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What's the story behind the cover girl in Pandemic Iberia having a different face?
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May 25, 2020 10:32
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| # ? May 26, 2024 05:59 |
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SelenicMartian posted:What's the story behind the cover girl in Pandemic Iberia having a different face? I noticed that too when browsing BGG after discovering the game: Published artwork here compared to the seemingly original artwork here. The artist's page features it here, which looks like the (presumed) original. Googling the name brings up a few interviews, but I didn't see anything about it, and I couldn't find anything on the boards. As far as I can tell there was no 'controversy' (like the current sphinx tiddie controversy or the Five Tribes slave controversy) but presumably before printing someone at the Z-Man/F2Z looked and said, "Can we change that" and they did. The hand on the mask looks the same, so it was probably a small change.
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May 25, 2020 11:07
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I've split the difference and grabbed Chinatown + Cartographers. Cause I have a problem And that problem is not enough board games
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May 25, 2020 11:25
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Just looks like an art choice, on the published one she looks friendlier, less suspicious.
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May 25, 2020 11:27
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Bottom Liner posted:https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2086043930 Yeah, this is great. Thanks for sharing! Also, I did have some questions earlier that seem to have been missed: Agent Rush posted:Hey, has anyone here heard/played the Death Battle Card Game? I like the concept of Death Battle, but if it's just a meme game I won't bother looking to get it. I also want to ask about Unmatched Battle of Legends because I'm a sucker for anything that references Alice in Wonderland.
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May 25, 2020 11:40
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Aramoro posted:Just looks like an art choice, on the published one she looks friendlier, less suspicious. Here we are in the middle of a pandemic, and Aramoro asks why people are looking suspicious and cautious instead of friendly and approachable.
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May 25, 2020 11:52
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Oh wow, somber nurse is so much better.
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May 25, 2020 13:17
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I keep seeing Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective get recommended to newbies and I feel like it deserves a slight word of warning: it’s a fun experience kind of game but what few rules it does have are surprisingly unclear at times. For example, the rules make a big deal about how for each case you have access to all newspapers up to the date on the case file .....and then the very first case’s single newspaper is actually dated a day after the first case file. “Oh, well Sherlock says at the end he’ll start his investigation tomorrow morning”, no way, come on, read the drat rulebook you yourselves wrote.
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May 25, 2020 13:20
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Mr. Squishy posted:Oh wow, somber nurse is so much better. As a nurse during the current pandemic, I can say that somber/exhausted nurse is definitely more on-theme.
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May 25, 2020 13:41
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I only recall seeing the somber face on BGG and thought that was published. Never had a reason to look out for it at the LGS. That's a shame, the original art is so much nicer.
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May 25, 2020 13:43
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Yeah the original artwork is better, but I can understand the idea behind changing it so you have a better facing product on shelves to catch the consumers eye. This popped up on my feed and it looks interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGbXJqnHEEI The dice placement looks neat, but the really interesting point to me is that to win it takes the lowest score of your Fame or Money scores. So you have to keep balancing both of them through the course of the game. Def would like to see it in action, and apparently a KS is starting soon
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May 25, 2020 14:05
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The original art is even included in the art booklet inside the box. And then they used similar faces for Tide and Rome.
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May 25, 2020 14:06
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I'm not an RPG fan really but even I found The Quiet Year interesting enough to get a copy. It has ideas that bounced around in my head ever since, like the contempt tokens. I like the idea that a community decision can be made by consensus, but nevertheless results in someone being tangibly dissatisfied.
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May 25, 2020 17:27
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Infinitum posted:The Crew: Quest for Planet 9 We've really enjoyed The Crew at home - and once normal life resumes I expect it'll be one I pull out quite a bit. Easy to teach, you can whip out a single mission very quickly, and has some real satisfying moments (and some funny blunders).
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May 25, 2020 21:04
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Is Watergate actually any good?
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May 25, 2020 21:45
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Yes. I've play about 20 times and it has depth and staying power despite being exceedingly simple for the type of game it approaches.
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May 25, 2020 22:50
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I like Watergate a lot, our games at home usually end with one person winning just a hair before the other player would have.
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May 26, 2020 14:50
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Agent Rush posted:Yeah, this is great. Thanks for sharing! I have not heard anything about either of those games. Which is not a super helpful answer (not hearing about games at all is usually reason to avoid them given how much I've seen, read, and played imo), but I wanted you to be heard.
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May 26, 2020 16:15
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Got to play about half a game of 1856 the other day and really enjoyed it. Someone described it as tighter and looser than 1830 simultaneously thanks to the loans you can take out and that you can start operating as soon as the President's Share is purchased, but the partial capitalisation of your companies and the fact that all cash after 50% is held in escrow results in some interesting decisions with raising capital for buying new trains and also embezzling. We didn't get to the point where the Government calls in their loans yet either!
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May 27, 2020 14:30
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How is A Feast For Odin on TTS? It's a game I am potentially very interested in picking up down the line for my strategy group, but would potentially like someone who knows what they're doing to hold my hand through a session or two on TTS to see if it's my cup of mead. 
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May 27, 2020 14:58
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Infinitum posted:How is A Feast For Odin on TTS? We tried it, the implementation is ok, some weird snapping on some components and putting tiles into the cards can be a little fiddly. It works well enough.
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May 27, 2020 15:02
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I hate playing feast on TTS, personally. Too many small components to track.
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May 27, 2020 15:17
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Yeah that's my worry. I've been actively avoiding playing poo poo like Twilight Imperium just for the sheer amount of virtual hand holding you need to do
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May 27, 2020 15:21
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Infinitum posted:Yeah that's my worry. I've been actively avoiding playing poo poo like Twilight Imperium just for the sheer amount of virtual hand holding you need to do If you want something of the ilk you could try Nusfjord and if you like that imagine if it had about 100 more components.
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May 27, 2020 15:31
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Aramoro posted:If you want something of the ilk you could try Nusfjord and if you like that imagine if it had about 100 more components. Thank you I will check this out. It's not like I'm adverse to picking Feast up, but it's expensive and I'd love to see it in action with someone who knew what they were doing via TTS. If it's super fiddly I guess I'll just watch a ton of gameplay vids to make up my mind! 
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May 27, 2020 15:53
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(If anyone can hook a brother up with a TTS session on the weekend for the ~Aussie AEST time zone~ shoot me a PM) I can easily grab extra players as well.
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May 27, 2020 15:55
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Infinitum posted:Yeah that's my worry. I've been actively avoiding playing poo poo like Twilight Imperium just for the sheer amount of virtual hand holding you need to do TI3 has a really good VASSAL module, and there is a TI4 one but I haven't tried it. VASSAL is different from TTS in that it's 2D. THe scripting in modules tends to be higher quality, and it's less fiddly (VASSAL was made to deal with hex-and-counter wargames)
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May 27, 2020 15:56
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I played Feast on TTS a couple months ago and it wasn't too bad. There's a semi scripted mod that does setup and moving workers to action spaces for you, which means the bulk is just moving all the silver and good pieces around your board. I found that okay, but I'm also very used to precision mouse clicking from years of PC use. The other two people played with a laptop track pad, but actually still were fine with it. I just would occasionally help them out when they were grabbing a lot of tiles at once. It definitely requires copious use of the zoom hotkeys. If people aren't comfortable navigating a virtual space like that constantly then it'll be a bad time.
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May 27, 2020 16:38
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Infinitum posted:If it's super fiddly I guess I'll just watch a ton of gameplay vids to make up my mind! Grab a couple of the uploaded versions and see which one feels best. You might need to adjust your auto align grid to match the size of the board. But, if you take like ten minutes to learn what all the buttons and options in TTS do, honestly it's less fiddly than the actual physical cardboard version. E: and use a mouse to control it. TTS is very much not good with trackpads, trackballs, trackpoint nubs, or controllers. M+KB only. Ceebees fucked around with this message at 16:47 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 16:39
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FulsomFrank posted:Got to play about half a game of 1856 the other day and really enjoyed it. Someone described it as tighter and looser than 1830 simultaneously thanks to the loans you can take out and that you can start operating as soon as the President's Share is purchased, but the partial capitalisation of your companies and the fact that all cash after 50% is held in escrow results in some interesting decisions with raising capital for buying new trains and also embezzling. We didn't get to the point where the Government calls in their loans yet either! 56 has a "A few acres of snow HH" issue but if you're just getting into 18XXs it has some fun stuff. Not sure if you're playing online or not but 1880: China (delayed capitalization, communism) and 1848: Australia (loans from Bank of England, and you can buy shares of the Bank of England which get more valuable as companies takes loans/run out of cash) may be up your alley in the future? Bellmaker fucked around with this message at 21:24 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 21:21
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Got to try a bunch more stuff on Tabletop Simulator (and now in person since we've left lockdown here in NZ): Dinogenics - I loved the theming - it's basically Jurassic Park the board game, and does a really good job of pulling it off as a mid-weight worker placement game. A few years ago I would have loved something like this, but now it felt a little too generic with so many more innovative worker placement games on the market. I think it would be a good alternative to Viticulture as it's about the same weight, and has similar gameplay in many ways (with some of the same problems of card-draw affecting the gameplay quite significantly) Barrage - played a bunch more games of this and I bought a physical copy cos I have really enjoyed it. It does a lot of what Terra Mystica/Gaia Project does for me but in a much shorter play time. It's made me consider getting rid of Gaia Project just because I so rarely have enough time to play a full game of GP with four players, but can get through a game of Barrage in an evening. Lorenzo Il Magnifico - played after reading/hearing a bunch of glowing reviews. We enjoyed it (apart from our euro-hating player, since it's about as euro as it gets) and as I cull my collection down, I can see this being one of the few worker placement games I keep alongside AFfO and Barrage. I don't know if it feels interactive or exciting enough to keep long term though - it felt mechanically exceptionally competent, but seemed to lack moments of real tension or excitement. Cthulhu Death May Die - I really really was not expecting to like this as much as I did. I've been looking for a game that lets you play fast, fun, one-shot dungeon crawl/dice-chucking scenarios and I think this might be it. Unlike so so many other dungeon crawl games I've played they did a fantastic job of letting your characters power up massively over the course of a single play session, with interesting decisions about how to build your character, and with a lot of design decisions that seem to have been based around fun and keeping things playing smoothly rather than 'realism'. Nearly every other dungeon crawl I've played has rules for moving through enemies - either you have to try and evade them, or they attack you in passing etc. Here they just follow you around, and since you can run at high speed (none of this moving one or two spaces per turn) you can theoretically round up most of the enemies on the map in a single turn - it's just that if they're still alive at the end of your turn, they all attack you. This leads to the game being really fast-moving, and for some really fun high-risk, high-reward gameplay, particularly once you start getting some items and special abilities. I do wonder what replayability will be like - by creating rules that emphasise speed and fun, I wonder if the design space ends up being more limited as there are fewer rules and interactions, but I can easily see this being a game that we pull out every few months when we want something light even after the initial appeal wears off. Raiders of the North Sea - this was fine. Another game I think I would have loved a few years back, but is not unique or engaging enough to want to play over alternatives. Civilization New Dawn Only played 2 player, and keen to play again with 4. Plays nothing like what I would have expected from a game with the Civ name, had I not been forewarned, but a lot of fun all the same. The card-driven action mechanic works really well and leads to some interesting decisions, but I wonder how well it will work with more players. In our 2 player game, we ended up in situations where we could theoretically have just traded a position back and forth every turn, and it kinda required one player to voluntarily choose not to keep fighting for that territory in order for the game to progress - which seems like a bit of an issue - but with more players clearly this would be less of an issue. Overall felt like an odd and unique game - at times the different systems and mechanics felt muddled and like a weird mish-mash of things, but it left me curious enough to want to try again. Space Base In one sense there's not too much 'game' here, since the decisions you can make on each turn generally felt fairly obvious, but it absolutely triggers that part of my brain that would be susceptible to loot boxes and gambling and gets a thrill out of big numbers and combos paying off. I had a lot of fun with this as a lighter not-quite-filler game.
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May 27, 2020 23:43
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Kerro posted:Civilization New Dawn Only played 2 player, and keen to play again with 4. Plays nothing like what I would have expected from a game with the Civ name, had I not been forewarned, but a lot of fun all the same. The card-driven action mechanic works really well and leads to some interesting decisions, but I wonder how well it will work with more players. In our 2 player game, we ended up in situations where we could theoretically have just traded a position back and forth every turn, and it kinda required one player to voluntarily choose not to keep fighting for that territory in order for the game to progress - which seems like a bit of an issue - but with more players clearly this would be less of an issue. Overall felt like an odd and unique game - at times the different systems and mechanics felt muddled and like a weird mish-mash of things, but it left me curious enough to want to try again. Civ AND is the single most surprising project to come out of latter-day Fantasy Flight. When I first saw it I was expecting another rehash of Civ TBG, with a complex tech tree and taking four hours. What we got was a tight 90-minute Euro where the tech tree is perfectly integrated into the mechanics. It absolutely is better with three or four, though, and certain civs are very unbalanced at 2.
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May 28, 2020 00:04
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Kerro posted:Dinogenics - I loved the theming - it's basically Jurassic Park the board game, and does a really good job of pulling it off as a mid-weight worker placement game. A few years ago I would have loved something like this, but now it felt a little too generic with so many more innovative worker placement games on the market. I think it would be a good alternative to Viticulture as it's about the same weight, and has similar gameplay in many ways (with some of the same problems of card-draw affecting the gameplay quite significantly)
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May 28, 2020 00:09
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Shadow225 posted:I have not heard anything about either of those games. Which is not a super helpful answer (not hearing about games at all is usually reason to avoid them given how much I've seen, read, and played imo), but I wanted you to be heard. Thanks! I figured Death Battle would be an ad more than anything. SUSD reviewed Unmatched though, that's where I first heard about it. They've been kind of hit-and-miss with me over the years, so if no one else is talking about it I may just chalk it up to a difference of opinion and skip it.
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May 28, 2020 00:47
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Jedit posted:Civ AND is the single most surprising project to come out of latter-day Fantasy Flight. When I first saw it I was expecting another rehash of Civ TBG, with a complex tech tree and taking four hours. What we got was a tight 90-minute Euro where the tech tree is perfectly integrated into the mechanics. It absolutely is better with three or four, though, and certain civs are very unbalanced at 2. Yeah, it is extremely outside of the usual FFG fare and honestly feels unlike anything else I've ever played. There's a ton of aspects that seem at first glance like similar ideas from other games (e.g. collect resources, buy cards), but then they work so completely different (it being extremely difficult to get resources, the fact that there's a finite number of them in total on the map) that it felt quite jarring at times. It's also in some weird in-between space that didn't feel quite euro to me - it's got the extremely asymmetric map with water spaces being important for maturing cities that felt very much more random than a typical euro with extremely abstract area control through the control tokens, plus dice-based combat and randomly moving neutral tokens that can significantly affect some players more than others. It's such an odd game, but one I will definitely play again. Llyranor posted:I would love it if Uwe made a game like this. Honestly I'm not sure that a Uwe game would be too different from what Dinogenics already is. The only things that feel distinctly un-Uwe is the event cards each round, which definitely can swing the game towards some players over others, and the direct-attack special action cards which honestly worked just fine in our play throughs. I imagine Uwe also would probably have had resource costs associated with the different special action cards, or VP associated with them to balance them out as in AFfO, but overall it's got a lot of stuff that is present in other Uwe games including needing to feed your meeples (dinosaurs) each round or suffer negative effects when they break fences and eat people. It's got less depth than some of his meatier games like Agricola, AFfO due to less variety in buildings and dinosaurs (that are the main variant in different approaches to scoring points) but is probably about on par with something like Agricola family version, maybe a little more varied due to all the card actions.
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May 28, 2020 01:08
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Bellmaker posted:56 has a "A few acres of snow HH" issue but if you're just getting into 18XXs it has some fun stuff. What's the issue with '56? There's a strat akin to the Hammer??? I'll keep an eye out on 1880 and 1848. I was mostly interested in '56 because it's nice running trains to places I've actually been and live in.
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May 28, 2020 02:51
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There's a strong "default" strategy in 56, which is taking as many loans for your company as you can before tossing it into the national and starting a second company, but it's not the only way to win according to the long-time 56 players.
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May 28, 2020 02:55
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FulsomFrank posted:What's the issue with '56? There's a strat akin to the Hammer??? In addition to what taser rates said, there's also 2 (I think, it's been a while, might be 3) companies that are significantly better than the others to the point that some people feel that anyone who doesn't open one of those two should just buy up their shares rather than opening their own railroad. If you're interested in the Canadian setting you can preorder 1861/1867 (the 1867 portion is set in Canada) here: https://app.crowdox.com/projects/joshuastarr/1861-russia-1867-canada It's a different style of game that focuses a lot less on stock shenanigans and more on growing your initially tiny minor companies into solid major companies so be warned if that's not to your taste There's also 1822CA, but I believe that is not currently being produced so you'd have to locate a used copy. 1882 is set in Canada, but a totally different part of it so possibly less of the running trains to places you've been.
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May 28, 2020 04:05
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Excellent article by Tom Russell (Irish Gauge) on what's happening in the euro game side of the hobbyquote:The other day, I was chatting online with some euro-y types about why we find so many new euro-y games so unsatisfying. Is it a trend toward hollow complexity - full of multiple paths to victory and interlocking mechanisms, signifying nothing? Is it a binary conception of balance that desperately prevents the players' actions from having consequences? Or perhaps it's that these games are built to deliver an optimal experience on the first play, which often means the types of experiences that the game can provide are very narrow and shallow, perfect for the one-and-done crowd, first impression reviews, and strong in-the-moment sales, but not so perfect of course for us highfalutin types who like to spend an afternoon arguing online about why we don't like something. And I think this is exactly what's happening with the increasing popularity of 18xx games. Players want their turns to mean something, to have an immediate effect as well as a long term effect. Concordia is a core representation of what I don't like in Euros. Micro turns that barely move the needle and little interaction. On the other hand in 1830 every decision is meaningful and has an impact on your longer term strategy. Naturally games like this lead to analysis paralysis, something else designers are running away from, but really that's a player problem and not a design problem. AP people should list to this https://www.spreaker.com/user/10238956/episode-116-ap-and-the-need-to-win Thank goodness for Splotter and the 18xx designers who still support entanglement and meaningful decisions!!!
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May 28, 2020 15:21
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| # ? May 26, 2024 05:59 |
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Concordia isn't very representative of modern euro games at all to me. The interaction is subtle but definitely there. The game is all about piggybacking others actions to your benefit for production and income, which makes actions inherently interactive. The micro turns also feel against the grain of many modern euros that have more involved turns and round structures.
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May 28, 2020 15:44
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