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Kevin Klemme
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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04 Dec 2014 01:31 - 04 Dec 2014 01:32 #191878 by Disgustipater
Played a game of X-Wing the other night with the new Decimator and Outrider. 2v2, 200 points per side. I was on the Imperial side and we had 3 Decimators. My list was two Shuttles and a Decimator and my partner's list was 2 generic Decimators and Howlrunner. The Rebels had a YT-2400, a few Headhunters, and 4 bullshit Y-Wings with some proxied upgrades from Most Wanted. He had his 4 Y-Wings flying tight together, each with the new title and Autoblaster Turrets . So at Range 1, he got 8 attacks, the second of which can't be evaded. They took apart my shuttles. These Y-Wings are going to be a pain in the ass to deal with. While we caused a lot of casualties on the Rebel side, we ended up losing.

The zero agility on the Decimator is a severe handicap. It's really hard to mitigate, and you can go down really quickly. I do want to build a (really expensive) build with Moff Jerjerrod and a couple of cheap Intelligence Agents to sacrifice. I'm still not convinced how viable to Decimator is. After seeing it in action half a dozen times, I'm not hopeful.
Last edit: 04 Dec 2014 01:32 by Disgustipater.

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04 Dec 2014 09:08 #191886 by Legomancer
Played Uruk II on Tuesday. Here was my hot take on it:

If you're coming into Uruk II thinking you're playing a civ-lite game, you'll be disappointed. The civ elements of the game are abstracted to the point where you can pretend that pretty much anything is going on. It's a sort of tableau-builder except you only have five cards in your tableau which you're theoretically gradually improving.

Uruk II isn't awful, but it has a weird sense that the game dislikes its own rules. There are costs to laying down cards, but one of the first techs you can get lowers them. A more striking example: in the game we played, at one point a civ card required our tableaus to be worth at least 13 points in order to buy a settlement. Fine, no problem, we're supposed to be raising the values of our civs anyway. Then the next civ card threatened a grave penalty if the value got above 15. Why? Why penalize the players for not only doing something you just rewarded, but which the victory condition of the game is built around?

The main issue with Uruk II is that it's an unremarkable entry into a crowded field. With so many options for tableau-building games, including civ-like ones (I'm looking at you, Imperial Settlers) there's just no reason to roll with this one, WITH ONE IMPORTANT EXCEPTION.



Draw a black dot on one side of the pig tokens and you can play Pass the Pigs between turns! No other tableau game I know of boasts this feature.

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04 Dec 2014 23:39 #191968 by hotseatgames
Played some Resistance and One Night Ultimate Werewolf tonight. This was my first time ever getting to play Werewolf and I liked it a lot.

We started with one person moderating but then switched to the app that does the moderating for you. That was pretty awesome, really.

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05 Dec 2014 05:42 #191980 by bomber
played Greenland, 3 new players, early frontrunner for most overhyped and overrated game of the year. It is fucking awful. I won't go into the usual complaints about the crap rulebook, terrible design of Components and info and box size, since thats a given with Eklund, but the game itself is just shite.

First of all, nobody gives a crap about the theme, well, let me rephrase that, I would happily Watch a documentary about the development of Greenland in the olden Days and I'd happily read about it in a proper book, but nobody is playing this game and savouring the blobs of text in the middle of the cards, and "getting into" the theme of the Thule World in olde greenland. The gameplay doesn't give any strong Connection to the "theme", so basically, lets just strip off all the theme and art, since it is totally extraneous except to appeal to a certain subsection of nerd that likes to feel like Eklund games are somehow "cleverer" than other games, even though most of them boil down strongly to a die roll or card draw.

Sure, some nice ideas in there, the cooling thing for example but it boils down to a fucking boring game managing a small number of boring Resources, and making use of incredibly boring special "Powers" that are almost all the same, even the tribal Powers are hardly boner inducingly different. Most of the boring cards on the display are hey, lets get 1 baby, hey lets get 2 Babies, hey lets get 2 Babies and an iron, or a fire. Woo hoo, a special Power card game where all the cards are minor variants of each other. An event each turn just messes stuff up,mainly making you lose people, inspiring the amazingly fun plonking cubes on various cubes to get more people and repeat. Whoah, amazingly there are a fewicons, fish, boat, hammer etc, letting you modify one result of a die roll. Now all 4s can be rerolled. great. Once you remember that the theme is pointless here it becomes a dull game of shuffling Resources (yeah you can fight a bit too) and optimising where you can throw Dice and get an extra number "succeeding" for you.

utterly boring, one of us ended up with no extra cards in tableau by the end, but 2nd with 26 Points mainly due to having a clump of cubes on a boring colony card, and then shoving an acolyte on someone elses boring card at the end.

There might be the cleverest, subtlest strategy of all time hidden in this game but I wouldn't bother with it, cos it was literally a waste of every millisecond playing it. Dull, boring crap that would be laughed off the table if it didnt have some "sciencey fucking text" on it, a few Icons and labels and the aura of Phil Eklund, oo, so smart on it.

Theres no way this could ever appeal to anyone long term either, because even if you have some kind of hardon for caribou and baby seals, you will soon get bored of flipping an event, Rolling a few die, and shuffling around the same few cubes, and coloured tokens.

Utter fucking pap.
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05 Dec 2014 08:13 #191984 by Legomancer

ldsdbomber wrote: even if you have some kind of hardon for caribou and baby seals


*perks up*

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05 Dec 2014 08:21 #191986 by Gary Sax
Did you like Pax Porfiriana? That would help orient your review for me, 000.
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05 Dec 2014 08:44 - 05 Dec 2014 09:06 #191987 by Cranberries
Well, that game is my only Christmas present, so this is a bummer.

Last edit: 05 Dec 2014 09:06 by Cranberries.
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05 Dec 2014 08:59 - 05 Dec 2014 09:06 #191989 by bomber
I havent played Pax, so i cant relate it to that, unfortunately but based on my experience with this (a simplified Pax), I'm not in any rush to try it, but a lot of people whose taste usually meshes with mine love Pax so its not out of the question. I really like RftG, and would put Chudyks games very high on my list (Innovation among my all time favourites), so it's not that I am anti card game / tableau game, its just this one is so boring, I mean 2 rows of cards are laid out but almost all of them (not exaggerating) boil down to putting a number of cubes on it, and Rolling 1d6 for each, and trying to get 1 or 2 on the Dice as a success, card Powers let you for example reroll a result of 3 or 4. Rolling like 2 or 3 of a kind let you take the card to hand or tableau, normal successes just give you a combo of Babies (cubes), fire, ivory, iron. But there is so Little variation and so Little interest between hunting the narwhal or the fucking boring fish, or the seal pup as they all require you to roll Dice and get some 1s or 2s, and then you get a few more cubes or a chip of fire, iron or ivory. Its utterly depressing, all the tribes cards and elders arent anything like unique enough. Theres no way I would ever want to play this ahead of the other card games I mentioned. Theres some room for "fighting" (again not done in an exciting way), but honestly, I Think "ROMA" does (for 2P) that better and more cohesively than this. Plus theres the usual crap with rulebooks, and card text, Icons and stuff pretending to be way more complicated than it is.
Recommend: avoid. Its so bad, I even cancelled ordering a few from the shops here as trade bait / ebay bait later.

PS Craniac, sorry if that bursts your Xmas bubble, but of course dont take my Word for it, I might be totally wrong, you might love it, though I suspect even those who kind of enjoy it will quickly wear out on it, there doesnt seem to be a huge amount of long term replay value in it, as it is in the box anyway. I really hope it works for you dude, dont let one cranky old fucker put a downer on your Xmas anticipation! Its just my opinion man, I've been wrong Before (many times!)

PPS
the one fun part did relate to us all protecting our "daughters" but eventually the game bored us so much we all basically offered up our Girls for the hell of it. No one wanted Peepeelee but someone stuck their cube up my Lovely Kirimi because she had the super special awesome Power of "rerolling 4s" on cards with a canoe in the corner. She isnt the best looking lass, but at that Point in the game we took what we could get
Last edit: 05 Dec 2014 09:06 by bomber.
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05 Dec 2014 09:08 #191990 by Cranberries
No, don't worry. It will still sell on the used market for $80 in two months.
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05 Dec 2014 09:38 #191992 by stoic

ldsdbomber wrote: I havent played Pax, so i cant relate it to that, unfortunately but based on my experience with this (a simplified Pax), I'm not in any rush to try it, but a lot of people whose taste usually meshes with mine love Pax so its not out of the question. I really like RftG, and would put Chudyks games very high on my list (Innovation among my all time favourites), so it's not that I am anti card game / tableau game, its just this one is so boring, I mean 2 rows of cards are laid out but almost all of them (not exaggerating) boil down to putting a number of cubes on it, and Rolling 1d6 for each, and trying to get 1 or 2 on the Dice as a success, card Powers let you for example reroll a result of 3 or 4. Rolling like 2 or 3 of a kind let you take the card to hand or tableau, normal successes just give you a combo of Babies (cubes), fire, ivory, iron. But there is so Little variation and so Little interest between hunting the narwhal or the fucking boring fish, or the seal pup as they all require you to roll Dice and get some 1s or 2s, and then you get a few more cubes or a chip of fire, iron or ivory. Its utterly depressing, all the tribes cards and elders arent anything like unique enough. Theres no way I would ever want to play this ahead of the other card games I mentioned. Theres some room for "fighting" (again not done in an exciting way), but honestly, I Think "ROMA" does (for 2P) that better and more cohesively than this. Plus theres the usual crap with rulebooks, and card text, Icons and stuff pretending to be way more complicated than it is.
Recommend: avoid. Its so bad, I even cancelled ordering a few from the shops here as trade bait / ebay bait later.

PS Craniac, sorry if that bursts your Xmas bubble, but of course dont take my Word for it, I might be totally wrong, you might love it, though I suspect even those who kind of enjoy it will quickly wear out on it, there doesnt seem to be a huge amount of long term replay value in it, as it is in the box anyway. I really hope it works for you dude, dont let one cranky old fucker put a downer on your Xmas anticipation! Its just my opinion man, I've been wrong Before (many times!)

PPS
the one fun part did relate to us all protecting our "daughters" but eventually the game bored us so much we all basically offered up our Girls for the hell of it. No one wanted Peepeelee but someone stuck their cube up my Lovely Kirimi because she had the super special awesome Power of "rerolling 4s" on cards with a canoe in the corner. She isnt the best looking lass, but at that Point in the game we took what we could get


That last part had me LMAO!

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05 Dec 2014 10:30 #191996 by Rafael Silva
I’ve moved recently so there isn’t much time to game around here.

My sister-in-law came by and we played Puerto Rico. She had not played it before but really enjoyed it. She got a tobacco production going and went almost unchallenged due to tile luck, my wife invested pretty early in a lot of quarries and I was stuck with the “low” crops till the endgame. I like this game with three but this session went so fast, I felt that when I got my engine going the game ended. My wife won by 3 pts.

After that we played Catan twice. I won both, my sister-in-law had never played it either and the game with three has so much space that two or three trades early game made it easy. My wife doesn’t like to play negotiation games with me because she doesn’t put as much focus in making deals as I do, so although my sister-in-law said she liked it I think as if she hasn’t played Catan proper.

I’ve to think about 3-player games now because she’ll be around a lot and I don’t play many games with 3. Any ideas? I have Runebound, San Juan, Biblios, Ascending Empires, Stone Age, Middle-Earth Quest, Snow Tails, Lord of the Rings, Arkham Horror and Talisman that I think would go over well with three. Does anyone have any thoughts if Die Macher, El Grande, Imperial 2030, Citadels and 7 Wonders play well with 3?
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05 Dec 2014 11:09 #192000 by charlest
Troyes is perfect with 3.
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05 Dec 2014 11:11 #192001 by JEM
I'd think 7 Wonders would work well with three. I hated it with eight...

The Road to Canterbury was designed for three players, is a really nice game, and sometimes shows up cheap.
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05 Dec 2014 14:30 #192011 by Sagrilarus
El Grande is a no for three.

Alhambra is a definite yes for three.

If you can find it Queen's Necklace is a yes for three.

S.
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05 Dec 2014 14:56 #192017 by RobertB
Die Macher is best for 4 or 5.

I'd second 7 Wonders for three.

San Juan is good for three as well.

My experience with Runebound is that it kind of sucks with more than three. Player number 4 has to spend too much time travelling to get loot, or ends up losing to mobs that are too hard for their level. That was 1st edition, and was ages ago, so my memory could be playing tricks on me.
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