Anything super exciting from Gencon?
I remember when FFG would suprise us with a new cool game unexpectedly.
A friend actually got a copy of the new Twilight Imperium Roll & Write. Says it’s absurd, but pretty good. I’m looking forward to him getting back and trying it out.
What is this? I am out of touch apparently.
Behold:
Plays 1-8 players. Each player gets several (dry-erase!) pages to roll and write on. Oversized dice! 24 Factions. It’s just so over-the-top.
I think official release is September. Gen Con had 50 copies a day or something. My friend works for a game company, so got in line early as a vendor.
So it’s a breezy 2 hour game, then?
(Haha, that was a joke, but then I looked it up and it’s true!)
Of course it’s true! Why would they lie?
I don’t know how many times I’ve picked up a copy of Twilight Imperium, turned it over ruefully in my hands while thinking “maybe …” but then always putting it right back in the shelf. I love the thought of it but it just wouldn’t get played at my house.
All mostly unpacked now, and all intact!
If you are having to move boardgames (or move at all really), I cannot recommend mover’s cling-wrap (on one of those hand-roller come-alongs) highly enough. My strategy of pulling out drawers from the Too Many Bones trove chest and wrapping them and boxing them outside the trove chest worked great. Also used it to the same purpose for my Eldritch Horror hold-em-all organizer crate. Also used it for any game that had even a hint of potential future lid lift.
And while getting all that cling wrap off of stuff was a hassle for unpacking (some things I think I wrapped as if expecting my stuff to travel cross country on a Conestoga Wagon in 1881), everything came through like a champ, so job done.
I knew abou that one, it got leaked a few months ago. Looking forward to hearing more about it.
That said do, I really want to play a 2 hour roll and write? Maybe??
I can play a 6 player TI4 game in 5 hours which is less than an hour a player.
I canceled my Moonrakers pledge today, and spent the money on
Caesar!
Viticultre + Tuscany
Maquis (solo game)
The Guild of Merchant Explorers
I had/have a deep desire for Moonrakers, but felt that 1) I got caught in FOMO 2) The parent company was abnormally good at marketing 3) The nature of Moonrakers meant I wasn’t going to get it played frequently.
Will be fun when I get a box of these new games! Hopefully I can get Moonrakers in the future.
We had a 4 player session of Wonderlands War yesterday. It is quite an exciting game. In phase one you prep your bag in this bag building game, by drafting cards around a tea party (rondel). In the war phase you fight for 5 regions, drawing tokens simultaneously out of your bag and adding to your battle strength.
If you don’t fight for a region, you can bet on the winner. So everyone is involved in a battle at every time. Pretty great system.
It reminded me of Blood Rage (drafting phase, quests, area control, 3 rounds) and Quacks (bag building, busting in battle).
And the game we played had standeees and not minis. A huge plus, because the standees just look better than unpaintend minis.
My big frustration was that there isn’t a way to get the nicer chips but skip the minis. You get standees either way, but I don’t need the pile of useless plastic.
I had my first opportunity to play Terraforming Mars today. Played with a buddy, 2 games. First game I lost 85 to 86.
Second game I won 156 to 127. I played as Ecoline and he was the Tharsis Republic.
Are those reasonable scores?
My first hand of cards, and a couple generations of draws, gave me an incredible microbe engine that I just hammered each generation:
- Extreme Cold Fungus: +1 Plant or +2 Microbe on another Card
*GHG Producing Bacteria: +1 Microbe on card, or turn in 2 microbes in cards to up temperature 1 - Symbiotic Fungus: +1 Microbe to another card
*Nitrite Reducing Bacteria: +1 Microbe to card, or remove 3 microbes card for +1 TR track
There are a few temp/o2 requirements on a few of those cards, but they were easily met. I basically decided to just generate credits with TR, and I spent the game rushing o2 and temperature increases, along with guaranteed TR creation every generation from the microbe engine. I ignored steel, titanium, credits, energy, and heat, and built everything else around plants and animals.
My friend really had no options to thwart me. He even built a crazy engine that was producing like 80 credits a turn to my 65ish by endgame… But my TR rating was a good 30 ahead of him.
I guess I don’t know why I’m sharing, just seemed a little busted for beginner players. We still had fun!
Terraforming Mars, without drafting, is a somewhat random and potentially broken game. It’s best played using the drafting variant.
I just don’t understand the point of supporters other than than they keep you in the fight. They don’t add to strength so they seem kind of wasted. In any other area support game they would add to your strength.
Please explain that to my friends. They say it just adds to the time and that if you’re drafting everyone is going to just take a card they don’t want you to have so it’s random anyway.
This is regarding Terraforming Mars and playing it with drafting as per the official variant. I have two response to this, one about game mechanics and playing, and one about the way that interacts with the group of people at the table. I’ll post each separately.
First off, as to the fact that Terraforming Mars is only a great game if you play with the drafting variant. Basically, the non-drafting variant is dramatically dependent on card draw to the extent that most games of non-drafting Terraforming Mars with competent players is going to be determined by card draw.
Drafting does not eliminate this randomness, but it does reduce it, substantially, to the point where a combination of good play and good drafting control the outcome rather than card draw. Terraforming Mars with drafting is still a bit more random than some of the other great Euros but I would still classify it as a great Euro due to its excellent commitment to the theme and the strong emergent gameplay.
Specifically, in Terraforming Mars, the cards are not remotely equivalent, with very significant variation in how useful some cards are compared to others. But that’s actually the smaller issue. The bigger issue is that Terraforming Mars is susceptible to tremendous synergies, such that if a player has some cards, other cards become exponentially more powerful There are card combos that break the scoring curve and produce the kind of unbalanced outcomes mentioned upthread where other players just don’t have a shot at victory.
And with the non-drafting game, getting those cards is primarily impacted by random card draw. There are cards that will let you draw more cards but getting those cards and putting them to use is part of the underlying randomness. There is no built in mechanic that lets a player cycle cards or enhance draw so non-drafting Terraforming Mars is an exercise in randomness. Even though I love the drafting variant, I actively try to avoid the non-drafting variant.
As to the complaint of Shieldwolf’s friends:
As to the latter part of that sentence, counter-drafting by other players is a perfectly valid strategy and more importantly, a CHOICE - it means the other player will be choosing NOT to take a card that could help them. Now, the distribution of cards in the draft is still random, which is why I say drafting reduces but does not eliminate the randomness.
HOWEVER as to the issue of taking more time… (see next post)
So now we get to the issue of not every game mechanic works with every group of gamers. Basically, as a veteran of timed MTG drafting, I’m perfectly comfortable with fast drafting and when I play Terraforming Mars with drafting it does not slow my play down much at all.
HOWEVER, the main group of heavy Euro gamers I play with cannot handle that, at all, so for years we played Terraforming Mars without drafting. I grew to dislike it rather intensely but it was the only choice.
I will illustrate the issue with that group not with Terraforming Mars but with Tiny Epic Galaxies. Tiny Epic Galaxies is a very good light to medium strategy board game with action selection mechanics that includes a “follow” mechanic: when a player on their turn chooses their action, the other players can spend a resource to follow that action and also perform the action. It’s a way of both balancing action choices and also increasing player interactivity on others’ turns. For the people who enjoy Tiny Epic Galaxies, it’s a huge positive. And in keeping with the light to medium game style, it’s clearly intended as a “swift choice” by the other players - either follow the action or not, chop chop motherfuckers. It doesn’t prevent a player from taking their main action and is a sort of “supplemental action” that can yield nice boosts but is in all honesty not something that requires Deep Thought.
And yet, with my Heavy Euro group, we tried Tiny Epic Galaxies once and 2 of the guys just took their sweet time, cogitating multiple minutes on every Follow decision. Imagine a 4 player game: Player 1 takes an action and spends a couple minutes, then Player 2 needs several minutes to think about following then a couple minutes to follow, then Player 3 does the same deal and… Instead of rounds taking 5 to 10 minutes and a game taking 30 to 60 minutes, you end up with rounds taking a half hour and a game taking 2-3 hours. Two to three long, slow painful hours, to play a game that BGG says plays in 30-45 minutes (I feel 30-60 is more accurate). And when we tried to get the guys to be a tad more dynamic, they just had no fun. They felt rushed, they felt the game was super random b/c they were being asked to make choices without enough time to think, and they hated it.
Needless to say, after one play, Tiny Epic Galaxies was banished from the table for that group.
Now I have played it many times successfully after that with other groups but it just didn’t match the heavier group. That heavier group strongly prefers games with time to deliberate, very little randomness, and very little hidden information. Uwe games, Castles of Burgundy and Brass are all favorites of that group, and I play those with that group with gusto. But I don’t try to make them draft Terraforming Mars, or play Tiny Epic Galaxies, or play any game contingent upon swift and dynamic decision making. That’s not their deal.
So, the big picture is, it takes all kinds. I play thematic games with one group. I play heavy Euros with another. I play lighter games with yet others. What I’m lacking at the present is a group to play my guilty pleasure Ameritrash with. I have Axis and Allies Zombies just waiting to get to the table… I know it’s a shit design by Euro standards but god I do love rolling some fucking dice sometimes you know?
As to Terraforming Mars, looking at it objectively, here is the deal: the best version of Terraforming Mars, if you have the right group, is with drafting. That’s the “Great” version of the game. The game is still “Good but Random” without drafting and is suitable for some groups that way.
That is my 99 cents on the topic.
@Sharpe Thanks for both of those posts.
As a new player to TF, the explanation of drafting mirrors EXACTLY my experience in the previous game. I just lucked into draws over the first 3 turns that gave me the vast majority of microbe cards in the game. My opponent would have needed to draw an even more lucky run of cards to beat me. He tried to fight it for awhile, but after 90ish minutes or so he knew he was beat, so we both just rushed the endgame conditions.