Boardgaming in 2018!

Nothing evokes the might of the Roman empire like mancala.

Worst. Game design choice. Ever.

@Sharpe, I have a real soft spot for Bora Bora for a couple of reasons. For starters, I got it as a gift from my Secret Santa two (?) years ago. I love that it’s a bunch of Pacific islanders, just grooving on fishing, making jewelry, cruising around in their boats, and giving each other tattoos, which isn’t something you see in a lot of game. If you’re going to serve up some points salad, the ingredients better be this refreshing!

-Tom

I had that same flow. About my 2nd or 3rd play it became incredibly relaxing and it’s a game my wife and I pull out when we’re tired. I think once you start getting the hang of it, there aren’t a ton of “real” choices, the game sort of plays itself, but is somehow still satisfying.

I just played Luna last night, another Stefan Feld game that I love. It’s a lot simpler then Bora Bora but about twice as weird. Everyone is members of a moon worshipping cult and you get points for impressing the moon priestess and sanctifying novices in the temple. You lose points for hanging out with the Apostate, who runs around the board whispering lies into everyone’s ears. You have a bunch of novices who are spread out between these islands and each island has an associated action with it. Performing the action always takes 2 novices, and a few of the actions force you to split your followers up, forcing you to find new ways to get them back together.

It’s got a few area-control elements which makes the game particularly nasty, which is a bit unusual for a Feld game. Players might compete by sending many novices to worship the Moon Priestess. If they over-do this, though, you can just send the Apostate to that island as well and knock out all their points. I really like the level of interaction. Everything requires 2 or 3 turns to accomplish so you know when someones about to be jerk and can try and counter plan before they pull it off. Really neat game.

I enjoyed Castles of Burgundy but I gotta admit I haven’t really been that interested in getting another Feld game.

@malkav11 Based on your tastes expressed on the forum, I don’t think Feld is ever going to be your favorite designer, but I also think you’d find his meatier games more inspiring than Castles of Burgundy. I’d suggest trying Trajan, Aquasphere, Luna or Macao if you end up changing your mind.

EDIT: As an aside, these aren’t necessarily my favorite Feld games, just the ones I think most likely to win you over.

They just all look pretty similar to me and I already own one that suits me fine.

I’m so sad that I have Aquasphere – it was ridiculously cheap at one point – and I’ve never gotten anyone to play it. Seems to me a game about scientists in an underwater base programming robots to harvest octopuses would at least be intriguing enough to want to try!

-Tom

Shoot. Caught in a 3 way battle for my wallet right now between Scythe, Spirit Island, and Unicornius Knight.

Well, 2 of those are amazing solo experiences.

I find Spirit Island perhaps the better designed game (in a system balance sort of way) but I enjoy Unicornus Knights more (I like the experience and the quasi-solo-wargame aspect of it).

Spirit Island would work better as co-op if you do co-op. Unicornus Knights has characters that are too passive or have too much of a support role that can make the experience frustrating for some players if they end up playing those characters.

Finally starting setting up my Gloomhaven. Got to say, punching out the components and setting things up isn’t exactly easy…

and the manual isn’t very clear either.

For all it’s faults, Mage Knight was straightforward to start, and get straightt o the action (just that the action wasn’t to various peoples’ liking)

Man, I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve played both plenty, and even when Gloomhaven gets a bit vague, it is nothing like the Rule Soup of Mage Knight.

For me anyway, all the many pieces to setting up Gloomhaven have a certain interlocking logic that I don’t get so much from Mage Knight.

I mean, the initial unboxing for Gloomhaven takes hours, for sure. Once you get used to it, actual setup isn’t that bad, better with some sort of organizer solution.

You need some sort of organizer. Plano boxes work pretty well, but you don’t want to be looking through plastic baggies for the last City Guard for 30 minutes when you still have like 8 pillars to find.

That’s an interesting take, because I found that Mage Knight’s rules are pretty clearly laid out and thorough, but they’re not intuitive and, well, face it… everyone knows Mage Knight is a terrible game. :) For me, it’s “rule soup” because of design issues more than presentation. The combat stuff with damage types and resistances is an atrocity for how I imagine Chvatil thought he was being elegant, but was instead throwing fiddly extra layers over a mostly bare gameplay system. So I guess I’m agreeing with you.

As for Gloomhaven, for the most part, I thought the rules were pretty well written. I’m a real stickler for rules writing and there was nothing in Gloomhaven that I couldn’t resolve by flipping to the right page. Whatever issues I might have with Gloomhaven’s design, I always got the sense that Isaac Childres knew what questions I might have and put the answers somewhere in the rules.

-Tom

Can you name a game with a more complicated set-up than Gloomhaven? Short of some edge-case wargame with a bajillion chits, I don’t think I can.

-Tom

More complicated? I dunno off the top of my head. (Maybe a Lacerda game - Lisboa, say?) I’d say pretty much every other similar dungeon crawler I’ve played is about as complicated to set up, though.

Edit: Actually, I think first edition Mansions of Madness is more complicated to set up. The second is way easier because it offloads a lot to the app (and doesn’t set up the whole board to start, either), but MoM had a ridiculous amount of single function components.

So I have both Chicago Express and German Railways in my shopping cart, and I’m so tempted to checkout. I already have American Rails, and have loved all my plays of that. Is there any reason I shouldn’t go ahead and pull the trigger on these two?

I punched out Gloomhaven chits twice as I bought it twice and sold it twice. I didn’t think it was too bad to setup and learn. It’s odd because my complaint for Gloom is that you do the same thing over and over…fight these tactical fights in these room layouts…over and over. Now, with other games, you play them the same way over and over also but I think because you usually only play them a few times and then can move on to other games, then I can forgive the over and over thing…but in one game, for 100 hours of over and over, it’s just too much.

Mage knight was not nearly as hard to learn as I had read and will get back to that after 7th Continent.

I managed to set everything up and figured I’d start playing and discern rules where hints weren’t clear, instead of trying to have it all in my head.

So far, actual y enjoying myself.

I’m soloing it as a Cragheart and a spell weaver.

The first dungeon has 3 rooms, and in the 1st room you get an elite bandit and 2 normal bandits.

Killed them fairly easily, pushed through to the next room managed to immobilise and then kill 2 enemies (regular bandits) and move adjacent to the 3rd(elite archer. Shoots for 6 hexes and 4 damage, applies poison)

Speelweaver had to rest, Cragheart almost took damage but the archer was adjacent and therefore “disadvantaged” meaning she drew 2 modifier cards and used the worst one. She drew +2 damage (or double damage, not sure) and…a nullify card. Sweet.

Now my Cragheart is out of cards and needs to rest.

I’ll kill the archer, pretty sure of that, but my damage dealing and healing (she healed the Cragheart to get him back to 10 health) spell weaver is running out of cards.

And there’s one more room. In that room there are 2 bandits and 2 living bones.

My Cragheart has an activated card that let’s him multitarget with his next 4 ranged attacks. I’ll open the door and use him to block it, and fire off ranged attacks galore, and tank damage.

He has another activated card that allows 2 damage retaliation for every melee attack, upto 4 in total, so those skeletons are in for a treat.

I am really enjoying the combat. Choosing your 2 cards and then the 2 actions out of 4 possible is much more straightforward than mage knight with the hand management puzzle.

And the elemental magic system is also pretty straightforward and simple.

I’m a bit iffy on how the looting works because, in the first scenario for example, it stands to reason that you’re going to loot everything once you kill the enemies in the first level, before you go to the next scenario.

I have to stand by my earlier complaint about setting it up. It’s annoying.

So many chits and so much to keep track off.

And it takes so much table space.

Also, I have to say I quite prefer the modular map design of mage knight. Uncovering tiles when you got there was a nice surprise.

I can totally see people getting tired of dungeon crawling.

I’m going to try a cheap option and use tupperware boxes to store all the chits separately, e.g. status tokens, map tiles, monster modifier cards etc.

Anyway, tldr:

Annoying to set up and fiddly chits. Awesome and fun combat.

I think the intention of the loot mechanics as written is that you have to include looting in your risk/reward decisionmaking. You can run and pick up those gold pieces, but you’re going to spend some cards to get there and back.

Flavorfully, it obviously makes no sense – you could just pick all that stuff up on the way out of the dungeon. But that’s what the rules say.

(We house rule it so that unlooted gold tokens are lost at the end of the scenario, but unlooted treasure is claimed.)

There is an app that is basically just a copy of the scenario book, but it blocks out all of the rooms and their associated discovery text. As you open the rooms, you uncover them. It helps a little bit with the feeling of discovery, but it’s offset by the additional setup annoyance of not knowing what tiles you need ahead of time. Maybe worth looking into.