ALL boards should be unmounted sheets so they can be placed under plexiglass. Mounted boards are annoying.
I find this a most American opinion :P.
You guys have big houses. In places where real state is more limited (here the median for a four member family apartment is about 120 square meters, and way less than that in big cities) and we don’t normally have basements or garages where to set up or store a plexiglass. Mounted boards that fold and unfold many times without stress are useful.
My goal in life is to be able to afford housing so I can have a real wargaming table set up.
And to have the time to give one of the Monsters a crack.
Maybe I want to play a solo game in addition to with my wife :-)
Maybe I never would, but I was wondering how easy an option it is. We don’t replay Pandemic Legacy, so I’m OK with a single play through.
It supports multiple simultaneous parties adventuring in the same campaign.
Yeah, the SUSD video makes it clear that people can drop in and out very easily. Sounds like a nice system!
What I’m doing is running a solo party in addition to the one I’m running with friends, on the same board. It’s a little awkward as written, since the manual says not to re-run completed scenarios, but I can’t think of a good reason to follow that rule.
I know, but I want one for my wife and I to do together the entire way through.
If I replay anything, I guess it will be just me solo (like SadleyBradley)- so I guess it isn’t a big deal if it is a bit of a hassle. Anyways, I may never do it so it REALLY isn’t a big deal.
I figured the kids might want to play a run-through in a few years.
I know I’m a new poster around here, but I appreciate you all letting me share my thoughts on my few games in this Boardgaming thread. I don’t have a group, and I have young kids, so I play most things solo, except a couple times a year when I get to play with my one friend who is interested in grander, more complex games.
In that vein, I played two games with that friend this weekend.
The first was Downforce. This is a racing game. At the beginning of the game, you go through a process of auctioning off 6 cars, each with a randomly assigned special ability. You also receive a hand of cards that you play throughout the game that tell you which cars move and how far. The special abilities allow you to do things like double play wilds, or move an additional space if certain conditions are met.
As the race continues, you reach lines on the board where you then secretly bet on which car you think will win… and it certainly doesn’t have to be your car(s). Scoring the end of the race is simple… you subtract the amount of money you spent in the initial auction, from your winnings from your car(s) placing (first place wins the most, obviously) and the amount you won from correctly betting on the winner. Highest value wins!
The game itself is perfectly made it that it is extremely simple to learn - so you can play it with kids and folks who aren’t patient enough for complex games… but the strategies involved with actually executing the race are endless. I highly recommend it, and it costs about $30 and the quality of the board, pieces and cards is good.
The second game I got out was Too Many Bones. I’ve played this game twice solo, but this was my first time getting into it with a second player. We played a medium length, 10 day game… and it took us about 4 hours (my friend and i are very collaborative when we play, so games take awhile). Interestingly, I thought the game was brutally challenging when I had played it solo, but yesterday it was a complete cakewalk. We played with Picket and Patches (a tank and a healer), and we didn’t lose a single encounter. It makes me wonder if we bungled some of the rules - like I wasn’t clear on how to apply poison if you have two baddies adjacent to your character - one with Poison 1 and one with Poison 2… or how do you apply poison damage from a ranged baddie with no attack stats, but a Poison attack… so we just kind of muddled through that.
I really enjoy the game, but a couple of things detract from it, in my opinion. The first is that the skill trees are really deep, but there aren’t enough training points to really explore them. In every game I’ve played I don’t get past about 3 skills… and that is because your training points are so much better spent in core statistics - specifically Dex and Attack.
The second challenge I have is that they have this entire deck of loot called Treasure Trove. It is super high-powered loot which requires you to spend a few days doing a mini-game of lockpicking to open… but the loot is very rare. In my 3 games, I’ve only received one Treasure Trove, which i lucked out and got open in one day. Frustrating to see a large deck of loot on the board, but never get to explore it.
The third thing was the most frustrating. My buddy and I were at the end of our session. We’d made it to Day 9 of 10, and were quite powerful, so we decided to attack the final boss (Tyrant). In our case, we fought Gendricks. We were super excited for this final battle, so we flip his card… and promptly spend the next 20 minutes trying to understand how to setup the battle. The card itself was so unclear and deviated enough from the standard battles that we ended up just throwing him out there and trying to figure out what to do as we went. We think by the end of the battle (which we won) we had the rules mostly figured out, but we’re also sure we had butchered some of them earlier on. The result was that after this long session, we both felt hollow about our victory. It was like we had lost all connection to the adventure. The other bosses I had fought weren’t that confusing, so perhaps it was just this one - but it was a sour way to end the game.
That being said, I do like and recommend the game - it just feels like it needs a tiny bit better balancing and clarity.
I really like the look of Downforce; I’ve had that on my radar for a few weeks now. Glad to hear you liked it! The only thing that’s stopped me is that I’m already overloaded on great games I don’t have the time to play right now.
I picked up Eminent Domain with the Exotica expansion and Unicornus Knights from Miniature Market’s winter sale, so I’m looking forward to playing those soon.
Unicornus Knights is an object lesson in what every grognard already knows: the two concepts that matter the most in military matters are 1) Logistics and 2) Star-Crossed Romance.
Finally tried out the Tragic Events expansion for Flash Point Fire Rescue, tonight, along with a lacing of other expansion content. We were dealing with a fire that had broken out in a subway station (from the Honor and Duty expansion) and won on recruit without a ton of difficulty. The primary things that Tragic Events does to modify the game are 1) introduce a Fire Deck that replaces the hot spot mechanic with Flare Up cards that add themselves to the Fire Deck. Every turn instead of following the original Advance Fire mechanic, you draw from the fire deck. By default, X number of the cards are just “Advance Fire” as per standard. But you also include Accelerate, which advances the fire twice, adds a Flare Up card, makes you draw an event, and reshuffles the deck. And Flare Up cards advance the fire, give you saved actions, add a Flare Up card, make you draw an event, and then make you draw again, meaning you could easily chain more than one in a single turn. (We never did, thankfully.) And 2) add an event deck. You only get events when Accelerate or Flare Up hits, so you may only see a few in your game (as happened to us), but they definitely complicate life. We had tremors that moved us around the board, forced delays that reduced our AP but gave us more saved AP than we’d lost, rain (which we rationalized as a sprinkler malfunction since we were underground) that put out fires, and more. All in all, it’s pretty simple but we all agreed the Fire deck made a better flow than the hot spot mechanic, and the events nicely spiced things up.
It also adds two new specialists (three, if you didn’t already have the Fire Prevention specialist as a promo): a Strategist that has a free AP every turn to either give to another player as a saved AP or to look at the top event card and either put it back or on the bottom of the deck, and a Suppression specialist who can use saved AP to flip dice on Advance Fire rolls, and prevents fire from being added in their space or the four adjacent spaces. The latter seemed quite powerful as we were able to parlay that ability into never having an explosion happen after the start of the game and eventually all of the active fire was cleared from the board by our CAFS specialist. There was smoke all over the place, don’t get me wrong, and if we hadn’t gotten our seventh rescue when we did it was entirely possible things would have had to flare back up somewhere in a few more turns. But we did, thanks in significant part to my activity as the Rescue Dog, a promo character who gets 12 AP every turn and can save up to 6, but can only move, squeeze through gaps in damaged walls, reveal adjacent POIs, and carry victims, and takes 4 AP to do the latter. You are a streaking blur moving around the board, but the actual rescuing is only slightly faster than a regular firefighter and you have no other way to contribute. So, tradeoffs.
I got Pulsar 2849 to the table 3 times this weekend. I came in last all three times and am still really loving this game. Hopefully if I finally figure out how to do well, I’ll still dig it.
It’s hard to sell it as exciting… The box looks like you’re getting into a crazy space 4X but the actual theme is more “Space Factories: Make Money Not War”. (Which, frankly, is good for me. I couldn’t care less about space 4Xs.)
It plays a bit like Troyes mixed with Russian Railroads. It’s a dice drafting game with tons of setup variability and a really fascinating dice drafting system, sort of like Troyes. And most of your actions will set you on a path that scores points every turn for the rest of the game, sort of like Russian Railroads.
If you’re in the market for a Euro where every action you take makes you feel like a badass space-points-lord, this one is worth seeking out.
That’s not a thing!
Still, I’m intrigued. But for my immediate space 4X boardgaming needs, I just got Alien Artifacts, which I’m looking forward to trying out this week.
-Tom
Oh, I want to hear about that. I didn’t love Imperial Settlers so I’m on a bit of wait-and-see for Alien Artifacts. But Portal usually does pretty interesting stuff!
My kids and I really like Flashpoint, I just hate the setup and all the little pieces. Is there 1 expansion that you think really improves the game that we should own?
Rumors are they are making an ios port of the game which would be awesome I think.
It’s a multiple system digital version, not just iOS as far as I know.
Flash Point expansions are very self-contained and modular for the most part, aside from new specialist roles and the decks in Tragic Events. I don’t think there’s any particular one that’s a must have as a result - just see what sort of challenges sound interesting to take on. But Tragic Events does bring a little extra to everything.
For some reason, my local game store’s distributor has a Gloomhaven release date of January 24th instead of the 19th. That’s OK because my wife and I are in the middle of a Pandemic Legacy Season 2 game. In any case the store confirmed with the distributor that 3 copies are being sent to them. One of them was already claimed, so I claimed the other. They sell the game for MSRP (looks like $140), so hopefully Amazon doesn’t decide to sell it for $99. I just didn’t want to risk not getting one.