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Jedit posted:Played Camel Up: Supercup again tonight. I'm still terrible at Camel Up. It's still great. What and how does it add to the base game?
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Jul 28, 2015 23:08
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Any goon thoughts on La Granja out there? I realize it just released domestically but it's been out since Essen and it feels like all my normal reviewers are split on it (some love, some enh, some hate). The concern I heard one person raise that concerned me was that the gameplay could evolve to get same-y after a while. Anyone have any experience with it to share? I'm trying to complete an order to get me that Mage Knight expansion and LG is topping the list of games I don't own already.
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Jul 29, 2015 00:50
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ETB posted:What and how does it add to the base game? Four things: 1) Betting partnerships. You trade your partnership card with a player who hasn't yet been traded with, and at the end of the leg you may each optionally cash one of the other's leg bets or pyramids. 2) Positional betting. There are tiles for each of 2nd to 5th place, paying £3 if you're right and -£1 if you're wrong. You can either take one to alter a leg bet you already have, or take one of them along with the leg bet from the bottom of a stack to create a bet. 3) The photographer. You can take the photographer tile and place the camera next to any space on the track. If a stack of camels finishes on that space, you get £1 for each camel in the stack and return the photographer tile. 4) Supplementary dice. Each camel has a second die with values 1 and 2. At the start of each leg, you put the die belonging to the camel in last place in the Pyramid along with the five normal dice. Optionally, you can allow players to return a pyramid tile to the stack after taking their action to add a supplementary die to the Pyramid. You can't add a die that has been used before or the die belonging to the lead camel. It also adds components to increase the game to 10 players (from 8) and a longer track for use with the supplementary dice.
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Jul 29, 2015 01:21
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Mr.Trifecta posted:Only anticipate getting 3-5 of these for $200. MSRP rules Gen Con pricing. Oh I know, I just wanted to give him a big enough selection in case he couldn't find stuff or it had sold out.
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Jul 29, 2015 01:30
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Memnaelar posted:Any goon thoughts on La Granja out there? I realize it just released domestically but it's been out since Essen and it feels like all my normal reviewers are split on it (some love, some enh, some hate). The concern I heard one person raise that concerned me was that the gameplay could evolve to get same-y after a while. Anyone have any experience with it to share? I'm trying to complete an order to get me that Mage Knight expansion and LG is topping the list of games I don't own already. I'm solidly eh on it, with the caveat that I tend not to like Euros. The mechanics seem fine on paper, but the game just kinda came off as being dull. There was no tension, no escalation, no nail-biting "gently caress what is he gonna do" type of anticipation, but at the same time it wasn't light enough to be a chillaxing type of game. It's just in this weird space where it's just sorta there. I also hated the mechanic where you put a dude in the village corresponding to your order (I probably have my terms mixed up, but I'm too lazy to look up the proper terms for the purposes of this post). It just seemed so arbitrary and tacked on, as if someone was like "hmm we need another mechanic/ingredient in the point salad" and somehow got that out of it. Eh.
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Jul 29, 2015 01:32
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Nique posted:Recently took my first dive into the hobby (beyond 2 player gaming at home) and have been going to a local board game club for the last few weeks and had the chance to try out a few games: I'd say feature rather than flaw. I enjoy the poo poo out of trying to convince players to do stuff to screw other players over and not me. There is skill in flying under the radar.
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Jul 29, 2015 02:29
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ledge posted:I'd say feature rather than flaw. I enjoy the poo poo out of trying to convince players to do stuff to screw other players over and not me. It's the same skill used in every highly political game, though, to the extent that it ceases to matter whether you're playing Eclipse or Kemet or Cyclades or Small World or whatever else. The mechanism by which you get to the point of campaigning for Friend A to attack Friend B rather than you varies from product to product, but if a modern tabletop game takes you there, you paid $$$ for a $ experience cloned in hundreds of less-well-designed games. It's ok if you like that $ experience, obviously. I don't like it.
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Jul 29, 2015 03:39
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Hey guys, how are the Dixit expansions? There are two available here (Quest and Daydreams) and I'm tempted because free shipping  I love the premise and I'd be playing it with non-board gamers who absolutely love Pictionary because of the guessing. Is there a sweet spot in terms of players?Is anything else on this list over here: http://www.elogroalegre.com.ar/juegosdemesa a must buy?
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Jul 29, 2015 03:45
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homullus posted:It's the same skill used in every highly political game, though, to the extent that it ceases to matter whether you're playing Eclipse or Kemet or Cyclades or Small World or whatever else. The mechanism by which you get to the point of campaigning for Friend A to attack Friend B rather than you varies from product to product, but if a modern tabletop game takes you there, you paid $$$ for a $ experience cloned in hundreds of less-well-designed games. The use of that skill exists in almost all games, e.g. convincing someone to bid for a different item in Princes of Florence, or take a different action to the one you want in Agricola or whatever. If you aren't doing that in these "non confrontational" games then you really may as well be playing solitaire. Also, the underlying mechanics of a game will still affect how enjoyable it is for me. lovely mechanics will still result in a game being shelved and never played again. The politics is on top of that, and getting to the "everyone gang up on the guy who's about to win" stage doesn't bother me, or the group I play with. Which is why I see it as a feature rather than a flaw.
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Jul 29, 2015 04:00
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Azran posted:Hey guys, how are the Dixit expansions? There are two available here (Quest and Daydreams) and I'm tempted because free shipping Dixit goes over great with non-gamers. Highly recommend it. That said I don't even know what exp I have but I'd recommend getting at least one. You just have longer before you cycle through the cards then, which if you're like me happens the first time you play. I'd hazard a guess that you can just look at the exp's art style and get a good idea...but that they are probably pretty similar in the end.
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Jul 29, 2015 04:08
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ledge posted:The use of that skill exists in almost all games, e.g. convincing someone to bid for a different item in Princes of Florence, or take a different action to the one you want in Agricola or whatever. If you aren't doing that in these "non confrontational" games then you really may as well be playing solitaire. No, euros do not require people to actively try to convince other people to do things to benefit you in order to be non-solitaire. That's a ridiculous statement.
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Jul 29, 2015 04:13
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ledge posted:The use of that skill exists in almost all games, e.g. convincing someone to bid for a different item in Princes of Florence, or take a different action to the one you want in Agricola or whatever. If you aren't doing that in these "non confrontational" games then you really may as well be playing solitaire. This is important lesson to learn about games. If you are playing Seven Wonders and you discard a guild that neighbor A (who appears to be winning) needs instead of the guild that neighbor B needs (who does not appear to be winning) you have harmed player A as surely as if you attacked his temple of over someone else in Kemet. If you point to your lack of both Longest Road and Largest Army in Catan as evidence of your weakness (but are about to seize both for the win), you have politically maneuvered in the same way as someone playing Twilight Imperium would if they pointed to their 2nd place VP score just before hitting their secret objective. War games just make the politics more obvious because slamming troops into another players base feels more aggressive than playing an economic game and starving them of an important resource. If these things aren't happening then you either have a case of a bad game or bad players.
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Jul 29, 2015 04:18
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quote:If you point to your lack of both Longest Road and Largest Army in Catan as evidence of your weakness (but are about to seize both for the win), you have politically maneuvered in the same way as someone playing Twilight Imperium would if they pointed to their 2nd place VP score just before hitting their secret objective.... into another players base feels more aggressive than playing an economic game and starving them of an important resource Yes, Catan and Twilight Imperium are both very political games. But lots of other games are interactive without being nearly as political as either. Games are political to the extent that players can choose to benefit or harm specific other players. Catan is political primarily because of trading and robbing being targeted. It has nothing to do with theme; Dominion could be about fighting vampires or building an anime love harem, and it would still have very low politics because you can't effectively target specific other players. 7 Wonders is somewhere in between; your choices tend to have diminishing effects with distance - you can choose to fight/starve your neighbor, but you have a harder time having much effect on the person 3 places down in a 7 player game. King of Tokyo has medium level politics despite its theme because, again, you have limited control over who you attack. There's lots of games all over the spectrum, and lots of ways of limiting the extent to which politics tramples over other game mechanics. Some people like political games, that's fine. But I've played enough of them in my life that I never need to "fly under the radar" or "threaten mutual annihilation" or any of the normal tactics in a political game ever again. jmzero fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jul 29, 2015 |
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Jul 29, 2015 04:27
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jmzero posted:7 Wonders is somewhere in between; your choices tend to have diminishing effects with distance - you can choose to fight/starve your neighbor, but you have a harder time having much effect on the person 3 places down in a 7 player game. This is specifically why I think Seven Wonders is a brilliant game at three players, a good game at four and maaaaybe five players, and a bad game above that.
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Jul 29, 2015 04:31
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Where it gets awkward for me is being in those situations where if people don't gang up on me then I will almost certainly win, but if they do then I will almost certainly lose, and my only way of affecting my outcome is to persuade them that the reality that I perceive is actually not the case, i.e. lying to them. My empire building game turns into One Night Ultimate Werewolf all of the sudden! It would be like playing poker open handed and coercing people to still make poor bets by lying to them about the probabilities and math of the situation while in the middle of a hand. I think hidden information and mechanics that let you actually bluff within the context of the game and not just BSing your way through table talk helps these types of multiplayer, high agency games.
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Jul 29, 2015 05:15
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I'm not sure how you could possibly avoid the ganging up on the leader aspect of empire building games though. It's always going to happen. At least I'm struggling to think of one that I've played recently where that doesn't happen. Recent games would include Kemet, Cyclades, Cthulhu Wars, Chaos in the Old World and Game of Thrones. I guess Terra Mystica might handle this, not as much that you can do in the end game to stop someone who's in a winning position. That said I really enjoy the banter that goes on at this point of the game, whether I'm leading and end up getting beat down or am coming dead last and embark on suicide missions just to stop someone winning. But that's just me.
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Jul 29, 2015 06:40
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Chomp8645 posted:This is specifically why I think Seven Wonders is a brilliant game at three players, a good game at four and maaaaybe five players, and a bad game above that. While I see where you're coming from, I find three player 7 Wonders to be far less satisfying than anything else because of the resources. In a three player game, if stone is available, it's available to everyone (unless it's a yellow card). In a five player game, you have to make sure that you aren't getting screwed out of having stone because your neighbours are buying it from the other side and you have none. It adds a tactical dimension that I'm really fond of. That same thing goes for military. I don't think you should be too worried about the non-neighbour players as a rule, unless Giza is hoarding stone or something.
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Jul 29, 2015 07:57
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Azran posted:I'm about to print the free BattleCON PnP trial (all this time I thought both Yomi and BattleCON were made by the same people I would actually say that Yomi is the more simple of the two. As other people have mentioned, the two games share a theme, but different mechanics. Yomi(apparently means read in Japanese) is asymmetric RPS. The characters have different power, speed, and abilities but it really comes down to did you read your opponent well enough to counter his rock with your paper. It has just enough nuances to remain interesting despite a very simple core mechanic. BattleCON does require you to read your opponent a bit, but it's more reliant in its other factors. The game has a board, so not only your attacks but also your positioning matter. You have to wait a minimum of two turns to use any set of attacks again, so you want to be very particular with your choices. Unlike Yomi, you have perfect information in this game. You know exactly what your opponents options are. You want to play the game like chess, attacking while forcing your opponent into suboptimal decisions or positions. Yomi, in contrast, allows you to do pretty much what you want to do, as long as you draw your outs, despite your opponents decision, as long as you don't lose the RPS. Battlecon has 58 fighters available among its three versions, where Yomi has 20. Both are good games. I would play Yomi if you have less time, have to teach the game, or prefer soul reading your opponent. Play battlecon if you want a war of attrition. For what it's worth, I prefer battlecon, but my friends prefer Yomi. Again, check out Yomi for free against ai at the website, and we can get you in a pbp game here.
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Jul 29, 2015 11:18
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) and I was wondering if there's any reason to prefer one over the other. Yomi, at least to me, looks more complicated and also seems to have some serious cheesecake art, which is always a minus for me. Granted, I haven't seen all the BattleCON characters yet...
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Basically: In Yomi you win by counting cards like it's a blackjack tournament. In Battlecon you win by pulling some weird-rear end character from the box your opponent has no idea he even existed and has an even smaller notion of how he works. Shadow225 posted:Both are good games. I would play Yomi if you have less time, have to teach the game, or prefer soul reading your opponent. Play battlecon if you want a war of attrition. This is true, but it should be noted that the word "attrition" is used here meaning wailing at the opponent with AP until one of you chickens out and throws the game.
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Jul 29, 2015 11:34
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Lichtenstein posted:This is true, but it should be noted that the word "attrition" is used here meaning wailing at the opponent with AP until one of you chickens out and throws the game. I'm confused. The games of BattleCON I've played lasted like maybe 20 minutes each? Not much "attrition" about it.
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Jul 29, 2015 11:38
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We tried Eclipse for the first time yesterday. 6 player game. It was a really neat experience, though I screwed up by attacking to early, not knowing the opponent could research and upgrade after I attacked. Though this should have been obvious to me as the mechanics openly allow for it. We did however have a problem with one player just not getting into it at all. She is an experienced gamer, but was not quite prepared during the rules explanation. She admitted to "not understanding anything" but wanted to just dive in and try to catch on. The length seemed to throw her as well, as she suddenly needed to pick up a pet, and we had to AI play for her collectively while she was gone. In the end she came back to a decimated force, though we really tried to do good moves for her. The end was just her sitting bored with no options. This is the exact kind of experience I want to avoid people having in games, and I wonder what we could have done correctly. Obviously she could have tried being more engaged, but I also think we maybe should have gone through the rules, or an example of a round slowly with her first so she was on board. I also think we should have been better at preparing her for the playtime. A 6 player game like Eclipse should mean "make no other plans for the evening". I also had a good time this week introducing Alchemists to new players. Explaining the rules are a bit of a hassle. I usually don't like not mentioning VP earners until later into the game, but here I find it quite useful. First explanation should focus on learning the deduction and the basic worker placement. The deduction aspect is a fun and clear enough goal in and of itself that you can wait with the whole publication/debunking and selling part til the second round. Just like the rulebook suggests. By the end, we felt like a bickering bunch of academics, who, despite our disagreements, had collectively mapped all the correct properties of all the ingredients. Fun times.
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Jul 29, 2015 12:00
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lordsummerisle posted:I also had a good time this week introducing Alchemists to new players... By the end, we felt like a bickering bunch of academics, who, despite our disagreements, had collectively mapped all the correct properties of all the ingredients. Fun times. This is the best thing about Alchemists. I love hamming it up when making unfounded claims and belittling the other researchers.
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Jul 29, 2015 12:34
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Eclipse is rough six player, so I'd reserve it for experienced, committed players. 4 player is a much less bumpy ride for new players, while still being the full experience
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Jul 29, 2015 12:49
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The End posted:Eclipse is rough six player, so I'd reserve it for experienced, committed players. 4 player is a much less bumpy ride for new players, while still being the full experience
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Jul 29, 2015 12:55
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Chomp8645 posted:This is specifically why I think Seven Wonders is a brilliant game at three players, a good game at four and maaaaybe five players, and a bad game above that. This is the problem: There are gazillions of brilliant games at 3-4 players. 7 Wonders' versatility at different player counts is one of its best selling points. Unfortunately, it's only worth playing at a player count at which there's tons of better choices.
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Jul 29, 2015 14:41
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Yeah. Seven Wonders is a pretty bad game and I dread every time people go "Oh we've got 5+ people. Must be 7w time."
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Jul 29, 2015 15:02
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Thunder alley looks like a good 7p game. I've only done a walkthrough game though.
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Jul 29, 2015 15:03
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If you have 6 people just play Virgin Queen 
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Jul 29, 2015 15:50
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Pictomania is the only 6 player game you need.
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Jul 29, 2015 16:31
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The Arctic Scavengers big box is only 30 bucks. Includes the base game and the new expansion. I think I remember hearing good things about it. Anyone have opinions?
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Jul 29, 2015 16:32
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StashAugustine posted:If you have 6 people just play Virgin Queen Might as well get the full 10 for CNA.
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Jul 29, 2015 16:39
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Megasabin posted:The Arctic Scavengers big box is only 30 bucks. Includes the base game and the new expansion. I think I remember hearing good things about it. Anyone have opinions? Eh. It's not as good as Dominion/Puzzle Strike/EmDo but better than the market row deckbuilders.
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Jul 29, 2015 16:56
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Just learned that Orleans didn't win Kennerspiel des Jahres. Looking forward to my KS copy now since at least it was nominated but it would've been really cool if it won and you can be the guy with the cool metal coins and stuff. Broom service still looks good and I'll get it at some point myself.
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Jul 29, 2015 17:39
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Crackbone posted:Eh. It's not as good as Dominion/Puzzle Strike/EmDo but better than the market row deckbuilders. Ah that's disappointing. I love the idea of a direct confrontation deck builder that works with multiple people, and the theme was super cool.
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Jul 29, 2015 20:08
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Jul 29, 2015 20:31
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Oh nice, this is definitely coming out, right? I am hype as gently caress for this and I apologize for nothing.  EDIT: holy poo poo, they are even retheming Loopin' Louie with a new Loopin' Chewie haha Dre2Dee2 fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 29, 2015 |
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Jul 29, 2015 21:04
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HOW?
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Jul 29, 2015 21:04
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Dre2Dee2 posted:Oh nice, this is definitely coming out, right? I am hype as gently caress for this and I apologize for nothing. The hunters and gatherers one have got my fiancee's family into this poo poo. Wanna throw more money at this game.
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Jul 29, 2015 21:07
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I have no idea how game licensing works, but I guess FFG didn't have a monopoly on it? And by typing that sentence, I realized that Monopoly is and always will be the license king. I also like the Disney border on that thing.
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Jul 29, 2015 21:08
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Archenteron posted:HOW? If there can be a Batman Love Letter, Star Wars Carcassone seems plausible.
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Jul 29, 2015 21:13
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