The Next Overdone Thing

Mechanic: last one was roll and write, now it’s trick-taking.
Theme: nature!

(Edited to clarify. I don’;t think any of these are intrinsically bad, it’s just that I’m seeing an awful lot of them.)

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A lot of nature stuff, but not enough Evolution theme stuff.

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Nature is my favourite theme, so I’m here for this!

Also, Earth does genuinely look great and potentially one to beat Ark Nova, so we’ll see.

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I don’t know if it’s still the case, but I remember there was a time not too long ago when you couldn’t swing a tentacle without hitting a Lovecraft (usually Cthulhu)-themed game.

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Probably the most effective instant turn-off of all themes/settings for me. Although anything with ‘Dungeon’ in the name isn’t far behind (so no, ‘Lovecraft Dungeon’ isn’t really the game for me!).

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I have to say that I’m enjoying Nature as a theme.

WW2 and Cthulhu are turn offs for me. Generic SF or fantasy are just a thing whereas I’d actively search out things like Ark Nova and Earth (I really like nature photography as well)

Also, roll and writes aren’t my cup of tea but I’m really into trick takers.

Basically, I think I’m going to spend a lot of money over the next 12 months

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For me a Lovecraft theme in a board game is too often what SVWAG called “punching Cthulhu in the face” – these should not be just a different bestiary that knocks down your sanity score as well as your hit points, they should be things that you can’t even understand never mind beat. So I’m conceptually happy with The Stars Are Right (you’re cults rearranging the stars to bring on the end of the world), but not with Arkham Horror (you can fight an Elder God at the end, and have a fair chance of winning).

Don’t mind WWII, again if it’s done “right” - big fan of V-Commandos/V-Sabotage, not so much Secret Hitler.

I find generic fantasy (elves and dwarves and wizards and fighters) dull, and generic SF (that sort of mishmash of Trek and Wars and Firefly and…) nearly as dull, but I’m up for either if they’ve got a distinctive flavour instead.

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Was it the Call of Cthulhu base RPG where one the best weapons you could get was a fireplace poker, and if you’re really lucky you might kill a minor minion at best?

I do enjoy unloading a blessed shotgun / dynamite at an elder god in Eldritch Horror, but yeah. Directly face-punching Cthulhu doesn’t seem great.

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Call of Cthulhu itself is quite variable – minor beasties can be tackled quite readily (let’s not forget it was a pioneering break away from the wargamey style of RPGs, and it didn’t break all at once; many of the early scenarios were quite fighty), but there are tougher ones that no PC team can ever hope to beat even if they do have stats theoretically on the same scale as humans. Later RPGs in the genre have mostly tended away from that, with the extreme being Cthulhu Dark, in which the rules for fighting a monster are “you lose”.

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I’m reminded of mid-90s PC adventure game “Prisoner of Ice”, where if any of the Cthulhu deep-one type aquatic monsters manage to close to melee range it just goes to a cutscene where you automatically die.

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Yeah trick takers are fine IMHO - enjoying playing them at the moment.

I’m a sucker for Roman history so almost any game with a Roman theme will at least get me to take a look but generic war games are not really my thing.

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I buy and buy trick takers and yet I keep buying more. Luckily, they tend to be smaller and less expensive than most games.

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I remember playing Ganz Schon Clever for the first time and adored it due to its novelty. No. I haven’t played Yahtzee before. I went out and pnp’d it. All laminated with markers instead of pencils. That was my solution because the game wasn’t available in the UK back then. Then, Welcome To happened and I thought it was still good. And then it kept going and going. Now, everyone and their dog designs “X and writes”. Even Knizia does it. GSC was gone a long time ago and I didn’t even tried its sequels. But I still remember how fascinated I was with GSC when I played it the first time.

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I love roll n writes, but definitely don’t need that many. GSC, Welcome to, Fleet TDG, and Hadrian’s Wall is plenty enough… And then the other Motor City Gamesworks games because they’re so silly.

Trick takers are all good with me. Excited for the English translation of Tricktakers. Heard great things and can’t find it anywhere.

I think repeated plays of The Crew, which I enjoy but was rather more enthusiastically enjoyed by another of the group, to the exclusion of many other games, killed off my enthusiasm for trick taking games, although recently I have been playing a bit of Vajazzle - I’m not sure if this counts as a trick taking game or not but I’ve been enjoying it.

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One of the things that irked me about The Crew was the mission progression. Have we really beaten mission 12, or did we just get lucky with the cards on our fourth attempt?

It put me off too; the thing that’s really make trick-taking click for me is the game of Ninety9 some of us are currently playing on BGA. All of a sudden things are making sense that didn’t before.

By Vajazzle sir means SCOUT? I think that is a “climbing game” (i.e. the thing you put down has to be better than the thing that’s already on the table, see also Red7) which is another significant mechanic in traditional card games.

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Well, you could say that about any game couldn’t you?

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I’m with @RogerBW here, the cards drawn as part of the mission parameters made a huge difference to the difficultly of each mission. After a while it felt like we were repeating the mission until we lucked out with the difficulty instead of getting better at working as a team.

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Ah, yes, that’s the one!

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That’s fair. I felt it very strongly in my plays of The Crew; I can’t remember the details, but there was one sort of combination which often seemed to us impossible unless the cards cooperated (perhaps along the lines of getting a lower trick just before a higher one in the same suit?), and then next time the randomness would mean you didn’t have to do it and it was no problem.

I wonder whether playing The Crew 2, where as I understand it you don’t have a book of missions but generate a random one each time, might feel different.

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