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Branch and Claw was, as far as I can remember, removed from the base game even though they were technically done at the same time in terms of development. It's relatively minor for SI/Branch and Claw, but for Eminent Domain the issue is much more egregious, where the base game is boring and uninteresting and the game only becomes complete when you add the expansion. I don't agree with how you boil down the argument though, because there are games which have expansions that build on a strong base game, and it's clear that the experiences intended for the base game versus the base game with expansion are meant to be wildly different. So the difference for me isn't that I don't want expansions to come out altogether, but how feature complete the base game feels with or without the expansion. As an example, some of the most stellar expansions for games I have ever played and enjoyed are the ones for Dungeon Lords and Dungeon Petz. Those expansions add new modular systems to the base game, but still leave reasons to play the base game over the expanded game. I love playing Dungeon Petz with Dark Alleys, but it's not for everyone and if I have new people trying to play the game, playing Dark Alleys would suck for them. Since it's relatively easy to remove or add the expansion materials without them affecting the base game at all, the expansions basically act as completely disparate games instead of adding new things to the base game or trying to balance patch issues with the game. I think Spirit Island has only a minimal issues with this repacking problem: there's really not that much reason to play the base game of SI over adding the B&C changes (or the Jagged Earth replacement rules if you really hate the event deck). On the other hand, SI expansions are more about adding variability to the game: more spirits, more powers, more adverseries, so the base game without Jagged Earth isn't that bad an experience, apart from lack of diversity after a while. I think probably the worst expansion system I've seen was the one for the Battlestar Galactica game: the base game was entirely playabable, but a little bit of unbalanced at times. The expansions for the game seemed like a scattergun approach to balancing the game as well as adding new features, and it led to a weird situation where to get a playable game again you had to pick and choose specific systems from specific expansions: it felt (and was) a mess.
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Aug 15, 2022 12:13
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Major Isoor posted:Has anyone played with the Dune 2019 expansions, btw? I'm thinking about getting the Ix+Tleilaxu expack because I liked them in the book, but I'm wondering if CHOAM+Richese synergise better with the base factions. (Or a mix of both expacks and the base game is best, even) YEP. Lots! I would say that the Tleilaxu and Richese are both great, and CHOAM and Ix less great (but still really fun), so having both expansions is good so you have access to both the better ones. All the stuff in the Richese / Choam expansion is cool and good and we use it all in our games, the new scoring mechanic and the treachery cards from Ix / Tlielaxu, we've taken to leaving out. But! I likewise was much more excited about the Ix / Tleilaxu factions for much the same reason. Its a bit funky with both in terms of who they should replace in the base game. Both Ix and Richese mess with the auction phase, so either of them with Atreides can feel a bit much, I don't think you'd want the three of them in a game. Similarly, the Tleilaxu generate a huge amount of money, and with the size of the economy being such an important factor, should probably replace Emperor. CHOAM oddly never actually seem to be that wealthy in our games, but it seems like they should be similar. Honestly, I would say don't get either until you've had a Bene Gesserit win from prediction. I use that as a somewhat arbitrary number of games, but it kind of speaks to how, the base game is so good, and the balance (or lack of) is such an interesting puzzle that plays so well when everyone is familiar with it. It's good to have a few of those games in before you expand. With the new factions, it's all a little more chaotic, which is really fun too, but... You know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:52
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I think it's a misnomer that Spirit Island + Branch & Claw was a complete vision that was split up. There was always a wider pool of material that had to get shoehorned into one big box and one small box and some left out, and it suffered for it. There were token types planned and printed on the original deluxe playmat that did not make the cut for Branch & Claw, so it's not really a 100% feature complete packaging of prerelease Spirit Island. I would also argue that the B&C mechanics in general don't really work properly when they're sequestered away the way they were in the B&C split. So base game + Branch & Claw was always more like a 75% complete game, and base game by itself played better as a result IMO.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:57
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Tekopo posted:Branch and Claw was, as far as I can remember, removed from the base game even though they were technically done at the same time in terms of development. It's relatively minor for SI/Branch and Claw, but for Eminent Domain the issue is much more egregious, where the base game is boring and uninteresting and the game only becomes complete when you add the expansion. Spirit Island probably works well here because internally it's so modular and has so many optional components. On one hand, it doesn't do much damage to the game to remove one function from the base game box because there are scenarios, settlers etc that we're already adding and removing, and most people slowly add these things as they're learning to play. Some of the Jagged Earth stuff might not get touched in the first 10 plays anyway. On the other, the base game without these things has so much replayability already that it doesn't feel like you're missing anything. I know that Merchants and Marauders isn't a thread favourite, but its expansion was one of the most interesting and best executed I've seen from the design perspective. It has been a long time since I've played it so i don't remember all of the details, but it didn't just add a new board or a bunch of maguffins that you need to contend with. Instead, it nudged every dimension of the game (a couple new ships, a weather mechanic, new things to visit on the map, new ship management functions) bit with the sum effect of adding a new dimension to the game that didn't feel intrusive. It, too, is a modular expansion where any of the expansion content can be added or not. All of it is on-flavour for the base game, none of it feels intrusive, and none of it interrupts the core game flow. I'd say that if you like the base M&M game you should get that expansion for sure, and if you're familiar with the base game and find design interesting, it would be worth playing once.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:19
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I've played M&M and it was fine at the time. I think when it was released there were some issue with the base game in terms of how balanced the various paths to victory were, but it always felt more like an experience generator (and I don't mean that in a disparaging sense) than a competitive board game.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:38
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Ok that note I was wondering what good examples of sandbox/open world board games there are? Or does that kind of game not lend itself to the format? m&M seems to be brought up as one of, if not the, best.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:41
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Tekopo posted:I've played M&M and it was fine at the time. I think when it was released there were some issue with the base game in terms of how balanced the various paths to victory were, but it always felt more like an experience generator (and I don't mean that in a disparaging sense) than a competitive board game. Having played it quite a bit, it certainly feels like an experience generator flavour-wise, but it's not like Talisman or Betrayal or whatever. M&M is definitely a game where the better players will win most of the time. It does a good job of threading that needle. Most of the meaningful decisions follow from reading the board state and choosing pathways. You can still get smoked by a card, but imo that seems fine given the setting and theme - you can't predict a hurricane coming anyway, right - and so dealing with the cards there is a lot like staring at the turn and the river in poker - it can only set you back to the extent that you put yourself in a position to be set back. For my own tastes it's like a top-tier in a bad class kind of thing - if I'm asked what I want to play, I'll never choose it, but I'll choose it well above a lot of other "heavily thematic" and "ok now you turn over a card" games out there. And just to loop around to my initial point, M&M is merely an OK game, but the expansion is a great expansion box for an OK game.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:50
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I feel like Dominion is one of those games that people burned out on precisely because it's so good but you start thinking, man I need more and then you go off chasing crazier and more exotic highs before ending up shivering in an alleyway in Marrakesh with a needle full of Clank! stuck in your arm. Dominion is so loving good that everyone who has tried to make it better has failed utterly. The issue is that Dominion is so loving dry that it basically begging people to find something more thematically interesting but inevitably weaker mechanically. Valley of the Kings is really good though (kills me that my friend who has played a bajillion games of that piece of poo poo DC Deckbuilder with his wife bought the overproduced AEG reprint and is selling it because they'd rather play DC). And Super Motherload doesn't get nearly enough credit for being a fantastic version of a deckbuilder with a board state.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:53
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The deckbuilding in Paperback isn't great in its own right but it does provide a good basis for creating words. I think Hardback makes both aspects a bit too easy though.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:00
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Tekopo posted:Branch and Claw was, as far as I can remember, removed from the base game even though they were technically done at the same time in terms of development. It's relatively minor for SI/Branch and Claw, but for Eminent Domain the issue is much more egregious, where the base game is boring and uninteresting and the game only becomes complete when you add the expansion. Wasn't Dominion also like that? I vaguely recall that in prerelease playtests they had hundreds of cards and just choose the simplest ones to make the Base game.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:07
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Mode 7 posted:It's ruined pretty much every other deckbuilder for me because ten minutes in to trying them I inevitably think "I would rather be playing Dominion" Ive had exactly one experience with another deckbuilder, that shadowrun one with all of the stickers. Bought the game, sleeved all the cards, got excited as gently caress and then on the first mission on the first turn someone got shot and we had to abandon the mission and retreat. Three more missions without the fun gameplay of dominion but rather us just dying, and having to do the "run the gently caress away" mission one of my group's players said, "I, uh, I really hate this game." and that was that. I couldn't even give the game away, I just unsleeved it and donated it to a local thrift shop... Never tried another one since that was, uh, not cheap when I got it.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:10
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The worst deckbuilder I ever played was the aforementioned DC Deckbuilding game. It built on all the bad design choices that Ascension contributed to the genre but made them even worse. I think the worst design decisions that it made was that pretty much every card gives you points and that the cards with the most powerful effects give the most points. So basically if your turn is crappy due to your draw you either have to make your deck worse in order to keep getting points or just not get points, which means that you are behind the curve. Meanwhile sometimes gets a lucky draw that allows them to pick up one of the big villains (there is a stack of big villains that you can defeat, defeating all of them ends the game), and along with a ton of points you also get a really powerful ability, thus accelerating your deck and making it more likely to keep winning. I'm not sure if DC Deckbuilder had a split economy but since it took inspiration from Ascension, it probably did. Like if I had to point to a deckbuilder that got every single lesson wrong, and just didn't understand how deckbuilding is meant to work mechanically, DC Deckbuilder would be it.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:16
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Tekopo posted:The worst deckbuilder I ever played was the aforementioned DC Deckbuilding game. It built on all the bad design choices that Ascension contributed to the genre but made them even worse. I think the worst design decisions that it made was that pretty much every card gives you points and that the cards with the most powerful effects give the most points. So basically if your turn is crappy due to your draw you either have to make your deck worse in order to keep getting points or just not get points, which means that you are behind the curve. Meanwhile sometimes gets a lucky draw that allows them to pick up one of the big villains (there is a stack of big villains that you can defeat, defeating all of them ends the game), and along with a ton of points you also get a really powerful ability, thus accelerating your deck and making it more likely to keep winning. I'm not sure if DC Deckbuilder had a split economy but since it took inspiration from Ascension, it probably did. You'll be delighted to know Matt Hyra designed an even worse deck builder game in the form of the Transformers Deck builder. So it has all the problems of DC but the Market on isn't a market its a grid of face down cards that your transformers move around, you then spend resources to turn the cards over and see if you can afford them or if its a decepticon that attacks you. Turn a card over and you can't afford or or its simply garbage for you? You wasted your turn, bad luck. It has split economy, unbalanced cards, random card availability, the full package. Oh and its pretty complex as well. It's the game which finally convinced me that BGG reviewers are completely deranged. Aramoro fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 15:27
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PerniciousKnid posted:Wasn't Dominion also like that? I vaguely recall that in prerelease playtests they had hundreds of cards and just choose the simplest ones to make the Base game. In some ways, yeah. When Dominion was just a game that DXV had prototyped and it took over his weekly Magic night he made a ton of cards. But in development nobody even knew if a game that was "just 500 cards" would even sell at the price you'd need to charge for 500 cards, so there had to be cuts. In some respects everything through Guilds existed in some form before the game was published, but that maybe sells short the amount of development that still went in to each expansion. Still, there's a reason Dominion expansions used to be a semi-annual thing and now they're a maybe-once-a-year thing.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:31
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Tekopo posted:The worst deckbuilder I ever played was the aforementioned DC Deckbuilding game. It built on all the bad design choices that Ascension contributed to the genre but made them even worse. I think the worst design decisions that it made was that pretty much every card gives you points and that the cards with the most powerful effects give the most points. So basically if your turn is crappy due to your draw you either have to make your deck worse in order to keep getting points or just not get points, which means that you are behind the curve. Meanwhile sometimes gets a lucky draw that allows them to pick up one of the big villains (there is a stack of big villains that you can defeat, defeating all of them ends the game), and along with a ton of points you also get a really powerful ability, thus accelerating your deck and making it more likely to keep winning. I'm not sure if DC Deckbuilder had a split economy but since it took inspiration from Ascension, it probably did. Nope. Single economy, and the "Super-villains" that are worth the most points and buy the best cards are all 1 shared pile of increasing cost/power, so it's massively snowbally.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:32
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Aramoro posted:You'll be delighted to know Matt Hyra designed an even worse deck builder game in the form of the Transformers Deck builder.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:49
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I went to a boardgame meet-up in 2015 or so and was invited to play a game that ended up being the DC Deckbuilding game with all of the expansions. For some reason we played with something like 8-10 people. It was awful.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:27
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Tekopo posted:The worst deckbuilder I ever played was the aforementioned DC Deckbuilding game. It built on all the bad design choices that Ascension contributed to the genre but made them even worse. I think the worst design decisions that it made was that pretty much every card gives you points and that the cards with the most powerful effects give the most points. So basically if your turn is crappy due to your draw you either have to make your deck worse in order to keep getting points or just not get points, which means that you are behind the curve. Meanwhile sometimes gets a lucky draw that allows them to pick up one of the big villains (there is a stack of big villains that you can defeat, defeating all of them ends the game), and along with a ton of points you also get a really powerful ability, thus accelerating your deck and making it more likely to keep winning. I'm not sure if DC Deckbuilder had a split economy but since it took inspiration from Ascension, it probably did. Don't forget that it has a market row that refreshes at the end of your turn and your choice to buy something may just let someone draw into way better cards the next turn because gently caress YOU. And don't forget that there are plenty of attack cards that can ravage your deck/hand if you don't have a defense card but lol those cards are actually pretty rare so enjoy being attacked constantly by other players AND when someone buys the villain because that triggers an attack from the card underneath it. Oh, and there are other random cards that are just "get extra points for every villain/hero card you've acquired throughout the game". And a card combo that lets you win outright if you've managed to grab certain card combinations. The game is so so so random and aggressively annoying and frustrating that it borders on an experience generator and that experience being Pain. I think the only other game I disliked more was Clank in space because at least DC is (usually) mercifully short.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:44
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Tekopo posted:The worst deckbuilder I ever played was the aforementioned DC Deckbuilding game. It built on all the bad design choices that Ascension contributed to the genre but made them even worse. I think the worst design decisions that it made was that pretty much every card gives you points and that the cards with the most powerful effects give the most points. So basically if your turn is crappy due to your draw you either have to make your deck worse in order to keep getting points or just not get points, which means that you are behind the curve. Meanwhile sometimes gets a lucky draw that allows them to pick up one of the big villains (there is a stack of big villains that you can defeat, defeating all of them ends the game), and along with a ton of points you also get a really powerful ability, thus accelerating your deck and making it more likely to keep winning. I'm not sure if DC Deckbuilder had a split economy but since it took inspiration from Ascension, it probably did. If you want all the worst parts of DC deckbuilding plus the worst part of coop from the old Marvel deckbuilding game, there's Helionox. On top of the market row, you are assigned a character with abilities. One character has the ability to trash and I don't recall trashing being available as a native mechanic of the game. IIRC there were a couple cards that let you do it? Sure hope so, and hope it comes up for you, would be a shame otherwise. Did you say you also wanted random events assigned to players on top of that? You've got it! Movement and pickup and deliver constrained by your available cards? Sure! It seems like there's a reason its capability for solo play is a feature mentioned in more positive reviews.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:08
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Can we talk deckbuilding guilty pleasures as well? Cause I loved me some of the original Legendary Encounters with the Aliens franchise, it was cool going through the films and I’ll let a lot of things slide if the primary mode of play is Co-op
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Aug 15, 2022 17:18
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Tekopo posted:Can we talk deckbuilding guilty pleasures as well? Cause I loved me some of the original Legendary Encounters with the Aliens franchise, it was cool going through the films and I’ll let a lot of things slide if the primary mode of play is Co-op As long as we include mage knight 
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Aug 15, 2022 17:23
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What killed Dominion for me was that, for the longest time there was an unofficial Android version of Dominion that ran up through... Adventures, I think. The AI was good but not perfect, but the AI took its turns immediately. You could do an entire game of Dominion in about 4-5 minutes. And cards like the ones from the Alchemy set that counted cards in your discard or deck or whatever, their value was updated in real time. So you never had to count your discard pile and divide by 3, the card would just tell you that it was currently worth 4 gold or whatever. That was my phone game of choice for about two years. I played north of 30 games a day. My desire to spend 45 minute with real human beings watching them generate colorless cheese chakra is basically zero.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:25
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Aramoro posted:You'll be delighted to know Matt Hyra designed an even worse deck builder game in the form of the Transformers Deck builder. At the very least, it's coop, so it's not like others are beating you at the game. You just may be doing stuff so others can make their turn better while you sometimes kinda flounder around.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:32
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I've had a lot of fun times with the various iterations of Thunderstone (currently Thunderstone Quest).
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Aug 15, 2022 17:42
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Tekopo posted:Branch and Claw was, as far as I can remember, removed from the base game even though they were technically done at the same time in terms of development. It's relatively minor for SI/Branch and Claw, but for Eminent Domain the issue is much more egregious, where the base game is boring and uninteresting and the game only becomes complete when you add the expansion...I think Spirit Island has only a minimal issues with this repacking problem: there's really not that much reason to play the base game of SI over adding the B&C changes (or the Jagged Earth replacement rules if you really hate the event deck). On the other hand, SI expansions are more about adding variability to the game: more spirits, more powers, more adverseries, so the base game without Jagged Earth isn't that bad an experience, apart from lack of diversity after a while. quote:I think probably the worst expansion system I've seen was the one for the Battlestar Galactica game: the base game was entirely playabable, but a little bit of unbalanced at times. The expansions for the game seemed like a scattergun approach to balancing the game as well as adding new features, and it led to a weird situation where to get a playable game again you had to pick and choose specific systems from specific expansions: it felt (and was) a mess. I want to know WTF they were smoking when they put Ionian Nebula/Crossroads in the game. OK, so you've played a three hour game and random chance says...you're eliminated with no opportunity to get back in before the end. Tough luck, dude! Fortunately, they saved a bunch of good stuff so that Daybreak (as far as I remember) was an expansion with only good stuff in it.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:52
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Leperflesh posted:I've had a lot of fun times with the various iterations of Thunderstone (currently Thunderstone Quest). My appreciation for Thunderstone declined with each play, I've landed solidly on not enjoying it.
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Aug 15, 2022 18:38
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Query: What do you all do with lovely board games that you've outgrown? ("lovely" being somewhat subjective.) Do you wait for math trades and hope somebody wants it? Do you throw it up on ebay for anything greater than 0? I'm talking like a good condition copy of Last Night on Earth and expansions, Arkham Horror boardgame first edition, etc. I've never really paired down on board games before, because I'm not short on space, but I have some games that I know aren't going to hit the table again. But I know that because they're not good.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:00
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CitizenKeen posted:Query: What do you all do with lovely board games that you've outgrown? ("lovely" being somewhat subjective.) Local Facebook group, priced to sell (less than half whatever it is on Amazon).
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Aug 15, 2022 19:05
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Store it in a closet forever...
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Aug 15, 2022 19:12
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silvergoose posted:My appreciation for Thunderstone declined with each play, I've landed solidly on not enjoying it.  So much loving complication for such a wet noodle of a game. The new one is certainly better than Advanced but I've found them all to be just criminally uninteresting.My friend with the worst taste in games imaginable, of course, loves it.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:14
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CitizenKeen posted:Query: What do you all do with lovely board games that you've outgrown? ("lovely" being somewhat subjective.) let them sit on my shelf/in a box somewhere forever because getting rid of them is high effort Actually my kid's camp has a "Donate a handful of things, let kids 'shop' for 50c/1dollar" yard sale event and we dumped Saboteur and Food Chain into that cause like, they're under ten bucks, shipping would be more than that, and it's so much effort to eke out a little bit of money. (no, not food chain magnate, this thing https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41890/food-chain )
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Aug 15, 2022 19:14
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I recognize Dominion is mechanically an excellent game and the granddaddy of deckbuilders with tight design, but I also find it incredibly dull and more an exercise in algorithm development than having fun. I just can't get excited in the slightest with it.CitizenKeen posted:Query: What do you all do with lovely board games that you've outgrown? ("lovely" being somewhat subjective.) I try to sell them on my local FB group, but if that fails then they just gather dust on my shelf as I'm v. lazy.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:43
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Tekopo posted:Can we talk deckbuilding guilty pleasures as well? Cause I loved me some of the original Legendary Encounters with the Aliens franchise, it was cool going through the films and I’ll let a lot of things slide if the primary mode of play is Co-op I've said it before but I'm a big fan of Lewis and Clark as a deck builder. It's perhaps a bit on the old racist side (maybe I don't really know) but its a fun game mechanically. The 2nd Ed they brought out fixed a bunch of the problems it had.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:51
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Leperflesh posted:Store it in a closet forever...
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Aug 15, 2022 19:55
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Hands in the Sea is a very interesting take on deckbuilding. Also, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to argue that Concordia could be included in that list as well...
FulsomFrank fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 19:56
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I treat "play cards and a special card to pick up all your cards" as a very different mechanism than deck building, myself
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Aug 15, 2022 19:57
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FulsomFrank posted:Hands in the Sea is a very interesting take on it deckbuilding. Also, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to argue that Concordia could be included in that list as well... Yeah, but that's the thing - Concordia is a deckbuilder-plus. You don't just build a deck and faff around with it, you do something with it. I love Concordia.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:58
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I want a deckbuilder+ that lets you build your deck to affect an area like in el grande. Substitute the known values of cards with some sort of deckbuilding that lets you alter the values in the deck as well as potential effects, so it would combine the bid, internal movement from province to court, and any side effects from the power cards all in one. Which I assume would come from playing your hand of cards. Communal market with diverging tech coming from player choices, of course. None of that market row.
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Aug 15, 2022 21:52
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Flamme Rouge is a deck builder with one option change my mind
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Aug 15, 2022 22:10
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Chill la Chill posted:I want a deckbuilder+ that lets you build your deck to affect an area like in el grande. Substitute the known values of cards with some sort of deckbuilding that lets you alter the values in the deck as well as potential effects, so it would combine the bid, internal movement from province to court, and any side effects from the power cards all in one. Which I assume would come from playing your hand of cards. What is the state of the art for Deckbuilding + Area Control?
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Aug 15, 2022 22:34
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