|
Bit late on this, but I got a copy of Boss Monster for Christmas. I remember it was received pretty poorly around here but we tried it out and I thought it was actually pretty good--not earth-shattering, but the core mechanics seem really solid. I enjoyed the trade-off between the short-term goal of trying to manage the hero queue and the long-term need to develop your dungeon. There is not a tremendous amount of depth but we saw a decent amount of variation in dungeon-building strategy and the differences in how people developed their dungeons felt very satisfying and distinct. The game also feels very competitive and even when someone was getting hammered they remained a viable threat. That said, two caveats to this impression: 1) We only had 3 players and I can see several scaling issues that may detract from the 4 player game, and 2) We completely missed the rule where you discard 2 cards from your opening hand. Why does this rule even exist? I will say as well that the spell deck is definitely a weak point. I did not mind the randomness of the room cards: you get lots of room draws, there's a decent amount of flexibility in how to build a dungeon, and the bait system means that even lovely room cards have plenty of opportunities to be relevant. On the other hand, in most games you only ever get to draw a couple of spell cards and there's no guarantee that they will ever be relevant. I don't feel like any of the games we played were unfairly decided by spell cards, but some of them may potentially have been decided by a lack of good spell cards.
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2014 21:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:16 |
|
|
Magnetic North posted:Basically, since some of the rooms are Advanced rooms and could be useless and some spells are totally useless, this is to give you some option of what to start with instead of just being screwed. Right, but... why not just keep the cards? The added flexibility seems to go a long way towards smoothing over the game's faults.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2015 08:18
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:V I would disagree--presumably most players would discard rooms over the rarer spell cards, and having more room cards in hand really expands your options. I can remember several points where my play would have been crippled if I had 2 fewer cards. Often I would have several cards in hand necessary for my long-term strategy, and if I only had 2-3 room cards in hand I would not have had the freedom to hold onto those cards and still have any room or choice to participate in the turn-by-turn competition to lure heroes--I'd be locked into playing my strong rooms ASAP and leaving the baiting up to luck of the draw. Which seems to be a common complaint of people who remembered the discard 2 rule. I guess I don't really dispute that the designers did a really slapdash job, between including a rule that deliberately cripples the game and having spell cards vary wildly in power and versatility (although in my experience they generally err on the underpowered side.) I just think the core mechanics are solidly enjoyable and they stumbled pretty close to a good game.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2015 20:04
|
|
V Normally, I'd say it's because the game is balanced to have only 5 cards in hand, but there's no way the designers of this game did that kind of math to understand that. Also, while I can't back this up with fact, I am inclined to believe that since you normally only get one card per turn, there is not a titanic difference between 5 and 7 after the first turn. There is still probably going to be only one sensible play a good percentage of the time.
|
Medium Style posted:FWIW I didn't play with any of the expansions and only saw two actual attack cards (militia and thief). Some decks really want as many of a certain card as possible, and snagging a couple copies out from under them just to deny them can be really valuable even if you otherwise wouldn't have touched them. An example from the base game: a halfway decent gardens deck can be really tough to beat, but it's almost impossible if you don't poach a couple of gardens yourself, even if they don't help you much. Some engines take a lot of time and a lot of cards to build. In the base set, if multiple players are pursuing a village+smithy+market engine that's 3 piles that will wind up very close to empty... making it very easy for players with weaker but faster decks to run them out and end the game before the engine players catch back up. If you have an early lead you can also use cards like Remodel to remodel cards into themselves to run piles out faster (e.g. trash a province, pick up another province: your position stays the same, but the game is one province buy closer to ending.) Most of the time you want to hold off on victory cards as long as possible, but if you notice that someone else is trying to empty piles to speed the game's end you can head them off by buying up cheaper VP cards to squeak ahead while they try to empty piles.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2016 21:51
|
|
|
Rocko Bonaparte posted:Do a lot of deck builders devolve into long turns with compound operations? I seem to wind up in that mode because I like the moving parts, but it makes my wife want to kill me. Just put your action cards in separate piles depending on how many actions they give you. When the pile of +0-action cards is bigger than the pile of +2-action cards, you're done. Also, yeah, it sounds like you used more victory cards than you're supposed to. The number of VP cards scales to the number of players, so that the game generally doesn't last very long once you get to the point where you're cycling everything every turn. Which means 1) people don't have to sit through as many mega-turns and 2) you have to be a lot more careful because by the time you assemble an engine for mega-turns you might have already lost the game, which in the long run discourages players from blindly spamming villages and the like.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2016 16:31
|
|
|
MrDru posted:im trying to convince the Co workers I play games with that dominion is the Supreme ruler of deck builders but they aren't having it. god damnit what else do I have to do? (note: i go easy on them, but I still beat them when dominion comes out) (note 2: one of my Co workers actually did say dominion is better, thank god) Whenever I introduce non-gamers to Dominion they are utterly awed by it, but a lot of gamers seem to have difficulty grasping it. I showed it to my old Magic group once and they started buying Coppers 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 22:11
|
|
|
To be fair they weren't very good at Magic either  Even so I was completely flabbergasted because yeah, they still really should have known better.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 22:51
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:Speaking of rules, are there any board games that work kinda like the card game Mao, where there are dynamic rules or players add rules as the game goes on? Eleusis is a card game that's basically a more formalized version of Mao (with more explicit emphasis on creating and discovering rules), and Zendo is basically Eleusis using puzzle pieces instead of cards. Don't know about any actual board games, specifically.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2016 19:03
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:
Man you can't even get your gimmick right, 3rd edition is the one Wayne England jizzed all over. I believe a few of them are recycled 2nd edition art but all of the ones with inexplicable glowy poo poo are pure 3e Talisman.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 05:01
|
|
|
Rocko Bonaparte posted:How do libraries work in the base Dominion game? Let's say I have something that gets me more actions, and I end my turn acting on a library. Do I get to draw 7 more cards and spend any leftover actions on them as I see fit? Playing an action card never ends your turn. As long as you have actions left, you can keep on playing action cards from your hand. Also, note that the Library is "draw until you have 7 cards in hand", not "draw 7 cards."
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2016 20:06
|
|
|
Rocko Bonaparte posted:I should elaborate there. I meant that for the last thing I could do with the cards in front of me, I played my library. Cards you've played aren't in your hand anymore. If you start the turn with 4x Festival + Library and play all your Festivals and then your Library, you currently have no cards in hand and get to draw a full 7. After you're done drawing you can play any action cards you have in hand using the pile of bonus actions you got from your Festivals.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2016 20:29
|
|
|
Seaside does have some good poo poo but it's got a lot of exceedingly meh cards. Aside from the duration mechanic it's arguably got more basic cards than the base game. That's not necessarily terrible, those cards help flesh things out and balance some of the other expansions nicely, but it really doesn't add much in its own right.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2016 22:00
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:It's funny, because I was wondering about if Boss Monster 2 fixed anything. The rules aren't online, but this FAQ says only one rule changed. Instead of "Draw 5 Room cards and 2 Spell cards, then discard 2 cards" you just keep all 7 to start the game. That means they took out what is basically the only non-obvious choice in the entire game: what to keep at the start of the game. Good lord, gently caress this game. I already said this in the post quoted in your link, but ditching the "discard 2" rule does make for a better (but still fairly bad) game. The game's central mechanic is supposed to be manipulating your bait symbols to attract points and avoid wounds and balancing that against the need to build up your dungeon to be more effective, but the original rules leave you with hand sizes that are just too small to make the mechanics work. If you only have 2-3 room cards it's a crapshoot to even have the right kind of bait cards in hand to influence hero distribution. You're also not likely to have much in the way of good cards held in reserve, so if you try to be clever by throwing a crappy room over an existing dungeon room to manipulate bait counts, you're probably not going to have a good replacement waiting in hand and are entirely dependent on luck of the draw to eventually turn that back into a good room. With 5 room cards your decisions get a lot more interesting, but under the old rules that's impossible unless you feel like throwing away your starting spells (which is basically a non-starter.)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2016 21:06
|
|
|
Caros posted:gently caress my life. One time we had everything go just right and had the elusive game where both sides were competitive and everyone got to participate and contribute leading to a narrow finish over the traitor... and everyone still spent most of the time being bored and frustrated. But nobody wants to shelve it. The real haunt is a spooky ghost that possesses people and makes them want to play bad games.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2016 21:34
|
|
|
silvergoose posted:Managing and "you drew lone gunman, he has AAR, you lose" feels...different. Well, now I know, I guess, it's just depressing to get to turn 9 knowing not to play the thing but not knowing that there's a way I can lose literally just by drawing it. silvergoose posted:I'm well aware that games can be swingy; I had two extremely bad hands, my opponent only had one, quagmire lost me three rounds bear trap only one for him, etc. But as I said, losing because of lone gunman because there's no way to get rid of it feels different somehow. That nothing in my hand can possibly even mitigate the problem, whereas with scoring, yes, it can be functionally impossible but at least you can use your ops to do *something* in that region even if it's not enough. Holding onto the China Card is great insurance against forced discards.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2016 19:55
|
|
|
The main advantage of auctions is that it gets properties into play faster. Letting people say "nah I want to save my money, nobody gets it" slows down an already intolerably slow game further. It also provides some aspect of resource management to the initial buy phase--players would rather bank money for development instead of buying garbage properties, but the alternative is letting other players get cheap property. Whatever sliver of merit it has as a mechanic is very much drowned out by the general awfulness of the rest of the game though.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2016 20:03
|
|
|
This discussion is a timely one for me, because the topic of erotic game art came up at a get together a few nights ago and my wife didn't understand why I wasn't as enthusiastic about the idea of a little cheesecake as she was. So I showed her the EXCEED art from the other page and her response was "Ew, not like that."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2016 21:47
|
|
|
The scourge of roll and move games rears its ugly head again.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2016 00:01
|
|
|
Guy A. Person posted:Also loving christ: can a goddamn crotch panel and your own hair even be classified as "clothing"? What a joke I have not interacted with females since I graduated from high school, but I have seen them many a time on TV and they appear to profess appreciation for cute and sexy depictions of women. There-fore I fail to see why anyone should be offended by a woman wearing a self-adhesive cooter cup and nothing else
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2016 22:18
|
|
|
deadwing posted:So you don't have any social deduction or bluffing games? Skull and Roses, The Resistance, Coup, One Night Ultimate Werewolf? Those should immediately appeal to Poker Dude. Maybe Sheriff of Nottingham? It throws in a card-tracking element that poker players should feel very cozy with.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2016 16:30
|
|
|
Scyther posted:When I first played Dominion I didn't like it, thought it just wasn't for me. Then I went and played a bunch of other (mostly lovely) deckbuilders and the whole concept sort of clicked for me. Then I went back to try Dominion again and went "whoa, this is so obviously way better". Yeah, Dominion's design accomplishes a lot of cool things in very elegant and subtle ways, which is one of the big draws of the deckbuilding concept.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2016 01:41
|
|
|
How did you know high school notebook margin doodle level art was my fetish
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2016 14:57
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:It has better bones. I have read many reviews that compare the game, from advanced users and they all say "Tanto Cuore is best" I know I'm breaking the cardinal rule here, but there was some discussion about what makes Dominion and deckbuilders in general tick a couple pages ago and I wanted to expound on that anyhow. Dominion's greening mechanic is brilliant and every deckbuilder that tries to "fix" it is garbage. Dominion uses green cards as an elegant way to unobtrusively level the playing field and slow things down to create a more deliberate, more competitive, and more strategic experience. Ascension is the only other deckbuilder I'm really familiar with and it demonstrates what happens when you take the pillar of Dominion's excellent design and gut it: luck of the draw takes over since drawing a big hand early gives you an advantage in your points and in your engine at the same time. Making VP cards inert means that the same deck is less likely to have massive swings in effectiveness depending on whether it draws 5 coins or 8 coins on turn 5.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2016 15:59
|
|
|
cenotaph posted:"Prevent your opponent from playing the game" is obviously a terrible card that never should have been included but in many ways red scare/purge is worse. Red Scare/Purge is what killed the game for me in the end. It's just way too good for a neutral event--aligned events provide TS with a very elegant combination draw mitigation and deck management system, and RS/P shits all over it. I'll take a multi-turn quagmire over getting Purged three times in one game.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2016 02:38
|
|
|
Trasson posted:Red Scare/Purge is giving up 4 Ops for knocking out 6/7 Ops of the opponent if and only if their hand was filled with 2 Ops+ cards and none of them were going to be played for the event and none of them were going to be spaced but now can't. More likely, it's only going to hit 4/5 and can whiff entirely. That's not trivial when 4 Ops at once could net you a big swing in a country through placement or coup. The problem with this assessment is that you assume that all ops are created equal, but the control mechanic means that hitting key thresholds is a lot more valuable than simple incremental increases. A 2 ops card played on a stability 1 battleground to turn it neutral can be undone by 1 op from the opponent. A 3 ops card played on that same battleground would flip it to your control, meaning the opponent has to pony up 3 ops of their own to get it back. Going from 3 ops to 2 ops completely cripples your ability to make plays in situations like this. Similarly, trying to secure a stability 2 country in a contested region using two 1 op cards in succession is vastly less effective than just playing a 2 ops card, etc. Even so, it's not the effect itself I object to: it's the fact that it's an unstarred neutral event. With Bear Trap/Quagmire and most other nasty cards, you know how many are in the deck; your bad events can be drawn by either player, which is bad for you in different ways depending on whether you or your opponent has it but also gets mitigated in different ways depending on who plays them. But neutral events are straight up coinflips, and they come back again and again. Take Bear Trap/Quagmire, or any other annoying paired event. Would TS be improved if the deck randomly varied between having 2 Bear Traps, 2 Quagmires, or 1 of each? Surely not. Note that I don't even think Bear Trap/Quagmire are a real problem--I still think the rare chance at 3+ lost turns purely detracts from the game, but the game specifically gives you means to predict and work around it, which are not in place at all for RS/P. (Also, when people are complaining about a game being swingy, saying "such-and-such power card might be completely devastating or it might do worse than nothing!" is not exactly a defense.)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2016 15:28
|
|
|
My dog is generally well-behaved but she really likes chewing on certain types of cardboard, so we have to be careful about what we leave on the floor.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2016 00:49
|
|
|
Exmond posted:I played at gencon and one of the moves someone did was doing the whole "Hire 3 managers things" plus "Train 3 doods" achievement? This gave him a free $15 for salaries (Support 3 people) and a free manager. It was a pretty strong start! It's "train 1 dood." It's an incredibly strong start, but most players are going to go for one or the other 99% of the time. Basically the only time you'll see it pulled off in a competitive game is in a mirror match where everyone goes recruiting girl -> recruiting girl + trainer as their opening hires, in which case there's no net advantage because everybody gets the combo simultaneously.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2016 16:18
|
|
|
Lunsku posted:Goons, throw some suggestions on somewhat recent (say last five years) light to midweight euros that play well with five. That seems to be our group size most of the time at the moment, but a lot of the older stuff I'd like to dig out from the cabinet caps at 4 (Samurai, Goa, Ingenious) in practice isn't something I would like to bring to the table for five (Caylus). I don't mind getting to play my Amun-Re and Space Alert a lot, with a bit of Ticket to Ride in the mix, but would like something fresh. Keyflower?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2016 22:58
|
|
|
silvergoose posted:Galaxy trucker, best way to teach is to say "you want lots of everything, all the time, you'll find out what all the cards are when we get to the end of the first ship, which should be considered a test ship" I love the helpful advice Galaxy Trucker's rulebook includes about ship construction (the description of every single part concludes with "You want as many of these as possible.")
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2016 19:11
|
|
|
ChiTownEddie posted:Is the question of why for the fact that a board game may be the largest KS ever or the fact that people are backing a mini's game in droves? The art and minis are pretty gross (think H.R. Giger with giant tits everywhere), which is why it gets the reaction it does.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 19:35
|
|
|
StashAugustine posted:I had someone get stuck in a ~5 turn Quagmire and his first action upon getting out was couping a battleground If I was stuck in a 5 turn Quagmire I'd be tempted to pull the "gently caress this gay earth" gambit too.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2016 16:33
|
|
|
...was a nonissue in June 1929, since it wouldn't kick off for several more months (and wouldn't really set in for a couple more years--it took most people a while to realize that this was different than previous market crashes.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2016 22:26
|
|
|
Aggro posted:If there's no time limit though, then how do you lose? You're still limited by your own hand and deck. So you still have finite resources and time to complete the objective, you just get to spend them at a more leisurely pace (it still gets noticeably easier, depending on how much you abuse it.)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2016 23:23
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:Sheriff of Nottingham is fun with a group of non-gamers, but has some major design flaws for a group of dedicated gamers. It's not broken like mafia de Cuba or anything though. Seconding this.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2016 20:59
|
|
|
Just tried Scythe for the first time. I remember hearing some talk about the Rusviet faction being OP, is that still the consensus? I don't know if it was a function of our group's inexperience but everyone else had a hell of a time trying to catch up.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2017 05:47
|
|
|
Jabor posted:Every faction ability is overpowered, and I have personally won games with every single faction by exploiting mine better than anyone else has exploited theirs. I mean I'm not going to say they're unbeatable or that every faction is worse, but a lot of them certainly seem to have an uphill struggle. Some factions seem to have to work really hard just to match (not necessarily exceed) the sheer brute force effectiveness of the rusviets, and I'm really not sure I see how some of them compete at all (looking at you, nordic faction.)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2017 07:20
|
|
|
IAmUnaware posted:I have probably 20-25 games of experience with Scythe--it has REALLY hit the spot for several members of my group--and I would put Rusviet probably in the middle of the pack, power-wise. They can get a lot of workers down quicker than anybody else and obviously they're quite good at getting to the factory, but I'd put Crimea and Polania above them as far as ability to actually win a game. Togawa too, probably. I think we've seen Rusviet and Saxony win about the same amount; Saxony doesn't look as powerful, but there's really a lot to be said for the ability to end the game on a move action even after getting an objective and a couple of combat stars. As Rusviet I pooped out 3 workers and a mech ASAP, teleported to the factory with a worker (carried by mech), then deposited him to establish a foothold away from everybody else. I farted around for a while building a basic infrastructure, and then at some point just started spamming mechs on my biggest worker stack, then spamming produce/upgrade to fill out my board, then spamming enlist/move to close out the game. Combat was limited to just jostling for stars; we had Togawa/Albion/Nords/Rusviet and everyone had a hell of a time getting at each other's core stuff for anything beyond skirmishes. A more aggressive Togawa player could have been trouble for me but she was focused on spreading out to trap every tunnel in sight and abuse bushido for skirmishes. I haven't seen Crimea/Polania yet but they definitely look like the best two contenders. Polania seems to be the only one as easy as rusviets with their "here, have free poo poo" power while Crimea seems like a high skill ceiling sort of affair (their power doesn't sound thst impressive but if you can manage to farm combat cards without having to devote too much effort to it then whoa drat.) the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jan 2, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2017 17:17
|
|
|
Electric Hobo posted:Oh, I know, and I'd say that they're probably right. Most of these violent sports games are real bad from a design point of view, but it's the one genre where I don't care. It's more about hanging out with a bunch of other nerds, drinking beer and laughing at how much the dice hate us. Personally I'd prefer to just play Blood Bowl and revel in its hilarious awfulness rather than play an okay but uninspired game like Guild Ball, but to each their own.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2017 01:22
|
|
|
FulsomFrank posted:This talk of kingmaking does kind of bring up the question of how do you avoid the issue when designing a game? Obviously most people here don't want to kingmake, aside from a few malevolent souls lurking around, but in general it's a lovely position to be placed in. Some games you can't just pass, so unless you take a move that is obviously disadvantageous to you and allow the contenders to play it out without your explicit interference (which seems to also go against the spirit of the game as well, taking a dive in a sense) is there anything else you can do from a player's perspective aside from just going forward with your moves as if you weren't losing? Generally I think the best approach is try to keep the game as competitive as possible to minimize the chances that someone winds up facing a hopeless decision. There's a bit of a balancing act here because you don't want players to wind up too deep in the hole, but you also want players to feel rewarded for strong early play instead of having the game always be decided in the last 5 minutes independently of everything that happened up until then.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2017 23:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:16 |
|
|
angel opportunity posted:I don't think there could really be a 2+-player game game without player elimination where you entirely eliminate the problem, but it's cool to see some games coming up with legit ways to at least mitigate it as much as possible. Player elimination is really not a fix for the problem; if anything, kingmaking seems noticeably worse for me in player elimination games. I have nothing to lose, might as well go out with a bang, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2017 23:06
|
|