Boardgaming in 2018!

My copy of Rising Sun came in. Looking forward to messing with it.

$140 is MSRP. Anything higher than that is scalpers trying to make a buck on low stock.

God help me I’m thinking about the $85 Daedalus organizer for Gloomhaven.

Gloomhaven has so much stuff that I think some sort of organizer is practically required. I have the Broken Token one and am glad I had it ready to go when the game showed up.

I just did the cheap 4-Plano box thing and it works great.

We’ve just finished the first real story arc in Gloomhaven The Necromancer after 10 scenarios. We failed 1, and came damn close a few others- literally exhausting ourselves as we win. This mission was also the trigger for the endgame of my personal quest, so I’m looking forward to seeing where things go from here.

Just got back from playing Dinosaur Island which I liked a lot. It was heavier than I expected but still did well with the theme. Maybe it’s a bit overstuffed, it has worker placement, buying, then more worker placement, and then a phase where the dinosaurs eat people. Will definitely play again.

That’s the best organizer, I think. I went with an EU based one, because this one would be double the price with shipping (over 100€) but of all the ones I’ve seen it seems the most practical.

I have many organizers (I like heavier games than my usual group, so it helps to sell them if setup is taken care of) but Gloomhaven is the only game I wouldn’t dread to open without an organizer.

While I can understand why some people want to use plastic sleeves on their board games (I kicked that habit back in my Decipher LotR TCG days), I wonder if Gloomhaven might make someone reconsider doing so. The cost of the recommended amount of sleeves for Gloomhaven in one store over here costs as much as the game itself.

Played my first game of Twilight Imperium (third edition) last weekend. I started the game by not really liking it much, but as the day went on I ended up liking it quite a bit.

One of the best things about the game is the movement mechanic. You put a token from a limited supply on a sector to activate it. That allows you to do things like building ships but also moving ships toward that sector. After you activated a sector, everything that is in there is basically locked down for the rest of the round. Quite an elegant way to make it so that you can not build and attack with the same ships in the same round.

Now there were a few fundamental problems with the game that I have since learned are fixed in the fourth edition. Especially when it comes to scoring points. At the beginning of your turn you can choose a role, Puerto Rico style. One of the roles just gives you two points straight up (out of the 10 needed). I realised how over powered that was and just began positioning myself to pick that role as much as possible. It made me win the game. The other scoring opportunities trickle out during the game and are of less value than just picking up that role. Crazy to make something so uninteresting that important.

Another issue that I had with the game was the player aid. There are a ton of ship types in the game which are al referred to by name and there is no hint on the player aid of what those ships look like. This made the learning curve much harder than needed the first few rounds.

Funny enough I thought I would hate the die roles for combat actions, but it ended up kind of liking the suspense. It was also simple enough so that you could make a fair assessment of the risk you were taking.

The original fix to the point role is in one of the early expansions for that edition, but they incorporated a lot of expansion ideas into 4th edition, as I understand it.

I was notified my copy of Darkest Night v2 will be shipping soon, and should be here this Saturday!

John Company arrived today. I have been really looking forward to it and am very ready to play, “The Game of Nepotism and Bureaucracy for one to six players.” Cute tagline and the idea of all players representing various families and trying to exploit the East India Company which is trying to exploit, well, the East; is a weird enough subject that it very much has a hook for me.

Tom Mc

Damn enablers :)

Sharpe,
I have TM and while I like it a lot. It’s not in my top 10. Would you say Gaia or Clans is different enough to warrant a buy? The graphic and component team of Gaia should be shot. It looks hideous. I’m not asking for much, but come on. Clans I had picked up, but due to a distributor debacle stores couldn’t sell the game so my order was cancelled.

Got some gaming in after being out of town and sick for the last week. I’m in a rut with new games. Just nothing quite scratching my itch.

Azul-
I’m not a fan of abstracts, but this was fun enough. The components to the game were not designed by someone with children. I just kept thinking coasters and starbursts.

New Angeles-
Interesting game. Like the theme and I would like to play it again. Not sure if would work for my usual group as there is a lot of negotiation, but played fast enough. I would recommend this to groups that do like negotiating and Archipelago.

TI4-
Second game of 3 players. Have another planned for 2 week with 4 to 5 players. I’m really enjoying the game.

Eclipse -
3 player game in 2 hours not too shabby.

Fortune and Glory-
I don’t know why, but I like this game and 2 new expansions are coming out this year.

Fallout -
(ugh) If ever a game needed an app. Long for the sake of being long. I’m not a fallout fan (just never played any of the games) but the theme is here. Interesting level up system, but there are better games even better FFG games that do similar things.

Wait till you play 4th edition. So much cleaner.

If you like the gameplay in Terra Mystica, then you will like the gameplay in Gaia Project. It’s very similar, with a few refinements. Clans of Caleondia depends on how much you like pure strategy. It doesn’t have a ton of flavor or player interaction, but the econ/strategy game is pretty good.

Just played a quick game of Gloomhaven with my son, and we loved it! The two of us made short work of the first scenario (I was a little worried at how tough it was going to be reading @tomchick talk about it in the previous thread) and I broke everything down and now we wait for the real campaign to start when our third player is available. He was a Spell Weaver and I was a Brute, and it was excellent.

The new edition has spin-down wheels for tracking health and XP and we found them hard to use. For one thing, the wheels are very easy to move, so you can often pick up the wheel and find them in the wrong position. For another, it’s hard to tell at a glance how much health your allies have, so I instead started tracking health with some little red dice I had previously picked up, for both allies and enemies.

I also used blue dice to track XP.

This made it not only a lot easier to track (than counting out and trying to carefully pile tokens) but much easier to see at a glance how much damage people had on them, too. Worked very well, I think.

We didn’t start a campaign, nor permanently track anything like picked up gold or XP, as we want to start fresh for the real thing. I mostly wanted to try out the game and teach my son how to play (he really took to it, and we had a fantastic time, as well as what I feel is a very fast set up and breakdown, which is key to my personal long term enjoyment) and I am super pumped to get into this regularly!

Welcome to the club!

I would kill a man if it meant letting me take this game back in time to give to me and my high school gaming group. 17 year old me would have died of ecstasy overload having this on hand. This is so fucking cool - from the sealed envelopes and character classes to the way each skill deck and action deck work to create defined and unique play styles and enemy types. This is genius level stuff here, and I’m proud to be a member of this club! :)

My upgrade kit for Gloomhaven (if you don’t like the spinwheels, just know that the first edition system where you tried to stick tracking tokens in a tiny cutout track on your character card was worse) has finally shipped…or at least been given a tracking number. But it’ll still be a few days. In the meantime, something else arrived: