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08 Dec 2019 11:55 #304904 by RobertB
Went to the local game club with my daughter and her boyfriend. She says, "I want a horror game." Well, heck. I know they're are plenty out there but I was drawing a blank for anything except Eldritch Horror and Mansions of Madness*. I didn't want a co-op, so I picked Tyrants of the Underdark. "It's got Drow in it, that close enough?"

I had never played Tyrants before, but it gets good word-of-mouth here. My other two players have never played deckbuilders before, so I went over the rules, gave them some hints about how deckbuilders work, and off we went. I saw that I could make points by killing every neutral I could and by taking the two sites close to me, and I did. They figured out how to get points too, but my strategery got started quicker, for more points and the victory.

On the strength of one play, its a winner. I like it better than Trains, which I guess would be its closest cousin.

*I just realized that I could've got out Last Night on Earth. I like it, and it's competitive. Heck, I have a copy and I've even painted the figures. Going senile I guess.

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08 Dec 2019 14:11 - 08 Dec 2019 14:12 #304909 by southernman
Another two games of Nemesis today, both 3-player normal mode.
First game I had to either get rid of player 1 or be the only survivor - about round 3 I ended up in the Airlock Control and player 2 was in the Fire Control (another yellow) room, I gave him a round to get out and he didn't so I couldn't resist on my turn and activated the room and closed all the doors around his room, he was the Pilot who had open door cards and he had one card left (my excuse that I gave him a chance :whistle:) … but it wasn't one of those so - whoooosh. The game only went another hour as I was soon out in an escape pod after leaving fires and malfunctions unattended through the ship, and it exploded not long after.
Second game we were all pulling together keeping the ship intact and I was wondering how I was going to get two weaknesses discovered as the Laboratory was still unfound with only three rooms left to check when the Captain said he knew where it was and he thought we should discover some weaknesses (I wasn't suspicious enough). Then the Mechanic got a bit worried as he thought the Escape Pods opened at the halfway point and not just the Hibenatorium - we then guessed he must have to end up in a pod and he was going to have to set off the self destruct since Hatch Control room was not in the game, plus as he had visited one engine room and was in a second also guessed he wasn't repairing them !
I used my security key to shut the doors around the Generator room (to delay him setting the self destruct) and toyed with racing to the Hibernatorium and getting in to prevent the self destruct being set so we both would lose, but since I had won the first game I decided to give us all a chance to win and carried on to the Laboratory humping an intruder corpse. The self destruct was set, but the Captain ordered the Mechanic into rooms a couple of times that brought a nice selection of angry intruders out that eventually killed him. I ran out of time to get my second weakness discovered but the Captain won as he had sent the signal plus the weakness I had discovered was the one he needed :huh: .

This is a damn good game - theme and base mechanics well integrated and implemented, and quality components giving a 'feel good' experience on top of the gameplay. But I do feel that it drifts a bit off theme by allowing players who's objective has no requirements for certain players not to survive to go and deliberately sabotage the ship (i.e. damage the engines), I can see the game getting a bit out of hand with players sabotaging the ship or airlocking each other at any opportunity.
Last edit: 08 Dec 2019 14:12 by southernman.
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08 Dec 2019 14:13 #304910 by Jackwraith

RobertB wrote: I had never played Tyrants before, but it gets good word-of-mouth here.
On the strength of one play, its a winner. I like it better than Trains, which I guess would be its closest cousin.


therewillbe.games/articles-beyond-review...-king-in-the-shadows
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09 Dec 2019 14:31 #304943 by RobertB

Jackwraith wrote:

RobertB wrote: I had never played Tyrants before, but it gets good word-of-mouth here.
On the strength of one play, its a winner. I like it better than Trains, which I guess would be its closest cousin.


therewillbe.games/articles-beyond-review...-king-in-the-shadows


Explains why I thought about it then. :)

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10 Dec 2019 09:17 #304962 by lj1983
A friend had a birthday meetup at the FLGS, so I stopped by and got snagged into a game of Nemesis It ended a 3.5 hour game.

I was the only new person, we played with 4. Pilot (me), convict, Captain, Medic.

I ended up with Hoarder objective and Extreme biology (or something). Basically a choice between get lots of stuff and get on an escape pod. or discover (discard) two of the alien advantages/disadvantages.

I didn't like having to choose my objective as early as I did. I'd rather an initial choice at the beginning of the game, or have that choice available later.

Still, I chose the extreme biology...which ended up being almost the same as the Medic's. We played against the Carnomorphs. who give out mutations which can cause you to die if you use the mutation too often. The convict spent most of the game fighting the little monsters and eventually mutated himself into a monster. the 3 left, we realized that our objectives all matched up pretty well, with none being 'antagonistic'. we started working towards fixing the ship and getting it home...then had an event that spawned tons of monsters everywhere there was an alien corpse. and all of a sudden the back half of the ship was swarmed with all the big baddies too. so nix that plan, wreck the engine we just fixed and run towards the escape pods.

I was at the port engine, and the escape pods were at the front starboard side of the ship(we had one get destroyed via event early in the game) with noise markers everywhere. so we gamed the shit out of things, leapfrogging each other to limit the noise rolls. I was the first on the escape pods, and GTFO leaving one pod for two people. and since we had been playing 'nice' for so much of the game, they went through 2 rounds of trying to get both people on the pod, but aliens kept showing up and kicking them out. Eventually the medic got tired of it and just left the captain behind.

Overall, I really liked it. great nods to various movies/games throughout. the objectives can definitely add some spice between the players. the individual card decks for various roles are something I absolutely love. I didn't like the monster movement, I thought it was very limited, a lot of these two stacks of monsters swap places. and the objectives locking down at the time they did felt odd. and the noise mechanic. I understand it's purpose and it definitely creates tension...but it just felt off to me. maybe I was just soured by the loooong time we spent at the entrance to the escape pod just trying to walk through a door. I'll have to play again, maybe with the classic 'alien' monsters.
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10 Dec 2019 17:11 #304985 by Erik Twice
I played a bunch of ok games but I'm not going to bore you because I also played Diplomacy and Dune.

Diplomacy was intense. That's the way to describe it, I think. It was my first game and I played as Turkey so I was shielded against the constant fear other players must have been feeling. The Russian player asked me to do the Juggernaut (cooperate to attack leftwards) and I did, but he was very insistent in having Romania so I tricked him and took it for me. It felt like an important territory and I would rather have it than him.

Astro-Hungary did not take long to leave the game. Italy played a mean game and a couple poor moves and fake turkish friendship did him in. I was the strongest player in the game, with a very safe position and a Russia I was not concerned about.

Russia was not happy, though. He wanted Romania. He wanted it so much he was more bothered by me taking it than me taking Sevastopool. It doesn't matter, I knew I could crush either Russia or Italy with some play. But France didn't bulge. He refused to do anything against Italy nor England and England refused to do anything against Russia in the North or try to win the game together.

Shortly after, the game was over. The France-Russia-Italy alliance had 18 centers and would not bulge. From what we saw, it was impossible for neither Russia nor me, or even both to win against them so we simply gave them the game.

I must admit I was a bit bummed by that. It felt very arbitrary as any 3-player combination would have enough centers to win. And, more importantly, it meant I had been playing "alone" for most of the game. All my talking with France and England was pointless because they had arranged a joined win from turn 2.

--

Fremen and the Guild won again in Dune. My girlfriend seems to have gotten the hang of stalling the game as Fremen and winning that way. My early aggression as Fremen and the support of my Bene Gesserit ally could have won us the game but we were at a loss at how to proceeed and we saw the game slip through our fingers.

On the way back we talked about how to stop her strategy and we came to the conclusion we "let" both but specially the Guild stand around doing "nothing" instead of poking their stacks. If left to their own devices, they'll eventually crush your last-minute attempts to win the game through sheer numbers. More importantly, if they are building up troops in a stronghold, that's one less stronghold available to win. And you are not going to take over 100% of the remaining strongholds. It's much, much harder to win when you need 3-4 out 4 strongholds than when you need 3-4 out of any 5.
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10 Dec 2019 17:50 #304988 by barrowdown
I played two small scenario games of Blitz! A World in Conflict! before deciding I do not like it and putting it on the trade pile. It was a little light for what I want out of it and gameplay-wise is probably alright for a group looking for something just above Axis & Allies. In order to offset its lightness, it has the worst rulebook I have seen from a major wargame publisher. Compass is usually not as clean as MMP or GMT, but wow, this things is a mess. There is no index, the rules are not very well cross-referenced, an unclear second person voice, no player aids, and always picking the most convoluted way to describe anything.

Quirky Circuits has already been played several times and is fast to teach, quick to play, and a lot of fun. This could easily be dropped on nongamers in a lot of situations as the basic rules are about a quarter of a page with any map/scenario specific rules included with the map.

My wife and I have played four games of Near and Far and I just picked up the Amber Mines expansion to add to the village. She has been really enjoying it and it plays like an adventure game despite primarily being very far to the euro resource-management side. I have managed one slight victory so far of our four games.

I also invited a new person to play the newest Keyforge set at the FLGS and it was alright. I think the new Federation-like faction was pretty flexible and had a lot of abilities that triggered on Play/Attack/Reap so they were frequently doing something. Neither of us had the Roman dinosaur faction so I am unsure how they would play. The new person seems to really want to play more games, so I will be trying to incorporate him into my usual group.

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10 Dec 2019 19:24 #304989 by Greg Aleknevicus
Diplomacy -- Remember that the official rules state that any player with pieces on the board (even just one) at the end of the game wins equally. So unless that ENG-FRA-ITA coalition wiped you out completely, you won just as much as they did.

This rule might seem suspect, but it helps lessen the likelihood of the situation you describe where two or more players decide to play for a "joint win."
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10 Dec 2019 20:19 - 10 Dec 2019 20:20 #304990 by Frohike
Played what may possibly be my last game of Suburbia

I’m stunned at just how shamelessly this adheres to the stereotype of the joyless multiplayer solitaire spreadsheet game. And for all of its dryness and constant +1/-1 adjustment prompts, there's no real payoff on the other side, where the math should fuel a private pleasure in choosing a path that threads the needle between creativity and optimization. It’s not even a very well designed spreadsheet, to be frank.

This makes Stegmaier games look like smorgasbords of player choice & interaction.

There's a major unforgivable sin for me in this light/medium-light design: next to nothing is provided to hoist yourself out of a hole if your economy drags in the early game, which can emerge either due to your sub-optimal/learner decisions or the occasional luck of the draw with the tile market and turn order. This is unnecessarily brutal for a game of this weight that doesn't have a title along the lines of Age of [...] or Railways of [...]

If you can’t afford any tiles around the shift to mid-game (stack B ) it is almost certainly game over for you. Have fun placing those lakes for temporary cash flow while everyone else boosts their constant income to 12+. Eventually, you’ll still be out of money, your adjacencies will be hosed by all the water in your town (or any lake borders bought in the same effort), and tile costs will be creeping into 15+, forever out of reach.

This happens to one unlucky player on a rotating basis every time and the Inc. expansion did nothing to alleviate it. There should be no room for this style of self-damnation in a game of this weight, even if it only takes 60 minutes after the mistake has been made for the miserable bankruptcy to come to an end.

Which brings me to what would normally be the saving respite, giving the loser some means of at least attempting to remain in the game once the market is no longer a valuable tool for them: interactivity. It is virtually non-existent in this game. The advocacy threads on BGG forums overstate what’s actually available. You can draft a few points off of other players here & there to perhaps dis-incentivize certain purchases, or purposefully deny a tile from the market if you’ve taken one of the alternative actions. But both of these feel like relatively weak and tangential pot shots that are really only of value to those who feel they are still in the game, to be taken while laboriously keeping your reputation & income engines in tune, an activity that remains a stolidly solo exercise in grooming points.

Compared to other contemporary spreadsheet racing Euros, there are generally very few footholds to catch up or slow one's own decline, equally few caltrops to slow other players, and a dearth of opportunity for creative play (which is dissonant with the theme of "creating" a suburban environment). This all seems weirdly anachronistic, like a Euro design that forgot its own passive aggressive lineage while also omitting any richness of choice in its cramped solitaire “decision spaces.” Player agency feels very hermetic, non-creative, and almost entirely subject to whichever tiles are affordable on a given turn (usually 2-3 options).

So the dynamics & flow of the game end up being equally dry & intractable while carrying the worst baggage that board gaming has to offer in this vein of spreadsheet racing: fiddly point tracking & cascading, gamey abstractions that pull players out of the theme, helpless down time while “opponents” ponder their options (combined with a frustrating inability to really plan ahead in this time since tiles on the lower, more predictably affordable end are often cycled through before your next turn), and most egregious of all... a near absolute silence at the table.
Last edit: 10 Dec 2019 20:20 by Frohike.
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11 Dec 2019 03:51 #304993 by mc
Thanks Frohike that's a really good analysis of that game. Far more eloquent than my thoughts (essentially: yawn..... fuck this).


Side question: what are some good city builders that aren't "place green next to purple for +1 VP"? Like. ..ones where your city has some personality and you can interact with what is being created - use buildings etc? I know Big City had good rep here.... anything else?

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11 Dec 2019 08:14 #304997 by Legomancer

mc wrote: Side question: what are some good city builders that aren't "place green next to purple for +1 VP"? Like. ..ones where your city has some personality and you can interact with what is being created - use buildings etc? I know Big City had good rep here.... anything else?


I like NEOM for that sort of thing. It's a 7 Wonders-like drafting game but you have a lot of different ways you can go with your city and decisions really matter.
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11 Dec 2019 08:36 #304998 by Ah_Pook
One of the 2 character packs for Dice Throne Season 2 was on Black Friday sale on Amazon so I grabbed it for $12. I like Dice Throne, and my nephew LOVES Dice Throne, so I've been on the lookout for a deal on Season 2. The new characters are fine, and fit right in with season 1. The game is just wildly overproduced in Season 2. 2 characters is not a $25 purchase, and season 2 is not worth $100. It's a dead simple pvp Yahtzee, and I'll never understand why they doubled the price the second time out. O mean I understand it, because money and Kickstarter, but it feels like the wrong direction for this particular game. Anyway long story short, I'm happy to but more characters at very reduced prices, and Dice Throne remains fun if slight.
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11 Dec 2019 09:00 #304999 by lj1983
here, close to the holidays we didn't have many at library game night, so we played a 4 player game of The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire.

It's fine, a serviceable worker placement / area control game with a layer of Godfather theme attached. Again, there are some neat idea. there's two types of workers (thugs and capos) which have their own spots and interact with buildings on the board slightly differently. There's majority control of an area for points, as well as 'most recent' control for a benefit with buildings. There's standard collect resources, spend resources for a 'quest' for points. and the 'bribe' phase, where you do a blind bid for various allies (chief of police, union leader etc) is pretty fun. except for the several boring allies that simply get you money back. (bid money....get ally, play ally for money you spent initially?) The big changeup is the fact that everything: money, resources, jobs all go into you hand, and you have a pretty limited handsize that is enforced fairly frequently. So making sure you having cards flowing out of your hand as fast as they flow in is a major part of the game.

Overall, it's a decent worker placement about the level of Lords of Waterdeep, pre expansion in complexity. I wish there was more control of the jobs (I sat the last round with 3 'gun' cards in my hand....desperately wishing for a 'drive by shooting' job). It did make me want to play the AH Gangsters game I played at AvalonCon that one time. All I remember from that is the plastic squirt gun.
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11 Dec 2019 09:51 #305003 by Vysetron
I've been playing a lot of the same stuff over and over lately (Irish Gauge, Texas Showdown, Lost Cities). But folks here will probably want to know about the most ridiculous of the lot: Giant Killer Robots.

Y'know how I don't like the KS giant box of plastic genre? This is very much that, but done by Weta workshop so it actually looks good as opposed to a being a bunch of gray amorphous blobs. The presentation is colorful, bombastic, and just plain fun to look at. But that only matters so much - what's worthy of note is just how much fun this thing is. Think a simplified card-driven riff on Battletech.

Not gonna give y'all all the rules (though it's a pretty short teach) but notable things include: a brief deck construction phase where you pick "packs" of weapon systems that you'll use for the entire game without revealing them to your opponents, incredibly quick combat resolution with roll to hit and armor saves, and cards-as-life which does an excellent job of thematic integration. Of COURSE your deck is your health and you lose access to systems as you get shot, and the more damage you take the more rickety your heavy hitter gets. I've spent years looking for a skirmish game that had the best parts of the genre without the massive time commitments between sessions and early impressions have me optimistic that this may actually be it.
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11 Dec 2019 09:54 #305004 by charlest
I had GKR and got rid of it. The big knock at the time was that it's way too long for what it is. Did you not find that to be the case?

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