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QoQ all depends on what you're looking for. If you are a heavy game looking for a lighter game for starters or finishishers, then go with Port Royal. If however you are looking for light-medium games as the entree then QoQ will work well there. One thing though, it's easy to cheat in the game so be aware of that if playing with strangers and cheating bothers you.
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Feb 5, 2019 15:07
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March of ants is good! The expo adds just th right amount of weight imo
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Feb 5, 2019 16:03
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Impermanent posted:March of ants is good! The expo adds just th right amount of weight imo Gonna wait to get that one until I played the game a few times but thanks for the heads up.
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Feb 5, 2019 16:06
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Merauder posted:Looked it up, it's just under that name, and appears there's some joke I'm probably missing, it's a 20 year old game without much in the way of components. The grail games reprint comes with plastic trains and that's about it. I have a love/hate relationship with Knizia reprints. I think the tiles in FFG's Tigris and Euphrates are better contrasted than the busy tiles of the original, but the original's art design and wooden discs are far better (Yellow & Yangtze nails the middle ground). FFG's Samurai has that FFG thickass token cardboard quality, but the original has these abstract pieces that far fit the theme.
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Feb 5, 2019 16:11
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Chill la Chill posted:Just 5 due to table space. Most of the game was simultaneous turns and people took to heart the disasters and not fighting to the detriment of your two peoples while everyone else prospers. But there were a few times where someone wanted to make sure another person was abiding the boundary treaties. Trading times didn't have to be capped since with so few players, there was only so much trading. The nice thing is that people realized calamities just happened so nobody really brought too much attention to getting or giving away calamities. Sometimes there was no trading while people recovered and didn't want to take risks. Thematic! The group enjoyed it a ton. They were already looking forward to the next game with 6-7 on Sunday. You'll get the times down in the future. My advice is to make some accordion'd cardboard or something to reduce the space for the techs, which are the real killer of space (in my opinion). Did you have a dedicated trade card person and someone to adjust the AST and call out the census? In our games it's essential that someone is on-duty sorting the trade cards and handling admin. The biggest slow-downs are in those times and when you can grease them up the game not only goes faster but also smoother.
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Feb 5, 2019 16:17
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FulsomFrank posted:You'll get the times down in the future. My advice is to make some accordion'd cardboard or something to reduce the space for the techs, which are the real killer of space (in my opinion). Did you have a dedicated trade card person and someone to adjust the AST and call out the census? In our games it's essential that someone is on-duty sorting the trade cards and handling admin. The biggest slow-downs are in those times and when you can grease them up the game not only goes faster but also smoother. Definitely. I was event caller and General GM, someone did trade cards (with me helping from time to time), and someone else handled credit tokens. I organized the cards as sets per player since there were enough to satisfy 5 and I’ll be getting the full card set later anyway. Might be a problem for this Sunday since we might have 7-8, but the near-complete sets go up to player counts 7-10 anyway iirc. I might have someone else track census, someone else track AST, but the space we had available made for a table setup such that the table was an L configuration and trade cards guy and I sat next to each other and the short L area was the best place to put the census and AST. Thanks for sharing tips and tricks too. Mind you this was with the superb owl being shown in the background with some snacking going on every now and then. a friend was getting so tilted as he always does at the Pats’ shenanigans. Nimby has the game too but hasn’t really talked about it much since I think they only got to middle or late Bronze Age on their first go.
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Feb 5, 2019 17:18
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Someone should make a boardgame based on the Superbowl. Listed playing time 60 minutes, actually takes four hours.
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Feb 5, 2019 17:31
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Jedit posted:Someone should make a boardgame based on the Superbowl. Listed playing time 60 minutes, actually takes four hours. Any game that lists 45-60m on the box takes 2 hours with my friends.
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Feb 5, 2019 17:35
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Jedit posted:Someone should make a boardgame based on the Superbowl. Listed playing time 60 minutes, actually takes four hours. Everyone claims to just play it for the advertising inserts.
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Feb 5, 2019 17:36
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Bruceski posted:Everyone claims to just play it for the advertising inserts. This year that was actually true. Survey showed that more people watched for the adverts than for the game.
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Feb 5, 2019 17:41
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Weird because I feel like the only part of the super bowl that isn't a known quantity by the friday before is the outcome of the game. All the ads I feel like I hear "Oh I heard about this one" as it plays.
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Feb 5, 2019 17:58
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M a x posted:Weird because I feel like the only part of the super bowl that isn't a known quantity by the friday before is the outcome of the game. Even super bowl fans appreciate deterministic mechanics
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Feb 5, 2019 18:04
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I'm working on a football game. The play-by-play is a highly tactical war game where each player simultaneously picks and reveals their game plan then executes their moves. Then every two plays you go through a season of The Networks for four quarters.
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Feb 5, 2019 18:33
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all football board games are poo poo. You're allowed to just play madden with your friends if you want a football sim.
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Feb 5, 2019 18:40
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al-azad posted:I'm working on a football game. The play-by-play is a highly tactical war game where each player simultaneously picks and reveals their game plan then executes their moves. Then every two plays you go through a season of The Networks for four quarters. If somebody calls timeout you play a round of Snake Oil.
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Feb 5, 2019 18:41
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Retromancer posted:all football board games are poo poo. BloodBowl is great shut your mouth.
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Feb 5, 2019 18:42
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Retromancer posted:all football board games are poo poo. The sim game is the roster manager one.
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Feb 5, 2019 18:48
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As I recall, Strat-o-matic football had the most tactical decisions of the series, because you chose your offense/defense each down. Aside from choosing your roster and timing your subs, baseball and basketball were basically rolling dice and watching the game play itself.
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Feb 5, 2019 18:53
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I recall soloing an entire season with APBA Football when I was a kid.
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Feb 5, 2019 19:12
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I have some old notes for an honest to god gridiron game. I rarely watch professional football but the underlying mechanisms behind the sport are very interesting to me because it's an incredibly political game (AMERICA!) and each play is like a mini skirmish you preplan for. The original gridiron was laid out in a checkered style like a chessboard and you kind of miss the etymology with the current purely horizontal layout of the lines.
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Feb 5, 2019 19:52
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The evolution of plays and trick plays is incredibly fascinating. What's really sad is when you try to bring it up during The Game and it turns out people don't actually want to analyze plays. 
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Feb 5, 2019 20:21
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March of the Ants is a great game but I can't resist pointing out that it's a game that is short because requires the players to be switched on and playing from beginning to end because of the reaction moves mechanic (I move, so everyone after me in turn order gets a mini move, etc) If you have any players who are phone-glancers or who tend to tune out the instant it isn't their turn, you're gonna have a bad time. At the very least it's going to make the game take much longer as you constantly remind people it's their turn to optionally take a reaction move (or whatever) and which one is it again and no, Bob, it's not your turn, you can move one ant one step if you want because Jane just did a and so on Multiply that handful of time by # of disengaged players, multiplied by average turns in the game, and it really adds up. Not to mention is mentally draining.
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Feb 5, 2019 20:31
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I like MotA but I did have one bad experience with it. The 3 other players were all new. One of them turned out to have agonizing AP, which is extra painful in a game with so many follow-up actions. He made an early play that did not particularly help him much, but seriously set back another player who was never able to recover enough to be competitive. As mentioned, it's a short game for a 4x, so the usefulness of your early card draws can make a big difference and there's not really any catch-up mechanism.
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Feb 5, 2019 20:39
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That sounds awful, my condolences. An experience like that can sink a new game's reception, which is why I sold off MotA because a) I knew I'd probably never get it to the table again with anyone who was at that table (or the one after it...) and b) I personally don't really want to try because I kind of fear ever repeating the experience.
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Feb 5, 2019 20:57
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Jedit posted:Someone should make a boardgame based on the Superbowl. Listed playing time 60 minutes, actually takes four hours. The board game is marketed as a cure for insomnia.
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Feb 5, 2019 22:19
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In nürnberg, german publishers announced a surprising amount of storytelling focused games. I'm telling you this because Pegasus is making an unoffical Ghost Trick game called Undo: This title isn't about solving a crime or catching a murderer. Instead, players must embrace their role as disembodied destiny weavers to go through the past of this man's travel to prevent his death. Everyone who leaps through time carries a momentous decision that in the end will determine whether he lives or dies?
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Feb 5, 2019 22:57
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SoftNum posted:BloodBowl is great shut your mouth. Not emptyqouting.
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Feb 5, 2019 23:08
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SoftNum posted:BloodBowl is great shut your mouth. blood bowl is a pretty good digital game that i'm probably never going to play tabletop ever again, because it takes three hours. and you have to commit to those three hours every week with a league. and wow the burnout gets real, real quick.
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Feb 5, 2019 23:20
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Gutter Owl posted:blood bowl is a pretty good digital game that i'm probably never going to play tabletop ever again, because it takes three hours. and you have to commit to those three hours every week with a league. and wow the burnout gets real, real quick. I managed to play some Concordia and Clank! recently so I suppose it's time for another write up of stuff everybody already knows! Concordia was pretty much exactly what I expected and I had a really good time playing. The cycle of building/buying stuff to get more resources in order to build/buy even more stuff was satisfying. Not maximising architects and senators seems like a good way to get beaten badly, luckily I was playing with a group that was fairly on point so the final scores were 137, 130, 126. I won with the 7 points I got for ending the game, although I could've taken another turn to solidify with no real risk, but it seemed uncalled for. Clank! was fun enough but after playing Concordia the decision space felt very restricted. It also seemed to drag on a for a little too long (it managed to take as long as the game of Concordia) but that may have been that it was with a different, less experienced, group and there were some notable pauses. I think I expected more because it is so far above some of my favourite games on BGG but I should know better than to trust a score aggregator. I am still hunting for the one true engine builder. I am starting to understand peoples gripes with a market row even if I can't think of a better solution.
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Feb 5, 2019 23:50
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discount cathouse posted:In nürnberg, german publishers announced a surprising amount of storytelling focused games. I'm telling you this because Pegasus is making an unoffical Ghost Trick game called Undo: My wife adores ghost trick so I'll have to look out for this...
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Feb 6, 2019 00:47
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Gutter Owl posted:blood bowl is a pretty good digital game that i'm probably never going to play tabletop ever again, because it takes three hours. and you have to commit to those three hours every week with a league. and wow the burnout gets real, real quick. was there any truth to the rumor of RNG being heavily skewed in the digital versions?
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Feb 6, 2019 00:58
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Probably not. Generating a pseudo random number string is pretty easy, correctly recognizing randomness is hard. Cyanide BB 1 had a bad bug where that string was available during play or something, but they fixed that.
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Feb 6, 2019 01:04
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Yeah, the first game had a problem where, if you knew how, you could read the RNG string before rolling any dice. So there was a cheating problem. Additionally, clicking "reroll" too fast would sometimes cause it to accidentally parse the same bit of the string instead of progressing, repeating the same die roll instead of calling the next one. I think they sorted that out? But Cyanide Studios is not a high-quality game developer. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Feb 6, 2019 |
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Feb 6, 2019 01:38
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Mr. Squishy posted:Probably not. Generating a pseudo random number string is pretty easy, correctly recognizing randomness is hard. Cyanide BB 1 had a bad bug where that string was available during play or something, but they fixed that. In theory it's easy to randomize things, but then in practice you get hilarious cases like Star Realms where the app legitimately and provably had a busted RNG that the devs had to step in and fix: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1402169/any-way-test-draws-are-truly-random/page/1
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Feb 6, 2019 01:57
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I played Villainous, the Disney villains game, the other day and left pleasantly surprised. It is not the Snakes And Ladders roll-and-move piece of trash cash-in I fully anticipated. Moving past the relative statement that it was better than expected to an independent statement of its quality: I would nutshell it as "worth buying to gateway that Disney freak in your life into serious board games, and probably not worthwhile otherwise." The single thing that stood out the most and was, I daresay, actually clever was its approach to inter-character balance. The characters you can play are all heavily asymmetric, with their own win conditions, permitted actions per turn, and personal decks of action cards. You know how, say, Chaos in the Old World only works at 4p, because you need a Khorne to check Nurgle and Nurgle needs to check Slaneesh or whatever? That's not a thing in Villainous because each character also brings his own separate deck of self-countering cards to the table. Other players simply select a "mess with opponent" action (always part of a bundle of four actions, by the way, so you don't have that issue of spending a whole precious turn to oppose only one of three opponents and thereby sink yourself) and then apply cards from the target's self-countering deck. There are thus no "match-ups" in Villainous because you never have to sweat that Jafar's in the game and nobody's character has anti-Magic Lamp tech - Jafar ensures that by his own presence. I'd like to know of other games that do this and came up with it first, if any. I also appreciate the presence of catch-up powers. Each villain has a couple of cards that trigger out-of-turn when another villain has too much game stuff and give the card-holder more game stuff so he can catch up. To my limited knowledge these are the only cards usable out of turn, so the game lacks counterspells and other directed "take that" gotchas that tend to displease inexperienced board gamers (disclaimer: I actually still get a bit hot under the collar about that myself). I know I just praised the "mess with opponent" feature but I consider that unlike from-hand counterspells and stuff because the "mess with" is more predictable and foreseeable, being a common part of everyone's action options you can see coming. Also, the "mess with" cards can be rough but are always of the "soft control" variety where they irritate you until you take X or Y action to be rid of them. No "try and play a card while I have two Islands, punk" stuff here. The presentation also impressed in that all of the cards had fresh art on them. The cards showed recognizable shots from the relevant movies but they were not simply screen shots. They appeared instead to be newly drawn and painted renditions of those shots from the movies. This shows care and attention, keeps the art style in the game consistent, and is sure to help the game hook those Disney freaks. The bad features that make me say it's probably only a good pick to bag a Mouseketeer: Cruella DeVille is silhouetted on the rule book and is not in the game. Also the player pawns look like gummy candy but are not edible. Seriously, though, it's pretty thin in strategy. While the characters are asymmetric, in our game three of the four players' win conditions were simply different dressings of "dig through deck to find victory cards and then purchase them." Jafar was rightly upset when he just couldn't find the Magic Lamp and it turns out the thing was literally the last card in his deck. RNG in deck shuffling is real here. We almost failed to stop an early victory threat from Maleficent because our "mess with opponent" actions kept turning up cards that didn't directly shut down her win. We skated by because she herself failed to draw her final victory card and we kept slamming "mess" until that twit prince finally decided to get off his lazy butt and break a curse (that is, Prince Philip and related cards were at the bottom of the counter deck). And speaking of draw RNG, the catch-up cards are rather less a good idea when you notice they must themselves be drawn out of your deck and so may or may not be in-hand to actually do their jobs when other players trigger their conditions. While "match-up" balance is pretty well settled, intra-character balance in the terms of relative ability to hit win conditions is questionable. I can't speak authoritatively after just one play but watching Ursula, Jafar, and Maleficent all dig through their decks to find their win cards and do other stunts along the way gave me a hunch Mal might be OP, for example. Yeah, Ursula actually won our game, but she was piloted by an experienced board gamer while Mal was rather less on the ball. Mal threatened an early win like it was nothing while Ursula had to jump through some real hoops - makes me wonder what happens when all characters are piloted well and play hard for victory. Speaking of Ursula's win, the end game gave me some Munchkin / Zombies! flashbacks. All four characters I saw (of six) win the game when they begin their turns with condition(s) X being true. I, as Prince John, threatened to win. Naturally this led to all other players firing attack actions at me - but Ursula managed to assemble her win at the same time as taking an ineffective shot at me. So as soon as Jafar managed to fish out a card that stopped me, it was a mad scramble to take shots to stop Ursula. Those shots failed and there ya go, that's game. Meh. Now you can rightly say that sort of thing happens in lots of games. CitOW certainly sees final play rounds loaded with "get him!" activity. I suppose it was the RNG of it all with whether or not fitting counters came up from attack actions that reminded me of bad games like Munchkin, where who actually wins has a lot to do with who happens to assemble a win condition when all the attacks are tapped out. I certainly noticed as we fished for counters to Ursula that cards like Ariel and Prince Eric, which could have done the job, were already in discard. I will grant you that this could theoretically stop being a problem with experienced players who know how to measure out counter actions during the game instead of madly flailing for them at the end, but my instinct is it won't. The game also gets only partial credit for theme. I praised the art but I think all of us cultured board gamers in the thread know that theme comes from mechanical interplay, not pictures. The cards generally did a solid job of having game effects that felt like the things they represented, as seen in the movies. While King Richard was around my Prince John couldn't play action cards that represented jailing and taxing people; Flotsam and Jetsam could bait heroes into going places they shouldn't; Jafar could hypnotize heroes and reverse their impacts; and so on. Nothing really clever or groundbreaking here, but a heck of a lot better than "Aladdin is worth two cubes." However, at the same time, the game felt like it could have been Disney's Heroes if various names and rules were simply swapped. I'm not really sure what any of us did that distinctly felt like scheming to villainous ends. My Prince John needing to accumulate money tokens could probably have been a Robin Hood accumulating money tokens and where Jafar and Ursula needed to control the Lamp or King Triton's crown it probably could have been Aladdin and Ariel doing the same. I suppose it speaks to how heroes in these movies foil plots rather than drive them. I fully intend to play at least one more game because there are two Disney fanatics in my life. Perhaps the game will reveal another layer of depth on re-play; most likely it'll just be forgettable amusement and I'll await the day I rope those people into CitOW.
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Feb 6, 2019 03:41
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King of Bleh posted:In theory it's easy to randomize things, but then in practice you get hilarious cases like Star Realms where the app legitimately and provably had a busted RNG that the devs had to step in and fix: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1402169/any-way-test-draws-are-truly-random/page/1
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Feb 6, 2019 04:34
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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Redundant posted:I am still hunting for the one true engine builder. it's race for the galaxy
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Feb 6, 2019 04:53
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misguided rage posted:Man that thread is really frustrating to read. "Hey these cards show up more than they should, here's proof" "Uh yes but uh do you think that's a high enough sample size (note I have never computed a p-value in my life, but will never ever stop making GBS threads this out whenever a statistical argument is made which I disagree with)" Man it's been 20 years since I last did a p-value, but once I looked everything up (and figured out how to plug it into a chi-square calculator because that's what I found first even though I'm cure there's a more elegant method for the same thing) those numbers were obvious. Other folks doing the same test and coming up with the same numbers just reinforced it.
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Feb 6, 2019 05:23
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I think my dream engine-builder would be Race: Alien Artifacts but built around the Orb. It was in interesting idea but just didn't work as something people had to turn away from the game to interact with. Give me a game where the whole deck's built around exploring the Orb, integrate it cleanly with the rest of the tableau, and I'm all in. Xeno Invasion did a better job of that integration aspect.
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Feb 6, 2019 05:27
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Kemet Ta Seti How do the mercenaries work? Do they just bring your infantry pool up to 15 and once they're on the board they're for all intents and purposes just more dudes of your colour?
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Feb 6, 2019 06:18
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