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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?
Talk about paring things down to the rawest essence. This is the tightest moments of something like El Grande just boiled down to almost nothing. 8 actions per player per game, every one packed full of agony and uncertainty. Love it.
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The 8-encounter leadup was challenging, but I have reached the threshold of the hidden stronghold and set it up on the table, and it looks like a vicious corpse grinder of a layout. Two small rooms, no cover, four sets of enemies, and a nasty but random weapon turret. Enemies are zombie versions of the usual opponents, so slower but tougher. And slow doesn't matter on a tight map like this. Dead enemies automatically reinforce completely each turn, unless I manage to completely wipe out a set of enemies, in which case they are replaced by a fresh group of random enemies. Normally, I can block an inconvenient spawning portal by summoning a maglev there, or by camping out with two of my dudes. But in this scenario, reinforcements are allowed to spawn near a portal, so blocking isn't really feasible. To top everything off, I can't complete this final mission until one of my dudes spends three consecutive turns next to certain spot in the second room, without any enemies close. So I need to think about this tactical puzzle more before I sit down to play again.
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charlest wrote: Shell head, so you have the Ambull expansion? I think that makes for excellent material once you've exhausted the main stuff.
No, but a local friend of mine has it. We were playing Blackstone Fortress occasionally before the pandemic, and look forward to catching up again sometime next year. I do have the Escalation expansion, and that seems to offer an entire additional campaign of about the same scope as the one in the base set. I will probably take a break from Blackstone Fortress for a few months before starting Escalation.
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- Andi Lennon
- Offline
- D6
- Do your thing
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- Sagrilarus
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- D20
- Pull the Goalie
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Shellhead wrote: The 8-encounter leadup was challenging, but I have reached the threshold of the hidden stronghold and set it up on the table, and it looks like a vicious corpse grinder of a layout. Two small rooms, no cover, four sets of enemies, and a nasty but random weapon turret. Enemies are zombie versions of the usual opponents, so slower but tougher. And slow doesn't matter on a tight map like this. Dead enemies automatically reinforce completely each turn, unless I manage to completely wipe out a set of enemies, in which case they are replaced by a fresh group of random enemies. Normally, I can block an inconvenient spawning portal by summoning a maglev there, or by camping out with two of my dudes. But in this scenario, reinforcements are allowed to spawn near a portal, so blocking isn't really feasible. To top everything off, I can't complete this final mission until one of my dudes spends three consecutive turns next to certain spot in the second room, without any enemies close. So I need to think about this tactical puzzle more before I sit down to play again.
Quoting myself in case this post lands on top of a new page. I finished the base set campaign for Blackstone Fortress.
My Christmas miracle was that I got an unbelievably lucky draw on the enemy cards. There is a fixed quantity of each type of opponents, and each enemy card specifies a certain enemy in a certain quantity. If your enemy cards for a given encounter require more of a specific enemy than there are minis (or tokens in my case) of that enemy, you just use what you have. So out of four possible enemy groups, I drew 3 Negavolt Cultist cards, which called for a total of 10 cultists when there are only 4 in the whole game. My other enemy group consisted of 1 Chaos Marine and just 4 Traitor Guardsmen. However, I had to be careful to never completely kill off the Negavolt Cultists, as that would have required a draw of a new random enemy group, and it would be unlikely to be more Negavolt Cultists.
One of my dudes had a one-shot item that let him set up anywhere on the combat map at the start of the first round, as long as the space was unoccupied. I dropped him next to the target spot (the stasis cube) in the second room. He got the jump on the guardsmen and cleared most of them out. The rest of my guys struggled to get across the first room while avoiding potential fire by the annihilation turret.
Long story short, the hidden vault was much easier than expected. By the end of the seventh turn, I had opened the stasis cube. I was instructed to open the special Hidden Vault envelope and follow the directions on the card to finish the mission. Unfortunately, I didn't get that envelope with my stripped eBay copy of the game. I thought that I got a great deal since I could make my own tokens and not deal with the huge hassle of painting the figures, but it turns out that the seller likely sold the envelope to somebody else. I checked, and I could buy one from an eBay seller for $29.
Instead, I googled to find spoilers for the Hidden Vault envelope. Everybody talked about the reward, which is a random permanent enhancement to your whole team of explorers. There are at least 9 different enhancement cards, and each base set comes with just one of those cards. The other side of the card was the instructions for how to finish the mission, but nobody online posted spoilers about that.
So I decided to skip the non-existent prize, and made my own victory condition, which was to try to evacuate my whole team back the way we entered the vault. And that was hard enough, as it turned out. My murder bot was pretty banged up at the end, and the ratling brothers Rein and Raus got killed during the escape, when one of them got picked off by a random blast from the Annihilation Turret.
I look forward to playing the Escalation campaign in the spring, but I will spend the near future on other games, including Cyberpunk 2077.
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- hotseatgames
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- D12
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I have conflicting emotions about this game. I want to like it more than I actually do; so much about it is proper Fallout. They got the tone right, the questing, the leveling up. Those things are great.
What isn't great, and is not Fallout, is just how FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE it is to get a weapon. I swear if I ever convince my kids to play again, we will all start with a random weapon. You have to fight a lot in this game, and if a super mutant gets a hold of you, you are screwed.
The other issue is the co-op itself. This game, for some reason, was originally made to be adversarial. I don't think they ever should have done that; or perhaps they should have leaned into it and not tried to cram co-op into it. By changing to co-op, they invalidate outright some effects in the game, making completing entire quests completely pointless in some instances.
Perhaps the real problem is something that this game has never been able to do; stick the landing. The process of playing and questing is fun, but actually trying to *win* is a combination of impossible and not fun. It should be called Fallout: The Journey, and you play for 2 hours exactly, and whoever has the highest level and most caps is the winner. Done.
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I think you nailed my overall feelings as well. The tone and feel is right, but play is a grind.
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There’s three suits, and you must follow the suit led if possible. The first suit played every round is the weakest suit (and the second the next weakest, with third being strongest). If you can’t follow suit then strongest suit wins.
It’s a tight little game that is very different depending on which persona you play, and has surprisingly difficult decisions. It’s a Korean design that doesn’t have an international release yet, but it looks very good and worth picking up.
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- hotseatgames
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After a few hours break we joined online again for a TTS game of Nemesis. For the first time, we tried out the Void Seeders expansion. These aliens can drive your character insane, and based on how insane they are, worse and worse things can happen to them. Based on how it went, I might be surprised if we ever played with the Void Seeders again; their added complexity doesn't translate to added fun. I think they would be good for people who were so hardcore with Nemesis that they could consistently kick the hell out of the regular Intruders, because playing with Void Seeders ups the difficulty of an already difficult game.
I hope this doesn't indicate how useful my Carnomorphs will be when they ship later this year.
As for the game itself, at the end of round 4 we drew the shitty event card that spreads fires, and the ship blew up. It's funny, but anti-climactic.
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Offer is still on the table to play with anyone here who wants to it loses something playing on TTS without the wild miniatures, but the gameplay is still the thing yknow.
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