I wouldn't classify Spirit Island as having deck-building elements at all.
So that was going to be my response as well, but I don't think you can ignore the fact that the design for the power hand has definitely been informed by deck-building games.
I can. New powers don't cost you anything to obtain (saving the sacrifice for a Major), they are drawn blindly from the top 4 cards of the deck rather than from any sort of layout, you never have an actual "deck" of your own (just a hand and discards), and the cards in your possession are meaningless in terms of scoring (which the game obviously does not have).
It has more in common with Ticket to Ride than it does Dominion.
I concede most of that. There's not really a huge difference between the draw-four and a center-row market except that it's in constant flux, though, and Major powers replacing weaker cards is very deckbuild-y. The big omission, obviously, is that card cost / obtainment happens at fixed costs and rates. In more general terms of the hand-management mechanics and the idea that recovering your discard is important, there's some influence of non-Dominion deckbuilders on display. It may owe more to the Thunderstone / Ascension / Star Realms tree than the Dominion one.
Even so, Spirit Island is definitely not a deckbuilder; I suspect you just don't write the power rules the same way without having played one.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited July 2020
I would tend to agree that Spirit Island likely wouldn't exist in the form it does without the influence of deckbuilders, possibly specifically Mage Knight. But the design is a lot more comparable to (and possibly influenced by) Concordia, which is also not a deck builder.
If you never shuffle and draw random pieces out of it, it's not a deck, so it can't be a deckbuilder.
Star Realms is pretty deliberately Ascension with a different coat of paint, which is not a knock against it.
I don't know if this is true for every scenario, but the one I played had a time limit and the time was advanced each time you reshuffled. The time limit was harsh enough that you only reshuffled your deck a few times in the entire game. Despite appearing at first glance to be a deck builder that pretty much ruined any of the actual gameplay from good deckbuilding games.
Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
I don't know if this is true for every scenario, but the one I played had a time limit and the time was advanced each time you reshuffled. The time limit was harsh enough that you only reshuffled your deck a few times in the entire game. Despite appearing at first glance to be a deck builder that pretty much ruined any of the actual gameplay from good deckbuilding games.
Mage Knight makes very different use of deckbuilding than other entries besides (arguably) Aeon's End in that the game is about getting mileage out of your available cards given more variety and information than usual.
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
I was looking through my collection to see if I had any other deckbuilders with unique mechanics. I was only able to come up with 3 that definitely counted:
Runestones is a really interesting take on it because you actually destroy your deck as you play it - play 2 discard 1. Plays best with more than 2 players, from everything I've heard.
Battle for Greyport and Shadowrun: Crossfire are both very similar co-op deckbuilders that use a central character that gets stronger over time (BfG during a game, Crossfire over multiple games) by buying cards to go into a deck and combat baddies. There's also a D&D flavor of Crossfire that I do not own.
Zeppelin Attack is a nice deckbuilder because almost all of the cards available are unique, and it's a direct combat game, so you have this situation where everyone diverges pretty rapidly, everyone's turn is interesting for the whole table, and because the game deeply encourages running a lean deck, there's a lot of feeling out of your opponents going on.
Valley of the Kings with its pyramid thing and needing to entomb cards in order to score them were two really nice shakeups of the dominion formula.
Arctic Scavengers is a classic now, and I've always appreciated its skirmishing mechanic, where there are direct confrontations, but not incredibly savage ones.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Man, the Asmodee distribution screwyness continues to mess up my local game store. They did manage to get in the backorders from last week that were never shipped... But they didn't get in any of the Keyforge that released this week.
For the Crown is a game I call Dominion Chess. Most cards can be trashed as an action to put a piece in your reserve, which is kind of necessary since you start with all of one (1) king on the board. Before your Dominion turn you get one chess move, which includes deploying a piece to a valid starting position (pawns second rank, everything else first rank). It's got all manner of fairy pieces too, very nice.
so my group has tried Glorantha: Godswar on TTS, which is made by the same folks who made Cthulhu Wars and uses very similar systems
they love it -- it seems it takes the great stuff from Cthulhu Wars (radically asymmetrical factions, each player having explicit short-term objectives, simple core systems, lots of potential for rebounding from losses) and drops or reworks some of the more annoying or questionable stuff (random VPs from elder sign tokens being a huge determining factor, extremely influential effects that feel harsh or unpleasant, a very limiting default movement system that discourages aggression, power economy being totally dependent on board state and thus vulnerable to attack).
it seems like a more aggressive, more layered game -- literally, as heaven and hell are side boards you play and fight on -- with a lot of fun non-combat interaction. For example, to leave Hell with any unit, you need "permission," which means a unit with higher combat strength than the leaving units has to grant permission. You can grant permission to your own units, but the permitting unit can't leave, so it's most efficient to get permission from other players who have units in Hell. One of the factions starts with their god already in Hell, where he has a combat value of 1, as do all his other units, so he has to grant boons to other players to convince them to let his god out. This is hilarious.
Conversely, the Darkness faction ignores the permission rule, and can pop out of Hell anywhere on the board, but they can't build any buildings in the Heaven areas.
I'm looking forward to trying it tonight!
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
I gotta stop watching SUSD. Thousand Year Old Vampire is in the mail. Not really a board game, per se, but board game adjacent.
It's sort of a weird thing where SU&SD has kind of aged enough that they're starting to align with more of my views overall. Just a bit (or a lot) less hype train than it used to be when everything was new and shiny to them. Not always, of course, and I can tell when a game isn't going to be for me. But Tom's views feels a lot closer to Paul's, who was the one SU&SD voice I almost always agreed with. So I figured I might enjoy testing out something roleplay that isn't bog standard~
I also wound up picking up The Machine and just ordered a journal today to start that up. Honestly, I'm quite intrigued and looking forward to that one, but it's ... well, rather inherently grim, so not for everyone. But if you're willing to go in on TYOV you should look it up.
I gotta stop watching SUSD. Thousand Year Old Vampire is in the mail. Not really a board game, per se, but board game adjacent.
It's sort of a weird thing where SU&SD has kind of aged enough that they're starting to align with more of my views overall. Just a bit (or a lot) less hype train than it used to be when everything was new and shiny to them. Not always, of course, and I can tell when a game isn't going to be for me. But Tom's views feels a lot closer to Paul's, who was the one SU&SD voice I almost always agreed with. So I figured I might enjoy testing out something roleplay that isn't bog standard~
I also wound up picking up The Machine and just ordered a journal today to start that up. Honestly, I'm quite intrigued and looking forward to that one, but it's ... well, rather inherently grim, so not for everyone. But if you're willing to go in on TYOV you should look it up.
Yeah ok maybe The Machine is happening, as well. I think I have some friends who may also be susceptible.
Yeah I have a big pile of CW stuff and it feels like it's outdated. To my tastes, at least.
The aesthetic for Godswar is not great. Honestly, I'm considering reskinning the Godswar rules and using the CW minis and settings and printing out our own boards and faction sheets. I do some graphic design, and it would be easy
Hell could be R'lyeh, and Cthulhu could be the Sky God; heaven could be Mars or whatever. The reskin is pretty easy.
I basically don't want to play Cthulhu Wars ever again; this seems like a flatly superior game experience
Everything I've seen online has boiled down to Glorantha and CW being broadly similar, and which one you prefer coming down to personal taste on which implementation of things you like better. I can personally say I have no interest in spending many hundreds of dollars on an ever so slightly different version of mashing needlessly huge plastic dudes into each other, but I'd be happy to try someone else's copy of Glorantha.
if my group does get it in person, it's likely that we'll do a high-quality print and play for the faction boards and map, and my friend who has a 3d printer will produce some stuff for the tokens and minis, or we'll sub in Cthulhu Wars miniatures
I'm reluctant to spend another $200 on a similar (but better, I think) deluxe board game
Picked up an Unlock! three-pack in B&N last month. Played Insert Coin with my wife and then watched a small group of friends (literally two people and the two kids of one of them) also run though it on July 4th weekend. That one was a blast, but we're all gamers so that was expected. It was interesting watching them get stuck on most of the same snags we did. Both teams 4-starred.
Tonight the wife and I took down Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Thread of Murder. Outside of one very devious set of hidden numbers it went well although man does that time slip away fast while you're pouring over a bunch of cards. Ate a couple of penalties but still had about 5 minutes to go. Another 4-star run.
Other than Insert Coin, the main reason I bought this pack was because the Level 3 game is Alice in Wonderland themed and that's my wife's all-time favorite book. Will probably be another week or so before we can get to it but super looking forward to it. And in the meantime maybe I can watch someone else try to unravel the scarlet thread...
My friends, a couple, introduced me to Heart of Crown. Being a Clank! veteran, I performed very well for my first game, getting to 14 Succession upon loss. Pretty intriguing how its economy is "phased" from money being important to succession and the card draw to find it. We couldn't help but joke about all the anime-tiddies.
Steam's version of Raiders of the North Sea was a gargantuan hit with them.
I love Raiders of the North Sea. In general that designer does a great job of making worker placement games more interactive and more fun, and making denial a more visible, explicit goal (I find it's usually implicit in Euro games, since it's such a staple of the genre)
Yeah I have a big pile of CW stuff and it feels like it's outdated. To my tastes, at least.
The aesthetic for Godswar is not great. Honestly, I'm considering reskinning the Godswar rules and using the CW minis and settings and printing out our own boards and faction sheets. I do some graphic design, and it would be easy
Hell could be R'lyeh, and Cthulhu could be the Sky God; heaven could be Mars or whatever. The reskin is pretty easy.
I prefer CW myself because it's a bit more streamlined. They're both great games tho.
Yeah I have a big pile of CW stuff and it feels like it's outdated. To my tastes, at least.
The aesthetic for Godswar is not great. Honestly, I'm considering reskinning the Godswar rules and using the CW minis and settings and printing out our own boards and faction sheets. I do some graphic design, and it would be easy
Hell could be R'lyeh, and Cthulhu could be the Sky God; heaven could be Mars or whatever. The reskin is pretty easy.
I prefer CW myself because it's a bit more streamlined. They're both great games tho.
My issues with CW boil down to lack of aggression (you're strongly incentivized not to attack until you get your GOO, so there are usually a few huge fights at the end and that's it), boring factions (Sleeper and Black Goat are pretty passive and it's a bummer, Yellow King has one good gameplan and is mostly dependent on other players ignoring them to win), and fragility (losing your GOO is often an irrecoverable setback, most of your economy is on the board and vulnerable). And random elder sign VP.
That could be our group's style, but Godswar seems to better incentivize aggression
CW is great and we've played it dozens of times, though — these are just things I notice by contrast
Yeah I have a big pile of CW stuff and it feels like it's outdated. To my tastes, at least.
The aesthetic for Godswar is not great. Honestly, I'm considering reskinning the Godswar rules and using the CW minis and settings and printing out our own boards and faction sheets. I do some graphic design, and it would be easy
Hell could be R'lyeh, and Cthulhu could be the Sky God; heaven could be Mars or whatever. The reskin is pretty easy.
I prefer CW myself because it's a bit more streamlined. They're both great games tho.
My issues with CW boil down to lack of aggression (you're strongly incentivized not to attack until you get your GOO, so there are usually a few huge fights at the end and that's it), boring factions (Sleeper and Black Goat are pretty passive and it's a bummer, Yellow King has one good gameplan and is mostly dependent on other players ignoring them to win), and fragility (losing your GOO is often an irrecoverable setback, most of your economy is on the board and vulnerable). And random elder sign VP.
That could be our group's style, but Godswar seems to better incentivize aggression
CW is great and we've played it dozens of times, though — these are just things I notice by contrast
An issue we ran into back in the day with CW is that there's no disincentive for the non-Cthulhu players to spend turn 1 effectively removing the Cthulhu player from play. This was a couple years ago so I don't know if there's been any errata to address this but if Cthulhu loses any power generation on turn 1 they're permanently behind on GOO progression and are basically a non-factor for the entire game, and since preventing the initial Cthulhu summon is mutually beneficial it tended to be how the meta went. Which was no fun for whoever drew Cthulhu.
Man I don't see how that play makes any sense, especially for whoever is going last in turn order of the three non Cthulhu factions in the base game. Let the other three factions burn their first round fucking around and you get a commanding positional advantage going into turn two...
Man I don't see how that play makes any sense, especially for whoever is going last in turn order of the three non Cthulhu factions in the base game. Let the other three factions burn their first round fucking around and you get a commanding positional advantage going into turn two...
I dunno, man. Passing the prisoner's dilemma in a diplomatic game also doesn't seem like a bad play for the first turn. :P
I gotta stop watching SUSD. Thousand Year Old Vampire is in the mail. Not really a board game, per se, but board game adjacent.
It's sort of a weird thing where SU&SD has kind of aged enough that they're starting to align with more of my views overall. Just a bit (or a lot) less hype train than it used to be when everything was new and shiny to them. Not always, of course, and I can tell when a game isn't going to be for me. But Tom's views feels a lot closer to Paul's, who was the one SU&SD voice I almost always agreed with. So I figured I might enjoy testing out something roleplay that isn't bog standard~
I also wound up picking up The Machine and just ordered a journal today to start that up. Honestly, I'm quite intrigued and looking forward to that one, but it's ... well, rather inherently grim, so not for everyone. But if you're willing to go in on TYOV you should look it up.
Yeah ok maybe The Machine is happening, as well. I think I have some friends who may also be susceptible.
Their vids are always entertaining but I think they badly need someone who really likes good game design more than "games about talking" in there.
Man I don't see how that play makes any sense, especially for whoever is going last in turn order of the three non Cthulhu factions in the base game. Let the other three factions burn their first round fucking around and you get a commanding positional advantage going into turn two...
I dunno, man. Passing the prisoner's dilemma in a diplomatic game also doesn't seem like a bad play for the first turn. :P
If the first player goes to attack Cthulhu, and then the other two players day forget that and play a regular opening then they will be at a significant advantage over both Cthulhu and the aggressive faction though. If the second player also goes to fuck with Cthulhu then the third player is even better off. It just seems like a weird meta to develop.
I am having a hard time teaching Tapestry. That may sound odd, considering its ridiculously small set of rules, but there's the difference in explaining the what do you do versus the why. For example, if my significant other doesn't understand why she's choosing any of the options, how to leverage them to reach a successful conclusion, she gets real flustered. My best was that it's worth pursuing every track but perhaps focus on two that are the most appealing to you or potentially your goals/faction. It kind of feels like you need more plays of Tapestry to see the best paths forward, though, and that's fine. I personally enjoying peeling those onions. However, right now, it just looks abstract and a shoulder shrug to those I've played it with.
And now to teach her my most recent purchase: Anachrony! :P
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
Man I don't see how that play makes any sense, especially for whoever is going last in turn order of the three non Cthulhu factions in the base game. Let the other three factions burn their first round fucking around and you get a commanding positional advantage going into turn two...
I dunno, man. Passing the prisoner's dilemma in a diplomatic game also doesn't seem like a bad play for the first turn. :P
If the first player goes to attack Cthulhu, and then the other two players day forget that and play a regular opening then they will be at a significant advantage over both Cthulhu and the aggressive faction though. If the second player also goes to fuck with Cthulhu then the third player is even better off. It just seems like a weird meta to develop.
I'm not disagreeing that it was a weird meta!
e: There seemed to be three tiers of GOO:
1) Progression trivially stopped by other players (Cthulhu, Shub to some extent)
2) Progression difficult or impossible to stop by other players (whatever the dark blue guy was, Ithaqua)
3) goddamn Tcho-Tcho. The worst.
This meta sounds very strange. Why go after Cthulhu, in particular? How are you successfully attacking on the first turn, when dice are so swingy? Why would you waste power on attacking so early when the opportunity cost to your own power economy is enormous? Why do you think Cthulhu, who has one of the cheapest GOOs, is easier to stop than e.g. Nyarlathotep, who is expensive and relies just as much on GOO activity to win, or Windwalker, who is a very slow builder and who has to sacrifice a gate to get his best boy in play?
It's very easy for players to securely hold two gates in turn 1, I think. You have to take a big risk and invest some crucial power in movement to even attack someone's gate, and since you can't move and attack in the same action, they always get a chance to summon a cheap defender.
This meta sounds very strange. Why go after Cthulhu, in particular? How are you successfully attacking on the first turn, when dice are so swingy? Why would you waste power on attacking so early when the opportunity cost to your own power economy is enormous? Why do you think Cthulhu, who has one of the cheapest GOOs, is easier to stop than e.g. Nyarlathotep, who is expensive and relies just as much on GOO activity to win, or Windwalker, who is a very slow builder and who has to sacrifice a gate to get his best boy in play?
It's very easy for players to securely hold two gates in turn 1, I think. You have to take a big risk and invest some crucial power in movement to even attack someone's gate, and since you can't move and attack in the same action, they always get a chance to summon a cheap defender.
It's entirely possible we were all just badly misplaying the game, but it seemed very easy to keep Cthulhu or Shub from making spellbook progress, whereas some of the others were slower but also much more difficult to directly interfere with.
...now I want to play it again and just learn it from the top without preconceptions, because based on these reactions I'm thinking we must have been doing it wrong somehow.
I love Raiders of the North Sea. In general that designer does a great job of making worker placement games more interactive and more fun, and making denial a more visible, explicit goal (I find it's usually implicit in Euro games, since it's such a staple of the genre)
The artists they use are fantastic as well
If Raiders has denial, I'm having trouble seeing it. Its the most free-flowing worker placement game I've ever experienced, due to the whole give/take double move. Do you mean the actual raids being the denial portion, since they can't be repeated?
I can't think of any reason where attacking Cthulhu turn 1 would be a good play and could possibly work out. There must have been something your group was playing wrong.
Not only is the prisoner's dilemma wonky (if I hear one more person saying Jol-Nar are balanced in Twilight Imperium because "everyone just gang up on them in the beginning!"), but even if you went with it, Cthulhu makes the least sense to gang up on and knock out.
He has the lowest win rate of the base factions.
He has the weakest late game.
He has the strongest combat ability early game.
He's vital to the ecosystem because he's usually the only player who can attack and blunt Hastur or Nyarlathotep before those 2 late game powerhouses get rolling.
Crippling Cthulthu early is like knowing you're going to have a deer infestation, and choosing to hunt the local wolves first. If I knew everyone else at the table would be on board with taking one player out of the game first turn, I would always choose Crawling Chaos hands down.
All the expansion factions are abominations and should never be played
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It fits in a small box is what it brought.
Um...
*sweatdrop*
I concede most of that. There's not really a huge difference between the draw-four and a center-row market except that it's in constant flux, though, and Major powers replacing weaker cards is very deckbuild-y. The big omission, obviously, is that card cost / obtainment happens at fixed costs and rates. In more general terms of the hand-management mechanics and the idea that recovering your discard is important, there's some influence of non-Dominion deckbuilders on display. It may owe more to the Thunderstone / Ascension / Star Realms tree than the Dominion one.
Even so, Spirit Island is definitely not a deckbuilder; I suspect you just don't write the power rules the same way without having played one.
If you never shuffle and draw random pieces out of it, it's not a deck, so it can't be a deckbuilder.
Star Realms is pretty deliberately Ascension with a different coat of paint, which is not a knock against it.
Trains is the earliest example I can think of where the deck-building itself is in service of something else (board placement in that case).
Salmon Run and The Quest for El Dorado use deck-building as a support for a race, and that is a surprisingly good match-up.
I don't know if this is true for every scenario, but the one I played had a time limit and the time was advanced each time you reshuffled. The time limit was harsh enough that you only reshuffled your deck a few times in the entire game. Despite appearing at first glance to be a deck builder that pretty much ruined any of the actual gameplay from good deckbuilding games.
Mage Knight makes very different use of deckbuilding than other entries besides (arguably) Aeon's End in that the game is about getting mileage out of your available cards given more variety and information than usual.
While true I don't think there were a lot of faction benefits? It's been a long time since I played first-release Ascension, mind.
This is true.
Runestones is a really interesting take on it because you actually destroy your deck as you play it - play 2 discard 1. Plays best with more than 2 players, from everything I've heard.
Battle for Greyport and Shadowrun: Crossfire are both very similar co-op deckbuilders that use a central character that gets stronger over time (BfG during a game, Crossfire over multiple games) by buying cards to go into a deck and combat baddies. There's also a D&D flavor of Crossfire that I do not own.
Valley of the Kings with its pyramid thing and needing to entomb cards in order to score them were two really nice shakeups of the dominion formula.
Arctic Scavengers is a classic now, and I've always appreciated its skirmishing mechanic, where there are direct confrontations, but not incredibly savage ones.
they love it -- it seems it takes the great stuff from Cthulhu Wars (radically asymmetrical factions, each player having explicit short-term objectives, simple core systems, lots of potential for rebounding from losses) and drops or reworks some of the more annoying or questionable stuff (random VPs from elder sign tokens being a huge determining factor, extremely influential effects that feel harsh or unpleasant, a very limiting default movement system that discourages aggression, power economy being totally dependent on board state and thus vulnerable to attack).
it seems like a more aggressive, more layered game -- literally, as heaven and hell are side boards you play and fight on -- with a lot of fun non-combat interaction. For example, to leave Hell with any unit, you need "permission," which means a unit with higher combat strength than the leaving units has to grant permission. You can grant permission to your own units, but the permitting unit can't leave, so it's most efficient to get permission from other players who have units in Hell. One of the factions starts with their god already in Hell, where he has a combat value of 1, as do all his other units, so he has to grant boons to other players to convince them to let his god out. This is hilarious.
Conversely, the Darkness faction ignores the permission rule, and can pop out of Hell anywhere on the board, but they can't build any buildings in the Heaven areas.
I'm looking forward to trying it tonight!
I also wound up picking up The Machine and just ordered a journal today to start that up. Honestly, I'm quite intrigued and looking forward to that one, but it's ... well, rather inherently grim, so not for everyone. But if you're willing to go in on TYOV you should look it up.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Yeah ok maybe The Machine is happening, as well. I think I have some friends who may also be susceptible.
I won, but we got several rules wrong
all the factions seem active, interesting and fun
I basically don't want to play Cthulhu Wars ever again; this seems like a flatly superior game experience
This makes me happy about pledging in the last KS, but also makes me wonder what I'll do with my pile of CW if my group ends up feeling the same way.
The aesthetic for Godswar is not great. Honestly, I'm considering reskinning the Godswar rules and using the CW minis and settings and printing out our own boards and faction sheets. I do some graphic design, and it would be easy
Hell could be R'lyeh, and Cthulhu could be the Sky God; heaven could be Mars or whatever. The reskin is pretty easy.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Everything I've seen online has boiled down to Glorantha and CW being broadly similar, and which one you prefer coming down to personal taste on which implementation of things you like better. I can personally say I have no interest in spending many hundreds of dollars on an ever so slightly different version of mashing needlessly huge plastic dudes into each other, but I'd be happy to try someone else's copy of Glorantha.
I'm reluctant to spend another $200 on a similar (but better, I think) deluxe board game
Tonight the wife and I took down Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Thread of Murder. Outside of one very devious set of hidden numbers it went well although man does that time slip away fast while you're pouring over a bunch of cards. Ate a couple of penalties but still had about 5 minutes to go. Another 4-star run.
Other than Insert Coin, the main reason I bought this pack was because the Level 3 game is Alice in Wonderland themed and that's my wife's all-time favorite book. Will probably be another week or so before we can get to it but super looking forward to it. And in the meantime maybe I can watch someone else try to unravel the scarlet thread...
Steam's version of Raiders of the North Sea was a gargantuan hit with them.
The artists they use are fantastic as well
I prefer CW myself because it's a bit more streamlined. They're both great games tho.
My issues with CW boil down to lack of aggression (you're strongly incentivized not to attack until you get your GOO, so there are usually a few huge fights at the end and that's it), boring factions (Sleeper and Black Goat are pretty passive and it's a bummer, Yellow King has one good gameplan and is mostly dependent on other players ignoring them to win), and fragility (losing your GOO is often an irrecoverable setback, most of your economy is on the board and vulnerable). And random elder sign VP.
That could be our group's style, but Godswar seems to better incentivize aggression
CW is great and we've played it dozens of times, though — these are just things I notice by contrast
An issue we ran into back in the day with CW is that there's no disincentive for the non-Cthulhu players to spend turn 1 effectively removing the Cthulhu player from play. This was a couple years ago so I don't know if there's been any errata to address this but if Cthulhu loses any power generation on turn 1 they're permanently behind on GOO progression and are basically a non-factor for the entire game, and since preventing the initial Cthulhu summon is mutually beneficial it tended to be how the meta went. Which was no fun for whoever drew Cthulhu.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Their vids are always entertaining but I think they badly need someone who really likes good game design more than "games about talking" in there.
If the first player goes to attack Cthulhu, and then the other two players day forget that and play a regular opening then they will be at a significant advantage over both Cthulhu and the aggressive faction though. If the second player also goes to fuck with Cthulhu then the third player is even better off. It just seems like a weird meta to develop.
And now to teach her my most recent purchase: Anachrony! :P
I'm not disagreeing that it was a weird meta!
e: There seemed to be three tiers of GOO:
1) Progression trivially stopped by other players (Cthulhu, Shub to some extent)
2) Progression difficult or impossible to stop by other players (whatever the dark blue guy was, Ithaqua)
3) goddamn Tcho-Tcho. The worst.
It's very easy for players to securely hold two gates in turn 1, I think. You have to take a big risk and invest some crucial power in movement to even attack someone's gate, and since you can't move and attack in the same action, they always get a chance to summon a cheap defender.
It's entirely possible we were all just badly misplaying the game, but it seemed very easy to keep Cthulhu or Shub from making spellbook progress, whereas some of the others were slower but also much more difficult to directly interfere with.
...now I want to play it again and just learn it from the top without preconceptions, because based on these reactions I'm thinking we must have been doing it wrong somehow.
If Raiders has denial, I'm having trouble seeing it. Its the most free-flowing worker placement game I've ever experienced, due to the whole give/take double move. Do you mean the actual raids being the denial portion, since they can't be repeated?
Not only is the prisoner's dilemma wonky (if I hear one more person saying Jol-Nar are balanced in Twilight Imperium because "everyone just gang up on them in the beginning!"), but even if you went with it, Cthulhu makes the least sense to gang up on and knock out.
He has the lowest win rate of the base factions.
He has the weakest late game.
He has the strongest combat ability early game.
He's vital to the ecosystem because he's usually the only player who can attack and blunt Hastur or Nyarlathotep before those 2 late game powerhouses get rolling.
Crippling Cthulthu early is like knowing you're going to have a deer infestation, and choosing to hunt the local wolves first. If I knew everyone else at the table would be on board with taking one player out of the game first turn, I would always choose Crawling Chaos hands down.