The Gaming Den

There are many games that should no longer be played. Here are a few:

Risk -> Small World
Diplomacy -> Game of Thrones
Settlers of Catan -> 7 Wonders
Monopoly -> 7 Wonders

Post more.

Settlers of Catan -> 7 Wonders
Monopoly -> 7 Wonders

Dude, fuck you.

But since 7 Wonders is both too new a piece of shit to warrant a rageview and too lousy a turd for me to be willing to invest the effort into truly untangling, I'll just go the cheap route and state that Sushi Go > 7 Wonders; because humanly comprehensible scoring > App required scoring.

I may suck at Settlers of Catan, but i will still play that while making you eat and choke on 7 wonders . .

Here's how it's gone in my gaming group

Monopoly -> Market of Alturian
Loaded Questions -> Cards Against Humanity
Chess -> Nightmare Chess
Dune -> Rex: Final Days of an Empire
Settlers of Catan -> 7 Wonders (richer, more fun, scales up to a stupid number of players with almost no overhead)
Puerto Rico -> 7 Wonders
Agricola -> Caverna (I actually quite like Agricola, but I have to admit Caverna plays a lot better and loses very little in the streamlining)
Uno -> Jungle Speed

EDIT
Risk -> Risk 2210 (nukes, water colonies, lunar colonies and a fixed number of turns FTW)
Space Alert -> Shadows over Camelot

Wow. So apparently a game called 7 Wonders exists, and it is a terrible piece of trash that is better than every other game that has ever existed, and I need to pick a side immediately.

Kaelik wrote:Wow. So apparently a game called 7 Wonders exists, and it is a terrible piece of trash that is better than every other game that has ever existed, and I need to pick a side immediately.

Welcome to the Gaming Den.

Red_Rob wrote:

Kaelik wrote:Wow. So apparently a game called 7 Wonders exists, and it is a terrible piece of trash that is better than every other game that has ever existed, and I need to pick a side immediately.

Welcome to the Gaming Den.

I think you misunderstood the point of my post. My point was that KAELIK CANNOT BE LAST TO HAVE AN OPINION!

M:tG -> ?

M:tG -> Android: Netrunner

Edit: That's not an entirely fair comparison. Netrunner has taken the place of MtG for me and my group (all recovering Magic players). It's initial version was designed by the designer of MtG (and he's given some credit on this new version, but it's clear that's more as a courtesy than because of his actual involvement). However, it's an LCG instead of a CCG, and the two games aren't just a hell of a lot alike... which is a good thing in my opinion.

MTG -> Hearthstone

Maj wrote:MTG -> Hearthstone

Yeah no. Not at all.

Kaelik wrote:

Red_Rob wrote:

Kaelik wrote:Wow. So apparently a game called 7 Wonders exists, and it is a terrible piece of trash that is better than every other game that has ever existed, and I need to pick a side immediately.

Welcome to the Gaming Den.

I think you misunderstood the point of my post. My point was that KAELIK CANNOT BE LAST TO HAVE AN OPINION!

Don't worry. 7 Wonders is an okay game but not great enough to merit inclusion on these lists.

4e DnD -> lords of waterdeep
Monopoly -> Settlers of catan -> carcassone/Puerto Rico
Risk -> risk 2210 (already said but bears repeating)
Apples to apples -> either newer a2a version or boxers or briefs?
Euchre -> spades -> bridge -> oh hell

Shatner wrote:[anything] -> Shadows over Camelot

You just made the wrong choice.

Yes, probably even with god damned Space Alert.

Orion wrote: Settlers of Catan -> 7 Wonders
Monopoly -> 7 Wonders

I'm curious how either of these games is replaced by 7 Wonders. I don't really see the similarity. In 7 Wonders, you trade because you have to (drafting game) as opposed to trading because it benefits you.

Kaelik wrote: I think you misunderstood the point of my post. My point was that KAELIK CANNOT BE LAST TO HAVE AN OPINION!

Just assume that there is at least one bad aspect of it and choose to hate it. You can then take your time to come up with a cognizant reason to hate it in your leisure time.

My biggest complaint about the game is that it's different enough from other games that the quickest way to explain it is to often play an entire practice game. This is offset by the fact that the game sets up and plays fairly quickly one everyone knows how to play.

My biggest complaint about the actual gameplay is that I often have no idea how well I'm scoring against the other players until late in the third (final) round, because of the stacking nature of scoring, and how cards become more valuable in later rounds.

Ancient History wrote:M:tG -> ?

Anecdotally, my wife and I switched from M:tG to Dominion. Not that I'd say it replaces it, but it was a nice money saver for the two of us.

Although, if nothing else, most of our friends and family who have played it like it, and it's easy to get new players into, compared to M:tG, where you either need pre-made loner decks and/or you tell them to go out and spend a bunch of money.

PhoneLobster wrote:

Shatner wrote:[anything] -> Shadows over Camelot

You just made the wrong choice.

Yes, probably even with god damned Space Alert.

Shadows over Camelot is a punishing game that can end friendships if the group dynamics play out wrong. For the uninitiated, SoC is a cooperative game where everyone is a knight of the round table trying to hold the realm together while everything goes to shit. It's deliberately punishing, where you don't so much win as hope you don't lose long enough to squeak out an Out Of Time victory. Death is permanent, random events can be crippling, and it features A FUCKING TRAITOR mechanic.

However, there is a niche for a game that's basically "the world is going to kill you, survive as long as you can", and there exist gamers who genuinely want a story about how those at the gaming table fought tooth and nail for 2 hours to be on the cusp of victory-by-default with half the team dead and the siege at Camelot a whisper away from complete... when fucking Mordred showed up and we all lost anyway.

If your gaming group contains that particular type of masochism, Shadows Over Camelot will scratch that itch vigorously. The game will crush and dispirit you and you'll have multi-hour games turn into sudden losses because it turns out Steve was a traitor the entire time and now your slim majority victory becomes a slim minority defeat. Fuckin' Steve.

And if you really, REALLY hate yourself, you get the expansion where just traveling around the map is subject to an RNG that is weighted to fuck you over.


In contrast, Space Alert is about you needing to coordinate with your friends to input a specific sequence of actions to keep a bunch of starfleet academy rookies from getting blown up on a training mission gone awry. If the string of commands you build over a half hour of ambushes and red alerts has even a single misstep or faulty assumption then every action afterwards will be similarly mis-timed and you will almost certainly die in a CGI fireball. It's like eyeballing the instructions for one of those construction robots on an assembly line and then watching it shove the windshield through the drivers seat because you forgot to advance the convey belt by two units. Punishing, sure, but in a "the compiler found an error in your code", impersonal sort of way. It lacks the personal touch of a fellow player turned traitor and the sense of narrative whereby mythic Britain succumbs to chaos.

The one good thing I can say about Space Alert is that it ends quickly; you play a pre-recorded sound track twice (once where you lay down your instructions and once to see how spectacularly your instructions failed), get into a brief shouting match/fist fight, and then you're done.

I'm not saying either game is good, or that you should ever play them. I fucking hate both of them, but my group does contain crazy people who occasionally want their entertainment to punish them for deigning to play it. And in that narrow category, SoC is a big advancement over Space Alert... which I understand is like saying the Wasabi Challenge is an advancement over the Cinnamon Challenge.

7 Wonders. Every player plays as the nation responsible for one of said wonders (they add more in expansions making the name increasingly inaccurate). You can only trade and fight with the players to your immediate left and right, so the decision space for player A in a 7-player game isn't any larger than it is for a 3-player game.

There are three rounds and you start each with a hand of 7 cards, each representing some building (e.g. barracks for military might, theater for cultural points, laboratory for science points, and so on). Everyone lays face down the card they plan to build, then everyone reveals their card and builds it, then they pass their hand to the player to their left (to their right on round 2). Simultaneous turns makes the game run very quickly regardless of the number of players, and since you're just making one decision for your turn, even noobs can stumble along at a pretty brisk pace. Each round ends when you play your second to last card (so, 6 cards played/round).

Cards you don't want/don't want other people to have can be removed from the game by discarding them to build your wonder. Some wonders want to be rushed early and provide lasting effect, some want to be built before the game ends but don't particularly care when, and some primarily exist to convert shit cards into less-shit results coughGreatPyramidOfGizacough.

The scoring is kinda like Agricola meshed with Puerto Rico, whereby you have a half-dozen categories you can squeeze points from and some end-of-the-game buildings that offer bonus points if you had a lot of points in a specific category. Everything is just integers being added to integers (my bathhouse is worth 3 points and my temple is worth 2 points so I now have 5 points) except science, which plays a weird game of points for sets of 3 AND X^2 instead of linear point advancement. Basically, science sucks unless you go big with it, then it can pay off hugely... which is why your neighbors will use crushed up labs and apothecaries as mortar for their wonders to keep you from getting those cards.

I've found the scoring and judging relative positions during the race to be manageable. You'll be operating under a gut assumption, but it's the same with Dominions and Puerto Rico and Power Grid and a dozen other games that are still worthy of playing.

And more than anything, the speed and elegance of playing the damn thing is so impressive that that looms much larger than anything else you can say about it. You pack 8 players into a game and finish a satisfying, rich builder game before the pizza delivery guy arrives and tell me that game sucks. Do it and I'll laugh in your face.

Though I will admit that one of the expansion wonders being Manneken Pis has got to be the game designers trolling.


Behold, the 8th wonder of the world!

Kaelik wrote:

Maj wrote:MTG -> Hearthstone

Yeah no. Not at all.

<shrug> For our gaming group, this is what's happened.

How does Shadows over Camelot compare to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame?

Because I have enjoyed BSG quite a bit.

Neither me nor anyone in my immediate circle of friends has played BSG, so I don't actually know, but I've overheard at some FLGSs that BSG is similar but it plays up the role of the possible traitor. The various "and then shit went wrong" minigames you're juggling are not as harsh.

Again, that's just me overhearing stuff from the next table over.

The most disappointing game of BSG I had was when one of the non-Cylon players refused to cooperate with the others at the very end (New Caprica) because he was stuck in jail on-planet on the last turn, causing us (the non-Cylons) to lose.

Note that being in jail did not mean he couldn't perform the obvious winning move, he just decided to act frustratingly in-character.

BSG is essentially a team v team game: Humans v Cylons (although expansions muddy that dynamic), because there's always at least one traitor and up to half the players can be traitors. In Shadows Over Camelot, the presence of a traitor is not assured, and there is only ever one, so it's mostly a cooperative game with a potential spoiler. SoC also has far fewer fiddly resource piles to manage, so it has less setup, less cleanup, and plays more smoothly.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:How does Shadows over Camelot compare to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame?

Because I have enjoyed BSG quite a bit.

In Camelot, whether you have a traitor or not is determined randomly, so the difficulty for the good guys varies dramatically based on the draw of one card. It also varies a lot based on the number of players. That is, since you can only ever have one traitor, at 6-7 (8 players guarantees a traitor), the difference between having a traitor or not is manageable, but at 3-4 a traitor is much more of a problem. With BSG, you're going to get your allotted number of Cylons at least for the back half of the game. And since that's when Cylons are more effective, because they can see which resources are likely to make the humans lose, the difficulty doesn't change so much whether you start with one (or two) or not.

OK, so Camelot falls if there are 12 siege engines out. Dealing with one requires two turns, one to draw cards that (hopefully) allow you to kill it, and one to actually try to kill it. But one can be placed every turn by just the traitor, in addition to those placed by the good guys as an alternative to losing life or drawing cards that can make quests fail. Effectively, a traitor who just places siege engines requires two other players to just sit around and fight siege engines the whole game, or they build up and you lose. At 4 people, that leaves one whole knight left to do the six quests that are all advancing towards failure simultaneously. That's...hard.

I'm okay with SoC, but I prefer BSG for the complicated traitor game, especially since in many SoC games you'll randomly not have a traitor. But for traitor games in general, I'm fond of Resistance. It really distills it down to the essence of who to trust with limited information.

Morat wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:How does Shadows over Camelot compare to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame?

Because I have enjoyed BSG quite a bit.

In Camelot, whether you have a traitor or not is determined randomly, so the difficulty for the good guys varies dramatically based on the draw of one card. It also varies a lot based on the number of players. That is, since you can only ever have one traitor, at 6-7 (8 players guarantees a traitor), the difference between having a traitor or not is manageable, but at 3-4 a traitor is much more of a problem. With BSG, you're going to get your allotted number of Cylons at least for the back half of the game. And since that's when Cylons are more effective, because they can see which resources are likely to make the humans lose, the difficulty doesn't change so much whether you start with one (or two) or not.

OK, so Camelot falls if there are 12 siege engines out. Dealing with one requires two turns, one to draw cards that (hopefully) allow you to kill it, and one to actually try to kill it. But one can be placed every turn by just the traitor, in addition to those placed by the good guys as an alternative to losing life or drawing cards that can make quests fail. Effectively, a traitor who just places siege engines requires two other players to just sit around and fight siege engines the whole game, or they build up and you lose. At 4 people, that leaves one whole knight left to do the six quests that are all advancing towards failure simultaneously. That's...hard.

I'm okay with SoC, but I prefer BSG for the complicated traitor game, especially since in many SoC games you'll randomly not have a traitor. But for traitor games in general, I'm fond of Resistance. It really distills it down to the essence of who to trust with limited information.

First off, there is a SoC expansion that allows you to have up to 2 traitors (though they don't know who the other is, or if there even is another). This can lead to the hilarious situation of a traitor accidentally revealing another traitor when they wanted their accusation to be false; a false accusation flips one victory point to a failure point, and there are only 12 total, plus the knights lose ties because winning ties is, according to the rules, unchivalrous.

For a 3 or 4 player game, we use the optional rule where you can't look at your loyalty card until 6 of the 12 victory/loss points are assigned (which roughly corresponds to the halfway point in the game) so everyone pretty much has to assume they're loyal early on.

The exact siege-engine spam issue was discovered and discussed outside of the game and a gentleman's agreement was made that if you play the traitor you have to try and slip under the radar for as long victory by stealth is possible (an unrevealed traitor flips one or two (I forget) of those victory points to losses at the end of the game so subtle sabotage is a valid strategy). You're still allowed to plunk down a siege engine every turn, but you have to come up with enough plausible excuses for why that's better than tempting the RNG that the rest of the group doesn't doubt your loyalty. The reason for this was because being obviously traitorous from the start of the game is just kinda bland and it undermines what fun there is to be had from this exercise in table top masochism.

Just about every action in the game and just about every quest demands or offers an incentive for acting in an unverifiable way (e.g. when you discard cards as part of the quest to reclaim Excalibur they go into the discard face down so you don't know if someone is throwing away largely worthless grail cards and 1-strength infantry or chucking Merlin cards and 5-strength infantry). This makes it a lot harder to tell if a traitor is active and, if so, who it even is.

Shatner wrote:The exact siege-engine spam issue was discovered and discussed outside of the game and a gentleman's agreement was made that if you play the traitor you have to try and slip under the radar for as long victory by stealth is possible (an unrevealed traitor flips one or two (I forget) of those victory points to losses at the end of the game so subtle sabotage is a valid strategy). You're still allowed to plunk down a siege engine every turn, but you have to come up with enough plausible excuses for why that's better than tempting the RNG that the rest of the group doesn't doubt your loyalty. The reason for this was because being obviously traitorous from the start of the game is just kinda bland and it undermines what fun there is to be had from this exercise in table top masochism

I'd agree that being a sneaky traitor is way more fun, but I prefer BSG because in that game being a sneaky traitor is also way more effective.

See, managing the bad stuff in SoC is more about coordination. You handle this problem, I take that one. You can sandbag on the Excalibur quest, but you play your cards face-up on the others. In BSG, it's much more about cooperation, so hidden traitors can secretly fuck with things to a much greater extent. It's like everyone is together on a new quest every turn, and instead of 1-5 fight cards, cards are 1-5 in five different colors, which count positively or negatively depending on what the quest card says. So a hidden traitor can actively sabotage as well as sandbag, and can blame high negative cards on the two randoms that also get thrown in. On the other hand, while "human" (including hidden traitors) players draw 5 cards and can play as many as they want, revealed traitors draw 3 and can only play 1.

And once all the traitors are revealed, it's much easier for humans to work together. Not only in the crisis checks ("quests"), but you no longer have to worry about spending actions and cards to try to replace the Admiral and/or President in case they're robots. And one of the most common cards allows you to spend your action to give another player two actions. For humans, it's huge, but it's risky if there are hidden traitors, so you want to stay hidden for most of the game.

The other thing I don't like is that the traitor mechanic is only a possibility unless you play with 8 people. I don't want it to be a traitor game or not determined by the luck of the draw, they're such different experiences. If I want a complicated game with traitors, I play BSG. If I want a game that is only about dealing with traitors, I play Resistance. And if I want to play a game about managing a bunch of different crises all exploding at once, I play Ghost Stories.