Is there anything that’s obsoleted Ascension as a quick playing competitive deck-builder? I like Star Realms but I prefer the weird theme in Ascension and the stack of expansions gets me excited for no good reason.
I mean I still have games going, and there is an active Qt3 league for it.
So no?
Only asking because it’s floated around for a long time in a pretty crowded sub-genre. Seems like exactly the kind of game that could be secretly obsoleted by the BGG deep state and you’d never know without doing all the research.
I continued my exploration of train games today, playing Chicago Express and German Railways. I had played CE before, along with its cousin, American Rails (both classics in their own right). German Railways was a weird experience, especially since we played the (awful) Queen games edition. The random turn order mechanism didn’t bother me as much as the other players, but the dividend mechanism just never really clicked for me. Also, it was more fiddly than I expected, with constant income track upkeep. Would like to try it again, though I doubt it will get much more play in our group.
Walking home, I started to think about all the train games I have played recently, and what the ideal order for introducing people to the genre is. This is what I’m come up with so far:
Ticket to Ride > American Rails >Chicago Express > Railways of the World > Steam > (Age of Steam?) > 1846 > (other 18xx)
Any thoughts?
Nah that’s a pretty sensible scale. Obviously depending on the group I may jump a few slots, or never move past the first spot, but it’s a workable starting spot.
Yes: Ascension.
Which is to say, the original game is kind of boring next to more recent sets. I don’t think there’s another deckbuilder in its mode that I’d rather play over it, though. Certainly not any of Cryptozoic’s (DC Deckbuilder, LOTR Deckbuilder, etc), which I thought were actually pretty awful.
There are a bunch of newer deckbuilders that do other cool stuff in the genre, though, they’re just more involved and time-consuming. E.g. we’ve been quite enjoying Aeon’s End.
A WINNER IS ME!
11 points with the Emirates of Hacan. TI4 is really an improvement in all ways, but 9 hours is too long.
Congratulations!! How many players?
Full set of six.
I’ve been quite enjoying Eminent Domain lately. It’s distinct from most deckbuilders in several ways: one, it’s got a total of five core cards (“roles”) that make up the majority of your deck throughout a given game; two, players only get two actions per turn (play a card from your hand, then play a card from the center that you can boost with more cards from your hand, as well as planets you control and technologies you’ve researched in your play area); and three, there’s a follow mechanic (when a player plays a card from the center, everyone else has the option to use cards from their hand and planets and technologies in their play area to follow and get a weaker version of that action, or to “dissent” and draw a card). The expansions add a couple more mechanics, but the core system of limited actions per turn ensures players can’t set up draw engines and turns always play out fast.
It doesn’t replace Ascension, but I’m not sure there’s anything that truly does at this point.
Yeah, Eminent Domain is very good. I think the Escalation expansion is really important to making it sing, though. The core game is decent but it’s over before you have much chance to actually research technologies beyond the very basic 3 point ones, and you have three sizes of ship in the box with no mechanical difference between them. Escalation adds asymmetric starting setups per player (which mix in more exciting tech from the very start) and give the larger ships a distinct purpose, both of which really help the game IMO. The other two expansions, eh. More stuff. But Escalation is great.
I’ll start by saying that yes, this is one of the items I received to review. It’s perfectly okay to not like that. The fact that my house has more board game covering the walls that I purchased than pictures, well let’s just say I buy a lot of board games. I just want to be open about this kind of stuff either way
Anyway, first the art is beautiful, i mean really unique on some quality card stock that doesn’t really get handled all that much.
So the basics of the game is one person puts on a sleep mask. Everyone else takes on the role of a Dream Spirit which is either a Fairy, Boogeyman or Sandman. The fairies have it easiest. These cards shown above are double-sided and have two words on each side. You’re basically using the pillow to hide one word and using the other. Then everyone around the table takes turns giving the dreamer a one word clue, with a few restrictions, to help the dreamer guess their word. When the dreamer thinks they know the answer, you move the card to the right or left, depending on whether they are right or not, and then move onto the next card. Rinse and repeat until the timer runs out.
Now the roles determine just what kind of “help.” you’re giving the dreamer. Fairies are good, and they want to help. Boogeymen are bad, and they’re trying to mislead the dreamer. .The Sandman has the most challenging role and the opportunity to make the most points… they’re trying to balance the two so they really want the dreamer to have an equal number of wrong and right cards to score extra points; this is hard to do.
At the end, the Dreamer has a chance to score extra points, they normally score with the fairies, if they can retell their entire dream which is basically restating all their guessed words. The game recommends dramatization which might be silly to a less roleplay centric groups like mine, but we quickly realized weaving these words into a story actually helped you remember what you said!
Now pretty much every Dreamer thought they were doing a lot worse than they were. And while initially retelling started at zero success, the story weavers got it or were really close, so we all started weaving stories.
Points are little stars, moons, nothing you have to write down which is a bonus. You can see there are a lot of cards, and this actually worked really well for a low key kind of game with some whimsical fun. Everyone even wore the mask!
Some minor down sides. The card holder you put on the board is cute and pretty and well-done but…
If you have up to ten people, I had 7 the entire night this time, that pillow and the other piece at the end can easily block the view of someone sitting. I don’t know how they tested this… but if you’re standing or really tall, probably not a problem. For some of us, there was a lot of leaning over. I was very close at the foot of the bed and I had to lean over several times to see the whole word. The dreamer is also not supposed to be able to tell which side his or her cards are going on, so you don’t want too much shifting.
With experience… almost instantly the boogeymen and sometimes the sandmen started working together which is a perfectly valid strategy because it created two themes, and as one of the Dreamers that experienced this, I had to basically pick which group I thought was telling me the truth and go all in.
Also I made an excellent Sandman and the extra two points from that effort helped me win the game.
Oh and storage is good, very minimal set-up except I don’t see a place to really put the 1 point clouds, the most commonly used point token, so I just throw them in with the stars and moons. Set-up is maybe 2 minutes, most of that dealing with passing the cards and waiting for others to quiet down.
Played Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn yesterday and it was quite good. I had purchased it a week ago, watched a video and read the rules, but otherwise it was 4 of us figuring the game out as we went. With 4 players, it took 3 hours but I’m confident it would played in 90 to 120 minutes with the same group a second time.
It’s quite elegant, compared to some of the longer civ-type board games, turns are quick, and I felt like there was always something happening. The focus action board, where actions become more powerful the longer you wait to perform them, is a very interesting spin on action selection. The combat system involves dice rolls but not that many, and you can stack bonuses to either strongly influence or completely control the result.
It’s a very elegant game in that, in this version, there are a fairly small number of factions, victory conditions and Wonders, but the availability of random setup and player map building give it a lot of variety.
I’m going to put this one in my rotation for frequent play.
Thanks for the review. I’m kinda interested in New Dawn. My group played the previous iteration a lot, even though we actually all thought it was kind of terrible; but it had the right level of complexity, length, and interaction that our group enjoys. Unfortunately it wasn’t balanced very well, and the expansion made the balance even worse (we never tried the 2nd expansion).
This new one looks more streamlined, so maybe that’s good. Hopefully there’s still a reasonable amount of punching each other though.
Sounds cool, I’ve almost bought this a couple times, might pull the trigger on it next time I swing by the local game shop.
Not a peep about the newest Axis & Allies?
I’ve never felt older. If you told the 12 year old me, who played A&A with his father religiously…that there would be a zombie version one day, his head would explode. I read this now, and my brain can’t figure out if I hate it or adore it.
I am curious if you see a lot of variety in how alliances are chosen in your games. Depending on player count, in some seasons, one player will simply have more mandate selections than others. By far, the players with more mandate placements were seen as more desirable allies in the games I played, and could often extract gold/ronin to agree to an alliance. Because the map is so easy to traverse in so many ways (e.g., by Dragonfly, some Kami, and all the shipping routes),. geographic proximity seemed to matter less to alliances than it could have.
Yeah, I’d agree. In our first few games there was definitely a feeling that the alliances weren’t important in quite the way we were expecting them to be. Geography, splitting up the map, or avoiding fights doesn’t seem to be a primary motivator for alliances.
However, I do feel in our games there’s been a lot of variety in how alliances are chosen that’s just super contextual. Like we had a time where we all thought the Koi clan was overpowered in certain setups and everyone was hesitant to give them too helpful of an alliance (the meta at our table on clan powers has shifted a lot each game…). Or when Lotus is in play, they can guarantee a choice of mandate so if the mandate you need is really specific that round, you may need to focus on allying with them. We’ve also had table state become part of discussions where if one player seems far ahead, other players are less likely to ally with them. When there isn’t an obvious reason to choose an ally, we’ll often ally based on territories we’ve already conquered because that makes splitting up the map easier. We also argue about whether it’s even worth chancing allying with someone who’s clearly honor-bombing. If they have Oni that benefits from low honor but aren’t on the bottom, they have a huge incentive to ally and betray (since that’s one of the rare ways to lose honor).
The weird thing with every part of Rising Sun is that how important it is and how it interacts with each game changes so drastically from game to game. It makes the game feel sort of slippery for my mind, like I can’t nail down any sort of good strategy for it. Which is both good and bad. It means each game is interesting in a new way, but it also sometimes feels like I’m not really learning anything about it each time I play. But yeah, in summary, the variables that have affected our alliances have been really different from game to game and round to round.
That’s a great insight. The variability seems to be great for forming alliances, but too chaotic for other long-term strategy. It’s not just that different variables come into play, like war reparations and hostage-taking etc, but that each one is important (as you say), and this can completely wreck all your careful planning. Do you agree, or think that’s a reasonable part of the game’s challenge?