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Xaris posted:However, I do agree that if you have a smaller 3-4 people group, there is a wide variety (dependingly) "better" games to play. Though it still fits a nice niche and it's a staple everyone should have, if only for those 5+ group nights or when you're playing with "casual" people and want to start off with something light-ish. Yeah, I'm really hard pressed to think of many games that fill the same niche as 7 Wonders does for large groups. In fact, I can't really think of any. There are more social games like Dixit or The Resistance, but I wouldn't put those in the same category at all. Team 7 Wonders is also a lot of fun and something I really recommend that people try. I actually think it makes the game better in smaller groups, as well.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:43
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Scyther posted:About the worst thing I can say about 7 Wonders is that it fills such a rare niche that if your group is usually 5-7 people, and you've got a majority of people clinging to the asinine ideal that everyone should play together at all times, you're going to get sick of 7 Wonders very fast. I have nothing really against the game, but I have no desire to ever play it again. Is it really that weird of a niche? My normal group is 3-4 people, but once every few months we'll get together with a few extra friends and end up in the 6-8 range. I'm usually the first person to say that you should just break up into smaller groups with regular high player count groups, but not for one off or infrequent nights. Edit- I guess I'm also just weird or something, because I like 7 Wonders enough that I actually do look forward to playing it when we have big nights. It beats the hell out of a lot of the alternatives.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:17
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Rexides posted:Ah, yeah, quarterbacking is definitely an issue. My group was lucky because we started playing the game together and no one is really in a better position that the rest in terms of skill, so it just plays out as the designer intended, most of the time. It's also just a sort of inherent problem that a lot of co-op board games have. Most of the interesting decisions happen at the "meta" level above what any individual player is capable of doing on their turn. Since there's no reason to hide information, you end up in a situation where you're basically playing a single player puzzle with multiple people. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a lot like putting a jigsaw puzzle together as a group activity. Quarterbacking is more of a symptom than an actual flaw.
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Dec 21, 2014 22:08
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Gimnbo posted:I've come to realize that my hatred for Munchkin comes from the fact I've mostly played Munchkin Quest which takes like twice as long as standard Munchkin. I'm pretty sure the rules are otherwise the same so I still wouldn't like it, but I don't think I would have the same seething contempt if it weren't for Quest. You haven't known true horror until you've taken two Munchkin Quest boxes and combined them to make eight player Munchkin Quest. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, I've done this. We managed to get through, as I recall, one complete turn. I can't help but feel that one of these days I'll be made to answer for my crimes.
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Dec 26, 2014 02:30
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Trynant posted:I got my non-boardgaming family to play five-player Space Alert with me. I started with the tutorial scenario, and today we finished (and won) an internal threats simulation. I feel like people really overstate how intimidating Space Alert is or just aren't good at selling it or something. It's one of the only board games in my collection where I've had random, non-board gamers ask to join in in the middle of a game.
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Dec 26, 2014 23:26
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MildManeredManikin posted:We were playing with the max number of people and took frequent food breaks so I suspect it had something to do with being unfocused. I would blame everybody doing their best old timey railway tycoon voice for slowing us down but that part was too fun not to do. I enjoyed the game but not the amount if time we took. TTR seriously shouldn't take more than an hour at most. We used to play it as a quick filler game (with five people) while waiting for food to show up. It's actually hard for me to imagine what would even take three hours. Did people have a lot of problems with the rules or were people just taking forever to get through their turns?
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Jan 2, 2015 20:45
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Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:Seriously though I just want to play simcity the board game. I guess a 4x might be better for that though. Suburbia is good and it is basically Simcity the board game, so I think you'd probably be alright going down that route. That said, I like Castles more (although I've only played it once) and I think it's probably better designed on the whole. For Suburbia, tile placement is generally just about adjacency and planning for future expansion. Castles has all of that, but extra spatial considerations piled on top thanks to the oddly shaped tiles. The master builder mechanic is pretty interesting too, and I think it helps to alleviate the multiplayer solitaire feel that Suburbia has. That said, both games are really good and I don't think you'll go too far wrong by just picking on theme.
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Jan 5, 2015 19:17
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Gumdrop Larry posted:Lordy Jesus I love Galaxy Trucker but three rough roads is a little much. We like to play with escalating Rough Roads. Start with one card in the first round, and add an additional card for each extra round. Sometimes we keep the previous cards out and just turn up a new one each round, sometimes we deal one, two, or three new cards each round. Good times.
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Jan 6, 2015 00:02
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Sloober posted:Unemployment was rampant so in the end we cared only about lining our own pocketbooks at the expense of gainful employment. One of my favorite things about Archipelago is that this kind of self-interested brinkmanship gives a ton of cover to the traitor who may or may not even be there. The game sort of encourages everyone to push the limit of what's personally beneficial at the expense of the group.
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Jun 29, 2015 16:16
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Texmo posted:For goons that have played both Chaos in the Old World and also Forbidden Stars, are they both similar enough that it would be a waste to get both, or are they different enough games that it won't feel like they're treading on one another's toes? If you found them similar, which one did you prefer, and why? They're very, very different games. Forbidden Stars is a straight up war game, whereas Chaos is a pure area control/semi-euro for all but one player (and that player isn't really playing a traditional wargame either). Both games are great, and both games are worth owning if their mechanics and theme appeal to you. Chaos is also worth owning just because it's one of the most asymmetrically designed board games available.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:10
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S.J. posted:games with politics are bad though ugh Chaos isn't/shouldn't really be political, though. Not unless you're actively trying to break the game.
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Mar 18, 2016 03:02
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Dirk the Average posted:Wait, what? The four powers explicitly wheel, deal, bargain, backstab, cheat, and compete with each other on a regular basis. The whole idea is that while they would rule the world in an instant if they ever cooperated outright for a length of time longer than it takes for one warlord to die, they bicker and quickly fall to infighting. The board game does a really good job portraying that. Thematically that's fine, but mechanically the game has some pretty delicate balancing that in my experience gets thrown off badly by politics. The big thing is that even though there are only two ways to win, everyone is effectively pursuing their own victory conditions and there's little actual room for the kind of ambiguous quid pro quo deals that political games rely on. 1) No one can really work with Khorne, because Khorne is the only person who wants to outright kill anyone and letting him kill units is bad, even if those units aren't yours. Basically everyone should be running from or trying to control Khorne as just a routine part of play, because otherwise you're letting him win. 2) No one can really work with Nurgle, because Nurgle is basically built to steadily build on the victory point track and suddenly pop as he starts ruining regions. Nurgle doesn't require the same kind of active control as Khorne, but you'll still hand him the game by just letting him dominate and slowly corrupt regions until he explodes VPs. 3) Slaanesh and Tzeentch don't need to be actively opposed as much, but their decks are all about avoidance and holding other players back. They never benefit from working with the leader, and there's no reason for them to try to screw someone who's behind. Anyway, I wasn't trying to say you shouldn't make the game political if that's how you want to play, just that my experience is that politics in CitOW works about as well as politics in Agricola. It feels like a lot like Eclipse to me, where the game looks like a political wargame, but in reality it's almost impossible to make deals that both sides actually have a reason to agree to.
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Mar 20, 2016 16:54
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Panzeh posted:It reminds me a lot of Virgin Queen and the COIN games because of these things. VQ has a lot of things where if you haven't played before you won't understand things. Like, the HRE player will pretty much always win if left unmolested, unless France is left unmolested, which almost never happens because the game pushes the action there. The politics tend toward more obvious, game-state kind of stuff rather than wheeling and dealing. The reason Diplomacy was well known for its politics is because the game state was less tactical and nuanced. The tactically best option in DIplomacy is so obvious that it almost becomes meaningless. Yep. I actually played my first COIN a couple of weeks ago (Liberty or Death) and definitely saw the similarities to Chaos, although it felt like there was a bit more room to work together with your "ally" in the early game at least. And you're definitely dead on about Diplomacy (and variants like Game of Thrones, or online Diplomacy-alikes like Neptune's Pride). The default state for any 1v1 conflict in that game is basically a pure stalemate, so you actually need allies. If you can win without politics in Diplomacy then not only have you already won, you've won harder than it should ever be possible to win. I think the one exception with Chaos is that it makes sense for anyone who falls too far behind to win to work together to just run out the time so everyone loses, but I can't actually think of any CitOW games I've played with my group where more than one person fell out of contention before the last turn.
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Mar 20, 2016 17:42
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Anyone have any opinions on Pax Pamir? In particular, does it play well below its maximum player count (our group generally has four, sometimes three)?
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Mar 27, 2016 18:36
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drat Dirty Ape posted:On a side note, someone is offering to trade me Roll for the Galaxy for my copy of Decent: 2nd Edition which I have never played (got it for like $20 at a B&N sale). Is this a good trade? I've never played Roll before and the only time I tried to play Race was many years ago and it was a bad experience (but I blame the teacher for being terrible at explaining things more than the game). Roll for the Galaxy is pretty good, but I was also a fan of Race for the Galaxy in spite of its heavy randomness so I'm probably a little biased. It's not really less complicated or faster than Race, it's just different, so if that was an issue for you then I wouldn't bother. Another thing to keep in mind (although it really shouldn't be a concern, but I know it is for some groups) is that it's very, very easy to cheat in Roll. The game is in fact totally reliant on a player honor system when it comes to rolling and assigning dice, because it's important that no one else knows what your dice results are before everyone simultaneously reveals. I'd say it's a good trade, though, but then again I also never really got to play my copy of Descent: 2E and had no strong feelings on it one way or the other.
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Apr 4, 2016 05:45
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Azran posted:I've been following Eric Lang's twitter for a bit (I don't want to miss on any Bloodborne news) and his #ActualQuotesFromAPitch series (about pitches he hears in boardgame conventions) has been quite funny. In case you don't follow him: I feel like this accurately sums up the design process of like 90% of the really lovely deckbuilders out there.
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Apr 5, 2016 03:31
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EVGA Longoria posted:The hard core players might pay that, but there's a lot of competition and the license doesn't hold nearly as much pull. This is pretty similar to my situation. A friend and I are each about $700 deep into X-wing, and we were recently saying that we'd pretty much stop buying cold turkey if we had to suddenly start paying full or near full retail. Likewise, I know my board gaming group would probably start severely cutting back on board game purchases (if not stop outright) if we were paying 15-20% more. Part of the problem with board games in general is that the good ones have incredible staying power. I'm willing to bet very few regular board gaming groups actually need to buy new games on a regular basis. I know that my tiny group (just myself and three friends) owns enough games to play for a literal lifetime. Hell, we could rotate through just the top tier of games that we own for probably close to six months before needing to repeat anything. I probably shouldn't be bitching about this at all since I'm constantly complaining that we should play fewer new games and revisit what we already own a lot more often.
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May 3, 2016 05:59
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Rutibex posted:Its seem to me the best way for a one vs many game like Decent to work is by giving a substantial advantage to the Overseer. Everyone just has to rely on the gentleman's agreement that keeps the DM from "winning" D&D games. Why not just play an RPG then? This was always my problem with Descent. It's clearly designed to be a competitive game, and it always felt like the experience was ruined for me with an Overlord who was holding back or trying to create a "challenging" experience rather than just trying to win. That defeats the whole purpose of 1 vs. many and just leaves you with a really stripped down, uninteresting version of D&D. That said, I loving love the app. Our group finally got a chance to play it a few weeks ago, which was the first time we actually bothered to break out Descent 2E since release. It was great and I can't wait for them to release more content.
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Jul 30, 2016 05:43
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I'm kind of surprised that you guys are saying that two player Keyflower isn't playable in an hour or less. I've been playing Keyflower a bit with my group lately and even with four people we're clocking in at like 90ish minutes less setup and tear down time. We're tend to be really slow too. Seems like two player Keyflower would be pretty quick, especially if you're playing it pretty often.
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Aug 2, 2016 22:12
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Crackbone posted:Quinns gets a hardon for small party deduction games a lot. He was raving about Mafia de Cuba which is pretty "meh" as well. He also seems to have a lot of difficulty separating good game mechanics from "I had fun with friends playing this!" lately. Even just within the social deduction genre it's really hard for me to see what makes Dead Last stand out.
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Aug 10, 2016 23:03
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I kind of had the same experience with social deduction games, although in my case it was The Resistance. I played a few memorable games (although everyone was pretty drunk, so that probably had something to do with it), but most of the time everyone in my regular group ended up treating it as a logic puzzle and the whole genre kind of lost its luster for me. We actually ditched it pretty quickly back when this whole thread was going crazy over it. Not that any of that is meant to be a knock on social deduction games or The Resistance in particular, they're just way more group dependent than a lot of other games.
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Aug 10, 2016 23:18
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deadwing posted:God I fuckin love plano boxes You're going to super regret having those dice stored that way when you actually need to get them out. Unless you're just going to dump the whole thing, but then separating them seems strange. Edit- Plano boxes do in fact rule for things that aren't cubes, though.
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Aug 14, 2016 06:56
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StashAugustine posted:I kind of want to buy Pax Porfiana and I also kind of want to just remake all the cards myself with sane formatting It's honestly not that bad. Like, it is bad in the sense that the cards are horribly designed from a usability standpoint, but the poor design mostly just gets in the way of explaining how things work. That sucks since Pax Porfiriana is already a difficult game to teach, but it's not the kind of thing where you're still going to be frustrated with the layout after a game or two.
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Oct 4, 2016 19:04
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Tekopo posted:Galaxy Trucker is a game I liked, I used to own and I sold. Since I tended to play with a rotating crew of new people all the time, my playstyle for that game tended to not make it easy for newbie and honestly, if I didn't play super-fast the game was personally boring as hell. The "Perfect ship" meta needs to loving die. Galaxy Trucker (especially the base game) is kind of weird because it seems very random at first glance, but in terms of actual outcomes it might as well have no random elements at all. Experienced players will almost always beat inexperienced players, and if the skill gap is large enough you can consistently expect the weaker players to get absolutely trounced. Rough roads cards definitely shake things up, though, and in general I think the expansions take the game from good to phenomenally great.
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Mar 20, 2017 22:24
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Lorini posted:I had the exact same thing happen with a guy and Blood Rage and I told him he could pay $8 for the replacement piece or return it to me for a full refund. He got his panties all in a bunch and told me to forget it. I had something like this happen a while ago when I sold my copy of Arkham Horror and some expansions on Craigslist. I ended up letting it go for a cheap as hell price because it hadn't been played in years, no one (least of all me) had any intention of ever touching it again, and I wanted the shelf space back. The buyer ended up bugging me because a single goddamn D6 was missing. I ended up just mailing him a handful of dice because I have bags of them lying around, but it still pisses me off that someone could be that petty.
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Apr 2, 2017 04:13
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I know the game is kind of old news for this thread at this point, but I got to play a three player game of Leaving Earth on Friday. It took us a solid four hours (and that was with everyone having read the rules or at least watched a video or two beforehand) and I can definitely see why it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, but I had a blast. The mathiness of the whole thing also isn't nearly as bad as it seems at first glance, especially if you can wrap your head around the basic process of plotting out missions in stages and, later, running missions by launching multiple payloads into space and docking them in orbit. There's less to keep track of in your head than there is in a game of Power Grid as long as you don't balk at the idea of using a pen and paper to plan things out for a board game. There were really only two sticking points for me: 1) It felt like some of the rules were unclear and in a few cases we had to just kind of shrug and move on. The one instance that stands out to me is the order that you resolve healing and radiation damage. We weren't clear if doctors healed astronauts immediately or if it was an end of turn effect. It's possible we just missed something in the rulebook, though, since it was getting pretty late by the time this was an issue. There were a few other issues with timing and minor rules that also didn't seem to be clearly explained. 2) I'm willing to put this down to a bad draw of mission cards, but the lack of generic objectives to work towards bothered me a little bit. The two highest point value missions on the board both involved Mars landing, which meant that that was the only thing anyone was working towards by midgame. One player went for a lower point value Ceres mission, but that screwed him in the end since ties for mission completion go to the player with the lower score. The lack of other high point missions also meant that the vast majority of the map was untouched since there was no reason to visit Mercury or Venus (or to go back to the Moon once we realized it was impossible to land on). That said, I'm willing to overlook most of the problems since the experience was just so great. I'm looking forward to trying out the Outer Planets expansion at some point.
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Apr 2, 2017 23:22
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I agree completely that it was more of an experience than a real game, but I do think some of the issues with missions could maybe have been avoided if there were guaranteed points for generic milestones like fly-bys or surveying. More so than mission completion acting as a catch-up mechanism for other players (which I do agree is a problem), I felt like the real issue was the decision space narrowing drastically as the game went on. Completing missions and giving other players an early advantage wouldn't hurt the competitive aspect of the game nearly as much if there was a viable way to score points later on by running a larger number of less difficult missions. As it is, scoring 2 or 4 points early on is meaningless since there's no way to keep doing that and outpace somehow who goes for a big 20 point mission later. Either way, I don't want to sound like I'm complaining too much since I did have a lot of fun with it.
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Apr 3, 2017 00:00
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Lorini posted:If you're willing to do the math that Leaving Earth needs, you'd have a better game experience playing Aurora on the PC. It's a free game and watch quill18's playlist to understand how it works. Oh, come on. That's not a fair comparison. The "math" in Leaving Earth is like adding two numbers together and moving them down to the next line. Aurora is a horrifying monstrosity of a game that eats modern computers for breakfast.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:06
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Bottom Liner posted:I maintain that Superfight is the best of those match white cards and black cards games, because it requires actual creativity and creates fun stories and is generally pretty solid, and the expansion decks let you custom tailor it to your group (anime, nerdy, kid friendly, scenarios besides fights, etc). It also has multiple variants built in and they're all solid. The humor also doesn't get old, since it's not based on shock value but the player's imagination. Like I said before, everyone that has tried it has agreed that it's more fun than CaH in my experience. I really hate CaH and never want to play it again so don't take this as a ringing endorsement or anything, but I think the lack of creativity is actually part of its appeal as a party game. CaH (and Apples to Apples and similar games) are about as low pressure as it's possible for a game to be. If nobody likes the cards that you're playing then you always have the excuse that you drew a lovely hand, and you're just as likely to luck into something that's "hilarious" as anyone else.
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Jun 18, 2017 22:08
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Start Player (either the physical version or the app) really isn't that bad since the randomization and large number of cards prevents the issue with the same person always being selected. My group is indecisive as hell so we mostly just use it as a way to force someone to pick a game to play, ignoring any cards that are subjective bullshit like "coolest phone." Also for games that have thematic start player mechanics that would never vary among the same group of people. Doesn't really take any more or less time than just having everyone roll dice so, eh, whatever.
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Jul 4, 2017 00:28
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dropkickpikachu posted:The only good Plaid Hat game is Summoner Wars and I will defend this opinion until I die.  Summoner Wars and apparently Terraforming Mars are the only two games I can think of off the top of my head where I really, strongly disagree with this thread's consensus. Well, that and I loving despise Sentinels of the Multiverse, but it seems like the general opinion here has finally come around on that one.
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Aug 6, 2017 22:14
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GrandpaPants posted:Don't forget "people who are willing to negotiate," which has been an issue in the Archipelago games I've played. Pfft like I'm just going to sac up Fish that I farmed with my action for free. I didn't cause the natives to revolt, everyone's inaction did! Technically this issue is supposed to be resolved by the fact that Archipelago is a scored semi-coop rather than a purely competitive game. The rulebook specifically lays out the idea that a last place victory is intended to be a better result for the person in last place than a group defeat, and only the separatist actually wins in a revolt. I know some groups really, really don't like this, but that's supposed to be the solution to the problem of people refusing to negotiate. Archipelago is one of my favorite games, but I think this is probably a major reason that it doesn't go over well with every group. It expects you to be a dick, but it expects your dickishness to be a kind of brinksmanship rather than something you ever fully commit to.
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Aug 21, 2017 01:20
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Gutter Owl posted:Eklund loves him some Atlas Shrugged. Please enjoy this selection of particular Eklundisms. It actually weirds me out a little bit how much I love the Pax games despite finding Eklund's politics revolting and those politics really clearly coming through the game mechanics.
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Sep 3, 2017 23:39
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