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11 hours ago, jaedmc said:

I'll have to look at JOKING HAZARD for Christmas gifts. The apples to apples gimmick is played on heavily these days, but if the humor is there it doesn't matter.

I highly recommend We Didn't Playtest This At All, its no apples to apples game style but it's what Fluxx wants to be:  a fast, funny, and frantic game. Just check out the sample cards and you'll see how crazy it can get.

And it's about that time of the year when I gotta do board-game research for gifting. It's so damn hard to top Dixit thou, everyone keeps on asking me if there's anything as great as Dixit and it's so damn hard to find anything even close.

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So I bought myself the Dark Souls board game as a self-Christmas gift basically. Really not my usual thing. I am not a miniature collector or a serious board game player but I had seen the game played and basically really decided it was a thing that would make me happy. This has so far proven true. Played three games so far. Breaking news: YOU DIED. I will say up front the tl;dr is that I enjoy the game very much so far.

So first off yeah it's pricey for a board game, because of the miniatures. Here's the included bosses and a big ass review dump: 

 

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It's certainly a game that makes a lot of visual impact and if you're a Dark Souls fan it's hard to imagine a board game making a stronger visual impact. I think justifying the price has a lot to do with how much you enjoy the Dark Souls world and/or miniatures, since obviously that's where a lot of your cash is going.

I will say this. As pretty much everyone else that plays the game has commented, the suggested play time of 90 minutes to 2 hours is a complete howler. There is absolutely no way you are playing the game under the default rules in under 2 hours unless you are some kind of board game speedrunning freak show. This is a game that does require a lot of time commitment. I could see this being problematic for group play but the game is also playable solo. A lot of people play with a "double souls, half sparks" house rule that in plain English means "double the currency reward but half your number of lives" which doesn't actually change the game balance radically but speeds the game up significantly and cuts out the grind element. Less overall lives does slightly raise the variance, in that one bad roll costing you a life would now mean more. But it's not enough to be offputitng from the whole idea.

Unsurprisingly if you want to do a 4P game you do need a large amount of space. This is a tabletop game in the most literal sense. 

I did not find the rulebook lacking or confusing, as some have said. But I'd also seen an online stream of the game beforehand so I had a really good grasp of how the rules worked in advance. The rulebook is also freely available as a PDF so I had an advance look. I think it could be organized slightly better but overall there's nothing I think is actually wrong with it, personally. I also have like 30 years of gaming experience, even if very little in board games, so it's not like you are going to show me much that I haven't seen, granted. Some people also seem to dislike the game is so open to homebrewing your own rules, but, I mean... I was a Skyrim modder. This is hardly a giant chasm for me and I actually think it's great.

The treasure deck, which has all your equipment and weapon upgrades, does take some sorting per game because some of the loot depends on what class you choose. EG the Assassin has some specific assassin-themed stuff that goes into the deck with the general stuff, killing a boss adds extra loot to the pool etc. I don't find sorting this that bad because there are clear symbols that separate things and a little "common sense" sorting into piles during gameplay makes post-game cleanup much faster. I have read some complaints about the randomness. I don't honestly understand this. If the game had no randomness why bother with a board game, go read a book. Doesn't bother me in the least.

The actual fight encounters are neat. It would be nice if the game had a somewhat wider variety of enemies in the base game but it's not a big problem. Hopefully someday the kickstarter expansions get out of production hell and this game would really be a complete monster. The biggest issue at that point would be storage space.

The boss fights are where this game really shines. I won't go into depth about how the rules work but suffice to say it's a really well done system for board game play, and genuinely fun to play. I really get into it, as far as a board game can go. These are meant to be the highlight of the game and they absolutely deliver.

I have seen a lot of middling reviews of this game, but I have to be honest, a hell of a lot of those smell like "disgruntled kickstarter backers mad about delays trying to apply customer support pressure through a review instead of through customer support". I don't know if this is a common board game thing, but on Steam video game people looking for tech support in reviews instead of tech support is nearly a meme, so it feels like the glove fits.

My biggest concern is how to actually store the miniatures safely. Like, I am terrified of busting the Gargoyle's (which I consider the showstopper of the minis) wings at some point. I have zero experience with this and haven't really worked something out yet.

Overall I have genuinely had a good time with this game and feel it was worth what I paid. Makes me happy, that's what matters.

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So we completed January of Pandemic Season 2 and it's fucking cool as hell. Can't wait to see where the story goes. 

I think what I love, without really spoiling anything, is that the character powers feel like the same powers as before, except everything is "depowered" because of the dystopian setting. So there's a learning curve of going "oh my character is like the scientist" but realizing it's not as useful as the scientist at all. It makes upgrading characters even more meaningful.

 

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I too have finished January of Pandemic Legacy Season 2 and I have come here to share something. I will spoilertag it for all who don't wish to know.

 

Here are the names we ended up going with for our havens:


Atlantas (like atlanta but atlantis as well)
Megacity 1&2 (because they couldn't decide between the names so now it's both)
The Trashgyre (the name of the big garbage lump in the ocean. this was my suggestion! :D! )

Other nominees were Double Chicago, Metropolis, and the same thing my old fantasy football league was named.

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On 12/3/2017 at 2:36 AM, BL88 said:

I too have finished January of Pandemic Legacy Season 2 and I have come here to share something. I will spoilertag it for all who don't wish to know.

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Here are the names we ended up going with for our havens:


Atlantas (like atlanta but atlantis as well)
Megacity 1&2 (because they couldn't decide between the names so now it's both)
The Trashgyre (the name of the big garbage lump in the ocean. this was my suggestion! :D! )

Other nominees were Double Chicago, Metropolis, and the same thing my old fantasy football league was named.

Might steal "Double Chicago" for our game when we discover another.

We had a good streak going winning Jan-March. Then April happened and holy shit did we get kicked in the fucking teeth. 

I think the game is fucking incredible. I know we're only in April but it's going to be hard to fuck this up. The story is so cool, and I love that they alternate between being specific and being vague so you can fill in the blanks.

Totally afraid that we won't finish before I go on vacation.

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  • 2 months later...

So I started learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons. Which lead to me making my own Dungeon tiles from scratch. the third picture is my favorite because it turned out better than I thought it would.

 

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I bought a 4 foot by 8 foot board of those pink insulation boards at Home Depot. Only 11 bucks. The rest is just using an exacto knife and some craft paint. Then sealed it with some polyurethane. 

Got the idea after falling down a youtube rabbit hole and discovered this:

 

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If the Dark Souls board game expansions ever get out of bullshit Kickstarter production hell, I could see doing something like that. I have never done much tabletop but a bit of that I do get what people see in it. There you are, hours in, hunched over a table like you're trying to cure cancer, rolling dice, being fucked, feeling pain, it's good

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I kind of regret not getting into dungeons and dragons earlier in my life. Me and my cousin would play the sword and sorcery games like Hero Quest, Key to the Kingdom and Battle Masters. But we never went into DnD. It didn't help that most of the people I saw playing I did not want to hang out with at all.

So far it's been a lot of fun. 

We're also two months from finishing up Pandemic Legacy Season TWO, and holy shit these games are fucking amazing. Worth every penny.  Interested in how the designer will do Betrayal at House on the Hill, but cannot wait for Season Three.

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Dude, Jae, that is so awesome. That beats the hell out of ordering laminated 1x1 grid paper. I seriously want to give that a go except my play group has now seemingly moved back to playing Magic.

We play for funsies and all that. None of us play anything terribly unfun. I do wish I didn't sell off all of my good cards though. Even still, there's skill involved with making a 100 card deck out of junk rares, commons, and uncommons and seeing that work.

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I was actually moderately good at Magic once upon a time (made Nationals twice, posted thoroughly mediocre results both times). A year or so back I randomly decided to get back into constructed Magic after an absence of about a decade, but the game has left me behind in a bunch of ways. It's still fun, but I no longer enter tournaments expecting to win.

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Magic is all kinds of messed up now. Their R&D is such a shitshow. Standard has been ruined by one particular deck and they had to do a banning outside of the normal banning schedule, but they didn't ban the deck that was dominating all of the tournaments. And then about a month ago they had to do another emergency banning to finally ban the enablers for that deck that was dominating. They're so focused on whatever dumb gimmick mechanic they introduce with each set and ignore that there are perfectly acceptable mechanics that already exist that people really like.

And don't even get me started on Modern. 

Oh, also, they changed up the set cycle to do away with core sets and move to a release schedule that would allow sets to stay in Standard longer. Then, about a year later, someone must have looked at the numbers and realized it was dumb to get ride of core sets because core sets are back again. I really love Magic, but I can't imagine playing anything competitive. I'm repeating myself too. Before I couldn't imagine getting back into the competitive scene because it was too expensive. I got out when Tarmogoyf was introduced. Before that, the most expensive rare was Cranial Extraction at $20. To then start seeing deck values explode to nearly $1000 was crazy. So now costs have come down, but you pretty much have to play one deck.

No thanks. I'll keep playing casual commander, cube drafts, and playing trash decks with friends.

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It's actually amazing to me how many game developers of CCG's don't seem to understand Magic became wildly successful despite the tournament scene, not because of it. I was in the game in the really early years and when the tournaments started getting bigger and people started disrupting the enjoyment of normal people with WELL THIS TOURNAMENT META an HERE'S AN OFFICIAL LIST OF FUN THINGS THAT ARE NOT ALLOWED, it was pretty clearly time to go.

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Starting a new D&D campaign tonight, which will be my first time playing 5th ed.  Very excited to roll out my Aasimar Cleric Praise-Tyr-On-High Hate-Evil Barebones.  My elevator pitch of him is "Imagine if Oliver Cromwell actually had the power of god behind him."  Should be fun.

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I played Magic this past weekend.

I would say about once every 3 months my son asks me to play (I am the only person he can play with)

So we pull out the decks he got a few Christmases ago from his Grandmother and muddle our ways through the rules.

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On ‎2‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 2:50 PM, jaedmc said:

So I started learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons. Which lead to me making my own Dungeon tiles from scratch. the third picture is my favorite because it turned out better than I thought it would.

 

That is awesome. I played for the very first time in my life on Sunday. My 8 year old is a huge fan of the Capcom D&D beat 'em ups, so he wanted to get into "the real thing" as he put  it. So we got the 5E starter set and convinced my wife to DM for us. We only got through the first part of it, but I had a fucking blast, and he did as well. Our only hang up was that because we could only convince my wife's cousin to come along for the ride, some of the combat encounters were a little rough for 3, as they were designed for 5 or 6, and my wife didn't know she could scale them down to accommodate the smaller party. I always wanted to get into it when I was a young man, but could never convince any of my friends to go for it with me. Also, as you mention in your follow up, most of the folks that I knew that played were not the people for me.

I can't wait to get back to the rest of this module and when we finish that try to find us an ongoing game. What a super fun thing to do.

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Steve Jackson Games and IDW are launching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Muchkin around June.  Kickstarter for it starts on March 7 - this is Eastman style art (some of it done by him) and original comic looks for all of the stuff, so don't worry, it's not those fucking hideous new Nick designs for the new Turtles shows coming out this year.

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Well, that's one I'll kickstart even though I haven't played Munchkin in years. 

Regarding Magic, my friends and I got together to play some stupid shit we put together. It was a good time. My one friend who watches games on Twitch and keeps up with the tournament scene more than I do remarked about how I'm playing with expensive shit unsleeved. A couple years ago or less was when I sold off my most valuable shit and I made over $1000 by selling off 15 cards or something. I didn't think I had anything super valuable left so I didn't put anything in sleeves.

I go online to mtggoldfish to check out deck prices and deck values are even more absurd than I remembered. $1400 for a fucking Modern deck! That's fucking insane. I'm looking through decklists and seeing cards that used to be $1 rares, $5 rares, or $10 rares that are now $50, $60, or $70.

Anyway, next up for us is resuming our D&D campaign from a couple months ago.

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I never got into Magic either.  The idea of it sounded cool, and I had played some CCG's back in the day like WEREWOLF: The Apocalypse(anyone remember that!?) but the aura around Magic kinda cooled me to it. I think anything that's super obsessed over or nerded over, like the Magic competive scene is, always turns me off. 

My son got super competitive in Pokemon...then after a year he realized most of his deck had been phased out for competition. The idea that all that money spent on his cards by himself and other people buying him presents was "wasted" crushed his soul. So he's looking for something to get into that he can collect but won't lose so much value.

I am DM'ing for my wife as a trial run to see if I can do it for other people. I had some Doppleganger's that were mucking around her town and she caught on, and confronted them waaaaaay faster than I expected. 

At one point I had one Doppleganger that was dressed as one of her characters, meet that character alone....and thanks to some fortuitous rolls I knocked him out.  Didn't have time to kill him completely but I was was thiiiiis close to my doppleganger taking over her character's place in the party without them "knowing". 

I'm in the process of making modular cave tiles that so far are turning out really nice. I'll post pics later.

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Maybe your son could try an LCG like Netrunner?  I'm not super familiar with it but it seems to be less pay-to-win than CCGs.

I'm really glad I got back into D&D but I hardly ever get to actually play since getting 5 adults together on a regular basis is like herding cats.

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2 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

I never got into Magic either.  The idea of it sounded cool, and I had played some CCG's back in the day like WEREWOLF: The Apocalypse(anyone remember that!?) but the aura around Magic kinda cooled me to it. I think anything that's super obsessed over or nerded over, like the Magic competive scene is, always turns me off. 

My son got super competitive in Pokemon...then after a year he realized most of his deck had been phased out for competition. The idea that all that money spent on his cards by himself and other people buying him presents was "wasted" crushed his soul. So he's looking for something to get into that he can collect but won't lose so much value.

I am DM'ing for my wife as a trial run to see if I can do it for other people. I had some Doppleganger's that were mucking around her town and she caught on, and confronted them waaaaaay faster than I expected. 

At one point I had one Doppleganger that was dressed as one of her characters, meet that character alone....and thanks to some fortuitous rolls I knocked him out.  Didn't have time to kill him completely but I was was thiiiiis close to my doppleganger taking over her character's place in the party without them "knowing". 

I'm in the process of making modular cave tiles that so far are turning out really nice. I'll post pics later.

You may want to consider deck building games instead of CCGs. Is Legendary still going? Before he and his family moved, one of my friends collected and bought all of the Legendary stuff and I thought that was pretty fun. Doesn't lose value (kinda?) and there's still a lot of variability from one game to the next. 

Other than that, all CCGs with any kind of tournament play or competitive play will wind up being phased out in favor of whatever new product is put out. Of course, while Magic is the standard bearer for obsolescence, Commander is a FANTASTIC format. What's even better is that if you or your son don't own any Magic cards, the various Commander decks that are sold are a great way to get into those games. Plus, you can then buy some packs of whatever the new stuff is, change out cards in your commander decks, and you're good to go. 

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Also, regarding the Commander format for Magic, it seems like one of the best ways to teach someone how to play. You get introduced to a handful of mechanics, learn about synergy on a smaller scale, and you don't have to worry about including 2, 3, or 4 copies of a card since Commander decks are all singletons/one-ofs. It's a 100 card deck where you can't have any multiples of cards, except for basic lands (mountains, forests, plains, swamps, and islands).

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