They also allow you to fight in a region to fulfill quest, even if you don’t want to win or to get that forge possibility. And they help you to win a fight by sacrifice and keep you longer in the fight.
Your bag gives you your main strength. I think Wonderlands War has a lot of (little) decissions that keeps the game interesting all the time.
That makes sense. Our first game we botched it and counted supporters for strength which actually worked really well.
Knowing we played this wrong, our last battle for the round
Player A had 9 supporters and 1 leader, 1 madness chip = Strength 10
Player B had 5 supporters and a 2 leader, 1 madness chip= Strength 7
Player C had 1 supporter and 0 leaders, 1 madness chip= Strength 1
When players drew a madness chip and lost a supporter strength got lowered down.
Also Player C had a chip that replaced supporters from one player and he got to move one of his from another area. This raised their strength and lowered the player they took from.
At the end of the battle Player A had 17 strength after pulling chips and and losing chips.
Player C had the lowest strength but through great pulls and managing other battles they ended up with a strength of 15.
On the last pull player A pulled their last Madness token and Player C ended with 16 and won. What was interesting is was if player A hadn’t busted he would have won as player C didn’t have anymoe chips other than madness.
Went to a local board game group today for the first time in three years or so. I brought Inis and taught it to a couple guys. Turns out Inis is still a pretty damn good game!
The other game I played was Marvel United, which did not impress me at all. Though I guess it would be good for playing with kids though.
Playing board games is a tactile experience and with a game like the second edition Pax Pamir and it’s superb components and excellent map that is a game that uses its physicality to its fullest extent. But, what the Rally the Troops website has done for me is allow Pax Pamir to be played quite a bit and it’s allowed me to really discover what I had suspected about this game. It really is the best design in the Pax series and is absolutely outstanding. It also seems to do very well at a variety of player counts. I’ve had a great time in variously sized groups and it is also an intense two player experience. When you have this laser focus on your opponent it’s ever bit the duel that a game of chess would be. It really is a good game for that. My original interest was to play it primarily in small groups and it’s very good for that but this recent experience here does have me wondering. Is two player its best player count? I don’t know and unfortunately I don’t have much in the way of substance in this post but I just had to gush, again, about this excellent game.
Seriously these components are outstanding.
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(image taken from board game geek)
Agreed on all counts! I have never played 2p yet. I should.
It’s the only one in the series designed by Cole Wehrle, FWIW.
Plenty of good games the past couple of weeks. Two biomedical engineers with an interest in classical history asked to play The Acts of the Evangelists, which of course I was pleased to agree to. Afterward, we spent a couple hours discussing the game’s historicity. An excellent play. Even better discussion.
The big play on Friday was a full session of John Company. It didn’t take as long as expected, and managing the company through deregulation and the advent of private firms was more natural than in the first edition. It’s hard to imagine wanting to play one of the short scenarios again.
Let’s see… the other game that’s on my mind is My Father’s Work. Third play last week. It’s too long. At least the text is. But it does some very clever stuff. Watching our town go Mad Max was a real pleasure.
I’m very interested in Ahoy, as I am of all Leder games. Curious how accessible it is, and if it survives at 2 players or requires the third.
Resist! was one I missed backing this spring, so super curious how it plays.
Dice Realms is another that I’m interested in. Who doesn’t want Dominions but as dice? The dice looked kind of fiddly however, and the cost turned me off a bit.
Happy to elaborate!
Okay, so I’m still trying to decide how I feel about Ahoy. Of the Leder catalog, it’s closer in weight to Fort than Vast, Root, or Oath, although that probably sells it too far the other direction. I’ve only managed two plays at 4p, and I have a suspicion it works best at 3p. It wants that Smuggler making the map dynamic rather than letting the Mollusks and Sharks increase region wealth wherever they’re bunkered. Our second play was very smooth, but I’m not sure there’s all that much to explore. Which is probably the source of my biggest surprise, since Leder titles usually have such depth to them. At least it’s very accessible! The rules aren’t much trouble at all.
I wrote about Resist! a while back (you can read my piece here). Solid solitaire game, rather tough, but the option to give up and walk away is integral to what the game is saying about resistance movements, so I wouldn’t change a thing. I like how it portrays the Maquis without resorting to the usual tropes; there’s no map, no resources even, just people. Its approach reminds me a little bit of Peer Sylvester’s The Lost Expedition, although there’s more meat to chew on here. I’m curious if it’ll annoy grognards, but I support these attempts to make war a little more human, not to mention more approachable.
As for Dice Realms… I think I’m the one person who doesn’t like it very much. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s perfectly enjoyable. I have yet to encounter a “bad” play, and there’s no question that Lehmann is a premier talent; I have to imagine he could design a resource-converter in his sleep and it would still be better than most of his competition. But pare everything away and the Dominion comparison feels especially apt, provided we’re only comparing it to the base box and not what Dominion eventually became. Like Dominion, it’s full of deeply abstracted medieval kingdom-building, uses a small selection of faces per game, encourages somewhat obvious combos, and feels like a system in its infancy. Every play has felt like four minutes of gameplay scattered among thirty minutes of setup and swapping out dice faces. Not my favorite.
I kinda felt this way too. I’ve only played it a couple times, but it just seemed like a lot of work for very little gameplay. The game is too short (as in, too few rounds) to really give you any chance to actually build an engine, and the dice mean even if you do it’ll probably never fire. But it’s too long (in terms of actual time) to play it enough times to really figure out if there is any strategy to it, or if it’s just whoever rolls best wins.
I do think Lehmann knows what he’s doing (I really like Res Arcana, for example, New Frontiers, Roll for the Galaxy, Phoenicia, yes, Phoenicia…), so possibly if I played enough Dice Realms, I’d find the fun in it. But I probably won’t. Lots of other things to play. Maybe if it shows up on BGA :)
My group digs Phoenicia. Probably not as much as we like Scepter of Zavandor, but definitely more than we like Outpost. It’s good to scratch that itch, and the games are relatively short- generally once you’ve fallen irrevocably behind, the winner just runs away with it and it’s over.
I’m curious to see if it would bear the adaptation! It’s just so airy. When Cartographers was digitized, it really highlighted how so much of its experience was about physically coloring in your own map. The result is a different game despite containing identical mechanisms. I wonder if the same will be true of a digital Dice Realms.
How’d you get your hands on a second edition copy? I’m still waiting for mine to ship.
He knows a guy.
Game Steward has them.
And, ordered.
I wrote the world’s first preview of the second edition! Cole was kind enough to send me a finished copy a month ago. I’m three plays in.
Or this:
Happened to you too.
LOVED that and loved buying the guy off to win.
So I have to ask more about Wonderland Wars from people who play it.
I feel the game has the bones of great game, but the decisions made by the designer baffle me.
1.Supporters- Supporters only being meat shields and not counting for strength.
2.Not losing strength when you lose a supporter or a wonderlandian.
3.Madness- Weak penalty for going mad? (Yes I know you lose a supporter) At first I thought if you went mad it was like an instant bust, but in fact you want to go mad because then you get recycle your chips.
5. Castles being permanent - When so many points come from castles it just seems too easy to do and you can’t not go for it or you’ll be out of the game.
4. Points - Winning battles aren’t nearly as important as unlocks and quest. In a two player battle all you need to do is get 2nd or if you do win take a castle.
5. Abilities - 2 Characters have amazing abilities. 3 characters have meh abilities.
Maybe it plays different in a game with more than 2 players. As it is the game is just so less interesting than it could be.
I played Wonderlands War a couple of times with 4 people so far.
Not sure how well it would work with 2 people, probably a bit loose regarding fighting in regions.
I like it that supporters do not add strength, you need them to stay in the fight. It did not help my army of supporters when all my good chips were exhausted and my madness stillin the bag.
Quests are pretty mandatory for points. However, it is always necessary to unlock character skills, too.
Most castles are placed by winning a battle. This can get tough. Good bag building is mandatory!
Wonderlandians are pretty mandatory, too!
To me, it is this huge puzzle, what to do, which actions should I take, which cards to draft, which battles to fight.
exactly! I like trick taking games, when I read the rules for Brian Boru, I was a bit disappointed that it was not a game where you follow suit. But then it clicked, and the trick taking the Brian Boru way makes totally sense.
First, if you want to conquer a town, you need to follow the towns suit (color). If other people want to win, then they of course need to beat you in that suit.
And the other big thing is, if you do not win, you get important other rewards, depending what card you have played. Winning can also become expensive, because some towns require you to pay money.
So you always try to figure out where you want to win and where not. And sometimes even a certain win will result in a fail because some of your neighbours played a rocal high number card.
Re Wonderland War: I’d bet these are largely issues with lower player count. I’ve played twice, both at 5 players (and both times on TTS so definitely a different experience than in person). I played it like 6 months ago, but this is my recollection of my thoughts…
Supporters - Supporters being meat shields makes them matter a great deal in my experience. Initially it’s counter-intuitive and seems weak, but I recall them being very important as the game progressed.
Madness - I’m not sure how this would work in 2 players, but in higher player counts sometimes you go to battle expecting madness and being okay with it. It’s similar to a player in Blood Rage going to battle intending to die for points, or in Ankh joining a battle just so you can play your rest card. Understanding that dynamic at the table is part of the strategy, if opponents aren’t going to take the battle seriously, you shouldn’t dedicate as many resources to it.
Castles - Yup, Castles are OP. Everyone should be going after them. Seems like by design though… I think their contribution to battle mattered a lot less towards the end of the game though. Don’t you get up to like 15 power in battles pretty easily towards the end? I remember it switching to a race to the top and the 2 strength from castles seeming to matter a lot less.
Points - Isn’t winning battles how you build castles? This seems like another case of the 2 player game maybe being weird. I’d compare the goal to Rising Sun where you want to win a battle in every region by the end of the game. I also like the importance of quests because it puts another wrinkle in how different players are approaching a battle.
Abilities - Yeah, totally agree here. Some of the abilities feel weak, but worse, only a small number of them are fun! Disappointing design there.
On the opposite end, having only played 5 player, I thought the game was way too long and slow. Betting on battles you’re not in is a great idea, but even still waiting for that battle to end is incredibly boring. They’re way slower than a battle in Blood Rage for instance. I have similar issues with Forbidden Stars at 4 player. I don’t hear this complaint much in reviews so it may have just have been a TTS issue.
