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Mountain Goats. Can't Stop, but with goats and a bit of take-that. Very light but colorful. Ordered a copy to play with the fam.
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They taught me Marrying Mr. Darcy. It’s everything modern board games try not to be. Roll a die to see if you miss a turn. Roll a die to get married and earn half your points. Roll a die as a spinster to score zero or 20 points. It’s fickle but amusing enough for a play to see if Mary can be witty enough for Darcy or who gets saddled with Wickham.
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- Legomancer
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- Dave Lartigue
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There are two issues, though. The main one is, this is most definitely multiplayer solitaire. What interaction there is is largely passive, even for what one would consider more "aggressive" empires. We played with two and I don't think I'd play with more than that because it doesn't seem like it would add anything but time to the experience. This is also unfortunate because it significantly carves down what's in the box. Having eight empires to choose from is great, but since you aren't really seeing how Empire A fares against Empire B, the 56 different combinations don't make much of a difference.
The second issue is these tokens:
boardgamegeek.com/image/7018177/legomancer
These are infuriating. The blue ones represent "population" and even though there are two people on the token it is one population. Pink is one, not three, resources. And yellow is one "progress". The ones with the dots represent 10 units of that item. The chevron on the progress tokens is represented within the game like this: > but the dots are arranged like the dots on the other tokens, orienting it like ^ or V, and of course V is "five" in Roman numerals, Rome being a faction available in the game. In short, these are a terrible terrible design all around. (And the effects transfer to the cards in the game, which will say things like "Pay 3 [icon for population, which depicts two people on it]". Maddening.)
Those issues aside, it's still a fun, solid game with a lot of potential for development. Just wish it was more interactive.
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The phase of my life where I look forward to grokking complex rule sets and engaging in 4 hr plus games has probably past. Its not that i have a family etc or no time, it just doesn't gab my like it used to. So i buy fewer wargames, and fewer games in general. I picked this up as it was supposed to be very similar to Hannibal Rome vs Carthage, which i loved then sort of burnt out on. I figured it would therefore be easy to learn. Which it was, GMT do good rule books and Simonitch himself is probably the best developer in the business. His games always feel very polished and complete across the entire package. Wargaming is blighted with products that feel 60-90% done.
The game has 6 turns, we played through 3 in about 2.5 hours with set up, and a chunk of rules checking. I think a full game once I know the system is likely to come in at 3-4 hours rather than 5.
Its a very traditional card driven wargame. The main difference between this and Hannibal or We the People is the Gaelic players role. They randomly draw new tribes each turn, which they can either place on their home provinces, or they can place them in a box and on a later turn unleash them all at once. The Rome player is kind of playing Pandemic. They have to run around Gaul whacking Gaelic tribes whilst dominating territory control for VPs. At the end of 6 turns, if Rome has 12 points they win. They can get bonuses from taking tourist trips to Germany or Britain and killing tribes. Like Pandemic its a question of balancing objectives between killing the tribes, visiting places and controlling territory. In the late game the Gaul's ramp up by getting actual leaders to meet the Romans head on.
I think this is probably better than Hannibal. Its certainly modernised in simple ways. The card deck seems to provide fair draws and give you plenty of choices each turn. The map is very open and gives lots of room for manoeuvre and creative thinking. The random tribe draw forces both sides to change their plans. the card based combat mini game is gone in favour of rerolls for better generals. This flattens out the probability curve and avoids death by bad card draw. Despite feeling more fair the game remains quite swingy. I think this is because both sides feel constantly under pressure due to their weaknesses. It looks hard for Caesar to get 12 points, but the Gaul's are constantly getting hammered and feel close to disintegration.
If you are in the market for a moderate complexity wargame you wont find many better than this.
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- Jackwraith
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Another game with an uneven card draw (that I do really like) is Wilderness War by Volko. The reinforcement cards, limited number of 3 values cards, and some special events (those required for the Brits to assault up the coast) have such a large impact on play that i sometimes wonder whether its the card draw that dictates the winner. In my experience of Caesar so far player decisions do seem to obviously trump the card draw.
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- Jackwraith
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Msample wrote: CAESAR ROME V GAUL is a good "new school" card driven game in that it resisted the urge of so many other CDGs riding the wave of PoG, HRvC , TRIUMPH OF CHAOS to add too much complexity and/or playing time.
True'dat. I enjoy both Paths and Triumph but, jeebus, is there are lot of detail to keep track of in both. Definitely all- or most-of-the-day experiences for most players.
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- Jackwraith
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First off, they brought Jabba's Palace Love Letter. It's not dissimilar from most other LL versions, except that the two sides are asymmetrical, with the Hutt side going from 1-8 and the Rebel side from 0-7. The 0 card for the Rebels is frozen Han Solo who gains you an extra victory token (you need 4 to win a game) if you win a hand with him in hand. Two of us managed to do this over two games by playing Rancor, which states that you count up through the cards and whomever has the lowest card is out EXCEPT zero. If you're down to one opponent and have Han, you can just play Rancor and knock out the other person, since you have the only card that the Rancor doesn't affect. They won a game each before we moved on to something else. I'd play it again, although I still think the risk accumulation of Lovecraft Letter makes it a more interesting game.
Then we tried out Abyss Universe: Conspiracy, which I had obtained in a recent trade. It's along the same lines as the mother game, in that you're trying to collect Lords and Locations (and pearls) to have the most points at the end of the game. It's an interesting tableau-builder of sorts, in that you put your Lords into an inverted pyramid of 15 (5-4-3-2-1) and you're trying to link up Lords of the various factions from Abyss to score points with the largest group of those that are adjacent in the pyramid, as well as gain the points from the highest of each faction (you have tokens to mark these.) Both Lords and Locations can have greater impact based on how your court is set up and can even allow you to rearrange some Lords in your tableau. I played aggressively when my opponents left large discard stacks of soldier and farmer Lords and snapped them up to finish my court when they still hadn't gotten past their top two rows. It's a bit of s brain-bender, but has a lot more depth than I first expected. I won 46-40-35.
Then they really wanted to play Betrayal at House on the Hill. I had played once around the time it first came out (almost 20 years ago) and was not impressed, although I know there were some significant editing issues in the first edition. Have to say, I'm still not impressed. We spent a long time wandering through the house until we had exhausted all of the ground floor locations, forcing me to do nothing but walk toward either the basement or the top floor for a couple turns. That was, in part, because we kept rolling past the Omens until we had 7 of them in play and finally had a traitor. Our plot was that the traitor had buried someone in the basement and we had to roll three times to dig them up after finding the room. We also had the spirit board that would've helped significantly with that, but it turns out that we didn't need it because I guessed right on my first try at finding the room and then we just spent a couple more rounds rolling Might to try to dig them up and it was over. Meh. However, if I hadn't guessed that early and we hadn't had the out of the board to help us, I can see how it would feel really frustrating to only be moving a couple spots and, even when succeeding on the exploration rolls, not know where to look until the victim was inevitably dead. It just feels very random and clunky and lacks the flavor that you'd expect out of a game like this. Maybe I've been colored too much by things like Fury of Dracula and/or Arkham Horror that have both interesting mechanics (former) and/or are drenched in setting (latter) for this to impress.
Finally, focus was fading for one of our players and so I suggested getting a game of Villainous in before they left. It was Lotso (me) vs Jafar vs Lady Tremaine. Jafar was picked randomly and I kind of advised against it, but he went ahead, anyway. It was my first time playing Lotso (one of these days, I'll get around to writing something about the last expansion which has been out for months) and I really enjoyed it. He has a significant hill to climb but has the right cards to make real progress on almost every turn. However, just like Syndrome (who is also in that expansion), he also has a Fate card (Woody) that would just wreck an entire setup and put you back at almost square one, which is not a positive facet of the most recent decks, IMO. Thankfully, I got Woody out via my own action, so his "When played" effect didn't occur. I won while Tremaine had both glass slippers in play and Jafar had made almost no progress, since the Scarab was at almost the bottom of his deck and the genie hadn't been found, either. That can happen with Jafar if you're not able to be ruthless enough about discarding.
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- Legomancer
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- Dave Lartigue
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Persia won with a steady strategy of just maintaining cities. I tried to do that and once I got above six I rarely dipped below it. I (Saba) carved out a nice area for myself and was able to keep 7-9 cities going pretty much each turn.
10 is definitely not a great number for this. You add the third commodity and the minor calamities but you don't *really* have enough people to accommodate them yet. With a couple more I think it would work better. With 9, you don't have those two things so you're also okay.
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We were able to wrangle 3 games in. Grifters, FaceEater, and Xenoshyft: Onslaught.
Grifters went swimmingly, and Nathan picked the game up at a scary pace. He had is Conveyor Belt of Doom of getting his crew back into his hand after drawing multiple Proteges and Femme Fatale (which nicknamed we Kim Catrall, FEMME FATALE!). Despite that, he lost by a single credit. Me? I was second to last. Trish was first, and Kelly came in last.
Trish next picked FaceEater. Whooooo Boy. That's one of those games where you either a) play with really close friends or b) friends you don't want to be friends with anymore. We played the standard 3 round game. And. it. was. brutal. Again, the winner was Trish, then it was Nathan, then me, and then Kelly.
Xenoshyft was next. I played Med Bay, Kelly played Barracks, Trish played SCIENCE! Lab, and Nathan played Weapons Research. I severely underestimated the time it would take to finish. Trish and Nate wanted to leave by 5:30, we didn't finish until 7:00 p.m. Despite the base having 60 HP, by the time Nathan brought down the last Hiver, it was down to 22. After looking on some of the card rulings, we played a few cards incorrectly, but in this game you need all the help you can get.
Next time, Nathan's bringing Fortune and Glory and we'll play that. If there's time remaining for the evening, I'll pull out a quick game to finish it off (Not Xenoshyft).
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- Virabhadra
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Virabhadra wrote: Fortune and Glory is a blast! FFP published the game over a decade ago and there are folks in a thread on ToS that are still actively salty about whether the Lair of the Spider Queen expansion will be released someday.
Good to hear. Nathan was giving an overview and I think I was immediately sold on one of the characters being an active Nazi puncher.
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