It requires an app. I’ll check the feasibility of it. Mainly if a player can leave the game and return back with just the code
Or just the GM using the app by themselves and relay info
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You can level the same accusation at the pandemic app.
I feel like theirs something about the slowness of real life that is necessary for pandemic because even though the puzzle is the same app pandemic feels like a complete waste of (a heck of a lot less) time. Just not thrilling or tense in the same way.
EXACTLY! I love the stubborn quirkiness of Alchemists, but to an extent, it just makes the game less accessible for little gain. Got to admit defeat sometimes!
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I’m confused. How does Carcassonne not incentivise you to finish things? Cities are only worth half the points if you don’t, and on top of that, every unfinished thing is tying up one or more of your meeples. There are big incentives to finish things. Can you clarify what the difference is?
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Roads and monasteries still score the same unfinished. Cities are always done by the controller, not anyone else, as cities are always a pain to finish. And the game is often quick enough that you can get away just having maaaaybe 2 meeples in your reserve. Although this is mitigated by the two expansion - Inns & Cathedrals, and Traders & Builders. There’s now a gamble on roads and big incentives (10 to 30 points) for anyone to finish cities.
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Received the biggest risk Kickstarter I have ever done and will likely ever do. These days I wouldn’t have backed a campaign like this and especially not for the ultra legendary deluxe version (playmat arrives tomorrow). It’s a plastic fest of big minis and gametrays ™. The box has already taken some damage that must have happened while packing it up (minor but grrr) and while the idea is nice to use the cardboard player tableaus to close the player trays even a few times pushing the cardboard on top of a tray is doing damage to it.
Other than these minor complaints the material is very nice. The game trays do their job of helping setup and providing easy access to all materials and keeping the load of stuff organized. I am sure there are prettier minis out there but these are better than most I have and the wash makes them look nice out of the box.
The rulebooks is well organized and I made almost no mistakes during my first two handed play through.
So this is a worker placement game with a slight doam element in Which players compete to place buildings in the Eldervale and gather elemental power for a scoring party at the end when the vale is settled or discovered… Each of the 8 elements has 2 associated factions with unique powers (though the two I had played very similar) and associated tableau cards gained by visiting the „dungeon“ location.
Each round players place one of their workers (starting with basic and later adding a wizard, warrior and dragon) on one of the hex tiles, executes the associated action and if someone else is present battles them by throwing some dice. If they place next to a monster the monster rushes them and gets involved in the fight as well.
Once all workers have been placed, players take the regroup action during which workers which survived get to execute actions on the player tableau.
Actions in the world or on the tableau include gaining resources, summoning more workers and transforming workers into dwellings and visiting the dungeon to extend the tableau to gain more action slots.
Overall at the start strategy felt quite opaque and I wish the manual had a little bit on strategy for the start. When I teach this I will definitely have to give players some pointers because it took me half the game to figure out how to have enough resources. One of the game end conditions is that all hexes have been discovered and because every dungeon visit includes placing game could end before it even starts…
I enjoyed the game but right now it is taking the last spot among my recent kickstarters packages (the others being Obsession and Moonrakers)
Overall my main misgivings are
- factions feel to similar
- not sure if there are multiple paths to victory
- feels less thematic than expected
- monsters had too little impact in my playthrough
- different elemental tracks are too similar
- battle is extremely random with very little mitigation a single worker could march into a stronghold and win with 1 die over 6
- losing workers in battle is harsh and in no way compensated through the gained resources
I do think this is not a bad game and I may be overly critical because I spent a lot of money on it when I didn’t know any better (their campaign was good). Bit it’s a big box and I am not sure it is filled with a big game. I have not tried solo mode and obviously this is a very fresh first impression… if this was a 50€ game I would be rating this higher. Right now this is probably barely a 7/10 for me.
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It is extremely attractive, seems like a very pretty production. Did the dragon miniature come painted like that, and are there more cool dragons?
This feels like one of those things that can either feel like annoying-swingy-randomness or a story-generator that allows epic moments that everyone can remember, depending on how it’s balanced. Shame to hear that it might lean more towards the former. Looking forward to hearing what you think after playing a game with others!
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Quite a bit of gaming with my wife over the last few days:
Super Big Boggle x3 - she managed an 8 in one of our games - seaweeds. Impressed.
Bananagrams x3 - won the last couple of these. I’m sure I’m due for a loss soon.
Love Letter x2 - we hadn’t played this in awhile, but it’s still good fun if a bit more luck based than we’d like.
Nut x2 - won one, lost one. A decent little 2-3 player game this one, one of the highlights of the Pack O’Games games (though Hue is still better). This could theoretically devolve into “who’s got the squirrels.” But it hasn’t happened in any game I’ve played of it (though you do always want to grab a squirrel if its up for grabs!)
Hey That’s My Fish - lost by one point - she neutralized two of my penguins pretty early so I was pleased it was as close as it was!
Pentago - this one I hadn’t touched in over 5 years, my wife suggested it. It’s still not bad. Connect five with a twist (literally!) we went 2 - 1 in favour of me. But it was fairly late at night so I’m not sure either of us was operating at peak efficiency.
We did not wait long and had a game of Root this afternoon between me and my daughter. She was braving the Eyrie (she loves the birds of the faction, so it is difficult to convince her of how tricky it can be for her to play their rules) and left me with the Marquise’s cat troops.
She started expanding quickly across the northern side of the forest, but her cards were not great: hardly getting any wild bird cards for her degree made her enter into turmoil twice. I was focusing more into establishing recruit centres, and managed to win using a dominance card by controlling the two opposite corner after sneaking through the east side and destroying her initial roost and keeping an ambush card to withstand her counter attack.
Definitely a great game, I cannot wait to learn it better and have a go at using the Vagabond with a three player game.
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We had another go at Dwellings of Eldervale (DoE) last night, this time with two players.
It says 30 min per player on the box. Make that 3 hours (including the teach though).
I managed to teach it surprisingly well and without having to consult the rulebook more than twice! So that’s a plus for the game.
And the game is very pretty and yes there is one more dragon. In the legendary edition there are 16 monsters (one of which is a “serpent” (the one on the picture), plus the Mother of Dragons and the Ice Giant or so. I’ve got the “sound bases” on which you can put the minis so they make sounds when you move them.
So how do my initial criticisms hold after game 2?
- factions feel to similar
This was a bit better with two different factions this time. But the faction abilities are another thing we were both griping about. Of the 4 types of workers (standard, warrior, wizard and dragon), each faction has two types with a special ability and we each had one that we never used.
After only having seen 4 factions in 2 games, I cannot speak to balancing between the different powers but I am betting that there are a couple of abilities in there that can break the game.
There game I think of when I see “unique faction abilities” is Terra Mystica. Each TM faction incredibly unique despite there only being minor tweaks to each faction board. DoE doesn’t even come close to this.
- not sure if there are multiple paths to victory
My partner won with VP from the prophecy-type magic cards, so apparently I was wrong on this count. I lost because I should have seen this coming and didn’t ;
- feels less thematic than expected
- different elemental tracks are too similar
This time the theme of each faction and of each element came through a bit stronger–but just a bit. I still think there should be more for a game like this. We got to see more different dungeon cards and there are a few that are done very nicely but too many are just similar and it seems like it doesn’t really matter much which elements are in play as long as all the resources are represented “evenly”
Thematic factions? How about Gloomhaven characters or Spirit Island spirits? I know it is a bit unfair to compare a game to the creme de la creme but those are two of my favorite games that I’ve played a lot and I can’t help but compare.
- monsters had too little impact in my playthrough
Yes and no. There was a great moment when my partner “tamed” on of the monsters. It was very frustrating for me because I had not seen that type of magic card despite going through a lot of them. And monsters then become workers, strong workers with a lot of dice to roll for combat. (I killed his monster after he used it once, so yay random combat)
At one point we had several monsters on the board and it was fun how they kind of blocked of parts of the map and made placing workers “more interesting”. I had been grabbing treasure tiles with my dragon (my special ability) in a corner of the map and suddenly I was boxed in.
But a few rounds later the monsters were all killed and the map was ours to the end…
Still, it’s something a bit ridiculous that probably has more impact with more players and I haven’t seen this type of thing in other games that much especially not in Area Control type games. So I guess it’s a good idea.
- battle is extremely random with very little mitigation a single worker could march into a stronghold and win with 1 die over 6
Or one dragon worker can kill the other player’s monster meeple (see above)
- losing workers in battle is harsh and in no way compensated through the gained resources
I would mostly stand by this point. However, my partner had a special ability that he could use one of his meeples from the underworld during regroup and I found a couple of magic cards that gave VP for losing battles and even allowed the retrieval of workers from the underworld.
It’s still harsh if you manage to kill off another player’s troops and deny them their regroup income. I neglected to do this at least twice because I didn’t want to antagonize my partner.
The game ended very close with my immensely frustrated partner winning by 128 over 125 points and being very surprised about this last second turnaround (weird because he was in the lead by 15 points before the final counting)
Our main criticism remains that the game is swingy because of the combat which is not easily avoided. Or at least I didn’t see a rule where you could skip combat when you entered a hex where someone else was already present (there are a few magic cards that let you avoid combat). We went through 3/4 of the stack of magic cards that the game has and there just isn’t enough mititgation in the deck for the randomness.
I’d now rate the game a solid 7/10. That’s not much better than before I know. With two players the game let me see that the choices I can make are indeed interesting enough. Rating may still go down through more plays, I highly doubt it will go up.
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Jaws of the Lion scenario 10. We’ve levelled up the monsters now. I joined the rest of the family with my character at Level 4.
We’re still really enjoying this. Getting to play awesome cards The Big One. I’m also really good at opening doors! Gaining new cards into your deck and modifying your attack deck are both very cool.
It’s hard with a family co op because we all want to combo with each other to do cool stuff, but the pre turn communication restrictions make that tricky. We push the line pretty hard at times.
I don’t know what the writing was like in the main game, but this story is comically gory. I think my youngest wouldn’t have enjoyed it a year ago.
Not many games grab us this much. For the four of us to still want to come back to it is really cool.
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Played a 2-handed short game of Brass B (just the canal phase) and must say I am pleasantly surprised to find strategies far less opaque than when I played Brass L as app. Having a physical copy of a game always helps me understand everything far better. I am looking forward getting this to the table in a real game.
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Enjoy. Having played it 3 times this week (for the first time) I’m still very keen to get it back to the table.
It’s even pushing my freshly delivered copy of fort to the back of my shelf to gather dust.
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Just finished my first playthrough of Viticulture Essential Edition - and it was wonderful. Just played alone as a two-hander rather than going against the automata deck to get the hang of it but after the first turn or two I knew it was good and I’m sure this will become a favourite too.
I got one rule wrong, forgetting that in combining white and red grapes for the blush and sparkling wines you add the combined values of those grapes rather than taking the lowest quality grape value, although only one of the order cards that came up involved a blush wine of value 4 so it didnt prolong the gameplay by that error. The game finished with purple defeating orange by 21 points to 19 so it was close throughout too, purple fulfilling more orders but orange picking up more victory points through cards and structures.
I loved how it felt like a slow burn, taking its time to develop through each round as you acquire more workers to take more actions, which leads to more blocking and planning but it didn’t seem complicated or to have a steep learning curve so it might even get introduced to friends new to games after they have tried some introductory titles… A definite keeper: one for the cellar, as it were.
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So. Let’s talk about Unlock, specifically the new Star Wars set.
There are loads of innovations, including…
An answer book, with complete solutions. Which seems weird because you need an app to play.
Advantage cards, you pick 3 each time you play to give you shortcuts. But… who plays the same Unlock scenario more than once.
Then there’s the numbers font.
Behold
Puzzles themselves were good as always, the Star Wars story and soundtrack were exactly what you expect.
So good, but weird, and terrible, terrible fonts.
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Worth buying as a huge Star Wars fan? How long did it take?
You’ve always been able to get basically an answer book with complete solutions for previous Unlocks. It’s just pdf on the website for each set.
We’re the advantages necessary or could you do fine playing without them?
Sounds like they were setting this up as an introductory set for people not into these kinds of things, which I guess sort of makes sense since the Star Wars theme will probably pull in new people.
It’s totally an introductory set.
Advantage cards are things like,
Add 5 minutes to the timer.
Or
X wings always fly in an X formation. (A basic hint)
They don’t really add anything special.
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A little disappointing but understandable I suppose. Thanks for the insight.
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That’s. Ordered it for a family xmas present. I think it’ll be a good thing to do on Christmas Day evening.
We’ve played a lot of Exit games, but none of the Unlock! games.
…
Scenario 11 of JOTL. More of a challenge now. The voidwarden is so powerful, but my wife kept leaving her adjacent to snakes which made the end very tense. Getting to know different characters initiative range is useful. We need to tighten up our teamwork though.
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