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Elysium posted:Played another round of 2p Spirit Island. Finished this one in under 2 hours, maybe 90 minutes of actual playing. Still on easy mode with no blight card, this time Lightning Swift Strike and Vital Strength of the Earth. We made sure to generate fear for destroyed buildings this time. There's a combination of factors here. Most spirits are going to feel pretty OP at the intro level, and when you're not used to dealing with the timing on slow powers Lightning feels particularly strong, but as you get used to using slow powers you learn that making them fast isn't the end all be all it seems at first glance. But also, base game Shadows Flicker is the weakest spirit that ever made it into print by a large margin and Vital Strength of the Earth is also maybe just a smidgen undertuned, and while River Surges isn't any weaker than Lightning it really demands mastery on timing slow powers so it's going to seem harder to pilot at first for the same reasons Lightning feels stronger.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:05
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My son is sick so it was board game time, but he's reaching an emotional maturity level where he can handle competitive games as long as they're not too interactive. Played a fair amount of Roll for the Galaxy and Lords of Waterdeep over the weekend. First time for both in years. Even dusting them off after a long time, neither of them was very enjoyable. Roll for the Galaxy is a perfectly fine solitaire tableau builder, but the "guess what action your opponent is choosing" element is so shallow (and mostly worthless) as to be completely forgettable. Waterdeep is a game of margins - I remember it being somewhat fun when people fought tooth and nail for each spot, but the moment you take your foot off the gas the enjoyment of the game completely craters. My son had his first role selection and first worker placement game, though, and loved both, so I'm chalking the weekend up as a win.
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Nov 26, 2023 22:17
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the holy poopacy posted:There's a combination of factors here. Most spirits are going to feel pretty OP at the intro level, and when you're not used to dealing with the timing on slow powers Lightning feels particularly strong, but as you get used to using slow powers you learn that making them fast isn't the end all be all it seems at first glance. But also, base game Shadows Flicker is the weakest spirit that ever made it into print by a large margin and Vital Strength of the Earth is also maybe just a smidgen undertuned, and while River Surges isn't any weaker than Lightning it really demands mastery on timing slow powers so it's going to seem harder to pilot at first for the same reasons Lightning feels stronger. Yeah people should not underestimate how easy it is to play lightning close to optimally. The only tricky bit is the first two turns and realising that you should save turn 1 to trigger your innate turn 2. After that it's very easy to get 80-90% of optimal play. This makes lightning feel OP at lower levels once you get it because you quite straightforwardly pilot it with enough skill to play level 6-8.
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Nov 27, 2023 01:15
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The fast part of Lightning is how fast you want to enter a reclaim loop. Playing the spirit optimally is very boring!
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Nov 27, 2023 01:19
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Perry Mason Jar posted:The fast part of Lightning is how fast you want to enter a reclaim loop. Hey I mean 90% of gameplay is trying to judge the exact moment to place the third round of presence. Such thrilling decisions! That said it's definitely possible to play lighting better than I can but it's definitely the easiest spirit to pilot up to that higher difficulty level.
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Nov 27, 2023 01:25
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Reminder/PSA: Spirit Island thread that away: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4017460&perpage=40&pagenumber=1&noseen=1 Not that I’m trying to stifle discussion of it here; just giving the link if someone wants to get into in-depth conversations of the best game ever. Oh, and to respectfully disagree: unaspected Shroud makes Shadows look like Lure or Keeper.
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Nov 27, 2023 10:12
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Admiralty Flag posted:Oh, and to respectfully disagree: unaspected Shroud makes Shadows look like Lure or Keeper. Maybe in pure solo games? Shroud's mechanics just break down when there's only a single island board to work with. It's physically impossible to get 9 fear farms barring extremely improbable shenanigans, which might not be such a big deal since that's only an occasional occurrence to begin with, but it's very difficult even juggling 6 since the math of having 8 lands and 2+ ravages every round makes it very expensive in terms of actions and blight. Not to mention that it's a lot more difficult to even set up that many fear farms quickly when you can't just scoop up other spirits' sloppy seconds. Having a bunch of edge lands with only 2-3 adjacencies also nerfs your powers that scale with adjacencies. Shadows also gets the short end of the stick in solo since being able to pay energy for infinite range doesn't really mean much on a tiny board, but even on a huge board that's an expensive luxury you don't get a lot of use out of so it's a pretty minor scaling issue compared to Shroud basically missing its key mechanics in solo.
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Nov 27, 2023 16:44
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Yet another Sidereal Confluence trip report, this time with a couple of the Bifurcation expansion races! This was a five player game with Faderan Conclave, K'jas Directorate, Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl, Imdril Grand Fleet and Yengii Jii. Everyone in this group now has around 4-8 plays under their belt of the original races, so I felt like this was a good time to introduce some additional dynamics to the game. Sidereal Confluence: Bifurcation provides a variant of each of the base game's races and if chosen, are played instead of the original race. Each variant has a new set of starting cards and race specific tokens (if applicable) but reuses the existing race's technology cards. The variant races are a sort-of inversion of each of the original races but still retaining their flavour: The Zeth Charity Syndicate now must beg to get their economy traded back to them each turn but you probably still won't refuse their offers, the K'jas Independants are completely reliant on donation goods from other players rather than being self sufficient, the Faderan Society of Falling Light are almost completely independent of everyone else by inventing for cheap but trading with them requires accepting a poison pill. The Caylion Collaborative is super interesting in that you become the center of attention due to people wanting to 'vote' on which set of your high-quality converters will activate this turn, of which each person who cast a vote will receive one, creating a dynamic where it's a great race for a newcomer OR a super experienced player to use as they'll be the center of attention. Some of the harder races to play become much easier with their variant (Deep Unity) and some of the less interesting races have an entirely new sthick to make them more challenging. The Bifurcation rulebook makes a big deal about being careful about how much 'Impact' new (to SideCon base AND/OR expansion) players see, and most of the new races have an impact score now: unlike the base game where the Zeth Anocracy is 2, and Eni'Et Ascendancy are 1, and everyone else aside from maybe the Yengii are 0. I wasn't necessarily convinced but I heeded the warning and capped the expansion races at 2 regardless. I played Faderan Conclave - I've now played SidCon about 8 times but this was the first game where I felt like I was actually getting a handle on everything and didn't make any major mistakes. The Yengii Jii are trying to sell 'Constraints' which are a high value converter (1 -> 3 or 0 -> 2) but they come with a catch - you can no longer consume the resource they generate for you. I accepted two - one was a [white -> two yellow], and the other was a [brown -> Ultratech], which then locks me out of using ultratech and yellow as an input. I was careful to make sure that I wasn't restricting any of my starting converters or the Relic World Deck. Two was pretty comfortable - I got a lot of free resources and rarely felt like I was being restricted from doing what I wanted. It also helped to focus my game a bit - instead of deciding which cards to upgrade, if it had an input I couldn't use, it was immediately burned to upgrade another card instead. The Im'Dril Grand Fleet start rich and with 5 fleets, but can't deploy any more, so they're about starting ahead and staying ahead. They can produce and sell 'Orbital Factories' which produce an extra small/large cube when attached to a planet. They weren't hugely important and didn't feel that impactful - I accepted early payment to take one, on the condition that it's output was given back to the Im'Dril player at the start of each turn. That said, their starting wealth is quite powerful so while they're difficult to leverage early, by the end of the game as their economy runs out of steam, you can start putting the screws on them. The game was fantastic - the modified races really change the game in subtle ways that forces everyone to look for alternate trades. Where base/inexperienced players might just be looking to trade cubes in a 1:1 manner, adding these different effects really pushes people down the path of multi-turn deals, trading converters and research teams away for fees as well as pre-arranged resource swaps. It really encourages some creative interactivity to get the most out of your economy and adds another layer to what is already a fantastic game. The Yenjii Jii player told me later that at the start of the game he was feeling like he'd played enough SidCon for a while, but by the end of the game he was completely on board with playing more. I won with 64.5 points, with the Grand Fleet player at about 61 and Yengii Jii at about 60 - our previous winning scores have been around the 45 mark. The additonal resources available help to get more research going (we had way more tech out than we have had previously, which was also helped by no one's economy crashing, which I put down to experience. The Kit and K'jas players were a bit further behind but they're still getting a handle on the game and I think they suffered a little from being so indepedent as you miss a lot of value if you think your own economy is 'enough'. It's a fantastic expansion that really pushes you into more mind-bending deals and collaborating with the other players at the board. Making life harder for yourself in this game really forces you to look at the alternatives available, so it's strongly recommended for once you've got a decent grasp of the base game.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:11
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Unaspected shroud is definitely stronger than base shadows. It usually has to take a blight or two early game to scale but it drastically outperforms past that point. The new aspect, Stranded, just gives Shroud a little bit better denial and movement in the first few rounds.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:20
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thanks for the trip report, I’m going to show it to my sidconpilled friend and see if he’ll spring for bifurc. sidcon2024 baby.
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Nov 27, 2023 23:22
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I cut the shrink wrap and unboxed my copy of Bifurcation the other day. Had mould growing on the inside of the box itself top and bottom. A BGG thread seems to indicate it's not an isolated thing, so if you have a copy in shrink might be worth popping it open and checking the box. Components are were fine.
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Nov 28, 2023 00:02
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I also just recently opened my copy of Bifurcation which I received as a gift a year ago. It didn't have mold, but the card colors were messed up slightly in an older printing and the small brown cubes look black, which could easily trip people up in such a fast moving game. According to a BGG thread the newest printing fixed that problem. I'm thinking about trying to reach out to wizkids but I'm not sure if they would do anything about it.
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Nov 28, 2023 00:20
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The Arkham Horror LCG core set is marked down from $45 to $6 for this cyber monday sale: https://www.miniaturemarket.com/ffgahc01.html Note that because this is the original core and not the revised core, buying two copies is advised (as you will want duplicate cards for deckbuilding consistency.) Other than that, the original core is still perfectly viable/usable with the rest of the product line.
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Nov 28, 2023 00:23
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Ticket to Ride Legacy is really good! We're half way through (six out of twelve chapters) and having a blast. It's still the same basic game (but with fewer colours of train cards) but so much more cutthroat. Ticket to Ride has always been a 'chill' game for me, but maybe that's because I've only ever played the European version. This is so much more cutthroat. It's really fun seeing the map get bigger the more we play, and the ability to build new routes is a great idea. My other new purchase is Return to Dark Tower, and all of the expansions. Which is absolutely gigantic. So far we've only played it twice, and just the base game both times (there are two expansions which weirdly aren't compatible with each other, you have to choose which one you want to play, and there's another expansion which is just miniatures for all the enemies). I really enjoyed it, but it seemed too easy; the game is divided into 'months', the first of which has one turn per player and the rest have a random amount of turns influenced by the number of players. I thought there were 4 months, but apparently there are six. Both games we won before the end of month 4 - the first one was the last turn of the month, the second was the first. Still, the gigantic tower rotating and spitting out skulls, glowing glyphs that gently caress us up at us and making all sorts of weird noises is a lot of fun. Sucks that there's no PC app for this - we usually play stuff like Mansions of Madness, Journeys in Middle Earth and even Gloom/Frosthaven with an app on a big monitor at the end of the table - but this has to be an android/ios tablet or phone with bluetooth. Might be a way of emulating in PC, I haven't checked, but lack of a native app sucks regardless.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:12
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Radioactive Toy posted:I also just recently opened my copy of Bifurcation which I received as a gift a year ago. It didn't have mold, but the card colors were messed up slightly in an older printing and the small brown cubes look black, which could easily trip people up in such a fast moving game. According to a BGG thread the newest printing fixed that problem. I'm thinking about trying to reach out to wizkids but I'm not sure if they would do anything about it. Did you mean the base game? Bifurcation doesn't have any cubes included from what I can see and its style matches the Remastered version of SidCon. The original printing of Sidereal Confluence was a readability mess, and also had the cube issue from memory.
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Nov 28, 2023 04:18
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They mean the cards. The original printing of SidCon Remastered had the ink a bit dark for brown cubes on the cards. This was tweaked in a subsequent printing. Not sure if Bifurcation got a new run with lighter brown.
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Nov 28, 2023 04:32
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dishwasherlove posted:They mean the cards. The original printing of SidCon Remastered had the ink a bit dark for brown cubes on the cards. This was tweaked in a subsequent printing. Not sure if Bifurcation got a new run with lighter brown. Ah ok - looks like I have that same printing then. I’m familiar enough now that I hadn’t noticed it as I look at the cube size first.
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Nov 28, 2023 08:05
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Quote-Unquote posted:Ticket to Ride Legacy is really good! Can you talk a bit about cutthroat? I got it for Christmas for my son who can handle complexity (SI) and loves legacy games, but it's still emotionally young for getting crushed.
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Nov 28, 2023 18:30
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CitizenKeen posted:Can you talk a bit about cutthroat? I got it for Christmas for my son who can handle complexity (SI) and loves legacy games, but it's still emotionally young for getting crushed. Especially in the early game, the map is very small and you don't have many trains, so you end up figuring out what routes people are going for and blocking them. You get a mechanism to cope with this a bit better in... I wanna say game 3, that lets you build one route even if it has already been claimed. And as the map grows it becomes less of an issue It's also a legit strategy to complete a couple of smaller routes for yourself then slam down trains as fast as possible, forcing an early endgame so opponents can't finish their routes, which loses them money. We've found that chasing a big score is undermined by someone doing this, so it's really important to keep an eye on how many trains everyone has out of a much more limited pool. Without spoiling too much, you also get routes that will give you a 'postcard' when completed, which can really swing a game. These are secret until used, which infuriated one of my mates when I pulled out a card right at the end to secure a victory. Actually this happened twice, so he was not happy!
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Nov 28, 2023 19:16
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I hosted a game night over the weekend and was able to get OG Nemesis to the table which I'd bought on a whim a few weeks ago. 5 players, varying boardgame experience, first time playing for all of us. I spent the week watching some 'how to play' and the No Rolls Barred play throughs of the game and it really paid off in the teach, which went relatively smoothly for such a fiddley game. That said after a 3+ hour play session I can see why its a polarizing game. 4 of the 5 of us had a great time, the 5th not so much. To be fair he didn't have a ton of boardgame experience and he had some roll based frustration and ended up leaving early. We just killed off his character and continued unabated. Overall the rest of us were able to squeak out a win but it was tense for sure, with it coming down to one last dice roll for me out of options just punching an alien (always a bad idea) and rolling a hit which turned out to be enough wounds to kill it and then I could escape into the escape pod. Everyone who stayed wanted to play again, now having picked up on some of the nuance that I missed in the rules explanation, and I'm looking forward to organizing another night during the holiday season. Overall a really good experience. 4 out of 5 dentists would recommend!
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Nov 28, 2023 22:46
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Commander Jebus posted:I hosted a game night over the weekend and was able to get OG Nemesis to the table which I'd bought on a whim a few weeks ago. 5 players, varying boardgame experience, first time playing for all of us. I spent the week watching some 'how to play' and the No Rolls Barred play throughs of the game and it really paid off in the teach, which went relatively smoothly for such a fiddley game. That said after a 3+ hour play session I can see why its a polarizing game. 4 of the 5 of us had a great time, the 5th not so much. To be fair he didn't have a ton of boardgame experience and he had some roll based frustration and ended up leaving early. We just killed off his character and continued unabated. For a game the internet hates so much, it's been a big hit at my table when it's come out as well. I think people need to be on board for what the game might bring them though (ie: a fast and random death at the hands of the Queen).
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Nov 28, 2023 23:49
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I played 18CH and now I'm a train gamer god help me
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Nov 29, 2023 00:40
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been gaming really good in november, my favourite thing about the weather turning chilly is this incredible month for tabletop before people get busy with december’s holiday plans first weekend of the month went to a friend’s place for catch-up under the pretense of gaming. it was his birthday so he picked the itinerary. we had 6 players so we ended up with spiel des jahres 2015 winner Colt Express on the table, an altogether fine programming game with strong table presence and a <60 minute length. I hadn’t played this in like five years and had to teach/refresh the other players, and was surprised at how clear and concise my teach was after all this time. for a better time I recommend playing with the advanced deck management rules and character drafting (last in turn order picks first). afterwards the birthday boy picked Mansions of Madness 2e which I won’t say much about because I disliked it and found it boring. to say something positive, the app integration made it the most fun and narratively cohesive of the Arkham/Eldritch cohort apart from the LCG, which isn’t really a high bar day after was serious game day with a more core-focused friend group, with my in-shrink copy of The Great Zimbabwe that I acquired at the beginning of september the one title I really wanted to get played. in the planning process the attendance ballooned from 4p to 7p, which caused some light consternation on my end when it looked like TGZ was out of reach, until someone suggested we just break off into a table of 3 and a table of 4. I forgot that that was a possibility. I got there later than everyone else so I missed the first two games (Broom Service, which I want to play again soon, and Not Alone, which is a good and quick one vs. many with strong bluffing elements that excels at a higher player count), but I was able to join in on a 7p The Great Split.  I really like The Great Split as a large-group pseudo-drafting game, though it’s really more of an I-cut-you-choose set collection title. production values on it are excellent, and because of the seeded decks and heavy interactivity with your table neighbours making meaningful splits remains exciting for the duration of the game. my one qualm with the title is that it’s extremely difficult to meaningfully interact with players other than those to your direct left and right, though the game is over so quick that it ultimately doesn’t bother me much. would highly recommend for a more casually-minded group that enjoys 7 Wonders or Sushi Go. afterwards we broke off into a 3p TGZ and a 4p Keyflower, which I was envious of because I also love Keyflower. nevertheless TGZ was a blast; the core rules are so straightforward (apart, perhaps, from hub use) and the gameplay so player-driven that it’s easy to see why this is some people’s favourite splotter. the god/specialist system is so elegant that I’m still thinking about how I could have approached the game differently more than three weeks later.  I went big cow because I’d never done so before and wanted to see how the most bloated strategy possible would stack up. for those unfamiliar, taking powerful abilities in TGZ increases the point threshold necessary to win. it was really fun to sling around so much cattle and buy expensive techs like diamond cutter outright but I think ultimately going leaner and meaner is the play, because I ended up inflating the economy via my turn order bids and craftsman prices. I came close though…  final scores 28/26 40/39 27/31. first tiebreaker is by how many points a player passes their points to win by, so I lost by 1. amazing game that I want to replay soon.  last game of the evening was a 6p Sidereal Confluence, which is always an amazing time but made even moreso by the table being composed of very capable gamers who didn’t need any handholding, which is novel to me, as my SidCon experience prior to were 9p games that always featured more casual players. I was getting lightly burned out by that point in the evening so I played Kit, the no thoughts head empty faction. the ease of use allowed me to focus on finesse, and I got to negotiate multi-turn trades, three-way trades, and converter trades more than I’d done in any game prior.  my final score was 47, coming in second to the Faderan player’s 53 who made some very interesting and aggressive trades. it was my first time playing with the 2nd edition, and I was amazed at how much nicer the production values are over 1e (which I own). sad I’ll probably never table my 1st edition again, time to let it go for 20bux. the week after was back at birthday friend’s place, this time with the explicit intent to play light games with 5 players. first off was a round of Letter Jam, which is always a hit with groups who like word games and are willing to play something a little more involved. my copy hasn’t been getting a lot of play recently because of So Clover, so it was a joy to get it on the table again. if someone has the 9th letter chip promo from gencon a few years back, get at me   next up was Cat in the Box, the “quantum trick taker” from last year. we’re in a bit of a trick-taking golden age, but I greatly appreciate this game for the way it incorporates several elements that I enjoy, from deduction to bidding to area control. it’s also ridiculously cute with great production values. do I like it better than Scout, Nokosu Dice, The Crew, Brian Boru, or any of the myriad other trick-takers that have come out in the last few years? yes, though it’s close for Scout.  next was Du Ký, a game I picked up in vietnam last month. It’s a co-op game that plays similarly to Mysterium, in which the players are trying to steer each other into choosing the correct illustrations by asking adjective-driven questions like “are your dreams spicy?”. on its face it seemed like it would be quite easy, but we lost both times we tried. the art was strong enough to sell the game, as all of it featured dreamlike scenes from the saigon cityscape.  we finished with Maskmen, which is in my top 3 oinks (Scout, Startups, Maskmen). the game’s been discussed at length in this thread before so I won’t bloviate about it but it was funny hearing a new player say “what the gently caress, this game doesn’t make any sense” after not being able to play a card for the first five hands and then that same player sheepishly comboing off their entire hand once the other players exhausted themselves establishing the wrestlers’ power levels. great game. the week afterwards I attended a 19-player netrunner tournament being held in the PATH (the 30km underground complex that runs underneath much of downtown toronto) which was amazing for the novelty of reclaiming pseudo-public space for the purpose of playing a card game, as well as because netrunner is the best card game ever printed. we have a thread for it btw.  and just this past weekend we did a netrunner cube. I did not win this time but I got to combo off with a teia twice. I did an effortpost on cube in the netrunner thread the last time I attended; if I could only play one game for the rest of my life it would be netrunner cube. these are my decks and my scored agenda area right before I comboed off in my game 1.    oh yeah early in the month I hosted a 16 player mtg chaos draft at a bar and it kind of ruled because people brought everything from 4th edition to lord of the rings and it really felt like we were playing in the gilded age before the collapse of rome with how much nonsense was happening (“what does ‘the ring tempts you’ mean?” “does anyone have any brick counters?” “does anyone have a non-spindown d20?” et al). anyway drafting owns and the decks were surprisingly high power level across the tables compared to the last time I chaos drafted in 2019, probably because the sets that have come out in the interim are tuned really well for limited.   gamers november. it only happens once a year.
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Nov 29, 2023 00:54
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armorer posted:For a game the internet hates so much, it's been a big hit at my table when it's come out as well. I think people need to be on board for what the game might bring them though (ie: a fast and random death at the hands of the Queen). Same - my group and I really like it! Out of curiosity though, how much did your groups use the crafting mechanic? I've played three times and I'm not sure if any of us have ever crafted anything
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Nov 29, 2023 00:59
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panko posted:gamers november. it only happens once a year. I'm jealous of all of that to the point that I was already nearly foaming at the mouth by the time you got to the Netrunner cube and Chaos Draft. I can't get my friends to play Netrunner since there's no multiplayer, and I can't get them to draft the sets they say they want to draft, much less a Chaos Draft.
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Nov 29, 2023 01:05
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Major Isoor posted:Same - my group and I really like it! Out of curiosity though, how much did your groups use the crafting mechanic? I've played three times and I'm not sure if any of us have ever crafted anything Not often. I've seen the taser get crafted and used, and a number of quest items although that's not exactly crafting. It's a useful mechanism if you manage to explore a lot of the ship without triggering an encounter and you have some items that aren't otherwise particularly useful.
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Nov 29, 2023 01:33
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armorer posted:For a game the internet hates so much, it's been a big hit at my table when it's come out as well. I think people need to be on board for what the game might bring them though (ie: a fast and random death at the hands of the Queen). Wait, why do you say the game is hated? It seems pretty universally loved. High rank on BGG. Good aftermarket resell. Current kickstarter just launched made like 4 million the first day.
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Nov 29, 2023 02:16
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iceyman posted:Wait, why do you say the game is hated? It seems pretty universally loved. High rank on BGG. Good aftermarket resell. Current kickstarter just launched made like 4 million the first day. It's frequently reviewed as being an experience generator, akin to Betrayal. People cite the high degree of randomness, player elimination, and pseudo-coop/traitor mechanism as resulting in folks having a miserable time playing it. It's wildly successful to be sure, but people also consider it to be a shining example of kickstarter bloated games that aren't actually good games. Honestly, all of those are fair criticisms to a certain extent, but it's still fun and folks have enjoyed playing it at my house.
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Nov 29, 2023 02:25
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It's another crowdfunding darling that's a mechanically bad game if you care about things like RNG dictating almost everything about the play. It's an experience generator with tons of minis and a trope people love, but the game part of it is a mess. Your personal goal might be impossible to complete because of the random layout of the ship. The person beside you may be able to complete it for free on turn two. Have fun if that's your kind of thing.
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Nov 29, 2023 02:25
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All the SidCon trip reports are killing me, I own the base game and expansion and have absolutely no one to play the game with. It's my dream game and it just sits there gathering dust  (((Keep posting the trip reports i live vicariously through you all)
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Nov 29, 2023 02:28
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Glagha posted:I played 18CH and now I'm a train gamer god help me If you have time I'd love to hear your impressions and insights and such
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Nov 29, 2023 02:32
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armorer posted:It's frequently reviewed as being an experience generator, akin to Betrayal. People cite the high degree of randomness, player elimination, and pseudo-coop/traitor mechanism as resulting in folks having a miserable time playing it. It's wildly successful to be sure, but people also consider it to be a shining example of kickstarter bloated games that aren't actually good games. Yep, agreed. However one thing to note, is that there are group objectives that you can pick, so that players aren't necessarily incentivised to throw other players under the bus. I don't really mind either way, but IMO that's a good step to take, in order to appease those who strongly dislike player elimination. Also drat, people comparing Nemesis to Betrayal? That seems way too harsh. Betrayal can be fun, but Nemesis is way more thought-out. There have been many occasions in Betrayal where the traitor/survivors are just instantly doomed the moment the Haunt is revealed, giving the other player(s) an easy win. While in Nemesis, everyone is in that "doomed" mad scramble to get out alive! 
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Nov 29, 2023 02:33
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I would compare it to Dead of Winter, which is probably even more damning. I don't mind the idea of a beer and pretzels game full of randomness, but Nemesis is too fiddly, arbitrary, and long to have as a fun dice chucker.
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Nov 29, 2023 02:37
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I agree with all those criticisms of the game but that wasn't really the question. I do not get the impression that Nemesis is generally hated, even in this thread. Comparing it to Dead of Winter is also unfair. Comparing anything to Dead of Winter is unfair.
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Nov 29, 2023 03:20
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Nah even on Reddit it gets plenty of detractors. Not that it’s broadly hated, but plenty of the community don’t like it or games of that ilk. Any crowdfunded minis fest is going to have a lot of detractors independent of the design itself. A lot of people still have negative interest in Ahnk because it’s a CMON overpriced and overproduced multi box thing, even though the actual game is a Knizia like game that’s pretty cool.
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Nov 29, 2023 03:37
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Rooster Brooster posted:If you have time I'd love to hear your impressions and insights and such Game was easier to play than I expected although I was playing it online so I dunno automation might help. Even our first game where we were all new to it we started getting slimy real quick when one of the other players bought my company out from under me, stole all its money with a train from one of his, then dumped all the stock and left me holding the bag. I lost that game. The second one we played I won by recognizing a situation where I could do the exact same to someone else and I blew them out and won off of it. Impressions are I feel like I'm probably lucky to be playing this with a group of equally skilled players because I get the feeling there's some real fuckin dirty tricks I haven't seen yet that would probably make me unhappy so I'm glad to not be exposed to it immediately because I feel like this is the kind of genre where there's going to be some kind of "oh you NEVER bid on X company in a 4 player game because if you do then the player with Y is in a position to block you and then..." blah blah blah somehow you lose for something innocuous. The kind of thing I'd prefer to find out about at game 10 rather than 1. For now though I suddenly finding myself thinking about 18xx games and wanting to play more so I ended up trying City of the Big Shoulders on BGA and now I'm gonna get into a game of Shikoku 1889
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Nov 29, 2023 04:30
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Quote-Unquote posted:Ticket to Ride Legacy is really good! I'll throw in another opinion of Ticket to Ride: Legacy, from a "core gamer", 3 games in. The thing with legacy games is that the "base" game onto which stuff gets constantly added needs to be solid and engaging in its own right or the modulations and curveballs are probably not gonna be enough to carry the experience. I have TTR, I like but don't love TTR, and basically keep it as a gateway game to bring others into the hobby. I give it a 6. Playing legacy TTR means playing what is basically TTR on a near-weekly basis and under this scrutiny, the flaws of TTR as a game begin to be more plainly seen, and less tolerated. The basic experience of TTR and its player interaction is hoping that the tickets you start with and draw throughout the game lineup with each other, and that another player doesn't step on your toes, typically more or less by accident. This basic formula hasn't been changing fast enough to make me hungry or interested in the rest of the surprises it may have to offer.
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Nov 29, 2023 06:19
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One hell of a SUSD video on John Company 2nd ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykrqCX2_mhU
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Nov 29, 2023 06:49
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Major Isoor posted:Yep, agreed. However one thing to note, is that there are group objectives that you can pick, so that players aren't necessarily incentivised to throw other players under the bus. I don't really mind either way, but IMO that's a good step to take, in order to appease those who strongly dislike player elimination. The problem is the Corp objectives are usually very hard in comparison to the personal objectives. If I remember rightly one of the Corp objectives is to reroute the spaceship, which there's no reason to do normally so it's really obvious what you're doing. Or you could just get 'Kill player X' which is super easy by comparison. That's where the game falls down when someone is trying to do something fun like get the Egg and someone else is just trying to kill that one player. It's really hamstrings an otherwise decent game.
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Nov 29, 2023 10:07
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 17:06 |
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Just on the subject: The crowdfunder for the third (and apparently final) Nemesis game is up. It is what it is, you probably already know if you give a poo poo. My feeling on Nemesis falls squarely into, “This seems neat enough but I would absolutely never pay that price for a shipping container full of plastic for a game I’ll get to play twice,” so I’m kind of jazzed that there’s a relatively cheap standee-only edition.
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Nov 29, 2023 10:23
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