What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Cappster_ wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: Unmatched proved uninteresting.

That's mean. I really enjoyed it. I think the issue was that the T-Rex kinda broke the Marmoreal Map.

I've played a few more rounds on Steam (no T-Rex) and maneuvering becomes much more important.

Let's play Buffy next.

Sagrilarus wrote:

Cappster_ wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: Unmatched proved uninteresting.

That's mean. I really enjoyed it. I think the issue was that the T-Rex kinda broke the Marmoreal Map.

I've played a few more rounds on Steam (no T-Rex) and maneuvering becomes much more important.

Let's play Buffy next.

Of course.

But I think you're focusing on the Buffy aspect. Did I buy the Buffy set with you in mind? Yep. Did I buy the Buffy set with the intent to replace the Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Board Game? Oh hell no.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Boardgame is glorious. Nothing could ever replace it.

I really like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game (2000). Each of the four scenarios simulates one of the first four seasons of the show. The rules are easy but manage to deliver a sense of the setting and themes of the show. There is character elimination. The tracking of the sun and the moon is fun, especially when Oz is still in the game.

I have only played Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game (2016) once. The board had a pleasing color scheme, but the game felt mechanical and relatively devoid of personality. I would easily place it in the Arkham Lite family of board games, and leave it there unplayed.

Cappster_ wrote: Yes.

How many games did you end up getting played? We played it twice face-to-face playing teams, and I've probably played it about a dozen or so times on Steam against the AI 1v1.

UnMatched plays right into my wheelhouse. I love card battlers & hand-deck management. It feels a lot like what I wanted Summoner Wars to be - however, I do kinda miss the dice. I love that the strength/weakness of some of the characters is the ability/inability to get cards, and how the characters are different enough in how they play that the only balancing factor isn't their power curve. I also love how it is all done within the system, so that each character doesn't feel like it's a completely different entity, like the factions in Root who almost feel like they are playing a separate game.

I agree with all of your positives. It fills a very solid niche and less complicated than Summoner Wars is a great description of that niche but I'm still ready to part ways with the franchise. I probably played about 12 face to face matches and another 15 or so in the app vs AI. I mainly played against my brother so maybe a variety of opponents is needed to prevent the feeling of repetition.

I feel like they favoured variability in characters over true depth. The positioning game isn't that interesting, the best part is coming to grips with how your character is supposed to be played. Once you "get" it I feel like I'm ready to move on to the next character. There's some added spice in understanding how your chosen character stacks up against a given opponent and that's part of the depth in the system but I didn't find it engaging enough to invest at that level. I also only played 1v1, the team stuff didn't seem very interesting. I'd rather play Gorechosen than Unmatched if doing teams.

I feel like the one thing that it needs, and Sag kinda mentions it in the recording (releasing next week), is favored ground on the maps.

I think that the Pathfinder system abstracts out what we would normally consider favored ground; instead of placing yourself in just the right way to break LoS, all you have to do is select the right color on the board.

I think something as easy as Glyphs from Heroscape could be helpful here, or some small bonus like +1 to attack/defense/health recovery to make the map more interesting.

The one game that I think did this masterfully was World of Warcraft: the Miniatures Game. The map was set up in such a way that you had to be mobile to succeed. Meeting in the middle to scrum would be your doom. You either had to capture a flag and return it to base, or you had to hold strategic positions to score points.

But adding these favored grounds bonuses could potentially lengthen the game, which I'm not sure UnMatched needs.

I've been slowly piecing together a comparison piece between Funkoverse and Unmatched that I was intending to publish here. I tried luring Charlie into writing with me because I didn't have what I felt was enough experience with Unmatched, but his schedule is too packed. So I called a friend whom I know is a fan of the system and we've played a number of times since then and I'm probably ready to start writing in the next few days.

I think one of the distinct advantages that Funkoverse (dice-driven) has over Unmatched (card-driven) is the team factor. Unmatched, despite its assertion that it can be played in teams, is clearly intended to be played 1v1. On top of that, because of the intended variability of a card-driven system (comes from the cards, not necessarily what you do on the board), you're always only playing one character and, as sornars points out, once you feel like you've got a handle on that character, you're ready to move on to someone different. In contrast, Funkoverse is always played with at least 2 characters per player and often three, which means that you can try a new combination of characters in almost every game. The other issue is that Unmatched lacks narrative context for its games. You're just trying to kill the other guy, which is perfectly fine for a fighting game. But the counter-example is that Funkoverse was intended as a scenario game from the outset. Even if you're playing with the same team of characters, if you're playing a different scenario (and often on a different map), it's a different game and your characters will function better or worse or simply differently as a consequence.

All of that said, I've been really enjoying Unmatched on its own merits and, to acknowledge sornars' point, I think gitting gud at a particular character begins to take on the feeling of other card games, like MTG, where a deck that you understand and which works for you becomes like slipping on an old shirt that still fits really well. If I were to go back to playing Magic, I'd still be wanting to try to play Black and Blue control decks because those were my favorites, even though there are lots of possibilities to play other colors and styles. Similarly with Unmatched, I'd still like to get better at characters like Sinbad and Invisible Man, but I'd gladly play Bloody Mary again anytime someone offered a game. There are a lot of other differences that I'm planning to examine (most obviously art design.)

There are a lot of good thoughts here. I can't wait for the article.

Played Unmatched last night in honor of this conversation.

Dracula versus Holmes. I put pressure on Holmes early and boxed him out of the secret passages on the Baskerville board. Watson got a shot off with his revolver and took a chunk out of the vampire. I fell back and healed.

Due to the secret passages, Dracula's ability where you don't want to end your turn next to him, and Watson's range, the mid and end game were full of tight positioning.

I went from pressuring Holmes and getting him down to five health, to losing all of the sisters and struggling to keep my footing. My opponent positioned well on secret passages spaces and our decks slowly whittled away with just glancing blows here and there.

I was going to try and push hard for a beast form 8 damage attack, but he removed it from my hand and everything turned.

I had to press with weak attacks as I had less cards in my deck. I took a chance with a four strength attack that was the last card in my hand. Holmes had three health, but the attack allowed me to draw a card. Holmes cancelled my effect and took only one damage.

He finished me off as I had no cards to defend with.

It was one of the most entertaining and tense games of Unmatched I've played

Look. I wouldn't put Unmatched in my top five skirmish games. I probably wouldn't put it in my top 10. But for an accessible battler with a great deal of support and content, it's a very solid game. I've stated in my reviews of the game that I don't love Unmatched, but I do like it quite a bit.

Also, I don't think it necessarily works well with the method of playing a single character repeatedly trying to master them. I think it's much more enjoyable when you get several boxes and always choose randomly. The sweet spot for the game is having some familiarity with a fighter and recalling a few of the cards, but not knowing everything.

charlest wrote: Also, I don't think it necessarily works well with the method of playing a single character repeatedly trying to master them. I think it's much more enjoyable when you get several boxes and always choose randomly. The sweet spot for the game is having some familiarity with a fighter and recalling a few of the cards, but not knowing everything.

The comparison this brings to mind is Smash Bros. There's a deep competitive scene for Smash Bros and I want nothing to do with it; I main RANDOM.

I'm also looking forward to Jackwraith's article but having to own any Funkos precludes me from ever trying the Funkoverse game. That may make me petty but I'm okay with that part of me.

Edit: Responding to Cappster_ below. I've totally neglected to mention the importance of different maps. They are cool and add enough gimmicks without much rules overhead and mix up the match ups a fair bit.

That is a hell of a session report!

I found one of your reviews on BGG and gave it a read. I think that you summed Unmatched up great in a couple of places, namely:

The map should be the silent 3rd player

While it isn't perfect, it is consistent, fun, and is fully aware of its limitations (and how to utilize them best)

I'm still considering Sag's main complaint about the lack of favored ground. I looked through the gallery on BGG and found one map (I'm not certain what set it was from) with high ground with +damage on attacks to the lower ground spaces. I'd love to give this one a shot to see if it makes things more interesting.

I'm also in agreement that "mastering" a single character is not the way to play Unmatched. I think, especially with as many characters that are available, that variety is the spice of life. My OCD brain told me when I was playing on Steam to pick a character and play it exclusively until I unlocked all of the achievements before moving to the next. Luckily, I decided that Random selection was the only way to play. Achievements be damned.

I think, going forward if I can play each character at least one time before the next set comes out, I'll be happy. And with the games as swift as they are, I think this should be a pretty reasonable goal.

There are several maps now that offer small positioning benefits. This was a major complaint of mine as well (and somewhat still is).

The map with high ground is in Battle of Legends volume 2. The Beowulf map has some door rules which are somewhat interesting. The Cobble and Fog board I mentioned has secret passages you can move through, but you can't attack a space through them. One of the Marvel maps has bonus tokens on certain spaces.

They're getting better in this regard.

sornars wrote: I'm also looking forward to Jackwraith's article but having to own any Funko's precludes me from ever trying the Funkoverse game. That may make me petty but I'm okay with that part of me.

Just to be clear, the figures for the Funkoverse game are not actual Funko Pops. They're about 2/3 the size of a regular Pop, so you don't have to pick up any of their (more expensive) regular figures to play the game. Like Unmatched, they're all sold as sets that come with a two-sided board and are meant to be played as games unto themselves (i.e. if you just like Batman and Co., you can just buy the original DC Comics set (Batman, Batgirl, Joker, Harley Quinn) and have games of 2 characters vs 2 characters in four different scenarios on two different boards.) I think the game does play better in teams of 3v3 (whether with 2 players or 4) so their decision to sell sets of 4 and 2 (the DC Comics 2-pack is Robin and Catwoman) is a questionable choice that I'll be talking about, too.

Look. I wouldn't put Unmatched in my top five skirmish games. I probably wouldn't put it in my top 10. But for an accessible battler with a great deal of support and content, it's a very solid game. I've stated in my reviews of the game that I don't love Unmatched, but I do like it quite a bit.

I think that's about as good a summary as you'll get on this one.

At t-minus 40 hours to the tournament, we decided to have a painting party in lieu of our usual game night.



No saying what will be finished in time, but our store owner is flexible about playing with primed or partially painted models so we aren't under too much pressure. Everyone just really wants to use fancy painted figures.

The reasons I got out of GW were many (too expensive, all my regular opponents had left town, etc.) but one of them was that I had burned out on painting after my dozen or so different armies (plus gangs, fleets, on and on) but I didn't want to play with unpainted figures, either. To me, it's an essential part of the whole package and I didn't want to be in a situation where I'd be geeked to play some new Skaven, Chaos Warrior, Sisters or Marine unit (the only four armies I had left) and not be able to play it because I didn't feel like sitting down and painting for several days before then.

In addition to most of my regulars leaving, the local scene had kind of collapsed overall, as a couple stores had gone under and the one remaining was both small (could only handle about a half-dozen people in a tournament) and wasn't really interested in promoting the painting side like yours is. My last tournament there was a 40K 1000-pointer. I brought my fully-painted, shaded, and detailed Sisters. The prizes were small gift certificates to the store. I won the tournament (Penitent Engines, FTW!) but when it came to handing out the prize for best painted army, the store owner told me that no one could win more than one prize, so they gave it to a half-painted and not even fully-primed Necron army, the player of which had entered just to knock around with his metal dudes. When the owner handed him the prominently-labeled "Best Painted" prize, he looked down at the pile in front of him and then looked over at my army and then back to the owner and said: "Why?" He tried to give it to me, but I told him to keep it and get some more Necrons (and more paint!)