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TorakFade posted:Would you guys say Viticulture EE is a must have for someone who loves worker placement? I have been looking for a game like Agricola but less tense, while keeping theme as a highlight and it would seem Viticulture fits this description pretty well. I don't know about "must have", but it definitely ticks a helluva lot of boxes. It's wonderfully thematic, has great art and production quality, and in its base game the rules, while not super simple, intertwine with the theme so well so that it could qualify as a gateway game. It scales pretty well (although people tend to like the generosity of odd numbers more, and 6 players can drag too long), and with the expansion even makes a solid 2 player game. If you do have the expansion, it comes with enough modules that the game can turn into a heavy worker placement with much more strategic gameplay, but slowly enough that new gamers can be eased into it. That's a lot of qualities to be found in one game that will generally be enjoyed, if not tolerated, by 99% of players. As for the specific worker placement qualities, they're pretty standard (and gentler thanks to the grande meeple) but the special worker meeples in the expansion can do neat things that change the game up a bit.
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Feb 21, 2018 13:39
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Known Lecher posted:As someone who’s been unsuccessfully looking for a while for a copy of 1862 at a non-extortionate price (as OOP 18XX games tend to go for), I’m stoked. But I didn’t expect them to print a title that’s on the more complex side of things, at least not as their second 18XX ever. Since they contracted with Mike Hutton for '62, my suspicion is that it'll be '60. Which would be really good, as '60 is even more popular than '62.
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Feb 21, 2018 13:51
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Crackbone posted:And regarding Pandemic Legacy: It's worth it even at MSRP. This is true. It is has been hard lately getting games organized but the most unlikely people I know will make time now for semi-regular sessions of Pandemic Legacy.
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Feb 21, 2018 13:53
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Known Lecher posted:As someone who’s been unsuccessfully looking for a while for a copy of 1862 at a non-extortionate price (as OOP 18XX games tend to go for), I’m stoked. But I didn’t expect them to print a title that’s on the more complex side of things, at least not as their second 18XX ever. Didn't they say that one would be a reprint of a rare game, and the other one a new title or something?
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Feb 21, 2018 14:47
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So Eclipse 2e is a kickstarter now? when did that happen?
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Feb 21, 2018 14:48
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Retromancer posted:So Eclipse 2e is a kickstarter now? when did that happen? May, if you want the accurate answer. Lautapelit don't want the hassle of holding large quantities of stock, Kolossal have Kickstarter experience, so they teamed up.
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Feb 21, 2018 15:12
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It'd be nice if they threw out an upgrade kit. I don't have the ship pack so I don't know if that would affect how it works though. And drat you al-azad, you've got me fiending for some TI:4. Just gotta get a copy but gently caress paying $160, where are my FFG/Asmodee sales up in the northern wastes?
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Feb 21, 2018 15:42
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FulsomFrank posted:It'd be nice if they threw out an upgrade kit. I don't have the ship pack so I don't know if that would affect how it works though. Not much. Ship Pack One is a couple of new hexes, a couple of rare techs and individual sculpts for the base game races. An Eclipse Upgrade Pack would just be the new ship sculpts, the colourful new hexes and whatever fix they added to the base game for Plasma Missiles - probably the Point Defence tech that lets you shoot them down.
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Feb 21, 2018 15:48
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A Horse Named Mandy posted:Been looking for 2-player co-op games. Already into Arkham LCG, but feeling the need to branch out. Has anybody tried Robinson Crusoe, particularly with two people? It's looking like either that, Mage Knight, or Aeon's End, but neither of us has much interest in a fantasy setting. Other coop deckbuilders - Sentinels of the Multiverse for a superhero/villain theme, XenoShyft for a sci-fi aliens theme. Flash Point and Codenames Duet are solid coop games with 2 players. A pretty good coop game not many people know about is Defenders Of The Last Stand. Theme is Fallout/Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic and you play as rangers who move around the board trying to prevent different roaming gangs and mutants from attacking the central city where the last bits of Humanity survive. 4 different gangs slowly spread over the board (similar to how the diseases spread in Pandemic) and your goal is to kill the gang leaders before they reach the city. Heavy, strong theme throughout and it has a sandboxy feel with several different things you can do each turn. Chubbs fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 16:12
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FulsomFrank posted:And drat you al-azad, you've got me fiending for some TI:4. Just gotta get a copy but gently caress paying $160, where are my FFG/Asmodee sales up in the northern wastes? One Eyed Jacques has a preowned copy for $75 ($15 shipping within the US, don't know about elsewhere) I've bought several games from them before, they're legit.
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Feb 21, 2018 16:12
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How is Nippon? I've heard it described as Brass meets El Grande, which sounds amazing. It's been out since 2015 though, and I don't hear much about it Same question for Empire: Age of Discovery. I've heard it compared to Dominant Species, which is appealing. How does it compare to other 4x favorites like Clash of Cultures? Megasabin fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 16:23
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Megasabin posted:How is Nippon? I've heard it described as Brass meets El Grande, which sounds amazing. It's been out since 2015 though, and I don't hear much about it My understanding is that Empires is just a re-implementation of Age of Empires III, which is an interesting and very fun area control game with some light civ elements than something much closer to a traditional civ 4x game like CoC. I haven't played Dominant Species but I think it and E:AoD/AoE are more similar in the purer area control aspects. Lots of Expanding and Exterminating, not so much Exploring and Exploiting? Chubbs posted:One Eyed Jacques has a preowned copy for $75 ($15 shipping within the US, don't know about elsewhere) Thanks, now I have to see if I can get it sent to a mailbox in NY.
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Feb 21, 2018 16:36
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Well, y'all sold us Spirit Island.
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Feb 21, 2018 16:49
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As far as Spirit Island vs Aeon's End, how do either of these scale from 2-4 players?
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Feb 21, 2018 17:19
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What’s the best method to make game boards? Assume I already have another board game and I just need to place something on top. Would I just need to buy label paper and get Kinko’s/Staples to print them?Huxley posted:Well, y'all sold us Spirit Island. It’s a good game. Much better than the other untimed alternatives. Enjoy it, friend
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Feb 21, 2018 17:22
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Chill la Chill posted:What’s the best method to make game boards? Assume I already have another board game and I just need to place something on top. Would I just need to buy label paper and get Kinko’s/Staples to print them? You could print it to label paper and affix each individual label but unless you're super careful it'll look a little wonky and misaligned. You could have the map printed to the full size, use spray adhesive to glue it on the board, then cut where the board folds.
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Feb 21, 2018 17:25
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Huxley posted:Well, y'all sold us Spirit Island. I'm not going to tell you not to get it - but it clanked pretty hard with my group. We all liked the variety of spirits. But the game requires a crazy amount of "option analysis" that makes it drag with more than a couple people. You end up with a few likely options: - YOLO out some imperfectly coordinated moves, and have a couple fizzle because Bob didn't remind you he was going to use his passive to move that Dahan so he could set up something big for after next turn's build phase. And take powers without exhaustively considering how their symbol counts add up and what combinations of abilities you'd be able to play while triggering your passive. You play on pretty low difficulty or you lose doing this. And the game snowballs really hard. - Spend 5 or 10 minutes planning each round, and still find you have to cut off discussion. - Get really good so you can see through your options each round quickly enough that it isn't painful. I can't see this working with more than 2 players, unless your group really digs it. The problem I see with this is that the game doesn't actually go much of anywhere. There's lots of difficulty options, but there's very little game variety. You have a bunch of knobs to turn, but they mostly read "how many invaders spawn". Again, I really like lots of the ideas, and the spirit mechanics are super creative/thematic. But it just crashes on the wall of AP. It would probably help to institute "Gloomhaven style" communication rules where you can talk about stuff only at the level of "I'll take care of this guy" - but as you crank up the difficulty that doesn't work and you need very effective coordination. And you really have to crank up the difficulty to keep playing, because there's nothing else to do - it's not like there's a bunch of other maps or adversaries or something. To be clear, we were excited to play against the Prussian empire or whatever, until you see the rules are like "spawn an extra town on each board, but some double spawn cards on top of the spawn deck". jmzero fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 17:29
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al-azad posted:You could print it to label paper and affix each individual label but unless you're super careful it'll look a little wonky and misaligned. You could have the map printed to the full size, use spray adhesive to glue it on the board, then cut where the board folds. Ah, I forget about spray adhesives. I’ve used modge podge a lot but that’s more for wood crafts so it would look too messy, even with a rolling pin. If I wanted to get the really expensive custom vinyl sticker method (so only one sheet), where’s the best place to do that in the US? The only thing that keeps me from doing that is knowing I could get a good 3’x3’ playmat made by inked playmats (who have 50% off coupons from time to time) that I could cut to size afterwards. But, if it’s cheap enough, I wouldn’t mind it for a square 2’x2’ quad fold.
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Feb 21, 2018 17:31
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1862 looks insane drat
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Feb 21, 2018 17:33
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jmzero posted:I'm not going to tell you not to get it - but it clanked pretty hard with my group. We all liked the variety of spirits. But the game requires a crazy amount of "option analysis" that makes it drag with more than a couple people. You end up with a few likely options: Thanks for the heads up. I am going to play this 100% of the time 2 player with my wife, who loved Pandemic Legacy but even by the end thought they were too simplistic and asked me for, "like PL but more crunchy." So I'll keep your advice in mind, and hopefully a lot of the issues you had we'll be able to dodge under.
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Feb 21, 2018 17:48
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Huxley posted:Thanks for the heads up. I am going to play this 100% of the time 2 player with my wife, who loved Pandemic Legacy but even by the end thought they were too simplistic and asked me for, "like PL but more crunchy." I have only ever played Spirit Island 2-player, where I found more detailed planning workable. At 3+ I'm not sure I'd like it. Similarly we just finished Pandemic Legacy 2 and I'm looking forward to getting back to Spirit Island or Aeon's End with that partner.
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Feb 21, 2018 18:01
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Bottom Liner posted:and judging by the So Very Wrong About Games podcast it went through an extensive playtesting process to balance it all. Speaking of, you guys should really give that one a listen, at only 13 episodes in it's easily the best board game media out there. Thanks for the rec on this. I'ma check it out. I've really felt most BG podcasts have been a little lacking of late, so the podcast descriptions on this raise some hopes.
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Feb 21, 2018 18:31
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Did that monopoly gamer thing actually turn out semi-interesting given how different and removed it is from actual monopoly, or is it just kinda a polished turd
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Feb 21, 2018 18:44
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FirstAidKite posted:Did that monopoly gamer thing actually turn out semi-interesting given how different and removed it is from actual monopoly, or is it just kinda a polished turd I see the box in toys r us all the time and it looks godawful like all monopoly clones.
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Feb 21, 2018 18:48
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Megasabin posted:How is Nippon? I've heard it described as Brass meets El Grande, which sounds amazing. It's been out since 2015 though, and I don't hear much about it I quite like it, although I wouldn’t describe it as such. It’s got area control, but the action selection is way different than brass. There’s a lot more granularity in developing and supporting your factory than in brass, but less interesting economic balancing. If you’re interested, there’s a free rules enforced implementation on board game arena, which is the only place I’ve played it.
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Feb 21, 2018 19:04
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Megasabin posted:How is Nippon? I've heard it described as Brass meets El Grande, which sounds amazing. It's been out since 2015 though, and I don't hear much about it It's more like Village meets El Grande? It's a What's Your Game joint, and they're always a little hard to describe. It does have area control, through dispensing goods from three different tiers of factory which require increasing quantities of coal to run and knowledge to build, and produce one of three numbered markers depending on how much you burned. The map is four regions with eight demands for each, including duplicates, allocated by randomly drawing and rotating demand tiles at the start of the game. Area majority is by marker value, and you can bump people out by putting bigger markers down - somewhere else on the same tile, even, if you're playing with less than 4. But that can be good for them, since the supply of markers is tiny and placing one gives you a bonus. Where Village comes into it is that you take actions by pulling six different colors of dude off a board space, and that includes deploy markers, build factories (each of which comes with some freebie or rulebreaker), run factories, export goods for income, bump permanent knowledge or coal income, add machinery so your factories make more, or deploy trains or boats to limited spaces in a zone to bump your marker value or get more points if you're in first or second. (There are preprinted foreign devil points so second isn't a guarantee even in 2P.) At any point you can skip your turn to lose all your money and coal and get your income again, and the dudes you pull off the board factor into this in two ways. First, if you've taken between 3 and 6 actions since last income (you have to skip your turn after 6) you can grab a bonus tile with a multiplier based on the action count, up to 5x, to assign to some endgame scoring category, most of which start at 0x. Second, you immediately pay out a salary per color of dudes you have collected. Game will fill up the board 6 times pulling dudes out of a bag to do it. When a board space runs dry it gets refilled from a queue, when the queue's also dry the whole board refills. So there's some planning for available colors. Majority scoring happens after the second and fourth refill, and after the fifth refill everybody gets three actions each to final (including majority) scoring. I can't think of anything else quite like it and it's an interesting middleweight game to play. Fairly low randomness but just enough to plan around, though you need to be aware of a couple things - factories of the same type or even in the same tier aren't going to be balanced against each other, and putting markers on the board is super-significant both in terms of scoring and immediate bonuses, which can often keep your multiplier going higher before you need to pass and take income.
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Feb 21, 2018 20:13
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Glazius posted:Great write up on Nippon This sounds really fun. I'll add it to my wish-list. Thanks!
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Feb 21, 2018 20:21
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medchem posted:As far as Spirit Island vs Aeon's End, how do either of these scale from 2-4 players? In Aeon's End, player turns happen in random order every round of the game, with a little turn order deck you draw from to see who goes next. In 4 player game rounds, each player goes once and the nemesis you're fighting goes twice. In 2 player games, both players go twice in a round (nemesis still goes twice). It actually makes the game somewhat easier because you have double the opportunity to improve your deck and set up combos before the round is over. The Nemesis gets harder at a steady rate as the rounds go on, so the quicker you can pump up your deck, the better.
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Feb 21, 2018 20:22
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FirstAidKite posted:Did that monopoly gamer thing actually turn out semi-interesting given how different and removed it is from actual monopoly, or is it just kinda a polished turd No its just a tolerable screw your neighbor game, tolerable mostly because it's over so fast compared to normal monopoly
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Feb 21, 2018 20:49
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Bottom Liner posted:and judging by the So Very Wrong About Games podcast it went through an extensive playtesting process to balance it all. Speaking of, you guys should really give that one a listen, at only 13 episodes in it's easily the best board game media out there. The name is really apt because Mark is so very wrong about games and yet he gives compelling arguments for Space Hulk and Cosmic Encounter.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:28
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Yeah he's really good at acknowledging problems in games but also explaining why he likes them or pointing out glaring design flaws in games that most people would overlook. The latest episode touched on a huge problem with the random/clockwise turn order/role selection order in Twilight Imperium 4 and how it can cost you the game, which is bad on its own, but especially offensive in a 6+ hour game.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:35
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Bottom Liner posted:Yeah he's really good at acknowledging problems in games but also explaining why he likes them or pointing out glaring design flaws in games that most people would overlook. The latest episode touched on a huge problem with the random/clockwise turn order/role selection order in Twilight Imperium 4 and how it can cost you the game, which is bad on its own, but especially offensive in a 6+ hour game. I'll have to give it a listen because I think he's pretty negatively biased against TI4 to the point where he misunderstands or miscategorizes its issues. The turn order is to stress the importance of the politics card which can go foolishly underutilized and I can recognize every time when it becomes critical. But another thing is that the people he plays with don't sound like a great group for TI4 which is probably the biggest issue with the game. Because it's so openly political the game hinges entirely on the group. The last game I played completely renewed my interest in it, I was on the verge of selling it, but the group I played with are loving sharks who understand the spirit of the game. In one episode Walker says something along the lines of "Well if you feel like you can't contribute anything than at least you can build cool plastic armies and fight everyone" and I'm just screaming in car because that's the fastest way to ruin the game.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:39
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I'm actually not sure which host is which by name because their voices kinda blend together for me (and I listen to podcasts at 1.3x speed), but I think one of them plays it monthly and the other (the one I'm referring to) doesn't like it and is a lot more critical of it. I don't always agree with his overall opinion on a game (he likes KDM despite acknowledging all the things that make me hate it), but I can always understand his points on dissecting the good/bad in a game. I do like that both of the hosts are a lot more analytical and critical of games than anyone else in the board game media sphere, which is why I listen and recommend it.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:44
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His co-host quite likes TI:4 and basically goads him on as Mark goes on a rant about it. It's pretty funny. It works really well in part because Walker and Mark have different tastes but have obviously been friends for a long time and have good chemistry. They are both critical and structures thinkers too, but are more capabke of quickly getting to the heart of the game than anyone else. The Sidereal Confluence review is case in point. Walker doesn't like negotiation games or games with hidden victory points, so he doesn't like this, but he quickly zooms in on the key design elements, and they both agree that the things that. Walker doesn't like are also nessecary design elements and seperate 'this is good/bad design' from 'you may/may not like this' Edit: it's Mark Bigney (who did all the games you like are bad) and Mike Walker (who did some reviews on the dice tower). Mark hates TI:4 and Walker plays it regularly yeah. Cthulhu Dreams fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 21:46
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Fellis posted:1862 looks insane drat It breaks like half the 18xx rules, lol, for example, you can just have a company with multiple trains do the same run for the same income as long as the run doesn't include the offmap areas.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:51
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Walker is a great foil because he's the Tom Vasel "it's fun and the art is beautiful and the components are great" kind of gamer but when challenged he actually backs himself up.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:55
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Bottom Liner posted:and judging by the So Very Wrong About Games podcast it went through an extensive playtesting process to balance it all. Speaking of, you guys should really give that one a listen, at only 13 episodes in it's easily the best board game media out there. They said some good stuff about sidereal Confluence and the differences to Chinatown, therefore they are good.
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Feb 21, 2018 22:08
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I just moved and actually totally forgot I have Catacombs and Dungeon Lords Anniversary. I have never played them. Which should I try first and also someone diagnose what is wrong with me. Help.
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Feb 21, 2018 22:09
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Glazius posted:It's more like Village meets El Grande? It's a What's Your Game joint, and they're always a little hard to describe. This sounds absolutely fantastic. Are there any major criticisms of the game? Why don't we hear about it more often in this thread?
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Feb 21, 2018 22:23
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Panzeh posted:It breaks like half the 18xx rules, lol, for example, you can just have a company with multiple trains do the same run for the same income as long as the run doesn't include the offmap areas. Not quite since you can only count each dot/city once per company. But yea, you're allowed to reuse track otherwise.
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Feb 21, 2018 22:23
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