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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Okay, I personally have enjoyed 7 Wonders every time I've played it, but this is definitely not true, at least not for me. I mean, it's true for the simpler cards, like the ones that give you resources or military points, but as soon as you get to third age (and before that with expansions) you're suddenly drowning in a sea of different symbols that you simply can't parse the first few times playing without constantly checking the reference sheet. I mean, I get why they're doing it, but I still think many cards in 7 Wonders actually lose intuitiveness because of their heavy use of icons rather than text. I'm in discussion with the company publishing my game on this subject. They want to do icons for everything so it is language independent, I don't want my game to be filled full of one-shot icons players have to reference.
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Dec 15, 2014 10:28
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Game haul! Got: Bang! The Dice Game which we did one play of and the jury is still out on it really. The group was a bunch of casual players and not much deduction took place just shooting people. Maybe this is how it is supposed to be? I've never played any of the versions of Bang! Sellswords, which is really Triple Triad (a game you could play in FF8) no plays yet but I can say that the rulebook is oversized (like Grandma doesn't need her drat glasses large) and folds out like a map for some weird reason. Brave Rats! is like playing two player Love Letter except it works. You each pick a card from your hand and the highest number wins unless a rule on the card says otherwise. It is easy, slightly meta thinky, a little deduction and very fast at 5min per game. I really like to bust it out play a round or two and then go back to whatever else you were doing. Galaxy Trucker the only Vlaada I've ever played is Space Alert and I'm looking forward to giving this a try.
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Dec 27, 2014 05:38
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Got a Saturday game night in, we played: (Everything was played 3 player) Star Realms as our opener, two copies so it could play 3. I haven't played 2 players yet but at 3 every game has been close. It is a deckbuilder where you have two main functions on ships. Attacking does damage to an opponent (Everyone starts with 50 "Authority" life points) and Money for buying things. You can buy and attack as much as you want/are able on your turn. There are two kinds of cards: Ships which are played like normal cards, they do their function and then are discarded. Bases which once they are played they stay in play unless destroyed and some of them are Outposts which must be attacked first before they can damage you. All non-basic cards come from one of four factions and they gain additional abilities if cards from the same faction are played together. The market to buy cards consists of 5 cards that once bought are immediately replaced by cards from a trade deck. There is also a static buy option of a basic but useful ship. We liked it a lot. It is a fast deckbuilder with little setup. A few of the games the first player got a pretty nasty lead but the other two player would shut them down enough while building themselves up that every game ended with everyone within 10 Authority of each other. Galaxy Trucker was the next one and it's the first time I have played it, the other two guys had played the app. Had to skim over the rules to cover any gaps not learned from the app but we eventually got it all hammered out. I really like it. It has the feel of "lets plan (build) something and hope it works (survives)" like Space Alert but doesn't have the reassurance of you working with other people. One of our players got too attached to his ships and didn't like how torn to poo poo they got in the travel portion but as he played he came to terms with it, his level 3 ship losing two tiles in all really helped. Questions: You flip the timer equal to the phase +1 correct? Also do you flip it as soon as possible or anyone can flip it anytime as long as it gets all of its flips before building is over? If the second option of the previous question is true when do you guys flip it in your games? Last game (besides a final game of Star Realms at the end of it all) was Steam Park. If I ever felt regret for ridding myself of my copy of Takenoko this game will relieve it. It has beautiful art/components, a fun theme, simple, and accessible. The game goes in phases: Roll phase has everyone rolling dice simultaneously, each face of the die has what actions you will use in the rest of the turn. When you get all of the dice you want banked you take a turn order marker which determines the order of who plays their actions and adds or removes dirt depending on which marker you got. Dirt phase has you get dirt tokens (these will penalize you at the endgame) for certain action rolls you kept +/- the bonus/penalty for your turn order. Then in turn order you do the actions from the dice you rolled. You can build rides and stands, attract robots, clean dirt, expand the park grounds or cash in bonus cards. Last you gain income for all of the robots you have on rides. Riders are a steady income but if you don't try and get the bonus cards fulfilled you won't get ahead. Sometimes the bonus cards will determine the kind of rides you want to build and there is only 1 of each ride size in each color so a lot of people will compete for some of them, this makes the real-time rolling phase even more important to the point that you may have some blank dice come through so you can get the 1st turn marker. SU&SD said in their review that most won't invite their friends over to play this game specifically despite it being a good game. It does make a good game to introduce people to a lot of little mechanisms all at once. If they said they liked any certain parts of the game then you could find a heavier game that uses them more prominently and with more depth. It has enough to it to satiate a gamer and not overwhelm a rookie. Overall a good experience and a game that will be a go-to for casual groups or introducing people to the hobby but not a game I will use often with my more serious game groups.
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Dec 28, 2014 20:32
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Prepare your rear end in a top hat Also there is a munchkin news site and forum because we all have needs. Played some games over Christmas, most of which I have already talked about but one I haven't. Paperback. It's a deckbuilding word game. You start with a deck containing R S T L N E letter cards and 4 "wild" cards that can be any letter. You draw 5 of them on your turn and try to spell a word. Any cards used provide money you can use to purchase new letters (wilds provide no currency). The letters you can buy can be normal letters, two letters together such a TI (they have to be used together and in that order.) and letters with powers that can only be used if they are used in a word (like an S that gives you +1 card to your next hand if it is at the end of the word.). When you are making your word there is a common letter card, usually a vowel, that is in the market area. You can include it in part of your word and redeem the money it would make you but you do not get to buy/take/keep the card UNLESS the word you made uses the number of letters indicated to win the card (7-10 letters, as they get won the difficulty to obtain them increases.). You win by having the most victory points, you can get those by winning the common letter cards or buying wild cards that have varying prices but provide the most victory points. The game ends when the common cards are all bought or two of the 4 victory point wilds are depleted. The game also comes with some wooden cubes and variant rules that use them. The one we used was if you were stumped you could offer a cube to someone to make a word for you and they could use it on their turn toward buying cards. I don't like trivia or word games because I'm just plain awful at them. This game was actually pretty fun. Even if you're not great at word games you can use knowledge of how to play deckbuilders to build the combo necessary to make a lot of cards enter your hand and spell simple words. I faced off against two people who are good at word games, spelling, and grammar but I got the win because I knew what powers to combo and when to buy VP. One thing that is harsh is if you spell that big word that gets you the common card chances are you made a lot of money making that word and can use the money to buy a victory point card. The cards that have VP values go from 1-15, common letter cards give 5. The last turn I spelled INSTALLERS and got the common card that would end the game and because the game would be over at the end of my turn I used the money to buy a 8 VP card. I may change it to the turn that you win a common card you can't buy VP cards or something. Also the starting wild card are worth 1 VP each and I don't know why. I'm guessing it is so you have to decide to trash them to cleanse your deck of cards that don't make you money but no one did it because wilds help and it didn't feel like 1 VP was worth getting rid of to maybe end up with a hand full of consonants. I wouldn't play this game often but it is good if people are clamoring for word games and it is a great simple way to introduce deckbuilders. The concept is simple and you don't have to explain anything except the shuffling. Everything else is already known and familiar, you need to build big words, you build words to buy letters to make bigger letters, you sometimes buy VP cards. Done. Also one of my highest point words was "molesters".
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Jan 3, 2015 18:48
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Super Munchkin with at by Rob Liefeld
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Jan 3, 2015 22:32
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Played some games at the game shop today. Mythotopia was the first thing to hit the table, the shop just got it in and the owner wanted to see how it played. We didn't keep it on the table for long. We played 3 rounds and decided to box it up. The game is like GoT if everything you got to do on your turn was determined by a deckbuilder. There's a map with turf to control and build on and you are supposed to capture areas, build stuff, and do certain things to earn VP. You have a shitload of actions on your summary board but they're more like potential actions. If you don't draw what you want to do something then you can't do it and the state of the board limits the action list to about 1-4 things. To invade a territory you spend 1 food card and cards with military icons and put that many at the border. The person being attacked needs to do the same thing (except no food icon cards) and his number needs to match or beat yours. A battle can only end if someone spends their first action to resolve it which turns into each person adding more military until they're in the lead and then cashing in the victory on their first action. Quickly the first few turns became action 1 resolving something and action 2 starting something that you'll hope to resolve on your next turn. By the way the only way the game can end is if the VP point areas run dry and there are no wars happening, THEN a player must spend their first action to end it. Each of the mechanisms relied heavily on the others to carry it and they all fell short. If someone knows the virtues of this game I'd love to hear them because it died quick on our table before anything of merit showed. Also there's a typo throughout the entire rulebook that there are 5 starting cards when there are only 4. Until we looked that up it was kind of maddening. We wanted to get some deckbuilding in after that so I brought out Trains. It's my favorite resource deckbuilder, I know Dominion is a better made game and most everything that has come out with that mechanism has been a diluted or cumbersome use of it. I like that it has the same speed but with more of a sense of having built something and gives you something to plan on besides what you hope the cards will give you in the off-turn. It went over well except for one player, he kept encouraging us do whatever ends the game because didn't want to play it. He's mainly drawn in by theme from what I could tell so he probably should have seen that Trains was about, well, trains (his favorite deckbuilder from what I could tell was Marvel: Legendary, which is really just art of Marvel characters and not a theme.) Funny enough after that dude left one of the guys brought in Legendary: Encounters. I had played the Marvel version and thought it was okay. I have to say this was better but it was still the Legendary system. One guy got turned into the alien player and another died leaving me to try and survive a few turns before I got taken down. The guy who got killed spent the rest of his time managing the cards for the players still in the game until it ended and it still took awhile. The Legendary system has so many moving parts it gets in the way of itself. All of the things you do also feel arbitrary because you're not sure if you made a good call or if all of the random variables just happened to line up. We didn't win by a long shot but I feel if we did it wouldn't feel like we conquered the system but that it happened to fail enough for us to exploit it. Spartacus was next. It was fun but it in reality it was like a more thematic and entertaining form of a Take-that game for me. It was always interesting what was happening between players and making bids and meta-thinking deal and card plays was good. I also like that the dice-fest gladiator battles weren't the end all be all of the game. If you wanted to could play around that system or rely on it to get the items for victory. I think that it would be hard to implement but if instead of dice the players did combat like in Star Wars: Epic Duels they would have a combat system with enough control and not add too much to the complexity. There are strong VP cards and gently caress you cards to stop them and cards that are a 50/50 dice roll to stop them. I won but I feel like it was luck and a waiting for the right moment to play past people's defenses. I look forward to what they may do with the X-Men retheme but I'm half holding my breath The last two were pad games as we waited for the shop to close up.Red 7 was great for slinging game after game of it. Light game with a good amount of think using the advanced rules. I've talked about it before on here and it still holds it's weight as it did then. The guy that made Machi Koro made a new game called Diamonsters and we ended with that. Diamonsters is pretty much diamonds in a condensed kid-like form. You have 5 cards numbered 1-5 and they beat each other in a circular pattern, highest number always winning except 5 is beaten by 1, the winner gets a random card from the deck and the monster they played placed in front of them. Each monster gives a diamond value from -2 to 2. When the diamond value of the monsters reaches 5 or when you have 3 of the same monster card you win the round. Win enough rounds and you win the game. It was alright as a game itself but it didn't have much to it besides the meta-think. As the round goes on players will have random cards in their hand so you can't place much confidence in what they will play. At times it feels like you might as well just choose whatever card blindly and get just as much success. I wouldn't object to playing it again but I think Brave Rats (if you only have 2 people.) or Get Bit! do it much better.
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Feb 8, 2015 07:07
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Alris posted:Wait what!? You betcha
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Feb 8, 2015 10:03
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PubicMice posted:I'm looking for a good solo game that's small and short, but with more strategy than randomness. I've narrowed the ones I'm looking at down to Space Hulk: Death Angel or Onirim, can anyone recommend any others/dissuade me from buying either? Both of them are pretty random, I have gotten my money out of Onirim far more than SH:DA but that is also because Onirim travels well. Onirim has more risk tacking than strategy, you have to make some plans based on what you think is left in the deck but a few bad draws could tank you. SH:DA is very random. Each room and encounter is random and everything is resolved by dice. If you want something that has a pretty good strategy level, is still variable, and well made then look at Friday by Friese.
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Feb 20, 2015 02:58
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Had some game days this past weekend. Played Kingsport Festival first. If you've ever played Kingsburg you've played most of Kingsport Festival and vice versa. The core gameplay is identical, you roll dice and place them together or separate on areas that give you resources and you spend those to gain bonuses and victory points, every few rounds an obstacle shows up and you use combat ability to defeat it for bonuses or not and lose VP or resources. Here is how it differs from Kingsburg:  In order to get resources from an area you place dice you lose sanity points. You start at 10 and on the average resource space you lose 1-3 sanity. You can gain sanity by placing on certain resource areas or getting bonuses that cancel it out. If you go below 0 sanity you lose VP instead of sanity points. If you are above or below 6 sanity cards do different things. To me this was the most interesting thing KF did that KB didn't do.Cards. Two of the resources are spells and magic points. Magic points are gained like any of the others on a scale on the board. Each time you get a spell resource you choose between three decks of cards with different spells, you can carry 3 unless something changes that. Spells can have effects in different phases and range from combat bonuses to die roll increases (some parts of the board you need 19 on three dice so they're only accessible with magic).Instead of Kingsburgs independent player build charts there is a shared board. You spend resources to enter locations and place claim markers to get the bonuses. It is pretty much the same just shown in a different way.It has a Cthulhu theme. It has as much to do with the game as Abyss did with underwater kingdoms really. It is nice art and not very intrusive.Overall if you want a different Kingsburg it is for you. Kingsburg looks more organized and has less hidden and random abilities. If you're wanting a "more Euro" kind of experience with a dice resource game then go with Kingsburg but if the random variables seem like the game will be more interesting or last longer with you go for Kingsport Festival. Next we played Merchants and Marauders for the first time. We had some rules errors in the early game but overall we enjoyed it. The game takes shape as people carve out their play styles. I was a pirate named Frederico who could carry an extra rumor and I ran away with the game by fullfilling rumors and running around the map to do them so much no one wanted to go out of their way to sink me. The asymmetry keeps it interesting but can lead to issues if you have a certain something you'd rather do but lack the skills in it. If the issues became too great then I'd propose we make a skill buy system for captains and skip the special abilities to avoid imbalance. One of the guys at the shop demoed me two games of Marvel Dicemasters. It was neat but to me it feels like: Marvel Dicemasters is to TCGs like Star Realms is to deckbuilders. It is fast, random, swingy, and a low cost of entry. Also my copy of Pictomania showed up today. ThaShaneTrain fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 20:31
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Deathlove posted:Same, Chicago. Me too, Oklahoma. "Point to us on the toy doorstep where they left it."
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Mar 2, 2015 04:30
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Played some games: Shinobi WAT-AAH! is a set collecting game that ranges from medium-light complexity to medium depending on the variant you play. In Grasshopper mode: On your turn you choose to draw 1 card or flip over the top card of the deck and draw the value of that card +2 (cards have a value of 1-8), doing this gives you negative points equal to the value of the card. Next you can play a ninja clan in front of you, add a ninja to an existing clan, or pass. A clan must be 2-4 cards and they must be of the same clan, if you play 2 or 3 of the same clan they usually have powers they activate like destroying another clan, trading hands with an opponent, or getting you more cards. Playing 3 cards gives you a stronger effect than playing 2 (for example, playing 2 of the spider clan destroys 1 card from an opponents clan where playing 3 destroys the entire clan.). You can add cards to an existing clan instead as long as they are the same color or they are a special character. Special characters have a range of values and their power is a copy of a clan in the game. At the end of your turn you discard 1 card. Once a player plays their 4th clan they end their turn and the game is over. Most points wins. Ninja Master Mode is the same but instead of playing the 4th clan being the end of the game it is just a round in a game of 3 rounds. Inbetween rounds you carry over whatever hand you had to the next round and you get ninja tokens based on how you placed in the previous round. You can spend these ninja stars to get cards that give you special abilities, attacks against the boss, or to look at Boss Decoy cards. The person in last place gets the option of a free look at a decoy card or a free power card from a different deck. At the end of the game you will face a boss card, there are 5 in the game, 1 of them is removed, 3 are decoys, and the last is the one you will face. If you can look at the decoy cards to get a good idea of what the boss card might be by process of elimination. The boss cards provide a large range of positive to negative points depending on how many ninja stars you have on them, you also get points for ninja stars used to look at decoys and to get cards. Most points wins. It is a good 20-30min game and once you play Master mode you won't really want to bother with Grasshopper mode unless you want to play a shorter game. Certain strategies formed in my group like people not playing clans that can destroy other clans until the clan that copies powers was already out and playing the clan that trades hands right before a round ends to get an advantage in later rounds. It is one of those games that you could autopilot through and would be a fun way to pass the time but if you really pay attention to what is going on in what players discard and keeping an eye on the decoys it gains a fair bit of strategy. It is something that we'll play when the game shop only has a little time left. Played Wiz-War (eighth edition), it feels old. Really really old. The newest edition didn't change it enough to make it feel like it wasn't from the 80s. You move around a board ( you get move points so at least you don't roll) and attack each other with spells while trying to kill each other (permanently) or steal each others books. It sounded fun until you realize how ponderous the action turns out to be. In a game where you need to run around and take victory points people don't spend a lot of time shooting each other with spells. If they decide to slog it out it ends up with one of them escaping more often than not because they realized the other player out-drew them on better attack or cancel cards. It is a cute game but at no point did you feel like you were in control of more than 1.5 of your turns. Pandemic: The Cure is the dice equivalent to pandemic. It is less complicated, more random, more action, and faster. No matter what you do a dice game is a dice game so it will always have that threshold of complexity and predictability. If asked I can break it down more but here's the short summary. 6 areas can get disease, you have actions that let you send cubes back in the bag or capture cubes to find the cure (then you must roll at least 13 with the dice collected). At the end of your turn you roll dice from the bag to infect areas. If too many dice get in an area they outbreak, too many outbreaks or not enough dice in the bag and you lose, find the 4 cures and you win. There's more to the game than that when you start actually playing it. The characters all have their own dice and special abilities that make them all very different from each other and there are event cards you spend dice to use. The game takes any nervousness that you would have felt in Pandemic when you hope that 1 card doesn't get drawn but it is amped up because the dice could all roll the same and turn a place that was A-OK to a disaster zone. The group all agreed that we'd rather play this over vanilla pandemic now because of it being faster to the core of the game (the parts of Pandemic we like) and each character/team feels very different. There are some clever ideas in the game and as far as dice games go this fills any need I ever had for a co-op.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:13
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Countblanc posted:The whole Timmy/etc thing always rubbed me the wrong way, because it's basically a horoscope hidden behind Very Serious Language so now it's ok. Seriously, I've yet to meet someone as uncomplex as any of those breakdowns imply, and the entire appeal is finding "yours" using selective memory so you can be like "yeah I totally LOVES IMMERSION, it's cool when my friends and I roleplay our characters in Dead of Winter," while ignoring that you finely tuned your Weiss Schwarz deck after hundreds of hours of playtesting to win Regionals, and also that you basically don't say a word during your bi-weekly Pathfinder game and just sorta bleed into the background. I think the past two pages and this post is the entire plot to Divergent.
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Apr 7, 2015 01:51
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In one of our games Discipline:2 was used to score Beat and Belt
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Sep 16, 2015 16:33
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Jedit posted:And it lasts one game. I've spent more than $40-50 on games I've only ended up playing once, but at least I could play them again. My plan is to eventually play it at a con so I don't waste money on it. That is, if it doesn't get spoiled for me at some point.
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Nov 4, 2015 23:07
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Xia was brought to my local game night. It hit max count and as each person who walked by it asked how it was the answers sounded more and more disappointed. The planets are randomly distributed and one player got his pick up planet and his deliver planet right next to each other. He couldn't be looted either because he was on planet at the end of each of his turns making stupid amounts of money and VP. After the first turn I heard one of them say "Welp, I guess we're competing for second place now."
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Nov 10, 2015 03:27
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