It seems like it’s still just a sandbox that doesn’t enforce rules. But it’s browser based and has a lot of cool games on it, so that’s appealing, especially if you play with friends who aren’t likely to ignore rules.
Edit: hmm, I am less excited by this than I was at first glance.
I played Wingspan
That sounds a lot like my experience with tabletop simulator!
The deed is done. After 40+ hours, I have finished Jaws of the Lion.
That was real roller coaster and I have a lot of mixed feelings about it.
I really started getting frustrated towards the end because I just kept losing over and over and over on the last few scenarios leading up to the final one. And after losing a scenario after 1.5 - 2 hours, I often felt like I did not have a clear idea of what to do differently to improve my chances next time. A lot of the late game scenarios are about dealing with massive amounts of enemies spawning at once with lots of status effects that just compound (like essentially permanently having poison and muddle due to imps).
I drew so many “miss” modifiers, and the enemies kept drawing their stronger attacks that reshuffled their own decks, and I usually felt burned at the end rather than interested in trying again. I’m pretty sure I only got through the second-to-last mission because I had a ton of misplays.
But that could also be because, even after using an app to track enemy actions, there is still a lot to keep track of solo. 20 character ability cards, 40 character ability modifiers, a dozen items between both characters, and whatever special abilities endemic to each character. I routinely forgot about items or abilities I had access to. I rarely ever long-rested to refreshed those items too, because it never felt like I had the breathing room. I never intimately learned either of my characters because I my mind had to juggle both.
And then that last mission. So easy! Too easy! It was a total cakewalk. After all the stress of the preceding missions, it was extremely anti-climactic. After a series of missions about large swarms of enemies with status effects, that were so challenge to crowd control, the final mission just tosses you just a few big-body enemies that you can focus on and burst damage real quickly. I think the final boss only hit me once before he died.
I think the game could have also used some more interesting environmental design. Movement through the scenarios felt a little too linear, too straightforward. The book-based map layouts probably limits that a bit, but I think the game only ever used the full spread of both books maybe once. That’s an idea I wish they revisited by the end of the game.
The plot and city events feel like throwaways. I think the story gives just enough context to give the scenarios flavor, and the city events also provide some additional flavor to the world. But the writing usually felt trite, and the city event choices meaningless. It was always “choose to do the obviously good thing and get a reward” or “choose to do the obviously bad thing and get punished”.
Despite all that though, it’s an excellent game. Every single aspect of the combat feels like they’re in conversation with each other. Every single new ability card you unlock feels like a valuable addition to your arsenal and makes you go “wow, this is cool!”, especially when you unlock a new key ability. That gradual change of your modifier deck really helps you play more confidently (or at least mine did since I removed a ton of the negative cards). At the same time, I see the value of the character retirement system you all mentioned is in the base Gloomhaven, because there is a sense of diminishing returns over time. So having you switch out characters after certain intervals is a smart move, especially if they’re all as unique as the few ones in Jaws of the Lion.
It was a good journey, and I feel relief at both having completed it and also at not needing to play it again any time soon.
P.S. It is hard to watch TV and play a board game like this at the same time, so it feels like these types of games are not great activities for multitasking. I feel like I haven’t watched or read anything in a couple months.
true. I like to listen to music, something long and transporting
Yeah I tend to just listen to music or do nothing else if I am playing a game.
Just played Cosmic Encounter and had a lot of fun! That’s a pretty silly game. I was also surprised by how similar to Dune it seems to be.
I read some old posts in the thread about it and I agree that it seems like decent filler for drunk evenings where no one gives a shit. And that’s not really my type of game, or only rarely is. There was a moment that was straight up UNO with four consecutive reverses and cancels. That was kind of funny but also just kind of stupid in hindsight.
played the first case of Suspects, a Christie-inspired version of those detective games like Consulting Detective. not as brutally hard
it gets a few things right: encourages early guesses from limited information in its scoring conditions (5 points per question answered correctly in the first 50% of cards seen, then 4 points etc. & can change mind later) ; uses cards to conceal/reveal information (lines on card need to match up to draw a connection, so suspects and the footprints match if the appropriately-coloured lines meet on the edges).
I had an insight part-way through. was doing the usual thing of trying to gather as much physical evidence as possible & hitting dead ends when I realised: this would make for a boring Poirot novel, he would not waste time on obvious dead ends. and so I tried to continue not as a detective solving a crime but as an author guiding a character to an entertaining & revealing story for a reader. spending more time figuring out if questioning the gardener would make for a good scene or not.
Follow up, Part 1:
I started playing some of Too Many Bones and I have mixed feelings on it.
Initially, I was really positive. It was exactly what I was looking for. It has a briskness and brevity to the combat with small, tight scenarios. They’re designed to be finished within six turns. You’re making relatively quick decisions on who to attack and what character skills to use against a group of 4 enemies on the board at a time. Every character has a mat with a big grid of skills, each represented by a unique dice, and as you level up you can slide in a dice into that skill slot. Each of those skills will vary in effect or strength based on the roll of its dice, so there’s some strategy around the odds of the dice and there’s the whimsical fun of rolling dice there. So it had the fast pace of combat that I was looking for. It’s a smaller scale game that you can finish several battles a full game within a couple of hours.
I also think the whole idea of using poker chips instead of figures and tokens is really neat. Stacking health chips under characters and enemies makes it immediately clear what health stats are like. Every character has 16 unique dice representing their different abilities! And dense, double sided rule sheets explaining how that character functions! A fun neoprene mat to slot those dice into!
But the more I played with it, the scope felt like it was shrinking instead of expanding. Rather than growing in depth it instead felt like the range of meaningful choices was actually really small. Part of that is because It’s a 4x4 grid and enemies can move two spaces every turn. You can move up to a certain number of spaces based on your dexterity stat but there really isn’t that much space to play with positioning when you’ve got 4 enemies on the board at once.
There’s a little bit of room to run away if you’re playing a ranged character, but if you’re a melee character then you’re just kind of staying in the enemy’s face. And then you roll generic attack dice. Your special skill dice are like one time use; you use them and they get exhausted for rest of the battle. So if you’ve used up all your interesting abilities, you’re just left at doing regular attacks with generic attack dice for the rest of the battle.
The idea is you’re supposed to level up the character over the course of the game and growing your pool of skill dice based on how you’re building your character stats. But that feels like it takes way too long to get to a point where you’re playing a vastly different character from who you are at the beginning.
There are different bosses called tyrants. You can choose one at the beginning of the game and each one is designed around a different game length (it tells you you know an estimate of how long each take). So some of them will make you play more battles than other, giving you more time to grow your character before the final boss and the end of the game. And as a beginner, I was playing the shorter ones. And maybe that’s why I just never got my character to a place that felt like they had an interesting variety of skills to use in any particular battle. By the final battle I maybe three or four skills. So I could use those abilities for the first couple of rounds, but then they’r exhausted and all I can really do is regular attack. So it felt like I wasn’t really doing anything particularly intersting outside of those first two turns of combat.
I then tried playing two characters at once, one melee and one ranged, and there was a bit more of an interesting scenario going on there. Planning around the melee guy running into the fray and attacking while the ranged guy stays back and plays support. But you’re still left with the issue of these beginning parts of the game where you really just can’t do much of anything interesting until you’ve leveled up a bit. It just takes you a lot of time to get there.
I really like a lot of the ideas here. The character building the unique dice. The monsters all have different keywords that affect their skills and behaviors, and there’s a good variety there. Everybody has some sort of skill on them. But the standalone expansion I got has a much smaller monster count than the base game, so you really run through the roster of enemies pretty fast, especially if you’re playing a solo. The game also has an enemy auto scaling system where the longer that you play, the higher level enemies you’ll end up putting onto the board. And it also scales based on character count. So I was playing one player and shorter length bosses, so I’m just facing large amounts of the easy enemies rather than drawing stronger enemies onto the board. So that could be aprt of it.
I got the standalone expansion because it was cheaper, but also beacuse the character were supposd to be more complex and interesting than the base game. And there are some cool ideas here are some ideas. This one girl is a cloak and dagger type who has a pet wolf that she can command in battle, and she can run around and attack enemies apply status effects and go undercover so she can’t be targeted. But all of this stuff is one time use. You apply a bleed effect on an enemy once and then that’s it. You can’t do that to anyone else.
The other character is like trap specialist and an archer. She has some options for summon pets too, but she can also set up traps onto the battlefield before enemies spawn. So you can set up traps at the beginning of the battle and then when you place monster, they might go on top of the traps right at the beginning. And then the battle starts she can buff up her arrows to multiple enemies and bypass armor. But again it’s all single use. Your traps aren’t relevant at all anymore.
Conceptually considering how these battles are short, that should be fine on a per battle basis. It’s just with how many battles you end up fighting in a single game, they all kind of end up feeling a little bit too similar despite how different enemies can be just because your actual options to combat those enemies feel limited (unless, I guess, if you’ve committed to a longer length boss run).
And don’t even get me started on the rulebook, made some poor decisions on when it wanted to explain certain types of rules, making it difficult to use as a reference. Here’s the fun, double sided keyword reference sheet though.
I’ve been wanting to play Brass for years and I finally got to over the weekend. It was the newer Birmingham version, which I picked up last year in a Black Friday sale because I figured that buying the game might be the only way I’d ever get to play it.
And it’s a very good game, just as I’ve always heard.
I just got a game called Warline that was designed by a friend of mine. Haven’t played it yet.
Last night, I tried the last three (of eight) boards in Welcome to the Moon. Not only is this basically eight games in one (the variety is impressive) but there’s also a campaign mode I haven’t even touched with a separate book and a big pile of cards.
Do you think Brass Birmingham has a nice thematic feel to it? My girlfriend and I like euro game but I think we like to feel in some way that our scoring and strategy is motivated by something that feels present in the theme, which we can relate to. Brass just looks good but I’m hesitant to get just another solitary euro game for us to play when we’re craving strategy and theme.
I don’t know how good Brass would be as a two-player game, if that’s what you’re looking for. But the strategic moves you make do tie in well with the theme. That said, it being a Euro game, the theme is a little dry.
If you want something with a fun theme that really comes through in the mechanics, you might try Spirit Island. It’s co-op, though.
And if you’re looking for an excellent two-player game (with a dry theme but it doesn’t matter), I would recommend Trambahn.
wourme brought Spirit Island for us at the last sbcon and it was so fun we played it twice in a row!
Excellent. I will keep Trambahn in mind. I just ordered a cheap copy of a game called Mr. Jack which I think will be the next game we play. We are always looking for good 2-player games and game that play well at 2-players.
In fact, this weekend we finally got around to this app-enhanced (lame) deduction game about discovering an unidentified planet called The Search for Planet X. If you’re not turned off by board game which require an app, this is a good deduction game that’s quick to learn and engaging to play with others. We were pretty happy with the theme as academics because it captures a bit about the vanity and career making potential of being the first to discover something as well as the value of communal knowledge.
I have a strong bias against tabletop games that require electronics, but The Search for Planet X is a very good game and I have to make an exception for it. (It helps that you could technically play it without the app, though it would be a pain to do so.) They have a follow-up game coming out soon, too.
or its ‘starter edition’ Horizons of Spirit Island which is to the full game as Jaws of the Lion is to Gloomhaven
I only played the originnal Brass but I feel like it handles its theme very well: capitalist robber barons competing with each other as they transform the countryside. I feel like a ruthless monster whenever I play well
That sounds great. Gonna look into how it plays with 2 players.
There are some explicit 2 player rules which I had to manually implement as errata on my copy but were later included officially in the rereleases. They worked exceedingly well and while I think 3-4 players might be ideal, 2 players is still a very good experience and the way I have played the most
You got me excited!
