1046

So, I forgot I had backed Aeons Trespass Odyssey, and they posted an update.

It is described as:

Kickstarter Breakthrough of 2019! Epic 1-4 player massive campaign game of adventures, base building and tactical battles with giant monsters.

So, definitely some minis in there. :)

1047

Re: Imperium:Classics/Legends

When the bot acquires a non-region card from the market, the unrest card will be on top of the bot’s deck. Playing your way, you’re guaranteed to return that unrest next round, but with the dice roll that’s not so.

So, the rulebook is really good as a reference, but terrible at teaching the game. The game could really use a walkthrough game to explain flow and theme. “Acquire” vs “Breakthrough” for instance: acquire is like stealing from your neighbors via armies/spycraft/whatever so causes unrest. Breakthrough is like you discovered it using innovation/diplomacy/etc (you had a breakthrough) so doesn’t cause unrest. Even the flow of moving from barbarian to empire by exhausting your draw deck isn’t well explained in the manual. It’s also really hard to get a handle on appropriate strategies for each nation from the capsule descriptions in the manual; you have to look through the decks, get an idea of the rudimentary tech trees, see what type of scoring/acquisition strategies each nation is best at.

It seems like the way the bot plays, it’s almost never going to be beneficial to try to engineer a global collapse of civilization. The bot just doesn’t gain unrest cards. I suspect this is a viable strategy in multiplayer however.

1048

Anyone have experienced opinions on Detective: A Modern Crime Game, its standalone Season One followup, or Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview?

1049

I played a new Stefan Feld game called Bonfire. It was basically a whole bunch of interesting mechanics smashed together with a theme that, outside of lighting a bonfire by flipping a piece of cardboard, didn’t really come through.

That said, with most heavier strategy games, it is the mechanics that draw me in and I couldn’t care much less about the theme.

I am not sure I could even describe some of the mechanics as they are weird. Two people watched videos beforehand and then we went through the instructions. Once they clicked, though, I won. :) We were all playing for the first time. The guy teaching loves Feld and likened it a bit to Luna and Aquashpere, but I haven’t played either in a while so I wasn’t getting that.

It’s a Feld Game. SO if you like his other titles, you should give it a try.

1050

Stefan Feld is such a weird name for me. I spent so long thinking of him as “the Trajan guy”, and I really don’t like Trajan for its mancala mechanic. Which is more on me than Feld; I have a hard time wrapping my brain around mancalas and rondels. So imagine my surprise to discover how much I like Bora Bora (there’s something just so – squee! – adorable about the the theming!) and Castles of Burgundy (a classic for good reason).

I have Aquasphere but I’ve never gotten it to the table. Which is partly why it’s currently in the “to get rid of” pile. But also, just reading the rules and poring over the components, I’m not particularly jazzed to try it. I’d be curious to check out Bonfire just to keep abreast of what Stephan Feld is doing these days, but hearing a Feld fan compare it to Aquasphere gives me pause.

-Tom

1051

I was searching the local online classifieds and tomorrow i should be picking up copies of Memoir 44, Magic:Planeswalkers (the Heroscape type game), Hunt for the Ring, and Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space (original version) all for about 115 CDN rubles which seems like a pretty sweet score to me. People have complained a lot about the convoluted rules manual for Hunt for the Ring, but i say that’s what YouTube and BGG are for!

1052

I do not own any Feld games. My friend who heads up our group owns all of them or I don’t know that I would have played much outside of Castle of Burgundy. I really love games with wild and varied mechanics, but his seem harder for me to learn. I prefer someone like Pfister who, for me, weaves it all together a bit more. And as far as games with tons of options, I still love A Feast for Odin and most Rosenberg games.

All of that said, my attitude is, “If you are going to teach it, I’ll play nearly anything”.

1053

My opinion is that Feld writes mechanics on slips of paper while he’s on the toilet, then, when it’s time to make more money, he grabs a handful of those slips, tosses a dart at a board covered in themes like “Rome” and “Medieval times”, and smashes them all together into a “game”.

1054

So a typical euro-designer then? He is pretty egregious sometimes, to be fair. Nothing says ancient Rome like mancala.

1055

That seems as good a theory as anything. Nothing in most of his are particularly difficult, but the amalgamation of so much variation is still difficult to process. I keep thinking “I’ve seen every obscure mechanic a designer can throw at me” and then these people come up with something else crazy.

1056

This. I don’t mind a Stefan Feld game every once in awhile. I think CoB is pretty fun. But the theme is just a sloppy paint job over what is really just a complicated abstract.

Speaking of… finished a solo playthrough of Imperium: Legends, me as Qin against bot as Mauryans. (I won 109 to 86 with the bot at Warlord (2nd easiest) difficulty.) My impressions:

  • The theming definitely strongly guides the design here. That said, you have to work at it to make the theme come through, as in narrate your turn with theme in mind. Or you can just play it as an abstract point-collection exercise, ignoring theme altogether.
  • It’s a bit of a point salad game, made worse by just dragging out at the end. It takes too long to reach the end conditions, and the extra round feels totally superfluous. And you have no idea what the score is until after the game is over, which makes the result feel somewhat arbitrary.
  • The arbitrariness is compounded because you can’t really make meaningful decisions unless you know your deck really well and have a decent idea about what’s available in the commons.
  • The arbitrariness is compounded more because it’s really hard to understand what the bot is doing. It doesn’t care about the scoring opportunity on its power card (which guides my strategy throughout), and it doesn’t care what I’m doing, so I feel like the bots are probably only slight variations on a theme.

After this playthrough, I cooled a bit on trying to get a copy of Classics, particularly since you can’t easily fit all the components into one box without abandoning the nice inserts.

All that said, I enjoyed the playthrough, will try some other combination of civs, and am interested to see how it plays multiplayer. I wonder if this would make a good forum/discord game @Dave_Perkins.

1057

I haven’t got a copy of Imperium and haven’t played it, so I dunno! But we sure are having a lot of fun playing tons of different games on Discord, even games like Summoner Wars that have private hands of cards, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Imperium was great by forum.

1058

Feld is one of my favorite designers (though I think he’s published some clunkers, he hits way more than misses for me). And maybe only worth mentioning because it will drive @Dave_Perkins nuts, I think Carpe Diem is maybe his best design. It’s incredible how much tension and sharp corners he’s built into a small ruleset that plays in under an hour. Easy to teach and learn, but a surprising number of ways to completely destroy yourself mid-play. Our last play we mapped a single action to a loss of 20 points in a hundred point game. I just really love how overloaded and harsh the decisions are in it. Also, it’s super duper ugly and doesn’t actually have a theme.

1059

We enjoyed this a lot, but much of your enjoyment is probably going to be tied to how much you like the central CoC gameplay loop, too. If that doesn’t work for you, then I’m imagining that even focusing things on a fun, Stranger Things-like campaign setting won’t matter much. We also spotted more text typos on the app for this one – more than in the base set cases.

But it was good, group-friendly fun overall. They hit the nostalgia pretty well here, and the conceit of having each player control a character throughout was a really good mechanic for what this was trying to do.

One word of caution: this expansion is sort of billed as more “family friendly” than some of the other CoC stuff…and I suppose it is. But I was glad my grand-nephew is a pretty worldly 13-year-old for some of it.

1060

Have to agree.
Feld has made some amazing games. I get people who don’t like point salad or abstractly themed Euro games, but Feld is top class.
In the Year of the Dragon is one of the easiest games to play and completely brutal.
Trajan is one of my favorites.
Aquasphere I enjoyed, but it’s been forever since I last played it.
Rum & Pirates is the best drinking game ever…EVER.
Haven’t played Bonfire but want to try it. I am worried it’s little too much like Luna.

1061

Friends are visiting from Africa and I have gotten to play Gaia Project in-person multiple times this week, 3p and 4p games. That game is such a satisfying merge of atmosphere, mechanics and fun stuff to move in a way most heavies aren’t for me. So good!

1062

Is THAT how you make that game fun? I never even thought to look at it through that lens…

1063

Our only play, we mapped how playing it removed 90 minutes from our lifespans.

1064

I really like board games where my decisions are guided by the theme and not by some arbitrary point-getting mechanism. Powergrid, for instance, requires you to do a bunch of maths, but the goal is just “provide power to as many cities as possible” and all of your decisions are in service of that goal. I might have to calculate how best to budget my income in order to upgrade and afford fuel for my power stations, but I’m never min/maxing my points, or trying to claw one extra point with a late-game combo or whatever. I don’t want to have to laboriously count points at the end of the game to see who won; I want it to be obvious.

There are surprisingly few competitive games that provide this kind of experience. (It’s common in cooperative ones, e.g. in Pandemic, you’re trying to cure the diseases.) I’m struggling to even think of any beyond classics like Monopoly (bankrupt the other players) and Risk (conquer the world.) I get why most Euros use a point mechanic–it helps keep all the players in the game until the end, particularly if the score is at least partially hidden–but I kind of think it’s been played out. I don’t get any satisfaction from getting 132 points against my opponent’s 124.

There is kind of a grey area. Games like 18xx or Food Chain Magnate–where the goal is to be the richest player at the end, and it’s very straightforward how you make money–don’t bother me as much for some reason.

I don’t know. Some random musings for a Thursday.

1065

This seems to me a facet of games about optimization. If you’re playing a game about getting an economic engine running, or capturing terrain, or managing lots of resources, there’s usually going to be a granular metric to show how you’re doing and to compare to how others are doing. But, yeah, I totally get what you’re saying. I love, for instance, an Uwe Rosenberg game called Fields of Arles. I love the act of playing it and getting a pastoral economy going. I love how the economy is meticulous, but it allows for a lot of creativity.

But when it’s all over, there’s an almost arbitrary metric for who best optimized his choices? Okay, that guy got 132 points to my 124 points.

But then there are games like Dune Imperium, which are also about getting an economic engine going, but you’re fighting over a very limited pool of victory points to be the first to ten. I love that low number. Only ten points!

Or a territory control game like Inis with a winner-take-all abrupt endgame condition looming over every moment.

I don’t mind scoring as much as you seem to (I think this came up in another discussion we had recently?), but I do appreciate when a game tries to be about something specifically different from minute score optimizations.

-Tom