I snagged the Fallout game from my LGS, who were having a sale on video game-adjacent board games during E3. I'm looking forward to some solitaire time with it.
My weekly group plotted out our schedules, and we figured that we just had too much stuff going on for the next few months (vacations, work, new games) and each new legacy game just adds fuel to the frustration fire. With our stalled-out Seafall game, an ongoing Pathfinder campaign, a few people interested in playing an actual campaign of the Arkham Horror LCG, Pandemic S2... Nothing is going to get done. So, what we've decided is that on days when we can't RPG, some people will play Arkham Horror, and the rest will break out Pandemic S2.
We said "to hell with it" to Seafall and laid out all the unfinished milestones, then opened everything to see how the game ends. We all decided that we were better off having done that.
GNU Terry Pratchett
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
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Well, a combination of moving out and changing tastes. This thread gets first dibs. Shipping prices will vary of course.
Dark Souls: The Board Game - $30.00. (Its okay if you house rule the shit out of it.)
Rising Sun, Amazon Retail: $40.00 (I haven't even played this thing)
Le Havre: $30.00 (Too fiddly for me. Encroaches on why I play Great Western Trail)
Android Mainframe: $5.00 (Unless FFG digitizes, I'm done with LCGs and Android, and that's not meant to sound hostile to FFG, they rock.)
Unknown: $25.00 (I'm picky with co-op games.)
This got buried.
In other news, our group's first game of Hansa Teutonica is incredible. The most bloodthirty in-your-face euro in existence. And it didn't even involve plants.
Can anyone give me a rundown of Pandemic Cthulhu? My gaming group is big Cthulhu nerds and they'd bite at it given the chance. I'm vaguely aware of how pandemic works, but is this any good?
I was unimpressed. It is fine, but didn't seem to work as smoothly as the base game. The components were nice and it may be a hit due to the theme alone for people who aren't absolutely sick of Lovecraft everywhere.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
There's a Trickerion expansion being kick-started!
Stay strong Mojo. You don't need it. Trickerion is good but already a bit fiddly. Hnnng
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
We played a lot of games this time, (there were more groups playing but I joined the games below):
- Azul: I was still doing the late shift at this time, so I just watched with half an eye. Having missed the first part, it took me a while to get it.
- Some cavemen type game whose name I didn't get: typical party game, you have two teams. Each team has a leader and the leader has to use cavemen language to get his team to build the construct he has on his card. Pretty fun. Hitting people with inflatable clubs not optional. Typical party game.
- Conspiracy card game: Seems like it could be fun, but it was too noisy and the person explaining it did not do a very job of it.
- Formula Sadly the mini version (one of the two games I brought), I am pretty much the Max Verstappen of my office; I take too many risks and take myself out of the race, while the more cautious players managed to finish. Always a fun game though.
- Magic Maze: The other game I brought (and actually bought for this night). We started at 22.00 and had to stop at 23.00, but we really enjoyed it. We only made it to scenario 3 (there are multiple scenarios to learn the game, each one adding rules). I do have to tell my colleague that she should not hog the red pawn (during gameplay you may not verbally communicate and can only prod other players to do something by putting the red pawn in front of them). Fun cooperative game, you can quickly pick it up by following the scenarios. Highly recommended.
So I have been going to this boardgame meetup every week and it costs 5$ but then you get a 5$ store credit token. Prices aren't the best but its money already spent. My plan was to save for Twilight Imperium after a few months and then buy it and not have anyone to play it with ever. My totally not a stupid plan has been challenged this week however.
Someone brought Nosfjord and I got a chance to play it. It is a 7 round worker placement game for 1-5 where you run a fishing company. You have 4 or 5 shares of your company which are all worth -1 victory point. The good news is you can sell them for 2 victory points each. The bad news is they can be bought by other players or yourself. When they are bought they are worth 1 victory point, but you have to pay dividends to the stockholders each round... in fish. And you have to pay other people first. There is ship building to increase your catch, buildings to build to give special powers and victory points, and a surprising amount of forest management. To add to replay there are three different decks of buildings to play with.
Now I'm thinking about buying the game that I could play often and with just my wife over the game that I'll likely never play because when will I get a day to play TI? What should I do?
Same system my about-to-close FLGS used. Typically they'd accumulate until I had enough to cash in on something I'd been eyeing but didn't need; Sentinels of the Multiverse mini-expansions and things like that.
Generally in a situation like that you don't want to buy games someone else owns if you can count on them to show up with them; I have two buddies who are chasing Magic Pink's architectural achievements and it's saved me a lot of money.
Man, Pink hasn't been on the forums since early April. Maybe board games boxes as building foundations wasn't such a hot plan after all?
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Can anyone give me a rundown of Pandemic Cthulhu? My gaming group is big Cthulhu nerds and they'd bite at it given the chance. I'm vaguely aware of how pandemic works, but is this any good?
Honestly, it's not bad. I enjoyed it a lot more than I did Iberia, as a comparison point. Ultimately how appealing it is to you is likely a combination of how much Pandemic you've already played (because it's still Pandemic at the end of the day) and how much of a Lovecraft nut you are.
Overall the game plays much faster and is, in some small ways, dumbed down. It plays faster because the board is smaller, the decks are smaller, and it's a fair bit easier to lose. While there are still four regions on the board, there is only one supply of cultists that populates all of them, so you're no longer dealing with things like "we have to reign in yellow." and instead "We need to kill cultists. NOW." Additionally, Shogoths add an actually interesting element to juggle amidst all of this, and serve as the way that players get the game's white-card-equivalent rune cards. Of course encountering shogoths and using rune cards are among the several ways players can wind up rolling a sanity die. Oh, did you think there wasn't sanity in this Cthulhu game? Silly, silly goose ... Your characters can go insane and most change rather dramatically if it happens, so that's cool. Also, if everyone goes insane you lose, so that's cool ... ;P While there's still an Epidemic-equivalent in the game too, the "disease severity track" or whatever it's called is now tied to a collection of old ones cards that get revealed and act like virulent strain effects. Except for everything because there are only cultists. And there are several more things in the game that reveal old ones than just those epidemic cards.
There's even more differences in the games, but hopefully this gives you a better idea of how it might stack up against vanilla Pandemic. I really can't stress how quickly the game plays. There's only 30 cultists to put out, and at a baseline you add 2 to the board every turn. The player deck is smaller so that timer runs out faster too. There are multiple additional ways to lose the game (add a shogoth to the board when there are none in their supply, all players go insane, reveal the final old ones card [it's Cthulhu, Be-Tee-Dubs]) and they added a die on top, so perhaps reasonably for the lore your house of cards can crumble very quickly if the right things go wrong. The production values are high, the price is not.
If you really do like Pandemic and you really do like Lovecraft, it's probably a solid pick-up.
There's a Trickerion expansion being kick-started!
Stay strong Mojo. You don't need it. Trickerion is good but already a bit fiddly. Hnnng
Do you already have the first Trickerion expansion? I really like Trickerion, but that expansion seemed like bolting on a bunch of stuff rather than naturally expanding what you can do in the game, so I never bothered picking it up. Will definitely have to look at this new one anyway. :P
There's a Trickerion expansion being kick-started!
Stay strong Mojo. You don't need it. Trickerion is good but already a bit fiddly. Hnnng
Do you already have the first Trickerion expansion? I really like Trickerion, but that expansion seemed like bolting on a bunch of stuff rather than naturally expanding what you can do in the game, so I never bothered picking it up. Will definitely have to look at this new one anyway. :P
Yeah, I didn't realise there were copies of Trickerion without the dark alley stuff given that it was all on the back of the original components. I was always confused why they kept referring to it as an expansion when it seemed so integral.
The new stuff is very much bolting on a couple of new systems that having looked at I don't feel are needed. The major holes in the game are the set-up/pack away time, and the AP that happens around choosing trick paths.
I'm not backing unless the stretch goals take it somewhere strange and unexpected.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
I think the Dark Alley has always been included in the game. I was talking about the small-box expansion Dahlgaard's Gifts.
As for this new one, I'm sort of tempted because it definitely could be interesting, but also the game is a table-hog already and they added another almost full-sized board!? =_=
Can anyone give me a rundown of Pandemic Cthulhu? My gaming group is big Cthulhu nerds and they'd bite at it given the chance. I'm vaguely aware of how pandemic works, but is this any good?
I'd generally recommend the base game over it, but I think it's a great twist on the formula. If the theme appeals it's quite good. The ongoing effects of the elder gods stacking up is fun (I forget the name of it but there was a similar thing on On The Brink), and the Shoggoths running around are fun. The difficulty definitely stoked from the base game, so if that's an issue for you I guess just be aware. We lost on the second turn once, due to some unfortunate Shoggoth spawning/sanity rolls.
I think the Dark Alley has always been included in the game. I was talking about the small-box expansion Dahlgaard's Gifts.
As for this new one, I'm sort of tempted because it definitely could be interesting, but also the game is a table-hog already and they added another almost full-sized board!? =_=
Ah okay. That stuff was also packed into my copy
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
I think the Dark Alley has always been included in the game. I was talking about the small-box expansion Dahlgaard's Gifts.
As for this new one, I'm sort of tempted because it definitely could be interesting, but also the game is a table-hog already and they added another almost full-sized board!? =_=
Well, a combination of moving out and changing tastes. This thread gets first dibs. Shipping prices will vary of course.
Dark Souls: The Board Game - $30.00. (Its okay if you house rule the shit out of it.)
Rising Sun, Amazon Retail: $40.00 (I haven't even played this thing)
Le Havre: $30.00 (Too fiddly for me. Encroaches on why I play Great Western Trail)
Android Mainframe: $5.00 (Unless FFG digitizes, I'm done with LCGs and Android, and that's not meant to sound hostile to FFG, they rock.)
Unknown: $25.00 (I'm picky with co-op games.)
@Cantido Iβd take Mainframe, as part of my new neverending dumb quest to get a complete Android set
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I think the Dark Alley has always been included in the game. I was talking about the small-box expansion Dahlgaard's Gifts.
As for this new one, I'm sort of tempted because it definitely could be interesting, but also the game is a table-hog already and they added another almost full-sized board!? =_=
Ah okay. That stuff was also packed into my copy
Thoughts? ;P
The two player mode is well implemented, and we would only not use the magician powers if there were 3 new players at the table.
If it's a couple of quid, go for it.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
In some ways I feel like the moment's passed, but I like the comments about gaming advocacy. I'll have to remember to add that to my own labels.
And yeah, it's definitely important to figure out and understand what you like and what you don't. I'm a sucker for Risk games--I have, I think, 6 different versions not counting the one I gave away to some folks, and I appreciate different things about all of them. (The less said about classic Risk, the better.) I also don't have a ton of discretionary income anymore and have probably fallen out of the loop for more modern games, so my library skews about 5-10 years older. I definitely have a few more recent games, but it's not necessarily a lot.
Just to reiterate, though, as someone who is a pretty "serious" board gamer with a focus on strategy games, I've played Pandemic three times and have no interest in it ever seeing the table again.
Unrelated, I picked up Dead of Winter: The Long Night a little while back and still haven't played it. Anyone familiar with it and have any big-picture thoughts?
Ivellius on
Me elsewhere:
Steam, various fora: Ivellius
League of Legends: Doctor Ivellius
Twitch, probably another place or two I forget: LPIvellius
Haven't gotten to do much gaming in the past few months but actually got to play Renegade last night only like a month after it showed up in the mail. It's pretty good! But it suffers from having too many individual rules. They're not hard to remember or terribly complicated, really, but there are just a lot of them. Took us a good hour into it before someone could get through a turn without looking something up. This despite having player sheets with a ton of text and iconography on them.
Haven't gotten to do much gaming in the past few months but actually got to play Renegade last night only like a month after it showed up in the mail. It's pretty good! But it suffers from having too many individual rules. They're not hard to remember or terribly complicated, really, but there are just a lot of them. Took us a good hour into it before someone could get through a turn without looking something up. This despite having player sheets with a ton of text and iconography on them.
I tried playing a couple of scenarios solo, and yeah, there is just a lot of shit to wrap your head around. For a given hand of five fairly basic cards, that are a TON of different ways you can use them. Also the game felt incredibly dry. Maybe it's better with other players?
I went to a friend's house for board game night last weekend, and brought Renegade and Aeon's End with me. The house had Pandemic available as their offering. So our three choices were all cooperative, and we had to choose between Biological Apocalypse, Technological Apocalypse, and Magical Apocalypse. We ended up playing Aeon's End, and were down to 50/50 on whether our player or the nemesis got to take the final turn (we lost).
Aside from the theme differences, I also noticed that between my two games, the choices were "choosing cards to buy is complicated, but playing your turn is straightforward" and "choosing cards to buy is straightforward, but playing your turn is complicated."
Haven't gotten to do much gaming in the past few months but actually got to play Renegade last night only like a month after it showed up in the mail. It's pretty good! But it suffers from having too many individual rules. They're not hard to remember or terribly complicated, really, but there are just a lot of them. Took us a good hour into it before someone could get through a turn without looking something up. This despite having player sheets with a ton of text and iconography on them.
I tried playing a couple of scenarios solo, and yeah, there is just a lot of shit to wrap your head around. For a given hand of five fairly basic cards, that are a TON of different ways you can use them. Also the game felt incredibly dry. Maybe it's better with other players?
There's not a whole lot of flavor in the actual game. I'm fairly certain it was more interesting with a full table than it would have been solo. Solo it'd basically just be a resource optimization thing turn after turn. I haven't looked at the solo rules but unless they change the turns-per-cycle or something it seems like it'd be really difficult trying to meet the countermeasure goals with only one hand of cards per turn to work with. With multiple players you can work together quite a lot in terms of pushing/moving tokens around the board to put people in more advantageous positions on their turns.
Unrelated, I picked up Dead of Winter: The Long Night a little while back and still haven't played it. Anyone familiar with it and have any big-picture thoughts?
I've played Dead of Winter, base game, about 5 or 6 times. My experience was:
First game - I loved it, couldn't believe how cool and slick it was. I loved the theme, how the mechanics and theme tied together, and couldn't wait to play again. Everyone at the table lost.
Second game - Still enjoyed it, but started to be concerned with the intertwining secret objectives / traitor mechanic, and wondering if it was at all winnable. Traitor back stabbed, caused a total game loss, but didn't get their objectives. Everyone lost again.
Third game - Started to see seems in the balancing. The game is already on a super thin razor edge of winnability, and it generally seems that minimal actions once or twice in the game by the traitor can completely tank the efforts. No winners.
Fourth and Fifth game - I'm now at the point where I'll introduce this game to board game newbies because of what a good first impression it makes, but my personal enjoyment of the game is basically null.
As far as The Long Night specifically is concerned, it generally takes the things I like about Dead of Winter (it's pretty easy to teach, it's thematic, it feels very much like a post-apocalypse survival situation), reduces those, and adds more stuff that I don't really like (more fiddly, more systems, less variety unless you add the extra new stuff (which makes it harder to teach for new players)).
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I'm wondering about thinning my collection as I have a few things that I can't see myself bringing to the table again. How do people go about selling their stuff? Or should I just cart it down to a charity shop and be done with it?
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
I'm wondering about thinning my collection as I have a few things that I can't see myself bringing to the table again. How do people go about selling their stuff? Or should I just cart it down to a charity shop and be done with it?
Depends on what you want to get rid of. Cheap stuff you likely wouldn't be able to sell for much? Give it away to friends, family, or a charity shop. Medium to larger games, could be worth selling on BGG or participating in a math trade and getting something for them. You could also try a local board game meetup to see if there's some local interest.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited June 2018
The problem with math trade is that people only run them at the start of the months and I promptly forget about it in the interim. Been trying to list stuff since someone brought it up here a couple of months ago.
Unrelated, I picked up Dead of Winter: The Long Night a little while back and still haven't played it. Anyone familiar with it and have any big-picture thoughts?
I've played Dead of Winter, base game, about 5 or 6 times. My experience was:
First game - I loved it, couldn't believe how cool and slick it was. I loved the theme, how the mechanics and theme tied together, and couldn't wait to play again. Everyone at the table lost.
Second game - Still enjoyed it, but started to be concerned with the intertwining secret objectives / traitor mechanic, and wondering if it was at all winnable. Traitor back stabbed, caused a total game loss, but didn't get their objectives. Everyone lost again.
Third game - Started to see seems in the balancing. The game is already on a super thin razor edge of winnability, and it generally seems that minimal actions once or twice in the game by the traitor can completely tank the efforts. No winners.
Fourth and Fifth game - I'm now at the point where I'll introduce this game to board game newbies because of what a good first impression it makes, but my personal enjoyment of the game is basically null.
As far as The Long Night specifically is concerned, it generally takes the things I like about Dead of Winter (it's pretty easy to teach, it's thematic, it feels very much like a post-apocalypse survival situation), reduces those, and adds more stuff that I don't really like (more fiddly, more systems, less variety unless you add the extra new stuff (which makes it harder to teach for new players)).
I've played a bunch of games of the base Dead of Winter. Haven't played the expansions.
I think the winnability problem is really just down to three factors:
1) there may not be a traitor in any given game - I've never seen a game without a traitor where we lost due to running out of morale
2) the secret objectives for non-traitors are too similar to the ones for traitors
3) traitors who get discovered get new objectives afterward
You can't guess that someone is a traitor based on odd behavior outside of something blatant like someone tanking a crisis because even non-traitors' secret goals are frequently selfish. Because your secret goal changes if you get voted out, the best way to win as a traitor is to act otherwise like a non-traitor until you've completed your objective and (probably around the last turn or two) enact your betrayal. Since you don't know that there's necessarily a traitor in every game, accusing people because they're doing something weird is mostly a bad idea.
The only times I've seen people win the game were when there was no traitor and they had fairly benign secret goals, or when a traitor turbo-fucked the colony on the last turn after being a useful and cooperative member of the team for the entire rest of the game.
That said, I still enjoy the game occasionally. It's the best zombie-themed game I've played and I really enjoy the Crossroads card mechanic. I thought the company was going to do other Crossroads games but instead it's just been DoW expansions
The problem with math trade is that people only run them at the start of the months and I promptly forget about it in the interim. Been trying to list stuff since someone brought it up here a couple of months ago.
Also what are you getting rid of?
I also find it's difficult to get decent value for the trade in math trades. They're also really time consuming.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited June 2018
I've never actually done one, but I can't think of what else to do with Arkham Horror + Dunwich Horror + Lurker at the Door. I need the cabinet space and it would be great to turn them into money or games I'd like to play.
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
@Cantido i really love the expansions for hansa as well
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
I've participated in at least 20 math trades over the years, both when the US/CAN used to ship to each other, and now that it's just domestic, and have done several local-only trades as well. After your first one or two math trades, they go very easily as long as you aren't one of those people listing 50+ games (and even if you are, some are probably repeats you can relist with 1 click). Value is always based on the participants, but as long as you don't mind going through a few cycles you'll probably get something you want out of it. I don't see how that's different from selling - go low to move it quick, or wait and find a more serious party. shrug
But I think it's worth highlighting how well math trades treated me over the years. I wound up getting to try way more games than I ever would have if I was just buying and selling them locally. And I think they also let you try out "hot new items" you otherwise wouldn't because they make for easy trades at solid value.
...
Now I'm curious how many games I currently own that I got from math trades. Hmmmm ...
I've participated in at least 20 math trades over the years, both when the US/CAN used to ship to each other, and now that it's just domestic, and have done several local-only trades as well. After your first one or two math trades, they go very easily as long as you aren't one of those people listing 50+ games (and even if you are, some are probably repeats you can relist with 1 click). Value is always based on the participants, but as long as you don't mind going through a few cycles you'll probably get something you want out of it. I don't see how that's different from selling - go low to move it quick, or wait and find a more serious party. shrug
But I think it's worth highlighting how well math trades treated me over the years. I wound up getting to try way more games than I ever would have if I was just buying and selling them locally. And I think they also let you try out "hot new items" you otherwise wouldn't because they make for easy trades at solid value.
...
Now I'm curious how many games I currently own that I got from math trades. Hmmmm ...
I think I've done nearly as many. My comment about value is like, heavily dependent on how patient/picky you are. If you want a wide variety of crap it's very easy. If you're looking to just cash out via gift card it's extremely hard to get something reasonable after shipping is concerned.
If you're listing it straight up for cash you at least get an idea of if it's valuable or not. Or you can get good results by trolling through bgg's trade finder thing and this tends to be a faster yes or no and you can at least try to haggle or sweeten the pot with a multi game deal.
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StragintDo Not GiftAlways DeclinesRegistered Userregular
Does anyone know anything about Rumbleslam? My friend saw it and we want to play it but can't find a lot of info.
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
What a day! I was waiting all day for my new board game to get delivered and it all came in at the same time. My cousin came over, the delivery person, and the food I had ordered came in at the same time. Perfect.
Thanks to all the suggestions my family played The Forbidden Desert and we all had great fun. There were four of us and while we started on the lowest difficulty we ended up losing big time. We quickly understood how to play, but it seems that we had no real strategy so no going home on a cool airship for us. Despite our defeat the game was a big hit!
We also played a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill and while everyone enjoyed themselves (2 of us maneuvered the rest on how the game works) our haunt was an alien infection one and it soured the experience a bit. The rules on that haunt seem a bit harsh and tedious so one of my family members wanted a mercy kill to get out of the game. We still tried playing all the way to the end, but the traitor ended up winning. Oh well. I had a great time today.
My cousin is going to introduce us to Game of Thrones Risk. I played a version of Risk (I think the original play style?) and didn't like it very much. I hope this turns out to be more exciting.
Armoroc on
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Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
What a day! I was waiting all day for my new board game to get delivered and it all came in at the same time. My cousin came over, the delivery person, and the food I had ordered came in at the same time. Perfect.
Thanks to all the suggestions my family played The Forbidden Desert and we all had great fun. There were four of us and while we started on the lowest difficulty we ended up losing big time. We quickly understood how to play, but it seems that we had no real strategy so no going home on a cool airship for us. Despite our defeat the game was a big hit!
We also played a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill and while everyone enjoyed themselves (2 of us maneuvered the rest on how the game works) our haunt was an alien infection one and it soured the experience a bit. The rules on that haunt seem a bit harsh and tedious so one of my family members wanted a mercy kill to get out of the game. We still tried playing all the way to the end, but the traitor ended up winning. Oh well. I had a great time today.
My cousin is going to introduce us to Game of Thrones Risk. I played a version of Risk (I think the original play style?) and didn't like it very much. I hope this turns out to be more exciting.
Well it's way better than the original, but I think not as good as the legacy version. You may run into further tedium. Hopefully not!
My cousin is going to introduce us to Game of Thrones Risk. I played a version of Risk (I think the original play style?) and didn't like it very much. I hope this turns out to be more exciting.
Almost every version of Risk is better than the base game. Risk: Legacy in particular is very good, but it's expensive and requires a time investment, so I wouldn't recommend it for new people.
Me elsewhere:
Steam, various fora: Ivellius
League of Legends: Doctor Ivellius
Twitch, probably another place or two I forget: LPIvellius
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
So using this pretty nifty guide, I just completed the re-boxed Organ Attack of my brother-in-law, because once sleeved, they no longer fit into the old case. Which was a damn shame, because the OrganAttack box was awesome looking. Anyway:
The top cover had a sad encounter with a wet towel, hence the smudges. Just gonna print a new face to cover that one.
Unrelated, I picked up Dead of Winter: The Long Night a little while back and still haven't played it. Anyone familiar with it and have any big-picture thoughts?
I've played Dead of Winter, base game, about 5 or 6 times.
<snip>
I've played a bunch of games of the base Dead of Winter. Haven't played the expansions.
<snip>
Two things about DoW: first, I always play with the variant where it very likely that there's a traitor. Even if everybody loses, I still like the game better that way.
Second, I think the basic flaws with DoW are pretty well established: the traitor can go twice in certain circumstances, can kill off his own people with basically no repercussions, and searching is like a triple benefit: it makes noise, takes out the best cards, and allows the traitor to fill up the trash. DoW is a game that, for the sake of approachability and game length, is missing that last "layer" of game mechanics, where the players can hold back resources for last-minute mitigation or limiting of traitor actions. BSG is the game infamous for having soul-crushing traitor actions, but ironically it's pretty hard to tank multiple things at once. I would have LOVED a DoW expansion that added this layer, or that contained modules to directly hinder (or aid) the traitor. Like how you can seamlessly add roles in Werewolf to strengthen one side or the other.
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When I was a child, I had a fever... My BoardGameGeek profile
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My weekly group plotted out our schedules, and we figured that we just had too much stuff going on for the next few months (vacations, work, new games) and each new legacy game just adds fuel to the frustration fire. With our stalled-out Seafall game, an ongoing Pathfinder campaign, a few people interested in playing an actual campaign of the Arkham Horror LCG, Pandemic S2... Nothing is going to get done. So, what we've decided is that on days when we can't RPG, some people will play Arkham Horror, and the rest will break out Pandemic S2.
We said "to hell with it" to Seafall and laid out all the unfinished milestones, then opened everything to see how the game ends. We all decided that we were better off having done that.
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This got buried.
In other news, our group's first game of Hansa Teutonica is incredible. The most bloodthirty in-your-face euro in existence. And it didn't even involve plants.
Stay strong Mojo. You don't need it. Trickerion is good but already a bit fiddly. Hnnng
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We played a lot of games this time, (there were more groups playing but I joined the games below):
- Azul: I was still doing the late shift at this time, so I just watched with half an eye. Having missed the first part, it took me a while to get it.
- Some cavemen type game whose name I didn't get: typical party game, you have two teams. Each team has a leader and the leader has to use cavemen language to get his team to build the construct he has on his card. Pretty fun. Hitting people with inflatable clubs not optional. Typical party game.
- Conspiracy card game: Seems like it could be fun, but it was too noisy and the person explaining it did not do a very job of it.
- Formula
- Magic Maze: The other game I brought (and actually bought for this night). We started at 22.00 and had to stop at 23.00, but we really enjoyed it. We only made it to scenario 3 (there are multiple scenarios to learn the game, each one adding rules). I do have to tell my colleague that she should not hog the red pawn (during gameplay you may not verbally communicate and can only prod other players to do something by putting the red pawn in front of them). Fun cooperative game, you can quickly pick it up by following the scenarios. Highly recommended.
Man, Pink hasn't been on the forums since early April. Maybe board games boxes as building foundations wasn't such a hot plan after all?
Overall the game plays much faster and is, in some small ways, dumbed down. It plays faster because the board is smaller, the decks are smaller, and it's a fair bit easier to lose. While there are still four regions on the board, there is only one supply of cultists that populates all of them, so you're no longer dealing with things like "we have to reign in yellow." and instead "We need to kill cultists. NOW." Additionally, Shogoths add an actually interesting element to juggle amidst all of this, and serve as the way that players get the game's white-card-equivalent rune cards. Of course encountering shogoths and using rune cards are among the several ways players can wind up rolling a sanity die. Oh, did you think there wasn't sanity in this Cthulhu game? Silly, silly goose ... Your characters can go insane and most change rather dramatically if it happens, so that's cool. Also, if everyone goes insane you lose, so that's cool ... ;P While there's still an Epidemic-equivalent in the game too, the "disease severity track" or whatever it's called is now tied to a collection of old ones cards that get revealed and act like virulent strain effects. Except for everything because there are only cultists. And there are several more things in the game that reveal old ones than just those epidemic cards.
There's even more differences in the games, but hopefully this gives you a better idea of how it might stack up against vanilla Pandemic. I really can't stress how quickly the game plays. There's only 30 cultists to put out, and at a baseline you add 2 to the board every turn. The player deck is smaller so that timer runs out faster too. There are multiple additional ways to lose the game (add a shogoth to the board when there are none in their supply, all players go insane, reveal the final old ones card [it's Cthulhu, Be-Tee-Dubs]) and they added a die on top, so perhaps reasonably for the lore your house of cards can crumble very quickly if the right things go wrong. The production values are high, the price is not.
If you really do like Pandemic and you really do like Lovecraft, it's probably a solid pick-up.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Yeah, I didn't realise there were copies of Trickerion without the dark alley stuff given that it was all on the back of the original components. I was always confused why they kept referring to it as an expansion when it seemed so integral.
The new stuff is very much bolting on a couple of new systems that having looked at I don't feel are needed. The major holes in the game are the set-up/pack away time, and the AP that happens around choosing trick paths.
I'm not backing unless the stretch goals take it somewhere strange and unexpected.
As for this new one, I'm sort of tempted because it definitely could be interesting, but also the game is a table-hog already and they added another almost full-sized board!? =_=
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I'd generally recommend the base game over it, but I think it's a great twist on the formula. If the theme appeals it's quite good. The ongoing effects of the elder gods stacking up is fun (I forget the name of it but there was a similar thing on On The Brink), and the Shoggoths running around are fun. The difficulty definitely stoked from the base game, so if that's an issue for you I guess just be aware. We lost on the second turn once, due to some unfortunate Shoggoth spawning/sanity rolls.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
@Cantido Iβd take Mainframe, as part of my new neverending dumb quest to get a complete Android set
The two player mode is well implemented, and we would only not use the magician powers if there were 3 new players at the table.
If it's a couple of quid, go for it.
And yeah, it's definitely important to figure out and understand what you like and what you don't. I'm a sucker for Risk games--I have, I think, 6 different versions not counting the one I gave away to some folks, and I appreciate different things about all of them. (The less said about classic Risk, the better.) I also don't have a ton of discretionary income anymore and have probably fallen out of the loop for more modern games, so my library skews about 5-10 years older. I definitely have a few more recent games, but it's not necessarily a lot.
Just to reiterate, though, as someone who is a pretty "serious" board gamer with a focus on strategy games, I've played Pandemic three times and have no interest in it ever seeing the table again.
Unrelated, I picked up Dead of Winter: The Long Night a little while back and still haven't played it. Anyone familiar with it and have any big-picture thoughts?
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I tried playing a couple of scenarios solo, and yeah, there is just a lot of shit to wrap your head around. For a given hand of five fairly basic cards, that are a TON of different ways you can use them. Also the game felt incredibly dry. Maybe it's better with other players?
I went to a friend's house for board game night last weekend, and brought Renegade and Aeon's End with me. The house had Pandemic available as their offering. So our three choices were all cooperative, and we had to choose between Biological Apocalypse, Technological Apocalypse, and Magical Apocalypse. We ended up playing Aeon's End, and were down to 50/50 on whether our player or the nemesis got to take the final turn (we lost).
Aside from the theme differences, I also noticed that between my two games, the choices were "choosing cards to buy is complicated, but playing your turn is straightforward" and "choosing cards to buy is straightforward, but playing your turn is complicated."
There's not a whole lot of flavor in the actual game. I'm fairly certain it was more interesting with a full table than it would have been solo. Solo it'd basically just be a resource optimization thing turn after turn. I haven't looked at the solo rules but unless they change the turns-per-cycle or something it seems like it'd be really difficult trying to meet the countermeasure goals with only one hand of cards per turn to work with. With multiple players you can work together quite a lot in terms of pushing/moving tokens around the board to put people in more advantageous positions on their turns.
I've played Dead of Winter, base game, about 5 or 6 times. My experience was:
First game - I loved it, couldn't believe how cool and slick it was. I loved the theme, how the mechanics and theme tied together, and couldn't wait to play again. Everyone at the table lost.
Second game - Still enjoyed it, but started to be concerned with the intertwining secret objectives / traitor mechanic, and wondering if it was at all winnable. Traitor back stabbed, caused a total game loss, but didn't get their objectives. Everyone lost again.
Third game - Started to see seems in the balancing. The game is already on a super thin razor edge of winnability, and it generally seems that minimal actions once or twice in the game by the traitor can completely tank the efforts. No winners.
Fourth and Fifth game - I'm now at the point where I'll introduce this game to board game newbies because of what a good first impression it makes, but my personal enjoyment of the game is basically null.
As far as The Long Night specifically is concerned, it generally takes the things I like about Dead of Winter (it's pretty easy to teach, it's thematic, it feels very much like a post-apocalypse survival situation), reduces those, and adds more stuff that I don't really like (more fiddly, more systems, less variety unless you add the extra new stuff (which makes it harder to teach for new players)).
Depends on what you want to get rid of. Cheap stuff you likely wouldn't be able to sell for much? Give it away to friends, family, or a charity shop. Medium to larger games, could be worth selling on BGG or participating in a math trade and getting something for them. You could also try a local board game meetup to see if there's some local interest.
Also what are you getting rid of?
I've played a bunch of games of the base Dead of Winter. Haven't played the expansions.
I think the winnability problem is really just down to three factors:
1) there may not be a traitor in any given game - I've never seen a game without a traitor where we lost due to running out of morale
2) the secret objectives for non-traitors are too similar to the ones for traitors
3) traitors who get discovered get new objectives afterward
You can't guess that someone is a traitor based on odd behavior outside of something blatant like someone tanking a crisis because even non-traitors' secret goals are frequently selfish. Because your secret goal changes if you get voted out, the best way to win as a traitor is to act otherwise like a non-traitor until you've completed your objective and (probably around the last turn or two) enact your betrayal. Since you don't know that there's necessarily a traitor in every game, accusing people because they're doing something weird is mostly a bad idea.
The only times I've seen people win the game were when there was no traitor and they had fairly benign secret goals, or when a traitor turbo-fucked the colony on the last turn after being a useful and cooperative member of the team for the entire rest of the game.
That said, I still enjoy the game occasionally. It's the best zombie-themed game I've played and I really enjoy the Crossroads card mechanic. I thought the company was going to do other Crossroads games but instead it's just been DoW expansions
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I also find it's difficult to get decent value for the trade in math trades. They're also really time consuming.
It does seem immensely complicated to setup.
But I think it's worth highlighting how well math trades treated me over the years. I wound up getting to try way more games than I ever would have if I was just buying and selling them locally. And I think they also let you try out "hot new items" you otherwise wouldn't because they make for easy trades at solid value.
...
Now I'm curious how many games I currently own that I got from math trades. Hmmmm ...
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I think I've done nearly as many. My comment about value is like, heavily dependent on how patient/picky you are. If you want a wide variety of crap it's very easy. If you're looking to just cash out via gift card it's extremely hard to get something reasonable after shipping is concerned.
If you're listing it straight up for cash you at least get an idea of if it's valuable or not. Or you can get good results by trolling through bgg's trade finder thing and this tends to be a faster yes or no and you can at least try to haggle or sweeten the pot with a multi game deal.
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I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Thanks to all the suggestions my family played The Forbidden Desert and we all had great fun. There were four of us and while we started on the lowest difficulty we ended up losing big time. We quickly understood how to play, but it seems that we had no real strategy so no going home on a cool airship for us. Despite our defeat the game was a big hit!
We also played a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill and while everyone enjoyed themselves (2 of us maneuvered the rest on how the game works) our haunt was an alien infection one and it soured the experience a bit. The rules on that haunt seem a bit harsh and tedious so one of my family members wanted a mercy kill to get out of the game. We still tried playing all the way to the end, but the traitor ended up winning. Oh well. I had a great time today.
My cousin is going to introduce us to Game of Thrones Risk. I played a version of Risk (I think the original play style?) and didn't like it very much. I hope this turns out to be more exciting.
Well it's way better than the original, but I think not as good as the legacy version. You may run into further tedium. Hopefully not!
Almost every version of Risk is better than the base game. Risk: Legacy in particular is very good, but it's expensive and requires a time investment, so I wouldn't recommend it for new people.
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The top cover had a sad encounter with a wet towel, hence the smudges. Just gonna print a new face to cover that one.
Next project - the Alhambra money color redesign.
There's a used copy available for me locally, so yeah I'm curious about your impression.
EDIT:
Two things about DoW: first, I always play with the variant where it very likely that there's a traitor. Even if everybody loses, I still like the game better that way.
Second, I think the basic flaws with DoW are pretty well established: the traitor can go twice in certain circumstances, can kill off his own people with basically no repercussions, and searching is like a triple benefit: it makes noise, takes out the best cards, and allows the traitor to fill up the trash. DoW is a game that, for the sake of approachability and game length, is missing that last "layer" of game mechanics, where the players can hold back resources for last-minute mitigation or limiting of traitor actions. BSG is the game infamous for having soul-crushing traitor actions, but ironically it's pretty hard to tank multiple things at once. I would have LOVED a DoW expansion that added this layer, or that contained modules to directly hinder (or aid) the traitor. Like how you can seamlessly add roles in Werewolf to strengthen one side or the other.
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