Boardgaming in 2019!

Games
3244

PAX Day 2:

Letter Jam
A deduction word game that is inexplicably co-operative, from CGE. Did they have a mix up and make Sanctum competitive and this co-op? We may never know. This felt a bit like playing Scrabble with all the bad game design filed off.

Europa Base Alpha
Yet another dice pool game, wow there’s a lot of these things all of sudden. This one has you competing to, let me read the description, well it says build bases on the moon of Jupiter. Well if you say so, this board game has the least theme of any game I’ve played, and I play Go. It had negative theme. Also it didn’t really have any game mechanics, some very light hand management. The game designer was super nice, so I feel bad dumping on this game. But hard pass.

God of War: The Card Game
It’s incredible, there’s never been more board games being published than now, but I fell like there’s only really three games being made, each a thousand times. This one is a co-op deck builder. Just what the world needed. It looked pretty and was pacy, but not much to make it stand out. Also when did CMON stop ramming unnecessary miniatures into it’s games?

1001 Odysseys
So first the caveats, this game’s not going to be out until around June, and the scenario I played had been hacked to make a ‘short’ demo. This is a co-operative story game, with you investigating a twee alien city. Did I mention it was twee, oh boy, this thing was unbearable. Just reading the wacky names of alien nonsense out loud for thirty minutes, and the people from Asmadi were at pains to explain how much longer the actual game will be. Great.

Marvel Champions: The Card Game
A co-operative customisable (of the ‘living’ variety) card game from FFG, with Marvel comic heroes beating on vaguely familiar villains. I was not expecting to like this, but a demo spot happened to open up as I passed the FFG booth. This is the revelation of the con for me, this game was fantastic. It may be the first FFG card game to fully land it’s theme, the co-op structure felt like it matched the games’ mechanics, and the game experience felt like it was a complete game. Highly recommend people check this one out, if I can find a copy it might make it to my son’s Christmas pile.

Ecos: First Continent
In this euro card driven engine building game, you collaborate with your opponents to create landmasses and oceans, raise mountains, spread forests and populate it all with animals. That the person running the game had to disappear for ten minutes to get on the fly errata from the games’ designer was not a good sign. The idea of this game is interesting, and it looks pretty cool on the table. But it fell kind of flat.

Other things I noted:

  • Sanctum seems to be a massive hit, CGE has sold out of all their copies.
  • Attending boring panels after playing board games all day is a good recipe for falling asleep.
  • There are way too many games to play, I could easily make a list of tens of interesting games I’ve not had a chance to look at yet.

Tomorrow is kids day and I’ll be attending with my son, so I may have less chance to try new games.

3245

I liked my friend’s copy of the 1st Ed Machina Arcana, but it didn’t seem like enough was changing in the 2nd Ed, so neither of us backed it. Now it seems like there’s lots of little tweaks that might make it nicer, and I’m kind of wanting it. Must… resist…

3246

The Reckoners was a complete dud to me. All those over-engineered trays, and ZERO of the ridiculous cost went in to conveying any sense of theme or atmosphere. Everything is so disconnected from the mechanics, and the mechanics are poor too (one of the die facings is massively superior to the others, pick the hero who favors that facing, win). All the production went into needless plastic trays and a single figure, zero went into the graphic design.

I even tried reading the novel (which turned out to firmly be a YA affair, despite assurances to the contrary from Tom Vassel) and it didn’t help form any kind of theme or atmosphere.

3247

It’s notable how effortlessly Marvel Champions achieves what Reckoners puts so much effort into only to face plant embarrassingly.

3248

Haven’t played Marvel yet, and I’m not a big fan of co-op (solo card games) or the FFG money sink, but even Rhado says this game is amazing.

3249

I played Ecos this weekend and it reminds me of Raccoon Tycoon. It is a pleasant game but lacks any passion in the design and just feels like any other library boardgame.

3250

You can’t really go wrong with Saboteur. It works well at all player counts.

Well, you can go wrong by playing the expansion/sequel. It overcomplicates an otherwise straightforward game.

3251

Yeah, I am there with you more or less. I have the first edition of Machina Arcana and was pretty good with that. The new version originally looked like the same game-- and it is. However, I did notice that over the years there was mumbling by the creator and fans about wanting to tighten up the systems and expand in places that made sense. The idea seems to have been refinement and lowering play time. Not streamlining so much as fixing first design pass missteps. Basically, it has higher production value and the benefit of designer hindsight. While I don’t have it yet, all signs point to the second version making the original quite obsolete.

I only mention it here as it does stick out as quite thematic Lovecraft with monsters that actually are quite terrifying to the player(s) with the smarter strategy most of the time being to run. This is VERY different than most Lovecraft themed games that just use sanity and health markers while swapping greater old ones for dragons in an otherwise standard dungeon crawler.

3252

I am very impressed with the player boards that came with the kickstarter. But have you seen the cards? They have a decent number of misspellings, including some that were called out during the kickstarter. I don’t understand how this is so hard to get right even after the game’s success.

3253

I demoed this game at PAX Unplugged this weekend and I am surprised to see this opinion from you here. My friend and I both thought this was a textbook example of bad game design. There are so many systems going on, so much obtuse iconography, tedious gameplay, and ultimately it all felt very shallow. We had a good laugh afterwards at the chain of feel-bad moments for both players that unfolded.

The scenario started off with my friend trying to infiltrate my defenses to destroy an objective point. My forces were strongly planted in high elevation defensive points while his crew were sitting wide open with little cover to hide behind. After a few turns of him taking heavy damage, he makes a run for the front of the building in front of him. Turns out there was no door (extremely hard to see the doors visually on the map). He goes invisible, jumps on top of the building, and runs directly towards the objective. I can’t hit him this turn even though he is standing in the middle of my entire squad. Next turn he unloads on the objective and gets 1hp away from destroying it. On my turn I then focus all the attack power I can from turrets and generic soldiers onto this character and fail to take it down because of how many hits it requires to kill. So he blows up the objective and celebrates his victory. And then finds out he actually lost the game because I had a couple more points than him.

It seemed like something I would like, but it felt so poorly implemented. Ultimately I think even if it was a tight design that pulled off what it was trying to do I don’t know why I would ever want to play this when I could just play XCOM without all the fidliness of physical components.

3254

@tomchick Tom, I spotted an old post you made on the City of Kings forum over on BGG and was wondering what your thoughts are regarding that game?

I think I’m looking for something more puzzly than the typical fantasy fare, and it seems like something I’d dig. Did you like it? I’d be getting it to play solo exclusively.

Dungeon Alliance and Champions of Hara are the other two I’m currently eying, but I already know you like those :)

3255

Pax haul:
Silver
Silver bullet 2
Both front lines no komrades expansions
Tiny Tina party
Parks (signed)
Animal kingdoms (signed)
Castle Dice and expansion
Runestones and expansion
Space base command station box
Taverns of Tiefenfal
Gloomhaven solo missions printout and metal coins
Reavers of Midgard mat
Raiders of the north kingdom mat
Pax scarf
Board game tables bags
Keyforge decks
1 painted mini
1 beholder 3D peintnhidden prize
Pins for gloomhaven
Wet pallet tray and replacements
Promos for champions of Midgard, bargain quest and others

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3256

I played Choas in the Old World for the first time in years this weekend. We called a loss to the board as Khorne failed to hit the dial victory and the rest of us failed to hit the VP before the event deck was running out.

That got me thinking about Glorantha Gods War again. Well, thank you to @tomchick I’ve got that arriving this week. My fellow Chaos in the Old World were pretty adamant that you really want the full four players in Chaos (or go on to five with with the expansion). Does any one have experience with Gods War at three? does it scale well?

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Huh, I never came close to seeing a board loss in CitOW in years of playing.

3258

We’ve had a few - really, when we’ve played regularly and everyone is doing their job keeping each other down around the table. Such a great game.

3259

It was the first game in years, for me. Two of the players played it quite a bit and we’re keen to begin that player checking right away. We definitely made quite a few strategic blunders, for instance we only ruined one area. Just one. I hadn’t remembered seeing that be that low either. One of the players was super terrified of giving Khorne battle opportunities to get double dial advancements and consequently did not spread cultist too far at all.

3260

We’ve mostly played with three (although not that much, in general) and it seemed to scale ok. An 8 player game would be craaaazy, but I’d like to try someday.

3261

Is this any good? Seems to be out on iOS.

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I’ve played a LOT of games of CitOW.

What we actually discovered is that:

-First game or two, new players will hand Khorne a dial victory.
-After they get wise to it, it is very hard for Khorne to win a dial victory.
-Khorne is actually better suited to a VP victory.

You start Khorne off in Estalia and Bretonia to start getting domination VP. Battle just enough for the first upgrade. Then, instead of going right for the cultist upgrade, you actually get the Bloodthirster upgrade (counts as 4 for domination) and get even more domination VP. Plunk down combat dudes, not spread out for max dial, but in spots where your domination majority is threatened. We found this is the much more effective route to a Khorne victory once the table catches on to denying him dials.

3263

I think it’s flat-out terrible. I started to make a video about why it’s bad, but then segued into the Dungeon Degenerates campaign that’s coming up on 20 hours now. Urk.

But I don’t recommend City of Kings to anyone. Puzzley in all the worst ways, terrible interface, a real personality problem, no sense of progression or heroic deeds, and a number of rookie boardgame designer mistakes. It is half-way decent as a tile-flipping exploration game, but that part is buried under so much detritus. If you want to explore and flip tiles to assemble a map, play Maximum Apocalypse or Gloom of Kilforth or something.

That said, anyone who wants a copy of City of Kings with all the expansions, let me know. Mine is in great shape and I’ll sell it for half of whatever is the lowest price on BGG.

-Tom