Gremlins Inc founds a new colony

The board for Gremlins Inc looks like a swirly looping mess of random spaces...Now it has company.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/10/20/gremlins-inc-founds-new-colony/

I cannot accept the first paragraph of this piece from a person who dismisses the Titan board!

I just couldn’t get into this game. It was a promising concept of fun filled greed and screwing your opponents over, but didn’t gel for me. Dissection warning!

I think at the core, it was that designers seemed to overestimate the positive and negative effects of a lot of stuff. Income, votes, and the governorship were way less useful than they seemed to be intended to be, while infamy and skull spaces were way less hurtful than they seemed to be meant to be.

There weren’t enough income spaces to make that investment worth it. Same with the bribe spaces being a hindrance. Even if you ran out of money, the bribe spaces still weren’t much of a threat. That meant the penalty of bigger bribes from infamy didn’t matter much, so infamy didn’t matter much. Infamy and the hell cards were supposed to be huge bonuses but at a big risky long term cost in the form of infamy. But the infamy penalty was a joke, so Hell and infamy based cards became easily the best way to get massive money and victory points. You could either play it straight and try to amass $500-$1400 to buy victory point cards at other locations, or just accept some infamy and get the points for free. It was a no brainer. The character I saw most consistently win was the bonus to hell/infamy guy, no contest.

And since bribery wasn’ta big deal, the governorship wasn’t a big deal. I never once ever saw a player pay for votes. Votes were just something to cash in for money and the governorship more of a coincidental bonus to the player who just happened to randomly have more votes at the moment. Elections also took so long to happen, further making it pointless to pursue being governor. On top of that, a big chunk of skull cards would randomly strip the governor of his office. So it took forever for the election to happen, you would quickly lose it to a random penalty card you had no control over, and the reward wasn’t that great even if you did manage to hold on to it.

Which lead to what was my biggest beef: the penalty cards. There were just too many that penalized everyone instead of just the person who drew them. They were set up on the board meaning to be a risk/reward (the approach to entering hell), but since half or more of them punished other players equally or more than the person drawing them, they weren’t that much of a risk. It just made all the other “slow & steady” strategies like income, governorship, or buying victory cards legitimately with money even less worth it because you’d constantly lose your income/money/governorship to a random penalty card that someone else drew.

At that point it was just “fuck it” and hope you drew better infamy cards than the other guy.

(the whole jail system was also a neat idea that I never saw materialize like they meant. I saw people playing the jailbird character spend entire games in jail grinding up to Don for victory points and never once did I see them come anywhere near winning)

I disagree - once you get a few games in you can see the strategy of each character type and I found the game to be well balanced.

It’s definitely not a Euro Board Game but I racked up 50 hours of gametime over the past year playing a few games here and there.

…the games do tend to drag on w/o turn time limits though :|

I appreciate the breakdown, Mr. Terran, although I can’t say it fits with my experience. I also wonder if maybe you’re being a bit premature with some of your conclusions. I don’t mean to play the “you didn’t play it enough!” card, but this is a game that takes time to wrap your head around and eventually appreciate. I was super unimpressed with Gremlins Inc when I first started playing it. Roll and move, without even rolling? Snooze!

It also sounds like some of your objections are to the “Ameritrash” elements of the design, where there are so many systems and incidentals that in any given game, some of them might be completely useless. Whereas in other games, some of the might be important. There are several systems at work here, and their weight can be situational.

I’ve played so many games where no one went to the Astral Plane, but I love that it’s there, and when someone does go, it’s a big deal! Yet I can imagine someone concluding it’s useless because he never saw it used. I’ve played plenty of games where infamy didn’t matter much, but there are the occasional games where it does indeed matter. Which then makes bribes matter more, which in turn makes the governor matter more. I’ve played games where jail was a big fat nothingburger, but in other games, it turned out to be a significant system for one or two players.

In other words, I agree with your basic observation that some of the systems don’t matter. But I disagree that this bears out consistently for any given system across multiple games. Like so many things in Gremlins Inc – and in plenty of game designs! – it depends. :)

-Tom

Not sure what to make of this sentence. Is it supposed to be two?

“The familiar courthouse, treasure vault, bank[,] the office[.] [P]rogression has been shuffled.”

I believe Tom is merely relaying the geography of the board. The players previous progressed through or past (I still need to play this game) the courthouse, treasure vault, band and office in that order.

Ah, I see what happened. You’re right about the intent belouski, but Mercanis was pointing out the missing comma and a “then” being truncated into a “the”. Thanks for the corrections!

-Tom

You should hire an editor. I hear that Grammar NAZIs, Inc. is a good agency for this.