I haven’t decided whether I’m going to pick up Star Realms or not when it comes back in stock here. It partly depends on the price, but I’m not the biggest fan of deck builders, my wife doesn’t really care about space-themed games, and I’m not sure I’d enjoy adding up trade/attack as well as dealing with all the card interactions and decisions. I think the main reason I enjoy the digital version is that it handles all that, making the game move fairly quickly.
Games I need to get to the table:
Rex Fall of an Empire
Dominare
Vanuatu
Merkator
Asgard
I just got in a copy of Cold War: CIA vs KGB, which a friend showed me a while ago and which I’ve been meaning to pick up ever since. Very simple, very thematic, plays in a half hour, lots of bluffing and interesting choices. I finally remembered to order it and it’s just arrived, and I have a friend coming over to play as I type this. Get your copy before Fantasy Flight foists off on you the upcoming Star Wars retheming!
-TomI play a new game every week with one other person. The last game I played was Firefly: The Game. I thought it was decent but way too long for a game that mostly comes down to luck of the dice and card draws - it took us 6 hours to finish, and don’t think we could get the time down much more on subsequent plays.
Next up on the agenda is Stronghold. I’m a bit reticent to try it because I have to learn 2 lengthy sets of rules (for the attacking and defending player) and I’m the one who has to teach since my partner never bothers to read the rules (which kind of irks me, honestly).
The Mage Knight coop session I mentioned in the “on your table now” thread ended up taking eight hours from setup to teardown, using the Volkare’s Return “Epic” scenario. Epic it certainly was. We laid a savage trail of destruction across every hex, conquered the city that’s Volkare’s objective in that scenario by the skin of our teeth and then positioned ourself to take on his ridiculously enormous army. I burned a hand of attack cards and the Sword of Justice (which doubles physical attack cards you play that turn if you remove it from the game, as well as giving you an extra fame point (xp) per kill) to slaughter almost his entire orc and keep defender force plus one fire dragon I froze with a Chill spell, while my cohorts took on his city troops, the majority of his dragons, and a couple of stray orcs. They actually ended up doing more damage with units and skills than cards because one had run out of cards already (we were on the verge of end of round) and the other used cards for a few ranged attacks but then took so much damage that his hand was cleared. And then we had a whole turn (and new round) to refresh a bit before he attacked again. We barely managed to kill three of his four remaining minions at considerable additional effort, and then the elf who’d stepped out to heal at the monastery ran Volkare down and sniped his sole remaining golem. Tada. I saw more artifacts (particularly burned), more elite units (any, really), more reputation loss, and more fame than in any previous game by a long shot. Hell, after all the butchery of Volkare’s army, I ended up at the maximum level of 10, and I was completely unwelcome among all civilized folk after conquering the city.
Fortunately, I was playing the new hero Krang (an orc shaman), who is a standalone hero expansion that I finally got to try this time. He’s pretty neat. He has a special version of Threaten that lets him either make units cheaper or get a ton of Influence and then spend influence at two points per level to make units ready again (even during combat), both at the cost of reputation, and a Savage Scavenging or something like that which is a move that lets him discard other cards as he moves to get crystals of those colors. These are both really powerful effects if you can set things up right. And then he has awesome skills like berserking - getting two free attack every turn or four if he flips it, but then he can refresh it by resting. Or one that’s a magical disguise that’s two free influence every turn (which at minimum counteracts reputation penalties for a while) but can be flipped to do an interaction as though he had 0 reputation and refreshed by spending a green mana . Or one that allows him to ignore two physical or one non physical damage every turn, which sharply limits the wounds he takes, especially against multi-attackers. I had the magical disguise from my first level up, so losing reputation didn’t especially worry me and I got some very nice high influence turns. It’s also the first game of Mage Knight that I’ve actually gone and burned down a monastery in - I had no movement or influence, I had the Sword of Justice and plenty of cards to burn for its basic effect (attack 3 per discard), so I used a magical sword of justice to slaughter innocent monks and loot their reliquary. Whee.
It’s interesting how they take a blackjack style push your luck mechanic and give it that little twist by giving the cards a special ability in addition to the simple value. I’ve had a copy here I’ve been sitting on a while. I haven’t gotten to play it yet.
Tom M
I’m sorry to hear Firefly bogged down for you. :( it can be a wonderful game, but it depends largely on which “story card” you use, if you’ve managed a table interface to keep thing snappier (it drinks up a lot of table real estate), and how well the players know the rules. Also, I hate to tell you this, but the Pirates and Bounty Hunters add-on makes a HUGE difference in terms of how it addresses some core issues in the basic game.
-TomDoes your copy have the poker chip tokens? If so, I’m jealous.
-Tom
I already have Pirates and Bounty Hunters on pre-order :) My main problems with Firefly were the length and lack of interaction. I’m hoping the expansion helps those issues.
I still have the first edition CIA vs KGB in shrink wrap. Maybe I’ll play that next instead of Stronghold. I didn’t know the upcoming Star Wars game was based on it, interesting.
Wife’s birthday was this weekend, so she got to choose the games yesterday. We had only one major constraint; one of our group hates learning new games, so we always try to play games she’s played before.
First up was Lords of Waterdeep, which I don’t hate but which holds no interest for me any more. Still have the expansion sitting in shrinkwrap beside the game table-- does it add any strategic depth to the game at all? I don’t mind the placement chaos at 5 players, but I still dislike the severe importance of the luck of the draw.
Of course, that’s all much worse in our other game of the night, Eurorails. This is my faded original copy from college, which we played the hell out of, apparently because we didn’t know any better. It has aged rather poorly: significant downtime, pointless screwage by random cards, and the winning tactic is usually to draw most of your track and then discard cards till you get something that works.
One bright spot is that I actually used my dead time playing the game to come up with a snappier variant that retains the charm of crayon-railing without the rest of the crap. I’m actually going to try to get it to the table again to test it. It can hardly be worse.
Love it! A lovely, elegant, pretty cutthroat game. When I culled my boardgame collection recently, it was one of the few 2-player games I kept–since I so rarely get 2p games to the table. But I really admire its design. Star Wars?? Bah…
Something to be aware of is that the new story cards might not all be as cool as they seem. We played a story card where each player has his own haven planet, and you get goal tokens by trucking loads of supplies to your haven. We figured it would lead to a rollicking good time of everyone trying to steal everyone else’s cargo. No such thing happened. We just did the usual multiplayer solitaire mode from the vanilla game. Maybe when you’re more comfortable with the new systems, that might be a cool new story card with more stealing and blocking. But I don’t recommend it as a way to show off how different the game is when you first try Pirates and Bounty Hunters.
Instead, I heartily recommend the story card where players earn goal tokens for piracy, bounty hunting, smuggling, and crime missions. First to five tokens wins! That’s a great way to highlight the new interactive systems, and I feel it’s a shorter game because when you pirate another player, not only do you get a goal token, but you can steal one of his goal tokens in addition. It accelerates the endgame pretty nicely and it strongly encourages interaction, and all the ships tussling in one big piracy scrum. Start with that story card. And let us know how it goes!
Uh, I take back what I said about this game previously. It’s a terrible game and you needn’t bother. In fact, I’ll take even it off your hands for a couple bucks. And I’ll pay shipping. See what a good friend I am?
I just played a bit tonight – with fire, who I don’t think reads these threads – and I’m as smitten with it as I’d hoped I’d be. What a wonderfully simple and sophisticated game design, with a cool intricate Cold War narrative spinning out as you play. I was about to loose Turkey to the guerillas and local militia, but I invoked the threat of nuclear escalation to win the day. Furthermore, since the Director of the CIA was directly involved – at no small risk to himself – I managed to secure Vietnam in the deal! I can’t forsee the Star Wars adaptation resonating with me as much. “So Jar Jar leads an army of AT-ATs to conquer Hoth, but Admiral Piet calls in the Jedi Council to force the Dark Side to discard Darth Greivous.” Hoo boy.
-Tom
Well, naturally, that leads me to ask what other games you kept specifically for the two-playerability.
-Tom
I’ve been on a 18xx rampage this summer (went back home for a few weeks which means all the 18xx I can play, and some of the locals here have lately been interested in playing as well). That’d be 1826, 3x1846, 1862, 18Mex, 18Neb, 18OE and 18US, and maybe half a dozen online games of 1830/56/70. And maybe 1830: Cardgame, though one would need to be very charitable to call that a 18xx game. Such lovely games. And Deep Thought Games finally added a priority option for certain games, so I should have a copy of 1817 early next month rather than sometime in the year 2016.
A ‘what’s on your table now’ thread with not a single photo for PROOF! For shame QT3.
triggercut’s amazing WW1 history lesson had me checking my collection for something relevant to the time period:
It’s been set up ready to go for a few weeks, but trigger is really dragging his feet getting from 1914 to 1918 so I can start! The laundry renovation with dust and crap everywhere has got nothing to do with the delay…
In other news, the stupendously large Ogre Designer’s Edition box lid makes a perfect cover to protect this from a boardgamer’s worst nightmare:
Don’t be deceived, they plot the destruction of all boardgames!
Ha, that’s the truth! I’ve been thinking that with my Eldritch Horror solo games going so late, that I might spread it over two nights and leave it up on the table. However with two cats, one in particular that has no small love for batting things off tables and the other who has gotten rather clumsy in his old age, there’s no way the board state would be maintained overnight.
Let’s see… Lost Cities, of course. And my copy of Labyrinth I’ve never actually managed to play 2-player. A strange game called Diceland played with giant paper 8-sided dice armies… Wow, that might be about it. (Okay, I kept some old Steve Jackson pocket box games from my adolescence, but those aren’t likely to get played.). Oh, I got a kickstartered micro game called Province that is really pretty good and quick. I remember weighing whether to keep Mr. Jack because it’s a good little game, but I ended up giving it to a friend. Oh and I kept BattleLore because my son enjoys imagining playing it! I have games I will bust out in a two player situation that aren’t exclusively two player–Roll Through the Ages, Catacombs, Fantastiqa, Ghost Stories… But as you can tell that isn’t a common situation.
Lord of the Rings: Confrontation is a really excellent 2-player game that takes less than half an hour to play.
I played CIA vs KGB and didn’t like it very much. I found the game to be high on luck with decisions that were usually obvious and not very satisfying. It is also very light on theme. I think children might enjoy it and I could see it as a good gateway game.
Working my way through Blood n Roses , very fun, till Fire in The Lake gets here, maybe next week?
