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Morpheus posted:I played Sabotage for the first time over the weekend, and had a lot of fun with it as the spies. Do you have any sense of how well it would play at 2? I was really tempted to back this but ended up deciding against it since 4 is a fairly rare player count with my group.
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Sep 30, 2019 20:53
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GrandpaPants posted:So in 4p Pax Pamir, should you be aiming for two coalitions? In both games we played (obviously not a big sample), it just feels impossible to catch up on board presence in a 2-1-1 configuration for the 1s. The amount of players associated with each coalition is going to vary a lot, but you're right that a coalition with two players supporting it is probably going to have more board presence than a coalition with 1. The main reason that a game might end up with a 2-1-1 spread is to prevent a successful dominance check and go for the disk victory condition. If someone's behind in influence points with a given coalition, it may be in their best interest to split.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:04
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pospysyl posted:The amount of players associated with each coalition is going to vary a lot, but you're right that a coalition with two players supporting it is probably going to have more board presence than a coalition with 1. The main reason that a game might end up with a 2-1-1 spread is to prevent a successful dominance check and go for the disk victory condition. If someone's behind in influence points with a given coalition, it may be in their best interest to split. But even if they split, that doesn't make the successful domination any more successful, right? Like there'll still be, eg, a dominating number of British blocks, you just won't be able to capitalize on it now?
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Sep 30, 2019 21:16
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I am organising a new board game meet up after my move. Trying to get new people is a hassle but we are growing at a slow but steady pace. Played a 4 player game of Cthulhu wars and came in second with Hastur. Then a 4 player game of Keyper which I won with 95 points.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:23
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M a x posted:Do you have any sense of how well it would play at 2? I was really tempted to back this but ended up deciding against it since 4 is a fairly rare player count with my group. Should be fine - I don't think the rulebook spells it out as a variant, but I believe each person just controls two spies/villains on their own. I think it wouldn't be very good if it was one spy vs one villain, as the odds of running into each other would be a lot lower. There are no explicit mechanics related to having two people to a team - team chatter is encouraged (if only as a whisper), and the action programming doesn't really create any problems related to confusing intent, like having people bump into each other or friendly fire or what have you. So yeah, it should play well at two. Edit: If you'd like there's an app that simulates the villains, so two people can do one team of spies vs an AI. Can't speak for how good it is, haven't used it yet myself.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:25
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Mayveena posted:Anybody home? What'd y'all play over the weekend? I played Barrage with some super mean people! I mean they are nice in real life but not in the game!! I lost of course, clearly I need to be meaner Played Colonial Twilight for the first time. Nice game, but we had a few confusions. Peace talks helped the FLN expand and win. Saturday was Brass: Birmingham, Hanabi, Hardback and Through the Ages. All a lot of fun. The TtA game was close early, but eventually I was ahead both in culture and military and it's unlikely to lose at that point. Hardback was great, my first game really getting to make use of "flip adjacent wilds" to spell "quoted" QXOTPD and such. Hanabi we exploded repeatedly. Brass we oddly stayed away from Birmingham at the start of the game, but did manage to get a couple of people there and ready for rail era.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:27
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GrandpaPants posted:But even if they split, that doesn't make the successful domination any more successful, right? Like there'll still be, eg, a dominating number of British blocks, you just won't be able to capitalize on it now? Well if you're coming 2nd of 2 players in a coalition why help pump the 1st player in the coaliton up. Without your help they might not have dominance, the other two players will be advancing their factions at the same rate. Maybe you'll be better off just getting some tribe discs on the map and getting points that way. It's very dependant on board state. But if two players work together in the same coaliton the whole game, it's likely one of those players is just kingmaking the other.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:33
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Played Pax Pamir for the first time this weekend. What a neat game. I'm broke but I must have itttttttt.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:34
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GrandpaPants posted:But even if they split, that doesn't make the successful domination any more successful, right? Like there'll still be, eg, a dominating number of British blocks, you just won't be able to capitalize on it now? If you're in second or third place in British favorability but you have the most disks out, it could be a worthwhile play to split in order to take out some British pieces before the dominance check.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:35
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Mayveena posted:Anybody home? What'd y'all play over the weekend? I played Barrage with some super mean people! I mean they are nice in real life but not in the game!! I lost of course, clearly I need to be meaner We did casual games this weekend, played Cave Painting which was fun. We only played 3 rounds out of the 6. With 6 players a round can take 20 mins and I don't think it's good for 2 hours. Fun for an hour though. Then into Decrypto, great game obviously.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:38
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Played 3p aFfO with the Norwegians. One player was new but there's very little (if any) extra teaching time with the expansion so I just taught it like that. I won from an emigration-heavy strategy after starting with Refugee Helper - my first 3p win (and like second ever win overall...). First time leaning into a full-on emigration strategy. Still feel like emigration is super powerful - i know it's not overpowered and it's just a highly visible point source, but I still need to form competitive strategies in response to it. I think final scores were 107-99-94. The new player really enjoyed it and looks forward to trying it out again, so that's a win. He appreciated how open and individual your strategic choices are.
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Sep 30, 2019 23:16
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Selecta84 posted:I am organising a new board game meet up after my move. Where did you move to? I'm assuming your CW game was with the base factions? If so then it was a good game with just the right amount of interaction. If nobody interferes with Yellow Sign then it wins, but if it comes last that usually means the other players concentrated too much on loving over Hastur and the winner was the one who didn't.
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Sep 30, 2019 23:48
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Got BrOaDtS&cetera in. Where do I place the stickers and what are the "18 baggies for mines" for? Really wish they included an instruction sheet with this.
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Oct 1, 2019 01:24
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Been playing a bit of the new TTA cards and really enjoying the flexibility some of the new leaders give you. Going about 50/50 on medium AI now but I'm not sure how much of that is me being better vs the AI not being as strong with expansion cards yet. Also played a lot of Air Land & Sea, an 18 card micro game that's basically a super paired down Battle Line/Smash Up with Fox in the Forest elements of scoring. There are three battlefields (air, land, and sea) and each of them have cards 1-6 in the shared deck. Each player draws 6 cards (and that's all you have for the round), and you alternate playing a card on its matching battlefield face up for its strength and effect, or face down as a generic 2 to any battlefield. Effects range from moving or flipping cards, playing your next card out of theater, increasing strength of cards under it, etc. The real catch though is that you withdraw when you think you've lost the current round or run out of cards, and your opponent scores points based on how many cards you have left in your hand, creating a brilliant tug of war and push your luck tension for each round. You might look at your 6 cards and think you have a good approach, but 2 cards in realize you can't do anything at all and immediately withdraw to save face instead of getting in too deep and giving them more points. The scoring combined with the simple but powerful card effects in such a small amount of cards is really solid and one of the best games of the year. This is the whole game here, so you can easily proxy it or use 3 suits (A's as 1s) to try it out, but it's only $12 on Amazon and feels like a Knizia design which is about the highest praise I can give a small card game. 
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Oct 1, 2019 01:27
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I wish they went with another name because Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea is ruining their SEO. I actually had to search for the game as "Arcane Wonders Air Land Sea" in Amazon to find it.
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Oct 1, 2019 01:50
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Chill la Chill posted:Got BrOaDtS&cetera in. Where do I place the stickers and what are the "18 baggies for mines" for? Really wish they included an instruction sheet with this. How mines nominally work is they have an amount of gold and iron in them, and whenever a new round starts, you draw one randomly. So when you build a mine you place the brown cylinder with number X on the board, and you add 3 gold + 3 iron to baggie number X. When you expand the mine you add whatever you need to add to the bag.
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Oct 1, 2019 01:53
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Mayveena posted:Anybody home? What'd y'all play over the weekend? I played Barrage with some super mean people! I mean they are nice in real life but not in the game!! I lost of course, clearly I need to be meaner I played a 4 player game of Spirit Island with one seasoned player and two novices (Ocean's Hungry Grasp, A Spread of Rampant Green, Lightning's Swift Strike, Vital Strength of the Earth). I think I did a fairly good job of explaining the rules and of striking the right balance between letting them discover and QB'ing them through certain situations. That said, while I've always been very keen on the game, it really felt this time that the game's flaws shone through. Predominantly, people in Spirit Island, even those who are fairly familiar with the game, tend to spend the majority of the time with their faces buried in the cards in their hand. As a result, it sometimes feels like the game is only partly co-op. Sure there's lots of bouncing powers back and forth and fun combos, but it was really striking to me this time how everyone seemed to be working so much on their own project, and the opportunity for interaction, or even co-operative decision making like you'd see in Pandemic, was pretty absent. It definitely dulled my enthusiasm for a four-player game. I think it plays better at 3 or even 2 when you can get to know your peer's and their capabilities a bit more intimately.
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Oct 1, 2019 01:56
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al-azad posted:I wish they went with another name because Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea is ruining their SEO. I actually had to search for the game as "Arcane Wonders Air Land Sea" in Amazon to find it. Oh weird, it's the "&" in the title and Amazon's lovely search being the issue. If you search "air land & sea" it's the top result, but "air land and sea" doesn't have it on 3+ pages
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Oct 1, 2019 02:01
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Bottom Liner posted:Oh weird, it's the "&" in the title and Amazon's lovely search being the issue. If you search "air land & sea" it's the top result, but "air land and sea" doesn't have it on 3+ pages And if you search Air Land Sea on Google it brings up Amazon's page "Arcane Wonders Air, Land, & Sea" which immediately takes you to a broken page lol At first I thought it was a rare sold out game because it got talked up on SVWAG but $12 for a compact card game I can't pass up.
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Oct 1, 2019 02:07
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Dancer posted:How mines nominally work is they have an amount of gold and iron in them, and whenever a new round starts, you draw one randomly. So when you build a mine you place the brown cylinder with number X on the board, and you add 3 gold + 3 iron to baggie number X. When you expand the mine you add whatever you need to add to the bag. Thanks for explaining. Just so I have this right, the player discs get a turn order and a prayer sticker while the mines 1-5, 7-8, 10-20 are used? I saw a note saying 6/9 aren't used to avoid confusion and there are only 18 mines.
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Oct 1, 2019 02:39
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Chill la Chill posted:Thanks for explaining. Just so I have this right, the player discs get a turn order and a prayer sticker while the mines 1-5, 7-8, 10-20 are used? I saw a note saying 6/9 aren't used to avoid confusion and there are only 18 mines. Yeah, there’s no 9 sticker. There is a 6 sticker, so you can use the 6 and not the 20 (or whatever number you irrationally hate) if you want.
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Oct 1, 2019 03:01
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garthoneeye posted:Yeah, there’s no 9 sticker. There is a 6 sticker, so you can use the 6 and not the 20 (or whatever number you irrationally hate) if you want. Need a  but it's  I ordered bro&adts this morning, among a few other things on sale. Should arrive Friday. I'm taking notes here. Might have to take some extra allergy meds this time. When I punched all of Antiquity in one go, halfway through I realized I had a paper dust allergy and was just a mess.
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Oct 1, 2019 04:10
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garthoneeye posted:Yeah, there’s no 9 sticker. There is a 6 sticker, so you can use the 6 and not the 20 (or whatever number you irrationally hate) if you want. I like that it gave you a choice. I used extra 1817 railroad stickers on the other side so now my mines can be owned by railroads with matching bags. 
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Oct 1, 2019 05:49
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Courtesy of breadnought: 
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Oct 1, 2019 05:50
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Chill sniped my gif while I was busy fixing the text centering and buying it as a smilie e: Breadnought fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 05:56
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Chill la Chill posted:Courtesy of breadnought: 
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Oct 1, 2019 05:57
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Chill la Chill fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 06:01
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Jedit posted:Where did you move to? I moved within Germany. Back to the village where I grew up. 1 hour away from Essen. For CW we had The Sleeper, Crawling Chaos and the Windwalkers (who won). 2 new players who could have focused more on the Windwalkers but everybody was fighting everyone (except me. Never hesitate - just desecrate). I had a slow start due to not having played the game for a year or so and if we would have played one more round I think I would have won.
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Oct 1, 2019 07:03
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I love all of this. 
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Oct 1, 2019 07:09
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Selecta84 posted:For CW we had The Sleeper, Crawling Chaos and the Windwalkers (who won). 2 new players who could have focused more on the Windwalkers but everybody was fighting everyone (except me. Never hesitate - just desecrate). Yeah, that makes sense. Whenever YS or WW are in the game I always tell new players that there will come a point where you have to drop what you're doing and nobble them or they'll run away with it. (And I am inevitably ignored, as obviously Jedit Has A Plan.) The problem is that when both of them are in the game, it's hard to stop one of them winning it. If they had focused on WW, you would probably have won - although to be fair, if you had your three Desecration spellbooks you could and should have helped.
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Oct 1, 2019 08:04
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Jedit posted:Yeah, that makes sense. Whenever YS or WW are in the game I always tell new players that there will come a point where you have to drop what you're doing and nobble them or they'll run away with it. (And I am inevitably ignored, as obviously Jedit Has A Plan.) The problem is that when both of them are in the game, it's hard to stop one of them winning it. If they had focused on WW, you would probably have won - although to be fair, if you had your three Desecration spellbooks you could and should have helped. I had Hastur and most of my guys on the map ready to strike but yeah, slow start and all that. I felt like I was just 1 round behind on my progress. Gonna do better with him next time. Having the King in Yellow just walk around the map, dragging some Zombies with him and then immediately desecrating the new area feels nice.
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Oct 1, 2019 08:14
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I'm looking to fill the hole that Pandemic Legacy Season One has left behind We want something that plays in 60-90 minutes, works with two and isn't ultra light weight. We don't mind whether it's co-op or competitive. Any thoughts from that vague brief?
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Oct 1, 2019 13:17
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Mojo Jojo posted:I'm looking to fill the hole that Pandemic Legacy Season One has left behind Trying to think of things that fit into your time constraint. Seasons? Isle of Skye (Less good with 2) King Domino Tash-Kalar Arboretum
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Oct 1, 2019 13:34
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Mojo Jojo posted:I'm looking to fill the hole that Pandemic Legacy Season One has left behind This may sound dumb, but have you considered Pandemic Legacy Season Two?
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Oct 1, 2019 13:44
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Mojo Jojo posted:I'm looking to fill the hole that Pandemic Legacy Season One has left behind Mechs vs Minions is an absolutely amazing legacy (or semi-legacy?) co-op strategy game. It's charming, smart, fast, and fun. The design mostly solves the typical co-op "quarterbacking" issue through simultaneous play and time-limited planning. And the components are the best I've ever seen in a sub-$100 board game. It plays fine with two, although I'd suggest each player control two mechs and playing it in "four-player" mode. In my opinion, Mechs vs Minions is one most overlooked games ever, probably because of the League of Legends license (which has nothing to do with the actual gameplay - I knew nothing about LoL going in, and I still don't after playing through it twice) and the fact that it isn't sold at traditional retailers. It's good. I promise. For non-legacy co-op I'd recommend Spirit Island. It's heavier than Pandemic -- even Legacy -- and the sessions will run long until you become familiar with the game, but it's one of the best co-ops out there right now, and you can add complexity through the different (included) variants as you get better at the game. Or maybe The Big Book of Madness, if you'd prefer to play a co-op that's a bit lighter and shorter. It plays great with two and scales up well for more -- and it'll be a hit if you and/or your partner are into a Harry Potter-styled setting. For a medium-weight, non-cooperative game that works well with two, my recommendation is always Castles of Burgundy. It's an incredibly elegant design, and it has enough meat to it that you can play a few dozen times and still discover new strategies. A little dry though, and there's no story at all. But the real answer is to just buy Gloomhaven. It's expensive and runs long and is... a lot. But it's the best co-op of all time, and it plays fine with two. WhiteHowler fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Oct 1, 2019 13:47
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I bought Combo Fighter because I'm an idiot completionist and I managed to have a couple of games yesterday and today (with the ones today being against someone that I've introduced to Yomi, BattleCON, EXCEED and Sakura Arms, and the former with my non-gaming SO). The game is basically a simplified yomi with even more reliance on RPS mechanisms, where strike beat moves, moves beat block and block beats strike. Strikes are the only cards with speed as well, although some characters can win a round with special dodges/blocks. Positives: - It's really loving easy to teach and my SO was able to grasp all the rules and play the game well even after our first game. - I like the art, it's quite nice. - The game is really fast and it's easy to play a couple of games in half an hour or so. - It feels pretty thematic to do the combos, from a strike, to ducking and weaving, then another strike, and the combo system is quick and easy to visualise. - It can lead to exciting endings when you are on pixel health and manage to pull out a win. - You can get into the mindgames for each of the different characters really easily. Alright, now stuff that I didn't like. You can combo from anything: if you do a block, it still allows you to combo into big damage. This kind of dilutes the strength of winning with a strike, because damage can be caused by any card, so it's more important to win rather than what you win with, apart from signature combos for each characters that have to start from a specific card. In Yomi, if you are aggressive and lead with high-speed strikes, you are effectively decreasing the potential damage your opponent is doing, because you are always beating throws and potentially any strikes, with the only thing that you need to worry about being dodges, which have limitations in terms of combo potential (although this does depend on the character, since some characters can really pump up the damage after a dodge). This makes the game a purer RPS, although still a weighted RPS, which I don't think it's for the better, although this does make the game much more accessible. The damage mechanism of the game is that you discard cards from either your hand or the top of the deck, and you die when you run out of cards in both (you only reshuffle the deck if you run out of deck but still have cards in hand, and are then at a single hit, no matter the damage, from defeat). This adds an additional level of randomness on top of the draw, since that card you need for your combo? You might have just shuffled it off. As well as that, it dilutes the damage you take. If you use 4 cards to do a combo, and it does 8 damage, you've just discarded 4 cards to make your opponent discard 9 (the one he played + the damage). The fact that you lose life even if you win is a strange part of the game, and doesn't adhere to theme much, but it was probably done to make the game more accessible and not require much else apart from the cards, which is not a bad trait. The last part of criticism is that there is less variety in the characters that I would wish, at least from the ones I've seen. Now, don't get me wrong: each character has a unique deck, which varies in terms of number of strikes/dodges/blocks, and even in each subcategory the cards are different, with some characters having faster attacks versus other characters with slower but more powerful attacks. The issue to me is that it didn't feel overwhelmingly different to play each character, since I'm still fundamentally playing RPS, although due to deck distributions, I will have higher/lower chance to access specific options. All the cards in Combo Fighter are fundamentally the same, with no cards that have specific special text: they have damage, combo damage and what they can combo into (and for strikes, their initiative). The only special text for characters in Combo Fighter is a single token with two sides, which is usually 'If you do X, flip this" on either side (although some characters power up permanently). In Yomi, the special cards for the characters can make a real difference to how you play. Playing Vendetta is a lot different from Pers, since the options they have available to stack the deck against your opponent are so vastly different. As an example, my last game in Combo Fighter was basically me playing the Ken analogue vs the Ryu analogue. The special of the ken analogue is that if she does a signature combo, she can flip her token and then potentially do a ultra-long combo in a latter round. I never got to flip the token and I managed to win (although it was very close). My opponent only managed to do his special token move only once in the game. In the end, the special character token was less important than just doing damage to your opponent. The last criticism of the game is that the randomness of it is heightened by the fact that you always draw back up to 5. In Yomi, getting your opponent low in cards allows you to pressure him because you know he has less options, but games in Combo Fighter are much more reliant on the randomness to the draw, and I've already had it when I had pretty much no good options left in my hand. It's hard to exploit your opponent as well, because it's hard to tell what options he'll have either (and in yomi this is already difficult, although possible). Potentially you could card count in Combo Fighter, although if a reshuffle does happen, this goes out of the window, but the speed of the game doesn't really make card counting as worthwhile as it is in Yomi. Overall I think I might keep Combo Fighter for the time being: it is really the fastest, quickest and easiest entry into the genre out of all the other options. I don't think there's going to be much depth for me to keep coming back, but I always needed something that was more involved than Dragonpunch for an intro, but not as difficult as EXCEED.
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Oct 1, 2019 14:11
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I dislike Combo Fighter because I felt like a genius when I came up with a combo system (or something extremely similar) for a game I want to design, only to watch SUSD's review and see that Combo Fighter is pretty much is the same as mine. Clearly they hacked my files. But actually I wouldn't mind trying it out. With SHUX coming up I may grab it and play a game or two with the person I'm going with. Not a fan of the 'deck as health' thing that reminds me of Kingdom Death and the same problems associated with it (namely you can be left with either your best moves or your worst in the deck, with no way to do anything about it), but eh.
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Oct 1, 2019 14:30
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That’s not as big an issue with CF due to the possible reshuffle and the fact that your deck has only 6 variations on cards at most. I mean Yomi has the same issue and it isn’t that big a problem.
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Oct 1, 2019 14:44
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Durendal posted:I love all of this. Coming soon: untiled gOOse game
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Oct 1, 2019 14:44
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WhiteHowler posted:But the real answer is to just buy Gloomhaven. It's expensive and runs long and is... a lot. But it's the best co-op of all time, and it plays fine with two. ehhhhhhh. Gloomhaven is the best legacy game of all time. If that was your favorite part of Pandemic Legacy, then Gloomhaven is a no-brainer as long as you can swing the time investment. If you don't care about opening up new boxes and putting stickers on things then I wouldn't prioritize it.
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Oct 1, 2019 15:56
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