Love me some Big Shoulders.
I suspect they’re a right winger upset by maintaining basic community standards, but I have no specific details.
Welp. Greater Than Games is doing a reboot/revamp of Sentinels of the Multiverse. A “Definitive Edition”. More details to come. I have real mixed feelings about this. I love Sentinels, and I can see where they could revamp some things to make it a cleaner experience and like, bring some of the early characters a little more in parity with some of the stuff they’ve done later or whatever. On the other hand, I have a giant heavy black box of Sentinels cards that was promised to me to be the complete Sentinels experience, period, we’re done with the product line. And now they’re not. And of course, I bought all those old versions, and don’t super want to pay for them to be obsoleted.
I really like the new art style. The original had a very indie comic vibe, this is polished-but-retro.
As for the gameplay, I admired Sentinels of the Multiverse more than I enjoyed it. Got rid of my core box long ago, and I won’t be getting this new edition. Still, it’s nice to see the game getting a new lease on life.
The follow who made the script has been banned multiple times from BGG for his less than civil discourse on current events. He’s left the script in place, but left for other pastures since.
Im super excited about
Anyone played it yet?!
Discovered today that although the description nowhere says so, the Dice Throne official TTS mod includes a two scenario demo of Dice Throne Adventures. it’s a very pared down selection of loot cards, minion cards, portal crawl tiles, and of course officially available heroes, plus two of the four scenario 1 scenarios and the first boss (scenario 2). So, my friend Ed and I did a trial run so that I could actually play it in coop and show someone else in my friend group what it’s like. He took Santa (no really*) and I took the Gunslinger.
We had pretty good luck with the first scenario, getting a little banged up towards the end but never hitting true existential peril or needing to use salves. We didn’t really get much loot, just temporary buffs and the like, but it did mean we could buy most of what the shop had to offer. Then we saved and quit. We’ll do the Fallen Barbarian next time the opportunity comes up.
(*Santa is a comprehensively reskinned Barbarian, complete with mistletoe on the cards.)
I played a game of Architects of the West Empire on Friday, and another Saturday morning. Really enjoyed it. And it’s a game I’m going to be returning to because I like that it has a deceptive simplicity about it, while I think I see some fairly deep strategic elements too.
So, cool.
But Saturday afternoon I was thinking that while I get why that game does Victory Points as a win condition, for my own tastes I still kind of like the narrative objective in games, whether it’s saving the world in a Fantasy Flight C’thulhu thing or actually surviving one of those rare times in a game of Robinson Crusoe.
And so I dug out my copy of the Mummy’s Mask big box of Pathfinder to get my narrative tabletop gaming fix. I’d stopped playing that particular Adventure Path/box back in October, and I wondered why. I remembered pretty well where things were left off, and realized I was just two scenarios short of completing the 4th of 6 expansion decks in the series. I’d been playing using the 2nd Edition, core box rules conversions. Which seem daunting at first, but most are pretty common sense conversion rules that you’d do anyway if left to your own devices.
And so I wondered: why’d I quit? And then I remembered: back in the fall, I had a devil of a time tracking down the 5th and 6th decks that complete that Adventure Path. And so I put it aside until I could find them, and never got back to it, even though I meant to, because I was having a blast.
So I decided to go looking for those decks to see if I could find them online.
And then I did something colossally, astonishingly stupid. Probably. :) More in a bit.
Oh, man, I hate it when they don’t post the whole season at once. Having to wait a week for the next episode is sooo pre-streaming.
-Tom
So I am looking online after checking with my two FLGS’s for those Mummy’s Mask card packs, and I find them…but the place I found them wanted me to pay $25.00 apiece (they retail for $14.95) plus shipping.
And thus and so I check ye olde Ebay site. And I find them for a decent price and decent shipping. But I paging through Pathfinder listings and I see a big one. With bid $$ attached to it. Really big $$$ attached to it. Retail new $$. And it is a listing for what is clearly something bought in a liquidation auction for some poor game store: all of the first four base boxes, all 7 adventure path decks and character add-on decks for each base box, and then 31 character expansion deck sets, and 3 of the 5 “Ultimate whatever” decks. Plus all the promo cards, plus all the playmats not only for the characters, but also the big playmat that’s been out of print forever.
And I recognize the seller. It is an auction/estate sale buyer that I’ve bought issues of MOJO magazine from in the past. And he’s always a “best offer” guy who I imagine is paying pennies on the dollar for this stuff, marks it full price, but is willing to move stuff to move it. So I make a “best offer” bid that’s less than half of what his sell price is, figuring he’ll hit me with a counter offer, and I can decide from there.
But…he accepts my bid. Huh. OK. It was less than I paid (which was More Hundred) for Kingdom Death Monster base box, so yeah. Gimme, I guess. (I do confess pangs of guilt that some poor gaming store had this stuff and went under; I can’t bring them back though. So I will be hugging my FLGS here in DC with lots of love for other purchases.)
My 50-pound huge box of Pathfinder stuff showed up this afternoon. It really is almost everything. I think I just need the Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Intrigue to have the whole deal. And what I had before I bought this lot was just the Rise of the Runelords box and 4 of the 7 adventure path card decks, and then Mummy’s Mask.
I’m pretty stoked…but a little daunted about where to even begin here. I will say: I think there are better games in my collection; I think Apocrypha is a better game system iteration even on this system. But with that said, I can’t think of any game I own that gives me as much joy and which I have more fun with than PACG. And…I guess I’m all set to take a big ol’ belly-flop into the whole thing now.
(I think I’m going to start with reviewing the old rules and playing both Skulls & Shackles and Wrath of the Righteous with those original OG rules, as they were released…but with the character decks added in. Then I’ll probably go back and try playing all four with the new Core Set rules conversions.)
The reason I didn’t end up springing for the class decks and the Ultimate decks and so on is that as far as I can tell none of that stuff is for people playing the Adventure Paths. It’s for people doing their weird organized play stuff. And I’ve struggled to get to the APs, let alone doing organized play with like, purchased PDF scenarios and whatnot.
Whoa, great episode of the Triggercut Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Saga! I did NOT see that coming. And I totally would have done that deal as well. With various erratas and FAQs, you’ve got a lot of probably smooth gaming that will follow the progression of Selinker’s design. I’d be more jealous if I weren’t knee-deep in a few other tabletop things right now (Champions of Hara, making a Raiders of Scythia video, standing by for the new Tainted Grail stuff to arrive, and trying to resist breaking out Too Many Bones while following @justaguy2’s thread).
-Tom
cough continue the KDM series cough
They get a lot of use there, I’m sure. But they’ve got full included rules for adding them to an adventure path play-through as well. And this is a game that for me is tabletop Diablo 3 or Grim Dawn. More loot to add to my decks? Yes please!
With the rules for inclusion in adventure paths, do you mean just adding no more than one deck? I’ve never actually come across any rules stating how to manage the class decks etc from a solo game perspective. Makes me wonder what I’ve missed is all, as someone who has a few class decks.
Yeah, that’s basically the scope of it – just “Introduce the B cards at the start of the path, and then don’t bring in the 1, 2, 3, 4 etc cards until you’ve brought in cards from the new adventure path decks with the same number.” Common sense stuff, but they’re obviously fine with folks using the class decks as moar cardz to play with in just a regular adventure path play.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733320302481
This study adds to the literature on household sector (HHS) innovation by investigating how user and professional designer teams differ in their ability to translate knowledge diversity into collective creative output. We test our hypotheses on a unique data set of more than 5,000 board game design projects conducted by either teams of professional game designers or by hobbyist (user) designers. Our study lends support for the notion that knowledge diversity is a double-edged sword that has opposing effects on the two dimensions of team creativity, novelty and usefulness. We argue and find that teams composed of self-rewarded users in the household sector are better able than teams of professionals to translate the informational benefits of knowledge diversity into novel concepts and game designs. Finally, we find that user teams are in general more likely to create truly creative (i.e. novel and useful) game designs. This particular result emphasizes the relevance of research on HHS innovation and shows that user designers from the HHS are able to conduct collective development work more effectively than teams of professional designers.
Are you actually planning to do anything with those other than sell them on? I can’t imagine they change enough from Fall of Avalon that you’d like it suddenly.
Was on a conference call this morning when my phone buzzed, and I figured it was Amazon dropping off the furnace filters I ordered. Got off the call, transcribed my notes, went and grabbed clothes out of the dryer, had a glass of OJ.
Went to the front door to get my filters (which, I was thinking “Weird, those aren’t supposed to show up until Monday”) and there’s a big ol’ honking Tainted Grail box there.
So…now I’ve got tabletop gaming for the rest of the year, pretty much.
I know I brought this up before but I’d be totally up to do a playthrough of the new core edition of PACG on TTS.
There is a great mod with both the 2nd Ed and the expansion online.