Are you talking about the promo spirits pack?
Gloomhaven is now available for $140 (free shipping, no tax) over at CoolStuffInc:
I managed to talk myself out of this when it was $130 on Amazon about a month ago, and then the price spiked. With more and more of you jerks talking about it (even giving it a separate thread!), I just can’t resist this window of opportunity. Even if I don’t have anyone to play it with. :(
I’ve now bought it twice and sold it twice…just too much of a time sink.
Still working on Mansions of Madness prep and storage, off and on. The plus side is that 2nd edition only uses the minis and map tiles from 1st edition, that’s it. All the cards, tokens, puzzle pieces, and other miscellaneous nonsense (and holy god does MoM1E have a ton of random bespoke nonsense), completely irrelevant to the new edition. As are the scenario books, etc. So all that can either go in the trash, or, more sanely, an “if I ever play 1E-style again” box in the closet. But there are still a ton of minis, and tokens and things to deal with, and the minis don’t like to click into the bases and are a nightmare to store that way anyway, and the monster stat tokens keep sliding out of the bases and aaaargh. But hey, I’m not playing it this week so I’ve got time.
Dumbest idea of the lot? 2nd edition has a “Riot” monster, which is represented by three individual rioter minis that all click into a single base, on one foot only. Because there’s no way that could go horribly wrong.
If you need help being talked out of it just know not everyone enjoys it and put yourself in that group.
Personally I disliked it.
Played Dead of Winter for the first time tonight, with 1 experienced player, 3 newbies including me, and the “Too Many Mouths to Feed” scenario. Yeah. We got crushed. I liked the game though and would play it again.
Too late. :)
Seriously, I know the acclaim is not universal, but I’ve read enough here and elsewhere to know that there is a high probability that I will love it. Nothing is 100%, of course, but I guess I’m ready to take the risk.
Ugh, Dead of Winter. I don’t know if I’ve ever spent so much of my life not beating something -.-
Are we still doing phrasing?
@Mark_L As I am sure that was your reference, or one of those many references on the amazing Archer, you win the Friday Award in Excellent sticker.
We played Dead of Winter for the first time in several years and found it kind of lacking and not nearly as much fun as when we first played it. What changed? No idea. We all remembered the story cards being more interesting, and instead they were confusing and didn’t really make any sense most of the time. Plus, the actual gameplay was a little boring maybe? And to be fair we were playing a ton of different games that weekend, so it may have been a little board-game-burnout-creep mixed in there. We also tried it in co-op mode and it was actually way too easy, but with almost always one traitor out of the three of us it was damned near impossible. Not sure what happened to us with that game, to be honest.
After Loving Battlestar Galactica, someone said I should try Dead of Winter. I tried it, and boy was that the worst comparison to make the game against. I might have enjoyed the game ok, if not played against that context. Anyway, I always considered this one boring… lol
What I like with Dead of Winter is that you need to reach your own goal to win, simply being on the right side is not enough.
Asmodee acquires Lookout Games & Mayfair Games.
They continue to take over the board gaming world.
https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/73620/asmodee-acquires-lookout-games-and-mayfair-games
I always wondered when the boardgaming bubble would burst, and now I see it’s going to be soon, after Asmodee buy everyone and then somehow fuck it all up.
I’m already not super fond of them (mandatory minimum pricing) but it hasn’t stopped me from spending $200-odd on Arkham Horror LCG and another $140 or so on Mansions of Madness 2E this week so I guess I’m part of the problem. (My haul from the Gaming Goat included what appears to be every release currently extant for the LCG, as well as the Legendary Encounters: Alien expansion and a clearance copy of Unicornus Knights.)
Edit/update:
Finally got Mansions more or less sorted (2E box for minis, 1E box for map tiles, Streets of Arkham box for all the tokens and cards and things, Call of the Wild box for all the 1E components and scenarios and stuff that aren’t usable in 2E), and unboxed the Alien expansion, and Unicornus Knights, and tried to unbox the Arkham LCG. The contrast between Fantasy Flight and publishers that actually give a shit about how their customers will store their damn games has never been starker. Arkham Horror LCG isn’t even technically playable out of the box because they want you to have an opaque bag to draw tokens out of and don’t give you one. To say nothing of how they completely fail to provide any sort of reasonable way to store the cards and tokens.
My wife and I finished up Pandemic Legacy Season 2 today. I found it had more choices and things to do than Season 1. Both were very good and probably the best board game experience I’ve had (mind you I don’t play a lot of board games). But, that clears the deck for Gloomhaven!
Here is a picture of our final map, score and some details of our Pandemic Legacy Season 2 play through. I would not look in here if you are currently playing the game or think you may at some point.
Sorry, the picture is blurry. Here is the map after we won in December. We thought we did pretty well, only losing the first game of the month 2 times and never losing the month as a whole. We didn’t have any cities end at 0 population. There were 3 at one point but we saved them with our production points. Our final score was 826, which was 24 points shy of getting in the best bracket - which surprised us.
After we were done we scratched off cards we didn’t do just to see what was on them. We felt guilty, but it was fun and the game was over so what the heck!
We stayed with our same 2 characters the entire time, neither getting and exposure until it was mandatory the final month. Wow was that final month stressful! We would have lost after my turn if I wasn’t able to end it when I did. We would have been totally screwed going into the 2nd game of December.
There were so many choices in this game on what to build on the map, what to make permanent, what upgrades to take. It really was a great experience.
Played 2 more games of Gaia Project yesterday, came in 4th and 3rd out of 4, with a group of veteran strategy gamers. In the one game I played a few weeks back with a different group, I won easily but with the hardcore group from yesterday, I cannot win. This group has a lot of Terra Mystica experience, 100 or 200 plays they say.
I signed up for another game of old-school Dune next Saturday. Should be fun. I kind of want to be the Bene Gesserit this time.
The BG are the most fun, that’s why!