Trogdor!!!
Burninating the peasants.
Burninating the countryside!
Completely agree. Very weird phrase.
I’m not sure it’s the same magic as Season 1, but it’s pretty interesting.
Season 2 felt a lot more open world, where certain discoveries made the game more difficult or easier, depending on when they were found. My group discovered in that the final goal was not possible for us, until we intentionally failed the first half of the month to spend time doing prep work.
Season 2 is much more on prevention, rather than cleaning up the infection.
Looks like they already did. The actual box cover held up in that Dice Tower review reads: “A frosty and fun civilization card game”
Oh, good! Because that sentence is all I would have seen when looking at my game box.
Yesterday, we played a 4 players game of Dragoon.
It’s a simple yet charming gateway / family game with a fun theme. You are dragons. Puny humans keep settling in your lands. You can either claim towns and cities and run a protection racket to earn shiny gold every turn, or burn them to the ground for a bit more gold immediately and no need to bother with that protection thing.
All the while, a thief is stealing gold. And if you catch her, you’ll have some of it back!
First dragon to amass 50 gold wins.
The art and production of this game make it stand out. Each player gets a dragon and a base. Towers to claim town/city tiles, and it’s all played on a cute cloth map. The simple act of playing on that cloth map makes the game feel different and satisfying.
Even the scoring board is a big draw bag which can hold all the game components if you so desire.
The whole package adds to the charm of the game.
As for the game, it’s easy to teach, plays in less than an hour and the back and forth between dragons allows for much posturing and many dragon threats.
Recommended soundtrack: How to train your dragon or songs like Bad to the Bone if you are planning to show those humans who they are encroaching upon. :)
The art captures Trogdor very well. What’s the gameplay like?
I hated Season 2. The middle game is a slog and my group hated the ending.
Into the Unknown just posted a kickstarter preview for Aeon Trespass: Odyssey which is a huge box minis game that they describe as a cross between X-Com, Dark Souls, Kingdom Death Monster and 7th Continent, 3 of which are pretty excellent. Here’s the elevator pitch:
Take control of the greatest ship of the Great Sea and its crew. Train your Argonauts, explore their veiled past and send them on adventures into the dangerous and mysterious lands of Ancient Greece (and beyond…). Learn the world’s secrets and create new technologies that will give you an edge both in combat and outside of it. Manage your resources and develop your base of operations - the floating metropolis of Argo. Build new Facilities, craft new Weapons and equipment. Gather allies and forge political alliances with the world’s factions. And, most important of all, tame the Titans, arm them, evolve them and ride them to battle with the fearsome Primordials.
Also:
These are mature stories with philosophical underpinnings, touching upon the themes of nihilism, totalitarianism, the cult of man, responsibility for your actions, hope and redemption.
So it’s going to be dumb. Characters get more powerful as they take damage. The devs call this the “Inverted Combat Paradigm” and have trademarked it.
Speaking of inverted, there’s a reverse Goatse monster:
Anyway, I’m going to say mean things about this game until I inevitably back it on day one.
Light. And the manual is not very well laid out. You need to burn all 25 locations while avoiding peasants archers and knights. We are going to have to watch a video to make sure we got the rules right. We played the starter scenario and it was too easy but strategy was almost a non factor with too many random elements.
This is probably me. A lot it’s going to depend on price (I’m guessing $100-150 for the core game) and how absurd they are on expansions.
Any thoughts on this deluxe edition of Struggle of Empires?
The people I play with aren’t usually up for games of this complexity (and I don’t think the theme would do me any favors). I’ve bought several Martin Wallace games at this point, and they are mostly unplayed. Is this worth adding to the pile?
Oh, God. Speak about a game that does not deserve a $120 deluxe edition. I’ve played Struggle of Empires maybe a dozen times over the years. There are a few interesting ideas there, but it’s never been a particularly satisfying experience. There’s effectively three parts to the game.
- The bidding for the alliances which is way cooler in theory than in practice, and ends up being a tiny part of the game.
- The engine building via buying / tapping the tiles. This part is kind of fun, but nowhere near as well developed as in a proper Euro cube pusher.
- The unit movement and combat, which have basically no depth to them but can cause huge swings due to excessive randomness. The kind where 90% of the time nothing happens and 10% of the time you’re totally crippled. It looks like there are some rules changes in the deluxe edition for this.
There’s not really enough here to justify the 4-5 hour play times today. At the time the game was published, there weren’t a lot of games combining euro engine building with ameritrash combat, so there was at least some novelty. These days hybrid designs like that are so common that it’s not even a feature worth mentioning.
If you’re really tempted to get a 15 year old best-with-6 hybrid engine building / die rolling combat game with shifting alliances from Wallace, go with Princes of the Renaissance instead. I played it a ton back in the day, and don’t see why it would not hold up today. Should be easy to find after the reprint, for much cheaper than that ridiculous deluxe SoE set.
Agree on Struggle of Empires. Also, it’s impossible to teach, because there are hojillion tiles which all have their own rules, they’re all available from the beginning, and if you don’t know what they do you can be seriously hosed by them. So, enjoy having all your friends tell you “you never told me that” and “what does that one do again” all night.
Played a game of Everdell with my wife for the first time last night. Really love the theme and artwork so I was looking forward to trying it out. The game seemed to start out pretty slowly as we realized the value of hand management pretty quickly, followed by learning how to make best use of the limited supply of workers. I really like the synergies that play out between various critters and constructions so I’m looking forward to being a bit more familiar with everything when we play next. I picked up the expansion as part of the KS but will wait to introduce that later on! I’d love to teach this one to my older daughter but I doubt she’s ready for it at 7. Another couple years maybe!
New game from Stonemaier:
Looks like it’s your typical SM game: high quality components, polished but derivative design. Probably not for me.
nice trailer, though.
Seems kind of up my alley, but 118 pre-painted miniatures? How much is this gonna cost?
Oh, only 18 of the minis are prepainted. Still.
Did anyone else back Sleeping Gods? I did, but I’m having second thoughts.
Why’s that?
I backed because the designer seemed well regarded here, I don’t have any of his games, and I like exploration and discovery. Plus it’s solo.