Board Games!

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We played Spirit Island last night. Hooooooly shit what a dense game

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I did enjoy it. I crave playing it again. But I need to PREPARE my brain.

Funny enough, the other game I was gifted for my bday was fucking Food Chain Magnate. My brain gonna be doing a big hurt for the foreseeable future.

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it took me FOREVER to do that exact same quest you have, shaft.ed

if it helps, the class you unlock from it is a fucking blast.

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oooooh wait you're right i think that did unlock an envelope and it's not that interesting honestly

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carcasonne is fine

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I seem to remember it being a role in rmmmmm.

Hello,

YoshiX

. You are

Carcassonne

. For years, Reck did nothing but play you. You were his favorite board game. All he did was sit around and study techniques and strategies to get better at playing you. After awhile, though, he forgot about you... however, at Caffwagon 2010, Reck finally remembered how amazing you are!

You are an

Innocent Child Cop

:

Active Abilities:

Bored Gamer

- Each night, you may send me the name of one person to investigate, and I will inform you whether or not they are town aligned.

Calling The Bluff

- At any point during the game, you may publicly request for me to mod-confirm you as a town role, and I will do so.

Passive Abilities:

None

Win Condition (Town):

You win when all threats to town have left the game.

***MODNOTE: Paranoid cop.


---

yep, 2010 was a time.

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i will also not defend dominion bc it's not good

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sameeee

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We did the intro game + the January month for S0

It seems fucking impossible to get both objectives completed. There's just not enough time before you're hitting too many incidents.

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ironically, the spike in cases due to the pandemic has made making progress on my Pandemic Legacy S0 game very difficult!

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ironically, the spike in cases due to the pandemic has made making progress on my Pandemic Legacy S0 game very difficult!

What month are you on?

feb

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I have switched over to Brute, she is a Scoundrel, since Tinkerer was not enough for me to help.

oof yeah, scoundrel/tinker sounds like a pretty squishy combo.

i always recommend that starting parties have at least one of brute or cragheart.
cragheart is my favorite class in the entire game, including what we've unlocked, followed closely by Three Spears

in terms of our party, it went (me/husband):
Cragheart/Brute
Sun/Brute
Sun/Circles
Two Mini/Circles
Three Spears/Circles
Three Spears/Cthulu

Not spoiling the actual class names, but uh... holy fucking shit did I get some of the most busted ass classes in the game.
Cragheart is a goddamn blast to play.
Sun was... fine. Not super engaging but like, fine.
Two Minis though? In a two player setup, it literally might just be the strongest class in the game. Not as strong at higher party counts. We completed some scenarios in two or three rounds thanks to a specific broken card.
Three Spears might be the most bonkers class in the game, though obviously we haven't played every class. This class feels like it's going to kick ass at all party sizes. Like, playing this class literally just feels like breaking the rules of Gloomhaven over and over again in absolutely disgusting ways. And the class's combat deck upgrades make it even more hilariously broken.

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Two Minis though? In a two player setup, it literally might just be the strongest class in the game.

You have to unlock Angry Face. Just as or more powerful!

My partner and I currently have Angry Face/Two minis as our party and it is a hilarious wrecking crew even in boss fights.

angry face i think one of us unlocks when we finish our quest? I don't remember, I think I have angry face and my partner has the Saw class
very curious at what Triforce is...

we've done SO MANY scenarios. probably 30+, and we're still not done yet.
i have the "kill 4 bosses" quest and it's a pain in the ass. might never finish it. might not want to bc three spears is so gd broken
for anyone who wants a light peek at what Three Spears is:

imagine a class entirely built around letting you break item usage rules. imagine never having to long rest bc your cards let you get back your stamina potions after you use them -- one minor and one major each means you recover 10 cards per scenario via items alone. imagine having advantage on every single attack because your eagle eye goggles reset every single fucking round. imagine a battle deck that's almost entirely beneficial shit PLUS draw more beneficial shit. that's three spears.

the build i'm running for 3 spears seriously feels like cheating.

anyway we are running out of time for gloomhaven... tainted grail is supposed to arrive in the next month, which fills a similar void, and then frosthaven is late 2021... so we need to wrap this shit up asap. we still have Forgotten Circles expansion we need to play through as well!

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ok so go to april in pandemic s0 tonight

BIG QUESTION PLEASE HELP

are the extra assets you get at the end of each month only usable that month for purchase? or do they go into a "shop" of some kind? bc it just is like "open the door" and then nothing in the rulebook says anything about assets available for purchase

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ok, i had no idea i was supposed to keep them around between games. whoops

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playing pandemic legacy s0 again tonight. v hype

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we got to june! man this game is getting complex as fuck

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we got to june! man this game is getting complex as fuck

Spoiler:

Have you had infection cubes on the board? We were able to stop the trials and didn't have to deal with those. Felt like it was complex for us without even dealing with those.

we lost

one city each time, i have NO idea how you're supposed to get THREE teams on the board to deal with those cities

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Does anyone here consistently win at Spirit Island? I feel like this game is a real struggle fest for us sometimes. I'd guess my partner and I win only about 50-60% of the time, and I really don't feel like I have a good grasp on strategy.

It is weird because usually, I feel like after 10+ plays of a game, you kind of start to get more efficient at your play, but it is always reinventing the wheel everytime I play this one.

Do people tend to stick with one spirit and just get really good at that style? Is 2 player harder than 3 or 4 player?

I've only played it three times and I've won every time so either I'm very good (unlikely) or we're fucking up rules (pretty likely).

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I've only played it three times and I've won every time so either I'm very good (unlikely) or we're fucking up rules (pretty likely).

There are lots of other explanations! (I like to talk about this game so I'm just going to keep talking about it!) If you were playing on at least medium-ish difficulty then you probably are at least pretty good though.

There are a few rules that are easy to mess up (the most common one i believe being that blight cascade only cascades to one adjacent land, which people only mess up because pandemic has trained them otherwise). But there's also a lot of variance from game to game, especially if playing with the event deck from Branch & Claw (which I recommend for various reasons if you do have the expansion, though some people I've played with were initially offput by it).

There's variance from the spirits you're playing; there are certain combos that are just plain

good

even in the base game, like Bringer + Ocean shoving every coastal town they can into the sea and getting bonus fear. There are card combos that can just win the game on their own situationally; I remember a 4 player game I played like 3-4 years ago had one player playing Bringer who played powerstorm + tsunami after amassing a ton of energy against level 5 England to fake-kill 8 cities and do... i guess 48 fear in one turn if my math is right.

There are stronger and weaker spirits in isolation; in the base game in my personal opinion, A Spread of Rampant Green is just the strongest spirit in the game straight-up, doubly so if paired with any spirit that (1) can only place one presence/turn and (2) has particularly good growth (the obvious choice if you have the promo spirits being Serpent). Shadows Flicker Like Flame is notably weak. The rest of base game spirits are probably roughly balanced; Thunderspeaker can definitely shine in some cases and like, Bringer can definitely be especially weak if you don't know what you're doing with it. But the other 6 I think are all pretty good but not too strong.

And of course there's card luck. Sometimes you'll never draw two in a row of the same terrain and that can be problematic in some games. Sometimes you just won't find enough of your elements to get your innates online. Sometimes the event deck will throw something amazing at you, or sometimes you'll get the card that says all ravages do +1 damage and oops, that's 3 blight.

There are a number of things that I think Spirit Island does better than any other game I know; first and foremost is how seamlessly it integrates theme with mechanics, but also the way difficulty works is really good. I think at the highest difficulty levels even really good players will have to play fairly slowly to make sure they're not missing anything crucial. If you want to sort of play casually and expect to win every game you can get reasonably good and then play at difficulty 0-2; if you're reasonably good and want a challenge but still want to likely win, you can play at like anywhere from 3-7 depending on how good you think you are and how much synergy you pick in spirits and so on. And if you want to lose and have it hurt as the knife is twisted, you can play against England level 6 (note: i actually still have never done this).

I do think card luck plays into it. In my first few games I've played, I've played Ocean's Hungry Grasp twice. The ability to just yeet people into the sea is so fucking strong, I feel? Like, it has single-handedly saved us games. Ocean just feels straight up busted and maybe is why we've won so frequently.

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i legitimately just hate Machi Koro. It's like everything I hate about board games boiled into one game

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Machi Koro is worse than sitting around watching Futurama episodes you've already seen with your friends. It might be as bad as sitting around watching family guy episodes.

It qualifies as a board game, if I'm generous.

It's the only game I've ever encountered where they released an expansion pack that took everything I hated about the game and added a whole new thing that made the game even worse. I think me and the designers want exactly opposite things out of a board game, they just found a way to cram new bad things in there. Then I heard about Legacy and I was like "yep, they really are on a specific vendetta against me."

This

No PJ I don't hate dice games. I think there's a way to design a game that uses luck well / manages randomness to let strategy really shine..MK does not do this. MK is a game pretending to have a single ounce of strategy in it's bones when it actuality it's a slot machine simulator

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Good dice games (my wife may not agree):

Perudo/Liar's Dice - Fucking fantastic. Liar's dice is one of the best games ever. The only components are 5 dice/person, and the only things you do is roll them and then try to guess how many there are. Dice isn't just the main mechanic, it's the only mechanic, and it's pretty nasty strategy. Feels like a game of mafia at times.
Bora Bora - great worker placement game, dice add a nice bit of positioning/planning. Tons of strategy.
Can't Stop - I can spend 30 minutes rolling dice for games of Can't Stop. Dumb, but hell, I love it. Really grasps the essence of push your luck. It's a slot machine simulator, but it's one that makes me laugh.
Mage Wars - custom dice, but definitely important to resolution mechanics.

Look, there, four dice games that I'd happily play any time. I am never unhappy to play a round of Liar's Dice. Machi Koro just sucks.

I'll add Dice Throne, Sagrada, Roll for the Galaxy, and Kingsburg to this list as not only "dice games" I'm happy to play, but games that are in contention for GOAT in my opinion

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Also Dice Throne is the best dice game ever, fight me (I mean the system as a whole, not sure about the co-op/solo expansion Dice Throne Adventures, which have a copy sitting in the board game cafe I'm working but haven't played it. I have heard mixed reviews about it and it's pretty different so I can't say anything about that, but just fighting each other by rolling dice and cardplay in the main game is really awesome and there are various ways to play in terms of characters and abilities.)

I got sent a copy of Adventures to review and haven't cracked it open yet bc I've been having too much fun just trying different characters in the Season 1 box.

That being said, I think Dice Throne just barely toes the line for dice games where it's juuuuust cute enough not to make the player feel completely dragged down during the game. But if you ever play with more than 2 people, it gets dragged down a LOT. I can't imagine adding in a bunch of mechanics in DTA on top of what's already in Dice Throne is going to do the game any favors.

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Dice Throne Adventures is so much fun.

Shadow Thief + Tactician have been pretty effective.

pro so far: you can pass shadows back and forth forever via Tactician and the Shadow Thief can keep robbing the portal claw mini bosses. Also we just beat our first boss using the same tactic. Yaye!

con: The combo has no regenerative power, but if the roll dice and card draws smile on us, I feel like we will do pretty well on our first full run.

This game is

fun

.

Shadow Thief is probably my favorite! I don't think we have the Tactician though.

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If you plan to buy Betrayal anyway and you know you’ll play it, I highly highly highly recommend the legacy version instead. Once you finish the legacy campaign, you’re left with a board that can be used to play regular games as well. (although now that I think about it, I’m not sure what haunts are included in the legacy general mode vs base game)

This x100

We've owned every version of Betrayal and they all pale in comparison to Legacy