Boardgaming in 2019!

[Pod]

Treasure Island is great. I feel it’s impossible to win as Long John because everyone can tail you out of prison and move faster. So I’m glad to know he won in your game!

The act of drawing in the maps is amazing and so unique. But I feel the pens in the game are a bit of a let down. You can buy some grease markers online that really show up, nice and bright, on the map surface. (Which itself is very reflective and so had a lot of glare).

But production aside, the game is so clever and interesting. (Except the card acquiring mechanic. I’m not a huge fan of that and would be interested in a variant)

[Wendelius]

“Things get dicey” is back.

And for those like me, who spend a fair amount of time watching game videos to try and decide what to buy, this one will keep you going:

[Wendelius]

I really enjoy Treasure Island. I believe I have played it 4 times over the past year and we are around 50/50 on Long John Silver victories.

For the markers, we use chalk pens my teacher wife used for school. They stand out brighter and are as easy to erase. They make more of a mess on the players’ hands though.

The game is a great idea and a really cool variation on the 1v.all hidden movement. We always have a lot of fun playing it.

[arrendek]

Yeah, I’m not a fan of Everdell’s “I hope I get the card I need” mechanic either. It’s a bummer in an otherwise interesting game that I enjoyed playing.

[arrendek]

Well, she is just plain adorable.

[Matt_W]

That was hilarious. Thank you! She should’ve shoved Rahdo in there, but those other impressions were spot on.

[Vesper]

New games this week:

Notes:

• Relic is a reissue from WizKids
• Puerto Rico Deluxe now includes the 2 expansions and “redesigned content.”

[AWS260]

The new Puerto Rico cover is amazing.

Executive 1: “Hey, people keep pointing out that our game is about importing and exploiting African slaves. Let’s put a blonde Fabio on the cover, and no one will ever complain again!”

Executive 2: “But won’t that change alienate our core euro-game audience?”

Executive 1: “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure the cover art is still bland and unattractive.”

@Vesper

[Kadath]

Big Thumbs up for Artemis project. Dice worker placement and competition for resources and ‘missions’

[Infested_terran]

@JoshL

@Infested_terran

I love how alliances are now limited to 2 players. That change was badly needed. 3 man alliances were no brainers, and a 1-2 player team couldn’t compete.

I found that using a rule (which I can’t now remember if it was a real rule, an optional rule, or a house rule) which required a faction to have one additional seitch for each additional player (i.e. a 2-player alliance requires 4 seitches to win, a 3-player alliance all 5) nicely balanced this out.

It was a standard rule.

I never found that to be a balancing factor in the games I played. The 3 player alliance wipes the floor with the remaining players, locks them out of every recovering, then easily occupies 5 strongholds. In theory they COULD backstab each other to break up and seize victory with a reduced requirement, but in practice there was no incentive because you were guaranteed the easy safe with just sticking with 3.

The only way around it I found is to bring in a meta rule where everyone throws in $5 in a pool at the start of the game and all winners split the pot at the end. It was the only way to encourage the intense backstabbing that Dune should have.

(similarly that’s the only way I’d ever play Cosmic Encounter again)

[JoshL]

Oh, and three-player alliances were also only allowed in six-player games. That’s important too!

[tomchick]

@Infested_terran

The only way around it I found is to bring in a meta rule where everyone throws in $5 in a pool at the start of the game and all winners split the pot at the end.

Whoa, I thought I was the only one who’s considered this! Not necessarily for Dune, but for any game that needed some stakes instilled so people cared about winning instead of just giving up halfway through. I’m mean, I’m all for friendly boardgaming, but not when it undermines the way a game is supposed to be played.

When I was in grad school, we used to play a modern Risk-style game called Supremacy.

Supremacy: The Game of the Superpowers

To add stakes, the winners got to write up a proclamation on a sheet of paper for each loser. Something dumb like “I hereby designate Tom Chick’s rule of the United States as illegal and consign him to the dungeons of Europe.” Then the loser had to post that on his dorm room door until the next game of Supremacy.

Unfortunately, none of my friends live in dorms anymore, so we’d have to do the thing with the $5.

-Tom

[Infested_terran]

I came up with “the $5 rule” just for games where you could share victory with other players, without much drawback to just anti-climatically sharing victory.

Oh god, Supremacy. I owned that in middle school. We tried SO HARD to make it work and have fun with it, because damn it was the early 90s and it seemed like MINDBLOWING board game design at the time! It was Risk, but with resources like grain/oil/minerals/cash, you needed to pay logistics to move units! You could build nukes and laser satellites!

We never got it to work. The economy was so broken where resources could cost $1 million at the start of a turn, and $1 billion by the end. You could prospect for resources in neutral counties for your own source of resources, but that means you’re not buying them from the market anymore and thus the price crashes, and since selling resources on the market is the sole way to make cash, everyone goes broke. Yes, everyone goes broke for being self sufficient in resources…

And the grain/oil cost to move units was ludicrous. It was ridiculously slow and expensive to move any kind of force around the globe, and impossible to conquer someone conventionally.

We never, ever, ever, EVER had a game that didn’t end in nuclear winter with no winners. Everyone went broke until someone built nukes. You could build laser satellites that had a 5/6 chance of shooting down a nuke, but each satellite was twice the cost of a nuke, and a single nuke getting through could destroy all the satellites in the game.

There’s literally fifty billion alternate advanced rules and new units in official expansions and online. I tried searching around online (back in dial-up internet days) to see if there was some way to make the game work. The answer was always someone pointing to the fifty billion optional rules that just added more complexity without solving any of the major issues.

Other old games I wanted to love but could never get to work:

-Gammarauders
-Nuclear War
-Risk 2210

(Gammarauders had the coolest cover art to a board game ever, even managing to beat out Fireball Island)

[Vesper]

My only memory playing Supremacy in college is that most games we played it we ended up with a nuclear winter and everyone lost.

[Infested_terran]

Speaking of Fireball Island, I just tried the remake.

Meh, didn’t really like it.

The original 1986 Fireball Island is probably the most fun you can have with a traditional roll & move game. Me and my parents to this day still have our annual summer time Fireball island game. It’s mindless, but always fun to tensely roll fireballs and screw people over with them along with stealing the jewel.

The remake…is a blag victory point accumulation. It doesn’t even feel like a race anymore. Or screwing people over. Or much tension at all. The setting for the game is that the previously deadly island has been turned into a tourist spot. You’re not treasure hunters anymore willing to rob each other and leave everyone to die by making off with the only rowboat, you’re tourists aimlessly wandering around collecting trinkets and souvenirs and taking scenic snapshots. Getting hit by a fireball no longer makes you lose a turn, just dropping one of the dozen generic treasure tokens you can pick up all over the place. The end of the game has everyone board a helicopter (the “Hello-Copter”) that has plenty of room for everyone.

In short, the theme unintentionally reflects the gameplay reality: this is a “sanitized” version of the previous deadly Fireball Island by a company to open it up to the public. You’re not being nasty to each other with a winner take all mentality. You’re meandering around taking tourist pictures and occasionally causing someone to lose one of their plentiful treasure tokens. The jewel is still there and can be stolen, but it hardly seems worth the trouble because it’s hard to get to, can be stolen, and is only worth 50% more points than your typical easy to get generic treasure token. Winner is usually whoever manages to match up more matching colored generic treasure tokens…

Check out the cool original art in what is the 2nd greatest board game box art of all time. It had a pulp novel look to it. Tons of little details all over the place where you could almost tell a different story for each of the bits. Terrified explorers in the grips of mortal peril or extreme courage. People hurling themselves at the suicidal trek to grab that precious jewel for fortune and glory.

The awesome art even extended to the cards.

And the board itself. Caves were carved into the cliffs all over the island. Molten lava spilled down paths and waterfalls. Deadly waters crashed against beaches and cliff walls. There were little details in it that took me years to spot like the snake coming out of rocks shaped like a human face, or a smashed boat with skeleton lying on a beach.

Now for the remake we have what now looks like a Saturday morning cartoon show.

How is it someone is being burned alive yet it still feels all kiddie?

Look how boring and nondescript the cards look now.

For the board itself, there’s no more tiny details that bring life to it. Special mention needs to be made of the caves. The caves in the original were dark caverns carved into the rock and very easy to spot. Quick, can you spot the cave in this screenshot? It’s that teeny tiny, hard to spot, washed out ‘3’ in the top right. They don’t even show actual caves anymore, just washed out numbers on random spaces.

Did Restorations Games even play the original? Did they think it was too scary and mean for kids and had to be softened up? Good lord I was only 7 when I first played it and I managed to not be scarred. It feels like you’re simulating a tourist attraction of a dangerous island mock-up rather than a dangerous island.

By the end of the 2nd game, we all looked at each other with the same “Did we really just spend $60 on this?” look and just went back to playing the original. The Fireball Island remake technically has a more strategic design to it, it’s just that none of it is any more fun than the mindless original.

[JoshL]

A guy in high school tried to teach us Supremacy. Which he did poorly, then he took his first turn and said, “I buy all the resources and then sell them all. Now I have a billion dollars and you can’t get any resources ever. Your turn.”

We never played again.

[Infested_terran]

@JoshL

A guy in high school tried to teach us Supremacy. Which he did poorly, then he took his first turn and said, “I buy all the resources and then sell them all. Now I have a billion dollars and you can’t get any resources ever. Your turn.”

We never played again.

Yup. That’s how the market worked. Though I think he cheated since you can only do one transaction on your turn, buy OR sell. If he drove down the price by selling, other players would have the chance to buy and drive the price back up before it got back to him.

The economy was still fubar though. You could buy 12 resources at $1 million each, which would then cause it to shoot up 12 spaces on the price track to something like $600 million each for the next player. Or sell 12 for $1 billion each, crashing the price to $50 million each. If someone prospected their own resources, the prices would stay crashed and no one could ever make any money again.

[SlyFrog]

I always heard that Risk 2210 was a great game out of the box (for a Risk game).

[Brooski]

@Infested_terran

I came up with “the $5 rule” just for games where you could share victory with other players, without much drawback to just anti-climatically sharing victory.

For that to actually work, you’d probably have to make it lot more than $5.

[Infested_terran]

@SlyFrog

I always heard that Risk 2210 was a great game out of the box (for a Risk game).

Maybe we just played it wrong, but it was usually over by turn 2. Whoever went last in a round just had to bid for first turn the next round (which I remember being very easy the way income and bidding worked) and they got 2 turns in a row. You can imagine how decisive getting 2 turns in a row would be in Risk. Now multiply that even more because not all the areas start with armies and a player could just expand unchecked onto the moon or oceans.

Game was over very quickly. Fun stuff like the nuke commander and his cards were never worth buying and never came into play.