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Chill la Chill posted:Yeah that's what I feared. I think I'll still really enjoy this game, but I wanted that abstract bluffing game NT promised. I think it was described to me once as "the grown up version of Stratego." But, a frustrating lemons out of lemonade game sounds great too. Bonaparte at Marengo, the predecessor to NT, is getting an update and a reprint some time in the near future so look out for that. It's smaller scale and will probably incorporate everything learned from NT into its updated design.
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Jul 9, 2017 17:30
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al-azad posted:Bonaparte at Marengo, the predecessor to NT, is getting an update and a reprint some time in the near future so look out for that. It's smaller scale and will probably incorporate everything learned from NT into its updated design. I'll always describe NT as bluffing at pokers but with 8 hands instead of 1. The game is just stellar.
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Jul 9, 2017 17:35
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al-azad posted:Bonaparte at Marengo, the predecessor to NT, is getting an update and a reprint some time in the near future so look out for that. It's smaller scale and will probably incorporate everything learned from NT into its updated design. If Napoleon's Triumph is a bluffing game, does that mean Bonaparte at Marengo is a game of chicken? 
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Jul 9, 2017 17:41
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I find it funny that a lot of the learning problems grognards describe with GOG is that you need to deprogram the assumptions made from years of hex and chit wargames. One day I will hopefully encounter a game that makes me question worker placement euro engines running over my friends and family. 
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Jul 9, 2017 17:44
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Tekopo posted:Just note that some of the rules (especially in regards to multi-hour turns) are pretty obtuse. I think it's a good game, but it is more random than NT and I don't think it is as well-crafted, even though I am more interested in the ACW than Napoleonics. I must know what these multi-hour turn rules entail.
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Jul 9, 2017 17:45
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I know it's not the same as having a copy, but you can play Napoleon's Triumph on VASSAL.
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Jul 9, 2017 18:07
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Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:I must know what these multi-hour turn rules entail. In essence: If there's a lot of troops on the field on both sides, and no one is making any attacks, the game condenses a little into a multi-hour turn. It results in very different movement rules (since your dudes are going a lot further than normal) and has some fiddly interactions with reinforcements (since blocks are coming on at different times but in the same turn). It usually ends up with lines forming all at once, i.e. you march your troops to the front and then they spread out quickly to form a line on the ridge you've chosen.
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Jul 9, 2017 18:09
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cenotaph posted:I know it's not the same as having a copy, but you can play Napoleon's Triumph on VASSAL. I feel like doing that will only make me want to play it in physical form even more. Plus, half the fun of bluffing games is trying to eke out a reaction from people while staring at them.
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Jul 9, 2017 18:09
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Chill la Chill posted:I feel like doing that will only make me want to play it in physical form even more. Plus, half the fun of bluffing games is trying to eke out a reaction from people while staring at them. No, the fun is watching a game in progress and having both players tell you privately that they're utterly screwed and do you see how thin my line is and oh god he's gonna push through and then I'm gonna just die. That was my first introduction to NT. No wonder I fell in love.
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Jul 9, 2017 18:14
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rchandra posted:Finally won an 18xx yesterday! Only 3-player 1846, but still nice. I got stuck with spending a bit more on privates than I wanted, so had to start NYC at $40 to avoid it being taken over. I had it buy the Michigan Southern and 3 other 2-trains, then make quick profits. One of my opponents tried to push trains to limit the profits but did it a bit less hard than I feared, so I got quite a lot of use of those 4 2-trains. I had the B&O dumped on me, with its share price at $40 so seemed easiest to just loot it and close it before being forced to get it a real train. On the same turn I started the Grand Trunk at $150, soon it issued a pile of shares and bought 2 Phase-IV trains. NYC took one of them and ran one 7/8 and one 5 route for decent money ($80 or so per share at the end). The closed company and 3-player game meant the board was very open, there was no real need or gain to start token fights At the very end I saw I had an alternate pair of routes (Windsor-Chicago, Buffalo-St. Louis) but it actually made the same money - might have been better earlier. I thought the bank would break one set of ORs earlier than it did, but one company withheld a few times and we might not have been quite there anyway. Final Scores $7821, $6380, $6166. Interesting game, we generally don't see a whole lot of dumping our games, did you buy in to prevent it being looted? We played last night and I floated the B&O early (with the steamboat to triple it), and then later on the C&O for some blocking and extra certs. Unfortunately I floated the C&O just a litttle bit late as the IC player was able to move about a bit too freely and ended up beating me by about $200 because of beefed up infrastructure in the SW. It was actually a pretty fluid 4p game, the GT player had a sizable early lead but instead of floating the Erie or doing cross investment he tried to go hard into his own stock, which was quickly diluted by other players (and then sold back to the treasury when he was eventually blocked from double hitting Chicago). I think we've played 5 times this week and I'd play again tonight if I didn't have hockey. (NY was out in this game, other player floated the PRR to good effect actually and cross invested pretty well).
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Jul 9, 2017 20:04
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This seems to be a good time to post the most BGG review ever: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1718420/avoid-simple I think Guns of Gettysburg and Napoleon's Triumph are about even in quality, in that both are spectacular. I love the artillery/combat token system in Guns of Gettysburg - Simmons rolled so much historical flavor into one relatively simple mechanic. The manual in Guns of Gettysburg is certainly a major problem. It's actually clear, well-written, and well organized, but the approach is so alien that it seems impenetrable. It really, really requires that you read it through, in order, that you retain everything you read, and, as people said, that you don't add your own conventional wargame rules. It also gives absolutely no advice on strategy or conventional play. I wish there were more designers like Simmons out there.
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Jul 9, 2017 21:01
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Hey, I got a compliment from Sphere in that thread!
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Jul 9, 2017 21:10
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I do not know how anyone could not like the GOG rulebook. It's just like the amazing COIN rulebook (assuming they all follow ADP's example). They both dispose of the chatty bullshit approach that Vlaada and Rosenberg just love.
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Jul 9, 2017 21:15
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The problem with her rulebooks is that they are a bit scattergunned when it comes to where rules are present. One of the worst examples of this is the combat rules for NT, which should be relatively easy but they are almost written as prose and not in an overly structured manner. I think some of the best rulebook I've read have been OCS but they've had 4 revisions to get them right.
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Jul 9, 2017 21:32
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Chill la Chill posted:I do not know how anyone could not like the GOG rulebook. It's just like the amazing COIN rulebook (assuming they all follow ADP's example). They both dispose of the chatty bullshit approach that Vlaada and Rosenberg just love. I disagree. GMT has a smart formula of labeling everything for easy reference. GoG has no such thing and as a result you're flipping through to find the exception mentioned once in a section it has no earthly business belonging. Again, Simmons' tutorial is indispensable and also equally impenetrable with a 2,000 word essay on how to set up. The best way to learn is just to play with yourself, following the book linearly.
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Jul 9, 2017 21:35
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al-azad posted:just play with yourself wargames.txt
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Jul 9, 2017 21:58
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al-azad posted:I disagree. GMT has a smart formula of labeling everything for easy reference. GoG has no such thing and as a result you're flipping through to find the exception mentioned once in a section it has no earthly business belonging. Again, Simmons' tutorial is indispensable and also equally impenetrable with a 2,000 word essay on how to set up. Also I learned that this game was a reprint that used kickstarter and I could've had a real ACW bullet with it had I known about it years ago. 
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Jul 9, 2017 22:05
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Chill la Chill posted:I was typing out a reply and as I did so, I realized that I do like how ADP includes an additional tutorial booklet with the concise rulebook, so yeah you're right. Visit a battlefield of the ACW and you can probably buy one for $2 US. Edit: this is because many, many bullets were fired during the ACW.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:15
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homullus posted:Visit a battlefield of the ACW and you can probably buy one for $2 US.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:18
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Tekopo posted:My fiancee lived in Fredericksburg for a while and she mentioned that it was pretty easy to go out and find some old bullets still out there. Fredericksburg resident here, Civil War memorabilia flows like water. There are several ACW conventions in the area. GoG inspired me to lay down the ground works for designing a Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville series that the city would probably subsidize, advertise, and distribute. I don't want to rip off Simmons' but whenever I think of ACW line combat I just go right back to that design. Fredericksburg was nasty. The design conceit would have to be splitting the battle on two fronts, the city and the slaughter pens, with the Union having superior numbers but due to terrible command you have to to devote forces to capture an unassailable point.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:41
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T-Bone posted:Interesting game, we generally don't see a whole lot of dumping our games, did you buy in to prevent it being looted? We played last night and I floated the B&O early (with the steamboat to triple it), and then later on the C&O for some blocking and extra certs. Unfortunately I floated the C&O just a litttle bit late as the IC player was able to move about a bit too freely and ended up beating me by about $200 because of beefed up infrastructure in the SW. I bought in to collect the sweet dividends and/or give the company less money now instead of more later. The player who dumped it really likes doing that and is thus probably happier in 1830 - he wanted to dump C&O on the third player but there would be no companies left to pick up the pieces. Yeah, B&O with Steamboat is a lucrative opening - our other game had that. NYC should never be out though? You select 1/2 of Erie, Penn, and C&O to cut for 4/3 players. You're very lucky, getting to play so often - our heavier games group plays every two weeks usually, and 18xx is one of many competing for playtime. 1846 in particular should really be playable more often at normal meetups but we're still slow, and too many people won't even accept 2-3 hours.
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Jul 10, 2017 00:31
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al-azad posted:Fredericksburg resident here, Civil War memorabilia flows like water. There are several ACW conventions in the area. That loving battle.
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Jul 10, 2017 00:33
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rchandra posted:I bought in to collect the sweet dividends and/or give the company less money now instead of more later. The player who dumped it really likes doing that and is thus probably happier in 1830 - he wanted to dump C&O on the third player but there would be no companies left to pick up the pieces. Oh no poo poo, for some reason I thought it was any one rail comes out in a 3/4p game (although to be fair we had always cut out the Erie or Penn previous to that).
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Jul 10, 2017 01:12
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Any takes on M.U.L.E.?
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Jul 10, 2017 01:35
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The Narrator posted:Any takes on M.U.L.E.? It was okay. Nothing like the videogame really, only the theme and resources did go up and down but not in realtime or anything. I won't play it again.
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Jul 10, 2017 01:45
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al-azad posted:Fredericksburg resident here, Civil War memorabilia flows like water. There are several ACW conventions in the area. This is a really cool idea
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Jul 10, 2017 02:02
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Are any of the expansions to Keyflower recommended by anyone who has the game here? Me and my wife love the game and we're wondering if any of them add depth without changing the game a ton.
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Jul 10, 2017 04:32
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silvergoose posted:In essence: Gotcha. I thought this was going to be something like, "If a player takes beteen two and four hours to complete their turn, they must offer their opponent a high calory snack or caffeineted beverage, unless it is later than 8pm or the opponent's prior turn was longer than seven hours..."
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Jul 10, 2017 04:53
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I got a new phone and noticed that Paizo had released Pathfinder Adventures on Android a while back. So I decided to give it a shot, since I was wondering how bad that game was and how exactly did the digital format benefit the game. At the beginning, the session-to-session deckbuilding seemed neat and concepts such as banishing (removing a card from your deck forever) seemed interesting as another way to play around with cards. Also the "add cards to a check to increase the number of cards you roll" was novel, at least for me. I did up to the second mission of the second adventure (the one with the boss that gets tougher as you dump blessings into the fight result). Attempted it with a Fighter, a Wizard, a Rogue and a Cleric. Pretty standard, take-all-corners team. After 15 attempts, I am done with this game. At least 10 of those attempts ended because I needed to roll a certain number and ended up rolling below it, even when I made sure to keep as many boost cards as possible. In one attempt, I lost because I failed to close a location. Needed a 7, rolled 1s on four d6s. This meant I had to go through the rest of the deck in that location to have another attempt at closing it - which I once again failed. In my last attempt, I reached the boss (the last card on the map) with 5 turns to spare. The boss does 1d4 random damage to all heroes in her location when she's drawn from the deck. She immediately left my cleric weaponless, so I failed that roll. No big deal, she's my worst fighter. I then went and fought her with the other three characters. The Fighter and the Wizard easily rolled 10 dice between both of them - they had to hit 12 and then 14 to kill her. I got 11 and 13, and then 10 and 13. On five dice. Also the F2P model is kinda bad - you get money for the first time you complete missions, as well as killing enemies and closing locations. 100 for the easiest missions, 150-250~ for the hardest ones with a big party (these are the only ones you can repeat for extra gold), 1 gold per enemy defeated and 5 gold per location closed. New adventures are cheap, but new heroes aside from the first two you're given (a Cleric and a Rogue) are 1500-2000 gold. It seems people do 1-character runs of the second mission at max difficulty because it's really easy, but that sounds dreadfully boring so yeah. Overall, the F2P model is not AWFUL but it's not good either. I just wish this game had more ways of mitigating luck than just "get more dice, roll better next time". It seems interesting, but it's really terribly frustrating because no matter how much you plan your turns, unless you get a 100% guaranteed roll you can and will have to redo all your progress just because your characters rolled awfully. Also it was very funny to me that my Wizard had the best damage output, the best damage mitigation spells and the most overall utility. I mean, sure, he had to discard those spells as he used them but he could recharge them (send them back to his 10~ card deck) by performing an Int check. Except that, you know, Int is his strongest stat. Yay caster supremacy! At least I could use a crowbar and lockpicks to get rid of the shopkeeper's daughter and the blacksmith's son. No idea what they were doing in the Evil Fortress of Doom but hey, they sure were dedicated to stopping my progress. Edit: Oh, almost forgot. Paizo REALLY needs to add icons to these cards. Dear god, there are SO MANY WORDS on them. I mean, look at this:  This is one of the most basic cards in the game. All weapons share this same template of "For your combat check, reveal this card to roll your X or X dice + 1dx". They may have +1s or the ability to discard the card for an extra die. EVERY BASIC WEAPON HAS THIS. Why couldn't they use symbols or keywords? Azran fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 09:51
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Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:Gotcha. I thought this was going to be something like, "If a player takes beteen two and four hours to complete their turn, they must offer their opponent a high calory snack or caffeineted beverage, unless it is later than 8pm or the opponent's prior turn was longer than seven hours..." Heh. If you can imagine the start of day 2 when some Union corps marched half the night and then all formed up on the fishhook, you can think of that forming up as a multi hour turn, no one's ready to attack yet, but there's a bunch of men on the field, so you take the four in-game hours, condense it into one turn, and the line just sorta extends to little round top. Ah, the 20th Maine. I did just listen to the killer angels, haven't read that book in ages.
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Jul 10, 2017 12:10
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al-azad posted:Fredericksburg resident here, Civil War memorabilia flows like water. There are several ACW conventions in the area. Yay Fredericksburg goons!  And yeah, you can find ACW stuff everywhere, both in the tourist shops and just metal detecting. When I was growing up we found all sorts of stuff just walking around in the woods around my house.
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Jul 10, 2017 13:03
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Anyone have any thoughts on Rum & Bones? Looking for a fun 2 player game and we both dig the pirate theme. It's a cmon game so will some expansions be required?
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Jul 10, 2017 13:35
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T-Bone posted:Oh no poo poo, for some reason I thought it was any one rail comes out in a 3/4p game (although to be fair we had always cut out the Erie or Penn previous to that). You remove one or two of the companies with a single-city grey home tile, so that you close those routes and effectively scale the board size with player count.
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Jul 10, 2017 13:49
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Hey guys so I posted this in the deals thread as well but just in case some of you don't check that...I'm moving to a tiny apartment in NYC for work and am selling a large amount of my (large) collection. The auction has been up on BGG for a bit, and a lot of you have probably already seen it, but here you go: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/227252/massive-moving-auction-us-eurosameritrashwargamesk There's still a lot of really good stuff that hasn't been bid on or BIN (Millennium Blades, Forbidden Stars, Viticulture, Istanbul, COIN, OCS, etc). It would probably be better to just bid on BGG but you can PM me here too if that works better or you don't have a BGG account or something.
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Jul 10, 2017 15:05
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screech on the beach posted:Anyone have any thoughts on Rum & Bones? Looking for a fun 2 player game and we both dig the pirate theme. It's a cmon game so will some expansions be required? Like most CMON, it's okay, but takes too long for what it is, and coasts on the models. They went for a pretty Ameritrashy implementation of a MOBA.
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Jul 10, 2017 16:34
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Rum and bones 2 significantly speeds up playtime and makes the whole thing quite decent. You can back port the new rules with an upgrade kit as well
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Jul 10, 2017 16:50
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Not directly board game related, but Sirlin games is using Fig to crowdfund their new video game based on Yomi. Besides how lovely the Fig platform is, the game looks like a bad version of the SF4/5 engine and the premise of "a fighting game for people who can't play fighting games and fighting game veterans" is pretty terrible. If you cater to the newbie audience, your game can't have real depth that the other half will enjoy and vice versa. quote:Why it’s Easy to Get Into For a person with his background, these are all just laughable design decisions. It sounds like an autoplaying version of fighting games to basically do what Divekick already did (way better).  
Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 19:27
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Actually, it's pretty cool and kind of fun. Source: I've actually played it It's not auto play at all, the graphics are basic but steadily improving (and in the current iteration they almost look as good as MvC:I, which isn't saying much but there you go), and the gameplay was pretty fun when I got to try it with a friend. Apart from the whole Sirlin thing and him overselling it like crazy, I don't think it's that bad an idea to try something like this.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:38
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That's good to hear, but yeah the pitch is awful. He really needs to start working on just mechanics and let others handle everything else.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:43
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idk those actually sound like intriguing design decisions that I don't see anything "laughable" about at face value. I'd absolutely give that game a shot based on that pitch. I haven't played fighting games since Street Fighter II ate all my quarters but I'd totally give that a shot.
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Jul 10, 2017 20:47
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