2903

A brief rundown of the Marvel Champions characters based on my experience so far. Maybe this’ll help someone, I dunno.

Captain Marvel: She’s really very good at blasting things in the face. She starts off with lots of HP, and I frequently use her cycling ability to add individual points while replacing cards I don’t need. Deckbuilding should focus on energy, because she has several cards and powers that use it. Has both burst damage and some build up potential.

Spider-man: Jack of all trades, master of hitting villains in the face for 8 damage sometimes. Spider-man is a very versatile character, with damage, healing, threat chasing, mitigation… a lot of choices. The trick is, you only have so much of each of those, so you want to have what you need when you need it. Consequently, I think card draw of some kind will be very useful for you.

Black Panther: Unusual, in that your alter-ego ability is a one time tutor through your deck to get part of your kit, done at the start of the game. You need to choose very carefully, based on your opposition and deck style. BP is also interesting in that he’s rich: his access to Wakanda’s resources give him awesome Vibranium resource cards and amazing cards like The Golden City for when he’s stuck in his alter ego. He also has a very strong 2-2-2 stat line, and a very useful special ability in Retaliate, letting him shrug off stuff like Ultron’s drones. He is arguably the burstiest character as he needs to have his equipment online for him to use Wakanda Forever, allowing him to unleash the beast, metaphorically speaking. Also literally.

Iron Man: Perhaps the most bifurcated character, Iron Man NEEDS to set up his suit as fast as humanly possible. Until he does, he is practically skipping your next turn every time he ends his turn in Hero mode, due to low intrinsic card draw. His suit cards are great, though, and can be used every turn you’re in Hero mode, giving you a real sense of growth and power. His alter-ego as Tony lets you cycle through your deck to find them quickly, which I think you really need to do without delay. Once online, you have truly massive damage potential and flexibility, especially if you stack your deck with resources (was it tech? energy?) for your repulsor rays.

She-Hulk: Wow, she has two amazing natural abilities and lots of HP! I see her as a bit of an all-rounder like Spidey, but I personally like her better. She can slow down or remove threat, absolutely wallop bad guys, and requires very little in the way of setup. Get her out there and start breaking faces!

2904

I don’t get all the Talisman stuff listed as new.

Is this yet another edition of Talisman? Why all the expansions? If they are releasing them all at once, couldn’t they just stick all that stuff in the game?

2905

Think it’s just a reprint. But they have the FFG logo and I didn’t think FFG had the license anymore.

2906

My apologies for the wrong photo showing FFG - I just grabbed from BGG. It’s a reprint - been gone for a bit.

It’s now being published by Pegasus Spiele.

2907

That makes way more sense.

2908

Marvel Champions seems like it was meant to be played as solitaire. Is that a fair assessment? I saw the Team Covenant video where they were playing 3 vs. the game and it seemed like there was a lot of downtime and not much interaction between them.

2909

Hmm, I have only played it solitaire, so I can’t really compare, but it ran very smoothly for me that way.

In case anyone is curious, I found the gameplay to be a hybrid between the Arkham Horror LCG and Sentinels of the Multiverse, with a cute nod to the original LOTR LCG in there as well.

But solo it runs much, much faster than Sentinels, and you have much more to do on your turn. Your turns take way more time than the Villain, as it should be.

2910

Good week for gaming.

Played 3 games of U-boot this week.
Tough game. You can and will run out of actions quickly and it’s hard to keep the ship together and morale at a manageable level. That said, It’s really engaging. Time flies while playing. I like that it really is a co-op game and not a one man solitaire game. At least at my skill level, I need other players to manage the other roles. U-boot is tense and rewarding. When you manage to find a fleet and sink your target it is so gratifying. Likewise, it’s both demoralizing and terrifying when you miss your target and the escort ship get a bead on you. Shouting dive orders and praying that you survive the incoming depth charges is nerve wracking. I commend the game for its ability to recreate what I imagine it must have been like to be on one of those ships. Could you play this game with just an app? Possibly. Could you play a better solitaire sub video game? Sure, but there is something special about getting together with friends at table and going through this experience together. If you like submarine movies or games, and you have 2 or 3 other friends who feel the same, I’d give it a try.

Ended the week getting to play my copy of Barrage. If you don’t keep up with the bgg or kicktstarters you may not know, but Barrage has had quite a begining. Poor communication, broken promises, sub par components, poor delivery and little customer support from Cranio have not helped the game’s release. Luckily it’s co-designed by Simone Luciani, who co-designed Tzolkin, Marco Polo, and Grand Austrian Hotel to name a few. If you like crunchy worker placement take a look. It scales well and the asymmetry of the player boards is interesting.
Be warned, the game is not forgiving and you can be locked out of points if you are not careful. In our game, by the 3rd round I had 5 points while the other player had already scored 45. They had a lot of money, had completed contracts and more importantly controlled the water. I was feeling pretty shut out. Luckily, I realized you can make a lot of points by building infrastructure. I was able to build and setup for the last 2 rounds and win the game. The final scores were very close within 10 points. I’m looking forward to playing again with more players. I know you can potentially play 5 players but I can’t imagine it.

2911

I’ve been done with Mansions of Madness every since I realized that the DLC scenarios would be a very rare thing and that their primary focus is selling expansion scenarios for $20 each (2 scenarios per $40 box + a bunch more plastic and cardboard crap I don’t want).

Yeah yeah naive to think FFG doesn’t put the business model first, but this one I just don’t get. There’s negligible overheard to creating and selling the DLC scenarios. They should be pure profit. Why are they being pumped out at an average of 1 per year??

2912

You can’t yet. 5p support will be in as yet unreleased expansion that has a different map and that adds new action spaces.

2913

Big thumbs up for nocturion!

image
8DA6FD11-87E3-45AE-9ABE-0EA132B5A903.jpeg2016×1512 1.52 MB

2914

Oh I know. That’s why I said potentially. I refuse to give them anymore money through ks. Still even with a new map 5 players is just too much. It would forever to play.

2915

Looks and sounds cool. How much take that is there. (I like take that).

2916

As mentioned last week, I had played three scenarios – er, missions – in Apocrypha, a game that plays a bit like Pathfinder the Adventure Card Game, but with much more narrative and theme, and set in a sort of X-Files/Supernatural tv show type setting. I enjoyed it greatly, and decided to spring for the two expansions to the game, Box 2: The Flesh and Box 3: The Devil.

But I also had this nagging suspicion I was doing a few things wrong in my playthroughs. And when I’m playing a game, and those kind of nagging questions are there in my mind, it definitely affects my enjoyment. And wading back into the rules felt…traumatic. At best. They’re that much of an impenetrable fog of opaque wording and unclear phrasing and usage of game terms that just opening that rulebook made me feel like my eyes were rolling into the back of my head. So. To BGG to ask questions, or to at least peruse the board there first to see if others had asked my questions.

And first discovery: Lone Shark, the makers of Apocrypha, have re-written the rulesbook and it appears in PDF form here.

Good. Good! The new rules book still isn’t perfect, but it is better. Much better.

But then I discover that a fan at BGG kind of re-wrote the rules book himself, and has been updating it, correcting it, responding to questions regarding clarity, etc by revising it. Currently his rule set (which he doesn’t call a rule set) is on version 2.50. And it is spectacular, I suspect mostly because it is written by a game-playing fan (who is a very good writer, btw) bringing a perspective of some distance to things. As I’ve learned at work: developers and designers sometimes bring a very different perspective to documentation than a user would.

And so: how clear are the rules especially in that fan-made ruleset? Let me illustrate. It took me the better part of 4 sessions to muddle through three missions with a pair of characters playing solo. After reading the fan-made rule “Guidebook”, I played 5 missions Friday and Saturday alone, in about 6-7 hours total time.

Oh! And my two new boxes, bag of Apocrypha collector dice (which are easier to read than I expected; only reason I got them is that they were included in the bundle I bought), deck boxes, and binder just arrived. So today is sleeving new cards day and figuring out if the 850 cards in the expansions will fit in the main game box. (And also reading about how others organize their boxes; Apocrypha’s main box is very generously sized, and comes with terrific card dividers. But unlike a lot of games, you’re not meant, I don’t think, to just mash all the cards from all the expansion boxes together; I think there are cards from each “chapter” or “book” meant to stay segregated from the base cards.)

2917

Thank you for this! The rules bounced off me when I tried it for the first time so I’ll definitely check out the rewrite.

2918

Yeah, hopefully between either the official or unofficial one, it clicks. :)

It was so danged frustrating for me, because so much about this game felt like it was made for me: I love the theme. I love the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. How could this not be the greatest thing EVAR? But those rules. Lordy.

One other thing for APOC players. The same person who put together the unofficial rules also created mission setup guides by chapter. There are errors and all sorts of issues with the storybook setups, and this guide makes setting up really easy as far as knowing which cards to pull out of the box to set up with.
That guide is here.

I still use the storybook for the prose content and setting that stage, but to actually know what mission structures, locations, minions and masters to plug in, this is invaluable.

2919

Very little. You can give out curse cards to other players but they pretty quickly hit a 3 curse limit

2920

Is there a big Qt3 contingent going? I’m considering heading down from NYC if the logistics work out

2921

Going to demo behond humanity: colonies tonight. Looks very interesting. It’s an app based game with pieces that can read information from the app.

2922

It is also entirely a Kickstarter exclusive and will have no retail release or commercial pre-order. I’m very intrigued by the concept, but that’s a non-starter for me.