5041

So even in that case, they have only two unkillable ships. For that price (16 mat, plus at least 1 upgrade option) you could have 5 interceptors, three of which fly past those dreadnoughts and neutron bomb the planets behind. Don’t even need any ship tech to do so. Also, those unkillable ships can’t really kill anything else with defenses either.

There are amazing subtleties in the ship designs.

5042

I really love this mechanic in Eclipse.

5043

Anyone here play Phantom Leader/Hornet Leader at all? I’m eyeing Hornet Leader as a purchase (as the pilots can all level more than once, rather than phantom leaders more limited pilot cards) but still interested in both games as well as the upcoming Thunderbolt/Apache Leader. Looking for recommendations, feelings on the games…

5044

Yeah. Out of the 4 or 5 times we’ve played Eclipse the Improved Hull approach was tried, but it was never dominant nor game deciding.

Neutron Bombs+Fast Drives, Orbitals, Monoliths, Plasma Missiles+Computers, Power Plants, Starbases, and Shields have all had a bigger impact at various points.

Not that Improved Hull isn’t nice! It doesn’t take any power so is a great early tech, gives you cheap credits towards later things, and it’s potent when it makes the difference between your ships being killed in two hits instead of one.

5045

It’s especially brutal if you’re playing Humans and your target isn’t. 3 moves to 2 is crushing.

5046

I’ve played Hornet Leader and it’s a blast. Reminded me a lot of the old F22 Interceptor game on the SNES where you’re given a random assortment of targets to take out.

Really liked how you draft a team of pilots and aircraft and watch as they gain experience and level up, so it has an RPG vibe to it. Really great for AAR nuts too.

5047

The Leader series is awesome. Definitely worth investing in.

— Alan

5048

Do the wider range of pilot experience cards in hornet leader make it better than phantom? Or should I get the game who’s campaigns I find more interesting? (still most likely hornet for the Iraq war campaigns.)

5049

I’m planning on picking up a copy of Phantom Leader one of these days. I’m sure I’ll end up with Hornet Leader too, but I am curious about the differences.

5050

Got to play two games of Advanced Civ this weekend. The first was a 6 player setup with one rookie. Playing Africa, I booted an early boat build, recovered by building a single early city, and pretty much paralyzed myself for the rest of the game. Nuts. Not happy with that, but I did get to see what the game was like from the runaway loser position. Definitely not as fun (the trading conditions get thin) but still very playable, especially if, as I’ve held before, you think of each turn as a game.

The second game was a 4 player experiment on the “Glory that was Greece” variant map. We were curious as to how it would play, all of us experienced players. With so few players, trade was sluggish, and seemed to stick on what the Dip player in me wants to call stalemate lines. Folks would stick into trade positions, and there wasn’t that temptation of moving out of it in hopes of hitting a home run. I’d even go rounds without trading or moving only a single set. Odder still was my winning the game. I copied the strategy the Thracian player used the day prior - booming population up to 45 or so before dropping 4 cities in one go. In so doing, I cheesed my brother off, and he seeing that he was paralyzed, decided to start attacking me. I spent the first 2/3 of the game handicapped by his vengeance. On the last turn, I had a chance to swap a bronze in exchange for a resin. I had just completed a trade with the same player, and knew that a milder calamity was in store than the one he’d just handed me. But the he’d profit just a little more than me (I think it would have been the last bronze, a monster set), so I held back. I won by a single point - 4130 to 4129. We’ve come within 5 points before, but this was shocking.

Also tried out seven wonders - which was pleasant but not great. I am glad to have it in my closet because it seems like it will reliably scale all the way to seven, and keep a reasonable play time. We played it with 3 and 4; I suspect play gets slightly more mysterious in the 6 and 7 range when you really can’t predict what might come back around.

And Galaxy Trucker. That was fun to lose. Nice blend of physical play, time pressure, and light strategy. I can see myself happily playing that and complaining loudly but contentedly. Seems to fit the niche of, “I want to do a little thinking, but not much, and have the consequences of my actions mitigated by a nice dollop of luck.” Settlers fits in this niche now, and having something new in there is quite pleasant.

5051

I had a copy of Hornet Leader, uh, it must have been almost twenty years ago. You mentioning it here is quite a blast from the past; great fun, though. I really enjoyed managing the squadron and seeing my pilots rack up kills and experience while making sure that they don’t get over fatigued.

If I remember correctly, I saw in the shop a helicopter game in the same series, which I wanted but couldn’t afford. I didn’t know there was also a version with Phantoms; this was before internet made it easy to find out about these things!

You could put it down to nostalgia - and it’s been too long to remember the specifics - but I’d also add to the above comments recommending Hornet Leader.

5052

So I got to play my first game of War of the Ring last night. I had been psyched about playing it for a year now and it did not disappoint. We didn’t even finish the game but I already love War of the Ring so much that I want to take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

My friend Len had played the first edition once before but it had been a while and he was a little fuzzy on the rules. I spent a lot of time with the rulebook, which is not an easy start to finish read, but it is very thorough. I probably had to read it five or six times to get my head around the game but when it came time to play I didn’t have any problems figuring out what was going on, which I thought was pretty great for a game as heavy as WotR is.

Aside from the rulebook and some posts from the rules forum on BGG I didn’t read anything else. No strategies from the web and I only looked at a couple of the cards so that we could just wing it for the first game. It seemed like–in a game where both players are completely new–it was easier to play as Sauron because you have those extra action dice and you can mostly concentrate on just trying to crush the stupid “free people” into their stupid ground. Uh, guess which side I played?

I was able to bring out Saruman on our first round. I love the way the characters can affect the game and so often in ways that mirror the books. In fact, the game is so thematic that it feels like you could put page references to the trilogy next to most of the sentences in the rulebook yet it still manages to be an excellent game (so far). In that way it reminds me a lot of Battlestar. But back to Saruman! So he let me crank out a ton of orcs and worg riders real quick like which I used to grind Rohan to a giant pile of horse dust. Stupid horses.

Meanwhile, my friend separated Gandalf, Aragorn and Gimli from the fellowship to rally the remaining free people to war while Sam and Frodo traveled (mostly) unscathed through Moria to Lorien. This part is boring!

So then! Before Saruman could grab all of the glory the remaining Shadow Powers got off of their asses and into the war. Sauron summoned the Witch King into the game and he immediately got to work putting some pressure on the elves with a combined force of Nazgul, orcs and mumakil. Yeah, Oliphants! Unfortunately for our heroes the stupid free people played a card that prevented me from attacking Lorien. Also in the meantime Gandalf had leveled up to White and gained some annoying ability to negate the powers of Nazul and Witch Kings. Fortunately, Nazguls and Witch Kings can fly across the map in a single bound, so they all bailed on the Lorien party and flew down to Minas Tirith to give Aragorn what for!

It turns out Aragorn can be annoying to kill, especially when he’s at Minas Tirith, but after a few siege rounds the Shadow Powers took advantage of Denethor’s (that’s the guy from Fringe) Folly and pulled the rug out from under the “king”. Smell ya later, Gondor!

Rohan and Gondor are left in ruin. And on that happy note we called the game for the night. Everyone had happy dreams of the elves and their dumb little friends burning to the ground. Yay!

5053

Great AAR!

I’m jealous. If I were to purchase this game and attempt to play it with my girlfriend, she would kill me. Oh, not for purchasing it, but for attempting to teach her how to play it (she never wants to read the rule books), as she doesn’t have the patience to learn new board games. But this one looks like so much fun and is dripping with theme…! There’s a chance she’d enjoy it, right? Right?

5054

Recently got to play 7 Wonders and Power Grid for the first time, and it was a great experience. 7 Wonders was actually my second time playing, but all the others were newbs. Despite that, by the end of the first age of the first game, everyone seemed to have a firm grasp of building mechanics, and before the third age, everyone seemed to at least grasp the basic strategies - the only problem that showed up (and which I had considered the first time I played) was that the point tallying comes at the end of the game and the science cards are difficult to evaluate. I think next time I show it to someone, I will give everyone a score update after every age and point to where future points can come from.
Power Grid I’ve had for a while, but it was the first time playing. Despite a couple of people barely listening during the rule walk-through, the two of us who did pay attention managed to explain any problems that came up, and it’s so logical that it’s difficult not to understand, after you get that you don’t need to power every (or any) city each round. Definitely looking forward to playing them both again.

5055

She might. I got my wife to play this with me and we played a couple of weeks ago. It took us three nights to finish but we had a lot of fun. She wanted to play the Free Peoples, which means she was at a disadvantage from the start. I ended up winning the game, butit was an enjoyable experience for both of us. One thing that really helped is that she read the rules. If your girlfriend won’t do that, I suggest she play the bad guys as you talk her through the game as the fellowship is an unsual mechanic.

5056

I’ve now played three complete games of Eclipse (and one half-game), and every time, people seem to like it more. Still find it better and worse in some aspects than other games in the genre, though. I really miss any ‘political’ aspect like in TI3, or the weird Regent phase in Galactic Emperor where you could influence control on the board without actual warfare. In Eclipse it’s just war, war, war. Sector tile draw randomness can be huge, too.

Our Risk: Legacy game thunders on. No spoilers, but christ, this game keeps on giving. Everyone is absurdly enthused to play every week- we just finished game 12. The hooting and hollering usually starts before the game even does, when we see how the board situation unfolds. Every time we open a packet, the entire shape of how the game plays is completely changed- dominant strategies are reduced to absurdly weak, factions that never stood a chance before are suddenly unstoppable. It really is quite brilliant.

5057

Mysterio, just make a playlist with all of the movie soundtracks and set up a timer to play it at low volume while she’s asleep. Then after a week mention the idea of buying a Lord of the Rings game. Extra bonus: you’ve already got background music for when you play!

Anders, 7 Wonders is kind of like a Knizia game because while you’re playing people seem to understand what’s going on but then you score it and everyone is like “Oh! That’s what was happening the whole time.” I tend to teach that game by gradually setting up an end game scenario in front of me and explaining what all of the cards are worth at the end. Basically a “here’s where you’re trying to get to” type of thing. I think that helps a lot, but playing all the way through a game is still the only way to really teach someone the game. Besides, it’s not like it takes long to do that.

Power Grid: still awesome. I love it even though I often tend to come in a close second. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought “I’ve got this locked up on the next turn” only to see someone else plow ahead and finish the game before that next turn occurs. Always a real close finish, though. Great stuff.

5058

I’ve been playing a lot of Ora & Labora as well as Last Will. O&L is a resource processing game, similar to Agricola and LeHave (all three are designed by Uwe Rosenburg). It’s different than those two, primarily because of two things…the stress of feeding is not there and there’s no randomization in the game. This review describes it well I think. I really enjoy it, in fact I’m hoping to play today.

Last Will is a game with a concept similar to Brewster’s Millions. You are trying to spend money so that your uncle will leave his considerable fortune to you. It’s a bit heads-down but there’s enough randomness to keep it interesting and it doesn’t last more than 90 minutes, even on first play.

I’m considering buying Rex and Wiz War but I have not made up my mind. I’m waiting to hear if Rex is in fact good as a four player game, because I rarely have six players and a lot of time, and frankly when I do, we usually play Advanced Civ anyway :)

5059

Fantastic. I finally cobbled together a group of four others to get a game started with, so I’m really looking forward to being able to crack open the box and get started.

5060

I actually do too. But somehow I can accept it as a “simple card game with a lot of fuzz built around it”. I mean, based on how epic the game seems to sell itself, you as a player aren’t really making any interesting choices. You’re just along for the ride. It’s just fun when the right kind of powers meet; more so in the hands of the right kind of players.

It’s definitely a take it or leave it game, though, that’s for sure. In my group it’s always a hard game to bring to the table, but once we do we always have a blast – one game more fun and memorable than the last, it seems.