Thanks for the offer! But I’ve been on the fence about that game ever since I saw it mentioned in this thread, and their making the rules backers-only was enough to convince me to pass. It’s a great concept, but I learned from Yetisburg that you can have the best concept imaginable and still end up with a game that’s no fun.
There’s not enough on the Kickstarter page to indicate what, if anything, is different from other deckbuilding games. And all the typos and the less-than-final graphic design don’t inspire enough confidence for $50 that I could be spending on a Dominion expansion.
Everybody who contributed should post the results in here once they’ve gotten the game, though!
Robert Florence has a timely Cardboard Children video on zombie games: http://vimeo.com/user1571465/rpszombies
Mall of Horror sounds like it has potential (for disaster in my regular group). I want to try Last night on Earth. Zombies is just too long and has never enthused the kids.
Wendelius
We played Zombies!!! last week. I found it far more thematic than LNoE because by the end of the game we all wanted to turn against and kill each other. It made us zombies! !!
I wanted to play the Buffy game too but Zombies!!! lasted too long. So sad.
LNOE is terrible, by my reckoning, as an actual game. It’s a dicefest with the old “beer and pretzels” rationale that works for some people, and I guess kids if they like beer. The only zombie-themed game that I’ve pinned my hopes on (but haven’t gotten to play) is Eaten By Zombies, which combines some of my favorite card mechanics with the (you would think) natural inclusion of victory conditions should you become a zombie. I hope it works out.
I agreed, after playing the Basic Game with the default scenario. Playing more scenarios with the advanced rules, I disagree. It’s a thematic game more than a brain-burner, yeah, but it’s got meaningful choices and strategies in it. It’s hardly perfect, but it’s pretty fun, definitely vastly better than Zombies!!!
Re: Kickstarter
After spending some time swept up in the awesome that is Kickstarter I am starting to believe that any board/cardgame over $40 is kinda of a sticking point for me. I can definitely understand folks being on the fence for some of the pricier games.
I know that I had a bit of buyer’s remorse about picking up Alien Frontiers and the new expansion.
Stuff like Miskatonic and Empires of the Void are on the wrong side of the risk/reward equation. It looks like Kickstarter is becoming a storefront for the boardgame industry rather than a launching pad.
Mrenda
3887
I’ve just come home from a three day gaming convention in Dublin. It was for general tabletop gamers. There were about 500 people there, 100 of them pure wargamers, 50 or so CCGers, the rest board gamers and RPG’ers. The big hit of the convetion was probably Bloodbowl: Team Manager. There were three shops there, each with about 10 copies each, by this morning they had all sold out. I got a copy and played it over the weekend and really enjoyed it. Probably the most innovative of the second wave of deck building games (which it sort of is) that I’ve come across. Good theme, good mixture of playstyles with the team, pretty easy to pick up (after the first turn everyone had all the rules down,) interesting decisions to be made, good quality pieces. This may be old news to a lot of you but I think it’s just come out here in Ireland and this was definitely the first convention since it was launched.
I picked up some other games but haven’t had a chance to play them. I got the Call of Cthulhu LCG, it was a tough choice between the coolness of Cthulhu and the co-op play with the LotR LCG, but theme won out. I also picked up some Malifaux models, but a lot of shops had reduced their range or stopped carrying it entirely in anticipation of Puppet Wars, which looks like it could do well. Last game I got was Dice Town, a poker dice based wild west game. None of my friends like playing poker (I don’t think they even know the hand order,) so I figure I can help them along to me winning their money with a boardgame.
Other things to note from the con: Guards Guards was getting a big push (the designers are from the North here,) the gossip going around the con was that Guards Guards is the only Discworld board game that Terry Pratchett is happy with, although I didn’t hear anything about the game other than the rules are confusingly written. Finally, there was an extra 250 people for the L5R European championships. AEG had a stand for their boardgames in the main hall, and were selling their games (undercutting the regular shops by a good deal, something I wasn’t a fan of.) However when they packed up early today they left all their unsold Thunderstone games and expansions to the charity stall, who then sold them for €10 a box with all the money going to charity and they flew off the shelves.
I can definitely understand that. I enjoy the interactive part of it and I have a much broader spectrum for what constitutes an acceptable price for a game (thanks Games Workshop!). I like to just impulsively go with my gut on these games like some kind of halfassed patron of the arts. With Miskatonic, for instance, the involvement of the Trail of Cthulhu guy (of all things) was the point where I kickstarted. I haven’t even bothered to read the rules, and it will be a nice surprise when it comes in and hopefully fills that “gateway” Lovecraft game niche.
There are plenty of games on there where I can believe they need the money. And then there are plenty of games on there where I can’t help but suspect that they’re already in the works and tossing it on Kickstarter just becomes a way to offer pre-orders. From what I’ve seen more and more often it seems that the former are the ones less likely to get much money.
I found the Call of Cthulhu LCG (well, I played it pre-L) kind of disappointing. It uses Lovecraftian monsters and characters, but it’s largely a combat-fest like many other CCG-type games and I find that heavily athematic.
I may be spoiled by having experienced Mythos previously, though. If you’re not familiar with it, it was one of the CCGs that came out in the 90s after Magic hit it big, published by Chaosium, IIRC. It failed, alas, though only after a few expansions. I think it captures the theme much better. The goal is to collect 20 points worth of completed adventures, which all have little stories specifying general categories or more specific cards you have to have played beforehand. You wander around the world, visiting places and meeting characters straight out of Lovecraft or other related stories, finding dark tomes and forbidden artifacts, casting spells and developing phobias…good stuff.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s possible to loose this game. I played yet another SP tonight (which I would think would be the hardest way to play) and made The King in Yellow my little bitch.
I’m trying to think of ways to make it more challenging like accelerating the clock. I fear that the issue though is that it’s just not that hard to get the die rolls you need.
I also have to heavily agree with LK’s complaint of theme being totally absent. You just don’t get the sense that you are doing anything in this game but playing yahtzee.
It’s too bad there is no sense of urgency, like fires are springing up faster than you can put them out, like you have in AH. Maybe it needs some sort of a mechanic where if a mission card is in play too long bad things start to happen. And somehow these bad things would actually have some real flavor text like the AH cards.
It’s a shame really, since the components are super nice. I find it to be a kinda relaxing thing to do while I watch TV, but that’s about it.
The absence of urgency is definitely an issue with Elder Sign. The game I played, we felt like we were losing for much of the game… but then we hit a point where I could simply buy an Elder Sign token on my next turn if we avoided getting any more doom and win. So there was no real reason to actually go on adventures at that point and risk anything.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, but I shall be keeping the trousers.”
http://www.shutupshow.com/post/8055401121/episode-2-descending-deeper
In your experience, are those advanced rules reasonably easy to grasp? Should I learn them before the weekend and teach those to the kids for our first game instead? Or is it better to start with the basic rules and scenarios?
Wendelius
I think it would be worth it to try. The opening scenario was bad enough that it colored any attempts to play later ones and resulted in one of the swiftest purchase-play-resale cycles in my collection.
Also, wrt Elder Sign’s difficulty, apparently theseare workable.
The advanced rules are VERY graspable, barely harder at all than the basic ones. And do NOT start with the recommended starter scenario (“Kill All Zombies”, I believe); the rescue the townfolk scenario is a fun one for starters.
The problem with the basic game is twofold:
-
By removing a lot of cards from the deck, it juices the zombies up by a mile, giving them lots of shamble (move fast) and fight (better chance of wounding) cards, instead of more limited situation-dependent ones.
-
In most scenarios, your goal is, sensibly, to avoid zombies and try to achieve your goal, fighting zombies when you have to. In the basic scenario, your goal is to kill zombies, so you have to fight them, and anything else is just a delaying tactic (and delaying loses you the game in n turns).
Put together a scenario that forces fighting with cards that make fighting really hard, and you have a recipe for a hideously unbalanced zombies-always-win experience, plus one where the virtues of the game (that tension of sticking in a building to search one more time, hoping that you’ll get a good weapon, or the gasoline you need, knowing that the zombies are coming and that you might get trapped) are muted.
GMT just kicked off a sale where normal dweebs get 20% off and P500 folks get 50% off. The coolest thing, though, is that they’re once again offering their hardship special to people who have been unemployed for a year:
People who haven’t been unemployed that long can get 50% off.
Gotta love GMT.
EDIT: Looking more closely at the email, you can even get 50% off if you were unemployed but recently got a job. Class acts all the way.
Thanks guys. That’s what I’ll do.
Wendelius
Re:LNoE, definitely ignore the “simple” rules and go straight to advanced. The advanced rules are pretty clearly what the game was designed around, and the “simple” set is a for-dummies version for people that hate board games but like zombies.
Also, I may have said this upthread, but the game really varies based on how much of a dick the Zombie player is willing to be. The zombie player draws to a full hand every turn, so he really should play them all more or less immediately unless he’s feeling generous to the players. How well that goes over will vary based on you group though.
Vesper
3900
I’m surprised by the comments here about Elder Sign being easy. The two times I’ve played it (2P games) we got our asses kicked. A lot of those scenarios are REALLY hard to complete the objectives. Is everyone doing the dice-mechanics (especially around focusing, assisting, spells, etc) correctly? The manual is not particularly clear on some of those topics. I had to seek clarification on the FFG forums.
