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02 Jan 2019 01:03 #289022 by Shellhead
I can confirm that the snake marbles are easily disturbed, to the point where it happens nearly every other turn. The big boulder is useless, except for annoying everybody by sending the snake marbles all over the place.

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02 Jan 2019 02:21 #289023 by Michael Barnes
Even my kids, who were thrilled to pieces to get the expansion, asked that we not play with the snakes anymore after the one game with them.

The ONLY reason people are cutting Restoration slack on this one is because most of the people who have it at this point bought it sight unseen and won’t admit that this piece of the line is a total dud. I mean, I have spaces on my $80 game board that won’t hold marbles from a $25 expansion. It’s bad that a quality issue from the base game isn’t even apparent until you have this expansion.

That boulder...good grief. The first time Scarlett rolled it, it went like literally 2 inches. We busted out laughing, but under the laughs I was thinking “you have got to be kidding me”.

I’m also starting to get pissed about the shit-ass figures...the warping has actually gotten worse. I did the hot water dip on the worst ones, they were fine for a few days, now they are back to being almost unplayable. They won’t stand up consistently in a game where you are trying to avoid getting knocked down.

Also- I counted. In three games, ONE tree was turned. It had zero effect on the marble trajectories.

Look, the game is lots of fun and I am very happy to own it..but it is super glitchy, grossly overpriced, and has a list of production issues. Any review or comment that doesn’t address these demerits is ignoring them. And I can totally understand someone saying “nope” and not enjoying it because of all of them.
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02 Jan 2019 09:09 #289043 by Vysetron
Well, we played more Gen7. Turns out Plaid Hat still hasn't gotten their act together.

I'm not even talking about the laundry list of errata. I mean that's awful, but that didn't impact our games. As a concept it's solid - coop worker placement, keep the ship running, find time to do your own tasks and solve plot problems in the middle of it. Fine. Good start. Problem is it's never interesting.

It's just too easy to solve everything the game throws at you. Over time they introduce what are presented as different types of problems within the story, but you solve them by placing workers, getting the required bits, and heading to the problem to use the bits. Every time. It's not challenging, it's not clever, it's just "place die get thing".

The plot is just awful. Clumsily written, poorly strung together, and dull as dishwater. It's the generic-est of generic sci-fi. This ties into the absolute worst thing about Gen7 - the crossroads cards. If you're going to have the gall to put that on your box as the main draw you CAN NOT have the cards be this boring and lifeless. They don't trigger often enough, and when they do the majority of them lack any real consequences. The best one we ever drew was holding an intervention for our bioscience officer who we'd been joking the entire time was just synthesizing various strains of space weed (Sweed). It wasn't entertaining because the game did anything right, it was entertaining because we were making fun of the game the whole time to begin with and it happened to get in on the joke by random chance. And in case you're wondering, it had no lasting effect. Of course. Why have actual consequences when you can just hint at them instead?

Plaid Hat has lost their way, and this game won't save them. What a disappointment.

We played Spirit Island and Root to get the taste out of our mouths. Both great.
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02 Jan 2019 09:57 - 02 Jan 2019 10:06 #289048 by Jexik
That's a bummer to hear. I was a big fan (and later tester) back in the Summoner Wars days. I'm hoping that Comanauts is something special again. Hearing Jerry talk about it has me excited. The success of Mice & Mystics and Dead of Winter certainly changed the trajectory of the company. I imagine being bought might have done something too. :(

On NYE I also played DropMix by Harmonix of all people. What a weird product. It was mildly entertaining and probably quite expensive. Kudos to them for doing something different, I guess. Keyforge stole my heart that night though.
Last edit: 02 Jan 2019 10:06 by Jexik.

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02 Jan 2019 10:31 #289061 by Josh Look
We did NYE at my wife's friend's house this year. They're gamers so I brought games. We had 8 people total and the first thing played was two rounds of Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt Skullfyre, which was not one of the games I brought. Automatic -6 stars for using the work "epic." Look, I love dumb shit but I could not care less if I ever had to see this game again.

We followed it up with The Thing, which I did bring and it was killer. Very close. I was picked as final captain and only had one final blood test. Took a huge leap of faith on one guy that I wasn't sure about but turned out he was okay. Human win. My wife as an infected and I could tell right away though no one else could. I had a real hard time convincing the group that she was a Thing based solely on a slight change in delivery. It took us a little while to get through it and I felt kinda bad that my game had dominated the night, but I think everyone had a great time.
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02 Jan 2019 12:10 #289080 by hotseatgames
My two sons and I tried out the cooperative scenario for Fallout that comes in the New California expansion. The rule changes to enable this are interesting, but we have put in 2 sessions on the same game and will probably give up on it for the following reasons:

1. In the regular game, you are trying to gain better / more agenda cards than the other players so that you can gain enough influence to win the game. In the cooperative scenario, the agenda cards only serve to either further the team's faction (star) or push the enemy faction BACKWARDS on the track (shield).

We had a lot of difficulty completing quests that actually granted agenda cards, and when we DID get them, we would invariably draw cards that would make the enemy faction recede as opposed to pushing our faction farther to victory. The end result of this is that the game JUST. KEEPS. GOING.

2. During all of this, my one son, who took the Enclave soldier character, was racking up SO much XP that he maxed his levels. He then got to quest in Vault 44 (which is implemented in a SUPER cool way.... you actually take your figure off-board and quest on the cards in a dungeon crawl style manner) and wound up with Tesla armor. He is now functionally invincible.

Overall, I'm very glad to have the expansion, but I don't think the cooperative scenario is one I'd be eager to pull out very often. At least I'd house rule a change to the agendas to let you choose what faction to move no matter what agenda card you draw. That is a simple fix.

They also include "extended" versions of all of the base game quests. I'm wary of how this will play out... the base game wasn't what I would call short.
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02 Jan 2019 13:49 #289084 by lj1983
for the last 4-5 years for new years, we've had the same couple come by and we have games all day. it's a good time. This time they came by on sunday too for a afternoon/evening game session.

Then we had a 'class 2 snow emergency' on New years eve day. No unnecessary travel. Hospitals, aside from emergency services, closed. The mines all closed (that's happened...once? in the last 5 years) My friends decided that coming over was necessary. So I obliged and dug out a parking spot for them.

The only "new" game I got was Falling Sky back from the GMT black Friday sale, so that's a no-go for this group. I did trade for a bunch of games right before Christmas, and bought a couple kids games.

Ultimate Warriorz - I think Charlie did a review on this a couple years back, and I've had it on the 'look for' list ever since. What a hoot. A half-step above King of Tokyo. You feel more attached to your warrior, and there's definitely some little strategy in what cards played and where to move. but mostly rolling dice, fighting each other and lots of yelling.

Fury of Dracula 3rd - it has been a while since we played this. So I started as Dracula. I gambled and started right next to one of the hunters. they fairly quickly drew an event card that made me reveal a location in my path. and the chase was on. they narrowed me down to Eastern Europe/Greece quickly, so I fled to Italy, dropped a vampire in the boot, then fled to the med and doubled back to Greece. The hunters split up, two in france/spain and two in eastern Europe. They ignored my stop in Italy, and so that vampire matured. I tried to drop a third one in Athens, but they dug it out. at that point I was able to go back to sea, and dropped Storms behind me all over the Mediterranean and the atlantic. I was able to sneak away to spain, and hide long enough for the third despair token and the influence boosts that happen then.

I was lucky, as there were many times that the hunters were choosing between 1 location and another and simply chose wrong. They called it "the most frustrating game every" as they would figure this out soon after, but by then I was gone.

Ice Cool & Ice Cool2 - the twins adore Ice Cool, so I picked up Ice Cool2 from the local shop during Black Friday. it is 99% the same as IceCool, you now have the ability to combine them and/or have more players. The regular game is a "hall monitor" chasing the student penguins around this school. then you rotate around and everyone has a turn as a hall monitor. it actually starts going alittle long, as a full game is really 4 round of hall monitor stuff. so with more players (though you start having 2 hall monitors) I don't really recommend playing this way. Instead, there's a 'race' version. Where you split into teams, and have to collect all the fish for all penguins on your team, then race to a finish line. There's less tension, without the hall monitor chasing people, but everyone gets a even chance to flick and make trick shots. and as soon as you've got both sets, you want to make larger schools, so there's more chance for things to slow down. I've gotten pretty good at jumping penguins over walls now.

Archipelago - This is still a favorite in the group. I've never seen more failed explorations before. I think we had 6 or 7 failed explorations throughout the game (including my first action).

it finally clicked that burning through evolution cards really fast was killing us on the revolution track. We ended up getting 3 pretty rough domestic crisis in a turn (2 immediate, then a regular) that drove the revolution marker to within 10 of the population. so this turn was all players tip-toeing through, keeping idle workers under control, putting up some temples (hard to do with no stone available), trying to diversify our resources to prepare for another crisis. Fish had killed us the turn before, so we all tried to gather some fish. Which is kinda dumb, since that's from the *previous* crisis....but that's how we were thinking. It's also mentioned, and mostly agreed upon, that we don't think there's a separatist among us. So evolution cards come up, another fish crisis comes around and we don't have enough. so we talk it out spin down enough to draw that evolution card. another fish crisis. these people love their fish I guess. So, crisis time, we put out enough resources to eek by. But the revolution marker is only 2 behind our population #. And I realize "Sarah got a fish last turn!" and didn't spend it. and that was really it. Oh, we tried. but Sarah taxed 3 times, and burned through evolution cards. We tried to fight back. we hired some surplus workers and increased population and gathered resources. but we were all too far from ending the game. That next domestic crisis got us. She played it great, talking with us about how to keep rebellion under control.

She chose Agricola for the next game. I've never played Agricola with this couple. It's not a game I really ever choose. I prefer Argent, Lords of Waterdeep or Alien frontiers for my worker placement stuff. I warned her, that I'm pretty good at Agricola. I know I'm not better than some of those people who live for WP games, but Agricola has two big ....flaws? maybe not flaws but things I don't like? in it. One is the negative scoring....which is just annoying. The second is that # of workers is a driver of both economy and scoring. They just end up being such a huge part, that if you fall behind at all in the race for kids, you are screwed. Maybe there's someway around it, but we don't play Agricola enough to know.

Argent works with this, by making additional workers fairly limited, and having so many other actions that you can do. One thing I'm good at, is identifying a specific goal and zeroing in on it like a laser. And for this specific goal, its fairly easy to focus on it. So I ended up with my 5 workers, having multiple turns where I had more actions than anyone else. I did waste 1 turn securing this(taking start player, as start player), but more than made up for it later.

I picked up My Little Scythe for my daughter, who loves games and really has a knack for them. We played 6 players, with my oldest son and their daughter joining in. My daughter just wiped the floor with us. 4 trophies, my son with 1 (from fighting of course) and no-one else with anything. It is a good little design, retaining a good bit of the best parts of Scythe and doesn't drag with 6 players.

Our local store did thing, where they wrapped up games and put significant discounts on them for Christmas. Purchasing blind. So my friend's had bought two, which ended up being Arcane Academy and BetaBotz

Arcane Academy I was surprised to see is a Eric Lang/Kevin Wilson design, so I chose that one of the two to try out. you are wizards, doing things. it's a combination tile laying/card game. you've got a tile board, where they are laid and generate actions. tiles that are correctly linked, will activate each other to generate actions/resources that you use to play cards. cards are spells/items that also act as victory points and end game timer. not a bad light game. some of the spells are wildly powered. and that's a plus in my mind, rather than a whole bunch of evenly powered but boring stuff.

and then, because we had mentioned it was my wife's favorite game, we played Arkham Horror we started around 9 PM and finished right around 11:45 with a gate-seal win. When my wife and I play, we both grab two characters and play a 4-player game. This is critical, as there are so many bad things throughout the game that inevitably one of your two characters will have a string of dud turns or just be so beat down that he's useless. So we played 4 players, 1 character each, and yep, two of the 4 ended up being kind of slow characters that didn't really help a ton. it didn't help that we were all tired from a string of long nights, and the game can drag when the gates don't generate a ton of activity.



This weekend is birthday weekend, so I've got some guys over for some conflict oriented games. I'm still not sure whether we'll have 3 or 4.....shoot we might only have 2. I'm hoping to get Clash of Cultures played. its been a while on that one.
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02 Jan 2019 14:20 #289085 by charlest
Yeah, Ultimate Warriorz is good stuff. I think Barnes liked it too, and I remember Mark enjoying it. It's definitely FAT/TWBG approved.

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02 Jan 2019 14:29 #289087 by hotseatgames
I liked it okay, but the kids never requested to play it, so I sold it.

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02 Jan 2019 15:48 #289095 by Gregarius
I got to try out my new acquisition Treasure Island last night, and I loved it.

The game is in the vein of the classic Scotland Yard, where one player (me) is Long John Silver who has buried a hidden treasure and everybody else are pirates racing to find it first. Ostensibly, the other players aren't really a "team," as only one of them can win, but in practice my group worked as a team anyway. (That made it harder for me, but I still almost won.)

The artwork and components are just gorgeous. There's a giant central map of which each player has their own miniature copy, and all of them are made with a high-gloss coat with the intention to be written upon. So as the game progresses and the pirates learn more clues about the location of the treasure, they can write it right there on the board (or maybe keep it to themselves on their own little board). There are great plastic pieces for straight edges, search circles, compass points, and even an actual compass for drawing circles. Great stuff.

Every clue that LJS gives feels like it gives away too much information, unless you're a pirate in which case it feels like the board is too enormous to ever find a treasure. Gradually, the clues add up and the available spaces narrow down, and you really feel the race element.

One of the players last night made the comment that what he liked about the game is that you were really doing what the game was about. You didn't say "I search here," then roll a die to see if you're successful. You literally draw a circle on the map, and either the treasure is in there or it isn't.

LJS has the opportunity to bluff on some clues, and players have secret information that they can share or not. In our game, it was cooperation that allowed one player to win, much to my chagrin.

I think the game works best if everyone goes into it with the mindset of simple, piratey, fun instead of uber-gamer analytics (which is why I think it will be a hit with the TWBG crowd, since you guys are all good at this). Anyway, I can't wait to try it again as a pirate.
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02 Jan 2019 16:33 #289103 by Gary Sax
Alright, where do you live lj, I'm coming over to play Archipelago with you next new year ;)
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02 Jan 2019 19:23 #289122 by cdennett

Josh Look wrote: We had 8 people total and the first thing played was two rounds of Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt Skullfyre, which was not one of the games I brought. Automatic -6 stars for using the work "epic." Look, I love dumb shit but I could not care less if I ever had to see this game again.

8 players?!? You did that to yourself...shouldn't be played with more than 5, and 4 is probably the sweet spot. And I do like the new rules that limit it to 3 "matches" total, with the winner declared via points, as the game can linger. It's still a good game, so long as you follow the very important rule: You must read your spell in your most wizardly voice when casting.

Had a lot of family-free time this holiday (which was great) and did some solo gaming, as well as some gaming with my son. Played a solo game of SpaceCorps where I ended up winning pretty handily. I did get a few things wrong in my favor, but not enough to swing things too wildly in their favor. I think the solo game may end up being a bit too random for the setup effort, but I may try it again. Really looking forward to seeing it multi-player.

I pulled out my "have lots of time" solo game of choice in Last Frontier: The Vesuvius Incident and after going over the rules again, proceeded to get my ass handed to me. Everything was quiet until one of my fireteams with my best soldier and my hacker got ambushed as they made it to the ring and got decimated. Another team on the other side of the ring was also ambushed trying to get to them and ended up carrying their wounded companion back to the shuttle. I explored some crew quarters before my losses stacked up and with a pile of 4 wounded crew in the shuttle, I sent a fireteam to check out engineering. Nothing interesting until they got to the Astrophysics Lab closet when I drew the "Airlock Open" event that depressurized Engineering and trapped my entire crew in the lab. Of course one of my guys was abducted while the two in the closet got ambushed, one of them being heavily wounded. I ended up ending the game earlier then should be allowed, as my remaining marine in the lab blew out the window just as the shuttle launched to go pick them up and escape. I never ONCE encountered any of the survivors of the crew...

I also got to try the intro scenario for Heroes of Terrinoth. I had played the Warhammer version a while back, and this one I think had a the rules cleaned up quite a bit. It was alright, but I wasn't blown away. The scenario was pretty easy, so I should try again with one of the other ones.

Played a couple of games of Sword & Sorcery with my son as it's his favorite game. The fucking missions in Arcane Portal expansion take FOREVER. I'm really getting done with the game, it is such a kitchen sink design. Why does it matter than a flying enemy can't be K.O.d...I missed that rule up until recently. It's got some good ideas bogged down by so much crap. Every attack is like 10 different steps of adding and subtracting nonsense. I think from here on out I'm going to start simplify things greatly to just get through the thing. But, it is the closest thing to a real RPG dungeon crawl that's fully cooperative, and it's his favorite game, so I will keep plodding on.

My wife and I ended up playing the first two chapters of Aeon's End Legacy last night and had a really good time. I do think they cranked the difficulty down a lot, at least for the first two chapters, but they've done some clever ways to personalize the game as you play it (that I don't want to spoil) and the story is alright. I think we'll probably finish this one pretty quickly, as I think the wife has that Legacy itch again. So far it's been well worth the price of admission. And if you're new to Aeon's End, this is a great way to learn how to play the game, as they slowly introduce the concepts from the full game, while twisting some others. It also takes away the question of how you set things up.

Played another couple games of Deep Space D-6. It can be quite a bit swingy and you can find yourself in a no-win situation from time to time, but the game really moves quick when you have it down. I may look to crank up the difficulty some.
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02 Jan 2019 19:35 #289123 by SuperflyPete

Vysetron wrote: Well, we played more Gen7. Turns out Plaid Hat still hasn't gotten their act together.

I'm not even talking about the laundry list of errata. I mean that's awful, but that didn't impact our games. As a concept it's solid - coop worker placement, keep the ship running, find time to do your own tasks and solve plot problems in the middle of it. Fine. Good start. Problem is it's never interesting.

It's just too easy to solve everything the game throws at you. Over time they introduce what are presented as different types of problems within the story, but you solve them by placing workers, getting the required bits, and heading to the problem to use the bits. Every time. It's not challenging, it's not clever, it's just "place die get thing".

The plot is just awful. Clumsily written, poorly strung together, and dull as dishwater. It's the generic-est of generic sci-fi. This ties into the absolute worst thing about Gen7 - the crossroads cards. If you're going to have the gall to put that on your box as the main draw you CAN NOT have the cards be this boring and lifeless. They don't trigger often enough, and when they do the majority of them lack any real consequences. The best one we ever drew was holding an intervention for our bioscience officer who we'd been joking the entire time was just synthesizing various strains of space weed (Sweed). It wasn't entertaining because the game did anything right, it was entertaining because we were making fun of the game the whole time to begin with and it happened to get in on the joke by random chance. And in case you're wondering, it had no lasting effect. Of course. Why have actual consequences when you can just hint at them instead?

Plaid Hat has lost their way, and this game won't save them. What a disappointment.

We played Spirit Island and Root to get the taste out of our mouths. Both great.


That’s a shame. I did a demo and while I agree the plot wasn’t super interesting (as it evolved, I love the concept) the game was pretty fun. It was kind of simple and easy, but I think the idea was more to have an interactive story...which only works if the story is engaging.
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02 Jan 2019 20:19 #289130 by Scott Rogers
The best thing about the New Years weekend is that my family traditionally travels upstate to our friend's. He owns about 800 games and is always up to play. Here's what we played...

Yatzhee Duel: Star Wars edition: While it was gifted to me as a gag, it turned out to be not a horrible game. It needs some modding and a few more characters, but the core idea is interesting.

The Lady and the Tiger: The art on this game is gorgeous. I just wished the gameplay was better. We only played a couple of the games (it has five different games included - always a warning sign in my book) because the others didn't sound very interesting.

Karuba the card game: A fun little game but I much prefer the tile and meeple version.

Evolution Climate: I had just played "Dinosaur Island" a few days ago, and while I found this to be an interesting and alternate take on dinosaurs, I found that luck of the draw played a huge factor in this game and I think I'll be sticking with genetically growing my dinosaurs in the future.

The Game of Things: A family favorite. Always a lot of fun to play although for some reason I played it to see if my answer could always get guessed on the first round. I "won".

Pitchstorm: My friends and family seemed to like this daffy party game which I bought as an example of how to make a game out of anything for my screenwriting students. I need to play it again to determine whether I really like it or not.

Pantone the Game: Full Disclosure, I designed this game. It gives me great pleasure to see people enjoy a game I made. However, I never get to play anymore because I wrote all of the clues. So I just kept score.

The Builders Middle Ages: A nice, quick game. I'd play it again, although I think it would get old quickly.

Songbirds: A very clever and fast card game. I actually found myself thinking about it more after we finished playing which is always a good sign.

Reef: Didn't care for it.

Codenames: Another family favorite. It's good, but I don't find it very challenging.

Las Vegas: My wife particularly likes this fun rolling and betting game. It doesn't really feel too much like anything in Las Vegas, but the production quality of the new version is nice.

Qwirkle: I was slightly amazed at how much I like this game and how satisfying it is to make a Qwirkle.

Qwixx: The "Q" games continue!! Played a big 8 player game of this and it's still a lot of fun. One of the best roll and writes out there.

Village: We played this because I'm designing a worker placement game and I was hoping to learn some things from it. While I feel like didn't I learned anything new from it, I still enjoyed myself.

Dominoes: I never came from a family that played dominoes so I've only played it a couple of times during my life. This trip I realized I really don't enjoy playing dominos. However, 2 out of 3 of my family members REALLY do. I guess I'll be playing more in the future. If any one can suggest interesting variants than just plain old "lay it down and score" I'd appreciate it.
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02 Jan 2019 21:32 #289137 by Shellhead

cdennett wrote: I pulled out my "have lots of time" solo game of choice in Last Frontier: The Vesuvius Incident and after going over the rules again, proceeded to get my ass handed to me. Everything was quiet until one of my fireteams with my best soldier and my hacker got ambushed as they made it to the ring and got decimated. Another team on the other side of the ring was also ambushed trying to get to them and ended up carrying their wounded companion back to the shuttle. I explored some crew quarters before my losses stacked up and with a pile of 4 wounded crew in the shuttle, I sent a fireteam to check out engineering. Nothing interesting until they got to the Astrophysics Lab closet when I drew the "Airlock Open" event that depressurized Engineering and trapped my entire crew in the lab. Of course one of my guys was abducted while the two in the closet got ambushed, one of them being heavily wounded. I ended up ending the game earlier then should be allowed, as my remaining marine in the lab blew out the window just as the shuttle launched to go pick them up and escape. I never ONCE encountered any of the survivors of the crew...


I understand that solitaire and co-op games should be hard, but sometimes the Vesuvius Incident feels impossible. I've had games where we never got anybody out to the ring section of the ship. The rules are a little too fiddly with details, but overall it works as a great approximation of Aliens.
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