Boardgaming in 2018!

Played La Havre for the first time today. It’s my 4th or 5th Rosenberg game. Quite good. Not as brutal as Agricola and not as flexible as Feast for Odin. I’ll have to play it some more to decide where it ranks on the Uwe scale.

  1. Five Minute Dungeon, The box makes it’s kind of awkward to haul but it’s not huge. You’ll get more than five minutes out of it. -cooperative-
  2. Unstable Unicorns, obviously for work leave the NSFW expansion behind. If you can get people to just play you can do that in 30 minutes or so. -fun screw you competitive-
  3. Timeline games, small, easy to set-up, competitive, might get a little old after a bit but certainly fun initially.

I’ll have to think about the others, but sadly most will not qualify due to lack of portability or length of play.

Ooh, 5 Minute Dungeon is actually next on our list. Has anyone ever heard of The Grizzled? It’s a cooperative game based in Ww1 where you and your fellow players have to survive together. I watched a YouTube video of it and it seemed interesting but I wondered how much replayability it might have.

I tried the old hotness Panamax last night. I was fortunate enough to have some players who already played it, because despite reading the rules extensively and carefully I still missed some important rules. Not a good rule book, and the game is riddled with wonky mechanics besides.

That being stated, when the game was over the players engaged in a vigorous discussion of strategy and mechanics. So, something went right.

There are two systems occurring at once in this game. The first system is the game’s action selection where you try to move your company’s cargo dice around the board to avoid warehouse fees and eventually get paid when the cargo reaches the other side of the canal. Interesting enough. The second system is company money versus personal money. Company money is not worth anything for end game victory. Personal player money determines winner. How does company money become personal money? Share dividends, which means this is a “stock” game. So, at specific points in the game, players are allowed to buy shares using their personal money. Then at the end of each of the 3 rounds, companies with the money to do so pay out dividends. If it wasn’t clear, players are allowed and mechanically encouraged to buy other players’ companies’ stock.

Now, throw on some other shared ecosystems. When you load cargo, you can actually load it into another player’s boat. Maybe that is a free rider for you. Or, when you move boats, if the canal lock in front is occupied, its occupants also move, possibly benefiting another company. So, despite reservations, I do recommend this game, if you like heavier and highly interactive type games.

I can’t speak to replayability, as I’ve only gotten it to the table once so far.

The rules are not terribly intuitive, but they work once you get rolling. But, man, that game feels brutal, even for a co-op game. You constantly have to cut your losses, plan to fail, play defensively, etc.

I definitely liked it enough to want to play it again.

Played Trickerion this weekend. I was just slightly behind and had devised a way that I could win, but I accidentally played the wrong card (theater instead of workshop) causing me to not be able to do what I needed to do that turn and locking out my ability to do anything on the last turn. It’s a tough, unforgiving game, but I like it a lot.

I’m counting three seas that should be suing for discrimination.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/389480684/dragon-boats-of-the-four-seas/description

I gave a little feedback earlier, but not much detail. I’ve only played the first two quests in the digital game, but I know the tabletop game pretty well.

Both games have similar card structure. Characters have the same stats and cards have similar effects. The stats do MOSTLY the same things as in the tabletop game. All cards are in a specific sphere (or neutral), which is how your deckbuilding options are limited.

The first big difference is that in the tabletop game the enemy is the deck of encounter cards that get dealt once a turn (one per player) and all the conflict is against those cards and any constraints the quest cards may put on you. In the digital game the enemy is Sauron, who has a deck and a hand of cards, and the player and Sauron (AI) go back and forth taking one action (play a card, activate abilities, attack, quest) at a time, limited only by their resource pools.

Another big one is that In the tabletop game you’re required to pay to play cards out of your hand with resources from heroes who match the sphere of the card, which makes deckbuilding a bit more complex. Each hero generates one resource per turn and if you don’t have resources on a hero in the right sphere you just can’t play the card. In the digital game you can pay any card’s cost with your generic pool of resources (i.e. the resources are no longer tied specifically to the heroes).

The core turn mechanics are also significantly different. Like I mentioned above, in the digital game you go back and forth with Sauron taking actions and when both players have exhausted their options or passed the turn ends. Resources are replenished and you start again. The tabletop game is MUCH more structured. In strict order, you:

  1. spend resources to play assets
  2. commit characters to the current quest
  3. draw encounter cards to see what bad things happen
  4. resolve your questing, which can be completely disrupted by what happened in the previous step
  5. combat, which can also be completely disrupted by step 3
  6. upkeep a bunch of things

That’s rough, but it’s more or less the idea. The tabletop game has a really strong push-your-luck feel because you’re required to play assets and commit characters to questing before you have any idea what awful things the deck will throw at you. On top of that, combat has a pretty strict structure so you’re often in a puzzle about how to actually push through the quest that’s holding you back or get at the enemy you need to beat without sacrificing critical characters and assets. It feels like you’re in a very tense balancing act most of the time.

There are a few other additions in the digital version, but from my limited play it’s pushing a more Hearthstone feel where you’re trying to generate incremental advantage by out-playing Sauron’s hand.

Thanks @coffeetv. That’s a great write up of the mechanics and summary of the basic differences. If anything, it really makes me want to try the physical game. It sounds tense and full of interesting decisions.

I haven’t taken the plunge on the digital version either as time has been short. The alternating action sequence, considered in isolation from the physical game mechanics, sounds like it could be neat. It gives each turn more of a back and forth than in Hearthstone, for example.

The tabletop version is absolutely my favorite solo board game etc. experience. Highly recommend. Biggest complaint people have is that it can require quite a bit of before-the-game deckbuilding to be able to solve the puzzle of a given scenario, and also sometimes you just get really unlucky and can’t win. Give it a shot.

Well the conclusion of this review was unexpected:

Has anyone here tried Brass: Birmingham?

Yup, it’s pretty great. It’s less tight than the original, but arguably more enjoyable as an experience. Some may disagree, but hey, how awesome is it that they both exist!

Damnit, well I was on the fence about getting the original Brass, but I guess I should just pick up Brass: Birmingham already. It seems unreasonable that a game about the industrial revolution should look so pretty.

So, I just picked up Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. I’m a solo gamer and this brings with it AI cards for each of the characters, both in the main game and the expansions. Hope they release a lot of solo scenarios or more coop ones so I can get some fun solo gaming in.

Now, I’m sure most of you have played Tabletop miniature games but this is the first one I will be trying. Kind of liberating not having to use any kind of restrictive board. If I can get my kid to play (he hates boardgames but loves Fallout), just looking briefly at the rules I can imagine setting up not only the scenarios provided but also just making a large play area with tons of destroyed buildings, cars, etc. and having a huge long running campaign against my son with each of us having our settlements and going out to find loot and weapons and building our characters up and eventually going after each other.

The possibilities seem endless.

I always walk past those tables with tabletop games going on at my local FLGS and never thought I’d have any desire or be “nerdy” enough to engage in those types of games…but this game might make me a convert.

I picked it up looking forward to trying it.

Kickstarter edition of Spirits of the Forest has arrived. Anyone try it yet?
https://www.dicetower.com/game-video/spirits-forest-review-sam-healey

Anniversary Edition of the Warriors of Middle Earth expansion to War of the Ring arrived yesterday.

Does the expansion add much to the game in terms of choices and player interest? I bought it mostly because it completed my edition of the core game. In any case, I hope to try it out soon.

I volunteer as tribute!

That looks gorgeous, though admittedly your entire set is gorgeous.

Yeah, what the heck, and me here with my sad little 1st edition and the one expansion they ever made for the 1st edition.

@Jason_McMaster and @Mike_Cathcart, get in here. What did you guys think of the boardgames we played over the past week?

We got in a ton of boardgaming over the past week with Root, Redacted, Lovecraft Letter, Lost Legacy, Sol, Santorini, Valeria Card Kingdoms, Vast, Sons of Anarchy, Witness, Triplock, Rise of Cthulhu, Mafia de Cuba, and maybe some others I’ve forgotten. Which ones did you like most and least?

McMaster gave me a copy of Chaos on the Old World as a gift (whoa!), but sadly, we didn’t get to play it. We also didn’t get to play Study in Emerald. “Womp womp,” as Corey Lewandowski would say.

-Tom