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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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24 Aug 2022 12:40 #335231 by Rliyen
While waiting to unlock a timed achievement in The Signal from Tolva, I played Xenoshyft: Onslaught. I picked the Command Center, because I never played it before. The abilities are reducing a cost of an Item Card by 1 once a round, Draw and additional card once a round in Wave 2, and in Wave 3 you can kill any monster once per game, but the base suffers 6 damage. Well, seeing that the base health was 15, that wasn't going to happen. I did, however, do surprisingly well. I got to Wave 3, Round 8 of 9. Void mines were my savior (do 4 points of damage to Hivers, when they attack the card in the lane or the unit in which the card is located), where the average Hive monster usually does a LOT of damage, but have relatively little health.

The last round played had a Brood Mother popping up, and I knew with the base only having 5 points left, it was the end. Still, I thought I'd be able to take out some of the bastards before they overran the place. Nope, after moving the Mother to the back of the line, I flipped over the next enemy. A Deathspur.... A &@%@^! Deathspur. Deathspur's are annoying in the fact that they're a 6/6 creature, and instead of attacked the first unit in the line, they attack rear unit first. Then, if that wasn't worse enough, you have to kill it outright. Otherwise, after a round of fighting, it damages the base for 6. Needless to say, the unit in the rear could take the 6 damage hit, but only did 3 damage in return. So, base went bye bye.

The only good thing was that I finished the last three achievements in Tolva, uninstalled the game, and hid it on my collection list. Never want to play that game again.
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24 Aug 2022 15:38 #335236 by lj1983
My wife and daughter decided we should dive back into Forgotten Waters. The witch's heart scenario, and we played it over a couple nights while camping and finishing up at home. As usual, there isn't much strategy, other than how long to linger in an area. But we loved this scenario vs the "beyond the oceans edge" that you start with. the extra length and all the various places that you visit just really filled the story. I, as the swordsman pirate "Jellyroll Jones" was the swaggeri-est pirate that ever swaggered. With my puffy white blouse, sword from my father and bejeweled pistol holster (less pistol), I was very pretty but quite useless in the final showdown. and My daughter managed to piss off a mermaid queen earlier in the game. Who then showed up at the finale to drag her off to the deep. Many laughs were had at her expense. It's a perfect light weight story game for us.

Wildlands - has been an absolute hit for me and the boys. We're still figuring out which factions each of us likes, but there have been enough stories such as the Big guy from the wizards smacking around the golem to win the game, or zombies being able to hunt down the owl-wizard for the win. It's just deep enough to be enjoyable without all the rules-weight that so many skirmish style games have. I love all those rules, but my 3rd and 5th grade sons don't. We may have to get the "adventuring party" exp

Warhammer: Invasion I have a mostly complete set. and I've toyed with selling it off and on, with prices on this set being very tempting. Mostly it's the effort in doing a complete inventory and making sure everything is as advertised that's stopped me. My eldest son has a Pokemon addiction, so I decided to introduce him to this as something similar. There's a set of 14 or so pre-made decks that have been floating around TOS for a while, that I have set aside. He loves the various dwarf decks I have made, it just seems to click with him. and who doesn't like big cannons? the younger boys enjoy it too, so we'll have to try the multiplayer cataclysm rules soon. I've stayed away from the Chaos/Dark Elf decks, the art's abit...intense for them.
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24 Aug 2022 16:38 #335237 by n815e
I always love reading about people enjoying games with their families.
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27 Aug 2022 16:54 - 27 Aug 2022 16:54 #335264 by Gary Sax
Sornars and I played Ahoy 2p. I thought it was very pleasant and the dice system provides just enough grit to be clever. Also confrontational. In person I bet you could tear through a game in an hour. Sornars called it a bit puzzly since it's all ordering and dice manipulation and that feels right.

The head to head version feels somewhat complete? I don't know how much a smuggler would add to the game, maybe a bit since they're manipulating value of the board and tipping the balance back and forth between the military powers. I definitely don't know how much a second smuggler would add to the game.

I definitely don't need to own the game since I don't have a lot of ftf quick game confronational opportunities.
Last edit: 27 Aug 2022 16:54 by Gary Sax.
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27 Aug 2022 18:12 - 27 Aug 2022 18:13 #335265 by charlest
I think three player Ahoy is better than two. The decision on when and who to fight provides an interesting dynamic. The smuggler delivering to certain islands also adds a neat wrinkle.
Last edit: 27 Aug 2022 18:13 by charlest.
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27 Aug 2022 18:23 #335266 by Ah_Pook
I watched some people play some of Founders of Rome at game night last night. It looks like a totally fine and probably fun tile laying euro, kinda got a Suburbia/Castles of Mad King Ludwig vibe from what I could pick up. But then it's bogged down by hundreds of dollars worth of minis and comes in a box that literally fills up an entire Kallax cube. The minis seemed like, beyond making the game stupidly expensive and a bear to transport and store, they also made the game harder to play than if they were just tiles. I don't get the appeal of this kind of thing at all.

Also tried out sometimes copy of Arcana Rising, a kinda neat tableau building card drafting game. There are 5 suits, and there's a board where you randomly distribute tokens matching the suits into pairs. Each round you draft a card, and then either play the card, or discard it to activate your played cards in the pair of suits for that given round. I really like that action economy, as it gives you a nice decision of playing this juicy card vs activating the cool combo you have built up in this suit which if you don't activate it now isn't coming up again for 4 more rounds or whatever. Where it kinda fell off the rails was in the final round it basically just turns into hate drafting the game, since you're mostly just activating your engine at that point. So you still draft a card and then discard it to activate your suits, so you just spend the whole time hate drafting things the person you're passing to would want. Felt a little bad. Still, id day it's worth a try if you get the chance and you like that kind of thing. The person had the Kickstarter version which came with literal abacuses to keep score on, which was funny.
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27 Aug 2022 18:45 #335267 by n815e
I really like the look of the buildings in Foundations, although I haven’t seen them in person. I think if the game was somehow different than it seems, I would have been interested. Like if it somehow managed to be a board game version of the old Caesar city building video game series, I would have ordered it right away.

As someone who has loads of Cthulhu Wars, Hellboy, Mythic Battles, Conan, Batman TAS, a Big Damn Crate, full expansions for five C&C games, an Isle of Lewis chess set, a hand made dice tower, etc., I don’t think it’s not worth the bling if the game is something you enjoy. But in this case, it’s not valuable to me.
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28 Aug 2022 00:41 #335273 by Gary Sax
I played Spirit Island and after like 150 plays I finally played Great Serpent. It's a great spirit but it fundamentally doesn't fit into *our* 2p. Great Serpent needs to eat other player's presence, which isn't that big a deal, but it also rotates on giving other players more cards and energy at its own expense which means that as a player you are really stepping back a touch to let someone else unleash more. I think that makes a lot more sense with more players than it does with two. With two it feels like you are sucking up their presence, which feels bad to sensitive player like my spouse, and you are just empowering them and planning for them to handle situations. Which also feels bad if you're in the mindspace of my spouse---wait why don't you handle these 2 situations in the depths of your board you weakass?

My only actual subtantive and not subjective critique of the power is that I question its reliance on certain elements to work well (earth in particular). I think since you're given so much support to work with you should really be pretty open to any elements en masse---it feels pretty bad to not draw the right elements and not only be mostly support but also not be able to do a good job firing up your powers.

Oh, also we won easily against Hapsburg diff 6 pretty early in stage 3. ;)
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28 Aug 2022 13:16 #335282 by RobertB
Broke out Acquire to teach my daughter and her boyfriend. I have the overproduced AH version, not that I'm complaining. My wife joined in; another game where she says, "I don't understand this game," and then wins. Yeah, right honey. I screwed up and started a corporation too close to the edge, and all the development went away from me. So I got to sit there broke for four or five turns, and that was the game for me. Final scores in $K were 49 (wife, as usual) - 45 - 45 (daughter and boyfriend) and me DFL at 29. The rules say in their strategy guide, "Don't build too close to the edge," but do I listen? I do not.
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28 Aug 2022 14:39 #335284 by HiveGod
A six-player game of The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31.

All the finger-pointing—including a $20 bet slapped on the table—was confined to three humans, culminating in a human torching a human. Meanwhile, the two imitations lollygagged around unmolested in the chaos until three rooms were destroyed and the infection track reached The End.

IMITATION WIN

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29 Aug 2022 08:44 #335290 by Legomancer
Foundations of Rome is a perfectly fine, perfectly average game. The minis look nice, and it plays fine with them. I can't imagine anyone getting their hat blown off by the gameplay, nor being infuriated by it. I wouldn't pay whatever they're charging for it, but unlike somethin like Mechs vs Marauders, I wouldn't be terribly interested in a more sane version either. It's perfectly okay.

Yesterday played Can't Stop, Ohanami, Hot Words, and then two games of The Guild of Merchant Explorers. Here's my write up of that one:

I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist, and I have enough faith in both the malleability of language and the human ability to look beyond literal meaning to find the spirit of the expressed concept, so I have no problem saying that The Guild of Merchant Explorers (GME) is a "roll and write" despite there being neither anything you roll nor anything you write. Its basic idea sits comfortably in that genre and we don't need to either create a one game "flip and cube" niche nor expand the existing category beyond all recognition into something like "do and do". A random event happens (card flip) and everyone deals with it on their own board (places cubes).

You're placing cubes (explorers) on a map in order to, well, explore it. You can discover treasure, set up trade routes, exploit resources, and construct settlements. That last one is important because there are four rounds and at the end of each round all your explorers are removed. If you want to get further than your capital (and to the good stuff), you'll need to establish settlements as alternate starting points.

The starting exploration cards will not get you far, but once per round you can gain a special card that will often give you a huge boost. Choosing these special cards and then setting them up so that you can really take advantage of them is a large part of the game, one I didn't really catch on to until too late.

Naturally you can get stymied if the exploration cards come out in a bad order for you. I imagine many gamers have grumped out over this. But once everyone knows how to play, a game will be pretty snappy so you won't have to endure a lack of control for too long.

I really enjoyed the game, and the two others who were also new to it agreed to play again immediately after our initial game.

My only complaint is that, given the size of the box and the gameplay, there is no reason for this to top out at four players. There could easily have been enough stuff for at least six players in the oversized box.
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29 Aug 2022 12:08 #335298 by Gregarius
I got to try out Underwater Cities. It has two of my least favorite trends in game design: worker placement and engine building. For some reason, I had heard good things and had sought it out to try, hoping it might be different. Nope.

I don't want to say there's anything objectively bad about the game; it's just not my style of play. But that's the kind of attitude that keeps these games around, so I'll say it: it's bad. I was bored the whole time. My "choices" were fairly simple and obvious based on my cards. Occasionally I heard someone groan because I "took their spot," but that was pretty much all the interaction there was.

Why do all of these games have to give everyone their own playmat? Like a child at Denny's who gets to solve a maze and a word search while waiting for their Fresh & Frooty to arrive. This game would be improved immensely by having everyone build on a shared map. Not only could you vie for position, but you could also share in the wondrous city you've created together by the end. Instead, we all had virtually identical cardboard maps with plastic blisters on them.

The other thing I hated was the length. When I heard four rounds of three turns, I thought it would be quick. Whoops. As the game progresses and everyone has built up their "tableau" (God I hate that term), each turn gets longer and longer. The turns generally moved at a good clip, but when you're just doing the same thing over and over, that was way too many rounds. They could easily shave an hour off of the game by making each round only two turns and not lose any of the gameplay.

Anyway, I guess I'm glad I finally tried it just so I can scratch it off the list and once again remind myself why I hate these types of games.
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29 Aug 2022 15:21 #335300 by Jackwraith
I tried it once about a year ago and much the same reaction. While I could see some of the elegance of the mechanisms, a lot of it felt extremely divorced from the overall theme. You didn't feel like you were building an underwater city. You felt like you playing a more advanced version of Connect Four, but with domes. I felt like it overstayed its welcome, too, but I could see why the game length was set at that level in order to enable some of the longer-term scoring goals and enable more cards to come into play. It's what many designers mistake for "variety" in gameplay and/or replayability. I'd probably be willing to try it again just to confirm things, but I'm definitely not in the loop of those that think this is one of the modern standouts. There's a lot more connection to theme (and more interesting play) in something like Taj Mahal than there is in UC.

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30 Aug 2022 11:10 - 30 Aug 2022 11:17 #335313 by Sagrilarus

Gregarius wrote: I got to try out Underwater Cities. It has two of my least favorite trends in game design: worker placement and engine building. For some reason, I had heard good things and had sought it out to try, hoping it might be different. Nope.


This just came up and our game session last night, where we were recording a podcast in the aftermath of playing Primordial Soup which is a 25-year-old game at this point.

I generally call games of that age German games rather than Euro games because there seems to be a difference to me in the feel and approach to how the rules are implemented. All of this predates the burning desire to have everything done by worker placement and the result is that you have typically a more open field of play on the table and the rules are a bit more decide-first and then hope for the best with whatever luck factors are going on on the table. I'm finding games of this age more refreshing than the modern stuff because of that. So to some extent I think if this podcast thing actually sticks it is going to tend to be about older games simply because we're playing older games and enjoying them more than the stuff that is coming out now.

For anyone who has seen primordial soup close up it becomes apparent that the physical design decisions of the pieces in the game simply would not pass muster with the current development paradigms. The main playing pieces on the board are these kind of clunky bases and spindles that though not beautiful are remarkably useful for the job they are designed to do. So you have a game whose table presence is of somewhat dubious value and a game who's play is more free-wheeling. It's not complicated. But its simple rules are designed to let each player's personality affect how they carry out their approach to victory. More modern games seem to focus heavily on plastic which oddly enough back in the late 90s was considered gauche and not appropriate for something as classy as an adult-oriented board game, and on a far more structured restrictive approach to what opportunities are available to you at any particular point of the game. So I personally find more modern plays less emotionally rewarding simply because I'm doing what everybody at the table agrees is the best thing to do given the situation.

And in what I thought was the final point of interest, this is a game with a static, non-modular board that still manages to have the underlying game state change as the play progresses. As each piece moves around the board it consumes resources and dumps others with the result being that some parts of the board that initially start out is very fertile ground for scoring points become wastelands that need to be avoided or need to be reseeded in order to become valuable again. This is all done by dropping a few cubes on each place each time there is one of your player pieces ending their turn there. So a static board comes to life over the period of the game and provides narrative that keeps the game interesting as it progresses and provides for a good post game show discussion, which was fertile ground for a podcast discussion as well.
Last edit: 30 Aug 2022 11:17 by Sagrilarus.
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30 Aug 2022 14:57 #335318 by Michael Barnes
Welp, here I go looking for a used copy…that was a great game, and a really unusual one for its time.
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