Boardgaming in 2018!

Gen 7, Crossroad Plaid Hat yeah!.. 3-4 players, 3-4! WTH. Dead of Winter went to 5. ugh!

Yeah, no loans in just the last 4 rounds.

I also don’t remember money being worth anything at the end, other than as a tie breaker.

One point per 10 money, IIRC. It’s income that’s just a tiebreaker.

I wouldn’t call revealed infected “trashing the ship unopposed”. The infected actions are pretty limited in what they can do. An unrevealed infected striking at the right time is much more devastating. The uninfected successfully outing and quarantining them is very effective, as it takes away the most threatening tools for the infected: a bigger die pool, being commander, and getting to choose a crises.

I mean, you could call revealed Cylon actions in BSG as “unopposed” too. I think the system works much better in Dark Moon though. An unrevealed traitor in Dark Moon is more damaging than an unrevealed traitor in BSG, and the post-reveal is stronger in BSG. The only real motivation for Cylons to stay hidden is to prevent unchecked Executive Order play by the humans, but the actual revealed Cylon actions are often way more effective than anything a hidden Cylon can accomplish.

Also, one of the strengths of Dark Moon over Battlestar Galactica – which doesn’t hold up at all, as far as I’m concerned – is that the bad guys have to actually do something to win the game. They can’t just hang back and let the game system do the winning for them. The traitor players in Dark Moon won’t win by just sandbagging. If you don’t understand that, you’re probably not going to like the game.

Which is why one of the guys in our group says Dark Moon is a game where you just repair shields every turn. Yep, if the infected players think all they have to do it hide, that’s pretty much how it’s going to play out.

Really, there’s no reason to spend three hours playing Battlestar Galactica when you could spend one hour player Dark Moon and then the other two hours play Dark Moon again, or something else.

-Tom

Well, my Daedalus Mansions of Madness insert/crate arrived. That’s the crate and the first three subassemblies pictured. The good news is it looks great and has lots of helpful/decorative etching. The bad news is it’s been quite a pain to actually put together, hence only three of well over a dozen subassemblies actually being done so far. Lots of bits that just don’t quite fit together like they’re supposed to. Also, apparently I’ve been spoiled by Broken Token/Go7Gaming because I was expecting printed instructions and there’s only a remarkably useless Youtube video so far (though the owner has promised a PDF, hopefully on Thursday. Based on some others I’ve seen from Daedalus, though, I think even that will probably have a ways to go to compare to the competition.

He’s only just now trying to take the insert business full time, though, so hopefully these are growing pains that will be addressed going forwards.

Yup. The infected need to be inflicting a certain amount of damage to win, and the damage that revealed infected can inflict is more limited. Unless the humans are in a critical state at the point where all infected are revealed, then the infected have probably lost (barring atrocious die rolls by the humans).

Best game we had was where one infected was revealed early. Rest of the game went with everyone else going out of their way to be as helpful as possible, all the way up to the final event being on the verge of completed. Everyone kept looking around, “What is the other infected doing? The game is almost over and there’s no damage.”

Then someone took a closer look at the final event text.

“Protect launch codes: If this event is completed and the commander is revealed to be infected, then the infected win the game.”

Holy shit! The commander has to be the other infected! He’d been laying low this whole time to sneak in a win!

The final event is one cube away from completion. It’s my turn, then the commander’s. I start arguing that we have to call a quarantine vote on the current commander because him being infected is the only possibility that made sense with the inactive 2nd infected. The commander starts arguing that I must be the 2nd infected trying to win at the last second by claiming the commander title for myself (whoever called the quarantine vote takes over if the commander is quarantined). The other players start waivering in who to believe.

Then I think up another plan. I issue an (executive) order to one of the other players. “Use your action to call the quarantine vote. You’ll take over as commander. If I was infected, there’s no way I would do that since I would lose at the end of this turn.”

The commander was silent, until, “I have no argument for that.”

Quarantine went through, final event completed, former commander shows he was infected and humans win. Someone asked why the infected commander didn’t argue me more.

“What he said made perfect logic sense.”

Tom, Not sure if that was directed to me, but the only games of Dark Moon I have played have been with you and you’re right sandbagging won’t win you the game because there is no time. You don’t have time for mistrust because the game will be over and the good guys will win unless you just trash the ship and then there’s not much hiding who you are. Every time I’ve played with you and I was the infected side we have won and there has been little reason to really hide who was bad.

The bad guys in BSG have plenty to do it’s just when do they do it.
At the start of the game there might not even have a traitor. One of my favorite BSG games was a 4 player game where every player thought one of the other players was a cylon and there wasn’t one. In BSG you’re sprinkling in your bad cards at opportune times or overly helping other times and then sowing mistrust throughout. It’s more a meta game than a mechanical game with BSG and I love how it evokes such a fantastic feeling of dread as you know someone is probably bad, but you don’t know who.

I can’t think of any instances where BSG had brilliant plays like that.

And that’s not even getting into how I thought that every expansion made the game worse by making it more convoluted and filling it with goals to arbitrarily muddy the waters. The Cylon Leaders had to have been one of the worst mechanics I’ve seen in a game. It was like they were playing a separate game that just happened to be using the same components.

Then you’re not playing with the right group ;)

BSG is like a game of Twilight Imperium. Whether you like it or not I guarantee you that every game comes away with a great story.

This is exactly the case with Dark Moon too.

I had the opposite experience in that there wasn’t much pressure to stay hidden in BSG since the revealed Cylon actions were pretty effective in hampering the humans.

In Dark Moon, if you fumble your reveal, you’re now playing with a significantly gimped capacity to hamper the humans. Your die pool is cut in half, you lose the ability to pick a crises on your turn, and the humans are more free to continuously issue orders to each other and double their actions (which they can always do unless the communications are damaged). The infected action choices are much weaker than the revealed cylon ones.

Yep, it’s a short game! And all the better for it, in my opinion.

Oh, there’s no shortage of stuff to do in Battlestar Galactica. Fantasy Flight and their – what? – five expansions have made that certain. My point was that all that junk is an avalanche of crises that will pile up and defeat the human players just fine, without the Cylons having to do anything but stay hidden. But in Dark Moon, the infected have to be proactive. I think anyone who’s played both games will see the difference, and it seems to me it’s an intentional part of their respective designs.

Namely, Battlestar Galactica is a traitor game where the traitors just have to lie low and wait three hours for the game to end. Dark Moon is a traitor game built for pacing above all, and it does that by expecting the traitors to actually work for a win instead of just hiding.

Because it was all buried under three hours of themed cruft!

-Tom

Yeah I think BSG’s appeal (aside from show fandom) was a case of “Whoah, a hidden traitor game with an actual game behind it unlike Mafia and Werewolf? Cool!”

Much like Pandemic was “Whoah, so we’re working…together?”

or Agricola was "Tell me more of this…‘worker placement’ "

(the most frustrating board game critic is Zee Garcia and listening to him to this day call Pandemic the best game ever)

Which is a lot of the appeal, isn’t it? And I can completely understand it. I’m as much a sucker for theming as the next guy. It was really cool in a D&D way for me and my friends to be Baltar and Roslin and Starbuck saving the day or – whoa! – revealing themselves as Cylons. But like those other games you mention, time has left Battlestar Galactica in the dust as a design, if not as a narrative experience. Albeit an expensive three-hour long narrative experience.

-Tom

Return to the London QT3 board gaming group! Come on, even Rich is making it to one this year 😋

For any other Londoners . . I am the host for regular weekend board gaming days for a friendly group that initially formed via this very forum. New joiners are very welcome and might not even be brigged! 😉

If you might like to join us in Canada Water for a game day please do ping me. We love games but play so many different ones that we are not particularly good at any. Collectively we have several hundred games to draw on but keep buying new ones too . . . .

. . . and it has been waaay too long since we played Battlestar Galactica!

I want to! I’ve been wavering on whether I can make it this weekend. I’d love to! Good games, good company, a mix of healthy and unhealthy foods. Can’t go wrong with that. :)

Any potential new joiners should definitely feel welcome to come meet you.

I’ll get in touch to let you know.

Wow, Gen7 kind of came out of nowhere. I’ve seen surprisingly very little of it in the board game media, which is not typical at all of Plaid Hat’s games. If nothing else, I would have expected a WatchItPlayed tutorial. I think Rodney always gets PHG’s stuff early.

What do you trade in GOT Catan? I trade you meat pies for dragon eggs?

Just read the rules for Marvel Strike Teams and it looks very promising. Reminds we of a mix of Gloomhaven meets Conan. I’m very excited to get it to the table!

It has a campaign system where your heroes level up across multiple missions, 3 random scenario objectives are drawn each mission, with 6 or so missions each campaign, and some scenarios include interesting aspects like developing relationships between heroes or completing various tasks… Each scenario is 4 rounds. It has a system where the heroes and mastermind leveling is accounted for game balance…

I like the push your luck aspect of gaining Action points each round, that can gain you action points but can also can result in command points for your opponent. Each round there is a Command phase (where both sides gain 1 command point or an action point usable by anyone on that side). Mastermind phase where each of the masterminds henchman and villains take a action, the Hero Phase where the heroes take a action which is either gain a set number of action points and heal damage, and the End phase which after four rounds the current scenario card is resolved either for the heroes or mastermind.

All the heroes and villains have cards you can buy for the mission, how many points you get is based on the characters current level. Damage is placed on the cards and increases the cost of activating the assigned cards and/or base abilities they are applied to. Many interesting powers for the characters to fling in battle like trap, slam (knockback) and target attacks that do damage to a area YOU chose verse the one the defender chooses, and many others. You also have unique battlefields you build and can destroy, throw, and/or fight across.

There is a LOT more to it, like henchman rules, breakthrough maneuvers, chained attacks, etc, The heroclix miniatures are nice, and I like this rule system FAR more already verse the one in the standard heroclix system.

Played a game of the 2 player version recently, and it is really good! Very different from the other 18XX-games I’ve tried. The different company sizes and acquisitions make for a lot of interesting decisions. Probably not a good game for beginners, though.