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Magnetic North posted:On a completely unrelated note: Does anyone know a short and sweet anti-ableism slogan I could add to the OP, in a similar vein to Black Lives Matter and Trans Rights are Human Rights? Personally, I am woefully underinformed on ableism (and should really do something about that), so I am unaware of any off the top of my head. I've seen variations on "Gaming Is For Everybody" going around, which seems pretty good, unless you want to get more specific with it.
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Apr 30, 2022 18:38
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Saw Ark Nova in my FLGS earlier this week for 75, didn’t grab it because I’m an idiot. Just paid a $30 premium because I’m impatient and I don’t want to wait for a second printing. No, I’m not afraid of missing out, why do you ask?
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Apr 30, 2022 19:48
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El Fideo posted:I've seen variations on "Gaming Is For Everybody" going around, which seems pretty good, unless you want to get more specific with it. That's probably a good way to put it. I've been a fan of reminding people that board games are for everyone ever since this seeing this legendary designer's TED Talk.
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Apr 30, 2022 20:36
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Infinitum posted:Paint the Roses + Good Cop Bad Cop should also be high on your pull lists. My copy of Paint the Roses just arrived and I’m going to try to get it to the table tonight. So excited for it.
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Apr 30, 2022 21:52
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For those enjoying Ark Nova, how did the enormous amount of cards and the randomness associated with it affect the game? Even before the NPI review that lambasted it, I had concerns with that after seeing SUSD talk about the game. Like, I'm not a terribly strategic person that would zero in on a strategy and hope to get the cards for it, but I could see myself getting really frustrated with feeling like I'm playing against the deck and losing.
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Apr 30, 2022 22:51
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Morpheus posted:For those enjoying Ark Nova, how did the enormous amount of cards and the randomness associated with it affect the game? Even before the NPI review that lambasted it, I had concerns with that after seeing SUSD talk about the game. All I can say is that the same people who aren't me keep winning our games. So there has to be more to it than card randomness, right?
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Apr 30, 2022 22:56
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In my experience with Ark Nova, don’t commit to a strategy early and let what you draw and see in the market dictate the flow of your game. Like if I have 3 birds early, the bird score card is out, and I don’t see anyone else playing them I’ll try to push for 5 birds. That sort of thing.
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Apr 30, 2022 23:10
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The criticisms seem similar to terraforming mars - if I didn’t like that but really like Civ: a new Dawn, tableau builders like Race for the Galaxy and through the Ages, and the theme - will I like Ark Nova? Who am I kidding I just succumbed to FOMO and ordered it.
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Apr 30, 2022 23:35
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Mayveena posted:All I can say is that the same people who aren't me keep winning our games. So there has to be more to it than card randomness, right? Fair enough. Definitely looks like the kind of game I'd like, so whenever I get to play it I'm going to avoid bringing it up. (Unless I lose in which case fuckin' random card bullshit munchkin would've won if it wasn't random 0/10 game guys anyway let's play Betrayal)
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Apr 30, 2022 23:40
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Paint the Roses is fantastic. It seems so simple but led to the biggest shouting match we’ve ever had over a game where everyone was wrong and right at the same time. And then we all lost our heads. 10/10
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May 1, 2022 00:08
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Blamestorm posted:The criticisms seem similar to terraforming mars - if I didn’t like that but really like Civ: a new Dawn, tableau builders like Race for the Galaxy and through the Ages, and the theme - will I like Ark Nova? You should be good, imo it felt very similar to something like RFtG where the cards are fairly random but the strategy revolves around using what you've got most effectively rather than hoping for some perfect combo.
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May 1, 2022 04:25
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"We need more Investigators for Arkham Horror" *ripping a fat fuckin rail of Colombia's finest* "Uhhh what about Carmen Sandiago and... Little Red Riding Hood?" https://twitter.com/FFGames/status/1520448008982532097
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May 1, 2022 10:53
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Infinitum posted:"We need more Investigators for Arkham Horror" They've revealed a bunch of these now, like 7 or so, so most people assume they're NPCs rather than Investigators. Which is a shame, Carmen Sandiego would've been an inspired choice lol
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May 1, 2022 10:57
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The other day I talked at length on the discord about Argentina's budding board game dev scene. Somehow some people found my rambling interesting and I decided I'd type this down in the thread for posterity. So without further ado: Argentinian Board Games Until very, very recently, the board games you could find in Argentina could be mostly split into two categories: Monopoly and rebrandings/slight redesigns of popular games from abroad. The two most famous examples are Estanciero (Ranch Owner), a 1937 Monopoly clone focused on ranchs and farming; and TEG (Tactical and Strategical War Plan), a 1978 Risk clone which spawned a bunch of sequels that either had slight rules additions and changes (like nuclear weapons and capital cities) or a straight up different theme (like Business TEG). Another fan favorite from that time was Combate en el Frente (Front Combat), a Stratego clone  Estanciero   TEG: La Revancha, the second edition of TEG (not to be confused with TEG 2, the third edition.   Combate en el Frente cover 'art' and components During the early years, the biggest board game publisher here was YETEM, which made a bunch of games with geopolitical themes, like Petrodolar and Espionaje. My dad owns most of their catalogue but I never played them. I do, however, know that Espionaje was basically a Clue redesign, which would eventually (like, 40 years later) get remade into a filler card game with no board.    Petrodolar, regular Espionaje and Espionaje The Card Game Many of these games came out during a time in Argentinian politics which was very much under the shadow of the dictatorship - even games made after 1982, after the military junta fell, had a very distinctive cold war or military streak to them. Just look at the cover art for TEG 2, featuring Argentinian tankers on a TAM, an Argentinian/German design that, at that point, was only 5 years old.  The one exception would be Estanciero, but there were 6 coups during the 20th century in Argentina: the most infamous one was the 1976-1982 one, but you've also got the 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962 and 1966 ones. The vast majority of them were carried out by the military. Given the context, redesigning Monopoly to focus on the idealized, romantic simplicity of the stern, hard-working farm owner is not surprising at all.  These are still pretty popular to this day, but they're pretty much antiques for the board game community. It's not until the late oughties that we start seeing actual designer board games being published. Due to a free-falling economy during the almost entirety of the 2000s, coupled with strict customs restrictions, you simply didn't get anything more than the occasional Catan or Carcassonne copy and they'd be pretty expensive, around $80 US dollars IIRC. During this time, you had a few attempts at artisanal imitations of famous board games, which would go for a much more reasonable price, but the components were of somewhat lower quality (not like that's an issue with Catan lmao).   Artisanal Catan and Carcassonne. Notice the flat meeples and thin tiles with no backing. As an aside, PMP, the company that made that artisanal Catan copy, makes an Argentinian board for Catan. The southernmost area of the board seems ill-advised but it features Che Guevara so who am I to judge.  Up to this point, if you went to any ol' regular supermarket, the shelves of the board game and toys section would unvariably have the following: Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Estanciero, TEG. In 2009, Zug gets published. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first Argentinian designer board game to be commercially available. It was the first and only design by Sebastian Caro, a mechanical engineer who also self-published it through his company, the now-defunct Spielen, which only ever published Zug. Zug is a tile-placing game about the Argentinian sugar industry, where players must install sugar processing factories and connect them by railroad to cities for distribution Two things immediately caught my attention: the very clearly Euro-inspired (and German) theme and the art. It's pretty neat for its time!  That's about it for this design. The game was heavily inspired by Carcassonne but with no midgame scoring, much more reliance on luck (since you needed the railroads to point a certain way) and the component quality was very poor. Still, it was ambitious for its time and a very brave first attempt at Argentinian Euros. During the early 2010s, we start seeing many more indigenous designs, but there's still a few copycats. This is the point where pretty much every design gets its own BGG page which makes tracking stuff much easier for me. We've got Imperios Milenarios (2012), a Civ-like which I've never played but the dev was passionate enough to do multiple design blogs about it; Nuevo Mundo, a 2014 territory control & set collection title with a RPS resolution system, which sounds bad in practice until you realize they made a custom component for it. Behold, the resolution stick:  It's actually called a 'criptex', apparently. Boo. A few more designs, which I've actually played! Ave Cesar (2013) was a very shoddy Citadels-like, the rulebook was a mess and the art was pretty generic to bad. It made me think of Dominion honestly. I actually had to email the devs to know what to do when the deck ran out.  LED (2013) is pretty great for its time (unless you're colorblind  ). It's a tile-laying abstract where the objective is to score as many points as possible by matching LED lights according to their colors. Every time you make a connection, you score points for both you and the color - there's a track for both players and colors. At the end of the game, your final score is both your own plus the color's score, which was secretly assigned to you at the beginning of the match. So everyone wants to go for their own colors, but discretely - if someone realizes which one is yours, then everyone will avoid making connections of that color during their turn. It was a favorite of my group back when I bought it. The game does as much as possible to avoid issues with luck of the draw: it gives you a hand of tiles, which is hidden away behind a screen that acts as a (bad) reference sheet and at any point during the match you can mulligan your tiles. It also makes you draw tiles at the end of your turn, rather than at the beginning. I'd say it's the earliest good Argentinian board game. I still have it in my collection.   LED Lastly, let's go with one that even Rahdo once posted about on BGG - Días de Radio (2014). Días de Radio is a real-time cooperative story-telling game, where the role of storyteller rotates among the players, but it's all one shared story - players can play cards that force the storyteller to add or modify plot points or themes, which is great if your group is creative and good at improv storytelling. Many Argentinian board game fans consider it to be the best Argentinian due to its uniqueness. It wasn't for me though, so I sold it a few years ago but It had little art, but what little there was was pretty great. One noteworthy aspect of the rulebook was that it was one of the, if not the, first to alternate between male and female pronouns, even mid-sentence (not great but I appreciate the effort). It got eventually re-published in Spain, this time with different art.  From here on out, the Argentinian indie board game scene starts booming and we get more and more new designs with every passing year. During the last neo-conservative presidency (2015-2019), Spanish publisher Devir sets up shop in Argentina and that allows the average person to more readily purchase board game classics like TtR, Catan, Carcassonne, Love Letter, etc. I'll cover the most interesting designs in a follow up post because this one's already long enough as it is. Thanks for reading. Azran fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 1, 2022 |
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May 1, 2022 12:56
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Azran posted:The other day I talked at length on the discord about Argentina's budding board game dev scene. …Thanks for reading.
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May 1, 2022 14:01
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Morpheus posted:For those enjoying Ark Nova, how did the enormous amount of cards and the randomness associated with it affect the game? Even before the NPI review that lambasted it, I had concerns with that after seeing SUSD talk about the game. During the initial stage of the game there were multiple routes I could have aimed my Zoo towards, based off end-game goals and cards in my hand, but I made conscience decisions about what cards I drew from the main board and from the draw pile. Strategy is a big factor in it, and I felt like you had to be flexible enough to be able to change tack multiple times when things weren't going the way you wanted. I saw a bit of the NPI review where he complains that the number of cards actively harms the game, I see it as an endlessly exciting possibility that I'll never be able to build the same engine twice. (Also I just had 6 different piles of cards at the edge of the board rather than one stack as all my cards are sleeved now. Worked great) I dislike a game like Viticulture, because some cards definitely feel like they have just random bullshit going on, Ark Nova is about careful card selection to build a machine that is juuuust 'Good Enough' to get you a win - and that engine gets off the ground a lot earlier in the mid-game. There's a lot of engine builders that end the game just as you're kicking into high gear, but here I was able to get a couple of smaller 'engines' running that helped me achieve different goals. It feels... less 'random' and more 'game state'. It's agonising in the best way seeing a card slide off the board that you had been working towards when a break/round reset occurs and you only needed one more round. The 'luck factor' complaint I saw from SUSD isn't really valid I feel, as if you're building an engine a certain way and luck out on the one card you need to win.. then.. good. It'll also never happen again with how many cards and zoo combinations there are, and now that's a great story about how they won the game. Hell I won the game last night by lucking out and being able to play one more round than I thought I would, and playing an animal card that netted me a bunch of points on the different tracks - but only because I'd been building my zoo in that direction the entire game. Normally I'm 1:1 with SUSD on a lot of things, but that complaint they got wrong. Honestly I had an absolute blast with it, and I can see why it's already being talked about as GOTY contender. I would love to play it again right now. Valid complaints would be that some card scoring is confusing, even with a glossary, and the money is trash (A set of Iron Clays worked great as a replacement) Hilariously there were multiple times a card would ask you to 'Pick up the discard pile and shuffle' and there was a massive pile of 100ish cards. Thankfully one of my players is heavily into MTG and that's how I learnt about Mash Shuffling  Game good. Game great. And now I don't have to even humour the notion of picking up Terraforming Mars, as I've got something better Azran posted:Zug. Zug Good read.
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May 1, 2022 14:34
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Zug um Zug is in my top 3 favorite board game names so I decided to leave that sentence as is Admiralty Flag posted:Thanks for posting. Always love to hear how games have developed in other countries besides the US & Germany, and the aspect of the military coups affecting the game market was interesting Yeah next post I'm going to go a bit into how the arrival of Devir and the current economic crisis has shaped the current board game market. I think it's pretty peculiar that even nowadays you just don't find military-themed games unless they're either set during the Independence Wars or something with a bit more mass appeal like the Crusades or WWII. And even then, it's just a handful. Anyways, teaser for next post: 
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May 1, 2022 14:46
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One of the other things I *really* like about Ark Nova is your hand size is small and is kept small with the break phases. Typically we don't see about half the deck in any given game. Big difference in comparison to TfM. I also like that it's almost always worth it to play an animal over nothing if you have one since the appeal alone is a big incentive.
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May 1, 2022 14:49
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Yeah just playing an animal to up your income via the appeal track is great with your initial hand size limit of 3 cards, which can be upgraded to 5 on round resets, which lead to a few "gently caress it that's in my zoo now" moments.
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May 1, 2022 14:52
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Do you think Ark Nova would be a good 2P game?
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May 1, 2022 15:44
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Eraflure posted:Do you think Ark Nova would be a good 2P game? It's 'best' as a 2 player game on BGG but I think that's because people haven't played it enough at 4 player to really appreciate the 4 player game. That said, it's totally fine as a 2p and you won't have a feeling that you're missing something by not having enough players.
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May 1, 2022 15:47
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Infinitum posted:
I'm still mad about their take on Mega Civ/Western Empires. I've had to talk like a dozen people off the ledge thanks to Quinn's goddamn video. Thanks for the write-up on Ark Nova. It's sounding like the hot game right now and the fact that it sounds so good or at least mostly played at 2 but can scale up easily makes me very happy. I got to play Canvas and 18MEX yesterday. Canvas was gorgeous and simple and fun and the type of game that could be a nice little snack before the main course. Shockingly reasonable price point too. 18MEX went very well and the guy we taught it to caught on faster than anyone else I've ever seen but I have to say, I think I nailed the description/rules if I do say so myself.
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May 1, 2022 16:03
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I've played a decent amount of AN at all player counts. It doesn't in my experience meaningfully change as you expand the player count, save for you having more players taking a card from the market/association action before you are able or breaking sooner than you would like.
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May 1, 2022 16:04
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SettingSun posted:I've played a decent amount of AN at all player counts. It doesn't in my experience meaningfully change as you expand the player count, save for you having more players taking a card from the market/association action before you are able or breaking sooner than you would like. I think the breaking is where the real interaction comes in a four player game. Also you have a lot more conservation objectives as well.
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May 1, 2022 16:36
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HAHA the biggest criticism of the new video game Terraformers is that's it's a board game in disguise. You know I'm all over it! 
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May 1, 2022 16:54
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Mayveena posted:HAHA the biggest criticism of the new video game Terraformers is that's it's a board game in disguise. You know I'm all over it! I read that as "Transformers" and immediately heard "WICK-wack-WICK-wock-WUCK-wick" in my head. And if you didn't, you're dead to me.
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May 1, 2022 18:37
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Jedit posted:"WICK-wack-WICK-wock-WUCK-wick" in my head. 
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May 1, 2022 19:42
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there's no good way to write out the sounds you think of when you see a Transformer do its thing
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May 1, 2022 19:48
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Given enough time I will one day homebrew rules for a skirmish game using transformers botbots on a mall madness board
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May 1, 2022 20:32
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Just bought ArkNova on a whim purely because it is so divisive.
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May 2, 2022 00:14
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I'm necro-ing a post from the previous thread:Memnaelar posted:In good game came out news, I received the unfortunately named "Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor" kickstarter this week and gave it a try and it's... promising? I came across this game and I feel slightly intrigued, seeing as how it is trying a take on a "coop 4x" which interests me. I haven't seen anyone else in here talk about it much as it was an expensive, overproduced kickstarter game from a few years ago. Wondering if you played any more of it and have some updated thoughts?
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May 2, 2022 04:27
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my new homebrewed warhammer quest 1995 campaign is going pretty well. i've generated an overland map using the WHFP 2e book "rengade crowns" which let's you populate a border princes zone with various ruins/dungeons/terrain/etc and i'm using it along with littlemonk's supplements and the traveling hazard tables. it's kind of working out like a version of the shadows of brimstone hexcrawl and we're able generate settlements and dungeons as we explore the map. i'm using littlemonk's expanded treasure tables and adventure book but i think i might go ahead and have the cards printed so i don't have to flip through the book so much. tonight the party was hired to verify the identity of a corpse in a tomb to help settle an inheritance dispute between two imperial lords in the settlement we were staying in. i love warhammer quest and it's been a lot of fun playing with all the fan made content that adds narrative depth to the between dungeon crawls parts of the game. sometimes i like skipping the dungeon tiles and just building the sections out of my dwarven forge stuff as i draw the room cards.      i'm playing an imperial mercenary class that's basically a reskinned brettonian questing knight. i made the pamphlets and the character sheet for it. warhammer quest 1995 is probably the greatest board game of all time.
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May 2, 2022 04:45
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Radioactive Toy posted:I'm necro-ing a post from the previous thread: I've played another couple of games and I think I've got a pretty good grip on it. It's a co-op 4x with an interesting problem where you've got a central empire in the middle of the map expanding out towards you and the forces of chaos converging in at you and you have to manipulate player scores by beating up on both so that all players are above the scores of both Chaos and Empire at game end -- if either Chaos or Empire scores more than any player, then everyone loses. To make things even more interesting, Chaos and Empire do NOT get along and will clash and potentially score points off one another if you don't intercept them -- which, in some instances, you don't WANT to do as you may be okay with a low-scoring Chaos picking off a dominant Empire legion or two to save you the troops and effort of trimming that particular branch of their tree. I like it - great pulpy art style, some smart mechanics, and a fun little co-op. NOW, for the negatives, it's VERY dice-swingy and that can be a deal-breaker for some folks. There were a couple of crucial rolls where my partner and I re-rolled illegally because a bad roll would have absolutely decimated our game. And that sucks. The new expansion they're funding on Gamefound seems to have SOME additional dice mitigation in the form of more re-rolls but that's definitely a problem with the base game. Also, the base game factions are pretty bland in their asymmetry. Either the already-existing expansion or the one that's being funded mix up the game in FAR more interesting ways than the base. It's a like, not love game for me. There are definitely other games I'd rather MUCH rather play solo (there is no "true" solo - you have to at least two-hand it) but I definitely prefer it to, say, any Pandemic variant for co-op play.
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May 2, 2022 05:15
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1000 card sleeves have arrived. Gonna sleeve TI  djfooboo posted:Just bought ArkNova on a whim purely because it is so divisive. Goons hate Terraforming Mars. Goons love Ark Nova. Allow 5 years for these statements to invert.
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May 2, 2022 07:58
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AN isn’t very divisive. The spectrum is mostly “it’s ok” to “it’s really good”. TfM is much wider from “garbage” to “top 3 game of all time worthy”. At the very least, it justifies its price tag instead of being made of Office Depot scraps and they didn’t pull their art from CC Wikipedia photos.
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May 2, 2022 08:13
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Infinitum posted:Goons hate Terraforming Mars. A finger on the monkey's paw curls and in 5 years we see the releases of "Razing Mars" and "Exodus Luna."
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May 2, 2022 08:21
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:strip_icc()/pic6643041.jpg)
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May 2, 2022 10:15
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If I have Ark Nova and Ares Expedition, and enjoy both, is there any reason to subject myself to Terraforming Mars standard game?
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May 2, 2022 11:09
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Spiteski posted:is there any reason to subject myself to Terraforming Mars standard game? Fixed your question for you. And the answer is still no.
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May 2, 2022 11:46
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Hm I remember Ark Nova looking different but alright
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May 2, 2022 13:24
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