I guess I like the story that ends up coming out of playing. It also is tense, with people close to dying all the time, zombies creeping up, guns breaking. I guess I like the chaos.
Santa (that’s me) brought Merchants and Marauders this Christmas, and it’s one kick ass adventure game. It takes the best aspects of Pirates!, converts them to boardgame format, and is playable in a reasonable 2-3 hours (likely faster once you’ve got it down).
Easily the best pirate boardgame I’ve yet played (beating out Fire & Axe), even if the Dread Pirate Juan did hunt me down like a mangy sea dog. It does a nice job of balancing both the pirate and merchant angle, has great player interaction, and I really like the way it allows the risk of your pirate dying without knocking you out of the game.
One thumb and one hook up.
I am finding this one tempting. Do you think it would work well as a two player game?
As a game its terrible. Its only really good if you get into the theme and think of it as a low budget zombie movie. It can create some hilarious situations.
Sounds like you were getting some bad rolls. I’ve played through an entire game with the same shotgun.
I’ve found it works best as a 5 player game: 4 human players, 1 zombie player. It can get pretty nasty towards the end!
I played it two-player the other night and it worked out pretty well. It might even be better with two players, since I imagine the downtime between turns is a bigger problem with more players. It’s a beautiful game, get it!
Seems like it should be fine 2 players, though I’ve yet to try it that way. It’d be a bit less interesting than 4 players as you’d have less chance for interaction, but the game should take half as long…
My son’s been angling to play two players, so I’ll probably get a couple of games in that way over the next week or so; I’ll post about how it goes.
Wandering off topic a bit, I find myself wondering how to combine it with Arabian Nights. That’d be the holy grail of adventure games, if you could make it work.
Coolstuffinc is offering 10% off all orders until the end of the year, so I bought M&M, Cyclades, and Ascension (I can never spell that damned word) for less than $100 shipped. I also learned about an online shop called Miniature Market out of Missouri that has terrific prices, good BGG feedback, and a $75 free shipping threshold. http://www.miniaturemarket.com/
ioticus
1969
I got that damn 10% off coupon the day after I placed a large order with Coolstuff.
Big fan of Miniature Market. Great prices and.a low shipping threshold. I wish they’d hurry up and get merchants and Marauders in stock.
Were you playing the intro “kill all the zombies” scenario? Because that one’s horrid. Never play it. I thought the game was awful and broken because I was playing with beginner rules and that scenario; after I played other scenarios with the advanced rules, it became much, much better.
And yes, the heroes do have to flee a lot. That’s basically the tension for them – they need to search, but if the zombie player is competent, it’s very difficult to get risk-free searches, so they’re always torn between running away and trying to search for the things they need to win.
Dixit was a big hit with a mixed-age group of non-gamers, as was Citadels (for the nth time). The former was an easy sell on account of the art and the focus on narrating that art, but the second really only came together once I got them through a practice round and passed around the photocopy of the character cards. I wish they would go ahead and make the Dixit standard box the same size as the expansion for it making it fully portable right off the bat, but I suppose there’s a still a faction pulling for shelf space and the ability to walk a bunny around a pond for points.
I agree, you don’t really need the bunnies to play Dixit, but I can see them being useful the first few times you play.
We got Small World for Christmas and it’s awesome. Really fun and easy to teach to kids. Lots to learn strategywise, too.
Well, one more board game purchase to finish off 2010:
1 - Thunderstone Card Game (New, Board Games, Alderac Entertainment Group) at $25.99 each
1 - Thunderstone: Doomgate Legion (New, Board Games, Alderac Entertainment Group) at $22.99 each
1 - Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements (New, Board Games, Alderac Entertainment Group) at $19.99 each
1 - Gosu Card Game (New, Board Games, Asmodee Editions) at $19.99 each
1 - Arkham Horror Dice Set: Beige with Black (New, Board Games, Q-Workshop) at $6.99 each
1 - Arkham Horror Dice Set: Black with Green (New, Board Games, Q-Workshop) at $6.99 each
Here’s the thing with Thunderstone. I hated Dominion. I blindly bought it and two expansions and promptly traded it away. The theme bored me to death and I didn’t like the idea of playing solely for victory points (I guess it’s too Euro for me).
On the other hand, Thunderstone has an enticing theme with gorgeous artwork and I really like some of the expanded mechanics (like the dungeon and leveling up heroes). I’m hoping (and expecting) I’ll like this Dominion clone much more than I did Dominion. And I looked into Ascension and Heroes of Graxia and the former seemed too simple and the latter too mathy.
I bought Gosu thanks mostly to UndeadViking’s excellent video review (Jeremy Salinas did a review of it as well). It’s another beautiful looking card game that plays like a CCG/LCG without the collectible format, kind of like Blue Moon with some very innovative mechanics.
And I had to get some “real” dice for Akrham Horror (the new beige dice look sweet). :)
Well, I’m officially broke now. Thanks a lot CSI and your low down, rotten 10% off deal.
It being Christmas, I got some board game time in.
I’m bored with Ticket To Ride. I remember being thrilled with it as an upgrade to Union Pacific, but now it just feels like a low-thought filler game. Of course this is what the relatives wanted to play most.
Agricola is fun, but the scoring is opaque. Who won / who was ahead always seemed like a bit of a surprise. This particularly after playing games where the score is always visible.
The Rails of Europe map for Railways of the World / Railroad Tycoon is definitely more fun than the original Eastern US map, since there’s no “you must start HERE” area like the New York / Boston area.
Honestly, I need better opponents. We also played St. Petersburg and Dominion, and I saw a lot of moves that were nearly random.
Dean
1977
I finally got my wife to play San Juan and now she’s a fiend. She beat me once, she understands getting Quarries and Smithies early, and she goes for the Chapel as soon as she can. Played this four times with her in the last week and she keeps wanting to introduce it to more people.
Reldan
1978
I have the same feeling with Ticket to Ride. I’m always stuck between wanting to recommend it to people as a gateway game and knowing that I’d never personally want to take the time to play it.
If you play it a few times you’ll generally get a relative sense of who’s ahead. To some degree, it makes it easy to ignore the scoring and just work on improving your farm instead of being 100% focused on who’s winning constantly.
You sound like you like train games with some depth. Do you have a copy of Steam by any chance?
The problem is that it makes the game difficult to teach. I had a couple of players who scored 19 points each (tied) in our first game, and scored 9 points (tied again) in our second. Without some sort of clearer feedback as to what is a good move and what isn’t, they floundered.
I wasn’t sure what to do either, but I picked up quickly on the idea that having a few points in everything was important.
Yes, I do, and no, I’m never going to play it with this group. It’s too unforgiving. Railroad Tycoon / Railways of the World shares the core mechanic that I really like, the delivery of cargo cubes, but it’s much more difficult to spend your way into an unrecoverable debt spiral.
I tried out 1856 with this group, and they were totally lost. Part of that I think is that all of 18xx games have a steep learning curve because of the private companies, which you have to bid on before you understand any of the game mechanics.
Skinner
1980
How about “A Game of Thrones”? I have it and have never played it. We’ve got 5 guys lined up tonight to play and we haven’t played anything in a really long time. So what do you think about that one?
I thought about Twilight Imperium also which we’ve played maybe 3 times.
