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Post Post #3375 (ISO) » Fri Jul 26, 2019 2:45 pm

Post by GreyICE »

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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Post Post #3376 (ISO) » Sun Jul 28, 2019 4:54 pm

Post by GreyICE »

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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Post Post #3377 (ISO) » Sun Jul 28, 2019 5:03 pm

Post by PJ. »

i definitely just thought argent wasx a different game than it is. looks weird and way too heavy
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Post Post #3378 (ISO) » Sun Jul 28, 2019 6:30 pm

Post by popsofctown »

There's no such thing as too heavy I'm so intrigued.
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Post Post #3379 (ISO) » Sun Jul 28, 2019 8:30 pm

Post by GreyICE »

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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Post Post #3380 (ISO) » Mon Jul 29, 2019 9:14 am

Post by xRECKONERx »

I'm gonna highly recommend Set A Watch. We played it this past weekend and it's a blast. It's the right kind of co-op and it forces you to make real, interesting choices. And I think the classes are different/varied enough that it prevents quarterbacking.
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Post Post #3381 (ISO) » Thu Aug 01, 2019 1:05 pm

Post by InflatablePie »

found new copies of Jaipur and Carcassonne for $4 each at a local thrift store today, so I own those now I guess
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Post Post #3382 (ISO) » Thu Aug 01, 2019 6:48 pm

Post by popsofctown »

Carcassone for 4$ is a pretty good deal.
"Let us say that you are right and there are two worlds. How much, then, is this 'other world' worth to you? What do you have there that you do not have here? Money? Power? Something worth causing the prince so much pain for?'"
"Well, I..."
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Post Post #3383 (ISO) » Thu Aug 01, 2019 11:54 pm

Post by Vi »

In post 3382, popsofctown wrote:Carcassone for 4$ is a pretty good deal.
Agreed. It's still my preferred gateway game.
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Post Post #3384 (ISO) » Sun Aug 04, 2019 1:06 pm

Post by Pine »

I've been meaning to get around to it for years.

Lately I've been playing Fairytale Battle Royale, or at least trying to mod the rules into something enjoyable and balanced.

Inspired by this, a few of us have also been trying to create a Battle Royale game for the summer camp staff.

So, for years, we have enjoyed (when children were not around) occasional speculation and dramatic collaborative story-telling about which of the camp staff would emerge victorious if we were all dropped into a Hunger Games-style battle royale against one another. I've been a perennial favorite due to my size, fieldcraft, and actual training in hand-to-hand.

We took it a step farther this year.

We've been developing, in secret, a board game version, with profiles on every "participant". We're giving everyone a rating from 1-100 on a variety of physical, mental, skill, education, and wild card traits, as well as a number of potential modifier attributes. Next we'll be making a game board, random events, and a combat system. If we do it right, the "game engine" should be reusable, with us just needing to update or fill out skill sheets for next year's staff.
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Post Post #3385 (ISO) » Sun Aug 04, 2019 1:08 pm

Post by zoraster »

In post 3380, xRECKONERx wrote:I'm gonna highly recommend Set A Watch. We played it this past weekend and it's a blast. It's the right kind of co-op and it forces you to make real, interesting choices. And I think the classes are different/varied enough that it prevents quarterbacking.
can you elaborate on the prevention of quarterbacking? That's always the major weakness to coop games to me, so any without a traitor element tends to fail the test. But if there's a way to avoid it that a game has figured out, that's great.
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Post Post #3386 (ISO) » Mon Aug 05, 2019 5:54 am

Post by popsofctown »

Mage Knights quarterbacking doesn't usually feel too bad to me, because people have a hand of cards and that's hidden information relevant to the decisions. People will tell their teammates about the cards in their hand to the extent that it's relevant for cooperation but won't volunteer the contents of their entire hand generally.

I bet that Marvel Universe deckbuilder thing resists quarterbacking some for similar reasons, I've only read about it though.

Hanabi is like, the ultimate form of hidden information prevents quarterbacking, as I understand it.
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Post Post #3387 (ISO) » Mon Aug 05, 2019 6:11 am

Post by PJ. »

Co-ops are normally trash and I'd rather not play them but if I'm forced to play them, please quarterback me so I don't have to actually pay attention or learn the rules.
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Post Post #3388 (ISO) » Mon Aug 05, 2019 11:55 am

Post by Vi »

In post 3386, popsofctown wrote:People will tell their teammates about the cards in their hand to the extent that it's relevant for cooperation
but won't volunteer the contents of their entire hand generally
.
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Post Post #3389 (ISO) » Mon Aug 05, 2019 1:21 pm

Post by GreyICE »

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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Post Post #3390 (ISO) » Tue Aug 06, 2019 4:00 am

Post by popsofctown »

I'll remember what's in my deck in a ranked game of Dominion or Magic, but memorizing my deck is a bit choreish and I don't usually feel tryhard enough to do that on a tabletop evening.
That might bear relation to why we lost the co-op scenario on the easiest difficulty when I played.
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Post Post #3391 (ISO) » Tue Aug 06, 2019 5:06 am

Post by GreyICE »

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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Post Post #3392 (ISO) » Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:25 am

Post by hitogoroshi »

To me the biggest problem with Mage Knight competitive is that tactics are nigh-essential to mitigate first hand RNG. When you're good at Mage Knight you can adapt where you go to what's left in your deck, and that puzzle element is super fun and puts control totally in your hands. But you have to choose where to end a phase with no idea what your first draw is like, so having tactics to change over your cards is totally necessary, and having the whole table discuss what their T1 hands look like and assigning tactics accordingly is one of the most impactful things you do. If you weren't working together as a table to assign tactics, you could get totally screwed by factors you had little influence over, aside from really unsatisfying second/third order controls (ie hard prioritizing movespeed skills).

You do pretty much need to memorize your deck but it's easier than it sounds after a few games because the starting decks are only two cards different
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Post Post #3393 (ISO) » Wed Aug 07, 2019 6:38 am

Post by popsofctown »

A house rule that you can copy the effect of a tactic with superior priority over the effect of your actual tactic seems good, both of the "mulligan" tactics are priority 2 or 3 and taking the tactic that makes you go last and swapping its effect for the one that makes you go 2nd should theoretically be a trade down.

But playing 2v2 or co-op mage knight is pretty sweet too.
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Post Post #3394 (ISO) » Sat Aug 10, 2019 1:49 pm

Post by xRECKONERx »

In post 3385, zoraster wrote:
In post 3380, xRECKONERx wrote:I'm gonna highly recommend Set A Watch. We played it this past weekend and it's a blast. It's the right kind of co-op and it forces you to make real, interesting choices. And I think the classes are different/varied enough that it prevents quarterbacking.
can you elaborate on the prevention of quarterbacking? That's always the major weakness to coop games to me, so any without a traitor element tends to fail the test. But if there's a way to avoid it that a game has figured out, that's great.
For us, it was more about the fact that each player has their own board and spells and abilities, etc to keep track of. It feels more like a puzzle: "How should we use our combined abilities to tackle the challenge?" There are a bunch of variables -- which abilities do you currently have equipped? How does it synergize with other things?

It felt really collaborative. It's possible once you've played enough to know every class inside and out that it has quarterbacking, but with I think 10? classes to play/learn, that'll take a while.

(Also shoutout to Gloomhaven for being un-quarterback-able and being an amazing game all around.)
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Post Post #3395 (ISO) » Sat Aug 10, 2019 5:04 pm

Post by hasdgfas »

Every time I play Gloomhaven I just want to play more Gloomhaven. It's incredible how many moving parts it has and how much tension every single mission still has
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Post Post #3396 (ISO) » Thu Aug 15, 2019 2:52 pm

Post by shaft.ed »

I finally got my wife to enjoy a board game
but its Code Names in 2 player mode

halp!!
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Post Post #3397 (ISO) » Thu Aug 15, 2019 7:44 pm

Post by chamber »

Code Names duet is a bit better for the 2 player experience I think. (I'm not a huge fan of either).
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Post Post #3398 (ISO) » Fri Aug 16, 2019 5:14 am

Post by popsofctown »

In post 3396, shaft.ed wrote:I finally got my wife to enjoy a board game
but its Code Names in 2 player mode

halp!!
Unfortunately I think that's like the pinnacle of the genre and I'm not sure what you would upgrade to :(
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Post Post #3399 (ISO) » Fri Aug 16, 2019 5:28 am

Post by shaft.ed »

but i dont like the genre

how do i move laterally to something that is actually fun to play?
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