Tail Feathers does indeed take heavy inspiration from X-Wing. But it’s also kind of a half-finished concept. It works ok and is really fun with great minis, but there are places throughout the rulebook that strongly suggest it’s meant to be a base set for a series of expansions/campaigns… which never happened because Jerry Hawthorne is always chasing new shiny and can’t be bothered to develop old shiny. That said, it could also function pretty well as a way to unleash kids’ creativity. Have them design their own modules. And it integrates with the Mice & Mystics characters.
I don’t know Mice and Mystics, but I love what Hawthorne seems to be trying to do with his storybook series. However, he’s absolutely terrible at the execution stage of his game design, or Plaid Hat is absolutely terrible at development, or some combination thereof. Aftermath, which Hawthorne and Plaid Hat made after Stuffed Fables and Tail Feathers, is an unmitigated disaster in terms of scripting. Brittle, sloppy, poorly documented, and even more poorly supported after its release. Very nearly unplayable, and I don’t say that lightly. I wouldn’t dump a new boardgamer, adult or otherwise, into one of Hawthorne’s games, especially if you want to develop an appreciation for systems, tactics, and rules over lore fluff and cutesy artwork.
-Tom
I will say, too, that I have Mice & Mystics and tried playing it a couple of times (once with my kids) and found that it’s a great concept and looks beautiful and is even slightly more streamlined than most dungeon crawly games, but it’s still clunky as hell and too slow paced to (in my opinion) keep the attention of a kid.
Voidfall announced today by Mindclash, an upcoming Euroey space 4Xish kind of thing? Art and design by Just Take My Damn Money.
This could be a good one! Turczi usually means a good solo mode at least. :)
Mike,
I’m starting a go fund me. Want to jump on?
That’s like the Holy Trinity of gaming for me.
I was about to buy Elcipse 2.0 and now I’ve got to hold off because of this.
While not 4x exactly, The Defence of Procyon III is shipping soon. Looking forward to playing that.
I played a couple of rounds of Bloodborne and it is really good. Thank the designers for not including any dice, only cardplay. The combat is defined by 3 different speeds, fastest attack goes first. Then you deal damage, no blocking, but dodge is possible (if you have the card in your hand). Stamina is provided by available attack slots (3), after that you need to spend a card to clear the slots (there are other ways, too).
The campaign is a deck of cards (actually 4 campaigns). And each campagin split into chapters with missions. The campaign cards convey the bloodborne story and lore. It is way more atmospheric than Dark Souls (the board game, which is just running around killing stuff). Here, you can rescue survivors and bring them to the Oedon chaple in one insght mission and I guess there are all kinds of missions.
I like it that it is relevant how you explore the map. In my first game, I explored and tried to clump the tiles all together, so that I have short routes, unfortunately, the enemies also are clumped. I think, I should have laid down the tiles a bit differently. Because enemies on your and adjacent tiles will pursue you. And I have created a lot of adjacency …
edit: needs some painting. There aren’t that many minis, maybe 30 … I can do it!
Sure, I’ll kick in a few dollars. At least when helping someone else buy a game I won’t have to figure out how to store it.
Also, thanks for reminding me that I backed Procyon. Actually forgot about that one until you mentioned it. I bought too many games last year.
Yeah… Yeah.
I finally got to try Azul the other day - played three games with my SO and it was immediately clear to me that it is “my kind of game” - very cutthroat, and making sure your opponent doesn’t get to do what they want to do, seems equally important to figuring out your own optimal plays. Sadly, she was not that into it. The design, and especially the nice, tactile tiles did a lot to draw her in initially, but she found the constant score counting very distressing when she was behind. Add that to several tiles “falling to the floor” and score her negative points because she could not place them. I think this game won’t see much play with just me and her.
It’s not that surprising - she’s not that into “screwing over” the opponent. For example, she enjoys Carcassonne with more than two players, while I think it’s brilliant heads up, and each added player diminishes the game. She’ll still play it two-player against me. That is also a very confrontational game, but the fact that much of the score is added up at the end might be why she’ll still endure my shenanigans in that game. Also she’s played it a lot, so we are more evenly matched.
A game we both have enjoyed a lot, is The Crew. Neither one of us has any experience with trick taking games, and we played this with two others that did (one a former bridge player) over several game nights. Great stuff! It is a cooperative trick taking game, and you have limited means of communicating what kind of cards you have to complete different tasks, that escalate in difficulty as you complete them. We’re just over half way through the mission book, and we’re finding it very challenging now. I was afraid I’d feel dumb too often when doing something suboptimal or misunderstanding what another player was trying to induce me to do - but mostly we’ve all had moments of “doh!” and it’s all good, and we start again, often agreeing that that specific deal must have been impossible (but it probably wasn’t!).
The Crew is brilliant. It’s one of our favourite family evening games. We do a couple of missions and shelve it for a few days.
Speaking of playing with your SO, have you played 7 Wonders Duel? As a head to head game, I think it’s one of the best. You are each working on your engine and whatever victory condition you are chasing. You can block the other by picking a card they wanted, but it doesn’t feel too cut throat. It’s just that you might both want that science or resource card. But there are many others to pick from in the pyramid. Plays quickly and easy to explain.
After a few games, we introduced the Pantheon expansion and it’s our favourite pure 2 player game by far.
We have both Azul and 7 Wonders Duel, and while it felt we got good value for a few games out of Azul, we felt at some point we had ‘figured out the math’, whilst 7 Wonders Duel we gave up on… felt long-winded and difficult to maintain a competitive opposition all the way through, one or the other of us would fall short and feel like we were wasting time getting to the end. It’s another reason I value brevity in game design, not because we lack the patience, but because the nail biting tension phase is a greater percentage of the match.
edit: sorry, didn’t mean to put them down, clearly people love these games and we bought them from excellent user reviews… I think it’s just another reason I was looking for a different kind of game upthread. I think these kinds of games I feel like I’m trying to solve a competitive math problem, which my wife loves, but I prefer to ‘play’ in the purest sense with a board, and maybe win as a byproduct, which is hard to do when I’m sweating counting things and assessing statistical probability of card draws etc.
Interesting. I think our 7WD stats are 55% wins for my wife and 45% for me. Our average score is within 3 points. And I’m constantly amazed by games that feel lost which actually end up being very close once we get to the score. There are a few runaway games, but it’s not the norm for us.
I get what you mean about looking for a different type of game. Tactical games or games like Mechs vs Minions are all about the experience and playing with the minis or standees on the table. Table presence is cool. We get this from other Ameritrash games in our collection too. But I do enjoy the puzzle of more Euro games too. It’s all good for me. I’ll play just about any genre and enjoy it.
I imagine you run into that problem a lot with competitive 2-player games. If you get the opportunity, it’s worth trying Azul with 3 or 4 players. It’s far less cutthroat (at least in my experience) as there’s much more advantage to improving your own board than wrecking one other player’s game.
That’s exactly how we feel about playing Kingdomino; four player games are a freewheeling good time… the two player game is a teeth gritting devination battle where you are juggling the cards you have, the cards you will have, the cards you want and the need to take the cards your opponent wants and will want, all needing to slot into an evolving layout… it’s exhausting, in a good way, but amazing how freeing it is when you know it’s impossible to keep track of everything with more players.
No worries, I got it under control. The fog gate prevents the other beast to enter the fight. And the mini boss scourge beast has double health.
I failed yesterday in Chapter 1 of The Long Hunt, but today, I knew the game system a little bit better. It is no accident, that there is a wall on the other side of the boss room.
You really need to manage the tile exploration, and when to fight and when to just run.
The great thing about Bloodborne is, that it is not fiddly. There aren’t a lot of moving parts that you have to manage, but enough to spice things up.
Also, the tiles are not too big, so table space footprint is small. Also half of the tiles have special abilities, so they are actually different from each other (not like the tiles in Dark Souls, which all feel the same).
Since the rule is, if you fail any chapter in a campaign, you restart the campaign, it feels more like a rouglike with permadeath.
But repeating the chapter didn’t feel boring, because enemy get placed random. There are 3 type of symbols on the tiles, and these symbols are assigned randomly to enemy types. So a second run will provide enough variance.
Also, suck it Scourge beast with your double movement and fast attacks.
They actually included missions as quest lines, you follow a mission line by fullfilling tasks for the mission and the connected missions tell little stories (so far).
That one is on my radar - tried it once, but it was the first time playing for both players, so can’t say I’ve got the “feel” for how it plays. Hopefully she won’t be to turned off by the theme. (She loves San Juan - building hearths and libraries and whatnot - but can’t get her to touch Race for the Galaxy. Admittedly that’s also a bit more complex with symbols that are hard to grok). I’ll pick it up next chance I get, thanks for the rec!
That makes sense - Carcassonne is the same way. Near impossible to plan with four players, so you might as well just go with the flow, and suddenly cooperation is good!
A difficulty rating of the games I am currently playing from highest to lowest:
Planet Apocalypse
Bloodborne
Too Many Bones
Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion
Bloodborne/TMB are pretty close, at least what I played so far
And I bet JotL will get harder after Mission 5 (the last one I played)
Planet Apocalypse (1st boss from core game), just crushed me, the longer it went, the harder it got.
