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I don't tend to resign from games. If I can't win, I find some other goal. But one time I resigned in Catan. I had no chance to win for a while, but I decided to build a chain of boats across the entire map for fun. A guy who usually never won was winning that time, and he managed to block me. If it had been anyone else, I would have playfully declared vendetta for blocking the infinite boat-chain and tried to spite them by helping someone else, but that felt too mean in this scenario, so I just resigned. Resigning in something like Root is just bad manners - the game doesn't work if one side just stops playing.
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Apr 19, 2024 20:15
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My cascading priority in games (beyond ephemeral things like "have fun" and "spend time with friends") is to...
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Apr 19, 2024 22:55
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Narsham posted:Britannia has a VP system that obscures who is actually in the lead, and gives each side its own specific objectives. I don’t think it works nearly as well as the other two, but it is usually the case that if your side is struggling, something weird or cool is happening as a result. In one extreme case, my Welsh managed to wipe out both the Angles and the Saxons, leaving a large portion of England unpopulated. (For those familiar with the game, this was technically the result of my sacrificing the Jutes entirely to ensure Welsh dominance.) I’m not quite sure it was “fun” for anyone else, exactly, but it was memorable and eventually legendary among that group of players, even if it was also the last time we played Britannia. Yeah. Everyone gets to be a top dog in Britannia with Invasions. It doesn't really matter whether you lose the whole game, when you get your moment in spotlight. That's why Britannia is great for emergent story telling. In one of our games, our Pict player got rolled up early and my Caledonians conquered all 6 provinces it could and ruled the Northern Scotland. Even the Norse failed to conquer them. At one point I could have gotten a 7th province, but I literally wouldn't have scored any points from it. 7 is the maximum number of populations they can have and they almost never reach it, because every other tribe is much stronger.
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Apr 19, 2024 23:37
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CitizenKeen posted:My cascading priority in games (beyond ephemeral things like "have fun" and "spend time with friends") is to... This seems really weird to me, I feel like there is a tacit contract in most games (especially euros) where it is assumed everyone is playing to maximise their score even if they aren’t going to win - basically if you can’t come first, playing for second is better than tanking the game for everyone else. So if I was behind in Agricola for example because someone else took the sheep or whatever I would be trying to maximise my score even if victory was out of reach rather than trying to block that person senselessly out of revenge. I can see some games where this maybe makes more sense (games without victory points or placings beyond first, like Cyclades?) but 99% of the games I play I think that priority order would get people thrown out of my gaming group. So the last game day we had we played Modern Art, Pulsar 2849, Great Western Trail, Babylonia, and El Grande, and I feel like that behaviour would be weird in any of those games. Revenge moves in particular - bash the leader or take an opportunity to maximise your position seems like it’s good game play, but revenge when it does not improve your position does not - otherwise in more conflict-y games people turtle up and never do the logical move because they are worried about reprisals and you get boring conflict free sessions of games like Eclipse. Blamestorm fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Apr 20, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 01:14
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Edit: double post
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Apr 20, 2024 01:18
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Aston posted:I'm almost at the point where i feel a teaching game shouldn't actually go all the way to the end, or should set a point in advance where the players can decide if they want to continue or restart. I do this all the time and it is GREAT. If you're going to pick a point to stop in advance, it should be after players have some context for different decisions. For example, I can only think of a handful of kingdom cards in Dominion that have a meaningful effect on turns 1 and 2 (Baker, the Heirlooms, Shaman when there's also Necromancer(??!?)), so you have to play longer. On the other hand, opening turns change the game in Food Chain Magnate. Generally, though, the people I play with will start to comment on how they now understand the importance of this or that in the teaching game, and that's a good time for a discussion about how much further to go.
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Apr 20, 2024 06:31
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mikeycp posted:losing by 200+ points in a competitive league game is not fun Sounds like the person making the game unfun is you. You would make someine unhappy by resigning though so by your own logic you cannot do that.
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Apr 20, 2024 17:16
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Played Iki for the first time today. The rulebook is laid out a little crazy, and it’s hard to really get a grasp of the game on your first play as you’re trying to evaluate strategies before you really know how scoring works. However, the teach for the game is pretty short, and once players have done their first season, the game runs smooth and steadily, which is a huge point in its favor. We had two players, so there was some additional fiddliness required to simulate a third. But overall, I liked it! I have never played a worker placement/point salad game before, and neither of us are the cerebral type of player to be crunching maths and gaming scenarios out six turns ahead, so I do think the 3 and 4 player game would suit us better as something more social and a little lighter. That said, it feels sort of like a better designed, more deterministic take on Monopoly to me, which is something I have been looking for in my game collection.
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Apr 20, 2024 21:46
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Got in a play of Skyrise, Roxley's rework of Metropolis. It's a clever little city-building auction game. You make a bid by placing a numbered building in a particular neighborhood, and each bid has to be a bigger-numbered building in a neighborhood adjacent to the previous bid, which gives it a really interesting spatial element. The neighborhood favor discs allow for a variable setup that doesn't take long. All in all I recommend it! I splurged on the deluxe Kickstarter, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
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Apr 20, 2024 21:55
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Iki is weird. The layout of the rulebook is very bad; buildings are a core mechanic of the game and they're alluded to throughout the rulebook, but their actual rules only appear in the appendix, after it goes over the end of game and final scoring. And I don't mean rules as in "how they score", no. I mean rules as in "how do they work and what makes them different from character cards throughout the course of the game". All inside a random box at the back of the rules. Just wild. I also sorta hate the fire mechanic, if you ignore it it's extremely punishing and very random, but if you don't (and why would you, it affects player order) it becomes vestigial.It's not bad but I disliked it more and more after each play so I sold it off. Azran fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 20, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 22:01
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Aramoro posted:Sounds like the person making the game unfun is you. You would make someine unhappy by resigning though so by your own logic you cannot do that. There's also no resign function in the software we use so I couldn't if I wanted to
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Apr 20, 2024 22:26
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I’m glad that board gaming had gone back to its roots of “people progressively becoming more and more resentful as the game goes on” missed those family board game nights
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Apr 20, 2024 22:40
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Seems like maybe that’s the critical flaw of “easier to turn board gamers into your friends than your friends into board gamers.”
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Apr 20, 2024 22:43
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Tekopo posted:I’m glad that board gaming had gone back to its roots of “people progressively becoming more and more resentful as the game goes on” modern equivalent of smugly counting your monopoly stacks and forcing your family into servitude
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Apr 21, 2024 02:14
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Blamestorm posted:This seems really weird to me, I feel like there is a tacit contract in most games (especially euros) where it is assumed everyone is playing to maximise their score even if they aren’t going to win - basically if you can’t come first, playing for second is better than tanking the game for everyone else. So if I was behind in Agricola for example because someone else took the sheep or whatever I would be trying to maximise my score even if victory was out of reach rather than trying to block that person senselessly out of revenge. 2nd and last position have the same value for me (assuming there is not an extrinsic reward tied to them, like tournament placing or prizes). My priorities are win, progress end game, try something wacky. I think most board gamers play for position or highest possible score, but I don’t think it is or automatically should be considered expected. Also, I don’t typically go for the spite play but I understand if someone does it to me as long as it’s only due to actions from this game and not because of something that happened in a previous game.
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Apr 21, 2024 04:42
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garthoneeye posted:2nd and last position have the same value for me (assuming there is not an extrinsic reward tied to them, like tournament placing or prizes). My priorities are win, progress end game, try something wacky. Aren’t you leaving some fun on the table that way though? I mean, most games I play I don’t come first; but I’m OK with a great score in Feast for Odin, for example, or a near win, or even coming last if I feel like I did my best under the parameters I had. I learn more for subsequent games too that way. Maybe it’s the kinds of games you prefer to play? I think this would definitely be considered bad form in most of the euro games I play. Sorry, I mean you do you and if it works for your group all good. I just enjoy most games I play whether or not I come first and that comes from maximising my position rather than doing something wacky or tanking it to end the game early. But also I play a lot of economic-y euros like Brass where I really want to get my stuff flipped and finalised and score as many points as I can even if I’m out of contention for number 1 - leaving stuff “undone” in terms of satisfying objectives in the game or executing a strategy is way more frustrating to me.
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Apr 21, 2024 04:53
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Board game club bought some new games, so I helped punch out, teach, and play Great Western Trail: Argentina and Wyrmspan. GWT: Argentina - well, in short, somebody who was new to the game went pure builders, almost never bought cows, and came in second by a couple points. I think overall it's better balanced than vanilla GWT. It does something interesting with its hazards - they're all just farmers desperate for help, the toll you pay stacks up on their space as a bonus, each hazard region has its own escalating bonus and there's also one just before the end of the trail, interspersed with regular action spaces. Clearing them out requires discarding cows to do work (and gaining filler "exhaustion" cards which you can remove on a special space or at the end of the line if they're in your hand, in addition to normal card removal) or using the work icons printed on your staff or unlocked on your board, and you can hire them immediately to work for you and produce grain. Grain is what you pay to make up for when you make deliveries, rather than train advancement, and since you're exporting cows by sea, as the game goes on some ships will sail away to foreign ports and be replaced with permanent export sites, and when you make a delivery you can additionally pay some more grain to get bonus money or points by moving a delivered disk into a first-come first-serve space in the city quarter. (Some buildings also give you grain - your starter tollbooth gives you one per building on a wheat field.) Train advancement does still let you put disks in stations, and the exchange rate for the first few stations is actually pretty favorable, but the additional draw is that if you move your train far enough you can exit the trail early and hop the train to the end of the line, skipping any hazards and maybe saving a turn or more on the loop. Wyrmspan - so you know how Wingspan usually ends with a few turns of just laying eggs? How about not that? The egg economy is much tighter, you both get and spend less, and instead of having a dedicated egg row there's one for caves - every site after the first in each row needs to be explored before you can feed a dragon and put it there, and caves will usually give you some small bonus for taking an action to place them down. This is where you pay your eggs, but just one for the third in the row and two for the last, and on the last column you can additionally pay three cards or resources in any combination to get an extra action token for the round, which are otherwise static. Running a row's actions costs an escalating egg toll beyond the first time you do it in the round, and per additional dragon it goes (food/card/cave) - guild rondel - (food/card/cave) - lay egg - (cache 2 food/tuck 2 cards/pitch cave to lay 2). The guild rondel is a new thing, 12 spaces long, small bonuses most of the way round, at the top and bottom you can claim a one-off of either powerful additional actions or endgame points. There's also a bonus action point most of the way through the rondel, but nobody I was playing with made it there, we mostly just made it one and a half spins for three cubes each in the center. A lot still depends on what cards you're lucky enough to topdeck or get dibs on in the market row, but it stays interesting all the way to the end.
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Apr 21, 2024 05:27
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Blamestorm posted:Aren’t you leaving some fun on the table that way though? I mean, most games I play I don’t come first; but I’m OK with a great score in Feast for Odin, for example, or a near win, or even coming last if I feel like I did my best under the parameters I had. I learn more for subsequent games too that way. Maybe it’s the kinds of games you prefer to play? I think this would definitely be considered bad form in most of the euro games I play. To be fair a lot of board games don’t have a way to control when the game ends, in those I typically try out things that I wouldn’t normally go for. I also only do this in games I’m certain I’m not winning, if I’m not sure or see a low percentage line I go for that instead. I am also operating under the assumption that there will be more games after this one. If this is the last game of the night, I’ll let the other players dictate the speed of the game if I can’t win.
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Apr 21, 2024 06:25
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Board Games 2024: The egg economy is much tighter
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Apr 21, 2024 11:11
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Enter sadman
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El Fideo posted:Got in a play of Skyrise, Roxley's rework of Metropolis. It's a clever little city-building auction game. You make a bid by placing a numbered building in a particular neighborhood, and each bid has to be a bigger-numbered building in a neighborhood adjacent to the previous bid, which gives it a really interesting spatial element. The neighborhood favor discs allow for a variable setup that doesn't take long. All in all I recommend it! I splurged on the deluxe Kickstarter, and it's absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, I got it to the table this weekend as well, and it was enjoyed by all. The spatial element really elevated the game. I was worried the game would be a basic auction with pretty minis, but the aspect of trying to get corned areas made for some interesting plays. The only element that was a little annoying was the bridges on the deluxe version. They don't stand out very well, and people kept overlooking them. I've since painted mine so they are more visible, but now their bad alignment problems are much more noticable. Oh well, not the end of the world, but I do feel there must have been a better way to design them. Ubik_Lives fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 13:11
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Azran posted:Iki is weird. The layout of the rulebook is very bad; buildings are a core mechanic of the game and they're alluded to throughout the rulebook, but their actual rules only appear in the appendix, after it goes over the end of game and final scoring. And I don't mean rules as in "how they score", no. I mean rules as in "how do they work and what makes them different from character cards throughout the course of the game". All inside a random box at the back of the rules. Just wild. On a replay, the worst sin of the rulebook is that it does not explicitly say, anywhere, whether buildings can survive a fire if a player’s level is high enough or if they burn automatically. 99% sure they cannot withstand a fire that reaches them by using some context clues but it is not explicated in the rules.
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Apr 21, 2024 13:38
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Rulebooks are this entire industry's dump stat.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:05
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quote:There's also a bonus action point most of the way through the rondel, but nobody I was playing with made it there, we mostly just made it one and a half spins for three cubes each in the center. I don’t understand, how could you make it around the board without hitting the extra coin space? You don’t go “through” the middle, you just place a cube token there and keep sending your shield around the outside.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:23
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Elysium posted:I don’t understand, how could you make it around the board without hitting the extra coin space? You don’t go “through” the middle, you just place a cube token there and keep sending your shield around the outside. Oh, whoops, got my wires crossed there. We did all hit it, but nobody I was playing with made it there more than once, over the four game rounds.
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Apr 21, 2024 17:59
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Blamestorm posted:This seems really weird to me, I feel like there is a tacit contract in most games (especially euros) where it is assumed everyone is playing to maximise their score even if they aren’t going to win - basically if you can’t come first, playing for second is better than tanking the game for everyone else. Sssooort of. I think when you play with the same people often enough though, there's actually a Metagame thing going on, where, for someone to gently caress you over like that, you want to establish that it will be REALLY poo poo for them, so that they don't see it as a winning move in future games. It's happened now in this game, but you can work to make future games more winnable.
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Apr 21, 2024 22:53
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I can't remember which game it was recently which included in the rulebook that players were vying to win or failing that push their score as high as possible. Which really throws a wrench in my hobby of reminding people that nobody comes 2nd, 3rd, 4th whatever. Most rulebooks there is a winner and an equal cohort of losers.
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Apr 21, 2024 23:05
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When you want to quit the game you're a spoil sport for everyone else and when I want to quit the game you're mean for not indulging my idea that I should not be bound to activities that I am not enjoying.
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Apr 22, 2024 01:30
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SettingSun posted:When you want to quit the game you're a spoil sport for everyone else and when I want to quit the game you're mean for not indulging my idea that I should not be bound to activities that I am not enjoying. The Conway Twitty Rule
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Apr 22, 2024 01:34
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Family (myself, wife, daughter, daughter's boyfriend) game day today! Quick warmup of Pan Am. Not the greatest game by any metric, but it is a quick, easy to teach, fun worker placement knife fight at four players. I pushed route revenue and buying stock certs heavily at the beginning of the game, downshifting into directive cards while trying to establish lengthy routes to sell. But I didn't sell enough; daughter's boyfriend built out on the Asia/Pacific line and on turns 5-7 Pan Am expanded like crazy along that line, and I came in second. The main problem with the game is the randomness of directive cards. I had four during the game, including the one you start with, and only two were of any use (I could have saved $2 by playing a third, but I saved it in case I had to win a destination card bid). Then, after a drought since late last year, Concordia Venus! What a wonderful game! Daughter's boyfriend rushed building 15 houses and ended the game, wife and daughter went semi-heavily into the personality cards, but I eked out a two point victory thanks to three Mars cards and a late game deployment of my last two colonists for 36 points, plus the Weaver card (and building my fourth cloth house on the very last turn of the game, which was an 11 point move: a new province, so 3 Jupiter cards, 3 Saturn cards, and +5 points for Weaver). I love the way points are obfuscated (I thought I was in deep trouble at the end of the game), how there are multiple paths to victory, and how you are forced to make terrible choices every turn, hoping your move will be the best of the different choices.
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Apr 22, 2024 03:07
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El Fideo posted:Got in a play of Skyrise, Roxley's rework of Metropolis. It's a clever little city-building auction game. You make a bid by placing a numbered building in a particular neighborhood, and each bid has to be a bigger-numbered building in a neighborhood adjacent to the previous bid, which gives it a really interesting spatial element. The neighborhood favor discs allow for a variable setup that doesn't take long. All in all I recommend it! I splurged on the deluxe Kickstarter, and it's absolutely gorgeous. My deluxe copy just arrived and yeah, it looks stunning.
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Apr 22, 2024 04:16
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Did you spring for the washes on the buildings? I didn't, they just looked kinda dirty to me. I might dry brush a little with flattering colors to bring out the details.
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Apr 22, 2024 04:24
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It took me a while, but I have finally finished my custom foam core insert for Primal: The Awakening. I wanted to get everything down to two boxes (sleeved cards and minis) and I just barely succeeded. I somewhat sorta winged it and it was a closer fit than I had intended; if I could go back in time I would try to shave centimeters off of every area I could to make the rule books fit better. I kinda just threw the tokens in with minis, but there is some free space in the bottom tray in the tall section that I could carve out into a token holder. I might attempt that in the future.  
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Apr 22, 2024 05:06
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El Fideo posted:Did you spring for the washes on the buildings? I didn't, they just looked kinda dirty to me. I might dry brush a little with flattering colors to bring out the details. I went for the washed buildings because I’m lazy. They look pretty good, though there is some pooling on the red buildings, because of their large flat surfaces. Though I was red during our first game, and because the red wonder is that statue, I decided to keep quoting Andrew Ryan from Bioshock as built my buildings. Having them be a bit more dirty than the others seemed appropriate.
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Apr 22, 2024 06:59
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Ubik_Lives posted:I went for the washed buildings because I’m lazy. Yeah same. I haven't painted anything in decades and I don't imagine I'll be starting soon. They look fine to me but I've not closely inspected them (or played a game) and I didn't follow the game closely during the KS period so I don't know what people were expecting etc.
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Apr 22, 2024 07:45
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Nalin posted:It took me a while, but I have finally finished my custom foam core insert for Primal: The Awakening. I wanted to get everything down to two boxes (sleeved cards and minis) and I just barely succeeded. I somewhat sorta winged it and it was a closer fit than I had intended; if I could go back in time I would try to shave centimeters off of every area I could to make the rule books fit better. I kinda just threw the tokens in with minis, but there is some free space in the bottom tray in the tall section that I could carve out into a token holder. I might attempt that in the future. Nice. Is that one of those games that comes in like six boxes of expansions and plastic slots with minis and all that stuff? Making lids for the various boxes is also a pretty good idea, that's always been something I've considered in the past with foamcore inserts but never really been able to make a satisfactory one. Morpheus fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 15:28
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Morpheus posted:Nice. Is that one of those games that comes in like six boxes of expansions and plastic slots with minis and all that stuff? Making lids for the various boxes is also a pretty good idea, that's always been something I've considered in the past with foamcore inserts but never really been able to make a satisfactory one. Yep. It was a kickstarter mini game so it, of course, had a bunch of expansions. Six of them, in fact, that added 9 additional monsters, 2 new characters, and 3D terrain. Since I sleeved the cards, it came with yet another giant box just to handle the cards alone (the game has a billion cards), so the core box was very barren and just contained the plastic clamshell holding the base game monster minis. I didn't want to lug around an extra 6 boxes everywhere I go so I experimented a bit with getting all the minis into the core box.
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Apr 22, 2024 15:54
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Dune Imperium Uprising question, are their new leaders compared to the base game?
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Apr 22, 2024 17:26
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Yeah there's 9 new leaders, no overlap with the base game.
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Apr 22, 2024 23:58
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The Eyes Have It posted:Rulebooks are this entire industry's dump stat. I love this so much. The joke, I mean, not the fact.
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Apr 23, 2024 05:31
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It does work out pretty well as a summing up, doesn't it? 
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Apr 23, 2024 16:30
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