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[Board Games] Cardboard Action at a Distance

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Posts

  • AstaerethAstaereth In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    ACsTqqK.jpg
  • initiatefailureinitiatefailure Registered User regular
    When I was working at the game store i heard only good things about betrayal legacy even from a few people who didn't like betrayal but got roped in and a even a staff group of jaded monsters loved it. Myself I just hate betrayal so your reaction is more what I'd have expected when it came out.

    Seafall I've never heard good thing about though. It seems to have balance issues and literally has a point where you just have to grind to get to the next part

  • VyolynceVyolynce Registered User regular
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    PL2 is... different. As a Legacy game I enjoyed it more than PL1 FWIW.

    nedhf8b6a4rj.jpgsig.gif
    AC:NH Chris from Glosta SW-5173-3598-2899 DA-4749-1014-4697 @vyolynce@mastodon.social
  • ArcSynArcSyn Registered User regular
    Vyolynce wrote: »
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    PL2 is... different. As a Legacy game I enjoyed it more than PL1 FWIW.

    Agreed. It's interesting, and depending on your luck with the cards I could see it going horribly wrong and being unfun, or well and not being a challenge. My group has enjoyed it so far.
    It's not pandemic, so the name can throw you off. It's based on it, but they've changed so much.

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  • Magic PinkMagic Pink Tur-Boner-Fed Registered User regular
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    Betrayal Legacy is one of our favorite games ever. We've never had a single issue with the game being broken in over 15 plays.

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Base Betrayal isn't what I would consider an especially well-balanced game. I haven't played Legacy version at all but it's a haunted house game so I expect a certain number of TPKs are almost mandatory.

  • HydroSqueegeeHydroSqueegee ULTRACAT!!!™®© Registered User regular
    Magic Pink wrote: »
    Cthulhu Death May Die is real fun, y'all. Like Zombicide but MUCH more structured and strategic.

    i got eated by a fire vampire :cry:

    My copy is sitting on my table, mocking me since it showed up Saturday. Curse my obligations! :(

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  • Ah_PookAh_Pook Registered User regular
    Ares games had all their Galaxy Defenders stuff on Black Friday sale. $30 for the base game, $10-20 for the expansions. I bought some of it.

  • AuralynxAuralynx Darkness is a perspective Watching the ego workRegistered User regular
    Magic Pink wrote: »
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    Betrayal Legacy is one of our favorite games ever. We've never had a single issue with the game being broken in over 15 plays.

    We've found it to be roughly as uneven as the original in terms of quality of experience. Some haunts have been much more satisfying than others in terms of fairness or odds, but mostly the proportion of Omen rooms seems really high.

    Overall I think the general play experience and rules are better but the core problem of the moment when the game switches up being random and sometimes quite early remains.

    We're having fun with the various sticker / destroy parts for sure, though.

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  • ForarForar #432 Toronto, Ontario, CanadaRegistered User regular
    Fry wrote: »
    "Tallest player goes first" tends to work out well for me.

    As someone who is 6'3"... I'm okay with going to random.

    First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
  • Hahnsoo1Hahnsoo1 Make Ready. We Hunt.Registered User regular
    "Just One" continues to be a smash hit in the casual board game nights that we host at our place. Everyone really gets into it. We bought a bunch of cheap $1 Magnadoodle clones at the Dollar Store, and use those for writing words.

    "Kingdomino" also continues to be a great filler (while we are waiting for more guests) that is easy to teach, even for the senior women who come join our game nights.

    8i1dt37buh2m.png
  • Custom SpecialCustom Special I know I am, I'm sure I am, I'm Sounders 'til I die!Registered User regular
    I just grabbed Just One in the Target sale (took trying in-store pickup 3 times before one actually had it for real...). I expect to play it this weekend during our holiday whirlwind.

    XBL: F4ll0utBP | STEAM | PSN : CustomSpecial | Bnet: F4ll0ut#1636
  • Ah_PookAh_Pook Registered User regular
    Yea just one is fantastic. I'm bringing it to my big family Thanksgiving this year for sure.

  • AstaerethAstaereth In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
    Magic Pink wrote: »
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    Betrayal Legacy is one of our favorite games ever. We've never had a single issue with the game being broken in over 15 plays.

    I’m genuinely happy for you! I’ve played Betrayal many times, as an accessible haunted house game it is right up my alley. I was super excited for Betrayal Legacy. But our experience has not been yours. Often there are unclear rules, baffling design choices, or scenarios that either are or feel unbalanced.

    For example:
    The game we played last night involved a traitor being a Re-Animator. We’ll call him Jeffrey.

    Jeffrey’s goal was to use the Inhabitants, now reanimated, as monsters under his control, kill the other players and reanimate them too. Also, once he died he could reanimate himself.

    Our goal was to gather 3 tissue samples (make an easy Knowledge roll near a reanimated 3 times), go to one of five specific tiles and mix up a zombie-killing concoction (if you had the tissue samples, you could only fail this roll by rolling all zeroes), and then succeed in a Speed attack against each reanimated to destroy them utterly.

    A whole host of problems arose from the fact that the rules are super fucking unclear. There are several things that needed clarification but the worst is figuring out who counts as Reanimated and who doesn’t and what that means.

    In the “Monster: the Reanimated” box in the traitor tome it says “Reanimated players and inhabitants are monsters.” Presumably it should say “Reanimated heroes” but it doesn’t. Our traitor assumed that once he became a Reanimated (“You are a Reanimated”, it says) that the rules applied to him—including the rule that Reanimated players are not allowed to speak. Result: we missed or misinterpreted a bunch of rules (Reanimated don’t have mental traits so when I killed an inhabitant with a Sanity attack that wasn’t legal; Reanimated are killed instead of stunned, which we didn’t realize until halfway through the game; the traitor can only resurrect dead Heroes, not dead Inhabitants as you might assume; Reanimated cannot carry items, which could have had a large impact on the game depending on whether this applied to the traitor or not).

    Other rules that were unclear:

    -Do reanimated heroes read the “You are now a Reanimated, you are now on the traitor’s team, you can no longer speak” box out loud or silently? (Hopefully they also realize they need to read the traitor’s tome page now, because crucial rules info is outside of that box! Hopefully they understand all those rules, because they can’t talk to ask a question about it!)

    -The hero win condition is that the traitor has been killed and all Reanimated have been destroyed. But the game seems to make a clear distinction between “killed” and “destroyed”, and the listed way to destroy a Reanimated is to have a vial of concoction and then succeed in a Speed attack against them. But if you kill a Reanimated some other way (say, by using a Weapon, which might also have a Might bonus, to make an ordinary Might attack), then the Reanimated is killed, not destroyed, potentially leading to a situation in which neither side can win or even end the game. On top of that, if when all other Reanimated are gone, the Reanimated traitor is killed and would re-animate again on his next turn (because he has not been destroyed with the special attack), do the Heroes win? Or they have to wait for him to reanimate and then destroy him?

    -When a player dies, they drop all their items and become a corpse. The base rules don’t explain what happens when monsters die (because monsters can usually only be stunned, but in haunts where they can die it often doesn’t explain what happens then). If dead monsters exist as corpses it suggests the traitor can or should be able to reanimate them again (which would make thematic sense but isn’t in the mechanics, so it’s an easy mistake to make, and we made it). If dead monsters exist as corpses, can the Heroes still gather tissue samples from them? If dead monsters don’t become corpses and are instead removed from the game, can the Heroes put themselves in a place where making the concoction and defeating the traitor is functionally impossible?

    -Can dead (not destroyed) reanimated Heroes be reanimated again?

    -Dead inhabitants add ghosts to the tile they died in. But did they die at the start of the haunt, when they got Reanimated? Or when they are killed or destroyed later on? Dead players also leave a ghost, but do they do that when they are killed, and again when they are killed or destroyed? If only one of those, which one? Can they die and be reanimated and die and be reanimated and generate ghosts over and over again?

    When you take a game that has hidden information, forbid certain players to talk, and then write bad rules that are unclear, you greatly increase the chances of players ending up in these terrible broken situations. This may be the worst haunt so far in this regard, but this kind of thing has happened to us on multiple haunts. The rules just aren’t clear enough and the whole game can turn on how they are interpreted. The base rules encourage you to prioritize getting the rules right over keeping each side’s hidden info hidden, and we should do more of that, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the traitor mechanic to begin with and we shouldn’t have to.

    Oh, and for one further fuck you from this game:

    Independent of that specific scenario, the game also introduced two new mechanics.

    1) All players were given a one-time use reroll (in addition the existing ability to use the Helm). (Can you use the Helm and the new reroll on the same roll? Unclear!) The traitor chose to save his reroll for next game at a crucial moment that might have stopped us from winning. Then the end of the scenario effects told us we lost those new rerolls anyway. Frustrating.

    2) The game generated a new scenario-independent side mission. It’s not explained why anyone would want to do this side mission, which would have been cumbersome to attempt and costly even in success. We decide not to worry about it as we are focused on winning the scenario. At the end of the scenario, the game tells us we missed our chance to do the side mission and that we must tear the card up. Frustrating!

    I have plenty of other complaints about this game. Like Seafall, it falls into the trap of competitive Legacy games of either having a runaway winner problem or not having much “legacy” to them at all. Like base Betrayal, the amount of randomness can make scenarios feel arbitrarily unfair for one or sometimes even both sides. There are even some inexplicably poor component design choices (the family cards get torn up by the stat clips; at one point the game has you discard a little box of figures and replaces them with a new box of figures, but the new box is shaped differently from the old box and no longer fits in the tray, which is just maddening).

    But the fundamental issue is that the rules are so often so unclear (god only fucking knows how the Helm is actually supposed to work), from the base rules of the game to the rules of many of the haunts we’ve encountered. In a game designed around scenario-specific, secret rules, this is absolutely deadly. Our group is just so angry at this game at this point, because it just keeps finding ways to frustrate, bore, or confuse us. I wish we were having the fun with it that you did.

    ACsTqqK.jpg
  • PMAversPMAvers Registered User regular
    Betrayal Legacy has some neat ideas in there that feel like would have been better implemented in a new game that wasn’t, at it’s core, still bussing Betrayal.

    persona4celestia.jpg
    COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
  • Magic PinkMagic Pink Tur-Boner-Fed Registered User regular
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Magic Pink wrote: »
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    Betrayal Legacy is one of our favorite games ever. We've never had a single issue with the game being broken in over 15 plays.

    I’m genuinely happy for you! I’ve played Betrayal many times, as an accessible haunted house game it is right up my alley. I was super excited for Betrayal Legacy. But our experience has not been yours. Often there are unclear rules, baffling design choices, or scenarios that either are or feel unbalanced.

    For example:
    The game we played last night involved a traitor being a Re-Animator. We’ll call him Jeffrey.

    Jeffrey’s goal was to use the Inhabitants, now reanimated, as monsters under his control, kill the other players and reanimate them too. Also, once he died he could reanimate himself.

    Our goal was to gather 3 tissue samples (make an easy Knowledge roll near a reanimated 3 times), go to one of five specific tiles and mix up a zombie-killing concoction (if you had the tissue samples, you could only fail this roll by rolling all zeroes), and then succeed in a Speed attack against each reanimated to destroy them utterly.

    A whole host of problems arose from the fact that the rules are super fucking unclear. There are several things that needed clarification but the worst is figuring out who counts as Reanimated and who doesn’t and what that means.

    In the “Monster: the Reanimated” box in the traitor tome it says “Reanimated players and inhabitants are monsters.” Presumably it should say “Reanimated heroes” but it doesn’t. Our traitor assumed that once he became a Reanimated (“You are a Reanimated”, it says) that the rules applied to him—including the rule that Reanimated players are not allowed to speak. Result: we missed or misinterpreted a bunch of rules (Reanimated don’t have mental traits so when I killed an inhabitant with a Sanity attack that wasn’t legal; Reanimated are killed instead of stunned, which we didn’t realize until halfway through the game; the traitor can only resurrect dead Heroes, not dead Inhabitants as you might assume; Reanimated cannot carry items, which could have had a large impact on the game depending on whether this applied to the traitor or not).

    Other rules that were unclear:

    -Do reanimated heroes read the “You are now a Reanimated, you are now on the traitor’s team, you can no longer speak” box out loud or silently? (Hopefully they also realize they need to read the traitor’s tome page now, because crucial rules info is outside of that box! Hopefully they understand all those rules, because they can’t talk to ask a question about it!)

    -The hero win condition is that the traitor has been killed and all Reanimated have been destroyed. But the game seems to make a clear distinction between “killed” and “destroyed”, and the listed way to destroy a Reanimated is to have a vial of concoction and then succeed in a Speed attack against them. But if you kill a Reanimated some other way (say, by using a Weapon, which might also have a Might bonus, to make an ordinary Might attack), then the Reanimated is killed, not destroyed, potentially leading to a situation in which neither side can win or even end the game. On top of that, if when all other Reanimated are gone, the Reanimated traitor is killed and would re-animate again on his next turn (because he has not been destroyed with the special attack), do the Heroes win? Or they have to wait for him to reanimate and then destroy him?

    -When a player dies, they drop all their items and become a corpse. The base rules don’t explain what happens when monsters die (because monsters can usually only be stunned, but in haunts where they can die it often doesn’t explain what happens then). If dead monsters exist as corpses it suggests the traitor can or should be able to reanimate them again (which would make thematic sense but isn’t in the mechanics, so it’s an easy mistake to make, and we made it). If dead monsters exist as corpses, can the Heroes still gather tissue samples from them? If dead monsters don’t become corpses and are instead removed from the game, can the Heroes put themselves in a place where making the concoction and defeating the traitor is functionally impossible?

    -Can dead (not destroyed) reanimated Heroes be reanimated again?

    -Dead inhabitants add ghosts to the tile they died in. But did they die at the start of the haunt, when they got Reanimated? Or when they are killed or destroyed later on? Dead players also leave a ghost, but do they do that when they are killed, and again when they are killed or destroyed? If only one of those, which one? Can they die and be reanimated and die and be reanimated and generate ghosts over and over again?

    When you take a game that has hidden information, forbid certain players to talk, and then write bad rules that are unclear, you greatly increase the chances of players ending up in these terrible broken situations. This may be the worst haunt so far in this regard, but this kind of thing has happened to us on multiple haunts. The rules just aren’t clear enough and the whole game can turn on how they are interpreted. The base rules encourage you to prioritize getting the rules right over keeping each side’s hidden info hidden, and we should do more of that, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the traitor mechanic to begin with and we shouldn’t have to.

    Oh, and for one further fuck you from this game:

    Independent of that specific scenario, the game also introduced two new mechanics.

    1) All players were given a one-time use reroll (in addition the existing ability to use the Helm). (Can you use the Helm and the new reroll on the same roll? Unclear!) The traitor chose to save his reroll for next game at a crucial moment that might have stopped us from winning. Then the end of the scenario effects told us we lost those new rerolls anyway. Frustrating.

    2) The game generated a new scenario-independent side mission. It’s not explained why anyone would want to do this side mission, which would have been cumbersome to attempt and costly even in success. We decide not to worry about it as we are focused on winning the scenario. At the end of the scenario, the game tells us we missed our chance to do the side mission and that we must tear the card up. Frustrating!

    I have plenty of other complaints about this game. Like Seafall, it falls into the trap of competitive Legacy games of either having a runaway winner problem or not having much “legacy” to them at all. Like base Betrayal, the amount of randomness can make scenarios feel arbitrarily unfair for one or sometimes even both sides. There are even some inexplicably poor component design choices (the family cards get torn up by the stat clips; at one point the game has you discard a little box of figures and replaces them with a new box of figures, but the new box is shaped differently from the old box and no longer fits in the tray, which is just maddening).

    But the fundamental issue is that the rules are so often so unclear (god only fucking knows how the Helm is actually supposed to work), from the base rules of the game to the rules of many of the haunts we’ve encountered. In a game designed around scenario-specific, secret rules, this is absolutely deadly. Our group is just so angry at this game at this point, because it just keeps finding ways to frustrate, bore, or confuse us. I wish we were having the fun with it that you did.

    We haven't done that one yet but I'm betting we'll have the same problems.

  • GvzbgulGvzbgul Registered User regular
    Hey. So SUSD just did a review of Dont Get Got which i also recently bought. I cant comment on the review because it hasnt arrived yet even though the site said 4-10 days and it has been 14 days.

    But if you want SUSD to do a game review of a specific game just let me know and I'll buy it.

  • BedlamBedlam Registered User regular
    They ment 10-4 days. Which means OK Days.

  • GnizmoGnizmo Registered User regular
    Hahnsoo1 wrote: »
    "Just One" continues to be a smash hit in the casual board game nights that we host at our place. Everyone really gets into it. We bought a bunch of cheap $1 Magnadoodle clones at the Dollar Store, and use those for writing words.

    "Kingdomino" also continues to be a great filler (while we are waiting for more guests) that is easy to teach, even for the senior women who come join our game nights.

    Just one has to have led to the biggest round of laughter from our table in one exchange. It was a five player game and the answer was Sewer. I tend to go with something clever to pull together the serious answers of my compatriots and put a reference to a reasonably popular media franchise. Turns out everyone had similar idea. The clues were, and in order no less, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" It was not successful in the sense that it led to the right answer, but I can't imagine a better way for it to play out.

  • AstaerethAstaereth In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
    What does the thread think about situations where you can easily make your own copy of a game? I was looking at A Fake Artist Goes to New York, which is basically Spyfall Pictionary, and according to reviews the components are both kind of crappy and also unnecessary—you could play with paper and colored markers and lose nothing. The game sounds neat but it’s a Japanese import so it’s pretty expensive, especially when you don’t strictly need it to play. Does it make sense to just make a home version, or am I morally obligated to buy the designer’s version?

    There are a few games in similar situations—Spyfall, Telestrations, Monikers, party games and the like, particularly when the designer is just packaging up an existing activity (like that game where you try to guess the name on your forehead). I’m just not sure what the right thing to do is in these situations.

    ACsTqqK.jpg
  • webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    Astaereth wrote: »
    What does the thread think about situations where you can easily make your own copy of a game? I was looking at A Fake Artist Goes to New York, which is basically Spyfall Pictionary, and according to reviews the components are both kind of crappy and also unnecessary—you could play with paper and colored markers and lose nothing. The game sounds neat but it’s a Japanese import so it’s pretty expensive, especially when you don’t strictly need it to play. Does it make sense to just make a home version, or am I morally obligated to buy the designer’s version?

    There are a few games in similar situations—Spyfall, Telestrations, Monikers, party games and the like, particularly when the designer is just packaging up an existing activity (like that game where you try to guess the name on your forehead). I’m just not sure what the right thing to do is in these situations.

    I'm fine with making your own. You're not selling them or anything.

    Steam ID: Webguy20
    Origin ID: Discgolfer27
    Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
  • GvzbgulGvzbgul Registered User regular
    edited November 2019
    Making your own is even better than buying them imo. A handmade game is superior to a bought game. I love my Skull pirate edition, my Secret Hitler with real bullets, and my Inhuman Conditions with a leather briefcase for a box.
    I don't love my laminated bits of card version of A Fake Artist Goes to New York, but I'm still glad I made them because it confirmed that I loved the game enough that I want to buy the actual game.

    The only pirating in games is buying pirated copies of games, like those cheaply made Chinese ebay/amazon copies. Everything else is cool.

    Gvzbgul on
  • ArcticLancerArcticLancer Best served chilled. Registered User regular
    Considering some of the games mentioned are actually just companies printing home games that have long existed (Telestrations was originally Eat Poop You Cat, and I'm quite sure Balderdash, Monikers and Headbandz were all around long before someone put them in a box), I certainly wouldn't feel bad about a lot of them. Odds are if it's easy to make at home, it's not particularly impactful. Hell, if you decided you wanted to make your own copy of A Feast For Odin there might be something respectable about that undertaking. :P

  • Ah_PookAh_Pook Registered User regular
    You can get Fake Artist at Target, I would personally recommend doing so.

  • JonBobJonBob Registered User regular
    I think there is a definite distinction between games that are packagings of parlor games, as ArcticLancer listed, and games that are truly original designs. Making your own version for personal use is certainly legally fine in either case, and obviously ethically fine in the former case. The ethics of making a homespun copy of an original design are murkier to me.

    This is a luxury good, and so there isn't an argument that everyone has a right to it. You can always just not play the game.

    You are not actively harming the designer or publisher by making a copy... unless you would otherwise have bought one, or are disincentivizing others from doing so.

    Clearly you should not obfuscate the origin of the game, if you do make one. Be up front that there is a packaged version available. Otherwise it's plagiarism.

    All told I lean toward "it's okay to make a copy for your own use, but if you have the means to reward the designer for their hard work you should do so."

    jswidget.php?username=JonBob&numitems=10&header=1&text=none&images=small&show=recentplays&imagesonly=1&imagepos=right&inline=1&domains%5B%5D=boardgame&imagewidget=1
  • initiatefailureinitiatefailure Registered User regular
    As someone who is always checking bars for cool coasters to turn into skull...

    Yes?

  • ForarForar #432 Toronto, Ontario, CanadaRegistered User regular
    edited November 2019
    Tomorrow is the big day! I spent a good chunk of Wednesday evening setting up the table. Aside from one figure that needs to be brought by a friend we're just about good to go. The board is set up, and either tonight or tomorrow morning I'll arrange the character sheets, and then we see how they hold up to facing some of the nastiest enemies in the game back to back to back.

    The game is Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. The players have been using the same characters on and off for years. The walls and 3-dimensionality has been added using Dwarven Forge terrain tiles, same with the LED features, as I've been collecting DF stuff piecemeal for about as long (both had big Kickstarters in 2013).
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    Okay, Windows says the files are a reasonable size, Previewing says they're a reasonable size. If this explodes to a 40 meg pic dump (as sometimes happens with pics on the forums) I'll do my best to bring them down and resize them again in Paint before I blow up someones phone or data limit.

    Forar on
    First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
  • webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    May I say, that's pretty fuckin' cool right there.

    Steam ID: Webguy20
    Origin ID: Discgolfer27
    Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
  • Evil MultifariousEvil Multifarious Registered User regular
    @Gvzbgul I'm curious, where is the skill involved in Flamme Rouge? It was fun enough the couple of times we played it, but aside from basic principles for handling terrain and mathing out/card-counting, it seemed almost entirely driven by the cards you draw for a given hand. I felt like there was almost always a single correct card choice (based on minimizing wasted movement from playing bigger cards), or else the outcome was essentially random for that turn, because it's extremely difficult to predict your opponent's choices when they're drawing a random hand as well.

    If anything, it felt like a clever iteration on roll-to-move games. Super curious why anyone would think it's a skill-driven game.

  • GvzbgulGvzbgul Registered User regular
    The skill is in predicting your opponent's moves and knowing when to swap to using your high cards.

    Although "skill" is the wrong word, its just that there is a big difference between new and experienced players. You can tell people how to play but they wont truly know until they lose their first game.

    Kinda the same with DSA. You need to be far more cautious than you think. It doesnt matter how much you reinforce that when teaching the game, new players will take too much and they will die. Several times.

  • crimsoncoyotecrimsoncoyote Registered User regular
    edited November 2019
    I'm excited for Thanksgiving 2: the Thanksgivingening tomorrow where I hope to get Just One to the table. We brought it to Thanksgiving yesterday, but were unable to play it as we were chasing around our toddler and playing with the 3 dogs there.

    We've only played with 4 players before and I am excited to see how it is at higher player counts.

    crimsoncoyote on
  • HamHamJHamHamJ Registered User regular
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Magic Pink wrote: »
    Astaereth wrote: »
    Betrayal Legacy amazingly continues to be terrible, broken, and generally unfun game after game after game.

    Between this and Seafall I’m actually wondering if Pandemic Legacy Season 2 is going to be any good.

    Betrayal Legacy is one of our favorite games ever. We've never had a single issue with the game being broken in over 15 plays.

    I’m genuinely happy for you! I’ve played Betrayal many times, as an accessible haunted house game it is right up my alley. I was super excited for Betrayal Legacy. But our experience has not been yours. Often there are unclear rules, baffling design choices, or scenarios that either are or feel unbalanced.

    For example:
    The game we played last night involved a traitor being a Re-Animator. We’ll call him Jeffrey.

    Jeffrey’s goal was to use the Inhabitants, now reanimated, as monsters under his control, kill the other players and reanimate them too. Also, once he died he could reanimate himself.

    Our goal was to gather 3 tissue samples (make an easy Knowledge roll near a reanimated 3 times), go to one of five specific tiles and mix up a zombie-killing concoction (if you had the tissue samples, you could only fail this roll by rolling all zeroes), and then succeed in a Speed attack against each reanimated to destroy them utterly.

    A whole host of problems arose from the fact that the rules are super fucking unclear. There are several things that needed clarification but the worst is figuring out who counts as Reanimated and who doesn’t and what that means.

    In the “Monster: the Reanimated” box in the traitor tome it says “Reanimated players and inhabitants are monsters.” Presumably it should say “Reanimated heroes” but it doesn’t. Our traitor assumed that once he became a Reanimated (“You are a Reanimated”, it says) that the rules applied to him—including the rule that Reanimated players are not allowed to speak. Result: we missed or misinterpreted a bunch of rules (Reanimated don’t have mental traits so when I killed an inhabitant with a Sanity attack that wasn’t legal; Reanimated are killed instead of stunned, which we didn’t realize until halfway through the game; the traitor can only resurrect dead Heroes, not dead Inhabitants as you might assume; Reanimated cannot carry items, which could have had a large impact on the game depending on whether this applied to the traitor or not).

    Other rules that were unclear:

    -Do reanimated heroes read the “You are now a Reanimated, you are now on the traitor’s team, you can no longer speak” box out loud or silently? (Hopefully they also realize they need to read the traitor’s tome page now, because crucial rules info is outside of that box! Hopefully they understand all those rules, because they can’t talk to ask a question about it!)

    -The hero win condition is that the traitor has been killed and all Reanimated have been destroyed. But the game seems to make a clear distinction between “killed” and “destroyed”, and the listed way to destroy a Reanimated is to have a vial of concoction and then succeed in a Speed attack against them. But if you kill a Reanimated some other way (say, by using a Weapon, which might also have a Might bonus, to make an ordinary Might attack), then the Reanimated is killed, not destroyed, potentially leading to a situation in which neither side can win or even end the game. On top of that, if when all other Reanimated are gone, the Reanimated traitor is killed and would re-animate again on his next turn (because he has not been destroyed with the special attack), do the Heroes win? Or they have to wait for him to reanimate and then destroy him?

    -When a player dies, they drop all their items and become a corpse. The base rules don’t explain what happens when monsters die (because monsters can usually only be stunned, but in haunts where they can die it often doesn’t explain what happens then). If dead monsters exist as corpses it suggests the traitor can or should be able to reanimate them again (which would make thematic sense but isn’t in the mechanics, so it’s an easy mistake to make, and we made it). If dead monsters exist as corpses, can the Heroes still gather tissue samples from them? If dead monsters don’t become corpses and are instead removed from the game, can the Heroes put themselves in a place where making the concoction and defeating the traitor is functionally impossible?

    -Can dead (not destroyed) reanimated Heroes be reanimated again?

    -Dead inhabitants add ghosts to the tile they died in. But did they die at the start of the haunt, when they got Reanimated? Or when they are killed or destroyed later on? Dead players also leave a ghost, but do they do that when they are killed, and again when they are killed or destroyed? If only one of those, which one? Can they die and be reanimated and die and be reanimated and generate ghosts over and over again?

    When you take a game that has hidden information, forbid certain players to talk, and then write bad rules that are unclear, you greatly increase the chances of players ending up in these terrible broken situations. This may be the worst haunt so far in this regard, but this kind of thing has happened to us on multiple haunts. The rules just aren’t clear enough and the whole game can turn on how they are interpreted. The base rules encourage you to prioritize getting the rules right over keeping each side’s hidden info hidden, and we should do more of that, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the traitor mechanic to begin with and we shouldn’t have to.

    Oh, and for one further fuck you from this game:

    Independent of that specific scenario, the game also introduced two new mechanics.

    1) All players were given a one-time use reroll (in addition the existing ability to use the Helm). (Can you use the Helm and the new reroll on the same roll? Unclear!) The traitor chose to save his reroll for next game at a crucial moment that might have stopped us from winning. Then the end of the scenario effects told us we lost those new rerolls anyway. Frustrating.

    2) The game generated a new scenario-independent side mission. It’s not explained why anyone would want to do this side mission, which would have been cumbersome to attempt and costly even in success. We decide not to worry about it as we are focused on winning the scenario. At the end of the scenario, the game tells us we missed our chance to do the side mission and that we must tear the card up. Frustrating!

    I have plenty of other complaints about this game. Like Seafall, it falls into the trap of competitive Legacy games of either having a runaway winner problem or not having much “legacy” to them at all. Like base Betrayal, the amount of randomness can make scenarios feel arbitrarily unfair for one or sometimes even both sides. There are even some inexplicably poor component design choices (the family cards get torn up by the stat clips; at one point the game has you discard a little box of figures and replaces them with a new box of figures, but the new box is shaped differently from the old box and no longer fits in the tray, which is just maddening).

    But the fundamental issue is that the rules are so often so unclear (god only fucking knows how the Helm is actually supposed to work), from the base rules of the game to the rules of many of the haunts we’ve encountered. In a game designed around scenario-specific, secret rules, this is absolutely deadly. Our group is just so angry at this game at this point, because it just keeps finding ways to frustrate, bore, or confuse us. I wish we were having the fun with it that you did.

    I honestly think this might help: Betrayal is not a competitive game. It is the boardgame equivalent of Who's Line Is It Anyway or Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. The rules are more like suggestions and the points don't matter. One of the funnier moments from my campaign was a very early haunt where the traitor summoned a monster and we had zero chance of doing whatever it was we needed to do to stop it, and it just murdered all of us in like 4 rounds. Or my big thing was heirlooming a scythe and them murdering so many people with it it evolved into a magical murder scythe of murder. And then when the police showed up to investigate all the serial murders that keep happening in this house I proved my innocence by murdering all the witnesses.

    While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
  • ArcticLancerArcticLancer Best served chilled. Registered User regular
    Huh ... Draftosauraus is kind of brilliant? Easy to teach, easy to learn, absolutely delightful to play, and only takes like 10 minutes if you know how to play it. Ironically, despite the dino-meeples being A+ quality, I wish they were cubes because they're kind of hard to get out of the bag, and you can definitely tell when you're drawing a stegosaurus. But that's such a minor nit-pick overall. People should absolutely try this one if they get a chance. I kinda want to buy it just because the dino-meeples would be excellent for game prototyping - that it would be a worthwhile game otherwise is a bonus. :P

  • Magic PinkMagic Pink Tur-Boner-Fed Registered User regular
    Well Nemesis showed up and they forgot to actually send me the base game. Looking on the forums and such, that's happened to a lot of people and it seems to be on purpose because they ran out of copies. Support isn't acknowledging it at all and isn't replying to tickets concerning it.

    I'm never buying a game from these fuckers again.

  • ArcticLancerArcticLancer Best served chilled. Registered User regular
    The only defense I would lend is that they have an active Kickstarter for The Great Wall, so I imagine they're somewhat overwhelmed.
    That said, I followed that project for the last week and it seems half-baked at best. For all the good will people seem to have for that company, their process looks like a fucking mess. Ergo no part of me would be surprised if they handle this situation with all the grace of a two-story faceplant. <_<

  • azith28azith28 Registered User regular
    Magic Pink wrote: »
    Well Nemesis showed up and they forgot to actually send me the base game. Looking on the forums and such, that's happened to a lot of people and it seems to be on purpose because they ran out of copies. Support isn't acknowledging it at all and isn't replying to tickets concerning it.

    I'm never buying a game from these fuckers again.

    Wow..that stinks. I've had a pretty good experience with them up to this point...butttt maybe they prioritized the color drop model orders. I've seen it in stores (The base sets) so i can't think this is going to be a long delay.

    Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
  • FuselageFuselage Oosik Jumpship LoungeRegistered User regular
    Just saw the SUSD episode for the party game Don't Get Got last night and immediately ordered a copy.

    https://youtu.be/9zUQklAZMa4

    That said, I had some ideas or questions about its use in the context of a work holiday party with a lot of people but limited amount of copies. Copying that from the BGG forum below. No spoilers about the game, just longer.
    Hello! I just ordered this, just one copy, and I'm wondering if this would be the perfect game for my upcoming work holiday party. I can easily get ten players, but I wonder if the "Get a Player to..." will be too constricting in that wider audience.

    I'm considering getting a group of friends from work together to know the rules and have their assignments in advance of the party, or potentially giving them their assignments myself and not telling them who the other players are.

    This would put me in more of a DM/GM role that isn't really designed for this game, but I feel like it could really add to the suspense if I pick from outside the "usual suspects" of the gamers at work.

    Needlessly complicated, or untapped seam?

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  • AthenorAthenor Battle Hardened Optimist The Skies of HiigaraRegistered User regular
    Oh My God.

    https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2019/12/2/barkham-horror/

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    pahc01_a1_cardfan_investigators.png

    Earlier this year, Fantasy Flight Games announced a fake product for April Fool's Day called The Dogwich Legacy, a deluxe expansion for Barkham Horror: The Card Game. Our graphic designer, Chelzee, had so much fun morphing classic Arkham Horror: The Card Game art into new zoological horrors, and we were delighted to share the article with all of you. We thought that was all the project was: a fun piece for one day.

    How wrong we were.

    The response from you, our fans, was incredible; and you asked, nay, demanded that we make this product. Well, we listened, and today we are proud to announce Barkham Horror: The Meddling of Meowlathotep, a 100% real, playable standalone adventure for Arkham Horror: The Card Game—now available for pre-order through our website and at your local retailer!

    We’re incredibly proud to bring this product to you, and we’re also proud to support Pets for Vets®, a charity bringing veterans and trained companion animals together. To learn more about Pets for Vets and their important work, check out their website here.

    He/Him | "A boat is always safest in the harbor, but that’s not why we build boats." | "If you run, you gain one. If you move forward, you gain two." - Suletta Mercury, G-Witch
  • VyolynceVyolynce Registered User regular
    We have a weird hobby.

    nedhf8b6a4rj.jpgsig.gif
    AC:NH Chris from Glosta SW-5173-3598-2899 DA-4749-1014-4697 @vyolynce@mastodon.social
  • VyolynceVyolynce Registered User regular
    We have a weird hobby.

    nedhf8b6a4rj.jpgsig.gif
    AC:NH Chris from Glosta SW-5173-3598-2899 DA-4749-1014-4697 @vyolynce@mastodon.social
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