We’d play Dalmuti at the pub after work on Fridays, so it was never super-competitive. Part of the fun is suffering through the indignity of being last-placed, getting a lucky draw, playing your cards right & climbing into the middle of the pack & perhaps even to first place. Plus, there’s chance of the great revolution, so first become last & vice versa.
Does your game group play many trick-taking games?
The people at the bottom end just kept getting terrible hands. I don’t think anyone got two jesters, either. We don’t often play those kind of games, no.
Also, here is a game that’s basically Apples to Apples except you hook up fictional characters
I once owned Tragedy Looper, but I never got it to the table. It seemed like it would be a bear to teach.
If I understood it right (and maybe I didn’t), it’s a mystery, wherein all the suspects have these arbitrary rules that govern their actions. You have to memorize all these rules, then deduce which piece shifting around on the board is filling which role, in order to alter the Groundhog Day-esque loop.
I imagine it’d be like watching a chess match for the first time, then getting quizzed on what each of the pieces can do. Or like combing through lines of code, looking for a faulty if/then statement.
I thought about what it might be like to teach it to my board game group at the time and the nightmares put me off. So I sold it. Maybe that was a mistake.
I haven’t played it, but I was pretty put off when I learned that you can only really play it once. The Shut Up and Sit Down review is well worth watching if you’re considering it.
It’s really not hard at all to teach, since the game comes with a a player aid for each player that details all the possible information they need to deduce the mystery. If you have a consistent group, I strongly recommend it.
Yeah I feel like that description of TragLoop can only come from having looked at but not played the game. No need to memorize anything because of the player reference sheets, there’s some underlying principles to how the resources work, too: Paranoia is the trigger for characters linked to special events, and both Paranoia and Intrigue trigger negative effects, while Goodwill triggers positive effects. From there it’s pretty easy to at least deduce one new piece of info every ‘day’. Every time I’ve done the tutorial mission, players figured out the actual roles after 2-3 loops and the final loops are always more chess matches of trying to outmaneuver the mastermind instead of a deduction match.
Yea, if anything the game tends to be tilted against the Mastermind since once you get beyond the learning scenarios, the protagonist side gets one last chance if they fail the final loop, where if they can guess every character’s role in the scenario they win anyways. A lot of the fun and difficulty of playing as the mastermind is throwing out false flags everywhere to keep the protagonists from gaining that information while still killing them off.
http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Game-Studios-FNF001-Tokaido/dp/B00ADNLT8G
so just because it kind of fit the dynamic of my house (and seemed to be easy to play) i ended up picking up Tokaido as our gangs first clubhouse boardgame for everybody to knuckle down and play between work meetings and stuff
its presented as a pretty simple game about traveling from one place in japan to the next, and its set up for 2-5 players. its a lot of fun and the rules can be learned in about 30 minutes or so, and the setup time is somewhere around ~10 minutes once you have all of the coins and cardboard popped out of their spacers.
the meta is kind of all about planning out your trip to block other peoples opportunities to build your score, so even though its really simple its basically made for people that can grasp two sets of gameplay types going on at once
Earth Reborn continues to be the best complete in the box tactical miniatures game by far. Christophe Boelinger is some kind of mad genius hybrid designer, like a French version of Vlaada Chvatil.
Also played three player Theseus. It’s weird, even just adding one player makes the game exponentially more chaotic. I think I like it most at 2p, but it’s still distinctly good at three.
I played a Gears of War clone today called Fireteam Zero. It didn’t really do anything super interesting gameplay wise, but the board itself is really cool. All the maps are made out of four giant board pieces, and there’s a whole bunch of different locations. I wouldn’t recommend it (I don’t think anyone has topped Gears in the hand-as-health Doom TBG-like genre) but that aspect of it was pretty neat.
Any of y’all ever play Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space? I (and my playgroup) dig it, and there’s a new and improved edition releasing in a few months:
Is this 30 minutes of reading the rules in preparation for teaching it to a group where everyone is kind of new to board games? 30 minutes to teach the game makes it sound more complicated that Dungeon Lordz/Napoleon’s Triumph/Dominant Species.
30 min of learning all the rules from the book being read out loud. The total playtime for Tokaido hovers around 10 minutes a player. Tokaido is a fun (though not very replayable in my experience, every game tends to feel similar) super minimalist worker placement. It’s actually got more in common with Caylus than later WP games because the placement happens along a linear road. But, you have only one worker and one resource to manage and there is no backtracking along the road.
Actually, I think that’s pretty close to a full explanation of the rules. Restructured: When it is your turn, place your token on any empty spot ahead of them on the road and do that location’s action. The player furthest behind gets to take a turn. Every player must stop at the inns along the road and wait for everyone else to arrive before continuing further down the road.
Man, if you can teach Napoleon’s Triumph in 30 minutes, I’d like to know how.
Basically, play the solo mini-scenario co-operatively.
the fun from tokaido so far seems to be seeing the small ways the characters available and route the players take change the outcome of the game - and so far nothing has been as funny as watching a player realize they dicked around too much in the early moves and don’t have enough room left to catch up
Ok, that actually looks awesome, thanks for tipping me on to that. Maybe I can finally get this played lmao
This looks right up my alley, a blood potion for you sir
I played Broom Service on TTS with my wife and it was surprising how good the game felt to play. It was a bit hard to adjust at first because it’s a very unusual kind of role/phase-selection game (each round, you pick 4 out of 10 action cards and then take turns playing either the brave or cowardly action on each card. Cowardly actions happen immediately, brave actions can be stolen by the other players that also picked that card at the start of the round and whoever was last to play a brave action becomes the new first player)
After a few rounds of play, we delved pretty deep into trying to read our opponent and subtly bluffing what we would pick. It’s not an economic or engine-building game at all (so the only thing it has in common with most phase-selection games is the actual phase-selection procedure) and it has just about the perfect level of variance for a light euro of this type (random event cards revealed at the beginning of a round which effect that round, usually just granting a bonus or inflicting a penalty at the end of the round based on board state; storm clouds are randomly distributed across the board at the beginning of the game)
It ostensibly re-implements the old Alea game Witch’s Brew but it has some massive differences from what I understand (not the least of which is the inclusion of a board whereas the previous was a pure card game)
It’s probably one of the best entry-level Euro games I have played. Featuring heavy player interaction and bluffing on the level of mechanics, it stands out as very distant from the modern crop of multiplayer-solitaire style euros.
Edit: I should note that this was our first game so it was only the basic gameboard and none of the optional variant rules. From what I have read, adding in the variants pushes the game complexity up towards a medium euro
Fairy Tale is an early drafting game and it feels pretty distinct from 7 Wonders and Sushi Go (I like it better than both of those)
Citadels popularized Role Selection mechanics but people tend to forget it was also a card-passing game. Good casual fun. Though some people find it to be a mechanic in need of a game, I disagree.
Has anyone played Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes? It would make for a good talking point re: the imaginary divide between vidcons and cardboardcons.
I’m a huge fan of Keep Talking. I love asymmetric co-ops and real-time co-ops and Keep Talking elegantly solves the quarterbacking problem by basically implementing it into the mechanics: all but one player is essentially trying to quarterback that one player but the instructions past the basic level are so arcane that it is difficult to efficiently communicate them.
that’s a great pitch for broom service, thanks!
