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The Supreme Court posted:It's on my mind as it was in the thread earlier, but Kemet works well, as the design encourages the players to attack each other pretty much equally (and constantly). Specifically, losses are easily mitigated, the map is modular so 3 players are forced into immediate conflict and aggression is incentivised by permanent victory points. The final turn can be a bit kingmak-ey, but the new victory condition (which doesn't need the expansion, as it's just a rules upgrade) should hopefully fix that. Is the expansion out yet in Canada? I did some basic research and can't seem to find any evidence of it actually being available. Would anyone who's played it recommend grabbing both together if I was going to get the base game? I don't own Kemet yet but from my reading about it it seems like a mix between Cyclades my favourite game of all time and Caverna which definitely sounds appealing to me but how does it compare to these two?
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Nov 16, 2015 18:22
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I would start with just the base game. The expansion adds a lot of new modules that aren't necessary at all. If you love Cyclades, you will probably like Kemet even more (it's rare to find someone that likes the former better). It's really nothing like Caverna, other than placing action tiles on limited slots each round (each player has their own board though). It's strict area control with resource management to buy tiles (powers) that add powers, units, and abilities to your army. Unlike Cyclades, there is no dice rolling for combat (the giant D4s are only to track your pyramid levels), but you each play combat cards face down and reveal simultaneously to determine the outcome of combat.
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Nov 16, 2015 18:27
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FulsomFrank posted:Is the expansion out yet in Canada? I did some basic research and can't seem to find any evidence of it actually being available. Would anyone who's played it recommend grabbing both together if I was going to get the base game? The main draw of Cyclades is the auction mechanism, as far as I'm concerned; the map is there to make those choices meaningful, and the monsters are more of an afterthought. The depth in Kemet is more evenly-distributed, and the monsters are Very Important. I can see why you would say it's like Caverna and Cyclades, because you do have role selection and there is a map to fight over, but in terms of how Kemet actually feels to play, it is not very similar. Definitely try the base game first, there's a good amount of stuff to master there. I think the expansion sounds like the thing to buy once your group has established what power tiles it thinks are best.
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Nov 16, 2015 18:40
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I recently had a chance to play Fortune and Glory and Touch of Evil... Are all of Flying Frog's like that? Because good lord they feel so much more complex than they really need to be. I was interested in Shadows of Brimstone since I like that western/horror mashup, but not if it's going to be like that.
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Nov 16, 2015 18:51
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Soothing Vapors posted:Hahaha, I think everyone who watches rahdo regularly goes through this phase until you actually see her. With how manic Rahdo is it's totally believable that he's just had a total breakdown and has imagined himself a wife Please give me a goon review of Darkest Night. I have eyed it since release, but it seems like it has a lot of zealots on BGG which concerns me.
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Nov 16, 2015 18:55
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Orleans might get my vote for game with the most unnecessary deluxe components. The coins and worker chits are fine in metal and wooden form, but the goods tokens actually lose functionality going from cardboard to wood. With the cardboard tokens, you can store them face-down on the map to randomize. My GF and I settled on using the cardboard tokens to mark where you get goods on the board and actually using the wooden ones to keep track of how many goods players have. I still think the deluxe version was worth it for how great the wooden worker chips are to use, but the other stuff feels like it wasn't thought through. (In particular, a game in which you don't often use money doesn't feel like it's the perfect candidate to have deluxe money components, even though they are very nice.)
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Nov 16, 2015 18:59
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Evil Mastermind posted:I recently had a chance to play Fortune and Glory and Touch of Evil... Yes. As much as one might accuse FFG of being glossmongers, Flying Frog is the epitome of style of substance. All their games follow the same pattern: unbalanced, overly-complex, randomfests trying desperately to convey theme through the use of bad photoshops of their friends and medium-sized OPEC country worth of plastic tokens, but failing to do so since nothing coherent has even the slightest chance of arising out of the huge mess you pour onto the table.
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Nov 16, 2015 19:14
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Codenames is great fun. 7 Wonders: Duel is a good 2p game. I should be getting my copy of Pax Porfiriana: CE in a day or two. Got my rear end handed to me in Trajan and Valley of the Kings. Played Fury of Dracula 3e - it can still be over-long, but it's the best of the versions. Pretty good week overall.
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Nov 16, 2015 19:38
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Picking up 7W Duel this week too, care to give a rundown of the key differences in play (aside from the tile setup)?
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Nov 16, 2015 19:44
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Tippis posted:As much as one might accuse FFG of being glossmongers, Flying Frog is the epitome of style of substance. All their games follow the same pattern: unbalanced, overly-complex, randomfests trying desperately to convey theme through the use of bad photoshops of their friends and medium-sized OPEC country worth of plastic tokens, but failing to do so since nothing coherent has even the slightest chance of arising out of the huge mess you pour onto the table. And it sucks, because I felt like there might have been the core of some interesting games there, except they got so tied up in creating this huge experience that covers so much stuff the games start to collapse under their own weight. My favorite bit was the end of Touch of Evil, where the endgame is basically just a round-the-table roll-off where everyone takes turns attacking the boss monster, and I got killed in the first round and got to just sit there while everyone else got to attack and use the stuff they'd spent the whole game stockpiling.
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Nov 16, 2015 19:57
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Shadows of Brimstone is somewhat more tactical in that it's more or less a Descent/HeroQuest style tactical game with some mini-adventures in town between dungeon crawls. In that respect, Shadows isn't really all that different from Descent or Myth or Rebel Assault. Really, it's just a matter of what theme works for you. Like traditional fantasy? Play Descent. Like Star Wars? Rebel Assault is right there for you. Horror Western float your boat? That's when you want Shadows of Brimstone.
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Nov 16, 2015 20:05
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Bottom Liner posted:Picking up 7W Duel this week too, care to give a rundown of the key differences in play (aside from the tile setup)? There are now 3 ways to win: 1. Standard high-score on cards (traditional green wreath icons) at the end of the 3rd age. 2. Military Superiority: Every time you build a card with 1 or more Military icons (the same traditional shield/swords), you move the Military pawn forward one space towards your opponent. There are 6 or 7 total spaces in each direction on the track, and if you get it all the way to the end nearest your opponent, you immediately win regardless where the game is age-wise. 3. Scientific Superiority: If you collect 6 of the 7 different Science symbols on cards (obviously these are new symbols, since it's more than the original 3), you immediately win just like with Military victory. The 7 Science symbols are distributed in a way that there are 6 of them on cards across all 3 ages, and the 7th is on a "Progress Token". Every pair of Science symbols you collect allows you to take one of the 5 randomized face-up Progress tokens (there are 9 or 10 in the box), one of which has the elusive "Law" symbol as the 7th science. The Progress tokens grant all kinds of strong bonuses such as large amounts of points, extra money, discounts on purchasing resources, etc. When purchasing resources you don't have in your supply, you no longer pay the other play as in traditional 7 Wonders. Instead you pay a flat 2 gold to the bank, plus 1 for each Brown/Grey resource symbol of that type that your opponent controls. For example if I have no lumber and you have 2 lumber on your brown resource cards, I have to pay the bank 4 gold to generate one lumber in trade to use towards building a card. There are 12 Wonder cards in the game, and they are drafted at the start. You deal out 4, the first player chooses one, then the other player chooses two, then the first player takes the remaining. Repeat this with 4 new Wonders but switch the selection order around. Everything else is basically the same, to my recollection having played it a few times now.
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Nov 16, 2015 20:07
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jng2058 posted:Shadows of Brimstone is somewhat more tactical in that it's more or less a Descent/HeroQuest style tactical game with some mini-adventures in town between dungeon crawls. In that respect, Shadows isn't really all that different from Descent or Myth or Rebel Assault. Really, it's just a matter of what theme works for you. Like traditional fantasy? Play Descent. Like Star Wars? Rebel Assault is right there for you. Horror Western float your boat? That's when you want Shadows of Brimstone.
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Nov 16, 2015 20:13
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If you'd like to play a streamlined tactical combat game might I direct your attention to Earth Reborn?
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Nov 16, 2015 20:14
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Evil Mastermind posted:I don't know if I'd say they felt unbalanced, but yeah it's all drawing cards for a deck to see which deck you draw from to roll dice against other dice. The only choices I felt I had was where to move to on the map, which determined which of the dozen decks of cards I drew from. Fortune & Glory felt worse for this than ToE (which we played with the two expansions) because at least when you failed at something in ToE your next turn wasn't locked into a second iteration of the thing you failed at. The imbalance is often more a knock-on effect of the randomness. If you've read the story about how the Robinson Crusoe designer was critiqued by Vlaada, where the macro-scale statistical balance in the original design was shown to fail to serve its purpose, it's pretty much the same thing here. I'm sure that, on the whole, there are (roughly) the right blend of cards and actions and challenges to fit every character in, say, F&G. But games aren't played “on the whole.” Instead, there will be a specific combination of characters and they will randomly encounter a specific set of cards and challenges. There is absolutely nothing to say that the two will match or even remotely represent the intended balance and difficulty. So you end up with one session where one character succeeds at everything, because it's the right character for the right cards being drawn, and everyone else gets slapped around horribly; or you end up with turns that will not end because everyone draws beneficial and easily accomplished tests — everyone's consistently successful, and it takes an hour to go one round around the table. They never have any mechanics to control for these mismatches, or perhaps more accurately, they do not have the restraint to limit the number of combinations so that those mismatches don't occur to begin with. The philosophy is always that more is better and the horrible outcomes are glossed over as “narratively or thematically appropriate”, even when it's infinitely more likely that they don't make any sense at all (I'm looking at you, Saharan ice-caves).
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Nov 16, 2015 20:18
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Remember that Pandemonium titty miniature kickstarter game from a few pages ago? It somehow got even worse    their whole campaign seems to be "remember that [guy/girl/tornado made of sharks] you liked so much, from that other thing you liked? we shamelessly ripped it off and made a lovely miniature out of it!" And yet somehow this made 63k so far
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Nov 16, 2015 20:19
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djfooboo posted:Please give me a goon review of Darkest Night. I have eyed it since release, but it seems like it has a lot of zealots on BGG which concerns me. DN is like a better Eldritch Horror. If you already own and are happy with EH, you probably don't need a second one. The biggest knock on it is that it needs its first two expansions bad. In fact, they sell the first two expansions bundled with the main game now in the "Necromancer Bundle," and that's the one you should buy if you do.
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Nov 16, 2015 20:25
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Soothing Vapors posted:their whole campaign seems to be "remember that [guy/girl/tornado made of sharks] you liked so much, from that other thing you liked? we shamelessly ripped it off and made a lovely miniature out of it!" And yet somehow this made 63k so far And holy poo poo that Furiosa mini looks terrible. I mean, they all do, but that one's standing out to me. e: I don't know which is worse: the nerd-pandering, the bad sculpts, or the terrible grammar. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 20:32
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, I own Descent (and even tried to play it solo with those organized play kits), and I know that Shadows is in that style with the campaign and stuff. I was mostly wondering if it had the over-design or whatever you'd call it of the other games. Eh, I didn't find it any more fiddly than Descent. Maybe the between dungeons town bit is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but that's like 10% of the game, tops.
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Nov 16, 2015 20:39
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3 kingdoms redux is not a wargame. The war in it is so abstracted as to be barely worth the 3k name. The game is fun though!
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Nov 16, 2015 20:43
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jng2058 posted:Eh, I didn't find it any more fiddly than Descent. Maybe the between dungeons town bit is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but that's like 10% of the game, tops.
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Nov 16, 2015 20:44
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jng2058 posted:But are there any war/strategy games that support three players well? If so, how do they avoid the usually inevitable end results of 1) One player is ignored while the other two fight, and that one player almost certainly wins, or 2) Two players team up against the third, and that player almost certainly loses?
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Nov 16, 2015 21:00
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It's not really a full "game", but I like to play "three word challenge" Codenames after we've finished a few rounds and don't really want to start another. Draw three random words out of the box, group tries to come up with a hint that covers all of them. Edit: this was in response to people talking about Codenames last page, not a suggestion for a wargame. Codenames is not a suitable wargame, in case you were wondering. America Rocks fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 21:40
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jng2058 posted:But are there any war/strategy games that support three players well? If so, how do they avoid the usually inevitable end results of 1) One player is ignored while the other two fight, and that one player almost certainly wins, or 2) Two players team up against the third, and that player almost certainly loses? Wargames I can't help you. COIN with a robot player, maybe? But interactive strategy games, Tash-Kalar is the gold standard. And TK's 3-player solution is so rock-simple, I'm surprised I don't see it used more often. You have two scoring tracks, one for each opponent, and the lower of the two tracks is your final score. So you have to mete out your aggression in equal proportion, or else you're going to lose hard.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:44
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Gutter Owl posted:And TK's 3-player solution is so rock-simple, I'm surprised I don't see it used more often. You have two scoring tracks, one for each opponent, and the lower of the two tracks is your final score. So you have to mete out your aggression in equal proportion, or else you're going to lose hard. That is a pretty cool idea and enough that I might add TK to my next order.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:48
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This rule also leads to hilarious moments where opponent 1 that you've killed a bunch realizes the only way to win is to stomp on opponent 2.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:49
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drat Dirty Ape posted:That is a pretty cool idea and enough that I might add TK to my next order. 3 player is by far the worst format you can play TK in. I have never enjoyed a 3 player game of that, since the only thing you can do is deathmatch, and with how the game works it can lead to some fun scenarios where a player is literally unable to be competitive.
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Nov 16, 2015 22:05
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Woo, looks like my various cubes and cylinders for Container showed up. Now we can play the game more artistically! Also we gave it a shot Saturday and it went really well, managed to avoid crashing the economy and ended something like 150-135-127-119-100 or so. Great with 5 but it takes a while, about 150 minutes (people were grabbing food for a bunch of that start timing, though). Not bad for a game that's got 10 rules and is the size of a deck of cards.
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Nov 16, 2015 22:20
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America Rocks posted:It's not really a full "game", but I like to play "three word challenge" Codenames after we've finished a few rounds and don't really want to start another. Draw three random words out of the box, group tries to come up with a hint that covers all of them. I like this. Do you make it a race to see which team can come up with a clue for them all faster? I played a variant with some fellow industry folks at a trade show last week in which the spymasters were allowed to use multi-word clues...with the catch being that you could only give clues which were names of board/tabletop games. It was, as you might expect, insanely difficult.
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Nov 17, 2015 00:05
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Viticulture enhanced edition arrived in the mail. How does it go with 6 players, like most euros where 4-5 is the optimal player count?
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Nov 17, 2015 01:07
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dishwasherlove posted:Viticulture enhanced edition arrived in the mail. How does it go with 6 players, like most euros where 4-5 is the optimal player count? It goes fine. Five may be the optimal count, though.
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Nov 17, 2015 01:13
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Lorini posted:Yay! I'm going to Dice Tower Con! Awesome, we got tickets too. I know when I mentioned going this year, it seemed some people itt weren't fans of it. It might be fun to do some gaming with some goons next year.  Were you able to get a room at the hotel? I heard it's already sold out.
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Nov 17, 2015 03:20
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The tickets sold out in 5 mins, the same 5 minutes the site wouldn't work for me (and many others). Cool.
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Nov 17, 2015 03:26
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Bottom Liner posted:The tickets sold out in 5 mins, the same 5 minutes the site wouldn't work for me (and many others). Cool. That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that.  I know a lot of people had issues with EventBrite's site. DT did do a release at 3PM of 400 additional tickets, with those on the waiting list having first crack at them. I've seen people mention on the Facebook group that they bought more tickets than they needed "for friends", or that they heard others did. This year a few people weren't able to go and sold their tickets right before the con, so maybe you can get one of those? They did say next year (for the 2017 con) there will be 3500 tickets available. The biggest issue from what I've read is the fact that the new hotel was double-booked with another con at the same time. We'll see how it plays out next year I guess.
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Nov 17, 2015 03:47
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Skutter posted:Awesome, we got tickets too. I know when I mentioned going this year, it seemed some people itt weren't fans of it. It might be fun to do some gaming with some goons next year. Yes I hope to stay over a day to go to Epcot.
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Nov 17, 2015 04:21
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Jedit posted:It goes fine. Five may be the optimal count, though. I think four is the optimal count for Viticulture personally, but it doesn't suffer too much from 5 or 6. With odd numbers (3 and 5) there will be less competition for board actions as more spaces are available, so the pace is a little different.
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Nov 17, 2015 04:27
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Thanks for the info. I'll post some thoughts when I get it to the table.
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Nov 17, 2015 06:11
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Can anyone tell me about the Eldritch Horror Expansions? My group plays the game once every few months and we already have Forsaken Lore. Are the other two, Mountains of Madness and Strange Remnants, any good? How much of what they add is more stuff for the base game and how much if it is extra modules that you can add on?
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Nov 17, 2015 07:40
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Fenn the Fool! posted:Can anyone tell me about the Eldritch Horror Expansions? My group plays the game once every few months and we already have Forsaken Lore. Are the other two, Mountains of Madness and Strange Remnants, any good? How much of what they add is more stuff for the base game and how much if it is extra modules that you can add on? They both add GOOs, Investigators and cards for the various decks. Mountains of Madness also introduces the Prelude cards, which alter initial game setup, and the Antarctica board that is only used with one specific Prelude or GOO.
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Nov 17, 2015 09:18
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Castles of Burgundy is 20 dollars as part of Amazon's Deal of the Day. I feel like I already own a lot of solid Euro's with similar town building themes like Puerto Rico, Caylus, Endeavor, and Orleans. Is there any reason to add this to that collection?
Megasabin fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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