thirded, and I even own one of the cosmic expansions, simply because throwing more shit on that pile only improves it
I do think it’s a notably long-lived design for being basically OK (see: consulting detective, archon), but it’s permanently B-tier
4 Likes
Sounds fun. I would have to learn this game.
I also would be interested in Tigris & Euphrates.
1 Like
both cosmic and T&E would probably be on my list of like, 10 very playable and representative board games, if not the absolute best
I’ve owned Tigris and Euphrates for decades (my copy is from before it was even translated into English) but have only played it once or twice. I’d like to play it again but it’s not an easy one to get others to play. Even people who love strategy games often hate it.
hey consulting detective is great, even though its design is literally just ‘playing an infocom game using only the feelies’
5 Likes
I played a bit of Tigris and Euphrates and I think its scoring system is really cool (you earn a set of scores as you play and your worst score in the set is the one that determines the winner) but it is very abstract and brain-burny. Probably Knizia’s deepest design if not his most enjoyable or accessible. I am by no means anywhere close to good at the game, but I can recognize that it has an extraordinarily high skill ceiling and have to admire that.
2 Likes
I used to love Cosmic Encounter, though I’ve grown a bit tired of it after a ton of games of it over the years. It excels in a few notable ways:
-
Very easy for a beginner to learn, even someone relatively new to board games
-
Casual enough that if everybody is familiar with the game, the group can play it while drinking, and even get a little sloppy.
-
Super fun art and theming
-
Can be very different every time, depending on which factions people are playing. Sometimes you can get novel combinations of powers that create an interesting or funny dynamic everybody has to deal with. This can be pretty memorable! Of course, on the other hand you might get a dud combo where two or more factions interact in a way that’s just annoying or time consuming.
My biggest problem with the game is that you really can not predict how long it’s going to take, as it entirely depends on who you’re playing with and what factions people get. There’s nothing as enervating as a game of Cosmic that just won’t end.
4 Likes
the best way around this is to actively take on the role of kingmaker when the opportunity presents itself. I’m not invested at all in winning if a game of cosmic encounter doesn’t end in 20 minutes, so I’ll just pick whoever seems closest to winning and take actions that make it easier for them to win.
3 Likes
Also, I have been playing some Cacao with coworkers and I think it’s pretty good. This could be an easy game to jump into and play, a quick one or warm up. Welcome To… is also a fun roll and write on BGA I can recommend for similar purposes.
Cosmic Encounter was the game people used to try to get me into their group and I hated it so much that it put me off playing any more board games for like one or two years lol
2 Likes
cosmic encounter is pretty bad in many respects! but it’s also a) got great physicality as a board game and b) winds up in so-bad-it’s-good territory more often than not
2 Likes
I’ve been thinking about this and I was wondering- is this a dig at small solo skirmish games, or were you just trying to express them as being fundamentally different from the “dungeon crawler” genre? I assume this is just due to my unfamiliarity with the medium, but I had just been assuming dungeon crawler meant any combat-oriented game where you move around a grid-like map. So I was assuming “small solo skirmish combat game”, if that’s a kind of game where you are put into a basic arena and fight monsters and the game is completely done when you kill everything, counted as a “dungeon crawler” too. I would like to think there are combat orient games that have variability or randomness that makes them worth playing over and over again, rather than just being one-and-done affairs like it sounds like dungeon crawlers actually are.
Where does something like Mage Knight sit between those genres? It looks like a game I would have assumed was a dungeon crawler, but it seems to be a lot about randomness and variability since you’re randomly drawing map tiles every time you play.
I bought Paladins of the West Kingdom specifically to play solo. I think I’m having a crises and don’t know if I actually like learning very complex games with other people.
The art style turned me off at first because it has webcomic vibes. Eventually it grew on me and I like the personality it gives the game.
Worker placement. You get a semi-random set of six workers to place on your board each turn. You have to fulfill the right configuration of colors to do an action, with purple worker as wild.
I like the game a lot. The biggest draw for me is the tight coupling between points and rewards. In a game like, say, Dominion you have fun combo cards to build your deck with but to actually win you have to take boring point cards that don’t do anything. In Paladins every action that gives points also gives a bonus worker or some other goodie. You can create big chains of actions that way.
I like how it implements debt. Usually debt in games feels overly punishing for what amounts to pushing resources around. The debt in Paladins though happens during an inquisition, only if your suspicion is high. You can lower your suspicion then artificially push the inquisition closer faster when your window of safety is open. It’s fun to manage.
Thematically I like the “Invader” cards at the bottom of my picture. You can attack them to get the immediate top benefits of the card or you can convert them to permanently gain the bottom effect. Cards with dual effects are always good.
2 Likes
I love cards with multiple affects. A game I mentioned above has these cards I’m mad about, they look so nice and are such an economic element to the board the way they can be played in three ways.
1 Like
lol it’s me following my train of thought to an extreme end, wondering how useful a recommendation it is, and thinking, “no, I agree, chess problems rule”
I don’t think there are small solo skirmish boardgames, videogames have them beat in the turn-based squad genre.
dungeon crawlers have a couple of features:
- be like a D&D dungeon crawl
- kick door (explore)
- murder (tactical combat)
- in tight quarters (no running around/away)
- dudes on a map (minis/standees/counters)
- loot (treasure/equipment)
- get strong (level up)
- different character classes
- and strong personal connection to ‘my’ character
- escalation (plot, bosses)
- (sometimes) choices matter?? (legacy mechanics)
these are trying to replicate the intentful twists and complications of a DM-led dungeon crawl. they use randomness to replicate the feeling of not being quite sure what your DM is planning. PRG CRPGs are very close adaptations, NetHack is a dungeon crawler.
skirmish games have combat but rarely any of the others. when I say a skirmish game I’m thinking of Mage Knight (2000)/HeroClix or Warhammer Underworlds or Wings of War or the thousand other games where there’s figures on a board/map and two players duel it out. if you squint really hard, Chess is a skirmish game
I think you and I have different ideas about dungeon crawlers? the newer Gloomhaven-style games I would call legacy dungeon crawlers, and are very different to (what I would consider the default) classic dungeon crawlers: GM-mediated or procedural ones, predetermined layouts or random scenarios, heavy plot/story or paper-thin linked campaigns
the ‘newer’ fashion is for a predetermined campaign with a few branches, packs of cards to open after a few sessions, stickers on the map, etc. these are more cinematic and intentful (since they’re designed experiences instead of rolls on random tables) but have terrible replayability. I think these ‘legacy’ dungeon crawlers are outliers, Mage Knight (2011) doesn’t share those features. nor do non-legacy dungeon crawlers.
Mage Knight’s (2011) randomness makes it quite similar to a dungeon crawler; it’s missing the tight tactical combat & explicit escalation. It’s most similar to Magic Realm (1979), an RPG boardgame
3 Likes
To add a point of clarification because this seems like it could be confusing if you’ve never encountered the term before in this context: In contemporary board gaming, legacy doesn’t mean “oldschool” as you might expect, rather it’s a very specific buzzword inspired by the games Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy, etc. Legacy games are games that create campaign-style experiences by having players make decisions and permanently alter the state of the board game as a result of those decisions, e.g. tearing up a card or putting a sticker on the board that changes terrain, unlocking mechanics and opening sealed compartments in the game box, etc. This has become a bit of a fad in the past 5 years or so. Gloomhaven does it pretty well.
5 Likes
Honestly I miss dungeon crawlers just being stand alone, since I love stuff like imperial assault but if I have that kind of regular group I’d need for it, I’d just play an RPG. I just wanna sit down and smash some dungeon rooms without persistent characters.
3 Likes
have you considered four against darkness?
This is me not actually knowing the proper board game terminology. I think I just realized that my entire conception around dungeon crawling games has probably been me subconsciously comparing everything to Ghost Stories, the only “combat” based board game I’ve played (though compared to Gloomhaven and these other proper dungeon crawling games, the concept of “combat” in Ghost Stories is more abstract.) So I’ve been assuming there were lots of games that were kind of like Gloomhaven but you had randomized enemies and/or map tiles, and you could finish it in a single sitting and play it over and over like in Ghost Stories.
The last few posts have been really enlightening! It’s interesting to learn that dungeon crawlers as a genre has been around for like 50 years and I just somehow never heard of them.
This explains so much, and I need to go back and re-read a lot of descriptions of some board games with this in mind. Because I had no idea.
The idea of one-and-done board games is new to me, but it sounds really interesting. I think your explanations have really just re-contextualized this entire conversation for me, and helped me think about what maybe I’ve actually been looking for (smaller scale, replayable “skirmish” games I can do in an hour or two).
Jaws of the Lion is really cool, but also I’ve probably “played” it for at least 10 hours and I’m still only on the fourth scenario because there’s been so much rule reading and upkeep: digging around the box to put pieces away and get pieces out, shuffling cards in and out of deck, trying to find the right generic fantasy battle music on youtube to listen to that isn’t too “epic” for tutorial battles. I can see how you can easily feel fully satisfied after completing game like that and not wanting to come back to it any time soon (despite it having four classes, and the main Gloomhaven having even more). It’s wild how there seem to be so many of these games out there that are all high profile but also require so much time investment from multiple people meeting up at the same place.
I’m so used to looking at board games as economy simulators.
Edit: I saw this what I assume is a “skirmish” style game called Too Many Bones that looks really interesting, but it’s also the most over-produced and thus over-priced board game I’ve ever seen due it using mousepad style neoprene mats instead of cardboard tiles, plastic instead of paper for rule sheets, poker chips instead of cardboard figures for characters, and dozens of unique dice for counters instead of plastic or cardboard tokens.
3 Likes
I am not a Boardgame Geek and I only have direct experience with Gloomhaven, but I have a LOT of experience with Gloomhaven so while I can’t contextualize it against like all the games in the genre or anything, I can give you lots of specific intel about how Gloomhaven works.
While GH does have a lot of character classes, it also has a retirement mechanic where eventually your guy goes away and you open up and play a new guy with small bonuses for all the previous retirements you’ve done. The game is so long, especially with the expansion pack Forgotten Circles, that it’s very possible to go through ALL the classes before you are done.
Despite it seeming like a game you’d want the same group to play it with every week or whatever, and that’s the way I mostly played it, it is absolutely built in theory for drop-in play. You can have a person grab a random character and jump in whenever. The “story” of the “campaign” is very bare-bones and is entirely agnostic about which little guys you throw into each mission.
I say “in theory” because in actuality the game is complex enough that there’s a lot of onboarding such that it’s pretty impractical to have somebody who’s never heard of it sit down to play just for one session. Like they won’t even understand what’s going on until the mission’s over probably. But like, we had the same 3 people playing the game every week for like 18 months, but there was like a two-month period where we had a 4th guy show up and then he disappeared again. The game accomodates this entirely seamlessly.
GH does have rules for random mission generation so you could theoretically play it “off-campaign” but honestly the regular game is so fuckin long that yes, once you’ve finished it I can’t really see wanting to play more for a very long time. On the plus side it means there is so much bespoke, designed content that there’s really no need for random generation. You get the advantage of random generation (infinite replayability) through the sheer mountain of content.
3 Likes