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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?
TIME BOMB: EVOLUTION. The only hidden traitor game I still have, from what was once my favorite genre. This one distills it down pretty far to the bone, and plays quickly. Unfortunately it is set in "Steampunk London;" fortunately the art is ignorable.
BEAR RAID. Second play of this stock manipulation game. I successfully shorted a stock and drove a company to bankruptcy (thus not having to pay back the stock), but the profit I made on this was dwarfed by the other players who went all-in on a company and then had the stock split twice. In retrospect I should have seen it coming and gotten in on the action. It definitely seems that shorting/splitting is the way to go -- the action economy is very tight, so trying to buy low/sell high is way too time consuming. But at the end of the game, all your positions (long or short) are liquidated for free, so it's better to hold on and try to manipulate the price to your advantage.
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The core economic engine flow is also really smart; the tempo is good in the game though when you fuck it up you feel it grind to a halt. I compared it to Space Base Phoenix, the game I thought was a *miserable* engine game I mentioned weeks and weeks ago---this game is all about combining actions and production to roll into your next actions efficiently, where that game just continuously grinds to a halt to take income and punish you for being a little inefficient. Absent everything else, the difference in the skill of the economic engine design in these two games was night and day.
I see why people call it the dry tech tree game, and it is, but it worked for me as a real distillation of the tech tree from 4x games attached to a slight but effective 4x style area control.
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Bad stuff first: the production is stupid. Box is too big because for some reason it comes with a fucking plastic Disney-looking scepter. All it does is signify who's the current king of the hill. Ridiculous.
The game itself, though? Sirlin at his most unrestrained. If you think balance is boring then this is the deckbuilder for you. By about the halfway mark you'll be throwing a lethal amount of gems at your opponent only to have it reversaled and so on. Big tension, bigger combos. It's best at 2p which was true of the original as well, basically becomes a tennis match played with a grenade.
Try it digitally first I'd say, but it's very good.
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- Virabhadra
- Away
- D6
- Too Many Projects
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DarthJoJo wrote: Thanks for the thoughts. I had been watching the campaign with interest but was put off by the monster, four-minute combos already appearing in the second and third turns of preview playthroughs. It felt like too much downtime, too early in what wanted to be a spry, punchy game.
There's a bit of that for sure. Generally we've only taken multi-minute turns when we're at death's door and sifting through a double-sized hand as a result, and/or triggering the pink gem bonus for extra cards and actions mid-turn. It's broadly not a problem though it'd be exacerbated in a 4p game, which I haven't played and don't especially want to.
Virabhadra wrote: The real question, is it worth owning both if I love the original but have next to no shelf space? Should I upgrade?
That's tricky because it's not an upgrade, they're straight up different games. I sold Puzzle Strike/Shadows because the digital version is just a better way to play that game, whereas this feels like a better tabletop experience because it's a marginally more traditional shop row deckbuilder. Very few of the original's mechanisms make a return. It isn't really trying to be another edition of the first, unless you count maintaining the tension of sitting on the edge of defeat while growing stronger for it.
It's very much a try before you buy situation. I really like it though. In the running for my favorite of the year, possibly over Dice Realms if the other shop decks are interesting.
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- Legomancer
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- D10
- Dave Lartigue
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Anyway, I played the following:
Power Grid (recharged rules, Middle East map)
Nanga Parbat
Babylonia
Caravan
Majesty: For the Realm
Dune: Imperium
All were new to me except PG. I won Nanga Parbat and Dune (as Baron Harkonnen). Will have more on the new games soon.
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- Jackwraith
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- Ninja
- Maim! Kill! Burn!
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Setup, explanation, and game took a little under two hours. They did get some great rolls going their way, so they got a little lucky, but they played well. I also used the Corrupted Hoboes, which aren't the best Acolyte in that scenario, because the gear spots aren't plentiful, but I also didn't want to max out my efficiency and crush them and kill any enthusiasm for playing again. No problem there, though, as they all commented about how much they liked it. So I think we're set to play again next week and try something more complicated, like a Redemption scenario. I'll give them the full stack of teams and let them pick and I think I'll go back to an old favorite in Sloth...
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This weekend, out of left field: "We should play Noctiluca!
Alrighty then!
I remembered playing it and thinking it was good. And I think it actually is. It's probably best as a 2-player due to the analysis involved. Three might work but four sounds dreadful.
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- Erik Twice
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- D8
- Needs explosions
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I've been playing online with Sornars on Yucata and it has been a lot of fun.
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I met a woman online in June and then face-to-face in July. By late August, we fell in love and then she had to dump me recently because I don't believe in God. She knew that about me up front but thought we could be friends, and then it got serious anyway. She appreciated everything about me, even my board games, but the atheism was a total dealbreaker. I told her that I was willing to convert but she wasn't willing to wait. While things were up in the air for a couple of weeks, I went to church and also read an interesting book that a Christian friend gave me many years ago, A Life Well Lived: A Study of the Book of Ecclesiastes. It didn't make me a believer, but definitely diminished my appreciation for material things and left me feeling like my life is empty. I went on a first date with someone else last weekend, and there was physical attraction for both of us, but she is obsessed with travel and I am stuck at home giving my elderly cat 3 pills a day. That sense of emptiness returned as I drove home from an otherwise pleasant date.
Fortunately, my childhood best friend is coming to town soon. His employer is sending him to the Twin Cities for 3 or 4 months for a specific project. They are covering all his expenses, but will only pay for him to fly home every other weekend, so we are planning to hang out every other weekend. We played a lot of board games back in the day, ranging from Stratego to Squad Leader, so I think he is going to enjoy playing ameritrash games.
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(Said as a former member of both groups, now having settled into a soft apatheism. My kid has recently gotten interested in Judaism, so I take her to the local Chabad House. They’re nice people there.)
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- hotseatgames
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- D12
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