Cole Wehrle on the design of Pax: Mouse Guard, Root

katiesgamecorner.com/2018/01/22/burning-...iary-by-cole-wehrle/

Interesting. I'm still sort of wishing I'd backed this, even though it would be destined for Toad Shelf at my house.

Not sure Pax: Mouse Guard is accurate, as all the Pax games hang together off that central card market. This seems more like "Cry Havoc: Mouse Guard edition".

On the plus side, my copy of Wehrle's John Company arrived today, and didn't get lost in the shipping mixups that have plagued it's release. (also destined for Toad shelf, but a theme worth buying for me).

Yeah, in a different situation I would have toaded this one too, looks interesting.

John Company arrived at my house too, I think. VASSAL, Paul?

I clicked the link excited about some new Mouse Guard licensed game only to discover that cranberries is a dick.

Mad Dog wrote: I clicked the link excited about some new Mouse Guard licensed game only to discover that cranberries is a dick.

THAT’S WHAT I WAS THINKING

The only MG board game is super blah. This one sounds good but it’s not MG.

Between this and Barnes’ tragic death, I just can’t trust thread titles here anymore.

Sorry about that, I've seen several alternative names for this:

Pax: Forest
Chaos in the Old Woods

And it does look a little Mouse Guard-y.



I think Dan Thurot referred to it as sort of a COIN game. "Forest Creature Abyss" or "A Distant Stump"

I changed it so you guys would like it more better....

Bah!!, totally missed this KS.

Chapel, there's a "Preorder" link on the Kickstarter for latecomers. I'm still somewhat tempted myself.

"COIN: Mouse Guard" may be the most accurate. While Cole did Pax Pamir, his other games are not very Paxy at all.

(but holy shit the John Company game board looks like an Eklund rulebook that has horrifically come to life)

Taking its inspiration from Phil Eklund's seminal Lords games, John Company offers Greed Incorporated by way of Republic of Rome — and with only sixty cards and multiple scenarios, John Company is one of the most accessible SMG offerings to date.

Dat board, though. I wasn't kidding:

BGG images don't end in jpg

Zoom in, it just keeps going...

This guy put together a print and play with the map at 150 percent , which looks more useable.

Is baroque the right word for this? Or just "mind numbingly complex"? I'm really interested in the topic, and I think it might have been the focus of Wehrle's doctoral research.

As far as I can tell, the JC map is encoding a lot of procedural details, so it's doubling as a state tracking board and a player aid. I haven't really spent any time on learning it yet, just opened it yesterday when it arrived and glanced through it. I have bigger issues for the next week or more.

The back side (can't find a picture online) is for another scenario of the game and is much much simpler.

I don't think it's terrible, just procedural. The rules are not excessively long, nor are there tons of exceptions. It might be difficult to figure out what the levers do at first, but it's probably manageable.

Hey, instead of hijacking this thread (100% my fault), John Company has it's own over here: John Company

I'm still waffling a lot on Root itself. It ticks a lot of boxes for me. I might spend some time with the PnP rules and see if it sells me.

Looks like the preorder copies are the same as the Kickstarter ones, with no weird exclusives.

I made a copy of & played a couple of games of the first print-n-play version of Root (both with 4 players). Opinions around the table were mixed; at least one person didn't seem to care for it, but most of us liked it well enough. The second print-n-play has some significant differences from the one we tried, but unfortunately I haven't tried that one yet.

At heart Root is a highly asymmetrical conflict game, so playing, say, the cats will be a radically different experience from playing the vagabond.

Anyway, the game felt cutthroat, and there was lots of interaction. The graphical presentation is fantastic.