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Anybody else hang out on yucata.de and care to recommend any of the games there? I recently discovered the site while looking for a way to play Thunderstone online, have since gotten semi-hooked on Port Royal, looking for some other games of a similar weight to play with my friends. There's a lot of games on there but I'm not familiar with most of them. Looking primarily for casual-but-thinky but I'm interested to know about any standouts on there.
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Dec 15, 2014 16:58
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 04:20 |
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Thanks for the pointer to boiteajeux, lots of enticing things there! (Including what at first glance appears to be a less byzantine and clunky implementation of Agricola than the one on play-agricola.com)
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Dec 15, 2014 17:26
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Been playing a good bit of Port Royal lately, which is a fun little twist on a deckbuilder with a nice balance between casual and interestingly complex. One thing though: Traders don't seem very good, and I basically never buy them unless I'm scrambling for the last couple of VP at the end. It just seems like a way better investment to buy swords or one of the special actions like Governor or Admiral. Is this just a weird/flawed bit of balance, or is there some aspect of Traders that's actually useful that I'm missing? I primarily play 2 player, maybe they're useful with more people?
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Dec 31, 2014 20:48
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My friend who introduced me to Small World is of the opinion that it plays better by passing around an ipad/laptop hotseat style, rather than setting up the physical board. There's a lot of fiddly tokens, and not anything in the way of hidden information; it's not a game where the physicality of the components is a big thing.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:21
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I'd like to talk a little bit about Castles of Burgundy strategy. It's a game I wasn't sure I'd like, it seemed super dry/euro/mathy at first, and while it doesn't exactly have a ton of charm or personality, the various mechanics are interwoven in an interesting way, and there's just enough randomness to keep things fresh and dynamic while still allowing lots of room for skill -- a lot of the game's challenge is about creating your own luck. I've played about 10 1v1 games so far and one thing I've been finding surprising is how effective economy is -- shipping goods and accumulating silverlings -- compared to focusing primarily on playing tiles and building combo groups. Building tile groups is important too of course, but our games consistently turn into a tense struggle over quarries and ships, especially early on. Ships especially are huge because of all the turn order trickery you can accomplish (i.e. hoarding a ship and grabbing first player right at the end of a year to get 2 turns in a row + first pick in the new year). More quarries means more silverlings means better control over the black market, and we've had a few games come down to who had more silverlings hoarded at the end. As for the other colors, naturally castles are awesome and the sooner you can get them out the better, but there is never the same scarcity/urgency as for ships and quarries. Animals can rake in a big chunk of points but mostly I just fill them in when convenient, unless there is something specific I'm shooting for like the 4 points-per-animal-type bonus, or a chance to rack up ALL OF THE SHEEP in one big pasture. Buildings are cool for setting up intricate combo plays, but don't always carry their weight as well as other plays. Yellow knowledge tiles are the game's biggest random element, and as such it's a little harder to say "I'm gonna go yellow" from the beginning: you might get some game-changing extra abilities (I love the tile that gives you a silverling when you rest to hire workers), or you might get a bunch of "bonus points for a building that never shows up" tiles. Anyway this is a cool little game, I am sure I am still pretty bad at it, would be interested in what other people have found.
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Jan 5, 2015 03:44
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Bubble-T posted:I finally played Caverna yesterday and just found it weird. You're avalanched with resources all game from spaces that give you 3 different things at once, you can put them almost anywhere you want, and while adventuring dwarves feels pretty fun it's also basically just shopping for anything you need and can't get with the game's God resource (rubies). Final scores where 79-80-82 which makes me worried that it's too easy to just do whatever the hell you want with every path being balanced to roughly the same numbers. The few times I've played, it's been with a hardcore Gric player who has outpaced the rest of us by 20+ points. It's pretty easy to play casually and do fairly well, but my sense is there's still a ton of room to point tweak and set up synergistic combos. My hunch is this is especially true with the full/advanced game, but I've only played the basic game so far. Also, with a smaller number of players at least, there's more competitive element possible than might be immediately apparent. The last (3p) game I played, as soon as another player got his 3rd dwarf hat at the blacksmith, I immediately snatched up the Weapon Storage Chamber (3 pt per helmet dwarf) because that was a bunch of points I didn't want him to have.
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Jan 5, 2015 04:38
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Are there any other good games that have simultaneous turns like 7 wonders? More and more I'm becoming aware of the downside to long turns or significant setup and tear down times, but I'm also a little burnt out on 7 wonders. It's not exactly simultaneous, but the "give everybody stuff to do on other players' turns" design of Puerto Rico keeps things moving at a good pace.
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Jan 11, 2015 16:28
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I played my first round of Stone Age the other night. It has a nice WP-light feel, a nice change-up from the crunchy WP games like Caverna/Belfort/Dungeon Petz that we usually play. I get the general flow of the game, though I'm not sure I have a good sense of strategy and was wondering if anybody had any tips? I had a close game with my friend (his first time playing too), he beat me out by about 10 points right at the end because he'd gotten all 8 of the technology symbols, while I'd concentrated more on huts, and cards which scored off of population or farming track. We were playing with the usual WP philosophy that recruiting more peeps is higher priority than everything else, so on alternate turns whichever of us was starting player visited the SEX HUT, while the other player went to the fields (+ farming track) or got a tool. Tools look super useful once you accumulate a few, but I'm not quite sure when/how to best prioritize them.
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Jan 12, 2015 01:30
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The End posted:The other line of thinking is sleeve nothing, as it's only treasure and victory cards that'll cop the most wear, and buying a base card replacement from time to time is muc cheaper than sleeving the whole shebang. They also make a nice Dominion Base Card set, I think it's like $11 US for a small box with just replacement currency/victory/curse/potion cards, all with nicer and more distinct artwork:   I dislike the feel of sleeves, and honestly the Dominion cards are sturdier and better made than most games.
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Jan 12, 2015 15:39
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silvergoose posted:More people is *not* the most important thing, early; generally you either go heavy tools (making every die count more) or heavy farms (and then recruit more people once you basically never have to send people to feed). Played (Stone Age) again last night, went heavy tools, let my friend take the extra peep every turn, tried to burn through one of the hut stacks while I was ahead and he was still having to send half his people to hunt every turn. It was a good thought, but he caught on and kept blocking the hut stack I wanted (putting a peep there and not actually taking the hut), and although a small number of peeps with good tools is impressively efficient (I could mostly get away with sending only one or two peeps when I needed a resource), I fell behind in the production curve, couldn't keep up buying cards, and lost pretty spectacularly. Still was a satisfying learning experience. I like the game a lot though I'm a little overwhelmed by how much it feels like you have to keep track of. It feels somehow more cutthroat than other 2-player WP games I've played, that there's more focus on reacting to and outmaneuvering the other player, rather than simply building the more efficient production engine.
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Jan 12, 2015 16:09
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silvergoose posted:Yeah it can be pretty brutal 2p, it's a little more forgiving more-p since not all the spaces are blocked by one worker. The key to heavy tools is to then be able to send one guy out hunting while the rest gathers resources and cards. So, like, send one guy getting food, two guys getting wood, and two guys can take a card or hut each, and the last guy assuming you grew once, say, gets tools whenever he can. It usually goes decently well, but yeah, not the easiest. Glad you're having fun! Finally won a game, 281-274, focusing on farms and growing up to 7 peeps moderately early. I ended up with kind of a crazy food surplus at the end (22 food) but going farm so much forced the other player to hunt more and tie up his extra peeps. The growth/production curve in Stone Age is pretty interesting and I'm sure it'll take a few more games to get a better sense for things. The random element seems a little swingy and unpredictable near the end, but that's not entirely a bad thing; all of the games we've had so far have been pretty nail-biting even though there's hardly any hidden information in the game (unless you get one of the cards with a face-down-card reward).
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Jan 12, 2015 23:14
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Last night I dreamed I was at a party where people were playing Cards Against Monopoly: whoever wins the hand of CaH gets to roll the Monopoly dice. I assume it involves money going to Free Parking, but I'm speculating on that part.
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Jan 19, 2015 20:45
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AMooseDoesStuff posted:So what's the consensus of Cosmic Encounter? Worth playing in the same way that the original 1960s Star Trek & Dr. Who series are worth watching. Most aspects of it are conspicuously very clumsy by modern standards, but I think it still has a lot of heart and panache, and it's interesting seeing how much of an influence it was on later games (like MtG; Cosmic Encounter pretty much invented the idea of emergent/synergistic effects between different abilities). Basically it's not super deep or balanced, but I think it still has a nice sense of fun and style. Worth trying if you get a chance (at a cafe or whatever) but probably not a good candidate for a blind buy.
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Jan 25, 2015 18:10
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Countblanc posted:Man there's so much iconography in Burgundy and little bits that it's a huge pain to teach someone who (I'm assuming) is coming from a straight Catan background. Also the game just looks really boring; the components are bad and the player aids are cluttered and feel cheap. I like playing it but I can't imagine trying to pitch it to someone who was already uninterested in moving past Catan. There's a review someplace that described CoB as looking like a cross between bad motel room art and a college math textbook (and then went on, rightly, to praise it).
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Jan 26, 2015 22:51
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 04:20 |
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Ahaha The guy from The Oatmeal is co-producing a card game that looks like it is essentially Uno with lol monkey cheese random humor. And NSFW expansions already planned.
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Jan 26, 2015 23:10
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