1746

So I stopped by a game store today and they had Gloomhaven for $140, $150 with tax. I had recently avoided spending money on Cthulhu Wars and have also been playing Massive Darkness with a friend and enjoying it.
So, I bought Gloomhaven. I figure my friend and I will graduate to it after we finish MD.

1747

Second edition of Pax Pamir is on Kickstarter.

Btw, don’t miss Cole Wehrle and Sen-Foong Lim on Low Player Count talking about “Concept-to-Table” design.

1748

Just an FYI that the designer of Clockwork Wars has a new game that has just been Kickstarted: Infamous

1749

PC Gamer (?) has an article on the making of Pandemic Legacy 1 & 2.

1750

So yeah, case two of Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game complete. All three of us thought we were doing much better than in the first case, and ultimately we did dramatically worse. I can confirm I absolutely hate Detective.

Has anyone else played it? I have questions about case two. I’m going to spoiler this—nothing at all about the plot of case two (or one), but I’m going to complain a little bit about some details of how we were graded on our results, so that might be a bit of a light spoiler on the mechanics of the case. Main critique: this still just feels like blind luck.

We were much smarter about the detectives we chose so we could have complimentary abilities. We made it to the very last leads before we were in a pinch about the ability tokens necessary to go deeper when we wanted to.

We were much smarter about managing our time, ending three of the six days exactly “on time” (no overtime, no time wasted), and the other three only going over by an hour.

We tried to explore each of the initial leads at least a little bit before going too deep on any one of them, trying not to end up following every rabbit trail on any particular branch (this seemed like a smart correction after our first case when we left one of the primary leads until the last day and then felt like it was opening up an entirely new avenue of investigation we had no time to consider).

We really felt like we had a pretty good handle on the questions we were tasked with at the beginning of the investigation as we went into the final exam.

We got 3/4 of the primary questions, 3/4 of the secondary questions, and NO EVIDENCE, which meant 0/30 on that front. Which gave us a terrible 15/53 points, and then we lost the 3 for the stress from overtime to leave us with a pitiful 12/53.

I get that evidence is important, but what the hell? We followed the leads that made sense, they provided answers we needed, we weren’t caught off guard by any of the questions in the end, but we just…still didn’t find the right cards to give us evidence? I guess?

It’s just so maddening to fail so spectacularly but look back and have learned nothing. I’m no closer to understanding what we did wrong, and it especially stings after thinking we were making corrections from our first failure.

I hate this game, I would steer anyone interested away from it, but my coworkers agree we should at least “hate-play” it through to the end now, just to really embrace our anger.

1751

Did we know this? We knew this, right?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/509580/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_Living_Card_Game/

1752

I think it was mentioned in the FFG Digital thread. I had no idea it was out already! Oh, Early Access. Wasn’t this supposed to be F2P?

1753

Yeah, I meant that it was actually available. “Release” date says August 28th! It has Mixed reviews - I wonder if someone who gets Steam games for free, like, oh I dunno, @tomchick, can investigate!

1754

I like the LCG as a solitaire game so I jumped on the digital version. It’s going to be F2P when the game leaves EA.

It’s similar to the LCG, but has some big differences: You no longer need a resource match to play cards (heroes’ spheres just define what cards you can add to your deck), and now Sauron has his own resource pool and plays cards from his hand. There are a handful of other new mechanics, but if you’ve played the LCG it will feel familiar.

As far as I can tell the way in-game purchases work is: you earn in-game currency (Valor) by playing quests. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to how much Valor you can earn in a day. You can buy virtually everything (new quests, pre-defined packs of new hero cards) except Palantir Views with Valor. Palantir Views are sort of the loot boxes of the game. You get a few of them in every mission/character pack you buy, and you also get a one-time Palantir the first time you score 250 points on each quest with each hero. At the moment Views are guaranteed to give you a card that you don’t already own, so they can be manipulated to give you all the highest Valor cards if you buy everything cheap first.

Edit: Pricing details https://expectingmischief.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/lotr-lcg-digital-pricing-faq/

1755

Tried Luxor and Orleans last night. I uhhhh… cheated all the way through Orleans 3 different ways due to rule misunderstandings. Won’t happen again, I promise.

1756

Anybody else on Battlecon Online? Played my first match and had a great time! A perfect rendition of the board (card) game.

1757

Played Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem yesterday and it was suprisingly good. It’s a cutthroat area control/worker placement game with some fairly cool and streamlined mechanics. It also lends itself to a lot of aggro and back stabbery so when you play, please observe this rule from the manual: “Don’t be an ass.”

The game sold really poorly I was told. My group discussed how the theme was a mismatch for dedicated board games, but the mechanics were not nearly casual enough for casual players. It’s not a heavy game; I would say light to medium, but definitely not casual.

Don’t let the theme put you off: if you are in the mood to throw a lot of elbows and stab your friends in the back, it’s quite good.

1758

Nice. I have it still in plastic. Will give it a shot soon

1759

I helped my friend break in his super-deluxe, super-complete copy of the latest and final expansion of Sentinels of the Universe:OblivAeon. The gist is that OblivAeon is a super-duper bad guy in the vein of Thanos or Darkseid. He wants to destroy the world, or I guess even the Multiverse, and he has many trusted lieutenants and henchmen to help him out. The expansion pits Obie, who starts out as immune to damage and with “10,000 hit points”, jumping between two environments. If he does enough damage to five environments, the game is over.

This is the kind of comic book story like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinity War where it would be ludicrous to expect all the heroes to make it through. Once a hero dies, their “incapacitated” powers can still be used, and players are expected to bust out another hero to enter the fight. It’s like popping another quarter into the machine. After losing three or four heroes each, we players definitely started focusing on dealing damage rather than trying to limit our human wreckage.

Four of us started playing. Four hours later, one of players bailed when he realized he had to take care of his newborn son. Another player started playing two heroes instead.

Nine and a half hours after we began, with a short break for lunch, the game was over. The last two environments were destroyed sequentially. We had brought OblivAeon down to fourteen remaining hit points. We lost.

I guess we had a good time. I was sad when we lost the island which, according to the Sentinels lore, was the exact same island as the island in Spirit Island. And I certainly would have preferred to win.

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1760

I got that (and my collector’s case) and ever since my friends have been too busy to come play it and the case is waaay too big to transport to a gaming gathering. So frustrating.

1761

“OblivAeon?”

1762

Sadly so much time has passed since I kickstarted this, It’s going to arrive and get packed up for sale. I’ll be lucky to get 50% of what I spent on it…

1763

Why is that? Have you just gotten over Sentinels in the meantime?

I tried out OblivAeon with my gaming group last month. It was ROUGH, but fun. We ended up misinterpreting (I realized afterwards) a reward card that made us way too powerful, so after getting our butts kicked for most of the game, we ended up winning by cheating. It took maybe 3.5 hours? I can see it going a lot longer if you don’t cheat. But nine hours! I’m definitely keen to try it again, but hoo boy I hope it’s not typically that long.

1764

I think my group is done with it. We played it for almost a year, but this was kickstarted in March 2016(!) and we’re just now getting it. Plus the iPad app pretty much killed anyone’s interest in playing it at the table anymore.

1765

Played a game of Civilization: New Dawn last night. I think it’s the fourth time I’ve played it, and I finally won a game (after getting crushed in the first three). I picked up two purple wonders early (thus avoiding the “control 15 hexes next to the edge of the map or water” victory condition, which for some reason I find very difficult). Then I looked to see what I needed to do to win, and all I had to do was conquer two city-states (there were two near my capital), and get to max science (I was already very near it anyway). So I bumped up my military (Flight + a Joint War diplo card), somewhat luckily managed to conquer the two city-states (despite being at +2 I failed two of the three rolls, but used tokens to turn one of the losses into a win). At that point I couldn’t be stopped, all I had to do was use my science card. Yay!

Then we played a game of Village, where I came in dead last. I did ok on traveling, and got some good value out of the City Hall, and managed to get four dead villagers into the Chronicle, but somehow managed to only buy one Market token. That… is not good. I need to pick up the expansions to this someday.