Boardgaming in 2017!

For those of you who have played One Deck Dungeon before: it’s marketing itself as a roguelike, but what does that actually mean? Or is it just further erosion of that word?

re: Kickstarter delays for physical games. Colosseum was kickstarted in Apr 2016 with an estimated date of Jan 2017. I got mine Feb/Mar 2017 and the US is getting it now, in April. It’s only a few months delay, but it can totally happen, even though TMG have done 28 kickstarter campaigns. Still, it’s nothing compared to most video games, which often blow their time-budget by 500%

I’ve not seen board games blow it nearly as barely as so many of the video games do. I think a number of KS board games I’ve played though seem to miss some polish, like play balance it issues, unclear instructions or of component problems… But those can be found via traditional channels too.

For my wife’s birthday I got her the Battle for Hogwards card game. It’s a deck builder with some mechanics for semi legacy play. It seems neat, and hope to get it on the table today for some 4 player.

Will report on how it goes.

When I found out my sister chose Clank as the game for our short vacation, I sent her the expansion too. We haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds interesting. I like that the concepts are generally easy to understand and the challenge is certainly time in addition to what everyone else is doing which they usually just speed things up anyway, so yeah it’s a race.

So a couple of friends are coming over tonight and we’re going to give Triumph & Tragedy a go. None of us have ever played it before. It’s my game and I’ve watched a few videos and read the rules. I don’t expect we will finish a full game, any tips for first timers?

I would say that it is a pretty good use of the word roguelike, Pod. The enemies, abilities and stuff you get are randomized (from a set pool) each run, and of course there is permadeath. The only thing you set at the beginning of each game is the boss you will face and correspondingly the effects of the dungeon you will be exploring. Everything else is random. Hope this helps.

My wife and son are big Harry Potter fans, so our house rule is that you have to yell out the spell’s name and do the wand motion as if you are a Hogwarts student.

Isn’t this just a Dungeon Crawler, though? Roguelike’s have a lot more stuff to them, e.g. hunger, unknown items that need to be ID’d etc.

Anyway, before I looked up One Deck Dungeon on BGG and noticed it was in the “Video game theme” family. So I clicked that and found out that there’s a Dark Souls board game that was released this year! Who knew about that?

I believe what they are hooking into is the idea that the difficulty is high, you have several random encounters on your way through floors, you collect random stuff along the way, and there is a good chance you will die. From what I know if it, I can see it as a sort of card based rogue like that you carry in your pocket. I sort of saw the Space Hulk card game in the same way, but it didn’t have leveling or loot.

Well, I can tell you that there is neither hunger nor ID’ing items in ODD, for what it’s worth.

Totally gonna do that :D

People who read the Kickstarting and Screaming thread… ;)

Not a very good one, from what I’ve heard.

Yeah. Dungeon crawls is a crowded space these days and I think Dark Souls ended up completely overshadowed by more impressive offerings. I’m a big fan of Souls, but I’ve got Descent and Zombicide on my shelf and Gloomhaven on the way. I can’t figure why I need the Dark Souls Boardgame.

Played Zingo, Outfoxed, and a Richard Scarry game with my girls today, followed by our Gloomhaven night tonight to celebrate Intl Tabletop Day.

I’m a big Dark Souls fan but I passed on that one. Just way too much on my plate already, game-wise. If it’s not very good that definitely helps me feel better about passing!

So I went for a copy of Vast here. Hopefully it should be showing up this week.

I’m a sucker for asymmetry and it helps that the reviews I see for it pretty much say there’s not much else like it out there. Good for me because I need those kind of excuses to bring a new game in.

Tom Mc

It’s a fun game but allow a lot of time for your first game for everyone to get the hang of their particular character. Probably best to learn each role ahead of time so you can help but it’ll still be pretty messy the first time!

Vast is great in theory, but in practice, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make a game in which everyone has to know how to play five separate games.

-Tom

That is the challenge for a asymmetrical game like Vast, some players/characters can counter some others but not all. It will take a few plays to understand who has to stop who from winning. I would agree with Tom that it is more interesting than great - if i can put words into his mouth. I would definitely play Vast again but i am not going to push for it. A neat experience.

I really liked it the time I played it and thought it clever, mechanically well done and quite an achievement as an asymmetrical game with completely different roles. That said, I don’t find myself in a hurry to play it again either. Part of it is that my tastes simply skew heavier these days.