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General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Iduno
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Post by Iduno »

Somebody brought Jumpdrive, the new fast version of Race for the Galaxy. Race takes 30-60 minutes depending on how things go, and the balance isn't great, most of the expansions are crap, but it's workable. Jumpdrive the first game I've ever hate-played.

Similar cards to Race for the Galaxy, except they've abstracted things down to explore (look at/gain more cards), settle (play world cards), develop (play development cards), gain cards (cards are money in this series), and gain points. Military works the same (settle some worlds free, but you have to invest in military first). Simpler and quicker.

Gain cards happens every turn, which takes the place of building and using the produce/consume engine. Because it's currently 1990, gain points also happens every turn. The game is played to 50, and it's possible to play a 9 point/turn card in the first turn (there is a card that lets you replace it with any world for free), mercifully saving everyone from playing this shit all the way to the end. Even without that edge case, it's very easy for one player to get 5 points/turn ahead or behind, so the game is decided in the first 2-3 rounds. Even the person who won got mad about the way the game played out, so we played several times and then talked about plans, and still could not come up with a non-insane situation in which you could catch up. Also, we could not come up with a non-insane way to enjoy the game.

We've also been playing some Arkham Horror Card Game, which scratches the optimization itch nicely, but it's a bit difficult to get the same 4 people to the table regularly. It's also overpriced for a game you'll play through once or twice.
TheFlatline
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Post by TheFlatline »

OgreBattle wrote:What games have a board where you gradually improve your production ability like Scythe?

I mainly like the tactice sensation of moving blocks around for upgrades
Side note:

Scythe is getting a legacy style expansion.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/3/168427 ... date-price

Additionally I pre-ordered (but missed the kickstarter) for Gloomhaven. Looking forward to that 22 lbs box at the end of the month.

Other games:

I've been playing the shit out of One Deck Dungeon lately. It's basically a tabletop rogue-like. Lots of fun for such a small game.

Parents got me Roll Through the Ages Iron Age, which I've wanted for a while. Seems like it's got more going on to it than Bronze Age, which was basically Yhatzee with a theme.

Picked up Fabled Fruit, which looks interesting. It's a "fable" game, so the game changes as you play it between sessions, but unlike "legacy" you can reset the game easily and play it over again. Simple worker placement game from Friedemann Friese and each round takes about 15 minutes. Should be a great lunchtime game.

Finally, another Friedemann Friese game, I have been playing a lot of Friday on my cell phone. Good implementation of a nice deckbuilding solo game. I *finally* after like 20-30 plays had something click in my head and I started winning the easiest difficulty level. I might be ready to move up to the next level. It's a great 10 minute time killer.
Iduno
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Post by Iduno »

I heard good things about the Fallout board game, but it is a tie-in game. It's also Fantasy Flight which is both good and bad (their games are usually thematic, complex, over-priced, needing expansions to function correctly, rules are only decent).

It's a good game that feels pretty much like fallout light with fucking horrible scoring. First player to a particular score based on the number of players (8 points with 4 players, 11 with 1?), before the game gets 3 points to beat you. Scoring comes from little cards (because FFG can't get off unless a game has 4 different-sized cards) that score you 1 point each, with a difficult option to gain a second point, and an insane option to gain another point. You can have up to 4 cards, unless we were mis-reading something. You start with 2 score cards, and gain 1 from some (not all) of the sidequests. The score card deck also acts as a timer, 1 card is flipped each turn to determine which monsters move. Both factions gain a point (out of 3) every time the deck runs out. 3 uses for one card? FFG did good there. Completing a plot quest unlocks a side quest chain and the next plot quest in the chain, and scores a point for one of the factions based on how the quest was completed.

We ran the "first" mission (it was on top of the pile, enclave vs brotherhood). 2 of us got 7 points when the score card pile ran out, moving both factions to the "end game" state of 3 points. I had a card that got me an extra point if someone else won, so we nearly got 2 people to win. This week, we played the slaves vs slavers mission. Plot quest 2 gave 2 points (out of 3) to one side, and quest 3 gave 3 points (the entire point track for a faction). We hadn't managed to go shopping for equipment (or found money) by the time the game ended. I think highest score was 5. This hammered home the idea that they don't know how their own game works and/or the correct way to play is to finish the first plot point to unlock a sidequest, then ignore the plot and just fuck around until someone accidentally scores enough points to win.

Overall: The game has a lot of moving parts (not all bad, it's at least thematic), and takes a bit too much time for the enjoyment you get out of it. The scoring is entirely fucked up, and appears to have been tacked-on by someone who never saw the rest of the game; for which the entire game suffers. You want to like the game, so play it with a houserule document thicker than the original rules.
Mord
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Post by Mord »

Thanks for the review - I've been looking at Fallout every time I visit my FLGS, so I'm glad to know I should spend my boardgame budget elsewhere. :thumb:
Hadanelith
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Post by Hadanelith »

As both a dedicated Fallout fan and a lover of big, RPG lite boardgames...guess I'm going to have to buy it to cannibalize it. Here's hoping that the folks on BGG are figuring out better ways to play it. Wouldn't be the first FFG product they've completely rewritten to make a better game out of.
Koumei
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Post by Koumei »

Iduno wrote:the correct way to play is to finish the first plot point to unlock a sidequest, then ignore the plot and just fuck around until someone accidentally scores enough points to win.
Isn't this how most people play the actual Fallout games?
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Hadanelith
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Post by Hadanelith »

More or less.
TheFlatline
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Post by TheFlatline »

Iduno wrote:I heard good things about the Fallout board game, but it is a tie-in game. It's also Fantasy Flight which is both good and bad (their games are usually thematic, complex, over-priced, needing expansions to function correctly, rules are only decent).

It's a good game that feels pretty much like fallout light with fucking horrible scoring. First player to a particular score based on the number of players (8 points with 4 players, 11 with 1?), before the game gets 3 points to beat you. Scoring comes from little cards (because FFG can't get off unless a game has 4 different-sized cards) that score you 1 point each, with a difficult option to gain a second point, and an insane option to gain another point. You can have up to 4 cards, unless we were mis-reading something. You start with 2 score cards, and gain 1 from some (not all) of the sidequests. The score card deck also acts as a timer, 1 card is flipped each turn to determine which monsters move. Both factions gain a point (out of 3) every time the deck runs out. 3 uses for one card? FFG did good there. Completing a plot quest unlocks a side quest chain and the next plot quest in the chain, and scores a point for one of the factions based on how the quest was completed.

We ran the "first" mission (it was on top of the pile, enclave vs brotherhood). 2 of us got 7 points when the score card pile ran out, moving both factions to the "end game" state of 3 points. I had a card that got me an extra point if someone else won, so we nearly got 2 people to win. This week, we played the slaves vs slavers mission. Plot quest 2 gave 2 points (out of 3) to one side, and quest 3 gave 3 points (the entire point track for a faction). We hadn't managed to go shopping for equipment (or found money) by the time the game ended. I think highest score was 5. This hammered home the idea that they don't know how their own game works and/or the correct way to play is to finish the first plot point to unlock a sidequest, then ignore the plot and just fuck around until someone accidentally scores enough points to win.

Overall: The game has a lot of moving parts (not all bad, it's at least thematic), and takes a bit too much time for the enjoyment you get out of it. The scoring is entirely fucked up, and appears to have been tacked-on by someone who never saw the rest of the game; for which the entire game suffers. You want to like the game, so play it with a houserule document thicker than the original rules.
This is more or less my experience with it. Fun game. Crappy endgame. Feels like they couldn't figure out how to score a "winner".
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SlyJohnny
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Post by SlyJohnny »

Played a first round of Gloomhaven yesterday. It was really fun. Looks like we're going to run a full campaign of it, and I'm super excited for it.

It's a coop dungeon crawler with deckbuilder elements and an interesting exhaustion mechanic. You can take short or long rests to get some or all of your action cards back, but you lose a card each time. Some powerful actions are single-use (the card becomes "lost" immediately rather than just discarded on use), so there's a balancing act between using your best cards or getting your long term buffs online early, and saving those cards just so you don't reduce your hand size to the point that you need to take more frequent rests and reduce your hand size even further.

The cards have a "top" and "bottom" action, and you put forward two cards, from which to play one top and one bottom action each turn. Everyone chooses their two cards to put facedown at the beginning of the round and you're only allowed to discuss your plans in vague terms, so sometimes, by the time your initiative comes around, the state of the board will have changed dramatically, and so you might wind up taking the opposite actions to those you originally planned.

The heroes are also really cool and atypical, as well. I'm playing a Cragheart, and he's got some heavy melee attacks, but also lots of ranged AOE and obstacle manipulation (including attacks that let him destroy obstacles by moving enemies into them, causing them extra unblockable damage). We've got a tinkerer, who seems to be a generalist who does healing and trips and stuff, a mindthief who summons rats and manipulates the actions of enemies, and a scoundrel who seems to be all about positioning for high damage and looting everything. There are classes other than the 8 or so starters who are unlocked by our ingame actions, and I guess our guys retire at certain points, so there's an emphasis on switching people out.
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Hicks
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Post by Hicks »

So for those of you who are poor or cheap (I'm both) and/or your computer is a potato whose chips are more "fried starch" than silicon, VASSAL is a free multiplayer table top board game emulator that can load up modules perfectly emulating a game; like an even more powerful version of Roll20, except it's a Java app and not a website.

I use it to play High Frontier, a game of near future solar system industrialization that is as hard science as it gets. The rulebook may seem byzantine, but once you get the hang of it and Control+F the Living Rules it reveals a rather deep game of card auctions, pick up and deliver, territory control, base building, and of course navigation of your rocket(s) around the solar system on a gorgeous dV map that doesn't require calculus to operate.
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Covent
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Post by Covent »

Been enjoying 5 minute dungeon.
Maxus wrote:Being wrong is something that rightly should be celebrated, because now you have a chance to correct and then you'll be better than you were five minutes ago. Perfection is a hollow shell, but perfectibility is something that is to be treasured.
Iduno
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Post by Iduno »

I played "Once Upon a Time."

It's a storytelling game. Each person has a hand of cards with characters (prince, old woman, etc.), aspects (it can fly, it breaks, etc.), or places (a tower, a river,, night, etc.) on them, and a card with the ending to the story. Some of the cards (about 1 in 5) also say "interrupt" for one of the types of cards, allowing that card to be played if the storyteller

The goal is to play all of your cards during your turn, then finish the story with the ending card you have. You play a card by mentioning whatever is on the card during the course of telling your story. The other players are allowed to ask questions while you tell the story, like a group of excitable children. Your turn ends if you say a word on someone else's card, they play an interrupt, or vote that you are stuck and lose your turn. You then draw another card, and whoever played a card on your turn or started the vote continues your story with their cards.

So the game pretty much comes down to asking questions to get the storyteller to admit someone "is a thief" or the story takes place on "a mountain" while the storyteller tries to answer the question in a way that only benefits themself.

It's a stupid and low-stakes enough game that winning and losing don't matter, but it still feels good to outwit the other players. Also, you get some "great" stories.
Last edited by Iduno on Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yak_Forger
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Post by Yak_Forger »

So I've been recently playing something less roleplay-related than usual, but still on a table.
I've gotten into the Battlegroup series of tactical wargames, most of them are WW2 related but there's an "open beta" of the NORTHAG project which is about the Cold War gone hot.
I've been brought into the thing by a friend, and now I'm more and more tempted to redirect some of my miniature and card money to little WW2 tanks and planes... And I'll try to homebrew something roleplay-ish out of it, not in the context of a World War of course, but I'm pretty sure there's something that can be done.
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