My only memory playing Supremacy in college is that most games we played it we ended up with a nuclear winter and everyone lost.
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.
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.
I always heard that Risk 2210 was a great game out of the box (for a Risk game).
For that to actually work, you’d probably have to make it lot more than $5.
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.
Barrage and City of the Big Shoulders arrived.
Barrage components aren’t as terrible as I feared, looking forward to trying it.
City of the BS is going to big cool.
Hey @Shieldwolf, have you tried Vindication? I played it for the first time today and enjoyed it quite a bit. I would classify it as a Euro but I felt it had some interesting non-standard concepts and mechanics, and an enjoyable abstract theme.
Also played Bloc by Bloc today, which is about The People rising up against The Police and is fairly light and loose but was also fairly enjoyable.
No, but I really want to try it looks very cool. I think I convinced Tom into buying it but have yet to play it.
Man, I loved Gammarauders. I mean, by modern standards the game is total trash, but that was fucking awesome in 1987
Got Fireball Island during the Kickstarter. Don’t have much memories of the original, but have played the new one a handful of times with the kids and their friends and good fun has been had each time. Regardless of theme, the kids love knocking stuff over with marbles, and they love the “tourist” theme snapping pictures/selfies on the “completely safe and definitely not volcanic” island.
The expansions we have also add a bunch of “nastier cards” that make losing a turn possible (bees, snakes, etc), so I think the “take that” element is about appropriate. Though, my tolerance for “take that” elements in games is limited in any case, and IMO it’s rarely good to have too much of it in a family/kids game.
The “Risk” game we played in Uni was “Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th century”. Awesome game - it had a planetary display with planets revolving around the sun at different speeds, so distances between the planets varied during the game allowing for shocking swings in fortune if one forgot to account for confluences of the planets.
The leaders in the game also had different special abilities - not very well balanced - so one of those games that tended to have a bunch of house rules. A game of many fond memories…
The thing I remember about Buck Rogers was that it was so easy to turtle and blunt any attack. Not only did you have move distance to see attacks coming, but there were purely defensive troops (gennies) that could be built at the same cost as regular troops but were something like 50% stronger. Plus you could build those death stars to take free shots at any ships entering orbit.
For a while I actually played a 1991 play by post equivalent of Buck Rogers. You received paper printouts in the mail every turn, then filled in scantron sheets and mailed them back where the company’s computer would process the next turn.
It was ridiculously pricey at $5-$11 per week, in 1991 dollars, on a ten year old kid’s salary. And as you can imagine, eventually one or more players would go inactive and stop mailing stuff in (maybe after realizing how expensive it would get). I do remember getting a hand-written letter in the mail from the Earth player asking for an alliance.
I still have scans of the sheets floating around somewhere. I’ll try to post them. I also remember they had the orbiting planets mechanic, but there were no exact spaces. You had to guestimate by actually measuring out the distance on the paper and converting that to per/turn move distance based on their orbit holy shit I’m only ten O_O
I saw ads for those sorts of play by mail games but I never actually got to try one. Not least because a lot of the places I was seeing those ads were old magazines (Dragon and Dungeon, particularly) that I’d bought secondhand so clearly weren’t current. Also because I didn’t have that kind of money. :P
What I remember to this day about Buck Rogers was the terrible character (Amadala, I think) whose power was basically take two fighters or one battleship from the enemy. It was ridiculous over-powered, and each of our games basically ended with her just being undefeatable as she drained you while restoring damage you did to her each turn.
Is the new Fireball island aiming for the normal ‘toy’ market, or something?
Oh many you gotta find that stuff and post it. I had a friend who was ridiculously into pay-by-mail. He played a bunch of Schubel & Son games. That was the original pay-to-win mechanic: pay more money, get more turns!
Oh, yeah, I played a bunch of the Flying Buffalo games. Illuminati. So much Illuminati.