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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Any goon consensus on the Tiny Epic games, specifically Tiny Epic Quest? I haven't played any of them but I'm heavily leaning toward grabbing that one based on the theme / art and what I've read about the gameplay. I haven't played Quest either, but I'll second the recommendation for Galaxies, it's a lot of fun and remarkably dense for it's size. I also like Western, though not as much as Galaxies; it manages to be even denser, but that bumps elbows with how much the game hinges around gambling on die rolls and poker hands. YF19pilot posted:I was curious about two other games. I've been seeing ads for the kickstarter for the expansion of The Networks, and was curious about picking up the base game. Also, the local shop has a big box, a "beginner box" and at least one or two expansions for a game called "Codex: Card-Time Strategy". It claims to be a translation of RTS video games into a card game (and I get very skeptical of "video game genre the board game"), but seems to have a decent score on BGG. Any opinions on these two games? I've played the networks, its pretty forgettable. The art is neat, but not enough to carry the game, especially through repeat plays. The game itself is ok, nothing about the rules is offensive, but nothing is particularly interesting either. It feels like they had the premise and art style and did the bare minimum to build a functional game around that. Codex on the other hand is amazing. To add on to what Tekopo said, the game is very much a perfect blend of the good bits of Magic, Dominion, and Warcraft 3. The creature interactions from Magic: "Is it worth trading my dude for their dude?", "Can I afford to just take the damage?", "Can I play my own dude now, or do I need to prioritize taking his guy out?" are all present in spades. Every turn you'll be thinking about Dominon-esque deckbuilding concerns, like how many cards are going back into your deck and which card you want to trash. Finally you have WC3 style build orders, transitions into strategies to surprise or counter your opponent, and the crucial decision of when you stop investing in the future and start throwing all your resources into killing your opponent ASAP (of course, if you judge this wrong and your opponent doesn't quite die he then has a major economic lead...). Just be aware that the art and flavor of the game is pretty not great, haha. Sirlin is great at mechanics, but pretty bad at everything else. I'm so bothered by it that I've been working on a full retheme of the game, but that's going to take me a while yet.
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Oct 1, 2017 18:56
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A bit late to the "Man, Codex's art and theme suck" chat, but I've been working on a full retheme of it. Almost all the pieces are there, but getting it all formatted into cards is going to take a while yet. Still, if anybody wants to poke around and give feedback/criticism that'd be helpful, especially stuff along the lines of "I don't get how this new artwork matches the card effect".
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Oct 9, 2017 18:16
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Did we already forget what happened, like, a page ago when we discovered that a panda vomiting a rainbow was actually a reference to an ancient D&D meme? Clearly Sirlin puts a TON of work into his characters and settings. He's awful at it, but that doesn't mean he doesn't put in work.
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Oct 9, 2017 22:49
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please knock Mom! posted:how does this make it better It doesn't! The end result is such a godawful mess that I'm retheming the whole game, haha. But the man definitely puts in work. CaptainRightful posted:The artwork you've gathered is certainly higher quality. I guess your "bootleg Warcraft" theme is an improvement over "bootleg mishmash"? Is there anything in particular that makes it feel bootleg (apart from it actually being bootlegged of course)? In a lot of ways I'm constrained by what images exist for me to steal, but anything I can look at to possibly make the whole package more cohesive and official-looking would be great.
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Oct 9, 2017 23:28
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Take this with a grain of salt of course, but a friend of mine told me a story about a friend of his who worked with Sirlin. Supposedly Sirlin wanted to have a pirate character named "Cervantes Threepwood" and had to be talked out of it.
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Oct 9, 2017 23:51
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Speaking of, I played two games of the new Robo Rally this past week. Both games ended in a death spiral where every single damage card in the game was in someone's deck. Theoretically having lots of damage cards means you are more likely to chain them together and get them out of your deck faster, but once you have a critical mass of the nastier ones it becomes very hard to net damage removed in a turn, let a lone do so and make progress to your objective. This also brings out the worst of the timing rules in the new version, I think it was designed assuming you'd have to check who was closer to the antennae maybe once a round, but with all these damage being resolved and not enough damage cards to distribute, the timing of every card matters for who ends up with what damage, so you have to calculate distance dozens of times a round. Its a shame because I like a lot of the changes in the new version, but even in a best case scenario its already too long for its weight and this kind of death spiral makes it almost literally unfinishable.
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Nov 2, 2017 21:22
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The SU&SD review said that Pandemic Legacy - Season 2 is a continuation of season 1, though I guess only loosely? My girlfriend wants to play in our Season 2 game, while simultaneously playing through Season 1 with some of her friends. Is there anything in S2 that would be a direct spoiler for S1?
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Nov 9, 2017 23:16
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Has anybody played Corrupted Kingdoms? Its on sale on CSI right now for almost nothing. I love the theme, but I haven't seen any kind of talk about it.
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Nov 27, 2017 22:22
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The CSI sale includes Mermaid Rain for a whopping $3. I picked up the game a while back after watching this review and I've quite enjoyed it, at $3 its an insane steal. The gist of the game is: you get a big hand of cards every turn and make poker combinations with them. Better poker hands give you bigger bonuses and put you ahead in turn order, however you use the leftover cards in your hand to move around the board and grab treasures. Play a big combination like a full house and you'll get to go first, but wont have many cards to work with. Play a small combination and you'll have a bunch of cards, but everyone else might grab the good stuff from the board before your turn comes around. Its not a perfect game by any stretch, the art leaves a lot to be desired and setup is a bit of a pain, but it plays smooth even at 6 players and has some pretty neat ideas.
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Nov 30, 2017 19:28
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Jordan7hm posted:I have this game too! I bought it for the same reason - the review makes it look good. Its a drat shame that many board gamers aren't comfortable enough in their masculinity to take pride in being the prettiest mermaid, a drat shame. I tend to ham it up, start some trash talk; that helps people get into it, but the groups I usually play with are receptive to that kind of thing to begin with.
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Nov 30, 2017 20:31
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FunkMonkey posted:Opinions of New Angeles? Caught my eye while Christmas shopping. Fenn the Fool! posted: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.
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Dec 2, 2017 00:30
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al-azad posted:Listened to So Very Wrong About Games, the podcast by the guy who did All The Games You Like Are Bad, and he is indeed so very wrong about games (talks up Kingdom Death Monster and how people confuse poor rolls with poor performance). It's definitely a better format for that guy considering his reviews were just standing in front of a bookshelf. I just listened to it last night, I agree that his opinions aren't great but even the the format I like a lot less than his old youtube stuff. His videos were really deep dives into specific games that had a good number of genuine insights, even if I didn't always agree with his final verdict. With this podcast he and his co-host do a lot more meandering from topic to topic without many interesting things to say about them, overall I was pretty disappointed.
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Dec 6, 2017 19:04
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AceRimmer posted:Anyone played Scoville before? Seems like a decent Euro and I can get it for $20 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.
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Dec 9, 2017 00:43
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Radish posted:It's that time of year where my parents want me to suggest a bunch of board games for the family and friends to play during the holidays and as a Christmas gift. You guys gave me some great suggestions last year (Code Names and Dixit went over well) so I'm wondering if anything good has come out recently as my radar is generally on nerd stuff from Fantasy Flight and the like which isn't everyone else's cup of tea. People like card games (tichu is a favorite) or board games where you can explain the rules in under 20 minutes. Everyone hates Fluxx. Some games that I like to bring out at family gatherings:
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Dec 13, 2017 18:29
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I had the pleasure of playing Escape from 100 Million BC. Despite the name it's not in any way related to Escape: Curse of the Temple, but it was on sale and my buddy couldn't resist the allure of saving JFK from dinosaurs. Unfortunately, JFK didn't show up in our game, but we got to rescue a civil war soldier, a space man with a ray gun, and Lucy. The highlight of the game was absolutely the hotshot reporter getting two pistols as his starting items and going in guns blazing against a woolly mammoth. After getting slapped around he fled into a stegosaurus who dealt the final blow, triggering the emergency teleport to the hospital. On his next turn the woolly mammoth had moved onto the hospital space, hotshot reporter spent the rest of his ammo trying and failing to kill it before being hospitalized again (later we found the FAQ which clarified that enemies can't move onto the hospital space, but this isn't present anywhere in the rulebook). The long and short of it is: the game is bad, and nowhere is this more apparent than in action resolution. To do anything you roll a bunch of dice and 4+ is a success, with 6's counting and then being rerolled for another potential success. Already we're getting a little fiddly, but it then, rather than just giving you a target number, the roll is always opposed by another set of dice under the same rules. This makes tests extremely volatile, even when doing something your character is specialized in and has equipment for you still have sizable chance of failure on every task you attempt. You have a small pool of will tokens that let you reroll one die when you fail, but this often isn't enough to make the difference and you want to conserve them as there are a number of other special actions that require spending one. Most of gameplay is in exploring tiles, you move onto a space and flip its tile over, potentially revealing items, enemies, or random events, but usually revealing nothing. To win you have to find the pieces of your time machine and bring them back without creating too much time paradox. Time paradox is created by using the emergency teleport, killing enemies, and by any items that are left in the item deck at the end of the game. In addition, time castaways spawn randomly, these have to be retrieved and returned to their portals to avoid creating more paradox. Essentially you spend every turn running out into unexplored territory hoping to find the things you need to win. When you inevitably run into an enemy you can try to run away, kill it, or scare it off, which is mechanically identical to killing it except that it costs a will token and doesn't add paradox. Whatever you try to do, you have to roll and that's far from guaranteed. Worse still, there's even further variance in what enemy you pull, with each deck featuring enemies that are hard to fight, enemies that are hard to run away from, enemies that are both, and enemies that are neither. And then we have the Pack special ability which has to be one of the most ill conceived mechanics I've ever seen. When you pull an enemy with "Pack 3" you flip the top 3 cards of the deck, if there are any copies of that enemy they join in attacking you and then their pack abilities also trigger, potentially cascading through the whole deck and creating a giant stack of dinosaurs. Or maybe you get lucky and are accosted by a single pterodactyl that you can punch out. The paradox mechanic was a sliver of a good idea, but the whole rest of the game is just surface level theme-driven mechanics with very little thought put into how they actually affect the gameplay. As a narrative experience there just isn't enough meat to carry things, what little flavor text the game has is actually pretty well written, but its spread pretty thin. I totally agree that rescuing JFK from dinosaurs is rad and it's pretty cool that the Snack Cakes card does nothing but generates the most paradox if you leave them behind, but those little morsels of flavor are all the game has going for it. And, I mean, you can play a whole game without having JFK or Lincoln OR Teddy show up. That's a hell of a design flaw. Those shoulda just been your player characters right there. Presidents V Dinosaurs, I'd be on that poo poo day loving one. Fenn the Fool! fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 20:12
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The best entry level drafting game is definitely Between Two Cities. It's fast and easy to teach, but with a good bit of meat there, especially with the expansion added in. The game has something of an unusual structure, you're drafting tiles to build one city in conjunction with the player on your left and another with the player on your right. You're literally between two cities, with your final score being the weaker of the two (meaning you have to try and improve both equally to score well). This structure gives the whole thing a very light and approachable atmosphere and new players can be helped along by their neighbors. I don't think I've ever pulled this game out and only played one game.xiw posted:I really wanted to love this game but we all found that the reaching out to the table and moving things around while people had their eyes closed was too easy to just tell from table movement / chair shifting etc - even the advice about having everyone tap the table and move around and make noises just didn't seem to work well. You should have everybody stand up for the night phase and maybe move some people around so that the furthest from the center are those with longest arms. Additionally, once everyone has seen their card, slide them towards the center cards so that everybody can reach everything easily. Fenn the Fool! fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 11, 2018 |
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Jan 11, 2018 20:47
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I got my copy of Rising Sun yesterday, got to run a 4 player game, all new players. I'm... not really sure what to think of it yet. I think you can definitely say that its not kind to new players, the difference between final scores was massive. I think it has a CitOW thing going on where everyone has to be keeping everyone else in check. This is only a few steps removed from the chip-taking "dogpile the perceived leader" mess that a lot of political games devolve into, but I don't see it getting that bad here. I do see some similarities to New Angeles, in that its a long game where nobody has a huge amount of agency and players are expected to make up for that by using negotiation to make your goals line up with other players'. Thankfully though, it doesn't have NA's massive swings in power due to random card draws. You do have massive swings from the hard reads you're trying to make in battles; which is a system I find really interesting, but I'm not sure how I'm going to like that level of swingyness in a game this long. I'm still optimistic about it and excited to see where it goes, there are a lot of mechanics that I find really interesting. I liked that, the way the game is set up, its just not possible to have that much better a board position than anyone else, that keeps the game focused not on who has the most stuff, but instead where you choose to try and contest. There are a couple things in the rules, however, that I don't understand the rationale for at all. The rules make an explicit point that all deals are not binding. Basically every modern game that allows negotiation clarifies that deals you can fulfill immediately are binding, so that players don't have to haggle over who hands goods over first, for fear of the second person reneging. This makes intuitive sense with how we think about trading, and I think that's how this game is intended to work, but that's not what the rules literally say. On the other hand if the intention of the design IS to make even basic trades a huge pain in the rear end to negotiate and always give one player the option to stiff the other, well that's not clearly laid out either. Secondly, in final scoring you get a huge bonus for having won wars in many different provinces; 10, 20, or 30 points in a game where a reasonable final score is probably somewhere between 50 and 70. The strange part is, 3 or 4 unique provinces will get you 10 points, and at 5 it jumps to 20. Why isn't 4 provinces just worth 15? Hell, why not make each unique province you have worth 5? Also, why score these at the end of the game rather than just as you acquire them? None of this makes any sense to me; the best explanation I can come up with for this and the binding deals issue are that they just didn't bother to think about it.
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Feb 9, 2018 18:01
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I'm really apprehensive about the new version of Monsterpocalypse. The simple paper street grids and janky prepainted models were a pretty drat good fit for the campy source material. I'm unexcited about the change in model style, the increase in price that will likely come with it, and the prospect of having to assemble and paint poo poo. They haven't said much about how they're changing the rules, but the two major changes they have announced both rub me the wrong way, though largely for superficial reasons. The first is making 2 monsters to a side the default and 1v1 a variant, the original game had the reverse. I imagine this ties to their game design (or maybe business model) somewhere but I like the 1v1 theme and its a shame to move away from that. Hell, even the new website is framed around a 1v1 stare down. The second major change is splitting the 6 factions into a simple 3 good guys/3 bad guys for army-building purposes. In the original game the 6 factions were set up in a circle and could pull allies from the 2 adjacent factions. I really like the flavor this added; the giant military robots could get help from the corporate nanotech ninjas or the environmentalist godzillas, but the former might also side with invading martians for a cut of the spoils and the latter with the destructive space monsters for some good ol' fashioned building smashing.
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Mar 14, 2018 00:43
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Spaceteam is also fun, but it's a very different beast from Space Alert. SA is fun to play over and over with the aim of learning to play it better, even more so with the expansion added in. The same isn't true for Spaceteam, the things that are challenging in spaceteam become significantly less interesting as you get more familiar with them. Escape: Curse of the Temple is similar as an easier/lighter SA, but has the same problems of not being anywhere near as replayable.
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Nov 27, 2019 18:35
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Any thoughts on City of the Great Machine? Kickstarter ends tomorrow and it looks drat cool. I know I should just wait for release, I've made the kickstarter mistake more than once, but the FOMO is powerfull.
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Nov 18, 2021 19:26
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