Met up with a new group tonight to play root for the first time, swept 2-0. First with a VP victory as the birds and then with a dominance victory with the cats.
I’ve still got it!
We should be meeting up on Monday to play with the expansion factions.
Hey I just won a game of Root tonight as well
The vagabond coalitioned with me, the alliance, and I got him to feed me enough cards to get a 10 point jump on the last turn, so we both won
A lot of Root's expansions are modular, and a new Kickstarter wave is starting to hit that was developed at least somewhat with competitive/tournament play in mind. Also fan input.
tzeentchlingDoctor of RocksOaklandRegistered Userregular
edited May 2022
I played and won a bunch of games at a con this weekend! This included Architects of the West Kingdoms in a 6-player game with the Works of Wonder expansion - which I had never played at all before, so beginner's luck maybe? - as well as an 8-player, massive game of Sidereal Confluence. I don't know why large trading games can be so enjoyable for me, but (especially when people are actually making trades and not being misers) I really get a kick out of them.
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
edited June 2022
Wait, what? I didn't even realize the game used an app... My store got it in and the theming seemed cool, but I need to back off big Kickstarters, so I waited. But if there is no ETA on a required app, WTF?
Edit: Huh. Kickstarter comments say there's a prototype web app floating out there, there's some between generation tool also floating out there.. but the main stuff isn't coming until the Android/iOS pages launch. Come on, Renegade, you are better than this...
My Viticulture and Brass: Birmingham upgrade kits came in today. I think I need to stop buying new games and instead purchase more upgrades for games I love, especially because this is such a tactile hobby. The 3D-printed trains, boats, buildings, and upgrades look so good. This is dangerous, too, though. Etsy in particular has so damn much.
How about you all? Any favorite upgrades you've purchased?
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
My Viticulture and Brass: Birmingham upgrade kits came in today. I think I need to stop buying new games and instead purchase more upgrades for games I love, especially because this is such a tactile hobby. The 3D-printed trains, boats, buildings, and upgrades look so good. This is dangerous, too, though. Etsy in particular has so damn much.
How about you all? Any favorite upgrades you've purchased?
I bought metal coins and got laser cut wooden shields that I painted up for King's Dilemma, along with a 5" Infinity Gauntlet bottle opener to take the place of the leader token, and a friend brought an actual gavel for the tie breaker. It made the game that much cooler.
Also for super popular games there are YouTube music playlists tailored to them. It adds a nice bit of ambience.
My Viticulture and Brass: Birmingham upgrade kits came in today. I think I need to stop buying new games and instead purchase more upgrades for games I love, especially because this is such a tactile hobby. The 3D-printed trains, boats, buildings, and upgrades look so good. This is dangerous, too, though. Etsy in particular has so damn much.
How about you all? Any favorite upgrades you've purchased?
I really like the D&Deeples I got for Lords of Waterdeep. Big upgrade over the cubes.
Relatedly, there's a gamefound campaign going for the uber-collection of Castles of Burgundy. Thick boards with cutouts, thick tiles, 3D-printed castles, metal coins, playmat, all the expansions, 60+ player boards. I mean, I enjoy me some Castles and there was a time when I was playing it at least once a week, but all that just feels like too much. Not exactly cheap, either, but they have already hit their funding goals!
Nemesis: Lockdown digital edition just released on Steam.
WELL???
I'm thinking of refunding it and holding out of Nemesis Distress instead. But at 14.99, I'll probably keep it. I can feel the love they put into the production.
Production values and aesthetics are top notch (the music is a homage to the first Alien movie)! But not only is multiplayer barely functioning, there are no AI players and the original Solo mode is your only single player option, which might be a reality of the complex amount of options in play.
It has a Discord so playing multiplayer should not be an issue, but I think I will enjoy Nemesis Distress more. I dislike being murdered by RNG in games like Panedmic.
BGG has some incredible acrylic chips for Quacks of Quedlinburg. It's a legit game changer, way sturdier than the cardboard it comes with and there's just something so immensely satisfying about clacking them around in your bag while drawing em out
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
Wait, what? I didn't even realize the game used an app... My store got it in and the theming seemed cool, but I need to back off big Kickstarters, so I waited. But if there is no ETA on a required app, WTF?
Edit: Huh. Kickstarter comments say there's a prototype web app floating out there, there's some between generation tool also floating out there.. but the main stuff isn't coming until the Android/iOS pages launch. Come on, Renegade, you are better than this...
Yeah, it uses an app for, I guess, replayability? It's basically a worker-placement game and the "town map" of places you can send your workers is in a spiral-bound book of maps. The rulebook contains rules for all the core gameplay elements but then there are 3 additional, sealed scenario boxes. If the app existed you'd pick the number of players and one of the 3 scenario boxes, then it would lead you through additional setup and rules based on it. Each turn you'd hit a button in the app and it would do story stuff and tell you if you're supposed to pull out more components from the scenario box or change town maps or whatever. The scenarios are each supposed to have branching storylines with multiple endings, all controlled and narrated by the app.
I'd be a lot less salty about it if there were a non-branching introductory game walkthrough available on the website, or even a notice on their website explaining why the app isn't available and indicating when it will be. I assume there's some sort of existing script or prototype utility out there somewhere since there are so many streamers with reviews of the game. I couldn't find the prototype app in my brief, frantic googling yesterday before we gave up and played a different game and if the game is physically in people's hands - and especially if stores are starting to stock it via their kickstarter pledges - they need to do a better job of informing people. If I had bought the game at the FLGS I sure as hell wouldn't think to go look at the kickstarter comments to figure out whether I can play it.
So instead of that we tried out Planet Unknown last night. It's a tile-placement game themed around planetary exploration. You've got a lazy susan with differently-shaped planet tiles in stacks, each with 2 terrain types. The stacks are in an outer ring of 5-square pieces in various tetris-like shapes and then an inner ring of 2- to 4-square pieces. On each player turn they rotate the thing so that their pointer (and each other player's) is pointing at one pair of stacks, then everybody has to pick one from the two they're pointing at. So you've got options for helping yourself or screwing someone else. The inner ring can be rotated independently before game setup to vary which outer ring bin matches up with which inner ring bin between games, and there's two-sided boards to give you either uniform planets and player powers or asymmetrical ones. We played the symmetrical game without the optional event deck and it was pretty good. The usual sort of constrained tile placement puzzles at hand, along with a set of advancement tracks that give you both end-game VP and during-game player powers/bonuses. You get a set of little rover minis that drive around your board as you place their associated terrain type, collecting bonus point pods and cleaning up meteorites which would otherwise prevent you scoring points at the end of the game. I don't know that I'd be in a rush to go buy it if I'd played someone else's copy but I'd play it again and try out some of the asymmetric stuff and/or optional content. It's a pretty solid lighter game, which is more than I can say for a lot of lighter kickstarter-resultant games I've tried. And there's no app involved, so that scored it some points last night.
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
Dunno about "cool" since Athenor mentioned his store has it in stock and for sale. It's one thing for backers of the project to fall out of the loop on updates, but another thing entirely for a product to be available at retail. And if we go with the rationality that they have this product via the available "Retailer Pledge" level, I would hope that Renegade went out of their way to try and contact retailers (who I wouldn't expect to follow a campaign's post-run messaging nearly to the same degree as individual backers) to make sure there was clear communication specifically to retailers that the game shouldn't actually be sold yet, or provide SOMETHING in retailer boxes to indicate the status of the game. I'm not going deep into the updates, but I'd be pretty cautious about calling the situation reasonable.
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
Dunno about "cool" since Athenor mentioned his store has it in stock and for sale. It's one thing for backers of the project to fall out of the loop on updates, but another thing entirely for a product to be available at retail. And if we go with the rationality that they have this product via the available "Retailer Pledge" level, I would hope that Renegade went out of their way to try and contact retailers (who I wouldn't expect to follow a campaign's post-run messaging nearly to the same degree as individual backers) to make sure there was clear communication specifically to retailers that the game shouldn't actually be sold yet, or provide SOMETHING in retailer boxes to indicate the status of the game. I'm not going deep into the updates, but I'd be pretty cautious about calling the situation reasonable.
I wouldn't. They could ship all or none. Backers wanted their games now plus they're a really small group that couldn't afford the storage anyway. I'm 100% ok with what they did; it's completely understandable. Backers included retailers so they should have known what was up and if they didn't then they simply weren't doing a very good job with their store.
Frustrating? Sure! But the hostility they're getting from this is ridiculous.
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
I don't follow kickstarter updates. If I notice it's a while past the nominal pledge fulfillment timeline I'll go look and see if I've been ghosted, but for the most part I back something and then I check out until I have it in my hands. If they shipped out the game despite it not being playable because of backer outrage, okay, I get that, but they really should have put a piece of paper in the box saying, "Hey, this isn't playable yet but due to popular demand we've gone ahead and sent it to you. Go to this URL for updates about when the app will be available."
Or, at very minimum the URL in the printed rulebook which claims to be where the app is available should be a page explaining that the app is not yet available, not a 404. I typed it 3 times because I assumed I was fat-fingering it, not that it just doesn't exist at all.
Slapping up a notification page, or just a redirect from the URL to the kickstarter comment explaining things, is like a 10 minute job. There's no excuse for that.
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
Dunno about "cool" since Athenor mentioned his store has it in stock and for sale. It's one thing for backers of the project to fall out of the loop on updates, but another thing entirely for a product to be available at retail. And if we go with the rationality that they have this product via the available "Retailer Pledge" level, I would hope that Renegade went out of their way to try and contact retailers (who I wouldn't expect to follow a campaign's post-run messaging nearly to the same degree as individual backers) to make sure there was clear communication specifically to retailers that the game shouldn't actually be sold yet, or provide SOMETHING in retailer boxes to indicate the status of the game. I'm not going deep into the updates, but I'd be pretty cautious about calling the situation reasonable.
I wouldn't. They could ship all or none. Backers wanted their games now plus they're a really small group that couldn't afford the storage anyway. I'm 100% ok with what they did; it's completely understandable. Backers included retailers so they should have known what was up and if they didn't then they simply weren't doing a very good job with their store.
Frustrating? Sure! But the hostility they're getting from this is ridiculous.
Had my worst boardgame first-time experience ever tonight, including the times I played Killer Bunnies and Fearsome Floors and immediately threw both away afterward.
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
Dunno about "cool" since Athenor mentioned his store has it in stock and for sale. It's one thing for backers of the project to fall out of the loop on updates, but another thing entirely for a product to be available at retail. And if we go with the rationality that they have this product via the available "Retailer Pledge" level, I would hope that Renegade went out of their way to try and contact retailers (who I wouldn't expect to follow a campaign's post-run messaging nearly to the same degree as individual backers) to make sure there was clear communication specifically to retailers that the game shouldn't actually be sold yet, or provide SOMETHING in retailer boxes to indicate the status of the game. I'm not going deep into the updates, but I'd be pretty cautious about calling the situation reasonable.
I wouldn't. They could ship all or none. Backers wanted their games now plus they're a really small group that couldn't afford the storage anyway. I'm 100% ok with what they did; it's completely understandable. Backers included retailers so they should have known what was up and if they didn't then they simply weren't doing a very good job with their store.
Frustrating? Sure! But the hostility they're getting from this is ridiculous.
Even if we take as given that retailers should be keeping up with the kickstarter updates on everything they back at a retailer pledge level for their store, the lack of any kind of messaging on their official website or at the in-box URL is inexcusable. The person who walks into an FLGS and buys the game for, I dunno, probably $150 given that it was $100 on kickstarter, can't be reasonably expected to figure out that the game on the shelf is unplayable based on kickstarter updates.
Also, out of curiosity, I just scrolled through the kickstarter update history: going back to the point where the project was fully funded, none of the update titles contain any indication the game won't be playable on delivery. I assume it's buried in the text somewhere but every one of them is "everything on track" or "fulfillment starting" or other generally-positive-and-routine-sounding headlines.
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Unrelated, I had actually wanted to chime in from our game night yesterday~
Foundations of Rome turned out to be better than our initial impression on tabletop simulator. Don't get me wrong, it's not a $250+ game no matter how nice the plastic buildings are, but it's an enjoyable mid-weight that keeps things pretty breezy. Honestly, while the buildings are genuinely delightful, the thing I realized while playing and was kinda sad about was that I was still just looking at the little placard of what it did. It's pretty enough to try and take in at the end of the game, but it was hard to shake the feeling of how it could just as easily have been cardboard tiles ... "When everything is grand, nothing is." et al ...
Furnace on the other hand seems like smashing value. There is an absolutely fantastic auction mechanism in this game - I hope we see it used again elsewhere, but for now it's exceptionally novel. Everybody gets 4 disks (values 1 through 4) used for bidding on buildings. When bidding, you cannot match an existing bid or place more than one of your bids on the same auction. The kicker is that for any bid you don't win, you get compensated for based on the value of your losing bid. It's such a good tug between winning what you need and losing what you want to lose, and you get so much mileage out of those 4 bids per round. The actual executing your engine part of the game is very "sure, whatever, make things, make points" as everyone puts their heads down for 2 minutes, but it's great how that means the interactive part of the game is where you spend most of your time and energy. The game might not have incredible staying power as the engines are pretty similar from game-to-game, but the low cost of this title makes it pretty easy to get your money's worth out of it.
I can tell you from my year working in a large LGS we absolutely did not track updates on retail backings. We just got them when we got them, pulled special orders, and put them in the system and on the shelves.
We backed a lot of things. And unless a customer asked if we knew when ____ was coming out, there was no time or reason to go check individual status updates
Edit: also I don’t know what circumstances led to a bunch of people demanding they receive a game they wouldn’t be able to play, but honestly sometimes it’s fine not to listen to “fans.”
So I went and read all 28 updates. As of the second-most-recent update the "App Status" section says everything is still on track for it to be ready when the game is shipped. The only point at which it's mentioned the app might not be available when backers received their games are two sentences in the middle of the most recent update, which was sent out on May 23rd. To quote:
With that said, the app is not likely to be available when you receive your game because shipping is beginning this week. But rest assured, it will be ready soon. We will post another update as soon as it is available for download.
That's it. Even the App Status section of that update starts off with how the app is nearly done, burying the lede at the end of the paragraph. There's no update calling out the status of the app beyond that or explaining why it's not done in time for shipment of the game (which was, itself, 4 months later than originally planned due to pandemic delays). I assumed from Magic Pink's description that this was some long, dramatic thing that anyone paying attention to the post-campaign updates would have been well-informed about, but nope. Every update is positive but for those two lines in the middle of the most recent one.
Even if I read kickstarter emails regularly I was on vacation for the week before I tried to play the game that showed up while I was gone and probably would have missed that one. But sure, that's on me for not carefully reading each kickstarter update before trying to play the game.
Who's it on when someone buys the game at the store and can't find that information on the publisher's website or at the URL listed in the rulebook? The store owner? The employee who took it out of the box and plopped it on the shelf? The customer for not thinking to go read through all 28 kickstarter updates instead of visiting the URL in the printed materials?
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
But I think their decision to ship the game even though the app was unfinished is completely reasonable. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to sit on a mountain of boxes and eat volatile shipping costs, assuming they're even capable of that. I doubt these games even pass through a long-term storage warehouse on their way to customers, so that would be a crippling expense.
But the fact that they couldn't remotely finish any version of their app in advance of release is, honestly, fucking embarrassing, and would guarantee I never buy a digital or digital-adjacent product from them again. The fact that they let this happen without sending out very clear ALL CAPS notices to their customers (if not a note stuck to the game itself) is even worse. They fucked up and, it seems, went with the "cover your eyes and hope it goes away" solution.
Edit: also I don’t know what circumstances led to a bunch of people demanding they receive a game they wouldn’t be able to play, but honestly sometimes it’s fine not to listen to “fans.”
Oh I can answer this
Contemporary board game culture is more invested in owning games than in playing them
The industry benefits from this, encourages it, and rewards it
But I think their decision to ship the game even though the app was unfinished is completely reasonable. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to sit on a mountain of boxes and eat volatile shipping costs, assuming they're even capable of that. I doubt these games even pass through a long-term storage warehouse on their way to customers, so that would be a crippling expense.
But the fact that they couldn't remotely finish any version of their app in advance of release is, honestly, fucking embarrassing, and would guarantee I never buy a digital or digital-adjacent product from them again. The fact that they let this happen without sending out very clear ALL CAPS notices to their customers (if not a note stuck to the game itself) is even worse. They fucked up and, it seems, went with the "cover your eyes and hope it goes away" solution.
I’m fine with them shipping it before the app. I’m even fine with them not finishing the app on time. Fuck, I’m fine with them not including any indication that this is the case in the box.
I’d have still been disappointed, but all I’m asking is that the URL in the rule book leads to a page explaining the situation instead of a 404 error.
Edit: also I don’t know what circumstances led to a bunch of people demanding they receive a game they wouldn’t be able to play, but honestly sometimes it’s fine not to listen to “fans.”
Oh I can answer this
Contemporary board game culture is more invested in owning games than in playing them
The industry benefits from this, encourages it, and rewards it
This has been a thing for as long as I've been playing boardgames (the last 30 years).
Back in the late ninties/early noughties as boardgaming got hot the typical number of times a game was played was once before people moved onto their next acquisition (and people would have the gall to make pronouncements about game balance after a single game!)
I would say that there was a trend to "actually playing games a decent amount of times" around the end of the 00s/start of the 2010s (Dominion especially encouraging hundreds, if not thousands of plays but quite a lot of other deep, many replayed games at the time) but we seem to have swing back hard to the "collecting" aspect of the hobby with Kickstarters turbo charging it.
Not replaying games is why I fell off the hobby. That plus the aggressive Kickstarter marketing strategies. Fell off for a couple years.
Luckily I seem to have found a play group that wants to play Root regularly, and a boardgame store that has a monthly Root night, and then I also have a copy on PC. So I am dipping my toes back into the boardgame waters with the idea of playing Root consistently.
I just saw the shut up and sit down video about netrunner in 2022. After being on the fence for 10 years I finally caved and bought the fanmade starter pack.
I hope I can find someone who will play it with me!
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Hey I just won a game of Root tonight as well
The vagabond coalitioned with me, the alliance, and I got him to feed me enough cards to get a 10 point jump on the last turn, so we both won
Root has a lot of expansions these days.
And a pen and paper RPG?!
The RPG hit about 6 months ago, I want to say.
A lot of Root's expansions are modular, and a new Kickstarter wave is starting to hit that was developed at least somewhat with competitive/tournament play in mind. Also fan input.
SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH
I got my Kickstarter box of My Father’s Work over the weekend while out of town. One player didn’t show tonight for Betrayal Legacy so I figure “hey, new 4 player game, 4 players…” So I read the rules ahead of time and set up the game. Game time comes and as I’m getting ready to explain I remember, “oh yeah, we need the app…”
Only there isn’t an app. Nor is there a browser version of the app. Nor is there any means of playing a demo/intro version of the game without the app. It’s just straight-up not playable until the app is released and there isn’t a release date.
The game looks great! The components are awesome. The trays are well-thought-out. The rules are a bit long for a game with an app but the rule book looks nice, is good quality paper, is well-laid-out, and teaches the game well.
But you can’t fucking play it.
At all.
So it’s up on a shelf now and fuck knows if I’ll bother once the app exists.
How the fuck do you - during a pandemic and global supply/logistics shortage - release a physical boardgame but not have even a basic version of the required companion app out simultaneously?
And the rule book has a url in it for the browser version of the app that’s just a fucking 404. For fuck’s sake, at least put up a message saying “blah blah so sorry app not here yet”. It took a table of 4 people googling and searching app stores and downloading the unrelated renegade games app to figure out that, yeah, it doesn’t exist.
So goodbye any good will I might have ever hd for you, renegade games. Fuck you entirely right off.
Edit: Huh. Kickstarter comments say there's a prototype web app floating out there, there's some between generation tool also floating out there.. but the main stuff isn't coming until the Android/iOS pages launch. Come on, Renegade, you are better than this...
WELL???
How about you all? Any favorite upgrades you've purchased?
I bought metal coins and got laser cut wooden shields that I painted up for King's Dilemma, along with a 5" Infinity Gauntlet bottle opener to take the place of the leader token, and a friend brought an actual gavel for the tie breaker. It made the game that much cooler.
Also for super popular games there are YouTube music playlists tailored to them. It adds a nice bit of ambience.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I bought all of this for Viticulture, though not at the same time:
https://www.meeplesource.com/proddetail.php?prod=BGEViticulture (this is what came today)
https://www.meeplesource.com/proddetail.php?prod=ViticultureTuscanyMeeples
https://www.meeplesource.com/proddetail.php?prod=STM304
I really like the screen printed meeples they have for games, but they're pricey!
I really like the D&Deeples I got for Lords of Waterdeep. Big upgrade over the cubes.
Relatedly, there's a gamefound campaign going for the uber-collection of Castles of Burgundy. Thick boards with cutouts, thick tiles, 3D-printed castles, metal coins, playmat, all the expansions, 60+ player boards. I mean, I enjoy me some Castles and there was a time when I was playing it at least once a week, but all that just feels like too much. Not exactly cheap, either, but they have already hit their funding goals!
I'm thinking of refunding it and holding out of Nemesis Distress instead. But at 14.99, I'll probably keep it. I can feel the love they put into the production.
Production values and aesthetics are top notch (the music is a homage to the first Alien movie)! But not only is multiplayer barely functioning, there are no AI players and the original Solo mode is your only single player option, which might be a reality of the complex amount of options in play.
It has a Discord so playing multiplayer should not be an issue, but I think I will enjoy Nemesis Distress more. I dislike being murdered by RNG in games like Panedmic.
No, folks. Renegade wanted to save shipping out the games until the app was done; the backers LOUDLY declared "no just send the games we'll make due". Plus admittedly it saves them a ton of money by not having to pay for storage.
It's been in the updates for QUITE a while. Everything's fine.
Yeah, it uses an app for, I guess, replayability? It's basically a worker-placement game and the "town map" of places you can send your workers is in a spiral-bound book of maps. The rulebook contains rules for all the core gameplay elements but then there are 3 additional, sealed scenario boxes. If the app existed you'd pick the number of players and one of the 3 scenario boxes, then it would lead you through additional setup and rules based on it. Each turn you'd hit a button in the app and it would do story stuff and tell you if you're supposed to pull out more components from the scenario box or change town maps or whatever. The scenarios are each supposed to have branching storylines with multiple endings, all controlled and narrated by the app.
I'd be a lot less salty about it if there were a non-branching introductory game walkthrough available on the website, or even a notice on their website explaining why the app isn't available and indicating when it will be. I assume there's some sort of existing script or prototype utility out there somewhere since there are so many streamers with reviews of the game. I couldn't find the prototype app in my brief, frantic googling yesterday before we gave up and played a different game and if the game is physically in people's hands - and especially if stores are starting to stock it via their kickstarter pledges - they need to do a better job of informing people. If I had bought the game at the FLGS I sure as hell wouldn't think to go look at the kickstarter comments to figure out whether I can play it.
So instead of that we tried out Planet Unknown last night. It's a tile-placement game themed around planetary exploration. You've got a lazy susan with differently-shaped planet tiles in stacks, each with 2 terrain types. The stacks are in an outer ring of 5-square pieces in various tetris-like shapes and then an inner ring of 2- to 4-square pieces. On each player turn they rotate the thing so that their pointer (and each other player's) is pointing at one pair of stacks, then everybody has to pick one from the two they're pointing at. So you've got options for helping yourself or screwing someone else. The inner ring can be rotated independently before game setup to vary which outer ring bin matches up with which inner ring bin between games, and there's two-sided boards to give you either uniform planets and player powers or asymmetrical ones. We played the symmetrical game without the optional event deck and it was pretty good. The usual sort of constrained tile placement puzzles at hand, along with a set of advancement tracks that give you both end-game VP and during-game player powers/bonuses. You get a set of little rover minis that drive around your board as you place their associated terrain type, collecting bonus point pods and cleaning up meteorites which would otherwise prevent you scoring points at the end of the game. I don't know that I'd be in a rush to go buy it if I'd played someone else's copy but I'd play it again and try out some of the asymmetric stuff and/or optional content. It's a pretty solid lighter game, which is more than I can say for a lot of lighter kickstarter-resultant games I've tried. And there's no app involved, so that scored it some points last night.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I wouldn't. They could ship all or none. Backers wanted their games now plus they're a really small group that couldn't afford the storage anyway. I'm 100% ok with what they did; it's completely understandable. Backers included retailers so they should have known what was up and if they didn't then they simply weren't doing a very good job with their store.
Frustrating? Sure! But the hostility they're getting from this is ridiculous.
I don't follow kickstarter updates. If I notice it's a while past the nominal pledge fulfillment timeline I'll go look and see if I've been ghosted, but for the most part I back something and then I check out until I have it in my hands. If they shipped out the game despite it not being playable because of backer outrage, okay, I get that, but they really should have put a piece of paper in the box saying, "Hey, this isn't playable yet but due to popular demand we've gone ahead and sent it to you. Go to this URL for updates about when the app will be available."
Or, at very minimum the URL in the printed rulebook which claims to be where the app is available should be a page explaining that the app is not yet available, not a 404. I typed it 3 times because I assumed I was fat-fingering it, not that it just doesn't exist at all.
Slapping up a notification page, or just a redirect from the URL to the kickstarter comment explaining things, is like a 10 minute job. There's no excuse for that.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Even if we take as given that retailers should be keeping up with the kickstarter updates on everything they back at a retailer pledge level for their store, the lack of any kind of messaging on their official website or at the in-box URL is inexcusable. The person who walks into an FLGS and buys the game for, I dunno, probably $150 given that it was $100 on kickstarter, can't be reasonably expected to figure out that the game on the shelf is unplayable based on kickstarter updates.
Also, out of curiosity, I just scrolled through the kickstarter update history: going back to the point where the project was fully funded, none of the update titles contain any indication the game won't be playable on delivery. I assume it's buried in the text somewhere but every one of them is "everything on track" or "fulfillment starting" or other generally-positive-and-routine-sounding headlines.
Foundations of Rome turned out to be better than our initial impression on tabletop simulator. Don't get me wrong, it's not a $250+ game no matter how nice the plastic buildings are, but it's an enjoyable mid-weight that keeps things pretty breezy. Honestly, while the buildings are genuinely delightful, the thing I realized while playing and was kinda sad about was that I was still just looking at the little placard of what it did. It's pretty enough to try and take in at the end of the game, but it was hard to shake the feeling of how it could just as easily have been cardboard tiles ... "When everything is grand, nothing is." et al ...
Furnace on the other hand seems like smashing value. There is an absolutely fantastic auction mechanism in this game - I hope we see it used again elsewhere, but for now it's exceptionally novel. Everybody gets 4 disks (values 1 through 4) used for bidding on buildings. When bidding, you cannot match an existing bid or place more than one of your bids on the same auction. The kicker is that for any bid you don't win, you get compensated for based on the value of your losing bid. It's such a good tug between winning what you need and losing what you want to lose, and you get so much mileage out of those 4 bids per round. The actual executing your engine part of the game is very "sure, whatever, make things, make points" as everyone puts their heads down for 2 minutes, but it's great how that means the interactive part of the game is where you spend most of your time and energy. The game might not have incredible staying power as the engines are pretty similar from game-to-game, but the low cost of this title makes it pretty easy to get your money's worth out of it.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
We backed a lot of things. And unless a customer asked if we knew when ____ was coming out, there was no time or reason to go check individual status updates
Edit: also I don’t know what circumstances led to a bunch of people demanding they receive a game they wouldn’t be able to play, but honestly sometimes it’s fine not to listen to “fans.”
That seems like it's kinda on you?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Sure.
So I went and read all 28 updates. As of the second-most-recent update the "App Status" section says everything is still on track for it to be ready when the game is shipped. The only point at which it's mentioned the app might not be available when backers received their games are two sentences in the middle of the most recent update, which was sent out on May 23rd. To quote:
That's it. Even the App Status section of that update starts off with how the app is nearly done, burying the lede at the end of the paragraph. There's no update calling out the status of the app beyond that or explaining why it's not done in time for shipment of the game (which was, itself, 4 months later than originally planned due to pandemic delays). I assumed from Magic Pink's description that this was some long, dramatic thing that anyone paying attention to the post-campaign updates would have been well-informed about, but nope. Every update is positive but for those two lines in the middle of the most recent one.
Even if I read kickstarter emails regularly I was on vacation for the week before I tried to play the game that showed up while I was gone and probably would have missed that one. But sure, that's on me for not carefully reading each kickstarter update before trying to play the game.
Who's it on when someone buys the game at the store and can't find that information on the publisher's website or at the URL listed in the rulebook? The store owner? The employee who took it out of the box and plopped it on the shelf? The customer for not thinking to go read through all 28 kickstarter updates instead of visiting the URL in the printed materials?
But I think their decision to ship the game even though the app was unfinished is completely reasonable. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a company to sit on a mountain of boxes and eat volatile shipping costs, assuming they're even capable of that. I doubt these games even pass through a long-term storage warehouse on their way to customers, so that would be a crippling expense.
But the fact that they couldn't remotely finish any version of their app in advance of release is, honestly, fucking embarrassing, and would guarantee I never buy a digital or digital-adjacent product from them again. The fact that they let this happen without sending out very clear ALL CAPS notices to their customers (if not a note stuck to the game itself) is even worse. They fucked up and, it seems, went with the "cover your eyes and hope it goes away" solution.
Oh I can answer this
Contemporary board game culture is more invested in owning games than in playing them
The industry benefits from this, encourages it, and rewards it
I’m fine with them shipping it before the app. I’m even fine with them not finishing the app on time. Fuck, I’m fine with them not including any indication that this is the case in the box.
I’d have still been disappointed, but all I’m asking is that the URL in the rule book leads to a page explaining the situation instead of a 404 error.
This has been a thing for as long as I've been playing boardgames (the last 30 years).
Back in the late ninties/early noughties as boardgaming got hot the typical number of times a game was played was once before people moved onto their next acquisition (and people would have the gall to make pronouncements about game balance after a single game!)
I would say that there was a trend to "actually playing games a decent amount of times" around the end of the 00s/start of the 2010s (Dominion especially encouraging hundreds, if not thousands of plays but quite a lot of other deep, many replayed games at the time) but we seem to have swing back hard to the "collecting" aspect of the hobby with Kickstarters turbo charging it.
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.
Luckily I seem to have found a play group that wants to play Root regularly, and a boardgame store that has a monthly Root night, and then I also have a copy on PC. So I am dipping my toes back into the boardgame waters with the idea of playing Root consistently.
Maladum or something like that
It MUST be Massive Darkness 2!!!
I hope I can find someone who will play it with me!