What Board Game have you been playing? ARCHIVE

Perhaps Josh is a super computer?

It's a funny feeling that's subjective for everyone - that of there being an obvious, optimal move every turn of a game. Why play that?

But for me, both Magic and Sentinels provide a lot (and enough for me) of options every turn. For example, I enjoy determining with my teammates who should try to hit what and when. Or do I heal myself/us? Do I buff myself/us? Gotta deal with the environment too.

Gotta agree with Josh on this one. I don't get why people get excited about Sentinels at all. Coops in general have this issue but I think Sentinels more than others. There's no way to put your own personality into the play, no way to change the board from what it is. Play you best card, tap the next player. Sometimes there's debate for which target to go after, but that's more like a board meeting than a game session.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote: Gotta agree with Josh on this one. I don't get why people get excited about Sentinels at all. Coops in general have this issue but I think Sentinels more than others. There's no way to put your own personality into the play, no way to change the board from what it is. Play you best card, tap the next player. Sometimes there's debate for which target to go after, but that's more like a board meeting than a game session.

S.

Do you feel the same about Magic? I find the two games vastly different in the number of reasonably equivalent options available each turn.

I couldn't tell whether there were actually tough decisions to make in Sentinels, because whether we made the best decisions or the boneheaded ones, we still always won. The game was bone-stupid easy.

I'm sure that the fans would say "well, you have to play with these heroes, in this location, against this villain: then you get a challenge!" Sorry, no interest in doing analysis to figure out which fraction of a percentage of the hojillion combinations actually results in a game that might be fun (especially when a major selling point of the game is supposed to be its bajillion combinations).

It was also incredibly unthematic feeling (don't worry, still WAY more thematic than DC Deckbuilding!), the modifiers were annoying, and having 10 different labels for your damage that almost never matter does NOT create theme.

Don't nobody go saying that you don't have options in Magic, though.

Space Ghost wrote: Do you feel the same about Magic?

Not a bit. Magic is dynamic as hell and yes, in theory there's a best move to make each turn. But given the number of permutations you always have this feeling of dread that you're going to sacrifice the guy about to get big breaks and keep the guy that isn't. Sentinels doesn't have that (and doesn't have what Magic did at the same point in its maturity) and frankly doesn't appear to want to. Card selection is designed to be very limited and I didn't get the feeling my superhero had three or four solid choices each turn. Hope for good cards to come up, play them when they do.

I don't quite know how to measure it, but some games you seem to be making the best choice of a range of good options, other games you seem to be making the least-worst choice of a range of bad options. Sentinels leans towards the latter for me.

S.

dragonstout wrote: I couldn't tell whether there were actually tough decisions to make in Sentinels, because whether we made the best decisions or the boneheaded ones, we still always won. The game was bone-stupid easy.

With only the base set this is true. The villains were easy, especially with more players but this issues was corrected with the enhanced edition. On top of that, many of the villains are extremely difficult with a high number of players now so there is more of a learning curve with each one now. Plus, I get to team up with my buddies and stomp around a comic setting for a couple of hours in an experiences that's almost as good as a well gamemastered RPG. I am IN.

Green Lantern wrote:

dragonstout wrote: The game was bone-stupid easy.

With only the base set this is true. The villains were easy, especially with more players but this issues was corrected with the enhanced edition.

We were playing with the Enhanced Edition. Far as I can understand, the "fix" to make the villains scale (we were playing four players; not exactly a huge team) was that SOME of the previously-fixed damage dealt by the villain's abilities is now equal to the number of players instead. It's an extremely poor fix, because the MAJORITY of damage dealt doesn't utilize that same scaling. It amounts to a couple more damage dealt per round, which is nothing compared to how much an additional player helps. And it didn't really matter anyway, because we were all incredibly healthy by the end of the game.

We also played against two different villains, including one rated as "difficult" in the back of the rulebook, I think (Grand Warlord Voss; the one we started with was the Dr. Doom-esque guy). Voss's shtick is that he's got a jillion minions to get through that also protect him. Problem is: we had the Superman dude, who can add +1 to everyone else's damage, innately. He's got a card that lets him add an additional +1 to everyone else's damage every turn. And we had Tempest, who can innately do 1 damage to every bad-guy card in play. Guess what the HP are of almost every single minion? 3! So literally, on the first turn, we wiped out like a half dozen minions without literally even TRYING. The game was already won at that point, because he adds about a minion per turn, and that doesn't even matter because of Triton's attack; we never even had to deliberately attack the minions.

We were also playing a supposedly difficult location, the Hell's Kitchen analogue. We constantly got these helpful people there who let us filter the location deck, giving us a choice between the top 2 cards; these choices were frequently "bad card, or another helpful person?" or "card with awful permanent effect, or falling rock that does some minimal amount of damage?"

I'm glad you're enthusiastic about the game, though, not trying to trash your experience.

+1 for this, +1 for that, +1 for every blah blah, -1 for this kind of damage, immune to this damage...yeesh. It's like Illuminati all over again.

With both Sentinels and Legendary you see a distinct pattern. If you have scalability between 1 and five players, a variable pool of characters opposing a modular adversary that incorporates two, three or even four different variables that affect game state and process or have specific triggers for effects...and THEN there's a luck of the draw element...there is no fucking way that you will see any kind of consistency in difficulty. It can not be done. You can playtest a setup 100 times and that 101st time is the one where the heroes got destroyed in two turns because things just fell in the right place. Then 102 is the one where the villain had no chance.

What both of these games want to do is impossible to do with any degree of consistency. You have to kind of roll with it. But it is definitely a design-level problem whereas that kind of volatility and broad range of possibilities is an asset in Magic, Cosmic or Wiz-War because there are greater controls in place in terms of standardization and balance. Which is kind of ironic, because player interaction would seem to be more of an unbalancer and destabilizer than an automated adversary...but there again, the problem is that you've got a villain, minions, a location, and then other random effects that pop up that can wind up practically tanking the game.

Michael Barnes wrote: ...that kind of volatility and broad range of possibilities is an asset in Magic, Cosmic or Wiz-War because there are greater controls in place in terms of standardization and balance. Which is kind of ironic, because player interaction would seem to be more of an unbalancer and destabilizer than an automated adversary...

To state the kind of obvious: the reverse is the truth. The player interaction in Cosmic and Wiz-War allows the players to counterbalance any imbalance that would have arisen due to just cards & powers alone.

It's a general problem that every co-op game has to figure out how to solve: they want to have variability, to increase replay value; but on the other hand, too much uncontrolled variability can make random games fall flat. Chris Farrell's recent post on Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is all about the push and pull between these two forces (he poses it as variability vs. narrative).

dragonstout wrote: It's a general problem that every co-op game has to figure out how to solve: they want to have variability, to increase replay value; but on the other hand, too much uncontrolled variability can make random games fall flat. Chris Farrell's recent post on Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is all about the push and pull between these two forces (he poses it as variability vs. narrative).

There's been two or three articles here on F:At speaking to that directly, all three or four years old. It's the nature of the beast -- if there's no sentience to play against you you can't expect good results.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote:

dragonstout wrote: It's a general problem that every co-op game has to figure out how to solve: they want to have variability, to increase replay value; but on the other hand, too much uncontrolled variability can make random games fall flat. Chris Farrell's recent post on Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is all about the push and pull between these two forces (he poses it as variability vs. narrative).

There's been two or three articles here on F:At speaking to that directly, all three or four years old. It's the nature of the beast -- if there's no sentience to play against you you can't expect good results.

Since you pulled the "F:AT did it first!"...the Farrell article is nonetheless worth reading, as it's actually *not* about what you're describing. It's also more specific and better than any of the articles here on the subject that I can remember.

Well I'm pretty excited. I'm finally going to play a game of Devil's Cauldron. Yes, it's over Vassal, and it is only the Saga of the 1st Airborne scenario but I'm stoked. I've wanted to play this system for a long time and I've owned Devil's Cauldron for several years.

I sent out the first set up move to Flim Flam who will be playing the Brits but he's at GMT East so he won't have a chance to reply for a few days.

In the meantime I've been playing a little solo. Lots of stuff to remember but the bones of the system are good.

Stuff I've noticed after just a few turns...

1) Moving in column (which I haven't come across in any other wargame though I don't play this scale much) is super important if you expect to get anywhere with any rapidity. 4mp's for leg infantry doesn't go far when it's 2mps to move in the clear.

2) Moving in the open within range of an enemy gun or unit will lead to punishing op fire. Unlike most games where op fire means a one time shot, here every time you move in view and range of an opposing unit in can attempt to hit you. Ouch.

3) Artillery and Mortar fire are more important that in other systems. They are stronger and more dangerous. Or so it feels. Which is good. In most games they are an after thought which I don't think, though I'm no expert, is very realistic.

So I'm pretty pleased. And the physical game is just top rate quality wise. The maps, the counters...just luxurious.

dragonstout wrote:
Don't nobody go saying that you don't have options in Magic, though.

Just to clarify...I may have come off harsher on Magic than I intended. There's options for sure, your best ones sometimes more obvious than others. It's really that your most important decisions are made outside of the game that keeps me off of it, but that's sort of the case with all CCGs/LCGs, as well as the majority of minis games. Magic helps pays the bills these days for us, so I can't knock it for that alone, and since they send stuff to my wife, we play a little kitchen table Magic from time to time.

If you like Sentinels, fine, great, glad you found fun to be had in it. I prefer my rules to fade away into the background and it's too procedural and mathy for my tastes, and the expansions only add more of that. I think that's pretty indisputable.

Ska_baron wrote: Perhaps Josh is a super computer?

Perhaps...will have to ponder on this.

I didn't mean to imply we did it first, just that it's not something you'll find in recent material. We don't talk coops here much at all anymore, save for this thread.

S.

Josh Look wrote: Magic helps pays the bills these days for us, so I can't knock it for that alone, and since they send stuff to my wife, we play a little kitchen table Magic from time to time.

Cool...is she illustrating any of the cards or is it other art related to the game? If so, which ones?