Boardgaming in 2017!

Rebellion is a two player game.

-Tom Mc

Does anyone know much about Star Trek: Ascendancy from Gale Force Nine? It completely fell under my radar last year, but it looks kind of exciting. There’s a dearth of reviews for it though, perhaps it flew under other people’s radar too.

Fantasy Flights says it’s 2-4… is it lying, and holy cow 3-4 hours. Man… that would make it 5-6 with my group.

Fantasy Flights says it’s 2-4… is it lying

Short answer, yes they are. The game design is really really comprimised if you try to play with more than 2. War of the Ring, which is no longer a Fantasy Flight game, also does something similar and it only makes fractionally more sense there but it is also a game for two players only.

Oh yeah, and yes it can take a while to play. Not a bad thing in my book because both players are heavily invested in everything that is going on. The pacing is really good.

-Tom Mc

It’s a 2 player game they shoehorned and dinked around with to “make” it 3-4 players, but every review I’ve seen says it’s not remotely a a 3-4 player game. You’re basically playing a 2 player game where people are just splitting turns from what I gather.

Oh that sucks. Thank for letting me know.

Oh the game doesn’t suck, it’s pretty good. It is just two players, that’s all. ;)

Tom Mc

I don’t do 2 player board games, but I have some pretty big star wars fans. I just don’t like those games much in general.

Without going down the rules bit in a long fashion, the core of the game are the missions you run with your leaders. The leaders are either Admirals or Generals. A leader during the mission phase has two states: assigned to a mission, and in the pool. Leaders in the pool can either move fleets or oppose enemy missions.

The 2 player games works like this:Rebels use a leader. Empire uses a leader. Rinse and repeat.
The 3-4 player game order works like this: Rebel Admiral Leader phase, Imp Admiral, Imp General, Rebel General. I may be off on the order, but the premise is the same.
There are some actions in the refresh phase assigned to the Admiral and General players, but it’s not important.

It’s actually not all that bad, and 90% of the time it works ok. Where you get boned is if there’s a set of missions you want to run a particular order, you have to pay attention to how you queue them up. Each leader has stats that affect the mission outcome. In a 2 player game, I can line up the missions based on stat, in a 3-4 player game I need the line the missions up based on if I want the first mission to be done in the Admiral phase, then the stat, and then the general phase. What I do like is you kind of get two separate actions per turn. That one/two punch can be handy.

I don’t mind the game 3-4 players. Especially on the imp side it’s handy to have someone keep track of the probe cards (the cards you use to eliminate where the rebel base is), or at least help with bouncing ideas off of "I think the rebel base is here).

That said, in a convention environment my main goal is to teach people how to play the game so they can decide if they want to play it. The games are clearly marked “teaching”. In this case, I’'ll take a game that shoehorns a 3-4 player game over just letting one player play it.

Thanks!! Hopefully mine will be in the group that is sent out tomorrow but we’ll see. I’m out of town this weekend anyways but it’d be great to have it waiting when I get back. Need a chance to learn how to play before we start a group campaign!

My group is enjoying Gloomhaven so much we’ve now twice met to play it on a day that’s not our regularly scheduled boardgaming night and will as of tomorrow have played it two days in a row. Level 2 power cards unlock some tasty options and now that most of us have two or three perks our modifier decks are starting to tilt in our favor as well. Each scenario, despite fairly structurally simple building blocks, has been a very different tactical challenge. This one involved fighting a bunch of undead in cramped quarters and then bringing down two hellatious bruiser bosses - which latter happened surprisingly quickly thanks to a couple of lucky crits on high damage attacks. (One thanks to my having spent a bit of cash on getting blessed while in the city phase.) And we now have six unlocked scenarios to choose between so the possibilities are racking up quite quickly. (There is a seventh but in this case it’s mutually exclusive with the path we took.)

Still a ways away from anyone completing a personal story or hitting any of the big unlocks but those strike me as something that’s meant to take some time.

I really enjoy ST:Ascendancy. I think it is a great 4x type boardgame that reflects its theme-ing well.
MiniatureMarket has a review of it and Barnes choice it as his Game of the Year (in a separate article).

i have played it twice and look forward to the next time we play. It can take a while to play, i would say 3+ hrs, but we did not mind that at all. There are 3 factions now (Fed, Klingon, Romulan), with Ferengi and Cardassian next.

You start off with your home planet and explore out from there, each star system you explore you draw a event card where something from the show can happen (giant amoeba for instance). Each planet (if a system has a planet) can have 1-3 building built on it (production, research, & culture). Production gives you more ships/building, research gives you more research (dont like the Romulan’s to cloaking, if you are the Federation research the counter). Culture is one of the victory condition, the other is taking the other home planets.

Thanks for that Seppey. I’d read Micheal Barnes’ review, in fact that’s the first I heard of the game and what prompted me to post here. It’s super weird that I’ve not heard anything else about this game.

I’m a little concerned that it needs specifically three people to play, would be easier to get it to table if it had a [less compelling] two player option.

Asmodee mailed me the new Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective so I’ll try to stream some this weekend. I’m not actually familiar with the original. Anyone here have opinions???

Any chance of a review? I want to know if these new stories are up to snuff, but without any spoilers.

Sure! I plan on it

Nice.

Rebellion is a 3-4 player game in the same way that cooperative games are for more than 1 player.

I’m pretty sure the game is puzzle and scenario based so anyone watching you is going to get it spoiled. I own it but haven’t played it though so I’m not certain.

I’ll probably do a how to play video then. Maybe a review