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30 Nov 2018 11:15 #287164 by Space Ghost

Erik Twice wrote:

Space Ghost wrote: I agree with this. I think that one potential mistake is to assume that Garfield is trying other designs in an attempt to "fix" Magic. He might just be trying other stuff out. Evolution of game design principles doesn't necessarily imply improvement -- just difference, exploring the potential design space.

From what I've gathered, he did find the original system to be flawed but considers that every time he has tried to improve on it, he has gone two steps forward and one step back. For example, he consider the Netrunner economy to be better but also "too complex". I disagree, of course.


I think it is hard to get everything perfect in one game (for what it's worth, I don't think that Magic is perfect, by any means).

As far as other CCGs, I really enjoyed INWO (but I like the whole realm of conspiracy theories) and, I know this will cause many people to discount anything I have to say in the future, but I liked Spellfire -- the main key being that it really didn't shine until 4 or 5 sets in; which many people didn't give it that long.

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30 Nov 2018 12:02 - 30 Nov 2018 12:09 #287169 by Black Barney

Erik Twice wrote: A friend of mine got a knife pulled on him over a Magic-related issue and it was only the tip of the iceberg. I remember having to watch my opponent like a hawk, because cheating was widespread. People would stall in every single game, they would abuse the judge system to take longer and generally act like asshole. And better watch your decks because theft is rampant. People are dicks even in Magic Arena and that's a place where you have 5 phrases to choose from.

By far the worst community I've been part of.


Yes, Magic has been the worst gaming community i've ever had the misfortune of having access to.

The best, from my experience, was the Lord of the Rings: TCG community back in the day. Everyone was super chill, there was practically zero cheating going on. Very social, very adult. I loved it.

Now I'm experiencing the various gaming communities in video games over the years and there is quite the diversity there too. Halo players seem to be the WORST. Gears of War players were my favourite (super collaborative and encouraging, a huge amount of African-Americans too who are awesome to play with). Call of Duty isn't bad, it's pretty funny, but I don't join lobbies anymore, i'm always in parties with friends when I play.


btw, I'm surprised Shellie hasn't blown a gasket that we haven't spun off this huge CCG conversation into another thread
Last edit: 30 Nov 2018 12:09 by Black Barney.

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30 Nov 2018 12:11 #287170 by mezike
By the sounds of it I am very pleased to have side-stepped the whole Magic thing in it's entirety!

Not meaning to disrupt the conversation, just dropping in what I've been up to in this past week's gaming.


At home:

A busy week so fairly quiet on the gaming front, however we did squeeze in a couple of rounds of Sentinels of the Multiverse. Yeah, yeah, I know that the love affair on here was very brief, we still like it though and the belated arrival of the final expansion has reinvigorated it. There are a total of eleven new heroes and five environments so plenty to try out, although I have no interest in the scenario included in the box which apparently takes several hours to play.

When I read what people are up to on the publisher’s forums I am astonished at some of the crazy combos that people have found and still have no idea how to actually make them work in my own games. What I like about this new wave is that the hero decks are maybe the most transparent of the entire run, in that the cross-deck combos are easy to figure out and to trigger. It reminds me of the very first box where it was fairly obvious how the different characters work together and support one another, the expansion characters often being a lot more obtuse.

Although there isn’t much love for the game on this site I think that it remains an astonishing bit of design work to have nearly a hundred decks that all have a unique theme and playstyle with plenty of interaction between the decks. The graphic design still looks like crap though, they kind of tied themselves into a poor style and couldn’t get out of it, but even with a proper full-time designer now on staff they still manage to do questionably stupid stuff like putting dark text on a dark background. Given how nice some of their other games look it’s a shame that they backed away from the tough choice of revising the usability of their banner product partway through its run.


At the club:

Kicked off the evening with classic filler For Sale, in which I started brightly in pacing my bids such that I was either getting the second card for only two or three coins or snatching cards for free when the spread was close. So I was buoyant for the second round but ran afoul of some impatient card reveals in one of the property auctions that resulted in me chucking in a card that I hadn’t yet settled on; It was the one that happened to be in my hand at the time and I didn’t want to be a dick having seen the other bids revealed so just chucked it in, which turned out to be a really awful play as I massively overpaid on a low value cheque with only weak cards left for the final couple of rounds. I couldn’t recover and so my game went from wonderful to woesome in a blink and I ended up a solid last.

Tavarua, oh yes we donned our wetsuits and hopped up on some fibreglass once again. The mean edge of this game is certainly being exploited by our group; from what I gather this wasn’t really the design intent as snaking waves is considered poor form in the sport and only an optional rule in the game. However it does something wonderful from a gameplay perspective as it’s no longer just about striving for the best possible run, the game also very much becomes one where you are trying to spoil your competitors attempts and leave them stranded while you ride away on ‘their’ wave. It also makes those superior scores even more exhilarating when you achieve them as you have not only had a high-scoring run, you have also kept all the other assholes at bay whilst doing it. Loving this game a lot, it’s a dead cert for one of my favourites of the year.

Everdell was up next and only the second time I’ve played this, interest being put on hiatus after the first attempt was banjaxed with some AP dithering and rules misinterpretations. I like it well enough, it feels a lot like a Trewicek-style tableau builder where you operate on what seems to be impossibly tight resources but if you have your wits about you then you can chain cards together to leverage their abilities and extend your turn out much longer than seems likely at first glance.

I have a confession to make in that I have an innate affinity with these kinds of games. My group refuse to play Imperial Settlers or 51st State with me because I will still be playing each round for several minutes after they have all passed, stomping to the kind of scores that mean they are really only playing for second place. It’s no exception here where I’m still in Winter when the other players are jumping into Summer, and reluctantly stepping into Spring while they are on the edge of Autumn. What I really like about Everdell though is that the fixed tableau size and individually-timed rounds restricts the ability of players like me from running away with the game. Timing becomes crucial as not having workers on hand means that you cannot jump into vacated spaces when someone changes their season, which inevitably means that you miss out on some of the plum ones altogether. Having a late and long Summer means that the other players get into the best scoring spaces while you are still locked out from them and they also have more workers available for grabbing the bonus-scoring events at a time when you are still using yours to scratch and dig for resources.

As you will eventually run out of space in your city there is no incentive to stay in any given season for too long other than to maximise the bonus that you earn in Spring and Autumn, which makes for very tough and interesting decisions on when to make your move. So although the other guys were astonished at how long I was able to drag out my seasons it was hugely problematic for me to do so and I had to keep cutting my plays shorter than they could have been in order to remain competitive with workers. I like that very much about this game.

What I don’t like so much though is the long list of “this must have been a kickstarter then” problems. The teeny tiny card text, the stupid badly designed tree, the easily-missed poor choice of differentiating between single-use and repeatable action spaces, the barely perceptible ‘open’ action symbols, the suspiciously imbalanced cards that you can drop into your tableau for free if they fall into your hands in just the right order. Oh it’s so close to being great, but there is no way I would reach over 51st State to play this and there is always Root to turn to for cutesy anthropomorphic critters in a complex game. I do hope there is a revised edition of this one day.

A lightening of the mood with Too Many Cinderellas, a lovely silly game that comes and goes from our table. For some reason I just couldn’t stop winning on this particular occasion even when it looked like I didn’t have a chance, so even with a pile of half a dozen diamonds in front of me we had to keep going until someone else finally managed to get engaged. No game of this is complete without getting the myopic prince to marry the bloke in a dress, and success was duly achieved.

Catch the Moon to see the night out, I was stuck with an ass to the right of me who kept piling ladders into the same teetering spot and no matter what I did I managed to knock something over each time. We had a pretty interesting structure on the go with a central ladder jammed in good and steady which then allowed for a blossoming hourglass style shape to start taking form, so we just kept going after the moon-tears were all gone even pressing the fallen ladders back into action.

Dragonmeet tomorrow, my favourite convention, so hopefully some fun things to report!

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30 Nov 2018 15:44 #287187 by DarthJoJo
My Arkham Horror LCG campaign with a new crew continues. We finally made it to the titular Dunwich village, and things don’t go terribly well. “Ashcan” Pete’s dog was kidnapped, pretty well completely crippling him, and the third player and I disagreed on whether we should kill the monster that ate the dog or search for more clues in its basement cell. We pursued our separate ends independently (a terrible and inefficient idea), but I won that argument by finding eight clues in a single action. So things turned out pretty well for me, but Ashcan’s player was so depressed by his dog’s death that he retired the drifter. Now he’s playing a priest!
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01 Dec 2018 08:40 #287210 by Erik Twice
Played a bit at more:

Venture Angels: This is a bad, bad game. You have 4 or 5 poker chips with values on them and the idea is to make blind bids on cards that give Victory points. TThere are some rules about overfunding resulting in the VP tile going away and so on but it's nothing special. What is special is that this game has one of the worst "catch-up" mechanisms I've ever seen. Basically, whoever wins has to play his bids face-up. If you win twice, you play with all your bids face-up. And wheover loses gets another poker chip. Apparently they decided that not only this 10 minutes game needed a catch-up mechanism but they also decided that the catch-up should defeat the entire point of the game.

Play Colossal Arena instead.

Chicago Express: Introduced this game to two new players and I felt a bit uncomfortable because they let me have shares for very cheap early on and I snowballed from there. I tried not to abuse it, it was a learning game, but it was hard when I had 3 more shares than the other players and twice the money.

Cosmic Encounter: Great game where everyone was an expert. Interestingly, while Observer sucks he has one of the highest winning ratios so far with 2 our of 3 games won.
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01 Dec 2018 21:51 #287234 by Msample
Got in two more games of CATACLYSM today, bring my play count up to 6. I think the Russians have surrendered in at least 3, maybe 4 of those games. We def need to figure out how to play them better. In the second game today, it was a race between Germany overrunning Russia and the Democrats not being to roll well enough to declare war - both the US and Brits missed on rolls of three dice apiece. Had they succeeded, their force pools would have made short work of the Fascists. They had already gone to war with Japan, but since they weren't allied with Italy/Germany, there was peace on the Western Front til it was too late.

Having a lot of fun with the game.
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01 Dec 2018 23:56 #287237 by Scott_F
Food Chain Magnate. I super hate econ games, almost as much as I hate euros and co-ops. This game is very good. The board is needlessly bland and the rest of the look is a throwback to diner days so its neither a plus nor a minus. But the gameplay itself was really fun. The guy that owned the game had played it 4-5 times and myself and another player were new. Owner pointed out that the game was designed with the idea of "If you can't lose on the first turn why have a first turn" philosophy and so there were only two first turn hires to pursue and be competitive. I went last and got to see what the other players chose as their first hire and went the other direction. My entire operation was about getting to market fast and making money in the short term and hitting as many milestones as possible for the bonuses. We did a medium game and I won by 3 dollars against the second place guy. Both opponents started slow but far surpassed me in income by the end of the game; still not enough to make up for all the money I collected early in the game. Rules were pretty easy too, highly recommend the game.

Tigris & Euphrates continues to be amazing. I've played it maybe 4 times in the past month and keep liking it more and more. Yellow and Yangtze has some good points, like having hexes for tiles and giving each leader a power. But the original game is still my favorite thanks to the aggressive push towards the treasures and the decision of making a monument or keeping your kingdom strong.

Kemet is still awesome too. Have had a couple plays recently and while everyone struggles with the tech tiles the game itself is good. I picked up the latest expansion, Seth, and really want to try it 2v1. More games need to be optimal at 3 players.
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01 Dec 2018 23:58 #287238 by Ah_Pook
Finished our first campaign of Dungeon Degenerates tonight.

Warning: Spoiler!


Gotta say the game was fine as a one off, but the branching campaign stuff is really fun and elevates it to another level entirely. We picked up the character packs during the Black Friday sale, and we're definitely looking forward to running through another campaign and seeing what other nonsense we can get into (and messing with the new skills and whatnot).
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02 Dec 2018 04:39 - 02 Dec 2018 04:44 #287241 by Frohike
I detest campaigns in almost every other system but this one, where the branching just adds to the gonzo drama of your Degenerates, and I think the
Warning: Spoiler!
victory is probably one of my favorites.
Warning: Spoiler!
Last edit: 02 Dec 2018 04:44 by Frohike.
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02 Dec 2018 07:17 #287242 by SaMoKo

Erik Twice wrote:
Chicago Express: Introduced this game to two new players and I felt a bit uncomfortable because they let me have shares for very cheap early on and I snowballed from there. I tried not to abuse it, it was a learning game, but it was hard when I had 3 more shares than the other players and twice the money.


Chicago Express is one of my all time favourites, but it’s one of the most fragile and unintuitive games I own. It’s fallen out of rotation over the last years; it takes a number of plays for new players to understand the implications of choices, beyond even games like 1846 or Imperial.

Meanwhile, Imperial offers many of the same types of decisions but new players seem to better grasp the effect on the outcome. It’s taken over for now, but I’m hoping it can lead to Chicago Express down the line. It’s nice to have a similar game that plays in less than half the time!

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02 Dec 2018 10:39 #287250 by Grudunza
I’ve seen a number of mentions about Dungeon Degenerates here over the past year. Obviously, y’all love it. But when I look it up and read about the gameplay, it seems like a pretty random game of rolling dice constantly for every little thing. Am I wrong? Are there decisions that matter? What’s great about it?

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02 Dec 2018 11:10 #287253 by Ah_Pook
It falls largely into the pull cards roll dice adventure game camp (think Talisman, Runebound). Mainly the draws for me are it's coop, it plays in a reasonable time frame, the art writing and world building are all rad as fuck, and the branching campaign is cool. But if you don't like rolling dice and random nonsense happening it's probably not for you.
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02 Dec 2018 14:38 #287267 by Frohike
I should point out that Dungeon Degenerates, while dice heavy in combat and full of attribute checks, does not infect traversal with RNG, unlike Runebound and other games in this genre. You simply decide whether you want to travel fast (forced march) or slow. If you force march, you do need to roll a check to see if you can repeat it next turn or if you become fatigued and need to travel more slowly until you rest. It takes out that un-fun element in Runebound where you were often stuck in a location because the dice just didn't favor travel that turn. DD allows you to just keep the momentum going, though what you encounter with that momentum is highly dice and card-flip dependent. The attribute checks are the most simple and often the most brutal RNG, whereas combat offers you options about which stances you want to take (affecting amounts of dice & what they mean) and items you want to use, & abilities, etc. However, you also have a valuable "Luck" resource that you can spend to re-roll those attribute checks. It's definitely in that Talisman/Runebound space, but with more interesting combat, a better setting, and the previously mentioned branching campaign/storyline.
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03 Dec 2018 10:13 - 03 Dec 2018 10:13 #287319 by Legomancer
This weekend's board games were:

QE
Bloc by Bloc
The Devil's Level
Fairy Tale
Welcome To
Junk Orbit
Terraforming Mars (Elysium, Venus, Prelude, Colonies)
Bloc by Bloc

Fairy Tale is funny because I was playing Paper Tales a few weeks ago and thought, "This is okay, but I'd rather play Fairy Tale." Then I remembered I no longer have Fairy Tale, as it got gone in a purge. So I re-bought it.

Bloc by Bloc - Here's what I wrote on BGG:

Being one who "glorifies insurgents and rioters" (in the words of one reviewer here) I was completely down with backing a boardgame that did the same. And I'm really pleased that I did. Bloc by Bloc is not just a great theme, handled to great effect (there are "ACAB" and "Our Streets" tokens!) but it's also quite fun and challenging. A top notch production in both game design and thematic implementation.

One thing to be careful of, however. The city is randomly generated, and though we didn't realize it at the time, the way the State tiles came out ended up handing us a very easy game. However, it was clear to see what the fix was and in the second play, while still randomly placing tiles, I tried to make sure it didn't happen again.


Glad I backed, rated an 8.

Terraforming Mars: Colonies - again, from BGG:

Terraforming Mars now has enough going on that we can start to evaluate expansions for themselves instead of "woo! new Terraforming Mars stuff!" And Colonies, I think, falls into the "lesser expansions" category, along with Venus Next.

There's nothing wrong with Colonies, it just adds stuff I don't think really needs to be there. No one is looking at TM and thinking, "Okay, but what if there were two more basic actions and other boards you had to pay attention to?" The added cruft just doesn't pay off. Throw in Venus Next, which the new Colonies cards play off of, and you can end up with a whole lot of action happening around Mars instead of to it, and a lot of mental overhead.

Thematically, it also bugs me. I want to Terraform Mars, and although there's mention of other things in the base game, it seems less of an achievement if Mars is just one of many already established locations producing things. Establishing a city on Mars kind of gets less special if you do it by bringing in supplies from the Pluto colony.

So far the base plus Prelude and either the base map or a Hellas/Elysium map are the winning combo for me. The other two feel like a "sometimes food" that I don't need most of the time.

Last edit: 03 Dec 2018 10:13 by Legomancer.
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03 Dec 2018 10:55 #287324 by mezike
We picked up Colonies at the convention on Saturday so also have the whole set, and played a little over the weekend with everything bundled in. As an early opinion I’d actually say that it somehow makes the game feel more complete as a whole. The challenge I always found with the base game on its own is that it isn’t always possible to enact a strategy once you’ve settled on one, and if the cards just don’t go your way then there aren’t many other options other than drifting toward the median with standard projects. What the Colonies do is allow you alternate ways to increase production and gain resources that in turn let you compliment your corporation, your blue action cards and the milestones and awards that you are chasing after. That's a lot more interesting to work with than crashing an asteroid for a VP and a bit more income. You don’t need to wait for the right card or have to change your game on the fly (which might not even be possible), you can choose to do something that actively works with your strategic intent.

For example, in our game last night my son went heavy on trade and had a great loop with Callisto (I think – the Power-based moon) where he was trading on the cheap using discounted power and then using the moon to cycle more power back that he was converting into resources and VPs on his action cards. He had three trade fleets in play so just went hard and I was scratching what I could from them in his wake. On my side I went Floater crazy and was trading them off for all kinds of things, but the interesting point is that we both barely bought any of the cards that we drew. We could afford to be a lot more choosy about what we were taking which meant that we weren’t so reliant on the card draws to drive our capabilities, and yet we both had a very close and competitive game (it was a draw at 121pts if you’re interested, he took the tie-breaker).

I would agree that Prelude is definitely the best and most enjoyable of the expansions as it gives you a head start and assists in forming your long-term strategy, but Colonies is like pressing the accelerator on that. Interesting note though is that apparently the original design had all of this extra content already in it and was stripped down to make the game less complex and available to publish at a more accessible price point. If that is the case then I’m not surprised everything together just seems to fit better than using the expansions piecemeal, even though it does make the game considerably longer and more complex. I’m also kind of into the bigger story that it tells, the idea that in order to terraform Mars they need to leverage the resources of the moons and transport GHG from Venus, so it isn’t just about rocking up and planting trees. There’s kind of this big space opera going on in the background with corporations vying to exploit the solar system as a whole. I’d actually like to see more of that in a different game.
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