Played Spartacus: A Game of Blood & Treachery and Kemet (both with 4 players) for the first time on Saturday:
We all enjoyed Spartacus, but the social aspect of wheeling and dealing threw us off, since, during the Intrigue phase, only gold can be used to bribe and such, while Assets (those cards played around your House) can’t. Assets can be used only during the Market phase, which follows the Intrigue phase. So you’re limited to gold (and non-binding promises) to escape Schemes played on you (or others) during the Intrigue phase. I’m certain our next play will be even more enjoyable than the first, and I’ve read the Spartacus: The Serpents and the Wolf Expansion Set is a good one.
Kemet, though, was a blast! There’s just something about leveling up your three different colored pyramids (each represented by an oversized d4 die; Red = access to Attack Power Tiles, Blue = access to Defense PTs, White = access to Resource PTs), purchasing PTs (some of which grant you a unique Creature!), claiming Divine Intervention cards (which are more powerful than we all originally thought!), and sending your 12 Units (in Troops of no more than 5 Units) out to conquer your opponents and claim permanent and temporary Victory Points! This is NOT a game in which you can (or even want to) turtle, since permanent Battle VPs can be earned only while as the attacker in a battle; the defender can never earn permanent Battle VPs, unless he owns a specific Blue PT. Temples, which earn temporary Temple VPs when claimed and permanent Temple VPs, if at least two are held until the end of the round, are the cheese that everyone’s fighting over. Everyone wants to play it, again, yesterday!
If I could play only one, it would be Kemet.
Tom_Mc
6062
Yea I have to cop to being an Arkham pseudo fanboy here. I love the game and wish I could play it a lot more. Most of the groups I play in have members talking about playing nothing but Arkham for long while. I haven’t had that experince which is why I am not as burned out as those other gamers.
I am a pseudo fanboy because I cannot get behind the expansions. It is probably because I haven’t exhausted the base game that I think it’s just too much to consider adding board after board. I think that Eldritch going global is a great idea. The major Lovecraft stories, Mountains and Call, both have worldwide elements. Granted in Mountains it’s pretty much just the journey to Antarctica where in Call more is done at other locations.
Anyway, done babbling I have high hopes.
Tom M
Well, AH with expansions is more of a toy box. I don’t think I’ve ever played with everything at once. Usually I add one extra board and a smattering of extra mechanics that accompany that board. Then there are other things you can kinda add in (Such as Injury and Madness cards or Epic Battle) that are not really tied specifically to a board.
As for Eldritch Horror, it does look cool, but it looks a little too similar to AH for my tastes (and game budget). I’m not sick of AH at all, but I’m not sure I need two games in my collection that share a theme and play very similarly.
Funkula
6064
Yeah, adding more than one board and one non-board expansion is a mistake (Miskatonic Horror doesn’t count since it’s a meta-expansion that expands the other expansions). Expansions nearly universally make the game harder. The only elements we add almost all the time are the investigators/gods and the Injury and Madness decks (which I think should be part of the base game).
Otagan
6065
I got this game to the table once without the expansion, and several things quickly became apparent:
- You absolutely should not use the “long” game (starting with zero influence each) for your first few plays. If the players are cutthroat enough, you’ll spend hours treading water at the halfway mark.
- This game can easily rank with Diplomacy in its ability to make everyone at the table hate each other.
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#2 further impacts #1.
That said, I know at least one of the other three I played with would be open to playing again, so I’m hoping the expansion mixes things up a bit. The base game is interesting enough, but just make sure you don’t start from zero influence as the game will likely take an eternity to play out. We liked the Gold limitations quite a lot as it required you to plan ahead and make sure you had a slush fund available for bribes at any time (or to have enough Intrigue cards or Guards to counter whatever was thrown at you).
This is pretty much what I do, though I suggest pulling out the Injury and Madness decks from time to time. Removing them as an “out” definitely ramps up the tension of some of the die rolls and also makes things a good bit tougher.
That’s my problem with Arkham Horror: not enough components.
Addendum: It all started with Cosmic Encounter, but every since then, I love games that have expansions, even if they end up adding a ridiculous number of combinations.
I think TI3 is the king daddy of the massive amounts of components and different options to add/remove, but AH is right up there. :)
I also love a glorious pile of bits!
I have played Arkham Horror with all the expansions (save the last thing that added cards to all the other expansions, since it wasn’t released yet). Okay, actually, I didn’t play. I sorta stood around the table being referee and guy-who-keeps-everyone-from-forgetting-about-this-thing-in-this-corner-of-the-board-here. I was doing that because we had a full complement of players! (8, right?)
It was totally done as a novelty and I don’t think I would do it again. Unexpectedly, the game was much easier, which I attribute primarily to the fact that the special Mythos cards for each expansion were mixed in with each other and so didn’t get much chance to play off other cards in the set they interact with.
It was an experience!
(I haven’t played AH since then, I don’t think. Now I mostly play Elder Sign. Coincidence?)
I’m more afraid to play AH with more than 4 players than I am with all the expansions. That must just be a mess, plus I bet it is too easy (I won’t explain why since it could spoil the game for others). Personally I think 3 is the perfect number for a game of AH.
sclpls
6072
I haven’t watched the video for Eldritch Horror yet, but I’m definitely interested in a new type of game play for that Lovecraftian setting. I find the decision making in Arkham Horror to be rote.
This is it, yeah. Miskatonic Horror is intended to help counteract this but it can’t counteract using every single expansion and mechanic all at once. That said, I really really love how flexible and expandable the game is and I wish I could see my way to spending all that money. If I like Eldritch Horror that would let me get in on the ground floor and that would be a heck of lot less intimidating. I’m just worried it’ll be another Elder Sign, which looked like a lighter Arkham and turned out to be Yahtzee.
I admit, I don’t quite get this Yahtzee charge. I mean, yeah, I understand that the dice mechanics are… well… reminiscent of Yahtzee at least in as much as you roll and keep X times. But it’s just a system to create a challenge, and in that respect it works. The purpose is to have a system where cards you’ve collected and your character abilities can make meaningful changes to your chance to succeed while suggesting some of the flavor of the setting. I would guess the real problem is not the dice-rolling mechanics, but the fact that there are a lot fewer storytelling hooks in Elder Sign than Arkham Horror. True? I mean, you can read the text on the cards, but it doesn’t really do much to build any coherent narrative. Arkham Horror is rarely very coherent, either, but at least the fiction seems relevant to each challenge. I don’t find the fiction, especially when it’s so sloppy, to be worth the playing time and rules confusion, personally, and that’s why I’m happier playing Elder Sign.
Agreed. It’s a misnomer to equate Elder Sign to Yahtzee, yet people continue to do so, which baffles me.
Well, it’s not that it’s literally Yahtzee, but rather that it’s basically just rolling dice. There’s a tiny amount of decision-making and the only real flavor or thematicity comes from the art, which is recycled from Arkham Horror and their Call of Cthulhu LCG before that.
I disagree about there being only a tiny amount of decision making. Maybe it’s a matter of what you consider a tiny amount, but there’s a whole mess of risk/reward in Elder Sign. And not just the Yatzhee style decision making about what rolls to attempt and whether to push your luck. You decide which characters to send where, which rewards to pursue, when and how to use items and spells and special abilities, how to spend your trophies, and so forth. My guess is that the Yahtzee comparison is mostly from people who don’t really understand the game and only see a handful of dice.
-Tom
I would argue that several of the things you mention are fairly automatic - you use items and spells pretty much any time you attempt an encounter because you’ll likely fail if you don’t; the character special abilities in many cases mean that they’re clearly the best option for certain types of encounter; you tackle adventures that have midnight effects or lock stuff as immediately as you have any hope of succeeding and prioritize elder sign adventures over ones that don’t unless you’re not going to be able to win. But it’s true that there’s more to Elder Sign than Yahtzee. There’s just a whole lot less to it than Arkham Horror, and it removes almost all of the bits that make Arkham interesting to me.
The iOS app is a bit better than the boardgame, though, because of the campaigns and animations and such.
If you think those decisions are “automatic”, then I’m guessing you haven’t played the game much. Furthermore, just because a decision isn’t always difficult doesn’t mean it’s any less a decision. Elder Sign is all about matching characters, abilities, and inventory items to specific tasks, and dealing with the risk/reward elements inherent in the game, which go beyond the die rolling. Dismissing that structure as a “tiny amount of decision making” and then supposing “several” of the decisions are “automatic” makes it sound like you understand the game as well as the people who dismiss it as Yahtzee.
And of course there’s less to it than Arkham Horror, as anyone can tell from looking at Andy’s picture. That’s, uh, pretty much the point.
-Tom
My problem with Elder Sign is that there is no sense of press your luck. Once you start a task you keep rolling until you either succeed of fail. So while there are decisions, they are almost never meaningful or exciting.
The ES mechanics just never seem to build that kind of tension, plus I don’t think ES tells a very good story, unlike Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness. Perhaps that lack of investment in the story is why the ES mechanics fall flat. I just never feel connected to the die rolls in ES like I do in AH or MoM.
*I am referring to the tabletop version of ES. As I understand it the IOS has a story mode that might solve this problem.
