Since when did I change genders? As I said before, evil always triumphs over good, because good is stupid.
Very cool!
wahoo
3162
Technology is both good/bad for boardgamers. I’m no longer doomed to try to play against myself like when I was a teen ager. Or have games bought but never played!
OTOH, the substitution of xbox live for boardgames is no fun for me. And I still prefer face to face but…
Otoh, it’s a good thing and I feel pretty sure that the skype type games will be common place in a few years.
omg Lorini has to tell us about A Few Acres. I want to get it but I’m kind of holding out for the not direct from publisher price.
For years when our friend group got together we’d mostly play video games, usually Halo. Our friend Andrew is not so much into the video games but he’d play to humor us and pretty much get slaughtered. Now we’ve been playing a lot of board games and he’s totally getting his revenge. Dude kicks my ass in Power Grid every time. Thought I had a chance last night but late in phase 2 I was completely locked in with a good chunk of money but nowhere to expand. If I could have built 3 more spots I would have ended the game and won but unfortunately for me the game went one extra turn and I lost. Blerg. I still <3 that game, though.
Also played a couple of games of 7 Wonders last night. I came in second and first. I’m getting a lot better at not spending every single resource on army. In fact I’m tempted to just stop spending on military completely and see if I can make up for it with other stuff. It’s only -6, right?
We didn’t play with the Leaders expansion because I just picked it up but after looking through it this morning I definitely want to give it a try soon.
Axis and Allies must be played Lorini-style over video skype. All of those electronic versions don’t match the glorious thunder of a dozen dice hitting a box lid. Or, for that matter, the wretched cursing when you drop said dice over eastern Europe.
Board games are the next generation of consoles! In high definition and real 3D. Yeah!
Anecdote/warning from one recent board game group evening: Let’s say it’s 1am, you’ve just finished the main game(s) of the night, and someone says: “Before we go, let’s just try this little card game I just bought: Fluxx. Looks like a quick one.” Be aware. a) Your half-drunk 1am brain will hurt a lot. b) It might not be very quick at all. But luckily: c) It’s hilarious.
Power Grid is a great game, but I’m really not fond of the ending. It pretty much always comes down to which turn it ends, with everyone induced into “the world is ending tomorrow” decisions to vie for victory.
Are you guys playing the power plant replacement expansion? If not, check that out. It makes the plants much more balanced, so there’s less of the “He got the Coal 25 plant, he wins” effect, and in general a much more difficult time figuring out which plants are worth the most.
Wait. So how is that not awesome?
Are you guys playing the power plant replacement expansion? If not, check that out. It makes the plants much more balanced, so there’s less of the “He got the Coal 25 plant, he wins” effect, and in general a much more difficult time figuring out which plants are worth the most.
I keep meaning to pick those up. I gotta remember to do that next week at the FLGS. I did buy a couple of the expansion maps but we haven’t used any of them yet since I still have a few friends who have only played once or twice.
So you think we should just ditch the original set of plants and use the expansion right away?
Yes. The expansion plants should be the original plants.
OK. Thanks, guys, I’m on it!
Yeah. We finished playing Power Grid at 11PM on a Thursday night and then we just “had” to play Arkham. I really did not mind the fact that it was one of our quickest loses ever. Atlach-Nacha plus three investigators equals frowny face.
Often I find it essentially random who wins, with which turn it ends on being the primary determinant of the victor. Rather like getting to the end and flipping a coin to see who wins. A bit of randomness I’m fine with, but it feels like too much for such an otherwise deterministic game. Plus it can lead to some pretty severe analysis paralysis.
I keep meaning to pick those up. I gotta remember to do that next week at the FLGS. I did buy a couple of the expansion maps but we haven’t used any of them yet since I still have a few friends who have only played once or twice.
So you think we should just ditch the original set of plants and use the expansion right away?
Absolutely. The expansion deck is entirely superior, and does a great job of dampening the runaway victor effect. As Tracy says, it really should have been the original deck, and I think of it more as errata than an expansion.
JM1
3171
It costs you and benefits your opponents, plus there’s extra cards that take advantage of military. I really don’t think it’s worth ignoring unless you know of a very strong alternative. I think the secret is making sure you have just enough military.
I will strive to be the middle bear of military in 7 Wonders.
Also, I just realized that I can fit the entire base game plus expansion in the expansion box if I leave out the rule book for the base game. That’s pretty sweet.
Alan_Au
3173
I find the key with military is either 1. spending just enough, or 2. opting out while your neighbor overspends, maybe in an arms race with the other-side neighbor. Really it all comes down to points/card.
Lorini
3174
A Few Acres of Snow is basically a card driven wargame with a deck building element. This means that the overall strategies of each side are ‘known’ before the game starts. The British have a lot of money but not much room to expand, while the money for the French is a lot more dicey but they can win the game relatively easily by just expanding. Coming from a Euro-strategy perspective, the game develops slowly. Think Dominion but with all the costs of the cards increased by 30% and your same starting hand. This may end up being A Few Acres of Snow’s downfall for me because I like games that have a faster pace then what it is presenting.
Outside of that issue, the game is very good. It allows for a lot of choices on how you want to go about winning within the parameters I mentioned before. However, do pick up the cards that allows for deck culling and extra card drawing as soon as you can afford them, and the French player needs the Trader card otherwise she will be at a real disadvantage through most of the game.
The two games that I’ve played so far have been pretty close. Like I said, France basically wants to win by running out of cubes or discs and Britain wants to win by successfully sieging France. Britain will take the sea territories that France starts with but I don’t think that’s a death knell for the French. The French basically need to fend off the British at Quebec and head for Detroit.
Mayfair will eventually carry the game so if you don’t want to pay $70, just wait for their edition.
Lorini
3175
Noting about the video gaming: We’re both using the Logitech C910.. This allows us to put the webcam on a tripod above the table and then use headsets to talk with each other over Skype and on a laptop. I thought it worked pretty well. Lorna had her setup better in that her the back of her laptop was facing the webcam, while I had mine to the side. Next time I’ll have my laptop faced like hers and things should go even smoother. We eventually plan to play multi-player games like this too, so I’ll keep you guys posted on how it goes.
Dean
3176
Back when we did our twelve hour TI3.0 game, during setup someone said, “There’s got to be an app to keep all this straight.” Some quick tapping later, everyone had a copy of the TI3.0 tech manager.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ti3-tech-manager/id443831978?mt=8
And it helped keep track of tech and it was okay (though I thought it made it a little harder to plot or plan where you were going with tech, since you can only see what you can get next, not what you want three techs down the road.)
So on Sunday I got an Android phone, and replaced all my apps very quickly, except there was no TI3 Tech Manager for android.
So I emailed the guy who made it on Monday, and asked if there were any plans to port it to Android. I told him he had one surefire sale and a standing invite to play TI3 in Boston if he ever got out here (he’s in Iowa). He said he’d see what he could do.
He finished it yesterday, and it’s on the Android marketplace today.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.chaddington.ti3tech
So, because he was such a nice guy and ported it over in a couple of days, I figured I’d pimp his software. Since my boardgame group are all Mac-philes, I come to you, Qt3 boardgame geeks, to go support this guy.
The app is a buck, btw.
Quarriors and Rune Age both sound really cool.
Reldan
3178
My goal generally is to aim for 3.5 points per card, as with 18 cards taken in each game that amounts to 63 points, which is around where I typically see winning scores fall in the base game.
Military has a possible value of up to 24 points (18 points at most and -6 points at least). At most you might be willing to spend 6 cards towards it, but only if that guaranteed you total domination all game long. On the reverse side, if you were not in a good position to win all the military showdowns, it’s hard to justify spending any cards simply to try and not get negative victory points.
The metrics shift quite a bit with more players of course, as the impact of granting negative points to neighbors is less advantageous for you the more players there are in the game that you cannot affect.
Played four board games today: Arkham Horror, Troyes, Rune Age, and Death Angel.
Arkham Horror session went terrible for the investigators. I think the more “stuff” I add to the game, the harder and less fun it gets. I did Kingsport + Curse + Miskatonic U. institution with Bohkrug as the ancient one and pretty much got our asses handed to us on a silver platter. Next time it’s going to be base Arkham and a few things on the side to make it more manageable. Way too much crap going on for two people to handle. :(
Next up was Troyes! What I really like about Troyes is that it’s short: 4 rounds of play and you’re done. However, it’s packed, absolutely packed with hard decisions to make. The big problem with this game and any game like it (Race for the Galaxy for example) is that it takes many, many plays to develop a full understanding and thus a competent strategy of the different cards and actions you can take on a given turn. I feel like at least the first 2 or 3 games are going to be purely experimental and it’s for that reason I can’t make any real judgment on whether or not I like it yet. Alien Frontiers is a freakin’ cakewalk compared to Troyes. Damn!
Played a quick round of Rune Age (took only about 20 minutes) and it felt so refreshing after Troyes. Still loving this one after 4 plays now. Awesome game.
Last was Death Angel and, despite the retarded rulebook, we found this one to still be quite fun and engaging. We won again…4-0 now. I thought this game was suppose to be hard? :P
JM1
3180
Death Angel IS hard - you’re either incredibly lucky or you’re Doing It Wrong ™ :)
