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We played Betrayal at House on the Hill last night. It was scenario 7, and my wife ended up being the traitor. She got kind of butthurt because we just about beat her in two turns, so I'm trying to figure out if there are some details to this. However, I will spoiler it: Scenario 7 was the one with the carnivorous plants. She was excited to play this as the traitor since we do keep some carnivorous plants. She was one of the little girls, since we didn't have the priest in our group, and the fallback went to her due to a dominant stat. The heroes did not know the plants could not move up/down stairs, nor did we know what the traitor's motives were. We had a kitchen on the ground floor from which we could make the chemicals. I had the item (book with instructions on the bug spray) that triggered the haunt, might surpassing 8, and knowledge of 5. Two of us were in the basement and one was in the upper. So we sent our upper-floor person into the mystic elevator and crashed down into the basement--it was a zero roll, but it worked out. We piled into the elevator, and hoped for the ground floor so we could get to the kitchen, but we wound up at the upper level. I believe here my wife as the traitor actually moved towards us, which I considered to be the only part of the scenario over which she had much control and should have done something different. This is because on our turn after that, we just stormed out of the elevator and turned her little girl character into a red streak across the floor. The first melee was a roll of 9 might versus 6, and then I rolled 9 might versus 3. The traitor dying ended any chance of her explicitly winning the scenario according to the traitor's tome. At best we could all just died and triggered a draw. My wife was frustrated because she knew she had to take our item and throw it away to win absolutely, but we pressed that it was a suitable victory if we all died. In the previous scenarios, the traitor didn't have to live for the traitor to succeed. So she kept playing with the plants, but we managed to mix up the spray. It looked like from the rules that we could do the "Walk of Jesus." with the spray. It wasn't an attack action to use it; merely walking into a room with a plant tip while having the spray would kill that plant. So immediately after mixing the spray, I walked through three rooms and took out something like 6 plants--far more than the 4 we needed for victory. What we didn't know on our side, and what my wife did not play well, was that apparently the plants could grab on to us and drag us into the roots, which would cause us to be devoured. So I was thinking if she had positioned them so that they were just out of reach on our turn, she could have caught some of us and dragged us away, but I dunno.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:46
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We have started to think that Machi Koro with the expansion is really luck-driven. I'm wondering if we're setting this up right. We took all the cards other than the free ones and shuffled them all together. We then made it so that only 10 unique cards are out at a time for purchase. If we had less than 10 after a purchase, and the next card was for one already out there, it just got piled on top until we got a unique one for the market at that time. Purple cards that everybody had already bought were also flushed out. Everybody now thinks it's very arbitrary. I suspect a lot of it is based on us accumulating cards to the point that basically one-shot to victory. I think that happens because people don't want to pile money, roll poorly, and give it all away to their opponents. So everybody will blow a fortune on cards that are out there so that they end the turn with nothing, while hoping that they accumulate enough for their one-shot. So I'm wondering if instead we should have, say, a 20-turn limit and whoever has the most money invested into the victory cards + surplus money wins.
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Feb 15, 2015 07:47
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Awhile back, I ranted about Machi Koro with the expansion still having some major flaws in it, but I found out we were playing it wrong. You can only buy one card a turn, whereas we were buying as many as we wanted. That meant usually buying as many as we could afford because nobody wanted to get nailed by red/purple cards. The game still has some arbitrariness to it, but now the red/purple cards have some meaning--at least later in the game.
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Mar 24, 2015 22:45
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My wife and I tried to play Brewcrafters this afternoon, and it devolved for my wife into a game of fourth-dimensional chess. I feel like it's because I'm the homebrewer and she feels like in this case she's playing a war game with a general or something. For our efforts, our scores were something apparently ridiculous like 83-60, but I am pretty sure we scored myself too generously; I was making GBS threads beers out of my brewpub, and I think those don't count for reputation. My wife went quickly for a two-bottle setup, then got her face kicked in economically for being unable to utilize it with the large staff she had. I wound up being able to pick up advanced ingredients at a pittance, and could pretty much guarantee myself a lambic a turn. So I became the sour beer specialty shop, making 5 rep a turn + 1 bonus for hop infusers + 1 bonus for having the brewing breakthrough research level. That being said, I'd probably throw up IRL if I drank a hop-infused lambic. We are having a hard time wrapping our heads around all the possibilities in the game. It's hard to figure out strategies because there's so much going on. Neither of us got any farms, for example. I'm also trying to figure out how the variation really comes into play with a 2-player game. The recipes are not wildly different, so it smells like there's a exploitable, consistent strategy in there, but I don't know what they might be. I'm hoping there isn't. 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. In a play-through, I saw them working through from that, so I feel like something isn't right with what I got. Beyond that, is there a helper sheet or something that just lists all the subsystems? My wife and I decided to try to crawl through a contrived run to try some of the stuff. We bring in a threat--a meteor--and immediately ponder firing the pulse cannon at it. But we didn't know how much energy it needed, how much damage it could do (5, IIRC), and whether or not it could target blue zone (yes, we think). I'm not really interested in an answer to that specific question in the thread, but rather if there is something that quickly summarizes all the ship's subsystems. I'm thinking if we're struggling at this so much after our 4th dimension Brewcrafters, other people with which we'd play are going to be despairing.
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Apr 6, 2015 05:04
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Jabor posted: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. Hmm okay good to know; that makes it a lot more concise.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:02
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Earlier in the thread, a few people were talking about "vaselification" or something similar. I assume it has to do with Tom Vasel and/or The Dice Tower, but I couldn't follow it beyond that. What is the big worry?
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Apr 6, 2015 06:02
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Durendal posted:
Somebody needs to explain this to me like I'm a 10-year-old or something, mostly because I don't know the other games that are being mentioned in that post. Is it that they're recommending stuff that doesn't even relate?
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Apr 6, 2015 19:01
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Something to worry about when going from Pandemic to one of the Forbidden games is that Pandemic tends to click better with people. The can get behind the whole "there are different diseases, these starters cities will be hotbeds, and diseases spread" vibe. We found with Forbidden Desert, it was just a little more abstract, so your more casual co-op gamers don't wrap their head around it. The storm in Forbidden Desert is a much better mechanic than Forbidden Island, but confuses the poo poo out of people. Actually speaking of that storm, the official rules are that you move the cards in the indicated direction, but it's easier on our heads to act like the storm is what is moving. That means the storm is technically moving in the exact opposite direction of what the card shows, but that fundamentally doesn't change anything over the course of a game. We generally rank the games in this order from least to best: Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, and Pandemic. Since you already have Pandemic, you might consider instead an expansion if you don't have one already. We got On The Brink, and found that you it is set up so you can elegantly fit the original game into its box along with all the expansion material.
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Apr 7, 2015 20:57
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After playing a bunch of other board games, tonight I got the chance to actually try Catan. I believe it was with an expansion. I wound up in the most intractable position based on my start that I had to just abdicate. I had thought I had started next to a port where I could trade 2 resources for 1 brick, when it was the reverse. I also had this notion that I would connect based on other people's roads, so I had built my settlements on completely opposite sides of the island. The guy setting up did nothing to really try to tell me that might not work out. A bunch of us were beginners, and he just figured we'd play to 5 and then start over, but everybody else insisted on continuing. I did not have anything that could give me a brick, and I had nothing anybody wanted to trade for some. We had whatever expansion rules in effect that let us play with 6 people. So everybody else was starting to build everything else, and I literally couldn't do anything. When I'd get 4 of something to trade for bricks, the thief would come around and take it. So I had to just give up. I was pretty surprised for how well-regarded Catan was. I was just totally powerless. I just assumed I'd linger behind everybody and try a few of the game features, but I was stuck at the starting point the whole game until I just gave up and started cleaning up. The only thing I could had tried was development cards and just hoped I accumulated the 8VP I needed above my base 2 in order to win, but I couldn't imagine how I could sustain that. It's about as bad as when I played Risk as a teenager and tried to break out with 30 units, only to roll 1's over and over again until they were completely depleted. So all I could do every few minutes was toss some dice, and then just walk off to clean up a little more.
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May 10, 2015 08:18
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Rutibex posted:Catan can be cruel, especially if you are new and no one will trade resources with you. You would be happy to know that Catan is basically an antique by board gaming standards now, there are much superior games out there.
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May 10, 2015 12:28
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al-azad posted:I usually suggest Stone Age as the replacement for Catan as a gateway game. You're still throwing dice for resources but you have much more control over their acquisition that you can't really screw yourself outside of being really inept or really unlucky. That's funny. We had Stone Age out as an alternative the whole night, and we have a box of Star Trek Catan that we haven't even opened yet. It's just two people knew the regular version, so we thought we'd cut our teeth on that first. Only one of the group that was actively playing had played before. The person that brought the game and tried to explain everything played as the bank. I'm going to chalk it off to "A Game Too Far." We have this tendency to play one game more than we should in the night, and that game ends up taking twice as long and everybody plays like complete idiots. Last time it was Temporum. The cards we drew to establish what ages were available were not very useful together. There were three ages everybody had to just move between: one to draw cards, one to play them for money, and one to score them. Every once in awhile, somebody would be in a position to screw a player or two by switching them to an age they couldn't immediately escape. Other than that, we were all pretty much at the mercy of the cards we had drawn, and we could have just turned it into a card game for the way we were playing it. Even while he was trying to explain it, I think it was pretty obvious our brains were just fried. I think we'll just force a better end time and stop with a party game. Since I am hosting these, it kind of scares me to think if one of the guests had been in that situation I felt I was in.
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May 10, 2015 21:07
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So my wife and I finally opened up our Star Trek Catan box after this past weekend's Catan-strophe. I can see how the role cards help, although it looks like starting position is still king. I decided to see what would happen with us playing two players if I did not necessarily have access to one of the common resources for building ships (roads) and outposts (settlements). We were just testing it out; we know playing normal rules with two players isn't really valid. I think it sufficiently crimped my style; I had quite a few more turns where I could not really do anything, and I did not have anything of interest to trade. I guess if I was in a position where all those starting resources were claimed when doing initial layout, I'd have to latch on to development card generation hard and pick my starting positions to secure them. It still feels very arbitrary.
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May 12, 2015 16:59
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The quote button is getting screwed up on my work filter for some reason. Is somebody posting boobs?al-azad posted:Negotiation games hinge on player cooperation and it sucks when everyone is tight lipped even when they're winning. Could you imagine a game of Diplomacy where no one negotiates with each other? Holy poo poo. I can barely imagine playing Diplomacy in the first place. I've just heard so much terrible stuff about it and how people degenerate. I think I've mentioned in the thread before that I'd love to get a cheap box of the game with half the missing pieces, just so I could replace the boxes contents with a bunch of knives from the thrift store. So on game night, I can go, "Anybody want to play Diplomacy?" *throws down box full of knives* fozzy fosbourne posted:Some pretty straightforward games still have tedious manuals that make them much more difficult to learn than they ought to be. Some popular euros come to mind; easy squeezy lemon peezy the moment I just executed a turn while looking at a cheat sheet, but myself and the others I play with simply kept putting down the rule books after a page or so because of the tedium and the feeling that this is the longest possible road to understanding the game. Then there's the case where nobody can seem to remember the cost rules for laying tracks in Trains, even with the back of base manual and the back of the expansion manual out and showing the table right there. That game and waste. It's funny that in a room of 10 people, somebody in the middle of the conversation can say, "trains" and three people will randomly say, "waaaaaaste."
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May 12, 2015 19:04
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What do people think of Artipia Games generally? We liked Among The Stars so we got some others. Briefcase was broken in the base game. I spent 8 consecutive turns unable to do anything but deliberately run down resources so the game could end. Drumroll was really hard to get points midgame of any volume, and then my wife wanted to kill me when I used a doublevote to start the show and cause her to hemorrhage points from not having enough money. We have Shadows Over The Empire, which looks promising, but the Rahdo for it had Jenn getting backed into a corner due to a hostile card mix. We have the expansions for Briefcase and Drumroll. However, they are just these little things that make me think they are bug fixes and not expansions. The Briefcase expansion made the fast start rules canon, and gave players something to do with their blocked cards. That probably should have just been there from the start. We also inevitably are confused by rules in Artipia Games rulebooks and hVe to trawl Boardgamegeek to figure out WTF. plester1 posted:I got Mysterium and Blood Rage for xmas. Any first-timer tips for these games, like rules that often get missed? For Mysterium, ignore the clairovyance track completely. The original did not have it, and it was enough of a challenge before players less good at guessing your intentions got punished by getting even less information.
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Dec 28, 2015 21:26
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We tried a 4-player game of Eminent Domain last night, with a lot of confusion. I had been playing according to my own perceived adjustments I read on BoardGameGeek, and nobody else had played before who could say otherwise. I spent most of the game trying to keep everything straight with everybody and blew my score horrifically. A noble sacrifice. I am also pretty sure I screwed up all the adjustments too. As I understand it, when you take a warfare or colonize role, you pick one particular aspect of that role to do. So you can either make fighters/take over a planet for warfare, or tuck in colonize cards/take over a planet with colonize. You can't, say, use 3 warfare cards to make fighters and then use a 4th in that role to take over the planet. Where it gets goofy is the leader bonus. I was lead to believe that despite all the card crap, people could choose to follow you in that "subrole." So if you play the warfare role to attack a planet, other people could then follow and attack a planet if they had one. If the followers wanted to instead, say, produce fighters, then they had to dissent. Does this seem correct with current thinking? I ask because I know it is not written that way, but some discussions made me think this was correct. I also got completely mixed up at the end on what happens with boosters from cards--particularly colonize boosters. If somebody had a card with a colonize boost on it, and a planet needing 3 colonies, then I presumed they only needed to use 2 colonize cards on the planet. The third could implicitly come from their extra, although they'd still need one more colonize card to actually settle the planet in the settle role. Or is that wrong? If so, what good are those colonize boosters? It's not like warfare boosters were you can just point at them when making more fighters and go to town. Some more trivia: one of the players got the colony drop ship scenario, and we realized we completely hosed that up afterwards. He was taking a colonize card from the stack each turn. I probably would have one then because the game ended right when Rocko's death machine was spinning up. However, he was taking a colonize card per turn until they depleted. Meanwhile, we also decided the rules for Carcassone: Hunters and Gatherers are a little goofy. The rules at mention scoring for, say, the fisherman is the player "who alone controls" the river gets points. It implies if you wind up with two fishermen on one river by connecting separate rivers that nobody scores, but we assumed from seeing some other Carcassone stuff that was wrong. Finally, we suck at Pandemic: The Cure. We've played 11 times, and won twice. Each time, we had a scientist role, and one of the times was at supereasy. We normally play at what we thought from directions was the normal difficulty; one epidemic in from the start. We also lose to outbreaks. I read up on this and saw that we should not reroll much. It did not help. We also would regularly buy cards if we didn't necessarily need one, but just wanted a cured/less disruptive cube go back in the bag and help our odds. Outbreaks are just so much more powerful in this game than the board game because there aren't really played cubes can get dumped an get ignored. Half the problem is researching cures would take upwards of three turns. The scientist could start rolling with just two, but we'd have situations with four cubes, and we'd roll 3 hospitals and a single dot.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:54
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I'll respond to different topics in different posts. Carcassonne here:Some Numbers posted:Wow, in my haste to correct you on EmDo, I completely missed this. Each river network can only have one fishing hut. Once someone drops a hut, no one else can place on that network. The rivers got connected after the huts were placed. Same for the fisherman. At any case, I was talking about the fishermen, because it was pretty clear in the end-of-game table that everybody got the same points if they wound up on a single, unified river. I finally have the manual here again. In the river section they have a section that is using just fishermen, not huts, so I assume the section is particular to fishermen. Huts are two pages away. quote:A player who alone occupies a completed river scores 1 point for each river tile, as well as 1 point for each fish in any lake terminating that river There's a separate section asking "What happens when multiple tribe members occupy one completed river or forest?" Apparently, the one with more members will score it, and they share otherwise. So I guess I just answered my own questions on that after finding that section again. The end-of-game section mentions huts share points too. Bottom Liner posted:Ignoring all of your issues with Eminent Domain, which is pretty drat straightforward, how can you read the rules, decide they're goofy, then declare them wrong? Blocking is a huge part of Carcassone and that's exactly what that rule is talking about.
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Jan 4, 2016 07:46
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Regarding Eminent Domain: I asked some of this on BoardGameGeek, so I guess I'll see from there eventually. I can't find where I had read about having to do the exact same role, so must have been hogwash in retrospect.Ralp posted:Colonize icons present in your empire (either on face-up planet cards or on a few permanent techs) are described explicitly in the rules. They just permanently lower the number of tucked colonies required to settle planets. The Colony Ship tech card makes colonies work more like fighters: instead of tucking them under a planet, you can just tuck every colony icon under the Ship card itself, and later freely redeploy them to any planet that you are ready to settle. Plus, as a free action once per turn, you can tuck one card with a colony icon under the Colony Ship. quote:Colony Ship holds Colonies. I suppose it could be something like: quote:Free Action: +1 Colony to Colony Ship
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Jan 4, 2016 07:58
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Bottom Liner posted:Real talk: do you work for Tabletop? Ehh, nope. What? We watched some of those some time ago but it seemed like the more seasons there were, the more tattoos Wil got, the more he transformed into a dick. We mostly just pay attention to the upcoming Tabletop season list so we can tell if we should buy a game before the actual episode airs because everybody usually sells out afterwards. For video, my wife likes to play a bunch of Rahdo, Game Night!, and some Dice Tower stuff as television background stuff though. In our experience, it gives just enough information to do something stupid trying to play these things. I think everybody's figuring that out. That being said, this past weekend was just particularly bad for it. We tried a bunch of stuff that was pretty new to all of us. I had only played Eminent Domain with my wife previously. We have played it repeatedly, but we have reached a point where we tend to both look at the same paragraph in a rule book and just assume the same thing anymore. So I had decided it was time to bring some other poor bastards in and make a mess  .When it came to Carcassonne, it looks like the one rule we actually broke was "starting an unpracticed game after midnight." The games end up taking twice as long and everybody collectively turns stupid. I remember ranting on here how terrible my first Cataan experience was. We did get smashed by the mechanics of the base game when we had played it, but the real issue was we tried to start it after midnight. Everybody else was all like "Hey gently caress hearing all the rules in details let's just wreck this thing," which we went on to do in slow, painful detail. I don't think it will bring my any faith, but we did successfully play a game of Eldritch Horror a few months ago, but it was started before midnight, you see . . . Rocko Bonaparte fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 08:53
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I absolutely loathed base Cataan due to the dice, and it kept me from unwrapping the Star Trek Cataan we had bought at a decent price. The Star Trek one has role cards, which I think is in at least a few of the other themed Cataans. It takes off a lot of the edge. You always have a role card regardless of what ever ill fortune you have. You can force a trade with one of them, outright take something with another, or substitute resources with a third.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:50
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Sloober posted:The role cards make the experience more tolerable, and they created some for base catan. So if you absolutely must play it or w/e, buy them as a gift for whoever really likes catan. Are those Catan Scenarios: Helpers of Catan Expansion? There are two people I work with that have the original that I think would make use out of it, so I might give them a late Christmas present. One of them had brought Catan over the one time we had a horrible run.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:21
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One of the people at our game nights hates playing a bad guy in any of the social games like Resistance: Avalon or One Night: Ultimate Werewolf. She will actually vote for the mission to pass every time. This was funny when my wife was Merlin, and the last quest had two minions in it, so she threw up her arms, declared herself Merlin and went to get some food. The mission succeeded, much to her confusion, but then when the assassination phase came around, it was pretty obvious what to do. Honestly, it would have been a brilliant move if she was Percival instead. What made it funnier is in something like 10+ games, she had never been Merlin, and was chomping at the bit to try it once. Some people just can't take the idea of being the "bad guy." We tried to come up with a narrative in Avalon to help her out, but it doesn't help that all the minion cards have really horrendous-looking people on them on red backgrounds. It's really hard to come up with a cover story for that. Like, "King Arthur had Merlin cast a spell that prevents all the Minions of Mordred from sleeping, so that's why your eyes are a little screwed up. You want to stop all those bastards because their goal is to make the kingdom toil sleeplessly forever." She's kind of like my 9-year-old Catholic school self who thought walking down the wrong side of the road was a sin or something. It's really awkward; we prefer the little goody-two-shoes that turn  horrifically evil when given a chance.Like really, what's it going to do to your moral permanent record? You drift off to the afterlife and get committed to a pit of despair because they relished being a bad guy in a role playing game one time in their otherwise spotless life. Do I have this correct?
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Jan 10, 2016 18:07
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Just played Mottainai twice with my wife. I read the rules, watched the official rule explanation video, and watched a 60-minute playthrough that was used in the KickStarter. My wife, not knowing any of the rules and getting frustrated as I tried to explain it, crushed me both times. The second time, she had half the clay cards in her area within 4 turns. I blame the shuffle on that one. She claims it's from all the San Juan she plays on the phone. I don't think you can just put it on that.
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Jan 10, 2016 22:13
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Big McHuge posted:Now recommend me some Alhambra expansions. I figured the work camp module would add complexity. In reality, it ended with a bunch of people just staring at them. I am unsure if they provide enough points. We also tried putting the role cards in the deck. I think that could be fun, but all players should know what is out there beforehand. Many of those expansions become harder to do when you are only playing with two players.
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Jan 12, 2016 09:08
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Selecta84 posted:On the Brink is the only Pandemic expansion I really need, right? Even if you wanted to get more expansions, On The Brink should still be your first pick. Beyond what was previously mentioned, there's an optional bioterrorist cat-and-mouse game you can play too. But beyond the mechanics, the expansion is laid out so you can put all the original game material inside and just use that box. It has stacking peetri dishes for the disease cubes and slots for everything else. For what it matters, the expansion becomes the new Pandemic.
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Jan 14, 2016 17:40
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Do a lot of deck builders devolve into long turns with compound operations? I seem to wind up in that mode because I like the moving parts, but it makes my wife want to kill me. Today's example was Dominion--just the base game. I wound up spamming villages so I could use the foundry to cycle my cards. I ended up losing 49 to 51 to her strategy of rarely cycling. It was not bad for my first time while I blindly searched for my groove, but it drove her nuts. I had something like 13 cards out at once, and I had to struggle to keep straight how many actions I had left to spend.
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Jan 27, 2016 09:43
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MrL_JaKiri posted:If they used all 12 it's not too difficult. Kind of a trivial mistake to make for your first game. Second game, yes. Apparently my wife played with her mom first awhile ago. Her mom won, for what it's worth. I looked some of this up last night. I guess people really analyze this game. I talked to my wife a little bit more and I think deck builders are just not for her. She's frustrated if I do anything that gives more actions, or draws more cards, or does anything that prolongs the turn from beyond dispensing and using the initial hand. So that pretty much means just playing a concentrated money hand (is that what the cool kids call "Big Money?"). She doesn't want to play Trains any more either as there are usually a few actions to draw more cards or similar, and I end up wading into them. It sounds like she doesn't like these games if 40% or more of any available cards are in effect table pollution. I can't emphasize enough: even a single village is too much for her style. I am pretty sure I did have too many villages though. I had bought all but one of them across this protracted 12-province game. If we had played through the same cards again in the same order, I probably would have been destroyed. As it was, with the drawn-out effect of having too many VP cards, I bought the last province cards and still lost. I had bought some junk thinking they would have mattered more, when they never did me anything. I also shied away from getting too much extra money, and favored using my two mines to upgrade my currency. My idea was to roll out all my cards and try to use that little money to do what I needed. I didn't have enough smithies (yeap, no foundry, smithy) to increase my hand size, and I went most turns with a surplus of actions. I also didn't realize remodel let me upgrade just about anything, apparently. I thought it was just the buildings, but you can throw it apparently at everything. All I can think we can do with cards like this and still do engine stuff are games like Deus because the chains are very well-established and are pretty quick to do even at the end of the game. Half the problem with these rapid cycling strategies is how hard it is to lay everything out on your turn. So the game does slow down dramatically on my turn. She does something in 5 seconds and then I grumble for 30 seconds over the diarrhea I generated on the table in front of me as I took actions to draw and play more cards. If I just started doing that during her own turn, it would take away 5 seconds, and then make it a huge pain if she plays a militia. disperse posted:There are a couple strategies with heavy cycling that seem effective (my experience is largely playing against the Androminion AI, so I'm not sure how good these would be against a good human player):
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Jan 27, 2016 16:35
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I think I'll argue 30 seconds isn't AP, but it is annoying with just villages. If I had a nice basket of things in front of me and I had to figure out how to make hay of it, then that's one thing. It's another that it was "village, village, village, village." Mostly I was using them as placeholders to try to draw out all my money. The only tactical decision I had to make was whether or not to keep going and see if I could buy two provinces, since I needed to catch up from the lag building that deck gave me. In truth, the lag time was too long anyways and we would have run out of provinces if we set up right. Still, I saw that stack and made a semi-informed guess at the pace. What really took a lot of time with doing them was keeping track of how many actions I had, and I was trying to be judicious about it since it was my first time, and my wife doesn't necessarily trust me when a gajillion cards come out. Not that I'm cheating, but that I'm going to fumble it. So I have to think, "One action spent, now I have zero, then I add two for my village, draw a card, play village, now I have one action, but I add two, so I have three..." when I figured out it was just an odd number series, it got much faster... down to about 12-15 seconds, at most. It's still not what I think my wife wants, which is "Card, card, card, card, card, I do this, I buy that k thx bye." MrL_JaKiri posted:Minions are from Intrigue, Alchemists are (appropriately enough) from Alchemy. Is there a particular expansion well-suited to thinner decks in general? Impermanent posted:Try playing with the Chapel in your next game. ...or should I just be doing this?
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Jan 27, 2016 18:43
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Mister Sinewave posted:I played with a fellow I eventually could not stand. He has to read and carefully understand every card and every option always equally. So this means he can't go "oh what's this? Oh extra exploration that's not relevant to me right now nvm" Any action that expands this decision space in any way doubles whatever his current think-time is. On top of it all, he always does whatever expands his options the most. You should set up a game of Shadows over the Empire with them. Just set it up, tell them they go first, and move on with the rest of your night.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:56
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My wife shows me some board game she got from a reseller on Amazon. It was supposed to be new. What we got has no shrink wrap, something inside was crumpled, and there was the name of the game and "Condition: New" taped to the top of the box. I can't even remember the name of the game. We already set up the return.
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Feb 9, 2016 16:01
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So it finally happened: Trains, one of our groups' favorites, finally turned into "Dominion with a board game near it." My wife and I played last night. I basically let her play on the board while I bought temporary timetables and tourist trains. The timetables let you draw two more trains from your deck, and the tourist trains are 1 VP each time you play them. So I just kept drawing my tourist trains to make points while building up more tourist trains and temporary timetables. Then I got two recycling centers and just bought out the towers. I had built one rail link into the adjacent city from my start point, and put down two stations. I used the recycling centers to pare down the waste from the towers. The score was something like 78 to 35. We're pondering ways to house rule making the map more important.
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Feb 9, 2016 19:07
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Players not used to deck builders have to understand a few of the mechanics. I didn't understand them until I tripped across something that explained cycling, clogging, and general deck management. You'd suspect people coming from collectible games would figure it out, but they never had to build up their deck during the game using a starting supply of what looks like crap. So they don't necessarily know how to start with that deck and turn it into something effective.rchandra posted:When I played Letters I felt like I'd rather just play Scotland Yard. I liked Specter Ops more but unsure of its longevity - only have 3 plays.
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Feb 9, 2016 22:44
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So we cycled out Trains for the base Dominions over the weekend. It was my second time playing. Somebody had played three times, and the other two never played it. I gave sufficient warning about playing Village Idiot, set up an hourglass and we went for it. I hope with 4 players that you set out all of the provinces, since that's what we did. The scores came out 36, 33, 27, and ...3. One of the newcomers went Village Idiot despite the growing, hilarious commentary about it, and he never bought any property. I wound up winning with a fairly even basket of markets, villages (only two of them!), and smithies. The other new player went Big Money and actually played admirably well with that in his first game. However, him and another one got a few militias and slowed the game down. That was great for me because then I didn't have to buy them. I am pretty sure I would have lost if the game was not slowed with militia. It's pretty clear we have a crew that like to drop out a gajillion cards in one turn that spit out confetti and prizes, so I am thinking we should get Prosperity to boost this up. Or we should just play Deus or something to scratch that itch.
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Feb 29, 2016 19:50
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How do libraries work in the base Dominion game? Let's say I have something that gets me more actions, and I end my turn acting on a library. Do I get to draw 7 more cards and spend any leftover actions on them as I see fit?
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Mar 23, 2016 20:00
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deadwing posted:You can't "end your turn" like that. Once you buy a card, you're done with actions. You do your action cards, then your currencies. I should elaborate there. I meant that for the last thing I could do with the cards in front of me, I played my library. What counts as in-hand there? If I play, say 4 cards before the library, does that mean I am starting the library with 5 cards in hand?
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Mar 23, 2016 20:27
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Foehammer posted:Also keep in mind you don't slap down treasures until you're done with actions, so you can't dump out your coppers into "play" and then draw a whole handful from library. OK, so I assume unplayed action cards also don't leave my hand. So let's say I got 1 festival, 1 cellar, 2 coppers, and a library. 1. I put down the festival. The other 4 cards are still in hand. I tap that festival to be my action, and now I have two actions. 2. I put down the library. I now have 3 cards in hand. I start drawing 4 cards into my hand. I first get: estate, cellar, gold, gold. 3. I may set aside action cards, and I set aside the cellar since I have one already. I am assuming that means I can draw another one, which is a gold. At this point, the library action is done. 4. I have an action left, so I use my cellar to discard the estate and hope for something else. Am I so far, so good?
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Mar 24, 2016 02:11
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MrL_JaKiri posted:1. Where's the tapping come from? So what does setting them aside really mean then? Let's say I drew 4 action cards. Now what? Recall some many pages ago that my first game was Village Idiot. I've stayed clear of that, but today we had some interesting things happen. Somebody did buy the library card, declaring it was for giggles, and we all figured we'd look it up and litigate it when he used it. Indeed, it was a mess. We decided to allow the generous interpretation of it to stand because we didn't know. At any rate, he didn't win because somebody else was able to throne room 3 smithies with the help of other compounding cards and go on a game-ending shopping spree. Also, many thanks to everybody putting up with this bullshit. Of the lot of games I have, I seem to run into the most situations with Dominion. I get to be the lead idiot in asking all these questions here since they come up when I'm playing, and I nobody knows what to do about it.
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Mar 24, 2016 02:20
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Okay, I think I got it. I should be able to play again this weekend with the same lineup and see how it goes. I have the Prosperity expansion coming in, so I am hoping what I'm learning in the details here will spare me some disasters with those cards.
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Mar 24, 2016 02:50
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In retrospect, I think a lot of my problems with Dominion have come from bad habits from playing Trains. We learned how to play that from a BGG Game Night! video, and they were playing open-hand for the sake of film. We always played that way. Hence, we didn't really have a difference between one's hand and one's play area. It also mattered less in Trains since there wasn't a limit or order to actions and buying.
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Mar 24, 2016 18:51
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You're supposed to use Ikea shelves guys! That's, like, the rule and stuff.
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Mar 25, 2016 16:44
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EnjoiThePureTrip posted:I'm going to be playing Sheriff of Nottingham tonight. Anything I should keep in mind, be aware of, or modify the rules for? You can offer a bribe to get the sheriff to open other people's bags. A thing I like to do is offer a bribe to open my own bag. Future contracts are not allowed, and anybody offering it is a dick. Something people miss is you can only declare one type of thing. So you can't declare 1 bread and 2 chickens. You can declare 3 breads and try to get the chickens through. You cannot lie about the number of items in the bag. This makes the game a little more strategic and less pure bluffing, because people claiming higher numbers will happen less often and really cause a moment to think. This is where I usually have four bread or something and offer a bribe to open my own bag.
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Mar 25, 2016 22:40
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