Hyperborea

Anyone try this yet? It looks...interesting. It almost seems like a combination of Mage Knight and Eclipse, although a bit simpler than both.

The game's gimmick is cube building, where you add cubs to a bag you draw from each turn. These cubes may then be used to perform certain actions or research technologies. There's a large list of technologies and many viable options.

This reminds me of Mage Knight in that you have to make due with what you've been dealt, however, there seems to be less options than in a typical Mage Knight turn (normally 3 cubes as opposed to 5+ cards in MK). You also move about the map like Mage Knight, destroying things, exploring and fighting bad guys.

It's got the Eclipse/Cyclades Euro hybrid thing where there's conflict but you can definitely win without committing any violence. It's also very mechanical like these Euro/AT hybrid games and the mechanics don't always jive with thematic reasons.

I'm a huge hybrid fan (Eclipse, Cyclades, Kemet, Mage Knight, Sons of Anarchy are all great in my opinion) and this game recently caught my eye as I think it's something I may enjoy. Another selling point is that the listed time is only 90 minutes, which is damn good for a Civ game.

Anyone seen/heard anything about this? Not much hype for whatever reason.

Asmodee is sending me one...looks interesting.

I saw this and read about its "cube building" engine. I thought that would scare most of the people around here off, which is almost a guarantee that I'll like it.

Pointing at Josh with mouth open, high pitched scream emanating from mouth aka The Donald Sutherland Stance.

Josh Look wrote: I saw this and read about its "cube building" engine. I thought that would scare most of the people around here off, which is almost a guarantee that I'll like it.

Well, cubes get grief when they replace miniatures as units on a board. They don't do that here as they merely represent actions. They replace cards and it looks like the game takes advantage of the cube thing by offering different combos based on color, which sounds intriguing. The game actually has around 80 miniatures I believe.

This is definitely more of a Cyclades than an Caylus when it comes to its cube-pushing Euro factor.

The cube building mechanism sounds pretty similar to Yggdrasil, which I found to be a lackluster imitation of Shadows Over Camelot (which I find to be just an okay game). In Yggdrasil, you can try to recruit some Vikings to help you in combat, by drawing from bags with varying populations of Vikings and giants. A Viking gives a one-shot +1 to your combat roll, while a giant is just discarded as a wasted draw.

The problem is that this mechanic is so central to the game that it subtracts from the theme. Instead of feeling like you are playing a Norse god fighting in the apocalyptic battle of Ragnorak, you instead have endless tedious discussions about the bags. Should we clean the blue bag? Should I draw from the black bag? Oh no, the bad guys just put more giants in the green bag. Bag, bag, bag. Should have called the game Bagnorak, the Final Battle of Bags and More Goddamn Bags. Bag, er I mean bah.

The game itself looks interesting. I don't have a ton of faith based on the designer (who's only other accomplished design is Kingsburg). The hype surrounding this at Gen Con got pretty big.

To me this feels similar to Eclipse in that it is trying to be a game that takes on the feeling of a well known AT style game...except you know in less time. There will probably be backlash from the AT crowd...I eagerly await the first negative review titled, 'HyperBOREa'.

I'll probably take the wait and see on this. Luckily a few people in my group have a boner for it, so I'll prob get to try before I buy. I will say that the production values look pretty damn high.

Yes, that's why rolling a die or flipping a card captures so much more of those kinds of themes.

Egg Shen wrote: To me this feels similar to Eclipse in that it is trying to be a game that takes on the feeling of a well known AT style game...except you know in less time. There will probably be backlash from the AT crowd...I eagerly await the first negative review titled, 'HyperBOREa'.

thurot.com/2014/09/17/hyperborea/
Close enough.

Michael Barnes wrote: Yes, that's why rolling a die or flipping a card captures so much more of those kinds of themes.

No, I think that it's the builder part of the mechanic that detracts from theme/setting. Whether you are stocking a bag of cubes or tokens, building a deck, or supervising a dice pool, you are spending too much of your attention on managing the mechanical aspect of the game and not enough on experiencing the theme/setting. I mean, I love Arkham Horror, but I admit that the hassles of the Mythos phase can sometimes drag down the experience.

I haven't paid attention to this one...So thanks for posting.
It looks intuitive which is great, I do wonder at 20-30 mins a player if it starts to overstay its welcome. Rules that steer people in certain directions I don't like so the rule where you get a VP for taking out an opponent's unit, but but only a second VP once you've taken one from all the others doesn't excite me. I'll start to keep an eye on it though.

So...rolling a die is a more thematic mechanic because you pay less attention to doing it?

That's weird.

Michael Barnes wrote: So...rolling a die is a more thematic mechanic because you pay less attention to doing it?

That's weird.

That's not what I'm saying. Managing a type of game component, like a dice pool or a bag of cubes or a deck of cards is more distracting than simply using them, and in my opinion detracts from the experience of playing a game that is about something, as opposed to a mere abstraction. So, drawing a card is fine with me, because I am facing a fresh challenge or opportunity or resource that I didn't have before I drew the card.

But managing the deck by controlling the cards that are in or out of the deck makes the game more about the component than the topic of the game, like a bughunt or an adventure or conquering the world. Same with rolling a die, or even drawing a cube. If I am just rolling a die or drawing a cube from a bag, I am experiencing some degree of risk that I am about to get what I want, or maybe not. But if I am expected to manage the kinds of dice that I could be rolling or the population of cubes that I am drawing from, the game becomes more of a game about dice or cubes, instead of a game about a bughunt or adventure or conquering the world. It's a trade of narrative for process, and I prefer more narrative and less process in my games.

For another example, Elder Sign doesn't entertain me because there is so much attention focused on the rolling and re-rolling of dice that it simply feels like a dice game and not a game about the Cthulhu Mythos.

this is a fair point.

In a game where you want the player to get lost in the setting, theme, conceit, whatever term you want to use, you want the interface to be as thin as possible. In a video game, if the player spends most of their mental power remembering what buttons to press or how the controller works they feel out of the game and lose interest, the same could be applied to board gaming. If you spend your energy interacting with a system that you don't for whatever reason immediately connect with the theme you can lose that thematic connection. Whilst cards and dice are not 'thematic' parsee they are very simple. So simple that your brain can focus on the decision, or the result (which hopefully are thematic) rather than dealing with the mechanism. If you are using a more complex mechanism a barrier can arise.

What made the bag management so intolerable in Yggdrasil was that it was a co-op game. Co-op games often involve a lot more discussion than adversarial games, but the bag management made a majority of the discussions in Yggdrasil about the bag, and less about the gods and monsters that threatened to destroy Asgard. I would rather play a game about gods and monsters than a game about bags.