Non-video games

[Merus]

Hanabi is great, but the last several times I've played everyone is giving hints beyond those that fit the rules, and it's made it considerably less fun.

 

Yeah, you absolutely have to cut the table talk for Hanabi to work.

 

I think if I were you, next time, I'd pointedly stare at the person, flip over a fuse token, then say 'that's one'. If they don't get the hint, at least the game'll be over quickly.

[BusbyBerkeley]

I don't care much for Hanabi largely because I play board games to have fun times with buddies and it feels like there are too many things you can't say so you have to scold people pretty regularly for talking the wrong way. And eventually any groups I've played with comes up with their own metagame language to convey information. It felt very tedious. I do love that it can be entirely accurately described as "Mulitplayer Solitaire" in a way that isn't like "everyone plays their own game at the same time" but in that it's almost exactly the game of Solitaire.

 

I got in a game of Tash Kalar yesterday and it went over great with the girlfriend. It's weirdly abstract and game-y, but the pattern matching puzzle element is a great hook for a casual nerd. I think having multiple objecitves to fight for at any given time really helped the game never really feel hopeless for either of us. And the flare cards are a great way to manage runaway board control, though neither of us were able to/did invoke them at any point.

[tberton]

I don't care much for Hanabi largely because I play board games to have fun times with buddies and it feels like there are too many things you can't say so you have to scold people pretty regularly for talking the wrong way. And eventually any groups I've played with comes up with their own metagame language to convey information. It felt very tedious. I do love that it can be entirely accurately described as "Mulitplayer Solitaire" in a way that isn't like "everyone plays their own game at the same time" but in that it's almost exactly the game of Solitaire.

 

I can't argue with that critique, but I'll just say that I enjoy talking about games after playing them as much as I enjoy the playing itself and Hanabi lends itself really well to after-game conversations.

[Salacious Snake]

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective appears to be entering the wild again! http://www.coolstuffinc.com/p/183130

 

I snapped one up, and I figured people here could be interested thanks to Idle Thumbs 180: Wars and Pieces.

[undermind9]

Ty for the info, i hesitated last fall when they came back @ $40.  I am truly interested in playing - and the price gouging on amazon is incredible

[TheLastBaron]

Are they already sold out again? That was fast

[YoThatLimp]

Damn, forgot to scoop a copy up, ah well.

[Cbirdsong]

Last time copies popped up at a number of retailers over the course of a few days. I'd keep an eye out elsewhere if you missed it.

[J.C.]

Played Memoir '44 for the first time a couple nights ago. When I first got into board games wargames did not appeal to me in any way, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this. A friend and I are going to be diving into a good amount of the heavier games he's got, like Twilight Struggle, which is apparently fantastic.

 

Also played Love Letter: Batman Edition as filler. Actually adds enough to the formula to stand on its own, which is really nice; I went in expecting it to just have a reskin of Love Letter.

[TheLastBaron]

I didn't realize that the Love Letter variants weren't just reskins. I saw the Lord of the Rings version at a game shop near me the other day and assumed it was like other light games like Munchkin or Fluxx or what have you that just pick a new theme and reprint the game.

[J.C.]

From what I've heard, each has a little gimmick that makes it different. Not sure how well the others work, but for Batman, it changes it up pretty well.

 

To elaborate: If you play Batman (rank 1, guard equivalent) and you guess and eliminate someone who has a villain card, you get a VP token. In this version you are playing to 7 points. You could potentially get 5 points in a round if you had 4 Batman cards and correctly guessed everyone's villains, and were the last one standing.

[osmosisch]

Played Memoir '44 for the first time a couple nights ago. When I first got into board games wargames did not appeal to me in any way, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this.

I believe the Memoir system is simply that good because I hate wargames in general but love their system, especially the Battlelore implementation.

[J.C.]

Got to try out Castles of Mad King Ludwig on Friday. Unlike the group I played with, I don't think it's better than Suburbia. Still really good, but there's something about Suburbia that just works so perfectly, although that resource track is too easy to bump and screw up. It was neat trying to fit all the differently sized rooms together and make it all work. The abundance of secret goals adds a good bit of direction in how you might want to build your castle. All in all a good game.

 

 

I believe the Memoir system is simply that good because I hate wargames in general but love their system, especially the Battlelore implementation.

 

I've yet to try Battlelore, but my friend I played Memoir with has it and is looking forward to having someone to play it with.

[Erkki]

Castles of Mad King Ludwig is pretty good. I've only played it once, though, and don't know what Suburbia is so can't compare. The only problem I have with it is that setting the prices as the master builder is nearly an impossible task that can lead to analysis paralysis, and when playing for the first time you just have no idea what to do there. But I guess it's still kind of fun, especially if you pull it of really well, and not that big a problem since you can just give up and use some random order (although that way you could unknowingly play into somone else's hands).

 

Lately I've mostly been playing a few games that have become favourites in my group(s). Firstly Lords of Waterdeep has become my favourite worker-placement game. It's amazingly simple for how complex it is, easy to explain, well balanced, and the randomized aspects (lords, quests, intrigues, buildings) make it very replayable. I only regret a bit that our group doesn't care much for the thematic elements, so we often don't even read the names of the quests and talk about colors of cubes instead of wizards/warriors/etc. The expansions are also cool, but it's too bad you have to separate them after each game and can't just mix everything together.

 

I think I have mentioned this earlier, but Cyclades is still our favourite strategy/area control game. It's also amazing how differently it plays, given the fixed starting positions. Some games can end rather quickly and surprisingly, but sometimes it gets really intense with people starting to insult each others' moms and it just ends up kind of like Munchkin where everyone wants to stop the leader(s) from winning until there's no way left to stop one player. It can get a bit anticlimatic that way if some big battles are fought in a round before the victory. Some complain that the Pegasus can be too randomly powerful, but to me that's kind of the appeal of the game -- that you can't protect yourself against everything.

I wonder if the expansions for Cyclades are any good? They sound interesting, but maybe just add unnecessary complexity?

[Gormongous]

I've decided that I need to buy a ninety-second sand-timer for Sons of Anarchy. This last game was more than double the suggested running time of ninety minutes because of all the under-the-table dealing, none of which actually resulted in any bribes being made, unless you count one bag of contraband paid to a player in case something that didn't happen happened... or better yet, a two-dollar and two-contraband bribe to a player who claimed that he didn't understand the bribe he was accepting when he accepted it and therefore that he deserved to keep the bribe anyway because of the inconvenience caused by that confusion.

 

I wonder if the expansions for Cyclades are any good? They sound interesting, but maybe just add unnecessary complexity?

 
I haven't played any of the expansions myself (I secretly think that Cyclades is like Battlestar Galactica, in that any additions ruin the perfect balance of the original design) but Shut Up & Sit Down reviewed both Cyclades: Hades (in text) and Cyclades: Titans (in video). Long story short, they hated Hades for adding a bunch of "modules" that dilute the focus of the game and multiply the busywork, but they loved Titans for being an all-in-one "remix" of the original game that was its own distinct but coherent experience.
 
I've played Lords of Waterdeep half a dozen times and really enjoy it, which is odd considering that there's nothing really special about its design. I wish there were a way for me to drill further down on that, but I don't own it myself, so I can't do a real teardown of the mechanics.

[tberton]

Lords of Waterdeep is the Blizzard game of Eurogames: unoriginal, but highly polished, almost to the point of being dull. It's not my favourite, but it's a good choice for introducing people to the genre, or if you just want to hang out with people without having the game take up too much focus.

[Erkki]

I kind of see what you mean, but so far Lords of Waterdeep has been anything but dull for us. Or well, for me one aspect that can make it dull-ish is that it might be even too well-balanced. You can think that you have an awesome lead, or even that you are losing, but end up winning by 2 points. It is possible to lose by a lot, of course, but then probably due to your own obviously sub-optimal moves.

 

I think what makes it great is how simple each element is, and how well they combine. It's probably one of the best examples of emergent combinations of game mechanics, at least in an eurogame. For example, that you complete quests after doing an action lets you play more stealthily by not explicitly showing what quests you are going for (by taking them just in time to complete them), but of course that way it is more difficult because you can't be sure the quests you want will be available.

[tberton]

To me, what makes Waterdeep kind of dull is how it applies the "point salad" approach to game design. Everything is equivalent to everything else. This is especially clear at the end of the game, when everybody's just taking the spots that get them the most cubes/money/gems/whatever because every just converts to points at the end anyway. It leaves each element of the game feeling kind of hollow. The fighters don't feel like fighters, the money doesn't feel like money and the snozberry's certainly don't taste like snozberry's.

 

My complaint isn't that "it does its theme poorly," which is a pretty common critique of Waterdeep. I actually quite like the implementation of the theme: the idea that all these different adventurers are abstracted into resources for use by the Lords feels neat. But I don't like it when games have interchangeable resources. It just seems like a missed opportunity. It makes the game really smooth, but also makes it kind of slide off me.

 

That said, I do enjoy playing Waterdeep and think it's a good game. I especially like the buildings: any game where you can buy buildings for other people to use gets at the core of what makes Monopoly fun and appeals to me greatly. I'm surprised more worker placement games haven't taken that up, especially since it was a core mechanic of Caylus, the ur-worker placement game.

 

If you're interested in more worker placement games that have a few kookier aspects, but are still fairly simple, I highly recommend both Alien Frontiers and Spyrium. Both have that same aspect of "simple mechanics working in concert" that you seem to enjoy in Waterdeep.

[Merus]

Oh yeah, I understand that complaint, but I find that most of those resources matter in terms of quests, which are non-optional if you want to win, and which resources you have easy access to does matter for the kinds of quests you like because of the tight theming. I wish the conversion mechanic wasn't just a straight 'these are worth 1 point, this is worth 0.5 points', especially since what that mechanic actually is doesn't matter in the slightest. Get one of each class, that's 5 points per class. Have the most money, you get 5 points.

[J.C.]

Castles of Mad King Ludwig is pretty good. I've only played it once, though, and don't know what Suburbia is so can't compare. The only problem I have with it is that setting the prices as the master builder is nearly an impossible task that can lead to analysis paralysis, and when playing for the first time you just have no idea what to do there. But I guess it's still kind of fun, especially if you pull it of really well, and not that big a problem since you can just give up and use some random order (although that way you could unknowingly play into somone else's hands).

 

Suburbia is another game from Ted Alspach. In it you're basically building a city by laying tiles, balancing income and population. Unlike Castles of Mad King Ludwig, you get bonuses from what is in your play area as well as what other people play. In that respect it's a tiny bit more fiddly, since you always have to pay attention. Another difference from Castles is that every tile is the same size and shape so there's no 'tetrising' the tiles into your layout. Regarding price setting, Suburbia doesn't have this issue. The board doesn't determine the prices of the tiles, it adds an additional cost to them (they have a base cost on them). Tiles come out at the end, having the biggest additional cost, then as tiles are purchased, they move down, being reduced in price.

 

It could all be I kind of prefer building a city to a castle, but both are really good games. I just prefer Suburbia.

[tberton]

Oh yeah, I understand that complaint, but I find that most of those resources matter in terms of quests, which are non-optional if you want to win, and which resources you have easy access to does matter for the kinds of quests you like because of the tight theming.

 

That is true, although it doesn't play as significant a role as I'd like it to. That also ties into another issue with the game, which is that the quests come out too randomly. If you're going for Warfare and the really good Warfare quests don't come out, you can be pretty screwed.

[YoThatLimp]

Have any of you tried bigger worker placement games? Lords of Waterdeep is kind of my first foray into the genre. I wonder how the expansion for Waterdeep is. 

[J.C.]

Have any of you tried bigger worker placement games? Lords of Waterdeep is kind of my first foray into the genre. I wonder how the expansion for Waterdeep is. 

 

There are two modules for the expansion. One basically just adds more stuff to do, while the other adds a new currency of sorts (corruption). They definitely add some length to the game, which can be both good and bad. Bad when playing with newbies who want to play with everything because it effectively doubles the length of the game. Good because it adds more variety to what is a pretty simple game.

 

I like the game but pretty much every complaint tberton has about it I share.

 

I strongly dislike Agricola, which I know many people consider to be one of the best worker placement games. Le Havre works much better for me. Kingsburg is technically worker placement and is also a very good one, though more on the intro side.

 

Looking through BGG's worker placement listing, most of the ones I've played fall on the lighter side, and even then, for such a prevalent mechanic, I haven't played very many.

[tberton]

Yeah, the Waterdeep expansion is pretty good. The Skullport module I especially liked.

 

As for other worker placement games, like I said, my favourites are Alien Frontiers and Spyrium. I also quite enjoy Lancaster, Keyflower and Last Will. I'm also not a fan of Agricola, but I haven't tried Le Havre and I know a lot of people who hate the former but love the latter. Personally, I wish Uwe Rosenberg would go back to designing game's like Bohnanza.

 

The worker placement games I tend to enjoy have a twist on the mechanic. Alien Frontiers' workers are dice, and it has an area control game layered on top of the worker placement. Spyrium has this really weird, neat two-dimensional bidding system and card tableaus. Lancaster and Keyflower both have systems where you can outbid people for spaces. Last Will is the most conventional of the ones I listed, but even it has a really fun, Brewster's Millions theme to it.

[J.C.]

Last Will is great. Runs so counter to how most people think so it's neat seeing them struggle against their instincts.