Qt3 Boardgames Podcast: Dice Throne, Fort, Freshwater Fly

Games
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Title Qt3 Boardgames Podcast: Dice Throne, Fort, Freshwater Fly
Author Tom Chick
Posted in Games podcasts
When April 8, 2021

Mike Pollmann gets to choose from sixteen different characters, Hassan Lopez will steal your friends off your own front lawn, and Tom Chick can't tell a salmon from a trout..

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These boardgame images always look like a videogame I would be interested in.

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A few points re: Dice Throne.

  1. Adventures works great. I was skeptical too, but it alternates between more bite sized fights with a big range of foes that are just shooting for a specific roll and maybe have a special passive, where part of the challenge is staying alive through multiple consecutive fights (with your game state staying for the whole scenario). And boss fights are pretty similar to the traditional mode but the bosses are much stronger than the regular characters and the AI works pretty well. Both get you upgraded loot cards for your deck.
  2. The Cursed Pirate doesn’t flip back and forth. She starts human and can, if she runs out of cursed doubloons, flip to her skeletal side, but she can’t flip back and starts taking ongoing damage when she does so it’s a race to the finish at that point. Also, the abilities on that side are not radically different - they’re more powerful, but they use mostly the same combinations and status tokens. A big difference is she starts giving the cursed doubloons to other players rather than gaining them herself, and they get hurt by those, whereas for her they were a resource to stay human.
  1. The character with the robots is the Artificer.

Personally one of my favorite things about the game is the characters all seem remarkably balanced against one another despite asymmetry and varying complexity. They’re not all necessarily quite as well suited to the Adventures mode, though - you have less chance to take “down” turns to get statuses without hurting your enemy and being able to blitz down portal crawl adversaries or tank their hits and recover are important - you have way less health in those scenarios so taking damage is bad and stuff that pays off over several turns with the same opponent only really helps on the hardest fights (like bosses). They’ll all work, though, it’s just a bit easier with some than others. The designers said Cursed Pirate is playable in DTA, but is “hard mode”.

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There’s fishing in the Stardew Valley boardgame, btw. I haven’t played it so that’s all I can tell you.

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Completely agree with everything said about fish. As Miss Manners once wrote, no one has ever been called a “hot, passionate fish.”

Planning your turn late in Fort, because you’re always losing cards and reacting to the board state, should be interesting, but I agree that the game doesn’t make up for missing explosive big turns with this interaction. It’d perhaps be interesting to sit on a great draw, full of anticipation, and see if your hand could survive until your turn, and perhaps be able to make plays in precious turns to strategically defend future hands, but that’s not really how it plays, at least, not at our level of skill. It’s too certain you’ll be interacted with and no particular hand would be worth defending enough to justify spending a card on it earlier, anyway.

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The ARTIFICER! I almost had it.

Right, I’ve heard/seen the same. I suppose I was trying to think of games that try to simulate (?) fishing in some way as their primary mechanism. Stardew’s fishing seems like a side-minigame.

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@malkav11 thanks for corrections on Dice Throne. I’m a total newb and just learning the game!

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Fishing looks like one of the main systems from what little I’ve seen, but it’s certainly not the main system.

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Hey Tom, a bit random, but: Did you ever play A Study in Emerald second edition? I swear I thought you wrote something about it, but I can’t find it. Possibly it was just a vision brought on by the Great Old Ones.

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I have not played it, but I have read the rules, shaking my head sadly at all the stuff that was lost. To be fair, it might be awesome if I were to actually play it. Have you played it? How did you like it?

-Tom

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I have not, sadly. I only played the original with a friend. I quite enjoyed it and was curious how the creator “revised it” for the follow up.