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PerniciousKnid posted:One of the problems I had with TfM, besides that it was a more luck-dependent Race for the Galaxy, is that it's also longer than RftG without adding much. If you add on drafting it feels really long for what it is. What it needs is more ways to see more cards during play, like RftG has. This is basically how I feel, I played TM before playing RftG and thought it was pretty good but once I got into Race I have barely played TM at all. TM has some fun ideas and the map is very cool but it needs some fundamental change to stop games from dragging on and to reduce the variance of play without relying on drafting. When I was really into TM I thought that you could probably fix a lot just by playing with a smaller deck with some repeat cards but I never got round to trying it. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 10:33
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:50 |
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Re CoB: I don't have any of the expansions but given that meadows always feel like a high risk and usually only moderate payout unless you get extremely lucky option I'd say the expansion with the goats might be a good addition Also I'm not sure if any of the new player boards might be a good addition since the core set has a few hot garbage ones and a couple of clearly optimal ones leaving a fairly small sweet spot for having a balanced game unless you always do a mirror match
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Jan 14, 2022 12:46
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TfM is a fun game but lets itself down in a number of places, notably almost everything you can do is based on random card draws and the only way to mitigate that is to play a drafting variant, and this also means that you kind of need to know what all of the cards do in order to play properly, and there's 150+ of them in the base game without expansions. Sometimes games can drag out extremely long if everybody just wants to generate more points and doesn't care about ending the game. A lot of people also complain about the low quality of the artwork. With that all said, there's something about the flow of the game which is usually pretty satisfying even if the core gameplay has problems, and it has a really strong theme going. Concordia is easily in my top 3 games I've ever played, it has incredibly straightforward and easy to remember rules (most of them are literally on the cards) while still managing to give compelling and surprisingly complex gameplay. It's dry as gently caress though, and the gameplay is only loosely connected to the theme (not Castles of Burgundy tier dry, but not far off). If you do get it, the Venus box is a good deal and has some slight differences from the base game which are (as far as I've been able to tell) generally considered to be improvements.
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Mar 5, 2022 10:28
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I have JotL and it was fun but I didn't find it had enough variety to keep playing all the way through, I'm sure that Frosthaven will be great but unless it seriously changes something in that formula I just can't justify owning it.
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Mar 20, 2022 17:03
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Shes Not Impressed posted:After reading that I now want to play For-Ex.  but unfortunately of the people I know who would even consider playing a game this obtuse, the theming kills it.
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Mar 29, 2022 21:57
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I really like the look of HT but it doesn't play 2 which is problematic for me and I also have so many other vaguely similar euro games in my collection it's hard to justify the purchase. It's kind of annoying when you're really into European history because I love the theming of these games but everyone else thinks of them as being ultra-dry and boring.
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Apr 1, 2022 19:02
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As good as that sounds, I strongly suspect that my group will not be as excited about conservationalism as colonising Mars
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Apr 21, 2022 15:59
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Decently presented but abstract markers are generally my preference, the more something tries to look "immersive" the more likely it is to have some aspect which I find offputting somehow. You can't really go wrong with cubes.
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Apr 29, 2022 16:17
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I was at the UK Boardgaming Expo yesterday with a bunch of friends, picked up Isle of Cats with the 6 player expansion. We had a chance to play a test game, everyone enjoyed it, and I currently have a severe lack of games which play 5-6 so it was a decent addition to the collection, as well as being a tile-laying game which is another unrepresented part of my collection. The artwork is absolutely lovely and the overall production quality is fantastic which is really nice, it's probably the most premium-feeling boardgame I own. In terms of gameplay it's nothing groundbreaking, but trying to fill up rooms and score points with groups of matching cats while also aiming for alternate points-scoring cards is a compelling enough puzzle, and the "family game" played with the same components is a fun option if you have younger children. As a cat lover the artwork and theming definitely drew me in more than a game with the same gameplay but lesser presentation, but in spite of that, after a few games I feel that there's enough to the game to keep it fresh for a while (having extra cards and tiles from the expansion helps) and I would consider getting the Kittens expansion at some point if we keep playing it but feel that the game could use additional complexity. Down the other end of the game complexity spectrum my boyfriend somehow located a cut price, completely intact but slightly worn copy of Bios: Megafauna, completely sleeved, which was a fairly amazing find. It's a game I've wanted to own since I played it a few years ago, but wasn't willing to pay the price for a new copy (also not giving money to Ion Games is good) so randomly finding it at a convention was certainly very lucky.
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Jun 5, 2022 13:38
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Aramoro posted:5-6 is our normal number so can I recommend you look for Sidereal Confluence, Unfathomable and Power Grid as games that all work really well at 6 players because they minimise the downtime when you're not doing things. The big problem I find at that player count is some games it can be like half an hour between turns and that really makes the game drag. The larger group I play with is quite casual, I'm gradually easing them into more complex games and Power Grid is definitely going to come out eventually at some point, but it's much easier to sell "here's a cute tile placing game with cats" than "let's be power companies". I haven't played Power Grid for ages and will have to relearn it, but I did play it a bunch years ago and agree that it is very good. Glagha posted:Okay so I played Roll for the Galaxy and I wanna know if I'm crazy for liking Race more. I swear I've heard the common or at least acceptable opinion that Roll is better and I LIKE Roll I'd play it any time, but I feel like the game has some like, boring do nothing turn stuff to it where you spend dice only to get more dice back and nothing else. Trading and Stocking just feels really boring but it's also super necessary. In my experience Race is generally the preferred game.
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Jun 5, 2022 18:29
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Bottom Liner posted:All that Dominion money couldn’t save them from the fever dream production that was Dice Realms I really want to play this game but I sure as hell am not going to buy it
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Jun 6, 2022 12:51
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Aramoro posted:The problem with Isle of Cats is that it's not very good and has loads of bits. I enjoyed it, but the art is definitely what sold it to me, I would not recommend it to anyone who doesn't specifically enjoy the theming.
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Jun 14, 2022 12:29
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I will insta buy any of those boxes, I do not make good financial decisions
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Jul 13, 2022 21:56
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I think the misunderstanding here is yours, all hail the new AI overlords
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Jul 25, 2022 07:49
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I'll admit I'm one of those people who will dig into strategy discussion for basically any game but doing it before you even played the game once seems unhelpful
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Sep 11, 2022 22:39
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I have had a soft spot for Tales since a sequence of events happened where my partner's character was forced to rob a dying hunchback with unpredictable results
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Oct 5, 2022 11:57
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Nowadays I tend to throw sleeves on any game which has cards that you need to shuffle at least occasionally, unless there are a lot of cards. It's such a small extra cost to get 1 or 2 packs of sleeves and it makes the game look and feel better.
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Oct 24, 2022 16:38
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Played Spirit Island for the first time at a meetup today. Not much to say, it was as good as everyone says. Easily the best coop board game I've ever played, with The Crew and Gloomhaven a fair way behind in second place. I usually strongly dislike coop games, but SI felt more like you were all individually working towards a common goal in your own way, while cooperating where needed, than the usual feeling of every decision being made by commitee.
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Oct 29, 2022 22:27
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RftG is still my favourite game and has been for a couple of years at this point. It's not the most complex, difficult, or strategic game, but it's always fun to play, somehow still manages to throw up new interesting decisions after dozens of hours, and is lightning fast compared to anything else I've ever played of a similar weight. The only expansion you need is Alien Artifacts IMO, I don't like the full "first arc" experience and if you're only playing with a single expansion then AA is miles better than TGS.
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Nov 2, 2022 22:12
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Viper915 posted:I find that I prefer RFTG at two players, where you get to use the rules about each picking two phase cards, but that at other player counts I enjoy San Juan a lot more. Playing race when you only get to pick one phase feels slow and plodding when you're used to the two phase rules. I think that this is mostly a problem with the 3 player game, 4 or 5 players picks up the pace a bit more due to more different actions being selected, although it does also get more difficult to predict what action choices other players will make. I do agree that 2P is where it's best though.
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Nov 3, 2022 12:36
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Chill la Chill posted:vaporwave Spanish version of RFTG Sorry, what???
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Nov 3, 2022 14:15
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CitizenKeen posted:I would back the heck out of a Race 2nd. I don't know that the game needs any updating, but I love me some games built around giant decks of cards. I would instantly back this if it had a rebalanced core deck (or just pick-and-chose from the existing card pool) and looked like this: I am seriously impressed and surprised how much better the cards look in spite of using the same artwork. The generally drab tone of the original is definitely its weakest point outside of the "yes you need to learn what all of these icons mean" learning curve.
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Nov 3, 2022 17:29
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I play a fair amount of TM, it takes way longer to play than it probably should but I know people who usually hate euro-style games or are at least generally reluctant to play them who will happily sit down for a game of TM precisely because you kind of have to just play to the card you see and don't have too wide of a decision space. The Venus expansion is absolute poo poo though. With that said, if I could convince my friends to enjoy RftG, Troyes and Concordia as much as they like TM I'd happily never play TM again
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Nov 16, 2022 17:44
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Does anyone have opinions on the Res Arcana expansions? I went to a boardgame meetup at the weekend and out of my collection this game got played a lot more than I expected. My main issue with the game is that it seems to drag a lot in the last turn or two when everyone usually has a ton of active abilities to use, I was wondering if there was anything in the expansion content which made games tend to wrap up more quickly?
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Dec 7, 2022 09:37
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Thanks guys, I'll keep that on the maybe list then. I wish there was a way to avoid the slowdown issue but it's come up every time I've played the game and it feels like it's an inherent issue with the design much like Terraforming Mars which has exactly the same problem of spending most of your actions lategame "running your engine" to generate resources, and it gets particularly bad with multiple players.
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Dec 7, 2022 11:03
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Magnetic North posted:Well, in other threads I have frequented that commonly get title changes, normally you get a few emptyquote replies in support. I'd be in favor of seeing that here when suggested, to make sure it's not just me making such requests alone. 
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Dec 9, 2022 23:18
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Mr. Squishy posted:I think someone owns the use of the word "edge" with regards to videogames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games (AKA Real Life Shitlord Tim Langdell) had some high profile failings in his stupid extortion racket about a decade ago but is apparently still roaming around claiming sole ownership of the word "edge" in spite of not being meaningfully active in the industry for many years (aside from starting litigation etc)
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Dec 16, 2022 00:14
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FulsomFrank posted:Yeah TM is the one I always think of but wasn't sure if one of the expansions fixed that or not, I don't have any of them and in my mind there are a dozen when in actuality there are probably maybe two I don't know. Christ, even Splendor figured out tiered decks. Nah, TM's expansions generally approach the issue by giving you more stuff which isn't reliant on cards and/or gives you more tools to be able to use the cards you're given.
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Jan 5, 2023 09:48
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FulsomFrank posted:I hear what you're saying and maybe I just don't play the game enough (~7 plays) but each time we played it felt like I was chewing through the chaff constantly to get to the wheat and it was tedious and annoying. Again, more than willing to say I suck at it, just seems like a tighter design would be making more choices that matter at particular beats in the game, mechanically and thematically. Just remembered Twilight Struggle does this too. Are you drafting? It's basically required, otherwise you don't see enough cards to make the game compelling. The game sucks without drafting and the fact that it's not the default is a problem IMO (though it does significantly increase play length which might be why they don't) TfM has its issues but I still really enjoy it and I don't think that it needs a tiered deck, it just needs some of the chaff removed so that every card at least has the potential to be interesting if you get it under the right circumstances. Nobody is ever excited by Dust Seals.
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Jan 5, 2023 18:04
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Chainclaw posted:Right now, it's easier for me to get people to play Terraforming Mars than Race for the Galaxy. RFG has a lot more skill to it, so people who've played it a lot more often tend to kick the asses of people who've only played it a few times. I'm not convinced that this is actually true, but people definitely think that it is. The game flow of TfM is more obviously comprehensible than RftG but both games rely on the same kind of game knowledge, and TfM with drafting gives you a lot of leeway to mess with other players via card selection. As someone who's played both games a lot I'd say that TfM gives a skilled player more chances to tough out a weaker initial game state and end up winning anyway than RftG does. Though TM also has significantly more variability in terms of starting conditions and might have fewer options to deal with a really bad initial setup, depending on your exact combination of cards, corporation, etc.
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Jan 5, 2023 23:24
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The Eyes Have It posted:Step 1: Select a new faction My partner does this regularly with games he's not familiar with - he'll fixate on a single strategy, then complain afterwards that the game is unbalanced and whatever strategy won is overpowered and / or boring to play It kind of sucks because I got into board gaming because of him and we used to play 2p a lot, but over time I developed totally different tastes to him so we rarely play games together nowadays 
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Jan 9, 2023 20:26
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Jewmanji posted:Had to sit on the margins and wait for a 2.5 hour game of Catan to play out last night because I couldn’t convince a group to play (in complexity order) Azul, Concordia, Tulip Bubble, TfM, Everdell, Root, Pax 2E, or Lisboa. For as much as Catan is credited for reigniting interest in the hobby it sure seems like plenty of people are happy to play Catan and never explore what else might be out there. I was very sad. I was forced to eventually come to the conclusion that some people literally don't care what game they're playing and see board gaming mostly as an excuse to socialise, which is totally fine but it's confusing to do that when you can just do that part by itself without having a board game get in the way. So a simple game which you already know the rules for is best, and it's good if games take a while because the start and end of the game tend to be more distracting. Also that some people have really weird ideas about "ettiquette" (like, if you have a new game which literally nobody in the group has played before you're not supposed to try to win intentionally in the first few games)
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Jan 17, 2023 00:08
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uncle blog posted:I'm looking to fill a missing "slot" in my collection. Most of my games tend to either be party games, very short fillers or on the complete other end, like massive 4x's and other games that are hard to learn and take a minimum of two hours to play. A gateway+ kind of game is what I'm missing. Troyes: The theme isn't most peoples idea of exciting but the late Medieval manuscript style artwork is absolutely beautiful Plays well at all supported player counts and doesn't take too long Relatively simple rules (although exactly how some of the professions work can be a little tricky to understand) Constant player interaction through dice stealing / purchasing, but the player losing dice always gets rewarded with money. The cathedral and "offices" give a shared space every player wants to interact with, with plenty of blocking of other players etc By the sound of it, it might be a bit too "brown Euro game" in theme or a bit rules-heavier than you'd like, but it sounds like a great fit if those aren't dealbreakers. If it wasn't for the 2 player requirement I would have also recommended Hansa Teutonica which is quickly becoming one of my favourite games, but it also has the crippling issue of requiring you to get people excited about a game where you put cubes on a map and pretend to be a German accountant RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Jan 18, 2023 |
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Jan 18, 2023 11:42
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I'll also second Babylonia, I forgot about that one as I haven't played it for a while. Only played it at 2, but the map size scales with players so I'd guess it plays at least somewhat similarly with more.
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Jan 18, 2023 12:04
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I do find it weirdly satisfying to figure out the most logical / efficient way to bag up board game components, actually punching out components is kind of a nuisance though
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Feb 22, 2023 16:36
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Bodanarko posted:you gotta upgrade to the heavy poo poo: designing and 3D printing your own organizers. I am unreasonably proud of a storage solution I found for RftG (plus some expansions) which basically involved cutting up the existing box liner and sticking it back together with tape. But thankfully I don't have easy access to a 3D printer or I'd probably already be there.
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Feb 22, 2023 18:28
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Admiralty Flag posted:To revisit this after the hand grenade of Talisman was thrown in the room: do you have objections to buying two different games? Because you can have two different experiences at 4 and 6. I'd say that CoB isn't any heavier than Concordia in terms of decisionmaking but it's a less streamlined game and is going to feel clunky until everyone knows what all the building and improvement tiles do, Concordia has that great thing where most of the rules are written on the cards
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Mar 10, 2023 17:20
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If that game works it sounds great but the general impression I'm getting is that they should have cut 1 or 2 of those feature points somewhere along the line.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:44
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Shame that the actual best RftG expansion isn't there because it's mutually exclusive with Rising Storm. Alien Artifacts just has better balanced and more interesting cards.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:10
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:50 |
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My number one complaint about board game rules is having multiple concepts within the game with similar names so that every time it's referred to in the rulebook you have to check that you're actually applying the rule to the correct concept and you didn't mentally swap something around. The worse offender for this I've seen recently is when I was learning Hansa Teutonica, which handily has Merchants and Traders (two different resources with similar but slightly different rules) and Tradesmen (which refers to both Merchants and Traders at the same time). In this particular case I'd guess / hope that maybe this distinction is clearer in the original German.
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Mar 24, 2023 11:17
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