Barnes on Games- Imperial Assault Expansions/Star Trek Five Year Mission Reviews, Moongha Invaders,

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Cube Quest is a blast.

Barnes on Moongha:

The setting is cool and all, I like a lot of things about it (including, paradoxically, the “charging” mechanic where you build up attack chits for a big blow-out attack later on), but I kind of wonder if the appeal of this game in 2015 is different than it was in 2010.

So I dunno, I need to play it a few more times (and with four) to see if whatever it was I saw in it in 2010 wasn’t just a result of really wanting this kind of game to exist. But I actually kind of found myself wishing that were playing Monsters Menace America (the reprint) instead.

The game's the same, with the same appeal. It's just that the hype wagon has thrown a wheel. (Rhyming bonus!)

I dredged up my 2010 comments on Moongha, which are pretty darn close to your current thoughts:

I only started having fun on the second-to-last turn (turn 7 of 8), which is when the board finally started filling up with monsters, heroes, and military units. That's a bad sign for a supposedly delicious monster killfest. Rating gets a one-point bump due to the fact that I successfully fired off the only nuke in the game.

Frankly, if I'm in the mood for a B movie, Monsters Menace America beats Moongha Invaders by an alien mile.

Edit to state the obvious: if you want a Euro-ish area control experience, Moongha might be your bag. If you want stupid fun, MMA is the way to go.


(Standard disclaimer: My tastes in games are four standard deviations from the norm. Any norm. Take your pick.)

I got Twin Shadows and have had to fight my feeling of "doing it wrong" or somehow "spoiling" it by starting there with the mini-campaign instead of with the base set. The Descent problem is magnified in IA because of the ostensible lack of divisibility of the campaign; whereas Descent gives you adventures that can be played separately or strung together, IA is, in its own terms, campaign only, and a long one at that. I actually got Descent played again a month or so ago, but I haven't gotten that group back together again, and I fear that the same type of thing will happen with a long IA campaign unless it's just my wife and me (and even then it might).

I would love to own Imperial Assault to play with the wife but goddammit is it ridiculously expensive, even without getting the minis to replace the tokens.

Cube Quest will likely let you down. I've gone rounds with Hotseat about it and we have agreed to agree that he's wrong, or something like that. It's so utterly simple, and if you play with someone who has any flick skills, the "game" lasts 3 turns, at most.

It's just bad. Great for kids, though.

Same with 5-Year-Mission. It just sucks. It has tons of faux-tension, where what you do doesn't matter but it is presented in such a way that you feel like it should, primarily because you 'care' about Star Trek. It's just poorly designed, and I would absolutely prefer Yachtzee to it, or if you want a more like comparison, I'd prefer Roll For It to it. Yuckwagon.

I'm thoroughly underwhelmed with Imperial Assault. A lot of it is so contrived that it takes away from the game. Well, maybe not a lot, but putting an AT-ST into a 10x10 room is just bullshit. Doom is better, IMHO. It's not horrible, but it's basically a dumbed down (read: streamlined, elegant) version of Descent, with some stormtrooper white paint slapped on. Unimpressed. If you like Descent you'll probably like it.

I've never played Moongha but it sounds like it wants to be smarter than it should be.

SuperflyTNT wrote: Same with 5-Year-Mission. It just sucks. It has tons of faux-tension, where what you do doesn't matter but it is presented in such a way that you feel like it should, primarily because you 'care' about Star Trek. It's just poorly designed, and I would absolutely prefer Yachtzee to it, or if you want a more like comparison, I'd prefer Roll For It to it. Yuckwagon.

I've been seriously eyeing Ancient Terrible Things after you spoke highly of it in another thread but it looks like both it and 5-Year Mission have Yahtzee mechanics. Why does ATT work but not 5YM?

It has much more flavor, to begin. With 5YM you basically draw cards and try to hit bogeys, and you have some character powers that can affect things. In ATT, it's much more like Quarriors or something in that you have places you move to and enact that space's powers. It may seem similar on paper, but 5YM is more like Roll For It: Advanced Version and ATT is sort of like Ghost Stories: The Dice Game, although it's adversarial.

I should be the audience for Mistfall, as I do love both LOTR LCG and Mage Knight, but I recall trying to watch Rahdo's runthrough of it during the KS campaign and my head spinning. Granted, Mage Knight was a monster to learn, but it was worth it, ultimately. So I'll be hoping for a more detailed write-up on that before getting interested. It would take a lot at this point to sway me, though, as I'm feeling more content lately to just enjoy what I already have in MK, rather than thinking I need something else in that same kind of vein. That being said, I've already preordered the new Star Trek version of MK, but that should be a lateral move, and not learning some entirely new game system.

Wow, didn't see that coming....Moongha invaders actually dissapointing. I played 2 sessions of this game back in 2010 and it was one of the few games were everyone at the table immediatly logged into an online gamestore to order a copy. We had very different tastes in games generally, so it was quite remarkable. Both sessions were incredibly tense affairs, with a building up towards an amazing crescendo (don't remember this being slow) with the final set of turns being almost unbearable: each move would totally change the situation.
I was impressed by the elegance of it all, and despite the short rules-set how much crucial decission-points it offered.

So now I'm very reluctant to delve into the new version.
All these years the original version was sitting on my shelve, and I almost always decided not to play it just out of fear it would suddenly dissapoint and blow away those fond memories of those 2 magical sessions. Kinda silly when I write it down like this...but still. And now it looks like the new version will also add some dissapointment on the visual front.
I actually was the only one at the table who liked the original art/board visuals. Everyone felt it was the weakes part of the game. I kinda thought they were very destinctive looking, full of character and charm. It had that underground comics vibe going...

Ah well...better keep my first edition copy.
Maybe I will give it a play one of these days...and maybe it will still blow me away. who knows.

Hey Barnes, don't dis the production. I was going to trade this version of Moongha for an original version, and I need people hyped about it!