What are people’s recommendations for lockdown online boardgaming? People seem keen on tabletop simulator but I have a bad mental association for it for some reason.
Funny you should ask. We’ve been talking about that over here:
So there’s been a game shortage with the lockdown demand. Both video and board games (every single Switch was sold out within 400 miles a week ago, every major retailer’s online store, then every other online amazon source was at a $100+ markup).
But holy crap this here is ridiculous!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B013TK5DFO/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all
Jeebus, I was going to make a joke about how you should just get Rising Sun instead, but then I stumbled onto this:
Only one copy available for $150.
Fortunately, I’m sure lots of new print runs of boardgames are on their way from China about now…
-Tom
We’ve moved our weekly meetups to BGA and Discord. A few folks are experimenting with facetime setups but that seems too fiddly for me.
In comparison to those bonkers Blood Rage prices, that hot new card game The Crew is only 15 bucks on Amazon right now and apparently in stock!
My wife and I have been playing it two player. I had reservations about the two player mode because it uses a dummy player, but it’s really cleverly done and is working great for us. Still very much looking forward to playing it with a bigger group post-lockdown, whenever that will be.
The Crew is a co-operative trick taking game with a big ol’ pile of 50 missions that all feel quite different. For instance, we recently did a mission where every trump card had to win a separate trick. It’s got the standard modern party-game twist that you’re not allowed to talk to your partners once the game has started. It’s simple, very familiar if you grew up playing Hearts or Spades, and the first few missions are a great tutorial if you didn’t. My wife didn’t know how trick taking games worked when we started, and the first 10ish missions are a great tutorial over basic strategies. I’m enjoying it!
Bought Project Gaia on Amazon and I will go into the bunker with it and the rules book. I read it has a very good solo mode. I wanted to get Scythe but it is sold out here. The digital edition is on sale on Steam.
I want to buy the Scythe digital and use the AI for the physical game, copying the moves to the board (when I get the physical). Like a companion app for solo play. Anybody does something like that, too?
We finished Betrayal Legacy. All in all, I liked it, but not as much as SeaFall or Pandemic: Legacy. It manages to be a legacy version of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but I think people who don’t like that style of game will bounce off it. Although the ending was satisfying enough, it felt like a bit of a too slow burn to get to it. I felt less invested in the legacy elements than in other games since you don’t really get to make your mark as much - not enough stickers and naming stuff! I get why it is like that since the game spans 350 years, but I feel it weakened it for me, so YMMV.
All in all, I strongly recommend it for people who like the Betrayal-style games, and just give a normal-strength recommendation for people who want to play a legacy game and don’t have anything else in sight.
So you finished the Seafall campaign? So much negative buzz about that game. What did you enjoy about it? I see it for super-sale all the time but have been hesitant because of the reviews.
But why?
You definitely made the right call for solitaire gameplay. Scythe just does that dumb thing of flipping up cards to push a dummy player ahead, with no consideration for the actual economy, or rules, or strategic gameplay. Gaia Project is a little better about this, and it’s especially better for how it only support some of the faction for solitaire play, because it tries to leverage each faction’s unique abilities.
Isn’t part of the legacy gimmick that you now have a copy of Betrayal at the House on the Hill that can be played as a self-contained, albeit customized, game? That was one of the reasons I was interested in Betrayal Legacy.
Also, ha ha, you played Seafall. :)
-Tom
playing solo with 2-3 player AI … I would like to play it physical with a board. With an automata system you only get so far. Of course I could play it on the PC, but I want to feel the pieces, shift them from here to there etc.
It is not for everyone. I wrote this in the Qt3 Games of the Decade thread:
Seafall I can understand that this game is not for everyone, and there are some mechanical issues in it. I think my group is probably an outliner in that we had a truly extraordinary experience. The game changes when new rules are introduced, and there are some jaw-dropping moments throughout the campaign. The combination of filling out the sea with stickers and the Choose Your Own Adventure-elements of the Captain’s Log is something I long for another game that does as well. Not for everyone, but one of the best game experiences I have had in the last decade (if not my life).
That is true, but I suspect a lot of people coming into it are looking for their next Legacy-game fix. I don’t think we’ll play Betrayal Legacy as a standalone game, though. I have the 2e and expansion of the base game that hits the table occasionally.
Yup, and proud of it! I have no idea how many groups had as good a time as we did, but it was one of the best gaming experiences of my life. The game has issues, but I wish for more games that have the ambition to create as good a journey and sense of exploration and world-building as it did.
We tried out The Crew with 4 people and also really enjoyed it. It’s much harder than it appears after the first few missions. Imagine playing Hearts but you have to make sure specific people win specific rounds. Players draft goal cards that are mini versions of the real cards. If I grab a blue 4 goal card, I must win the trick containing the blue 4. If this gets messed up for any reason, the mission is failed. You get to communicate one card the entire mission, and based on where you place a marker on the card you are telling everyone else it is your highest/lowest/only of that color.
Really clever and I’m looking forward to playing more. Lots of variety in the missions.
My brother and I got together on his birthday to play games all day, as well as eat donuts for breakfast and carry out from our favorite local fast food restaurant for lunch. Such a fun and meaningful day. I wish I had photos to share. The games:
Pipeline, an oil refining worker placement with an emphasis on blocking, plus a tableau puzzle of colored pipes. Feels like more open-ended, complex Power Grid with its replenishing crude oil market and challenge to build a profitable operation you also have the cash to run. It’s less structured, though. Subsequent plays have an Agricola feel as you distill down to the realistic strategies and counterplay available, which lets you play games quickly thus play more games.
Fuji Flush. We included my young nephew on this one. It’s a quick highest-number shedding card game. The flush is that other players can beat the current highest number with matching lower numbers, e.g. two 6s = 12 which beats one 10. Very light and expands to 10 or so players.
Spirit Island. Plenty has been said about this coop anti-Catan game here and on the podcast. I’m still using the starting spirits to teach new players, but drawing one of the blight cards instead of the default printed on the board. It works for tutorials because you teach the game with the easy side of the blight card, and when it flips to the hard side, you’re enough into the game that they can handle a new rule. This is a game I’m going to be playing hundreds of times if I can find the players, so it was a pleasure to teach it to a new player and I’m glad it was well received.
On Mars, a lovely, absolute unit of a worker placement/engine game from Lacerda. We play lots of Kanban so we thought we were okay just reading the rules in advance; we weren’t quite. Getting the rhythm of the worker management was challenging as the game rewards your player for efficiently traveling between the Mars colony and the orbiter and you can only place workers in one at a time, and the work in both locations interacts. We liked the scarce resource system. The colony map, in addition to being a building area, is where you drive cute little robots around to pick up resources, which was some lovely childhood game nostalgia. Lacerda said you can win just by driving your robots around, so I’ll try that next time.
Jealous.
Twilight Imperium 4 just posted new variants (under “player resources”) to 2 technology cards and the Diplomacy card. All 3 were the worst picks in the game and received badly needed buffs.
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/twilight-imperium-fourth-edition/#/support-section
Just completed the recommended introductory setup of Street Masters, standing victorious after probably around 3 hours (including setup, with three fighters and a lot of rules double-checking). It’s a pretty neat game, with a similar general design to my longtime favorite Sentinels of the Multiverse, but a few more wrinkles (at the cost of smaller decks, admittedly).
Like Sentinels, you’re taking a team (in this case 1-4, in Sentinels 3-5) of heroic characters against a villainous threat (in this case, generally an organization rather than a single character, although there’s still a boss whose defeat means victory), in a given environment (or stage, in this case), and all of these things have custom, prebuilt decks representing that character, group or place/scenario. Where Sentinels is trying to replicate comic books, Street Masters is themed after beat-em-up videogames like Double Dragon, with heavy character design influence from versus fighting games like Street Fighter. Unlike Sentinels, though, Street Masters has a positional element, minis, dice, and an interlinked system of defenses and charging up power, as well as some more ancillary things like a randomized deck of consumable Loot cards, a Story Mode where you can do little campaigns with specific setups and upgrades or penalties based on your success or failure previously, and allied/rival characters to add a little extra help or challenge.
I mostly would rather not have the minis - there’s hundreds in the total game to date and they’re a pain to deal with. And while they’re fine in terms of sculpts, they’re small enough and dark enough that they’re not that easy to distinguish without painting, which I am sure as shit not going to do. I do think moving around a stage and having to worry about which enemies you’re directly in melee with, distinguish ranged attacks and contend with area of effect moves adds a fair bit, though. I was a bit dubious about using dice to attack, but interestingly, there’s no “miss” result, really. Your absolute worst outcome is instead of getting the damage you need, you get damage-blocking defense tokens that, when you do in fact block that damage, power you up in the bargain. Which really reduces the potential for that randomness to feel bad.
There’s two other big differences that I think are worth noting. One is how enemy action is handled. In Sentinels, most enemy-related stuff happens in the dedicated enemy phase. Street Masters has a Threat Phase before each hero’s turn, and a Reaction Phase just after, as well as an Enemy Phase. This means enemy cards are drawn on hero turns during the Threat phase and, if they’re a minion, will be acting during that hero’s Reaction phase from then on, which reduces the amount of simultaneous tracking needed. (importantly, they don’t necessarily target the hero that drew them. Just do their thing on that turn.) Only the boss and any boss-related cards activate on the enemy turn, which for The Brotherhood (an arms smuggling gang led by RPG-toting Dmitri), who I faced in my intro game, tended to be maybe two or three cards.
The other is the stages themselves. Gonna be honest, I always felt like the environment deck was the weakest part of Sentinels. They certainly have unique identities and conveyed a certain degree of theme, but I never really felt like they did much more than throw random spanners into random works. Stage decks in Street Masters aren’t necessarily a lot more complicated, but every single one of them comes with a Stage Setup card that makes sure there’s the basic structure of some sort of scenario going right from the beginning - special rules, objective cards, etc. Some of the stage maps also have special spaces unique to that stage. The recommended starting stage for learning was called Going Ballistic, and well, it’s an arms smuggling warehouse. So, the objectives are boxes of weapons that the boss goes to try and pick up, and which enhance damage from attacks for whoever carries them, heroes or boss. But getting hit means you have to leave yourself a little more open trying to keep hold of it (dump a defense token), or drop it. Stage cards included things like stray grenades you had to toss away from you that turn (for an AoE burst of damage to a space near you and at the cost of your Action step that turn) or have it blow up in your face; a weapons jam that penalized anyone carrying objectives, and bonus equipment for minions like a ballistic vest to give them more health and defense or a pistol to do a small ranged attack every activation. Pretty straightforward, but I felt like it was a more cohesive and focused change to gameplay than any environment I’ve played with.
Oh, and two of the three fighters I used were pretty cool, too. Kyoryu has some sort of innate storm magic and can gain power much more directly than many fighters as well as spending it for effects other than charging up his special. He also had a number of potent ranged and multiple target effects, including a weak but long ranged zap he could do basically every turn without an action or card spent, an attack where he sucks in an enemy from range and then attacks every enemy adjacent to him, and a flying lightning kick he can feed power into to do automatic damage. Oh, and that special, which is a strong attack against three ranged opponents. Brandon (who’s clearly meant to be Bruce Lee)'s cards pretty much all have secondary Combo effects that he can trigger in various ways, including his special letting him do his entire hand worth of combos at once, and he’s got some fun position manipulation, damage cancelling, and potential support. My third character was Chinese policewoman Ying Hua, who seems to specialize in powering up based on enemy deck manipulation and defeated minions in the enemy discard? Plus some handy support effects. It’s not that she was bad, exactly - and when she had an objective crate and did a couple of kick attack cards that chained three separate attacks she did some crazy damage to the boss. But she definitely seemed to be harder to get full use out of and I didn’t feel like I managed all that well. Ah well.
Anyway, TLDR: If you like Sentinels and want more in that vein, but a bit heavier and significantly more expensive? So far this one’s a winner for me. (I’d still buy Sentinels first, if you haven’t. A base set’s like $40. It’s a no brainer.)
Thank you for posting. That is a huge fix to diplomacy. The techs are at least usable now.
I won’t know until the next game, but I think I like those TI changes. Magen is really smooth now. At least for our table, Diplomacy could actually make our games more small-scale aggressive since it’ll be easier to poke and interfere with retaliation while getting a reliable the economic bonus.