But you could center an entire campaign on trying to untangle Roman mythology. Detectives for the gods themselves, trying to figure out the entire list of girls that Zeus has knocked up.
You have (probably accidentally) hit the nail on the head. Roman mythology is not synonymous with Greek mythology. It fits in a lot of the Latins and the Etruscans, and in the expansion into Greece adopted some of the Greek traditions (much like it did in the expansions in Gaul or Egypt as well).
I'm actually quite a fan of both. Lumping them together is doing a disservice to awesome things like the Dionysian mystery cults and the Roman vestal virgins.
In my last Pathfinder game, hereditary lycanthropy was a mark of the nobility, said to be inherited directly from Romulus and Remus. So, of course, any family that wanted to "discover" their noble birth needed to get their line infected. One plot point was when an unfavored son, relegated to the PC's backwater village, undergoes the change and flips out in happiness because this means he's a real man of the house.
Of course, in my game, any magic user who refused to serve three years in the Legionnaire was considered a heretic and put to death. And the paladin sheriff running the town was a former Legionnaire commander.
So, yeah, Roman flavored empires in decline are awesome for games.
There's Agon which is about bigging it up hero style and outdoing your companions in deeds that will resound in the halls of Olympus and get Homer singing about you.
There's also Mazes and Minotaurs, an expansive nod and clever mickey take on early D&D where the 70's Ur-gamers were all about sandals and bronze rather than medieval trappings. It's pretty good and it's free.
Pony, you have experience with Dread, let me ask you - how do you usually go about making questionnaires for a game?
I started by thinking of some archtypes and filling in questions from there and have come up with three characters - a Soldier, a Journalist, an Ex-Con, but I'm stuck thinking of two or three more archetypes for my game. Is there a different approach I should take?
Pony, you have experience with Dread, let me ask you - how do you usually go about making questionnaires for a game?
I started by thinking of some archtypes and filling in questions from there and have come up with three characters - a Soldier, a Journalist, an Ex-Con, but I'm stuck thinking of two or three more archetypes for my game. Is there a different approach I should take?
this is for the Venus one, yeah?
Yeah.
Like I said, I'm basing a bit on the Ray Bradbury story "The Day It Rained Forever". Venus has been terraformed so it's livable, but outside of climate-controlled domes where people live it's wild jungle and it rains all. the. time..
The players will be on a shuttle traveling from one dome to another when it is struck by lightning and it crash lands. They will have to trek on foot to the nearest dome, but the idea is that they will come across another dome that isn't on any known charts...
Pony, you have experience with Dread, let me ask you - how do you usually go about making questionnaires for a game?
I started by thinking of some archtypes and filling in questions from there and have come up with three characters - a Soldier, a Journalist, an Ex-Con, but I'm stuck thinking of two or three more archetypes for my game. Is there a different approach I should take?
this is for the Venus one, yeah?
Yeah.
Like I said, I'm basing a bit on the Ray Bradbury story "The Day It Rained Forever". Venus has been terraformed so it's livable, but outside of climate-controlled domes where people live it's wild jungle and it rains all. the. time..
The players will be on a shuttle traveling from one dome to another when it is struck by lightning and it crash lands. They will have to trek on foot to the nearest dome, but the idea is that they will come across another dome that isn't on any known charts...
Some other archetype ideas:
The Researcher - Venus has all kinds of unique flora as a result of the terraforming process. Someone would want to research it, that shit's cray!
The Bureaucrat - Presumably, in the spacefuture, there's still bureaucrats who push paper (or its digital equivalent), whether they're corporate or government or some weird grey area that's both
The Celebrity - They were on their way to make some kind of special appearance at a dome on Venus when the shuttle crashed, they could be a musician or actor or whatever, let the player decide on the questionnaire
The Engineer - This dude is a blue collar guy who just works on machines on Venus. He maintains domes and filtration tech and stuff like that. Dude might've just been commuting.
The Runaway - A young character who is fucking off from Earth for one reason or another (let the player decide on the questionnaire). They were hoping Venus was going to be their escape from their Earthly problems.
those are just off the top of my head. Remember that in Dread characters don't have to be "useful". Don't think in conventional RPG terms of "skills" and "abilities" and usefulness to the campaign because none of those things exist in Dread. Characters exist to be roleplayed, they exist for the story, so sometimes your character isn't Hudson or Ripley from Aliens, they're fuckin' Burke. The useless, shitty corporate sleaze who almost gets everybody fucking killed by being a short-sighted greedy asshole. In other games, that's campaign poison, but Dread isn't built for campaigns, it's built for one-shot stories, so it doesn't matter. Sometimes the character who looks on paper to be the useless teenager or the whiny pop idol can prove to be the real hero in the end, because nobody has any stats and that shit doesn't matter. It's what makes sense for the story, that's what matters.
Right, that's a good point, Pony. I was thinking a little too hard about making sure people had useful skills to contribute, instead of just an interesting character to contribute.
All you creative people are making the things I've come up with in the past seem really dull
Oh man do you have any idea how long I've been sitting on my game idea not working on it? Months and months, completely ridiculous. But once you start the gears turning and putting stuff down on paper (or in word processor, whatever, don't play semantics with me) then stuff just flows.
I mean I hit a sticking point after working on it, hence my asking Pony for advice, but I had several hours of pure workflow before that.
All you creative people are making the things I've come up with in the past seem really dull
Oh man do you have any idea how long I've been sitting on my game idea not working on it? Months and months, completely ridiculous. But once you start the gears turning and putting stuff down on paper (or in word processor, whatever, don't play semantics with me) then stuff just flows.
I mean I hit a sticking point after working on it, hence my asking Pony for advice, but I had several hours of pure workflow before that.
Same. I literally thought up that Roland adventure as I was reading Dread, like, years ago. That's part of why big chunks of it don't fit with the Dread mechanics, because I've been hammering at it ever since.
But thinking it out, I think using the Ghost as a ticking clock/death mechanism, and having Van Owen and the PCs be the "real" monsters (in that he just doesn't want to let the players find him, and is willing to kill whomever gets close, and in that the players are out for blood, and off on a witch hunt), is the right call. Something like
Act 1: Players establish relationships, someone turns up dead, Roland's "demands" are sussed out (blood on the walls, ominous visions, that kinda thing)
Act 2: Finding who in the town is guilty, who knows whose backstory, piecing together who Van Owen is
Act 3: Finding and offering up Van Owen, and testing how far the players are willing to go to get him to say "I beg for death."
On another note, we played Pandemic at the local game shop for the first time (shout-out to Redcap's Corner in Philly, which opened up a new store in our neck of the woods last week)--super fun game!
We lost, bad. Not super bad--we cured all four diseases, but ran out of cards before eradicating them. We were kind of up the river from the moment we drew three Epidemic cards in as many turns. But it was super fun, and I think I might pick it up down the road.
it's quite hard, but it can be really nice to play co-operative games where everyone comes together and the planning really kicks in
It's not the most tactically in depth game but it's exciting to play and also doesn't take too long, which is cool
Yeah, we figured out the rules, developed a good handle on both the flow of things as well as some basic points of strategy, and ran through the game itself all in the span of an hour, maybe 90 minutes.
And I love Co-Op games, they're some of my favorites!
There's Agon which is about bigging it up hero style and outdoing your companions in deeds that will resound in the halls of Olympus and get Homer singing about you.
There's also Mazes and Minotaurs, an expansive nod and clever mickey take on early D&D where the 70's Ur-gamers were all about sandals and bronze rather than medieval trappings. It's pretty good and it's free.
Agon looks fascinating, but not for what I'm doing. I kind of dig the idea of a competitive RPG just in general, and this is the best iteration of that I've ever seen I think. Unfortunately, it looks less fit for political intrigue and dramatic tragedies, which is probably more my general direction.
Mazes and Minotaurs, while shockingly well put together, is too reminiscent of D&D for me. Like, fuckin' old school D&D too, with the gender restrictions and the characters who have a race as their class. I'm not huge into class based stuff in general though, and this makes it all the worse.
There's Agon which is about bigging it up hero style and outdoing your companions in deeds that will resound in the halls of Olympus and get Homer singing about you.
There's also Mazes and Minotaurs, an expansive nod and clever mickey take on early D&D where the 70's Ur-gamers were all about sandals and bronze rather than medieval trappings. It's pretty good and it's free.
Agon looks fascinating, but not for what I'm doing. I kind of dig the idea of a competitive RPG just in general, and this is the best iteration of that I've ever seen I think. Unfortunately, it looks less fit for political intrigue and dramatic tragedies, which is probably more my general direction.
Mazes and Minotaurs, while shockingly well put together, is too reminiscent of D&D for me. Like, fuckin' old school D&D too, with the gender restrictions and the characters who have a race as their class. I'm not huge into class based stuff in general though, and this makes it all the worse.
I'm reading more Agon stuff and just getting progressively more fascinated by this game though. I'm considering just totally switching focuses and going for that instead.
It seems like it would be pretty good for one shots too, which might be a good way to rope in some of my less nerdy friends.
This is now the third time this has happened in this thread.
I feel pandemic should be clearer in the rules at this stage.
I know the source of the confusion--it specifies that infections can occur after a disease can be cured, but not after a disease can be eradicated, early in the rules, which indicates that you have to eradicate a disease to stop the Infection phase, which indicates that only eradication ensures the game can really be won.
All you creative people are making the things I've come up with in the past seem really dull
Oh man do you have any idea how long I've been sitting on my game idea not working on it? Months and months, completely ridiculous. But once you start the gears turning and putting stuff down on paper (or in word processor, whatever, don't play semantics with me) then stuff just flows.
I mean I hit a sticking point after working on it, hence my asking Pony for advice, but I had several hours of pure workflow before that.
Same. I literally thought up that Roland adventure as I was reading Dread, like, years ago. That's part of why big chunks of it don't fit with the Dread mechanics, because I've been hammering at it ever since.
But thinking it out, I think using the Ghost as a ticking clock/death mechanism, and having Van Owen and the PCs be the "real" monsters (in that he just doesn't want to let the players find him, and is willing to kill whomever gets close, and in that the players are out for blood, and off on a witch hunt), is the right call. Something like
Act 1: Players establish relationships, someone turns up dead, Roland's "demands" are sussed out (blood on the walls, ominous visions, that kinda thing)
Act 2: Finding who in the town is guilty, who knows whose backstory, piecing together who Van Owen is
Act 3: Finding and offering up Van Owen, and testing how far the players are willing to go to get him to say "I beg for death."
Yeah... yeah, that'll do nicely.
I still think you have to make sure that the final scene is in a bar in Mombasa. Though having his body ragdoll to Johannesburg from Kenya is a bit of a stretch.
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simonwolfi can feel a differencetoday, a differenceRegistered Userregular
After a series of delays and miscommunications and frustrations, this week I'll hopefully be having a chargen/town building session with my new World of Dew crew. It might end up being five players, though, which is more than I've ever handled before as a GM.
Also, Tragedy Looper gets its official English release in a few days, and I am incredibly hyped up for it, since everything I've played by the designers has been really well done.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Or Seafall. Preferably Seafall. Starting from square 1 with the idea of "game evolves as you play it" fills me with all manner of feelings that I had previously only read about in Jane Austin novels
And potentially, some of the guys from work said they would be down to doing a weekly night for a legacy game (although nobody was super enthused about Risk Legacy)
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
I've been trying to temper my excitement for new board games because there's still all these existing ones I've never played!
I think I really want to get Archipelago next. I've got enough 4 player games already so I'd like to pick up some more mid-length games for >4 players.
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SwissLionWe are beside ourselves!Registered Userregular
edited September 2014
Archipelago's all fucked up.
It's rad though!
My only advice would be to decide beforehand if you want to include the Sympathiser and maybe even Pacifist roles right at the start, or if you want a slightly more standard version of the co-ompetitive clustersnuggle that any game of Archipelago ends up as.
For your first game I'd say leave them out. Our first game, it became immediately apparent that one of our players had drawn the sympathiser and it became less about the interesting interlocking systems and more about countering his blatant worker overproducing every turn.
Since then we've left him out and the games have been a lot more satisfying.
Edit: The sympathiser card, I mean, not the player. He has gone on to great success as an antagonistic pineapple baron.
All you creative people are making the things I've come up with in the past seem really dull
Oh man do you have any idea how long I've been sitting on my game idea not working on it? Months and months, completely ridiculous. But once you start the gears turning and putting stuff down on paper (or in word processor, whatever, don't play semantics with me) then stuff just flows.
I mean I hit a sticking point after working on it, hence my asking Pony for advice, but I had several hours of pure workflow before that.
Same. I literally thought up that Roland adventure as I was reading Dread, like, years ago. That's part of why big chunks of it don't fit with the Dread mechanics, because I've been hammering at it ever since.
But thinking it out, I think using the Ghost as a ticking clock/death mechanism, and having Van Owen and the PCs be the "real" monsters (in that he just doesn't want to let the players find him, and is willing to kill whomever gets close, and in that the players are out for blood, and off on a witch hunt), is the right call. Something like
Act 1: Players establish relationships, someone turns up dead, Roland's "demands" are sussed out (blood on the walls, ominous visions, that kinda thing)
Act 2: Finding who in the town is guilty, who knows whose backstory, piecing together who Van Owen is
Act 3: Finding and offering up Van Owen, and testing how far the players are willing to go to get him to say "I beg for death."
Yeah... yeah, that'll do nicely.
I still think you have to make sure that the final scene is in a bar in Mombasa. Though having his body ragdoll to Johannesburg from Kenya is a bit of a stretch.
Oh, without a doubt. Maybe make that his final condition, i.e., "you want me to beg for death, take me to this bar...
After all, I have to see my daughter one last time."
So tonight I swung by the tournament at the con for infinity again, but since it is sunday night and things are winding down I was the only entrant! And basically as a reward for my continual interest and talking with people there he gave me the first place prize, a model for Cassandra Kusanagi and $10 for the dealer room.
I feel like I should use the $10 to grab something infinity related but I have no idea what I should get.
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SwissLionWe are beside ourselves!Registered Userregular
Well for one, the themes it presents are pretty messed up!
You've probably seen the SUSD episode about it, where they bring up the fact that this pretty horrific period in history is boiled down to a black meeple chasing a white meeple, they're also correct in that it's occasionally thought provoking but some people have had more trouble coming to terms with the thematic elements than others.
Also, though the implementation is usually pretty elegant and enjoyable, it's pretty damn complex and stressful at times. From what I understand that probably won't scare you off but I usually assume my group of people is a bit more willing to deep-dive on this kind of stuff than most. Every one of our group is excited for the next time we play 1830, for example, which is the kind of game you would explain to people if you were trying to scare them away from board games.
I'm sure you'll dig Archipelago though, and it really is great for medium-big groups. A full 5 player game is quite the experience.
Okay yeah that's what I figured you meant, but I just wanted to be sure. I've seen the SUSD video so yeah, I'm aware of the... Distasteful topic.
It's one weird thing that some board games seem to have. I remember Kemet has a rather poor choice for the colour of one of the upgrade types. I think it's White for the ones that mostly involve slavery.
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SwissLionWe are beside ourselves!Registered Userregular
At the very least, the cards that are usually most beneficial (for the group as a whole, at least, not necessarily as individuals) are things like Education. Which at least sends a nice message, while not terribly historically accurate.
I've so far just seen the game as a nice opportunity to create an alternate-history utopia with thriving, intellectually vibrant, pineapple-based port cities. It's just a tonne of funne to uncover and build these custom little island chains. The art's just really beautiful. Every time we play I just want to steal all the hexes from my friend and use them to build a whole awesome continent.
I was always obsessed with maps as a kid, and would always be drawing and detailing my own little islands and worlds, so if this game had been around I would have lost my shit.
Yeah I was a little sad when the SUSD let's play video the other week only ended up with a handful of hexes being explored when they had this big stack of them left unused. It looks so cool I'd just hate to not have a fully explored map!
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SwissLionWe are beside ourselves!Registered Userregular
Yeah I was a little sad when the SUSD let's play video the other week only ended up with a handful of hexes being explored when they had this big stack of them left unused. It looks so cool I'd just hate to not have a fully explored map!
If you're gonna do a serious game, that is one impulse that, take it from me, you're going to have to control at least to some extent. Exploring is fun, and gets you neat tokens which you can use as wild card resources, or can sometimes contribute to win conditions.
But it'll also flood the market with a lot of workers that usually will be hard to find places for, and will eventually lead to unrest, especially if the tile you uncover and have to place is the mountain tile with one ore and a whole bunch of huts.
Much to my teammate-opponents' chagrin, my corner of the Archipelgo has so far been easily the most explored but least populated. It's really interesting how everyone can establish a different, but more or less equally successful balance between workers as a resource and workers as a ticking timebomb of crisis-based unrest.
I generally prefer a smaller, more efficient and picky workforce. Generally involves a lot of towns used to maintain control of a few high-value areas, whereas others will focus on huge swathes of workers harvesting resources to put towards VCs or crises or the markets, with churches to maintain order.
Man... I really just want to play Archipelago now...
My Shadowrun group started our second campaign on Sunday. So far, there has been a mysterious envelope stapled to my dwarf Shaman's door containing 3 pictures, one of a clearing in the Tacoma woods, one of an elaborate silver pocket watch, and a third of a silver ankh, that when held up to moonlight revealed some Germanic runes detailing some type of summoning ritual. On our way to research the runes, we were being tailed by 6 motorcycle gangers on the freeway. They started to get aggressive, so we brake checked them, killing two outright, knocking another two off their bikes. The remaining two got sliced up after our 8ft troll Street Samurai kicked open the back doors of our armored van, and I cast Levitate on the troll and moved him into position to chop them up good. In one super lucky swing, he took off the first guy's head and cut open the chest of the other. Then, after picking up some supplies, we headed to the home of the guy who sent the envelope to my character, where we found him in his living room, missing a large portion of his torso, and on the body, we found the ankh and pocketwatch from the pictures. In his basement lab, we found some interesting notes and got the hell out, and that is where we ended the session.
Posts
I'm actually quite a fan of both. Lumping them together is doing a disservice to awesome things like the Dionysian mystery cults and the Roman vestal virgins.
In my last Pathfinder game, hereditary lycanthropy was a mark of the nobility, said to be inherited directly from Romulus and Remus. So, of course, any family that wanted to "discover" their noble birth needed to get their line infected. One plot point was when an unfavored son, relegated to the PC's backwater village, undergoes the change and flips out in happiness because this means he's a real man of the house.
Of course, in my game, any magic user who refused to serve three years in the Legionnaire was considered a heretic and put to death. And the paladin sheriff running the town was a former Legionnaire commander.
So, yeah, Roman flavored empires in decline are awesome for games.
Lions of Al'Rassan or Sailing to Sarantium in particular.
Agon
There's also Mazes and Minotaurs, an expansive nod and clever mickey take on early D&D where the 70's Ur-gamers were all about sandals and bronze rather than medieval trappings. It's pretty good and it's free.
Mazes and Minotaurs
this is for the Venus one, yeah?
Yeah.
Like I said, I'm basing a bit on the Ray Bradbury story "The Day It Rained Forever". Venus has been terraformed so it's livable, but outside of climate-controlled domes where people live it's wild jungle and it rains all. the. time..
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Some other archetype ideas:
The Researcher - Venus has all kinds of unique flora as a result of the terraforming process. Someone would want to research it, that shit's cray!
The Bureaucrat - Presumably, in the spacefuture, there's still bureaucrats who push paper (or its digital equivalent), whether they're corporate or government or some weird grey area that's both
The Celebrity - They were on their way to make some kind of special appearance at a dome on Venus when the shuttle crashed, they could be a musician or actor or whatever, let the player decide on the questionnaire
The Engineer - This dude is a blue collar guy who just works on machines on Venus. He maintains domes and filtration tech and stuff like that. Dude might've just been commuting.
The Runaway - A young character who is fucking off from Earth for one reason or another (let the player decide on the questionnaire). They were hoping Venus was going to be their escape from their Earthly problems.
those are just off the top of my head. Remember that in Dread characters don't have to be "useful". Don't think in conventional RPG terms of "skills" and "abilities" and usefulness to the campaign because none of those things exist in Dread. Characters exist to be roleplayed, they exist for the story, so sometimes your character isn't Hudson or Ripley from Aliens, they're fuckin' Burke. The useless, shitty corporate sleaze who almost gets everybody fucking killed by being a short-sighted greedy asshole. In other games, that's campaign poison, but Dread isn't built for campaigns, it's built for one-shot stories, so it doesn't matter. Sometimes the character who looks on paper to be the useless teenager or the whiny pop idol can prove to be the real hero in the end, because nobody has any stats and that shit doesn't matter. It's what makes sense for the story, that's what matters.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Step your game up, nerd!
Oh man do you have any idea how long I've been sitting on my game idea not working on it? Months and months, completely ridiculous. But once you start the gears turning and putting stuff down on paper (or in word processor, whatever, don't play semantics with me) then stuff just flows.
I mean I hit a sticking point after working on it, hence my asking Pony for advice, but I had several hours of pure workflow before that.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Same. I literally thought up that Roland adventure as I was reading Dread, like, years ago. That's part of why big chunks of it don't fit with the Dread mechanics, because I've been hammering at it ever since.
But thinking it out, I think using the Ghost as a ticking clock/death mechanism, and having Van Owen and the PCs be the "real" monsters (in that he just doesn't want to let the players find him, and is willing to kill whomever gets close, and in that the players are out for blood, and off on a witch hunt), is the right call. Something like
Act 1: Players establish relationships, someone turns up dead, Roland's "demands" are sussed out (blood on the walls, ominous visions, that kinda thing)
Act 2: Finding who in the town is guilty, who knows whose backstory, piecing together who Van Owen is
Act 3: Finding and offering up Van Owen, and testing how far the players are willing to go to get him to say "I beg for death."
Yeah... yeah, that'll do nicely.
We lost, bad. Not super bad--we cured all four diseases, but ran out of cards before eradicating them. We were kind of up the river from the moment we drew three Epidemic cards in as many turns. But it was super fun, and I think I might pick it up down the road.
it's quite hard, but it can be really nice to play co-operative games where everyone comes together and the planning really kicks in
It's not the most tactically in depth game but it's exciting to play and also doesn't take too long, which is cool
Yeah, we figured out the rules, developed a good handle on both the flow of things as well as some basic points of strategy, and ran through the game itself all in the span of an hour, maybe 90 minutes.
And I love Co-Op games, they're some of my favorites!
so now we play quite a bit of Pandemic for that reason
Have you tried Eldritch yet? It really improves on the Arkham model.
Agon looks fascinating, but not for what I'm doing. I kind of dig the idea of a competitive RPG just in general, and this is the best iteration of that I've ever seen I think. Unfortunately, it looks less fit for political intrigue and dramatic tragedies, which is probably more my general direction.
Mazes and Minotaurs, while shockingly well put together, is too reminiscent of D&D for me. Like, fuckin' old school D&D too, with the gender restrictions and the characters who have a race as their class. I'm not huge into class based stuff in general though, and this makes it all the worse.
I'm reading more Agon stuff and just getting progressively more fascinated by this game though. I'm considering just totally switching focuses and going for that instead.
It seems like it would be pretty good for one shots too, which might be a good way to rope in some of my less nerdy friends.
In non co-op news. Birthday gifted myself Cutthroat Caverns and Citadels.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
Oh, I thought you had to remove them from the board after curing them! Hooray, we won!
I feel pandemic should be clearer in the rules at this stage.
Satans..... hints.....
I know the source of the confusion--it specifies that infections can occur after a disease can be cured, but not after a disease can be eradicated, early in the rules, which indicates that you have to eradicate a disease to stop the Infection phase, which indicates that only eradication ensures the game can really be won.
I think.
I still think you have to make sure that the final scene is in a bar in Mombasa. Though having his body ragdoll to Johannesburg from Kenya is a bit of a stretch.
Also, Tragedy Looper gets its official English release in a few days, and I am incredibly hyped up for it, since everything I've played by the designers has been really well done.
And potentially, some of the guys from work said they would be down to doing a weekly night for a legacy game (although nobody was super enthused about Risk Legacy)
Satans..... hints.....
I think I really want to get Archipelago next. I've got enough 4 player games already so I'd like to pick up some more mid-length games for >4 players.
It's rad though!
My only advice would be to decide beforehand if you want to include the Sympathiser and maybe even Pacifist roles right at the start, or if you want a slightly more standard version of the co-ompetitive clustersnuggle that any game of Archipelago ends up as.
For your first game I'd say leave them out. Our first game, it became immediately apparent that one of our players had drawn the sympathiser and it became less about the interesting interlocking systems and more about countering his blatant worker overproducing every turn.
Since then we've left him out and the games have been a lot more satisfying.
Edit: The sympathiser card, I mean, not the player. He has gone on to great success as an antagonistic pineapple baron.
Oh, without a doubt. Maybe make that his final condition, i.e., "you want me to beg for death, take me to this bar...
Just really twist the screws on the PCs.
I feel like I should use the $10 to grab something infinity related but I have no idea what I should get.
Well for one, the themes it presents are pretty messed up!
You've probably seen the SUSD episode about it, where they bring up the fact that this pretty horrific period in history is boiled down to a black meeple chasing a white meeple, they're also correct in that it's occasionally thought provoking but some people have had more trouble coming to terms with the thematic elements than others.
Also, though the implementation is usually pretty elegant and enjoyable, it's pretty damn complex and stressful at times. From what I understand that probably won't scare you off but I usually assume my group of people is a bit more willing to deep-dive on this kind of stuff than most. Every one of our group is excited for the next time we play 1830, for example, which is the kind of game you would explain to people if you were trying to scare them away from board games.
I'm sure you'll dig Archipelago though, and it really is great for medium-big groups. A full 5 player game is quite the experience.
It's one weird thing that some board games seem to have. I remember Kemet has a rather poor choice for the colour of one of the upgrade types. I think it's White for the ones that mostly involve slavery.
I've so far just seen the game as a nice opportunity to create an alternate-history utopia with thriving, intellectually vibrant, pineapple-based port cities. It's just a tonne of funne to uncover and build these custom little island chains. The art's just really beautiful. Every time we play I just want to steal all the hexes from my friend and use them to build a whole awesome continent.
I was always obsessed with maps as a kid, and would always be drawing and detailing my own little islands and worlds, so if this game had been around I would have lost my shit.
If you're gonna do a serious game, that is one impulse that, take it from me, you're going to have to control at least to some extent. Exploring is fun, and gets you neat tokens which you can use as wild card resources, or can sometimes contribute to win conditions.
But it'll also flood the market with a lot of workers that usually will be hard to find places for, and will eventually lead to unrest, especially if the tile you uncover and have to place is the mountain tile with one ore and a whole bunch of huts.
Much to my teammate-opponents' chagrin, my corner of the Archipelgo has so far been easily the most explored but least populated. It's really interesting how everyone can establish a different, but more or less equally successful balance between workers as a resource and workers as a ticking timebomb of crisis-based unrest.
I generally prefer a smaller, more efficient and picky workforce. Generally involves a lot of towns used to maintain control of a few high-value areas, whereas others will focus on huge swathes of workers harvesting resources to put towards VCs or crises or the markets, with churches to maintain order.
Man... I really just want to play Archipelago now...