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I played Wingspan for the first time the other day with the actual physical board, as opposed to playing on BGA. I can't quiet understand what the strategy is to the game. There is just so much going on all at the same time with ways to earn points, and a lot of it seems to be luck of the draw of what bird card you get with the bonus powers. Which is fine, I do enjoy games where it's not all strategy and some luck involved, but it just seemed a bit one sided where two people dominated and me and another person had like half their scores.
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Mar 14, 2023 20:44
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There’s a ton of luck involved in the drafting, but once you have your cards it’s fairly straightforward to optimize. The thing to know is that it’s rarely profitable to do anything in round 4 other than just place eggs every turn. Also I don’t know if you’re playing OG or with expansions like Oceania, but in case of the former, the bottleneck to getting food at the beginning of the game is a bad and stupid design flaw that was addressed in Oceania. It’s not a deep game and you’re not missing out on any subtle strategizing, it’s mostly luck. My wife and I play together and our win rate basically breaks down to 50:50 (not unlike Azul).
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Mar 14, 2023 20:50
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Jewmanji posted:It’s not a deep game and you’re not missing out on any subtle strategizing, it’s mostly luck. My wife and I play together and our win rate basically breaks down to 50:50 (not unlike Azul). Azul can be rather cutthroat, with hate drafting and turn counting as the display tiles get close to empty. I haven't played much at 2, but it's absolutely nothing like Wingspan with respect to randomness. So if you were just observing that you also are 50:50 with your wife in Azul that's one thing, but if you're suggesting that it's due to randomness in Azul then I have to strongly object.
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Mar 14, 2023 20:55
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Astro7x posted:I played Wingspan for the first time the other day with the actual physical board, as opposed to playing on BGA. I can't quiet understand what the strategy is to the game. 
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Mar 14, 2023 21:01
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armorer posted:Azul can be rather cutthroat, with hate drafting and turn counting as the display tiles get close to empty. I haven't played much at 2, but it's absolutely nothing like Wingspan with respect to randomness. So if you were just observing that you also are 50:50 with your wife in Azul that's one thing, but if you're suggesting that it's due to randomness in Azul then I have to strongly object. Yeah this is very fair. I guess I wasn’t referring to the randomness, more just the fact that due to the game design, it’s difficult to get substantially better once you hit a certain plateau. There’s definitely a bit more player interaction in Azul and there’s really no concept of hate drafting in Azul, but similar to Wingspan (and countless other games) it doesn’t seem like there’s a deep enough strategy for you to win more consistently.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:10
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Yeah, I don't know if there's any way to improve much on "add birds until you have enough egg spots to accommodate spamming the egg action until the end of the game, and then do that." If your card drafts allow you can do a little engine building. You know that you are going to be doing lay eggs more than the other resource actions, especially late game, so point-generating grassland powers are great. Other terrains have worse returns, especially if you add a bunch of powers that generate even more of the resource they normally generate (food in forest / cards in water) since that means you'll need to hit that action less often. If you can generate cross-terrain resources (cards in forest / food in water) then you can streamline the bird spam part of the game and leverage your powers better since you can spam the same terrain over and over to generate all the resources you need to play birds instead of needing to rotate. Otherwise, grass / water are good places to stash birds that don't have brown powers. But the draws are random enough and low enough impact that it will generally be a wash.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:18
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Jewmanji posted:Yeah this is very fair. I guess I wasn’t referring to the randomness, more just the fact that due to the game design, it’s difficult to get substantially better once you hit a certain plateau. There’s definitely a bit more player interaction in Azul and there’s really no concept of hate drafting in Azul, but similar to Wingspan (and countless other games) it doesn’t seem like there’s a deep enough strategy for you to win more consistently. There is 100% hate drafting in Azul! In the later rounds it's somewhat common for there to be a color tile which no player can place a large number of, and yet a large number of are accumulating in the middle. As the factory tiles start to empty out, you can count the number of possible draws left, and alter it by drawing tiles that push certain colors into the middle, which steers the last draw to a particular player and screws them with a ton of negative points. You can also just outright take the tiles another player needs for a large point placement even if they don't get you anything particularly useful. Edit: And high point scoring strategies revolve around initial tile selection and placement such that on later turns you're filling in spots with horizontal and vertical neighbors, while also trying to fill columns/rows/all-of-a-color for the bonus points. (All of which you can hate draft tiles to prevent the other players from doing, if you're watching what they're building out on their boards.) Edit2: A concrete but simple example of what I'm talking about with draw counting is: Two player game, my draw, there's 5 red tiles in the middle which neither of us can place (so they'd all go on the floor) and one remaining factory display with 2 Black, 1 Yellow, and 1 Red. If I take the two black, it pushes red and yellow into the middle, so you then take the one yellow and I get stuck with 6 red. If I take the 1 yellow, you take the two black from the middle and I get stuck with the 6 red. If I take the one red even though I can't place it, putting it directly on the floor, then the 2 black and one yellow go to the middle. You take the two black, I take the one yellow, and you're stuck with the remaining 5 red. That's a trivial case where there's only one factory display left, but you can look for those situations and do the math in your head when there are several factory displays left. Maybe I would have gotten some points by placing those two black, but likely not enough to offset the negative points from the 6 reds. armorer fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 21:18
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Hate drafting in Azul doesn’t scale up to other player counts as well but at 2p it’s absolutely a knife fight in an elevator
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Mar 14, 2023 21:33
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Morpheus posted:Can you take a couple pics of this? Would be nice not to have three boxes on my shelf. This is a pretty common hack, maybe if I describe it differently? Box top (as normal) Box bottom (normal, set in upside down box top): non flat shot Box top (but upside down): flat poo poo the same size as box footprint squished between bottom of box bottom. This only works if you rise above the height required for both lids to clear each other. Not sure it works with 1 expansion for instance.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:35
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Bodanarko posted:Hate drafting in Azul doesn’t scale up to other player counts as well but at 2p it’s absolutely a knife fight in an elevator Eh, if you have 3 or 4 players that all do it, it's still a knife fight. You often can't steer the nastiness very much, but you can try to make sure it doesn't land on you. At 2 players though yeah, it can be mean.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:36
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the holy poopacy posted:Yeah, I don't know if there's any way to improve much on "add birds until you have enough egg spots to accommodate spamming the egg action until the end of the game, and then do that." Although you may want to start in the water row if you have a good engine at the start and try to dig for some nice combos at the start of the game - I think my highest score was in a game I started with 2 birds in the water lane, with a "discard 1 egg on another bird > gain 2 food of your choice" crow and a "cycle 1 card, lay 1 egg on this bird" bird. That Italian Guy fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 21:36
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That Italian Guy posted:If you can build an engine that takes eggs and spits out cards and food, you can more or less only use the grassland row all game long - and get a good chunk of points out of the rest of the actions in that row. Yeah, that's the thing--building a wholly contained grassland engine is the dream but I feel like it tends to take too long to assemble since eggs are the least important resource for placing birds, forest/water engines are faster to get going because you're hammering them more often to get things going. Bodanarko posted:Hate drafting in Azul doesn’t scale up to other player counts as well but at 2p it’s absolutely a knife fight in an elevator I feel like it's got a good balance to it though where mindless aggro doesn't really seem to be a winning play, so you need to stay sharp for the right moment to stick the knife in.
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Mar 14, 2023 21:50
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That's already some good Wingspan advice. Thanks! Never very fun playing a game with someone for the first time and gives you zero advice. Reminds me of playing Space Base for the first time, and not realizing how important the dice manipulation cards were.
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Mar 14, 2023 22:18
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the holy poopacy posted:
You’ve got to be doing the Azul maths so you can make sure the tile bomb doesn’t hit you. Then you can think about hate drafting.
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Mar 14, 2023 22:31
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Astro7x posted:That's already some good Wingspan advice. Thanks! space base is a weird one because we went through a few iterations of 'what's super broken' and eventually converged on 'if you get a top VP card in the 1-6 slot first, you probably win, if you can't get a good card in those slots save up to buy a yellow card' which seems to outrace other engines 75% of the time. Buying any card in slot 7+ seems to be a trap. Would be interesting to sim it at some point.
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Mar 14, 2023 23:18
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FulsomFrank posted:And I will gladly explode myself on a grenade in a game if that gets another ten to the table, total agreement. Zero issues. All I'm saying is it takes a bit of pride swallowing to let yourself become a bit of a pincushion to get there especially when your opponents act like they're the second coming of Cornelius Vanderbilt. I don't know if you're overly sensitive or your friends are just assholes lol. Either way the first game doesn't count for anything (inasmuch as any game does). I consider it kind of a failure to win a game I'm teaching, not that I play bad on purpose but I try to help everyone else succeed at what they're trying to do. I win more often than not anyway because I'm a lovely teacher. 18XX in particular is the sort of game where it's pretty much impossible to be too strategic in your first game without help, before seeing how things play out, at least for me and my friends.
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Mar 14, 2023 23:34
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Morpheus posted:Can you take a couple pics of this? Would be nice not to have three boxes on my shelf. Yeah:    I hope that explains it? You kinda have one lid extra, upsidedown, under the main box, with the big cardboard bits in it (plus rulebook).
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Mar 14, 2023 23:55
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Something similar you can do with one box and some matboard is make a rectangular insert for the box base which is however tall you need, and then thicken it with a second layer of matboard on the outside above the lip of the box base. Essentially making the box base taller. It works as long as the box is roughly as thick as a standard 4-ply matboard.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:14
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Any opinions on Escape the Dark Sector?
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Mar 15, 2023 00:42
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Any opinions on Escape the Dark Sector? A friend of mine owns this (and I bought him some expansions for Christmas) and I really enjoy it. It is very much a co-op 'experience generator' though so don't expect any super deep strategy. Every turn, one player of the team's choice draws an encounter card and resolves it. Sometimes it won't be something that their skills are good for, sometimes you can nominate someone who does have good skills for it, sometimes you make a decision on which of two decisions to make, sometimes it's a fight where everyone can contribute. The only things you need to really think about are which player gets to use the limited healing (if one player dies, you lose) and who is the best person to have which equipment card that turns up. Most of the time, no matter what you draw, it's going to come down to x number of players getting y number of dice faces in z number of rolls. But the narrative and artwork on the cards is fun sci-fi schlock and there's enough variety in them (and the equipment/upgrade cards) that every playthrough is unique, and only takes 20-30 minutes. The encounter deck is tiered so it gets tougher as you go, culminating in a boss, so there are no cheap early deaths unless your entire team rolls incredibly poorly, in which case it's still pretty funny (a bit like exploding your entire ship in Galaxy Trucker) and, well, you lost 10 minutes of your life to get eaten by some sort of space mutant.
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Mar 15, 2023 01:10
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I played Stephenson's Rocket for the first time in years. I've only played it once before, with me teaching but it was so traumatic I put it back on the shelf forever. I'm a bad teacher, it wasn't the crowd for it, but yeesh it was painful. People like it but I've yet to see past the clunk. There are three ways of in-game scoring, two out which are pretty much identical, and the last is totally different and pretty inconsequential. The fact that the minimal one is rail freight, with the real money coming from passengers is thematically jarring. The actual anatomy of a turn is a chore. Again there are two simple actions, place some wood down on the board, no problems there, but laying track is annoying. Move a loco, add a share, determine if a veto auction is happening, do the veto auction, spend some shares, let someone else move the loco but it's still your turn, lay down track, maybe gain a passenger, maybe do a bit of scoring... and then you get to do it again. We were four experienced gamers but that was so ungainly! Maybe if we played it enough to memorize all that and we can actually play the game, it'll be fun. But I do most of my gaming at meetups so there will always be a new player trying to keep straight town and merger scoring. On top of everything, the Grail rulebook is.... I want to say lousy but maybe it's just bad, and the iconography is utterly opaque.
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Mar 15, 2023 01:34
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I honestly disliked SR quite a bit in my one play last year, and for basically identical reasons. I think it was a different edition, but it sure had rules issues making it hard for us to determine what exactly happens to, I think, a dead railway's shares and such.
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Mar 15, 2023 02:01
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I don't find there to be much difficulty to the rules at all in SR, no more so than any other Knizia game of that era. Definitely wouldn't say that scoring from goods tokens is inconsequential either, it adds up by the end of the game for someone that can use them well enough so to make a difference.
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Mar 15, 2023 05:20
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In the original map goods won't win you the game but they can lose it. They're definitely a "grab as a b plan when you have no other moves" thing but never a priority.
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Mar 15, 2023 06:08
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PerniciousKnid posted:I don't know if you're overly sensitive or your friends are just assholes lol Yes! Bit the bullet and proxied up a Staples version of Off The Rails. It's not perfect but until I can find a legit copy on the second hand market it'll do pig, it'll do. I've also been playing a bit of Tainted Grail's PC version. I like it! But I have a very difficult time imagining this as a board game so no clue on how similar they are. I guess it'd play similar to Gloomhaven meets Deck Builder X? EDIT: forgot to mention that I play a ton of 2P Azul and it's fantastic. Knife fight is apt, tons of hate-drafting, tile counting, deliberately filling the floor with a single type... Lovely stuff. FulsomFrank fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 14:44
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So I did try playing some games of Wingspan last night on BGA and had some success using those techniques mentioned. I think the key things were -Trying to play cards early on that essentially give you double actions. Things like taking extra food, or gathering eggs when an opponent does. -Focusing Round 4 entirely on filling every spot possible with an egg. That will definitely help next time I play in person with friends. xiw posted:space base is a weird one because we went through a few iterations of 'what's super broken' and eventually converged on 'if you get a top VP card in the 1-6 slot first, you probably win, if you can't get a good card in those slots save up to buy a yellow card' which seems to outrace other engines 75% of the time. Buying any card in slot 7+ seems to be a trap. The strategy for Space Base completely changes based on how many people are playing and which cards you get early in the game, which is something I kind of love about it. There is not one single strategy I think that will help you win. -I've once won a game entirely focused on the "You Win" card, being able to grab it early and then swap it into a lower sector from the 12 spot, all while having zero victory points until I won. -I've won a few games by only buying those planet/income cards and no spaceship/point cards, basically getting my income so high near the end where I was just collecting all high value colony cards. But it doesn't always work. -You can try using the bell curve strategy, with stacking the 6 spot since it is the most frequently rolled spot in the game. -You can try using a few key dice manipulation cards. The one that on the lower sectors that let you add 1 or 2 to your dice roll when combined with those in the higher sectors that let you bump up to the higher sector rewards are pretty good. -And of course... a 2 player game you want to kind of divide your cards between the upper/lower portions so that you are getting good rolls on both since they alternate. On a 4-5 player game, you want to switch your focus to those cards on the upper portion that you collect when your opponent rolls. I'll also say that the one card that is "All Opponents lose 4 VP" is incredibly overpowered. There was a game where I combined that with several dice manipulation cards and was able to basically play it whenever I wanted. I was able to hold all my opponents scores down while I racked up gold and bought colony cards. I find Space Base to be a really good game with straight forward rules. It is also much easier to follow what your opponent is doing when building their engine because it is very visual with how the cards stack. I found that with wingspan it's difficult for me to really figure it out because you have to read all those cards and they're upside down.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:37
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Played a solo game of Great Western Trail, man that game is fun. Just getting cows across the midwest. My only real complaint is that, being half New Zealander, I want to get that game also but I won't be able to justify it, and wasn't aware of it until after I had purchased GWT.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:50
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FulsomFrank posted:I've also been playing a bit of Tainted Grail's PC version. I like it! But I have a very difficult time imagining this as a board game so no clue on how similar they are. I guess it'd play similar to Gloomhaven meets Deck Builder X? The BG is an interesting story driven game with decent enough deckbuilding and combat mechanics, tied to a CYOA-like skeleton with map exploration and resource management. It unfortunately gets really bogged down in the resource management aspect - you often have to double back to collect the necessary stuff not to die, which artificially bloats a very enjoyable 30h experience into a 60+ one. You want to keep playing for the story and exploration, but to get to the juicy parts you have to go through the "go back > fight a beast > collect food not to starve" part too many times. Edit: I have only played the base story, so I am not sure if this gets somehow addressed in the newer ones. That Italian Guy fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 17:02
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People say Oceania mitigated some Wingspan balance issues, can these changes be back ported to the base game? I like fixes but I don't care about birds from the upside-down.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:07
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Morpheus posted:Great Western Trail, man that game is fun. Just getting cows across the midwest. I have heard many good things about it and my wife would totally dig it if it weren't a game of just getting cows across the midwest to be murdered at their final destination.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:21
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You also pacify some teepees on the way there.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:23
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homullus posted:I have heard many good things about it and my wife would totally dig it if it weren't a game of just getting cows across the midwest to be murdered at their final destination. No no, you're helping cows get to new homes across the United States to live happy lives. They have breeding potential, not butcher potential, after all Mr. Squishy posted:You also pacify some teepees on the way there. What
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Mar 15, 2023 18:25
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Morpheus posted:What I checked and there's a handshake icon underneath the tile, so you're making a treaty or something to get past.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:30
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quote:In this game, we are entering this world in an ‘abstract’ way, using only certain aspects of history, and therefore end up with a romanticized and narrow view. You don't say
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Mar 15, 2023 18:33
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Morpheus posted:What If I recall correctly, in the first edition, some of the 'hazards' along the trail were Native Americans. In the edition you probably have, that's been replaced by bandits, I think?
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Mar 15, 2023 18:35
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Magnetic North posted:If I recall correctly, in the first edition, some of the 'hazards' along the trail were Native Americans. In the edition you probably have, that's been replaced by bandits, I think? Oh. Yeah it's green and orange bandits and environmental hazards (floods, rockfalls, and heavy drought) to get through in the 2nd edition. I could see there being native americans in the first, I don't remember from the one playthrough I did years ago though.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:38
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PerniciousKnid posted:People say Oceania mitigated some Wingspan balance issues, can these changes be back ported to the base game? I like fixes but I don't care about birds from the upside-down. Not really? They aren't rules fixes—it adds a new kind of food and replaces the player mat.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:41
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Ah, I didn't know it had been changed. Probably for the best.
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Mar 15, 2023 18:43
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Very much for the best, yes.
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Mar 15, 2023 19:29
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Mr. Squishy posted:I checked and there's a handshake icon underneath the tile, so you're making a treaty or something to get past. very curious what happens to these treaties when one party eventually wants to modify the terms
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Mar 15, 2023 20:02
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