Isn’t this the second time I’ve given something ambivalent / not very stellar feedback and you found that positively convincing? Do we have opposite-land tastes or something?
I just know how easy TMB was to learn, and how hard it is to learn a game in a group when nobody knows how to play. And also how bad videos are at teaching games in general. I bet that solo, ignoring videos, and reading the rule(s)book, I’ll probably get it.
I already wanted Burncycle, just the reminder that it exists and I don’t have to wait for Kickstarter was enough to sway me!
burncycle is CTG’s easiest game to get to grips with because there’s a lot less wild asymmetry and you’re not contending with 20 different levelling options 10 minutes into the game or an entire faction’s worth of keywords on a double-sided rules sheet for the specific thing you’re playing.
I agree that Too Many Bones, mechanically, is not particularly complicated, but you’re having to reference sheets every three seconds to figure out how the pieces interact. And the rules aren’t very well laid out, also.
Whereas burncycle has a bit more going on in terms of overall mechanics but each bot has one special ability and might unlock 3 more (one of my complaints is this is often suboptimal next to buying other more generic stuff), guards just have the one ability, and there’s only like four or five kinds of guard period not counting the captains. So once you’ve mastered the general situation, there’s not much more to get to grips with in an individual run.
As far as flow:
A summary of flow
Each bot has blue action dice for the turn equal to their current energy, plus any yellow or red dice they’ve unlocked. They can at the start (and end) of their turn use energy to upgrade, and they can replace one or more chips in the burncycle with action chips from the group stock or their own. Then they step through the burncycle. Each slot lets them take one action from the general list or special mission actions. If it is a colored chip, it will give them a bonus to a couple of related actions (purple: move, strike; blue, opening doors; green: getting a free network card or hacking a terminal). If it’s a captain chip, something bad happens but they still get to act.
If an action requires AP it will say so and you pick how many action dice to use on it. You then roll them. Add up any AP results and either return blank blue dice to your pool or pair them for 1 AP each. All rolled dice except returned blanks are now used up for the rest of the round so you need to plan ahead if you expect to do multiple actions requiring
Then you step through the burncycle again in the network, moving your IP peg 1 step in the mandated direction (I can’t remember if it’s clockwise or counterclockwise off the top of my head but it’s always that) or up/down a layer for blank or captain chips, to the next appropriately colored node (including one layer change if desired and accessible) skipping all nodes between if it’s a colored chip. If at any point you run into a ping, you fight it and whoever has higher network strength loses a point and kicks the other off the network temporarily (players respawn at their entry point to the network and are detected, pings go away). The bad guys win ties. If you run into a red node, you stop there and gain a benefit based on layer. If you can manage to stop on a node that matches a network card or cards you have (not always easy if you’re using colored action chips), you can resolve them for some often really good benefits, otherwise they’re discarded. The network is really helpful in reducing threat and, if you can get deep quickly, generating power for upgrades/dice/healing. Network cards can also do a ton of useful things if you can manage to hit them.
Then the burncycle degrades - a random chip becomes useless until replaced.
Once everyone’s taken their turn, the bad guys get to go. Guards go after bots they can see, then awareness chips, then patrol if they haven’t taken a crack at either (only in hallways!). The CEO maneuvers pings around the network to try and get to red nodes and ultimately to player entry points, in which case they’ll kick you off the network entirely for a bit. Bad news! And oh yeah, threat goes up one for every player.
At some point you’ll want to reboot the burncycle, which will refresh your action chip stock and give you a fresh burncycle of blank chips and captain chip, but it also bumps your threat equal to a whole round of play, so you want to be sparing!
This is my favorite review TMB, which I think is pretty dang fair on the pros and the cons. It is a very, very deep dive.
I watched a few solo games of Burncycle and it did seem like the game play was pretty easy to figure out but the 2 rulebooks that immediately reminded me of Comancheria with the How To Play and Reference manuals seemed daunting.
Seems they made it harder to learn than it should be.
If the official Burncycle rulebooks had included the few paragraphs of flow summary prepared by malkav, that would have helped a TON. All that stuff malkav laid out is contained in the rulebooks’ many pages, but not in any integrated or coherent way. That’s really the hurdle my group faced.
It comes with a ‘learn to play’ tutorial walkthrough book that I found did a pretty good job of hand-holding me through how it all holistically works. There was an issue with the book using terminology that hadn’t yet been taught (the titular ‘burncycle’ for example!), but eventually it got explained.
The main issue I had though is that it wasn’t the full walkthrough - it wanted me to download a pdf to get the rest of it. For such a ‘premium’ game they could have included another few pages! :)
Huh. Apparently my friend did not know about that bc we didn’t use that.
It’s this one here.
I guess the walkthrough is kind of interspersed amongst the relevant basic rule explanations, but I just worked through it start to finish.
Funnily enough the PDF version of the book also directs you to download a pdf for the rest of tutorial…
“We ignored the documentation” is definitely one way to not learn a game! 😂
Oh, to be clear, the stuff I said about stopping when you run into pings or red nodes on the network is just for that one chip’s worth of move, you would still use the rest of the burncycle if any. Get a decent amount of burncycle with colored action chips going and you can really zoom through that sucker.
Lots of Ryan Courtney designs this week. Trailblazers is better than Pipeline or Curious Cargo, in part because it isn’t quite as burdened with cruft. It’s about the routes! Not about weird min-max puzzles. Bear Raid, the one game of his that doesn’t feature pipe-laying, is about the min-maxing. Specifically, about shorting stocks and then trying to have those companies go bankrupt so you never have to pay them back. Am I becoming a Courtney fan? What a weird thing to say after disliking his first two games.
I’m still grappling with how I feel about Circadians: Chaos Order. I love this type of game: there’s plenty of politicking and even more bloodshed, and little details matter that might otherwise get rounded out. The combat is a combination of Kemet’s strength vs. damage model and Dune’s battle wheel, except with some unique dynamics that make battles feel dynamic and interesting. At the same time, it’s all so overstuffed. Asymmetric factions, but mostly in the sense that they have loads of minor powers, not that they’re totally distinct the way Root’s are. A Euro-ish action pricing system, except the prices rarely matter all that much. Would I rather play this than Kemet? That depends on the version, I suppose. We’ll see if it holds up.
Hey folks, why has nobody told me about the No Rolls Barred channel (on YT). Some brits play boardgames and they are really well edited and transport a lot of fun.
I like their Lord of the Board 2P tournament … they really make me laugh out loud
and this was enjoyable, too
No Rolls Barred got me to buy Nemesis with their boardgame masterpieces video and their playthrough. We (my wife and I) haven’t regretted it.
The bumbling drunk Captain is the best. They are a lot of fun to watch.
it is so refreshing to have board game youtubers actually editing their stuff and have great audio quality. I never heard of the game Fugitive, but this was so over the top, I laughed tears.
I played a couple (new-to-me) games last night that were pretty great. The first, Ponzi Scheme was exactly what it sounds like- and exercise in taking loans to buy stuff (ultimately for VPs), but then having to take more loans to cover the debt on those first loans and buy more stuff, and then take more loans, etc., etc., all the while mixed with a neat hidden buy/trading mechanic among players. If one player can’t pay their loans when they come due, the game is over and that player loses. The rest tally their VPs- even if they probably would have lost next turn, heh. So it’s an example of not having to ourun the bear, just one player…
The other was Brian Boru,a very Euro game. It’s got it all- trick-taking, area control, card drafting, point salad, etc. (but, thankfully no deck-building!). All in all, a neat, thought-provoking mid-weight game, I’m interested to play again.
I know this is a late note, with only 3 hours left. Memoir 44 is on sale for Prime Day. 33 bucks
Deal of the day for Prime Members: Days of Wonder Memoir '44 Board Game | Historical Miniatures Battle Game | Fast-Paced Strategy Game for Adults and Kids | Ages 8+ | 2 Players | Average Playtime 30-60 Minutes | Made https://a.co/d/cga1VSG
Pleased to note that I managed to get Guards of Atlantis II to table tonight and yes that is indeed the good stuff. Sadly, the design being heavily based around even teams of 4-6 (or up to 10 if you’re crazy and have that many friends) means it just can’t really hit the table that often for me. The only reason I could swing it tonight was my girlfriend is visiting from out of state. But it’s such a cool design.
Multiple paths to victory and if you seem to be losing on one you might be able to steer into another. Teamwork is very helpful but you can’t do any private discussion or steer teammates during potentially very important fine-detail decisions in actually resolving their cards. Attacks are all or nothing - they work if not defended (with a card with an equal or higher defense value), otherwise they don’t. But given a hand of five cards and a mandate to play one every one of the four turns in a round, this means careful timing or attacks from multiple corners can potentially do in even the most heavily armored warriors, even with relatively weak attacks. And even if they don’t, you’re constricting your opponents’ options. But by the same token, you generally only have two cards you can attack with, and they not infrequently are also your best sources of movement. If your attacks don’t let you move in the attack action, you have to carefully position on one action, and then follow up later and hope your opponent doesn’t beat your initiative. If they do, that can be just as tricky, because it’s often mandatory to use the movement in a certain way to do the attack at all!
You only have five cards at any given time, less as you play them during a round, so in theory plays and counterplays could happen in hardly any time at all, but in practice there’s a lot to think about. How do you position yourself? How do you mess with their plays? How do you keep your options open? Do you try to farm minions (levelling, tilting the balance of the conflict to push towards the enemy zone or defending against that)? Or do you go after the enemy heroes? (Tougher, but it also helps level, knocks them out of position or constrains them if they manage to defend, and whittles down that life count…). Of course, it really helps to know what your opponents have access to as well. Which is complicated by the fact that a full set has something like 24 characters, all of whom have their own unique card pool. But if you know that, for example, they’ve still got their most powerful attack…but they can’t use it if you’re in a straight line from them and they’ve no chance to reposition first, being in that line might be a great option. Oh, they’ve played their special defense card to move? How iiiiinteresting…
It really seems like it’s capturing all the complex interplay and tactical thinking people love about the MOBAs it’s patterned after, but without the part where I have to have twitch skills or play with people in some of the most toxic communities online.
I own Fugitive but haven’t played it in a while. I need to watch that video and get it back to the table. It relies on cool little mind games to outsmart the opponent. I enjoy playing both roles. The only limitation to me playing it more is that it is, by design, 2 players only.
I’m sure the NRB actual play of it is a lot funnier and over the top ten my typical play session. :)
yeah, if you know the NRB people, you will love the fight between the creep Dom Allen and Brooke Bourgeois. Is this even her real name? I can’t tell with brits, they have funny names sometimes.