I never played any intro scenario or setup for Spirit Island…it was very easy to figure out without doing that.
DofZeds 3 was definitely annoying in the way they did it.
Oh Craig, I have something for you. I’ll post a pic in a bit but it’s not a moon.
Has anyone here played Guards of Atlantis? Finally got it to the table this weekend and I really enjoyed it. GoA is a board game moba. Downtime is minimal as you all play cards at the same time. The heroes all play very differently and can pull off some fun and interesting combos. If you like the genre at all and can find a copy, I recommend you check it out.
I really want to play this game. It looks excellent! I’ve been holding off buying because I’m worried I couldn’t get it to the table. How many players did you have?
I had the same problem. People hear “moba board game” and get worried. I can see some saying, “why not just play league of legends”, but the game just worked for me. Besides, it’s fun watching your friend’s face drop as his perfectly executed assassination is thwarted by your card.
We had 6 players. 2 of them were light gamers. 1 player was very much new to board games, but played moba video games. Try not to over analyze your actions the first game. Just play and get a feel for how your hero works. Otherwise the game will drag. In our game, my team pretty much just played cards and everyone so often would check to see if anyone could support an attack etc. You can set up some powerful combos by working with your teammates and you should, but too much team chat will bog your game down.
All that said, the heroes are interesting and hit all the arch types. The upgrade system is cool when you upgrade a card you get to choose from 2 options. Whichever option you don’t choose becomes an permanent item upgrade that increases your stats. I’m not sure if this is mentioned in the rulebook, but I also used it to track your level by putting the cards under your hero each card representing a level. I need a few more games to see if it will stay in my library, but It’s fun and not like anything else I own.
Black Orchestra reprint is finally out! Just arrived by mail the other day. I had completely forgotten about it, was supposed to be out last August.
I played my first ever game of Black Orchestra last Thursday and I liked it. It’s a fun co-op, and I had more fun with it than a Pandemic or something. I need a few more plays to have a real opinion though.
Anything is more fun than Pandemic to me, so I should be set!
Yes, exactly my thoughts. Many people don’t have the mental bandwidth to want to control multiple characters, manage multiple separate hands of cards, etc…and I grudge them not. It can be somewhat physically clumsy. The logistics! In certain heavier co-op games with supposed ‘hidden hands’ like the Lord of the Rings LCG, I DO play that game true solo but this completely changes pre-game DECK BUILDING entirely. I think it is WAY BETTER with two players or two-handed solo because that is what makes the encounter deck sing/combo and it totally OPENS UP the pre-game deck building options a lot more. A LOT!
I do like Aeon’s End, but with a few reservations. I see it as a much improved Sentinels of the Multiverse. Yes, it loses some theme and story telling without locations or constructed decks. However, the story is nice, but I sort of got burned out on the very predictable ways the decks worked and trying to do similar things all the time. It gives up a bit on theme, but I really like the per game challenge of trying to see how this (randomized) market combination can work against this Nemesis and that random Nemesis deck. Even when I have worked with certain combinations of market cards or breech mages, I feel like the market is mere tools and I can forge a new path (like your toolbox analogy of an RTS) whereas SotM felt too boxed in. The strategy (in SotM) felt more locked in exchange for a story that was a bit free form.
Also, SotM is not a deck builder. I have not played them all by far, but while building deck engines is fun, I often feel that their games are almost themeless as it’s mostly about engineering card mechanics. I guess the Legendary series improved, but the first Marvel one left me not wanting to return. Ascension and the like are good, I’ll give them that, but outside of their lore text, they are not thematic at all. I enjoyed some of Thunderstone as nice while thematic, but it’s (mostly) competitive. I like co-op over competitive.
The story/ theme is not, not there in Aeon’s either. The modular market system has some limitations since all cards work (in one way or another) off of aether and damage. As such, all things sort of need to distill down to a “bag of hit points.” I guess this disappointed me when I realized it limited variation between mages as well. But if they pushed the market to be more diverse than aether and damage mechanics, then I would probably end back up at the SotM predictable problem.
The mechanics do hint at theme though (to me). The Carapace Queen is cool in that she summons a swarm a la a Starcraft Brood Queen. I see the rule of “can’t split damage on husks without losing 1 health” as themeatic for the Mage needing to wade in and take a few scratches if she wants to blast more husks than just flinging spells down the streets of Gravehold. I see Crooked Mask, via mechanics, as messing with the players intended good plans by offering something good with a forced negative/ sinister cost. It seems you have War Eternal from the Umbra Titan reference. I see it as slowly eating Gravehold (sort of digestion tokens) and the only way to slow it is for a Mage to distract it by taking damage in a short “hey, over here!” melee (Mage takes damage instead of the Titan discarding tokens).
But yeah, it’s still a bag of hit points. And yes, I am sort of divining theme out of mechanics. However, I enjoy its modularity a fair bit, and it sits as the best straddle of engine builder, (some) theme, co-op, and deck builder. I like Dragonfire too, and sometimes Xenoshyft, but those are more deck “adders.” I am awaiting my future copy of Direwild from Kickstarter. Aeon’s is my ‘best for now’ but I quiet like it over others of similar games.
If you have not given up, try a few plays of random mages with something like random gem <4, random gem, random gem >4, three of any relic, random high cost and low cost spells via the randomizer cards. Then try to “solve” the market. This game also really benefits from more content (purchases) as it adds more seed variety to the market. To me it is a nice blend of “river” markets like Ascension and static markets. I also think the control of not shuffling with the minor chaos of random turn order also really gives it a cool feel while “solving” a market.
So yeah, I like it, but there may be a new king someday.
Glad to hear your positive take on Aeon’s End. I certainly think of it as a keeper, but it found its way to the bottom of my stack of solitaire games after a few battles against the more basic enemies. I was using random mages and a random marketplace, but if I recall correctly, that’s not how the game is presented. I seem to recall the rules kind of whiffing in terms of how you decide the set-up. As if it knows it can be too difficult if you roll up a challenging combo, but it also knows it can be too easy if you just pick whatever optimized combo you want. I’m really spoiled by Spirit Island’s sliding scale of difficulty settings with the various invader nationalities and their escalating difficulty levels. I wish Aeon’s End hadn’t left it up to me to find my own difficulty level (which is one of my pet peeves in game design, board- or video-).
I haven’t tried the cooler enemies like the Carapace Queen, but she definitely stood out for me because she has her own board. I should push Aeon’s End up a bit higher in my stack to give the better enemies a try. (However, for the foreseeable future, my solitaire table has been all but conquered by Kingdom Death: Monster).
Good point about the limitations of Sentinels of the Multiverse, and how each hero/deck is sort of fixed in its role. That’s probably part of why it got old for me. Each hero is cool and all, but if you’re using your favorites every time, you’re just going through to motions to get his or her best configuration set up. But to defend that game’s overall structure, I think the appeal is the combinatorial dynamics with a) different heroes, b) whichever villain you’re using, and c) whichever environment you’re using. The villain and environment combos ideally make up for the repetitiveness of your favorite heroes.
Not that I imagine that game is ever going to bubble up to the top of the stack again. With a perfectly cromulent videogame version, I have no desire to get as fiddly as you have to get playing Sentinels on the tabletop. Anyone want to buy a ridiculous amount of Sentinels cards?
-Tom
I guess this just seems weird to me considering most of us have played Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and so on, all featuring control and advancement of multiple characters. I mean, I grew up with SSI’s Gold Box D&D games, for Pete’s sake! Why would ever want to play just one character? :)
-Tom
The fixed decks are one of Sentinels’ biggest appeals for me. not only do I not enjoy building decks (as an out of game thing, I mean - I like deckbuilders like Aeon’s End and Legendary Encounters fine), but it makes for much more focused, concentrated theme than you will ever manage in a game where you can assemble whatever deck you like, or are pulling from literally random market piles/rows. And yeah, the modularity of the design and the combinatorial dynamics really make for great replayability. I’ve largely moved on to other games myself, just because I have only so much time and there are all of these other games to play, but I’ve played Sentinels dozens of times already and I can’t say that about more than maybe 2 or 3 other games in my collection. (Gloomhaven and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, to be specific.)
Well I loved Dragon Age and Mass Effect but I enjoy Divinity Original Sin more… because I get to share that joy with other real life people, people I even like. NWN, We played co-op too… same group even. We’ve been cooping for literal decades.
Ho ho ho…if only most us aka everyone at the table had played Baludr’s Gate, Pillars, Dragon Age, Mass Effect…I can only wish. I can wish every person had the same vocab and history. The same knowledge in the school of games. But it is not clearly the case in my experience, The event being…if one day I play with a bunch of retired nuke engineers…which I I have!
AKA ignore this post please! In so far it regards to a steampunk rally which I almost won.
“You must gather your party before venturing forth.”
“You must gather–”
"you must gath-- "
“you–”.
“You must gather your party before venturing forth.”
Insert disk 2.
I concur…
I am not a fan of out of game deck building either; I just don’t seem to have the luxury of that sort of between game gaming anymore. It chased me away from games like LotR LCG or even army building/ card purchase chasing of X-Wing.
The rest of your point reminds me of a discussion I had with @merryprankster once when discussing the merits of FFG’s app driven AI games. In the summary of my feelings for Mansions of Madness 2e versus Descent 2e with Road to Legend app, I said that if I was going to play one of them only once, Mansions of Madeness wins by a landslide. It has such great narrative. However that narrative is its weakness as subsequent plays feel more and more hollow and suddenly Descent looks way better if you plan to play something several times.
That is a different shade of my feelings on SotM versus Aeon’s End.
For me I just don’t want to play a game once I feel like I’ve seen everything. So even if I were less prone to chasing the hot new thing (and I really am, to my detriment), I don’t end up worrying too much about the experience of repeating plays with the same setup, since I have little desire to do that anyway.
Played the FFG Fallout game tonight. My initial impressions are mixed. I loved the flavor and the story-driven quest system, but the skill gain and skill check systems were a bit too Arkham/Eldritch Horror-esque for my tastes. Also, the scoring system is just whacky.
I think I might view this the way I view Firefly: a game with flawed mechanics that can be very fun if you play with people really into the flavor.
I’ll probably give it at least another play.