Boardgaming in 2016

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Zinegata
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Boardgaming in 2016

Post by Zinegata »

So with all the usual misery and hubub about RPGs (and because I'm terribly bored today) I decided to write up on some developments on the boardgame scene.

It's been a surprisingly good year.

First, let's get the trash out of the way. Seafall was released this year and was supposed to be the second great Legacy game after Pandemic Legacy. In practice it lost me after the fifth preview and the rest of the fandom around two weeks after release. It was just that awful.

I still think the Legacy mechanic is pretty strong if implemented correctly, but Seafall demonstrated that you need to have a strong core game first before giving it a thematic campaign. In the case of Seafall, the core game turned out to be a dry-as-hell Euro that nobody liked playing.

Second, pretty much every boardgame is now owned by one company - Asmodee. They've pretty much bought out all the competition - FFG and Z-man - leaving only a handful of indies and the games hostaged by Hasbro/WoTC. Whether or not Asmodee turns out to be a relatively benign capitalist obsessed with seizing the means of production or a Great Old One seeking to devour worlds is still up for debate.

Aside from these stinkers however, it was a great year for "big box" games.

Blood Rage really made a splash this year - being a simple game of Vikings murdering one another and summoning huge monster minis - and cemented Eric Lang as one of the lead designers of the present era.

Scythe proved that Polish-themed games are still STRONK and may have finally managed to mix Euro management with a war game.

And Star Wars Rebellion? Possibly the best SW-themed game in a long while. It basically lets you play Episode IV to VI (as well as Rogue One) in one sitting, where the Empire is marching around with the Death Star and a powerful fleet while the Rebels have a flexible hit-and-run force that is always trying to stir up trouble.

There were also a ton of cool small games that came out. Sushi Go! has been made obsolete by Sushi Go Party!, which uses the same core mechanics but has a different deck configuration at the start of every game to ensure it can be played over and over again. Codenames really rocketed up the sales charts and proved that simple word games still have a place in the world. And Mysterium is basically a very fun murder-themed implementation of the core Dixit mechanics.

My personal favorites though are the releases from Red Raven Games - which is basically one guy (who by all accounts is not even 30 years old) doing all the design and the art. He released Above and Below last year, which basically combined Agricola with a choose-your-own-adventure minigame RPG that was far better than Caverna and other attempts to mix genres.

Next year he's coming out with Near and Far, which is basically an RPG campaign (with legacy mechanics and a choose-your-own adventure book) in boardgame form. For the first time ever I've pre-ordered a game and am looking forward to trying it out around April. It should be an interesting experience to see if he manages to really blend the RPG experience into boardgame form.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

First, there was nothing surprising about how many good games were released -- the answer is "more than I will ever have time to play". We are in the golden age or boardgames, where the guy what owns one of the two FLGSes complained to me that there are now more good games than he has time to play and he pretty much demoes a new one every day at his store.

There's definitely some 'den analysis needed on the subject of Legacy games and how they overlap and differ from Campaign style boardgames (Mice and Mysitcs, Mechs vs Minions, Siege of the Citadel, etc).

But for trash games, Oregon Trail is far and away the worst of 2016. It's just bad. Not even an interesting disappointment like Codex, just a painful attempt to directly recreate the 80s computer game without any consideration of the differences between the media and player count.

Asmodee being a big player doesn't bother me, being as the entire 20th century was about Hasbro gobbling up every successful game and the company that had previously gobbled up the rights to each of those games. Having a second competitor is an improvement, and you're probably underselling the potential for indie developers to make waves in the age of social media and crowdfunding.

Sushi Go Party is actually kind of worthless for what I personally want out of Sushi Go. Sushi Go is the introductory draft-and-pass game, it's dirt cheap, quick to teach, easy to play and has a set-up time of "write names on a score pad, shuffle then deal a hand to each player". The Party edition doubles the price (still cheapish), makes setup and/or tear down involve sorting card types based on player count and placing markers on a score track while also adding more explanation if your player count ever varies. If I wanted a draft and pass game where I have to futz with score markers and rejigger the whole deck each time someone decides there's a more interesting game starting at the next table I'll jolly well play 7 Wonders.

Above and Below does really sell the whole sense-of-wonder and exploration theme. And has amazingly flavored art. Not sure how it holds up to repeated plays -- I suspect it likely degenerates first into favored tiles and later into memorized scenario book passages.

Codenames is not a word game. Codenames is a limited-communication guessing game more akin to Charades than it is to Scrabble, Boggle, and Bananagrams. It's also not a 2016 release, and painfully so as I have had way too long to play it so many times that I'm kinda sick of it.

Mysterium is awesome. I describe it as Dixit meet Clue. You should download the free soundtrack for extra ambiance if you haven't already. It's also not a 2016 release, but it was the very first game I played in 2016, since it's what we did last New Year's Eve. My only real quibbles are that setup is kind of a pain and the clairvoyancy tokens do not match the awesomeness of the other components.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata »

Josh_Kablack wrote:First, there was nothing surprising about how many good games were released -- the answer is "more than I will ever have time to play". We are in the golden age or boardgames, where the guy what owns one of the two FLGSes complained to me that there are now more good games than he has time to play and he pretty much demoes a new one every day at his store.
They had 600 releases last year. Basically two per day. That there was more good or forgettable than outright bad was the surprise given the huge glut of games that came in.
Above and Below does really sell the whole sense-of-wonder and exploration theme. And has amazingly flavored art. Not sure how it holds up to repeated plays -- I suspect it likely degenerates first into favored tiles and later into memorized scenario book passages.
We, uh, played it so much that we bought the expansion so there are more scenarios.
Codenames is not a word game. Codenames is a limited-communication guessing game more akin to Charades than it is to Scrabble, Boggle, and Bananagrams. It's also not a 2016 release, and painfully so as I have had way too long to play it so many times that I'm kinda sick of it.
It's a word-association game where we have insane people give clues like "Batman 6" and get five of them. We also didn't get a lot of stocks until early 2016, albeit we then got Codename: Philippines thanks to the local distributor doing a deal with Vlada.
Mysterium is awesome. I describe it as Dixit meet Clue. You should download the free soundtrack for extra ambiance if you haven't already. It's also not a 2016 release, but it was the very first game I played in 2016, since it's what we did last New Year's Eve. My only real quibbles are that setup is kind of a pain and the clairvoyancy tokens do not match the awesomeness of the other components.
Ditto on the stock situation. Mysterium ran out fast that some people actually bought the Polish version with inferior art!
Last edited by Zinegata on Thu Jan 05, 2017 6:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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