Boardgaming in 2018!

Anyone in the Portland (Oregon, not that other one) area is hereby encouraged to contact me for games playing. I might even play a Euro!

We should be able to play Time of Crisis. Of course it might not fly with a crowd expecting Settlers of Catan but it’s a brilliant take on deckbuilding and, Tom, you might like it. I’ll just try not to remind you that it’s about Romans.

Tom started playing it with me but I taught it badly.

Oh yeah, I’m excited about Spacecorp shipping soon.

I’ve been reading the playtest rules. It reminds me of Destination Neptune.

Spacecorp is from the great designer, John Butterfield, while Destination Neptune is from Ian Brody a newer designer who also created Quartermaster General. These space games take a much lighter approach and tell a broader narrative of space exploration than a game like High Frontier or Leaving Earth. Of course I love those deeper experiences but like Tom said some games you can get to the table more than others. I’m lucky enough to have brought a few friends into the High Frontier fold but those die hard are few more and far between.

Yeah I’m (im)patiently awaiting this one too, as the man quite often does a good solo ruleset. Perhaps this belongs in the other thread, but:

:)

Yes, join the Qt3 Portland Board Game Club (working title)

PM incoming! I’d love to have you come up and visit!

Pfft, not badly enough. To really teach something badly, the person has to come away never wanting to play again. That was absolutely not the case with Time of Crisis.

-Tom

I’m excited for Spacecorps, but I’m also looking forward to Stellar Horizons, which looks like High Frontier, the 4X.

I like the map and the player boards. Seem to indicate some interesting gameplay (rule book is not bailable yet).

Stellar Horizons looks pretty interesting. It seems like it hit some delays and is coming out later than expected.

Last night I played The Incredibles Save the Day with our 4/6yo girls, then followed it up with the intro scenario of Legacy of Dragonholt with my wife.

The Incredibles games is actually a fun little co-op which the girls really liked. Quick & easy, you just move around the city trying to fix problems that pop up half the time when you roll your Move die. You have to solve all currently existing problems and have currently saved Jack Jack (who also teleports away from you at times) in order to win. It was cheap with the recent Amazon sale so I figured I’d try it out.

Dragonholt went well too as we created our characters then jumped into the intro. Switched off reading the passages depending on which of us was the active character, which seemed like it worked well. I’m definitely looking forward to exploring the village and seeing where it goes next.

I tried 2 games of Time of Crises and was unimpressed both times. The 2nd game was purely a “maybe we missed something” exercise.

It’s a deckbuilder in the sense that it’s sort of like Dominion if you got to pick your cards every turn instead of random drawing.

The main problem we had with it was that the interesting parts you expect the game would revolve around never happened. There’s Rome in center being very valueable to the player who can capture and declare themselves emperor and rake in big points every turn. Other players can declare themselves pretenders which gets them bonus points and nullifies the extra points the emperor would otherwise receive, BUT there is an incentive for third parties to go after pretenders since if you capture their capital it immediately reverts to you at no cost.

So that sounds like an interesting king of the hill setup. But the game is never decided by that.

No, the game is always decided on who kills the most NPC barbarians. They randomly invade different provinces every turn and you get big points for killing them. They are also a major threat if you leave them alone and they disrupt any development plans you may have. Between how often they spawn, how dangerous they are if left alone, and how many points they’re worth, the most effective strategy become “barbarian farming” where you just keep your troops at home to kill them, or at the most make an offensive move to snipe barbarians in another territory. The winning player is NEVER the one who holds the emperor title the longest. It’s the player who was the best barbarian farmer (maybe holding Rome one or two turns). The games I’ve played, the games I’ve heard from others, and the games I’ve read online, I’ve literally never once seen the winner be the player who was emperor the most turns. It’s always the player who expands to 2-3 territories, puts a building on them, then just sits on them farming barbarians.

So instead of king of the hill against the other human players, you just end up playing neutral barbarian wack-a-mole for 2-3 hours. It ends up feeling like you’re playing Game of Thrones where the focus is on who can kill the most Wildlings.

(there’s other minor quibbles like one of the buildings being much better than the others, or the blue cards being by far the least useful (nobody has ever, ever purchased the highest value blue cards in any game of ToC ever))

I’ve played the game 6-8 times now, and the people who farmed barbarians eventually got clocked by the guy who became emperor. There is just too much Legacy in it.

I think this is a game where the players have to feel out the right strategies over time. Play a few “farm the barbarians” games, then evolve strategies to beat that. There are ways of neutralizing barbarians cheaply while you take Rome.

Very much a Pericles-like game that doesn’t give up its secrets in the first few playings.

I’m not sure I understand - no one in any game ever played? Because I have. Or do you mean in any game you’ve played? Because unless I misread your post (which I may have) you’ve played two games? So no one in those two games did?

I’ve got about four games of Time of Crisis in and I’m inclined to agree with Bruce. Barbarians seem like an initially easy victory point prize but by far dominating the empire pays off in spades. Pretenders are a good way of countering that but just to set one up is it’s own heavy investment. The winners in those few games I did play were the ones that did well controlling Rome and not the barbarian hunters.

I am always interested in hearing about how games go with other groups and I generally think it’s a positive thing that different player groups can have such different interactions with a game. Let’s talk about how you guys have experienced John Company so far. Oh boy do I love that one and am now looking to get my hands on Root.

I got Flipships from my Secret Santa last year. It is a fun dexterity based game if you like those styles. I love the graphic work in this game as well.

Has anyone tried Detective: A Modern Crime Game ? I like the idea of a coop detective game that ties cases together into a story and seems to be different than Sherlock Holmes. I am also one of those that like Ignacy Trzewiczek games, especially First Martians. However, I can only play First Martians solo as my wife hates it so hoping this one might be more up her alley as a fan of mystery novels.

I’ve only heard the really good buzz about Detective. Rob Daviau raved about it on twitter, and I think the Shut Up Sit Down guys are bullish about it, too.

SU&SD’s final thoughts have become so opposite of right (Terra Mystica much better than Gaia Project? Seafall is worth buying?) that I actually consider their recommendation a red flag. It takes at least 3 other glowing reviews just to cancel out a SU&SD recommendation :p

And I was looking forward to Detective! Off to find 4 glowing reviews then.

(We’ve really been looking for a substitute for Consulting Detective that’s actually a game. Too many of those cases are overly vague on letting you know when you’ve solved them)

I played a game of Detective at GenCon. Still working on my gencon post. Will have my impressions on it and other games up today.

So I’ve played Detective through 2.5 cases now (not the pre-order or GenCon cases) - and it basically boils down to this. Portal Games, yet again, needs to hire a god-damn editor, translator and professional writer. It just vomits exposition, has some (comical) translation issues and wades into the “CSI bad fan fiction” pool too many times. Which really frustrates me because its really good.

Like you guys mentioned, the structure of Sherlock and Mythos Tales was the cases were distillation. You had to whittle down the motive, suspect, location and that was it. You knew most leads were 50/50 bullshit, and when Sherlock explained the optimal path, you scrunched your face wondering how the hell he made those logic jumps to get X,Y and Z in 12 turns. Still good fun.

Detective reverses the reductionist approach and gives you a task, which quickly hydras into an entire world of leads and clues. Your job is to assemble a tapestry of evidence that builds and supports your theory of the crime(s). Then like crude paper-craft puppetry, you hold up your Frankenstein of leads and evidence up to the light and see how well it matches what really happened. From what I’ve seen, you have done well if you get maybe 50-60% ranking at the end of each case - they are that deep. It’s hard to explain more without spoilers, sorry.

There are rabbit holes which go on for hours (literally). But what sold me on the game is that after playing the first case twice (with different groups), I realized that a whole tangent in Case 1 didn’t matter for what they knew at that point - but actually helped me solve Case 2 in my game. Very rewarding and has me pumped for what the whole 5 case narrative is. Also, the site is so purposely 90’s cheesy it’s awesome. Bring a laptop with a charger, cause it is another player.

In other news, I’ve played Root twice now. It’s nothing special, and seems just the GenCon hype train eventually forgotten (hi Photosynthesis, Seafall, Flick’Em Up). It’s your typical asymmetric Risk-lite with woodland creatures. I appreciate what it tries to do, but like all asymmetric games, you have to learn all 6 factions to have a clue what is going on. It’s too long, its susceptible to dog pile tactics and just generally boring. Chaos in the Old World is a better version and it’s almost a decade old.