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Buying Slaves day 1 and Priest of Ra day 2 lets you upgrade your other two pyramids from 0 to 4 for 3 ankhs, each. It's pretty ridiculous.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:07
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Broken Loose posted:Recently, I finally got to play One Night Ultimate Werewolf with most of my regular crew. I've had the game for a while and even played it a bunch, but I hadn't yet played it with my regular Avalon gang. My group really enjoys ONUW, we'll play a dozen games in a row sometimes. When you say the day round can be solved if "the players have more than 2 minutes to discuss it", what exactly do you mean? In my experience, some games will be trivial to solve, but those games aren't that common. The game is totally random, and it sounds like that's what you and your group dislike about it. If you ask me though, everyone losing because of "one jittery person with trust issues" is hilarious and exactly the kind of thing that makes that game so fun. I'm not upset if I lose a game of ONUW; some of the best games are where you think you have it figured out, and it turns out everything you thought you knew was an elaborate lie. The game is all about creating situations for people to lie in really clever ways; that's why the night round is such a mess, if you can untangle that mess just a few moments faster than the other players, you can lie about it. Even if you're not a werewolf you should be lying because maybe someone switched your card or maybe you can get a werewolf to out himself. I know I'm going to lose some games for stupid reasons and win some games for stupid reasons, but it doesn't bother me because trying to lie and catch people lying and just figure out what the hell is going on is so much fun and an entirely different experience from any other bluffing game I know of.
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Dec 17, 2014 07:32
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Recently got and played Sail to India, has anybody played this game? I like it in theory, but I'm not sure how you beat the harbor maintenance strategy. One of the players purchased it in the first couple turns and did nothing for the rest of the game but sail three ships in circles for a reliable two points per turn. Every 2-3 turns he had to sell goods and buy a new cube so he could track his points, but he was still making more points faster than any other way I could see on the board. Of course, the worst part about it is there's no thinking at all, its a really boring strategy to play out. Did we miss a rule somewhere, or is there a way to block this strategy? At the moment I'm thinking of adding a "max once per turn" rider to it like almost every other technology has.
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Dec 28, 2014 21:45
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I've played quite a bit of Tzolk'in and I think it's pretty drat great. In the base game there are probably only a few viable strategies, but the expansion really shakes that up and just generally comes with a ton of stuff and rounds out the game. The caveat here is, the game isn't very friendly to new players. Playing the game really well is about getting exactly as many resources as you need just before you actually need them, and this means you generally have your next 2-4 turns already planned out. It takes a couple games to get into the swing of things and new players will feel like they're just farting around, they never have what they need when they need it, and they'll end the game with a pile of junk that they never managed to turn into a meaningful amount of points.
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Dec 31, 2014 08:39
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We play skull by just dealing one person all the K's, another all the 4's, another all the 10's, etc. We call the game heartless.
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Jan 6, 2015 16:41
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Almost all I'm ever looking for in board game reviews is a quick overview of how the game plays and how it's different from other games in the genera. I really like this guy's reviews just because they're so quick and to the point; I wish there were more reviews done in this style.
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Jan 13, 2015 21:16
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I do have to say that the SU&SD GenCon special was really good and pretty recent, more recent than the second sci-fi special that everyone hates. They can be really funny guys, I just wish they'd focus more on that fun stuff.
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Jan 24, 2015 17:07
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Broken Loose posted:A basic example of an Enemy ID you'd encounter: What happens when a player accidentally violates one of the speech rules?
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Jan 28, 2015 19:14
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I've been going on a lot of camping trips lately and having Hive along has been great because I don't have to worry about playing it down in the dirt or having pieces get blown away by the wind. Are there any other good tile-only games or good ways to get custom tiles made? Additionally, what games would work well sitting around a campfire? I think the resistance or spyfall would, if you had someone acting as game master; any other ideas?jivjov posted:So just for fun, I bought myself a complete Badger Deck. Now that I'm in possession of a 10-suited deck of cards, each running from 0 to 20, with an Ace and 10 other face cards...what wacky games can I recreate/simulate? The Resistance, Coup, Love Letter, Skull and Roses, Red7, Lost Legacy, and One Night Werewolf all work pretty easily, with varying amounts of player aids. You can do Hanabi by replacing 1's with "Beginnings" (F, H, or M), 2's with "Heirs" (J or P), 3's with "Royals" (Q or K), 4's with "Mages" (W or S), and the 5 with the Castle. Just lay out an extra suit, in a pyramid, as a player aid.
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Mar 24, 2015 23:31
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Lottery of Babylon posted:They're not difficult to understand mechanically, but they're fiddly in ways that slow the game down for no reason, and lead to far more discussion and time being sunk into simple moves than should have been necessary. This actually makes wilderness/expedition areas much easier to access, though I don't know how much impact that actually has on the game's difficulty. Rules as written, getting into an area with no boat/train routes is hard, because you have to do it with your first move, but you can have tickets prepared so that once you're done there you can easily leave. I kinda like how this works from a thematic/pacing perspective, and given the game is pretty much 100% theme, preserving that seems like a good thing.
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Apr 10, 2015 06:31
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Tekopo posted:In one of my games someone drew a rolling rock and I managed to guess moss correctly We had a player draw something with a mouth and a dollar bill. We all guessed cashew. It was actually fairy. Pictomania is great.
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Apr 14, 2015 00:13
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Another Eminent Domain question: can you follow a role if you have zero of those symbols? We had a player who wanted to follow a research role to buy expansion things that cost fighters, from the rulebooks I can't tell if he needs a research symbol to do it or not.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:16
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Is Evolution any good? 6 player simultaneous play is a good niche to fill, but I'm not super confidant about what I've seen of the game play.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:32
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PubicMice posted:So, my buddy got Super Dungeon Explore and asked me to help put it together, and I discovered that holy poo poo building minis is fun as hell, and now I want to make all the minis. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot of minis board games that aren't either pre-assembled or wargames, and those aren't really what I'm looking for. So, besides Shadows of Brimstone and the hopefully-soon-to-be-released Kingdom Death: Monster, what are some good games to scratch my newly acquired itch? Uhhh, Blood Bowl? Really, most games that sell themselves on their miniatures are pretty lovely games because their customers are mainly interested in miniatures v  v. The general consensus here is that Super Dungeon Explore is pretty bad and the last I heard of Kingdom Death it had tons of kickstarter backers because of it's (kinda skeevy) miniatures, despite not actually having rules yet. I'd recommend you just buy miniatures from wherever and build them for fun, and maybe you can find a few games where you can replace a few cardboard chits with them.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:58
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PubicMice posted:you forgot to judge Shadows of Brimstone Honestly, I've never heard of it; like all games I assume it's bad until I have evidence to the contrary. It looks like a dungeon crawl sort of game, Level 7: Omega Protocol is usually considered the best game in that style and it has miniatures (I think they come pre-assembled, but you can paint them). Are you exclusively looking for games you can play solo? There are only a handful of games that do solo-play well.
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Apr 30, 2015 17:41
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Broken Loose posted:Just switch over to Resistance + Hostile Intent + Hidden Agenda. You'll have variants and characters for ages to come. Are most copies of the expansions available at CSI or whatever the misprinted ones that need sleeving, or was that only kickstarter backers?
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May 2, 2015 18:58
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The weird thing about Sheriff of Nottingham is, if you hand the sheriff a bag of legal goods he's in a no-win situation. No matter what he does the player will keep all of their goods, the only question is whether he also has to pay a fine for opening the bag. We tried out a house rule: if the sheriff returns a bag unopened and it's owner didn't lie about the contents the sheriff gets $1 from the bank for each card that was in the bag. It's not a silver bullet or anything, but it seemed to help discourage the usual trend of never putting contraband through, which is good.
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May 17, 2015 21:44
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bobvonunheil posted:If you like these you might also like the Non-transitive Grime Dice. They're like rock paper scissors but with dice (as in, Die 1 has better odds of beating Die 2, which has better odds of beating Die 3, which has better odds of beating Die 1) I thought these were really interesting and was considering designing a game around them, but then I did the math and realized that they're pretty closely equivalent to each player rolling a standard d6 and the player with the advantage wins ties.
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May 30, 2015 19:04
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Speaking of thematic co-op games, has anybody played Xenoshyft? Watch it Played did a runthrough that made it look like it had some interesting ideas, but I'm not exactly sold.
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Jun 7, 2015 06:07
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Re: Specter Ops The game is definitely biased towards the hunter side. We've played 5 or 6 times and the agent only completed a second objective in 2 of those (to win the agent has to complete 3 of the 4 objectives and then escape). I don't know how that is going to shift as we get better at playing the game, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad place for the balance to sit. The hunters getting to feel good for stopping the agent while the agent gets to enjoy having completed a few of his objectives before going down seems better than the alternative, where the agent winning is the foregone conclusion and the hunters' only consolation is how many times they punched him before he left. The motion sensor is very powerful, but it has some major drawbacks too. You can always move slowly to avoid detection from it and whoever activates it can't move on their turn; as the agent you can exploit both of these if you can accurately read when they're going to use it. There's also an important rule we missed in our first few games: if hunter A drives the car, hunter B can't activate the motion sensors on the same turn. With all that in mind I think the motion sensor is necessary for the game to work. If the agent gets behind the hunters and they don't have a good idea where he went they'll be spending a handful of very boring turns wandering around randomly and waiting for the agent to complete an objective; the motion sensor gives them an idea of where you are and lets them get back in position in a reasonable amount of time. For most of the game the hunters know which block the agent is in, but with all the possible hiding spots it can be very difficult to pin down his exact location. In these situations the motion sensor isn't useful because they already know what it's going to say. The agent's goal here is to bide his time until he can cross the road to the next block safely, either by using an item or by simply having enough of a head start that the hunters can't pin down his position in the new block. On the topic of agent balance, both Cobra's and Spider's abilities effectively do the same thing as Orangutang's, they mean you can be spotted more times before dying, and I certainly wouldn't say that Orangutang has the best unique equipment of the three. Blue Jay's ability and unique equipment both give her really crazy options for misdirection and, seeing as misdirection is how you win the game, I'd say she'll turn out to be the most useful character; of course it's still too early to call anything definitively. All in all my group has been really enjoying the game. Even with how badly the agent has been doing, everyone is clamoring for their turn to try and outsmart the hunters. It still seems possible that the dominant strategies will get worked out and it won't have much longevity after that, but if we can get 10-15 good plays out of it I'll be satisfied. Also, holy hell the eratta has some really gamechanging poo poo in it, this stuff should absolutely be in the rulebook if they do a new print run.
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Jun 21, 2015 19:22
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Bottom Liner posted:What was your player count? I've heard the game balance drastically shifts with different Hunter numbers. We've only done 5 player one time, the others were a mix of 3 and 4. The game definitely feels completely different at different player counts and I expect that to become more pronounced the more we play.
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Jun 21, 2015 19:44
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It can often be better to just ask a bunch of lovely questions instead of always looking for the best possible one, this gives the other players more opportunities to get little bits of information across and the spy more opportunities to flub something. It also gives you a lot more plausible deniability when you're the spy and you ask something dumb and off the cuff. I asked an otherwise meaningless throwaway question last night and the guy responded with "I don't believe I have"; we were at the cathedral so that instantly cleared him of all suspicion, but because the both the question and answer were entirely meaningless outside that one word it gave the spy basically no information.
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Jun 26, 2015 20:46
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The Supreme Court posted:Spyfall has a web app. Skulls, the resistance, love letter and coup can all be played with ordinary cards. https://spyfall.meteor.com, pretty great stuff; you lose out on the artwork but it means everybody gets a comprehensive list of the possible locations, which is nice. One Night Ultimate Werewolf and The Resistance can also be done with a regular deck of cards. To make things easy to remember you'll want a piece of paper in the center of the table with all the card effects written out for easy reference. My gaming group calls Skull done with playing cards "Heartless" and for Coup your roles become Assassin, Kaptain, Quontessa, Jambasador, and 10uke.
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Jul 9, 2015 17:07
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bobvonunheil posted:Does anyone have good role recommended combinations for different player counts? I've just got One Night and Daybreak and I'd like to prevent an introductory few games from falling flat. Until you're familiar with the game you should always have the core of: Seer, Robber, Troublemaker, Villager x3, and Werewolf x2. Daybreak lets you swap out villagers for more interesting minor roles like the Apprentice Seer, but for new players having the easy cover of "I'm a villager, honest" will help smooth out the first few games. If your group is mostly new people add in simple roles who's actions are explained by the soundtrack like the Drunk, Apprentice Seer, Insomniac, and Masons. From there you can just swap in new roles every game or every other game to keep things interesting. This starting set should be tilted fairly heavily toward the villagers, so once everyone has things figured out you'll want to add the Tanner or the Minion to keep it competitive. A few things to watch out for: don't have the Village Idiot and the Revealer at the same time, it creates too much information. Don't use the Doppleganger with the Minion, as it adds a very significant amount of time to the soundtrack. Roles like the Thief, Doppleganger, and P.I. can create situations where the majority of people at the table think they're a werewolf, this can be ok occasionally, but if it's happening too often consider swapping out some of those roles. Unlike in The Resistance, even the Villagers should be lying A LOT; look for your group being too open with information and try to use it against them.
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Jul 27, 2015 19:24
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The "expansion" that comes with the dystopian version is a deck of special action cards, the first leader for each mission draws one. They're really unexciting, the special roles in Avalon are a million times better. The expansions for the dystopian version include the Avalon special roles, along with a bunch of other new stuff that people like, but some of the expansion cards have obviously misprinted backs, meaning you might need sleeves to play with them. As an aside I believe the dystopian version came first and Avalon was released afterward.
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Jul 29, 2015 23:39
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bobvonunheil posted:It's not all too dissimilar to the D&D boards. Compared to the Descent/ImpAss boards it's pretty embarrassing. Yeah, that was cool. And then it started talking about how in between missions you only recover some of your hitpoints and you only get your revive potion back on a successful die roll and I couldn't stop screaming.
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Jul 31, 2015 22:45
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The expansion for Tzolk'in is one of the best board game expansions ever printed, there's so much stuff in that box and all of it is great. That said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the base game, it plays very well so get in at least a handful of plays before you upgrade.
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Aug 1, 2015 17:24
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Che Delilas posted:Oh, and last week I played Munchkin with some co-workers because they had the game at work. It was loud and stupid and I won because I was the second person to try to win and everybody blew their load preventing the first guy to try to win from winning. Fun was had, I think mostly because of the alcohol and everybody just heckling each other; I'm sure there are games that encourage that kind of social interaction without the monkey-cheese humor and chaos of Munchkin. Any recommendations? Right now there's only Munchkin in the office and I'd like to maybe see about providing an alternative. Well, if you're just looking for something light then Lost Legacy and Love Letter are really good. They're light and fast, but there's a good bit of strategy in there too. If you really want banter then your group might enjoy some hidden role games where they can throw accusations at each other and the Resistance is the gold standard for that. One Night Ultmiate Werewolf is more wild and random; I'm personally a big fan of it, but public opinion is a little more divided. Coup is another really good game that sits somewhere between Love Letter/Lost Legacy and The Resistance/ONUW, simple to play but you'll see it quickly transition to serious strategy and mind-games.
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Aug 31, 2015 19:05
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Archenteron posted:I'm always the Duke, and you're always the Ambassador. I always have the princess and everyone always knows 
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Sep 4, 2015 05:20
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My group is a big fan of Lost Legacy. We picked up the new decks and, well, they actually seem pretty bad. The Staff of Dragons is all about cards that modify your investigation speed, on most turns there isn't much to do aside from play the card that will get you the best investigation speed at the end of the game. The 3 and 4 eliminate all other players who's discards sum up to a number divisible by 3 or 4, respectively, but you don't really have a way to set this up. The 5 wins you the game if you have the 3 and 4 in your discards; a number of cards in the set let you manipulate discards, so this is possible to set up, but we never actually saw it happen over a dozen or so hands. The winner tended to come down to whoever drew their way into a better investigation speed. The Sacred Chalice is a bit more complicated. It's gimmick is, if you play card that is the same or higher value to your previous card, you must play that card face-down for no effect. The 1 and the 5 are the only cards that break this rule; the 1 may be played face down, if the player wishes, and the 5 must always be played face down. The goal here is to hide cards in your discards, potentially revealing them to be the 5 in the investigation phase. In addition, the 1 can make you instantly win if you find the 5, the 3 can steal that win from the 1, and the 2 can instantly win if it finds the 1. All of this sounds interesting, unfortunately the 6, 7, 8, and X are all nearly useless, so if you don't draw one of the low cards you basically don't get to play the game. Our consensus is the Vorpal Sword is still the best set, with the Starship a close second. The Flying Garden and the Whitegold Spire are both solid, and these two are not very good. We also picked up Dogs of War and, man, that game is really unforgiving for new players. The game is a fairly complex economic puzzle, but on top of that it's incredibly political. The games we've played have felt very swingy, with huge disparities in final scores. It seems like that's just because it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot early on by investing in losing battles and losing factions, that the strategy will be about trying to anticipate these bad choices before they happen, but we don't have enough experience with the game to tell.
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Sep 21, 2015 09:32
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Meme Emulator posted:Are there any online chess websites that allow you to make illegal moves? I want to try playing Chess 2 online with a buddy of mine I couldn't find one, but I made this and you're welcome to use it. Edit: the black box is for secretly bidding stones Fenn the Fool! fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Sep 26, 2015 |
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Sep 26, 2015 22:53
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I played T.I.M.E. Stories last night. The SU&SD review actually nails this pretty well: the game sucks. On the good side of things, the production quality is really nice, the art looks good, and it is interesting to poke around new areas for clues, but everything else is just a mess. The game's narrative is really bad. You have no idea what you're trying to do, why, or what the stakes are. The game sets up a mystery and then you don't actually solve it; you go down into the basement and punch somebody in the face and then the game goes "good job team". From the word go there are tons of people to talk to and things to mess around with; some of these are vital clues necessary to finish the game and others are completely pointless red herrings and there's no real way to discern which is which. Worse still, the game frequently gives you tasks and then, after completing them, they wind up being complete wastes of time or even actively detrimental. The game even has a "haha, this is a dead end" card and there are two different ways you can run into it. The characters you choose between are all psychiatric patients with their own psychological quirks, but none of them ever really mattered in play. Things might be even worse mechanically. Sorting through all the cards to change locations is incredibly inelegant and time consuming. It only took us about 3 hours to play through the game, and you can't replay it in any capacity. You throw tons of dice and they're almost entirely pointless. The amount of time it takes to move from location to location is determined by a movement die, it has the faces: 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3. Completing tasks involves chucking a bunch of dice, if you fail the penalty is you have to spend another turn rolling more dice. Failing challenges against monsters can knock you out, which just means you can't do anything for 7 turns. There were a couple of cases where the backs of the cards held a mini-game to complete, but these required their own set of rules to learn to learn and weren't very compelling. One these mini-games allowed you to spend 5 turns upfront to bypass the puzzle and completing it in fewer turns than that would have been really difficult. At the end of the game you get a score, so you can be 1st rank agents or 2nd rank agents or whatever. At less than 10 points you don't get to be agents anymore. We got -2 points. And that was with a liberal amount of cheating. The game had one main puzzle that we were actually interested in solving. The solution ended up just being "have you been everywhere in the game and remember all the clues you found?". Even worse - spoilered in case people want to play the game: you can solve this puzzle wrong. If you didn't pick up on a small detail from the beginning of the game you get what seems like a legitimate lead that ends up being a long walk to the dead-end card.
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Nov 1, 2015 18:47
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TM is my board shame. All my friends love it, but I've never found it to be very exciting and I always win by a wide margin. The last time we played an extra player dropped in unexpectedly right as we were getting started. I split my attention between chess with him and the TM game, and still won the latter. I feel bad about not liking a game everyone else really enjoys, but I have some bizarre tallent with those kinds of resource management puzzles and so I don't find the game at all challenging or interesting.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:35
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Bombadilillo posted:Any goony hands on with T.I.M.E.? I posted a long winded review of it a few pages back. The long and short of it is: it has some pretty pictures, but really sucks in basically every other way.
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Nov 5, 2015 01:57
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I'm really surprised to see two people that think Hand of God (free pyramid level every night) is one of the best tiles; I've always thought it was decent, but not amazing. Here's a strategy I run if I want to upgrade my pyramids quick that I think is miles ahead of anything you could do with Hand of God: Turn 1: buy Slaves (1 ankh discount on pyramid upgrades), upgrade white from 2 to 4 for 5 ankhs Turn 2: buy whatever that one tile is called (1 ankh discount on everything), upgrade blue to level 4 for 3 ankhs (normally this costs 1+2+3+4, with your double discount this becomes 0+0+1+2) Turn 3: upgrade red to level 4 for 3 ankhs Cheap, simple, and it lets you quickly pick up the sphinx and a +1 VP tile for an easy 5 point lead out of the gate. For general Kemet chat, white has most of the tiles that enable strategies in other colors. The get ankhs for kills tile lets you turn an otherwise red focused strategy into a very economically powerful one (though, note that the two free kills from Initiative happen before battle, so you don't get prayer points for them). All the white tiles that give you more DI cards and more choice over your DI cards work great with the red tile that lets you pitch DI cards for strength and the blue tile that forces your opponent to play their combat card first. Outside of those, there aren't many tile combinations that are hugely synergistic, in general everything is useful and works together fine. Kemet is all about creating situations where you have a strength advantage, the best tiles for this are the 5 monster tiles (I'm not counting the elephant because it only gives +1, but I am counting the snake because canceling an opponents monster is effectively +2). The thing is, these tiles don't stack and it's unlikely you'll be shut out of all of them, so you probably want to pick up some of the other strength bonuses first. +1 strength while attacking, +1 strength while defending, +1 strength across the board, Initiative, and Legion are all less powerful than a monster, but they stack with one, so they're good to pick up early.
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Nov 14, 2015 20:35
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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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I recently picked up Mission: Red Planet, The Grizzled, and Between Two Cities. Mission: Red Planet is great, not that that's particularly surprising. It's a medium-weight territory control game; have the most astronauts in a region of mars and you'll collect the resources it produces. You send astronauts to mars by selecting role cards, each card lets you load one or more astronauts into one of the communal rockets and provides some special effect. Each card's special effect feels unique and powerful, there's never an obvious play. I definitely recommend the game; it has a good deal of depth, the component quality is amazing, and it's easy to teach. My only complaint is the names they used for the regions and resources. The region names are pulled from actual regions of mars, but they're in Latin and they don't exactly roll off the tongue. Similarly the resources are ice, "sylvanite", and "celerium"; it's tough to remember which is which for the latter two, so we've taken to calling them "crystals" and "the good one". The Grizzled is a cooperative game about French soldiers in WW1. Despite the military setting there is no real combat, the core of the game is about braving the horrors of war through the power of friendship. The game plays like some distant relative of Hanabi; you're all working together, but you can't talk to one another and have to infer information from how the other players are playing. The art for the game is fantastic and the theme comes through incredibly well, but the gameplay I'm only lukewarm on. I'll need to play it more before I come to any final conclusions, but from my plays so far it seems a little shallow and the difficulty seems a little sporadic. Between Two Cities is absolutely amazing. It's a drafting game that seats seven; it both plays faster and is easier to teach then seven wonders. Each player is building two cities, one in cooperation with the player on their left and the other in cooperation with the player on their right. Each player's final score is the weaker of their two cities, so you want to try and build them evenly. The game is definitely on the lighter end of things, but every group I've run it with has had a blast, I highly recommend it. Bottom Liner posted:Yeah but what's your ELO for tournament Coup Coup has a huge amount of depth in spite of it's very simple and elegant rules. If your group has overlooked that then you've missed out on a lot of what makes the game so great.
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Nov 25, 2015 08:53
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I had the exquisite honor of playing the second T.I.M.E. Stories adventure yesterday, The Marcy Case. It has all of rolling dice to waste arbitrary time units, bullshit red herring dead ends, and almost zero exposition or explanation of the plot that you've come to expect from the franchise, but this time they've managed to poo poo up the few things the first adventure, Asylum, actually did right. Asylum started off with a somewhat interesting and unique setting; it takes a very rapid turn into a wall of cliches, but it starts off mostly good. TMC, on the other hand, is as generic a zombie outbreak setting as you can imagine from the word go. They even put umbrella symbols everywhere. Seriously. In Asylum the playable characters were a colorful bunch, as patients from a mental hospital they all had interesting rules quirks and you had a good number of them to choose between. In TMC you get exactly four characters and they are painfully generic: the FBI Agent, the Spunky Reporter, the Tattooed Ex-Con, and the Vietnam Vet (named Will, no less). Only one of them has a special ability, and it's not very interesting. The Asylum had one, maybe two, good puzzles; legitimate diamonds in the rough among a sea of dung. They used the card system in interesting ways to create something unique and challenging. In TMC, the main puzzle is little more than "find the hints that tell you which option is the correct one" AND the clues are written so poorly that the whole thing only makes any kind of sense if you go off of some bullshit "the correct answer must be among the choices we've found" video game logic. ~spoilers~ Seriously, I'm gonna spoil everything because this games makes me so god drat irrationally angry. ~spoilers~ The main puzzle is figuring out who Marcy is. You find four test subjects from the evil lab, they're all young women with red hair, they've been drugged so they can't just tell you their name. You find notes and cassette tapes that talk about the subjects and can use the few pieces of information you know about Marcy to eliminate two of them. One of the clues just states that one of the test subjects isn't progressing as she should and is going to be transferred out of the area; you're supposed to assume this means she can't be Marcy and that, therefore, the fourth girl has to be. Plothole Roundup Jamboree: -The city has been quarantined and is totally overrun with zombies, but somehow nobody knows about it; the Spunky Reporter is there to get her big scoop. -The mission starts with a crashed cop car, they were taking a shortcut through the quarantined town. -The four test subjects are all in different parts of the city. Most of them are chained or handcuffed to something. No explanation is given for this. -At the end of the mission a chopper picks up the girl. They are implied to be time-assholes too, and have a DNA scanner (what looks like a colored pattern on the card's border is used to check if you have the right girl). Why didn't they just send the main team with the drat DNA scanner? It would have made everything a hell of a lot easier. Stupid loving rear end in a top hat Dead-Ends -In the very first scene you can rescue a prisoner from the zombies. Two different areas have "If the prisoner is with you, you must flip this card, you can't flip this card otherwise" cards. Both of them are bad and get you nothing. -In the police station is an Abort Button. If you'd called the chopper to pick you up it stops them from coming. -A priest asks you to donate medkits. If you do he throws you into a room with a zombie giant. -The hotel has both stairs and an elevator. The stairs cost either a life or a time unit. The elevator has no downside. -From the very start of the game you can go to the river. Once there you can't leave, you can only try to go down the river. Trying to go down it without the fisherman or gas can is suicide. If you get to the end you get nothing unless you've done literally everything else in the game.
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Jan 27, 2016 07:25
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T.I.M.E. Stories ChatBottom Liner posted:If you don't mind, I'm going to share this with a board game Facebook group full of 8,000 members that won't shut up about how great the game is and collect their responses. Please do. Applewhite posted:At least all of you got to bond over how terrible you thought the game was. Scyther posted:Like hell, I bet all the other players thought it was the second coming of board gaming Jesus. I played both cases with the same group of four. At the end of the first case we were pretty fed up; we knew the solution, but started just flipping over the cards as we wanted rather than playing it out by the rules. Nobody walked away having hated the experience, but after discussing it we all agreed it was pretty bad. Going into the second case we were all fairly excited, but knew to expect the same stupid dead-ends and run around that we got in the first game. I called some of the dead-ends ahead of time, got a few good "why did you have to be right?" looks and then all four of us would laugh. At the end of the second case the consensus was that we wanted to like the game, it's an interesting idea, it makes a great event; but it does everything it can to poo poo up that experience. So the long and short of it is, yeah, we did have fun; but it was definitely in spite of the game. The owner of the game said he was on the fence about buying the next one, but he probably will because  , so expect a review eventually.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:06
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 12:43 |
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Has anybody had a good experience with One Night Ultimate Vampire? My group played the hell out of ONUW and were really excited about the new stuff, but it's fallen flat every time we try it. It seems like if we use predominantly ONUV roles than the role cards don't get moved around enough to make the game interesting and if we predominantly use ONUW cards there's not enough going on with the marks to make them worth including. Maybe we've just used bad combinations of roles, any suggestions on how to make it work?
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Jun 21, 2016 19:27
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