rowe33
1086
Guys, guys, it’s ok - he said he didn’t do it. He also said that he didn’t do anything to the other people that he said will likely come forward.
NI1
1087
e-Raptor also make some nice inserts.
So…Edge of Darkness? I played about 20 minutes of one round of the game and it didn’t quite grab me but to be fair judging from what I’ve seen since that’s not surprising. Anyone here have it? Is it good/great or just bloated Kickstarter nonsense.
Matt_W
1089
My sister and her husband visited this weekend. My brother-in-law is a big boardgamer–he runs a Youtube channel dedicated to train games–so naturally we visited a boardgame shop while he was here. He picked up Dune Imperium and we played it 3 times. Wow, that game is super fun. Tight decision making. Everything is obvious and visible, i.e. it’s easy to see what your opponent is doing and how you might counter it. The worker-placement game runs super slickly. The deckbuilding is painless and satisfying. And yeah, 10 points ftw. Once you get the rhythm of the game down it takes 60-90 minutes. I really liked it.
DT
1090
Pretty solid week. The standouts were Kabuto Sumo, Intrepid, and Cuba Libre. I have a group that wants to try some of the tougher COIN games, so that last one was a way of dipping their toes in the water. The good news is that they performed much better than I anticipated, so A Distant Plain might be next.
AWS260
1091
Regicide is so darn clever. I had never heard of it when a friend pulled it out on game night, and I came away incredibly impressed. Which reminds me, I need to grab a deck of cards and see what my better half thinks of it, so that I can justify buying the official version.
Played Nemesis for the first time yesterday with @Mike_Cathcart and @Lenkenobi. Really cool game where we all worked together and for my dude personally I probably shouldn’t have. They needed eggs. I did not. We spawned a Queen. I blew myself up with a grenade to try to save them and kill her. It did not work.
You left out my punching infection!
Merakon
1094
Glad to hear!
I hosted a board game event for the first time since early 2020 this weekend. I finally got to play the deluxe version of Coloma I picked up from @Vesper 's store way back. It was a bit of a rough start because there are so many possible things to do and it’s hard to understand what will or won’t work. But after a few turns, everyone got into the flow and really enjoyed it.
The core mechanism is that everyone simultaneously picks an action on their action wheel. If one action got picked more than the others, that action “busts” and those players only get the core part of that action and don’t get the “boom” bonus. But it didn’t feel particularly punishing to bust, and you can get a sense of what other people might want to do. And the mechanism is propped up by a very cool rotating piece in the center of the board that “sticks” there because of magnets embedded in that piece and in the board. All in all, very exciting, and very thematic for a euro game.
In this photo, 3 of us chose the same action and busted, and the yellow player was the only one who could “boom.” In this case, he went to the “construct a building” action and if he had enough resources to build two buildings, he could have. I think this is excellent design, because while he got the advantage of booming here, in reality, he has to spend more resources which may set him back and make it easy to predict where he’ll go next, and he might not be able to get a string of full boom actions unless he can find sufficient resources.
I didn’t realize you punched her ass out until I was done writing the post! That Queen got what she deserved from your bare bloodied hands, then you died like Wheels and I.
jsnell
1096
I wrote a bit about Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game in another thread. It’s got some obvious flaws: the writing is awful, and none their attempts to introduce more board-gamey mechanisms like the time management work. But the over-arching campaign of five linked cases was quite compelling, and about as close as we’ve ever gotten to making a cork board with red string when playing one of these games. So a cautious recommendation, recommending on exactly what you enjoy in these games.
As far as I’m concerned, Chronicles of Crime is poop in a box :-P
Tried the first case of Season One, and none of us are very excited to play it again.
My main complaint with Consulting Detective was always not knowing when you were done, and turning to the question section would reveal spoilers. Did we miss a major lead? Did we stumble on the solution half an hour ago? We’ll never know unless we spoil it!
The limited time mechanic was an attempt to get around that. I think Mythos Tales was the first one I saw it used. It ended up just making things worse, because it focused on the one absolute worst flaw in CD: actually giving a shit about score and beating Sherlock. It was impossible to do that unless you happened to pick the exact relevant lead first, which was always arbitrary as your first choice in the game.
Season One’s 1st case was the worst for that. Given the over half a dozen first choices, the one that would put you on the path to cracking the case was the LEAST relevant seeming one.
Quick: you’re head of a murder investigation of a professor found dead in the university lab. What do you look into first?
The building security footage
His assistant
His wife
A mysterious package he received the day before
Follow up on footage of him being assaulted in the parking lot the night before
The mob-connected casino he was in major debt to
His mistress caught slapping him on camera
Contact the FBI for info on his research
If you chose anything but the last one, you’re a sucker and were wasting time! Every other listed trail was completely irrelevant to the solution. Yes, why WOULD “real detectives” even bother with any of those other leads?
bleh
The one detective game we’re playing that got around that was the Sherlock Files series.
You get a deck of cards with every case. Every card is a clue. Everyone gets a hand of clues and has to play one on their turn. Face up if you think it’s relevant, face down if not. Go until the deck is out. Figure out the mystery based on face up clues, score points by correctly answering the questions, lose points for irrelevant clues you played face up.
It’s simple, and forces the case to a close without a bullshit time mechanic.
Really hoping Intrepid is a great co-op without alpha gamer.
DT
1100
This was only our first play of Intrepid — of the finished game, anyway — and there’s so much info on the table at any given time that it seems like it would be hard to alpha, or alpha with much accuracy. My main worry is that you can “math out” each turn, which becomes an exercise in long addition rather than a fly-by-your-pants thrill ride.
Yeah that was what I kind felt like from Rhado’s review. I was on the cusp on it and decided to pass, but would love to hear more when you get some more plays in.
So Tainted Grail Chapter 7 may be the most painful experience I’ve ever had in gaming. After 2 1/2 play sessions trying to find Part 6 of restoring the order we gave up. I still don’t know where it is, but we went to Kamelot with everything else and had enough to get the quest completed. We just opened the book and read the passage then were told to go across the map to the next location. So we just read that passage too and completed the chapter. I have read that that chapter in particular is borked and the rest of the game picks up. I really have enjoyed our time with the game, but Ch7 was just painful.
Kadath
1103
Three years later, after backing on @kickstarter and introducing it to my gaming group, I fiiiinally won @StarlingGames #Everdell :) can you see how happy I am?!?!
Matt_W
1104
What’s the best solo boardgame specifically designed for solo play (i.e. not as a variant or with an automa or whatever)?
JoshL
1105
It probably depends what you’re into. There’s been a lot of solo games made in the last few years. I generally hate playing board games solo, but I’ve played quite a bit of 7th Continent and enjoyed it. I even kickstarted the sequel!
I guess I should say 7th Continent technically can be played with more than one player, but I never have.
