Yeah, The Crew worked well for my small work group over lunch times on TTS. I’m the only card player, so it was rather easier for me to work out what was going on. We all had fun, but in the end the 50 missions were all perfectly doable and we finished relatviely quickly. I suspect 3-player is a lot easier than higher player counts for many of the missions.
I’m playing Hanabi with that group now, a game with remarkable depth once you start working out conventions for what specific clues could mean. I think I’d be teaching them Bridge if there were four of us.
I’ve been playing Cryptid occasionally with my regular non-work group, again over TTS (the mod for this is particularly good). It feels like Cluedo / Clue but with the trivial deduction replaced with a much more interesting system.
I’ve been having fun with One Deck Dungeon solo; i kind of didn’t like it at first but it’s grown on me a bit more with a second playthrough. I can leave it out and play a few rounds, then get back to it the next day when i have some time, as it’s not too messy. I do really dislike games that have these “endless rule changes on cards” sort of design though, because i’m never 100% sure exactly what the card means and feel that there’s a whole lot of interpretation going on. Roll dice to play only really works when you have a lot of dice to roll, evening out the odds of particularly good or bad rolls, and this game does have a lot of dice.
I did pick up Renegade Game’s Proving Grounds solo adventure game. High production values, but actually, there’s not that much in the box as far as the game itself goes, so we’ll see. I noticed that there’s a solo game they publish called “Warp’s Edge” by Scott Almes, he of Tiny Epic kickstarter fame… but i don’t see the appeal of the art, tbh.
Some board game reviewers say the solo modes of the [____] of the West Kingdom games by Renegade are some of the best in the business… but there’s like four different games in the series. Anyone know of a comparison between all four? It’s not at all clear to me from this distance how or where they differ. The West Kingdom Series - Board Games — Renegade Game Studios
I swear Fantasy Flight went out of their way to give you no way to store that game and it pisses me right the fuck off.
Caveats: I haven’t actually played my copy of the game yet, so this is strictly from watching a 2 player playthrough with the Pioneers of New Earth module, a solo playthrough with just base game stuff, and a 3 player playthrough with a pre-release version of the Fractures in Time expansion (w/ David Turczi, the designer, coaching folks in the new stuff). Secondly, I don’t play a ton of worker placement games, so no claims any of this is strictly unique, just things that appeal to me about the game.
Importing resources from the future. I admit I don’t yet fully understand the strategy behind this, since you’re expected to close the loop down the line, and you’re risking things every turn you don’t. But it’s a cool idea. And it includes workers, and powered exosuits, and you only have one warp tile for each individual thing so you have to plan when to import them.
Faction asymmetry - I think this is optional, but the faction boards have at least one side where they have different properties from one another. E.g., usually you need to assign a worker to ready all your exhausted workers and increase morale - one faction can do it as a free action. Another faction can spend resources instead of power cores to power up their exo-suits, has an extra paradox space and scientists in many of their buildings don’t come back exhausted. (the first faction I mention presumably has other benefits but I wasn’t as clear on them). Also, each faction has two leaders (three with Fractures in Time) that give different special bonuses, and different goals to enable evacuation and get bonus scores, and I believe this is even if you’re using symmetrical faction boards.
Exo-suits. I like the idea of having to protect your workers when they go into the ruins of the past civilization, and having to gauge how much you need to act on the shared board (at a cost, pretty rapidly) and how much you can just use your worker pool on your own buildings.
The exhaustion/readying workers system, while simple, is an interesting strategic wrinkle.
Different types of workers, able to take many but not all of the same actions, but particular types getting bonuses in different actions.
Super projects. This not only just appeals to me the way Wonders do in Civ, but the part where they’re invented at a particular point in time and you will likely have to travel back in time to build them is pretty neat too. And having to find space in your city.
The cataclysm - it does shrink your action space by closing off exosuit spaces (unless you have a particular faction leader, who ignores that), but it also puts collapsing city tiles on the main six central action spaces which reward an additional bonus for the first player to use them…but then that action space is gone forever. It makes the endgame distinctly different than the majority of the game. (I agree that it’s not immensely interesting in and of itself, but it’s another piece of the puzzle.)
Pioneers of New Earth - a module where you can send exo-suited workers to explore outside the city, drawing cards representing various discoveries and associated challenges - you can get some great benefits from doing so, but your exosuits have to be up to the challenge rating or you risk failure. And you can research /spend resources to improve both your card draws and your suit rating. And there’s a mechanic where each explorer on a round gets a progressively lower starting bonus, down into the negatives.
Fractures in Time. Adds a bunch of stuff, of course, but the big deal is a new system where you can get Flux Cores and use them to “blink” your exosuits to a second space (leaving the first one empty again), get the second space action as well, and retrieve your worker from the suit early (which is probably not that important usually, but may lead to shenanigans in edge cases) - at the risk of infecting your stuff with Glitches that both block things from being used and cost you points in endgame. You also fill up a track with the cores, which makes it more risky unless you take steps to clean up (and ultimately will limit your blinking unless you do so) but can score you points if the right agenda is out. I believe you can also use them to “recall” workers back off buildings in your faction board, which can lead to engine generation if you set up correctly.
Doomsday - nobody played with it that I saw, so I don’t have details, but apparently instead of having a fixed position cataclysm you can use a module that lets you do science to move it forward or back depending on your side of the argument, with presumably attendant bonuses etc. Any good? Dunno, but it sounds neat.
(There’s also a Galactic Council module that I don’t really have a picture of since it wasn’t used in the playthroughs either, but I think makes the game more political and backstabby, which would not be for me.)
I continue to be very skeptical of solo modes for competitive games, myself. But Anachrony’s supposed to have a good one, so given the world at the moment, I may have to try that and see if my opinion changes.
finished my first game of Planet Apocalypse and got destroyed after I accumulated 9 despair dice. I only played 2 heroes, but in my next game I want more movability, so I will try it with 3. The gameplay loop is pretty addictive and fast, it is not so complicated to play. But there are always interesting decissions to make.Doomtrack went up to 12
Also I set very early in the game an ambush of 4 volunteers in the start area. They suck. They roll 1d10 so at most they can stop one minion from leaving.
Also if you scout invasion tokens early, you have less demons to deal with than when waiting for 8 despair dice.
I love the gifts, they really do have an effect. A second die is huge, and if you can upgrade it, even better.
me too, it is a great solo dice chucker. I play it on my phone a lot, there are some interface issues with undo moving dice, and the loadtime when starting is really too long. I like the campaign mode and that you get improvements. Have not beaten the Hydra, yet. Using a Paladin.
I’ll second that solo recommendation. They are definitely the best solo modes I’ve seen so far (I definitely like them better than the Turczi one I’ve played).
There are only 3 West Kingdom games (Age of Artisans is an excellent expansion for Architects of the West Kingdom):
Architects of the West Kingdom is my favorite. It’s an engine-builder race game where every time you activate an action it gets stronger. The first time you go to the silversmith you get 2, the next time 3, then 4, etc. The twist is that other players can stop that engine at any time by capturing all of the people you’ve sent there, and they get paid to do it. The end-game is variable, so a lot of the strategy is in trying to figure out how many actions to dedicate to continuing to build your engine vs focusing on actually gaining points. It plays really well at all player counts, but is best at 4 and 5. The solo mode is an excellent simulation of a 2 player game and is quite challenging. With the expansion it is substantially more challenging. It plays in about an hour.
Paladins of the West Kingdom is my least favorite of the bunch. It is a game with a large personal board with many action-spaces, similar to Orleans if you’ve played that. Every round you draft a set of meeples of different colors and then place them on similarly colored spots on your board. You also choose a Paladin card each round which gives you a super power for the whole round. You’ll do a lot of planning at the top of the round and then spend the rest of the round executing that plan. If you like making long term strategic decisions and then attempting to execute them, this game may be for you. Players interact by stealing spots on a central board, so your plan can get upset, but it’s not super common. This game feels relatively solitaire even played with an opponent. I haven’t played the solo mode in Paladins but have heard good things. This one took me 2 hours the few times I played it.
Viscounts of the West Kingdom is a deckbuilder with a twist. Each turn you only play a single card, but that card stays out for 3 turns, so you’ll quickly have 3 cards out in front of you every turn. You’re trying to combo the 3 cards out in front you to perform super actions out on the shared board. Each of these actions is surprisingly limited. So if you build a deck focused on writing religious manuscripts (one of the four main actions), you will find all the manuscripts run out about halfway through the game. Now you have to figure out how to quickly change your deck to focus on one of the other actions that hasn’t run out. One neat twist is you get money whenever you trash cards, so trashing cards focused on useless actions to replace with new useful cards is relatively easy. The solo mode here is excellent with four different AIs that are easy to run and all focus on different elements of the game. It takes me about 90 minutes to play the solo mode.
Shem Phillips also recently released Raiders of Scythia which may be worth a look, though I haven’t played it. It’s a worker placement engine building game about racing to conquer various regions before your opponent and is supposed to have an great solo mode as well.
I have not. I see the Dahlgaard’s Academy expansion adds a David Turczi bot for solitaire play. Have you tried it? Unfortunately, it looks like the core game isn’t available anywhere.
I think you’re thinking of a different game? The Shadowrun game Razgon linked is just a bog-standard deck builder. And, sadly, not a very good one. It’s just one of those games with four colors of poorly themed resources. Throw in some cards with fantasy/cyberpunk names and – voila! – Shadowrun. Really, it is to deckbuilders what Lords of Waterdeep is to worker placement.
He, he. Fair enough. That will unfortunately have to wait until I finally manage to source Dune Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak, the 2 Deck Builder / Worker Placement hybrid games I’m currently eyeing as a nice twist on the genre.
I have the original edition and it’s quite hard and the campaign elements/variety aren’t strong, but it’s kinda fun? And yes, it’s coop. And a deckbuilder, not a bag or pool builder. I’m curious about the Prime Runner changes but…probably not enough to rebuy it. Actually, while it’s not yet across my “eliminate from your collection” threshold, it’s probably going to hit that point whenever I get rid of the stuff that is and still need to make more room. Just not that into it compared with the competition.
Seriously, though, if you’re a big Shadowrun fan, the theming will probably carry it for you. I just need more than “blue = magic” and “green = hacking” in my gameplay mechanics. In Dune Imperium, for instance, the different factions and resources have distinct roles in the gameplay systems, in how they’re used, in which other systems they feed into, in their role in the gameplay economy. It’s a really imaginative implementation of the theme. I would have loved to have seen that done with Shadowrun’s goofy fantasy-meets-cyberpunk world, but I felt like they just slapped labels onto generic resources and called it a day.
I do think there’s some distinctions between what magic, hacking, etc do mechanically, but there aren’t a ton of different cards and you don’t get to buy them very often so it doesn’t come through very strongly.
Where it really falls apart is in the cards you have to beat. Events or crises or nemeses or challenges or whatever they call them. Good luck finding any meaningful theming there. It’s incredibly half-assed, like they couldn’t even be arsed to try. So 90% of the game is absolutely “if it’s blue, it must be magic!” with a couple of cards you might add to your deck possibly hinting at some rationale for how magic could, perhaps, if you squint, work in some way to sometimes, on occasion, be slightly different from hacking and shooting. And don’t even get me started on how utterly irrelevant the different races are.
I mean, I can see the game Shadowrun is supposed to be. Unfortunately, I’m invariably left playing the half-assed game they actually made.
Yeah, they really missed a trick by having the race options be purely cosmetic. And even the “levelling” barely matters. Some of the expensive karma stickers have more dramatic effects but since the base game only came with 3 scenarios and 2 of them expect you to grind the first one quite a bit to be “on par” with them (if, again, the stickers actually upped your power level very much), that’s a lot of doing the same thing to get there. Which, sure, most deckbuilders that’s just the game and that’s fine. But Shadowrun doesn’t have the game to game variety of most deckbuilders or the modularity of many, and it teases this progression mechanic.
I’ve been having difficulty locating a copy of Under Falling Skies, at least for anything approaching a reasonable price. Haven’t heard of Warp’s Edge though, have to look that one up.
