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New Board Gaming |OT2| On Tables, Off Topic
- Thread starter Karkador
- Start date
Which expansion is it? Anyway, you're going to have so much fun! Unfortunately I've only been able to play the game three times myself.
Fame and Fortune
Played the witcher last night in a 2 player game. I totally see where all of the criticism for this game is coming from, but I did end up enjoying it a decent amount. I definitely want to get a couple of more plays in with the different characters to see just how well I like it, but it was no where near as bad as some people make it out to be (IMO).
It was really long though.
It was really long though.
So I've played Mascarade last night and I loved it. The first game I was at 10 and everyone forgot I was the king so I won. In another game I falsely claimed "Peasant" just to make one of the peasants (who just had his turn) win the game 
People weren't swapping nearly as much as they should have. I think this is a result of playing too much Coup beforehand.
Speaking of Coup we finally played with Reformation and it made the game much better, just chaos everywhere. One guy even set a suicidal trap so that the next player had to coup him xD
We also played Survive with the Dolphins/Dive Dice expansion but I'm not sure how I feel about it, the game is evil enough without people moving the sea monsters anywhere they want or moving them 3 spaces!
People weren't swapping nearly as much as they should have. I think this is a result of playing too much Coup beforehand.
Speaking of Coup we finally played with Reformation and it made the game much better, just chaos everywhere. One guy even set a suicidal trap so that the next player had to coup him xD
We also played Survive with the Dolphins/Dive Dice expansion but I'm not sure how I feel about it, the game is evil enough without people moving the sea monsters anywhere they want or moving them 3 spaces!
I went to a game party this afternoon. I got there late so I didn't play the first game, but we only got through 3 games after that because 2 of them were so long.
Coup: We had 6 people and played without the expansion. Went okay, I was the second last person out. Not sure if the group would like playing it again. Hopefully they would be willing to try the expansion at least.
Keyflower: We had 5 people. Complicated game where you start with a town hex in front of yourself, and build a town Carcassone style out of tiles. You have to bid on tiles using meeples to get them into your town, and you can also spend meeples to use actions from your tiles, tiles in the middle of the table, or other people's towns. This was pretty complicated, kind of annoying to keep your meeples of various colors hidden behind the little cardboard house, and I failed at my only goal -- not being last place. Apparently I was last place by quite a bit, sadly.
Eclipse: We did not use (or have?) expansions. We had 4 people since the 5th person decided it looked too complicated for a late night game, like 8-midnight. We all played alien races. I was the Descendants of Draco or something like that, a race that gets along with the powerful Ancients that attack everyone else.
Someone there said Eclipse was basically the light version of something like Twilight Imperium, but we still used a giant table and tons of parts, and took hours to finish. I started out exploring a bunch to get lots of tiles with ancients, since I could look at 2 tiles and select whichever one had an ancient. I got a good bit of money income at the start. I had diplomatic relations with 2 of the other 3 people, and I just wanted to explore, chill with the ancient aliens, and stay on my planets without attack anyone.
Unfortunately someone else finally started being a traitor by trying to cruise in on a starbase I had. So, I upgraded it with ancient technology I was saving, and dropped 2 more down on the same space. Antimatter cannons for 4 damage per starbase, +3 targeting computers to hit on a 3 dice roll or greater, 4 initiative, 3+ hull points each. That first player blew himself up attacking those 3 bases.
He decided to back off, but by the end of the game, the other two players had amassed some crazy ships and both tried to hit my other choke points that DIDN'T have 3 starbases. One guy had a dreadnaught with nothing but 12 plasma missiles on it, 2 damage each. So he rolled 12 dice, just needing 2 6's for guaranteed hits...no 6's.
I think I only ever ended up losing one planet I had, and even then the Ancient on it defeated the player's attack after I lost my ship(s) and colony(s) so I still got the end of game bonus.
I ended up surviving the onslaught and winning by 3 points, with a final score of 40. I just want to be peaceful and hang with the ancients! ;_;
Coup: We had 6 people and played without the expansion. Went okay, I was the second last person out. Not sure if the group would like playing it again. Hopefully they would be willing to try the expansion at least.
Keyflower: We had 5 people. Complicated game where you start with a town hex in front of yourself, and build a town Carcassone style out of tiles. You have to bid on tiles using meeples to get them into your town, and you can also spend meeples to use actions from your tiles, tiles in the middle of the table, or other people's towns. This was pretty complicated, kind of annoying to keep your meeples of various colors hidden behind the little cardboard house, and I failed at my only goal -- not being last place. Apparently I was last place by quite a bit, sadly.
Eclipse: We did not use (or have?) expansions. We had 4 people since the 5th person decided it looked too complicated for a late night game, like 8-midnight. We all played alien races. I was the Descendants of Draco or something like that, a race that gets along with the powerful Ancients that attack everyone else.
Someone there said Eclipse was basically the light version of something like Twilight Imperium, but we still used a giant table and tons of parts, and took hours to finish. I started out exploring a bunch to get lots of tiles with ancients, since I could look at 2 tiles and select whichever one had an ancient. I got a good bit of money income at the start. I had diplomatic relations with 2 of the other 3 people, and I just wanted to explore, chill with the ancient aliens, and stay on my planets without attack anyone.
Unfortunately someone else finally started being a traitor by trying to cruise in on a starbase I had. So, I upgraded it with ancient technology I was saving, and dropped 2 more down on the same space. Antimatter cannons for 4 damage per starbase, +3 targeting computers to hit on a 3 dice roll or greater, 4 initiative, 3+ hull points each. That first player blew himself up attacking those 3 bases.
He decided to back off, but by the end of the game, the other two players had amassed some crazy ships and both tried to hit my other choke points that DIDN'T have 3 starbases. One guy had a dreadnaught with nothing but 12 plasma missiles on it, 2 damage each. So he rolled 12 dice, just needing 2 6's for guaranteed hits...no 6's.
I think I only ever ended up losing one planet I had, and even then the Ancient on it defeated the player's attack after I lost my ship(s) and colony(s) so I still got the end of game bonus.
I ended up surviving the onslaught and winning by 3 points, with a final score of 40. I just want to be peaceful and hang with the ancients! ;_;
Cool. that one brings investments to the table which I thought was nice. The other expansion, Wisdom and Warfare, fixes the battle-system by giving units attack and hit points. If you dislike the combat in the base game you could try to customize the battle cards into proxies for the WaW ones (the WaW cards replace the original ones).
joeyjoejoeshabadoo
Member
I hate the AI on the app. It's completely predictable and they are boring to play against. As soon as missiles come on the tech board the AI will do it's best to buy them. Once it has missiles it will then build missile boats.
BattleMonkey
Member
Eclipse plays quick, it's the setup and such that make it take forever
Affeinvasion
Member
Your second point is absolutely true but there are ways to mitigate it. I think the times that Eclipse becomes solitaire is usually because of purposeful placing of ties to cut people off from each other. A very viable strategy is to box yourself in, build up your upgrades, and then develop warp technology to jump through half-gates and blow shit up.
Played Shadows of Brimstone with 3 players. If you ever play, it is highly advisable that you use the house rule of only one straight away in a row. We had 3 and the a crossroad so no exploration tokens...made the game go longer. It was too tough in the beginning but the finale just overflown with baddies. Though we lost cause darkness escaped the mine.
Soon I hope to open the other box as well as exploring other worlds.
Also played a 10 point game of XIA. My friend by cheating, he/we didn't know you can't reuse a ship's abilities multiple times in one turn. But I had a blast when I took a thief mission and then flew by a cop who started chasing me and crashed into a planet shield. Need to play a 20 point game soon.
Soon I hope to open the other box as well as exploring other worlds.
Also played a 10 point game of XIA. My friend by cheating, he/we didn't know you can't reuse a ship's abilities multiple times in one turn. But I had a blast when I took a thief mission and then flew by a cop who started chasing me and crashed into a planet shield. Need to play a 20 point game soon.
Heh, I'm teaching it to four noobs tomorrow after work & really looking forward to playing the physical game after being stuck with the ios one for so long.
So what did you get?
ok so I have $150 and im itching to buy some new games what do you guys recommend?
BGG collection
I unfortunately can't share any of it, but I've seen the Dark Moon rulebook and it looks like things are ramping up and going to print pretty soon.
While the box art (you CAN see that on BGG) doesn't light my world on fire I DO like the board a lot (again I can't share). But I will say it has a very The Thing (81) like vibe.
While the box art (you CAN see that on BGG) doesn't light my world on fire I DO like the board a lot (again I can't share). But I will say it has a very The Thing (81) like vibe.
Nothing worse than a slow ass game getting deleted before you finish.
Hmm you have a very nice collection as it is. Sadly enough I dont see many ratings for your eurogames.
If you do like Agricola and others I would probably go for Terra Mystica and maybe Bruges.
Bruges because you seem to like card driven games. And this is a really good card driven euro.
Also Warhammer 40k Conquest seems like a good choice for you.
City of Remnants, Terra Mystica and Battlecon: Devastation of Indines are three big favorites in my collection that I noticed you don't have. All three absolutely great games.
joeyjoejoeshabadoo
Member
If you like Smash Up, definitely get Blood Bowl Team Manager + All the expansions. The base game is fine by itself, but you'll want more once you play it, so might as well grab it all now.
Dat CG render, the box cover looks like a 90's PC game. I've been waiting for this one for awhile now, BSG Express was a ton of fun. I ended up trading my copy of BSG Express away (got too good of an offer) and I've been dying to play it again.
I think you'll be pretty pleased. In an ideal world, it'd somehow still have a BSG theme, but the game is certainly tweaked for the better now.
Thanks for the recommendations, I have some videos to watch and money to spend.
I played a few games of Fairy Tale the other day... and I like it! Plays like a very quick 7 Wonders; we easily blasted through two games in 20 minutes. Set up is almost nonexistent. Not sure how it'd hold up over repeated plays but I love how quick it is to pick up and finish a game.
Quickly becoming a "boxing day" candidate for me.
Quickly becoming a "boxing day" candidate for me.
I got to play Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Inca Empire last night.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is like an improved Suburbia for me. I do like Suburbia, but it's kind of a soulless solitaire game. This game fixes that by having the players set the prices for things, and have players pay each other rather than the bank. I actually can't think of many games that have a part where you "play shopkeeper', but it's a nice and intuitive way to play. It has a soul now! Even nicer is that making a castle floorplan is a LOT more fun than putting a bunch of hex tiles together.
Inca Empire is also a euro-style game with a lot of player interaction. First of all, I gotta say that the theme is really interesting. It's cool to play out the story of the Incas, rather than Yet Another European Conquest. It's funny (and rather tragic) that the game ends immediately when Pizarro shows up. But aside from the theme, the game itself feels unique - you're intrinsically tied to neighboring players, and constantly helping each other; almost everything you do will help or hurt you and your neighbors. You have to find the ways to maneuver that push and pull and outpace the other players in point-gains. It was really interesting to try to figure out.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is like an improved Suburbia for me. I do like Suburbia, but it's kind of a soulless solitaire game. This game fixes that by having the players set the prices for things, and have players pay each other rather than the bank. I actually can't think of many games that have a part where you "play shopkeeper', but it's a nice and intuitive way to play. It has a soul now! Even nicer is that making a castle floorplan is a LOT more fun than putting a bunch of hex tiles together.
Inca Empire is also a euro-style game with a lot of player interaction. First of all, I gotta say that the theme is really interesting. It's cool to play out the story of the Incas, rather than Yet Another European Conquest. It's funny (and rather tragic) that the game ends immediately when Pizarro shows up. But aside from the theme, the game itself feels unique - you're intrinsically tied to neighboring players, and constantly helping each other; almost everything you do will help or hurt you and your neighbors. You have to find the ways to maneuver that push and pull and outpace the other players in point-gains. It was really interesting to try to figure out.
Castles is awesome, it's another one we got to try out. Being the master builder is interesting for sure. I think I screwed up at the beginning and priced things people wanted too competitively so that 2/3 of the other players took money instead of buying from me. It's a weird thing where if you go too high, players will just pass on it and you'll quickly run out of money, but if you go too low then they're getting a great room for cheap.
The only thing I can think of when we first played it (that I corrected later, and I got so many plays in that week so I dunno if you played more with me past that) is that we were using face value of the dice from where they were collected instead of rolling collected samples for 13+ to find cures.
Either way, it was still fairly easy compared to normal Pandemic. I think I only lost once or twice out of 10+ plays after correcting. It still got pretty close and I think bumping up the infection track another section would be a good difficulty modifier, but I didn't test it and could be wrong since it doesn't really scale linearly.
It appears a new pixel tactics Kickstarter is up... I haven't played the original version, but it looks like it was well received. I'm starting to think I'm a sucker for Brad's style of game design, and I mean that in a good way!
Damnit lvl99, don't make me back yet another thing while I'm still waiting for the other two to arrive.
Damnit lvl99, don't make me back yet another thing while I'm still waiting for the other two to arrive.
BomberMouse
Member
Interesting, here's a link for the lazy like me
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/level99games/pixel-tactics-deluxe
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/level99games/pixel-tactics-deluxe
Be sure and watch the tutorial on youtube.(LINK) Have your friend watch it too if possible.
I would still read the rule book, but its a lot easier to teach someone else after they have watched the above video.
Additional rules info that people sometimes get wrong at first:
Ice is not destroyed or flipped over after being broken by the runners icebreakers
Most icebreakers need their strength pumped up for each ice they encounter. The shaper icebreakers that say "gain 1 strength until end of run" are the exception to this.
Unless a card is an agenda, or specifies that it can be advanced, it can not be advanced.
The corporation can only score agendas on his turn. (but can choose when to do so, and does not have to score when the advancement requirement is met).
Ice is not destroyed or flipped over after being broken by the runners icebreakers
Most icebreakers need their strength pumped up for each ice they encounter. The shaper icebreakers that say "gain 1 strength until end of run" are the exception to this.
Unless a card is an agenda, or specifies that it can be advanced, it can not be advanced.
The corporation can only score agendas on his turn. (but can choose when to do so, and does not have to score when the advancement requirement is met).
Affeinvasion
Member
I've stopped kickstarting Level 99 games because I know I can get them for much cheaper after they've been released and they're always widely available online. That being said I might chip in for the promo pack for 5 bucks.
I got in there before CSI sold out
I am very jealous right now.
Thanks. I haven't been looking because I haven't had a chance to play many games the last handful of months. :/ Stopped going to my local game night. I may go Thursday but there's supposed to be a big storm.
Watched the official tutorial video, watching another complete tutorial I hope I can hold my friend's attention long enough that he understands this. I love the set up, the style and the asymmetrical board.
So I tried King of New York last night, and I'm a bit bummed that I didn't like it. I've heard a lot of people say it fixes King of Tokyo, and I can see why someone who has played KoT to death might find this game interesting again - but the player elimination is still a huge downer for a party game, and all the added stuff just makes explaining the game harder, and doesn't really add a lot of fun to the game. I just sat there wishing we were playing Rampage/Terror in Meeple City, but it doesn't go to 5 players.
On the other hand, Snake Oil was a huge hit. You actually have to be creative and funny, and the cards aren't going to sound like outplayed jokes after you see them once...but it's not a demanding exercise in improv, either (which is where I feel a lot of funny storytelling games intimidate people). Better yet is that this game can be as tame or as raunchy as you want to make it, because there are so many different ways you can spin a pitch based on two innocuous words - so it's going to please the family crowd as well as the CAH crowd. Get this game, play this game.
On the other hand, Snake Oil was a huge hit. You actually have to be creative and funny, and the cards aren't going to sound like outplayed jokes after you see them once...but it's not a demanding exercise in improv, either (which is where I feel a lot of funny storytelling games intimidate people). Better yet is that this game can be as tame or as raunchy as you want to make it, because there are so many different ways you can spin a pitch based on two innocuous words - so it's going to please the family crowd as well as the CAH crowd. Get this game, play this game.
Playing Twilight Imperium on Saturday. I'm very excited. This will be the second game for me and three others and the first game for two newbies. Glad we got to six players this time because five last time was a wee bit awkward in terms of board and conflict balance. We also are trying and some variant rules and stuff from the second expansion, since we figured if you're going to play this thing you might as well go all out.
The big one we're trying is a trimmed politics deck so that a lot of the issues that barely matter aren't in there and that most of the votes become a big deal. I'm not totally sure how this will work out since it can possibly lead to some huge swings based on votes, but it will be interesting to see. It should at least make everyone care more about the voting section of the game which is good because in the first game there were definitely some votes where everyone just kind shrugged at the outcome.
The big one we're trying is a trimmed politics deck so that a lot of the issues that barely matter aren't in there and that most of the votes become a big deal. I'm not totally sure how this will work out since it can possibly lead to some huge swings based on votes, but it will be interesting to see. It should at least make everyone care more about the voting section of the game which is good because in the first game there were definitely some votes where everyone just kind shrugged at the outcome.
Played 4-player Coup, Masquerade, and Diamonds last night.
Still not sold on Coup, but masquerade was awesome (and can go up to 13 players!). Diamonds was interesting. Definitely a good transition game for older relatives/friends that only pay traditional card games. It's a modern bgame twist on hearts/spades like KoT is to Yahtzee.
I will be picking up Masquerade before the holiday gatherings for sure.
Still not sold on Coup, but masquerade was awesome (and can go up to 13 players!). Diamonds was interesting. Definitely a good transition game for older relatives/friends that only pay traditional card games. It's a modern bgame twist on hearts/spades like KoT is to Yahtzee.
I will be picking up Masquerade before the holiday gatherings for sure.
I REALLY like KoNY but yes it is for gamers (or at least people who've played entry-level games). Barrier to entry is a bit higher. I think it makes for a lot more interesting decisions and the core mechanics are always fun. The idea that no one in the city is safe because units fight back is great, as is progressing in Manhattan to improve your rewards.
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
Damn man I want to play some TI3 again. It has been so long
Make sure those newbies are well versed in the rules lol
platypotamus
Member
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is legit. I haven't liked a game this intensely this immediately in I can't even remember how long. It must be mine.
Yeah, maybe it was my mistake for jumping into KoNY with a group that hadn't played KoT.
Still, for what I want out of a game like that, I think I would have liked the expanded mechanics to focus more on the monsters beating each other up than adding a bunch of building tiles to flip. It's clever how the buildings flip to military tiles, adding more heat in your area as you bust it up, but....you get to actually bring the building structures down in Rampage, which is awesome.
Even as someone who has played KoT (though it's not one of my favorites), and is more experienced with different games, I kept tripping on the concept of Manhattan having different spots, having to move up along the track in Manhattan, being on either the 2-4 or 5-6 space, and what happens when you roll different amounts of stars or the military icon.