a much meatier game. How true is this? Anyone own one or both expansions? With the full package does it even come close to Fields or Arle's depth or are we talking two different levels of game?
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Aug 9, 2016 06:35
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Even with the expansion Acbas does not even come close to the meat of FoA. Acabs is all about the animals. The buildings offer more variety. Like you can try a horse strategy or another building makes it feasable to build less fences but still almost all of your points come from animals. FoA offers so much more different strategies and ways to get points. It is a huge sandbox and i love it. So for a nice little Worker placement game with animals that plays in 20-30 minutes get Acbas. For a meaty Worker placement game with lots of decisions and strategies that takes around 2 hours get FoA (plus it is an amazing solo game)
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Aug 9, 2016 07:52
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I really like All Creatures Big And Small, though I'm a bit odd in that the only big Rosenberg game I really enjoy is Le Havre. ACBAS is about as much pure worker placement as I can typically stand in a neat little package, I'd rather play a few games of it than one game of Agricola. You definitely need one of the building expansions after playing it a bit though, lets you do a variable setup every game.
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Aug 9, 2016 07:57
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Oh Bloodborne! That was the first and only video game I ever got a plat on AND the same game which singlehandedly made every other one look like such poo poo that it drove me to this hobby...which I am finding way way harder to git gud at. I hope it plays as well as I hear from the buzz. Sleekly fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 09:20
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Did anyone else try out London Dread yet? I played it at Gencon and thought the first part of the game with the timer was really interesting, but not sure how many times I'd get it too the table on account of the underwhelming back half of the game.
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Aug 9, 2016 12:05
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Been playing a bit of Race for the Galaxy online because working in August sucks, and I can't decide whether I like it or not. Mostly not, but I'm willing to forgive much in order to slack off. I love simultaneous role taking and the mindgames that come from it, and the develop-produce-consume game is tight. OTOH, the military game is crapshoot (sometimes it seems a small military is worse than no army) and it seems that you can't develop a strategy before getting that all important 6 development card. Plus I spend most of my game selling stuff to only have the option to maybe build something interesting. Card economy is kinda crap in general. Do the expansions fix it? Do... do I somewhat like bad games?  EDIT: The more I think about this, the more I realize that Race is quite random. You select the strategy the game throws at you (military, VP chip cleaning, Big Industry) and then pray that the next cards you get work with that strategy. The rest is optimizing and guessing your opponent intentions to coast on their role selections, but still a healthy amount of draw luck. Fat Samurai fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 12:28
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The End posted:Rum and Bones is Ameritrashy as hell, and can run a little long, but it nails the moba feel. 2nd ed rules should sort out playtime variance a bit as well I hate MOBAs but enjoy Rum and Bones. The upgrade kit is going to streamline the game a bit which it definitely needs. I would either wait until the new game or upgrade kit comes out to get it.
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Aug 9, 2016 12:59
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Fat Samurai posted:Been playing a bit of Race for the Galaxy online because working in August sucks, and I can't decide whether I like it or not. Mostly not, but I'm willing to forgive much in order to slack off. You played Eminent Domain? It's RftG as a deckbuilder and also good.
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Aug 9, 2016 13:08
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Fat Samurai posted:Been playing a bit of Race for the Galaxy online because working in August sucks, and I can't decide whether I like it or not. Mostly not, but I'm willing to forgive much in order to slack off. The first expansion is good and expands a little on the military game to make it a viable option from all angles. The other two expansions I don't care for because they go deep in different meta games that it doesn't really need. I've played the game a bit with my friends who were so deep into Race through college that they designed a card (R&D Crash Program) and played the game with Lehmann to the point where they're probably as intimate with the game as he is. Like any card game you're relying on luck, probability, and knowledge of the deck. You're right in thinking a small military is worse than no military because it's an all-or-nothing affair. If you see a ton of military planets in the discard early game then you know it's foolish to continue on that path and should focus on something else. Race is one of the core engine building games next to Dominion where it's all about efficiency. Go with the flow, don't fight the current. My friends have long fallen out of love with Race which coincided with their falling out of Magic and they explain to me there's a lot of DNA there. Probably explains why I don't care for Race anymore. I like being more in control of my fate.
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Aug 9, 2016 13:14
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If you can get past the box cover and the artwork of the titans and enjoy some direct confrontation in your WP games, do youself a solid and go check out Panthalos. It's an obscure game from Essen 2014, but available. YWIA.
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Aug 9, 2016 13:35
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Fat Samurai posted:Been playing a bit of Race for the Galaxy online because working in August sucks, and I can't decide whether I like it or not. Mostly not, but I'm willing to forgive much in order to slack off. I don't know about Race being particularly random, at least in outcome. The game throws a lot of cards in your direction, and you only select a very few to actually play. That means your fate is largely in your own hands, even if the cards presented to you are pretty random. I really like Race for the Galaxy, just from a design perspective. It's a really deep game, but also fast and easy to set up. It also manages to cram all that into a system that only uses cards. I wish there were more really good games that were just a big deck of cards. Some times it feels like these board game designers don't pay any attention to how many bits their games has, and how fiddly it is to set up and store.
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Aug 9, 2016 14:07
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Bubble-T posted:I really like All Creatures Big And Small, though I'm a bit odd in that the only big Rosenberg game I really enjoy is Le Havre. Would you say ABCAS is a light of medium weight game?
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Aug 9, 2016 14:41
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Fat Samurai posted:Been playing a bit of Race for the Galaxy online because working in August sucks, and I can't decide whether I like it or not. Mostly not, but I'm willing to forgive much in order to slack off. Play with the Alien Artifacts expansion. It's kind of the introductory expansion (even if it's arc #2) and it seems like a strict upgrade to the base game. And winning at Race is about knowing when to pivot strategies based on draws and your opponents' moves -- if you rely blindly on your Turn 0 strategy you will lose most of the time. Oh yeah and Eminent Domain is arguably a better game but it's way less elegant.
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Aug 9, 2016 15:31
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Megasabin posted:Would you say ABCAS is a light of medium weight game? Base game is very light. Expansions push it into medium for strategy, it don't add any further mechanics.
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Aug 9, 2016 15:42
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Tulpa posted:Innovation is as shallow, random and stupid as Fluxx but takes 3 times as long to play. I cannot imagine how anyone can like it. What are the good games from this year? I've been out of the loop for a while. James The 1st fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 15:59
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Countblanc posted:Had a board game meetup this week! I wanted to meet some new people since I just moved to NE Ohio, and evidently the first Sunday of the month the local library has a board game club meet up there. Better still, it was designed for people new to the area and the hobby! Where I'm NE Ohio?
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Aug 9, 2016 16:16
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Are there any cons in Southern Ontario worth attending? I get envious reading about GenCon 
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Aug 9, 2016 16:36
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Sloober posted:Not sure if anyone else has played it but Deception: Murder in Hong Kong was a surprise find at Gen Con thanks to Kaddish. I love playing all social deduction/hidden traitor games ever since I first played BSG. I've barely ever been able to get a 5 person, serious group together to play BSG, so I've resorted to Avalon a lot of the time. Deception seems great for groups that like social deduction, but are horrible at the social part of it. The clues give players topics to talk about and the murderer can easily lie if they chose items similar to items possessed by other players to muddy the water. On the end of the spectrum, I think Werewolf is virtually entirely social- if your group is bad at making conversation and asking probing questions this game is a dud. Deception, Mysterium, Secret Hitler, Resistance, and Werewolf is my ascending ranking of base social skill required for some popular hidden traitor games. The former gives players things to talk about to start it off, while the latter is almost an open conversation with little to no direction.
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Aug 9, 2016 16:40
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Texibus posted:Where I'm NE Ohio? Kent.
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Aug 9, 2016 16:46
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ne Ohio board game meet up soon folks. I need more friends
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Aug 9, 2016 16:56
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Countblanc posted:Kent. Nevermind roughly 3 hour drive for you to game with us.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:00
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Mister Sinewave posted:I've always been kind of curious about [ The premise reminds me of the old Cheapass Games' Before I Kill You, Mister Bond which I liked. Having played Nefarious, despite winning both games, I don't ever intend to play it ever again. The theme barely applies to the mechanics and it all comes down to if you drew high scoring cards. I believe in my second game, aside from maybe the first turn or two to set up, I spent every turn just collecting money until I had enough to play the two high scoring cards back to back and won. Nothing anyone else did mattered. Edit: I've just remember that was only possible because the game has a mechanic that has variable rules from game to game, drawn randomly. That game I was dealt the two highest point scoring cards with the random rule of cost to play cards is halved. So unique scenario but basically very random and not even in the fun kind of way. Fat Turkey fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 17:01
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Siroc posted:I love playing all social deduction/hidden traitor games ever since I first played BSG. I've barely ever been able to get a 5 person, serious group together to play BSG, so I've resorted to Avalon a lot of the time. Every game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf we play starts with the same guy claiming to be the Troublemaker but refusing to say who he swapped. Everybody knows he's usually lying, but it does get things rolling.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:02
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Fat Turkey posted:Having played Nefarious, despite winning both games, I don't ever intend to play it ever again. The theme barely applies to the mechanics and it all comes down to if you drew high scoring cards. Thanks for the summary. Sounds like a miss for me. Come to think of it besides Dominion (which I like to play but don't see myself ever owning) I think Donald X's stuff has been a miss for me.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:30
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Kingdom Builder is ok for me, not great but not bad. I have some friends who love it and I will play when they bring it. His new party game Pina Pirata is great too.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:33
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I like Deception and would happily play it, but I feel it could do with some card and question tweaking. Cards: while the majority are fine, there are a few that are practically impossible to provide clues for (circuit board? Pamphlet?) and many that only have 1 or 2 question cards that could even help (fingernail, when nothing body specific comes up, or spring, when the seasons don't come up). Since the murderer chooses, the card is more likely to be one of these potentially ungettable ones. Questions: Location and cause of death are great and lead to good discussion. Generally one of the other four will be useful, but at least 2 of the others will be useless, either repeating what you've said already or not helping at all. Sexual orientation of the victim? Season the death occurred? I feel like you need to scrap the very obscure items and allow a way to pick questions a bit better (choose from 4 of 6 initially, then redraw from two card selection?). But I've had fun with it. Oh, and make sure you're not playing with a forensic investigator who decides they're going to make up a story that has no bearing on the weapon or the item, like I've mentioned before if you look at my previous posts.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:34
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