Laffo! I outright REFUSE to play Lords of Waterdeep without the expansion at this point. The base game I would say is a terrible play. The expansion introduces EPIC quests for huge point swings and the salvation in the corruption mechanic. If everyone is corrupt, IT IS TERRIBLE. If only a couple people are corrupt, IT IS AMAZING. And it makes all the difference in the world.
The one game of Lords of Waterdeep I played was with I think both expansions and I was not super impressed. Didn’t help that the lord I got was the beholder, who instead of getting an actually actionable bonus just makes corruption suck slightly less, which is not remotely competitive with any of the others I’ve seen.
I agree in that specific lord. Its the weakest of the bunch, in fact I pulled it.
Even with the expansion, I don’t understand people’s willingness to abide Lords of Waterdeep. There are so many better worker placement games!
-Tom
Do you think Waterdeep was always bad, or just that it’s been made irrelevant by newer, better, games?
It’s not bad if you’re into pure worker placement, theming be damned. The corruption stuff does a good job making it more interactive. But as you say, I just think there are so many better designs that use worker placement. Energy Empire, Age of Discovery, Dominant Species, Argent, Euphoria, etc.
-Tom
My first exposure to several board games has come from your reviews here on Qt3. With what I know of your taste in video games and movies as a reference, I find I’m easily persuaded by your take on board games that I don’t have any experience with myself, and so far I haven’t been burnt by acting on that and actually buying/trying games you recommend.
The flip side of that is I’m also inclined to be skeptical of games you’ve panned that I haven’t actually tried. I’m aware that’s the case, and so I try to still keep an open mind and judge for myself when a friend wants to try something I’ve heard bad things about.
So that’s why I was curious. As I said, I’ve only played a single game of Energy Empire and a single game of Lords of Waterdeep and that’s really it for worker placement games so far.
Amusingly, my friend used how “unthematic” Waterdeep was as a selling point, knowing several of us are ambivalent toward D&D at best.
I agree that Waterdeep is kind of a mediocre game. It never comes out at game night anymore.
However, it does have a really well done digital port (on Steam, iOS and Android), and I’ve been playing that regularly with some of my board game buddies.
So that’s a reason to play it – because I can.
I know what you’re saying, but I want to make a small, well…correction? It’s never really my goal to “recommend” something when I write a review. I can’t know what someone will or won’t like. Unless it’s a conversation where someone says, “Hey, Tom, what’s a worker placement game that doesn’t stink?” or “Hey, Tom, should I bring Deus Ex if I’m going to be stranded on a desert island?”, I’m inclined to just talk about my opinion and let people infer from that whatever they need to know. That’s especially true when I write reviews. I don’t think of them as recommendations, and they’re certainly not buying guides. You’ll never find me writing stuff like, “You should totally get Gloomhaven”, or “Gloomhaven belongs on your shelf”, or “If you like dungeon crawlers, you’ll love Gloomhaven”. That’s just not my angle and it never had been.
Plus, I don’t really like Gloomhaven.
But, yes, I can completely understand if you picked up something I was nuts about, only to discover it doesn’t work for you. My top three boardgames are all pretty idiosyncratic (Archiplago, A Study in Emerald, Spirit Island). Similarly, people seem to be crazy about Gloomhaven, Mage Knight, and that Power Grid abomination. So I hope everyone knows to take my enthusiasm or disdain with a grain of salt!
-Tom
I think the more relevant theming in Waterdeep is that wizards are purple.
Yes! It’s one of those games that I wouldn’t want to play on the table, and now I never have to because I can race through it as a quick computer game. Splendor is like that for me, as well. A dull abstraction on the tabletop, but a nifty little iOS puzzle time waster otherwise. It’s the same with that Waterdeep port. A solid way for some quick n’ dirty worker placement.
-Tom
Oh yeah, not a literal recommendation. Just me having a familiarity with your reviews and past experiences so I have a better guess of where our preferences line up than from a reviewer I’ve never heard of.
I think Lords of Waterdeep is a really solid game but the mechanics are dry and there is basically no gameplay connection to the theme. It is pure, but dull. I agree it is one of those games that is much more appealing on the app. Playing a physical copy in real time feels like a bit of a slog.
If you are OK with rolling dice, I feel like Champions of Midgard (which is essentially Lords of Waterdeep with dice instead of cubes, and monsters to kill instead of quests) is a more exciting implementation of the concept. I do sometimes like LoW when I don’t feel like bowing down to the RNG.
I played my second game of Tiny Epic Galaxies last night and it was a distinctly less enjoyable experience than my first play, for the reason that culture planets were in short supply on the map all night (we started with only 1 of 6) and without culture, players can’t use the follow mechanic and a lot of the uniqueness and interactivity is lost. We agreed afterwards to establish a house rule of a mulligan on starting planet draws unless there were at least 2 planets of both culture and energy. I think that will smooth things out.
I liked Champions quite a bit. LoW is a good filler game. When we just have a few hours to get one last game in on game night, it’s a quick to setup and play game. Sometimes, that game is Ticket to Ride, sometimes it is LoW.
How long are your usual game nights?? I’m lucky to get our little group to play 1 game, much less enough that a few hours left would be considered the very end.
I will get there tonight at 5 and we will play until 10:30-11. Granted, not all of that is game time, but we can usually get a game of Eldritch and something else in. Last week we got Godfather and Champions in, and we needed to understand to the rules to each since it was the first time through.
Yeah, I played the hell out of the iOS game. Takes about 20 minutes to do a full game. And I’m not that fussed about theming, especially in digital versions (I still don’t know what the theme is supposed to be in Splendor and I’ve played hundreds of games). It’s just a pure hit of mechanics, which I’m all for when I’m gaming on the go.
I’m jealous - I used to be able to get them to try new games a year or so ago but now there’s resistance any time I want to introduce anything that requires more than 5 minutes to learn.
That’s frustrating. I had kind of the opposite change of desire to learn with the group that I first got into board games with. For a while there they would pretty much only want to play Catan and Small World, and any time I tried to introduce something else it would be met with a lot of resistance. Somewhere along the way, YEARS later, I guess they saw the light and now it’s at the point where they are practically buying and learning more games than I am. But then you get into having a different problem where you spend so much time learning new games that you never get past the top layer of strategy in any of them. I sort of miss the days where we could spend a long time dissecting decisions that were made in a game of Small World because everybody had such deep knowledge of the game.
Quick Pandemic Legacy question. I will be playing two player starting tomorrow. Should we each take one character or each take two characters?