It has the first three expansions, for a total of eighty cases.
It’s good to hear it might play better with a more casual group, since I’m more likely to get to play it than mahjong, which requires exactly three other players willing to learn a complex and really old game. (Elder Sign is solitaire, of course, so I don’t have to worry about any of that.)
We had a few board games show up today, and the surprise hit was the Harry Potter deckbuilding game. It was several people’s first deck building game and their first coop game.
Great to hear! I had one other friend tell me it was pretty good, so I picked it up for my sister for Christmas. She likes games but doesn’t have much experience with deck-builders. She loves Harry Potter though!
My son and I did our first play-through of Small World… He picked it up surprising fast… after the game he was like “I was hoping there would be more fighting”… LOL… luckily, I purchased Descent rev 2 knowing his proclivity toward combat.
Oregon Trail is a classic PC game from a long time ago. Well nostalgia is nothing if not profitable in this day and age, so somebody released a board game based on the Oregon Trail theme. I played it Christmas night. It was terrible.
It is cooperative, and players need to play 50 trail cards to win. For the most part, playing trail cards is pretty straight forward. If you have any trail cards that are legal to play, you do have to play them. If you do not, your turn is drawing a new trail card. So, essentially any card you draw, will eventually have to be played, meaning not a lot of strategy. Even worse, most trail cards have some challenge associated with them: either drawing a calamity card or needing to roll a die to ford a river. Calamity cards can eliminate a player unless somebody spends some supply cards to resolve and discard it.
So, that is pretty much the entire game. The only choice is do I play a card now or later when it is the only legal move. Or, do I spend supply cards to resolve a calamity and maybe keep a player in the game. It gets worse. There are two cards in the calamity deck (die of dysentery) which instantly eliminate a player from the game. No saving throw, no spending resources to prevent it, and no way to look at the calamity deck and possibly re-arrange it. I played this with relatives, and one was eliminated from play on his second turn due to this card.
There is the very rawest idea for a reasonable adaption of a game I enjoyed greatly while young, but the game is essentially asking you to win by surviving random events. Most likely you will not. I do not mind challenging games, but this isn’t challenging players by giving them a difficult puzzle. This is challenging players by making them roll dice and hope for the best.
Banzai
1773
This is a very solid game when you finish adding the various rules. It’s too simple for the first few ‘missions’, but by the fourth, there are enough different systems and villians going to make things interesting.
Tyjenks
1774
This is probably the worst game I have played since I got back into boardgaming 3 or so years ago. It basically takes a poorly made card game from 30 years ago when there was much less innovation and somehow makes it worse.
Catching up with some recent game recommendations played by the QT3 London Boardgame Group! Yeah! together with @Wendelius @Ginger_Yellow and a few others we have a regular weekend gaming thing going. If you are in London & might like to join PM me. Newcomers are very welcome!
Super quick and simple to learn and the indicated play time of about 45 is actually spot on! There is very little downtime. Even comparing to other programming games like Lords of Xidit & Robo-Rally there is less downtime. Play is quick, continuous, a little chaotic & occasionally hilarious. The closest comparator I can think of is Colt Express, which is a huge compliment, but this game does have more depth. Also pirates!
There are effectively two things going on. One is a ship maneuvering, battling & boarding and the other is an exploration of the treasure island by player captains. They are impactful upon each other and both dimensions offer ways to pick up VPs.
If a player ship is reduced to zero health it becomes a ‘Ghost Ship’ with some different powers. I became a Ghost Ship by our second turn but also managed to redeem back to the living world via cashing in 5 doubloons. Less impressive, my Captain literally didn’t leave the Island beach during the game. Hammock, coconuts, good fish, why climb towards a volcano?
The end-game is super fast and basically gives a round or two of opportunity to pummel each other and potentially steal doubloons or gain notoriety for extra VPs. Ironically despite being in a losing position I started our first end-game round with a full hand of ‘Captain’ cards which advanced my Captain to the end-game trigger.
The basic game already offers more depth & variation that Colt Express and there are optional / advanced rules to play with for more variety. Could definitely come to love this one.
If you like hidden traitor or social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica, Resistance, Dark Moon, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Coup, Love Letter etc then Tortuga 1667 offers a fantastic light to mid-weight quick playing option with minimal learning curve. Great ‘twist’ in comparison to the other games mentioned is that there are two or three teams - French, English and potentially one ‘Dutch’ player. No one knows at the start who is on which team!
Probably works better at higher player counts but our group of 5 enjoyed it a lot. Each turn offered some real action choices. Gather information to prepare for a later turn, push your luck by taking a chance on a card you haven’t seen, go for a take that move, shift treasure around, misdirect, call a vote, jump around between a ship and the island? Choices & consequences are more meaningful than other games of similar duration.
I played this in a group of 4 at Essen. If you’ve played Camel Cup / Camel Up it has a lot of similarities. It is a more complex and also a longer game for better or worse. I do like how the shared tableaus mean you have some shared and some hidden information between players. I have a fair level of appetite and tolerance for randomness so long as gameplay is engaging and enjoyed this.
Brooski
1778
So, Gloomhaven is the #1 game on Boardgamegeek now.
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame
In the history of BGG, there have only been 7 number one games. Here are the other six (in reverse chronological order):
Ah, the days when Paths of Glory was #1!
/wistfulness
The King is dead, long live the King!
First Kickstarted game to be officially the best game in the world ever.
Brooski
1780
What I find interesting is that based on the list, those are all really good games (except Pandemic) that shook up the current mechanical consensus.
I’ve never played Tigris and Euprhates and I believe there is an ios version of the game. Does it still hold up today or have other games come out that do it better?
SlyFrog
1782
I’m just happy that Pandemic is gone. I’ll see about Gloomhaven once I get it, hopefully in January.
Brooski
1783
It’s a classic Knizia. Nothing else does quite those mechanics. It’s a fixed four-player game, though.
jsnell
1784
I can’t imagine E&T being a satisfying game against an AI. So much of it is about trying to read what tiles the other players have in hand, so that you can trigger the right conflicts.
Mark_L
1785
It’s still number one in my heart.
It’s fantastic! It has a great sense of scale, like you’re playing through thousands of years of history in an hour and a half. Empires rise and fall and your family of leaders can be really fickle. If someone has a better kingdom than you you can try and oust them by conquering their kingdom, but if you can’t do that you can just cause a religious revolution and steal their kingdom from them. The game is really dynamic and dramatic.
I agree with @jsnell that so much of it is about trying to understand what others are doing and it seems like it wouldn’t work with AI. (I also think it works great at 3 players unlike @brooski, but it’s a pretty bad 2 player game.)
Except Pandemic? It’s been scientifically determined on BGG that Pandemic is a better game than Twilight struggle and rest of the wargames.
