Hyperborea

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.

VonTush wrote: 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.

Yeah, that whole rewarding killing everyone equally thing will certainly rub some people the wrong way. It's reminiscent of the can't eliminate a player unless it makes you win this turn rule Cyclades has. I don't mind gamey rules like this as long as they accomplish what they are trying to achieve in an efficient manner and don't minimize your options too much. If this rule results in increased interaction in Hyperborea, then I will enjoy it. If it results in making me change my plans and use up multiple actions wasting a lot of time just to kill one final player's piece to complete the set then it will annoy me. I don't find that rule annoying in Cyclades because it's easy enough to do your thing and ignore the beaten down player(s).

I'm not worried about the game overstaying its welcome because its setup to be played in either a short, medium, or long length. If the short game is 20-30 minutes and this truly has been playtested for 2 years as the designers state, I assume length won't be an issue. We'll see.

charlest wrote: If the short game is 20-30 minutes and this truly has been playtested for 2 years as the designers state, I assume length won't be an issue. We'll see.

They playetested for 2 years? And had to issue a rules Errata due to a potential rules exploit just a few weeks after GenCon?

VonTush wrote:

charlest wrote: If the short game is 20-30 minutes and this truly has been playtested for 2 years as the designers state, I assume length won't be an issue. We'll see.

They playetested for 2 years? And had to issue a rules Errata due to a potential rules exploit just a few weeks after GenCon?

Yes, if you read the entire thread about the errata it makes sense. Basically near the end of development they added a new rule allowing you to keep cubes on your board for partially completed techs. The whole purpose of this rule was just to make the game a bit more friendly to newbies in case they drew cubes trying to build a tech but didn't have enough in their bag or calculate things correctly to finish building it. Instead of those cubes coming off the partially completed tech in the Refresh, they added a new rule allowing you to keep them out to be less punishing.

After release, a user realized you can keep your cubes out on multiple techs to thin the bag. This isn't a huge issue except for one particular strategy which is too powerful. They since errata'd to remove the rule which makes it slightly harsher to newbies but makes the game function as originally intended.

The errata comes down to removing one paragraph in the rules, not a big deal in my opinion.

charlest wrote:
After release, a user realized you can keep your cubes out on multiple techs to thin the bag. This isn't a huge issue except for one particular strategy which is too powerful. They since errata'd to remove the rule which makes it slightly harsher to newbies but makes the game function as originally intended.

You would think that this would be super obvious to anyone working with deckbuilding/dicebuilding/cubebuilding. Thinning and increased draws are the most dominant strategy in any of these games -- have been since the early days of MtG.

VonTush wrote: They playetested for 2 years? And had to issue a rules Errata due to a potential rules exploit just a few weeks after GenCon?

Never believe a playtest quote measured in years. It's a stupid thing to say, but it's out there all the time. Last Night on Earth claimed eight years.

It's fun to speculate on new releases, but games actually released get more testing in two weeks than they did through the entire development cycle, two years or otherwise. The only way to make a good decision on quality is to let 500 players go after it and report back.

S.