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There has always been a weird bit of cross pollination between TI and Eclipse and it causes lots of consternation. They both have ships, dice-based combat, hex maps and space faring on a civilization level. But Eclipse is an economics game, while TI is a space opera political tech-tree game thing. Euro v American for lack of a better term. I vastly, vastly prefer Eclipse. Though I would consider playing TI4 because it has a limited number of turns. I am not in college anymore, so I can't play 14 hour games of TI3.
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Mar 26, 2024 19:01
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How the hell does anyone make a single game of RftG take 90 minutes? Even half that much is a long, slow game 
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Mar 26, 2024 19:03
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listen this was over a decade ago so i might be misremembering how long it took but the point is it was too long, and absolutely loving miserable
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Mar 26, 2024 19:07
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it would be funny if you were remembering a play of eminent domain instead
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Mar 26, 2024 19:11
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mikeycp posted:listen this was over a decade ago so i might be misremembering how long it took but the point is it was too long, and absolutely loving miserable We're all commiserating. Bad first experiences can sour a great game, any game.
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Mar 26, 2024 19:12
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Eclipse is great but you have to make sure take to food breaks
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Mar 26, 2024 19:18
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I don't know if I told this story in the thread or just in the discord, but I was a party to someone's terrible first game of Dominion recently. I do my gaming at a public meetup, and there's one guy who's super nice and tries to make newcomers welcome. He also has all of Dominion, sleeved. One week, some guy came in for the first time, and found his way to DominionFan's table. There followed a friendly interrogation about what sort of games the newbie liked, and how many he had played, at which point he said that he enjoyed Dominion. So after a quick trip to the car to bring up the several cases of Dominion, a kingdom was set up with several interesting cards from recent expansions and editions and we were off to the races. No real rules refresher, because the guy enjoyed Dominion right? You just do what it says on the card, it's a simple game really. And for the first few rounds, the new guy was holding his own, but after he tried to play 2 Smithies in a row, we gently reminded him about how you need to spend Actions to do that. Then after a few rounds, I noticed he wasn't buying anything so we reminded him you didn't need to spend Actions to play Treasures. Guess it turns out he really enjoyed playing Dominion in dorms at Uni, several years ago. At this point we were over half-way through the game and he didn't want to stop the game for a rules teach or start over with simpler cards. By the end I was leaning back in my chair to look at his hand and telling him which cards to play. Sorry, new player, we let you down. e: another rough game of Dominion was with a new player and another guy who only has the Base set and Plunder, the expansion with weird Duration cards that stay in play for weird times, weird Reaction cards that play themselves at weird times, and weird Treasures that just do weird things. Not a set for new players, I can tell you. Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 19:25
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Harold Fjord posted:Eclipse is great but you have to make sure take to food breaks Huh? I played a five player game of Eclipse 1E with three newbies in 2.5 hours including setup, breakdown and teach.
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Mar 26, 2024 19:28
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Jedit posted:Huh? I played a five player game of Eclipse 1E with three newbies in 2.5 hours including setup, breakdown and teach.
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Mar 26, 2024 19:32
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Harold Fjord posted:Eclipse is great but you have to make sure take to food breaks but there's stuff all over the table!
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Mar 26, 2024 21:30
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Mr. Squishy posted:I don't know if I told this story in the thread or just in the discord, but I was a party to someone's terrible first game of Dominion recently. I do my gaming at a public meetup, and there's one guy who's super nice and tries to make newcomers welcome. He also has all of Dominion, sleeved. One week, some guy came in for the first time, and found his way to DominionFan's table. There followed a friendly interrogation about what sort of games the newbie liked, and how many he had played, at which point he said that he enjoyed Dominion. So after a quick trip to the car to bring up the several cases of Dominion, a kingdom was set up with several interesting cards from recent expansions and editions and we were off to the races. No real rules refresher, because the guy enjoyed Dominion right? You just do what it says on the card, it's a simple game really. And for the first few rounds, the new guy was holding his own, but after he tried to play 2 Smithies in a row, we gently reminded him about how you need to spend Actions to do that. Then after a few rounds, I noticed he wasn't buying anything so we reminded him you didn't need to spend Actions to play Treasures. Guess it turns out he really enjoyed playing Dominion in dorms at Uni, several years ago. At this point we were over half-way through the game and he didn't want to stop the game for a rules teach or start over with simpler cards. By the end I was leaning back in my chair to look at his hand and telling him which cards to play. I don't like the thought of playing even one recent Dominion expansion that's new to somebody at the table without first doing some kind of walk-through. It seems unnecessarily unfair (I am not blaming your group, mind you). The last decade's expansions have been more game-bending and create more interactions that are not necessarily intuitive. Sideways cards aren't cards! You can get projects for the rest of the game but you never gain them! You can get cards that really are cards without ever gaining them! The player across from you is a card, who should be dealt with! I'm not sorry!
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Mar 26, 2024 22:14
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Oh, we were certainly committing board game crimes. I'd feel worse about it if it was my copy and my rules teach, but without that responsibility I just find it funny in retrospect. We did go through each card up top, but both times they didn't have rock-solid Dominion fundamentals to put that information on top of.
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Mar 26, 2024 22:43
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SithDrummer posted:Yeah, I haven't played either eclipse or TI, but I thought the general consensus was that TI is the game you set aside a day to play through. Ti can be played in around 8 hours with full player count just like dune 2019 doesn't take all day.
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Mar 27, 2024 06:25
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8 hours is all day.
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Mar 27, 2024 06:33
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last time i did ti4 it was 12 hours in 2 6 hour sessions over 2 weekends was great. love ti4
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Mar 27, 2024 06:35
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haddedam posted:Ti can be played in around 8 hours with full player count just like dune 2019 doesn't take all day. When I first taught my playgroup Dune, I did say, 'look, this game can go on a long time, but you gotta be careful, anyone can win from as early as turn two'. And we played a game, and it lasted maybe 5 hours? Everyone wanted to play again immediately, but they were concerned we might not get to finish because 'there's no way this game can take less than that'. And then I won on turn two.
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Mar 27, 2024 07:35
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My group regularly played TI3 in 3ish hours BUT we always used preset maps, everything was set up in advance (with factions allocated) and it took playing about three games to get there. So it is possible. That was with 5-6 people and bits from the two expansions. Two major factors that speed everything up other than setting up as much as possible before people arrive is 1) everyone being an experienced player and across the rules, especially for combat to go quick, 2) everyone beelining for objectives and game win conditions, which tends not to happen as much the first game or two. That said I eventually sold it because I realised having the same experienced consistent group meeting every weekend probably wasn’t going to happen again (people moved) and rather than invest in getting new people up to speed I’d rather play 2-3 other solid games instead in the same length session with way less prep required. I got sick of having to basically plan ahead for it. I do think whatever someone wants out of TI there is probably something tighter and more focussed that does that given thing better.
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Mar 27, 2024 10:18
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Bottom Liner posted:8 hours is all day. that’s half a day in world of warcraft time
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Mar 27, 2024 18:05
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Man I'd kill for a group willing to play ti
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Mar 27, 2024 18:17
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mikeycp posted:Man I'd kill for a group willing to play ti They were such a nice kid, we're not sure what caused them to snap, before the killing spree they were muttering about something called the Hacan.
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Mar 27, 2024 19:07
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Magnetic North posted:There has always been a weird bit of cross pollination between TI and Eclipse and it causes lots of consternation. They both have ships, dice-based combat, hex maps and space faring on a civilization level. But Eclipse is an economics game, while TI is a space opera political tech-tree game thing. Euro v American for lack of a better term. I own both and my desire to play either has plummeted to zero after playing Arcs. Will be selling both this year as they'll never leave the shelf again.
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Mar 27, 2024 20:51
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CitizenKeen posted:I own both and my desire to play either has plummeted to zero after playing Arcs. Will be selling both this year as they'll never leave the shelf again. Oh drat what is Arcs? Me and my buds play both Eclipse and TI. Eclipse is considered the euro, while TI is considered theatre.
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Mar 27, 2024 20:52
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CitizenKeen posted:I own both and my desire to play either has plummeted to zero after playing Arcs. Will be selling both this year as they'll never leave the shelf again. That is some high praise. I kinda lost track on Arcs late in development, so maybe I should look into it again.
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Mar 27, 2024 21:01
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So I recently grabbed a few new games and got them played (rare, I know). Few of my thoughts, but I won't go into detail on the mechanics themselves unless someone wants to. Forbidden Stars - a bit of a rarer OOP game, but someone was selling it cheaper than original MSRP so I snagged it the heck up. This game is super interesting, the orders mechanic is really quite juicy and leads to a pretty exciting bluffing game going on within the typical (3)4x gameplay. It certainly suffers from the "spend a whole day playing this game" issue at over 2 players, but this is not much different from Eclipse or TI, which my group is willing to play if the game is good. Combat itself is probably one of the best among the 4x I have played. Eclipse for me is always "Make the best glass cannon", TI is ok but nestled in a horrid slog. Voidfall combat is not even a thing - it's just a heavy euro calculation. This one strikes a pretty good balance between an initial dice roll that sort of shapes your strategy from there on. Really dig it. I've been eyeing up the community expansion stuff for some extra factions that look interesting, but haven't played the base 4 to death yet so in no rush to bloat things. My main draw is wanting the Imperial Guard - the faction I used to play when I had unlimited money and time for the wargame. Daybreak - From the designer of Pandemic, except here, people are the virus DUN DUN DUN. We played at 3 players, and I have since played 2 games solo and I really think it's good. It took some getting used to the free-form no-turns taking actions but it flowed surprisingly well. Really satisfying engine building with intersting decision making in terms of what cards you want to play versus what you want to give up to power your engines. One of our players was initially hit quite hard with AP finding it hard to give up ANYTHING but after 2-3 rounds they'd started to let go. I think this is a byproduct of EVERY card being quite good, so it can be hard to grok that you're meant to focus on 1 or 2 things at a time, and churn those engines hard until you need to focus elsewhere. We did win on the final round just, having the Majority World player (me) being the slowest at cutting emissions. I had spent a big chunk of the game building resilience in the world so they'd be more receptive to the plummetting climate before pivoting to sweeping regulations to switch to green energy. Part of this was due to being the faction that has the most growth in power demand every turn and that took some effort to slow and turn around. The game does a pretty fun cycle of feeling overwhelming until, like Spirit Island, you suddenly start to make headway and you feel like you cruise from there. Crucially it also ends the game once you're "winning climate change" so you skip the rote parts of playing things down after that, which is nice. Unsettled - A big box Kickstarter that I got in on during the second campaign finally arrived. I had played this previously so knew how it would go. It's a space-themed exploration co-op with a heavy leaning on comedic events and writing. It was good when I first played it, and having played 4 scenarios since it arriving, I am still pretty confident in it. It's definitely best at 1-2 players though. 3-4 is a bit more prone to quarterbacking as it can be VERY punishing for suboptimal playing, and if your group is not happy with a reset 30% of the time, I'd recommend sticking at 1-2 players (which is always 2 explorers). I think at the rate I am going through it, I will probably finish it up in about 6 months and flick it on. I don't think there'll be a massive replayability where it's worth a permanent keep. That being said, there is a LOT of content (9 planets, 4 scenarios on each) so I may have it for longer to get through it all. HEAT - Heavy Rain expansion. If you like HEAT, this expansion is more greatness. It adds two new major mechanics - chicanes and flooding. Both are really interesting and shake things up on the maps that use them. You can somewhat port things back to the older maps but it's less easy to do so. There is also a new engine part type that allows an alternative method of reducing heat from your discard pile instead of your hand, and that is substantial enough on it's own that it has a pretty big effect on all map types. Highly recommend, except it's a bit poo poo that it comes with only 1 car for an extra player. Interestingly though, the new maps have space for up to 12 on the starting line, so seemingly they're planning for a lot more expansions. I of course lost the poo poo out of this when we first played the Mexico map, having a chicane that had a +1 heat spend modifier at speed 2 followed by another speed 2 corner (modifier applies to both corners of the chicane) right before the back straight. I just couldn't get my hand to work for me, and ended up spinning out on the final turn and slipping from a comfortable 2nd down to 6th of 7. Brutal.
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Mar 27, 2024 21:02
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CitizenKeen posted:I own both and my desire to play either has plummeted to zero after playing Arcs. Will be selling both this year as they'll never leave the shelf again. How's the one-off vs campaign play developed? Can you jump in to a fully realized asymmetrical setup without playing the base game(s)?
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Mar 27, 2024 21:05
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Spiteski posted:... Is this out in the US yet? I haven't found it in stock anywhere, although it's available for pre-order on a bunch of sites (with an estimated delivery date of yesterday).
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Mar 27, 2024 21:13
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Not sure about the US, but it's available in the UK, which is where I got it shipped to New Zealand from.
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Mar 27, 2024 21:21
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Magnetic North posted:That is some high praise. I kinda lost track on Arcs late in development, so maybe I should look into it again. The game is estimated to be shipping for crowdfunding backers in May/June. Finalized rules are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f7rznbgyt6xvya7/AAAi0y7YJKznEOb2zVB0hQIVa/Rules?dl=0 You can play on TTS with this workshop https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037846252 Someone also made a Tabletop Playground package here: https://mod.io/g/tabletopplayground/m/arcs1 I’ve only played the non-campaign game at two players so far but it was fun and much faster turn structure compared to Root or Oath. This is the only Leder game that I enjoyed with 2p as well. Bottom Liner posted:How's the one-off vs campaign play developed? Can you jump in to a fully realized asymmetrical setup without playing the base game(s)? You can but it’s highly recommended that you play at least once with the base rules (with the leaders and lore pack for light asymmetrical setup if your group is comfortable with medium complexity from the beginning). The campaign rules are about 60% of the total rules volume so without some familiarity with the base game, a campaign session will take forever. Pockyless fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Mar 27, 2024 |
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Mar 27, 2024 22:00
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So the external pitch for Arcs is "Leder and Wehrle in SPAAAAAAAAAACE" The internal pitch (the pitch from the team) is "Luke Skywalker didn't blow up the Death Star because the Rebels researched +1 Attack". I think it nails both those goals. It lets you play a huge sweeping space opera game with guilds and factions. It has fleets of ships, some of which have special powers and weird technologies. You build cities and space ports and you fight tooth and nail over valuable planets. You encounter weird aliens and strange powers. You build super stations and jump gates and arrays of cosmic powers. Diplomats and spies war in secret over powerful laws. Religion and ancient artifacts and planet breakers all twist the game in weird ways. And it does it all of this in a playable amount of time, and with a reasonable teach, and in doing so you feel like you're focused on the people of the universe and not the tableau of cards. How? Because you're unlikely to encounter all of this in one game. There are two versions of the game, but they both involve the asymmetric unlocking of cool stuff. All the cool stuff is available when you open the box, but only some of it will be present in any given game (but that which is present will be at the forefront). The game has touchstones in Dune and Star Wars and Foundation and Star Wars and Star Trek and so forth, just like all good space operas. But it also recognizes that those IPs aren't about "all the things", so each game you play is about some of the things - Dune isn't about dog-fighting space ships, and Halo isn't about dynastic legacies and politics. So if your game ends up involving a powerful Theocracy, ancient gene-crafters, and a crack squad of elite spies, then that's what your game is about, and not about psionic ghosts or a promethean doomsday weapon or a brutal capitalist oligarchy. The trick-taking (trick-taking adjacent?) core mechanic for action taking feels like a knife-fight in a phone booth, and really forces immediate engagement with your opponents. If you draw 3 Aggression cards in your opening hand, you have two choices: be Aggressive or inefficient. Your choice. The game feels like the promise of Oath fulfilled (though I'm still glad I own Oath). And it's illustrated by Ferrin, so a big plus in my book. There are three versions of the game:
Can't wait for physical copy to arrive. This is how I'm spending my birthday. (I know Tom of SUSD is working on a review right now, so that'll be up soon.)
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Mar 27, 2024 22:41
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Even as a massive Cole fan, I got burnt too hard by Oath and didn't back Arcs. Keen to see some real long term impressions and there will no doubt be second Kickstarter in the Leder style.
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Mar 28, 2024 01:48
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Will the retail version have the wood pieces?
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Mar 28, 2024 02:21
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Bottom Liner posted:Will the retail version have the wood pieces? Yeah. The plastic molds are the add-on.
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Mar 28, 2024 02:27
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I loving hated Dominion my first game, but I was going up against extremely experienced players. Dragged my feet on playing it again but glad I gave it another go.
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Mar 28, 2024 10:38
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I still don't really like Dominion, it's interesting for historical reasons but I feel that other games have done deckbuilding better by now. I'll play it, but I've never loved it like I do a lot of other games.
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Mar 28, 2024 11:21
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No game has yet to do deckbuilding better.
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Mar 28, 2024 13:43
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Mr. Squishy posted:No game has yet to do deckbuilding better. Hell, no game has yet to do deckbuilding as well. Every twist someone tries to add detracts.
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Mar 28, 2024 13:50
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Which is not to say no game has done it in a way that's more to someone's taste, of course. Maybe you like market rows, or the theme of dungeon diving, etc. But yeah, for pure deck builders it's still the best.
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Mar 28, 2024 13:52
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The theme is garbage though.
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Mar 28, 2024 14:26
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The old AndroiDominion app (which was minimalist game with Expansions through... Guilds?) ruined Dominion for me. The AI was sufficient that I had to think, and I could play a full game in about five minutes. Every time since I've tried playing with other human beings it feels criminally slow.
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Mar 28, 2024 14:30
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There is a new Dominion app. The AI is insanely good (outside of occasional quirks). The expansions are expensive so I just play the free daily game each day and talk about it with some other buddies.
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Mar 28, 2024 14:48
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