Sometimes customer service goes right! Then whether Blood Rage is better than Rising Sun, whether Dinosaur Island does dinosaurs well, and whether you need the expansion to enjoy Fallout.
There are no feathers in that dinosaur art, so I’d reckon it’s not doing dinosaurs well at all. ;)
This podcast is settling into a nice groove.
I haven’t played Dinosaur Island, but I do have Dinogenics. From what I can glean, the two games have some significant differences, despite having the same core mechanic (worker placement) and theme (build a dinosaur park).
Dinogenics is a very sandbox-y experience, similar to Caverna, and its dinosaurs have unique abilities that provide some nice flavor: brontos don’t need to be contained in a pen, t-rexes are twice as destructive when they rampage, etc. Rampages can cause lasting damage to your park, although they aren’t modeled in detail; the outcome is determined by a d6. (A lucky roll means that security contained the dino before it could cause real damage, and visitors think it was all part of the show.)
There’s also some direct player interaction in Dinogenics. The last time I played, I had a card that let me sneak into my wife’s park, steal DNA from her brontosaurus, and then create a clone in my own park. Which is a thematic way of saying that I duplicated someone else’s dinosaur. Another card caused visitors to flee from my competitors’ parks into my waiting hotel rooms.
While I’ve really been enjoying Dinogenics, I’d very much like to try Dinosaur Island. It seems like it might be a bit crunchier mechanically, and I absolutely love that bold graphic design.
Thanks for fixing Mike’s levels!
Rising Sun cannot “obsolete” Blood Rage because one is about Japanese mythology and one is about Vikings.
Also, @tomchick has never played Bios: Megafauna. JUST SAYIN’.
I have, and let me tell you. It is not a super hard game to play, but it is confusing as hell the first time you do! The rules are thorough, but the way they are covered makes figuring out what you can do, and the ramifications hard to parse until halfway through the first game.
We have an all-day TI4 extravaganza planned for Saturday with a full table, so I’m happy to hear it’ll be discussed in the next episode.
I am looking forward to it but do they actually discuss “Fallout” the game or the series. or Fallout 4. Well I’ll just listen.
Wait, really?
So do I, as a matter of fact. First time I’ve ever played the game too. Been on my radar for a while.
Nice! I’ve played 3rd ed a couple of times with a subset of this group. We weren’t able to meet in 2017 or 2018, so everyone’s excited.
Re: Twilight Imperium 3 vs 4
They streamlined the tech tree so it’s a lot more intuitive to understand. They sort of streamlined some expansion elements from 3 and integrated them into 4. They simplified trade away from those silly contracts and just made it so you just produce tokens that are turned into trade goods when you give them to another player. Then they made controlling Mecatol Rex a little more important by having it be worth a VP every turn if you take Bureaucracy.
aaaaaand that’s about it for changes. I enjoyed it for 2 plays but I don’t think I’d be interested in any more. There still some big time balance issues with the races (Jol-Nar are still too good, Winnu are a bad joke you only take as a handicap, Sardak N’orr still stink). The tech tree arrangement still doesn’t make much sense balance wise. What really dampened me on it though are the tech based victory objectives. There’s too many of them and it makes the game too random. Game would be a lot better off without them.
And now that I think about it, the only reason it’s streamlined is that they threw out 80% of the expansion stuff. I gather all the bloat and fiddliness will be back once the expansions come out, same thing that happened to Eldritch Horror.