ISS Vanguard was actually my first Awaken Realms game. I’d read so much good stuff about Tainted Grail that I wanted to try it, but of course if you missed the Kickstarter you couldn’t get it. So I figured I would just back their next game, and this was it.
And as far as being a big sandbox to mess around and adventure in, it does kinda deliver. The rules aren’t too bad. There are some situations where you have to make a judgement call, but most of the questions asked on BGG are answered in the rules. I guess people are divided on whether the writing and story are any good – I don’t think they are, but they’re sufficient. The art is pretty cool. It’s not a miniatures boondoggle – the game contains exactly 9 (small) miniatures, only 4 of which you’ll ever use at one time (you can buy lots and lots more miniatures for it if you want, but they’re packaged and sold separately – I didn’t buy them and I’m glad I didn’t). Like I said, the gameplay didn’t hold up for me as a solo game through the whole campaign, but it did for quite a while.
The only other Awaken Realms game I’ve played since then was Nemesis: Lockdown. Now, the rules in that game are awful. In our few plays, we regularly run up against situations that just cannot be resolved by the rules. When you look them up on BGG you get threads of people saying things like “well, thematically I think you should do this”. Nobody points to anything in the rulebook. It does contain a bunch of oversized miniatures, which you need. There’s no writing or story to speak of (the story is emergent, rather than relying on a paragraph book, or cards with flavor text).
Still, it’s kinda fun. Running around a doomed Mars station, getting torn apart by vicious aliens, all the while scrounging for medpacks and looking for the damn room that lets you send the signal or research alien weaknesses (or whatever your character is trying to accomplish). It’s too darn long, and it’s super hard (we’ve played three times and everybody has always died, except one time when a single person escaped and won). Unfortunately it is too long for our normal weekday game nights, so it only comes out on our rare weekend game days.
We’re almost at the end of ISS Vanguard’s base campaign in 3 player and it’s been a blast (I’m in the camp that thinks the writing is good fwiw). It’s true that it’s not always clear what you’ll turn up when exploring or whether it will relate to the objectives but we’ve generally been fine being completionist in exploring everything and found cool stuff 90% of the time even if it’s not mission critical. Certain planets have been too hostile to complete in one go, but not that many, especially as we’ve advanced, and only one mission actually kicked our butts properly (midway through - I’m not sure, but it really felt like the game kind of expects you to lose that one. And even then we were very close to being able to pull it out, I think.). That one mission killed about 15 crew and we’ve lost maybe 2 more, total, beyond that. One of which was 100% due to my decision in a story beat (and they’re not dead, exactly… just…not going on any more away missions).
I think it’s probably their most consistently successful narrative campaign game because there’s enough crunch to the mechanics to make for interesting decisions a lot of the time (Etherfields is too light for me, although it works well enough), but it’s not too in the way of getting narrative stuff going, and it feels more consistently part of the experience than the fight mechanics in Tainted Grail. That said, the problem all of their big campaign games have had so far and ISSV is no exception: if you’re thorough and play well, you will run out of progression headroom and mechanical incentives significantly before the end of the campaign.
I adore literally every one of their games I’ve played though. Which is almost all of the ones that are out.
My son is asking me what I want for my birthday, and the only thing I can think of is a board game. But, they’re kind of expensive for a 17 year old to give their dad so I don’t know if I’ll mention one. If I do, I was thinking either Daybreak or Paleo (it has to be a co-op game). They both have been spoken of positively here. Any opinions about which one?
I tell myself “no more campaign games” but then when I saw The Isofarian Guard was getting a second printing last year, and fulfilment won’t be too long, I found myself too weak to resist. It arrived today, and my comments to the delivery man was “I guess it’s heavy.” To elaborate on how weak I am, he asked if I needed help getting it to the door. Thankfully I’m not that weak :)
I haven’t played the game yet of course, barely even cracked open the plastic and let the game breathe. But I am blown away with the storage within the box. Boxes within the main box, and within those boxes, everything has a home. Baggies? Don’t need them. Lovely spiral bound books which should be the norm for any hefty rulebook in my opinion.
If the box were a little bit bigger, I could solve the issue of where to store my entire boardgame collection. But right now, I honestly have to work out where to store this game until I do get it to the table that I expect will be sooner rather than later. I think I have a bit of reorganising to do for my collection.
@malkav11 - I did a search on the forums and saw you got a first edition. If you managed to find the time to start playing it, did it meet your expectations? Or were you waiting for the upgrade pack? It honestly looks like the game is even bigger than I was originally expecting.
We played a couple chapters of the first campaign (I think? might not have finished the second chapter) before they announced all the significant changes coming and I said “let’s wait for those”. The combat is pretty interesting, which is good because there’s a lot of it. Really my biggest complaint is just that there’s a lot of combat under the first edition rules. If you were to just beeline all the quests, you wouldn’t have a lot of repeat fights, but you also want to be gathering materials and going to towns to pick up gear upgrades to keep pace with the story fights (experience will largely take care of itself, I find), and you can get a lot of QOL upgrades from building structures in your home base (which, go figure, requires going and gathering materials). Any given fight doesn’t take that long (story ones aside) but there’s one almost every step of the way any time you go anywhere. The update includes some rules for skipping some of that and also some other ways to obtain materials and such so should address that concern at least partially.
There is something to be said for the way you can get to know what fights benefit from what sort of builds (you can freely adjust your skills anytime you’re not in combat and your gear as well as long though your carrying capacity on the latter is limited), where to go to pursue particular fights (for specific drops), and what towns offer what services, but I think that’s not going to be a pleasure that necessarily fits everyone. And as it’s 2P or solo only, and the woman I was playing 2P stuff with has not really been available for gaming in a while (we still hang out sometimes but mostly see movies), it might be a while before I get it back to table.
Yeah I watched a video online first before I went into it, and was impressed by the combat system. It seems like every player action is a consequence (good or bad) by the player with a small amount of luck thrown in based on what is drawn from the bag. Add to that the nice little AI for the opponents which seems to be one of the more clearer systems out there in terms of what should be done each step. It is a much slower game I’ve gathered, not the sort of thing where you rush through a battle. It does seem like the sort of game I would have to leave out for extended periods of time and play through gradually, which is fine. I had Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor on my table for about 2-3 months at one point this year because I enjoyed it and was going back to it but didn’t want to bother with packing it up all the time.
Shall do! Still need to check all the components first and make sure everything is there. It turns out it is quite a bit. Have I said the box is heavy? I remember Gloomhaven being heavy. This is something else entirely.
Spirit Island is such a victim of its own success. It’s so bloated now. : (
When Nature Incarnate was released, I impulsively grabbed it, thinking I should be a Spirit Island completionist stat. Then it arrived and I realized it was going to be a long, long time – probably never – before I played that deeply into all the junk the game has accumulated. I’ll go back to the core set with Branch & Claw at some point, but I have no use for most of that other junk, and from watching people struggle with it, I think it actively diminishes the quality of the game.
I guess my point is, “Don’t give in, @dionisus1122!” Unless it’s just to pick up Branch & Claw.
My inlaws sent me a birthday check so I’m going to let my son dip into that to pay for a birthday present. He works, so he wants to pay for some of a present, but I don’t want him to feel like he needs to use so much of his paycheck. I still don’t know which of these would be a better fit for us - I’m thinking Paleo would be a safer bet, but I’m really not sure.
I disagree! Mostly with the last sentence. “Jagged Earth” is the best expansion, it doesn’t require “Branch and Claw”. “Branch and Claw” and the base game spirits are just not super interesting. The “Jagged Earth” spirits are more thematic, still relatively simple, and really fun to play. I believe the events deck from “Jagged Earth” is considered a better one too, but I don’t really know which events are from which set so I couldn’t say.
“Horizons of Spirit Island” also has a great set of simple and fun spirits, great for introducing new players, but also great for experienced players. It’s also cheap. Unless you’re a completionist, I’d say you can skip Feather and Flame + Branch and Claw. Get Nature Incarnate when you’re looking for more content.
I think all of the expansions have a lot to offer and a lot of great spirits to play. But there’s certainly no need to get more (beyond arguably Branch and Claw as that was basically the last piece of the original design) until you feel like you need an injection of fresh toys to play with.
I agree. Though with a caveat where I’m waiting to see where the design goes with the slated “Dahan” expansion which I think would be wonderful… if done well that is :) I don’t want more spirits, and I don’t really care for more powers or doo-dads to place on the board. But give me some more interesting colonial powers, and importantly, change up the rules for the Dahan and I think I’d be on-board.
I just started playing path of civilization, which is a no-map civlite Game that is vaguely like seven wonders, although without the passing component. I actually like it quite a lot, but I am posting to ask a question;
Like many more modern board games this one has an automata mode, and in addition the automata mode has been implemented on board game arena. I am finding this a good way to improve my play so I wonder which other board games that people like also have their automata implemented on board game arena?
You might already know this, but you can’t play solo games on BGA without a paid subscription. So if you want to go that route, pony up your monthly fee!
As for which games actually implement their solitaire modes, I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing not many. You might have more luck getting a definitive answer if you post your question to the BGA thread; someone in there will probably know more.
Actually I did play a couple of solo games w/o subscribing, so they may have changed that rule. After a few games they sent a pop-up asking me to suscribe, but still let me play w/o it. And then I felt I ought to sign up so I did :)
