Board Game Thread 4e: The Call of Catan

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Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

Broken Loose posted:

Steam Park (I haven't played this so I cannot confirm if it sucks)

Basically, you don't quite have enough time to get a real "engine" running, but neither do your opponents, so it's a mad scramble no matter what. The scramble's accentuated by the preparation phase - everyone rolls all their die as fast as they can to try and plan out their turn's moves, with the fastest player getting to clean up their park and the slowest player having to add more dirt to their park. Which can be kinda okay too going slow - at least half the die faces add more dirt to your park, so you could wind up coming in last, being forced to add 2 dirt to your park, and still wind up adding less dirt than the fastest player who got the ability to clean up four dirt.

Then you've got a building phase which, thanks to that frantic pace from before, feels a little bit like Galaxy Trucker in that you suddenly stop and look at your secret goals and realize you hosed yourself over like crazy but thanks to the short timescale, lavish theme, and general game's humor, you can't get mad (unless you're one of those people who hates Galaxy Trucker) at your fuckup.

Finally, there's a brilliant game of space management and setting yourself up with a micro-engine when it comes to actually buiding your park. More rides means more robots which means more money, but more robots means more waste means less money, and on top of that, nothing can be placed alongside anything else unless it's the same color, in which case they must connect.

If your group plays more than one game in a night and you're not a Eurocentric group, Steam Park is fuckin' fantastic. It's not the best at anything, but unlike other relatively quick "middle" games like Pompeii, or Lords of Waterdeep, or Seasons, you'll be finished much faster, it's easier to teach, and the art style and theme is fuckin' gorgeous. There's heavier choices than Takenoko, which is the the only game I've got that matches it in presentation and simplicity. It reminded me a bit of Theme Park while playing, in that kind of irreverant "everything is going to poo poo" atmosphere you get while you're laughing like hell at your horrible decisions. It's already completely replaced Ticket to Ride as my "intro" game to get people into the hobby, and while I can't imagine anyone with any degree of familiarity in the hobby would call it their favorite, it's just really charming, tight, and well developed.

I'd just make sure to buy a fuckload of baggies. Setup is a bitch if you don't have every single little thing sorted.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 16:59

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 09:37

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

ambushsabre posted:

Speaking of free print-n-play games, does anyone know of any good ones?

RoboDerby: Express is basically a slimmed-down travel version of RoboRally; there's absolutely no reason to choose it if you already have RoboRally, but it's there. You might also want to check out The Thing, which is better than it should be (although takes a LOT of printing) and Micropul, which is absolutely the best abstract print-and-play game I've played. It's themed in a million and one ways too, so you can really make it look like whatever you want when you play.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 15:05

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

Tekopo posted:

One thing about Space Alert that you need to be careful if your group is used to playing other (lesser ) co-ops: you will probably need to tell people that they need to be pro-active within the game and not wait for instructions, since there isn't time (especially to crank up the difficulty) for people to tell other people what to do. This can be quite difficult for players that are used to a lot of quarterbacking and I've seen people do nothing at all because people didn't directly what to do. Usually to get people of their shell I do stuff like saying 'okay I need to fire the cannon at time X while someone fires the secondary gun, who can do it?'.

Thanks; I'd briefly forgotten this, and was once again on the verge of buying it. 90% of the time when I play games, they're two-player only. The few times I get more than two people around, one of my regular gaming friends will not make a decision in any co-op. Like, when it's their turn on Pandemic, there's a city next to them with three cubes of virus, and there's no other actions, they sit and say "oh hey guys what should I do."

I need to keep a post-it above my computer that says "close that shopping cart and find a group that already owns Space Alert, you'll never get to try it out any other way."

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 19:33

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

Fat Samurai posted:

I pitched the idea to a friend and he immediately asked me if I wasn't too old to be playing with tazos (Pogs). It's kinda hard to convince someone to play.

Pogs? You baby, I'm gunna go screw up making a pretty fireworks display like an adult.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 16:15

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

Rutibex posted:

Mage Wars is like when you where 12 and tried to play Magic with your younger sister. She didn't quite understand most of the cards and wasn't really into it but maybe she humored you and played a game or two because she was bored and you insisted. You quickly gave up on this and started playing at the local game store. Not an option with Mage Wars, with Mage Wars everyone is your younger sister.

My wife refuses to play the game with me. It's not that she doesn't like it; she does, and she usually wins because she's frustratingly good/I'm hilariously bad at games. She just doesn't want to put in 'homework' time for a board game, and hates that it takes like almost two hours to play between the two of us. It's always because we wind up looking up status effects and one-off wordings of things; I get to play it once every eight months, and after each game, she says "okay, so that got really fun, I'm sure if we got some practice in it wouldn't take nearly as long."

Then nobody will play again with me for ages. The "no homework" thing is why I didn't get Android: Netrunner instead, and why I'm not gunna pick up Doomtown:Reloaded, and thought having the whole spellbook there would be easier. Why can't Mage Wars just not be so.... it's like, the whole thing is great, and complex, and probably balanced well, just designed for two best friends who live together and do nothing but play Mage Wars, and nobody else.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2015 15:10

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

I've been playing the 'good' kind of board games regularly for about five years now, and have built up a pretty sizeable collection, with poo poo ranging from Star Trek Catan to Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective; from Ghost Stories to Suburbia, Mage Wars to Takenoko... basically, I've tried to play everything I could. Until last night though, I'd never actually played Dominion or any of its analogues. Dominion: Intrigue just showed up in my mailbox.

I know that it's stupid as hell to say "why didn't anybody tell me it was this fun" because it's loving Dominion, it's one of the most successful 'good' board games around, and people talk about it all the goddamn time. But why didn't anybody tell me Dominion was this fun?

# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 12:29

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

The cards from AA turn the game into a "holy jesus gently caress I'm going to get ruined" game super quick. Maybe I'm just saying that because my wife is a loving master of military strategies and I'm just sitting around trying to create fluff to make sure my contact specialists have a nice planet to live on, but even trying to 'game' her has turned from something I can win one out of every five games to "I bought this three months ago, play super regularly, and haven't won a single game."

# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 04:11

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 09:37

Wungus: Mar 5, 2004

jeeves posted:

I'm thinking of sleeving some Dominion/Netrunner cards, and when I look online for quick recommendations I just keep seeing the treadmill of "A sucks, use B" and then "B sucks, use C" and then it seems it always leads to "they all suck, JUST GO FOR THE KMC HYPER MATTES!" for people who like to burn money or something.

Does anyone have any non-extreme recommendations for just simple/cheap ones that are not pure crap?

You could always go this route

I knew a guy who did that with all of his M:tG cards. I'm still not sure how I feel about it; on the one hand, holy permanent decision Batman, on the other, those cards are probably still in perfect condition now. It may not be a smart move, but it's definitely a cheap move.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 21:24

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