Digital Spirit Island has no Branch and Claw content, which makes for a pretty hollow Spirit Island experience. And to make matters worse, the Jagged Earth add-on just came out for the physical boardgame.
-Tom
I just saw that it advertises multiplayer, but the only option is Steam’s remote play feature (i.e., share a screen with Steam friends for laggy play and everyone controls the same mouse & keyboard).
Handelabra generally gets the expansions in over time. Sentinels is a complete digital app these days, for example, at least if you buy all the DLC. I can understand why they don’t like to implement it all at once. But it does make digital versions pretty underwhelming when they lack so much you could be playing with at the table. And I’m sad that no Obsidian version of any of the good Pathfinder Adventure Card Game adventure paths has come out. (I mean, Rise of the Runelords is fine, and the app is well done, but…it’s old news.)
We played a 3-person game of Axis and Allies last night. A&A is a game I probably have fonder memories of than it deserves, especially given how much we fucked the rules up as kids.
The Steam version I find to be an excellent port of the game overall. However, more than 2 people for a live game is tough. The turns take so long that it’s about an hour to make a full cycle through the rotation. The person who is just playing one country can go get dinner while waiting for their turn,
Digital Root was released early access the 20th.
Although the consensus at this point seems to be the game is a lot better without the Vagabond and replacing him with one of the expansion factions? Just the 4 base factions right now.
I don’t mind the vagabond. No expansions available online yet, so you’re stuck with him (unless you’re playing 3 player). Anyway, it is early access and has some issues (online play seems pretty much broken at the moment).
The vagabond is amazing and my consensus is that you should get the expansions, remove all of those other dummies and just play with four vagabonds.
So I’ve tried a dozen hours, playing all factions to the point where I could win reliably. I didn’t care for the physical version but figured I was missing something and it would become apparent how amazing it was once I figured out all the strategies and “ecosystem”.
I still can’t get into it. I guess the appeal is that it’s a more approachable COIN game, but it feels more like Cylon Leaders in the BSG Pegasus expansion: people playing a different game that just happens to be sharing the same board. Winning just felt like who happened to get beat on the least during the “final round” where everyone is within one turn of winning, and victory didn’t feel any more satisfying than defeat.
This is definitely a common criticism of Root. It really, to me, feels like a game that needs a different objective than “earn some points.” (Though I’d also say most games do.) It’s a potentially narrative-rich game and the rules and components are really very thematic for a euro, but the points system just spreads treacle over all of that and smooths it out into a random-feeling strategy-ish game with a kingmaking problem. I think the game would benefit from having a set of scripted scenarios rather than a generic ruleset. You could even come up with ways to have 2-player games with other than cats vs. birds.
The Game of Thrones boardgame adaptation is out soon:
Is there a consensus on whether the actual board game is any good?
I’d be fine to never play that game again. The mechanics are interesting enough and I’d probably be into it if the game lasted about an hour, but it suffers from inbalance at less than the full six player count, at which point it can easily be a 3+ hour game. The theme is hard to resist, you get to move armies around a giant map of Westeros and all of your favorite and most hated characters are there, but nothing about the gameplay really feels Game of Thronesy and it just goes on forever. Every time I’ve finished a game of this–even games that I won–I’ve been exhausted by it and glad to put the thing away.
There’s always a better choice than the GoT board game. For similar mechanics but a more reasonable game length I’d be interested to try Battle for Rokugan. For a game that is similar in both mechanics and length but that has the depth to make that interesting, StarCraft or Forbidden Stars. For a better game with the same theme, the Game of Thrones LCG. And a game I am really looking forward to playing with my group when we can all get together again: The King’s Dilemma.
I’d say the consensus is pretty positive for the game. I’m not super fond of it either, though. It’s really long and you can get into what feel like unrecoverable positions pretty early.
But more importantly my concern with a digital implementation is table talk is an essential part of the experience. A lot of people compare the game (favorably) to Diplomacy. Without the similar backroom promises and betrayals, the game loses a lot of what makes it cool. That stuff is hard to do in digital, since you’ll miss out on body language and with voice chat have difficulty having private side conversations. Maybe they’ll have some clever communication tools to address that though.
Thanks for the opinions, guys. The length of the game doesn’t seem so daunting when it’s wrapped up as a PC strategy game. But hearing that table talk is essential to the experience doesn’t sound great. If you buy a boardgame adaptation you at least hope it will be entertaining playing single player against AI, but if you lose so much without player diplomacy then that makes me less interested.
Speaking of alliances and diplomacy, I really like the system in Struggle of Empires (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9625/struggle-empires) where each round the alliances change and are then locked in for the full round.
This adaptation also came out today in Early Access. The theme is very charming:
Scythe Digital is now on mobile- Apple and Google Play ($9 on the latter, and I assume the same on the former). It popped up as an ad whilst I was scrolling through FB, so I clicked through and bought it. I played a few times on the Steam version on my Surface Pro 5, but it was a little underpowered, and the touch controls were a little janky. Hopefully a mobile-focused version will be a little better in that regard.
The other issue is that there’s just no breathing room and everyone is hit with frustrations right from the start.
The cats are ganged up on and torn down from the start.
The birds frustratingly have everything collapse from one little error*
The alliance is frustrating to play against.
The vagabond is frustrating to play against.
The vagabond is frustrating to play as if everyone adopts the meta to smack him early and never craft items he needs.
Everyone having a drawback is fine, but the negative to positive feedback was too much.
I think the biggest problem though, is that boardgaming in general has long evolved beyond the point of “everyone take a complete turn”. Games - especially ones over 2 players - realized long ago that everyone going around taking one simple action was a much better approach. Root goes back to the ROOT of old school games with complete turns, and the length is extended by not being able to plan out your strategy when it’s not your turn since the board state changes so much by the time it gets back to you again (doubly so for the “final” round).
- One first time player hated the game and never wanted to touch it again after playing the birds and going into turmoil, not realizing that having no warriors in your pool triggered a failure for recruiting (“But I had roosts in the right clearings! How was I supposed to know that?”). It’s just endless “legal scaffolding” like that that makes Root one of the most painful games to teach & learn I’ve ever seen.
Digital Game of Thrones could be good for getting the game out more often than a physical get together, but I’m not excited for it simply because the base game balance is horrendous and I doubt the digital version will have options for any house rules that fix it.
Even the full 6 is terrible. Lannister is hopeless. Winner is usually a race between Greyjoy and Stark, with the slim possibility of Baratheon somehow pulling ahead. Any other outcome requires some serious prisoner’s dilemma metagaming from the whole table.
The best change I’ve seen is the Mother of Dragons expansion. Gets rid of the most ridiculous leaders (fuck you, Balon). Daenerys throws in some much needed flexibility and dealings. But it carries the HEAVY downside of being much weaker thematically. Nobody wants to play the North as the Boltons. Nobody wants to play the later characters over the base ones. Once you strip out that theme, what does GoT really have to offer over anything else?
(Shut Up & Sit Down had a ridiculously glowing review for War of Whispers, billing it as “Game of Thrones in an hour”. That is absolutely not true. It’s much closer to a worker placement game with AP-inducing card combos and the absolute worst graphic design I’ve ever seen in a board game. I tried it with 3 different groups and everyone soured on it within 2-3 games. Largely thanks to the SU&SD review, it quickly sold out and prices shot up at the start of lockdown. Paid $50 for it, had zero qualms about selling it a month later for $100.)
Also, Gloomhaven now has multiplayer.
We played Blood Rage last night on my gaming group. Finally convinced them to buy it. It went well with no lockups. It seems like they fixed the multiplayer issues.
Scythe on iPad is pretty neat. No issues on my original 12.9"
I have also been getting into Axis and Allies again.
I played the GoT beta and this was exactly my taleaway. Without the interaction it’s just a shallow and not very interesting war game.
I picked up Wingspan, in case anyone else did the same and is looking for players