Ravendas posted:

Xia talk:
Our first game, a friend went to the debris field to collect stuff. This location has this roll: 1-3: DEAD, no save. 4-20: Get a purple cube to sell. First roll: 2. Dead! He had a tier2 ship, so he had to miss an entire turn.

He respawns, tries this again as a quick way to make money to make up for lost time. First roll: 2. Dead. Another turn skipped.

Respawns, decides he'll explore a bit. Blind jumps into the sun. ~Dead~

Respawns, decides to do some simpler exploration nearby, through a single tile of a debris field (once again, 1-3 dead, 4-20 safe). Rolled a 1.

That's when we decided to stop the 'die and lose a turn' mechanic, replacing it with 'respawn with slight damage and slight energy loss' on the following turn.

It's pretty much a game where you can't care about winning, because the dice, which control EVERY action in the game, can really mess you up.

silvergoose posted:

Except for mall and city of horror which are about dealing with each other...

Elysium posted:

So I'm picking up Coup, Through the Ages, and Temporum and I need one more game to get free shipping. Here are all the games I own: http://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/ElysiumSA

Mainly looking for 3+ player games, nothing super long or heavy, any recommendations?

p.s. the last recommendation I got here was for Libertalia which has been a huge hit, so thanks for that.

bobvonunheil posted:

I've been playing stuff like Agricola and Terra Mystica for years, I guess I was surprised that such a highly-regarded game didn't seem to have more going on strategy-wise.

At least Castles of Burgundy will be easier to get to the table than those other ones, which tend to sit around unopened for years

sonatinas posted:

Played Le Havre and Hansa Teutonica for the first time over the weekend.

Le Havre seems to have more interaction than Agricola and penalties for not feeding you crew are not as dire as Agricola. Also, I do like how everyone shares the cards instead of what you have in your hand. For right now I do prefer Le Havre over Agricola; however, I ma be biased since I'm bad at Agricola.

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.

Tekopo posted:

Guess what Vlaada -related kickstarter stuff I just got in the mail?

The Deleter posted:

So is Cthulhu Wars the overpriced Kickstarter garbage it appears to be, or does it have anything of merit? I ask because I love asymmetric strategy games and this makes my nerd sense tingle, but I am like 80% sure I would be better off buying Quantum or Kemet instead.

fozzy fosbourne posted:

2) Which expansions are considered better for Race for the Galaxy? Arc 1 or Arc 2? I will probably play this mostly 2-3, maybe 4

Big Ol Marsh Pussy posted:

What are some good games with an auction mechanic?

thespaceinvader posted:

I'd suggest Caverna (definitely this over Agricola, it's IME a better game, and the theme is a lot more obvious and fun)

h_double posted:

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.

Broken Loose posted:

I've heard nothing good about Babel; just that it adds obligatory bullshit to the game and extends the playtime in uninteresting ways.

Lorini posted:

Backing up a bit: LeHavre has two major problems which is why I sold mine and problems Caverna doesn't have. I'm spoiling it in case you want to find out for yourself.

Loans are ridiculously overpowered, unless you are playing four player it does not make sense to actually produce food, just get loans instead. And even then only the fourth player should produce food, everyone else should get loans. There's really only two strategies in the game, ships or shipping steel/coke. That's about it. You need to play a bit to find this out, but I was really disappointed. Caverna doesn't seem to have these issues (yet).

Lorini posted:

Back a bit again, you guys are writing too fast for this slowpoke .

OK in our games, good players manipulated food so that at the end of the round, they could take a loan, that's how good loans are vs food, and if you see the penalty you can see why. The fourth player in a four player game shouldn't do this because the food accumulation is great enough to make food worthwhile.

The issue that I(we) have with the two pronged strategy of Le Havre is that there are let's say sucker deals in the game. For example, you can't win concentrating on the end- game scoring cards if others are going for coke/steel or ships. Contrast this with his game after Le Havre, Ora et Labora, where there is again only two real strategies, but everything in the game is used to achieve either of those strategies. You don't have the situation where you are basically fooled into thinking that there's an end game strategy that ultimately will never work out. In Ora, you can either do settlements or Wonders. However, doing either of those strategies will have you exploring the entire game, not just coke/steel, not just ships. So the design is broader and more accessible AND (importantly) newbie friendly, where Le Havre is not. Ora is one of my top 5 games of all time, I love that game, will play it any time, so no, I have nothing against games with limited numbers of strategies. I don't like games though where what appears to be a way to win is not, and I don't like games where much of the design is not needed to win the game.

Indolent Bastard posted:

what country are you in?

Scyther posted:

I don't know why anyone would subject another person to a 6 player game.

Skutter posted:

I have yet to play either one of those games, so I can't comment on the similarities/discrepancies unfortunately. I can say though that this was my first time I've played a truly cooperative game (I played Betrayal at House on the Hill, but that didn't play like this one did) and I really enjoyed it. As much as I enjoy competitive games, I had a lot more fun playing this, and am looking forward to the next game night to play it again. It was really easy to pick up, maybe 10-15 minutes' worth of explanation, and each character card has a turn info cheat sheet on the back, so it wasn't unnecessarily difficult to keep track of gameplay either. If I get a chance to play BSG or Pandemic, I will definitely come back and do a quick comparison, but otherwise this is my only experience with this genre of boardgame.

echoMateria posted:

Hoping for one this year, been out of print for so long.

jivjov posted:

7 Wonders: With Babel, are the little bag-shaped tokens for "Hey I participated in the Great Project" little cardboard chits or wooden meeple things? I've seen what looks like pictures of both online, and I'm not sure if I'm just seeing playtest/prototype vs final production versions or what.

echoMateria posted:

There was a print error on the progress board of Dungeon Lords Anniversary, which they first tried to fix with a sticker. Now Vlaada made a rules change to compensate for it, since people weren't particularly happy with the sticker idea:


Interesting turn of events.

Poison Mushroom posted:

I've said it a couple times, but I think it bears repeating: Robinson Crusoe is very, very good, but in exactly two mutually-exclusive situations.

1. Several players of about equal skill level at board games experiencing it for the first time together (and their continued adventures of trying to master it together).
2. A marvelous solo game with a meta-campaign of learning to suck less.

The quarterbacking problem in RC is atrocious, because of the punishing difficulty, and how difficult it is to just give decent 'general statement' good advice any more advanced than "don't forget about your roof, fucko". So if one or two players are significantly more experienced than the others ('significantly' in this case can even be 'almost completed the first scenario once'), it becomes them telling everyone else what to do, because otherwise you'll all lose and die.

Rutibex posted:

VVV Oh yeah do not play Robinson Crusoe with actual people. It is a solo game only. I don't care what is says on the box.

Richard Garfield posted:

Though there are about a dozen games that have directly influenced Magic in one way or another, the game's most influential ancestor is a game for which I have no end of respect: Cosmic Encounter, originally published by Eon Products and re-released by Mayfair Games. In this game, participants play alien races striving to conquer a piece of the universe. Players can attempt their conquest alone, or forge alliances with other aliens. There are nearly fifty alien races which can be played, each of which has a unique ability: the Amoeba, for example, has the power to Ooze, giving it unlimited token movement; the Sniveler has the power to Whine, allowing it to automatically catch up when behind. The best thing about Cosmic Encounter is precisely this limitless variety. I have played hundreds of times and still can be surprised at the interactions different combinations of aliens produce. Cosmic Encounter remains enjoyable because it is constantly new.

Cosmic Encounter proved to be an interesting complement to my own design ideas. I had been mulling over a longtime idea of mine: a game which used a deck of cards whose composition changed between rounds. During the course of the game, the players would add cards to and remove cards from the deck, so that when you played a new game it would have an entirely different card mix. I remembered playing marbles in elementary school, where each player had his own collection from which he would trade and compete. I was also curious about Strat-o-matic Baseball, in which participants draft, field, and compete their own teams of baseball players, whose abilities are based on real players' previous year statistics. intrigued by the structure of the game, I was irritated that the subject was one for which I had no patience.

These thoughts were the essence of what eventually became Magic. My experiences with Cosmic Encounter and other games inspired me to create a card game in 1982 called Five Magics. Five Magics was an attempt to distill the modularity of Cosmic Encounter down to just a card game. The nature of Cosmic Encounter seemed entirely appropriate for a magical card game—wild and not entirely predictable, but not completely unknown, like a set of forces you almost, but don't quite, understand. Over the next few years, Five Magics went on to inspire entirely new magical card games among my friends.

Social Dissonance posted:

The game has deceptively simple rules as it's a worker placement game at its core.

Social Dissonance posted:

Edit: This game generates wonderful stories. I got jumped by a surprisingly powerful Iguana, and had to smoke a pipe and rush it with two broken bottles to survive. It's a game that generates stories a bit better than most. Even if people aren't contributing 100%, they still have the things that they do contribute to a fun (or depressing) story.

Social Dissonance posted:

You take colored pawns and place them on things to generate resources or inventions? Of course the game has a lot more than that going on, but the game comes down to taking risks or guaranteeing results based on how you allocate limited pawns to limited areas. I'm comparing it to Lords of Waterdeep though, so if that doesn't fit your definition I guess we have two different standards.

Social Dissonance posted:

That makes sense. The game does limit you from doing doing the same exact action twice though! The rulebook didn't make this incredibly obvious, and the first couple games I played I gathered from the camp or another source twice. It makes good camp placement really important.

Tekopo posted:

I think they jumped the shark around the time of that extremely lovely 'Knizia invades from space' episode that was just one painful joke after the other.

fozzy fosbourne posted:

Does Wil Wheaton actually like more complex games? He can't just play Ticket to Ride and Catan for Kids all the time, right? Maybe he is using Tabletop as some trojan horse, like the TV show equivalent of a gateway game, and now that he has some momentum he'll sneak Space Alert or Battlestar or something else amazing in there. I think more complicated games could really benefit from a studio with actual editing and graphics and stuff.

Poopy Palpy posted:

I'd put more stock in this reasoning if they went to the effort of getting the rules right. Once you've given up on that, what does it matter if people can follow every detail?

Kai Tave posted: