The Gaming Den

Is there any other war themed legacy game to look out for? I enjoyed the game of thrones boardgame and Axis & Allies, and figure something like that would be good for legacy.

RobbyPants wrote:We taught my sister-in-law and her husband how to play last weekend. He innately adopted this strategy and kicked all of our asses, twice. I was trying to play this style side-by-side on my own to see how it paced, but it seems a lot harder in a two-player game (with just four gems of each color). With seven of each, plus the gold gems, he was able to effectively reserve and horde some 4-5 point cards. He won with around six cards each game.

This makes so much more sense! I was deeply confused by how little this advice tracked with my experience, and I've played a lot of Splendor. My total active time playing could be measured in weeks.

Nearly all of that is for the two-player game though, which I've always felt was more competitive than the 4 player. I've seen all in strategies for nobles, 3rd row cards, 2nd row cards and hoarding in one or two colors succeed, while 4 player games have always felt pretty random to me.

OgreBattle wrote:Is there any other war themed legacy game to look out for? I enjoyed the game of thrones boardgame and Axis & Allies, and figure something like that would be good for legacy.

Nope Risk and Pandemic are the only two games using the Legacy mindset. I expect quite a few to come out this year though, followed by a massive glut next year.

Axis & Allies probably won't be too much of a stretch since it's under Hasbro, who did Risk Legacy. Game of Thrones however is published by the FFG/Asmodee Empire, and they've never done a Legacy game before.

Pandemic meanwhile was published by Z-man, who have a huge line-up of games that could be given the Legacy treatment in addition to the inevitable Pandemic Legacy Season 2.

Robinson Crusoe, Agricola, Endeavor, Neuroshima Hex, and maybe Terra Mystica are good candidates among their best-selling existing games for a future Legacy treatment. Though given its popularity, the most likely game to get a Legacy version despite its unsuitability is Carcassonne. *shudder*

Lol, speaking of new Legacy games - a brand-new one had just been sent to the printers:

http://www.ungeek.ph/2016/01/seafall-fr ... ublishers/

Release might be by Gencon or Essen 2016. Interestingly Seafall is an all-new game that's supposed to follow the Age of Discovery with a world map that's gradually built up.

Also, another all-new design is coming in 2017:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame ... es-origins

Which is a Civ game with Legacy mechanics.

Zinegata wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:Is there any other war themed legacy game to look out for? I enjoyed the game of thrones boardgame and Axis & Allies, and figure something like that would be good for legacy.

Nope Risk and Pandemic are the only two games using the Legacy mindset. I expect quite a few to come out this year though, followed by a massive glut next year.

Axis & Allies probably won't be too much of a stretch since it's under Hasbro, who did Risk Legacy. Game of Thrones however is published by the FFG/Asmodee Empire, and they've never done a Legacy game before.

Pandemic meanwhile was published by Z-man, who have a huge line-up of games that could be given the Legacy treatment in addition to the inevitable Pandemic Legacy Season 2.

Robinson Crusoe, Agricola, Endeavor, Neuroshima Hex, and maybe Terra Mystica are good candidates among their best-selling existing games for a future Legacy treatment. Though given its popularity, the most likely game to get a Legacy version despite its unsuitability is Carcassonne. *shudder*

They'll never do it but Battlestar Galactica: Legacy would be f*cking AWESOME.

Axis and Allies, oh my. I understand nostalgia, but there's plenty of cheap/free computer versions that'll show how limited the game is (try TripleA). I suspect Shogun is similar, hard to tell, that one also took forever to set up and seemed to have more moving parts...but have only like 2 or 3 games experience with it.

Risk needs some rule changes (which it may have gotten) or it's strictly a dice rolling game.

I would say try Shogun on the Risk board + territory cards for familiarity to speed things up.

A legacy board game about designing/,arketing a tRPG would be amusing. You can either keep on using designers for publicity or ostracize them for incompetence and tear up their card.

The legacy concept seems an inherently better fit for a cooperative game like Arkham Horror than for an opposed game like Settlers of Cataan. That being said, games where you are already doing a dynasty squabbling with other dynasties for power like Shogun or Junta seem like they would be very amenable to the concept thematically.

-Username17

One board game I got recently is Small World. I'm afraid it may be a bit too complicated for my boys yet (oldest is now 7 years old). And oh my ghost if it didn't take me almost 10 minutes to punch out all the chits. I think cleanup is going to be a pain for this game but at least the box is beautifully laid out with trays for everything.

Having kids is nice. In a few years I'll be able to play lots of board games. It actually makes a tenable argument for me acquiring more games whereas before my standard response was: "a 40-80 buck game that I'll probably only play once or twice in my life? pass."

Anybody played Organ Attack, the Awkward Yeti game?

If so, thoughts?

Game On,
fbmf

fbmf wrote:Anybody played Organ Attack, the Awkward Yeti game?

If so, thoughts?

Game On,
fbmf

It's basically Exploding Kittens but rethemed. It can be stupid fun in a casual gaming environment but not much else.

It is selling pretty well though precisely due to its light nature.

Oh, and having played Charterstone - I have to say that it may be the first competitive (and Euro) legacy game to be actually worth its price tag.

Zinegata wrote:Oh, and having played Charterstone - I have to say that it may be the first competitive (and Euro) legacy game to be actually worth its price tag.

I'm interested in hearing more about this. My IRL group and I got burned pretty bad with Seafall, but we're still big on the legacy concept.

I backed the board game Massive Darkness and it arrived. The core box alone is pretty heavy, but with the various expansion things it was indeed massive. I might review it at some point, it's pretty cool. Basically it's simplified D&D without a DM, that can be played single-player, and has a whole bunch of minis to paint up (and use in regular roleplaying if need be). So you know, basically "what I want a board game to be".

Mord wrote:

Zinegata wrote:Oh, and having played Charterstone - I have to say that it may be the first competitive (and Euro) legacy game to be actually worth its price tag.

I'm interested in hearing more about this. My IRL group and I got burned pretty bad with Seafall, but we're still big on the legacy concept.

First let me preface that I won't give any spoilers - meaning everything I say can all be found out in the first game. Indeed, I would note that the first game is in many ways a "tutorial" and "Let's learn together" session more than anything.

Charterstone, at its core, is a worker placement game but with a very innovative twist: Your workers do not block other workers. Instead, workers already standing on a building space are "bumped off" by others who want to use the same space. You want to be "bumped off" as much as possible because you are forced to waste an action to retrieve all of your workers if all of them are on the board. In effect, getting bumped off gives you free actions.

This has two major effects on game play. First, it means the game is not very cutthroat, which makes it easier to sustain players over multiple sessions without generating bad feelings ("You screwed me last game so I will screw you this game!"). Second, it means each game session is lightning fast (45 mins - 1 hour), because you can stop worrying about being blocked and just figure out your own plan. This makes the core game hugely better than Seafall, which has both the game length issue and the "take that" issue.

Meanwhile, the Legacy element of Charterstone lies primarily with its village-building aspect. At the start of the game you basically start by building six measly worker spaces - each producing one resource - and a couple of pre-built industrial buildings from the capital.

However, you also start the game with several "crates" - which are basically the game's way of signifying technological progress. Players who unlock crates will get new cards, which gives them new abilities or allows them to build new buildings . These new buildings - once built - can produce more resources, introduce all-new resources, or add other scoring opportunities. From a relatively simple game of six resources, you now transition to a game that can support more complicated engines, thus giving the game a real sense of progression.

What's more - and rather very elegantly - newly constructed buildings often leave behind new crates to unlock. So the guy who built the Lumber Mill Mk 2 (I'm making this up, as with all the buildings in this paragraph) will have an opportunity to unlock its leave-behind crate and get the next building in its technology tree (say Lumber Mill Mk III). However, the game doesn't reveal this tech tree at the start - you have to peel away layer after layer - and sometimes it throws you curve balls which lend a lot of excitement to the game. For instance, rather than the expected Lumber Mill Mk III you might get a Wand Factory instead which introduces totally new rules.

That said, the game is very much a Euro. It's strictly a game where you collect resources and convert them into engines and points. Folks who expect it to have a serious story arc that makes it more of an adventure will be disappointed. The "story" is really about how you built your village.

What games have a board where you gradually improve your production ability like Scythe?

I mainly like the tactice sensation of moving blocks around for upgrades

Like Catan for example?
Sette village, upgrade to city, get more ressources?
Later AddOns may add rules i am not entirely aware of.

You have a board representing your government style.



It starts off with the production stuff covered in blocks. Later on the upgrade action lets you move a block covering productivity to a block covering price, so the cost of actions becomes cheaper while the effect of actions increase.

That looks pretty similar to Eclipse, a game in the Masters-of-Orion-as-boardgame subgenre which is basically a lighter Twilight Imperium.

OgreBattle wrote:What games have a board where you gradually improve your production ability like Scythe?

I mainly like the tactice sensation of moving blocks around for upgrades

Depending on what you mean, Terra Mystical does, although it's a bit more complex than I like for a game.

OgreBattle wrote:What games have a board where you gradually improve your production ability like Scythe?

I mainly like the tactice sensation of moving blocks around for upgrades

As Rob mentioned there's Terra Mystica, plus a newly released sequel called Gaia Project which is basically the same game but in space. Eclipse has also been mentioned - and it's a very good game - but currently most people are waiting to see if an upcoming second edition will fix the first game's flaws.

I don't think there's a game that does it better than Scythe at the moment however.

Schleiermacher wrote:That looks pretty similar to Eclipse, a game in the Masters-of-Orion-as-boardgame subgenre which is basically a lighter Twilight Imperium.

I'll be honest, the amount of times people have written about how Twilight Imperium takes so long to play made me curious about playing it at a friends place. I ended up watching a youtube video (or two?) on how to set up the game fastest; and a strange irony, I was able to end the game in an hour or so of play.

I had something in my faction description that indicated it was religious, or something; and I decided to declare myself "Space Pope". Every round I interspersed obvious strategic actions with telling the other players that I wanted to build "space cathedrals" and "lead space pilgrimages" to specific planets/hexes, and would "space exocommunicate" any factions that "commited space heresy" and get in my faction's way (they were probably looking to accomplish the VP objectives of their own cards as it was, and my objectives weren't close enough for them to get to, for them to consider styming my own attempts at VPs).

As a result I was able to cash in a lot of victory points every turn. I was also super lucky in that every potential victory point card I drew was directly accessible from my own hex tiles. Instead of, you know, buried deep within an other faction's territory; and teeming with death suns & space fleets.

It literally took more time to set up the game, than it did to play it. Which is great, b/c 6+ hours of "Risk of Space Catan" might have been a drag for everyone.

Zinegata wrote:[things about Charterstone]

Thanks for the details! I've got a few other board games on the play pile first, but when I run out I'll see if I can pick up Charterstone at my local discount board game place.

Roommate purchased Pixel Tactics, with all of the expansions. The leaves me feeling kind of "meh". Not something I would turn down playing again, but it's definitely not something I would have bought for myself - for reasons I am finding difficult to put to words.

virgil wrote:Roommate purchased Pixel Tactics, with all of the expansions. The leaves me feeling kind of "meh". Not something I would turn down playing again, but it's definitely not something I would have bought for myself - for reasons I am finding difficult to put to words.

I love Pixel Tactics in abstract, because the huge number of different leader matchups create a huge number of distinct game setups. A game where you're playing the Paladin against the Sniper has very different concerns than one where you're playing the Mascot against the Psychic, and so on. In practice, I feel much the same way you do. I think the sequence of play just has too much procedure to be properly fun.