malkav11
6321
Got my Kickstarter copy of The Agents this Saturday and managed to get it to table tonight. First impression? This is a slick, slick little card game with a lot of scope for tricky plays. The basic idea is that you are assembling “factions” of one to five agents each shared by you and one of your opponents, with an eye towards scoring the most points at the end of the round in which someone hits 40 points. The catch comes in that every single agent card is a double-edged sword. One end of the card gives out points, the other gives an effect, and you have to choose which you get and which your opponent gets. Sometimes this is a one shot (“free agent”) that’s discarded after play, but mostly they go into your shared factions. The points go out automatically every turn, the effects happen when first played and can be reactivated with an action by the player they’re facing. The final complication are mission cards that can be assigned up to two to your side of each faction. These score points once a turn whenever their criteria are fulfilled (i.e. you might score 1 point per dead agent in the associated faction, or 4 points for having at least two agents with the same ability facing you in that faction). That’s already a recipe for some sweet tactical choices, but then you have to consider that you only get two actions per turn, -must- take both actions, new cards cost points, and effects -must- be used if possible when agents are first played…lots of lovely wrinkles.
Our session ran about an hour but we were still figuring it out and fairly slow to make our plays. I could see cutting it into the 20-40 minutes the box suggests with some experience. There were also some expansions and such funded by the Kickstarter, adding some funky new agents and missions, plus a new agent type called partners, commanders that provide a player-specific ongoing passive bonus, etc, which all look to do really interesting things to the game space, but we didn’t get into those this time around. I wish I knew when it would be generally available, but so far it looks like a good buy when it is.
geewhiz
6322
Good to hear as I backed Agents at the Santa level so getting two copies (one as a present). How are the plastic cards?
They seemed pretty nice, but that’s not the sort of thing I pay a huge amount of attention to. I couldn’t even remember if they were plastic or not.
Chaplin
6324
Anyone toy with the dice builder (supposedly Dominion with dice) Quarriors? Is it strategic or utterly random? Good gamer night game? Did you get to try out the Quartifacts expansion (adds quests) and did this alter how you felt about the game?
I am putting an Amazon order together and since the iOS version/would be demo is failing to drop, I am tempted to just toss it in the cart and play it with folks over the holidays. Bad call?
JoshL
6325
I’m not super-fond of Quarriors, but it isn’t bad. It has several things over Dominion and its ilk:
- No shuffling!
- Setup and tear-down time is significantly reduced.
- It’s short (usually).
The down side is that everybody has to read the cards in the middle that explain what the dice do. This is a problem in Dominion, too, of course, but at least in Dominion once you have the card in your hand, you can just read it. In Quarriors you’re always straining to read the REALLY REALLY tiny font on the cards in the middle of the table. Also, it does feel like there is a lot of luck to it. I haven’t played it that much so maybe I am just not picking up on the strategy, but it seems like the majority of the time your creatures will get killed before it comes back around to your turn; you mostly just have to hope your opponents roll badly and can’t set up any attacks.
Tom_Mc
6326
I got cold on Quarriors pretty fast. I’m not a big fan of Dominion right now either.
I like my deck builders thematic and interesting. A Few Acres of Snow, love the game and I will stay out of the, “it’s broken,” argument, just know that there is one. Eminent Domain I want to revisit and play more of. Core Worlds is a great ultra competitive deck builder. There are a ton of agonizing decisions in that fairly simple framework.
Tom Mc
Chaplin
6327
Quarriors is broken or were you referring to Acres of Snow? Either of you try Quartifacts? It seems targeted to help out most commonly felt failings of the rest of the product line.
10 dollars off any Game from Barnes and Noble, as long as the purchase is of 20 dolalrs or more, and with a master card. Any suggestions on what to get though?
Tom_Mc
6329
There is a fairly extensive Acres of Snow argument regarding Halifax and hammers. I enjoy the game regardless and I think that your average gamer will enjoy A Few Acres of Snow if they are at all interested in the subject.
I heard that some of the Quarriors expansions make it more interesting. I have no personal experience there. The core game didn’t carry me too far. It like those Shut up and Sit down guys say, there are way too many good games to spend time playing one you feel meh about. But, if Quarriors registers as good for anyone by all means go for it.
Tom M
While I don’t doubt some people still assert A Few Acres of Snow is “broken” – really, what game isn’t if you push it far enough? – I think the Halifax hammer issue was put to rest by a few rules tweaks in a later edition. These included simple things like taking a boat out of the French starting deck and more involved things like not letting certain types of cards get banked and thereby slowing down the British rush. But, yeah, I’m with the other Tom and think A Few Acres of Snow is brilliant. I’m really looking forward to Wallace’s A Study in Emerald.
-Tom
Quarriors is good, not great. The big thing that bugs me about it is the double-randomness: You first have to draw a good die from your bag THEN roll a good side on it for it to be maximally effective. Pretty much every die has a “mana-only” side, so you can finally draw your big dragon only to have it be nothing but mana. Can be a little dispiriting. If you’re used to strategy games, then look up the advanced rules (they’re apparently the rules that were playtested for 90% of the development of the game)–they offer players a few more choices to players.
Oh, and YES to A Study in Emerald. Still have yet to play Few Acres of Snow.
I’ve played it a couple times and don’t care for it. It drags and I’ve never felt like I got to make much in the way of interesting decisions. The people I played with liked it.
geewhiz
6333
I play Few Acres of Snow with my son, and we both like it. I think if we were to play it a lot day after day than it would over time be broken due to finding or reading the optimal strategy problem that has been discussed on BBG etc.
I think if one only plays it occasionally then it remains fresh and fun. And part of the fun was to determine an optimal strategy anyway which I forget by the time we play it again. :)
geewhiz
6334
I do not care for Quarriors either; most of the people I played with really liked it a lot.
I think that cards being different is one thing but having dice being different to build a rolling bag of dice ( versus building a deck) just doesn’t feel right. Not sure why I feel like that but I do.
Count me in the camp of people who don’t like Quarriors. I really, really wanted to like it. (Tons of dice? Sign me up!) I agree with the double-randomness issue, but my biggest problem is that you don’t roll the dice enough. I mean, if I’m attacking someone, shouldn’t I roll the dice for my attack? I just seems wrong to roll a die once, then leave it on that face the entire time.
To put it more simply: It’s basically a deck-building game, where you add cards six at a time.
shang
6336
I’m sad to say that at least the cards in my copy certainly feel quite “cheap”. They are perfectly functional but thin and the edges are shabbily cut. There are also some color variation so some cards have a slightly different hue on the back side making them potentially recognizable even when turned over.
I’d say they are not terrible for the price but definitely not high quality.
EDIT: So yeah, I guess this explains why the edges are a bit rough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkBcPj2XSYE :P
Last night I finally got to give a couple of new games a try:
Ladies & Gentlemen: This is a great concept and pretty well-executed. For those who don’t know, L&G is a team-based social game where half the table are ladies, each paired up with gentlemen. The team with the best-dressed lady at the ball at the end of the game wins. The women go shopping for outfits while the gentlemen go to the stock market and earn their income. Then the men have to choose which of their lady’s items they will/can pay for. We had a full group of ten, and although teaching the rules took awhile, the game runs pretty smoothly, if just slightly chaotically (we blurred the lines between phases a bit, but it didn’t seem to have any bad consequences). We had two women at the table, so three of us guys were ladies, which wasn’t a problem (I thought some of my players wouldn’t care for that). I had a great time shopping and strategizing (I also won by a point). I got the impression that the ladies had more fun than the gentlemen. Both halves of the game are pretty luck-based, but several of the men felt that they really didn’t have much control or a chance to sway the game significantly. But I think everyone who played would be up for trying again.
1969: This is a worker placement game about the space race. It’s like a REALLY trimmed down version of that boardgame Liftoff! that inspired Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. There are basically two parts to the game, hiring scientists (and spies) to assign them to different areas of research, and then rolling dice to try to complete missions to get prestige (VPs) and to boost your chance at the moonshot mission. My impressions are pretty good. After reading the rules, I thought it was going to be pretty cutthroat because of the ways you can use spies and intelligence cards to muck with people’s research and missions–it turns out the incentives just aren’t as high to do that rather than invest in your own stuff (admittedly I didn’t play with any super-cutthroat players). Early on it felt like it would be impossible to make much progress in just 7 turns (1963-1969), but it turned out that your research really improved your purchasing power (less so your chance of perfectly completing a mission, which was still pretty tricky). I think some might find the game a little dry, and I have suspicions that there might be an optimal way to build up. But I will definitely play it again, especially considering that it only took us an hour-and-a-half to play with learning time.
So, actually, we found there was very little of that kind of tension in the husbands-purchasing bit. The gentlemen can’t buy anything the ladies don’t hand them as options, and I don’t think there’s a lot of incentive to hand them junk. Anyway, I think a lot of that kind of fun is more role-playing than game mechanics. If anyone else has played and has a different experience, I’d love to hear it.
tylertoo
6340
Looking for recommendation for a card/dice/board game to play with my wife and 13-year old daughter. Last Christmas, King of Tokyo was a big hit. In past years, Ticket to Ride, Castle Panic and Carcasonne were favorites. My attempt to interest them in dungeon crawling went for naught, same with LoTR:LCG. 7 Wonders was not liked, too serious in tone perhaps. Lately my daughter is less interested in family gaming, unless it is Apples to Apples, which she finds hilarious and I find devoid of anything resembling fun.
Thoughts anyone?
EDIT: Would Small World fit the bill? Bohnanza?
