Wow, I’ve been called out by Tom three times in two weeks, which is kinda cool in a “witness me, Senpai” kinda way but isn’t adding to my growing love of the hobby! :)
As to the “screw your neighbor” factor, if that is your bag I heartily recommend Junta once again.
On the issue of gaming faux pas, a couple months back at an all day meet up at pretty big location, one of the attendees threw a nerf football which landed smack in the middle of our game of Gaia Project, pretty much completely randomizing a game that had been at the midpoint. This generated a brief flash of truly high intensity nerd rage, until we all saw that the perpetrator was a very nice middle-aged grandmother and very nice person who was just caught up playing with a grandchild, so we let that one slide, albeit with some (quiet) grumbling.
As Stephen J. Gould said about the strike zone in the last inning of the World Series, sometimes rules are situational.
(However, there have been no further Nerf incidents and all Nerf objects are now banned from the facility.)
Hah, as I read this paragraph, I went along with you on the same emotional journey you must have experienced. From “HOLY EFFING WTF WHO TEH EFF IS THROWING A GODDMANNM NEFR FOOTBALL IN HERE???” to “oh, okay, but please be more careful in the future…”.
-Tom
I hope grandma showed up next week with water balloons.
I mean with a 4 and a 1 year old, any board gaming is an exercise in constantly watching for projectiles, greedy fingers grabbing score markers, and general chaos.
But also times to play with them, and have them move the pieces so it is all worth it.
Speaking of kids and games… We got out Jenga w my 4 year old this weekend. Thus far, she hasn’t been able to get interested in Chutes and Ladders or Candyland… But she really liked Jenga and played pretty decently. It was also easy to setup and cleanup. Was pleased to have a game she liked to play.
Uh, check your hall closet.
So I played this game Grifters tonight. It’s a hand-builder like Century: Spice Road, but with more player interaction. You play cards to acquire cards, do special abilities, and purchase victory cards. You play cards into an area with 3 slots and each time you play a new card, all the cards move to the right. When cards move out of the 3rd slot, they come back to your hand. When you play a bunch of cards to buy a victory card, you end up with a big part of your hand committed to the table and not playable until it cycles back to your hand. The design seems pretty elegant, but it turns out the designers did not quite grasp the min/max combo insanity of players like me.
The game started out pretty normally, and then I realized that there were certain cards that could be used to accelerate the card-recovery process, based around the “Femme Fatale” card which lets you play another card after Femme Fatale. There are also 2 other cards, one that can copy a card in your play area, and one that can copy a card in your hand. If you have at least 1 Femme Fatale and 2 of the others (or more Femme Fatale cards) you can create a loop where you play a big bunch of cards to buy a victory card, and then cycle all of those cards back into your hand the very same turn. To really keep things humming you need 4 or 5 of the target cards total. There are 3 of each card so the total number of these cards in the game is 9. You only need to get half of them and then you just PWN the game.
Once I got my card recycling engine rolling it was LOL-land. I hoovered up the remaining victory cards, grabbing one every single turn. The scores in the game ended up: 4th place, 6 points; 3rd place 9 points; 2nd place 12 points; me: 36 points.
The game is just broken, in particular the Femme Fatale card. I think if I play it again I will suggest a house rule of no more than 2 cards played per turn so you can’t get the magic recycle pump going.
It is kinda hilarious to me that the game is in general release and yet it’s really pretty broken. I almost felt bad about winning that massively.
DAMMIT!
-Tom
Sounds like we’re getting another Tom vs Bruce!
It’s like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective meets The Pink Panther movies. Also, a card-driven legacy game design with an innpvative storage solution. Coming to Kickstarter.
Unfortunately, that’s not as uncommon as one might like. I was very excited for Greater Than Games’ sophomore effort after Sentinels of the Multiverse, Galactic Strike Force. Then I got it, and the math is flat out broken. The way shields work and the way combat works means you only need like 6 or 7 points of shielding to become 100% invulnerable to all enemies other than the boss, because only one ship can fight each PC at a time. But conversely, PCs can only fight one ship at a time and so you’ll either be against an enemy that can spawn faster than you can kill them, in which case you’re not at serious risk of defeat but you’ll have to fight the boss guaranteed, or they don’t, in which case you’ll clear them out and win. They haven’t come out and said anything about it, but you’ll notice there hasn’t been any continuation of that product line…
Miniature Market is clearancing a bunch of stuff:
https://www.miniaturemarket.com/deals/promo-sale.html
A bunch of Fantasy Flight LCG packs and RPGs and such, City of Remnants, Vlaada Chvatil’s Prophecy (supposedly his take on Talisman), and more.
Heroscape?
Sale Alert. Coolstuffinc will be having a ding and dent sale starting Sunday and 12:01am.
Close, but since setting up Heroscape is the game, no cigar.
So Terraforming Mars is supposed to be getting a digital version on Steam this Spring.
Thanks for the heads up. I love me some ding/dent. :)
So I stopped by my local game store / gamer hangout for a game of Lords of Waterdeep (came in 3rd, damn 40 point quests) and like usual on a Saturday with no big event it was a mixed crew. Some MTG folks including some old school hardcore degenerate Legacy players, some miniature folks, a game of Blood Bowl, a couple of people playing X-Wing, my table of board gamers and another table of board/wargamers.
I mention the last as I chatted with them and it turned into kind of a meta discussion of Euros vs Ameritrash vs what I think of as “wargames” (the old school hex based Avalon hill games with chits constituting units). Apparently in their circle, the term “wargame” has gone out of fashion as it is considered too vague (yes they surpass me in grognardery perhaps even reaching Brooski-level heights) and the term now in use is “combat simulation”. As a sometime PC gamer, this sounds wrong to me as “simulation” to me means something quite different. The good news is, I got a couple of folks to agree to sign up for our marathon game of Twilight Imperium 4 next Saturday.
Anyhow, is that the thing now, “combat simulation”? Has “wargame” gone the way of “beatnik” and “doobie”?
I am sure that Brooski has an opinon.
Got two plays of Spirit Island in today with a friend. We did a practice game with the starting recommendations and then decided to use a level 1 Prussia adversary and a Blighted Island card, plus randomly selecting our spirits. (We got Shadows Flicker Like Flame and Bringer of Dream and Nightmares.) Turned out we got one major rule wrong in both games (we thought damage was done to the Dahan if present instead of the land. Nope! Simultaneous!), and had a little confusion about power targetting in the first game, both of which definitely undercut our wins in the respective runs. (Shadows + Bringer made for very little ability to kill Invaders but excellent ability to move them into areas that weren’t activating that turn, as well as hard charge a Fear victory.) Still, we were both quite enamored with the design and I look forward to seeing how it plays out with a larger island and cohort of spirits, as well as when we incorporate the expansion (and sooner or later, promo spirits). And with scenarios. And with higher level adversaries.