I wish Frostpunk had real coop because I don’t really play solo a lot but I do look forward to breaking my copy out at some point here.
Not at all! I really enjoyed 300. My Persians were exceptionally lucky on a few rolls, which prevented the Greeks from halting our advances or making a counterattack on our pontoon bridge. We tallied the points at the end. Even though the track maxes at 6, I would have had about 20 points. So I’m certainly not complaining about that!
The co-op mechanic is that each round the leader changes. As leader your break ties so if you want to make it feel like a real struggling society, you can listen to their ideas go along with them and then change your mind and do what you want to do.
Yeah, it’s really no more a coop game than Nemo’s War or Dawn of the Zeds, both of which have “coop modes” in their latest editions that amount to handing off control of part of your turn to someone else. I am not saying there’s no fun to be had in having a second brain to bounce off when making decisions but it’s a far cry from having actually separate turns, roles and scaling based on player count.
(And of course some would insist that even those games are really solo games, but I think we can all still see a difference in design between a game whose designer(s) expect one hand at the tiller and one where they expect 2-5 or whatever.)
Have you played This War of Mine? It’s actually a good co-op game that they put out. It’s a different feel from Frostpunk but is an interesting dark survival co-op like the video game. It can be played solo, but giving each player a character is interesting I just never wanted to put my game friends through such a depressing experience.
Side note. Glass Cannon scored their 4th game IP Apex Legends. They do a great job with games but a skirmmish bright multiplayer is definitely out of their normal wheelhouse. As much as I love Apex I wouldn’t even bother giving it a second look, but these guys do such good job with video game translations that I am now at least intrigued.
I have zero interest in playing This War of Mine. In either capacity.
I do own the videogame though. And FWIW, there’s some creative(s) on the boardgame version of This War of Mine that worked on the Frostpunk boardgame but it was an Awaken Realms joint, whereas Frostpunk is Glass Cannon Unplugged.
Quick question…
The late pledge for Tainted Grail opened up and I remember thinking it sounded cool, but I don’t remember why anymore. I know it is a narrative heavy game, but does it also have strong mechanics?
The reason I ask is that I thought Sleeping Gods sounded cool and my wife and I didn’t like it. I was set to back Tainted Grail and figured I’d ask here if disliking Sleeping Gods has a strong potential to correlate with disliking Tainted Grail. Games we have enjoyed…Gloomhaven, Too Many Bones, Pandemic Legacy and regular Pandemic. I like Spirit Island but she thought it was a bit punishing.
Also, worth getting Fall of Avalon 2.0 in addition to Kings of Ruin?
Thanks!
It’s my second favorite boardgame of all time. The writing is really good, imo, the worldbuilding is imaginative, the decisions hard. The encounter mechanics aren’t super involved but they’re solid. I haven’t played Sleeping Gods, just the Primeval Peril demo thing so I can’t compare very closely, but I think there is probably overall more writing and a more focused narrative - you do have freedom to move around and there’s major branches in the primary story and secondary quests and encounters, but you are following a single general story arc. Sounds like Sleeping Gods is more sandbox.
All of the above is Fall of Avalon. The new standalone sounds like a refinement from people who have demoed it.
If you bounced off Sleeping Gods pretty hard, there’s a reasonable chance that Tainted Grail may not do it for you either.
Hmm, now I’m torn since it ain’t cheap but looks cool. I didn’t like Sleeping Gods for multiple reasons.
- The story felt like a bunch of side quests that while maybe consistent with the world, it was mostly a set of disjointed stories.
- Exploration mostly felt arbitrary, with some exceptions. For instance there was a quest that said it was near something (I don’t recall), and we were like ‘hey on the map it looks like that is the landmark the game was talking about’. That didn’t feel arbitrary, but much of it just felt like wandering without a lot of motivation or information to make it feel interesting.
- Wasn’t too crazy about the combat mechanics. It was Ok.
- Holy cow the table got busy with all the cards we accumulated that had to be kept of the board.
- I don’t like making decisions without having some knowledge or reason to feel like I can choose / deduce a good decision. I don’t like things feeling random.
I’m not sure how much of those dislikes would apply to Tainted Grail. It seems like the combat system is more in line with what I’d like. It also seems like the story is a more coherent, overarching story rather than random events. I guess I’d prefer a game to be mechanics focused (but doesn’t have to be super complex or anything), but having a good story to give the choices and actions context would be nice.
Tainted Grail’s narrative gameplay is a lot more focused on a single goal – not nearly as side-questy as Sleeping Gods. I was not a fan of the exploration in Tainted Grail at all, however – it’s yet another game that punishes exploration with mechanics that feel arbitrary. Ish.
And Tainted Grail can table hog with the best of them, including all the cards. And the combat and diplomacy mechanics are…interesting, let’s say. I enjoyed Sleeping Gods’ take on combat a lot more.
I just played with a couple of friends, and the table talk was delightful. This game does such a good job of encouraging you to cajole and argue with your friends.
We lost on the penultimate turn. We were all feeling pretty confident and plotting to put ourselves in the catbird seat, but some of those Year 3 cards are brutal.
It sounds like the 2.0 version in the kickstarter tries to lesson the grind or just trying to collect resources to keep the things lit to keep exploring. After looking at some comparisons on Reddit and BGG, I can definitely see the risk of Tainted Grail falling into the same problems that Sleeping Gods did for us.
Here’s a question for you, did exploration feel any more or less arbitrary in Tainted Grail than Sleeping Gods? It looked like there are sometimes clues to follow - do they make sense or is it just guessing?
If I get TG, I’m thinking maybe I should just get the 2.0 version of the original. Not sure what I’ll do.
Broadly speaking, there’s usually good clues and breadcrumb trail laying, although there is one bit in the early game where it basically says “your goal is to find a goal”.
Signs point to Kings of Ruin being the most refined version if you’re only going to get one, but obviously it’s not out for anyone to have a final opinion on it.
I loved TG’s story and hated, the mechanics. starts out fine but then becomes repetitive. minor spoiler You build up and when you finally do the game takes everything from you for no reason other than they wanted you to have a hard reset. . I suspect the expansion has addressed some of the repetitive game play but by the end we just played it like a chose your own adventure book.
And malkav11 is right that your goal is find goal is annoying. I think we played 2 or 3 hours of gameplay before we find it.
Despite being sick all last week, I still managed to get in a few good plays.
The best one? Still Land and Freedom. This one came close. The Moderates were able to win despite a stern showing from the Anarchists and a late surge of approval for Communism. This might be the title I’m most excited about right now.
Hope you’re feeling better.
Did some game box at go back in time and crush a butterfly? Those are the ugliest and least interesting box covers I have seen for a game in some time.
What a thing to say! I think some of these are rather handsome. Better than the “merchant counts coins in a vaguely Near Eastern market” box cover of Euros past, anyway.
Zach of Zachtronics (SpaceChem, Opus Magnum, programming games) has a solitaire tactics card game coming out:
@tomchick Thought this might interest you! I think I’m going to get some to sell at my store. Rules are available here: THE LUCKY SEVEN
It’s a no-brainer at £8, though with UK postage it’s more than double that