ckessel
3621
I stand by my recommendations. It’s arrogant of you to play thread cop, passing judgement on which recommendations are worthy of consideration.
You started the conflict, not me. I haven’t given one word of critique on anyone else’s recommendations.
You could have simply given just your recommendations. Or just said “Dragons haven’t been a problem for me”. No, it wasn’t sufficient for you to give your own take, you had to go further and piss on someone else’s take.
I’ve never played the game, and I have no dog in this fight.
Where is the arrogance in disagreeing with your opinion that dragons are overpowered? It seems to me you’re overly emotionally invested in your house rules. He’s not playing “thread cop,” he’s saying that he disagrees with your assessment of the game balance, and that new players would be better served learning the game as written. Seems like a good idea to me. If they come to the same conclusion you did, they can always nerf the dragons after they’ve learned the normal rules.
Your house rules are, in effect, a critique of the game rules. Why should discussion of game balance be off limits anyway?
ckessel
3623
He said my recommendations were “not appropriate for someone who’s never played the game. Period.”
That seems to be pretty clearly arrogantly dismissive.
Yes, the OP asked for recommendations. I gave them. The OP didn’t ask for a game balance debate. I didn’t ask for one either. Rather than give his recommendation, Mysterio decided to go one further and dismiss the recommendations of others.
As to whether new players are better of starting with house rules or not, well, I tend to favor using the popular BBG house rules right out of the gate. It’s pretty rare I play any game of complexity without some house rules. And I don’t play games often enough to home in through trial and error, so I almost always play with what seems to be the most recommended house rules from game one. That’s obviously a matter of taste.
I’m not invested in the OP using them. I have no invested interest in Mysterio’s recommendations either (the list that was after his comments on mine). Mysterio’s other recommendations are probably perfectly fine.
Mysterio telling me that only people that don’t have “proper planning” or play “armchair designer” would use such changes, well, he can take that arrogant dismissal of my experience, along with the implied dismissal of the opinions of the friends I play with, and shove it up his ass.
Vesper
3624
Sorry to have started a conflict guys. I appreciate all of the opinions. My group tends to have one or two “we really should house rule X” people which I tend to reject unless I see something that is totally broken. I always want to give the base rules a fair try before I start tweaking. As Mysterio said, people like to think they’re better game designers than the guys who wrote the game and after (presumably) lots of testing before the game was published.
That being said, it sounds like a large portion of people think the dragons need some tweaking. I’m intending on playing the rules as is while keeping in mind the suggested house rules brought up here. Then I’ll be able to judge how things would have gone differently with the rules tweaks.
You didn’t do anything wrong, that’s just the nature of the beast sometimes. Anyway, Dreadfleet previews are up including a sample turn.
I think that’s the key. I have no issue with house rules and modified game modes, but I think it’s important to have, many, many games under your belt before doing so.
Although I have immediately decided that the whole “you can hint at your card, but not disclose it” mechanic in Death Angel is so worthless. It’s just too wishy-washy for me. I’m waffleing between no discussion and open discussion, since I see the benefits of both. I am leaning toward open discussion though, given that I have started to enjoy the planning ahead/timing aspects of single player that the action cards create.
Any thoughts from more experienced players on how to turn that into a real rule and not just some weird BS mechanic?
Nope. Too many other games to play and at $5 I’ll wait for a sale. Silly, I know, but there’s just a flood of decent quality stuff coming out for iOS these days.
Lorini
3629
I will immediately house rule board games so that they follow my rule “once seen, always seen”. I have extremely poor short term memory, so I’m not interested in games that break if people can continue to see stuff that they’ve seen before.
I haven’t house ruled CoN and don’t plan to in the short term. However if several games in a row become scripted, then I would consider it. I would not change fundamental rules like being able to take areas only using land units; you might as well play some form of Risk and be done with it.
I know Chris modifies a lot of games. But honestly I’m not interested in becoming a playtest group, which you become if you keep applying house rules. Most designers are on BGG and many times explain why rules are the way they are.
I will say this though; I’m finding that some of the Euro strategy games are breaking under aggressive play. Some playtest groups are playing the games the way the group thinks the game was meant to be played instead of aggressively going after exploits available in the game. So when our group plays the game, there are issues obvious to us that don’t appear to be considered in the game’s development.
I also consider the designers. The guys who did CoN are seasoned designers and I trust that the game they produced is sound. The game has more randomness then I would like, but I’m fairly sure they are comfortable with their design and feel that it is solid. Whereas with Vinhos for example, the designer was new and the game had been in development for a long time and it showed it.
So in the end I don’t consider the designers God, but I’m also not willing to devote a lot of precious game playing time to playtesting either. I try to buy games that are good ‘out of the box’ so many of these issues don’t come up in the first place.
Thanks for posting that. The sample turn was a good read.
The rulers to measure movement are a bit of a turn off to me. Not my type of game. However, as you read the actions taken themselves (full speed ahead to ram a ship, broadsides, boardings and duels, explosions and attacks by flying flesh eater fish), it does sound like it could be quite different and entertaining. Certainly would make a change from more traditional board games.
Wendelius
ckessel
3631
Hence the reason I use suggestions from BBG, pulling on the collective wisdom of a player pool, quite possibly one much larger than the actual play testers. I pretty much never invent house rules from whole cloth.
I always read the rules twice and play a solo game once before springing it on the game group. After that, and just general familiarity with game mechanics after playing board games for 30 years, I feel comfortable with considering whatever house rules are on BBG.
I respect game designers and play testers, but thinking a game must typically be perfect out of the box would imply every book, movie, TV series, video game, board game is also perfect since it was obviously thoroughly reviewed/edited/playtested/etc and any criticism would clearly just be from a lack of understanding.
It would be a shame to simply sub in boats for the hex based combat we’ve all seen a million times in land and space combat. It really comes down to how clear the advantages of positioning and movement are relative to the dice rolls that will take you from sub-optimal to optimal maneuvers.
On the other hand, those hexes are there for a reason. So I guess it will also depend how well those thematic details come through in the effort required to go from turn to turn.
Was there a contest I missed?
Mysterio
3635
It looks like I’ll be crossing you off my Christmas list, Sensitive Sally. That’s some serious venom you’re spewing, but we all know the web allows people to say stuff they wouldn’t dare say to someone’s face for fear of physical reprisal or displaying a lack of common human decency. So be it.
You’ve read way too much into my comments and are now emotionally invested in them. Continuing our friendly banter, then, would serve no useful purpose than to derail this thread. So I’ll be the adult and simply wish you a good day.
Technically wouldn’t being the adult involve not responding at all?
I seem to vaguely remember that as being sort of true before the internet was invented.
ckessel
3638
Mysterio has his take and I’m fine with him having the last meaningful post on it.
On board games:
I need a good 5 player strategy game with decent theme. CoN and Chaos in the Old World would be good examples, though 4 players.
Do people have any experience with the new 5th player expansion for Chaos in the Old World? Does it do anything to help Nurgle’s “can only win by VPs” issue? Any other recommendations come to mind? Length isn’t a big deal, but no more than 4-5 hours (i.e. no TI3).
Reldan
3640
I think the new release of the AGoT board game coming up will fulfill this niche nicely. LK may be able to speak for Chaos with Horned Rat, I haven’t had a chance to play it yet.
Starcraft’s way of dynamically generating the board every game, with the size relating to the number of players, makes it work quite well for 3-6 players. 5 can be a hard number for strategy games because board layouts are typically designed around squares or hexagons.
There’s always Axis and Allies. I hear it plays like CoN but with a WWII theme, and you don’t have to worry about dragons getting all up in your bizness.
