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Real talk about Betrayal at House on the Hill: It is a given that the game is completely unbalanced and busted, with often not totally clear rules in its scenarios, so my favorite way to play is by completely busting the game over my knee. House rule: Double Traitors. After the Haunt begins, reset the number of Omens that you roll against to zero (existing omens still remain in play.) Continue making Haunt rolls as new Omens are revealed, adding to the new total. It is now possible to start a second scenario, with an additional traitor or having the current traitor become a majestic Double Traitor. At this point it is unlikely that anybody will survive long enough to reveal a third traitor.
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Dec 16, 2014 15:23
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Fungah! posted:the deckbuilder game with worker placement and area control elements Now with Pop-o-Matic(r) dice! e: somebody mail this thread to yourself before Steve Jackson reads it
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Dec 16, 2014 20:10
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Madmarker posted:Munchkin Against Humanity: Cthulu Dice Edition:The Zombie's Campaign for North Africa 
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Dec 16, 2014 20:51
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Big McHuge posted:Yeah, but if I'm going to make a lovely game, I at least want the artwork to be distracting enough. I don't think Ascension is all that bad, is it? It's consistent, at least. If we're going to bag on art that ranges between amateur and weird, then we're gonna have to have stern words with some Eurogames.
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Dec 16, 2014 20:58
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Chomp8645 posted:Please tell me that this happened because one time around the office you mentioned that you liked board games. Some real Monkey Paw poo poo happening with the office Kringle 
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Dec 18, 2014 21:39
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sector_corrector posted:The local NPR affiliate was doing a designer boardgame hour (!!!) and someone mentioned a game that sounded like Space Alert-lite, with an app that dictated action, but I can't remember what it was called. Does anyone know the name of that game, and can they provide opinions on it? Could be Spaceteam? It's a multiplayer app that syncs up to all the players on local wi-fi. Everybody has an assortment of devices on their screen, and the orders that display on their screen reference devices that are on other peoples' screens. So, you have to announce the order that appears for you, hoping somebody else can figure it out. Activating the wrong devices moves the ship toward the exploding star or whatever, activating the correct devices moves it away. While all this is happening, everybody's control panels are constantly malfunctioning and falling apart, and the time window in which orders must be executed is getting progressively smaller.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:52
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sector_corrector posted:Spaceteam sounds right. It sucks because I was hoping it was run from a single app that acted as the DM instead of something that was required by all players. I'm pretty sure the app is free. There's some DLC, but the base game was perfectly adequate last time I played it. It's cross-platform, as well (android and ios), as it relies on the local wi-fi for its multiplayer.
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Dec 24, 2014 17:16
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 How can a game with secret cards gently caress up this bad? I am amazed.
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Dec 30, 2014 15:23
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I've got King of New York on its way. It looks like a good palate cleanser for my group between heavier games, with relatively quick setup. I also grabbed the Paint the Town Red expansion for Marvel Legendary because we've been trending on that game, lately.
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Jan 2, 2015 20:56
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sonatinas posted:Over the long New Year's weekend I played 3 games of Mage Knight (opening scenario, full conquest, and druid nights, 3 players). GF and I were new and my friend was teaching us the game. The game really scratched an itch I didn't know I had in gaming. The game flow moves really well even though there are a lot of moving parts. The concepts were pretty accessible; however, the natural language of the rulebook might turn off people who are not used to it. However, we didn't get many rules wrong, which was good. Mage Knight is one of those games I'd like to get on the table more often, but it's a game that really suffers because one of our regulars gets real bad AP. Deck-building as an analog for leveling up is a really good mechanic, though, and it's really satisfying to curate your hand for a couple turns sitting outside one of the Cities until you have all the cards you want in there and just nuke the place to the ground in one move with your magic.
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Jan 5, 2015 16:59
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Captain Walker posted:This happened exactly; coupled with people who also didn't know the rules, and people who never read rules in advance for any reason, which makes playing RPGs with them a loving living hell, it crashed and burned spectacularly. You have my group  To this day I'm the only one who's read the rules for FATE, and there were two in the group when we were playing D&D that only read the parts of the PHB that said what their spells did. At least three out of the five of us are willing to read board game manuals, though. One refuses outright and then gets mad at the rest of us if we realize we were mis-playing something after a game or two.
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Jan 6, 2015 19:08
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TheKingslayer posted:If I just got Battlestar Galactica, would I be missing out on a lot by not getting the expansions? I'm going to see some friends who love traitor games next month and want to get the most out of it. The expansions add a lot to the game, but they also change it in major ways sometimes. I think Pegasus didn't change the game much- it just adds a bunch of cards and another side ship. It also adds the Cylon Leader character type. There can only be one of those per game, and they win the game under their own secret conditions, independent of the humans and normal Cylons. The basic gameplay pattern doesn't change a whole lot from the base game- you just get more options. Daybreak, for my group, changed the game significantly. It alters the way Treachery Skill cards work by giving them all a "Skill Check" effect that gets resolved whenever the card is counted up during a skill check. Some other skill types have this, too, but the Treachery ones really change how the game plays by frequently spiking players' hands with additional treachery cards, and a new type of card called Mutiny Cards, which you play as an Action the way you might use Quorums as the president. The treachery cards rapidly proliferating makes it hard to win skill checks without side effects, and the mutiny cards have unpredictable effects that resemble "once per game" powers in scope. I consulted the FAQ while I wrote this, and learned that my group played Daybreak wrong last week. The FAQ states that the treachery card, "Violent Outburst", which moves the current player to Sickbay, cannot be used to break them out of the Brig. However, we were doing this constantly, and it became necessary at one point because I (the Cylon Leader version of Boomer) was the only player not in the Brig. I think the expansion would have been less fun if we hadn't been able to break people out with that Treachery card, but that is a house rule so YMMV.
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Jan 7, 2015 15:03
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jivjov posted:How dependent on expansions is the 7 Wonders wonder pack? I had the chance to pick that up cheap, but haven't actually received it yet. Should be in today though, and I'm curious how many of the wonders I'll be able to use with just the base game. Do any of the wonders directly reference leader cards, black cards, or debt? If no, then you're probably safe. As far as I know, no new resource types or anything were added by expansions.
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Jan 7, 2015 17:49
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Gort posted:One thing I'd like them to do with BSG 2e would be to standardise the game length. So, it always takes five crises to get ready to jump, and the humans always win after four jumps (or whatever game length balances well). However, the Admiral and scouting players get to pick jump destinations that are more or less destructive for the fleet to go to, and players scouting the crisis deck get to pick better or worse crises for the fleet to encounter. These are all really reasonable suggestions. I feel like they might have to up the stakes ever so slightly on the locations, though, because currently the distance:danger ratio is part of the decision process for the admiral. The addition of a standard "distance tracker" on the game board somewhere would help a lot for Cylon Leaders. It makes it pretty obvious that I'm up to some fuckery involving distance traveled if I go and rifle through the pile of discovered planets halfway through the game.
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Jan 7, 2015 20:53
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Funso Banjo posted:For me, Dominion isn't a game for a new group. Not to mention, while it was definately the genre leader once, it's now been surpassed by several newer games in terms of gameplay and mechanics. Better alternatives as a first deck builder are Marvel Legendary, Thunderstone Advance and (I can't stand this next game, because the theme is just gross, but there is no denying it's a stronger game at it's core than Dominion, which it is almost a re-theme of in some ways (Dominion is better once you add all its expansions in, I am talking just base games here)) Tanto Cuore. If you adore anime, you might give that last one a try, if not stay way. Marvel Legendary was my first intro to Deck Builders, and it's still really popular with my group. It works really well for introducing people to the genre, I think due to its combination of recognizable theme and clear mechanics. Especially in the base set, most of the characters do what you expect them to do in their cards. Wolverine does damage and heals wounds. Hulk hurts himself and others. Captain America is a team player. Spider-Man mostly fucks around. The objectives are made clear by the elements on the board. There's a track that fills up with bad guys each turn, and it's "not good" if that track overflows. There's a big juicy target off to the side that you have to work up toward. The Scheme system creates an absolute mess of replay value once you take into account the masterminds and hero/villain combos, while still keeping the game fresh with varying side objectives. The game is very teachable. The initial Hero HQ roster likely has all the card mechanics present, so you can explain how the symbols are also color-coded, and a symbol in the "effect" area means you get that ability if you combo off of that color from earlier in your turn. You can also see the Fight, Recruit, and Cost elements. Villain abilities you can easily explain as they appear. The only real hurdle is getting people to understand what Deck Building is- I find that most people, if they don't get it at first, figure it out immediately after they shuffle their discard for the first time. "Oh, I get the cards I bought after a short delay, and they stay with me and maybe build up on each other."
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Jan 9, 2015 15:15
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silvergoose posted:Uhhh lots of people who play board games don't gamble? Plus, real money has a tendency to make your hands smell funny. I'm sort of tempted to just pack a set of poker chips in with my general gaming kit and forgo the fiddly coin tokens that every game comes with. They're universal, you can pretty much get them in whatever style you want, and if you get the good ones that are made of clay or whatever, they have a really nice heft. I think if I ever start doing game compression for storage I'll end up doing that.
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Jan 12, 2015 14:51
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KiloVictorDongs posted:I also have opinions on Shut Up and Sit Down, but I 'd rather post about how Magnetic North's tortured metaphor on the last page is a frontrunner for 2015's post of the year. All the recent Space Alert talk is making me really want to teleport 40 dollars out of my pocket, too, but the time pressure thing may get weird with my group. We really like Vlaada games, but we are also like the table talk capital of the planet.
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Jan 13, 2015 16:37
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^^^ Jeopardy theme is a good candidate for this, too.
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Jan 14, 2015 13:59
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Lord Frisk posted:If these people ignore the social rule your group has set, then they are not people you should play games with. Not taking half hour turns isn't an unreasonable request, especially considering they're wasting your time too. In our gaming group, we send transgressors to the abandoned downstairs bedroom, where the spiders dwell  That's not true. We just sit and wait for that person to take their turn, even if it takes so long that everybody else loses track of whose turn it was.
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Jan 14, 2015 15:46
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I've got a guy who will sit there with his 3DS and play Smash Bros or whatever between his turns. It is marvelously infuriating.
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Jan 14, 2015 20:50
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Lorini posted:I like meetups much more than game stores for that very reason. Not many people are going to let smelly anti-social types into their meetup because those people run off everyone else. Whereas it seems like to game stores that a warm body is better than no body at all even if it does smell and make everyone uncomfortable. My FLGS solved that by breaking up into relatively rigid cliques  Don't want to play board games with the guy who needs to buy a belt? Good, because you won't be! Mind you, I can see how this wouldn't work in an area with lower nerd density.
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Jan 15, 2015 19:12
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PerniciousKnid posted:I should try one of these "meetups" sometime; I saw one at the grocery store cafe and they definitely looked more social than the usual GameNite crew. I had a friend who used to go to a meetup on Tuesday nights at some diner. They'd get a cheap dinner and then head back to the host's place for board games. It sounds like an okay time, especially if you don't have anything else happening.
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Jan 15, 2015 19:57
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Tekopo posted:There's no such as a 'real game' or not. Everything they play is a game and they have played some pretty good ones in the past. They have to play stuff that you can explain in a 10 minute introduction, is fast to play and has social aspects, which tends to skew towards some of the stuff which isn't as well designed as it could be. I mean, imagine them trying to play Dungeon Lords: they would spend most of the episode just explaining mechanisms, because as interactive as the game is, the interesting scenarios within the game require extensive knowledge of the rules in order to understand what is going on. A lot of Dungeon Lords seems to actually boil down to keeping up with your neighbors. You don't want to be the most aggressive player unless you're prepared to fight the Paladin, but you don't want to be under-prepared for the regular heroes, either. I've found that my best games of Dungeon Lords have just been me actively avoiding getting wizards in my party.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:24
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Shadow225 posted:This is the reason I don't really care to pick up any Vlaada games. From the outside looking in, it sounds like everything but Mage Knight, which looks long and fiddly, and Tash Kalar, which looks awesome, is designed to screw you. I cannot convince myself it sounds appealing. Yeah, a running theme in Vlaada games is "this board is trying to murder you, and is very good at it". You have to sort of approach the game with the attitude of accepting that you're going to see casualties, and try to find amusement in the chaos of it all. I think that's a little easier to do in games like Galaxy Trucker or Space Alert, which have a bit of slapstick to the way their various catastrophes play out. Dungeon Lords is really fun, but I tend to take it a little more personally when things go sideways because it requires a degree of meticulousness to get all the resources you need. Mage Knight is long, but not as fiddly as it looks. Most of those tokens are static on the board until you kill them, and the rest are just resources that pass between your own pool and a bank. Other than that, it's the usual lineup cycling that many deck builders have.
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Jan 16, 2015 14:15
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bowmore posted:I'm hopefully playing Fiasco tomorrow night (first time in person), anybody got any experiences they'd like to share? If you're not used to storygames, you may find that this is a good rule to follow: At the beginning of the scene, once you've decided if you're setting the scene, or the group is, whoever is setting the scene should announce in pretty clear terms what is going on there, and why. It helps make it more clear when the pivot point for the white or black die actually occurs, because that should be based on the what and why. If you just go into a scene all "x people are at y place, improv theater" you're likely to end up with some kind of wishy-washy plot points, especially in the first half. Whereas "X people are at y place, person z ((wants the thing to happen, doesn't want the others to notice a thing, etc))" gives a more concrete point for something to actually happen- the scene will pivot on whether person z gets what they want, and it comes down to the contents of the scene itself before that pivot whether it happens.
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Jan 16, 2015 14:24
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Special report! Our group's AP guy even gets AP in King of New York
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Jan 19, 2015 00:53
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Gimnbo posted:From the account given winning wasn't the objective. It was to piss away the night. It still doesn't make sense, though? There are so many less inane ways to piss away a night. I think the only way I would willingly play Risk at this point is if one of my friends bought Risk Legacy. Like, I think everybody in that room would have had more fun if somebody was just like "let's drink some beers and watch netflix"
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Jan 19, 2015 16:18
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edit: wrong game >_>
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Jan 19, 2015 17:14
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Some Numbers posted:Right, but why would you continue to attend gatherings if you knew you were going to be eliminated first, no matter what? Desperate for human interaction in what, based on that post, is a society that openly dehumanizes him? "Lol he's not actually black, but we note that he almost looks black and use that to assign a variety of pretty horrible nicknames to him it's cool guys"
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Jan 19, 2015 21:01
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fozzy fosbourne posted:My biggest beef with Mage Knight is that it feels like it crossed that invisible threshold where I'm wondering why I'm not playing an automated version on a computer or iDevice. Vlaada mentioned in his Tash-kalar blog how he got the motivation to design TK because of an initiative to make more mobile friendly games, and I'm surprised that they haven't considered Mage Knight. It seems like it would be perfect, and it doesn't have negotiation or other weird mechanics that make it unfriendly for digital adaptations. If I could play Mage Knight on my phone, I probably would never stop playing Mage Knight.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:16
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Sistergodiva posted:I'm in Sweden, but I called my FLGS and they said they can't take it back since they can't sell it again since it's opened. I'm sure I could pull consumer law stuff on their rear end, but I really like the store and the people who work there and I play there a lot. IIRC this happened with early print runs of the Marvel Legendary, too. I meticulously counted every card when I bought it, and got lucky I guess.
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Jan 21, 2015 22:15
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Poopy Palpy posted:It's entirely within reason that a board have about the boring part of a video game could be fun. Video games and board games are different. Lots of fun board games are about boring things. That, and a board game about the fun part of xcom would just be Descent or those D&D crawlers with a scifi skin.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:02
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Tevery Best posted:Pretty much the same. I got roped into the hobby by Arkham and Munchkin, and I own a copy of each to this day, because I never throw or trade anything away. I don't regret buying AH, because for all its flaws it's really given me a lot of fun time with friends. I even still drag it out to the table with some of them, even if more and more ironically these days. Are we airing our board games dirty laundry? My first "real" board games were Arkham Horror, Twilight Imperium, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Talisman, playing with my roommates in college. I didn't find out about eurogames until a few years later when I started hanging out at the FLGS and learned about the magic of worker placement. Somehow I only managed to play Catan like once during that time period, and I didn't really understand it  Anyway, as a result of that I own copies of Arkham, Betrayal, and Talisman with the two smaller expansions. Because I'm a monster. I also have Dungeon Lords, Mage Knight, and Agricola, though, so I'm one of those redeemable monsters like Interview With a Vampire 
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Jan 26, 2015 16:46
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silvergoose posted:What if it came with dozens of little baggies to store the bits in? Baggies are unacceptable I buy those little snack-size food containers and keep my bits in there. That way you have a convenient bin for resource banks and such, too. It makes set up/breakdown a lot easier. I run Mage Knight almost entirely out of a Plano box except for map tiles and cards.
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Jan 27, 2015 21:15
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cyberia posted:I was at my FLGS yesterday and my wife was looking at a copy of The Doom That Came To Atlantic City and wanted me to buy it mainly because it's a big box with a bunch of minis (and Cthulhu!!) but it's just a reskinned Monopoly, really, isn't it? Eldritch Horror seems alright. It's better than Arkham Horror, at least. Joke Answer: Cthulhu Dice
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Jan 29, 2015 22:15
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Zveroboy posted:Board Game Thread 5e: My Agricola family is obese That is a pretty good "hard mode" kind of rules hack, though. One of my go-to tactics is to produce a messload of extra food in the middle of the game so I can concentrate on other things.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:03
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Poison Mushroom posted:It's something your friends will break out instead of Munchkin? It's the thing you'll have to suffer through at a birthday party instead of Cards Against Humanity, and your only consolation is that there are effectively infinite tacos available to fill the void where gameplay used to be. e: Based on a true story
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Feb 2, 2015 22:11
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Echophonic posted:Settlers of Catan - Summer 2016 Two roadworkers in different colored shirts meet at an intersection, throw down their tools in a huff, and head to a nearby saloon. *90s pop hip-hop* Man in black looks around a little, picks up their tools, and jogs off. *pack it up pack it in, let me begin* This is a thing that can only work if it is 100% a bitter nerd making fun of the source material. Instead, I bet it will be some kind of weird medieval small-town drama.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:25
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ashez2ashes posted:Could it be a better game if you left the traitor card out? Or would it be too easy? BSG is waaaay less complicated than it looks. Your turn consists of "go to a place, do a thing, draw a card and do what it says on it. There will probably be a color-coded secret vote in here somewhere, and the colors present in the resolution are how you try to guess the cylon(s)" The enemy ships operate on a really, really basic algorithm that consists of "always fly toward the closest target, unless there are human ships already in the sector". It's a little more complicated for the cylon, but generally your best bet is "keep it on the down low until the fleet is already having problems, then reveal yourself to gently caress them over more." The game doesn't get very complicated until you add the expansions with stuff like Cylon Leaders and mutiny poo poo. Man I really fuckin love BSG. The other day we had a person who was already both President and Admiral (due to revolving door on the brig) become a cylon during the sleeper phase. There was nothing anybody could do once they figured it out because the other cylon revealed and there was only one human player left outside of the brig. She whittled down the last of the resources for the human fleet just by choosing bad outcomes for the last couple of jumps and crises. I lost as the Cylon Leader because I banked on getting another Cylon Victory agenda while I spent the first half of the game loving with the human pilot, but my end state was 3 human agendas and 1 cylon. The game is swingy as hell, but everybody has a lot of fun.
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Feb 20, 2015 19:23
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Lugubrious posted:Any tips for eight- or nine-player Eclipse? Gonna be playing tonight (not sure if the ninth will show), and I'm wondering if there's any strategies particular to the inflated game size. Probably gonna be playing Mechanema or Planta. Pack a lunch, because you'll be clocking about an hour per person
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Feb 23, 2015 21:01
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