You take that back!
I totally know why people would think Betrayal is awful. I happen to think it’s a great game, as long as you know exactly what you’re getting. Which is a broken game roughly 30% of the time, an unbalanced game 50% of the time, and an unbelievably memorable game the other 20% of the time. Between that 20% chance and the fact that I always get to see a scenario I’ve never seen before (even if it’s unbalanced), I’m happy to drop an hour on it.
Thanks. I think this may have been a case of knowing the answer before I even asked it, but I appreciate the reinforcement. I’ll take a look at a couple runthroughs of all three and see which will best fit my interests. I’ll also look into Ottoman Sunset. Hadn’t heard of that one before.
I got Warhammer Quest a few months ago, but haven’t gotten around to trying it. That also might fit your requirements.
I actually heaped some praise on WHQ:ACG in the post above my question. I do still really enjoy it, but despite the box saying it’s a 30-60 minute game, I find it more like a 60-90 minute game, and that’s not including setup and teardown. It’s also a bit more crunchy than what I’m looking for to fill this gap in my collection.
As for other recommendations, I recommend you steer clear of Mage Knight, which – as we all know – is the worst boardgame of all time.
I’ve played Mage Knight solo a few times on Vassal, and while it’s a monster to learn, I found it at least somewhat enjoyable. I’m not among the crowd that calls it the best solo game ever, but I recognize there’s at least a very fervent group that feels it is. I had really high hopes for Star Trek:Frontiers, the Mage Knight retheme, but I should have remembered WizKids is involved. The pictures of it from earlier this year were very disappointing to say the least.
I was just having a discussion with some friends about Betrayal the other day after playing it again on Tabletop Simulator. It is a complete mess of a game, but if you go into it knowing you’re going to need to deal with a bunch of situations where the rules are completely ambiguous and can just have fun with the setting, there’s fun to be had. I’m going to be very interested if the recently announced expansion fixes all that (a new rulebook and replacement haunts would go a long way to doing so) or just reinforces the problems with the game.
I’ve had Ottoman Sunset over a year now and I still haven’t gotten it to the table. I need to rectify that. Although I still think it would’ve been cooler if it had been a board game based on Automan.
My kickstarted copy of Dawn of the Zeds just arrived! Holy moly what a jammed to the brim box of stuff! Can’t wait to dig in.
Mine has apparently shipped a couple of days ago, but I’m still getting “tracking number invalid” on the provided link.
Boohoo, my tracking says I won’t get mine till Friday Next week.
Do any of you guys have the 2nd edition Dawn of the Zeds. I’m curious to know what the differences are and if you think it’s worth buying the new edition. I’m kind of planning to get it when it hits stores but I’m not sure yet.
The third edition (I assume that’s what you mean) was just delivered to my home. Unfortunately, I am out of town and won’t be back for a week, so I can’t help you there.
Note that VPG expects to have very few copies left after the Kickstarter distribution is complete, and those will be sold from their website, not in stores.
Well darn, apparently that’s because it’s not being sent courier at all, doesn’t have a tracking number (so why send me one?) and will take 4-6 weeks to arrive! Grr…
My copy of the third edition of the Dawn of the Zeds arrived yesterday. One corner was dented pretty badly, but everything inside was fine, thankfully.
The game is seriously gorgeous. Every component is top notch. It also includes quite a few more variants to the game than I expected. Can’t wait to give it a go this weekend!
My copy arrived today. Complete with SIX rulebooks.
Yeah. It’s intense. And beautiful. Mine arrived Sunday and I’ll likely give it a try later on tonight. In a way, it made the decision to not back Darkest Night easier (although I already own DN first edition and most of its expansions) as I have a hard time imagining wanting to play DN over this going forward – as this game is far more my preferred weight level.
Even were I a gelatinous cube, I could not be more jealous.
Yeah, I’m sad I missed that Kickstarter. I got the option of buying into it, after backing Nemo’s War, but it was a bit too much money at the time.
The only downside so far is that the organization of the rulebook is entirely based around players playing through a tutorial first. As such, the rulebooks have rules scattered throughout them in a less than coherent fashion, in my opinion. I wanted to jump right into the Brains game (level 3), but I had to skip around in the rules to find all the references I needed.
I think they could’ve made things simpler by not going with six rulebooks.
Got just hammered on my first Brains game (where I started as well) and decided to post to BGG asking for basic strategic tips. Not really sure learned enough from my defeat to really know what I’d do differently on my second go-round. Tough game and the dice, as usual, don’t make things any easier for me.
Tried the Basic Game in coop tonight. We got crushed roughly halfway through the event deck. We succeeded at, I think, maybe two Forage rolls all game so spent a lot of time not getting bullets so as to not shoot the onrushing Zeds. The military sniper hero who can craft her own ammo was a huge help. The mayor, not so much. (Yes, despite his Forage bonus.) I enjoyed it and definitely see room for the promised five additional levels of complexity and variety but, as one might expect from a game that was originally explicitly solitaire, the coop really feels very tacked on. If you’re not familiar, basically, you get one player action per player in addition to any event actions and character-specific actions. As compensation, many events trigger additional spawns or Zed movement based on the number of players. But those player actions are completely interchangeable and can be used on any player unit regardless of which hero is “yours”, so there’s really no mechanical division of labor at all. They also don’t go away regardless of player unit casualties. So you’re literally just playing the solitaire game with more actions, spawns and movement and there’s really no attempt to enforce division of labor or anything else that would give the additional players any investment in the game. I think I’m probably just going to stick to solitaire with it in the future unless my players express a specific interest in revisiting it.
I really wish I could pick this up, but it seems unattainable.
Hey, has anyone tried Descent with the new Road to Legend app?
I managed to progress a bit in the app’s tutorial, but had to stop and read the app’s manual, since I had never played the actual game (only read its rule book). If you’ve actually played the game and wanted to play it co-op with an app controlling the monsters (it’s not an implementation of the Overlord), you can’t go wrong giving it a spin. It is free, as are the two original campaigns (second one was added last week or so).
I will note that the app doesn’t move the monsters; it simply gives you an action list for each for the player to execute. This means the app doesn’t track the monsters’ locations or hit points. It also doesn’t track the health and conditions of the heroes.