Barnes on Games - Grand Prix in Review, The Others, Black Fleet, Planet Rush

I will say that I don't think that The Others is amazing, and broadly agree with Frohike's comments from the before times in history back. I think it may actually be best as an asymmetrical two-player game and others have mentioned Claustrophobia being better which I'll have to take their word on.

Having had the opportunity to find myself playing Chaos every other week with a reasonably solid group I begin to regret this push toward abstraction which Lang no doubt feels is refinement. As it stands right now, I want to sell Blood Rage, because it's just nothing like as interesting as Chaos and I'm decreasingly interested in his purported take on Diplomacy coming up.

Black Fleet seems to be one that has flown under the radar. It's a beautiful game, with easy to grasp rules, and a mean streak similar to a 1980s mass market family game. If you have any love for something like Survive you will be VERY happy with Black Fleet.

As for The Others...I guess I'll be the only other person besides JEM that defends the game. I agree wholeheartedly that comparing this to a dudes in a hall or dungeon crawler is a mistake. As JEM mentions the game is actually fairly abstracted. It's just presented in the most in your face, non abstracted way possible. As a horror game that is "scary or horrifying" it fails miserably. The "horror" in the game comes from the tension of not knowing what the Sin Player will do and the fact that heroes will die. It's not a matter of "if", but "when".

For me that is the greatest part of the design. The Others invokes a hopelessness of something like Lord of the Rings where you know the odds are stacked against you, but you'll die trying. That sensation of having to sacrifice yourself for the cause is really strong and not many games pull it off well. I also love the corruption mechanic as it forces the heroes to slowly take on more of it to gain their best advantages. You're forced to ride that knife's edge of corruption with out toppling over and it's a balancing act that I find very engaging.

That being said, I don't think the game itself is one that FEELS all that much fun. It's far think-ier than it's garish, over the top, components would lead you to believe. Sure you're chucking dice, and doing cool shit, but the whole thing is a SLOG. As the heroes you're constantly faced with setbacks. As the Sin player you only can do so much evil shit. It's very tight and not forgiving at all. As I mentioned before, it's not a game that leaves a particularly sweet taste in your mouth after your first couple of gulps. You really need to be comfortable with the ENTIRE design before it clicks. In the age of playing a game once or twice and shelving it, having to devote yourself to this one particular game can seem like a big negative. I think those that play the shit out of it will find it very rewarding. It's surprisingly clean from top to bottom and it's refined/abstracted nature is unfortunately a major turnoff for fans of chunky miniatures. I think CMON has rock solid game on their hands and Eric Lang has in some ways created the ultimate 1 vs all design.

Chaos so much better than Blood Rage, however the people I play with do a lot of M:TG so get hard about the drafting. So I think I'm stuck playing the game I like less, pretty much every time until I get smarter friends.

Thanks for posting the dissents! I don't have a dog in the fight but I'm always interested to hear games which have the fort divided a bit.

Also can we stop comparing Blood Rage and Chaos in the Old World? Besides the points each player spends during their turn, the designs share almost NOTHING in common. Blood Rage is ENTIRELY about the draft and feels more like an abstracted/Euro-ized Cosmic Encounter rather than CitOW. When I play Blood Rage it doesn't even come close to scratching the same asymmetrical itch that CitOW offers.

When you play CitOW, the Chaos God that you play as will completely dictate your style of play and choices. When you play Blood Rage you're free to mold your viking clan however you see fit (as long as the cards come your way). So yes, by the end of the third round each player's clan is different and specialized it still doesn't come close to the highly focused asymmetry of CitOW.

The dudes on a map portion of Blood Rage and excellent components means it gets compared to other giants in that genre. The fact is it's more of a hybrid/hodgepodge design that is like 85% drafting coupled with 10% board placement...and 5% fuckery/card play tossed in to round it out. I just don't feel like the two games are even remotely close to each other in terms of design.

Name sounds familiar...is this the same designer as the BB:TM card game?

No, Jay Little designed BB:TM. Eric Lang's most well-known FFG design (only one?) is Chaos in the Old World.

I didn't think The Others was all that great either. I mean, it didn't have any obvious flaws, at least not mechanically. I liked the branching scenarios and the corruption mechanic too, especially the latter. It looks nice, but that's getting less and less impressive. It's in a very crowded design space, and to some extent I think positive response is due in part to its scale. Large scale competent games can easily be overrated. I also really don't care for the setting. Regular Cthulu stuff is already overused, and this is basically just ersatz Cthulu. At that point just use the public domain property and be honest with it. I'm not much of a Cthulu fan in the first place. I dunno, from the setting standpoint it came off as pandering to me.

But that said, if someone really LIKED that genre of game I can see why they'd like The Others. I just didn't stand out to me at all, and the most interesting parts were not nearly enough to overcome the whatever side of it for me.

Blood Rage is always comparable to Chaos. Both games trace their roots to Midgard. I get what you're saying, Egg, and it's those differences that make Blood Rage the less interesting game to me.

Egg is right. They really aren't comparable. They both have a map, they both use the rage/power thing, and they're both by Lang, but that's about it. The execution of the two games are entirely different.

And Blood Rage is the better of the two.

I'd be very surprised if you don't like Conan. It's typical French Ameritrash. Meaning it's awesome.

Franco-Trash has a better average than ameritrash on consistently being enjoyable.

The French know their shit in this regard.