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What's wrong with that? sounds cool...
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Mar 22, 2023 20:31
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It seems a little bloated but it might be fun to play.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:42
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If that game works it sounds great but the general impression I'm getting is that they should have cut 1 or 2 of those feature points somewhere along the line.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:44
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The biggest red flag on the gamefound is that it's launching with an expansion lol.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:45
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I played Dwellings of Eldervale which is the designer's previous game, which was just about as overstuffed with mechanics as this one but everything was so simple that it worked anyway. The extremely over the top production turned me off, and there's more focused games that I'd rather play, but it's mostly a shrug from me. This one seems to be trying to that but even more. It is definitely amusing how lazer focused this one is on croundfunding types lol.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:55
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an actual dog posted:The biggest red flag on the gamefound is that it's launching with an expansion lol. Everything launches with the expansion now on crowdfunding sites though.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:07
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There’s something to be said about trying too much, and I think for me the breaking point is Feld games, where there are two many little subsystems that the game becomes too unfocused to be enjoyable. I have personal experience with helping designing a game that tried too much to have weird individual system that didn’t really mesh together all that well and although I’m still relatively proud of the outcome the game felt like a mess even up to release. Designing one system can be tough, designing two interlinked systems can be even tougher, and the difficulty rises the more systems you try to put in.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:11
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Trajan owns, though. Tempo central, get there one turn before someone else does, forever.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:16
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There’s only one good Feld game, and it’s in the year of the dragon, because it’s a very tight design. I actually think my board game journey might bring me back to ameritrash in the end. Bring back the themes
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Mar 22, 2023 21:19
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every Feld game feels like he throws together some actions then balances by adjusting how many points each comes with.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:21
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In the year of the dragon is indeed good. But Trajan is too, despite the extremely point salady feel. Die Speicherstadt is pretty cool too, it's got this neat auction system a little like the orders stacking in starcraft/FS
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Mar 22, 2023 21:25
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Tekopo posted:There’s something to be said about trying too much, and I think for me the breaking point is Feld games, where there are two many little subsystems that the game becomes too unfocused to be enjoyable. I have personal experience with helping designing a game that tried too much to have weird individual system that didn’t really mesh together all that well and although I’m still relatively proud of the outcome the game felt like a mess even up to release. Designing one system can be tough, designing two interlinked systems can be even tougher, and the difficulty rises the more systems you try to put in. Not sure I see the specific objection to Andromeda's Edge here but I'll address my own experience with the project and its relationship to Dwellings of Eldervale. I thought Dwellings was actually pretty good (not great) and enjoyed the novel way it did the euro worker placement/tableau management combo with a side of DICE WARS. Some parts of it (RAWRING MONSTER SOUND BASES) were absurd but they tickled me and overall the mechanisms played pretty well together, although I don't entirely disagree with SVWAG's Mark Bigney''s issue with the fact that sometimes the dice fighting over area control Feels Bad (I think Walker was fine with it.) But when AE came along, the touted improvements over DE were pretty... middling and the added systems seem more complex for complexity's sake than actually well-realized improvements on a good system that could be great. Plus, the aesthetic is a definite move in the wrong direction for the most part and lacks a lot of the flavor that DoE had. I ultimately passed on it because I already have a decent nonsense game like DoE and that's DoE; AE didn't do enough to separate it from its predecessor. It's not like Gaia Project for me in that I truly feel that game innovated enough on Terra Mystica to totally replace it for me 9 out of 10 times I'm looking to pull that sort of game off the shelf. Not sure how AE gets us to board games were a mistake, but AE at least feels like it could have tried a bit harder to be its own thing if it wasn't going to be a definite upgrade on its predecessor.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:26
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Yeah I’m overegging the pudding on both games I’ve criticised tbh. But playing Bora Bora really put me off Feld and I just can’t see his designs as anything other than stapled together point scoring systems that barely synergise .
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Mar 22, 2023 21:27
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What comes to mind when I hear this is: concatenation instead of integration. That's what Lacerda games look like to me, from outside anyway. A concatenation of disparate mechanisms instead of the integration of them together into systems. I still have never played one of his so maybe they don't play like that. Just saying how they look when I read the rules or see gameplay, etc. Trickerion is an example of both concatenation and integration that I have played once in the before time. To my recollection, most of the game is pretty well integrated, but the mini game of making patterns with tiles to create tricks or whatever is completely bolted on. The game was done and the concatenated that system onto it.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:28
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Memnaelar posted:Not sure I see the specific objection to Andromeda's Edge here but I'll address my own experience with the project and its relationship to Dwellings of Eldervale. I thought Dwellings was actually pretty good (not great) and enjoyed the novel way it did the euro worker placement/tableau management combo with a side of DICE WARS. Some parts of it (RAWRING MONSTER SOUND BASES) were absurd but they tickled me and overall the mechanisms played pretty well together, although I don't entirely disagree with SVWAG's Mark Bigney''s issue with the fact that sometimes the dice fighting over area control Feels Bad (I think Walker was fine with it.)
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Mar 22, 2023 21:30
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Tekopo posted:Yeah it was just a bit of a joke, to be honest. Like trying to describe a game as a worker placement tableau building asymmetric area control hand management dice chucker is just loving funny to me. I don’t really know that much about the game. Nah, jokes are good. Just wasn't sure if there was something specifically dumb about that write-up. It IS, somehow, all of those things and still surprisingly simple to explain on a teach (well, DoE is. No idea how much a few of the extra bells and whistles in AE adds to the explanation). My opinion, however, is almost certainly invalid as the biggest draw of DoE to me is that the big NPC monsters in the game have, in the stupidly kickstarter version, battery-powered sound bases that make them screech and roar every time you move them from one hex to another. You know, just the way Kramer and Kiesling always intended. ;-)
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Mar 22, 2023 21:34
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That’s loving great tbh, more games should have roaring pieces
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Mar 22, 2023 21:36
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feld’s also responsible for it happens… which at first glance looks like a potentially-fun outlier in his oeuvre but ultimately commits the sin of being a dice-driven game that isn’t exciting at all. unless you really like cartoonish phallic imagery in which case it’s a solid 6/10 (credit @moviebuffs on bgg)
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Mar 22, 2023 21:37
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I would say “that’s actually a bone” but, you know…
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Mar 22, 2023 21:40
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silvergoose posted:In the year of the dragon is indeed good. But Trajan is too, despite the extremely point salady feel. Those are the 3 Felds I like. My biggest problem with Feld is he’ll come up with a really neat core mechanism (shogun tower in Amerigo, wind rose in Macau) and the rest of the game is really boring point salad stuff.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:43
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Tekopo posted:Yeah it was just a bit of a joke, to be honest. Like trying to describe a game as a worker placement tableau building asymmetric area control hand management dice chucker is just loving funny to me. I don’t really know that much about the game. It's kind of a mile wide inch deep sort of thing.
Area control, tableau building, and dice chucking get all the real decision space - the other ones are really just being namedropped. Or maybe content warned, if you really don't like secret cards or asymmetric player powers?
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Mar 22, 2023 22:32
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The only Feld I'd unhesitatingly play at a meetup, after checking to see nothing more interesting is in the offing, is Castles of Burgundy. I find the dice system a nice way of narrowing your decisions, but it's still open ended enough that it's unlikely there will be "a bad roll".
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Mar 22, 2023 22:41
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Mr. Squishy posted:The only Feld I'd unhesitatingly play at a meetup, after checking to see nothing more interesting is in the offing, is Castles of Burgundy. I find the dice system a nice way of narrowing your decisions, but it's still open ended enough that it's unlikely there will be "a bad roll". I find most of my "bad rolls" in CoB are caused by me draining all my workers in the previous turn trying to pull off a 'spectacular' move (snatch castle with mods - place castle with mods - buy mine with silverlings - place mine with castle wild die) and having nothing to do with the two dice that would have been perfect for an unmodified roll of what I had just pulled off using four workers. I'd still play a lot of games before CoB, but it makes a great school night game -- time-bounded and limited decision space to minimize AP.
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Mar 22, 2023 22:50
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Magnetic North posted:What comes to mind when I hear this is: concatenation instead of integration. That's what Lacerda games look like to me, from outside anyway. A concatenation of disparate mechanisms instead of the integration of them together into systems. I still have never played one of his so maybe they don't play like that. Just saying how they look when I read the rules or see gameplay, etc. The worst expansion I have ever bought is the one for Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and it suffers from this problem. It has 3 'modules' you add in: Secret passages and moats are just kind of lame, but the third is the most concatenated rear end system I've ever played with. Random rooms come with a random colored token, and if you buy the room you get the token, and then you score by collecting sets of colored tokens. It's so generic you could literally bolt that system on to any game ever made.
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Mar 23, 2023 00:16
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Oh yeah the swans. I didn't dislike the expansion, but nothing in it was interesting at all, yeah.
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Mar 23, 2023 00:25
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Hoplomachus turned up today so I was able to give it a quick trial. I used the default setup with Krakenbane and took on a couple of fights. The first was a 4 vs 3 sparring match where the twist was that rival units would roll the same dice as my hero does. I felt that this was best taken on early before I improved any of my dice. In a Spar your objective is to defeat all rival units except for the lead unit, who is called a Tribune. You can defeat the Tribune if you want, but he's a local hero so the crowd get angry and beat the poo poo out of you (you go to 1HP). The problem is that the lead unit is always stronger than a regular Neutral unit. Adding to that it was also a Retiarus, who as a Tactician character has the ability to move (but not attack) on the turn he deploys - non-Tacticians cannot move or act until the turn after. And as I was Atlantean we were fighting in the Atlantis arena, the special feature of which is a Trident that can be picked up and thrown at any enemy for 2 damage or 3 if the thrower is local. So, whatever unit I played was going to be facing down an enemy that could - and in fact must - deal 3 damage to it and which I wasn't allowed to kill. I elected to bring in my Defender first, as it had 5HP and could survive a Trident hit. The Retiarus closed in and as it was holding the Trident, had to use it. It also used a Hamstring tactic on my Defender, meaning it couldn't both move and attack. I took advantage of being adjacent to use a Stun tactic on the Retiarus, meaning that it didn't act the next turn, and I also held onto the Trident so it wouldn't be thrown straight back. Now I only had to deal with the Archer that had just entered play and was out of range of the Defender, and I also had an Attacker on the field. On turn 3 the enemy deployed its final unit, a Defender of its own, and the Archer moved towards the Defender as per Atlantean priorities: flagbearer, unclaimed Trident, enemy with the Trident, most distant opponent. On my own turn 3 I deployed my hero. In the default setup Krakenbane has the ability Grand Entrance, which deals damage equal to the number of units you have in play to the strongest enemy when you deploy him. I hit the rival Defender for 3, putting it to 2, then moved Krakenbane and the Attacker so that all my units were all two hexes distant from it. Then my Defender finished it with the Trident. Come the rival turn the Archer had to move to the Trident and throw it according to priority, which meant the most distant opponent. As all my units were the same distance away I had the choice, so my Attacker took the hit for 2 damage (as the Archer is neutral). The Retiarus was engaged with my Defender, but was only able to deal 1 damage. I now had the Trident and the only remaining rival unit other than the Tribune had 2HP, so that was that. The second fight was a deathmatch where my hero had to fight three enemies alone, but was given bonus abilities that reduced the quality of enemy attack dice to no higher than blue (the second worst after yellow, 3/6 to hit) and set the maximum damage he could take from any attack to 1. I think this one would have been more interesting outside of Atlantis; two of the enemies were low health to begin with and the last was a local Reptilian that could regenerate HP, so it turned into the Trident ping-pong situation that I'd played to avoid in the first fight. I did have to use a Blessing to survive, though, and I probably wouldn't have taken that fight on at higher difficulties. Overall I enjoyed what I saw. There's definitely a lot of tactical and strategic choices to be made; even knowing that I was only going to do a couple of game weeks I still was able to plan out my route to the Primus I wanted to fight at the end of Act 1, with an alternate plan to use if I had to rest up. (While the game is on a strict clock, resting takes no time at all. Your punishment is instead to increase the influence of the Scion that you'll fight at the end of the game, making it stronger and you weaker. Picking a careless route can also force you into resting when you don't want to in order to make it to a capital arena before time runs out.) I'm going to break it out again at the weekend when I have more time and play a full Act, to see how it holds up over the intended session length.
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Mar 23, 2023 02:07
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The best expansion for any game is the Journeyman expansion for Isle of Skye. Its not just more of the same it turns it into a whole different game. Playing with the expansion is a real choice because its 2 different games now.
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Mar 23, 2023 09:38
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Aramoro posted:The best expansion for any game is the Journeyman expansion for Isle of Skye. Its not just more of the same it turns it into a whole different game. Playing with the expansion is a real choice because its 2 different games now. I agree, which is why I think it's a terrible expansion. e: more words on what I don't like about Journeyman: IoS's charms don't survive the extra play-time and rules complexity of a second game. I think most games would find it hard to survive having a second game played over top of them. Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 09:59
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The best expansion for me has, and always will be, Dark Alleys for Dungeon Petz. Base game is really good, but Dark Alleys really kicks it up a notch and manages to make the game ride the fine line between risk and reward like a knife-edge.
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Mar 23, 2023 10:42
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My favourite expansion is Orleans: Trade and Intrigue. The base game is very good but steady. The random events in T&I stop it becoming a card counting exercise, and the new Beneficial Deeds board is a massive step up in the original. And if you really want to get interactive, there's the Intrigue board (also known as the Dirty Deeds board) that lets you sabotage other players. Other expansions that raise a game from good to top class are: Dream Home: 156 Sunny Street Barenpark: Die Grizzlies Sind Los! (aka The Bad News Bears) Celestia: A Helping Hand League of Six: Loyal Retinue And of course, no discussion of expansions is complete without mentioning A Feast for Odin: The Norwegians.
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Mar 23, 2023 11:30
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I haven't played dark alleys, so my pick is the Norwegians for feast, it's astonishingly good.
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Mar 23, 2023 11:31
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Admiralty Flag posted:First: Intrigue cards. These are the worst part of the game. Some are near useless (+1 water), some are OK (+1 with a faction), and some are outrageous (+1 VP for 4 spice or 7 Solari). There are only two ways to mitigate Intrigue cards' randomness: get a lot of them yourself (and use the, so you stay under the limit) or stay ahead of the scoring curve. I'd second most of this. I've seen players win without getting seats / swordmasters when everyone else had. It's definitely not the only way to win, and yeah, is sometimes just wrong. Thinning your deck is so good. We play the advanced game these days, which goes longer, (I think to 12 points? I can't remember) and thinning is super super important there. I would disagree about the intrigue cards a bit. In that, yeah, some of them are game changers, but I don't think it's the VP ones. The combat ones tend to be the ones that win the game, in my experience. (Never use them level 1, or if there's no VP for the win, try and save them for a double VP conflict). I think though, either way, you kind of HAVE to invest in having a bunch of intrigue cards. And, yeah, they sway the game hugely. But so does you drawing that expensive card you managed to buy, why is this any different? If one person takes the time to visit the BGs to get them, or win a combat to get them, then, I mean, they're just as 'earned' as having something good come up on the market row for you. It cost you resources to get them, that you could have spent elsewhere. I'd also kind of disagree with the sentiment that buying 'The Spice Must Flow' is something that comes up often. I mean, if you build your deck for purchase power rather than combat, sure, that's a good and viable strat. But I think that's just one strategy and I would say most others don't really have you buying TSMF more than once a game, unless you get really lucky. But, I mean, I think that's something that's very very meta dependant. If everyone goes hard on building their engine, then combats are just naturally going to be lower octane and require less of a commitment, so overall everyone is going to be able to get away with more purchase power. I do think the expansions are great for fostering better deck building choices. Card synergies are actually really important, and building a deck that can do powerful things is actually really important. It feels like there are a bunch of good strategies now that are all fun. /EDIT: On the topic of Expansions chat I definitely think both the Dune Imperium expansions improve the game a lot. They're good for bringing new things, but it all being sidegrades that improve the quality of the game and interaction, rather than just adding 'more stuff'. For me personally, the expansion for Twilight Imperium, Prophecy of Kings is the best though. It's not everyone's cup of tea (SUSD don't like it at all) but it was very very much our playgroups jam. For me, certainly, it gave all the factions much more personality and idiosyncrasy, added a bunch of stuff that make things more exciting, and introduced some of the best factions in the game. That it managed to do all that, while actually improving the balance was really impressive. !Klams fucked around with this message at 11:49 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 11:43
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silvergoose posted:I haven't played dark alleys, so my pick is the Norwegians for feast, it's astonishingly good. Any game that you can get an expansion for that is then considered indispensable a la Norwegians is S+ rank. Bananas to me that the Danes continues to exist only in hushed whispers and hastily photographed prototypes. Inis, Cyclades, Kemet all have really good ones but their base games are perfectly without them so I think it fails the test if the test is something that either fixes issues with base game and/or just adds such great content that you never leave home without it.
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Mar 23, 2023 13:47
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I don't necessarily agree with that, to be honest. I've always had the mind that if the base game becomes too mundane without the expansion, then there were issues with the base game. I like expansions where there is a reason to include them or not depending on the mood, which I think both the Dungeon Lords and Dungeon Petz expansion manage to do: want a more relaxed, newbie friendly teaching game, but still have a rock solid core game? Remove the expansion stuff. Want to have a tighter, more unforgiving game that has extra stuff to keep the old hands on the edge? Include the expansion.
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Mar 23, 2023 13:51
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Speaking of expansions this post on Reddit today had a great breakdown of expansions for games in the BGG top 100, looking at which ones did best, which did noticeably better/worse than the base game etc.
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Mar 23, 2023 13:52
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Honestly not surprised that Carcassone: The Catapult is the worst expansion when compared to the base game. Catapult is so bad.
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Mar 23, 2023 13:56
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Related: we never play Carcassonne without traders and builders, and inns and cathedrals. The extra workers and tiles just work great and add a bunch of fun choices.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:02
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Tekopo posted:I don't necessarily agree with that, to be honest. I've always had the mind that if the base game becomes too mundane without the expansion, then there were issues with the base game. I like expansions where there is a reason to include them or not depending on the mood, which I think both the Dungeon Lords and Dungeon Petz expansion manage to do: want a more relaxed, newbie friendly teaching game, but still have a rock solid core game? Remove the expansion stuff. Want to have a tighter, more unforgiving game that has extra stuff to keep the old hands on the edge? Include the expansion. See, for me, it's a question of onboarding and complexity. The expansion may make a game better but may be a lot to teach all at once. It may be a lot to experience all at once. So you play the base game (which is great!), but once you've grown comfortable with the foundation, you build upon that. That's much less common though than games where the base game had flaws that were fixed.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:03
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Tekopo posted:Honestly not surprised that Carcassone: The Catapult is the worst expansion when compared to the base game. Catapult is so bad. Does it have an actual catapult to fling meeples at the tiles?
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Mar 23, 2023 14:03
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Mr. Squishy posted:Does it have an actual catapult to fling meeples at the tiles? :strip_icc()/pic399168.jpg)
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Mar 23, 2023 14:04
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