I think Memoir is the easiest option. Familiar theme, very few rules.
Many say Ancients is the best, but at the cost of a lot more units and unit-specific rules along with more complicated battle-back mechanics.
BattleLore 2e is maybe the best compromise - asymmetry and interesting rules with some of the lessons learned from older games, but with an attempt to re-streamline.
Hoth is going to end up in my house no matter what I do. It is…unavoidable.
I have ALL of Memoir, which I got when my best friend lived 2 miles away but then he moved 40 minutes to the other side of DC and we haven’t touched it since. I may trade it out for BattleLore one day.
It’s in two boxes - base and flight plan. One box I glued strips of foam core to make rails and did a marker on the side to color the hexes, so they are all stacked. The other box has maps and manuals. Units split pretty easily between the two. It’s… less impressive than you might think?
I need to take a picture of my updated sell pile, so I’ll maybe dig it out at the same time?
I have all of Memoir 44 except the Equipment Pack and New Air Plan. All the tiles, counters and paper maps are in 3 binders on a shelf. The combat decks are in a single small expansion box. Everything else is in the base game box. It is exactly as unimpressive as you might think.
Note that the printed rules got badly messed up for the new Meltwater release. The components certainly look very nice, and I’m sure the game is as enjoyable to play as ever; but if you’re picking up the new version then my impression is that you want to ignore the supplied rules and go immediately for an online replacement manual.
Im so hyped! I hope Allplay gives us the full amount of containers like in 1e. In 2e, it was Mercury Games’ genius idea to cut down the number and so your 5 player is screwed up.
So today I played a prototype of his next game: Orbitstar: Expedition to Darwin IV. Which is a title that might grab your attention if you’re familiar with the sci-fi artwork of Wayne Barlowe (I wasn’t before – or at least I didn’t know the name – but I absolutely see the appeal). As you’d imagine, the game is full of that art and it’s looking lovely.
The game has you exploring the planet Darwin IV, trying to discover and study alien species in various different regions. There’s not a lot of direct player interaction (mostly it’s competition for who studies any given species the most, and occasionally rescuing another player if they take too much damage (saving them time and getting you benefits). It’s a bag/engine builder, with quite a bit of flexibility in letting you do something with what you have in most cases, but letting you do better things if you have the ideal components and have researched the appropriate things. There’s a fair amount going on, but it’s not overwhelming by any stretch, and your viable options are often constrained to a manageable set of choices based on where you are on the planet at that point in time. Horrible things happen to you if you stay in the same location very long, so the game encourages you to shift around regularly.
I had a good time playing this one, and I can see it making a bit of a splash when it reaches crowd-funding just for the sci-fi artwork.
10 minutes into an hour-long video, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that this deep-dive, by an obvious enthusiast, into the book that Orbitstar is based upon, is going to be about the best coverage of that book that you could hope to find online:
(Edit: I have genuine hand-over-the-mouth anxiety about this dude and his coffee.)
Discovery Channel also adapted the book as a ‘documentary’ called Alien Planet:
Oh, interesting. I have the Mayfair first printing. And I like it in a lot of ways, but it is just a single sided board, no black monument, none of the other modules.What I really want is Samurai (my ding and dent version has been trash from the start) but I could get a fresh coat of paint on this one.
