Forgive me, Herr Doctor. The temptations of the cardboard was too strong. Easter weekend sale on Magic Madhouse
Oriflamme + the Ablaze expansion. I forgot who talked about this in the “influencer” sphere, but I like filler card games with player interaction. I think it was the SUSD gang.
Sumatra - Quinns didn’t like it. But it was a Knizia on sale…
Ratzzia - Sophia Wagner impressed me with Noria. I haven’t tried The Boldest yet.
Karekare - spatial game with something more going on from what I’ve seen.
Lost Expeditions: Fountain of Youth & Other Adventures - a gift to a friend. I hope she doesn’t have the exp yet!
Lost Cities: To Go - Amazon said it’s “Deutsch”. Listen, pal. I don’t care if it’s in Dutch. It’s £3 with Prime! I’ve been to Holland once. I can handle this.
Join us! It’s a great duelling card game for filthy casuals who don’t want to tinker with their decks like me.
Oh, I’m all for a bit of summoning! Got a friend interested already. It’s just I’m not sure whether to go for the Total Cards preorder, who is cheapest but often delivers late (my fort preorder was like a month late!), or Dice & Decks, which is about the same price but just short of free shipping.
I’m thinking of combining SW with the latest Return to pack for Arkham LCG, which would give free shipping but delay my order by 2 weeks. But D&D are a lot more reliable and would I play it in those 2 weeks anyway?
And yes, I love card games but hate deck tinkering. I guess deck tinkering is okay if you can do it socially, but all my friends are impatient and want ME to make the decks on my lonesome before game night. I cry
And I hate never knowing if the bad game was me or the deck. Just give me a deck that’s been proven to be okay!
There’s a site for that. Arkhamdb. Has all kinds of posted deck suggestions for all the investigators, sometimes even tuned for a particular cycle, or whether going through solo or multiplayer. I believe it can even suggest a deck based on the cycles you have purchased. I have not used it yet, but from everything I hear it is a great resource.
Does using someone else’s deck design not feel as if you’re missing out on part of the game?
(Just as I wrote a Book of Missions, basic reasonably-efficient mission plans for Leaving Earth, but I recommend people don’t use it because much of the fun is in working them out for oneself.)
Yeah, I tend to use the DBs for Arkham, Netrunner, SW Destiny, and L5R decks. Or at least for the foundation and then swap in and out the interesting cards I want to try.
For Arkham I’m going to do the ultra nerdy thing and get some hardback books printed with the scenarios so it’s not all loose leaflets, and to bring together Return to with the campaigns. Think I’ll sort out some deck lists for the appendices of each campaign too.
Some people just don’t like deck construction and it actually hinders their enjoyment of the game. Sounds like @KIR2’s friends may fall within this description, or they just want to spend their time playing the game, and not prepping for it.
But in essence, I agree. I think it is more fun to make your deck (even though countless people have probably made it before without you knowing), warts and all.
What @COMaestro said. My friends just want to meet and play. Deck constructing feels more like pre-game admin to them. Playing with pre-constructed decks is no different from assymetrical set ups of other board games.
I do like making decks if there’s a conversation to be had about choices. As a solitary venture I don’t find it much fun, especially if I need to make several decks for my friends. If it’s something competitive like Netrunner, Flesh & Blood or Destiny, I’ll be more tolerable of deckbuilding alone for surprises, but I haven’t done that in a longwhile.
Part of the frustration of deck building is when there are SO MANY cards that knowing them all is a hassle. Knowing what is comparable in function is a headache. When it’s a choice of 1 out of a limited set of cards, like Aristeia, I find it more fun. Enough to tinker with to create a custom build, but not enough to take loads of time and restricted enough that you know you probably won’t break it for yourself.
The other big controversy is: How many games to play in an Arkham session? My friend only likes to play 1 game a session because he finds it too stressful. But IMO, 2 games a session is best to knock a campaign out in 4 sessions. 8 sessions tend to drag a bit too much and it becomes a chore to sort out sessions by the end (especially as I always have to go to his house, since he doesn’t like dogs - it’s a lot of cycling).
I’m asking not because I have a point to make but because I’m having similar trepidation about Ashes. I’m really not interested in “learning the meta” or getting into tournaments, but I don’t want to play only with precon decks. I think for a small group that’s mostly playing with each other it would probably be more fun to start with a stock deck and perhaps tweak it a bit than to use someone’s hyper-optimised tournament-winning design.
I’m always interested in how a small kitchen counter group meta develops, but I have no interest in tournaments where you’re playing against a hive mind meta with everyone playing variations of the decided optimal decks. I want to learn myself, not be told what I need to play to win!
The tournament system is broken when so few people are actually doing their own thing IMO.
I’m hoping this is what will happen with my local group and Flesh & Blood. But I’m sure people will be googling optimal decks in no time. It’s the world we live in
Not a “played” per se but I think for the first time I’m just going to bin the pieces for my recently received copy of canvas.
The wooden bits are nice and the cardboard bits don’t fit even when punched so it feels utterly pointless to keep the “downgrade” pieces. The only hitch is that it feels completely wrong to bin the cardboard chits.
Over here the shops have really quite different timings when they get in new games. One shop is always getting a few copies ahead of everyone else (because I am slow on the decision making if I haven’t preordered I miss those copies). Another one is consistently cheaper and much much later by the time they get copies I am in phase two of my waffling and tend to miss it as well. I think it is all in who they have distribution with for each publisher and how their contracts are set up. But that’s just wild guessing.
And then there is my FLGS. From some publishers they get stuff earlier than even the webshops, sometimes they have copies left when all the webshops are sold out. But their pricing varies wildly in comparison mostly veering toward expensive and if they have to back-order something–it takes forever!
The 900lb gorilla importer in the UK is still Esdevium (now an Asmodée company). They decide what they’re going to bring over, which isn’t always what the shops want or as much as they want, but they have to deal with them for the bread-and-butter games no matter how thin their margins get.
I know that Leisure Games and Thirsty Meeples do quite a bit of their own importing, and I suspect that others do too.
I played the Arkham Horror LCG with some friends, and I really disliked that phase of the game. I’m new to the game, I don’t know how it works yet, I don’t know what these cards do yet, there’s a ton of them, and so now I have to read all the cards and try to make some kind of informed decision based on almost no knowledge, and maybe end up making bad choices – all of which takes quite a long time to do, delaying any kind of fun, and lowering my overall enjoyment of the session.
You can spend so much time doing it, and then it’s pure chance whether you ever see those cards when you want them, so it can easily be a waste of time in practice, which is even more aggravating – firstly you were forced to become super-aware of the cards that you personally wanted, and then the game never let you use them.
Don’t do this to people unless you know that they’re keen on that aspect of the game. You can just give everyone a pre-built deck and start playing the game – give newcomers a chance to find out if they even like the game before making them do extra work outside of it. If the game isn’t enjoyable with some kind of default deck, then it’s surely a bad game. If the people do enjoy the game, then maybe (maybe) they’ll be keen to do some custom deck-building in subsequent games, having acquired enough background knowledge to actually get some enjoyment out of the process. I certainly ended up with a better understanding of the deck-building process as the campaign went on, but I’d still gladly have skipped it every single time, and had the rulebook tell me which cards to use so that we could get to the gameplay.
SWMBO has been playing Terra Mystica with her regular bunch, so I stopped off at the FLGS and bought their only copy (using my outstanding $20 credit). Turns out I just beat one the folks she’s been playing the game online with by less than an hour. BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
- it’s a lot of cycling).