the One Night Ultimate games are generally fine with me but they are definitely “drink and hang out with friends” games
Though it is (at least with the early sets) possible to actually deduce the situation so long as the people who have no reason to lie don’t lie. It falls apart if someone starts bluffing when they have no reason to.
Yeah, my issue with the games is that it’s always just a game of people with provable powers proving their stuff and then whoever is stuck with drunk or exposer or blob or cow hoping someone looks at their cards. After that it’s just an argument about who chose what token when and why. It’s partly saved by the tanner and minion, without characters who win by dying it’s just dumb
Cosmic Encounter was one of the games we first played when I was getting back into board games, and it nearly put me off them entirely.
Codenames is a fun game and also cheap so I would recommend that. It’s better than Mysterium (I don’t think Mysterium is a very good game). Hanabi is also very good but I’d suggest it after the board game group is more settled in. It’s not as good a gateway game as others mentioned here.
there are meta ways to get around this
If you’re a character who has information but also has no reason to lie, the best thing you can do is to only give partial information. “I’m the seer but I won’t say who I looked at” until you feel confident about who the werewolves are and either expose them or start lying.
I just found out there’s two Moby Dick card games.
Help me.
Has anyone bought into the new Fantasy Flight produced Legend of the Five Rings living card game? I wasn’t a player of the old CCG, but found myself swept up in the hype (at least among all the Netrunner players I know). I’ve had the chance to play about 5 games of it so far, and I’m really enjoying the pacing and flow of the game. It has barely any economy cards and auto-refilling currency as part of its core design, which leads to it having a really nuanced sense of early game, mid game and late game. It’s quite complex initially but I was surprised how quickly and intuitively it’s working in my head already. If anyone is interested, the Team Covenant people have been making some decent introductory videos, including this “learn to play” alongside one of the game’s lead designers.
Here is a jpeg of me playing it yesterday (because I am invested in card games for the accessorising potential as much as I’m invested in them for their systems).
Hell yeah L5R looks like it rules, I’ll probably get it this month or next month. Did you hear about the controversy about the chanting at events tho? It’s pretty fucked up imo and I haven’t heard if FF has addressed ppls concerns or not…
I only really started hearing about it once FFG issued their discontinuation of the “Banzai” chant announcement and its subsequent replacement, via here. It seemed like a really misguided thing to promote in the first place, and I’m definitely behind any kind of actions to make card game environments more welcoming to players coming from minority backgrounds.
Generalising is obviously bad, but I’m already realising the kind of privilege I’ve had as a Netrunner community member, based on that community’s efforts to be as welcoming as possible and consistently intolerant of badness and bigotry of any type. In comparison, at the L5R Launch event I attended last weekend there were people making jokes about and deriding FFG’s decision to change the chant, and the vibe of the players was different to say the least (but generally welcoming and chill?). But yeah, I’m maybe hesitantly curious to see what the player base and community of this game ends up being like…
Oh! Yeah, I hadn’t seen that press release about replacing the chant. That’s good. I feel comfortable supporting the game at this point, but FFG had definitely make sure to enforce the new rule and also any players who are overly (which is to say, vocally/publically) shitty about it.
yeah in the aforementioned discussion thread on SU&SD the justification for the previous chant was essentially a bunch of attempts to frame the context of the word around its “original meaning”
watching a bunch of people willfully ignore the modern connotations of words so they can justify yelling them at the beginning of the tournament is something else, wow
the main problem I had with the usage (and I said this in the thread) was that there was nothing in the game itself that attempted to re-contextualize the word. the only two things that were actually present was the chant itself and a card called “Banzai” that depicts a guy jumping into a bunch of spears pointed at him
so this is actually a really good way to address it I think – by making the chant something that the diegetic parts of the game itself supports it allows the game to retain its setting without appropriating cheaply. FFG obviously put a lot of work into the magical asian setting of the game, so it’s good to have them double down on their own setting as opposed to trying to shoehorn actual asian things into the game that’s kind of set in ancient japan but not really
Is it one of their older games reskinned or is it a new thing?
Its a reskin of an old AEG game whose setting was developed by a white guy named John Wick (yes, really). It was also a terrible RPG! When D&D 3rd edition came out a dnd version came out called “Oriental Adventures”. Really.
FFG didn’t actually do any setting development as far as I know, they just licensed the ccg and converted it to an LCG.
The weirdest instance of colonialism via this game is still at AEG. You know how love letter was reskinned when it came to america with a generic medieval europe theme (where as the japanese edition naturally had a medieval japan theme). One of the first reskins of love letter was into the L5R setting and you could get this version before you could get one with the original art. So you could get a fake japan theme for a japanese game but not the original japanese theme.
Oh, I meant the mechanics because I expect their old GW licensed games to show up at some point and I thought Conflict was pretty neat. That is good information, though, and I’m glad you told us.
no L5R was a CCG that they acquired, and while they changed a lot of the mechanics, it’s still at its heart that old CCG.
The old GW license games are going to be coming out under their generic settings not one that they licensed. (for instance, Fury of Dracula will probably be a letters from whitechapel spin off, Warhammer Adventure Card Game was essentially adapted into the Arkham Horror Card Game, Forbidden Stars (which was already a starcraft re-implement) will probably show up as a twilight imperium spin off (or a spin off of their generic fantasy setting))
!!!
there are differences (The arkham horror game is an LCG so you’re expected to regularly buy expansions) but it’s obviously of the same lineage, the LOTR LCG -> Warhammer card game -> Arkham Horror evolution
From speaking to old CCG players who are picking up the FFG LCG, it seems to be a very different game mechanically. It seems like they wanted to keep some of the core concepts (honour, provinces, back-and-forth conflicts) but a lot has been done to change the game while retaining its feel. I don’t know if I’d characterise it as a reskin (although I was surprised to learn that certain card art is borrowed from the old CCG). I’m somewhat glad they didn’t borrow its mechanics and make it a Jedi battle game, or whatever, but I’m going to be paying pretty strict attention to what sort of sensitivity they employ in handling the game’s setting.
I played Alien Frontiers for the first time the other night. Been a long time since I have been able to get all my friends together for some games. I loved it and I thought it was much better than Kingsburg. Not really knowing anything about the game or it’s design besides dice placement I was really surprised how clean and elegant the design is.
I still havent played it but people talk about Voyages of Marco Polo as the very best dice placement game
I just spent way too much money on a certain rare edition of a certain rare game on ebay after playing it for the first time at shux and being amazed at how good it was (compared to splotter stuff, which in my experience generally doesn’t earn the pricetag), and I had it delivered to the sb meetup location because the seller didn’t want to ship to canada
look forward to it
