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Author Topic: The Boardgame Thread  (Read 585233 times)
MrHat
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Reply #1260 on: February 20, 2014, 06:54:53 AM

Thats a lot of games.  What is Japanese Rules Love Letters?

Anyone own Robison Crusoe board game? Looks intense.
Ingmar
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Reply #1261 on: February 20, 2014, 12:11:45 PM

I didn't like Nexus Ops much.

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lamaros
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Reply #1262 on: February 20, 2014, 01:34:05 PM

I didn't like Nexus Ops much.

Hmm. Thankfully I only bought it second hand! Though it does by reports look like my kind of game.

The other lover letter, IIRC, has no elimination but just a number of rounds. And some different roles.

And yeah, lots of games. Partly because I'm obsessive, partly because now I'm playing with a group 1-2 times a week I'm actually getting them played.
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Reply #1263 on: February 20, 2014, 02:27:49 PM

It's been a while but my recollection is that some weirdness in the scoring made it better to fight battles out in empty hexes away from the mines you were supposed to be fighting over, which offended my sense of simulation. Not everyone will have trouble getting past that sort of thing though.

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Soln
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Reply #1264 on: February 22, 2014, 09:26:55 AM

Thats a lot of games.  What is Japanese Rules Love Letters?

Anyone own Robison Crusoe board game? Looks intense.

Dying to play Crusoe.  May have to solitaire it.  Feel lucky to just snag on EBay a clean copy of the only expansion - "Voyage of the Beagle" - which has absurd production value.  Ignacy is on track to make boardgames compete with novels for time, attention and thoughtfulness.
lamaros
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Reply #1265 on: February 22, 2014, 04:26:37 PM

But not tidyness or simplicity.  why so serious?

Played Chaos in the Old World, finally. What a great game! Deep, thematic, and pretty simple mechanically.

Also played Munchkin for the first time. I don't really get the hate. I'd prefer to play that to 7 Wonders!
Chimpy
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Reply #1266 on: February 22, 2014, 04:32:33 PM

The only person I know who hates Munchkin is the guy who stopped being able to win every time after the rest of us finally read/got to know the rules (he "taught" the game to everyone else and he tends to gloss over things).


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Ingmar
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Reply #1267 on: February 22, 2014, 04:47:47 PM

Munchkin just goes on and on forever if you have people tearing each other down properly.

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Samwise
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Reply #1268 on: February 22, 2014, 05:16:06 PM

Munchkin is great fun the first hundred times you play it.

Shut Up & Sit Down touched on it briefly before reviewing Gauntlet of Fools, which is a similar sort of game that plays much faster:

Quote
I hate that in parodying D&D so focusedly it erects walls around gaming as a whole, its 20 year-old injokes acting like barbed wire. I hate that it goes on for 30 minutes longer than anyone wants. I hate how the game is entirely based around attacking the lead player, rendering the entire first 60 minutes almost pointless. But most of all, I hate how it gets everywhere.

I'll be at the pub, explaining SU&SD to some friend or stranger or travelling pervert, and they'll say "Oh! Yeah, I've played Munchkin. It was OK!" And with that, all the icecubes will disappear from my drink, a new wrinkle will appear on my body and all the babies within two miles of us will start crying.

The part about it going on 30 minutes too long is spot on.  The last few times I've played Munchkin we didn't even finish the game because we all realized we weren't having fun any more and decided to do something else.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2014, 05:17:43 PM by Samwise »

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JWIV
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Reply #1269 on: February 22, 2014, 06:54:17 PM

Munchkin is great fun the first hundred times you play it.

Shut Up & Sit Down touched on it briefly before reviewing Gauntlet of Fools, which is a similar sort of game that plays much faster:

Quote
I hate that in parodying D&D so focusedly it erects walls around gaming as a whole, its 20 year-old injokes acting like barbed wire. I hate that it goes on for 30 minutes longer than anyone wants. I hate how the game is entirely based around attacking the lead player, rendering the entire first 60 minutes almost pointless. But most of all, I hate how it gets everywhere.

I'll be at the pub, explaining SU&SD to some friend or stranger or travelling pervert, and they'll say "Oh! Yeah, I've played Munchkin. It was OK!" And with that, all the icecubes will disappear from my drink, a new wrinkle will appear on my body and all the babies within two miles of us will start crying.

The part about it going on 30 minutes too long is spot on.  The last few times I've played Munchkin we didn't even finish the game because we all realized we weren't having fun any more and decided to do something else.

Exactly all of this. I enjoyed Munchkin the first few times I played it, but once you realize that the endgame is a dragged out dogpile, a lot of the fun goes away.
Riggswolfe
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Reply #1270 on: February 22, 2014, 07:35:23 PM

So, after watching Tabletop I purchased Gloom and played it with my family. It was tons of fun and the stories we came up with were silly and in a few cases very creative. My daughter and my dad had some nutty stories and my dad nearly fell out of his chair laughing at one point. Highly successful game with the right group if I do say so myself.

"We live in a country, where John Lennon takes six bullets in the chest, Yoko Ono was standing right next to him and not one fucking bullet! Explain that to me! Explain that to me, God! Explain it to me, God!" - Denis Leary summing up my feelings about the nature of the universe.
Goldenmean
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Reply #1271 on: February 24, 2014, 02:18:53 AM

Anyone own Robison Crusoe board game? Looks intense.

I've played a solo game of it and one with the girlfriend. It's a fun little cooperative. The theme fits very well, and there's an enjoyable mounting tension to the game as turns go on. As you perform actions, you'll occasionally trigger adventure cards, many of which will get shuffled into the event deck (which also serves as a timer to the game). You resolve an event every turn, but if you draw an adventure card instead, you resolve that, and draw the next card, and so on and so forth until you finally get to an event. In both of the games I played, the last couple of turns entailed 5+ adventures blowing up in my face.

I really liked this mechanic. It gives a nice narrative flow to the game, and it helps shift your strategy. The whole game feels very reactive in interesting ways. Every scenario has an objective, but you're constantly being distracted from that objective to respond to events and adventures as they occur. Get bitten by a snake? Should probably take a break from making that rescue bonfire and research the cure item before the snakebite card cycles through the event deck. Storm on the horizon? That wood would probably be put to better use making a roof for your shelter.

My only real qualms about the game are pretty minor. First, it's highly random. Dice dictate whether you succeed in what you're doing or not, whether you get an adventure or not, and whether you take a wound while doing it or not. You can mitigate this by sending an extra worker pawn along, guaranteeing a success, but you really don't have the workers to spare most of the time. What isn't covered by the dice is covered by the several card decks. Like I said, this doesn't bother me terribly. I tend to veer towards low-luck euros for competitive games, but to me, cooperatives are more about constructing an interesting story, and I find the randomness in this just makes the stories more amusing (like my girlfriend playing the carpenter character who managed to injure herself every single time she attempted to build something) Second, the rules are a little wonky. They're not terrible, but there are definitely a couple of places where it was obvious they'd been through a shaky translation pass, and some of the cards and scenario objectives are definitely open to interpretation.

If you're looking for a cooperative, this is probably one of my favorites. It should have some good longevity also. There are 6 scenarios in increasing difficulty, and a good range of cards so there's a lot of variety even within a single scenario. The Voyage of the Beagle expansion also has a campaign mode of interconnected scenarios.
lamaros
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Reply #1272 on: February 24, 2014, 01:01:10 PM

Mice and Mystics arrived yesterday so I had a little poke through. Looks like a fun little romp about. Not an especially involved system, but good looking with a sense of fun. The GF was engaged by it, which is always worth bonus points.
grebo
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Reply #1273 on: February 25, 2014, 12:10:07 PM

Anyone play any Madeira yet?  I ordered it when I got Terra Mystica because it looks table shatteringly heavy and that = sexy for me.  Can't find too many reviews yet on it, the one video playthrough I did find had some super annoying guy I can barely watch.

Why don't you try our other games?
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Reply #1274 on: February 25, 2014, 03:48:50 PM

Anyone play any Madeira yet?  I ordered it when I got Terra Mystica because it looks table shatteringly heavy and that = sexy for me.  Can't find too many reviews yet on it, the one video playthrough I did find had some super annoying guy I can barely watch.

I haven't played a full game of it yet, but I did walk through about half of a game playing against myself. It's ... dense, and it's going to be one of those games where you just go horribly wrong the first time. I absolutely dread playing this with people with severe analysis paralysis though because everything is so tightly interwoven. There's practically no choice in the game that is atomic and doesn't trickle out to other parts of the game. This makes the game feel more complex and brain burny.

In most worker placement games, there's a very simple cause and effect. In Agricola, you need wood, so you take the space that has a pile of wood built up on it and proceed on your merry way. You'll probably eventually build fences or something with that wood, but that's another atomic action. In Madeira, there's no "I'm going to do x", it's all "I'm going to do x,y and probably z" where x, y and z don't necessarily have anything to do with each other.

It's essentially just a worker placement game where your workers are dice. At the beginning of the round three dice are rolled for every player and then placed in a grouping with player order and victory condition tiles. In passing order, you pick one of those dice groupings, take one of the victory condition tiles in that row and that also determines player order for the round. So already your one choice dictates three effects (actually I lied, there's 4, but I neglected an aspect for simplicities sake), and here we also see why I'm not entirely sure how much I like the game.

That has the possibility of creating very interesting choice. Do I really want to go first? Is it worth taking the crappy dice associated with going first? Maybe I need that particular victory point tile in the grouping associated with going last that turn. Is that worth it? But that's best case scenario. It's also entirely possible that going first is also associated with exactly the victory point tile you want, and has a great selection of dice. In that case, everything's coming up Millhouse for whoever the first player is and the other players are stuck with whatever dregs are left.

And that theme continues throughout the game. There's 5 different places you can place dice. In every round one of those places is just going to have a default "harvest" action associated with it and the other 4 will have a different character action. But each of those places is also associated with a particular building action that again, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the character action that gets placed there. They're also each associated with a region. You can only place a die in a region if its number is greater than or equal to that of the region. If its lower, you've got to pay the difference in bread. Out of bread and you have three dice showing one? You know what action you're taking three times.

Oh yes, and the power of the building action is determined by how many worker figures you have placed in that region (Yes, there are workers as well as dice. Yes, this is sort of confusing). Oh yes, and the building action has a cost associated with it. That cost is a fixed number minus a roll of all of the dice that got placed in that region, so the more people who take a particular space, the cheaper the building action in it will probably be. Oh, and did I mention that there are pirate dice? Well, there are. Those are neutral dice that you can use if you have workers in a particular area, and they'll let you use the character part of an action space without using up one of your dice, and they'll increase the penalty for people who can't end up paying for the building cost of a particular space.

And all that is without me actually mentioning what any of the actions actually do. So, yeah, dense.

I worry about how interwoven everything is, because I'm not sure it's interwoven in a way that actually creates interesting choice you can plan around. I think what the designers had in mind is some grand tactical ballet of "Ah, hah, if I take that action, I will benefit from all the different things that come out of it", but I think that what will actually happen is that most players will just stare blankly at the board in a panic and eventually go "Ummm, wine, I need wine. Going to take the action that lets me harvest wine, and I have no freaking idea what I'll do about all of the other things that comes along with that".

TL;DR version It's a gamers game for gamers who don't mind being restricted to a tactical view (you can only plan limited strategy when you don't know what characters will be paired with what buildings or what set of actions you'll be able to take) and who don't mind a fair amount of randomness they'll need to respond to. I'd really like to play a proper game of it, but honestly I think it's too complex for many of my friends, too random for most of the others, and difficult enough to grasp the interrelations that the first game is just going to be a mess regardless, which will make it harder to convince people to play again.
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Reply #1275 on: February 25, 2014, 03:49:31 PM

Whenever I hear 'heavy' in this context I just think 'mind numbingly fiddly, complicated, and boring'. I just don't get the appeal. Super annoying guy seems apt!  why so serious?
Goldenmean
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Reply #1276 on: February 25, 2014, 04:19:49 PM

Whenever I hear 'heavy' in this context I just think 'mind numbingly fiddly, complicated, and boring'. I just don't get the appeal. Super annoying guy seems apt!  why so serious?

You're definitely right about mind numbingly fiddly and complicated in this context, but I was certainly never bored. Like grebo, I tend to view gaming heaviness as a positive thing. I play games to engage my mind, and up to a certain point there's a correlation between that and game heaviness. Go Fish certainly isn't going to churn any neurons. I think that correlation probably falls away at around 3.0 on the boardgamegeek.com heaviness ratings though, and from there on up, heaviness just maps to "How many hours is it going to take to explain this before we can play?" and "How likely is it we'll screw up some key rule?"
Soln
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Reply #1277 on: February 25, 2014, 07:25:49 PM

I also like heavy games, but I also prefer to have choices and that there's a good theme.  I'm avoiding Terra Mystica because the theme seems tacked on. How is Madeira for story and theme?
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Reply #1278 on: February 25, 2014, 10:53:48 PM

I also like heavy games, but I also prefer to have choices and that there's a good theme.  I'm avoiding Terra Mystica because the theme seems tacked on. How is Madeira for story and theme?

I'll try to resist getting on a soapbox about Terra Mystica if you've already made up your mind (It's one of my favorite games, and I own/have played A LOT of games)

Themewise, I'd say they're about on par. Terra Mystica has this gigantic elephant in the room about how it's a game about races competing over very limited terrain who seem completely unwilling to directly interact with each other and instead just decide to compete about who can best worship the elements and build the longest string of buildings. Other than that, it's moderately themey for a euro. Your settlements make people for you. Your trading posts make money, and they're cheaper when built next to other people, because, hey, trade. Race powers all make a sort of intuitive sense, and so on.

Broadly speaking, Madeira's theme probably makes more sense. You're all merchants and you get victory points by fulfilling requests for the king, which all feel like the sort of thing Portuguese merchants would do: develop relationships with different guilds, send ships to foreign colonies, start trade routes, flat out donate money to the crown, and so on. You need bread to feed your workers. You need wood to create or perform upkeep on your ships. Different parts of the islands produce different goods, and some have forests that need to be clearcut before you can get to them. That all makes sense.

Where it really breaks down themewise for me though is in the combination of buildings and characters and dice. Why is it that sometimes certain building actions are associated with certain character actions and sometimes they aren't? Why is it that sometimes I just can't figure out how to make boats (because I only have dice showing 1s, and that character action is in the 3 region)? And so on.

I guess basically I feel that Terra Mystica makes thematic sense if you ignore the fact that the premise of the game is ridiculous, whereas Madeira's premise make sense, but it's not really clear on a thematic level why your individual actions are so restricted from turn to turn.

If you give me a list of your favorite games and why you like them, I could probably better tune recommending it to you or not based on that.
lamaros
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Reply #1279 on: February 26, 2014, 04:04:52 AM

Go is a very heavy game, but it's not 'heavy'. You don't need to have three thousand bits and rules that do fifteen different things to have a challenging game experience.

I do recognise that some find working out a d defeating the system fun, but I'd rather play a game where that challenge is most directly the other players (Chaos in the Old World/Dune) than the game system (Agricola, Suburbia, etc). Even if I do enjoy the latter also.

But you gotta draw the line somewhere!
Goldenmean
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Reply #1280 on: February 26, 2014, 09:22:16 AM

Go is a very heavy game, but it's not 'heavy'. You don't need to have three thousand bits and rules that do fifteen different things to have a challenging game experience.

I do recognise that some find working out a d defeating the system fun, but I'd rather play a game where that challenge is most directly the other players (Chaos in the Old World/Dune) than the game system (Agricola, Suburbia, etc). Even if I do enjoy the latter also.

But you gotta draw the line somewhere!

Agreed in general, especially with Suburbia, which is actually a very light game in my opinion (BGG says 2.7 out of 5 and there's a one page PDF that seems to have all the rules), but is one that I find absolutely exhausting to play just because I feel like I need to be constantly walking through everybody's moves to make sure they don't accidentally misscore something, and it leaves me no time to actually optimize my turn. That game really wanted an app version to moderate everything.

I like both direct competition games and the "multiplayer solitaire" euro games, but I tend more towards the later because most competitives fall on the ameritrash side of the fence and rely too much on randomness for my taste (not that I don't own a significant chunk of everything FFG has put out)
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Reply #1281 on: February 26, 2014, 12:24:50 PM

I feel like I must have missed something about Dune. It seemed way too trivially easy for 2 players to win a joint victory the one time we tried it.

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lamaros
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Reply #1282 on: February 26, 2014, 01:02:26 PM

Against four others?

It does have a bit of a learning game feel the first time, as the asymmetry does give some sides obvious strategies and others more involved ones (Chaos in the Old World is the same), especially with Guild/Emperor being pretty straightforward and being fed by others if they're not sure what they're doing. But after everyone has a bit of an idea someone has to play pretty well to win.
lamaros
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Reply #1283 on: March 05, 2014, 03:47:22 PM

Anyone played Dominare? Looks pretty interesting to me.
Goldenmean
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Reply #1284 on: March 05, 2014, 06:14:52 PM

Anyone played Dominare? Looks pretty interesting to me.

It looked pretty good to me too, and I feel that with some house rules, you might be able to make it a pretty good game, but I'm too easily swayed by the new shinies to try to fix it myself.

The problem with the game is really in the power scaling. The abilities your agents have get more powerful the later in the game you are, so much so, that the last turn practically invalidates all of the previous turns. This combined with the length and tediousness of some aspects of the game left a bad taste in my mouth. Every turn you iterate through all of your currently played agents, placing a new one every turn. That means that if you're in direct competition with another player in a particular area, every single turn, you'll watch the exact same events unfold as you each canvas with those agents in the same way.

And then it'll all be for naught when someone just nukes the site from orbit on the last turn.

One of the big disappointments of 2012 for me, and one of those ironic "I'd like it more if I liked it a little less" things. There's so many aspects of it that I found appealing that I ended up more annoyed with it than I would have been if it was just entirely mediocre.

Typical Your Mileage May Vary disclaimer though: We only played it once, and while I don't recall botching any rules, it's possible that expertise in the game might rectify the things I didn't like about it. Lots of Boardgamegeek opinion seemed to lean in the same direction though.
Soln
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Reply #1285 on: March 05, 2014, 07:54:23 PM

I believe consensus is that Courtier in that series is better.  Canals seems very thin.
lamaros
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Reply #1286 on: March 05, 2014, 07:57:27 PM

Anyone played Dominare? Looks pretty interesting to me.

It looked pretty good to me too, and I feel that with some house rules, you might be able to make it a pretty good game, but I'm too easily swayed by the new shinies to try to fix it myself.

The problem with the game is really in the power scaling. The abilities your agents have get more powerful the later in the game you are, so much so, that the last turn practically invalidates all of the previous turns. This combined with the length and tediousness of some aspects of the game left a bad taste in my mouth. Every turn you iterate through all of your currently played agents, placing a new one every turn. That means that if you're in direct competition with another player in a particular area, every single turn, you'll watch the exact same events unfold as you each canvas with those agents in the same way.

And then it'll all be for naught when someone just nukes the site from orbit on the last turn.

One of the big disappointments of 2012 for me, and one of those ironic "I'd like it more if I liked it a little less" things. There's so many aspects of it that I found appealing that I ended up more annoyed with it than I would have been if it was just entirely mediocre.

Typical Your Mileage May Vary disclaimer though: We only played it once, and while I don't recall botching any rules, it's possible that expertise in the game might rectify the things I didn't like about it. Lots of Boardgamegeek opinion seemed to lean in the same direction though.

Oh, I thought it was a case of 'the abilities your agents have are better the later on in the game you play them". As in, you can't use the turn 7 power unless that was the 7th agent you played?

I need to take a look at the rulebook I guess.

Got the rulebook. You maybe played it wrong? You only get two actions a season, then 3 on the final season. Your agents only use the abilities from their rank or below. Their rank is what season they were played in.

Quote
Each agent ability has a number. You can only use an
agent’s ability if the number of that ability is less than
or equal to the rank of the agent. Thus an agent in
rank 3 can only use abilities numbered 1, 2, or 3.

Quote
In
Seasons 1–6, each player receives two actions. In
Season 7, each player gets three actions.

You only take 13 actions over the course of the game,
so agents that grant extra actions can be very valuable.

Edit: Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding you. And you meant that and expressed it ambiguously.
« Last Edit: March 05, 2014, 08:13:25 PM by lamaros »
Goldenmean
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Reply #1287 on: March 05, 2014, 08:23:15 PM

Oh, I thought it was a case of 'the abilities your agents have are better the later on in the game you play them". As in, you can't use the turn 7 power unless that was the 7th agent you played?

I need to take a look at the rulebook I guess.

No, you're correct. It's not that agents "level up" over the course of the game, it's just that agents you play later in the game are much more powerful (assuming you didn't do something incredibly boneheaded like play a good turn 7 ability agent on the first turn) You'll end up with seven agents out. One will have been out since turn one, one since turn two, etc. And you can only use a particular ability if that agent's rank is equal to or greater than the number of the ability. So you can only use a number 7 power if it's on the agent you played in the final turn.

In theory the power of the high rank abilities is tempered by how infrequently you'll use them. After all, you'll have been able to use a number 1 ability on your first agent 7 times over the course of the game. But it just doesn't work in practice because of the power differential. The level 1 abilities might as well say "Gain 1 victory point" or "Gain 2 victory points", while the level 7 abilities say "Gain 1 million victory points" or "Gain 2 million victory points". You spend 90% of the game squabbling over things that just don't matter at all and then someone deus ex machina's a win because they drafted the most broken high rank agent. Or at least that's how it felt to me and the people I played with. It's possible that if you're playing with people who really know the game, you'll be more able to make early play actually matter in the endgame. No one in my group wanted to bother getting to that point though.

If I were attempting to fix the game, I think the first thing I'd try would be adding scoring rounds after every turn instead of just at the endgame. That at least would make the early and mid game feel as if they had some point. But I think you'd need to tweak a lot of agents to make that work.
Goldenmean
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Reply #1288 on: March 05, 2014, 08:25:37 PM

Edit: Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding you. And you meant that and expressed it ambiguously.

Yeah, I was trying to avoid another wall of text explaining exactly how things worked so I just fuzzy languaged it with "Things are better later in the game"

That'll teach me.
lamaros
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Reply #1289 on: March 05, 2014, 08:35:58 PM

Oh, I thought it was a case of 'the abilities your agents have are better the later on in the game you play them". As in, you can't use the turn 7 power unless that was the 7th agent you played?

I need to take a look at the rulebook I guess.

No, you're correct. It's not that agents "level up" over the course of the game, it's just that agents you play later in the game are much more powerful (assuming you didn't do something incredibly boneheaded like play a good turn 7 ability agent on the first turn) You'll end up with seven agents out. One will have been out since turn one, one since turn two, etc. And you can only use a particular ability if that agent's rank is equal to or greater than the number of the ability. So you can only use a number 7 power if it's on the agent you played in the final turn.

In theory the power of the high rank abilities is tempered by how infrequently you'll use them. After all, you'll have been able to use a number 1 ability on your first agent 7 times over the course of the game. But it just doesn't work in practice because of the power differential. The level 1 abilities might as well say "Gain 1 victory point" or "Gain 2 victory points", while the level 7 abilities say "Gain 1 million victory points" or "Gain 2 million victory points". You spend 90% of the game squabbling over things that just don't matter at all and then someone deus ex machina's a win because they drafted the most broken high rank agent. Or at least that's how it felt to me and the people I played with. It's possible that if you're playing with people who really know the game, you'll be more able to make early play actually matter in the endgame. No one in my group wanted to bother getting to that point though.

If I were attempting to fix the game, I think the first thing I'd try would be adding scoring rounds after every turn instead of just at the endgame. That at least would make the early and mid game feel as if they had some point. But I think you'd need to tweak a lot of agents to make that work.


Ah ok. I guess not having card abilities to see it's a hard one to judge. The sound of it doesn't really put me off, though (I actually like the idea of constant back and forth squabbling via the canvassing phase, with a bomb here or there with actions), so I think I'll get it.

It does sound very much like a game where if you think you're making scoring moves from the start, rather than positioning for the big push knowing that its coming, you might approach play differently and feel less put out by end game scoring. Which would come up more once you'd played it already.

Also I'd have thought an easier solution would just be to make the end game have fewer moves than the early game, so final two turns you do 1 thing, not three. Also perhaps having the first draw for agents a draft also.

Edit: Looked at some cards. I normally hate end game domination in scoring, but at least in this it matches thematically (yeah, you turn over the King on your side, of course you're going to make some big changes with that), and the whole game does indicate you're playing for that.  If you did want to change it about it looks pretty easy to houserule a few changes in.
« Last Edit: March 05, 2014, 08:55:56 PM by lamaros »
Goldenmean
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Reply #1290 on: March 06, 2014, 12:08:11 AM

Also I'd have thought an easier solution would just be to make the end game have fewer moves than the early game, so final two turns you do 1 thing, not three. Also perhaps having the first draw for agents a draft also.

Drafting would help. Seeing the high rank cards go around the table gives you more of a chance to prepare for them, so they aren't just a surprise punch in the gut on the last turn of the game. Also makes it easier for people to diversify strategies and form interesting combos. Some of them do rely on the sneak attack aspect though, and drafting reduces that quite a lot.

Maybe part of why I'm so cranky about this one is because of how long it went. We were playing with the maximum number of players with two of the worst analysis paralysis prone people I game with. Sudden and arbitrary victory is one thing, but sudden and arbitrary victory after more than 4 hours is quite another...

Anyway, like I said, it's got aspects I really liked, and I think it's fixable, or improves greatly once you're experienced with the card variety, I just have too many games to skill-up on one I found so frustrating on my first play. I'd be curious to hear your opinions once you've given it a play-through.
lamaros
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Reply #1291 on: March 09, 2014, 10:53:01 PM

Aaaannndddd.... I just picked up Earth Reborn on eBay. I'm getting a little carried away here.

Might need to sell my Pro Player Hex to cover my costs if this keeps up!
Goldenmean
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Reply #1292 on: March 10, 2014, 09:28:30 AM

Aaaannndddd.... I just picked up Earth Reborn on eBay. I'm getting a little carried away here.

One of these years I'll get around to playing that...

It falls into that unfortunate "Advanced 2 player game" category that are probably too involved to interest the girlfriend, and seat too few people to do as a game night. Earth Reborn, Stronghold, most of the GMT card-driven games, all just lie languishing on my shelves.
Thrawn
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Reply #1293 on: March 10, 2014, 10:10:29 AM

most of the GMT card-driven games, all just lie languishing on my shelves.

I think my copy of Here I Stand is still in the plastic wrap.  Which makes me sad.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Goldenmean
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Reply #1294 on: March 10, 2014, 10:22:56 AM

I think my copy of Here I Stand is still in the plastic wrap.  Which makes me sad.

I love reading rulebooks too much to leave anything in plastic wrap for long. I have some hope of actually playing Here I Stand, as it seats up to 6. I just need to stop buying new games long to get around to working through my backlog.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'll probably never play that either. Will that stop me from buying its semi-sequel, Virgin Queen at some point? Probably not.
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