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Magnetic North
Dec 15, 2008

Beware the Forest's Mushrooms
Stolen from the Trad Gaming Industry thread. It's a thread of TTS alternatives that might come in handy.

Leraika posted:

I couldn't find the one I was thinking of, but this looks useful:

https://twitter.com/UmbyUmbreon/status/1480727673026473984

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Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Magnetic North posted:

Stolen from the Trad Gaming Industry thread. It's a thread of TTS alternatives that might come in handy.

The big thing with TTS currently is that is has momentum - I can choose any game that's come out and there's a pretty decent chance it exists on TTS. Probably every game on my shelf is available there, in multiple languages. Alternatives will have a lot of catching up to do in this regard.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Magnetic North posted:

Stolen from the Trad Gaming Industry thread. It's a thread of TTS alternatives that might come in handy.

Laughing my rear end off at them including a place to play digital Cards Against Humanity, aka Apples to Apples: Casual Bigotry Edition.

Crackbone
May 23, 2003

Vlaada is my co-pilot.

Fenn the Fool! posted:

I really like his designs, but man does he make some bad choices when it comes down to... everything else.

Yup, and he doubles down so hard on his choices when he gets criticism... the man has an incredibly fragile ego.

PRADA SLUT
Mar 14, 2006

Inexperienced,
heartless,
but even so

Jedit posted:

Laughing my rear end off at them including a place to play digital Cards Against Humanity, aka Apples to Apples: Casual Bigotry Edition.

You don’t get it, you’re just not playing with the right people, ones who don’t use “the three-fifths clause” as relating to race.

!Klams
Dec 25, 2005

Squid Squad
I just finished the Sleeping Gods campaign. That game is great! Really compelling, really fun, just a beautiful experience. I wanna play it again and go see stuff I missed, but I feel like my wife will probably need a bit longer before she's keen to jump back in the boat. Anyone have any input about the expansion? It feels like it might be a great way to make playing it though again more palatable?

Fenn the Fool!
Oct 24, 2006
woohoo
I picked up Super Skill Pinball: Ramp It Up and I'm pretty impressed with it, the new tables are a clear cut above the original set. I liked the originals, but they tend to be a bit one-note with a fairly obvious optimal strategy. With this new set you'll have multiple different things you want to accomplish all at once and I've had a lot of fun trying to improvise around how the dice are landing. That said, the tables are also generally more complex and that exacerbates some of the problems with the design, like every table having unique quirks/exceptions with no consistent iconography or it being difficult to indicate what target your pinball just hit without smudging the dry-erase. Still, I love pinball, I think the way the game captures that pinball feel is fantastic, and I'm really enjoying the meatier decision space with this new set. The Gopher Gold table is available for PnP, that'd definitely be where I'd recommend starting for anybody who wanted to check it out.

Llyranor
Jun 24, 2013

!Klams posted:

I just finished the Sleeping Gods campaign. That game is great! Really compelling, really fun, just a beautiful experience. I wanna play it again and go see stuff I missed, but I feel like my wife will probably need a bit longer before she's keen to jump back in the boat. Anyone have any input about the expansion? It feels like it might be a great way to make playing it though again more palatable?
1) Tides of Ruin adds a few extra map pages, so it's "more of the same". But since the base game is big enough for at least a couple playthroughs without overlap, you don't need it right away (in fact, you might never need it, depending on how much of this game you will ultimately end up playing). It does, however, add extra event cards and items, which are nice for variety.

2) Dungeons seems pretty skippable, imo. I asked in a bgg thread, and it doesn't seem to add much narrative, either.

Spiteski
Aug 27, 2013



Have just recently delved beyond a few board games that I really knew about and owned to properly selling my RPG books (Thanks COVID!) to dive properly into the board game hobby with a decent haul of games.
I did my own research (COVID taught me how!) by watching youtube channels that had people with big shelves of games behind them, so I know they are authorities on the subject and ended up with the following:
Azul
The Crew: Mission to Planet Nine
Undaunted: Normandy and it's two expansions
Spirit Island and it's two expansions
My City
Terraforming Mars
Betrayal Legacy
Pandemic Legacy S1
Dune Imperium
Sleeping Gods
Brass
Root

I have added these to the games I have owned for about a year and me and the family have really like - Wingspan, Everdell, Dead of Winter, Photosynthesis, and the Grizzled. EDIT: Oh yea I forgot Gloomhaven. I played that for a year straight. That barely counts though. EVERYONE did :v:

So far I've managed to get in a bunch of games of the Crew and Azul and we freakin love them. Spirit Island I have played twice now and holy crap it was a step up in complexity but once we got the swing of it (just the base game so far) we've really really enjoyed it.
It's way too late now, as I have already blown the book budget on that lot, but are any of those games stinkers or did I do ok?
I also score a copy of Tidal Blades kickstarter deluxe + expansion that someone was flogging for 40NZD and it's a behemoth but I have no idea about it. If it's crap though, it seemed like a super cheap deal that I could pass on to someone else at a profit.

gschmidl
Sep 3, 2011

watch with knife hands

!Klams posted:

I just finished the Sleeping Gods campaign. That game is great! Really compelling, really fun, just a beautiful experience. I wanna play it again and go see stuff I missed, but I feel like my wife will probably need a bit longer before she's keen to jump back in the boat. Anyone have any input about the expansion? It feels like it might be a great way to make playing it though again more palatable?

One full playthrough? Or multiple? A full session of 3 event decks goes on for much longer than I expected, not that that's bad per se, but with the constant lockdowns...

!Klams
Dec 25, 2005

Squid Squad

gschmidl posted:

One full playthrough? Or multiple? A full session of 3 event decks goes on for much longer than I expected, not that that's bad per se, but with the constant lockdowns...

I've only played it through once. I do wanna play it again though, there's so much I didn't see. We actually didn't even get 3 full event decks, and had exactly enough time to gather 8 of the totems, yeah, 54 turns (48 in our case) is actually a long old time!

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry

Aramoro posted:

On BGA I would recommend

Terra Mystica
A Feast For Odin
Russian Railroads
Railways of the World
Caylus
Yokohama
Beyond the Sun
Lost Ruins of Aranak
Race for the Galaxy

They all work fairly well asynch.

!
!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wow, and here I thought it was neat how they got Agricola up and running.

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry

the holy poopacy posted:

So I know I'm super behind the times on this but we just started playing AffO after Christmas. I've never really followed AffO chat that closely but I have the impression that a lot of people talk about exploration being super high priority, and I'm kind of wondering what we're missing because we're just not seeing that so far. The highest scores we've seen always seem to come from vomiting out green & blue tiles to develop the home board ASAP and leisurely grabbing later islands to fill with overflow income; gunning for early islands always feels really really strong but then seems to come up short in the end. Having to keep going back to the mountains to get resources feels really painful in comparison to the bonus resources on the home board and it sucks filling in all those -1s from scratch instead of getting to do it organically as you build income. Granted, we've only just been playing the two of us and I can see how with 3-4 players you wouldn't want to get locked out of islands altogether, but from what we're seeing that still seems more like an expensive insurance policy than an improved engine.

Overall we're still really impressed with the game so far. Everyone talks about how much better and more balanced the expansion is but so far the game feels way more robust than I'd been led to expect. From what we're seeing the game resists being boiled down into an optimal strategy, victory seems to come down to being efficient and tactical with puzzle pieces and action spaces (and, admittedly, some amount of occupation card luck.)

Iceland and to a lesser extent Greenland are pretty good early income. Iceland in particular is basically a replacement for your empty homeboard square. Of course, if they flip over they're big winners too, as long as you've already got some placement-ready tiles. Shetland and especially Faroe aren't quite as good, on either side, unless you've got some occupation support, but if the flipsides get a big pile of money on them they ain't terrible.

(The Norwegians also does a good job of making its A and B islands worthwhile, especially with that end of round space where you build a whaling boat and then go exploring.)

But there's lots of ways to win the game. Try one where you go hardcore immigration, leave an empty homeboard square, and upgrade all the food you never ate for homeboard -1s (or a longhouse for those long narrow pieces).

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"

The Bloodborne board game is weirdly great, I continue to really enjoy it. I kind of think there needs to be a rule about being able to take a free one-space move after killing an enemy or something though. I've been playing around with it and it doesn't seem to unbalance the game too badly - it does make it very slightly easier, but if you're playing solo you're basically getting screwed by having to run around everywhere yourself anyway*. Plus, it feels way more like the fluidity and aggression of the video game, and it's not like most of the areas represented are particularly big. I really like being able to chain fights and spend my turn interacting with the combat system and missions instead of staring at the board and counting spaces and cards and enemy activations before the next Blood Moon reset before every Move action.

* Everything else in the game seems to be tuned really intelligently towards player count, but it seems like the ability of more players to push the map in more directions at once and handle quest turn-ins in multiple places in the same round is just really hard to counter even with increased enemy activations and quest requirements.

the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe

Glazius posted:

But there's lots of ways to win the game.

That's basically what I'm seeing, yeah. We are seeing some better scores coming out of early Iceland/Greenland, but our all time highs are still coming from games with an early focus on the home boards. It still feels more efficient to wait a couple turns on exploration, which creates an enjoyable tension over who is going to bite the bullet and accept the opportunity cost just to lock down an island and deny it to their opponent, since you probably don't want to be stuck with the home board forever (even when we were newer and weaker we were generating too much stuff to fit on the home board alone.) I definitely see how larger games would be more cutthroat about this, though, especially since there'd also be much more competition over actions to generate tiles.

Overall the strategic balance feels very robust, outside of some variance on occupations (we're finding the occupation cards to be more useful and better balanced than what some of the discussion I've seen had led me to believe, but there's no denying that there's some real stinkers in the deck. I still need to track down the list of recommended removals, although judging by the size of the lists I've seen I suspect there's still some questionable ones they leave in the deck.)

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

Gloomhaven trip report: I picked it up on Steam during the Xmas sale, and from what I understand it's a very faithful adaptation so I figured I'd talk about it here instead of in Games.

I went in totally blind, playing the Campaign on Normal with the Brute and the Cragheart, and I've done the first mission with the thieves and their skeleton buddies about six times now and I think I'm close to beating it (my Brute just hit level two, which should help). I was surprised to discover there's no penalty for actually failing a mission and you can just redo it as many times as you like, as though you're expected to grind XP to make progress. I know it's not Xcom, but the game does have a strategic overworld component alongside the tactical mission parts which comprise the bulk of the game, so I guess I was expecting some kind of material cost for failure, especially when so much of the game appears to focus on resource management.

And speaking of resource management, I'm going to say the one thing I really don't like about the game so far, and I'd be willing to bet this is a common newbie complaint, is that your used cards get burned. I think the combat system is great; the cards and abilities are interesting, and the whole move or attack thing feels good and suitably tactical. The RPG elements and the theme are also handled really well, and I could easily see how the whole package created a compelling experience that took the gaming world by storm when it came out.

But after a few attempts at that first mission I began to really feel the impact of the burned cards system and how it stifles the whole tactical part of the game. It's like you're given access to this fun and exciting game but you're only allowed to enjoy it for a very short amount of time each session. And I think it warps the experience so much that at it's heart, the game isn't a tactical RPG at all, it's simply a puzzle game.

So at this point I'm still interested to see how the overworld map changes or develops (and whether there's much of a story attached) and to discover more about the world and its characters, but my enthusiasm for the actual combat parts has diminished a lot and I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it. Is the first scenario just particularly strict with regards to how much you need to accomplish in the turns you have? I love hard games, but leaning so heavily on resource restrictions to create difficulty just feels, I dunno, artificial?

So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this thread has seen my post a hundred times before, but I really didn't have any preconceived notions about what the game was going into it except that it was a tactical RPG and it was hard.

Azran
Sep 3, 2012

And what should one do to be remembered?
Burning cards is something you should ever do in an emergency or in the very last room. There are a few exceptions, for example cards that give you an ongoing benefit that you want to get online ASAP

That said, the campaign's first scenario is notoriously difficult for new players, that said. Guildmaster is a bit more forgiving when you're starting out.

The story is exceedingly mediocre and the main reason people love the game is the combat and progression aspect. In comparison to every other dungeon crawler in the market (and the vast majority of RPGs), Gloomhaven's combat mechanics are brilliant.

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
Yeah, I got the same issue. Game is fun for the first few rounds then you start running out of cards and freaking out.

I think the game also becomes better in co-op, having tried a couple of times in person. I need to find someone to do a coop campaign with online.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

Wait, there's no way to avoid burning cards, is there? I know you can choose to burn them early, but once you've discarded every card in your hand you must burn one to get all the others back, right?

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Azran posted:

Burning cards is something you should ever do in an emergency or in the very last room. There are a few exceptions, for example cards that give you an ongoing benefit that you want to get online ASAP
Also in short scenarios, though this requires a bit of experience to get a feel for how long a scenario should take. Going from 25 rounds of cards to 20 doesn't really matter if the scenario is going to take 15 in total.

Losing a card to negate damage is much worse for longevity than playing a loss card too.

Deceptive Thinker
Oct 5, 2005

I'll rip out your optics!

Kalko posted:

Gloomhaven
Gloomhaven thread where we talk about both digital and physical
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3840191&pagenumber=342&perpage=40
My group failed the first scenario on our first attempt and got through it by the skin of our teeth the second attempt - this was even after 2/4 of us had been playing guildmaster for a few weeks and doing pretty well with it
Flash forward a bit and we've pumped up the difficulty to +1 a few scenarios ago are still on an 8 scenario win streak - it definitely gets easier and there's definitely a learning curve

Viper915
Sep 18, 2005
Pokey Little Puppy

Has anyone played Raiders of Scythia? My local shop has a copy on the shelf, and the reviews seem positive. The solo mode especially seems very interesting, if it's also fun with a group, all the better. I have played none of the west kingdoms or north sea games.

armorer
Aug 6, 2012

I like metal.

Kalko posted:

Wait, there's no way to avoid burning cards, is there? I know you can choose to burn them early, but once you've discarded every card in your hand you must burn one to get all the others back, right?

Right, but I think folks here were talking about using card actions that inherently burn the card. Those should not be used until late or in emergency situations.

I haven't played on Steam, but my group played through at least 15 missions (before I moved away) and only had to re-run one. The first two missions are hard, but totally doable with out-of-the-box characters. You need to be really careful about getting hit. Don't end your turn by opening a door, don't rush up on enemies, use choke points well, etc.

the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe

armorer posted:

Right, but I think folks here were talking about using card actions that inherently burn the card. Those should not be used until late or in emergency situations.

This is debatable--burning a big attack preemptively to kill enemies faster can save you some damage and also cards played, so in the long run a well played burn card can increase your longevity.

Aggro
Apr 24, 2003

STRONG as an OX and TWICE as SMART
If you’re routinely burning cards early, you will definitely run out of cards and exhaust before the scenario ends. Everything in Gloomhaven is a resource — items, HP, cards, etc. Using them all to their full effect is the key to success. Knowing when to take a hit and when to bail is one of the skills that you have to develop. Like, Invisibility seems like a pretty mediocre ability until you realize that if you go invisible in a doorway, no melee monsters can get through and you can buy some time to rest/buff before going into the room. You also learn the monsters’ typical abilities and learn when you can safely hang back.

I’ve played a disgusting amount of Gloomhaven, which I know because Steam is an rear end in a top hat and has told me exactly how long I’ve spent on Guildmaster and the campaign and it’s a few…hundred hours. It’s a great game — my biggest complain is that the feeling from early in the game that you’re scraping by the skin of your teeth disappears as you level up and get better items. Later on, you have to crank the difficulty up to make up for the power creep.

Come hang with us in the Gloomhaven thread!

Admiralty Flag
Jun 7, 2007

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022

I played Castles of Burgundy for the first time last night. I liked it a lot, noted the recommendation on BGG that it's best at 2, and so am thinking about getting a copy to play with my wife.

Any recommendations on must-have expansions?

armorer
Aug 6, 2012

I like metal.

the holy poopacy posted:

This is debatable--burning a big attack preemptively to kill enemies faster can save you some damage and also cards played, so in the long run a well played burn card can increase your longevity.

Occasionally yes, but certainly not on the first few missions. Later once you have a handle on things you'll know when it makes sense to do this. OP is essentially XP grinding to beat mission 1 and talking about burning cards too fast.

rydiafan
Mar 17, 2009


The first Gloomhaven scenario is oddly enough one of the harder ones.

silvergoose
Mar 18, 2006

IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS




Admiralty Flag posted:

I played Castles of Burgundy for the first time last night. I liked it a lot, noted the recommendation on BGG that it's best at 2, and so am thinking about getting a copy to play with my wife.

Any recommendations on must-have expansions?

No need for any that I've seen. Base game is perfectly good.

Street Horrrsing
Mar 24, 2010

Godwalker of The Grateful Prisoner



Admiralty Flag posted:

I played Castles of Burgundy for the first time last night. I liked it a lot, noted the recommendation on BGG that it's best at 2, and so am thinking about getting a copy to play with my wife.

Any recommendations on must-have expansions?

At the moment, the big box version is probably both cheaper and easier to find than base version and contains more CoB than you will ever, ever need

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004


Ah, I should've known there was an actual GH thread here. Thanks.

armorer posted:

Occasionally yes, but certainly not on the first few missions. Later once you have a handle on things you'll know when it makes sense to do this. OP is essentially XP grinding to beat mission 1 and talking about burning cards too fast.

Yeah, I was doing that the first couple of times but once I realized you should only do it when cycling your hand I started making a lot more progress.

Llyranor
Jun 24, 2013

Admiralty Flag posted:

I played Castles of Burgundy for the first time last night. I liked it a lot, noted the recommendation on BGG that it's best at 2, and so am thinking about getting a copy to play with my wife.

Any recommendations on must-have expansions?

Base game only is my recommendation.

Kerro
Nov 3, 2002

Did you marry a man who married the sea? He looks right through you to the distant grey - calling, calling..

Rockman Reserve posted:

The Bloodborne board game is weirdly great, I continue to really enjoy it. I kind of think there needs to be a rule about being able to take a free one-space move after killing an enemy or something though. I've been playing around with it and it doesn't seem to unbalance the game too badly - it does make it very slightly easier, but if you're playing solo you're basically getting screwed by having to run around everywhere yourself anyway*. Plus, it feels way more like the fluidity and aggression of the video game, and it's not like most of the areas represented are particularly big. I really like being able to chain fights and spend my turn interacting with the combat system and missions instead of staring at the board and counting spaces and cards and enemy activations before the next Blood Moon reset before every Move action.

* Everything else in the game seems to be tuned really intelligently towards player count, but it seems like the ability of more players to push the map in more directions at once and handle quest turn-ins in multiple places in the same round is just really hard to counter even with increased enemy activations and quest requirements.

Yeah it kinda amazes me that this seems to have flown under the radar as much as it has. The card combat is up there with Gloomhaven imo for the degree of interesting decision making and often it feels a lot more tightly balanced. It doesn't have the variety of progression or unlocks as GH of course, but has the advantage of allowing you to develop your character much faster and not having to commit hundreds of hours to see the majority of game content.

It's a little disappointing that the scenarios are not more varied in design, but the core gameplay is so satisfying that I feel it gets away with it.

Admiralty Flag
Jun 7, 2007

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022

Thanks all for the recs about CoB!

CODChimera
Jan 29, 2009

I finally played Root and it was great, only 2 player but it's been hard to get 4 people lately. Honestly can't wait to experience it with a full group though

One of the things I like is the small box size and easy setup, the first games I brought were big campaign games(Tainted Grail, Etherfields) with 5 or 6 huge boxes and it's just such an effort and time investment. We played through all of the main Tainted Grail campaign which took forever and I still have 3 other campaigns to play through??? I should probably just sell it all

RabidWeasel
Aug 4, 2007

Cultures thrive on their myths and legends...and snuggles!
Re CoB: I don't have any of the expansions but given that meadows always feel like a high risk and usually only moderate payout unless you get extremely lucky option I'd say the expansion with the goats might be a good addition

Also I'm not sure if any of the new player boards might be a good addition since the core set has a few hot garbage ones and a couple of clearly optimal ones leaving a fairly small sweet spot for having a balanced game unless you always do a mirror match

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



CODChimera posted:

I finally played Root and it was great, only 2 player but it's been hard to get 4 people lately. Honestly can't wait to experience it with a full group though

One of the things I like is the small box size and easy setup, the first games I brought were big campaign games(Tainted Grail, Etherfields) with 5 or 6 huge boxes and it's just such an effort and time investment. We played through all of the main Tainted Grail campaign which took forever and I still have 3 other campaigns to play through??? I should probably just sell it all

The Root app is pretty drat good, and might be easier to get a couple folks for asynchronous play.

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.

Dr. Lunchables posted:

The Root app is pretty drat good, and might be easier to get a couple folks for asynchronous play.

I remain undefeated at asynchronous Root play. :smug:

FulsomFrank
Sep 11, 2005

Hard on for love
Has anyone played Cape May that can weigh in with their thoughts on it? I love the theme and idea but am scared that it is another MWE...

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gschmidl
Sep 3, 2011

watch with knife hands

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