Who likes new games?
Is the Sherlock Holmes game new content or a reprint kind of thing?
It’s a new expansion, at least for this version. I don’t know if it’s a reprint of one of the old expansions from the original French version back in the day but I don’t own that, and I bet neither do you.
Ooh, exciting.
I’m pretty sure it’s brand new. I think I read a post on BGG that the designer has been working on it for the last 10 years or something. I’ll probably pick it up for my gal and I to play, as the rest of the SH:CD stuff is impossible to get.
I think I did once or twice a few years ago. However, it’s too far back for me to remember much about it, I’m afraid. I can’t quite say whether the mix of dealing with the other players and the villains added to the pressure or simply lengthened the game and was annoying…
Solo / Co-op is where it’s at for me at the moment.
So say we all, about everything.
So I have to know. Is Jaws of the Lion worth it for someone who was utterly fed up with the set-up/tear-down/fiddly gameplay-ness of Gloomhaven proper?
I have only played Jaws, not the original. But certified Tom Chick fanboy Dan Thurot says:
Setup is definitely faster. There’s no digging for the right tiles, or for furniture overlays. The books just gets opened and aligned with the secondary book, and it tells you how many tokens you need, such as treasure chests, coins, and traps. Gameplay is pretty much exactly the same as Gloomhaven, except it comes with little tokens for laying out initiative order.
On a larger scale, there’s no big mechanics like unlocks, enhancements, retirement, or prosperity to deal with. The box comes with sections to organize what items are available, used event cards, and enough bags for all the monster standees.
I’m in the extremely small minority of people who haven’t been blown away by the scenario book in JotL. It’s fine, and it does save you from arranging the tiles but that’s only a couple of minutes. I’ve got a cheap plano that holds all of the obstacles so finding them and putting them on the map takes no time at all. Unless you are the real life equivalent of the classic Infomercial Before Guy you’re not saving much time. The custom art for each mission is nice, though, and to me that’s the only selling point of it.
One thing I like about regular GH scenarios is using the official Gloomhaven Scenario Viewer during setup. The app shows you the tile layout of the dungeon but only shows you the contents of the room you start in, with fog covering the other rooms and their accompanying text. As you open a door you click on the room and the app shows you what’s inside that room. I really dislike setting up an entire map ahead of time and being able to see where every treasure chest and enemy before we even start.
Did anyone back the Kickstarter for Smirk and Dagger’s The Night Cage? I generally really like most everything the company puts out (though I fully admit to never having played Cutthroat Caverns, the game that really made it for them). The Night Cage is very thematic and has a macabre, unsettling design that I really like (even though I tend to avoid scary things).
I should be able to access the game on Tabletop Simulator soon, and I’m excited about that - but what I really can’t wait for is the chance to play this game in person, with the lights out, the spooky music on, and nothing but a few flickering candles to set the mood.
Want to talk about old games? I went on a small campout with friends for my birthday over the weekend. One of my go-to games for car camping is the old Lost Worlds fighting gamebooks, kind of a first-person-perspective melee battle system. The same designer did the Ace of Aces cockpit dogfighting books, and another series called Bounty Hunter, basically a turn-based FPS western shootout (a decade before FPS as a concept existed). But I digress.
So when I go camping, I bring my stack of original LW books- I had some when I was a kid in the '80s, and found a huge stack of them being sold as a bundle at Half Price Books a decade back at a discount. It’s a super easy to teach system, and there a ton of variety in characters to play. We just sit around the campfire and kind of have mini-tournaments, or try to figure out the multiplayer rules to have a few folks take on one of the big monsters like the Drake, Unicorn or Hill Giant (they can get kind of confusing when you’re mildly inebriated).
I seriously wonder why it hasn’t been converted to some sort of app by now- it seems like the basic framework would be dead easy, and you could sell all the different PCs as DLC for a buck apiece. You’d make a mint. Or maybe not.
My friend in high school had a bunch of those. I don’t think I ever won a game. I couldn’t figure out if there was any strategy or you just randomly picked moves and hoped you got a good result.
My dad’s current wife did art for a few of the Lost Worlds books (not the one pictured). They stiffed her on payment. That bad experience with a game company is why she turned down Wizards of the Coast when they inquired about her doing art for Magic: The Gathering back in the early 90s…
On the one hand, it’s kind of glorified rock - paper - scissors. On the other, they give you a lot of strategy choices - you opponent (and you) will be restricted in movement.alot of the time, so you have a limited subset of which actions you think they’ll perform, and how you should respond. It’s goofy fun.
Ouch, that’s terrible. I knew some folks here in Seattle in the '90s that were on that train - WOTC paid royalties for that art- so every card printed paid you a nickel or something (I don’t remember the specifics). When the game took off, those folks made a ton of money. That’s a big part of why they moved away from the original art when they started doing unlimited sets, etc, but that lasted for years.
I love Lost Worlds, and there sure was strategy if you know both the kind of moves which are possible to your opponent as well as your opponent themself. Most moves were logical, i.e downswings are great against ducking/jumping opponents, swings are great for dodging, thrusts against jumping away, if I swing high and you swing low, you hit my leg and I hit your body etc. There is an XP system which allows you character to make more damage with certain attacks, and oh the manly tears we shed when your favourite character was reduced to -5 health, thus dying and losing all those XPs.
Good times.
Good times indeed! Seriously, though, I would love to see a competitive app version to play on my phone against friends, with leader boards (hardcore mode!), etc.
It’s awesome that you brought up the Lost World series. I grew up in the 80ies with tons of Fighting Fantasy books, but had never heard of these ones. They look like a fun blast from the past.
As far as I know, they were not translated in French or sold in Belgium. If they had been, I would have been all over them, no doubt about it.
Looking to the future, how does everyone here feel about a deck builder game by the creators of Clank with worker placement and set in the universe of… Dune.
They have my attention!