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I played a few new games at a meetup today. As others have said, Mysterium is essentially co-op Dixit. I played with strangers and we lost because our ghost player never really picked up on how the investigators were interpreting the clues. If the investigators all agree that one choice is clearly correct, and then it isn't, the ghost must bear the blame. On the other hand, with friends it would amplify Dixit's replay problem: if your group learns that certain cards always point to the same culprit or location, then the game could become trivially easy. We played an American box using the original Polish rules. Apparently the American rules add a voting mechanic that makes it more like Dixit, turning it into some sort of co-op/competitive hybrid that I didn't fully understand. The other was Mafia de Cuba, a preview copy of a game that will be released at Essen. This is a social deduction game very much like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, except that you get to choose your role. We played with 8 and everyone loved it. One player is the mafia don. He has a cigar box with a bunch of diamonds, some loyal henchmen, FBI agents, etc. He leaves the room while the other players pass the box in a circle, secretly removing any number of diamonds or a role chip. Then he returns and starts grilling everybody. If he correctly accuses all the thieves and recovers all his diamonds, he and the loyal henchmen win. If he accuses a loyal henchman (if the group is large enough, he gets one mulligan), the unaccused thief with the most diamonds wins. Of course, there are spoiler roles--the FBI agent only wins if the don accuses him, the street urchin wins if any thief wins, etc. It was different enough from Werewolf to feel fresh and fun, but I'm biased because I really enjoy this kind of game. Bonus tidbit: I overheard a guy pronounce "Trajan" as if it rhymed with "Catan". CaptainRightful fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 00:34
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I played two new stock-trading games yesterday and I'd recommend trying both (but not buying either yet, if you can avoid it). Tesla vs. Edison has an interesting and well-realized theme along with great artwork. We had 5 players and I was Charles F. Brush, one of the 3 inventors who got screwed out of marquee billing. You each have one action per round to spread across 4 systems: setting up power in the city network; developing your scientific abilities (in 3 separate tracks: bulbs, AC power, and DC power); buying and selling stock; and propagandizing. The game lasts for 6 rounds, and every 2 rounds you bid on a partner from the auction row. Each partner can do an action. Obviously, you don't have enough actions to develop all 4 areas--you can even double up your inventor and any number of partners to really advance a particular action, but that limits your focus even more. After only one game, it's difficult to see whether a variety of strategies are viable. Early on, you need to commit to a strategy and if that fails you might be screwed in the long run. It seems like shrewdly speculating on the stocks (you get 4 permanent shares in your own company and can buy up to 4 shares in each of the others, which you can sell later) could be more effective than focusing on building a large network or getting caught up in propaganda wars. The AC vs. DC mechanic is clearly an important part of the theme, but only AC can power Level 5 cities. We all felt that set up a clear imbalance and disincentive for anyone to focus on DC development and propaganda. Once you know the rules, the game should play fairly quickly. A few parts seemed needlessly complex, the limit on number of actions per round seems too strict, and the inventors' unique abilities seemed imbalanced. That said, I'd love to play it again. Stockpile was much simpler. We played with the "advanced" board that has each stock advance differently, but without the unique player roles. In this game, you start with 1 stock, some cash, and a simple board to stack your regular stocks and split stocks. Each round, you get a secret tip on how stocks will perform this round and everyone sees one public tip. Then you get 4 cards dealt to you and 1 card dealt to an auction stack (1 per player). Each player plays 1 of their cards face up and 1 face down on whatever auction stack they prefer, then you bid on each stack until 1 goes to each player. Then you play all the action cards, raise or lower the values of the affected stocks, collect dividends, and sell off whatever stocks you choose. After a certain number of rounds, whoever has the most money wins. This was very easy to learn and also seems like it could play quickly. I won, but feel like that was due to a very fortunate start: my free stock, Epic Electric, was also in my first secret tip, which raised it by 4. Since people had so little information to go on during the first round, I nabbed 2 more EE stocks and by the third round they split. This gave me such a huge early lead that no one else with more volatile stocks could catch up. One player had 4 or 5 Laboratory stocks that all had to be trashed when that stock hit zero, which killed his chances of recovery. I suppose having variables that are almost impossible to anticipate adds to the realism of the theme, but that may make it too random for some people. That said, I'd like to play it more to see whether better knowledge of the mechanics allows you to anticipate and avoid the random aspects.
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Aug 30, 2015 18:43
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I played Codenames for the first time today with 5 strangers. Everybody grasped the concept and rules immediately and enjoyed the gameplay, the interaction, and the post-game analysis. It's definitely the lightest Vlaada game I've ever played, but seems like it would be fun with just about any group.
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Sep 13, 2015 03:18
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Ah, so that was you! I ended up playing Roll For The Galaxy and Five Tribes after that, so it was a pretty good day of games. What did you think of Terra Mystica?
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Sep 13, 2015 03:47
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Morpheus posted:Codenames: Thanks to Betrayal taking up so much time, we only got to play this once. Predictably, everyone loved it. I had a brilliant clue near the end of the game that should've won it for us ('March:3' for 'Penguin', 'Bugle', and 'Square') but they didn't associated Penguins with it, which made me so sad. The toughest part of the only time I've played this so far was when I had to give a clue for "disease" that would not also apply to "doctor" or "needle". The other team won on the final round by giving "double 3" because their final 3 cards were the only ones left with double letters.
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Sep 14, 2015 17:50
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That's good to know. It was the first time any of us had played it and we rushed through the rules. I'll put an asterisk next to it in my secret list of every defeat I have ever suffered.
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Sep 14, 2015 17:58
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lordsummerisle posted:Played Five Tribes for the second time yesterday. Found out we read the rules wrong the first time in regards to viziers. "10 points per player you have more viziers than", not "10 points if you have the most viziers". Suddenly they seemed much better, and almost broken. But I think it balances quite well, giving all players something to try to keep up with. Still enjoy the game a lot, though knowing what to do can be quite confusing/AP-inducing. I just love the feeling of picking up colored meeples and moving them around the board, dropping them off one at a time. Good times. Whoa, are you sure about that? In the one game I played, I grabbed the djinn who makes viziers worth 3 points a piece instead of just 1. I then (obviously) grabbed more viziers than anyone else, but we scored the bonus as a straight +10. I came in third with scores something like 98, 95, 94, 88 (which impressed us as surprisingly balanced considering we were all first time players). If your reading is correct, I would have crushed that game just because I was fortunate enough to stumble on an overpowered mechanic. Of course, there are counters to this tactic--other people grabbing up viziers first or everybody using assassins against mine--but that rule still seems unbalanced.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:15
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Merauder posted:He's correct, it's +10 for each player who had fewer than you. So the player with an untied majority in a 4 player game will have +30, in addition to the face value of 1/ea. Next most player will have +20, then +10, and lastly no bonus. OK, if it applies to all players, then our final score would still have been close. That's good. Of course, we probably screwed up other rules, too. The variety of strategic options is interesting, but many of the djinn powers seem highly situational, particularly the ones that require additional resources and a separate turn to activate.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:33
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I assume he's referring to the draft as "7 rounds of drafting" That would be the dumbest game.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:01
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lordsummerisle posted:Roll is so much fun. Easy to teach, but deeper than it might seem. And it plays quite fast as well. The 3 things that prevent me from really getting into either RFTG game: 1. Almost no player interactivity 2. Strategies seem determined by (or destroyed by) luck of the draw or roll. 3. Unlike Dominion, it feels like I can barely get an engine set up before the game ends. Are those persistent issues or am I missing something important? Because I've played Race quite a few times and, while Roll is more streamlined in other ways, it doesn't seem to improve on these points.
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Sep 16, 2015 16:07
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I just played Zhanguo for the first time and my head still hurts. So many mechanics, so much point salad. It didn't help that the guy who taught it to us had only played it once, yet he still got exasperated when we didn't grasp every single rule the first time he explained them. Then we played Codenames a few times and I got screwed by needing "bank", "figure", and "row", with "check" as the assassin. The best I could come up with was "columns 3".
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Sep 22, 2015 06:33
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Impermanent posted:Depending on your group, you might be able to use Charon: 3 They were relative strangers. So I was pleased that a bunch of nerds got "belt", "bar", and "beach" from "weightlifting 3".
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Sep 22, 2015 15:49
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The last time I played Codenames, I asked if there was any limit to the number of words you could use if it was a proper name. I was told there is no limit, which seems like a dangerous loophole if someone wanted to abuse that rule.
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Sep 23, 2015 15:45
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silvergoose posted:But you're not allowed to make up proper names, remember. And honestly, if you abuse it, then people will stop wanting to let you use proper names, so don't be a dick (which should be a rule in all games) ((except games where you're supposed to be one)). Well, yeah, "don't be a dick" is always what you want. But there are plenty of board gamers who will do whatever the rules technically allow, so it seems like disallowing proper nouns (unless they are also a common noun, like "Dominion") is the best way to go unless you know everybody at the table well enough.
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Sep 23, 2015 16:08
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The Mantis posted:Hosting Game of Thrones (2e, duh) this weekend with (hopefully) a full group. Any common oversights/mistakes re: the rules? One thing people seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around is the relationship between supply and mustering--specifically that changes in allowed army size are not resolved immediately, only when the resupply card is next drawn. Then there's the whole difficulty of remembering every rule relating to ports...
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Sep 25, 2015 16:34
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Morpheus posted:Look at that rulebook. Goddamn though, it's pretty. According to BGG, the rule book is 223 pages long.
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Sep 26, 2015 05:52
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Big McHuge posted:My GF's father had to do a hail mary in the last round of Code Names, trying to connect Ray and Match. He smartly said "Mancini 2". Unfortunately two of the other words out there were Boom and Glove. Light 2!
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Sep 28, 2015 00:03
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BonHair posted:Turns out people have terrible taste. A common game in Denmark is "nailboard" where you get a block of wood, a hammer and some nails, and whoever gets their nail in the furthest/with fewest hits wins. This game is by all measures terrible, and yet people enjoy it more than, say, Agricola. My friends play a variation of this at backyard barbecues called Stump. The difference is that you have to hammer everyone else's nail in before yours, taking turns in a circle. And you have to flip the hammer before you bring it down. The thing is, that's a fun game in situations where it would be impossible to play any board game, even one with no strategic depth. It's not always a question of taste, sometimes people enjoy getting drunk and flirting with danger. People who bring out Cards Against Humanity at parties aren't preferring it over a different game because they have bad taste--they otherwise wouldn't be playing any game at all.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:46
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Aghama posted:My nephew is turning 9 and is a big war history buff. What would be the best game to get him? Serious question: are any of the updated versions of Axis & Allies good? That's what got me into board games when I was his age. Lots of little planes and tanks and ships to move around and the rules are actually pretty simple.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:37
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Dominion feels far more interactive to me than both RFTG games, even just using the base set. I know people around here don't like http://www.playdominion.com, but the tutorial does a good job of explaining basic strategy. It even warns about the trap that Bottom Liner and friends fell into: that snatching up low-value Victory cards early on will hurt more than help. Once you understand the strategies better, the endgame is not simply dragging it out doing nothing--you may be hoping your engine hits 8 so you can finish off the Provinces, but you also may be battling it out for Duchies + Dukes, or you may be grabbing every lovely card you can to maximize your Gardens, or you may even be buying up Estates after you had trashed them early on. I looked up that recommended first game setup and it's boring as heck. Woodcutter sucks. Workshop w/o Gardens sucks. And it's missing most of my favorite base cards - Chapel, Throne Room, Festival, Laboratory, Witch...
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Sep 29, 2015 18:36
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I haven't played Robinson Crusoe enough times co-op to really judge, but the variety of tactical options seems to work against quarterbacking. Everybody can decide on their own how they want to die.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:19
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Rutibex posted:Robinson Crusoe and Pandemic should only be played by a single person. If you must play them as a group, do so by consensus, don't assign people individual pawns. Maybe this is why RC worked well the only time I've played it co-op. My friends aren't a bunch of beta introverts and we chose our individual tasks after group discussion, although everybody had the final say on what they wanted their pawns to do.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:52
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Bottom Liner posted:So Dominion, Eminent Domain, and...? Those are my top three deck builders, and of the the three VotK is the most accessible. It requires one small purchase to get the full experience, instead of lots of big boxes or an out of print expansion. It's great, and if you're all Dominioned out its probably the best deck builder. Isn't Arctic Scavengers supposed to be pretty good?
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Oct 2, 2015 15:18
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Aside from him overhyping it, is there anything actually bad about Arctic Scavengers? It got plenty of other good reviews and a quick search through this thread only turns up positive comments from people who have actually played it.
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Oct 2, 2015 16:00
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quote is not edit
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Oct 2, 2015 16:00
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I've only played Mysterium without the individual scoring rules (i.e., the US version but using the Polish rules). It felt like co-op Dixit. I'd like to try it with the clairvoyance points, which may give it more longevity.
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Oct 5, 2015 20:00
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Lichtenstein posted:That's actually one reason I don't mind kingmakerish games every once in a while: I actually enjoy the fact I can play with bad newbies and have them all gang up on me (the obvious threat), because they're usually sensible enough to let go when I'm stomped pretty bad to focus on whoever snuck into the lead, and in the end everyone is in a sensibly meaningful position and has fun. I can't think of any other board game that handles this situation like Game of Thrones. You can't win by simply having a better understanding of the rules, because all potential strategies are visible and available for discussion. At the moment of combat, you don't know which leader your opponent will choose, but you are allowed to see all of their available options up until they decide. It's usually in the other players' best interest to advise a less experienced player and inform them of options they may have missed. And you (probably) can't win by either turtling up while the others duke it out or by going solo and refusing any temporary alliances. It's too bad I can't get it to the table more often--is there anything similar out there with a shorter play time and that plays well with less than 6 people?
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Oct 7, 2015 16:06
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Tekopo posted:COIN If my friends are loathe to commit a full day to Game of Thrones, I don't see how I'll ever talk them into Fire in the Lake.
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Oct 7, 2015 16:10
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esquilax posted:Does anyone have recommendations for a storage solution for Mage Knight? The Broken Token organizer is high quality, fits all the expansions, and drastically reduces setup and teardown time. http://www.thebrokentoken.com/magic-night-organizer/
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Oct 7, 2015 23:47
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Radioactive Toy posted:The craziest part of that Scythe Kickstarter campaign is that the majority of backers are going for the $99 collector's edition. I'll probably back it as I think Jamey does an excellent job both designing and running a Kickstarter, but the regular $59 version is probably alright for me. Although metal coins are pretty great... The premium version also gets you 4 plastic containers, which saves you the trouble of finding appropriately sized Plano boxes or whatever.
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Oct 13, 2015 18:12
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More often than not, people bitch about stretch goals being too ambitious and spreading the developers' efforts too thin (although this is more of a video game thing). Having pseudo-stretch goals that are easily attainable is far better. Also, every single aspect of Kickstarter is a "marketing gimmick".
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Oct 13, 2015 21:18
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There's an upcoming local meetup run by people who just got back from Essen. They're raffling these: Pandemic: Legacy (signed by BOTH designers) 7 Wonders Duel (with Essen Messe card and metal turn marker) Between Two Cities (signed by designer and with Essen promo cards) Beasty Bar: the New Beast in Town (+ Tazmanian Devil card) I Hate Zombies / Falling Coin / Bearanoia / G.Nome / Ocracoke Suburbia: 5 Star (expansion to Suburbia)
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Oct 14, 2015 01:47
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The first update for the Scythe kickstarter explains the rationale behind stretch goals that have already been designed and playtested. Do you think he reads this thread!?!?? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameystegmaier/scythe/posts/1382312
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Oct 14, 2015 16:33
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Impermanent posted:I wonder if FitL would qualify as uncritically using colonialism, seeing as it is at least one player's job to keep Veitnam independent. It's 3 players' jobs to keep Vietnam controlled by the Vietnamese!
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Oct 18, 2015 02:37
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I'm hoping to play Burano and Porta Nigra on Saturday, but there's gonna be a lot of people vying for seats at those tables, I think. Between Two Cities is also on my list. Prodigals Club also looks like it could be interesting. What I'd like to avoid is getting stuck for 2+ hours learning a new game that turns out to be yet another slight variation of thinly themed point salad worker placement. Zhanguo killed that genre for me.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:23
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At today's big Essen extravaganza meetup I played 3 new games: Porta Nigra is a fairly straightforward Euro worker placement game. The unique mechanic is that you have 4 districts in which to build towers, using pieces from 5 common piles in the center. Each district has different scoring and endgame bonuses. Each player has a master builder on a horse that circles the 5 piles. You can only buy from the pile corresponding to the district your builder occupies (or the central pile) and you can only build in the district your builder occupies. It costs money to move to a different district. You have a personal deck of cards, from which you draw a hand of 2 each turn. Each card has a number of actions you can perform (buy, build, collect money, etc.). You choose one of the two cards each turn and a round ends when everyone has worked through their entire deck. A game consists of 2 complete rounds. Of course, there are lots of other purchasable cards that affect this basic setup--bonuses for building in a certain district, extra workers, ability to buy from a different district, etc. It was a lot of fun and easy to grasp and remember all the rules despite the point salad nature of the game. Because of the common resources and the limited number of building spaces, it felt more interactive than similar games (e.g., Trajan). Between Two Cities is a coop-with-competitive-scoring game with a short playing time. It took almost no time to learn. This was simpler than I expected and I'd have to play again before I could evaluate how strategy would work. Obviously, you want to maximize the value of both of your cities since you only score for the less valuable one. But the complexity comes from the 7 Wonders-style passing of unselected cards. It wasn't quite as great as I hoped, but my expectations were pretty high. Manhattan TraffIQ was one I hadn't heard anything about. Despite the stupid name, it's a clever variation on Carcassonne. You place your taxis and delivery trucks on the intersections between the tiles. Each turn you can place tiles, draw tiles into your hand, and/or move a taxi/delivery truck. It played very quickly and was more short-term tactical than Carcassonne (no farmer equivalent), but had some interesting back-and-forth since you can remove a player's vehicles from the board by outnumbering them along a specific street. Not quite as luck-driven as Carcassonne, because there was also no monastery equivalent. Edit: Forgot to mention that Manhattan TraffIQ had some annoying IKEA-style skimping on the components. You get different numbers of vehicles in a 2, 3, or 4-player game, so it comes with 7 red and 7 yellow, but only 5 blue and 4 green. We thought the box was missing the others, but nope. CaptainRightful fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 01:16
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homullus posted:The djinns also feel like misplaced design depth, considering how few make it into a given game. They're MADE like starting factions and end up being tiny bonuses that don't even appear in every game. This bugged me, too. All the diverse djinn powers and point values (which warrant the cheat sheet) led me to expect they'd play a much larger role. The whole game feels like "let's use every single mechanic!"
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Oct 29, 2015 20:30
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Played 3 new games today. Favor of the Pharoah is a Yahtzee-style rollfest with almost no room for strategy. Everything you can buy gives you a significant boost so you buy the best card you can each time and once someone gets 7 of a kind, everybody else gets one more chance to outdo that roll. The high-level cards are ridiculously overpowered - e.g., take another turn immediately; add +1 or +2 to all of your dice. Plays quickly, but no one wanted a second game. Hab & Gut is a simple, elegant stock game with partially hidden info. Each turn you can buy or sell goods and then play 2 cards to manipulate prices--those cards are drawn from racks that you share only with the players to your left and right (like Between Two Cities). The other unique angle is that you can contribute a certain amount of goods to charity (the type of goods are secret and they are cashed in at the good's price at end of a round). At the end of the game, the person who contributed the least to charity automatically loses and of the remaining players, whoever made the most money wins. I'd definitely play this again, but apparently it's out of print right now. I Hate Zombies is a fast-playing party game where zombies fight humans via rock-paper-scissors. The humans have modifiers (some of which seem really broken), but that's the whole game. If you get turned into a zombie halfway through the game, then the zombies win, do you consider that a win or a loss for yourself? Who cares! The party micro-game field is getting crowded, so I can't imagine ever wanting to play this one again either. Still, Hab & Gut made up for the other two. And then we played Galaxy Trucker, so I can't complain.
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Nov 8, 2015 00:59
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Oldstench posted:I really want a copy of this and was about to get really excited that maybe it was reprinted, but then I read the last line... I assume it was a friends copy? A guy brought it to a strategy game meetup.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:57
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jmzero posted:I'm not sure exactly why I want this game so bad - I'm unlikely to get many plays in - but I'm on the P500 list for it and still check EBay now and again. Do you already have Fire In The Lake? If not, that should scratch your COIN itch until A Distant Plain actually gets printed. P500 can get depressing--I'd love to try Navajo Wars, but it's got 430 more orders to go. Of course, even that situation is preferable to something like this: http://www.simmonsgames.com/products/
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Nov 12, 2015 00:33
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