Board games!

[Werthead]

Oh wow, the original Dune board game, which has been out of print since the 1980s, is coming back.

[HokieStone]

On 3/16/2019 at 12:08 PM, Werthead said:

Oh wow, the original Dune board game, which has been out of print since the 1980s, is coming back.

Didn't it come out about 5 years ago, as some non-IP game..."Rex", or something like that?

Ah, here it is...from 2012, it looks like - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104363/rex-final-days-empire

 

[Werthead]

11 hours ago, HokieStone said:

Didn't it come out about 5 years ago, as some non-IP game..."Rex", or something like that?

Ah, here it is...from 2012, it looks like - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104363/rex-final-days-empire

It was a reskin by Fantasy Flight in the Twilight Imperium universe. Apparently they also added some traditional FF faff to the game, which is why people seem quite pleased that they didn't get the rights this time around. Fantasy Flight do make quite good games, but they've never met a rule system they didn't think could be improved by 305 mostly unnecessary tokens, two rulebooks, an expansion that immediately breaks the game balance and a crisis team on permanent standby to help baffled players.

[RedEyedGhost]

On 3/16/2019 at 10:08 AM, Werthead said:

Oh wow, the original Dune board game, which has been out of print since the 1980s, is coming back.

Hopefully with an updated rule set.

[RedEyedGhost]

Watching Shut Up and Sit Down's TI4 part 1 video... so many rules mistakes in the first 20 minutes   Don't know if I can continue.  Watched their play of Great Western Trail, and that was pretty bad too.  Surely they play better when they're not on camera, and hopefully they improve as they do more and more streaming.

[DaveSumm]

9 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Watching Shut Up and Sit Down's TI4 part 1 video... so many rules mistakes in the first 20 minutes   Don't know if I can continue.  Watched their play of Great Western Trail, and that was pretty bad too.  Surely they play better when they're not on camera, and hopefully they improve as they do more and more streaming.

Yea I was disappointed in the GWT stream, I’d much rather see someone on the top of their game playing. But then I’ve never really understood streaming games. Do people really watch Heavy Cardboard for 4 hours straight and follow what’s going on? The best one I’ve seen is probably Geek and Sundry:

...which goes to show the production values you need to really follow a game. They must have 10 cameras set up for that. But again, it’s noobs, so it’s not that interesting to me.

In other news, after owning a Feast for Odin for years, I’ve finally started playing it and really like it. Except I seem to suck at it, but that feels OK with this game. It’s still fun to spread yourself around and live the life of a Viking for 3 hours even if it’s the life of a shit Viking. I’m thinking I need more engine buildery/worker placement type games, seeing as I play mostly 2 player I was looking at Fields of Arle.

[RedEyedGhost]

9 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Yea I was disappointed in the GWT stream, I’d much rather see someone on the top of their game playing. But then I’ve never really understood streaming games. Do people really watch Heavy Cardboard for 4 hours straight and follow what’s going on? The best one I’ve seen is probably Geek and Sundry:

...which goes to show the production values you need to really follow a game. They must have 10 cameras set up for that. But again, it’s noobs, so it’s not that interesting to me.

In other news, after owning a Feast for Odin for years, I’ve finally started playing it and really like it. Except I seem to suck at it, but that feels OK with this game. It’s still fun to spread yourself around and live the life of a Viking for 3 hours even if it’s the life of a shit Viking. I’m thinking I need more engine buildery/worker placement type games, seeing as I play mostly 2 player I was looking at Fields of Arle.

I watch a lot of Heavy Cardboard, but it's while I'm doing other stuff.  They rarely make rules mistakes (probably because Edward does such a thorough teach at the start of each stream, and all of the players will have usually played it together earlier that week or the week before) which may be why SU&SD's are so glaring.  

My favorites to watch in addition to HC are JonGetsGames, Slickerdrips, and Ant Lab Games.  That Geek and Sundry show is good too, haven't watched their GWT video though.

A Feast for Odin is fantastic, I think I've already played it 9 times this year (seven of them with the new expansion).  Five of the times were solo, because I, too, am terrible at the game.  I still love it though.  The expansion does tighten the board up for the different player counts, if you feel that it is too wide open at 2.

[Werthead]

Red Alert arrived this morning.

I may have gone overboard with the add-ons.

[RedEyedGhost]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Red Alert arrived this morning.

I may have gone overboard with the add-ons.

Did you end up Kickstarting it?

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Did you end up Kickstarting it?

No. A dude who did kickstart it flogged his entire set on eBay the second he got it at, as far as I can tell, a loss so I snapped it up. This tends to happen on a fairly regular basis as far as I can tell (people spend lavishly on a Kickstarter and 18 months later when the thing finally arrives, they need the money back so have to sell it).

The actual Kickstarter-exclusive stuff is fairly minor. The silver embossed dice are cool but hardly necessary and you get a bunch more ships (for both sides), which helps when constructing fleets with high point values, but again you don't need them. The six expansions are all commercially available with the base game, which I'm not sure but might be unprecedented (at least for a game that falls more on the board game side of things than the wargame).

The ship models are very smart, the card stock is quite superior to most of this type (much better than the cheap-arse shit FFG use), although the cards are a bit flimsier than the norm. Going to sleeve them anyway. The quality of the components is exceptional, which is good as the price of the game is on the steep side at £70-£80 (although hardly in the outrageous bracket).

[RedEyedGhost]

33 minutes ago, Werthead said:

No. A dude who did kickstart it flogged his entire set on eBay the second he got it at, as far as I can tell, a loss so I snapped it up. This tends to happen on a fairly regular basis as far as I can tell (people spend lavishly on a Kickstarter and 18 months later when the thing finally arrives, they need the money back so have to sell it).

Nice.  Some kickstarters you can find on the cheap right away, but most are initially resold at quite a markup (at least here in the US).  It is sweet when you can find that deal.

 

38 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The ship models are very smart, the card stock is quite superior to most of this type (much better than the cheap-arse shit FFG use), although the cards are a bit flimsier than the norm. Going to sleeve them anyway. The quality of the components is exceptional, which is good as the price of the game is on the steep side at £70-£80 (although hardly in the outrageous bracket).

At this point I'm sleeving 90⁺% of my games.  Only games where the cards are in hand simply for reading text on them do I skip sleeving.

[HokieStone]

Sleevers....ugh. 

[RedEyedGhost]

I'm sleeving two games right now!  

[Inigima]

I've played several games of Treasure Island lately. I really like it, I am a huge sucker for games with cool gimmicks and this one has them in spades. Very loosely based on the Stevenson novel, one player is Long John Silver and the other players are his mutinous crew.  Silver has hidden his treasure somewhere on the island -- almost anywhere -- but the pirates have turned on him and imprisoned him in a tower and are interrogating him about the treasure's location.

As a pirate, you only have a few weeks (each turn is a day, but only one player gets to move each day) to find the treasure before Silver breaks out of jail and can go retrieve his treasure himself. Pirates will inevitably cause some information sharing, but they are working against each other as well as Silver -- only one person can win. For his part, Silver is forced to give up information on most turns according to specific rules, but his goal is to make his hints as unhelpful as possible. For example, if a player is searching along the west coast, Silver might have the opportunity to say that the treasure is east of that player. It's true! It just doesn't rule out very much. Silver has to pick from the hints in his hand, so sometimes you can give a nearly useless hint and other times you'll have to say something genuinely helpful. We've played a few times, and I've always been Silver since I'm the one who knows the rules the best; they've always found the treasure before I could break out, but it was a lot of fun regardless.

The big gimmick here is that the game is very physical. You mark up the map (and players' secret mini maps) with dry erase markers, and it comes with several physical tools for you to use. The most obvious and probably the coolest is a caliper (like a compass from middle school math) to help you draw perfect circles, but it also comes with several rulers and compasses (the other kind) and circles. By the time the game is over the board is absolutely covered in dry erase information. It has worked really well for us. I will say that since you have to decide whether, say, players have found the treasure in the area they're searching, you have to be a little flexible if it's on the edge or something; if I'm not sure, I always err on the side of helping the player. It would be very frustrating if I decided they missed it by a millimeter or something since I have to compare my secret personal map (where the treasure is marked) to the full-size map the players are moving around on.

This has been a big success for us and I'd recommend it as something new and cool.

[polishgenius]

I got the chance to crack into my recent impulse purchase Solenia recently. Sort of a card managing/resource collection-and-delivery thing based on the premise of gathering and dropping off resources via airship on a planet with permanent day and night sides, it's great fun. Simple (though we didn't get onto the harder ruleset) but strategic with where and when you play what cards, and flows terrifically.

Great presentation too, gorgeous art on solid components- good card, nice wood for the resources, smart design of the cards, and if you like a gimmick to reference Inigma's previous post there's a definite wow-factor with the board itself, a double-sided modular effort which flips piece-by-piece as you progress the airship and turn day into night. Really the only tiny downside is that what with all the effort clearly put into everything else, it's a bit odd that the main airship itself is relatively cheap plastic on an equally flimsy stand. Overall it's not a major issue but something solid in bakelite or wood would not have gone amiss.

But overall that's a tiny issue in an overal great package. Most of the games me and my sister have picked up since we started tentatively building a shared-ish collection (tricky since we live in separate countries) have been either abstract strategy or in some way exploration or quest based, so this was a different and welcome addition to the pile.


Also:
 

On 1/2/2019 at 5:20 AM, RedEyedGhost said:

I'm quite introverted myself, but through meetup I now have cultivated several different groups that I play with on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Going to the english meetup site and searching for Berlin shows me a group that has nearly as members as the one here in Denver, and the first group listed is for people wanting to practice German.  So that might be helpful, too.  The nice thing about the board game meetups is that most of the people attending them are introverts too, so they will be able to recognize your nervousness and be very welcoming.

I never replied to this coz for various reasons I've not been together enough to go to anything like this the last few months, but I definitely will at some point so thanks for the help.

[HokieStone]

The last thing I need is another game...but Amazon has the 10th anniversary edition of Notre Dame for 50% off.  I played it like 12 years ago, and remember enjoying it...and you know...the whole Notre Dame thing...so I went ahead and picked it up...

[RedEyedGhost]

On 4/23/2019 at 4:32 PM, polishgenius said:

I  never replied to this coz for various reasons I've not been together enough to go to anything like this the last few months, but I definitely will at some point so thanks for the help.

No worries.  Meetup really is a great way to cultivate a group of friends.

 

I've been on a bit of a Vital Lacerda kick, recently played Escape Plan, Lisboa, and Kanban for the first time.  Loved all three of them.  Hard to pick a favorite of the new ones, but I think Vinhos is still my favorite of his.  

I played my sixth game of TI4 this past Sunday, and came away as the supreme ruler of the galaxy.  Played as the Yin Brotherhood, it was their second appearance in our games... and their second win.  It was the first time that I gave up my Support for the Throne, in a like swap with the vile Nekro Virus.  There was one player between the two of us, and they were pushing the other direction, so it felt like a safe exchange.  He would have scored enough points for the win if the glorious clones of Darien Van Hauge didn't have the initiative.  The two players to my left had swapped SftT fairly early, but I had that border defended well enough that my direct neighbor never really pushed into my territory, other than when I let him move a single fighter into my completely undefended home system (I was planning to produce the following round).  That actually let me score a secret objective that I thought would be impossible with the Yin - win a battle with your flagship, and it cannot be destroyed.  Only an 8 hour play time with 2/6 playing either their second or third games.  I love playing this game, tentatively scheduled to play again on July 14th.

Played some very solid mid weight euros recently too - Village and Gentes.  Very much looking forward to playing both again.

 

[Werthead]

I played some Camel Up recently, a very straightforward and charming game which ends up being a lot of fun and surprisingly tense.

Picked up Battle of Britain and Memoir '44: New Flight Plan, but haven't played either yet. Been mostly doing a Red Alert campaign and almost through the base game, after which we can start using Dreadnoughts, which should be fun.

[Werthead]

Intrigued by the Company of Heroes board game Kickstarter. The original video game is brilliant, and has some very board-gamey mechanics which should work quite well (particularly area control providing resource points to summon more units into battle).

Against that, this is stretch goal city with a metric butt-ton of pretty miniatures which always sounds alarm bells, as these often take away from the core gameplay focus. Will sit on the fence on this one for a few more days (it's running until the 21st).

[DaveSumm]

I was looking to sell some games, and discovered the FB group ‘Board Game Trading and Chat UK’ ... holy shit, within an hour, I’d made £200. Highly recommended if you wanna off load the stuff you don’t play anymore, I’m sure there’s equivalents in other countries. If only it was on some other medium than Facebook, which I detest more and more with each passing day.

My dream is to curate a collection where you genuinely might play any of your games, instead of having 70% of them existing for a group of people that you thought might magically come to your house when you bought them. Next purchase will either be Gloomhaven or Spirit Island I think. Gloomhaven is a risk, never played a dungeon crawler and neither has my SO. But we do love Legacy stuff.