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Zaranthan
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Post by Zaranthan »

Arkham Horror isn't exactly a paragon of design either. Every game I've played has ended with the Rookie Cop using his special move followed by everyone else winning the game.
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Post by erik »

I'm a fan of taking solid BG mechanics and expanding them to create RPGs. Arkham Horror has some problems but none if them are regarding their RNG. Same for Battlestations.

I got to play some games of Dead of Winter a couple weeks ago when family was in town for holidays and concur that it is the best zombie survival game I've yet played.

For bad games that I've played recently, exploding kittens takes the cake. It was like Munchkin, as it never ended until i stacked the deck on a shuffle to let the 6 year old win. My wife and I recently were discussing rules to end run this. [edit:] and this is what I get for posting in bed on phone... I just got out of bed and checked the rules and apparently we played it wrong, since defusing an exploding cat lets you stack it in the deck as you please.... which certainly should up the deadliness, we were just putting it in discard pile to be reshuffled.

[edit:]

We have since played it with the correct rules and that was over 9000% more fun but not *great*. The kids could play and enjoy it and now I can tolerate it, so I guess it will continue to be played.
Last edited by erik on Sun Jan 24, 2016 2:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by rasmuswagner »

Zaranthan wrote:Arkham Horror isn't exactly a paragon of design either. Every game I've played has ended with the Rookie Cop using his special move followed by everyone else winning the game.
Arkham Horror has a very bad process-to-decision ratio. I do not like it, not at all.
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Post by Shady314 »

I love Arkham Horror and I'd love it even more if the tasks/missions were more fulfilling and players could more reliably pull them off.

I've played it with a number of friends who also play ttrpgs from time to time and we've managed to craft stories out of the random experiences. Of course it makes our doom a certainty as the game is very harsh when you don't play pragmatically. I've also made fun stories out of Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Rookie Cop is from an expansion. Some investigators are obviously much more powerful/useless than others.
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Post by Zinegata »

rasmuswagner wrote:
Zaranthan wrote:Arkham Horror isn't exactly a paragon of design either. Every game I've played has ended with the Rookie Cop using his special move followed by everyone else winning the game.
Arkham Horror has a very bad process-to-decision ratio. I do not like it, not at all.
Arkham moreover is a game originally designed in '87 and the current more popular incarnation is from '05. By RPG standards it is a D&D 2Nd Ed vintage game.

It has issues, most specifically bad balance, fiddlyness, and long downtime especially with more than 4 players. But it is a product of an older era. By contrast Pandemic came out in '07 and is a much cleaner game.
Last edited by Zinegata on Mon Jan 18, 2016 4:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Pixels »

erik wrote:I just got out of bed and checked the rules and apparently we played it wrong, since defusing an exploding cat lets you stack it in the deck as you please.... which certainly should up the deadliness, we were just putting it in discard pile to be reshuffled.
You never reshuffle the discard pile into the deck in Exploding Kittens. Eventually the deck literally is all kittens, at which point it is a matter of guessing who has an attack, skip, or defuse card. But yeah, I'm not a fan of it either. Love Letter is superior in every respect, unless you like the Oatmeal artwork.
Last edited by Pixels on Mon Jan 18, 2016 7:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by RobbyPants »

I just got into Splendor last month, and just got my copy last week. I like how relatively easy it is to teach for being a "nonstandard" board game.

I haven't found any obvious winning strategies. Obviously, there's "don't waste turns" and "you probably shouldn't reserve too often, because it's inefficient", but that's it. I haven't noticed any serious difference in success between trying to get lots of nobles, trying to get some strong tier 3 cards, or winning with lots of tier 2 cards. I've won the game each way. For better or worse, the luck of the draw as to which cards come out on which player's turn seem to make a bigger difference.
Josh_Kablack wrote:...so I'm down for the sorts of discussions it's impossible to have on BGG.
I've been there before, but I don't have an account. Are you not allowed to be critical over there?
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Post by erik »

My 6 year old picked Splendor up fairly quickly. We were helping him at the start and then stopped helping him too late since his economy was a juggernaut. Only reason he didn't win was that he didn't make a plan for what top tier card or noble to pursue.

I've tried various strategies, and spite reserves was a fail one for sure.

Mostly I try to buy things as cheap as possible, maximize gems I can get per turn if not buying, and set something up so that I can efficiently buy a tier 3 card or two. I'll race to nobles if it looks like I can win that race.

When I played with my brother, he felt that player 4 should get some sort of bonus since they can be screwed on selection by the time their turn comes early on. I think in those cases though it actually pays to reserve.
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Post by Stinktopus »

Has anyone here played the new edition of Fury of Dracula? I'm curious about any tweaks or (cynical laughter) improvements. Do they finally, clearly explain what happens when you run from a minion?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I have played it and consider it a substantial improvement. Lots has changed, and I'd look at the FFG articles for some idea as to just how much. To address your specific question, there basically *aren't* non-vampire minions anymore, human minion encounters are basically events (like, take 4 damage, -2 damage for each firearm you reveal), so there's no running from them involved. Vampire minions are handled a lot like fights with the Count, except fewer HP.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

RobbyPants wrote:
Josh_Kablack wrote:...so I'm down for the sorts of discussions it's impossible to have on BGG.
I've been there before, but I don't have an account. Are you not allowed to be critical over there?
You are not allowed to be Den-levels of profanity laced critical, no matter how much a game deserves it. Also, many of their policies are designed to benefit the types of game publishers who advertise on their site.
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Post by cthulhu »

Galaxy truckers is a great game - and that designer does really good work. I really like Space Alert as well if you like coop games. Similar mechanics (you program orders while under time pressure with partial information), then you have a resolution phase where you see how badly the plan failed. It's also really hard to quarterback because it's impossible to keep track of the situation for multiple players, people get assigned 'you deal with XYZ' and they need to figure it out.

The people I play boardgames with love coopish games so we play them a fair bit. Not a huge fan of legend (it's like dominions, except shitter) but it has coop so I play it now and then.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Kaelik wrote:The only Zobmie Board game I've played that didn't suck is Last Night on Earth. Way better than Walking Dead, although I haven't played Dead Winter.

Honestly though, just never buy a franchise tie in board game. There might be some that don't suck, but chances are really fucking slim. Franchise tie ins rely on the name to sell copies, non franchise tie ins rely on actually good experiences, so chances are much better that "unnamed space run around game" is going to be better than firefly.
Battlestar Galactica bucks the franchise trend. It's long, and a little clunky, but it still does one of the best traitor mechanic games I've ever seen.

The core game is probably the tightest iteration honestly. Add expansions at your own risk.
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Post by TheFlatline »

cthulhu wrote:Galaxy truckers is a great game - and that designer does really good work. I really like Space Alert as well if you like coop games. Similar mechanics (you program orders while under time pressure with partial information), then you have a resolution phase where you see how badly the plan failed. It's also really hard to quarterback because it's impossible to keep track of the situation for multiple players, people get assigned 'you deal with XYZ' and they need to figure it out.

The people I play boardgames with love coopish games so we play them a fair bit. Not a huge fan of legend (it's like dominions, except shitter) but it has coop so I play it now and then.
Space Alert is tons of fun. It's also a game about basically dieing in the most spectacular way possible as everyone gets communications crossed and then you end up finding out you ran around the ship like a mad person pressing buttons that didn't do anything while your ship was destroyed.
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Post by Zinegata »

RobbyPants wrote:I just got into Splendor last month, and just got my copy last week. I like how relatively easy it is to teach for being a "nonstandard" board game.

I haven't found any obvious winning strategies. Obviously, there's "don't waste turns" and "you probably shouldn't reserve too often, because it's inefficient", but that's it.
Actually, having played in a Splendor tournament and reached the final table, I can say that the game definitely favors buying expensive cards as opposed to pursuing nobles. All of the finals games were won by people who bought five cards or fewer, and people were seriously reserving cards even with no gold available as the best move available to them.

Splendor when played competitively is simply death or something so like it that I could not tell the difference. It got to the point that I started making suboptimal moves at the end of the final table just to make it stop. A friend of mine who played in two separate tournaments and reached the finals in both instances basically stopped playing it altogether afterwards.

TheFlatline wrote:Battlestar Galactica bucks the franchise trend. It's long, and a little clunky, but it still does one of the best traitor mechanic games I've ever seen.

The core game is probably the tightest iteration honestly. Add expansions at your own risk.
There have been other good franchise adaptations. Chaos in the Old World is probably the best and tightest from the FFG line-up; but the king of all franchise adaptations has to go to Spartacus.
Last edited by Zinegata on Wed Jan 20, 2016 2:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Zinegata »

Josh_Kablack wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:
Josh_Kablack wrote:...so I'm down for the sorts of discussions it's impossible to have on BGG.
I've been there before, but I don't have an account. Are you not allowed to be critical over there?
You are not allowed to be Den-levels of profanity laced critical, no matter how much a game deserves it. Also, many of their policies are designed to benefit the types of game publishers who advertise on their site.
You can be critical there, but just without profanity (family friendly etc...).

The bigger issue is that the fanbase of many games tend to be overly defensive of their favorite games, and engage in silly neg rep battles against other games when something threatens their favored game's ranking on the BGG list.

OTOH you can sometimes interact directly with the designers and end up suggesting strategies or rules fixes to them directly. I've had Tom Lehman (Roll for the Galaxy) and Mark Herman (Churchill) comment on my threads/posts.
Last edited by Zinegata on Wed Jan 20, 2016 2:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by RobbyPants »

erik wrote:My 6 year old picked Splendor up fairly quickly. We were helping him at the start and then stopped helping him too late since his economy was a juggernaut. Only reason he didn't win was that he didn't make a plan for what top tier card or noble to pursue.
That's good. I have a seven-year-old I want to teach.


erik wrote:I've tried various strategies, and spite reserves was a fail one for sure.

Mostly I try to buy things as cheap as possible, maximize gems I can get per turn if not buying, and set something up so that I can efficiently buy a tier 3 card or two. I'll race to nobles if it looks like I can win that race.

When I played with my brother, he felt that player 4 should get some sort of bonus since they can be screwed on selection by the time their turn comes early on. I think in those cases though it actually pays to reserve.
I've never tried spite reserving. My wife made an interesting run reserving off the top when she didn't like her choices, and won. I imagine that was a lot of luck.

By base strategy is to try and get nobles by first getting the most common color gem shared between the most of them, and to see what I can muster from there. As for overall victory, I tend to try and buy a bunch of 2 and 3 point tier 2 cards and/or a noble or two. I only buy tier 3 cards on opportunity. That may be an issue for me.

Zinegata wrote: Actually, having played in a Splendor tournament and reached the final table, I can say that the game definitely favors buying expensive cards as opposed to pursuing nobles. All of the finals games were won by people who bought five cards or fewer, and people were seriously reserving cards even with no gold available as the best move available to them.
Only five cards? What do they do? Just hoard gems and pick up the cheapest tier 3 cards there are? You can only hold ten gems, and a lot of those cards seem to be between 9 and 14 gems to buy.

I guess I haven't studied to see what the overall cost is in tokens (and turns) to buy a bunch of tier 1s before moving up vs saving for high-value cards and making a few power buys.
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Post by Zinegata »

RobbyPants wrote: Only five cards? What do they do? Just hoard gems and pick up the cheapest tier 3 cards there are? You can only hold ten gems, and a lot of those cards seem to be between 9 and 14 gems to buy.

I guess I haven't studied to see what the overall cost is in tokens (and turns) to buy a bunch of tier 1s before moving up vs saving for high-value cards and making a few power buys.
To end the game one player needs to score 15 points. The maximum point value of a tier 3 card is 5 points, so you can theoretically win with just three 5-point cards.

That said it takes at least 10 gems to buy a 5-point card. So it's more common to aim for a four card win using several 4-point cards, especially those costing only 7 gems apiece to win. That's theoretically just 28 gems to score 16 points.

Tier 2 cards are usually taken only to rush the game even more. Say instead of getting four 4-point cards, get three 4-point cards and get a 3-point Tier 2 to end it a little faster.

Tier 1 cards are almost never taken at all in vicious tournaments. At the minimum you're spending around 4 gems to get one. This is already half the cost of a cheap Tier 3 card and often comes with zero points.

Sad to say, but even nobles don't seem to fix this. Even two "aligned" nobles still requires 12 cards played in total for just 6 points. To get to 12 cards you need to spend 48 gems on Tier 1 cards. Even with discounts it's too far from the mere 28 needed to end the game with Tier 3 cards, especially considering you'll only have 6 out of 15 points needed to win.

Reservation happens a lot in tournaments. The extra gold helps break hoarding monopolies and assures purchase of those precious 7-cost 4-point cards. The only way to slow it down is seemingly to do the same thing. Indeed, on tables where people tried to go Tier 1+nobles the game tended to end even faster in favor of the Tier 3 power buyers.
Last edited by Zinegata on Wed Jan 20, 2016 5:02 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Zinegata wrote:layer needs to score 15 points. The maximum point value of a tier 3 card is 5 points, so you can theoretically win with just three 5-point cards.

That said it takes at least 10 gems to buy a 5-point card. So it's more common to aim for a four card win using several 4-point cards, especially those costing only 7 gems apiece to win. That's theoretically just 28 gems to score 16 points.

Tier 2 cards are usually taken only to rush the game even more. Say instead of getting four 4-point cards, get three 4-point cards and get a 3-point Tier 2 to end it a little faster.

Tier 1 cards are almost never taken at all in vicious tournaments. At the minimum you're spending around 4 gems to get one. This is already half the cost of a cheap Tier 3 card and often comes with zero points. Tier 1 cards. Even with discounts it's too far from the mere 28 needed to end the game with Tier 3 cards, especially considering you'll only have 6 out of 15 points needed to win.
That makes sense. I was thinking of the total number of turns spent, and I was planning on running a mock game against myself where I tried two different strategies.

Zinegata wrote: Sad to say, but even nobles don't seem to fix this. Even two "aligned" nobles still requires 12 cards played in total for just 6 points. To get to 12 cards you need to spend 48 gems on Tier 1 cards. Even with discounts it's too far from the mere 28 needed to end the game with Tier 3 cards, especially considering you'll only have 6 out of 15 points needed to win.
Ugh. This reminds me of when I learned that the optimal play in Dominion is to almost always "just buy money". The game loses some of its magic after that.

Zinegata wrote: Reservation happens a lot in tournaments. The extra gold helps break hoarding monopolies and assures purchase of those precious 7-cost 4-point cards. The only way to slow it down is seemingly to do the same thing. Indeed, on tables where people tried to go Tier 1+nobles the game tended to end even faster in favor of the Tier 3 power buyers.
So, it ends even faster because no one is competing for the good tier 3 cards? I can see that.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Well now I'm going to be completely un-Den like and say nice things about games which I do not have deep insight into. (So basically this is like every post on BGG)

Here's Josh's best-ish of 2015-ish boardgame list. (Mostly new games that I played for the first time in the past 12 months and which are worth some praise)
  • The entire set of Pack O Game™ - This series of microgames (BUS, FLY, GEM, HUE, SHH, TAJ, TKO,) managed to impress me more than anything else I played for the first time within the last year. Some are way better than others, but even the worst of the set is worth the $6 cost. From a design perspective it's really neat seeing how each of the games uses cards differently (as random hands, as score sliders, as tappable resources, as tiles to place, as a means for hidden voting, as dexterity targets, etc). Highly Recommended.
  • Spyfall - This is a social deduction game (ala The Resistance or One Night Ultimate Warwelf) that manages to overcome my innate hatred for social deduction games. Recommended
  • Letter Tycoon - this one is just the opposite, it's a word game and I love word games., However it manages to deftly occupy that wide complexity gap between quicky word games like Boggle / Bananagrams and less than the tournament-worthy Scrabble better than any other word game I have played. It has a Zepplin token and you get to patent letters! Highly Recommended.
  • Tiny Epic Galaxies - My gaming buddy Ben did the graphic design for this. It's a dice-progamming game (Vaguely akin to Kingsburg and Alien Frontiers) that's a solid entry into the solid Tiny Epic series. A bit more complicated than a game with "Tiny" in the name should be, and the listed playing time is literally less than half of the actual time every game I have played has taken. Still recommended.
  • Evolution - A game about building species and customizing their traits to survive both the variable food supply and predation by other players' species. This is only superficial pop-science, but it's an enjoyable and interesting game. Unfortunately there are some real issues with component quality. Well worth playing, but only buy the current printing if'n you can get it extra cheap.
  • Star Realms - This is pretty much the introductory deckbuilder anymore. It's Ascension in space where you count your opponent's life down to zero instead of your VP up to boredom. The best part is the clever pricing / marketing strategy where a single 2-player deck is just a $15 entry point. You need another deck for every additional pair you add to the game, but that's still competitive with most other deckbuilders. I can recommend the physical game. The App version is decent, (with brutally good AI) but it only implements like 96% of the rules correctly and they are never going to bother to fix that last 4%, so I cannot recommend that anyone spend money on it.
  • Colt Express - I only played this year's Sphiel winner once, but I would really like to play again. You're a train robber meeple on a 3d-cardboard train model using WoF mechanics to play your moves and get the most cash, jewelry and gunslinger prestige, while avoiding the marshal and the bullets and fisticuffs of your rival bandits.
  • Broom Service - Likewise, I only played this year's KennerSphiel winner once. I am less eager to play again than I am with Colt Express, but I am really eager to see variants of the Cowardly/Brave action declartion mechanic and the risk/reward it offers make it into future games. This is something aspiring designers should investigate.
  • Mysterium - It's basically Dixit meets Clue as a co-op. One of you is a ghost who can only communicate via vision cards, the rest of you are psychics at a seance who are trying to solve the ghost's mystery and lay the spirit to peaceful rest. Much fun, and awesome art, design and game bits. On the downside, there are so many moving parts that pretty much anyone is likely to screw up the entire game the first time they play as the ghost. Recommended, if and only if you can forgive your gaming friends for misreading things like clues and the rules.
  • Medina (second edition)Speaking of games with neat looking components, this is a game of placing 3-d city components onto a grid and then claiming areas that are worth the most points. Very good tension between building areas to be worth more points and claiming those areas with your limited claiming tokens. Recommended
  • Operation F.A.U.S.T. This game uses the basic mechanics of COUP as a starting point for lengthier, more complex game themed around recovering famous artworks from the Nazis in WW2. Recommended
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Post by Mord »

Josh_Kablack wrote:Evolution - A game about building species and customizing their traits to survive both the variable food supply and predation by other players' species. This is only superficial pop-science, but it's an enjoyable and interesting game. Unfortunately there are some real issues with component quality. Well worth playing, but only buy the current printing if'n you can get it extra cheap.
Much disagree. Evolution is really poorly balanced, to the extent that some traits in combination are instawin (long necked diggers) and many other traits are just worthless.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Yeah, I like Star Realms quite a bit better than Ascension. Ascension's got this problem where the shuffling and accounting is kind of annoying when you're playing table top while the phone experience is held back a bit by the shoddy AI and the sheer amount of crap on the table. Star Realms is more streamlined and perhaps as a side effect the app AI seems capable of math hammering its way to decent play when set to high difficulty whereas Ascension's AI is in way over its head. That's a big plus if you're like me and really only use the app to occasionally kill some time without racking up data charges.
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Post by Zinegata »

Mord wrote:Much disagree. Evolution is really poorly balanced, to the extent that some traits in combination are instawin (long necked diggers) and many other traits are just worthless.
Not really. Highly efficient herbivores can be hunted by carnivores. Moreover, the food supply of herbivores is dependent on the players - and the players can in fact deliberately play low-value cards to limit the vegetable supply. By contrast carnivores are not limited to the vegetable supply and can keep eating so long as there are other species on the board that they are able to hunt.

Indeed, highly efficient herbivores are especially vulnerable to predation because of the 3-card limit on each species. If you are already a long neck and a digger then you can only have 1 additional defense card. An alpha predator with multiple attack cards can thus easily overcome these defenses. Or better yet deploy two or more predators with only a few basic attack cards to munch on the same high-efficiency herbivore (especially when they increase in size).

The key to Evolution really is to spot the table meta and work it to your advantage. If I can't out-compete against a herbivore efficiently, then I will deploy a carnivore to eat them instead while tanking the vegetable supply. If the table is loaded with carnivores, I tend to deploy a lot of low-efficiency herbivores with specific defenses so that the carnivores will tend to target other players instead. There is pretty much no trait that will not find some kind of use in this game, and any card not immediately useful becomes another species or population point or size increase anyway.
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Post by Mord »

Zinegata wrote:Indeed, highly efficient herbivores are especially vulnerable to predation because of the 3-card limit on each species. If you are already a long neck and a digger then you can only have 1 additional defense card. An alpha predator with multiple attack cards can thus easily overcome these defenses. Or better yet deploy two or more predators with only a few basic attack cards to munch on the same high-efficiency herbivore (especially when they increase in size).
You are describing a great game of subtle interactions, but not the rules as written. Long necks straight up pull food from the bag, so they are at less risk of being shut down by limiting the food available on the board. Burrowing doesn't disincentivize attacks or make them more difficult, it forbids them when the conditions are met.
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Post by Whipstitch »

TiaC wrote: I found deck thinning too powerful a mechanic. If you pick up some of the cheap cards that do this, you can improve your card quality much faster than simply buying cards.
I'm late on this but I'm gonna comment anyway. Deck thinning can actually be a pretty fragile tactic in Ascension. Cycling through your deck faster doesn't do much good without a few ringers to abuse in the first place and unfortunately the vast majority of deck thinning cards are incapable of helping you break the 5 rune per turn barrier by themselves. I like pitching my Militia into the void ASAP as much as the next guy it but for the most part I only prioritize deck thinners if it's an early-to-middle game Arbiter of the Precipice or if I have a Temple Librarian to go along with those Void Initiates and Shades of the Black Watch.
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