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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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24 Jun 2019 16:10 - 24 Jun 2019 16:12 #298817 by Gary Sax
I am very torn on the zero sum Here I Stand vs. much less so Virgin Queen. Especially in early plays (I've only played twice) cautious new players just try to cash in hard on the non-conflict VPs and I am not fond at all of that dynamic. I'm not saying it's the pareto optimal strategy set for good players, but...

I also hate the assassination system with the white hot heat of 1000 suns. That you can very easily end up with a garbage 0 skill general who can only command 6SP is just frustrating. Everything else is so cool though, especially because they make much more subtle deals possible.
Last edit: 24 Jun 2019 16:12 by Gary Sax.

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24 Jun 2019 20:35 #298825 by Count Orlok
I'm frankly baffled at the reception that Command and Colors: Medieval has had. Do people really only think of the Middle Ages as the Hundred Years' War (at the tail end of the entire period)? Maybe I spend too much time on Paradox games and forums, but I love the Byzantines and really enjoyed studying the period as an undergrad. The design principle, from what I can tell, is to try and follow the developments through the period, and the Byzantines were the only ones there at the beginning and the end. They also fought pretty much everyone, so you can have an expansion for: the Arab conquests (which also pit the Arabs versus the Persians), the Bulgars (also the Rus), the Turks, the Venetians, and so on. The rising and falling fortunes of the Byzantines give a huge variety of historical scenarios to build from and give so much more than just retread Agincourt for the thousandth time. I'm excited to start digging into C&C Medieval, but I must be patient.

On topic, I finally got to try Spirit Island. Now I see what Gary has been going on about. It's a pretty impressive design, but I'm not sure how well it would work with more than two. I'm eager to try it again, since replay seems quite high on it.
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24 Jun 2019 22:32 - 24 Jun 2019 22:35 #298827 by Sevej
Had a lot of fun with Zombicide Black Plague with the first scenario. I arrived at the office early, set it up, played--learning as I went--and tore it down in 1.5 hours. Admittedly, I didn't play it to the very end--got all the objectives, only waiting until the Dragon Bile comes up from the search deck.

It's lightning fast, especially I'm playing alone. A lot of times I thought, "Is that it?". But it is. The game's so simple, so I can enjoy more the minis and background of the game.

It seems like a game that's fun, but can be repetitive. But that's okay. I also like that it's not difficult. It's certainly more Diablo-ish.
Last edit: 24 Jun 2019 22:35 by Sevej.
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26 Jun 2019 07:10 #298856 by mezike
I’m conscious that I am contributing too many dang words to this thread that everybody hates so I’m thinking about putting up an onsite blog instead when I get back to having enough spare time to write nonsense about toys on a regular basis; in the meantime though there are a couple of things that I tried over the past few weeks that are worth a mention here.

Villagers is one of those KS games that tries to do something new yet ends up with something old and familiar. You make a tableau, some of the cards can only chain on the back of other cards, there’s bonus scoring, set collecting, a light resource economy and so on. There is some blah about rebuilding after a plague but it’s irrelevant to the game, you are simply wooing specialist workers who require a foundational supply chain to be present before they can be put into play – e.g. if you want to have a Blacksmith then you must first hire a Miner or there is no raw material for them to work with. Each Miner can support two specialists and so it goes. The game features a semi-open market that you put discards back into and which makes for some occasionally interesting decisions as the depletion of decks in the market also times the mid-game scoring round. Sometimes you will want to hold onto the really valuable individuals despite not having the full supply chain in place and there is an associated opportunity cost involved that is often challenging to work with. Hate drafting also abounds. Overall though it’s largely unremarkable.

The light and wafty set collecting of Ticket to Ride is boiled down into a demi-glace of surprisingly deep intensity in TTR:London. This is very similar to the fairly recent redux of the game into the New York edition, however this one comes with two main benefits. The first is that it is set in London which is of course, in my totally unbiased view, the tinglymost exciting of cities, and the more important second reason is that it adds a much sharper edge that adds more pulse and tension than the fairly direct port of the previous effort. The change between the two games is that in TTR:NY you gain a handful of bonus points for connecting landmarks, a pretty straightforward affair especially if it sits in line with your route cards, whereas In TTR:L this is replaced with being bonused for completely connecting all locations in defined regions of the board. It’s much more challenging to achieve but the rewards are big enough that it becomes a game strategy in itself rather than merely being a support that sprinkles a few points on top of your score. It also creates more competition for routes on the board beyond the interaction of the route cards, especially when someone responds to being cut off on a route by then angling instead for the region which then screws up other player’s routes and so on. It’s a really fun reduction of the longer form game that augments the format by adding something extra that is appropriate to the scale of the new version. I’ll probably get a copy for myself at some point and I think it might even usurp the regular Europe edition that we sometimes play at home.

I was listening to one of the Distraction Pieces podcasts the other day, I think it was with Nick Helm as the guest, and they talk about how there are times doing stand-up or spoken word where the audience isn’t responding but some of the artist’s peers are in the wings or at the back and really appreciating what is being done on stage; it might not be popular, it might not work for the crowd, but it’s respected by those who understand the craft behind the performance. On a similar note I played Babel for the first time and felt that it was a design that I understood and respected, I could appreciate the intricacies of it and see how they have formed the roots for so much other work. But I just didn’t like it.

For those unfamiliar with this turn of the century Rosenberg classic you have two stacks of temple cards that are numbered between one and six, they come out in random order but must be put into play in sequential order. To do this you have a hand of colour coded cards that represent the different tribes of the era. You discard these cards to move a pawn to various locations and pile them up when you get there to put temple cards into play, and if you discard a set of three then there are special effects that make the game work as something more than a rote puzzle. You can destroy your opponent’s temples which then go back onto the stacks, which is vital as it is otherwise extremely tricky trying to dig out cards from deep inside the stacks, or you can kidnap or murderate their followers to hinder their capabilities.

There is intricacy in how the balance of power waxes and wanes as one small play, switching some followers or lopping the top off a temple, that then unlocks a sequence of events that allows you to pull several of the available temple cards onto your side of the board. Eventually the push and pull swings so hard that you tip into one of the victory conditions with no way for your opponent to climb out. The rise and fall and escalating stakes remind me a lot of Tigris & Euphrates. It did feel though like I was in a repetitive cycle of waiting to see what devastation my opponent would cause and hoping it wouldn’t be too much for me to recover from before doing the same in return. Interesting game all the same.

We’ve also been playing a lot of Gizmos. I think that it makes for an excellent choice as a family friendly game, being a light engine builder with a fun tactile element. There are lots of quirky looking doo-dahs and thingummyjibs drawn on the cards but they aren’t quite brought to life so it is a very mechanical game to play. That also makes it the sort of thing where you are spending an inordinate proportion of the playing time just waiting for your turn to come back around. It actually reminds me quite a lot of Wingspan in that you have a small number of fixed actions that you can take and in the process you improve what those actions do whilst taking them. The only real difference is that Wingspan has a fixed number of actions whereas Gizmos is a lot more fluid with how long a game can run of for. This means that you can take a bit more risk in how you pace your engine building, although the downside is that the fastest moving player then sets the pace of the game. It’s also approximately 20% as cute as the pretty pastel pieces and ornate ornithological offerings of the former.
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26 Jun 2019 08:58 #298858 by Sagrilarus

Count Orlok wrote: I'm frankly baffled at the reception that Command and Colors: Medieval has had.


I get it. This should be something I'm interested in. But somehow I'm not. I simply don't have enough footing in Eastern European history, and when I try to get it my eyes glaze over. Maybe it's too many players, maybe it's just the authors I've picked.

I'd settle for a bit of Charlemagne.

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26 Jun 2019 22:17 - 26 Jun 2019 22:47 #298907 by mc
The F:AT Pax Ren vassal game has coincided with me picking up a hard copy of Bios: Megafauna (first edition). I played a little bit of the solo mode using vassal some time ago. I'd forgotten how straightforward this one is, really. It's just about getting your little reptiles/mammals out on the board, with a few added points coming from other sources (but not many). Of course its Eklund so there's a stack of things that result it going back and forth to the rulebook for the edge cases which, all being said, still make sense (mostly - I'm not sure I can wrap my head around what you are getting points for if you purposely go extinct to turn a genotype card into VP).

As I'm crunching the DNA strands to try and see how I can possibly get my species evolving to suit the surrounding biomes, I keep thinking, could this have been made simpler? And the answer is yes, but it would lose all the stuff that makes it interesting.

It's hell chaotic too, which is basically the theme of the game. I played 2 games yesterday - one with solo rules, and the other multihanded. I lost the solo game because the biomes that were popping up in my base of operations were just not suited to the card draw and I couldn't expand; meanwhile, the two-tusker had developed a huge string of DNA that initially suited his location and then allowed him to just swamp me. It was never close. A catastrophe would have wiped him off the board but it never came. In the multi-hander, The Dino-croc expanded into 1 spot before catastrophes hit, all the other species went extinct. The lone survicor Dino-croc expanded and then evolved an offshoot amphibious species while the other 3 species eventually lazarised, but before 1 scoring round even arrived the global cooling snowballed and ended the game.

It's weird, because in the meantime, I've played Evolution:Climate a fair bit with the family, and it is an example of how to make the thing simpler. So many similar thematic ideas there - choosing evolutions in response to other players, feeding off your own species, adjusting size, the VPs being a kind of fossil record, the climate shifts The thing that makes BIOS different - and ultimately more interesting, in the telling of a story - is all the biomes shifting and changing and immigrant species coming in and being predators and whatnot. The map, basically. I don't know. Is it worth it? I don't know.
Last edit: 26 Jun 2019 22:47 by mc.

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26 Jun 2019 22:29 #298909 by Gary Sax
That is a great post, mc. I watched a playthrough of Bios on heavy cardboard and have thought a lot about picking it up. Meanwhile, I gave away my copy of evolution 6 months after I got it. Like you said, core gameplay ideas similar but the story in Evolution didn't work for me.

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26 Jun 2019 22:49 #298910 by mc
Yeah Evolution will stay in the house, kids like it, but I will look to introduce BIOS as soon as possible I think. That will really tell the tale as to its worth.

If you wanted to give it a go on Vassal at any point happy to oblige. I realised my post was about 1st edition, I haven't looked at 2nd at all.
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26 Jun 2019 23:10 - 26 Jun 2019 23:11 #298911 by Sevej
So, more Black Plague. Had to wait my manager taking his evening prayers, so I set up the 2nd scenario. That lasted 3 hours, despite the book saying 60 minutes. But it's partly my mistake, sending a party without 2-damage weapons and clumping spawn spots in the same place (thinking it was a smart strategy... it's not!). Still super fun, my heroes turning to real zombie slayers as the time go.

However, things I don't like:
1. Super crazy zombie turn around. Nearing the end, the game spawns 10 zombies, only to be returned into the box. That each zombie sculpt have different place in the tray exacerbates this.
2. The noise tokens often feels arbitrary. At the beginning of the game they're kind of useful, but later, not really.
3. Tracking actions can be confusing, especially when you get 1 free action, 1 free movement action, that gets complicated quick, especially that I solo this.

But, here's the good stuff, that's more subtle that people don't realize immediately:
1. The spawning and movement just works. They takes an instant to execute with very little doubt. Additionally, the game enables mixed monsters (instead of just the same 4 goblin spearmen). They may seem very similar, but how the extra activation works make them interesting. These extra activations can even work in players' favor, like separating necromancer from abomination, which actually matters in this game.
2. First turn abomination!
3. How monsters damage work. Just deal damage. No dice, no funny cards, no fuss. That's great.

But, man... even looking at the next scenario gets me excited. More of the same thing, but it's a fun thing!
Last edit: 26 Jun 2019 23:11 by Sevej.
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27 Jun 2019 07:45 #298914 by mezike
@mc @Gary Sax

I've only played 2nd edition BIOS: Megafauna which I understand is quite a different game from 1st ed. I find that 2nd ed. gets better with more players as it creates variety and competition. With just two players you're likely to end up with isolated species and it then becomes a straight race to get three emotions. Games end up lopsided and often finish prematurely if the setup is lacking fluid options for predation of advanced species. The living rules attempt to nerf this a little by making an emotion victory only possible in the third age but it still doesn't solve the isolation problem with low player count.

There are tiles for Mars and Venus that halve the size of the map that are designed for solo play but can be used multiplayer with a variant. I didn't find it satisfying compared to the full game.

Given the price point I wouldn't recommend 2nd ed. unless you will have three or four willing players - the point where the game comes alive is pushing your luck against environmental change in striving to be competitive against other species so it really needs a crowded board to work well.
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27 Jun 2019 08:49 - 27 Jun 2019 09:29 #298915 by charlest
We tried the new Shaggai map in Cthulhu Wars last night and it was great. Functions somewhat like Ragnarok in Blood Rage, with spaces of the board blowing up and you having a little bit of notice. If the spaces flagged actually blow up is down to a die roll though so it's not guaranteed.

The map sort of breaks apart in interesting ways and everything feels much tighter, leading to more conflict.

If your stuff blows up you get a power per unit and an elder sign if you had a controlled gate. Most rounds, I'd trade a single gate with a cultist for a power and elder sign. This happens in the Doom phase by the way, after you've gained the power for the gate/cultist as well as the Doom, so it's kind of nifty.

Anyway, I did pretty well as Sleeper but Black Goat amassed too many elder signs and pulled out a sneaky win. This was our fifth or sixth play with Ancients and we were much less amicable to their cathedral expansion. Ancients player had an early lead but we beat him down and he never recovered. His Ritual of Annihilation at the beginning of turn 2 was a massive mistake.

We've also now played the campaign (read: advanced) game of Wings for the Baron a couple of times, and I think it improves the overall game. I certainly dig the base game, but adding in Recon and Bomber designs allows for multiple new strategic vectors. It also really emphasizes continual factory expansion, something which is minimal in the standard game. Everyone enjoyed this again and this looks to be a keeper.
Last edit: 27 Jun 2019 09:29 by charlest.
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27 Jun 2019 10:44 #298922 by barrowdown
Played my first game of Cyclades last night with the game group. I quite enjoyed the game. It pays off very well, especially when compared with the very low rule complexity. I ended up eking out a win by taking Ares and using the Siren to form a path to a metropolis to win. I look forward to playing it again and I think everyone in the game group also liked it a lot (it was also their first game of it).

I have the Monuments expansion in the box, but I have never played it. The rules look simple enough. Is it recommended that we wait a few plays before introducing it or should I dump it in next time?
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27 Jun 2019 11:15 #298926 by jeb

barrowdown wrote: I have the Monuments expansion in the box, but I have never played it. The rules look simple enough. Is it recommended that we wait a few plays before introducing it or should I dump it in next time?

I would hold off on it. You should see a few ways to win in the regular game first. I've seen folks take Zeus to cycle Heroes until the Philosopher-stealer shows up, folks saving their hash with Polyphemus boat pushing, folks take some relatively undefended island, buy the chimera to make a building converter and snag a Metropolis. All kinds of craziness. There's a lot of game in there.
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27 Jun 2019 11:30 #298931 by charlest
Monuments is such a small expansion, I wouldn't wait too long to add it in. I really dig it and think it's underrated, as it provides new incentives to construct buildings you may otherwise ignore.
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28 Jun 2019 09:50 #298966 by Sagrilarus

charlest wrote: We've also now played the campaign (read: advanced) game of Wings for the Baron a couple of times, and I think it improves the overall game. I certainly dig the base game, but adding in Recon and Bomber designs allows for multiple new strategic vectors. It also really emphasizes continual factory expansion, something which is minimal in the standard game. Everyone enjoyed this again and this looks to be a keeper.


Euro game of the year for 2015 and no one has even heard of it.

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