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Aramoro posted:On BGA I would recommend ! !! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wow, and here I thought it was neat how they got Agricola up and running.
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Jan 13, 2022 22:18
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the holy poopacy posted:So I know I'm super behind the times on this but we just started playing AffO after Christmas. I've never really followed AffO chat that closely but I have the impression that a lot of people talk about exploration being super high priority, and I'm kind of wondering what we're missing because we're just not seeing that so far. The highest scores we've seen always seem to come from vomiting out green & blue tiles to develop the home board ASAP and leisurely grabbing later islands to fill with overflow income; gunning for early islands always feels really really strong but then seems to come up short in the end. Having to keep going back to the mountains to get resources feels really painful in comparison to the bonus resources on the home board and it sucks filling in all those -1s from scratch instead of getting to do it organically as you build income. Granted, we've only just been playing the two of us and I can see how with 3-4 players you wouldn't want to get locked out of islands altogether, but from what we're seeing that still seems more like an expensive insurance policy than an improved engine. Iceland and to a lesser extent Greenland are pretty good early income. Iceland in particular is basically a replacement for your empty homeboard square. Of course, if they flip over they're big winners too, as long as you've already got some placement-ready tiles. Shetland and especially Faroe aren't quite as good, on either side, unless you've got some occupation support, but if the flipsides get a big pile of money on them they ain't terrible. (The Norwegians also does a good job of making its A and B islands worthwhile, especially with that end of round space where you build a whaling boat and then go exploring.) But there's lots of ways to win the game. Try one where you go hardcore immigration, leave an empty homeboard square, and upgrade all the food you never ate for homeboard -1s (or a longhouse for those long narrow pieces).
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Jan 13, 2022 22:30
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Kerro posted:I haven't yet. For some reason the scenarios just haven't interested me - and I've been playing a lot with people on the SI discord and they never seem to do scenario games. If I ever run out of interest in just playing different spirits against different adversaries perhaps I'll give that a shot! Yeah, solo mode is tuned pretty tightly in Ark Nova. It puts you on a timer where you gotta fuckin' book it from word go. Since the game is otherwise a race to make your tracks cross, playing a learning game with other people who aren't moving too fast means you don't have to move too fast either.
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Feb 9, 2022 08:29
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SelenicMartian posted:Can Ark Nova be played like TFM, never advancing to the end trigger? In theory yes, but in TFM when it hits that point you're still using cards to get points, just not finishing the terraform. In Ark Nova, points are what ends the game. Appeal tickets and conservation points go around the board in opposite directions, and when somebody's tracks cross, everyone else gets one final action. I can see setting up a big point action and then stalling out for a little to try and fill out some of your endgame conditions, if you can even do that without scoring enough to get to the cross point. You can go beyond that point, but then you're just wasting your turn to do nothing or maybe cycle some cards.
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Feb 9, 2022 22:28
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I absolutely own Bus. I suppose it wouldn't be much of a random generator if it couldn't make existing games.
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Mar 17, 2022 13:26
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So I finally decided to give the Faiyum solo game a try. I must have gotten God's own card flop or something because I ended it with 330 points, which I attribute mostly to getting a fairly early Grower + Small Town (saw regular Town in the endgame cards, knew I had to snap it up) and a midgame Tax Collector + Papyrus combo that saw me burning 4 cards out of the market to do back-to-back $28 pulls out of my discard pile. I pretty much always felt the tension of card play order, though. Okay, I need to set up the map like this and get these resources in order to play this card, but if I actually play those cards first how am I going to get them back so I can keep setting up the map and getting resources?
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Jun 8, 2022 20:50
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FulsomFrank posted:How do you find Faiyum as a whole? I've wanted it for a while after reading the Space-Biff review. Do you think it'd play alright at 2P? The thing it's going to depend the most on is how the players feel about their own bad luck / someone else's good luck. This game tips the odds quite a bit, but it's absolutely got the generic market row problem in that there will be times when you're going to see a new card come into the market based on your buying or admin that would be so perfect for you, and an opponent buys it before you get the chance. Very few cards provide genuinely unique map functions - there are lots of ways to, for example, get more grapes - and it's extremely unlikely you'll find yourself completely screwed out of any one thing, but a bad shuffle and a bad flip can leave you disadvantaged for quite a while. Or, in short, it's a game where reacting to chance is important, but that also means chance is important. Skip it if that's a problem for you. Otherwise it's a pretty great gathering and conversion game which is extremely leaning into its sort of "game from grandma's attic" aesthetic, which kind of weirdly helps to sell the general "city of antiquity" theme? I maybe consider it to do a little better at 2P and 4P than 3P and 5P? The one thing that's bumping up against the granularity limits is how many cards fall out of the market every admin, which is 2 for 2P and 3P and 1 for 4P and 5P. And unlike in the solo game you don't get a choice, so at 3P and 5P you could potentially see a market wipe if a bunch of people's admin phases line up. Glazius fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jun 8, 2022 |
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Jun 8, 2022 21:32
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Morpheus posted:What was the name of that card game where you're expected to cheat by, like, palming cards and tossing them under the table or hiding them or basically doing whatever possible as long as the designated judge person doesn't catch you? Oh, that was Mogel Motte, or "Cheating Moth". It's one of a number of bugged-out card games with nonstandard mechanics, like Cockroach Poker and Tarantula Tango.
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Sep 13, 2022 15:01
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Millennium Blades with all the expansions has the biggest decks in gaming, particularly without the rule sperating core and expansion boosters lol. ...but you're not supposed to use all the cards, you're supposed to just mix a handful of mini-boosters into the core deck, different every game?
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Jan 6, 2023 10:51
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facepalmolive posted:Grand Austria Hotel -- Well we just hosed up this game hard. Both of us blew our initial money, which kinda screwed us over later on. We just couldn't do anything later on. In retrospect, both of us picked guests from the market based on color (completing blocks of rooms) as well as card effects, rather than the resource costs of the cards (which would let us put food directly onto cards more efficiently). Still, it feels like there's very few sources of income? I don't know. We clearly sucked at this game. I wouldn't mind trying it again to figure it out; SO is less keen on it. Yes, running out of money is an extremely bad situation in Grand Austria Hotel. It's basically the spark plug to your engine, you spend a little and get a little back, and you should absolutely be jumping on sources of that whenever you can. Assuming you're running the identical night side of the boards, a big early-game target is the 4-block of red rooms on the first two floors. What you're looking for aside from that are the customer bonuses - not only money but discounts and free versions of things that would otherwise cost you money. Rather than paying for expensive staff cards, you should be judiciously amping up your basic actions to improve customer turnover.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:34
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interrodactyl posted:This seems like the video game Twinkle Star Sprites more than Touhou, FWIW. Yes, the two Touhou Phantasmagoria games (dimensional dream, flower view) were heavily derived from Twinkle Star Sprites.
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Mar 20, 2023 18:22
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Tekopo posted:Yeah it was just a bit of a joke, to be honest. Like trying to describe a game as a worker placement tableau building asymmetric area control hand management dice chucker is just loving funny to me. I don’t really know that much about the game. It's kind of a mile wide inch deep sort of thing.
Area control, tableau building, and dice chucking get all the real decision space - the other ones are really just being namedropped. Or maybe content warned, if you really don't like secret cards or asymmetric player powers?
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Mar 22, 2023 22:32
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I have to share a little love for Caverna: The Forgotten Folk, which adds variant playable folks to Caverna like the humans who only dig one tile at a time but can overhang their outside board, or the trolls who always get one more thing from adventures but eat more and can't use big weapons. It also introduces actual cave farming (planting mushrooms like pumpkins in open caves) and plantable rubies (gemfruits). Each of the folk has four buildings to swap into the standard set of furnishing tiles, and they recommend swapping four folks' worth in even if you play with less people. They're all balanced against regular dwarves, too. Glazius fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 14:45
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Jedit posted:Gernot Kopke has a series of Developer Diaries on BGG in the AFFO forums. Uwe Rosenberg isn't involved in the design - he's credited as the creator, but Gernot is doing all the work on expansions. That includes The Norwegians, so at least you know he's good at it. Yeah, AFFO strikes me as a very expandable game, with plenty of things you can tinker around with in small ways without needing to overhaul the core concept. I'm glad it got somebody else excited enough to drive the expansions.
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May 16, 2023 09:06
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Most of the engine cards in Ark Nova are nice enough to give you a little something for all the stuff you've placed down that they would have given you a bigger bonus for placing after them, so it's not a total loss to draw, like, an expert on Europe when your zoo's full of Europe already.
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May 24, 2023 01:47
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Anonymous Robot posted:It’s funny, there’s another space 4x style board game that my group likes that is equally obtuse, hard to teach and dependent on unintuitive iconography and is also very good, but I haven’t ever seen anyone discussing it online. It’s called Impulse. We bought a copy from the creator at a convention, and I don’t think it got a huge print run. Oh hey, Chudyk In Space! Yeah, Impulse was a pretty fun time for a little while, but it was always kind of an outsized teach for the fun we got out of it.
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Jun 18, 2023 20:50
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!Klams posted:Been playing a bunch of Dorf Romantik. I have zero idea why it's called that, but my brother in law got it for my wife for her birthday, and we've been playing just the two of us all day. "Dorf" means "village". It's a "dream village" construction game.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:25
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Dobble is a goddamn home run for the theming. It's a deck of 55 circular cards designed such that each card has a bunch of different symbols on it, but any two cards will only have one symbol in common. There's a bunch of different games to play with the central mechanism of "spot the one matching thing in this pair of cards". Real good when the main draw of your IP is "here's a bunch of different and recognizable critters". Frozen Peach posted:Yeah, I'm aware. I'm weird and really despise playing board games on TTS. I don't think that's weird at all. I'm a big fan of BoardGameArena, which is pretty much just browser-based versions of a bunch of different games with automatic rules enforcement and progression and such. As much as I enjoy the physicality of games it's the least important part to be faithful to in an online setting. SettingSun posted:TfM lets players sandbag in perpetuity but the person who is winning should really cut the knot and just finish it off. That table will probably get mad at me because I will force endgame even when I’m losing. Get your engine rolling faster next time. "When your score tracks meet" is a pretty nice race condition that more games need to try. I liked it in Rajas of the Ganges but I'm sure it's even older than that.
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Jan 3, 2024 23:58
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Azran posted:Should I pick up Nusfjord or Agricola if I want something that can scale well up to 3-4 players? I've already got All Creatures Big & Small and I really like it FWIW Nusfjord plays a bit faster, but you'll recognize more of the stuff in Agricola. Agricola has a thing where because of the way new base spaces come in it's not quite the same game from 2 to 4 players; I think it's that clay is the rarest resource for 2-player, reed for 3-player, and wood for 4-player, but that's more of a concern at elevated levels of play.
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Jan 27, 2024 10:28
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Played two games at the weekend game club, but one of them was Caverna: The Cave Farmers (+ Forgotten Folk) so that was most of the day there. We had mountain dwarves, pale ones, cave goblins, humans (me) and trolls. Overall just a 10-point spread between first and last, which was pretty surprising considering we had three newbies including two to the game. The mountain dwarves bought both craft discount rooms and a stone supplier, and pretty much only got outside elements to put animals on. They made up the food with a breeding cave and got a bonus from the menagerie and prayer chamber, since they went weaponless. They had better things to do than finish the cave and the writing chamber helped there and with the single begging token they got from an early-game crunch. They did something I hadn't seen before, which was buy the couples' dwelling on the one midgame round with no harvest and grow their population twice - and then they went for the sixth dwarf. They also had the mixed dwelling, so well done on special dwellings for that dwarf, but maybe not the best play overall since the board got extremely cramped near the end of the game. (total people count: three 4s, one 5, one 6) The pale ones armed up and bought the trolls' bone grinder and candle maker and the goblins' kennels, so their dogs were worth 2 food and they could breed them and got a point for eating a pair. They mostly put meadows outside to pile up animals and supplemented themselves through mushroom planting. They also had the stone storage and I kind of disappointed them a bit by grabbing a big pile that had built up on the ore delivery space in the last round, on the off chance I'd be able to hit up the trading space with the ore half of it. The cave goblins got their guard dog school and the pale ones' sheepdog school and both armed up and had extremely good boys remaining. They built the mining cave and wound up with 4 donkeys in mines pretty early for a nice feeding discount. They got the mountain dwarves' training chamber to dynamically amp up their weapons and ended with most of them near the cap, and a bonus from the supplies storage. Only 4 cave goblins total, oddly enough. The trolls played a fairly conventional game for trolls, getting their goblin dwelling and otherwise arming up and going on tons of adventures. I (humans) won with a combination of a cooking cave early and a 4-pasture manure pile and the pale ones' schnapps parlor late to get that extra 10 points from my pile of stored vegetables. Entire field was overhangs, and I only dug out 4 additional caverns, two of which (plus my starter) just had normal dwellings in them. I honestly figured I was fairly behind since I didn't get a big combination or very much special, but I did build a whole lot of pastures and was rapidly breeding 3 or 4 animals per harvest and just leaving them there.
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Mar 24, 2024 04:24
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xiw posted:I find I've gone off caverna a bit with the expansion because it felt like it pigeonholed the folk types a bit much - like, the asymmetry is so high that if mountain dwarves and humans and trolls are at the table, the action spaces all get nicely split up and the game gets a bit predictable. Kind of wish they were less all or nothing into their various gimmicks. Humans still need a place to live and stone to build it. For as empty as my cave was, I dug maybe one less time than I would have in a full game. But yeah, in theory the forgotten folk are balanced against normal dwarves, so if you just want to pick four folk and replace buildings with them but otherwise play normal dwarves you're probably just good to go.
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Mar 25, 2024 17:19
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Funny story, because I had a game of Ark Nova this weekend that I lost because I ended it too early. I'd done the last break and had a choice of animal plays - one would put me one ticket over the markers crossing, one would leave me one ticket short. I had 5 points with an association action on tap at the time, and after I pulled the trigger it turned out everybody else had one good scoring action, but not the two I was afraid of. I suppose "don't end the game if you've got significant points in hand" is a good heuristic, but maybe more is that it's probably pretty rare for someone to be able to notch significant points three actions in a row, at least without a big pile of X tokens. Also had a 3-player game of vanilla Innovation that ended kind of amusingly. We had all fought pretty hard to deny each other the last winning achievement, and were out of achievements except for two special ones that were a bit of a way off for everybody. So the person with the lowest score played Fission and went nuclear, and the first flip off the 10 stack blew up the world, leaving total ruin and the 10 stack the only thing standing. After that it was just random who'd topdeck the 10 that would let them score the most points before the cards ran out. So it was an entertaining experience, at least for me. Glazius fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Apr 7, 2024 |
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Apr 7, 2024 03:11
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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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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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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.
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Apr 28, 2024 03:20
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