Yeah I feel like… jealous of those people? I’m not that interested in board games as mechanical objects but my brain won’t really let me see them any other way. I wish I could just not care and use dense flavor as a prompt to lose myself in an emergent narrative… but alas.
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Been seeing some Oink games in shops lately, they must have been reprinted. Just was looking at like five copies of A Fake Artist Goes to New York. I got a copy of Deep Sea Adventures myself.
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I’ve found that whenever I fail a scenario in Jaws of the Lion, I dread trying again rather than looking forward to it, and I feel like that’s more due to the amount of work it takes just to administrate the game rather than the time to play itself (though the former definitely informs the latter). Shuffling through all the decks for both the characters and monsters constantly when a reshuffle modifier is pulled, placing individual damage tokens, moving elements around. I wonder how much of this is due to table space making the workflow more disorganized than necessary (I actually bought a new, 4’x2’ table just for board games because my old 2.5’x2.5’ was just too cramped), my playing this solo and having to do everything myself, or it just being an inherent administrative overhead for a game with so many different types of tokens and full size decks in action at once.
I wanted to jump into board games to experience more physical types of games, but I think I’m hitting a point in Jaws of of the Lion (that is to say, the second stage in after the tutorial ends) where I feel like my experience might be better if I just restart with the video game version.
It’s been a fun thing for me to experience though, a large scale combat board game that’s more like a strategy game than a corn growing sim or something. I feel at this rate I’ll probably end up having to jump back into growing crops or colonizing indigenous cultures sooner than I expected (those all still seem to be the best of the medium anyway). Maybe the simpler, dice heavy games might work better for me on an administrative level and they look like the trend as shorter games too, which would be nice. It looks like there are a lot of those, though I guess they aren’t held as in high regard considering how random dice are.
But I am also getting curious about all those narrative focused, choose-your-own-advenure style board games like Sleeping Gods or ISS Vanguard…
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this is not the case unfortunately
The dice-heavy dungeon games are in fact far more cumbersome and slow despite having simpler overall rules. (My experience here is limited to HeroQuest, Descent, and Kingdom Death (don’t play Kingdom Death, it’s genuinely awful))
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ok there are apps specifically for gloomhaven (/jotl/frosthaven) that automate a lot of this, it can handle every enemy deck and track damage/status/turn order on a screen… i know it sounds silly to set up a monitor at the end of the table to play a board game but we decided to try it out when we were playing with four players and embraced it immediately, the sheer table space it clears up was more than worth it. and plenty of physical components remain crucial-- you’ve still got all the guys on the board, you’re just not shuffling and moving tiny tokens around on envelopes so much. and i expect there would only be more to gain if you’re playing solo
(enjoying these posts btw, i’ve had the vague idea of solo boardgame time in the back of my head since most of my local options splintered and i might think about it a little more seriously now)
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the new version? (is it different) the original was slow with the contested dice rolls & rolling for movement but definitely not cumbersome, most useful tactics for most monsters was to run directly at the players and then die after taking one wound
solo games I enjoy most have very easy automation rules. Spacecorp isn’t the greatest game but I can run the opponents turn in about 20 seconds, after internalising the decision flowchart (really just 1-3 preferences in order for each action) in a couple of slow beginner turns
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yeah i’ve seen heroquest around and been curious if it’s still interesting today/been changed much
i want a re-release of space crusade even though i bet it sucks now
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no I meant the old one, I didn’t even know there was a new version. I suppose I only mean that it has a cumbersome set up and is generally a very slow experience
real heroquest problem is that it is at exactly the right point where I’d rather play a real TTRPG since its just a degraded version of that.
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Hasbro had to replace the fimir (GW original OC do not steal) with murlocs. skimming the rules, looks identical to the original
I think the closest is Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress. a spiritual successor, wildly different in every way (players are rogue traders rather than spacies, no enemies from the original game except 3 chaos marines, WH Quest-style rules rather than HeroQuest) and yet so much the same
there’s also Space Marine Adventures, way too scaled back to be a suitable Space Crusade successor
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oh interesting, i might check it out. i have one of the space marine adventure games and yeah it’s just way too scaled down, it’s not very interesting
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I think you probably just saved the boardgame version of the Gloomhaven franchise for me. I completely forgot those were a thing! I had been looking forward to trying out Frosthaven at some point in the future up until I called it quits on the boardgame JotL in my last post. Now I have to go back and unpack the JotL box after packing everything up already!
I’ve actually been skimming through videos and googling around for information on this game a lot the past week. I had asked a friend, who’s really into boardgames, what I should play and he recommended Kingdom Death: Monster (does this name actually mean anything?). After looking into, it I didn’t realize it had such juvenile edginess to it but I also didn’t realize that it’s super popular and also fairly influential (I read it spawned the “boss battler” genre of board games). But I also kind of don’t fully understand the appeal.
So like, the battles all look like there isn’t anything to do other than run at the monster and attack it, and attacking is literally just a dice roll check. People talking about the game talk about it like there’s strategy, and how it become really easy to kill the lower level monsters once you figure out strategies and stuff. But I can’t find explanations on what those strategies actually entail and despite the game’s popularity almost every youtube video on the game seems to be the same boring Really Big Lion at the beginning of the game (a very exciting monster design).
Everything else about the game seems to be just rolling dice to trigger random events that cause random assortments of debuffs to your characters before the next battle. And I guess I can see the appeal there in a The Sims kind of way, where you replay the game to see what wacky nonsense befalls your characters and try to get as far into the game as you can with whatever stats you end up rolling. But I feel like that only works if the battles themselves have more to them than just walking forward and attacking.
I feel like I’m missing something, so I’m trying to understand the appeal because clearly there’s a lot of fans.
Also, the real motivation is that I read about a more recent game called Aeon Trespass: Odyssey that sounded interesting, but it’s battle system is heavily inspired by Kingdom Death: Monster. So in actuality, in a roundabout way I am trying to figure out if Aeon Trespass: Odyssey is cool or not. It’s concept sounds neat (it takes place in a post-Eschaton Greece where the Argo is a gigantic city-on-a-ship and the Argonauts control the Titans to fight the big monsters that caused the end of the world). I just can’t tell if actually playing it is neat.
It’s actually been interesting to try to investigate Aeon Trespass: Odyssey because I now know that board gamers care just as much about Spoilers as video gamers and movie goers. The game has a lot of effusive praise but it’s difficult to find specifics on what the game plays like (similar to Kingdom Death: Monster) in the long term because no one seems to want describe the game in detail because they don’t want to Spoil the game.
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Jaws of the Lion status: officially saved (thanks 8128).
Blood Tumor boss status: way, way too annoying.
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Your impressions of how KDM plays exactly line up with my experiences playing it. I think there are equal parts sunk cost and fondness for theme to explain why some people adore the game.
I think part of this is there are several overlapping groups of board gamers that want different things from board games. There are those who value adherence to “theme” and aesthetics over mechanical clarity and depth. In games like that, such as KDM or earlier editions of Arkham Horror, the rules exist to convey theme and mood, often trading away ease of play and rich strategy for how well they convey the implicit story of the game. Historically, these were called Ameritrash games (though obviously there’s a pejorative edge to that so I try to avoid the term)
On the other end, there are games which have cardboard-thin theming but are full of rich strategy, the emphasis is on making the act of playing as engaging and fruitful as possible. Historically, these were simply called euro games, since the board game renaissance of the 90s was centered around the works of european game designers like Reiner Knizia and Uwe Rosenberg. “Spoilers” and “story” aren’t really concerns with these games.
It’s rare nowadays for a game to exist on either end exclusively, as game designers have taken influence from both extremes over the years. Gloomhaven exists around the midpoint of these two camps as do the works of designers like Eric M. Lang and Vlaada Chvatil. I think at some point, many game designers understood that ‘theme’ vs ‘strategy’ was a false dichotomy.
I don’t know where I’m going with this
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You’re just doing a great job articulating why ‘good game design impedes flavor’ as a concept pisses me off so much, so that’s somethin’.
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I appreciate the write up! There’s a lot of this cultural/genre background that I don’t have, so I always know that I am never completely understanding what people are saying when describing why a game is good or bad (“this game is so thematic”, etc.). There’s a lot of history here that I’ll need to absorb over time.
Hypothetically speaking, if a maintenance tech was doing some work in my kitchen with a buzzsaw, cutting through some wall plaques and drywall, and I didn’t notice that all the sparks were shooting directly towards my board game table on the other side of the room with all my Gloomhaven stuff on it, and there was also a big cloud of smoke that hovered in my apartment and I think has also settled microfine dust everywhere- how easily will this scratch the cards and other stuff as I use them?
Hypothetically speaking lets say there’s a bit of a grindy texture whenever I rub cards together, and I can kind of feel and hear it when I rub my finger across the card. And hypothetically this is appears to be what the layer of dust looks like based on the token tray that was open on the table too (which should just be clean black).
Blinged out my Great Western Trail second edition, a game that’s become my partner’s and my own longer game to play. It was proving to be kind of a pain in the ass to set up because the insert was so garbage.
and I got this thing to dispense the worker tokens, which was a pain to fill, and may prove kind of dumb in the end, or really useful. Pulling these tokens out of the bag was the most laborious part of the game so I was hoping this thing would make that process a bit easier. This part doesn’t fit so nearly in the box with the new insert. But if I leave out one of the trays, and if I file down the edge that sticks out at the sides along the top, I can make it fit just fine I bet!
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Update my storage system for magazine games and finally give up the tranditional zipbag way and paper box like RBM.
unpunched magazine game will storage in this big box, 60mm height, 8-10 magazines with game, easily stack in any direction.
and after punched, it will storage with a GMT counter tray, fits perfectly in a 27mm height box. 30mm height is out of stock now, I will order in further for the extra space, put all my player aids printed from bgg.
next step: the label idea from RBM is still work here, I need to print more now
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Has anyone played games on tabletopia? They’ve got lots of stuff on there that isn’t on BGA. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but it seems like the implementation is at least presented like it’s well done. The free account I made didn’t seem to indicate any harsh limits like BGA has where you can’t invite friends to certain games. Would love to play some Hansa Teutonica on there!
I haven’t used tabletopia yet but I’ll try it out
when it first came out, a lot of board game folks were wary about it because it seemed like a more money grubbing version of tabletop sim, and I don’t think the game implementations could enforce rules at the time so no one really saw the point of it. Does it enforce rules now?