Kalle
3641
I played Merchants of the Middle Ages and Carson City at my gaming club yesterday.
We were four players for Merchants and five for Carson City, one of us had played Merchants before and we were all unfamiliar with Carson City. This proved to be a bit of an issue.
In Merchants the bidding for wagon loadmasters ended up being severly underpriced for the first turn as we really had to bid blind essentially and the player who won the bid for two of the three wagons scored a big profit from other players loading their goods before the wagons had even left the starting cities. Ultimately he would go on to win the game though it ended up being a more closely contested game than the first turn suggested. I ended up dead last through a combination of horrible bidding and not getting on every cart that I could. No matter what price the loadmaster asks you should get on the cart as long as it will make you a profit. I got too caught up on a few hundred in fees that I missed out on thousands in lost sales. In hindsight I want to kick myself for it. I also ended up bidding 2300 for a cart on the last turn that never reached it’s destination before the game ended.
Overall, it’s a good game but the bidding nature means that how it plays will very much depend on your group and their experience with it.
Carson City was a clusterfuck at the beginning. We misread the dueling rules (duelling strength is guns plus cowboys left at the end of your turn, deployed cowboys don’t count), redid the entire first turn, then realised we had misread the attack/defend property rules (attacking a property give you half it’s income, it doesn’t flip the entire property to you) and had to restart the entire game.
Once those initial mishaps were over it turned out to be a very enjoyable game though the map became very crowded with five players. Since it was the first time we were all playing we failed to realise just how important it was to place cowboys on the VP squares until halfway through the game. My entire second turn was more or less wasted from a VP perspective. Next time there’s going to be a lot more fighting over those early and cheap VP purchase squares.
One issue we all had with the game mechanics was that the player picking the sheriff would always get first turn, be able to take an uncontested action, and could keep picking first turn the entire game through. It felt like the player going first would keep going first the entire game through because there was very little incentive to give it up.
I was very positively surprised by the game length btw. Roughly two hours for a five player game we had never played before (after the restarts) means you can cram more gaming into a session.
SlyFrog
3642
More games I think you mean, not gaming.
You should play Euchre, you could cram even more gaming into a session. :)
peterb
3643
I know it’s an old game, but I just want to say that personally I have gotten more value for money out of Commands & Colors: Ancients than almost any other game I’ve bought.
mkozlows
3644
Played Touch of Evil today, in co-op mode. I forget how fast that game is capable of playing – I don’t think we went over an hour before finishing it up. (In co-op mode, time to finish scales nearly linearly with the number of players, and I was playing two-player.)
The more I play it, the more I think I like it. It fills a nice middle ground between the mathy puzzle-ness of Pandemic and the baroque complexity of Arkham Horror.
I have A Touch of Evil, plus the expansions. And though it is good…I just cannot get into it for some reason.
But…
Flying Frog’s newest game is awesome. Fortune & Glory is a lot of crazy fun.
So apparently Dreadfleet shipped, or at least my copy from GW did via standard mail. I was kind of expecting a longer turnaround, so I’m pleased to hear that.
O_o
Already? Guess mine won’t be long. Not a lot of time to prepare the wife for another big box delivery.
Wendelius
Enjoy it!
That’s a game that sounds awesome but I know it will never ever get played.
Hey speaking of games with awesome minis that I’ll probably buy even if the game is bad and I never play it, Robert Florence is making me buy Super Dungeon Explore. I kinda hate that dude now.
omg that dragon. And the magey girl! With the hat! If this game turns out to be bad I’ll just use the minis for Arkham. Gloria Goldberg, elf ranger!
Mysterio
3650
wahoo and I just had an epic battle in Conquest of Nerath in which mucho units and cards were involved on both sides. During my Karkoth Draw phase, I hit his Nerath forces with an Event card (Rampage) that sent my 5 Monsters rampaging through his forces wounding his Dragon and killing 3 of his Footsoldiers. My Karkoth forces then attacked his Nerath forces in the Fight Battles phase.
Before the dice were rolled in Round 1, wahoo played a Treasure card (Reflecting Shield) that negates the First Strike ability of my Wizards when a battle includes Nerath Fighters. Ack!
He then played an Event card (Militia Defense) that adds 3 Footsoldiers to the battle when defending, bringing his total number of Footsoldiers in the battle to 6! Double ack!
To make matters even worse for Karkoth, he then played another Event card (Veteran Warlord) that changs his to-hit for all Nerath pieces from 6+ to 5+ for the duration of the battle! Noooooo! Suddenly, those 6 Footsoldiers were an offensive threat!
After his Wizards used their First Strike, I played my own Treasure card (Robe of the Archmage) that causes my Wizards to inflict 2 hits instead of one on a 10+ roll (Wizards roll d10 dies). From that point on, the battle was on.
After Round 1 concluded, I decided to retreat, since I didn’t want to press my luck against his Veteran Warlord (nasty Event card, especially when used on the offensive!).
The battle round is detailed here for those interested in reading it. :-)
I know that some folks here are big Ascension boosters. I’ve gotten my wife hooked on the iOS version so I was thinking I might spring for the box. I know some people (Mike Cathcart or Tracy Baker, maybe?) say that the expansion is even better than the original. Is this consensus? I haven’t looked at expansion stuff since the Ascension website doesn’t have a list of cards or really any info on Return of the Fallen (I find it strange they’re calling this new expansion in November the ‘first’ expansion) but I did look at some of the promo cards they’ve given away at various events and with a couple of exceptions they’re all kind of crap. The Leprechaun one just seems like it adds a lot of crap on to a game that’s as tight as it should be, the Rat King does the same while also coming across as a possible VP explosion. The stuff just looks poorly thought out. While I might love to get the Pathfinder, who lets you use runes as power when you play him, I’d probably banish it if I ever saw it.
So are those promo cards indicative of what I can expect in Return of the Fallen, or are the additions in there better thought out?
And why is Storm of Souls (or whatever) being called the first expansion. Is it just cos it requires the Chronicle to play while Return can be played on its own?
I have not played the expansion yet, I just thought the cards looked interesting. The general take on it at BGG is that the cards are not the same size as those in the original game (so it’s best to sleeve everything), and that some of the expansion cards aren’t costed correctly.
Regarding the promos vs. Return of the Fallen, the latter looks like it is much better thought out. There are pics of all the cards on its BGG entry page, plus a text spoiler you can download.
Storm of Souls is listed as the first full-sized expansion. I guess that makes Return of the Fallen a regular sized expansion. SoS comes with 200 cards compared to 120 in the other two games, can be played standalone like they are, and adds several new mechanisms (many of them persistent or semi-persistent) to the game. It sounds like they’re also updating the art on the basic militia/mystic/cultist/monster cards, kind of like Thunderstone did with basic cards in its later expansions.
I love Ascension on iOS but I don’t think I want to own the game for reals. The card size thing is a total deal breaker because I flat out refuse to sleeve cards. There are more good games that don’t require sleeving than I have available quality friend time for anyway so Ascension just did me a favor with that.
I will pick up the expansion when it’s available for iOS, though. And then I will invite you guys to some games. And then I will lose those games.
Yeah. That broke it for me, too. Why release an expansion that can’t intermingle easily with the base game? That just seems weird.
Lorini
3655
Wizards did it with Magic the Gathering so it must work.
Vesper
3656
Apparently they wanted to change card stock and had to bite the bullet on when to do it. They are releasing a second edition of the base game sometime soon that will be on the new card stock as well. Sucks for us that got the original earlier, though. I have the main game and expansion intermingled, and with sleeves on the cards the pile is too high for one stack.
God help me, it seems I am back to painting miniatures…
Ascension
There’s yet another ascension expansion coming soon. You might want to wait to see how it is.
Super Dungeon Crawl
Saw those minis. The game is said to be a very light dungeon crawl. I would actually like to see it play like a Zelda game. I’m going to guess that the game will be pretty bland, but the minis will make up for it.
Ha! I played “A Touch of Evil” today and came here wondering if anyone here had played it too :)
I really liked it … it gave me a feeling of being on a Witcher-like world which was pretty cool.
We were 5 and couldn’t finish the game in less than 2h. It also seems to get a lot harder with more players. I guess it will be faster next time because we’ll know how things are played then.
I’m liking these Flying Frog’s games. We also have “Last Night on Earth” but we already won all the scenarios so it kinda have fallen on the unused pile.
Classic board game Imperial is now out on iOS at the ‘I think I’ll wait a little bit’ price of $9.99.
And Rio Grand Games founder Jay Tummelson has apparently confirmed ‘electronic versions’ of Dominion by the end of the year and Race for the Galaxy in 2012. He didn’t say iOS, but a lot of people seem to be making that assumption. At least one person in the comments mentions that he’s beta testing the Dominion app, which would either suggest that it’s definitely coming for iOS or that he should immediately seek a source of water as his pants are currently aflame.
