So no news on Summoner Wars iOS? Boo.
So, question.
If I find that I really enjoy Ascension, is Dominion worth a look? For the most part I will be playing with two people, with occasions of playing with four. Will it play well with just owning one copy of the game, or is it one of those things that requires getting multiple copies to play with more people?
Also, is the Lord of the Rings card game superfun in and of itself, or as a Star Wars nerd who can give or take Tolkien should I just go ahead and wait for FFG to release their Star Wars game next year?
Case
3122
Dominion was the first of the deck building games, and is a little simpler than some of the newer titles. While sometimes it can feel like 4-player solitaire, the cards often work together in cool and unexpected ways. The theme is a little thin, though. It’s easy to teach, though, and is a great gateway drug.
LotR LCG is a co-op game and can be hard to beat. The real problem is that Fantasy Flight is trying to milk the players… charging more for an unnecessarily huge box, putting just enough in the game to push you to expansions, etc.
Dominion is worth a look and comes with everything you need for four people. If you buy Intrigue you can play with up to 6 in a single game or even split into two groups of 4. Though it isn’t the world’s best interface you can play Dominion online for free.
Dominion is an easy game to learn, but weak on the gameplay compared to other deck builders. I find ascension similarly easy for new players to pick up and there’s a lot more going on there. Dominion suffers from card balance issues as around half of the cards in most sets are not worth buying, ever, because money upgrades are more powerful.
Vesper
3125
No Summoner Wars on iOS was shown at GenCon. They said it would be out in September/October though.
Orsson
3126
The guy who covers iOS stuff for Boardgamegeek got an early look at the Summoner Wars port (scroll down the post a bit).
Hello everyone,
My turn to jump into the frey. : ) My wife and I are getting back into boardgames after being out of them for a bit. We played Arkham Horror until 3am last night with Merryprankster, and the weekend before kept both Merryprankster and Omniscia here until midnight. Anyway, we’re down with a lot of rules (like to get into something you can really chew into and debate), and we’re looking for something that we can do either one of two things… or both.
1: Spend a couple hours playing just the two of us
2: Something persistent that we can leave setup somewhere and come back to once or twice a week, but still has an end… and is meant for 2 players.
D&D isn’t really going to work, because we want something co-operative, as well as guided. So, if anyone knows some great 2 player games, please, let us know! We’d greatly appreciate it! :D
-Inspectigater
Mrenda
3128
For just two players my mind instantly goes to card games. Any of the Living Card Games or games based on CCGs should work, like the Cthulhu LCG, Warhammer Invasion, A Game of Thrones LCG, War of Honor, even Race for the Galaxy would work. Otherwise I’d go with either Memoir 44 or Battlelore, whether you prefer a WW2 or fantasy setting.
2: Something persistent that we can leave setup somewhere and come back to once or twice a week, but still has an end… and is meant for 2 players.
D&D isn’t really going to work, because we want something co-operative, as well as guided. So, if anyone knows some great 2 player games, please, let us know! We’d greatly appreciate it! :D
-Inspectigater
Co-operative, persistent and two player is a tough ask. The new edition of Descent is what comes to mind, it’s a dungeon crawl type game and it’s bringing in rules so you don’t need someone to play an evil overlord, so you can play against the board. I think it’s also bringing in (or already has) persistence rules. If you leave out the co-operative aspect, there are tonnes of wargames, both miniature and board game style that are two player and persistent with campaign rules.
I like Knizia’s Lord of the Rings quite a bit. It’s abstracted, but does a great job of evoking the narrative, and can be really challenging if you set the difficulty right.
Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Arshdalon are D&D-light – tactical co-op dungeon crawls that can be played in an evening.
Prophecy is a pretty good fantasy adventure game in the style of Talisman, but tighter in some ways better designed. It can run up to 3-4 hours, so on nights when we’ve played it, my girlfriend and I have done what you mention – left the game set up so we could pick up where we left off. It’s a competitive game, but think there’s a co-op variant in the rulebook.
Pandemic is a decent co-op that has you racing around the world trying to thwart outbreaks, but it is prone to the alpha player syndrome, where one person can analyze the situation better and just tells the other player(s) what to do. A fair number of co-op games suffer from this issue, actually.
Defenders of the Realm is what happens when you take Pandemic and illustrate it with Larry Elmore paintings. Haven’t played it (can’t get past paying $80 for a box god-awful graphic design), but everyone I know who has loves it.
I’ve also never played Ghost Stories, but it’s highly rated, and apparently brutally difficult.
Space Alert is a nutty and fun co-op game wherein you crew a space ship in a crisis situation, programming your characters’ moves in real time as prompted by an audio CD (that randomizes some elements), and then play out the scenario step by step to see how you fared. Hilarity and death by space amoeba usually ensue.
Two-player co-op to me says LOTR CCG.
On an unrelated note, I played Starcraft today with my son. Or rather, not a whole game, but a couple of turns of it. This game is intimidating to learn, because there are like eight different kinds of tokens, four decks of cards, plus a zillion plastic minis to go with the 45-page rulebook – but it’s actually pretty straightforward. A phase where you place your order tokens, a phase where you execute the orders (of which there are three kinds to have chosen from), and then the necessary cleanup/resolution phase. Combat is simple, buliding is straightforward, resource management is simple.
Without having even finished the game, I can’t say much about it, but as a FFG big box game goes, its complexity seems to have been all subsumed into a pretty elegant and streamlined system, so I approve that far.
Reldan
3131
I’m not sure that I agree that building is straightforward. That’s probably the weakest part of the Starcraft design - executing a build order generally takes longer than everything else you do during a turn combined, and it’s comprised of about four different phases of building that have to be done in order. It makes executing a build in TI seem simple in comparison.
I really do like the game and am glad you’re finding it enjoyable.
Orsson
3132
A recent thread on BGG explored two-player co-op options, actually.
I’d also put a plug in for two absolutely classic 2 player games: Twilight Struggle and 1960: The Making of the President. Similar mechanics (the games share a designer) and quality, so you can easily pick based on your preference for the subject matter (Cold War vs. US politics). The games are quite deep (with TS perhaps having the longer legs) and can be left on the table and returned to quite easily (the on-board turn markers and unplayed cards in your hand can help you jump right back in). Each game can generally be played in 2 hours or less, though, once you’ve gotten through a first session.
I just put in a birthday order for Combat Commander: Europe (I hope I actually find somebody to play this with) and Wrath of Arshdalon. That last one can be played solo, but I can also get the lady to play with me.
Inspectigater, if you liked Arkham you might also want to look into Elder Sign. It’s not out yet but it should be soon. It’s designed by the same guy who did Arkham and reuses a lot of the characters/settings/mechanics but gets rid of the board and most of the cards and adds in more dice. I haven’t played it yet but I’m kind of hoping it’s a little bit faster to set up and take down so it might be good when you want some Arkham on a slightly smaller scale.
It’s really only two phases, though, depending on if you have a base there. If you do it’s units then modules/buildings. If you don’t it’s modules/buildings then a base and the “build a base” phase is essentially spending 2 minerals to put a base on the active planet, it takes about five seconds.
If you’re thinking ahead about what you want to build the build order really doesn’t take long. It definitely shouldn’t take longer than combat, where you have to move pieces off of the map and draw cards and then figure out who kills what and then figure out what to do with the remaining units. Combat is probably the most complicated thing but since it’s also a lot of fun it’s kind of hard to complain about.
StarCraft is the bestest.
Starcraft definitely looks pretty interesting. I’ve played my fair share of RTS’s and hadn’t thought to look at them in boardgame sense, but now that I see it, it makes total sense. I’m interested in it. I imagine, just like the game, it’s competitive, though?
Thanks for the replies, definitely some interesting stuff so far. I can definitely say, however, that we’re not at all enthralled by CCGs. : ) We appreciate all the recommendations so far.
Otagan
3136
For the most part, yes. There are a few scenarios in the expansion that have different dynamics than the base game, but don’t go into Starcraft thinking you’re going to get a co-op experience as you will be sorely disappointed.
Great game, though. I recommend it as well.
StarCraft is great stuff but it does require a little bit of an investment. I’d say the worst thing about it is that it can seem very overwhelming when you teach it and when you play your first game or two there are 9 million options to choose from. Likely you’ll be staring at all of the pieces trying to figure out if it’s better to build a zergling or purchase a module for your base.
But in that sense I guess it is a lot like a regular RTS, isn’t it? In your first few games you kind of try to build a little bit of everything, then you refine those choices. The difference is that with a real RTS you can play 30 games in a night and with a board game some of us are lucky to play one game a week. However, if you stick with StarCraft I think you’re getting a fantastic game full of big nerdy space battles with lots of pieces, lots of action and lots of cool, interesting choices.
You’re right that SC is highly competitive, though. In fact, when combat happens most of the advantages and choices are given to the attacker so the game really wants you to be aggressive. Turtling will not work. However, because the rules limit the number of units that you’re allowed to attack with and because of the semi-randomness in how combat works the defender still has a chance.
Which reminds me that I love the combat in StarCraft. There are no dice, instead you’ll have a deck of cards and you’ll play those to determine your attack strength. So there is randomness in which cards you have but you also get a chance to mitigate that randomness by choosing which cards to use for which units. And the game also allows you to research technologies, which allows you to add new cards to your deck that can make some of your units even more powerful. So semi-random abilities based on a deck you can customize. Totally awesome.
So while it is very competitive the good news is that one big attack isn’t going to end the whole game. Usually the two of you are going to be attacking each other all over the place and I think it’s probably harder to get mad about losing a battle when there are so many fights and each one opens up more opportunities for both sides. You’ll spend a lot of time figuring it out and your first game will last forever but if any of this sounds interesting StarCraft is definitely worth a look.
P.S. Just buy the expansion with the base game. It only adds a few new rules that really aren’t that hard to figure out but it also rebalances all of the units in the game, adds a few new ones and adds the super important defend token and leadership cards. The expansion will add 5 minutes to your rules explanation but it’s worth it. And hey, if you end up hating the game just hang on to it for a bit. Seems like FFGs relationship with Blizzard may not last very long so the game could go out of print forever and then in a few years you can sell it for 3x what you paid :)
Wow! That sounds really interesting! Maybe we’ll have to give this a look, even though it’s competitive! I always did like talking incessant trash, even though most of the time I lose! :D
Good to know, probably wouldn’t have bought the expansion, but knowing how incredibly important balance is in an RTS, I can see how just flat out nabbing the expansion is a BFD.
We’ve also been looking a little bit at some of the Dungeon Crawlers (like Descent) mentioned here. Anyone care to elaborate on those?
Also, I was peroosing around the interwebs and found this little guy Inkognito. It sounds interesting enough… not good for 2 people, but still a curious concept. Anyone have experience with it?
Yeah, Starcraft is very PVP, kind of shockingly so to my Euro-trained tastes. Player elimination and everything, even. This is the biggest cliche in the book, but I think if I were a kid, this would be the game I’d want to play instead of Risk.
Reldan
3140
There’s also Build Workers which has to come after you build everything else, which makes 4 discrete phases of building that must be done in order with the caveat that you only ever do 3 of them depending on the base status of the planet you execute the build order on.
I’m not saying it’s rocket science, but compared to how slick the rest of the game flows it feels clunky. Planning ahead is great, but since you don’t know what other players are doing until they happen, and you can’t always execute your build order at your leisure during the turn, you may need to on-the-fly modify your decisions, which takes time. Some people are also just really bad at making flexible plans and will wait until they do the build to reevaluate the board position.
I really do like the game. If you can name something in the game design that works worse than Building does, let me know - all I’m saying is that I think it’s the weakest link in a great game.
