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The copy of Takenoko I bought for that crazy discount arrived today. I played it this morning with my boys and it was really fun. I gotta say, the rules made it sound more complicated than it was though.
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Oct 25, 2019 17:59
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Got a play of Sanctum this morning. It's fine enough - the monkey cheese randomness of the early game is exaggerated even by the demonstrators - but it's not €60 worth of game. €40 and I'd have snapped it up. Alubari, on the other hand, is €50 worth of game. I sat down with a group of three Swedes, and one of them asked for the rules explanation to be paused so he could go buy it. Then I went to buy it after the second round of play, came back and told everyone there was about a dozen copies left, and the other two Swedes stood up.
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Oct 25, 2019 22:10
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So we finished our Euro Day. Nobody played any of the games before and we were 3 players every time. 1) Crystal Palace Everybody liked it. Really intricate game with a nice level of interaction. Setting your dice and trying to make the most out of them is a lot of fun and one of my favorite parts about the game. Getting the things you need for building the prototypes and having enough money to pay for all your personal cards feels good and we all managed to get through the game without taking a loan. Game ended 84 - 74 - 65. I came in second, trying to get ahead on the buzz track fast for the higher vicotory point bonuses and getting lots of sience tiles to cover up my negative points. Really looking forward to play more of it. Explanation and playtime was about 2 hours. 2) Cooper Island Man, that game felt exhausting but in a fun way. Second longest game of the day with explanation an playtime taking about 3 1/2 hours. I won 26 - 23 -14 with going for a milestone in round 2 and 3 for income boats and then houses. Got the third in round 4 for deliveries. Chaining bonus actions, free market actions and using your cartographer (who feels so important for being able to get the ressources you need) is tons of fun but hurt my brain. I felt tired after that one. But I hope I get to play it again tomorrow cause I wanna try a statue and island exploring strategy. Again everybody liked it and I can't really say anything bad about it. Both games have very good player boards and they really help you during the game. 3) Maracaibo Longest game with like 4 hours including explanation and the final round took like 1 hour. We had a hard time to get into it and I think at the end of round 2 we got the hang of it. The way the cards work and the way the actions are triggered took some time to get used to but then we were able to try out some strategies. Game ended with 165 - 165 - 158 and I tied for first place. Went with a victory point track strategy, some direct victory points from my helper and card actions and then a rush for some influence with the strongest faction. Another player went combat heavy and the third had a mix of combat, questing and moving along the discovery track. Trying to rush for the end of a round felt like strong choice as you get an additional combat action which is rare in the scenario we played. Again everybody liked it but our Pfister fan likes GWT more atm.
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Oct 25, 2019 22:27
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dwarf74 posted:The copy of Takenoko I bought for that crazy discount arrived today. I played it this morning with my boys and it was really fun. taking into account the straightforwardness of the game it's trying to explain, takenoko is one of the worst rule books i have ever read
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Oct 26, 2019 00:21
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Feeling angsty about my friends bringing around A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) tomorrow evening. Any tips or things I should know before playing?
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Oct 26, 2019 01:54
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Lampsacus posted:Feeling angsty about my friends bringing around A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) tomorrow evening. Any tips or things I should know before playing? Remind folks that the game is a lot like Diplomacy and that if everyone tries to win single handed, they will get steamrolled by any factions even halfway working together. Games like that end up back and forth stalemates until someone squeaks out a marginal victory.
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Oct 26, 2019 02:05
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Lampsacus posted:Feeling angsty about my friends bringing around A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) tomorrow evening. Any tips or things I should know before playing? Evening? Have you all played it before? It can be extremely long without experience. Does everyone know the rules in advance?
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Oct 26, 2019 06:54
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Aeon's End Legacy We completed the campaign last week and found it overall to be a surprisingly quite enjoyable experience despite my initial skepticism. Having played a few games of Aeon's End in the past, we were mostly ambivalent towards the core game. It felt competent but not terribly new and exciting. Despite that I backed the Legacy Kickstarter on a lark and just recently got around to playing it (after getting burned out on Gloomhaven). And I wish we had tried it sooner because the legacy style campaign was a decent shot of much needed something to finally make the game pop for us. In the base game, the one off random market setups and battles just never really landed for us and made for an emotionally detached experience overall. But with the Legacy campaign, the linked games and clear progression changed all that. Analyzing the market, strategizing on synergistic card picks, and upgrading your characters really sparked our longer term interest in the campaign to the point we eagerly played a game every night. As far as the Legacy mechanics, it's not nearly as bold as Pandemic Legacy Season 1 in terms of evolving game play and emergent story narrative. (mild high level spoilers follow). It's actually fairly conservative in that regard. The campaign is pretty much on rails. There's a lot more narrative story compared to Pandemic gluing all the various sessions together, but it's not much to write home about. Young adult novels probably have more gripping drama and dialogue. The legacy mechanics were mostly stickers and writing names on cards which unfortunately did not end up changing the core game play significantly from start to finish. And the sticker quality was poor. The Insights were horrible to open. Several stickers were peeling off towards the end of the campaign due to shuffling (in a game with very little shuffling actually). The two main criticisms I would level at the legacy campaign are 1) lack of good balancing mechanism for when you win or lose a game 2) keeping you completely in the dark on mage progression options. In Pandemic Legacy, if you lost a game, the next game was made easier by relaxing the core mechanic. If you lose that, the next game was made even easier, and so on. And then the reverse happens if you're winning which lead to a nice equilibrium of difficulty. But with Aeon's End Legacy, if you lost a game, you just repeat it with a temporary difficulty reduction. If you lose again, you just move on and difficulty ramps back up even higher with a newer and nastier nemesis. You could wind up bumbling through the entire campaign and I can't imagine that ending up an enjoyable experience. And then on the flip side, albeit of lesser concern, if you win, there is nothing to really make the game harder. And there's also one poorly thought out nemesis in the middle of the campaign which can end up quite punishing with long lasting effects if the game goes quite bad for you. Building your breech mage from scratch lead to some of the more interesting strategic choices between games. But not knowing the options ahead of time was a risk. You get a ton of choices over the course of the campaign and in the end you could develop some really synergistic optimized monster mages. But you don't know what lies ahead and not all upgrade options were equal. If you chose poorly, the ramping of the game difficulty might leave you behind and result in a poorer play experience. Several of our starting upgrades were useless in retrospect by the end of the campaign because they no longer really factored into the role in which that particular mage evolved. This aspect of the legacy mechanics seemed to hinge a lot more on player skill level and the ability to scrutinize the value of mechanical bonuses. There's a reset pack available to reset the campaign and play it again, but would I really ever want to? No. It was good enough for a first run through but not compelling enough for multiple tries. Legacy games should probably accept that they will be one-and-done affairs and focus design around that to make it as memorable as possible. Aeon's End New Age Legacy wet our appetites for more Aeon's End campaign style play and New Age promised this with the new Expedition mode. We're nearly done with and I think it succeeds quite well at the task! Now all the boring content from the base game has renewed purpose. Expedition mode is a "legacy-lite" mode that can make use of all Aeon's End content previously released (and future to come). Now you can play a series of "linked" games with some (non-permanent) character progression, market optimization, and nemesis difficulty ramping. I have a few design quibbles over the Expedition rules, but it's mostly flavor, nothing a few house rules couldn't fix to season it to taste. Overall the rules as written are fairly serviceable out of the gate. The one criticism I would have here is the art. Aeon's End as a whole has had pretty consistently good art. But style choices for some cards in New Age felt like a downgrade, almost cartoon-like at times, and the gem artwork looked more like hazy colored pencil. Also, the lack of artwork for most of the treasure cards is a disappointment. It just feels cheap when all the other components feature so much unique art. As for the general use new content (mages, nemesii, spells, etc.), it's hard for me to judge as I'm not an Aeon's End expert. It's all definitely more complex compared to the base game stuff but it still feels on level. There's no simple 2 Aether Jade or what not. But with nearly 4 core games and 6+ expansion, I have to wonder if the design space is getting a bit cramped. We liked our starting mages in the first Expedition enough to stick with them to the end. The first nemesis felt like a re-tread of stuff we've seen before. The next three appeared new and unique enough. There are a few new keyword gimmicks for cards that work well enough without requiring a bunch of new extraneous tokens.
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Oct 26, 2019 07:09
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Aeons End Legacy hit the right spot for me with Legacy games. Pandemic Season one was good, and two just dragged on without meaningful choices. But permanently upgrading a mage between rounds, and then being able to use it afterwards was great. Of course, the created mages are very strong compared to the others, but bumping the difficulty fixed that. The expedition mode breathed a lot of life into the game as well. I am an Aeons End completionist, so I have a Hobby lobby box full of content, with spillover in the New Age box. Before expedition mode, Aeons End didn't get out much because digging through everything was a pain. Now that content is persistent through a multigame system, I'm having fun pairing cards in the market for combos with the mages and upgrades available. The Aeons End app is out and good, but unfortunately I don't think there was enough interest in it to put out expansions. I would love to have expedition mode on mobile.
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Oct 26, 2019 11:48
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Lampsacus posted:Feeling angsty about my friends bringing around A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) tomorrow evening. Any tips or things I should know before playing? Lannister has been recently errata'd to have an extra ship, located in Lannisport.
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Oct 26, 2019 15:56
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Jedit posted:Got a play of Sanctum this morning. It's fine enough - the monkey cheese randomness of the early game is exaggerated even by the demonstrators - but it's not €60 worth of game. €40 and I'd have snapped it up. I can't find the right stand for Alubari, I saw a sold out sign but nowhere to play it. Can you point me in the right direction?
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Oct 26, 2019 19:05
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Ubik_Lives posted:Lannister has been recently errata'd to have an extra ship, located in Lannisport. Thank god. The only time I played I read a guide for the octopuses (in my defence, I was the only new player) and completely crippled Lannister on my first turn.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:35
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Yes, it is unambiguously a good change. Lannister needed a buff. The question these days is, does Bara need a buff when playing with the expansion?
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Oct 26, 2019 19:42
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How does the vassal system help with lower player counts?
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Oct 26, 2019 20:12
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Now that Essen impressions are here, the game that caught my eye is "Die Crew reist gemeinsam zum 9. Planeten". A co-op tricktaking game thats building up some hype.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:14
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discount cathouse posted:Now that Essen impressions are here, the game that caught my eye is "Die Crew reist gemeinsam zum 9. Planeten". A co-op tricktaking game thats building up some hype. On a similar note, the new Fox in the Forest sequel is a 2 player co-op trick taking game where you have to balance the number of tricks each player takes to move along a path, but without communicating info about your hands of course. After how well the first one captured trick taking in a 2 player game I'm really excited to see this.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:21
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Bottom Liner posted:How does the vassal system help with lower player counts? Really well, actually. It's hilariously fun to have a neutral force you can smash into players you can't normally interfere with. It also leads to some neat political moves. I played Lannister and my friend played Stark with an Octopus vassal between us. Baratheon spent two turns slapping us around with it before I managed to take control and coordinated with the Stark player to kill off half its forces, ostensibly so that people would stop slapping us around. The next turn I gave it up as a vassal to the general confusion of everyone involved. I then promptly took the undefended octopus home base, capturing the remaining fleet I'd docked in the port the turn before and watched the Stark player poo poo a brick. For a game where you get up to serious shenanigans it opens up some really cool options. Ohthehugemanatee fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 21:35
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lockdar posted:I can't find the right stand for Alubari, I saw a sold out sign but nowhere to play it. Can you point me in the right direction? I can't recall the exact number, but east side of hall 3 at the northern end. Come in from Galleria, turn left, turn right at Helvetica Games and it's the booth selling Oriflamme. E: I'm almost finished with Spiel, just Hall 4 to look at, so if you want to meet somewhere we can meet.
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Oct 26, 2019 22:53
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Rusty Kettle posted:Aeons End Legacy hit the right spot for me with Legacy games. Pandemic Season one was good, and two just dragged on without meaningful choices. But permanently upgrading a mage between rounds, and then being able to use it afterwards was great. Of course, the created mages are very strong compared to the others, but bumping the difficulty fixed that. What Legacy content did you "keep" for use for later games? Their recommendation for balanced cards seemed too hand wavey. Tier 3 and 4 is only 8 cards, not enough to even make a full market. I feel like some from the earlier tiers are worth it like Neural Wreath (which we kept for all of the campaign).
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Oct 26, 2019 23:06
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I played Paladins of West Kingdom or whatever and it has a lot of good ideas but holy poo poo is it too longed. By the end we had basically emptied every track and maxed every stat so victory came down to fortify (a random draw) and leftover gold. It’s like the game was built by people who got frustrated playing engine builders that ended too early. People rag on Terraforming Mars but this was worse because in Mars players control the game’s pace but in Paladins your only option efficiency.
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Oct 27, 2019 01:21
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Cocks Cable posted:What Legacy content did you "keep" for use for later games? Their recommendation for balanced cards seemed too hand wavey. Tier 3 and 4 is only 8 cards, not enough to even make a full market. I feel like some from the earlier tiers are worth it like Neural Wreath (which we kept for all of the campaign). I kept everything. Obviously some early cards are strictly worse than others, but I don't mind. A game like this is going to have a fair amount of randomized difficulty. I mix all the encounter cards together too, but I do keep the card types in proportion to the 'base' encounter decks. Still, it is possible that we just get a lot of cards that hammer Gravehold or something. This makes the first game more difficult, but expedition mode allows us to correct for it as time goes on, which I like. If we don't draw new market cards, new mages, or new upgrades that fix gravehold, we might ' cheat' a bit by mulliganing or swapping out an antigravehold card or two with other randoms. One way or another, we recognize that games like this with so much randomized content will create very difficult games, but I found with Aeons End it's best to roll with it and try to pull through. We have a good time one way or another. I also have never played with more than two players.
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Oct 27, 2019 02:45
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Went to Geekway Micro today. Didn't play any of the play and win games, since being on the board means I can't win them anyways, but I did get 9 games in which is pretty good. Instead we played Quacks of Quedlinberg, Gizmos, Copenhagen, Parks, Welcome To, Azul Stained Glass, Encore! x2, and Tapestry Sadly I didn't get Pret-a-Porter or my prototype, White Hat, in but hoping to get those both to the table tomorrow with my normal group.
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Oct 27, 2019 04:34
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al-azad posted:I played Paladins of West Kingdom or whatever and it has a lot of good ideas but holy poo poo is it too longed. By the end we had basically emptied every track and maxed every stat so victory came down to fortify (a random draw) and leftover gold. I don't mean to disparage your experience, but are you sure you played it properly? I've played it twice now, and not once did I see anyone max out all of their attributes, nor finish more than two of the actions for the King's Favor in the seven rounds allotted.
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Oct 27, 2019 04:38
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Phelddagrif posted:I don't mean to disparage your experience, but are you sure you played it properly? I've played it twice now, and not once did I see anyone max out all of their attributes, nor finish more than two of the actions for the King's Favor in the seven rounds allotted. I kept asking if something was hosed up but nah, we checked at every weird edge case and was playing properly. Average score was 90, everyone had completed the kings action. At least one stat was maxed with the other two in the high teens (we were not adding our paladins to the value). What it came down to was conversion bonuses but everyone had parity with each other, the colors were different but the bonuses the same. I believe there are too many opportunities to remove debt, clear action spaces, and rack up workers. It reached a point where there was no legal actions to take while sitting on like 6 purple workers. I was notified we had promo (?) cards because some of them seemed unreasonably good. I had a pickpocket that got an extra coin from the tax booth, and a patron that gave me a worker/coin when I clear an action space. I can only bring 3 workers over so I’m just using purple to pray itself, get a coin and worker, do this to get down to 3 purple and 3 white and just toss them for develop or something. Idk, the game was like 3 hours with four players and no AP players either, there was just too much room to do actions. al-azad fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Oct 27, 2019 |
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Oct 27, 2019 05:05
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Hey goons, I finally listened and got Spirit Island, and yeah okay this game fuckin slaps. Might be top 5; need to play it more to make up my mind but certainly leaning that way. It depends how cleanly the difficulty levels scale up, because base level does get pretty easy once you understand the basic flow.
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Oct 27, 2019 06:03
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Ohthehugemanatee posted:Really well, actually. It's hilariously fun to have a neutral force you can smash into players you can't normally interfere with. That actually sounds way more interesting than I was giving it credit for. I might look into it because I have 3 players that really like AGoT 2nd but it's pretty weak at 4. Root has filled that spot nicely but they'd be eager to try Mother of Dragons. hito posted:Hey goons, I finally listened and got Spirit Island, and yeah okay this game fuckin slaps. Might be top 5; need to play it more to make up my mind but certainly leaning that way. It depends how cleanly the difficulty levels scale up, because base level does get pretty easy once you understand the basic flow. The difficulty is so granular that you can dial it in to your precise taste and then adjust it to your faculty with individual spirits. It's really something.
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Oct 27, 2019 07:14
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hito posted:Hey goons, I finally listened and got Spirit Island, and yeah okay this game fuckin slaps. Might be top 5; need to play it more to make up my mind but certainly leaning that way. It depends how cleanly the difficulty levels scale up, because base level does get pretty easy once you understand the basic flow. The difficulty scales beautifully. I recommend starting with the adversary Brandenburg-Prussia at a low level - it is probably the least brutal of the adversaries, and also introduces the least number of new rules.
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Oct 27, 2019 10:32
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Any opinions on Coimbra? I really like Castles of Burgundy and thought Santa Maria is ok.
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Oct 27, 2019 12:51
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Terminally Bored posted:Any opinions on Coimbra? I really like Castles of Burgundy and thought Santa Maria is ok. I’m a big fan of Troyes’ dice draft but hated Coimbra. Was confused by it the first play but the other 3 plays confirmed it and made me hate it. Couple problems: the card flop is completely random and has zero relation to whatever colors you might want. This means you can end up overpaying or underpaying or everyone can just be opportunistic and move up the tracks arbitrarily. With only 12 (or was it 16?) choices the whole game, taking the first player marker sucks and depending on what cards show up it might not even help. No way to change dice costs or influence the market in any manner unlike Troyes. Unless you take that pitiful cost reduction action but have fun doing that and having the card you want taken away anyway. I think most of these stem from the way dice color has no relation to player color, which seemed an interesting gimmick compared to Troyes. I think there’s a way to do it well but Coimbra isn’t it.
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Oct 27, 2019 13:28
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I have Troyes with Ladies iirc and like it very much. Thanks! Via Nebula is cheap as hell in Eastern Europe as well, btw. Will get a copy this week.
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Oct 27, 2019 14:42
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lockdar posted:I can't find the right stand for Alubari, I saw a sold out sign but nowhere to play it. Can you point me in the right direction? Coming back to this - there are two copies of Alubari at 4-I115 as I speak.
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Oct 27, 2019 14:58
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So we played City of the Big Shoulders yesterday and we enjoyed it, although it was a two player learning game. I can see the consternation regarding its 18xx association because it's not 18xx in the slightest (ok the stock market and the goods payouts maybe  ). It reminds me of a more playable Arkwright actually, it should be shorter than Arkwright with four and not needing to lean into having four players. Very much looking forward to playing it with a full complement of players.Cloudspire is up for today, I'm looking forward to that! Hoping to eventually play it co-op but today's game will be 2p pvp.
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Oct 27, 2019 15:30
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Terminally Bored posted:
It's £45 here 
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Oct 27, 2019 16:10
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Jedit posted:Coming back to this - there are two copies of Alubari at 4-I115 as I speak. poo poo, already in the car back home. I did get to play it which is awesome!
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Oct 27, 2019 18:13
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Any impressions of Maracaibo? It was the one game Capstone put out this show that I wasn't 100 percent sold on. Be curious if anyone fell in love with it.
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Oct 27, 2019 18:42
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Memnaelar posted:Any impressions of Maracaibo? It was the one game Capstone put out this show that I wasn't 100 percent sold on. Be curious if anyone fell in love with it. "Just another Pfister" is a verdict I heard several people give. More people seemed to be packing that Newdale game. Best games I played this weekend were Faultier and Miyabi. Azul: Summer Pavilion is easily the best of the three as well.
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Oct 27, 2019 19:08
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Memnaelar posted:Any impressions of Maracaibo? It was the one game Capstone put out this show that I wasn't 100 percent sold on. Be curious if anyone fell in love with it. I quite liked my first playthrough. Lots of things to discover. Not sure If I will ever get the chance to play the campaign but it should be good good enough for a few more games with the basic scenario. I only own Blackout: Hongkong so my collection has space for another Pfister game.
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Oct 27, 2019 21:07
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Jedit posted:Best games I played this weekend were Faultier and Miyabi. Azul: Summer Pavilion is easily the best of the three as well. Played my copy of Faultier yesterday and really liked it. Played the basic setup with the fixed starting locations for the animals. Looking forward to try the other ones and placing them more freely
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Oct 27, 2019 21:09
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Jedit posted:Azul: Summer Pavilion is easily the best of the three as well. Curious on this one. Changes/improvements?
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Oct 27, 2019 21:13
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Bottom Liner posted:Curious on this one. Changes/improvements? It hits the right balance of mistakes never being crippling but remaining significant. There's a lot of rewards for planning ahead, and the game scoring incentivises the tactics that provide them. Lastly, there's a sensible amount of flexibility in placement and a couple of other features that reduce the luck of the draw and of turn order. This is the game that should have won SdJ, not the original.
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Oct 27, 2019 22:47
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