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Cats suffer a lot in new player groups but aren't nearly so bad off once everyone had more experience, including the cat player. New cat players get tricked by their starting placement into trying to defend the whole whole board
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Dec 11, 2023 18:10
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Newbies look at cats and see the whole lumber thing and it looks like an engine builder and they start building mills and they seem to be doing well and then people cut off their lines, score points taking out their cardboard, and slow them down. They might maintain their pace, but the other factions just accelerate and the cats don't keep up well. I have a friend who always plays games super aggro and he played the cats in his first game and almost won in a dominance victory. From the start he was pumping out recruiters and keeping nearly every piece on the board (holding back just enough to buy the occasional bird card from the otters). He was complaining about my attacking him (as badgers) and I was saying that it was because I had to attack someone and he was everywhere. That was true, but I also just know his style well enough to suspect from the start what he would try to do and I wanted to put pressure on him to spread out his defense. My daughter ended up winning as otters because he left a huge stack of cardboard empty in his final attempt to hold his fox clearings and she was able to just scoop up those points and then spend her last meeple moving her stack into his territory, forcing me to pay for mercenaries and spend my actions doing the actual fighting. He called it kingmaking because by stopping his immediate dominance win, I basically made her win inevitable. I think he was just employing some good old fashioned "tactical whining" - he's the one who left his pile of wood lying around. Anyway, root is fun if you don't mind the kind of political game that rewards whining and manipulation. If you play the cats, go for dominance.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:07
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My play for cats was always to pull back and go hard on lumbermills with consolidated defenses. That worked reliably well with the original 6 factions, can't speak much to how they do with the new deck, maps, or against the new factions as they're generally not picked any more.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:17
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The cats are your bog standard imperialists, it's the rats who are fascists.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:56
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King Burgundy posted:The Fox Experiment! We played this for the first time on Sunday and it was surprisingly good. The rulebook was a bit of a tome but it was easy enough once you got going. The dice rolling is not too punishing and the way your genetically superior foxes go back into the line up was neat.
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Dec 12, 2023 12:19
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When did Dice Tower add like two dozen reviewers? Are there different teams or what?
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Dec 17, 2023 18:17
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My copy of Oathsworn was delivered on Friday. I didn't kickstart it but got it right from the Shadowborne website, shipped after about a month which I suppose isn't too bad (I had heard they had to wait until all the kickstarter fulfilment was done in my region first, which makes sense) Just lol at the size of the shipping box. In other news I also got in a few games of Sky Team with my wife, and had a pretty good time repeatedly crashing trying to land at Montreal-Trudeau airport. Lot of plate spinning and a huge random element with the dice. Commander Jebus fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Dec 17, 2023 |
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Dec 17, 2023 18:36
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I was finally able to get Unfathomable to the table and while having never played BSG before i know of it's legacy and i can see why it originally became such a success! Is the game suppose to be super hard for humans? The traitor basically didn't have to do much of anything to actual hurt us while various crises slowly dwindled down our resources and it was a last second full traitor reveal that ultimatly did us in. Overall a lot of fun on first play and hope to get more time in.
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Dec 17, 2023 20:42
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Unfathomable sometimes has that issue. There's also times where the randomness favors the humans too and the traitor can't really do much about it. BSG fixed a lot of that with expansions.
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Dec 17, 2023 21:14
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BSG leans traitor because even outside of their interference, the humans still have to overcome their own bad luck with the crisis deck.
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Dec 17, 2023 22:09
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They kind of have to lean traitor, or having 0 traitors during the first phase wouldn't work. I think that's healthier than leaning human, it gives players who start traitor more agency on when they'll reveal and how to approach the game.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:08
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Busted out some Sidereal Confluence today, 4p, first time for everyone. Extremely fun time and the first game is always about getting your bearings in how the game works. I really like that the game is about greasing the economy so the wealth on the table constantly goes up, and everyone has asymmetric goals and their own little economies the support. Very interesting in getting more players and playing again.
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Dec 18, 2023 04:51
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Played heat with the vehicle upgrades, a lot more fun with the small level of variance.
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Dec 18, 2023 05:06
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SettingSun posted:Busted out some Sidereal Confluence today, 4p, first time for everyone. Extremely fun time and the first game is always about getting your bearings in how the game works. I really like that the game is about greasing the economy so the wealth on the table constantly goes up, and everyone has asymmetric goals and their own little economies the support. Very interesting in getting more players and playing again. Not to be that guy again but I'm going to throw in my dislike of this game that everyone seems to love. I don't like negotiation so I mean it's no surprise that Negotiation: The Game is deeply unfun to me but I can try to put some words as to what/why it is I don't like. To me the game is basically like an advanced party game with each player holding one end of a long thread that all lead into the middle of the table and are knotted together. To untangle the knots, you must interact with other players in real-time haggling since they have stuff you need to run your engine and vice-versa. Sometimes, cooperating with someone else will release more of your thread than theirs; sometimes, it will release more of yours. Being sufficiently open to making a deal while not giving away more than you have to is the "game" of the game. At the end, once the knot has been completely untied, the player holding the longest string is the winner. Of course there is more of a there there, with such considerations as what direction the economy is going and trying to offer what is scarce and require what is abundant. But all in all, it feels like work to me to unknot this web, and really a big yapping contest when it comes to who will come out on top.
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Dec 18, 2023 07:04
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Not to put too fine a point on it but I wouldn't ask someone who dislikes it so much to play it. It's no fun to force someone to play a game type they hate! I understand why this type of game doesn't appeal to you. I have friends who would rather cut their eyes out than suffer a hidden traitor game or any other game where the gameplay is a form of social engineering. I think reducing the game to an exercise in asset risk analysis is missing the forest for the trees. I'm in it to make insane multi turn deals and offering my shoes for the opportunity to use someone else's converter while negotiating just how much food I can swindle out of someone else.
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Dec 18, 2023 07:29
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Was going to play board games yesterday but was starting feeling ill and decided to cancel it. I made the right choice but it sucks  Had a big ol' selection ready to go
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Dec 18, 2023 10:47
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I've played a few games with a friend of a friend recently who's generally a decent guy but has a pretty lovely attitude towards playing stuff outside of his preference and it's made me not really want to play with him any more. I am totally fine with people having their own tastes but his issues seem totally incoherent, like he thinks that Euro games in general are "too slow / AP inducing" but his favourite games are straight wargames and epic DOAM dice throwers, many of which take an entire day to play. Also complains that Euro games have too many decisions to make and too many "special case rules" and that the most experienced player will win every time because the gameplay is just about properly interpreting the rules, but then ends up doing perfectly well on his first play anyway because in spite of his attitude he's great at seeing opportunities on the map. We did a full teach to 2 new players + play of a 5p game of Hansa Teutonica in less than 2 hours which seems totally reasonable to me? Meanwhile when we played Chaos in the Old World at his request it took over an hour just to do the rules explanation, one of the players got completely hosed by a random event (Tseench only getting 1 card draw / turn for almost the entire game) and basically wasn't allowed to play the game, while the rest of the game was just Khorne and Skaven beating up the other players with minimal pushback and there was at least one occasion where someone took literally 15 minutes to take a single turn. This was a really dull experience for me, but I didn't follow it up trying to argue that the games is objectively bad because it's really loving rude to poo poo over someone's game that they're enthusiastic about, even if I think that these sorts of dice-chucking games are complete rear end by design and this was a particularly egregious example of it. I get that the easy answer here is to just not play with him any more but I guess the reason this feels weird / frustrating is that he's clearly good at the games and understands how to play (and therefore it's fun to play against him!) but for some reason that he doesn't seem to be able to properly articulate he just inherently prefers these other games with a more epic scope and always gripes about it afterwards like he's doing us a favour by lowering himself to playing a lowly Euro game. I don't know anyone else who really prefers DOAM / ameritrash type games which is a shame because I'd feel better about it if I could get a more nuanced take on why he thinks these games are more fun to play
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Dec 18, 2023 11:51
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Have you tried some of the more highly interactive Euros? I'm thinking the great Zimbabwe, Santiago, fresh fish, reef encounter. Just wondering if his beef is with low interaction, not what he stated (and thinks, I'm not saying he's lying).
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Dec 18, 2023 12:22
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Some people really like dice. I don't know if there's a relationship between game tastes and gambling, but it would be interesting to see.
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Dec 18, 2023 12:24
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silvergoose posted:Have you tried some of the more highly interactive Euros? I'm thinking the great Zimbabwe, Santiago, fresh fish, reef encounter. Just wondering if his beef is with low interaction, not what he stated (and thinks, I'm not saying he's lying). Quite possibly but HT is already dangerously high interaction compared to the preferences of most of the people I usually play with so I don't own or have access to anythink that falls into the high end of the Euro interactivity scale. I have a pretty weird regular gaming group where the three most popular games are Terraforming Mars (minimal interaction, inoffensive but outstays its welcome 90% of the time because the game end timer is poo poo), Galaxy Trucker (honestly don't know where to class this in terms of interaction but I loving hate this game, it's the only game I will straight up not play any more) and High Frontier (has quite a lot of interaction but in weirdly indirect ways, also takes 1-2 days to play a game). There's a significant bias in favour of sci-fi themed games without much linking things together mechanically, which makes it generally difficult to get any of my own collection to the table (I am almost entirely theme agnostic but all of the games I want to play for mechanical reasons have bland European history themes, which I do honestly enjoy as well, I am a big history buff) This new guy is a regular in the D&D group which mostly overlaps with our boardgaming group (I am not in the D&D group, mostly because I moved to the area after everyone else and the DM doesn't want more players) but while I've seen him around at a bunch of meetups I've never actually played games with him until a couple of weeks ago. Oh dear me posted:Some people really like dice. I don't know if there's a relationship between game tastes and gambling, but it would be interesting to see. If the opportunity comes up I'll see if he fancies a game of Troyes.
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Dec 18, 2023 12:43
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Galaxy Trucker hate? In the thread??  ???
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Dec 18, 2023 13:00
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Let's spitball some ideas off the top of my head. Let me know if you think I'm off base here. 1: This could be from a difference in the individual importance of theme in games. Games like HT and Concordia have low 'thematic dissonance' but also low 'thematic resonance.' These are terms I am just making up but I feel they get something across about the role of theme in games. For many avid board gamers, what matters is that the mechanics are good and the theme is not actively disruptive, but others need or want some additional thematic entanglement for their games actions to be engrossing. This is why some might favor moderately complex games like Nemesis, or for a less exaggerated example, the Lang DOAM games like CitOW / Blood Rage / et al yet chafe at Food Chain Magnate. To understand this, I like to imagine "Could this have been easily rethemed to something else?" For instance, Nemesis would be difficult to retheme to anything but a pastiche of the Alien franchise because that theme is resonant and highly integrated. It's always a measure of degrees, and there are limits. Sidereal Confluence could be rethemed as a game about modern corporations but it could not be rethemed as a non-negotiation game. Food Chain Magnate could be themed away from 1950s americana and junk food but could not be taken away from the "urbanity" because it's about roads and neighbors in a "positional 1989 SimCity" sort of way. I would normally say the way around this is to try themeless games, but they tend to be either 2 players (abstracts) or very light (party games). Also, there are a subset of gamers for who the existence of a theme, any theme, is important. They like For Sale but not No Thanks. They like The Crew but not The Mind. This is also on top of some themes being more appealing then others based on personal taste, like sci-fi or fantasy. 2: Board games are multifaceted in their appeal, and many gamers take different joys out of them. Some things like aesthetics, bittyness, social interaction are common but the two I think about most are what I'll call 'puzzle' and 'competition.' A low-interraction Euro is more of a puzzle while a DOAM is typically more of a competition. Some people want to work out how they can do their best, while others are working out how to do best. That is informed by someone's level of competitiveness. At the edges is where you see some of the rankling. In Flamecraft, it's basically solitaire outside of the primary worker placement. Things you compete over like Fancy Dragons are drawn randomly. The exception is you can go to a shop and take a spell before someone get it because they are in a public market. You can see the spell needs Diamonds and Meat and Andrea has 4 of each, and you've got 1 of each so you can go make a move to take it from her. It's a backbreaking move and unusually cutthroat and is one primary source of bad feels in that otherwise soft, cute game. 3: Randomness. Everyone has a different relationship with randomness. Some people want to have it expressed as a die, to be outward and clear. Other games shunt their randomness with card draws for random events or use luck mitigation to allow ways to manipulate luck to a certain extent. I had a player tell me he didn't like Eclipse because the ship combat was too random, which is fair enough, though things like computers can mitigate that. He did not have an issue with the tile drawing in the same game for whatever reason. Non-deterministic combat is something lots of gamers are suspicious of. Other games like Five Tribes possess what I will call "de facto randomness by board state complexity." The board is set and not random. It is set. However, the number of possibilities of meeples you can take in a Five Tribes mancala action is high, the number of spaces you can move will vary and the board set up will change very single turn meaning that you might need to change your plan on your turn. This will affect some minds differently than others. For myself, that sort of spacial puzzle absolutely freezes my brain so I don't find it super appealing, and because I'm neurotic, any game which causes AP in me makes me feel like I'm being a bad opponent. (YMMV.) A less extreme example might be a center-market deckbuilder like Ascension or Clank, but typically there are only 5 or so cards to understand so the effect is mitigated. In those cases, the more likely issue is the inequal opportunity. 4: Most people cannot communicate effectively. This is not exclusive to board gamers. They like what they like and have never bothered to interrogate it because it's difficult, annoying and often quite fruitless and others find it tiresome to listen to. Even if they try to communicate, people equivocate terms all the time. "This game is one I like" and "This game is good" are two different statements, but that nuance is often lost. These limitations can confuse people as to why you would like a game that isn't good, or why you would call a game good if you don't like it. It requires clarity, and let me be frank: this is hard and I don't blame anyone for not managing it. Despite considering myself to be a pretty good communicator and being extremely plugged in to board games, I usually don't accomplish this to my own level of satisfaction. It's made harder by the fact that often people are annoyed that their very limited leisure time is not going their way. It's the same reason people are often very mad on their vacations. It could be an issue of misaligned expectations. I'm sure there's more to say on this, but that's what I have for now.
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Dec 18, 2023 13:35
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I think your point about "types of randomness" is probably on the money since he did have a specific beef with games being overly deterministic. For reference, the two games I've played with him which he complained about are Concordia and Hansa Teutonica which both have a lot going in terms of making the game state complex, but every time you take an action the outcome is entirely fixed. He seemed to get pretty bad AP at times when it didn't seem like the game state warranted it, which might suggest that he was trying to plan multiple turns in advance. Personally, I love randomness of possibilities in games, but dislike randomness in outcome (I particularly like Troyes and Castles of Burgundy for managing to have dice rolling mechanics which are fun to engage with). I'm guessing from his comments that he prefers the reverse, where you have a more static pool of options to choose from, but the outcome of some of your decisions is ultimately determined randomly. He's apparently well known within the D&D group as being the most socially abrasive of the lot and having absolutely no filter so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's just saying exactly what he thinks as soon as the thought comes up and that his comments shouldn't be taken in an overly critical way, the other guy who was playing for the first time had a pretty bad game and was giving off a lot of negative vibes so I wasn't in the best frame of mind. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 14:45
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RabidWeasel posted:I think your point about "types of randomness" is probably on the money since he did have a specific beef with games being overly deterministic. For reference, the two games I've played with him which he complained about are Concordia and Hansa Teutonica which both have a lot going in terms of making the game state complex, but every time you take an action the outcome is entirely fixed. He seemed to get pretty bad AP at times when it didn't seem like the game state warranted it, which might suggest that he was trying to plan multiple turns in advance. Does he hate losing too and if he wins a game the first time he plays it dramatically affects the likelihood of a positive impression or not? And conversely, if he gets stomped or feels lost it suddenly turns into "worst... game... ever..."? Not exactly related to this but I have a friend that just prefers more aggressive in-your-face type games and naturally gravitates toward ameritrash/conflict oriented games versus Trading In The Mediterranean While Watching Track Go Up™ and honestly, I can sympathise more often than not. VVV Just introduce people to 18xx and then you only have to explain the subtle differences between this one and 1830/46. Ta-daaa FulsomFrank fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 14:52
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He actually won both games which part of what's confusing me, I'm used to people feeling sore after playing a game for the first time and getting stomped, but when you just barely squeeze out a victory in a 4 or 5 player game that's usually the sort of thing that makes you want to play more I think I'm also starting to get fatigue from always having to teach 2 or 3 new players every time I play a game because otherwise we will just play game number 12,000 of Terraforming Mars but I guess that's the downside of trying to get people to try new things when you're part of a larger group of gamers which don't meet up with a fixed schedule and who seem perfectly happy to play the exact same game every time unless someone puts in the effort to deviate from the path of least resistance E: On a vaguely related note I just found out we've been playing HT wrong in at least 2 different ways and this is after already picking up a different rules issue a while ago. I have never had this much difficulty with rules with a game before but I guess I'm usually the person who errors checks everyone else's rules explain so since I am the only guy ever teaching this game it leaves more room for misinterpretation. I'm letting the new players look through the rulebook rather than reading it myself every time. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 15:21
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Just played my first game of TI yesterday. I picked Hacan without sorta realizing quite how much of the board state I needed to know and how much wheeling and dealing I really needed to do. I found my inner used car salesman and rocketed into the lead for a while and then unfortunately stalled as the board sort of locked up on me. Still wound up with a top half finish, super fun game though.
LionYeti fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 19:05
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finally the truth about galaxy trucker comes to light: galaxy trucker sucks
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Dec 18, 2023 19:35
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wrong
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Dec 18, 2023 19:39
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The only problem with galaxy trucker is that you can get good enough at it to survive to the end.
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Dec 18, 2023 19:46
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My favourite galaxy trucker survival was when all I had left was my main cabin and a single gun. Survived for four cards, just floating home.
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Dec 18, 2023 19:53
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When you look at the last deck of the last 3 cards and pray that there isn't an Open Space left. But there is always an Open Space left.
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Dec 18, 2023 22:02
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sirtommygunn posted:The only problem with galaxy trucker is that you can get good enough at it to survive to the end. Just play with more rough road cards. MOAR! (sic). Once you get to half a dozen staying alive becomes extremely difficult, partly because you generally have fairly insane ship building restrictions. Gravitational Anomaly, remorseless fate, and Defective connectors really ratchet up the difficulty. If you're playing with a mix of skill levels, you just have only a subset of the rough road cards apply to people. We do: New player: none Has played before: one Has been first amongst equals atleast once before: Two Considers themselves good at the game: three Considers themselves the best player at the table: Four
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Dec 18, 2023 23:27
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if everyone's surviving to the end then you're not flipping the timer fast enough
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Dec 18, 2023 23:31
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LionYeti posted:Just played my first game of TI yesterday. I picked Hacan without sorta realizing quite how much of the board state I needed to know and how much wheeling and dealing I really needed to do. I found my inner used car salesman and rocketed into the lead for a while and then unfortunately stalled as the board sort of locked up on me. Still wound up with a top half finish, super fun game though. There are probably better races, but Hacan has to be near the top of the "you'll have a blast playing these guys" faction. It's also great for new players because it teaches them real quickly that the goal is not to play space risk, it's to convince all the other idiots to play space risk.
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Dec 19, 2023 05:10
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christmas came early this year and I was fortunate enough to get to play games every weekend in december. here’s a quick trip report on everything I played in-person (have also been embroiled in an async troyes series with fellow bg discord goons, which has now mutated into a caylus game) scout is an excellent ladder-climbing game in compact packaging. it’s been covered at length in this thread already but it’s one of my top 3 oinks (scout, maskmen, startups) and I played it more in-person than any other title this year, by virtue of it almost always being in the game bag. my usual strategy is to save my scout & show tile to finish off my hand, but this time I got to do the hilarious play of “someone lays a seemingly unbeatable show of 7 cards, use my scout and show token to take a card from the show and play pretty much the exact same show to beat it, end the round because no one can beat my show”.   the estates is one of my favourite games of all time. it’s easy-to-learn, fast-to-play, extremely cutthroat, and offers the opportunity to make many interesting decisions. I’ve won this game with 3 companies and I’ve won it with 0 companies, but this time around I played and won with a fairly safe strategy of picking a company with a strong cube pattern in the pool, hanging back to see what other players committed to, and then aggressively attempting to screw them with the zoning tokens.  this was my first play of istanbul and I found it kind of bland. the mancalaesque movement was somewhat interesting but the core gameplay loop left me feeling wanting. It reminded me strongly of yokohama, a game that is mechanically bloated in comparison but that I found a lot more interesting.  space base was sold to me as a better machi koro, and it definitely felt like it, but I don’t really like machi koro at all anyway so it didn’t wow me. the core conceit of building my own bingo board was executed better than in machi koro, and it was fun building a broken combo that caused the rest of the table to groan every time it resolved, but I didn’t come away from the game wanting to replay it.  I wrote a little about cat in the box earlier in this thread. I think it might be my favourite trick-taker. It’s extremely fun and nail-biting trying to thread the needle of winning exactly your bid of tricks/get good board presence for the area control element/not be the player who paradoxes. as of right now I would play this any time anyone asked.  maskmen remains a lot of fun and I mention it here for both completion’s sake and because this was the first time I’ve seen a definitive wrestler strength ranking.  millennium blades was ridiculous. the theme of the game is that we are players of the in-universe tcg millennium blades, and we’re attempting to build decks and collect sets of cards to perform well at tournaments and to show off. the game feels janky as gently caress, some card combos were broken as hell, the game thinks it’s way funnier than it actually is (a cloud strife pastiche named blizzard angst…) and it took way too long, but I kind of really liked it. I have very similar feelings about argent, the level99 worker placement title. the real-time deckbuilding phase is 95% of the appeal of the game, wheeling and dealing with other players, spending the silly stacks of money to crack packs, keeping an eye on the secondary market, and trying to draft a set to display as well as a functional deck. the actual tournaments took too long and felt kind of rote. I wished this phase of the game was somehow more automated a la autochess. would play again, but maybe only as a once-a-year. I won primarily by exploiting the meta-destroying effect of the aptly-coined bro’kin the overpowered, a card I had from the very beginning of the game.  I love el grande. this was the first time I’ve gotten to play it physically. still one of my favourite area control games, alongside condotierre. hoping to pick up a cheap copy of an earlier edition once the newest version hits shelves soon, because I think the aesthetic of the older map has a lot more character.  race for the galaxy is a perfect night-ender, playable in fifteen minutes if everyone already knows it. it’s a thread favourite for a reason. I’ve played close to a hundred games of base for the galaxy via the app/bga so I wish the host had had an expansion or two for flavour, but it nevertheless fits its play length and purpose well. diversified economy ftw.  this was my first time playing great western trail, and I was thrown into the deep end with the new zealand edition. apparently it’s like the base game + its expansion, but with the power level cranked across the board. It’s not often that I gloss over as someone explains rules to me, but it happened with this title. there’s just so much of it. it’s not a very difficult game but there are an almost lacerdaesque number of interconnected systems at play, which I apparently have increasingly less patience for versus games with easy rules and deep strategy. it was still fun (in the same way I find brass: lancashire fun) and I liked tooting my boat around for bonuses, but I would never suggest playing it especially with newer players because of the long teach. also, for a game set in new zealand it had little to no representation of maori people.  we played a res arcana while we waited for our fourth to arrive, and it cements for me in my mind that tom lehmann is the king of fast-playing card-based tableau-builders. this is another game that I’d never played physically before, having had a pretty serious Board Game Arena dalliance during lockdown, but we banged it out in thirty-five minutes and it was enjoyable throughout. definitely recommended for fans of tapping cards for incremental gain.  for years the discord has been talking up square on sale as kind of a mirror reflection of the estates, an easy-to-learn bidding-focused area control title with an out-there othello element that makes it an extraordinarily engaging gateway game. unfortunately, it’s never had a non-japanese printing, so it’s quite tough to come by in canada. I had put it out of my mind, hoping to acquire it when next myself or a friend went to japan, but a few weeks chill la chill told me about a copy on sale via suruga-ya, which was at the time running a free shipping promotion. it came to $45 cad, though I did get dinged an additional $20 in duties. we played it once and immediately unanimously wanted to run it back. it’s an extremely good game that I currently have no idea how to play well, and of the titles in this post the one I’m most looking forward to playing again.  I really like quo vadis. it’s one of my favourite thirty minute games, but unless I insist on it it’s tough to get to the table. this was my first opportunity to play my recently-acquired deluxe copy of zoo vadis – I didn’t really think I needed it, but I have a lot of store credit and I figured the upgraded aesthetic would be conducive to getting it played more often. I must begrudgingly concede that zoo is a better game than quo, mostly because of the peacocks - the animal powers, while interesting on paper, didn’t really add a lot to the core gameplay. we also played this twice, and it was great seeing the first play inform the table’s approach to the second play in both this and square on sale.  we finished with a <45 minute 4p game of hansa teutonica, again another game that requires no explanation both at the table and in this thread. it was notable for how fast we got through it, that the final scores were 37/35/29/5 (the last place player was playing for a long game that was never going to happen), and that I drank this bizarre sparkling cold brew from vancouver. that’s probably it for me for gaming in 2023, unless I end up playing avalon or bohnanza or similar when I go visit family over the holidays. there’s three more months of indoor-friendly weather to kick off 2024. my new year’s gaming resolution is to actually bother to log my plays on bgstats, starting from january 1st.
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Dec 19, 2023 05:36
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panko posted:
I love Estates, it's probably my most played game, and imo one of the best, tightest games in general. I don't think I ever won a single game, I just love making big stupid plays too much.
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Dec 19, 2023 09:48
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panko posted:this was my first time playing great western trail, and I was thrown into the deep end with the new zealand edition. apparently it’s like the base game + its expansion, but with the power level cranked across the board. It’s not often that I gloss over as someone explains rules to me, but it happened with this title. there’s just so much of it. it’s not a very difficult game but there are an almost lacerdaesque number of interconnected systems at play, which I apparently have increasingly less patience for versus games with easy rules and deep strategy. it was still fun (in the same way I find brass: lancashire fun) and I liked tooting my boat around for bonuses, but I would never suggest playing it especially with newer players because of the long teach. also, for a game set in new zealand it had little to no representation of maori people. It's a Pfister game. Little to no representation of indigenous people is to be expected, and all things considered the less of it the better. (E: by which I mean he's not good with it.) Jedit fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Dec 19, 2023 |
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Dec 19, 2023 09:49
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Fantastic list of games. Agreed on Pfister continuing his awful track record of either ignoring or outright offensively using culture and peoples. I'm sadly kind of in the camp of thinking the estates is fantastic and I hate playing it. So often the game ends with a player who's out of the running deciding where to put something that decides the game in favor of one or another player. Bad feels.
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Dec 19, 2023 12:58
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RabidWeasel posted:. For me I think the key there is agency, or at least the appearance of it. With a DOAM map game it's easy to put down your dude and do a thing, it's very clear. With lot of Euros it's more esoteric, I do a thing that for some reason makes me better at thinking about delivering the post in Germany! The goal is clearer. This might be what he's getting at when he says its just about knowing the rules. Then tied with the randomness it's very easy to rationalise that your wins are from your tactical genius and if you lose its from luck. I would suggest something like Inis as a DOAM game but there's a lot more to it as well for the Eurogamer.
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Dec 19, 2023 14:10
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Aramoro posted:For me I think the key there is agency, or at least the appearance of it. With a DOAM map game it's easy to put down your dude and do a thing, it's very clear. With lot of Euros it's more esoteric, I do a thing that for some reason makes me better at thinking about delivering the post in Germany! The goal is clearer. This might be what he's getting at when he says its just about knowing the rules. An interesting take, since for me it's the exact opposite - I know what getting x victory points means and it's a very clear step towards the objective of getting the most points, but when you're trying to figure out how many units you need to place on whatever part of the map, the probability of winning / losing a fight, and the amount of resources you're expecting the opponent to be willing to put down in opposition, no matter how carefully you try to consider all the variables the end result is basically just an educated guess and you might have actually just made a game losing move. You do get this sort of thing in many Euro games, but it's more transparent in a "oh, I thought I'd be able to use this ability to do something, but I got blocked by another player, or just miscalculated how many points that would give, etc" sort of way, and you can usually see in real time exactly why your strategy failed.
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Dec 19, 2023 14:37
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