Are there decently written translations of those rules in English that I could find somewhere?
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I am sure there are, but the only significant change is the clairvoyancy tokens. You can safely cut those out entirely. For the vote at the end, every player gets to see all 3 final vision cards.
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Incredible. Itās so easy. I hate the way the voting thing confuses the co-operative gameplay with this competitive feeling. I will absolutely not play with the clairvoyance token crap next time.
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It was a weekend of 2-player games with my lady friend, including two winners we picked up from a local store in Queen Anne that seems real cool, Blue Highway Games.
Watergate is a historically themed tug-o-war game between the Nixon administration and the Washington Post, fighting to gain momentum in their respective efforts to see Nixon reelected or impeached. At the center of the board is a network map of evidence, across which each team exercise power plays to obstruct or create connections of evidence linking Nixon to select conspirators and informants. Along the research track to the right of this map, players will move evidence tokens (relating to tapes, payments, and testimonies by āthe plumbersā) by playing cards from their hands, chosing to either move a certain kind of evidence tokens or the momentum or initiative token a number of times, or burning these cards and removing them from the game by playing their interesting and very powerful event actions. Itās a game about reacting to eachothers hands, gambling, and doing huge moves that really throw a thematic spanner in each of the players plots. It really feels like a struggle against power when youāre playing as WaPo, where youāre using your nimbleness to do research and investigate against the sheer reach and might that the Nixon admin has to exercises. Itās fucking intense and fun and sinister. This is maybe one of our favorite games to play. The rulebook is full of interesting history, and each card has a quote at the bottom of it, so we would often do a bit of research after reading particularly interesting quotes.
Beer & Bread is a lovely competitive resource and engine building game, where players compete to produce the most bread and beer as possible while sharing resource pools from a village field and nearby river, dealing with bountiful seasons and dry seasons across 8 rounds. Bread or beer is made using resources you harvest and place into your limited storage, and you sell these from your breweries and bakeries by playing permanent upgrades. At the end of the game, you count only the lowest score between all the bread you sold and all the beer you sold, meaning you need to produce both throughout the game. My favorite thing about this game is that it is specifically a friendly competition between people in the same village, so when you harvest resources which you cannot store, you decide what you want to keep and offer the rest to your competitor instead of trashing them or whatever. Thereās a lot of fun interaction like this, which makes the whole thing just fun and lively. During the bountiful seasons turns end with you swapping your entire hand with your competitor, and during dry seasons instead you select from a market of three communal cards and keep your hand at the end of your turn. Itās a small game, with an adorable theme, and it has really fun interactivity and some surprising engine building depth I think. Highly recommend this one.
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Anyone interested in playing some tabletop simulator games sometime? I am honestly not playing a ton of videogames these days, only boardgames on weekends. But Iām of course a gamer at heart.
Iād love to play any game, really willing to learn. But Iām very curious about Hansa Teutonica, Dune Imperium, and Smallworld.
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I donāt think very much of Smallworld (I think itās a shit game tbh) but Iād be down to play something else, either on TTS or on BGA
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That would be fun! Small World just looked kind of Warcraft-y in an appealing way, and Iāve never used BGA before.
Is there something youād like to play? I only know a handful of games myself.
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BGA is nice because every game has a custom implementation (of varying quality some times but always better than what you can get in TTS) and the implementations enforce the rules for you, so its very easy to get used to.
Iām always up for a game of Tash-kalar (the best abstract wargame of all)
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I would also be interested in playing something. (I much prefer BGA to TTS when thereās an option, personally.)
Hansa Teutonica is one of my favorite games, but unfortunately itās not on BGA.
Have you ever played Race for the Galaxy? Thatās a good one.
Or Troyes or Troyes Dice? (The latter is very quick when you play online.)
Iāve also been wanting to try Cacao again at some point. I played it once (in person) but couldnāt decide how much I like it from that one game.
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I havenāt played any of those, but I saw Troyes at a game store and it sounded really cool to me. Would love to play it. Race for the Galaxy is something Iāve seen mentioned all over but know nothing about.
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The other day I noticed I have 6 hours of playtime on Tabletop Simulator and Iāve never actually played anything on it. All that playtime is just downloading and looking at workshop mods of weird things. It feels very old internet sometimes when you discover the niche stuff people are uploading on there.
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Watergate helps me recognize all the names in All the Presidentās Men
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wow, Combat Leader Bundle got a discount from 67.95 to 27.18 in deal of the day, super good price if you got instrested in WWII squad-level tactical games.
noticed:
I paid for it, Gary Graber, the designer of this game serie, looks like forget to add bookmarks but mix all the modules as one big chunk. Need split the pdf file by your own.
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So I was mentioning this in another thread, but I wanna get some board games to play by myself (donāt really have a reliable group to play with). I havenāt really played modern board games at all- the most recent Iāve played is probably Dominion 15 years ago. But every year I visit a friend at an anime con, heās demoing the Bloodborne board game and it makes me want to buy a cool boardgame with cool figures. Buying Bloodborne feels bad because there are so many expansions that are so expensive and thereās lots of kickstarter exclusive stuff too. So I want to see what else is out there.
I actually bought Gloomhaven a few days ago, was in awe of itās 20 pound box, then realized Iām moving to a smaller apartment in a few weeks and I also got the PC version for free on Epic Game Store, so it probably wasnāt the best choice, and returned it. Jaws of the Lion was recommended to me in the other thread, but thatās also on PC, so probably not the most effective idea. So now Iām on the hunt for something else.
So Iāve got a few questions.
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It seems like if I want miniatures, then I should play a genre called dungeon crawlers. Gloomhaven is often called the most popular dungeon crawler, but earlier today I stumbled on a conversation where people were saying itās ont really a dungeon crawler, because itās too thinky and about card management. What defines a dungeon crawler? Were those people being pedants or is there a meaningful differentiation in style between Gloomhaven and other ādungeon crawlersā?
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Also, I thought I saw someone recommend Mage Knight but I couldnāt find the post. Mage Knight Ultimate Edition. Would that be a good option to just go with, or should I explore whatās out there more?
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Also also, I saw this game called Tainted Grail that seemed neat. It looked like an exploration heavy game with lots of narrative in some sort of choose your own adventure book, where the cards and the book work together to affect how the map builds out and where your character can explore. Anyone know anything about it? It seems neat, but also kind of edgy. Itās a kind of game I didnāt realize was out there so thatās why Iām interested in it. It never occurred to me that boardgames could be heavy in story.
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Also also also, crowdfunding seems pretty popular in the boardgame space. Are those things worth doing? Anything I should keep an eye on in the future? I found that site Gamefound and played the tabletop simulator mod for some new Street Fighter boardgame on there and itās got some ideas that I like but thought the reliance on dice to make any of your actions succeed weakened your agency a lot and made a lot of your turns completely useless no matter how many resources you used to set it up. So it was at least good to learn a bit of what turns me off.
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absolute pedants making a nonsense distinction, gloomhaven is more euro-style (relatively) than its antecedents like Descent: Journeys in the Dark but it absolutely is a dungeon crawl
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Mage Knight is really good! Great RPG combat with a fun mini-deckbuilding component. Itās like 80% co-op and 20% competitive, which strikes a cool balance. Itās just competitive enough to add some friction while youāre largely just chilling together and cheering on each othersā victories. The game includes a bunch of weird little variants and stuff I havenāt tried, but I imagine would add variety if you got tired of the main game. One potential downside is that thereās not much direct player interaction in the default mode, but if thatās an issue for your group then maybe some of the variants change that. Iāve only played the base game, but Iād expect the ultimate edition to be the right buy. It probably just has the expansion stuff packed in, which I believe is mostly new characters and variants. Canāt go wrong with that!
Mage Knight can also be successfully played at a Dennyās at midnight if you have absolutely no shame and donāt mind revealing your power level to your waiter. So thatās a plus.
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Damn, now I want to go buy Mage Knight.
i have mage knight but iāve barely ever gotten to play it. it seems really cool though
trying to find an objective reason to argue, since they didnāt have fun with it & theyāre āintoā crawlers, that it must not be a crawler (and deny any subjectivity in their opinions). agreed, nonsense
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