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Update on teach-o-game Class 1 had groups of Coup, The Resistance, and Codenames. Codenames encountered some "I DON'T GET IT" attitudes, but they figured it out and had fun. The Resistance group had trouble with the rules but I helped them through it and all six of them fell in love with the game and just wanted to keep playing. One Coup player had played before and they had a good time. Class 2 had groups of Splendor, Sushi Go!, Coup, and Codenames. Again, Codenames had a rough start. Splendor was a mess for the first half of the class, and they figured it out and started to get into it, but they ran out of time. They're all confident that they can play a full game in the slot when teaching others now that the group is starting with some knowledge. The Sushi Go group needed a bit of help with the scoring the first time around. So far Coup is proving smooth.
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Jan 10, 2017 18:39
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I was delayed at the airport recently, so I did a quick search for board games on Android, and bought Talisman thinking it was something else. I spent roughly half the game sitting on the final space, waiting for my turn to come up again so I could roll a die to see if I got any closer to actually winning. Six of those turns got cancelled by various antimagic effects. The rest was me mostly rolling poorly, and the 6-health character healing up multiple times. At no point in this did I have any decisions to make. Crushing boredom was better.
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Jan 10, 2017 18:58
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I'm unsurprised that Codenames was tough. Codenames with words is pretty tricky for some new players to make a 2 or higher clue without referencing a word they didn't want to reference. Pictures is easier, because the board is smaller and I find the clues end up being less risky. I played Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle last night. It's a cooperative deck builder, and here's my review after 2 games. We've played a bunch of Dominion, and I've played a bunch of Lord of the Rings The Card Game, so both concepts are familiar. The component quality is really quite good. The insert is well made, and stores everything pretty nicely. They even include these nice, thick cardstock dividers to separate the cards. The bottom side of the game board is nicely printed too, so it matches the box when the lid is removed. Good attention to detail. Plus the metal skull tokens are pretty cool, as I am a sucker for all metal game components and miniatures. We started in Game 1, though the rules say to start at game 3 if you are familiar with the concepts of a deckbuilder. My wife is a big enthusiast of all things Harry Potter, and she didn't want to miss any content by skipping ahead. The game works by having each player choose a hero, with an associated 10 card starting deck. Then you'd draw up a starting hand of 5 cards (sound familiar?). Setup includes putting out one or two Location cards specific to the scenario. These have blank spaces for skull tokens, which represent villain control of the location. When they fully control the location, they advance to the next location. Game ends with the players losing if the villains fully control the locations. Each turn, you follow the instructions on the location. In game 1 and 2, the instruction was always to reveal a single square "Dark Arts" card which works like the treachery cards from Lord of the Rings. The Dark Arts cards typically had an on-reveal effect that targeted the active player, but sometimes they'd have global effects (no more card draw!) or affect multiple players. Then, after revealing and resolving the Dark Arts card, you'd move on to the effect of the active Villain card. These villains also had effects, sometimes synergizing with an unlucky draw on the Dark Arts cards. For example, a Dark Arts card may have just forced a discard from all players, and the Villain's text reads that any time you are forced to discard, lose two health. Oof. Now, the active player plays cards from her hand. These cards will either be spells, items, or allies. This phase was surprisingly difficult to parse from the rulebook, because you're allowed to do any of the stuff in any order (forget Action Buy Cleanup!). Cards played will usually either generate an attack token (shaped like a lightning bolt) that is placed on the player mat or an influence token (works like money) also placed on the player mat. During your turn, you transfer the attack tokens onto the villain's card, and when the villain has attack tokens equal to his life, he is defeated and you draw a new villain. The game ends with a win when all the villains are defeated. Also during your turn, you spend your acquired money/influence to buy something from the 6 revealed cards in the "Hogwarts Deck", your market row. Acquired cards are added to your discard. Once you've done all the buys you want and played the cards you want, you discard all remaining unspent tokens and cards and draw up a new hand. The next hero now becomes the active player. If you lose all your health, you discard all your tokens, discard half your cards, add a skull token to the location, and are "stunned" and can't do anything until the beginning of your next turn, when you resume with full health. This never happened in our games. The first two games were not very difficult. I was never really concerned that we'd lose, it always looked like we'd win for sure but it might take a while. It was particularly a bummer because there were only 2 cards in the 10 card starters that generated any attack tokens, which meant it took quite a few draws to burn through villains with 6 or 8 health when you were only putting 0-2 damage on them each turn. It also sucked to have the market row fill up with cards that were too expensive to buy (value of 7 or 8 when you were only capable of drawing 6 money in a perfect draw), or cheap filler cards that would clog up your deck. There's also, at least in game 1 and 2, no rules that allow you to trash any cards so we never wanted to buy the crappy stuff either. There was also no mechanism for clearing and replacing stuff in the market row either, so undesirable stuff that showed up in turn 1 stayed there the entire game. We called it a night before starting Game 3, which added unique passive hero abilities to each player (such as, the first time in a round when someone is healed any damage, they can heal +1 extra damage). My impressions thus far are that there's a good little game in there, but probably not worth buying for $40 unless you love the theme. I find myself always comparing it to genre leaders in each category. It's a deckbuilder that's not as deep or engaging as Dominion or Valley of the Kings. And it's a cooperative card game vs. a villain deck that isn't as good as the Lord of the Rings LCG, and is sorta the LOTR for babbies (could probably apply that criticism to the entire Harry Potter universe but OK).
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Jan 10, 2017 19:26
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Has anyone played the stupid $4.99 DLC scenario in Mansions of Madness 2nd ed? I'm vaguely interested in it despite the silliness of DLC for a boardgame. I bought it when it first came out (at the even stupider price of $7.99 in my region). We've only played one game with it so far. My impression was that it was decent, but not amazing. For a DLC scenario I think I'd hoped that they might try for something quite different/innovative, but instead it felt a lot like playing scenarios 1 or 3, just in a slightly different spooky haunted house. It seemed relatively light on combat which I preferred, and since we didn't get the 'correct' solution on our first play-through also discovered that it had quite a fun alternate end-game solution that proved to be pretty tense and led to an enjoyable but close loss on our first playthrough. Overall, I could recommend it to anyone who just wants 'more of the same' - and given how few scenarios the game initially came with for the up-front cost I was eager to expand the play possibilities so didn't mind the price. If you're still happy playing the existing scenarios and don't feel bored with them yet, then I would suggest leaving it and just buying the upcoming expansions.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:42
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I've got $100 in gift certs to one of my FLGS, should I wait for A Feast for Odin to come back in stock or get Mansions of Madness 2?
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Jan 10, 2017 20:03
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OgreNoah posted:I've got $100 in gift certs to one of my FLGS, should I wait for A Feast for Odin to come back in stock or get Mansions of Madness 2? They're two extremely different, good games. What do you want more?  Kerro posted:I bought it when it first came out (at the even stupider price of $7.99 in my region). We've only played one game with it so far. My impression was that it was decent, but not amazing. For a DLC scenario I think I'd hoped that they might try for something quite different/innovative, but instead it felt a lot like playing scenarios 1 or 3, just in a slightly different spooky haunted house. It seemed relatively light on combat which I preferred, and since we didn't get the 'correct' solution on our first play-through also discovered that it had quite a fun alternate end-game solution that proved to be pretty tense and led to an enjoyable but close loss on our first playthrough. Overall, I could recommend it to anyone who just wants 'more of the same' - and given how few scenarios the game initially came with for the up-front cost I was eager to expand the play possibilities so didn't mind the price. If you're still happy playing the existing scenarios and don't feel bored with them yet, then I would suggest leaving it and just buying the upcoming expansions. Appreciate the feedback. I'll wait until we work our way through the existing scenarios, and given that I have other games to play, that might be a long while. Not like it'll go out of print...
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Jan 10, 2017 20:47
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Does anywhere have A Feast for Odin in stock?
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Jan 10, 2017 21:05
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Section 3 update: Codenames, The Resistance, Splendor, Hanabi. Hanabi was a slow start but it grew on them. Codenames was an unqualified hit with this group. Splendor misfired again. There's something flawed in the rulebook which doesn't make the coins -> development cards relationship clear. I suspect it's actually a page layout problem.
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Jan 10, 2017 21:28
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EBag posted:Now that some of the GIPF games are coming back into print, what are your favorite abstracts? I've played some YINSH on boiteajeux and really like it, and of course Hive is great. Seems like aside from YINSH, DVONN and ZERTZ and TZAAR are the most unanimously agreed on as being the best of the series. I've never played a GIPF game apart from YINSH, maybe now is the time.
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Jan 10, 2017 21:49
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CommonShore posted:Section 3 update: When I've taught splendor, I told the players to arrange the cards they bought in piles of the gem they produce, and put your colored stack of coins on top of it. It makes it easier to visualize when you have 2 diamond mines and 2 diamond coins on top and can see "oh i can spend up to 4 diamonds!"
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Jan 10, 2017 21:50
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How the hell do you gently caress up Splendor?! Johnny Truant posted:Ooh! Tell me how it is, I'm still enamoured with polyomino placement games, and Uwe is sooooo dooooooope! Its pretty! And pretty cute! While you may be tempted to think 'Patchwork for 2+' it's a little lighter than that. Good intro game level or when you're not up for something heavier. The components are really nice and printed on board that's soooo chunky its great.
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Jan 10, 2017 21:50
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The Nastier Nate posted:When I've taught splendor, I told the players to arrange the cards they bought in piles of the gem they produce, and put your colored stack of coins on top of it. It makes it easier to visualize when you have 2 diamond mines and 2 diamond coins on top and can see "oh i can spend up to 4 diamonds!" Yeah I do that part way through the class, but I'm letting the students to have 10 or 15 minutes with the rules before I intervene. Both groups so far have had trouble with the gold tokens, and both groups have had trouble figuring out that the object is to collect the development cards, which you keep permanently (they were "spending" the cards and then getting pissed because they couldn't see how you could ever get bigger cards). This information is in the rules, but the gold tokens clarification/process is a bit buried, and the chips->development cards->bigger cards bit is actually in a headnote on the page, outside of the normal text. I'll add that these are groups of people who mostly haven't played any kinds of games before, and quite a few of them were surprised today to have a board game shoved into their hands when they came into the door.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:01
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Synthbuttrange posted:Its pretty! And pretty cute! While you may be tempted to think 'Patchwork for 2+' it's a little lighter than that. Good intro game level or when you're not up for something heavier. The components are really nice and printed on board that's soooo chunky its great.  Sounds right up my alley, gonna have to pick it up sometime soon! I looooooooove polyominos far too much.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:03
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CommonShore posted:Yeah I do that part way through the class, but I'm letting the students to have 10 or 15 minutes with the rules before I intervene.  Tell us again, what's the context for this? What class, where, why, etc.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:09
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silvergoose posted:
CommonShore posted:Ok I'm about to try an experiment with my communications students - I need you guys to wish me luck. I'll be doing it all day with multiple groups. I've never tried any kind of teaching activity this risky.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:15
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silvergoose posted:
It's a first-year business communications class at a Canadian community college. I'm teaching a unit on instructions and basic documentation. This is the first content day of the class - it's essentially a cold open in which we have a process (the game) and model documentation (the rules). Day 1 is learning a game from the documentation. Day 2 and 3 are teaching that game to classmates with the support of that documentation (and trading roles, so everyone teaches once and learns once). I chose a bunch of light-ish games which people should be able to learn and play in an hour. Pretty much everyone is able to get the rules down in an hour for all of the games so far (Splendor, Hanabi, The Resistance, Codenames, Biblios?, Coup, and Sushi Go), though strategy has been weak in cases. I jumped into a group of 4 to play The Resistance just now. In one game I was a spy and I sabotaged a two-person mission. The resistance player who was on that mission with me then became leader and nominated me for the next mission
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Jan 10, 2017 22:18
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CommonShore posted:I jumped into a group of 4 to play The Resistance just now. In one game I was a spy and I sabotaged a two-person mission. The resistance player who was on that mission with me then became leader and nominated me for the next mission The future elites of Canada are loving morons.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:22
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CommonShore posted:It's a first-year business communications class at a Canadian community college. I'm teaching a unit on instructions and basic documentation. This is the first content day of the class - it's essentially a cold open in which we have a process (the game) and model documentation (the rules). Sweet. And yeah I probably should have clicked the ? but hey, lazier and this gets more people seeing it. 
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Jan 10, 2017 22:24
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CommonShore posted:I jumped into a group of 4 to play The Resistance just now. In one game I was a spy and I sabotaged a two-person mission. The resistance player who was on that mission with me then became leader and nominated me for the next mission I like this kid. What was the outcome of this game?
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Jan 10, 2017 22:29
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CommonShore posted:I chose a bunch of light-ish games which people should be able to learn and play in an hour. Pretty much everyone is able to get the rules down in an hour for all of the games so far (Splendor, Hanabi, The Resistance, Codenames, Biblios?, Coup, and Sushi Go), though strategy has been weak in cases. I jumped into a group of 4 to play The Resistance just now. In one game I was a spy and I sabotaged a two-person mission. The resistance player who was on that mission with me then became leader and nominated me for the next mission Holy poo poo
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Jan 10, 2017 22:29
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Is the Ultimate Edition of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space going to be any good? I've mentioned a few times in this thread that one of the coolest/most unique games I remember playing a couple times as a kid was Clue: The Great Art Caper, which had an invisible thief moving around capturing paintings, and this looks to be kinda the same style of game.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:35
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Probably a case of "hey it's the teacher, surely I can trust him". Cute though.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:40
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We're going to start April in the Pandemic: Legacy PbP. So far it's pretty similar to base Pandemic, so it's a good time to join if you're interested before poo poo gets weird.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:13
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theroachman posted:Probably a case of "hey it's the teacher, surely I can trust him". Cute though. I figured more of either "I don't actually care about this" or "I don't actually understand the objective of the game"
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Jan 10, 2017 23:14
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Countblanc posted:I figured more of either "I don't actually care about this" or "I don't actually understand the objective of the game" These are college students? Then it's probably both.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:27
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Bottom Liner posted:Does anywhere have A Feast for Odin in stock? You can get it on amazon if you want to pay $180! 
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Jan 11, 2017 00:08
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Storing Eldritch Horror is fast becoming its own Eldritch Horror.  6 large card boxes, 2 mini-card boxes, two craft organizers + a small tub as a monster cup.
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Jan 11, 2017 00:32
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Section 4 had only 5 people present - a group of 3 played Hanabi and got wayyyy into it. They stayed 15 minutes past the end of class to finish their game. I joined the other two for Sushi Go.SettingSun posted:I like this kid. What was the outcome of this game? Fail Fail Fail game over haha. I think it was a bit of information overload. Also remember that people who post in this thread are atypical in their capacity to logic and strategy. If she's playing like that on Day 3, I'd be worried. This is probably the first time in her life ever playing any game that even remotely resembles this. People were surprised that these games even exist. Really, you can poo poo talk, but have you ever tried taking a group of random people who don't know that manufacturers beyond Milton Bradley make games and trying to get them to play something like The Resistance? That was the experiment here. It's paying off- they're having fun and warming to the ideas.
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Jan 11, 2017 00:36
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I'm not poo poo talking, I'm simply saying exactly what you said; that she didn't understand the game, with the possible addition of not actually caring because of the thing we've discussed in this thread a bunch where people simply shut down when they decide for themselves that something isn't For Them. That person clearly did not understand the rules of the game since a person cannot ever play a Fail card and be a Resistance member. Or, perhaps more generously and significantly less likely, assumed you were cheating and had played a "Fail" card when you weren't allowed to and wanted to give you a second chance to reestablish your pedagogical authority in the eyes of her peers.
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Jan 11, 2017 00:44
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Recommendation question: I absolutely love the Sierra Madre Pax games, Pax Renaissance and Pax Pamir slightly more than Porfiriana. Are there any mechanically similar games out there? I really like how the Pax games turn relatively simple rules into very complex strategy, how they handle markets, how they build tension between cooperation and conflict, and how they place control of pieces (armies for instance) in a grey area where they don't really belong to any one player.
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Jan 11, 2017 01:26
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Countblanc posted:I'm not poo poo talking, I'm simply saying exactly what you said; that she didn't understand the game, with the possible addition of not actually caring because of the thing we've discussed in this thread a bunch where people simply shut down when they decide for themselves that something isn't For Them. That person clearly did not understand the rules of the game since a person cannot ever play a Fail card and be a Resistance member. Or, perhaps more generously and significantly less likely, assumed you were cheating and had played a "Fail" card when you weren't allowed to and wanted to give you a second chance to reestablish your pedagogical authority in the eyes of her peers.  I realized the same thing immediately upon reading his post. If he didn't immediately point out that person's error after the game then that's pretty loving bad form as a teacher because they obviously didn't understand the game.
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Jan 11, 2017 01:34
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jivjov posted:Storing Eldritch Horror is fast becoming its own Eldritch Horror. I think you need some more expansions.
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Jan 11, 2017 01:38
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Countblanc posted:I'm not poo poo talking, I'm simply saying exactly what you said; that she didn't understand the game, with the possible addition of not actually caring because of the thing we've discussed in this thread a bunch where people simply shut down when they decide for themselves that something isn't For Them. That person clearly did not understand the rules of the game since a person cannot ever play a Fail card and be a Resistance member. Or, perhaps more generously and significantly less likely, assumed you were cheating and had played a "Fail" card when you weren't allowed to and wanted to give you a second chance to reestablish your pedagogical authority in the eyes of her peers. Oh no I was accusing the other rude poster of poo poo talking. I should have been clearer in who I was addressing with each part of that. Your assesment is reasonable.
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Jan 11, 2017 01:46
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Chomp8645 posted:I realized the same thing immediately upon reading his post. If he didn't immediately point out that person's error after the game then that's pretty loving bad form as a teacher because they obviously didn't understand the game. Well, it sounds like the point of the exercise is to let the students learn solely through play and the manual, in which case obviously you wouldn't want to correct that sort of thing. But if not then yeah hopefully that was explained later.
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Jan 11, 2017 01:47
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Rutibex posted:I think you need some more expansions. There are no more expansions. This is what the collection ended up at after I worked Dreamlands into it.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:00
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Gilgameshback posted:Recommendation question: I absolutely love the Sierra Madre Pax games, Pax Renaissance and Pax Pamir slightly more than Porfiriana. Are there any mechanically similar games out there? The COIN series if you haven't already gone down that road.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:11
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CommonShore posted:Oh no I was accusing the other rude poster of poo poo talking. I should have been clearer in who I was addressing with each part of that. Your assesment is reasonable. I wasn't trying to poo poo talk either, I'm genuinely curious about how new people play and I think you're awesome for exposing these games to people who otherwise wouldn't know they exist.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:12
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jivjov posted:Storing Eldritch Horror is fast becoming its own Eldritch Horror. Amusingly there is a free app that eliminates the need for location cards and lets you tick off boxes to include expansions. You still need player cards and mythos but not research, gate etc. Cuts down huge. I have them all and its two big boxes and thats it, in order to play it, and any expansions Called Eldritch Companion in the google play store.
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Jan 11, 2017 03:17
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Sloober posted:Amusingly there is a free app that eliminates the need for location cards and lets you tick off boxes to include expansions. You still need player cards and mythos but not research, gate etc. Cuts down huge. I have them all and its two big boxes and thats it, in order to play it, and any expansions As an iOS-haver, your Eldritch ways are closed to me
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Jan 11, 2017 03:22
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CommonShore posted:Section 4 had only 5 people present - a group of 3 played Hanabi and got wayyyy into it. They stayed 15 minutes past the end of class to finish their game. This is genuinely sheer curiosity, please don't think I'm hating on non-gamers, but did these people get the rules right? In my experience a full game of Hanabi should take less than 15 min, and it's not like you can lengthen this a lot by long deliberation, given the limited communication - and taking too long on each turn is actually likely to make the game harder since everyone will start forgetting valuable information.
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Jan 11, 2017 04:08
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