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quote:So there's this new KS for a semi-co op game called HOPE. In it you're trying to save existence by spreading life across the universe. Looks fiddly and gimmicky, but where I really stopped paying attention was "meta-coop". Apparently they've combined "maybe there's a traitor" with "co-op, but one person 'really' wins too". Either of these is really hard to do and usually end up sucking, doing both seems like they're just trying to tick too many boxes. In terms of campaign, this seems like a potential disaster if they just limp in. Random holofoil cards and metal medals, 100 little plastic dudes, cards and tokens out the wazoo - if it works out they have to make 300 copies for $25k, I think they could end up way short. quote:But anyway, their fund goal is $25k, which is supposed to be enough to make a barebones game using abstract wooden pieces. However, they had really cool designed pieces they wanted to put as stretch goals, but they showed them off extensively. Enough that apparently many people thought those pieces are part of the game as it is. So they were forced to unlock a few stretch goals early to compensate. God - I had forgot you said this. Those pieces are there in the section "What's in the box", so crazy me I assumed they'd be in the box. jmzero fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jun 10, 2016 |
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Jun 10, 2016 16:41
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quote:If Tanto Cuore had a bland and generic theme like Dominion then it would be Dominion, because Tanto Cuore literally is Dominion reskinned with anime tittygirl art. Stop defending it. It makes me respect you more to know you haven't played that game, but my understanding is that you're actually wrong on this (though I haven't played the game either). I believe it actually pioneered the "entomb" mechanic later seen in Valley of the Kings. The mechanic was, uh.. themed differently.. but I remember game design people thinking it was an interesting idea at the time, and that it was implemented well in this terrible, terrible game. I'm sorry if this gives you some sort of cognitive dissonance pain that there are sometimes good parts to bad things.
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Jun 16, 2016 16:55
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quote:Wasn't Cryptozoic's Ghist Buster games kind of garbage though? Cryptozoic's games have generally been no-effort licensed garbage, or "very casual" type stuff (eg. Deul at Skullzfire Mountain) - but they seem to be using different designers than usual here (specifically, Brady and Adam Sandler, who are X-WANG/Descent people). That's no guarantee this won't be hot garbage, but it's reason to expect something different than Cryptozoic's norm.
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Jul 13, 2016 21:44
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I don't have use for lots of crazy dice, but I often check dice KS's because I want a particular thing: a big, vanilla-designed-but-heavy, spin-down D20. Finally there's someone doing a run of precisely this - here.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:08
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quote:Thornwatch, a pretty-looking game with art from the Penny Arcade guys is up on Kickstarter. I'm kind of ambivalent since Tycho's a transphobe and a rape apologist. My quick appraisal is that it'll be terrible. It looks to be a pretty generic dm-vs-players, "players can choose to kill-dudes-on-grid or touch 3 poops before turn 8" type game, with firm rules for how far you can move and what happens when you attack with ability X... which I guess is fine... but it also has really squishy stuff like "if you and the judge agree you're being *heroic*, do X" type things that should create lots of "Is this a play-to-win game for me? Is it one for you too?" type debates among players. There's too many hard rules to do much role playing, I'd think, but they still really want that to be the focus.. I guess. If they're making an RPG, I don't think they're committed enough that they'll actually build much of a world (eg. there's pretty much no new art on the KS page or in the Print & Play as it stands) and so that will end with there not being enough grist for the story mill. If they're making a board game, I think it'll be terrible; there's no reason to believe they'll put real effort into the design. Like, Penny Arcade Deckbuilder was perhaps the worst designed game I've ever played. Cryptozoic always phones in their designs, but this was by far the worst - worst core game idea, worst balance, worst everything. And, yeah, the PA guys have done minimum effort on art for their previous board games, with most cards just reusing poorly cropped images from the strip. This game will require a bunch of art, and the PA people haven't demonstrated the attention span that would be required to make that happen. Edit: Lastly, you don't have persistent characters, you just unlock perks (sorry, "knots") that go into the pool of poo poo you pick at the beginning of a session. I realize that makes the game easier to balance and play with a changing group... but it's also garbage. I mean, imagine playing Mice & Mystics (or Imperial Assault or whatever), only with 1/3rd of the original art, random subjective judgments about mechanics (oh yes, Han Solo was very smuggly there, he can untap his Wookie), and no persistent player characters/progression. Who wants this game? I do like that the DM is called the "Judge of Wood", though. jmzero fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Sep 6, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 23:26
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Helical Nightmares posted:
Not to be too much of a wet blanket, but their last game - RESISTOR - also looked pretty cool visually. Unfortunately, it was pretty much one big glaring game design problem, got tepid reviews overall, and I think was forgotten about pretty quickly. So yeah, I really like the visuals and the boxes here, but I have no faith in their ability to design a game.
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Oct 11, 2016 18:53
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The bar has been raised. That is amazing.
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rchandra posted:I'm not sure if this is necessarily the case but in the example it's all vowels missing, and all consonants in the word are on the table - if so that would be a good enough constraint, you can't just keep saying floccinaucinihilipilification. Sure, but if you know even 7 or 8 very long words (that each cover a good chunk of the alphabet), that's going to be a big advantage, and you'll outscore "normal" creative words a fair bit of the time. Like, here's the words with the most different letters in English: superacknowledgement, pseudolamellibranchiate, pneumoventriculography, phenylthiocarbamides, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, formaldehydesulphoxylic, blepharoconjunctivitis Realistically, you could squint at that board for a while and come up with "backgrounds" or something. Or you could just use "superacknowledgement" again, for about the same score. And when "f, x, h, p, y, m" pops up, you're going to have a really dumb, boring advantage. Anyway, the solution is probably some combination of "you can't repeat words in a game" and "don't play with jerks" or something - but it does seem like a legitimate rut the game could fall into.
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Nov 2, 2016 15:49
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EverettLO posted:I thought Dead of Winter was a critical darling. Huh. What is wrong with it? It was a critical darling - but board game criticism is not well developed. It doesn't mean the same thing to be a critical darling board game as it would to be a critically acclaimed movie or book. T.I.M.E ST0Ri3S ended up on a bunch of people's "Best Game" lists, and it's super-the-worst garbage. Part of this is that "designer board games" are still a developing medium and people don't have a consistent mental framework for evaluating them. Part is just how media has changed in the last 15 years, and who ends up being heard. If movies were a new thing, right now, the people writing about them and getting attention wouldn't be the Oscar committee, it'd be nerds who are super enthusiastic about them - and best movie lists would tend towards, well, the thematic and gimmicky.
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Feb 22, 2017 18:42
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Go RV! posted:Anyone have any insight on Dice Throne? It seems like they took the shell of Magic: the Gathering, hollowed it out and added dice and characters. I don't have any special insight, but I did give this one a hard look over (before passing). There's some vague potential rule problems on timing and what not (there's a certain amount of implied "resolve this like you would in Magic" I think) but I didn't see any big red flags - and there's evidence in the rules that they've done reasonable playtesting. For example, the characters have different attack/defense focus, so in the team mode they made your "effective target player" sort of half-controlled/half-luck (so that they don't just skip attacking a character with good defense, but you aren't just forced to spec one character as "tank" to compete). I suspect they've played this a lot and I would expect it to generally work. That said, it has that scattershot tone of sort of "we're cool, but also maybe some lazy wackiness?" that doesn't do anything for me, and I don't feel like I'd be itching to play more of this after a few rounds. I think this is a good fit if your group really likes, say, King of Tokyo, and you want more games in that niche (in terms of mechanics, weight, and theme) or if you specifically want a team game in that category (which are hard to find).
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Feb 22, 2017 21:35
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malkav11 posted:None of them are super fast, but I don't think it would be possible to avoid retiring at least once during the campaign. Some can be quite fast - while there's some goals that you'll never hit without making the effort (eg. Merchant Class only ends when you own a bunch of extraneous items, others have a "final quest" that you can just not do). In any case, I think it's better to not fight with the game's excellent pacing. Just pick the goal you like, and let the game wash over you. Having staggered retirements in your party means you get to try a lot of different permutations; between that and the varied monsters and items and objectives, the game keeps feeling fresh. And the balance is great; we've only lost once, but we've had several last guy's last card wins.
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Mar 18, 2017 05:11
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Randalor posted:My wife and I started playing Gloomhaven, we're only running one character each and the first scenario is surprisingly brutal, unless we're overlooking a rule. We've cleared the first room once. She's running the shatterheart, I'm running the tinker. We had to switch to the variant "less variable damage" rule, just because we had a run that ended in... essentially two rounds (the elite guard critted her on the first turn, critted me on the second and the two regular guards basically finished us off the following round). Remember that you can choose to lose a card from hand (or two from your discard) to prevent taking damage from something - so you shouldn't ever be getting wiped out by damage in the first room (though if you lose enough cards this way you might be hopeless). Even if it won't kill you, it's often worth losing a card against a big crit, especially if you don't have a heal handy. But yeah, it's definitely not an easy game - but we've all really liked it so far; don't give up. We're probably 20 hours in, and a couple of the players in my group are probably going to back the next KS, even though they're not sure who else they'd play with. I might back it, and just have an extra copy sitting around. Heaven knows it's displaced enough of my other gaming budget that it'd still be a good value.
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Mar 18, 2017 21:11
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dwarf74 posted:How many players are recommended for Gloomhaven? 2-4, 2-5 ... I know there's solo play, too, which is neat. We play with 4 and it works good, but I think 2 or 3 might work even better. 5 isn't officially supported and sounds like a bad idea.
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Apr 6, 2017 20:09
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Agent Rush posted:Anyone here looking at the Cytosis kickstarter? It sounds interesting, but I'd like to get more opinions on it. Rules look reasonably solid, and I like the theming, but there doesn't seem to be anything about it that really stands out. Maybe I'm missing some big hook somewhere, but I think this gets lost among a lot of other solid, basic WP games out there.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:07
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LordAba posted:Battle for Biternia is a MOBA style boardgame. Looks good, unlike that other game that is a LOAD of crap. HAHAHA. I'm on the fence on this. The combat system makes some effort to avoid the usual ruts (ie. it's not "every turn I move 3 then roll 3 attack dice against 2 defense dice") and there seems to be some interesting decisions (particularly in skill order and timing). What I like less is the tick-tock of everyone takes turns moving, then everyone takes turns using a skill. Combined with limited positioning (heroes share big spaces, ranged heroes can hit the next space over, that's it) I feel like there's going to be a low limit on the interesting tactics you can pursue (and perhaps the hero design space as well). Yes, there's some meat on the old "hidden action selection", rock-paper-scissors bone, but I'm not sure if it'll be enough (especially, again, when movement resolves the way it does). Perhaps more importantly, it seems like the game will snowball pretty hard. While that's also a characteristic of video game MOBA's, I don't know how satisfying that will be in boardgame form, especially when it's unclear how much potential there'll be to come back through out-playing. I feel like the static map and game mode (the team mode is just splitting one person in two), limited hero selection, and limited build options, play will slide into a rut pretty quickly. But I'm also considering grabbing it. It seems like they put some work in, and it should be at least a passable take on a genre I'm interested in. jmzero fucked around with this message at 04:21 on May 13, 2017 |
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May 13, 2017 04:19
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Tekopo posted:So the Kitchen Rush kickstarter is finally live, and (although I'm biased), the game looks really good from what I've seen so far. No rules out yet, but Rahdo's video pretty much shows 90% of the rules so it's a good starting point. This seems like such an intuitive great idea, I'm surprised it doesn't already exist. Kind of reminds me of Paperback that way. Anyway, I'll be backing this one. I think it'll be great as a family game.
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May 24, 2017 15:52
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Deathlove posted:I mean, Overcooked: The Board Game sounds good to me?? Well - yeah, exactly. I will say that, watching the video, I'm a bit disappointed the game isn't more... physical? Like, I wish you were actually moving little ceramic plates with mini food around the kitchen - like maybe you have to sort of push them around the restaurant and not bump into things. And I wish that you had to assemble the food a bit more - like, make hamburgers where you actually have to put a little meat patty on a bun and then a little bun on top or something. And then have, like, 2 sides to the burger patty tokens so you mark when they're done cooking by flipping them over. Also, I want there to be varying maps. (And working conveyor belts). Anyway, yeah, I think I'll still grab it, but I'm less excited than I was for the wackier Overcooked board game that was in my mind. VVV: Well.. that's kind of a different subset again though? I guess I like the hourglass-as-worker-placement-kind-of idea in implementing a co-op time management food game. Yes that's very specific. Geez guys just let me love this game! jmzero fucked around with this message at 18:37 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 17:22
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Love the artwork; especially how diverse each tribe looks. Just me, or is the team-caricature poster pretty cringey? 
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Jun 7, 2017 00:29
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djfooboo posted:Just backed: Parsely Games: ACTION CASTLE plus 11 more games Never heard of these, but I'm in - sounds great. Am hoping it doesn't actually take until Dec 2018(?!) to ship though. VVV: As I have no patience, I went over to RPGNow and grabbed one. I'll try it with the kids tonight, see if these are actually going to work. jmzero fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 16:21
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Kai Tave posted:BGG also has Dead of Winter and TIME Stories scored around an 8 apiece which even going off of the video game journalism school of numerical weight is sufficient to cast doubt on the usefulness of BGG scores for determining a game's quality. Yeah - TIME Stories is a great cautionary tale on leaning too hard on BGG ratings (or game awards/reviewers). Everyone I've talked to that played it was excited going in, and were excited for the first hour... and then blown away by how poorly it went from there. It went from "hard to find gem" to "Facebook group hot potato" in the course of a couple weeks. The fact that it (or, perhaps even worse, Pandante) still has a reasonable score on BGG says either nobody updates their ratings, or they don't play the games they buy. I'd wager 70% of newish BGG reviews - and a depressing percentage of boardgame journalism - are based on 0-1 hours of actual play. Right now, despite finding the idea interesting, I'm certainly getting a fishy vibe off 7th Continent; think I'll wait.
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Oct 9, 2017 02:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:If you roll a 5, you get a "chaw" which goes into a pool. If you roll a 6, you get a "brainz". Every time you get a chaw, it cancels out a boost unless you use a brainz on it. Even if you use a brainz on it, though, the chaw still goes into the pool - it just no longer cancels the boost. Note that brainz have no direct use to improve rolls - all they can do is prevent chaw from cancelling boosts. Wow... that is an amazing paragraph. If I was writing a parody RPG system, I can't imagine better words to use than "chaw" and "brainz". That's like the "Put it in H" of dice system comedy.
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Nov 20, 2017 21:57
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Henker posted:I'm also pretty sure the creator really wanted the word dragon in the title for no reason. God that's entertaining. While he isn't explicit, I assume the Dragon is a Book of Revelations reference, and he has some theory about fiat money collapsing and how we'll all have to get RFID chips with the Mark of the Beast to buy Illuminati chemtrail gas with Devilcoin MK Ultra Doritos. Also, it pisses me off a bit that he's calling himself SSI Publishing - it's probably just accidental name collision, but I have a lot of good will for Strategic Simulations Inc. jmzero fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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Dec 5, 2017 01:08
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Aeon's End: Legacy looks really good. The base game is well received, and... there's mystery boxes. I'll cop to being a total sucker for mystery boxes. They're also selling "full reset" packs, which I like, even if I probably won't use. I'm not sure about its "Kickstarter Value" proposition on this, but I'm excited for the game.
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Feb 13, 2018 21:13
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food court bailiff posted:*Literally everything, I mean the basic file standard supports human-readable ASCII. Yeah - this doesn't make any sense to me either. I understand incompatibility between 3d software at a higher level - rigging, shaders, animation, even normal mapping - but it doesn't make sense at the geometry level, which is mostly all that's needed here.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:15
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JackMann posted:Mark Diaz Truman wrote a blog post about how both sides needed to be more civil, and that everyone had good points and people shouldn't say such mean things about Zak S because don't you know hate just begets more hate. I'm new to this, but it didn't read that way to me. The guy clearly doesn't like Zak, and doesn't think he's partly right or something. I mean, he's not really talking about Zak at all, he's talking about Rob's post; he thinks telling someone to "go gently caress a goat, you waste of human existence" is wrong, regardless of how bad of a person Zak is. I agree. And if I had to run a public-facing business, I wouldn't want to partner with someone who posted like that. You're burning bridges and not helping anyone. (That said, if I had a business, I wouldn't have written the post MDT wrote either - I'd say stuff privately or not at all. Nobody likes someone "turning on their friend", and other people will be mad you don't hate buddy as much as they do).
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Mar 5, 2018 23:30
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Mors Rattus posted:Good to know you value not telling abusive assholes who ruin people's lives to gently caress off over not tolerating abusive assholes. Well... I'd describe it as "I value not being an abusive rear end in a top hat"; I think it's abusive to tell people to screw goats. I personally am not going to run around policing people's tone or something (and, again, I wouldn't have written this thing that MDT wrote, especially if I was trying to run a business), but I think it'd be better if people didn't tell each other to screw goats - or, at least if they conceded that it wasn't the best idea later. There's better, more productive ways to say whatever it is you want to say. I mean, I guess you disagree, and I'm OK with that. We're many levels removed from the "life ruiner" here - you're mad that I'm not mad enough at someone who was mad at someone for being too mad at someone for "doing the actual thing that was wrong" (I think).
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Mar 6, 2018 01:08
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counterspin posted:Why are you so invested in covering up the actions of lovely people? Are we seriously never supposed to discuss the bad actors in our communities because it's bad form? Well.. to be clear, I'm not very invested at all. I just heard about this here, and it seemed to be big news, so I read the links. After reading the links, I didn't understand the reaction this MDT guy was getting. I still don't really. I posted mainly curious if there was something I was missing. And there must be, I guess, because I'm getting the weird "spill-over anger responses" that normally come for people defending Kingdom Death or something. Anyway, sorry. I'm sure this Zak guy is terrible. Screw you, Zak. Edit: lol - quote:how big was your kingdom death pledge
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Mar 6, 2018 01:59
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FunkMonkey posted:Hey, I wanted to raise awareness for a boardgame kickstarter from a local developer, True Messiah. This is the second and last attempt to Kickstart it, after the first one only raised about half the goal, and he's basically funding at a considerable financial loss at the current goal just because he wants to get it published. I like a lot of things about this game. I like picking cards and player asymmetry. I like that it sidesteps politics by avoiding free for all. On the other side, the grim-dark theme is a turn off, the card-text templating seems loose and wordy, and the rules link goes to a 404 page.
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Mar 12, 2018 23:48
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basically destroys society overnight. Out of the ashes rises four cults, each lead by a titular messiah who can tap into the Belief Engine to harvest their flock's faith to create "miracles." Players control each cult as they compete to determine the one true representative of God on earth. Basically, you're Mad Max Jesus.
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Good Dog, Bad Zombie is in its last couple days. It goes a little far on the hoomans and doggos and Central Bark stuff for me, but it also seems like a competent "things pop up" co-op that my kids (and non-gamer visitors) will like.
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Apr 10, 2018 20:37
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:"I built a world where I embraced right-wingers' freedom fantasies as valid" is such a bizarre thing to build a game around. I don't know anything about this actual project - but when you say it like that, it actually sounds pretty entertaining. I'm thinking like sort of "Ron Swanson World", where our knowledge of fishing and leather working keeps us free from Euro tyranny. Could play it with my dad.
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Jul 6, 2018 17:52
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Impermanent posted:Key Flow kickstarter is up https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breese/key-flow I was super stoked about this at the rumor stage, but it appears exactly the opposite of what I wanted. I was hoping we'd get a simpler, lighter, smaller-footprint card based game that retained some of Keyflower's wonderful mechanics. Instead, it appears to still have a lot going on with space-devouring tableaus and a million bits, while it departs fairly heavily on mechanics.
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Oct 4, 2018 00:54
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Jimbozig posted:The amount of defensive vitriol people who want to play in the sanitized versions have for the people who are put off by them or who prefer the versions that keep the bad stuff intact is weird to me. It's okay if someone doesn't like the same game as you! It's even okay if they have a good reason for it! It doesn't make you a bad person to like a piece of media that other people find problematic. I don't think many people would have reacted, without exactly one line from exactly one post: quote:So, like, if you can enjoy playing in Ersatz Leave It To Beaver Land without it always reminding you of the bad poo poo, more power to you, I guess? Intentionally judgmental or not, I think that wording registered as condescending to people (including me) who do not have the same issues with the game.
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Nov 2, 2018 19:02
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Covok posted:I think it was quantum Ninja who proved that mathematically you can't ever tell if you optimize your die roll or not. Which really says a lot about your system when computer scientists are telling you that it's impossible to ever tell if you optimized a single roll in the game, not character creation just a roll. You piqued my interest here... but I don't think this is correct. I don't know the game well, but it looks like you roll some D10s, and divide them into groups totaling 10 or more. Obviously this is a trivial computational problem with realistic numbers of dice. But regardless of the number of dice (n), there's a solution in P because the dice are interchangeable within a maximum of 10 sets. With arbitrary die faces/group-totals you'd need a 2^n memo, but here you can use a n^10 one (for the naive algorithm, obviously in practice there's a lot of valid greedy optimizations like "each 10 can automatically be counted as a group").
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Nov 6, 2018 04:11
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