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I think the default box inserts for games suck in one way or another 98/100 of the time. If I may insert a plug, I have a friend who started making inserts out of plywood, and they are great: http://gameguard.eu/ (he ships internationally, I think). He tries to make all expansions fit into the original game's box if possible. At about 25€, it's too expensive to get this for every game, but I'll probably get them for several of my favourite games as he designs new ones.

 

I have the Cyclades one and it works perfectly, making the setup very easy and enjoyable. I also got the Merchants & Marauders one, but haven't played it yet.

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So we've been playing a bunch of Imperial Assault in our house with Star Wars Mania in full effect.

 

I am not sure why, but my wife is currently obsessed with the game and she isn't a huge star wars fan and doesn't really like physical board games at all. It's combination of theme, minis and very basic tabletop rpg (investing and getting attached to your characters) has her totally hooked.

 

We played for 6 hours Sunday, 2.5 hours Monday, and she asked if we could keep the game setup so we could play after dinner tonight as well.

 

Was not expecting that this Warhammer RPG-esque game to be the game to finally hook my wife, but not mad about it at all hah. 

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Nice! We've got a campaign of Imperial Assault going every other week. I really like the streamlining of the Descent rules they made for it. Makes everything go nice and fast. It's actually not all that fiddly and they're pretty clear with the rules, which is an improvement over Descent I'm very glad for. We've had to stop maybe once to check for a clarification that came down to the player interpreting something in his favor when he shouldn't have.

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Is Imperial Assault any less swingy than Descent 2e? The fact that it uses opposed rolls to resolve combat really rubbed me the wrong way. Most of the advantages and disadvantages you could gain during play were far less significant than the potential swing introduced by the dice.

 

On the subject of board games with persistence: Anybody else playing Pandemic Legacy? I'd highly recommend it.

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Is Imperial Assault any less swingy than Descent 2e? The fact that it uses opposed rolls to resolve combat really rubbed me the wrong way. Most of the advantages and disadvantages you could gain during play were far less significant than the potential swing introduced by the dice.

 

On the subject of board games with persistence: Anybody else playing Pandemic Legacy? I'd highly recommend it.

 

Once you start earning XP and credits and start buying stuff you get a lot of stuff that helps negate the randomness of the opposed rolls. 

 

How far are you in the Pandemic Legacy campaign? I bought it but have not had a chance to get it to the table, was thinking about maybe cracking it open this weekend. 

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How far are you in the Pandemic Legacy campaign? I bought it but have not had a chance to get it to the table, was thinking about maybe cracking it open this weekend. 

 

 

We just finished March. Had a really shaky start with two straight losses in January, but easily won game 1 in February and barely squeaked by game 1 of March. From the tone of chatter on BGG,

the shit doesn't really hit the fan until later in the year, so I'm happy we got two victories after a really discouraging first session.

 

It seems like it will definitely be best when played with the same group every game. Like vanilla Pandemic, it is ultimately an extremely difficult group puzzle solving exercise, but the long-term consequences from losing means a group with disparate skill levels is even more likely to have unhappy players at the end of the game. Either experienced players will hold their tongue and not instruct newbies on exactly what the best strategies are, resulting in a loss, or they will boss the newbies around, who will wonder why they're even there if they have no agency on what's going on at the table.

 

 

With that caveat out of the way, I'm far more absorbed in Legacy than I ever was with regular Pandemic. Every game will be a little (or a lot) different than the one that came before it, and when you get a real unlucky streak you can't just throw in the towel and try again - you have to actually deal with it, as well as figure out how to reduce the chances of it happening again. It's so much more harrowing than the standard game.

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Imperial Assault is pretty stacked against the rebels. As you progress though, new skills and equipment make it less of an uphill battle. You also have side missions that come up that don't net you a large reward, but stop the Empire from growing even more powerful (which so far has always been the right thing to do).

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SUSD did a great review on Arboretum and it's a simple enough game mechanics and theme wise that I think I'll be able to get family members playing. Need to play more to feel it out but placing trees in rows is pretty relaxing.

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Looks like Eric Lang is designing/has designed a Bloodborne card game for Cool Mini Or Not.

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I am getting a group together this weekend to play Twilight Imperium, it should be a fun, frustrating and long day.

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I played a game of Scythe finally, at a friend's place, and all it did was confirm to me that I don't really get what makes a game "hot" in internet communities. There are a lot of cool things at work in Scythe: unique player boards with upgradable orders, military units that are also used as transports for workers, an achievement-based calculator for when to end the game, and a tiered victory point system that restricts aggressive behavior without disincentivizing it. It's clearly a careful design by a smart guy, and yet... I don't know, even though I ended up winning, there were just a ton of things that didn't gain traction with me how I like.

  • It's weird that it's only worth it for each player to win two battles, because that's the maximum number of stars to be gained from it, and yet the game is constantly throwing combat cards and power levels your way like you're constantly getting into fights. If that's supposed to be an incentive by itself, it didn't work in our game at all.
  • Resources are incredibly important in the early game, but once you've built all your mechs and buildings, made all your upgrades, and recruited all your soldiers towards the mid-game they plummet in value to being the weakest source of victory points, which also reduces workers from the key means of getting resources to the weakest form of area control. I understand the urge to keep a player with an airtight engine from running away with the game, but there's an incredibly unsatisfying feeling to having laid out your workers across the perfect number of hexes to be defensible and to provide you with all the resources you need... until you've bought everything, then you splay them out trying to claim as much territory as you can for the end-game.
  • A lot of the "hard" decisions for units and buildings are actually not that hard: you don't have to defend buildings once they're built, because they're there for the rest of the game, so their placement's usually a matter of at-the-moment convenience; losing combat just wastes a move order and gives you a card, while winning it can tank your popularity and only gains you the space on which you fought; characters and mechs, the two combat units, are almost always better employed having encounters (the character's only other utility, except for fighting) and transporting workers, respectively.

Honestly, the biggest downside for me is that most of the systems have been deliberately tuned not to be "random," something the designer and his fans have trumped up all over the internet. Yeah, great, but there's a ton of hidden information and card draws. Deterministic chaos technically isn't randomness, but it's managed exactly the same way, so... I don't know, it doesn't seem like a worthy design goal for me when it makes so many of the game's decisions feel less exciting to confront. If I could ever get it to the table again, I'd almost rather play Sons of Anarchy, which gets a lot more energy out of the "worker placement but you can attack other player's workers" cluster of mechanics...

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The dislike of anything that smacks of randomness is my biggest (game design) gripe with a large portion of the board game hobby.

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I share that pet peeve of a peeve. I mean, I totally get not wanting it to feel like you have no influence over things, or that there's no meaningful strategy, but there are plenty of dice-heavy games that reward strategic thinking and careful planning.

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The dislike of anything that smacks of randomness is my biggest (game design) gripe with a large portion of the board game hobby.

I share that pet peeve of a peeve. I mean, I totally get not wanting it to feel like you have no influence over things, or that there's no meaningful strategy, but there are plenty of dice-heavy games that reward strategic thinking and careful planning.

Life in general is figuring out how to mitigate randomness.

 

And, as I said, deterministic chaos (having too many variables with too complex determiners to be reasonably expected to track) is functionally the same as randomness in the overwhelming majority of board games, except those with heavy deductive elements built into the gameplay, and yet most games "fix" their randomness by replacing it with deterministic chaos, even though you can "predict" randomness on a dice roll much more than you can predict what card someone will play in a rocks-paper-scissors battle system drawing from a shuffled deck into a hand. It's clearly just to placate a certain breed of nerd who wants their board games, like most video games, to be power fantasies about absolute control and untrammeled cognition. They want there to be a version of the game where they track every little thing and make all the perfect decisions, even if that's functionally impossible.

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Anyone playing anything recently? I picked up 7 Wonders: Duel which ahs been nice to break open, i also picked up the X-Wings Miniature game core sets to test out, looks interesting! 

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43 minutes ago, YoThatLimp said:

Anyone playing anything recently? I picked up 7 Wonders: Duel which ahs been nice to break open, i also picked up the X-Wings Miniature game core sets to test out, looks interesting! 

 

I finally managed to play Inis at a local board game convention and it was great. Economical, fun, beautiful art. I also played Tyrants of the Underdark and liked it more than I thought for a hybrid area-control/deck-building game? Lots of good games available these days.

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I've been playing Mahjongg every other week, but I've also found time to fit in some Machi Koro. It's basically Settlers of Catan but instead of a map, you buy properties Monopoly style that pay out with different dice rolls. It's simple but quick and fun.

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Nice, I watched some of the Yogscast guys on a sponsored stream and it looked great.

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9 hours ago, Gormongous said:

 

I finally managed to play Inis at a local board game convention and it was great. Economical, fun, beautiful art. I also played Tyrants of the Underdark and liked it more than I thought for a hybrid area-control/deck-building game? Lots of good games available these days.

 

Did you happen to see Potion Explosion?  A friend played it at what I'm guessing is the same convention, and she said it was really good.  The pictures she posted of it looked rad, using marbles to brew potions in card board potion bottles to hold the marbles in. 

 

I've gravitated towards faster, easier games lately because it seems like on the rare occasion I can play anything, we never make it through bigger or more complicated games, so this looked intriguing.

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13 hours ago, Bjorn said:

Did you happen to see Potion Explosion?  A friend played it at what I'm guessing is the same convention, and she said it was really good.  The pictures she posted of it looked rad, using marbles to brew potions in card board potion bottles to hold the marbles in. 

 

I've gravitated towards faster, easier games lately because it seems like on the rare occasion I can play anything, we never make it through bigger or more complicated games, so this looked intriguing.

 

I not only saw it, I played it! It was weirdly hot at the con.

 

Some of the people with whom I played liked it a lot, but I was a little lukewarm myself. Part of it was that I lost, and badly at that, but part of it felt like the design of the game itself. Doing well in Potion Explosion is mostly about pulling a marble from the tray in such a way that marbles of the same color come into contact with each other and you get to pick them up as well, Tetris-like. You use the potions that you complete with those marbles to change the makeup of the tray, in order to get more marbles when it comes time to pull one. I thought the basic puzzle was interesting, but if you guess wrong for your two starting potions or can't get the right one in the draft, you're just going to fall further behind as other players use their potions to get marbles to complete potions to use them to get marbles, and so on. Your only real option for catching is to wait for the other players to make mistakes or get unlucky, too.

 

It may be that I was just unfortunate enough to be playing at the wrong level: with more seriousness, I'd probably have the knowledge and experience to minimize the snowballing of other players, and with more casualness, I'd have had more fun just watching the other players pull off ridiculous combinations. Still, it didn't really grab me, as it stood. My go-to short games are still Skull and Codenames.

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Potion Explosion is a gigantic hit in our household. Both my daughters also love it (4 and 6) - the younger at a more physical level, the older also trying to think ahead about chain reactions. The only knock I'd give the game is that it encourages very long turns because there's so many options once you have a few potions done that you want to think everything through. But that's also just the kind of players we are and know so maybe more of an indictment of our playgroup.

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Haven’t posted in this thread for a while, but I have to say guys, I think Inis is a super awesome evolution of the Cyclades/Kemet kind of area control game. It has improved on the simplicity of the rules and dramatically shortened the game time compared to Cyclades. It can take you many games to realize how many differenent ways there are to victory, and then it can still surprise you. This last game I thought I had a chance to win on the first round, but instead lost on the second, this is how dramatically quick it can be, if players want to go really competitive.

 

It has card drafting instead of Cyclades’ auctions and it works really well without much downtime compared to possible analysis/paralysis of Cyclades. And the way all the possible actions come from cards (drafted and otherwise gained) is brilliant combined with the area control mechanics.

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I have been playing Twilight Struggle like crazy for the last year and a half or so. For those that have not heard of TS before, think 1v1 Risk between the USA and USSR during the cold war, with Risk's poor game balance fixed and a bunch of extra well-crafted complexity layered on top. 

 

I know it's been said before, but holy cow the theme and mechanics of this game are in lock-step. The way the board naturally unfolds really does often mirror the actual cold war, with the Middle East becoming a hotbed early on and SE Asia being contested by the USSR coming in from the North and the US from the South. Even just at the board level the mechanics and theme dovetail really well, not to mention the very thematic and well-crafted card events.

 

I honestly think it is my favorite boardgame ever at this point. With the right partner it's such a deep game with such a large possibility space for each and every move. When you lay a hidden trap many turns in advance and finally get to spring it for a huge VP swing... man, it's so satisfying! 

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