I think it has fun design elements but too many options. I still think Patchwork is better. Would play again, or we could switch things up and do a different game.
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Letās do it another time.
Also really like Caverna and Beyond the Sun on BGA
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Oh and terraforming mars just came out
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Recently I played a board game called Street Masters on TTS. This was a game I heard about last year when I first started looking at board games but was out of print due to various publisher issues (itās apparently coming back under a new publisher). I only realized recently that thereās a fully feature TTS mod.
I think this is right up the alley of what I looked before way back when I first started posting it this thread. I was looking for something with lots of miniatures to play with like action figures, something not like a Euro board game that I was used to, and something really easy to pick up and play on a whim. Street Masters is a deceptively straightforward combat game built with modularity of its components in mind. Apparently itās closest analog is the card game Sentinels of the Multiverse (which Iāve never played but is apparently quite good).
Itās themed after video game belt scrollers and visually it rips off a lot of video games and movies but with way uglier art than anything itās aping. The goal of any game is to use your characters to beat a boss character before the boss completes its objective for the stage youāre playing on, and youāll be obstructed by the bossās minions as well as various stage effects. The game is modular because there are dozens of playable characters each with their own deck of action cards, a multitude of bosses each with their own minion units and behavior cards, and lots of different stages that have their own game boards as well as stage cards that represent a special stage effects and an ongoing stage objective the boss will be attempting to complete.
So you basically mix and match characters and bosses and stages and see if you can beat the game with each of this combinations.
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One character breaks the āplay one card per turnā rule to create big combos. Another character attacks remotely through tokens it can place around the board. A different character can play cards into game zone reserved for enemy cards or stage cards, letting them act outside of the regular game turn order.
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One boss constantly stacks its defense to ever increasing heights by constantly stealing defensive tokens away from the players. Another boss builds curse tokens on players for increasingly deadly effects every turn. A different boss does not innately have any movement options in itself and instead permanently has āattacksā assigned to each player that activate every turn no matter where the player is standing.
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Stage cards are primarily about giving the boss an objective itās trying to complete and creating additional debilitating effects for the player every turn. One stage is a warehouse where the boss trying to collect and steal briefcases of cash around the board. Another stage is an laboratory where the bad guys are trying to activate clones in test tubes but the player can also reprogram the clones to attack the bad guys. A different stage is a prison where the bad guys are trying to capture and interrogate prisoners while the player is trying to keep them out of enemy control.
Because the base rules are so straightforward, all of this variance is established through card text. It means a lot of cards can get text heavy and there can be a lot of reading at the beginning of a game while youāre still becoming familiar with what the particular enemy behaviors and stage rules youāre chosen. But the fact that the game isnāt afraid to write a lot of text means there is a lot more space to develop and differentiate the characters, bosses and stages.
One negative I noticed in the couple of games I played is the emotional pacing of a game- itās kind of flat. Every turn the boss takes its action; every turn the stage effects go off; every turn an additional minion is added to the map. While conceptually the game should become increasingly harder as it goes it, it never felt like the intensity was ramping up or down in an interesting way. I can see in the stage cards there were rules to make the boss increasingly more difficult the longer you took, but maybe itās because Iām new and was so focused on learning my character that I never felt like the board state had an ebb and flow to it to create a memorable pacing.
Dunno if I want to spend hundreds of dollars on it, but it was a fun TTS game. But man is it ugly.
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Maracaibo is really fun! Similar to GWT in some ways but all about card synergies. It feels like a fun adventure as you play. But itās also interesting, and pretty nasty feeling, that a big part of the game is lending your strengths to the imperial forces of Spain, England and Franch as merchant marauders just trying to make a buck off the influence you gain for aiding Spain in displacing England.
There is an expansion where you Pandemic-like remove the cubes that represent these nations from the board in a co-operative mode. I donāt have that and donāt think I will ever track it down (like base Maracaibo, it doesnāt seem abundantly available) because thereās really enough in the base game to explore forever, but the idea seems cool.
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Someone in my board game group wanted to play Feast for Odin tomorrow, and I kind of just said yeah sure letās do it. But then I thought about it some and, well, I donāt know if thereās time to learn such a complex game lol. It would be one person teaching three others how to play the game, outside, starting at 6pm, and it will definitely by far the most complicated game one of us has ever played. To those who have played it, that doesnāt seem like the most choice time to play this game, right?
Feel like I should intercept here and be like, why donāt we schedule a day to play this four player some other time 
I donāt think thatās unreasonable if one person knows how to play. The actual rules arenāt that complicated but there are just a ton of options and you have no idea which ones might be good or might lead to a coherent strategy the first time you play. (Or maybe ever, in my case.)
Thatās sort of how I felt with Agricola, so long as you just managed to feed your workers. I shanāt worry then!
Yes, whatās equivalent to that is making sure you have the right food items to put on the banquet table each round, remembering that it keeps getting longer and some rounds you get no free food items so you must plan ahead a little.
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As I expected, Feast of Odin went a little long for our context. But everyone had fun. I was pleased because the person I expected to be the most overwhelmed actually walked away thinking theyād like to play it again, and has said so a couple times since then. Exciting. It was a cool game. Very sandbox-y. We played with the Norwegians expansion, but I couldnāt exactly tell what difference that made. Though some people say it really helped shape up the shagginess of the original.
Now I am planning for a six-player Dune game my partner and I will be hosting next week. The more I learn about the game the less intimidating it gets, but initially thereās something really foreboding about the idea of it. Itās the economy I think, just how almost requires paying spice. But once I realized that several factions have a sort of passive income of spice, and that there are indeed many reliable ways to accrue spice besides getting into high risk fights (which I will encourage others to play more conservatively this time) playing seven or ten rounds seems down right possible. Weāre gonna do the advanced rules, they donāt seem much more complicated or burdensome while buffing up at least one faction, the Fremen, quite a bit.
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I played Lewis and Clark for the first time last night. Iāve never really looked at it before because I own Discoveries and I figured they were similar. But they really arenāt, aside from the artwork.
The board game is worker placement, deckbuilding (a little), hand management, and a race.
Discoveries is a dice placement/manipulation card game.
Although Iāve been trying to limit my collection in recent years, I think I will have to buy the board game. I had a lot of fun with it and would definitely like to play more of it.
Looks like itās also on Board Game Arena. (I played it in person.)
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Iād like to try this game on BGA
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That looks fun. Iād join in. Iām always a sucker for board games that have a sense of a journey or adventure. Even just in the theme.
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In my journey to play anything thatās not a euro, Iāve tried a few narrative heavy campaign games and Iāve at least learned that I donāt know these kinds of games really do much for me. And also to not trust anyone in boardgames who claims a game has good writing or a good story. The thing that really kills these games for me are the narratives, because they doesnāt feel focused or developed enough to get me invested in, well, anything. And I wonder how much of this is because the narratives need to be kept somewhat breezy and light for an environment with multiple players, or how much these are trying to bank on that āemergent narrativeā aspect of boardgaming to get you invested in the stories. But since Iām not really into the whole role-playing and imagining my own narrative thing for now (I feel like if I wanted to do that I should be playing tabletop RPGs instead), the narratives are too shallow and the mechanics divorced from the narrative are not interesting enough by themselves.
I guess I really do want something more mechanically complex or more gamey (I feel Iām inevitably just going to fall back to euros). I donāt really mind having played these though. It was interesting to see how the idea of narrative heavy boardgames works. I think mechanically these games are actually okay ideas for something designs to propel you through a narrative, they just need a better story and writing to make that narrative something you actually want to see as a reward for playing through the mechanics. This just might be something videogames do better (unless you want to play TTRPGs).
There are a few other games I want to check out that thankfully are more like regular board games, but I think Iāll be exploring stuff with Tabletop Simulator more going forward. Just saves money and physical space.
The three narrative games I tried:
Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood.
Summary
You alternate between reading a story book with some light CYOA elements and a āboss battleā where you fight one or several big monsters on a board. This is the one thatās most like just reading a straight story book between battles, but despite integrating CYOA decision points not a lot of the decisions in the story feel meaningful. You are funneled into one of two story paths every chapter regardless of what you choose and your decisions mainly seem to affect what bonuses you get before combat. But most of all, the story isnāt very good. After setting up what seemed like the main event to put an adventure into motion, it kind of forgets that ever happened and you meander through lots of random adventures. It introduces characters but they have little presence in the moment-to-moment storytelling and arenāt really developed in any way so itās hard to get interested in any of it. Which made it really weird when it spent a few paragraphs talking about how attractive one of the characters are and how everyone found them really attractive.
The combat is fine (uses a card based system like Gloomhaven), but the decision making feels a little too straightforward. For what should be a large number of possible things you can do with your hand of cards, the choice of what to do each turn feels obvious (whichever one lets you run up and attack easiest). This could be because I was playing as two full characters and two simplified characters (simple characters have less actions to choose from but buffed stats/skills to compensate), so I might come back to this and try a full party of full characters. Mercifully this game also provides abbreviated story summaries if you just want to skip to the battles.
ISS Vanguard
Summary
This integrates the story directly into the gameplay more than Oathsworn. As you do things in the game, whether itās part of exploring a planet or managing your spaceship, you will be instructed to check a CYOA narrative logbook to read story contextualizing your actions and affecting gameplay. Itās got a lot of interesting ideas. Each player plays one of the space shipās departments (security, science, engineering, recon) and you build a selection of dice that represent your competency at certain types of skills that will be required when moving on and exploring planets.
So youāve got dice that have faces for mining, for studying aliens, for physical strength, and a whole host of other things. When you go explore a planet you can do some recon work and figure out what kinds of activities a planet will require and you equip your squad with the right crewmembers, dice, and equipment to roll for whatever challenges the planet will represent. As you explore the planet and succeed/fail at actions, youāll read different narrative logs in the logbook that tell you what happens, which can open new paths on the planet, introduce global effects, or change your objective. I donāt know if itās a deep game, but it is neat and the breeziness of the system makes it easy to alternate between gameplay and reading the logbook.
Youāve also this thing called the ship phase where your space ship is represented by a big old binder with card sleeve pages, and you are using that binder to represent what is on your ship, what crewmembers are working on what activities, and so on. Itās kind of like busy work, but as a physical process itās cool to play with.
My main issue with ISS Vanguard is that itās a longform campaign game and, once again, the overarching narrative has been too generic if youāre familiar at all with sci-fi tropes. Now that Iāve typed this all up I kind of want to revisit it though, just to explore some planets. But I wouldnāt look forward to working around the restraints on what I can do placed upon me by the overarching story, and the penalties for avoiding doing what Iām supposed to be doing.
Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin
Summary
An open-world-ish adventure game where you move your figure around a map made of large cards, each representing a place in the world. As you move around you place more map cards, slowly growing this world through which you can freely travel back and forth.
This game feels more CYOA book with board game mechanics than a board game with a story, but not necessarily in a bad way. Every one of those map cards represents a place in the world and youāve got a big Exploration Journal book that has a section for each of those locations. For whatever place youāre on, you can open the book and explore that location, going through a CYOA adventure there. Thereās a choice matrix youāre filling out to track long term progression through the story, so you get access to different stories as you revisit places to reflect where you are in the game. There are also global event cards and what not that also give overall quest goals and events relevant to whatever chapter of the game youāre on.
Thereās a really weird and abstract combat and diplomacy system where youāre playing cards and trying to physically connect and link chains of symbols between the various cards to activate any effect. It makes sense the more you play with it, but itās such a weird thing. Itās not like youāre playing a card to attack the monster, youāre trying to play a card with a Red Damage Cube icon that lines up with the Aggression stat icon on the last card played so you can add one Red Damage Cube to the enemy, but you also want the new card you played to have a Courage stat icon so you can play this other card that has a Draw One Card effect that attaches to Courage stat icons. Or you can play another card that has a time-delayed effect of adding 2 Red Damage Cubes after a turn has passed, but only if you do not link another card to it because the stat icons are placed in a position such that if you were to line up a new card to them, the new card would be placed on top of of the existing cardās effect text, nullifying its ability.
But hey, maybe if youāre going to make a big Dark Souls-wannabe fantasy game, maybe donāt have me just running errands for a generic narcissistic king and with his generic family drama for the first 15 hours of the game. Iāve tapped out because I donāt know how much longer thatās going to last. Itās got an interesting world, but I wish the story itself was interesting. Itās also another one where the game has characters, but thereās not enough development of those characters to make me care about them. Maybe that much writing would pull you too out of the game if youāre playing with a group, but without it everything feels too lightly touched on. Especially the titular villains, the Kings of Ruin, one of whom finally appeared but thereās like little story interaction with it at all. It just adds a game mechanic. Felt very anti-climactic.
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Dune is a lot of fun and much easier to play than you might expect. The tension you hear people mention when talking about this game is real and itās much more structured and obviously more thematic than Cosmic Encounter, which is fairly similar in some regards. I love that there arenāt victory points in the game just multiple win conditions (including a default that one faction can cynically kill themselves over and over again to hold onto). Makes me want to play more games with win conditions instead of VP scoring, which I am usually indifferent to. I found a game at a thrift store called Power Struggle which I am excited to play because it may feel like it has more of a strategic victory instead of a mere points victory endgame.
These were the Tleilaxu tanks after I blew up the shield wall as the Fremen
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I recently got one of the newer Dominion sets (a piracy-themed one called āPlunderā) and I tried it out tonight. One of the players got tired of Dominion years ago after playing just the base set too much and with too many players (Iād never go above four), but after this game has renewed interest.
The other two players were totally new to Dominion, but Iād played the Unicorn Overlord card game with them a while back and so I was able to say to them that Dominion is a lot like Unicorn Overlord when introducing it.
This expansion is a good one.
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Today I played an unassuming game called Imperial by the designer of Concordia. It took nearly five hours to play but was fun and engaging the entire time. Itās somewhat 18xx-like in that there are no player colors/pieces but you invest in different powers and control the ones you have the most stake in.
The powers change hands frequently and their values can be manipulated. The ultimate goal is to have the most valuable investment portfolio at the end of the game. One difference between this game and an 18xx game is that a nationās āstockā value and your number of held shares can only ever go up, never down.
Definitely something Iād play again.
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On a work trip and went to a game store, just longingly looked at the games imagining anyone would be willing to play them. We all went back to our hotel rooms before 8:30 and now Iām on BGA, nearly desperate for someone to play with!!
Before I left my partner and I had just set up and started to learn Teotihuacan: City of the Gods. It is really stretching our brains for some reason. Weāve both played lots of games like it but this for whatever reason makes us feel like weāve barely played anything whenever we look at it. Seems really cool though. It has that Ark Nova thing where a round/game ends when two markers meet, one black and one white. And when they do this is called an eclipse. Theyāre usually triggered after a bunch of worker dice are upgraded to their six sides, and they āascendā and are interred within the cityās avenue of the dead (gaining you a point on that track and resetting the dice to 1). The board is crazy looking, truly every rule is written on it through some archaic symbol that manages to keep inline with the art style. Itās really impressive and overwhelming
I also got a copy of Brass Birmingham for us, which has me very excited to try.
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