Descent definitely totally not 3.0

mads b. wrote: I was surprised by the lack of analysis in this video. Most of it is just "I like this, I don't like this" with no explanation as to why. Or maybe he could just give us a little more about his experience. His point about not doing app stuff as a group was good and I would have liked some more of that.

Apart from that I'm starting to like what I see. I'm not a big fan of having an app when playing a board game, but on the other hand I can see how the lack of having to understand the mechanisms could be a plus when playig with my kids. I think they would also appreciate the rather cool terrain stuff more than Vasel did.

This. Compare the DT review with NPI’s. In addition to not being presented by a smarmy shill, their preview (not a review, it was under embargo at the time) is full of thoughtful commentary and analysis about what works, what doesn’t, and what makes this a notable release. There’s also a real enthusiasm for the potential of the game instead of “I’m a review mill cranking out content”. I actually really like Efka and Elaine’s commentary - they are really sharp, and their analysis has a credibility far beyond anything that falls out of Vasel’s mouth.

Also, neither Efka or Elaine dress like Fozzie Bear.

RobertB wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: I think I posted in the discord on this, I might skip the extensive dice tower merch in the bgg store lol: boardgamegeekstore.com/collections/dicetower

The poster is my favorite, jesus christ. What would Erik Twice think.

"Proceeds" from sales "support" The Dice Tower. JFC.

I haven't looked as closely as I used to, but I know BGG used to beg for donations like another $10 will enable them to give birth to world peace. I think both BGG and The Dice Tower are for-profit, which is fine; we all gotta eat. But don't blow smoke up my ass and try to convince me that the dollars I spend on them are going to a 'good cause'.

There is no think, it’s a fact. And I have no problem….til they start pandering like they are struggling non profit. BGG seems to have toned down the tin cup shtick somewhat the last few years.

I guess I'll call it. This game will have about as much staying power as "Discover: Lands Unknown" or any of the other experiments FFG seems to spuriously think they have the resources to support.

I've never looked at something like Gloomhaven and pined for what this app gimmick does. Not to mention the lame, Puzzle Quest style alternating portrait highlights & cookie-cutter text cutscenes that look like a time warp from 10-15 years ago in the video game space. Are we supposed to sit and watch this trash DIY RPG dialog as a group? Are you kidding me?

If Rob Oren and Vasel think it's kinda sorta hot garbage (tepid garbage?), I see little reason to front any of the cost for this. If someone in my sporadic "group" picks it up, I'll indulge a play. If they don't, I won't be missing much aside from a footnote in the "genre"... whatever that's worth.

Odds are you are exactly right Frohike...I think it will do better than that absolute bomb and I think we’ll at least see a couple of expansions that flare out in a blink and then are worth a bunch of money...but you know MOM 2e and JIME have done OK, so maybe there’s an inroad to an audience there?

I’m expecting; at this point, for the game to be the most evolved hybrid of digital and board game to date. I genuinely want to see what that looks like, but my concern remains that it’s not going to feel like a board game. NPI didn’t really seem to think that way and Calvin doesn’t either, so it’s promising.

Here’s the deal. I am totally OK with offloading pretty much all the admin work to an app at this point. If it does away with ten decks of tiny FFG cards and 5 punch boards of heart tokens...gimme all of that. And I’m all for an AI assistant that replaces the usual solo mechanisms and triaging. I’ll take it.

Gary Sax wrote: It's hard for me to believe Tom's super weird somewhat unprofessional style managed to become such a big success. First mover advantage and different strokes, I guess. Imagine being, say, Shut Up and Sit Down and putting that much effort into your scripted videos and knowing the Dice Tower bad rules explanation/off the cuff seemingly one take personal opinion format probably beats or at least rivals you on views, money, etc. I don't even necessarily think he's wrong on this review or anything.

The Dice Tower actually has surprisingly low view numbers. Many of their videos don't get more than a couple thousand hits despite having over 200.000 subscribers. They compensate by having more content than anyone else. I counted on Youtube and they posted 38 videos in less than a week.

I'm told that most people doing reviews or other content for The Dice Tower are not paid. This explains why their huge roster is sustainable and why so many people do a video for them once and then dissapear. I suspect many are simply offered the opportunity to get a review copy and a bit of exposure in boardgaming's biggest channel. This also seems why you have so many videos with very low production values, such as a complete lack of editing, webcam-quality video and no scripting.

This is not a knock against the person featured in this video or her actual advice, but I think stuff like this show extremely low editorial standards and shouldn't be acceptable in a professional setting:



Look at it. The video quality is extremely low. Ms Makak must have used whatever camera she had around and she recorded it in her room or something similar with no actual lightning. She has to flip a manual twice in the beginning to create an intro of sorts. Didn't she get an editor? Advice? Any sort of branded material to create a proper thumbnail? I find it very hard to believe a full-pro like Vasel couldn't get her anything better than a poorly slapped bit of text stating her name in white.

She has done 42 videos for The Dice Tower since she started. And this is not the first, no, this is the latest one. Is this the critical quality The Dice Tower is supposed to represent? Frankly, I would be ashamed to review games and criticize other people's work if these were my standards. Imagine complaining about a poorly put-together manual or typos in the cards when you do fully unscripted, unedited content. The least he could have done is give her a decent webcam. After 42 videos, I think she deserves it.

Let's be honest, I was a moron once and gave my writing for free to some random website for year and a half. The editor didn't even bother to set up meetings in my time zone. He even censored one of my articles once. I don't know how much Ms Makak is paid, but I doubt it's a fair compensation for the time she puts in it. If she likes this stuff, I hope she has the same realization I did and works on her own because she's clearly not getting any benefits from working with boardgaming's largest channel.

sornars wrote: Edit2: I did notice the clearly in focus games behind Tom during the review and found that extremely bizarre. I actually thought he planned to point to them for some point of comparison or relevance to the current review but no, they just sat there as some sort of product placement.

I saw quite a few advertisments for The Loop on BGG so that also seemed odd to me. Here's what I found.

First, The Loop is published by Pandasaurus which is one of the Dice Tower sponsors.

Second, they have done a bunch of videos on the game including one unboxing video and a live play-through in which they give away three copies of the game in a contest again sponsored by Pandasaurus.

I'm not American but I must note that showing games this way is in oppossition to the guidelines set by the Federal Trade Comission. They explicitly mention that you must disclose you are being paid to promote a product if you show it in the background or something of a similar kind.

So yeah, there's nothing bizarre about it. It's just undisclosed advertising.

Michael Barnes wrote: This. Compare the DT review with NPI’s. In addition to not being presented by a smarmy shill, their preview (not a review, it was under embargo at the time) is full of thoughtful commentary and analysis about what works, what doesn’t, and what makes this a notable release. There’s also a real enthusiasm for the potential of the game instead of “I’m a review mill cranking out content”. I actually really like Efka and Elaine’s commentary - they are really sharp, and their analysis has a credibility far beyond anything that falls out of Vasel’s mouth.

Also, neither Efka or Elaine dress like Fozzie Bear.

Uhh, for those of us who don't know every acronym in boardgaming, what is NPI?

Nonpharmaceutical Interventions No Pun Included , a fairly popular Youtube channel and podcast duo that tend to dig a bit deeper with their analysis than many other content creators in the hobby.

Michael Barnes wrote: Also, neither Efka or Elaine dress like Fozzie Bear.

Tough, but fair.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but the obligatory Two Minutes Hate whenever the Dice Tower comes up is pretty tiresome. However you feel about them, that video has lots of hands on footage of the app, which is the first time I've seen that outside of the FFG livestream from a while back (which didn't have particularly detailed app info of memory serves). The game is purchasable and the app isn't available for another 3-4 days, so that seems like pretty relevant information atm.

It’s really kind of off topic too, especially when we have an interesting and potentially divisive or disruptive game in the horizon...which IMO is resin to celebrate, we’re talking about a game and not a crowdfunding campaign.

The cost, I think where they went wrong is not emphasizing enough that the app is part of the cost. It’s not a board game with a free app. The app is half the game and that cost is not really represented in what you buy off the shelf. Yeah, the box had about $75-$100 worth of material in it. If that. The minis look really good and are better quality than most FFG stuff, which is definitely figured in. Maybe by simply having a code in the box that you need to download the app could have made the psychological impact of the price lessened?

"resin to celebrate"

Well played.

Michael Barnes wrote: It’s really kind of off topic too, especially when we have an interesting and potentially divisive or disruptive game in the horizon...which IMO is resin to celebrate, we’re talking about a game and not a crowdfunding campaign.

The cost, I think where they went wrong is not emphasizing enough that the app is part of the cost. It’s not a board game with a free app. The app is half the game and that cost is not really represented in what you buy off the shelf. Yeah, the box had about $75-$100 worth of material in it. If that. The minis look really good and are better quality than most FFG stuff, which is definitely figured in. Maybe by simply having a code in the box that you need to download the app could have made the psychological impact of the price lessened?

I don't think they'd win any ground arguing half or more of the cost is for the app. The more you push the app to the fore in terms of marketing the more people will lean into the notion that this is a video game with a board game component tacked on.

Also, there are many games the cost of the app doesn't seem as prohibitive such as Destinies, Mansions of Madness 2, Journeys in Middle Earth, and Forgotten Waters.

That last point may be about perception though as there is more app content in Descent than in a game like Destinies, but it's difficult to shake that perception once you cross certain price thresholds.

I'm still eager to try this at some point, but I imagine the app may go too far for my tastes. Destinies, Journeys, and MoM2 have sort of landed in a realm for me where I feel like I'm messing with the app far more than the board, which is not what I personally want.

Forgotten Waters is the gold standard for what I want an app to do. Event cards (including tracking linked events behind the scenes), scenario setup, and setting specific voice acting for all of it.

charlest wrote: I'm still eager to try this at some point, but I imagine the app may go too far for my tastes. Destinies, Journeys, and MoM2 have sort of landed in a realm for me where I feel like I'm messing with the app far more than the board, which is not what I personally want.

I'm not in the market for another dungeon crawler, having two in the house that don't see enough play already, but my thought would be similar to Charlie's vis-à-vis the app. I'm fine with app use, in general, but I really don't want to be messing with my phone for half the time that I'm supposedly playing a board game. The app in Alchemists was necessary to play the game and was pretty slick in its simplicity, but that simplicity meant that you never spent more than a few seconds looking at it or using it every round. If you're saying that the app removes the "tedious" parts of the game, that immediately summons two more questions: 1. Is the game any good if large parts of it are tedious? 2. Are there other games you could be playing that don't need an app to make them not tedious?

I skipped a fair amount of the video, but how does the app maintain its understanding of the state of the game? Or does it not need to?

I don't know the answer completely, but if it works similar to Mansions of Madness 2e then it doesn't care what space characters are on.

It will just pop up with events and resolve enemies attacks/behavior through text. In MoM it will cycle through monsters and tell you to move them towards the nearest character and attack, asking questions like if there is a target in range and then generating results.

But there will be points of interest, like a book case or item on a table you can investigate which you must move next to on the board and then click in the app to resolve.

This is where the interactivity and much of the app time comes in.

So imagine someone's turn:

Sag moves to the tile edge with his mini and then picks up the tablet and touches the little icon indicating you want to open the door/explore.

Now the app cycles through several things telling you what tile to place and then all of the tokens for key points of interests to investigate. You dig up tokens and place them on the actual board, at least in MoM.

Then someone else moves into the room and takes the tablet to investigate a spot. Text pops up explaining what happens and you read it to the group.

And so on.

If you attack monsters you input die results/successes into the app.

At round end monsters activate which requires you keep the tablet in hand.

Almost nothing, individually can be performed without the app. Maybe if you move and do nothing else. Even then you may want to use the app to check line of sight.

This is assuming it works mostly like MoM and Journeys in Middle Earth. I think that's a safe bet that it evolves off these.

What seems like a bit of a pain is reading character speech bubbles when you go to town. Narrating that stuff aloud to the rest of the group is always awkward.