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I like Zendo but Tek must be defeated at all cost.
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Apr 20, 2019 06:28
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Now that we’ve collectively lowered our defenses, Tek will reveal his true form and attain a level beyond...The Eyes Have It posted:I considered it briefly but remembered that a) I don't know how drafts work, and b) I'm not looking to start a new part time job at the moment
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Apr 20, 2019 06:47
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T-Bone posted:I like Zendo but Tek must be defeated at all cost.
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Apr 20, 2019 09:15
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Tekopo posted:This shows the true intentions of my detractors: after getting the caylus/T&E power pair, everyone knows I’ve won already and now they are desperately trying to smear me Calyus is not that good - it's an aging example of a mediocre genre. T&E is cool
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Apr 20, 2019 09:43
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Straight White Shark posted:I find it amusing that every spirit in the box has been pitched as an optimal introductory strategy, and also that everybody else got it wrong What's the deal with Shadows Flicker Like Flame? I'm new to Spirit Island myself, but on flavor and appearance Shadows is one of my favorites, at least. Though it also seems... Nonstandard, perhaps?
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Apr 20, 2019 14:46
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Shadows is a support-oriented, versatile spirit. Which is very cool, but trips people up a lot because it's a lot less obvious in its use than its beginner spirit comrades so it's easy to do poorly and assume the spirit is weak. It doesn't help that the name mentions fire and the other spirits are basically water, wind, and earth so one might just immediately assume fire = damage when they're new
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Apr 20, 2019 14:50
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Countblanc posted:Shadows is a support-oriented, versatile spirit. Which is very cool, but trips people up a lot because it's a lot less obvious in its use than its beginner spirit comrades so it's easy to do poorly and assume the spirit is weak. Alright, thought it was something like that. Thanks. I was wanting to give the game a try solo; what spirits would be good for that? River Surges in Sunlight caught my eye, and Vital Strength of Earth and Thunderspeaker both seem like possibilities too, but I don't know enough to make a call.
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Apr 20, 2019 15:15
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I'm just kidding, there's nothing "wrong" with Shadows per se. There are a bunch of minor design flaws that add up to it being a little bit weaker than other spirits. It's perfectly playable. A big part of it is that your starting card elements do not match up well with your innate thresholds, so you're more dependent on luck of the draw than most spirits. If you pull a bunch of cheap moon+fire cards and appropriate majors you'll do just fine. If you don't, you might not even get to use your innate power at all some turns, which is not good for a spirit that relies on it for its bread and butter. (Notably, Shadows gets a lot better if you use the power progression cards. The other "beginner" spirits get recommended cards that are often questionable at best but Shadows is loving stacked.) Your first two turns are often really good because Favors Called Due + Concealing Shadows lets you nuke the biggest, nastiest land on the island and get a ton of bonus fear on top at a time when most spirits can't do jack poo poo about lands with cities. But by the time you get into your second hand other spirits are getting strong enough they can handle those kinds of ravages without letting them blight, and if you try aiming your nuke at anything larger than that you lose the bonus fear from Favors Called Due. There's a general issue with Shadows' concept: combining fear and control doesn't work well because shuffling invaders around to prevent builds and avoid ravage damage means missing out on fear from destruction which is generally more important than fear from cards in the long run. (Even Bringer of Dreams and Nightmare's base fear generation isn't that impressive, it's all about the dream kills.) It's nice that Shadows has the fear output to make up for what he's missing from his lack of kills but he still tends to fall behind more aggressive spirits, leaving him primarily a control spirit and inviting unfavorable comparisons to River Surges in Sunlight (who gets 0 fear during those first few turns when your big combo is at its best, but then starts wiping out multiple lands per turn and generating just as much or more fear as you without some really good draws.)
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Apr 20, 2019 15:38
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Calyus is not that good - it's an aging example of a mediocre genre. T&E is cool 
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Apr 20, 2019 16:02
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Pictomania 2.0 $14.25 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CC9KGQ4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_r10UCbRHY8FNX
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Apr 20, 2019 17:50
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Straight White Shark posted:I'm just kidding, there's nothing "wrong" with Shadows per se. There are a bunch of minor design flaws that add up to it being a little bit weaker than other spirits. It's perfectly playable. This is the biggest issue with Shadows. The other starting spirits can use their higher level innate powers without drafting new cards. Shadow has very little flexibility it's first two turns if you want to trigger your innate power and you are dependent on drawing good powers throughout the game. The only way I've been able to reliably win at the higher difficulties with solo Shadow is an early major power (losing one of the starting powers with worse elements) and drafting powers to either trigger your innate or major power thresholds. Doing this greatly expands what you can consider a good card / good elements. I cann reliably beat difficulty 10 with Earth and Lightning, in comparison, without drafting any new powers as Earth. It's starting powers are just that good.
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Apr 20, 2019 18:14
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One big thing Shadows has going for it is its presence track. It starts off rocky but gets better quickly.
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Apr 20, 2019 18:29
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Ragnar34 posted:One big thing Shadows has going for it is its presence track. It starts off rocky but gets better quickly. Yeah. I'm never too worried about using the innates of Shadows Flickers Like Flame. This is also true of Vital Strength of the Earth - sometimes you will set up a degenerate thing with copying and reclaim every turn so you can do it, other times you will just forget stuff and rely on piles of energy + major powers + Defend 3.
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Apr 20, 2019 18:53
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And of course, as always, you can shore up any spirit's weakness with Spread of Rampant Green. But I have a fundamental problem with the spirits that focus on killing explorers, like Shadows and Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves, which is that France and Britain don't give a poo poo what you do to one explorer and the other two adversaries have ways around you in phase 2, which comes at you fast when you're playing Prussia. Killing explorers is a strategy that doesn't scale very well with difficulty.
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Apr 20, 2019 19:52
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Yeah, I'm just finishing up a game of Caylus and I just can't care for such a plodding game. I can totally see how this was like the prestige Euro 12 years ago but I think Keyflower really ate its lunch.
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Apr 20, 2019 20:21
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I hope the new expansion for Spirit Island has more ways to up the difficulty. We only play against level 5 or 6 adversaries and I can't remember the last time we lost.
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Apr 20, 2019 20:43
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KPC_Mammon posted:I hope the new expansion for Spirit Island has more ways to up the difficulty. We only play against level 5 or 6 adversaries and I can't remember the last time we lost. The expansion rulebook has guidelines for adding extra island boards and stacking adversary abilities from multiple adversaries.
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Apr 20, 2019 20:45
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KPC_Mammon posted:I hope the new expansion for Spirit Island has more ways to up the difficulty. We only play against level 5 or 6 adversaries and I can't remember the last time we lost. thats impressive, what player count?
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Apr 20, 2019 20:48
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Bottom Liner posted:thats impressive, what player count? 2 to 3. To be fair we've played it hundreds of times at this point. Straight White Shark posted:The expansion rulebook has guidelines for adding extra island boards and stacking adversary abilities from multiple adversaries. Thanks for the reminder, our last loss was with an extra board against level 3 or 4 France. Scaling max number of towns with number of players instead of boards is really rough. After trying that combo several times we found it probably the hardest in the game. KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 20:50
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I can confidently say Caylus has a terrible iOS version, at least.
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Apr 20, 2019 21:29
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al-azad posted:Yeah, I'm just finishing up a game of Caylus and I just can't care for such a plodding game. I can totally see how this was like the prestige Euro 12 years ago but I think Keyflower really ate its lunch. Yeah this is my theory. It's outstanding quality is elegant meanness, but there is lots of elegant meanness around now - Keyflower, the estates, lots of stuff
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Apr 20, 2019 21:29
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I got a thing yesterday. 
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Apr 20, 2019 22:41
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come back when you've fit it all in a single box 
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Apr 20, 2019 22:45
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Open Marriage Night posted:I got a thing yesterday.
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Apr 20, 2019 23:03
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Redundant posted:Looks cool. What is it? A tepidly reviewed batman kickstarter boardgame with lots of plastic minis.
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Apr 20, 2019 23:19
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Redundant posted:Looks cool. What is it? Gotham City Chronicles all in package. Backed it on Kickstarter last May. They’re doing a season 2 in June for people who missed the first Kickstarter, and some new stuff for people who liked the first one. Going to unbox and play with my friends tomorrow. I’ll report back on how it goes. Edit: Don’t know if BoardGameGeek is the best review site, but the game is averaging an 8.7 out of 301 reviews. Open Marriage Night fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Apr 21, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 23:58
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So very wrong about games is the best review source, and yeah tepid is a good summarization.
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Apr 21, 2019 00:06
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Open Marriage Night posted:Gotham City Chronicles all in package. Backed it on Kickstarter last May. They’re doing a season 2 in June for people who missed the first Kickstarter, and some new stuff for people who liked the first one. I'd be interested in hearing more about it
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Apr 21, 2019 00:21
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When you thought you could escape salty video game players by playing Dominion...
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Apr 21, 2019 00:27
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Vault of Dragons trip report: A pretty tedious luck 'em up which pretends to be an area control game. Lords of Waterdeep is a much better experience if you want a D&D flavoured game. Problem 1: The rulebook is awful. They tried to do a thing where there's a brief description of each 'thing' in the game followed by detailed rules, but this doesn't work. In practice you end up with the rules for different things scattered all over the place, e.g. to fully resolve a dungeon you also need to refer to bits of the combat, dice descriptions and the Yawning Portal sections, instead of just having one big section saying 'to resolve a dungeon follow these steps'. This makes it very easy to miss things and makes the book useless for quick reference during the game as a vital rule could be in one of numerous areas in the book. Problem 2: They don't really 'get' area control. A single figure from another faction is enough to 'contest' a region, which disables its unique action and stops someone from getting resources. Outside of specific cards (more on that later) the only way to get rid of opponents to regain control is to perform the 'fight' action on your turn and hope you roll higher than them in the combat and force them to retreat. Problem 3: Combat is absurdly swingy. You get dice depending on which types of figure are involved, and not the number of them. If you have fighters you roll a D10, Rogues roll a D4 and a extra Casualty die, and Wizards roll a D12 (if both of your Wizards are present you may reroll one die). You then choose one die to be your combat roll, and roll an extra casualty die for each of your dice you scored a crit on (the max result, i.e. 10 on a D10 etc.). The Casualty dice is have two blanks, three 1s and a 2 and are added to whichever die you picked, in addition to killing that many enemy figures. You can also add items which can increase your roll, usually Magic Items but occasionally Treasures, plus Rumours give +1 each when discarded. This makes it very easy for battles to be one sided simply by having a spot of good luck, or wasting an entire turn on a bad roll. Combat is used against other players with the Fight action, and is also used to beat Dungeons and Quests. Problem 4: Victory is sudden death and very dissatisfying. In order to win, first any player must have acquired three 'secrets'. Normally you get these from beating Dungeons, but some actions and Magic Items will give you them (Each secret adds 1 to your combat roll in a Dungeon, but also means you roll an extra Casualty die afterwards and kill that many of your pieces). Once this happens the 'final dungeon' is unlocked and any player can attempt it, though players with three or more secrets don't have to pay the usual entry cost. To win you have to get a combat result of 20+ and have all your pieces survive. Therefore the whole game revolves around drawing as many Magic Items and Treasure cards as possible, hoping to get the ones that either boost your roll or mitigate casualties, and then hoping to get a high roll. Ironically you want someone else to get the secrets because they only add +1 to your roll but can potentially kill two of your pieces. Problem 5: The Magic Item and Treasure decks are wildly imbalanced. Some cards are just outright better than others so the player who has the most luck when drawing them will win. If you don't manage to luck into the good combat boost cards you have no hope of winning the game, and these comprise maybe half of the Magic Item deck. Particularly egregious is the 'Dungeon Key' Treasure which enables you to go to a dungeon from any location on the board without paying the cost to enter the dungeon and without using one of your limited actions. This enables you to suddenly build up a large force (using the hire action) and immediately adventure without anyone else having the chance to respond. TLDR: Avoid this game, it's bad and almost entirely luck based. It plays like a pointlessly complex version of Munchkin, though at least it doesn't have the terrible 'humour'.
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Apr 21, 2019 00:33
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Mayveena posted:Hey folks, I've gotten desperate If you want to minimize the time/effort you put into picking your powers each turn, so you can focus on actually using your powers and not screwing up the rules, try this: Vital Strength of Earth (from a goon earlier in the thread): Turn 1: growth option 3 (presence from card plays), play Draw of the Fruitful Earth Turn 2: growth option 1 (presence from card plays), play Draw of the Fruitful Earth + Rituals of Destruction Turns 3+: same as turn 2 except presence from energy River Surges in Sunlight (from the bgg forum): Turn 1: grow for 2 presence (cards, cards), play Wash Away + River's Bounty Turn 2: grow for 2 presence (cards, cards), play Flash Flood + River's Bounty Turn 3: grow for 2 presence (cards, energy), play Boon of Vigor + whatever you reclaimed Turns 4+: reclaim all, play all 4 starting cards, max out your innate. Perfectly functional and lets you keep slamming the same cards down every turn.
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Apr 21, 2019 00:57
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. I'm considering trying Spirit Island AGAIN as a two player. Can you folks help me with a strategy to win the basic scenario?
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Shadow225 posted:I'd be interested in hearing more about it Here’s their page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/806316071/batmantm-gotham-city-chronicles I’ll have more pictures up tomorrow. This is our first time getting a game from Kickstarter. We haven’t really played anything more advanced than Betrayal or the Fallout board game.
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Apr 21, 2019 01:50
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Been a bit of a while since I did an impressions dump, so here goes some thought bubbles about games I've played lately: Gentes - this game is incredible. Still haven't played my copy of Arkwright, but based on how well this plays, I'm super excited to get it to the table. The action/time economy is really clever, and it's a really interesting abstraction of civ games that differs from the usual Sid Meier style model. Warfighter - Imagine if Sentinels of the Multiverse was actually a fun game instead of a book-keeping task; Your team of operators will push through hotly contested enemy terrain to complete a typical spec ops operation - vip capture, killing a high value target, reducing a stronghold etc. There's a clever time pressure mechanism where you can only advance to the objective by drawing new locations from the same deck that you'll gain action cards from, so depending on how cards come out, you'll either be able to carefully choose a route that minimises risks, or you'll be forced to take any path you can before time runs out. Enemies will spawn on mass, and you need to balance fighting and running if you're going to get through the mission. It's a very entertaining game, that definitely evokes what it sets out to do. Seal Team Flix - a terrific hybrid of miniature style tactical combat and light hearted tactile dexterity. You need to be very careful with loadout, then your movement through the mission area. Cover and positioning is important and the game even has stealth elements that work surprisingly well. Then you shoot at enemies by flicking discs at them, trying to ping them around corners and bank-shotting enemies like you're playing pool. Especially cool is the sniping mechanism - you have to flick very precisely along a side board, landing your disc on a very tiny target to nail the shot. It's a terrific game. I'm sad to hear that game hasn't sold the way Wizkids has wanted, endangering reprints and expansions. Manhattan Project: 2 Minutes to Midnight - Kickstarted this back in the day, and have played it ten times or so by now. It's well and truly held up over time, and is easily my favourite of the 'franchise'. I've seen this on deep discounts around the place... I'm not sure why it's selling as it should. Kingdom Death: Monster - Not going to be a popular opinion, but I'm about a third of the way through a campaign and this game is impressing the heck out of me. The combat mechanisms are a mess of dice chucking, but as you get deeper into the game and better equipped, you acquire many different ways to mitigate the RNG, and that is actually the key to a lot of the gameplay - you spend as much any given fight attempting to avoid getting hit, and hoping when you do get hit that your armour can soak as much damage as possible - taking damage to your actual characters is deliberately impactful - if the beasts you fight do manage to land a clean hit on you, it has the potential to sever a limb or blind an eye. You're not slugging things out, you're dancing around incredibly dangerous creatures that have ways to seriously gently caress you up. The traumas you incur along the way leave both physical and mental scars, and the game has a whole framework around the consequences of that trauma and builds narrative from there. The world that your people are scraping a living together in is disturbing and strange, and the game does well to build that strangeness into a compelling narrative. The resource management/settlement side game is a key part of the experience, and combined with the combat, this gets closer to being an XCOM board game than anything else I've played. The company as a whole definitely makes some problematic stuff, but the game itself largely avoids it. I do think this game deserves to be tried and not pre-judged. The price tag is always going to be a barrier though. The Estates - Believe the hype, this game is so savage. I feel like it's a great companion to Container - between the two of them, they're basically Game Theory 101 in a few hours. Lords of Hellas - continues to compel me. Of all the mini heavy dudes on maps games in recent years, this is one that really sticks. Blood Rage bored me. Cry Havoc feels far too constrained. Rising Sun is fun but not a game that finds its way to the table often. LoH is a game I want to keep exploring at every opportunity. silvergoose posted:So very wrong about games is the best review source, and yeah tepid is a good summarization. It's funny - my tastes don't align too closely with theirs, but their discussions and analysis are really valuable. And yeah, some of the games they're nutso about I've loved Empires: Age of Discovery and Seal Team Flix.
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Apr 21, 2019 02:02
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The End posted:Kingdom Death: Monster - Not going to be a popular opinion, but I'm about a third of the way through a campaign and this game is impressing the heck out of me. The combat mechanisms are a mess of dice chucking, but as you get deeper into the game and better equipped, you acquire many different ways to mitigate the RNG, and that is actually the key to a lot of the gameplay - you spend as much any given fight attempting to avoid getting hit, and hoping when you do get hit that your armour can soak as much damage as possible - taking damage to your actual characters is deliberately impactful - if the beasts you fight do manage to land a clean hit on you, it has the potential to sever a limb or blind an eye. You're not slugging things out, you're dancing around incredibly dangerous creatures that have ways to seriously gently caress you up. The traumas you incur along the way leave both physical and mental scars, and the game has a whole framework around the consequences of that trauma and builds narrative from there. The world that your people are scraping a living together in is disturbing and strange, and the game does well to build that strangeness into a compelling narrative. The resource management/settlement side game is a key part of the experience, and combined with the combat, this gets closer to being an XCOM board game than anything else I've played. The company as a whole definitely makes some problematic stuff, but the game itself largely avoids it. I do think this game deserves to be tried and not pre-judged. The price tag is always going to be a barrier though. How did you find the tonal whiplash between the Darksouls esque darkness and body horror versus punching a lion in the ding dong and eating poop?
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Apr 21, 2019 02:21
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It's a powermetal version of horror. A boardgame is always going to struggle with creating a consistent tone because of the realities of the environment of playing a boardgame, unless you're doing a very curated experience ala a RPG with a dm. Having weirdness and humour bubble up is going to be fine, because it's not a continuous narrative. You're chucking dice, discussing tactics, looking up rules, talking about the weekend, chasing a cat off the table. When narrative does bubble up, it's in bits and pieces. So yeah, existential horror lives okay with comical references to fuzzy ding dongs and outlandish pychoses.
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Apr 21, 2019 02:40
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Zark the Damned posted:Vault of Dragons trip report: pretty tedious Interesting. This is the one that's a reimplementation of the Sons of Anarchy game, right? That one's been sitting on my to play pile for a few weeks now. The SoA rulebook is pretty well put together, and describes a game that sounds way better than what you played. I wonder what went wrong.
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Apr 21, 2019 03:53
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I played half a dozen games of kdm, and thought it was alright, dice chucking aside. My two big problems with it are 1) due to the structure of the campaign, it's possible to encounter a boss and simply not be strong enough for it because one of your best guys was just killed or you had some bad encounters before hand, so you're hosed. An answer is to bend the rules and allow you to grind for materials, but that's not a lot of fun in a board game. 2) I got spoiled on the ending of the game, and it made me want to not keep playing the game. See, what happens is you beat the last boss and find out that it was keeping the worst evil of the land at bay, so you're all killed. Nah.
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Apr 21, 2019 04:00
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Morpheus posted:I played half a dozen games of kdm, and thought it was alright, dice chucking aside. My two big problems with it are TPKs are part of the game. The genius is that much like XCOM, as long as your base continues to develop, you can equip and train a new crack squad pretty quickly.
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Apr 21, 2019 04:12
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El Fideo posted:Interesting. This is the one that's a reimplementation of the Sons of Anarchy game, right? That one's been sitting on my to play pile for a few weeks now. The SoA rulebook is pretty well put together, and describes a game that sounds way better than what you played. I wonder what went wrong. If that is based on SoA, it sounds unrecogniseable. SoA is actually a really breezy and fun game, that hits the light area majority/worker placement itch well.
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Apr 21, 2019 04:14
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Morpheus posted:2) I got spoiled on the ending of the game, and it made me want to not keep playing the game. See, what happens is you beat the last boss and find out that it was keeping the worst evil of the land at bay, so you're all killed. Nah. Haha, I just looked up the endings to the three campaigns, and it's pretty funny that not only do two out of three have nihilistic endings, but he specifically went back and rewrote the first one for 1.5 because it wasn't quite grimdark enough. The ending for the People of the Stars campaign is rad, but he didn't write that one.
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Apr 21, 2019 05:11
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