2761

That sounds pretty interesting, assuming it’s not just a sci fi ravenloftalike.

2762

I couldn’t have gotten anywhere without the rule summary from headless hollow, which is true of most FFG games. Maybe that will help?

2763

This looks like the Doom board game. I approve.

2764

Good games on sale here. I have no idea about the company though, never heard of them before.

2765

Thanks for the link LK, I found same in Files section of BGG. I played a 2nd game last night, with my son, and it went much quicker and smoother after reviewing some of the various summary/outline files.

It’s amazing how much coordination I have to have to get my attacks right… I unlocked ultralisk, but hadn’t done the research such that the ultralisk combat/tech cards never came up, so it ended up useless. Expensive lesson!

2766

Wow, thanks. At the Gates of Loyang is 17 dollars. I’m actually going to be about an hour from the store on Saturday and could pick it up for no shipping cost. Of course, that would be 2 hours of driving and probably would cost almost the 10 dollars I’d pay for UPS shipping in gas so probably not a great idea. Still, even with shipping it’s 11 dollars less than CSI and 10 dollars less than Amazon with Prime.

On the other hand, it’s not like I was planning on buying Loyang anytime soon. Bleh, I’ll probably think about it too long and then they’ll sell out when I decide to buy.

2767

A game I am interested in, but not ready to take the plunge and buy it: Cosmic Encounter.

I keep reading all this good stuff about it, ppl say it is one of the greatest games ever made, but when I look at it, it just doesn’t interest me. Granted, I have not played it.

For those that have played it (the FFG version, since that would be the one I would buy), did you like it? What is so good about it?

Thanks

Chris

2768

Do yourself a favor and purchase this game yesterday. At first glance, it doesn’t look very appealing. But that first glance is deceiving. It’s a very social game that plays quickly and is best played with 5. Alliances are forever shifting, from turn-to-turn, so it’s an absolute hoot. It’s easy to learn and teach, and no two games are ever identical given the 50 different aliens (each alien has unique powers) that are included in the base game with 25 additional aliens available in each of the two expansions.

The three other people I play board games with regularly have very discriminating tastes, but I thought they’d enjoy CE. So, I purchased it and taught them how to play a few weeks ago, and all four of us played for the first time (two 4-player games). It’s now our favorite game.

2769

It’s the social game part that really makes CE. If your group just analyzes the board and makes moves, then CE just drags on forever and winning it is hard. Your group has to table talk for the game to be really good. My gaming group prefers co op games and the Avalon hill version of CE fell flat with us.

2770

Listen to this man. I bought CE a while back but didn’t have a chance to play it until last weekend. My group of friends (and I) loved it. It’s a terrific social game.

2771

I like CE, but if you don’t like fairly bouncy (by which I mean, it’s not random, as such, but it’s definitely not a taut puzzle game), alliance-based PVP games, you won’t like it.

I’d actually say that it’s a lot like Citadels in the general feel, if not in any gameplay specifics.

2772

Same thing I was thinkin’. And just as I don’t care for Citadels, I don’t like CE either. CE is a great game for when you have a steady group who really enjoy playing together, and can kind of roleplay stuff. I don’t have that situation (I run a 100+ member board game meetup) so CE doesn’t work for me.

2773

Played Claustrophobia yesterday and enjoyed it. We played with a couple of rules wrong (that errata is pretty significant!!) but it was still fun. Took the 45 minutes advertised but no more and we could have easily played a couple more times had there been time.

2774

Played a couple of games of Citadels with GM and his girlfriend. Think I can safely say the game was a big hit. Death Angel wasn’t quite so popular but not anything like the polarising force that is Arkham Horror.

We also played a couple of games of vanilla Pandemic (GET THE GODDAMN EXPANSION ALREADY) and lost both in double quick time. Vanilla’s small set of roles really does feel very limiting.

2775

Cosmic Encounter is basically the grandfather of break-your-own-rules games, as well as games where each player has uneven abilities. Basically, you have a simple gameplay mechanic (think Risk), but each alien power allows them to break a rule: tokens are worth four instead of one; lowest score wins; you can look at your opponent’s card before playing yours; and so on. One game I played with my brother as the Masochist, where he wins when he loses all of his ships. It’s harder than you would think to defend against someone who is trying to lose.

Add to this the special cards, optional decks and rules, technology cards, and the varying alliances that can form, it’s a different game every time you play. And if one player ends up with a stronger power, this is balanced out by the other players teaming up against him. It really plays very differently depending on your group, but it pioneered many gameplay mechanics that are common today (Magic for example was directly copied from CE), and the FFG version is the best one available. My favorite game of all time.

2776

I played two games of Chaos in the Old World with the new expansion today. If anyone has any questions I can answer, go ahead and ask!

2777

Thanks, I’ve got some.

Did you play with the new Morrslieb cards? If so, how did they change the dynamics of the game. Especially for Khorne, if you got any imporession of that.

One of the things I like with CitOW is how chaotic the board gets as demons and corruption starts to get piled on, but does adding a 5th player make it hard to keep track of what is going on?

Exactly how awesome are the Skaven?

2778
  1. The new cards seem to be weaker, and based around combo-ing with each other. For example, Slaanesh gets a card that allows his Keeper of Secrets to count as 3 nobles. He gets another card that causes nobles to count toward his domination of a region on a one for one basis. Khorne supposedly gets cards to encourage VP victories, but they were not used much- instead people went with his new Vengeance card, which has you roll one extra die whenever you would roll dice in combat, and a verrrry interesting new card that allows you to move your Bloodthirster for free, once per round, into a region with six or more corruption. In general, I’d say the relatively weaker cards means there are more situational choices and less no-brainer decisions (gee, should Slaanesh get the cultist upgrade?).

For the record, Khorne did very poorly in the first game and won by dial in the second- this happened even though I was sure that dial wins would be much harder to come by with the 5th player in the mix.

The 5th player adds surprisingly little information overload. This is because- 1) There are no new areas on the map and 2) Skaven do not drop corruption. Basically, you need to worry most about where the Skaven figures themselves are, and since that is by nature going to be where the most corruption has been dropped, your attention will tend to be focused there anyway. If the Skaven is trying for a dial win, focus is a little harder, but I tend to think dial wins would be pretty hard for Skaven to come by.

The Skaven are pretty awesome. They naturally gravitate to places with skaven tokens at first, trying to dominate them for dial ticks. Those places are easier to dominate, too, due to the skaven tokens themselves, so the ensuing dominations will earn them a fair chunk of points. Once the corruption starts dropping in earnest, they use their mobility- which between spell cards and upgrades is pretty huge- to pop into areas on the verge of ruination to grab ruiner bonuses and steal points. They usually won’t get first place, but have a real good chance of getting second in many situations, and that adds up fast. Their neatest upgrade is probably the Under-Empire, which links all areas with skaven token with adjacency, and lets them evacuate units that are in a ruined region to one of those other regions. I am also quite fond of their Council of Thirteen upgrade card, which lets you add a third power card to a region, once per round. Adds a real air of unpredictability to things, and makes it more likely that the skaven will get to play a card where it counts.

2779

You make me really want that Chaos expansion. CitOW is easily one of my favorite games released in the last few years. I actually saw it at cardhaus when I stopped in their retail store the other day and almost picked it and the new TI3 expansion up. Then I decided I’d give the boardgame store I actually play at a chance to get them in (to ‘pay my rent’ as it were). Instead, I picked up Ascending Empires and Bottle Imp (two games I know they’ll never get in). I got to play them both that night.

Bottle Imp is a little trick-taking cardgame that has been around a while in German, and I’d heard good things about, so when I actually saw a copy on their shelf, I grabbed it. My group loves these things (we’re big fans of Tichu and Haggis, for example) and this game was a big hit, too. If you like these kinds of games, pick this one up- I can’t imagine you being disappointed. It plays three or four.

Ascending Empires was a blast. I’m really enjoying the new wave of dexterity-based ‘flicking’ games that have come out in the last year. First Catacombs (Descent/Hero Quest-meets-Crokinole) and now AE, which is basically a space 4X game-meets-Crokinole. The core of the game isn’t actually the flicking, it’s a pretty neat, elegant little euro-style resource and action management game. Every turn you get one action: Move, Build, Tech, handled similarly to a lot of these games. The twist is that to move, you flick your little spaceship disks across the board- planets are essentially bumpers. If your ship goes off the board, it is returned to your supply and has to be rebuilt (actually a very easy task, but time-consuming). Combat isn’t quite what you’d think, either- instead of trying to actually hit your opponents’ disks, you actually just try to get near them (‘in range’)- two ships in range of an opponent kills it, and you get VPs. If you actually do hit his disk, you both die- you’ve just rammed him. This provides no VPs. Tech tree upgrades do all the usual stuff- longer range weapons, bigger ships, movement and building bonuses, etc. It’s all very slick. Like Catacombs, not the game you want to pull out every week, but it is great fun every once in a while.

Man, just thinking about it, I’d love to see one of the new ‘boardgame cafes’ here in Seattle (AFK Tavern and Cafe Mox(just down the block from my house!)) commission a big, custom shuffleboard-style table for Catacombs and Ascending Empires. My brother and I like to play shuffleboard in bars when we see it (the new Tom Douglas bar has two beautiful tables, and it’s across the street from one of my restaurants, a dangerous combination), and having an oversized set of one of these two games would be awesome.

Just to make this wall of text even bigger, my combined Battle Lore rulebooks project ‘done’. I posted about it in the thread on BGG here. Toward the bottom is the relevant info. There’s ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ image versions, and if anyone wants it, I’ve got a link to a lulu.com print-on-demand version that costs 21.70 (full color, perfect bound, no profit to me). Someone in the BGG thread said something about a 20% off coupon for the month of May…

2780

And hey, speaking of Cafe Mox, if anyone in Seattle wants to meet for a bite, a brew and a baordgame down there, I’m game. Drop me a PM.