The original fix to the point role is in one of the early expansions for that edition, but they incorporated a lot of expansion ideas into 4th edition, as I understand it.
I was notified my copy of Darkest Night v2 will be shipping soon, and should be here this Saturday!
John Company arrived today. I have been really looking forward to it and am very ready to play, “The Game of Nepotism and Bureaucracy for one to six players.” Cute tagline and the idea of all players representing various families and trying to exploit the East India Company which is trying to exploit, well, the East; is a weird enough subject that it very much has a hook for me.
Tom Mc
Damn enablers :)
Sharpe,
I have TM and while I like it a lot. It’s not in my top 10. Would you say Gaia or Clans is different enough to warrant a buy? The graphic and component team of Gaia should be shot. It looks hideous. I’m not asking for much, but come on. Clans I had picked up, but due to a distributor debacle stores couldn’t sell the game so my order was cancelled.
Got some gaming in after being out of town and sick for the last week. I’m in a rut with new games. Just nothing quite scratching my itch.
Azul-
I’m not a fan of abstracts, but this was fun enough. The components to the game were not designed by someone with children. I just kept thinking coasters and starbursts.
New Angeles-
Interesting game. Like the theme and I would like to play it again. Not sure if would work for my usual group as there is a lot of negotiation, but played fast enough. I would recommend this to groups that do like negotiating and Archipelago.
TI4-
Second game of 3 players. Have another planned for 2 week with 4 to 5 players. I’m really enjoying the game.
Eclipse -
3 player game in 2 hours not too shabby.
Fortune and Glory-
I don’t know why, but I like this game and 2 new expansions are coming out this year.
Fallout -
(ugh) If ever a game needed an app. Long for the sake of being long. I’m not a fallout fan (just never played any of the games) but the theme is here. Interesting level up system, but there are better games even better FFG games that do similar things.
Wait till you play 4th edition. So much cleaner.
If you like the gameplay in Terra Mystica, then you will like the gameplay in Gaia Project. It’s very similar, with a few refinements. Clans of Caleondia depends on how much you like pure strategy. It doesn’t have a ton of flavor or player interaction, but the econ/strategy game is pretty good.
Just played a quick game of Gloomhaven with my son, and we loved it! The two of us made short work of the first scenario (I was a little worried at how tough it was going to be reading @tomchick talk about it in the previous thread) and I broke everything down and now we wait for the real campaign to start when our third player is available. He was a Spell Weaver and I was a Brute, and it was excellent.
The new edition has spin-down wheels for tracking health and XP and we found them hard to use. For one thing, the wheels are very easy to move, so you can often pick up the wheel and find them in the wrong position. For another, it’s hard to tell at a glance how much health your allies have, so I instead started tracking health with some little red dice I had previously picked up, for both allies and enemies.
I also used blue dice to track XP.
This made it not only a lot easier to track (than counting out and trying to carefully pile tokens) but much easier to see at a glance how much damage people had on them, too. Worked very well, I think.
We didn’t start a campaign, nor permanently track anything like picked up gold or XP, as we want to start fresh for the real thing. I mostly wanted to try out the game and teach my son how to play (he really took to it, and we had a fantastic time, as well as what I feel is a very fast set up and breakdown, which is key to my personal long term enjoyment) and I am super pumped to get into this regularly!
Welcome to the club!
I would kill a man if it meant letting me take this game back in time to give to me and my high school gaming group. 17 year old me would have died of ecstasy overload having this on hand. This is so fucking cool - from the sealed envelopes and character classes to the way each skill deck and action deck work to create defined and unique play styles and enemy types. This is genius level stuff here, and I’m proud to be a member of this club! :)
My upgrade kit for Gloomhaven (if you don’t like the spinwheels, just know that the first edition system where you tried to stick tracking tokens in a tiny cutout track on your character card was worse) has finally shipped…or at least been given a tracking number. But it’ll still be a few days. In the meantime, something else arrived:
My wife and I are going to be starting August of our Pandemic Legacy Season 2 game - I think it’s going well do far as we’ve won the first game of the month twice in a row, But, the big thing is that I need to finish this before we start Gloomhaven! I may do a non-permanent first scenario to learn the game before then, but I’m excited to get to the real thing!
I received my birthday present very early from my little sister. We played this game, and I really did enjoy it. She was afraid I might buy it before she had a chance to give to me.
Summary: 1-4 player game, really quality components and the goal is to basically place cards which contain a variety of books from one of a number of genres into your library first in alphabetically order and then in numeric order so A 1/10, A, 2/10, etc. If that is not challenging enough, there is a bonus genre, a banned book genre and then you have a special genre just for you!
It’s kind of a work placement in that your taking your assistants and special assistants (special assistants each have unique abilities).
If everyone knew what they were doing and understood the locations without having to look them up.
It’s a lot to keep track of, if you get your books out order they don’t count as points, and there are only a few locations that will allow you to rearrange. Beautiful, complex, but once you get the idea, just a challenge to beat everyone else. I tied for second on my first go through against a couple of people who played a few times. I surprised them by putting down a few cards and finishing my library sooner than expected.
Oh and I forgot to mention, they spent a lot of time on the books on the cards. Each spine is unique and kind of clever and funny like Everything You Don’t Need to Know Vol. 3 sort of thing.
I only got to play it once, but I really enjoyed Ex Libris. It’s got tons of personality and some really cool asymmetry among the different librarians. I liked how the actions varied from turn to turn.
However – and this is a big however – the presentation is godawful. You have to read lots and lots of teensy text, and it cycles every turn. There are so many little variations among the characters and especially the actions, and the available actions are brand new every turn. Keeping up with them is a lot of leaning over the table to re-read “what does that space do again?” I wish they’d worked out some kind of iconography. It reminded me a bit of Sentinels of the Multiverse. Some really cool gameplay ideas, but only ever expressed with chunks of intricate text.
Oh, here’s an Amazon.com link:
But I liked it and I’d gladly play it again. I can imagine once you learn it well enough that you don’t have to keep reading the different action boards, it’s a lot snappier and more accessible.
-Tom
Intriguing. I saw another favorable review somewhere; this tempers my enthusiasm a bit.
Then again, what could be more thematic in a game about a library than forcing players to squint at tons of small print?
Yeah I feel like once you really know the special assistants and the locations well enough not to have to keep reading them or look them up, it will flow as intended. The slowdown will hit though every time you have a new player, and it’s pretty big.
I am kind of tempted to just photo copy the locations and the assistants and just hand them out to everyone. This game needed some quick reference sheets.
This made me chuckle.
I had the same experience. I’ve only played it twice, but the last time I played I was the inevitable “all pieces are upside to you” designated sucker. That made it so I had to lean in close and read each new spot upside down. Some of the spaces require careful reading of the rule wording until you get familiar with it. Still, I really love the gameplay and I’m willing to put up with the dense text for now.
Oooh, that’s a great idea, Nesrie! That would make a big difference if each player could just mark on a sheet the boards as they come out.
-Tom
Loving this video… thx.
I played Time of Crisis yesterday and really didn’t enjoy it. I don’t have a lot of experience with Wargames (I’ve only really played Twilight Struggle and Fire in the Lake, both of which I’ve enjoyed). Time of Crisis felt weirdly archaic. It has a round structure that feels a couple decades out of place. Each players turn involves 10 steps that I don’t think anyone remembered all of at any point. Games nowadays tend to combine round resolution steps so that you go through them as a group and take turns during an action phase. Time of Crisis’ round structure makes the game feel really long and tedious.
There’s a high degree of randomness in the game. I usually like dice chucking fun especially if it makes great story moments. But Time of Crisis feels a little flat to me. There are cool leaders and barbarians building up at the gate with a neat spill out, but all the barbarians and their leaders are functionally identical. There was no sense that being governor in Egypt was any different than being governor in Gallia. However, there are some really cool historical notes on some of the figures in the rule book, but I didn’t own the game so I didn’t read them until the game was over. It would have been fun to have them integrated into the actual experience, like the historical notes on the leaders being on their cards when they appear. For all the possible craziness I thought would happen in the game, there were only a few moments that felt like they created a story (when the emperor was deposed and the creation of the first pretender state).
There’s some really neat mechanics in the game. You build a deck that you can pick any 5 cards from, but you pick them at the end of your turn. So you’re preparing specific cards for an uncertain future. This requires balancing safety picks with exciting moves. For instance, you may want to draft a ton of political power so next turn you can max out your governors power in a few nations and get the ability to start a Pretender Empire. But doing so means you can’t draft money to pay off the barbarians for a turn, so if you randomly get attacked you’ll have no way to deal with it.
Unfortunately, I don’t think those mechanics are good enough for me to deal with the annoyance of the round structure. I also felt their thoughtfulness is undermined by the randomness of exploding dice. All of these ideas feel like they could work great in a different game or a more refined version of this game.
Still, it definitely had moments where I was hooting and hollering. My pretender empire came in second and had some fantastic late game combats.