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Shadow225 posted:What are some suggestions for bar games? I am putting together a game pack that stays in my car. For Sale. It's a quick game (no more than 15 minutes) that's just about auctions. There are two rounds: in the first, players are bidding their cash to buy houses. Each house is represented by a card numbered 1 through 30, which are randomly drawn from a deck of 30 cards. Cards are drawn out and auctioned in sets equal to the number of players (so everyone gets a house from every auction, with the highest bidder getting the best) until the deck runs out. In the second round, players are buying checks valued $0-15 (two of each card in the deck, with no $1s), in a similar auction style, except this time you're bidding using the house cards you acquired in round 1. Each player secretly selects a house card, and the best house gets the best check. This repeats until the second deck runs out, and the person with the most money wins (this includes money left over from the first round). Our group busts this out every few weeks and it's always a hit. Just use poker chips or another currency token, as the paper chips included are pretty flimsy. Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 22:02
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silvergoose posted:
What a coincidence, came here to post about UC as well. Played a 4-player game last night. I was hesitant to play with 4 since I've heard stories of it taking forever, but it was actually pretty reasonable (started setup at 7:30, setup and teach took about 45 mins, finished around 11). I did try to keep the game moving by encouraging players to start their turns while the active player was fiddling with the bits on their player board or whatever. Top two were surprisingly close: I finished with 102, and the winner had 103 (he went heavily into getting special cards that gave him actions and various end-game points, while I focused on building lots of cities that had all building types). Three of us really liked the game, while one player seemed frustrated that it didn't click with him. Overall though, it was a resounding success and I'm sure it'll get brought out again.
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Jun 5, 2019 20:55
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Pipeline - Played it for the first time yesterday. I really enjoyed this, actually; more than I expected to. The board looks like a complicated mess, but the gameplay is actually really straightforward. You're taking actions to buy crude oil, build a network of pipes to refine it into higher grades of oil, and then either sell that on open markets or fulfill contracts, all with the goal of making the most money. The most engaging part of the gameplay is the spatial puzzle aspect of the pipes: each pipe tile is a 2x1 rectangle with an arrangement of pipes running across it, with 3 colors of pipe in the game. Your goal is to arrange the tiles you buy in such a way that you build them into long, unbroken pipes of a single color, since that lets you refine oil into high grades more efficiently than using shorter pipes does. Also, once you've made some extra cash, you can spend that on machines that let you spend money to automatically process your oil, rather than spending an action to refine it (actions are very limited in this game); however, the machines cover up part of the tiles, which can break up your network if you're not careful. Also the Kickstarter edition has metal cubes instead of wooden ones. So that's pretty neat.
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Jun 10, 2019 04:51
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Based on another review I've seen I have one question: Did you win? I did, yes. And I know my opinion is colored by that. That said, here's reviews by some of the others I played with: quote:I liked it a lot. The puzzle it presents felt unique relative to most of the games I play, especially euros. Second play will certainly benefit from experience. The rules are really pretty intuitive; we rarely consulted them during the play. Felt a little Lacerda-esque at times given you have only 18 turns to do a lot of stuff, with a sprinkle of Splotter due to the spatial puzzle. Our play was about 2.5 hours I think, and Matt commented 2 hours should be very reasonable 4p with a little experience. This is from the person who came in last: quote:I really enjoyed it. I had some low expectations going in (not sure why) but the puzzle of the game was engaging and frustrating (in a good way). It felt like it moved along pretty well. Sure there were times of AP but there were also turns that took less than a minute. I do fear the area where AP primarily hits (pipe building) is an area that will be very hard to speed up. Just too many shapes and colors in too many areas of the board to be able to process it quickly. But maybe that's just my brain with this type game. (Also think that makes it near impossible to also spend time analyzing everyone else's board to see if there is a tile you should take to block them, etc.) But overall, it didn't really overstay it's welcome and provided some logistical challenges.
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Jun 10, 2019 14:36
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:The reason I ask is that the other comment Wass because it's a game of incremtally compounding advantage without a way to radically change the game like FCM radio it can be obvious you've lost but takes acouple of hours to get there. I can see that. What I can say in Pipeline's favor over FCM is that it's short enough that by the time someone develops their engine, the game is almost over, so you're not just sitting there turn after turn while they rack up a ton of points, and they can't build up a huge point lead. Also, the endgame goals (which are random) may help to switch up the game between plays, as they provide a lot of the total score. We played the "recommended" first-game set-up with goals that reward players for things they did anyway: make long pipes and lots of high-grade oil. There are other goals you can use, such as building a specific color of pipe, or diversifying your pipe colors and lengths, that make it so you can come out ahead even without a perfectly efficient engine.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:53
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Played Everdell for the first time tonight, and oh my god I love it. The presentation and artwork is top-notch; I absolutely adore the critters, and it's easy to picture the town you're building as it develops into a bustling community. The gameplay's not bad either.
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Sep 19, 2019 05:46
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I'd bought Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle for the family last year, as a light cooperative game for us to play together, but we never ended up opening it. Last night I suggested it to my little sister (who's not a gamer at all) and we gave it a try. She really liked it! We played through the first three years (it has modules for each of the 7 years of the books), and the game did a good job of teaching the mechanics early on, and slowly ramping up the tension and difficulty. Now she's insisting that we finish the rest of the game as soon as possible 
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Sep 30, 2019 20:44
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Another 2P that I haven't played but have heard good things about is Watergate, a competitive game in which one player is Nixon trying to stay in office, and the other player is an investigative journalist trying to take him down.
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Oct 1, 2019 16:24
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pospysyl posted:Okay, I give up, what foes BrOaDtS&cetera stand for? Roads and Boats with &cetera expansion https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/276502/roads-boats-20th-anniversary-edition
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Oct 2, 2019 17:24
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Gave Sierra West a go last night. I was really looking forward to it, but unfortunately one of the people in our 4-player group was completely new to board games. The rules took about 15 mins to explain (we were doing the basic, introductory module) and he asked at least three times if we were ready to start while I was covering them. He didn't seem to pick up any of the mechanics (even the concept of putting his cards into a discard pile was foreign) and we basically had to walk him through each of his turns. We ended up not being able to finish before the taproom closed, though that was partly due to a 1.5-hour game of Countdown Action Edition played beforehand. A disappointing evening, but I'm definitely ready to play it again with more experienced players.
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Oct 2, 2019 20:06
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FulsomFrank posted:Is Architects of the West Kingdom any good? I've only played one of his other games, Shipwrights of the North Sea or whatever, and did not like it at all. I just know that when Architects initially came out it got a lot of buzz from the usual suspects but I'm concerned it's another blandly functional MWE. Both meetups I attend have had a good time with Architects. The actions are straightforward and simple enough that it moves at a good place even with 5 players and is easy to teach, and the way that your workers make actions better and better is an interesting dynamic. I got to teach Brass Birmingham to a friend last night (on TtS) and we played through a full 2p game. He really enjoyed it, and managed to accumulate a very impressive income (26!) by the end. I did go kind of easy, specializing in Manufactured Goods (I don't have much experience with how to play those) but still ended up just a little ahead of him at the end. He wanted to try it to see if it would be a good fit for his group, and while he thinks it might be a bit too heavy for them, he's ready to play more himself!
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Oct 8, 2019 15:50
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Jedit posted:26 income isn't impressive, it means you didn't take out enough loans early on. What were your final scores like? Oh, of course, I know it's not competitive by any means. It was just a learning game to show him the ropes, and he got really excited to see that number keep going up and up. I also didn't play very aggressively as I didn't want to scare him off the game. I think final scores were 179-167.
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Oct 8, 2019 18:22
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Flipswitch posted:Has anyone got any tips on teaching Root? Little tips and things to point people in the right direction while playing? After going over the basic rules (movement, attacking, etc) use the learn to play guide included. It walks you through a scripted example of the first few turns of the game, so players can see how the game mechanics work in practice. From there you can keep playing, or reset and start a fresh game.
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Oct 14, 2019 15:53
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Candyland
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Oct 21, 2019 14:54
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Played Paladins of the West Kingdom last night, 4 players, and we all enjoyed it. Everyone felt like it provided an interesting array of choices, where even if you feel like you made the wrong play early on, such as developing a certain action, you can roll with it and keep going down that path and make it work. We liked the way that criminal workers encourage you to play a little dirty but not go overboard (unless you're specifically recruiting townsfolk to make crime pay) and it had enough player competition over action spaces and cards without feeling too aggressive. It won't work for more competitive groups, perhaps, but it was a great fit for us.
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Oct 23, 2019 20:51
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Selecta84 posted:Got everything I wanted. Just got back and will sort out everything. We played a 6p game of Letter Jam last night. Everyone enjoyed it, though almost nobody managed to spell a word at the end, which surprised me. Though, at least one player had... difficulty with spelling (I gave the first clue, and from her perspective it was ERR?RS. Couldn't work out her letter from that.)
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Oct 24, 2019 20:50
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al-azad posted:I played Paladins of West Kingdom or whatever and it has a lot of good ideas but holy poo poo is it too longed. By the end we had basically emptied every track and maxed every stat so victory came down to fortify (a random draw) and leftover gold. I don't mean to disparage your experience, but are you sure you played it properly? I've played it twice now, and not once did I see anyone max out all of their attributes, nor finish more than two of the actions for the King's Favor in the seven rounds allotted.
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Oct 27, 2019 04:38
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hito posted:Spirit Island question - we ran Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares and Ocean and Oceans Hungry Grasp. It feels like this combination is bonkers strong, because Bringer's no-kill restriction becomes irrelevant on the coast and it actually becomes a benefit - you get the extra fear that you get instead of killing, then you push the stuff into the ocean and it still drowns. Does that work, or did we miss a rule somewhere? Because it seems like Bringer's strength is massively different in situations where it can still kill via pushing vs. when it can't. That absolutely works, and it's why those two are such a fun combo.
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Oct 28, 2019 04:39
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There were three simultaneous games of Bus at our meetup group last night. I enjoyed it for what it was, and the design was very clean and well-presented, though it didn't really do much for me gameplay-wise. What was entertaining was coming up with the story of our city (we ended up with roughly half of the city covered in nightclubs and bars, so everyone was always out partying it up except for the one guy who slept in his office). I ended up winning, though I didn't expect to. It turned out that because there were so many bars, we'd neglected to build nearly enough houses for the people who came to live here.
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Nov 14, 2019 20:00
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Megasabin posted:Can you compare your feelings on it to other Splotter games? I was considering picking it up, but I might hold back now. Well, the only other Splotter games I've played have been FCM and Indonesia. Bus is definitely more straightforward and shorter (which I appreciate!). I've only played the other games once, but FCM I have no desire to touch again, while Indonesia was chaotic fun, though a bit on the long side even with 5 players. I'd recommend Bus if you're looking for a relatively shorter game that still has room for strategy, and works well if your group is a bit unpredictable and not too serious. I also appreciate the rulebook graphic design!
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Nov 14, 2019 22:10
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Megasabin posted:What didn't you enjoy about the gameplay? You mentioned it didn't do much for you. Just that there wasn't a lot of variety in the kind of things you could do - you're laying down routes, upgrading your busses, adding new buildings and passengers, and delivering people for points. Not bad by any means, but more modern games have developed additional mechanisms that make it feel like you're building an engine that does more and more for you. For instance, we followed that up with Rajahs of the Ganges , a worker placement dice game where it's possible to daisy-chain actions together and have big, exciting turns. Bus doesn't have anything like that - it's much more straightforward. It's not a bad game and everyone who played it seemed to have a good time! It's just a 20-year old one, and that's not for everyone.
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Nov 14, 2019 23:07
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We did use the expansion fwiw. That said, I was just offering my thoughts in response to questions. I didn't claim to have good opinions!
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Nov 14, 2019 23:26
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Control Volume posted:Look man I really want gloomhaven but I cant convince my boyfriend to drop 150 dollars on a legacy game. Im working on it! Im trying!!! It's only like $99 now.
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Nov 26, 2019 07:51
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Tekopo posted:Okay, the TM expansion: The central premise of the game is to do more things with rivers/lakes (there are new maps that come with the expansion). The way that the mechanisms work is that you can now get boats: these are usually built by building a new tech 3 building, basically a shipdock/port that allows you access to a new action that builds ship for resources. The ships have actions that allow them to move and if they reach another player's settlement, you get points based on the type of building you "traded" with, along with bonus resources. You use a marker to mark that you have traded with them as well. There is also some faction balancing since the new extra boards that have the dock piece also give you bonuses/maluses based on which faction you are. Other additions are stuff like new favours, new objectives (trying to trade the most for example). I played a 4p game of the expansion with its designer (he lives here in NC) a few months ago, and had basically the same impression. I do like that it gives the potential to start a new settlement in a place you couldn't otherwise reach, but the trading mechanic felt clunky, as you said. (Also it was hard to judge how it affected the outcome compared to the base game, since he's played hundreds and hundreds of games of TM so I wasn't anywhere near competitive).
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Dec 3, 2019 05:59
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The Eyes Have It posted:That's pretty clever, I like that a lot. A fellow Ganz Schön Clever fan, I see!
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Dec 10, 2019 04:57
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Bottom Liner posted:I have a box with two of the VotKs in it (can't remember exactly which) that I'll ship to anyone that wants it for the flat rate box price ($7 I think). Don't need it now that I have premium and happy to pass it on. I'd be happy to take you up on that. Just let me know where to send my info. Thanks!
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Dec 15, 2019 08:12
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Let's Make A Bus Route is a wonderful game and I will play it every time it gets brought to the table.
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Dec 23, 2019 20:12
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Bottom Liner posted:I have a box with two of the VotKs in it (can't remember exactly which) that I'll ship to anyone that wants it for the flat rate box price ($7 I think). Don't need it now that I have premium and happy to pass it on. Just wanted to say thanks, after the shipping mixup it finally arrived! Had a chance to play a friend's copy of the base game of VotK before the Christmas break, so I'm looking forward to trying out Last Rites. Tomorrow, though, is Dune.
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Jan 5, 2020 05:58
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Played Nemesis for the third time today. One player got away on an escape pod, but they died when their chestburster hatched. I got mauled to death by an alien. Then an event card caused fire to spread too far through the ship, blowing it up and killing the rest of the players. Nobody won. I love that game so much.
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Jan 16, 2020 06:35
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It's fun because you start out just exploring the ship and collecting items, and it ends with everything on fire and you being hunted down by horrible murderous monsters. also there are aliens
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Jan 16, 2020 20:13
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Morpheus posted:
This. I've played one game of Secret Hitler, with 9 or so people. I was liberal, and a couple of turns in the presidency passes to me, so I nominate my neighbor as chancellor since we've basically been ignored the whole game and I figured it would be fair to the two of us to get involved. The group votes against the choice since we'd been too quiet (I'm usually very quiet in social games by nature) so the job passed on. I did nothing for the rest of the game. Played On Mars for the first time tonight and had a blast. Ended up in 2nd (of 3) though I misplayed my executive action on my last turn and lost a few points. I also misunderstood the scientist scoring (they give you points for the next building type, so my shelter scientist scored for mines) and lost some points there, too. All in all it was a great experience, definitely my favorite Lacerda game I've played.
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Jan 23, 2020 05:46
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Magnetic North posted:One more Root question: If you go into turmoil, do you still score for your roosts? You go to evening, so that is what it seems like. You do.
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Feb 9, 2020 17:26
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Played a 3p game of Reef Encounter tonight. It's about growing clusters of coral that you protect with shrimp, until they're big enough for your pufferfish to feed on. Players can interfere with each other's clusters by growing reefs of different colors, and there's a dominance system that determines which colors can grow over each other. The game is pretty good, but I had a bad experience early on, and it kind of soured my feelings for the game. I'd misjudged what one of the other players was going to do, and I overextended my reef, so he broke it up a turn before I could score it, completely shutting me down. My fault, of course, and in lots of games you learn from that and adjust your play in future games so you don't make the same mistake again. For this one, though, it seems like I've seen everything there is to see and I don't feel like additional plays will lead to new or more interesting outcomes. also the rulebook is written in comic sans and that's unforgivable
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Feb 27, 2020 06:26
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Went to a friend's birthday party yesterday, and at her request we played her new (well, un-opened; the game is about 10 years old) copy of Rails of New England (4 players). She was ready to get it to the table and see how it played. By the time we were done she was ready to be rid of it. The game just has problems everywhere. For starters, the printed rulebook isn't well written, and is missing key features such as a list of components. We had a pile of cardboard bits and some wooden train pieces that we had no idea what they were for. The game board is also poorly laid out. For those who haven't seen it, RoNE is a lot like Power Grid, in that you have a bunch of cities spread across the map, with varying link costs between them. Unlike Power Grid, however, the names of the cities you're building depots in actually matters, which meant we were constantly hunting all over to find the specific city we needed for a card we'd built or a special route we wanted to hook up. And the number of cities and links on the board is frankly ludicrous (God help you if you're trying to calculate the cheapest link cost to an important city on the other side of the map). Rules questions and graphic design aside, the most disappointing part was that the game just wasn't fun. There's a public card draft every round, with early cards having wild and nonsensical differences in power, to the point that the game felt more dependent on luck than strategy. Speaking of Power Grid, this game has none of the interesting decisions of that; you have no reason to build depots in another player's territory since the map is so huge and each player's starter cards are in different states, and turn order just passes clockwise rather than being based on who's built up the most stuff. One player in our game got behind early on income, and loans in the game are locked behind a random event that didn't pop until the end of the third round for us, so we were there building up our infrastructure while he was literally passing his turns. He only caught up because everyone got to a point where we'd all optimized our tableaus and had nothing left to do, and at that point it was just a question of who wanted to spend the money (and by extension, victory points) to cause the end of the game to trigger. I think I came in second? But none of us cared enough to check.
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Mar 3, 2020 07:16
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I'd looked into painting for when my copy of Sanctum shows up, but decided it wasn't worth the time/money investment as I don't buy many games, especially ones with minis.
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Mar 4, 2020 05:41
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Jedit posted:Another thing that isn't worth the investment: Sanctum. Thanks for the kind words, friend!
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Mar 4, 2020 17:49
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golden bubble posted:Sanctum feels like it can't decide if it wants to be a PvP game or a solo game. As a PvP, there isn't enough interaction. It's a few drafts between relatively similar items and monsters that are going to appear over and over again. Likewise, trying to take down the demon overlord that will destroy the world doesn't lend itself well thematically to PvP. But the overall game structure is a bit too shallow to be a solo game. That's completely fair! I was hesitant at first to pick it up as I wasn't confident the gameplay would hold up. It was a combination of a friend who was excited for the game encouraging me to get it, and the fantastic artwork and overall style of the components that pushed me over the edge.
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Mar 4, 2020 20:54
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Aramoro posted:2nd Edition Eclipse We played it a week ago with 4 players. It was... good? The scores were horribly skewed in the end, with 2 players ending up in the low-mid 20's, and me as the plants topping out at ~51. Everyone was new, though, so it was hard to judge what was a result of bad choices, bad luck, or just testing stuff out for the heck of it. For myself, I went very isolationist, which I think is how the plants are supposed to play anyway? My closest neighbor was the robots, but he hit a string of bad tiles that had ancients on them when exploring, and kept them in play rather then toss them. That meant my first actual physical neighbor was the guys with money? We immediately formed an alliance, though that was helped by the fact that I had a couple cruisers on his border and he had almost nothing. Because my robot neighbor had hemmed himself in, it was easy enough to place tiles near him with no wormholes connecting us, and at that point it was just a matter of claiming as many sectors around my home system that I could. Snapped up metasynthesis (I think it's called, it's the rare tech that lets you populate every type of advanced planet), and grabbed wormhole gen later on as defense. Ended up with 11 tiles owned, 2 with monoliths. I'd definitely play it again with a different faction and hopefully a larger group, as I can't imagine most games go in that kind of direction.
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Mar 10, 2020 05:37
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I played Panic on Wall Street over the weekend (this was with a group at a friend's house; they lean towards more social games rather than anything heavy). It's a pretty simple negotiation game where half the table are stockholders, and the other half are investors looking to buy into those stocks and make a profit. All the wheeling and dealing happens in real time and at the end of the round, we roll some dice to see how the stock values change and find out who made or lost money. Like I said, very simple, not my kind of game but whatever, it's quick and not too painful. The trouble I had was, the guy who taught it was using a completely different set of rules than the rulebook. This led to a completely different profit and incentive model for all the players, and while it wasn't necessarily a worse game, it was weird. I'd read over the rules while the game was being set up, and then to start playing and be told we're doing it a different way was surprising and uncomfortable. The guy told me that this was a reprint and he'd learned it based on the original rules (it's true that Panic on Wall Street is a new edition of Masters of Commerce, but at least based on the files on BGG, the rules for both editions are almost entirely the same). I'm all for a little house-ruling to fit the group, but this was a bit much!
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Mar 16, 2020 21:37
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ketchup vs catsup posted:I’ve played masters of commerce, what were the rules differences? You mean between the rulebook and what we did? (I'll use MoC terms rather than PoWS) - There was no "rent". After the negotiation phase, the investors purchase the properties from the landlords for the agreed-upon price, taking the tile and keeping it in front of themselves. - The market value, which gets changed by rolling the dice, is not a regular income that the investors get every round by holding the property. Instead, they only get that amount by selling them to the bank, removing that tile from the game. If they choose not to sell a property, hoping that it goes up in value, they can hold it but have to pay a $10k tax. - Three properties per landlord were auctioned off in the auction phase, meaning we went through the stack faster and the game had fewer rounds. Also, if you won a property, you couldn't bid on the next one. Basically, rather than the landlords building up a "portfolio" of properties that are collecting rent, they are just buying them at auction and hoping the investors want to pay a higher price next round.
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Mar 16, 2020 23:46
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