New games!
Hi Vesper, do you have any more Coloma copies left? I’m interested in it, also Taverns of T. Glad you have copies of the two new Clank! games, woo!
AW-HAW-HAW-HAW yissssssss -
I am a huge fan of the original, and all I’ve seen of this one indicates that it’s built with a better opportunity for randomness, which will make replayability a lot better. I’m going to head to my local shop tomorrow and see if they have a copy. Though my wife will probably make me get rid of my old box.
I do! I have Standard edition for sure and may have a Deluxe edition but have to check tomorrow. Shoot me a PM if you’d like a copy!
The kid and I played Terminator Genysis Rise of the Resistance last night. Kind of a mishmash of a few games like Fireteam Zero and Zombicide.
The first mission you have to uncover waypoints around the map. Some waypoints escalate the enemy numbers while others are supplies needed…once you have all supplies you head to a truck to high tail it out of there.
I sent Arnold (the kid) to one side of the map while I, as Reese, headed to the other. Things went ok for awhile with some dice rolls that did not spawn any enemies.
There are spawn points like Zombicide and each turn, the heroes May spawn enemies that are from a spawn pool in their own color. Those enemies of that heroes color then activate to move and attack. The players decide who goes first in a new round so they know which color enemies will activate first so this gives round planning some serious thoughy when a lot of enemies are out.
There are a limit to enemies that can be on the board so this makes it already a bit better than the endless enemies from Z games.
Each turn, you roll 4 die and place them in action spaces on your player board or weapons or class cards. There are lots of action spaces and so lots of choices in what to do each turn. I enjoy this mechanic in other games also.
There is a campaign or one off missions and an expansion with another campaign and more of everything.
We enjoyed the first mission. Reese was downed (cool mechanic…when downed you can use actions but only if you roll 1’s…so can only move 1 space,etc…cool thematic touch). Arnold was on the other side of the map and tried in vain to reach Reese to revive him and head to the truck. Was in cover when overwhelmed and had a few bad die rolls. Will try it again with lessons learned.
It’s a fun game…pretty basic dungeon crawl type with some good interesting decision making and some ok ways to mitigate die rolls…more later in the campaign when you have more command tokens to re roll. I like it…pulled out zombicide afterward and put it right back away to try this again…so a decent thumbs up but have to play more of the campaign to see how much each mission changes and if they form a cool story with some more variety in the missions.
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Etherfields late pledges are open. Boondoggle ahoy!
[I thought I’d do a session report here just to call out some games. Sorry in advance for the length.]
So, I had a nice weekend of gaming with a friend last weekend. He’s a Euro gamer that has some more grognardy tastes. So we got a good variety of games in.
We started with U-BOOT. I am already predisposed to dislike games that use apps, and although I understand exactly why this game is using an app, it just made me want to play Silent Hunter III. The 3D model gets in the way of seeing who the different crewmembers are (Herr Pentagon vs Herr Circle) and the weight of mechanics is way, way too much for the gameplay. This is a digital game, right? I know that’s right because I Kickstarted it. I think it was a mistake to make this a boardgame, but if they made lots of złoty on it then good for them. Still. The word for this in my opinion is “tedious.”
PS I can see how with four players you might be able to “get into a role” but with two it was the adjective above.
Then we played Black Orchestra my thoughts on which are here:
My friend was all like “this is just Pandemic with Hitler” and I’m like “what could be better?” Thing is, we won in ten minutes (literally) by killing Hitler with poison gas in Deck 1.
So that was that.
The next day was my big mistake. Because my friend likes interesting mechanics, and generally likes heavy games, I roped him into a game of Churchill with a local friend. Like I said, a mistake. The opaque victory point situation and the conditional decision space really combined to turn him off. “Wait, why are you taking my Production?!” Etcetera. My local friend loves the game and says he would “play it anywhere, any time,” which is probably a bit more than I would give it but at least two of us had fun. I felt really bad blowing an entire long afternoon on it, though, since my friend really didn’t like it. Like I said, I’m a bad person.
The next day was entirely more enjoyable for him. We started with a grognardy game called Ghost Panzer
which is sort of Advanced Squad Leader lite-lite-lite. Our good compatriot @Rod_Humble hates this one, and prefers something called Old School Tactical, which you can just tell by the name is more fiddly. I’m lukewarm on it, myself, but my friend really likes it and has no local opponents so I was glad to indulge him, especially after the Churchill fiasco. I won, btw. We played something like eight full turns in just a couple hours. It moves fast, I’ll give it that.
Ok, so the next game was a really guilty pleasure, called Eldritch Horror. You may have heard of it. We played with the Mountains of Madness sideboard, which really added to the gameplay I think. It also integrated really well with the story. I was impressed. We lost, though, to the Something Elder Something. It ate us. We invited a local mutual friend and the three-player dynamic was great. Our friend had a character who ended up with something like fifteen spells.
The next game was my friend’s choice as well: Labyrinth. He loves this game and was all excited to show me some text-only app that runs the solo bot for you. Ok. I played the Good Guys and it did not go well. We played with the **Awakening: 2010-huh?” expansion, which does some interesting things with an Arab Spring theme but can get very snowball-y if you get too many of those counters out. I got out of Afghanistan as the US but then had to invade Egypt, which had gone Islamist. I resigned.
We rounded out the weekend with Command & Colo(u)rs: Medieval which I felt was a good aperitif. If you have played the original C&C, this version is much more cavalry-heavy—both in numbers and weight (cav now have four blocks per unit instead of three)—because historical accuracy. It makes for a more mobile (and kind of wacky) game, and I’m not a huge fan of the system, but there is nothing like those dice rolls and all the “oh I can ignore a sword because you’re a lower class, and that retreat because I have a leader” nonsense. Bag o’ dice combat is like that.
Then on Wednesday yet a different local friend came by and we played a real game: Ukraine ‘43. This taught us valuable lessons we will be sure to use if we ever need to fight a colossal mechanized war on a steppe. We got through an entire seven-turn scenario (well, six- I had enough victory points to win after six turns and he conceded) in just under five hours. I am becoming a huge fan of the revised Mark Simonitch system: so smooth but with plenty of historical chrome.
We are both so enamored of the system that we will probably try out the Normandy ‘44 game next week, even though it is against my religion to play any games about D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. We do have a giant 4’ x 7’ version to play on, though, thanks to bigboardgames.net.
And that’s what I did on my days off.
Don’t do it Bruce! Is this warning coming too late? Oh no, I just read some more about it and it takes place in a dream world. Using dream logic! Is it from Poland? Is that why you’re buying it?
Don’t worry, I am not buying Etherfields. But I know that literally everyone else is.
Just a warning on this: Compass seems to release tons of games with awful editing, proofreading, and downright broken rules. It seems like they have no developers. It’s like they just give the stuff to the designer, and publish whatever they get back. If you Kickstart this, be prepared for a final product that doesn’t work. But since they don’t fix them afterward, the retailer copy will be broken, too, so that won’t help you. Sorry if I’m bitter. FWIW. YMMV. FTAGN.
I’ll admit it, I backed Etherfields, but just at the lowest level. What can I say? The setting at least looks cool.
I pulled my handmade Magic Realm set out a couple days ago, an adventure game that and old-school wargamer like @Brooski could appreciate. It’s got it all- a mass of intricate, arcane rules, a million tiny counters and chits, a several-hour playtime. It’s great.
Bought it aeons ago, read through the rules thrice, played it once on the easiest setting (no armies, no magic). Was fascinated by it, but board game design came a long way.
You can’t since with four players two have so little to do. The navigator and the guy with the app have meaningful data and interactions with the systems. The captain has no data to work with but has to give all the orders; so they’re basically just a relay. And the engineer just has two solitaire minigames to play that just matter for the other players.
Interesting I’m not sure what game you guys were playing. I’m not sure how it can be tedious. Our ship is constantly breaking… (okay that can be tedious) HQ is always sending us errands. We’re always sending people to work on jobs that aren’t theirs because we’re starved for actions, morale or both. Navigator has to make food because morale sucks and you won’t have long to do it before you have to fight. The App guy better be putting crew members on steering and helping the engineer with moving the ship.
Oh, absolutely. I agree, it isn’t a good game, from a modern perspective. But it is absolutely fascinating. I’ve heard Western Legends is an open world boardgame with more modern systems, I’d like to try it out one day.
Tedium is being forced to do things that are not interesting or that detract from the goal of the game, and this game has that in spades. The most interesting thing, by far, in UBOOT is the navigation interaction with the app. Cool I am a submarine captain (or navigator, or something). Everything else feels like a way to take your attention away from that in the most annoying manner possible. You’re hunting a merchant – oh wait, the engine room is on fire. Which guys are the ones good at engines? Brown triangle guy I think. Where is he? [Squint around the 3D display to find the one guy that looks like all the other guys but his base is a brown plastic triangle.] Ok, move him back to the engine room. Whoops, shift change. Let’s move everyone around arbitrarily, take off tokens, and don’t forget to move four freaking guys up to the conning tower as observers. Every time we change shifts. I get that this is what happens on real submarines in bygone days, but so does seasickness and smelling people’s body odor, and you’ll forgive me if I don’t have that be part of my game, either. I mean, it’s solely my opinion, but that opinion is that a bad game design is one that introduces what feels like a lot of busywork in between the parts of the game that are naturally much more interesting. I’m lining up a shot on a merchantman, and hey, everyone needs to eat or the ship’s morale goes down, so one guy has to fix breakfast using a breakfast mini-game. No joke, I have to choose the eggs and then the next thing adjacent to but only adjacent to the eggs, but I always have to take the lemon (if there is lemon available) and it makes two-token or three-token breakfast, all while everyone waits. Now back to the (admittedly very interesting) plotting display! I spent much more time in the game wishing I was using the plotting display, thinking about how fun it would be to use the plotting display, and making “phoosh-phoosh!” torpedo noises with my mouth than actually using the plotting display to fire torpedoes and do other warfighty things that were not figuring out if the token for eggs was next to the token for potatoes. If that’s not tedium, then I’m writing a nasty note to Merriam-Webster.
Sorry, that became kind of a rant. Everyone is entitled to like the game. My friend who brought it likes it a lot, and I was glad to play it with him. I even enjoyed his enjoyment of the game, if that makes sense. But from a game design perspective, particularly the one that determines whether or not I happen to like a game, it has a lot of problems.
I know, I know. But I’ve been waiting for this game for 5 years. The rulebook seems ok at a first read, and at least some of the components seem beautiful.
It’s a gamble.
For your perusal.
Let the squawking begin!
