I’ll see you there with my pimped wheel
My local boardgame supplier just did a wonderful thing for me, so I’m going to take a moment to promote him. Conveniently, while he’s local, he’s also a mail order supplier, so everyone in the states can benefit.
Time Well Spent Games has:
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a very large supply of hobby games (more on the euro front than wargames, but some of the latter);
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deep discounts (frequently 20+%);
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and a website that, while not much to look at, I think does a pretty darned good job of telling you what’s new, what’s back in stock, and what’s popular.
If you happen to live in the Denver area, you can pick up orders right at his warehouse for no shipping charge.
This is basically a one-man operation, run out of a corner of an ambulance repair shop. But in my experience, the service and the prices are excellent. I’ve cancelled orders, done returns and exchanges, arranged special pick-ups, and today he left a box of games for me on the porch of his home before he went on vacation so I could have a game in hand for my son’s birthday on Monday. Give him a try!
I think Eclipse has a pretty awesome rulebook, especially when you consider the amount of stuff going on in that game. Would have been pretty easy to write something completely incomprehensible for it. The old Avalon Hill game Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage was also pretty excellent, as I recall.
In general, a rulebook has done its job if - after your first game without any experienced help- you don’t feel like you’ve messed up some game element that would have completely changed the outcome of the game. Sadly, that seems to be all too often the case.
Tom_Mc
5824
By that criteria Avalon Hill rules are terrible. Too often there is a modifier hidden that would completely change oh say a battle outcome.
Eclipse did flow for me pretty well. The resource mechanic while pretty intuitive for me caused some confusion when I had to explain how you sent those blocks out in to the galaxy “uncovering” more income by placing those cubes. It’s very fiddley and clutters the player board.
Tom M
I think most people would agree that Avalon Hill produced great games, but that the rulebooks frequently left something to be desired.
mtkafka
5826
Hey I just got back into boardgames. Mainly Descent 2, Runebound, Talisman amd Thunderstone. Whats a good new coop dungeon crawler? I did hear the DnD ones are decent, but is there any obscure ones I should be looking at? preferably solo playable as well as coop. thanks.
For something a little different, I would highly recommend Catacombs. It’s co-op like Descent (overlord vs. everyone else), but it’s unique in that the characters and missile attacks are wooden discs and you move and attack by flicking them with your finger. It’s enormously fun, and while the flicking makes it chaotic, there is very substantial strategy involved.
Check out Escape: The Curse of the Temple
I want to get a hold of Escape, but it seems like no-one has it in stock.
mtkafka
5832
Catacombs and Escape do look cool. Catacombs looks great! Thanks for the suggestions!
Btw, coolstuffinc is where I was told to buy stuff. They are cheap! and over 100 dollars free shipping.
They have 20+ copies of Escape.
Just wanted to say board gaming really rocks now it seems. BUT IT IS DAMN EXPENSIVE! I probably spent more for board games in a month than I did for video games in 6 months!
Also Legions of Darkness, this solitaire tower defense/rpg/card builder looks interesting. anybody play this? Only 20 bux on coolstuffinc… so tempted to buy… yeesh.
hepcat
5833
Legions of Darkness is a Victory Point Games product. They make great games with unique rules. I’m anxiously awaiting the release of the second edition of Dawn of the Zeds. Rumor is that it will be this week sometime.
Mark_L
5834
Legions of Darkness is my favorite of their siege games. Ask away if you have any questions.
Haven’t managed to do a ton of gaming lately, just my usual Tuesday night group in Redmond, but lately quality has certainly trumped quantity.
First, we started a Formula De league. We’ve just finished the third race, and it’s been a riot. We’ve pulled out all the stops for this thing- running time-trials for each track as people arrive before running the actual two-lap race, using all the Advanced (weather, drafting, etc.) rules. The game gets a bad rap IMO for being nothing but a dice-fest,but this league is really testing that notion- the three best players are all tied for first place in points after three races, with the other two peeps not-too-far behind. Which isn’t to Say the dice can’t throw you a bad game- I myself got hit by bad dice this last week and came in dead last, allowing the others to catch me in points (I’d been in first after the first two races). We play one track per week, before the ‘main’ game of the night.
This last week, the main game was an epic game of Eclipse, with 7 players (including the expansion, obviously), and it was awesome. We didn’t do the ‘simultaneous’ turns thing, but everything else was in play. It ended with me holding the center and eking out a win against the space-pirate player who’d gone all-in on plasma missiles on the one flank, and the Planta on the other with a huge conventional fleet. I couldn’t win a straight-up fight against the Planta (I’d tried, and gotten decimated) but I had the point-defense system, so the pirates really couldn’t touch me. The pirates could annihilate the Planta, though, so neither could effectively invade. It was sweet.
I love that Gordon Berg is advising Mt. Kafka on which boardgames to play. It is like I am in an alternate universe from 2002.
I just want to say that I just found out about Android: Netrunner. It’s my new second-favorite 2-player game after Battle of the Bulge.
What’s up with the online play on this one? I know it is available, but most discussion about it sounds like a bunch of acronyms and programming language.
I’m more of a Speed Circuit fan, but it’s easier to get players for Formula De, so that’s what I play. As much as a dice fest as it is, our league produced reasonably consistent results. The full rules with qualifying, weather (I think it rained for over half our races), tire types, etc. really added to it.
It’s available on The Octagon, http://www.octgn.net. I got a chance to play it over the weekend and it does a nice job of “helping” you enforce the game mechanics. You can still make mistakes, but it’s harder than it would be, say, on VASSAL.
There is also a cool database of how each faction fares against the other, and a place to download decks.
Wave 2 for Star Wars X-Wing has been released. That means the Tie Interceptor and A-Wing are added to the game’s star fighter list along with the first new large ships the Millennium Falcon (YT1300) and Slave-1 (Firespray) are appearing on tables and at FLGS along with internet vendors. Some interesting upgrades are in this wave such as co-pilots and cloaking devices that are already threatening to shift the meta game.
