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  Hello and welcome to the Something Is Awful Dot Com Board Game thread! Unless you're from Somalia, everybody's had experience with some sort of tabletop game that involved a board or even a card game that didn't use a poker deck. We discuss those and more in this thread, so whether you're just curious, want to know what's good, have an eye for design, or just got lost, I hope you stick around long enough to grasp some of what's going on!  Okay, so forget about literally every board game or card game you've ever played. I presume their names might be Risk, Monopoly, Apples to Apples, or Munchkin? Forget all about those. We're currently in a board gaming renaissance. Long story short, in 1995 a crazy Nazi named Klaus Teuber made a game in his basement called Settlers of Catan, and it was wildly different from previous games. Older board games usually involve a lot of just rolling dice and watching what happens, but Settlers upset everything by redefining the concept of turns and completely changing how players interact with each other. It was a breakout hit, and like Spider-Man the movie, Street Fighter 4, Survivor, and many other media sensations, it caused a resurgence in the genre with the amount of attention it received. Now, more than ever, new and bizarre board games are pushing the limits of creativity, to the point where we often wonder how we got along before this all started. Why haven't you heard about this? Well, a certain handful of big-name companies happen to have a stranglehold on what's allowed on mainstream store shelves. You can't go to Wal-Mart and buy something that's not made by Hasbro, Mattel, Parker Brothers, or other Good Old Boy companies run by rich Americans that churn out licensed trash. As a result, a lot of these games are relegated to limited printings and specialty retailers. The system doesn't look like it'll change anytime soon (short of some attempts by Hasbro to pick up some of the more unique designs it finds at conventions), but we have lots of ways to get around these particular limitations. To try to describe what makes these games so much better than the games you grew up with would be like trying to describe what makes chocolate so good-- to an extraterrestrial. So, what are you missing out on? Keep reading!  There are two big sides of this whole area of entertainment. One side is a more American school of thought that focuses on style, and the other is a more European school of thought that focuses on substance. Ameritrash games usually have high cost, complex rules, and a large footprint on your table in exchange for fancier components, more thematic experiences, and more unique settings. Eurogames usually have pasted-on themes, boring components, and little variation from game to game in exchange for lower cost, tighter mechanics, and gameplay that scales between all skill levels seamlessly. Also, keep in mind that many games fall into a grey area between the two, and the continental descriptors shouldn't always be taken literally. A good example of an American-style product would be Die Hard. Flashy, lots of special effects, and spectacular amounts of money put into the license and marketing. Some people enjoy the spectacle and are right for doing so! Other people find it dull because it is unchallenging, or because they have no testicles. A good example of a Eurogame-style product would be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cerebral, rich, and with scores of effort put into every facet to make a cohesive and fulfilling whole. To some, it's boring and requires too much effort for a leisure exercise, and those people are also stupid. Others enjoy the intellectual experience and are right for doing so! Within each big genre are littler genres that are more like a venn diagram of shared mechanics. There are dozens of these from Auction to Drafting to Tableau-Building, but I'll try to outline some of the more notable ones here. Deckbuilding games have been a sensation since the 2008 hit Dominion (which we'll describe in detail later). Most card games involve a deck of cards, right? Well, deckbuilding games involve a lot (think sales lot, not the amount) of cards that you pick and choose from to assemble a deck for personal usage. What's more, you're often using the deck at the same time you're building it. These games are fun in the same way LEGO blocks are fun, but also fun in the same way traditional card games are fun. It's a really cool experience overall. Worker Placement games, some examples include Caylus, Dungeon Petz, and Stone Age, are the kings of indirect conflict games. Basically, there is a shared menu of actions among the players, but the menu is limited and competition over the actions is fierce. Workers (usually little wooden dudes that are sometimes called Meeples) mark actions chosen by players, and once an action is chosen nobody else can perform said action until all the workers on the board are wiped off. These games are usually Euro as gently caress. Traitor games aren't that alien to a lot of people. Many goons have played Werewolf or Mafia in GBS, but those are Tic-Tac-Toe compared to The Resistance or Battlestar Galactica, which take the paranoia and teamwork to extreme levels. The better traitor games are the ones that require players to work together with the opportunity for traitors to attempt subtle sabotage efforts, reducing the traditional popularity contests and trolling of Werewolf. Cooperative games are kind of like RPGs. The players are all on the same team, and they're usually fighting against the game itself. Coops vary wildly in quality, but a single game stands out as so much better than the others that almost no other coop is worth playing. It's called Space Alert and it will get its own section below. Of course, this doesn't cover everything. With so much to do, where do you start?  You can probably find a local board games club at your Friendly Local Gaming Store, but not everybody is so lucky. For some of you, you'll be the first in your circle of friends to embark on this journey. For you specifically, I have made this handy guide.   Where do you buy these games? Well, support your FLGS, otherwise go here: BoardGamePrices This site lists all shops internationally and compares their prices. You can search by location or by game. Bookmark the gently caress out of this. Failing that, go to: CoolStuff has prices and shipping rates that are basically uncompetitive. I mean it. They're so cheap that they're destroying the local market. I live near their warehouse. They also have an experience system where you get growing discounts the more you spend. And free shipping on $100+ orders. Boards and Bits certainly is a website! FunAgain Games employs goons!  This Coupons and Deals thread link keeps you up to date on cool discounts and Board Game Deals! PRO-loving CLICK  Can you try these games online? Certainly! Many games are available for free play on BrettSpielWelt (including Carcassonne, Caylus, Stone Age, Puerto Rico, 7 Wonders, Pandemic, Settler of Catan, Cities & Knights of Catan, and many more) using their software or through a Java-based browser window, BoardGameArena is a browser-based place where you can enjoy many games that are also on BSW, you can play Through the Ages through your browser at (a very heavy but awesome 4X Card Worker Hybrid) at BoardGaming Online (and it supports Play By E-mail), literally all the Dominion sets but Dark Ages are available at Isotropic complete with leaderboards + promo cards + the original playtest art for each card, and you can play some of the rare games as VASSAL modules if you have Java. You can also purchase many games on XBLA, the Droid marketplace, or iOS, including Settlers, Carcassonne, and Hive!  Well, you can go to BoardGameGeek to locate forums and designers of various games, plus BGG has separate regional forums for you to find local players. If you want to talk with us, though, we usually hang out at #boardgoons on synirc. Come idle with us! There are games going on and off all the time, including playtest of some up and coming goon projects! Want to travel back in time? Relive the glory days? Board Games Megathread (2010-2011) Board Games Thread - We've Only Got Four Meeples to Save the World (2011-2012) Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2012 15:09
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There are review sites for board games. Most of them suck. Shut Up and Sit Down is really good; it's 2 British guys (that like mostly American-style games) who are fantastic at articulating what you experience out of a game while also being hilarious. Untitled Flash-Based Review Thing has short reviews that are really insightful and clear on what mechanically drives each game he reviews. No Fun Allowed is entertaining Goon Rants by one of our own (Tekopo). I may edit some more in here later. Okay, so throughout 2012 we collected votes on which games were the best. This Google Doc has the results. But don't click it. These are the reviews of the top 5.  7 Wonders is a game where you draft cards. What's drafting? Well, everybody starts with a hand of cards, picks one to keep, and passes the rest to the player next to them. As time goes on, all the good choices have been lobotomized and you're cursing out your friends for giving you a hand full of poo poo! The premise of 7 Wonders is that you're all building the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, and over 3 ingame Ages you build communities, addons, and militaries surrounding these monuments. When the game is up, everybody looks at what they've built and scores them accordingly. It's good fun, not terribly challenging, and goes from 15-30 minutes.  Dominion is the deckbuilder. This game started the deckbuilding genre and god drat if it's not the reigning loving king. You start off with a 10-card deck of stupid bullshit, and you sculpt it into an unholy engine of destruction by purchasing cards from a shared supply of randomly chosen additions. Also, you occasionally send out armies and minions to inconvenience your neighbors. The premise of Dominion is that you're building a kingdom and... the theme really doesn't loving matter. It's genius in its execution, and it says something that its most fierce competitors are literally just the same game with a different theme or with an extra mechanic or two. You win by having the most victory cards in your deck when time runs out, but victory cards are dead weight, so there's a delicate balance between winning and being able to maintain the lead. Everybody who plays this game gets addicted to it. Dominion has a shitload of expansions. In release order they are (and feature) Intrigue (cards with choices), Seaside (sustained actions), Alchemy (totally broken actions that require a unique resource), Prosperity (lots of money), Cornucopia (a wide variety of cards), Hinterlands (cards that act immediately upon gaining them), Dark Ages (manipulating the trash), and the final expansion Guilds (saved money and optional add-on purchases). There is also a Base Cards mini-set which you can purchase if you want to skip straight to the expansions instead of getting one of the initial two box sets (Dominion or Intrigue). This is pretty much the only game in existence where we will recommend you get all of them (although Alchemy has a pretty unbalanced awesome:poo poo card ratio, skip over it and get it last). The expansions are not necessary to enjoy Dominion, but they will dramatically increase the life and enjoyability of the game. They were released in order from least complex to most complex. Get them in any order you want. Release order if you can't decide. I typed their names in release order. Buy the expansions to the game in the order I just listed them, but skip over Alchemy. If you want to get the Big Box, whatever, knock yourself out-- but the Big Box contains (A) the one expansion you should skip and (B) the Big Money expansion which might make the game feel a little unbalanced. I have now typed 4.5 paragraphs on this game, 2 of which were on the expansions and the order in which you should buy them. If you ask what order to buy them in, you are loving illiterate. Umbilical Lotus posted:The thing with Dominion is that I can see EXACTLY where I went wrong, and now I really want to play with those exact same cards to see if I can salvage the horrible wreck my deck had become. I usually like nice, friendly, happy co-op games where everyone is helping everyone else against the nasty mean board, but Dominion actually manages to stoke that faint and dying spark of competitiveness in my soul.  Chaos in the Old World is a wargame. It's no normal wargame, though, it's a wargame with 4 assymetrical factions, a grip of magic, and thousands of innocent bystanders. CitOW takes place in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, and you play as one of the 4 gods of Chaos. You lead armies of demons and worshippers all up and down the land, corrupting and raising hell every which way. Each god has its own unique mechanics and victory conditions, and the game itself is a shining example of Ameritrash at its best. It has a load of pretty components and the game itself oozes theme. One sidenote: The game says it supports other numbers, but you NEED 4 players to play this. Exactly 4. The gods balance each other out in specific ways, and absent gods upset that balance.  Battlestar Galactica has its own goddamn thread, it's that good. It's based on the newer show, but don't expect spoilers. Kind of. 50,000 people are all that remain of the human race as they attempt to escape an armada of unstoppable killer robots. But it turns out the robots look like us now and are hiding among us. Everybody is working together to win the game, but just under half the players are secretly sabotaging things before revealing their true nature and ordering fleets of automated battleships to home in on the group. It's a combination of nearly every traitor game hidden underneath a thick layer of cooperative deathtrap. Players could be evil from the start, they could be sleeper agents without even knowing it and switch sides halfway through the game, they have once per game super moves that can either save or destroy the fleet, there are chances to sabotage and run, there are chances to point fingers, there are chances to gather information that may or may not be lied about, and so on. It does a better job of pulling off the show's premise than the show actually does. That said, it's really drat good. But it's not perfect. Each expansion adds a slew of really unbalanced things without adding many positive things to compensate other than more characters. And while the base set is pretty clean, the expansions do spoil events from the show in bizarre ways (like a character's once per game power being to get themself killed, etc). BSG is fine for people who have not seen anything. Pegasus should be held off until after you've seen all of seasons 1 and 2. Exodus and Daybreak should be held off until you've seen the entire show. Also, it's Fantasy Flight as gently caress, so it's lengthy, fiddly, and the rules are kind of rear end. 2 hours minimum. 4 minimum during your first game. But it's really good. There are constantly ongoing Play-By-Post games of this occurring in The Game Room. Refer to the main BSG thread for highlights. I seriously recommend you go look at them to gain an understanding of both how the game is played and how hilarious it is. Finally,  Space Alert. By the holiest of holies, Vlaada Chvatil. It's the best loving board game out there. We mean it. Now, what I'm about to tell you will sound crazy and/or stupid, but bear with. In Space Alert you are a crew member on a Sitting Duck-class Starship of the United Space Exploration Services. Your mission is a boring survey. Your ship will hyperspace jump into an uncharted region of space, automatically scan the area for 10 minutes, and then hyperspace jump out. No interaction on your part is required. You just sit back and drink coffee. Space is mostly empty, so this job is the best-paying 10 minutes of doing nothing there is. Totally easy. Spoilers: The entire universe hates you and wants to kill you. When you drop out of hyperspace, fleets of alien ships target you simultaneously. Meteors radiate toward you like you're a loving ice cream truck. The systems controlling all your defenses are prone to malfunction and/or being hacked. The squadron of armed, semi-sentient androids put on the ship to defend you have turned sentient and murderous. There isn't enough energy to fire all the guns. There is no shielding against teleporting saboteurs, terrorists, or xenomorphs. Your communicators keep cutting out at random times. There is a gigantic crack in the hull. A giant octopus is trying to make love to the ship. The elevators can only fit 1 person at a time. A psychic satellite is knocking you unconscious every 3 minutes. The bridge's Main Computer has a screen saver that you have to manually prevent from activating every few seconds or it will disable the lights and life support. And the USES still expects you to survey the region and come back in one piece. Space Alert is the coop to end all coops. Cooperative games tend to have a "quarterbacking" problem where the best person tends to boss everybody around. They also have poor balance, where either they're impossible due to poor planning or they're too easy because the designers didn't think more than 1 person could put their heads together. Space Alert solves these. Space Alert takes place over 10 minutes in real time. During these 10 minutes, an audio track acts as the ship's computer which serves to announce incoming threats. You and the other players plan a course of action, and you NEED the other players because no single person can do even more than half the work required (or even pay attention to more than half the problems that arise). After your huddle and BREAK! your crew high-fives to do their job. Then, you watch the ship's black box recording of what actually happened, and the results are as horrifying as they are hilarious. Space Alert turns board game night from "let's sit around the table, drink a beer, and make small talk" to "let's freak out and experience the most stressful half hour of our lives littered with cold sweats and elevated heart rates." It's almost more of a video game than a board game. It's so good. Space Alert is the most fun you can have with a table that doesn't involve cake or lubricant. If you don't like this game there is something wrong with you, as in broken in your loving brain. This is not hyperbole. This is not goon bandwagoning. The game is ACTUALLY THAT GOOD. What's more, the rules are taught as an in-character academy lesson as a dark comedy. The whole game is a dark comedy in a cynically Soviet future. This game is not recommended for the faint of heart or for those brand new to this whole board games thing. Play the other games first. Save the main course for when you can appreciate its richness and hilarity. Aston posted:In summary, trying to train the battlebots in IT whilst they're revolting against you doesn't work. Spiggy posted:Sure- we may have died pretty horribly the next three games in a row, but it was probably one of the best experiences I've had in gaming in a long time. The highlight of the session was coordinating everyone to stare out the window during the final phase to celebrate our victory, only to discover that we didn't kill that destroyer which crashed into and destroyed the ship in that same round. quote:The Sitting Duck has: kaptainkaffeine posted:I wanna love space alert but when people lose horribly the first time they get all discouraged and don't want to hear "ok, the tutorial went ok, let's try the first mission" Putenbrust posted:Now the blue zone had four damage markers. And lucky me! The octopus (two life points left) did exactly two damage... jayquirk posted:Psssst... you don't need clones. That's for those other explorers. You can do it, you're good enough. You'll get your levels waaay faster. Don't you want to get levels? Fuligin posted:I thought space alert was just a goon meme until I finally got to play it with friends Casnorf posted:I got Space Alert the other week and even with all the general good feelings and hype surrounding it, I feel like it actually exceeded expectations. I absolutely cannot wait to play again. Sloober posted:It's all fun and games until your captain has a massive brain fart and accomplishes exactly zero of what he thought he was putting cards down for. (It's me, i'm the bad captain and instead of activating the crewbots and sealing the fissure in the hull I road the center lift up and down several times and looked out the window a couple times) homullus posted:Beat the two tutorial missions, then on the first simulation mission, communications officer (and the rest of us) learned that he should read the threat cards before firing the rockets twice on the major and minor asteroids converging on the ship. As chaotic as the "live" phase is, people were surprised at how tense the resolution phase felt. KiloVictorDongs posted:Got my friends together to play my first couple of rounds of space alert yesterday. Deceptive Thinker posted:Space Alert - just...wow Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Nov 30, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2012 15:09
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Just woke up; changed the American/Euro analogy slightly to something less stupid. Anything else needs fixing in the OP?
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Jul 3, 2012 01:14
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Countblanc posted:Some time near the end of the last thread (I clicked back 15 pages and didn't see it but I may have just missed it) someone posted an online site for playing a handful of different games online, including Caylus and Stone Age. It was entirely browser based, but I can't find it. Anyone have any clue what I'm talking about? See "PLAY ONLINE" in the OP.
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Jul 3, 2012 02:42
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General Battuta posted:Vlaada fans, hear my plea. I played Mage Knight for the first time last night - none of us had ever touched it before, and they assigned me to figure out the rules and teach everybody. We did the tutorial scenario. It was a grueling, joyless, cruelly random experience. We only made it through one day-night cycle (about three or four hours of play?) before I dropped out. The biggest issue seemed to be waiting for other people to take their drat turns - it seems like a game that could be fun with rapid-fire Dominion-style turns, but in practice there was a lot of hemming and hawing and 'oh, crap, I don't have enough movement points go get there'. Mage Knight is heavy as gently caress. It is long and deep, and the rules aren't complex but they are numerous. Try learning the game offhand through a solo game, or only with other really heavy players around. It is a beautiful game, but it is definitely not for everybody.
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Jul 3, 2012 23:51
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Lord_Pigeonbane posted:Back in February, Treefrog Games announced that A Few Acres of Snow: 2nd Edition would be out in May/June. Has there been any information since then? I'm getting impatient here! It just fixes a couple of typos. If you're wondering whether or not they patched the game-breaking British automatic victory, Martin Wallace has gone on record saying the game is "by design, unfixable." I guess that's what happens when you make a deckbuilding game and you don't have any Dominion or Magic players do any of your playtesting!
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Jul 4, 2012 18:37
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Not to mention the issue that anybody who's even remotely good at deckbuilding games clearly knows the power of a thin deck. The British can get their deck thinner, faster, and even ignoring Halifax have at least 1/2 other ways to gently caress up the French. Of course, you can't remove trashing from the game without breaking it, and you can't remove British trashing without breaking it. They managed to get through playtesting without using a Chapel strategy. The proposed solution? Make the French deck slightly smaller at the beginning of the game. This doesn't solve any of the problems at all, of course. The map is still broken and attempts to defend against the Halifax Hammer actually make things easier on the British because of the effects of sieges.
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Jul 5, 2012 01:48
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Pope Guilty posted:My offline gaming friends and I were complaining about co-op games, mostly about how they could as easily be solo games. Hidden traitors alleviate this to some extent, but I had the idea of a game with a structure similar to the tabletop RPG Paranoia- you've got your own goals that you want to accomplish, but you can't do it alone and need to work with everybody else to accomplish either your goals or a set public goal and then also your own person goal. Is there anything like that out there? You're looking for Cutthroat Caverns, a rather light card game in which everybody is in a single D&D party fighting eldritch horrors that require teamwork, but the credit for each kill goes to whoever got the killing blow. It's not bad, but I wouldn't really recommend it outside of this particular instance. Also, Space Alert does away with the "could as easily be solo" problem.
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Jul 5, 2012 02:24
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xopods posted:I think an asymmetric two-player deckbuilding game is one of the hardest things you could possibly aspire to make. Most Dominion setups are kind of broken, but the point is that they're broken a different way each time and both players have equal access to the cards, so it's about (a) spotting the breaking strategy and (b) if your opponent does too, executing it just a little better in terms of the fine details. There have been efforts to design really awesome kingdoms, and, as a few people who've hung out in #boardgoons can attest, the best games of Dominion are the ones where multiple strategies counter each other on the board. I agree that it would be difficult to make an asymmetric deckbuilder, but I also think that Dominion has been out long enough for there to be experts on the matter worth consulting. If the right people put their heads together, you could make an awesome and relatively balanced game. Of course, if you ignore the established experts in the genre, then you end up with a terribly broken game (see also: Puzzle Strike).
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Jul 5, 2012 06:38
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Blistering Sunburn posted:Anybody have thoughts on Eminent Domain? I already own and like Dominion and Puerto Rico, which both seem to be ancestors of Eminent Domain in terms of mechanics. I'm wondering: I was told on IRC before buying Eminent Domain to play it three times. I think that's a good guideline for the game in particular. Eminent Domain has a very unique deckbuilding style. Most DBGs are very much like Dominion in that you buy cards using ingame money (and "strength" is sometimes a currency) and your starting deck is full of lovely dead weight cards that you'd never want to buy ever. Eminent Domain has you gaining cards automatically (at no cost) depending on the strategy you use, and the cards in the starting deck aren't dead weight by design (but become less useful over the course of the game for emergent reasons). The role portion of the game is a combination of Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy. Like PR, roles are chosen a player at a time and it's much less random when it comes to taking advantage of other players' role choices. Like Race, participating in a role is optional and can be severely modified by the cards in your hand. Unlike PR, the game is very hard to solve because there are a fair amount of random mechanics to keep each game sufficiently different (starting world/available technologies, starting shuffle, planet shuffle). Unlike Dominion, the game layout is fairly static to the point where not fully understanding what's available to you from game to game shakes the foundation of your strategy. The game itself is very fun, quite interactive for a DBG, and has a good deal of strategy for players that enjoy both of the compared games. It's also not terribly lengthy and the components + design are very appealing. If you're hooked during your first game, I can pretty much guarantee that there is more to discover. If you can play it three times and still enjoy it, then you should buy it. Find a store copy or a friend's copy if you can. The downsides are that the box kind of sucks at storing the game (especially sleeved), and you'll have to buy 2 types of sleeves if you normally don't use clear ones.
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Jul 10, 2012 09:51
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Even if it's not The Resistance it doesn't matter. The Resistance is the best traitor game and no others except BSG count.
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Jul 10, 2012 10:27
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Arclyte posted:My group gets together every other month or so to play BSG. I think the biggest draw is the traitor mechanic and all of the finger-pointing/scheming that goes along with it. I think it does a really good job of keeping everything in shades of grey, where decisions are rarely cut and dry and it gives the cylon players a lot of opportunities to work. I'd like to find a game along the lines of BSG that can be played in under 3 hours though. Nah, you're looking at it too clinically. First, the "one of the other two people is a spy" binary aspect isn't. The group has to vote on mission teams to send on missions, and eliminating half the group from being considered trustworthy is a great way to completely throw a wrench in the cogs. Not only that, but if you can't decide on a mission team within a certain number of votes, the spies automatically win. It's a combination of no player elimination, involvement of everybody in the game (mandatory Leading of missions and having chunks of players put on the line simultaneously), and the concept that everybody on your team is required to cooperate to win. It's not like BSG where you sow seeds of dissent through secretly making things go wrong and use the game to advantage. Rather, it's something like stalking another player and sabotaging all of their missions so they get blacklisted for being a spy. It's really rich. As far as a detailed rundown of how it works-- Step 1: Leadership passes to the left Step 1.5 (optional, recommended): New Leader flips Plot card if he didn't gain Leadership through a "No" vote. He then gives it to another player for their use later. Step 2: Leader nominates a group of players to go on a mission. The size of the group grows in later game rounds. Step 3: The group votes using anonymous cards on whether or not they approve of the mission group. If "No," goto 10. Step 4: If "Yes," the group goes on the mission and uses a similar technique to voting as to whether or not the mission succeeds. If a single sabotage card is played, it fails. Step 5: Successful mission = 1 Resistance Point. Failed mission = 1 Spy Point. Step 6: Goto 10. If a team gets 3 points, they win. If the group cannot decide on a mission team 5 consecutive times, the Spies win by virtue of completely wrecking the trust of the Resistance. 3 points is an incredibly low number (but just high enough to make the game not random). There isn't a lot of room for mistakes, and for that reason tensions remain incredibly high throughout the whole game. Also, plot cards function closer to BSG action cards, where you can force a player to vote faceup, etc. The requirement that you must give away a plot card causes even more drama for obvious reasons. It's a really good game.
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Jul 10, 2012 17:03
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Crackbone posted:You're the one of the few people I've heard saying they like it. It must not have sold very well - when I was at Gencon there was a booth with a wall of Dreadfleets for $50 that weren't moving at all. Dreadfleet was a tremendous failure. GW actually ended up buying back half the copies they shipped to retailers after they sat in stores untouched for a year.
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Jul 14, 2012 01:26
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GrandpaPants posted:Is it an actual bad game or was it poorly marketed/priced or what? The miniatures looked pretty rad and it's not terribly rated on BGG, so I'm not sure what the hell happened there. Cool minis plus potentially terrible game seems to have worked for all those CoolMiniOrNot Kickstarters, so I dunno. It wasn't TERRIBLE but it WAS GW as gently caress. Really really generic roll and move roll to attack roll to breathe roll to check the rulebook Games Workshop hour long dicefest with elaborate miniatures in their generic fantasy heavy metal album universe. Priced pretty high in stores and then GW fans bought copies to scalp on eBay for double that. I'm willing to bet that if the game came out 3-4 years ago they wouldn't have had to recall it. The current state of board games has such a high average quality that even pretty good games with notable flaws are passed over regularly and fans as a whole are pickier about prices (see: Eclipse). Dreadfleet was destined to go the way of Gears of War.
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Jul 14, 2012 01:46
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Panzeh posted:Dreadfleet is the kind of game that leaves a terrible first impression because the introductory scenario is between two ships that will pretty much take hours to kill one another. It's a bit better with the full fleets in play, though it does still feel incredibly random. Oh lord, the randomness. Thinking back now, I understated it. It all just came to me how much I hate Dreadfleet. Dreadfleet is so shitfucking random that it makes Munchkin look like Go. I already mentioned the random movement distances (2d6) and standard GW dice offs (roll to hit, roll to save, etc), but there's 3 or 4 decks of stupid bullshit that happens whenever you do anything. So, you fire broadsides during your Broadsides phase. You select a target, check arc of sight, determine how big a bucket of dice you are going to roll, cross-check a chart using the range to the target to determine what number you want to roll on said bucket of dice, roll the bucket of dice, your opponent rolls a corresponding bucket of dice to how many shots connected, and then they draw from a deck of damage cards to determine what happened to their ship. (A single action for a single ship is expected to take a minimum of 5 minutes according to the manual's estimate play length for the smallest scenario) Drawing a damage card is the part where the concept of determinism just puts a gun in its mouth (having taken out a hefty life insurance policy at the beginning of the Movement phase), as the results from the cards vary wildly, including such effects as "a crew member died," "there's a hole in the side of the ship," "the shot struck your gunpowder reserves," "instant loving death," and even buffs. Yes, buffs. You can shoot somebody and their ship improves. Oh yeah, there are status cards, and those are random, too. gently caress. And then there's the Fate phase. Each player draws a random card from the Fate deck, which is basically every single deck from Arkham Horror combined in how terrifically arbitrary it can be. Oh, look! I get a buff to one of my cogs (small boats), except I have no cogs so it doesn't do anything. Wind changes direction 2d6. Now John gets to draw a Fate card. What's that? He gets to draw 14 damage cards and assign them to ships, 12 to mine and 2 to his? That's faaaantastic! And then the wind changes direction 2d6 again, 30 seconds later, which makes the last wind direction change pointless (wind affects Movement). Then there are Order cards. Thankfully, you don't draw them from a deck-- they are static items that have a per-turn limit and each one is a different order. Just play one on a ship, and... roll a loving command check! You didn't think you'd get to use any strategy, did you? Not in a GW game, no. I hope you didn't plan on failing that check if you wanted to use that boat or Order this turn. And boarding actions. Boarding actions! Get 2 ships into base contact and then dice off with your opponent. You'll want to pick up more dice, though. Each side rolls a number of dice equal to your captain's swashbuckling stat. Compare all the 5+ dice and then the opponent draws a Wound card for their captain and then rolls on a Duel Result chart to determine how grievous the wound was. I'm not exaggerating or embellishing any of this. Compounding all of this is extremely typical GW rules writing with tons of cross-referencing, poor wording, more tables on which to roll whenever you contact an enemy/travel into certain parts of the board/travel off the board/attempt to deploy other boats/meet the scenario requirements/dock/claim treasure/etc. Oh, and scenarios. The scenarios are a big list of "cinematic" adventures that involve more unique dice tables and special characters or forces of nature that interfere with the game heavily and change the victory conditions. The special characters all have their own stats and do really extravagant things like changing the wind at will (using dice) or summoning dudes (using dice) or forcing extra dice or affecting rerolls and so on. It's all really lengthy and so random as to be non-sequitor. Before release, there was absolutely no details on it up to the moment it shipped into stores. Nobody is allowed to post the rulebook online. It got released at a "premium" price with a loudly announced, "limited" release with no real justification for it being limited other than a combination of false scarcity and promise of no additional support. It has elaborate miniatures that don't conform to any single theme and add an ungodly amount of assembly time to the game (not to mention paint/glue costs, which you can purchase at your local Games Workshop™ Dollar Dumpster). The player choices and interaction are elementary and obvious for the brief moments when they exist. Strategy and long-term replayability is sacrificed in favor of being "cinematic" by virtue of extreme variance and gimmicky rule variants. 1-3 hours of watching pixelated life simulator static and it can be yours for $114.99 (or $189.99 if you live in Australia!) not including paints and glue and Heavy Metal Painting Guidez. It's peak Games Workshop. God, I loving hate that company.
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Jul 14, 2012 11:58
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Pizza Dude posted:none of us would want to play something with a theme based around an ip of some sort (like Battlestar Gallactica or Game of Thrones) Why is this?
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Jul 15, 2012 03:37
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If anything, the fact that playing a certain very boring style will make it impossible to lose Arkham is kind of a testament to how bad the game is. Just stock up on a decent set of weapons, wait for the GOO to come, and then blow them up. Way easier than playing the actual game, with way fewer rules arguments. Does it completely ruin the point of the game? Well, yeah. But if you play the game as intended then it becomes a slog of houserules and random events that can take a long drat time. And it's not very fun either way.
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Jul 15, 2012 19:11
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Caedar posted:I had the opportunity to play the prototype for this game last November with the designer. It was AMAZING! I wrote up a session report here. And no, it's nothing like Space Alert. I didn't need this game until I read this report. Now I can't loving wait.
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Jul 17, 2012 14:17
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Splat posted:Played some Space Alert last night with a new group, but it was the first time I'd played with 5. Not really that much experience with 4 either, though, but some. Seemed muuch harder with 5? Blew up 3x on the Advanced sim, before we even got to the interior threats. Small mistakes each time and unlucky draws I guess (serious threat on a XYYZ track, that heals and damages on Y, whichever that one is). But it seemed much much more unforgiving. In 4 player, we'd get throught even with some or lots of damage, but 5 player seemed like mistake = death. Is this common or we just unreasonably terrible? Serious threats are kind of a shitstorm regardless of the track they go on (especially given your playstyle: I hate Trajectory 2 because it's T1 but enemies spawn out of Pulse Cannon range). Sometimes you get better cards or a better soundtrack to go with the cards. The variance in difficulty shouldn't be too terribly much, but adding the extra threat can probably push a "difficult" mission into the "gently caress everything" range. I've often found that having a 5th person makes things way easier because it's that much more likely that both squads of battlebots will be properly utilized without sacrificing firepower at necessary angles.
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Jul 17, 2012 20:39
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Len posted:Rio Grande is apparently a Gencon sponsor so do you guys think I'll be able to snag a copy of Space Alert down there this year? Kengi will be at Gen*Con selling his copy of Space Alert for a very reasonable price. You should look him up!
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Jul 21, 2012 06:41
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If you get Starcraft, Brood War is pretty much required. It fixes a lot of the game's problems and adds a lot of really amazing stuff to the game which make it a lot more interesting and fun. Too bad it costs so much and takes up so much space (even in the box!).
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Jul 22, 2012 05:22
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Paradoxish posted:The first (and only, so far) time we played with the Enterprise ship, my friend decided to blow all but one of his crewmembers on the really expensive abandoned ship. He was going to cut his losses and give up after that since he didn't have any cargo anyway and hadn't lost any parts yet, but he decided to press on for another turn or two. Next card was a Saboteur which rolled a 7-7 and cleanly split his ship in half. I had a friend take the Enterprise, load up on cargo on a shitload of planets, and get bisected by a meteor. All of his crew but 1 was in the saucer section. All of his cargo was in the drive section. Me: "Which half of your ship do you want to keep?" pause Him: "Yeah, gently caress 'em." Of course, having abandoned his crew to the asteroid belt, he was immediately left adrift in Open Space a single card before the end of the round. All of his engines were on the other half.
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Jul 24, 2012 16:54
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sector_corrector posted:Simultaneous turns is a pretty cool design concept... not a big wargamer, are there any kingdom building / worker placement games that make use of it? DUNGEON LORDS
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Jul 26, 2012 05:13
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Elysium posted:Finally got in my first play of Space Alert. Had 4 people, none had played before. We breezed through the first 2 training missions and a simulated mission. Decided we had time for one more, and we felt confident moving to an advanced simulator. We were doing well despite not noticing until resolution that our hacked shields were actually on the other side of the ship from where we were repairing. Luckily there were literally no other threats on that side of the ship. Anyway we did fine after that, easily taking out another internal threat with our battlebots, and then one guy forgot to wiggle the mouse ("ok, turn 8 you're wiggling the mouse, yeah? Yeah.") and that delayed us all, causing us to take damage, which caused our laser to do 1 less damage, and our missiles to be delayed, leading to us being destroyed on the last turn. My friends and I thought we were hotshots at Space Alert for the first month or two of play until I realized I had 2 copies of the training CD. I downloaded the mp3s of the real missions and god drat did our spirits get plunged.
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Jul 26, 2012 05:34
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McNerd posted:Speaking of the computer maintenance in Space Alert, does anyone know why that exists? It's such a dumb little arbitrary, unthematic element that even the rulebook makes fun of it ("Screen saver"). Why toss it into a game that is otherwise so tightly designed? What's it add except a slight difficulty increase that could be achieved in many other ways? Maybe he was running out of things to do with C actions were getting to be a little too worthless but surely he could have come up with something better than this? You're crazy. It's thematic as hell. I mean, the whole game is mired in bureacracy and layers of corporate interference. The company goes through recruits at such a fast rate that the instructors don't know whether or not they're giving a training seminar or a eulogy. Corporation Incorporated is either incompetent or malicious with respect to its practices and treatment of employees. The Sitting Duck itself must have been designed by the lowest bidder and built in an outsourced factory by underpaid child laborers. It's no coincidence that every exploration mission materializes in the middle of a gigantic enemy fleet and in an asteroid belt orbiting a black hole. The Sitting Duck has:
Naturally the ship has a screen saver featuring an advertisement of the company who built the goddamn thing. Of COURSE we can't disable it, that would be against company policy! It's not like you're doing anything on those missions, anyway; the ship's computer is the one recording the sector and doing all the work while you sit on your rear end. And then it makes perfect sense that the screen saver activation turns off the lights because of a glitch in the ship's computer that cannot comprehend that it would never begin a mission manned and suddenly become unmanned halfway through under the logic that "nobody postponed the screen saver therefore there is nobody on board." As a mechanic in a science fiction dark comedy, it's spot-on. It's straight out of Hitchhiker's Guide; the last hurrah of penny-pinching executives and poor quality assurance all around. As a mechanic in the game, it's great. It's a key reminder that throughout all the stress of death spiral you have to escape, no amount of ingenuity or teamwork can overcome the fact that your ship is a gigantic piece of poo poo. What's more, you have a job to do in the sector; it just turns out that survival is like a billion times harder than the job itself.
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Jul 26, 2012 20:41
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I played SDE last year quite a few times. It's overpriced, long, clunky, too random, too swingy, requiring too much work to initially assemble, and any claims that it supports more than 2 players are an outright lie. Some of the concepts were cute but the game overall is a huge no-no.
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Jul 28, 2012 22:07
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There's a difference between "not a pure strategy" and "85% of the events ingame don't involve player decisions." Things like somebody powering through a 3-hour game because of lucky rolls, a good character, and everybody else getting hosed, only to roll a 1 on the final endgame dice chart and lose the game for everybody. Mechanically, every player decision is rather arbitrary, strategy doesn't actually gain you any advantage, and you cannot plan any further than your current turn. A game that's "not pure strategy" would be something like Dungeon Petz, where you encounter a lot of out-of-control circumstances-- but there is still a coherent narrative and structure. The highs and lows make sense and your decisions have mostly predictable ramifications. Talisman is non-sequitor. Everything that you do is random, everywhere you move is random, everything about your character is random, and it's unforgivable because the game takes upwards of 2 hours to play and whoever "wins" was arbitrarily chosen by the RNG to begin winning 20 minutes in, like Monopoly. Except that Monopoly has an actual player progression that makes sense. I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong for liking Talisman, but I will tell you that it's not really a game. It's more like a long and boring movie with a randomly generated plot and only a slight chance of an actual ending. edit: Play Talisman for free online here! Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jul 30, 2012 |
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Jul 30, 2012 18:42
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enigmahfc posted:Some people here use that therm to describe these they hate. The term game can describe a fuckton of things, but some people don't see it that. Playing SlugBug in a car can be a game, and so can Space Alert, that doesn't mean you have to like it. It's like to trying to debate what the term art means. Talisman is considered less of a game because games are supposed to be interactive, and Talisman is about as interactive as a roller coaster ride. There are lots of terrible loving games (Panic Station, Cosmic Encounter) out there that are still interactive. Shut Up and Sit Down described Arkham Horror in much the same way, and accurately so. Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jul 30, 2012 |
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Jul 30, 2012 20:27
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A Strange Aeon posted:Whereas an adventure game like Talisman offers numerous surprises, every turn. Some of us really like seeing what happens next. We get pleasure from finding a new weapon for our dude, or seeing a sick monster kill an opponent. I'm not going to use the whole "it's fun!" argument, since anything can be fun, but seriously. There's nothing inferior about games that don't involve strategic planning; often, I feel more agency in a game like Talisman than I do in a Euro, since there are numerous possibilities and each game plays very differently, whereas in a Euro, I usually end up feeling constrained by the design, like the designer is forcing me to play the game in this very specific way. Everything else has been tackled, so I'll single this bit out. What you're describing is Zynga-style Compulsion Game Design. The only things hooking a person into the game are a perception of progression at an unpredictable and/or glacial rate. If you go down this path and claim it as a legitimate thing to be lauded or positively considered as a source of "fun," you'll probably end up in way more poo poo than you ever imagined. There's a reason why the "anything is fun" statement comes up whenever we discuss Munchkin: People will use nostalgia to mask bad taste, and this thread is mainly one of recommendations. I'm a pedantic rear end in a top hat, so 9 times out of 10 I'll be there to flip my poo poo when somebody makes a recommendation using terrible logic. Talisman is an awful game all around, and has many symptoms of terrible practices in the hobby-- overpriced, too many components, poor rules, lots of randomness, extreme length, roll and move, grandfathered from the 80's, and so on. It just so happens that we're focusing on a few aspects during this discussion. If your primary reason for liking a game is that it's addictive (and only because of a basic psychological trap), that's bad. You need to recognize that it's bad, and recommending it to others is kind of out of the question. "Hey, try these cigarettes! You'll be hooked." How is that a recommendation? Golden Bee posted:I love CE. It's a battle game without the ability to pick on others; diplomacy is engaged in every round; there are 100 core races. Cosmic Encounter is a fun game until you attempt to apply any sort of critical thinking to it whatsoever and then it falls apart. It's one of those games where the abilities are totally broken and out of whack, but the players are expected to balance it out by being assholes to whoever has the most powerful ability. Finally, it Munchkins out at the end. Each game ends several hours later in an X-1 way tie, where X is the number of players, unless somebody got extremely luck with the Destiny Deck. Simply put, everybody has the power to team up and prevent a player from winning, and you'd have to be braindead to allow such a thing to happen... and then you get bored as gently caress and brute force the ending. Before you interject with "but if you turn off your brain it's good!" the difference between a good game and a bad game is that a good game is good no matter who plays it and in what way they do so. See also: Talisman. It's also an FFG rehack of an established Euro that wasn't so hot to begin with. Yay unreadable rulebooks!
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Jul 31, 2012 02:20
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homullus posted:I'll just put this here since nobody else has yet in this thread, I think. Monopoly was not supposed to be a game of brilliant negotiations originally; it was supposed to be "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences", i.e. a ball of suck for everyone except the winning player. It succeeds admirably at this (or would if people caught on to that theme); how it's now perceived is a whole other cautionary tale of marketing and nostalgia. Monopoly is a kaleidoscope of comedy because the same horrible business practices that the original game protested were used to steal the product from the original designer, bully better games off of shelves, and ruin each individually played game to this day. The whole thing is a historical shitstorm, yet it's respected purely out of blind nostalgia.
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Jul 31, 2012 22:21
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Philthy posted:Tried out Le Havre on IOS this weekend and got hooked. Thinking about picking this up and another game that seems often clumped with it, Agricola. They will mostly be played by 2-3 people, and possibly solo on a Sunday afternoon when I'm not busy. Any opinions? Don't get Gric. Get Dungeon Lords instead. Gric takes too long, has too much luck, doesn't have enough interaction, and the pacing is awful. A game can take 2-4 hours but the winner is obvious a half hour in, and the game usually ends the first time a player activates his engine so it's an incredibly unsatisfying experience for everybody else. Dungeon Lords is shorter, has a better theme, has less of a luck factor, has more options to express yourself when building, has better pacing throughout, has more interaction, has better art and components, and is fun as hell. Dungeon Lords can't (officially) be played solo, but I still can't let you do this to yourself.
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Aug 6, 2012 20:09
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Hey, Orlando goons, what are your plans this week? I need you for playtesting.
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Aug 7, 2012 03:53
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bobvonunheil posted:wanna play this game I think I briefly had Dungeon Lords rated 10 but my ego tried to smother me with a pillow that night. I'm actually really excited about the game as it is and am glad that it wasn't released 2-3 years ago when it was first playable. The game really opened up, I learned a lot about how to tackle non-mechanical design issues, and the amount of violent and horrible things you can do to people has exponentially increased. No more boring conga lines and explosions! Now it's spinning piledrivers, grenade olympics, fire-spewing weapons platforms, and telekinetically hurling people down bottomless pits!
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Aug 7, 2012 04:28
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Trip Report: 227 - 81. This new scoring system is still kind of blowing my mind. Highlights: My SO held off activating the Infinite Prevention System just long enough to attempt to incinerate the Dummy in a large explosion from point blank range (while she was protected by an aura of flames crackling about her). A miscalculation led to my being showered in money and tokens from the aftermath. I tried to Seismic Hammer a bomb from across the screen in an attempt to clear a walkable pathway. The bomb was a dud, but I still ended up splitting the earth open, closing a bottomless pit that was blocking my path. Explorer is still probably the most broken power in the game by far. I had to reduce the IPS threshold, but the current limit is just enough that unique combos are more profitable than loops. Yay balance! Quadruple Money is probably broken. I'm at the point where I'm either to start my stale kickstarter from 2010 that never got finished or I'm to figure out a way to start flying across the country to cons to show this poo poo off. Anybody got a hookup for Gen*Con (I have PMs)? bobvonunheil posted:I really want to design a zombie survival style game where everyone is in a town trying to survive while scavenging and negotiating with each other, except it's more about making sure your specific group of survivors stays alive the longest. Stealing stuff from the communal stash, building town improvements that benefit everyone but your own group most of all, scavenging in the wilderness. Sort of like the browser game Die 2Nite in boardgame form. Why not try a survival scenario from a different history? Like, post-nuclear war, post-alien invasion (especially if we won, a la Independence Day), or a medieval demonic outbreak or somesuch? You can do the same cool survival stuff but with interesting technology and without doing zombies further to death. Hell, maybe you can even throw in a zombie or two in those settings without them being intrusive.
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Aug 7, 2012 08:40
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Call me a hopeless romantic, but if your setting doesn't at least inspire a slew of mechanics, interactions, and cool scenes you would like to see played out, then you have a very tough road ahead of you. Even my worst designs had really amazing elevator pitches.
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Aug 7, 2012 09:31
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bobvonunheil posted:Yeah true, though the theme at its core is "Small group of people who can't trust each other in a hostile and unknown environment", having to work together while working against each other, but as a worker-placement style game. There's a slew of intriguing mechanics that emerge (contributing hidden cards to the stash, deciding who goes on lookout duty, who gets elected the defacto leader and if there are mutinies etc). The 'gloss' is whether that environment is a zombie apocalypse or a nuclear wasteland. I'm leaning towards intergalactic explorers because there is something super cool to me about holding on until the last second and dicking each other over while a pack of crazed natives/mutants/animals devours everyone and everything then escaping at the last moment through a wormhole or what have you. A pile of equipment sits in a corner of the cave, lit only by refracted flashlight. Nobody was awake to attend to it, but it would most likely corrode in the "air" if left outside with the watchman. Deep in the cave, a lone crew member works in the crystal mines. He has his eye on the prize; the precious Eonite needed to restore their ship's engines. It's like co-op Eminent Domain, but not. Only one person can take the gun or the gas mask, and what's more each item has limited uses. You can stretch the usage of an item by powering it with energy crystals, but do you really want to use those on THAT? Players have hands of cards that they play to represent the tools and resources used each round, and appropriately matching tools against threats in their deck will award Glory to whoever was cleverest. (I'm at the doctor's office, typing on my phone, but I can add more details later if this doesn't spark some cool poo poo) Crackbone posted:"A Game of a Game" needs to be replaced by something else. Well, the current board art is placeholder as gently caress, but I'll probably keep it so that the poo poo on the screen is pixel-art and the rest of the room isn't, as it's thematically appropriate and also a good visual divider. I'm glad you "get" the card art (there is also a grid on the cards, will post a detailed image later). Really, the tagline is also a placeholder. The current working one is "The Game: The Game" which is a tiny bit funnier and also more historically relevant.
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Aug 7, 2012 17:04
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Tekopo posted:We'd have to find out how the hell to do stuff in Vassal, and that's not something I look forward to. Vassal's not hard; it's just a pain in the rear end. If that makes any sense.
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Aug 8, 2012 19:19
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I missed out on the last board game design contest because I was too busy. If there's interesting ideas/discussion afoot, then I'll be down for it. xopods, do your worst. I'm not afraid of you.Winson_Paine posted:(Talisman RULES) (Talisman RULES) (Talisman RULES) So should I come into the Pathfinder thread and start posting about how much BESM rules?
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Aug 8, 2012 21:12
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The most important thing about theming contests like this is because it's the Iron Chef Secret Ingredient that prevents people from submitting things they've already created.
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Aug 9, 2012 03:57
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Paradoxish posted:Yeah. I feel like I've seen people complain about explaining Galaxy Trucker more than once, and I don't get it. I've had to explain the rules multiple times now and I don't think it's ever taken more than five minutes to get people building ships. New players aren't going to immediately get that looking at the cards is important and they'll probably forget what one or two components are for, but the rounds play so fast that they'll be building a new ship in no time anyway. Having your first ship be such a piece of crap that it gets completely blown away is a GT rite of passage, and hardly matters on the first round since it shouldn't be more than a couple of minutes until everyone else has landed. I had to explain Galaxy Trucker and the Big Expansion to a group last night (having not played the game in months) and it was a cinch, even with all the expansion parts. It's even easier if you use the mnemonics they say in the manual (every part is The Most Important Part in the Game and they want As Many As Possible). I also add the "rear end to rear end" mnemonic so players remember that connectors cannot connect to an open side of another tile. Explain the Gun/Engine gap at the same time, explain all the alien types at the same time (ask if they can tell which aliens do what based off the colors, and drill in the point that Alien Life Support allows an alien to live in an attached crew cabin), explain the variants last but group them with the matching pieces (so group the powered guns with the regular guns when showing tiles but explain powered thingies last). The whole thing should take no more than 5 minutes, 10 with expansion. And, if done right, it'll be entertaining and memorable like the Space Alert tutorial. Teach Space Alert enough times and you can teach anything.
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Aug 10, 2012 03:26
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