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Elysium posted:Is it redundant to get San Juan if you have RFTG? Yes. Once you know Race for the Galaxy, the only use for San Juan is to use it as a teaching tool for getting new people into Race. They're very similar, play in the same amount of time and Race is simply a far, far better game that manages to boost the complexity and actually shrink the play time. I do mean that it makes for a good teaching tool in all seriousness though. Not everyone would want to sit down and learn RFTG but San Juan is approachable and simplified. One or two games of that and even board game newbies can figure out Race.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:51
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BioTech posted:Also played Coup for the first time. That is some tight design, wow. Everything just seems to be balanced so well, the whole game works great and you can play with less than a minute of explaining. Very impressive. Coup is fantastic. Not only is it as simple as you describe, it evolves as you play. It somehow manages to draw out layers on layers of deception without ever becoming pure guesswork. It's honestly jaw dropping in how elegant it is.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:18
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EDIT: Looks like everything's done so disregard this post. And my sincere apologies to that one guy who is either upset that I'm giving stuff away or that I don't like Kemet. Or both. I dunno. Alright, it's time for the annual purge of the games that don't get played often enough. I could drop these off at half price books but I hate doing that when things can go out of print and I'd rather have them to go to folks who will use them. I also once threw away a copy of Avalon Hill's Civ and Advanced Civ (later rebuilt from scratch because god drat) and as such am now pathologically unable to throw away a board game. I'm trying to get rid of the following: They're all decent to good games (except Kemet, I stand by disliking that one even if everyone else loves it), but they just don't seem to come out often enough to justify keeping them around. They all suffer from being almost as popular as something else my group is into. Here's my system: If you want a game, post and claim it. My email address is my username at yahoo, so email me an address for shipping and I will mail it out to you. One game per poster. Go ahead and post a second request if you'd like and if no one else wants it, I'll throw that in too. Once I get everything sent out and you get a game, buy me a 5-10 dollar amazon gift card to cover shipping and send it to my email address. Edit: Should probably mention I'm in the US and can only really ship within the States. If there's a question, I can look into how much shipping is elsewhere but I suspect probably too much. Ohthehugemanatee fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 23:58
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Chomp8645 posted:On the topic of 7 Wonders, how recommended are the expansions? I picked up just the base game recently and so far it's been a big hit with my friends and family. It's getting a lot of play already so I'll probably be wanting to expand it sooner or later. They're good. Leaders makes wealth a valid strategy and opens up long term planning not present in the base game. The cost is that it dumps a ton of unique symbols on people at the start of a game and it temporarily slows to a crawl as people who haven't played very often pass around the manual during the leader drafting phase. I love what leaders does to the game but I cut it every time there's a new player at the table. Cities adds some very mild antagonistic options and powerful but costly cards which don't seem to change the game much in my experience. The best thing to come out of Cities is the team play variant which works really well with Cities but can be easily adapted to the base game if you skim the Cities manual online. Team seven wonders turns it from a game I'll play if I have to to a game that I genuinely look forward to.
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Jan 5, 2015 06:33
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I guess Vlaada helped playtest Robinson Crusoe. And apparently he consulted on Nations development. I'm pretty interested in that one, it kind of sounds like it does to Through the Ages what Eclipse does to Twilight Imperium? Eh.... that's far higher praise than Nations really deserves. Nations is not a streamlined TTA. It's the components of TTA modified slightly and then used to make a different game that is more turn-by-turn tactical, less about long term engine building and very number-crunchy. In a world without TTA it would probably deserve to be held up as an amazing game. In a world with TTA however, it suffers from being neither streamlined enough, interesting enough or well produced enough to be worth recommending. If anything, it feels like a precursor to TTA, not a successor. Before I picked it up, I read a bunch of reviews on BGG and was confused about why people were so meh about something that looked so perfect. Now I get it. It's just kind of uninspired. I would love it if someone would do to TTA what Eclipse did to Twilight Imperium.
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Jan 15, 2015 06:37
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Durendal posted:I wish I was making this story up, or embellishing it, but it was real, and was just as enjoyable as you would imagine. And I know I am a whiney poo poo for posting this, but it I needed to vent. You ended a game of risk. You've done the Lord's work, son.
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Jan 19, 2015 16:25
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Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:I just played my first game of Eclipse And I was really loving impressed with it. The setup was a massive pain in the rear end, but it was a really easy game to learn. With all of your possible actions clearly listed on your player sheet. The biggest load of bullshit was the diplomacy though, with no shared victory it seemed like there was little reason not to throw away your ally at the first moment you could take advantage of it. I actually love Eclipse's diplomacy. Peace offers economic benefits at the cost of end game VPs and the traitor card is just painful enough that it punishes players for acting as you suggest (unless you gain a ton of VPs from breaking peace you're probably hurting yourself and doing a favor to your victim). It makes diplomatic relations something you have to really think about instead of a no-brainer.
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Jan 20, 2015 07:22
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ThisIsNoZaku posted:Isn't an alliance in Eclipse only worth 1 point when all the combat result tiles range from 1 to 5? I haven't played in a while, and only once, but I remember thinking that making it 2 points, rather than equal to literally the worst possible combat outcome would make it more appealing. Up to four from what I recall. The question is whether you can leverage the extra income into more VPs than you lose out on. It's already a close thing and I definitely wouldn't want to increase the value. I suspect it would kill any incentive for combat between players.
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Jan 20, 2015 07:43
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I've always wanted to play Ascending Empires. The idea of combining a 4x type of game with a dexterity game just seemed so ridiculous that I feel like I need to experience it. I recall reading about a bunch of issues with the board not being perfectly flat and loving up the shuffle puck maneuvers, though. You really don't need to. The shuttle puck thing is a cool concept (and the slight board edges are fine if everyone is cool with the odd "anomaly" sending their scouts spiraling out of the galaxy), but the game itself is pretty underwhelming once you get beyond the thrill of flicking spaceships around. A game like catacombs did really creative things within the dexterity mechanic (e.g. a shield is a wooden token you put in front of your dude, or an arrow is a smaller token you put within an inch of your piece and flick). Ascending doesn't really do any of that, and the empire building game going on in the background is really uninspired. If I put the components in front of you and asked you to design a game, I'd give you good odds of coming up with something a lot more fun than the designers did.
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Feb 11, 2015 08:00
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So dexterity games came up a while back and someone mentioned Cube Quest which I'd never heard of, but it was twenty bucks on Amazon and goofy looking so I picked it up and I've been playing a game or two a night with my wife for the past week. It's surprisingly cool. You each get a little mat with a castle on it and a king die that goes in said castle. You set up an army of other dice behind a screen to shield your king and then take turns flicking dice at each other trying to snipe the opponent's king off the board. Dice get removed if they are knocked off the board or land in your opponent's side with a shadow side facing up (more expensive pieces have more active sides so they don't get captured as often). You can build large two dimensional screens, make little forts, build a ziggurat or stack all your dice in a huge tower if you feel so inclined. At first you just flick wildly at the other player's king, but after a while you start to realize the value of formations and chain shots that spill dice onto the other player's mat faster than they can clear them off. Then you start to realize the value of disrupting said formations and pretty quickly it gets surprisingly tactical, or at least as tactical as anything can get when you are flicking dice across a mat. This is great and exactly what dexterity games should be. It's simple, plays in ten minutes and the rules mechanics tie into the physical pieces so that there's no referencing of rules or measuring range or any of the other stuff that more complex dexterity games toss in that slow things down. It's just an interesting set up phase and a series of flicks with a surprising amount of emergent complexity given the simplicity of the rules. It's also just really fun to build a little castle out of dice and equally fun to knock them down. It's never going to replace Agricola or Eclipse and no one is ever going to spend an hour and a half straight playing it or anything, but for $20 it's definitely the best dexterity game I've played and worth looking into if the above sounds interesting.
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Feb 22, 2015 05:37
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Bubble-T posted:Played some 2v2 Tash-Kalar last night, I partnered with my wife against our newly married friends. I tried this out too and really didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. It gives me flashbacks to bridge sessions where your partner looks at you with murder eyes as you keep raising your bid except that the whole game is like that. The 2v2 high form variant is really, really well done and I'm surprised there aren't more games that use that bridge dynamic of making communication vital and then strictly limiting everything you can say.
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Mar 11, 2015 01:35
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Frijolero posted:From the looks of it the will only change cards right? Maybe some minor cosmetic changes? I just got Agricola last month I can't fathom needing more cards for Agricola. Agricola is a beast of a game as is and basically comes with two of what most publishers would have called expansions sitting in the box. Have no regrets.
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Mar 12, 2015 04:16
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GrandpaPants posted:I think Resistance has a smaller footprint than ONUW, so I'd probably travel with that before ONUW. Resistance requires more people though. Along the lines of Love Letter, there's Lost Legacy, which is sort of the sameish design. Tiny Epic Kingdoms was designed to be a travel game, but it is also a bad game. It is there if you're desperate for games, though. You can also just bring some Dixit cards and play that. Resistance or Avalon are fantastic but you need 6+ people. Coup is great for 4 or 5. I've had great success with non gamers with both since the rules are so minimalist but the emergent gameplay is wonderful. Both games are cheap and fantastic.
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Apr 23, 2015 23:49
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^^^Beaten! Curse you, may you draw nothing but Fakirs when you play TMZveroboy posted:Later on, sat down for Terra Mystica. Rules explanation took nearly an hour. Ew. TMs rules are kind of a mess but that seems extreme. What did they do, run down each faction and give strategy advice? Go over every token in the game? If ever there was a game that called for a cursory rules explanation and a quick practice round, it's TM. Also, three and a half hours of gameplay? Holy hell, I've seen a game go over an hour and a half once.
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Apr 26, 2015 01:46
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Texibus posted:It's poo poo. The only enjoyment to be had is fooling around with the Ipad on your first play through and then you realize you're playing a really boring push your luck mechanic under a X-com theme annnnd you say fuuuuuccccckkkk they got me again, then you just sit in your room alone listening to X-com theme on replay for an hour. I've actually enjoyed playing it, although it definitely isn't super deep or anything. You could almost consider it Space Alert lite, and with the right crowd that goes to pieces and fights with each other under pressures, it is a lot of fun. Where XCom is lacking is in giving everyone enough to do. Basically everything should have been just a little more complicated. As is, there's usually an optimum play and as long as you're looking at your options before it's time for you to activate, you'll probably do okay. It does give you more time to bicker, which is fun, but I can't imagine anyone is going to be putting in a ton of effort the third time they play the dude who assigns soldiers. What I actually really like about Xcom is the app. It has a ton of potential for Co-op game design. The problem with Co-ops is that its easy for the difficulty to get skewed and players to get into cakewalk or impossible situations and there isn't much fun about either. I think (but this is only a guess based on a few play throughs) that the app actually tries to push the difficulty into a middle ground. Do too well and it seems to throw more at you. Get brutalized and it will pull a punch. It's actually a really good idea, since by obfuscating the difficulty adjustment players can't game the system. There's probably some magic number of alien ships you want on the board to get an easier time of it, but since no one knows what it is you're never doing weird metagame stuff to reach it. It's a great idea tied to something that is almost but not quite as cool as space alert.
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May 4, 2015 17:27
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Lord Frisk posted:Only the combat. Taking over systems and forming alliances and politicking are still good. This is a complaint I've seen before but never really understood. What's the garbage? In my experience, Eclipse gives you a combat system that is very random during the first and possibly second turn of the game (which leads to lots of rolling 2 dice and looking for sixes, bad guy rolls 2 dice looking for 5s, you roll two dice looking for sixes...) and that would be awful it kept up that way as fleet sizes grow, except that the game then hands you a literal bag full of ways to mess with your die rolls and make combat horrifically unfair in your favor and tells you to just go nuts. The game also ensures that anything you pick in turn allows other players to pick up a counter which is generally cheaper but of course if they're countering you they aren't countering the player on their other side... which is what leads to all the cool politics and alliances and agreements to have border skirmishes instead of all out wars. All in all it's a pretty decent system. I can see it would be terrible if people refused to upgrade their ships and people were rolling buckets full of dice trying to roll sixes, but I think you could just slap on a decent computer and murder those players silly until they learned to not be terrible.
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May 26, 2015 21:14
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unpronounceable posted:I've actually been thinking about getting something for a big, heavy game, and Dominant Species was on my short list. I thought about Eclipse because I think I'd really like the exploration and economy building, but I also think I'd just be frustrated at the combat. I'd consider an 18xx game, but I don't think I'd be able to convince anyone in my group to play it with me. Someone in my group has Cuba Libre, and I think has ordered Fire in the Lake, so I'd want to try one of those before getting a COIN game. How about something like Terra Mystica? It only goes to five, unfortunately, but it moves relatively quickly and is pure economy through and through. EDIT: Re-wrote my post because I suspect I misread his initial request. Ohthehugemanatee fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Jun 6, 2015 |
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Jun 6, 2015 15:30
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unpronounceable posted:I played my first game of Eclipse today with 5 other, slow players. It took too long, but I had a good time. With my first explore, I lucked into the discovery tile with the +3 computer, so from that my aim was to load up with plasma missiles on my cruisers. I made a bunch of strategic mistakes, but in the end, I ended up winning with 33 points. It felt a bit too claustrophobic with 6 players, so I'd like to try it with 4, but I definitely want to play again. Even with experienced players six player eclipse can take a while. There's a variant in the expansion that allows for simultaneous turns that helps a lot with higher player numbers. You don't even need to buy the expansion to use it either - just check out the expansion rule book online and you'll see how it works. The only component you'll need to make is second active player marker. You're right in aiming for four players though. 3-4 seems to be the sweet spot.
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Jun 21, 2015 15:04
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Holy poo poo, I know there isn't a lot of love for Warhammer in this thread and there absolutely shouldn't be because it's garbage, but the current warhammer thread is really worth checking out. They just released a new edition of fantasy and the rules are batshit. You don't so much build an army as much as you just pile miniatures onto the table until you literally run out of space. People were expecting the usual combination of grognardy stuff, forced miniature purchases and imbalances but what they got... As an example, there's one model who is an insane knight. He has the usual things you'd expect for a wargame - bonuses in some areas, penalties in others. Want an extra edge though? If you run around the table pretending to ride an invisible horse he can re-roll his dice. He gets a stronger bonus if you talk to the horse. There's a model that forces your opponent to have a staring contest with you. There's a model that gets better if you are holding an alcoholic beverage and one that gets better if you hold a drink aloft and proclaim the honor of "the lady." There's a character that gives you a bonus if your mustache is larger than your opponent's. There are units that force you to not smile during your turn and one that causes you to instantly lose if you ever kneel. Dancing if you play chaos gets you extra rolls and getting your opponent to dance with you is even more effective. It is also literally possible within the framework of the game rules to offer to blow your opponent. If they accept you get to take one of their units. The rest of the rules are about as awful looking as can be expected but GW is now asking the kind of people who want to meticulously paint 40 Brettonian knights to run circles around a table yelling at their horsey. Game stores are gonna get real weird if this takes off.
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Jul 5, 2015 05:02
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PerniciousKnid posted:All in all, I've been enjoying Agricola more than I thought I would. It's a bit fiddly, with all that cart reloading, and it feels a bit slow and overlong, but much less so than I expected. I find it surprisingly satisfying to play, both a challenging puzzle and a sedate country slice of life. If you're describing Agricola as sedate you need to play it a little more. That game generates more howls of anguish than Eclipse, TtA and Risk Legacy combined. I've seen people accept the neutron bombing of their homeworld with equanimity but holy poo poo dude, if you touch that sheep...
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Jul 16, 2015 16:40
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thespaceinvader posted:Seriously, don't skip the tutorial. Mage Knight is a phenomenally complex game and it will confuse the piss out of even experienced gamers. There's a tutorial for a reason. Yeah. It's also a good tutorial. You get to build a hero and explore all the elements of the game in a fairly unrushed manner. The full game requires a lot of foreknowledge about what's out there and will go to a crawl when you try to explain how a city assault works.
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Jul 19, 2015 21:20
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Chomp8645 posted:Are people hearing stuff about board games being cool again and just opening cafes straight away with zero additional research and no personal interest in them? Because I don't know how else to explain something like that. They're kind of a thing and you have to remember that most of their customers want to hang out and play stuff they're nostalgic about. I was at a board game themed bar years ago and people really were playing stuff like candy land and uno. The selling point is nostalgia and familiarity, not solid game design. The bar versions in particular are about giving people something brain dead to do while they drink. Opening a bar or cafe targeting the kind of people excited to try out Caverna or Eclipse would be a great way to go out of business. There just aren't that many of us. Even what we'd consider introductory social games are pretty intimidating to most folks without a friend to explain the rules.
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Jul 25, 2015 06:01
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Blamestorm posted:So is Runebound 3e likely to be "not as good Mage Knight that I can actually theoretically both teach and play in one session to more than one other player at a time, and thus get out ten times as often?" Or will it be: "Talisman: the Grinding: the game?" Having never played the earlier ones I'm trying to assess whether it could be a nice slightly lighter "run around a map fantasy level up game" which sound quite appealing, as I can't think of any good ones outside of MK and that is so much effort for new players I mostly just play 2p. Assuming they keep the core of 2nd edition, Runebound is a slow paced game of running around and leveling up. It isn't as random as Talisman by any means (you aren't going to get frogged or ganked by the Reaper) but you also won't get the random windfalls Talisman can drop on players to mercifully end the game. You also lose out on the random weirdness of Talisman. Instead of events and strangers and wild unfair spells and all that jazz you just end up fighting monsters over and over again. You're also going to be dealing with what might just be the worst movement system ever designed. Oh, and I think the old edition has this weird inverse leveling curve where the first levels took forever and later levels went by in a flash which made the tedious beginning particularly painful. Hopefully they'll ditch that. If there was a word to describe the last edition of Runebound, I think I would choose "plodding." Gun to my head I'd choose Talisman over it because I've laughed my rear end off at times while playing that game. Please do not take this as an endorsement of Talisman.
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Aug 1, 2015 06:10
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Durendal posted:Some changes in the new Through the Ages edition have been posted. Seems like they are still playtesting it so nothing is final. Wow. Those are actually huge. Not sure how I feel about removing the sacrificing of military units. It was a clunky as hell rule and half the people I play with still struggle to calculate their potential military strength at times, but it was key for making military a real threat, making defense credible and most importantly of all it ensured military leaders would regularly lose their lead based on how much they wanted specific colonies or successful aggressions. It was a very key part of the way the game keeps people cycling through ups and downs. It also lead to fun mind games where you could bluff people into and out of sacrificing units they didn't need to. The new set up sounds much more static and I don't see much of a mechanism for allowing military catch up. Glad they tossed Holy War though. The only time that card was ever played successfully we looked at what it would do to the victim and house-ruled it on the spot (tracked the victim's culture as if they had been holy warred into oblivion but didn't remove any of their pieces and kept a second score count going so that they could keep playing and see what their score would have been otherwise). Copying tactics though is genius. The wonder and leader balance is interesting. They've buffed some wonders I thought were fine and in particular gave some leaders a massive boost. Things will doubtless be pretty different with the military changes though so it's really hard to judge. Cool to see that the new edition is going to be a very different game though. I'll be happy to own both.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:15
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These Loving Eyes posted:Does the X-Wing Miniatures game work well as a team-game, e.g. in 2 vs. 2 scenarios? Not particularly. The larger format kills off some of the more interesting tactics. You also lose the speed of play that helps make x wing fun. It's doable and it isn't painful or anything, but 1 on 1 is where the game shines.
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Aug 8, 2015 15:53
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Rad Valtar posted:Which Sentinels of the Multiverse expansions are worth picking up? There aren't any bad expansions really, and your best bet is to pick whichever one looks like the heroes and villains are cool. I particularly liked Infernal Relics and Shattered Timelines. Rook City had what I felt were kinda poorly thought out heroes (Mr Fixer in particular can get absolutely screwed by his deck) but the villains and environments were great.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:35
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Malloreon posted:None of those answers were condescending. Can we keep a tally in the OP for every time someone who thinks they're having fun is heroically corrected? It might keep out the riff raff who are busy enjoying themselves and starting to get dangerously interested in the hobby.
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Aug 14, 2015 20:26
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Trasson posted:Telling someone who enjoys SotM not to get any expansions is completely reasonable. Board games are not a free commodity one summons from thin air. If a person asks which $40 add-on they want for a pretty subpar product, it's a fair statement to tell them their money is better spent elsewhere. You sound like a lot of fun. When you see ultimate frisbee players, do you knock the frisbee down and give them a lecture on playing a better designed and more competitive sport? Do you lecture basketball players on the inherent flaws of a game where height differences can matter more than skill? Spend a lot of time in Starbucks lines lecturing people on their inferior coffee choices? Giving an un-asked for and rude critique of a thing is not a public service. In the real world we call it "being a dick." If the dude had asked what people think about Sentinels then by all means, open fire. But he didn't. If someone asks about Kemet strategies, it is not an implicit invitation for me to tell them why I don't like the game and how they should play something else. The odd thing too is that it's easy to critique a thing politely if you absolutely feel the need. "Sentinels? I think I liked the expansion that adds the Chrono Ranger and the Omnitron hero. To be honest though, the more I played the game the more aggravated I got at it, so I'd be leery of picking up too many expansions. It's just too easy for the game to generate no-win or no-challenge scenarios and after one too many of those it starts to lose its shine." See that? That's a recommendation and a polite critique all wrapped together. What the dude got though was "LOL BURN YOUR GAME" and "WELL HERE IS A LIST OF WHY THE GAME IS poo poo. POINT THE FIRST..."
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Aug 15, 2015 16:29
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S.T.C.A. posted:Why do people hate Star Realms so much? What makes it inherently less skillful than Dominion? It's a far simpler game with a much larger random component due to the way the cards come out. It also doesn't give you a ton of choices (although I'd argue that Dominion often doesn't either for most of your turns). The two really shouldn't even be compared though. Star Realms goes for $15 and is competing with microgames, not Dominion.
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Aug 20, 2015 04:52
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Smeef posted:What's the goon consensus on Puerto Rico? I'm irrationally drawn to it and see that it has good reviews. It's one of the best economics games ever made and somehow manages to make indirect economic competition more nail-biting than thermonuclear war. It's right up there with Agricola. It is simply amazing. The only downsides are that the early moves are to some extent solvable and that skill differences are not only brutal but imbalancing because every player has to act as a check on the others. Puerto Rico excels as a game where a group explores it together and gets better together. It is a terrible game to invite a new person into once a group knows what's going on though because a single new player making random role selections will easily give the game away on turn two to the player on their left and lead to howls of anguish around the table that they won't understand. That's pretty much my only frustration with the game - once you really get it, it's really hard to play with new folks.
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Sep 20, 2015 05:13
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I got to play the new Game of Thrones card game a few days ago and man, Fantasy Flight has come a long way from the days of Warhammer Invasion. It's really tightly designed. The game has a moderately involved strategic layer, a simple political layer and a pretty basic card game at its core and the pieces work together really well. I never played the original so I don't know how much is just left over from the old design, but it's both thematic and fun that you can be getting set up for a curb stomping in the card game and dodge it by out-guessing your opponent at the higher levels. It feels very much like you're scheming at all times. It's also neat to see how well they manage spite levels in the game because GoT is spiteful as all hell and it could easily make for a nasty game of pummel-the-loser. I'm used to political games like Diplomacy or Conquest of the Empire where the first battle you lose sets off a grim downward spiral but FFG managed to make a game that both feels incredibly spiteful yet never seems to punish anyone past the point of no return. It's hard to explain, but when you're attacking you feel like you're kicking your opponent's teeth in, yet having been on the side of the kickee as well, I just felt like I was trading away pawns in the service of longer term goals. The central card game may be pretty straightforward, but it's well set up to allow hampering rather than destruction. I was genuinely impressed. A three player game took about an hour and a half with some fumbling around because no one knew quite what we were doing and the second one was about on par with that so it certainly isn't a short game. I didn't get a chance to play the 2 player version but it loses out on the political aspect of the game which everyone at the table loved, so I'm not sure if it's going to have Netrunner players tossing their cards away to switch over. I think it would be worth looking into for a group of 3-4 though. One core set seemed to offer plenty of gameplay.
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Oct 5, 2015 15:29
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Xelkelvos posted:I'm glad I dropped the cash on Gloomhaven instead of 7th Continent. I made the print and play demo for Gloomhaven and it was amazing. This designer is clearly someone who has played every dungeon crawler and co-op game I have and has had exactly the same aggravations I've had with all of them. The design is just tight as all hell, unique and incredibly streamlined. It gives me the same vibes as Mage Knight but in a faster, more graceful package.
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Oct 27, 2015 05:32
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BonHair posted:It may not be the best game in the world, but it is not bad either. My point was that it is not random in a bad way with more than 3 players, for basically the same reason that Agricola is not just random with more than one player. Sure there are less things you can be certain of, like getting all the resources, but the best part of the game is mitigating that and making sure that you have options no matter what hand you are passed, while also trying to prevent the others from having good options. Just like in Agricola where you can't be certain that a certain action will be available, so you plan around the possibility of it not being an option. The other saving grace for 7 wonders is the team variant. At 6 and 8 players it's actually fantastic and far more strategic than the base game with any number. It's a shame it is tucked away in one of the expansions as an easily missed variant when the paragraph should really be titled something like "Holy poo poo, never do anything but this." It's a weird beast. It's outdone by many games at 3-4, decent at 5 because of the reasons outlined above, great at 6, pretty mediocre at 7 and great at 8.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:21
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So trip report on Warhammer Quest. My reaction is a bit mixed. I loved it at first but I think it's going to go in to the "deeply flawed" category of FFG games. In, short, it takes the mechanics of Death Angel (a very light but brutal co-op puzzle) and the Lord of the Rings LCG (a more complex game focused on deck building and an even more brutal co-op puzzle) and kind of melds them. There's no deck construction but there are more and better options for each character and each turn is far less obvious than it could be in Death Angel. It adds on an RPG-lite progression system unlike anything present in either prior game. The game also moves away from the brutal co-op puzzle style. It's easier than both of its predecessors and the fun is less about overcoming painful odds and more about exploration and progression. Unlike DA or LOTR, WHQ really nails the feel of what it's going for. It really feels like a game of Heroquest or Descent or whatever. You explore, you fight, you get loot, you get tougher and ultimately the heroes will probably win which, frankly, they really ought to. These are heroes after all. It's less about if you win and more about how you win and what you end up dragging out of the dungeon. It's kind of refreshing. There are a few dice to roll but in a solid choice by the designers they are very predictable and most of the luck that comes out shows up in the form of bursts that help the player. The parts of the game where the game plays itself are also extremely quick and streamlined. Unlike in LoTR you're going to spend a lot more time taking your turn than you are going to be shuffling chits around and flipping cards. You can run a quest in half an hour to an hour with one or two people and the light, fast moving nature of the game really works for that time frame. But then the problems rear their head. For one, the game hasn't really been properly tested. The game comes with a short five-mission campaign and a randomly generated mega-dungeon that is a mini-campaign in its own right. The latter is unfortunately broken out of the box. I won't get into the details, but there's a somewhat counter-intuitive strategy that trivializes the quest in its entirety. Aggravatingly, it's the kind of thing that should have been caught within ten minutes of play testing. There are ways to patch it, but it's aggravating that you have to. So that alone knocks out a bit of the replay value since the mega-dungeon is supposed to be the part that can be replayed over and over. The other problem that eats into replay value is that there just isn't quite enough there. If your game is going to be more about progression than difficulty, it needs lots of options to progress and things to do or it can become stale. There are some options, but frankly not a ton. The heroes are each unique and have cool things they can do, but with no branching upgrade trees there's no difference between one high level wizard and another. They have unique treasures for each hero but there are only three per hero and you'll see 1-2 in each campaign or 2-3 of them in the random mega-dungeon so once you've seen them... Once you've gone through the campaign, there just isn't a huge reason to go through it again. It would have been laughably easy to include other campaigns or a few more options but hey, FFG. I'm sure the expansions are already at the printer. All in all I really like what WHQ is trying to do. I'd even go so far as to say I thought it was amazing the first time I played through the campaign. The mechanics are solid, the game play is tight and the whole thing is only let down by there just not being a ton there to do after you finish the short campaign. With expansions it's going to probably be awesome and with a patch the mega-dungeon will probably work well, but it wouldn't have killed FFG to actually put more gameplay in the box. It's a cheap game by their standards, but for $25-35 it wouldn't have unreasonable to put more than six hours of gameplay into the box. The short version would be: neat game, not really a lot there though even for a budget title. Ohthehugemanatee fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Dec 17, 2015 |
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Dec 17, 2015 16:33
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Bottom Liner posted:I assume you're talking about the explore exploit? We ran into that too, and just implemented a hard counter on the number of times per location you could explore. I'm actually ok with the amount of content. The campaign was ok, and the persitence mechanics were a nice innovation to the genre, but I think the game mechanics are strong enough to carry the game with just the random dungeon delve quest in repeat plays, at least until we get more campaigns. For all my complaints, I suspect I'll pick up at least the first few expansions when they come out. I really like the streamlined dungeon crawler gameplay. It's the first time any game trying that has clicked for me and the campaign was a blast for the first one and a half times through. The mechanics really are wonderful at capturing the feel of a dungeon crawler while ditching the aggravation. I still can't give FFG a break for half the game being broken out of the box or for not putting in a minimal amount of effort and throwing in a few more quests. This game is expansion bait in true FFG form. It's totally going to work on me but I'm still going to be annoyed about it.
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Dec 17, 2015 18:23
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Beffer posted:Have any goons played the FFG Warhammer Quest card game? It has good reviews but it is hard to tell with anything even indirectly related to GW. What do people here think of it? If you check my post history in this thread you'll find my rundown. As someone else said, it captures the feel of descent. It has some really awesome mechanics and plays far, far better in my opinion than either of its predecessors (LOTR and Death Angel). It is actually a great game to play solo, something that I've never felt about any game before, and it succeeds in this because the upkeep where the game plays itself is incredibly smooth. I tried it out to learn the rules to better explain them and ended up playing through the whole campaign over the course of the week just because I was having a good time. It does have limited replayability though. The campaign is short (~4 hours) and doesn't hold up well on a second run through. The random mega-dungeon that is essentially a campaign in its own right and which is supposed to offer true replayability is unfortunately broken out of the box. It could be fixed in a FAQ and there are lots of house-rule solutions out there but as is the difficulty can be trivialized. Kind of a problem when that's what is supposed to keep you coming back. What gets me about the game most though is that it's clearly been shorn off at the knees to pave the way for the inevitable expansions and it absolutely didn't have to be. It feels like a demo for what could be an awesome game system and given that there's only maybe 4-5 hours of real game play there, it is. Even their LCG intro boxes tend to offer more gameplay than WHQ has, and those are explicitly marketed at starter sets.
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Jan 6, 2016 21:48
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cenotaph posted:What game is that? Gonna go with the first edition of Talisman.
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Feb 11, 2016 03:39
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dishwasherlove posted:I have been in this thread too long. I swear we had this RFTG argument 4 or 5 years ago. Aren't there a few much better tableau builders around these days anyway? I'm not sure. Race nails both depth and brevity in a way very few games do. There are plenty of fun and interesting games in the genre but few that have anything near Race's longevity.
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Feb 12, 2016 23:10
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Impermanent posted:Is playing old tta a suitable intro to ntta if you want to see if you'd like ntta or is it so changed that it's better to start with the new version? Sure, but you should probably just be playing old TTA because it's a masterpiece of a game rather than as some bridge to something better. It isn't like FFG where each new version of a system fixes the thousands of things wrong with the last. TTA was pretty much perfect for what it wanted to be. The new version is a very mild patch on the old system and given the complexities of TTA it will be a long time before it's even clear if the new version is better or worse.
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Feb 17, 2016 07:08
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COOL CORN posted:I watched all of Rahdo's Uwe videos, and now I really want Loyang, Merkator, and Glass Road. Caverna really is amazing. I had Agricola and held off because of the price and not really seeing any need for what looked like an Agricola variant when the base game was one of the best things I've ever played. A friend finally cracked and I'm glad he did. It takes off a lot of the pressure which sounds like a bad thing, but then gives you far more options and the time to see them pay off in a way Agricola doesn't. You're racing to succeed rather than racing to not starve to death. There's still competition obviously, but it's far, far less cutthroat and that changes the feel of the game in a significant enough way that it really feels fresh. It also has probably the best components of any game I've ever played except for maybe HeroQuest. It's definitely $100 worth of stuff. Absolutely worth it for a fan of Agricola.
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Feb 26, 2016 20:36
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