6241

Castle Panic. You will love it and so will your kids.

6242

So, deckbuilding games… While I’m aware Ascension has a strong following here, what deckbuilding games really have your attention at the gaming table?

My current favorites:

Heroes of Metro City
Core Worlds
Eminent Domain
Ascension
Mage Knight (not quite a deckbuilder… not completely not a deckbuilder)
Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

I’ve played Dominion, Tanto Cuore, DC Deckbuilder, LOTR (and Two Towers). What would you suggest I look at? Do you have feelings about deckbuilding games?

6243

Mage Knight and Pathfinder. As the entire focus of the game it hasn’t typically worked terribly well for me (Ascension, okay, but that’s not hitting my gaming table, that’s hitting my iPad and eventually PC), but in the more contextualized formats of those two games it works really well. I have hopes for Eminent Domain, which looked to me like a kind of hybrid between Race for the Galaxy (which I adore) and deckbuilding, but we’ll see. I won’t actually have it to play until the ED: Escalation Kickstarter ships rewards.

6244

I really like Eminent Domain. Along with Dominion, it’s my favorite deckbuilder, although it’s quite different. It very much is Race meets Dominion.

I thought Rune Age was a good deckbuilder, with its best feature being that it can be played in multiple scenarios, some of which are competitive and some of which are co-op. It’s not perfect… I think the economy kinda breaks down in some games. But still worth playing.

I mentioned it in the solo games thread, but Friday is a one-player deckbuilder about Robinson Crusoe. Very well designed and challenging.

One that hasn’t been mentioned (and that I haven’t played) that gets good marks is A Few Acres of Snow. A deckbuilding wargame, I gather.

6245

I’d have to say that Lord of the Rings: LCG is easily my favorite game that involves building decks. Fantastic game!

6246

Well. This is interesting: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/24570/fireteam-zero-the-official-announcement

It’s the right kind of boardgame for me - coop monster stomping - and it’s using the backstory of an indie horror series that I’ve been fairly impressed with by Michael Langlois, which could be cool. (If you’re not familiar with the series, both entries so far, Bad Radio and Liar’s Harvest are currently free for Kindle and possibly other ebook platforms.) Also, it’s doing action cards as health similar to what Pathfinder Adventure Card Game does, which is cool in that game. I guess we’ll probably find out more when they launch the Kickstarter.

6247

Thanks for the kid game recommendations. Castle Panic looks right up our alley (BGG shows a ton of happy kids playing). I’ve played Forbidden Desert once before, and I think that (or more likely Forbidden Island at first) would work great too. I love co-op games, and I remember the rules for Forbidden Desert being pretty easy to pickup.

Definitely looks interesting. Our kids have actually just finished a unit on greater/less than in Kindergarten, so that might be a good way to reinforce the concepts. They also do love animals!

6248

I’m not the most discerning board gamer, but other than some of the stuff already mentioned, I’ve played Shadowrift a few times at our local meetup and it’s been pretty fun.

6249

I always suggest Puzzle Strike when deck-builders come up. It’s my favorite deck-builder, but has the strong caveat that it’s a 2-player game. There are rules in the game for more players, but they’re not worth looking into.

Puzzle Strike plays quick, is asymmetric, highly interactive, and is full of interesting decisions. When I play with friends, we usually play the tournament rules: Best of 3, the loser can either replace one set of cards in the supply with a chosen set, or choose to have the whole supply randomized. This way, the game takes about an hour and a half, which is just right for me. Plus, it allows interesting interactions with the supply that are character dependent. Finally, the game plays quite differently depending both on which character you’re playing and which character your opponent is playing. Since the game is highly interactive, both choices and the randomized supply shape the feel of the game. So there’s a huge variety to playing the game as well. Even if you get just the base set, which has 10 characters in it.

6250

Why do you say it’s only a two player game? I’ve played it with 3 and 4 players before and had a blast. Is it because of player elimination?

6251

That’s cool! I have different complaints with the 2nd and 3rd edition multiplayer. With 2nd edition, you could only attack to the left, which felt arbitrary and more importantly meant you couldn’t actually interact with the the player who was killing you short of playing defensive chips. I only played with 3rd edition multiplayer rules once, and it felt too random and swingy since players would just target whoever was strongest. Plus the end seemed very determined by king-making.

I’m probably overly critical because I love it so much as a 2-player game and it seems less serious with more people. I have plenty of opportunities to play 2 player, and a whole heck-ton of games I love for more then 2-players so maybe I’m pegging it a bit harder then it deserves.

6252

It turns out I do like Zombicide, incidentally. It seems simplistic and limited in variety on the face of it, but in play it turns into a tense, extremely difficult experience with plenty of tough decisions and some clever little bits like being able to voluntarily walk into a horde of zombies to distract them long enough for your friends to get away (/ accomplish a goal), at least in scenarios where you can win without all characters surviving.

6253

Yesterday was the last day of the Sasquatch Board Games Festival. I posted the description in another thread [.

Though I was there for lots of the long weekend (it started Wed. afternoon, ended Sunday night), I didn’t actually play a lot of the ‘big’ releases. A few I played more than once, learning the first game and then teaching a group for the second and/or third. And some of the games I played were new games in general release already (many of the Essen games won’t be out stateside for months, if ever).

Wed. Night was pretty tame. I got there late, and ended up only having time for a couple games. One, [url=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/144270/relic-runners]Relic Runners](]here[/url) is the new Days of Wonder release. Kind of a light, puzzle-y race/resource management game. I can’t recommend it, though it wasn’t actually bad, just kind of meh.

Had to skip Thursday because of a fun, 12-hour work day, so I got back to the festival Friday afternoon, and immediately got roped into A Study in Emerald, the new Martin Wallace release, based on the short story by Neil Gaiman. The premise is that HP Loveraft’s Elder Gods have taken over the world during the Victorian/Edwardian era, and players are agents of two factions pitted against each other- the Loyalists, who are attempting to keep the status-quo, and the Revolutionaries, who are attempting to banish the Elder Gods and restore the natural order of things. The kicker is that no one knows which side anyone is on at the beginning of the game (though it should be apparent after a couple turns), and that despite everyone being on one of the two factions, it is not a team game. When the end conditions are triggered, you look at who has the lowest score- their team all loses, period, no matter what their highest-scoring player had. The highest-scoring player on the other team wins. So if you suspect someone who is doing poorly is on your team, you can’t necessarily end the game if you’re doing well. I really liked this game, and played/taught it a couple other times over the course of the weekend. And just for the sake of disclosure, though I’m partial to Lovecraft, Gaiman and the time period, I haven’t read the story it was based on, and still loved it a lot. Really, all you need to know is ‘Sherlock Holmes fights Cthulhu (with a side of GK Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” thrown in for flavor)’. The theme does well setting up the mechanics, but it’s the mechanics you’re staying for- a bit of bluffing, a bit of deckbuilding, a bit of influence/resource management.

Tash-Kalar, Arena of Legends is the new release from Vlaada Chvatil, author of a pile of my favorite games- Galaxy Trucker, Space Alert, Dungeon Lords- the list goes on. I like how he takes genre-concepts and puts fresh spins on them. This game is fantasy arena combat, something I should have been pretty well-disposed to, but for me it kind of fell a little flat. It is very, very much a two-player abstract strategy game with a theme pasted on. I imagine it’s pretty deep once you know all the cards, can see all the board positions and formulate moves accordingly. My friend Jon is pretty into that genre, though (abstracts), and is also a fan of Chvatil, so if the local store/cafe gets a copy in their library that we can kick around over a couple beers, I’ll certainly try it again. Otherwise, I’ll be avoiding it.

I taught and played Amerigo a couple times, which I wrote about here a few pages back when I played a production prototype at a free game day a few months ago. It remains a great game in my opinion. Lots of choices, strategies and options. It has been officially released now, so I’ll probably pick it up for myself for the holidays (a guy at my regular group just got his Kickstarter copy, so there’s no rush).

I also taught a game of Archipelago, a release from last year’s Essen (she had a copy at Sasquatch then, but it was in French, so we had to wait for the English version a couple months later). The guy had owned it for seven months and never got to play it, which I thought was a damned crime. Again, I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ll say again, it is probably my favorite euro-style game from last year. I’ve played it probably a dozen times, and it still doesn’t get old. Every game is a struggle.

Rampage, a disk-flicking game about giant monsters knocking over buildings and eating meeples in a city. No, it isn’t actually licensed from the old video game, but yeah- it draws a heavy inspiration from there. Good goofy fun. I have my stable of disk-flicking games I like, though (with expansions, [url=]Catacombs with expansions, [), so I don’t particularly feel the need to buy this one. If someone has a copy, we’re goofing off, had a few beers and the night is winding down though, I’m sure I’d play it. It was good fun.

We played [url=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid]Power Grid](]Ascending Empires[/url) with the new Indian Subcontinent map and associated rules. Australia is the other side of the map. My group plays a lot of Power Grid. It comes in phases, sure, but it always finds its way back to the table before too long. We really like the ‘economic snowball’ games- PG, the Outpost family (Outpost, Phoenicia, Scepter of Zavandor), and we all know them really, really well, so our games are very cutthroat. The India map introduces a slew of new rules (brownouts, limited resources, etc.) that added a bunch of new twists to take into account. I didn’t get to play in the Australia game, but it is similarly complex (Uranium selling market, lots of small, disconnected networks, etc.) and brutal, so I’m pretty sure one of the PG owners in my group will pick up these maps soon, breathing some new life into the old favorite.

Myself and another player taught the Robinson Crusoe game (another release from last year’s Essen), which I was happy to do, as having another player who knew the game well let us play something besides the first scenario. I’ve gotten it to the table four or so times myself, but it always seems to be with a new group, so we play the first one to get people to know the mechanics (and just how brutal the game can be, heh). This time we played the Family Robinson scenario, and managed to sail to an easy victory. I still really like this game, and wish I could play it more. Nice, thematic co-op. Sasquatch had copies of the Essen-released expansion, which is a set of campaign scenarios, based on Darwin’s scientific expedition aboard the HMS Beagle, which led to the Origin of Species. It looks fabulous, with the scenarios all being very different from one another and the base game, and progress carrying over from one to the next. The festival organizer Jennifer was keen to play it, but I was a bit skeptical- I didn’t want to only play the first one or two of the bit, and then have to restart again with my normal group. Ultimately, it was moot as our in-between-games time never seemed to mesh up.

Finally, the fest ended last night with the Essen release Nations. It was ok. Kind of like a less-fiddly, more streamlined version of Through The Ages. Buying cards, deploying workers, scoring points. It was fine, but didn’t excite me too much.

Like I said, I didn’t get to play a slew of the other big ones- Madeira, Caverna, Glass Road, Lewis & Clark, Concordia, Bruxelles 1893 and a couple others all seemed to be in heavy rotation, but I never found the time (not to mention the hundred-or-so others I didn’t even see touched, though I’m sure a lot of them were). The next ‘big’ Free Game Day is in January. I’m sure I’ll get to try some then.

6254

Yesterday was the last day of the Sasquatch Board Games Festival. I posted the description in another thread here.

Though I was there for lots of the long weekend (it started Wed. afternoon, ended Sunday night), I didn’t actually play a lot of the ‘big’ releases. A few I played more than once, learning the first game and then teaching a group for the second and/or third. And some of the games I played were new games in general release already (many of the Essen games won’t be out stateside for months, if ever).

Wed. Night was pretty tame. I got there late, and ended up only having time for a couple games. One, Relic Runners is the new Days of Wonder release. Kind of a light, puzzle-y race/resource management game. I can’t recommend it, though it wasn’t actually bad, just kind of meh.

Had to skip Thursday because of a fun, 12-hour work day, so I got back to the festival Friday afternoon, and immediately got roped into A Study in Emerald, the new Martin Wallace release, based on the short story by Neil Gaiman. The premise is that HP Loveraft’s Elder Gods have taken over the world during the Victorian/Edwardian era, and players are agents of two factions pitted against each other- the Loyalists, who are attempting to keep the status-quo, and the Revolutionaries, who are attempting to banish the Elder Gods and restore the natural order of things. The kicker is that no one knows which side anyone is on at the beginning of the game (though it should be apparent after a couple turns), and that despite everyone being on one of the two factions, it is not a team game. When the end conditions are triggered, you look at who has the lowest score- their team all loses, period, no matter what their highest-scoring player had. The highest-scoring player on the other team wins. So if you suspect someone who is doing poorly is on your team, you can’t necessarily end the game if you’re doing well. I really liked this game, and played/taught it a couple other times over the course of the weekend. And just for the sake of disclosure, though I’m partial to Lovecraft, Gaiman and the time period, I haven’t read the story it was based on, and still loved it a lot. Really, all you need to know is ‘Sherlock Holmes fights Cthulhu (with a side of GK Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” thrown in for flavor)’. The theme does well setting up the mechanics, but it’s the mechanics you’re staying for- a bit of bluffing, a bit of deckbuilding, a bit of influence/resource management.

Tash-Kalar, Arena of Legends is the new release from Vlaada Chvatil, author of a pile of my favorite games- Galaxy Trucker, Space Alert, Dungeon Lords- the list goes on. I like how he takes genre-concepts and puts fresh spins on them. This game is fantasy arena combat, something I should have been pretty well-disposed to, but for me it kind of fell a little flat. It is very, very much a two-player abstract strategy game with a theme pasted on. I imagine it’s pretty deep once you know all the cards, can see all the board positions and formulate moves accordingly. My friend Jon is pretty into that genre, though (abstracts), and is also a fan of Chvatil, so if the local store/cafe gets a copy in their library that we can kick around over a couple beers, I’ll certainly try it again. Otherwise, I’ll be avoiding it.

I taught and played Amerigo a couple times, which I wrote about here a few pages back when I played a production prototype at a free game day a few months ago. It remains a great game in my opinion. Lots of choices, strategies and options. It has been officially released now, so I’ll probably pick it up for myself for the holidays (a guy at my regular group just got his Kickstarter copy, so there’s no rush).

I also taught a game of Archipelago, a release from last year’s Essen (she had a copy at Sasquatch then, but it was in French, so we had to wait for the English version a couple months later). The guy had owned it for seven months and never got to play it, which I thought was a damned crime. Again, I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ll say again, it is probably my favorite euro-style game from last year. I’ve played it probably a dozen times, and it still doesn’t get old. Every game is a struggle.

Rampage, a disk-flicking game about giant monsters knocking over buildings and eating meeples in a city. No, it isn’t actually licensed from the old video game, but yeah- it draws a heavy inspiration from there. Good goofy fun. I have my stable of disk-flicking games I like, though (with expansions, [url=]Catacombs with expansions, [), so I don’t particularly feel the need to buy this one. If someone has a copy, we’re goofing off, had a few beers and the night is winding down though, I’m sure I’d play it. It was good fun.

We played [url=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid]Power Grid](]Ascending Empires[/url) with the new Indian Subcontinent map and associated rules. Australia is the other side of the map. My group plays a lot of Power Grid. It comes in phases, sure, but it always finds its way back to the table before too long. We really like the ‘economic snowball’ games- PG, the Outpost family (Outpost, Phoenicia, Scepter of Zavandor), and we all know them really, really well, so our games are very cutthroat. The India map introduces a slew of new rules (brownouts, limited resources, etc.) that added a bunch of new twists to take into account. I didn’t get to play in the Australia game, but it is similarly complex (Uranium selling market, lots of small, disconnected networks, etc.) and brutal, so I’m pretty sure one of the PG owners in my group will pick up these maps soon, breathing some new life into the old favorite.

Myself and another player taught the Robinson Crusoe game (another release from last year’s Essen), which I was happy to do, as having another player who knew the game well let us play something besides the first scenario. I’ve gotten it to the table four or so times myself, but it always seems to be with a new group, so we play the first one to get people to know the mechanics (and just how brutal the game can be, heh). This time we played the Family Robinson scenario, and managed to sail to an easy victory. I still really like this game, and wish I could play it more. Nice, thematic co-op. Sasquatch had copies of the Essen-released expansion, which is a set of campaign scenarios, based on Darwin’s scientific expedition aboard the HMS Beagle, which led to the Origin of Species. It looks fabulous, with the scenarios all being very different from one another and the base game, and progress carrying over from one to the next. The festival organizer Jennifer was keen to play it, but I was a bit skeptical- I didn’t want to only play the first one or two of the bit, and then have to restart again with my normal group. Ultimately, it was moot as our in-between-games time never seemed to mesh up.

Finally, the fest ended last night with the Essen release Nations. It was ok. Kind of like a less-fiddly, more streamlined version of Through The Ages. Buying cards, deploying workers, scoring points. It was fine, but didn’t excite me too much.

Like I said, I didn’t get to play a slew of the other big ones- Madeira, Caverna, Glass Road, Lewis & Clark, Concordia, Bruxelles 1893 and a couple others all seemed to be in heavy rotation, but I never found the time (not to mention the hundred-or-so others I didn’t even see touched, though I’m sure a lot of them were). The next ‘big’ Free Game Day is in January. I’m sure I’ll get to try some then.

6255

That is an enormous amount of gaming. I have A Study in Emerald coming in the mail due to the kickstarter. Glad to hear it’s good, I was a little nervous (I find Martin Wallace a bit hit or miss, but his hits are my favorites). My FLGS is hosting a post-essen gaming thing this weekend where they have pre-release copies of a bunch of games. The two I’m looking forward to most are Nations and Glass Road. I really enjoy Through the Ages but my gaming buddies all found it overemphasized ganging up and war, which it sounds like Nations addresses. Glass Road’s central card choosing / following mechanic just sounds awesome, and right up my alley.

Also excited to hear you like Amerigo. Last weekend I finally got to play Bora Bora and I was disappointed by it. It felt so kludgy and pasted together with perhaps the worst implementation of a theme I’ve ever seen in a Euro game. Otherwise, I think Stefan Feld is becoming one of my favorite designers. I love Trajan, quite like Castles of Burgundy and Macao, and wouldn’t mind playing Brugges every so often.

I’m looking forward to Amerigo, though am apprehensive about the action choosing mechanic. Is it a pretty weighty game or more light and easy to get into?

6256

I’d call it solidly medium-weight. The mechanics are pretty easy to explain and simple at their core, and it’s pretty easy to see where they all lead. It does seem a bit complex on initial explanation, but a few actions in and everyone sees how it all works if there was any confusion. None of the games I’ve played (all 4-player, the max), have lasted longer than about an hour and a half- it goes pretty quick once everyone gets into the swing of it. That said, it isn’t a game where you can plan any sort of a strategy before you start- no “no I’m going for the corn strategy here”, or losing the game through bidding two dollars more than you should have on an auction five turns ago. More of a ‘roll with the chaos and adjust your plans on the fly’ sort of thing, though with the procession of colors, there is a baseline potential order of actions you can be assured of. It is really good.

It really was a great weekend- I really don’t like cons normally, but this is small, friendly and focused enough that I’m ok with it. I didn’t even mention all the little filler games , both new and old, played in between all the biggies.

6257

Excellent write-up, Mr. Quixote! Now I simply must get my hands on A Study in Emerald.

-Tom

6258

I’m taking a good look at Terra Mystica. The theme isn’t really strong, but the gameplay has a lot of interesting things going on. It’s a civ builder where everyone has mostly the same abilities but each race(14 in all) has a slight tweak.

The board has a pre printed hex world on it, similar to a Catan layout with various terrain types and rivers flowing through. The replayability comes from the multitude of starting races and one of the core concepts is terraforming. The 14 races are distributed across 7 player boards. The boards correspond to the 7 terrain types. Each race can only build on the terrain suited for them, they do have the opportunity to change the terrain. The closer to the desired land the easier it is. That’s just one part of the economy though. There is a branching development tree that produce differing resources as the buildings are placed. The player mat is Eclipse-like in that as the buildings go out it uncovers your income. The game is very informative at a glance. That is, once you comprehend its language. If you are confronted with a setup board the impression it could give is of a much more complicated game. The eclipse-like fiddlyness of the player board looks daunting.

The Shut Up and Sit Down guys do a nice albeit quirky review.

Tom M

6259

Terra Mystica was a big miss for me. My friends and I played it twice because I was really expecting to like it, but we didn’t like it either time. I had two primary issues with it. The first was that the most important and interesting decision was at the beginning of the game. Choosing which race to play and where to start seemed to determine the game more then anything else, and afterwards it was just playing out what felt like the inevitable result.

The second was that it’s a game full of interlocking systems that don’t really lead anywhere interesting. Per turn decisions have a lot of “noise” from all the systems, but all you were doing was looking through that noise for the optimal move and executing it. That sounds pretty reductionist… I guess what I mean is in retrospect there didn’t appear to be much argument for what a player should have done. In general, the systems really seem to prioritize noise over interesting decisions. The mana bowls are a good example of that. It’s a really complicated system that ultimately results in extended cooldowns for abilities. If the game design had an editor, I think they would’ve cut the whole thing out, or at least simplified it significantly.

All that said, it was kind of interesting and probably would be a game I’d like if it was streamlined / edited. It doesn’t justify the 3-4 hours it took us to play a game. Kingdom Builder, I think, suffers from a similar issue with your opening position often cementing how a game is going to play out, but I’m willing to accept that since it’s only 30 minutes long. Terra Mystica is currently sitting in my “give away to someone who might actually appreciate it” pile.

6260

Not liking Terra Mystica is of course your prerogative, comparing it to Kingdom Builder, now that’s just mean ;)

It is a Euro the theme is very loosely placed and if you’re looking, as I am at times, for a nice chuck of the dice lets see what happens kind of deal, yea it won’t be that. I agree you are being a little reductionist about it and personally Terra Mystica is right up there with Stephen Feld’s Castles of Burgandy. It’s a game where it is all about making the most VP and optimizing a strategy to do just that. Sure that means some moves are better than others in certain situations but so is every competitive game. And make no mistake this thing is competitive. You may not be able to push people out of thier territory but you are definitely pushing each other around.

I’m getting a little ranty, sorry about that. After hitting Agricola and Battle of the Bulge lately I guess it put me in a weird headspace where Terra Mystica really resonates and I think it deserves a better defense than I can muster. But you’re right it won’t be for everyone, nothing is, but I’m really enjoying it.

Tom M