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Played three games today, averaging three hours each. Viticulture came out second, but the summary's fastest, so: somebody went pure point-gen (cards, spaces, and buildings) and hit 20. Somebody else sat at 0 for 5 out of 7 rounds and cashed in 21 points of wine orders on the final two rounds to win it. There are so many ways to play, some quite unconventional. Francis Drake came out first, and I came in tied for second. It plays in three turns, each with two phases: a port phase that works like Tokaido, and a sailing phase that some people were comparing to Lancaster. In the port phase you stock your ship up with crew, guns, supplies, and trade goods. Arriving at a place later gets you less stuff. There are some special spaces that will upgrade your ship to a proper warship, or give you special powers to peek in the sailing phase, distribute troops or ship strength in the sailing phase, get an extra action in the sailing phase that fires first, or hit forts without using guns in the sailing phase. There's also the Francis Drake space, which requires wasting a turn but gives you two crew, two guns, and one of either. Spaces have a fixed placement the first round and are shuffled for the second and third. Once per game you can trade in 4 points (you start with 4) to get one crew, one gun, and one of either, or upgrade your ship. The order you pass determines your placement order in the sailing phase. In the sailing phase, you place disks numbered 1 through 4 face-down, in addition to the first action and a possible "ghost ship" token you can use as a bluff. There are 4 different zones, and your range is limited by how many supplies you stock. The first and closest zone has two trading posts, a city, and a fort. The second zone has one trading post, a city, a fort, and a ship. The third and fourth, and farthest, zones each have a city, a fort, and a ship. Each place has two open spots, except the indigo trading post in the first zone, which has 3. But you can place as many disks there as you want, and only the lowest numbers (ties broken by placement order) will actually participate. At trading posts, you can swap a trade good for a commodity tile. Indigo is produced at the first port, and coffee, sugar, and tobacco are produced at two ports each. A set of tiles trades for 2/8/16/26 points at the end of the game, depending on how many are in the set. Cities require you to spend 1 crew to sack. Each scores a small number of points, and the first to each city will loot silver in zones 1 and 2, and gold in zones 3 and 4. Forts require you to spend guns to breach the walls, unless you bought a pinnace to sneak in the back. Then they require you to spend a base number of crew, plus the crew tokens (0, 0, 1, 2) distributed by one role, or randomly if nobody took it. Each scores about three times the points of cities, and the first to each will loot silver or gold, the same as the cities. Ships require you to have upgraded to a galleon. There are three ships, 4 points/1 gun, 6 points/2 guns, and 8 points/3 guns, and they're randomly distributed every turn. Another role distributes additional gun tokens (0, 1, 2). Ships score their listed number of points, in addition to a gem for the first one there. You can pass out of this round early -- first gets 2 points, second 1 -- and depending on how much damage you did you get extra points at the end. 10 points if you sunk a ship, breached a fort, and sacked a city; 4 points if you did two of those; 1 if you only did 1. Your ship is downgraded and you lose anything unspent, besides commodity tiles and your plunder. At the end of the game, trade goods score, and silver, gold, and gems (which are kept in a little cardboard treasure chest and are hidden information) score 3, 4, or 5 points each. I managed second despite not getting out beyond zone 2 in the first 2 rounds and only having one commodity tile. I got to places early and got a decent pile of loot. Patchistory came out last, and this is a pretty neat civ-building game that plays a little like Keyflower. It runs for three eras of five rounds each. Your civ has eight parameters: - military determines your offense strength - defense determines your additional defense strength - transport determines your movement and exchange capacity - politics determines your action budget - industry determines your ore production - agriculture determines your food production - culture determines your point production - economy determines your coin production You spend politics to grow new workers (you start with two), each costing more food, build trade routes, construct buildings on wasteland, et cetera. You can also cash it in for votes, which will get you points on various Keyflower Winter-style categories that come out at the end of each era from three you have at the start of the game. So for example, in our four-player game, if politics comes out as a category, the person with the most gets one point per vote on it, the person with the second-most gets one point per two votes on it, the person with the third-most gets nothing, and the person with the fourth-most loses a point per two votes on it. You start with a 2x3 grid, which can either be the same for everyone or randomly varied. Every turn, one new card per player comes out, and bids are carried out with money, a little like Keyflower - if you're losing a bid you can pick it up and put it somewhere. But you only get one bid, and bidding immediately ends once all cards have one bid on them. Cards are 2x2 and will either feature normal production tiles, with optional bonuses if they're worked, or a special feature - a wonder or a hero, which give you large production bonuses or a special effect. Like Chichen Itza, which will let you kill your workers for 5 points each, or Otto von Bismarck, who lets you spend politics to threaten anyone, even if you haven't built a route to them yet, and get bonus points when you do it successfully. But here comes the "patch" part. You have to put the cards either over or under at least one tile of your existing grid. And you're limited in size - 5x5 in the first era, 6x6 in the second, 7x7 in the third. Some cards have seas on them, which can't be patched over, under, or even adjacent to each other. Production is open but total values are secret, so here comes a consequence of a hidden information game: there's an action that lets you steal points from people. And it was my first time, so I had a lot of interesting triggers and was counting out points in ones and twos through my whole turn. I got stolen from quite a bit. The guy who won had a single giant point income only happened once, and it seemed like he was getting less than me even though he was outproducing me 2 to 1.
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Dec 14, 2014 06:45
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Cocks Cable posted:How long did this game take? Stats say 2 to 4 hours and I just wanted to know how realistic that is, because drat, that's long. Yeah, figure about 1 hour per person. We went for about 4 and it was 2 veterans + 2 newbies. 15 multipart turns is a lot of game. Blamestorm posted:All that having been said about how it works, how much did you like Francis Drake? I own it but haven't gotten it out yet - have been hoping it was a good puchase! Adapting Tokaido mechanics to the worker placement track made for some neat choices. Do you hang back and make full use of your tokens, but get a slightly worse return? Do you dart ahead to get some good stuff but forsake earlier placements? Can you afford to get nothing, but pick up a special role? Sailing placement is interesting too. You don't have to lead with your trumps. You might have exclusive access to something, so dump your lower-priority markers there and wait to see what other people are doing. You might just see what you want and go for it. Trade goods are a neat little wrinkle. They're worth 6/8/10 points, at least once you get one, but that's also how much fighting the last ship/fort/city is worth, especially if it's worth a decent whack of points or you're the first one there. Getting trade material is very limited, only one space and a rider on two others. I was in kind of a poo poo position for most of the game - late in placing order, low on available zones, having little to no information from the special roles. I managed a tie for second and I see a few places I might have improved to get it outright. Intelligent placing can save your butt, and that was in the most crowded possible player configuration. I've only got one game out of it, so this isn't some kind of super judgement. But it's much less complicated than it originally looked, and the decisions involved were interesting but not overwhelming. I didn't regret the time I spent playing it, which was about 30 minutes per player. It really depends on what other worker placement games you have, but it's basically a mash of two distinct styles of placing and there's nothing I know that's like it.
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Dec 14, 2014 10:13
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silvergoose posted:Viticulture, as you said, is really interesting in the multiple ways to win, without having the insane point salad of some games (not saying I dislike Feld, but it's a welcome change!) There are six possible ways to get points in Viticulture. Wake-up track, fill wine orders, sell grapes with the bonus, build a windmill and plant vines, build a tasting room and give tours, get visitor cards that give you points. But everything scores immediately; there's no end-game scoring, or very little with expansions. That makes it seem less like a point salad. That and the unified theme, I suppose.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:28
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Impermanent posted:How are Viticulture and Euphoria as games? Viticulture and Euphoria are both middle-weight worker placement games with fairly well-integrated themes. Viticulture is a game about making wine. You'll draw vine cards, build the structures that support them, plant them in the fields, harvest the grapes, crush them into wine (building better cellars if you need them), and fill wine order cards, which you also draw. There are half as many placement spaces as players, round up, and generally the first person to hit a space gets some kind of bonus. It's got selectable round-to-round playing orders, Fresco-style, with lower orders having greater bonuses, up to and including an extra worker for the year. It has a large random component and requires at least some reactive play, and there are several possible ways to get points. Euphoria is a game about building influence within a dystopia to get a power base across its four factions. The three ground-bound factions all have a base commodity production area, a mining area which produces building materials or artifacts, a preconstructed artifact market where you can trade artifacts for influence in the faction, and two markets which require various mixes of materials to build. The flying Icarites have a commodity-production area, and markets which will let you trade commodities for materials or artifacts, or materials for influence directly. Spaces are rarely blocked. Some spaces can take any number of workers; others hold one at a time, which is bumped back to your hand when someone else places there. This is a bit of a bonus for you as it means you can take one more turn without wasting one to retrieve your workers. The only thing dependent on the number of players is how many workers it takes to build a market, which is a blocking mechanism of sorts as the market finishes when they're done, lets the builders place influence, and provides some downside, such as: anyone who hasn't got influence on the Cafeteria of Nameless Meat can't train more workers unless they have only one, for reasons completely unrelated to nameless meat. It is a bit of a bear to keep track of everyone and what they can't do. Three gauges shared by everyone are morale, knowledge, and faction influence. Morale influences how many artifacts your workers will be okay with you holding onto (your hand size). Knowledge is, of course, terrible for your workers to have - they're dice, and anytime you roll your workers when they return and the total is over 16, you lose whoever rolled the highest knowledge. You advance the faction influence track for each faction by doing various things, and it gives you bonus powers if you have a face-up recruit of that faction. (dealt 4, picked 2, start with 1 face-up) Both games have something a little unique for worker-placement games, at least in my experience. An "it ain't over 'til it's over" endgame. The game state itself is static and doesn't evolve over a limited number of turns. Instead, the game ends at a certain score: when someone in Euphoria has placed their tenth star, they win. When someone hits 20 points in Viticulture, the game will end at the end of the year. This makes it possible to save resources for a scoring sprint, and also to run out of juice short of the ultimate goal.
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Dec 17, 2014 22:39
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GrandpaPants posted:I am requesting opinions on Patchistory. Is there a decent amount of player interaction? Is war handled well? I recall hearing some good things earlier in the thread, but I'd like corroboration and the counsel of the hive mind. War is basically declare war one turn, go to war the next. You can burn a fairly rare resource called ore in order to power up your attack, and in later eras you need to burn some to get to war in the first place. Ore is also required to build pretty much everything including trade routes and useful structures on top of wastelands and seas. In the turn between, someone who didn't declare war can buy military tiles or shift workers to produce defense. You get 5/10/15 points for winning a war, based on the era - 3/6/9 if you won it as the defense. If you win by 5 or more (and this can be rare) you also steal 7 VP from your target. In addition to wars (which cost 1 politics and 2/3/4 food to start, and time depending on your transport capacity to declare) you can also spend 3 politics to threaten someone you're stronger than, and steal 2/4 VP or 3/5 money depending if you're up by 5 or more, or not. The only problem with player interaction is that you can see how much any given person has produced in a given turn, but unless you're good at doing everyone's maths in your head, you have no idea how much they're hiding behind the screens. So you can end up picking the wrong target for war/threats and hand someone else the game. Right, let me explain trade routes. You can spend 2 politics and 2 ore to build a one-way trade route from you to an opponent. You spend 1 politics and 2/3/4 food depending on era to put one of your workers on a trade route at space 0. One way trade routes go START - 2 COIN - 2 FOOD - ORE - 2 COIN - 2 FOOD - ORE - WAR? Every turn you move every trade route a number of spaces, up to your transport capacity. You always have at least 1 for this purpose. You get whatever your traders have landed on as extra income. When your trader lands on war, you secretly choose war or peace with whoever you reached the end of a trade route with. If you both choose peace you can put down an alliance trade route, which goes START - 3 VP - 2 COIN - 3 VP - 2 FOOD - 3 VP - ORE - 3 VP - END, if you both agree to an alliance. You decide who comes at it from which direction. In my first and so far only game I went for trade routes and got land tiles that gave me an extra of whatever the trade route landed on. In this way I had 5 trade routes going at the end of the game and 7 workers, 2 of which sat on the spaces to give me a trade bonus, the other 5 of which went out trading. Glazius fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Dec 27, 2014 |
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Dec 27, 2014 05:12
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So I got my Tuscany expansion in the mail. The Structures box came with an extra pack of structure cards, labeled "Open At Your Own Risk", and I figured what the heck, I'd see what they did. Spoiling this because I'm not sure if it's the same for everyone, or if this is like Risk Legacy where there were a few different "DO NOT OPEN EVER" packets. It had the markets from Euphoria in it, same names and I believe same art, but cropped differently. You build one and take the penalty, like losing all your money at the end of the year, or wine orders being worth 1 point less, or not being able to pick 3 on the wake-up track, and in return you get a victory point residual, scoring 1 point at the end of each year. Glazius fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Dec 27, 2014 |
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Dec 27, 2014 23:50
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Got a chance to play Imperial Settlers at the FLGS tonight. Got stuck with Egypt as the last player, drew Oasis my second turn. I got through all but 6 cards of my faction deck and got almost 150 points. Though both Sphinxes were out too so that total is a little inflated.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:41
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Mega64 posted:Last game of the night was my copy of Viticulture with three players. It took several turns to kinda click with everyone, and I didn't realize until three or so years in that grapes and wine age (which I probably should've caught since it's pretty intuitive and all), but it's a pretty nice worker placement game. I'm curious if any buildings are worth it besides the ones that let you grow bigger vines, the Yoke, and the Cellars, since those were the only ones that were built the game (though I can imagine the one that lets you draw an extra card in the Fall would be very useful). I can definitely see even with three players how competitive and cutthroat it can be to do all the actions you want to do, especially in the end where I could've won if I Harvested/Made Wine/Fulfilled an Order with my three workers left, but I knew one of the other players would block me from making wine and I needed the Grande for fulfilling the order, so instead I had to gamble on drawing more Wine Orders, which didn't work out. As a fan of Agricola, I can't wait to see how horrible and cutthroat it gets with four or six players. Grande workers are definitely useful in this game, and I'm glad there's an out that doesn't completely screw you over while still being not enough to bail you out if you decide to go last in turn order. I'm definitely looking forward to trying it again. Tuscany is just more ways to shake up Viticulture.. Semi-random starting conditions, secret objectives, a bigger board with a territory-control minigame, more visitors, more functions for existing visitors...
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Jan 12, 2015 13:58
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CodfishCartographer posted:What's the thread consensus on King's Forge? I played a game of it over the weekend and had a pretty fun time, but we only played a single game so didn't really have a lot of time to get a solid read on it. It holds up pretty well over multiple games because there's a lot of variety. Different gathering locations and different available crafts means there's no single best strategy. You always feel like you've got a chance at something but it's very expensive to be certain you can do it.
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Jan 20, 2015 09:00
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Today's trip report: Opened with my first game of 7 Wonders, because my board game history has weird holes in it. Built a poo poo-ton of resources and trade in eras 1 and 2, then a poo poo-ton of point buildings in era 3, with a last-minute military build to snag 10 points. Only built the first level of my wonder because everything else was so many more points (also was Babylon but my science was being largely culled). Came in second to an under-resourced guy who had a giant chain of free VP builds from the tech tree. Continued with Euphoria, which I've talked about before. One day I will manage to win a game of it. Had an Icarite with a hidden Icarite get a three-star turn because his star in Icarite territory also filled the allegiance track. We buried him under endless market penalties but he clawed his way back out to win it, though with the rest of us much closer to him. Had my first game of Notre Dame, an interesting little drafting game where you start with a handful of workers and have nine options in your deck to place or move workers: - get a coin from the bank, +1 per worker already there - get a VP from the town center, +1 per worker already there - get a worker from the guild, +1 per worker already there - kill a rat at the park; every 2 workers there gives you 1 VP more every time you get VP - kill a rat at the hospital; every worker there reduces incoming rats by 1 - move your wagon around the city and pick up messages worth points and often a coin/worker/dead rat, +1 space per worker already there - hire someone at the inn to get a coin/worker/dead rat. 3 workers at the inn lets you hire 2 people. - move your trusted lieutenant to an area of the city and activate him; he counts as a worker - send a priest to pray at Notre Dame, tithing 1/2/3 coins for 1/3/6 points and claiming a share of the end-of-year 8/10/12 VP if you play with 3/4/5 people. The personal districts of each player are irregular polygons and each will tile against a different side of the central Notre Dame shape. I thought that was a really neat touch. Every season you pull three cards from your deck and draft them, hire a visiting professional to do something for 1 coin (6 fixed options, 3/3/3 progressing options for year A/B/C, also dealt out 3 at a time), and then add the number of rats to your city displayed at the bottom of the professionals' cards. This can vary, usually 4-5 with occasional 2-8 outliers. If your city would hit more than 9 rats, you are plagued and lose 2 VP and a worker from your busiest district -- and your rat counter stays at 9. I did a strategy heavy on moving the wagon around and came in second to a guy whose strategy was basically to get money and tithe to Notre Dame. Pretty neat game that I might play again. But I find I don't consider the next person's point of view nearly often enough in drafting games. Waited for a few people to close out a long game of Kingsburg with a game of Let's Take a Hike, a card game with a cute visual style about gearing up for hikes, being prepared or losing supplies if you're not, and random run-ins with the wildlife. Ended the night with a 5-player game of Caverna and didn't quite crack 100 points, only managing 99. I think if I'd switched things up a little more I might have had a few turns of an extra dwarf and that would have made the difference. I was 6 points off first place so that's not too bad at all.
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Jan 25, 2015 06:49
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And now for more on the exciting frontier of board game repackaging: You can fit the entirety of Machi Koro and the Harbor expansions, including dice, bagged coins and player starting buildings/money in bags, in just the Harbor box with the insert removed. Even if all the cards are sleeved.
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Jan 27, 2015 03:05
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ChiTownEddie posted:I freaking hate the Machi Koro base box haha. I fully expect to combine them into something much much smaller. Probably, but the sleeves add a lot of height to the card stack. I filled around 3/4 of the expansion box, with its insert removed, with sleeved cards, and I think sleeved cards are good for a game with as much card-handling as Machi Koro.
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Jan 27, 2015 03:26
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Dr. VooDoo posted:That's your friends fault. Everyone who owns a copy of Munchkin has to throw it into the fires of mount doom or forever be cursed to have people ask to play it. Seriously throwing it into a fire pit was the most fun I ever had with my copy of Munchkin I haven't done that yet. I've actually kind of tried to make it work, but I don't know if that actually helps solve any problems. I've had a couple of playtests but that's too small a sample.
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Jan 27, 2015 05:18
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fozzy fosbourne posted:The "name of a region + setting from 200 years ago" trope is boring as hell, though. At least try something slightly different like Sushi Go, Bohnanza, Suburbia, Tokaido, Tokenako, etc.. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong.
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Jan 28, 2015 19:52
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thespaceinvader posted:Viticulture I really enjoyed, and I'm looking forward to adding the expansions. It played quickly (with 3, on a first game) and had some good choices, interesting interactions, seemed fairly balanced (albeit the Visitor cards seem a bit iffy in balance in places). It adds to a good stable of WP games I enjoy. Overall, I think I'd probably prefer this to Caverna. One of the expansions upgrades most of the visitor cards by giving them two functions, so it's not likely you'll find yourself holding a completely useless card.
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Feb 4, 2015 21:35
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thespaceinvader posted:It wasn't that they were useless, ever, it was that they were useless, now. I got two 'do X for a worker' cards after I had all my workers, when my opponent got 'pay 9 money for 3 points'. Does the expansion fix this? Yes, sorry, I meant "useless then". The "get a new worker" cards have as options "make wine tokens", "get 1 VP for each opponent with 6 workers", "get 2 VP if you have all 6 workers". And a space on the board upgrade lets you exchange 2 cards for 1 VP or 3 coins or a 1-grape token, interchangeably, so even when cards are situationally useless they're not absolutely useless.
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Feb 5, 2015 01:09
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lockdar posted:Normally I'd hate to have to end the game with a roll of a die but somehow it felt so good after surviving several rounds of brutal attacks and crisis cards. So there's this alchemy deck-building game called Magnum Opus that uses a d8 to determine if you met the synthesis difficulty, including for the final synthesis that'll win you the game, the Magnum Opus. I manage to get the cards out for it, and as I'm shaking up the die it slips out of my hands, bounces across the table, and lands in the middle of a card on the fusion matrix. Like, right in the middle, not cocked or anything. And I groan, which leaves everybody else looking to see where the die wound up. It's an 8. Automatic success. But it's not how I wanted to ROLL an 8, you know? fozzy fosbourne posted:Yeah, maybe we just need to get gud. But there were times when someone would give me a clue that would both give me an obvious play, but also would give me a not yet piece of useful information about other cards in my hand. Like, all of these other cards are not 1, or not green, etc. Trying to keep track of those details over the course of several turns was sort of aggravating. Well, you can flip cards over since the art on the back has a pagoda under a sky full of fireworks. And I generally play that you can ask to be reminded about any card you've got flipped over. Of course, this requires that someone else in the group remembers what they told you about your hand.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:56
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TastyLemonDrops posted:I am kinda addicted to civilization building board games now. I've been playing them non-stop in the past few weeks/months: Through the Ages, Patchistory, Clash of Cultures and Sid Meier's Civilization being the most recent. Anything else I'm missing that I'll probably like if I enjoy all of the above-mentioned games? You might want Nations, but it's mad to hella expensive. Anyway, game night report! First game: Tokaido. Played as the geisha against the wandering swordsman, functionary, and street performer. Overflowed the board score counter. I worked at a lot of farms, bought a lot of souvenirs, came in first place on the temple and with hotsprings count (also shared souvenirs), and generally ate 1-coin meals and was lucky not to get screwed once I'd downed 2 of them. Also lucky to get 2 complete sets of souvenirs, though the magistrate also managed that. Also also lucky to finish the farm when everyone else was jockeying for mountain and ocean spaces. MEANINGLESS RP poo poo: The geisha gets her second souvenir free, I say it's from a fan. Works well in the first town when I get a top from a little girl. ...and then the next three freebies are two liquors and a drinking cup. Fanboys heard I was touring and ruined everything. My 1 coin meals are "eating light" and the ton of hotsprings are also part of the "diet". I show up in Kyoto first with 3 coins and figure the diet worked great. LET'S EAT TWO FEET OF FISH ON A TWO-FOOT BOWL OF RICE (tai meshi). Second game: Machi Koro + Harbor. After the last game dealt out 10 buildings 9 of which were 3 coins or greater, I decide hell with it and put all 26 out. I think about two-thirds of that game was analysis paralysis so I'm thinking of going back to the 10. But I'd kind of like to have more 1-coin or at least early-game buildings out for purchase. Any suggestions. Third game: History of the World. It's basically a deeper, better Risk. You play over 7 eras and pseudo-draft cards giving you your starting territory, armies, and turn order. Only one army per territory, combat is attacker rolls 2 dice keep best, defender rolls 1 (or more for terrain bonus) and ties are mutual annihilation. You're not friends with "yourself" from a previous era but "you" will give up without a fight and your color still counts for scoring. And there are special cards you get that can do anything from let you absorb two losses to give you a great leader who will let you roll 3 dice per combat until all 3 match. Get 10, play at most 2 an era. At the end of your turn you score points based on landmarks you occupy and if you're controlling (3 dudes + being only person in region) for 3x points, dominating (2 dudes + most in region) for 2x points, or just occupying (in region but not most) for 1x points, and regions are worth more points, and in the case of the Middle East and North Africa, less points as you continue on in the game. I came in second on account of being in just about first on the last turn and getting drafted a terrible nation, the early United States which basically can't mount an offensive to Europe but might hit China or Southeast Asia. My power turn was in the fifth era, a ridiculous breakout with 20 armies by the Mongol Hordes that gave me domination in five regions of the world, followed by an alright sixth era that let me play the Aztec/Incas early enough to take most of the points, in addition to an event card that took back most of my conquered territories in China and India after a bunch of angry barbarian Tibetan monks found them in the Alps. The gamebox is divided into eight broad component trays, 7 for the plastic minis in 6 colors that represent everybody's maximum forces during that era. So, uh, when I banged the box with my elbow near the start of the sixth round, I basically spent the next two rounds sorting minis and having other people roll for my defense until it was my turn again. Also it took about 6 hours to play.
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Feb 8, 2015 06:14
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EvilChameleon posted:What's the goonpinion on Euphoria? There is a guy who brings it to board games night every week and the visuals are very compelling but there's just so many dice. What else is new and cool? I feel like I should buy something new but I don't know what has come out lately besides a few things (King of New York, Castles of Mad King Ludwig). It looks like so many dice in so many colors but those are actually your workers. You will take four of one color and start with two, and place them on the board like you would place workers. Euphoria is a pretty neat twist on the worker placement game for two reasons: first, it's a worker placement game where people hardly ever block each other. There are large production areas that can hold any number of dice, and most of the single spaces are open placement - you just bump a worker back into its owner's hand, which can be an advantage for them since they don't have to spend an action recalling. The only real blocking takes place when building markets - if you don't get there in time, the market goes up without you, and people can block others from building one if they lack certain materials. Second, your workers rebel. You need to keep morale up or they won't let you hoard the artifacts you need to buy influence all over the map. You need to keep knowledge down - certain abilities can bump it up, in addition to the more generous production conditions. If you roll the dice and have unused dice plus total knowledge equal to 16 or more, your smartest worker realizes what's really going on and deserts. You can bump someone's workers back in an attempt to get them to trigger this, or to try and get them to lose resources if you've built a market that steals them on a certain die roll. Honestly I'd at least give it a play unless the guy is rubbish at explaining games.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:49
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The few times I've played Keyflower it's been generally not too cutthroat. Bidding does ramp up, but the inclusion of the Key Celeste miniexpansion that lets one player lock someone else's bid but get all the meeples from it kind of keeps that down to a reasonable level. Nobody dropping three meeples on someone else's tile end turn to lock them from it - that's three meeples that could pump up your own endgame conditions after all.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:08
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Board game club day trip report! On this cold snowy Valentine's Day, we opened with 5-player Sushi Go to wait for other people to show up. It was taken pretty well as "7 Wonders Lite" and things were pretty even until the last round, when the guy who'd slowly been stockpiling pudding got one hell of a power turn. Nobody showed up, so we sat down for a longer 5-player game of base Hansa Teutonica, a game about getting influence as a member of the Hanseatic League. It's basically like if Ticket To Ride took a long swim in the euro. You have five level-up-able stats: longest route multiplier, maximum relocation, number of actions, office privileges, and maximum refresh from stock. You spend cubes to complete routes and they go into stock, and you kick extra stock into knocking out someone blocking your route (and they get to re-place on an adjacent one). The level ups take place in remote corners of the map, and some people opted to forego leveling and stick dudes in them, who got points every time the place was scored by anyone. I took a more balanced power-up approach, but by the time I realized how far ahead everyone was (end of game triggers at 20 points and then end-game scoring can tack on a pile) it was too late to shift gears. And THEN five more people showed up, so everyone factored off into a game of Tichu, a game of Terra Mystica... and I sat down with somebody to teach and play a few rounds of BattleCON Devastation. We had three consecutive matches with different characters from Flight 1, and I swept them thusly: Match 1: My Alexian vs. his Karin & Jager. I had a couple good range counters with Steeled and a couple good range boost negations with Mighty. I did not actually dodge a Howling by standing directly on top of Jager with Mighty, which I think might be the ultimate insult? Match 2: My Marmelee vs. his Shekhtur. He punched through a Meditation with Combination but I managed to play a nail-biting range game and drop the occasional pile of damage with Petrifying. It ended with a time-over when his Shekhtur retreated to try and tag me with a Burst, but I dashed right inside the range. Marmelee wins! Friendship? Match 3: My Eligor vs. his Pendros. The terrain tiles really seem to be more of a threat than a central gimmick for Pendros, who will drop a loving train on you more or less any time he wants. I made good use of Vengeance and soaked up a lot of punishment but delivered just a bit more. Despite getting Aegis clashed out from under me twice, I think by use of Tectonic both times, I managed to land the killing blow when I was on 1 life myself, so basically eligor.txt for that one. We ended the night with a three-player game of base standard layout Argent: The Consortium. I kind of ran away with influence, getting a lot of influence supporters and making frequent use of the catacombs, also taking the pity influence from the infirmary and using a divinity spell to get back up and moving. I was Larimore Burman but I picked it up first turn. I got Influence, Diversity, and Mana outright (marks on those last two), and Influence broke ties for me on Natural Magic (which I saw early and the Nature player saw late, taking supporters from the three other schools of magic he saw), Divinity (which had really bad luck in terms of available spells/supporters), and 2nd-most Supporters, which I never even saw. Verdicts: Sushi Go was light and quick and I have a pile of poker chips to keep score with, so no problems there. Hansa Teutonica... really seems to assume players will power up a decent amount and not try to burst to 20 to end the game. Also the bumping mechanic basically relies on other players really wanting specific routes, which you can't really rely on them taking the bait for, especially if you do a lot of powering up and "look like you're ahead" despite having 0 points. My first time playing BattleCON live and even with the simplest Flight 1 characters there was a decent amount of complexity there. Everyone had a good time with Argent. I aggressively ended the final round because I didn't want to get spells dropped on me, and even with the meager variety of rooms available there was a lot of jockeying for position.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:49
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Kai Tave posted:Edit; well we've got a guy rapid fire talking about ways for GMs to gently caress players over in Pathfinder so already off to a swimming start. "You take 10,000 psychic damage, as though a great intelligence in a higher dimension suddenly wanted you to die." I mean, there are other ways, but they all stem from that one.
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Feb 18, 2015 03:50
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Lord Frisk posted:Somebody had a prestige system that bolted on to make the game less rear end, but I don't have a link unfortunately I have a link! Because it was mine.
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Mar 11, 2015 06:14
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jeeves posted:The Adventure Time Munchkin cards are really nice-- excellent art and etc for the theme. I just have no desire to play the game for obvious reasons. Hi.
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Mar 25, 2015 15:30
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fozzy fosbourne posted:My group realized last weekend that we really like Shopping as a mechanic in games. We like Dominion, we like buying the power tiles in Kemet, buying technologies in Eminent Domain, buying from the market in Suburbia, the items in between rounds of Arcadia Quest, etc. "Shopping" is kind of broad and could be used to describe a number of vaguely similar mechanics, but the shopping in these games is more appealing than in games where we draft from a pool that changes from turn to turn (7 Wonders, Agricola). Especially if drafting has an equal cost associated with each. Games where you "shop" from your own hand (Race, GtR) sort of fall somewhere in the middle. Prosperity (not the Dominion expansion) is an interesting shopping game. You buy exclusive access to one of a number of city tiles, with new and better ones continually entering the market as "time passes", and the entrance also triggers scoring in one of five areas. You can pay through the nose for the best high technology, or invest in research and get it for cheap.
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Apr 2, 2015 21:08
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Chekans 3 16 posted:I made out like a bandit at the Tabletop Day event I went to, won Magnum Opus, Krosmaster Arena, and Pixel Tactics along with promos and a giftcard. Anyone played Magnum Opus? I had never really heard of it before I won it. Magnum Opus is an alchemy-themed deckbuilder focused around getting ingredients into your deck and doing synthesis. Money persists from turn to turn and is used to get new reagents or do synthesis you already know. There are the standard income-engine cards available. Inspiration is earned from failed rolls and can bump up rolls by 1 per. You're working with an eight-sided die and eight different reagents, done in mystical/physical pairs where one type is 1 money/1 diff to 4/4, and the other is 1/4 to 4/1. Roll the combined difficulty or over to make it happen. There's a 4x4 grid of syntheses seeded at random at the start of the game with three parts of the magnum opus and a selection of others - not all synths happen every game. Synths that aren't the magnum opus will give you multiple reagents or one-shot boosts to your deck. They can also give you enhanced income cards because you're turning lead into gold on the regular. There are also prizes for doing each synth if you're the first one there, usually some kind of lab equipment. Synthesis is done by playing cards to your lab and then using an action card to do the synth and kick things into the discards. Some equipment stays around but might need to be repaired if a synthesis fails. You can do a synthesis that's already been discovered by "buying ingredients" for your lab assistants - you still have to make the roll and get nothing if it fails, but you don't need to get the right cards out of your deck. The Magnum Opus is made of three reagents and you'll find out which three by doing the appropriate synth, which lets you draw a card from the three component decks. The ingredients are obtained as normal, and once you get them all onto your bench and make it, calculating difficulty as usual (and the difficulty can be from 7 to 9), you win the game. I played it and liked it, but that could be because I managed to win.
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Apr 13, 2015 23:42
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Can't even fit a deck and discard pile on a go board, -10/10 try harder ghost of board games.
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May 22, 2015 07:39
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EBag posted:With the Fields of Arle talk I was wondering from those who have played it how much variability there is from game to game. Are there randomized elements at setup? Are there enough different strategies and things to do that it would still feel interesting and different after 5+ plays? Of the available buildings, 9 are fixed for use in every game, and 9 are randomly chosen at the beginning of every game. Each rewards a different emphasis on various parts of your farm.
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Jul 20, 2015 04:53
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Lorini posted:Cacao is supposed to be similar to Carcassone. Cacao is a little bit like Carcassone in that it's a tile-laying game, but you're not trying to make contiguous features. You're using everyone's worker tiles to make a checkerboard with the public action tiles - hand of 3 worker tiles with different numbers on the faces, 2 publicly available action tiles at any time, put down a new action tile when there'd be workers on two sides - and when worker touches action, worker does action. It's much harder-core into territory control than Carcassone is, so if you liked the gameplay of jockeying to get yourself in on a big structure somebody else was building, that's there in Cacao.
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Jul 21, 2015 13:10
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Undead Hippo posted:This sounds generally right, and I've only played the game once. One that struck me as particularly unbalanced though was Kublai Khan when compared to Johannes Caprini. Kublai starts in Beijing, and gets no other bonus. This is pretty good on its own merits, because you get a 10 victory point bump and get to monopolize first arriver bonuses while everybody else is racing each other at the other end of the map. Johannes Caprini gets to teleport between watering holes and gets 3 gold every turn. Johannes Caprini can just travel to Beijing on T1 to completely counterfeit the bonus of Kublai, while also still retaining the ability to teleport, and also getting that gold per turn income. I don't see how those two characters can possibly be balanced against one another... Johannes seems to do everything Kublai does and more. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts though, because you've obviously played it quite a bit more than me. Is there a reason that you would pick Kublai over Johannes? Johannes can pay 3 movement to get almost anywhere (city -> oasis -> different oasis -> city) but that 3 movement still costs 12 coins and he's up 15 coins over the course of the game. In a game with Kublai, assuming his Diet Kublai start happens, he's up 3 coins and down 3 VP while Kublai has, say, grabbed a bonus in Lan Zhuo or Sumatra. The thing is, you only ever get 5 travel actions, not counting the occasional 1-bump from contracts and the "camels to travel" city office action, but the 1-bumps don't really take advantage of Johannes' power, and the city action, if it's there at all, burns a 3 die and 6 camels if Johannes is using it to teleport. In addition to his 10 points, Kublai effectively gets 20% more travel action, for free.
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Jul 22, 2015 17:03
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Tonight I played a game called Stuff and Nonsense at my FLGS and I had the oddest sense of deja vu, only realizing now it was from James Ernest's how to play video 10 months prior. (Though the rules have changed since then.) Anyways, it's a light little set-collection game. After the success of Professor Elemental's imaginary Polar Expedition in the salons of London, it's the fashion to tell amazing adventure stories, but of course you need certain props. The game comes with 6 suits of 14 cards each: photographs, interesting facts, recently-deceased heroes, odd artifacts, riveting anecdotes, and intriguing plant and/or animal specimens. Shops for the 6 are placed radially around the adventurer's club and flea market, eight cards are dealt out and distributed appropriately, a Professor Elemental pawn starts on one random shop tile, and the game begins with everyone starting in the center. On your turn you may move and take an action where you land. You can always move to any of the two buildings in the center - the market lets you discard a card from hand and draw one blind from the deck, the club is where you score - and always from the center to any shop, or from any shop to the two adjacent. At a shop you pick up the card you want and then deal another from the deck. Numbers in the bottom corner tell you whether Professor Elemental then moves clockwise, depending on the number of players. Professor Elemental is a bit of a hazard, and in addition to moving when the deck says (which is maybe a third of the time, less for more players) he always moves when someone tells a story. If you move to a spot where he is or have him land on you, you either discard a card to placate him or lose one point for every card in your hand as he critiques them mercilessly. It's your choice and you can go negative. How do you score? Well, there are five possible remote destinations: Africa, Mt. Everest, China, the South Pole, and the Amazon. Everything you pick up could potentially play to two or three of these destinations, with variant points for each - often 1 or 2, rarely 3. When you go to the Adventurer's Club, you turn in your story, at most one card per suit, and all the cards have to score at least one point for their destination. In addition, there's a minimum set for each location, though you can collect more: 2 for Africa, 3 for Everest, 4 for China, 5 for the South Pole, and all 6 for the Amazon. Each story is also worth a number of bonus points - at the start of the game there's room for the bonus to rise once or fall twice. So, for example, Everest's bonuses go 2-3-4-6 and the Amazon's go 6-8-11-14, and they start at 4 and 11. When you tell a story the club's interest wanes in that location and the bonus moves down one step, then you roll a d6 and on a 2-->6 you bump Africa->the Amazon up one step, assuming there's room. If your story cleaned out your hand, draw a card, and then Professor Elemental moves, possibly landing on one of your rivals. So if I put together a collection of, say, 6 cards for the Amazon, worth 1-2-1-1-2-2 points, and go when the club's interest is highest, that's worth 23 points. Game is to a variant number of points depending on players - we played with 4 players so it was to 50, and this is a Cheapass Games production so get some poker chips or something to keep score. I managed to hit 50 points exactly to win, after tales of adventure to Mt. Everest, the Amazon, the South Pole, and finally Africa. The cards are comedic fare as is usual for Cheapass Games, with funny drawings and flavor text, and you do not have to tell a grandiose story beginning with "There I was, in the very heart of" when you score your cards, but you also do not have to drink anything but water. I didn't see any explicitly problematic cards and we got through most of the deck, but it is kind of Orientalism: The Game, even if you're lying outrageously about fakes produced in and around London that might be tied to anywhere in the world. Glazius fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 06:51
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Trip report: I got two games of Broom Service in on board-game day. It won KennerSpiel this year, and I can see why. At its core it's pretty simple - use gatherers to make potions and wands, fly around the map with witches, drop off potions with druids, get clouds out of your way with weather fairies. Except you pick 4 out of 10 of those actions every turn, and so does everyone else, and you have to follow the lead of the current, well, basically "trick leader", so you might not take your actions in the order you wanted. Each action also has a lesser "cowardly" version that lets you take it right away, and a more rewarding "brave" version that gives you bonuses... as long as nobody else picks brave before the end of the round. Then you get jack squat. Also, whoever was brave leads the next trick, so enjoy that bonus while you've got it. Round-by-round events shake things up over and above this guessing game (one forces the trick leader to play brave, another lets cowardly actions score 3 points instead of taking the action), and when playing with less than 5 players, you use one of the unused player decks to reveal (5 - players) "bewitched" actions every round, that cost -3 points when played, even if you play brave and don't get to do anything. It was a trip, and I managed to win both games (in one case by keeping parity but otherwise getting a large number of clouds, in another case by heading alone for a remote corner where everything was worth more points) but there was some really close play there and a lot of guessing and second-guessing. There's another side of the board with even more advanced tricks and mechanics, but we didn't play on that one.
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Jul 26, 2015 15:44
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Lord Frisk posted:"The only good use of dice in a modern board game" Got to play a demo of The Voyages of Marco Polo the other day. It's got pretty good use of dice. How has it got pretty good use of dice? Well, you get various special character powers, and one guy's power is that he just places the dice how he wants, he doesn't roll them. He is not really at an obvious advantage. Sometimes you want high dice, sometimes you want low dice, and if your roll is terrible you get compensation in scarce resources.
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Aug 7, 2015 15:05
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Played Traders of Osaka yesterday at my FLGS. Light and fast little set collection and trading game, lemme run it down for you. Four suits of cards: red, blue, green, and yellow (fabric, porcelain, tea, rice). Values in each are 2, 3, and 5, distributed roughly evenly, weighted more to 2s than 5s. There's also a boat token for each color that starts on space 1 of a 6-space track, and "achievement" tokens in each color. There's a 3-card "farm" row and a 5-card "market" row, and each player has a reservation token and a stockpile token. You start with one achievement token of your choice and draw cards from the deck until you get at least 8 points of goods, and pick one of these actions to do on your turn: Reserve a card by putting your reservation token on it. This can happen on either the farm or the market row, though the other two actions only interact with the market row. You can only get your reservation token back by taking the card you reserved; you can't relocate it. Cash a card from the market row by taking it into your hand. This can be an unclaimed card or your reserved one. Buy out the market. Discard cards from your hand to meet or exceed the combined price of every unclaimed card in the market, plus your reserved card if it's there, and place the cards in a tableau in front of you. So if there are 3 3s in the market, you can discard 2 5s to get them (10 > 9) but you don't get change. Then the ships advance: 1 space if you took that color, 2 spaces instead of you took multiples (no matter how many. Take 4 yellow cards? Yellow ship up 2 spaces.) When any ship hits space 6, selling happens. Selling cards from your tableau is pretty simple. For any given color, you sell all the cards, and get points equal to the number of cards in the set times (highest card + achievement tokens). So if you had yellow cards 3/2/2 and 1 yellow achievement token, that's 3 cards * (highest card 3 + 1), or 12 points. Keep one card from the set for every 5 points or fraction thereof, keeping the lower cards if you don't keep all of them and drawing extras from the top of the deck if you score more than 5 points per. Put those cards face-down under your stockpile marker, and then take an achievement token of that color. Then the ships on space 6 go back to space 1. But this shipping is over kind of dangerous waters, and any ship at space 4 or 5 when selling happens is caught in the Black Tide and sinks with all goods on board. Those ships move back to space 3, and everybody discards all their goods of that color... unless they have insurance. 3s are worth 1 point of insurance, 2s are worth 2. For every one you discard from your hand, you can save that number of cards as long as the insurance and the goods are the same color. When you use insurance, turn the goods sideways in your tableau; they're insured forever, no matter how many times a ship sinks. After selling is over, refresh the market row: the 3 cards in the farm row move down, along with any reservation tokens on them; 2 cards are dealt to the market row from the top of the deck; and 3 more cards are dealt out into the farm row. The market row also refreshes if it's out of unclaimed cards. If the deck runs out, reshuffle the discards; the game is over when, after selling, someone has 8 achievement tokens. Then whoever has the most cards under their stockpile marker wins, with achievement tokens as a tiebreaker. I really liked the game. There were a lot of things to think about (what color do I take for money? how are ships going to move? do I need to save some insurance? can I stall a color I don't have at space 4 or 5 while the others advance?), the farm is enough of a preview of the next market while leaving some to chance, and it played in a little over half an hour, not counting rules explanations.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:10
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With the latest Machi Koro expansion out, I tried a homebrew market row thing and it worked out well enough that I thought I'd share. THE SETUP: a 12-card market row. The 4 leftmost cards are 2 coins cheaper, the next 4 are 1 coin cheaper, the rest are full price. The farthest leftmost slot will decay after every player's turn. I laid out a 4x3 grid with a 20 by the top row, a 10 by the middle row, and a renovation token at the top of the left column DEALS AND DECAY: After every player's turn, if the farthest leftmost slot wasn't bought out, discard one card from it. This might not empty the slot, which is fine. Slide the cards to the left to fill any holes, then replenish the market row up to 12. Cards enter at the bottom right of the market row, and International Exhibit Halls and Gaming Mega Stores return to there when they're used. Even discarding a single card moved us through a pretty big chunk of the deck, and the discounts made for many fewer stalled-out turns.
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Aug 30, 2015 12:37
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Crackbone posted:Speaking of Stonemeier, has anybody tried Viviculture Essential yet? Not this re-release but I've played a lot of the original. It's point salad-esque in that there are a lot of ways to get points, but there's little to no mystery scoring so it's never a surprise when someone wins. There is kind of a big money strategy: plant mixed fields and keep drawing wine orders until you get one with sparkling and white wine, then fill it.
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Dec 17, 2015 16:29
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Jedit posted:There's no "mystery" scoring as such, but it's still possible to ramp up a lot of points in one turn - as many as 10, if you have the wine. Everyone knows you might be able to do it, but nobody knows if you have the right orders. Right. I was thinking more about my own experience with point-salad games, where there's an elaborate final scoring and it's not obvious where everyone stands going in.
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Dec 17, 2015 18:23
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Got a chance to play some Favor of the Pharaoh last night. For those who haven't played To Court the King, think Yahtzee where you need certain combinations to get more dice or unlock certain special powers like setting a die where you want it or bumping any number of dice up by 2. When someone gets 7 of a kind, that unlocks a final round where people try to top their winning set. This version includes a giant variable setup with tons of rewards and reward conditions, including small disposable one-off bonuses, new special dice, and enough for everyone to have their own set. The problem is that it's super easy to fall behind on dice economy, with many rewards bumping your die total by one and a couple that can bump it by 2. It's likely that your final roll might just go unchallenged, which is kind of anticlimactic.
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Dec 18, 2015 16:07
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Finally got to play one game of 504. It was 183 - I play with pretty advanced people so I figured I'd introduce the whole game at once instead of starting out with a game without residents. (729 also seems like it's going to be pretty interesting when we get there.) Everything went pretty well, but a decent amount depends on the random privilege you draw for purchase and somebody got screwed by only pulling the VP ones from the deck. Not sure how you fix that, or if (in this case) 27-to-1 odds are worth addressing.
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Jan 24, 2016 16:10
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Dr. VooDoo posted:Are there any economic/market games out there in which you are able to buy/sell/trade stock of other players that are tied to their performance in the game? One of the modules of 504 is stocks, and it works like this: As a primary module (victory condition), you buy and sell 5 sub-companies which play 5 rounds of the game and try to wind up with the most cash. As a secondary module (income condition), you buy and sell 5 sub-companies which play the game through to completion, and score each of your final shares based on the company's final VP. As a tertiary module (flavor condition) everybody is their own company, and scoring works like it does in the secondary module. You can sell your own shares for cash or buy ones other people have sold.
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Feb 4, 2016 20:50
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