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al-azad posted:Did he actually say he wants to compete with Frosthaven? Because CMON SON! No, that's just my observation. I wonder if the Frosthaven announcement would change their plans. quote:Also a reconstruction era game I'm hugely hesitant on it. The dude has the chops to pull it off without being too clinical or maudlin but that is territory yet to be really successful. It's still in the really early stages. I don't think they have a concrete idea for what kind of game they want to make yet, but Cole believes he can make a strong historical argument about the period.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:10
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I went to Pax Unplugged. This was my first board game convention. Here's my thoughts: Bus (1 play – 3 players) It’s Splotter at their finest, which means another fantastic cutthroat logistics management. What makes this one unique is limited actions at a variable rate: Everyone has 20 workers, but you use them at your own pace, when you are out you’re done, but others can keep going. However, if a majority run out, the game will end and you will lose unspent actions. Like other Splotter games, the complexity is low with but the depth is immense and based off player interaction. There’s only 5-6 actions, but the order they resolve is interesting & deliberate in a way that reminds me of Dominant Species worker resolution phase. How you use those actions to spatially interact with others on the board itself is the meat of the game similar to all of Splotter’s other games. Hard to believe, but this might be their meanest game, which makes me love it even more. It’s a shame the 20th anniversary edition is sold out. Crystal Palace (2.5 Plays – 4/4/3 Players) Second favorite game of the con. I almost bought it, but I have some reservations about balance that I’ll touch on below. It’s a worker placement game with dice as your workers, but there’s no rolling to be seen. You secretly select the pips on your 4 dice and then simultaneously reveal, but the catch is you have to pay for each pip and money is EXTREMLY tight in the game. You then place dice on different action spaces, which are crafted in such a way that there’s always more open spaces available than actions there are to be resolved. It’s hard to explain, but it is incredibly clever and allows for so many possibilities. Let’s cover a brief example-- You have an action space that allows 2 people to take the action, but there are 4 spots for dice. One requires a minimum of 5 pips to place, then 3 pips, 2 pips, and the last one allows 1 pip but you have to pay 2 money to use it. If you see you are the only one with a 5 pip dice, you can purposefully choose to place it in the 3 or 2 pip slot to block off options for other players, but give up the special extra ability that comes with placing on the 5-pip slot. Or let’s say you have a 6 pip dice and save it (dice placement is round robin) when two other people have committed a 5-pip and 3 pip to the action space—you then place your 6 over the 2 pip space, and because yours is the highest, you resolve first in the resolution phase, meaning you get first choice of how to use the action, and the person who put the 3-pip dice gets nothing. Another cool example of the high level of interactivity is inventions. Building an invention is one of the primary mechanism of scoring points and when you build one it gives a 1x effect that usually has a positive and a negative attached to it. You can choose to take the effect yourself or you can force it onto another player. If you make them go broke with this you can even force them to take a loan, which is significant negative victory points at the end of the game. I really enjoyed this game because of the level of player interactivity. This is the opposite of multiplayer solitaire. You constantly need to be paying attention to the dice of your opponent, what resources they have what slots they could be jockeying for, what inventions they have and the effects they could potentially force on you if they build it. There are some potential downsides. The game has a bit of a kitchen sink issue. There are a few too many tracks, markers, and mechanics. For example they added 8 meeples to the game which are only used for a single mechanic called the black market. I’m not going to explain the market, but what I’ll say is that in a vacuum the black market is an interesting & clever mechanic, but I’m not sure it really needed to be in the game with everything else that’s going on. There’s a few more examples of excess like this. My main hesitancy in purchasing is that in our few plays and from talking to others who played, there seemed to be a single dominant strategy in rushing up the income track which gets you more money, which then allows you to use higher pips, which secures you the action space that lets you go back up the income track, etc… Now this is a brand new game and everyone playing it is only doing so for the first time, so this potential issue could simply be group think by new players. Still, I’d rather wait it out and see what others think after playing it 5-10 times. Alburi: A Nice Cup of Tea (1 Play – 4 players) I was excited to try this after see good press in this thread from Jedit. I quite enjoyed it, but I don’t think I was as impressed as he was. It’s a solid middle weight worker placement game, which is sort of damning onto itself, because at this point you have to be amazing to be worth purchasing in the crowded design space of the mid-weight euros. The unique mechanic involves obtaining a specific resource that you can then use supercharge your worker’s actions or even let you obtain a temporary extra worker for the turn. It’s a neat mechanic and it feels rewarding to pull off a super turn when you utilize it correctly. One issue is that this utilizing this mechanic is mandatory to doing well, but the main gameplay mechanism used to acquire this resource is taking an action that is limited and subject to some degree of randomness via events and turn order. One of the people playing got screwed by an event, and within 3 turns all of these actions were used up and were no longer available for the rest of the game. There are other ways to obtain the resource, but they are much more inefficient than that one limited action space, and that person lost the game handedly. I don’t really understand the design decision of making this action space limited, as it involves the major mechanic the game is based around. I can see the early game playing out very similar every single time as everyone makes a mad rush to secure this action space until it runs out permanently around turn 3. Even if I’m wrong about this and there are other viable playstyles, I’m just not sure the game is interesting enough to see playtime vs Keyflower/Caylus/Agricola/Orleans/*Insert your favorite mid-weight eurogame*. It’s a Wonderful World (1 play – 3 Players) Mark my words, this game is going to soar up the BGG ranking list. It’s a mash up of 7 Wonders + Splendor/Century Spice Road. I’m not a big fan of any of those games, yet even I could tell it was quite well done and probably better than all of them. You draft 7 cards. These color coded cards can either be kept or discarded for resources. You can build the cards you keep by putting the correct colored cubes on them, and then they themselves because cub generators. Each color has a theme (black builds war stuff, blue are end game cards with high points or multiplier scoring conditions, yellow have many cards that are simply worth victory points, etc… You also get bonuses each round for producing the most of a certain resource. It’s only 4 turns so it plays very quick. It’s subject to the same randomness that all light weight drafting games are. For example I built a blue engine, and then out of 21 cards we drew a single blue card in the final draft of the game. Ultimately, not my cup of tea as I prefer heavier games, but I’d play it over Splendor, 7 wonders, or century spice. Cooper island (1 play – 3 players) This game is bad. It’s an action selection & resource management game that involves mild 3D spatial building mechanisms. The 3D board makes it looks cool, but once you play it the gameplay is very dull. The issue is that it’s essentially multiplayer solitaire (I didn’t look up from my own board other than placing workers in the center rondel) with a few poorly tacked on mechanisms to force player interaction (pay someone 1 good if you want to use the action they took already!). To make matters worse, the 3D spatial boards never change. People are going to very quickly figure out the ideal building strategy to obtain the most resources (the higher you build, the more resources that space is worth). Even though the tiles you draw are random, they have a very limited amount of variation. I can easily see this game being “solved”. Blood on the Clocktower Fun social experience, bad logic puzzle. This is a great example of a game that is fun but not good. Anyone who likes hidden role games knows they live and die by the strength of the logic puzzle at the core of their design. This game has so many ways to create chaos and disinformation that the logic puzzles falls apart easily. There’s tons of roles that can make other people’s abilities malfunction, but the worst is that some of these mechanics are arbitrary and lack consistency. For example, there is a good guy role that when viewed by other roles whose power is to find out if you are good/bad, can SOMETIMES come up as good or sometimes as bad; a decision made by the narrator’s personal preference. No governing rules or conditions—simple arbitrary choice by the narrator. I hope I don’t have to explain how problematic that is to the logical puzzle, but what I will point out is how unfulfilling it feels to realize your reasoning was correct, but hey the narrator decided to gently caress with you. Not to mention the game requires an insane amount of time investment to work. You need a few good narrators (unless one person only wants to do that every time) and everyone else needs to learn the bazillion roles. It takes way more time to set up and play than Avalon or One Night. This game is going to keep getting buzz as long as they keep showing up to cons and demoing it, but as soon as the company stops doing that it will fade into obscurity. Other I also played Tiny Towns, which has a fantastic complexity-depth ratio. Silver Bullet (1 play – 4 players) by Bezer games, which was a cute filler memory game but not worth a second look. And some game involving elastic bands and poles which sucked. Megasabin fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 19:11
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Megasabin posted:I think you are way off the mark about Resistance. At least Avalon, which is the version almost everyone plays. I have seldom agreed with a post as hard as I agree with this one. I lost my Avalon group a couple years ago, and I miss it all the time - lots of my favorite gaming moments from those games. Great game that continued to surprise us after hundreds of plays.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:17
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Llyranor posted:Ah, that's a shame. I usually reserve Climate for when we're 5-6p (the simultaneous phase keeps things moving briskly). I have too many games competing at the 4p medium weight space that haven't gotten enough plays yet. Yeah unless they've made recent updates Oceans is structured differently than Climate in that way. Instead of "everyone do phase 1, everyone do phase 2" like climate, you perform all phases, then the turn passes to the next player. Doing it this way has advantages, but it means simultaneous play is out.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:20
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FulsomFrank posted:Where does Cthulhu Wars fit into the broader DOAM genre? I love those games but I've already got a few of them (Inis, Kemet, Cyclades etc.) so I'm always curious what people find especially intriguing about it? The price tag is also really up there, which doesn't make it an impulse buy either. CW was originally designed as a computer game, but after that failed Sandy Petersen decided to retire and make what he'd always wanted to make as a last hurrah: a grotesquely overproduced minis game intended to be the crown jewel of anyone's collection. What he didn't realise was that his timing was perfect; Zombicide had just delivered, everyone wanted the next huge minis game, and suddenly in comes the original Lovecraft Legend with an offering based around the single most popular memetic theme including a Cthulhu figure that was practically life size. $1.4m later, he had a new company and a new career. Essentially the game is asymmetric Diplomacy but with dice-based combat and enough minis to choke a Shoggoth. The game scoring mechanics create a clock that means a typical game lasts five or six rounds, so you have to plan smartly to get everything done and the game also plays out in 90 minutes. However, the real USP is that unlike most other DOAMs each faction has a unique set of tasks which must be met before you can win. There are also two ways to trigger game end - reach a certain point threshold, or a specific action is performed a set number of times. This means that a runaway leader can be stopped by blocking him from completing his last task before the endgame is triggered.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:01
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Selecta84 posted:Thinking about getting Orléons and the Invasion Expansion. Enough gameplay or do I need the Intrigue Expansion as well? However, I vastly prefer Invasion for the coop mode. For my group, Orleans is almost solely a coop game, it's so good. My fav pure euro coop. I don't care for Invasion's other modes, though. There is no overlap between Invasion and T&I, except the new buildings can all be used in competitive mode.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:03
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Fellis posted:Does anyone go to BGG con in November in Texas? PAX Unplugged announced next year’s date will overlap with it and I am curious about the vendor and designer presence there and the general attendance. I think that vendors would pick the bigger con, but I feel designers would rather go to the con directly targeted at people who use BGG. Either way it is not ideal and I hope PAXU reconsiders the date. Wow that sounds nuts  Wonder why they are doing that?
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Dec 9, 2019 20:10
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Aramoro posted:Afghanistan is famous for it's resin. Everyone is really just going to sleep on this one, huh
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Dec 9, 2019 20:23
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al-azad posted:... a reconstruction era game I'm hugely hesitant on it. The dude has the chops to pull it off without being too clinical or maudlin but that is territory yet to be really successful. I’m stoked to see what comes out of the process good or bad, as Reconstruction is a bit of American history that is little understood and little explored. E: if I were designing though I think I’d err on the side of maudlin- that Reconstruction was a necessary and noble endeavor that will ultimately end with goals unmet and the project unfinished. It’d be up to the players to accomplish as much as possible before the forces undermining Reconstruction manage to overwhelm it. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 20:31
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Mayveena posted:Wow that sounds nuts I have seen criticism of PAX practices met with “we just do it a different way” so not sure how much they care. General PAXU rant ahead: They do their TG con so differently than many others and I feel there is this undercurrent of “make your own fun”. This works for videogame centric cons where singleplayer experiences are much higher quality and multiplayer often has inherent matchmaking, plus the general shorter gameplay loop of a videogame. “Make your own fun” really falls apart when you need to find a group that will invest an hour+ of their time into learning a game and introducing themselves/interacting with strangers face to face (which can be daunting for some nerd folk). There is some presence of game demos which helps, but the demand is much greater than supply and some people have had REALLY bad experiences, especially if this is their first major nerd convention, much less first PAXU. In the PAXU thread, someone posted that they felt they missed opportunites to meet new people because it feels difficult to break into groups playing games, and you focus on spending time with the people you showed up to the convention with to have something to do. I may not have a full picture of these problems though, because I do PAXU very differently to “make my own fun” and it works for me. I have to rely on what I hear from others and negative feedback is much louder than positive
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Dec 9, 2019 20:33
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Megasabin posted:
Thanks for the great write up! I'm disappointed to hear you didn't care for Cooper Island, it's one of a few I'm looking forward to trying. I've got Bus ready to ship when Ketchup hits my FLGS, and Crystal Palace has rocketed up my list based on what everyone here has been posting. Jedit posted:CW was originally designed as a computer game, but after that failed Sandy Petersen decided to retire and make what he'd always wanted to make as a last hurrah: a grotesquely overproduced minis game intended to be the crown jewel of anyone's collection. What he didn't realise was that his timing was perfect; Zombicide had just delivered, everyone wanted the next huge minis game, and suddenly in comes the original Lovecraft Legend with an offering based around the single most popular memetic theme including a Cthulhu figure that was practically life size. $1.4m later, he had a new company and a new career. Nice write up too, thanks. I think our group would enjoy it based on what you said. Is there an ideal player count? Also, I seem to recall there being tons of expansions; hopefully there isn't one that's considered essential?
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Dec 9, 2019 20:42
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In my experience when I'm alone at a con I look for the closest group that has a "teach us!" sign up for a game I know or a "looking for players" sign. Everyone who uses those signs, and there's a lot of them, are very receptive to strangers plopping down and hanging out. Sometimes you have to learn a game by reading out loud from the book and that sucks but PAX is the only con I've been to where the staff teach the games setup and the "Enforcers" are what separates PAX from every other convention.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:45
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al-azad posted:In my experience when I'm alone at a con I look for the closest group that has a "teach us!" sign up for a game I know or a "looking for players" sign. Everyone who uses those signs, and there's a lot of them, are very receptive to strangers plopping down and hanging out. Sometimes you have to learn a game by reading out loud from the book and that sucks but PAX is the only con I've been to where the staff teach the games setup and the "Enforcers" are what separates PAX from every other convention. I get paid once a week to teach games at a board game cafe and when i went to shux, my loving teach-sense took over and I beelined towards anyone holding a rulebook i recognized looking confused. Got some good games and met some nice people that way. SHUX is so expensive, but it is the nicest con ever. Like if you look slightly alone/hopeful-for-a-game for more than 5 minutes, random people will swoop in to invite you to games. Completely different from PAX Prime (note it hasn't been called that for years so this is very old opinion), where - as fellis says - i ended up just playing with people i know because that's what everyone else is doing.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:53
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al-azad posted:In my experience when I'm alone at a con I look for the closest group that has a "teach us!" sign up for a game I know or a "looking for players" sign. Everyone who uses those signs, and there's a lot of them, are very receptive to strangers plopping down and hanging out. Sometimes you have to learn a game by reading out loud from the book and that sucks but PAX is the only con I've been to where the staff teach the games setup and the "Enforcers" are what separates PAX from every other convention. BGG has done this for years in their hot games room. There's always someone around to teach, especially at the start of the con.
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Dec 9, 2019 21:16
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FulsomFrank posted:Where does Cthulhu Wars fit into the broader DOAM genre? I love those games but I've already got a few of them (Inis, Kemet, Cyclades etc.) so I'm always curious what people find especially intriguing about it? The price tag is also really up there, which doesn't make it an impulse buy either. Cthulhu Wars is like a more freeform version of Chaos in the Old World. Everyone has radically different powers and several possible game plans that they can blend together or switch between. The agency - the plethora of options and minimization of luck (despite the dice combat, which is impressive) - is almost intoxicating when combined with the length and progression of the game. The way it all plays out is a distinct product of a huge aggregate of player choices, often forking the game down radically different paths, which just feels incredible compared to the scripted-feeling pace of many similar games (including Chaos and Kemet). That said, despite the arc of the game being within the players' control, the exact winner sometimes comes down to luck between the leaders - usually because of Elder Sign draws. It's also quite possible to kingmake, though it's rare in practice because everyone almost always has a genuine shot at winning the game themselves (even if it would require a good set of Elder Sign draws). I think the inclusion of these attributes are prices worth paying for Cthulhu Wars' player agency, but if they're big turn-offs then Chaos is likely up your alley instead. Neither Cthulhu Wars nor Chaos in the Old World compare very clearly to Inis or Kemet (I've not played Cyclades). Inis is in some ways the closest in terms of player agency, since the objectives and terrain that you're contesting are only generated by player actions. Cthulhu Wars and Inis also both require you to monitor the other players carefully and keep them in line, though their mechanics and reasons are quite different. Cthulhu Wars (like Root, for another example) will let an unmolested player rocket exponentially to victory, while Inis has very linear player power but extremely attainable victory conditions that are almost always within everyone's potential reach. In either case, someone who flies under the radar can smash the table. Despite these similarities, Cthulhu Wars (like Chaos in the Old World) is still fundamentally different from any of the Matagot DOAM family because of the extreme asymmetry between player powers. Inis and Kemet both allow players to diverge a little in capabilities, but your long term goals are always going to be the same. Cthulhu Wars is different. There's room in Cthulhu Wars for players' interests to legitimately coexist, due to differing requirements for their engine, even if everyone is chasing the win. That, along with the grandiose sweep of the game's length, often makes Cthulhu Wars feel more like diplomacy than Diplomacy. e: Or for another analogy, Cthulhu Wars is like an entire game of Dominions 5 packed into a few short hours. 
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 21:29
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FulsomFrank posted:Thanks for the great write up! I'm disappointed to hear you didn't care for Cooper Island, it's one of a few I'm looking forward to trying. I really liked my Cooper Island games so far. Yeah, it is a kinda solitaire optimisation game but I enjoy it. The decisions feel pretty meaty and I think it offers a lot of strategies that solving it should take time.
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Dec 9, 2019 21:48
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Llyranor posted:If you intend at all to play competitive, Trade & Intrigue makes the game a lot better.
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Dec 9, 2019 21:51
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All right, this is my round-up of games played/demoed at Pax Unplugged: Oath - I'm really excited for this game. Right now it looks really strange and unique. There are several different victory conditions, which in this game means ways to score victory points. These conditions are exclusive, so there will be only one way to score victory points each session. Alternate victory conditions apart from the VP track are buried in the draw deck, and if one of these alternate conditions is used in the game, the winner can elect to change the VP condition for the next session. There are two factions in the game, the Empire (I don't remember the exact name) and the Exiles. Exiles each have their own piece on the VP track, but the Empire has one. Multiple characters can be in the Empire (and I think the player who won the previous game will start in the Empire), based on an invitation from the Chancellor, the "leader" of the Empire. If the Empire has the most VPs at the end of the session, whoever has the most prestige points in the Empire will win. The methods of earning prestige points are always the same (I think). As for actually playing the game, on each turn you'll be adding cards to either your own personal tableau or one of several public tableaus. These cards will allow you and/or other players to be better in combat, manipulate the amount of Favor each suit has (this is important for Prestige and for your income each round), or change the board state. The demo I was in had a combat-focused victory condition, so I saw more of the combat than anything. When you decide to attack or something you decide your objectives (such as setting up strongholds in one or more regions, kicking someone out of a part of the board, or just killing guys), which affects the difficulty of winning. Your combat strength is based on the ratio between your guys and the guys defending whatever objective you're going after, so managing your objectives to maximize that ratio, minimizing the penalty, while stilling accomplishing as much as possible is important. As in Dune, you're allowed to sacrifice your own soldiers to power up your combat value, but the difference is that you decide this after the combat die roll. I was able to get in on Cole's demo for this game, and I was completely sold. I'll be a backer for sure. I'm excited to see how the game would develop after multiple sessions and to see how to build a strategy with the different suits of cards. Cole mentioned that the box would have a sort of Quick Save style setup solution for taking down the game while simultaneously preparing for the next session, which certainly sounds intriguing. Caylus: 1303 - Like golden bubble said, this is a much more approachable design than the original Caylus. It's basically if Caylus was designed in 2017. The iconography on the board is much clearer, you only have to worry about one currency (meeples), and the character cards add a little bit more flexibility to your play. For all the usability design improvements they've made, though, the simplification of building the castle actually makes the game less friendly to newbies. Although the board makes understanding the rules of the game simpler, not being able to visually see the development of the castle and who has been getting points from that process makes understanding the strategy of the game more difficult. Without the castle being a large presence on the board, it's less clear that the point of the game is to build that castle. It's still true in Caylus: 1303 that you're going to get a ton of your points from the castle. I played the game with someone who had never played Caylus before and someone who had, and the guy who never played ignored the castle while even the guy who had played before passed up a lot of opportunities to build. I built the castle nearly every turn and I won handily. On the Underground: London/Berlin - I really wanted to give this one a try since I like route building type games and the board looks beautiful, but I was very disappointed. The neat thing about the game is that at the start you're given multiple train routes to build, allowing you to score multiple points for delivering passengers to stops. The thing that kills this game, though, is how fiddly it is. There are two kinds of stops passengers will go to, stops they will go to if they are nearby and ones that they must go to no matter where on the map it is. In the latter case, they will always take the route that will require the least amount of walking, that is, the fewest amount of undeveloped route lines on the board. This method is also used to measure the nearest optional route. You might already see the problem with this: figuring out the shortest route requires careful counting, and ties for the shortest route are common. Ironically, the burden is worse at the beginning of the game, when you have to count more routes. It's the tedium of running train lines in Tokyo Metro, but after literally every turn. Another pain point is the factor that luck plays in the game. If one player gets lucky and the stops line up on an early turn allowing that player to get four points by having the passenger ride their train multiple times to reach their stops, that will be an insurmountable lead. That's because towards the end of the game passengers will usually end up taking multiple players' trains each turn, giving everybody points and allowing nobody to gain ground on the leader. Like I said, this was a big disappointment and probably my least favorite game of the con. Bus - Like On the Underground, but good! I love the tension between wanting to build up your routes and bus fleet while not wanting to get screwed by someone starting time back up. This was my game of the con and the only one I bought. I felt I had to buy it because SUSD highly praised it during their panel and there were only five copies left at the booth. I'd imagine there will be a rush on it soon if they choose to make a video. City of the Big Shoulders - I like the iterative nature of placing buildings to create worker placement spots, and the stock system works fine, but neither of these changes are enough to differentiate this game from a fairly standard worker placement game. I'd pass on this one. It's a Wonderful World - Stop me if you've heard this one before: a civilization game played by a pick-and-pass card draft. What differentiates this game from 7 Wonders is that instead of passive production, buildings will produce cubes that are necessary for completing other buildings. If you don't want to play a card,m you can discard it to get a cube. There's also a cube that can act as any other color of cube. This invention of a "wild cube" is proof-positive that the game designers of today never stop innovating. The game somehow has less player interaction than 7 Wonders. Set collection mostly happens by accident (what do you know, a lot of black cards produce green cubes and a lot of green cards produce black cubes! Design!) The main clever idea in this design is the staggered production. Each color of cube produces in a specific order, so building a production chain is a little more of a compelling challenge (unless you happen to complete buildings using recycled cards, which is fairly common, sooo...) This game is completely replaceable. Terramara - A worker placement game with tracks, but in this game, you need to advance on the track to make different worker placement spots available. There's a strong Caylus influence here: a tight set of resources, the possibility of losing workers for a time, the prominence of roads making things available. I would say that this is a better "Kaylus for Kids" than Caylus: 1303 if not for the arcane symbolism present on the ability cards you can acquire to create your own personal worker placement spots. I'd say it's a more easy-going version of OG Caylus and therefore worthwhile, but I wasn't particularly compelled to buy it. Mental Blocks - A really fun puzzle game. Each player gets an image of a block configuration. The image is either in 2 dimensions with color or 3 without.The players must cooperatively put the configuration together. I think most of the restriction cards that come with the game are bunk. Like, not being able to touch yellow pieces is easily circumvented by telling someone else to pick it up. I think the game would be the most fun if the players couldn't speak while doing it. There's also a hidden traitor mechanic (See? I'm on topic!) and I think that would add a lot as well. However, the demo I did gave us the easiest level difficulty and we were only able to finish the puzzle just under 10 minutes, which is the standard time limit, so maybe not being able to talk would be too great a challenge. Tidal Blades - This was a big kickstarter craze earlier in the year, but I didn't see anyone sit for a demo at the con, which definitely says something, though I'm not sure what. The goal of this game is to build a dice pool to win dice challenges and score victory points. You do this through a worker placement game, though I thought the worker placement stuff was substantive. There will often be an ideal place for you to go, so you need to balance coming prepared for a die challenge with beating other players to the spot. I actually found the dice play to be less substantive, which surprised me. I do think there could be a great game where you mix drafting dice with worker placement, but I'm not sure this is it. Flotilla - This game has got to be going for some kind of record for the most distinct mechanics in a board game. Concordia-style deck building and action selection? You got it. A modular board? Yes, please! Influence tracks with four separate factions? Absolutely. Point salad prize-finding? Why not? Dice drafting? Sure! Commodity speculation? All right, but don't forget variable scoring conditions, set collection, and a modular player board! This sounds like it would be a mess, but I actually found that it hung together fairly well. The card play borrowed straight from Concordia is the core mechanic, and the game uses it well. Each action is sufficiently interesting and all the other mechanics flow naturally from those actions. I think this game has real legs, and it's the runner-up to Bus for my game of the con. Finally, there was a Japanese game I played, but I forget the name of. Using a personal set of dice (representing workers) you acquired fish to fulfill order cards. The core conceit of the game, though, is giving sake to your workers to make them happy and therefore more efficient, manipulating the die faces. However, at the end of the game if you gave them too much sake they would become alcoholics and cost you money. I wish I knew the name of this game, because it was very cute. It's short and fun, and you'd probably be happy with it if it was the only dice drafting game you owned. I also played Asmadi Games Phoenix Syndicate, but I don’t have anything to say about that, other than that it was basically fine and I liked the plastic cube components, they had good color and feel.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:16
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Is there an expected launch date for the Oath Kickstarter? I'm basically ride or die on Cole's games now.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:26
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I'm sad I didn't get to play Fotilla. It looked really cool. Also I forgot in my write up that I did get a teach/demo of Trismegistus at the publisher's booth. I did not actually play the game though. The mechanics seems very convoluted and to make matters worth all the symbols in the game are bizarre, and their matching counterparts on the board are drawn in a weird artsy way that makes it not easy to decipher at a glance.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:32
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Speaking of DOAM, I can get a copy of Forbidden Stars on the cheap. How does it hold against more modern games?
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Dec 9, 2019 22:40
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Mayveena posted:Wow that sounds nuts I would bet it's the only weekend that works for the convention center, since they're usually booked out pretty far for big events. The first year also overlapped and a lot of people were angry and PAX said they would try not to overlap in the future unless there's no other option for the dates. Having two big national conventions in one weekend is a sign that the industry is growing, and they're vastly different in styles so it's fine. The number of people that could go to both is astronomically small anyways, it's more a choice for vendors but given the nature of BGG Con that's an easy choice. Pax would make for a lot more sales and exposure, if only because it's like 10+ times bigger.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:51
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Fat Samurai posted:Speaking of DOAM, I can get a copy of Forbidden Stars on the cheap. How does it hold against more modern games? Anyway on the topic of BSG-likes, isn't the Homeland game a bit of a hidden gem in that regards. I've only really read good things, but having played neither, not sure how the comparison holds up.
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Dec 9, 2019 22:55
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There's definitely not going to be a forbidden stars expansion, ffg lost the license.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:04
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I think I remember Tidal Blades because it made a ton of money for having really fancy components and coming off as extremely over-produced.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:15
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taser rates posted:There's definitely not going to be a forbidden stars expansion, ffg lost the license. The guy was referring to a potential Forbidden Stars remake. Forbidden Stars had an expansion designed prior to the license being yanked, if I recall. I imagine they could reskin the game to Twilight Imperium verse with very little actual difference to the gameplay, and I sorta wonder why they haven't.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:17
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pospysyl posted:On the Underground: London/Berlin - I really wanted to give this one a try since I like route building type games and the board looks beautiful, but I was very disappointed. The neat thing about the game is that at the start you're given multiple train routes to build, allowing you to score multiple points for delivering passengers to stops. The thing that kills this game, though, is how fiddly it is. There are two kinds of stops passengers will go to, stops they will go to if they are nearby and ones that they must go to no matter where on the map it is. In the latter case, they will always take the route that will require the least amount of walking, that is, the fewest amount of undeveloped route lines on the board. This method is also used to measure the nearest optional route. You might already see the problem with this: figuring out the shortest route requires careful counting, and ties for the shortest route are common. Ironically, the burden is worse at the beginning of the game, when you have to count more routes. It's the tedium of running train lines in Tokyo Metro, but after literally every turn. You might have played this a little bit wrong. The Passenger visits exactly one express station then one regular station every turn, there is no "if they are nearby" or "anywhere on the map" about it. FulsomFrank posted:Nice write up too, thanks. I think our group would enjoy it based on what you said. Is there an ideal player count? Also, I seem to recall there being tons of expansions; hopefully there isn't one that's considered essential? Ideal player count is 4 or 5 IMO, although I do have the 6-8 player Earth map and the 9-11 player Earth map coming. There are a lot of expansions, but most of them are alternate maps and packs of independent Great Old Ones and monsters that can be added to the game in various combinations. The only "essential" expansions are the additional factions, of which you probably want two or three for variety. I'd recommend the original three: Windwalker, Opener of the Way and Sleeper.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:28
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Jedit posted:You might have played this a little bit wrong. The Passenger visits exactly one express station then one regular station every turn, there is no "if they are nearby" or "anywhere on the map" about it. That's how we played it, except for in the cases where no express stations came out of the deck, so the passenger just visits the nearest normal station. Sorry if I didn't convey that properly.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:33
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pospysyl posted:That's how we played it, except for in the cases where no express stations came out of the deck, so the passenger just visits the nearest normal station. Sorry if I didn't convey that properly. S'OK, no worries. I didn't find the route calculations too onerous when I played it, but then I was playing with Pevans, who regularly games with Sebastian Bleasdale and was a playtester on the game so he had it fairly instinctively.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:04
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GrandpaPants posted:Is there an expected launch date for the Oath Kickstarter? I'm basically ride or die on Cole's games now. Sounds like it might be around March 2020.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:19
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Megasabin posted:Bus (1 play – 3 players) Effectively this in a 3 player game, but the rules state the game ends when "all but one player is out of actions."
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Dec 10, 2019 00:22
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pospysyl posted:All right, this is my round-up of games played/demoed at Pax Unplugged: I bought the game, read the rules for it and it seemed super boring. But if it has the tension of Caylus maybe I'll give it a shot. I have a player aid for the symbolism so that's not an issue.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:30
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GrandpaPants posted:Is there an expected launch date for the Oath Kickstarter? I'm basically ride or die on Cole's games now. He was saying Q1 at PAX Unplugged
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Dec 10, 2019 00:48
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Terramara has some of the tensions of Caylus, but the design puts a lot of effort into avoiding too much player conflict or difficulty. For instance, ostensibly somebody at the head of the military track could steal stuff and block other players with ease, but every player also has a chieftan piece, a super-worker that can ignore blocking. Certain spaces are blocked off unless you've moved your wagon down the road sufficiently far, but lots of the cards give you free wagon moves.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:52
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Aramoro posted:It also avoids the 'Games all set up, turn 1 we brig the guy who spent too long reading his loyalty card, lol'. As easy as this is to houserule, I really love that the 2p deduction game Inhuman Conditions came up with a clever solution. In the game, one player is a Blade Runner-esque investigator, and the other is either a human or a robot. The investigator has five minutes to interrogate the suspect and determine if they're a robot. Sorta like cylons, robots have special rules on their cards (in this case, behavior and communication restrictions or compulsions they must obey), while the humans don't. So, to combat this, the human cards have a looping circular maze printed on their cards. For each of the ten possible scenario sets, the maze has a different looping sequence of letters. The investigator has an answer key for the scenario, and asks for a specific answer from the maze at the start of the game, e.g. "what are the three letters after C?" The scenario specific robots *also* have an answer key. The maze gives something the humans have to stare at for a bit before the game starts. In the advanced extra difficult mode, the suspect also has to give the next letter in the sequence unprompted once every minute or else they lose, which both gives the suspect an extra thing they have to think about, and also gives the suspect a reason to glance at the card again in the middle of the timed session without looking suspicious.
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Dec 10, 2019 01:09
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That's pretty clever, I like that a lot.
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Dec 10, 2019 04:15
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The Eyes Have It posted:That's pretty clever, I like that a lot. A fellow Ganz Schön Clever fan, I see!
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Dec 10, 2019 04:57
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Oh that sounds like a cool solution to the problem there.
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Dec 10, 2019 12:19
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Is John Company ever getting a reprint or is it like An Infamous Traffic where its contract ran out?
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Dec 10, 2019 14:39
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Rusty Kettle posted:Is John Company ever getting a reprint or is it like An Infamous Traffic where its contract ran out? Kickstarter for John Company planned for early-ish 2020.
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Dec 10, 2019 14:55
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