Non-video games

[miffy495]

Looks cool. What the hell, I'm in!

[YoThatLimp]

That is a neat idea for a game!

[syntheticgerbil]

Hooray! Thank you guys!

[Bjorn]

We did a Thanksgiving with just friends yesterday, and it was a fabulous day of great food, great people and new games!

Gravwell was the biggest gaming treat of the day. It's fascinating, kind of taking the idea of rubberbanding in racing games and building a board game mechanic around it. The game is "simple" in that you need to simply reach the end of a spiraling track on the board. Each round, players draw cards that dictate how much and where they will move. The trick is that your reference point for where you move is the nearest source of mass to you. So if you're in last place, and you play a "Move 10 spaces" card, you move 10 spaces forward. But if you're in first place and you play the same card, you'd move 10 spaces backwards, because there is no source of mass in front of you. All players show their movement cards at the same time, and the cards are resolved in alphabetical order (each card has an element on it). There are rare cards which draw all mass towards you, and cards that repel you from the nearest source of mass. Players get to move 6 times each round. Once per round you can deploy an Emergency Stop that cancels your movement. The result is a lot of chaos as each of the players bounce back and forth from winning and losing, and the skill/strategy is in trying to position yourself in the best location at the end of each round. It plays quick, and everyone always feels engaged in it. I was really impressed with it.

Takenoko is a panda feeding game with some design element similar to Settlers (hexagon map that you connect with irrigation systems and collect resources from). Unfortunately we didn't get all the way through it. It's a longer game, and dinner was ready about halfway through, meaning we had to clear the table. But I liked what I saw of it.

Alhambra did not impress me very much. It's a kind of tile/city building game where you are assembling your Alhambra palace thing. Players score points based on who has the most of certain types of tiles. It just didn't feel particularly engaging to me. There's no real player interaction.  One person pulled ahead, and stayed ahead the entire game.  Early mistakes can punish you the entire game.   To be fair, I was a bottle of wine and several ciders into the evening when we played it, so that might have affected my perception as well.

[tberton]

I've played Alhambra. It falls into a common category of games that are perfectly fine but that I would never choose to play over dozens of games that I like more.

[Spenny]

I've found that I've become more and more adverse to board games which don't put forward a good reason why they shouldn't just be computer game instead. Me and a buddy played 2 games of Twilight Struggle, and both times we fucked up keeping track of the rules, we enjoyed it fine, but there's so much to internalize, a computer keeping track of it would be much preferable. That's not the worst offender, just one that came to mind.

[YoThatLimp]

Does anyone else have the full 5E Player's Handbook? What do you guys thing of Prayer of healing on page 266.
​
​It says Casting Time of 10 minutes, but duration is instantaneous which is kind of throwing me for a loop.

[Korax]

Check out 202-203 for more detailed definitions, but that reads to me like this: Casting time is the actual time it takes to perform whatever ritual you need to do to activate the effect. You are making magical gestures or speaking magical words, but most (mechanically) importantly, maintaining concentration. Duration is how long the actual effect lasts. Prayer of Healing's duration is instantaneous, so its healing effect is fully manifested the moment the casting time completes, as opposed to, say, a Light spell that can be cast quickly (1 action), but provides its effect continuously for an hour before fading out.

[Merus]

As a GM, I'd probably play this as the wounds slowly healing over the 10 minutes, and if it's interrupted, they open up again.

[YoThatLimp]

Check out 202-203 for more detailed definitions, but that reads to me like this: Casting time is the actual time it takes to perform whatever ritual you need to do to activate the effect. You are making magical gestures or speaking magical words, but most (mechanically) importantly, maintaining concentration. Duration is how long the actual effect lasts. Prayer of Healing's duration is instantaneous, so its healing effect is fully manifested the moment the casting time completes, as opposed to, say, a Light spell that can be cast quickly (1 action), but provides its effect continuously for an hour before fading out.

 

Yeah and I guess if you think of what it is, the act of praying, the 10 minutes thing makes sense, i don't think I will be busting this out in battle any time soon hah.

 

I am really digging my archer Wood Elf Cleric. 

[N1njaSquirrel]

I got Netrunner the other day on the advice of the thumbs. I originally went in to get Munchkin. How easy is this game to get into? I have never played this game before :S

[Gerretic]

I got Netrunner the other day on the advice of the thumbs. I originally went in to get Munchkin. How easy is this game to get into? I have never played this game before :S

Different people will take different paths into Netrunner; I dove into it full-force almost immediately, buying all the expansions and finding groups at local game stores, etc., as soon as I decided to play it at all, but many people have a lot of fun playing with just the core set and one or two friends. A "typical" trajectory with Netrunner is to play with the prebuilt decks for a faction pair for a while, then switch to other factions, then start building your own decks within the core, and if you enjoy all that, start buying the data packs and building new decks. Have you played other card games like this before (Magic, L5R, Yu Gi Oh, Pokemon)? If so, did you mostly play with friends at home, or go to game shops and play there? I hadn't played a card game like this in 10+ years when I started Netrunner, but when I did I played at stores and that's what I gravitated towards in Netrunner as well. If you haven't tried it but can find a local group, maybe give it a shot anyway! The community aspect of it can be really nice and I enjoy playing this kind of game with strangers, even though I don't typically enjoy playing most board / card games with anyone I don't already know.

Episode 8 of the Terminal 7 podcast (https://www.idlethumbs.net/terminal7/episodes/eventually-your-breathing-will-stop) discusses tips for new players, but that may require a bit of experience with the game already internalized to make sense.

[undermind9]

over the break i found an unopened Carcassone box (base model) in my closet.  I think I've had this for 12yrs unopened - the box art apparently did not appeal to my 18yr old self

 

 

Anyways, it is a great time! My wife who is normally very hesitant to new games or styles of play has totally fallen in love.  The design is a simple tile game and score points by arranging tiles in a way to complete roads/cities, but the big points come from the open "fields" where you can score farmers that connect their fields to other completed cities.

 

Does anyone have experience with the expansions? A quick look on boardgamegeek.com showed mediocre reviews on all expansions...and there are a lot of them.

 

It reads to me that they got a good initial theme/concept and have over the years kept going to the same well for another expansion

[Cbirdsong]

It reads to me that they got a good initial theme/concept and have over the years kept going to the same well for another expansion

Yeah, your instinct is not far off, but the early ones are pretty good. The best ones are Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders.

The Inns & Cathedrals gimmick is basically adding pieces that make roads and towns worth more points if you finish them, but nothing if they're incomplete at the end of the game. It also adds a large follower that is worth two, which facilitates more cutthroat battles over control of cities. Traders & Builders adds resources in city tiles that are earned when completing that city, and extra followers that enhance cities and fields when you play them on one you already own.

I feel like those are the best while keeping the feel of the game the same. The River is a decent buy if you want to play with 4-5 players , but I feel like Carc is at its best with two players in a zero-sum game. If you have an iOS device, the version on the App Store is fantastic, and it has a bunch of expansions available now, if you want to try them before buying.

[tberton]

I haven't played any Carcassonne expansions, but the newly released Carcassonne Gold Rush is supposed to be quite good. Also, my former roommate did the translation on the rulebook, so it should be comprehensible!

[undermind9]

thank you for the info! 

 

I have to correct my initial post, the box set must have been a second edition because it has the river tiles included.  I'll check in at my local game store next time out on that side of town for those expansions

 

 

And looking through humble-mobile bundles I found the Android Carcassone app.  I will take a look and see if i can get the dlc w/builders & inns for a trial run.  great idea!

[Salacious Snake]

If anyone here appreciates the extraterrestrial lifeforms from the Alien franchise and enjoys challenging cooperative games, then I wish to recommend the awkwardly titled Legendary Encounters: An ALIEN Deck Building Game.

 

It's a deckbuilder in the sense of Dominion or Ascension. I didn't understand that bit of jargon until recently, thinking that building a deck referred to what you did prior to playing a game of, say, Magic: The Gathering. But no, it's one pool of cards, and the central mechanic of the game is that of acquiring cards from that pool to shuffle into your deck.

 

Anyway, this takes some generally well-trod mechanical stuff (most directly from Legendary, the Marvel super hero thing) and puts in aliens and Jonesy. It's something where you might expect a superficial paintjob, but they came up with a new framework for the action that makes it exceptionally evocative of the theme. Hidden critters and hazards of various sorts march inexorably toward the players, faces are hugged and chests are bursted (which can lead to a dead player reentering the game as a baddie). There are even traitors working for the company among you! 

 

I doubt it'll go down as a classic, and I'm sure there are far better games in this style out there, but it uses its theme really well, it's easy to play, and it has a surprising amount of variety, thanks to multi-layered objectives and hidden agendas.

 

Plus, I really like ~xenomorphs~.

 

It super sucks to organize the cards when you first open it, though.

[Korax]

I just grabbed a copy of Boss Monster after playing it a little while ago. I was initially apprehensive of it because it seemed like the sort of thing that would just be the vehicle for a bunch of winking references to retro games, but it's pretty fun. It also has a bunch of winking references to retro games, but I didn't find them to be overbearing or obnoxious.

[Bjorn]

Who the fuck is my D&D character?

[feelthedarkness]

that is amazing!

[Gormongous]

You can often tell a great game by how it tempts you into the mentality of its subject matter. By that rubric, Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem is a masterpiece, if just for how it had my meek bean-counting friend threatening to put some of my boys in the emergency room over territory that meant nothing to him, just to show that I couldn't walk up on him like that. Of course, I ended up being the one who threw down, even though it lost both of us the game, because I knew I had the guns and he didn't. Learned my lesson, you can't be wasting your time beefin' over corners when there's another guy out there pushing product.

Okay, it's obvious I've watched The Wire more recently than Sons of Anarchy, but this game really captures any piece of media about small-time gangsterism.

[Bjorn]

I never would have believed that a Sons of Anarchy game would interest me, but your brief summary there piques my curiosity. 
 
 
Speaking of transmedia games, Xcom: TBG comes out this week.  RPS has a rundown on the single player experience, with the multiplayer review coming next week. He seems to have come away from it with a quite positive experience, but what he actually describes doesn't sound all that interesting to me when I try to expand it to four players. But maybe the timed element on the app solves some of the issues I have with co-operative board games, where the person who thinks they are the smartest just tries to run everyone else's turn.

[Gormongous]

Speaking of transmedia games, Xcom: TBG comes out this week.  RPS has a rundown on the single player experience, with the multiplayer review coming next week. He seems to have come away from it with a quite positive experience, but what he actually describes doesn't sound all that interesting to me when I try to expand it to four players. But maybe the timed element on the app solves some of the issues I have with co-operative board games, where the person who thinks they are the smartest just tries to run everyone else's turn.

 

The interesting element in a multiplayer game is that each person has to complete their business within the allotted time, else the time is taken out of the next person's turn. That makes for an incentive not to interfere unless they're horribly flubbing it, which is probably where most of us would draw the line in solving the "alpha player" problem. It does mean that XCOM doesn't seem that interested in being accessible, though.

[Cordeos]

I have only played the Tutorial mode for Xcom the board game with four friends, but I'm already enjoying the game. The timed aspect really adds a level of stress that other co-op board games don't really have. We did a lot of planning since we could pause the app, I do wonder how the game changes when time is a big factor. You can always try to plan a little for the next round during the resolution phase, but in the timed phase you won't really have a chance.

[Dewar]

Sounds awesome to me. I imagine that the game almost turns into a negotiation game as you add more people.