“We are making a Shin Megami Tensei board game but want to skip past the complexity of making multiple versions for different languages.”
This being made by a merchandise company that usually makes figures and such, who have never made a game before, explains a lot about this (machine translated):
I’m sorry is this talking about a 6 hundred dollar board game
the yen’s pretty weak nowadays, it’s probably a mere $450.
do the people who buy these games ever actually play them anyway, or do they just paint the minis
if I had $450 to blow on plastic figure related nonsense, I’d get a 3D printer
that’s a lie, I’d get Warhammer Quest
A game store I live nearby has a section for used games, and last night we played maybe my favorite discovery. It’s a game by the creator of Concordia, Mac Gerdst, called Navegador. It is a euro game with a rondel action system where you are racing either to buy all the factories, churches, and shipyards available to players that increase the effectiveness of certain actions or the purchasing power of them, or to explore with your ships the reaches of the sea between Portugal and Nagasaki. The game is fairly quick to set up (quicker than Concordia) and it doesn’t have a lot of component pieces, which is something I appreciate at this point in time. The rules are also pretty slight, and turns are quick because your choices are constrained by the rondel which limits you to the actions available in the next three spaces ahead of your player piece. Yet there remains a lot of interesting strategy. And the length of the game is variable since it’s determined by player’s decisions, which gives it a kind of sandbox-y feel in a really small box. My favorite mechanic is the way that selling goods to the market decreases the sell value of the commodity but increases the value of refining it using your factories, and vice-versa.
I think this is likely to be one of my favorite games. I played it with a 2-player variant suggested by the guy who designed Race for the Galaxy, which is very simple to implement, and makes 2-player games score closer to what 3 and 4-player games end up at.
oh yeah, I played some games
The Magnates: A Game of Power is a blind trick-taking game set in the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I say trick-taking, the game says auctioning. but you’re supposed to watch what everyone plays (2-14 of their own suit, refresh all each turn) so you can deduce minimum values for fighting wars. you make your plays blind, in sets of 3 (for the 4 Sejm seats), 5 (for privileges), 5 (conflicts). one of your cards is a woman, worth 10 for politics but 1 for military…
struggled a bit with the Polish example player names in the how to play, since each card has a Polish noble’s name and I am easily confused. playing tricks blind, in advance, is not fun
I read that this game was inspired by The Republic of Rome but there’s no reason to ally or betray. apparently the publishers worked with Martin Wallace to adapt his very similar design of God’s Kingdom to 4 players and localise to Polish: that game looks very good, so does the adapted Boże Igrzysko. this game is not fun, give it a miss
Amyitis is a euro tile-claiming game, where you are competing to plant the gardens of Babylon to score points + some small bonuses. it’s good! a variable tableau of actions each round, a travelling caravan that determines which plants or upgrades are available, a track of upcoming resources, network building & area control of irrigation, and 3 temples with small end-of-round bonuses for majority (+aging out of old priests)
this is a game about grubbing for points, little and often. though there are some compounding lines where repeated upgrades get better and better, and some tiles grant free upgrades (of your choice, or of the red Cultural cards worth from 1-10 points). if you haven’t developed red, it’s another small point bonus; if you had developed, then into the lead you go. think we got close to 50 points all told by the end
I enjoyed how confusing the first round was “how do you play?” and by the third round everyone took the labourer for resources as fast possible.
You’re making an awful large assumption that they even paint them at all.
After owning it for a while I finally had a chance to play Kiri-Ai: The Duel. Once you have your head around the rules games take only a few minutes a piece. It’s pretty fun! The tactical depth from only just a few movement/attack options is pretty impressive. And I love a game that I can just tuck into a pocket of my backpack to bring places.
Path of Civilization is a tech tree simulation: generate resources and research points to buy one technology (5 types, 4 levels, cost 1/4/7/10) each of 9 turns. simultaneous turns, population, wonders, leaders, etc. you have 5 technologies but can only use 4 each turn, 2 for resources & 2 for research, last is discarded.
all the art is AI generated, I thought we’d have more time before this crud
game is “Agricola if it was bad”. researching a technology in Government/Science/Religion/Warfare/Industry grants an additional bonus, usually unrelated. getting a new government type bumps your population, science grants builders (for wonders). so you can save for the cost of something through choosing which technologies to use each turn, or by buying techs with immediate bonuses. so the usual Agricola plan “by the end of the game I want stone huts and farms and animals and vegetables” becomes “to get X by the end, I can <bewildering collection of potential actions>”. no competing over tecnologies, there’s enough for everyone to get everything (and more than once)
the tech names are extremely French, what they do or grant has little logical thematic connection. the normal civilization games are better, Through the Ages is still king
I see Tikal was added to BGA. Anyone wanna play an async game?
finally grouped enough people to hold my first time f2f 7-players Diplomacy.
A marathon of dark humor.
I got the final victory as UK, at the beginning, the German player successfully misled the less experienced Russian player, causing him to kick me out of Norway. However, when he attempted to unite others to besiege France and was on the edge of success, France making significant concessions and sacrificing itself to form an alliance with me to stop Germany, Austria-Hungray and Italy. This allowed me to advance towards Brest and control Portugal, ambush Denmark, which led to I gained absolute dominance on the map and everyone turned to unite with me to divide Germany.
Germany player publicly losing his temper and accuse the Russian and French players.
btw for appeasing the German player’s rage, everyone could only say that Diplomacy is a very bad game and Germany lost in history all the time.
Sadly it seems that we won’t playing Diplomacy in the short time lol.
muaad’s cunning…
Pissing everybody off is the classic Diplomacy experience.
And Germany/Austria/Italy are generally regarded as the toughest starting positions just because you’re surrounded by “friends”.
if you’re still friends after a diplomacy game you played it wrong
is this why felix didn’t come to sbcon this year…
I did the Kickstarter for the reprinting and expansion of Lords of Vegas a couple years ago. There were a lot of delays but it arrived about a month ago. So far I’ve played the base map once to relearn the game (having played it only once, years ago) and last night I tried one of the new maps, New Orleans.
I like the factor luck plays in the game. You roll dice only when someone initiates a power struggle or when you choose to “gamble.”
We used the “sprawl” and “reorganize” actions a lot more on the New Orleans map. Because a number of your dice are on the (mobile) riverboats, you run out pretty quickly and have to decide whether to repurpose the ones you have on the board.
Money changes hands so often that I think it would be a chore to play with the paper money the game comes with. Instead I’ve been using the poker chips that came with Brass and they work very well (and I guess they also fit the theme, but the theme doesn’t really do anything for me in the first place).
I guess now I’ll have to try the other three new maps, each of which has a unique mechanic like the New Orleans riverboats.
Played Aeon’s End this weekend, or rather one of the like apparently 20 combos of expansions of Aeon’s End. It’s a deckbuilder with a dark fantasy theme seemingly intended to produce a lot of white knuckle, barely made it situations. Despite playing the tutorial mission with the enemy cards set in a specific, developer-intended order, we got trounced twice. Could not figure out how our power curves were supposed to keep up with the monsters’. My friend who brought it, who is one of those board game sickos with hundreds of games and owns all the Aeon’s End stuff, swore that he’s played and won multiple scenarios but couldn’t offer much advice on what we were doing wrong with this specific one, which he had never played before. Spent the whole time wishing I was playing Frosthaven instead.
I like Aeon’s End a lot, but I usually modify the starting life totals to be slightly in favor of the players (as suggested in the rule book for adjusting the difficulty).
But even then, one of the more annoying aspects of the game is that more often than I’d like whether you win or lose comes down to whether the randomly-selected final turn happens to be a player or the nemesis.
