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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?
- SuperflyPete
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Got in a 3P game of Hyperborea this afternoon over a long lunch. LONG lunch. Loooooong.
Neat little game, like the 4X-iness of it, like the bag building (I think it's way more interesting than deck building or dice building), like the art mostly.
HATE the fact that the cities tend to be concentric circles of buildings mostly but the ruins are all sort of square-ish. Makes no sense to me. Did the new culture realize that circles>squares or something?
Don't like all the icons. Not at all. I get that they need to have something, but I just don't like the board all muddied up.
Maybe it'll grow on me. I think it's a very solid game, but it seems a bit dry and repetitive. I don't like the "if you have less than 3 minis on the board, you get more free". That's bullshit. I hate catch-up bullshit. No, you should have to give up cubes to buy them back or something.
Anyhow, neat game, might be really good, but as of my first tinkering with it, I'm thinking it's a but underwhel-meh-ng.
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- hotseatgames
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That aside, we played mission 4 (Twitcher) which involves the 8 VP tokens on the board, each of which can become a hostile (to both sides) zombie. It was really cool and the most fun I've had with the game so far. I continue to like it.
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Two-player is really the only way to play it, though. It seems like the game would scale perfectly, but playing with four always seems to increase the play time from a sharp 15 minutes to a bloody, dragged out hour...
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It can be played 5 Fine... the Rat Player is Neat to play.... if you have a good group it works
Cthulhu Wars is Very Similar but a little less complex... Anyone play it yet?
I've played my copy about 3 times so far... pretty fun achievement Spellbook system.
-Chris
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Best part about this is we can play on the pool table again instead of on a crappy plastic folding one that can't fit large games.
Anyway, first play was my current version of Shiv which is very close to being ready to show to the publisher. I don't know if they will end up going for it but I think I've taken it about as far as I can. It did work very well and was enjoyed. No changes came out of the playtest which is a good sign it's wrapping up.
Then we played four player Cthulhu Wars. I was Black Goat and Cthulhu and I built a second gate on first turn. Yellow Sign got desecration on and for some reason Crawling Chaos just wanted to harass me and threaten my cultists. This wasted too much of his time/attention and he took too long getting more power, which probably cost him the game.
Yellow Sign appeared to be dominating early, getting tons of desecration and monsters out. I slowly built up acquiring my spellbooks in what felt like the most efficient order. I hovered around second in Doom points for awhile.
Cthulhu was being played by an inexperienced gamer who I haven't met before. He made some suboptimal moves but eventually got the strategy and started suicide running Cthulhu, which is very scary when you unlock all six spellbooks and have unlimited combat.
I took a little long to get my Dark Young out onto the board but my Rituals of Annihilation were perfectly timed and I held 3 gates for most of the game. Late game it started to turn against me but it was too late. Yellow Sign was pushing on me, CC was catching up and controlling five gates to my two, and Cthulhu was stomping around. I was able to seal the deal due to my cultist sacrifice ability to draw an Elder sign and I ended up with two 3's amongst my 6 elder signs.
Everyone loved it.
We then followed it up with Blood Rage. Playing both of these back to back was amazing, one of the best weeknight sessions of my life. I introduced all 3 to the game and beat the living hell out of them. I felt kind of bad but one of the guys who played wins more than his fair share so I wasn't going to put the training wheels on. I ended up with a score of 195(!), I've never seen anyone get close to that before. Think second place had 120ish.
Extremely fun though and I utilized a strategy of pillaging the lowest hanging fruit and biding time until I could make a move for Yggdrasil late each age. My quest placements were near perfect and I won the battles I needed to while losing the others that helped (8 glory for losing ships).
I had one crazy battle where I triggered a pillage with my ship hoping to lose. I was way outnumbered and did in fact get destroyed but it was in a highly contested area near the top of the map. I received 8 glory for losing my ship, 9 glory for playing a battle card which had everyone discard their battle cards and award me glory equal to the total, and then another 2 glory from my next played battle card (stole from the winner). 19 glory from losing a single battle is insane.
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- SuperflyPete
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Putting anything but balls and chalk on a pool table is a crime, or should be.charlest wrote: Best part about this is we can play on the pool table again instead of on a crappy plastic folding one that can't fit large games.
I'm still awaiting my proto copy....Anyway, first play was my current version of Shiv which is very close to being ready to show to the publisher. I don't know if they will end up going for it but I think I've taken it about as far as I can. It did work very well and was enjoyed. No changes came out of the playtest which is a good sign it's wrapping up.
@Wade: I never played it, sadly. I think I'd have liked it based on what I've read (co-op, smart...) but I just never got the opportunity.
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SuperflyTNT wrote:
Putting anything but balls and chalk on a pool table is a crime, or should be.charlest wrote: Best part about this is we can play on the pool table again instead of on a crappy plastic folding one that can't fit large games.
Nah man it's perfect. Pool tables were doing that recessed hand rail stuff before Geek Chic left its mother's womb.
I just put a couple layers of felt sheets over it to prevent the actual felt surface from getting messed up.
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First try of Napoleon's Triumph after reading the rules a couple of times. The game didn't work for me. I see the strategy and appeal to it but I didn't have fun. The steep learning curve and lack of opponents makes this game a non-starter for me too. Little flavor to the game, and I felt like it was chess with hidden strengths. I've always hated chess and have never found anything exciting about it. Same feeling here. Moving pieces into tactical positions each round and taking advantage of your opponent is it. In theory it sounded fun but it wasn't. I instantly loved playing Hannibal Rome v. Carthage and Maria but with my neutrality on this game maybe I'm not that into wargames.
Couple more games of Cthulhu Wars. Its still a great game albeit the base game has clearly scripted openings. Its a luxury good for sure but with so many games out and available I don't have a problem with that. You can only spend your time on one game, why not make it an amazing looking fun experience. Also listened to the interview by CharlesT of Sandy and one thing really stuck out from what he said. He wanted to make it an awesome, fun experience from the start. No slow buildup wait for fun. The game definitely accomplishes that and I really appreciate that. Good interview too.
First game of Nations. I didn't like it. I haven't played many civ games outside of the computer versions, which I love. I hate games that force you into certain behavior or you suffer penalties - like Agricola, possibly my most hated game behind Terra Mystica. Nations felt like that. The winner used golden age cards to buy points. We had one military unit come out in the first three rounds, and no more than 1 engineer per turn. I can't help comparing this to Sandy's statement above about making a fun experience for the players. This was not fun. I felt like I had to make half of my moves a certain way or suffer large negatives, and the wonders rarely were built. And it took 3 hours with 4 players, three of us being noobs. Military leads to going first and sadly the first player of the game remained that way for half of the game thanks to lack of military cards. This also felt kinda like 7 Wonders with military being a neighbor vs. neighbor thing and not directly attacking, also in the way you build your civ. But I like 7 Wonders and had fun for the hour it takes to play with 6-7 people; I get to do cool moves that other people couldn't. In Nations I didn't get that same feeling of making cool moves on my turn. I also haven't played Through the Ages either or Clash of Cultures. Maybe I'd like those more.
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(Hyperborea is great, too, certainly better than Yggdrasil and a certain other Euro game in AT clothing that SUCKS OUT LOUD that will remain unnamed)
Anyways...
I've spent enough time with Fury of Dracula Third Edition to weigh in on it.
TL;DR version: This is as perfect of an iteration of this game as we could have hoped for and improved upon enough to justify replacing your old copy with.
The fact that they made such significant changes over second edition in so many areas and yet didn't spoil the spirit and feel of the game is truly remarkable. Some of it is very subtle and you won't realize it's an improvement until put into practice, such as the structure of the Hunter turns. How it's broken up into two separate phases, movement only possible during the first, is obvious, what isn't obvious is that, due to when combat with Dracula occurs, the hunters can now get a bead on him and have time to converge on that point. Another thing you don't get from reading the rules is how much of a beast Drac is in combat now. Dracula initiating combat is incentified but the game doesn't force you to play that way. As the game goes on, the reward for Dracula to kill one of the hunters becomes so tempting, almost as if his thirst for blood is becoming uncontrollable. The combat is diceless but feels essentially the same, yet deeper, and is more accessible to those who've never played. What counters what is clear on the cards. No more restrictions on what cards Dracula can use in combat based on the day/night cycle, instead some cards are just better. No more teleporting around the board for anyone, no more event cards that reveal Dracula on turn 1, no more wasting your entire turn trying to take a train, the list of things that remove frustration goes on and on. Then there's the really smart stuff that should have been there all along, like the encounters being on cards which explain what they do, the location cards showing what places Dracula can move to from that spot...
I think much of what makes this edition so good is just that, less frustration. Long periods of time without finding Dracula is still possible (though Mina's inherent ability helps), but you're not going to get around that without breaking something in this type of game. I love FoD, it's easily in my Top 5, but the truth is that there were always these random things you had zero control over and were just so much bullshit. Removing those elements, not to mention the dice entirely, could have easily pushed this edition into bone dry Letters From Whitechapel territory. Yet they didn't. FFG really pulled it off and made the game even more satisfying along the way, all without disrupting the balance, which is always the downfall of asymmetrical games. It's the same game you've always loved, but...yup, I'm saying it...perfected. The box cover is probably the only reasonable complaint I can lodge against it.
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- san il defanso
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I have my copy on the way from MM. I'm really excited about it.
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