Note, some of the new corporations are not very well balanced in Venus next. Though I think Venus next combined with Prelude makes the game a little more deep but the same amount of playtime
Recommended alternative setup, each player drafts one of the core corps and one each from Venus Next and Prelude corps. They keep one after looking at their initial draft. It gives the players some additional strategy and options on starting. So far we’ve played that setup each time we play and all so far prefer it!
Adam Sandler voice [ON]: I spent the first 18 years of my life being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness so I never had Chistmas as a child, AND my birthday is 2 days before Christmas and I skipped that too, SO I WILL OPEN MY CHRISTMAS PRESENTS WHENEVER I WANT!!
Runebound, I assume you mean. I haven’t played the third edition but personally I would play Talisman over Runebound any day of the week and twice on Sundays. For all its flaws, Talisman at least consistently lets you move and encounter things. Runebound, not so much.
Yeah, Runebound. I think that game really needs a couple expansions to be an enjoyable experience, but I’ve never yet had an enjoyable experience with Talisman. I picked it up on Steam for cheap and even still it just feels like it drags.
I have played two editions of Runebound and playtested a couple of the expansions and the terrain dice movement system and encounter bead system just guarantee a miserably dull experience in my book. I wanted to like it, too, because it is absolutely meant to be a better, deeper version of what Talisman is doing, but it just fails, imo.
In regard to Venus Next, IMO you are correct. The other two expansions (Hellas & Elysium and Prelude) don’t add tons of cards and don’t dilute the game IMO.
I’m not such a big fan of Venus – I think it definitely dilutes the game and drags it out longer. The official “workaround” for that extra length proposed by the rulebook is “push up a world parameter each turn!” which I think really messes with a lot of strategies.
But Hellas + Elysium is a good expansion, though I think it’s quite pricey for a double-sided boards with FIXED milestones / awards. I really wish that expansion was a double-sided board and a bunch of overlays for milestones/awards, like how the Venus expansion had overlays.
I’ve only played two games with Prelude but I like what it does to the game, as it means each player’s starting position is even more divergent than in the normal game. (I also quite like the idea of, but have yet to play, just including the prelude corps into the normal mix and not giving every one a prelude cards, except for the corp that gives you some)
I’ve yet to play Colonies. I think I’ll wait to play that one before buying it.
* Well, one flaw in the game is the complete lack of player interaction, aside from the awful and undefendable “take that” cards that aren’t even usually good for the player playing the card, and are best ignored by everyone. The only defensive card is the one that means NOTHING can happen to your green stuff, which is a massive swing in the other direction. I really want an expansion that addresses this aspect of the game.
Well, sure, if you’re drafting randomly. Which is a lousy way to draft! But deciding whether it’s important to take a card you need or deprive the other guy of a card he needs is the very picture of “interesting decisions”. It also adds an interactive element to the game that you don’t get when you’re just playing it as multiplayer solitaire dependent on luck of the draw.
By the way, the folks who ported Terraforming Mars didn’t include drafting. After much complaining from the folks who actually play Terraforming Mars, they’ll be adding it early next month. There’s are a fair number of other issues with the port, but at least they’re fixing the one that all but undermines the design of the game. I mean, even if you don’t care for the drafting, how can you not understand how important it is to many of the folks who play the game?
Sorry to invade the boardgame thread with a Steam game, but it is a boardgame! :-)
I have Splendor on Steam and just played a couple games. My impression is similar to one someone else had in one of these threads. It’s a neat puzzle game, but after a game or two I’ve had enough. It plays pretty quickly though and I can see firing it up once in a while.
I’ve only played the game 2 times (won both 2 different groups). I hated the first game so much it has been almost 9 months since I tried it again. We did not draft. At the threat of opening Pod’s Pandora’s Box, is drafting a rule in the game? Do you do it each round? Personally drafting sounds good in theory, but the game is already needlessly long. I can’t imagine who is sitting there looking at each card in a player’s tableau. Also isn’t the game supposed to be tactical. You have to look at the cards you’re given figure out what will help you or won’t? Heck sometimes I would buy only keep one card, maybe none. It didn’t seem to hurt my scores.
It’s a ‘variant’ in the rule-book. Instead of getting 4 science cards each turn to buy from, you instead draft 4 cards. And then from the final 4 cards you have you buy stuff.
In my experience of it it just adds more time to the game and doesn’t really affect the outcome, but it gives people the impression that it affects things.
Whether drafting improves Terraforming Mars depends entirely on the group of players. If you have a group without anyone prone to AP and where every member of the group knows the cards at least moderately, then drafting is a huge improvement. If either of those things is not true, then drafting adds more time and delay than strategy.
My best Terraforming Mars experiences are where I can find a group where drafting is viable. However, if people are still learning the cards and/or even moderately prone to slow decision making, then drafting is not advised.
Unfortunately that would have limited it’s market by 70% to 80%. As a member of that 20% to 30% who drafting works well for, I prefer drafting but there’s a reason why TFM gets discussed so much: it has a relatively wide appeal for a medium-heavy game.
If you made drafting mandatory in TFM it would make the game effectively a heavy game with a more limited player base. I would personally like that game better, but I also like the fact that it’s easy to find TFM players at most Meetups.
Here’s one way to think of it:
TFM without drafting is a light-side-of-medium Euro with a higher than normally amount of randomness. TFM with drafting is a heavy-side-of-medium Euro with a lot of strategy, that is also longer and more susceptible to AP.
