Board Games!

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Yeah, deckbuilding is pretty ace. It started with Dominion, which is heavily based around "engine" play. You have a bunch of piles of cards in the middle (there's ten different types of cards, randomly determined, and a large number of copies of each one), and each turn you play your starting deck and acquire cards from the center into your discard pile. When you run out of cards in your deck (which is pretty quickly, since you start with 10 cards and draw 5 each turn), you reshuffle your discard into it, so you're slowly upgrading your deck with new cards.

A Magic pro got their hands on Dominion and made their own inspired-by game: Ascension, which they later refined into Star Realms. It's an interesting spin, and it changes the focus somewhat to resemble a Magic draft. Instead of being able to freely build an engine, you have to pick from a row of five cards when you acquire cards. It's more about adapting a strategy on the fly.

A game that's doing some interesting things with deckbuilding is Codex, which should be releasing around this winter. It's a hybrid of deckbuilding and CCGs, where you secretly add two cards to your discard pile every turn from your own personal stash of cards. So it's a CCG (albeit noncollectible--you get all the cards for your faction upfront by buying the game) where you build your deck as you go. This has a nice double effect. For one: you don't have to worry about drawing dead cards that aren't playable until many turns later in the game, because you don't have to add them into your deck until later. Secondly: you can build your deck to adapt to your opponent's threats and strategies, instead of relying on a "sideboard" to swap out cards in between matches.

[themaque]

Anyone gotten their copies of Scythe and gotten a chance to play yet?

[Knaight]

A Magic pro got their hands on Dominion and made their own inspired-by game: Ascension, which they later refined into Star Realms. It's an interesting spin, and it changes the focus somewhat to resemble a Magic draft. Instead of being able to freely build an engine, you have to pick from a row of five cards when you acquire cards. It's more about adapting a strategy on the fly.

So, between these two which is the better option? I could use another deck builder.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

So, between these two which is the better option? I could use another deck builder.

I'd go for Star Realms, personally, for a few different reasons.

Ascension, first of all, has a sort of "mana screw" problem because the center row is populated both by monsters and by cards to buy. Sometimes, you'll have a turn where you have lots of money but there's pretty much nothing but monsters in the center row, or lots of attack but there's nothing but cards to buy in the center row. While there are two cards you can always buy (a 2-attack card and a 2-money card) and there's a monster you can always fight (costs 2 attack, gives one point), they're underwhelming compared to the cards you can usually be buying. Star Realms doesn't have that, because there's no monsters in the core deck, which means that you spend your turn finding the best acquisitions for your deck and strategy, then executing it.

Ascension's core set also (in my opinion) suffers a bit from faction imbalance. The Mechana faction is very powerful on its own, as is Lifebound (though I've found Mechana to be far better at snowballing into a win), while the other two factions wind up playing support and second fiddle to those two factions. In Star Realms, I've found each faction to be highly potent--and each faction generally requires using at least one other faction as a supplement. Mono-faction decks are far harder to get working, although they're not impossible.

The pacing of Star Realms is also really fun; I enjoy it a lot better than Ascension. While dealing damage and earning points are technically two sides of the same coin, it feels way cooler to be chipping your opponent's life total away (as opposed to earning "Honor Points"), and it makes the whole game feel more head-to-head. Plus, you wind up getting this cool momentum effect, as both players build their decks into crescendos of damage-slamming finales. It feels pretty much like a shounen battle, complete with attacks that leave you at 1 health--and you respond next turn with something like 30 damage from a combo.

Also, Star Realms is sold for $15. It's nigh-impossible to beat the price. It's cheap enough that you could buy multiple copies of the game for 3-to-4 player. (Well, okay, that's one thing to keep in mind: it only supports 2-player games out of the box. You need one $15 set for every two players. But it's not a huge expense.)

[themaque]

If you like Deck Builders might I also suggest TRAINS in case you missed it?

It's similar to Dominion but it also has a board where you grow and expand your rail line for points. If you expand and build the board you start filling your deck with junk but if you ignore the board you are just giving your opponent points.

It has a great stand alone expansion that adds a lot more player conflict. I've found TRAINS well worth my time and investment. I've had little to no desire to play dominion since.

[Knaight]

If you like Deck Builders might I also suggest TRAINS in case you missed it?

It's similar to Dominion but it also has a board where you grow and expand your rail line for points. If you expand and build the board you start filling your deck with junk but if you ignore the board you are just giving your opponent points.

It has a great stand alone expansion that adds a lot more player conflict. I've found TRAINS well worth my time and investment. I've had little to no desire to play dominion since.

I prefer Dominion to Trains, but I have enjoyed Trains. The removal of the limited actions requirement kind of hurt it in my opinion, and while the map aspects are fun, it just hasn't seemed as good to me.

I love Dominion though - "Not as good as Dominion" is not exactly a heavy criticism. Trains is also a well liked game, and while it doesn't come anywhere close to replacing Dominions I am glad I get to play it occasionally.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Something I forgot to mention--there's free apps for Ascension and Star Realms (and Star Realms also has a free demo version on Steam) if you want to try before you buy.

[Feytalist]

If you like Deck Builders might I also suggest TRAINS in case you missed it?

It's similar to Dominion but it also has a board where you grow and expand your rail line for points. If you expand and build the board you start filling your deck with junk but if you ignore the board you are just giving your opponent points.

It has a great stand alone expansion that adds a lot more player conflict. I've found TRAINS well worth my time and investment. I've had little to no desire to play dominion since.

Yeah, I quite like Trains as well. It's not as deep as Dominion, I feel (that's nigh-impossible, what with Dominion's 20,000 expansions and all), but the board-expansion aspect is a nice extra dimension, and it's fairly easy to pick up and play.

I'll always have time for Dominion though.

[Starsign]

*sigh* Well I haven't been at this thread for awhile.

So I haven't played board games much due to my parents being busy and rarely meeting my relatives, but Ticket to Ride has been the go-to and standard favorite for being easy to learn, easily identifiable, and fun for a group.

I also got Carcassonne which is even easier for my family to learn, at least when not including rules like farming or the river. We haven't played it much though.

I still have Saboteur as well, though that's largely put off unless we have a group of 6 or more players which... is unlikely for the most part.

Finally, I DO have Tokaido, a game I was extremely excited to get. But because it's a bit more complicated than the other ones I have and there's not been much time, I've had no chance to actually play it at all.

So... yeah. Not been feeling great by the lack of playing physical board games. Anyone else had this issue too, where they have this point where they tend not to get much, or any, board games in?

[Knaight]

So... yeah. Not been feeling great by the lack of playing physical board games. Anyone else had this issue too, where they have this point where they tend not to get much, or any, board games in?

I don't have that right now, but it happens. Same thing with RPGs, really.

[Fri]

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/e...-path-forward/

Well, this is something.

Dang, there's still some of their games I'd like to get. Oh well.

[Morph Bark]

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/e...-path-forward/

Well, this is something.

Dang, there's still some of their games I'd like to get. Oh well.

Aw man. I guess I better hurry to get the core books to their Warhammer 40k TRPGs. Those always looked interesting.

[Eldan]

I got Eldritch Horror (it was on sale, I also got Forgotten Lore and Mountains of Madness, sadly neither Strange Remnants or Under the Pyramids were available at reasonable cost). And after almost two months of back and forth, we finally got a game together and finished. Seven players. Far more than recommended. Some five hours of play time. Awesome.

We played Azathoth and the Antarctic side board, via prelude. Which proved to be invaluable, as our last mystery was to aqcuire an artefact and the Antarctic sideboard just happens to feature the City of the Elder Things, which lets you generate them reliably. One character permanently hung out in the Antarctic and at the end, ran around with five artefacts.
We also had a Senator Kane, permanently generating items for everyone, a team of three general troubleshooters running around and killing things, closing gates and solving expeditions and me. I was the medium, which meant, with seven players, that I got one or two clues every turn and could send them to other players.
The game ended with doom at 2, our investigator miraculously Unearthing the original manuscript of a 17th century Italian Opera in an eons-old ruin in Antarctica and spending the seven required clues to send Azathoth to sleep again. Funnily enough Senator Kane's last encounter was someone trying to put on a production of just that opera in Minneapolis and preventing it from happening.

A big highlight of the game was when I killed ten monsters at once. We had several monster surges (devastating ones, with seven players) and the board was very crowded with more monsters than we could possibly kill. Luckily, I had the perfect combination of items. The flutes of Azathoth's servants is an item that lets an investigator spend 2 health and 2 sanity to kill all monsters on his field. Purify the World is a task where you kill monsters, then for every monster killed, kill another, weaker one anywhere in the world.
So, long story short: cruise to Istanbul, travel to the pyramids, where a stack of five monsters, including a Shoggoth and a Starspawn of Cthulhu are waiting. Play the flutes, blow them all up. Bind their spirits, send them out to Tokyo and London and the Hymalayas and Shanghai to kill their fellows and clean the entire damn board.


So, tons of fun. Can't wait to do it again.

[Feytalist]

I got Eldritch Horror (it was on sale, I also got Forgotten Lore and Mountains of Madness, sadly neither Strange Remnants or Under the Pyramids were available at reasonable cost). And after almost two months of back and forth, we finally got a game together and finished. Seven players. Far more than recommended. Some five hours of play time. Awesome.

Aw man, you just made me realise I haven't played it in a while. Sounds like an awesome round, and you managed to actually win it took us like 5 games to even get close to winning at first. Senator Kane is a useful character, but the player has to be okay with basically being a buyer/delivery boy. (I remember one of our games, our Kane took out some loans had had a bad rolling streak, so he spent most of the game with a broken leg and a sprained back. Many laughs were had.)

Great game. Needs some time investment, but worth it.

[Eldan]

Senator Kane also took what basically was the game master role. Or half of it. I was the one reading the encounter cards, but since he was handing them out anyway, he took charge of tokens, items, spells and conditions.

I also played the medium, which meant that once per round, when someone got a condition, I could look at the back of it, read it to everyone, and gain a clue. And we needed clues like crazy (7 on one person for the last mystery), so we basically said that Senator Kane would take a debt whenever we hadn't had a condition yet that turn. He also ended up with two Dark Pacts. We started making fake campaign ads for his presidency out of it. "Vote Kane: is your candidate still alive after taking out loans from Nyarlathotep and Eibon?"

[caden_varn]

Kane is also our groups clue generator, sitting in a London pub generating clues .

I think the game is somewhat easier with more investigators - playing with just two means very few clues, and if they don't happen to spawn near you you are basically doomed if you need clues for solving mysteries (which you generally do) - we normally play with at least 4 characters - either 2 each if there are just two of us, or with Charlie Kane as a floating investigator if there are 3 of us.

Not played with the Antartic side-board - what does it bring to the game?

[Narkis]

Senator Kane also took what basically was the game master role. Or half of it. I was the one reading the encounter cards, but since he was handing them out anyway, he took charge of tokens, items, spells and conditions.

I also played the medium, which meant that once per round, when someone got a condition, I could look at the back of it, read it to everyone, and gain a clue. And we needed clues like crazy (7 on one person for the last mystery), so we basically said that Senator Kane would take a debt whenever we hadn't had a condition yet that turn. He also ended up with two Dark Pacts. We started making fake campaign ads for his presidency out of it. "Vote Kane: is your candidate still alive after taking out loans from Nyarlathotep and Eibon?"

Pretty sure the medium can only look at the back of non-debt conditions.

Pretty cool game though. We've played a few times with 4-5 players and have yet to win once. Our politician keeps getting killed, and always the same way: He becomes delayed for some reason and immediately after a gate opens at his location spewing forth death. And we always get overwhelmed before the second mystery is solved.

[Eldan]

There's a pretty good vassal module for Eldritch, by the way. I played two solo games on it to learn the rules.

[Velaryon]

[I]So... yeah. Not been feeling great by the lack of playing physical board games. Anyone else had this issue too, where they have this point where they tend not to get much, or any, board games in?

I've been there too. Nowadays, I can get one night in every month or two with a couple friends, but it's usually only 3 or sometimes 4 of us, and two are more into casual, easy to pick up and play kind of games, rather than anything that's too deep or complex. And I don't mind that, but I feel like we're always playing the same handful of games because they don't want to go to the effort of learning any new games.

[BRC]

Played a ton of Eldritch. The game definetally gets easier, or at least more fun, at 4 investigators. Anything less than that and you are forced to spend all your time running across the world, since the chances of anybody being in a good location goes way down.

We generally just put Charlie Kane on Tokyo, to have him snipe monsters from a distance. As more expansions add more encounters to tokyo this becomes risky, since the chances of a non-influence based encounter goes way up.

Really, Akachi is the lifesaver, her ability to reliably close a gate a turn is a huge deal.

[Eldan]

We never used Akachi so far from the 20 or so investigators I have, but she seems very good. Especially if you can get her a star chart or whatever that item was called that gives bonuses from each closed gate.

[Feytalist]

Really, Akachi is the lifesaver, her ability to reliably close a gate a turn is a huge deal.

For a moment I thought you said Akachi is the lifestealer, and wondered when Eldritch Horror and Neverwinter Nights did a crossover

We've used her a couple of times, but mostly for clue gathering, if I recall. (Mostly because our rolling in this game tends to be atrocious.)

The game really plays best when you've got an even number of players. 4 and 6 seem the best bet. Anything else and you've got the burden of higher instances of... everything, but not with enough manpower to do much about it.


My buddy recently acquired the Antarctica map, actually. Be interested to see how it plays out.

[Eldan]

Not sure how problematic the expansion can be, but I felt it made the game easier. (With my experience of two games.) There's local actions on the squares and they enable you to grind for clues, skill improvements and artefacts. Which I don't think I like.

[BRC]

Not sure how problematic the expansion can be, but I felt it made the game easier. (With my experience of two games.) There's local actions on the squares and they enable you to grind for clues, skill improvements and artefacts. Which I don't think I like.

Yeah, the Antarctica Sideboard makes things easier.

Far more interesting, in my opinion, is the Egypt sideboard that gets introduced in Under the Pyramids. It's not nearly as powerful (no Artifact Farming), and is a lot more centrally located, whereas Antarctica makes the map substantially bigger. I think we did the math, and Egypt, despite adding new spaces, does not actually make the map bigger, since everything is a local action away from either they Pyramids, or the Heart of Africa.

Also, if you're using Akachi as a clue hunter you're wasting her.

[Philistine]

A question for anyone who has played Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2E: Have you found the overall game balance tilts toward one side or the other? And if so, a follow up: Which side do you see as being favored, and how heavily?

In my own limited experience (one session as a Hero, one and a half* as the Overlord), it seemed to me that the game is slightly weighted toward the Heroes - but not so much that the OL can't pull out the occasional win with a few lucky dice rolls (say, succeeding five times out of six attempts on a test that has a 28% chance of passing) or if Team Hero makes very poor tactical decisions (you disregard the wisdom of the ages at your peril). But I'm curious to hear the opinions of others with more experience (and/or more successful experience) of the game.


* My second session as Overlord ended very early after one of the Hero players - ironically, the same player who proposed, and then insisted on, TH's poorest tactical choice (over the objections of his teammates, while I watched in amazed disbelief) of the campaign - threw a screaming, cursing fit when the poor tactics he championed led directly to an easy OL victory (the only really easy victory, for either side, of the campaign) in the Interlude quest. Sadly, it doesn't seem likely now that we'll ever get the game to the table again as it will probably be seen as socially toxic.

[Narkis]

A question for anyone who has played Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2E: Have you found the overall game balance tilts toward one side or the other? And if so, a follow up: Which side do you see as being favored, and how heavily?

In my own limited experience (one session as a Hero, one and a half* as the Overlord), it seemed to me that the game is slightly weighted toward the Heroes - but not so much that the OL can't pull out the occasional win with a few lucky dice rolls (say, succeeding five times out of six attempts on a test that has a 28% chance of passing) or if Team Hero makes very poor tactical decisions (you disregard the wisdom of the ages at your peril). But I'm curious to hear the opinions of others with more experience (and/or more successful experience) of the game.

Depends on the scenario really. Some are biased towards the heroes, some towards the Overlord. But in general I'd agree, it's just a bit easier for the heroes. Which is exactly in line with my DMing sensibilities. You don't want to demoralize your players, or they'll just stop playing altogether and everyone loses.

* My second session as Overlord ended very early after one of the Hero players - ironically, the same player who proposed, and then insisted on, TH's poorest tactical choice (over the objections of his teammates, while I watched in amazed disbelief) of the campaign - threw a screaming, cursing fit when the poor tactics he championed led directly to an easy OL victory (the only really easy victory, for either side, of the campaign) in the Interlude quest. Sadly, it doesn't seem likely now that we'll ever get the game to the table again as it will probably be seen as socially toxic.

Sounds like a problem player, a prime candidate to be kicked off the group.

[Fri]

the problem with overlord is, in my friend's opinion at least, an actually competitive overlord could make the game frustrating.

We used to play descent 2e a lot. I basically had permanent overlord position. I must say that I'm not that good of a wargamer/optimizer, and I always try to make the game interesting. But one day I can't come to our boardgame session, and they played one of the expansion. In that expansion they have to defeat a boss with good movement or something in that line. The overlord for that session was our most competitive and experienced board gamer. So basically he played the game in a frustrating way, by using his advantage in movement (I think the boss can fly) to make the heroes barely able to plink him, and use various annoying trap and such to whittle the heroes and make it even harder for them to chase after the boss. Which is to be fair, perfectly legal and winning move, but it basically ruined the whole game for everyone else (that one fight took a whole day or something), and, the owner literally sold the game after that session (not because that particular session he said, but that session makes him notice the particular problem with the game which is looming for future sessions).

[Velaryon]

the problem with overlord is, in my friend's opinion at least, an actually competitive overlord could make the game frustrating.

We used to play descent 2e a lot. I basically had permanent overlord position. I must say that I'm not that good of a wargamer/optimizer, and I always try to make the game interesting. But one day I can't come to our boardgame session, and they played one of the expansion. In that expansion they have to defeat a boss with good movement or something in that line. The overlord for that session was our most competitive and experienced board gamer. So basically he played the game in a frustrating way, by using his advantage in movement (I think the boss can fly) to make the heroes barely able to plink him, and use various annoying trap and such to whittle the heroes and make it even harder for them to chase after the boss. Which is to be fair, perfectly legal and winning move, but it basically ruined the whole game for everyone else (that one fight took a whole day or something), and, the owner literally sold the game after that session (not because that particular session he said, but that session makes him notice the particular problem with the game which is looming for future sessions).

Some friends of mine had a similar experience with Descent 1e. The most competitive player in their group played the Overlord, and he quickly figured out a way to lock down the heroes in the starting room of their quest so that they couldn't progress, and they all were swarmed and killed by monsters. I've never had an experience like this playing either 1e or 2e, but they weren't able to give enough detail in their recap for me to figure out whether their Overlord followed the rules correctly or not.

My experience with Descent 2e is limited - I've had the game for awhile but not quite enough interested players to play the game more than once or twice. From what I remember, the players had a slight advantage but could lose it if they didn't play too smart.

[UserClone]

For my own purposes, I couldn't play Descent (or any many vs. one game) if I always knew the larger group was going to win.

It sounds like your competitive player came up with a good strategy that your other players got frustrated by and didn't figure out a team-based solution to. Or are you trying to say that the scenario rules were broken?

[Fri]

As I said, technically it's legal and winning move. It's just frustrating. He's stretching a game that's supposed to be played for 2 hours into the whole day (at least 6 hours), by using the boss' advantage of movement (ability to fly around while the players have to walk around) and whittle them down using even more movement traps and plinking damages while the heroes can't even engage him on an expansion map that's bigger than usual playing map.

Sure, you win. But if you'd like to play a skirmish game, why don't just play actual wargame?

Honestly, it's the scenario's fault, and I can easily think a solution for it. Have the hero's actual objective to be destroying something the villain have to defend. There, now the villain have actual motivation to engage the hero in battle instead just flying around for six hours.

There are many other scenario where it's still engaging and fast and the overlord can still easily win without resorting to that kind of things too much.