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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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25 Feb 2019 09:23 - 25 Feb 2019 09:24 #292977 by charlest
Yeah, that Protomolecule module is excellent (and techs are an auto-include in every play for sure).

I played the first two intro scenarios of Resident Evil 2: The Board Game and well, uh, yeah. I would not recommend this game to anyone right now.

It's only redeeming qualities are that the layout of the maps exacty mimic the level design of the video games, and there's an interesting push mechanism which helps convey a similar tactical approach. Enemy behavior (particularly lickers) do what they should and you can tell there were fans behind this.

But the physical production is off the charts bad for a 2019 release. The tiles may as well be black they're so dark. It's ridiculous. The door tokens are equally as dark and one side has an open side, but you won't be able to tell by looking.

It has these little wall pieces that you place down on a couple of tiles, they're ugly thin strips of cardboard you punch out that look like trash. I wouldn't be surprised if a few owners threw them away by accident.

Ammo dials for a few weapons (the ammo management and system is actually kind of neat, though not mind-blowing) are misaligned so there's overlap on the edge.

The minis are OK, like a step below CMON. Not awful but not great.

There are some cool ideas such as how you can spend extra ammo to roll more dice and kind of push your luck. The full campaign, which I start next scenario, has ink ribbons which refresh this event deck - that appears to work rather well. Basically spend an ink ribbon for a breather and to gain some more time.

The tension deck (event deck) on the whole is kind of neat. You draw it after each player's turn and it can trigger unexpected events like two dogs jumping through the windows and immediately spawning. When you combine that with dwindling ammo and some desperate tight quarters, it gets a bet suspenseful in an RE2 sort of way.

I also do actually really like how the enemies don't really have their own AI system or turn, rather they react to your actions. This means that shooting draws all enemies closer, and they also auto-react when your turn is over. The only enemies that react, however, are the ones on your tile or a connected series of tiles with open doors. This causes you to close doors occasionally behind you and avoid the fight. That perfectly mimics running past a group of bad guys and saving your ammo. There are moments such as these where I start to really dig the game and almost overlook the complete failure of a physical product.
Last edit: 25 Feb 2019 09:24 by charlest.
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25 Feb 2019 10:02 #292981 by hotseatgames
I have to believe that they didn't mean for those tiles to come out like that.

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25 Feb 2019 10:03 #292982 by Legomancer
Yesterday's games were:

The Mind - Played twice, lost both times. But man, what a load of fun.

Empires - Here's what I had to say about it:

Abstracted game of colonial domination. A lot of the feel of a "nations in economic conflict" game but whittled down to its essence. You have four a few resources: bonds, people, gold, goods, territory, and you want to eventually produce "luxuries", which generate VP. I predictably chose the pacifist empire, Portugal (may be a surprise to some folks) before realizing that "wars" are just auctions. And honestly it won me the game because I didn't need to worry about money too much and got free territory. The negotiation was okay. There wasn't a ton of it and at least for me I could ignore a lot of it as what I already had was coasting along nicely.

This is in a similar space as Sidereal Confluence and Trade on the Tigris. Of those three it's probably my least favorite for gameplay, but it has an advantage in the time it takes and the space it takes up (Sidereal is a hog for both.) I think ultimately Trade on the Tigris is the winner here, but all deserve more chances. (I also would rather play in space or in ancient Babylonia than in Imperial Europe.)

How eager am I to play again? I'd be up for it.

Is this something I'd like to own? I don't think so.

Rating after first play? 6


For Sale - A classic. This is the game I have the most logged plays for, though Terraforming Mars is racing up from behind. One of the few games I'm consistently pretty good at.

Sushi Go - I prefer Fairy Tale for drafting games, but Sushi Go is adorable and fast and easy to pick up.

Acquire - The classic game people seldom think about, which is a shame. Just an incredible old school style (my copy is an old 3M bookshelf one). Should be constantly in print and have Disney and My Little Pony and Transformers versions.
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25 Feb 2019 10:15 #292985 by Gary Sax
Thanks for posting the extended nations impressions!

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25 Feb 2019 10:20 #292988 by charlest

hotseatgames wrote: I have to believe that they didn't mean for those tiles to come out like that.


I'd hope not or someone should really re-evaluate their tastes.

I can't say the same about the ridiculous wall sections. They knew what they were doing there and it's absolutely ridiculous. It's almost like they wanted you to be able to grab whatever tiles you wanted regardless of artwork (simply grab the right size) in order to speed up setup. But they should have just put some walls on the damn tiles and forced players to eat the setup time. Let no publisher copy this idea ever.

It's frustrating though because their previous game, Dark Souls, had the exact opposite problem in that the components were great but the game was extremely dull. RE2, from my tutorial experience, isn't great from a gameplay stance but it's certainly solid. Those components though..ugh.

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25 Feb 2019 10:25 #292989 by Shellhead
It's a shame that David Ausloos wasn't on the design team for that Resident Evil 2 boardgame. He was great at component design and had an obvious love for the setting, based on his imitation game Dark, Darker, Darkest.
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25 Feb 2019 11:29 #292998 by Colorcrayons
I'm a bit shocked to hear that. After the original printing of Survive Escape from Atlantis by stronghold, Ausloos' efforts seemed quite amature.
I haven't delved into his other stuff though, so maybe he raised his bar for quality.

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25 Feb 2019 11:59 #293001 by jpat
Played a pretty slow 5p Mare Nostrum: Empires game on Saturday. One guy came :30 late, and the teaching went more slowly than I'd intended, so we ended up with only 3.5 hours for a play window, which ... should've been enough but somehow wasn't. I will say, it's the first game I've played (of four total) in both editions where the game didn't end because someone came off with a more-or-less surprise win. My wife (Greece) was extremely close to Pyramids on coins, but everyone (like you should) figured that out and didn't trade coins to her. I (Carthage), while I was telling everyone not to trade coins with her, came up to 11 unique resources+the one pair of commodities that Carthage is allowed to have but couldn't ever quite tip into 12, and in fact slid back quite a bit after Rome started gearing up. Babylon ignored the western parts of the board and went full-on against Egypt, and then I picked up the pieces of Egypt in the west, so that was probably not the most fun ever for that player. We ended up calling it for Rome, with Greece and Carthage "tied" for second, Babylon third, and Egypt last. People wanted to play again, so that's a success. I think the macro issue here with this session, paired with inexperience, was a failure to adapt, as people (me included) kept up with their initial strategies to the point of failure.
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26 Feb 2019 04:32 #293034 by Erik Twice
Ok, hot take time:

I've played Cryptid like 6 or 7 times now and I haven't really cared any of those times. As in, it has not been interesting enough for me to remember it the next morning. It's a wash, it works but I don't really find it interesting. Part of it may be the genre or the fact that I'm not allowed to take notes and that heavily impacts my ability to play it. I just can't keep all the variables on my head, I have a bad memory.

Deep Sea Adventure is cute, but broken. The idea of the game is that you roll and move from a submarine down the sea. The deeper you go, the more valuable tiles you can pick up. Picking up tiles reduces everyone's oxygen every turn so if the group is "greedy", you might not come back. But I believe it's broken.

The issue is that there's a huge incentive to just kill everyone or close the round if you have the lead. As in, you go down and pick up the first 2-3 tiles you land at so Oxygen depletes super fast. No oxygen, no possibility of other players catching up.

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26 Feb 2019 08:39 #293038 by Legomancer

Erik Twice wrote: Ok, hot take time:

I've played Cryptid like 6 or 7 times now and I haven't really cared any of those times. As in, it has not been interesting enough for me to remember it the next morning. It's a wash, it works but I don't really find it interesting. Part of it may be the genre or the fact that I'm not allowed to take notes and that heavily impacts my ability to play it. I just can't keep all the variables on my head, I have a bad memory.


Cryptid was my worst game of 2018, but don't pay attention to me; we apparently "played wrong". It's a fragile game with an uninteresting look to it and not much payoff.
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26 Feb 2019 10:01 #293043 by Vysetron
Played a bunch of stuff lately. Las Vegas, Deception, Dungeon Mayhem, and No Thanks are all games I don't need to elaborate on. You all know they're good. I have played some stuff I think is worthy of comment though.

Picked up Mini FITS at the geek garage sale we attended recently. I never got to play vanilla FITS and the internet says that the mini version is just worse, but this game is adorable and I kind of love it. It's everything fun about multiplayer solitaire stuffed into maybe 10 minutes. It also fixes one of my biggest issues with the current year crop of roll & writes and their ilk - everyone starts with a different piece on their base line. That's all it takes to force varied decisions, and yet the newer games just don't bother. All the more reason to not play games that don't have Knizia's name on the box.

Played Combo Fighter, which is Kolossal/Plotmaker's take on Yomi. I make a point of playing every attempt at fighting-games-the-card-game. It's a lot simpler than Yomi and loses a good bit of the nuance for it but that's not a horrible trade if it means actually getting it to the table. Each character's deck is different and they have a unique mechanic that uses a flippable token in some way. For example, Grace has a stick that makes her better at everything and starts with a card in hand that has her smashing her stick over the other guy's head. It's super strong, but if you play it you flip her stick token and she loses all her "I have a stick" buffs. Choosing when and where to give 'em the stick is a fun puzzle. All the characters are kind of like that, except for Stomp whose gimmick is he's slow and bad. So far I'm enjoying it.

Lastly I wanna talk about Godsforge. I think this game might be doomed before it even comes out as it was deemed inadequate by the Hat Man. Unfairly, in my view, because it's the best "wizard fight" card game I've played in ages. It's straight up better than Dice Throne and that game is super popular. Plus it's absolutely stonking gorgeous. There is no justice.

Mechanically it's pretty simple. You have a hand of cards that require certain die combinations to play. You roll, utilize single die rerolls, and spend stones as modifiers to get what you need. Once everyone figures their dice pool out they simultaneously reveal what card they're playing, then resolve. No turns, no waiting, just stomp the gas and whoop that ass. It's exactly what I want from this genre. Prototype version is up on Tabletop Simulator if anyone wants to try it out.

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26 Feb 2019 10:11 #293044 by Ah_Pook

Vysetron wrote: Picked up Mini FITS at the geek garage sale we attended recently. I never got to play vanilla FITS and the internet says that the mini version is just worse, but this game is adorable and I kind of love it. It's everything fun about multiplayer solitaire stuffed into maybe 10 minutes. It also fixes one of my biggest issues with the current year crop of roll & writes and their ilk - everyone starts with a different piece on their base line. That's all it takes to force varied decisions, and yet the newer games just don't bother. All the more reason to not play games that don't have Knizia's name on the box.


Looking at bgg, it appears that it's the exact same game as regular fits but with smaller boards (both physically and less squares to fill), only 2 boards, less pieces, and cardboard instead of plastic Blokus style pieces. So, I would imagine it's still super fun as I love Fits to bits, but it does sound basically like a less good version of Fits.
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26 Feb 2019 10:55 - 26 Feb 2019 10:55 #293052 by hotseatgames
I don't understand the fascination with Dice Throne. I played a few rounds of it a while back, won every time, and thought it was blander than bland.
Last edit: 26 Feb 2019 10:55 by hotseatgames.

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26 Feb 2019 11:18 #293058 by Vysetron
Dice Throne has this problem where maybe 1/3 of the characters have actual choices. The rest try to bamboozle you into thinking you did things while having nearly identical math. The season 2 characters are guilty of the same. It's also too long for what it is, especially with defensively oriented characters.

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26 Feb 2019 12:29 - 26 Feb 2019 12:31 #293066 by RobertB

Erik Twice wrote: Deep Sea Adventure is cute, but broken. The idea of the game is that you roll and move from a submarine down the sea. The deeper you go, the more valuable tiles you can pick up. Picking up tiles reduces everyone's oxygen every turn so if the group is "greedy", you might not come back. But I believe it's broken.

The issue is that there's a huge incentive to just kill everyone or close the round if you have the lead. As in, you go down and pick up the first 2-3 tiles you land at so Oxygen depletes super fast. No oxygen, no possibility of other players catching up.


Grass had that problem - it was a rethemed version of Mille Bornes but scored like that, where you could end at any time if you had the right card. So why not end it, which also gave you a small bonus if you had the highest points scored in that round? Granted, this was the 1980's, when men were men, women were women, and most games kind of sucked.
Last edit: 26 Feb 2019 12:31 by RobertB.

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