Mage Knight solos fine, it’s very thinky and long & takes up a bunch of space. also only 8 figures (4 minis)
there was a Star Trek retheme published a few years back, so instead of a dragon sorcerer sieging a monastery you’re Janeway on the USS Voyager sending an away team to a blue planet
just buy minis, it’s a fine and acceptable hobby and you too can get mad like me at tiny barely-profitable casting/sculpting companies run by 2 hobbyists that cannot answer an email in 3 months let alone ship a single figure
in general, no. very hit-or-miss when no traditional publisher involved, and to build the expected hype for a campaign they must be expensive and have loads of extras to show value for money. I think backing reprints/redesigns is fine but probably won’t ever look at a new crowdfunded game again.
quite a lot of the crowdfunded miniature-heavy campaigns are targeted towards people wanting more plastic (proxies for Warhammer, characters/monsters for tabletop RPG) and aren’t too fussy about the game they come with. and these small operations don’t have the time/expertise to thoroughly playtest. so sometimes the game design suffers. not to mention the industrial design part of “sculpting minis that can be moulded effectively & retain detail” meaning the preproduction visualisations from the campaigns can look a lot better than the delivered minis
if you see a campaign with sculpts you like, and the price is ok, then sure go for it. Reaper Bones just push plastic, they do great
ah, part of the appeal of these games (miniature-heavy board games, not specifically Gloomhaven) is to have the bits to push around on the table. if you’re happy to play the game without the bits, then don’t bother with the minis
the overlap between enjoyable solo games and minis is pretty small. solo games are (reductively) puzzles or roll-and-writes, and you don’t need multiple people to quickly agree on the position & facing & loadout of a piece (which is what minis absolutely are best at)
anyway Castle Ravenloft had a bunch of minis and a solo mode, bit out of print
Yeah, for sure. If I didn’t already own Gloomhaven on PC I think I likely would have kept it. I’m sure digital games are able to be more efficient than the tabletop sources, but the physical experience of looking at and interacting with real things, with size and scale and physical relationships, feels like the appeal that’s really drawing me into exploring these. It’s a mixture of playing a game (the mechanics), playing with toys (moving the figures around), and making an art piece (building the overall diorama of the entire set).
Well, that’s how I’m imagining it anyway.
Yeah, something I’ve read here and there while googling was complaints about the kickstarter-fication of board games, and how so many of these huge kickstarted games are releasing with a half dozen expansions at release and there’s no iterative design from base game to expansions anymore.
Learned this morning my gf and I have misunderstood a rule about this game we’ve been playing for like two months. It’s so significant that we’re basically going to be playing a different game.
sound like a new game prototype was designed!
That’s why I enjoy boardgame much more than video game after I grown up
I wanna play Warcraft like Story of Seasons and enjoy the peon said ‘work, work’ but the AI always come to beat me with their gaint army
In a boardgame, I found out the scenario background is summer, the pic on the left is totally wrong
I could improve it in a minute without a professional hacker mod tools and all I need is a painter
This is how I always tried to play warcraft 2 when I was a kid and so I used cheat codes relentlessly so that I could continue making peaceful orc cities unimpeded
Getting some new games today 
Hanamikoji and Port Royal.
Saw Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion on Amazon just now for $24 and I guess there is literally no better time to jump into dungeon crawling board games than that. I was going to just wait until the PC version was on sale, but this is even cheaper than that.
I got a BGA premium sub and would love to start a turn-based game of this next week if you’re interested! Or a real-time one. Open invite for anyone else too.
Here’s my profile on BGA
So in looking for solo dungeon crawler type games, a lot of stuff seems to be these “campaign” games with lots of story in between actual gameplay that takes like 50+ hours. Are those pretty common or are they just talked about a lot because they’re kind of like spectacles? I’m seeing stuff like Gloomhaven, Oathsworn, Etherfields, and lots of other stuff (I get amused when I see these described generically as “Kickstarter style games”). The battle systems of games like Gloomhaven and Oathsworn seem cool, but is there anything like those that are smaller in scope? And aren’t one-and-done linear “campaigns”?
(Okay, I know everyone is just going to say Mage Knight. But I want to try something new, and not quite so classic sword and sorcery!)
Also, are dungeon crawler games always so expensive? $100+? Is that pretty normal for those kind of boardgames, or is that just the case for those really extravagant “kickstarter style” games (It looked like Mage Knight was also a similar price to those and it’s realy old)?
Haven’t played Sleeping Gods, but I know it isn’t exactly a linear game, and I think it may be able to be played solo mode. Reminds me of Sunless Seas and Skies.
Sure, I sent you a friend request. There’s also a Selectbutton group on BGA that you can join if you want.
That game Tulpa mentioned, Tash-Kalar, might also be a good candidate for asynchronous play.
I’d also be up for a real-time game. I’d be happy to teach Race for the Galaxy or whatever other game sounds fun that I know already.
If we picked a time, I’ll bet others would jump on. I’ve done that a couple times in the past and it’s been fun. We could resurrect the thread that we used to coordinate those things, since maybe not everyone who might be interested checks this thread regularly.
the Race for the Galaxy implementation on BGA was one of their first, it’s extremely clunky if you’re not intimately familiar with speed-playing the physical game. which is me recommending lol no for beginners
Alhambra is one of the newest adaptations and has lots of useful quality of life features, like auto-selecting money for purchases
I’m thrown off by this having combat because aesthetically it looks so nice and inviting. All the characters are smiling!
I haven’t seen too much of it, but the smiley art has caught my attention in the past. It does seem like these smiling people are in for some danger however!
Lets do this! I am free all week next week after 5pm PST, except Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I bet there’s some real-time gaming we can get going if we plan and get that thread started up again.
these super-plot-heavy single-playthough legacy campaigns are newer. there’s still plenty of games that are random campaign-based (with paper-thin plots) and are replayable
but there’s no getting away from plots completely. the character progression + story escalation + better equipment is a pretty core part of what people think dungeoncrawlers are. without the campaign, they’re one-off skirmish games. there’s not enough material in a box to get a real roguelike experience (tho 1995 Warhammer Quest was pretty close).
small solo skirmish combat games with no campaign plots are… puzzles? chess problems??
mini-heavy boardgames are expensive because people who like buying minis are used to paying a lot.
Mage Knight was like $60 when it came out, the 2018 Ultimate edition is pushing $100. think it comes with an extra 4 minis (so, 8 total + 4 castles; it’s not mini-heavy, it’s just a premium-priced heavy game)
price points are generally increasing but if you hit up the BGG second-hand markets for these older titles, you can pick up copies for $50-80:
these all come with 20-30 minis (except Clank!), and you’d have to find or devise your own solo rules for most of them.
Thanks for the perspective and suggestions- I appreciate it! I have no frame of reference for any of this so I’m still learning what I should be expecting from scope and design of board games, and what looks like “good” design vs “bad” design. While looking for old posts in this thread on Gloomhaven, I saw someone describe Kingdom Death Monster as “roll-to-hit garbage” in comparison, and I realized I just assumed most games had you do a random dice check or equivalent to figure out if you hit something. So I don’t have a good sense for how much randomness is good or bad in these kinds of games.
For example, I was messing around with a new Street Fighter board game in TTS and while there are some elements I like about it, ultimately whether your ever hit anything is based on passing a dice check. So you can blow a lot of resources and have nothing to show for it, and that felt really dissatisfying to me. But I couldn’t tell if I was just being too harsh on it.
It’s cool though- my last exposure to board games was that mid-00s boom of Dominion and Power Grid and Ticket to Ride - competitive games based around victory points and stuff. So all these other genres are completely new to me. The idea of board games having stories was something I never even thought of.
Speaking of, I opened up Jaws of the Lion over the weekend and did not realize just how much prep work there was going to be in learning and sorting and organizing components before even playing the game. It’s early going and I’m realizing my 33.5" x 33.5" still somehow feels a little cramped due to all the cards, but it’s really neat how the playfield is created using a spiralbound notebook. That’s such a cool idea and a neat alternative to putting together tiles. I also realized I am entering a new sphere of nerd-dom when I decided to search youtube for “generic fantasy battle music” to give me something to listen to while working through it and seeing this is an established practice for DnD judging by the mountains of videos and playlists.
I have recently played several new (to me) board games. I’ve put these roughly in descending order of how much I like them after just one play.
I immediately recognized the Bilibin-inspired art. I initially thought that this game might be a little too complicated to work, but in the end I liked the mechanics and the decisions. The final scoring was a little strange, but that might just be because I didn’t read the rules myself but had it explained to me. I can see this game being intimidating to someone seeing it for the first time who doesn’t like “heavy” games, but it’s not as heavy as it looks.
I enjoyed this one. Not enough to buy it, especially given the high price and huge box, but I liked the strategy and the dressmaking theme was something different.
Including “dice” in the name of a game is getting a little old, but the person who introduced me to this game said it was like Las Vegas and that was enough for me to at least give it a chance. (Coincidentally, Las Vegas is another game I initially had no interest in because of the name/theme, but it’s a good one.) Dice Manor was pretty fun and I’d play it again.
I enjoyed this game, but it’s one that I think might benefit from not knowing the strategy yet. There are many avenues you can take and it might be tedious to try to figure out the ideal one at each step. I’d play it again but I don’t see myself buying it or anything.
I like complex roll-and-write games (such as Hadrian’s Wall) but I thought this one was a little much in giving you so many choices that result in so many chain reactions. It’s easy to forget some of the powers you have or to make a mistake. These concerns might no longer be an issue on subsequent plays, but I don’t see myself going out of my way to play again.
I’d been curious about this one for many years, but had never had a chance to play it. I like aspects of the design and how there are so many different races, but the way someone actually wins the game isn’t particularly satisfying. It’s as much of a kingmaker game as Munchkin, though at least everything else about the game is better than Munchkin.
This one was nice-looking and had an interesting concept (you build shared cities with other players and your score is based on the lower of your two cities), but I ultimately didn’t care too much for it.
Pirates racing around an island. Amusing to see the chaos, but I think playing this once was enough for me.
Exactly my feelings
I am willing(if there are no alternatives) to sit through a casual game of cosmic encounter while waiting for others to arrive to a board game night but I am unwilling to do so for munchkin
