What Board Game have you been playing? ARCHIVE

Latching on to that, it's not only if they are comfortable with it. It's also a question of realizing the importance of procedure. MtG players would definitely see the immediate importance of doing everything in the correct order every time. I don't know how many times I try to say something like "this specific order of doing things doesn't seem important right now, but later..."

Erik Twice wrote:

And turn order is also based on a dice roll, not one of those smart euro mechanisms.

I thought that Stone Age turn order is only set at the very first turn, then first player goes clockwise around the board. If you got it wrong, fixing it isn't going to make it great, but it will help it some. Although IMO you're better off playing Lords of Waterdeep anyway.

Legomancer wrote: ASIDE #2: Missing the key rule bugs me because it's the third time I've done this recently an I need to give up my teaching rights. Which is fine because I'm sick to fucking death of doing it with this group. I don't mean to be an asshole, but if I'm teaching a game, do not fucking interrupt me every three seconds to ask a question about something I haven't said yet. If you don't get what I just said, fine, ask me to clarify, but don't jump all around the goddamn rulebook and then get pissy that I forgot something because you had to know right the fuck then about something I was going to get to. And what's worse, don't barrage me with questions and then not listen to the answers. This particular group keeps getting worse and worse about it, and, as a friend said, they all seem to also want to show off how much they know about games and game design by anticipating whatever the rule will be. Just sit down and shut up and listen. And if you do otherwise, I REALLY don't want to hear, "Oh, I didn't know that rule!"

ASIDE #3: Actually this is a continuation of #2, but with an addition. I'm not trying to be Sergeant Tightass about rules, but yes, shut up and listen to them. Also, when we're playing (especially when we're playing for the first time), please do things in the right fucking order. At least two guys I play with do shit in whatever order pleases them and as a result they (a) never know what's going on because they don't know when anything is supposed to happen and (b) confuse themselves because they can't remember if they got their VP for this or not and wait where was this worker and oh it turns out I should have gotten three bricks and I only got two. If the game specifies that this phase takes place before that one, let's assume there's a reason and do it in that order. Maybe once we've played we'll discover it doesn't matter, but for the first game let's just play by the goddamn rules, okay?

Hell. Yes.

I've pretty much given up on explaining rules altogether at this point. I finally reached my breaking point, and it also just eats up way too damn much time when I really only have from 9-12 to play games anyway. If we're going to play a new game, I send a link to the rulebook to everyone who's never played before ahead of time. It's wonderful, AND it makes it less likely that we play without some random rule being missing (as surely SOMEone will remember it) AND it means less put-the-game-on-hold rulebook lookups mid-game for the same reason.

I find the resource collection the only interesting part of Stone Age. What you do with the resources you gather is boring.

Well, according to this game's resident champion (?), you build "fuck huts" so that you can make caveman whoopee in them.

What a terrible game. I hope that I never try it.

Oh, about explaining rules. I'm probably even more over it than some of you folks are. Back at the store, I swear 60% of my job was teaching people how to play games.

The Hellfire Club gang is usually pretty quick to pick things up so I don't mind it there...I usually do the "I'll explain this stuff later" thing because NO ONE wants to sit and listen to rules for 20 minutes. We usually cock it up at some point and have a laugh about it, none of the people I play with are too serious about it which is nice.

On the other hand, I absolutely DESPISE listening to someone explain rules. I can not fucking stand it. I'm the guy that asks for the rulebook on turn one and reads it really quick. The only person who I can bear to listen to rules from is Frank Branham. But he always misses what we call the "Branham Rule" which is usually the method by which he wins a game.

Michael Barnes wrote: What a terrible game. I hope that I never try it.

Stealth punch-line?

Got in my first game of Battlelore 2nd edition with my 9 year old yesterday. The best part was after the game when he proclaimed that he always wants to be the demons. That's how we referred to the Uthuk faction, but he loved the ability to roll more dice when you lose troops. He totally wiped my guys off the map with that tactic too. It's always good to find something he enjoys like this that I can get into also.

Regarding rules, I'm a terrible listener and I learn by playing so I treat every 1st time playing a game as a learning game. I don't expect to win or do well, just learn the ropes and it seems to serve me just fine. Half the games I play we never get to a second time anyway as most in my gaming groups are firmly entrenched in the cult of the new.

Michael Barnes wrote: I find the resource collection the only interesting part of Stone Age. What you do with the resources you gather is boring.

Well, according to this game's resident champion (?), you build "fuck huts" so that you can make caveman whoopee in them.

What a terrible game. I hope that I never try it.

You don't build anything and that's part of the problem. You have, what I find, a cool mechanism for collecting resources, but all you do with them is buy tiles that get you points. You don't use gathered resources in any way during the game to advance your tribe, you just blatantly trade wood and stone for VP.

Myth. learning the rules is its own game! yay for kickstarter rules!

also legendary, received in trade. It's deeper than DC deck builder, but no more thematic. graphic design sucks. still I think both myself and the wife like it better than DC deck builder.

Legendary kind of grows on you. I'm not a big deck builder fan for the most part and I hated Legendary the first time I played it...

But now...eh..I think it's kinda alright.

A few more plays and I might be a full fledged fan boy of it like Engineer Al.

I finally got around to playing some Field Commander: Rommel again after a long absence from the table. When I last played I remember feeling the game was hard. Last night though I felt like I was playing a different game, and to an extent I was because I realized that I was making things a lot harder by playing rules wrong or just making bad decisions or not being able to recognize openings that I needed to capitalize on.

The game ended in victory, and the more I play the Field Commander games I feel like they should end in victory and it is just a matter of how well you did. And upon reflection of last night's game I know I could have done a whole lot better. I'm very much looking forward to retrying the mission again because I was not satisfied with last night's results.

I played a couple of games of Legendary myself, using Josh Look's old copy (it still smells of ham, butterscotch schnapps and chamomile, in case you're wondering).

First off, the comments about graphic design are UNDERSTATED. This game is a fucking trainwreck of graphic design. It's literally like a laundry list of "don't do thats". On top of HORRENDOUS typography, readability issues, terrible layout etc. etc. the game also looks like it is straight out of 1995. If I had a time machine, I could go back to 1995 and show this game to people and they'd be just like "yeah, that looks like it came out this year, sure". Even the "comics" art looks straight out of the mid-1990s. For fuck's sake Marvel, could you not supply Upper Deck with any of the awesome artwork you have both on file and that illustrators hand in every day? And the same art on every card IS an issue, because it is a COMIC BOOK GAME. 50% of the comic book equation is ILLUSTRATION so that means ILLUSTRATIONS ARE REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT.

It's the same problem with the Batman game Wizkids did...not a lick of the _awesome_ Batman artwork that exists in the game. Instead, it's the same art DC peddles to companies that make dollar store notebooks and party favors.

As much of a fumble as Sentinels of the Multiverse is, at least that small press game with a bunch of sorry-ass nobody characters has ORIGINAL ART for each card. And Marvel can't do this?

There is NO EXCUSE for a Marvel Comics game to look bad. There is no reason that this game couldn't be almost a gallery collection of great marvel art over the decades. How awesome would it be if these cards had images from throughout Marvel's history, direct from the comics? Nope, shitty commercial art that looks literally 20 years out of date.

I can't believe Richard Garfield's name is in the playtester list...mainly because this is the man that more or less created the standard layout for CCG-style card games. I can't believe he wouldn't have looked at these cards and said "hey, um, not so much."

With all that out of the way...it's probably the most _fun_ deckbuilder of the lot. It plays really smoothly, it definitely feels like a third (fourth?) generation deckbuilder and it's clear that it's iterating on the best qualities of Dominion (extensive card chaining), Thunderstone (advancing adversaries common to all players) and Ascension (drafting from a limited "river" of commonly available cards). The co-op/competitive thing actually works well and it's more subtle than I expected- love how things like the bystanders give incentive to go after bad guys that may not be in the best interest of the group.

I like it, don't love it...the look of the game actually damages it quite a lot since it's a comics themed game...you don't do a game about the Old Masters and have Marc Silvestri redraw The Night Watch for it. I think with the Dark City expansion, which adds a lot more variety and difficulty, I might get closer to loving it. It does tell a simple story and that counts for a lot, but above all I like how smooth it plays and how straightforward it is...even though the rulebook looks like trash from 1995 like everything else, I like how on the level it is- "Turn over the villain card and do whatever it says".

It just occured to me that Upper Deck may have been thinking that the game should look like Vs...which also looked like total shit...

Perhaps Garfield played a prototype without art?

I do think it's funny how deckbuilders have almost gone 180 around these parts. When dominion came out it was hammered as an over-hyped game, and when every game that followed it came out (Thunderstone, Resident Evil, Nightfall) they were panned as knockoffs of a game that nobody liked anyway. It wasn't until Puzzle Quest that people started to come around on the genre and now there seems to have been a renaissance around these parts, both on deckbuilders as a whole and individual deckbuilders that were panned. I remember Thunderstone getting HAMMERED when it came out. Mathy, derivative, the opposite of fun, etc.. I haven't seen anyone complain about it in a long time.

i still hate deckbuilders

I love that passion of yours Barnes