2981

Conquest of Nerath is good. It’s firing both Runewars and Nexus Ops in my collection.

2982

I want to hear opinions after a number of play throughs. I was thinking the same thing when I first heard about it, but I appears to have no random set up?

It looked a little too Risk-like for me, but I’d love to be wrong.

2983

It’s a lot closer to Axis & Allies rather than Risk.

2984

Anyone here have any experience with Formula D? I’m not a big tabletop guy generally, but this one caught my attention. Just wondering if anyone has any impressions?

2985

Yeah, same general idea though. I’m worried that it is too light.

2986

The random set up is in the Event cards, which change from game to game. The lack of a random set up means that you can actually play the same side for a few times and explore what they were trying to do with each race. It’s zero like Risk except you take over areas. But a lot of games (nearly any battle game) do that. After a few games I might rename it “Fight for the Center of the Board” but I’ll see :).

2987

Chris, not to give you even more analysis paralysis, but you might also try Gloom and Red November. Gloom is an Edward Gorey-like card game in which you do awful things to your own family so they’re the most miserable when they die. In Red November, players try to escape from a doomed goblin submarine; smart/lucky players can betray everyone at the very end, but it’s otherwise mostly cooperative.

Pandemic is a really good choice though. I personally liked-didn’t-love Guillotine, but my co-players adored it.

Wild shot: I just found out that Cheapass Games has gone Free-To-Play. One of the freshly-available games is the original real-time card game Falling, some of the most fun I’ve had in mixed gamer and non-gamer groups. (It’s probably too loud to play with sleeping kids, though.)

2988

CoN is fantasy Axis and Allies with a couple added game elements. I’m not just saying that it’s similar - it’s to the extent that if they had branded this as Axis & Allies: Nerath I would not have batted an eye. You’ve got dragons instead of bombers, warships instead of transports, siege engines instead of armor, and infantry instead of… infantry. They even include the exact same grey and red plastic chips for designating multiples of the same stacked unit.

The added elements:

  1. Event deck for each side. Adds a touch more randomness to what might happen on a given turn, but since you only draw one per turn the impact isn’t overwhelming. It’s a fun little mechanic and allows the sides some semblance of asymmetry (and the average strength of the cards is how they mitigate the inherent advantages and disadvantages of the turn order).

  2. Dungeons and Treasures. This is the replacement for the technologies from A&A - you instead spend money to buy hero units that you can use to attack dungeons - which really just means you roll dice and if you do so well enough you can get a Treasure card each turn (which buffs a random unit for the owner).

  3. Alternate Short Victory Conditions - The “long” game victory condition is to, surprise surprise, conquer the capitols of your enemies (does this sound familiar?). However, they provide a victory point track you can instead use to determine the winner by playing to a preset number of points.

I’m really not trying to rag on the game. I actually liked the game - a part of me also likes Axis & Allies. This is probably better than Axis & Allies in that it feels a bit more refined and balanced and the event cards are quirky enough to be fun. To me, though, the game is like Axis & Allies in the way that Words With Friends is like Scrabble.

2989

I would just add that it’s nothing like RISK but I have no A&A experience to contrast it with. I think it’s a game where more dice would have been handy, some of the bit choices are weird (why is the gold like that? just to make storage strange?), I have trouble envisioning the starting setup requirements allowing for huge amounts of diversity, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with how in a game where a one good or bad turn can change everything before you’ve even moved there’s really nothing to prevent the rich getting richer. But it does what it’s supposed to in terms of allowing you to clearly envision the odds of a battle and move your troops aggressively with a minimum of hassle, so you can spend four solid rounds beating the hell out of each other before starting over. I liked playing in an alliance, and I’m curious about free for all. I can’t ever imagine preferring this kind of game to something like Chaos, though.

Battleship: Galaxies was nuts. For one thing, I didn’t realize it was literally a Battleship franchise game until we opened it and someone asked me about that. I know, it’s obvious in retrospect, but Battles- and space just have different connotations to me now. In any case, the actual battleship part is mostly cosmetic apart from providing a very streamlined way to deliver hits and track damage. I think there’s a good amount of strategy in the wings if you get the hang of balancing your the power of your capital ships with their intense vulnerability; the grid system does an interesting job of making big, slow targets feel like big, slow targets. The choice between investing in card upgrades and more ships is nice as well.

HOWEVER: this is a 2 player game. Whoever rebranded this as a 2-4 player game is a sadist. Between wait time and the Sophie’s choice of sockpuppeting or having a schizophrenic break in the command structures of ships that are designed to work with each other it’s just not solid with more players, and I can’t envision it becoming better over other scenarios.

2990

It’s fun, and it works particularly well with a giant pile of people, which few games do. They have both “simple” and “advanced” games, and while the advanced game is better, the simple game in this case does work.

2991

Formula D (Previously known as Formula De) is a great racing game if all your players really like rolling dice to move. There are some that don’t like it, but I find it fun to play the averages to sneak into a turn and get a roll up on the other racers. I liked it when we played it as a group for about a year, having track schedule and points earned for placing.

Pitchcar can be a nice alternative, if you like dexterity games.

2992

I never thought Battleship Galaxies was anything but a two player game. I’m very curious to find out what people think of Nerath as two player vs four player. Which will ultimately be the better experience?

2993

I had the chance to play Flying Frog’s Fortune and Glory this weekend, and it is great. Everything that you should love about a FF game: streamlined rules, zany genre characters, fantastic cards. It’s also comparatively kibble light, which is nice after A Touch of Evil, but still has 8-10 decks of cards.

The theme for this one is 30s pulp adventure, where you try to collect artifacts and sell them for Fortune tokens in order to win the game. The artifacts are generated by two card decks, one giving the the first part of the name (The Ring/The Mask/The Temple/The Armor) and the Fortune value, the other giving a description (of Poseidon/of Power/of Medusa/of the Crimson Hand) and the number of dangers you must encounter to reach said artifact.

Dangers are double-sided cards drawn from the bottom of a deck and have genre traps and encounters: car chases, sneaking onto zeppelins, nightclub rendezvous, and all sorts of “ancient tomb boobytrap” type things. If you fail at a danger, you flip the card and a cliffhanger is revealed, which your character must resolve next turn or be KO’d. These are specific to the danger (but not always the same cliffhanger for each danger) and are things like sinking in quicksand after failing the quicksand challenge, “Silhouette of Being Stabbed” after failing to escape the assassin, and if you get lost in the ice caves, there’s a yeti attack.

Along the way you compete with the other players as well as the Chicago Mob and, naturally, Nazis. Nothing like beating up Nazis. There’s also a co-op rules set where players work together to stop the mob or the Nazis from gathering artifacts, but we didn’t play that.

We got through a 4 player game of first timers in about 3 hours, and I’m betting an hour or so could be trimmed off that for a standard playthrough so it goes pretty fast. Each phase (movement, action, etc) is done by each player before moving on, so you don’t have a long wait before you do something again, and there’s typically a need to roll against another player for some kind of fight/opposition before too long anyway.

A solid thumbs up on this one, and a day one purchase when it comes out in September (or earlier if you go to PAX or Gencon).

2994

And yet it says 2-4 on the box, and I’m confident it’s not uncommon for people to think that it works as a 4p game. That’s what I wanted to correct based on my initial impression.

2995

Anyone had the chance to play Star Trek Expeditions or The Ares Project? Star Trek is kind of appealing since it’s coop and The Ares Project sounds like a real gamer’s game with a separate manual for each of the four factions.

2996

Both are really good games for what they try to be. There are some various optional rules for Formula D that can make it a bit more interesting, but it’s not required to have fun. My version is old so maybe rules have tweaked. The biggest problem in the past was in high gears the range was just too random for some folks.

Pitch Car (I have Carabande, it’s predecessor) is great fun. It’s something you can set up before a party and folks can drop in, do a couple laps, and drop out.

2997

I played (and won) my first game each of Carson City and A Game of Thrones (no expansions) last week and really enjoyed both of them.

Carson City is a cool game from 2009 about building an old west town with a combination of role selection, worker placement and tile placement with dice rolling to settle disputes. All of this happens over four turns and then the game ends. I haven’t played Caylus but from what I’ve heard Carson City sounds like Caylus with dice and shooting, so that’s pretty good. I sort of wonder if 4 turns is too few since the game ends just as you get your little empire going but then again the short game does keep the pressure on to not ignore victory points so it’s probably just about right. Really solid, I liked it a lot.

124 is a pretty high ranking on boardgamegeek but unless it really breaks down after several plays I’m surprised Carson City isn’t ranked even higher. I guess cathedrals > the old west on BGG.

A Game of Thrones is pretty great, too! We played with 4 people and half way through the first game it was obvious that you really need that fifth player, but I didn’t mind because it was a learning game and hey, not having the Greyjoys around really worked out well for me (Lannister). I’d love to play some more with a full group or try that one four player expansion.

I’d love to buy both games but the one guy who would probably be around for Carson City hates it and AGoT has been out of print forever. Apparently it’s getting a reprint soon so I may check it out then. In the meantime I need to get some friends watching the TV show to get them interested in it.

Oh right, and another quick Arkham report. Played a game with Spoofy and Mrs. Spoofy today and we beat Eihort (brood token guy) with base + Dunwich boards down. We won in the final boss fight but we were using the epic battle cards. Those things rock! Glad I picked up Kingsport before it got hard to find.

2998

I want to talk storage solutions. Do any of you remove the games from their boxes and put them into smaller containers? Obviously when you have boards like in CITOW it’s not really a good idea, but 7 Wonders has a huge amount of wasted space - you could fit the game into a rectangular box just a little bit bigger than the Wonder boards themselves, as long as you weren’t averse to folding the rulebook.

Agricola could also use a better box, although it’s not huge to begin with. Space Hulk is another one with a ton of wasted space. On the plus side I’ve managed to fit everything into one Arkham Horror box, which is good going.

So, does anyone have any smart solutions, or do you keep everything in the original boxes?

2999

I really like the Games of Thrones system with the hidden orders, and I think it could be aces with any number of players, even though the game board is clearly built for five players. But I’m a bit surprised that “hidden orders” mechanic hasn’t been borrowed as widely as, say, the card offices from Puerto Rico, Twilight Imperium, and Carson City.

Ergo, you didn’t “win” because that game didn’t “count”.

-Tom, one of the players who therefore didn’t “lose”

3000

The extent of my smart solutions is putting a simple divider into my Space Hulk Box to allow me to have neat stacks of tiles on one side and segregated plastic figurines on the other to allow for quick setup and storage. Other than that, I occasionally re-cut or fold the insides of original sets to allow for expansions, such as making space in the Cosmic Encounter box for expansion 1 & 2, fitting all three Battlestar items into one box, and then there’s building on Tracy’s original tacklebox setup inside of the TI3 box to accomodate the new stuff.

Since I take my games to semi-public gaming things fairly often, it really wouldn’t make much sense to get completely rid of the box without a tremendous amount of work (and then potentially getting screwed by the next expansion). I have found that before traveling an “air box” like For Sale’s oversized container works well for fitting a bunch of card-oriented games compactly, but that’s the only time I go full ziploc.