Yep. More than any other game I’ve played, AH LCG is often hilariously fun when the wheels completely come off in the middle of a scenario and the nightmares facing your intrepid investigators just stack up like crazy. In a lot of scenarios in campaigns, there are ways to simply bail out (but even that isn’t guaranteed, and more than once I’ve had a pair or trio of investigators fighting just to get to the point where they can get out intact (and take the penalties for that for the next scenario in the campaign).
Yeah, I liked everything about the Arkham card game except…the cards. I’m just not into deck building.
If you’re wondering about buying it, ask yourself how much you love deck building? If you’re not into it enough to eventually spend exorbidant amounts of money on it (the serious sleezeball move of forcing you to buy 2 core sets if you want complete deck options, with 70% of your 2nd core set going to waste because you only needed the investigator cards), then I would say to give it a pass and just pick up Arkham Horror 3rd edition. They lifted so many mechanics from the card game that it’s essentially the same game just without the deck building or campaigns.
If you are into deck building and don’t mind the $$$$ then you’ll probably love it. A lot of people say it’s built for solo play, but I would think it’s the most fun if you treat the scenarios like D&D modules that you invite friends over to play and make a night of it.
I watched a play through of Obscurio, and it seems like a cool game. It’s got some of the Mysterium vibe, crossed with Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. A ghost is trying to help you guess the card that will take you out of the magical library room you are locked in (you must unlock several of them) while a bad wizard is trying to waylay you and waste your time until it’s too late to leave the library.
Nine Tile Panic also looks like a fun real time diversion.
I think the campaigns are a really core part of the LCG’s appeal, though. And 3rd edition has had waaay less support.
I read that they had planned more, quicker support for 3rd but the (lead?) designer left the company and that threw the release schedule off?
Yeah I wish 3rd had a campaign introduced too (and not the paper thin afterthought campaign of Eldritch Horror’s Masks of Nyarlathotep, so terrible to the point of false advertising). They so SO desperately need to introduce some kind of victory condition randomizer to the scenarios. I think taking the Adventure mechanic approach from Eldritch Horror with randomized Acts I-IV would work the best. Because right now it’s the on rails scenarios of the card game, but without the deck building to customize each attempt. Once we’ve played a scenario 2-4 times and seen all the paths, we have no desire to play it again.
They also really need to find a use for Will and Influence. They keep giving all investigators the same stat totals as if all the stats are created equal, but they so are not.
The Unity Games convention in the Boston area seems to be back after many years of absence. Rebranded as “Reunity Games”.
Tom Vasel has published his review of Tapestry. Despite some here not liking him, I think it’s an excellent review.
It’s clear he has put in the plays. He stayed away from the hype and articles until he could form an opinion. And that opinion is nicely balanced. He liked the game, but had some issues with it.
Worth a watch if you are on the fence about the game.
Haha, somehow he managed to sort of sing twice in that. I was sort of interested, but mostly because it can accommodate 5.
I agree. Was surprised how lukewarm he was on it compared to previous Stonemeier games (which I think almost all have similar problems). It’s just another overproduced (and overpriced) dry eurogame.
Has anyone else tried Cloudspire? I opened it, marveled at all the pieces, set up a solo game, then got overwhelmed by it all and packed it back up. Will try again this weekend. There were a couple solo game examples on YT but they also said there were mistakes, etc. Hoping a better, more correct run through has been posted in the past week now that the game’s out. Could really use something like that to make the learning process a bit smoother.
Cloudspire Mine’s coming soon. I tried to read the manuals from the net…amazing the solo manual is over 80 pages.
So much to learn. Trying to learn Lifeform now and this in a few weeks…brain explosion.
I might sell Tapestry once it arrives. I like his games but not enough to ever play them much and I always sell them.
If anyone wants my copy…I wont un shrink wrap it…$10 off new and free shipping…PM me…should have it within the next 10 days or so.
Most of that is made up of the scenarios though, right? Unless I’m missing something! I haven’t read the whole rulebook yet.
Yes, scenarios…and that’s actually kind of annoying now that i think about it. There are 12 I believe which is great…and I’ve read in the forums that players are having a hard time winning just the first one they’ve tried, which to me bodes well for replayability…but I remember glancing at the rule book and the setups and rules for each individual scenario are very long and may take so much time to set up and figure out that it detracts from even wanting to try a new one. Guess we’ll see.
Just spent an extremely frustrating evening playing Unlock Noside. Despite the fact that there wasn’t much actual puzzling going on at all, we barely got through a handful of cards, spending ages looking for and failing to find hidden numbers. This is not fun! WTF.
So have you played any of the Unlock games before, and was this one not well made, or was this your first experience with the series?
Because I have played a bunch of them, and my wife and I love them. However we have not played that specific one.
First Unlock game, but I’ve played several board escape games. I was flummoxed by a) the lack of any narrative to thread the puzzles together, and b) the fact that as far as we were able to proceed, all the “puzzles” were the same, and not puzzles. We failed to spot a hidden number for half an hour, which pretty much ruined the game.
Ok. I can’t speak to that specific one, but I will say many of them do have a narrative thread. Wizard of Oz in particular almost has an adventure feel as it very much has a story.
In fact they have gotten pretty good at interleaving story, see Wizard, Dinosaur, and Sherezade. As for the hidden numbers, that is part of their design. Usually there is a logic to them, and it makes sense.
I would say give them another try, in fact the three I named would be my strongest recommendations. There is very much some clever and varied puzzle design, and some out of the box thinking needed. Sherezade even ends with a word input where you have to tell a story to solve one puzzle. Which is very thematic! And unlike anything else they have.
Noside is a sequel to Squeek and Sausage which puts you in an evil mad scientist’s lab. So I could see it being more puzzle for the sake of puzzle.
My issue was that there weren’t any puzzles. It was basically all hidden numbers/letters, or adding numbers according to the rulebook. There was one thing we did which I would consider an actual puzzle. Admittedly, though, we didn’t actually get very far.