The week’s big event was Star Trek: Ascendancy with seven players, which we’d been planning for some time before the pandemic and which only became recently possible. As you might expect, it was a long play, although not quite as long as we feared. Between three simultaneous turns at the game’s beginning and the extra resources at game start variant, it took about five hours. Not bad at all.
Oh cool, I’d like to hear more about Star Trek Ascendancy.
Me too. My gaming group favors co-op play, and STA only seems to offer that in the Borg expansion. I also like playing boardgames solitaire, but again, that means the Borg thing – which means buying both the gase game and that expansion. Also, the expansion apparently has lots of rule ambiguities.
Still, I could be talked into this game. I like the theme!
My group has played a fair bit of Ascendancy. It’s very fun, but you really have to play into your faction’s strengths to have a chance of winning, so that rather limits your options as a player. There’s also a fair degree of randomness that can screw you over.
Personally, I love Ascendancy. It’s one of my preferred 4X games, in part because it captures Star Trek almost perfectly. With any Star Trek adaptation, there’s the question over which Star Trek it will emulate, but Ascendancy does all of them. The early exploration parts are the Original Series and Voyager, the gradual border tensions and teching-up are the Next Generation, and the diplomatic negotiations and eventual all-out war are DS9.
The Borg expansion doesn’t really work. They have a tendency to either steamroll somebody within a few rounds or sit around letting you farm their tech.
Probably the wrong type of games for lots of people in this thread but I finally got on board physical board gaming. Mainly to drag my son (9 years old) from the screen and us something to do together in the house without a monitor.
I bought Forbidden Desert, Flash Point, Marvel United (plus 2 expansions; Enter the Spider Verse and X-men), and Harry Potter Battle for Hogwarts.
Forbidden Desert is good but I felt it’s a little tough for him. However, he really enjoyed it and actually taught his friends how to play it too.
Flash Point. Amazing game with a really good theme. A little simple until you go to the advanced rules. The game gives lots of opportunity to role play and have fun outside of the game (poop explosions in the washroom!)
Marvel United. Great game! A perfect blend of challenge, theme and gameplay. Playing different heroes, fighting against different villains with abilities is great. I wish more expansion were released weren’t locked behind an old kickstarter but what we have now more than eough. We just want more! Especially the miniatures.
HP:BFHW. Cooperative deckbuilder in the vein of Dominions/Ascension. I like this game mainly because I get to teach my son about the tenants of card games (drawing first, play to win not to lose, draw engines, etc). Plus the game slowly open up new rules and abilities as you progress though each of the 7 rule packs. As much as I like it, my son loves it. The theming is spot on and the challenge is perfect for him.
I’m eyeing Spirit Island and Mage Knight for myself now.
Someone announced a Heroes of Might and Magic III boardgame. YAY!!!
Coming to Kickstarter November 2022?!?!?! What?! Ugh, now to forget it was announced for 3 years.
Thanks to the generosity of a friend, I have a copy of Tony Go’s latest Deep Space D-6 game. The original, simply called Deep Space D-6 was a plucky little intersection of Yahtzee and FTL. You placed dice on the layout of a spaceship to activate its various stations, which let you work your way through a deck of obstacles. It was modest, tight, and snappy. My favorite thing about it was how the different ships played so differently. Clever asymmetry within the context of a simple ruleset. One of the hallmarks of great design!
His follow-up is Deep Space D-6: Armada, which is a co-op/solitaire game based on multiple ships navigating obstacles that accumulate on a small board.
And it’s a mess.
Far too many misprints, which speaks volumes about the QA process before it was sent off to the printer. Furthermore, it doesn’t feel like it went through any meaningful playtesting. The designer just issued a short list of drastic changes. Now you’re limited to a certain number of dice, the game’s running time is essentially cut in half, and repairs are made easier so you spend less time licking your wounds and more time accruing them. In other words, the sort of stuff that any good playtesting process would have caught.
It just goes to show that so many boardgames are made in the development process instead of the design process. And one of the enduring contributions of Kickstarter is an entire generation of boardgame designers who have no idea how development works. :(
Now you’re talkin’! Those are both “desert island” level games.
-Tom
Wow. You’ve come a long way, Tom!
Mage Knight as a solo game is just a completely different experience than trying to play Mage Knight with other players, I’ve found.
But Tom probably has his own reasons for not liking, but then maybe liking, the game too. But that was my experience with someone teaching me the game and playing with one other as well, and then me much later playing the game solo and finding “Hey wait. This isn’t making me hate it anymore.”
shudders
Thank you for the warning. I had owned, played, got bored of, traded away the first… but was curious about Armada. Now I can avoid it!
I still like MK with two players, but no more than that, whether co-op or competitive (both have their merits). I remember seeing the first expansion that added a new character “and you can play 5 players now”, and was like Holy Hell NO.
I seem to recall Car Wars was just a rules book and a bunch of graph paper. In which case, that’s a lot of graph paper in that box!
-Tom
Well, It doesn’t have mini’s but I’m being inspired to crack open:
Currently eyeing a copy of Nemesis. I really, really like Aliens.
You’d probably really like Nemesis. It’s got a ton of pieces, so yeah, it’s fiddly. it’s got nice little deck management and the random unique goals for players I like a lot. If you’ve seen the box or pictures of the game there you probably have a good idea of what you’re in for. I don’t think I’ve won yet but I have played a good 5-6 times. It’s not short and that’s a little bit of a drag in a game that has player elimination.
I know you said Aliens and not Alien but this is kinda cute. Very light but sometimes that’s welcome,
Totally different league then Nemesis though. and definitely not the full on sci fi horror extravaganza that Nemesis and all those minis are. but if you have only an hour or so at a time.
I watched some boardgamer on Youtube play through Fate of the Nostromo and it really didn’t look all that interesting to me. Is it more fun than it looks?