Thanks! I mean, I don’t mind an expansion if it’s worthwhile.
But my experience with the large box expansions playing with a couple of friends, one of whom has the one with the biplane on it, is that we basically did our damnedest to avoid actually having to go to that sideboard. Because, man did the game just slow to a crawl then.
The only side board expansion I sorta like is the Dreamlands one. That one at least feels less tacked on. The ones that replace a section of the board – like the biplane one – I wish they engineered it so you could fit a smaller board over that area. It made it less clunky.
My EH box is huge now, and I am thinking of stripping everything from the big box expansions except the investigators (and setting aside their assets) to make the thing more manageable. My Asset deck is like 5" tall now.
One of the guys in my group ordered it (Tapestry), so maybe we’ll have it for game night next week? That’d be cool. This is a game that is really hard to tell if it is going to be any good, because the rules are basically one page (every turn you pick a track to advance on, pay the cost and take the benefits. There I just taught you the game), so most of the game is going to be in the unique civ benefits and the tapestry cards.
That looks fascinating.
You don’t need to actually use the sideboards unless you play one of the specific old ones that focus on that sideboard (and then I think you spend a lot of time there) or have a prelude adventure that does (which you could just ditch if you would rather not bother). IMO, the non-sideboard content they add is all pretty worthwhile and focus is a really important improvement to the game that gives you something productive to do with actions that are often otherwise dead. That said, one of the small box expansions has the mechanic also.
Why did you deal yourself a prelude if you’re just going to decide you’d rather not bother? :) Preludes could have been a cool set-up tweak. Instead, they’re just another example of how Fantasy Flight doesn’t even do feature bloat right.
To my mind, focus is one of the biggest examples of how Fantasy Flight really can’t be trusted to do anything other than screw up a perfectly good design. Rather than challenge players to make difficult decisions that might “waste” an action, Fantasy Flight throws them a cookie. I mean, yeah, I get it, the game isn’t “fun” when you can’t use one of your actions. No one wants something to not be fun! But focus is the worst kind of feature bloat: pointless and redundant busywork that leeches from the game a sense of stakes.
Every time I’m tempted to break out Eldritch Horror again, it’s stuff like this that makes me realize I have better ways to spend my time. Namely, by playing game designs rather than business decisions.
Actually, I should do this to cut out the cruft the expansions added. The problem is that some of that cruft got spaghetti’ed into other areas of the game, so I’m not sure if I need to just reset everything to the base box, or whether I can keep elements of some of the expansions. Frankly, I’m not sure Eldritch Horror is worth all the bother. :(
-Tom
I would only bother with Foresaken Lore. It expands the mystery and location decks to what they should have been in the first place. Yig is a decent ancient one.
I wouldn’t bother with anything else. Maybe another one of the small boxes if you’re interested in the ancient one. The big box ones are all bloated crap. Masks of Nyarlathotep is an outright scam: small box expansion content at big box price, and campaign rules as a selling point but it’s the laziest most barebones bullshit ever (“Use 2 preludes, dead investigators can’t be used again, personal story progress carries over, win 6 games”. That’s it. You could find half a dozen homebrew campaign rules online with more thought and balance put into them). It’s the only FF product that made me downright angry.
Speaking of, I just read that the lead designer of Arkham Horror 3ed had left, which is why it took so long for the first expansion. They really dropped the ball with that game. The universal impression everyone took away from it was “promising, but lean on content and replayability. Seems designed to integrate expansions with minimum bloat so can’t wait for those.” The board wasn’t terribly attractive but was made that way for expansions to save it. The pre-designated scenarios were great the first couple times but limited replayability, but new scenarios from expansions would save it.
It was a game designed from the ground up for expansions to save it, and it’s taking them over an entire year to pump out a single small box expansion.
[quote=“tomchick, post:2586, topic:139349, full:true”]But focus is the worst kind of feature bloat: pointless and redundant busywork that leeches from the game a sense of stakes.
-Tom
[/quote]
Focus was the only decent mechanic added by the expansions! Eldritch Horror is entirely about the economy of the limited 2 actions per turn you get. Focus just gave you another option. Do I use one of my valuable actions to bank a more favorable roll in the future? They needed to do something to make wilderness and expeditions not be a waste of time. The expeditions were almost never worth doing.
I’ll take focus over any of the other bloat features they added like preludes, personal stories, side maps, a dozen new conditions that make each Reckoning phase 10 minutes long, and ESPECIALLY those damn impairment tokens.
I liked destroyed cities too!
They were a neat idea. Terrible execution though.
They hardly ever came into play when we played against Shudde. There’s only like 3-4 disasters before the game is decided, and half of the disaster deck didn’t destroy cities. It was meant to be (and sold as) the world turning into an apocalyptic hellscape as the game went on, denying you city refuge and turning you more and more to the ruined encounter deck. I think we averaged maybe one ruined encounter card draw every 2 games.
Special mention of art failure. The marker for devastated cities wiped off the map was…a grey compass with an eyeball in the middle? Why not the conflagration on the disaster deck cards? Pictures of rubble? Anything but an eyeball compass!
Sam was the only reason I watched after a while. Part of the reason I stopped is because Dice Tower went the route of “Flood of non-stop videos” which made being subscribed to them a nightmare and once I un-subbed I sort of forgot about them, plus we weren’t playing many board games for a while.
I did find Sam’s opinion and tastes more reliable than prototypical neckbeard fedora Tom, or Zee “I can’t focus for more than 15 minutes” Garcia. But he was ridiculous during those top 10 lists, to the point I think he was consciously ignoring the theme.
The Christian angle was especially grating. You don’t get to ding games with the slightest of non-Christian themes while making constant throat-punch jokes/threats to everyone.
Come to think of it, I think I only enjoyed their Top 10 videos when it was a worst of list, since it was the only time Tom wasn’t gushing about a game, Zee wasn’t shoehorning Pandemic into #1, or Sam wasn’t shoehorning Twilight Imperium into #1.
I feel it’s worth it. I already shunted off the big box monsters except Dreamlands. Prelude and Adventure cards are easy to offload too. I like the investigators for each expansion, and the added encounter cards so it’s not that bad with the expansion content.
In regards to Tom Vasel, I absolutely agree that not every game has to be a hardcore brain burn and I don’t deny that a great part of the resurgence of gaming is because of him and those that work with the Dice Tower. He used to be fine, but now with the glut of games out there, and he seems to review them all, I just don’t watch his reviews like I used to. Zee and Sam are fine but Zee’s but their game tastes just seem a little to light for me.
I agree with Pod and about Sam and Zee.
Zee’s top 8 games
#8. Game #8. King of Tokyo. …
#7. Game #7. 7 Wonders. …
#6. Game #6. Ghost Stories. …
#5. Game #5. Blue Moon Legends. …
#4. Game #4. 7 Wonders: Duel. …
#3. Game #3. Neuroshima Hex! Michał Oracz.
#2. Game #2. Onirim (second edition) Shadi Torbey.
#1. Game #1. Pandemic. Matt Leacock.
Of those 8 listed 6 of them are games I play with my kids. The other 2 I don’t have access to. I don’t deny their mass appeal, but where’s a Feld game or Rosenberg or Chvátil? That list reads like a Walmart shopping cart.
MvM has gotten better but it took a over a year to get to the point they are at now. I still think they soft pitch reviews. I’m not sure if it is concern that they will stop getting reviewer copies, but you never see them say a game is not good.
This AMA from FFG sounds a lot like they’re planning to wrap up the LOTR and AGOT LCG’s. I wouldn’t be super-surprised to see L5R following soon after. I don’t think it’s exactly been a rousing success and they have a bunch of much bigger properties to attend to now, including suprise-hit Keyforge.
Used to love all three of these designers, but now think they’re overrated (though Chvatil’s party games are brilliant). They’re worshipped on BGG though.
Tommy V has openly stated his desire is for the Dice Tower to cover every single game, even in 2019 with 5000 games being released each year. This is obvious when watching the videos: They’re clearly all done in a single take, back-to-back. However it’s also clear they play the game more than once, so even if the videos are hastily done, the gaming-playing doesn’t appear to be when compared with other reviewers.
I’m quite thankful for that approach though, as often they’re the only video on some random game. And they’re also the only ones to bother to have a series saying “If you like Monopoloy/Scrabble/Risk perhaps you’ll like…”
However, I’ve never understood what the point is of all of the “other” dice tower people that aren’t Tom/Zee/Sam. They get minimal viewings and they just confuse the “Dice Tower” brand. There’s millions of them these days and they just spam the subscription feed. (Not that I really pay attention to it)
I forgot about the throat-punch “jokes”! They even had a show with that in the name??
It’s a shame the rulebooks are awful ;)
I’m pretty sure I’ll be picking up Kingdomino Duel. Looks addicting and we play the main game quite a bit as a family.
I think I’m getting old. It seems to me that 90+% of these minis kickstarter are going for the extreme/edgy esthetic, and man, it just turns me off.
Hey, King’s Dilemma! I pre-ordered that but was vaguely expecting it to get pushed out another month - the designers said they’re releasing at Essen.
It basically looks like the Politics side of Game of Thrones.
Players all control various noble houses in a low-fantasy city-state or kingdom. The entire game consists of voting on how to resolve various dilemmas the game throws at you, and noting the effects. Effects can include tracking resources (Influence, Wealth, Power, etc) placing stickers on the board for ongoing effects (and having to sign them showing which house was responsible for them, good or bad). Houses are all different, with short and long term goals that unfold over the game- it’s a somewhat managed/branching story that unfolds across 15 or so games, with something like 75 envelopes to open.
There’s a good write-up of the preview game they were demoing at GenCon over here:
