We had a super game of Churchill at the Lucky Lab Thursday Game Night last night. We blew through the “tournament” (5-Turn) scenario in three hours, which was great. Oh yeah, @David2 won because the British are tricksy!
This is a fair criticism. If that’s a primary thing you’re looking for, then you have no reason to revisit Dominion. (And since you asked for newer games, my “recommendation” was just an excuse to spout my unpopular opinion again. I’m sorry I don’t have more restraint.)
This is the thing I think is conspicuously NOT true. Most deckbuilders have taken the deck-construction idea from Dominion, but utterly missed the second element that made Dominion such a revelation, and that’s card mechanics that complement each other in almost every combination. Most deckbuilders have a very shallow set of card interactions compared to Dominion. And usually the more themed the game is (as much as I like that), the more one-dimensional the card combos become.
I’m very much on the fence for “The Shared Dream”. Want to play it solo. Any comments on the game?
I so thoroughly agree with you here. Most games simplify the card mechanics in a way that makes the cards and turns so much less interesting than Dominion. I especially appreciate the “one action per turn” thing that seems to be the first thing thrown out by most subsequent deckbuilders. It’s so core to what makes Dominion interesting!
Played two great games this week! Loved them!
Most recently played Churchill. @Brooski hosted this gem, and it really is a fantastic political/ pseudo wargame from GMT Games. You can play as Churchill, Roosevelt, or Stalin and set political agendas, debate agendas, and finally assign those resources to the pacific or European theaters to push forward to defeat both Japen and Germany. The game is amazingly simple once you get the basics down! The depth of it though, cannot be understated, and the asymmetric powers and objectives for each side has some real teeth to it.
Brooski succinctly taught us the basics of the game in about 20 minutes, and before you know it we were wheeling and dealing for our agendas. I played as Churchill, and very quickly picked up on this factions key strengths, the boost I get to setting the agenda allowed me to start one agenda that I usually kept control of. Additionally it quickly became apparent to me that since I always won the agenda my strength was seeing what other people wanted to prioritize, and based on the strength of my 7 drawn staff cards I could see where I was likely to have the strongest influence.
From there I could either choose agenda that suited my strength or weakened my ‘allies’., forcing them to likely have to spend resources to prevent from being weakened by having their resources co-opted. I loved playing Churchill, and his staffs strengths were obvious to me, and felt instantly suited to the European faction! In fact, it clicked so well that at times I felt I was kind of overpowered.
It also REALLY tough to tell who is winning, and winning too well is bad, as if you crush your opponents by more than 22 victory points, you actually lose! I went for it, and was leery I might trigger that, but turns out the winner only had a 5 point victory, REALLY tough to forecast the spread (especially on the first play).
I LOVE playing Churchill, I’d like to try Stalin, but I think I’m nervous about getting stuck with Roosevelt, as I didn’t get a clear strategy for the US faction to victory… other than pursuing the Atom bomb, and winning the war in the pacific. However, the US is more vulnerable to allies co-opting their production, which at times can be crippling and would hate being on the receiving end of. Also Churchill’s staff is particularly suited in stealing agendas back if the US is winning. I’m leery of how tough a fight the US has to victory.
I see some serious mistakes i made now, like with stealing production which is one production stolen, but if you steal military resources you steal 2 production worth. Stealing production is good if you need it to push the atom bomb research, or increase your fleet size, or fund influencing actions for political gain I didn’t pick up on that till late in the game, loved this game, and cant wait to play again!
This week I also played Combat Commander: Europe. This is essentially a lighter version of Advanced Squad Leader with card mechanics and again from GMT Games! I also loved this one!
I loved Advanced Squad Leader, and would normally vie for being the allies, but my strategic acumen took a big hit a few years back due to some neurological damage I suffered, and wasn’t confident I could do the allies justice, and consented to playing the Nazis.
The US as the defenders set up first, and they unexpectedly deployed right up front! So, I basically set up in some woods just outside of the US’s weapon range and just within the superior ranges of the German light and heavy machine guns.
The game has interesting mechanics, In that you draw cards and that determines what actions you can take that turn, The actions can be move or fire, etc. Once you take a action with a unit, they can’t take another. Except they have effects you can play to supplement actions, like gunning on the run, or spraying fire. There are leaders that can activate all units within a certain radius, and also add their leadership stat to all the soldiers in range.
The card mechanic does a good job of simulating the chaos of combat and the lack of certainty a squad will do what you want, when you want them, and adapting to the opportunities at hand. Cover plays a big factor in survival, but the cards often lure you into taking chances that put you in a place where you end up out in the open. The game has the equivalent of dice rolls by drawing a card which all have numbers on them and can additionally trigger events, including sniper fire. Killing a unit requires you first damage it to pin it, and then damage it again to destroy it. Of course, the pinned units can use a recovery card to pull to return to full strength.
I did lose, but I did start out very well inflicting 2 allied kills, and pinning down two allied squares with my optimal set up and raking the buildings with allies with my three squads lead by my best leader. I then had a 2 other squads on a later turn dash out into the road, with 2 recovery cards saved and using terrain to block most of the allies return fire on my squad in the open. My teams ended up getting suppressed as expected, but used my planned recovery cards and then used my satchel charges and flame thrower to deal the death blow and take out 2 more allied squad and a leader, and hopefully force him to retreat. Turned out I got some poor card draws and didn’t achieve the kills I was hoping for… and next turn the allies did a move and hip fire to pin the guys in the open and had his squad adjacent advance and wipe out my squads in HTH, It felt all very squad leaderly without taking infinity hours to play.
So says the tricksy Russians! :) Its strange how on turn 2 how Churchill had a heart attack (!!) AND Roosevelt died! Everyone knew it had to be Russian poisoning! Also you were pretty darn scary with you stealing ALL the research on the atomic bomb AND defeating Germany in the European theater! Also, there is also very little you can do, to tie up/distract the Russian war machine during the agenda phase.
I don’t own Clank, but i did play it and with the sunken expansion. It’s a fun game and not that difficult to get into. I can see where some might want more, depth and maybe more complexity but was really enjoyable when played it.
Well one thing we could have done is open up a second front for them.
And one of the little wrinkles that, being inexperienced, did not get flagged in time was me and @Brooski fighting the Global objective. Your colonial machine was the driver for victory for you. And with Colonialism there wasn’t anything we could really do to stop it. Had Bruce let me have the global issue, I could have flipped that, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered, but maybe it would. But, alas, we fought over the global issue, and you wound up winning with a nearly covered colonial Asia.
But that is an interesting emergent gameplay property, though I saw it too late. It was in both of our best interests (more so if it wasn’t the last turn) for me to flip the colonialism global issue. Sometimes you win by having someone else win! Now that we know the basics, it would allow for more seeing opportunities to haggle.
Really by the last round the game was nearly well decided, though perhaps a few minor changes here and there.
Granted I was hopelessly behind after having a brutal conference in Yalta that saw me get shut out. Even second place Bruce more than doubled me up! I think the game as the US felt very reactive, where I almost never got to set goals, but merely responded to what was going on. It didn’t help that all my production got siphoned off to the eastern front!
I think the longer game would give more opportunity to start setting things up. As is, the US, I felt the short game basically required me to dump everything I had into the Pacific. But a few setbacks there and, well, it led to lagging the score. But perhaps that’s the quirk of the short game, the full game might give a little more room to absorb a few bad dice rolls.
Iwo Jima, a tough rock in the ocean, and the Americans stumbling block. I’ll be back. With more guns next time.
@CraigM, I felt bad about how much I threw you under the bus during the agenda phase (really). So much of my staff it dedicated to stealing from the US IF its on your track. What’s worse? I often didn’t even fully utilize their abilities in that area because I was locking political influence out so effectively. I really would have hated to be in your shoes!
I suppose the one weakness I really have in this area, is if Russia decided to fight me for political influence . I would not have been nearly as effective in countering them.
You really had some rough luck in the pacific! And yes people leaching off your resources really hurt your war machine…sorry about that. :-I
Also, would have opening up the 2nd front really hindered the Russians? They could ignore it pretty much as they did and still have the same outcome. Opening up, is at MOST a potential distraction, one I thought Bruce would never fall for…
True, unless we used the Russian directed offensives to ‘force’ him to spend there, rather than taking them from us, and super boosting his stacks each turn. At the very least it could have stopped a breakthrough or two and given the West a chance to get to Germany proper.
But without utilizing the directed offensives? No, it wouldn’t matter
It’s amateurish and sloppy. I bought the base game and all the expansions that I’ll sell you for cheap!
-Tom
Everything about Churchill sounds frickin amazing.
The Harry Potter Hogswarts Battles game is a nice co-op deckbuilder that has very simple rules and cards to start, and gradually adds complexity.
My kids also like the Legendary, marvel superheros co-op deck builder.
These both have the advantage of not being as prone to ‘one player to rule them all’ co-op game syndrome.
I think Churchill is the most important wargame design of the past ten years. And then Pericles does interesting things with it.
Played another round of 1846. I really like it, and will probably pick it up to play back home. Scales well based on players and you really get into the meat of the game really fast. I really enjoy the drafting of private companies instead of auctions, and the partial capitalization where companies earn dividends on their unsold stock. I need to stop thinking of distance in hexes and rather in stops, though.
Then, after a quick game of Cryptid, we played the crazy multiverse mode of Sentinels of the Multiverse: Oblivaeon. It is completely and utterly ridiculous. Mostly in a good way, I think, but not something I’d want to play except for the right occasions. Thematically I think it is a huge success, though.
As someone who has gone on a deep dive of Sentinels the digital version, I’m glad to hear this. Still exploring the ‘season 1’ Content, which is basically everything prior to the multi villain team expansion.
It has literally been the only video game I’ve played for two months. Not that this is saying much.
Thanks for the comment. I liked the theme of the game but was unsure about the mechanics (and I fear there’s no cheap selling from the US to Germany anyway). So thank you for talking me out of it.
I can certainly understand the temptation to get Shared Dream It seems like an awfully cool idea, and it looks appealing, with the different scenarios, and the waking/dream states for each character, and the randomly built cities. But the execution is a mess and it smacks of first-time designer without many playtesting resources. Lots of useless character powers, a borderline useless magic attribute, unclear interactions that lead to rules issues, and way too much leaning on lore and writing. Since I went all-in – I’m such a sucker – I still want to play some of the expansion scenarios to see if they get any better. There’s a zombie apocalypse scenario, for instance, with rules for infection or something. I can’t very well not try it. But I have my doubts that it will come together. And I’m certainly in no hurry to get back to it with so many other things to play.
-Tom
Just wondering, how long did your game last, and did you win? In the one time I tried it, we played until the wee hours of the night and we lost at the last moment.