Boardgaming in 2019!

Letter Jam is a lot of fun if you like word games with friends. I played a prerelease copy a couple months back and had a blast.

Dreams of Tomorrow looks gorgeous but what…is it?

Oooo, ERA is an evolution on Roll Through the Ages!

That Toy Story game looks so cute! Baby’s First Deck-Builder!

Era: Medieval Age is cool. I got to play it a few weeks ago. The city building stuff is really satisfying, and not just because of the miniature buildings. Everything fits together to create a nifty economy based on dice and the distribution of different die faces. Also, the game has just enough interactivity in terms of stealing each other’s resources that it doesn’t feel like multiplayer solitaire.

One downside is the player boards are made of uniformly colored plastic and the symbols lightly engraved into the plastic are nearly impossible to read. Imagine playing a strategy game with the gamma turned up so high that the text is lost in the glare. Ugh.

-Tom

The retail release comes with stickers attached to the box to ‘fix’ the player boards.

Or use crayons!

It’s like coloring in the numbers on the dice of my D&D Red Box set.

I was disappointed to see those boards. Glad to see they packaged in a solution! Too bad they still look like half-assed Milton Bradley components, when Roll Through the Ages had those nice hefty wooden boards…

So I didn’t know where to put this. Here, the Kickstarter thread or the Grognard thread. It’s a little bit of everything.

Anyway, one of the games I was excited for is finally here (we’ll, doing a preorder Kickstarter).

Seems like High Frontier but fiddle in different ways and with way more direct conflict. A lot of cool UI decisions (the planet boards with transit times) and some, well, definitely not cool ones like the player boards.

What’s more baffling is that they are launching this 13 days before the High Frontier 4th edition KS launches (and I will jump a HF with the new graphic design Sierra Madre games have now, good thing it launches the day before my birthday).

Anyway, there goes my monthly Boardgame budget.

Looks like an unholy mix of Space Corps, High Frontier and Leaving Earth. This would be a must-buy for me except it’s on Kickstarter. I’ll wait to see if they do a retail version.

HF4 is sounding to me like a dud. I don’t like the modularity of it, and I suspect whatever redesign they do will needlessly complicate the game. I’ve got Origins coming (my final unfulfilled KS order that will actually be fulfilled) and I’m pretty satisfied with my copy of HF3.

It’s Compass, there will be a retail version.

I’m not getting rid of my HF3 (I gave away my second edition plus expansion when I got it) until I play HF4 and see how different they are. But I like most of SM games recent decisions, so I’m hopeful.

I mostly jumped on HF 3rd because it sounded like a cool game and it was hard to come by. I can’t really justify getting another edition because there is next to no chance I will ever get to play it, though.

@Vesper have any copies of the Dead of Night Arkham expansion reached your store? Every single store in my metropolitan area had it down to arrive last Friday but none have shown up and they don’t know why. Either it’s a region wide delay or something at FFG’s shipping center.

Yes I have 3 on my shelf right now. First showed up last week. I suspect there was a mess up getting it to the Alliance warehouse in your area.

Huh, my local store JUST got it in a few hours ago.

So did we ever get a final verdict on the Selinker-created occult apocalypse coop cardgame Apocrypha? The rules are a mess and will be a slog to get through, but if the game underneath is good, I’m willing to put in the effort.

Just kinda want to know whether it’s worth it.

I think it’s better than the PACG. But I am biased towards urban fantasy. And honestly, if you’ve played that you already have a pretty solid understanding of how Apocrypha plays, they’ve just introduced a few more points of variation and an (IMO) more interesting dice system.

I actually think the rules are very well written, and they demonstrate that Selinker and company have learned a lot from the time they spent honing Pathfinder. If you mean they’re a mess in terms of how they’re organized, I can understand that. But Apocrypha is one of those rare games where almost every issue, question, or apparent inconsistency could be resolved for me by a careful reading of the rules.

I’ve also heard the complaint that the rules are difficult to parse if you’re learning the game and don’t know Pathfinder. But since I knew Pathfinder, I can’t speak to that.

DoubleYes.

-Tom

Heh, thanks and thanks. And yeah, I guess by “mess” I mean that they’re organized oddly, at least to my PACG eyes. But that being said, the first big box of the first PACG setting was out for like a year and people were still finding inconsistent rules and we were getting clarifications, so if it manages to reduce those issues, I’m sold.

The South Park “Band in China” episode said a lot. For most of it, the message was straight forward. However, in one scene a character is working on a screen play, but all I could see is the many real world board games on the shelf in the background.

Does anybody have any idea why the show is including these seeming random board game references?

Open to Scene in Question

image

I do know a lot of modern board games are made in China, especially plastic components. I also know a lot of the low quality knockoffs were coming out of China. But why these specific games?