The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
Curious whenever someone tries the new streamlined Dune A Game of Conquest and Diplomacy.
On one hand, streamlining the extremely long original (where it was possible to lose in the first turn) could be good.
On the other hand, Rex was a disaster.
One thing I'm not keen on is cutting the factions to 4. Not only that, but they took the 2 most powerful factions, Bueno Gesserit and Emperor (yes, I'm declaring them slightly to massively OP depending on the experience level of the group), and merged them into one. Seemingly they retain the best advantages of both? While all the other factions stick with just their original abilities and nothing new? Also looks like they shrunk the map (which was an indirect buff to Emperor & Gesserit in Rex).
MrBody on
0
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
Curious whenever someone tries the new streamlined Dune A Game of Conquest and Diplomacy.
On one hand, streamlining the extremely long original (where it was possible to lose in the first turn) could be good.
On the other hand, Rex was a disaster.
One thing I'm not keen on is cutting the factions to 4. Not only that, but they took the 2 most powerful factions, Bueno Gesserit and Emperor (yes, I'm declaring them slightly to massively OP depending on the experience level of the group), and merged them into one. Seemingly they retain the best advantages of both? While all the other factions stick with just their original abilities and nothing new? Also looks like they shrunk the map (which was an indirect buff to Emperor & Gesserit in Rex).
I strongly disliked it. All of the problems with overpowered alliances were present in the printed rules, so they made a bunch of errata which seemed clunky to me. It's a very long game with poor fun management. Seems strictly better than Rex as long as you pay careful attention to the errata.
I also loathe games that make memory match a meaningful part of the game, and this one has a single faction that can take notes and sell access to them as part of the balance.
I also loathe games that make memory match a meaningful part of the game, and this one has a single faction that can take notes and sell access to them as part of the balance.
Games of memory is one of my pet peeve mechanics. The most prevalent are the "public scoring/resource handout, hidden stockpile" mechanics. Every handout of points or money is public information, yet it becomes hidden immediately after and you're not allowing to know everyone's total. You COULD know, if you had perfect memory or wrote stuff down, but come the fuck on.
Typically that specific role is there to keep games from grinding to a halt as everyone calculates everything to the nth degree. It's usually good enough to have a rough idea of where everyone stands.
If it's that much of an annoyance to you just house rule that it's open information and ditch the player screens or whatever. It's group dependent on how annoying the end result will be
In my experience, it is very annoying to all the players except the one person who really wants to know the information, because they have the personality of wanting to math it all out. If you are very lucky all the players have the same personality type in this regard and you're fine: in which case definitely house-rule it and everyone will be happy.
My preference is for just enough unknown fuzz to be added to the system to make this complaint obsolete. For example, in Keyflower you can see the meeple colors that everyone is acquiring, but in setup you start with a random assortment of a few. This makes it impossible to know exactly how much anyone has, but you can have a rough idea that "Alice is hoarding all the reds" or whatever.
+3
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
I also loathe games that make memory match a meaningful part of the game, and this one has a single faction that can take notes and sell access to them as part of the balance.
Games of memory is one of my pet peeve mechanics. The most prevalent are the "public scoring/resource handout, hidden stockpile" mechanics. Every handout of points or money is public information, yet it becomes hidden immediately after and you're not allowing to know everyone's total. You COULD know, if you had perfect memory or wrote stuff down, but come the fuck on.
One of my favorite games, Sons of Anarchy, uses a mechanic like this. How many guns, "contraband," and money you have is hidden. At the end of the game, money is the only thing that counts towards victory, but the others can be sold to help increase money. However, there is a mechanic that kind of requires the resources to be hidden: Blind bidding. The game is full of mechanics where you blind bid against the other players. If resources were public knowledge, that would be impossible to do. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe there is also trading/bribing. So there's enough in the mix that no one can perfectly track where everyone else is, especially in higher player count games.
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
I think Smallworld is the biggest offender I've experienced about that. Since it's explicitly a game where everyone is supposed to be beating up on the leader, if you don't actually know who's in the lead it can be a mess.
senile gaming is the best everything is constantly new including who and where i am
0
ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Hidden points is one thing, but if there's a version of this that bugs me it's the constant instances in deck-builders where the rules don't want you to review your discard pile. Like, yes, sure I could be counting everybody's cards, OR, you know, you could just let me review what I've already played?
I know it's just as easy to house rule "fuck that noise" and I'm more than happy to do so, but it always bothered me that they defaulted to those rules. Moreso because frequently you'd be allowed to do stuff like count cards remaining in decks/stacks/stocks/etc so clearly they intended for you to have some info but not all of it.
It typical adds absolutely nothing to the strategy, just an extra, unnecessary headache of mental hoop jumps before you can do any actual strategizing.
It doesn't solve any AP mathing issues because there's always at least one person who's going to insist on doing that. They're just going to take longer now as they try to recall from memory, or work out a wider range of X where horded token values are hidden. You either match that and give yourself a headache and waste more time, or you concede the advantage to players who do.
There are some games where imperfect memory is properly baked into the design, but WAY too many games just use it as a lazy band-aid solution for their weak design's gang up on the leader problem.
I guess the one advantage to it is that it lets some people feel artificially superior and snarkily look down on others?
Well shit, why else would we play these things
+1
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
edited February 2022
Yeah my group just does the simple "if it used to be public it still is" houserule and the "you can look at your discard or draw pile any time, just shuffle the draw pile afterwards and don't do it often enough that it delays the game" houserule.
Specifically in 2019 Dune or whatever those fixes are broken-ish, but my group was never going to start playing 2019 Dune on weeknights
Edit: Though i don't mind actual memory match as long as it's pure. Hide stuff then later grab stuff squirrel game was fun, even if i was very bad at it.
Hey folks, I'm trying to do some house-cleaning and (a minuscule amount of) downsizing, and I've got some board games that I don't want anymore. Does anyone want to take these off my hands? For free, I'll ship 'em to you, if the shipping is under $20 I'll cover it.
All but one of these have been opened and handled to some degree or another, but for the most part are in "good" to "excellent" condition, I can take photos if you're interested.
Alchemists - Note that (1) my copy is missing 2 of those little plastic translucent cubes that are used as counters (it was like that out of the box), and (2) part of the charm of this game is that you install an app on your phone to take a photo of ingredients and tell you what potion they make; the game and app are from 2014, so who knows how well it works now. The good news is that instead of the app, you can sit a dedicated person down with a special chart to fill this role.
EDIT: Alchemists, Thunderstone Quest, Descent 1, and Descent 2 have been claimed! King of New York - ironically, the one that is still in completely mint condition - is still up for grabs! We are packing for a move, please rescue me from having to pack more boxes!
...I guess I'd still have to pack more boxes, to ship these things out, but you know what I mean
EDIT 2: All gone! I ended up putting King of New York outside with a sign saying "free", and it was gone in like 15 minutes. I hope someone gets a kick out of doing monster-stomping, and it's not just someone grabbing it to resell since it was still shrink-wrapped (although honestly, even if someone did, good for them, can't turn our noses up at the hustle in this day and age).
Delduwath is awesome and my games showed up today! Apparently we live close enough to get overnight shipping without paying for it. Looking forward to getting these to the table!
This is more games expecting you to forget, and people who cheat with their ‘paying attention’ and ‘counting’ and ‘remembering’.
My groups are always more than willing to indulge the expectation to be clueless, distracted and senile so I’ve never found it to be an issue.
I guess the one advantage to it is that it lets some people feel artificially superior and snarkily look down on others?
I don’t know where you saw superiority in an ‘I R Dum’ joke (which slayed I’ll have you know, count those sweet 4 awesomes) but I promise you no condescension was meant.
Anyway, after the SU&SD review I leapt on ‘The ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ Initiative’, partly amazed I could find stock after a SU&SD review and also because of the strong recommend for it as a game to engage kids.
And let me tell you they weren’t wrong! Gameplay wise it’s a very simple co-op (so far) but two games in, the meta game code breaking and ongoing story have my girls (10 and 8) hooked hard. This is especially great as the 8yo usually isn’t too interested in board games so gets a bit left out when the rest of the family play.
A bunch of experienced gamer adults would probably find it all a bit simple but playing it along with the family and stepping back to let them make the discoveries is pretty magic.
Anyway, after the SU&SD review I leapt on ‘The ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ Initiative’, partly amazed I could find stock after a SU&SD review and also because of the strong recommend for it as a game to engage kids.
And let me tell you they weren’t wrong! Gameplay wise it’s a very simple co-op (so far) but two games in, the meta game code breaking and ongoing story have my girls (10 and 8) hooked hard. This is especially great as the 8yo usually isn’t too interested in board games so gets a bit left out when the rest of the family play.
A bunch of experienced gamer adults would probably find it all a bit simple but playing it along with the family and stepping back to let them make the discoveries is pretty magic.
Haven't watched the SUSD review yet but this game has been on my radar and I'm always a sucker for good games to play with my kids!
Playing Wingspan yesterday with my daughter and she was complaining that I was pulling a SungWon Cho with my whistling duck
and red breasted nuthatch
I was working every bit of grain out of the bird feeder to feed the whistling duck and then caching the rest on my nuthatch.
I was feeling pretty smug until she beat me 88 to 80 because she played a bald eagle and a purple gallenule among others plus got 14 points on the bonus card that gives 2 points for every rodent-eater.
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
+6
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I was feeling pretty smug until she beat me 88 to 80 because she played a bald eagle and a purple gallenule among others plus got 14 points on the bonus card that gives 2 points for every rodent-eater.
My friends and I tell an old tabletop wargaming story like a parable.
I was playing a casual game with a friend of mine. I was playing a hard control caster and set up a web of anti-ranged defense, movement debuffs, counter-charges. An elaborate web of tricks and traps.
My opponent starts his turn, thinks for a few minutes, and then teleports some guys in and punches me in the face until I die.
I was feeling pretty smug until she beat me 88 to 80 because she played a bald eagle and a purple gallenule among others plus got 14 points on the bonus card that gives 2 points for every rodent-eater.
My friends and I tell an old tabletop wargaming story like a parable.
I was playing a casual game with a friend of mine. I was playing a hard control caster and set up a web of anti-ranged defense, movement debuffs, counter-charges. An elaborate web of tricks and traps.
My opponent starts his turn, thinks for a few minutes, and then teleports some guys in and punches me in the face until I die.
I was feeling pretty smug until she beat me 88 to 80 because she played a bald eagle and a purple gallenule among others plus got 14 points on the bonus card that gives 2 points for every rodent-eater.
My friends and I tell an old tabletop wargaming story like a parable.
I was playing a casual game with a friend of mine. I was playing a hard control caster and set up a web of anti-ranged defense, movement debuffs, counter-charges. An elaborate web of tricks and traps.
My opponent starts his turn, thinks for a few minutes, and then teleports some guys in and punches me in the face until I die.
ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
I played a few games of Regicide with a friend this week. It's cute, and solid enough for a 52-card-deck design, but I do feel it has slightly limited appeal. Don't get me wrong, if you know the rules it's a more engaging game than solitaire, and I also think that when you know the rules the art themes in the deck are really appreciable, but I can't fathom actually buying a copy of the game unless you were a collector of playing card decks.
Anyway, it's effectively a free game, so I do recommend anyone with even a passing curiosity check it out.
I played a few games of Regicide with a friend this week. It's cute, and solid enough for a 52-card-deck design, but I do feel it has slightly limited appeal. Don't get me wrong, if you know the rules it's a more engaging game than solitaire, and I also think that when you know the rules the art themes in the deck are really appreciable, but I can't fathom actually buying a copy of the game unless you were a collector of playing card decks.
Anyway, it's effectively a free game, so I do recommend anyone with even a passing curiosity check it out.
I printed out the rules to take with me as a travel game. Looking forward to playing it.
The family freaked out when cracking a code lead to finding a sheet of additional rules under a false bottom to the game box. It was amazing to see.
I’m currently smugly silently sitting on the fact that I’ve noticed the game board is clearly double thick with a seal around the edge and presumably has secrets inside. That one’s going to blow their minds.
The family freaked out when cracking a code lead to finding a sheet of additional rules under a false bottom to the game box. It was amazing to see.
I’m currently smugly silently sitting on the fact that I’ve noticed the game board is clearly double thick with a seal around the edge and presumably has secrets inside. That one’s going to blow their minds.
It's amazing how often that first thing 1) is used and 2) almost always works. I'm super suspicious of it now and it still catches me occasionally. The most recent was a James Bond-style Unlock! adventure.
That second one, though? That's just fuckin' devious.
They're pretty much an exact copy of the Sherlock Files games. You get a deck of cards with clues, everyone either plays one face up or discards face down on their turn if they think it's relevant or not to the case, then you solve it at the end.
The tradeoff is that there's only one case (as opposed to the 3 in each Sherlock files box), but it's more detailed and structured. The deck has an exact order to it. There's a linear progress to the case, as periodically throughout the deck you'll run into "Plot Twist" clues that add more insight. You also don't lose points for irrelevant clues played face up. Instead, each clue has a number on it and you cannot play that clue face up until there are that number of cards in the discard pile. So you'll be unable to reveal more clues until you start chucking some away. I like this more than Sherlock Files' method of penalizing you for playing irrelevant clues, because often you couldn't tell which were important or not for the first half.
So, for the same price as a Sherlock Files box, you're getting a significantly better constructed 60 minute case, but only one. Decide what you will about that tradeoff.
Think they'll get all the movie killers? Probably as individual expansions.
Cool seeing the hooks work.
The article I read said no. There's a standard version that has about half of the DBD-original survivors and killers, and a "collector's edition" that will have all of the DBD-original survivors and killers through Trickster. Neither version will have any licensed stuff.
Think they'll get all the movie killers? Probably as individual expansions.
Cool seeing the hooks work.
The article I read said no. There's a standard version that has about half of the DBD-original survivors and killers, and a "collector's edition" that will have all of the DBD-original survivors and killers through Trickster. Neither version will have any licensed stuff.
They're doing a conversation about it on the L99 Discord, they just mentioned that they want to keep the project simple and there's two tiers: 50 for the standard and 100 for the Collector's. And the Collector's will be all-in, and there won't be add-ons beyond that.
Average play time is around 45 minutes.
PMAvers on
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Posts
Don't own that one.
Thanks, Google! x_x
We borrowed it from my sister in law weeks ago. I'll have to make sure to get it back to her and into the box.
I'd say you should smuggle it inside another package, but it could easily get lost. Unlike a load of crossbows
On one hand, streamlining the extremely long original (where it was possible to lose in the first turn) could be good.
On the other hand, Rex was a disaster.
One thing I'm not keen on is cutting the factions to 4. Not only that, but they took the 2 most powerful factions, Bueno Gesserit and Emperor (yes, I'm declaring them slightly to massively OP depending on the experience level of the group), and merged them into one. Seemingly they retain the best advantages of both? While all the other factions stick with just their original abilities and nothing new? Also looks like they shrunk the map (which was an indirect buff to Emperor & Gesserit in Rex).
I strongly disliked it. All of the problems with overpowered alliances were present in the printed rules, so they made a bunch of errata which seemed clunky to me. It's a very long game with poor fun management. Seems strictly better than Rex as long as you pay careful attention to the errata.
I also loathe games that make memory match a meaningful part of the game, and this one has a single faction that can take notes and sell access to them as part of the balance.
Games of memory is one of my pet peeve mechanics. The most prevalent are the "public scoring/resource handout, hidden stockpile" mechanics. Every handout of points or money is public information, yet it becomes hidden immediately after and you're not allowing to know everyone's total. You COULD know, if you had perfect memory or wrote stuff down, but come the fuck on.
If it's that much of an annoyance to you just house rule that it's open information and ditch the player screens or whatever. It's group dependent on how annoying the end result will be
My preference is for just enough unknown fuzz to be added to the system to make this complaint obsolete. For example, in Keyflower you can see the meeple colors that everyone is acquiring, but in setup you start with a random assortment of a few. This makes it impossible to know exactly how much anyone has, but you can have a rough idea that "Alice is hoarding all the reds" or whatever.
One of my favorite games, Sons of Anarchy, uses a mechanic like this. How many guns, "contraband," and money you have is hidden. At the end of the game, money is the only thing that counts towards victory, but the others can be sold to help increase money. However, there is a mechanic that kind of requires the resources to be hidden: Blind bidding. The game is full of mechanics where you blind bid against the other players. If resources were public knowledge, that would be impossible to do. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe there is also trading/bribing. So there's enough in the mix that no one can perfectly track where everyone else is, especially in higher player count games.
My groups are always more than willing to indulge the expectation to be clueless, distracted and senile so I’ve never found it to be an issue.
I know it's just as easy to house rule "fuck that noise" and I'm more than happy to do so, but it always bothered me that they defaulted to those rules. Moreso because frequently you'd be allowed to do stuff like count cards remaining in decks/stacks/stocks/etc so clearly they intended for you to have some info but not all of it.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
It doesn't solve any AP mathing issues because there's always at least one person who's going to insist on doing that. They're just going to take longer now as they try to recall from memory, or work out a wider range of X where horded token values are hidden. You either match that and give yourself a headache and waste more time, or you concede the advantage to players who do.
There are some games where imperfect memory is properly baked into the design, but WAY too many games just use it as a lazy band-aid solution for their weak design's gang up on the leader problem.
I guess the one advantage to it is that it lets some people feel artificially superior and snarkily look down on others?
Well shit, why else would we play these things
Specifically in 2019 Dune or whatever those fixes are broken-ish, but my group was never going to start playing 2019 Dune on weeknights
Edit: Though i don't mind actual memory match as long as it's pure. Hide stuff then later grab stuff squirrel game was fun, even if i was very bad at it.
Delduwath is awesome and my games showed up today! Apparently we live close enough to get overnight shipping without paying for it. Looking forward to getting these to the table!
I don’t know where you saw superiority in an ‘I R Dum’ joke (which slayed I’ll have you know, count those sweet 4 awesomes) but I promise you no condescension was meant.
And let me tell you they weren’t wrong! Gameplay wise it’s a very simple co-op (so far) but two games in, the meta game code breaking and ongoing story have my girls (10 and 8) hooked hard. This is especially great as the 8yo usually isn’t too interested in board games so gets a bit left out when the rest of the family play.
A bunch of experienced gamer adults would probably find it all a bit simple but playing it along with the family and stepping back to let them make the discoveries is pretty magic.
Haven't watched the SUSD review yet but this game has been on my radar and I'm always a sucker for good games to play with my kids!
I can't believe I let it intimidate me. It is short.
and red breasted nuthatch
I was working every bit of grain out of the bird feeder to feed the whistling duck and then caching the rest on my nuthatch.
I was feeling pretty smug until she beat me 88 to 80 because she played a bald eagle and a purple gallenule among others plus got 14 points on the bonus card that gives 2 points for every rodent-eater.
My friends and I tell an old tabletop wargaming story like a parable.
I was playing a casual game with a friend of mine. I was playing a hard control caster and set up a web of anti-ranged defense, movement debuffs, counter-charges. An elaborate web of tricks and traps.
My opponent starts his turn, thinks for a few minutes, and then teleports some guys in and punches me in the face until I die.
We refer to it as the Riddler moment:
Hordes?
eKrueger vs. High Reclaimer.
Anyway, it's effectively a free game, so I do recommend anyone with even a passing curiosity check it out.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I printed out the rules to take with me as a travel game. Looking forward to playing it.
I’m currently smugly silently sitting on the fact that I’ve noticed the game board is clearly double thick with a seal around the edge and presumably has secrets inside. That one’s going to blow their minds.
It's amazing how often that first thing 1) is used and 2) almost always works. I'm super suspicious of it now and it still catches me occasionally. The most recent was a James Bond-style Unlock! adventure.
That second one, though? That's just fuckin' devious.
They're pretty much an exact copy of the Sherlock Files games. You get a deck of cards with clues, everyone either plays one face up or discards face down on their turn if they think it's relevant or not to the case, then you solve it at the end.
The tradeoff is that there's only one case (as opposed to the 3 in each Sherlock files box), but it's more detailed and structured. The deck has an exact order to it. There's a linear progress to the case, as periodically throughout the deck you'll run into "Plot Twist" clues that add more insight. You also don't lose points for irrelevant clues played face up. Instead, each clue has a number on it and you cannot play that clue face up until there are that number of cards in the discard pile. So you'll be unable to reveal more clues until you start chucking some away. I like this more than Sherlock Files' method of penalizing you for playing irrelevant clues, because often you couldn't tell which were important or not for the first half.
So, for the same price as a Sherlock Files box, you're getting a significantly better constructed 60 minute case, but only one. Decide what you will about that tradeoff.
Huh, I can’t say I saw this coming, but in retrospect makes sense.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
There's a free POD game called the Gates of Fog or something, a pretty good fan game from what I've heard.
This looks hella weird but ima be all in see if i ain't
Cool seeing the hooks work.
Wonder how it will compare to Final Girl gameplay wise.
The article I read said no. There's a standard version that has about half of the DBD-original survivors and killers, and a "collector's edition" that will have all of the DBD-original survivors and killers through Trickster. Neither version will have any licensed stuff.
They're doing a conversation about it on the L99 Discord, they just mentioned that they want to keep the project simple and there's two tiers: 50 for the standard and 100 for the Collector's. And the Collector's will be all-in, and there won't be add-ons beyond that.
Average play time is around 45 minutes.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch