Played a four-player game of Scythe a few weekends back. I think the most of any of us had played it was maybe three times and it had been a long time since the previous time, so most of the game was fumbling around trying to remember how it plays. I got screwed by forgetting that Popularity is essentially the multiplier for a lot of the final totting up, so finished well behind the winner, who effectively just maximized their resource production and hoarded their money rather than spending it.
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post-2016 or so tabletop games are all so overdesigned in that way imo. itās just not any fun to try to keep the meta in your head
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Yeah I think itās much more fun to play euro games for a personal best or strategy curious angle, rather than trying to be really competitive when it comes to these very large modern euros. There are tighter and lighter games from the past that are much easier to learn and begin play competitively, even just the effort to glimpse and begin engaging with the meta takes significantly less time.
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Gotta pop on Kickstarter
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Yes, there are a lot of games that I think have interesting systems but that are kind of a hassle to play competitively. I just want to play with the interactions, not necessarily to do so more efficiently than others.
I think the aesthetics of Scythe were enough for me to look past this, though I noticed the other day that itās not a game Iāve had near the top of my list of things I want to play in a year or two. I donāt ever grab it anymore when going to a game night, though I wouldnāt turn down a game.
Occasionally one of those modern games with a lot of different things to keep track of integrates its mechanisms in an elegant way that makes it fun to play and works just fine as a competitive experience. For me, Ark Nova is an example of this.
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some modern games (like Scythe) take the trappings of heavy competitive games and end up being hangout games. I dislike it when my hangout games take up the entire table and 2-3 hours
I found Ark Nova pretty clunky, every system was balanced for game purposes and the theme had to go hang
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trying to think of a game I purchased in the last five years that wasnāt a remake or 20-year-old Knizia game
uh,
hmm.
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I bought a remake recently. Itās Indulgence, a remake of 1981ās Dragonmaster, which is a remake of 1966ās Coup dāEtat. I havenāt managed to get it played yet but I hope to soon.
Iām trying to think of what might be the newest non-remake game that I count among my current favorites. It might be Ark Nova, though I think Heat and Gest of Robin Hood are pretty good.
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oh Iām realising Iām getting old and grumpy
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I have a good friend whoās as into board games as I am, and weāve been playing them together for many years. We went to a board game cafe yesterday and he grabbed Feudum off the shelf because he remembered it getting a lot of buzz on Kickstarter. Heās always gotten caught up in the hype cycles around stylish Kickstarter games, and they often (but not always) turn out poorly designed or bloated. This game was both!
Itās hard to describe, sort of a light area control game with this incredibly complex economy built on top of it. There are six guilds, and each has its own different system that interacts with every other guild in a frighteningly complicated way. Itās one of those games where every action you can take comes with 20 fiddly little edge case rules youāll never remember. The whole thing is exceedingly difficult to learn, and I get the impression that once you know the game well enough to play strategically, itās easy to intentionally break the economy in a way that very slightly benefits you while dramatically slowing down the game for everybody else.
It also has the most difficult to parse board Iāve ever seen:
Itās committed to skeuomorphic design to a fault.Each of those different side areas with portaits of people in them represents a guild, and a bunch of seemingly innocuous parts of the illustration are actually functional ā for example, you have to put little cubes on top of the shelves in the market and on the apple in the guyās hand, covering up the prices for those items, so you have to take the cubes off and put them back on to find out what they cost. On the main map, every location you can visit has a compass direction on it, but then each region theyāre in also has a compass direction, so you can be in an S location in the NW region, but the regions arenāt actually marked in the map, you have to infer them from the illustrationā¦ And when the cards reference an S location, they donāt disambiguate between an S location and an S region. Itās all deeply unpolished.
Truly miserable game! The classic example of a kickstarter game that put more thought and resources into its illustrations than its game design.
The one plus Iāll give it is that some of its game mechanics were clever in the sense that they were trying to represent the system of feudalism in a way that meshed well with its theme, e.g. youāre constantly being pulled between the influence of the church and the kingā¦ But this stuff doesnāt cohere into a functional strategy game.
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The designer of that is putting out a lighter strategy tile layer game about escaping a prison called Fled, which I kickstarted without knowledge of Feudum. Hoping itās more fun and much slighter, but still clever.
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I played both Great Western Trail Argentina for the first time and Great Western Trail New Zealand for the second time this past week. While I really loved NZ the first time I played it, it never left the shelf in a year because it is quite the setup. But after we finished and were really thrilled by our game of Argentina, which was much less involved of a setup, and a slight but fun sort of GWT āExpert Modeā version of the original, we did end up giving NZ another shot. And, alas, our impression of it has soured greatly. I remember liking how point-salady it was, how more forgiving or less focused it was on drilling down on a particular strategy compared to the original. And the deckbuilding emphasis was interesting, as was the sheering mechanic. But this timeā¦ it just felt way too bloated and unfocused. And that combined with the large setup process left me thinking Iād like to sell this one, and keep just Argentina and the original around.
But yeah, Argentina is a good version of the game. There are some smart and fun changes to the formula there that donāt make it into some other kind of game, just a more intense focused one.
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I really liked Argentina the one time I got to play it. The only one I own is the original. I havenāt yet tried it with the expansion but Iām hoping thatās somewhat similar to the Argentina experience.
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Iām curious about the expansion too. Would be interested to see a post by you when you get the chance to play it.
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he has nearly as many copies as m-- oh nevermind. gravity land looks cool
āBut what do modern games give us?ā
:shows Warhammer Quest:
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Played a rare Dune Imperium game with someone new this weekend. Have got the Immortality expansion and want to give that a try, but also want to play the base game a bit more. Figured it wouldnāt be good to throw it in with a new player, either. And that was a good call because, we learned, that I have misunderstood the rules in a significant way each time Iāve played in the past. We havenāt been rewarding players with influence when they send agents to the faction spaces on the left of the board. Because of this our games have always gone very long and influence was very rare to acquire.
Pretty embarrassing. But it at least excites me to play it correctly in the future.
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Over the past year or so, Iāve taken to sometimes sneaking in an expansion even when teaching people new to a game, just because Iād so rarely be able to play with expansions otherwise. I just try to be sure I understand the new parts well enough to teach seamlessly.
I havenāt yet done that with Dune: Imperium, but Iāve only played that with the expansions once and Iād like to do so again so I might just include everything next time even if there are new players and hope for the best.
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A friend with good taste in board games told me recently that Endeavor: Deep Sea was his best board game discovery this year. I got to play it this weekend and it was a lot of fun. I was afraid it might be one of those games with too many ways to score points so you really canāt tell who is ahead or how you should change your strategy. And it still might be that type of game, but it was enjoyable enough that I didnāt care on my first play at least.
Never played the two previous Endeavor games, so I donāt know whether this one is better or worse but itās definitely attractive.
I guess I have several good tabletop games set underwater in the ocean, but they are all quite different:
Iāve thought about buying Oceans, that game in the Evolution series, at some point. But Iāve heard that the climate game is actually the best in that series so I need to try it out before deciding which one I want to own if I want to own any of them.
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Endeavor was a serious hidden gem but maybe suffered from the emulation of profit from the slave trade. Deep Sea is less fraught. Top 20 game for me for sure.
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