It’s one I saw on sale recently, and didn’t learn about in time to pick it up. Hoping to get it sometime soon. I don’t have people who buy board games around me, so I sometimes have to take a gamble and try things sight unseen. But any time a game is recommended here, I know it’s good and worth my time.
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think Oceans is fun, a decent iteration on Evolution
best underwater game is Deep Sea Adventure
to close out the night while you finish your pint. the trick is to have at least two people who think it’s a pointless luck-fest (and one of them trying to use all the air to finish the game faster) while the true adventurers try to find both the zero-point treasures
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i love this youtube channel, its a grumpy old guy who loves to go out dancing playing rules heavy tabletop games alone. he is SUCH a curmudgeon. ive been watching him for a while but held back on recommending the channel cuz he sprialled a bit after his wife killed herself but hes doign a lot better now
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I liked Oceans the one time I played it but all the vertical cardboard kind of bugged me. That’s not really a flaw of the game, though, and I’m sure I could come up with some kind of custom solution.
I find Deep Sea Adventure annoying in the way that I find every “press your luck” game other than Can’t Stop annoying. If skill in that type of game translates into some sort of real-life aptitude (maybe investing in the stock market?), then I don’t have it.
Unrelated, but I’ve been reading about unofficial fan-created campaigns and scenarios for the Arkham Horror card game. I want to try Dark Matter, which apparently everyone thinks is at least as good as many of the official ones. And people claim that it ultimately makes sense why your 1920s investigators are on a spaceship.
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I’ve been very slowly playing through the Dunwich Legacy campaign for the Arkham Horror card game with a couple family members since November 2020. We’ve generally done a session only when meeting up over a holiday, and not even every holiday. We finished that campaign yesterday.
In the meantime, I’ve also played a couple other campaigns (including another run of Dunwich Legacy with SB people in 2021, though in that instance we weren’t permitted to see the final chapter because that’s just how the game goes sometimes).
I also finally got around to trying the game that Kurt Vonnegut designed this week. It’s a chess-like abstract strategy and I like the look and feel of it, but I’m not sure it’s one I’ll want to play a lot. One fun element is a single paratrooper you get to deploy at any time. It’s not hard to take out an enemy artillery unit with it, but you’re likely to lose it in the process so you get just the one shot.
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Played a few games over my break…
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At the Gates of Loyang - this makes four-for-four with Rosenberg with us, because we loved this random surprise I picked up out of someone’s collection that they were selling. Fun T-shaped player boards, interesting round pacing, satisfying tension, and really thinky.
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Ark Nova: Marine Worlds - this is definitely a good expansion that you might as well just throw in there. The aquariums in our game didn’t get too much use. But I love the wave affect that the new cards have, pushing cards down and out of the display. Really helps move through the deck in a two-player game. I also like the upgraded player pieces.
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MicroMacro Crime City: All In - picked this up for cheap and really like it. It’s just a big Where’s Waldo map that is the size of a coffee table and 14 criminal cases to work through. We’ve taken to the advanced mode which has you read only the introduction, and then work your own way through the investigation without referring to the other cards until you’re ready to call it in and submit your conclusion.
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Milli Fiore - played this with my Knizia-loving family, and it seems like a perfect game for a family group. Easy mechanics, simple decisions, a decent amount of strategy with choice little way to assure that you can pull off your strategy. It was fun. And I think it solidified my feeling that I should just go in on any new Knizia reprint, for the most part.
Looking forward to receiving Ra and Endeavor: Deep Sea soon. And hoping to play Quest for El Dorado and Mind MGMT with some friends this week!
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Rosenberg considered Agricola, Le Havre and Loyang to be a triptych
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looks dope
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Reminds me of awful green things from outer space.
(Says guy with awful green things avatar)
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you mean a banana avatar
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No it’s Captain Yid of the Xnutar.
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Captain of the banana boat
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No this is racist against whatever type of alien Captain Yid is.
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OK fine banana
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You say that as if something has changed.
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https://talk.consimworld.com/WebX/.1de8319f/
Ken M. Keller - 12:46pm Jan 8, 2025 EST
Musician. Programmer. Twice the hack.I regret to announce the passing of Alan Emrich, a good friend, and giant in the gaming world.
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Today I got to play Imperial 2030. It took five hours with five players but it never dragged at all. As with the original Imperial (which I got to play once last year), you are not identified with a national power but you invest in any number of the nations.
Whoever has the largest investment gets to pull the strings and direct a nation’s conquest. Your ultimate goal is to become personally wealthy though this manipulation and how the nation ultimately fares is irrelevant to you as long as it earns you money. It’s extremely cynical but it’s a very good game.
Other than having an initial investment assigned randomly, the game has no luck factor whatsoever.
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Curious if anyone here wants to go to bat for hidden movement games? I’ve played a number of them at this point (Mind MGMT, Letters from Whitechapel, Nuns on the Run) and I rarely feel like they’re thrilling successes whenever we play them. I played Mind MGMT with my partner 1v1, and then with her and some other people 1v3 this weekend. It was definitely a cool experience, but it also felt kind of gimmicky. Like it was basically the same game as Letters from Whitechapel but with a lot on top of it. I guess if you’re really into the game, all the extra stuff is in service of building almost campaign-style over many different plays, complicating things as you go along as it introduces new mechanics and novel quirks. But it’s still hide and seek. I was left wondering if LfW was a better game for being at least easier to get into. But I haven’t played that one in years, so I wonder also if I’d even like it if I did play again.
Nuns on the Run is still maybe the most interesting of these I’ve played, because it’s one seeker versus several hiders. It is literally hide and seek with a cheeky theme to it, and of all these games I’ve played with groups in the past that one seems to have struck the strongest chord with people.
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Beginning on the dark path that is sleeving my deck builders. Trying to be strategic and smart about it at least, like I’m not gonna sleeve ALL my AH LCG cards but a lot of them yeah.
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Seems like every year there’s one big game that the internet’s just losing its mind over, and this year that’s Arcs. A friend of mine picked it up (with the expansion that adds a campaign mode), and we’ve been playing it a bit.
After 3 games, I must say: Arcs is a Bad Vibes Game.
You ever play a game that’s interesting, meaty, and well-designed, but it just makes you feel fucking terrible?
The Qualities of a Bad Vibes Game
- The actions you take are largely based around avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure.
- You’re heavily incentivized toward aggressive play – you only succeed by screwing over your opponents.
- There are so many variables in play and so many fiddly systems that you can easily lose track of things and get totally screwed. And when you get hit by a complex, unanticipated failure that you technically could have prevented, it results in exactly the same feeling as, like, falling for a phone scam.
- The moment-to-moment gameplay is so chaotic that you can never make a realistic long-term (or even medium-term) plan. You’re not climbing a mountain, you’re scrabbling in the dirt.
- The game is really long and you can get so screwed you don’t even want to play any more.
Arcs has a very cool theme with a lot of fun ideas. The campaign mode assigns you a character that’s sort of an archetype in a space opera situation. The different archetypes bounce off each other in interesting ways that were clearly thought through. Today I played as the Steward, a bureaucrat striver in the big space empire. I wanted to bolster my position in the empire by securing objectives for it. One of my opponents was a capitalist trying to raise his status through trade. A sort of end-of-feudalism conflict arose where he kept throwing up roadblocks in the empire’s governmental procedures and I kept having to bribe him to leave me alone, which meant that he kept consolidating wealth and outpacing me on objectives, and I was like “god damnit, this must be how the nobility felt about the bourgeoisie”.
I respect the cool theme and the ways the game’s mechanics line up with it, but ultimately because it’s such a Bad Vibes Game, emotionally the whole time it just felt like I was getting beaten up on relentlessly for 7 hours. I’m honestly a little embarrassed at how tilted it was getting me.
I’ve played most of Leder Games’ output:
- Vast: The Crystal Caverns is incomprehensible but I like the bizarre theme and ambition. WOULD NOT PLAY AGAIN.
- Root is pleasant but such a pain in the ass to teach that it wasn’t really worth it. WOULD PLAY AGAIN WITH PEOPLE WHO ALREADY KNOW HOW TO PLAY.
- Oath is the most absurdly unintuitive game I’ve ever played. Totally galaxy brained rules, bizarre systems, just impossible to hold it all in your head at once. WOULD NOT PLAY AGAIN.
- Arcs is an extremely Bad Vibes Game but… WOULD PLAY AGAIN BUT WILL NOT ENJOY IT.
These guys have got to be the most overhyped designers in board games right now. It’s all the art. Their games are a chore to play but the art is so good that everyone pretends to like them!
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