Boardgaming in 2018!

I enjoyed the base set, but found it to be a bit anemic in content. Not sure how much content for the buck the scenario packs have.

I like the Arkham LCG too, but I’d warn that you might not have a ton of fun with the base game. I thought the interesting mechanics didn’t kick in until the Dunwich Legacy expansion.

I found the pricing for the card game to be ridiculous. $80 for the core set if you want full options (why the hell can’t they just sell extra investigator decks separately? That’s ALL you need from the 2nd core set; 60% of the other components are redundant and go to waste), and $15 per scenario after that.

I could only ever see it being worth it if you treat it as a D&D campaign night and a group chips in $5 each for an evening of entertainment.

(well, and the base campaign was pretty weak that turned us off to it. Carnival of Horrors was good though)

Picked up This War of Mine. I think I enjoyed it.

I found no problems with the pricing of the Arkham Horror card game. $30 for the core set for a nice solitaire setup. Gives you a chance to experience a decent-sized piece of the game…and then I think I paid $25 for the Dunwich Legacy expansion. As a solitaire experience, it’s just fantastic.

Only minor quibble I have is that the cards aren’t of the greatest quality, and I had to sleeve them to forestall warping. Great game. The base campaign is terrific.

So Fantasy Flight hasannounced a standalone video game based on Mansions of Madness. Hard to say what it is at this point. A straight port? Based on it with different mechanics? Multiplayer? Online play?

Well they call it an “Adventure Game” so probably not a port.

Ewww. HARD PASS!

-Tom

Hard pass?! Well, let’s try to be optimistic. But yeah, I would have been more hopeful if they had chosen Arkham or Eldtitch Horror to convert first. Imperial Assault I would have taken too.

Tom Mc

It’s definitely been some…interesting…choices as to what to convert. Elder Sign is easily the worst of their Cthulhu games and while it’s mildly diverting in the app version with the art, music, and SFX contributing a veneer of theme the boardgame almost entirely lacks, I sure wasn’t clamoring for a digital version. Talisman is a classic of sorts, but it’s a patience tester in the physical space, much less with notoriously fickle random internet denizens, and I’m not convinced it has a ton of appeal solo vs the AI. I guess some people like Hey, That’s My Fish but it’s pretty lightweight and an electronic version has little to offer over just sitting down with a copy. And now Mansions of Madness, a game where a digital app already does the lion’s share of the bookkeeping and fiddling one might look to an app version to unload. Ooookay.

(And of course, their upcoming Lord of the Rings LCG conversion that apparently isn’t implementing the actual card game but some bowdlerized version with strong cues from Hearthstone on the art design, because people were sure clamoring for that?)

I like it for a quick game.

Elder Sign is changed quite a bit by the last few expansions. Feels more thematic now.

It would certainly be hard for it to be less thematic.

Last night was Clans of Caledonia. Took a long time to get set up and rules established but turned into a really fun challenge. There are soooo many ways of scoring points that it became a challenge to accurately know who stood where until final tally. I took second place and was pretty happy with it, losing by a slim 4 points. My strategy was to deploy the income producers as quickly as possible and get coin churning. That plus having the double contract clan worked well. One major failing is that I did not understand that there are only 5 rounds until round 3. Had I known that I would have changed a few things around a little bit. Somehow another player was able to get 6 contracts complete, same as me, without me knowing. I could have gotten 7 if I had prioritized that over buying all upgrades with coins at end of round 5.


April 19. Clans of Caledonia.
by HARFORD BOARDGAMES, on Flickr


April 19. Clans of Caledonia.
by HARFORD BOARDGAMES, on Flickr

Has anyone here played Lords of Hellas and/or Heroes of Land, Air and Sea?

Are they any good? They both look awesome, but the videos I’ve seen either haven’t really shown much come from reviewers who tend to like everything.

I really liked this. Almost better than terra mystica, but I need to play more before I can say if the clans are balanced.

We know what we have to do for request Wednesday folks! Tom WILL become an FFG fanboy weather he likes it or not!

If I were at FFG and looking at digital/video games, I’d be taking a very hard look at Pathfinder and at Through The Ages. Those are video/mobile games that essentially obsoleted the table top versions of those titles. If it were my decision, I wouldn’t be ready to do a full digital conversion of a title I was still raking money on, like Eldritch Horror or Arkham LCG or even Mansions. I maaaaaaaaaaaybe might consider Arkham Horror (the original boardgame) because it kind of is getting to the end of its sales life cycle.

Yeah, I actually think that creating games that fit better in a digital space makes more sense than adapting cardboard to digital. I thiknk that an adventure game based on the Arkham Horror/Lovecraft property is a cool idea, if not my particular cup of tea.

Speaking of which, there’s a new Mansions of Madness expansion out this week. Not quite as big, price and tiles-wise as Streets of Arkham, but adds two new scenarios, which is nice.