Boardgaming 2021: minis are back, baby!

Games
1006

2021.7.9
2021.7.91500×600 175 KB

Good week. Highlights were:

All Bridges Burning. Second play, this time as the Moderates after trying the Reds last time. They have less to do, but they’re also the easiest faction. I won by keeping polarization low and settling a major political issue early on. Only one in-game year passed. Might be too easy as Moderates? Still trying to decide.

Mind MGMT. Every play of this has been perfect, but I love hidden movement games. Started reading Matt Kindt’s comic book series thanks to the game, and I’m happy to report that the game evokes the series rather well despite being hemmed into the constraints of the hidden movement format.

Brew. Didn’t know what to expect from this one. Has sharper teeth than expected. Given how friendly it looked, that maybe means it has teeth at all. Allows for some decent surprises during play, like overthrowing a contested forest at the last second.

1007

I started burying my barbarian tribe cards into history, when becoming an empire, until I realized that there is a development card, that allows me to play barbarian cards… (as Rome)

1008

I like how thematic that sounds :)

1009

So got to try Too Many Bones last night for the first time with a couple of friends, both of whom were also trying it for the first time, I played “the tank” it would appear (Patch?)

Some ignorance or lack of awareness on our first couple of combats led to me being ko’d right out of the gate before I got a turn which wasn’t a great first impression and that meant we were 3 scenarios in before I’d even had a chance to drive my character and start to overcome what at first appeared to be the baffling mechanics of running my character via the dice on the character mat.

There is an awful lot to absorb on that mat and the character QR sheet and given the training points arrive fairly thick and fast I felt it wasn’t until I was assigning my 10th or 11th point did I really understand why I was picking certain options above others and the synergies in the choices I could make.

I had a couple of light bulb moments during the scenario which would definitely make me choose my training points differently next time but that is to be expected in such a system with so many moving parts. (For instance I completely failed to appreciate the synergy between having more defence dice than my dex would allow me to roll in a single attack allowing me to exhaust them via shield bash and still have a full hand for next turn when selecting what to take for my training points)

The event cards seem as meh as they are in Gloomhaven and I didn’t really feel like they are immersing me in the universe (but then it doesn’t really matter what game I play I don’t tend to feel that)

Combat feels like a knife fight in a phone booth, I didn’t feel manoeuvre played any significant part whatsoever in combat other than occasionally having to expend some dex to shift over to the next bad guy who I then exchanged hits with via our dice. Initial positioning before it starts though seems absolutely crucial though judging by the way I got the smackdown in our first two combats and we learnt that rapidly.

I would definitely give it another go, but the learning curve to make your character effective seems pretty steep (despite the “starter build” guide on the QR sheet for the character), the adventure we did took forever (we started at 7am and finished at around midnight) and that was either the shortest or second shortest one but that inevitably involved much, much looking up stuff in the rulebook and I would anticipate a second go take quite a bit less time.

1010

Patch is the medic. Your “tank” is Picket and his trick is that he can roll defence before starting the fight, so he has his shields already up.

And it doesn’t take much for him to convert those shields into a shield bash, which can hurt the enemies quite nicely.

But reading the rest of your post, you figured that out :)

Each character guide gives you a base progression plan that you can use, until you feel comfortable enough exploring other options.

imho, it seems steeper than it is. With almost any character, if you go high on defence, you can fend off the enemy.

Go high on attack and you can do some real damage, but imo defence > attack.

And each character has one or 2 key skills that are worth developing, and you can pretty much ignore the rest.

BTW, campaigns are enabled by getting the expansion that lets you play as Duster.

Just wait until you get campaigns going, with multiple Bosses. Your gearlocks get laughably OP, to the point the game isn’t that much fun any more.

And the games take a while. We tend to leave things set up over multiple days, or weekends in the current case!

The game doesn’t scale at all well imho with higher number of characters and days, because the battle mat size stays the same.

By day 4, you will be getting 4 baddies, which is the maximum that can fit on the mat at any one time.

And if you are playing with 3 or 4 characters, after day 4 they get steadily more and more powerful, so much so that you reach a point, in our games usually day 8 I think, where any number or type of baddies is irrelevant because you only need to worry about 4 at any one time, and after the initial 4 are down, the replacements always start with lower initiative.

Running the campaign (multiple Bosses) the penultimate fight (game board is still set up for our last fight, which is the 3rd boss) had us face off 3 20 point baddies then a bunch of 5 points and 1 points.

Duster got knocked out, because she always gets knocked out the way i play her, but not before summoning her wolfie.

And Stanza has a song that brings back KO’d gearlocks with 1 hp, when it gets to the 2nd round of the song.

So I would just time the 2nd round of the song to be the 2nd or 3rd round of the fight, and use Duster aggressively to ninja stuff, get some damage (she needs to be damaged to summon the wolf) on round 2 and then get aggro’d, and get knocked out round 2 or 3.

Meanwhile Stanza is singing her heart out and de/buffing everything, and Picket is shield bashing everything, and the 4th Gearlock is Boomer, who is imho maybe OP and maybe the most powerful Gearlock. She can range attack ad nauseum, so just put Picket to defend her, max her dexterity and attack, and she can range attack with multiple dice constantly.

The rules are terribly written. We had to consult the videos, multiple times.

Despite that, I kickstarted Hoplomachus Victorum which looks to be the same core idea, i.e. dice and casino counters, but with multiplayer and better arenas for fighting.

1011

The campaign expansion is Age of Tyranny, which has no Gearlocs in it. Duster is from Undertow, the standalone expansion which has a whole new set of encounter cards, bosses, monsters, etc, because you’re headed south instead of north.

Victorum is solo, actually. Hoplomachus Remastered is what you’re thinking of. And I hope what you pledged for, if that’s what you wanted! :)

1012

[quote=“Vesper, post:998, topic:150673, full:true”]
Speaking of dungeon crawlers, I just picked up Altar Quest (we got our kickstarters 8 months late. Blacklist Games is… not good). Going to give that a try this next week I hope[/quote]

Blacklist Games’ mailing and delivery is uniquely bad. I had a very frustrating experience with them about the web store part of my Altar Quest that should have been a quick easy thing, but took months.

As to the game, I think it is a very unique dungeon crawl. It is very dicey, but with all results being useful in some way which mixes well with their intricate combos and resource systems. That said, the default difficulty with the Rules As Written is a bit off (easy) which makes the systems just feel scattered when you are swimming in resources.

House ruling really helps the game sing. There are some popular options such as threat +1 (extra card draw). Personally I give all threats +1p armor tokens (1p per round for bosses), seed the feature deck with difficulty modifiers from the campaign deck, and add in timings for gaining threat tokens (these tokens help different enemy type stand out from each other more). Each is less in itself than just adding spawns, is a bit more overhead, but flesh out the games weaknesses rather well in my mind.

No matter what, read Dr. Bandages visual tutorial first. It is way better than the rule book for teaching the game and they even link it next to the faq on their website.

1013

I pledged for both iirc. They came together at the tier I pledged.

Undertow has campaign mechanics.

1014

Huh. I own it and I never would have realized.

1015

I assume because you have Age of Tryanny too? Which I don’t have but which appears to be the bigger expansion.

Yeah in Undertow your campaign must start with the Kraken, then the 2nd boss is randomised, and the 3rd must always be Nobulous.

And you have 18 days to get to Nobulous.

We’re playing in a party of 4 (well 2 of us with 2 characters each) because from experience a party of 2 gets wiped out very easily in the early game.

A party of 4 is fun in the early game, but the power ramps up quicker than the difficulty, and I think a big deal of that is the super super cramped battle field.

I wonder what it would be like if the board was the same dimensions as chess, i.e. 88, instead of 44, with the same rules regarding positioning of your gear locks, but allowing 8 enemies on the board.

Manouvrability would become more important I think, and I suspect you’d be able to kite much more easily.

1016

Oh, Undertow is a much bigger and more worthwhile expansion. Age of Tyranny is mostly just campaign stuff (where you work your way through like seven tyrants, but you don’t get full carryover between them, just a little bit from the most recent tyrant) and I haven’t heard many people talk about campaign as the way to play TMB.

1017

This is pretty depressing. I knew about the difficulties as most of you probably do as well. That people are going to still be dicks to designers/publishers/logistics companies makes me want to puke, but if there is one thing these last few years have reinforced it is that people are terrible.

1018

I’ve seen the idea raised that someone should setup board game manufacturing in Mexico. Still cheap labor but no more ocean containers (at least for US markets).

1019

Can anybody help me find the original twitter link to this? I have someone I’d like to forward it to, but I’d rather send them the original. Nvm, found it.

1020

Counterpoint, from memories of working catering (I haven’t read the article yet.)

As a rough estimate, I’d say maybe 10% of people in any given day were challenging, and of that 10%, a smaller subset would be truly annoying, like they were having a really shitty day and wanted to take it out on the world.

For example, I used to work at Prêt a manger and the doors would open at 0800. We’d start working at 0600.

Team meeting about 0730 to go over what needed to get done.

And one time there was a guy banging on the doors at 0745 demanding to be served, right next to the sign that says “open 0800-1800.”

And he got super aggressive about it.

80% of people would be pretty forgettable.

And the remaining 10% would be actually nice, and actually talk to me, try having real conversations and get to know me.

Ofcourse, the annoying 10% are what stuck with you! I think there’s probably an evolutionary basis for this, as in pay attention to the “threat.”

Edit: I’ve read the article.

Sounds like entitlement culture plus alors of marketing speak gone wrong.

By which I mean, marketing stuff now usually means having to promise the biggest, best thing and promise it will be with you NOW!

Marketing does this because it works.

But some people take it as a literal promise, which is what I meant by entitlement culture.

What I find ironic is that these same people backed a Kickstarter.

Kickstarters take forever to get done.

Since December I think I’ve backed about 5 or 6 big kickstarters, including the new Hoplomachus.

I can’t remember the rest because I see Kickstarter as a bit of a gamble.

I back a game, then a year or 2 later a game arrives, that I’d forgotten about, and it’s a pleasant surprise.:D

I also backed an RPG called Black Geyser years ago, which is coming to early access soon, might take a look at that.

1021

What vesper said just larger models not really worth the 43 dollars… Wait wow it’s 20 cheaper on gamefound 69 dollars is just dumb. DO NOT PURCHASE!

1022

It’s so bad that one company I backed was like we’re going to air freight games because it’s still cheaper than waiting for a boat. 3k to ship before now is 30k. It’s ridiculous. I have high priced electronics I ordered that’s been sitting in Austrailia for 5 weeks and is now going to sit there 2 more months. I can’t even begin to guess how bad it is for gaming companies. I’m all for the move to Mexico for factories or even dare I say the U.S. (Sure we’ll pay more for games but we already are might as well give people jobs).

1023

I’m not sure. Maybe @Vesper knows?

1024

Finally got a complete game of War of the Ring in this weekend. I lost as the free peoples, but it was close. I was on the Mordor track when I lost. I love this game.

A few things looking back that affected my outcome:

  • I should have spit the fellowship earlier and gotten extra dice.
  • I struggled with the military aspects, but was hampered by activating and attacking due to not being at war. I didn’t have many event cards that let me muster non-at war nations.

I also got really lucky with hunt dice. At one point he was rolling 6 dice and whiffed on all of them.

1025

What’s this almost obsession with doors in miniatures games. I am watching a playthrough of the V-Commandos game. Lot’s of doors. Open/close doors. Use a crowbar for it. Shoot it. And they look ugly on the board. Galaxy Defenders, the same. Space Cadets, too (I think). They usually influence line of sight. One more fiddly thing to remember. But when watching movies about Alien Invasions or a WWII special op team infiltrating, I don’t remember doors to be important part of the lore, unless they are part of a prison cell.

I think Gloomhaven JotL was okay, it limited setup time, and once you reach the door, it will spawn the minions behind. And done.

But really, I don’t care about doors anymore.