Wow King’s Dilemma sounds cool. I’m going to have to check that out!
Also, I’m amused that the art features a facepalm.
Pigasus looks like an adorable game for a kid. I am going to have to check that out for nephew.
Yeah, it sounds neat. It says it only plays up to 5 (but there are 12 houses to choose from, so you can conceivably have players who drop in/out per game/session. What I’m doing, though, is having my old GoT-watching group over to part on a bi-weekly basis. That’s 8-10 people, mostly couples, so each couple will play one House, sharing decision-making duties between them. This way we get more discussion and/or strife!
Possibly, but I would say they still belong in a top 10 of all time over king of tokyo.
PS I love King of Tokyo.
I want to play King’s Dilemma. I hear it’s more story and less gameplay. I’m okay with that.
I don’t think LOTR is going away. They’d be pretty foolish to stop printing the existing content as it always seems to sell out as soon as it gets into stock. I was waiting over a year (maybe two?) to get the Dwarrowdelf packs and I finally managed to grab them in the most recent reprint a few weeks ago, and they’re mostly out of stock again. The saga expansions have similar issues.
What I do think will happen is they’re going to do something to get away from the current model. I don’t know what that means, maybe less frequent expansions more along the size of the deluxe or saga sets? Maybe they’ll take a lesson from Arkham and come up with more campaign type content. Hard to say for sure.
The only thing I can say is that looking at the cost of the content I haven’t purchased yet (which is most of it) is a little daunting. Getting new players into the game is going to get increasingly difficult for the same reason. I keep an eye out for people selling the game on BGG and I recently saw someone list their entire collection which was almost all the content released to date, for something like $1,100. That’s… a lot. But it’s still probably a discount over buying the stuff new.
I do think the L5R LCG is going to die some point soon. The game really looked and sounded interesting initially, and I think they had some good ideas, but when it released it was too complex and the games lasted too long. I say this as someone who never played it, but watched some matches, and I’ve heard that opinion echoed by others. They couldn’t stripped a few things away from it and sped up the game and it might have had a better chance.
Which will be a pity if it happens…of all of their card games, it’s my favorite. But it is deep and it is difficult. It’s definitely not intended for a mainstream audience.
With any luck, the fact that FFG owns the L5R IP outright may keep it around. They’re not having to pay out any licensing fees to Disney for it.
It’s interesting because the CCG version that predated it is one of the longest running non-Magic CCGs. The last content arc started in 2014, almost 19 years after the game debuted. So it’s clearly got staying power. If it’s not working out as an LCG (which should have given it substantially more potential purchase), one wonders what Fantasy Flight is doing wrong.
Oooh, anyone know if the James Bond Legendary game is good? I like the Aliens game, and I like James Bond.
Wait, James Bond was an alien? Sounds like retcon to me!
Which tabletop RPG filesystems is Alien-Bond?
Played City of the Big Shoulders tonight.
It started out well, but the market was empty and the I wasn’t able to get goods from the market. We realized after 2 rounds that the well you sell your goods the resources go back into the market. This killed two of us and the 3rd player (who was selling first) was killing us. We knew we were playing something wrong, but man the rule book is terrible. Still, the game is a loads of fun. I was able to complete end game goals and win.
I’m not an 18xx fan, but this scratches that heavy economic itch and doesn’t take nearly the same amount of time. It’s not going to surpass an 18xx, but if you’re intimidated by those, definitely give this a shot.
Tried Marrying Mr Darcy for the first time. Game where everyone plays a lady from Pride & Prejudice, jockeying to get the suitor of their dreams to propose to them.
I’d put it in the same category as Ladies & Gentleman: a game you will have fun with simply acting up the theme of stifling Victorian social norms, once, then never want to play again.
Whereas Ladies & Gentlemen was meandering, unclear rules where 50% of the game had no meaningful decisions, Marrying Mr Darcy is simple, clear rules where 90% of the game has no meaningful decisions.
The proposal mechanic sounded like some fun push your luck. You line up the suitors from least desirable (Mr. Wickham, natch) to most desirable (Darcy). The ones you meet the minimum requirements for, you roll for in order. On a 4+, they propose. You can accept and take the points, or decline and move on to do the same with the next most desirable suitor, but you cannot go back to one you’ve turned down. You can also forgo all suitors and focus on just one for a +1 roll, but no one else will propose if you fail. So do you get greedy and hold out for Darcy, or settle? Even settling is better than the worst thing possible, becoming an Old Maid. Did that posh TART just steal my man?!
Unfortunately, the proposal portion is only 10% of the game. The other 90% is the “courtship” phase where you just pick a card on your turn, read the card, and follow the card. Most of the time you just play a card that will increase a stat (VP and proposal requirements). It has about as much decision making as a game of Exploding Kittens. It goes on way too long for what the game is.
I can’t really recommend owning it or playing it more than once. The proposal portion needed to be at least half the game, either by making it longer or making the courtship portion shorter. Shorter courtship phases for multiple, shorter rounds with a final culminative score would have worked a lot better.
(the default rules where every lady has a different VP value for each suitor is stupid. It gives an unfair advantage to people who know the story and it doesn’t match up with suitor difficulty. Throw it straight into the garbage and play with the “Everyone loves Mr Darcy” rule that fixes the point values for everyone)
Does anyone like the Tiny Epic games as much as me? I’m not much of a board gamer - our favorite holiday game is Carcassonne Hunters and Gatherers - but I really like the Tiny Epic series’ tactile nature and constraints driven by packaging size, a series which seems to get more and more interesting with each iteration.
The most recent Kickstarter’ed iteration where they turn the box into a map is like literally what I would have done as a kid. It’s just a ton of fun.
Next to them is a comparatively huge and unopened box of Castles of Burgandy. By the cover art, it’s just a giant pile of hex chits. Eh.
I’ve been wanting to try one of the games with my family. Which tiny epics game do you recommend the most?
Well i’m actually fairly new to the series, so ask me after Christmas how everyone likes them ;). I’ve got Kingdoms, Zombies, and Tactics on order. I’m looking at picking up Mechs, since supposedly this is really a programming game rather than a dice game. Zombies looks a bit violent and graphic for pre-teens, depending on your families’ tolerance for such things, and Mechs has a very “Fortnite” aesthetic, so YMMV.
Galaxies feels a bit stripped down compared to Quest, but is the highest rated game at BGG of the series. Galaxies is basically a card game with dice, a fiddly resource tracker, and lots and lots and lots of re-rolling. The decision space in Quest seems larger and more interesting - although to win, heavily constrained by the quest cards - but otoh i can imagine Quest might be harder for families to learn since Quest is basically about optimization and if you don’t grok the scoring system you’ll never win - where it is more clear in Galaxies what the score at any point is, there are actually penalties in Quest if you fail to complete certain “quests”.
Of the games we’ve played, I’d say Galaxies is better for younger players and Quest for older ones, and Galaxies is better for families who prefer dice games with more randomness, and Quest for families who prefer more strategic games with less randomness (although, still, there are dice). And i’d say the art is easily better in Quest. If your family doesn’t like fiddly bits though, or doesn’t like fantasy, Galaxies is really a bit more abstract. OTOH, if you like “item-meeples”, if you like the idea of your little guy actually holding a sword, than Quest would be your cup of tea.
I think the name is a bit misleading - the soon to be released Tiny Epic Tactics is really more like what i think people think of when they think of “Questing” - individual named heroes, dungeon delving, victory points and victory conditions, ect. Tactics also looks to be specifically PvP, where Galaxies and Quest are more like worker placement games.
Thanks for the info! I’ll have to check out the quest game.
Didn’t they brand Mr. Darcy as a role-playing game? I would guess that most of the fun is meant to be in acting out and playing up the story that’s suggested by the cards.
Frankly, I’d love a game with that theme that’s not a social game, but a more mechanical one. So what you’re describing makes me more interested in it, personally. But I wonder if why the specific mechanics they have feel slight is because they’re meant to be just the framework to a kind of structured storytelling game…
If you want to talk like you’re in a Jane Austen novel, my recommendation is Dinosaur Tea Party. It’s just as flimsy, but the art is fun and something about the absurd theme helps people make meandering queries using accents.
I am not sure if this is the thread for digital versions of games, but I have been playing digital Scythe to get familiarity with the rules again.
The game in general is really starting to grow on me. It’s a complicated game, but I am really enjoying it.