Octopus Overlords

wonderpug wrote:Woops! I must have replied to an outdated browser tab. I was actually wondering how Terra Mystica plays with two. Caverna info not for naught, though! I'm on a continual hunt for games that scale well to 2.

Oh, I see. I have heard that TM is not particularly stellar in 2-player, so I have never bought it. But, as it is a game that relies on a struggle over limited space, it seems to me that more players would certainly make for a better game. That being said, some day I will probably get TM anyway.

One of the interesting mechanics in Terra Mystica is how players can give each other a bonus while building next to each other -- it's a consolation to having your expansion blocked. That tension won't work in a 2-player game, and often shuts 1 player out in a 3-player game.

Went to ROBA (Rochester Hills/Oakland Boardgame Association) first time Saturday (they meet monthly, last Saturday of the month, they had to postpone one week this time).

Played Yggdrasil (sp?) - a coop norse gods game (Norse gods are trying to protect the world tree for various bad people). The guys explaining said it's brutal, they almost never win. 4 of (me and another new guy, and the 2 experienced guys). We ended up winning (they said it was their 5th win in MANY games).

And tried Werewolf finally. Never played before. Thought it was an elimination game, but this version, we just did a round as a game, next round was a new game. Had time for 2 rounds. I ended up being a werewolf in the first one, but knew it cause I was the robber and stole it. Managed to convince everyone else that the troublemaker was the werewolf, I won (was the only ww, the other one was buried in a pool in the middle). Second round, I was villager and we won. Having heard of this a bit around here, hadn't sounded that terribly exciting, but actually playing it in person, quite fun. Thinking my gaming group that almost never meets might enjoy that. Nice light/social game.

Zenn7 wrote:And tried Werewolf finally. Never played before. Thought it was an elimination game, but this version, we just did a round as a game, next round was a new game.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

It's quite different from standard werewolf. Sort of compresses the whole thing.

baelthazar wrote:

wonderpug wrote:Woops! I must have replied to an outdated browser tab. I was actually wondering how Terra Mystica plays with two. Caverna info not for naught, though! I'm on a continual hunt for games that scale well to 2.

Oh, I see. I have heard that TM is not particularly stellar in 2-player, so I have never bought it. But, as it is a game that relies on a struggle over limited space, it seems to me that more players would certainly make for a better game. That being said, some day I will probably get TM anyway.

Although you *can* build your wooden "empire" far from your opponent in a 2-player game, you won't. The brilliance of the mechanics practically insures this: Every upgraded building(temple, stronghold or sanctuary) must be first turned into a trading post. A trading post is discounted by 3 when it is built next to another player's buildings. This discount is so significant, especially in the cash-strapped early game , that even in a 2-player game, that there's a good incentive to hang close to your opponent.

Gave Avengers vs. X-Men a try last weekend and it got us hooked enough that I've been picking up booster packs here and there when I see them... probably picked up about 40 With that, we have a pretty good distribution of dice and cards. We only pulled 1 Green Goblin and 1 Silver Surfer, and in a few cases we have 5+ of a single die. No super-rare cards but a decent number of rares, nearly all the uncommons.

The game is definitely not "just" Marvel themed Quarriors. It plays out more like Magic the Gathering, in dice form. Summoned heroes have the option of attacking or staying on defense, the defender gets to choose who they want to block with, etc. The "deck" building aspect of it is pretty daunting. Even with just a few booster packs you'll have a wide variety of characters and special abilities/costs to sort through.

After a few games we're suspicious of the value of the really expensive (6-7+ energy) dice. It's really hard to get that much energy in a single turn, even with access to heroes/actions that let you draw more dice per turn. 5 energy is about as much as we usually get, and there's a good selection of heroes that cost that much.

Standout hero for us has been the uncommon version of Storm for 5 energy. She lets you re-roll up to two opposing heroes in the field... if they come up as energy they're removed from the board AND their owner takes 2 damage per die removed that way. Only downside is sometimes you reroll them and you get a stronger version of the hero, but you could also wind up rolling a weaker version too!

Daveman wrote:Gave Avengers vs. X-Men a try last weekend and it got us hooked enough that I've been picking up booster packs here and there when I see them... probably picked up about 40

I've picked up 120, ie two full boxes (though only ~$80 - yay CSI). My 7 yr old and I are still enjoying it. We pick characters fairly randomly. We have a few of the starter characters where we only have 3 dice, but for the most part we have enough to play any character at max. I have two super-rares, one of the best and one of the worst.

Character like Beast and Gambit (I think) can have you rolling 7-8 dice in a turn which can get you a lot of energy for the big guys especially with some action dice mixed in. With only 20 life, you really don't NEED the big guys though and there is a lot of cheap removal so they don't always pay off.

As you mention the combat is way more interesting than Quarriors... each combat can present daunting decisions. The complexity isn't obvious at the outset but you soon realize this is not a fluff game.

My wife's been dying to play this, but while she got her booster packs already, her starter pack has been back ordered for a while now.

Anyone know of any websites that have it in stock?

FLGSs should have limited stock over the next couple weeks. The major restock should be end of June or early July. It has been a fight to get your hands on it since the beginning. If you are willing to pay a premium you can get them on ebay.

Played two games of Archipelago with hepcat this weekend. It's an interesting mixture of euro worker placement, resource management, bidding, tech development and exploration/tile laying. While there is one public scoring condition (most towns/ports/markets/type of goods, etc.), each player has their own hidden personal end-game and shared scoring condition. If the dissent exceeds the population, everyone loses but a person who drew the traitor victory condition.

There are a lot of things happening at the same time. You can explore to expand the board, harvest resources, move people around, trade to a domestic or foreign market, build, expand your population and tax. At the end of the turn, there's a technology bid but each technology that's developed or discarded risks a potential domestic or foreign crisis. Expanding gives additional production resources, but expansion adds population which will require ever-increasing resources to avoid dissent. Nearly everything you do has multiple layers.

It's definitely easy to win as the traitor, like hepcat was in both games this weekend. If everyone expands but fails to cooperate to avoid dissent, it's easy to let things develop out of control. For a competitive game, the players really need to band together -- while avoiding getting suckered in to make sacrifices that will cheat you out of those hidden victory conditions.

After two games, I was just getting some insight into the game's mechanics. Archipelago could have legs if it's well balanced underneath -- right now, that's hard to tell.

^ Let's be honest. When you say Hep is "taking a break," what you really mean is "I've got him in my cellar as my boardgaming gimp." Amiright or Amiright?

My wife and I played a game of Krosmaster Arena the other day. Despite having read the rules a million times, I still had to check out the book as we played. I think it is that the rules are so simple, I kept checking them to make sure they were not more complicated than they seemed. Overall, a nice and light minis combat game that is over very quickly (most rounds would take less than an hour, I would say). The powers we had did not particularly work well together, and I think next time she and I will do a draft for characters. Still, quite a fun little game, and I would certainly rank it as a nice intro to mini combat games.

My KS habit was crazy bad over the early part of the year. I've got Arcadia Quest and Super Dungeon Explore: Forgotten King (largely for the solo rules) supported. I'm hoping to ease the wife from Krosmaster into SDE (vanilla) and prepare her for the other two.

Great gaming weekend for me. Managed to play a couple of games of X-wing (although I did lose both, I am now on a 5 game losing streak, have to get back to winning ways!) and then a game of Dominion, and a game of Ticket to Ride Europe. Also managed to play a 3 player game of Caverna. I think I will just get rid of Agricola now. I really see little reason to keep it as anytime I want to play it I see Caverna right next to it and grab it instead. Agricola is a fantastic game, but I think I just like Caverna so much more and they are similar enough I don't see Agricola hitting the table again.

Then tonight my wife sat down with me and we played a couple of really quick games of Buccaneer Bones. It's a fun little dice game where you essentially just try and get pairs and sets of three of numbers while earning extra dice and re-rolls etc. Quick, fun, and with the KS package it sits 8 people. Although with more than 4 it slows down enough you might as well play two games at once. One of the kickstarters I couldn't be more happy to have backed (especially only at $9). I enjoy that game for some quick dice throwing action that only takes a few minutes per player. We played two games and split them. A good enjoyable weekend of gaming all around.

Got in a couple of games of Crokinole at a syttened mai picnic yesterday.

(Oh, and I had a bunch of games in the FLGS Yard Sale yesterday. Waiting to hear how I did.)

Was that your original D&D computerized game and Willow? Someone nabbed the GDW games that were tempting me, after deciding that Thunderstone was worthless.

Zarathud wrote:Was that your original D&D computerized game and Willow? Someone nabbed the GDW games that were tempting me, after deciding that Thunderstone was worthless.

No...here's what I had in the sale (from memory.)

Zombicide
Star Trek Fleet Captains
Dungeon Twister
A Formula D track
DC Comics Deck Building Game
Star Trek: TNG Deck Building Game + Expansion (Like the game, just think TOS version is superior)
Space Empires 4X
Fallen City of Karez
Storm the Castle

Pretty sure those all sold. By 3pm, the table was starting to get lean. I now have a new place to buy paintbrushes!

Zarathud wrote:Pretty sure those all sold. By 3pm, the table was starting to get lean. I now have a new place to buy paintbrushes!

Yeah, everything sold. Now have $267 in store credit.

Whew - TON of games played this last weekend at Geekway to the West in St. Louis. Lots of old favorites and a few new notables:

Archipelago - I'd been wanting to play this for awhile. Lot of interesting things going on here, from exploration to worker placement all with a semi-cooperative aspect. We ended up collectively losing, but I definitely want to try this again. I'm disappointed it's so expensive.

Rampage - played this a bunch both with my game group and with my kids. Lots of fun, purchased a copy.

Lewis & Clark - a really interesting "race" game with a ton of actions and different paths to victory. Once you get the basics down it seems like a pretty simple game to understand while being a really difficult game to manage. I love those kinds of games, this was the other one I purchased.

Glass Road - Hadn't played before, and this one was good but not amazing. It's Uwe Rosenberg, so if you've played Agricola or it's like then you get the idea. The dials used for glass/brick manufacturing are a neat idea, but for me this is just one of many solid Euros.

Also got in a fantastic game of A Game of Thrones board game with the 4-player expansion. Hidden objectives make this game SO MUCH BETTER. Also had an epic afternoon of Earth Reborn, which should help get my copy off the shelf more.

One of these days I'm going to make it down to Geekway...

Yeah, I forgot to post anything leading up to it this year. Next year's dates are already 95% set - May 14-17, 2015. It's the weekend between Mother's Day and Memorial Day.

[quote="hentzau"]One of these days I'm going to make it down to Geekway...[/quote

You say that about a lot of cons. Still 9 days for discounted registration for BGGcon.

coopasonic wrote:

hentzau wrote:One of these days I'm going to make it down to Geekway...

You say that about a lot of cons. Still 9 days for discounted registration for BGGcon.

Geekway is a lot more likely to happen than BGGcon, since I can stay with relatives. But BGGCon is on my bucket list. Maybe make that a goal for next year.

hentzau wrote:

coopasonic wrote:

hentzau wrote:One of these days I'm going to make it down to Geekway...

You say that about a lot of cons. Still 9 days for discounted registration for BGGcon.

Geekway is a lot more likely to happen than BGGcon, since I can stay with relatives. But BGGCon is on my bucket list. Maybe make that a goal for next year.

We can arrange lodging and local transportation in Dallas as well. Just saying.

Just played Trieste (with hepcat!) today. Very fun first game, wish we could have gotten more in but we promised a game of Robinson Crusoe to someone and that took up the rest of my time. Trieste is an asymmetrical 3-player (only 3 player, no more no less) card game. Plays very quick. Hoping to get some more time in with it soon.

We beat the Cursed Island scenario in Robinson Crusoe (4 players). Seemed really easy compared to the Castaways scenario.

We also played a game of Core Worlds, I enjoyed it a lot.

My in-laws gave me a relatively nice Go set for my birthday. None of them, or anyone else present had any idea what Go was.

Since Marvel Dice Masters is apparently impossible to get, I've decided to order Quarriors + the first big expansion to keep me happy until I get my hands on the marvel one.

I understand that they will restock around June, but being able to get a copy in Asia is going to be very difficult ;_;

Played a game of Euphoria last night, the "Build a Better Dystopia" worker placement game. It's an interesting concept - all players work to sort of collectively build up the buildings and areas on the board using dice that represent workers. Your dice are rolled into your pool and then placed on the board - higher values get you more benefits, but those workers are "smarter" and can potentially lead to penalties or problems if you're not careful. There are a variety of commodities and resources you're collecting while trying to get your prestige markers on the board.

I was really enjoying the game until I was shut out of a building project. When this happens, a penalty is applied to everyone who did not participate in the building project. In this case, the penalty completely shut down my entire strategy for the game, and because we were close to the end it essentially knocked me out of the game entirely. I would have been able to overcome eventually, but at the cost of 7-8 turns which in this game is an eternity. Soured me on the experience quite a bit (that particular penalty seemed way unbalanced compared to others) since as far as I can tell, there was no way to anticipate or mitigate that particular penalty. But, I'll give it another shot.

I have a copy of Warhammer: Disk Wars and Smash Up (plus each expansion) on the way...either arriving today or tomorrow (fed ex says today, but I am thinking that it will be tomorrow). I have been watching lots of videos about Smash Up and the Warhammer game...looking forward to both of them.

Marvel Dice

EzeKieL wrote:Since Marvel Dice Masters is apparently impossible to get, I've decided to order Quarriors + the first big expansion to keep me happy until I get my hands on the marvel one.

I understand that they will restock around June, but being able to get a copy in Asia is going to be very difficult ;_;

Marvel Dice Masters is soooo much better than Quarriors. The upside to Quarriors is that it's not collectible and that's about it, well that and you can actually buy it. Crap nevermind.

Seriously though, Dice Masters is much deeper than you think. The combat mechanics make for some tough and very meaningful decisions for both the attacker and the blocker. On top of that the interplay of the powers takes it up another level... and you can still play three (or more) games in an hour.

Uncanny X-Men set is due in September and they just announced Dungeons and Dragons Dice Masters for Q4.

On a related note I may need to mug Eric M. Lang at BGGcon to get some of that money back.

coopasonic wrote:

Zenn7 wrote:And tried Werewolf finally. Never played before. Thought it was an elimination game, but this version, we just did a round as a game, next round was a new game.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

It's quite different from standard werewolf. Sort of compresses the whole thing.

Long overdue thanks for that.

Game day again (last Saturday of the month is now my official favorite day of the month!).

Carson City - fun enough, lost badly when someone managed to get a huge income one turn - had a bank maxed and the helper that doubled income - and bought VP for $4. He ran away with it from there.

Steam engines (?) - build railroads along the Atlantic coast into Southern Canada. Didn't quite figure out a basic strategy until the game was half over. Then I made a semi-decent come back, but along the way, gave the guy instructing us on the game about 10 points, enough to allow him to win by 1. Bummer for the 2 guys tied behind him. I was way behind (thought not quite last place in 6 players).

Damage report - kid had been playing this with the folks playing it earlier. They had played a "Trouble with tribbles" type scenario that the owner got with a kickstarter. They'd lost every time. We won the game I played. New game - you're on a ship, that's in an asteroid field and been damaged. Senior crew is out of commission, it's up to the players to repair the ship and get out. Except you take more damage every 3 minutes. No turns so much... you have a 15 second timer for each player - you can take one action every time you get the timer to the green square. Then it resets to whatever color life support is on (you wanna keep that fully repaired as much as possible so you aren't stuck waiting to get back to green). Very frentic and somewhat chaotic.

Ended with Red Dragon Inn - adventures finish their dungeoning for the day and retire to the inn to drink, gamble, brawl... last person standing wins. A game where you get drunk! Had much fun, have to assume this would be very popular for people who like to drink. (Lost - last turn, when I had 1 alcohol less than my health, I healed to and had to drink --- Elven wine w/ a chaser (3 alcholol), the chaser was... Elven wine w/ a chaser.. 3 more alcohol, followed by 2 more alcohol. Ended at 25 alcohol level - decided my guy wasn't waking up from that until next week! :p

Very fun day over all!

A new meetup is struggling to get started much closer to home than most of the others, which is exciting if it can get some momentum. There were only about 7 people there Saturday.

Phase 10 - It's a mass market card game kind of like Uno but a little bit better. We indulged a retiree to help her get comfortable with the bunch of IT game geeks.

Skulls & Roses - Can't remember who taught me this at OctoCon, but it was good I knew how to play. Somebody brought it but hadn't played it so I was able to teach it (and win it 2 games out of 3).

One Night Ultimate Werewolf - This was my first time playing this and it was especially interesting with the Grandma. In the first game she very noisily made the exchange when it was the Robber's turn. In the second game, it's morning and 3 of the 4 of us call out our roles, Villager, Villager, Robber (I think). I look at Grandma and say "Who are you?" and she responds, "a werewolf." First we crack up because she just threw that out there without and thought, then we ask the Robber who he switched with and he hesitated before saying it was one of the villagers... duh! We had a hard time deciding if she had picked the game up really quickly or was just naive. Villagers won all 3 games, probably because I was a good guy each time. The last time he threw in the hunter and the tanner but nobody got the roles.

Marvel Dice Masters - Taught a guy to play with my cards and dice. He picked it up pretty quickly, but my little bit of personal experience playing with my 8 year old was too much for him. It wasn't very nice, but I crushed him with Black Widow - Tsarina in the first game, then we switched sides of the table and he didn't keep blockers up while I was rolling Wolverines. When you only have 20 health, you don't want to give up 12 points to one die. MDM tip: By the 3rd round you must have blockers!

I forgot one quick, nifty game I had never seen before, Timeline: Inventions.

They are super easy to explain games that anyone can play and drive some fun discussion as well. Each player is given a number of cards 4-6 depending on number of players and a seed card is placed on the table, starting the timeline, then you have to place your cards in the correct position relative to the timeline made up of the cards on the table. If you are wrong you draw a new card. First person to place all of his cards correctly wins. It plays in about 10 minutes. It starts out pretty easy and gets more difficult as the timeline is filled out. Did the watch come before or after the check? How about the wheel, was that before or after bricks?

The guy that brought it told me about Cardline: Animals as well which I think will be great for the kids. This one changes from timelines to one of three animal stats, lifespan, weight and length. Same concept, place your cards in the right place relative to what's already out there.

The only downside is they are teensy cards (think Ticket to Ride). On the other hand, it is a very portable game.

There are other variants. We were talking about how you could make your own variants as well, maybe for your kids significant birthday, 16/18/21 whatever, a timeline of his life's events. Or for a big wedding anniversary or something like that. A use for all those damn pictures we are always taking!

We played 5-man Galaxy Defenders and had a blast. We actually won the first mission, which I consider a triumph. I learned that, if you want to solo play, then your team NEEDS the Hulk. He is basically invincible. I loved playing him! The game took us all day. We are slow gamers, and took breaks, but I don't see how we could have gone a lot faster. With 5-players, the turn downtime is also long, although that can be mitigated by co-op strategizing. We also had a 10-year old who played and he did well (despite the long downtime). I would go so far as to say GD would be kid friendly with the right kid.

We also loved saying "give me the GD dice" or "I want to be the GD alpha agent" - obviously putting a lot of emphasis on the G-D. Yes, we are juvenile.

coopasonic wrote:Marvel Dice

EzeKieL wrote:Since Marvel Dice Masters is apparently impossible to get, I've decided to order Quarriors + the first big expansion to keep me happy until I get my hands on the marvel one.

I understand that they will restock around June, but being able to get a copy in Asia is going to be very difficult ;_;

Marvel Dice Masters is soooo much better than Quarriors. The upside to Quarriors is that it's not collectible and that's about it, well that and you can actually buy it. Crap nevermind.

Seriously though, Dice Masters is much deeper than you think. The combat mechanics make for some tough and very meaningful decisions for both the attacker and the blocker. On top of that the interplay of the powers takes it up another level... and you can still play three (or more) games in an hour.

Uncanny X-Men set is due in September and they just announced Dungeons and Dragons Dice Masters for Q4.

That sounds great but it seems impossible to get my hands on a set ;_;.
Even places who offer a restock often tell me they won't ship to Hong Kong so yeah, that sucks...

baelthazar wrote:We played 5-man Galaxy Defenders and had a blast. ... The game took us all day. We are slow gamers, and took breaks, but I don't see how we could have gone a lot faster. With 5-players, the turn downtime is also long, although that can be mitigated by co-op strategizing.

Are you trying to make me sell the game before I try it? All day is not a duration I like.

coopasonic wrote:

baelthazar wrote:We played 5-man Galaxy Defenders and had a blast. ... The game took us all day. We are slow gamers, and took breaks, but I don't see how we could have gone a lot faster. With 5-players, the turn downtime is also long, although that can be mitigated by co-op strategizing.

Are you trying to make me sell the game before I try it? All day is not a duration I like.

I've played a dozen or so games and never gone over three hours including the first game. Time wise it's like zombicide. Some missions are long, some are short.

coopasonic wrote:

baelthazar wrote:We played 5-man Galaxy Defenders and had a blast. ... The game took us all day. We are slow gamers, and took breaks, but I don't see how we could have gone a lot faster. With 5-players, the turn downtime is also long, although that can be mitigated by co-op strategizing.

Are you trying to make me sell the game before I try it? All day is not a duration I like.

We are super-slow. We regularly take much longer than stated box times. For example, we have never played a game of Twilight Imperium in under 7-9 hours. I would not take our experience as representative.

Definitely try it, because it is really the sweet spot for co-op games. Everything Myth should have been. Then try to resist going all-in on the season 2 KS.

My 9 year old got Smash Up for his birthday and we played through part of a game with my 11 year old. We all loved it. It is a little too complicated for the younger one, but I'm confident that he'll pick it up over time.

baelthazar wrote:

coopasonic wrote:

baelthazar wrote:We played 5-man Galaxy Defenders and had a blast. ... The game took us all day. We are slow gamers, and took breaks, but I don't see how we could have gone a lot faster. With 5-players, the turn downtime is also long, although that can be mitigated by co-op strategizing.

Are you trying to make me sell the game before I try it? All day is not a duration I like.

We are super-slow. We regularly take much longer than stated box times. For example, we have never played a game of Twilight Imperium in under 7-9 hours. I would not take our experience as representative.

Definitely try it, because it is really the sweet spot for co-op games. Everything Myth should have been. Then try to resist going all-in on the season 2 KS.

I have 9 days to get a game in. *tick*tick*tick* I read the manual yesterday and I watched a few turns on youtube. I need to just set it up and give it a go at this point, but it seems like there is always something else calling me.