Trashdome - Twilight Struggle VS War Of The Ring

vote: War of the Ring

vote: Twilight Struggle

Too lazy to vote this week...guess I need to weigh in here...

At first blush, I thought "WotR all the way". It is one of the key, canonical AT titles. When it came out, it was like a fucking warning shot across the bow of the H.M.S. Eurogame. It was awesome, and between it and DUNE there's not another game that more perfectly captures its theme.

But you know what? I haven't played it in like three years. I've got a lot of great memories of truly epic sessions and we had a blast, but it feels almost like it's permanently mothballed. There are some problems with it that aren't apparent in the honeymoon period, the main one is that it really is a very complex CDWG in disguise- and I'd probably rather play an honest one most times. I also think there is some scripting that emerges, and the functionality of the components is suspect. I _hate_ the pieces of this game from the tipsy Nazgul to the 2-point font on the cards. And the uneven map, the colored borders...it's a _nice_ looking production, but not a very good one all things considered.

TWILIGHT STRUGGLE gets my vote, much to my surprise. It's an incredible design, and it's every bit as thematic as WotR. The difference is that it's a VERY compelling theme and it's not more genre stuff. The pictures on the cards, the visual style, and the mechanics all sum up to one of the best games in recent years. Every time I play the game is completely different, fresh, and ludicrously tense when you play with someone who knows it well.

At least this is another standup fight, not a walkover like DUNE versus ARKHAM HORROR _should_ have been.

i always hear people bitching about the font of the cards. I have bad eyes and i have NO trouble reading the cards. Do you guys play by candlelight?

However, AMEN to pointing out the tippy Nazgul. how often do these things fall?

how often do these things fall?

Wrong question. It should be "how often do these things stand up for more than two minutes at a time?"

Black Barney wrote:

However, AMEN to pointing out the tippy Nazgul. how often do these things fall?

Unless you are playing with a lumbering minotaur, hardly ever.

Now that's just spin right there. You know as well as everybody else here that those damn things don't stand up for shit. I've seen ALL kinds of solutions to the problem, mostly involving gluing something (pennies, poker chips, etc.) to the bases. The fact is, they're too tall and the base is too small. They're born to fall.

As for the font, it is a problem not because it's hard to see, but because it's bad design. It's ridiculous for cards with so much important text to be printed so small.

you go anywhere near Nazgul-led armies and those leaders tip right over. You reach across Middle-Earth for something and the Nazgul tip over. They drive me bananas.

Does the Collector's Edition address this?

At the MSRP, they better be mounted on gold bars.

Vote: Twilight Struggle

Over a hundred plays and still learning and still feeling the tension in every move.

I love it how Trashdome draws out the lurkers.

There's just too much at stake to sit silently on the sidelines.

Good call JoshBot.

Throwing in another vote for Twilight Struggle. If I have someone willing to play and the time to play it in, it will always be my first choice.

Black Barney wrote:

you go anywhere near Nazgul-led armies and those leaders tip right over. You reach across Middle-Earth for something and the Nazgul tip over. They drive me bananas.

Isn't that the whole point of the nazguls? To create fear and madness on the battlefield.

I have played both games exactly once. Both seem like great games. But the one I most want to play again is WotR. TS was a bit too long and too card-driven(?) if that makes sense. I totally lost our 1st game because of the very final hand I was dealt. I simply had no chance when every card I had, was a positive for the other player. And he then got Europe on the final turn. Otherwise the scores would have been very even. The 1st play was fun reading all the cards though. But that's something that is great to explore the 1st play.

WotR seemed like a great game with a lot of different aspects to explore. Perhaps not all things that you CAN do is actually strategically sane, but there seemed to be a lot of options, that can be tried. I have avoided all strategy articles because of this. I want to explore the possibilities without someone telling which ones are worthless.

Vote: WotR

Theoden: So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?

Aragorn: Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.

Theoden: For death and glory.

Aragorn: For Rohan. For your people.

Theoden: The Horn of Helm Hammerhand will sound in the deep, one last time!

Even if it is only better during the honeymoon phase, it is such a GREAT honeymoon.

WotR