Board Games - The expansion thread

[HokieStone]

My Frosthaven arrived over the weekend.  It is...large...and very heavy.  In fact, we were out of town, and my 80 year old mother-in-law was house and cat-sitting for us.  I saw on my doorbell, her struggling to drag a giant box into the house, and I figured it had arrived.

Now I just need to decide if we're going to play it, or if I'm going to sell it.

[Werthead]

My Frosthaven is sitting here unopened. I'm just waiting for the extras to arrive and then I'll look at the resale demand.

[HokieStone]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

My Frosthaven is sitting here unopened. I'm just waiting for the extras to arrive and then I'll look at the resale demand.

Which extras did you get?  Mine came with the solo scenarios and reusable stickers in the box.  Well, in the giant box that held those and the slightly less giant Frosthaven packing box...which held the actual giant Frosthaven box.  So many boxes.

[Werthead]

9 hours ago, HokieStone said:

Which extras did you get?  Mine came with the solo scenarios and reusable stickers in the box.  Well, in the giant box that held those and the slightly less giant Frosthaven packing box...which held the actual giant Frosthaven box.  So many boxes.

I think those plus the organiser (plus metal coins for Gloomhaven).

9 hours ago, Crazy Old Guy said:

What's the best board game y'all can think of?

I'm trying to pick one with "learning as a point" to it.

Do you mean a board game which teaches something beyond being just a board game. Or an easy-to-learn board game?

[HokieStone]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think those plus the organiser (plus metal coins for Gloomhaven).

Ah...I didn't get the organizer, my plan was to try and recycle my Gloomhaven organizer.  But who knows now.  As I recall they changed mid-stream on the organizer because of some controversy with Broken Token, who was going to supply the wood organizer.  This thing is so heavy already, adding another few pound of wood organizer may result in a hernia.

[DaveSumm]

I got the Folded Space insert, but I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t get the stickers and solo scenarios. Were they a later addition? Unlike GH, Frosthaven will be harder to replay without those stickers as the building is such an integral part.

I’ve played 5 scenarios so far and I’m really impressed. I’m far more invested in FH and what’s happening there, I’m rooting for the town and the people. The scenario design does a much better of evoking some element of the storyline, GH was more often just ‘some shit has happened, which has led to … this room full of monsters, you need to kill them all’. And as before, it’s sprawled out across my table which I guess means we’re not playing anything else for a good while. 

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I got the Folded Space insert, but I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t get the stickers and solo scenarios. Were they a later addition? Unlike GH, Frosthaven will be harder to replay without those stickers as the building is such an integral part.

Looking at all the different video reviews and podcasts, the idea of "replaying" Frosthaven sounds unlikely. Getting through it once sounds like a Herculean challenge in itself.

I'm hearing a lot of people saying it's deeper, more complex and (much) more challenging than Gloomhaven, but it's also far more time consuming as a result, and the app is pretty much mandatory (whilst it was more helpful but not required for GH).

For me I'd need to get a group meeting weekly or even twice a week to do Gloomhaven, but if I had a group meeting that often I'd probably prefer to just run an RPG (which makes me wonder if I should get rid of Gloomhaven as well on a twofer deal).

[RedEyedGhost]

On 1/23/2023 at 7:25 PM, Crazy Old Guy said:

What's the best board game y'all can think of?

1822PNW - not one I would suggest as a starting point though.

 

Quote

 

I'm trying to pick one with "learning as a point" to it.

 

For you to learn modern mechanisms, something that is actually educational, or for you to try and get others into board gaming?

[Werthead]

On 9/19/2022 at 8:40 PM, Corvinus85 said:

@Werthead I'm surprised you haven't made any mention of the upcoming Homeworld: Fleet Command board game.

It's live and backed.

It's really just a Homeworld reskin of Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare on a smaller board with more manageable minis, which I'm 100% down for. Red Alert is amazing but cumbersome.

[HokieStone]

I fell prey to the Kickstarter bug twice last week:

Wiz-War, the classic chaotic wizard duelling game is getting a 9th edition from Steve Jackson Games.  Played a bunch of an early edition back in high school.  I got the Fantasy Flight 8th edition a decade ago...but it was too overwrought.  This one promises to get back to the roots.

The Search for Lost Species is a follow-up to the deduction game The Search for Planet X.  I enjoy Planet X, so I'm eager to see what Ben and Matthew have done with this iteration.

[DaveSumm]

9 minutes ago, HokieStone said:

The Search for Lost Species is a follow-up to the deduction game The Search for Planet X.  I enjoy Planet X, so I'm eager to see what Ben and Matthew have done with this iteration.

Massively looking forward to this, love Planet X. I good deduction game seems hard to come by.

Only other news is that Frosthaven continues to be spread across my entire table, and therefore the only game we’ve played since we got it (except Blood on the Clocktower which is elsewhere). I forgot how daft these Haven games are, I have a chair next to my chair that’s just for books / paperwork, and even then you’ll find mid-scenario you’ll need the rule book, so it’s just there on the chair right? Except wait, that’s the section book … no, that’s the scenario book … those are the stickers … puzzle book, board, campaign sheet, scenario flowcharts (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) … alchemy chart … AH HERE IT IS. 

Oh we did buy a board game table. Obviously YMMV on how you feel about kickstarters, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a table that looks this good for this price (3 days to go…)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsandgeeks/the-monarch-a-stylish-board-game-table-to-last-generations?ref=ksr_email_user_watched_project_launched

 

[Werthead]

Finally got to playing Frostpunk today.

It's an interesting game which has a lot of excellent design but it's also a lot. It has a huge amount of trackers, a lot of tokens, a lot of (mostly glorious) miniatures and a huge number of card decks (some of which needed to be randomised, some need to be carefully put in order, and some need to be carefully put in order, have cards pulled out and then randomised). It's also what people complained it is, a solo game so hugely cumbersome that you really need four players working together with different responsibilities to play it.

The game takes a huge number of ideas from other games and merges them. So you have a collective-against-the-game feel from Pandemic, you have an overland exploration mechanic via a card system apparently lifted from Mage Knight (which I've not played) and a lot of worker placement like every other Euro game ever, with card draws impacting on all of this.

I would say the way it replicates the video game mechanics in the board game context is very ingenious, to the point that playing the video game first will give you a huge heads up on how the game works and what it's trying to do. But in the process of trying to make the video game mechanics work in a board game context, it has so many things going on that it's very easy to skip things or make mistakes. We completely fucked up how the Dusk deck works (the manual explains it terribly), to the point where we stopped using it, but without the Dusk deck throwing up random hazards, the game became far too easy to the point of being a pushover.

Some stuff I really liked, like the way the round tracker works. As well as showing the current round, you put things further down the tracker, so you can see how long you have until the next storm arrives, but you also put down a token representing the thing you are researching. You might have some cool tech to help survive the next storm coming in, but the tech will arrive 2 turns after the storm has hit, so you can build Workshops and then send Engineers to the Workshops to speed up research, so the first time you do that, the tech will arrive on the same day as the storm, and the second time it will arrive 2 turns before the storm hits, giving you time to make use of it. That was quite clever. Other things, like stockpiling food, are oddly overly-complicated.

Overall, I think this is the nichest game I've seen. I think you need to absolutely love the video game and also have 2-3 friends who love the video game and you want to play it together co-op. As a solo game it replicates the video game experience in such a complicated way you are far, far better off just playing the video game. As a board game in its own right without any knowledge of the video game, it's just too much game. People who really want to mix survival games, worker placement and co-op might also end up enjoying it, but otherwise it feels a bit unnecessary.

Will give it a second whirl with a fellow Frostpunk fan (I played it with a Frostpunk virgin and they did not enjoy it) and then probably look to offload. A shame, because it looks amazing (and I am strongly considering holding onto the scenery and miniatures expansions because they'd work really well with BattleTech). I do not say this lightly but Frostpunk: The Board Game has the best tree minis ever seen in a board game.

[Werthead]

Please dedicate your next sheep purchase to Klaus Teuber, the creator of Catan (aka The Settlers of Catan), who passed away last week at the age of 70. Arguably one of the forefathers of the modern board gaming renaissance.

[HokieStone]

Obligatory wood for sheep joke.  

I didn't realize that he won the Spiel de Jares 4 times - and Settlers was the last of his games to win.

[HokieStone]

Got to play my deluxe copy of Darwin's Journey this past weekend.  I had high hopes for this, and it did not disappoint.  Significantly more complex game than I had originally realized - and sure enough in our first play, I missed a key rule that really screwed me...but I suppose that's what first plays are for.  Second game went much smoother.

There's an interesting worker training dynamic, so that you can only send workers to spots that are trained in certain disciplines.  Really...too much for me to try and explain here, but I really did enjoy the game.  It came packed with a bunch of built-in expansions, I'm looking forward to trying them out...but there's certainly a lot of replayability in the base game.

[Werthead]

This review is broadly positive on Frosthaven but also makes me feel good about selling on my copy. There's so much game here that I would never get round to it, and I've barely broken the seal on Gloomhaven.

 

[DaveSumm]

I’ve missed Matt’s reviews. I don’t really disagree with any of it, although I like it more. I’m very fortunate that it’s just my wife and I that play it, so sometimes we can do 2-3 games a week, thus making the campaign finishable in a non ridiculous amount of time. So we did just want more Frosthaven. 

I was hoping he’d go into slightly more detail on the outpost phase. Overall I do feel far more invested in Frosthaven (the town) than I ever did Gloomhaven (the city). But it’s painful sometimes, I should hate attacks because I care about FH, not because they’re a complete pain in the balls to deal with.

[DaveSumm]

Gloomhaven: Second Edition

Quote

Gloomhaven: Second Edition is a revised and elevated version of the award-winning core game of Gloomhaven. This is the culmination of everything Isaac Childres and the growing Cephalofair Games team have learned since Gloomhaven’s initial release, including feedback from the community, playtesters, co-designers, and developers. This new edition is the new best way to experience Gloomhaven.

The world, story, and challenging gameplay are all still the same, but there is a plethora of additional content to explore. Even for those who have played Gloomhaven before, this edition brings new material to the table, with rebalanced and redesigned mercenary classes, items, and scenarios, as well as brand new artwork, newly written narrative and events, updated miniatures, a new faction-based reputation system, and more.

 

[Werthead]

20 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Gloomhaven: Second Edition

 

Urrrrgh.

No upgrade or conversion kit for the original game either.

[RedEyedGhost]

Played Hegemony a couple of weeks ago.  I knew going into it that I would like it, but wow, that was amazing.  It has the right amount of asymmetry, fun actions, and wonderful interaction.  Will be shocked if anything can knock it off my #2 spot for 2023.