Octopus Overlords

I loves me iPad...

All sorts of excitement here...

Panic Station should arrive on Monday.

I'm still loving Eminent Domain. I played a 4-player game on Tuesday that ended way too fast. There was a total of 2 5-point Tech upgrades, and exactly 2 Influence(VP) tokens take from the pile when the game ended. That sucked. I'm going to probably let three piles of actions run out next time, or all 32 tokens.

In addition, Urban Sprawl should arrive next week. I'm excited about that too.

Eminent Domain 4 player rules are that game ends after you run out of 3 card sets or VP token pile. And you have to play with cards....

Zarathud wrote:Eminent Domain 4 player rules are that game ends after you run out of 3 card sets or VP token pile.

No, I just confirmed. It's two piles. Too short.

My urban sprawl hasn't shipped yet - I assume they are doing it by order date.

I think there is an extended variant for EmDom (hee hee sounds like FemDom - ask Hep what this means, he will know). I know there are rules for extended 3-player.

Legend of Drizzt should come tomorrow! This one looks to be the best so far of the D&D games!

T wrote:

hentzau wrote:Elder Sign for iOS and Android?

Yes please.

(Available in the next few weeks, they're saying...)

Also, Cyclades is due out this month and Summoner Wars and Tigris and Euphrates soon. Not that I've played any of them, but I'm trying to get into board games through my iPad.

Cyclades is out now. However, no AI.

baelthazar wrote:Legend of Drizzt should come tomorrow! This one looks to be the best so far of the D&D games!

Played a game of this yesterday, there are some interesting new ideas they've added. Despite the focused theme it looks to be a good addition to the series. Enough so that when I saw it for $34 at my FLGS this morning, I couldn't pass it up.

I got this, despite the fact that I only played wrath of ashardalon about 3 times. But my quick look at it at GenCon convinced me that I needed it.

Tomorrow I'm hosting an epic game of Twilight Imperium at my place. The last time this group got together, they got through 4 turns in around 18 hours. I've not played TI since 2002 or so, I'm excited to play the new version, I hear it's much better.

They cut the time for 4 turns down to 17 hours.

Boudreaux wrote:

baelthazar wrote:Legend of Drizzt should come tomorrow! This one looks to be the best so far of the D&D games!

Played a game of this yesterday, there are some interesting new ideas they've added. Despite the focused theme it looks to be a good addition to the series. Enough so that when I saw it for $34 at my FLGS this morning, I couldn't pass it up.

It looks pretty glorious actually, and I'm very excited to try the competitive scenarios! I am confused about Stances however. They are Utility powers, so typically after use Utility powers flip. But I'm gathering that you can lay a stance token on the power and it gives you the bonus for as long as you have the token on it and that you can take the token off (putting it on another card) and the power still remains available. Is this correct, or do you flip after you take the stance token off? It has no "FLIP WHEN USED" statement on the card.

The characters also look a LOT more powerful than the CR and Wrath ones. They probably should be, and the monsters look positively wicked, but I wonder about balance and if the CR and Wrath characters are unable to play on the LoD scenarios. I'm sure people are looking to mix and match here, and build giant campaigns that go through the underdark.

They cut the time for 4 turns down to 17 hours.

I wish this wasn't true...

Actually SpaceLord, I'm a HUGE fan of TI:3rd. My group is pretty slow and we tend to finish a game in about 8 hours with 4-5 people. Sometimes it is more like 10 hours. Part of this is due to a distinct lack of aggression on the part of some players.

baelthazar wrote:I am confused about Stances however. They are Utility powers, so typically after use Utility powers flip. But I'm gathering that you can lay a stance token on the power and it gives you the bonus for as long as you have the token on it and that you can take the token off (putting it on another card) and the power still remains available. Is this correct, or do you flip after you take the stance token off? It has no "FLIP WHEN USED" statement on the card.

That's a good question, and I don't actually know. When we played our game (2-player) it didn't come up. Drizzt has a stance he uses with Twinkle (one of his scimitars) that let's him attack, then put the stance token on the Twinkle card. It prevents him from attacking with it again, but he can remove the stance token to negate 1 pt of damage when he's attacked.

I was playing Catti-Brie, and used her Heartseeker stance near the end of the game. It adds +1 damage to all her attacks while in that stance. We won the scenario and ended the game before I changed it, so what happened when I altered stances didn't come up. I'll look into that more when I crack open my copy later tonight.

I assumed that since they're Utility powers they were one-use-only, but I guess I didn't look very closely. If they're always available and it's just a matter of which stance you're in, that makes them much more useful. And would have given us some more breathing room - we barely survived the scenario as it was.

Added some new games into the mix last night -- Eaten by Zombies and Battleship Galaxies.

We played the intro setting for Galaxies and had a blast. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I liked the mix of dice, cards and lite strategy. Plus anytime I can launch multiple nuclear warheads into the spaceship of any enemy, it's bound to be a good time. We only had two players, but I 'm curious to see how it scales up with four. It also seems like there could be a million different expansions for this game - new ships, cards, tiles, etc... which I take as a good sign. The ships had what looked like a quick paint "wash" on them and I'd imagine a motivated person might paint them with more detail, but to me they looked fine (and certainly better than just plain white or gray plastic). I don't really have a perspective for space fighting board games, but this was enjoyable.

EBZ was tough as hell. The game starts out a bit slow, but it ramps it rather fast into a zombie nightmare....at least with two people playing. It was our first time so we flubbed some of the rules, but the hands are rather fast as you really only have to make a single choice - fight or flee. I am pretty sure the best strategy for the early rounds is to overkill (or over-flee?) the zombies as much as you can so that you have plenty of points to scavenge new swag. Because once you burn through the first zombie deck and you need to deal with two each round, it gets out of hand and you're just trying to squeak by. Anyway, we liked it, but it did require some mental gymnastics as it takes the same basic mechanics from other card games and modifies them slightly.

We did another round of THUNDERSTONE, but this time playing with the actual rules instead of just making up our own. Much faster game play and the end was much closer in terms of score. I think I might need to spring for the basic set, though there seems to be a ton of variety in the Dragonspire expansion I have. I really like the lite RPG mechanisms (character leveling, XP) and the theme beats the pants off of Dominion.

I just ordered Eaten By Zombies last night. Looking forward to that one, actually.

Played Settlers, Alhambra, and our second game of Fleet Captains.

FC ended again without a shot being fired. It was a very odd start for my buddy as he started off with with both 5 strength Federation ships, reducing him to 2 actions a turn. However, he had a command card which allowed him to add one to his fleet strength, allowing him to do a reinforcement action and grab the Yosemite. On his first movement he encountered the Black Hole, so the Prometheus was stuck there and damaged. A turn or so later he drew the "alternate reality" encounter, which forced him to discard the Prometheus outright and replace it with the Sutherland.

After that, the game settled into a similar pattern as Brandon tried to cycle through as many mission cards as possible to get the low-hanging fruit (sensor missions he could easily wipe out w/o confrontation). Meanwhile I was much more aggressive with cloak, pushing echoes into his face and daring him to waste actions on scanning echoes before jumping in with the real cloaked ships... but he didn't bite. I went into my final turn up 8-7, the extra margin due to taking extra risk and pushing one of my cheaper ships into Brandon's rear to sensor test a planet he'd scanned and take control of an installation he'd built. I completed a 1 vp mission on that turn and to replace it I drew a 2 vp mission that was automatically completed if the player was within 3 vp of winning and had lost no ships up until that point. I satisfied both conditions and that gave me the win. Even though I'd made the extra effort and completed some more difficult missions, behind enemy lines, that only allowed me to keep pace and I still kinda felt that this came down to the flip of a coin (me getting the right mission at the right time).

We did have some 'aha' moments though. We learned that we were playing movement wrong in the first game. Specifically, we'd been spending full movement costs on the first hex move of each ship's movement, which is just wrong. I also had a much better feeling for cloak and had the midboard riddled with cloak tokens and echoes in short order. I also start realizing the strengths of the various combat decks (Imperial Expansion for the Klingons, for example, seems to be based primarily on the presence of installations). Having made my deck randomly BEFORE drafting (which we did intentionally just because we had no idea what the decks did anyway), I was fortunate that I included the Battleship deck (started off with one 5-strength ship), but found the Imperial Expansion deck almost completely useless since no combat took place. I think I'll be peeking at each deck more carefully before selecting the next time we play. I also intended to use cloak heavily so Hidden Enemy was a great choice.

I also did have a couple questions come up.

1) For Klingon Hidden Scouts, I'm not sure if we're getting exactly how the mechanic works. It says you can reveal your cloak token to scan an unexplored hex the ship is on but gives no more info than that. Do you show them the cloak token on the ship card so that they know which cloak # you are or the cloak token on the map that represents the ship itself? We played it as the latter. I'm honestly not sure based on the text what benefit this is supposed to give the Federation player.

2) If the game hadn't ended, I was going to attack for the first time, so we decided to simulate the combat for one turn a piece just to see how it would have played out. I moved the Rotarran to attack the Yosemite solo, then doubled up Maht-Ha and the Ch'tang on the Venture. Brandon played a combat card to automatically the end combat without rolling for the combat against the Yosemite. We each played combat cards for the big combat and after rolling dice the final results were 28-16 in my favor, inflicting a single damage. On his turn, Brandon attacked the Ch'tang with Venture, outscoring me 26-9 and damn near one-hitting me. Just to make sure I'm interpreting this correctly, on my turn I could have used an action for the Ch'tang to cloak it, then spent up to 5 movement points getting the hell away, right? If so, cloaking appears to be a pretty significant advantage.

I drew a 2 vp mission that was automatically completed if the player was within 3 vp of winning and had lost no ships up until that point. I satisfied both conditions and that gave me the win. Even though I'd made the extra effort and completed some more difficult missions, behind enemy lines, that only allowed me to keep pace and I still kinda felt that this came down to the flip of a coin (me getting the right mission at the right time).

I absolutely hate that mission card. It does feel like a completely arbitrary win and it ruined the experience for both redwarlord and I during two separate games as it cheapened the victory considerably. I believe in future games, I'm going to make sure it's okay with the other player then remove it from the game entirely.

As for your questions, I'll take a crack at them. But the BGG forum has some great folks who answer questions far more intelligently than I. The only downside is that the forum for STFC has mostly devolved into a pissing match between people who bitch about the poor components and those defending the game's price tag.

1) I think you played it right. The advantage is to the Klingons as they reveal (without using their once per turn power adjustment), scan, remained cloaked, then move any echo tokens for that ship into the same hex and then can take movement normally (if they haven't already moved) with the echo rules.

2) Cloaking in battle rocks. If you cloak, your breakaway is automatic (no need for a roll) and you just get the hell out of dodge. A few important things to remember about combat:

a) The card play goes in this order: attacker chooses whether or not to play a card,
then defender plays a card. If the attacker chose not to play a card before the
defender did, he can NOW play a card.

b) Remember that you can only play one card, but you can discard any number of crew members on participating ships as "sacrifices" and still have the ability to play one card from your hand. This applies to both sides.

c) Power adjustments for the current player can be done ONLY at the beginning of the turn. NOT in the middle. The defender does NOT get a power adjustment as it's not their turn, unless they play a card that allows them to.

hepcat wrote:I absolutely hate that mission card. It does feel like a completely arbitrary win and it ruined the experience for both redwarlord and I during two separate games as it cheapened the victory considerably. I believe in future games, I'm going to make sure it's okay with the other player then remove it from the game entirely.

The one thing I *did* like about it is that it appeared to seemed like it encourages aggressive play, i.e, you wanna get into the mix and make sure you inflict a casualty, especially if the card hasn't come up going into the lategame. Still... Another card I didn't care for was the 3 VP "20 sensor test" mission. My buddy drew that card in both games and both times he was able to kick it out without any real effort at all.

Otherwise, were you watching over our shoulders at all the shit we did wrong? Cus every one of "remember" points below we did incorrectly. I truly do hate the rulebook. I found myself getting really frustrated while playing last night trying to dig for info and to make sure we were doing everything correctly.

hepcat wrote:1) I think you played it right. The advantage is to the Klingons as they reveal (without using their once per turn power adjustment), scan, remained cloaked, then move any echo tokens for that ship into the same hex and then can take movement normally (if they haven't already moved) with the echo rules.

I'm not sure I get this. The way we did it, revealing constitutes your power adjustment for the turn. So I'd reveal, THEN do a scan action if that's what I wanted to do, then recloak the next turn (since that's when that ship would again have an available action). It seems like you're saying you can do a scan action without uncloaking and I definitely didn't see that in the extremely well-written organized rulebo...... fuck.

I need to dig up a pdf of the rulebook (or a user-created reference guide) and read cover-to-cover I think just to make sure I have all this shit down. Thanks for the tips Hep.

Even the site (How To Play tab) is unclear. You click on the picture to get the rulebook, the link at the bottom is the FAQ. When people tell me to click on a link, I'm looking for text.

Saturday, I played a 4-player game of Twlight Imperium 3. Three of the players had a combined 3 games of TI3 under their belt, while I had only played the 2nd edition, probably 10 times. I haven't played since '02 or so.

I was playing the Winnu, who have better Ground Forces, and can always use the Influence from their Home Planet when it comes to voting, which came in handy several times. The first few turns ended up being just about expansion. On turn 3, one player decided to go for Mecatol Rex. He succeeded, but only had 1 Ground Force for control. During my turn, I played a Local Unrest card, wiping out his Ground Force, and thus, control, of the central planet. Since he only had one planet with the capacity to build units(his homeworld), he wasn't doing anything the next couple of turns.

The other players decided that he was a threat, so there was an invasion by the most experienced player. The other player cleverly completed the hardest Objective cards during the battle, and then, on turn 5, was able to complete the last few cards to reach 10 VPs and win the game.



It was a good time. However, I didn't feel like the others were explaning the actions to me very well, so I struggled the first couple of turns, and didn't conquer enough planets to ramp up production.

Boudreaux wrote:

baelthazar wrote:I am confused about Stances however. They are Utility powers, so typically after use Utility powers flip. But I'm gathering that you can lay a stance token on the power and it gives you the bonus for as long as you have the token on it and that you can take the token off (putting it on another card) and the power still remains available. Is this correct, or do you flip after you take the stance token off? It has no "FLIP WHEN USED" statement on the card.

That's a good question, and I don't actually know. When we played our game (2-player) it didn't come up. Drizzt has a stance he uses with Twinkle (one of his scimitars) that let's him attack, then put the stance token on the Twinkle card. It prevents him from attacking with it again, but he can remove the stance token to negate 1 pt of damage when he's attacked.

I was playing Catti-Brie, and used her Heartseeker stance near the end of the game. It adds +1 damage to all her attacks while in that stance. We won the scenario and ended the game before I changed it, so what happened when I altered stances didn't come up. I'll look into that more when I crack open my copy later tonight.

I assumed that since they're Utility powers they were one-use-only, but I guess I didn't look very closely. If they're always available and it's just a matter of which stance you're in, that makes them much more useful. And would have given us some more breathing room - we barely survived the scenario as it was.

It's hard to say. I haven't seen the actual rules for Legend of Drizzit, but in the pen and paper game some stances are one use and some are use at will. I'd say if there isn't a "FLIP WHEN USED" on it, then you can use it more than once.

Jow wrote: I'm not sure I get this. The way we did it, revealing constitutes your power adjustment for the turn. So I'd reveal, THEN do a scan action if that's what I wanted to do, then recloak the next turn (since that's when that ship would again have an available action). It seems like you're saying you can do a scan action without uncloaking and I definitely didn't see that in the extremely well-written organized rulebo...... fuck.

I thought you were talking about the command card that allowed you to uncloak and make a scan. That's the only time you would uncloak without making a power adjustment. Normally, it does require a power adjustment. But there are a few klingon cards that allow you to uncloak without making a power adjustment, as well as cloak without taking an action.

And yeah, i did note very early on that the manual was not the best written one I've come across. It is very confusing at times and doesn't even include an index. I've been using this as a crib sheet. It's helped out a great deal.

In addition, I picked up Eaten by Zombies! on Saturday. It's out of print, and the local coffeeshop/gamestore had copies.

I expect Panic Station to arrive tomorrow, and I hope to play it at the meetup tomorrow night.

Urban Sprawl is shipping from GMT now, I hope to have it by next week from Boards and Bits.

Tell me what you think of EBZ. It's a very different kind of deck builder. it starts off slow...then turns into utter chaos in a rather short amount of time. i like it, but haven't played enough to find the strategy needed to win...although I've played Twilight Struggle numerous times and STILL don't know the strategy to win that one either.

Well, as I said earlier on this very page, I think you need to overkill (over-flee) early on in EBZ to pick up as much Swag as possible during the first day. It also really seemed like you're not trying to win as much as you're trying to be the last one to die. And of course the best way to do that is to make sure you have plenty of Swag cards to lose to the zombie horde as you fail to fight or flee. There's a FAQ linked from the BGG site that was rather helpful - more so than the printed rules.

Anyway, we didn't really pick up on the over-fight/flee until too late so our game was brutal. Unlike Dominion or THUNDERSTONE your EBZ deck is way more dynamic. You're constantly losing and gaining cards, and during the later rounds it might be a loss of 3 or more each hand -- which is just insane.

Smoove_B wrote: and during the later rounds it might be a loss of 3 or more each hand -- which is just insane.

3? I had a loss of almost 8 at one point because I chose to flee instead of fight.

I think the most we lost individually was 3 or 4 cards, probably totaling 6-8 points. But that was around Day 4 and my hand turned up six zombies at that point, losing the game for us both.

It was fun, but it's a hard game.

You REALLY have to think about the consequences of either fleeing or fighting in later rounds (and by later rounds, I mean every round beyond the second one methinks). if you misjudge, the penalties can be huge.

...dang, now i wanna play again.

Sounds interesting. Where was this at OctoCon?

LordMortis wrote:Sounds interesting. Where was this at OctoCon?

Still in production. It came out a week or two afterwards.

p.s. why do i envision LM writing this while wearing a king's robes and pounding his scepter on the floor?

hepcat wrote:p.s. why do i envision LM writing this while wearing a king's robes and pounding his scepter on the floor?

Remus or redrun must purchase it now. I command it!

I actually played EBZ a week ago Saturday. It was different, and pretty brutal. I'll need more plays to really form an opinion.

LordMortis wrote:

hepcat wrote:p.s. why do i envision LM writing this while wearing a king's robes and pounding his scepter on the floor?

Remus or redrun must purchase it now. I command it!

Thought about it but I haven't even purchase Arcana yet and that will come first.

Remus West wrote:

LordMortis wrote:

hepcat wrote:p.s. why do i envision LM writing this while wearing a king's robes and pounding his scepter on the floor?

Remus or redrun must purchase it now. I command it!

Thought about it but I haven't even purchase Arcana yet and that will come first.

I still need to get in a game using the proper rules for bribery which you found after one play through and I missed after about 4.

Remus West wrote:

LordMortis wrote:

hepcat wrote:p.s. why do i envision LM writing this while wearing a king's robes and pounding his scepter on the floor?

Remus or redrun must purchase it now. I command it!

Thought about it but I haven't even purchase Arcana yet and that will come first.

Dude. You're killing the illusion. I expect to play on Friday after work or maybe Saturday afternoon, though we'd have to break up early so mom can do my hair.

Tell you what. You buy both games and bring them to my house Saturday late morning/early afternoon (I have plans for Friday night ). Hand them to me. Go back to your car and return an hour later. That way the illusion that I bought them will remain and we can play both of them.

LordMortis wrote: though we'd have to break up early so mom can do my hair.

you wanna go back and rewrite this? you know we're not gonna let it go...

Played Chaos in the Old World yesterday evening, with the Horned Rat expansion. We only had four players, so we went with the four base gods (no Skaven god), but used the expansion chaos cards / powers. It was a good, close game. I was Tzeentch, and just barely pulled out a VP victory over Nurgle. Not sure why - I think because Khorne wound up placing a reasonable amount of corruption, plus Nurgle's "cultists place an extra corruption" upgrade, but the Old World got ruined crazy fast.

Amusingly there was a huge showdown in Bretonnia on turn 4 because it was on the verge of being the fifth ruined region, so people dumped cultists, warriors, and demons in there with the aim of having the most corruption there at the end. But then the Khorne player literally rolled three sixes (plus some other hits), and rerolled those three sixes to...three more sixes. I rolled several sixes as well, so at the end (IIRC) Khorne had 10 hits, I had 8 hits. At the end of the bloodbath I had one cultist in the region, and Slannesh had one warrior...who were then promptly killed by "Teclis Aids the Empire" and by the hero in the region, respectively.

Anyhow, still one of my favorite games.

El Guapo wrote:Played Chaos in the Old World yesterday evening, with the Horned Rat expansion. We only had four players, so we went with the four base gods (no Skaven god), but used the expansion chaos cards / powers.

From talk on BGG that's the best mix for four players as going with Skaven instead of one of the corruption-dropping gods tends to favor Khorne because it slows ruination down considerably. Also lots of talk about Nurgle being even tougher to win with than the base game... good to see him in the running at least.

Jow wrote:

El Guapo wrote:Played Chaos in the Old World yesterday evening, with the Horned Rat expansion. We only had four players, so we went with the four base gods (no Skaven god), but used the expansion chaos cards / powers.

From talk on BGG that's the best mix for four players as going with Skaven instead of one of the corruption-dropping gods tends to favor Khorne because it slows ruination down considerably. Also lots of talk about Nurgle being even tougher to win with than the base game... good to see him in the running at least.

I read that too. The expansion definitely helps Nurgle in terms of being able to double-tick; whereas in the base game it's very difficult for Nurgle to get more than two DACs, here he was able to get three or four. Winning via dial is still probably very difficult for Nurgle, but no longer borderline-impossible, and helps him get his upgrades sooner. And generally he can spread a lot of corruption very quickly with his leper upgrade.

In any event I'll need to play a few more rounds before I assess this. I'm also interested in the BGG discussion as to whether Khorne's new warrior upgrade is overpowered.