What did you play in the last week. Recommendations, warnings and experiences are all intersting!

  • Deadlytosty
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    1 year ago

    We spent most of our week discovering 2 kickstarters that just landed, The Witcher and Isoforian guard.

    The Witcher is very easily becoming a slog when playing at higher levels. We played a 4 player game that lasted 3 to 4 hours. It is a lot of fun, but the sweetspot for the game feels around 1 or 2 players. Lastly we are thinking anout adding some extra homerules, as you can now win the game by only fighting lvl 1 monsters. This is also something I see a lot of on BGG forums.

    The Isoforian guard is so much fun! Really like the bag drafting gameplay, and the story. The game is tougher than we thought. We wanted to continue with the story, but we got our asses kicked and learned that grinding might be needed to get some better equipment and abilities.

    • cthonctic@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’m very much looking forward to playing The Isofarian Guard! I snagged one of the remaining copies and it’ll hopefully be here before to long.

      Didn’t hear about it being such a tough challenge though, makes it sound even more interesting :)

    • wbouvy@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      We played the Witcher a few weeks ago, both with 2 and 4 players. Funnily enough the 4 person game went relatively fast, because one player was not afraid to take risks and rush monsters, rather than collecting more cards, trails, monster weaknesses and exploring etc. It still took a while because it was the first game, but I also got the sense that the game can be very fast, if at least one of your players is willing to take risks and forces the others to move faster.

  • stormesp@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Started playing Imperium Legends, amazing game despite all the problems the spanish editions has (a lot of rules not translated clear enough to the point i had to reread most of the rulebook in english, tons of typos, paragraphs moved to incorrect parts of the rulebook, king of kings card being printed only in one side, sentences just incorrectly translated and more, seriously, just dont buy Devir’s edition)

    Im loving the mix of deckbuilding with a bit of civilization buildign/resource management, have played 5 games solo already

    My main gripe being how the Qin faction is just unfun to play against (in Solo), after searching a bit i saw that is a common problem, whish i had read that before playing as most of my games were against them, still had fun getting to know the mechanisms.

  • chemslayer@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Knocked out some Dominion! I have all the original cycle expansion, plus the 2nd edition updates. First game was crazy, Platinums/Colonies, Tiara, Pirate, Tide Pools, all lead to crazy and big plays. Second game was grindy as hell, only trashing was Lookout and Jack of All Trades, and only draw or action engine was doing nonsense with Trail. First game I got to try Tournament though, which is a really interesting power-curve throughout a game.

    • dpunked@feddit.deOPM
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      1 year ago

      Absolutely love Dominion, classic but it remains strong. We only have 2 expansions. Seaside and Intrigue. What is your favorite one?

      • chemslayer@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Ooo tough choice! I’d go with either Prosperity or Dark Ages, for complete opposite reasons.

        Prosperity has a lot more support for “big” plays (big money, big actions, big engines), along with platinums and colonies, so it can be a lot of fun to get up to much more nonsense than usual.

        Dark Ages on the other hand, lends itself to more grindy, clever engines. The themes of trash value, as well as low-cost stuff and ruins, really lets you get into the mud and grind a pile of dirt until it miraculously creates gold. The addition of shelters to replace the starting estates is really fun too, and gives the starting deck a little more oomph and utility.

        Back to the wall, I guess I’d pick Dark Ages, as I love me a battle of attrition. But either of these are great, and tbh any of the original expansions are wonderful! (I can’t give an opinion on the new age expansions since I own none of them)

  • donio@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    We tried the 2-player variant of Cat in the Box. It works fine but it left me feeling that a better 2p variant should be possible. Seems too easy to tie the tricks and avoid paradoxes. Might be our lack of experience with the game, maybe it’s different with a more aggressive playstyle? I have some ideas for tweaking it but I want to play it more first to better understand the game.

    Would love to hear other experiences, especially about the 2p variant.

    Also learned Challengers, online only on BGA so far but thinking about picking it up. Love it when a game doubles down on a core idea and makes it work. In this case it’s focusing entirely on the deckbuilding portion of deckbuilders with with the round playing out mostly automatically, sort of like in auto-battler video games. It also reminded me of some other games I like: Tea for 2 and Baseball Highlights: 2045.

  • pathief@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I finally got to try The crew: Mission deep sea. I like it, but I think I prefered the simplicity of the first one. The game is basically the same but I have to constantly remind people what the meaning of the goal cards are.

  • Kempeth@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    On Tuesday my group played Die Zwerge - Big Box Scenario 2 and so far I’m not a fan. There’s no real mitigation option for bad dice rolls making combat really unsatisfying and the final three challenges were just ridiculously impossible.

    On Sunday I played Mystic Vale with my girlfriend. She had a powerful totem that gave her a free mana and a VP for every upgrade that she bought. This meant that she was quickly racking up pretty sizeable mana pools and getting a constant trickle of VPs. I on the other hand was stuck with two sun elements and a hugely expensive leader which I couldn’t upgrade until well into the second half. I focused (perhaps a bit too much) on getting a decent set of elements to buy vale cards which let me rack up a good amount of VP that way. Ultimately the game ended really tight with 64-62 VP in her favor.

    Also on Sunday my group met for DnD. We’re almost done with the Lost Mines of Phandelver - or so we though. Almost got TPK’d. A 28 damage fireball took out half of our party, a third tried to ram open a door and knocked himself out leaving only our halfling - down to 2 HP - trying to save everyone. Miraculously she remembered that the healer still carried a healing potion, used it on him who was then able to heal everyone up with a lucky dice roll on his group healing spell. In the ensuing retreat the knight managed to alert another horde of monsters to our presence.

  • dpunked@feddit.deOPM
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    1 year ago

    We played our first game of Ark Nova (2 Players). There are lost of mechanics to take into account at first and while the start was slow, I am eager for our next session. Since its raining outside, this might even be today.

    We also had a session of Splendor Duel. I love this tiny duel game, currently its my favorite in our collection.

  • nachof@feddit.cl
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    1 year ago

    Saturday was our twice a month large meetup. Went with the kids for the first couple of hours, and we played:

    • Dodo. The kids love this. It’s really simple, just be fast and remember position of the tokens, and that’s it. But it’s a lot of fun watching that ball roll slowly towards disaster.
    • Team3. Interesting communication game, we discovered that if the 8 year old gives spoken instructions to the 5 year old tempers can get a little hot. All other combinations worked well, it was just that one that didn’t.
    • Stella. My 8 year old loves it, but the 5 year old still isn’t fully ready. She has issues with mapping the cards to her pad. Still, by the fourth round things went much smoother.

    Then the kids went home with mom and I got to play a couple of heavier titles:

    • Pax Pamir 2nd Edition. First time playing. I expected this to be good, but it was still much more fun than I expected. The rules seem a little dry, like you’re just moving stuff around, and all the theme will be all condensed in the card text. But then you play it and everything feels very thematic. I’m pretty sure we played it extremely wrong (in the strategy sense, I think rules were fine), but still had a blast. And I think it would probably work better with at least one more player (we played a three player game)
    • Beyond the Sun with expansion. I love this game. First time playing with the expansion (the other two players were also first timers, one was also a first time BTS player). I really liked the leaders cards. Also, it was a weird game, in that there was no achievement token in either Empire or Trascendence. One player had the leader that gives you a private achievement, and he completed that, plus the other two achievements that were drawn (4 strength in three locations, fully empty a single disc track), that meant three and triggered game end. He was the second player, and I was the third player, so I maneuvered to be able to colonize a fourth system, while at the same time denying player 2 the ability to do so in two of the systems he had a majority in. Player 1 had nothing to earn him more points than maneuvering over the map, so he did that, and he couldn’t prevent me from colonizing (I had two possible targets and he didn’t have enough ships/jumps), so he prevented player 2 from doing so, since that was a 9 point difference (5 from the planet, 4 from the achievement). Player 2 had his turn busted, so he instead prevented me from colonizing. My last turn was also maneuvering on the map, so nobody got their fourth system, and the achievement stayed empty. And for techs, there wasn’t even a single level three tech researched. The leaders do push you to play more on the map board, plus only a single guild came up, and I chose the terraforming one because others were better prepared to take advantage of the research action. And only a single level 2 tech that could research level three was drawn, but again, it was discarded. So that was it, no level three techs, so of course no level four either. Scores were quite lower than we’ve seen other times, too: 36/32/31. Anyway, definitely the highlight of the night, and as usual after playing BTS I’m left wanting to play more.
    • dpunked@feddit.deOPM
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      1 year ago

      I see that you are the one to ask for nice scifi games! I will keep that in mind, its my favorite genre :)

  • WarmRegards@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago
    • The Toledo War - Two player Schotten-Totten style fun, quick card game from Amabel Holland @ Hollandspiele about the historical conditions of Michigan becoming a state. Was the free game giveaway for their 2019 Holiday Sale. Played a couple rounds before everyone arrived.

    • Land and Freedom: The Spanish Civil War - Three players (max). Currently, my favorite game. The Semi-Cooperative nature of it is fantastic. You have to work together with your political opponents to defeat the fascists. Unfortunately, we lost at the beginning of Year 3 this round.

    • 7 Wonders Duel - Two players. First time playing, but neither of us cared much for it.

    • Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition - Two player variant. First time playing with only two. Usually love this game, but there aren’t enough interesting things going on in the two-player version in my opinion and probably will stick to 3+ players from now on.

    • dpunked@feddit.deOPM
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      1 year ago

      Oh wow, a game about the spanish civil war. Its an interesting concept. So the facist are controlled by the game? (Are you spanish?)

      • WarmRegards@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, the game controls the fascist Falange/Carlists via Event Cards which happen every turn. The three player factions are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Communists, and Moderates. Each has their own priorities, but ultimately if you don’t work together the fascists will win. I highly recommend checking out some videos on it. The YT channel Homo Ludens has a Tabletop Sim play-through with the designer helping as they play.

        I’m not Spanish, though did just visit!