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The big difference between a board game and a (triple-A, single-player) video game is the latter can have more Stuff in it. A drip feed of new levels, weapons, story bits, enemies, abilities, visuals, or whatever else keeps the player engaged. Even if each new morsel is small and not particularly engaging on it's own, the player has a steady stream of new things to keep their attention. A board game simply can't pack that much content into the box; they lean towards robust and challenging game mechanics because those can be packed into a box. Pen and paper RPG's are more like these video games because they are about a drip feed of new content, generally provided by a game master. The video games that feel most like board games are the ones that have the most replayability, like roguelikes or fighting games, because they are built around interesting and challenging game mechanics.
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Jun 23, 2016 20:57
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On the subject of Vassal versus Tabletop Simulator, which is better/easier for prototyping and playtesting games?
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Jun 28, 2016 20:03
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I'm really excited to try out codex, all the game mechanics look amazing. But my god is the art and theme the most blandly uninspired, low effort, completely loving inconsistent, copy pasted, bullshit I have ever seen.
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Jun 30, 2016 21:11
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The most maddening thing is how bad all the worldbuilding, or lack thereof, is. There's such a bizarre mishmash of themes and settings that none of it makes any sense and none of the flavor is compelling. Like, one of the Red heroes is a goblin or an orc or something(?) but literally no other unit in the game is and the units he has are mostly human pirates and brigands. Why isn't he just a pirate? I have absolutely no idea who would be excited about playing Blue's army of traffic cops, tax collectors, and assorted bureaucrats. Purple's wonky-rear end sci-fi units are completely out of place next to the other factions. Any link between flavor and rules is so tenuous it hurts to think about. The ninja, spaceship, and traffic cop are all 1/1 creatures but the panda cub is a 2/2. The ninja can be detected and the spaceship can be blocked by another flyer or shot down with AA stuff; the traffic cop though, get hosed, can't stop a god drat traffic cop. This is all aesthetic stuff and I really don't want to let it affect my opinion of the game, but drat is it hard not to. I almost want to do a re-theme of the whole game with warcraft 3 screenshots or magic card art or something, uggghhhhhh.
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Jun 30, 2016 23:39
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SU&SD released their first review from GenCon; a party game that I haven't heard mentioned anywhere called Dead Last. Quins, at least, sounds pretty enamored by it, but from their description it doesn't sound very exciting. Anybody get a chance to try it out?
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Aug 10, 2016 19:39
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For what it's worth, Codex plays really well on Tabletop Simulator. I find most games to be a pain in the rear end to play on TITS, but Codex has so many tokens to throw around and cards to be shuffled back and forth (not to mention set-up/tear-down) that playing digitally comes out about even with the physical copy. The files up on the steam workshop only have the starter set; I found a table with the full game, but I'm not sure who made it or what the legalities are for putting it up on the workshop. In any case, if anybody wants the table and/or wants to play some games add me on steam. I also wouldn't mind playing some BattleCON on there, seems like there's a decent amount of overlap between those two.
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Oct 25, 2016 16:53
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FulsomFrank posted:What are people's thoughts on Scoville and its expansion? It looks adorable and the mechanics appear interesting. Picking a peck of pickled peppers possesses prodigious potential, but is prevented from perfection by petty problems. Planting peppers in the public plots produces places to pick powerful peppers. Planting powerful peppers lets you pocket points and produces places to pick more powerful peppers. Planning how you plant and place your pawn to pick powerful peppers, while preventing other players from pursuing their own plan, is pleasing and provocative. Put plainly: procuring peppers is a peak point of play. Problems present themselves in the peripheral mechanics. Paying pennies for player priority is paramount in ways that are problematic to perceive. If a player preceding you purchases a recipe placard pivotal to your plan, the peck of peppers you've picked may become pointless. Play permits six players, but a populous party prevents paying proper attention to player plans; a pair-plus-one is the proper paradigm. Play proceeds until a preset portion of the placards have been purchased, this predominantly feels premature and perfunctory. I have not purchased or played the expansion. As presented previously, placing peppers in the public plots is pleasant. Providing private plots seems polar to that purpose. Perhaps it is a premium product, but I have not perceived any prose to that point. My prevailing perception of picking peppers is pretty positive. It possesses problems, but if you are preferential then I propose you purchase. my gaming group REALLY hates when I do the rules explanation for this game
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Oct 26, 2016 22:20
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Impermanent posted:I could get into this, although It hink there's already some places to play online like TTS. The TTS set isn't on the steam workshop, but I have a copy for anybody who wants it (and srsly, somebody fight me). There are also a bunch of PbP games on the official Codex forums using some spreadsheet nonsense.
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Oct 28, 2016 22:41
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Cinnamon Bear posted:Is Mansions of Madness 2E cool and good compared to the mess that the first edition was? I haven't played MoM, but my group does really enjoy Eldritch Horror. Charming trash is the perfect description; the game is way too long, way too random, oppressive, and massively unfair, but it always finds new and interesting ways to gently caress you. Enjoying it is about following along with each character's story, being able to laugh when the game kicks them while they're down, enjoying the absurdity when Scotland Yard asks an 8 year old to examine a murder victim or when a cigar-chewing American politician beseeches an ancient samurai order to kill some guy in Australia. About one character per game, give or take, will actually start accomplishing things, building up items and abilities, and with them gaining some sense of control over the course of the game. Almost every time this confidence will be ripped away from you by a random, unavoidable event, which is godawful game design, but also pretty thematically appropriate. So, yeah, Eldritch Horror is a terrible game and I absolutely do not recommend it unless the above sounds like something you and your gaming group can wholeheartedly dive into.
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Nov 1, 2016 16:32
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Shadow225 posted:Charlie Kane makes the game p. trivial. I think I've played Eldritch 3 times. We won the two games I played Charlie. Maybe he's powerful and maybe it was just luck, the game is way too random to know. I've played dozens of times and the character that I see most consistently Doing Stuff is Mark Fuckin' Harrigan; his abilities look pretty underwhelming but maybe they happen to work together in subtle ways, or maybe it's just because he earned his middle name from a few lucky games and confirmation bias has carried things from there. I don't know, and I don't really want to; like I said, it's a lovely game, but it can be a fun experience and I know that examining the strategy closely will only reveal more flaws in the mechanics without doing anything to improve the experience side of the equation. It's a big, dumb, unfair, "experience generator", with all the negative connotations that brings, and we make the most out of it by playing with random characters (well, draw 2 - keep 1), dramatically reading their backstories, and enjoying the slow downward slide to the end of the world. Fenn the Fool! fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Nov 1, 2016 |
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Nov 1, 2016 17:47
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I started looking into Rum & Bones. I loved Monsterpocalypse, so a new Customizable-Armies-On-A-Map-Resource-Management-Dice-Rolling-Push-Your-Luck-Em-Up sounded right up my alley. Now that I've watched one of CMON's gameplay videos I'm significantly less excited. Obviously the big draw of the game is the shamelessly cheesecake and intellectual property infringing minis, but does anybody have anything good to say about the game itself or is it exactly as dumb and random as it looks?
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Nov 4, 2016 16:21
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Man in bright blue fedora and rubber duck tie is right about everything. Onlookers stunned.
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Nov 11, 2016 17:38
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I played my first game of New Angeles last night. My initial impressions are that the rules do a good job of encouraging player negotiation, you can't do much of anything solo so you have to play the table, but the game also seems pretty drat random. The game is semi-cooperative, so the players are working together to avoid an "everyone loses" state, but otherwise are competitive. The bulk of the game is about negotiating deals, two players will have action cards down as competing offers for an asset. Action cards do stuff to the game state, generally fixing something to avoid the mutual-loss, but sometimes just handing out victory points or more action cards to some or all of the players. Assets give you special abilities and may be traded. Each player can support one of the two offers by discarding action cards. I actually like this as a means of reducing randomness, most of the cards you draw are discarded face down, so you can get rid of the cards that aren't pertinent to the situation and keep the ones that are. Now, you only draw 3 cards at a time, and you have to make those last across 4-6 deals, based on the number of players. This means that you have to be really selective about how you spend those cards, they're valuable because they're rare and you have to provide something substantive in negotiations for people to use them to support you. There are a couple of other small quirks to how offers are placed, when players draw cards, etc. that create uneven power dynamics from turn to turn, and the players have a lot to gain from holding the whole process hostage unless they're paid a couple victory points or somesuch. Overall, I like all of this, it means lots of negotiation, politics, and backstabbing which is exactly what I was hoping to get out of the game. Now, for the randomness. There are many cases where a player could make money, at the cost of pushing the game closer to mutual-loss, from a particular bad thing being on the board, but you only have a tiny sliver of agency in what bad things are on the board and where they are placed. If a bunch of organized crime happens to spawn in spaces that produce resources the city needs, well that's a nice little windfall for the guy playing the private security corp, and there's basically no way to mitigate that. Then you have the assets, which seem hilariously unbalanced. You still have to win the deal to get an asset, but remember you're not always on equal footing because of stuff like who the first player is and how many cards people have left, so when those good and bad assets come up can swing the game significantly. One of the asset cards we saw let you prohibit one player from trading anything for that deal, which is a neat little trick to tip negotiations for you, but once you used it you couldn't use it again until you drew cards, overall a pretty weak asset. Another asset let you immediately draw TEN CARDS as a one-time effect. Like I said, I've only played once, so maybe these things are more controllable/predictable than it seemed at first glance. I legitimately enjoyed the gameplay despite the randomness and the components are gorgeous, so, yeah, game is probably decent, but probably not amazing.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:06
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Caedar posted:Is it weird that I see the widely different strengths of the asset cards as a positive? A weaker asset card coming up gives breathing room for you to slip in a beneficial action card into the offer/counteroffer, and people won't raise too much of a fuss. The variance in asset strength creates a wider dynamic range in how the players react, add offers and counteroffers, and throw in votes. They create different foundations on which to negotiate. It's also another way of feeling out the players; if player X is going really hard for this weak asset card that's only good in situations Y and Z, then what's their motive? Who could they hurt with it? Perhaps those two players are rivals? No, on paper I agree with you. Maybe, after everyone at the table has a good deal of experience with the game, it's all very calculated and controlled but, then again, maybe it's not. I definitely want to play it more before I make any kind of final judgement, but my first impression is that it seems pretty random.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:13
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Kamikaze Raider posted:Do you think that maybe making a little chart that has a listing of all the potential assets, as well as all the potential cards each corporation could potentially play during the negotiation phase, would help to alleviate that? No, because if there is an issue it would be about high powered cards coming up when a player who's already in the lead is in a good position to grab them easily, or a low ranking player consistently having underwhelming cards come up when they're in the same position. A list of "these cards are really powerful and you should watch out for them" could be helpful, but you'd want that list to be written by players with a lot more experience about the game than I have now. The asset effects in general seemed to be pretty universal, I didn't see any that leaned in any real way towards one corporation, strategy, or even being ahead/behind on victory points; the really good assets were universally valuable and the not so good ones universally mediocre. SilverMike posted:Just one nitpick based on my reading of the rules - isn't it supposed to be 3-5 deals, determined by the event card on the previous round? No, you only draw on your turn. There are 3-5 deals in each round, but each player doesn't necessarily get a turn in a given round. I was glossing over stuff because it's confusing to explain, works fine during play though.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:02
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I played two more games of New Angeles over the weekend. The game is definitely way too drat long; almost all of it is negotiation, which is the best part of the game, but by the end it starts to drag. The games I played clocked in around 4 hours, but that includes setup and a rules explanation that's more difficult than any other game I own. Don't misunderstand me here, the actual gameplay flows just fine, but explaining everything is really awkward because there are a bunch of tokens and figures who's rules aren't written anywhere, the overall turn structure is obtuse for no reason I can discern, and, most importantly, everything has to be explained in complete detail up-front because the entire gameplay is lying and negotiation. If all the players are very familiar with the game I'd say you could get it down to right around two hours, but that's still pretty drat long. I haven't moved much from my initial impressions: the negotiation is really interesting and the game gives you lots of reasons to do it, but winning and losing is largely determined by random draws. Just about every asset that lets you draw more action cards is crazy powerful and throws the entire card economy out of wack. Strangely though, assets that generate or steal victory points tend to be reserved, producing only one or two with some cost or choice from another player to prevent them from being frequently used. VP's can be traded where action cards can't, so maybe that was done on purpose to solve some other problem, but either way it just accentuates the randomness of which assets come up when. The other two ways to generate VPs are with Investments and Contracts. You get three investments over the course of the game, drawing two and keeping one for each third of the game. These are weirdly consistent though, everybody always gets between 5 and 7 VPs so it's not like you can meaningfully influence the game here. Unless you draw the prisec investment, its worth 8 if there are 3 prisec on the board; one or two prisec get placed during setup and there are twice as many cards that place them as there are that remove them so it's basically always worth 8 and you'll always take it over your other draw. Contracts are where each player gets VPs for fixing the thing their corp is geared toward: the biotech corp gets VPs for removing disease, the media corp for reducing unrest, etc. This is where the game could be really interesting, like the biotech corp wants to make people sick so that the group has to fix things or everybody loses. Unfortunately, new disease tokens are only placed by random events, so you better hope that they land in districts that matter. The other corps have varying degrees of agency over whether they can force their services to be in demand, but at the end of the day it's mostly about the random events. The strangest thing here is that making money off your contract makes that contract less valuable. Remove a bunch of disease from the board and there are now fewer diseases on the board, so it's less likely that more will need to be removed in the future. The takeaway from all this is that the vast majority of VPs you earn are a one-time thing, it may make you the leader for the immediate future but doesn't increase your ability to get VPs going forward. This, coupled with bash-the-leader politics, means that scores stay pretty close the whole game and the winners are determined by who happens to be ahead at the end. Then you have the cooperative/competitive gameplay. In Archipelago it was there so that the players who are behind can extort the players that are ahead with the threat of mutual-loss, at the risk of handing the game to the player with the secret objective to cause the mutual-loss state. However, in Archipelago this was about a 50-50 gamble, but in New Angeles someone is the federalist 80-86% of the time, depending on player count. So threatening to tank the game is almost always just handing the win to another player, largely defeating the purpose of it as a balancing mechanism. So, yeah, a lot of these design decisions seem half baked or straight up baffling, but despite all these  I still kinda like it. I wouldn't call it a good game, but if you want a 3 hours of negotiation that ends randomly and has lots of pretty pictures then go nuts.
Fenn the Fool! fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 23:31
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EBag posted:Anyone have an opinion on Scoville? Looks like a nice light-mid weight euro with some decent player interaction and I love games with a spatial element. Does it hold up after a few plays? Fenn the Fool! posted:Picking a peck of pickled peppers possesses prodigious potential, but is prevented from perfection by petty problems. Planting peppers in the public plots produces places to pick powerful peppers. Planting powerful peppers lets you pocket points and produces places to pick more powerful peppers. Planning how you plant and place your pawn to pick powerful peppers, while preventing other players from pursuing their own plan, is pleasing and provocative. Put plainly: procuring peppers is a peak point of play. Also, have some shelf porn. The thing just happened to fit perfectly in this little nook in my new apartment. Hopefully it doesn't collapse under all the weight! 
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Dec 22, 2016 17:13
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Garvey posted:Looking for a game recommendation for my board gaming group! There's 8 of us who regularly play but usually only 4-6 of us at once. We're relatively new to the hobby so while we own a good number of games they're all fairly simple ones i think. Below are the games we own between us and my thoughts on them and how people like them. Your group seems to really like games in the vein of CaH. I'm sorry. Here are some games that scratch the same itch, but have a lot more room for creativity: Say Anything: Like Cards against Humanity, but you write whatever answer you want on a whiteboard! Scoring is a little more complicated, to prevent just awarding points to a person rather than an answer, but it's still lite and simple. Get as vulgar and obscene as your group wants, or be totally clean when playing with family or children. The only caveat here is the game will only be as good as you know the people you're playing with; in-jokes, references to personal lives, and answers that hit just a little too close to home are what makes this game really shine. Snake Oil: Like Cards against Humanity, but you're a sleazy infomercial salesman! Each player has a hand of cards that say things like: boat, noodle, mountain, soap, cape. The judge has a customer card, marking him as a Pirate, Teacher, Janitor, Dictator, etc. Each player combines two of their cards into a product and makes a sales pitch to the judge. Convince the judge that, clearly, every astronaut needs a Noodle-Belt, because in zero gravity spaghetti would just go everywhere and be impossible to eat, but your patented noodle-belt has the perfect zero gravity spaghetti dispenser. Funemployed: Like Cards against Humanity; but you're at a terrible job interview! Convince the judge that your resume of "Very Thin, Time Machine, Bean Burrito, and S.T.D." would make you the perfect drill sergeant. Not as inappropriate as CaH, but it leans that direction. Also I'd like to second the recommendation for Eldritch Horror, if you like Arkham Horror then it's a straight upgrade. The game is absolutely too long and too random, but its a great experience generator if everyone at the table is into dying horribly in new and exciting ways. Just don't play with more than 4 (and add communal characters if you have less than 4).
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Jan 9, 2017 18:43
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Holy poo poo, I want that deck of cards so bad.
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Jan 10, 2017 00:59
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My gaming group has a giant backlog of cool games from xmas, looking forward to digging in to Blood Rage, Millenium Blades, Forbidden Stars, Hyperborea, Inis, Forge War, and Tiny Epic Western. I'm incredibly hype, but don't want to comment on them until I've had a chance to play a few full games. There are a couple of lighter games that I have gotten to the table though: The Bloody Inn: I feel like this game has a lot of potential in there somewhere, but it doesn't come out in play. The core of the game is acquiring a hand of cards, each card is an accomplice and you'll have to pay $1 for each accomplice you have every turn. Every action requires a certain number of accomplices, those accomplices are discarded unless you're using them for the one action type that they are good at. This is a really interesting mechanic, but the game suffers from two major flaws. First, it takes a lot of actions to accomplish anything, and you just don't get many of them. A parade of guests, potential accomplices or victims, will march in and out of the Inn, but you just don't have enough actions to actually capitalize on interesting options that might come up, your hands will often be tied by the plans you've set in motion on previous turns. Second, the balance between cards can be bizarre, with some options paying out $30 and others paying out $3, with little difference in investment. Overall I didn't hate it, and I think there's some really good ideas, but I wouldn't recommend it. Ice Cool: I haven't seen it talked about at all in this thread, but Ice Cool is pretty radical. It's a dexterity game where you flick anime penguin weeble-wobbles around multiple-room cardboard high-school. Weeble-wobbles make great things to flick, you can get them to jump up and over walls by flicking them in the head and cause them to curve with spins. This is challenging to do reliably, but most players start experimenting with these techniques in their very first game. The game is all about flicking your penguin through doorways, which is great both because it requires an accurate flick and because it means you can easily put a wall between you and the penguin trying to smash into you (of course they can still try to hit you with a curve or jump). It's light, silly, and quick but definitely check it out if you get the chance. Patchwork: I hadn't picked this one up because I had so many other two player games that I already enjoyed. Recommendations for this one are all over, so I don't need to beat that drum much, but its an easy to teach and solid little game.
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Jan 11, 2017 19:04
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I bought the Helpers of Catan mini-expansion at the recommendation of somebody here. It really helps smooth out the randomness of the game, I enjoy playing with it a lot more than without it. It's still not an amazing game, but its something I don't mind playing.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:47
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Kerro posted:What do you think of Concept? It sounded like an interesting idea but wondered if it would actually be fun to play. My group has been playing this a lot. It's really fun, but you need the right clue and the included clue cards are pretty hit or miss. Each card has 3 easy clues, 3 medium clues, and 3 hard clues, but after a few rounds you'll probably find the easier clues lacking any real challenge. A large number of the hard clues are somewhat obscure turns of phrase like "dressed to the nines" or "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", these are difficult to give clues for and not very fun to guess. Specific movies, people, events, etc are usually the most fun, but then you run into a new problem: the clue has to be obscure enough that it isn't guessed without several details, but not so obscure that no one at the table is familiar with it. Two markers down on the spaces for "movie" and "animals" is all it takes for somebody to guess Bambi, on the other hand there might be nobody at the table that has heard of Bowling for Columbine, so you'll have to take the fact that you got somebody to say "bowling" and "Michael Moore" as the best victory you were going to get. So, yeah, I recommend concept, just don't take it too seriously. Bigger groups are better because you get the most table talk and they make it more likely that somebody will actually get the answer. Here is a clue I did the other day that nobody was familiar with, hopefully somebody here will get it. The green question mark is the main concept, exclamation points are sub-concepts, and cubes are associated with the concept of the same color.
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Jan 20, 2017 00:12
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Codex takes everything that Magic does well, cuts out all the poo poo that Magic does poorly, and splices in the best pieces of both deckbuilding and RTS games. Except for art and flavor, MTG has these in spades where Codex is largely mediocre and uninspired. It's also a fiddly mess with lots of little bits to track and remember, and the rulebook has a number of things that are pretty confusing if you're not already familiar with the games it's borrowing from. Gripes aside, I like Codex a lot and heartily recommend it. Once you get past the presentation and rulebook, the game underneath there is pretty drat fantastic with a ton of variety in each match-up and so many interesting decisions to make every turn. In Magic you build a deck that does one thing really well, then you shuffle it up and hope you draw the right cards so that you can actually do that thing. It is very common to have one or fewer playable cards in hand on a given turn and it's rare to have reason not to play that card. Codex works very differently. You start the game with a deck of ten cards, all ten of which can be played and are useful from turn 1. Every turn you have to decide which cards to play and which cards to turn into land-equivalents, permanently removing them from your deck. At the end of each turn you discard your hand and draw a new one, giving you a completely new set of options for the next turn, then you look through your "codex" and add any two cards you like to your deck, allowing you to pivot into a large number of potential strategies mid-game. Codex also takes some of the things magic does well and just does them better. For example, deciding when to attack with your creatures in Magic can be a very interesting decision; you need to weigh the relative values of dealing damage to your opponent, potentially leaving yourself open to attack, and whatever the result of your opponent blocking might be. In Codex, you put your blockers in one of five different slots, each giving the creature a different bonus, and the attacker gets to decide which creature he wants to attack. In this way, the attacker has more options in how they attack AND the defender has more options in how they defend. Codex also adds heroes, which are clearly taken right out of Warcraft 3, but are also directly analagous to a fusion of MTG commanders and planeswalkers: powerful options that you always have access to that grow more threatening the longer they stay on the board. Starting with such a small deck and adding to/removing from it brings in a lot of the same strategies you find in deckbuilders. Having stuff on the board means you won't draw it, so there's an extra layer of consideration whenever you could kill something. Having a small deck that cycles makes things quite predictable; you know when you'll draw a specific card, give or take a turn or two, and can plan around that. From RTS's you get some really interesting strategic concerns around build orders. Cards added to your deck from your codex aren't seen by your opponent until you play them, but if you can accurately predict what direction your opponent is heading then you can have the right counter ready ahead of time. Further, in order to play the strongest cards you have to divert resources to required prerequisites; these prerequisites don't do anything by themselves, so you're effectively handing your opponent a resource advantage that they can try to leverage to end the game before your more powerful cards hit the table. Codex has problems, but overall it's pretty drat great, if you have any interest at all then definitely check it out. I'm really looking forward to the digital implementation, the game was designed from the ground up to play asynchronously with that in mind, but I haven't heard any news about it and Sirlin seems to be focused on Fantasy Strike for the time being, so who knows when that'll actually be a thing.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:42
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Mikey Purp posted:Any recommendations for what to buy for a person who is sort of new to the hobby but generally gravitates towards Ameritrash/4X type stuff? His current collection consists of Pandemic Legacy, Cry Havoc, GoT the board game, Inis, and then some lighter stuff like Love Letter, Sushi Go, Camel Camel, etc. I'd like to keep it in the $30-$40 range, and it doesn't have to specifically be 4X. Hyperborea looks the part of an Ameritrash 4x game. Though, once you get it to the table its a lot more abstract and euro than you'd expect from that presentation. Not sure if that'll fit your buddy's tastes, but its a solid game, worth a look.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:56
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I can see how Inis does some cool stuff if everyone at the table knows the game very well, but it's gone over poorly with my group. The combat in particular really rubs me the wrong way because I can be punished for my opponent making a mistake. A fight goes on until everyone involved agrees to stop; if a player continues fighting when this is the wrong choice, that is to say they are hurting their board state more than helping it by continuing to commit resources to the fight, they drag themselves down AND drag down everyone else in the fight. Trying to judge the reaction of other players should be part of the game, but you get punished just as much as your opponent for their over-commitment and this feels REAAAALY lovely.
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Feb 17, 2017 17:26
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SU&SD did a review of Scythe over the weekend and I'm pretty baffled by it. Usually their videos are relentlessly positive about everything, highlighting the good things about a game and heavily downplaying the bad. Even in their review of Kingdom Death, Paul did everything in his power to talk about what does work and is exciting about the design, before coming down on it with legitimate criticism and concluding that it isn't worth investing in for most people. I don't always agree with this approach to reviews, in a lot of cases I think they give way too much benefit of the doubt to mediocre games, but I think it's good that even garbage fires like Kingdom Death get a fair shake. With this video though, every topic is spun in a negative way, it's so bizarre. The video starts with a lengthy rant about how kickstarter games tend to have lots of stuff in the box, and that this is vaguely bad; there's a salient point about kickstarter to be made somewhere in there, but I don't think Scythe was negatively impacted by having too much stuff, nor is it anywhere near the worst offender. Scythe isn't on my top 10 list, but it's a solid game with a lot of things to like: unique mechanics, amazing artwork, low downtime, and a reasonable playtime for such a sprawling game. The review lightly touches on these things, but doesn't gush over them like I've seen Paul and Quins do for so many other games, the whole thing really rubs me the wrong way.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:25
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Corrupted Kingdoms is available at CSI. Has anybody played it? I really dig the theme and art, but I'm pretty skeptical about the gameplay.
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Mar 24, 2017 18:19
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I watched the Rising Sun gameplay video through the first season. I don't know if they're playing with an older version or something, but I've spotted two rules mistakes. When Dragonfly harvests he takes a reward where the Turtle clan has a stronghold, Turtle has higher honor and their strongholds count as a model so they should have the highest force in that province. Then when the war phase starts, Koi turns their coins into ronin, but their ability does the opposite; he uses them interchangeably so I guess it works out fine, but still odd. I really like the look of the mechanics in the game, but I hate the kickstarter business model. It probably has something like a 25% chance of being poo poo, 50% chance of being decent, and a 25% chance of being amazing. If it ends up being amazing I'd regret not having the kickstater version with all the bells and whistles and extras. But if it ends up being only decent then I'll regret having paid $150 for an OK game. It'll probably be pretty easy to flip for the money back, but that takes time and effort. Ugghhh.
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Mar 31, 2017 19:10
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Mission: Red Planet and Pictomania are also really good at 6.
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Mar 31, 2017 21:38
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FulsomFrank posted:How have I not heard of Between Two Cities until now? It looks really cute. Between Two Cities is a really neat little game, easy to teach and fast to play. Its a drafting game where you're working together with the person on either side of you. You build one city cooperatively with the player on your left and another cooperatively with the player on your right; your final score is the weaker of the two cities. As a light filler I recommend it. I haven't played enough times with the same group to see how it fares when played super competatively. The optimal strategy seems to be building one city focused on factories and another focused on houses, with parks/shops being solid situational choices and avoiding taverns/offices, but being a drafting game everyone going for the same strategy makes that strategy less effective.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:06
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Bogart posted:Hey folks. Just bought a game called Scythe -- strange kinda Risk of Cataan thing, only problem is, it seems like I only got half of the game board? Or that half of the board is printed on either side of one piece of gameboard, and it won't be opened up any more. What am I missing here You should have the full board on one side, and half of the board printed twice as large on the other side. As a deluxe add-on you can buy the other half of the board printed at double size to have a super huge board, but you don't need it to play. EFetc.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:36
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Also keep in mind that Scythe is mostly an economic/resource-management game, with combat being infrequent. You'll threaten combat a lot to control areas, but fighting is expensive and you need to pick your battles carefully. I think its a really solid game, just don't go in expecting a non-stop giant robot slugfest.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:42
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Taintrunner posted:Is there a decent board game for 12 people? I've got a party coming up and I'm not so sure in my ability to scale up Imperial Assault for that many people. Your options are really limited, but if everyone is serious about playing games then splitting into two or three groups is the way to go. If people don't want to split because its more of a social gathering then Codenames or Wits and Wagers are your only real options. If one or two people cancel then The Resistance, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and Space Cadets Dice Duel w/ expansion can all seat 10 and Panic on Wall Street can seat 11.
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May 2, 2017 17:43
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Roshambo posted:Should I buy Hero Realms, Star Realms, or Star Realms: Colony Wars? I haven't played Star Realms, but I believe it's not been well received here. Though, I think there are some advocates for the phone app, as something mindless to do against the AI. I'd take a look at Valley of the Kings, also a deckbuilder and in a similar price range, and just an all around well regarded game. The other goon-recommended deckbuilders are Eminent Domain, Puzzle Strike, and Dominion, though each of those are quite a bit more expensive. If you're looking for a drafting game, which is a bit different than deckbuilding, then Sushi Go Party, Between Two Cities, Seven Wonders, and Blood Rage are all solid games that run a wide spectrum of costs and intensities.
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Jun 9, 2017 19:18
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I've also played Fantasy Strike and enjoy it a lot. I love fighting games but how much they turn off new players is a real problem. I think they're more intimidating and front loaded than legitimately difficult to learn, but in any case designing a game from the ground up to circumvent those problems is pretty great. If you throw $5 at Sirlin's pateron you can download the current alpha build. There's also Pocket Rumble on steam early access that's a very similar concept.
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Jul 10, 2017 21:38
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Rulebook for the next Scythe expansion. Nothing earth shattering here, just a couple extra wrinkles added to the game. I'm really disappointed that each faction's airship model looks the same though. Edit: that link isn't working for some of my friends and is for others, weird, you can get to it through this article. Fenn the Fool! fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 16:36
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Kerro posted:I saw some generally positive comments searching the thread for Dogs of War but nothing much detailed. How has it stood up as a game? Worth getting during a sale? I like highly interactive Euros (like Keyflower, Caylus etc) and it seems like it would fit the bill. Dogs of War is a game that I've enjoyed, but not a game that I think is good. The core gameplay of political maneuvering and backstabbing is a lot of fun, but who ultimately wins isn't under anyone's control. Your clever ploy might come up 1 strength short or you might get steamrolled in a 2v1 fight, in which case you spent a bunch of resources and have absolutely nothing to show for it. It'll give you some exciting twists and lots of opportunity for banter, but at the end of the day I can't recommend it and I certainly wouldn't describe it as a eurogame of any stripe.
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Aug 4, 2017 19:21
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Hanabi can have some truly brilliant moments where, like, you give a clue that looks like exactly the wrong clue to give, but that is, itself, a clue to someone else at the table. Thinking through what everyone around the table knows and passing information to them through limited channels is some really cool design space and I wish more games explored it.
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Aug 8, 2017 19:57
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StashAugustine posted:Is New Angeles good? I keep hearing mixed opinions on it. There are a lot of things I like about it, but I have to recommend strongly against it. It's WAY too long for what it is, often pushing 3 hours simply because the semi-coop nature generates a lot of discussion and negotiation. All this talk is the best part of the game, but there's just not enough meat to keep it interesting. The game is also very highly random, most of this is driven by the asset cards varying wildly in power, but also because how the game is structured means that your ability to affect the board will vary significantly from turn to turn. If the city doesn't have any problems you can solve, or if you just don't have any cards left from previous turns, you have very little agency. On the flip side, if you're the only one that can solve a major problem and that happens to drop a very powerful asset into your lap (especially the ones that give you a bunch more cards) that means you have significantly more agency than everyone else for the rest of the game. I love the art and genuinely enjoyed the first couple games, but its just not good enough to warrant more plays. I'm really hoping for an expansion that turns my opinion around, but they haven't announced anything yet.
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Aug 22, 2017 17:14
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 15:47 |
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I finally got sick enough of Codex's art that I started seriously working on a retheme. Went with a Warcraft setting, mostly because where else was I going to find enough art for 350-something cards. I made a big post about the fluff for it over in the WoW lore thread:Fenn the Fool! posted:~*~Fluff~*~ At this point I have new names written and new art picked out for every card, I just need a card template to put everything together. I think I can use Magic Set Editor and make some kind of custom template? Anybody have any tips on where I should start with all that?
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Sep 11, 2017 22:02
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