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jesus WEP posted:honesty time how many games do you own that cost #DIV/0! per game (mine is 5 i think)
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Jan 8, 2024 13:38
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Mock as you will, but if you're on this thread, there are better games to be playing than TTR Legacy and we all have a problem. But $120 for TTR is a privilege, $120 for TTR that you know you're going to play twelve times at a maximum, is out of reach of a lot of people. But TTR Legacy is, I think, as good a gateway experience to tabletop board gaming as there is on the market right now (price notwithstanding). If you've got a sibling and some niblings who are curious about your giant kallax but maybe haven't played a ton, TTR Legacy is a Christmas/Easter sermon. It's got all the bells and whistles and by the time they realize they're playing TTR they'll have a kallax of their own. I've got my own wall of shame, unopened expansions to unopened games. But let's not pretend that's an easy pitch to people who aren't already addicts. To my brother and his wife, $120 for a board game you "only" get to play twelve times is a mark against.
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Jan 8, 2024 14:32
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TTR legacy is cool and novel and we don’t need to pretend it isn’t. It is expensive though.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:20
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CitizenKeen posted:Trip Reports (ish) for Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West. The very first box we opened immediately sold us on this game. It's so perfectly on-theme and obvious in hindsight and one of the most satisfying experiences of any legacy game by far.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:37
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SettingSun posted:TfM lets players sandbag in perpetuity but the person who is winning should really cut the knot and just finish it off. That table will probably get mad at me because I will force endgame even when I’m losing. Get your engine rolling faster next time. I've come to realize that those people who love cranking their engines in TFM are really just cookie clicker likers. Which is fine, it's its own activity/game (arguable, different topic) genre, but the big sin is they want everyone else to watch their cookie clicking in the guise of a multiplayer board game. There's probably a hidden genre that'll be exploited once publishers realize this. Aside from the current publisher continuing to pump out expansions for TFM to satisfy those players, of course.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:17
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CitizenKeen posted:Mock as you will, but if you're on this thread, there are better games to be playing than TTR Legacy and we all have a problem. What's stopping someone playing the game after the legacy campaign ends?
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Jan 8, 2024 20:37
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Nothing, and one of the the selling points with legacy games you end up with a wholly unique game at the end shaped by your experience. But in practice, at least in my experience, is once you're done with the campaign the magic fades so the game is more of a museum piece.
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Jan 8, 2024 20:58
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SettingSun posted:Nothing, and one of the the selling points with legacy games you end up with a wholly unique game at the end shaped by your experience. But in practice, at least in my experience, is once you're done with the campaign the magic fades so the game is more of a museum piece. Yeah, I know how Pandemic Legacy says, 'Oh no you can totally play this as a normal pandemic game board later if you want' and everyone is just looking at each other asking, why? We've got normal Pandemic right there. Charterstone tried that too and that game suckkkkkeeedddddd.
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Jan 8, 2024 21:07
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Evil Badman posted:What's stopping someone playing the game after the legacy campaign ends? I assume once the legacy component is over, we'll probably play one more game just to see it all, maybe? But then it's just TTR with some randomized weirdo elements bolted on, which sounds - as non-Legacy experience - worse than just regular TTR, which isn't really getting to my table anyway. Similarly, if it's your gateway board game or whatever... What's to stop children from loving the toys they get on January 30th as much as on December 25th? Nothing, but there's a magic in opening a box and trying something out fresh that is lost the more you do it.
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Jan 8, 2024 21:23
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Where’s the go-to game price crawler?
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Jan 8, 2024 22:14
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PRADA SLUT posted:Where’s the go-to game price crawler? I use: https://www.boardgameoracle.com/
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Jan 8, 2024 22:21
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glad I somehow avoided getting rused into charterstone or seafall after the incredible heights of risk legacy. new year old games this past weekend:     didnt have much time to get a new game bag together before an impromptu hangout on saturday so I brought one I hadn’t unpacked from a few weeks ago. got to table square on sale, cat in the box, and zoo vadis with a different group of friends at 4p, 5p, and 6p respectively. effective strategy in square on sale still eludes me; I think I’m doing well, and then it’s the end of the game and I’m in fourth after several othellos ruin my board presence. I think I have to fundamentally alter how I approach the game. cat in the box was as good as ever, with the notable occurrence being a two-way tie for first. zoo vadis was one of the friendliest games I’ve played of it to date; every player was forthright and accomodating with their dealings until the very end, and everyone got into the senate. after 5+ games of it I’m enjoying the player powers quite a bit, as they add a lot of unpredictability and room for negotiation. yesterday’s games:   lifeboats is an underlooked classic from 1993, an extremely cutthroat negotiation game with a whole lot of prisoner’s dilemma. our session had players getting up from their seats to pace around, hollering at card flips, and grasping their heads in anguish as other players betray them. the very solid wooden pieces don’t fit very well, the red and orange aren’t differentiated very well, the rulebook is riddled with typos, and the art is charmingly ugly (couldn’t find a credited artist in the rules so I’ve chosen to assume that the designer did it himself), but it was the most fun I had all day.  speaking of prisoner’s dilemma, 2019 spiel des jahres winner just one is an amazing fifteen-minute title that channels the fun of struggling within that delightful bit of game theory into a fully-cooperative word game. everybody gets one chance to write a one-word clue for a guessing player, but must do so wholly independently. before the guessing player sees any clues, all clues are cross-referenced, and all instances of duplicate clues are eliminated. the best moment of our session was when the word was TRIANGLE and 4/6 players wrote ISOCELES.  vanuatu is a game I discovered via playing it browser-based and asynchronously with the board goon discord during the pandemic. I bought a copy secondhand in 2021 but hadn’t had the wherewithal to get it on the table until yesterday. vanuatu has almost exactly what I want out of a midweight euro: extremely limited resources and actions. the board is tight, options are slim, and the game’s esoteric action resolution mechanic (it’s kind of like a reverse worker placement) make for a hardscrabble experience with fairly straightforward rules yet very agonizing board states. this was the first time I’d played 3p, and with the optional role tiles to boot, so it was by far the most permissive game of this I’ve played. I’d like to get another play in soon, this time with 4p or 5p. the board doesn’t scale at all to accommodate higher player counts   wavelength is another exceptional filler title. I like it better than codenames (because it’s faster), but slightly less than so clover, decrypto, or even trapwords. I hosed the game up for our team by giving “five-hour old cement” as a clue where the spectrum was SOFT —— FIRM and the target was about 65% of the way towards firm. I thought cement took about a day to set but one of the players on my team was adamant (and correct) that it takes more than 48 hours for it to be firm enough to walk on, so they set the dial leaning soft. oops.  we had a slightly-cursed 6p count at the end of the evening without anything particularly exciting on the meaty end on hand other than lifeboats that we could all play together, so we took a dip into the host’s collection. we jokingly suggested power grid before tentatively landing on captain sonar, but then I spotted rising sun + one of its kickstarter boxes tucked way back and under on his game shelf. I have fond memories of playing this game on six or seven consecutive weekends six years ago when it was new, so I made a case for it. I wish we had played captain sonar instead. the game does some interesting stuff w/r/t blind bidding and significant asymmetry and its production values are very pleasing, but it just took way too long and felt unpleasantly unbalanced at 6p because of how turn order worked. I also found the aesthetic a little dated, though my perception of that is definitely coloured by how much (or how little) care went into the theming. part of that too is how much importance is placed on mass seppuku as one of the few means to gain honor, which I found kind of funny six years ago but somewhat distasteful now. there was also a giant disconnect in how cool the big minis are versus how weak they are in-game, as even the most intimidating behemoth can be taken hostage in battle. there’s also a lot of individual downtime, especially during war phases. while the game isn’t actively horrible, I wouldn’t be despondent if I never played it again. I did not win a single game all weekend! I really appreciate this, as my playgroups are populated with skilled, sociable, minimum-AP gamers I truly enjoy spending time at the table with. but. I crave those dubs. next time… I’m bringing caylus.
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Jan 8, 2024 22:42
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panko posted:
the civil engineer in me would cringe away from using cement or concrete because i would get pedantic about the kind of mix and i dont think my friends know nearly as much about it as i do, plus the choice of cement or concrete matters too much lmao also i bought a new copy of pandemic s1 that my group is going to play through again, since we haven't played it since the initial release date and we only remember the twist. nowadays we play have a host rotation that goes between playing frosthaven, then misc games, then jackbox/light stuff so i was looking for a game to fit into there and pandemic fits
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Jan 9, 2024 15:19
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panko posted:
Using any kind of quantity in your clue is against the spirit of the game. Since the whole point of the game is to quantize things on an arbitrary scale, you are essentially short wiring the game by trying to sneak in "5 out of 24" into your clue. For that clue I'd use something like "tofu" or "bus seat", etc. ------- On another note, let me get this off my chest: you don't need to throw expansions in on the first goddamn play. You think you need to because you buy too many games that you don't play enough and thus feel pressured with every play to throw all the crap you have for it in. Expansions are for breathing new life into a game you are already familiar with and have played nearly to death. Including them in the first play just obfuscates the base game for players, making it harder to learn, and totally tarnishes the marginal utility of an "expansion", which is greatest when you have the base game practically solved.
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Jan 11, 2024 04:36
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GOOD AVATAR ——————^- BAD AVATAR “serotoning”
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Jan 11, 2024 04:44
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Serotoning posted:On another note, let me get this off my chest: you don't need to throw expansions in on the first goddamn play. You think you need to because you buy too many games that you don't play enough and thus feel pressured with every play to throw all the crap you have for it in. Expansions are for breathing new life into a game you are already familiar with and have played nearly to death. Including them in the first play just obfuscates the base game for players, making it harder to learn, and totally tarnishes the marginal utility of an "expansion", which is greatest when you have the base game practically solved. Depends on the game and exactly what the expansion does. I'd point to Eldritch Horror as an example of a game where using the expansions from the outset is a good idea. Extra cards to pad out the decks mean you won't see the same encounter twice within your first play, and the addition of Focus tokens mean you don't get awkward moments where you just go "uh, there aren't any actions I can take, I guess I just skip my turn?" But it also doesn't add extra complexity or make the game harder to teach, since if you're using a base game old one and no preludes, none of the fiddly extra stuff exists. (Yes I know someone is going to say that your real mistake is playing Eldritch Horror in the first place.)
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Jan 11, 2024 05:59
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Serotoning posted:On another note, let me get this off my chest: you don't need to throw expansions in on the first goddamn play. You think you need to because you buy too many games that you don't play enough and thus feel pressured with every play to throw all the crap you have for it in. Expansions are for breathing new life into a game you are already familiar with and have played nearly to death. Including them in the first play just obfuscates the base game for players, making it harder to learn, and totally tarnishes the marginal utility of an "expansion", which is greatest when you have the base game practically solved. i'm actually pretty good at playing the base game first(it makes it way easier to explain to everyone) but my issue is I buy the expansions either before that first game or in the immediate high after the first game
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Jan 11, 2024 06:36
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Some new games over the last few weeks: The White Castle, a fairly simple dice drafting / worker placement game set in 17th century Japan which is a spiritual successor to The Red Cathedral. The core twist of this game is that at the beginning of the round three sets of different colored dice are rolled and then placed in numerical order. On your turn you can take either the highest number or lowest number of a color, and then you place the die on an action space to take the matching color action. If your die is higher than the number printed on the board you will gain money, and if it is lower you need to pay money, but taking the lowest number allows you to run a small resource engine that is built up on your personal board. There are three sections of the main board which allow you to place different meeples or collect resources, and these areas can trigger special bonuses and also are used for end game scoring. One of the areas only triggers at the end of the round if there are dice remaining of the matching color, so sometimes you might pick a less optimal move to restrict other player bonuses. There are only 3 rounds of 3 actions each, finding combos that allow you to trigger other actions can be really important and feels great. I enjoyed this game quite a bit. There can be a small bit of hate drafting but usually you aren't fully locked out of any actions. It plays quick and looks really nice on the table. A few months ago we played The Red Cathedral and I did not care for it much at all, I found this to be a significant improvement.  Globetrotting, a game about planning your retirement travel around the world. This is done by the same team who did Canvas and is similarly a very light game with nice components and art. The box is a big suitcase and you get to map out routes on a personal globe. It is very charming. Each round a set of three destinations is revealed and you choose whether you are going to visit one of them in Spring, Summer, or Fall. You draw a line from the previously planned location in that season and the distance determines how much you pay for the flight, with an end game bonus VP awarded based on how many people paid more than you did. Everyone gets three personal goals to accomplish, one for each season. These may be objectives such as "learn a new language (visit 2 locations in Europe and 1 location in Oceania in the Fall)" or "Go on a safari (end your Spring travel in Africa)." In addition, there are small VP bonuses for visiting the same city in the same season as your left or right partners. This leads to fun conversations where you are trying to coordinate travel plans so that a few of you all visit Alhambra during your summer travels. The biggest knock against this game is that you have to put together and take apart the globes every game, and because it plays in under an hour you most likely want to get a few games in per session to make it worthwhile. Each of the destinations is related to board games, which I thought was a nice touch. Everdell, it was cute  Had a 2-player game day with a friend where we played:  Mythic Mischief, a 1v1 game about squads of spooky high school students (Vampires, Monsters, etc.) where you walk around a 5x5 grid trying to position yourself, your opponents, and magic bookcases so that the school Tomekeeper, walking around the map in a somewhat pre-determined fashion, runs over your opponents more than you. Each faction has their own set of abilities that plays slightly differently than the others. It was surprisingly chess-like, and some turns were exceptionally long as you would be mathing out all of the different ways to move pieces around for the most optimal result. I would play it again but it wasn't my favorite.   Wizards of the Grimoire and Sorcery: Contested Realm (pictured), both 1v1 card games that have somewhat melded into one game in my mind. I think I enjoyed Sorcery more, which felt a bit like Magic but with a map to move characters around on. I would probably compare this pretty closely to Summoner Wars but with more map interaction e.g. placing out lands on the board which act as your mana but also interact with other aspects of the game. It also had these tiny little baby cards for tokens that were originally a mistake during pre-production, but they were a big hit so they went forward with them. Ashes Reborn: Red Rains - The Corpse of Viros. This turns Ashes, a 1v1 dueling card & dice game into a cooperative experience. I didn't much care for the competitive mode but enjoyed the cooperative one. We played 2 games and lost both pretty handily, but we went in with pre-constructed decks and this might require some deckbuilding. And some old-to-me games were played:  Wonderland's War. I think I talked about this somewhere earlier in the thread but this is a competitive bag builder in an Alice in Wonderland setting where you play out three rounds, each first with a card drafting / minion placement / powering up during the tea party phase and then battles in 5 different locations. This is one of those weird games where it seems like a mess of mechanics but it works really well. The theme is well done and the battles are a mixture of strategic planning and push-your-luck by pulling chips out of your bag to add power to your location, with certain chips removing your forces but allowing you to refresh the bag.   War of the Ring. One of my favorite games that rarely gets to the table. The wife and I played one game New Year's Eve into the New Year, and then another game on New Year's Day. Both games had me winning as the Free Peoples by throwing the ring into Mount Doom, but the second game was real close as the Shadow nearly achieved both a military victory and a corruption victory. We then played a few days later with two friends as a 2v2 game (thanks to those who responded recently about my questions in the thread!). This was both of their first times, so we played the standard 1v1 rules just with two people on each side. The game was a big hit. It really nails the theme and has constant tension. This time the Shadow players won as they were able to dominate militarily while we struggled to defend. We couldn't ever get forces big enough to punish militarily, and we had bad luck with the ringbearers running to Mount Doom. Unfortunately after these games my wife, who I play a majority of games with, informed me that she just doesn't like War of the Ring. She has no reverence for the LotR theme, and sees the game as Risk but with a little bit added on. She also felt it was too random, as many times her large forces were decimated with constantly bad rolls on her part. I definitely get that, but to me seeing the big swings that come with dice in this game really adds to the feel of pulling something unexpected off. Big loss going into 2024 for me. Oh also I 3D printed some mountains, Mount Doom, and flying stands for the nazgul which really added to the game.
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Jan 11, 2024 07:20
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Nice reports! Also Globetrotting looks really cute and cool, I must admit.
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Jan 11, 2024 09:58
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Depends on the game and exactly what the expansion does. I'd point to Eldritch Horror as an example of a game where using the expansions from the outset is a good idea. Extra cards to pad out the decks mean you won't see the same encounter twice within your first play, You won't anyway, unless you really drag it out somehow or spend the whole game in one region. The problem with core-only EH is that you see the same cards every game, so it's not very replayable. The first expansion fixed that by adding enough extra location encounters that you shouldn't cycle the whole deck in a game and enough variations for the base GOOs that facing one of them didn't always feel the same.
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Jan 11, 2024 10:32
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Serotoning posted:you don't need to throw expansions in on the first goddamn play I've never played base A Feast for Odin. I went straight to A Feast for Odin + Norwegians, and it owns.
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Jan 11, 2024 10:41
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Infinitum posted:I've never played base A Feast for Odin. Norwegians reworks the base game rather than expanding it. For the same reason I'd put Trade and Intrigue in with Orleans from the first game - both base games are fine, even great, but the expansion makes them special. But by the same token I wouldn't add The Plague to Orleans for a first game because it does increase complications.
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Jan 11, 2024 10:49
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It's an expansion if it's a 2nd thing you have to buy Modules, like Mind MGMT's, are more akin to what you're describing.
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Jan 11, 2024 11:17
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Infinitum posted:It's an expansion if it's a 2nd thing you have to buy I'd call them all add-ons, if I were that interested in language pedantry. Some add-ons are like trailers; they make your vehicle bigger but harder to drive. Others are like automatic transmission; they make your vehicle different to drive but don't change anything else about it. Sometimes add-ons are optional but included in the cost, other times you need to pay extra.
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Jan 11, 2024 11:36
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Lottery of Babylon posted:
not me i love my dice chucking experience generator
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Jan 11, 2024 13:41
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Has anyone played Daybreak yet, and has any opinions to offer? I'm very tempted to pick it up. Bonus points if I can play with my friends who are more optimistic and less jaded than I am about where our climate change future is headed and get a little happiness out of it.
Viper915 fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jan 11, 2024 |
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Jan 11, 2024 14:17
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I think Dune Imperium is very meh without the first expansion and maybe would tie into Jedit's "re-working" rather than simply adding content. EDIT: are the best "expansions" really just updates/bug fixes??? FulsomFrank fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Jan 11, 2024 |
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Jan 11, 2024 14:33
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Jedit posted:You won't anyway, unless you really drag it out somehow or spend the whole game in one region. The problem with core-only EH is that you see the same cards every game, so it's not very replayable. The first expansion fixed that by adding enough extra location encounters that you shouldn't cycle the whole deck in a game and enough variations for the base GOOs that facing one of them didn't always feel the same. Late in our first game, we got some kind of encounter where a knight dies and hands you a specific artifact sword to take up his quest. We couldn't gain the sword because one of the players already had it from earlier in the game where that same knight had already died and given away that same sword. I think that was a research encounter? The base game only has 8 of those cards per old one, and a lot of mysteries require you to do a lot of them.
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Jan 11, 2024 16:35
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Radioactive Toy posted:The White Castle, a fairly simple dice drafting / worker placement game set in 17th century Japan which is a spiritual successor to The Red Cathedral. I did not know that. I still have Red Cathedral unplayed on my shelf.
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Jan 11, 2024 17:31
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CitizenKeen posted:I did not know that. I still have Red Cathedral unplayed on my shelf. There's a planned third "Blue" game in the series, but they haven't yet revealed which blue building it will be.
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Jan 11, 2024 17:36
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Red Cathedral was pretty standard euro fare but solid enough. Worth a play definitely, and big kudos for the small box. It’s currently my only dice drafter and it survived the last cull purely because of the space it takes up.
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Jan 11, 2024 17:38
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Serotoning posted:On another note, let me get this off my chest: you don't need to throw expansions in on the first goddamn play. You think you need to because you buy too many games that you don't play enough and thus feel pressured with every play to throw all the crap you have for it in. Expansions are for breathing new life into a game you are already familiar with and have played nearly to death. Including them in the first play just obfuscates the base game for players, making it harder to learn, and totally tarnishes the marginal utility of an "expansion", which is greatest when you have the base game practically solved.
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Jan 11, 2024 17:45
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A sweeping generalization like that has many counterfactuals. Lots of game expansions are patches on weak systems by adding more of the same, new factions, and/or errata that can easily be slotted in. Some games bolt on whole new systems that can should be left out for a while. You gotta evaluate on a game by game basis.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:00
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Sometimes an expansion was always a part of the game through most of the design process, until the time came to figure out what would fit in a box with components that add up to a target retail price.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:08
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SettingSun posted:A sweeping generalization like that has many counterfactuals … You gotta evaluate on a game by game basis. 
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Jan 11, 2024 18:10
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Poopy Palpy posted:Sometimes an expansion was always a part of the game through most of the design process, until the time came to figure out what would fit in a box with components that add up to a target retail price. Yeah, I think perhaps the funniest counter example is the invaders from afar expansion for Scythe. Let's you go up to 7 player. I like the idea of saying "No you two, go away, we only play BASE game to begin with".
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Jan 11, 2024 18:15
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That White Castle game looks nice. It seems like an acceptable level of complexity for a dice drafter/worker placement game for me to still enjoy it. But I haven’t played that type of game since Dungeon Lords, which I haven’t touched in years. I wonder how White Castle plays with 2.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:17
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Poopy Palpy posted:Sometimes an expansion was always a part of the game through most of the design process, until the time came to figure out what would fit in a box with components that add up to a target retail price. This is the case with the Spirit Island expansion Branch & Claw, so I always recommend either grabbing the expansion with the base game or ASAP.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:21
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!Klams posted:Yeah, I think perhaps the funniest counter example is the invaders from afar expansion for Scythe. Let's you go up to 7 player. I like the idea of saying "No you two, go away, we only play BASE game to begin with". Then, and only then, once all seven of the seven players have played the base game at least once, are you free to never play the seven-player expansion because one of the people who played the base game twice hates it and never wants to play again, and all the people who played only once are scared they’ll get their rear end beat by the people who have played the game literally twice as much as they have.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:48
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!Klams posted:Yeah, I think perhaps the funniest counter example is the invaders from afar expansion for Scythe. Let's you go up to 7 player. I like the idea of saying "No you two, go away, we only play BASE game to begin with". Wasn't Scythe the one where people begged him to make it 7p compatible and Jamey tried to warn them that just because he made 7 factions it was definitely not a 7p game? Maybe the best design instinct he's ever shown.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:53
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