what’s almost worse is the number of video games adopting “deckbuilding” mechanics that just come off as limp attempts to make randomness compelling
hand of fate and concrete jungle are both decent games otherwise but the idea of building a deck that you’ll use to interact with the rest of the game isn’t really touched on outside of token mentions 
Yeah, the individual mechanics aren’t inherently bad, they just form an unholy marriage of shitty unplaytested game design glutting the market with terrible games (Thunderstone, Ascension, Star Realms, DC Deckbuilder)
I still haven’t played Through the Ages but I’m way interested in trying it out, especially since it got a second edition this year. I’m pretty overtly a huge fan of Vlaada Chvatil’s designs (as can be seen by how many appearances he has on the OP list)
I’m still looking forward to playing Brass as well, but it’s a tough sell to people because I don’t have a good board games scene in my area so I’m usually acting as ambassador for the better sorts of games. A heavy euro-game focused on the cotton industry of 150 years ago hasn’t appealed to anyone. Oh well, at least I won’t ever have to suffer through Sentinels of the Multiverse thanks to my petulant refusal to put up with that game.
TTA is not much like vlaada’s other designs, even though I get the impression that it was kind of a breakout success at the time (everyone loves Civ!) and led to the formation of CGE. it’s a slow one. I still like it though.
Just chiming in to say, ‘Thunderstone is one of the worst games I have ever played, and I love deckbuilders.’
Through The Ages actually uses its market row intelligently by turning it into a dutch auction, which makes all the difference. I’m super hype for the new version speaking of which, US market needs to hurry up and get it already.
A quick recommendation for Ghost Stories – it’s a coop game that really requires four players to work correctly; if you have those four though, it’s really quite good in that it’s consistently challenging even after you figure out optimal strategies and the varying powers of the players, the enemies and the board configuration means that every game is pretty different. It does fall a bit into the trap of one person who’s decided that they’ve figured out how the game should work attempting to dominate other people’s turns, that’s true for pretty much any coop game in a game group with an asshole though.
How does it compare to Chaos in the Old World besides the obvious (it’s not a co-op)?
Much simpler, much faster. Basically, it’s a wuxia game and you’re four Shaolin priests defending a village against overwhelming numbers of ghosts/demons, one of which is the Big Bad Demon, who comes in one of a variety of forms. There are resources that color-match against the demons/ghosts, and each priest has a unique special power (actually, each priest has two, you randomly select one at the beginning of the game).
The village is a 3x3 grid of tiles, each representing a functionary that performs a task for the priests. The players have to move around the grid, although they have to be on the outside tiles to fight the enemies, who come in down the 12 channels to the edge tiles – if they reach one of the edge tiles, the tile goes haunted, you lose whatever function it serves and depending on what difficulty you select, you could lose (in the easiest difficulty, it has to be a tic-tac-toe sequence for the players to lose IIRC).
The enemies come in incredibly rapidly, sometimes 2 to 3 per each player’s turn, so you’re constantly running around trying to plug the gaps of evil trying to overwhelm the villages. You have to get through like 40 monster cards before the Big Bad Demon shows up so basically every turn is going OH FUCK what was really bad is now really really bad, how can we react to this situation in order to have the greatest chance of survival. Plans are constantly changing, players often make sacrifices for each other when they deem it necessary and it’s incredibly tense. And then if you survive long enough, a hideously powerful incarnation shows up and you have to do some sort of special sequence to defeat them. The group I play with has about a 66% success rate at the easiest difficulty and I actually think we’ve been pretty lucky to get a rate that high.
Highly highly recommended.
Sounds like Pandemic? If I can get a playgroup of exactly 4, then I’d prefer to play CitOW once, over Pandemic. If the group wanted to play co-op, then Knizia’s Lord of the Rings.
LotR is pretty easy & plays ok with 2 (with two hobbits each). The challenge is to see how much you can exceed your previous high score by. The meta-challenge is to not purchase & play with the Sauron expansion because it increases the player count & lengthens the game & doesn’t add any fun.
That’s me, it’s even better when you have two [players like that] tho.
Agreed, the best situation is multiple of those people and nobody who’s going to allow themselves to be railroaded and then feel shitty about it afterwards.
(I tend to do it myself; I try to keep in my lane as much as possible though as my social anxiety over creating awkward situations overpowers my need to Be Right.)
Oh man, I really want you to play Space Alert, or at least Hanabi to find out just how untrue this can be. Hanabi (from the same designer as Ghost Stories!) because communication outside of its specific prescribed method is against the rules of the game, Space Alert because time constraints and informational density make it impossible to actually play like that. You’re too busy trying to not fuck up your own actions to tell everyone else how to act. It’s more important in Space Alert to clearly communicate what you are doing than it is to communicate what others should specifically be doing.
I did play one game of Ghost Stories, but it was 3 players and I ended up kind of hating it. The threat deck just dumped 6 ghosts in a row at the start of one turn and we went from winning to ‘almost impossible to win’ because of that. (we ended up being one turn short of guaranteed victory and figured this out a few turns before that) I’ll assume that this game is way less unbearably random with a full complement of players.
Pretty sure every Vlaada game can be described as not much like his other designs. I can see very little in common between Code Names, Space Alert, Mage Knight and Tash Kalar
TBH the only game by him that I’ve played and didn’t like at least some part of was Galaxy Trucker
Wait, how it LotR easy? The game forces a pretty high degree of loss per board if you play with 4 hobbits (let alone all 5 the game comes with), in that there are several types of tokens you get penalized for not having, and there are only 3 of each of those. Plus the whole RNG at the end to win. I mean, I’ve only played it like twice, but it didn’t seem easy (unless you did like one friend did, and assumed there were supposed to be more than 3 of each token thing), to the point where it makes me laugh. I’m fully willing to grant that whoever showed me that game didn’t know the full rules or nothing, but yeah.
my wife and I are playing pandemic legacy together w/ 2 characters each over the holidays after we got sick to death of each other trying to dominate pandemic games in larger groups so I will report back about that
When you’re familiar with the LotR boards, you can earmark the gifts from Galadrial to be used by certain hobbits on certain boards & blast 3/4 of the way through a board in two turns. Not every hobbit will make it to the end, so in the later boards one of them can be the patsy & take the corruption fall & leaves the tokens for the others.
IIRC you need to get 60 points to ‘win’ and we’d get high 70s without much effort and would make our fun by seeing how far into the 80s we could get.
oh, I always forget about mage knight. by “unlike his other games” I just meant slow paced and without the possibility/inevitability of dramatic upset and swings among players, but mage knight is definitely like that too.
Pretty sure every Vlaada game can be described as not much like his other designs. I can see very little in common between Code Names, Space Alert, Mage Knight and Tash Kalar
I agree with this, he’s definitely no Feld or Rosenberg to give some examples, but at the same time that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some unifying tendencies in his games post-TTA. The biggest one that stands out to me is some form of simultaneous decision-making, which I believe is only absent from Mage Knight, Codenames and Tash Kalar. There’s also in my mind a rough quartet of games formed by Galaxy Trucker, Space Alert, and Dungeon Petz/Lords, which all have this particular eastern European bleak sense of humor based around building something up as the game actively tries to tear it down. Also, I recall reading an interview before where even he considered TTA relatively unique among his games.
Chiming in quickly to say that if you guys like deck-building games, check out Star Realms, and not just 'cause I was the game’s graphic designer. It’s actually just really well designed and super addictive (the digital version makes me upset because I think it looks gross, but it lets you bang those games out real quick).
If you ever see me at PAX or something I will give you a copy if I have one on me.
I am wrist deep into boardgames. Here is my BGG profie:
Here is my top 5 games:
Here are 5 games you should buy and teach to others:
Dead CCG I play: Shadowfist
P.S. What the fucking shit is this autonumbering? List should be numbered the reverse of what shows.
1830 is great. Still love it. definitely feels like an american game from the 80s but it holds up about as well as can be expected. Chinatown is a nice brisker version that scratches the same itch but maybe isn’t quite as good in the end, the same way that String Railway is a nice brisker version of Carcassone.
Terra Mystica I just found too fiddly. It’s neat and well-balanced, but the production is just so weird and it doesn’t add up to much.
Most of my other favourites (Agricola, Cosmic Encounter, Tash Kalar, Consulting Detective, Eclipse) have already been discussed itt. I’ve still not played Caverna though I hear good things – basically I’ve heard that it’s like Agricola crossed with Dwarf Fortress.