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Just got back from a grueling 7 hour game of Caverna. Seven players, never again. My pacifist farming-and-growing strategy lost by a single point (to someone taking a line revolving around expeditions), but I think I botched the last turn quite a bit and definitely had a good shot at winning. We're all pretty keen to get it back to the table at a much more reasonable player count.
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Dec 13, 2014 14:54
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Rutibex posted:
Admittedly, we did stop for dinner partway through (and it was pretty much everyone's first game, involving quite a lot of AP). We all basically agreed that the manual isn't messing around when it recommends not introducing the game that way.
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Dec 13, 2014 16:05
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homullus posted:It's a given that Monopoly is a bad game, so I play with two sets of property cards, and each property can be purchased twice. Somebody can be both the property owner and have to pay rent when landing on a space! Just waiting for the chance to become the majestic Double Landlord of Boardwalk. I call this version WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANYBODY DO THIS, IT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. Still better than the apparently-almost-universal house rules of "no auctions" and "you get money when you land on Free Parking".
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Dec 16, 2014 15:46
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Would you enjoy a mutual masturbation session while watching the Firefly tv show y/n
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Dec 23, 2014 01:26
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malkav11 posted:or untangle a priority chain in Magic. I'm always confused when someone brings this as somehow being complicated, because it's literally the opposite. Like, you can literally just put the cards on top of each other as you play them (and then one-at-a-time into the graveyard as they actually take effect), it's dead simple.
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Dec 24, 2014 03:50
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Gerund posted:It actually isn't once you get beyond "the stack", and instead get into the resulting state-based-effects when things go into and out of each zone which triggers each and every other zone. 613.1, regarding Layers, is actually something you have to memorize if you want to judge events. It literally just works as you'd intuitively expect it to work outside of some weird edge cases. The rules are specifically written (and rewritten, when necessary) in order to make that happen. Yes, if you're actually judging an event you need to know enough of the rules to recognize when one of those weird edge cases crops up, but as a player it's honestly not particularly relevant. And even then, Magic is far and away the easiest TCG/LCG to actually know the rules for, since there are no fiddly exceptions and nothing ruled on a case-by-case basis, the rules themselves are straightforward and cover every scenario.
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Dec 24, 2014 04:11
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Perhaps the biggest issue with Hanabi is that there's no opponent with a vested interest in calling you on your poo poo if you're wink-wink-nudge-nudging your way around the rules the way there is in, say, contract bridge. It can only be self-enforced, and the only motivation to do so is your own sense of fair play. A digital PBEM version could be pretty nice, as it would remove all ambiguity about what communication is allowed.
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Dec 29, 2014 23:32
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As far as I recall, the first expansion only introduced a handful of event cards (like, 3 per stage), which you should be able to look up in the manual. The second expansion introduced a similarly-sized number of event cards, plus the intruder cards. And the round 4 cards, of course. I tend to play with the new events even when not using the components introduced in that expansion - the only cards you really need to take out are the intruder cards if you're not using the second set of expansion tiles, and the round 3 card that adds two round 4 cards. You could probably even include that last one if you were willing to separate out the round 4 deck enough to have intruders vs. not intruders.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:03
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The End posted:It has to be much less strategic with that number though. With 5 of every card in the game, the amount of information players have is never going to be significant. Basically you get a whole bunch of political avoid-drawing-attention-to-yourself bullshit until about half the players are eliminated, and then the survivors get to actually play the game. You're right in that it's not particularly good.
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Jan 1, 2015 03:54
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Honestly I think Ticket to Ride is one of the best "hidden victory condition" games, because the whole point is to figure out what your opponent's goals are and to stop them from doing that while advancing your own.
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Jan 3, 2015 21:10
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Gumdrop Larry posted:I would say yes if that's the ultimatum because Kovalic's simplistic, newspaper comic-style stuff isn't that terrible, it's just tired and doesn't really deserve to be as prominent as it is. Foglio's art is bad in an unsettling way. It's hard to look at, and whenever people rave about how much they loved his old Magic card art I feel like I've entered the loving bizarro universe. Kovalic's art is basically really good for Munchkin, and not good for anything else. People like Foglio's Magic art entirely for the novelty factor, if it wasn't so different from Magic's usual art style no-one would care about it at all.
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Jan 3, 2015 23:20
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Kai Tave posted:Of all the insults people have leveled against Munchkin in this thread, this might be the most cutting. I don't even mean it in a "they're both bad so they're made for each other" way. Munchkin's only notable feature is that it's chock full of one-liner jokes, puns, and D&D references. Having art that looks like a cleaned-up version of the notebook doodles kids do when they're bored in class is thematically fitting.
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Jan 3, 2015 23:49
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It's probably pretty lame in two player, but in multiplayer Prescience is a major incentive to gently caress with anyone except the guy with Prescience. There's basically no way to get anything better than a phyrric victory against it - even if you have superior strength and play your 4/1 you're going to take a boatload of casualties, and you can't play a protective card to cover against that because then you're likely to just lose the fight.
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Jan 10, 2015 11:19
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Pro tip for Dominion cards: When putting the game away, put the cards you used back on the bottom of the pile instead of on the top. Otherwise you'll end up with, for example, the top-most coppers being almost completely worn out while the ones at the bottom are pristine (because no-one ever buys that much copper).
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Jan 12, 2015 14:04
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Social Dissonance posted:You take colored pawns and place them on things to generate resources or inventions? Of course the game has a lot more than that going on, but the game comes down to taking risks or guaranteeing results based on how you allocate limited pawns to limited areas. I'm comparing it to Lords of Waterdeep though, so if that doesn't fit your definition I guess we have two different standards. You're describing a generic action selection mechanic. When describing mechanics, it's best to ignore how those mechanics are themed, and instead look at how they actually function. Anything can have a theme involving putting meeples on spaces, that doesn't mean they're mechanically similar. "Worker placement" is basically where people take turns selecting actions from a common pool, where after an action is chosen it is no longer available for anyone else to choose.
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Jan 13, 2015 05:14
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So today I got a shipping notice from DHL that Czech Games has shipped something my way. What could it beeee?  It's finally arriving 
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Jan 17, 2015 01:00
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esquilax posted:Like many games, it's a lot more popular outside of the opinions of the "popular" posters in this thread. Monopoly sans auctions is also "popular", most people here prefer to talk about whether a game is actually good. (I've played it, it's a market-row deckbuilder with no mechanics to mitigate the randomness of the market, hence it's pretty much guaranteed to suck)
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Jan 17, 2015 18:54
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SolitarySolidarity posted:Does anyone know where I can find a good quick reference for Caverna? What sort of stuff are you looking for that isn't on the player reference cards? A list of buildings and stuff?
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Jan 19, 2015 08:37
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The only game of Cosmic Encounter I've played ended in an n-1 victory because holy poo poo it had been four goddamn hours and I just wanted it to be over already, so I invited everyone else in on the attack against the player I'd been randomly chosen to fight against. We could have just rolled a dice at the start to see who lost and saved the hassle.
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Jan 25, 2015 17:10
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Go RV! posted:My very early opinion on One Zero One is that it's fun, but pretty swingy and luck based. Though, that means you're never really out of it, and getting lucky with when you draw the right thing can bring you back into it. Which is totally fine, as the deck is 16 cards and a game lasts 5-10 minutes. I've only played about three hands, and it did feel a bit swingy, but I'm willing to put that down to us not really knowing much strategy. In particular, all three of our games ended after someone played into to row 5, and their opponent was able to use either print or enter to claim the row and finish the game that turn. One particularly devastating moment was when playing enter shrunk row 4 down to two cards, for a 90-point swing. I think the game would feel less swingy once we've stopped opening ourselves up to quick losses like that, and are instead jockeying for enough of a lead on the top four to be able to actually play on the bottom row.
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Jan 26, 2015 02:05
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You don't have to put in five cards every time. Are they still going to call you when you put in three cards? If so, just rake in the money off the penalties, and if not, smuggle your contraband in three at a time. You can draw contraband from the discard pile to encourage the sheriff to inspect your bag, which goes even better if you pick up one legal good while doing so (that happens to match what you already have in hand). Also, if lots of weird coincidences happen (like, for example, drawing lots of the same card in a row), especially if it's the first time you've played a game, I tend to think that the deck wasn't shuffled sufficiently before starting.
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Jan 29, 2015 12:47
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Got to break out my kickstarter copy of Dungeon Lords today. It's really good.
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Feb 6, 2015 13:33
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I just want to say BL, many thinks for making international shipping reasonably-priced.
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Feb 10, 2015 09:47
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As someone who spent $80 on a wooden box for a game, I can definitely understand someone wanting high-quality components for a game that they play a lot. If CGE decided, for example, to put out an edition of Galaxy Trucker with solid, mahjong-style plastic tiles, I would jump on that even though I already own the game. I'm not sure I'd personally go for third-party pieces (at that point, I'd rather manufacture them myself and enjoy the journey as well as the end product), but I can definitely someone who plays TtR a lot and has disposable income wanting to upgrade their copy.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:01
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silvergoose posted:Skirting the edge of too evil is usually the easiest strategy, get easier adventurers and no paladin while getting useful ghosts, vampires, demons. But getting the propaganda room can get you super easy adventurers so you can focus on more imps and rooms, getting super evil means you can get all the best monsters and extra from the paladin. It's all what you can do while getting lots of points. What you actually want to do (at least in the second year) is be approximately as evil as everyone else, that way you can flip up or down the evilometer to get the adventurer that's easiest for your particular dungeon setup to beat (for example, getting the high-level warrior instead of the high-level thief when you have the trap room). But in terms of actually winning the game, adventurers are kind of a sideshow - as a baseline you can expect that everyone's going to get 12 points from beating adventurers, lose 0 points for not paying taxes, and be within a couple of points of each other after counting up raw number of monsters, number of unconquered rooms, and number of conquered dungeon tiles. The points to actually win the game come from paladins, point-scoring rooms, and titles, and the strategy of the game is how to get as many of those as possible while still defeating your adventurers. Or at the very least, getting more points from that than you lose by fighting off adventurers less efficiently.
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Feb 28, 2015 01:22
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Texmo posted:However, the difference is that, when gambling, there is no Correct choice as there is with assured outcomes, and these games can never be Solved. Yes there is? Blackjack is a solved game, for example.
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Feb 28, 2015 02:21
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GrandpaPants posted:I'm not good at Dominion, but do you have an example of how you'd alter your strategy based on what other people are doing, besides the obvious "Buy Moats/defense cards if people are buying attack cards"? This biggest decision is deciding whether to go for provinces, or to three-pile the game out early. Making that decision correctly requires judging how fast your opponent's deck will be once it's running, and how long it's going to take them to get to that point, and comparing that against your own options.
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Mar 4, 2015 01:37
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GoneWithTheTornado posted:One question, are interceptors generally worth using? Considering their short range and the fact that the player piloting them has to as to spend a turn doing nothing to return to the ship, it seems better for a player to spend their actions doing other things. The action efficiency isn't actually that bad (assuming you need the battlebots activated anyway) - firing the big guns also requires a "wasted" action by someone to recharge the appropriate reactor.
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Mar 20, 2015 01:39
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Tekopo posted:Also, a question: how do skilled players become skilled at a game? If a game that lacks chance elements (or minimizes them) is only fun for people that are skilled in the game, how do people even get started into the game? By playing people of an approximately similar skill level. Are chess clubs in schools still a thing? The kids aren't usually excellent players in an objective sense, but by playing other kids with similar skill level they can be motivated to improve themselves and also measure their progress against their peers. The best way to learn is by playing close games, so you can see where things went well or poorly for you and think about things you could have done differently. One-sided games between players of widely different skill levels aren't usually that educational.
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Mar 21, 2015 12:32
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Poison Mushroom posted:Blackjack almost counts. But it says something that the dealers can and do tell you what "the book" says you should do at any point if you ask. Except that you'll get thrown out of the casino for playing optimally (bidding big only on deals when the composition of the deck is in your favour).
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Mar 21, 2015 15:13
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Wooden meeples are usually hefty enough that it would take quite a gust to actually blow them around. If it's just an occasional breeze then things should be fine. You could test it out by setting up a game inside and then pointing a fan at the board or something.
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Apr 2, 2015 23:34
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I also did insist on getting Space Alert. Aren't there supposed to be cards that have the missions written down on them? I thought that was for figuring out how you did after the 10 minutes of terror. All I can think to do is replay the drat audio track to figure out how we did, and that would get annoying real fast. When you flip over a new threat, you're supposed to put one of the yellow chips on it to tell you when that threat appears. You use that information in the resolution phase when reconstructing what happened. The resolution phase doesn't care about when things like communications down or you drawing more action cards happens.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:23
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Assuming there are n different cards, and you draw k cards per game, and further assuming that the cards you're drawing don't change the distribution of cards in the deck... The chance, on any particular draw, of drawing the same card as last time is 1/n. You'll see this possibility k-1 times per game. So the probability that you never draw the same card twice in a row is (n-1/n)k-1. For seeing three cards in a row, it's similar - for any given two consecutive draws, the odds of them both being the same as the previous draw is 1/n2, and there are k-2 times per game for that possibility to appear. Further derivation is left as an exercise.
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Apr 10, 2015 07:29
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Aston posted:Also there's nothing wrong with Magic jargon, cards like this make perfect sense: Note that this is literally a joke card from a joke set that isn't legal for tournament play because every card in it is a joke.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:23
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Rutibex posted:Integrating apps into board games puts me right off, and frankly feels gimmicky and lazy. If I wanted to play a computer game that's what I would do, computer games are great. Putting board and computer games together is like christian rock, you aren't making Christianity better you are making rock worse. I play board games to get away from a computer screen for a bit; there is enough trouble with people fiddling on their phones at game night I don't need to encourage it. Mostly this, but audio tracks are cool and good.
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Apr 11, 2015 16:14
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Rutibex posted:A well balanced game would mean what exactly, that the players always have a chance to win? I think that would ruin the horror theme. Horror movies are a rare variety; often the hero will escape and win the day, but just as often everyone will die and be destroyed by their own hubris. You never know in a horror movie if the protagonists will "win", so there is a tension you don't get with a typical movie (where the "good" ending is a forgone conclusion). The fact that HoHH isn't balanced like a normal co-op game gives it that same "horror movie" tension and is an integral part of it's story engine. By that argument it seems really poorly designed if you know straight away that the protagonists don't have a chance. In fact your entire argument seems to be in favour of a "balanced" game where it's unclear what the end result is going to be.
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Apr 12, 2015 12:21
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Rutibex posted:But that's what I'm saying? The protagonists can win at HoHH just as often as they lose, if they draw the right cards/haunt. A normally balanced co-op game the players expect to win most of the time, if they earned it. In HoHH you can lose even if you play perfectly, just like a horror movie. If the game ended once you flipped the haunt then sure, that argument would make sense. But in a horror movie, you have the big antagonist reveal, then the movie escalates towards the climax where you find out whether the protagonists actually get away or not. In Betrayal, you get the reveal, then you spend the whole second half tediously going through the motions while already knowing what's going to happen. The thematic argument you present doesn't actually line up with the reality of the game.
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Apr 12, 2015 12:44
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Jedit posted:Yes. It's a common mistake, probably because people logically assume Day comes before Night in the turn phase order. Also because starting with 5 and then gaining two before you have any way to influence the amount you gain seems kind of pointless, because the rulebook could just have told you to start with 7 instead.
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Apr 13, 2015 07:47
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MTG's system does have flaws for sure, but I'm not sure you can point to anything else and call it clearly better. Lands introduce a whole lot of variety and meaningful choices when it comes to deck building, because you have to make a whole lot of risk/reward decisions around how many colours you want to play in your deck, how many lands of each colour to play, how much you want your spells to cost (more powerful spells are more expensive, which both prevents you from casting them early and gives you the risk of not being able to cast them at all) and so on. The downside of having risk/reward decisions is, of course, that there has to be a meaningful penalty for being too greedy, and that you'll sometimes get hit with that penalty even if you made reasonable tradeoffs. Systems which aim to "solve" the variance in MTG often just end up removing those risk/reward decisions, and aren't necessarily better for it.
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Apr 17, 2015 04:59
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The End posted:$8 for each art pack (there are three). $ to remove ads. These two seem reasonable, TBF. (Holy poo poo did they seriously go for a bullshit freemium energy mechanic?  )
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Apr 24, 2015 07:22
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