I remembered! But left it off my list for no good reason.
Played Coup Rebellion last night, the modular version of coup. The first round we picked random cards to play with, and it was awful. We were more careful with what we picked the next few rounds, and the games were much better but still felt messier and looser than normal Coup which is pretty much perfect (though everyone last night complained about Contessa being a terrible card to have).
It was fun trying different combinations, but unless we find a really good one, I donāt see myself playing it again.
Also won No Thanks with my best score yet, minus twelve.
Splotter put up preorders on their online shop for the new printing of Indonesia.
ā¬75 feels a bit gougey for such a fiddly game. Are Splotter the MMP of euros?
The price is more because they do small print runs than anything, but you get a lot of game with a Splotter box. Theyāre pretty much the kings of high interaction zero luck Euros.
So a local game store is having a stocktake sale, so Iām wondering if some of you want to have a quick look here and see if there is anything worth grabbing? Iām pretty much only interested in games under $30 though.
http://www.adventgames.com.au/c/4552384/1/re-opening-stocktake-sale.html
If you havent picked up Coup Reformation, it is a good expansion for regular Coup. Only for the new mechanics added (they make high player counts more interesting/less totally chaotic) as the inquisitor card is itself not very well designed (a sign of how bad Coup G54 would be, maybe?)
Otherwise, the timeline games are probably not to your taste but are decent trivia filler (one of the small handful of games that do trivia well)
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Got Space Alert for my birthday and tried to learn it alone before I bring it to my group this weekend. I normally like to set up a game and sort of mime through it by myself to ensure I understand everything. The game is kind of pain/overwhelming to act through yourself; I guess thatās probably a good sign for how complicated/hectic it will get with a group. I read through the walkthrough rulebook as well as skimmed the rules proper for anything I was unsure about. I think I have a general idea how to play, now. I guess Iāll learn this weekend if Iām missing anything.
If Iām playing with people that are pretty experienced in board games, whatās the smoothest way to teach the game? Should I follow the scenario structure in the walkthrough manual? It seems like some of the training scenarios are unneeded or introduce mechanics too slowly. I guess I can probably just play it by ear and skip ahead if my group gets board on the more limited scenarios. Just donāt want to introduce the game the wrong way and run out of time/get bored with it before we get to the meatier runs.
I would skip ahead to the first simulated run where people play cards face up and then do the mission before internal threats are introduced. Finally just do the full game from there.
I think WatchItPlayed has a full tutorial video as well, you can watch that to ensure you get the mechanics Just checked and I was incorrect. There are youtube tutorial videos explaining the mechanics of space alert but I canāt attest to their quality. Might still be useful?
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The old UFBRT video is an excellent high level primer on the gameflow.
You definitely want to be as familiar with the game as possible before you teach it, it will be painful otherwise. Iād recommend doing a solo run or two first. When actually teaching it, the main thing you want to get across at the start is the split nature of the game when it comes to action and resolution. Iāve had good luck splitting teaching into two missions: teach everything up to internal threats (so all A and B actions, and the C actions for mouse jiggling and shooting missiles, etc) and do the advanced simulator, then teach internal threats and the rest of the C actions and do the other advanced simulator that has everything. Also make sure to point out the color coding on the movement arrows, because lol.
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Played Space Alert tonight with 3 friends (so 4 people total). Was a lot of fun, and everyone seemed to enjoy it!
Took @agrajagās advice and did everything up to internal threats, then did full games. Seemed to work pretty well that way. I donāt think I missed anything while teaching. I think my explanation itself was a little inelegant ā didnāt quite know what order to explain the mechanics in ā but I got the rules across well enough that no one really had any questions or misunderstood the rules.
We played one round of the simulation w/o internal threats, which we lost pretty definitively (one player shot into empty space most turns and when asked why said āI donāt know! I was overwhelmed!ā). We then played the advanced simulation (with internal threats) and barely won; I think one sector took 5 damage.
We went on to play missions 1 and 2, which we both lost, and we finished with a run of mission 1 which we won. We used the white threat cards the whole time; I was scared of the yellows and we werenāt doing well enough to warrant them anyway!
The game is sort of the perfect amount of chaos. With four people we tended to work in teams of two. It didnāt always split well that way (based on the cards we had), but in general our more successful runs followed that pattern.
Our failures were actually a pretty good mix of strategic and mechanical errors. One player kept mixing up red and blue arrows (had a game where he tripped 3 times ā we lost that one). Another player tripped when teleporting, which is a funny mental image. He had looked at the teleport card upside-down, so he thought he was going to the bottom of the ship when he was actually going to the top.
We had quite a few mishaps with energy manipulation. This is probably one of the hardest parts of the game for us right now, but we got a lot better at planning it as we played more missions. By the end of the night we were planning energy correctly for the first couple phases, but weād sort of inevitably lose track of it by the end of the round.
The saddest loss was one where we were fighting a Cryosheild Frigate. That enemy ignores all damage the first time itās hit; we either overlooked that fact or the person that was meant to ping it forgot. Our first hit on it was 9 damage, which it completely ignored. If one of our players had used the pulse one turn earlier (instead of refiling the energy on the already-full reactor), we would have won.
Anyway, super fun game and Iām excited to play it again. Thanks for the recommendation @Tulpa (& others!)
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So I played a few games of Carl Chudykās Innovation and I hope itās not representative of his general sense of design (since people spoke positively of Glory to Rome itt)
Itās just a bad game in just about every way. Thereās some small joy in how ridiculously unbalanced it is for the duration of the first game. Starting off with minor abilities in your tableau and ending the game by scoring 10 points per action in addition to free card draws. Thereās a sense of recklessness to it, which quickly deflates in follow up games. Itās as shallow as Fluxx but easily one of the more convoluted and text-heavy card games I have played. It features both absurd amounts of take-that gameplay AND runaway leaders (If they top-deck particularly overpowered cards it is hard to catch up until you topdeck something equally unbalanced. Still they will usually have enough of a headstart that you will lose no matter how tactically strong your game is)
I won the games I played so this isnāt sour grapes about not being good enough to beat the game, this is just kvetching about playing a game that amounts to: use an overpowered card you were lucky enough to draw until you win.
Literally the only games I can think to compare Innovation to are Munchkin and Fluxx, only itās worse than both because while it is as lolrandom and shallow as those games, it has unreasonably convoluted mechanics, that slow the game to a crawl because each player has to read a paragraph or more of rules text on each card.
I own his game Impulse, but Iāve never tried any of his other titles. Itās a so-called 4x space conquest game with a minimalist design (both visually and in the way you re-use components in different ways). Iāve played the game three times now and I like it. Itās deeper than you might expect for a game that looks simple visually and can easily be over in a little more than half an hour.
Also, I am a little infatuated with Android: Netrunner now. Iāve been experimenting with deck ideas and researching the available cards, though I have only played the game a handful of times so far. As with my Magic: The Gathering experience in the past, I donāt see myself ever going so far as to play competitively. I much prefer just playing with friends who arenāt too serious about it and just want to experiment with different interactions.
You shouldnāt play his games, one of his direct inspirations is Combo Winter of 1998 M:tG. Most of his designs include a race to break the game first, usually by setting up an infinite draw-play combo or insta-win condition. Glory to Romeās meta game is all about this.
Also, bit harsh to call it a bad game when Cards Against Humanity/Exploding Kitten existā¦
There are degrees of bad-game. Just because some games are worse doesnāt really excuse the total lack of strategy and tactics in Innovation. Like it would be one thing if I was building a broken combination of cards in my tableau in order to win, but all Innovation could accomodate was top decking a card with a broken ability on it and only using that card to score points faster than the other players (or ruining the other playersā tableaus)
I just got a copy last week, but havenāt played it yet. What card was it? Iām guessing it was a mid-age card, as the first three ages are pretty week and the last few super powered (but Iād expect players to have a pretty good board by the time they came into play).
From a quick scan, Iām guessing Anatomy (4; demand: return a score & then top card), Classification (6; steal and meld all card of one color), or Sanitaion (7; demand: switch their highest with your lowest cards in hand)?
Early advancement: draw a card and use mathematics (2) dogma, repeat until you get a more efficient card or math gets covered up.
Medicine (3) is one of the only effective catch up mechanisms in the game and you hope for it if you arent lucky enough to be in the lead.
Astronomy (5) is like mathematics, easy advancement and in addition gives a possible vp.
Combustion (7) though, just do that every turn and get achievements when you can. The better your opponents play, the more you gain. Though if luck plays out like it did for me in the last game, you would have 5 of 6 achievements (for two player) by the time you started on the fourth deck.
I have a weird soft spot for Innovation even though itās not really a good game because I played it back when all I was playing was crappy Ameritrash stuff (Last Night on Earth, the old FFG Game of Thrones) and it and Dungeon Lords are what got me into Euros.
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Just played Glory to Rome yesterday. Thatās a pretty good game. Everyone wanted in for a second round. I am wondering about mottainai which seems to be a redux.
I have played GtR many times and was in on the Kickstarter. It is in my long box of ācard games you gotta tryā
Thereās a level of Innovation play where you memorize the decks that seems compelling and less rnadom, but I am not sure it is worth reaching.
Red7 is also pretty OK
Yeah Iāll give GtR and Impulse a shot. Red7 just sounds like more fluxx though.
Memorizing the cards in innovation still seems pointless. I was able to do some card counting in my second game because each deck is only 10 cards, one of them removed and the others being split up evenly amongst 5 colors so I could predict which colors I was likely to draw with some regularity, and I could at least remember the colors of the extremely broken cards per age. It still amounts to drawing the good card before your opponent(s) does only you can figure out one turn earlier there are no more good card draws in a particular age.
I wish I was less salty about this game but thereās a particular sting of betrayal when you open up a game with the promise of complex tactics and interesting card interactions and what you instead get is convoluted fluxx but a bit more random.