Oh, wow. Axis & Allies. That brings me back.
Sort of like Risk, but better.
Then again, the last time I played it was about a decade ago, so who knows anymore.
I have been curious about this game, what do you think of it?
Itâs cutthroat, you can really screw over other players with a timely action.
Itâs dry, it has an agenda to get you to use bank loans.
Itâs not easy to catch up, we had a runaway leader in our first game.
I like it.
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Is it euro-y tho because I play brass so dry and cutthroat with loans and few/no catch up mechanics are great in a euro context.
agricola++
le havre
at the gates of loyang
agricola: all creatures big and small+
dominion+++
kingdom builder+
gauntlet of fools
race for the galaxy
7 wonders+
7 wonders duel
puerto rico
san juan
twilight struggle
netrunner
citadels
pandemic+
pandemic legacy
splendor
notre dame
the princes of florence
stone age+
carcassonne+++
power grid+
galaxy trucker
space alert+
descent++
tammany hall
settlers of catan+++
ticket to ride
man, i donât even get to play games that often, really. and iâm scared iâm forgetting some
Iâd say i actively dislike 7 wonders, dominion, and rftg
Itâs very euro-y, itâs straight worker placement and set collection and score-to-vp catwalk rounds.
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This has been on my buy list for a while and seems like the raddest game for my tastes (I love area control and interesting catch-up mechanics, the theme seems well implemented)
Have you had an opportunity to play it?
My own personal very-well-regarded-games-I-hate are Catan (cool euro game why is it so high variance) and Agricola (semi-solitaire point salad)
My shameful lot
Zertz
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space
Carolina Death Crawl
Tetris Uplink
Express Monopoly (better than its namesake IMO)
Robert Abbottâs Confusion
Pass the Pigs
I hate Cards Against Humanity
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Iâd say I actively like Race for the Galaxy. 7 Wonders and Dominion I can take or leave; I think 7 Wonders is always kind of on the brink of boredom (but it goes fast!), and Iâve had pretty good and pretty bad games of Dominion. Specifically games with curses drag on really long, and everyone feels exhausted and defeated at the end where the person with the only non-negative score wins.
Dominion is pretty bad with 5 or more people. 4 people even feels like itâs pushing it sometimes.
yeah, a lot of people seem to dislike agricola for that, and I usually hate overly-solitaire-type games, but it totally works for me. Not quite sure why. The degree to which you impede other players is better than it gets credit for.
Settlers isnât terrible but the dice rolls are too frustrating, the expansions all just make it too slow/complex to justify for what it is, and itâs kind of dry. Like most people I have a much bigger soft spot for carcassone, and Chinatown is a more pure âgatewayâ game [ that I can get my extended family to play if we need something to do] that has the same randomness and negotiation (though it breaks down if your group is unevenly cutthroat).
i like race a lot, and i like agricola even more. there really is a hell of a lot of clear interaction going and i like that there is more and more of it as you get deeper in the game and you start mapping out other playersâ remaining turns in addition to your own. and iâve never played a heavy euro game game with such adorable tuning of flavor to mechanics.
i was really into dominion for a while, though iâve cooled on it a bit now. i still think it can be very interesting and the way the expansions ramp things up and riff on older ideas was super compelling when i was going through them the first time but i guess i canât really imagine, like, pulling ten cards at random from all these boxes and sitting down to play a game anytime soon.
7 wonders is so light that it never gets too offensive to me, though i admit i usually feel like my choices are made for me by the time the last cycle starts. it is a game i can play with people who arenât willing to get totally invested in something like a game of agricola, though, and some of the people i play stuff with are definitely those kinds of people.
@tulpa i like tammany hall a lot but i really havenât played it enough to give it a real recommendation. i played just a few games when i first got it, probably more than a year ago, and havenât had a chance to get back to it since. i guess i donât remember it that well at the moment, but i know at the time i was excited to play it again
Eclipse, Agricola, and 1830 are probably my favourite three âcomplexâ games and theyâre all substantially different. each one is impeccably balanced and just a huge amount of fun, and only Eclipse is really comparable to a videogame genre (all the more remarkable that itâs a straightforward 4X thatâs actually tightly paced and works as a boardgame)
TTA is great too but itâs a tiny bit of a slog compared to the others, and the Civ theme is both its main draw and a little tired.
I had archipelago for a while â finally managed to sell it â and itâs similarly well-done in terms of theme and aesthetic, is nicely complex, and has a great amount of player interaction but itâs just a little overstuffed and needed a few more balancing passes.
The only way to play Dominion is to make a market of the worst cards in the game so it takes forever and no one has fun.
so⊠ascension?
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aw, snap!!!
Is Ascension taking a long time really something that happens?
i played dominion once and HATED it but it was 2p, so maybe itâs a game that fares better later. felt like i was just going through motions.
i am surprised this thread got to nearly 300 replies so there is a lot that iâm skipping, but for the record my wife and i ownâŠ
agricola
carcassonne
go
the amazing labyrinth
lost cities
NATO: Operational Combat in Europe in the 1970âs (i am dying to play this even 1/4 of a time)
netrunner
puerto rico
chess checkers cards backgammon et al
she used to have dominion, stone age, and race for the galaxy, each of which i played once and found unredeeming, and ticket to ride which i never played but she hated. we were selling a bunch and we played one game of lost cities which we thought was pretty cool so we kept that.
i actually just played a game of carcassone last night (my third or fourth?) and iâm amazed at how it eliminates like 95 percent of what i canât stand about euro-style games.
i hateâŠ
- hidden scores
- a possibility space inherently unmapped to the first-time player (or few-time player)
- a theme that is contradictory to the expected player behavior
- spoilsport behavior that encourages turn-delaying point-counting
- player-decided end-of-games (that arenât explicitly races)
carcasonne essentially has none of these, which is why i love it compared to most things i have played.
iâm sure thereâs something positive to find about agricolaâs end-of-game, but the theme (build a farm, raise a family) and mostly-solo play inspires creative, constructive behavior, and then two turns out youâre counting ahead and seeing how you can fuck somebody badly. i thought that this natural evolution from peaceful play to cutthroat behavior was splendid the FIRST time i played. âwow⊠this organic sense of paranoia as phase 14 approachesâ⊠anyway the wheels started turning in my head of how i could do things better, and i realize that of course there IS an ideal tactic, even if it hasnât come to me. the moment i realize that âi could have played betterâ, if nobody i am playing with joins me, i am already in the mind-state of considering things like bogarting the clay for 11 turns or making all my family beggars or whatever is best. which, in the end, would lead to a bunch of bad farms for everyone else, likely.
so then why is the carrot of âbuild a fancy farm with meeplesâ dangled in front of the playersâ faces when at round 12, the person who started paying attention at round 8 or better yet round 1 is going to have the edge up?
the sad thing is, i liked the game as i played it but a game whose purpose is mathematical optimization can only encourage this train of thought. i feel like even if i extinguish it i can never go back to the pleasant farming game, and at the same time i feel like i would feel no joy playing against ruthless agricola pros online or wherever. why are you making the game about farm building NOT about farm building and about mutually assured destruction instead?
mixed messages i guess is my problem. i do not want to be the one who thinks too early OR too late. this is my problem with most of these games. stone age was pleasant and then i realized i could decide to win the game and then just counted up the current point differential each turn to decide when i should clinch it. booooooooooooooooooooooooring. and if what it takes to surmount this is playing with superior stone age players then forget about it! i donât even like the game!
all of my criticisms can be negated with âplay with people exactly like youâ and âconstrain your inner desiresâ but thatâs what you do when you play with children, not adults! the other answer is âplay WAY more oftenâ which i do not have the time to do.
which is why i enjoy luck in games, as a social lubricant. when everyone realizes their position is fickle from the beginning, everyone feels motivated to strike! no shame, no spoiling the vibe, nothing!
my wife said âoh i think thereâs only two of thoseâ regarding a carcassonne piece though so now i have to pretend there isnât a count or that iâd ever have any desire to know the odds of pieces coming out. itâs funny how the makers of carcassonne DID include the tile counts â because if you just counted them all youâd have an unfair advantage â but then just transferred that advantage to the person who pays attention to a list. they could have included, say, a checklist or something as each tile came out to indicate what was remaining, but then that FORCES tile counting in a game that could have more or less avoided it if everybody would just⊠you know⊠be coolâŠ
many of these games i feel would be greatly benefitted as computer games or having some kind of random seeding occur at the beginning (i.e., there are 70 tiles and you remove 20 before playing) to eliminate this kind of perverse behavior. that feeling of wheels turning in your head, the âoh, i GET this game!!!â moment is why some of these games exist, but there is ALWAYS further strategy and if you look too deep itâll get unfun very quickly.
i have one game of puerto rico under my belt. sort of a slog, but the game expresses itself as pure competition and itâs a constant scramble to do ANYTHING you want to do. it let me feel free!
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