My copy of Santorini arrived, it was a great recommendation. It’s a very fun game to look at once the board is populated. The kids picked up on the general idea quickly, and the god powers provide a welcome variation once the basics are nailed down. And of course, if I enjoy the moving around and positioning and planning of moves, my wife, lover of puzzles and estimating statistical probabilities, is having a hard time getting into it, but at least now we have something to balance out our game library.
Anyone try After the Empire ?
It looks like Galaxy Trucker meets Stronghold. Players do worker placement to build castle components, then every has a tower defense gauntlet of invaders smashed up against the castles they made and the one left in the best shape wins.
Looked interesting, but damn it’s $90.
Yeah. I’m interested, but I’m not sure the worker placement is interesting enough. Toy factor is a 10 for sure.
Also, Great Wall is arriving in September and I suspect that will fill the same spot.
I enjoyed this long-form video essay even while disagreeing mildly with some of the bits of it.
(And he’s right: the sneaky-great thing about Sleeping Gods is that the gameplay is really quite good and interesting, which isn’t something you read about much in a game where most reviews remark on the narrative storytelling aspect.)
So my group played After the Empire today on Tabletop Sim and I like it quite a bit. It’s a Euro, with worker placement to gather resources and build a castle with defenders, then deterministic combat controlled by cards with hordes of barbarians trying to sack your castle. All players face the same threat cards but the gold score of the players (gold is also Victory Points) controls how many attackers each threat card produces for that player. So, front running can be highly dangerous, as I discovered when I pushed towards overwhelming victory in the final round with an unbeatable gold lead, only to get hammered flat by threat and sadly sacked by barbarians, which knocked me down hard enough to come in last. (I was not mad though b/c at least I lost trying to win damnit.) A good mix of Euro strategy and combat tension IMO without any direct antagonism between players other than the normal worker placement blockage and elbow throwing.
After a single play, I give this one fairly high marks.
I have this on order, and am looking forward to playing it live once the COVID situation here improves (which may be soon-ish).
finished The Long Hunt campaign from the Bloodborne core box, which is 1 of 4 campaigns.
it was pretty good, I played pure solo, which worked really well. Actually, I have a feeling that 1 player character is a bit on the easier side. At the end of the campaign, I didn’t even upgrade anymore since I already upgraded all my 12 basic stat cards.
In a game with more players, you don’t have the luxury/time to upgrade all hunters. I think, 2-3 players is the sweet spot. I will try the next campaign, The Healing Church with 2 hunters.
Also, Ludwigs Holy Blade is pretty OP, he will be in any of my campaigns ;)
I like the branching paths of missions within a chapter, and how decissions in earlier chapters can have consequences in later chapters. All done by a 60+ deck of cards.
Now I have the problem that I want to play the game, but also I want to paint a minis, this will take some time.
The diceless combat and the enemy AI decks are working really well, also all enemies have 2 variations represented by 2 sides of an enemy card. So there is enough replayability.
Also, as I mentioned, exploring the map and putting down tiles does matter in regarding how enemies will activate and how dangerous the map is.
I had no issue with running out of time while exploring the map to find the Insight missions. I might have done some minor errors. I remeber one occassion where I crossed a wall, which I put out deliberately so that monsters cannot come from that direction, and I forgot about it and just crossed it.
Really happy with buying it on the secondary market. If you are a Bloodborne fan you cannot go wrong. It has the Bloodborne feeling.
I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to put me in charge of a squadron of F-4 Phantoms during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but here we are. In my defence, I’ve only had one pilot carted away after completely freaking out from stress and no-one has actually died yet, so happy days.
Phantom Leader (Deluxe!) + expansion arrived the other day and I’m now in the final mission of a three day campaign over Cuba in 1962. I just have to thread a path through all those hostile red chits, blow the dickens out of the port in the middle and get the squadron home without anyone going batshit crazy or exploding.
The game’s much less about the actual mission than the planning. Who’s going to carry what weapons where? Is there anyone who can actually hit something with their guns? Can I trust Monger, who’s already twitchy and muttering to himself, to hold it together long enough to get to the target?
It’s all very engrossing and not too simulationy, striking that sweet spot between Advanced Squad Leader and Hungry, Hungry Hippos. Weirdly, despite being about ten years old and recently reprinted via Kickstarter, the manual omits big chunks of the rules, such as what all the keywords on the targets mean. You have to download the rules for Hornet Leader to get all the info - easy enough to do but kinda the designer’s job? I’ve had a minor whine at the developer about this but no response yet.
Anyway, recommended if you fancy a chit-based fighty/ flighty puzzle.
Something to look forward to in next year’s thread:
I signed up so fast my thumbs hurt (mobile phone.)
I got Too Many Bones a few weeks ago and I am loving it.
Perhaps slightly too easy with 4 characters but the missus loves how over powered we are and how we smash 20 point enemies to bits.
I also, 2 days ago, bought the expansion pack Undertow and also some extra characters, like Ghillie. The missus doesn’t know this yet hehehe.
edit: I also backed their current Hoplomachus KS at the level that gets me the remastered version of the original, and the new game.
Thanks for this. I have my tower of boxes still unopened over in the KS shame pile. I plan to do an initial Bloodborne video game run to set the mood then give the first campaign a try. When? Who knows. Even a pandemic doesn’t give me enough time to play games.
it will be a pleasant surprise. I would even call it an elegant game (design).
Tonight, around a week after my physical copy (which I won’t be able to get to table for a while still) arrived, we broke out Middara: Act 1 via the intense official TTS mod, which has all of the Act 1 content (I don’t think any of the resin kits/addon stuff, but it only recently added the fifth chapter of act 1 so maybe that’s coming if it isn’t in already). This is, easily, one of the most impressive mods I’ve seen on TTS and it’s 100% okay with and actively supported by the game designers. I’d be half in love from that alone. I don’t think it’s quite to the point of the Gloomhaven mod, but let’s face it, that game’s an order of magnitude better known and loved. One click setup for every single encounter and hidden “diagram” board (and it’s a huge game). Auto teardown. Almost entirely automated management for all the various decks in the market, skill offer, and combatant loot. A movable map. All the AI cards have on-card figure spawning, health tracking, and dice macros. Setup to load the professional audio narration for every chapter into the TTS music player and sync-play with everyone in the game. It’ll find and spawn any hidden campaign content for you with a simple search of the key the campaign gives you, and that stuff will then auto-clear and auto-spawn in the same way all the starting content does. It automates initiative handling. It automatically makes the dice face you, even!
But, uh, yeah, Middara. Well, one encounter in I’m pretty impressed. Not the easiest game to start up - the rulebook’s like 75 pages and it’s just page after page of exhaustively laid out rules from point A to point Z, not, e.g. “here’s what you need to jump in, then here’s the stuff you’re going to need to reference first, then…”. But a) if you’ve played dungeon crawlers, most of the concepts are going to be familiar, and b) it is, I think, generally fairly easy to reference. You will have to reference it fairly regularly for a bit, and there are a few things that work noticeably different than other dungeon crawlers that take a bit of adjustment, but I’m mostly not sitting there going “wait, so how does this work?” or “this interaction just doesn’t seem covered”. A few things that might trip you up: one Move action or Ability that is equivalent (one of the characters can fly, for example) per turn, if you need to move more it costs more to use that action and you get very little additional movement for that additional cost (but there are effects that can move you without being a Move action, generally just a little bit); you cannot pause during an action to use another action (so no move-attack-move, for example); the amount you beat a target’s defense by is your baseline damage - you don’t make a separate roll or have a damage value on your weapons, etc.
But mostly…it’s really fun. The writing’s not top of the line but it’s been decent so far (and the narration is pretty good). The enemies are flavorful and have a logical, easily processed turn structure. But most importantly? Your characters feel powerful, distinct, and have a bunch of interesting tactical options from the very beginning, and the way gear interacts makes for some really cool build potential. So, y’know. One encounter’s worth of play, too early to make any final judgments. But I feel like I made a good choice so far.
Does anyone know what happened with MicroMacro Crime City? Did it release in the US? Did I just miss it/it sold out in an instant?
I can’t keep up with releases in boardgames anymore because I hear about something on a podcast or even on YouTube but it might be a promo copy sent months before launch, or a soon-to-be-Kickstarter doing PR, or a European release that has yet to sort out its North American launch plans… There’s no way I can keep track, I just hope one day I’ll see a game I was interested in on the shelf or in these updates from Mike. And that I’ll remember that I was interested in it six months ago.
It’s been released. I have a copy at home but haven’t had a chance to check it out yet :(
So after an aggravating session of Tainted Grail 2 weeks ago, this week was awesome! Now I don’t know if this is poor clues or our own decisions, but we needed a specific item. Once we found it we were able to push through 3 chapters last night. Say what you will about gameplay the story is really cool and very, very dark.
Hey! Open question to everyone: what are your favorite “fillers” right now? Quick and easy games that play in 30 min or less. I’m trying to expand my collection of these a bit, since I’ve mostly ignored them historically. Right now, I have:
Fantasy Realms
High Society
Archaeology: the New Expedition
Animix
Startups
Herbaceous (just ordered this one)
What are your recommendations?
Dungeon Mayhem (+ optionally “Battle for Baldur’s Gate” and “Monster Madness” expansions) A mad battle to be the last hero / monster standing. It’s ideal as a quick game we can play at lunch time at the office. Very simple. Take that. Often funny.
Don’t Mess with Cthulhu (Deluxe): Hidden role where some no good cultists are trying to summon a Great Old One. This game comes without a lot of the pressure on the cultists that normal hidden role games bring. Also very easy to explain, plays quickly and accommodates a fairly large range of player counts.
For 2 players, one of my colleagues and myself really enjoy Air, Land & Sea. Despite not looking like much, it’s a really cool series of battles across 3 theatres of war where knowing when to retreat before the battle is fully lost (or bluff the other player into doing so) is a really cool mechanic. Plays quickly too.
We also play The Crew as a family filler. But that’s maybe a tiny bit more involved as it requires players to get the concept of trick taking.
Of those already mentioned, I really enjoy Startups, High Society, and Air, Land & Sea. I’ll have to check out the others.
In my family and gaming group, we also really like Arboretum, Hanamikoji, and Innovation for “filler” length games.
Fillers!
Res Arcana fits the “quick” criteria, but is more medium-weight than light. Once you’ve got the hang of it, 30 minutes is the upper end of length, but your first game will be more like an hour. It’s a standard euro resource conversion game with an alchemist theme, but the twist is each player gets 8 substantially different cards they need to build an engine out of, and they are the only cards that player will ever get. Feels like Race for the Galaxy, for reference.
Bullet Heart is both quick and light, probably 20 minute playtime. It has a bullet-hell shmup theme, but plays more like Tetris Attack with tokens following down in patterns and you trying to match them to send the tokens into your opponents play area. The game is played in rounds against a 3 minute timer, and does a great job balancing speed with strategy. 3 minutes is usually just a bit more time than you’ll need so making good decisions feels more important than making fast ones. Each player takes on a different persona with very different feels, but rulesets that are similar enough that this isn’t hard to teach (like other highly assymetric games like Root). I’ve only played 2 player, rules look a bit funky at more than 2.
Imperius probably runs closer to 40 minutes. A drafting game where you draft your opponents cards and choose where to play them. You’re trying to play your opponents cards such that they screw each other over and not you. If you can predict how others will play your cards, that’s the best way to win.