Octopus Overlords

Agreed. Archinerd was our Quarantine Specialist who saved the day often. I played our Researcher Kiki Maru until the very end, then brought back our Medic Clem Fandango. That was not the optimal choice.

Haven't played either yet, but Krosmaster: Quest showed up 2 years late and SW:Rebellion showed up as well. Got some work to do

Rebellion has been a huge hit for my boys and I. We played another game last night (my two boys as Rebels vs my wife and I as Empire). We won...but it was close. The only real mistake they made was where they moved their base to. It was a gamble what they did, and was very risky, and in the end, that risk didn't pay off for them.

They were first at Toydaria, which is slot right in the middle of the game board. I never really suspected there, but did started making threatening comments about the death star paying the Toydarian a visit. They moved the base from there after that. They had 2 choices (after the game, they told us). Tatooine or Alderaan. Christian wanted Tatooine, but Jacob at the last second chose Alderaan. A few comments slipped from them, leading me to Alderaan. Too bad for them, as there were two massive fleets sitting in two adjacent systems. Easy battle takes place and the Empire wins.
If they would have taken Tatooine as the new base, they most likely would have won, because I was 2 turns away from Tatooine, so I probably would not have gotten there in time, if I would have even thought they were there to begin with.

Movibg the Rebel Base "behind enemy lines" can work sometimes...but it didn't this time.

This game, we started at 5:30 and it was over at 8:10. The game is already set up for another one tonight. As soon as it was over, Christian asked to play it again...last night! So yeah...this one is a keeper (both the game and the boy! LOL)

We played through May in Pandemic Legacy last night and lost badly twice.

The first game was mostly our fault - we did get some really bad card draws, but we spent too much time on a certain objective and not enough time containing outbreak threats.

The second game we played very well, and except for the way the next to last epidemic played out, could have had a good shot at winning. Unfortunately we drew the exact two cards we absolutely did not want to draw, and it was outbreak chain city.

That game is a blast, but that month humbled us greatly. It's incredibly balanced though. As good as we've felt we've played, we're currently sitting at 4 games lost and 4 games won.

Played lots of Dicemasters this past week, and did the MtG Shadows Over Innistrad prerelease with my younger son, kenetickid and his son. We went 3-1, 2-2, 1-3, and 0-4 respectively.

Enjoying the hell out of Dicemasters.

Have you tried a rainbow draft with dice masters yet? I think that may be my favorite thing about it. Seppe and I did one at our FLGS for a tournament and I pulled an ultra rare almost immediately, which was sweet.

nope, for the most part I just got a shitload of store credit and got a huge collection for us to use.

Buddy of mine has his own "deck" of Xmen/Brotherhood Evil Mutants he is building/tweaking as we play.

Played Shadows of Innistrad release booster draft, took 4th of 30, then stayed up all night playing Dicemasters.

Last week played COIN Liberty or Death, this week it's COIN Fire In The Lake.

Seekrieg 5. The King George V and the Repulse vs. the Bismarck and the Prince Eugen in an alternate version of the Battle of the Denmark Strait.

The Bismark got the range of the KGV early, and pounded her down quickly, eventually getting a magazine detonation. As the Repulse, I managed to knock out a good bit of the Prinz Eugen's firepower, and took out half of the Bismarck's boilers, bringing her down to 18 knots max before I turned tail and ran after watching the flag ship detonate off my port bow.

It might have been a loss in terms of materiel, but we certainly kept the Bismarck from disappearing into the Atlantic to wreak havoc, as they were forced to disengage as well and head back to port for repairs.

Taught and played Dicemasters to another friend Sunday.

Played Batman versus Spiderman.

Needed Overcrush so bad, I hate Aunt May and Daredevil.

I ordered some Hazmat suited soldier minis to use in our Pandemic Legacy campaign. They came in today and look fantastic. I'll post some pics in the miniatures painting thread once I get them finished. I'm going to try to have them done by our Wednesday night session.

I used character meeples from meeplesource.com but actual miniatures are cool.

I was thinking about getting minis for Letters from Whitechapel. It's my number one game and I think it deserves some pimping. I just need to go through the effort to find something appropriate.

More Dicemasters with LM (and he made scrummyicious spicy sliders!)

Man that Superman with Iron Will and Overcrush is a NIGHTMARE.

Finished our first game of Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization. It took us a few nights of an hour or so per night. In between all I could think about was what I wanted to do on my next turn. That's a sign of a good game.

I can't wait to play it again and this time add in the serious military and age III cards.

We crushed Pandemic Legacy last night for the months of June and July. We were heading into June with two crushing losses in May, so we were due a win. It wasn't a cakewalk, but we managed to eke out a victory through some sound strategic play.

July we expected to lose handily, but some fortunate card draws early allowed us to knock out a difficult objective within two rounds. After that it was just a matter of keeping outbreaks under control while we coasted through the other objectives.

Our current game session record is 6 wins, 4 losses. However we've only lost one month outright, so month-wise we're at 6 wins, 1 loss. Pretty darn good if I do say so myself.

Just wait, YK. We were doing well until everything collapsed at the end.

Played through the tutorial / intro adventure for Secrets of the Lost Tomb last night and had a good time. The game feels a bit like a B-movie you'd find on the old USA Network during a Saturday "Up All Night" marathon, but I get the feeling the guys that made it are huge RPG fans. It's very much like playing Eldritch Horror (or Arkham) but instead of a pure Cthulhu theme it's more of a early 1900s pulp Alan Quatermain / Indiana Jones mythos horror...thing. So one minute you're fighting ghost pirates, then it's vampire WW1 soldiers, then a mummy. Each turn kicks off with a tomb event (like a horror deck) that runs random events in the tomb. It's dungeon-crawl style with random tile pulls and the base box set comes with quite a few. You follow instructions for each adventure and as things happen in the game (you pull a certain tile, the comet track hits a certain number, etc...) you refer to a numbered listing in the campaign manual and resolve that event. On the tiles themselves you are challenged for ability checks or you can have card-based adventures with lots of flavor text based on passing or failing ability checks. Everything is resolved via successes on die rolls, so it never felt heavy. What I really like - and what I think it does better than Eldritch Horror - is properly scale to the number of players. For example, last night we were using two adventurers so the game rules tell us we each get 6 actions per round. If we had four players, we'd only have 3 actions per round. Anyway, it was created by two local NJ guys and went through a KS a few years ago. It looks like they're going to be at GenCon this year, so if you see them I'd definitely swing by and look for a demo. Just based on the theme and how it scales, I can see it hitting our table now quite frequently.

As the Chicago group well knows, I'm a huge fan of Ignacy's 51st State series of tableau builders. Well, looks like there's an updated version coming called 51st State: The Master Set. I'm just about to dive into the rules, but I'm guessing he's tossed out of some of the more fiddly rules from the original games (the Rule of 3, etc.). Whether or not this will result in a dumbed down experience that takes away from what I always considered "a gamer's game", I don't know yet. I'm still preordering though because for 50 bucks (plus 5 bucks shipping in the U.S.A.) you get two more factions, a bunch of customized tokens, and the gratifying feeling of getting it a month before stores. It's looking like a late April/sometime in May shipping date right now.

Hey Hep, any chance I can get a quick overview of why you are a huge fan of the 51st State series? Don't have any experience with the existing games but looking at the Master Set and really thinking of pre-ordering. Thanks.

51st state... Tempting. I haven't played it... But I'm sure I'll like it. Tempting.

How much randomness is in 51st state? Looking into it more now.

The available cards come random, then it's a little like a draft to get them.

Then the choices of what you use and how you interact with other players comes in.
Quite often you put some things into play so that others use them to your partial benefit.

I have the original 51st and New Era.

Hep also show me another much like them with specific factions

I sold my copy of 51st State after playing New Era. The latter was essentially version 1.5 in the series and it's definitely what I consider the starter for the series (at least up until now).

Why do I love the series? I guess I could break it down into three main things:

1) Theme - The series just drips with it. Every single card tells a story. You incorporate a school into your faction? It provides you with labor (it IS a post apocalyptic setting, people). You built a watchtower? It allows you to see further and thus attack things outside your normal range. Most games would be content to give you to the standard "farm gives you grain, quarry gives you stone, etc."...but the amount of work Ignacy put into making each card unique, incredibly thematic and varied in ability is amazing. Considering that there are hundreds of different cards in the series, that's a lot of work. Pax Porfiriana is the only other game I've ever seen with that much theme in each card.

2) You have a LOT of choices on your turn. This isn't a game where you will do 3 or 4 things during a round, then pass. You'll THINK you're done, but then someone will send a worker to one of your factories, thus opening a production possibility, which then opens up an action you can now take, which in turn gives you the ability to...well, you get the idea.

3) It is the ultimate engine game. You will find yourself getting excited to see what new cards come up so you can tweak your economic/combat engine even more. It's addictive as heck trying to get it "just right".

Now, the downside is that it was notoriously tough to teach. It has something called The Rule of 3 which was added purely for balance and that limited you to only 3 of some things on everything but your base card. It was pretty unintuitive and Ignacy put together Imperial Settlers basically to show he could create a similar game to 51st State without resorting to using it. It also has a ton of tokens and icons that can make Race for the Galaxy seem positively elementary.

But when you are playing, those shortcomings seem to become strengths. It's odd, but it's a game I consider incredibly fiddly, but that makes me want to play all the more.

How much randomness is in 51st state? Looking into it more now.

Remember when I taught you and your wife Imperial Settlers years ago at an Octocon? It's very similar to that in respect to randomness. Maybe even a bit more as you don't have faction specific cards in the 51st State series. Everything can be acquired and used by anyone. Still, the amount of ways you can then use those cards (establish a trade route with it, destroy it for spoils, or add it to your faction as an incorporated entity) nullifies the downside of random card draws in the game, in my opinion.

It's looking more like this edition of 51st State will be more like Imperial Settlers than I initially thought. That's not a bad thing for you folks thinking about jumping into the series with this new edition, though. It's just that some of us old timers (chaos, seppe, zarathud and I) will probably keep our original editions around to play. Considering that New Era/Winter and the small expansion pack Ruins has a wealth of cards already that I've yet to even play in a game, I'm not going to be too upset that the original series won't get any more expansions. And I do love Imperial Settlers, so if they keep the theme strong and don't mess with the core of the game (the wealth of actions you can take each turn), I think it will be a hit with me.

Sounds like the new one (master set) might be even more like imperial settlers. Not sure how I feel about that. I like imperial settlers, but I think I would rather the games were more distinct.

psssst Hepcat, for fiddly rules and craploads of chits with identities try DIVINE RIGHT

Sheesh, that's an oldie. I never played, but I'm not sure my sanity would stay intact with that much fiddly.

Chrisoc13 wrote:Sounds like the new one (master set) might be even more like imperial settlers. Not sure how I feel about that. I like imperial settlers, but I think I would rather the games were more distinct.

I've been doing a bit more reading. I think the change from 5 rounds and then done from Imperial Settlers, to the first who hits 25 points wins in the new 51st State will prove to be a significant difference in game play between the two for me. I also like that they're keeping trade with cards the same, apparently. That gives you three choices on each card, instead of the two from Imperial Settlers.

This article goes over some of the changes, so you might want to read over that.

But at the end of the day, Imperial Settlers IS built on the 51st State mechanics, so there are going to be a lot of similarities.

I wish they'd kept the artwork from the original games too, by the way. Another reason I'll hang onto my copies of New Era/Winter. But for 50 bucks, I'm happy with my pre order. Ignacy rarely lets me down.

BTW Divine Right is best played as a continual Season by Season extended game left on a table for months rather than single Season Game done in a long ass day of gaming.

Heh.

Off topic:

Hey, you got Tabletop Simulator on Steam? If so, they have an Ashes mod. We could set up a game with LM some night. They also have an Archipelago mod, but I imagine that's a nightmare to set up.

I'll have to look into that

Just looked for something on Steam and noticed that Tabletop Simulator is actually half off right now (9.99 for one copy, 29.99 for a four pack). Although it looks like that deal is ending today.

hepcat wrote:Just looked for something on Steam and noticed that Tabletop Simulator is actually half off right now (9.99 for one copy, 29.99 for a four pack). Although it looks like that deal is ending today.

I highly recommend TTS. Between playing it and making my own mods, I have over 200 hours logged.

Chrisoc13 wrote:Sounds like the new one (master set) might be even more like imperial settlers. Not sure how I feel about that. I like imperial settlers, but I think I would rather the games were more distinct.

I spent some time going over the rules at lunch today. They kept more than I thought they would of the original rules. I really think this will feel much closer to the original than it will Imperial Settlers.

...although I'm a little dismayed that Ignacy is still hell bent on adding humor in ever increasing quantities to his rule books. I've met the guy and he's really nice, but his sense of humor doesn't seem to translate well into English, if you ask me.

Ok cool. I'm intrigued. I might jump in this quasi kickstarter.

coopasonic wrote:I was thinking about getting minis for Letters from Whitechapel. It's my number one game and I think it deserves some pimping. I just need to go through the effort to find something appropriate.

Problem solved:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpa ... espansione

There is expansion coming (probably this year) that includes minis for the wretched, the investigators and jack (replacing the tracking markers for jack as marking his place on the board would make the game a bit difficult for Jack). It also apparently includes a set of alternate/optional balancing rules, plus a new screen for jack.

The minis are not painted and not that detail. If you go to the game page there is a picture of the back of the box that has actual minis. I guess there is a chance Fantasy Flight will upgrade them in their version.

I guess I'll just have to pay Blackhawk to paint them for me.