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Antiquity is pretty old at this point, and I know a lot of other games have taken inspiration from it. Does it's gameplay still hold up at this point? Is it worth getting to the table? How long is it compared to Splotter's other games?
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Jun 3, 2017 21:11
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Bottom Liner posted:Zee is really friendly and chill. Sam is a dick. That jives with my experience of watching their content, Zee is the only tolerable one of the three, and IIRC Sam had a meltdown during a Twilight Imperium live-stream and sat and sulked for the rest of it or something.
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Jun 3, 2017 21:48
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lummawks posted:Sam had a meltdown during a Twilight Imperium live-stream and sat and sulked for the rest of it or something. What like on the show? In his favoruite game? 
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Jun 3, 2017 21:53
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GrandpaPants posted:Played Dark Souls. Tedious game. What a miserable experience that was that is pretty much strictly inferior to Gloomhaven. I'm not sure I can go back to "move and attack, repeat ad nauseum" dungeon crawlers after trying Gloomhaven.
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Jun 3, 2017 22:05
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Ragnar34 posted:So much love for Gloomhaven. I wonder what "widely available in November" means. So the problem with wider distribution is that publishers don't like the slim return on investment, right? It sounds like a price hike in November would be perfectly fair. Unless you want to cut classes or scenarios, there really isn't. About the most you could do is go to the standee-only version, but that'll save you maybe a couple bucks and then you're stuck carving away real content.
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Jun 3, 2017 22:15
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Heh - "there is a D&D version of Betrayal at House on the Hill coming, called 'Betrayal at Baldur's Gate'"
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Jun 3, 2017 22:18
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Tekopo posted:Played Kitchen Rush at the expo and it was good! Really liked it. However, the star of the show was Codenames Duet: it's really really good. Basically you get double sided clue cards. It's a fully coop game where you have to guess 15 agents in total. Each side has 9 agents and 3 assassins. Three agents are shared by both sides of the clue card, one assassin is an assassin on both sides, one is an agent on the other side and the the last is a bystander on the other side. You have a set number of turns that you have to guess all the agents. The game I played went down to the wire! Where's Kitchen Rush exhibiting? I'd check it out tomorrow if it is still up. You made it sound very interesting! Codenames Duet sounds a bit too close to standard Codenames... Pictures hasn't seen much play because it doesn't seem as good for a reason i cant really pin down.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:19
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Which Sherlock Holmes version should I get? It seems like there are maybe a few and Im not sure which is best.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:20
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Consulting Detective. There is either a new version out or one is coming out soon, which fixes some translation issues for a couple of cases.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:37
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Fat Turkey posted:Where's Kitchen Rush exhibiting? I'd check it out tomorrow if it is still up. You made it sound very interesting! I mean, yeah, I had Codenames Words and Codenames Pictures in my bag and I didn't really see a need to get another Codenames, but honestly, I think Duet is the best Codenames and has the best mechanisms of the series in my opinion. So, more words about Codenames: Duet: there's a level of meta-play that is readily apparent from the very first turn. The way that assassins are mixed up is really interesting and since there are a total of 5 of them the game gets intense very fast and provides a more meaningful puzzle. The game provides everything that you would want to experience in Codenames in a single game: you take on both roles simultaneously and your choices and decisions are shaped by how you and the your fellow player gives clues and interact with each other. It's just a much more fulfilling package when all players are on equal footing. The game is also not strictly speaking a 2P game only as well (we played with 4, 2 players on each side). As well as the above, the game has a way to ramp up the difficulty in an interesting way. If you want, you can play a game as a campaign, which is based on a map: you start in Prague, which is the easiest difficulty. Once you beat Prague, there are several different cities you go to. After going from city to city, you eventually end up on a specific branch and you have to beat all of the cities on that branch in order to beat the campaign. Difficulty is handled this way: each city has a rating of x=y(Prague, the one we played, is 9=9). x is the number of turns you have to find all 15 agents. y is the number of bystanders you have. So in Prague you get 9 of each, but I saw some cities with like 10=2. What happens if you have less bystanders than turns? If you use up more bystanders that you have, you lose an extra turn for each extra bystander you need. So, for example, in a 10=2 city, you have already mis-guessed 2 bystanders and you have 8 turns left, if you then select another bystander, you end up with 6 turns left instead of 7.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:41
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Codenames Duet sounds way better than vanilla.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:47
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Bottom Liner posted:Codenames Duet sounds way better than vanilla.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:50
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Fat Turkey posted:
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Jun 4, 2017 00:09
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Sleekly posted:What like on the show? In his favoruite game? Bottom Liner posted:Heh - "there is a D&D version of Betrayal at House on the Hill coming, called 'Betrayal at Baldur's Gate'"
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Jun 4, 2017 00:11
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Aghama posted:Pictures is a must if you have younger kids, my 4 and 6 year old love playing both roles. I wouldn't bother with it otherwise.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:11
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Fat Turkey posted:Consulting Detective. It sounds like there is a Jack the Ripper version and a Thames murder one? Should I just get whichever I guess? E: it appears Jack the Ripper is the most recent? It's much cheaper on Amazon at least, so maybe I'll get that. Fusion Restaurant fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Jun 4, 2017 |
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Jun 4, 2017 00:13
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Bottom Liner posted:Heh - "there is a D&D version of Betrayal at House on the Hill coming, called 'Betrayal at Baldur's Gate'" Time to summon the meteors.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:26
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Ragnar34 posted:So much love for Gloomhaven. I wonder what "widely available in November" means. So the problem with wider distribution is that publishers don't like the slim return on investment, right? It sounds like a price hike in November would be perfectly fair. The retail version will be more expensive than either KS price, yeah. Currently projected to be $140. Which is still cheap for what you get. (I paid $64 for the first KS standee version. This is the only boardgame project where I've ever saved real money over retail.)
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Jun 4, 2017 00:30
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Fusion Restaurant posted:Which Sherlock Holmes version should I get? It seems like there are maybe a few and Im not sure which is best. Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures. It's the first of the current lot of reprints and has the fewest errors / best production quality.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:38
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Played Coal Baron last night and the owner of the game got really defensive when we pointed out that his house rule seemed to defeat the point of one of the spaces. He said it "ruined the point of it" or something. To get into specifics, the game is a Worker Placement with a set of 8 spaces where players can pick up coal tiles. When one's bought, it's immediately replaced from the draw pile. There's an additional space that allows players to draw 5 from the draw pile and choose one to buy while returning the rest in any order to the top or bottom of the stack. The owner's house rule separated it into two stacks that players could pick from to draw five and return from, but replacing drawn tiles would alternate between the two stacks. The other thing was that when the stacks got low, he'd shuffle the two piles back together. Another player and I argued a little that the house rule defeated the point of being able to draw 5 and return in any order, but we both dropped it when it was clear that he was getting really angry and defensive about it especially when he tried justifying it with having played it a lot and how it would ruin the game. As a side note, he didn't win. I did and the other person who argued about it came one point behind (in a 100+ point game).
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Jun 4, 2017 01:37
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Scyther posted:Time to summon the meteors. No that's a Morrowind thing, not D&D
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Jun 4, 2017 01:59
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dropkickpikachu posted:No that's a Morrowind thing, not D&D You n'wah!
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Jun 4, 2017 02:00
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Tekopo posted:
Please pretend I posted the Stephen Colbert 'give it to me now' gif here, tia.
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Jun 4, 2017 02:07
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about Codenames: Duet
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Played a couple new (to me) games last night: Great Western Trail is exactly as good as everyone says it is. Believe the hype. This feels like the love child of Russian Railroads, Kanban and Mage Knight. You need to have a finger in multiple pies to be successful, and there's a number of clever ways to influence your opponents indirectly. Coolest of all is the variable tempo that the cow herd introduces - draw a great hand at the get go? Run for KC as fast as possible to cash them in. Draw a handful of crap? Make some stops along the way to manipulate your herd, whilst building your infrastructure (trains and buildings). It's clever, it's fast and I really want to play it more. Tyrants of Underdark commits a number of deckbuilding cardinal sins: You have multiple currencies. You have unlimited buys and actions. It has a market row. The best cards also are worth a tonne of VPs. It would just be trash grade market row multiple currency deckbuilder ala Ascension, but the board mitigates the penalty of bad draws, and the 'promote' mechanism is Valley of the Kings' entomb - which means that trashing is part of the game from the get go, and that you have a strong incentive to start destroying your deck towards the end of the game. So, ultimately, it uses a number of cludgy fixes to solve problems it shouldn't have created in the first place, but that results in a passable deckbuilder. I'd play it again if I had to, but it felt braindead. Oh, and the components were utterly awful. Some of the worst feeling cards in a deckbuilder ever.
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Jun 4, 2017 02:09
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Saalkin posted:I'm hankering for a new game and have no idea whats been coming out lately and what's worth picking up. Have you heard of Hinabi? I just got it and my group loves it. The theme is that you're absentminded pyrotechnics who've just mixed up their fireworks only a few minutes before the show, and now you're trying to sort through them all and make something worth seeing without blowing yourselves up. Mechanically, it's a simple co-op card game where you each play with your cards turned around so that everyone EXCEPT you can see them, and you can give your partners certain hints as to what's in their hand. Weaknesses: I get the feeling it's solvable as soon as your group figures out how to efficiently communicate within the rules, and also this is the kind of game that doesn't function if players aren't strict enough about what hints you can give. And how about Pandemic, just the basic version? I think everybody's heard of it by now , but if you don't have it, it's cheap, elegant and simple.
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Jun 4, 2017 02:57
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Ragnar34 posted:Have you heard of Hinabi? I just got it and my group loves it. The theme is that you're absentminded pyrotechnics who've just mixed up their fireworks only a few minutes before the show, and now you're trying to sort through them all and make something worth seeing without blowing yourselves up. Mechanically, it's a simple co-op card game where you each play with your cards turned around so that everyone EXCEPT you can see them, and you can give your partners certain hints as to what's in their hand. Weaknesses: I get the feeling it's solvable as soon as your group figures out how to efficiently communicate within the rules, and also this is the kind of game that doesn't function if players aren't strict enough about what hints you can give. Hanabi
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Jun 4, 2017 03:07
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Ragnar34 posted:Have you heard of Hinabi? I just got it and my group loves it. The theme is that you're absentminded pyrotechnics who've just mixed up their fireworks only a few minutes before the show, and now you're trying to sort through them all and make something worth seeing without blowing yourselves up. Mechanically, it's a simple co-op card game where you each play with your cards turned around so that everyone EXCEPT you can see them, and you can give your partners certain hints as to what's in their hand. Weaknesses: I get the feeling it's solvable as soon as your group figures out how to efficiently communicate within the rules, and also this is the kind of game that doesn't function if players aren't strict enough about what hints you can give. Yup thats the weakness. When you create your own language of "sorta low" sorta high. "miiddlish" meaning specific numbers. Its like Spades becomes about secret table talk, but its a coop so you have to enforce the rules on yourself and create more "wa cant say..."? Then you end up fighting your own rules? I think its a game with a limited run life. But its cheap so whatever, still good.
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Jun 4, 2017 03:22
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Saalkin posted:I'm hankering for a new game and have no idea whats been coming out lately and what's worth picking up. Pandemic is a good choice but Forbidden Island is cheaper and simpler and might make a better introduction because of that. Co-op games are one of the things that I really like to show people who haven't experienced modern board games, because chances are they haven't seen anything like it.
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Jun 4, 2017 03:23
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Pandemic is a good choice but Forbidden Island is cheaper and simpler and might make a better introduction because of that. Co-op games are one of the things that I really like to show people who haven't experienced modern board games, because chances are they haven't seen anything like it. I just played forbidden Desert with the kids just now. 2nd this opinion. Island is pandemic lite but ridiculously cheap, really quick and less fiddly. You often get down to the same point where theres a stack of cards/tiles and the one that will lose the game is in there and you have to draw 4 just survive and we can win, oh god oh god, YES. Its really a no brainer for a introduction game, no pressure beacuse of the coop, simple but very meaningful choices. and Its always under $15.
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Jun 4, 2017 03:28
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So we busted out Mage Knight again today and played two games doing some two player co-op. And I have some questions about the Tezla expansion. Our first game was classic city conquering, and we won handily. But we tried out the Life and Death scenario next and didn't even come close to winning. The avatars of Tezla take forever to burn down. I think the necromancer one requires over 30 damage, not counting its physical resistance plus all the creatures it comes with. By the time we killed it we only had the last night to reach and kill the other avatar, which was simply not possible. Have any of you guys been able to beat that scenario in two player? It really seems like having the leaders at level 8 is total overkill. We got a bit unlucky with tile placement but I think we would have crushed city objectives or Volkare with the decks we had.
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Jun 4, 2017 04:24
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malkav11 posted:The retail version will be more expensive than either KS price, yeah. Currently projected to be $140. Which is still cheap for what you get. I love Gloomhaven, but I think a non-significant portion of the volume falls in the "nice, but non-essential" category. - Now that trackers are dials, the character boards could easily be downgraded to card stock. - Get rid of the character tuck boxes - wrap individual sealed character boards/decks in parchment-style paper (separately). - Character tracking tokens can all be stamped on a single sheet - I don't think there spoilers in the token symbols, though it's possible that some characters I haven't unlocked yet might have character-specific tokens? - Get rid of character sheet stacks (or just provide one or two). Create app for character tracking + release sheets for self printing. - Could do the same with party sheets. - The world board is pretty much non-essential. It's just used for keeping track of unlocked locations and deciding where to move next. Reduce size and switch to a paper map. - Standees only. It'll still be an expensive game, but these changes would at least reduce the size and heft of the box, and probably take a chunk out of manufacturing costs. That said, Isaac could probably just run Kickstarters every 6 months and keep selling out stock himself. Stickman fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jun 4, 2017 |
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Jun 4, 2017 05:23
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Bombadilillo posted:Yup thats the weakness. When you create your own language of "sorta low" sorta high. "miiddlish" meaning specific numbers. Its like Spades becomes about secret table talk, but its a coop so you have to enforce the rules on yourself and create more "wa cant say..."? Then you end up fighting your own rules? You gotta play bridge rules. You can only give the exact hints (no extra information in tone of voice or variations in what you say or anything), but conventions (ranging from the simple "no-one's clued my oldest card so it must be safe to discard", to the elaborate "he clued the white 5 which had already been clued, which means i'm holding the corresponding 2 and 4") are fair game.
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Jun 4, 2017 06:10
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Bruno Faidutti wrote a long effort post defending his use of colonialism in his games with a lot of really lovely logic, even considering the language barrier. http://faidutti.com/blog/?p=3780 Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jun 4, 2017 |
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Jun 4, 2017 06:12
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Bottom Liner posted:Bruno Faidutti wrong a long effort post defending his use of colonialism in his games with a lot of really lovely logic, even considering the language barrier. What bits did you disagree with?
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Jun 4, 2017 08:11
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I want to take a swing myself. I'm not mad or anything but this guy is being kinda dumb.quote:Nevertheless, the recurrence of exotic settings in board and card games can be unsettling. Understanding why we use such settings, and why they can be unsettling, is necessary, but I don’t intend to condemn it and I don’t think we, game designers, should stop making boardgames that caricature the Orient or Ancient Greece, no more than we should stop making games that caricature barnyard or jungle. I know for sure I will keep on doing it because it’s easy, it’s simple, it’s fun and, most of all, it probably makes better games. When it comes to game design, being lazy is usually being efficient. quote:It makes better games because the setting of a game doesn’t have the same function as the setting and theme of a novel or movie. When reading a novel or an essay, or watching a movie or theater piece, one does spend most intellectual energy in understanding what is told in the book or movie, and tries to get all the subtleties of it. When playing a game, most of the player’s energy is spent in trying to use the rules, the game systems, in order to win. The thematic setting of the game must not detract from “the game itself”, meaning from aiming at victory. It might even be, like in a math water tap problem, just a tool used to make the rules clearer. Cosmology! You are a planet. Collect more moons than your opponent. Mail room! The slowest employee is going to get downsized, and all of you hate this job. Get fired by being the worst. The ocean! Design the strongest sea monster. Gas leak! Co-op game where you use deductive reasoning to find the gas leak before your house explodes. quote:The setting must therefore be extremely simple, and must be known by the players before the game even starts. In good novels and movies, the storyline is used to explain the meaning of a complex theme. In good games, the light theme is here to help the players create the story. A game’s setting must be very simple, very light, and works best when it uses connections already known by the players, not when it tries to reveal hidden ones. Pop culture settings, such as science fiction or heroic fantasy, are great for this, but are not mastered by everyone. Plain exotic settings, be they historical or geographical, are even better, because they are understood by more people. quote:Furthermore, boardgames are often played by adults and children together, and therefore require “childish” settings and imagery, and of a kind that is known by two or even three generations. quote:That’s why simplistic exotic settings, be they exotic, historical or fantasy come naturally to me, and that’s why I’ll keep on using them, though I’ll probably be more careful now to use more or less systematically irony to defuse the issues that I highlighted in this article. And yes, I know, irony can be missed, but it’s so fun when it isn’t that it’s worth taking some risks.
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Jun 4, 2017 08:57
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You pretty much hit it all. He's basically flailing and making every possible excuse for relying on it instead of addressing and acknowledging the inherent issues with it and writing off his responsibility for a lot of bullshit reasons (irony, comedy, popularity, etc). A Redditor wrote a snarky TLDR:quote:Racist imperialist caricatures are ok in boardgames because they're easy and I'm lazy, plus it probably makes better games ...somehow. Also caricaturing ancient greece is literally the same thing as caricaturing modern third world countries so if you're ok with one but not the other you're a hypocrite. Gotcha! This is totally an academic exercise and not just a long winded attempt to justify the lovely themes my games have had. Also it's kind of a joke or whatever so don't take it too seriously and criticize it or anything. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Jun 4, 2017 |
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Jun 4, 2017 09:07
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So, finally got Pax Renaissance to the table last night. We played with 4 players, rules explanation took forever. I had played one or two solo games when I got it a few months back, but still the amount of stuff that you can do paired with the horrible graphic design of the cards meant that we were consulting the rulebook constantly. The organization of the rules could be better too, some concepts are only clarified in the glossary, some are in the main rules, little exceptions and edge cases kept coming up and could only be resolved by googling. Fourth player dropped out after about an hour, finished with three and my wife won a globalization victory. Played two more two player games afterwards, which I both won with an imperial victory - both times my opponent was careless and didn't watch my tableau and hand cards closely enough. We probably got a lot of little rules wrong, and didn't even start getting into the more advanced interactions. Bishops, for example, were woefully underused in all three games. The utility of the tax op only got became apparent in the third game, where there was not one tax card coming out and the whole of western europe was starved of units because the trade routes were picked clean of money before the papal states every time and no trade shifts came out either. This game is odd. It's highly thematic, every operation on every card has a little line of flavor text explaining why this card has that operation. Every mechanic fits the renaissance banker influencing events all over Europe theme very well. It's incredibly interactive - you have to watch your opponent's tableaus constantly to prevent them from campaining against your empires or beheading one of your most important cards. It's also very intricate, pretty much the most complex game I've played yet, apart maybe from the COIN series. But once you grasp the mechanics and how they interact it's actually kind of beautiful. If you can get beyond the hideous graphic design, that is. Still, I want to play this thing again and get better at it. Not so sure how the rest of my group thinks about that though. Afterwards we played a game of 13 Days. I like this one a lot. It took a lot of ideas from Twilight Struggle and it makes a very different yet still great game out of it. Having only a maximum of 5 cards at a time keeps AP low, so it really plays in about the 45 minutes stated on the box. Mechanically it's done really well, the agendas, map influencing and defcon management interact nicely to form a very satisfying game.
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Jun 4, 2017 09:17
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Bottom Liner posted:You pretty much hit it all. He's basically flailing and making every possible excuse for relying on it instead of addressing and acknowledging the inherent issues with it and writing off his responsibility for a lot of bullshit reasons (irony, comedy, popularity, etc). A Redditor wrote a snarky TLDR: Not that I'm trying to defend him, but I wonder if this opinion is common among French academia.
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Jun 4, 2017 12:37
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Stickman posted:I love Gloomhaven, but I think a non-significant portion of the volume falls in the "nice, but non-essential" category. This can be reduced even further by simply releasing the the system as a book, and letting players use pocket change and graph paper to do the battles! But at that point it's just 4th edition D&D. I think you are missing the point of Gloomhaven with these suggestions. People don't want a smaller box! The impossibly big board game box looks impressive on a shelf, it is as much a status symbol as it is a functional game. Shaving weight down from the components will only hurt that.
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Jun 4, 2017 13:50
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The bizarre part is someone reading Said, understanding the concept of Orientalism, and then deciding to double down on it. I mean, holy poo poo, that Waka Tanka game!?
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Jun 4, 2017 14:11
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