Boardgaming in 2019!

Forgive me not remembering the name but there’s was a fun dexterity game that paired roll and write with it. The dexterity portion replaced the roll part and it was very interesting. Essentially had four different mini games on the sheet that you filled in based on the location of the disks with some bonus sections you could land on.

Nice. Big rec from today was dice manor and Kapow. I bought 3 game below Amazon price to support Game Keep too.

Oh, the Evolution port finally came out?

Great! I’ll just get it for my iPad4, which I’m perfectly happy with and…

FUCK! Requires iOS11.0? What is so hardware envelope-pushing about this boardgame port that a piece of hardware that could perfectly run Hearthstone can’t handle?

Fuck you, Apple.

so true. From my days when I was developing small game projects for ios, whenever an ios update was introduced, you as a developer had to download new certificates and rebuild your project with this new stuff… and you had to rebuild it for every ios version you wanted to support. Something like this. It was so much work, that I stopped ios development … probably something similar with the Evolution dev. If they want to support other ios versions, they need extra dev time. Also, maybe some older ios version no longer possible to release games for as a dev.

I think Apple wants to push there latest OS versions (some of them cost money).

so yeah, Fuck you Apple

Has anyone played Tsukuyumi: Full Moon Down? Curious to know how good it really is. I saw it was getting 2nd editionkickstarter. Can’t justify the mini cost, but the base game sounds cool.

I’m also really interested in a 2016 game called Forged in Steel? I love area control and this looks like a good one plus the historic theme sounded interesting. I know it didn’t get a lot of press, but I suspect the mean nature of the game was a put off to many. Would love to know if anyone has had any time with it.

Did get to play Trade on the Tigris. I don’t care for negotiation games, but this one works. It’s a light civ game that takes the best part of Civilization’s trade and makes it it’s own game.
Basically you have 5 minutes to trade goods with other players. You can’t like about the good on top of the card, but the bottom can have positive/negative effects and push players out of their current strategy. That you can lie all day long about that. As you play matching sets of cards you will move up a political and religion track which unlock more cards for you to access and give you special powers. These power cards can also be traded to other players. Think Promissory notes from TI4. They can give you bonuses or protect you from the card when the owner plays it. Game plays up to 6 in about 1.5 to 2 hours and is ripe for expansions. Not necessarily a game I would play a lot, but if you like negotiation I would reccomend taking a look.

New games:










Picked up Evolution on steam.

What’s the playtime like in a physical game? How’s the AP with serious players?

@Vesper Will you be getting this? Thanks in advance!

As of this moment it’s not listed for pre-order yet, but since it’s not releasing until October I’m not surprised. I can definitely order you one when it’s available if you like.

Awesome! I’ll PM you again before its release.

We play this with Climate physically all the time. It’s my daughter’s favorite board game. When I play with my kids, we all do our turns simultaneously (which the rules permit as a variant, but can make a difference sometimes.) We’re able to complete a game usually in under an hour because that really speeds the game up. I don’t think AP is a big factor in the game. You don’t ever have a huge number of cards in your hand, and the success of your strategies will depend heavily on what the other players are doing.

I finished a 3 player campaign recently and while it wasn’t bad, it did leave me feeling relieved that I hadn’t rushed out to buy the expansion already. Seven games was the right amount for us.

The core mechanics are very simple but you quickly get flooded with more and more ‘stuff’ until the most challenging part of the session is figuring out how to lay it all out on the table. Rules change from episode to episode and those changes can appear in the scenario book, on components that get swapped out, or on double-sided rule cards that start to pile up. You wouldn’t want to play this with a group that relies on just one person to have a good handle on the rules.

For a semi-coop game, you aren’t given much incentive to be selfish. As a result we mostly cooperated and breezed through the majority of the games. The crossroads cards hardly ever took effect and made little impact when they did. The story was fine – in fact the most enjoyable part of the game was trying to reconcile the need to perform utterly mundane tasks while everything was going to hell plot-wise. I mean sure, no one wants the ship to explode this turn, but we did schedule these performance reviews more than a month ago.

We enjoyed it. Just not enough to care about the branching narrative.

I don’t know much about Bus other than it’s 20 years old. Tom Chick would flag that saying, “It was before people knew how to make good board games.”

That said I do like a good splotter and capstone makes awesome games so my spidey sense is definitely perked.

Vesper,
Thanks for posting this week’s goodness.
Into the Black sounds awesome. I’m curious to hear if it actually is. I’m holding off on underwater cities till an expansion comes as it sounds like most people are saying one strategy is pretty much dominant to everything else in that game.

Hmm…

It looks like Ticket to Ride. Cute artwork, though. I can imagine it might have retro appeal.

-Tom

I can tell you it’s definitely NOT Ticket to Ride, but yeah not pretty game.

It is boring. I tried a few times with a mixed group of old D&D players and casual players that find munchkin too complicated. It is too bad because I invested time on painting some of the minis. I think it is cute. The combat is too simple for the D&D people and too complicated for the casuals. They didn’t like to roleplay as mice either. Very disappointed. I thought I was going to convert people into RPGs.

The Stuffed animal one was bad too, and that one had annoying rules that are not clear cut, so you have to wing it. It really does seem to be for much younger players as it was too easy.

I’ve been looking at that one a lot lately. I don’t know if there is anything really special in the game mechanics but the theme has got me even if I am not familiar with the actual source material.

I remember liking the book. Pretty inventive. It helps a little if you like epistolary novels, which I very much do.

Edit: Ooh, with art by the Nemo’s War guy. I love the style of that game.

Who would want to be Portishead or… Redruth… who I don’t even remember and I read it like a few months ago? Googling says she just shows up at the end and doesn’t really get fleshed out, which would explain not remembering her.

Good lord. Who on earth would want to sit down with this at a game night?

Players play nurses of a terminally ill hospital patient with days to live as they try to get him to tell his big life regrets.

This thing actually got a retail release with copies at local stores.