RBM shows a good example for collecting magazine/ziplock boardgame
Paper box is super easy in my town, I will make my own version for mess collection
https://www.festi.info/boxes.py/
If youâre finding a box lazar cutter site
I played Hansa Teutonica many years ago and had a positive first impression of it, but it was hard to find at the time and it never seemed to come up in the various game groups I visited. But a few years ago they published the âbig box versionâ and I bought that. I recently got a chance to play my copy for the first time and I think itâs a very good game. Worker placement with direct player interaction thatâs constant but never feels vicious.
Another game I played a few times recently is Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, a card game based on the Terraforming Mars board game (which Iâve never played). This game shamelessly borrows from Race for the Galaxy, and the interactions between the cards is a lot of fun. However, unlike Race for the Galaxy, which (by design) ends just when youâre really getting your âengineâ going, this game gives you several more turns after that in which youâre just collecting tons of resources and putting down more cards you donât really care about at that point. Itâs kind of what you sometimes wish youâd get a chance to do in Race, but it also illustrates the wisdom of Race not letting you do it.
This week me, @Mothra and @bib finished Gloomhaven and its expansion, Forgotten Circles. We started playing when lockdown happened in March 2020 and have been playing nearly weekly. Thatâs 2 and a half years.
Just a wonderful dungeon crawl on a mechanical level. Seems to preternaturally produce skin of your teeth situations where, despite all the complexities leading up to it, you often just barely win (or, occasionally, lose). After failing once on the very final boss, thatâs how we suceeded. Extremely satisfying. Especially when the Super Metroid escape music randomly came on my shuffle player while we read the last text box about escaping a collapsing demiplane.
The game also contains this overarching metapuzzle, almost ARG-like, composed of many smaller puzzles. We got most of it ourselves, but not all. We spoiled ourselves on it after we finished and it leads you to a webpage with a downloadable pdf with a whole other class to play! Bananas.
Certainly the best board game Iâve ever played, for sure. Itâs akin to a tabletop campaign, except that itâs heavily combat-focused. Itâs hard to say if this would be better as a video game, but theyâve achieved that level of complexity on paper without bogging anything down.
The combat is endlessly interesting, and the difficulty is incredibly well-balanced. As someone who rarely tends to like the combat side of tabletop-adjacent games like this, I was enthralled by it here. Really, really requires a plan, and the team working together, to achieve anything.
I have to admit that it sort of heralded the end of my interest in modern board games but that Iâve been really enjoying the PC version â itâs good, I just never found it as appealing as a physical artifact
speaking of, the PC version is still free on the epic games store for the next 10 hours.
i also found it really fiddly as a board game, but am excited to give it a shot with the computer doing the bookkeeping.
annoying the Epic store doesnât have the mac version though
the PC UI is only serviceable, very much the work of a porting shop, not equal to how much love went into the physical artifact, but⌠itâs good
more gloomhaven postingâŚ
way back in the day i had reservations about playing it on TTS re: missing out on the charms of cardboard, but it turns out if you load into the same instance of TTS every week for 30 months it starts to accrue its own surreal digital cruft, by the end we had all kinds of card graveyards scattered around the virtual table, strange sticker scars we couldnât rid of, remnants of mothraâs doodles coming and going, notes weâd make and then accidentally delete and then half-restore, sometimes a component would go missing and then pop out from underneath or inside of something weeks later⌠parts of it were getting pretty rickety by the end
re: balance, of the many charms of gloomhaven itself probably the most powerful is the way that your hand of cards functions as your ultimate HP clock in a scenario while giving you the option of expending them more quickly to make more powerful pushes when you see an opening⌠if youâre trying to play as efficiently/optimally as possible (and the game is often difficult enough to encourage this) you would ideally be just about to to run of cards just as you finish every scenario, so as you adjust to that mindset the elasticity of your resources lead you to make each game as tight as possible on your own. so easier scenarios where you can make explosive, expensive plays constantly and nail-hard endurance scenarios where youâre trying to stretch your turns out as far as possible can both end up being satisfyingly close ones as they wrap up. itâs the energy of the last rounds of a euro worker placement game or whatever, where youâre mathing out the perfect way to expend the last of your resources to claim victory, but as the skeleton of a dungeon fight rpg game (âŚwhich is exactly what i want)
anyway now i gotta figure out what the hell iâm gonna do about frosthaven, the thought of getting in there without jay bugs and the c-bear may be unthinkable
Someoneâll put it on TTS eventually yeah?
I really donât think the rules of the game are as âfiddlyâ as they appear, but the physical reality of getting the map pieces and all the monster standees and cards and damage tokens and whatever definitely is. Weirdly I think TTS is the best way to play it, rather than a full vidcon version. Managing the rules yourself is part of the fun, but letting the software automate the physical setup is an ideal middle ground.
I couldnât really deal with TTS when people first started wanting me to try it out, too much of the experience of playing a board game for me is like⌠getting up and walking around the table, serving food and drinks, taking a walk, smoke break, checking sports scores, etc
It turns out that my gaming is either extremely focused and solitary or the total opposite and I havenât taken well to a lot of the intermediary options in the streaming era
part of the fun of TTS/Tabletopia is misunderstanding the game adapterâs UI choices and accidentally, when trying to pick up one face-down card from a pile, instead taking all-but-one, shuffling them, and packing them away
recommend against playing Wingspan on Tabletopia
played Ark Nova last week. what a terrible game, ruined by pandering to a solo mode
I had so many cute animals to put in my zoo & constantly getting atomic wedgied by the 3-card hand limit, enforced after people draw too many cards. really hated getting two end-game-scoring goal card, âoh so these are what Iâll build towardsâ, never seeming more than 2 matching cards for either of them. this is a game of reacting and doing the best you can with limited resources. which is dumb, I want Zoo Tycoon, gradually moving towards a park filled with Yellow-Throated Martens only
I think itâs not that dry, a lot of lording it over other players from your corner office or goading them into spiteful suboptimal moves. I locked down the horsies in our first game and I will never be permitted to ever again
tho weâre pretty boisterous and mostly play in the pub
Yes, I didnât make a very good pitch for the game, which is actually one that I like a lot. I guess Iâm thinking more of the theme when I say dry. Itâs definitely a game where you scheme against other players, as opposed to the âmultiplayer solitaireâ thing that a lot of modern board games do. Itâs far from that.
Has anyone here tried Flesh and Blood? Itâs an excellent new(ish) hero/class-based TCG. Iâve been playing it for the last year and a half and am completely in love with it. The biggest MTG youtuber just made a cute video about it for its three year anniversary: Why I Believe In Flesh And Blood - YouTube
I read All about war games by Jack Scruby last night, one of the early heroes in wargame revival, said on wikipedia
it has a very useful term definition about early age wargaming for me, I didnât got what âMorale Factorâ means when I tried to read Chinamail early days in this year.
I played John Company 2nd Edition a bit recently. The solo game is challenging and reasonably fun, using âpromiseâ cubes to simulate negotiation with the AI player (the Crown) and giving them up to change their decisions OR taking suboptimal actions to earn one or two. I ran two games solo (to learn the rules) to completion. One company failure and one turn limit hit, both roughly -1 to 20 in favour of the Crown (oof)
The game itself is about the internal horsetrading and jockeying in the East India Company from 1710 until the late 1800s, a truly despicable operation. The game does a good job of abstracting away the misery caused by your actions so you simply see opportunities to feather your nest with e.g. the opium trade with China. And the various regional powers in India have their own unpredictable AI to baffle and startle the families back home. Perfect company bro mindset
Unfortunately the game doesnât drive it home. The short game is 5 turns long, youâll be aiming to retire an officer from the company every turn & need cash on hand to pay for their luxurious manor to retire to, so turns are:
- secure at least one or more appointments to a company office
- get as much cash as you can
- hope one of your appointed family members retires
- spend as much cash as you can on a stately country pile
The first two require working with the other players (and the first one may be impossible, if there are no vacant offices), the third is randomly-determined. In our five-player group, negotiations quickly stalled as we worked out how best to sandbag entire markets and deny income & offices to other players, and reluctantly seeing that the company would fail if we continued in this fashion.
I didnât feel like the game fulfilled the theme very well: we were encouraged to min-max our plays for the short term, which feels like the opposite of what I want from directing multiple generations of company men. We didnât see the point of negotiations, or the importance of company actions at the beginning of the turn until many actions later (on the same turn).
One of the group succinctly put it: the added complexity is there for the sake of it. Which is true! I felt like the game went out of its way to make it extremely hard to predict its state after the next few actions. Ideal for a solo game and terrible for non-solo, the fickle whimsies of the other players is trouble enough.
I must sigh and put this with Oath, another solo game ruined by pretending to be multiplayer. Nowhere near as good as Diplomacy for negotiation & long-term strategy, or Junta for making exploitation & swindling explicitly satirical (and way more fun).
aside: Iâm seeing a pattern with Coleâs games since going separately from established games companies: the rulebook was missing setup instructions, no double-page spread explaining the parts of the board, typos. and the self-indulgent designs!