Board Games!

[SleepyKrew]

tts is the best online platform for gloomhaven whereas it is not for d&d

[shaft.ed]

is it better than the Gloomhaven Steam game?

[brassherald]

I can't get them to do any online platform for D&D, we use One note for maps and Google meets to chat.

[Ariel]

is it better than the Gloomhaven Steam game?

Steam game hasn't implemented the campaign yet, has a fair amount of issues with multiplayer connectivity, and isn't as convenient when you need to undo a misclick.

[brassherald]

As with all board games, I think there's something to be said about having a physical copy and really moving things.

I also will share I have had some desire to start painting miniatures for Gloomhaven in particular, first, but then maybe just get D&D miniatures to paint as well. Anyone know how much the tools and paint would actually cost?

[brassherald]

So my fiancée has been in a lot of pain from a possible kidney stone this weekend, due to this we stayed in today and played Marvel Villainous. I'm a fan of the fact that each character has a different win condition. Also Ultron beating Hela would only happen in this situation but I pulled it off as Ultron.

[shaft.ed]

Played Space Base with my group last night
it's a good concept, but I don't think it's very well executed
The way you can choose split or combine dice, you're just always way better buying single dice cards. The cards requiring 2 dice (especially 10,11,12) just aren't powerful enough to bother getting since you hardly ever get their benefits, especially on your own roll. And if they were powerful enough, the game would be too swingy to be enjoyable.
Seems there is just a clearly optimal strategy

[VP Baltar]

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

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

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

[shaft.ed]

are you doing it on easy?
I've found at base difficulty its p inevitable to win

The important thing is to keep developing your spirits
if you focus too much on keeping everything damage free, you won't scale your power fast enough to overtake the engine

[implosion]

I've played probably a 2-3 dozen games. What are you usually losing to and what difficulty numbers are you playing at? The biggest trap in the game is probably what shaft.ed said; a lot of early interesting decisions in the game amount to "can I grow, or am I obligated to deal with this thing".

There are a lot of useful heuristics. For instance, unless you're playing against an adversary that has a particular reason not to (Sweden if it'd cause double blight, england if you're close to losing to their alternate win condition), you should group up enemies whenever possible and prioritize handling the smaller fires (e.g., if one of the starting cities is drawn on one of the first couple invader cards, it's often best to just let it blight). The only general downside to this is blight cascade but there's blight removal/defense/etc. If you're deciding between, say, a growth option that lets you get more energy to play a card to defend against a blight or a growth option that lets you put down an extra presence, the presence is almost always gonna be better early in the game. Blight on the board usually does nothing early (it kills dahan which is annoying but not usually that harmful, if you're placing presence in safe places it shouldn't usually kill any) until it flips the card. So you can think of it as a resource.

Another example of a good heuristic is that if you draw two cards in a row referring to the same area (e.g., if two cards both have wetlands on them, or you draw jungle followed by the coastal card so both refer to coastal jungles) every place where you can deal with the ravage completely (e.g., killing the invaders and not just defending) is really killing two birds with one stone because you're also dealing with the build (unless you're playing against england but england is evil).

There are others; a lot of the game is sort of developing these heuristics and balancing when they are more or less important. There's also of course the tactics of what cards to play where/how best to coordinate with other spirits etc.

[implosion]

Regarding the specific things you asked about there are spirits I like playing more (my current favorite is Shifting Memory of Ages) but I generally play different spirits game to game. The game is harder at 2 than at 3 or 4 (interestingly there was recently errata dealing with this!) The main thing is that with 3 players the number of ways to cooperate grows very fast. The number of ways to put out any given fire is bigger. If you really need to do X this turn, or if you spent your one big defense card last turn and can't reclaim this turn, it's more likely another player can handle it.

[VP Baltar]

That's actually really helpful. Maybe I get too caught up early game trying to contain invaders, when I should be taking actions to place presence and gain cards/energy.

[VP Baltar]

Blight on the board usually does nothing early (it kills dahan which is annoying but not usually that harmful, if you're placing presence in safe places it shouldn't usually kill any) until it flips the card.

So are you stacking presence on the same lands early rather than trying to spread on the board for card reach?

[VP Baltar]

In terms of when we lose, I feel like it usually due to cascading blight, which is a function of not containing invaders.

We most often win when we just focus on a fear generation strategy, but that can end in a blight vs. fear race.

[implosion]

Blight on the board usually does nothing early (it kills dahan which is annoying but not usually that harmful, if you're placing presence in safe places it shouldn't usually kill any) until it flips the card.

So are you stacking presence on the same lands early rather than trying to spread on the board for card reach?

Primary goal is to maximize areas you can reach, secondarily to place presence in areas that can be defended if needed (i.e., preferably empty lands, or possibly lands with other spirits' presence so you have more incentive to stop a ravage there). "Safe places" mostly just meant places without a bunch of invaders. Of course it also depends on the spirit (river wants to get to as many wetlands as possible, rampant spread wants to put it in jungles/wetlands where it wants to immediately stop a build/ravage, etc).

I think a common antipattern I've seen a lot of times, especially when I/others am playing spirits we haven't played before, is doing not enough/the wrong kind of growth early and then feeling trapped in a "reclaim cycle" - you think, oh, I have to reclaim this turn or I can't do anything. And then you use your only good cards and you have to reclaim again next turn. And you wind up in a cycle where you can barely grow at all in the midgame. Usually this is a sign that you didn't grow enough early, or with some spirits (e.g. lightning, though the spirit that comes to mind when I think of having fallen into this trap the most is sharp fangs behind the leaves) possibly a sign that you invested too heavily into card plays without gaining enough minor powers/energy/something.

[VP Baltar]

That's helpful. I definitely rarely completely reveal my tracks by placing all my presence, instead focusing on the cards I have and trying to maximize effectiveness each turn so we control invaders. Next time we play, I'll go for more presence placed early.

[xRECKONERx]

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

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

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

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

[VP Baltar]

Or I'm fucking up somehow!

[implosion]

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

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

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

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

good

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

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

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

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

[xRECKONERx]

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

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

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

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

good

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

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

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

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

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

[VP Baltar]

There are a few rules that are easy to mess up (the most common one i believe being that blight cascade only cascades to one adjacent land

Just to clarify, the originating land still gets a second blight placed, correct?

Also, when you are describing playing on different difficulty levels, what do you mean? I wasn't really aware of any difficulty scaling other than not playing with the Healthy/Blighted island cards.

[shaft.ed]

add an adversary
they have scaling difficulty levels on their cards

[VP Baltar]

add an adversary
they have scaling difficulty levels on their cards

Oh interesting! We hadn't done that yet because we were not winning enough! I figured the adversaries just made the game even more difficult

[brassherald]

By the way, currently the humble bundle has digital board games as a bundle.

[brassherald]

I played Exploding Kittens this weekend.

Meh, it's a game.