Somebody on bgg is selling a new in shrink copy of Warcults for 75 bucks with just $10 shipping, which is less total than I paid:
We played our first game of HEXplore It: The Forests of Adrimon. It sure would have helped if I had had more time to actually read the rules properly beforehand. I am a bit intrigued and there’s a lot of things I liked. Replacing a lot of tokens and cards with dry-erase markers works well for the most part, but the game really suffers from a lack of player aides. A huge QOL-improvement would have been a mat with all the items for all the players, preferably with boxes to mark how many you have. Having the conditions listed on the back of the Battle Mat is also very annoying. Amazingly there’s no player aid with the different keywords either.
All in all the game felt very uneven, but I suspect a lot of that is us not being very familiar. I am cautiously optimistic that the game will improve with some more plays. I’m probably sounding more negative than I am, but my first impression is that the game does a lot of things right, but some of these things unfortunately pulls in different directions. Really looking forward to the next time we get it to the table!
Heh, this made a big splash with my usual boardgame group. The usual host went ahead and bought the full set of both games and expansions, since I’m often not free enough to make it out to the gatherings. They had an epic 5-hour slog through the other night. I was quite envious :)
The manuals for both base games are available as PDFs on the dev’s website. Next time around I’m probably just gonna print out the pages with conditions, items, and roll results.
Or photocopy the big game rule placards at work. But that involves bringing a boardgame to work. Which is. . . nah.
The kickstarter for Season 3 of Dice Throne launched today. I’m tempted to get the Season 3 + remastered Season 1 bundle.
I’m hoping we’ll be playing Hexplore It tonight. Got to test out Valley of the Dead King with one of my usual gaming friends last Thursday, but we got a late start and he still had to get me home (I own the game but we were playing at his new digs out in the suburbs), so we basically did a few quests, fended off an invasion of grizzly bears, and called it for the night. We both loved it, though. And my friend said he couldn’t wait to introduce the rest of our group to it, so fingers crossed that a) gaming happens tonight and b) everyone’s up for it. (And we get an earlier start…)
Dooooo it.
I’m a huge fan of what they’ve done so far so it was a no brainer for me.
Yeah, it’s pretty great. I have a couple of the Season 2 battle boxes. The only reason I am really hesitating is my daughter is the only one that is willing to play it with me so I don’t know if I want to drop that much cash into something I won’t get to play all that often probably. I’m trying to get my son and wife to get into it but no luck yet.
Do they like coop fantasy adventuring? 'cause if so it seems like you have a hook ready and waiting.
Flight Leader is this pilot’s favorite board air game.
I own Hansa. I own Die Hanse. Now I need to buy Hansa Teutonica? Ack!
Here is an incomplete gaming menu I have offered my friends:
Angola (Dicken/Kendall)
Brass: Birmingham (Wallace)
Modern Art (Knizia)
Andean Abyss (Ruhnke)
AuZtralia (Wallace)
Glorantha The Gods at War (Petersen)
A Study of Emeralds (Wallace)
Firefly (Whedon)
El Grande (Kramer/Ulrich)
Time of Crisis (Ferrell/Johnson)
Concordia (Gerdts)
Champions of Midgard (Steiness)
Blood Rage (Fritz Lang)
Tigris und Euphrat (Knizia)
I was also going to pick up either Terra Mystica or Gaia Project. I played the latter with @tomchick and was hoping the former might have a more robust “theme.”
They’re roughly equally thematic. That is, they’re essentially complex abstracts with some interesting artwork.
Eric would like a word
Also, have you considered Inis to fill this slot? (area control+card drafting)
Ohhhh, I know that game! A buddy of mine brought it out to an RPG night one night when we needed a game to play to kill time. I can’t recall the name, but I enjoyed it :)
That is Eric Lang, designer of Blood Rage, Rising Sun, X-COM: The Boardgame, and many others playing Cosmic Encounter (not his design.)
Yes, that’s the one! I can’t say I’ve played any of Mr. Lang’s work, but I can appreciate his appreciation of Cosmic Encounter, at least :)
Yeah, I’ll be printing out reference sheets before we play again. However, for a game with this level of production it felt very skimpy on stuff like that. I find it baffling that there’s not a refernce sheet for the keywords. We also discovered that there is no description for Energy Drain in the rules, and my friend googled it and apparently they forgot to put it in.
Really looking forward to playing it again, though.
Since Tom doesn’t seem to market his boardgame videos very much, here’s a link to Tom’s Most Recent Boardgame Video:
I chalk it up to inexperience. As a company they’ve produced: Valley of the Dead King + expansion in one run, and Forests of Adrimon + expansion + VotDK reprint in a second. That’s it. So, is it a frustrating omission, sure. But compared to other creators of their level of experience I think they’re doing pretty well. And honestly better than some longstanding operations, even if that’s more of a knock against the latter than an accolade for the former.
Versus film maker Fritz
Indeed. But since this was their second game, I would expect they had gotten some feedback on this from the first game. It is no big deal, though, and a lot of games from experienced companies are also not that good at reference sheets.
I wonder if the Headless Hollow-site is still active and making reference sheets for games. Too the google-machine!