| Title | Qt3 Boardgames Podcast: Paleo, Hadrian's Wall, The Last Bastion |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games podcasts |
| When | April 29, 2021 |
Tom Chick is serving up woolly mammoth burgers, Mike Pollmann is gathering "resources", and Hassan Lopez has moved beyond ghosts..
Holy cow who is so furiously typing???
Our main recording died, so we had to use a back-up recording. I suspect someone was Googling with a muted mic, but their recording picked up the sound of their keyboard. Sorry about that, but I promise it beats the alternative, which was an hour of silence. :)
-Tom
Doh that’s probably my bad. I didn’t think the recorder app would pick up muted stuff. Also my keyboard is super loud.
BTW, I’m with Hassan. For me the biggest drawback so far for Architects, Viscounts, and Raiders of Scythia has been the “compete for a high score” end mechanic. It just feels so…dry. I can feel very into the theme to that point, but then that just kills it when I think about it, and I feel like a monkey moving (unthematic) levers around.
Wait, how is that different from any other worker placement games? Or do you just mean that all games decided by score feel dry to you?
-Tom
Essentially this, I guess.
But there are worker placement elements to Robinson Crusoe…and it has an ending that if things go right for you is even satisfying. :D
Qt3 HQ live feed:
Okay, that’s just weird. If I’d realized @hassanlopez was saying the same thing, I would have made fun of him!
I mean, you guys know how real wars work, right? All the generals get into a room and they work out who earned how many victory points by holding the most valuable victory point locations, then they add up the math on a pad of paper to determine a winner. It’s the same with farming. The farmers heap up all their crops and livestock, then they tally their points on a pad of paper, and the one who made the most points wins at farming. Same with Egyptian history, dungeon crawls, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraftian horror, and superheroes. That’s weird to me that you don’t know that.
-Tom
Right, but then they go to the news reporters, historians, novelists, playwrights and screenplay jockeys and tell them what the points on the pad of paper said, and those guys make up a narrative to explain why the general – or Great Old One, or Orcs – won that particular fight and why.
And some of us like that bit there. :D
Speaking of bastions, anyone try End of the Empire?
It looks like Galaxy Trucker meets Stronghold. Players do worker placement to build castle components, then every has a tower defense gauntlet of invaders smashed up against the castles they made and the one left in the best shape wins.
Looked interesting, but damn it’s $90.
Yeah, Paleo’s pretty great! I like how it can be chill game, despite being able to kick you in the ass by the end game. A big agreement on the carbon foot print of the thing though. Another game that beats this in the cringey overproduction category has to be Colt Express. Just give me 6 cards to act as train carts or something. I don’t need to be assembling this thing and having it make a big box game out of something that could otherwise fit in a nice little box.
Last Bastion actually looks cool AF though. As someone who thought of ghost stories at one point but didn’t end up getting it (late to the board game hobby), I looked at the Last Bastion art (though it’s growing on me) and some of the quibbles that were originally had with it (I think they made the single player/2 player feel a bit more anemic with some of the mentioned tweaks) and thought that I wasn’t missing out.
That said, the positivity here might be a bit contagious as thinking a bit more about all of those baddy characteristics and shuffling around of the location spots and the increased “party” variety has kind of got me checking this out again. I think that I got to give a few of my coop games a bit more love though:
-Spirit Island: I super love the concept and the evolving structure of the game, but it’s really intimidating to pull it out. I’m one of those cranky back people and this game tends to have a tendency to trigger a pulling of something (I think when you’re cranking around the table with all of these little pieces, it greatly increases the chances of pulling a muscle with a well timed motor tick,lol!)
-Arkham horror 3rd: I think that they might’ve cracked the code with this one…I love how they essentially put the card game into a digestible format for me. I miss those spell cards from eldritch horror though.
-Paleo: Yeah, i think Tom managed to hit all of the good stuff that’s going on here. Probably one of those games I’ll end up snagging up all of those little module decks they release for it.
That said, I feel like Last Bastion could fill a pretty good niche in complexity between paleo and the heavier 2-3 hour affairs of the former.
