3141

Starcraft isn’t really a great 2-player game. It follows more in the vein of other FFG competitive games like Twilight Imperium and Game of Thrones:TBG, where a balance of terror between multiple parties is a significant component. The game itself heavily favors offense over defense, which is offset by the risk of getting flanked by another player if you heavily invest your forces in attacking someone. 2-player makes the game zero-sum which does not work well with this type of gameplay.

My copy is one of the first 200 prerelease copies sold at Gencon back in 2007. If it goes out of print permanently I wonder if that would increase the value (it has an extra set of Scourge units that were cast using the wrong color plastic for the bases).

3142

I guess I’m not sure why you are saying that workers are their own phase or why you think workers would come after everything else. Building units (workers, transports and anything with a mini) is all one phase.

When a player executes a Build order, he may do the fol- lowing, in this order:

  1. If the active player has an existing base on the
    active planet, he may build any number of workers and transports, and build a number of units equal to his unit build limit.
  2. If the active player has at least one friendly base or unit on the active planet, then he may upgrade his bases by purchasing one building and/or one module, placing them on his Faction Sheet.
  3. If the active player has at least one friendly unit on the active planet, but no existing base, he may build a new base on the planet.

So if you have a base there, you do 1 & 2. If you don’t you do 2 & 3. Workers, transports and units are all one phase. You can build all of them under step 1. When you are finished building all of those things you go on to step 2.

3143

You’ve got me, having step 1 be a matter of building 3 disparate things is still a single phase, it’s just clunky because I do not typically see people planning their build in that order - it’s more logical and intuitive to determine how you’re spending resources on everything else before determining what you have leftover for more workers. I still maintain the build order is the clunkiest and worst part of an otherwise excellent and streamlined game. It’s a series of blatant if-blocks masquerading as game design. I’m not sure what you’re trying to defend here, that the build mechanic was well-designed? It’s worse than building in TI, and that’s saying something.

So if your goal was simply the need to point out how wrong I was about a technical point, then congrats. I admit defeat.

3144

I just thought you were making it out to be a lot harder than it really is. Building has two distinct steps. I don’t think it’s like the best thing ever, I just didn’t think it was bad, either. Let’s hug it out.

3145

Looking forward to playing the following titles this week: Rune Age, Ra: The Dice Game, Mansions of Madness, and Troyes. :D

Most excited about Rune Age and Troyes. I’m one of those people who normally dislikes Euro-style mechanics, but when you give me dice to roll like Alien Frontiers and now Troyes, it suddenly becomes the best game ever. Can’t wait.

3146

I’ve also got an order on the way, including 7 Wonders: Leaders, Dominion: Intrigue and Space Alert. Space Alert! Can’t wait to play that one.

3147

How does Ra: The Dice Game work? I think Ra is a fantastic game as is.

3148

I’ve never played Ra, but it plays a lot like Roll Through the Ages, where you roll dice and then, based on the outcome of those dice, assign them to various areas to score points in different ways.

3149

I thought Ra: The Dice Game was a huge letdown, but people who are better than me at evaluating games claim it’s far deeper and better balanced than it first appears. I need to give it another shot.

Compared to Ra, it has the same basic scoring mechanisms (pharaohs, monuments, civs, Nile) but is a press-your-luck game and doesn’t have the auction component. It’s Yahtzee with a Reiner Knizia twist, not Ra with dice.

3150

Speaking of dice games, I picked up Quarriors at Cardhaus last night, and played it pretty much all night with by regular game group.

First two games were two player, where we read the rules for the first time and walked through a game. Even doing it like that, we were up and running in about 20 minutes.

Then another guy showed up halfway through that game, picked it up while watching, and we played with him.

Then another couple guys showed up (that we’d never seen before) and got sucked in. Pretty much people kept showing up watching, learning and getting in on the next game (or being bummed that the game was full). All in all, it seemed like a success.

Essentially, for those that haven’t heard of it, it’s generally described as “Dominion, with dice”, a dice-based deck-building game, and that description is pretty damn accurate. I’m not the biggest fan of Dominion in the world, but this scratched my itch for such things just fine. Don’t get me wrong- I think Dominion is a well made innovative game, and I’ll play a game every now and then, but I pretty much never want to play 15 hands of it in a night like some of my gamer acquaintances do- 1 or 2, tops, will do. I liked Quarriors a bit more because in some ways it’s a bit more forgiving- even if you’ve built a pretty good engine and culled your ‘deck’ down to make it work effectively, you can still be left up to the whim of the dice. Unfortunately, it seems a bit off-balance for 4 player games- some people on BGG are reporting a ‘runaway loser’ problem with 4 players, basically meaning that one player fails to score early (thus helping him cull his deck), which prevents him from scoring later (further preventing culling, etc.). We saw that happen in a few games. In hindsight, however, some of it may have been mitigated by experience- seeing the position you’re in, and taking steps to turn that into a strength (as long as the right cards are out). What I’d like to see in the future of the game is more cards that allow you to adjust the faces on your dice (turning them up/down a face, swapping them, flipping them, etc) like Alien Frontiers.

I also picked up Cadwallon:City of Thieves, mostly because I’m a whore for Rackham/Confrontation/Cadwallon stuff. I recently heard about the closeout sale on all the pre-painted plastic Confrontation stuff over at miniaturemarket.com and have spent far, far too much money on it. CoT looks light and not terribly thematic if you know anything about the setting, but might be a good beer-n-pretzels sort of game.

The other thing I grabbed while at Cardhaus (and most of the reason I went up there in the first place) was the latest Twilight Imperium expansion. I keep trying to get it to the table, but the game seems to fall through at the last minute. Hopefully someday soon.

3151

We just had our first game of TI3 with the new expansion this past weekend and everyone enjoyed the additions quite a bit - the political stage most of all seemed to gain a good bit of weight, even though you’re still voting on a lot of the same laws as in pre-expansion. I think it was mainly that a lot of delegates can give you bonuses if you get your way (or sometimes not) in votes.

The one weakness we all felt, however, is the new Trade card. Its ability to aquire a mercinary is not enough incentive to take the card - nowhere near a good as the old one where you got three trade goods and your full trade value. We’ve decided to play with Trade II in the future except add on the ability to draw a mercenary as well.

3152

Got Rune Age today and played three sessions, each of a different scenario, and I’m really liking it so far.

Our first game was a co-op scenario where we played as a team to defeat the event deck. Sometimes they were enemies, like in Thunderstone, we had to beat, other times the enemy actually attacked us. There were also cards that had us make tough decisions, like discarding a bunch of cards or having your home realm take damage. It was very, very tough, with us just squeaking by with a victory. Both of our home realms just had 1 HP remaining.

We opted to play the Dragonlord scenario second, with victory either by defeating the objective (an 18 strength card) or by defeating the other player by taking out their home realm. I think this scenario really opened up the game for us, allowing more strategy and ways of using our cards. I actually ended up winning by making a surprise attack on my opponent’s weakened home realm.

The last scenario we played was the more passive, build a monument scenario. Players aren’t allowed to attack each other’s home realms (they can attack one another’s cities however) and must conduct a strategy of acquiring as much gold as they can. I initially thought the only strategy would be to buy all the gold cards you can, but the event cards change that, with enemies that offer tempting gold rewards should you defeat them in combat. I ended up losing this one due to a powerful mind control card that allows a player to steal a card from their opponent. I just happened to have a juicy ‘3’ gold card in my hand when this happened, giving them just enough to build their monument.

If you’ve ever played Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, Rune Age takes the scenario system it has and combines it with a Dominion/Thunderstone deck building game to create a really unique experience every time you play. It doesn’t feel bulky like most deck building games either; setup is quick and easy and there’s little to no downtime with most games taking no more than 20-30 minutes.

You could almost call it Runewars: The Card Game because most of the artwork, how each factions plays, and many of the same concepts, like spending influence to buy neutral cards and attacking cities to gain influence, are used in Rune Age. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing either; I think they really pulled it off in bringing the same concepts of Runewars to a card game form.

Fantasy Flight seems committed to expanding the game too, just as we’ve seen the multitude of expansions for games like Dominion and Thunderstone. I own and love Thunderstone and it makes me wonder if it’s worth keeping and (more importantly) playing both, especially when I can’t even keep up with the expansions for one deck building game.

Anyway, that’s my short review of Rune Age. It’s surprisingly good.

3153

Curse you for that Rune Age review. I’m addicted to deck builders and had no idea this was available, and now I have to get my hands on it.

My copy of Quarriors is stuck with my Summoner Wars master set preorder, which went from a ship date of August to October. FML.

3154

I played Rune Age over the weekend myself, and yeah, it’s fun. I lost the Dragonlord scenario due to the event cards picking on me almost exclusively. I also had a blast playing Death Angel for the first time.

3155

Oof, that is not good news! I was so looking forward to kicking off September game nights with the Master Set…

3156

If you pre-ordered directly from the company you’re all right. They are shipping those copies over via air freight. Sounds like they had a perfect storm with their printer that caused all this. The game was delivered print-ready to them in May and they’ve dropped the ball repeatedly since.

3157

I’m an Amerikaner here in Cologne for Gamescom and so I had to stop by a German boardgame store! Brave New World was a very nice shop not far from the center of town. Frankly, it looked almost identical to any American hobby game store.

My goal was to find something that A) I can’t get in the states and B) would fit in my already overpacked bags. Oh and C) I knew was a good game. And I found the perfect games: Verrater and Muerterer, two strategy card games. (Bruno Faidutti baldly stole the character selection system for Citadels from Verrater.)

Heartbreaker was not being able to get Dschunke (Michael Schacht) because it was too large… Would have loved to have gotten a copy of Colonia in Cologne, too!

3158

Mysterio and I are going to try to play Conquest of Nerath online. We both own a copy of the game so we can set up and moanuever boards…Mysteria is the dark alliance and, fittingly, I am sweetness n light.

3159

A friend and I just played Railroad Barons using 1080 webcams and Skype. I’m in California and she’s in Oregon. It worked pretty well! So we are planning on playing A Few Acres of Snow next week and then eventually 1860.

3160

That’s awesome. :)