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Megasabin posted:I think it's finally time I added some games to my party line up. Avalon, Codenames, and ONUW have kept us occupied for years. What are some newer gold standards? I remember a lot of talk about Decrypto in the past few months. Is that the go to? I think I also remember some positive talk about Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, but not sure if that's different enough to get when I already have Avalon & ONUW Decrypto kills Codenames. I'll also throw Arkham Ritual in for shits and giggles. It's a little bit like Avalon, except you know which team everyone else is on but not yourself.
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Dec 27, 2018 17:58
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As far as party games go I'll toss in my favorite, Ugg-Tect. I've also enjoyed the admittedly little time I've spent with Trapwords - it's a word guessing game where someone needs to get their teammates to say specific words without saying certain words themselves (stop me if this sounds familiar), but the gimmick is that the words the hint-giver is locked out of using are assigned in secret by the rival team. So if I need my team to guess "hammer" I might be worried that the other team wrote "nail," but then again that's super obvious and you don't get to write that many forbidden words so maybe they didn't. So I might say "it's like an axe but blunt", but turns out they predicted I'd try something like blunt instrument and wrote "blunt". There's also some modifiers like "the hint giver has to give their hint in one breath" or "the guessers can also trigger trapwords". It's cute.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:13
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Jedit posted:Decrypto kills Codenames. ...for gamers. For a game you can pull out with muggles / at a party, Codenames is absolutely still the right call.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:12
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Bring Your Own Book is a CAH-type, except instead of a hand of cards, you have a book to try and find answers in. Click Clack Lumberjack is one of those children's games that becomes an excellent drinking game. Cash N Guns works as a party game for gamers, Bang! the Dice Game for non-gamers. Really Bad Art is a good one for normal people. Everyone takes a card and then draws what the card says. You only get six seconds to draw. Then there's a Dixit-style guessing of who drew what. I have heard very good things about Just One, which is kiiiind of like a co-op version of Trapwords.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:43
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Merauder posted:...for gamers. Yeah, people like Codenames and it still functions well if you've got people who mostly want to sit on the sidelines or otherwise just dip their toes in. If people are more into it, I do try to steer them to Codenames Duet pretty quick, though; being a guesser in regular Codenames can get super boring, and having only one person generating clues sometimes really goes slow/terrible.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:46
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The best way to own Codenames is to get Codenames and Duet and the Broken Token box organizer. You can fit both games worth of components into a single box, and you're set for party or two player play in a handy organized form.
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Dec 27, 2018 20:53
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I friend of mine asked me for recommendations for games is in the apprentice gamer space. Games for people ready to graduate from Catan or TtR, but not ready to jump into something overly complex or heavy. I'm not too familiar with that space anymore so what's the current hotness?
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Dec 27, 2018 21:52
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SettingSun posted:I friend of mine asked me for recommendations for games is in the apprentice gamer space. Games for people ready to graduate from Catan or TtR, but not ready to jump into something overly complex or heavy. I'm not too familiar with that space anymore so what's the current hotness? From what I've heard Blue Lagoon fits this niche perfectly
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Dec 27, 2018 21:55
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Yeah Blue Lagoon is even simpler to play but much more engaging decision wise. Lots of depth and interaction.
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Dec 27, 2018 22:35
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Pictomania is brilliantly designed but it's a gamer's game. Lots of the things players need to do make perfect sense but they ONLY make perfect sense from a "Gaming" perspective. Non gamers can hobble along, but if you're not playing with people who "get" games then the instant you leave the room no one will have a clue what to do. If that's your crowd then I'd suggest Telestrations as the more non gamer friendly drawing game. It's also a great game but less overhead and has step by step rules of what to do on every page. (Which you can read from when people inevitably won't know what to do next regardless)
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Dec 27, 2018 23:09
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Learning Spirit Island has been.... fun. But I see why so many people enjoy the game now. A few more plays on easy and We might be able to win.
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Dec 28, 2018 00:31
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The Eyes Have It posted:Pictomania is brilliantly designed but it's a gamer's game. Lots of the things players need to do make perfect sense but they ONLY make perfect sense from a "Gaming" perspective.
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Dec 28, 2018 01:43
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Ropes4u posted:Learning Spirit Island has been.... fun. But I see why so many people enjoy the game now. A few more plays on easy and We might be able to win. You'll get there! Tonight we won against Level 6 Brandenburg-Prussia, by removing all Invaders from the board with 2 cards left in the Invader deck (fear deck still at level 1). Incidentally, Unrelenting Growth as Heart of the Wildfire is a scary card - place 2 discs and 3 blight! I took it planning to play it on my partner's Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, but then saw we were close to winning and/or losing, and dealing 4 or 6 damage from the flames was worth it. edit: this is inaccurate, when Wildfire places multiple presence at once the damage/blight only occur once. I'd like to try Trapwords or Just One but Decrypto (6/10) absolutely did not kill Codenames (9/10) for me. The deduction and writing was way less fun than the connections. rchandra fucked around with this message at 20:02 on May 18, 2019 |
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Dec 28, 2018 03:14
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There isn't a mention of this in the rules so I assume it's correct, but when you remove the blight that starts on each board before placing any others, it still returns to the blight card right? So you can have more blight on the card than the X per player that starts there?
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Dec 28, 2018 04:10
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Ayn Randi posted:There isn't a mention of this in the rules so I assume it's correct, but when you remove the blight that starts on each board before placing any others, it still returns to the blight card right? So you can have more blight on the card than the X per player that starts there? Completely correct. You can also get extra blight in the pool from Sweden and Heart of the Wildfire.
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Dec 28, 2018 04:33
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I've been playing tabletop games with some friends online, and after playing ones like Imperial Assault which are very carefully designed (though not without issues) it's interesting to try ones that aren't. Mercs: Recon looks like a decent game in the main overview but it just falls apart the moment you try to play it. As someone who likes to poke at things, see how they fit together, it's a fascinating trainwreck. Mainly because the issue isn't "the enemy spawns too fast and we die" so much as "the enemy spawns too fast, now nobody can move because everything is full. This hallway took one point of damage, we can't fit enough people to breach the objective." and so on. We get a couple of turns of play and then the mercs and the OpFor just kinda stare at each other until we give up and go home.
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Dec 28, 2018 05:17
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Snagged Galaxy trucker + Big Expansion + Another Big Expansion CA$100 
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Dec 28, 2018 05:25
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The Eyes Have It posted:Pictomania is brilliantly designed but it's a gamer's game. Lots of the things players need to do make perfect sense but they ONLY make perfect sense from a "Gaming" perspective.
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Dec 28, 2018 06:58
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So I'll never get to play Twilight Struggle in person ever again. Played it against my dad twice when I visited over Christmas. He and I had played a few rounds before, him even winning one after I started WW2 with Missile Envy / Duck And Cover as the US, but I had a lot better grasp of the game from playing guides and trying to walk people I know thru tutorial games in hopes they may want to play it (and generally failing to do so). I played US against him first round, and got away with clowning straight into east Europe, while he complained about his cards (while tossing out a Turn 1 / AR 1 Blockade), and how baffled he was at the idea the USSR was favored in the early game. Game was over by turn 3 due to scoring. So after a break he came back for another round, and I talked about how often the USSR player had to seize the initiative and do things like "throw coups", and after some convincing, we switched sides, did our initial set ups, and I kicked things off by doing a turn 1 coup on Italy with a 3 card and rolling a six, and he had no influence in France so yet again I managed to run amok in Europe. Other fun events for the embittered yankees: losing the Korean War, losing the Israeli-Arab war to a lucky six, not understanding that it might be a good thing he drew Blockade as opposed to me drawing it. By turn 4 I was up 15 VPs, I had the China Card, and I drew the East Asia Scoring Card and Cultural Revolution, immediately saw the obvious gameplan before me, and so I figured it was pretty much over. I didn't have anything useful to headline for Asia so I just threw in Liberation Theology. He, meanwhile, headlined South America Scoring in an attempt to burn it before he figured things went bad there, too. So that coincidence ended the game. I think he threw one coup total that time and neither of us did any realignment rolls, him because he didn't bother to figure them out and me because I figured the other dice results were making a bad enough impression already. The evening ended not with SALT but with salt, directed mostly at dice rolls this time, with choice words directed at the treachery of the Italians. Here's the amateur level clusterfuck of a board at the end of game 2. The only things not captured are soviet control of Mexico and DEFCON 4 due to lack of coups, lack of realignments, and a general level of ineptitude. Shoutouts to the weighty metal duck bravely holding down part of the board.  I love Twilight Struggle. Some day I will see a late war card. e: oh god and now I just realized Central and South America are separate scoring regions and not another SE Asia / Asia situation gently caress. oh well Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 08:15
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Bruceski posted:I've been playing tabletop games with some friends online, and after playing ones like Imperial Assault which are very carefully designed (though not without issues) it's interesting to try ones that aren't. Mercs: Recon looks like a decent game in the main overview but it just falls apart the moment you try to play it. As someone who likes to poke at things, see how they fit together, it's a fascinating trainwreck. Mainly because the issue isn't "the enemy spawns too fast and we die" so much as "the enemy spawns too fast, now nobody can move because everything is full. This hallway took one point of damage, we can't fit enough people to breach the objective." and so on. We get a couple of turns of play and then the mercs and the OpFor just kinda stare at each other until we give up and go home. I was always a little curious about that game since seeing the Kickstarter. Pity it's half baked but not really surprising either.
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Dec 28, 2018 08:35
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Won our second game of spirit island, rolling earth and river together. It's a very different game when fast damage is thin on the ground, also by the time we had won our first lightning/river game at terror 2 we were just flipping our first fear card this time around. Escalated quickly though, we were in want of 2 more fast damage to kill the final city and snatch a terror 2 victory but just didn't have fast powers for it, we were then staring down a 4 territory double land build that would take that win out of reach and we'd probably be trying to farm another 7 fear for terror 3 and target down the cities before we ran out of invader cards, but we were saved by a clutch fear card that prevented builds everywhere huts outnumbered buildings, which was everywhere relevant. Slow powers leveled the final city for the win with 3 cards left in the deck, very nice. Considering level 1 brandenburg-prussia next time but I have a feeling that's going to escalate far faster than the modest rule text suggests, might just go with the basic rules but more complex spirits and no power progression instead.
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Dec 28, 2018 10:11
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Tiler Kiwi posted:So I'll never get to play Twilight Struggle in person ever again. Twilight Struggle is a pretty good game but extremely overrated, because it's so much about memorization. I prefer Wir sind das Volk for this reason. Other "fully hidden" CDGs like Paths of Glory are also superior because they have a lower percentage of nullifying response cards and no instant suicide cards.
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Dec 28, 2018 14:42
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My last memorable game of Spirit Island was a game between Serpent that Slumbers Beneath the Island and Rampant Spread of Green against France level 3. Game went very smoothly thanks to some favorable events but the most memorable part of the game was I as Serpent was able to play the enhanced version of Cast into the Briny Deep to destroy half of the island. This ended the game instantly else I would have done it a second time.
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Dec 28, 2018 14:58
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Board Game X-mas Trip Report My family ended up with like 10 new board games, so let's write about some of them. I'm interested in comparative opinions to what I mention below. Most of this is off of our initial play through. Dice Forge An engine / bag builder where your dice are your engine/bag. It's fine. There's a few mechanics that play off the fact that you are playing with dice instead of personal tableaus or bags or whatever. Also my brother managed to consistently make enough to grab the Hydra (big points) every round starting round 6 so the last few turns were spent mostly flailing. The gimmick of building dice is severely hampered by needing to roll them on each player's turn; slowing down the game while people lego sides on and off their dice. I had fun, will likely play it more, but it's hard to recommend over other real engine builders. Also the initial setup of putting everything in it's place was time consuming and unaided by awful instructions. luckily my (other) brother had played enough to help. Meeple Circus Dexterity game about building stacks of meeples, and meeple-like things. This was pretty disappointing vs. our expectation. It was fun and engaging to build towers of stuff; but the scoring seems uneven, you get 4 points for some seemingly trivial things, and 1-2 points for things that are way harder. The cards in act 2 & 3 don't seem well balanced. It was fun, enjoyment was had, and laffs when things went wrong. It just seemed like the more complicated things didn't score as many points as like "here's a set piece for each scoring part gimmie points" My wife and I just felt disappointed with our initial run-through. Gempacked Cards Splendor for kids, with (imo) sushi-go aping art. It was aggressively fine, through instead of breaking into tiers like splendor everything but the scoring cards is in the same deck, so there's a board-wipe mechanic if too many high-level cards come out, that provided a weird take that mechanic where you could cut someone off from the gen they were gunning for by wiping the board. With my kids already loving Century: Golems (spice road) I'm not sure how much play this is realistically going to get. Also the setup is kind of obnoxious, since there's basically 2 copies of the game in the box and you kitbash them together for 4+ players.
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Dec 28, 2018 19:24
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My holiday was spent playing Keyflower, Go, and Railroad Ink. We also got Harry Potter Codenames which is a surprisingly good coop version similar to Duet with a cute thematic campaign. It was a big hit with the kids in the family and the double sided cards with pictures/words is great (I think the other licensed versions did that too). Also played Shards of Infinity a few times and it's easily the best of the small deckbuilder duelers. Much faster and less swingy than the Realms games and more strategic than Ascension. Still not nearly as good as Valley of the Kings for a small box deckbuilder though. The giant character dials are useful but too big to the point that the box won't close halfway once you sleeve the cards.
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Dec 28, 2018 19:28
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I got Railroad Ink and found it a bit dull. It's fine enough at hitting the Karuba vibe of "everyone gets (basically) the same resources in the (basically) same order, but who puts them together better?" but it feels a bit hollow to me. Karuba and others have random factors that become deterministic after they hit the table but before the players get them, but Railroad Ink does not. Maybe it's something related to that. Anyway, props for being not expensive and trying something new, though. Wish the markers had a finer tip on then so I could better indulge my sense of creativity.
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Dec 28, 2018 19:41
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CaptainRightful posted:Twilight Struggle is a pretty good game but extremely overrated, because it's so much about memorization. I prefer Wir sind das Volk for this reason. Other "fully hidden" CDGs like Paths of Glory are also superior because they have a lower percentage of nullifying response cards and no instant suicide cards.
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Dec 28, 2018 19:55
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The Eyes Have It posted:. I might be missing what you mean but isn't that what the dice roll is in RRI exactly?
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Dec 28, 2018 19:57
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The Eyes Have It posted:Karuba and others have random factors that become deterministic after they hit the table but before the players get them, but Railroad Ink does not. Yeah, curious if you could elaborate what you mean by this?
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Dec 28, 2018 20:14
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Well it's something I haven't put my finger on yet but in one case you shuffle a bunch of face down tiles and put them in a stack. You draw one at a time until you've gone though the whole stack. Everything is predestined and it's a matter of how you use it as it comes up. In the other you roll four dice every round and people use those four as they wish (occasionally adding a bonus of their own) then the dice get rolled again for the next round. In one there's a predestined mix of a known set (or mostly known, I don't remember exactly whether any tiles are discarded blindly during setup or not) and in the other there is not. The dice get rolled anew every round and  anything can happen, which to me exacerbates the feeling that I'm just waiting to see if the dice come up lucky for me or not in a way that -- to me -- is not present in games like Karuba or Ganz Schon Clever.
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Dec 28, 2018 20:15
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The Eyes Have It posted:Well it's something I haven't put my finger on yet but in one case you shuffle a bunch of face down tiles and put them in a stack. You draw one at a time until you've gone though the whole stack. Everything is predestined and it's a matter of how you use it as it comes up. Welcome To... does this with it's decks of cards... but isn't GSC still just dice rolls? Like you could never get a 6 in GSC. EDIT vvvv : If RRI used cards and say there were like 3 straight roads in the deck and you had only seen 2 you would know that you're going to get a third eventually, vs. the dice where you may never see one until the end of the game. This is pretty marginal, but I know a ton of people who prefer the former (like those who use decks of cards for catan) SoftNum fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 20:18
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So the main difference there is knowing the tiles that are remaining and playing the odds vs knowing the odds of the die rolls and playing the odds that way. In effect, they're pretty identical systems though. I will say that RRI is best when you mix in and out the expansions from game to game to keep it from feeling samey. You can even proxy the other color's expansions with a d6 and pdf of the rulebook if you want. So far I like the river and volcanoes the best, the lake is ok, and I didn't like the meteors.
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Dec 28, 2018 20:21
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Some day I'll play my red/blue copies of RRI with the expansion dice. Some day I won't be teaching new people. Some day. 
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Dec 28, 2018 20:23
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RRI kind of feels like GSC but without the rerolls, bonus structure, and silver platter, which would leave it feeling pretty one dimensional to me. But it's really just evidence I haven't really thought it completely through and put my finger on why I feel so differently about them, I guess.
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Dec 28, 2018 20:26
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silvergoose posted:Note: charterstone is not great and I suspect would be far worse at 2. This thread dunks on it a bunch, but we've massively enjoyed charterstone. It's definitely not perfect, but every round is fun, trying to make optimal plays, and then when the round finishes something exciting happens! I think there's way more to like than not, if you can get it for a decent price and have a regular enough group of 4, 5 or 6 that can commit to 7ish sessions (two games in each) I'd say go for it.
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Dec 28, 2018 20:47
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The Eyes Have It posted:I was always a little curious about that game since seeing the Kickstarter. Pity it's half baked but not really surprising either. My friend who has it lives near where their offices were, and has caught himself wondering if anything would've changed if he'd made it out to their playtesting sessions. He and my brother were enamored with it after a demo at Gencon, brother's words were "this is clunky but interesting, I want to see the final product." Turns out that was the final product. The part I find interesting is that every bit in a vacuum seems to work, but the moment stuff starts to break down it all breaks. There's no single mechanic you can fix, but it feels tantalizingly close to being fixable. It's as if the game was a Junk Art sculpture and the players are using long sticks to poke something on the other side. Except that analogy actually sounds like fun, I kinda want to go get a Jenga set and some sticks now.
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Dec 28, 2018 21:00
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Tekopo posted:Honestly I think that Twilight Struggle was really interesting and innovative for the time but it has a bunch of really big issues that were unsuccessfully papered over with new cards that didn't really fix the innate problem with the game and I honestly have no motivation whatsoever to play TS now that I've learnt the joy of playing WsdV 2+2. It's not perfect, but there's a lot of good things to say about TS: - The competitive balance has held up remarkably well despite a ton of play and attention, and the metagame still hasn't really settled. This is an impressive stroke of good fortune or something, because I don't think the designers/playtesters had the game's competitive balance figured out. - The theme is satisfying to a broad range of players because of its very large scope. It has big familiar events and personalities, and working on the "modern country or larger" level makes the game narrative clear and memorable. It also, not trivially, makes it easy to find stuff on the board. There's lots of good games that are harder to connect with (or even just play) because players don't know, say, the geography of Afghanistan. They're much more likely to know where Cuba is, and that that's where Castro was - and recreating those familiar events is satisfying. There's a lot of grog joy to knowing the background of your historical game, and with TS everyone gets to be that grog. - Big events feel big and dramatic. There's crises and huge swings, and also little things that do little. Many other games I play feel too flat, too focused on grinding out small advantages - all jabs, no haymakers. There's other stuff I don't like. There's a lot of fiddly/unintuitive rules. Cards have lazy/inconsistent templating. The game is harder to teach than it needs to be. The strategy around the DEFCON track is too static. There's a few cards that have the potential to ruin games. But, yeah, I also see reasons that TS has seen continued success.
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Dec 28, 2018 21:43
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Yeah TS is a game about memorization only to the point that both players learn the small deck then it really opens up. It’s not perfect and has been improved upon but is still really great. I really wish the AI were better on Steam though.
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Dec 28, 2018 21:47
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I think the major issues for me are the fact that quite a few of the cards have obviously not been created with the type of gameplay that TS has in mind. I don't think that the designers saw how there's a constant pull to remain at DEFCON 2 for almost all of the entirety of the game and how this affects cards like the Olympics etc. There are cards that outright badly designed, in my opinion, like the obvious two, but stuff like Red Scare as well. The coup system is kind of bad and even stuff like 1989 showed that a better coup system could be designed (although 1989 has problems all of its own). I think the tipping point was when the game first came out on Steam and I grinded games online: in the end I was more frustrated by the game than engrossed by its mechanisms.
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Dec 28, 2018 21:59
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I had serious issues with TS after my second play where I was purged three times and decided I didn't like it by my third game. Tried one more pbem game with my buddy where he could have taken Europe on turn one and that cemented my dislike. It's just a completely enervating experience for me.
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Dec 28, 2018 22:07
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