Is Firefly really the best of the bunch when it comes to pick-up-and-deliver games set in space? I like it quite a bit, but it’s the only one I’ve played. I feel it’s overlong and lacking in interesting aesthetics.
Various people speak positively about Xia: Legends of a Drift System and Merchant of Venus. Although Star Wars: Outer Rim would be the first one I’d try today.
Yeah, Tom mentioned Xia on the podcast. But didn’t mention (until he posted later) that it is unavailable and costs $300 on the secondary market.
PS Merchant of Venus was a great game at one time, which doesn’t so much make it a great game right now.
And if I’m going to triple-post, I might as well say that while I absolutely endorse spending $300 on a boardgame, I’d much rather spend it on these:
In some prisons they are banned because they “promote fantasies of escape.” Not kidding.
It is a long game, and all the more so as you add players and sideboards. But “lacking in interesting aesthetics”? I don’t even know the TV show, and I’m keenly interested in its aesthetics. I can only imagine how interesting a Firefly fan would be in the aesthetics.
Oof. Hey, if you really want to try it, I know a guy who would be willing to sell his slightly used copy.
Hey, Geryk tricked me into clicking on some site with boring historical hexy wargames about the East Front and whatnot!
-Tom
WHY YOU DIDN’T TELL DA PEOPLE HERE?? WHY?? There are only two Ameritrash games I want to own–Duel of Ages 2 Master Set and Cave Evil. I have the former but CE proves even harder to hunt it down unless I have $300 to spare, which @Brooski will tell you it’s better to spend on the acquisition of Big Board Games LLC instead.
Even worse, you’re gonna write about it and make me feel super jealous! Urgh.
Apparently the publisher is working on getting it reprinted, but they’ve given no time frame that I could see.
Didn’t the FFG re-release update it but also include the original game? So you subscribe to the Tom Chick theory that all games before a certain date are bad, or that certain games obsolete previous games?
The cards are good. But the game board is very large and mostly just stars. The player boards could be charitably described as drab. And why are all the goods and passengers just generic? It would have been so much cooler if they represented something less abstract.
I guess you really hated this thing, I should listen to the podcast…
Played Root last night. It looked way too complicated to start but then we hit a groove and it was fantastic. I won by one point with Vagabond, which was fun to play, doing hit and runs, disappearing into the forests, and generally acting as a foil to everyone while doing quests and plundering ruins. Would play again!
We also played a few games of Fireball Island, an old 80s game that’s been redone a bit and can be played in 20 minutes or so. Fun little game.
I’m busy trying to learn to rules of Root to play tomorrow with @Lykurgos and others and feel like my brain is going to go boom.
I still have no clear picture of how it all meshes together and forget how most of the actions like crafting work a minute after learning them. This is going to be a tough one, I think.
I’ve been watching these videos to learn (they have the updated 3rd reprint rules):
It’s one that really has to be learned through play, I think. I didn’t understand what was happening just from reading the rules either, but once we started playing it got so much clearer.
Yep, best to just start to play, that’s how we did it. Each faction plays completely differently so if you try and learn the rules for all factions you’ll probably confuse yourself. Best just to jump in after setup.
Our bird guy’s government fell apart like 4 turns in a row at the beginning of the game and he almost won, so don’t worry about it. Just concentrate on what gives you VP.
Oops, I’m just now seeing that I was tagged here.
Pretty much the same. It’s a grand glorious mess. At this point, I’ve still spent more time organizing it than actually playing it. But by golly, I’ve organized the hell out it! When I finally knuckle down to progress beyond the base game, it’s going to go sooooo smoothly.
-Tom
That was Foxbat and Phantom for me.
I was so into the damn game. I so very wanted to play it with friends. I left the instructions, heavily underlined, with a friend.
It never happened. And I never got my manual back.
I got my Kickstarter copy of Villagers, but I’ve only given it a mock two-player playthrough by myself to understand how it plays. Impression is good, but have to get it to the table with a real group! I’ll let you guys know once I have.
Also, I saw a little bit about how Ship Shape works, and it looks great, too. Eager to get my hands on that.
OH. EM. EFF. GEE.
@RichVR played Foxbat & Phantom. What’s next? @ChristienMurawski played Drang Nach Osten?
Sure, you never played it, but that was the case with 90% of gamers back then. We wanted to play stuff, but with whom? When my junior high school friends moved on, I was stuck playing games by postal mail.
My spoiler for this post is that Foxbat & Phantom is not good. It had some good ideas, but game design and development was not far enough along at that time to solve the serious problems posed by jet 3D aerial combat on a hexgrid. I don’t think we understood that as 12-year-olds. We thought that Jim Dunnigan was a genius. But the game didn’t and doesn’t work, at least to do what it set out so do, which is to model 1970s jet fighter combat with 20 pages of rules, which were really ten pages because of the fold-out rulebook. Nice try, though.
That game came out in 1973. I think we didn’t play it until around 1979. Five or six years later, I was playing MS Flight Simulator on a PC in college. @scharmers can take over from there.
I know we don’t have any of them here, but only true nerds need to watch this:
Wait. What? How did I get thrown under the Panzer?
-xtien
You might be surprised, sir. :) I had both Squad Leader and Cross of Iron. I would set up a game on my bedroom floor and play one side each day. Solo. My mother hated it. How could she clean with that mess on the floor?
And remember, tanks with separate turret counters.
Neither, I think, was SPI’s Air War. That game was literally an early flight simulator in cardboard format.
Flight Leader, I think did the best job, but when it comes down to it, you really can’t break down the dynamic and frenetic nature of air combat using cardboard that easily.