I have an ungodly amount of things delivering after going through an unhealthy kickstarter phase last year:
Creature Caravan
Andromeda’s Edge
Keep the Heroes Out (received and haven’t played)
Defenders of the Wild (received and played - pretty average game)
Preordered
Undaunted 2200 Calisto
GameNerdz sale because i’m weak:
Wandering Towers
World Wonders
Distilled
i’ve made some poor financial choices
Welp, that was exactly what I hoped for!
Me and my friend got two games in, albeit slowly and carefully, looking up rules as we went, taking care to explain steps and cards to each other. I’m so glad to be playing boardgames with this fella again, as he and I are pretty much on the same wavelength in terms of competitiveness and pacing.
He asked if he could play the Runner first, which was perfect, bcause I was gonna ask if I could play the Corporation first. So we hesitantly made our way through the match, his hand getting locked up for want of programs while I got a decent economy going, and eventually my Haas Bioroid deck won by situating Director Haas in a double-protected server to give the Corporation an extra action. Using the extra action, I was able to install and advance Accelerated Beta Test agendas in one turn. I was lucky enough to have two in my hand, and those four agenda points easily tipped me over the victory limit.
Then we flipped sides and I took Andromeda and a Criminal deck against his Jintekis, at which point he pretty much did something similar with the Jinteki director reducing my hand size by two, so I only have three cards. Annoying. But not as annoying when he then rezzed some card – I wish I remembered the name! – that let him do three damage to me. Andromeda flatlines, and that’s our second Corporation win for the day.
We’re both pretty buzzed about getting back into the game, and he’s really hot-to-trot to start buying Null Signal content, but I’m okay with the stuff I’ve currently got for now. So he might start buying the Null Signal replacement cards for the ones we’re using now. I’m a bit concerned about mixing rule sets, so I’m not sure how that’s going to go.
But we’re both even more invested now and I’m totally stoked to see if one of us can manage a Runner win next week.
I knew about Jinteki – another friend of mine got hardcore into playing online Netrunner, to the degree that I don’t think I could even play the game with him as anything other than a speedbump – but I’d never heard of Chiriboga! Very cool.
However, I have zero interest in playing boardgames online these days. I do appreciate the convenience and I love how it lets people share their passions remotely, but at this point in my life, the physicality of boardgames is pretty important to me. I’m not sure I can even articulate why, but I feel pretty strongly about it. I’ve still got Tabletop Simulator installed to occasionally check something out, but it’s only ever to test whether I want a physical version, like for when I finally bought I, Napoleon. TTS let me pore over the components virtually, but I had absolutely no desire to use it as a way to play the game. I can’t really explain it, and it might sound a little weird, but there it is. : (
I think most of us feel that way - maybe not as strongly, but to some degree. (Which is why I think people worried about their games being playable on TTS are understandable but utterly misguided.) I played enough TTS that I can navigate it pretty well and it made it possible to play boardgames with friends both local and long distance (including my girlfriend) over the social isolation period of 2020 and 2021. I would still use it if I needed to for something, or as an aid for a forum game here. But most games are just not as pleasant or compelling an experience without the physicality of them and ideally good friends sat around the table. TTS is a substitute at best. Often a lackluster one, sometimes greasing the wheels in a way that less makes me want to play on TTS specifically and more makes me wish the physical game involved less faff.
I don’t have any experience with yucata.de or BGA but the sort of games they focus on aren’t my usual fare and I think I would resent the rules enforcement.
This is a fascinating look into the world of wargaming and how governments use it.
People Make Games - The games behind your government’s next war
That sounds like a blast! I don’t want to spoil the generic Runner’s secret if it’s more fun to discover on your own, but they can generally make the Corp player very uncomfortable and cash-strapped by just repeatedly running HQ and R&D early on. They’ve got nothing to lose but cards that they can’t afford yet :)
I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve gained a real appreciation for the physicality and also the attention economy of in-person boardgames. Games play fundamentally different when you’re holding a deck of cards and trying to juggle the disparate bits of information you’ve gathered in real-time versus reading tooltips on a screen and throwing your move over the wall to the next player.
Here’s a review and playthrough of a scenario in the upcoming Mass Effect boardgame. Sounds really favorable, with cool characters (that a lot of us are already familiar with), cool abilities, and solid solo playability.
I’m guessing mine will take a while still, being international shipping and everything.
Innovation is a brilliant two player game. Somehow all those different cards are pretty balanced and the game works. I’ve played the base set 100s of times and I still see things happen that I haven’t seen before.
Hey that’s Quinns from SUSD! I noticed that he hasn’t done a lot of videos for them recently. Have they parted ways or is he simply branching out and doing other things?
This is really timely as I’m currently on the fence about buying the System Gateway Edition. I got interested in it thanks to Tom’s (of SUSD fame) video about it. I don’t know that I would have anyone to play it with but somehow I’d just like to own it. I feel like I already missed out on acquiring the original Netrunner. This is the best tutorial I’ve found on it so far:
He has parted ways with SU&SD for the most part in order to focus on his new RPG review channel (Quinns Quest) and his work with People Make Games (which has been ongoing for a while). It’s pretty amicable, I think he still comes back for at least some of their top 100 videos and reserves the right to do boardgame reviews if he feels so moved but he’s not really spending that much time with that hobby currently.
He has been looking at more journalistic endeavours with People Make Games for years. If you enjoy Quinn’s personality, you should check them out.
As for Board Games, he is no longer an owner of Shut Up and Sit Down I believe. He had been doing that for a looong time. Instead. he now runs the excellent Quinn’s Quest about his current love: RPGs.
It’s really good.
I knew he had started another channel. Glad that things were pretty amicable but it makes me super sad to hear it. Tom and Matt are still producing some great stuff, fortunately.
Honestly I’ve been starting to wonder if the whole thing is starting to lose momentum. I very much enjoy their content when it goes up, but it doesn’t seem to me like they’re managing even the reduced schedule they’d talked about when announcing Quinns’ departure and there’s been no video content from the new people they’d hired in several months. I really enjoyed Emily’s videos and she hasn’t done one for close to a year (although she’s certainly been a welcome presence on many of the podcasts). I gather Ava had to hang it up for other reasons but I miss her too.
But heck, even if I’m right, it’s been a hell of a run.
They released a bunch of content just this week. New podcast episode (with Emily), 60 minute video on Race/Roll For the Galaxy, review of Vale of Eternity.
I personally think they’re getting settled into the new studio space and figuring out how to do the content they want to do. How to work with Emily who is in Australia and figure out the flow with the new people (Pip is pretty great too, just a lot more dry). Tom said on the podcast that he spent a ridiculous amount of time on the Arcs videos (and was thinking of doing a third). He had the Johns Company video early this year that had to have taken a lot of time.
The video’s Emily has done have also been pretty heavy duty on time commitments.
I saw Matt in a GenCon video for another channel, so he was out there.
I just don’t think they do the sit in front of a camera and talk like most channels - their stuff takes a lot of time to dream up, film, and edit. NPI is the only one I think who comes close to the complexity.
We’ll see I guess. I’ve never viewed them as like my regular content farm - but I’m so appreciative of their stuff. Tom and I share about 95% the same taste in games, so I’ve enjoyed watching his stuff in particular.
The Vale video was last week so another one this week is roughly on announced schedule, as is a pod 3 of four weeks, but the pod was absent for a month or more before last week (which Tom did address on its return). I get that their videos take plenty of effort to create, and the Arcs and John Company ones in particular. But most of that has been true all along, and they committed to a reduced schedule that still hasn’t been met. I’m not here to nag. If they didn’t want to commit to a schedule at all and just do videos and pods as and when they have time, I’d be fine. (Though people who donate monthly might not be, I suppose.) It just makes me wonder, is all. If it were still Paul and Quinns and Matt, I’d chalk it up to aging and having more life commitments, but Tom is famously youthful and bright-eyed.
Hey, stop making me feel old.
Oh, I’m not new to Netrunner! I’m just rusty. : )
But we definitely got into the habit of punishing a Corporation that left its HQ or R&D undefended. Of course, his Subliminal Messaging helped keep me on my toes. Man, that’s an annoying card.
It really is, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking of it as one of those densely-packed designs that really needs more players to flex, but I have no idea where I got that idea. We ran through two two-player games – and he’s normally exceeeeeeeedingly sloooooooooow – in practically no time, and neither time did we feel we got jacked because of player count. In fact, I think there might be some kind of Carl Chudyk Magic Pixie Dust going on.
I do wonder if it might take higher player counts to reach some of the endgame wackiness? Neither of us progressed into clocks and I don’t think either of our games got past the introduction of the industrial age icons. But, yeah, against all odds, what a great two-player design, as well.
One of the fun things about storage projects is when you forget you did them. I pulled out my copy of Arkham Horror Third Edition because I want to test a mod – I hate hate hate the Headline Deck and I’ve surgically removed it! – and I was delighted to discover I’d been busy:
Look at the adorable little tuck boxes! I know I went on a tear to wrestle Eldritch Horror and all its myriad expansions into shape (now that was a project!), which must be when I printed out those little tuck boxes using a template I found online; you could adjust it based on the size of the deck you wanted to store. So apparently I made these for Arkham Horror Third Edition, and labeled them, cute as could be, and now look how easy it is to set up the scenario!
(BTW, my mod simply substitutes a 2d6 chart when you draw a Headline token. Instead of drawing from the wildly swingy and 100% unthematic-to-the-scenario misbegotten lump of cards known as the Headline Deck, the idea is that Headline tokens represent some mundane aspect of the Investigator’s life, such as lunch, a social call, or rent. Most of the time, on a roll of a 7, nothing happens and the Headline token is as good as a Blank token. I realize this makes things easier, but if I never lose again because of the goddamn Headline Deck, that’ll be fine by me! The idea is that Headline tokens might apply a tiny tweak, positive or negative, and then move the fuck on without introducing some dramatic new wrench in the works to get in the way of the Third Edition’s tighter “action economy” design.
This also means the rumor system is gone, but that’s fine by me. At least Eldritch Horror had the common decency to gate the number of rumors that come into play. Not Arkham Horror Third Edition! It just throws a naked deck of random bullshit into the proceedings, which might be nothing but rumors. I love pretty much everything about Third Edition, but the Headline Deck is not one of them. So here’s my mod to remove it:
I might have to try this. Do you have a headline timer too? Part of the purpose of the headline deck is to simulate the passage of time and encourage you to finish the scenario. So you get a doom if the headline deck is empty when you’re instructed to draw one.
I think you can only have one rumor at a time in play in AH:3e.
