Yes indeed! I loved that game. I had many bookshelf games as a kid. Ploy was also a great game.
The molded minis for Feudal were really outstanding, especially for that era.
Wow even your troll post has a troll in it. Brilliant
A bit late to the party.
1830 is a great design and IMO never really obsoleted or replaced. It took the ideas from 1829 and turned them into a game that - while complicated for any not-a-wargame boardgame - is pretty clean, taut, full of constraints and difficult choices and generally tempts players onto the knife-edge between winning and sudden failure that makes for some really tense games.
There are other really good 18xx games, I know, but I think 1830 stands out as the cleanest and least chrome-laden version of the genre that is still a great game in its own right.
Yep, I really enjoyed Feudal as a teenager.
I enjoyed Feudal as an older kid. In my 20s. My friend Joe and I would smoke weed and play the game. We had a blast.
Did you do the king in the castle, because you got that one area where there was just one entry point. And the one piece that was a guy with a knife, that you put in the courtyard? As a last chance effort to stop the advance?
Am I imagining this?
What no Buffy love, it was the game that got me back into gaming after 15 years
Follow by
It’s a perfectly respectable coop, surprisingly decent compared to a lot of licensed tie-in games, but “truly great”? I didn’t even play it as much as 2nd edition Arkham Horror, which I think most people would consider average to bad.
Yeah you are probably right, it holds a special place in my heart as it was the game that reignited my love of board games, and i often use it as a gateway game when Im trying to show my friends why i love games. ROFL
Great article Bruce. Reminds me of the comparisons in the flight sim scene between older sims hat focused on fun, and newer flight sims (once PCs were up to the task) that tend to obsess over realism. In that case it was the matter of a computational budget, whereas in the strategy/wargaming world it’s about a game complexity budget, which is easily infinite (by human standards) even on older computers.
You nailed it. I just searched the thread for Paydirt. :)
Bowl Bound is just as good.
Speed Circuit is excellent.
I’ll also add USAC Auto Racing from Avalon Hill which can be played both multi and solitaire. For a 500 fan, there’s nothing better IMO.
I also love the irony that increasing the complexity budget results in less balanced games, since it’s so much harder to debug the optimal paths. Also the irony that computers make it easier to iterate, which leads to finding the optimal paths through overly-complex games even faster. You neglect to mention the difficulty of creating an AI (which is almost a requirement for overly-complex, overly-long games), the deficiencies of which make it even more likely for these games to be unbalanced (aka the Chick Parabola).
Yes! We played this game a lot, too. Counter-picking victory conditions against each other kept the game balanced (we can’t all be astronauts, after all.) Missing out on college due to luck could be brutal, though, as could be becoming stuck in the corners. I remember modifying the rules over time but not how. Thanks for bringing that up.
Eh. I think it was a little too simple. That said, I’m a huge fan of BattleLore (1st Ed) (enough that I did a ground-up DTP redesign/compilation rulebook of everything official for the game so I wouldn’t have to go searching through 8 different books), so my opinions are a little suspect.
Getting into the point of the thread, though, I think it’s a little asinine to posit that only since 2008 have designers really considered the ramifications of their design choices, and that nearly everything before that somewhat arbitrary date that was good was merely accidental. There have been great, well considered and designed games coming out for at least 25 years, and probably extending back to Sackson’s run in the '60s, just as there are dozens of mediocre/bad games that come out every year for the last 12 or more (I hate to say it, but Kickstarter has a lot to answer for, here).
I really loved @Matt_W’s post about Power Grid upthread. It spells out exactly why that game has such an amazing, well-thought-out design. Nad there are many more games of that era that fit that criteria.
oooh. I haven’t seen those boards in a long time.
Nice. I still have an Unpunched Panzer Leader.