2022-09-28T18:56:23Z
Cooperative Boardgames: Oathsworn, Tales From the Loop, Castle Panic, Roll Camera, Horizon and more!
(Roger’s Negative Reviews)
Immediate visceral reactions, for which my scale is more or less (1) don’t care, (2) will play if someone waves it under my nose but will probably forget about it, (3) will seek it out for a demo, (4) will buy unplayed (very rare). I’m starting from the position of having lots of games I like and little space for new acquisitions, so I’m certainly being harsher than I was five or ten years ago.
00:32 Roll Camera - I was already interested in trying this, and am now more so. 3
07:48 Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan - dungeon crawler, app, big box full of minis, this is all pretty much calculated not to appeal to me. 1
16:34 Castle Panic - I’ve owned this before (well, Munchkin Panic which was basically the same thing). The game’s OK, I guess, but I don’t love it, and I think other games have done the robot hordes versus players thing better since it came out in 2009. Can the expansions salvage that? Probably not for me, and they all seem to be on BGG with publication dates a few years ago, and apparently I never heard of them. 1-2
22:49 Oathsworn: Into The Deepwood - interesting idea, but big box (boxes), minis, and generic fantasy, and boss fight. 1
30:59 Tales from the Loop - as someone who was meaningfully conscious in the 1980s, I don’t have nostalgia for it. Game looks moderately interesting. 2
39:11 Horizon: First Contact - why not produce a more convincing prototype before sending it to the media? And a circular grid doesn’t make a lot of sense with limited movement. Basically there’s nothing here to grab me beyond “eh, it’s a big cool fight”. 1
3 Likes
I have this. Haven’t seen the video yet.
I will put this on my “need to play this again” list so I can give a better accounting. It’s been a while. I generally remember being slightly disappointed that it was more theme than actual game. But I may remember it wrong.
3 Likes
Aside from some… questionable… manual decisions (like mentioning a rule once and then never mentioning it again, including it not being in the index… “Free Company Token,” I’m lookin’ at you), it is quite good in a Gloomhaven-y sort of way.
I think the effort to keep everything secret is kind of a detriment, since many of the rules and explanations have to be vague enough to allow stuff we haven’t seen “work,” but we did have fun with the first scenario. Is it worth the price? Probably not. But a retail version that doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars would probably be quite good.
The minis are nice, but unnecessary.
Tales from the Loop has been on my radar for a long time, but this video hasn’t convinced me to pull the trigger just yet. Mostly because of my insulting embarrassment of riches I have to play these days (the aforementioned Oathsworn, and Descent 3rd Ed, and the new Journeys in Middle-Earth expansions, and Blackstone Fortress, and Destinies, and Forgotten Waters, and the expansions for Sleeping Gods, and the old The Undercity game from Privateer Press, and Infinity: Defiance… I think that’s all of the barely-played or unplayed RPG-style games I have at the moment… I’m probably forgetting at least a few).
So yeah. Going to keep holding off on TftL.
3 Likes
It’s definitely a “try it first” rather than “buy blind” for me.
3 Likes
“I’ve been manually networking computers via SSH.”
My profession has been insulted. This literally describes the nature of my work.
3 Likes
That’s OK, ssh wasn’t released until 1995. 
2 Likes
And yet I still run into customers who ask to use telnet. We’re 20+ years into the age of SSH, people.
3 Likes
Castle Panic and Roll Camera look like fun, but the rest were meh. Oathsworn looked particularly uninspiring to me (we passed “way too big” at least three boxes ago) and Horizon needed some more time in the kitchen before being sent out.
Love the setting for Tales From The Loop, but the game is gonna be a miss here, I know it.
2 Likes