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PJOmega posted:I wouldn't mind if the scenarios were interesting. So many GH maps boil down to "deal with this murder hallway without blowing too many resources. Then fight this perfunctory boss in a room that will either be easy or impossible." There's always Forgotten Circles 
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Feb 11, 2021 02:22
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They could improve Gloomhaven by giving players more flexible monsters, like maybe having an AI and hit location deck with some reactions in it as well. Scale back the hero abilities to make the players more 'average', and add a way to build out the home settlement, like with upgradable buildings and gear crafting. Just 'teleporting' into the fight is boring too, it needs a few random events while the party is on its way. Also, the random events should all have a 10% chance of instant death.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:38
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throw a dildo on the table and it'd be a complete garbage game
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Feb 11, 2021 02:40
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PRADA SLUT posted:They pushed the game back to July, I think they could get books out. I suspect we will finish playing Frosthaven first before those map books get released.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:41
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Infinitum posted:Any recommendations for worker placement style games similar to Lord's of Waterdeep + Champions of Midgard? -Caylus is the original and may still be the best? -Russian/German Railroads if you can find it (good luck  )Other strong ones: -Troyes -Le Havre -Stone Age -Lorenzo il Magnifico I would have recommended T'zolkin/Marco Polo but the creator appears to be garbage! Bellmaker fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 03:55
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Doctor Spaceman posted:There's always Forgotten Circles Never picked it up, tho my local store has a used copy for $20. If you enjoyed Gloomhaven reasonably is it reason to break out the big box again?
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Feb 11, 2021 05:59
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By all accounts forgotten circles is garbage For ~$35 Jaws of the Lion is a good pick if you just want more GH and in a slimmer package (physically and design wise).
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Feb 11, 2021 06:12
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PJOmega posted:Never picked it up, tho my local store has a used copy for $20. If you enjoyed Gloomhaven reasonably is it reason to break out the big box again? There are two components to FC: a new class (the Diviner) and a new 20-ish scenario campaign. The class is a strange support class. The two main mechanisms are traps (that actually kinda work, as long as you understand monster movement) and manipulating which ability and modifier cards are drawn. It's an interesting puzzle if you like those specific parts of the system but it's hard to use well (especially at low levels or in small groups) and the cards overvalue deck manipulation. The scenarios are complex and fiddly. Different rooms are split across various pages and you won't know what components are required at the start of a scenario. Combined with some significant mid-mission puzzle solving and scenarios become drawn out and badly paced. The puzzles themselves also very much rely on being in sync with the way the developer thinks; worse, they go against some of the assumptions in base Gloomhaven. Since a lot of scenarios have partial success options it can be better to fail and retry than take a "win" that locks you out of multiple scenarios. A related issue is that you often won't know the win conditions at the start of the scenario, and sometimes not until you hit them. Vague flavour text frequently provides key information on how to complete scenarios, and in some cases is outright missing the clues that were meant to be there. There's a second edition of FC which fixes most of the problems with the new class but doesn't really change the scenarios beyond a few fixes. I'm enjoying it but there are huge caveats and I couldn't recommend it in general (unlike Jaws).
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Feb 11, 2021 06:14
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Bottom Liner posted:By all accounts forgotten circles is garbage This 100%. You can buy the Diviner Class on drivethrucards. Absolutely no reason to touch Forgotten Circles
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Feb 11, 2021 06:14
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nordichammer posted:This 100%. You can buy the Diviner Class on drivethrucards. Absolutely no reason to touch Forgotten Circles Yeah, you can also play JOTL with new classes if you want.
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Feb 11, 2021 07:01
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Bottom Liner posted:By all accounts forgotten circles is garbage You can port the classes into the base game, too.
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Feb 11, 2021 07:27
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Forgotten Circles is phenomenal, but this is coming from someone who has played it exclusively through TTS and so has never had to physically set up a scenario. I can absolutely see, based on how elaborate a handful of the scenarios can get, how folks can find them frustrating, which is a shame because they’re much more inventive than anything in the base game. I’d say, if you’ve got the opportunity to pick it up, you should be aware that: 1. the scenarios are significantly longer than those in the base game 2. you are often asked to pull out new enemy types, components, and map tiles during scenarios, and to rearrange existing ones, which can be fairly cumbersome 3. I have not included any of point 2 in point 1
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Feb 11, 2021 08:24
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Making you decode runes in the middle of a scenario is pointless busywork in a game whose biggest flaw is the amount of admin. It's obnoxious as hell.
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Feb 11, 2021 08:31
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Making you decode runes in the middle of a scenario is pointless busywork in a game whose biggest flaw is the amount of admin. Oh god, he turned the obnoxious bonus class rune hunt from the main box into something you have to do in the middle of a mission?
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Feb 11, 2021 09:04
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I’m not sure I’d agree with “have to” (I don’t recall progress along the main questline being blocked by it), but yes.
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Feb 11, 2021 09:26
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PJOmega posted:Oh god, he turned the obnoxious bonus class rune hunt from the main box into something you have to do in the middle of a mission? There are scenarios where you get clues given in runes. I'm fine with mid-mission puzzles (if you are against those FC probably isn't for you) but translating a series of runes when you have the decryption key adds nothing but time. There's puzzle stuff outside of the scenarios but that's handled a bit better.
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Feb 11, 2021 09:44
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quote:Ever wanted to read a comparative analysis of @colewehrle's An Infamous Traffic and John Company, and how they make separate economic arguments that complement one another? SpaceBiff is a really good writer.
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Feb 11, 2021 09:51
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PJOmega posted:Oh god, he turned the obnoxious bonus class rune hunt from the main box into something you have to do in the middle of a mission? I'm replaying the campaign right now, and I'm just going to immediately unlock the Bladeswarm as soon as we finish the Envelope X stuff..
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Feb 11, 2021 09:53
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Nah they've tried to keep a lid on Envelope X (and A) stuff as much as possible. I think the overall idea of X (a nearly campaign-long quest to unlock a class, focusing on metatexutal elements) is fine and they just hosed up the execution. If you opened X when you opened the town records instead of a personal quest and got more and more hints for the various runes in artwork as you progressed through the book you could have roughly the same puzzle with a lot better pacing and direction.
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Feb 11, 2021 10:02
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PMush Perfect posted:I'm replaying the campaign right now, and I'm just going to immediately unlock the Bladeswarm as soon as we finish the Envelope X stuff.. That is what I did too, consideringI think there's a typo in the clues.
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Feb 11, 2021 10:06
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alkanphel posted:That is what I did too, consideringI think there's a typo in the clues. That's been fixed in most of the versions at least.
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Feb 11, 2021 10:09
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Going to start JotL with my partner this weekend - I assume since they only included 4 classes, it’s well enough designed that any two will work reasonably well together? Not looking to tediously minmax our choice, just want to not nerf our party straight away
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Feb 11, 2021 11:22
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Infinitum posted:Any recommendations for worker placement style games similar to Lord's of Waterdeep + Champions of Midgard? I wouldn't recommend Arnak. I played a demo game and as with Sanctum before it, I felt that I'd already got everything out of it that I was going to. I think you're looking for a WP game where the game is played more through "side quests" than by gathering X and building Y with it? Then I would suggest The Magnificent. You draft dice to use as workers to build a travelling circus and put on a show. Beautiful game, fun theme, plays up to 5 with the Snø expansion and is quite quick as well.
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Feb 11, 2021 11:44
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Jedit posted:I think you're looking for a WP game where the game is played more through "side quests" than by gathering X and building Y with it? Then I would suggest The Magnificent. You draft dice to use as workers to build a travelling circus and put on a show. Beautiful game, fun theme, plays up to 5 with the Snø expansion and is quite quick as well. I like The Magnificent , it looks really cool as well.
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Feb 11, 2021 11:46
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Aramoro posted:I like The Magnificent , it looks really cool as well. My favourite comment on it came from a casual gamer friend: "I don't care if it's the best play, I'm taking the neon armadillo!"
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Feb 11, 2021 11:58
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Bellmaker posted:-Caylus is the original and may still be the best? Ta for the recommendations. I know Russian Railroads is getting a Big Box Edition later this year in Ultimate Railroads, but I believe it's only available to Ze Germans to begin with. I did have T'zolkin on my Wishlist for a while until I read about his bullshit ITT and promptly removed it. Jedit posted:I wouldn't recommend Arnak. I played a demo game and as with Sanctum before it, I felt that I'd already got everything out of it that I was going to. My group seems to enjoy WP, drafting, and engine building a lot atm, so I'm leaning that way for my next pickup. I've never heard of The Magnificent. Just had a quick butchers and it looks very pretty. I'll check out some reviews. I do like the look of Arnak a lot, and I wish there was a TTS module to test it out.
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Feb 11, 2021 12:08
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jesus WEP posted:Going to start JotL with my partner this weekend - I assume since they only included 4 classes, it’s well enough designed that any two will work reasonably well together? Not looking to tediously minmax our choice, just want to not nerf our party straight away I didn't spoil myself on what the classes all did until after we'd played the first few scenarios but my partner and I ended up picking red guard + hatchet based entirely on the appearance of the characters which is probably one of the more optimal combinations. I've heard that the demolitionist is significantly less fun to play without having the red guard there to take aggro for you and that the voidwarden isn't a great choice for a 2p game but I haven't played either so that could well be wrong. What I will say for sure is that the red guard is far more interesting to play than I was expecting and I'd strongly recommend that one of you try him out unless you really don't like the tank archetype. The mixture of ranged and melee attacks and use of pull and immobilise effects as a source of damage mitigation, as well as your more obvious defensive / healing abilities makes him very versatile.
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Feb 11, 2021 12:14
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Doctor Spaceman posted:That's been fixed in most of the versions at least.
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Feb 11, 2021 12:37
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PMush Perfect posted:Does it still require finding the designer's email address and then sending it an e-mail with a single character? More or less. You send the word "dust" rather than a single character. The support email for the company works (I suspect a bunch of official ones do) and http://www.cephalofair.com/dust provides the answer as well.
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Feb 11, 2021 12:56
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jesus WEP posted:Going to start JotL with my partner this weekend - I assume since they only included 4 classes, it’s well enough designed that any two will work reasonably well together? Not looking to tediously minmax our choice, just want to not nerf our party straight away The only combo I'd avoid is Hatchet/Voidwarden. Not because either of those are bad - far from it - it's just voidwarden wants stuff from her allies Hatchet doesn't provide (like being in melee)
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Feb 11, 2021 14:10
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Lorenzo il Magnifico looks like my jam. Will watch a couple of reviews of The Magnificent tomorrow 
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Feb 11, 2021 14:22
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dishwasherlove posted:SpaceBiff is a really good writer. I'll read whatever he has to say. It is refreshing to get analysis and reviews outside of "Component quality 8/10; Fun 9/10" I want him to compile his article series "What we talk about when we talk about Games" into a book.
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Feb 11, 2021 15:42
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Asmodee bought boardgamearena. Enjoy it while you can, I give it 2 years before it’s functionally destroyed.
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Feb 11, 2021 16:20
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That makes me really sad to hear
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Feb 11, 2021 16:24
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I've owned the Deluxe version of Clinic for...a while now, and of course yesterday was the first time I got to play it in non-solo mode...on TTS. Anyway. Better than I thought. There was an actual competition for resources, which I wasn't expecting as much, though there's still a heavy solitaire component to it - I wouldn't have minded a little bit of a way to affect your opponents aside from taking resources they could potentially use, but it was still a lot of fun to play it with someone. I may be considering the expansions on KS right now...
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Feb 11, 2021 16:26
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Crackbone posted:Asmodee bought boardgamearena. I've played ~2000 games on BGA now so I think I've had my money's worth from it. Interesting to see where it goes from here.
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Feb 11, 2021 16:42
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Really enjoying I/E so far, it has been a natural fit for a group I've played a lot of Dominion/RFTG/Res Arcana with  It reminds me of Mottainai but just uhhh more interesting and more natural in how it flows? The Containeresque economy of actions owns. (I got Green - Lithuania flag!) Infinitum posted:My group seems to enjoy WP, drafting, and engine building a lot atm, so I'm leaning that way for my next pickup. Agricola with drafting is still a really good if brutal WP. They're gradually releasing all the decks again too which is neat (D just came out). Maybe they'll like Caverna more though because of the theme (isn't there an expansion coming out soon too?), but Agricola is the more interesting game long term imo. e: but just get Keyflower tho and shove it in front of them. Key Market is pretty good too actually -- it's kinda inelegant though, at least compared to Keyflower. T-Bone fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 17:18
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My wife and I finished Jaws of the Lion as Hatchet / Red Guard with no issue. I imagine Red Guard and any other would work well.
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Feb 11, 2021 17:44
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Kerro posted:Well you'll certainly have many tens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay in that bundle if you enjoy the game enough! Glad to hear a positive review on it. I got my boxes last week but haven't been able to run it yet; hopefully this weekend. I was a little worried this would end up one of those "licensed game with a bunch of minis, so the gameplay is half-baked" kind of deals.
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Feb 11, 2021 18:01
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I suspect a lot of people probably will end up overlooking Bloodborne because of the IP tie-in and expectations of the company and mini-heavy KS games in general, but after playing two more 3-player scenarios last night I actually think this might be something really quite special. For a game that does come with a solid amount of plastic, it feels like a very 'mechanics-first' design, and the mechanics that are here are actually pretty wonderful in creating a deep decision-space without much complexity or fiddliness. It's not a word I would have expected to use to describe a CMON game full of minis but it honestly feels quite elegant how it all plays out. I think one of the strong points of the design which was fairly present in Death May Die but is even more present here is that there is no enemy AI - enemies only ever respond to what players do, so you have full control over where the enemies end up, when and if they attack, when they'll respawn etc - they don't behave independently at all. What this means is that you have near total control over how things play out, so that every decision feels meaningful as you almost always know exactly what the outcome will be and in a sense you're playing the enemies as much as your own character - drawing them to where you want them, having them attack when it suits you and so on. It also cuts down on fiddliness and downtime - enemies move during your turn, and only attack you during your turn, there's no 'mythos/enemy/encounter' phase between player turns, it just rolls seamlessly from one player's turn to the next. The other really strong point is the cardplay and the way the two-sided trick-weapons work. You only get three cards per turn, and each side of your player board has (usually) three slots that allow you to play attack cards, after which you have to discard a card to flip the board to its other side to reveal a slightly different set of attacks. Every time you play a card onto your player board to attack an enemy, that enemy attacks you back. If your attack was faster it resolves first (which could cause the enemy attack to be cancelled, or outright kill the enemy before it gets to react), if it was slower the opposite happens. You can also play a card with the 'dodge' keyword into an empty space on your board in response to the enemy's attack, and if this is the same speed or faster than the enemy attack then you avoid it. This super-simple system combined with the fact that the enemy attack deck is only 6 cards (so you can often largely predict what they're going to do) ends up being quite deep and allows for some interesting plays, and most importantly plays that feel powerful and cool. As you get upgrade cards, which come easily and early in the game, you can pull off some really fun combos. In our last session, I had a fight against a fairly tough enemy where I was able to play a card to attack him that also let me draw another card, and then use a second card to dodge his response attack. This upgraded dodge card allowed me to transform my weapon for free (flip to the other side, clearing all slots) and because of my hunter special ability and an upgrade card I'd got, this free flip also allowed me to refresh my firearm and gave me extra speed and damage on my next attack, which I then used with my final card to attack again, use my firearm to disarm his basic retaliation attack, and save the extra card I'd drawn for when he attacked me on his activation (at the end of the hunter turn). I find that one of the things that causes me to lose interest in co-op games is when the decisions you're making turn to turn end up feeling rote and mechanical. To have lasting power, it needs to feel that your character is doing things that are clever, cool, or powerful. This is what makes Spirit Island work for me, it's what makes Mage Knight work for me, it's what makes Death May Die work for me and it's why I liked one of Michael Shinall's previous designs (Xenoshyft) so much more than Aeon's End which could end up feeling very incremental and dull over repeated plays (though Xenoshyft has other problems - a bear of a setup and too much downtime). Bloodborne at least so far seems to have that 'fun' element in spades - when you can work out the right sequence to play your cards in so that the enemy you're up against can't even land a hit, or so that you can chain actions into actions to do far more than seemed like it should have been possible on your turn, it's just a blast to play. I think good co-op games give the player the feeling of being in control, whereas bad ones leave you feeling as if you are just being done to by the game system. Again, Bloodborne largely nails this - as the player you control nearly everything down to the enemy's movement, so anything going wrong almost always feels like the consequences of your choices rather than some arbitrary thing you could never have predicted or foreseen. This is all helped my the quick setup (less than five minutes I'd guess) and the short campaign structure. Rather than the sprawling campaigns of some other recent co-op games, here a campaign is three linked scenarios in which you keep your upgrades between. Last night we played two out of three scenarios of a campaign, with rules teach and setup, in just under three hours. So 60-90 minutes per scenario seems totally reasonable, and there's few games with this much in the way of interesting decisions that play that fast. Finally on the positives side, I think the game strikes a great balance of randomness (in that there isn't too much) vs predictability (a lot). As noted above, enemy movement is entirely predictable. Enemy attacks have some randomness, but are drawing from a deck of 6 cards comprising 3 possible actions but you know exactly what each of these 3 actions will be, so it's usually possible to calculate odds of what the attack will do and consider possible responses, i.e if the enemy draws this attack then I respond by doing x, but if he draws the other card then I do y. Player decks are only ever 12 cards, and you draw 3 per turn - so there's a small amount of randomness there but not a great deal. There's a bit of randomness in what order you discover tiles (see below), but because you get to choose how to place them you still have quite a bit of control over where enemies appear when you move into new spaces and where the entrances/exits are. Most of the unpredictability actually seems to come from the scenario-specific mission cards, which imo is where you want it - it means that each scenario feels fresh the first time you play it, and creates interesting and unexpected situations that you have to work out how to respond to. I think good co-op games give the player the feeling of being in control, whereas bad ones leave you feeling as if you are just being done to by the game system. Again, Bloodborne largely nails this - as the player you control nearly everything down to the enemy's movement, so anything going wrong almost always feels like the consequences of your choices rather than some arbitrary thing you could never have predicted or foreseen, and when I've failed it's made me interested to try again rather than thinking 'well I hope we get luckier next time'. I've only got a few reservations at this point. Firstly, the quality of the cardboard tiles and chits really should be better for a game at this price point. I can see the map tiles getting chipped/scuffed quite easily, especially since there are not many of them so they will see repeated use and it's just a shame they're not better made to withstand this. Secondly, we still haven't run into this being an issue, but the fact that you need to find specific tiles to complete the quests for a scenario and these tiles are shuffled into a stack seems like it could lead to having a bad time if you got unlucky and the tiles you needed just ended up being on the bottom. I don't know if this would make the scenarios actually impossible, but it seems like it could be getting close. I think this would be easily fixed with a house-rule and if we do run into it being a problem then we might do just that (e.g semi-construct the tile deck so that there is one objective tile in every 3-4 tiles so that they are more evenly distributed, as per something like Pandemic's outbreak cards). Lastly, I've only played twice solo and twice with 3 players but the initial impression is that this does not scale the same with different player counts. You get the same number of enemies per tile with higher player counts, and while boss (and scenario-specific) enemies have more health with more players (though not all of them for some reason?), a lot of stuff does not scale up with more players. Yes, you advance the timer more often from hunters going to the dream to upgrade, but you get so many more actions per round with more hunters that it felt a hell of a lot easier. Playing solo (I did the first scenario twice) I lost once due to running out of time, and won once on the second-to-last space compared to 3-players where we had 3-4 more rounds to go when winning each scenario. I don't think this is necessarily too much of a problem as I think it would be very easy to slightly tweak the difficulty in a variety of ways for people who want more/less of a challenge (and honestly I think this is almost necessary in co-op games as different groups have different preferences and experience obviously improves play - we've gone from playing level 3-4 Spirit Island to 7-8 for every game now) but it's something to be aware of for people who might want the game to be perfectly balanced regardless of player count. Edit: One more thought for the negatives column. I got the KS version so this isn't an issue for me, but for retail it's a real shame that given how much plastic is in the box that they only included four hunters, since this is one of the things that seems like it will create the most variation in experience from play to play. This is even more baffling since the hunters are component-light - each hunter only requires one small mini, and two cards (not even punchboard) so why aren't there more in the base box, like the 10 that came with Death May Die. Given that so many of the hunters are locked to the KS-exclusive stretch goals box this is just.. bad. Overall, this has been the biggest surprise for me since (perhaps unsurprisingly given it's one of the same designers and same publisher) Cthulhu Death May Die, which I had unfairly assumed would be a mindless dice-chucker, but Bloodborne hits even more of the right notes for me by leaning into the low-luck, puzzle-solving type gameplay that I love in Spirit Island (and Mage Knight before it). I can't wait to try out more of the campaigns and see how different hunters and enemies play out. Kerro fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 19:50
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