Octopus Overlords

Was out visiting my daughter at college, and instead of going and doing the usual Family Weekend activities, we kidnapped her back to our hotel and played a couple of hours of D&D. At her request.

Awesome!

paulbaxter wrote:We opened Castle Panic and Smash Up for my son's birthday today. Castle Panic is pretty easy to play, but seems hard to win with the default rules. We may need to make the rules easier for future play throughs.

Smash Up is easy in theory, but you end up with lots of options and way too much going on on the table. Fortunately most of the various actions and minion powers are one time things. It would get tough to keep track of a whole bunch of ongoing powers. It would make for a really nice computer game, though, since the computer could handle all of the organizational stuff easily.

Be sure to download the printable placemats for smash up, makes life a lot easier while playing it ^^. You can find it on BGG

After watching and reading a few reviews, I have a very strong urge to get my hands on Memoir '44. Amazon had it a few days ago for $40 with Prime shipping, but I held off and they ran out. Unfortunately, it is either out of stock everywhere, or for sale a jacked up prices.

It's free(mium) to play on Steam. You get like 50 tokens, and each mission takes 2-3 to play.

Blackhawk wrote:After watching and reading a few reviews, I have a very strong urge to get my hands on Memoir '44. Amazon had it a few days ago for $40 with Prime shipping, but I held off and they ran out. Unfortunately, it is either out of stock everywhere, or for sale a jacked up prices.

Since it's published by days of wonder don't worry it will be available soon. They are very good about keeping games available.

I love the game. Start with the base game and don't expand too quick. That would be my suggestion. there is plenty in the base game for a long while.

Blackhawk wrote:After watching and reading a few reviews, I have a very strong urge to get my hands on Memoir '44. Amazon had it a few days ago for $40 with Prime shipping, but I held off and they ran out. Unfortunately, it is either out of stock everywhere, or for sale a jacked up prices.

If you're interested in Memoir '44, Battlelore 2nd Edition might be worth a look too. They both use the same basic gameplay, but there are differences. I think both games are worth playing and have their pros and cons, but have come to like Battlelore a little more.

M44 is all scenario based. There's a lot included with the base game and tons more than have been added, but it still comes down to selecting scenarios. Also, many of the scenarios are unbalanced, one side is more likely to win than the other, although some scenarios are much more unbalanced than others. The game is designed around the idea that you play the same scenario twice, switching sides to see who does better. If you're looking for a single battle with a fair chance of either player winning, there's a handful.

Battlelore uses a simple scenario creation system... both players are dealt 3 scenario cards and chooses 1. Each card details how to setup your half of the map and what your goals are for the game. Each player then customizes his army from the choice of 5 unit types in the game. We've come to like this system a lot, but setting things up and customizing your army takes a little longer than setting up M44 scenarios.

Not to diminish M44 at all though... we still break it out and it's a great game as well. Just thought you might want to consider Battlelore 2nd Edition too Strictly speaking the original Battlelore is out there as well, but it's out of print and presumably retired since FFG bought the rights, put out some content for it, and then released the 2nd Edition (which isn't compatible).

Battlelore looks great, but one of the things really appealing to me about Memoir '44 is the setting, and I think it will hook the kids as well.

Battlelore Second Edition is a bit more expensive as well. I am thinking of dumping Memoir myself. If I want to play it, Isgrimnur has a copy.

Blackhawk wrote:Battlelore looks great, but one of the things really appealing to me about Memoir '44 is the setting, and I think it will hook the kids as well.

If you do play an unbalanced scenario (many are) switching and playing again real quick is a good solution. The games are fast so it doesn't really take much longer. Also I've found the lack of balance nice in some situations. Like when teaching a new player, I give them the stronger side. A win always makes people more likely to try again .

Never played battlelore so can't comment on it. But it is ffg which us another game company I love. Usually can't go wrong with DoW or ffg.

All this talk of memoir makes me want to get it out.

Blackhawk wrote:Battlelore looks great, but one of the things really appealing to me about Memoir '44 is the setting, and I think it will hook the kids as well.

Blackhawk,

I can send you my copy of Memoir. I might have a couple other things I am looking to offload that you might appreciate. Have you looked at Puzzle Strike or Nightfall (it would be the Martial Law set - it works standalone)? Did you get Sentinels of the Multiverse?

coopasonic wrote:

Blackhawk wrote:Battlelore looks great, but one of the things really appealing to me about Memoir '44 is the setting, and I think it will hook the kids as well.

Blackhawk,

I can send you my copy of Memoir. I might have a couple other things I am looking to offload that you might appreciate. Have you looked at Puzzle Strike or Nightfall (it would be the Martial Law set - it works standalone)? Did you get Sentinels of the Multiverse?

I'm not familiar with any of the three. The kids and I have only recently begun to dig into card games with Dominion, so I'm not up on what's what.

The trope that everyone I game with is tired of hearing from me is that Dominion is competitive solitaire. There is potential for conflict in certain cards and expansions, but for the most part, each person can quietly take their turn, not announce anything, and other players that aren't paying attention, will have no clue as to what happened.

Nightfall is guaranteed conflict. You have minions in front of you that you deploy. The first thing you do every turn is attack your opponents. Every player's turn, there is the opportunity for every player to play cards. It's only the purchase and cleanup phases that are solo actions. To me, it improves player engagement, which is my new buzzword. I've started looking at it when I look at games. It's why I'm going to avoid things like Talisman and limit the number of players in games like Letters from Whitechapel.

Puzzle Strike is somewhat similar to Nightfall in that regard. Your actions directly impact other players and your goal is to knock other players out. It's Puzzle Fighter crossed with a deck-builder, except they aren't cards... but whatever.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a co-op card game that people often compare with Marvel Legendary, except it doesn't have deck-building. You pick a character and use that character's deck more like Magic: The Gathering, but simpler and you play against a villain deck that is sort of scripted to play itself and an environment deck, that also plays itself.

I'll look up some reviews on those three. If you're serious about getting rid of Memoir '44, drop me a PM and let me know what you're wanting. I'm definitely interested.

Memoir '44 is great fun. One of my favorite games. And I've tried BattleCry (Civ war) and BattleLore (fantasy, original DOW version). I think Memoir is a much better game (and I'm not a huge WWII guy.) Everything all of these guys are saying...the games can usually be played in about half an hour, so you can play, then reset and switch sides and try it again.

If coop is offering, snag it up. You won't regret it.

(And I've never been able to get into the online game. I like sitting across a table from someone and watching their reactions when we play.)

A player paying attention in Nightfall can tear through their opponents. Which is how Izzy took to Nightfall like a starved hyena to a haunch of beef. Hepcat and I were the haunches of beef, and I don't think hepcat ever recovered from getting our clocks cleaned so thoroughly.

While Nightfall is great fun, the speed of Star Realms makes it my go-to deck builder lately. At $15 for a 2-player deck, Star Realms is also cheap to try out!

I played one round of Nightfall at a gaming convention two years ago and I thought my head was going to explode.

We made it through another two scenarios of the Pathfinder Card game this evening and laughed because it was almost a year ago to the day (9/27) that we played our first game. I only know that because we are tracking the completion dates of each game on the character sheets. We're 75% of the way through Deck 2 (The Skinsaw Murders) and I guess at this rate we'll finish some time in 2016.

After that, we played through a quick round of Ascension using the Apprentice set. That seems like it could be another good game when we have 45 minutes or less to kill. We'll probably play through this set another half a dozen times, but I'm pretty certain I'll just get the main base set eventually.

I also got a good look at the UpFront cards my buddy created with Artscow. We went through some of the basics, and as complex as it looks (the cards) it actually seems rather intuitive in terms of game play. He wants to run through some more tutorials, but I can tell he's drooling to get it to the table.

Assuming I ever get around to playing through the two Pathfinder adventure packs I have now, I wonder if the rest of them will even be available by the time I'm ready for them.

I have to believe so, yes. Though I was not happy to see Amazon reviewers indicated that their second printing of certain decks (which allegedly fixed typos) has cards that are noticeably different than the first print run. Not only were people commenting that the color was different (making it easy to identify new deck cards when looking at the backs), but a few people said the cards were actually a different size. No idea if that was a widespread problem or a fluke, but that's ridiculous.

Man, that kind of thing has been going on so long in board gaming. It really drives me bonkers when you can't guarantee that the thing you buy today will be really compatible with the thing from the same product line that you might buy later. I get that matching up production runs is hard, but you really need to do it if you want your stuff to work together.

Finally got to make it to the local monthly board gaming group (ROBA) today (missed last 2 months for family stuff). Played Spellbound - co-op game of player wizards trying to stop a witch by getting spell books before she does. Early on, I commented that I'd played a few coop games now and have won every time (3 games of Pandemic, Damage report, and Yggdrisil (sp? the Norse world tree game). Continued said streak as we won this one.

Played 2 games for competitive (euro style I think) games for points - 5 Tribes and I don't remember the other one. Both were fun, but I lost both. Though I did get all the way up to second place in one. The first one had a fun mechanic because you had a tower that had some cardboard inserts. You dropped all the action cubes in there and what fell out the bottom is what you started with. Then, on every colored action phase, you'd drop all the ones that were out in, and get to choose an action from which ever colors fell out, and whichever color there were the most of was how many action points you had to spend on that action. Just a fun way of randomly determining that. 5 tribes, my claim to fame (that ended w/ me in 3rd out of 4 players) was to get 8 of the 9 resources in my set for 50 points. Favorite mechanic there was to get djinn that let me get a bonus every time I killed someone w/ the assassin meeples

And a game of Shadow Hunter - played this last time so I knew the basics. 6 players - 2 hunters, 2 shadows, 2 villagers. No one every declared. We were all feeling pretty bloodthirsty though. I was the Unknown, and by dumb luck, the other shadow played a Hermit card to damage a hunter, and I said "no damage", so he figured I wasn't a target, and I concluded from that he wasn't. Then, we proceeded to kill others, and the first 2 we got out were the hunters. I had no idea, just the people that were the most damaged that I helped die. We won.

I love game day!

Zenn7 wrote: I love game day!

Come to OctoCon! Lots of games there!

Would love to, ever since I saw the thread for it last fall.

Need to save a few bucks for the trip, not be on call for work (me and one other guy - so I'm on call 50% of the time) and get wife-approval. It's not really that bad a trip (4-5 hours depending on where in Chicago, we drive through going to visit in-laws in WI once every year, but never get off I94). Almost tempting to drive down early Saturday just for the day. That would alleviate hotel costs, then it's just gas/food, bring road snacks from home and by 1-2 meals (always wanting to try some Chicago Deep Dish pizza, love the deep dish from Pizza Papolis (sp?) - think it's a local, maybe small chain? in Detroit area). But 8-10 hours of driving round trip would be a bit hard.

Besides, I said I didn't especially care for your favorite game, wasn't sure you'd still let me come

Oh sure. I'll let anyone in. Once.

You can always tell your wife that you're going to a church in Chicago. It's not far off the expressway. Deep dish pizza gets ordered in bulk on Friday nights, and the Polish buffet at the Jolly Inn on Saturday is filling and inexpensive. Driving would be the kicker, especially after a full day of gaming.

hentau hasn't kicked me out yet, even after the last time we played Heroscape when I rolled critical misses and shot his hero in the head, killing him. Under the peace of One-Handed Jesus, even hepcat and Jeff V behave themselves. Mostly.

Zarathud wrote:You can always tell your wife that you're going to a church in Chicago.

My wife and child are very much religious. I am an atheist (though I support them an encourage my daughter as I promised my wife I would). "I'm going to a church in Chicago" - that may not be the best excuse...

Won't happen this year, but I'll keep watching for them and make it some day! I'd like to go to Gencon someday too, but Octocon seems a bit more realistic.

We're a hell of a lot cheaper than GenCon, that's for sure.

Had a solid weekend with some gaming in it.

Two kickstarters arrived this week, the first being most of the rest of Myth, but somehow they still managed to mess that order up and not quite everything is here yet with no real word on when the rest will arrive. Didn't play it, likely never will again, just put it all in the box and deciding when to list it on Ebay, or what to do with it.

But I did receive Monsters and Maidens this week as well. It is a simple little dice rolling game I backed last year. A quick little filler that takes roughly ten minutes or less to play. A little dice rolling game. You roll nine dice each with 3 different possible faces, a monster face, a maiden face, and a hero face. You roll maidens you get to save them. Then you compare heroes to monsters. Every hero cancels out a monster, any monsters left they capture some of the maidens, any heroes left they save some of the previously captured maidens. It's a little bit of a push your luck game that goes real quick. I played it three times this weekend and rather enjoyed it for a quick filler game.

Played a few games of X-wing this weekend as well, but I documented that pretty fully in the X-wing thread including pictures and all so I'll just leave it with we broke in the new rebel aces, and had a great time with them. Played three games total, still love the game and it has easily become my most played game.

Then today I played Ticket to Ride 10th Anniversary with my wife. She loves Ticket to Ride so I got it for her for her birthday a couple of weeks ago. Today we finally had a chance to break it out and play it. It isn't any different really than Ticket to Ride USA with the 1910 expansion, other than the board is a little bit bigger, the cards and board have different art, it comes with 1910 cards (all full-size too!) and the most improtant part, the individual trains which are really cool. Completely unnecessary, but since my wife loves it so much it is fun to play with the different trains.

I managed a pretty sound victory, which is rare in Ticket to Ride against my wife. While the 10th anniversary set isn't necessary, it sure was cool to play with all of the little trains. Obviously I am a fan of bling in my games though.

Heads up to the Galaxy Trucker fans I know we have here -- an iPad version was just released. So far, reviews seem pretty positive.

Picked Galaxy Trucker up last night on iOS. Very slick interface and an open mini campaign.

I watched some video of Tom Vasel playing D&D Attack Wing and dammit, I want the game now. After I just decided to keep going with X-wing. I suppose it's possible to come up with a X-Wing vs Dragons hybrid game to use all those bits. How does a dragon compare to a B-wing? How many hobgoblins does it take to bring down the Tantive IV?

coopasonic wrote:I watched some video of Tom Vasel playing D&D Attack Wing and dammit, I want the game now. After I just decided to keep going with X-wing. I suppose it's possible to come up with a X-Wing vs Dragons hybrid game to use all those bits. How does a dragon compare to a B-wing? How many hobgoblins does it take to bring down the Tantive IV?

A word of caution about the Wiz Kids versions of X-wing. I love X-wing and love Star Trek every bit as much as Star Wars so naturally I wanted to get into Attack Wing to add to the action I was having with X-wing. But it didn't take long for me to decide that I simply couldn't do it, Wiz Kids just manages to do so many things wrong. There was no balance between factions in Attack Wing, not even an attempt to balance the factions. Instead you can just take whatever you want on any ship regardless of faction and pay a 1 point penalty. That way they don't have to worry about balancing the game. It also means everyone has Picard on their fleet etc.

On top of that there is no attempt to balance the point value of the ships. They simply add up the numbers (agility, attack, shields and hull or whatever they are called) and multiply them times a number (2 I believe?) and that is the cost. No taking into account the dial for the ships, the firing arc, the powers, or pilot skill. It's a bit crazy really. Odd that there is no balance. Lastly it is wiz kids, so the components are of poor quality when compared to X-wing, the waves come out waaaaaay too quick (every month a new wave of ships for attack wing), and there are loads of rare but extremely powerful promos. I finally decided after dabbling in it for a while that I had to move on from it. I sold off my collection. I had a decent collection by the time I did but if it ever came between playing it or X-wing X-wing always won, so it was time to let it go.

That being said I know little about the D&D version, but after being involved in the Star Trek Attack Wing version all I can say is going from X-wing to attack wing was impossible, X-wing is just too good by direct comparison. But I'm also not into D&D and the theme does nothing for me so I haven't really looked into the Dragon Wing game.

Death Star. Hobgoblins don't have the cute factor of Ewoks. So they get blown to pieces like the Planet Alderaan.

I had the kids for the weekend for the first time in nearly two months. Sunday is board gaming day with the kids normally, and one of my old board gaming buddies was going to stop by, so we made it a group effort.

Played Ticket to Ride with the 1910 expansion (won - my points counter even lapped another player.)

We followed that up with two games of King of Tokyo + Power Up. I died the first time, won with victory point the second. King of Tokyo is a great game, but I was beginning to burn out on it. Power Up really does a great job of shaking things up. It adds another layer of decision making to the dice rolls, and what evolutions you end up with can really affect your strategies - plus it makes each monster a little different. Gigazaur is set up for killing off all of the competition, while The King excels at taking Tokyo and setting up camp there.

We followed that with a game of Qwirkle. Lost that one to my eldest.

After the kids left, my friend and I broke out Pandemic. I got it a while back when Amazon was having a big sale, but haven't been able to try it. We ended up playing three games, enough to try out most of the roles. We lost the first time (we had no idea what we were doing, plus unknowingly dealt ourselves the hardest difficulty.) We won the second two times - on the easiest difficulty, plus we had excellent character combinations (Medic + Quarantine Specialist and Researcher + Scientist.)

Next time we'll randomize the full role deck and play with medium difficulty.

All in all, a great day of non-stop gaming (although my tongue feels like I ate a belt sander.)

I don't think I have seen anyone but baelthazar post about it here, but my kickstarter copy of Arcadia Quest shipped with delivery expected tomorrow, just in time to not go to Octocon. X(8) watched some of the Watch It Played videos with me and he seems interested, so I might get to play it anyway.

Just picked up Five Tribes and I'm quite impressed by the game, not sure how much legs it has, but I'd say it's a after-gateway euro game. By that, I mean after you show your group the usual gateway euro games, Five Tribes is a good one to try after that. It's not terribly complex, but it can be overwhelming in number of options unless you're used to it.

I've watched a couple of reviews for it. I think the way it works is cool, but have no interest in actually playing it. I guess that should be obvious based on my looking forward to Arcadia Quest.

Just looked at arcadia quest and wow, no wonder Soda Pop and CMON broke up, that game is pretty much a clone. It probably has more to it, but that's a given considering how long its been since the original came out. It's like how so many FFG games are based off prior games, like the lineage of the DOOM boardgame leading into the super successful Descent. Or how the temporary Wings of War license got them a base for X-Wing.

I'm not a fan of CMON as a business, I know their history and current problems. But, I guess I can't fault them for doing the practical, and proven successful, business move of copying a more successful product.

I actually like dungeon crawlers, or miniature and tile style games as well, but I also lucked out and found a fun group that also likes to play euro style games.

I'm definitely swinging back toward enjoying more pure euro games after hitting the adventure/miniatures/dungeoncrawl games pretty hard the last few year. That's what my kids were drawn to, so it made sense to dig into those pretty deep. Lately though, I've been really wanting to play the shorter, simpler, German-style euro games. I picked up Five Tribes recently and it hits that spot perfectly.

There are a handful of games now that I traded away years back, thinking they were kind of dry and boring at the time, that I wish I'd held on to. Games like Java, Torres, and Through the Desert.