Tell them to hurry up and take their turns.
Hit them.
Hit them fifteen times.
I broke 100 points in Underwater Cities. To paraphrase Anthony, “it’s a game you can get better at.” It’s also a game that’s easy to speed up by handling various administrative tasks.
Twilight Imperium is a dangerous galaxy that’s just a little too crowded for everyone, even with 3p. I lost my second space dock to early aggression from the L1Z1X (that’s the Borg) and it was the nail in the coffin for ever having a forward base.
Martin Wallace’s AuZtralia is incredibly interesting as a game. But it’s also interesting as a bit of a dodge. Like A Study in Emerald, it uses Mythos creatures to avoid overtly addressing British Empire and imperialism, while still using it for broad thematic strokes.
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AuZtralia has a few neat ideas! The use of time as a resource is fascinating, and combat has this blackjack vibe that I got into. There’s a bit too much variability from what I’ve seen though, in my playthrough it felt like half the face down monsters were kangaroos and character have a wide power range.
I’ll see how I feel in another game or three - the fortune / misfortune of the unknown in the outback feels good, and you can roll straight through most of the opposition you run into. And the 2p variants are more intriguing than most.
I played a game of Nemesis today, which is more or less Aliens, the board game. The players each control the a character from a crew that recently woke from cryonic sleep due to an emergency, finding another crewmember dead next to them. Due to cryonic sleep induced amnesia, they only remember the rudiments of the ship’s layout, giving the ship some fog of war effect. In addition, each player has two objectives from which they will choose one and discard the other. You win by fulfilling the objective and surviving by either fleeing inside an escape pod, or ensuring that the ship will survive and going back to cryonic sleep. Since you don’t have time to check everything yourself whether the ship is in good order, you also have to trust other players to an extend. Oh yeah, and there are a bunch of aliens who want to eat you, which you have to avoid, flee from or kill. They can also infect you which has the risk of killing you even if you survive the game and complete your objectives.
This game was a lot of fun. It cribs a lot from other games. Most notable similarities I found with Dead of Winter and Massive Darkness, at least among the games I have played before. And of course the flavor has a lot from other fiction franchises with similar premises, i.e. Alien and Dead Space. But it was a lot of fun. It helps though when everyone at the table your are playing at is a massive geek, rattling off more sci-fi tropes and joking about the idiotic layout of the ship etc.
The game itself had unfortunately was also a bit hard. Three of us players were almost immediately covered in slime, which makes it far easier for aliens to spawn, and as it turned out the room which lets you remove that state was not in that specific game. My personal objective also required the comms room to send of an emergency signal was also one of the last we found, though that also more or less covered with the other part of my objective of exploring every room on the ship.
Basically I had all my objectives done, but I also found I had been infected with an alien parasite. This meant that I needed to head to the surgery room which was unfortunately a ways away, particularly with me hobbled by both a serious wound which affected the number of cards I could have in hand, and the fact that I had the infection card in hand which blocked one of my hand slots. However, other players also needed to head there which I thought would let us fight together. But out of the blue our Soldier unlocks an escape pod with a key card he had found while basically searching every time he could, and the other three players including myself are just “wtf”.
Next players turn happens and I couldn’t shut my mouth, telling him that he is close enough that he could escape instead at the risk of dying to a possible infection himself, and he takes opportunity, as well as the next player instead of joining up with me to go to the surgery room. A three player battle over the pod ensues, with the soldier coming out ahead anyhow and fleeing. So I had to slowly trudge to the surgery room, spending all my resources to fend off aliens, while the other people were now farther behind.
I managed to do the surgery, but in the end an event triggered an overload of malfunctions, ship lost hull integrity and everybody on board died. Only our soldier, who with his escape also robbed us of our greatest source of firepower to kill aliens, managed to survive, and the bastard even completed his objective: escaping with an emergency pod while holding seven item cards. Had the others just let him be, we could very likely have managed to make it to surgery, head back to the cryonic pods and everybody could have me their victory conditions.
Still this was a lot of fun and I’d like to play it again or even own it. Unfortunately it appears the game was a Kickstarter only thing, which a) makes no sense whatsoever, and b) means that unless I will play with more or less the same group again, I will never be able to play it again.
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Nemesis isn’t kickstarter only. It’s just not in retail yet. Awaken Realms is one of those companies that can never get its shit together and either give realistic dates or speed up their production cycle.
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Haha, I just got an upgrade pack for my copy of This War of Mine from them. They sure do put out a lot of stuff, don’t they?
We played Cerebria (and the expansion that adds Balance) twice this week - lots of things to analyze and think about, but it’s very easy to lose sight of medium-term plans and disappear into short-term tactical decisions. It seems useful to think at least one turn ahead.
On a similar note, we played Antiquity on Friday. It had been over a year since I played, and I completely forgot everything I knew - optimal build orders, schedules for when goods should arrive… but it worked out and we were all equally bad. Only Bill (who had never played before) had an excuse.
Summit, as an incredibly silly palate cleanser on Saturday. Anthony has promised to teach the competitive game at some point, which sounds like a cartoon scramble to the top of K2.
Quartermaster General: The Cold War (ie. the 3p QMG). Works great, even with three teams. The QMG system is solid, you still get the fundamental goodness of managing builds and battles and statuses, even with extra phases to play cards. You can also share spaces with your enemies now, and look uncomfortably across the table at the tactical nuke that’s sitting face-up in front of them.
I can’t imagine playing this game and not escalating to nukes - QMG’s Cold War can be bloodier than its WWII.
Also Combat Commander, if you count reading the rules and working through the example of play. I had no interest in hex/counter wargames until I found out CC was also a card game…
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My rules project this week was Combat Commander, which I played twice: on Friday (with Sean) and Sunday (with Anthony). The game on Sunday was a bloodbath, with three out of the four leaders dead in the first two game turns. Seemed like a good time to call it, anyway, since I didn’t have a snowball’s chance with my German platoon hunkered down in a useless farmhouse, surrounded by 50+ leaderless Russian riflemen.
Anthony wanted to play a trick-taking game and had a go at the 3p variant of Yokai Septet this week. It works with three, but it doesn’t hold up to my favorite 3p trick-takers… I’d like to try the partnership game, you could actually capture some of the weaker 7s by working together.
This week’s Quartermaster General: The Cold War immediately became a hot war over Germany, which passed back and forth just enough for the third world to sneak in a win, even after enduring a significant bombing campaign from NATO at the end of the war. If the world superpowers could only make a dozen nuclear weapons between them, and immediately opened fire in 1946, this would have been a plausible outcome.
Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Kraken. One of Anthony’s favorites, with a new expansion. I like the Kraken, adds just a bit more drama to the story. It’s also another opportunity to get completely demolished by bad rolls, so it helps to set your expectations accordingly.
Also The Lost Expedition, Everdell, and The Rise of Queensdale (game 7/?)
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Played a full game of Forbidden Stars this weekend. While I enjoyed the session, we horribly mangled a number of rules; Forbidden Stars is definitely a classic FFG game in that it’s got more exceptions than it has rules.
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Warmed up on Friday playing Agility with @DemoWeasel, before a spontaneous game of 1846. You might not think it’s possible to play a train game spontaneously, but at present the only games I’ve played more than 1846 in the past decade are Netrunner, Race for the Galaxy, and Dominion. (after last year, 1889 is creeping up there, too)
Saturday was a fully pleasant game day of Rise of Queensdale, Solenia, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and Kingdom Builder. Queensdale and Consulting Detective are stand-outs; we hit all the beats unraveling the second case.
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A few hands of No Thanks and Sticheln during the week… also:
Combat Commander: Europe, which has proven entertaining enough to order the extra box with British, Italian, and French armies. Last night Eric got the event that spawned Dietel the German hero AND the event that turned him into a veteran back-to-back, gave him his only heavy machine gun, and Dietel personally killed two squads of Russian militia, ran through a minefield, and winged the Russian captain with a stray bullet before getting lit up in a fatal melee inside the Russian command post. He was like a Team Fortress scout who made it all the way to the flag room and got destroyed by a turret.
It’s not as easy to make time for 2p games, but CC has been worth it.
Maria is a wargame with a completely different approach - a European design about a very European war, for three players, using a hand of suited playing cards and a dense point-to-point map. It reminds me of when I first played a tabletop role-playing game published by a Japanese designer for a Japanese audience - a design on a completely different wavelength from anything Avalon Hill or GMT would publish.
Anthony also ordered two expansions that arrived this week. One expansion for the recent Dice Forge (not to be confused with King’s Forge, Dice Throne, or Castle Dice) which adds a nice bit of variety.
An expansion for Euphoria, which is practically a second edition being sold as an upgrade kit. This weekend we played Euphoria for the first time in four years, and all of the changes seemed well-considered.
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I bought a copy of Fury of Dracula and played a first game tonight without the advanced rules. Up to four players play four hunter characters from Dracula lore while another players Dracula, who moves hiddenly by playing cards with his position face down. If the Hunters find one of Draculas cards they may encounter one of his minions or other traps, or have to fight Dracula himself, while Dracula has to stay alive, hopefully have his vampire minions remain untouched by the minions to achieve a point goal.
The luck of the draw made me Dracula and I admittedly played pretty badly. I cornered myself early and the hunters managed to expose and kill my vampire encounter card I had on the board. I had to flee by sea from southern Europe but the Hunters also blockaded ports I wanted to land on and forced me to stay at sea longer. However, that also caused them to get confused. Just as they had almost caught up to me in Spain, the most vocal player on the table exclaimed that he was an idiot and that I was likely went to the Black sea on the other side of the map instead, as I admitted that I had overlooked that it borders the Ionic sea through the Bosporus earlier in the game. An involuntary sly smile from me sealed the deal and they turned around, trying to chase me in eastern europe again, leaving me loads of time to saunter through the spanish countryside.
However, in the end I also made a mistake. I had an event card that would have let me redirect a train in a direction of my choice but I forgot about it, which let one hunter wildly guess on their last turn and catch up to me. A combat ensued with me only on 6 life. However, the hunter made a mistake and played their combat cards in the wrong order, allowing me to end combat by countering one of their cards and made me win by hitting the point goal in two ways almost simultaneously.
It was a very entertaining game for me when the hunters put themselves on a wild goose chase. However, it also took way too long as we played for almost 4 hours, including teaching the game to the other players beforehand.
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Fury of Dracula is three hours of beautiful tension followed by ten minutes of anticlimactic rock paper scissors. I enjoy most of it but that last but makes playing it over something like Treasure Island very difficult.
Four hours does seem awfully long for Fury of Dracula. There’s no formula for “this game is taking too long”… you just feel it in your bones.
90 minutes is already a little long for that game, IME.
Yeah, the table took a long time deliberating an analyzing my every move once they had a trail, counting up the entire possibility space, or the players took a long time deciding what to do during their turn. There were also multiple discussions into vampire lore and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in particular which didn’t help to speed up the pace.
I think your players were just slow. When we played Fury of Dracula or Scotland Yard we narrowed down the space very quickly.