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Scyther posted:Q: What's a good zombie game? City of Horror isn't a safe recommendation either because it's a very political and adversarial game. I'd much, much rather play Zombicide, flawed though it is, because I prefer cooperative games or at least relatively mildly competitive games. I'm probably not alone in this preference (for coop or mild competition, I mean. I may well be alone in liking Zombicide!). Easier to just recommend steering clear of them altogether, I'd say.
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# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 21:58 |
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:01 |
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CodfishCartographer posted:My experience with Zombicide: on my very first turn, a combination of various bad luck meant I died on my very first turn. If we hadn't been playing with the "zombvivor" expansion, I would have been eliminated right off the bat. The game took over two hours to complete. I wouldn't recommend playing Zombicide at a player count where you're only controlling a single survivor, and if you must, I'd definitely recommend using the Zombivor rules. Specifically because of how fragile survivors are and the fact that it's not particularly fun to get knocked entirely out of the game. That said, what you describe is definitely a real edge case. Even being in a position to get killed on the first turn is unlikely, and having survivor fatalities not spiral into rapid demise also seems pretty rare. (That assuming the scenario parameters even let you win without keeping everyone alive, which a fair number do not.) I think the fact that you can have things combine to produce a result that undesirable is definitely a flaw. In my book, the mere possibility isn't fatal, though. It would need to be commonplace, like Betrayal's tendency to drag on its completely uninteresting first half and then enter the second, adversarial half with a setup that instantly screws one side or the other.
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 01:22 |
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:As someone who played and enjoyed Betrayal once, but can see the huge potential it has for being swingy and causing all kinds of random unenjoyable nonsense, what are some good games that deliver the same kind of experience without as many of those issues? There isn't really anything that delivers a directly comparable experience, much less does so while being good. I think the design mandate for Betrayal pretty much forces some lovely game design to be possible at all. The closest thing I've run into would probably be Mansions of Madness. I actually like Mansions, which I can't say for Betrayal, but Mansions has plenty of its own issues.
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 23:23 |
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Clockwork Gadget posted:I played Touch of Evil many times a few years back, and remember never having had fun. Don't remember any specifics, but I think it suffers from the same issues that most Flying Frog games do. Very much so. It has a few good ideas (the villagers each having a random dark secret; the big bad having specific monster spawns and such associated with it), but it's also kind of bland and random. It's a roll to move game, for starters, which I'm not sure is ever fun but certainly isn't here. You're getting most of your stuff from four decks that also contain generic negative encounters, and it's mostly just straight numerical bonuses to the four (very unevenly useful) main character stats. And if you want a cooperative experience, well, the game has a cooperative mode but it feels like an afterthought. The cards don't even reflect it in their text. It might be better with the "advanced" villain mode on and maybe expansions, but I'd probably rather just play Eldritch Horror instead, myself. (Or Arkham, come to that.)
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 04:29 |
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KingKapalone posted:Since the 7 Wonders discussion continued after my post about my decision between it, Agricola, Chaos in the Old World, or Kemet, maybe I can get more advice. Chaos wouldn't scale to three very well, and requires the expansion for 5. YMMV whether adding the Horned Rat ruins the experience - some people seem to think so, I don't. Kemet and Agricola both scale quite well.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 04:30 |
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Cocks Cable posted:Oh boy. A Touch of Evil is my favorite guilty pleasure board game. I just love the theme, art direction, and copious amounts of gothic styled villains. It is literally Sleepy Hollow the Movie the Game. But even I would have to agree that the game is flawed out of the box. It doesn't scale well with the number of players. Competitive mode is arguably the most balanced, but no one plays that, and unfortunately Coop isn't designed well. Some of the base game villains are kinda "huh?" in their design. All in all, I just want to nurse it back to health with a heaping dose of house rules. It's like there's a potentially brilliant adventure game in there if FFP wasn't so wed to their silly dice fest tropes. There are a few expansions and they make the game a bit better with more flavorful and challenging villains and a bigger board to explore. You really need them to make the game more palatable which is a big investment to ask. Not recommended unless you love the theme. I'd really love it if someone other than Flying Frog did a similarly themed pure coop game with stronger core design. (Well, I mean, if Flying Frog could manage it, it could be them. I just have no faith in their ability to do so.) It's a concept I want to like, I just really couldn't find the fun in A Touch of Evil.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 06:58 |
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elgarbo posted:Sweet, thanks! This'll take about ten years for me to investigate (and afford) so I'm pretty much all set. Consider also adding Mage Knight to the list. (But only if you're okay with games taking 4+ hours.) The board game, not the clix miniatures game.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 14:50 |
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Bubble-T posted:I ordered this and two other games that were supposed to ship October-November but all those port delays mean they're probably all going to arrive while I'm away over Christmas It's truly astonishing how many of my Kickstarters seem to be hitting a point where they'll probably arrive during the one week in the next six months where I won't be home.
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 03:18 |
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Megasabin posted:Why is Kemet so expensive right now? Is it out of print? It's 55-70 dollars on Amazon. Pretty sure it's MSRP $70.
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# ¿ Dec 17, 2014 03:16 |
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My biggest issue with Pandemic is that the player roles are prescriptive. They make you so much better at some aspect of the game that they pretty much determine that one thing as the thing you will be doing all game unless there's a really pressing reason to give it to someone else. In almost every other coop game I play, assuming there's player specialization at all, it's either in a way that still requires you to interact with most of the game (e.g., in Ghost Stories, the player with the movement power will be better at going to crises, but they're still going to be collecting resources, interacting with villagers and exorcising ghosts.), or you can swap roles mid-game (like in Flash Point).
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 01:11 |
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Anniversary posted:Thanks for all the write ups on Sentinels! Sounds like its a little more flawed than I expected and has me putting it in the do not purchase category; but maybe play if someone has it. Personally, it's one of my favorite games of all time and I've gotten more playtime out of it than any other game I own, full stop. I love the variety, I love the coop nature of it (I hugely disagree that having a player play the villain would be an improvement), I love how unique and individual every one of the heroes and villains and environments are. I love that I get an (admittedly lightweight) version of the CCG combo experience with the decks, which is the appeal of those games to me, but I don't have to construct them, which I don't particularly enjoy. I think the people bitching about limited decision-making, intense book-keeping, and bad art are crazy, also not particularly representative - aside from the Shut Up and Sit Down crew and this thread I've never encountered anyone who's played Sentinels and had any of those issues with it. Certainly not any of the people I've played it with, and more than one of them have turned around and bought the game themselves. If you don't have access to someone with the game, I would try the app and see if you like it. It's relatively cheap, and it probably shows the game in its most favorable light (albeit minus all the expansion content...but I don't think they're likely to sell you on the game if you don't like the base.).
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 01:50 |
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Trasson posted:Sentinels of the Multiverse would not be improved by having a player play the villain. A hypothetical game that used the basic gameplay fundaments (multiple fixed decks in play at once, varying setup with differing combos of elements, etc.) but had 1+ players be antagonistic to the others would be a vast improvement because then there would be a play-counterplay dynamic that would prevent every player's deck from having a One True Optimal Play to aim for. Yes, I understand that you weren't talking about Sentinels specifically. I still disagree. You could probably make a fun competitive game using similar building blocks (indeed, Sentinel Tactics is vaguely along those lines and is so far seeming enjoyable), but I wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much as if it were cooperative.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 02:04 |
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The End posted:Your anecdote sure beat the hell out of my opinion there. Bravo. While we're slinging anecdotes, I've watched every single member of my gaming group who liked it go from red hot to ice cold on that game in the space of a year. Every single one. Your opinion bears no resemblance to my experience of the game. But certainly my opinion isn't any more inherently valid than yours.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 02:45 |
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jmzero posted:But for all the good (and potential) of Sentinels, I don't know how anyone wouldn't find it fiddly. It varies (with the boss/characters/environments), but at its worst it is the fiddliest game I think I've ever played - and it's not unusual you spend more time resolving the villain's turn than you do on all the player turns together. The frustrating part is that most of this is unnecessary waste - the effects are seldom complicated, the time is just in reading the paragraphs of text on all the cards (because nothing is standardized or done with icons or keywords - and because every stupid generic henchmen works slightly differently in terms of when they attack or whatever you can't even just skim). In the context of other games I've played, like Mansions of Madness, Arkham Horror, Mage Knight, and particularly virtually any CCG, Sentinels of the Multiverse just doesn't register as particularly fiddly. You're resolving one card at a time and most of the time there are only a few applicable modifiers if any. I'm apparently better at remembering these than some people because I've never found the need to use the various markers they included in my Kickstarter copy (aside from health tokens), but it's still not like trying to decipher an attack on Volkare's army in Mage Knight, or untangle a priority chain in Magic. (And icons would be actively harder to parse, as far as I'm concerned.) It's also not particularly difficult to understand why villain turns would take longer, because there's usually more characters acting than during a given player's turn.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 03:33 |
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thespaceinvader posted:The recent kickstarter for Lords also included reprinting Petz. Don't know whether that translates into another printing though. It did? I don't see that anywhere on the main page or in any of the updates. Did they say something about it in the video? (I never watch KS videos.)
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# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 06:07 |
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In my experience it's not so much something you play earlier in the session as something you play for the entire session, unless your boardgame get togethers occupy entire days. As I've said before, last time I played it, with three players, it took roughly 8 hours from setup to teardown. With two it's been more like four or five. I've heard that if you really get it down cold you can get in a session in 3-4, but I think you'd need to play it a fair bit for that. That said, that 8 hour session is the single most fulfilling boardgaming experience I have had in my entire life. I'd recommend the expansion for solo or coop play because it introduces General Volkare, who is a more interesting opposition force than the dummy player. And of course introduces more variety to all the existing mechanics, which is generally nice.
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# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 07:43 |
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Fat Samurai posted:8 hours for 3 players seems excessive, though. I should mention that we were playing the Epic version of the Volkare's Return scenario. That probably played a significant part in how long that took.
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# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 17:16 |
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Lord Frisk posted:It's definitely variations on the same puzzle, but I had a lot of replays with Pandemic. I wonder if Forbidden Desert is actually flat out better than Pandemic with expansions. I can't say I've played Forbidden Desert or Pandemic with In the Lab (and isn't there a third out/coming soon? Or am I thinking of the dice game?), so I can't personally judge, but it sounds like expanded Pandemic would be a richer experience, to me. Not that there aren't plenty of coop games I'd rather play over any of Leacock's trio, starting with Flash Point and culminating with Mage Knight.
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# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 19:38 |
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Death Angel is a Fantasy Flight game, not Games Workshop. It just uses the Space Hulk (/40K) license. I think the price of the expansion content has more to do with the fact that all of it is print on demand and thus avoids economies of scale.
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# ¿ Jan 5, 2015 14:35 |
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The End posted:EDIT: Regarding tactical combat games: Descent is pretty good by most accounts actually. If you don't mind scifi Level 7: Omega Protocol is awesome. Of course, you could always go for some full blown kriegspiel and get some war games. Descent is unbalanced and kind of swingy with too much reliance on dice (seriously, defense shouldn't be a roll...and wasn't, in 1st edition), but if you can find someone who actually enjoys the Overlord role, which is completely different from and IMHO far less satisfying than the heroes, it's not terrible, no.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 02:24 |
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Having received the latest Sentinels expansion today, Wrath of the Cosmos, I'd just like to clear up a popular misconception: A number of people here seem to believe that Adam Rebottaro, the artist for Greater Than Games, is incompetent and his (supposedly) lovely art is because he is not capable of doing better. (Personally, I like the art in Sentinels and think it's perfectly appropriate for the subject matter, but YMMV.) However, this expansion contains an environment deck called the Enclave of the Endlings and the art on this deck, still by Rebottaro, is as far as I can tell a spot-on emulation of Jack Kirby's art on various cosmic Marvel titles. So the style he normally uses on their games is clearly a deliberate choice.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 04:20 |
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Scyther posted:Rebottaro has obviously improved his technique over time, but the only thing the art for Sentinels and its expansions emulates is deviantart faux-anime scribbled on some 13-year old's school notebook. There aren't any images up that I can link, but I assure you that the Enclave of the Endlings is pure Kirby.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 14:47 |
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Yeah, I think I would agree that his art is amateurish and that's not deliberate, so I concede that. But, I think he references common cartoon caricature styled art rather than actual superhero comic art which makes it even worse! There are people out there that like this kind of stuff though (not me). Just to be clear, I am not asserting that the standard SOTM art style has anything to do with Kirby. I am saying there is a specific 15 card deck in the latest expansion that as far as I can tell is spot on Kirby. Since I can't find any images online, here are some lovely iPad camera pics of the art on three of those cards: I don't think you can be incompetent and manage that. Assuming they're not directly plagiarized, I suppose. But I just know the style, I haven't actually read enough of those comics to have any idea.
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 07:18 |
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Krazyface posted:About ten copies of Euphoria just appeared at my local games store. It looks kind of interesting, a Euro with some real theme to it. It briefly came up a couple pages ago. Is it any good? It's got a number of neat ideas (workers with knowledge scores that interact with certain mechanics but too much knowledge means they escape; markets that penalize everyone that wasn't involved in their construction; recruits that give you special powers and access to bonuses based on faction allegiance tracks; a moral decision card), a cool theme, and great art/components/etc. I'm a fan. Enough so that I went and snagged their first game, Viticulture and the recently Kickstarted expansion when that project was funding. (Viticulture is also pretty cool.)
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# ¿ Jan 10, 2015 07:16 |
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Mega64 posted:
I can't swear this is true in advanced play, since we were all newbies too, but the person that won our first game of Viticulture hardly filled a wine order all game and scored a bunch of their points off the Windmill and Tasting Room (they had visitors that let them build those cheaply well before the rest of us).
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# ¿ Jan 11, 2015 18:48 |
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Some Numbers posted:That sounds like a really really watered down version of Battlestar Galactica. Sounds more like a slightly more complicated reskin of Pandemic, to me. With a security guy that kills all the diseas...I mean, aliens, and lots of trading cards around. But hard to say without playing it.
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# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 00:36 |
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Social Dissonance posted:That makes sense. The game does limit you from doing doing the same exact action twice though! The rulebook didn't make this incredibly obvious, and the first couple games I played I gathered from the camp or another source twice. It makes good camp placement really important. For both solo and coop Mage Knight I highly recommend picking up the Lost Legion expansion. Without it, it's mostly a score race against a dummy player in those modes. With the Lost Legion there's a proper antagonist in the form of returning Atlantean General Volkare, who's a nice stiff challenge and a timer all in one.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2015 06:18 |
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Does Wil Wheaton actually like more complex games? He can't just play Ticket to Ride and Catan for Kids all the time, right? Maybe he is using Tabletop as some trojan horse, like the TV show equivalent of a gateway game, and now that he has some momentum he'll sneak Space Alert or Battlestar or something else amazing in there. I think more complicated games could really benefit from a studio with actual editing and graphics and stuff. My understanding is that the explicit purpose of Tabletop is to try to popularize hobbyist tabletop gaming among the general public, so the odds that it will ever feature higher complexity games that particularly appeal to people who are already sold on hobbyist tabletop gaming are pretty slim, at best.
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# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 02:16 |
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Jedit posted:The main reason not to hire all your workers is that the game usually ends by year 6 or 7. If you're not careful you can end up spending $4 and an action to get one action back. There are also a number of visitors that let you hire workers in ways that are superior in some way to the basic hiring action, so it might be worth keeping at least one or two back in case you get one of those.
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# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 02:18 |
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I'm just curious if he's interested in more complicated games outside of the context of the show or if Tabletop is simply his favorite games. Not trying to neuro or casual shame . All of those are still pretty lightweight (except maybe the Star Wars minis, I dunno), as these things go. Though, for that matter, so is (unexpanded) Galaxy Trucker, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that either. Space Alert is likely to make entertaining viewing but it has enough of a learning curve that I don't know if it's likely. I have no idea what Wheaton's into in his personal gaming time, but I don't think we can deduce too much from what he chooses to put on Tabletop for previously mentioned reasons.
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# ¿ Jan 14, 2015 03:55 |
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QnoisX posted:Yeah, there's just new versions of some of the old techs with ship symbols instead of one of the role symbols as the second icon. But I guess it doesn't matter. Page 6 of the expansion rules says, "You may never spend ships to research technologies that do not have ships in their printed cost (e.g. technologies from the base game)." Didn't see that the first time I read through it. It's a bit odd to do it that way, but I guess they do have versions of the old techs with ships as a cost. So I guess you can't go total Warfare if you want those base game techs that aren't duplicated in the expansion. Wonder if that was a design choice or if they just didn't want to print a ton of errata cards (it came with 3 already, but my copy of the base game had fixed copies already) or stickers or something. Those techs count as a ship of that type towards paying costs with ships, I believe.
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# ¿ Jan 16, 2015 04:37 |
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Stelas posted:I've been playing Imperial Assault against a friend and it feels a lot more balanced than Descent 2e ever did, and that's coming from several campaign's worth of experience. The Overlord has more ways to customize himself and has some legitimately strong powers that don't rely on luck to draw, while the heroes are guaranteed an acceptable amount of gold and xp to keep boosting themselves up. The missions seem like they're balancing out better - both sides are neck-and-neck in how many missions they've won - and the reinforcement rules and events mid-mission are much more flexible. The fact you can 'partially succeed' at quests means it's not so black and white. Basically, I'm impressed. Dammit. I want to believe this. I want the balanced, flavorful, asymmetric-but-fun-for-both-sides, campaign-oriented version of this game concept that I've been craving since the Doom boardgame that originally kicked the whole thing off. But I've been burned by every iteration so far. (Honestly, the closest they've come for me was 1st edition Descent, even though there wasn't a campaign there until the third expansion and even then it didn't really properly mix with existing content and it was too easy to get permanently screwed. And game sessions took way too long.)
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# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 05:03 |
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PerniciousKnid posted:Can someone explain why Eminent Domain is good? As far as I can tell, it looks like simplified Dominion plus simplified Race for the Galaxy, resulting in a game that looks really simple. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. The base game is pretty close to what you're suggesting. The expansion is pretty critical to making it an interesting game. I think the thing that shakes things up the most is that it provides a mechanic where everyone starts with a different setup out of a pretty broad pool instead of the default where your starting deck is an even spread of all the action types and you get a random planet. These starting setups typically grant at least one technology to start with (bringing technology into a much more centrally affecting role since in the base game by the time you get 5-7 research techs, you'll hardly have time to use them before the game ends), feature very different action spreads (sometimes with fewer cards than the original, and definitely much less evenly distributed between the types), specific starting planets, etc. It also adds significantly more variety to the technologies, differentiates between the military ship types and gives them uses beyond just invading planets, introduces "diverse" technologies that require a spread of different planet types, adds support for a fifth player, etc.
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# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 21:35 |
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Broken Loose posted:You're thinking of Thunderstone, whose creators touted it as the "Dominion-killer" and claimed the problems of Dominion were that (A) they literally couldn't buy anything they wanted and win with any deck and (B) there wasn't enough killing. Thunderstone was awful and the only reason why I remember it better is because Ascension is literally a worse version of it. Ascension isn't building on Thunderstone's design and skips most of the issues I had with Thunderstone, most notably that it was really easy to have a village setup that had no way to deal with the mechanics the dungeon cards were invoking. (I think that's what those were called, at least.) There's also no stalling the game because the first couple of dungeon cards that come out are way too powerful to be taken on in the early game, no wonky as gently caress experience mechanic, etc. It certainly has its own issues, but for my money it's a better game than Thunderstone - and shorter, too. Which is damning with faint praise, but there you go.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 19:58 |
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echoMateria posted:I got all the Keyflower promos a couple of months ago and they didn't cost half as much total. For a couple I bought a German language issue of Spielbox magazine (I don't speak German), two I ordered from a shop in Canada and the last one from BGG Store. Yeah, that's my experience of Thunderstone in a nutshell: either you get the tough monsters up front or everything is impossible because of monster mechanics there's no way to counter. I don't think I've ever not had that happen, although I did stop playing it pretty quickly. You can really slowly build up a deck that can take that stuff on anyway, but it takes forever and the game is dull as hell until that logjam gets cleared. And I know there was a "breakthrough" mechanic on some of the really big bads but I forget how that triggered. It wasn't on any sort of time limit, I know that much.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 04:22 |
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tarbrush posted:So what's the current best worker placement game going? Ideally something reasonably thematic and probably not too lengthy? Keyflower? Caverna? Agricola? Agricola is probably the best one I've played. I've heard Caverna is better, but am not convinced (also you can get Agricola and expansion for what they're charging for Caverna). Haven't actually played it so I can't say for sure. Some other worker placement games that I would consider worth investigating: Dungeon Lords (might wait until the Anniversary Edition is in circulation), Viticulture, Euphoria. Probably Dungeon Petz, too, but I have yet to play that.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 00:40 |
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:That was put out by Fantasy Flight right? How in the hell can they have the perfect rulebook with what is basically Talisman but have issues explaining poo poo correctly in what is basically Descent (Imperial Assault)? Talisman is a Games Workshop game that Fantasy Flight licensed and updated. Imperial Assault is a Fantasy Flight game. Or at least, I suspect that's the difference. But even if the Talisman rulebook isn't just an updated version of the one from previous editions (I don't think I've ever read them, actually.), it'd be the exception, not the rule. Fantasy Flight is terrible at rulebooks.
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 03:57 |
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GrandpaPants posted:Was. I haven't heard anyone complain about Eldritch Horror's rulebooks or any of the LCGs (the LCGs have issues with FAQs and specific card rulings that make it incredibly difficult to take the competitive scene seriously, but I digress). The LCGs may have issues with timing windows, but they have helpful diagrams at least. Eldritch Horror's rulebook is a better reference than some, but wasn't great for learning the game. It's not a trainwreck like Arkham, granted. And Mansions of Madness' rulebook is awful and that's by Corey Konieczka. Descent 2e, also. I dunno, they may not all be awful. But most of the ones I have direct experience with have been.
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 04:14 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:We had seven. Based on the game mechanics it seems like game length is directly proportional to the number of players. Yeah, don't play either Arkham or Eldritch with 7 players. I wouldn't personally go over 4 or maybe 5 if you really must. (Eldritch probably scales better than Arkham, but still.)
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 06:33 |
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:01 |
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mottbag posted:So I'm currently playing my first game of Arkham Horror (solo) and I've got to say - gently caress lost in time and space. I'm like 12 turns in and I've only managed to seal one gate; my characters KEEP getting sent there whenever they try to get through the otherworld zones to close the gates. At the moment I have three characters lost in time and space. Have I just been really unlucky? Yes. It's certainly possible to get directly sent to Lost in Time and Space (as you have no doubt experienced), but it's much more commonly visited when you zero out either health or sanity in an Other World, and even that shouldn't be happening very often unless you either go in with perilously low health/sanity or terribly low skills, neither of which are wise. And there are also a bunch of encounters that immediately send you back to Arkham for an early close. So either you're playing it wrong or you're getting really unlucky. With Arkham, either is entirely possible.
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# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 10:23 |