Worst non-PnP traditional games ever.

[TheFlatline]

That being said, I'll admit to being completely and totally burned out on Munchkin even if everyone around me seems to love it. I don't find it entertaining any more. 90% of the time one player gets a lucky combination of cards and is unstoppable for the rest of the game.

I have a couple problems with munchkin now: first: the last like twenty god damned times I've played, it's been with the same friend and just that friend, so there's never much new about another game, unless I just bought a new set. second, I love mixing and including lots of expansions, and all that, but it gets hard to decently shuffle that many damned cards.

Buy the cheap-ass penny sleeve card protectors. They make shuffling magnificently easy. I have the super-Lunch Money set (two core sets and two expansions) and the deck is I kid you not like 7 inches tall once they're all sleeved. Pain to carry, but I've had something like 9 people playing a Lunch Money game with the super deck, and it was a total blast.

[PhoneLobster]

I'm gonna give a shout out to Shadows Over Camelot as a terrible terrible game. Apparently it is fairly well known, enough that I had heard about it before playing it recently. In addition inexplicably well thought of, apparently.

So the idea is that it is a knights of the round table simulator. And one of you is a traitor (oh *gasp*, oh no, oh woe!). And that you engage in a tension filled series of quests to save Camelot while a nefarious bastard in your own midst stabs you hilariously in the back.

In reality it is...

1) Boring The quests all have unique mechanics, but all of them basically may as well be (and in many cases literally are) a progress bar onto which "losing" pips are randomly placed as the game progresses. You fight against that by sitting a knight on it which, hey, does various things, but all of those amount (often literally) to putting "winning" pips on the progress bar.

Oh noes! The Grail Progress Bar is in the red by 30%, quick, stand several knights on it until it shifts to 100% win!

I'll admit the Excalibur quest, which was one of the MOST "its just a progress bar" quests was mildly hilarious as we had about 6 knights standing on a lake shore progressing that bar into the white at one point. But that was only funny because of the incongruous imagining of 6 knights of the round table standing on shore yelling profanities at the lady of the lake as she held the sword aloft and wavered randomly back and forth in the water.

2) Incredibly Limited Strategy and Tactics Really the choices were incredible lame. Each turn you had to activate a "bad things" mechanic, then do a good thing mechanic. So your "choice" was, activate the bad things mechanic with the lowest current bad progress bar. Then go and sit on the good things mechanic most in need of you doing so.

Sure there were some more complex options, cards and knight special rules supposedly available. But basically you could get away with basically ignoring everything other than the basic progression mechanics, indeed, you were better off doing so.

I had a special ability to "leave Camelot for free" (I had the suspiciously gay colored heraldry knight, his secret power was of course, coming out). I used that a sum total of... ONCE in the game.

And if it was bad being a REGULAR knight it must have SUCKED being the poor old traitor. With the "choices" that helped win the game being so poor and transparent he really couldn't get away with much. I basically pegged him on his third turn when he ran out of appropriate progress cards for his chosen progress bar quest and went home for more. Yeah, the "biggest backstab" he could manage was "Mildly inefficient time management" and even THAT revealed him at a snap.

And if he gets revealed? He loses even THAT ability and gets basically nothing in return other than a MARGINALLY better (still semi random) ability to pick which bad stuff he plays on his turn.

The biggest back stab he could EVER pull off would be to first WIN a quest, get a major artifact like the grail, then run off to traitor land with it FOREVER. And that would require him to, well, reveal himself, AND win a major quest for us progressing the over all victory progress bar (significantly) against his own favor!

3) Random Mechanics Oh yeah, a major part of the game ran off an annoying random card draw mechanic (or three). Ultimately it averaged out to "might as well not have happened", but all the same with the lack of choice ALREADY in the game the random card draw only took away from it further.

4) Winning By Losing The overall game win/lose progress bar has bad points AND good points stack for the purpose of determining game end. So you can move closer to a victory by "scoring" yourself some "bad" points, as long as you have >50% good points. Which is seriously super duper easy.

This might seem "nice" for the traitor since he can go around losing quests and say he is helping you win... but ultimately it is bad for him because he IS going around losing quests and helping you win.

5) Incredibly poor difficulty scaling OK so here is a major problem with the game. It's "fans" thought it was the hardest game to win for the good guys ever. My play through made me think that it is well short of impossible NOT to win it.

Now while I would LIKE to think we won and it seemed easy to me because I am just so super AWESOME, considering the lack of opportunities to BE awesome that the game provides I highly doubt it.

Much, MUCH more likely the problem is that the game has really really shit scaling. Sure every player turn adds bad stuff AND good stuff. BUT you don't get extra traitors (well maybe at maximum players you get two, I forget, I think we were one short of that and had only 1 vs like, 6 of us or something). So every player is an extra one working for you. Bad stuff is only SEMI random in nature and with that many people controlling the largely simplistic (if mildly obfuscated) progress bars of bad and good stuff in your favor and only one who has a really hard time working against you... well...

Now in a 3 player game with one being the traitor, maybe the difficulty really IS super hard.

But then that is a pretty shitty difficulty scale if it really does happen, I mean, "cannot win with 4 or less players, cannot lose with 5 or more!" sucks monkey balls.

Which is either the way it really is or the Shadows over Camelot fans I played with are really poor at playing their favored game, or liars about their own, apparently many, games with it, or something.

6) And on top of all the rest... It's about Camelot, I hate that stupid ass "Emo" place. I agree with Monty Python 100% about "going there".

[TheFlatline]

It's not popular or well liked, but I"m going to go ahead and say History of the World is a horrid game.

Take Risk, and divide it into 6 stages. Create wildly unbalanced armies in each "era", and randomly deal an army to each player each era. Then play a mini 1 turn game of Risk. After each player's turn, he scores x number of points, and that's it for the epoch.

It takes forever to set up, takes FOREVER to play (I think a 3 player game took 6 hours), and if you're lucky enough to pull 2 monster armies (Romans and I think like the Germans) you win the game. Period.

It's just kind of a mediocre game that loses itself in an Axis & Allies level of setup time.

[Jilocasin]

I've got to chime in about munchkin. I love it and hate it. Whenever I play it (which is rarely) it's with my two best friends, and we always play in pretty much the same way. We'll play normally for awhile, and then one of us will get close to winning at which point the other two will intimate the various ways we could possibly bone them, or at least keep them from winning for another turn. Usually it amounts to making them fight some monster with enough add-ons to make it absurdly high level. We keep doing that until we run out of screw you cards or one of the two of us wins. No matter what the outcome it always end up with lots of anger and yelling. Somehow screaming at each manages to be a bonding experience though. I think we don't play munchkin as a game, it's more of an excuse to vent at one another for any real or imagines slights. It's a very angry game, but it's sort of an exuberant angry that leads to going out and doing something actually fun.

[RobbyPants]

I've only ever played vanilla Munchkin. It's a fun game that I like because of the set up time. It's also insanely popular with my wife's cousins, so I tend to play it around the holidays.

My biggest complaint is the Kneepads of Allure. Basically, whoever gets those ends up winning the game unless someone else is already level 9 or something.

[Hyudra]

Just want to add Dead Money to the list. Card game, where you're trying to get rid of all the cards in your hand. The only problem is that you do so by playing the cards, and a third of the cards you play have effects like 'you draw two cards', 'you draw three cards' or 'make everyone else draw two cards.' Another third require having one of the four 'brain' cards, but to get those cards you typically need to employ a bidding mechanic... and winning the bid means drawing more cards.

It's not as bad as some - there's some general strategy - but for a game about zombies playing poker all night, it really lives up to its name. I remember playing a round and after a certain point two of the four players (myself included) began trying to make one of the other players win. It dragged on for maybe an hour and a half after that.

[norms29]

2) Incredibly Limited Strategy and Tactics Really the choices were incredible lame. Each turn you had to activate a "bad things" mechanic, then do a good thing mechanic. So your "choice" was, activate the bad things mechanic with the lowest current bad progress bar. Then go and sit on the good things mechanic most in need of you doing so.

What kind of house rules were you playing by? you don't get to choose which bad progress bar you move. that's decided by a random card draw.

Sure there were some more complex options, cards and knight special rules supposedly available. But basically you could get away with basically ignoring everything other than the basic progression mechanics, indeed, you were better off doing so.

???

And if it was bad being a REGULAR knight it must have SUCKED being the poor old traitor. With the "choices" that helped win the game being so poor and transparent he really couldn't get away with much. I basically pegged him on his third turn when he ran out of appropriate progress cards for his chosen progress bar quest and went home for more. Yeah, the "biggest backstab" he could manage was "Mildly inefficient time management" and even THAT revealed him at a snap.

WTF? you do realize that the rules explicitly say you can't tell people what cards you have, everygame I've played the traitor has been able to hoard cards. taking a few Merlin cards out of circulation makes it much harder to prevent the bad progress bars from filling. even a hand full of ones stop anyone from doing the pict and saxon quests. for that matter, simply playing low cards on the two solo quests is a fool proof way to throw a fight. (since the bad cards are placed face down)

And if he gets revealed? He loses even THAT ability and gets basically nothing in return other than a MARGINALLY better (still semi random) ability to pick which bad stuff he plays on his turn.

The biggest back stab he could EVER pull off would be to first WIN a quest, get a major artifact like the grail, then run off to traitor land with it FOREVER. And that would require him to, well, reveal himself, AND win a major quest for us progressing the over all victory progress bar (significantly) against his own favor!

dude, the traitor isn't supposed to win by sword count, most traitor victories I've seen were via seige engine

3) Random Mechanics Oh yeah, a major part of the game ran off an annoying random card draw mechanic (or three). Ultimately it averaged out to "might as well not have happened", but all the same with the lack of choice ALREADY in the game the random card draw only took away from it further.

you see, this sounds like you had really good luck drawing black cards. did you even draw a single special card? you know, the ones with the red dot in the corner, which take 3 merlins instead of one to cancel? the stuff like "everyone loses two lifepoints" or "merlin cards can't be played" or "one of the major artifact qests can't be worked on untill a nother quest is over" ?

5) Incredibly poor difficulty scaling OK so here is a major problem with the game. It's "fans" thought it was the hardest game to win for the good guys ever. My play through made me think that it is well short of impossible NOT to win it.

you played a heavily randomized game once, and you think that you have a read on it's difficulty?

Now while I would LIKE to think we won and it seemed easy to me because I am just so super AWESOME, considering the lack of opportunities to BE awesome that the game provides I highly doubt it.

sounds to me like you won because of some very lucky card draws

Much, MUCH more likely the problem is that the game has really really shit scaling. Sure every player turn adds bad stuff AND good stuff. BUT you don't get extra traitors (well maybe at maximum players you get two, I forget, I think we were one short of that and had only 1 vs like, 6 of us or something). So every player is an extra one working for you. Bad stuff is only SEMI random in nature and with that many people controlling the largely simplistic (if mildly obfuscated) progress bars of bad and good stuff in your favor and only one who has a really hard time working against you... well...

actually, I'd surmise that having a full board is a disadvantage. because more of the good actions are spent drawing cards and moving around, leaving proportionally less to actually pursue quests, as well as reducing each player's ability to predict what the situation will be by their next turn. can't be sure, never tried it with less then 5 people.

Now in a 3 player game with one being the traitor, maybe the difficulty really IS super hard.

But then that is a pretty shitty difficulty scale if it really does happen, I mean, "cannot win with 4 or less players, cannot lose with 5 or more!" sucks monkey balls.

Which is either the way it really is or the Shadows over Camelot fans I played with are really poor at playing their favored game, or liars about their own, apparently many, games with it, or something.

seriously, if you could give me a play-by-play of your one game, I'd be more inclined to believe you

[PhoneLobster]

What kind of house rules were you playing by? you don't get to choose which bad progress bar you move. that's decided by a random card draw.

You decide to have the random draw that progresses one of what, 6? random progress bars. OR you take "I'm damaged" progress bar. OR you take a "Camelot is besieged some more by catapults" progress bar.

Like I said. Semi random with some choice. There is plenty of HP and catapult buffer on those rare occasions a random progression of one of 6 other progress bars must be stopped.

WTF? you do realize that the rules explicitly say you can't tell people what cards you have, everygame I've played the traitor has been able to hoard cards. taking a few Merlin cards out of circulation makes it much harder to prevent the bad progress bars from filling. even a hand full of ones stop anyone from doing the pict and saxon quests. for that matter, simply playing low cards on the two solo quests is a fool proof way to throw a fight. (since the bad cards are placed face down)

Everything you described is utterly revealing of your nature as traitor. I never even saw our traitors hand. He never revealed it. He just said "I'll deal with that quest!" then ran out of cards (or the will to place them) and went home early. Placing low cards on the fight quests is just BEGGING to be revealed. What sort of drooling morons are you playing with that don't see through that?

dude, the traitor isn't supposed to win by sword count, most traitor victories I've seen were via seige engine

So the creators were just joking when the main victory condition of the game was printed on ALL the character cards. Oh OK.

And again what sort of chumps do you play with. Non optimal selection of the siege engine ahead of the random bad progress draw or personal hit point damage, again DEAD GIVE AWAY.

you see, this sounds like you had really good luck drawing black cards. did you even draw a single special card? you know, the ones with the red dot in the corner, which take 3 merlins instead of one to cancel? the stuff like "everyone loses two lifepoints" or "merlin cards can't be played" or "one of the major artifact qests can't be worked on untill a nother quest is over" ?

We got two out of three of those and didn't even stop in stride.

you played a heavily randomized game once, and you think that you have a read on it's difficulty?

Yes. There were a lot of us. We drew half that deck. We hit the "big scary cards" you were so scared of.

It.
Was.
A.
Boring.
Push.
Over.

sounds to me like you won because of some very lucky card draws

No we won by sheer force of numbers. One guy rushed the black knight. 1-2 guys fought off the saxons and the picts. And the rest of us spammed Excalibur and the Holy Grail in large numbers. We ignored the armour quest (which never failed on its own) which in the end hurt us... because it was hanging by a thread and if it had failed we would have won the game sooner.

When you have 7 lots of generalized only semi random "bad thing" progressions going on all spread out and you can take 5+ (or whatever the maximum was) of your good progressions and drop them on ONE of the progress bars... you win that progress bar. No two ways about it.

There ARE character limits at some quests. But not in any SIGNIFICANT manner. Only one guy can go and fight the black knight? OK who cares? It only TAKES one guy on that progress bar. If you max out the knights on the Excalibur OR grail quests, those are basically auto wins. It takes a while watching that BORING ASS progress bar progress, but that's progress bars for you, you know they will reach 100% they just might not do it within standard windows estimated time.

Anyway we cleared the black knight real early and I threw a "+1 White Sword" card on it. A couple of kids went and cleared out an early saxon invasion basically for shits and giggles. The grail did poorly on random progression AND got that "scary" no grail questing card in play. So we spammed the Excalibur quest in large numbers, walked away with the sword. Spammed grail, blew up Excalibur to help the already only semi random bad things work in our favor and walked away with the grail.

I'm pretty sure at that point the game was won. Not a SINGLE black sword on the table. Only about half the siege engines on Camelot. The picts had only NEARLY invaded and nothing else at the time looked very scary.

Then it was a matter of earning enough white OR black swords to end the game. Which was stupid. But it freed people up to defend and junk, and we had TONS of people... and we STILL got mostly white.

Seriously. THIS GAME IS SHIT.

[Zinegata]

I also hate that the allies not only outnumber the Axis powers, but generally outproduce them too every turn. If the Allies are competent, I can't see how they *can* lose, save by the hatred of the Dice Gods.

Actually, if you follow real history the Allies should have overwhelming material advantage over the Axis.

More realistic games (i.e. Fire in the Sky, Europe/Asia Engulfed) compensate by giving different victory conditions.

Generally, Axis auto-wins if they managed to conquer a good portion of the world (knocking out a combination of France and either Britain OR Russia) in Europe, and taking Australia.

If they don't manage this, then the Axis' only hope will be a hold out victory against the overwhelming masses of the Allies. In Fire in the Sky, for instance, the Japanese "auto-win" if they ever hit 20 Victory points, but they can also win at the end of the game if they have at least 1 Victory point.

Given that the Americans get about 10 carrier units over the course of the game and the Japanese get 2, this is kinda balanced .

(Also, who screwed up the quote tags?)

Norm29->

PL's being silly. The biggest problem of Shadows Over Camelot is that there is a specific sequence that you can follow to all but ensure winning the game (an "uber strategy").

If the group doesn't know this yet, then great, the game is fun. But if you know how to do it the game gets real easy.

[PhoneLobster]

The biggest problem of Shadows Over Camelot is that there is a specific sequence that you can follow to all but ensure winning the game (an "uber strategy").

You guys realize your defenses of this game are actually really harsh criticisms of it right?

You say there is a fixed auto win strategy? That is a really bad criticism of the game.

The other guy said that random variance in the game can turn it from an auto win to an auto loss? That is a really bad criticism of the game

I would like to add on the "uber strategy" front. If my group hit on that... well... Myself and the rest of the three players who I think contributed the most to winning had all never played the game before. The regular players, the fans of the game were the ones who contributed the least and seemed to understand the game and how to win it the least.

That says a lot about the game, and it's fans.

[Jacob_Orlove]

The worst game is War. That's the one where you flip over cards and see who has the higher card, and repeat that until one or more players get fed up and quit. Never play this game.


Munchkin is pretty lame too. It just devolves into one player getting close to winning, then everyone stops them, then another player gets close, then everyone stops them, and you just repeat that for a while. Then some random person wins because they got to level 9 just after everyone runs out of tricks. It's like a race, but the goal is to come in somewhere around 5th-6th place, after things drag out way past the point of being fun. Maybe it's different with fewer players.

And my experience with Shadows Over Camelot mirrors those of the detractors. Cooperative games should at least be challenging, otherwise what's the point?

[Zinegata]

You say there is a fixed auto win strategy? That is a really bad criticism of the game.

But that's not your criticism of the game and yet you're claiming it's the worst game ever

We're not saying that the game doesn't have faults. We're saying that your criticisms of the game is silly.

[Kaelik]

You say there is a fixed auto win strategy? That is a really bad criticism of the game.

But that's not your criticism of the game and yet you're claiming it's the worst game ever

We're not saying that the game doesn't have faults. We're saying that your criticisms of the game is silly.

Actually, that is his exact claim. He said "This game is fucking easy, and I don't see how you could ever lose, all you have to do is X."

So yes, his criticism is that you just follow one specific uber strategy and always win.

[Ice9]

It just devolves into one player getting close to winning, then everyone stops them, then another player gets close, then everyone stops them, and you just repeat that for a while.

If you play Munchkin in a really aggressive style (mess with people early and often, try to stop them getting to 2nd level instead of 10th level), then it does avoid the "circling the table with everyone at 9th" thing. It can, however, make the game drag at the beginning and everyone get pissed off at each-other.

If you play with several expansions, it diminishes the impact of single awesome cards like Kneepads of Allure, but it does mean that there are a lot of "make the combat not count" cards in play for the endgame.

[Jacob_Orlove]

If you play Munchkin in a really aggressive style (mess with people early and often, try to stop them getting to 2nd level instead of 10th level), then it does avoid the "circling the table with everyone at 9th" thing. It can, however, make the game drag at the beginning and everyone get pissed off at each-other.

Munchkin isn't supposed to be a serious game, though, so we only play it when there are people who aren't interested in more strategic stuff. That means that as soon as it begins to drag, the game isn't fun. Making it drag sooner would honestly be worse.

Next time we play, I'm going to propose rolling a die every time you level up. If your level + the die roll = 10, you win. I think that might fix things, not sure though.

[PhoneLobster]

We're not saying that the game doesn't have faults. We're saying that your criticisms of the game is silly.

No. You drooling idiot.

I said the game was boring and easy to win.

You said "Oh the only problem is it is easy to win which can make it boring.".

You do NOT get to make the same criticism as me and then declare my criticism stupid.

How incredibly moronic are you Zinegata? Oh wait, this has come up before hasn't it, yeah...

[Zinegata]

Oh wait, this has come up before hasn't it, yeah...

Yep. And it's been proven time and time again that you just take what other people have already said and claim it as your own original quotation.

Because you're a plagiarizing moron.

But, anyway, back to thread while PL rants incoherently.

[norms29]

hoarding cards a dead giveaway? all you have to do is say " this hand isn't good for any of the quests" and you've bought two or three turns of drawing cards.

playing low fight cards isn't a giveaway with any group that's realized that it's viable to do so if done quickly. or for that matter, you can start a solo quest, and if any of the many specials that force all the knights to discard cards come up in the next five or six turns you can have an ironclad alibi to bail, wasting some number of turns.


Also; I' m not convinced your one victory wasn't from houserules. you claim to have knocked out the grail and excaliber early but had no accumulation of siege engines? if you're playing by the actual rules, once you complete the grail, sword, or dragon quests you add siege engines whenever the cards comeup. also, you're supposed to keep the cards discarded at excaliber hidden from the other players. so dropping the best cards their is another strategy that offers plausible deniability. seeing as how you need to do a progression of evil every time you play one card, or move, or draw, the idea that you could've completed enough quests to have a victory without coming close on siege engines strains belivability. infact I'm not cinvinced it's even theoretically possible. how many turns did your game last? you claim to have

also, why is it you think that being revealed is such a threat, look at the back side of the character cards, the revealed traitor can does more damage, both of the times I've been the traitor I won by deliberately revealing myself.

maybe my experiance is tainted because I play in the campus gaming club and one convention, so only a fraction of the table are people who I've played that game with before. and it's easier to mask treason as actual incompetance.

I'll even admit that the past couple games when the traitor was revealed it was immediatly met with shouts of "I knew it" from 3 differeant people.

as for the mental acuity of those I play with... I'll give that to you... my first game a guy gave himself away by drawing a black card for the blackkinght or Lancelot's armor quest and stating it was very low, when I, playing the knight that get's to peak at the black card before I choose my progression of evil, knew it to be very high, I immediatly accused him, and it turned out he wasn't the traitor, he was just square-peg round-hole retarded.

hmm... maybe the game is easy... fuck... what did you say your strategy was? PSU gaming club isn't exactly the greatest meeting of the minds

[norms29]

hoarding cards a dead giveaway? all you have to do is say " this hand isn't good for any of the quests" and you've bought two or three turns of drawing cards.

playing low fight cards isn't a giveaway with any group that's realized that it's viable to do so if done quickly. or for that matter, you can start a solo quest, and if any of the many specials that force all the knights to discard cards come up in the next five or six turns you can have an ironclad alibi to bail, wasting some number of turns.


Also; I' m not convinced your one victory wasn't from houserules. you claim to have knocked out the grail and excaliber early but had no accumulation of siege engines? if you're playing by the actual rules, once you complete the grail, sword, or dragon quests you add siege engines whenever the cards comeup. also, you're supposed to keep the cards discarded at excaliber hidden from the other players. so dropping the best cards their is another strategy that offers plausible deniability. seeing as how you need to do a progression of evil every time you play one card, or move, or draw, the idea that you could've completed enough quests to have a victory without coming close on siege engines strains belivability. infact I'm not cinvinced it's even theoretically possible. how many turns did your game last? you claim to have

also, why is it you think that being revealed is such a threat, look at the back side of the character cards, the revealed traitor can does more damage, both of the times I've been the traitor I won by deliberately revealing myself.

maybe my experiance is tainted because I play in the campus gaming club and one convention, so only a fraction of the table are people who I've played that game with before. and it's easier to mask treason as actual incompetance.

I'll even admit that the past couple games when the traitor was revealed it was immediatly met with shouts of "I knew it" from 3 differeant people.

as for the mental acuity of those I play with... I'll give that to you... my first game a guy gave himself away by drawing a black card for the blackkinght or Lancelot's armor quest and stating it was very low, when I, playing the knight that get's to peak at the black card before I choose my progression of evil, knew it to be very high, I immediatly accused him, and it turned out he wasn't the traitor, he was just square-peg round-hole retarded.

hmm... maybe the game is easy... fuck... what did you say your strategy was? PSU gaming club isn't exactly the greatest meeting of the minds

[Zinegata]

The correct strat is to have everyone go do Excalibur first, then do the Grail.

Since there is an unlimited number of people who can participate in both quests, you can have everyone go there.

And since everyone who is there when the quest is completed gets +1 life, you can all essentially take 1 life hit each instead of putting up catapults and such.

In short, if you know how to do it and everybody cooperates, you should all be up by about 4 white swords without losing anything.

[norms29]

The correct strat is to have everyone go do Excalibur first, then do the Grail.

Since there is an unlimited number of people who can participate in both quests, you can have everyone go there.

And since everyone who is there when the quest is completed gets +1 life, you can all essentially take 1 life hit each instead of putting up catapults and such.

In short, if you know how to do it and everybody cooperates, you should all be up by about 4 white swords without losing anything.

both of those quests take more than a full round of the table, BEFORE you take a turn for movement into account... even if you assume that everyone has 1-2 grail cards, although that's still an improvement on our typical position, if we ever had 9 evenly distributed grail cards at start..

this is what I get for gaming with art-history majors and townies.

PS. now that the alcholol is clearing my system, I'm thinking that maybe the real secret to being a fan of the game is to have an idiosyncratic first experiance that runs counter to the real optimal strategey. or trust someone who did, so tat the optimal strategy doesn't occur to you.

[Username17]

Yeah, Munchkin strategy requires kicking people in the dick the moment they look they are going to beat anything. Flaming Death Potion comes out the first time some fucker tries to beat a comfy chair. If they win any fight, they get at least one level and at least one treasure, making it much harder to stop them next time around. If you let them win 8 fights before trying to stop them, it's nearly impossible - and their hand is full of ways to fuck you over as well.

People get hurt feelings when you won't let them kill even tiny but advanced people for levels and treasure while they are "no threat" to world peace, but it seriously is the only way to get anywhere in the game.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Well, I'm putting Zinegatta on ignore now, I'm pretty sure he is just a lying troll throwing insults for lolz anyway. It isn't like he SAYS anything (certainly nothing coherent or even internally consistent).

hoarding cards a dead giveaway? all you have to do is say " this hand isn't good for any of the quests" and you've bought two or three turns of drawing cards.

Well since NO hand is a "bad hand" for Excalibur why are you not doing that quest?

playing low fight cards isn't a giveaway with any group that's realized that it's viable to do so if done quickly.

Sadly it IS a dead give away. Rushing the armour quest is pretty questionable (and frankly you should probably ignore that quest OUTRIGHT). But rushing the black knight IS viable. But then... with 5+ knights around the table if you can't FILL the black knight progression on your own with a rush then WTF are you doing there? Traitor.

and if any of the many specials that force all the knights to discard cards come up in the next five or six turns

So... you can rely purely on getting lucky to achieve your traitor goals? How is that any different to I dunno not even being the traitor.

More to the point. Unless that was a random discard you STILL cannot justify why you lost the cards you needed for THAT specific quest. Again why did you throw out the grail cards while at the grail quest Traitor.

Also; I' m not convinced your one victory wasn't from houserules. you claim to have knocked out the grail and excaliber early but had no accumulation of siege engines?

Your logic on that criticism is internally inconsistent. That is also not what I claimed.

1) Knocking out the grail and Excalibur leads to a build up of siege engines AFTER you knock them out.

2) I am pretty sure I claimed we knocked over the dark knight, a Saxon invasion, and Excalibur BEFORE we knocked over the grail and then we basically could have sat on our hands (and indeed mostly did) and still win the game.

So by the time we cleared the grail there were between 1/2 to 2/3rds siege engines. Even before clearing the grail I was sitting on Camelot punching siege engines in the face with Excalibur. And we cleared the grail only a couple of rounds after Excalibur anyway. It's not like it was hard since the TRAITOR had after all helped us out on that early.

if you're playing by the actual rules, once you complete the grail, sword, or dragon quests you add siege engines whenever the cards comeup.

We totally did that. I am fairly competent we were playing plain vanilla from the box, no optional rules or expansions. (those apparently, ugh, exist for this piece of shit game).

also, you're supposed to keep the cards discarded at excaliber hidden from the other players.

Who cares, chuck merlin cards at it. You still progress the success of the Excalibur quest for us foolish traitor. And it's not like you have any single card I give a damn about when no single cards are especially powerful, you have a hand of 4 or so and the "good guys" have a collective hand of about 30+.

to have a victory without coming close on siege engines strains belivability.

Oh I think we DID top somewhere around 3/4ths siege engines, some time AFTER we completed grail and before we won. Though by the time we won it was somewhat less than that, and would have dropped even more dramatically after.

But since once we did the grail all we had to do in order to win was basically sit on Camelot with 7 knights and kill catapults until we failed enough quests to win... well. The only reason we didn't clear more catapults was the "regular" fans of the game running off like reckless glory hogs to try and fight picts. And they still helped us win the game faster ANYWAY even if the result was one or two more catapults.

how many turns did your game last?

Hard to say. Lets see. I left camelot ONCE. Sat on the grail for like 2 turns until it got shut down. Joined the yelling at watery wenches party at Excalibur for like 3 or so, went home, drew cards for maybe 2 turns and hit catapults for maybe 3? and... game over. So at a WILD guess and deteriorating memory a total of maybe? 10-15 rounds?

also, why is it you think that being revealed is such a threat, look at the back side of the character cards,

Having not bothered to examine all the rules I WASN'T going to use I can only extrapolate that like the front side special abilities traitor special abilities are largely useless and annoying little frills.

I won by deliberately revealing myself.

The regular fans of the game assured me that was a bad idea when I suggested that surely it was the best strategy for the traitor to do that. So hell, who knows maybe it IS the best traitor strategy. Entirely removing your "good stuff" contribution from the game and no matter how marginally improving your bad stuff SEEMS like a good deal when you consider how very much you can't avoid helping out team good guy otherwise.

But A) The fans claim otherwise.
B) The game is not supposed to work like that.

You are supposed to work for your evil cause in secret, then reveal yourself (probably for tiny benefit from some useless card) MID game. Not at the first opportunity to create an incremental progress track accountancy DOOM.

And considering one of the best things a traitor can do is A) Accuse a non traitor and B) get others to accuse non-traitors. Revealing yourself might just be a bad idea because of that at the very least.

But anyway. It seems like again a defense of the game which really is just another highlighting of it's flaws.

Anyway we should probably cut this back to smaller posts so people can complain about other games.

I'm going to name Fucking Space Hulk as being a horrid game to criticize next. And after that advanced hero quest.

[Zinegata]

Well, I'm putting Zinegatta on ignore now, I'm pretty sure he is just a lying troll throwing insults for lolz anyway. It isn't like he SAYS anything (certainly nothing coherent or even internally consistent).

That's fine. You're a thread-crapper anyway. Again, you just take other people's posts and claim them as your own. And you have the audacity to say that people were making claims that were the exact opposite of what they said.

So less replies from your lying mouth is a good thing.

[Zinegata]

both of those quests take more than a full round of the table, BEFORE you take a turn for movement into account... even if you assume that everyone has 1-2 grail cards, although that's still an improvement on our typical position, if we ever had 9 evenly distributed grail cards at start..

While it takes over 1 full round to finish the Grail/Excalibur, it still takes less than 2.

And there is one guy on the team who gets x2 life when quests are completed, remember?

The main point is still to have everyone in the same quest. Because the +1 life is awarded to everyone, and it really minimizes the "cost" of finishing both of these quests.

Splitting yourselves up to do different quests is the surefire way to pain, because not all of you will get the +1 life and put you behind.

PS. now that the alcholol is clearing my system, I'm thinking that maybe the real secret to being a fan of the game is to have an idiosyncratic first experiance that runs counter to the real optimal strategey. or trust someone who did, so tat the optimal strategy doesn't occur to you.

I've said a couple of times that Shadows is a game best for casual players. For more experienced players, knowing the optimal strat makes the game a lot easier.

However, that doesn't make it a bad game per se. It's just that PL is such a moron who can't tell the difference between a casual game and a serious competitive one.