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Definitely Concordia, or alternately Archipelago.
It's not that bad when you get into it. Bid for tiles, place them, do worker placement stuff.
Really want to play it again now, it's so great.
So we replaced the hot spot mechanic with the new Tragic Events fire advancement. It was fantastic!
So in Flash Point, if you're not familiar, at the end of your turn you roll dice (d6 and d8) which correspond to a coordinate on the map where smoke appears. If there's fire adjacent, the smoke turns to fire. If there's already smoke on that space, it turns to fire. If there's fire, there's an explosion, and if there's a hot spot (the initial 3 starting locations, and potentially more depending on the difficulty you're playing), you roll again for a second smoke.
It sounds complicated now typing it out, but it's not when you're playing.
The new Tragic Events decks replace the hot spots and adjust how the end of your turn goes. Now, instead of just rolling the dice you flip the top card of the fire deck. Depending on your group and difficulty, there are different numbers of starting cards, but for last night we played with 10 regular and once Accelerate. If a regular fire advance card is flipped, you just roll the dice and proceed as normal. No big deal.
However, if an Accelerate card is drawn, you roll twice for two locations with new smoke (or worse if there's something already there), then you add a Flare Up card to the deck, then draw an event card, then you shuffle everything in the fire deck back together and start from the top again.
Now the event deck has some interesting stuff in it. A couple of the cards we got were; "Did you hear footsteps", which had you increase your POI (potential object of interest - usually people to save) from 3 to 5. Another was a POI token that was actually explosives. Another caused all the exterior doors to shut. Another made the deck gun from the fire truck not work.
The Flare Up cards give the player who just finished their turn two extra actions next turn, but then cause you to draw an event, and flip over another fire card potentially causing a lot more fire to happen.
It really does make the game much more interesting, and keeps you from getting too far ahead of the fire if things are going well and making the game boring and easy. We got back to back accelerate cards once, and there was so much smoke and fire on the board. We still won, but I expected that since we were playing on easy and with new players. Next time? Definitely going to run the more difficult setup.
If direct trading with other players was mentioned it might also have been Sidereal Confluence.
I mean, it's not a great game, but I would still probably use it to introduce somebody coming into the hobby cold
dominion and code names are also decent intros, maybe
dominion isn't much more complicated than catan but all of the mechanics will be new to somebody new to the hobby
same with 7 wonders - it's too light for me to really enjoy but still maybe too heavy for some intro situations
It's an old Feld game but feels quite different than anything else I've played by him. Essentially you have a set number of turns with a known series of bad things happening at the beginning of each turn. You have to deal with the bad things and try to score points while doing so. The rules are easy to pick up and it's quite an interesting game, though if you don't like punishing games it might not be one to go for.
But save a few for Lefty too
For me, one of the things that really blew my mind was there are dice but rolling those dice does not move you along a number of spaces. It's why I mentioned in the past that Machi Koro is a good intro game (Even though it lacks many other features and isn't actually very good)
I don't think 7 Wonders would be the best intro as a lot of starting to play that game is turning through the reference to try and find what the random collection of arcane symbols means
It's really the worst thing I think of Catan and something I think can sour it to using it as a gateway game, going a turn or longer with getting no or few resources so you can't do much of anything on your turn.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
There's probably non-terrible options too
but before that dynamic formed, there was one guy who kept reading the win condition card list and giruign out what everyone was going for and he would always win over people playing more casually
i really don't like having game mechanics that benefit from extreme calculation and hypothetical note taking
we often houserule games on our first playthrough to make private information that was once public stay public
Somebody super needed to explain to that guy about colonialism and racism.
If you don't get a resource from the dice roll, you gain a new resource (coconuts for example). You can trade 3 coconuts for any resource of your choosing.
Except they aren't lazy, they're in the process of revolt and they get stronger if you treat them like shit. That's why you lose, because they drive your lazy, cruel, white, imperialist ass off the island. That's hardly racist.
But colonialism it definitely is and that can be a pretty upsetting subject to play a game about, understandably. Mombasa is the same, but at least they call that out in the rule book and give people a link to read up on more of how awful it really was.
There is some meta involved on the USA map after a while, but other maps help with that, but its not as blatant as secure North America, Venezuela, Iceland, and Kamchatka and then win in Risk.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Base game is great with 3, seafarers is solid with 4.
Especially using the tournament start rules (that I swear were official but I can’t find them anymore and maybe they were a 3rd edition thing?) it’s a fun, fast game. My crew gets 3 player catan done in under 60 minutes and 4 player in under 90.
I hear about 3 hour games of Catan and I am baffled. I hear a lot of players refusing to trade. And of course the game is going to suck then, you can make any game suck by refusing to engage with it.
War of the Rings is not a bad game because the Shadow Player can refuse to ever attack. It just means the SP is breaking the social contract of the boardgame he is playing.
That just ends up with the player who had the best starting position winning after an extra long game.
Steam: Spawnbroker
Final Fantasy XIV: Spawn Broken
I want to thank everyone who mentioned Sidereal Confluence. Although availability in Europe is bad it still showed up at my door today.
I am looking forward to playing!!!
I had a euro VP point hole in the 6-9 player range that 7 wonders doesn't quite fill, partly because I dislike multiplayer solitaire. Cube trading century: spice route went over excellently. But has a lot of downtime with 4+ ap prown players. It might replace century at the 4-5 player spot.
Even 90 minutes seems bad
The bad rap is deserved though. Not getting to do anything on your turn is rubbish. Not getting to do anything on several turns in a row is poor design
He's not a gateway player. We've played all sorts of things with him, he just really loves Catan. But no one else in the gaming group likes it.
I really like the idea of Archipelago but it's long and kinda busted. The lead player has zero incentive to contribute to crises because there is no gamer on earth who would rather lose by themselves than tank the game for everyone.
That said, puppies, your group seems to have a chronic issue with perverse incentives
HYPE!
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
PSN:pablocampy
Man excessive downtime is not a complaint I've ever heard levied at spice road. If they chew over that game so much be sure you use timed trading phases in Sideareal or else you'll be at it for a thousand years.
But save a few for Lefty too
Yeah we are less devoted to winning than some. It makes for great games of blood rage and TI but it's an occasional problem in Inis. Obviously it makes no difference in worker placement games.
1. Gloomhaven
2. Guards of Atlantis
3. Sidereal Confluence
4. Spirit Island
5. Azul
6. The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31
7. Codenames: Duet
8. Civilization: A New Dawn
9. Aeon’s End: War Eternal
10. Quest for El Dorado
Late additions that should probably be on there: Battle for Rokugan (played for the first time yesterday, it's amazing) and Charterstone (five games in and digging it a lot).
Would be interested to hear other favourites for the year.
Potion Explosion
Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
Survive! Space Attack
Captain Sonar
Flash Point: Tragic Events (even though it was only once, it really does improve on the game)
Did the first two scenarios from Dunwich, and holy shit.
On the other scenario, we were at down to literally the last action possible where we got the Alchemist bomb off to actually kill the Experiment. Thankfully glad I pumped a bunch of shots into it via Roland's pistol earlier.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Archipelago is the only game I can think of where I almost think I'd have more fun just doing away with the objectives and end trigger, and just playing to see what happens until we run out of components and.. just tell stories about our game?
There are six cut out houses. One's all wood, the other's a thatch roof cottage, one's made of red brick, and.... the rest of the three are nearly identically colored and styled blue-gray houses, differing only slightly in the doors. It's all visually unbalanced. See here.
Would prefer something newish - ie from the past couple of years otherwise we probably already own it. Level of complexity isn't much of an issue?
Any thoughts or things I may've missed? I'm a bit out of the recent gaming loop.
Do you have any other guidelines at all? There are a lot of games...
But save a few for Lefty too
Century spice route. Fun and goes up to 5 but plays really well at 2 also.
Any tips? On teaching this, plus how to grok the latter two roles?
(Note: I also have just gotten Keyflower, plus some of the other guys wants to play Concordia, so the next session kinda sounds crowded in terms of brain energy required...)