Barnestorming- Temple of Elemental Evil in Review, Lift Off, Small Box Games

charlest wrote:

Mr. White wrote: From Barnes - "Super Fantasy: Ugly Snouts Assault- GREAT dungeoncrawler, fired by the return of D&DAS. And the fact that this genre is over-represented in my collection as it is. $28"

Yes and I of course disagree with him on that. I was just saying if you've never heard of it you should check out his review.

Looks like we've got our first candidate for a 'crossfire' style article.

Barnes and DDAS vs Charlest and SF!

I've only played it twice, and DDAS once so I don't think I'm the guy for that.

But a good idea. I could a Myth vs. the world where everyone tells me I'm an idiot, but I still love that game.

VonTush wrote: That's what it sounds like ToEE did...It remained stagnant and tried to recreate the magic from five years ago. It didn't do more when it could have. Perhaps ignoring the past five years of industry change?

Those early DDAS games were crap. Virtually no strategy and boringly repetitive. I played Castle Ravenloft through all its scenarios, participated in and contributed to Barkam's variant which made a stab at giving it some decent AI but ultimately traded it away dismissing it as suffering from TMMNEG syndrome (Too many minis, not enough game) .

TOEE is the superior release. It's not doing well, because the system was never that good and times have changed and it didn't.

D&DAS has got to be one of the most misinterpreted designs ever...it just isn't intended to be some kind of deeply strategic/tactical square-to-square game like Descent or whatever. It's a dungeon-themed board game. It's intended to be imminently accessible and really not too much of a step up from Dungeon!. If you're fussing about the AI or whatever, trying to add complexity...you've missed the point.

I really like Super Fantasy and I actually liked the comics style. But ultimately, I look at a shelf that has that, Claustrophobia, Imperial Assault, Space Hulk, Wiz-War and Space Crusade as well as all four D&DAS titles and it feels like it is the right one to pass on even with Claustrophobia and Space Hulk being two player only, Wiz-War really being a take-that game and Imperial Assault really not being very good.

I've said it before...it being actually D&D is a big deal to me.

Since it seems relevant, here's a link to the Revisiting DDAS games thread from exactly a year ago.

fortressat.com/forum/10-ameritrash/18047...m-games?limitstart=0

Michael Barnes wrote: D&DAS has got to be one of the most misinterpreted designs ever...it just isn't intended to be some kind of deeply strategic/tactical square-to-square game like Descent or whatever. It's a dungeon-themed board game. It's intended to be imminently accessible and really not too much of a step up from Dungeon!. If you're fussing about the AI or whatever, trying to add complexity...you've missed the point.

I know. But I feel it's not so much that I missed the point as they missed the mark ... something you allude to when you say TOEE is 1.5, but you were looking for 2.0. In that sense, I was looking for 2.0 from the get-go.

First post. Just to be clear: I'm not a Polish racketeer using surplus circa-'83 East German microcomputers with dial-up connections to spam boardgamers with great rates on anal mortgages and 5% discounts for Cat Viagra. Really.

I love the D&D Adventure Games, but they have repeatedly and completed bombed with my games group. We're a group of fairly casual players, composed of men and women with a wide range of ages. My group likes OTHER mechanically-simple, thematic dice-rollers: Eldritch Horror, Talisman, Zombicide, etc. The D&D games have FLOPPED bigtime. We're talking a flop of Ishtar proportions.

I've thought about it a lot. My suspicion is that my group dislikes the things that I like about the D&DAS games. The total absence of artwork on the cards, the way the cards have that slightly beige background, the austere appearance of the tiles, the streamlined but not revolutionary mechanics. Between those aspects and the D&D branding, the game has a real retro, aesthetically-minimalist throwback feel that takes me way back to a very specific place. If the game came with cardboard standees instead of miniatures, you could easily mistake it for a relic from 30 years ago. A relic that carries a lot of meta-nostalgic weight for me, and maybe a bunch of other people, but sadly not anyone else in my game group. I think my love for the game is tied in nostalgia, a nostalgia that's reinforced by the spartan (and old-school) look of the components, especially the barren cards and boring tiles. But nostalgia is hyper-subjective, and without the visual zing of full-color art on every card and super-detailed tiles, the D&DAS are gonna fall flat with a LOT of people, especially when there are so many dungeon crawlers out there that are much more interesting to look at than D&DAS.

Well, that is a mighty good first post and you really get at a lot of the subtle things that make me like this game so much. I actually really like that austere, plain look and yes, there is a kind of pastoral nostalgia that it evokes. It reminds me of simpler times- not only in terms of design, but also in terms of how we used to receive games. In 1985, 1995...these games would be stone classics and you could send them back to those times and it would fit right in. And that could be a reason why they are divisive in a post-Descent setting.

Lift Off is pretty good. And it is damn cute. It's a lot like Survive if Survive were mostly about the boats. You can try to win via paper-thin alliances, or you can try to win by being a complete shitlord. Either way you're going to have fun and people are going to berate you for it.