Make sure you google the errata for the civilizations. The developer has gotten a LOT of heat over how dumb the changes are. Jamey Jamey Jamey…
Aha, we didn’t do that. We played a five player game. I enjoyed it, but it felt a bit uneven. I like that there’s a lot to do, but the combos that scored a lot of points felt a bit random. I’m sure it will feel better the next few times, but I don’t think this is a game we’ll be playing for very long.
Wait, what? You have got to be kidding me. I’m scared to look.
-Tom
I don’t know Tapestry well enough to appreciate how big those changes are, but that smacks of “oh shit, we didn’t playtest this very well, and now people on the internet are pointing out some of the stuff we missed by not playtesting very well.”
So, basically, five of the civilizations suck bad enough to need a leg up at the beginning of the game, and one was overpowered enough so that it has to pay a penalty at the beginning of the game? Awkward.
-Tom
Someone talk to me about Glen More II.
Word on that
And the fact that the fixes are just raw VP adjustments. Ouch.
The FedEx driver was incompetent to the last, but I did finally get it. Part of the problem apparently was that it got addressed to the wrong apartment due to a printing error at fulfillment (they dropped a 0 on my apartment number).
Re: the Tapestry adjustments. In a 4-player game, the Chosen get 45 points. A winning score in this game is often 200-250 points. That’s nuts. They’re terrible and it’s completely obvious they’re terrible.
This is no different to Viticulture, Scythe, etc. I don’t know why everyone praises Stegmaier’s designing abilities when all of his major games have gone through multiple, and very public, re-writes, re-releases, re-kickstarters, and generally getting money from old rope.
Then again, after all of that iteration at least the resultant game is decent. But that’s also why I won’t buy one of their games until after it’s finishing being tweaked with. I saw that with Viticulture! (And even then, you had to buy the game + expansion to get the “desired” game, even though that was know at the time, as there had already been multiple versions/editions of the base+expansion)
Viticulture (his first game, AFAIK) got a revision, and then a couple of generally improving modules from the expansion got backported into it. I can’t vouch for the scope or effect of the revision (it didn’t seem major) since I got in at that point, but we played several pre-expansion games of Viticulture and never felt like anything was missing or horribly unbalanced. The added modules just spice it up a bit more and increase game-to-game variation.
Euphoria and Scythe just got expansions as far as I know? I’ve never purchased any of them and don’t feel either game needed them to be balanced or functional.
I grant that I don’t know how big these changes to Tapestry are, but they seem very different to those previous games and like very unelegant solutions to a problem.
Did the Tainted Grail intro/tutorial just now. Looks pretty neat so far. I had some concerns given they are not native English speakers (they assured backers that they’d be commissioning a quality translation, but you never know) and it’s a very text heavy game, but so far no real issues there (one typo, but that happens). The combat and diplomacy systems seem interesting - linking keys on cards based on character attributes, with special effects in text, with decks customized based on character archetype and (to a lesser extent) character. The little bit of writing the tutorial shows you was good. My one complaint so far is that the menhir figures are a little too big to sit on a location card and not obscure any of the text. Well, that and the dials are a little hard to read at a distance.
I have to assume this is seriously tongue in cheek since I think Cthulhu passed up zombie and WWII Nazi theming a few years ago.
That said, I enjoy Shadows of Brimstone a great deal as a narrative crawl adventure where you both are and are not in control of the narrative. Plus it is a fair bit outside of the normal Cthulhu copy/paste public domain stuff.
For something that is really off the usual path of most folks, there is Machina Arcana. That has a serious Cthulhu vibe without being FFG design vomit. If anyone is interested, the updated version is darn close to being available (“available” is a loose term here as the game has been Kickstarter/ developer web page sale only). The 2.0 version is supposed to clean up everything from production level art to pacing from the first edition.
We’re partway through chapter 1, and we’ve already abandoned the giant statues and hard-to-read dials for dice. Liking it otherwise! It’s like 7th continent meets an actual game: deck building, a neat (card-based) combat mechanic and more structured co-op.
Played the intro.
Story was great. Card play was interesting, but not sure how long it will hold my attention though I suspect it will evolve.
Anyone know anything about Tank Duels from GMT? Looks kind of awesome.
My five-year old daughter really enjoys playing board games. She’s played the usual kids board games, but has also enjoyed playing Machi Koro. She also wanted to play that train game, so we tried a game of Ticket to Ride with her but she is too young to manage all the goals of building bonus routes and whatnot in the game. I’ve found a few rules variations for younger kids. I was wondering if anybody here as experience with modified rules. I know there is First Journey, but I’n not really interested in getting the junior version of the game.
You want Ticket To Ride New York City
Lots of good buzz. And it’s not necessarily a “lite” game. Ben Bosmans, who is infamous for posting nasty comments about anything that isn’t hex-and-counter, posted a glowing review.