I have long assumed that proframming digital board games was easier than other genres of video game. People were doing it in basic 40 years ago. Nonetheless, there is probably a twilight struggle post mortem or an armello post mortem floating around if you want a modern look at it.
UPDATE: The Escape from Aliens people are sending me a replacement, it looks like, so hereās hoping!
Also, I played Power Grid for the first time! I won thanks to getting lucky and being able to get a powerful turbine farm on the first turn. It is a well designed game and I enjoyed it, but itās a bit long and I donāt think Iāll really feel the desire to play it again anytime soon.
Finally purchased Pandemic Legacy and played the first two games with a group of 4. Will use spoiler tags when I get into the nitty gritty later but we had a close win in our January game and had a ridiculously fast win in our second game
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Played AGE OF STEAM tonight. The only other train game Iāve played is Ticket to Ride which I enjoyed, but I like this one better. Similar thing but more depth, but not TOO much depth (though still deep for my casual group, so Iāll probably get Ticket to Ride too).
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Martin Wallace economics games are (usually) remarkably solid. Iāve been hearing a lot of good things about his recent game, Via Nebula.
He has a great talent for making more in-depth economy mechanics feel simple and accessible. I can get the appeal of an 18xx game but I will never be reasonably able to play it becauseāof my local groupāI have the heaviest taste in games and those games only really work if more than one person is on board with mathy train economics.
Pandemic Legacy spoilers talk
January
We won our first game. Yellow ended up being our COdA virus. I was the researcher, my wife was the dispatcher, and my two other friends were the scientist and medic. Scientist took a scar because of some bad luck. Epidemic and then infection on the same city, same turn, causing an outbreak where he just happened to be. He picked the Intimidated scar because that seems the least hazardous early on. Scientist isnāt going to be spending a lot of their actions treating diseases anyway. Blue was eradicated before we finished curing 3 diseases, so our upgrades were one positive mutation on blue (The disease known only as Anime), and a starting research station in Istanbul.
February
No one switched characters this game and we must have gotten extremely lucky. A single outbreak in an otherwise empty part of the world, and we cured all 3 diseases in 3 and a half rounds. We never even drew any yellow infections after the initial infection. Sadly, no eradications so we just upgraded our characters. Obvious medic upgrade and obvious dispatcher upgrade applied. I have to say the idea of the āuncurable diseaseā is a clever way to implement the Legacy narrative. I have some ideas where it is going but weāll see when it happens. Iām guessing zombies, which would make this the only good board game about zombies.
What is everyoneās favourite train related games
Iām a sucker for drawing and just look at that cover art
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1830
well and transamerica if that even counts
Edit: Letās throw in Chicago Express
I have played Iron Dragon more than once.
I should have added āand whyā to my post
1830 is the ultimate game of unbridled capitalism. It can be played 100ās of times without getting boring. THe train part is almost incidental to the stock manipulation. ~4-8+ hours a play
Transamerica is a pretty abstract 20 minute game that is like ticket to ride with no cards. Great filler.
Chicago Express is the perfect euro distilatiomn of 1830. Plays in 90 min and still has stocks.
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Power Grid b/c people who donāt like train games still like playing it.
But that isnāt a train game! Itās about power plants!
āThe mechanics in Friedemann Frieseās Power Grid were taken from crayon rail games. Its predecessor Funkenschlag even used crayons to denote power lines. In this sense, Power Grid is more of a ātrain gameā than such train themed games as Ticket to Ride, Union Pacific, and TransAmerica.ā
IF THERE ARE NO TRAINS IT IS NOT A TRAIN GAME, THIS IS HOW THE WORLD WORKS MIGUEL
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What if you house rule it that there are trains?
OK I finally played a couple of games of Cosmic Encounter. Itās ok for how old it is but I would have to be pretty drunk to get into it since itās Kingmaking the game. Multiple times I was in a situation where I could immediately end the game by giving the victory to another player. Everyone else was in the same boat as me. Very shallow experience. Too long for how filler-y and non-designed it is. I guess itās good for people who like seeing wacky things happen in the game, but even then itās low meaningful interaction.
As far as actually good games, I played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. The only drawback I had with it was that only 4 players made it way too hard for the killer and the game would be better with closer odds between the murderer and investigators. This game is kind of like if Mysterium was blended with the Resistance (it came out before Mysterium but it went largely unnoticed). One of the players is a murderer, who chooses a weapon used to commit the murder and a clue. Another player knows who the murderer is and the cards they chose, but can only communicate by pointing at tiles that vaguely answer questions about the crime scene. The rest are investigators who freely discuss murder scenarios and at the end of each of the rounds they state a theory on how the murder happened. The murderer is pretending to be an investigator as well, and also presents theories. Every investigator also has one chance to accuse a person of being the murderer and pointing out which weapon and clue was involved in the murder. If their accusation is correct they solve the crime. If no one successfully accuses the murderer before the end of the third round of investigations, they get away with it. Deception takes about 15 to 20 minutes per game, and is a riveting experience even if 4 players is too few for a balanced game.