Played Codenames and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective this week. Codenames is perfect. Sherlock was kind of a mess, but I was on newspapers for case 5, so basically just 2 hours spent re-reading the same five pieces of paper, combing for non-existent clues. Does anyone who’s played through all the Sherlock cases know if there’s some place to find a list of typos per case that doesn’t reveal too much? Just the basics, like, Case 5: May 5 should be March 5.
i was going to buy these if anybody has some experiences with them / they kind of look like the thing my players and i would be interested in from our limited experience
http://www.amazon.com/Kobold-Press-GFX96736-Champions-Midgard/dp/B014TKCZ4K/ref=pd_sim_21_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=61%2BFqvqb0aL&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR160%2C160&refRID=0NY2XPD12NZYCZBH4C2Q
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Raven-Games-008RVM-Artifacts/dp/B013R8VJRO/ref=pd_sim_21_21?ie=UTF8&dpID=51iLIcrZZCL&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR100%2C160&refRID=0NY2XPD12NZYCZBH4C2Q
http://www.amazon.com/Plaid-Hat-Games-SO01PHG-Specter/dp/B00YB3YVJS/ref=pd_sim_21_7?ie=UTF8&dpID=51uJzfHkMhL&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR142%2C160&refRID=0NY2XPD12NZYCZBH4C2Q
Anyone free this afternoon/evening for some games on BGA or tabletop sim?
I am willing to play whatever, just in a board game mood today.
Haven’t played any of those, here are my unqualified opinions based on what I have seen
Champions of Midgard: seems like a middling lightweight worker placement but with dice combat? If it were me, I’d sooner buy some of the more highly recommended Worker Placement games before CoM. If you do decide to go with it, let me know how it is.
Artifacts Inc seems decent. Of the three you linked, this seems most likely to be a good game
Specter Ops, uhhh from what I’ve heard it’s not as good as either Letters from Whitechapel or the third edition of Fury of Dracula.
+1 on Codenames
I have backed:
Kingdom Builder - Marshlands
Inhabit the Earth
Scythe
The 7th Continent
Arsenal: Arena Combat
Trove: The Crystal Caverns
Shadowfist: Year of the Goat
The Last Spike
Mottainai
Paranoia (Pen and Pencil RPG)
Twilight Struggle Collector’s Edition
Shadowfist: The Coming Darkness
Kremlin
Shadowfist Revelations and Reinforcements
Shadowfist: Combat in Kowloon
Got It!
Ogre Designer’s Edition
Glory to Rome
I’ve backed a ridiculous amount of tabletop RPGs but basically no board games (I backed One Night Revolution and the Resistance expansions, and also Mouse Guard: Swords and Strongholds)
RPGs:
- Wrath of the Autarch
- Lovecraftesque
- The Warren
- Blades in the Dark
- Night Witches
- Feng Shui 2nd Edition (iirc Shadowfist is a spin off of this, right?)
- Primetime Adventures
- Urban Shadows
- The Clay that Woke
- Ryuutama
- Fate Core
- Dungeon World
I now work in FFG’s warehouse, and I get 70% off their stuff.
I can’t even decide what to do, might have to play through Descent with all of the add-ons or something.
@ronnoc Get Forbidden Stars, Mission: Red Planet, and Tigris & Euphrates
Seconding all of Tulpa’s suggestions. Also get Diskwars because it needs more love.
That means X-Wing will now be perfectly affordable for you. And their nice card sleeves won’t cost half the price of a game.
See if they have a forgotten copy of Starcraft lying around. It’s a good game.
I got a new game called Xenon Profiteer after playing a friend’s copy. It’s a deckbuilding game (well, kind of the opposite, really) in which you build a plant to isolate Xenon from the other gases in the air. I like its mechanics.
I also recently tried Codenames and was impressed with it.
If you’re looking for Starcraft, look for the expansion as well, even though Forbidden Stars is a reimplementation of the system anyways.
Oh, I did not know that! I’m much more interested in trying that now.
I actually did peek at the OOP area in the warehouse, but there wasn’t anything of note, and we have to order from the manufacturer to get the discount anyways.
Insofar I have backed:
Arcadia Quest: Inferno
Trove
Middara
Burgle Bros
I tried to cover it up, but my terrible taste can not be hidden.
I backed:
- Up Front (haw)
- Coin Age
- Innovation
- Bay Area Regional Planner
- RuneQuest
I missed out on backing Lord of the Fries but plenty of copies appeared in shops the day after I found out I missed backing it.
I just got a copy of Codenames today for my birthday. I couldn’t figure out why the plastic wrap was all cloudy and the components so dusty. Until I dug a little deeper and found that the hourglass had exploded.
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@JoeX111 that sucks
But the hourglass is pretty much optional anyway. If you have an android phone, use the official app, it works both as a timer and a replacement for the key-cards, and is among the best board game assistant apps I’ve tried.
@Tulpa I’ve played Marvel Legendary a couple times and didn’t much enjoy it. How do you think Legendary Encounters: Alien improves on it?
From what I remember (it’s been a while since I played either), there’s direct player interaction. Marvel Legendary was a ‘co-op’ where most of the challenge was not accidentally fucking over your teammates, which ends up being very shallow. LE: Alien adds the ‘coordinate’ ability to some cards, which essentially lets players ‘lend’ cards from their hand to other players to use on their turns. It at least enables some direct player interaction in a game that was sorely lacking it.
The theme feels less pasted on as well: instead of just defeating the ‘mastermind’ 4 times, they must overcome a set of objectives pulled from the objective deck, the encounter deck is made of three separate piles of cards corresponding to the objectives to emulate the escalation of the movies (the 1st objective cards are generally easier to deal with than the 3rd objective cards). It’s similar to how the Mythos deck is constructed in Eldritch Horror. These encounter cards are also not immediately revealed when entering the game’s market row (called the Hive in LE: Alien and the City in Marvel Legendary). Instead there is a dutch auction mechanic to revealing the cards. One of the most common fixes for faulty market row mechanics is introducing some kind of dutch auction element, so this was a natural design decision.
Players also have role cards (Gunner, Technician, etc) added to their decks at the start, which help to differentiate the players before the deckbuilding begins.
The way facehuggers work is also conveyed entirely through mechanics, such that if you are to die from a chestburster it feels deserving and not just a product of RNG (my tastes are such that I’m generally hostile to excess variance in games, though more forgiving of it in co-ops). There’s also optional traitor mechanics but I haven’t ever used those. One of them is that anyone who dies from a chestburster becomes a player alien, replacing their deck with an alien deck and pursuing the new goal of killing the remaining human players.
I dunno, this is probably tl;dr. To sum up: direct player interaction, dutch auction mechanics, and mechanical individuation of the players makes it at least a decent co-op. It will certainly never be my favorite game, but I do like what it does whereas I really don’t care for Marvel Legendary.
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Nah, I like reading your opinions/analyses. Those changes all sound for the better. I especially like the lend mechanic and the role cards.
Actually, we tend not to play too many co-op games in our group. Do you have any you’d really recommend, or do you find them all sort of middling?
My board game group has kind of wound down some too, recently, and we’ve been sticking to video games (Smash) or TV/Movies. My most recently played games were One Night Werewolf and Cribbage (which my sister loves). I sort of like Cribbage too, although it feels pretty high variance. I’m no expert, though, so maybe that changes as you get better.
The aforementioned Hanabi, Mysterium, and Space Alert are all excellent co-op games. They all set out to fix the parts of co-op play that were fatal flaws of the genre otherwise: too much open communication turns any co-op into an exercise of single player puzzle solving for the loudest asshole player (which is always me). Space Alert solves it by limiting how much time there is to figure out the randomized obstacle course. No one is able to keep the actions of 4 other players in their head while planning their own actions in under 10 minutes, it’s info overload by design. Mysterium solves it by being basically un-quarterback-able. No player can really authoritatively say “This is the right interpretation of the card the ghost gave you.” Hanabi is a mini game that almost completely restricts communication to a very specific form. Formalizing what kind of tabletalk is acceptable is probably the best solution to the Problem of Co-ops.
I have more to say but have to go get groceries so expect more rambling.
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