A friend of mine bought Here I Stand a few years ago and we finally managed to get it to the table last weekend. The rulebook has to be one of the most dense game rulebooks that I’ve ever read, even compared to other GMT ones. The game itself was enjoyable, though I felt like the Protestant player (me) didn’t have many meaningful decisions as the others during the first half of the game. I understand that the game’s six player dynamic is what makes it interesting, but I almost feel like you could cut out one or two of the powers and wouldn’t lose much. It’s hard enough to find four players willing to play a COIN game, getting six for this is near impossible.
Wow, it looks like the crowdfunding campaign for the Heroscape reboot actually failed. I really gotta get on top of selling my heroscape stuff, I gotta imagine that now is as good a time as any.
Teeheehee! Score!
Local classifieds, advertised complete for $50! I’ll inventory it tonight to see what’s what.
Oooooh, I loved this one as a kid. Had to play on my parent’s bedroom since that was the only room with enough free floor space.
That’s an excellent score. In a way, it’s like the bastard love child of HeroQuest and the Command & Colors games. I had so much fun with that as a kid. I picked up a copy at a thrift store years back- still have the figures and tower in a box, but not the map.
Happy to report it looks almost entirely complete!
Seem to be missing one die, one battle card and one chaos archer. Other than that, usual partially painted bits and bobs and the odd broken and warped plastic.
My son took one look at the box, shook out the 4’x4’ map and said “I wanna play that!”
Because your backlog isn’t big enough, here’s BGG’s all inclusive Black Friday sale tracker:
A little bit off topic, but I imagine this thread is the audience:
I just received a copy of Heat: Pedal to the Metal and while I was supposed to work to make up some time, the game showed up at my office and my kid was with me so I had to try it out.
I played Flamme Rouge and Rallyman back in the day but neither of those did much for me as I only tried them solo. But, my kiddo was here so I could try this out.
And, it’s good. Hand management game where there are 1 to 4’s on the cards for movement spaces on the map and also stress cards and heat cards. You play as many cards as the gear you are in but if you do certain actions like taking corners too fast or boosting (one extra move card that turn) then heat will be added to your draw pile and can clog up your hand and the only way to remove them is to downshift to cool down your engine. It worked well, I was quite ahead of my kid as she took a few turns too quickly and built up her hand with heat too fast so I was able to pull ahead during the 2nd lap and kind of coasted from there. You really need to make sure you shift up and down quite a bit for corners and straights and stress cards can make you take moves too fast for corners so you spin out.
I have no idea if the AI will be any fun but the 2 player game was fun. 4 different maps in the game, some with tighter corners and some with more straightaways and there are also some extra modules like changing weather conditions and upgrades to really differentiate the players hands.
I think they did a good job learning from their older game, Flamme Rouge and this one for me after just 1 game is a step or two up from that game.
We played a game of 1830 yesterday. I’ve played some other 18xx games already but it was our first time playing “the original”. I had read that usually a player goes bankrupt, but we didn’t have that happen in our game. Ended up with all companies running at the end. I ran three of them and ended up winning. I have a feeling that some people in our group played a little too “nice”, helping people buy share in their companies even when it didn’t really benefit them!
Some of the other guys in the group had only played partial capitalization 18xx (where you don’t need to float companies with an IPO) and they greatly preferred that method of capitalization. I’m split either way, though I do kind of agree with them.
After 6.5 hours of 1830, we decided to end with a lighter train game and played Ride the Rails . But it ended up being “thinky-er” than we thought and we ended up completely brain fatigued. We definitely need to play it again when we’re not brain dead.
I’m no train game expert, but I believe in partial cap games like 1849 or the several 1822 style games you buy IPO shares directly from the company rather than the bank, so it’s only fully capitalized when all of the IPO shares are sold. But they’re also typically able to operate when only the President’s share is sold. In some of these games, companies can also raise funds by selling their IPO shares to the bank (to be placed on the market), but the bank isn’t allowed to hold a majority of shares, I. e. you can’t buy the President’s share then fully capitalize by selling the rest of the IPO to the bank.
Yes, that’s why they preferred 1846 and 1851 to 1830. They didn’t think it made sense the way players pay into the bank to buy IPO stocks instead of directly to the company.
The company already got paid for those shares up front, when it floated. In real world terms, it would map to a IPO not being fully subscribed, the underwriter having to buy the remaining 40%, and then selling those shares to the players later. (There’s other oddities in the model that have less satisfying explanations.)
Partial cap tends to be combined with shares in the company paying dividends to the company and all transactions happening at current price (no par price), so buying shares in opponents’ companies is actually an aggressive move: it’s giving the company capital now but depriving it of much bigger amounts of capital later. (Both due to the shares being bought at a low price now rather than high price later, and due to missing out on subsequent dividends). So running companies in partial cap becomes kind of odd: you’d prefer to not run your companies for the best income, so that others aren’t tempted into buying shares too soon, and the company has an easy time of buying multiple permanent trains.
Trying to map this to the real world ends up feeling just as nonsensical :) No real company holds their own shares and gets the dividends on them, and companies get to choose when they issue shares and at what price. The idea of a hostile investment at the current market price to hurt the company in the long term just doesn’t compute.
There are definitely idiosyncrasies due to the stock market in 18xx games being driven by supply but not demand. (Selling stocks drops the price, but buying them does not increase it.)
Fun puff piece about Gloomhaven creator Issac Childres in the New Yorker
Ooh, bargains! Local FLGS was quitting some stock after moving premisis.
Also picked up a Solforge Fusion starter and a booster, which had just happened to come in!
This sounds rather good.
Yeah, No Pun Included had good things to say about it recently as well.
I had missed that one. Thanks for the link.