Thanks for sharing! Do you play with the Nobility expansion or only the base game? Btw, I just went through War Chest’s rulebook. The combat system is as deterministic as chess right with its only randomness coming from the coin draw? I think I’d like the combat system in its sister game Undaunted series even more but I’ll still give this a go.
I haven’t tried the Nobility expansion. Combat is deterministic and the draw is the only random element. However, it’s a bigger random element than it seems. You need to move next to a target to attack it and then you need to draw that token again to do the attack and hope your opponent doesn’t claim first-player and draw a counter attack. There’s plenty of ways to mitigate this, but overall there’s still a good bit of hang-on-to-your-seat with an attack.
Started a new game of Cities:Skylines (the boardgame) with all “extensions” like news, roles etc.
What I like about this city builder is that there is no fiddly upkeep when you place a new building. You do not need to remember that this building gives you a bonus for this and this building for that.
You get a building bonus when you build, and that’s it. Adjust your tracks for polltuion, happiness, energy and so on. Next turn. It has a bit of push your luck chosing the right moment to finish your milestone (out of 4). If you wait too long you could lose some hapinness points because of your different tracks.
If you finish too early you might miss some possible happiness points.
it is very relaxing after the tensions of Under Falling Skies.
I had no idea there was a Cities:Skylines boardgame. I’ll check it out.
Speaking of boardgames based on Paradox Interactive video games, though, did anyone know there’s a Stellaris boardgame in development? I just found out yesterday when I noticed it on the hot list on BGG. Apparently they’ve been talking about how they’re in the middle of playtesting and artwork, and the Kickstarter is going to start in the next few months… for over the last year. Anyway, heres the interesting info :
Design your own burgeoning, starfaring race from dozens of Trait Cards. Customize your population by choosing a Government Type, and Ethics Cards that influence how you interact with the galaxy. Any type of alien civilization you can imagine, you can play!
Lead your empire through fast-paced 2-hour games where each session progresses your empire through new ages so you can continue to expand your empire, advance your technology, face new challenges, tell new stories, and discover new game mechanics. Grow your empire through the eons over multiple games.
Time for a new empire? Abandon it and start a new one! The galaxy you play in can continue across an infinite number of games with stories that develop your unique galactic history. Even abandoned empires remain in the galaxy for new empires to encounter.
At any point new players can join the game. Difficulty auto-adjusts for empires in different eras with events and victory conditions that scale to accommodate empire levels.
Navigate through hundreds of stories told via Event Cards that merge together and spin off story intrigues and plotlines, weaving changes into the fabric of your empire, its traditions, and its goals. Event Cards offer you choices that may guide your empire’s destiny, lead them to great discoveries, or unleash unexpected challenges.
If it can deliver on that it will truly transcend its source material.
that’s what she said honestly, nobody grabbed the low hanging fruits?
Yeah, it seems like it’s a tad on the ambitious side, which is what I was trying to subtly imply with my comment about their updates over a long period of time with nothing real to show. But, it would be really cool if they actually hit that mark.
So who is into the zombicide games and can tell me if this current one looks like it’s worth picking up if I’ve never played any of them?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cmon/zombicide-undead-or-alive
CMON really fucked over Zombicide fans with their Night of the Living Dead game, which was a cheap untested cash-in. It’s basically a set of minis with a half-assed ruleset attached that’s almost impossible to lose because the scenario design makes no sense and the rules can’t be bothered to do any heavy lifting. It’s one of those ‘enh, here’s some stuff you can do to move pieces around, if you have any issues, whatevs, you figure it out…’ So that’s where I am with Zombicide.
That said, I like how the whole Black Plague/Green Horde set ended up.
-Tom
Ultimately I can’t recommend Zombicide, not because I think it’s a bad game (at least, originally - I dropped off before the fantasy version, which, like…I already got plenty of fantasy coops thx) but because it’s a decent lightweight game with the price tag and shelf occupancy of one of those mega-campaign games with a zillion boxes. If it were, say, about the size and price of Zombies! (which is terrible, fwiw), it’d make way more sense.
So are you tempted by the new one? It has western stuff! The previews sound pretty positive, and as you know, people who make YouTube content based on prototype versions of kickstarter games with the intent of having their video featured on the campaign page are very critical.
I bought Zombies! one year when our game night happened to fall on Halloween. It is truly terrible, so our tastes must be aligned.
On the other hand, I’m getting a real strong vibe that by the time this campaign ends they are going to throw a big ol’ train mini into the game and I may not be able to resist.
You do get a lot of minis, if that is a selling point.
This plus The Wulfsburg expansion are my favorite. I am partial to fantasy over modern though. I would never, and have never, paid their fully price, so I never Kickstarted any of them. A lot of the cost are sunk into the minis, which are nice but not incredibly special, and I just don’t care. I might’ve considered this if i wanted something western or didn’t have the others, but the games just don’t vary enough for me to want to pay that much for any of them.
Boy do I love to scale these games up with a lot of people at the table but… there are just better games out there for 100 bucks. Around 60 for the main games and 30 for the expansions.
I own 4 of them. I have no interest, at this point, for more.
Wow, @Nesrie likes a big minis game? Enough to own FOUR of them? Must be alright :)
Ok, so after reading around people seem pretty happy with the (slight) rules tweaks going on here, plus the western stuff looks cool to me, plus I’m not in a hurry to get it, plus all of the extra ks exclusive characters and stuff makes it seem like this is not a bad way to go.
Currently in for a dollar, I guess I have until the end of the pledge manager to talk myself out of it. I am getting better at that, though. There were several big campaigns that I excitedly backed at pm level in the 2nd half of 2020 that I ended up passing on when decision time came.
The KS exclusives don’t really amount to that much. Unless they’ve massively tweaked the design, characters are differentiated by a single skill like 3/4ths of the way into the progression and slightly different stats. I think you do tend to get a bunch of extra minis, but the flip side is that you pay full list price instead of the dramatic markdown it sees at online retail.
Cool, cool. Ok, pledge manager is still a couple months away but I’ll do some comparison shopping then. On the other hand, if they add a playable character based on Wynonna Earp I will not be held responsible for my spending decisions.
It seriously scales up for big groups and any pain points there are mild to fiddle with. I mean instructions for 10 players! You can mix and match them pretty easily, and just fill a table full of map pieces, players and just a ton of zombies. It gets that overwhelming panic feeling going by being overrun by zombies despite the ever expanding number of bullets and weapons and it drew my group in because it did a lot of that without hugely complex rules, although the rules aren’t as tight as I like.
I just have a hard time believing they’ve added enough meaningful change for another one. I mean I like these games, but I got more so more could play and we can vary the map, not really because I thought they made significant enough changes to warrant a whole new game. And that’s just my pain point really, not a knock in quality so much as… so it’s a Western Skin Zombicide where you can lure Zombies to get hit by trains and bunch them up for a stick of dynamite… wood dice are cool.
I’ve reached that point where some Podcast someone posted here a long time ago mentioned most board gamers get… where you have too many games to play. I think they said you either run of out space (There’s always room for one more!) or realize you can’t possibly play all these. So it’s 100 dollars plus 30 to ship it for something that is likely to show up on Amazon at some point for 60-65, ships free. So that 60 dollars is really to hit those Kickstarter exclusives. Now don’t get me wrong I feel compelled to get KS exclusives, and I hate that it’s a consideration because at the rate I back KS, I’ll almost never get those so it’s really a matter or replacement. Do I think the Western version of Zombicide would get more play in my house than the modern and fantasy equivalents I have… no I don’t.
I do like Zombicide mechanics, as loose and sometimes messy as they are, and it is a game you can scale up to 10 people for a wild night of playing with friends and family who often don’t do these types of games because the complexity of the rules seems to involve more time than playing the actual game. I’d recommend Prison Break for the Zombivor for modern and Black Plague for fantasy, with the option to easily add to both if it’s liked.
But hey, the new one might totally be worthwhile… I am just skeptical it’s 130 worth when there are so many other games out there for that and half that would get you one pretty close to that.
For me, I definitely prefer the modern setting for my zombie apocalypses. But Black Plague/Green Horde gives them just enough room to add some playful fantasy-based gameplay systems. It’s not the dumb fantasy excesses of Massive Darkness – anyone want to buy my Compleat Massive Darkness Collection of Utter Nonsense for cheap? – but neither is it the anodyne ‘enh, here’s some stuff’ shrug of their Night of the Living Dead cash-in.
Alternatively, you could drop a few hundred bucks on Shadows of Brimstone and start immediately gluing together the minis yourself! Paging, @justaguy2, who’s probably got glue all over his fingers this very moment.
-Tom
I wish someone other than Flying Frog (or, I guess, CMON) would do a coop weird west game. I’d happily try Shadows of Brimstone with someone else’s copy (or via Tabletop Simulator, if anyone had made a mod that was playable without a physical copy) and maybe I’d suffer through assembling minis and trying to figure out storage for it if I ended up liking it. But I’ve not liked anything else I’ve tried of Flying Frog’s, and so it’s just not a reasonable purchase for me. But the theme is so compelling. :(
I do really like Doomtown as a multiplayer card game, but that’s a whole different genre. maybe Pinnacle will do a Deadlands coop someday.