My views on Feast for Odin with Norwegians is pretty much the same: a solid upgrade to the base game, improved balance, better options.
One specific thing @Don_Quixote didn’t mention is that the Norwegians improves what I consider the weakest point of the original Feast (and a common weakness of Uwe games more generally): the IMO overly random card play. In Norwegians, there are improved options for playing cards, and any time you could play a card, you can also discard that card for a chit which yields points (more points for the first few chits, less for later, first come, first served) which means that if you don’t get the right card synergy you can still get a decent amount of points from your cards, even if the cards themselves don’t actually help you much.
Now that I’ve tried Norwegians, I feel it’s an essential expansion.
After the shotgun specialty Marshal could no longer clutch a shotgun in his rather unluckily mutated tentacle arm, the melee focused Indian Scout who could hold an enhanced Trusty Axe in his mutated tail had his combat stat crushed by an arm wound, and the Lawman lost his leg to the horrors of the Void, my party was lost in the Boneyard of the Swamps of Death last night.
After failed surgery attempts, they were trying to find the oft whispered about healing springs deep in Jargono so that perhaps the Marshal once again would be able to wield his shotgun. Unfortunately, they were reatedly assailed by poison arrow fire from the trees (the number of times I rolled HBtD doubles to get that particular depth event was ridiculous) until the posse was finally corralled into an arena. As if the heavy club wielding Serpentmen of the Blue Moccasin tribe were not enough, the heroes also stumbled upon a horrifying Harbringer picking apart giant carcasses in the Boneyard. Alas the heroes put up a valiant fight, but the Harbringer shrugged off all critical wounds as he summoned enhanced flying beasts to his side in between devastating tail swipes. The crushed arm of the Scout sealed their fate. Even dabbling in the dark arts, as the Lawman forsake everything earthly, a desperate passage from the Book of Tarn was spoken in hopes of respite. It was not enough to heal wounds and failing minds, but it was enough to welcome enough corruption to mutate the Lawman’s leg into a writhing mess. One by one they fell. The swamps were indeed the Swamps of Death.
I’m really enjoying Shadows of Brimstone. I have (had) two parties running. The other is going strong, but this one had bad event after bad event across several sessions. This party was very Lovecraftian as something beyond their knowing or control seemed to enjoy torturing them. For me it was both funny and frustrating as everything went either wrong or horribly wrong for them. It was a merciful death as I finally accepted the Elder dice Gods and their demand for sacrifice.
Brimstone is not the best crawler. It definitely has dice both too random and, frankly, too controlled. But it sure does something unique. It tells stories like no other game. Some games do one or a few fairly controlled story/ stories well. However, Brimstone is like a blender of story bits waiting to be discovered. It is a pen and paper RPG with fully rule driven mechanics and a DM replaced by a sort of hard drive radio disc jockey spitting out a randomized playlist that just works. It is Choose Your Own Adventure and Encylopedia Britanica’s Lovecraftian love child. Flavor text should not be skipped, and imagination should be unleashed as caulking in between the story boarded frames of cards and dice rolls.
I fully intend to roll a new party this weekend. And I have @hepcat to thank for my adventures. I might have passed (or not achieved critical mass) on/in this crazy modular game without his aid. Also a nod to @tomchick as his podcast got me to bring the game back to the gaming (and gluing) table.
I can’t wait to see what happens to Jezebel the saloon girl (with her cherished personal item of shackles), her faithful yet slightly more insane by the adventure gunslinger companion William, and their sermon heavy guidepost “Padre” who now brings the light of the good book from one hand as the other hand wields the wrathful blaze of a laser sword relic found deep in the ice of an ancient frozen city only populated by guardian automatons thoughtlessly continuing the programming of their long dead masters. All of this from a board game. Good. Times.
Ah, I see. What did @TomChick not like about Lords of Hellas? I think it’s fantastic, for reasons explained in the review: a nice collection of interlocking systems, with mechanics that fit the theme, and four distinct victory conditions.
Hello – has anyone tried Getaway Driver published by Fowers Games/designed by Jeff Beck, the Hardback? I grabbed a bunch of micro machine police cars from the garage to replace the meeples, since the game comes with stickers it expects you to get on somehow (I am convinced the motorcycle meeple is impossible to properly sticker.)
It is too luck-based for me to take it seriously, but it creates a lot of fun moments for 2 player filler style game and is perfect for people who normally won’t play boardgames with you. One thing I do kind of like is that the ‘random events’ are really dramatic permanent rule modifiers. Sometimes, they even change the entire objective of the game in the middle of it. They aren’t handicaps for one side or another as they were in Fugitive, although that was a nice system as a balancing mechanism.
I wish there was more for the driver to do, because it is a little more fun for the police to play. They get to set all the tiles and decide what to buy and where to place it. The driver mainly has to determine whether to go on a tile without peeking (like in Burgle Bros), and whether to use a stunt when confronted with a Hazard.
Not sure about Tom but for me…I played Lords of Hellas RIGHT after Rising Sun. Personally I felt Rising Sun was a similar game, but much tighter, similar depth, but played very slick and fast! My main issue with Lords of Hellas was it just felt weaker having played Rising Sun before, which I couldn’t wait to play again
Ah, I never bothered with Rising Sun because it’s three players and up, and I consider myself fortunate whenever I can rope one other person (usually my wife) into playing a game with me. So I focus on board/card games I can play solo or with at least two players.
Also, isn’t Rising Sun more similar to Diplomacy than Risk? Seems like two wildly different types of games to me, but, like I said, I have no experience with Rising Sun, except from stuff I’ve read and videos I’ve seen about it on BGG.
So I had 3 friends in town this past weekend for a ‘get the guys back together’ weekend and a lot of boardgaming. I wasn’t able to record the podcast this week, so here’s my information dump of what we played and enjoyed:
Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea: We didn’t complete this game but played 7-8 turns before some of the non-hardcore boardgamers started to fade. I think this game has a lot of potential but there are two barriers: First, the game is difficult to teach. I had the rules down pretty well and still had to look up a number of details as the game went on - things that could be solved with just a little more info on the player aids. Secondly, the way the turn order really messes people up. For half of the actions, other players can then copy the action on their own by sacrificing a serf. For the other, you can sacrifice your own serf for a bonus action. This leads to a lot of “who’s turn is it?” confusion especially when trying to explain the game to newbs. I’m going to try it again with a smaller player count (we had 5).
Evolution:Climate: The hit of the weekend. I had played Evolution on iOS and enjoyed it, so I decided to grab the Climate box at the store. Everyone loved this game and I loved the additional things the Climate expansion added (additional strategy of what food card to use, new abilities, etc). We played this 5 times over the course of 3 days and I can’t wait to play again. I’m also happy that I backed their new Oceans game as this design is just brilliant. I also ordered a promo pack that includes some other new cards.
Welcome To…: A strange neighborhood design game that lends itself to casual play while chit chatting. @tomchick should consider this as an alternative to Lovecraft Letter as his warm-up/end of night game. Try to place house numbers and fences in according with desired design patterns, maximize use of bonus points, and even has a cool app you can use instead of the pad of paper. Liked this game a lot.
Lovecraft Letter: It’s better than Love Letter.
Star Trek: Ascendancy: I hadn’t played this in about 2 years (last time 2 of these same friends were out). We played with the Ferengi and Borg add-ons. The Ferengi were a lot of fun to play (that was me) since I got to park ships everywhere and collect extra production. We used the Borg variant where they don’t start on the board, so we only had one real encounter with a Cube. We combined forces and got rid of it in a hurry before it could take over a planet and make more. This game is a fun alternative to Eclipse or Twilight Imperium with a lot of flavor. Play time is long though - our game took about 6 hours.
Quacks of Quedlinburg: This game is so so good. Every time I play it, I like it a little bit more. Sadly it’s a little hard to get at the moment while we are waiting for a reprint, but this game deserves all of the accolades it has accumulated.
