1e is tainted by Eklund, so I haven’t been interested enough to seek it out.
But 2e is a great game, no doubt about that. And so is John Company 2e.
I’m less keen on the Leder games development process that led to Root and Arcs - there’s clearly a big difference between his games and Leder games.
Seeing you do this reminds me how bell much I like MoM 1st ed and despised 2nd ed.
I think 2 things work well in 1e. Seeing the whole map at the start. This leaves a lot less turns using only movement and getting all bored. Secondly having a GM type bad guy mitigates the arbitrary nature of player decisions. It allows the game to be a bit curated and therefore an exciting experience.
This is to say I think all your efforts are very worthwhile!
I played (wrestled with) **The Old King’s Crown** on Tuesday night. 3 players.
It was short notice so I’d forgotten the rules and we learnt as we played.
Its ultimately a lane battler with powers with 3 conflicts each round and then other bits that influence the outcome of the conflicts or the rewards or punishment of those conflicts.
A round is split into seasons.
A round begins with a blind auction for ‘Kingdom Cards’, which give unique and situational powers, then a flow into placement of cards and other bits into conflict. Then the conflict, with powers triggering in turn order. Then there is a phase where you can spend cards to get better (and faction unique) cards, get more rewards and then finally a bit of clean up.
It didn’t explode of the table at me as being unbelievably amazing. It’s good, interesting and will reward repeat plays. It has loads (too many?) of cool concepts. It has multi use cards (big plus for me), auctions for cool stuff, battles with switcheroos and gotchas, trading up and some area control elements as well.
It is staggeringly beautiful. However, the art outweighs the readability of the cards (the font is very small), some iconography is just for show and that bit is not explained in the rulebook. There are keywords and action types and it feels like you have to know them all, and the consequences of them to play it well. Going last is the catch up mechanism, but we didn’t get the benefit of that.
Some games blow me away within a few turns, and they often turn out to be favourites. This was a bit fiddly for that.
It’s definitely not a 10 (yet), it is tempting to flog it at the height of the SUSD effect. I fear it will be like Root where it’s self balancing and a game every has to learn together. It’s probably too big to be a 2 player game, but I do want to go back to it with the rules down play it properly.
The absolutely miniscule hammer and scroll icons are madness. They could be the same size as the other icons and not detract from the art at all.
I dont think there’s even self balancing. Because how do you precisely attacking the leader when you dont even know much about their position? The biggest decisions in this game are pretty much a crapshoot, i feel.
It would need to be an exceptionally good game to outweigh the rage that this would induce in me!
Played Herd Mentality (it’s fine, “Did you guess the word?” party games bore me)
Then got to play Beyond the Sun for the first time and absolutely loved it.
Might have to look into getting it or Beyond the Horizon, as I’m not as fussed about the very aggressive space control part of BtSun and won’t miss it in BtH.
There was definitely some of that. Not that I’d claim to be especially good at the role (for all I know the 2nd ed. app might do a better job than me overall); but there were certainly occasions when I held something back to give them space to keep making progress after they’d stalled a bit too long; and at the end I could see the game ending on either a disappointingly anticlimactic note (in my favour), or a very dramatic crescendo which might go either way, and that decision was a no-brainer. For the most part I took to heart the advice I’d read that the Keeper should be trying to win the game, and I tried to make things difficult for them (albeit with them frequently quashing my attempts with distressing ease!); but naturally I want the game to be fun first and foremost, and that trumped any other goals.
Cheers :)
I’ve not played 2nd ed. myself, nor even read very much about it; but it was apparent to me that both editions have their fans, with 1st ed. remaining the favourite for plenty of people who’d tried both. I don’t know that I wouldn’t also enjoy 2nd ed. but I can say that, as appealing as it is to have something eliminate the hassle of running it, I can’t imagine the social experience for the players could match up to the human vs human game, so your comments make lots of sense.
Coincidentally, I also played Beyond the Sun yesterday for the first time. I also really enjoyed it. I didn’t feel like there were many turns when my best move was obvious or I only had one choice, but they all felt important.
From what I’ve heard from my friends who play BtS, they prefer it to Beyond the Horizon but I’m not sure of their reasons. And my unfamiliarity with the games may mean I wouldn’t understand them even if I knew what they are!
Tetrarchia, in which I had three of the four members of the tetrarchy removed from the board during the course of a single round, along the way to the empire being obliterated by the barbarians. I wasn’t in really strong positions for any of those battles, but I was at least flanking the enemy in two cases, and I’d backed myself to win more than zero of them. I think I rolled a 1 for myself in all three battles. The dice pretty much hated me all game, and I never recovered!
I followed that game with a win, and then had another loss-and-win sequence playing Hispania. The latter games were both fairly quick results… and while I’ve lost quickly before, I don’t think I’ve previously won a game of Hispania on hard settings with this much time left:
Then I broke out Beacon Patrol for some chill tile-laying (in which I failed to score the start tile, and just went careening off to the left…)
(I’m confident that I didn’t originally place the tile below my boat like that :). I took the photo after going indoors for a bit, and when I went back out the wind had shifted a bunch of tiles around… apparently I wasn’t paying sufficient attention trying to put them back! :).
We play this quite a lot as a family at Christmas and such times when we’re all together but don’t want to get up and do anything. We usually end up in really heated arguments about people’s choices and/or ridiculing someone for a crazy answer
A post-Essen gaming weekend (since Handycon wasn’t an option).
Tinderblox: Storm Edition, adds “rain” cubes and a different set of building demands. Is it better than all others? Do I Need it? No, but it’s fun. The rain cards really ought to have the progression of cubes on them (1: add one, 2-3: add two, 4: add three, 5: add four) rather than putting this as a mat in the rules, especially as the rules won’t ever fold flat.
Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game with the Missions expansion. I like it; you get short-term obectives to compete for, there are purple dice which give a small bonus (a point, two cards, or a wild resource), and there are extra cards for the existing decks. This isn’t super demanding and I suspect I will use it even with introductory games.
Map Masters, another Essen risk. We played the co-op mode against boss number 1 (recomended start; the first boss is number 0) and… well, there was a lot of poorly-described fiddly setup, then we did the task with almost no effort. I won’t condemn it yet: a tougher boss, a solo game against a tougher boss, indeed the competitive game could all be more fun. But this wasn’t an impressive first showing.
Diamonds, a trick-taker that’s been coming to Essen with Indie Boards & Cards since 2016 (and it still sells enough to come back each year). Must-follow trick taker; when you win the trick or play out of suit you get one of the suit actions that are how you score, and whoever has most of each suit in their won tricks at the end of the round gets another suit action. You could play this with normal cards and I don’t think it would break anything, but I’ll admit the plastic crystals are shiny. I seem to do rather better at this than at most trick-takers.
Flip 7, not from Essen but always good when the group gets big.
Sea Salt & Paper, similarly but without the big group.
Ticket Gagnant, JC Bouvier’s next game after the Rallyman series. Effectively self-published and I hadn’t managed to find a copy of this before randomly running into JC at Essen. On the surface it looks like a bet-on-the-race game like Wolfgang Kramer’s Top Race system that had its latest incarnation in Downforce; but one o the types of movement card lets you move one horse next to another, displacing another horse that might have been where you landed, so it rapidly goes wild. Great silly fun. (On BGA too.)
We had our friend Yvan over on Saturday, so of course that meant three games of Ticket To Ride Rails & Sails. He won all three, as he usually does, despite loudly complaining that he was unable to do anything, also as he usually does. It’s a running gag at this point.
We then showed him Sea Salt & Paper. He seemed dubious at first, but gave it a shot.
Ten games later, it was 4 AM, our respective dogs were giving us side-eye like “aren’t you EVER going to bed?” and we had a new convert.
I swear, that game is cardboard crack.
It’s highly luck dependent, right? Like, the better person at tracking probabilities, points efficiencies, remembering discards, calling bluffs will generally win but not always. A lot comes down to draw, right?
I ALWAYS LOSE. By like 20 points. It’s insane.
I’ve fundamentally missed something in the core workings of this game. But I do love it. I think this was the one that really settled me that Cathala is one of the greats - I mean, it stands on the back of Cyclades and Splendor Duel and all that, but SS&P was like, ok. People don’t just MAKE stuff like this.
LOBSTERCON WEEKEND EDITION!
Tower Up - very good old-school game. Has a tinge of left-right binding though.
Waddle
Tchu Tchu Train - Korean train game where it uses 2 decks of standard cards. The cards are used to lay tracks a la TTR. Very unique but rather too tactical for me.
Indonesia x2 - someone brought their own pnp of Indo. Amazing game. Fights with The Great Zimbabwe as my number one game ever. Both games of this are epic.
Kansas Pacific - great game. We are all newbies and we underbid on this a lot, and so the player who won the most paper wins.
Power Grid - played 4 player with good players
the Estates - brutal, beautiful, clever
Bohnanza
Greed Incorporated - A Splotter game that I really want to try. Easily one of the best new-to-me. The guy who made this pnp was the same owner of the Indo pnp. Great ideas and I would play it again, but it felt cyclical. We buff up our companies and then crash it so we get fired as executives and then earn our golden parachutes. …and then, rinse and repeat. Hmmm…
HOOOOOOOOOOT STREEEEEEEAAAAAAAKKKKK x3 - FUUUUUUCK YOOOUUUU DAAAAANGLE!!!
Pax Transhumanity x2 - both played with 2 players. First was a teaching game and then the guy said “fuck it!” and we played again and it was lightning fast this time. 2nd game ended in a Singularity and lost this time.
Innovation Ultimate base + Cities + The Unseen - no notes.
Square on Sale - we played it with someone who made their home-made copy with lego. It end up being so beautiful as a result because of the chonky blocks.
Gulf Mobile & Ohio - 5 players and it was excellent
Pax Porfiriana - 4 player guns blazing in Northern Mexico. Player 3 won via military coup after gaining the Catholic Church’s side and at we called it at that point since there’s no moves to stop her.
Magical Athlete - crazy! My twin magician trumps all competitors!
Battlecon - this guy and myself were looking for players and a game to play. And then he was like “this is a bit out of the blue, but do you like Street Fighter”
“uuhh no. I don’t. Why did you ask?”
“I have this game called Battlecon. Any chance you’d like to play it?”
“oh shit. I love Battlecon!!!”
The guy was joyous that someone knows how to play Battlecon and loves it. We had an epic fight. I was Runika against Lucida. Runika got Artificers (e.g. Priority +2) which makes her a menace at early game, but if you hit her, you get to deactivate one of these.
It was unwise to choose the alpha side of her finisher move as it was difficult to setup. And got KO’d. Excellent as usual!
Black Forest - Uwe game revisited. This time I went nuts on livestock by building pastures and cram as many pigs and cows in them.
EDIT:
Forgot these:
Indulgence - trick taking. Its previous version is called Dragonmaster which is the #2 entry on BGG
Power Vacuum - another trick taker. Very interesting concept
I wonder if he knows about Exceed: Season 3? It’s by the same people as BattleCon, their second take on the model. And Season 3 was the full SF2 cast.
Season 4 was Hollow Knight - I have those two and have sadly have only had two rounds.
He has Exceed, Yomi, Sakura Arms, and perhaps some other arcade fighting games I dont remember. He got all bases covered
Everybody’s got their thang.
Which sparked a thought - when one of us gets enormously rich and has a house with a 20 ft ceiling, we should use it to make a mosaic/map of the world using only board game boards (likely a lot of train and war games).
Sounds like a job for pillbox!
