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I'd still check counters because some thrift stores reshrink games. I think a goon found some old wargames in shrink and they were missing a bunch of stuff.
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Sep 28, 2018 21:30
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Tekopo posted:I'd still check counters because some thrift stores reshrink games. I think a goon found some old wargames in shrink and they were missing a bunch of stuff. This place doesn't have a shrinkwrapper, so if that happened it would have been upstream. But I'm hopeful. I'll probably check them once I'm done frantically throwing an Arkham Horror deck together and trying to remember how to play.
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Sep 28, 2018 22:07
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silvergoose posted:Er, season 1 or season 2 Moot point now since I found a stash of 100+ sleeves to use, but thanks! I was trying to look up a number range for how high that deck could get, if it ever changed, but I couldn't without a spoiler minefield.
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Sep 28, 2018 22:13
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Chill la Chill posted:Yeah sorry ma’am! It’s just that usually it’s an old boys club looking affair which is intimidating to people for various reasons. Los Angeles has this problem. There are a core group of 18xx'ers that no one wants to play with and so it's hard to find 18xx games.
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Sep 28, 2018 22:44
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Shadow225 posted:I had some game experiences last night. Moderately late response, but wanted to agree that both these games are great.
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Sep 28, 2018 23:11
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It looks like they are releasing a new spirit for Spirit Island:CNN posted:The recently discovered fossil of a new dinosaur species in South Africa revealed a relative of the brontosaurus that weighed 26,000 pounds, about double the size of a large African elephant.
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Sep 29, 2018 03:18
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A local store has Schotten Tottem available at a reasonable - for the region - price ($20), looking at it it's... Battleline with a new coat of paint? Is that correct?
Azran fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 08:13
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Azran posted:A local store has Schotten Tottem available at a reasonable - for the region - price ($20), looking at it it's... Battleline with a new coat of paint? Is that correct? Other way around. Schotten Totten was first, then Battle Line adding the tactics, then reimported the tactics to Schotten Totten.
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Sep 29, 2018 08:33
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Citadels just got an Iranian edition, to be released internationally at Spiel. I don't want it, and I can't read Persian anyway, but it's really really nice looking. I hope they do well.
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Sep 29, 2018 09:31
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Pandemic Legacy: the Researcher + Scientist character combo is so good! We easily made it through the first two months, but lost in March because a disease we already cured exploded while we got stuck not drawing player cards for the last disease we needed to cure. We're thinking about swapping one of those characters for the Quarantine Specialist so we can "freeze" remote locations that have three cubes so we don't lose to outbreaks again.
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Sep 29, 2018 16:22
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Man this thread moves fast and is hard to keep up with. Imo a boardgame subforum with a general thread and specific threads for different games to discuss would be really good
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Sep 29, 2018 19:51
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Except that's what this subforum already is?  More popular discussion games already have their own threads, some of which move plenty faster than this one.
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Sep 29, 2018 19:59
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Like 99% of the threads in here are for specific games. Which one are you interested in? The flavour of the month tends not to get its own thread, but big long-term favourites pretty much all do.
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Sep 29, 2018 20:14
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This subforum is still decidedly collectible game-and-TTRPG focused for sure, but there's no reason people can't post threads for specific games if they want to. The thing is many people aren't likely to play any given game more than once a week or less (often much less) if the game isn't something that's designed to be played a bunch in quick succession like Dominion or a legacy game. Conversation tends to dry up in game-specific threads pretty fast unless there's a good way to play online and a dedicated group doing just that.
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Sep 29, 2018 20:45
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If you guys want to throw money down a hole, MTG Arena's open beta is up and running: https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena There is, unfortunately, no friend list for some reason, but I can't imagine they won't work on that.
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Sep 30, 2018 16:43
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For anyone that's played both versions of Brass, which one do you prefer? I can't decide if the beer opens it up more or not.
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Sep 30, 2018 16:50
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Trip report for RinCon (local AZ tabletop convention). Been a long time since I've gone to a convention without business on my mind, although I did sit on a one hour "Diversity In Games" panel and got my ticket comped. Good local cons are honestly more enjoyable than the big crazy shows if you wanna play rather than buy. You get more games in, and you've got a good shot at getting in if you're waitlisted. Bit of a bummer that my comp copies of Meltwater didn't arrive in time to show off, but what can you do? --- High Frontier 3rd Ed: Base game, full five players, four hours. Played NASA. Still the same giant ramshackle mess its always been. Soaked up free boost fees all game as people had to repeatedly reconfigure bad missions. Spent most of the early game trying desperately to liftoff a mass 11 megarocket with mediocre fuel economy (7/4, the thruster stack was very unkind if you weren't planning on solar-sailing), but it was 100% worth it to get an ISRU-2 orbital laser out into the asteroid belt, and I struck paydirt on my first trip to the Karin Cluster. ...And that's when I started making mistakes. My S-Factory let me flip my heavy laser-robonaut for a light self-propelled missile-robonaut (4/2 dirt rocket with afterburner, modified to ISRU-0), so I figured that rather than launching another big fuckoff heavy laser from Earth, I'd just cruise around the Ceres belt with the new hotness and a new light refinery in tow. M-sites and D-sites seemed to be rare and valuable, so I set off to try one of those And that's about when I relearned that trying to prospect light bodies with a missile is really loving annoying. See, prospecting is just a straight up d6 roll against a site's size. Fail and the site is barren. There's three types of Robonauts you can use to prospect celestial bodies with. Lasers let you prospect from orbit (so long as a site doesn't have atmosphere) and can hit multiple bodies in one action. Great for shotgunning those little clusters of ones and twos. Buggies give you a reroll on small sites, and can hit all of a big multi-site planet in one action. And then there's missiles, which are self propelled (no need for extra baggage), but have no luck mitigation whatsoever. And the prospecting die can smell fear. So six turns later, I've hit nothing but dead rocks, and meanwhile the China player has basically been gentrifying Luna, and human space colonies are worth a lot of points. Finally squeaked out a second factory on a rare D-type, but I'd already been overshot, and came in second. What I totally should have done instead was either a) suck up the cost and launched another laser from home orbit, or b) banzai'd my new cheap autopilot dirt-rocket onto the nearest atmospheric world with aerobrakes, since the big planets are literally too big to fail. ...and complex considerations like that are what keep me from selling off my own copy of HF3, even though I could probably make a decent chunk flipping it. Like, gently caress it. The game is a ramshackle mess of bizarre parts and unmodified dice rolls, but a good game of it just feels so *good* to think through, and that's without the added nonsense of the Colonization expansion. That said, the game was almost torpedoed by the Shimizu player, an old prickly-rear end engineer in his sixties who had a massive ego problem. The entire game, he couldn't figure out how to read the thruster triangle, and he couldn't wrap his head around the difference between fuel tanks and fuel steps. He'd ask for help, but immediately get cranky at us because he's not stupid. Then he'd ignore any advice we'd give him, speed towards a different planet that he couldn't land on because his thruster was too weak, and complain that the game isn't fair. (Granted, Shimizu is the hardest faction to play, since their starting thruster is the absolute weakest, and their special ability is the weirdest to try and leverage. That one was on us experienced players, one of us should have taken them.) Thankfully, his long whiny turns just gave most of us more time to do math. --- Root: Four players, three hours. Marquis, Eyrie, Alliance (me), and Riverfolk. Ran by the same guy who ran HF, coincidentally. He played otters. First time playing. This one was a lot of fun, and it's definitely going in my collection as soon as my FuLGuS gets a copy in. (Stupid distributor allocation.) Unfortunately, the Cat was way too scared of losing cards to really stomp on my Sympathy, despite multiple players (myself included) pointing out that I was a threat. So naturally I ended up catapulting into the stratosphere in the late game by cashing in warriors for 4pt sympathies. Wasn't too bad a stomp, because I was new too, and I spent too much time planning multiple revolts rather than scooping up sympathy and crafts. And we realized that the otters at 28 points might have won the turn before, had they hard-drawn for a craftable sword/anvil/coin. In general, I think the otter was a little too involved in his funding puzzle, and didn't spend enough time trying to aggressively price the right services. I was his only real early buyer. And that was a mistake on my part, because wow the mice do NOT have soldiers to spare. In conclusion, remember to violently quash any rebellions before they can mobilize, kids! War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. --- Sidereal Confluence: Eight players, four hours. Everyone except Zeth (Space Mafia). I played the Im'dril Nomads. gently caress. I'd almost completely talked myself out of wanting this game. Now I need it like I need blood. And I will never in a million years get it to the table. Also, you know how we all make fun of the game for being kinda ugly? Turns out, the extremely utilitarian card design is VERY USEFUL when trying to parse an entire hell tableau of nonsense, or dig through a deck for some absurdly-named technology. I gained a very strong appreciation for big clear names and big clear icons that aren't squished by artwork. And honestly, the flavor does come out in the gameplay itself, without the need for a ton of polish. I have to give real credit to Tauceti Deichmann. In short, my guys are the big economic powerhouses of the game with strong efficient converters, but they have a lot of trouble setting up. They can't hold or use colonies, which are your main source of free resources over the game, and they have to burn a lot of early resources setting up a fleet of world-ships, or else their tech doesn't work. So, inspired by the fiat currency from the designer diaries, I dug out a piece of paper and a pen, and started taking out loans from other players. "Hey, would you like to get in on the ground floor of an investment opportunity?" I said, with my face mouth. So, if you don't know, the game has a handy guide on each player aid for what constitutes a fair-market trade (1 hexagon = 2 big cubes = 3 small cubes = 3 ships). Using the game's binding deal rules, I'd offer slightly bad trades for myself, with the catch being that I'd repay in future turns. If you give me that brown cube now, I'll give you one ship a turn for the next two turns, etc. I felt very clever. ...apparently this is such a common idea that there are BGG player aids for exactly that purpose. But it was still pretty loving cool, and confirmed my personal suspicions that the phrase "all deals are non-binding" is the most overused cop-out in our hobby. I absolutely want to incorporate binding deals into a future prototype. Alas, I was a little too overzealous in hunting down my trades, and ended up in third place. Gave too many freebie points to the Faderans, and too many lopsided deals to run the Kjasjavikalimm's planet-devouring engines. Also, I took the faction guide's words to heart and burnt a lot of early resources setting up my fleet ships, and overshot by a ton. I ended turn 1 with seven fleet points. I think there was only one moment where I needed more than five fleet points, and that was somewhere around turn 5. --- Stationfall -- Didn't actually get to play this one, just spectated a bit. New prototype from Matt Eklund, not publicly available yet. So this is all from possibly-inaccurate memory. A space station is falling out of the sky, and has a certain number of turns before burning up. There are twelve characters on the station, from a possible pool of like 20. Some of them are the player characters, but you don't know which ones. You know who you are, and what secret conspiracy you're a part of, based on your hidden identity card. On your turn , you can place an influence cube on one of the twelve characters, and then move/act with any character you have the most/tied-most cubes on. You can only have a total number of cubes in play equal to your character's influence limit (which is a secret until you reveal, but you do have to play honest). Alternately, you can reveal your role, at which point all cubes are removed from your matching character, and only you can move that character from now on. Each character has a special ability, as well as a conspiracy that defines how the matching player gains VPs. The Boarder gets points for stealing certain things. The Corporate Operative gets points for making sure evidence doesn't survive, and certain individuals don't make it off the station alive. The Captain gets points for rescuing people and then surviving long enough to go down with the ship. IIRC, your conspiracy can give you a max of 5 vp. You also gain 1-2vps if your "ally" escapes alive. (You get two roles at game start, you pick one to be your character, and the other becomes your ally.) That's all I remember for certain. The station is chock full of all kinds of interactables--evidence reports of corporate wrongdoing, a spacesuit, a computer that may or may not be alive and playing the game, a single lasgun that's biolocked to only work for characters with Authorization, etc. It seems like the exact sort of maximalist party time the Eklunds are good at, but thusfar without a Phil screed on why corporations dropping colonies from orbit is actually a good thing. No clue whatsoever how balanced or playable it actually is. It just looked cool and cinematic, and I hope to hear more about it in the future. ---  ALSO! Hit the convention Flea Market, came across a copy of 1st Ed Cash & Guns. Really old German-language edition with the black foam guns that they can't make anymore. It's a neat thing to have, but I know a lot of goons are more interested than I am, and I'm willing to part with it if someone makes an offer. Hit me up in PMs or Discord if you're interested.
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Sep 30, 2018 17:10
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Bottom Liner posted:For anyone that's played both versions of Brass, which one do you prefer? I can't decide if the beer opens it up more or not. I think if you want a broader game then Birmingham is better, but Lancashire is certainly tighter. We all like Birmingham the best, noting that we'll not turn down Lancashire either.
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Sep 30, 2018 17:37
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Gutter Owl posted:*cutting out so many words* This sounds like SpaceStation13 or whatever the hell game goons love to play on that private server. I'll have to keep an eye out for that one, it sounds pretty unique. Edit: Sidcon is indeed amazing. It's just so hard to get to the table, since it really needs 5+ to shine. It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy wheeling and dealing for hours with some amount of effort to come up with trades. Ravendas fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Sep 30, 2018 |
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Sep 30, 2018 18:04
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Ugh now I'm thinking about High Frontier 3rd Ed that I finally cancelled my order after well past a year of  when I learned it's just not going to happen anytime soon.That old guy sounds like an unfortunate mix of needs help, defensive about it, AND doesn't trust y'all aren't trying to trick him so SHARP LEFT TURN. (At least I grew out of that nonsense as a dumb teen.) 
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Sep 30, 2018 18:40
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Gutter Owl posted:...and complex considerations like that are what keep me from selling off my own copy of HF3, even though I could probably make a decent chunk flipping it. Like, gently caress it. The game is a ramshackle mess of bizarre parts and unmodified dice rolls, but a good game of it just feels so *good* to think through, and that's without the added nonsense of the Colonization expansion. This is a good summary of the charm of High Frontier. It's a clunky mess, but somehow creates a gripping conundrum. I keep thinking of The Player of Games and a game that is so complex it approximates real life.
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Sep 30, 2018 18:53
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Played Rising Sun this morning. There's a lot of depth there in combat. Essentially, the point of the game is to prioritize which regions you want to pick up out of the ones that are up for grabs that turn, then make sure that you're spending your coins wisely and running down the coins of your opponents. Because the combat is so interesting and requires so much attention, it can feel like the mandate turns are just meant to set the stage for those fights, making each of those actions feel unsatisfying. You're basically picking a way in which you want to win fights (more dudes on the map, more ronin tiles, attrition, etc) and getting what you need to win what you need to. Since there are so many ways to win fights, it's rare that you're going to shut somebody out of one of those methods. The combat's a great game, but you need to play a fairly disposable game to get to it.
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Sep 30, 2018 19:15
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The thing that surprised me about Sidereal Confluence is the art. Like, everyone makes jokes that the game looks awful, with a pile of zero-effort gradient-tool cards. And that's actually not true! The game is actually *filthy* with visual art. It's just really not the type we're used to seeing in board games. It's like the box art itself. You glance at it at the store, or on a BGG thumbnail, and you just see a blank field of stars and galaxies, and you totally glaze over it. You kinda have to look to see the silhouettes of the alien races.  Likewise, the background of each racial technology card is actually 100% unique, littered with sketches and diagrams, including detailed biological and technical breakdowns. Plus nine different self-consistent written orthographies, one for each race. And Tauceti didn't just dash these sketches off, either. Each one is exhaustively explained in the liner notes on BGG. Like, "Im'dril cell nuclei look like this for this reason" explained.   And maybe that does absolutely nothing for you, and that's fair! It doesn't do jack poo poo to convey game concepts to the player in situ, and it certainly looks like rainbow clipart vomit to a passerby. But if you're the sort of dweeb what buys wargames to read the designer notes (me), or bought OG loving Android because the idea of a neo-noir cyberpunk novel in a box appealed to you (also me), then boy howdy. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Sep 30, 2018 |
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Sep 30, 2018 19:23
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Tauceti has also stated that the game's universe is also used in an RPG he's developing (or developed but hasn't published? It isn't really clear), so it probably made a lot of sense for him to map all this stuff out since it makes brainstorming other things all the easier.
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Sep 30, 2018 19:40
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I find it very funny that Sidcon spun off from this guy's RPG universe he thought a lot about and it's still generic as hell. C3PO convinced space wasps to be friends w/ the Krogans.
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Sep 30, 2018 20:23
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Between Agricola and Dungeon Lords which plays better at two players?
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Sep 30, 2018 20:29
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Agricola, because you don't have to bother with a dummy player.
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Sep 30, 2018 20:36
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Gric is a very good, mean 2p game, played well you're blocking a ton and trying to interfere. DL is okay at 2 but way way better at 4, the dummy players you get to choose actions for are fine but aren't as engaging.
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Sep 30, 2018 20:38
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Bottom Liner posted:For anyone that's played both versions of Brass, which one do you prefer? I can't decide if the beer opens it up more or not. Neither can I. The beer does add another layer of interactivity as it's exclusively owned by the players but it puts an awkward limit on network building in the rail era and unless you've set up multiple sells for your second action you can basically kiss your beer goodbye before your next turn especially in a 4 player game. Beer also removes a luck dependent element compared to Lancashire's oversees cotton but offsets it with extra industries which frankly I think clogs up the board. My overall opinion of Birmingham is that it streamlined in the right areas but midway through the rail era it turned into a clunky mess. As the game went on your options shrunk pretty decisively and made the game feel procedural. I was no longer thinking "how can I create a new opportunity to make my opponents dependent on me?" but rather "this action gets me 3 points and this action gets me 3 points but this action gets me 4 points which opens up this 2 point action... decisions..." After playing Brass Brum I'm pretty solid in my opinion that Martin Wallace is not a designer for me. nonathlon posted:This is a good summary of the charm of High Frontier. It's a clunky mess, but somehow creates a gripping conundrum. I keep thinking of The Player of Games and a game that is so complex it approximates real life. It's a good summary for all of Eklund's games. On the surface they're all unbalanced and poorly written but they're rarely uninteresting. His games are the best examples of a narrative forming from play, no flavor text necessary. Even when you're losing there's no end of interactions you can make to change the game state. Gutter Owl posted:Root: Four players, THREE HOURS I don't even know how...
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Sep 30, 2018 21:09
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Got to try out a few new (to me) games this week: Dinosaur Island: It's really no surprise that this is by the guy who did Dead of Winter, as it's another example of mashing together game concepts together without knowing why they work. While there are tons of nods to the Jurassic Park franchise, I never truly felt like I was really creating a park. The DNA management was just pushing a few cubes up and down, not engaging at all. There are two rounds of worker placement: For the scientists, I never felt like there was real competition among slots. The only single-use spaces were for grabbing specific types of dinosaurs, but even then there aren't any differences among the dinosaurs in each category with regards to scoring/excitement levels. The other worker placement aspect has you placing workers on your own tableau, so it's more just an action allocation since there is no competition over spots. Why not just look at a game that uses this successfully, like Manhattan Project, that has a mix of common-area and personal tableau placement? Additional, and it may seem extremely minor, but this was the retail version so all the dinosaurs were pink triceratops, which actually took away a bit of the engagement from making dinos. There's also some market-row stuff in the middle of every round, but thankfully it's mitigated a bit by having a rather wide variety of options available at each price level. Just like Dead of Winter, I had high hopes going into this based on the theme/concept, and it was a bit of a letdown. Not horribly broken like DoW, but just "fine". I'd play again but would never want to add it to my collection. I almost feel like it's a game that should have been split into two halves, the first half designing the park and the second half dealing with events/disasters, like Galaxy Trucker only with dinosaurs. This would have made the game a bit less strategic, but it doesn't really stand out as a strategic game to begin with. Next up was a game that I had doubts about going in, Hail Hydra. I'm happy to report that those doubts proved unfounded, and that this is actually a pretty good implementation of a mix of The Resistance with BSG. The only somewhat confusing part were when the powers of each hero were able to be used. Probably not an issue for experienced gamers, but I could see a need for reference cards if playing at a family gathering or any event with a lot of non-gamers. It also felt like it might be pretty easy for the Hydra agents, but I've said the same thing before on other hidden traitor games, so perhaps it gets harder once players are more intimately familiar with the systems of the game.
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Sep 30, 2018 21:35
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silvergoose posted:Gric is a very good, mean 2p game, played well you're blocking a ton and trying to interfere. Can confirm; DL is basically a strictly 4 player game for us; the dummy player mechanics are flawed at 2 players and worse at 3.
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Sep 30, 2018 22:13
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Man, the play report above just makes me all the sadder that SidCon seems impossible to find in Australia.
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Oct 1, 2018 00:28
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al-azad posted:I don't even know how... Probably wasn't a whole three hours. We started a little past ten, and I made it home...sometime after 1am. I didn't have all my brain with me after a long friday of conventioning (and High Frontier). We also had a pretty thorough rules and faction explanation, and a cat player who was a little slow. Finished the last day of the convention with Container. Mostly stuck to shipping and auctioning this game . Came tied last, about $11 behind the winner. But unlike my first game where I felt like a squirrel in a woodchipper, this time I could pinpoint my downfall to a single mistake. I didn't buy my own ship of garbage for $10, when it would've given me just enough to protect my 5/10 good from crashing. Feels good to actually understand why I'm drowning, at least. Pour one out for the $40 retail version of the game that should have been and never will be. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Oct 1, 2018 |
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Oct 1, 2018 01:26
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Container is easily a 10/10 game for me and while I love the components it could easily be repackaged in a $20 box.
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Oct 1, 2018 02:23
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The Narrator posted:Man, the play report above just makes me all the sadder that SidCon seems impossible to find in Australia. I originally got it from Amazon before they blocked direct delivery from the US site. Few copies up on eBay but they are pretty pricey. Bloody Wizkids.
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Oct 1, 2018 02:25
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The best part of Container is getting a ship that should be worth a bunch of money for you, except that it would force you to null the 5/10 good. Trying to figure out if you should gamble on getting another shipment later to protect the 5/10 good is great fun.
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Oct 1, 2018 06:41
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The best part is figuring out what people's cards are and crafting shipments to force that situation.
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Oct 1, 2018 07:52
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al-azad posted:Container is easily a 10/10 game for me and while I love the components it could easily be repackaged in a $20 box. That true. It's pretty but so excessive. Even as a first step, every container and ship could be half sized and it would still be fine. At the UK Tabletop expo on the weekend and there were lots of demos and things to look at. Soloman Kane and Joan of Arc both had the pretty and seemed interesting but I'm still very unsure about them as games. There was half a dozen new miniatures-in-a-box systems, all of which blurred into one with the exception of a squadron based WW2 one from Warlords which was quite clever. Pandemic Rome was nice. I picked up The Captain is Dead: Lockdown which I'm looking forward to.
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Oct 1, 2018 07:52
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I'd buy a sensibly priced or non-ugly version of Container in a heart beat
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Oct 1, 2018 11:06
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Jumbo Container is just ludicrous. When we played it we had a stack of ships on the island because there just wasn't room on the table for them. On the Heavy Cardboard playthrough the host explained that they sized the containers as being comfortable to hold, then built the ship to that scale, and I feel strongly they should have had a second process to see if those ships were not now grossly oversized.
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Oct 1, 2018 12:03
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