Well, Charterstone is 12 games and you’re done. And the individual games aren’t long either, we’d do 2-3 a night, I think it only took us 5 game nights to finish (4 player, might be longer with more)
Au contraire! It’s 12 games and then you have your own unique board. The charter stuff gets dealt out randomly, and of course, there’s no progression. But the idea is that the 12 legacy games shape the board and then you have a regular ol’ worker placement game.
Now whether you’re interested in continuing to play is another question, but it’s definitely not one of those legacy games where you just throw it in the trash when you’re done. Hi, Pandemic!
-Tom
My DC boardgaming friend from down the street is moving. I am deeply saddened. We each have two small kids and we share the notion that a great night out (other than going out with our wives) is playing a board game together. We’ve battled through Pandemic Legacy, Forbidden Stars, Clockwork Wars and Star Wars Rebellion. I didn’t have a chance to bring out Spirit Island or Gloomhaven or War of the Ring or…it goes on.
Can you all let me know some good options for online board gaming and what setups you use for video/speech while playing? I have Tabletop Simulator on Steam but I couldn’t get a good handle on controlling the game I tried (Clockwork Wars). I am going to study up on using it now though.
BTW, we are hooked on Clockwork Wars. I saw the designer (Hassan Lopez) has a new game in the works: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220224/infamous
Thanks for any help.
Joe
Move with him?
My group got six games into Charterstone before we dropped it, but even during those games many of us weren’t enjoying it much at all but wanted to see how it developed.
Tabletop Sim + a Discord group voice chat room works pretty well for us. TTS has voice chat capability onboard, but it’s not very good.
One of the trade-offs of the physics model of boardgame simulating with TTS is that it can occasionally be a little bit awkward…not to mention that objects sometimes react in rather surprising ways. It takes some getting used to for sure. Once you get the hang of it, though, you can fly through games, and the different stuff that can be scripted and automated seems pretty powerful (to this non-programmer, anyway).
Anyway, it makes spending an hour setting up and tearing down the cardboard Arkham Horror or Gloomhaven every time you want to play obsolete, and that’s worth some occasional funkiness.
As mentioned earlier Discord is great for speech. Skype works too. Have you tried Vassal for gaming itself?
I would highly recommend Board Game Arena. My wife and I have friends who we get together with weekly and play board games online. We’ve tried quite a few different game sites/tools and the one we keep coming back to is BGA. I was ok with Tabletop Simulator, but it took a lot of getting used to, and we would almost always have some issue with it (cards being revealed unintentionally, components lost or moved, etc.).
BGA doesn’t have the same selection as TTS, but it takes more of an app approach to the games instead of a physics-based sandbox. Things that can be automated are automated, available actions are limited by the rules, the UI is generally pretty good and provides summary info, and it fully supports both real-time and turn-based play. It’s also very easy to setup games, and fill in seats with other players. They’ve also got some pretty big-named games (Puerto Rico, Terra Mystica, Race/Roll for the Galaxy, Seasons), and if it’s important to you, they’re fully publisher-approved unlike TTS.
A handful of the games (such as Terra Mystica) do require a BGA subscription to create a table for them, but you can join any game as a non-subscriber. The subscription is not unreasonable either, $24/year I think. One of the members of our group is a subscriber, and all that’s needed is for him to create the table and the rest of us have no problem joining.
I’ve also tried a few of the others such as BrettSpielWelt and Yucata, and found them to be very hard to use as a new player.
We use Ventrilo for voice communication (we’ve been using it since World of Warcraft days), but BGA has built-in voice and text.
I played Rex for the first time today, which is a re-skinned and slightly revised update of the old Dune game. It has essentially the same mechanics and same factions, just based on the Twilight Imperium lore instead of Dune lore. The thematic elements do matter and I feel like Dune is the better gaming experience, but Rex was still quite good, and the fine-tuning of mechanics (with the exception of the map layout which should be circular with pizza slices dammnit) worked pretty well. Also, the quality of the printing and components was quite high. We played with just 3 today, which is pretty minimal, but I liked it enough that we are planning or organizing a full-on 6 player game in a few weeks.
I suspect Tom would like this.
I keep meaning to write a nice post here and forgetting, so I’m going to write a quick crappy one instead.
If anyone else is going to Dice Tower Con in Orlando next week and wants to meet up, shoot me a message. There are already two of us who are going and we are going to have a Qt3-plays-a-board-game meet up.
If enough stragglers come out of the woodworks we could also play something big like TI4 or Sidereal Confluence provided the stars align (schedules permit).
Probably!
I mean, there’s basically no game I won’t try. Everything gets its fair shake. But trying something and spending money to own something are two different things. It’s unlikely that I would buy Hardback sight unseen – the budget and closet space just don’t stretch that far anymore – but I’ll certainly give it a shot if I have the opportunity.
Thanks for the replies. I tried out Clockwork Wars again on Tabletop Simulator and it worked quite well. I’m not sure how that is street legal but I don’t feel bad since owning the game (and all possible accessories). I am going to check out BGA tomorrow.
I was in a board gaming dark age for many years prior to this neighbor. I guess I will have to branch out more now which I loathe.
You may recall that I posted about having purchased Prophecy some time ago, billed as Vlaada Chvatil’s take on Talisman, and that evoked a certain skepticism from people who rightly consider Talisman a bad game.
Well, Prophecy is definitely similar in certain respects: battles are resolved by rolling a die for each combatant and adding a strength or willpower value depending. Encounter cards spawn in terrain spaces mixed in between special spaces with their own particular roles. And you’re trying to get a powerful artifact to win the game (in this case, four of five, once all five are in play.) But there are a bunch of key differences that make it far, far more of a game.
Start with movement. In Talisman, it’s classic roll to move. Prophecy says “fuck that”, and introduces a system where you can move one space left or right for free, or two (skipping the intervening space) for a gold. If you happen to start out at a harbor, you can move to the harbor left or right of you (a good quarter of the way around the board) for a gold. If you start on a magical portal, you can teleport to another portal (often clear across the board) for 2 gold. One can also find transportation-affecting items, and one of the artifacts gives a board-wide teleport at the cost of magic.
Or stats. Strength in Prophecy is your health and vice versa, same with willpower and magic. If you lose health or magic (most often spent, in the latter case), you’re rolling at a lower stat value until you heal. But actually gaining strength or willpower requires special effects, often provided by defeating certain enemies or having certain special encounters. And many combat encounters offer the option of fighting either with strength or willpower, but initiating the latter costs magic, so you have to be careful about whether it’s worth it. (Willpower is easier to come by, though, and caps higher.)
Or advancement. Fighting things (and some other effects) gets you experience, which is a currency you carry with you and can spend for skills at one of five guilds spaced around the land. Each character is a member of two and gets those skills for just XP, but the other three require an equal payment in gold. Once the training is bought, that’s it until the event deck cycles around to add more training to that guild. (But if one isn’t bought, a second will be offered, and if a third comes out at that point the oldest goes back into the deck.) Skills offer specialized but handy bonuses which evolve combos and bonuses quite naturally along with your equipment.
Or encounters. Talisman has these cards spawn when you move to the space, making planning impossible unless someone fails to deal with an encounter and leaves it present. In Prophecy, Adventure cards are dealt to a given terrain type (with various frequencies) whenever an appropriate event card is drawn, and are placed face-up unless there is already an adventure card on that space. This combined with the flexibility and choice of movement makes planning both quite possible and indeed vital.
Or the artifacts themselves. They are locked away in five astral planes, each accessible from two terrain spaces on the board, as a movement option on the turn after you arrive at one of those spaces. (And thus, need to deal with whatever Adventure cards may be present when you get there, though not any that arrive on the turn you assault the astral plane.) Each plane contains a Lesser Guardian, a Greater Guardian, and an Artifact, in that order. The Guardians are significantly stronger than Adventure encounters (with one or two exceptions), and if you defeat the Lesser you must immediately fight the Greater. (The Lesser does not respawn if you fail the Greater encounter, though. And the Lesser Guardians do have considerable rewards.) And they start face down, although there is an event that lets you reveal one card from one plane each time it occurs. Defeat both, and the Artifact they guard is yours. These are the best items in the game. Once all five artifacts are in play, if someone has four, they win. If not, the Final Battle begins immediately. The person holding the Royal Cape (which allows teleportation) picks the battleground, everyone with an artifact is immediately brought there, everyone is healed and repaired to full, and then you take turns fighting each other and stealing artifacts until someone has four, eliminating anyone who loses their last artifact immediately. No drawn out chasing or endless die rolls with the Crown of Command.
I just found that one big advantage to hardback (that may not be evident if you’ve only played the iOS version of paperback) is it takes a lot less time to set up. I just started playing it but it does avoid the paperback problem of having totally dead hands, since you can make any letter a wildcard in hardback.
Rex fell flat with me every time I tried it. They tried to streamline and shorten the Dune experience, but they messed up the balance doing so because they indirectly nerfed a lot of factions without giving them anything to compensate.
Mostly they buffed the faction that totally did not need buffing: the Emperor/Lazax (mostly money trading restrictions eased in Rex)
Then all the weaker factions got nerfs they absolutely did not need. The Fremen/Sol lost their elite unit for no reason (the Emperor gets to keep his). The removal of blank cards nerfed Harkonen and Atredeis with their bonuses to card draws and info. The board was made smaller and units have a base movement of 2 instead of 1. That was HUGE and it heavily nerfed factions that relied on a mobility advantage for strength, namely Fremen/Sol and Guild/Hacan. It also nerfed Harkonen/Letnev and Atredeis/Jol-Nar since they rely on their starting mobility advantage from controlling the space ports.
The only ones who didn’t get nerfed were the Emperor/Lazax and Bene Gesserit/Xxcha, and they were already the best factions in Dune. There’s rarely a reason for Lazax, Xxcha, and one more faction not to form a 3 way alliance as soon as possible and never break it. The remaining 3 factions just can’t stand up to the Lazax money machine and the Xxcha’s “voice” ability. Hacan is pathetic with their horrible leaders and all their strengths all tied up in mobility in a game where mobility’s importance has been greatly reduced.
Rex plays in less time but I found it so much a poorer experience that I’d say just block off the extra hour or two and go with Dune.
Can someone help me? I have the Arkham Horror LCG Core Set sitting in my cart. I need someone to talk me out of going down this rabbit hole.
Doooo iiiit.
That’s talking you out of it, right?
Don’t do it, save a tree. When are you actually going to play it?
Do it. I played it solo just tonight and had tons o’ fun.