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ActingPower
Jun 4, 2013

panko posted:

one precious petal in the unfolding flower of a hansa group’s meta is setting up early offices in the cities adjacent to the 2-length routes and trying to spam out plates/force others to stop you from doing so :getin:

My group is still at "Man, the first guy to put a trading post at a good upgrade seems to run away with the score," so I'm doing this exact trick next game. We'll see what happens >:]

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panko
Sep 6, 2005

~honda best man~


one great thing about plates is that they give a player collecting them a lot of opportunity to disrupt early office droppers: both the extra slot and position swap plates are less sought-after than the obvious powerhouses (relocate 3, free upgrade, +action, in roughly that order) but often end up creating a 2-8 point swing between the affected players depending on when and where they’re used

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."
Plates are really undervalued in my meetups HT (including by me). I'm pushing it towards a cross-map connection based meta so maybe I should try that instead.

RabidWeasel
Aug 4, 2007

Cultures thrive on their myths and legends...and snuggles!

panko posted:

one precious petal in the unfolding flower of a hansa group’s meta is setting up early offices in the cities adjacent to the 2-length routes and trying to spam out plates/force others to stop you from doing so :getin:

I am somewhat reluctant to do this now since the last time I did it in a game one of the players (who, to be fair, had only played the game a few times before) said that since I hadn't specifically pointed out that this was possible (in spite of teaching all the relevant rules) that I wasn't teaching the game properly and the only reason that this could be the case is "because I didn't want any new players to be able to win" and now he doesn't want to play HT any more. He did well in his first 2 games from setting up trading posts at upgrade locations and I thought that demonstrating that you really can't ignore what the other players are doing even if you think you're onto a winning strategy would be educational...

FulsomFrank
Sep 11, 2005

Hard on for love
About to do my first game of OG 1980 Civ tomorrow. Can any veterans give me any advice about running it compared to Adv Civ/MC/WE? I think I have a good grasp of the rule differences broadly but heads up about anything that's an easy mistake to make would be appreciated. Also, turns out the guy I bought my copy from had the expansion goods included. I have separated them because I want to keep the game Pure as St Francis intended, but if pros say to add 'em, I will do so.

Admiralty Flag
Jun 7, 2007

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022

Moving locally, so I just mailed off my 30+ year old worn and beaten copy of Cosmic Encounter to my old-town gaming group, where it will hopefully find a good home in shafts, doublecrosses, and hosejobs. I should have done this years ago but never worked up the energy to do so. Of course, I'm keeping my FFG copy with all the expansions, but haven't found a group to bite on it locally like my old crew.

Found a lightly used copy of Praga Caput Regni in the consignment section of the local game store. Always been intrigued, so I bought it. Especially intrigued by the $20 price tag. Checked it for completeness and surprisingly it was all there -- now to learn it.

Played Splendor Duel twice for the first time last night when most of the usual crew didn't make it to game night. A clever design. I'd have to play it a bit more, but it just might fall into the 7 Wonders Duel category: 2P game better than the multiplayer that spawned it.

Memnaelar
Feb 21, 2013

WHO is the goodest girl?

Admiralty Flag posted:


Found a lightly used copy of Praga Caput Regni in the consignment section of the local game store. Always been intrigued, so I bought it. Especially intrigued by the $20 price tag. Checked it for completeness and surprisingly it was all there -- now to learn it.


I really love Praga and it's not that bad to learn. If you're on BGA, you can find me there under this name if you want a game online. :)

silvergoose
Mar 18, 2006

IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS




FulsomFrank posted:

About to do my first game of OG 1980 Civ tomorrow. Can any veterans give me any advice about running it compared to Adv Civ/MC/WE? I think I have a good grasp of the rule differences broadly but heads up about anything that's an easy mistake to make would be appreciated. Also, turns out the guy I bought my copy from had the expansion goods included. I have separated them because I want to keep the game Pure as St Francis intended, but if pros say to add 'em, I will do so.

Nah expansion goods need the expansion techs and such I think.

Honestly the biggest thing to consider is the AST; since it's not points, it's pure get to the end, you need to carefully figure out your way to three colors, etc. Mysticism is both very useful for that and very limited.

Otherwise it's not super different, just a little harsher.

Tekopo
Oct 24, 2008

When you see it, you'll shit yourself.


Does anyone have any experience with 21Moon? I’m playing through it and apart from the variable setup the gimmicks aren’t really doing it for me.

Magnetic North
Dec 15, 2008

Beware the Forest's Mushrooms
I had myself a dog game day afternoon. All with three players.

Yokohama: 3rd-4th-ish time playing. One new player. Man, this game kicks rear end. The variable strength building up the power to take actions now or save them up, improving locations to warrant repeat visits, incentivizing rushing to get limited rewards and achievements while staying focused on accomplishing your game is so incredibly elegant. There's something about completing orders and cheevos in a little special sub-turn that is extra satisfying. You feel under pressure but not suffocated. We kept getting into each other's way, sometimes intentionally, mostly by accident. I got a Ball early and scored a lot of orders, which was something I had wanted to do. One player was behind and made the mistake of taking enough orders for me to trigger end game while far ahead, which probably screwed player 3 out of the win, but I'll take it. Gotta get this one to the table more. A classic.

Fast Sloths: First time for all players. Nice to get it off my shelf of shame. This game is charming as all get out. Somehow a game with zero randomness can feel like complete looney toons silliness. I think it's the ants and the elephants that make it feel especially cartoony. Also, this game is fast! About an hour with teach? You look at it and the rules are a bit odd and you think it'll be plodding and mucky, but it's all mostly inutitive. The clever card drawing and discarding mechanisms mean that there is an ebb and flow to the power of your animals and a differential of opportunity. Those crocs can motor! Maybe with 5 it will be more messy, since the number of animals or size of the map are unchaged. We were all in a dead heat, and I thought I had the win until my opponent noticed that the donkey I was relying on was too scared to cross a bridge. Which, fair enough, I also would not cross that bridge, not because I'm scared but because I'm so very very lazy. Super excited to try this again with more and different players. I hope it's a (giant air quotes) middleweight (air quotes end) game I can get with a few lighter members of the crew, but I think the whimsy will help.

Pueblo: First time for all players. I don't crowdfund much at all, but this game has intrigued me for the longest time as one of very few games that people say is 'great' that never got reprinted. My brain has not been able to grok abstracts like Hive or Tak, and I rarely get to player games outside of with my SO, and we prefer escape-style co-op games if it's just us. So when I heard about this, a 2-4 player abstract with golf scoring, I was interested enough to pledge. I can see why this game is well liked. There is some serious tactility to the way the pueblo builds up like a ziggurat slowly over the game. Making players alternate between colored and neutral blocks is a lovely simple way to give players agency while making them distribute the risk. The pieces being all identical reinforces some interesting patterns as as time goes short, those high points start peeking over the top as extremely painful spots. The fact that players choose the number of spaces to try and make players take penalties, or to prevent the next player from being able to bypass a strong penalty, is so much more fun than if it were random. Now, in this first game, I absolutely crushed my opponents by nearly halving their scores, so that might tinge my opinion. I am looking forward to trying that one again.

As for the production, it's certainly not stellar, and the point track is just loving nuts. Only a few of my blocks are slightly messed up, but not enough to effect gameplay since I paid more for an add on to let me use a different color in 2 player. Still, the lazy susan is very nice, so I guess I am satisfied enough in the end product.

MrBlarney
Nov 8, 2009

Tekopo posted:

Does anyone have any experience with 21Moon? I’m playing through it and apart from the variable setup the gimmicks aren’t really doing it for me.

I posted an overview / first impressions in this post, but I don't know how valuable that is, coming from an 18xx genre newcomer. It's certainly in my "want to play again" list, since I want to understand more about how the game's gimmicks can be used.

Interestingly, the plays I've had on my copies of Shikoku 1889 and 21Moon have prompted others I've played with to get on board the 18xx train, where they've picked up their own titles. One person picked up the classic 1830, while another purchased 1880: China. While we haven't played 1830 yet, we played a very long four-player game of 1880. I don't think I was prepared for how much trouble we'd have with picking out the best routes for the X+x trains, or even the Express trains. With so many companies in the game, processing companies was kind of a slog towards the end of the game. It's kind of interesting that the plain track tiles only go up to green. There are other gimmicks like the mid-game market freeze, and bonus revenue depending on market position that I'm not really sure I have simple thoughts about. I'd definitely have to steel myself to play it again since it is such a long game to complete; my preferences so far continue to be on the relatively shorter end on the 18xx spectrum for the time being.

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry
Two games this weekend.

The first was Ark Nova with the new Marine Worlds expansion the club got. A couple of people came up with really good synergies - one started with the new Publications sponsor, permanently discounting association donations by their total science count, and had the association asymmetric action that let them double up on partner zoos and universities, so some double-research universities and a few relevant sponsors, and they pretty much had free donations for the whole game.

One topdecked a 27-point turn - they had the asymmetric build action that always let them build an extra pavilion and absolutely went for it, then drew the new Landscaper sponsor which let them place a pavilion to cover their zoo map and then gave them one appeal for each of their 19 current pavilions.

In short, the asymmetric actions really let you get away with some bullshit, and we were all at least mild fans.

The second was Oranienburger Kanal, which I'd had for a while and was excited to get out. Managed to get a building out on the last turn and double-activate it for a total of 20 points, which was pretty much the difference. It's a two-player-only worker placement game with a sharply limited total number of spaces, where buildings are build on a grid and activated by either surrounding them with a variety of paths or connecting them with two bridges. Pretty quick-playing, at least for an Uwe game, which means we wrapped it in under two hours for a first play.

Fat Samurai
Feb 16, 2011

To go quickly is foolish. To go slowly is prudent. Not to go; that is wisdom.
My copy of Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate finally arrived yesterday, after all the delays due to VAT. Can't wait to a) try the new spirits and b)try to cram everything together in a single box.

Is there already a decent inserter for the entire thing? I'm only missing Horizons.

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

Played the first game of Arcs last night. One would think this game was the best game of all time looking at some reviews, but I dunno. This take is definitely informed by losing, badly, but I'm kinda tepid on it. It's one of those games where if you don't get it, it's just taking some meager turn and have it being completely invalidated by another player, leaving you worse off than if you did nothing at all. I want to give it another chance, but it feels bad to only score 6 points. Maybe the campaign is better; we played the one-off.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
I am really not a fan of the map redesign, both from aesthetics and the way it abstracts the map into something much different than the original design. Does it even have a different map for one-offs and campaign games now?

Prairie Bus
Sep 22, 2006




SettingSun posted:

Played the first game of Arcs last night. One would think this game was the best game of all time looking at some reviews, but I dunno. This take is definitely informed by losing, badly, but I'm kinda tepid on it. It's one of those games where if you don't get it, it's just taking some meager turn and have it being completely invalidated by another player, leaving you worse off than if you did nothing at all. I want to give it another chance, but it feels bad to only score 6 points. Maybe the campaign is better; we played the one-off.

The Thurot review from last week was embarrassing. I'm looking forward to trying Arcs, but Oath was a big miss for our group. I think Wehrle does best with serious design limits like he had in Pax Pamir or Root.

Kazzah
Jul 15, 2011

Formerly known as
Krazyface
Hair Elf
Got roped into a game of Tapestry, took five hours, got annihilated. Never doing that poo poo again.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Kazzah posted:

Tapestry, took five hours

what the gently caress

Kazzah
Jul 15, 2011

Formerly known as
Krazyface
Hair Elf
It was with all the expansions, and one guy who had no clue what was going on, and another guy who insisted each player 100% finish their turns before the next started (like, would refuse to start until I had finished optimising the position of my new building on my personal city board that doesn't affect anyone else). Grim stuff.

Impermanent
Apr 1, 2010
trip report on the new StS board game: very good. My wife (no StS experience, but a lot of Dominion, puzzle strike, etc.) and I (StS vet) both enjoyed the heck out of it. It is really the best-of-all-possible-worlds interpretation of the computer game into a board game, and its very novel to suddenly have, for example, an Ironclad limit break deck be able to be majorly supported by a Silent deck with a lot of Vulnerability cards. She loved that the cards are so clean iconographically. Dyslexia makes less honed deckbuilders and card games hard for her because of the sheer amount of text going on - the StS board game team put a ton of effort into making the cards extremely succinct. The standard floor fights hit a good balance of quickness versus effort - there's less turns happening per fight here than the computer game, which solve the problem of not having the computer there to calculate things for you. The big boss fights are slower but meaningfully crunchy, especially with the big damage they can toss out.

I wonder how bad a loss to a strong Goblin Nob in act 1 when a character manages to draw 0 defend cards at the wrong time would feel in a team game, however. This hasn't happened for us so far but it seems possible - if not for us then for someone who is a little newer to this kind of game. Upgrading your defends allows you to use your defends on other character, rather than just yourself - I wonder if that kind of play is going to make upgrading them more valuable in this game vs the digital version.

Tekopo
Oct 24, 2008

When you see it, you'll shit yourself.


Playing through 21Moon and the one thing that piqued my interest is share-switching, which actually has some interesting tech involved in terms of not just getting more shares than the limit, but what you can switch for and getting money out of the trade. Interesting.

silvergoose
Mar 18, 2006

IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS




Kazzah posted:

Got roped into a game of Tapestry, took five hours, got annihilated. Never doing that poo poo again.

I still haven't played Tapestry and maintain that every single thing I've ever heard about it has made me want to play less, right from the game being released.

This post is no exception.

FulsomFrank
Sep 11, 2005

Hard on for love

silvergoose posted:

I still haven't played Tapestry and maintain that every single thing I've ever heard about it has made me want to play less, right from the game being released.

This post is no exception.

I'd be happy to try it again but I foolishly bought it on a whim and when we played it felt miserable afterwards. Didn't help that one player randomly got the Futurists and just creamed us in a way that had everyone looking at the rulebook wondering if we made a mistake somewhere. We did. But not in the way that any of us realised...

Perry Mason Jar
Feb 24, 2006

"Della? Take a lid"
Played Fief: France 1429. I really like this style of game, which I haven't played much of, but the experience soured when I got just a smidge ahead in terms if board position, alliance, and title (just the one though...) and three players moved against me simultaneously. Got ruined because building a Stronghold is a huge noob trap. You're better off building 3 knights and 1 man at arms for the cost unless you're getting a second fiefdom. Maybe in a smaller game it's fine (probably not) but in a 6-player game the odds someone has Secret Passage is too high. Save it for when your army's already massive I guess. Cost me the game. Well, we didn't finish, but it would have.

Other than that pretty fun. Wish the cards explained themselves better and the rules were clearer, spent a lot of time referencing and looking up. There's also a lot of minor rules that are easy to forget especially when it comes to the convoluted Cavalcade action.

Perry Mason Jar fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Apr 29, 2024

Mr. Squishy
Mar 22, 2010

A country where you can always get richer.
There should be an award for most hosed playtime-for-game trip report. "After 5 days we have finished our game of Ganz Schon Clever"

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

In case anyone is confused by that, it's actually Fief: France 1429.

And yeah, anyone getting that strong in Fief is painting a target on themselves. It's not a game that is designed for individual victory. When you find yourself about to become very strong, your immediate task is to find another player to marry so the two of you can become unassailable.

FulsomFrank
Sep 11, 2005

Hard on for love

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Played Fief: France 1942. I really like this style of game, which I haven't played much of, but the experience soured when I got just a smidge ahead in terms if board position, alliance, and title (just the one though...) and three players moved against me simultaneously. Got ruined because building a Stronghold is a huge noob trap. You're better off building 3 knights and 1 man at arms for the cost unless you're getting a second fiefdom. Maybe in a smaller game it's fine (probably not) but in a 6-player game the odds someone has Secret Passage is too high. Save it for when your army's already massive I guess. Cost me the game. Well, we didn't finish, but it would have.

Other than that pretty fun. Wish the cards explained themselves better and the rules were clearer, spent a lot of time referencing and looking up. There's also a lot of minor rules that are easy to forget especially when it comes to the convoluted Cavalcade action.

I've had this on my shelf forever. Did you play any expansions or base game? How much of a nightmare was it to learn/teach/play?

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant

Bottom Liner posted:

Does it even have a different map for one-offs and campaign games now?

You block out randomized sections of the map for one-offs, creating functionally different maps. For the campaign, you use the whole map.

I adore Arcs.

Perry Mason Jar
Feb 24, 2006

"Della? Take a lid"

Jedit posted:

In case anyone is confused by that, it's actually Fief: France 1429.

And yeah, anyone getting that strong in Fief is painting a target on themselves. It's not a game that is designed for individual victory. When you find yourself about to become very strong, your immediate task is to find another player to marry so the two of you can become unassailable.

Ah, yeah, that's what I meant. It sure is Monday!

I did form an alliance! They just were poorly positioned geographically to meet the forces at my border villages. I wanted to make an alliance with a different player but they refused, and I figured my second choice alliance was better than none. And it would've probably been fine if it weren't for the stronghold purchase display. We only played one more round after two of my villages fell in the previous round, but I was pretty cooked after that so my (game) husband would've had to do something amazing to save our alliance.

FulsomFrank posted:

I've had this on my shelf forever. Did you play any expansions or base game? How much of a nightmare was it to learn/teach/play?

Base game. Not my copy and I didn't do the teach. But, that said - nightmare to teach and learn!

The rules are often opaque, poorly coded. For example, can you put your set-up lord/stronghold/army in a Principal Village... good luck finding out! The set-up text says "Village" but does that code as "(does not include Principal Villages)"? Who loving knows! It doesn't say "village" or specify/rule out Principal either. Based on the text not saying "village" but instead "Village" you might infer that excludes Principal Villages, which seems to me a very fair reading and what I would automatically accept if the loving board set-up example image didn't literally show a set-up in a Principal Village! We ended up disallowing set-ups into Principal Villages because (1) we had already done set-up before digging into this particular wording/rule (2) at six players it would mean one player (the last player, one must assume) doesn't get a Principal Village without storming it.

I want to talk that over with the group though because it would probably speed up the game a bit if you did allow set-ups into Principals. In that case though I would want a ruling that the first player card moves in the opposite order of the order of play (eg, the last player in the 1st round is the first player in the 2nd round). Turn order matters a lot in this game. Unsure if these two rulings would be too drastic, but confident they'd speed up the game without too unnecessarily punishing the last player.

Other than that, yeah, there's lots of little rules scattered all over that are easy to miss. I downloaded the rulebook to my phone right away and looked at it a lot, and there were like two or three rules I had to correct/clarify/remind the teacher about. One other player did a similar thing. So it's fiddly enough you need 1.5-2 teachers or rules-nerds.

Actually playing it is not nearly as difficult as teaching/learning it until you get to Battles in which case basically every battle will significantly slow down the game as people double-check rules and figure out how many SPs they have by slowly the counting the too-similar game pieces.

This is NOT to discourage anyone. I still rather liked the game and we all agreed to meet up and play it again - this should go a lot smoother. But yeah your first game will probably be a wash with a second game being the real first game.

Perry Mason Jar fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 29, 2024

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

CitizenKeen posted:

I adore Arcs.

Can you expound? I'm actively looking for things to like about it after our first foray.

FulsomFrank
Sep 11, 2005

Hard on for love

SettingSun posted:

Played the first game of Arcs last night. One would think this game was the best game of all time looking at some reviews, but I dunno. This take is definitely informed by losing, badly, but I'm kinda tepid on it. It's one of those games where if you don't get it, it's just taking some meager turn and have it being completely invalidated by another player, leaving you worse off than if you did nothing at all. I want to give it another chance, but it feels bad to only score 6 points. Maybe the campaign is better; we played the one-off.

You're making me feel better about not backing it. God bless.

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant

SettingSun posted:

Can you expound? I'm actively looking for things to like about it after our first foray.

To bring everybody up to speed, there are three levels of complexity to the game:
  1. The Teaching Game, Vanilla
  2. Leaders and Lore
  3. The Campaign
If you played the Teaching Game (no Leaders and Lore), I mean, I liked it, but I didn't love it. It was fine? There was some interestingness in the mechanics and so forth, but starting with so much symmetry was just fine; by the time the tableau gets under way and you really feel like you understand your strengths and your weaknesses, you're done.

But with Leaders and Lore and the starting asymmetry, I loved it. You're constantly in a tension between the action cards* and the tableau, trying to maximize what you can do. The game will usually force someone into early aggression, so the game gets underway fast. And it gets into this weird political dynamic where you're looking at your neighbor like "I'm sorry, I don't want to attack you but this is what I gotta do", and you get this great cold war feeling wherein you're saying things like "I'm going to take this planet from you by force, bombing your cities into nothing, and then I'd really like us to go back to peace because I don't want an extended conflict".

It feels like the game has a very strong emergent narrative where you get a "feel" for the empire your opponents are playing as a cohesive entity; I feel like I know what my opponents tableaus are "about" more than I do with a game like Dune Imperium or TI or whatever, even with established IPs behind them.

If you didn't "get" the game I can understand why maybe it's not fun? But also, that's kind of the point of the Teaching Game - the book recommends (IIRC) not playing it with a group of people who know how to play. Like, maybe for competitive circuits but not for fun. You're supposed to play the game with some more asymmetry out of the gate. And the campaign just seems bonkers.

I'm not going to try to convince people that it's the best game, but it's probably the first choice amongst my collection, and I think it's handily better than Root or Oath, and I'd usually rather play it than JoCo.

The game billed itself during design as a trick taking game, but I think it's more accurate in its final form to describe it as an action-follow game, with randomized actions and using "trick taking" solely to determine who goes first in the next round, which is important but not the whole enchilada.

Aramoro
Jun 1, 2012




Finally got through Kings Dilemma at the weekend. Overall it was pretty good. There are some niggles with it, I would. Prefer it if the results of the votes weren't so clear, more based on the narrative of it. It's fun but that clarity in what's going to happen makes it really hard to sway opinions. I had a point when to get my house goal I had to convince everyone to get a puzzle wrong, which wasn't really possible because there was an obvious right answer.

That and we played 15 games and it ended in a draw.

We think we'll get Queens Dilemma when it goes on discount.

Some Strange Flea
Apr 9, 2010

AAA
Pillbug

Aramoro posted:

I had a point when to get my house goal I had to convince everyone to get a puzzle wrong, which wasn't really possible because there was an obvious right answer.
Ah, always nice to meet a fellow delegate from House Porcupines and Mountains.

Sweating at the table trying to figure out if it’s kosher to try to bribe people with dream money or figure out yet another way to phrase, “but the card said the obvious answer was wrong!”

Aramoro
Jun 1, 2012




Some Strange Flea posted:

Ah, always nice to meet a fellow delegate from House Porcupines and Mountains.

Sweating at the table trying to figure out if it’s kosher to try to bribe people with dream money or figure out yet another way to phrase, “but the card said the obvious answer was wrong!”

It would have netted me exactly 1 point in the end game and wouldn't have had to share my victory. But it was not to be.

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

Jedit posted:

In case anyone is confused by that, it's actually Fief: France 1429.

And yeah, anyone getting that strong in Fief is painting a target on themselves. It's not a game that is designed for individual victory. When you find yourself about to become very strong, your immediate task is to find another player to marry so the two of you can become unassailable.

Admittedly as normally a read-only thread person I was a little confused by WWII era French fiefdoms but also a little intrigued and afraid to ask

Mr. Squishy
Mar 22, 2010

A country where you can always get richer.
I played 2 interesting games yesterday.
The first is an auction game called Puerto Banana, which is a teeny 15 minute filler based on a non-intuitive but mathmatically stable auction. So bananas are what you bid for, and what you bid with, and the ultimate victory point. At the start, everyone has 10 bananas and is bidding for 10 more bananas. Simultaneously, players write a number on their cute little banana-shaped whiteboard (nice production from Blue Orange, but this game would be trivial to proxy). The winner is the highest big, but they don't pay that amount but instead the difference between theirs and the second-highest bid, which they pay to the second highest bidder. So, in a four player game the bids for the starting auction of 10 bananas are like, 4, 5, 6, and 13. The saps who bid 4 and 5 are discounted, the big spender who bid 13 takes the packet of 10 bananas before giving 7 of them to the player who bid 6. If the winning bid can't make that payment (like, they bid 100 and the second highest bid 10) then their banana holdings are zeroed out (which is bad but recoverable) and the round is re-assessed without them. Next round check who has the most bananas, set that as the next packet to bid on, and keep going til someone has 200 bananas. I think that form of auction is how ad-space is sold online, or something like.
The other game is called DerrocAr: The week of Five Presidents, which gave the feeling of an early Ecklund Pax game. Apparently in 2001, Argentina went through 5 presidents in a week, and this game has players reliving that, with the goal of being president by the game's end. It's got nice art ( the caricatures are expecially charming) but pretty shonky production otherwise. The translation is imperfect, with the rules reminders on the board contradicting the rulebook (my guess is the negatives got flipped during translation). There is teeny-tiny text everywhere, which is possibly the fault of art-design or of the maximalist design philosophy. The designer had a theme and wanted to inject a lot of the detail into the game, and I'm not sure it had a round of playtesting to remove everything chromey. It's extremely take-thatty with players able to steal support from and throw mud at each other. It's one of those games where players can negotiate round the table (hate it), with the extremely weird rule that it's legal to short-change trade partners if they don't spot it. Might house-rule that away as it's annoying. It's card-driven which leads to a lot of luck, and also breaks the flow because the deck has a fair number of unique cards that do weird things. I liked it a lot, and it only takes an hour which is a lot shorter than some games of Pax Porf.

Ohthehugemanatee
Oct 18, 2005

Quote-Unquote posted:

I finally got round to playing the Heroes of Might and Magic III boardgame!

It's... not great, from first impressions. Production values are very high; the artwork is amazing, all the components are decent quality and the minis look fantastic (more on the minis later).

I’d echo basically everything you said. The rulebook really is godawful, and is in fact so godawful that someone already rewrote it and posted it to board game geek. The miniatures are also not only pointless, but actively cover up the information you need on the unit cards. It’s possibly the dumbest use of plastic I’ve ever seen in a board game.

The design is also really weird. Leveling up is almost entirely pointless, and puts cards into your deck that are flat out worse than some of the cards you start with. Picking up a spell card is possibly the worst thing you can do, because it turns out the magic arrow everyone starts with is in fact the best spell in the game barring a handful of noncombat spells that speed up movement. Artifacts are also a crapshoot, with a handful of decent ones and many more that you wish you’d have never picked up. Each hero also has a specialty with upgrade cards that get added to your deck and again, most of these are simply worse than the cards you start with. It reeks of a deck builder designed by someone who never got how deck builders work. The game rains rewards on you and half the time the greatest reward would be letting the player decline the reward which of course it does not.

I guess it helps keep the balance between low and high-level heroes?

It also takes ages. We’ve played 2 4-player games, both of which have been split across multiple days and will come to 6-8 hours each. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it’s longer than freakin mage knight.

All that said, everyone seems to love it although I think nostalgia is carrying the experience. I don’t think I’d recommend it when there are so many games that let you do much the same thing faster and easier.

Ohthehugemanatee
Oct 18, 2005
Oh, and anyone have thoughts on the Divinity board game?

One of my friends is really interested but after watching some play throughs it doesn’t look amazing. Combat looks like it takes way too long, and from what I can see players are going to spend one combat figuring out their combos and then doing them over and over again for the rest of the campaign. Even paid previewers seemed bored with it.

Anyone have any experience with it?

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Suddenly Susan
Oct 21, 2003

Ohthehugemanatee posted:

Oh, and anyone have thoughts on the Divinity board game?

It’s one of the few campaign games I’ve gotten all the way through. I played it 2 player with each of us controlling 2 characters. The game has at least 3 completely divergent paths through with different bosses, maps, enemies, and potential rewards. The character building is extremely open with free and encouraged respec’ing between stages.

The game very much encourages and in some ways requires teamwork/combo crafting. There are a number of environmental conditions (fire/wet/oily/charged) that can be placed on map spaces that will significantly improve your damage if you can get the right type on the right spot. One of our regular combos was getting a space wet making an electricity attack become AOE which would transition the space to charged allowing for future electricity attacks to be more powerful.

The game is challenging without feeling unfair and you will feel your character get significantly more powerful over the course of the campaign. A full campaign isn’t overly long either which is a bonus and makes me want to actually do another run through of the game picking a different path through using different characters and completely different builds.

The game is expensive, but fortunately the minis boxes are completely unnecessary. I also played through without the optional expansions. It is currently my favorite campaign based “dungeon crawl” game I’ve played and I have played the vast majority of them.

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