J'ai une âme solitaire: Solitaire Boardgaming Megathread!

I put Victorum away to play Aeons Trespass and Frosthaven but now kind of miss it. Will get back to my first campaign in a few years!

My Victorum Kickstarter still hasn’t even arrived lol! :)

I’ve been a bit turned off by Chip Theory ever since I bounced off Too Many Bones, and I don’t generally love their ultra-premium mindset… but Hoplomachus is really tempting me right now. arrghh

I really can’t tell you not to.

I’m working on a massive ongoing cull of my boardgaming collection, so I’ve plucked from the pile a solitaire fantasy overland adventure called Shadows of Malice. I haven’t touched it since it came out nearly ten years ago, but I want to give it a chance to stay in the collection because I appreciate its minimalist approach to epic fantasy adventure; there is almost literally no artwork. Instead, it’s all text and iconography, leaving the visuals entirely to your imagination. As such, the graphics in this game are literally unparalleled! And I mean that in a good way.

At its heart, Shadows of Malice is a sort of super-lite Mage Knight based on dice chuckery instead of card draws. Characters gad about on a hex map to gear up and gather resources; meanwhile, a bad guy ramps up his own power to eventually impose his Evil Fail State. Hopefully, your little artless dudes can get powerful enough to stop him before then!

One of the unique elements of Shadows of Malice is that you’re constantly rolling what are called “stars”, along with the usual d6s, d3s, and even occasional d2s. “Stars” are a 50% chance to add +1, which means you roll a d6; a 1-3=0 and a 4-6=+1. This means lots of small numbers and modifiers get flung around as you play.

For instance, a moderately powerful monster might add two “star” dice to its damage every turn. Since default damage is only a single point, and since characters only have five hit points, a creature that adds two “star” dice is going to do between one and three damage every time it hits, and that can be painful! Or maybe it doesn’t roll well and its hits only ever do 1 points of damage.

The game is full of these kinds of modifications during combat, but it’s weirdly agnostic about how you perform and incorporate the die rolls! Because the developer seems to think rolling too many dice too often will frustrate or annoy or confuse or somehow confound players, the rules give you four ways to implement “star” modifiers:

  1. Roll every time the modifier would be used. This is what how I would expect it work – this is, after all, a pretty unabashed dice-chucker – but the rules give you three more options.

  2. Roll at the beginning of combat and use that result for the entire combat.

  3. Don’t even roll dice! Just count each “star” as 1/2 and round up.

  4. Competing “star” modifiers cancel each other out, so only apply the difference

None of this is in the initial release back in 2014, but at a certain point, designer Jim Felli rewrote the rules and introduced this new stipulation for the “star” dice, letting the players pick how they want to play. He explains this is to let players decide their own balance between speed of gameplay and the variance introduced by modifiers.

And this is exactly the sort of thing that undermines my confidence in the rest of a design. If the designer opts out of something as fundamental as the balance of pacing and variance, what else has he opted out of? Do I really want to invest my time exploring a design that includes such a casual shrug at a fundamental level? As with Final Girl (you can probably scroll upthread and find my kvetching about something similar in that game), the answer is a resounding “no”.

A designer can certainly tune as much or as little of his game as he likes. But I find that I have little patience for designers who leave it to me to decide the rules. That’s not my job, so Shadows of Malice went onto the “get rid of” pile before I even finished a playthrough. :(

Not precisely solitaire game related, but any interesting observations from the cull? Discover and forgotten gems?

I am curious since having moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, my collection didn’t migrate with me.

I exiled Hoplomachus Victorum to a friend. In the end, I just couldn’t take so many little battles over and over and over. I just want a tactical game on a larger battlefield. So I bought Remastered. We will see. I just need to get my kid to play some PVP but that probably won’t happen.

H:V was a solid production and had wonderful chips and playmats. Iit was just in a weird place. Not long enough for a one off campaign and too long for multiple short campaigns that I would want to replay.

I just received my copy of Legacy of Yu

Basically, a short worker placement campaign that can be reset to replay.

I’m hoping to play this weekend and will report back

Yes, please. I generally don’t enjoy worker placement but the few reports I read about the campaign look pretty cool.

Finished a couple games. Was thrashed in both. Attached are a few pics from one game.

Pregame setup. Game quality is excellent, and not over the top. Nice wood meeples for workers, flood, barge and for brick and wood resources, as well as farms, huts, and outposts.

Cardboard punchouts for provisions and shells.

Card quality is great as well.

Art is good, iconography is easy to grasp after the initial learning curve.

The theme of the game is that you have to build a canal before the flood destroys everything. While doing this you are attacked by barbarians. You have to use your townsfolk to generate resources, build the town, build the canal, and avoid getting overrun by barbarians

You win by completing the canal. You lose if the flood hits before you’re done, or barbarians kill everyone.

The loss conditions are satisfied through 2 types of countdown timers.

The first is running out of townfolk. You start with a deck of 10 cards that represent the townfolk. You draw 4 cards from the deck each turn. You then play from that hand to do actions. Mostly this is generating a small number of resources, or you can discard the card from your deck for more or rarer resources, or you can tuck the card in board spaces to generate resources each turn. You can also discard cards from your deck for powerful actions, or as a consequence of other things in the game.

Every turn you draw 4 more cards, and once your deck is empty, you shuffle and start again. Each time you do that the flood advances. That is the first countdown.

The townsfolk not in your deck aren’t out of the game, they are used across the top as a supply. You can spend provisions to buy more townsfolk for your deck, or to generate resources. Opposing this is a deck of barbarians. As you build the canal more barbarians are drawn each turn, reducing the available townfolk to draw. If you don’t defeat barbarians each turn, then they will destroy resources from your supply, force you to discard from your deck while simultaneously making your supply of townsfolk smaller. If Barbarians ever fill all the slots in your town, you lose.

Here is me losing (kids showed up to play with the bits I wasn’t using)

This is also a campaign game, so certain cards trigger story events. In my game I triggered a famine, which made me discard cards for food - making the game even more difficult. As you go you will add and remove cards from the game, but it is super simple to reset.

I like worker placement, but it isn’t my normal game and I probably kind of suck at them. I find this game to be extremely challenging. One mistake in building your engine sends the whole thing out of balance and likely sends you on the path to a loss. It was much more difficult then solo Viticulture and Maquis.

But I do like it, as there are enough actions to burn the brain a bit as you try to find the solution to the puzzle. I also like the campaign aspect, as I’m a sucker for the treadmill of new things and changes.

For me, this is a big thumbs up, even though I’ve yet to win!

Is anyone familiar with this ancient John Butterfield game, Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora? It’s a magazine game from 1981, way back before games were any good!

I recently saw there’s a GMT remake in the works and I’m pondering signing up for the P500. Butterfield, plus solo, plus sci-fi narrative-type game, equals interested.

Maybe next he’ll remake Ambush!

Based on a friends reccomendation for a good, fun, story involving legacy game I just ordered the whole shebang of Lands of Galzyr. It looks very nice. And BGG ratings are also solid. Anyone here have first hand experience?

Yes, I have a game on the go atm! Played a bunch of times and really enjoy it.

Quick and easy to set up, play, and tear down, with nothing too taxing or stressful. Some clever open world and skill-check mechanics, and the ‘choose your own adventure’ style storybook app works well. It’s slick to use, and can serve different content based on season or day. Solid component quality too.

The simplicity won’t appeal to everyone but for me it’s a nice change of pace to the overcomplicated 100-hour campaign token-fest adventure games that never seem to make the table. Maximum charm, minimum fuss. :)

I think it was mentioned upthread by a couple people too. Expensive and took a while to arrive from Finland or wherever but worth it.

edit: was in the other bg thread

Thank you, I searched for the name here but came up empty. Sounds perfect. I don’t have time for sprawling setups what with a small kid and 2 cats and a wife etc. What you write sounds perfect!

The persistence is cool too. Your actions can change locations to provide new opportunities. Each time you play a game you’re on the next month, and the map changes from summer to winter. Events can add temporary cards to locations that you can interact with, if you reach them in time. World quests cycle through a kind of job board, and appear at different places over time.

Each play session you can drop in/out of the ongoing world as one of the different characters, and their growth persists from game-to-game too (basically which cards they have, and the state of their skills). They each have a unique starting quest chain, which is over all too soon unfortunately! :)

And of course it’s ‘legacy’ but doesn’t damage anything, so you can reset the world back to the start state if you really want (though I’m not sure why you would want to).

Hey, I actually own a copy of that game! I’m going to see if I can get on the P500 list for the sequel.

Yup, that was my take, which holds. I played it frequently for a solid (real life) month. There is no overarching story AFAIK and the strategic decisions are very limited, but I did enjoy it. The save system is great, so when I finally put it away, I ‘saved’ my end state, and can just pick up where I left off when I decide to return.

EDIT: Meant to mention that my dog chewed one of the cards, so I messaged the designer on Discord and he mailed me a new one! I paypal’d him a few bucks to cover the postage, but that was right nice of him. He’s active on their Discord and said expansion(s) are planned.

I played Wreck of the Pandora for Qt3’s Starship Week oh so many years ago. Voyage (Ares magazine #6) actually released after Wreck (Ares #2) and I remember it being a bit more involved, with paragraphs not unlike he used in Ambush a few years later. As much as I do have a fond nostalgia for those games, I can’t imagine a reprint being any good – it would have to be a full-on redesign.

I forgot that there are more than one B.S.M. Pandora games out there, I actually own Wreck. Got this bad boy off eBay some time ago as I recall.