Please consider adding your quick impressions and your rating to the game entry in our Board Game Directory after you post your thoughts so others can find them!
Please start new threads in the appropriate category for mini-session reports, discussions of specific games or other discussion starting posts.
He definitely has a different approach to design, as evidenced by just two releases. Manoeuvre was really good, and Thunder Alley might be the new benchmark for racing games. It doesn't make any sense that this guy isn't in demand with publishers.
I hate to say it, but some of it could be working with GMT. That may not be the best place, for example, for a basketball game to originate. Aside from that, sports are DEEEEEEEAAAAAAAADDDDDD subject matter for games, sadly. I don't care much for sports IRL, but I actually really like sports board games and I'd love to see that basketball one.
He might be better suited with VPG, for example.
I am actually keenly interested in Fury, especially if it is the "fleshed out" Manoeuvre it threatens to be.
Wasn't someone selling Manouvre here a while ago? I want it if anyone is.
Sports games are tough. A lot of them hover on the edge of the precipice, nearly falling into the miniatures game category where painting and stuff like that is as much of the hobby as playing is. Some of them dive right over the edge. I can't think of many good successful non-racing sports games that are straight-up card or board games without the miniatures aspect. I'm not really sure Blood Bowl Team Manager is a true sports game the way Blood Bowl is. ScrummBrawl is the only one I've found that I like to play repeatedly. I used to play quite a bit of BattleBall with Mr Bistro's rules, but I've gotten a bit tired of that as well. Dreadball looks neat, but I really couldn't be less interested in the miniatures part of it and buying teams.
The P500 list might be the perfect place for a basketball game. Who else would print it? I have to imagine the cross-section of board gamers who are also basketball fans isn't impressively large enough for a more traditional publisher to squeeze a game like that into their playtesting & printing schedule.
Gary Sax wrote: It's amazing how hard a time Horger has had getting his games made given the acclaim they get. He has bunch of other shit on p500, hopefully if people like thunder alley they'll push those over the top or someone else will come along and poach. Like, he has a basketball game there, doesn't he?
Title Chase Basketball is the game over on the p500 and it is languishing. The traditional GMT customer is probably not very interested in this which results in low low numbers. I appreciate GMT attempting to expand their horizons starting with Dominant Species (great), Leaping Lemmings (above average), to Urban Sprawl (not very good). I think it's smart for them to branch out from wargames. Certainly they have the knowledge to put out excellently produced games.
I really had zero interest in Title Chase Basketball. I hate professional b-ball and only tolerate college ball during the tournament. However, after seeing what a bang up job they did with Thunder Alley I am inclined to pre-order it.
Michael Barnes wrote: There's no danger of oversteering and crashing into the wall- a brilliant piece of abstraction, why would these drivers even be on the track if they were that incompetent?
The thing about Horger's approach to sports games, as far as I can tell, is that he isn't interested in simulating the gritty mechanics of the game itself. Thus Thunder Alley isn't about moving your guy 7 spaces when it's in gear 2 like, say, Formula De.
The thing that makes me think about putting in a P500 for Title Chase Basketball is that a) I enjoy the NBA a lot and critically b) it is not about individual games.
As far as I've seen, Title Chase Basketball is about basketball seasons and overlal performance. There's no basketball simulation version of Bloodbowl going on.
I think that's about right. Thunder Alley isn't about minutiae, Horger definitely isn't interested in the micro end of it. It's almost like he said "This is what is important about NASCAR style racing" and trimmed the list down to different types of movement with a couple of possible events (which do, Craniac, include those kinds of crashes!).
It's really about the feel more than anything though, when you see that line of cars all moving and pulling ahead of another line of cars, that totally feels like NASCAR both visually and _strategically_.
Playing with a couple of my "semi-gamer" friends tonight. Hoping that it's all that we put on the table, actually. It comes with four tracks, which I think is a hell of a value for $40.
Michael Barnes wrote: He definitely has a different approach to design, as evidenced by just two releases. Manoeuvre was really good, and Thunder Alley might be the new benchmark for racing games. It doesn't make any sense that this guy isn't in demand with publishers.
I hate to say it, but some of it could be working with GMT. That may not be the best place, for example, for a basketball game to originate. Aside from that, sports are DEEEEEEEAAAAAAAADDDDDD subject matter for games, sadly. I don't care much for sports IRL, but I actually really like sports board games and I'd love to see that basketball one.
He might be better suited with VPG, for example.
I am actually keenly interested in Fury, especially if it is the "fleshed out" Manoeuvre it threatens to be.
Wasn't someone selling Manouvre here a while ago? I want it if anyone is.
Totally based on anecdotal evidence, but I'd guess that GMT is as good a home as any for the basketball game. The GMT fans I know are mainly wargamers, and the wargamers I know definitely skew a bit more conservative, and pro-sports seems to be bigger amongst conservative minded folks. I see far more pro-team ball caps on the heads of the wargamer crowd than I do on the euro/fantasy/sci-fi gamers.
Again, just a feeling based on local observations.
Now's a great time to get back into Manoeuvre...Distant Lands is on its way.
Games
How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
