That looks so fascinating!
I actually picked up Pathfinder on Steam a few days ago since you recommended it to me earlier. I’m excited to try it out. If I really dig it, I’ll pick up the physical copy, too.
I think I’ll pass on Arkham Horror for now. Some day I’ll dive into the wonderful world of solo LCG, but not today. So I guess it’s back to impatiently waiting on 7th Continent to show up.
We got absolutely destroyed on Robinson Crusoe tonight. Dead on day 7 or 8.
What scenario? It’s a brutal game, but it can be a blast when everything works. I play it solo, usually with the Carpenter, Friday, and Boy (from the expansion). Family Robinson is a good scenario, as well as the Treasure Island one. Never got far in the expansion, Voyage of the Beagle, though.
Oh, and which RC edition did you play? I know y’all are probably sick of me saying so, but the new edition with the clarified rules is glorious.
Castaways with Cook Soldier Explorer and 1 more
Had a big gameday yesterday.
Started out with a four-player game of Fantasy Flight’s new Civilization: A New Dawn. Much more streamlined than their previous Civ game. I was a bit worried it would be too streamlined, but there’s enough variety with the techs, wonder powers, and diplomacy powers to keep it interesting. The game developed in an interesting way. The rules have a few fiddly bits, but overall not too bad, and all our questions were answered in the rules or the FAQ. Everybody liked it (even the one player who generally hates Fantasy Flight games), and we’re all eager to try it again.
The we tried Vast: The Crystal Caverns which I’d picked up at a flea market recently. This is the “extreme asymmetry game”, where one player is the Knight, one the Dragon, one the Goblins, and one player is… the Cave. Each player has their own rules, it’s basically four different games. It was ok. It it hard to learn/teach, it went on a bit too long, the downtime is a problem. The good thing I’ll say is that it was remarkably balanced; everybody at least got somewhat close to their objective. Nobody hated it, but I don’t know if it will hit the table again.
Then we played something called The Ninth World. This is a bidding game where you have a hand of 5 bid cards, and each round there are four auctions, and you have to decide how to apportion your cards between the auctions, and then at the end whatever you have left over you can use to upgrade your bid cards. That part was kind of cool, but the stuff you’re bidding on was so bland and uninteresting (“here’s a monster, it’s worth 4 points”) that I ended up not really enjoying it.
One player bowed out and we did a 3-player Yokohama. This was the only game of the day I’d played before! This is sort of a ramped-up Istanbul, you move your guy around the map to different buildings that give you different actions and try to do various things that give you victory points. I like this quite a bit.
Yeah, Numenera is such a bonkers setting that you’d expect a game based on it to have some actual character (especially when Lone Shark, who simulated Pathfinder so well in the ACG, are making it) but I couldn’t detect any when they pitched it on Kickstarter, so I skipped it myself. Seems like I made the right call.
Quick reminder to message me if you’re going to Dice Tower Con this coming week and want to meet up.
I forgot about the Dice Tower Con so I went to their page, only to see they are preemptively trying to avoid an issue that occurred at another con. Just solidifies reasons I don’t go to these but those who do, I hope you can let us know anything interesting you see.
My gaming group is really diverse and DTC is too, so when I read the recent Reddit post about how much it sucks to be a female board gamer I was baffled at first.
My group is mostly women but we’ve added a few guys recently. We don’t go to cons though, and we mostly avoid local gaming stores. It’s just weird and awkward to go there at night for their gaming sessions.
There are a couple of gaming shops near me that have that old school boys only vibe and they’re full of gross dudes, so I don’t blame you if that’s what you’re seeing. I’M not comfortable there either. We recently had a cool stuff games open by us though and the vibe there is a lot better, and there is usually a woman working when they’re open and I’m sure that helps.
Mech like Card Game:
I posted this in the Battletech thread as well. It is one of the Dice Tower Essentials games. So far most of the games that have had that label have been pretty good (the most well known probably being Sheriff of Nottingham).
Critcal Mass:
http://www.dicetower.com/game-video/critical-mass-overview-tom-vasel 10
That would be awesome. It’s been a bit since i made the local rounds to these shops here. I really should just give them another go.
The board game scene is getting what I’m guessing is a long overdue #metoo reckoning. One of the lead designers of Codenames called out his codesigner on Twitter today and the codesigner is going to get let go I think I heard.
One designer banned from Origins, another from DTC.
Oh man, that’s worse than I thought. Well I’ve heard rumors for years and the board-gaming sites are not really better than video gaming so hopefully this will just open things up for more people into the hobby in general.
Uh, the lead designer of Codenames was Vlada Chvatl. In fact he is the only listed designer at board games geek.
So, is he getting called out or is he doing the calling?
He designed the original Codenames, yes. There are like another four or five Codenames releases since then that I don’t believe he was directly involved in. I have no idea what his relation to this reckoning might be but I hope it’s the right side because the man makes great games.