Boardgaming 2022: the year of "point salad really isn't very filling"

I like the game enuff to have pimped it out from items on Etsy:

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I bought this tray because my bridge table has a soft top and this helps keep things in place:

Yeah, Marvel United is a light coop with some actual depth and a liiiil’ bit of actual theme and smart enough that I actually enjoy it. I just, you know, don’t enjoy it enough to pay hundreds of dollars and have like an entire bookshelf worth of boxes of it, nor would it stay fresh if I only bought in a little bit. So I’ve not bought it myself.

I also got some tokens like that from Etsy. They are pretty cool. I don’t have the dashboard thing though. The plastic token set from the X-Men KS is also pretty snazzy. I like the stacking poker chip like health tokens from that especially.

On the space complaint side, yeah. All of KS has been like that lately. I recently got Massive Darkness 2 too; it is also a huge joy as a modular Diablo crawl. It is also just huge. And that’s the thing. So many KS games are super expensive and come in a stack of boxes nowadays. At this point my greatest issue with board gaming is the storage footprint in my house. My personal office is full of KS boxes that frankly give me more anxiety than enjoyment. I need to get better with passing along the games that I don’t enjoy as much.

That said, I successfully reduced MU and MU X-men to a few boxes plus the card boxes. It’s big, but not the wall of boxes big that it was originally. It would be even less if I just tossed the minis together and/or didn’t sleeve all the cards.

Just to go one further, I like the game enough to have opened an Etsy shop to help others pimp it out. The only problem is that the shop has been keeping me so busy I haven’t had time to actually paint or play the game in several months.

The game has been a big hit with the adults I’ve played with. I’m hoping my nephews – who were raised by wolves – will grow out of their perpetually-sticky card-folding phase soon so I can introduce the game to them.

For Marvel Champions Solo play I bought these:

I am on vacation next week and plan to try out some solo board gaming. I think having the cards stand up will help me play easier. My eyesight seems to be getting a bit worse these days so anything that can help me is a blessing.

Been playing Welcome to the Moon, a flip and write game. There are 8 maps with all different rules and a solo mode with 8 difficulty levels, and a campaign game. Played the 1st map, the most basic and sort of a tutorial, lost against level 5 first game but beat level 4, barely, 2nd game.

Been more and more into write games lately and this one plays fast but has some decent brain burning. Hopefully more the higher numbered maps but even map 1 has been fun.


Do you sell stuff for other games?

No, it’s all Marvel United so far. I can’t keep up with demand, which caught me by surprise because most orders are going overseas from Australia. The hunger for upgrades is strong when you suddenly find yourself with 19 boxes of content for a single game.

Would you mind linking to your Etsy shop? Even though you’re all booked, I’d love to see what sort of stuff you’re creating.

-Tom

It’s Minis From Mars. It looks barren at the moment because Etsy hides anything that’s sold out – not helpful! You can still get to those listings if you click through the reviews though.

Mini Tokens

Senator Kelly mini

Good game. I like it.

Those look great! I’ve started to upgrade a few games on Etsy (Quacks of Quendlinburg, Gloomhaven player stations). They can get pricey, but it is worth it if you love the game.

Really like those thugs, civs and threats. what are the dooms and mm’s from? I only have base set, base x-men and spider-man since no kickstarter.

Whoa, that’s awesome! And just to clarify for anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, the game provides the token on the left for a character named Senator Kelly. You created that sculpt, printed it yourself, and then painted it. Amazing work, especially for how it fits in with the look of the rest of the game!

And you’ve done the same for other items in the game that would normally be represented by tokens. That’s impressive. I’m really glad I don’t know this game, because if I liked it, you would have ruined those tokens for me! :)

-Tom

The Doombots are from the Fantastic Four expansion that gatecrashed the end of the X-Men kickstarter, and Multiple Man is one of the exclusives in the stretch goal box. Considering each of those tokens are only used when playing as or against 1 particular character out of ~200, I was shocked at how popular they were.

And thanks Tom, hopefully I’ll find some tokens to ruin for you in the future. I clearly missed the boat with Champions of Hara, which is still sitting in my backlog!

Just received Burncycle from the TMB guys. Heard that it was less dense and easier to learn than their other games…uh…I dont think so. Watched a few YT vids and am kind of dreading learning all there is to figure out with this game. But, I’ve been playing a lot of roll and write games so my brain is kind of recharged from any heavy games so I’ll give it a go…anyone else play this yet?

I definitely wouldn’t call Too Many Bones difficult to learn or dense! It’s practically for babies! (Like me!)

It makes Gloomhaven look like Gloomhaven!

Burncycle looks dope though, I want it

I also feel like TMB is pretty simple, it just appears to be more complex than it is.

I didn’t care for TMB. There was just a ton to learn and how rules were presented wasn’t great.

Burncycle looks cool, but I’ve learned my lesson that Chip Theory Games aren’t for me.

I am excited for the Moonrakers big box coming soon!

So a couple of friends and I tried Burncycle a couple of weeks ago. The production quality was excellent and it had a lengthy rulebook and reference but the videos we watched to learn the game were not that good. We tried to watch some official videos from Chip Theory and those were not very coherent - lots of jumping around, no smooth explanation of game flow, just not good. And the rule books had the same problem: all the info was there but the game flow, the context, the way it integrated, was not well explained.

I ended up not enjoying the experience, but would be willing to try again with better rules and player aids, and maybe a really good FAQ, plus ideally some MUCH better videos. One of our group pretty much hated it. The other member, the one who bought the game, strongly wants to try again.

I’m…not sure. There were some interesting ideas in there and maybe it all comes together if the players understand the game creators did a terrible job of giving the players the info they need. Basic stuff like how the dice pool and action selection worked were not explained; apparently CTG assumes we all know how their approach to dice pool and action selection works. Likewise, there’s a fairly interesting and potentially deep hacking/network mini-game but the explanation of how that works and more importantly how that integrates with the main game, was sorely lacking.

I’m uncertain if I’ll try it again. My friend wants to try and I want to accommodate him, but…

Ugh, fine, you convinced me.

Just bought it.

Along with a bunch of other shit to get free shipping.

Sigh.