Boardgaming in 2018!

Games
2088

2008 is an interesting start date for the revolution, except Agricola was already out for a year already and we all knew the Revolution Was Here and In Full Swing by then. Not to mention St Pete, Dominion, Race For the Galaxy/San Juan, TTR, Caylus, Imperial, Thurn & Taxis, Through the Ages, Tribune etc,etc.

2003 would be a safer choice - after Puerto Rico showed the gameplay, right before San Juan and Saint Petersburg introduced the streamlining and elegance we now expect in modern games (both are still frequently played around here).

2089

They’ve never done that. There’s still regular text articles, including a (usually) weekly news roundup, reviews, lists, etc. Also a podcast. They apparently get way more traffic from videos though.

I agree, but let’s not assume that Talisman-like games have to be roll-and-moves just because that’s Talisman’s biggest flaw. Prophecy is very clearly inspired by Talisman but that’s one of the mechanics it drops, to excellent effect.

2090

Oh, I love Dune. I just think one of the things that got invented with good boardgaming was an awareness about pacing, and a big part of that is game length. The asymmetry of Dune is still amazing, especially for how smartly it evokes actual Dune-ness. But you can probably teach and play three games of Chaos in the Old World in the time it would take to teach and play one game of Dune. Probably my favorite part of the invention of good boardgame design is that it’s careful about how it uses its most precious resource: my and my friends’ time.

Don’t get me started on Agricola. I have a lot of respect for Rosenberg and it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling seeing his name on a box. But it seems he’s got one foot stuck in the Time Before We Invented Good Boardgame Design. Agricola has three strikes against it: dry mathy points salad, punishing difficulty, and outdated worker placement. The only meaningful interaction is cock-blocking. Frankly, I think Le Havre, which is more or less concurrent with Agricola, is far and away a better design. Also, I don’t really know anything about A Feast for Odin, but I keep meaning to look into it.

What’s Prophecy? Lemme Google that… Oh, look, a super old game from the guy who did Mage Knight. Pass!

:)

-Tom

2091

I agree. I’ve only played Prophecy once, but it struck me as a great “move around a map and have adventures”-game.

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2092

I don’t think any of your complaints about Mage Knight would apply to Prophecy. I have no idea if Talisman-but-a-lot-better is a design space that would do anything for you, though.

2093

I really dislike how SU&SD will enjoy a game, but not recommend it because they don’t think its worth the money. Everyone’s money value judgement is different depending on their financial situation. I guess I’d rather them focus on reviewing the actual game than giving consumer advice.

2095

NAILED IT.

Just curious how is it a broken mess? I’ve only played it 3 times and it was very reminiscent of our Dune games but under 4 hours

2096

Weird, I thought you find Pandemic just as insufferable?

Catan is not by any means a bad game and certainly not as bad as Monopoly (which is basically a bad game). I can agree with you that I don’t have much interest in playing Catan and still say it is fundamentally well-designed. To wit:

  • Open trade is an invigorating and simple form of player interaction.
  • Playing on the intersections of tiles makes for pretty rich choices of placement.
  • The map is incredibly readable in a strategic sense, while also being colorful and fairly evocative.
  • The bad: I think the armies mechanic is dull.
2097

This is an age-old discussion regarding game reviews. A lot of people agree with you. A lot of people, like me, don’t.

I can accept perhaps that you cannot necessarily add a review component based on the price of one game alone, but you can certainly compare game X with other games in its genre/class from a price/value perspective. Last time I said this, I compared it to car reviews, which I think caused several strokes and other cases of fainting and fan waving.

(And no, before it is said, I do not buy that games are art and therefore are not subject to monetary factors in a review. If the components are substandard for a $100 game, for example, I want to know that.)

2098

I have a couple things to say to this.

One is that the one puzzle on the Pharoh we couldn’t solve without a hint did something that is somewhat standard for Exit, but since this was our first three us for a loop. When they say use everything…

As for Unlock, they have improved a lot on their design. In fact they’ve done one thing that’s really smart, they’ve leaned into the app integration. Little audio clues and puzzles that aren’t straight math codes improve the games. It has allowed more interesting usage of their machine mechanic.

And the most recent ones we’ve done have had some really great design on them. The pirate one uses the card backs in a way I really enjoy, it felt appropriately Treasure Island. The Wizard of Oz has characters, and each has a personal quest. So just because you defeated the witch doesn’t mean you’ve won, you still need to help the Cowardly Lion find bravery. It makes it feel like much more of an adventure. Easily their best effort yet.

2099

I feel like it’s a concern that only makes sense if one ignores the actual review and leaps straight to the bare bones conclusion. If you read or watch a review, and one factor doesn’t matter to you then you can, in a well made review (and IMO SU&SD reviews are), ignore that factor and make a decision based on the other things they present that do matter to you.

2100

For me 2009 was the year of Endeavour and Carson City. I am sure there are other good games from then as well but those two in particular struck me as being really well designed and having a great pace and overall length.

2101

I got excited for a moment about all the new posts. I thought something big must be happening in 2018 and a new awesome game or maybe a few, hopefully not only 1-4 players was coming but nope… haha. I don’t look at the years around 2009 as anything good, and I certainly wasn’t in a position to buy anything. I really should go back some day and see what I missed.

2102

There are tons of ways to mitigate the random draw in Cosmic Encounter. That’s an absurd complaint that would only hold up if everyone playing the game didn’t care who won. If your table is letting anyone get to 4 colonies, then yeah it’s going to be random who wins. At 3 colonies, there’s no safe trading and a player needs to somehow get an ally to 4 and then ally with them again to win as a pair, which isn’t a guaranteed play at all since who you face is random (and could end up being the person you allied with).

I’ve played the game in more party-ish settings where we’re not playing competitively and the game is silly-fun, in line with what you’re saying, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for. But if you get people around the table who want to play competitively then Cosmic Encounter definitely holds up to that playstyle and, unless powers dictate otherwise, you’re unlikely to be winning with your opening hand anyways.

I still think this is the best design with take-that elements out there. It depends a lot on the players coming to the table for the same reason, but I think that’s true of any game with heavy take-that style design. Nowadays I only play it a couple times a year, but I don’t think I’ve gone a year without playing it in the last decade. And I’m intending to keep that train rolling.

2103

Ha! But in their Seafall review, they told everyone to go buy a copy just to appreciate the design!

2104

They took the factions that were on the verge of being overpowered and made them better, then nerfed the factions that were on the verge of being underpowered.

They wanted to make it faster, so they shrunk the map and doubled the base movement speed. That was a huge nerf to factions that relied on some kind of movement advantage as their strength: Guild, Fremen, even the Harkonen/Atreidis starting with a spaceport.

They took away the Fremen super unit, but let the Emperor keep his, because…reasons?

They took out blank cards. I can see wanting to remove that aspect in the game, but again they were a pretty big part of the balance (played into Harkonen and Atreidis strength) and they didn’t replace the part they removed with anything else.

There was something about with the way the card worked that triggered alliances that they changed that made it less turbulent, but I can’t recall it.

A new rule they put in was “no secret talking”, which was a huge nerf to Atredis since they relied on information brokering.

They took away all factions being able to trade money at the end of a turn, which was a HUGE boost the Emperor. The Hacan (Guild equivalent) in REX often have tons of money they can’t do anything with because they don’tneed it for movement, and they suck in combat due to their weak leaders.

WHY ARE YOU BOOSTING THE EMPEROR SO MUCH, FFG!!! He was already one of the strongest factions in Dune, requiring careful play by everyone to not hand him the game. Then they went and hobbled all his rivals. The emperor got major boosts, the Bene-Gessrit went untouched, and everyone else got indirectly nerfed when they removed or downplayed a bunch of mechanics that played into their strength but didn’t compensate for it. I…have no idea why they just straight up removed the Fremen super unit.

Dune took longer to play, but it was worth it.

2105

Well, if there’s one thing I know about Chvatil, it’s that no two of his games are alike. Dude’s a chameleon or something.

Oh, I do. But Pandemic tries to address a lot of the issues that bogged down boardgame design up to that point. Catan is just a dumbed-down family-friendly Euro game that somehow got super successful, and while I agree with you that the idea of built-in player trading is good, I don’t think the implementation in Catan is worth a wooden nickel. Pandemic, on the other hand, addressed issues of theming, player interaction, pacing, balance, modern day relevance, AI, and so on. It was one of the first games to say, “Okay, forget all those other games everyone is playing; let’s try something different.” I think there are far better versions of Pandemic – some by Matt Leacock himself – but that’s the turning point* where good boardgame design was invented. The equivalent of nailing theses on a church door.

We tried Carson City recently, and I think I’m out of love with it. :( Endeavor, on the other hand, is still gold.

It’s certainly the purest, isn’t it? It’s like the whole game design is a support structure for a lot of back-and-forth “take that’ing!”

-Tom

* Look, we all know I’m casting about for an arbitrary point in time. Basically, I’ve been saying “there are no good boardgames older than 10 years” for too long, so now I’ve got to fix the statement to a specific date, and seems the publishing of Pandemic is as good a date as any.

2106

Except it is 3 years post Railways of the World, and ergo your chosen date is invalid.

If you’d have said 2005, I’d have shrugged, but 2008 excludes that masterpiece so I must loudly plant my flag there. Gotta stand up for my second favorite board game of all time.

2107

I’ve gotten in a couple of games of Thunderstone Quest now and it’s my current favorite deckbuilder, by a lot. In terms of core deckbuilding game play, it’s a further improvement and refinement of the prior games. For example, now all the complex stuff about “attributes” versus “abilities” and so on is all gone, replaced by fairly simple phases of “in the village”,“in the dungeon”,“before battle” and “after battle”. The additions are more content: a modular dungeon layout with rooms affecting the monsters in many more ways than just light=strength, and several options within the village. You can also purchase consumables now which can even out good and bad hands quite a bit.

The biggest change is that defeated monsters no longer go into your discard pile: you get experience chits for defeating monsters (and sometimes other stuff) and then the monster card is removed from play. This prevents that whole “I did awesome early and now my deck sucks rocks” issue.

Another great change is that the monsters are now tiered by level. There’s always a pushover Tier 0 opponent (infinitely respawning like the Goblin in Clank!), and then tiers 1 to 3 of progessively tougher opponents. Taking on the low tiers doesn’t require much light, but going deep its gets pretty dark. This means that you have the option to start killing stuff in the dungeon very early on, but to score the big points you also need to hit town to train and buy the good gear.

Two thumbs all the way up for me. My buddy has the Kickstarter with 2,000 cards and I will sadly have to buy the retail version and piecemeal out the expansions.

2108

I jumped in on their last Kickstarter for the co-op/solo barricades mode (plus all the other stuff). It’s like 4 tons of cards. I very much look forward to that delivery day. I like the theme of Thunderstone too where you are actually leveling heros and equipping them as you play. I have the original first edition Thunderstone. It looks like it has improved a lot over the years.