Worst non-PnP traditional games ever.

[Zinegata]

Yeah, Munchkin strategy requires kicking people in the dick the moment they look they are going to beat anything.

True story: I've seen a table of adults gang up on a nine year old while playing Munchkin.

A nine year old.

[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.

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.

Oh. It's in the second post. Whoops

Oh well. Fuck him still. I've received enough shit from him to simply not care if he gets hit by unwarranted fire.

[norms29]

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.

the last sword has to be white. if it isn't than white swords come off to make room for black. I haven't checked the book in a while but some of the club swear up and down that that's in there everytime someone quotes that complaint from a messege board (once or twice a semester).
and who said I wasn't talking mid game? that's when theirs actual things for the traitor to DO. early you do have your hand's tied (although people have to wait for mid-game to accuse you anyway.) but in mid game you cna jump around like a jackass and claim you were putting out fires (which isn't that hard to convincingly fail)

and I'm still calling BS on your siege engine story. the mechanics for fighting seige-engines (and regaining life-points for that matter) are such that you can't break even, with regards to cards used versus cards drawn. you'd be hard pressed to do one of those things every other turn. ( the alternate turns being spent drawing cards)

EDIT: alright, I'm continuing to sober up, and I'm not really willing to stake anymore of my credibility on a game I never properly analyised. and I'll grant alot of ground on it's quality. I'm just saying that my particular band of defectives never saw any hint of the specific problems mentioned.

EDIT, the second: it just dawned on me that that's pretty much what the paizo cultists say

[Zinegata]

the last sword has to be white. if it isn't than white swords come off to make room for black. I haven't checked the book in a while but some of the club swear up and down that that's in there everytime someone quotes that complaint from a messege board (once or twice a semester).

I think that's just for the Traitor Reveals and when people guess the Traitor incorrectly.

Not that it helps the good guys lot mind you. What kills most players is Siege Engine accumulation. It still takes a while for a quest to fail, and you often can't fail the Picts or Saxons quest because they add Siege Engines to the whack-a-mole fest.

and I'm still calling BS on your siege engine story. the mechanics for fighting seige-engines (and regaining life-points for that matter) are such that you can't break even, with regards to cards used versus cards drawn. you'd be hard pressed to do one of those things every other turn. ( the alternate turns being spent drawing cards)

Picking siege engines all the time leads to horrid death. Because no, you can't break even.

What you should do using the uberstrat is to finish Excalibur and Grail first (Don't split up. Concentrate on one quest or the other), then keep drawing the bad guy cards. Anti-Excalibur and Grail cards are turned into siege engines by this point, but you shouldn't be getting one every turn anyway so you'll have breathing room.

With the +4 (or was it +5? I don't have the board at the moment) white sword advantage from the get-go, you can actually afford to lose a few quests by spamming bad guy cards anyway.

I honestly don't get how the hell PL can claim the game is easy though, because the way they played was so flooded with mistakes that it should have been a tough game.

For instance, using the free travel ability only once? He's seriously ragging a free action in a game that is basically a race against the clock?

EDIT, the second: it just dawned on me that that's pretty much what the paizo cultists say

As I keep saying:

SoTC = Casual. Game.

Treating it competitively is like treating Munchkin as a TCG Tourney-worthy game.

[A Man In Black]

it just dawned on me that that's pretty much what the paizo cultists say

Realizing this is the first step towards recovery.

[PhoneLobster]

the last sword has to be white. if it isn't than white swords come off to make room for black.

Now that is news to me. However it changes very little. The game end condition is still fill the table" and the win condition is still "have more white swords than black". You earn black swords at most 3 at a time and have some moderate control over when and by how much that happens. You can still easily win the game earning black swords.

and I'm still calling BS on your siege engine story. the mechanics for fighting seige-engines (and regaining life-points for that matter) are such that you can't break even, with regards to cards used versus cards drawn. you'd be hard pressed to do one of those things every other turn. ( the alternate turns being spent drawing cards)

You don't HAVE to break even. You throw all the bad stuff out to random draw and let various quests fail to win you the game, you stall or even profit on siege engines at the "cost" of accumulating black swords. Black swords that will win you the game sooner. And sure with quests passed SOMETIMES that random draw will throw on a siege engine, but it mostly won't, so yeah, "break even" vs siege engines is far from impossible, not that you even NEED to do that well in order to win, and easily.

Meanwhile really.
Space Hulk
WTF? Why do people like that monotonous boring ass game? Is it simply because they want what they can't have since GW refuses to sell it to them?

[Koumei]

Space Hulk
WTF? Why do people like that monotonous boring ass game? Is it simply because they want what they can't have since GW refuses to sell it to them?

It is indeed a shitty game. My guess is that GW fans are fuckwits who will buy/masturbate to anything released with the GW logo on it (see: Necromunda, Dark Heresy, WHFRP, Spess Hulk) and GW know it. Even though it doesn't make any new fans, it basically doesn't have to.

[Kaelik]

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, stop being retarded. He is not claiming other peoples posts for his own.

He very explicitly said that it was a shitty game because it was boring and easy. That was his very first post on the subject, and he fucking started the subject.

[Zinegata]

Zinegata, stop being retarded. He is not claiming other peoples posts for his own.

He very explicitly said that it was a shitty game because it was boring and easy. That was his very first post on the subject, and he fucking started the subject.

Whatever, robotic parental figure.

[Zinegata]

Space Hulk
WTF? Why do people like that monotonous boring ass game? Is it simply because they want what they can't have since GW refuses to sell it to them?

It is indeed a shitty game. My guess is that GW fans are fuckwits who will buy/masturbate to anything released with the GW logo on it (see: Necromunda, Dark Heresy, WHFRP, Spess Hulk) and GW know it. Even though it doesn't make any new fans, it basically doesn't have to.

Hey! Don't make me feel bad because I bought it for the shiny pieces.

It's not a great tactical game, but it's an okay beginner's wargame.

Still, I have to wonder about what goes on in a Space Marine's head when they decide to assault one of the most cramped places in the universe... with their bulkiest power suits. Which offers about zero protection in melee anyway.

[PhoneLobster]

My guess is that GW fans are fuckwits who will buy/masturbate to anything released with the GW logo on it

That is also my guess. Though I would also talk about the cult marketing methodology used to MAKE such individuals in the first place. And not suggest it isn't still happening as we speak. (they ARE, literally, making new fans, and NOT by means of exposing them to the game!)

Necromunda

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!

Oh yeah. Now I remember that.

MAN that game is bad. From the super bad era of GW when they were even worse than now, which is pretty bad.

And it is probably among the MOST inexplicably liked table top games. (not the most liked, the most inexplicably liked, it's almost like it's so hated it has reversed polarity into a hate white hole that generates negative hate)

You can sit down with a "fan" and go through these points...
1) The setting is a shit sandwich of shit that shits on GW fans
You aren't allowed to play space marines and movers and shakers and stuff in your semi RPG tactical mission game in the setting. Go be fucking beggars in a slum, and like it, bitches.

2) It's a dice clusterfuck
From gang formation to game play to gang advancement to missions to everything. Skill is NOT a factor. (well beyond some shitty ability to recognize which gang or table to roll on is the totally crazy OP one to pick from the mass of shit) It's all utterly ridiculous dice rolls spiraling into a one sided domino effect made of ASS.

3) Stupidity Leads to Necromunda, Necromunda leads to hate, hate is supposed to lead to the dark side stupid!
THE DARK SIDE. Not to saying "gee that was fun". I have seen few "games" that generate more arguments and hatred than Necromunda. It's ABYSMAL rules, especially with its terrible measurement, line of sight, etc... sub systems result in arguments. And not even FUN arguments really pissy petty ones. That whole GW era did that in general, but this game was the PINNACLE of hate generation. And yet people somehow FORGET that I sat there and watched them seriously lose friends over this shit pile and say "I love Necromunda". It's like it's fucking Crack Cocaine or something, only they don't even enjoy it while using it.

4) Every Necromunda Campaign you or anyone you know has EVER been involved in has crumbled into chaos, stupidity, apathy and yelling
No one EVER plays this game for long. They try, and fail, they avoid it for years then drag it out and FAIL AGAIN. NO. You did NOT enjoy it last time. Last time 3 out of 5 gangs quit after LESS than one game each and the other two players STILL aren't talking to each other. So NO I do NOT think it would be a "great idea" to try and get a "good long" campaign of Necromunda going "Like you used to play". Because you NEVER USED TO DO THAT, and you WON'T SUCCEED IN DOING THAT AGAIN.

5) Mordheim also sucked
Up yours Mordheim.

...and after going through those points and the fan agreeing with you on all of them. They will say "gee, we should get a campaign of Necromunda going, that would be so cool!". It's like... UTTER INSANITY.



PS. Advanced Hero Quest still sucks.

[Koumei]

The one, single good thing about Necromunda* is this: if you're lucky, someone could get a good shot in on turn one and Bottle your whole gang, meaning you get to stop playing within a few minutes.

Actually, the game is so poorly made that this happens quite a bit.

I assumed Mordheim was the same, but haven't even looked over the books so I can't guarantee it. Also on the topic of GW being bastards, they're releasing a new 40K expansion called Spearhead, that focuses on tanks.

Protip, there's already a 40K game that focuses on tanks.

It's called Warhammer 40K. Seriously, it already is fucking tank edition.

*Someone needs to think up an insulting name for it.

[Zinegata]

Spearhead was honestly just an excuse to makesell more tank models.

Edit: Fixed

[Username17]

I would accept all of those criticisms and more for Gorka Morka, but Necromunda or Mordheim genuinely can make for a good league game. Having played for years in various leagues at a local store with big tables and great terrain boxes, I can say that it can generate a lot of good times. That said, some of your criticisms are valid, some of them are not. I'll try to go through the list:

• The setting is a shit sandwich of shit that shits on GW fans
  
  Yep! I hate GW fans. Honestly, getting away from Spess Marines is a good thing. What little GW flavor there is in the game is actually sort of unfortunate. I'd prefer it going even more into generic post-apocalyptic scifi than it already has. But while there are people who are sad that there are no tanks with gothic cathedrals on the top covered with skulls that shoot chaos missiles - I genuinely think the game is better for it. Plus, the small scale lets you use doors and ladders and shit, making the terrain much more interesting and usable.
• It's a dice clusterfuck
  
  I'm not feeling you here. Yes, individual die rolls are incredibly swingy. You roll a 1 and suddenly your Heavy Bolter is out of ammo. You roll a 3 or a 5 and it's the difference between a character getting an awesome skill or a piece of crap that is useless (and still adds to gang rating, so is actually worse than not having gotten anything). This is all true. But the fact is, there are a lot of die rolls. And differences in strategy really do make themselves known after you roll the dice enough times to even out good and bad rolls. You just have to remember that you are literally and specifically better off letting some of your guys wander out into the wilderness and die when they get too many advances that are not helpful.
• Stupidity Leads to Necromunda, Necromunda leads to hate, hate is supposed to lead to the dark side stupid!
  
  Wat? I have no idea what this complaint means. Were you getting into too many arguments while playing this game? Yeah, it's a GW game and some rules are unclear. And you're drawing line of sight across a table covered with actual physical objects. But if you have an actual league and some disinterested observers from another game table to go look at a line of fire to give thumbs up or thumbs down, it generally works out OK. Much better than full size Warhammer, because fire lines are being drawn from one model to another model, which means that you can bust out a laser pointer and simply answer the damn question for reals. Squad to squad LOS doesn't make any kind of sense, and never will.
• Every Necromunda Campaign you or anyone you know has EVER been involved in has crumbled into chaos, stupidity, apathy and yelling
  
  Well, no. I agree that Necromunda leagues do not end with a bang, but with a whimper. But the same can be said about literally any open-ended campaign. Gradually the differences between the gangs doing well and the gangs doing poorly become so stark that the shit gangs can't even catch up with the boosts they get from taking on stronger gangs. And then they quit. Or people get jobs and quit. Or move off to go to school and quit. Or whatever. The point is: by the time any faction gets to Gang Rating 2000, your 20+ person league has like 3 players. I don't really see that as a problem. You play until you don't want to play any more. Sure, it would be nice if the game had an endgame which could keep people interested after the "winners" start pulling ahead severely. But it doesn't, and it's not a game breaker, especially in a league with fixed duration.
• Mordheim also sucked
  
  Mordheim follows pretty much the exact line of flaws and advantages as Necromunda. But again, I've had very fun leagues of both. I think it has to do with having a decent player base and great terrain at the local store.

Now, Gorka Morka I will give you. I wanted to like that game. I really fucking tried. But it's just fucking awful. The thing is that they made the game so you literally have to model all your prospective vehicles before you can use them. No stand ins can work, even if the other players would be willing to let you. So if you get advances to your gang that change the vehicle pool? You're fucked. You can't just use an extra unpainted ganger model until next tuesday. The models actually have to fit "into" a truck model that you haven't assembled yet. Ugh. Clustertrophe. Added to a less interesting set of tactical choices and more unbalanced troop selection, and you have a deeply shitty game.

Which is bizarre. Like I said, I wanted to like it. I think Necromunda would be a better game if it went more generic post-apocalyptic and sucked less Imperium cock. And so when they said they were going to set the next game in a radioactive desert full of mutants and Mad Max style trucks - I was excited. But... no. Just... no. That game fucking pissed me off.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

Shadows over Camelot is rife with problems - like how the difficulty is massively, massively dependent on the number of players (which is the root cause behind the 'omg it's so hard and omg it's so easy how can you suck so much posts - some player numbers straight up have more actions than others, making it way easier), and I'm pretty sure the best traitor plan is just not even to pretend to be helping the heros unless he thinks he can scam them out of the armour.

BSG is better.

[Zinegata]

BSG is better.

[Username17]

I don't think a "Traitor" mechanic can work well unless everyone has secret mandatory goals. Like, everyone gets a secret goal and they have to complete it and the team has to win in order to win personally. The traitor can be special in that he wins if and only if the entire rest of the team loses. And then you can have all kinds of people doing weird shit instead of everyone agreeing on the best strategy and then making it be fucking obvious who the traitor is.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

I like the backstabbing mechanic from the Paranoia bonus mandatory fun card game. (I won't say traitor mechanic, because it's treason mechanics are about something else entirely)

Each mission motivates players to either work together or against each other (and towards mission success, or mission failure) based on their rank, backhanded deals with team leader, and the kind of hand they draw that mission.

In any given mission anywhere up to EVERYONE might be working to fail, then next mission anywhere up to EVERYONE might be working to succeed. All based on messing with your motivations via rewards and costs caused by the mission card, that is cool.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Space Hulk
WTF? Why do people like that monotonous boring ass game? Is it simply because they want what they can't have since GW refuses to sell it to them?

It is indeed a shitty game. My guess is that GW fans are fuckwits who will buy/masturbate to anything released with the GW logo on it (see: Necromunda, Dark Heresy, WHFRP, Spess Hulk) and GW know it. Even though it doesn't make any new fans, it basically doesn't have to.

I was almost chased out of the game store I played Warhammer Fantasy in because it became known that I used paints that cost me 60 cents a bottle instead of the massively overpriced GW paints. Luckily, the owner did not support the ouster so it eventually dropped.

[norms29]

Meanwhile really.
Space Hulk
WTF? Why do people like that monotonous boring ass game? Is it simply because they want what they can't have since GW refuses to sell it to them?

Finally something we agree on.

that piece of shit was one of the campus clubs aquisitions this year (one of few because it was so overpriced). the Warhammer guys spent half a god-damn semester assembling the minis (which, oddly, seem to be higher quality than the ones from the wargame) and then played it twice... tedious, boring, retardedly unbalanced.

[Zinegata]

I don't think a "Traitor" mechanic can work well unless everyone has secret mandatory goals. Like, everyone gets a secret goal and they have to complete it and the team has to win in order to win personally. The traitor can be special in that he wins if and only if the entire rest of the team loses. And then you can have all kinds of people doing weird shit instead of everyone agreeing on the best strategy and then making it be fucking obvious who the traitor is.

-Username17

BSG prevents this via its resolution mechanic. Everyone contributes cards to a pile (secretly), two more random cards are added, and everything is shuffled. While it's still possible to figure out that there is a traitor (i.e. there are three or more negative cards during resolution), without prodiguous card-counting it's not easy to pin down the traitor.

Honestly, there were many games where I just teamed up with one other guy I absolutely trusted and locked everyone else up.

With the expansion, we would generally have everyone else locked up, then shot.

[Username17]

The only positive thing to say about Space Hulk is that sometimes it costs less than the equivalent boxes of Space Marine Terminators and Genestealers.

Which is more of a negative about 40k in general, but there you go.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

Bah. The cardboard pieces are nice too you know.

[cthulhu]

I don't think a "Traitor" mechanic can work well unless everyone has secret mandatory goals. Like, everyone gets a secret goal and they have to complete it and the team has to win in order to win personally. The traitor can be special in that he wins if and only if the entire rest of the team loses. And then you can have all kinds of people doing weird shit obinstead of everyone agreeing on the best strategy and then making it be fucking vious who the traitor is.

-Username17

BSG prevents this via its resolution mechanic. Everyone contributes cards to a pile (secretly), two more random cards are added, and everything is shuffled. While it's still possible to figure out that there is a traitor (i.e. there are three or more negative cards during resolution), without prodiguous card-counting it's not easy to pin down the traitor.

Honestly, there were many games where I just teamed up with one other guy I absolutely trusted and locked everyone else up.

With the expansion, we would generally have everyone else locked up, then shot.

Yeah, too often the move is totally telegraphed. I'd like to see frank's proposed mechanic.