Some of that plastic stuff gets pretty damn tiny. The storage inside the box is actually pretty spectacular for one of these Dungeons and Dragons games (the previous two of which have lacked anything even resembling a Dominion-level organized storage structure), but you might look for some containers into which you can put the little plastic figurines and/or cardboard bits if you’ve got young children or small animals about the house, eager to hide them from you.
Z-Man just got acquired by Filosofia (a Canadian company), so there may be a delay as they sort things out, but I think Zev said somewhere that the game was so far along in the production that there was no chance it would be dropped.
So far my kids have been good about small plastic fiddly bits, so I’m not too worried when it comes to playing games with them. Still, the OCD in me will still compel a complete inventory and packaging of the contents of the box when it arrives (as I do with every game), so even if my kids weren’t so trustworthy, there would still be barriers to loss of pieces. :)
It’s been a game in the making for ages, now, so I think the planets are aligning just right for it this year. But I agree that you’ve got to keep your eyes on those Canadians, with their politeness and the possibility of French.
At any rate, my dealer confirms July 8th for Battleship, which is great news.
If anyone here gets Quarriors and wants to review it, I’m all ears!
If you cut the RP oriented stuff from Hero/Warhammer Quest, and redesigned the combat rules to reward more tactical and much faster movement, you would have Descent. So… Yeah, it should remind you of Hero Quest. It is very obviously the child of that game.
It’s also a game I warmly recommend to any 4-6 person group with a love of tactical combat crawlers and 3-4 hours to spare on a regular basis. It requires no prep time at all beyond setting up the table, and the rules (while scattered and disorganised beyond the second worst rules chaos I’ve ever even heard of) are few, simple and intuitive enough that you’ll virtually never have to look anything up (fortunately, since you’d have no idea where to look), even if you only play about once per month (like we do).
The vinyl minis for the game are plentiful, somewhat cartoon’ish in style, and surprisingly well done. They also lend themselves well to painting, and as they’re vinyl, can easily be re-posed by submersion in 70-80degC water for a minute or two, followed by 10 mins in the freezer. Only issue is the flash is a bitch and a half to remove - but that only matters if you plan on painting them.
You should expect to buy counter trays for every player, and at least 2 bit boxes for the basic game alone. Descent’s greatest problem is the excessive amount of counters. It feels like there’s a couple of hundred different ones, though in truth it’s probably less than 50. Which is still enormously many. Point is, without an organised approach, they will bog down the game and make setting up the table take far longer than it has to.
Descent should definitely ship in tackle boxes to remove that inevitable step.
Yeah, it would be nice if it had a better organizational system. We use ziplock bags.
Me want now. Love the production quality. And look at all those dice!
Tony_M
2890
I’ve been trying Lord of the Rings LCG. The introductory mission was fine, fairly easy. Then we stepped up to the 2nd mission. Jeepers this game is HARD. We got completely smashed.
Tony
I liked one recent reviewers description of descent. It’s the tactical swat in high fantasy. There has to be some efficiency of action/movement or the overlord will gain the upper hand.
So on a different note, I played Flying Colors this weekend. This is a GMT wargame that simulates Napoleonic-era fleet actions. As always with war games, I played with my son, so it can’t speak to it from a hardcore competitive perspective. But from a casual wargamer’s perspective, it’s a pretty great game. The rules are EXTREMELY light, from a GMT perspective, with just enough chrome to make it seem passable realistic; it plays quickly; and playing the game made me understood why fleets use the tactics they did, and the importance of things like “having the weather gauge” (aka being upwind of your opponent).
A war game that feels plausibly realistic, gives you insight into the period, and yet is quick to learn and play seems like almost the ideal there, so yay for them.
if you’re into the napoleonic era I assume you have heard of Napoleon’s Triumph? It’s the best wargame I’ve played so far. It manages to explain the rules within 12 pages and looks and feels elegant. But it could be to abstract for youngsters. I never played a game where I truly felt like I am the commander of an army, except this one (and The Longest Day perhaps).
as I love sea battles of this period, I’ll have a deeper look at Flying colors for sure!
Just finished playing the first scenario of Earth Reborn with my seven-year-old son. Conceptually the first scenario was interesting, but nothing about it was precisely “post-apocalyptic”. On the other hand, the mechanics are very similar to X-COM with a Last Night on Earth vibe to the gameplay as well. Setting up is a huge pain as there are irregularly-shaped pieces - maps can be incredibly complex and because of the irregular pieces the replay value is through the roof, but setting up for the first time was annoying.
Once we got into it and understood the basic mechanics, the game flowed very nicely. By the end of it, we were both excited by the potential of the game and wanted to go another round, but unboxing to finish of first scenario was about 2.5 hours and I needed a break. Definitely not disappointed & can’t wait to see some of the other scenarios (that add in more complex game mechanics).
davidf
2894
SOLD! I love the idea of a XCOM themed boardgame…and becoming more fond of Z man games by the day…too bad they got bought out.
Be advised it’s not humans versus aliens, but humans versus… well, other humans, and some zombies, and some mutants, and a mad scientist or two. There’s also no research - it’s all tactical battles.
/don’t hate me if my praise has been too high and you dislike the game
The other scenarios are even better. As you say, though, ER’s unboxing/setup time is really over the top even by the standards of these sorts of games, and that was a dealbreaker for me.
Other than that, Arabian Nights was a huge dud. A zero skill, 100% random game that recreates choose your own adventure novels within the context of a cool setting…I thought that would be fun, but it wasn’t, and in retrospect I can’t imagine what I was expecting. I think I’m just out of the target audience, because the absence of interesting decisions and the absurd wait time made me want to go bananas. It wasn’t the most miserable gaming experience ever, but it was pretty ridiculous when three of us had enough points to win and were just waiting to randomly encounter whatever would remove X ailment that was keeping us from winning or returning to Baghdad. 15 turns later, I finally won after having done nothing except be a little more consistently lucky.
Dean
2897
We played a demo of this at PAX East and all of us were thoroughly underwhelmed. The scenario we did was a bunch of zombie/mutants attacking a lab. As the zombies, we had to get the secret formula that would zombify everyone so we could take over the world.
This is Ameritrash+++. It has lots of fiddly bits, and we thought the whole combat system seemed needlessly over complicated. Even the guy running the demo from Zman sometimes forgot modifiers and such.
Also, as the zombies, we didn’t seem to have much chance of winning. We had four people playing, so each took two of the characters on a side. I had an evil scientist and a mutant with a circular saw for a hand. I couldn’t do a damn thing against the army guys until I got up close and personal, and that amounted to one attack before they dispatched me. The army guys surrounded the building we were supposed to take and took us out at range.
So glad you enjoyed it, but I would give it a 5-6 out of 10.
Zev’s still running the show, he just doesn’t have to worry about all the administrative crap now. The new owners want him to keep finding and cultivating new designs like he always has. The rate at which he puts out new games may slow, but he has published an unbelievable number of games in the past couple of years, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
You can read a brief interview with him on the subject of the sale here, if you’re curious.
Dean, what I like about the system is how modular it is. Don’t like the premade scenarios? Make up your own. I was thinking today that it might be interesting to use the mechanics and characters with the maps from Last Night On Earth: zero setup time with all the fun of the better system.
I’m a bit of a board game newbie, so maybe you might be able to help me. I was looking for something that works well with three players, do you guys have any recommendations?
I love Twilight Imperium but I felt it worked best with more than three people, and that’s pretty much all I’ve played.
