I have to say I wasn't massively overwhelmed by my first Gloomhaven play. It just all felt a bit... bitty? It probably didn't help it was a loss on the opening adventure.
However having spent today marathoning three adventures in a row I see now that it just needs some familiarity to really grow on you and I now feel quite invested in my character and keen for more. Again three wins for three adventures probably helps! And it does seem very good at having you win just as your cards are about to run out.
My guy is now looking at retirement already for needing three specific types of adventure, one of which now played immediately opened up two more qualifying options, but I'm not sure I want him to go so soon. But then the allure of the sealed mystery box is strong...
Are you looking for Crypts? Because that quest doesn't end as soon as you complete the missions...
Scenario 2 feels awful, particularly since it gates any choices you have about where to go. But scenario 1 could also stand to be more welcoming to new players.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Played our first game of Space Base: The Emergence of Shy Pluto. I won't spoil anything, but I do like the new mechanics we've introduced so far, and how they have been handling it. Of course, the player who is REALLY good at making strong economy engines did amazingly well. Had a piece on like 2 that allowed him to charge and eventually get 20 coins. He just ran away with scoring by buying outposts.
Tried The Reckoners, and it was extremely underwhelming.
Based on the series of books about superheroes all being evil and taking over the world as common humans form a resistance against their rule and their evil superman leader (they are totally young adult books though, despite what Tom Vassal says). It's pretty similar to Elder Sign. Instead of museum location cards, you have supervillain cards. Each player does the standard yahtzee roll on their turn, and you do stuff based on the symbols. Defeat the roaming evil superman boss before they kill too many civilians.
All actions just seem so disconnected from the theme. VERY disconnected. It makes Elder Sign look like Mythos Tales. This villain kills a population, boosts the boss' red track, and sets up a barricade. This villain kills a population, sets up a barricade, and boosts the boss' blue track. The boss kills a population and sets up a barricade. No flavor text. All art is only a close up portrait of a character. No art of any locations (each villain space is just a "city"). Every item card is a picture of just the item (why show cool artwork of someone sneaking into someplace wearing the night vision goggles when you can just show the goggles floating in empty space?). Does this evoke the sense of a warzone as cities are flattened by rampaging supermen? The artwork there is...I don't want to say it's technically bad, but it reeks of YA cover art.
We broke the game on our first play. It was so easy, we figured we got some rules wrong. We double checked and we didn't. See one of the die symbols is "planning", which gives you a wildcard token that can be used as any die symbol on a future turn. Not turn a die into any symbol, but an actual additional wildcard result for every token. There's no reason not to always go for them. There is no limit to how many you can store. Imagine banking unlimited wildcards in Elder Sign. It felt trivial delaying the clock until one character saved up enough planning tokens to nuke the boss in one turn.
It's also over $100. I guess overproduced trays have now replaced overproduced minis. Does that screenshot really look like a $120 game to you?
It's also over $100. I guess overproduced trays have now replaced overproduced minis. Does that screenshot really look like a $120 game to you?
I realize the Reckoner trays ain't it, but I appreciate adequately-produced trays. You can really reduce the barrier to setting up and tearing down the game with a well-produced tray.
It's also over $100. I guess overproduced trays have now replaced overproduced minis. Does that screenshot really look like a $120 game to you?
I realize the Reckoner trays ain't it, but I appreciate adequately-produced trays. You can really reduce the barrier to setting up and tearing down the game with a well-produced tray.
Eldritch Horror, The Reckoners aint. There really aren't many components there. No more than Elder Sign.
Speaking of which, I'm halfway through the first Reckoners book and I'm pretty sure I figured out the central mystery. Just wanna throw up this guess to pat myself on the back later.
What is Steelheart's weakness? They spend all the time researching what was in the bank vault. That's going to turn out to be a red herring, and it'll end up being the father admiring him when he pulled the trigger. He'll be a tragic meanie who has to make everyone hate or fear him to not be vulnerable again.
That was my guess in the first hundred pages, and at the halfway point I just reached they found a hidden stash of his own propaganda to intentionally make him seem worse, so that pretty much seals it. The end will probably be Prof or David try to kill him, but realize they can't because they hate him too much. Then Megan will do it and succeed because they had to establish that she thinks he did good, but she's a professional who doesn't let her opinion get in the way of the mission.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
Okay, you guys were right. Villainous is much better than it has any right to be given the under-the-radar presentation and pedigree.
Prince John is basically a cardboard "Come at me, bro!" meme and it's quite an achievement to have managed to create that in what is basically a take-that game and made it fun.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Just two, shakedown runs with me and my wife, her on Malificent the whole time. I gave Captain Hook a try and he seemed kind of easy before we realized the allies get discarded when they remove heroes. Fun, though!
Then I tried out Prince John and didn't look back, because that's just a great deck design.
Just two, shakedown runs with me and my wife, her on Malificent the whole time. I gave Captain Hook a try and he seemed kind of easy before we realized the allies get discarded when they remove heroes. Fun, though!
Then I tried out Prince John and didn't look back, because that's just a great deck design.
I've only played my copy like 3 times but Prince John has a strange weakness: he needs people to attack him. In larger player counts, he can just be ignored and winds up sitting there with an empty jail.
Just two, shakedown runs with me and my wife, her on Malificent the whole time. I gave Captain Hook a try and he seemed kind of easy before we realized the allies get discarded when they remove heroes. Fun, though!
Then I tried out Prince John and didn't look back, because that's just a great deck design.
I've only played my copy like 3 times but Prince John has a strange weakness: he needs people to attack him. In larger player counts, he can just be ignored and winds up sitting there with an empty jail.
Hook's somewhat the same way but at least has own-pile acceleration to fish for Pan, but the same doesn't seem to hold for Maleficient (got it that time!). It's why John has two Bad Stuff spaces for other people, I think - you pretty much have to do what I did in our last game and constrain other people to the point where they can't do anything fun either while you're building towards a wincon that can't be stopped.
It's interesting the degree to which the decks I've looked at depend on finding a key card to really kick in to overdrive, too; the Crown is great, the Raven't great, and Hook has the literally-mandatory map.
E: looking again, everyone's got two, but still - I think you need to basically focus on being obnoxious and fishing for reactive stuff or henchmen to lay out so you're not caught unprepared in the early going.
Auralynx on
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
Prince John and Maleficent has the most visible progress, so they're the easiest targets.
Hook becomes a needed target once Peter Pan appears, BUT he also wants/needs to get Fated before Peter Pan appears.
Queen of Hearts's is also as visible, but a lot more slower, so she doesn't get as much heat.
Jafar and Ursula are possibly the most opaque during the first half of their gameplans. It's also pretty mandatory for them to keep a low profile, since they can't really afford any further slowdowns compared to the rest.
Ursula is so damn slow - she doesn't have as much deck searching as Jafar (Jafar has extra draw with the Scarab, and a spell that quickly digs through your deck for items), so it's important during your first few turns to really dig through your deck and pretty much dump your hand if you don't have anything useful in there.
Yeah I'm 0-2 with Ursula and the games weren't even close; one of the two cards I needed was always buried in my deck. Lost to Malificent (3p) and Hook (wild 6p game; Hook needed to defeat Pan at like 17 strength).
Won the third game with QoH, at least. I think that was 3p again.
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
Anyone gotten a chance to play with the new chars and see how they stack up?
I want to play this game so badly, but our one attempt was with a full table and explaining all the rules ate up so much time that we really weren't close and didn't feel out the mechanics.
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Third game of Arkham Horror 3rd edition went well. There’s really a lot to like about it, including the fact that they finally got less brutal about some aspects (for example, delay now takes one action from you, not your entire turn).
Haven’t lost yet but tonight’s game (in the Cthulhu scenario) was pretty exciting. Three characters died, the board was becoming increasingly unmanageable, but we pulled it out at the end by just dumping every possible reroll and add on into the big bad. He had 18 health, and Tommy hit him with an attack of 3 base strength plus 4 for a weapon, plus 2 for an ally, plus a 4-die lore roll to add an attack spell, plus a 6-die Intervene that got rerolled into a perfect six hits (dumping focus, clues, everything). I shriveled him from the next space over and on the next round we finish him off. It was a very satisfying end to the scenario. Can’t wait to play the last one.
I've played a couple games of Villainous, both at 4 players, and felt that it was enjoyable but went too long, and that the take-that was annoying because it often happens at the expense of doing something to help yourself. I guessed that the game would play much better at 2 players. For those who have played at different counts, does that track?
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CaptainPeacockBoard Game HoarderTop o' the LakeRegistered Userregular
I found that it takes as long as the players let it. Since there isn't a ton of interaction between players, with 4 people you should pretty much have your turn planned out well before it comes back around to you. As long as nobody if fucking around and wasting time, it can go at a pretty good clip. Only time your plans should derail is in one of two situations:
1. Someone fated you
2. Someone just got obviously close to their win condition
Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man's a mushroom, etc.
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jergarmarhollow man crewgoes pew pew pewRegistered Userregular
Sekigahara fans, I know it's good... but how difficult is it to get "up to speed" with a new player? How is the game length in those early games? I'm agonizing over picking up a copy. It will adversely affect my mental health if I get a game I know is good but can't play.
When I was a child, I had a fever... My BoardGameGeek profile
Battle.net: TheGerm#1430 (Hearthstone, Destiny 2)
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
On Friday I played Manifest Destiny and wow, we were debating about Ameritrash a few pages ago, I'd say this game is a good definition. Its area control, all conflicts are solved by rolling dice. Cards are distributed and range in power from forcing yourself to lose money or territory to things like losing half of your area, your money, and your turn. You can't discard cards and you suffer income penalties if you go over your hand size so you can be forced to play cards that only hurt you and help everyone else. Technology is a big part of the game. You research technology by buying a pioneer and then you roll dice because of course. You have to over the course of the game roll specific numbers to unlock the tech. Once one person gets a tech no one else can get it. There are commodities on the board but they only pay out if you use the alternate function of some cards, ignoring the text to make them pay out. They pay out to everyone and because there are so many different types it was almost never worth paying them out in our play. It took 5 hours for the game to finish. The component quality was low, game didn't come with a board, more of a folding map. Luckily I was playing with fun people so we made the best of it. The guy who brought it at one point said "This may not have been as good a game as I remember" and we all laughed. I've loved everything he's brought in other than this so it was pretty surprising to play.
After that we played a quick bluffing game with mercenaries and special cards with a name I can't remember. The goal was to control 5 areas of Italy or 3 contiguous areas. Someone would play a 10 strength card, so they'd be winning, but then you could play Winter, and make all cards worth only one. Your hand didn't refill between rounds though so there was some strategy.
On Saturday I got to play Wingspan which has been the most hyped game in this area since Root. I found it much better than Root although it is a totally different type of game. Engine building game with a great theme and nice art. I'd recommend it and maybe pick up a copy if it was available to pick up at reasonable prices.
After Wingspan we played the "short game" of Feast for Odin which is a brain buster. Worker placement combined with Viking Tetris in a field of -1 Victory Points as far as the eye can see. If you fill up your -1 Victory point ocean, you can buy more islands, huts, houses, etc filled with -1 VP to cover up. You place workers to get you various Tetris pieces to place but only certain colors can get placed, and certain colors can't touch, so you need to upgrade them too. Also you need to spend some of the pieces to feed your vikings although they can just eat your money instead. I never really got the time to Emigrate my vikings (this is massive points) and needed to buy another island to turn my cow into jewelry on but it was fun. Short game lasted 3+ hours with 3 people though. Can't imagine long game with 4 people.
Sekigahara fans, I know it's good... but how difficult is it to get "up to speed" with a new player? How is the game length in those early games? I'm agonizing over picking up a copy. It will adversely affect my mental health if I get a game I know is good but can't play.
I would recommend against buying sekigahara if you don't have someone to play it with already lined up with expressed interest. It's a long 2p war game, and it doesn't play solo.
Sekigahara fans, I know it's good... but how difficult is it to get "up to speed" with a new player? How is the game length in those early games? I'm agonizing over picking up a copy. It will adversely affect my mental health if I get a game I know is good but can't play.
I would recommend against buying sekigahara if you don't have someone to play it with already lined up with expressed interest. It's a long 2p war game, and it doesn't play solo.
Baby, don't go breaking my heart...
When I was a child, I had a fever... My BoardGameGeek profile
Battle.net: TheGerm#1430 (Hearthstone, Destiny 2)
After that we played a quick bluffing game with mercenaries and special cards with a name I can't remember. The goal was to control 5 areas of Italy or 3 contiguous areas. Someone would play a 10 strength card, so they'd be winning, but then you could play Winter, and make all cards worth only one. Your hand didn't refill between rounds though so there was some strategy.
Probably Condettierre (spelling?). The card minigame in Witcher 3 appears to have been based on it, though the standalone version of that game has gotten pretty far away from it.
Sekigahara fans, I know it's good... but how difficult is it to get "up to speed" with a new player? How is the game length in those early games? I'm agonizing over picking up a copy. It will adversely affect my mental health if I get a game I know is good but can't play.
I would recommend against buying sekigahara if you don't have someone to play it with already lined up with expressed interest. It's a long 2p war game, and it doesn't play solo.
Baby, don't go breaking my heart...
I'm all for buying aspirational games as long as you can play them solo too. Sekigahara entirely doesn't work solo though, do unless you have someone on the hook that wants to play a 4 hour long 2p war game you're throwing money in the garbage. It was a hard habit to break myself of, as I have a tendency to get really excited about stuff I will literally never get to the table.
Tried The Reckoners, and it was extremely underwhelming.
Based on the series of books about superheroes all being evil and taking over the world as common humans form a resistance against their rule and their evil superman leader (they are totally young adult books though, despite what Tom Vassal says). It's pretty similar to Elder Sign. Instead of museum location cards, you have supervillain cards. Each player does the standard yahtzee roll on their turn, and you do stuff based on the symbols. Defeat the roaming evil superman boss before they kill too many civilians.
All actions just seem so disconnected from the theme. VERY disconnected. It makes Elder Sign look like Mythos Tales. This villain kills a population, boosts the boss' red track, and sets up a barricade. This villain kills a population, sets up a barricade, and boosts the boss' blue track. The boss kills a population and sets up a barricade. No flavor text. All art is only a close up portrait of a character. No art of any locations (each villain space is just a "city"). Every item card is a picture of just the item (why show cool artwork of someone sneaking into someplace wearing the night vision goggles when you can just show the goggles floating in empty space?). Does this evoke the sense of a warzone as cities are flattened by rampaging supermen? The artwork there is...I don't want to say it's technically bad, but it reeks of YA cover art.
We broke the game on our first play. It was so easy, we figured we got some rules wrong. We double checked and we didn't. See one of the die symbols is "planning", which gives you a wildcard token that can be used as any die symbol on a future turn. Not turn a die into any symbol, but an actual additional wildcard result for every token. There's no reason not to always go for them. There is no limit to how many you can store. Imagine banking unlimited wildcards in Elder Sign. It felt trivial delaying the clock until one character saved up enough planning tokens to nuke the boss in one turn.
It's also over $100. I guess overproduced trays have now replaced overproduced minis. Does that screenshot really look like a $120 game to you?
bleh
I was about to make the same post, too. It was my first real miss in terms of board game purchases. It felt very bland and static, without any real character, either. Hugely disappointed.
At least I finally dove into Terraforming Mars. It was another game I had put off due to its perceived weight, but it wasn't hard to learn at all. I really like it, with one very large asterisk. Throw the player boards out. They're terrible. Disregarding the fact that one bump will kill your entire game, pushing and converting masses of cubes to calculate production and resources is incredibly tedious. People weren't enjoying themselves at all.
I later discovered several production-phase phone apps. The one I downloaded was TM Assistant. It automatically calculates your resources for each generation, and makes it very easy to gain and subtract resources and production. It made all the difference. Not only did it speed things up, but it turned everyone around on the game and we couldn't stop talking about it afterward.
Dashui on
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
Third game of Arkham Horror 3rd edition went well. There’s really a lot to like about it, including the fact that they finally got less brutal about some aspects (for example, delay now takes one action from you, not your entire turn).
Haven’t lost yet but tonight’s game (in the Cthulhu scenario) was pretty exciting. Three characters died, the board was becoming increasingly unmanageable, but we pulled it out at the end by just dumping every possible reroll and add on into the big bad. He had 18 health, and Tommy hit him with an attack of 3 base strength plus 4 for a weapon, plus 2 for an ally, plus a 4-die lore roll to add an attack spell, plus a 6-die Intervene that got rerolled into a perfect six hits (dumping focus, clues, everything). I shriveled him from the next space over and on the next round we finish him off. It was a very satisfying end to the scenario. Can’t wait to play the last one.
Cthulhu is the hardest one. Tommy is tied with Calvin for best investigator. To tweak difficulty, keep in mind Tommy, Calvin, and the singer lady are the strongest while Dexter, Norman, and Rex are the weakest.
I too had fun at first, but I think the replay really falls off hard after the 2nd or 3rd play through of each scenario. You lose the mystery of the codex but you're stuck in the same objective order.
I do like how they reduced a lot of brutal stuff. No more brutal encounters. Encounters now almost always do what the location says. You can improve skills with normal action. No skill impairments (I bet they'll bring them back in an expansion though).
I really think they need to come up with some way of bringing some kind of objective randomizing to the scenarios.
Third game of Arkham Horror 3rd edition went well. There’s really a lot to like about it, including the fact that they finally got less brutal about some aspects (for example, delay now takes one action from you, not your entire turn).
Haven’t lost yet but tonight’s game (in the Cthulhu scenario) was pretty exciting. Three characters died, the board was becoming increasingly unmanageable, but we pulled it out at the end by just dumping every possible reroll and add on into the big bad. He had 18 health, and Tommy hit him with an attack of 3 base strength plus 4 for a weapon, plus 2 for an ally, plus a 4-die lore roll to add an attack spell, plus a 6-die Intervene that got rerolled into a perfect six hits (dumping focus, clues, everything). I shriveled him from the next space over and on the next round we finish him off. It was a very satisfying end to the scenario. Can’t wait to play the last one.
Cthulhu is the hardest one. Tommy is tied with Calvin for best investigator. To tweak difficulty, keep in mind Tommy, Calvin, and the singer lady are the strongest while Dexter, Norman, and Rex are the weakest.
I too had fun at first, but I think the replay really falls off hard after the 2nd or 3rd play through of each scenario. You lose the mystery of the codex but you're stuck in the same objective order.
I do like how they reduced a lot of brutal stuff. No more brutal encounters. Encounters now almost always do what the location says. You can improve skills with normal action. No skill impairments (I bet they'll bring them back in an expansion though).
I really think they need to come up with some way of bringing some kind of objective randomizing to the scenarios.
Personally I find it tough to bring games to the table more than a handful of times, so I appreciate the stronger narrative arc of this one compared to the randomized objectives in Eldritch Horror. But I recognize the replay aspect is important to others.
Those are slightly weird rankings to me, at least in my three plays. Tommy seems on par with at least the gangster. The singer is super good (and helped us win our second play) but died early on against Cthulhu. Rex kicked ass in our 2nd game, in part because that player just did not stop rolling sixes, he almost never failed a test even given Rex’s limitations. I have no idea why Calvin is supposed to be that good but maybe I just don’t understand how he’s meant to be played. I also did very well with Dexter against Cthulhu—took a Dark Pact that brought me from two spells to five and then focused up a bunch, and between Shriveling, Astral Travel, and tomes that gave me +2 when casting or warding, I was a dynamo across the board.
I do think the game doesn’t help you understand the importance of party building enough—you need a spellcaster or two and a fighter or two if you’re going to be basically competent, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you might have a hard time with either doom or monsters.
But overall I think it has a really good flow. I like especially that the clock is more relaxed, unlike in other FFG versions where a deck will run out or a track will advance more or less automatically.
I picked up a second-hand copy of Tokaido a couple of weeks back for 30% off the list price and got a chance to play it this weekend. It's a pretty fun and relaxing game and after the various scoring options were explained was able to be played without too many issues with 4 people, 2 of which were boardgame novices. The two of us who were more experienced with boardgames both noted that the scoring system felt a lot like SushiGo. We also noticed that the different characters could have a pretty big impact on the strategies and that certain ones could actually make things easier for the other players. One suggestion that was made is that the Orphan's ability be changed so they could select any meal for free from the stack that is drawn when they arrive at an inn rather than allowing them to draw an extra card and then if they want to instead purchase a card from the default draw pile. This means that ability doesn't help everyone else as much since you aren't providing effectively adding 1 card to the inn meal pool.
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
One suggestion that was made is that the Orphan's ability be changed so they could select any meal for free from the stack that is drawn when they arrive at an inn rather than allowing them to draw an extra card and then if they want to instead purchase a card from the default draw pile.
Wait, what?
*checks*
Huh, her ability got changed. I distinctly remember her old ability being "Draw the top card from the meal deck and she gets that for free, and if she can't eat it, discard that card and she has to buy a meal normally"
Third game of Arkham Horror 3rd edition went well. There’s really a lot to like about it, including the fact that they finally got less brutal about some aspects (for example, delay now takes one action from you, not your entire turn).
Haven’t lost yet but tonight’s game (in the Cthulhu scenario) was pretty exciting. Three characters died, the board was becoming increasingly unmanageable, but we pulled it out at the end by just dumping every possible reroll and add on into the big bad. He had 18 health, and Tommy hit him with an attack of 3 base strength plus 4 for a weapon, plus 2 for an ally, plus a 4-die lore roll to add an attack spell, plus a 6-die Intervene that got rerolled into a perfect six hits (dumping focus, clues, everything). I shriveled him from the next space over and on the next round we finish him off. It was a very satisfying end to the scenario. Can’t wait to play the last one.
Cthulhu is the hardest one. Tommy is tied with Calvin for best investigator. To tweak difficulty, keep in mind Tommy, Calvin, and the singer lady are the strongest while Dexter, Norman, and Rex are the weakest.
I too had fun at first, but I think the replay really falls off hard after the 2nd or 3rd play through of each scenario. You lose the mystery of the codex but you're stuck in the same objective order.
I do like how they reduced a lot of brutal stuff. No more brutal encounters. Encounters now almost always do what the location says. You can improve skills with normal action. No skill impairments (I bet they'll bring them back in an expansion though).
I really think they need to come up with some way of bringing some kind of objective randomizing to the scenarios.
Personally I find it tough to bring games to the table more than a handful of times, so I appreciate the stronger narrative arc of this one compared to the randomized objectives in Eldritch Horror. But I recognize the replay aspect is important to others.
Those are slightly weird rankings to me, at least in my three plays. Tommy seems on par with at least the gangster. The singer is super good (and helped us win our second play) but died early on against Cthulhu. Rex kicked ass in our 2nd game, in part because that player just did not stop rolling sixes, he almost never failed a test even given Rex’s limitations. I have no idea why Calvin is supposed to be that good but maybe I just don’t understand how he’s meant to be played. I also did very well with Dexter against Cthulhu—took a Dark Pact that brought me from two spells to five and then focused up a bunch, and between Shriveling, Astral Travel, and tomes that gave me +2 when casting or warding, I was a dynamo across the board.
I do think the game doesn’t help you understand the importance of party building enough—you need a spellcaster or two and a fighter or two if you’re going to be basically competent, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you might have a hard time with either doom or monsters.
But overall I think it has a really good flow. I like especially that the clock is more relaxed, unlike in other FFG versions where a deck will run out or a track will advance more or less automatically.
The gangster is almost as good as Tommy, but his low sanity can kill him.
Calvin starts with a +2 strength, +2 ward weapon for 5 dice warding right out of the gate which is great. Then he gets an item that can soak 2/2 damage and recovers 1/1 every reckoning. What really pushes him over the top is his optional card, which really isn't optional at all. You can pay a sanity to reroll any skill check, which is amazing. The downside is it gives you a dark pact, but you can also use the reroll for the dark pact. So you get that amazing reroll ability at the cost of a 1/36 chance of a reckoning triggering a dark pact. It's a no brainer to take it every time (maybe his player didn't take it in your game?). So he gets a weapon to start, amazing warding, regenerating damage soak he can't lose, and a reroll that's basically Rex's ability but without the whole "permanent curse" thing. He's the one strength of Dexter meets a non-crippled Rex right out of the box.
Oh, Rex. An investigator who starts off having to build up just so he can reach the level of a baseline investigator. He's so bad, that if you removed all his text from his character sheet, he would actually be improved. The key thing to note about his reroll is that you have to reroll all the dice. You no longer get your choice like in Eldritch. That's a huge nerf and makes him garbage at anything that requires multiple successes like combat and warding, in a game that's 90% combat and warding.
Dexter stinks because not only is spellcasting overall weak right now, but he's weak even for a spellcaster. The singer and cook are much better. I'm not a fan of characters who rely on spells because not only is the spell deck weak, but you need 3-5 items to become as effective as non-spellcasters are with only 1-2. Plus you're bleeding sanity.
Another change I like: getting rid of the flip mechanic for spells and items. It was an interesting idea in Eldritch and Mansions, but in practice it just become time consuming and tedious.
What I would like to see in future expansions is at least a stab at randomness in scenario objectives, an attempt at an actual board that's nice to look at, , some kind of campaign like the card game, and some tweaks in the more lopsided investigators.
What we'll end up getting is a dozen new separate categories of unique asset deck bloat and impairment tokens
Tokaido is an excellent, easily teachable game and kind of perfect for introducing novice boardgamers. Incredibly simple rule that governs basically everything (last person goes next), beautiful art style, competitive but not massively so and since every move is meaningful (i.e. every spot gets you points, money or an item - if you can afford to buy items) and quick no one feels left out or bored.
Definitely one of the games I put out that has never gotten a thumb down.
mysticjuicer[he/him] I'm a muscle wizardand I cast P U N C HRegistered Userregular
It’s been a while, but my experience with Tokaido with our group was that the painter won handily every time. Not sure if it was a case of misunderstanding a rule somewhere, or the group not adequately dog-piling, or what.
The way we read the rules on the orphan is the first person to arrive at the inn still draws meal cards equal to the number of players +1. The orphan gets to draw the top card from the pile as well, and frequently will take that card. This means that unless the orphan is using the option to purchase a meal from the meal card pile, there are now 2 extra cards available for everyone else to select from instead of 1 extra card. The orphan's ability saves them 1-3 gold, but it also potentially saves other players 1-2 gold as well.
My wife suggested that rather than drawing 2 and choosing one character, everyone just draws 1 character tile and has to play the character you get. Her argument is that it helps balance the field between new players and people who haven't played before while also forcing people who've played a bunch to change up their strategies and not just do the same thing every time. We'll have to try the game out with our more serious boardgame group to see if these houserules are a good idea or not.
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
The way we read the rules on the orphan is the first person to arrive at the inn still draws meal cards equal to the number of players +1. The orphan gets to draw the top card from the pile as well, and frequently will take that card. This means that unless the orphan is using the option to purchase a meal from the meal card pile, there are now 2 extra cards available for everyone else to select from instead of 1 extra card. The orphan's ability saves them 1-3 gold, but it also potentially saves other players 1-2 gold as well.
Ah! We do the same. I mistakenly thought there was a new printing because the online rules says "Satsuki receives one of the available Meal cards at random for free"; it wasn't the wording that I was remembering.
My wife and I really like Tokaido. We have Crossroads and some of it is ok, but it is definitely not something we needed. I could be wrong, but Matsuri doesn't look worthwhile at all.
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
The Crossroads stuff is indeed better than Matsuri, but the new guys seem fun to play.
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Are you looking for Crypts? Because that quest doesn't end as soon as you complete the missions...
Based on the series of books about superheroes all being evil and taking over the world as common humans form a resistance against their rule and their evil superman leader (they are totally young adult books though, despite what Tom Vassal says). It's pretty similar to Elder Sign. Instead of museum location cards, you have supervillain cards. Each player does the standard yahtzee roll on their turn, and you do stuff based on the symbols. Defeat the roaming evil superman boss before they kill too many civilians.
All actions just seem so disconnected from the theme. VERY disconnected. It makes Elder Sign look like Mythos Tales. This villain kills a population, boosts the boss' red track, and sets up a barricade. This villain kills a population, sets up a barricade, and boosts the boss' blue track. The boss kills a population and sets up a barricade. No flavor text. All art is only a close up portrait of a character. No art of any locations (each villain space is just a "city"). Every item card is a picture of just the item (why show cool artwork of someone sneaking into someplace wearing the night vision goggles when you can just show the goggles floating in empty space?). Does this evoke the sense of a warzone as cities are flattened by rampaging supermen? The artwork there is...I don't want to say it's technically bad, but it reeks of YA cover art.
We broke the game on our first play. It was so easy, we figured we got some rules wrong. We double checked and we didn't. See one of the die symbols is "planning", which gives you a wildcard token that can be used as any die symbol on a future turn. Not turn a die into any symbol, but an actual additional wildcard result for every token. There's no reason not to always go for them. There is no limit to how many you can store. Imagine banking unlimited wildcards in Elder Sign. It felt trivial delaying the clock until one character saved up enough planning tokens to nuke the boss in one turn.
It's also over $100. I guess overproduced trays have now replaced overproduced minis. Does that screenshot really look like a $120 game to you?
bleh
I realize the Reckoner trays ain't it, but I appreciate adequately-produced trays. You can really reduce the barrier to setting up and tearing down the game with a well-produced tray.
Eldritch Horror, The Reckoners aint. There really aren't many components there. No more than Elder Sign.
Speaking of which, I'm halfway through the first Reckoners book and I'm pretty sure I figured out the central mystery. Just wanna throw up this guess to pat myself on the back later.
That was my guess in the first hundred pages, and at the halfway point I just reached they found a hidden stash of his own propaganda to intentionally make him seem worse, so that pretty much seals it. The end will probably be Prof or David try to kill him, but realize they can't because they hate him too much. Then Megan will do it and succeed because they had to establish that she thinks he did good, but she's a professional who doesn't let her opinion get in the way of the mission.
Prince John is basically a cardboard "Come at me, bro!" meme and it's quite an achievement to have managed to create that in what is basically a take-that game and made it fun.
Just two, shakedown runs with me and my wife, her on Malificent the whole time. I gave Captain Hook a try and he seemed kind of easy before we realized the allies get discarded when they remove heroes. Fun, though!
Then I tried out Prince John and didn't look back, because that's just a great deck design.
I've only played my copy like 3 times but Prince John has a strange weakness: he needs people to attack him. In larger player counts, he can just be ignored and winds up sitting there with an empty jail.
Hook's somewhat the same way but at least has own-pile acceleration to fish for Pan, but the same doesn't seem to hold for Maleficient (got it that time!). It's why John has two Bad Stuff spaces for other people, I think - you pretty much have to do what I did in our last game and constrain other people to the point where they can't do anything fun either while you're building towards a wincon that can't be stopped.
It's interesting the degree to which the decks I've looked at depend on finding a key card to really kick in to overdrive, too; the Crown is great, the Raven't great, and Hook has the literally-mandatory map.
E: looking again, everyone's got two, but still - I think you need to basically focus on being obnoxious and fishing for reactive stuff or henchmen to lay out so you're not caught unprepared in the early going.
Hook becomes a needed target once Peter Pan appears, BUT he also wants/needs to get Fated before Peter Pan appears.
Queen of Hearts's is also as visible, but a lot more slower, so she doesn't get as much heat.
Jafar and Ursula are possibly the most opaque during the first half of their gameplans. It's also pretty mandatory for them to keep a low profile, since they can't really afford any further slowdowns compared to the rest.
Ursula is so damn slow - she doesn't have as much deck searching as Jafar (Jafar has extra draw with the Scarab, and a spell that quickly digs through your deck for items), so it's important during your first few turns to really dig through your deck and pretty much dump your hand if you don't have anything useful in there.
Won the third game with QoH, at least. I think that was 3p again.
I want to play this game so badly, but our one attempt was with a full table and explaining all the rules ate up so much time that we really weren't close and didn't feel out the mechanics.
Haven’t lost yet but tonight’s game (in the Cthulhu scenario) was pretty exciting. Three characters died, the board was becoming increasingly unmanageable, but we pulled it out at the end by just dumping every possible reroll and add on into the big bad. He had 18 health, and Tommy hit him with an attack of 3 base strength plus 4 for a weapon, plus 2 for an ally, plus a 4-die lore roll to add an attack spell, plus a 6-die Intervene that got rerolled into a perfect six hits (dumping focus, clues, everything). I shriveled him from the next space over and on the next round we finish him off. It was a very satisfying end to the scenario. Can’t wait to play the last one.
1. Someone fated you
2. Someone just got obviously close to their win condition
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After that we played a quick bluffing game with mercenaries and special cards with a name I can't remember. The goal was to control 5 areas of Italy or 3 contiguous areas. Someone would play a 10 strength card, so they'd be winning, but then you could play Winter, and make all cards worth only one. Your hand didn't refill between rounds though so there was some strategy.
On Saturday I got to play Wingspan which has been the most hyped game in this area since Root. I found it much better than Root although it is a totally different type of game. Engine building game with a great theme and nice art. I'd recommend it and maybe pick up a copy if it was available to pick up at reasonable prices.
After Wingspan we played the "short game" of Feast for Odin which is a brain buster. Worker placement combined with Viking Tetris in a field of -1 Victory Points as far as the eye can see. If you fill up your -1 Victory point ocean, you can buy more islands, huts, houses, etc filled with -1 VP to cover up. You place workers to get you various Tetris pieces to place but only certain colors can get placed, and certain colors can't touch, so you need to upgrade them too. Also you need to spend some of the pieces to feed your vikings although they can just eat your money instead. I never really got the time to Emigrate my vikings (this is massive points) and needed to buy another island to turn my cow into jewelry on but it was fun. Short game lasted 3+ hours with 3 people though. Can't imagine long game with 4 people.
I would recommend against buying sekigahara if you don't have someone to play it with already lined up with expressed interest. It's a long 2p war game, and it doesn't play solo.
Baby, don't go breaking my heart...
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Probably Condettierre (spelling?). The card minigame in Witcher 3 appears to have been based on it, though the standalone version of that game has gotten pretty far away from it.
I'm all for buying aspirational games as long as you can play them solo too. Sekigahara entirely doesn't work solo though, do unless you have someone on the hook that wants to play a 4 hour long 2p war game you're throwing money in the garbage. It was a hard habit to break myself of, as I have a tendency to get really excited about stuff I will literally never get to the table.
I was about to make the same post, too. It was my first real miss in terms of board game purchases. It felt very bland and static, without any real character, either. Hugely disappointed.
At least I finally dove into Terraforming Mars. It was another game I had put off due to its perceived weight, but it wasn't hard to learn at all. I really like it, with one very large asterisk. Throw the player boards out. They're terrible. Disregarding the fact that one bump will kill your entire game, pushing and converting masses of cubes to calculate production and resources is incredibly tedious. People weren't enjoying themselves at all.
I later discovered several production-phase phone apps. The one I downloaded was TM Assistant. It automatically calculates your resources for each generation, and makes it very easy to gain and subtract resources and production. It made all the difference. Not only did it speed things up, but it turned everyone around on the game and we couldn't stop talking about it afterward.
Cthulhu is the hardest one. Tommy is tied with Calvin for best investigator. To tweak difficulty, keep in mind Tommy, Calvin, and the singer lady are the strongest while Dexter, Norman, and Rex are the weakest.
I too had fun at first, but I think the replay really falls off hard after the 2nd or 3rd play through of each scenario. You lose the mystery of the codex but you're stuck in the same objective order.
I do like how they reduced a lot of brutal stuff. No more brutal encounters. Encounters now almost always do what the location says. You can improve skills with normal action. No skill impairments (I bet they'll bring them back in an expansion though).
I really think they need to come up with some way of bringing some kind of objective randomizing to the scenarios.
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Personally I find it tough to bring games to the table more than a handful of times, so I appreciate the stronger narrative arc of this one compared to the randomized objectives in Eldritch Horror. But I recognize the replay aspect is important to others.
Those are slightly weird rankings to me, at least in my three plays. Tommy seems on par with at least the gangster. The singer is super good (and helped us win our second play) but died early on against Cthulhu. Rex kicked ass in our 2nd game, in part because that player just did not stop rolling sixes, he almost never failed a test even given Rex’s limitations. I have no idea why Calvin is supposed to be that good but maybe I just don’t understand how he’s meant to be played. I also did very well with Dexter against Cthulhu—took a Dark Pact that brought me from two spells to five and then focused up a bunch, and between Shriveling, Astral Travel, and tomes that gave me +2 when casting or warding, I was a dynamo across the board.
I do think the game doesn’t help you understand the importance of party building enough—you need a spellcaster or two and a fighter or two if you’re going to be basically competent, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you might have a hard time with either doom or monsters.
But overall I think it has a really good flow. I like especially that the clock is more relaxed, unlike in other FFG versions where a deck will run out or a track will advance more or less automatically.
Wait, what?
*checks*
Huh, her ability got changed. I distinctly remember her old ability being "Draw the top card from the meal deck and she gets that for free, and if she can't eat it, discard that card and she has to buy a meal normally"
Since when was her ruling that way?
The gangster is almost as good as Tommy, but his low sanity can kill him.
Calvin starts with a +2 strength, +2 ward weapon for 5 dice warding right out of the gate which is great. Then he gets an item that can soak 2/2 damage and recovers 1/1 every reckoning. What really pushes him over the top is his optional card, which really isn't optional at all. You can pay a sanity to reroll any skill check, which is amazing. The downside is it gives you a dark pact, but you can also use the reroll for the dark pact. So you get that amazing reroll ability at the cost of a 1/36 chance of a reckoning triggering a dark pact. It's a no brainer to take it every time (maybe his player didn't take it in your game?). So he gets a weapon to start, amazing warding, regenerating damage soak he can't lose, and a reroll that's basically Rex's ability but without the whole "permanent curse" thing. He's the one strength of Dexter meets a non-crippled Rex right out of the box.
Oh, Rex. An investigator who starts off having to build up just so he can reach the level of a baseline investigator. He's so bad, that if you removed all his text from his character sheet, he would actually be improved. The key thing to note about his reroll is that you have to reroll all the dice. You no longer get your choice like in Eldritch. That's a huge nerf and makes him garbage at anything that requires multiple successes like combat and warding, in a game that's 90% combat and warding.
Dexter stinks because not only is spellcasting overall weak right now, but he's weak even for a spellcaster. The singer and cook are much better. I'm not a fan of characters who rely on spells because not only is the spell deck weak, but you need 3-5 items to become as effective as non-spellcasters are with only 1-2. Plus you're bleeding sanity.
Another change I like: getting rid of the flip mechanic for spells and items. It was an interesting idea in Eldritch and Mansions, but in practice it just become time consuming and tedious.
What I would like to see in future expansions is at least a stab at randomness in scenario objectives, an attempt at an actual board that's nice to look at, , some kind of campaign like the card game, and some tweaks in the more lopsided investigators.
What we'll end up getting is a dozen new separate categories of unique asset deck bloat and impairment tokens
Definitely one of the games I put out that has never gotten a thumb down.
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
The more frequent winners are the Orphan, the baskethead Ronin, the daimyo, and the expansion's Inn thief.
Do mind that he doesn't get a painting card at the first and last inns (assuming that's still the rules).
My wife suggested that rather than drawing 2 and choosing one character, everyone just draws 1 character tile and has to play the character you get. Her argument is that it helps balance the field between new players and people who haven't played before while also forcing people who've played a bunch to change up their strategies and not just do the same thing every time. We'll have to try the game out with our more serious boardgame group to see if these houserules are a good idea or not.
Ah! We do the same. I mistakenly thought there was a new printing because the online rules says "Satsuki receives one of the available Meal cards at random for free"; it wasn't the wording that I was remembering.