It is a subtly cutthroat game, once you start picking up the strategies at play, so thats the only hazard with 2 player… It’s not a “take that” game but a “you fool, you have played exactly into my plans” game. A lot of market manipulation and waiting for the exact moment to take a big action
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Sounds like Brass might be a good game to bring to a SB meetup. It weighs a lot, though, so I’d want to be sure people actually want to play it because it would displace other games and things. (It would weigh less without the fancy poker chip money, but those things are very nice and enhance the experience.)
A few more games I played for the first time recently:
I’d been wanting to try 51st State for a while and it was a nice surprise when I showed up to a board game meetup and that was the chosen game to start with. I liked it but some aspects of it felt like busywork. I generally can’t get too excited about engine building games, and this was no exception.
Automania is one I’d never heard of. It sounded like a light version of Kanban, which I’d always heard is one of the heaviest games out there. But I’ve never seen Kanban so I don’t know how similar it is. One thing I found interesting about Automania is that it has several “layers” of worker placement. Kind of wish the people weren’t drawn in that generic overused style, but the rest of the art and design is pretty elegant. I’d play this one again.
Oceans is another that I’d been looking for a chance to play, despite never having tried any of the other games in the Evolution series. I guess it’s just a theme I like, judging from how many games I already own about marine life. I had a positive first impression. I like the way you customize your species and the actions you take make it feel like an actual ecosystem. I think I’m going to have to play it again to form a real opinion and see if it’s something I might want to own one day.
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I will literally play anything and give it my serious attention.
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great fun, very different to Evolution but lots of indirect player interaction, oh you’re a shallow feeder, well I’ll push all the fish down to the depths
better that Evolution imo. it suffers from the carnivore being kind of necessary but requiring way more investment than a burner herbivore, and that a couple of small combos makes it very easy to get lots of plant food safely. the threat of going carnivore is good metagaming (to force people to waste adaptation slots on defences) but rarely good in practice (those same defences)
last game I played I tried the Intelligence herbivore route, challenging to set up and extremely safe once in place
Oceans has the two deck of adaptations, cheap repeated basics and way better, expensive, and all unique specials. and going carnivore is less of a resource sink, expected, not such a big deal
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This seems really thematic and strategic, Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein, although I really feel like I have to run this by my partner before I get it to try because the art on the cards is actually kind of shockingly gory!! You can see some of it in this video…
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I was skimming info on this new Apex Legends board game and one thing that caught my eye was it saying it has a solo mode “designed by Dávid Turczi, world-renowned author of board game solo variants.” This got me thinking- this sounds like the board game’s main designers made an Apex Legends board game, and then contracted someone else to come in after the fact to adapt the game into a something that can be played solo. This also implies this might be this person’s job, specifically; to be hired to designed solo variants of board games.
Is “solo rules designer” a thing? I imagine most board games are designed as multiplayer affairs, so are there lots of people whose jobs are to be contracted to do this kind of thing? It certainly sounds like an interesting challenge, and I wonder how often this leads to a faithful solo adaptation of a game’s existing rules versus the solo rules designer coming up with a very different game that just uses the concepts and elements of the main game.
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I suspect but need to confirm that this person became known on bgg for creating solo variants of board games and this is one of his first paying gigs
Edit: he has seven years of published games and does get consulting work to make solo modes for other games, seems like he did get his start making homebrew solo modes though
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see, the thing is
the thing
is
board games make no money. ‘hiring’ a developer to design a solo mode is way out of reach of most publishers & games companies, only the giants or a successful crowdfunder could attempt to contract someone. even these big publishers will make the call after comparing the cost of commissioning solo rules verses the expected increase in sales, and it rarely comes out in favour.
most solo rules come from hobbyist designers or fans. most game designers working outside of the giants are moonlighting/retired from their career.
so that could be your ‘job’ if you don’t reliably need money
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standard solo rules add Automation to simulate the actions a rational player would take: a decision tree/table, card-based actions, preprogrammed moves, tracking internal state. most gamers would not be happy with playing a different game with the same bits. and most solo designers wouldn’t either, they’re trying to fill the demand gap of not having enough people willing to play that game with them
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Not always! Agricola’s solo mode doesn’t rely on simulating other players, it is purely a score attack optimization puzzle (that I played too much of a few years ago, I got so sick of worker placement for a while)
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sure, same for Carcassonne. I want to go on about the boundary between different types of solitary leisure-time activities & how puzzles and solo board games jostle next to each other. chess problems again
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i remember meeting someone at gdc who told me his job was “designing the puzzle modes that no one plays”
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I know several in this thread have mentioned the Counter-Insurgency (COIN) games. I’ve wanted to try one of those for years. I hear Cuba Libre may be the best intro/easiest to learn, but Fire in the Lake looks the most appealing to me. (And maybe has the most Euro influence? I like games that are kind of half war and half Euro, such as Wallenstein/Shogun.)
Finding players for one of these games might be a challenge, but I think I’d like to make the attempt. (Might be easier than Dominant Species: Marine, though, which I’ve owned for almost two years now and have yet to play.)
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Oh wow, I had no idea. I guess that makes the attention on crowdfunding in this space make more sense. I can see companies treating the kickstarter as the entire lifecycle of the game- funding the development, doing a single print, delivering it to the backers who are the only “buyers”, and then ending the game’s life right there. Like a one-print run boutique.
I had no idea fan-made solo modes was such an established thing either. That could potentially open up a lot games for me to try out. Gonna have to look into this.
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For some reason tonight I’ve just been watching video review after video review of Oath, fascinated. I can see so many problems with it: intense learning curve, bad rulebooks, long waits for turns just to perform some marginal action, wild swings of luck presiding over minor and major outcomes, it basically requires a dedicated playgroup who all want to play that game specifically over and over again…
It would make no sense for me to invest in this game. But I want to. It’s like Sidereal Confluence: there’s no way for me to ever bring this to the table, and even if I did, I don’t feel like I’d be capable of teaching it. I don’t have the players who would be up for this level of commitment or who are looking for the experience this game would convey. I will just look longingly from afar.
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still think you’d have more fun playing, and as much trouble convincing people to play, Junta. which hits all the same notes at a faster beat
the Oath rules aren’t that hard. the rule book is bad but so are the rules, so it suffers from trying to explain unimportant minutiae that should have been cut by the developer. also making every site card hidden and unique makes it even harder to work out what the game is about. at least in Pax Pamir all the baffling cards are public, so you have a chance to understand them, ask questions, choose what to go for, think through what other players might go for, compare value
my take is that Cole got very lucky with Root & Pax Pamir, and benefited heaps from the structure of existing games + company support structures.
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I had the chance to host a game of Dune at a company gathering last week where people on my team flew in and we got to hang out for a few days. We only got to the middle of the third round due to not having a ton of time and the time it takes to get through the first couple when you’re just learning. But we still had a great time talking through everything and bidding and lying to each other. I would love to get to play a whole game sometime, but that will be a good memory in its own right.
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I bought the Jagged Earth Spirit Island expansion this week because of this post, and I tried it out tonight. It comes with a ton of new spirits to choose from and I like the way the tokens work. I was afraid they might be one of those expansion things that detracts from the elegance of the experience, but that wasn’t the case. (I didn’t play with events, though. Maybe next time.)
This expansion also allows for a six-player game. Although everything is simultaneous so you don’t have to wait for another player’s turn, I can only imagine how long coordinating all the actions would take. I may have to try it, but I may have to set the expectation that it could take 6-7 hours just in case.
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I need to off load some boardgames in my collection!! Don’t care about profiting off them or anything like that, would prefer they go to someone/someplace that would enjoy them 
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What games are you looking to get rid of? I’ve developed a semi-regular board game group out here and I’d be potentially interested in a few.