A few people like to claim that it is about slavery, but most just find it reading way too much into the game, since the exact same pieces occupy the Customs House, Fortress, and City Hall. I had no problem teaching the game to my son.
That’s been my biggest frustration with Here I Stand - that there are a large number of disjoint mechanics to learn. Each one of them is simple, but I’ve got a stack of them to chase down and check modifiers and exceptions and whatnot. I’ve played 3 games, and it got marginally better, but that oddly separated gameplay meant I was never truly tickled.
Finally got a game in of Ankh-Morpork with 4 players, and we all liked it. Really simple to learn the basics, and the players seemed to have more goal-awareness than in many other games. In the two games we played, we probably did miss some rules at times, such as removing trouble markers when moving a minion and possibly an assassination that happened when there was no trouble marker in an area, but the basics are very clear.
I do wonder, and I guess I’d need some threads on BGG to research it, whether some goals are easier than others, or if it’s just the first few games where players aren’t eagle-eyed for, say, Chrysoprase’s objective. I also wonder whether the Vimes objective doesn’t lead people to king-making behaviour.
Lurk on agame of TtA? Sure! Where?
That was on http://www.boardgaming-online.com/ – But a couple of days ago it was barfing SQL errors and now isn’t responding so who knows when it will come back online.
Looks like their web hosting company did a server migration and may have corrupted the database. Hopefully they’ve got a good backup to restore to and it’ll be running soon. The one league game I was in was actually pretty close and we were just about to start the last round :(
I thought it might be of interest to some here to know that Treefrog Games are apparently emigrating down under and having a sale on their games: http://www.treefroggames.com/
Some of you may already know that we intend to emigrate to New Zealand early next year. Progress has been quicker than we first thought and so we are having to rush the closure of our warehouse. We have to be out of the premises by the end of June. Consequently we are holding a sale to get rid of as many games as possible before then.
The sale will end June 29th to give us time to process the final orders. After that date Treefrog will cease all direct sales to the public. In future you will need to ask your local store or check online about acquiring our games.
They have games like Discworld:Ankh Morpork (the Collector’s and Deluxe editions), London, Age of Industry, Gettysburg, … on sale.
Wendelius
Does this mean ordering their games in Oz will get cheaper in future? Exciting.
JM1
5271
That looks gooooooood.
(Is this the point where we finally point out there was a miniature gaming thread that Iain posted his photos on? ;))
Only if you want to burn your paints in despair.
Nice work, merry.
Syzygy
5275
Good news for Labyrinth fans. Looks like Andean Abyss is shipping in mid-July! My first P500 with GMT.
If you go to the Games menu at the top of the site and then click on Join a Game you should see the list of all open games. Click on one of the open spot in the game Nate made (Quarter To The Ages) and use QT3 as the password.
That leaves one open spot. Someone else join because the current game we’re playing is easily the worst game I have ever played. I need a distraction from it :)
Ha ha, yeah, you couldn’t really catch a break that whole game. Meanwhile, I’ve never had such swimming success with Cook like this before! Of course, the balance was thrown a bit out of whack with the player dropping out and all and I probably wouldn’t have been able to grab and keep so many territories otherwise.
Any Brass fans here? There’s a similar clunky-but-functional asynchronous web version that I’ve played on from time to time here: http://brass.orderofthehammer.com/
I just had a lengthy gaming session over the weekend where I played four games that were new to me, though we only made it maybe 1/3 of the way through a game of Thunderstone before circumstances required us to end it early.
- Alien Frontiers
This worker placement game where the dice stand in for your workers was a decent time, but the heavy dice-rolling element easily left one of our four players at a major disadvantage despite making what appeared to be mostly correct decisions. I’d play it again, but I doubt it will make it into my collection.
- Discworld: Ankh-Morpork
This game went pretty quickly, but I enjoyed it. I’m not sure how deep the strategic elements would actually go, but it was a nice mechanic of no one knowing which of the 8 possible end game scenarios each person was attempting. I’m told the game is much funnier (though no better a game) if one has read the Discworld books, so I have bought the first one in order to rectify what I’m told was a huge hole in my library.
- Ra
This is a classic Knizia auction and set collection (and not a new game by any stretch). I have always liked Medici, but I think Ra is just light years ahead of it and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good auction game.
I had kind of the same experience. Another negative can depend on your crowd, but I found the 4-player game depressingly slow as each player’s turn is spent sitting there crunching through all of the permutations of how the dice can be modified, flipped, and placed in order to maximize their output.
I did like the dice-as-worker-placement idea, and there are a few other games in that vein out there. I suggest giving Troyes or Kingsburg a try; they have the same problems but both have some more flexible options for players to mitigate the diceyness of things.
Thanks for the recommendations. I now remember someone saying that it was like Kingsburg in space, but having not played it before, it slipped my mind entirely.
