2862

The Dune SUSD review pretty much nails it. If the game is in your wheelhouse it may easily be your favorite game. It definitely rewards many plays. I think it’s one of the best multiplayer games ever designed, and it’s easily one of the best designs integrating theme.

2863

There is no way my group could do this game, which is sad because it does sound super unique. Great video. I like him.

2864

More of you need to be backing the FlickFleet 2nd Kickstarter. I need stretch goals for my expansion, dammit!

The first one is a great and fresh take on tactical/dexterity games. Plus it’s also handmade, which means it’s no different to the tat that you can buy in Etsy which lots of people love to do!

2865

Received Marvel Champions LCG today. Played a quick (too quick) solo game with Spiderman against the basic Rhino.

Hit him for 10 damage right off the bat…thought, simple…too easy. But, didn’t turn out that way.

Once I killed his first card I could never get any damage on his second card as 2 more side schemes came out along with my nemesis Vulture. I was constantly on the defensive. Had no allies out and kept relying on my def stat along with occasionally moving to Peter Parker mode to heal up 3…but with too many enemies attacking me and no help, I went down in flames. I tried to play with Parker and removing threat but one scheme added extra threat to the main scheme so I was falling behind there too.

If you don’t try and take out minions or side schemes quickly those things really multiply your issues and I did not have good draws early OR I just suck.

It was fun. Quick. Fairly thinky. And I lost to the easiest villain so that’s great for replayability. Next game trying either a different hero or 2 heroes as I think that will really ramp up the possibilities and with so many ways to set up the decks this will be a long term challenging game for me, and maybe the kid too.

Marvel
Marvel.jpg480×640 108 KB

2867

Just curious.
Has anyone backed Beyond Humanity: Colonies on Kickstarter?

2868

How was it? Compared to say, sentinels of the multiverse?

2869

I have played and survived my first two missions of Apocrypha. It’s Mike Selinker’s game that follows on the heels of – and borrows heavily the mechanics from – the Pathfinder Adventure Card game series.

I love the setting for the game a lot – modern urban horror/fantasy. Think The Secret World setting, as a boardgame. If you’ve played PACG you’ll (eventually) see that this game is really similar to it – albeit with some notable changes.

And so this bears noting: the rules for this game are very tight and smart, although occasionally there are some fiddly bits that feel unnecessary, especially if you’re playing solo and controlling multiple characters. But the rules make sense and there are far fewer headscratching “I dunno which rule applies here” moments than base PACG (which it should be said, they’ve done a nice job tightening up in future iterations of the game past the initial Runelords box).

But this also needs to be said: the rules presentation of Apocrypha is about the worst thing I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve encountered Magic Realm and Robinson Crusoe expansions. The rulebook lays out all sorts of outlines for setting up and gameplay while introducing a variety of terms and not explaining them at all, or giving them a cursory explanation. Eventually you’ll realize that “Nexus”=“Location”, and that “Gifts” = “Boons” from Pathfinder, and that “Threats” are kind of equivalent to the random monster encounters, etc.

Even then, though, the rulebook does a lousy job of telling you what certain cards do, and how to deploy them in setting things up. (I was on my third re-read of the rulebook before I felt like it finally came clear what the structure cards do and which ones to choose for each specific mission.)

Worse: the game directs you to a “How to play” video created by the developers of the game. These videos are hilariously awful and bad. Key terms whiz by unexplained, and core game concepts aren’t outlined (you know, just important stuff like how the dice are used to resolve every skill encounter in the game – trivial shit like that.) It’s a case of people who have been central to designing this game

All isn’t lost though. Rahdo – who often drives me nuts with his videos – actually does a really nice job with his video on the Apocrypha setup and a few turns. And there are a couple of other videos as well that actually cover the rules nicely.

And here’s the thing: this – at least so far – is a really great game. Like, it’s worth doing some work on the rules end, because the gameplay and atmosphere are fantastic. Apocrypha does a much nicer job of telling a story or letting an emergent narrative through than Pathfinder does.

The core box comes with a ton of missions, which I can’t wait to dive deeper into. I also kinda want to see how the (strictly and totally optional) app figures into things.

What sucks is that I think a LOT of people would enjoy this game, but its reputation for the way it presents its rules precedes it. I can’t help but think it undermines sales of the game to the point where Selinker and co. would be really well served by putting together a new “Learn to play” video that actually goes into some depth and teaches the game.

2870

Survived another Spiel in Essen, with 25 different games played.

It was a good year overall, though the games I ended up liking were uncharacteristically light. Basically the only heavy game that was a hit was Barrage, everything else I really liked was short and snappy. But then again, Barrage does seem like a pretty exceptional heavy game so I’m pretty happy.

Die Crew is such a crazy idea (campaign-based cooperative trick taking) that I bought it just for the concept. Usually those purchases are total failures. But this time it worked, and was a ton of fun. I think it’s going to lead to resurrecting lunch time games once a week for me…

A rough classification on what I played below, feel free to ask for a more detailed opinion :)

Good

  • Barrage
  • Die Crew
  • Dawn of Mankind
  • Tiny Town
  • Irish Gauge
  • Point Salad
  • Skytopia
  • Die Inseln im Nebel

OK

  • Res Arcana
  • Babylonia
  • Terramara
  • Little town
  • Orchard Ocean
  • Steamopolis
  • Pipeline

Garbage

  • Cartographers
  • Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North
  • Crystal Palace
  • Obscurio
  • Aftershock
  • Plunderbund
  • Aqua Mirabilis
  • Ecos: First Continent
  • Hellapagos
  • Human Punishment
2871

I’ve played Ecos twice, I kinda like it? It’s definitely a novel system, which is nice. It can be hard to figure out how to actually put together a scoring combination, but if that ends up being a skill you can get good at (rather than just a matter of luck) then I think I’ll end up liking it.

2872

This is actually kind of fun when you have a large number of people, which it is designed for. If you have like 10 people, there is only so much you’re going to get out of a game like this, and it’s funny to hear the reasoning for why people want to do what they want to do.

2873

What did you not like about Crystal Palace? I’m really looking forward to trying it.

Also is it me or was it a crap year for essen?

2874

Out problems with Ecos were that despite the shared map there were basically no interaction points between the player. Sure, they were doing all kinds of shit on the map, but it basically didn’t matter. Maybe a cheetah managed to eat a hippo and lost one player a couple of points, but that was it. It’s like the game is just playing itself, and you’re along for a ride.

The mana system was really fiddly, with these turns that were really unpredictable in length. Most of the time it’s just these five second turns, but every now and then you’d get these multi-minute action chains. And you can never parallelize anything due to the shared map. You can’t even spend that downtime on thinking, since you don’t know what mana you’ll be getting in what order. Can’t even step away for a while after taking a move, since unlike in most games with long turns, you can’t tell when a slow turn will happen and since it’ll be immediately followed by you needing to make another decision.

So it’s really a bit of a worst of all worlds case, I just find the whole design utterly misguided.

We played with 9. Admittedly this isn’t my genre, but nobody in our group liked it compared to other similar games. E.g. Cerberus has a much better implementation of the schtick with everyone having to cooperate in the beginning, turn on each other in the mid-game to whittle down the numbers, and then win as team. So when Cerberus came out, the same group played 4 or 5 games in a row. Hellapagos? It was packed up after the first game, nobody asked for a rematch, and the owner started looking around for some fool to sell the game to.

The worker placement / economic systems were just utterly bland soulless. Now, that was also the case for games like Terramara and Steamopolis. I don’t mind worker placement as a side dish, but you just can’t base the entire game around it in this day and age. Everyone knows that, so of course the designs have to include a gimmick or twist of some sort. The gimmick in e.g. Barrage is the amazingly clever water flow simulation. The gimmicks in Terramara and Steamopolis turned out to be ineffectual but harmless. The twist in Crystal Palace is basically blind bidding.

There are pretty much no game mechanisms that I despise as much as blind bidding. Here you basically have a blind bid for the turn order and the power of your workers, with no useful input data to determine what others might bid. Arbitrarily changing the blind bids by just a couple of coins (you start with $40, to give a sense of the scale) has a massive impact on just what you can get done on a turn.

I thought it was really good. Can’t actually think of a better year off the top of my head.

The one major downside is that the massive game price inflation is still going on. I think it’s because people love bix boxes with lots of unnecessary junk, so you have these completely mediocre games released at 50-70 Euros. Or stuff like the Vital Lacerda games from Eagle at 110 Euros.

2875

I couldn’t disagree much more. My wife and I both enjoy the engine / empire building. The tribes add nice variation to the strategy. And the game comes with a cool solo mode with various challenges to beat.

It’s personally one of my higher ranked games this year. I’m looking forward to the upcoming expansion.

2876

Interesting. Usually there are at least 5 games that are standout, “you must own me!” games, but I just haven’t heard anything from Essen this year that seems to hit that mark. Even the Bgg essen list show of game started with… Jaws? Jaws! Don’t get me wrong I think Jaws is great for what it is, but yeah. I own Barrage haven’t had a chance to play it yet so I’m looking forward to it.

2877

I don’t understand the appeal of this. It’s just a bunch of random scoring rules and set collection. But I’m not sure what I expected from a game that’s based on a pun.

:(

It’s been a big hit at Chez Chick. I even bought colored pencils. Why didn’t you like it? Part of what I like about it is that I don’t really have anything else like it.

I can completely understand not getting into this, even though I share @Wendelius’ fondness for the engine building. I’ve only futzed around with it as a solitaire game, but part of my problem is that I don’t quite get what they’re expressing with the specifics of the different decks. That’s probably from not playing enough, but there was nothing in a couple of playthroughs that hooked me and made me want to investigate deeper.

I’m also a bit concerned it’ll be too much multiplayer solitaire, even though you can throw axes at another player to shut down their buildings. I guess the race to grab the islands is the main player interaction?

-Tom

2878

There’s definitely something to this; certainly early in the game you may get the option to place or move animals, but if nobody has yet played any cards that score for animals, you have no idea what to place/move or why. Same for trees/mountains/terrains.

But it isn’t always that way. For example, in my last game, a player was getting a lot of points for groups of hippos, so I used my animal move power to break up his group. Cost him a lot of points! He won anyway, but at least I did something!

So I guess it depends; will you most of the time be given actions that don’t matter? Or will your actions matter enough to make it interesting? I don’t know yet.

As for the variable turn length; that makes it interesting to me, rather than just I go, you go, he goes; it’s anybody could go at any time, possibly multiple times. I didn’t feel anybody’s turns went on all that long, and if they did, I could spend the time looking at my hand and figuring out which card I wanted to play next. And the whole thing is only about an hour anyway, so how much downtime can there be?

But I’ve only played it twice. Haven’t totally made up my mind, but obviously my first impression was better than yours!

2879

It looks like Cerberus caps at… 7, and they recommend even fewer than that, 5?

2880

Fair enough. I don’t care at all about the buzz, since for me it’s purely about going there and playing the games myself. And it helps that I no longer really follow new releases that closely, so I don’t really care if something is technically a Gen Con or Kickstarter release rather than new at Essen. What matters is whether it’s new to me.

If you’re just looking at games that technically had their first release at Essen, having the games get spread over the whole year by Kickstarter will reduce the apparent impact.

Yes, I definitely know where you’re coming from. My prejudice going into the game was that it was going to be trash, but during these trips I’ll play anything once. But then a few minutes into the game I had to begrudingly admit that I was actually having a lot of fun. (Sorry for using the F-word).

I have a couple of theories for why basically everyone was into the game. One is that it’s just the slot machine dopamine hits, which are coming up a lot faster in this game than pretty much any other card game. The other is at how easy it’s to screw over other players, both intentionally and accidentally, thanks to the way picking vegetable cards will cycle the scoring cards. Combined with the fast pace of the game, you get to feel really mean several times a minute.

This is a really dickish thing to say, but it’s not even a game, it’s an activity. This is probably the closest to multiplayer solitaire I’ve experienced in years. And then on top of that the optimization puzzle aspect isn’t particularly interesting. There were a lot of games with much more compelling solitaire optimization components.

I can see that there is a ton of charm in drawing maps onto grid paper with pencils. If the physical presentation of the same mechanisms was somehow differnent, e.g. placing cubes on a board, I would have grumbled even more. In this case I didn’t entirely begrudge the time spent on this, but I also have zero interest in playing again.

Then again, my friend wanted to buy a copy after we tested this despite not being able to articulate any reason for why it was any good. All he said that he’d already imagined walking to the stationary store to buy some colored pencils, and then sitting down in the hotel lobby to fill out some more maps. But that plan failed, since they were sold out on all language versions already on Saturday morning. So clearly I’m in the minority here.

Right, and that’s really weak for a game that this slow and fiddly.

I love a good tableau builder as much as anyone. Race for the Galaxy, Innovation and Glory to Rome are probably all in my top 20 games of all time. But that also means that I have very little patience for games that not only fail to advance the state of the art, but can’t even get close to the games from a decade ago. And that’s what Empires of the North ends up being for me. (Whereas e.g. for Res Arcana I still don’t know whether I actually like it. But the thing it’s trying to do with the 8 card decks is so audacious that I feel compelled to play more of it to figure it out.)

Sure, I wasn’t recommending it as a 1:1 replacement. The point was more that this is a group where a lot of people really enjoy these kinds of games, and others can tolerate them enough to play them for a couple of hours a night. But Hellapagos (with the expansion) just fell totally flat.

2881

It is good information to have. I do appreciate that others share their experience.

These kind of games, my group resorts to when we have too many people for the others, and need a pause form Unstable Unicorns.

It would be… intriguing to have a game that can accommodate 10-12, but goes lower to like 5-6 and that is chosen, often for the 5-6 crowd. Unstable is the only one that is really in the ball park right now, a favorite for both sizes.

2882

I’d put Res Arcana in good, rather than OK, myself. It’s fairly simple but not too much so that it’s readily solvable, and it’s great to have something that plays in an hour or less. The only real knock against it is the relative lack of aggressive player interaction, but a) it’s not zero and b) I find the competition for particular places of power and for the first player marker is enough on its own.