Just scored an awesome trade getting Xia in a few days. Will report back.
Stumbled across a new in box copy of Warhammer Diskwars for $20 at my local Half-Price Books. Welp. Good thing I’d been waiting on it!
Machi Koro is still on sale at TWS, and now Tammany Hall and others.
How is Tammany Hall? I get nervous that in board games with voting that the social dynamics of the table end up running the game (which I’m fine with in short party games like The Resistance, but that doesn’t appear to be Tammany Hall’s goal).
Tom_Mc
1945
I like it. The turns are really simple you have very limited choices so of course they matter a lot. It is a game about voting but really it’s bidding that’s going on as you are playing for territorial control. Shut Up and Sit Down’s Paul thought it was good but overhyped.
Tom M
There’s a lot of positive buzz about this game, and it just became available for purchase at CSI. I’m looking forward to your report!
hepcat
1947
One of our Chicago crew has it and I’m looking forward to playing it. But for 85 bucks online, it better massage my temples and feed me margaritas while I play.
Tom_Mc
1948
Yea he got me to open a thread on it. I got excited earlier today when my tracking label was printed. Slow day I guess. I’ve been reading through the rules and have been thinking about combat strategy and timing. I’ll post in the other thread some of those thoughts once I’ve got sone gameplay in.
Tom M
newbrof
1949
I can recommend Patchwork, a 2 player (light/medium) game by Uwe Rosenberg. You basically build your own quilt by buying cloth from the market, which will earn you income to buy more cloth. The cloth tiles are tetris-like pieces and the VPs/currency is represented by buttons. It looks like this:
The interesting decissions are: Which tile out of 3 to buy or to collect money. Each tile has a time value, it has this time/turn-order. Who is last on the timetrack can act. (like Tokaido, Egizia ot Thebes)…
You lose points at the end of the game for each square that is not covered on your quilt…
Anyone played seasons? I like drafting games, and here you draft cards and dice… it is supposed to be a very good 2 player game. I almost pulled the trigger to buy it, almost. Someone want to tip me over?
hepcat
1950
I’ve now had a chance to play this on two different saturdays and I have to say, I really like it. It’s a fantastic amalgamation of rpg and board game, with just enough of each to keep that precarious balance from tipping one way or the other. Seppey and Zarathud from Qto3 have characters in my game and they’ve managed to level them up at least once.
I combined everything but the loot and scavenge cards, and the exploration tokens, last night. Took me almost two hours, but the variety available in the game now is really making me want to play again. Thankfully I’ve got a Christmas gaming event coming up with a bunch of childhood friends back in Ohio during the holidays.
Pros:
Great theme and interesting story
The combat isn’t too light but it isn’t too heavy either. It’s a porridge that’s just right.
The exploration actually pays off during missions, rewarding players with decent weapons and upgrades in a CRPG fashion.
The meta game as represented by visits to a rather extensively detailed town in between missions is fantastic. Shop, heal, have text based adventures…it’s very, very cool. And the community on boardgamegeek.com has already extended the options greatly with fan made material that’s easily as good as that found in the base games.
Cons:
The figures are not hobby level, but they’re certainly fine for a board game. I just wish they’d come assembled.
Most of the fights we’ve been in haven’t been as close as I would expect. Thankfully, they’ve included numerous ways to make the baddies even harder. I may have to explore those options in our next game. Of course, everyone in our group runs around with about 3 sticks of dynamite, so that may be the larger reason for the ease of our encounters.
It chews up table space like you wouldn’t believe. There’s a deck of cards for almost everything you do, as well as numerous charts for town events, traveling in between missions, etc…
Andon
1951
Xia is a very fun, but flawed game. If you have folks you game with who aren’t patient it can get frustrating for them. Overly AP people can cause turns to drag out a bit. Movement is based on die rolls, and you can opt to move and roll up to 3 or 4 times a turn as needed. Add in getting some missions, looking over the map for the optimal routes, etc… And next thing you know, you’ve spent 5 minutes on your turn alone. We found we had to house rule a few things to keep the game moving along.
The other CON is the length. Due to the randomness of the game, if someone gets an early lucky lead with a few exploration tokens, it can be hard to catch up. The optimal move we found in the game is for everyone to pack in the biggest engine possible and run as quickly as possible to explore every location you can. Once the MAP is built and explored, people reconfigure ships and change roles to pick up the needed Fame to win. I find this to be a little annoying since everyone plays exactly the same for the first 20-30 minutes of the game. Again, room for some house rules maybe?
The game was designed as a sandbox, and even the designer has said he’s interested to see how the game evolves in the coming months.
I have a few ideas I’m working on for a solo mode as well as scenarios ala Firefly.
I was not a huge fan of Seasons. The draft happens at the beginning of the game and then the rest of the game is responding to it. To me it felt too restrictive once the drafting was done, and that restrictiveness pulled the excitement out of the game for me. I’m not a huge fan of games in general where it feels a bit like playing out your starting positions. (But as you can see on BGG, the game gets a lot of love so take my opinion with a grain of salt.)
The theme also really doesn’t work. In theory, you’re at a wizard tournament that takes 3 years to play out (if I remember right). In practice, you’re at the most glacial fashion show ever where you can’t put on your gorgeous robe unless the weather is going to bring out its colors. Kind of a minor thing, but it’s sad a game with this fantastic art doesn’t really feel like what it looks like.
Chaplin
1953
I was wondering if I just like things too tough. I have not run high level heroes, but the online community seems to believe that once a few level ups happen the baddies become a cake walk. In my experience, even in low levels, the baddies can bring moments of danger, but fairly often the heroes have things well in hand. I am still shakey with some of the finicky bits of the rules though so I may be doing things a tad wrong. I have been debating things like bumping up the threat deck a notch, adding elite skills always, or using the mean side of the creature cards. Or maybe limiting dynamite and/or making a rule that makes it possible to have it blow up in the heroes’ bags. There also seems to be a fair bit of healing in “catch your breath” and the like so it seems to reset the characters a fair bit after every fight robbing the game of a push your luck kind of thing such as “whew we made it, but I don’t think we can take one more fight.”
None of this should be taken too heavily though. I love SoB. As Hepcat says, it straddles board game and mechanics driven RPG quite effectively. If you are the sort that liked the story telling through mechanics along with cooperative elements, but maybe were turned off by the spatial ambiguity or lack of persistence in Sentinels of the Multiverse, or maybe if you liked Descent, but wanted more story and less Overlord, then you might want to look into Shadows of Brimstone. Well, if you like the idea of Cthulu vs the Old West that is.
Gedd
1955
I’m probably the last person who you want to hear from on this, as I’ve only played one game of it so far, but I’m placing it around a 6 or 7 on a 10 point scale (with 5 being ok). I think you make a lot of interesting decisions throughout the game, and there’s some room for reacting to what you’re opponent does. I will admit that the game’s art is also a big part of what initially attracted me to the game, and I enjoy throwing the large dice around. I also think some of the mechanics are interesting (like having some amount of control in how fast the game goes by which dice you leave).
Ghost Stories is currently a Lightning Deal on Amazon for $23 (54% off), the lowest price ever on Amazon. 37% claimed.
The game is better with expansions. I play 2 players only 4 players just feels too chaotic. I’ve played an embarrassing amount online so much in fact that I sold my copy of the game.
Chronic
1958
I missed Mysterio’s post about Ghost Stories on sale at Amazon but when I went and checked it was only a couple bucks more I also grabbed Betrayal at House on the Hill for just under $40. Whoo Hoo more games for the backlog.
I got Notre Dame recently and have played it four times now. It’s really good! It’s the first “older” Stefan Feld game I’ve played. It’s really simple, clean, and quick but every decision feels very meaty. Our last game was only 30 minutes in length, but felt meaty like a 2 hour game.
The central mechanic here is card drafting, but the interesting part is every action (represented by one card) grows in power after each use. For instance, the action that gains you money gives 1 money on it’s first activation, then 2, then 3, then 4… increasing on each activation. But unlike many engine building game, there’s plenty of opportunities to score points early as well as late. Often, Notre Dame asks you if you’d rather have 7 victory points or another action towards increasing your engine. Unlike many engine-builders, this decision is tough because 7 victory points is a large amount to gain at any point in the game! Instead of scoring all your points at the end as you often do in Splendor or Dominion, here you’re questioning a lot of points vs. late game power nearly every turn.
I got the game on amazon for… let’s just say too much money because it was the German version. Apparently the game received a German reprint recently, but not an English one. None of the game components are language specific, though, and you can print off the English rules from BGG. If you have an opportunity to pick this game up, do it, it’s great!
Tom_Mc
1960
I have three Feld games I can think of offhand. Trajan, Castles of Burgandy and The Spiecherstadt. I really want to see Aquasphere make it to a place I can reasonably buy it. I like what I have a lot although I want to play Castles and Trajan more to really see all they have. The Spiecherstadt is a great small super viscous bidding and speculation game about the warehouse distruct of Hamburg. It’s bidding mechanism is one of the most simple but infuriating I’ve ever seen. It’s a good light one and when I bought it it was only $14 or so. I got really great milage out of it.
Tom M
