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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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31 Jan 2016 00:56 - 31 Jan 2016 00:57 #221157 by Disgustipater
Almost 2 games of Twilight Struggle. The first game, I was the U.S. and I was doing surprisingly well. It was turn 6 and I had 12 VPs, and a decent handle on the board. However, I kind of neglected Europe to the point that I didn't realize that my opponent was quietly turning all the battlegrounds to his favor during the turn. I was too concerned with my own plans elsewhere. Based on some back and forth chat earlier, he convinced me he didn't have the Europe Scoring Card. He did. Instant win for him. A painful loss, but a good lesson for me. That only took 2 hours, so we restarted. This game was much more even throughout the entire thing. VPs were hovering around zero, we each had domination of a few regions. Unfortunately I had to leave a specific time, which meant we had to call the game in the middle of Turn 9. Painful to do; I really would have liked to see how it played out. Oh well, it was good practice. Still, I think 5 hours total was pretty good for a 6 turn game and a 9 turn game.
Last edit: 31 Jan 2016 00:57 by Disgustipater.
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31 Jan 2016 05:33 #221159 by repoman
Cards Against Humanity

What can I say? At least it wasn't Munchkin?
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31 Jan 2016 08:45 #221164 by Black Barney
If the publisher frequents this site, could you put that on the back of the box ?


Disgust, feel comforted that the only people that lose to Europe Scoring are terrible.

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31 Jan 2016 08:53 #221166 by DukeofChutney
Went up to Leeds to play some games :)

Mottainai - Not sure what to make out of this. It feels like Glory to Rome in a straight jacket in that there are not a lot of cards and you often can't use most of them to do something interesting. The result is i often felt there was one real option and it didn't do a lot. However i suspect it might open up a bit once you know how the game is supposed to be played.

Secret Hitler - Won this twice, both times as Hitler. This is really just another Resistance Variant. Im not sure its any better or worse than avalon, just different. It has very little do with German politics in the 1930s though.

Shogun - I'm not really sure why I like Dirk's game so much. for some reason, and perhaps its just my group is maturing a bit, people are very relaxed about the direct confrontation in this game. It always ends up being fun with no serious angst. I also I love the cube tower. For me this sits along side Dune and Ascending Empires as one of my favourite DOAMs.

Spaceteam - a pattern matching game where you grap tools from other players hands to match damaged components in your personal deck. If you get all the the ship parts out of the deck. It's a bit easy, Some of the damage cards force the players to use only their fingers (no thumbs) as a robot, or go quiet and unresponsive until someone notices (drifting in space) which sort of save the game. Its ok, i had fun with it, but i doubt its replay.

Pandemic Legacy - The slog continues in my Friday evening game group. We lost another game, and i think at this stage we need to play pretty much the perfect game to win. The difficulty has ramped up and we were struggling with everything the game could give us before. I'm pretty much done with this, but it seems I am bound to lose another ten or so games across my next ten gaming eve's before we can start playing fun games again.
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31 Jan 2016 09:34 #221170 by wadenels
Mottainai does open up a bit after a few plays as you find more ways to make interesting combos and generate points.

The thing with Mottainai is there aren't that many cards, and a regular player could learn the deck and potentially use this to great advantage. It's a much tighter game than Glory to Rome. Glory to Rome was a ton of cards and some ridiculous combos, with more of a way to directly attack players.

I guess it's a matter of which concept you find more appealing, since the core mechanics are nearly identical.
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31 Jan 2016 10:37 #221172 by Disgustipater

DukeofChutney wrote: Spaceteam - a pattern matching game where you grap tools from other players hands to match damaged components in your personal deck. If you get all the the ship parts out of the deck. It's a bit easy, Some of the damage cards force the players to use only their fingers (no thumbs) as a robot, or go quiet and unresponsive until someone notices (drifting in space) which sort of save the game. Its ok, i had fun with it, but i doubt its replay.


I would just assume play the app version. It's free, so you should easily be able to get whomever to download it.

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31 Jan 2016 11:53 - 31 Jan 2016 11:53 #221181 by Jexik

DukeofChutney wrote: Mottainai - Not sure what to make out of this. It feels like Glory to Rome in a straight jacketThe result is i often felt there was one real option and it didn't do a lot. However i suspect it might open up a bit once you know how the game is supposed to be played.


Indeed. I have only played it once and I'm not dying to play it again. I like the crazy stuff that can happen in Glory to Rome though.

Secret Hitler - Won this twice, both times as Hitler. This is really just another Resistance Variant. Im not sure its any better or worse than avalon, just different. It has very little do with German politics in the 1930s though.


I played it one evening too. It does feel very similar to the Resistance, and I think it's kind of neat that a good guy might want to get a fascist policy through if it means they can kill Hitler. I'd have to play it more to see if I can learn how to play it well. There's a lot of variation even in Avalon though- last Thursday we played a 5 player game with Merlin, Percival, Mordred, and the Assassin... that was different.

Pandemic Legacy - The slog continues in my Friday evening game group. We lost another game, and i think at this stage we need to play pretty much the perfect game to win. The difficulty has ramped up and we were struggling with everything the game could give us before. I'm pretty much done with this, but it seems I am bound to lose another ten or so games across my next ten gaming eve's before we can start playing fun games again.


I've hypothesized a few times that the game could get in a death spiral if you start letting too many cities riot/collapse/fall, and even have important characters get lost. Is this what you're experiencing? How many players in the group? 4?
Last edit: 31 Jan 2016 11:53 by Jexik.

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31 Jan 2016 12:20 #221185 by Gary Sax
Isn't there a box you open if you lose enough? I'm guessing that has some sort of mechanism to make the game easier?

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31 Jan 2016 12:48 - 31 Jan 2016 12:48 #221187 by Jexik
I opened it out of curiosity after we finished our campaign. The help didn't seem as powerful as I expected, but I'd have to see it in action to really know.

Got in our 2nd session of D&D on Friday using the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign that comes in the starter set. I really like how thorough the adventure book is, but a lot of the fun is going off book and responding to what the players want to do. I was also really surprised at how bloodthirsty they were. They got a bunch of enemies down to 1 hp and the party was already beat up, so I had the bad guys run away inside a building and lock the door. They blow away the door. "There are a dozen guys in here." You know, trying to cue them to back off. "FIRE HANDS, FIRE HANDS!" And then a crazy melee. I eventually had the inferno get crazy enough that they had to run away as the bad guys escaped out the back. It was a really fun encounter though and I called my old DM from high school the next day to relate that and other experiences.
Last edit: 31 Jan 2016 12:48 by Jexik.
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31 Jan 2016 20:59 - 31 Jan 2016 21:00 #221217 by Gary Sax
Fields of Arle this evening with my wife. I've been strongly thinking about getting rid of Agricola, this didn't do anything to dissuade me. Fields of Arle does everything that I like about Agricola without the in-game maintenance. I'd rather put in the 5 minutes of extra prep for Fields than do the constant in game refill maintenance of Agricola. It's a personal thing, since I play these games with 2 as a sort of building activity. I get why others who play knives out worker placement with many people wouldn't like Fields. But knives out worker placement pretty much IS Argent: The Consortium, so...
Last edit: 31 Jan 2016 21:00 by Gary Sax.
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01 Feb 2016 08:53 #221233 by Legomancer
I played Dark Moon at Trashfest NE and enjoyed it, so I bought that copy. Brought it to my regular Sunday group and it bombed hard. I figured it was going to the trade pile, but last night I tried it with some folks who didn't play it that one time and we had a blast. One of the infected showed his hand fairly close to the beginning (but didn't reveal) and stayed in quarantine the whole game, screwing up tasks and such. Everyone was rolling shitty, though, and it wasn't too long before the station was collapsing around them. I was the other infected and I only meddled in a task twice or so; all the other times I genuinely couldn't have contributed anything useful. The humans lost when one of them chose a malfunction that sunk the station. We had a great time whipping suspicions around the table. I haven't played BSG in years and have no desire to, but this was a lot of fun. It can stay for now.

Honestly, I'm starting to feel kind of distanced from that regular Sunday group. There's one guy who really only wants beard-scratchy complex puzzly Euros, which I've had more than enough of. There's one guy who, no matter the game, is always going to come barrelling out the gate antagonistically just doing whatever he can to fuck with people, and there's one guy who wins pretty much all the time because he has a knack for finding some kind of angle in a game he can lean on and bend (if not break). If he can't, he usually won't play it again (or worse, he will, and just piss and moan the whole time). It's just not a great fit for me these days.
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01 Feb 2016 09:18 - 01 Feb 2016 09:19 #221238 by SuperFlySwatter

Gary Sax wrote: Fields of Arle this evening with my wife. I've been strongly thinking about getting rid of Agricola, this didn't do anything to dissuade me. Fields of Arle does everything that I like about Agricola without the in-game maintenance. I'd rather put in the 5 minutes of extra prep for Fields than do the constant in game refill maintenance of Agricola. It's a personal thing, since I play these games with 2 as a sort of building activity. I get why others who play knives out worker placement with many people wouldn't like Fields. But knives out worker placement pretty much IS Argent: The Consortium, so...


hmm
I'm finally getting a bit bored of Agricola though its still my wifes fave. We have played several hundred times F2F and several hundred on the ipad so I mean its more than earned its keep. I looked into trying the alternatives but Caverna just seems stupid and additionally loses the tension that makes Agricola so great, Glass Road seemed a bit dull, La Granja was a Little bit too much Stefan Feld feeling for my taste, so Fields of Arle was the other option, but its one of the few games I have opened the box, started to look at the Components and thought FUCK RIGHT OFF and just repacked that shit and sold it immediately. I felt like Rosenberg was personally trolling me at that Point. No way can I be arsed with fucking sorting all that shit out, 14000 chits and EVERY SINGLE ONE seemed to be a different size or shape. Even when I started to look at some videos online it just looked retarded. I dont Think of Agricola having any maintenance but I mean we play 2P so its no bother to have a big bowl with all the pieces in it and just plop them out on each space as you turn it, and stuff you spend put to one side of the board to make it even easier to refill. Other than that its deal out cards from a stack, the in game cards are in a ziplock bag, the games just zip by, theres no fucking way on Earth I can even imagine the setup of FoA not being a pain in the ass in comparison. THe genius in the Agricola variety is the cards are in hand, I feel like these Agricola type games (Caverna) which have Buildings out on the table, impossible to read from the other side and covering the entire table are just ill advised nonsense. Ora et Labora was a bit the same way if I remember.

Anyway, we only play Troyes these Days, that game kicks ass. Then again I almost gave up on that after the first few plays as it felt fiddly but its super smooth and Lightning Quick. Easily the best Euro game thats come out since the "Classic euro" era that disappeared with El Grande, Tigris etc. For me its the ultimate "modern Euro"

PS
in case that comes out like my usual loud mouthed bombastic bullshit, let me reinforce that I'm kind of saying oh thats interesting you say that, why dont you tell me more about FoA and tell me why you like it over Agricola (and how much have you played Agricola by the way)
Last edit: 01 Feb 2016 09:19 by SuperFlySwatter.
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01 Feb 2016 09:59 - 01 Feb 2016 10:00 #221247 by Egg Shen
I've decided to dive back into Descent Second Edition once again. I'm trying to find something worthwhile in this game, but time and time again it proves to be a infuriating experience.

My main gripe is that the game is simply not enjoyable. The mechanics as written would make for a fun little dungeon romp except that is not what the Campaign in the base box provides. The scenarios included are a mis-mash of objectives where you need to race around the map. Many times fighting enemies is completely detrimental to accomplishing your goal. To make matters worse if an overlord blocks a door/choke point with a large monster you're fucked. Then if you die, be prepared to get caught in a cycle of stand up, KO'ed, stand up, KO'ed. Man is it frustrating. I think my biggest problem is that I'm trying to play the game like a dungeon crawl when it is clearly not designed to be. It's a race game and you need to stay ahead of the Overlord or else.

The complete removal of any real exploration is a huge mistake as well. The final straw is the lack of loot. Searching will reward you with one shot items and potions, which are fine. However, the real reason to search is to get money. Except it costs an action to search which slows you down which means it's often not worth searching...but if you don't search you don't get money to buy new items in between quests........FUCK! None of this is any fun! I rarely get pissed off when playing games, but I turn into a miserable twat during most Descent 2.0 quests.

I'm determined to finish the campaign, but I don't have high hopes that the experience is going to improve much. I really don't see what people see in 2.0. Still, onward I trek...
Last edit: 01 Feb 2016 10:00 by Egg Shen.
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01 Feb 2016 10:28 #221251 by Gary Sax

Egg Shen wrote: My main gripe is that the game is simply not enjoyable.


Yeah... always a Descent problem. ;)

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01 Feb 2016 10:45 #221253 by VonTush
A Study in Emerald: My third game, three new players and one other who had played in my prior two games. I should have steered the game to avoid that player. He's the type of player that makes gaming up at shops less than desirable - He doesn't attempt to understand the game, the nuances and the strategies. I'd rather play against an AI opponent because at least then moves make an attempt to make sense. Then, due to fluke situations, he falls into victories...But I digress.

I was very pleased with the way the game was progressing. Everyone, except one, was filling their decks with cards and I felt like we were right on the cusp of wrapping up the prep and move onto the real meat and action of the game. And then it happened, the guy fell into his victory...The guy to my right, feeling out the game, succeeded in an assassination attempt on the guy who was just going around collecting random city cards. The guy flipped his role over and turned out to be an Restorationist ending the game. His fellow Restoratinist ended up having an agent that gave her a VP moving her off of '0'. Which left myself, my fellow Loyalist on '0' eliminating our side from contention giving the dead guy the win. Cue the trombone "Wah, Wah, Wahhhhh". And what's more frustrating is that this is the second time out of the three games he has fallen into a victory!

Dogs of War: This game is feels more like an older German-Style game rather than a newer Euro-Style. So I really like what the game delivers. Two of the players afterwords felt that though the game didn't do anything wrong and everything worked it wasn't their style of game. Which isn't surprising because they fall more into the heavier Euro-Style side of the spectrum.

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