Please, Carcassonne Was My Father's Name: The Board Game Thread

frog fractions is actually good though?

just wanna update folks on my noob boardgame adventures. this last week at the BG club I played splendor for the first time, which was a great romp, and the original USA ticket to ride.

i have to say that as far as splendor goes, i am really into it. i like easy to pick up games with simple mechanics and a wide variation of strategy within limited constraints. thinking about picking it up.

ticket to ride usa…felt inferior to the european one to me, which was the first i played. without the ā€˜train stations’ or whatever they’re called, it’s very easy to get demoralised early on from a route being cut off from you and essentially KNOWING you are losing points from turn 10 or something. at least with the stations it could be a mid/late game gamble depending on how you played, and it still has a disadvantage (doesn’t contribute to longest route). also not having long-routes as part of starting cards, and the whole way you pick routes at the beginning annoyed me. was fun, just, i’d like to try out more versions (UK, pennsylvania) rather than replay this one.

in other news, i have finally been playing the thread’s namesake with my spouse. a lot of fun. we started out w basic rules & have expanded to using the 3 additions pre-packaged with contemporary carcassone boxes: the river, the abbot, and farmers. after some reading, i think i really would like to get inns & cathedrals and traders & builders to make it that much more complex. seems like inns & cathedrals is a little more hard to come by, however…

lastly, i found out about biblios and am salivating over it. i suppose my bias towards ā€˜smaller-scale’ games is becoming clearer and clearer…

PS loving citadels, someone in the BG group brought another game, ā€˜mission red planet’, i think it’s called, suggesting it to me since i liked citadels so much. we didn’t get a chance to play but looking forward to that one quite a bit.

Those are the two good expansions, the other expansions make the game more complicated but don’t offer more complex strategies, so they really just serve to muddle the experience.

I recommended Mission: Red Planet to you up-thread, you should definitely try it out.

TBH I’m not enamored with Splendor at all. I do not get the appeal.

Since you’re digging into small-scale games so much, you should check out Coup. (NOT Coup G54, only the original Coup)

I find Splendor really boring and basic as well, but I can understand the appeal in a) the quality of the chips (which is apparently less so in the latest printings, lol), and b) it’s baby’s first engine builder. I taught it to my sisters, who had previously played no modern board games ever, in like 5 minutes, and ended up playing it 3 times in a row or something. Otherwise yea, I sold off my copy and don’t play it if there’s something else going on.

ah yes indeed you did tulpa. r

funny, i was reading about coup last night. i sort of went off the deep end with major insomnia and started looking up all kinds of video-reviews of games i’d never played so i could get a feel for them and my list has expanded ten-fold. i’ve gotten really fond of the ā€˜starlit citadels’ review gals, who know their shit and aren’t jocks about it.

which incidentally piqued my interest in collaborative narrative storytelling like arkham/eldritch horror. eldritch sounded appealing to me for being more streamlined and ā€œeasierā€ and also potentially much shorter than arkham. but i also have read some detractors saying it’s better to just start w arkham anyway. is there a non 18,000-hour way of playing arkham? i think like <3-4 hours is acceptable to me, i dono if i’m at the point in my life where i’d sit odwn for an 8 hour boardgame.

other things that came up that looked amazing: istanbul, roll for the galaxy, alchemists, jaipur, quantum, pocket imperium, mascarade.

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arkham is terrible ignore the naysayers. Eldritch improves the whole experience to the point that it becomes a decent story generator on par with Tales of the Arabian Nights.

Starlit Citadels is a good channel but they do only do exclusively positive reviews because they’re basically the marketing arm of a games store (which isn’t too great a criticism as the fact that they are remotely watchable does put them leagues ahead of most youtube boardgame people). If you want a good channel that no longer updates, https://www.youtube.com/user/UvulaBob/videos these are good, to the point reviews. Someone will probably recommend Shut Up and Sit Down and yes in your case they are perfect because their aim is to talk about games for the audience of people that aren’t already Knee Deep in the Board (if I start a board game podcast this is the name I’ll use)

roll for the galaxy, I haven’t played yet but I am the one very big fan of Race for the Galaxy in this thread so I can probably passively recommend it, alchemists is kinda gimmicky rather than deep, Jaipur is GREAT 2 player, so good. Quantum’s fun and does neat things with dice. You should try both mascarade and coup and just buy one of them because they’re similar but mascarade is more chaotic (because it’s french and french board games are known for their chaos (chaos and randomness are separate concepts in board games and I am usually on the side of chaos in design because that’s where the play happens (see also the use of the fruitful void in story games, where game designs are often left intentionally incomplete because that’s where player input happens))) and coup is more actively bluff-focused. Coup works better with low player counts whereas Mascarade supports more than 10 players.

Everyone should I get into Netrunner

how much do you like fgc hyper-competitive culture

netrunner/magic players are the only people I know that worship at David Sirlin’s feet

i dont care about fighting games whatsoever, i just remember netrunner being a big thing for a while

Ah well

The game is itself well designed but the community surrounding it is really obnoxious so you’re probably best off just buying two core sets and playing within your own social circle and never going beyond that.

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actually, tulpa, i’ve seen quite a few videos where they give games mediocre reviews, or even (in the case of biblios) say that it’s a nice filler game, but they’d pick any other filler game over it first (i still want it, btw). i get what you’re saying but after the rule explanation section i’ve actually seen a lot of critiquing, more than anything–than again, i only watched like <12 videos, obvs there are hundreds and maybe there are more as you say.

i’m DEFF into mascarade; i’d probably pick that over coup. love the theme, aesthetic, and really into chaos in games as well.

I think this is a good game, despite having played it something like three times now and losing every time. I think one of the keys is keeping track of as much as you can mentally (though you can’t have perfect information), and I typically don’t attempt that sort of thing when playing games.

I think this is a very good game. It reminded me a little of Five Tribes at first, mechanically, but I like it better than Five Tribes. I look forward to the next time I get a chance to try it again.

I’ve been playing this for a month or two, and I’ve only ever played against the one friend who taught me the game and a couple others I taught the game to. I’ll warn you that even though you can theoretically pick up a limited number of cards to play casually with friends and stop there, you will almost certainly find yourself wanting to get more. So be prepared for that sort of investment if you try it and like it.

yeah I was excited for netrunner because the Living Card Game format of giving you playsets of new cards every month so you didn’t have to worry about trading cards and card rarities seemed like a perfect way to allow players to keep up with the game

and then I realized that every month is actually really quick and I have no idea how to keep up with anything anymore

dinosaurus is still the best tho

Yes

re netrunner:

This is exactly my plan

The first expansion for my company’s game Epic is coming out next month. It’s like Magic: the Gathering except much much cheaper. Maybe check it out?

Epic was not my cup of tea. Maybe others would like it. Kind of like starting a MtG game at turn seven.

Ok, I finally got around to playing some board games and Mission: Red Planet is really good. Aside from just being a good game, it was nice to have something with so few rules for once because our game group tends to play things blind and has short attention spans.

We also played Runebound and, although it’s not awful, it’s pretty slow and there’s a lot of downtime. I suspect if you really want to play it, there’s a card-based game that will scratch the same itch better.

Speaking of which, has anyone played the Warhammer Quest card game? I haven’t heard any first hand information about it, but it does seem to sell really well.

I have actually heard many good things about the warhammer quest acg. I havent played it, mind you

It takes a certain type, but the people who love it really love it. I admittedly have only played a few games, but my biggest concern is that you can run away with a game much easier than in MTG. Then again, there are plenty of people who play nonsense like Vintage and are used to that sort of thing.

Also we’re throwing $100,000 at a year-end tournament. Wish I could compete, I can’t imagine the metagame will be too tough to decipher.

Yea, biggest complaint I’ve heard about it is that there’s not enough content and the randomly generated mission system can be broken pretty easily, but they seem to have errata’d the latter last I heard.