I dusted off The Voyages of Marco Polo. Before playing this, emphasize to players that this is not Ticket to Ride and their route objectives should not be a priority.
If anyone that has Gloomhaven needs another player, I can join up via Tabletop Simulator. There's plenty of mods to pick from to get most of the pieces and all you gotta do is read off the scenario.
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, as I heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
Aldo on
0
KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, as I heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
It's a fun game with the right group, and the sheer variety in races and abilities can make for some great shenanigans. I wouldn't ever call it one of the best games out there though. Not even close.
Cosmic Encounter requires players to be willing to win as a team and also betray that team at the last moment. But that is essential to maintain forward momentum.
+1
mysticjuicer[he/him] I'm a muscle wizardand I cast P U N C HRegistered Userregular
Yeah, Cosmic Encounter seems like it either kills or it's a total wash, depending on the group. I don't really dig on it.
Just for a counterpoint one of my groups loves Cosmic above all other things and I had to twist their arms to play Great Western Trail or Sidereal Confluence instead.
The lack of supplies plus the massive epidemic spike? Unless you somehow managed to beeline for the exploration of South America and draw the Lima search card real early, it seems enormously difficult.
Even with the big bonus, we drew ZERO SUPPLY CARDS for two games, which was devastating.
With permanent research centers and havens that would be like 20 supplies. Especially useful after the big influx. But no, we got hosed.
I'm really leery of inoculation, as it seems like it could be the poisoned apple here, but it seems necessary to win at this point.
We've lost three in a row going into the second half of April. I really hope we win this one and don't open the consolation box. Ugh.
I dusted off The Voyages of Marco Polo. Before playing this, emphasize to players that this is not Ticket to Ride and their route objectives should not be a priority.
The routes are important though... 20-25 points is nontrivial, plus plotting your route through the available city actions/bonuses to complement your character choice and overall plan is basically the entire game...
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, asI heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
Where did you hear that? It's a very dated game that isn't far off munchkin in how much it outstays it's welcome once it enters the "everybody is a point from winning" phase
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, asI heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
Where did you hear that? It's a very dated game that isn't far off munchkin in how much it outstays it's welcome once it enters the "everybody is a point from winning" phase
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, asI heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
Where did you hear that? It's a very dated game that isn't far off munchkin in how much it outstays it's welcome once it enters the "everybody is a point from winning" phase
Yeah Quintin from shutupandsitdown is a fan of cosmic encounter (writer of the Eurogamer review). And maybe with the right group it's a great game.
But we had much the same experience with the game. My group is more into cube pushing than munchkin.
The person who bought it from me said that it was a go-to game in his group and he needed a new copy because the owner of their copy was moving away.
It is apparently very hot or miss.
Dirtmuncher on
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, asI heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
Where did you hear that? It's a very dated game that isn't far off munchkin in how much it outstays it's welcome once it enters the "everybody is a point from winning" phase
Surely 7.6 doesn't put it in any of bgg's Top X lists given those are community scores where anything less than seven is bad? Shut up and sit down do have a weird blindness for the game which I presume just comes from nostalgia. When cosmic encounter came out it was the late seventies, the market was sparse so it was relatively fantastic. Nowadays it's anything but.
I don't think criticism of that game is hard to come by at all
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
+1
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
edited January 2018
It's also a favourite of Rab Florence and Tom Vasel, and regularly features in their 'best board games' lists.
I traded my copy away last year; it had been in rotation but waning against other stronger & newer titles. It was never anyone's favourite, but it filled the time when we didn't feel like something else.
That said, I do wonder if the Game of Thrones reflavouring makes the game more palatable.
Eh. 94th on bgg. And I thought we played the 2011 version. But my friend bought the game, hyped us up and then continued to give a bassackward explanation of the rules. We should have played a practise round without any special cards and then we should have looked at a few cards to get a sense of the bullshit we could encounter. Instead we kinda just started playing and had him dive into the rulebook every time he said something was impossible. That annoyed us, which did not help at all. After a short while we all calmed down and in the last 2 rounds we made tactical decisions. Took us like 3 hours to slog through it and only the last 15-30 minutes were enjoyable to me.
So we played some boardgames over the weekend. Agricola came out for the first time having languished in my chest for two years without a sniff of action. It's rep as a hardcore Euro game and the iffiness of the rulebook put me off, but in practice it's quite a nippy affair once you have the rules down (thanks to the various YouTube vids I watched). Four players meant a game of about two and a half hours including rules explanation. It feels like death by a thousand cuts as you get closer to the end and realise there's nowhere near enough time to do all the things you need to do and feed everyone. Good fun.
Quantum remains zippy puzzle fun as people try and work out how to get that one last cube down while everyone else is circling the same few planets and blowing up the ship you need in orbit next turn.
Alien Frontiers is good, but the game ended in a bit of an anti-climax as I played kingmaker by putting my last colony down. To be fair, the player who'd played smartest still won, but time was getting on and people needed to get home. The dice as spaceships thing is a pleasant idea in both games., and the style and iconography of AF remains a genuine pleasure.
We tried to get Trickerion to the table, but the table proved too small once we'd pulled out the board, four character sheets and the three other boards you attach to your character sheet and some tarot sized card decks as well. Maybe next time we do what someone jokingly suggested and play on the floor.
We also played a lot of codenames, at which I was spectacularly bad. "Hot - 2", intended for 'Beach' and I think 'Engine' (engine - fire engine - fire - hot) was instead quite reasonably interpreted as pointing to 'Chick' or 'Spot', because of course it was and why hadn't I noticed those words?
So we played some boardgames over the weekend. Agricola came out for the first time having languished in my chest for two years without a sniff of action. It's rep as a hardcore Euro game and the iffiness of the rulebook put me off, but in practice it's quite a nippy affair once you have the rules down (thanks to the various YouTube vids I watched).
That is what makes the original rule book so hilariously bad. Agricola is not a hard game to learn but the standard rule book makes it seem fundamentally impenetrable. I hold that prior to the most recent edition no-one had ever learnt Agricola from scratch by themselves - it has only ever been passed down by oral tradition in an unbroken line leading back to Uwe Rosenberg.
The rule book from the most recent edition is a quantum leap improvement over the old.
We also played a lot of codenames, at which I was spectacularly bad. "Hot - 2", intended for 'Beach' and I think 'Engine' (engine - fire engine - fire - hot) was instead quite reasonably interpreted as pointing to 'Chick' or 'Spot', because of course it was and why hadn't I noticed those words?
Metal-4 with fucking copper on the board for the other team was the highlight for me
We also played a lot of codenames, at which I was spectacularly bad. "Hot - 2", intended for 'Beach' and I think 'Engine' (engine - fire engine - fire - hot) was instead quite reasonably interpreted as pointing to 'Chick' or 'Spot', because of course it was and why hadn't I noticed those words?
And pants
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I've been through the rules for Empires of the Void II (the pdf on the website is out of date, it was how things stood during the kickstarter which was much rougher)
I suppose technically it is a 4X, although it's one that doesn't focus on building up empires and armies. Instead it's about gaining influence with native species and performing cargo runs for them. It's more like Star Trek I suppose.
There's a really neat system where the game clock is a deck of cards that you draw from to do things and you put in one event per planet at the start. So each game something will happen on each planet at some point but you don't know what or when.
I really have no memory of backing it, but luckily it does seem like it has its own niche. Hurray
Hopefully one day I'll play it
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
+1
mysticjuicer[he/him] I'm a muscle wizardand I cast P U N C HRegistered Userregular
And that's why Codenames is among the fucking best. It's one of the best "oh my god, remember when" generators I've played.
Played 2 back to back 3p games of Forbidden Stars last night. The first one was a bit anticlimactic as I kinda snuck in a win in round 3, so we set back up and played again. Went the full 8 rounds, at the end of which two people had claimed enough objectives to win so it went to the tiebreak. Man that game is full of crunchy decisions and really interesting design. The order token system makes placing 4 tokens on the map the crunchiest puzzle I've run into in a while, as you try to figure out which and in what order you need to put them down in and where/when everyone else is going to place theirs. You stack them face down in each sector in order they're placed, and then they resolve top down, so the timing of when you place a thing is just as important as what you place. Even just talking about it now is getting me hyped back up.
Tldr, if you aren't put off by direct conflict and you have 2 other people who would play a 3 hour long extremely intense direct conflict game with you you should seek out a copy of Forbidden Stars asap, as it's OOP and copies are getting scarcer all the time. it's sooo good!
Cosmic Encounter suffered from a confused explanation and frustrated players. We started to enjoy it more after we learned what the base rules were. Then the end dragged on as we started to approach it like poker and played more conservatively and started to block each other more and more.
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, asI heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
Where did you hear that? It's a very dated game that isn't far off munchkin in how much it outstays it's welcome once it enters the "everybody is a point from winning" phase
I think comparing it to Munchkin is crazy. Cosmic Encounters doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to dog pile on leaders and can have multiple winners. A game of Cosmic where everyone is one point from winning should be over if a few turns tops.
+4
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Played 2 back to back 3p games of Forbidden Stars last night. The first one was a bit anticlimactic as I kinda snuck in a win in round 3, so we set back up and played again. Went the full 8 rounds, at the end of which two people had claimed enough objectives to win so it went to the tiebreak. Man that game is full of crunchy decisions and really interesting design. The order token system makes placing 4 tokens on the map the crunchiest puzzle I've run into in a while, as you try to figure out which and in what order you need to put them down in and where/when everyone else is going to place theirs. You stack them face down in each sector in order they're placed, and then they resolve top down, so the timing of when you place a thing is just as important as what you place. Even just talking about it now is getting me hyped back up.
Tldr, if you aren't put off by direct conflict and you have 2 other people who would play a 3 hour long extremely intense direct conflict game with you you should seek out a copy of Forbidden Stars asap, as it's OOP and copies are getting scarcer all the time. it's sooo good!
It's screaming out for an expansion that will never happen. So sad
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Re: Cosmic Encounter talk, the game should also not be played with fewer than 4 players.
I have a soft spot for Cosmic and still enjoy a couple rounds from time to time, but I won't deny that has more to do with nostalgia and historical significance. IIRC, the original version is slightly older than I am which is absolutely ancient in terms of modern boardgaming. The hobby has come a long way since then, but a lot of that evolution came from Cosmic's influence on designers.
AC:NH Chris from Glosta SW-5173-3598-2899 DA-4749-1014-4697 @vyolynce@mastodon.social
Eh. 94th on bgg. And I thought we played the 2011 version. But my friend bought the game, hyped us up and then continued to give a bassackward explanation of the rules. We should have played a practise round without any special cards and then we should have looked at a few cards to get a sense of the bullshit we could encounter. Instead we kinda just started playing and had him dive into the rulebook every time he said something was impossible. That annoyed us, which did not help at all. After a short while we all calmed down and in the last 2 rounds we made tactical decisions. Took us like 3 hours to slog through it and only the last 15-30 minutes were enjoyable to me.
Let's not be judging things by their BGG rating now! Hansa Teutonica is currently ranked 102, Galaxy Trucker is 123, "strictly inferior Race for the Galaxy" is 5, basically the people voting on BGG are deeply disconnected from reality is what I'm saying
(I forgive anyone who loves Terraforming Mars but its' not the 5th best game!)
We played with 4. My friend just texted we missed one rule from the fineprint that stipulated you could only have 10 flare cards in the draw deck. We used ALL the cards...
I mean, it’s neat to look at but it’s all deeply subjective both in terms of taste in games and what rating a game 7.5 means to someone (for some people it means the game is pretty good, for some that means a game is garbage.)
There is only one game in the top 10 on BGG that I personally really like, and just 3 in the top 20. It’s all relative.
Eh. 94th on bgg. And I thought we played the 2011 version. But my friend bought the game, hyped us up and then continued to give a bassackward explanation of the rules. We should have played a practise round without any special cards and then we should have looked at a few cards to get a sense of the bullshit we could encounter. Instead we kinda just started playing and had him dive into the rulebook every time he said something was impossible. That annoyed us, which did not help at all. After a short while we all calmed down and in the last 2 rounds we made tactical decisions. Took us like 3 hours to slog through it and only the last 15-30 minutes were enjoyable to me.
Let's not be judging things by their BGG rating now! Hansa Teutonica is currently ranked 102, Galaxy Trucker is 123, "strictly inferior Race for the Galaxy" is 5, basically the people voting on BGG are deeply disconnected from reality is what I'm saying
(I forgive anyone who loves Terraforming Mars but its' not the 5th best game!)
BGG ranking is more about popularity I guess. It all comes down to personal taste and the tastes of your group. I bought the scythe collectors edition (HYPE) and it has seen 5 plays at most. In my opinion agricola is easier to teach and score than scythe and I rather play that.
Edit:But then 8 and 15 isn't such a big difference in ranking...
Dirtmuncher on
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
And that's why Codenames is among the fucking best. It's one of the best "oh my god, remember when" generators I've played.
I had a word or two on the board that made me think "Political intrigue", but the only word I could think of was Deepthroat - 2. Turns out they instead went for every remotely sexual word on the board instead.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
When you give a weird clue and they get it perfect. It is amazing. And then you give a super obvious clue and they go straight for the assassin, which isn't even related to the clue!
+3
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
when the other team comes from behind and gets 5 when you have one left
and the clue was barely related to the last word and the guesser went through the exact same tortuous chain of links the cluegiver did
Posts
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
All in all I can't imagine ever wanting to play this game again. Very sad, as I heard that this is supposed to be one of the best games currently out there.
It's a fun game with the right group, and the sheer variety in races and abilities can make for some great shenanigans. I wouldn't ever call it one of the best games out there though. Not even close.
The lack of supplies plus the massive epidemic spike? Unless you somehow managed to beeline for the exploration of South America and draw the Lima search card real early, it seems enormously difficult.
Even with the big bonus, we drew ZERO SUPPLY CARDS for two games, which was devastating.
With permanent research centers and havens that would be like 20 supplies. Especially useful after the big influx. But no, we got hosed.
I'm really leery of inoculation, as it seems like it could be the poisoned apple here, but it seems necessary to win at this point.
We've lost three in a row going into the second half of April. I really hope we win this one and don't open the consolation box. Ugh.
The routes are important though... 20-25 points is nontrivial, plus plotting your route through the available city actions/bonuses to complement your character choice and overall plan is basically the entire game...
Yeah Quintin from shutupandsitdown is a fan of cosmic encounter (writer of the Eurogamer review). And maybe with the right group it's a great game.
But we had much the same experience with the game. My group is more into cube pushing than munchkin.
The person who bought it from me said that it was a go-to game in his group and he needed a new copy because the owner of their copy was moving away.
It is apparently very hot or miss.
Surely 7.6 doesn't put it in any of bgg's Top X lists given those are community scores where anything less than seven is bad? Shut up and sit down do have a weird blindness for the game which I presume just comes from nostalgia. When cosmic encounter came out it was the late seventies, the market was sparse so it was relatively fantastic. Nowadays it's anything but.
I don't think criticism of that game is hard to come by at all
I traded my copy away last year; it had been in rotation but waning against other stronger & newer titles. It was never anyone's favourite, but it filled the time when we didn't feel like something else.
That said, I do wonder if the Game of Thrones reflavouring makes the game more palatable.
Quantum remains zippy puzzle fun as people try and work out how to get that one last cube down while everyone else is circling the same few planets and blowing up the ship you need in orbit next turn.
Alien Frontiers is good, but the game ended in a bit of an anti-climax as I played kingmaker by putting my last colony down. To be fair, the player who'd played smartest still won, but time was getting on and people needed to get home. The dice as spaceships thing is a pleasant idea in both games., and the style and iconography of AF remains a genuine pleasure.
We tried to get Trickerion to the table, but the table proved too small once we'd pulled out the board, four character sheets and the three other boards you attach to your character sheet and some tarot sized card decks as well. Maybe next time we do what someone jokingly suggested and play on the floor.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
That is what makes the original rule book so hilariously bad. Agricola is not a hard game to learn but the standard rule book makes it seem fundamentally impenetrable. I hold that prior to the most recent edition no-one had ever learnt Agricola from scratch by themselves - it has only ever been passed down by oral tradition in an unbroken line leading back to Uwe Rosenberg.
The rule book from the most recent edition is a quantum leap improvement over the old.
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.
Metal-4 with fucking copper on the board for the other team was the highlight for me
@Rhesus Positive
And pants
...
Wait, that's a terrible defence
I suppose technically it is a 4X, although it's one that doesn't focus on building up empires and armies. Instead it's about gaining influence with native species and performing cargo runs for them. It's more like Star Trek I suppose.
There's a really neat system where the game clock is a deck of cards that you draw from to do things and you put in one event per planet at the start. So each game something will happen on each planet at some point but you don't know what or when.
I really have no memory of backing it, but luckily it does seem like it has its own niche. Hurray
Hopefully one day I'll play it
Tldr, if you aren't put off by direct conflict and you have 2 other people who would play a 3 hour long extremely intense direct conflict game with you you should seek out a copy of Forbidden Stars asap, as it's OOP and copies are getting scarcer all the time. it's sooo good!
Words were something like space, planet, lab, and I can't remember what else, but it was all fairly obvious to me.
I gave the clue, and immediately my friend goes, "I got this." Then plants his finger, without any further discussion, on mole.
I about lost it before he explained Avogadro constant and then I remembered and felt so blind that I didn't see it. And then we lost next turn or two.
I think comparing it to Munchkin is crazy. Cosmic Encounters doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to dog pile on leaders and can have multiple winners. A game of Cosmic where everyone is one point from winning should be over if a few turns tops.
It's screaming out for an expansion that will never happen. So sad
I think all it really needs a fifth faction
The only way this could be better is if ‘mole’ was also the assassin. Oh my god I’m WHEEZING!
I have a soft spot for Cosmic and still enjoy a couple rounds from time to time, but I won't deny that has more to do with nostalgia and historical significance. IIRC, the original version is slightly older than I am which is absolutely ancient in terms of modern boardgaming. The hobby has come a long way since then, but a lot of that evolution came from Cosmic's influence on designers.
Our eyes selectively does not read those words until after you have spoken the words you thought would be perfect.
Let's not be judging things by their BGG rating now! Hansa Teutonica is currently ranked 102, Galaxy Trucker is 123, "strictly inferior Race for the Galaxy" is 5, basically the people voting on BGG are deeply disconnected from reality is what I'm saying
(I forgive anyone who loves Terraforming Mars but its' not the 5th best game!)
I guess I will give the game another chance.
There is only one game in the top 10 on BGG that I personally really like, and just 3 in the top 20. It’s all relative.
BGG ranking is more about popularity I guess. It all comes down to personal taste and the tastes of your group. I bought the scythe collectors edition (HYPE) and it has seen 5 plays at most. In my opinion agricola is easier to teach and score than scythe and I rather play that.
Edit:But then 8 and 15 isn't such a big difference in ranking...
I had a word or two on the board that made me think "Political intrigue", but the only word I could think of was Deepthroat - 2. Turns out they instead went for every remotely sexual word on the board instead.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
and the clue was barely related to the last word and the guesser went through the exact same tortuous chain of links the cluegiver did