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- It Came From the Tabletop! - Western Legends and Thunder Road
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It Came From the Tabletop! - Western Legends and Thunder Road
Go get the rope, boys! Josh and Al talk about Western Legends and manage to not say the "S-word," but totally fail to not make Bruce Springsteen jokes when they chat about Thunder Road.
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- Legomancer
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Legomancer wrote: I support Merchants and Marauders as an adventure game.
(Insert bearded man nodding in approval gif)
The official ICFTT t-shirt will read this on the back in big font.
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- engineer Al
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Legomancer wrote: I support Merchants and Marauders as an adventure game.
SANDBOX!!!!! (There, see what you made me do. . .)
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Is "Drunken Adults" taken?Josh Look wrote:
Legomancer wrote: I support Merchants and Marauders as an adventure game.
(Insert bearded man nodding in approval gif)
The official ICFTT t-shirt will read this on the back in big font.
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- Sagrilarus
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Legomancer wrote: ICFTT microbadge now available: www.boardgamegeek.com/microbadge/46838
SWEET! I'm sportin' mine right now!
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Westerns and Oil games might be my favorite two themes/settings, and I am always on the lookout for a new game. Part of me found your take on Western Legends refreshing -- matching my enthusiasm after my first few plays. Since then, my excitement has waned (although, I will keep playing since it is still probably the best Western game).
Some thoughts:
- At first, I liked the fact that the poker cards played a role in almost all of the task resolutions. The nice thing is, as you mentioned, is that it creates hard decisions about when to use which cards and what to use them for. However, regardless of how streamlined and modern it is, I think that eventually it gives a feeling of "sameness" to all the tasks that use the poker cards.
- I think that there were some missed opportunities to make the game feel more like a western. Namely, I think that the pick-up-and-deliver elements don't integrate well. The cattle rustling and cattle wrangling is somewhat monotonous and turns into an efficiency system.
- I think a missed opportunity would have been requiring Marshal players to get the bandits/outlaws they arrest back to town. While en route, other players should be able to disrupt them (this is something that the Life and Times of Wyatt Earp got right in 1958 -- probably the only thing, but satisfying none the less). Hell, how many episodes of Gunsmoke were literally just Marshall Dillon trying to get someone back to town safely so they could stand trial.
- The expansions are almost a necessity. They really should have just been included.
- As you guys bring up, the minis are just bizarre in that they don't match up.
- I wish the upgraded named items had slightly different effects instead of being identical. I don't know that this would an improvement on how the game plays, but it does give a bit more flavor/uniqueness to the game. Likewise, it would be nice if there were more variability in what it took to trigger the story cards.
Now these are just small complaints, it still is probably one of the best Western games out there. I put it up there with Gunslinger (which is shooting for a completely different feel).
As for Thunder Road, my almost 5-year old son is obsessed with it. He carefully unboxes it (I still have my copy I got for my 8th birthday in 1987) and sets it all up and makes his mom play when I'm at work....with rules that he makes up. We are just starting to incorporate the chopper rules -- really is just a great game.
We also are doing Battleball, Pac-man, and Bumper Cards. They've also been enjoying Curse of the Cobras...
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Space Ghost wrote: Just another thing I have to add to "list of shit to keep up with".
Thanks for listening, Space! Glad we could make your list of "shit". . .
I'm interested in the games you mentioned when playing with your kids. I'm always looking for good games to play with my kids at school. Battleball has been a favorite for a while, but I've never heard of the rest that you mention. They seem to not exist on BGG, except for Curse of the Cobras which is owned by a total of 18 people. Where did you get these games? Are they ALL remnants of your childhood?
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Gary Sax wrote: I adore it when Al is very agreeable but then quietly turns the corner... "actually, you're wrong, some of the characters do determine your strategy..."
Except that I was still right, just not about the first stages of the game.
Space Ghost, I think you’re right about a lot of what you listed. I was just thinking about how easy going to jail is and what I would have done if designing the game. I kind of came up empty handed. When we showed our Kaiju game to Matt a few months ago, something he said that lead to a lot of course correction is that dicking someone over or denying them can definitely be fun, but there’s a thin line between fun and bullshit. There’s definitely the sweet spot between those two things (and Intrigue is the living proof of it), but I do feel like arrest in Western Legends is done the best way it can be done. There’s definitely some tropes that can’t be mined there, but what would the outlaw player be doing on those turns where they’re brought to town? Dueling to get away? The marshal player would need a pretty killer hand to ensure they can hold them. Even then, the process would slow down advancement of not only the outlaw player, but the marshal. I think it would lead to less interaction if it were to take more time than it does, and that would _really_ hurt the game.
I find myself talking a lot about how clean and streamlined modern mechanics in thematic games are, but I feel like knowing where to abstract is the most important. This is what leads to games, not just this one, where every turn offers something that’s fun. Old games were streamlined, too, but not all of them could guarantee a fun option every turn. Modern games where the designer knew where to abstract, condense, and exclude all together when dealing with familiar territory are the ones that tend to impress me the most. We’ve been looking at certain subjects and settings in games for so long, it almost takes a leap of faith to work in such broad strokes. Civ: New Dawn is my poster child of this. It has no military units or a linear tech track and it’s certainly more abstract, and I would still play it over most other 4X games because it is so consistently fun each turn.
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- engineer Al
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Josh Look wrote:
Gary Sax wrote: I adore it when Al is very agreeable but then quietly turns the corner... "actually, you're wrong, some of the characters do determine your strategy..."
Except that I was still right, just not about the first stages of the game.
Yes, Josh was still right.
Except for where he was wrong. . .
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- It Came From the Tabletop! - Western Legends and Thunder Road