Barnes on Games- Baseball Highlights 2045 in Review, Historia, 13 Days, Greenland again

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Yeah I reviewed FTZ awhile ago. It's solid but not great. Like a dumbed down Gears of War.

I agree about the combat in Rebellion -- it really stalls the flow the game. It is almost Dungeonquest-esque in nature; in fact, it might be worse because there is already enough to consider in Rebellion the combat really is a distraction. At least with DQ it just felt out of place due to pacing.

I think I am going to go with the add dice equal to leaders combat rating and use the lightsabers as blocks.

So I'm 5 plays into Rebellion now. At first I thought the combat wasn't so bad, certainly not as bad as word of mouth had you believe. After my 3rd play I thought it was terrible and needed to be replaced. Now I'm coming back around and thinking it's certainly the weakest element in the game but still fun. I'm seeing a tad bit more variety in the cards, which helps. There's a also not a huge amount of combat happening in my games, and what combat does happen is never more than 2 rounds. It sounds like Egg Shen wants to play on Monday, we'll see how I feel after that.

I actually bought Baseball Highlights 2045 minutes ago from my LGS totally on a whim, didn't see it was what you were reviewing this week. Psyched to take it home and crack it open.

I played quite a bit of Historia before I sold it off. The Civbots actually work pretty well, which freaks me out a bit because it makes me think there isn't actually that much game there other than trying to build combos out of the Wonders. We figured out pretty early on that spending your actions/cards to get as many complimentary Wonders as possible is the One True Path to victory. Being a little behind on the chart is not a bad place to be since you can then use your hand cards to catch up to the other players, and eventually you should have a little Wonder engine going that'll get you moving by leaps and bounds. So the whole thing basically reduces down to "can I put together a better Wonder engine than the other players?"

The various mini-expansions you can get for the game can change that dynamic some, but they also add some fiddly to an otherwise pretty clean design. I didn't feel most of them were worth the effort.

Josh I think you will really like BH2045...probably a good buy for you.

Yeah, I tried the Civbots...and I also kind of wondered if he fact that a deck of six cards can actually be competitive...how much game is really there? But they keep wiping each other out, which also makes me wonder if hat part of the game is worth pursuing at all. I dunno, I'm kind of 50/50 on it right now.

Maybe you had bad Civbot draws? I've seen them be pretty competitive.

Josh, did you ever try out your suggested simplified combat for Rebellion? If so, how did it work out?

Coincidentally, I just bought BH2045 yesterday -- hopefully can try it out soon.

I did play around with it, just setting up some combat situations and seeing how it played out. Didn't work. That and playing a couple more times helped me come to the conclusion that you kind of do need the cards. The rarer effects, blocks, double hits, you need that stuff in the grand scheme of things. The Rebels in particular need them. The Empire is going to win most battles, there's little doubt about that. The Rebels need whatever bullshit they can get out of the cards, they simply don't have the numbers to compete.

Michael, you were right, I love this game! I'm going to need the expansions.

I've got the Deluxe version on the way. Are the last two expansions (Errors and Big Fly) from the Super Deluxe edition worth picking up at some point, or would I be better off picking up the extra teams?

I would get the expansions instead of the teams unless you are playing with a larger group. The expansions add mechanics/new free agent players. The teams are just rookie/veteran assortments and although there are some differences, you usually wind up sending most of those guys back to the minors anyway. It comes with NY, LA, Boston and SF so if you want "your" team, maybe get that. I usually play with NY since I don't have Atlanta.

I would not buy any of the extra teams until they reprint. I bought Cincy at the same time I purchased Super Deluxe and the card sizes were pretty different. If you are going to sleeve it anyway then go right ahead.

I only have a few of the expansions, but I especially like the Rally Cap one, which has abilities that tend to trigger if you're behind in the game, and other effects like that. That kind of thing plays well into what feels great about this game, with the timing of when to play certain cards.

There goes Barnes trolling again. If you "don't give a toss about baseball" then how in the hell can you classify BBH as "one of the elite sports games?" It's a deckbuilder with a thin baseball coat of paint that has little and less to do with the actual sport of baseball. I'm glad the boardgamers of the world seem to all have a collective hard-on over the damn game, but spare me the flowery proclamations of "BEST SPORTS GAME EVAR!!!11!!" over a deckbuilder, especially when you follow it up with the equivalent of "Fuck baseball."