I got to try Arcs a couple weeks ago. I’d been very curious about its pseudo trick-taking mechanic. I enjoyed the experience and would play it again but I won’t go out of my way to play it again.
I also played two new (to me) games set in Japan recently.
Iki is about opening shops on a street. Your shopkeepers eventually retire if they don’t die in a fire first. I liked this game.
Sekigahara is an attractive war game involving Japanese history. I found it interesting but exhausting. We constantly had to check the rules and I think it took about four hours. (The estimated play time is three hours.) This might be one of those games I admire more than enjoy playing, but I would probably play it again if the opportunity arose.
I’m in the middle of two Arkham Horror card game campaigns at the moment, with two different groups and a scenario every few weeks for each. I’m having to switch some cards between decks because several of the decks are made up of cards from my collection, but both campaigns have been a lot of fun so far.
One is The Circle Undone, which is based on The Dreams in the Witch House. Every character had trauma already by the third scenario. I’m playing ex-cultist Diana Stanley with this starting deck:
The other is The Path to Carcosa, which is based on The King in Yellow and is generally considered the best campaign the game has to offer. Just one scenario in, I can already start to see why. In this one I’m playing chef Zoey Samaras with this starting deck:
I’ve been hearing a lot of positive things about the fan-created Bloodborne custom campaign, but it’s prohibitively expensive to print with 600 cards. It does look nice, though.
I love sekigahara but I’ve never played a physical copy (only played it on TTS). I love the way it simulates the fog of war with the stacked tiles with hidden symbols
good list, I sure felt the same playing Oath. a lot of these qualities make the game solo-friendly. which is where some of the hype comes from (lonely gamers). John Company is exactly the same, and is amazing to play solo. a side effect of the development process, preferring solo playtesting to groups
think some of the other hype is from game designers (budding or active) getting excited by the systems, which are terribly over designed.
curious that such solo-heavy designs specifically avoid the “multiplayer solitaire” criticism. I usually prefer this, people are much harder to predict than decision trees/dice rolls.
I had a lot of thoughts about the other ways of handling this interaction other games have, but fundamentally Cole tends to choose “take this action to stop someone else from winning without significantly improving your chances to win”. the worst kind of kingmaking, where you have to drag out the game hoping you reveal a situation that you might be able to capitalise on. not even “you lose, I win” zero-sum
My 9 year old who is always looking for games to play to bounce his ADHD off of used his little school-currency at the school store to buy a copy of Coup they had there. Why they had Coup for sale at the elementary school store is a mystery to you and me. It’s fast and really fun, the boys grasped it after just a couple rounds.
Yes, this is really perceptive and exactly what’s going on in Arcs. It can make the person on the receiving end feel pretty bad. When someone’s only taking an action to slow you down for no personal benefit, it feels so much more personal than board game aggression usually does. Now and then it’s fine, but when it’s happening to you over and over for an entire game it adds up.
After a few plays of Root I don’t think it’s for me and I don’t know if my group is going to dig it out again. It’s about as far away from multiplayer solitaire as you can get, but at the same time it kind of weirdly induced that feeling of solitary play since every other character was a black box and people ended up focusing exclusively on their own actions
I bought Splendor Duel and it’s become one of those games I can show to anyone and they’ll probably enjoy it (other games I’d include in this list would be Code Names, Tichu, and Patchwork). One couple ended up getting their own copy after trying mine. Base Splendor is a little on the simple side but this adds abilities onto cards, new win conditions, a new resource type in the form of pearls, a grid puzzle when you get your gems. It’s a pretty perfect balance between accessibility while also being interesting to play
It looks great in person but it’s a little impractical. When you get large stacks of blocks it’s easy to get confused about which city they are on when the cities are close together. They also obstruct your view so you can miss a resource cube or unoccupied city. And of course it’s easy to bump the table or a stack and expose/mix up the blocks.
some new 18XX versions (1871 The Old Prince) are extensively playtested online on 18xx.games and never make it to a publisher. and most Alchemy cards in MtG: Arena are impossible to play fairly on a physical table
Going to (hopefully) play our first four-player Arkham Horror LCG game this weekend. Two new players, though I guess one of them has at least played it once before. Not sure how to get things started. Jumping into the beginning of The Dunwich Legacy, or playing the first scenario from the starter campaign and then going onto The Dunwich Legacy. Now that I type this out, I think we should just jump into Dunwich since I’m sure time will quickly get eaten away and why put off the shit you’re excited to get to any longer than need be?
Oh, and speaking of Carcassonne. I got the digital version on Steam last night and my partner and I played a game of it. Pretty good adaptation. I was excited that it came with an expansion I don’t own, and have heard curious things about, Carcassonne: Expansion 3 – The Princess & The Dragon .
In this one a dragon meeple is placed onto the table and will stomp around up to six tiles from its starting location (the location of the most recently placed tile with a volcano feature on it) and it scares away any meeples it comes into contact with. There is also a fairy meeple that you can place next to an already placed meeple, which will sacrifice itself to the dragon if it ever comes your way. That fairy meeple also nets you one point every time it becomes your turn, so long as it’s still protecting another of your meeples. There are also tiles with portals that allow you to move meeples onto already placed tiles that have incomplete features.
This expansion felt very at odds with the Carcassonne I have come to love. I actually said that it seemed like the Carcassonne expansion for people who don’t like Carcassonne. It is very random and especially mean feeling. I did kind of like the dread I felt of maybe pulling a dragon tile that would force us to march the dragon around the table, but overall it’s too destructive for what you’re trying to enjoy with Carcassonne. Taken as a whole it felt like this might be fun for little kids who are kind of frustrated by the rules of Carcassonne.
The first time I ever played the AH card game, we did all three base set scenarios and then carried our characters right into Dunwich, upgrades, trauma, and all.
But I’ve also taught new players when starting a campaign without them ever having seen the base set. As long as someone knows how to play pretty well and the decks have been built somewhat competently, it shouldn’t be a problem.
This is a player aid that I found helpful when learning the game and now I use it when teaching if someone wants something to look at:
But note that it has two things that could use clarifying:
The part about evade makes it sound like the investigator moves but it’s probably just trying to say put the monster back in the room from your threat area.
In the Upkeep section it says that each “engaged” investigator draws a card. The word engaged shouldn’t be there.
Designer Richard Tucholka was once turned back at the US/Canadian border, not because Canada Customs thought his map tube (a repurposed rocket launcher no longer functional for its original purpose, IIRC) was a bit weird but because they felt his personal dice collection had too many dice and was therefore deemed suspicious.
