Board Games!

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That's understandable. Any cooperative game is basically a single-player optimization experiment with the joy or frustration of dealing with other people. Maybe I haven't hit the point where it loses its fun.

I feel like some achieve a really good balance. Then again, my favorite is by far and away Darkest Night, and no one even knows what that is. So, like, yeah, there's a point to that.

If you like co-op but hate the "optimize the board and argue with others" Archipelago is semi co-op, but everyone has their own objectives (and one person could have the objective of completely fucking everyone over, so you can't 100% trust people to act in the Archipelago's interests).

Only warning I'd toss in is that it's basically about being colonial bastards and brutally exploiting, enslaving, and killing the natives. It's under a layer of abstraction, but that's the theme, and some people don't like that.

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It's a lot of fun. The game is just very well put together.

Basically, you start out, small party of heroes. 4, to be exact. And the goal is to try and defeat a Necromancer, either by recovering holy relics, or by actually doing battle with him and beating him (this is hard). Meanwhile, he spawns these irritating blights that will start to overwhelm the board.

You have to go around the board, searching for keys to unlock the relic, and collecting artifacts, cards, and keys. The monastery is your "safe zone", close locations are mediocre (but safer) and the far locations have the best stuff, but are far away.

Okay, so what makes it tick? Just, so much cool stuff. Like, each class gets 10 ability cards, and you only get 3 (out of 4 predetermined abilities) to start. So you want to go after those other 6, because there's some REALLY cool skills hiding in there. But it doesn't directly help you out. But you want them! And you want the artifacts (they're amazing!). And all of the limited use stuff is awesome too! So you want to get it.

But see, you have this meter called "stealth." Different heroes have different amount, but a lot of the things you're doing are going to lower your stealth. And see, the necromancer rolls to determine how he moves, and if he gets a roll above your (steadily decreasing) stealth, he's going to stop moving randomly and charge you. The only way to recharge it is to move or retreat to the Monastery (where the Necromancer can't track you). So you can only do so much before the Necromancer notices you and starts to track you down. And you think you can control it, right? But you get an event card every turn. And some of the events get worse if you're at low stealth. So you might think "Oh I have at least a turn before he notices me" then get a bad event, lose stealth, and suddenly you're Necromancer bait. And you have to go running across the board to go cower in the Monastery until it's all over.

So the result is that you really feel a desire to push your luck. If you're on one of the far spaces, busy earning awesome artifacts, abilities, keys, chests, important things, you want to stay there. But each turn you do the likelihood rises that something goes terribly wrong.

Oh, and cool stuff? The heroes. Each one is different. We're not talking "different ability names." Oh no. The Prince rallies support from the countryside. He starts with horrible stealth (meaning even out the gate the Necromancer can notice him) but his abilities are often placed on locations, giving everyone there cool bonuses. Because he's rallied the locals, see? And there's the Acolyte, who is like a mini necromancer - his abilities work similar to the Necromancer's, and can even raise the darkness for bonuses (but bringing your loss closer). And there's the usual Rogue (Stealthy, can backstab people and spend and regain stealth in awesome manners), Priest (great healer), Fighter (obvious), Druid (transforms into awesome forms - you WANT to go diving for his abilities, because he has some great forms). There's a scholar who doesn't do great in combat, but he's absolutely great at finding things - he just wants to be left alone to research while everyone does important combat thingies.

The quality of components is a little meh, if that matters to you, and definitely get the hard board over the fold out mat - but the game itself is really, really, really fun. The "push your luck" mechanic and the chance (different from randomness) that can change your decisions means it's rather hard to just "solve" the way Pandemic can be. Everyone has a slightly different tolerance for risk, and if the dice like you, you might get far with some finger crossing. The different heroes make every game feel sufficiently different, and even replaying heroes you can end up with different abilities and a different feel.

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Trains is a genre. I have a 'train games' shelf in the store.

And, according to my train game snob friend, Ticket to Ride is

not

a train game.

It's really not.

"Train Game" is more like "Worker Placement Game" than it is like "Pirate Game". That is to say that train games are literally a genre (like Wargames, etc.). Ticket to Ride is no more a train game than Race for the Galaxy is a Wargame.

String Railroad and Trains also fall into this weird twilight zone where they look like Train Games, but really aren't. Although Trains is pretty close.

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In the same manner that the card game war is a "wargame"

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I just don't get what your definition of "train game" implies. Like, do you mean the idea that railroads are being built and then you pass resources along those routes to complete things? I guess you're getting at the idea that Ticket to Ride is simple enough that it could be rethemed and completely remove the idea of trains, but I think that's plausible for any game. I think if you're grouping under the criterion of "trains" then that's theme rather than mechanic. That's why I think War actually is a fairly suitable fit for the category of wargame because it is a game of two sides sparring against one another using some sort of system, even if it's pure luck.

Watch this:



Also war is most certainly not a wargame.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18XX_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crayon_rails

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_game

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A train game or railway game is a board game that represents the construction and operation of railways. Train games tend to be highly involved hobby games that take several hours to play. Like wargames, train games represent a relatively small niche in the games market.
Not every game with a train in it is a "train game". For example, the domino game Mexican Train and Monopoly are not usually considered train games because they do not represent railway operations. Empire Builder and 1830 are examples of train games.

The issue is that Ticket to Ride is a simple and cute set collection game, but it mechanically doesn't even attempt to represent trains. At best it attempts to represent rail lines in an extremely abstract manner (you don't pay for rail, except by collecting sets of colored cards which represent... something or other). But it doesn't represent trains at all.

You can't have a train game that doesn't have any trains in it. That's just something else entirely. (the same goes for the quite enjoyable Japanese game "Trains")


As an unrelated pet peeve, it's completely unplayable in my group because we have a colorblind player and it makes zero attempts to respect that color blindness is even a thing (would you like to build on the red route or the green route? How about the middle finger route?). Literally none. I have very rarely seen a board game that makes so little acknowledgment that color blindness is even a thing (and it would have been very simple to do).

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No. A train game has to have a train in it. You have to actually have a locomotive or locomotives that haul things around.

Ticket to ride has no trains.

You are talking about a genre that is fueled by a very specific form of nostalgia combined with a dedication to simulationism.

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As an unrelated pet peeve, it's completely unplayable in my group because we have a colorblind player and it makes zero attempts to respect that color blindness is even a thing (would you like to build on the red route or the green route? How about the middle finger route?). Literally none. I have very rarely seen a board game that makes so little acknowledgment that color blindness is even a thing (and it would have been very simple to do).

Except that EVERY route color has a separate and distinct symbol? On both the card and the route, last I checked (we only own the American version).

I mean, I get that it's cool to hate on TTR, but let's at least hate on it for things that are true.

Uh... where, Flay? Where is this magical symbol?

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Okay so later (in a new edition of the game I'd have to give them more money for) they added... an invisible dot to the center.

I greyscaled it. Anyone wanna play this game?



And yes, later versions they offered a very sad 'fix' for this issue, but frankly I'm not giving them more money for a game I didn't like very much in the first place.

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I mean if it was some minor portion of the game, okay, we've worked around that in the past. Or if it was some game with shitty components we paid $10 for we could scribble all over the board without worries.

But how do they make a huge title like this where the central mechanic is color matching and never get around to asking "hey, what about 7% of the male population?" They could have just made every track a different shape and solved the entire problem...

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I don't really know why it matters if ticket to ride is technically a train game or not?

Well it's useful to categorize games because there's an awfully large number of them, and when you're introducing them to new people it's good to have useful shorthands. So there's "worker placement games" and "deckbuilders" and "wargames" and "bluffing games" (such as Mafia) and so on and so forth.

Ticket to ride is most certainly a very simple set collection game (where you collect sets of things). Those can be extremely fun, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but if you tell people "Ticket to Ride is a train game" and they go and buy a Train game because they liked Ticket to ride, they're gonna be out some money and probably quite annoyed.

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TTR is a

Spiel des Jahres

Game of the Year award winner. That should completely and compactly summarize what you'll be getting when you buy it.

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Spiel der Jarles

GotY games are all extremely tight mechanical packages based around a central theme with no extraneous parts and deep tactical play. Dominion is the closest to violating that rule, but Dominion is literally revolutionary (it started the entire deckbuilder game set on its own, and it's still the tightest and best-designed deckbuilder out there - you might enjoy others more, but I can tell you exactly why Dominion did everything it and other games cannot say the same).

Alhambra - tight mechanical package, simple game with deep tactical play (often compared to Go)

Hanabi - central theme, extremely tight mechanical play, no extraneous parts

Kingdom Builder - central theme, extremely tight play, no extra parts.

Etc. All of them look like that. There's no room in

Spiel der Jarles

for the sprawling craziness of Archipelago, the 'oh fuck why not' design of Seasons.

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You'll be buying an extremely tight package with one central theme and one major mechanic.

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Okay, I'll toss in a sentence covering the mechanic.

Ticket to Ride: Collect colored sets to advance board control based on a set of controllable random objectives.

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Well I meant random more in the sense that you only have a limited control over what objectives you get.

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Except the importance of how great dominion is!

Dominion is seriously 100% the best.

Please hit me up on AIM or Skype if you want to play, I have Goko and all the expansions + two promos (two of the three good ones)

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Oh god, I wish. Not free until around 2 PM PST (work)

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Easier said than done! (actually pretty easily done, I took a long hiatus, and haven't even climbed back into the top 500 yet)

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Own Archipelago. It is HIGHLY patchworky. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game, but it has so many moving parts that all move separately. The entire game, in point of fact, is a tension between two moving parts - your own goals, win conditions, and agendas, and the ongoing crisis mess that can make you lose the game easily. Anything you do to stop a crisis usually lowers your chance of victory.

If you're playing with a fairly competitive crowd your island is going to explode the first time because you're all too busy trying to compete and the natives revolt.

Eventually you'll find the balance of churches, market sales, and idle worker management to effectively handle everything with little issue, but trust me the first time you'll play you'll realize there's five different gameboards, none of them are the ones you play the game on (that's done with hex tiles), you can build any one of four structures on those hexes, interact with any sideboard, there's an entire deck of cards that gives you a whole NEW mechanic for interaction, and then you'll be burned at the stake because you're a witch.

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Like - the design philosophy of Suburbia. It is the opposite of that. Also extreme color blindness warning.

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Oh. Well it plays just as well with 3 or 4. Expansion also genius.

Basically it manages to be a completely one-mechanic game with absolute elegance of design that is quite balanced, and yet avoids the perils of games like Lords of Waterdeep - you never feel the game is overbalanced. Sheer brilliance in action, it reminds me of Dominion and that is not faint praise.

Archipeligo is a mash up of every mechanic the designers thought was cool, but it's been playtested enough that it actually kind of works really well despite the immense amount of noise.

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Suburbia does sound very interesting, but I've heard that there is a lot of bookkeeping since so many of the tiles can work together and continue to do so throughout turns and thus I'm hesitant about trying it.

It all works so well together that there's minimal bookkeeping. Basically it all just WORKS.

I dunno how else to describe it. Genius.

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And that one scenario where the investigators have no way to win (no really, there's no conditions for victory).

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Meh, given it's betrayal, there's a 1 in 3 chance the scenario is an instant-win for one side or the other when it's drawn.

It's a decent game, but not exactly flawless. It's really badly in need of a second edition.

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Hmm, some googling tells me I have a second edition, that's the one where the pieces like to warp into curves.

-_-

Oh betrayal. I'd tend to agree with SU&SD that it's less a game and more a modern art piece, but what an absolutely fascinating modern art piece. I enjoy it, but I'm always hesitant to suggest it, because it sometimes feels like such an anticlimax. "Oh I shall play a game. Oh I shall explore a house! Egad, I am in a basement, let me poke around. Oh dear, water is rising and it appears we have not drawn one of two tiles that could save me. I guess that my objective is to flail about a bit and drown."

(for those who have never played it, it's a lot more fun than that, but that's not only a scenario that can happen, that exact scenario happened to someone who played in a game we played. He never really had a single input on whether or not he could live, and he died virtually immediately after he learned how he needed to win)

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I'll post my collection sometime soonish~

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Me and LLD enjoy Darkest Night and Forbidden Island. The D&D games are also very good, and check out Mice and Mystics

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Played some Pixel Tactics today. Good game, a little rough around the edges, but made me want my Argent and War kickstarters even harder.

In other news, Mage Knight hit the table again. Remains a brain burner, in a good way.

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Eclipse Phase

- might just be the setting for you. Hard sci fi, with a strong transhuman theme. System is very reminiscent of GURPS. Not sure if you'd count it as "goofy stuff" - it definitely focuses on technology used to upgrade humanity, rather than the future simply having humans who use more advanced gizmos, but it's very good.

In the same vein,

Nova Praxis

is simply excellent. Fate based, so the rules are lighter and easier to get into, and quite flavorful.

Finally, if you just want a far-future flavor without really considering the ethical/moral issues of improving humanity (as well as the attendant DM issues of having to consider how transhumans approach a problem, which usually is very different from how humans might approach a problem) then

Dark Heresy

will be a nice breath of fresh air. Just don't get too attached to your characters, they are doomed to death.

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I'm not normally one to bitch about the math too hard, but Savage Worlds has one of the least intuitive systems ever for GMs. There is no fucking way that gaining more skill should make a task HARDER to complete, but Savage Worlds.

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I disagree that this is true in any meaningful sense. And it probably wouldn't affect my enjoyment of the system if it were. But of course, YMMV.

Y'know, I'm fine with YMMV, but this is not YMMV. Going from d4 to d6 makes it less likely to succeed on many tasks due to exploding dice (namely difficulty 6, although 5 and 7 are virtually the same), and it's a system where even a master swordsman (d12) has a pretty good chance to lose to a neonate. Given that there's a bunch of things in the system that actually boil down to mathy bonuses (unlike Fate), you can't just shrug your shoulders and go "eh, math sucks". And even where a d4 isn't strictly better, having improvements in systems just doesn't feel extremely rewarding. It's a system where you will fail a moderately difficult task often, no matter what you roll (a difficulty 7 is only a 50/50 with a d12, after all).

I dunno. I feel the system has aged badly. YMMV, as you said, but I wouldn't pick it up when you can ALSO run everything with Fate, but with less fiddles and a system that scales nicely. And when you go from 2 to 3 it really feels important, rather than "oh yeah, well now I... I don't really know what happened". Although I will say rolling a big d12 FEELS really good, so there is that.

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I fucking hate Savage Worlds. It's so BORING to miss/fail all the time.

On that note, try any Powered By Apocalypse system (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monster Hearts).

Failure is fucking amazing! In Dungeon World it's how you get XP. And it's never, ever boring (you do not 'fail to open the locked door', you 'alert the city guards' or 'break the lock so that it's obvious what you did' etc.).

It's really revolutionized how I look at games. Especially the "10+ = full success/7-9 = success at a cost" mechanic.

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I'll run Dungeon World for people. It's like D&D but much more fun.

Weekends or weeknight?

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Okay, I've decided.

Running

The Gates of Firestorm Peak

(no worries if you never heard of it, don't look it up (it's my module) using Dungeon World rules. The rules are fairly light - for board gamers, a little heavier than Settlers of Catan, but lighter than Battlestar Galactica. About 10 minutes to explain, usual classes (fighter, wizard, cleric, druid, paladin, etc.). Thursday nights, we'll start next thursday if I get 3-4 people interested.

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6ish PST/9ish EST

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3-4 hours is my experience.

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Okay, anyone interested in Dungeon World, PM me.

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That's why you have a games night. Once people have committed to playing games for 4 or 5 hours, you can get things like BSG to hit the table.

Otherwise they'll hang around and do jack shit for 4 or 5 hours, but they won't commit to playing a game because there's the chance they could do something else (even if they'd really enjoy the game).

Psychology sucks.

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Got in plays of

City of Horror

. Everyone is too nice. I need to play this with scummers or something so the pain is more real.

Lords of Vegas

is what monopoly wants to be - a push-your-luck area control game with both randomness and significant methods to control it.

Mage Wars

is kind of Magic the Gathering's older brother. Scary-good game.

Twilight Struggle

remains way too fun for what should be an insanely dry game.

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Amazon has

Splendor

for $25.32 with free Prime shipping. Anyone played this and want to give thoughts on it? Considering scooping it up.

It's... light. It's very light.

It's strategic, and it's got the basics of a good thing, but for my money there are better. Basically you pick up chips, buy stuff, and go for goals, but there's no sort of engine, and no real variety. It's extremely Euro.

The components are a joy though.

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Haven't played King's Forge.

I would actually lean towards Spyrium as a replacement. It's going for a similar $25, and it's a damn good game. A little bit of worker placement feel, but with good bidding mechanics, and a lot more complexity and depth. Underrated little gem.

[GreyICE]

Huh, I've only seen Splendor for like $40 elsewhere. Doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy... "light" games, to me, need to be a 15-30 minute ordeal, not 30-60min.

I played with two the times I tried it, so maybe its longer with more, but I'd say around 20-30 minutes seems right if you have some experience.

Oh, for a really good light game, go with

No Thanks

! It's basically about taking cards, where you get 8 little red chips, and points are bad. On your turn, you can either send a card in front of you on to the next person by putting a red chip on it, or take it, and all of the red chips on it.

Simple as fuck, I just explained the entire game, plays pretty quickly, and has a lot more strategy than you'd think.

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See, I never felt Splendor was an engine builder. I tend to think that an Engine Builder should have at least some form of engine. Take Seasons. There are just cards that work extremely well together in Seasons, but are fairly terrible on their own. Their mediocre nature only combines to form an engine if you aim for it and build it.

In contrast, Splendor has no engine. I can buy a card that makes everything 1 red gem cheaper. This combos with a card that makes everything 1 green gem cheaper to make all cards 1 red and 1 green gem cheaper. If my opponents take my green gem engine piece, all they'll get is everything... being 1 green gem cheaper.

Now maybe if one card gave you 1 red chip a turn, and another card let you get an additional red gem to spend whenever you used a red chip, and a third let you spend red like gold, you'd have an engine. You'd get a free red chip every turn that could be turned into a red + anything, without lifting a finger, and chances are that no one else really wants the "spend red like gold" card all that much, but it rocks for you. But that would add complexity, and Splendor isn't about complexity. It's about "elegance". There's nothing wrong with the game, but there's nothing particularly great. There's no amazing moments, no time when your friend completes his engine, no time when you laugh about how insane it was that someone won. Just a gentle progression towards 15.

As I said, for $25, get Spyrium. Maybe it takes half an hour longer, maybe it's "less elegant" because the cards actually do something interesting, rather than have blindingly obvious and trivial effects, maybe it has a hell of a lot more focus on "economy" in your game about "buying stuff". Maybe its a better game.

[GreyICE]

I don't want to argue semantics too much, because that's a straight shot into madness, but I really wish that there was any way to combo the cards or do anything. Each card gives each person the same benefit, there's no way to get any moving parts.

I feel like it has the tools to be a really good, fun, simple game, just by varying the card effects up a little so there was more than just "a gem" and "VP" as possible things cards did for you. It wouldn't have to be very much for me to like the game a lot, just something where you got it going and other people went "oh that's cool!" Maybe something that let you pay gems to reserve cards, or gave you bonuses for having a certain thing (3 Green gems gives you 2 red gems, does nothing if you have less than 3), or giving you a gold every time you bought a white or black card... just SOMETHING.

But I doubt I'm the target audience (Spyrium is still better for $25 dammit~)

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I've only ever played it, and it's a bit of a unicorn, but if you can find Glory to Rome, highly recommended. Other than that, I have only praise for Mage Knight (although that's a little bit of everything to all people, but engine it definitely is when it gets rolling) and for $15 its hard to beat Star Realms, if its in print. Star Realms is definitely a tad on the simple side, and can feel pretty random sometimes, but it scratches the engine builder itch in a 2 player game, and plays quite quickly (15 minutes a game is not unreasonable)

[GreyICE]

I've only ever played it, and it's a bit of a unicorn, but if you can find Glory to Rome, highly recommended. Other than that, I have only praise for Mage Knight (although that's a little bit of everything to all people, but engine it definitely is when it gets rolling) and for $15 its hard to beat Star Realms, if its in print. Star Realms is definitely a tad on the simple side, and can feel pretty random sometimes, but it scratches the engine builder itch in a 2 player game, and plays quite quickly (15 minutes a game is not unreasonable)

I was kind of "meh" on Glory to Rome. I do loooooove Mage Knight, and the expansions have been excellent. I'll definitely give Star Realms a try when I can.

Are you on Boardgamegeek at all? I'd be curious to see your game rankings if you are.

I read it on and off, and I have an account, but I can't recall me ever posting. Too many holy wars, too much random garbage.

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So anyway, I feel like running

City of Horror

in Mish Mash.

Voting/Negotiation/Strategy game, fairly light, 5 turns long. No complex mechanics, no dice.

Who is game?

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Carcassonne

is somewhat obvious as an intro area control game that is easy to teach. You're basically building a little medieval world, 1 tile at a time, and scoring based on area control. It's quite fun. Plays well with like 2-4 or so, doesn't gain too much time with extra players.

Flashpoint: Fire Rescue

is a great intro game because it's co-op. Simple rules, and can be made even simpler with a "family game" variant. You're firefighters putting out fires. Non-family games add a fire truck and roles, as well as hazardous materials Scales nicely up to 4 players. Enough randomness its resistant to quarterbacking, and quite fun to play because new players don't get this sinking "I'm going to lose" feeling.

Ticket to Ride

is, in my opinion, somewhat overrated. But it's still a nice intro game.

PEdit: Do NOT start people out with Agricola.

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Twilight Struggle is a beastly awesome game! Although it does have its table flipping moments. 2 hours down the drain due to a Lone Gunman...

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I've heard that Twilight Struggle is really complex. She's pretty new to board games and I want to ease her in.

It is a hyper intimidating board with mediocre component quality and insanely deep strategy.

By the by, just picked up my Mage Wars expansion. It's really threatening to totally replace M:tG, if more people played it I think it would. Too goddamn cool.

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Played a game of it on Thursday.

I think

City of Horror

is better, but

Cosmic Encounter

is so amazingly silly. My major problem remains that it doesn't really have any time limit - our game lasted 2.5 hours due to a lot of back and forth, and I feel like that was a little bit of outstaying its welcome. City of Horror just runs faster and cleaner.

Still a great game that I'm not at all sad to own.

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Cosmic Encounter is super fun, but be careful not to play with too many people. My first game of Cosmic encounter took probably 2 hours and everybody got 1 turn.

Well some group was inviting too many people along on their encounters.

I think we got around 8 or 10 turns in or so in our game? It was hyper defensive, and negotiations just didn't happen.

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Could Cosmic encounter work on forum/Vassal/BSW?

I think my first playthrough would be like 3-6 players, probably more likely lower numbers. But it's literally $46 and that would be the most I would have ever spent on a board game. (I know, I'm fortunate/cheap. The most I've ever spent is like $41 for

Stone Age

, which never gets played. :'( Anyone wanna trade?)

Speaking of which I woke up this morning and Amazon sent me mail telling me

Felix the Cat in the Sack

was on sale but it was still $35

I rather intensely dislike

Stone Age

... so that's a no.

I guess I would run cosmic on forum if people really wanted it, it would be fun to mod, but it's a very component-friendly game (you get 20 little UFOs that are a big part of the game). Best option is to find a gamestore with a library, and test it there.

[GreyICE]

Could Cosmic encounter work on forum/Vassal/BSW?

I think my first playthrough would be like 3-6 players, probably more likely lower numbers. But it's literally $46 and that would be the most I would have ever spent on a board game. (I know, I'm fortunate/cheap. The most I've ever spent is like $41 for

Stone Age

, which never gets played. :'( Anyone wanna trade?)

Speaking of which I woke up this morning and Amazon sent me mail telling me

Felix the Cat in the Sack

was on sale but it was still $35

I rather intensely dislike

Stone Age

... so that's a no.

I guess I would run cosmic on forum if people really wanted it, it would be fun to mod, but it's a very component-friendly game (you get 20 little UFOs that are a big part of the game). Best option is to find a gamestore with a library, and test it there.

Would play forum-Cosmic

Hells yes. MS people are the perfect people to play it with. You need to have a complete willingness to slit each other's throat in game combined with the ability to ignore the doubledealings when the game is over.

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How is

The Resistance

bottom tier? In person it's like a better Mafia.

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Mafia

,

Resistance,

and

City of Horrors

being three of them. Or

Diplomacy

and

Game of Thrones

.

Negotiation/social deception games by their nature rely on having a good group of people. More solitary, strategic games let you get joy out of the pure strategy, outside the social aspect.

[GreyICE]

Cosmic Encounters

is heavily reliant on negotiating with other players, and getting them to help you. The entire game is virtually all social negotiation. There's even a "Negotiate" card where if both people play one they have 1 minute to cut a deal (cards, powers, whatever). If you want to play your own game and not talk to other people, this is not the game for you.

I mean that and the wild powers the aliens have are basically most of the game (and how much fun 20 UFOs are... and how great the cards are... and there's like 6 expansions... it's just pure fun)

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OTOH 6 Epidemics isn't that tough really.

The key to Pandemic, and what makes it a less-than-great game IMHO is that chasing cubes is such an enormous waste of time. Everyone assumes the Medic is the strongest role at first, but the Medic is actually quite mediocre. The strongest role in the game is the Researcher. It's basically risk-mitigation, with you assuming exactly how little effort you have to do to stop a region from having more than one or two outbreaks, then playing race for the cure.

I hear In the Lab makes the cubes relevant again, so I'd like to pick it up.

[GreyICE]

Quarantine specialist is boss because you can do emergency responder a lot better than Medic, which often ends up pseudo-removing a bunch of cubes, but with less outbreaks than a medic would have.

Scientist is really boss with the Researcher (notice a pattern?) but overall works pretty well with Dispatcher or revised Operations Expert (first Operations Expert is a fairly dire role). Like the Researcher, you'll be hobo squatting in labs all game. Unlike the Researcher, there's a small chance you'll briefly leave the lab to go get a card. See, you think you're playing some large map-management resource game, but in actuality you're playing

Ticket to Ride

. I'll pay 4 blue tickets to

build a route

cure a disease, it beats 5 any day!

[GreyICE]

Dispatcher is awesome. Love the role, top notch for enabling card trading, or letting medics wander then fishing them somewhere useful. Really only have strong issues with iteration 1 Operations Expert (usefulness is entirely dependent on what cards you get, making the role randomly either "just fine" or "horrible") and contingency specialist (can randomly be pretty bad, although base effect is pretty awesome if the cards go out right).

Never played with the bioterrorist, I keep trying to convince myself to buy expansions for it, and keep investing in more

Darkest Night

expansions instead (it's a similar game that is almost entirely better, imho)

[GreyICE]

Don't play with friends.

Smoke weed so you're relaxed

Don't be Turkey

[GreyICE]

Seasons

is top notch. Me and Lexi were playing it last night.

[GreyICE]

I'm at work right now, but when I get home I wouldn't mind teaching people.

[GreyICE]

I'll be home in about 40 mins.

[GreyICE]

I'm here and on.

if you want you can play panda simulator and I'll grab food, that game is a little meh for me

[GreyICE]

what's you two's name (mine is easy to guess)

[GreyICE]

okay, you're both added, hopefully I pop up

[GreyICE]

Okay, super fast write up of Seasons, begin!

Seasons is a game about gathering energy and casting spells in order to gain magical crystals. At the end of the game, whoever has the most magical crystals wins.

On your turn, there will be a number of dice you can pick from that will either do one of the following things (in BGA mouse over to see a breakdown):

- Give you Energy of one of the 4 types to cast spells
- Give you Crystals (VP)
- Give you Summoning Gage (star). Summoning gage lets you summon cards. You can never have more cards than summoning gage
- Let you transmute energy into crystals, based on season (I'll show you this)
- Let you draw a card from the deck

This is a card:



The symbols in the middle are the energy types you need to summon it. The purple number is how many crystals (VP) its worth at the end of the game. The effect does what it says it does.

The game is split into three years, and at the start you will get to divide 9 cards into 3 you get each year. Generally you want engine cards (cards that reward you for playing cards, or give you energy) early, and cards like Olaf's Blessed Statue above that only give you crystals or VP late.

There's a few details like bonuses (essentially cheating) and creatures vs. items that I've glossed over, but if we skype I can explain it, and it's not that difficult to pick up during the game. First game will be on apprentice mode (higher difficulties add drafting and complex engine-promoting cards)

[GreyICE]

is there a skype call?

Edit: I'm theoreticalstring on skype

[GreyICE]

Drafting removes most of the randomness, to be honest.

The dice are random, but they're more random that you all have to deal with. I very much like randomness in options (as opposed to randomness in outcome)

[GreyICE]

That can bite, but I still feel that it's more manageable than the randomness in something like M:tG. Certainly not as non-random as something like Dominion, but a very good game.

Then again, I tend to like luck-mitigation games a lot.

[GreyICE]

In any case, totally doing a game of

Spyrium

in about half an hour. Which has zero luck basically.

[GreyICE]

Soon friends

[GreyICE]

No worries about Spyrium. Looking at it, you probably could have come in second or third if you'd just bought a whole bunch of buildings on turn 6.

Still down for Seasons, Spyrium, Caylus, Sabatour (light, but fun), or if a few people have big brass balls we can dare a Vlaada game and try Through the Ages.

[GreyICE]

Well it's a Vlaada game, so basically there's three difficulty modes (yes, for a competitive game). We could try it on the basic difficulty which is just two ages, it's going to be a brain burner (if you know Dungeon Lords, Dungeon Petz or Mage Knight, that's him)

I would absolutely love this, because frankly his games are unlike anything anyone ever makes, and they're all fucking amazing.

[GreyICE]

Is

Spellcaster

worth it if you have

Seasons

,

Summoner Wars

and

Mage Wars

?

I feel like from your description its treading over old ground.

7 Red looks like an amazing goto for a quick filler game.

[GreyICE]

Well, played

Through the Ages

last night, both the beginner mode and the full game. It's... nuts. It's Civilization, the board game, much much more so than

Civilization: the Board Game

. I can already see dozens of huge errors I made, and want to play again. So good.

[GreyICE]

Got in a play of

Dungeon Lords

last night.

Best. Game. Ever. I ended the game with 3 whole victory points, half my dungeon in ruins, and laughing hysterically.

Not nearly as complex as people say, just a little fiddly. Everything is super-easy to understand.

[GreyICE]

Letters from Whitechapel

is probably your game for deductions. Or

Scotland Yard

[GreyICE]

Maybe try

Mystery Express

. Had to look that one up (I vaguely remember the announcement not interesting me a while ago), but it's Days of Wonder, which means good component quality and playtesting, and it's meant to be an upgraded clue.

[GreyICE]

So I'm going to start teaching people

Mage Wars

, which I would describe as M:tG's older brother, over OCTGN just to get people to play with. Anyone interested?

[GreyICE]

TBM picked up suburbia, not sure what I think of it so far. What comes up feels kind of random at points. A little too hard to plan ahead effectively.

A little bit of experience generally changes that. Except for Airports, airports are weird. But generally:

- It's very rare for the $10 tiles to be worth it, so generally you can plan at getting a shot at them. The only reason to go for them is generally lock someone out of a strategy.

- The goals often guide what is going to be fought over. If most government buildings is a goal, then schools are going to be snapped up. Since schools are one of the few things that even comes close to making green viable in the base game, avoid green like the plague. Conversely, if least government buildings is out, it may be possible to go for a green+school thing (especially if you have a secret goal that supports that).

- Income early is good. Grabbing early income generators is your friend, even if they suck (gas station, etc.).

- Reputation early is bad, get it only if you're content to go for a low-money strategy. That being said, people will often undervalue it on later playthroughs. Watch for it.

- The game is more tactical than strategic. Only go for specific strategies like restaurants if you have goals that support them or can otherwise use the tiles for a plan B. That being said, restaurants are not awful from a pure income perspective, so if people are ignoring them, it becomes extremely cost effective to pick them up...


The entire tension of the game is that virtually every tile is effective at +$0, and virtually no tile is effective at +$10. So it's hard to evaluate the risk, but if you do it better than your opponents you will win.

[GreyICE]

Juls! We need to play board games more often. Up for learning Through the Ages tonight (remember I'm PST so my tonight is fairly late by EST standards)

[GreyICE]

I'm in. I'm calling toaster prematurely. I'm like always a toaster.

[GreyICE]

Daybreak please.

[GreyICE]

Mage Wars is actually fairly simple, it's just got more overhead in the rulebook than MTG (rather than on the cards). I'd set up the apprentice books, then roll.Basic idea is that your mage is actually a unit on the field (rather than an abstract planeswalker) and you are summoning on to a physical battlefield. You hand unit orders back and forth for the round. So if you want to think about it like MTG, you have the following:

Untap

- Gain Mana Phase

Draw

- Select spells you can cast this turn

Upkeep

- Development phase (used for certain cards that let you cast stuff before the turn starts). Comes after Draw here.

First main phase

- Quickcast phase (can cast the spells with the yellow lightning bolt icon here). Flip your quickcast marker if you do this.

Combat Phase

- Trade activation of creature orders. Creatures can either move+quick action (lightning bolt) or full action (hourglass). Mage acts like a creature, for the most part. You can use your quickcast marker to cast before or after any creature's activation.

Second Main Phase

- Second quickcast phase. If you haven't used your marker yet, you can flip it to do something.

Cleanup Phase

- Cleanup!

The game is fairly built on the structure of magic, with more emphasis on creatures and combat (creatures are a LOT more than a bundle of stats), which leads to enchant creatures being a lot more valuable. In addition you can enchant spaces and stuff, and walls actually act like walls, because there's a physical battlefield.

In the same way:

Instant

- Yellow Lightning bolt icon

Sorcery

- Purple Hourglass Icon

Enchantment

- Zones

Aura

- "Enchantment"

Creature

- Creature

Equipment acts very little like MTG equipment, it turns your mage from fragile squishy into, potentially, front line destroyer who can tank nearly infinite damage. At the cost of a lot of mana, of course.

Anyway,

Mage Wars

is clearly inspired by someone loving magic's ideas, and hating how decks generally play out.

[GreyICE]

Oh definitely a possibility, but as long as people don't tank for 20 minutes, it's usually okay. As soon as people realize that very few things will outright win/lose the game for them unless they've made huge strategic blunders (grouping a bunch of creatures for a firestorm, letting your mage get pushed into a deathball, etc.) then it tends to speed up. You can definitely play reactive and proactive at the same time.

But for learning, it gets a lot easier if you've played M:tG, as long as you realize it has M:tG's structure.

[GreyICE]

It allows you to play spells with the yellow lightning bolt. You can only use it to quickcast a spell once a turn. You can do that:

- During the 1st quickcast phase (before any creature activates)
- Before or after any of your creatures' turns during combat
- During 2nd quickcast phase (after every creature is done)

If you choose to use it at any of those points, you turn the marker face down.

For instance, enchantments have quickcast, you can see the result of an enemy action, and then quickcast an enchantment if your creature survives. You can also quickcast an attack booster before your creature attacks.

EX:

1) My Archer attacks your creature with three health remaining. I roll 3 dice, and manage to do 2 damage. To prevent it from activating, I use my quickcast and quickcast Hurl Rock to let me kill the creature before it activates.
2) I quickcast Deflection Bracers during the 1st quickcast phase before any creatures have activated.
3) Prior to attack, I quickcast Bear Strength, and then flip it. My creature attacks for massive damage!
4) At the end of the round, I quickcast Battle Forge. Now it's available next round.

Why are there two spells?

You may also cast with the mage's action during the mage's activation. So your beastmaster can both quickcast and quick/fullcast. Creatures may ONLY be fullcast (hourglass icon)

[GreyICE]

Specials, like in Magic, don't follow the rules.

[GreyICE]

I have had a severe lacking of board games in my life lately.

Are there any good online, in-browser board games or card games that are half decent to play with like 2-4 people?

Boardgamearena has Seasons, Hanabi, Through the Ages, and Race for the Galaxy. I can recommend all but the last one, and a lot of people like the last one.

Goko has Dominion, which has steadily improved to quite playable.

[GreyICE]

I'm in if there's a fleet board and I'm around

[GreyICE]

I like the idea of the Blind Jump, but I think you generally lose less from destroying two civvies than you gain from eliminating a whole jump cycle from the game. I don't want to exclude her from future games, but something needs to be done.

57.1% of Crisis cards have a jump icon. It takes 4 icons to auto jump, so on average she saves you about 7 Crisis cards. This improves significantly if there's revealed Cylons, as the Cylon-picked Crisis cards are less likely to have a jump icon, and the other stuff the Cylons do inhibits you without potentially revealing jump icons.

Destroying a Civilian ship is about as bad as a bad Crisis card, so we can call her ability roughly "skip 5 crisis cards".

Everyone's Miracle is pretty good, and her drawback can be nasty, but that is way past the power level of most miracles.

[GreyICE]

Argent: the Consortium

is really the best worker placement game ever made. Mostly because it takes the rather stale "ah, you have taken a space that I want, that was interaction" concept and replaces it with "ah, you have taken a space that I want, I am going to burn your face with a fireball so your worker is in the hospital and take that space right back." Ever get tired of someone taking your reeds or squatting on the good buildings? Take the Nature mage, who just stomps them out of the way, or the dragon who banishes them with a wave of his hand. Don't want this? Play the angel who can just regenerate her injured mages (and gets 2 magic-immune divine mages in her starting worker pool). Or just play the head of the student council, who gets crappy mages, but can conjure up more of them!

Your workers have powers! You have spells! You can get magical treasures and recruit supporters! It's just amazing. Great flavor, great character, great everything. Level 99 is moving into position as my favorite game company. Helps BattleCON is also the best game ever.

[GreyICE]

Vassal is more of an overview than a review. I really dislikes how he goes over some things that should be saved for later plays, like how there's an alternative set of abilities for your workers. It's just a little confusing. Not terrible, but not the best.

I kind of like this better for that style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qymq6wbAQsI

But yeah, utterly top-notch game. I'm really having a problem trying to think of why I'd play a different worker placement. Maybe Keyflower.

[GreyICE]

So, I need more quick, drop in drop out type games to play at parties.

Cards Against Humanity is sort of what I mean, though it's a pretty boring game. Something that can handle a ton of players and people can come and go as they please, or it has a short runtime.

I'd strongly recommend

Snake Oil

or

Coup

with

Reformation

expansion.

[GreyICE]

Finally played

Castles of Burgundy

this evening and really, really enjoyed it. Fun, dynamic action selection, no risk of getting bored during opponents' turns, a dose of luck in its dice mechanic that keeps it from being too dry without ever risking a complete screw-over of your plans (that's just the other players). Can't believe it took me this long to try it.

If you like Castles, try

Bora Bora

. I like Bora Bora more in virtually every way, and I really like castles. Same designer.

Also I want another opinion from a Castles fan, I have one person who likes Castles but dislikes Bora Bora, and one who dislikes Castles and likes Bora Bora.

[GreyICE]

anyone here play mage wars: arena?

Exceptionally good game, with a large initial up-front time investment.

[GreyICE]

Oooh, looks like fun. Lemme give my awful guesses.

Spoiler:

1) Mechanic, Purple
2) Tennis, Black
3) Couch, Green
4) No idea, Blue
5) DeathNote, Black
6) Kangaroo, Green
7) Skee ball, Orange
8) Jailkeeper, Red

[GreyICE]

Machi Koro

I saw this played but couldn't really make sense out of this, would love to know more about it. What could you tell me about it?

IMHO? It's just not a good game. Dice city is a better version of the same thing:

[GreyICE]

Don't think of either Five Tribes or Agricola as lightly interactive. Agricola is the game of strategic jackassery. Like "Aloha, I see you're building pastures. Let me take these three sheep and drop them into my firepit." Or the wonderful dance on home expansion and family growth. Or "yep, day before harvest, lemme snag first player then sow/bake bread. Now go build an oven or something if you want to not starve".

Race you get mildly rewarded if you anticipate what your opponent will do, but you can never get badly punished. I admit it's the key to winning the game, but that's almost by default - in a symmetrical game the only thing that can decide the winner (once you're all equally adept at manipulating the game variables) is either player interaction or random chance, and in Race player interaction edges out random chance, usually.

But compared to Five Tribes? First, player ordering is way more interactive and punishing than RFTG. You can actually lose moves. Worse, you can lose moves

incidentally

. A good player doesn't even have to take your move in order to screw you out of it - just dropping a meeple on that space negates the move entirely. So you have an incentive to bid high to get what you want, but bidding high costs you Victory Points (whereas just calling the phase you need in Race costs you nothing). That's an interesting tension. The Yellow set collection meeples are an interesting tension, because they're almost worthless EXCEPT for edging out your opponents. 1 point/meeple is the worst (even vanilla priests give you 2 and that's the worst use of priests) but the 20 point swing when you edge someone out in the yellow leaderboards is unbelievable. So that's interactive. Hell, even the market is interactive, I've sandbagged a 0 bid because I wanted something at the far end of the market and figured another player would take some market cards and drop it down into fishing range with a 2/6 space. Compare that to race where you're drawing face down cards - your opponent drawing before you means nothing because the deck contents are random and there's no interaction potential.

I think race is about as close to solitaire as a game can be.

[GreyICE]

Argent - the Consortium

- remember how I said Agricola is a knife fight for certain spaces? Argent is a knife fight where everyone brought a gun. And flamethrowers. And nukes. My elevator pitch is "Imagine Hogwarts if Voldemort was a rather unremarkable teacher. The headmaster just announced he's stepping down and one of you will replace him." There's 12 different voters (2 revealed, 10 hidden), and you have to win the majority over to your side in order to win the game. There's different rooms in the university, and you can send your mages to them, so standard worker placement stuff, but the catch is that your spells and even your own mages (workers) can do things. Do you want a space someone else took? Send a pyromancer there and burn your opponents mage (who has to go to the infirmary) and take it for yourself. But beware the nature mage, who can just use strength of earth and boot your guy to a different space and take it for herself. And that's just things you can do in round 1. By round 5 you'll be nuking entire rooms, playing your mages in a shadow dimension, and breaking the laws of time and space for fun and profit.

Oh and the Voldemort thing? Candidates include an 1100 year old Lich with a grudge against practically everyone, an eldritch abomination who is teaching classes for fun, and a red dragon.

Cutthroat Caverns

-

Without cooperation you won't survive. Without treachery you won't win.

That's what's printed on the game box. A "cooperative" dungeon crawl where only the last person hitting a monster gets the glory. So you sit there. It's got 180 HP, and you do have a critical hit 100 and are going 4th, so you might kill it, but... what if the person going first just pokes it with a stick (0 damage)? I think of it as Munchkin done right, because it has similar levels of "Take That", but with two important changes. First you have HP, and when you die you're just dead. No glory for the dead. And second, the monsters are weird and can change the entire game. Like, the Wereboar. If he bites you you get an "are you a wereboar" card. 5 say "no", one says "yes". And at the end of the game you flip it, and if you're a wereboar the party gets to fight the Wereboar again (you win if you kill them all). Or the minecart racing, where you're just racing each other through mineshafts and screw the fighting monsters stuff. Or summoner, who is going to add a new monster to the deck every round he's alive, so suddenly screwing your neighbors comes with a caveat of "but will you actually survive the newer, longer dungeon?"

Less Euro than Argent, but a ton of fun.


Obviously Secret Hitler, Resistance, Mafia, etc. but I figure you know those.

[GreyICE]

A note about Argent is that you will absolutely go over the advertised game length unless everyone playing has played a couple of games before. I've played several games with people from my department (and lost every one because of silly Astronomy Tower abuse on the part of one of the others/heavy gambling on schools that didn't count) and it was easily over half the gaming session every time. Other than that everyone agrees that it's top of class.

@GreyICE - on the subject, if you have the expansion, Golem Lab has never showed up in one of my games but it looks kind of lame (i place here turn one, and now I get an extra placement that will go in the location I would have gone to had the Lab not existed). Also, Synthesis Chamber showed up in one game but no one used it. Your thoughts?

GOLEM LAB IS THE BEST THING EVER

No really, it's the cheatiest of the cheaty. Can you banish or move mages? Then boot them off the golem lab. It's like any instant action that way, only instead of a lousy half action like you get on most immediates its a full real action. There's a reason you only get one golem, and that's because banishing then replacing is insane. Try putting a Grey mage there as a bonus placement with a spell, then banishing it with a spell next turn and immediately replaying it. It's like cheating, only... no, it honestly feels like cheating. Its shenanigans the university tile.

It's kind of crap if you're playing legit, but when is Argent ever won by people like legitimately putting down one mage a turn? Golem lab is an enabler for silly bullshit. Seriously, remember the golem stays even if the mage goes somewhere else, then start counting all the ways you can abuse this. It's an interesting exercise, isn't it? Quite a few powers even on the basic abilities there, then imagine using a technomancy research to get a spell that does it turn 1...

Synthesis chamber... I'm still super eh about. We haven't played with it yet because its a whole brick of rules and decisions that lands on your lap, and it starts in the mage draft. I want to get it to the table at some point, but the synthesis items don't look super strong and anything that's that hard to acquire needs a really good effect. I wonder if it's actually too much work for the sake of novelty (I feel a bit similar about the Archmage's staff).

[GreyICE]

Side B Archmage is a nightmare that I can't imagine. Am serious. Side A is just nice.

But really with the immediate effects, they're all weak. Side B adventuring is the classic, but all of them are just kind of meh. So you can get 3 mana immediately, but then it costs you usually 1 mana to bounce/move the mage (at least) so it feels like you got 2 mana for an action which is really fair. Golem lab is get a real placement. Real placements are just so much more valuable... it feels really really good when you can make it work. Into a fucking shadow slot no less, you're NEVER getting that thing out of there. Just super duper good. Getting Key was super nice with lab and I'd always grab it first placement to ship a temporary mage to a shadow space using a fast/grey placement then maybe get my guy back too... bahroken.

Also hyper constricts the board because it's not really a room (every placement there is a placement somewhere else) and can lock other rooms, so those placements are premium as fuck.

[GreyICE]

Remember this great line: "When everyone at the table gangs up on 'the best' player [use air quotes here] its the player who still works with them while paying lip service to the grand alliance who benefits."

[GreyICE]

1v1 me at baron bitch~

[GreyICE]

2nd Edition of Dominion and Intrigue are coming out, with a handful of removed cards and some new ones. Absolutely great time to get into Dominion if you haven't already, as the new cards are all very playable and the removed ones were kind of blanks. So great game, now with higher replayability and more depth in the boxes... okay, I've probably played more Dominion than I have of every other board game I have combined.

[GreyICE]

Well I've long held the only cards in Dominion that are sheer trash are Chancellor (I know it has a theoretical usage, but come on it's basically never a good buy), Thief and Saboteur (although Adventurer, Transmute and Secret Chamber come damn close) but the replacements are just so cool. I mean Harbinger? Merchant? Poacher? These cards are awesome! I mean seriously, the upgrades are all huge improvements.

They also killed off a bunch of Intrigue cards that were meh (Scout anyone?) and replaced them with excellent stuff. Really good choices, both sets showed their age to some extent, as there are "fixed" versions of Thief (Noble Brigand), Chancellor (Salvager) and Scout (Vagrant) floating about.

[GreyICE]

There's upgrade packs if you have 1E. Other than that... That price is pretty damn cheap. What board games go cheaper?

[GreyICE]

I was thinking it would be cheaper because it's a card game.

Well it is 500 cards. You could try buying 500 cards from WOTC and see what it runs you~

But seriously, $0.07 a card is pretty typical.

[GreyICE]

Seasons is a ton of fun. Lots of people call it MTG and... It's not. But it's great time. Remember, fire is not red.

[GreyICE]

Oh who wants to play some dominion tonight when I get home? I have all the sets except empires online.

[GreyICE]

We can play it on boardgame arena. I feel like only a few people have ever taken us up on offers to hang out and play there

It's an interesting game to be sure.

[GreyICE]

What's a good time? I can host games online, and the client is free (the host has to have cards, but I do). I'm insanely rusty at 3-4 player, but I have played a bit of 2 player so I might have some advantage. But hey, Dominion is still fun~

[GreyICE]

Happily up for that.

If your group thinks Power Grid is the height of complexity though Argent is probably going to fall a little flat. It's a pretty big and interesting game.

[GreyICE]

It probably is? Idk man, we are new to board games, have never played it, and i knew it was fairly popular, so w/e and I won't be playing it that often because it's 3-6 players and as long as it's fun 3 times, it'll be worth the price of admission.

Jaipur is real good tho.

Do you have any suggestions for 2 players(probably me and my girlfriend)?

What themes does she like in other media? Like TV Shows, movies, books, etc.? Does she like anime? If so, which ones? What's she interested in?

[GreyICE]

She likes crafts(quilting and crocheting and shit), love novels, grey's anatomy, minecraft, she liked nino kuni so probably digs ghibli things. And she likes pro wrestling.

She read a little blurb on agricola and liked it but idk if she knows how complicated it is.

I think Patchwork is an absolutely great game then. Literally right up her alley.

I'd recommend Paperback, which is a deckbuilding word game, you play out your hand using words. Definitely something where someone with a broad vocabulary could beat someone more experienced in gaming.

Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective is pretty much a must for anyone who likes Sherlock Novels, it's an excellent game. Just completely the experience of being in a Sherlock Novel. Download BGG's errata for case 3, the translation from the French was a complete failure on that one, but the rest is great (there's 10 cases, so that's pretty minor).

I think anyone who likes Minecraft can grok Agricola, it's just adding VP to more-or-less Minecraft logic. Although maybe more Caverna? I like Caverna so much less though. Dungeon Pets could be excellent, it's got a very builderesque atmosphere, and is pretty cute, although its a definite step up in difficulty from Agricola.

[GreyICE]

Fucking Scythe.

Why.

[GreyICE]

It's still bad.

[GreyICE]

Try Concordia - https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos ... concordia/

[GreyICE]

https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/podcastle/

[GreyICE]

I'm personally enjoying the writeups.

As a side note, Cry Havoc is awesome, but the expansion Aftermath really switches things up in a cool way. Really, really good expansion.

[GreyICE]

Blood on the Clocktower is bad mafia for people who don’t like mafia.

Sidereal Confluence is still the best game ever.

[GreyICE]

For me it’s like Agricola, in that respect. You’ve got to feed your family (converters) each harvest (round) but it’s what you do to score that changes up the strategy. Because you want to be amassing cubes of a single color, and your converters are going to rainbow a bit. So maybe you don’t want to run your own converter, you want someone else’s (that’s an option). Or maybe you don’t want to run the converter at all. Most everyone has at least one converter that’s below average - for instance the Bees’ hyper tech converter. Many times there’s someone who wants 1 hyper tech more than the value of the output of that converter. So you can use the converter as a negotiating tool. Everyone has a little mini game they can play to shape the table economy - Caylion with the 2x resource (should always be upgraded in the first three rounds), bees with upgrading people with planets, as I art in the most obvious way, etc.

It’s positioning your scoring resources that’s the heart and soul, and there’s a ton of options.

[GreyICE]

Argent is still my all-time favorite. As complex as other peoples' favorite heavy games, but so much more blatant in how rude you can be. The two-player variant is actually way smoother than I imagined. I learned that Synthesis Workshop is pretty much only useful in games where it comes after Council Chamber B.

As someone who has probably played more Argent than me, I'm interested on your thoughts on the factions. First, I'm strongly leaning Council B/Infirmary A is the only way to play at more than 2. Otherwise Council Room is such a 'don't really care' room when it comes to ordering. Second, I really feel like Purple A is ridiculous to the point where I keep feeling like banning Ezra or handing him to the new player is the right call. B side feels more balanced. Having 2 purple mages is already so good that having arguably the best spell (behind MAYBE Trias) feels super bs. Also orange doesn't really get anything from having two technomancers since 1 is usually all you need, which makes them feel a little weak. Also boy does Red B side feel bad when you don't have any Immediately rooms.

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I tend towards encouraging conflict, that's why I suppose Council A and Infirmary B rub me the wrong way. There's nothing particularly wrong with them, it's just that they both tend to make the game more passive (and Infirmary B goes a long way towards removing any ability to punish a leader by blowing all their crap up).

Ezra is fine if he only had the spell - it's among the best, but it's only among them. It's the combination with the purple mages that makes it almost offensively annoying. Not only can he rushdown like Berman, unlike the Lich he can take a prime spot in absolute safety, with only the tiny drawback that he gets it second (which is irrelevant on many spots). It's really the fact that Lavanina's spell is so obviously worse, and yet she's still perfectly fine that makes me uncomfortable with Ezra - if I can play a character with an obviously worse spell and yet still not feel like I'm at a disadvantage, then there might be something wrong with the A side. He'd be fine if Purple cost a mana to use. The one time we played with Purple B he was fine to bad - doing the same thing three times is a bit of overkill. I dunno, I've seen too often the entire table turn against Ezra and him still find a win or at least second place - if he gets the Legendary Planar spell it requires almost tablewide coordination to stop him from playing a game on his own separate copy of Argent instead of the one everyone else is at.

Then again, the legendary planar spell is a questionable piece of design. It's such an "I opt out of playing the game" it's obscene. Everything else just does something splashy and cool, the Planar spell turns you into an irritating ghost that haunts the rest of the gameboard whispering "spoooooky" then takes all the belltower cards. I am so happy whenever people take other things. I wish it somehow did something cooler or more fun, or just less obviously "place two mages, three if you have mysticism". Combining that with a purple mage lets you place 4 mages in 1 turn which never makes new players happy (or experienced players, if we're honest. We just have more coping mechanisms, like nuking all their stuff with extreme prejudice, or not placing anywhere they want to shadow until later).

Agree on Rikhi and Sophica, although I don't think Sophica is awful. It's just that two Technomancers is garbage - spending 6 coins on just mage placements is a cost that's too damn high to make much use of, especially when the technomancers lie and tell you that orange likes vault cards (it doesn't. You just blatantly don't have money to buy them).

Oh and agree the free shit orange spell is B.S. It's one of the ones I'll happily nuke if I get the spell that lets me do that, and trust me using that thing makes serious enemies. But if I use it on that, usually the table thanks me. Friggin free marks for the cost of a single research is stupid. Normally you'd have to pay gold for a vault item and you wouldn't get any of the benefits of casting a spell (last game Lexi had that and the spell that let you use other spells again... yeah, that was bad)

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I absolutely confused Burman and Byron. My bad. I always think of them as the Lich and the Dragon thanks to BattleCON.

The purple legendary spellbook is pretty obviously the best of the bunch for that first spell, yeah. Not even because of the shadowing, but because it places two mages to begin with. It could probably cost 3 mana instead of 2... although I'd be more in favor of reducing the cost of the more destructive spells. You've already gone out of your way to get a legendary spell; you should be allowed to have fun.

TBH I feel like most of the mana costs above 3 could be reduced by 1 and the game would be more fun. No one is actually going to use those 6-cost spells, m8.

I really think that not putting Planar A and Mysticism A in the same game is simply healthier.

Agree with everything here. The placing two mages (3 if you have a grey) is stronger than the shadow aspect. I honestly don't see it researched above the first level unless someone is chasing purple points, it's just all about the double/triple place. And strongly agree with the mana costs - they look cool, but they get used on the fifth of never because you've already spent 5 gold and a buy and an intellect and some wisdom and some research and now you need to pay a fortune in mana. The effect would have to summon Bender with a platter of Whiskey bottles at that point.

Maybe the solution is Purple B, Mysticism A? Or B side both? TBH B side mysticism is WEIRD. It's either fairly pointless or totally broken and there doesn't seem to be a middle ground.

My copy of the game is out in the car but I'm pretty positive that the scientology mages don't actually require you to spend to place. It is true that you don't really need more than one except in extreme cases, but then again using the ability once per round is already strong.

They don't, but then you effectively have one yellow mage. 1 Orange > 2 Orange mages, and that means that basically everyone else has a better number of technomancers than the actual technomancers. Our meta usually has everyone grab a technomancer, meaning orange only feels special in that they're like half a student council with no merit badges.

My last game was 2P and this spell flipped up midway through round 1 (because I used my orange research to grab a spell midround). Of course, my opp got it with their orange. The board had Mark scarcity.

We agreed after the game that the other person played p.badly because I only lost 6-6 by the Influence tiebreaker.

Lexi didn't make many mistakes - I think it split 6/4/1/1 in votes. And she had those 6 locked.

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Okay, got a game in today with the Argent Setup Randomizer. It spit out a nice board, with some bizarre mages. We got Red, Purple, and Grey as B side. Which really slowed the game down. Kind of think that Purple A should just cost 1 mana is definite, there were many times I'd have paid 1 mana to get a fast action place. Red B is also busted, and probably takes Burman from meh to "what the fuck". Grey B is alright, I managed to get two of them and they were worth about 4 mana a round for me, which was still less than two Red mages would have been. Does make the 3-4 cost spells way more attractive though.

Synthesis Chamber was out and it... never got used. Boy howdy that thing sucks. It is very like having a board that is 1 room smaller, and with the Archmage's Study, the board was really cramped and got ugly fast. Of course I might just be kvetching because one round I had 3 mages in the infirmary.

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It's an extremely good game. I've heard it described as "Worker Combat" game and that's pretty accurate.

The general idea is that the head of a magic school has stepped down. Only this is Hogwarts if Voldemort was an average teacher - things are competitive, a little evil, and generally insane. So the only way you're going to become the new headmaster is if the 12 voters out vote for you (they're powerful people in the kingdom who have a hand in choosing the new head). Each of them will vote for you if you accomplish some goal - there's a mercenary who only wants to see Gold, so will vote for the richest person, an undead lord who needs mana to sustain itself so he'll vote for the person with the most Mana, a mage who wants to see harmony, so will vote for the person with the widest variety of stuff, etc. At the end of the game each person gets voters for each category they won, and the person with the most voters wins.

And you send your students out to get stuff - new spells, upgrading the spells you have, magic items, gold, mana, int/wis (to learn new spells), etc. The thing is, all the "stuff" you're gathering does something. So a spell will cost mana and do something - anything from letting you place mages in the shadow realm, to wounding mages, to rearranging where other people put their workers. Since you're only going to get stuff at the end of the round, losing a spot means losing what you wanted off that spot.

Combined with some pretty clever mechanics - a method of rushing the end of a round abruptly, fast actions to let you do more on your turn, each mage having a special ability (some defensive, some utility, one offensive) it's VERY hard to figure out exactly what's going to happen. Makes the game extremely tactical. It's almost never that you plan out your round and it goes anywhere near like what you think it might, unlike many worker placement games. You can generally execute the broad strokes of a plan - people can't come and steal your resources (well, much), people aren't going to wreck all your stuff, but you're not just going to place workers down and browse the net waiting for your next turn. It's very highly interactive, and forces you to try and get a good grasp on what other people are doing.

It's actually not super complex from a rules standpoint. Every turn you get a fast action and a normal action. Anything that says "Fast action" (spells, treasures, etc.) is one, otherwise casting a spell, using a treasure, placing a mage, or taking a belltower card is a normal action. After that you do what it says on the card (or put the mage on the board). It's the emergent complexity of having half a dozen viable options on your turn, and trying to figure out whether you should rush for prime spots, or hold back and knock other people off them, how much offensive power they have, where they want to use it, etc.

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Mage Knight damn near requires a supercomputer to break down all the possibilities you could do for a Day/Night phase. You need to generally know the content of your decks, what you want to accomplish, what cards you'll likely be seeing soon, what you'll need to just pitch for bonuses, and how you'll defeat what you want to defeat. Doing that equation on your own is enough of a bear. Doing that for multiple decks would give me a migraine.

Seriously, the content of your hand isn't that much information because you need to know the content of your deck, and therefore what you're going to draw into to get you to do what you need to do.

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Yeah, Mage Knight is not a kind game to those sorts of sentiments. Movement alone is a brutal puzzle where you need to figure out exactly how much you need to get what you need to done. It very much rewards having exactly enough movement to get to everywhere you want to go, and killing/buying what you need to when you get there. If you end up overspending cards on movement and can't kill, or underspending cards and can't get to anything that's really worth killing, you'll end up not improving as much as you could improve. That, in turn, makes your next phase worse, which snowballs into more bad phases, and so on and so forth. Then you reach the end and need to take a city with a huge defensive value and it's like... uh... fuck me.

It makes up for that by having zero RNG in its battle component (minus summoners), so you can't just accidentally lose a battle - if you get somewhere with the right values you WILL win. But the game more-or-less counts on you performing this sort of optimization of actions reasonably efficiently, which is why it has a reputation as a brutal game. It's also why the competitive version isn't popular - trying to do that sort of calculation while jerks throw wrenches at you is not really fun.

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Um... is this question "how do you pull a bait and switch?" Or "what games of similar complexities are there in other genres?"

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Play Paperback.

Alternatively, play Scrabble properly so she hates Scrabble.

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Play Paperback.

Alternatively, play Scrabble properly so she hates Scrabble.

i can't make her play Scrabble properly
its the worst
she just ignores the score

Doesn't matter. Playing scrabble properly is about denying people the ability to put words down anywhere useful. It's like screwing with each other on purpose. Like you memorize all 2 and 3 letter words and just turn the board into a morass of pain.

https://meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/

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should probably just give up and try to start a board game group

This is probably the best option. If someone is dead set on not liking something, and Paperback is "too complicated" you might just want to find a group of friends who enjoy it.

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I really dislike Scythe.

If you want a big box game it's really hard to beat Twilight Imperium 4E. If you want something lighter, Inis is a fantastic game that is way better than Scythe.

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TI4 is really about time. Do you have 6 hours to devote to a game? TI4 is worth it. Do you want something that's over in 1-2? Inis is a great game that rewards good play, and is constantly interesting. They're both wargames, while Scythe is a Eurogame, but since most people I find think that Scythe is going to be a wargame thanks to the mechs, it's worth it. And for my money, Terra Mystica is a better "euro with area control aspects" even if it's not my favorite game overall.

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TI4 is really about time. Do you have 6 hours to devote to a game? TI4 is worth it. Do you want something that's over in 1-2? Inis is a great game that rewards good play, and is constantly interesting. They're both wargames, while Scythe is a Eurogame, but since most people I find think that Scythe is going to be a wargame thanks to the mechs, it's worth it. And for my money, Terra Mystica is a better "euro with area control aspects" even if it's not my favorite game overall.

Thanks for the suggestions! And yeah, the mech theme had me intrigued; guess it's not as battle-heavy as I might have hoped?

Resource management is enjoyable, but I do like getting my hands dirty with some conflict.

Yeah, there's not a whole lot of combat in Scythe.

Here's the reviews of Inis and Twilight Imperium.




That should give you a good idea if you like them.

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Four of us played Twilight Imperium 4E today, and there was plenty of conflict to go around toward the end of the game. That said, with three of us being new to 4E, it took us ten hours to clear the game.

4 player is also the least conflict-prone, due to the relative map sizes (it's the same size as six player, everyone gets more space). Six player usually has squabbles very quickly. Usually no one wants to commit their entire army, or commit to wiping someone out (there's always better ways to do things) but big fights happen. It does usually follow a trajectory of rounds 2-3 are petty squabbles where a few ships die, 4 is when shit starts heating up, and 5-6 is when people try to take homeworlds and throw huge armies at Mecatol.

What factions were in the 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."

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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.

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God I hate Bora Bora. Fucking fishing village bore me to tears.

Liars dice is amazing though and can't stop is just so east to enjoy

I'm sorry you're so wrong about Bora Bora. Your taste in board games makes you a terrible person.

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I've played Machi Koro a handful of times. I enjoyed it.

Maybe I haven't played it often or seriously enough to see the optimal strategies.

It's not about optimal strategies. Me and Lexi actually discussed it today, and what pisses me off about Machi Koro isn't that it's a slot machine simulator. It's a slot machine simulator where your reward for winning is you get to buy more slot machines to pull the arms on. Thus, if one player gets unlucky early, they get to watch everyone buy a bunch of slot machines, while on their turn they get to pull the arm on their one slot machine. Meanwhile other people are pulling the arms on 4-6 slot machines. Then they make slot machines that steal other people's money, which punishes the players who don't have any money to begin with more than the haves of the world.

We talked about it, and we have yet to play a game of Machi Koro, either of us, where one player wasn't simply out of the game very early on. Often with no relevant decisions they could have made to alter their fate, because it was just based on not being able to pull the lever right.

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In other news, who here has Tabletop Simulator? I'd love to organize a TI4 game with expansion this weekend.

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If everyone likes talking and negotiation, Sidereal Confluence, definitely.

Resistance and Resistance Avalon, to get that sweet, sweet mafia experience at the home.

Other than that,

Argent the Consortium plays six with expansion.

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Oh @Anix for a very flavorful game I suggest shadows over camelot.

I'll definitely look into it, but I'll also keep what you are saying in mind LLD, especially because one of my group's toxic board game traits is being obnoxious when we find a loophole strategy because we are at least partially lawyers.

One game I picked up on the cheap I am excited to play is Fog of Love, which seems extremely thematic to the point it seems more story-telling vehicle with game elements than the opposite.

Shadows was one of the first hidden traitor games, and it's a hard road to walk. Mafia just eliminates traitors, but when they have to stay in the game you need compelling things to do when you're hidden, and compelling things to do when you're revealed. On the other hand I just don't know how playtesting didn't catch it. Removing a catapult is so difficult that they're essentially an endgame timer mechanic. Speeding up the endgame timer is both the best thing you can do (because it very directly puts pressure on everyone) and also the only worthwhile choice a revealed traitor gets, so they're kind of a "place catapault" bot, which is a role a drinking bird could replicate.

Unfathomable is a bit more complicated, but a great hidden role game.

OTOH I can't sing the praises of Quest highly enough. Completely replaces Resistance in every single way for me. Simpler, but also much less arguing and much, much less voting (as in none). Also has the most hilarious thing of regularly having the town outnumbered by scum, and yet the scum still having to play like scum.