shoots terrorist through table
Hitler’s Reich is awful. Just terrible. So much wrong with it.
I’ve lost track of where the Unstable Unicorn chit-chat was but…
I now have three full expansions for my game, two new additions
Love it. It’s fun and silly and naughty and never stops giving chuckles and of course moments of delight when you slam that oh so inappropriate neigh on someone.
These are some bad ass holy reset the game kind of cards in here (no this is a good thing), apparently it’s two kickstarter packs in one but the Pugicorn. Oh my god, a pugicorn!
Anyways after NSFW this is my favorite and then the dragon expansion.
There is definitely a coolness factor with this pack. It just doesn’t stimulate the oh my gosh a pugicorn moment we had when that card first came out.
As for as price goes. They retail for 15, and due to sales I paid 7.50 to 11 because… yeah I don’t often pay retail for anything.
???
There is so much to say. I wanted to write a review but have not had the time or really the patience to enumerate the faults. It’s basically a half-baked idea that absolutely doesn’t work in practice. The rulebook is a hilarious mess for how badly it manages to explain what is ultimately a simple game. Example: a game based on card play does not say when you should draw new cards. ??? The mechanics are a nice idea that would have been an obvious failure to anyone who tried to play the game for more than ten minutes in how clumsy and repetitive they are. There is a huge disconnect between the amount of junk you need to do to play a turn and how much that turn actually translates into any visible action. The attention landscape is horribly allocated and arranged.
I guess I should just formally review this thing. Maybe when I have a couple days off.
Seems pretty clear to me. If the rules don’t tell you to do it, you don’t do it. It’s that simple. So you’re obviously supposed to play the entirety of Hitler’s Reich with your opening hand. Duh.
-Tom
It simulates both the Nazi regime’s dwindling options as time goes by and the simultaneous sense, symbolized by the full deck from which you do not draw, that they might have been able to accomplish something if they hadn’t been constrained by their leader, much as the player could have done something like build a birdhouse with their time or simply have chosen to play a different game.
I wish I had thought of this!
Still a terrible game.
I got to play 7 Wonders with the new Armada expansion tonight, and I like what it brings to the table! I pursued the new islands (the green ship track) and managed to do some interesting things, and to score in the middle of the pack. I’m a little disappointed that based on this play, the expansion makes the science route at least as powerful as it used to be, which means unless you go out of your way to screw them, a science collector will probably still win the game. I thought Cities (which we didn’t play with) did a tiny bit to address this, but I still wish they were doing more in the expansions to tamp green down a bit.
I also played Settlers of Catan (vanilla) for the first time in more than a decade. And I don’t care if I get ridiculed: It’s not a game I am ever jumping to play. But it’s a very, very good game and still holds up against many contemporary games. Really demonstrates how smartly constructed game dynamics trump loads of features and components and scoring tracks and even theming. Catan has meaningful board positioning without armies, rich social dynamics without tons of screwage, and satisfying progression without a million fiddly elements.
Oh well.
I wanted to find a replacement for Quartermaster General. I liked what QMG was trying to do, but it boiled down to too much luck, and one-trick luck at that. Either the Germans got their 2 essential status cards out in time (whatever ones let you build+battle in the same action) and won, or they didn’t and lost.
And that was playing with both expansions that “fix” the game. Those expansions made the strange change that it was the Allies who started out in a dominate position and the Axis who had to buy their time to gear up.
He’s done a couple of iterations since then. World War I, the Peloponnesian War, a Cold War on the way. I haven’t tried any of them, but I’m like you in that I feel Quartermaster General has kind of been “solved” for our group. Or at least exhausted.
I just got this Martin Wallace oldie, and it reminds me a bit of Quartermaster General:
-Tom
This whole paragraph is like a UFO conspiracy theory to me. I read it and think, “What unhinged madman came up with this stuff?”
Seriously, though, that is kind of cool to hear. I can’t imagine there will ever be a time I’d not rather play something else, but it’s cool that Catan still works for some people and groups. It’s not hugely successful for no reason. Just don’t go singing the praises of Monopoly anytime soon.
-Tom
So after 6 plays of Arkham Horror 3rd edition, I’m still not totally sure about it.
We enjoyed ourselves, but I’m not sure if the scenarios will hold up. It’s not quite as linear as the card game, but definitely way less open than Eldritch. It feels like Eldritch Horror if you did the same 3-4 mysteries for every ancient one…which was the case with the base game, but imagine if they were always in the same order. I feel like both games should go with the same model that Eldritch uses for the “Adventure” cards: divide the cards into three “acts” of escalating scale but then have multiple cards of each act that you randomly pick from. You retain the unpredictable variety but retain the narrative escalation.
It also felt a tad too constrained. You only get 2 actions per turn, and 90% of the time one of them is going to be moving. If you have to deal with even a single monster, that’s your entire turn right there, and another after that if you don’t kill him in one shot (very rarely can an investigator one shot a 4 health monster). There’s an item that gives you 3 actions per turn, and that feels juuuuuust right when you get it. I’m curious about a how a variant would work out if it gave you 3 actions per turn, then made you draw 3 mythos tokens instead of 2 to compensate.
The investigators feel a little lopsided. The cop or gangster are almost mandatory for the harder scenarios. The mechanic is just a weaker version of the cop. Dexter Drake stinks (he has to gear up in a game where there’s no time to gear up, and spells are back to AH2 levels where they’re not worth the risk or cost compared to items (not to mention the spell deck is painfully thin right now)).
I dunno. Pick it up if you’re curious and don’t mind that the most you might get out of it is 6-10 plays before you shelve it to wait for an expansion?
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I spent the last dozen years avoiding Catan in favor of other games. I happened to walk into a New Years board game party and that was the game starting up, so I joined in.
I know the Monopoly dig may just be a joke, but if you think Catan and Monopoly have really anything in common, or are on the same spectrum, you have forgotten what Catan is like.
I definitely value elegance over a lot of other qualities, so that’s a thing that I can appreciate in Catan vs. a lot of the more overwrought games today.
I’ll always stand by the statement that Monopoly is not a good game, but is still a better game than Catan.
Both are trade negotiation games with bargaining power being up to the roll of the dice.
Monopoly wins out though for having hard elimination to put you out of your misery, whereas Catan forces you to play to the bitter end long after you’ve been soft eliminated. Monopoly also starts everyone out on equal footing, whereas in Catan you can be soft eliminated right from the setup.
The best strategy in Catan is to always give away all your stuff to the leader, so that the game ends faster and you can play something else that isn’t Werewolf, Cards Against Humanity, Betrayal at House on the Hill, or Exploding Kittens.
Cute. I don’t know if you’re actually interested in engaging in an argument about the merits of Catan and Monopoly, but I would be happy to make the case for Catan. To wit:
It’s easy to say “Both games are luck-based.” But how precisely the luck factors in matters, as does how you can respond to bad luck. Catan’s trading mechanism is a pretty solid way to work around temporary dearths of a resource.
Catan is also way shorter than any game of Monopoly I’ve played (admittedly, it’s been a very long time), even with early elimination–which, while we’re on the subject, is pretty much always a garbage mechanic except for extremely short games, because of the social burdens it usually causes outside the game.
Oh no, not at all. Catan is actually fine for what it is. Monopoly, on the other hand, isn’t even that. I just think of them both as games obsoleted by changes in design philosophy. As for Monopoly, I think roll-and-move should be burned with fire, with maybe one or two exceptions.
Ah, well there we go! I guess my feeling is that elegance is overrated? I mean, yeah, I like elegance as much as the next guy. But if it’s gotta go to make room for narrative or some unique design tweak or even just ambition, then by all means chuck it out the window. I probably won’t even miss it. For instance, behold the sprawl of what’s currently on my solitaire gaming table:
Such a sprawl but, for me, such a delight!
-Tom
They sold a three ring binder with 3x3 card pages as an addon during the KS and I would highly recommend something like that for saint management. That way you can just take out each saint’s halo and lay it on the table without worrying you’ll knock stuff around.
I was introduced to the wonderful world of 18XX when I spent last semester in Canada, and now that I am back home I am planning to throw various 18XX-games at my friends to see if they stick. I’ve decided to start with 18AL, and have started checking around if it is feasible to have it printed on cardstock.
If you want a higher-quality production, I highly recommend 1846 from GMT as well. Its relatively simple as far as 18XX goes, and should be faster than most (though your first couple games might still be quite long). My only complaint about it is that the capitalization is a bit different than the other 18XX games I’ve played, though it is actually a bit more forgiving.