This game seems to be popping up a bit amongst video game circles the same way Gwent did.
I thought Gwent was pretty boring and struck me as just people who only know how to play Uno and Poker being like 'omg this card game Gwent is amazing!!' Is it the same deal with Orlog or is there more there, there?
Gwent was the worst part of an already boring game.
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
edited November 2020
Gwent was absolutely fine. It's not an exceptional game, but there are far worse games built into games.
I've no idea about Orlog, but I certainly have doubts that it breaks the mold. The rules are pretty straightforward, and it sure is a 2-player dice game so ...
(Basically how much do you like King of Tokyo when there are only two players left? This is what Orlog seems to roughly equate to.)
We just started the prologue of Pandemic Season 0. I must say that curing a disease in the regular game seems a bit more fulfilling than building a van. Then again if I was Fred from Scooby Doo, having a Soviet Mystery Machine would be pretty badass.
NNID = Zepp914
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Oh God, King's Dilemma is back in stock at my local store...
Sorry haven't been in this thread for at least a year. Things changed and we stopped playing board games every week. I'm sad
Anyways, anyone played the Friday the 13th board game? Just saw it tonight, love the Friday the 13th series, and see it's relatively new. Anyone heard any feedback on it or played it?
Looks really ugly. They couldn't go with any other colors than red and brown?
Besides the teeny tiny counselor portraits, I'm not seeing one bit of artwork. The whole thing is giving off vibes of that really awful and soulless Die Hard game from a couple years ago.
Hmmm I didn't look to close at it. My GF showed me it from amazon, saw it ws relatively new, and thought I'd ask here first. Does it really look that cheap? Are there any sites that do reviews of board games that is trusted here? I love F13, and was really hoping someone here had played it and had an opinion on it.
Last night the wife and I finished Harry Potter: Battle of Hogwarts. We've owned it for about 2 years now and just got around to finishing year 7 and defeating Voldemort once and for all.
My thoughts on the game: Battle of Hogwarts is a deckbuilder but it's simplistic and in my opinion not as interesting as other deck builders I've played like dominion. You must buy cards from a random selection and there's no way to clear out the junk cards that appear and focus on the cards that you really want so your deck is basically going to end up as a collection of good cards. The cooperative part of the game helps with that as you can split up the cards so that they go towards the player that can use them best but it's not foolproof. The difficulty is somewhat random as it depends on what villains are currently active and the weak villains from year 1 are mixed in with the more deadly villains from the later years so our go-to strategy was to kill villains until we got an easy combination and then stalling as long as we could while powering up our decks.
The art is from the movie series and quite good, the real fun of this game was brought out by the theme and we enjoyed watching Hermione demolish villains in a flurry of spell casting but if the theme doesn't excite you then I'm not sure I'd recommend Battle of Hogwarts. It's a bit of a shame as I liked the idea of a cooperative deck builder and I feel like there's a good game in here with some rules tweaks.
I really fell in love with the game and I do not care for Harry Potter anything at all. The random but section can cause problems if it gets clogged with junk, but I don't remember that happening too often. I might be looking at it through rose tinted glasses as I haven't played the base game in a very long time. I know the expansion introduces a rule of clearing the market once a game if you don't buy anything from it. It helps clean up the dead areas a bit, and the somewhat l as than perfect cards.
The first expansion does introduce a mechanic that lets you thin your deck. It also introduces cards to just crap up your deck that have to be removed which makes the random card selection a lot more painful at times. If you super weren't feeling it then I can't say it is worth it, but if you feel it is just a few tweaks away then I would look at what the first expansion introduced to see if it solves your problems largely.
I still need to get the second expansion. Probably a Christmas gift for my beloved spouse this year. We loved the game enough to get the Toy Story version as well so another expansion seems super exciting to us. Random elements of the game don't bother us as much, and we love cooperative games so that might be the difference. I haven't found another coop deck builder that our group has really fallen in love with. (We have tried Aeon's End and Dragonfire to little success).
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
My partner and I played through most of HP:BoH as well. I had a few big problems with it:
Your starter decks never change - this is one part boring and one part card wear problem. The game is constantly adding new cards and how much use they get is completely random, but your 10-card starter deck is going to get worn down pretty quickly. You could try and sleeve everything, but I don't think the box is really designed for it, and also that's a shitload of sleeves.
The game manages to get worse the further you play it - no spoilers here, but this is a weird one. Effectively the game was the most fun at the beginning when it was the most straightforward, and there are stacked elements of luck that the game will throw at you the further you go.
The market sucks - as mentioned, no way to clear it in the base game, and the game has a big problem with the card-buy economy. Coins have early game use, but you never do anything with them other than buy cards, while every other resource starts useful and gets more important as the game goes on. Since deck thinning isn't a thing it makes buying cards that are good at buying cards pretty bad overall.
The design space is limited - This is me succinctly summing up that the game contains and emphasizes several strategies / archtypes, but also contains villians you have to defeat that specifically hard counter those strategies. It's too all-or-nothing a lot of the time (other villains will similarly be pushovers when they don't directly counter your decks).
Bonus randomness leading to losing turns - yeah, this is a thing too. One of the decks can just cough up cards such that you immediately die and lose your turn. Nice. Would be more forgivable if 1) it was more rare than it was and 2) there was any mitigation/counterplay.
We had some fun with it, for sure. But by the time we were on the 5th or 6th box it hadn't felt like the game changed since box 3, just that there were more bad cards that probably come out more often, and a huge dilution of the market deck which can also just lose you the game. I never picked up the expansions, but why would you want to when that's the play experience it left us with?
Topically, there was recently a Toy Story game released which is apparently the same format, but includes some of those fixes from the first expansion. Given it's a better theme (fight me), seems like the obvious choice to me if you were interested in a family-friendly deckbuilder.
The Toy Story game definitely fixes a lot of the random crap the game can throw at you. I would push back on losing your turn, but it definitely cuts it down by a lot potentially. Either way Toy Story won't have that happen, and has the deck thinning elements built in from the start.
The major problem with Toy Story is that it has two very different games in it. Adventures 3-5 have a lot in common as I remember, and 1,2 and 6 have a lot in common. The differences between the two are night and day. To the point where a lot of the elements of one group of adventures cannot be used in the other group of adventures. It is super weird in not a good way.
holy crap i think one of the game showing up this weekend might be Dungeon Crusade. Man if you want to see the the absolute WEIRDEST kickstarter i've ever been on go look at that page.
I really fell in love with the game and I do not care for Harry Potter anything at all. The random but section can cause problems if it gets clogged with junk, but I don't remember that happening too often. I might be looking at it through rose tinted glasses as I haven't played the base game in a very long time. I know the expansion introduces a rule of clearing the market once a game if you don't buy anything from it. It helps clean up the dead areas a bit, and the somewhat l as than perfect cards.
The first expansion does introduce a mechanic that lets you thin your deck. It also introduces cards to just crap up your deck that have to be removed which makes the random card selection a lot more painful at times. If you super weren't feeling it then I can't say it is worth it, but if you feel it is just a few tweaks away then I would look at what the first expansion introduced to see if it solves your problems largely.
I still need to get the second expansion. Probably a Christmas gift for my beloved spouse this year. We loved the game enough to get the Toy Story version as well so another expansion seems super exciting to us. Random elements of the game don't bother us as much, and we love cooperative games so that might be the difference. I haven't found another coop deck builder that our group has really fallen in love with. (We have tried Aeon's End and Dragonfire to little success).
I'm not surprised to hear that the expansion fixes some of the issues we had, it feels there's a good game in there somewhere and a few tweaks could bring it out. My ideal version would let you save your money from turn to turn (risky since if you get stunned you lose it all), have a rotating market where the unpurchased items would get replaced, and have stronger but fewer villains so you didn't end up facing malfoy + crab and goyle every game. We used to joke that crab and goyle were the true masterminds as we always defeated them last which is amusing but probably not the theme that they were going for.
Getting a feel for Fury of Dracula - Digital Edition. I'm still working the tutorials, which are meticulous and well done. It makes you play as both Dracula and the heroes to get a feel for their song and dance.
Production value is top notch while not trying to be immersive. It wants you to know its a board game. The "pawns" are fully colored busts. Portraits are nice, though combat consists of those portraits swaying back and forth. As characters take damage they appear gradually more bloodied like the Wolfensetin guy, and it can be rather unsettling. Loading screen is a black and white film of a bat flapping, a homage to both old vampire movies. Some of the characters look lame, but that's because I'm making unfair comparisons to Francis Cappola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (nobody wants Jon Harker to look like Keanu Reeves, but Van Helsing looks wimpy and sleepy.)
Gameplay seems...fiddly and sluggish? I'm still trying to get a feel for reserving tickets to cover a lot of ground, but I'm not getting how these tickets are supposed to save me time.
I really fell in love with the game and I do not care for Harry Potter anything at all. The random but section can cause problems if it gets clogged with junk, but I don't remember that happening too often. I might be looking at it through rose tinted glasses as I haven't played the base game in a very long time. I know the expansion introduces a rule of clearing the market once a game if you don't buy anything from it. It helps clean up the dead areas a bit, and the somewhat l as than perfect cards.
The first expansion does introduce a mechanic that lets you thin your deck. It also introduces cards to just crap up your deck that have to be removed which makes the random card selection a lot more painful at times. If you super weren't feeling it then I can't say it is worth it, but if you feel it is just a few tweaks away then I would look at what the first expansion introduced to see if it solves your problems largely.
I still need to get the second expansion. Probably a Christmas gift for my beloved spouse this year. We loved the game enough to get the Toy Story version as well so another expansion seems super exciting to us. Random elements of the game don't bother us as much, and we love cooperative games so that might be the difference. I haven't found another coop deck builder that our group has really fallen in love with. (We have tried Aeon's End and Dragonfire to little success).
I'm not surprised to hear that the expansion fixes some of the issues we had, it feels there's a good game in there somewhere and a few tweaks could bring it out. My ideal version would let you save your money from turn to turn (risky since if you get stunned you lose it all), have a rotating market where the unpurchased items would get replaced, and have stronger but fewer villains so you didn't end up facing malfoy + crab and goyle every game. We used to joke that crab and goyle were the true masterminds as we always defeated them last which is amusing but probably not the theme that they were going for.
Of those, only the last one is done directly. The expansion gives you a whole new set of villains, and it is a smaller amount over all. The villains them can be real nightmares too. It is a 4 box affair, and as I remember you get a different set of monsters for each box, but my memory might be playing tricks on me. They have rules for how to fit it all together at the end as well that would still do what you are looking for. I have played plenty of games where I was really hoping Crab and Goyle were in there eating up a spot cause man could we use a breather.
It might be play style differences, or maybe the expansion changed something I forgot but we had a lot of coins going into turns typically. We built for team draws and team coins as a base strategy. Team draws also mitigates the stun a lot since you can get to 7 cards semi regularly once its all going, and the stun at that point is net 1 card loss which isn't too painful. Especially not with the expansion garbage card they use to fill your deck.
The market I have a house rule suggestion if your group is open to that stuff. I am stealing it directly from Toy Story as well so it feels more like a fix they came up with later in my head. Duplicate cards stack in the market. It doesn't eliminate the garbage parts, but combined with a once a game wipe certainly comes close to fixing it. A stack of 5 chocolate frogs eating up one is a lot easier to ignore rather than feeling like you have to take one for the team only to get yet another chocolate fucking frog.
For a house rule, try this: At a cost of 2 coins, you can flush the market and reveal a new set of cards.
This does several good things. Most obviously, it allows you to search for cards that are better fits for your deck composition and where you are in the game. It also helps get to cards that are specifically required for victory conditions in later years, especially considering that the market deck has gotten really fat by that point in the campaign.
But perhaps more importantly, it gives you a thing to do on a dud turn. If you only have a couple coins, you can ask the group whether to spend those for a market flush, so that the next player may have a better opportunity.
holy crap i think one of the game showing up this weekend might be Dungeon Crusade. Man if you want to see the the absolute WEIRDEST kickstarter i've ever been on go look at that page.
i honestly didn't think it would ever show up
False alarm, it was Dwellings of Eldervale.
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
holy crap i think one of the game showing up this weekend might be Dungeon Crusade. Man if you want to see the the absolute WEIRDEST kickstarter i've ever been on go look at that page.
i honestly didn't think it would ever show up
False alarm, it was Dwellings of Eldervale.
That is one big box.
I mean, probably not at the top end of Magic Pink's house of games, but it's pretty well up there for my collection. Now if only I had any hope of being able to play it.
holy crap i think one of the game showing up this weekend might be Dungeon Crusade. Man if you want to see the the absolute WEIRDEST kickstarter i've ever been on go look at that page.
i honestly didn't think it would ever show up
False alarm, it was Dwellings of Eldervale.
That is one big box.
I mean, probably not at the top end of Magic Pink's house of games, but it's pretty well up there for my collection. Now if only I had any hope of being able to play it.
I mean, you don't want to put large things at the top, they're better as a solid foundation.
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HedgethornAssociate Professor of Historical Hobby HorsesIn the Lions' DenRegistered Userregular
edited November 2020
My 10-year-old loves Hogwarts Battle, which means I've played it a bunch (20+ times) and have spent a lot of time browsing the BGG forums looking for house rules to improve it.
The biggest problem isn't the random and overly large market deck (although that is annoying), but that the game puts all tension and uncertainty on the wrong end of play. The later books can take 2+ hours to win, but 95% of games you know whether you've won or lost in the first twenty minutes. Either in the very early going you've purchased a couple cards that remove Dark Marks from the location deck, in which case you'll eventually win because the villain deck can never get ahead of you, or else you don't get those cards, you end up at location #2 after 15-20 minutes, and then you'll never overcome the power curve and so you'll eventually lose. Most winning games never progress past location #1, in which case the last hour is just a mindless slog of bashing villains who pose no challenge, and most losing games end up with the players being quickly overrun by villains who they have no chance of matching. It's the exact opposite of the normal Pandemic-style co-op progression, where things seem increasingly unmanageable up until the endgame.
I've seen (and tried) a variety of house rules that either incentivize or force the players to advance locations, or else make the Dark Arts draws dependent on the number of remaining villains rather than on the locations, but none of those rule changes have felt all that successful. But to really make the game tense, there needs to be something that forces you to be drawing more Dark Arts cards as you get closer to victory.
Getting a feel for Fury of Dracula - Digital Edition. I'm still working the tutorials, which are meticulous and well done. It makes you play as both Dracula and the heroes to get a feel for their song and dance.
Production value is top notch while not trying to be immersive. It wants you to know its a board game. The "pawns" are fully colored busts. Portraits are nice, though combat consists of those portraits swaying back and forth. As characters take damage they appear gradually more bloodied like the Wolfensetin guy, and it can be rather unsettling. Loading screen is a black and white film of a bat flapping, a homage to both old vampire movies. Some of the characters look lame, but that's because I'm making unfair comparisons to Francis Cappola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (nobody wants Jon Harker to look like Keanu Reeves, but Van Helsing looks wimpy and sleepy.)
Gameplay seems...fiddly and sluggish? I'm still trying to get a feel for reserving tickets to cover a lot of ground, but I'm not getting how these tickets are supposed to save me time.
How is the AI in that? Feasible for (non-pro) humans to team up against an AI Dracula?
Local game store was having a clearance sale for all the demo games they used to have downstairs for everyone to play. Picked up Spartacus: Blood in the Sand for $10! I remember hearing it was real good for a licensed game?
No guarantee though that all the components were in the box though
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Local game store was having a clearance sale for all the demo games they used to have downstairs for everyone to play. Picked up Spartacus: Blood in the Sand for $10! I remember hearing it was real good for a licensed game?
No guarantee though that all the components were in the box though
I only got to play it a couple times before it got stolen out of my car but it played while and had some really interesting concepts. Not sure how well it holds up over more plays but for $10 I'd recommend it.
Getting a feel for Fury of Dracula - Digital Edition. I'm still working the tutorials, which are meticulous and well done. It makes you play as both Dracula and the heroes to get a feel for their song and dance.
Production value is top notch while not trying to be immersive. It wants you to know its a board game. The "pawns" are fully colored busts. Portraits are nice, though combat consists of those portraits swaying back and forth. As characters take damage they appear gradually more bloodied like the Wolfensetin guy, and it can be rather unsettling. Loading screen is a black and white film of a bat flapping, a homage to both old vampire movies. Some of the characters look lame, but that's because I'm making unfair comparisons to Francis Cappola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (nobody wants Jon Harker to look like Keanu Reeves, but Van Helsing looks wimpy and sleepy.)
Gameplay seems...fiddly and sluggish? I'm still trying to get a feel for reserving tickets to cover a lot of ground, but I'm not getting how these tickets are supposed to save me time.
How is the AI in that? Feasible for (non-pro) humans to team up against an AI Dracula?
I lack the skill to tell.
I'm almost done with week 2 and Dracula has gradually been starving while I've been unable to find him. Its rather frustrating. I'm not sure I could sell my friends on this.
Getting a feel for Fury of Dracula - Digital Edition. I'm still working the tutorials, which are meticulous and well done. It makes you play as both Dracula and the heroes to get a feel for their song and dance.
Production value is top notch while not trying to be immersive. It wants you to know its a board game. The "pawns" are fully colored busts. Portraits are nice, though combat consists of those portraits swaying back and forth. As characters take damage they appear gradually more bloodied like the Wolfensetin guy, and it can be rather unsettling. Loading screen is a black and white film of a bat flapping, a homage to both old vampire movies. Some of the characters look lame, but that's because I'm making unfair comparisons to Francis Cappola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (nobody wants Jon Harker to look like Keanu Reeves, but Van Helsing looks wimpy and sleepy.)
Gameplay seems...fiddly and sluggish? I'm still trying to get a feel for reserving tickets to cover a lot of ground, but I'm not getting how these tickets are supposed to save me time.
How is the AI in that? Feasible for (non-pro) humans to team up against an AI Dracula?
I lack the skill to tell.
I'm almost done with week 2 and Dracula has gradually been starving while I've been unable to find him. Its rather frustrating. I'm not sure I could sell my friends on this.
I haven't played the most recent edition of Fury of Dracula (which I assume the digital game we're talking about is an implementation of), but the previous edition of the game, a common complaint was that the game was misnamed. Less Fury than it was Cowardice of Dracula.
A good Dracula makes it seem like he's pulling all the strings and smacking down the hunters at every turn, laughing all the way. Or, at least, bluffs successfully enough that the hunters think that's what's happening as Dracula desperately tries to draw better tiles/cards. Not really Fury, but "Fiendishness of Dracula" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. Either way it's definitely a deduction-and-chase game and not a brawl-Dracula-on-a-rooftop kind of game, for which Unmatched: Cobble and Fog is right there and is also glorious.
Edit: If Dracula is starving, that makes it sound like he's spending a lot of time at sea (forgive me if I'm wrong here). That does mean that he's not able to lay any traps or build up his power by laying tiles, and there are only so many ports he would be able to land on, making it easier to figure out where he will eventually end up.
A good Dracula makes it seem like he's pulling all the strings and smacking down the hunters at every turn, laughing all the way. Or, at least, bluffs successfully enough that the hunters think that's what's happening as Dracula desperately tries to draw better tiles/cards. Not really Fury, but "Fiendishness of Dracula" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. Either way it's definitely a deduction-and-chase game and not a brawl-Dracula-on-a-rooftop kind of game, for which Unmatched: Cobble and Fog is right there and is also glorious.
Edit: If Dracula is starving, that makes it sound like he's spending a lot of time at sea (forgive me if I'm wrong here). That does mean that he's not able to lay any traps or build up his power by laying tiles, and there are only so many ports he would be able to land on, making it easier to figure out where he will eventually end up.
I'm going to go with the AI making a power play. I never found him in the main continent in Iberia, Italia, Germany-whatever fancy words, all the way to the Eastern side of the map, and suddenly an event resolved in Britannia when Van Helsing came from there.
I still have the game save and Dracula making a trip like that again is unsustainable, so maybe I should head over there.
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@Magic Pink
Can I get feedback on this ASAP? Like... gameplay wise. =/ Store's stressing they only have a certain amount available...
@Athenor itll be a while before i get a chance to play it but if you go check out the kickstarter they have playthroughs you can watch
I thought Gwent was pretty boring and struck me as just people who only know how to play Uno and Poker being like 'omg this card game Gwent is amazing!!' Is it the same deal with Orlog or is there more there, there?
I've no idea about Orlog, but I certainly have doubts that it breaks the mold. The rules are pretty straightforward, and it sure is a 2-player dice game so ...
(Basically how much do you like King of Tokyo when there are only two players left? This is what Orlog seems to roughly equate to.)
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I got my copy just as the lockdown started. It still sits at my friends house, waiting for us all to be able to get back together and play.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Hmmm I didn't look to close at it. My GF showed me it from amazon, saw it ws relatively new, and thought I'd ask here first. Does it really look that cheap? Are there any sites that do reviews of board games that is trusted here? I love F13, and was really hoping someone here had played it and had an opinion on it.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172881/quartz
I haven't played it, but you should be able to find reviews for it anyway. Looks like a take that card game?
ALL of them?!?!
Ain't enough time in the day.
With enough of us, and enough tables, we can do it!
I noticed that Viticulture is also digital, but only on Android.
My thoughts on the game: Battle of Hogwarts is a deckbuilder but it's simplistic and in my opinion not as interesting as other deck builders I've played like dominion. You must buy cards from a random selection and there's no way to clear out the junk cards that appear and focus on the cards that you really want so your deck is basically going to end up as a collection of good cards. The cooperative part of the game helps with that as you can split up the cards so that they go towards the player that can use them best but it's not foolproof. The difficulty is somewhat random as it depends on what villains are currently active and the weak villains from year 1 are mixed in with the more deadly villains from the later years so our go-to strategy was to kill villains until we got an easy combination and then stalling as long as we could while powering up our decks.
The art is from the movie series and quite good, the real fun of this game was brought out by the theme and we enjoyed watching Hermione demolish villains in a flurry of spell casting but if the theme doesn't excite you then I'm not sure I'd recommend Battle of Hogwarts. It's a bit of a shame as I liked the idea of a cooperative deck builder and I feel like there's a good game in here with some rules tweaks.
The first expansion does introduce a mechanic that lets you thin your deck. It also introduces cards to just crap up your deck that have to be removed which makes the random card selection a lot more painful at times. If you super weren't feeling it then I can't say it is worth it, but if you feel it is just a few tweaks away then I would look at what the first expansion introduced to see if it solves your problems largely.
I still need to get the second expansion. Probably a Christmas gift for my beloved spouse this year. We loved the game enough to get the Toy Story version as well so another expansion seems super exciting to us. Random elements of the game don't bother us as much, and we love cooperative games so that might be the difference. I haven't found another coop deck builder that our group has really fallen in love with. (We have tried Aeon's End and Dragonfire to little success).
We had some fun with it, for sure. But by the time we were on the 5th or 6th box it hadn't felt like the game changed since box 3, just that there were more bad cards that probably come out more often, and a huge dilution of the market deck which can also just lose you the game. I never picked up the expansions, but why would you want to when that's the play experience it left us with?
Topically, there was recently a Toy Story game released which is apparently the same format, but includes some of those fixes from the first expansion. Given it's a better theme (fight me), seems like the obvious choice to me if you were interested in a family-friendly deckbuilder.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
The major problem with Toy Story is that it has two very different games in it. Adventures 3-5 have a lot in common as I remember, and 1,2 and 6 have a lot in common. The differences between the two are night and day. To the point where a lot of the elements of one group of adventures cannot be used in the other group of adventures. It is super weird in not a good way.
i honestly didn't think it would ever show up
I'm not surprised to hear that the expansion fixes some of the issues we had, it feels there's a good game in there somewhere and a few tweaks could bring it out. My ideal version would let you save your money from turn to turn (risky since if you get stunned you lose it all), have a rotating market where the unpurchased items would get replaced, and have stronger but fewer villains so you didn't end up facing malfoy + crab and goyle every game. We used to joke that crab and goyle were the true masterminds as we always defeated them last which is amusing but probably not the theme that they were going for.
Production value is top notch while not trying to be immersive. It wants you to know its a board game. The "pawns" are fully colored busts. Portraits are nice, though combat consists of those portraits swaying back and forth. As characters take damage they appear gradually more bloodied like the Wolfensetin guy, and it can be rather unsettling. Loading screen is a black and white film of a bat flapping, a homage to both old vampire movies. Some of the characters look lame, but that's because I'm making unfair comparisons to Francis Cappola's film Bram Stoker's Dracula (nobody wants Jon Harker to look like Keanu Reeves, but Van Helsing looks wimpy and sleepy.)
Gameplay seems...fiddly and sluggish? I'm still trying to get a feel for reserving tickets to cover a lot of ground, but I'm not getting how these tickets are supposed to save me time.
Of those, only the last one is done directly. The expansion gives you a whole new set of villains, and it is a smaller amount over all. The villains them can be real nightmares too. It is a 4 box affair, and as I remember you get a different set of monsters for each box, but my memory might be playing tricks on me. They have rules for how to fit it all together at the end as well that would still do what you are looking for. I have played plenty of games where I was really hoping Crab and Goyle were in there eating up a spot cause man could we use a breather.
It might be play style differences, or maybe the expansion changed something I forgot but we had a lot of coins going into turns typically. We built for team draws and team coins as a base strategy. Team draws also mitigates the stun a lot since you can get to 7 cards semi regularly once its all going, and the stun at that point is net 1 card loss which isn't too painful. Especially not with the expansion garbage card they use to fill your deck.
The market I have a house rule suggestion if your group is open to that stuff. I am stealing it directly from Toy Story as well so it feels more like a fix they came up with later in my head. Duplicate cards stack in the market. It doesn't eliminate the garbage parts, but combined with a once a game wipe certainly comes close to fixing it. A stack of 5 chocolate frogs eating up one is a lot easier to ignore rather than feeling like you have to take one for the team only to get yet another chocolate fucking frog.
This does several good things. Most obviously, it allows you to search for cards that are better fits for your deck composition and where you are in the game. It also helps get to cards that are specifically required for victory conditions in later years, especially considering that the market deck has gotten really fat by that point in the campaign.
But perhaps more importantly, it gives you a thing to do on a dud turn. If you only have a couple coins, you can ask the group whether to spend those for a market flush, so that the next player may have a better opportunity.
False alarm, it was Dwellings of Eldervale.
That is one big box.
I mean, probably not at the top end of Magic Pink's house of games, but it's pretty well up there for my collection. Now if only I had any hope of being able to play it.
I mean, you don't want to put large things at the top, they're better as a solid foundation.
The biggest problem isn't the random and overly large market deck (although that is annoying), but that the game puts all tension and uncertainty on the wrong end of play. The later books can take 2+ hours to win, but 95% of games you know whether you've won or lost in the first twenty minutes. Either in the very early going you've purchased a couple cards that remove Dark Marks from the location deck, in which case you'll eventually win because the villain deck can never get ahead of you, or else you don't get those cards, you end up at location #2 after 15-20 minutes, and then you'll never overcome the power curve and so you'll eventually lose. Most winning games never progress past location #1, in which case the last hour is just a mindless slog of bashing villains who pose no challenge, and most losing games end up with the players being quickly overrun by villains who they have no chance of matching. It's the exact opposite of the normal Pandemic-style co-op progression, where things seem increasingly unmanageable up until the endgame.
I've seen (and tried) a variety of house rules that either incentivize or force the players to advance locations, or else make the Dark Arts draws dependent on the number of remaining villains rather than on the locations, but none of those rule changes have felt all that successful. But to really make the game tense, there needs to be something that forces you to be drawing more Dark Arts cards as you get closer to victory.
Just comes down to randomization of card draws that can be easily unbalanced in either direction.
How is the AI in that? Feasible for (non-pro) humans to team up against an AI Dracula?
No guarantee though that all the components were in the box though
I only got to play it a couple times before it got stolen out of my car but it played while and had some really interesting concepts. Not sure how well it holds up over more plays but for $10 I'd recommend it.
I lack the skill to tell.
I'm almost done with week 2 and Dracula has gradually been starving while I've been unable to find him. Its rather frustrating. I'm not sure I could sell my friends on this.
I haven't played the most recent edition of Fury of Dracula (which I assume the digital game we're talking about is an implementation of), but the previous edition of the game, a common complaint was that the game was misnamed. Less Fury than it was Cowardice of Dracula.
Edit: If Dracula is starving, that makes it sound like he's spending a lot of time at sea (forgive me if I'm wrong here). That does mean that he's not able to lay any traps or build up his power by laying tiles, and there are only so many ports he would be able to land on, making it easier to figure out where he will eventually end up.
I'm going to go with the AI making a power play. I never found him in the main continent in Iberia, Italia, Germany-whatever fancy words, all the way to the Eastern side of the map, and suddenly an event resolved in Britannia when Van Helsing came from there.
I still have the game save and Dracula making a trip like that again is unsustainable, so maybe I should head over there.