Which I’ve developed somewhat of an obsession over the digital version for.
I don’t want to contemplate playing the physical game, especially not some of my favorites like Argent Adept or Guise.
Great meeting you, too!
I managed to escape with minimal damage. We don’t have much space in our apartment, so I have a pretty high bar for purchases these days. Came home with:
Everdell, which is a beautifully produced worker placement and tableau building game.
Dinosaur Tea Party, which re-implements the old Whosit? deduction game.
Adorable Pandaring, a surprisingly cutthroat filler game about adorable pandas.
I wanted to pick up Paper Tales, but it sold out.
I also really enjoyed Auztralia and Root, but I’m counting on others in my gaming group to pick them up.
I don’t think BGG is all that bad, but I do think there is one characteristic across the site: everyone is a cheerleader for whatever game is being discussed on its forum. There is very little critical discussion, and when it starts, it’s usually dismissed at best, or shouted down at worse. Pretty much everyone over there is desperate to convince himself his $50 was well spent, which is relatively easy to do given that most people posting will only ever play a given game a couple of times.
Also, there are some really dumb people over there*. 90% of the rules questions could be answered by reading the rules.
-Tom
* To be fair, there are some really dumb people everywhere.
It sounds like you’re describing “the internet”.
For those of you in the US, Amazon has some daily deals on various board games:
Initial impressions of Wildlands: very positive. Possibly the most player interaction of any game ever, as you can be interrupted mid-turn and pretty much every action puts you in conflict with someone else. The tension between wanting to take lots of actions on your turn and needing to have cards in reserve to react during others’ turns, or to pick up crystals, is a really powerful dynamic. It’s quick, and gets very tense as players near the 5 points needed to win, particularly since there are two completely different ways to get those points. My main issues so far are:
a) It’s not obvious which team colour is which player once all heroes are on the board - they really should have either themed the decks and made the bases permanent, or simply included a team colour marker to put in front of each player. Easily dealt with though.
b) It seems like the initial set-up is going to have a huge impact on how the game plays out, especially in combination with the asymmetric decks. My faction was built around area damage and never once got close to a space with more than one hero. Another faction had all their crystals put in one corner of the board. I hope it turns out that these sorts of situations are balanced once people know what they’re doing, but it does seem you could be thrown a completely unworkable (or unloseable) starting position.
Been going over some Arkham Horror 3 rules and non-spoiler playthroughs. It seems like it’s taken some steps back since Eldritch? Monsters are back to blocking you, can only buy or heal from certain locations. The card game had the same monster system, but you could get new stuff from anywhere. There were also a bunch more decisions on what to do with your actions while in AH3 it seems like the only choices are “move+fight” or “move+ward”, then hope you luck out with the encounter card you draw.
Anyone who’s played it not found that to be the case?
I view the game as a progression from AH2, and not a progression from AH2-EH-AH3. While the games are similar thematically and phases, AH3 for me is more of fixing issues with AH2. AH2 you could only buy from locations, and that is the same in AH3, However, I think AH2 also let you buy common items without needing a prompt from an encounter card. AH3 requires a prompt from an encounter card. I also think gear is slightly less important since each character starts with some decent gear.
The two largest problems I had with AH2 were the investigator sliders and monster movement (included also is skies and outskirts). These problems are largely solved in AH3.
I can see that, but to me EH also solved a lot of major issues with AH2, mostly eliminating a lot of “can’t do that” situations (blocked movement from monsters, no money, locations specific stuff which is blocked by monsters). You could buy anywhere, rest anywhere, plan out future movement. The limitation was the finite resource of actions, not limiting the actions themselves like Arkham did.
You’re definitely right about the set-up being a deciding factor, but remember that it’s in control of the players. I had a game where I decided to just put all my guys together as best as I could, but because I wasn’t really paying attention, it put the other guy’s crystals all in once area, far removed from anything I could do. It was a short and uninteresting game, but that was all on me.
Keep in mind that those magic attacks aren’t just area damage! They also ignore cover and line of sight. Targets hiding in covered spaces can’t use their cover defense icons, and targets normally inaccessible on higher elevations or behind those annoying wall segments in the dungeon map are fair game! It’s easy to miss those rules, but they’re a big part of why that faction’s magic attacks are effective.
-Tom
There are a few ways around that, though.
- Money is easy to get with gather resources action.
- You don’t have to go in a set player order at any time. So if you need to get past a monster, the fighty-guy can go engage the monster and then you take your turn. You also get an additional action if you evade. I also think evading exhausts the monster.
You were still blocked a little in EH. You needed to defeat the monsters before you could have an encounter in a city.
Yeah, I was aware of that, but in practice it never seemed to be a good use of my cards. For whatever reason, the people on high ground weren’t targeting me, and they had enough health that I could only wound them, meaning someone else would get the point. That said, I lost, so maybe I should have been doing that instead.
I guess one improvement is fights are no longer to the death like AH2.
Probably plan on picking up 3 to play with the folks over the holidays. Discovering the BGG marketplace has lowered my barrier to purchases lately. If it doesn’t work out I can always sell it and recoup half the cost.
(geez though I need to find a way to sell my complete AH2 set. The shipping cost makes that insanely impractical though)
You can evade during a fight in AH2 as well.
Well, combat continues until you succeed at killing or evading the monster, or unit you die.
It makes sense to me that Arkham, even in 3rd edition, and Eldritch wouldn’t use the same rules because Arkham has a much smaller scope. It makes sense that one monster in an entire city wouldn’t prevent you from leaving that city if so inclined. Similarly, it wouldn’t make sense to only be able to buy items in certain cities, but it does make sense to make you go to the stores in a game that’s city sized.
Making sense is for Euclideans.
On a Christmas note please be advised that the reprint of Arboretum includes the blue spruce now which is Christmasy as all hell. The old art style was probably better though but that game is really great if you are into tile laying and some tough decisions.
Has anyone played Narcos? There is so little coverage of it and the few reviews out there are all over the place. I actually came to this thread in my efforts to google more info on Narcos before trying it out. it was more than a little scary to play what appears to be such a lazy marketing cross-over with limited promotion. But I had some fun the other day, it actually worked OK with just 2 players. I think playing with more would lead to a co-op quarterbacking problem. As a hidden movement game, it plays way way quicker than Rebellion, which is my only point of reference for the genre, but it’s a much uglier game unless you really enjoy news articles about El Chapo. The rules seem terribly drafted and there’s no answers online for ambiguities really so it was a mostly fun experience but not a serious one. Does anyone know of any games like Rebellion that play shorter and maybe aren’t as potentially bad as Narcos?
Not sure how wide a net you’re casting for “hidden movement”. Specter Ops? Fury of Dracula? Mr. Jack? Letters from Whitechapel?
If you mean large and strategic like Rebellion then I don’t know. 2 player Fury of Dracula could fall under that I guess.
