I really see no reason to play any other Rosenberg game than Agricola, because it’s pretty plain he does a lot of iterating on the same basic design ideas, but Agricola is the one that’s got modular occupation/minor improvement decks. Which is the thing that makes it magic for me. The rest? Standard, unexciting Euro fare, competently delivered. I ain’t got time for iterations on that.
Ha, I’m fortunate that my wife and kids kind of dig playing some board games with me, and Ticket to Ride is one of them. It’s certainly getting a little long in the tooth but I still enjoy it - it’s kind of our Monopoly I guess.
Agricola is one of those games that I’ve been reading about over at BGG for jeez, decades at this point? and just never played it. I don’t think I even know anybody that owns it! I am curious to try it one of these days though.
By the way, Caverna is on BGA, and it is a much better way to play it, especially a casually async game where people take turns once or twice a day. It does take forever that way, but you have time to read all the tiles without having to walk around the table, you can take your time thinking about what your best move is, and best of all, you don’t have to set it up, clean it up, or have a table the size of the Grand Mesa.
I really disliked Caverna back in the day, but playing it on BGA is actually somewhat pleasant! You can even play it with seven players and it is no more annoying than four players. On an actual table, seven players would be… not good.
And yet what ends up happening is that the two people who’ve never played before rightly surmise they’re going to lose against the guy teaching the game unless they gang up on him, which they do, and so one of them ends up winning even though it was their learning game and they didn’t really know what they were doing!
I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in the same chair as that guy on the left. :)
Nice! I love this idea.
If anyone here is interested in hosting a Caverna game on BGA, my account name over there is “tomchick” (I don’t have a premium account, so I can’t host games). Heck, I’d be interested in any number of games on BGA if anyone wants to host. I’ve tried to get online games going with my friends, including at BGA, but nothing has “taken” so far. Maybe some of us from this thread could start a game?
Even hilariouser!
I’m just over here quietly reminding my copy of A Feast for Odin that words cant hurt it and that we will be together forever
I think I still have a premium BGA account. I haven’t played Caverna but I’ve played Agricola?
Are they actually? When I say modular decks, I mean that Agricola has at last count something like 8-10 different Occupation decks and a similar number of Minor Improvement decks, any of which you could potentially use in a game of Agricola. I’ve certainly never seen them sell expansion decks to any of the games you name but maybe they have different ones in the box at least?
I’m not really a Euro fan, in general. I recognize that Rosenberg does good ones, I do! And a lot of them. But they’re not operating at a level of complexity that makes the mechanical focus and VP-centric nature of the “Euro” subgenre capture my interest enough to bother playing them. I’m sure I would like A Feast for Odin or Fields of Arle as much as I do family mode Agricola (which doesn’t use the decks), which is to say tepidly, and certainly not enough to need more than one.
You might as well try to sell me on the wonders of Reiner Knizia, who’s only ever made one game I actually liked - and it is not any of the ones he is no doubt justly famed for, but rather the silly Fantasy Flight dueling card game Blue Earth, because it’s one of the few times he’s ever really attempted theme.
If I play a Euro at all (and I almost never do), I’ve found it needs to be brain-burningly ridiculously interwoven and toothy. Vital Lacerda’s stuff, or Mindclash. But it also needs to not be full of stocks nonsense (your 18xx games and City of the Big Shoulders, etc), and when I played Panamax I learned I absolutely loathe mechanics where your success is distinct from and could actually be hindered by, the success of the faction or company or whatever you control. And it probably shouldn’t look like someone handed you their home prototype (Splotter) or have an incredibly dry theme (e.g. Pipeline).
PS: I don’t even own Agricola. It’s just the one mid-weight Euro I’ve enjoyed in the past.
I can, but because of the way BGA games work, it’s easiest if I just know who is going to play before I create the game. So PM me or reply here or something and I’ll start it up if we get a reasonable number of players by, say, Monday?
What is this explanation? Is it just “pay attention to what your opponents need and screw them whenever possible”? Because I can imagine how to do that in Ticket to Ride, but some games just don’t feel like they should be played with more than a certain level of cutthroatedness, and TtR seems to be one of them. Am I just being misled by the theme and presentation?
Have you played any 18xx games? They’re quite a bit different than “euros with stock mechanics”. The stock manipulation in those games is absolutely the best part and is why they are still played today.
My grail game is for something with the business and stock mechanics of 18xx but that plays in under two hours. Many have tried and most have pretty much failed to do this.
I am very confident 18xx is the opposite of what I want.
I’d love to play if there’s room. “bmarinari” on BGA. It’ll do me some good to have games of something other than Ark Nova.
I’d love to play some BGA games too, but since I’m living in the Hong Kong timezone, it might be a bit tricky to find a good time. My account name is “cpugeek13”.
I was suggesting async games (1-2 or more turns per day), but having one player in an 8-hour different time zone tends to slow things way down, since you’re likely to only get a maximum of one action a day. And Caverna is a lot of actions.
Fellow Feast for Odin friend here, unite! I like the tetris aspect, and the chase your own highscore is made interesting when accompanied by the Scenario and Puzzle Book that is available via BGG
Note this is for playing the game solo. I’ve never, and plan to never play Feast for Odin with more than one person.
IMO, Agricola’s biggest problem is that 50% of the cards in the game are complete junk. The game knows this as the manual provides 4(?) different card-dealing methods to try and fix that and says “hey, you choose the best!”.
No thanks game, you choose please, it’s basically your job.
So in order to learn how to play Agricola you’ve got to play a bunch of awful games of Agricola where you figure out which cards are bad and then remove them from your game entirely. And the cards make or break the game, so if you get a bad hand you’ve got 3 hours of pain in front of you as you struggle to survive whilst everyone else goes on to display incredible synergy.
Or buy all of the card decks (that also contain junk) and hope you water down the junk with the new cards, as @malkav11 is talking about.
Agricola Family is pretty good.
ps I’m on BGA and have a premium account! poddster
However I’ve had to stop playing, otherwise I don’t get any work done :D There was a time when I had something like 50 games going at once…
But I’m happy to play the occasional game. If you’re all in dire needs I could host some of the premium ones for you and provide an opponent that hasn’t read the rules nor plans to. BGA makes “winging it” easy.
I can’t speak for the Caverna game, but I don’t mind playing async with folks in other timezones even when it stretches the game out.
Just to get things moving, I’ll send a few friend requests and start a game of Race For the Galaxy. Space for 2 more if anyone’s interested!