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HOOLY BOOLY posted:Speaking of expansions, does Pandemic:In the Lab assume you bought the other expansions? The rules talked about On the Brink and the Bioterriost alot. Is it possible to play it without those 2 other expansions then? For the most part, no, you don't need OTB to play In the Lab. ITL just mentions it a lot because the purple disease (either mutation or bioterrorist) obeys different rules from the normal diseases, so the rules need to take care to address where it might affect play. However, the "Panic Mutation" variant and the two new brown epidemics are specifically expansions to On the Brink, and can't be used by themselves. That said, the simplest answer is "pony up, buy On the Brink, and never look back." The purple disease is such an important addition to the game that I wouldn't dream of excluding it in anything but a teaching game anymore.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:26
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Vegetable posted:I just bought Dominion. Is the strategy really as straightforward as I recall it: Trash the Copper and Estate cards asap, buy tons of Silver/Gold, then go for the Duchy/Provinces? I played this game hundreds of times against the AI when that fan-made app was free on the iPhone, and I recall doing this almost every single game. Haha, no. Or rather, you've grasped the most entry level of strategy for the game. What you're describing is commonly called the "robo-money" strategy, and it's essentially the speed test for a given kingdom. A deck that buys nothing but Silver, Gold, and a little card-draw or trashing will usually take four Provinces by turn 15, if another player doesn't interfere with attacks or other effects. So any deck you build should either work faster than Robo-Money, or have ways of slowing Robo-Money down. Robo-Money is a perfect example of what game designers call a FOO (First Order Optimal) strategy, a strategy with a low-skill in to high-power out ratio. They're actually extremely useful for new players, since they give you a solid handle to grip when you're learning the game. But you're meant to move beyond them when you encounter a level of play that outstrips it. And unfortunately, writing an AI for Dominion is hard. (Or rather, writing an AI that functions for variable setup is hard. Some kingdoms are functionally solvable to a script, but it takes a website full of nerds pounding on it for a couple years to refine an optimal script, as in the link above.) Well beyond the scope of your average unofficial fan program. So you were probably never forced to move beyond your FOO strategy and see the game underneath the tutorial level. Play Dominion against an experienced player, and I guarantee it will be a different experience altogether.
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Dec 17, 2014 08:59
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FISHMANPET posted:RE: Legacy games, ls "Legacy" a brand or just a concept? And either way what other "Legacy" games are there besides Risk? Looking at the Kickstarter, for Tuscany (Viticulture expansion) it sort of has a Legacy feel to it, because it wants you to slowly add expansions in over time. But I thought it was a Hasbro trademark and all they'd released was Risk: Legacy. But now I see Pandemic Legacy is a real thing, but will it actually be called Pandemic Legacy, or something else? Sort of both? Rob Daviau is the creator of Risk: Legacy and the co-creator of Pandemic: Legacy (also, the hugely-hyped Seafall: A Legacy Game). So Z-Man is clearly trying to trade on a sort of name recognition here, even though neither Hasbro nor Z-Man have Legacy as an established brand or trademark. But the "legacy" mechanic of persistence between game sessions is something other designers have been futzing around with, like Stonemeier with Tuscany.
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Dec 17, 2014 18:49
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Broken Loose posted:The closest games I can compare to Hanabi, with intentionally designed restrictive rules, are Tragedy Looper and Pandemic. Tragedy Looper is incredibly clear on what is allowed, and thus the concept of accidental cheating is never considered. Pandemic is not, and thus it's considered one of the worst co-ops due to rampant Quarterbacking problems when people ignore or bypass the communication rules and a huge luck overhead when played as intended. Pandemic isn't an example. The communication rules are gone in the newest edition. Matt Leacock realized they were a crap patch over the quarterbacking problem. Even then, though, the Pandemic rules were extremely clear cut, if stupid: "You may not show your cards to another player." Period, end rules. Everything else is allowed, up to and including reading off every card you're currently holding.
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Dec 29, 2014 23:32
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unpronounceable posted:What are the best compact Dominion storage solutions? I just got a couple of the big expansions, and would rather not take my 3 boxes around when I bring it somewhere. Should I just get a bunch of MtG deck boxes and label them? From a bit back. I've got a complete Dominion set, which I've managed to condense into two boxes (I use the base box and Dark Age) by basically tearing up a couple 2-inch 3-ring binders. For each, I cut out the spine/ring mechanism, trimmed it, fit it in the box, and filled the box with binder pages. One box has Base, Intrigue, and Seaside, along with a set of Dominion Base Cards (still in the little box) and the various accessories (coins, tokens, mats). The other box holds the other six expansions, plus a page of promos. The randomizer cards and extra treasure/victory cards are in a box in my closet, and I use the Randominion app on my smartphone to generate kingdoms instead.
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Dec 30, 2014 16:54
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BonHair posted:Speaking of, how do you guys deal with summoners in complex combats? Technically, their attacks are not revealed before the block phase, and so you have to decide on what you want to range attack before revealing. But what if I made an unrelated mistake somewhere? For my group: If the play is still legal (e.g. you miscounted your attack, or played a card you meant to save for later), then the play stands and you have to suffer the consequences of your mistake. If the play is illegal, and quickly cannot be made legal (e.g. you assaulted a city and forgot to pay the movement, but have a march in hand), then you back up and shuffle the brown token into the pot.
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Jan 5, 2015 21:10
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ETB posted:Has anyone received their Dungeon Lord: Anniversary Edition in the U.S.? I haven't seen it yet. Kickstarter Update #24 posted:As for those of you outside Europe and outside the US, the packages were sent to you this week, last ones should leave today. Mr. B Games in the comment threads posted:Hi Everyone - Just heard from the folks at CGE and they will have an update for everyone very soon (likely by the end of the week). As you all can imagine, lots of moving parts, delays, issues out of our control with shipping, and they are looking into this and putting together an update to address everything as soon as they have enough data to inform everyone.
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Jan 7, 2015 07:52
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StashAugustine posted:Also on the subject of base-set Dominion: what can really support rush or combo decks? I can see big money, slog, and engine decks, but it seems like there aren't any cards for total gimmick play. Base Dominion still contains one of the strongest rush decks in Workshop/Gardens. You can reasonably three pile before a BM player takes their fourth province on Turn 14/15. If the kingdom contains Workshop, Gardens, Village, open double Workshop. If you can, pick up 2 workshops, 2 villages on the next pass through the deck. Then devour Gardens, Estates, and whatever third pile you can manage (usually Workshop or Village).
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Jan 9, 2015 19:33
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thespaceinvader posted:Eh, Workshop/Gardens is pretty old hat these days. Ironworks/Gardens is more efficient, Beggar/Gardens hilariously more so. True, but he was specifically asking about Base Set only, and your rush options there are a bit constrained to Workshop/Gardens or Woodcutter/Gardens.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:37
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It's literally the same as this, but without the polyurethane finish or the laser engraving. You can even order it with an insert specifically designed for Dominion. thespaceinvader posted:Since I don't think I spotted an answer to this... yes, there is. Anniversary Edition bundles in all the expansions (Festival Season, Minions Bearing Gifts) along with a couple of KS-exclusive events and spells (nothing else but events and spells, so nothing particularly important to miss out on) and comes with a better set of components (some nice glass cubes instead of wooden ones for player colours, primarily as well as minis instead of tokens for the trolls, and a set of little boxes for all the bits. The box insert fits everything in really nicely, too. It also comes with one additional mini-expansion (currently exclusive to Anniversary Edition), which gives you randomized initial setups with special rules.
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Jan 12, 2015 18:36
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thespaceinvader posted:Blah, didn't realise that was a KS exclusive. It's not a KS exclusive, but it is an Anniversary exclusive. Theoretically, if Dungeon Lords: Happy Anniversary goes into distro like Galaxy Trucker: Anniversary Edition did, the Dungeon Setup expansion will be available in all copies. And there's every possibility that the Dungeon Setup expansion will get plopped on the BGG promo store, like the Galaxy Trucker: Even Stevens expansion did.
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Jan 12, 2015 19:06
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Funso Banjo posted:I think Quinns and Paul are still funny sometimes. Okay, Matt Lees is a man who made his name making mouth noises over E3 videos, and has three entire jokes. He should probably be stopped. But Brendan's a drat sharp writer when he has good material. His Dog Eat Dog review hit the loving bone, for example. (And okay, I really enjoyed The Unenviable Insomnia of Halloran Kin, and that colors my opinion, sue me.) His problem isn't a lack of talent. It's his complete lack of screen presence. He's clearly not an actor in any sense, but Paul and Quinns keep pointing a camera in his face. And he does about as well as most people do when you stick a camera in their face: Horribly. And I don't get the shade thrown at the other contributors. Matt Thrower is probably the best writer/reviewer on the site. Yeah, he pushed that one "haha insane wargoon" joke too long, but he's since dropped it, and he's a hell of a lot more evocative than Paul or Quinns. Pip is...I don't have a real opinion on Pip yet? She's really only done one solo review (Zooloretto), and that was fine, but she hasn't really established her own voice yet. And Leigh Alexander is Leigh Motherfucking Alexander. And I'm sure the goonmind hates her, because she's the sort of thing the goonmind hates--a pretentious essayist who mostly writes about her emotional relationship with pixels and cardboard. But as a counterpoint, gently caress you. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 19:18
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So this exists and is a thing is happening. Note that $500 is the first tier that actually includes a copy of the game.
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Jan 14, 2015 19:37
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Dre2Dee2 posted:This is like some post-modern commentary on kickstarter irony thing, right. Actually, I wouldn't necessarily put it past Larry Roznai (the president of Mayfair Games). He has a notoriously dim view of board game kickstarters, as anyone who's attended his seminars at GTS will attest. Specifically, he argues that Kickstarter hamstrings the relationship between the publisher and the brick-and-mortar. By his argument, a store isn't going to order the game through distribution if you already sold copies to their most enthusiastic customers, and your product/company won't be able to sustain itself through long term sales past the initial project. This Kickstarter makes sense for his philosophy, actually. Mayfair's kicking a product that almost certainly has no future in distro/retail, so it's not putting them in competition with their client stores.
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Jan 14, 2015 20:51
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Morpheus posted:Oh no, won't someone please think of the poor middlemen. God forbid enthusiasts get to buy games directly from the people who make them! Er, yes. You should think of the middlemen. Those middlemen give you the economy-of-scale you need to keep a tiny cottage industry alive. And designer board games are a tiny cottage industry. If manufacturers had to rely solely on direct sales, Carcassonne would cost $70-80 a box, and BSG would cost maybe $150-200. Let me break it down for you, child. Imagine you've launched just the nifty-keenest board game to ever throw dice at a meeple, and your first print run has sold like gangbusters, possibly due to KS preorders and KS hype. You've got a nice little startup under your feet. Sweet deal, let's do another print run! Okay, even a tiny new print run is going to be 500-1000 units. No legit printer is going to give you the time of day for less units, unless you're the kind of company that can do a sustainable Print On Demand. (And because your name isn't Fantasy Flight, you're not.) And you're not even hitting the discounts until you're brushing 1500-2000 units. So now you've got 500+ boxes sitting on your warehouse. And you're sure as hell not going to move them near as fast as the first run, because the folks who had the big wobbly hard-ons for your game have come, paid, and gone home to towel off. So now you're looking to store these units for a while. There's an extra cost. (And a much higher one than a distributor would be paying for warehousing, by the way.) Likewise, since this run is going to move on a slow drip, you've got to make sure your audience of potential nerd-money donors don't forget that you exist. Gamers are like magpies in ugly comic book t-shirts, and they'll flock to the newest shiny thing in their field of vision. The traditional solution here is to outsource the job to earnest, bearded men behind counters (or at least behind shopping cart software) who will buy a couple copies from you(r distributor), stick it on a bookshelf, and match it to a customer two to four months down the line. But we're too good for middlemen, right? So that means one thing: advertising. Advertising for months after the release, at minimum. As an aside, I work in board game advertising. It's not cheap. So let's say you've done it. Your customer base has managed to remember that you exist, and people are still asking for the game over time. Wonderful. Now you've got to pack and ship those games. And whoops, you declined to establish a relationship with a distributor, who can take shipping crates from you, combine multiple games into larger pallets, and ship your units en masse. Looks like you have to mail each box yourself. That's only like 5x the cost, right? Well, until you factor in the salaries you're paying to your warehouse manager and her packaging line staff and the guy driving the truck to the post office. But it's all worth it, right? You get to connect directly with the customer. All five of them who are still willing to pay the exorbitant sticker price, which you've had to massively inflate to cover all these small scale operating costs. And that little connection is the feeling of a job well done, which will hopefully replace the feeling of food. Morpheus posted:Look, I don't dislike them as people, but when a job becomes obsolete, it's not up to the consumers to retard their practices so that others can stay in business. I feel the same about them as I would about milkmen when refrigeration was introduced. Do you feel sorry for Gamestop owners now that downloadable games are more popular? If you really want, you can just buy the game from the developer and then donate an extra percentage of that to your local gaming store. Did you know that digital content requires surprisingly little in the way of per unit manufacturing, storage, and shipping? Or that milk farms rarely do direct orders these days, preferring to use those filthy "grocery store" middlemen? EDIT: I'm not saying (or rather, Larry Roznai isn't saying) that Kickstarter is bad because "Old Mom and Pop Goober are going to have to close the Goblin's rear end in a top hat Game n' Jerk if you don't throw pity cash at them!" I'm saying that a policy of massive direct sales early on can gut your ability to maintain the long term sales through distro, and a small company runs a real risk of Glory to Rome-ing themselves off a cliff. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 22:20
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Morpheus posted:Good stuff! Guess I never thought about it that way. Still, with Kickstarter doesn't that alleviate much of the problem? When you can guarantee X number of sales, and get money for it? Though I suppose that'd still be short term, but I'm not sure what kind of success kickstarter ventures get after the initial, uh, 'kick', as it were. That's the problem, though. Those X number sales are the first print run--the sweetest apple in the barrel, because you can unload them fast to the people who want them most and want them now. But after the hype-catchers and early adopters have all bought in, your second, third, and nth print runs are going to trail out slow, which is when you want the distributor/retailer support to sustain you. But here's the thing: The retailers and distributors want their bite of that sweet first apple too. Being part of the initial sales rush incentivises your partners to throw in with you for the longer haul. And if you've sold all those hot early copies without them, they're not gonna want to pick up your slower, colder leavings. Now, we've seen that you can go the Kickstarter route and still have success in distro. Stonemaier, Level 99, and Tasty Minstrel are success stories here, partly because they made smart moves and didn't shoot themselves in the foot. Level 99, for example, never does Kickstarter Exclusives. (Exclusives might draw in backers by threatening them with "losing out," but exclusives devalue the later retail copies, which are "incomplete" and unappealing.) But you've gotta make sure you're not making GBS threads on the people who will keep you in business after the rush.
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Jan 14, 2015 23:41
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silvergoose posted:Wait why in this weird world where b&m stores are extinct would all publishing go extinct too? You got me. I wasn't talking about retailers (b&m or online) going extinct. I'm talking about a world in which they decide that a given publisher's product isn't worth investing in, because the retailers/distributors were cut out of the big early sales.
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Jan 15, 2015 00:06
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QnoisX posted:About the expansion, all of the new techs have warfare or research costs. Do you replace the old techs with the new ones, throw them all into the pile with no changes, or add them all in but use warfare or research to buy them like the new tech? Some Numbers posted:No, yes and yes. The new techs are in addition to the base techs and they can be bought with either Research symbols or Fighters. Er, Some Numbers misspoke: No, yes, and no. The old technologies can still only be purchased with research. Only the new technology can be purchased with fighters.
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Jan 16, 2015 04:27
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StashAugustine posted:COIN Gallic War this year! Gallic War has been pushed back for additional playtesting and tweaking, and has been removed from the production schedule for now. Liberty or Death is the next COIN game, and Gallic War might not see print until next year.
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Jan 16, 2015 17:28
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GrandpaPants posted:The more I play Sellswords, the more I like it, but the more it frustrates me. The rules really, really need to be written better, and the abilities need better clarification. There've been so many questions that some explanations and some examples or even a more rigorous FAQ would have been great for. I really wish the game had come with an actual rulebook instead of a fold up map because drat, the "full explanation" of abilities really need to be fuller. The game is fine mechanically (barring some balance issues with regards to going first vs. second), but missing that fundamental accessibility of clear, coherent rules and explanations is killing it for me. This is sort of a consistent problem with Talton and Level 99. His games range from decent to excellent--BattleCON is the second-best money I've spent on this hobby after Dominion. But christ, his rulebooks are pathetically bad/unclear, and the card templating is all over the place. (You can induce an immediate headache in most BattleCON players by asking a rules question about the "Pulse" special action.) Next time he does a kickstarter, I really hope one of the stretch goals is "hire a loving technical writer."
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Jan 16, 2015 17:43
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burger time posted:AFAIK you're the most experienced with Level 99 Games so I'm gonna ask you: I'm waiting on the BattleCon War kickstarter to arrive (not owning Battlecon yet), but I'm wondering if Pixel Tactics is worth pledging for, or is it another 2 player game occupying a similar length/weight that's just not as good as Battlecon (and I'll just end up playing Battlecon instead)? Well, pledging for it is a bit of a sailed ship, since the Deluxe edition Kickstarter finished last weekend. I pledged for a copy, but I might end up turning around and selling it. PT is a whole different beast from BattleCON, and doesn't compete for the same space. If anything, it plays more like a CCG with mirrored preconstructed decks. You have a hand of cards, you play dudes from that hand and send those dudes to attack other dudes for damage. If BattleCON is a short but thinky game about predictive play from fixed, known positions, Pixel Tactics is a lighter, more random game of drawing cards and slapping chumps on a board. Here's the big problem for me: Pixel Tactics isn't competing against BattleCON for my table time. It's competing against Tash-Kalar. In the (way zoomed-out) abstract, both games are about drawing from a fixed deck of options and trying to keep the board stable enough to put those options to optimal use. And for that kind of gameplay, Tash-Kalar is far and away the better experience. I like Talton, but he's got a looooong way to go to compete with Vlaada. My big hope is that the upcoming cube draft format will add the extra weight I want out of the game. Otherwise, it's hitting eBay or getting donated.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:17
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The End posted:Eldritch is a funny one. It's played well for me up to 4 players, but the moment we hit five, it sank like a stone. That's with both expansions to cut the repetition too. I think the designers should've had the integrity to just hard limit the game to 4. Then again, the pressure probably came from FFG's marketing branch. Just like Game of Thrones 'supports 3 - 6 players', when everyone knows it's 'play with 6 and only 6. 5 if desperate.' Bit of a digression, but I've played GoT a few times now--still probably too novice to make any conclusive statements--but I'm starting to actually prefer 5 player, if you take out Greyjoy instead of Martell, and use the "Pike is impassable" token from the 3-player components. Lannister feels a lot more viable without Greyjoy breathing down your neck. Never play five player with neutral Martell, though. The game will always, always go to Tyrell or Baratheon. The free Dornish buffet is just too good.
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Jan 21, 2015 07:43
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Bubble-T posted:I like mechanical theme. I enjoy flavour (text) that *supports* mechanical theme. I really strongly dislike flavour for its own sake, or more specifically the assumption that a game is "thematic" just because you wrote lots of stories on your cards that have gently caress all to do with the mechanics of the game. In system design (and video game design), you're talking in part about conveyance, or the science of transcribing an intuitive experience onto a foreign media or interface. Or to tone down the  , "How much does the thing I'm pretending to do feel like doing the thing?Space Alert is a game with high conveyance, because the panic feels like an escalating emergency. Arkham Horror is a game with low conveyance, because it boils down to a generic "roll dice to proceed" mechanism with a funny mask on top, which does nothing in particular to reinforce the supposed narrative experience.
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Jan 23, 2015 07:56
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Bubble-T posted:At least that means Xia isn't alone in the category of "roll-to-move games released in 2014". Oddly enough, one of the more odd and interesting games I got in 2014 has roll-and-move as a core mechanic, and it kinda works. I'm starting to think that there's honestly no such thing as an irredeemably bad mechanic. Implementation is everything. Xia and SoB are still hot garbage, though. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Jan 25, 2015 |
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Jan 25, 2015 07:19
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Zark the Damned posted:Each individual figure can be summoned once per round. You don't have to summon from your supply of dudes. If you only have one guy on the map (and they haven't already been summoned this turn) you are allowed to summon that dude off the map and put them back down anywhere (by paying their summon cost), which can be useful if you're getting backed into a corner. Fat Samurai posted:A bit of a weird rule: when moving the last unit out of a region, that region still counts as occupied by you until you place down the unit you just moved. Basically, you can always move a figure on the board to an adjacent region. Zark is incorrect on both counts. First, there is no rule preventing you from summoning and resummoning the same figure multiple times. If you want to spend your entire round hopping a single Bloodletter around the board, you're welcome to. Second, Fat Samurai has the correct interpretation on summoning from the board, according to page 11. The resolution order for a summon action is
gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jan 25, 2015 |
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Jan 25, 2015 19:04
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Goddamnit BL. I had money for once. Actual money. I was saving up for my wedding and everything. A pox on your house. A pox on your animes. --- Bit of a late aside, but I'm kinda surprised at the shade being thrown at Blood Bowl, given that it's basically Ameritrash Campaign Mode Galaxy Trucker--a game of trying to make the best series of decisions under time pressure, in the hopes of best weathering an inevitable thunderclap of complete bullshit. It's the one Decent Game that managed to escape GW's soulless Profit Maximization Engine with a reasonable number of limbs attached (largely thanks to prolonged triage from the unpaid dev team working in GW's blind spot). Like, I get that the game hinges on the dreaded +X-to-succeed dice rolls. But it's possibly the one game I can think of where that system makes your decisions more meaningful, rather than less, since the gameplay is built around choosing the right moments to risk a catastrophic failure. (Because all failures in Blood Bowl are some degree of catastrophic, since almost any botch gives the turn to your opponent.) And unlike most "risk management games," you're not just repeatedly making a simple choice between low risk/low reward and high risk/high reward. Often, you're making qualitatively-distinct decisions. (E.g. you only have one reroll for the turn, and it's going to the first roll you botch. Is your first risk going to be the defensive move or the offensive move? How many people do you move onto defense before making your first roll, and how many do you leave available to capitalize on a success? Do you blitz the ball carrier in scoring position, or do you write off the point and focus on injuring players to improve the next drive?) And yes, a match can be decided on a string of hot dice. But BB is built to be a tournament-bracket game. The better player might not win a given match, but will finish higher in the league standings at the end of the season. BB has some annoying flaws. The biggest one is that, for a league game of superiority-over-iteration, the iteration cycle is painfully long. It's easier to brush off an unfair mana-screw loss in, say, Magic, because that anomalous game took 5-15 minutes. A dicefest loss in Blood Bowl still takes 1-2 hours to play out, made worse because Blood Bowl's team development rules actively punish you for conceding a game. (Also, the game can be a massive money sink if you purchase miniatures, because GW miniatures will never not be an embarrassing money trap. But you can skirt that by not buying GW miniatures. Like seriously, don't. None of that money goes to Jervis Johnson or the dev team, so you're not even supporting the creators. Do print and play standups, or third party minis or whatever.) But I dunno, this game survived for decades with the support of, like, 0.01% of GW's horrifying marketing engine. The game survived--and evolved--entirely on the back of nerd devotion for like 20 years. And yeah, nerds are powered by unreasonable nostalgia, sure. But if GW nostalgia is all it takes, then why doesn't...I dunno, Gorkamorka have a living rulebook? Or a large surviving goon fanbase? There has to be something appealing in it beyond nostalgia or the GW Brand. Then again, loving Talisman hasn't been cleansed by the fires of history, so maybe that argument holds no water.
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Jan 28, 2015 18:46
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StashAugustine posted:BB does also have some bad issues with faction design, but I agree that it's at least tolerable in digital form where you can play a match in a quarter of the time. Okay, that's another potential issue with Blood Bowl: The factions are notably imbalanced. It's important to note that this is by design--several teams are "comedy options" that intentionally exacerbate the dice mechanics, and are meant to be taken as a form of handicapping for experienced players. Unfortunately, the joke teams aren't very well signposted. There's a line of small print text at the beginning of the team roster section, saying that certain teams are meant for experienced players only. But:
Additionally, even within a given "tier," teams are meant to be balanced across their whole careers, not for specific team values. For instance, a fresh Dwarf team has an advantage against almost every other fresh team, but gradually loses steam as the opposing teams gain crucial skills. Conversely, a Chaos team is basically a weak Orc team until mid-career, where their superior development options start to snowball. Over the course of a league, the imbalance evens out between early-career, mid-career, and late-career teams. But if a new player starts with a late-career team, they might not stick with the game long enough to survive the rough early career.
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Jan 28, 2015 19:20
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Gort posted:Yeah, definitely this. The game falls apart when played in any kind of long-term league or tournament since some teams have tons of good ways to advance their players and others get diddly. "Long term" is a bit of a weird idea in blood bowl. Ideally, you'd want to reset to fresh teams every 2-3 "seasons" in a given league, depending on the size of the player pool and the duration of the season. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are primarily experiencing Blood Bowl through the "perpetual" leagues of the Chaos Edition video game. And the team balance does break down in any sort of perpetual play environment.
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Jan 28, 2015 19:29
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Oh come on. I love Ameritrash and I'm not afraid to say that Blood Bowl is garbage with a great theme. This is the most wrong post in the thread, and I've watched Rutibex try to defend Talisman. A) Er, what teams would those be, exactly? Without other information, I'm going to guess Dwarves, because rookie coaches do not understand how to beat Dwarves. (Here is the secret to their "unbeatable" strategy: Stand a few guys exactly one square away from their "cage"/offensive formation. They will move one square forward a turn and fail to reach scoring distance of the endzone before the half ends. Win the game 1 to 0.) B) No, it doesn't "work incredibly well." With the exception of Amazons, your average agility team can reliably outscore a bashing team with a 3:2 player disadvantage. You will lose players. You will be down players and have awful mercenary stand-ins. Use them as cannon fodder. This is what you're supposed to be doing, and you should still be able to win. (The injury system does have a few things I dislike. Namely, every injury beyond "Miss Next Game" or "Niggling Injury" should just read "Dead." Because you should be firing these players and replacing them.) C) Block supremacy is a thing, yes, but that is one skill-up. Dodge is debatable, and restricted to certain players--most of whom should have started with Block already, so this would be your first level-up. You vastly underestimate skills like Tackle, Wrestle, Guard, Side Step, Mighty Blow, and a whole host of other "second level-up" skills that are often preferable to Blodge. D) Skaven, Humans, and Wood Elves are all new-player friendly agility teams. Lizardmen, High Elves, and Pro Elves are fine with a season's experience. Bruiser teams are easy enough to beat if you can figure out how to avoid them, outscore them, out-position them, or feed them cannon fodder. tl;dr You seem to have decided that there is only one effective strategy in Blood Bowl, with all the conviction of someone declaring Big Money to be the only strategy in Dominion. This is a problem with you, not with the game. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jan 28, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 22:39
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What's the gooncensus on Starlit Citadel's reviews? I'm sure it's been brought up, but I must have missed it in the middle of some good ol' Vasel-bashing.
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Feb 3, 2015 07:28
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Arnm616 posted:Do any of the Galaxy Trucker expansions add to the player count? The Big Expansion comes with a 5-player variant, but the rules get a little more complex to make the adventure cards scale. (They're mostly intuitive. Each abandoned ship/station can be visited twice, for diminishing returns. Each purple enemy has to be defeated twice, but gets weaker after the first "hit." Each combat zone affects the first and second place positions. One planet on each planet card can be visited a second time for a smaller bonus.)
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Feb 4, 2015 22:05
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Indolent Bastard posted:When buying tash-kalar I should look for the CGE logo to get the new version, correct? The CGE logo is on both versions. The old version includes a ZMan Games logo, the new one does not. The new one also features a BGG "Golden Geek Award" logo.
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Feb 10, 2015 16:42
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Rivensteel posted:I've done a little bit of gaming with my girlfriend, and I was hoping to get her something that she might like. We tend to play 2-player, and she's liked iOS Pandemic, Hanabi, 2-player Love Letter, and Forbidden Desert. She hasn't much enjoyed Sentinels of the Multiverse or Robinson Crusoe for the many bits to track and card piles to manage. I think the features we're looking for are scales well to 2 players + plays in 60-90 minutes or less + fewer fiddly bits to set up/track +/- cooperative. Before more people spam Final Attack at you, you might want to try some of the older Real Time co-op games. Space Alert, the modern forefather of the genre, is still a thread favorite, but it's a bit overwhelming by design. You have 10 minutes to protect a ramshackle spaceship from an onslaught of angry aliens, meteors, and the occasional amorous space squid. You have to program your movements (robo-rally style) before the soundtrack stops, then everyone gets a soda and you calmly step through your moves to figure out where (not if, where) someone hosed up and killed everyone. Here's a video. If that sounds like a bit much, Escape: The Curse of theTemple is the lighter, softer real-time game. Roll dice as quickly as possible to move through the rooms of the temple, returning stolen gems to various altars, before the soundtrack ends and the temple collapses on you all. Of course, if your dice come up with curse symbols, you might get briefly turned to stone, and another player will need to come rescue you. If you've played Farkle/Zombie Dice/Martian Dice/Sushi Dice/Whatever-Nerd-Bait-Noun Dice, you can play Escape. Have another video. Zombie 15' is relatively new, a bit expensive, and features goddamn loving zombies, but I like the look of it. This is really the game Zombicide wanted to be and failed at. Run through the streets! Scavenge weapons! Kill zombies to clear your path! But don't make too much noise, or you'll attract more of the fuckers. Streamlined down to the absolute essentials, with no clunky dice mechanics or enemy AI to slow you down. And look, another video. Only the best for you, my friend. If any one of these ends up turning your crank, then yes, Final Attack is the new hotness. That said, and I'm sorry if I'm taking a sale out of your mouth, BL: If you don't like fumbling around with a huge array cards, you might not like Final Attack. The cards are much, much simpler and less mathsy than Sentinels. Almost all of them have big, bright icons instead of text, and boil down to "spend X, get Y." But if big piles of cardboard just intimidate you, it might be a bit too much. EDIT: And you just said you already have Escape. Awesome! If that goes over well, look into these others. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 22:42
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Kai Tave posted:Re: BattleCON, it sounds like my best bet is to wait for Fate then, I'm assuming that the fighters in that set aren't redundant with any of the others (sort of like how Summoner Wars does it I think), and then go with Devastation if that turns out to be a good pick. Actually, your best bet is to go here. Find the one marked "BattleCON: PNP Demo Game." Download it, print it, try it. (To answer your question, there are no redundant fighters between Fate, War, and Devastation.)
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Feb 20, 2015 17:49
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Noaloha posted:Or, crap, I could just ask "what are your personal 2-player game preferences?", and take any suggestions as the recommendations they are. Dominion is a perennial favorite of the thread, plays 2-4, and belongs in every collection. It plays like someone took the fun part of Magic: the Gathering (creating a deck) and made that a game unto itself. Each game, you start with a small deck of ten awful, low value cards, and a shared market of cards that you can buy and add to your deck. Over time, you craft a more and more powerful machine. The rules of the game are dirt simple, with most of the "complexity" being carried by cards and their interactions. Plays in 20-30 minutes. $45 retail to buy either original Dominion or Dominion: Intrigue, either of which can be played just fine by its lonesome. From there, Dominion has 8 (soon to be 9) expansions, which combine to create one the deepest, most varied games on the market. Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends is another 2-4 player favorite, designed by thread hero Vlaada Chvatil. You play as summoners competing in a ritualized duel/performance. You create and command legions of magical statue-soldiers and try to arrange them into mystical patterns to summon even more powerful creatures and please the random aesthetic whims of the Lords of the Arena. Basically, think Wizard Chess from Harry Potter, except it's Wizard Go instead. 1-2 hour playtime, depending on player speed. $40 retail for the latest edition. (You want the one that DOESN'T have the "Z-Man Games" logo.) Yomi and BattleCON get into West Side Story-style gang wars in this thread. There's a lot of snapping and dancing. Both are card games that try to emulate 2D arcade fighting games, and both revolve around players secretly picking a move from their hand and revealing at the same time. Yomi is more abstract, with a focus on timing and setting up combos. BattleCON is more spatial, with a focus on maneuvering and perfect information. Yomi has 21 very, very tightly balanced characters, and assumes you'll pick one character as your "main" to practice and master. BattleCON has 58(!) canon characters, a slew of secret and promotional characters, and assumes you want to try a variety of different playstyles, as well as a variety of alternate modes of play. They're mostly balanced pretty alright, sure. Both games are very deep rabbit holes, and both have their own threads. I prefer BattleCON, but it's very much a taste thing. (Mostly, I don't like how Yomi depicts its female characters.) Yomi is $40 retail for a pack of 4 fighters, and will cost ~$200 for a full set. (Sirlin Games is currently releasing a new edition, and all the new fighters aren't available yet. You can get an older edition with the first 10 fighters for $100, but it's out of date.) BattleCON: Devastation of Indines is $75 retail and comes with 30 fighters, plus arenas, extras, and a cooperative dungeon crawl mode. BattleCON: War of Indines (Revised Edition) is releasing in a couple months, and costs $50 for 18 fighters. BattleCON: Fate of Indines will release in a couple months as well and costs $25 for 10 fighters. All three games are standalone, but are also fully compatible with one another. (Note, there is an older edition of War of Indines from like 2008. It comes in a small brown box. DO NOT BUY THE OLD EDITION. It is ugly as sin, and the characters need errata.) gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Feb 24, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 22:50
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Archenteron posted:So as it turns out, when you play Final Attack and use Leo, whose first rule is "Players cannot use contractions", my group will inevitably begin some sort of failure cascade halfway through the game. It's hilarious. (Each time you break an enemy rule, the enemy evolves. If the enemy can't evolve further (There's 3 evolution stages, and the contraction rule is stage 1), it throws two extra attacks at you. We had a good 6-10 extra attacks thrown at us in one stage.) Leo is the one Robeast I don't really get the theme behind. BL's gone out of his way to explain Fornax. ("The barbecue grill lights you on fire, which makes you very impolite.") Orion is ambushing and misdirecting you, hence the confusing pointing rules. Musca is a swarming insect, making it difficult to talk over the horrible buzzing. And Libra is clearly just the Azathoth of the game, doing nothing until it can instagib you. But I don't get what a giant robot cat has to do with contractions, or playing one handed. Is it a lolcat joke or something?
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Mar 9, 2015 22:49
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Zveroboy posted:I'm having a few friends over in a couple weeks for Tabletop Day and I feel that my collection is still missing a sort of grand "centerpiece" game. Something that would last a few hours, get us talking, scheming, teaming up, backstabbing and warring. I'm lookng at A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, how does that play with 4 people? The base game for AGoT is strictly a six player game. (You could maybe swing five, but not using the official rules. Instead of making Martell neutral, remove Greyjoy and mark Pike Island as inaccessible.) Four is absolutely terrible. That said, there is an expansion for AGoT called A Feast for Crows that specifically retools the game for four players. I've not had a chance to play it, but it might be an option. As far as Sci-Fi games, you still can't do better than Space Alert and Galaxy Trucker.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:32
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Rutibex posted:Instead of replacing the slave cards they should have put them into comical stripped prison jump suits, you know to show that they deserve it. It would be as realistic as pretending slaves didn't exist in the 10th century Surprisingly, I am not playing Meeple Mancala to engage with the historical atrocities of the Abbasid Caliphate period. There's a time, a place, and a venue for sober history in gaming. Usually in games with a more thorough research bibliography than "watched Aladdin a couple times." 
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Mar 27, 2015 00:44
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Prairie Bus posted:Gutter Owl, was it you that brought up the term for when mechanics reinforce theme in the old thread? I was thinking about that and I couldn't remember the term that you used. You're probably thinking about my rants on the concept of "conveyance." Conveyance in game design describes the degree to which the actions, decisions, and responses you are making/experiencing with the game state or game components mirror the actions, decisions, and responses you would make/experience in the situation you are thematically simulating. Or, if you want to sound like less of a prick, conveyance is when what you're actually doing feels like what you're pretend-doing. So Space Alert is a game with strong conveyance because the time pressure, communication difficulties, and mounting crises feel like piloting a hunk of junk through an enemy attack. Whereas Arkham Horror is a game with weak conveyance, because I'm not actually intimidated or awed by the obscure mysteries of this card I've seen like five loving times. And Nyarlathotep can't cow me with his unfathomable cosmic grandeur when he goes down like a punk to a library sciences graduate with a tommygun and a boob window. EDIT: Tekopo posted:I thought it was BL with 'Conveyance'. poo poo, now I gotta go look up which one of us said it first. Okay, looks like BL has me by a mile on this one. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Mar 27, 2015 |
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Mar 27, 2015 01:21
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Quote is not edit, shitprincess.
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Mar 27, 2015 01:22
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