Mecanisburgo - AT/Euro monstrosity?

Anybody played this and enjoy it?

the rule book has been rewritten by fans, iconography complex, anybody get to the core of the gameplay? Is it a monstrosity or is there a good game underneath the trappings?

To my knowledge, ATBarnes hated it so ERPBarnes will hate it doubly.

I only played it once but am dying to play it again. I remember it being hulking and bizarre.

Legomancer wrote: I remember it being hulking and bizarre.

Cool description tho someone here is gonna say that describes their penis to a T

Heck, those descriptions are all over the site.

- It's a lot of fun, in a small package.

- I don't get it out much when I leave the house, but my wife does like it.

- Nobody's having a good time, and they're just staring at it with frowns on their faces.

Complete waste of time. It's very, very rare that a game with "fan rules" is worth playing (Magic Realm and...uh...). This game is a jumbled, cluttered mess. It falls into that vast abyss of games that just are not worth the time and effort to play, especially when there are other similar and better games available.

I remember trying to teach this train wreck to my friends. Turn 1, one of them says "This game fucknig sucks". It got swept off the table- literally, you just shove all the pieces into the box without bagging/sorting/etc., which is in my area the ULTIMATE condemnation of a game.

Barnes wrote: This game fucknig sucks.

From the urban dictionary:

Fucknig
A most foul insult.

Reserved for when any other insult just won't do.

Can be used to cover up a typo when trying to write fucking.
"Yeah? Well you're a total fucknig! How do you like them apples?"

"Fucknig? FUCKNIG? How dare you call ME a fucknig?"

---
This games a fucknig, then.


Some people whose opinions I respect like this monster tho... what's his name, the scorched earth guy from Brooklyn and Scott E. ... are sure this doesn't need revisiting Barnes, the same way you see DoA (II) differently these days?

The fan rules are just a rewriting for clarity. It's along the lines of a Headless Hollow rules summary, but without the condensing.

I ran through a turn 2P with a friend of mine just yesterday in the hopes of running through it again, in full, in a later session. It's just as I remembered, and it's absolutely a mess. The whole thing is done in four turns, but those four turns can take more than two hours depending on how many players you have.

It's a worker placement, but the workers you're placing have unique stats and they fight over who gets to perform the action. One of your workers is a dummy, there to take up space in one of the four slots each location has to place in. When you're in a conflict, you pick what type of combat you're going to have. There's negotiation, where feelings get hurt, or combat, where the loser has to pick somebody at the location to die. You pick one of your workers present to be the leader, who provides a base negotiation/combat stat, then add the support values of any other present workers. You can also activate buildings in your possession for various effects. You have three support tokens that you can add per turn, but once used in a conflict they can't be used again until the end of the turn. Both players choose these in a double-blind fashion by placing them in your hands. Then you have to spend a card with a number on it from your hand to augment your base numbers, like in LOTR: The Confrontation, except those cards also provide income for the turn. When choosing your card, you have to decide if playing a higher card is worth it since you could potentially lose both the board location monetary reward and the end-of-turn income. You have to do this for every location where there's a conflict. If there are multiple players in a location, they all fight at once and the highest total defeats the others.

The locations give you rewards for controlling them, but there are also other things that can be done at those locations, and they're all represented by icons. Many of those things resolve by taking those hand cards and adding a number found by flipping the top card of the deck. It's random as hell, but at least there's a fixed distribution in the deck.

There are multiple ways to win. There are cards in the deck that have instant win conditions if the player who has them can fulfill their requirements. There are special victories that show up after the second turn where a player can win by fulfilling their requirements. You can just last until the end of the game and win on pure points, which you get by owning cards and buying Major Projects that cost symbols that are present on some cards. You can also straight up lose at any point by having all three of your board members die in one turn.

Most people will not like Mecanisburgo. And they're not wrong. After reading all of that again, I can't blame anyone who doesn't. I'm happy to own it, but I also already have one sprawling, unloved, Frankenstein of a game in Android and I'd rather play that. Which I have, twelve times. Mecanisburgo's at three completed games, but it'll be four soon enough.