not to mention all the free one-off dungeons cephalofair put out during the 2nd printing kickstarter. It really does have all the benefits of random generation (seemingly limitless content) without the drawbacks (mediocre design)
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I was wondering if these long boardgames suffer from the same content-fatigue as open world video games, but this is such a genius idea to work around that issue.
One-off and āhomebrewā maps are also an obvious idea that I never thought of. Since the maps are built from individual tiles, thereās nothing stopping people from creating their own maps and challenges. I guess thatās one disadvantage of the Jaws of the Lion route where the maps are printed.
Dang, Gloomhaven and its ilk are a lot more thoughtful about their lengths and scope than I imagined.
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My girlfriend researched and picked out this absolutely massive co-op game for us to play as an anniversary gift.
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Oh, let me know how the components feel! Itās from the people I mentioned in my last post who apparently who overproduces everything they make with really luxurious materials. Their games look interesting.
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Yeah they are quite lavish. The dice and poker chips are weighty and nicely colored. Itās ridiculous, to be honest. But the neoprene mats are kind of interesting. If they could be produced with recycled plastic then maybe itās a fair alternative to cardboard, as far as the ecological impact of super niche board games go? Like if every boardgame was produced with these it may be really bad. idk. But theyāre cool. They have these plastic pegs you pin into them to slot in upgrades or indicate a changed status, which is very neat to me.
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you may be disappointed to learn that thereās a whole cottage industry of custom third party neoprene mats to replace the boards for certain games (terraforming mars and marvel legendary are the ones you see most often)
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Yeah, they look like they have some nice physicality to them. I was initially drawn to Too Many Bones because I thought their idea of literally slotting dice into your character mat/sheet to represent your stats and abilities, and rotating them to denote numerical incrementing or status changing, was a really nice visual effect. Subsequently, the original game alone comes with around 150 dice since I think every individual ability in the game for each character has its own unique die.
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Been reading the manual for burncycle during my shift when thereās downtime and it seems pretty fun. I havenāt played them, but if you know about those Resident Evil co-op games they seem like a pretty similar stealth puzzle game, but obviously more complex and lavish.
Last weekend at her birthday dinner, I got to teach and play Parks to my girlfriendās family for the first time. I thought it was decently fun, to be honest. Itās also really beautifully made, obviously. They have never played anything more complex than like Azule, so this was a slight step up, and a whole new mechanical thing with worker placement. But it was a delight to see them bickering among each other over strategy down at the other end of the table while me and my gf just smiled about how clearly successful this was. What a rare treat!
Going to tempt fate and push my luck again by bringing Hans Teutonica to learn and play for the first time at a dinner with my mom and grandma, her bf, and my gf too. It seeeeeems simple? I think it could be fine if they can get over the dry theme.
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I tried another game by the designer of Power Grid last night. This one is named Findorff, after the town where said designer grew up. You construct houses and buildings and collect peat from the bog. I like it, but so far Iāve played it only with two players and I think itās really designed for more.
A lot of what goes on the main board is strictly for aesthetics, which is interesting because the design is pretty dry (though attractive enough). Some of it feels a little like busywork, though it doesnāt take so much effort that itās an issue.
I wasnāt happy with any of the player aids that people posted on BGG so I made my own and I might post it there. But I donāt know how many custom player aids on the site is too many.
I played the game at someone elseās place and there was an observer.
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I donāt care for Settlers of Catan but it was basically my gateway into modern board games. Itās the only game in my collection that I donāt think I will ever play again but that I also donāt think I will ever get rid of. (And I refuse to call it simply āCatan.ā)
My favorite Klaus Teuber games are
Lƶwenherz
This game was repackaged as Domaine back in 2003 and I have no idea whether that involved only new art or also changes to the rules.
Starship Catan
When the computer game FTL came out, my first thought was that it reminded me of Starship Catan. I just now learned that they released some print-and-play āscenariosā for Starship Catan like 20 years ago. I may have to try them out.
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Havenāt been able to focus on Jaws of the Lion since I bought it in the middle of moving, but Iāve gotten through the five tutorial missions and I must have already played this game for at least 10 hours. Thereās a lot of time setting the game up, shuffling cards around during play, and then putting it away! It also took me three tries to beat the fourth missions, so that was an ordeal (the enemies using their strongest attack that causes their modifier deck to reshuffle 3 times back to back at the beginning of the scenario really, really hurts). I also had to go out and buy a new table because the one I had was too cramped, and it was a pain trying to constantly organize all the different stacks of cards and keep them from falling into each other.
The letās play guide is really smart though. The way it walks you through the mechanics and eases you into the gameās many facets over the course of those hours is so incredibly well done. With how much brain power the core game requires, it is a blessing that itās so kind in how it slowly adds more things to your mental load rather than making you read through a big rule book.
Iām not sure how I feel about the writing. Something about the way itās essentializing the varying races of its world as having certain personalities hard coded into them, and how that makes certain races like vermlings just unilaterally ābad peopleā and your characters treating their lives as having little worth rubs me the wrong way.
Itās been interesting to peruse boardgame focused youtube channels and writing and seeing just how important theme and roleplaying is to the boardgame audience of these kinds of games. I guess this connects to how falsedan explained dungeon crawling games were borne out of tabletop roleplaying games, but it was just really eye opening at seeing how much that roleplaying aspect can seemingly supersede mechanics and player agency. There are lots of people who enjoy systems with lots of randomness (seemingly just rolling dice to see if you succeed in an action) as long as the gameās flavor is strong and lets them interpret a story through those results.
Itās a completely different way of approaching games than Iām used to. Iām kind of curious to see if that appeals to me at all. Iāve never really played a tabletop role playing game before, so these facsimiles are completely foreign concepts to me. But itās intriguing.
Also, the boardgame kickstarter x youtube influencer feedback loop looks heinous. Why are previews of these games in development always presented as āreviewsā? And a cottage industry of channels scrolling through kickstarter pages and giving recommendations on whether to invest in a game or not based solely on ad-copies on the crowdfunding pages. Maybe this is how all kickstarter discussions are. But itās bizarre from the outside looking in.
Edit: Also, Iām going to make some poor financial decisions despite still working through Jaws of the Lion.
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Iāve been playing the new game in that series, Frosthaven, and I noticed theyāve gotten much better at this. In one of their Kickstarter updates they mentioned hiring a consultant to help get this sort of thing right. It seems to have made a difference. Of course, the comments on that post were the exact kind of nightmare you could expect. Most of the board game enthusiasts Iāve known IRL have been sweethearts and fundamentally right-headed, so I sometimes forget that the internet culture around the hobby has many of the same horrendous problems video gaming does.
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Iād describe a good tabletop RPG as less likeā¦purely just rolling dice and seeing what happens, and more like mechanics that sort of exist on a spectrum between interfacing with a fictional agreed upon reality, and improvisational narrative prompting?
Like in my ideal formulation dice kick in as points of narrative tension spurred by what someone chooses to do, and change the narrative situation in such a way that it changes and prompts the next set of choices that lead to another point of narrative tension, if that makes sense?
I would absolutely no way play a dungeon crawler board game as such because it isnāt about engaging with a narrative that way. There might be a narrative implied by the events, and the mechanics might create an interesting facsimile of one, but itās not what an RPG is doing which is playing a game with the fuzzy narrative space as opposed to just essentially improvising flavor text on mechanics.
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Also yeah tabletop influencer stuff is the absolute worst. Iāve poked a lot at miniatures youtube and itās astonishing how likeā¦I know this is a bad phrasing since gamer gate but how wildly biased the channels are towards companies that provide them free product. Itās also pretty astonishing how bad some of the advice is out there because itās there to generate a tagline or controversial statement.
ā¦and yet every single miniatures game painting tutorial Iāve ever watched has neglected basic shit like how to filter your acrylic primer before airbrushing with it to prevent clogs which ever long term hobbiyest I know in modeling will tell you to do.
Or the dozens of āway cheaper than the alternatives you can make on your ownā that take a bunch of time, effort, or in one case an industrial bottle of glycerin that would definitely end up costing about the same as the product they were telling you to replace.
Itās all just terrible.
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Yeah, the latter is what I think Iāve been seeing (though I canāt be 100% sure because Iām not fluent yet in board game lingo). I was reading about some games called Hexplore It!, Aeon Trespass: Odyssey, and Kingdom Death: Monster, and ultimately all of the interaction in those games appear to come down to drawing a card with lots of flavor text as to what is happening to you or what you are going to do an enemy, being given a number to pass with a dice roll, and then you roll the dice to see if you succeed or fail. Thereās some stat building mechanics between battles, but ultimately your success comes down to just rolling some dice and hoping you succeed.
But people praise those games, saying they are not mechanically deep but āthey create amazing storiesā. Which I assume comes from a combination of the flavor text and how wildly momentum shifts between the player and the conflict theyāre in due to it all being dice rolls. The player doesnāt have a lot of control over the results, so itās like some people appreciate these games like theyāre watching stuff happen in The Sims.
I saw similar musings about Fantasy Flightās LCGs Marvel Champions and Arkham Horror. Marvel Champions looks like pretty classic TCG combat framing and mechanics (albeit itās a cooperative game where youāre fighting an AI deck rather than the players fighting each other). I donāt really know how Arkham Horror works, but I think it might be similar but framed as āinvestigatingā things instead of fighting things. And I recall seeing people say Marvel Champions is mechanically fun, but Arkham Horror is more memorable because it creates better stories due to its flavor.
So itās like there is an audience out there for whom that flavor of the gameās concept or theme can supersede any kind of shallowness of the actual player agency. I could also just be completely misreading them, but thatās how I was interpreting it.
Yeah, weāre talking about two different kinds of storytelling here ā the robust, player-created collaborative storytelling of tabletop roleplaying games, vs. the more barebones, ad-hoc, emergent storytelling that arises from the interactions of game mechanics, flavor text/theming, and player agency in a strategy board game.
Hereās an example of the latter: I used to play a lot of Arkham Horror 2nd edition, which was a lot more maximalist than the newer streamlined 3rd edition. It had a ton of wonky little interacting systems, and silly actions players could waste their time with. Every one of those systems and actions was fairly simplistic, but there were enough options to allow for player expression, albeit in a very goofy way. A story in that game would look like:
Playing as the frail old Astronomy professor, I acquired a badass motorcycle and a shotgun, and ended up becoming the best monster fighter in the game just thanks to my items, despite my character seeming ill-suited for it. My professor tore through the streets of Arkham, taking out zombies and cultists, and even a huge dhole. Just when the waitress character seemed hopelessly surrounded by monsters, I rode in and saved the day. Then I accidentally got warped to a future timeline where a giant preying mantis alien did science experiments on meā¦ But I managed to escape and close the portal, preventing the city from imminent doom. Through all of this, our useless soldier wasted time vacationing in Kingsport, having charming interactions with the townsfolk miles away from the actual conflict. In the end, we were unable to prevent Cthulhu from awakening, but thanks to our badass astronomer and the noble sacrifice of our cabaret dancer, we were able to defeat him on the last possible turn to win the game.
And then, a year and several games later, āHey, remember that time you wasted the whole game hanging out in Kingsport and we almost lost? lolā
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Thereās a few games Iāve played that did it pretty well, but I will say drowning bad rules in flavor text is a really, really, really, common thing in a lot of tabletop games. Iāve played RPGs, Board Games, and Miniatures games that were all guilty of this. Itās so easy to get folks invested in flavor text over substance a lot of game companies focus on the text more than the game.
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