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So, a copy of greed inc has come up for sale.locally for a good price. I love other splotters I've played in this order: Indonesia, the great Zimbabwe, bus, food chain, antiquity, horseless carriage. Is greed comparable? Should I snap it up or is it not worth trying out these days?
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Feb 18, 2024 09:45
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Admiralty Flag posted:To take it back to train chat for a moment, . New thread title right there
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Feb 18, 2024 12:09
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The 7th Citadel, a kickstarter game I backed in October 2020, finally arrived today. I am extremely excited to start playing it with my partner but we need to finish our playthrough of the 7th Continent (their previous game) first, which we started back around the middle of November before getting slightly sidetracked with Baldur’s Gate 3 😅
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Feb 19, 2024 00:21
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TACD posted:The 7th Citadel, a kickstarter game I backed in October 2020, finally arrived today. I am extremely excited to start playing it with my partner but we need to finish our playthrough of the 7th Continent (their previous game) first, which we started back around the middle of November before getting slightly sidetracked with Baldur’s Gate 3 😅 Oh nice, I'm waiting for the shipping info for mine still.
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Feb 19, 2024 00:49
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So I started my copy of 7th Citadel and was pretty thrown off by the intro scenario, which felt just as punishing and difficult as the original game. I was initially really unhappy with this game…and then I took a break overnight and came back the next day and started an actual Threat/campaign. My god, this is so much better than the original. There’s far fewer random punishments for making a binary choice, there are tons of mechanics for recovery, and they split up the “campaigns” into multiple scenarios that consist of “go out from the Citadel, do some objectives, then come back when you feel ready to move on”. The scenarios are all “fail forward” where no matter what you move onto the next chapter when you return. Improving the Citadel feels great and gives a ton of options for how to improve your next outing. I’ve done the first two scenarios and had an absolute blast. The story is far more compelling too, so I’m eager to see where it goes. All that to say, if you find the intro a bit hard, don’t sweat it. You gotta take it at its word when it says the objective is to GTFO; don’t try to be a completionist.
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Feb 19, 2024 01:45
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Pryce posted:So I started my copy of 7th Citadel and was pretty thrown off by the intro scenario, which felt just as punishing and difficult as the original game. I was initially really unhappy with this game…and then I took a break overnight and came back the next day and started an actual Threat/campaign. Is 7th Citadel still multiplayer unfriendly like 7th Continent? I remember how 7th Continent looked like it could have 4 players but was really best played solo or 2p.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:24
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So, after reading all this 18xx chat and looking at my unplayed copy of 1830 with tears in my eyes, I decided to look for a shorter 18xx. I stumpled upon 18MS and it seems like one of the shortest while still having most of the 1830 rules. The fixed round number and the predictable train rust seems like it could be used to ease new players in without having to spend 5-6 hours on 1830. Any thoughts on that or is there a better option while still offering a 2 - 2 1/2 play time?
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Feb 19, 2024 09:22
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Selecta84 posted:So, after reading all this 18xx chat and looking at my unplayed copy of 1830 with tears in my eyes, I decided to look for a shorter 18xx. I really like MS for the reasons you stated. It is still an outlier in the XX pathenon with a heap of random rules on top of 1830 (you can contribute personal cash to train buys for a cost, D and plus trains, inital double tile lays, triple and quadruple with the privates, New Orleans & Chattanooga bonus, 70% ownership) but I think if someone experienced was driving the turn track and the phase changes it would go quick. And it only plays to 4p (3 is probably best).
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Feb 19, 2024 10:14
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dishwasherlove posted:I really like MS for the reasons you stated. It is still an outlier in the XX pathenon with a heap of random rules on top of 1830 (you can contribute personal cash to train buys for a cost, D and plus trains, inital double tile lays, triple and quadruple with the privates, New Orleans & Chattanooga bonus, 70% ownership) but I think if someone experienced was driving the turn track and the phase changes it would go quick. And it only plays to 4p (3 is probably best). Yeah, I think those little extra rules would still not overcomplicate it. I watched a playthrough and it seemed pretty straight forward, my buddies, who enjoy euros quite a lot, should not have any problems. 2-4 is perfect.
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Feb 19, 2024 10:24
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I'm always happy to play it (usually online) but it does tend to deveop a little samey given the limited companies (at least at 4) because you can't execute some of the staple 30 maneuvers like floating a second company to bail yourself out, suitcasing and and other stock shenanagins. I reckon if you play a physical train game more than 3 times you are probably doing better than most people in that niche.
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Feb 19, 2024 10:32
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dishwasherlove posted:I'm always happy to play it (usually online) but it does tend to deveop a little samey given the limited companies (at least at 4) because you can't execute some of the staple 30 maneuvers like floating a second company to bail yourself out, suitcasing and and other stock shenanagins. I reckon if you play a physical train game more than 3 times you are probably doing better than most people in that niche. I think it will not overstay its welcome. But having the possibility to show it to my group, teaching them the basics one on one most of the time. We all have children and whatnot and can't always meet up with everyone. So having an 18xx that plays in 2 hours, teaches most of the rules and then we can arrange a longer day for a full 1830 game would be perfect.
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Feb 19, 2024 10:58
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Selecta84 posted:Yeah, I think those little extra rules would still not overcomplicate it. I watched a playthrough and it seemed pretty straight forward, my buddies, who enjoy euros quite a lot, should not have any problems. DO NOT PLAY ANY 18XX TWO PLAYER. In general the 2player option should be removed from the box.
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Feb 19, 2024 11:57
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:DO NOT PLAY ANY 18XX TWO PLAYER. pssh, 2p MS is funny. Not good, no, but funny. 62, the ridiculous one with express freight and local trains, plays 2p, it turns into a zero sum euro basically. But i don't disagree with you, either.
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Feb 19, 2024 13:33
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:DO NOT PLAY ANY 18XX TWO PLAYER. 60 and CZ are pretty good at 2p. The real question is why play 18xx at 2 when you could be playing Nap's triumph or Go
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Feb 19, 2024 16:06
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alkanphel posted:Is 7th Citadel still multiplayer unfriendly like 7th Continent? I remember how 7th Continent looked like it could have 4 players but was really best played solo or 2p. I can’t speak to it directly but with both games I looked at the rules and went “yeah I’m not gonna play this with other people”. So probably not much has changed there.
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Feb 19, 2024 16:49
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I'm one and one-half games into Dungeon Petz. I have little experience with worker placement games. The lack of them in my collection is part of why I picked up Petz. The other worker placement games I own are Manila, a tremendously lighter game, and Dominant Species, pretty much the heaviest you're gonna get. I've played some Tzolkin and Stone Age, though. A handful of thoughts about Petz: + The board is cute with all the little imps running around being whimsical. + The fact that imps that are not deployed to the market board have jobs to do at home playing with pets, cleaning their poo, and potentially getting mauled preventing escape means, due to the importance of those actions, that you do not simply receive a consolation when the market spaces are booked up but there effectively exist useful action spaces that no player can block you from using. This is a very pleasant feature alongside the otherwise fittingly-tight market competition. At present the balance of the at-home jobs being important but definitely not covering everything you need feels like it hits that sweet spot of keeping you from feeling totally screwed in the placement competition but not taking all the bite out of the jockeying for actions that is the heart of a real worker placement game. + Worker grouping as a way to bid for action selection primacy is something I've not seen before (keeping in mind I haven't played a worker placement game more recently designed than...uh...Dungeon Petz, I think). I love it. The blind-bidding risk of shooting for first against maintaining breadth of options brings a little bit of the gambling excitement of Manila to the game. The previous point that imps have very useful things to do outside of the action selection competition adds strategic depth here because it allows you that space for breadth of options with the useful and guaranteed "actions," giving you increased reason beyond picking up the "scraps" on the board to have more smaller groupings instead of always hammering out the two biggest groups you can. + Pet management is delightful. This is an example of how to manage and utilize randomness. What your pets will require can't really be 100% known but you have both the high degree of certainty needed to execute plans and feel good when they work and the wiggle room to mitigate a plan gone wrong. Here again I feel like you're given a potential off-ramp for losing the action competition but never one that vitiates the competition. And the way that pets become more demanding pains in the rear end to manage as they grow but simultaneously more valuable - and that you can flex them into being even bigger pains in the rear end on purpose with double-icon need cards for sake of cranking that value at the right moment - brings that risk-reward management gameplay seen in more simplified gambling form in Manila while also being great theme conveyance. You feel like you are raising some kind of monster when the bastard starts seriously threatening to break his cage every round, or eating the whole town supply of meat, and this is mechanically demanding of you. In my completed game I purposefully made Direbunny angrily spray poo poo everywhere with quadruple poo cards plus some rage (and hunger) to please the hard-partying orc customer for a big sale. Afterwards, of course, I faced the mechanical issue of a cage posing a huge risk for future plays, which was also a very thematic consequence of prodding a monster into angrily spraying poo poo everywhere. That's the kind of little mechanics-theme marriage story that you remember. - The board is a graphic design nightmare with serious readability problems due to color choices and in some part to all the whimsical crap decorating it. Obvious, solid lines around the action spaces to draw immediate attention to what is mechanically relevant would be good. I'm actually considering taking a Sharpie to the boxes to add some thick black outlines. - Lack of colorblind friendliness with the red and green imps and red and green food cubes. Making the food tokens different shapes would have been an easy fix for them. Would probably prefer the red and green cards to be different colors too; the angry / contentedly eating pet illustrations on the backside give you a way to tell them apart, but can take just a little moment too long to recognize. - Who made red and yellow imp colors anyway when the imps are little red and yellow dudes in reddish-yellowish burrows? The red and yellow player boards are indistinct blobs. - The yellow imps are particularly bad against the colors of the market board. Can take just a hair longer to spot the little fuckers' positions, and that's annoying. - The box calls this a ninety-minute play and I do not believe it. One and one-half plays in, I am happy with it.
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Feb 19, 2024 19:27
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I think the WP trifecta of Agricola, Keyflower, and Petz is hard to beat.
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Feb 19, 2024 19:35
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Thinking some more I suppose the foreseeability of needing to clean cages and play with pets really does make them like unblockable action spaces, but you're going to plan for that in group formation, so there is less an aspect to them of giving you a release after losing competition than I saw on first pass. Still, I like that. There's still flex in playing/cleaning/getting mauled of which you can take greater advantage when imps don't make it to market.
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Feb 19, 2024 20:55
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SuperKlaus posted:Thinking some more I suppose the foreseeability of needing to clean cages and play with pets really does make them like unblockable action spaces, but you're going to plan for that in group formation, so there is less an aspect to them of giving you a release after losing competition than I saw on first pass. Still, I like that. There's still flex in playing/cleaning/getting mauled of which you can take greater advantage when imps don't make it to market. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. You can always send a market group back home to assign to whatever care & maintenance duties you want later, there's no real incentive to hold imps back when forming groups even if you know you'll need a couple at home later. This even means sometimes if you found you massively overbid you can send back a big chunk of imps early in the round if you decide your next group is "good enough" in the face of the competition. And then this can also create some interesting push-your-luck scenarios on the back end if everyone else wraps up early, when you're looking at multiple needy pets and you've only got two imps left but c'mon they left four food on the table how many play needs can these pets possibly draw anyhow
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Feb 19, 2024 21:31
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I didn't mean holding imps back I meant more like creating some 1 imp groups to do like you said maybe shooting for a leftover action square or maybe going back home to play and clean. I'm only a game in though so I haven't seen it yet that I'd want to recall a large group that otherwise has priority in selection.
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Feb 19, 2024 21:41
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well now i want to break out my copy of petz and bring it out at the next games night
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Feb 19, 2024 22:23
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SuperKlaus posted:I didn't mean holding imps back I meant more like creating some 1 imp groups to do like you said maybe shooting for a leftover action square or maybe going back home to play and clean. I'm only a game in though so I haven't seen it yet that I'd want to recall a large group that otherwise has priority in selection. This is especially important in the 3rd round (where the first buyer becomes active), since you want to do the good old-fashioned "1 imp with a mountain of gold" strat in order to get the spot on the 3x platform.
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Feb 19, 2024 23:55
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silvergoose posted:pssh, 2p MS is funny. Not good, no, but funny. 62, the ridiculous one with express freight and local trains, plays 2p, it turns into a zero sum euro basically. Yeah if you know what you are doing, sure, but like if someone asking for an introduction to 18xx lists 2 player as part of being perfect needs to be told to not do that
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Feb 20, 2024 01:33
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Yeah if you know what you are doing, sure, but like if someone asking for an introduction to 18xx lists 2 player as part of being perfect needs to be told to not do that Well, the plan is to play it with more people of course... Just looking for a short one that supports two players cause you know, sometimes we are not more then that. And it is really just to show off some of the mechanics and stuff, not to have a balanced game or so. And if I got to play it with everyone in the group, a full 4 player game should of course come next.
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Feb 20, 2024 13:15
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Have any of you tried He-Man battlegrounds? I might get that game as a nostalgia gift for someone, it got pretty good reviews online but I'm curious if any of you tried it. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/360332/masters-universe-battleground
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Feb 20, 2024 14:39
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Selecta84 posted:So, after reading all this 18xx chat and looking at my unplayed copy of 1830 with tears in my eyes, I decided to look for a shorter 18xx. MS is really kinda interesting if ultimately shallow. The set ORs and rusting events are curious and the craziest thing I can say is that it'd be interesting if another, deeper game took that mechanic and gave it a whirl. Also, 1830 can go really, really quickly if you do what some other posters have said that's Always Buy Trains. Start a company. Buy all the trains you can. Next SR sell down, start another company. Rinse and repeat. Bonus points if you are able to time it that the 3Ts pop quickly and can buy your private in.
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Feb 20, 2024 20:42
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Selecta84 posted:Well, the plan is to play it with more people of course... Yeah do not play 18xx at 2 players. I cannot emphasise this enough. If you only have two, play a different game.
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Feb 20, 2024 21:16
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Yeah do not play 18xx at 2 players. I cannot emphasise this enough. If you only have two, play a different game. Ok OK, I won't 
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Feb 20, 2024 21:25
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I pulled the trigger on 18Chesapeake as my gateway 18xx for getting others into the hobby, after much reading (and thanks for the input I received here). Decided against 1889 as I know someone with it already, and it seems a little less forgiving of mistakes, thus perhaps not the best first-timer game. Now to wait for it to arrive...already so excited for it I calculated my bank from my poker set (I.e., counts by chip denomination) and what starting chip stacks would be for each number of players (with an eye toward maximum flexibility in bidding while staying within banking limits).
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Feb 20, 2024 21:39
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FulsomFrank posted:MS is really kinda interesting if ultimately shallow. The set ORs and rusting events are curious and the craziest thing I can say is that it'd be interesting if another, deeper game took that mechanic and gave it a whirl. I would be OK with it if it offers like 5-6 games before moving on. Admiralty Flag posted:Now to wait for it to arrive...already so excited for it I calculated my bank from my poker set (I.e., counts by chip denomination) and what starting chip stacks would be for each number of players (with an eye toward maximum flexibility in bidding while staying within banking limits). I also bought a new set with denominations. I wanted chips anyway so I hope I also get to use them. I used this https://www.tckroleplaying.com/bg/18xx/bank-generator/ and bought 300 chips. Selecta84 fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 21:39
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There are usually two things that make 18xx games go slow with new players: people aren't used to the purely mechanical aspects of bookkeeping (keeping track of routes, paying dividends, moving stock market tokens, shifting assets around, floating new companies, etc), and people don't buy trains fast enough. The first one you just get better at over time, individually and as a group, though I'd also recommend if you can playing with someone who does know what they're doing as they can speed that process up significantly, also having paper/pencil and calculators ready. The second one is alleviated as suggested, buying more trains. If you buy more than the other players, you'll generally outearn them and you'll rust their trains faster. This isn't always true of course, but you'll learn how to play better and faster by being more aggressive and learning to dial back than the other way around.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:10
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When I taught 89 to 3 new players I used the "dump 1 train card at the end of each set of ORs" rule to keep things moving and it worked really well.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:20
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Out of curiosity is there a difference between heat and heat pedal to the metal other than name/branding? I suspect "heat" may just be the French version of the game. Got some store credit at a board game store so was thinking I might pick it up
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Feb 21, 2024 11:57
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ilmucche posted:Out of curiosity is there a difference between heat and heat pedal to the metal other than name/branding? I suspect "heat" may just be the French version of the game. There is a 2015 game called Heat: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/157815/heat that is different from the 2022 game Heat: Pedal to the Metal https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/366013/heat-pedal-metal. Looking at the French edition, it does appear to just be called HEAT https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameversion/621856/french-edition possibly because in that market it doesn't need to distinguish itself for trademark reasons. The image linked on the French edition says it's the Czech edition, but I assume it's just because it's the same. The Spanish version is identical as far as I can tell https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7502424/heat-pedal-metal
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Feb 21, 2024 12:09
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Thank you for looking that up, I had a look on board game geek but was still a bit confused. Going by the box art it's definitely the racing game in stock, and the same as pedal to the metal. Bit expensive but I can get the cost down to less than 20 euros, so tempting
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Feb 21, 2024 12:31
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It’s good fun and reasonably simple to learn and at 20 Euros would be a steal.
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Feb 22, 2024 04:22
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I mean it is like 65 euros I just won a bunch of store credit that I'm not sure if I want to turn into more magic cards
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Feb 22, 2024 08:46
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I got started on this hobby by trading a grave titan for a copy of dominion. if you’re driving down this path make sure your tires are roadworthy
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Feb 22, 2024 17:06
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Got Doubt is our Product and it's a doozy of a game. The message in it is extremely strong, but the game is extremely playable as well, and I love the asymmetry. The Company is playing a really interesting deckbuilder efficiency puzzle, and the Movement a (moderately less) interesting tablau-builder/market row. Although I felt the message was similarly strong in This Guilty Land, I felt that the gameplay suffered because of it, but this wasn't true of Doubt is our Product. Also, the supplement that talks about the personal effect that smoking had on the designer Amabel Holland is really heartful, and spoke to me since my dad also was a smoker for decades and only just managed to beat cancer himself. Would recommend. I also got Kaiju Table Battles but haven't tried it yet.
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Feb 22, 2024 20:49
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Feb 23, 2024 00:59
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