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Weird it's up for me: http://genie.game-host.org/activelist.htm
Gatekeeper
Member
God I hate living in a place without a regular gaming group. I don't remember how to play most of these games.
Ah, sweet innocent mojo_billbo.
Anyway, this things I am playing this weekend:
-Race for the Galaxy (finally gonna try the new expansion, will be playing 2p though so probably will do sans goals).
-Galaxy Trucker (been addicted to this, can't wait to have an excuse to get the expansion)
That's it! Light weekend.
Anyway, this things I am playing this weekend:
-Race for the Galaxy (finally gonna try the new expansion, will be playing 2p though so probably will do sans goals).
-Galaxy Trucker (been addicted to this, can't wait to have an excuse to get the expansion)
That's it! Light weekend.
BronzeWolf
Banned
So I am planing on getting The Last Night On Earth and Settlers of Catan.
I think my dudes and me need something a little bit more relaxing than D&D, not so complicated and we are getting tired of RISK.
What do you think?
I think my dudes and me need something a little bit more relaxing than D&D, not so complicated and we are getting tired of RISK.
What do you think?
hectorse said:
I can't comment on The Last Night On Earth, but Settlers of Catan is about as safe a board game bet as you can possibly make. The basic gameplay is plenty fun, it goes up to 5-6 players without much fuss, and there are expansions at various levels of complexity if you really get into the game and want to do more with it. Let us know how you like it!
FnordChan
Heh. Well, at least the GAFers are going to come in 1-2. At least, if things go according to plan.AstroLad said:
Nice. I still haven't gotten a chance to try out the new expansion either. But really, RftG+tGS works so well already that I'm not even that excited by the new stuff.
I do believe so. Too bad the server's down now...ugh.
The takeovers seem...weird. And like I mentioned earlier, even the manual hedges on their place in the game by saying you should use them every other game. WTF? Definitely going to play without to start, but I am excited for new cards. As if shuffling RftG wasn't enough of a bitch already.Cyan said:
I was surprised over how much stuff they included in the expansion. Some wooden cube counters, those lineal things for your military strength.... and in the end you don't need it at all. In fact, we never used them even once. They're just in the way 99% of the time.AstroLad said:
I'm not so sure about the new "fight" rules. They seem tacked-on, and I can't say that they've added any more fun to the game so far. I haven't played all that much of the new expansion though, maybe it'll get better over time.
Last night we played
Crokinole: Introduced to 2 new players with much success.
Citadels: Played first 4+ player game. I think I like this one more with 2 or 3. Need to play more, though.
Battlestar Galactica: Introduced one more to this, who'd never seen the show. She caught on quickly. Super close game. 2 Cylons sitting next to each other hurts, though!
Crokinole: Introduced to 2 new players with much success.
Citadels: Played first 4+ player game. I think I like this one more with 2 or 3. Need to play more, though.
Battlestar Galactica: Introduced one more to this, who'd never seen the show. She caught on quickly. Super close game. 2 Cylons sitting next to each other hurts, though!
This weekend I finally got to play my new games. Four friends came over, and we got cracking. Didn't have nearly enough time though, Supernova and Robo Rally had to go back with their owners, unplayed. 
What we played:
Puerto Rico. Awesome game, it's like Race for the Galaxy on crack. It's also awesome (i.e. I won the first, and only game).
I'm going to hell though. The "settlers"/"colonists" come on ships, work on farms, and are handled like goods. And they're these brown tokens. See what I'm getting at? Right. The manual covers every possible question one could have, really impressive work - they even catch slip-ups like forgetting to refill theslave colonist ship.
It's brilliant how much you can fuck up your fellow gamers by choosing the right phase at the wrong time, especially at the beginning. Our tobacco man lost more than 10 victory points due to some devious captain-ing at one point.
Citadels. We played once with the original setup, and then used all of the expansion character cards in a second game, which is clearly not the intended way of doing things. I think the King card will have to go, the schemer card is awesome and will replace it nicely. Love the game so far. The german version is a bit shoddy though, e.g. the Priest gets coins for blue buildings, but the text on the card says it's purple buildings instead. Also, the cards suffered more than I'd have thought. Don't buy the german version of this game, folks. Very appealing artwork for the most part though.
Magna Carta.
...
Oh gawd. Where to begin. We started off using the standard rules, not the beginner rules, because "those are for pussies". There was some heated debate about a very questionable use of "forward" and some other ambiguous wordings in the german manual. After that was resolved, we had a great time. I will play this game again ASAP.
I promised a write-up, so just skip the rest if you're not interested. I'll focus on the negative parts since I'm a grumpy German. Read ads if you want happy happy sunshine stuff.
First, the rules.
You start out with your player token, a bunch of coins, some tokens for goods (there's wood, rock, meat, and gold - you start out with two units each of meat and wood). You also have four workers (in your color), and some building plans drawn at random from your personal deck. Yes, the building cards are color-coded.
The start of a road (aka some special cards laid side-by-side) is lying in the middle between all players. Your job is to add to that road at the end, harvest goods and money, and use them to help building a castle. A special token (the reeve) sits at the end of the initial road and moves around in the game. There's also the aforementioned castle and a bridge. The bridge accommodates four numbered slots for the player tokens. On the castle card there are three stacks of victory point tokens, worth 4, 3, and 2 victory points. The game ends when the castle is finished (i.e. the tokens are gone). Until then, you play rounds divided into six phases.
Phase one, everyone gets two coins, plus any other bonus they may have from buildings, like additional coins or a card. This is done one by one, starting from the player in possession of the start card, which is a special card that's changing ownership each round.
Phase two has players take turns (starting from the starter player) doing the following: you may either set down a worker on an unoccupied part of the road (and pay one coin), invest goods and build a building at the end of the road, draw one additional card for one coin, or drop your hand and draw the same number of plan cards from your deck. You may also spend goods on building one of several special prestige buildings using special rules: They replace a specially prepared building, give the builder huge amounts of victory points at the end of the game, and in special rare cases give them some bonus in phase one.
After you perform any one action, your turn is finished and the next guy may choose. If you don't want to choose (or can't pay for another action) you may "pass" by putting your colored token on the first free space on the bridge. The other players may continue choosing actions, but for this round, you are out. When all players have passed, the next phase begins (and the first one to pass gets a coin). Placement on the bridge is pretty darn important and influences the next phases greatly.
Phase three has a ingenious way of getting people to spend money to piss each other off. Players may have the reeve move along the road, forwards or backwards. Why this is important will become apparent in the next phase. One movement between adjacent cards costs one coin, and you may not spend more than three. The first player to pass in Phase 2 gets first pick, and so on, until the last one - so each player only gets one chance to move the reeve.
Phase four is where the workers come in. From the start up to the card with the reeve on it(!), every card with a worker on it has its effects activated in this specific order. Every card gives both the builder and the guy with the worker on it some sort of bonus (goods, money, exchanging goods for money or vice versa, preparing buildings for prestige buildings, ...). In case the worker and the building are from the same guy, only the one from the worker applies. Workers between the reeve and the end of the road have no effect at all. At the end of the phase, everyone gets their workers back.
in Phase 5 every player may contribute to the building of the castle. You need three goods (one each of wood, rock, and meat) to get one token, and you can get as many tokens as you want provided you have the goods; you're free to skip though. The first player to pass in phase 2 gets to pick first, etc. If nobody contributes, two victory point tokens are removed, always using up those with the highest value. Ouch. The one player that contributed the most gets one gold token, which is needed for prestige buildings and in a pinch as a wild-card good for normal buildings. If there's a tie, the first one gets it. Obviously, if nobody contributed, nobody gets the gold. Even though there are buildings that let you buy gold, they're expensive, and the prices for buying gold are high.
It's not mentioned in the manual anywhere, so we took our player tokens off the bridge in this phase, since it seemed to make sense.
Last phase is boring, the reeve walks two cards in the direction of the end of the road, if possible (i.e. if it's not already there). The player that started this round gives the card signifying this fact to the next player on his left.
After that, if there are still victory point tokens on the castle, the round starts from phase one again.
At the end every player adds up the victory point token values in his possession, the values of his (prestige & normal) buildings on the road, and adds one point per gold token and another one per wood-stone-meat token combo. Remaining money may give you some VPs too, but this is rather negligible.
Impressions
It sounds complicated, right? Don't worry, it becomes second nature after a few rounds.
No thanks to the german manual though. There's lots of text, but it uses very imprecise language, and the player token aspect isn't covered. A nice overview would have been helpful. Just some sort of flow chart, to ease you into the game. I'd have taken a cheat card too.
The beginner game rules are a very nice touch and all, gotta appreciate that they acknowledge that it's a rather complicated game, but these starter rules are not so fundamentally different - they still are a huge intimidating wall of text. From what I can tell all they do is drop the reeve (and thus, his phase), simplify income (always 2 coins) and prestige buildings (they're played like normal cards). this could have been implemented as a little colored side-note in the normal ruleset, or the other way around, as a "Advanced play rules" section after the starter rules.
Also, all of the text is justified. Sometimes with horribly large gaps in between words. not good.
Then there's the full-color picture examples that are supposed to clarify rules.
One example, they show a "game in progression" - but with all tokens removed and at the sides in one big heap. Basically, it's a depiction of a bunch of cards lying in a snake-like pattern on a blue background. Doesn't help. At all. Sure, it looks nice, but eh... most of a page of the manual, wasted.
The rest of the examples are side-by-side with the rules, but not clearly assigned to them, they're just roughly at the same height of the rule they are referencing.
The second is so awesome that I snapped a quick-like photo of it. The german word is "income". Awesome, eh? Took me a second to comprehend what was going on in that pic.
So to sum it up: German manual = three stars out of six. Gets the job done.
The cards are nicely done, but the artwork/design could be better. It's utilitarian. Not bad, or anything, but ... So sue me, I played MtG for a long time, I'm spoiled.
There's no text on cards, only icons and artwork. That's a plus, I guess. The icons for coins and one-time goods are too detailed, but it doesn't really matter. After you get used to how the information is presented you will have no problem at all in estimating a cards usefulness at a quick glance.
Cards can be flipped to prepare them for prestige buildings, or simply for additional income per turn. Flipped cards are mostly green. Green is a player color. Same for prestige buildings, which have a blue background and a black border. The starter street cards are pink, which I guess would distract the red player, except his color is easily distinguishable.
Couldn't they have used other colors? There's more than red, greed, blue, and yellorange. It's no problem since there's still a player-colored border around the background, but most of the card still sports a rather deceiving color. It's distracting, I'm always tempted to do a double-take even if I train myself to only use the border as a clue. They also use subdued colors, which makes it a bit harder to get a quick overview over a big street.
Due to the nature of the game they're also rather small. They handle well, even with my big paws, but to others that may be off-putting.
So the cards get between four and five stars. They could arguably be much worse.
The Tokens are simplistic as well, but they're made out of wood, and in stark contrast wit the cards they're brightly colored. The yellow player gets orange tokens, which might bother some, but to me it's well within the acceptable margin of "color error".
The workers are cylinders, which is kind of a waste. Why not use Pachisi/Ludo "men", for visual and usability reasons? Oh well. Not like it matters, they're functional and big enough to grab and set down.
Unlike the goods, however. After some playtime shuffling them about gets a bit tedious. Do not play this game when half asleep, you will drop them, and you will follow them below the table, to the cheers and insults of the others. I got used to pushing them around instead of picking them up. Again, my big hands may be to blame, but it happened to others too. Their cube shape makes them jump in delightfully random ways. Seriously, they're just a fraction of a millimeter too small to grab comfortably and reliably.
Meat and Gold are quite brightly colored (pink/yellow), and stone and wood look the part (gray/brown). While I wonder about the meat, I have to admit that I have no clue what single color would be more appropriate.
I have very little complaints about the tokens. Five stars. They're not perfect, but of high quality and certainly usable.
The Box is nice, and blue, and way too big. No compartments, but some plastic bags for the tokens. Artwork's OK, but very different to the one used "inside".
Hm. Gonna give that one a very arbitrary three points.
Conclusion
Like I said, the game is fun. Very fun. But only if you like tactics/strategy. There's little luck involved (the penalty of getting a bad hand is rather low, and at the beginning you're granted a free redraw, but if you're exceptionally unlucky you'll go under in this game too). As long as your friends aren't the type to mull over tactics for extended periods of time the game goes by quickly. Shame about the manual, I hope the international versions are better.
There are rules, so expect a short downtime in the beginning. Communicating them takes longer than understanding them. An experienced player can help things along tremendously - the rules can be taught while playing (even if the outcome of the first game is obviously gonna suck for the newbs).
The rules speed up the gameplay when there's little action (two VP tokens removal rule), reward strategy (I love the "bridge" mechanic), and allow for several approaches to win. I haven't noticed any faults so far, but I haven't played the game often enough for them to become apparent I guess.
Recommendation:
It's rather cheap, it's very fun, the rules are intuitive ... why wouldn't you want to play this?
What we played:
Puerto Rico. Awesome game, it's like Race for the Galaxy on crack. It's also awesome (i.e. I won the first, and only game).
I'm going to hell though. The "settlers"/"colonists" come on ships, work on farms, and are handled like goods. And they're these brown tokens. See what I'm getting at? Right. The manual covers every possible question one could have, really impressive work - they even catch slip-ups like forgetting to refill the
It's brilliant how much you can fuck up your fellow gamers by choosing the right phase at the wrong time, especially at the beginning. Our tobacco man lost more than 10 victory points due to some devious captain-ing at one point.
Citadels. We played once with the original setup, and then used all of the expansion character cards in a second game, which is clearly not the intended way of doing things. I think the King card will have to go, the schemer card is awesome and will replace it nicely. Love the game so far. The german version is a bit shoddy though, e.g. the Priest gets coins for blue buildings, but the text on the card says it's purple buildings instead. Also, the cards suffered more than I'd have thought. Don't buy the german version of this game, folks. Very appealing artwork for the most part though.
Magna Carta.
...
Oh gawd. Where to begin. We started off using the standard rules, not the beginner rules, because "those are for pussies". There was some heated debate about a very questionable use of "forward" and some other ambiguous wordings in the german manual. After that was resolved, we had a great time. I will play this game again ASAP.
I promised a write-up, so just skip the rest if you're not interested. I'll focus on the negative parts since I'm a grumpy German. Read ads if you want happy happy sunshine stuff.
First, the rules.
You start out with your player token, a bunch of coins, some tokens for goods (there's wood, rock, meat, and gold - you start out with two units each of meat and wood). You also have four workers (in your color), and some building plans drawn at random from your personal deck. Yes, the building cards are color-coded.
The start of a road (aka some special cards laid side-by-side) is lying in the middle between all players. Your job is to add to that road at the end, harvest goods and money, and use them to help building a castle. A special token (the reeve) sits at the end of the initial road and moves around in the game. There's also the aforementioned castle and a bridge. The bridge accommodates four numbered slots for the player tokens. On the castle card there are three stacks of victory point tokens, worth 4, 3, and 2 victory points. The game ends when the castle is finished (i.e. the tokens are gone). Until then, you play rounds divided into six phases.
Phase one, everyone gets two coins, plus any other bonus they may have from buildings, like additional coins or a card. This is done one by one, starting from the player in possession of the start card, which is a special card that's changing ownership each round.
Phase two has players take turns (starting from the starter player) doing the following: you may either set down a worker on an unoccupied part of the road (and pay one coin), invest goods and build a building at the end of the road, draw one additional card for one coin, or drop your hand and draw the same number of plan cards from your deck. You may also spend goods on building one of several special prestige buildings using special rules: They replace a specially prepared building, give the builder huge amounts of victory points at the end of the game, and in special rare cases give them some bonus in phase one.
After you perform any one action, your turn is finished and the next guy may choose. If you don't want to choose (or can't pay for another action) you may "pass" by putting your colored token on the first free space on the bridge. The other players may continue choosing actions, but for this round, you are out. When all players have passed, the next phase begins (and the first one to pass gets a coin). Placement on the bridge is pretty darn important and influences the next phases greatly.
Phase three has a ingenious way of getting people to spend money to piss each other off. Players may have the reeve move along the road, forwards or backwards. Why this is important will become apparent in the next phase. One movement between adjacent cards costs one coin, and you may not spend more than three. The first player to pass in Phase 2 gets first pick, and so on, until the last one - so each player only gets one chance to move the reeve.
Phase four is where the workers come in. From the start up to the card with the reeve on it(!), every card with a worker on it has its effects activated in this specific order. Every card gives both the builder and the guy with the worker on it some sort of bonus (goods, money, exchanging goods for money or vice versa, preparing buildings for prestige buildings, ...). In case the worker and the building are from the same guy, only the one from the worker applies. Workers between the reeve and the end of the road have no effect at all. At the end of the phase, everyone gets their workers back.
in Phase 5 every player may contribute to the building of the castle. You need three goods (one each of wood, rock, and meat) to get one token, and you can get as many tokens as you want provided you have the goods; you're free to skip though. The first player to pass in phase 2 gets to pick first, etc. If nobody contributes, two victory point tokens are removed, always using up those with the highest value. Ouch. The one player that contributed the most gets one gold token, which is needed for prestige buildings and in a pinch as a wild-card good for normal buildings. If there's a tie, the first one gets it. Obviously, if nobody contributed, nobody gets the gold. Even though there are buildings that let you buy gold, they're expensive, and the prices for buying gold are high.
It's not mentioned in the manual anywhere, so we took our player tokens off the bridge in this phase, since it seemed to make sense.
Last phase is boring, the reeve walks two cards in the direction of the end of the road, if possible (i.e. if it's not already there). The player that started this round gives the card signifying this fact to the next player on his left.
After that, if there are still victory point tokens on the castle, the round starts from phase one again.
At the end every player adds up the victory point token values in his possession, the values of his (prestige & normal) buildings on the road, and adds one point per gold token and another one per wood-stone-meat token combo. Remaining money may give you some VPs too, but this is rather negligible.
Impressions
It sounds complicated, right? Don't worry, it becomes second nature after a few rounds.
No thanks to the german manual though. There's lots of text, but it uses very imprecise language, and the player token aspect isn't covered. A nice overview would have been helpful. Just some sort of flow chart, to ease you into the game. I'd have taken a cheat card too.
The beginner game rules are a very nice touch and all, gotta appreciate that they acknowledge that it's a rather complicated game, but these starter rules are not so fundamentally different - they still are a huge intimidating wall of text. From what I can tell all they do is drop the reeve (and thus, his phase), simplify income (always 2 coins) and prestige buildings (they're played like normal cards). this could have been implemented as a little colored side-note in the normal ruleset, or the other way around, as a "Advanced play rules" section after the starter rules.
Also, all of the text is justified. Sometimes with horribly large gaps in between words. not good.
Then there's the full-color picture examples that are supposed to clarify rules.
One example, they show a "game in progression" - but with all tokens removed and at the sides in one big heap. Basically, it's a depiction of a bunch of cards lying in a snake-like pattern on a blue background. Doesn't help. At all. Sure, it looks nice, but eh... most of a page of the manual, wasted.
The rest of the examples are side-by-side with the rules, but not clearly assigned to them, they're just roughly at the same height of the rule they are referencing.
The second is so awesome that I snapped a quick-like photo of it. The german word is "income". Awesome, eh? Took me a second to comprehend what was going on in that pic.
So to sum it up: German manual = three stars out of six. Gets the job done.
The cards are nicely done, but the artwork/design could be better. It's utilitarian. Not bad, or anything, but ... So sue me, I played MtG for a long time, I'm spoiled.
There's no text on cards, only icons and artwork. That's a plus, I guess. The icons for coins and one-time goods are too detailed, but it doesn't really matter. After you get used to how the information is presented you will have no problem at all in estimating a cards usefulness at a quick glance.
Cards can be flipped to prepare them for prestige buildings, or simply for additional income per turn. Flipped cards are mostly green. Green is a player color. Same for prestige buildings, which have a blue background and a black border. The starter street cards are pink, which I guess would distract the red player, except his color is easily distinguishable.
Couldn't they have used other colors? There's more than red, greed, blue, and yellorange. It's no problem since there's still a player-colored border around the background, but most of the card still sports a rather deceiving color. It's distracting, I'm always tempted to do a double-take even if I train myself to only use the border as a clue. They also use subdued colors, which makes it a bit harder to get a quick overview over a big street.
Due to the nature of the game they're also rather small. They handle well, even with my big paws, but to others that may be off-putting.
So the cards get between four and five stars. They could arguably be much worse.
The Tokens are simplistic as well, but they're made out of wood, and in stark contrast wit the cards they're brightly colored. The yellow player gets orange tokens, which might bother some, but to me it's well within the acceptable margin of "color error".
The workers are cylinders, which is kind of a waste. Why not use Pachisi/Ludo "men", for visual and usability reasons? Oh well. Not like it matters, they're functional and big enough to grab and set down.
Unlike the goods, however. After some playtime shuffling them about gets a bit tedious. Do not play this game when half asleep, you will drop them, and you will follow them below the table, to the cheers and insults of the others. I got used to pushing them around instead of picking them up. Again, my big hands may be to blame, but it happened to others too. Their cube shape makes them jump in delightfully random ways. Seriously, they're just a fraction of a millimeter too small to grab comfortably and reliably.
Meat and Gold are quite brightly colored (pink/yellow), and stone and wood look the part (gray/brown). While I wonder about the meat, I have to admit that I have no clue what single color would be more appropriate.
I have very little complaints about the tokens. Five stars. They're not perfect, but of high quality and certainly usable.
The Box is nice, and blue, and way too big. No compartments, but some plastic bags for the tokens. Artwork's OK, but very different to the one used "inside".
Hm. Gonna give that one a very arbitrary three points.
Conclusion
Like I said, the game is fun. Very fun. But only if you like tactics/strategy. There's little luck involved (the penalty of getting a bad hand is rather low, and at the beginning you're granted a free redraw, but if you're exceptionally unlucky you'll go under in this game too). As long as your friends aren't the type to mull over tactics for extended periods of time the game goes by quickly. Shame about the manual, I hope the international versions are better.
There are rules, so expect a short downtime in the beginning. Communicating them takes longer than understanding them. An experienced player can help things along tremendously - the rules can be taught while playing (even if the outcome of the first game is obviously gonna suck for the newbs).
The rules speed up the gameplay when there's little action (two VP tokens removal rule), reward strategy (I love the "bridge" mechanic), and allow for several approaches to win. I haven't noticed any faults so far, but I haven't played the game often enough for them to become apparent I guess.
Recommendation:
It's rather cheap, it's very fun, the rules are intuitive ... why wouldn't you want to play this?
Just picked up both expansions to RftG. My friend and I have been playing the original quite a bit and finally played an expansion game. 2p advanced with goals, no takeovers.
First, the deck is now HUGE. Man it's a pain to shuffle lol.
Second, holy high points.
We both started off with a military strategy due to the cards we were getting but my draws eventually turned me into a produce/consume strat while my friend stuck with his Rebel military strat. I probably would have had him if not for two things. One, he picked up both major goals in the end (even though I had all the minor). Second, there is a rebel 6pt card that gives vps based on rebel and military cards on the tableau (from the second expansion). That card ended up being worth around 30 points alone.
He won 82 to 65. Normally our games range in vps from the mid 30s to low 50s. 82 is just ... wow.
Still a ton of fun. I like the new dynamics of the expansions. Goals are great but maybe not for 2p games. Going to need to keep a pen and paper handy for tallying VPs now though.
First, the deck is now HUGE. Man it's a pain to shuffle lol.
Second, holy high points.
We both started off with a military strategy due to the cards we were getting but my draws eventually turned me into a produce/consume strat while my friend stuck with his Rebel military strat. I probably would have had him if not for two things. One, he picked up both major goals in the end (even though I had all the minor). Second, there is a rebel 6pt card that gives vps based on rebel and military cards on the tableau (from the second expansion). That card ended up being worth around 30 points alone.
He won 82 to 65. Normally our games range in vps from the mid 30s to low 50s. 82 is just ... wow.
Still a ton of fun. I like the new dynamics of the expansions. Goals are great but maybe not for 2p games. Going to need to keep a pen and paper handy for tallying VPs now though.
garath said:Just picked up both expansions to RftG. My friend and I have been playing the original quite a bit and finally played an expansion game. 2p advanced with goals, no takeovers.
First, the deck is now HUGE. Man it's a pain to shuffle lol.
Second, holy high points.
We both started off with a military strategy due to the cards we were getting but my draws eventually turned me into a produce/consume strat while my friend stuck with his Rebel military strat. I probably would have had him if not for two things. One, he picked up both major goals in the end (even though I had all the minor). Second, there is a rebel 6pt card that gives vps based on rebel and military cards on the tableau (from the second expansion). That card ended up being worth around 30 points alone.
He won 82 to 65. Normally our games range in vps from the mid 30s to low 50s. 82 is just ... wow.
Still a ton of fun. I like the new dynamics of the expansions. Goals are great but maybe not for 2p games. Going to need to keep a pen and paper handy for tallying VPs now though.
Haha, we played a 2p game with all the expansions and I expressed two of your points:
-Man it's a pain to shuffle lol.
-Goals are great but maybe not for 2p games.
Don't know how much I'm digging the second expansion though, we both had really hodgepodge strategies like you apparently did. I guess some might say this is added depth, but I do like having some focus.
AstroLad said:
Yeah, I couldn't get my strat straight. At first I was pushing all military since that's where my initial draw was leading me but I was watching my friend really laying some serious vp with the rebel cards and I wasn't getting any vp producing military cards. I got a few good production cards and shifted gears. But I wasted half my tableau with non-producing military planets and techs (luckily had a windfall in there) and couldn't play everything I wanted without ending the game before I started actually accumulating VPs with produce/consume. If I had just started the produce/consume earlier I would have won.
There's just SO many military cards now. If you aren't drawing a ton of cards each turn it's going to be hard to focus your strategy. At least that's how it seems to me so far. We're having a flat out gaming night Thursday where I'm sure we'll get more than a few games in.
Some of the new cards are crazy though. In the end I was drawing 10+ cards and generating 7vp a turn even with my half-assed tableau.
joeyjoejoeshabadoo
Member
I found my Guillotine set and played a bunch of games of that over the weekend. It's really a simple game that plays fast and works great as a filler. My girlfriend and I played 5 games (3 rounds each) in about an hour waiting for my friends to show up to play Catan. Once they showed up we play Catan: Cities and Knights and our love afair grows deeper. It's such a great game.
Last night we introduced Vegas Showdown to a couple new people and they dug it. It's such an easy game with a theme that really appeals to most of mine and my girlfriend's friends. It has become our go to entry level game if we want to play with new people, even more so than Catan.
Last night we introduced Vegas Showdown to a couple new people and they dug it. It's such an easy game with a theme that really appeals to most of mine and my girlfriend's friends. It has become our go to entry level game if we want to play with new people, even more so than Catan.
aphoushole
Neo Member
TheExodu5 said:
It is very good, although playing it with less than 5 players is less than ideal. I believe an expansion makes it so that 4 player games are more enjoyable than the base game.
I'm considering getting 1960: The making of the President, I was wondering what GAF's opinions were on the game.
I'd suggest getting the Twilight Struggle reprint instead. The game share very, very similar design and mechanics (which makes sense), but TS is unequivocally better (although 1960 is a good game certainly). I'd only give 1960 the edge if you are super, super, super into the theme and you value aesthetics very highly (1960 is a beautiful game).aphoushole said:
aphoushole
Neo Member
AstroLad said:
Ok, thanks.
platypotamus
Member
CTLance said:
I read the whole thing, not quoting it all for obvious reasons, but thanks a bunch! Way helpful and informative. Definitely sounds like a blast, but sounds a lot closer to the original Caylus board game than I expected, and now I'm worried that it'd essentially be a duplicate in my collection.
My weekend:
Had a little board game party this weekend. It was a bit of an experiment in inviting people I hadn't boardgamed with before, to see who would come and who would have fun. It seemed to go rather well, except for the fact that I accidentally finished on the heaviest game of the night, because I hadn't really thought about the time. Go me.
What we played:
Let's Kill - We started with this one while waiting for a car stuck in traffic. Really light, pretty hilarious, but not really deep enough that I'm too interested in playing again.
Dominion (+ Intrigue): Only squeezed in one round of this (split into two groups, with their own mixed-boxes action cards). Had a Dominion vet in each group, so rules explanation was a breeze. This seemed to be a big hit with the newcomers, as I expected. I love how this game is fun pretty much right away, and not just once you know what you are doing (Agricola, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy all are a rough first play I'd say).
Fluxx - This is probably my favorite of the Looney Labs games (though I've got a special place in my heart for Chrononauts as well). It's nice and light, very chaotic, but with some strategy possible. I won the first game with a ridiculous turn that had me play literally about half the deck.
Caylus - This is the one that we finished with. There were a couple glazed over, vacant facial expressions as I explained how to play, but after a round, people were kind of on top of things. By the end, despite everyone being tired, I think it was popular enough that it'll get another play.
The biggest success of the night was just the fact that people were interested in making this a recurring thing, so I might be doing a lot more board gaming in the future. Woot.
This weekend I played a second game of Z-Man Games' new edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights and have some thoughts to share about it.
TotAN is a storytelling game with a lot more emphasis on the former than the latter. This isn't to say that there isn't a game structure there, but the act of playing is largely random to the point where there's only so much you can do to determine your fate. Each player chooses a character (Ali Baba, Scheherazade, etc.), picks three skills (i.e. Weapon Use, Quick Thinking, Piety, etc.) is dealt a quest (i.e. you have been betrayed by your siblings and must return home a rich man to show them your success despite their treachery), and sets off from Baghdad in search of their fortune.
From there the players travel around the world in search of adventure. The way it works is you'll visit different areas of the map and draw encounter cards, which will include a variety of people, places, and things, all of which will have an encounter number associated with them, sometimes with different numbers depending on what sort of terrain you're in. The players to each side of you will have a book of encounters - well over two thousand of them - and an encounter matrix respectively, and throughout the game these books will be passed around to share the storytelling duties. On an average turn you might travel to a city and draw an encounter which, because of where you are and a dice roll you make, turns out to be a Mad Wizard. From there you'll be told to make a decision from a particular encounter matrix chart, at which point you can chose to grovel, trick, attack, pray, hide, or what have you. Based on your action and the skills you have, the player with the story book will read the corresponding paragraph and, with luck, good things will happen. Otherwise, you may find yourself wandering the globe insane, grief stricken, or with any number of other exciting statuses that effect your character throughout the game. You also have the aforementioned side-quests that you can work on throughout the game. If you fulfill the conditions and you'll get assorted bonuses, as well as another quest to pursue.
The thing about TotAN is that the decisions you're making are fairly random. Let's say you encounter a dark beast of some sort. As you have the Weapon Use skill you may decide your best bet is to attack it. Sometimes you'll be right, and sometimes the game will want to know if you have the seduction skill instead. It will then turn out that your weapons are useless, that you failed to seduce a shape-shifting creature properly because you didn't have that skill, and all hell will break loose. The end results of your encounters are generally quite entertaining even when you're being royally shafted, but the decision making process you made to get there isn't exactly intuitive. On the bright side, occasionally you'll find yourself having epic chains of encounters based on having picked a response on a whim, which is always a lot of fun, even if life is about to get ugly for your poor character by the end of it.
So, yeah, it's pretty random. That said, the system (which includes a variety of other quirks I won't detail here) works well and is rather elegant at times, the game is drop dead gorgeous, and the book is completely packed full of possibilities (along with a generous helping of encounter, quest, and treasure cards), so you aren't going to exhaust all your options anytime soon. It's also a lot of fun to play, randomness and all. I dunno if I'd recommend Tales of the Arabian Nights to everyone, but if the storytelling aspect sounds appealing or if you're a fan of the theme I strongly recommend checking itout.
Ali Fnordba
aphoushole
Neo Member
FnordChan said:
Thanks for your thought on Tales of the Arabian Nights. As soon as I heard of the game I became interested in the idea of a story being told as you play. Not to mention the game looks really well constructed.
XiaNaphryz
LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
I agree that TS is the better game of the two, though 1960's not bad at all. It's completely on what theme is more interesting to you and your gaming group.AstroLad said:
aphoushole said:
I've played other storytelling games (such as Once Upon A Time and Aye, Dark Overlord) that use drawn cards to provide structure to your story, but otherwise you're making everything up yourself. TotAN provides an interesting change of pace in that the story is told for you, but you get to make the decisions that got you there, even if your carefully chosen action gets you into terrible trouble. In any event, by the end of the game you've got quite a story to go along with your character, even if you weren't personally telling it.
And, yes, it is very well constructed. The quality of everything included is nice, the game looks absolutely wonderful, and it's positively dripping theme. The rules themselves are also well put together, though there's at least one card (sex-change) that, if you get hit with it, is probably going to put you out of the game. So, it ain't perfect, but, gosh, it really does look nice.
Scheherafnord
aphoushole
Neo Member
XiaNaphryz said:
I didn't know that 1960 was so similar to TS.
It seems like I'll get TS when the reprint comes out. The theme for TS does admittedly interest me more because of the global scale of TS instead of just the US for 1960. I also like the box art on TS more than 1960.
Is it possible to play Tales of the Arabian Nights solo?
platypotamus
Member
Just played a "series of 5" Dominion/Intrigue with the wife. My own (almost certainly not unique) invention:
Shuffle up the marker cards, and deal out 5 stacks of ten. Then play 5 straight games, using each stack to determine the kingdom cards for the 5 games. This means you see every card (so far) exactly once.
She won 4, and I won 1. :\
Shuffle up the marker cards, and deal out 5 stacks of ten. Then play 5 straight games, using each stack to determine the kingdom cards for the 5 games. This means you see every card (so far) exactly once.
She won 4, and I won 1. :\
Mr_Guillotine
Member
Hey everyone, I've read through some of this thread out of pure curiosity and I've found myself to be pretty intrigued by this stuff, I could easily see myself getting into a hobby like this. Anyways, is there a list of recommended games for people trying to get into this or any kind of advice for someone looking into the hobby? Any help would be appreciated.
platypotamus
Member
Neverfade said:
It actually lowered downtime between games, since we didn't put the "used" Kingdom cards back in the box, we just made little staggered stacks next to each box... so it wasn't too brutal.
Not nearly Agricola or Descent (which I'm guessing is close to Heroscape?) bad though.
Mr_Guillotine said:
Boardgamegeek.com is the penultimate resource. It can be a bit overwhelming at first though.
Are you 100% fresh fish when it comes to this type of boardgaming? There's a pretty solid line between a few major areas of gaming. Eurogames, American style games, and Wargames being the major three. They all have their pros and cons (well, maybe no pros if you're into wargames [i kid, sorta
]). Knowing if you've played ANYTHING before will be a huge start. I suppose the go-to "big" gateway game is Settlers of Catan, which is actually how I got started (though there was about a two year gap between that and me really picking up the hobby). The best thing about Catan is there is a Xbox Live Arcade version, so obviously theres a demo. You could start there, since its free.
Fragamemnon
Member
Just an FYI to anyone here who is a fan of Conflict of Heroes-Academy Games annouced a new game from John Hill (of Squad Leader fame) for a Gettysburg series of two games. The first game will cover the first day, the second the last two days. Like CoH , it'll be easy to pick up, have all the fancypants components (mounted mapboards, big counters, etc.), and shouldn't take too long to play through a session. Uwe Eickert is also doing design for the game alongside John. I've seen some highlights of the play and it sounds like it is taking a lot of core ideas from This Hallowed Ground and distilling them into smaller scale via specific scenarios and simpler rules.
No idea when Conflict of Heroes Storms of Steel will actually go on sale (should be real soon now)? If you are looking for a WW2 squad combat game not made for scary bearded folk that's pretty much the best one going ( Combat Commander is way better IMO but is a good bit more complicated ).
I'd find a local game store that holds a game night and drop on by. Since Eurogames (with their small sets of rules) can generally be picked up by anyone competent enough to make it past Junior Member here on GAF, you should be able to pick up on the rules and have some fun and see if the hobby is for you.
Regarding specific games-I can't really suggest anything outside conflict simulations (aka wargames) since that's all I play. I can vouch for intro games like Twilight Struggle (yes, this is very much a wargame) and the aforementioned Conflict of Heroes if you're looking for a game where you actually battle with someone instead of comparing the size of pumpkin patches or whatever abstract victory condition is popular with the Euro set these days.
No idea when Conflict of Heroes Storms of Steel will actually go on sale (should be real soon now)? If you are looking for a WW2 squad combat game not made for scary bearded folk that's pretty much the best one going ( Combat Commander is way better IMO but is a good bit more complicated ).
I'd find a local game store that holds a game night and drop on by. Since Eurogames (with their small sets of rules) can generally be picked up by anyone competent enough to make it past Junior Member here on GAF, you should be able to pick up on the rules and have some fun and see if the hobby is for you.
Regarding specific games-I can't really suggest anything outside conflict simulations (aka wargames) since that's all I play. I can vouch for intro games like Twilight Struggle (yes, this is very much a wargame) and the aforementioned Conflict of Heroes if you're looking for a game where you actually battle with someone instead of comparing the size of pumpkin patches or whatever abstract victory condition is popular with the Euro set these days.
aphoushole said:
There's a solitaire variant on the Z-Man Games website. I looked at it and it's fairly straightforward, though if you're playing to their victory condition it could take a while. It should still be fun, however, even if the game works best with a few other people.
Mr_Guillotine, I second the advice to find your local game store and see if they have a board game night. If not, that's a bit trickier, but you might be able to find a gaming group via the BoardGameGeek Game Groups forum. If all else fails, look for a highly rated game on BoardGameGeek that catches your attention, buy it, and try it out. Settlers of Catan is a safe bet to start with if you have no idea where else to start and can talk at least two other people into trying it out with you.
Fnorladdin
Flynn said:
I refuse to play Yspahan because it's kind of broken. Basically an unchallenged player can cycle through the card deck and manipulate the supervisor to get lots of cubes on to the caravan track, then just rinse and repeat and score a bunch of points again and again when the track clears. He totally ignores the shop scoring on the main board. The guy who did that completely obliterated the rest of us by getting twice as many points as the person that came in second. I think games like Yspahan in which someone can win employing just one aspect of the gameplay is poorly designed, that is why I rated Yspahan a 5.
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