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Archive for Jeff Pratt
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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I haven't posted anything since my Gen Con recap because, well, I've been too busy gaming. Two games in particular have been responsible for that and both of them are pretty controversial, at least here on the geek. Namely, Innovation and Quarriors!, both heavily hyped and in the end, somewhat critically bashed. Right now, I'm loving both of these games and here's why.
Innovation has been attacked by some for being a giant pile of random effects that offer players very little control of their game as it goes wildly careening into a chaotic and completely unpredictable ending. This is absolutely a true statement, but weirdly, only for the first 3-5 games. As you play through it again and again, you realize that there is an "innovation" to combat almost every single tactic your opponent can use against you. Things that seem unbalanced and out of whack your first time through can be fairly easy to counter, once you know what you are looking for. Also, aside from the card abilities that drive the game, there are also some tactics built into the game's basic rules that aren't readily apparent until you have played a few times. It took me three games to realize that sharing a technology with my opponent could be a more effective weapon than a direct attack. Weird, right? I understand the criticisms leveled at the game from those who have only played it once or twice, but take my word for it, the game doesn't show it's true colors until you invest some time with it. My wife and I have played almost nothing else for the past few weeks, it has even made Dominion sit down for a spell. Trust me, if you didn't like it the first time give it another shot (or six), it's worth the effort.
The other game I want to talk about is Quarriors!. This one has really been taking a beating on the forums for a number of reasons. (Of course it's still selling out, so maybe the silent majority actually doesn't have any complaints!) Like Innovation above, I actually tend to agree with, or at least understand, some of the complaints leveled against it. There are times when it is much too random. I have seen my son buy four Dragon dice, yet never get to summon one because of freakishly bad die rolls. I have seen the runaway leader problem that crops up when someone gets lucky and scores multiple assistant dice and then culls down to a super efficient dice bag. These are real problems...but Quarriors! has still been an enjoyable hit for my family because of one simple feature of the game. The fact that summoned monsters attack everyone at the table, every time and with no targeted aggression makes for a fantastically peaceful family game session. Sure, there is the occasional Spell card that must be targeted; but for the most part there is little, if any, reason for anyone to ever feel picked on. Would I necessarily want to play this with my Power Grid buddies? Probably not, but I think that's what everyone who is complaining about it is missing. I wasn't all that impressed with it either (just check the Gen Con recap), but I also hadn't played it with my kids. I think maybe this is just a kid's game and for that target audience, it really does work.
That's not to say that it can't evolve into something more and I certainly hope it does. Looking back I felt much the same way about Dominion when I first played it. I thought it was a neat idea, but poorly executed (or at the very least, boringly so). A half dozen expansions or so later and Dominion has evolved into one of the best games in my collection. Quarriors! is built for the same type of expandability, so hopefully the game's design team will be able to address some of the its flaws through clever and interesting new card abilities, the way Dominion has. I think it's certainly possible to tighten up the game play, even if it never quite makes it up to par as a hardcore strategy title.
Next up, I think it's time for a return trip to Arkham Horror. I think the kids are good and ready to recieve their scholarships to Miskatonic U.
I just hope all those cards don't collapse the kitchen table...
Thu Oct 13, 2011 12:00 pm
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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Now that I've had a few days to recover from the 20-hour days and binge drinking nights that are the Gen Con experience, I figured I should probably throw something up here about some of the new stuff I got to test drive at the convention. I flew back to Ohio on a red eye Monday night, slept away most of Tuesday (jet lag is a bitch) and set off Wednesday for the hallowed halls of Gen Con. The drive flew by, as it was a long overdue reunion with my best gaming buddies from Team Digression. After we got to the hotel, we dropped our stuff in the room and made a quick run to the local liquor store for the evening's entertainment.
The first official game of the convention for us was a run through Cutthroat Caverns. Aside from Dave and myself, no one else had ever played it. After a quick rules briefing and a few more beers, the beautiful backstabby goodness of the game commenced. In the end, we made it to the final boss with only three of us left standing. I managed to put myself into a pretty strong position to stall the others out and claim the winning kill...until new Team Digression recruit Devo accidentally downed one too many cocktails and handed Matt the win. At any rate, the game played out great and I think everyone had a good enough time that we will be very happy to revisit it in the future.
After we packed up Cutthroat, Matt brought out his Summoner Wars decks. He had been talking this game up for the better part of a year, so I was very eager to take it for a ride. I came away from the convention (after several plays beyond this first one) a total convert. At first glance the game seems too light to be anything special, but as I tried out a few different decks I became very intrigued with how uniquely each faction plays. For such a simple game, the depth of tactics is pretty impressive. Summoner Wars has flown to the top of my Must Buy list.
Thursday morning we leaped out of bed and hit the Con running. Well, I actually kind of just staggered, as the Jet Lag was still hitting me pretty hard and I never really went to sleep. Fortunately, the adrenalin rush of opening day kept me upright and alert for most of the afternoon. The first stop was Z-Man Games. Matt was absolutely dedicated to grabbing a copy of The Ares Project, about which he had been hearing a lot of positive buzz. Now I'm going to jump a little bit ahead here and talk about the game. We didn't actually grab a demo until Saturday, but we had vastly uneven experiences. Matt managed to sit down with Geoff Engelstein and learn most of the basic game. Dave and I however, just missed him. We got a guy that had just read the rules on the plane for something to do, without ever playing it. Now that's not a knock against him, he tried his damnedest to guide us through it...but to no avail. I think I managed to grasp at least the primary function of most of the mechanics, but still, I really have no idea how to actually play the game to its conclusion. Bad demo aside, it still seems like a pretty neat game once you puzzle it out. One thing that I can't dismiss though, it sure is ugly. The graphic design is a mess, the cards are too full of stats and arcane symbols to impress the game's theme upon you, and the whole package just feels like it was pulled through a worm hole from some grognard's closet circa 1983. Yuck.
The next stop was for another game I had never heard of, Mage Wars. Our primary motivation was to swag a free t-shirt, but amazingly enough we found ourselves participating in a pretty enjoyable demo. The big gimmick of this title is that while it's a card game, you build your deck into a spellbook and are allowed to find and cast any spell that you want in any order that you need to. There's no blind card draw or resource issues to speak of. I had a few issues with the sheer volume of different status effects and the amount of hidden information (not because I dislike hidden info, but simply because it got to confusing to keep track of what was where!). But overall, it's a very intriguing concept and I am looking forward to seeing how the game does when it's released to a broader audience next year.
Next up was Star Trek [Deck Building Game]: The Next Generation. This was recommended to me by Dave, who had gotten a demo earlier in the year at Origins. I personally had already read through the rules PDF a few weeks before, so I had a feeling that I wasn't going to like it. The demo guy was bored and our fourth player was far more interested in surfing his i-phone porn hub than taking his turns. There's no question the bad demo made my impression of the game worse than it probably deserves, but nevertheless I just don't think the game does a very good job of representing the Star Trek universe. The characters are all there, but the game doesn't utilize them in a way that makes you feel like you're playing through an episode. I think it's a dud, but hardcore Trekkies might give it some love.
One Trek game I did enjoy was Star Trek: Fleet Captains, Wizkids new big box board game. This one supplied everything that Bandai's deck builder lacked. There was exploration, missions and ship to ship combat. It's all very abstracted, were not talking Star Fleet Battles here, but overall I think Wizkids has done a nice job of putting together a game that looks right at home in the Star Fleet Universe. The only drawback to the game is its incredibly cheap cardboard components. Both the hex tiles that make up the primary game board and the cards used to trigger missions are paper thin. It's a shame really, because to me the bad tiles are a deal breaker. There's no way I'm going to pay a hundred dollars for a game and have the board wear out in three months. The game's mechanics require you to manipulate both the tiles and cards quite a bit, so I think it's pretty inevitable that it's going to happen. Hopefully, I'm wrong.
We also spent quite a bit of time kicking around Fantasy Flight's booth for demos of Rune Age, Blood Bowl: Team Manager - The Card Game, Elder Sign and Star Wars: The Card Game. (That's us demoing Blood Bowl Team Manager in the still frame that's posted below the Aug 11th BGGNews Blog, for Fantasy Flight's Day 1 video.) Team Manager was a solid game. It did a pretty good job of distilling a long and complicated board game down into a quick and manageable card game. I'm not sure it has legs though...The consensus among Team Digression was that it would probably get old very quickly after ten or so plays. Matt also pointed out that realistically, the game was closer to Lost Cities than to its Blood Bowl namesake. It seems kind of crazy, but the more I think about it, the more I tend to agree. The game really boils down to just a battle for a majority presence at one of four locations, there's actually very little football going on. It was fun, but not exactly what I hoped it would be...
Rune Age on the other hand, was much better than I expected. So good in fact, the group left the Con with two copies! In many ways, Rune Age does a lot of the things that I've always wished Dominion could do. There is aggressive player interaction, direct combat and decks that can be built to achieve a specific goal. My only critique is the tiny card pool. There are only a couple of options for randomizing the available cards for a particular scenario, so it is possible that the game might become repetitive after a few plays. It seems a no-brainer to expand it, but Fantasy Flight has branded it a Silver Line game. Typically that's where Fantasy Flight puts their lighter, low cost, non-expandable titles. Maybe they've changed that branding, but if they don't expand this title, they are doing it a grave disservice. It's that good.
Elder Sign was pretty much what I expected. A push your luck dice matching game with a very thin Arkham Horror veneer. It was fun, but certainly not a replacement for the classic adventure game. I'd play it again, but it didn't catch my fancy enough to worry about picking it up any time soon. Again, this has been branded a Silver Line game...So I'm not sure if it's going to expand or not!
Last but not least was the new Star Wars card game. It's definitely going to appeal to fans of The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. It plays a little differently, but shares enough to make learning it a breeze if you've played the LotR title. I'm pretty sure it's going to be a big hit...I know I'll be buying it when it finally releases next year. I also got a look at Star Wars: X-Wing. Wings of War with Twin Ion Engines and S-Foils? I think I've died and gone to heaven...
After we were done with Fantasy Flight, I swept through the Flying Frog Productions booth and picked up Invasion From Outer Space: Cloaked Martian Scouts. I haven't had a chance to play them yet, but I did upload a writeup and a couple of pictures courtesy of my wife:
Shelby Pratt
United States
Washington
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I wanted to get a better look at Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game, but with everything else going on I just didn't have time. I have never left a Gen Con without picking up the Flying Frog pre-release, but I simply wasn't going to be comfortable dropping a hundred bucks on a blind buy. I'll just wait a bit and see what everyone else thinks about it.
Friday night was an evening with Navia Dratp. I relearned how to play, remembered how much fun it was...and also how much I suck at it. I guess I'm lucky I never hit the tournament scene on this one, because I never would have made it past the kiddie table. Matt on the other hand, is sort of a Navia savant. He hasn't played in three years and still managed to pound everyone's face who dared to play him. This was pretty much my cue to scoop out of his way and go play more Summoner Wars, a game I decidedly DON'T suck at.
Saturday night saw Team Digression sit down with Eagle Games for a run through Glenn Drover's Empires: The Age of Discovery - Builder Expansion. Age of Empires III is an old favorite of ours, so we were very excited to see the long awaited expansion pack. The game itself was a tense as ever, interspersed with a few bouts of smack talk and a dejected Matt crying in his beer about the South American genocide at the hands of Dave and myself. On a more humorous note (I think), we had one extra non-Digression player at the table with us. He was a very nice gentleman who seemed to be a bit concerned when Dave and I continued to line up Matt's colonists and knock them down with the warfare box. "Why do you always kill the Missionaries first?" he asked. "Because they are the one's that ruin all the fun." I responded...He wasn't amused. A little later, we pretty much sent him running from the table when Dave declared "You know Matt, I don't know why you are such a rules manipulating bastard even when we are learning a new game. Did you come all the way to Gen Con just to get one over on me? That's why I'll gladly sleep with Jeff or with Devo, but I'll never get in bed with you!" Now obviously this isn't the Bored Gaymer blog and what Dave was referring to was the perpetual re-assignment of sleeping arrangements as we tried to find a way to fit four dudes onto two tiny beds. The look on our guest's face was priceless. Hopefully we didn't scar him too much, but he certainly didn't waste anytime getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as the game concluded. Good times.
The expansion itself was very interesting. It seemed to add a whole lot of extra colonists to the game. At first I thought that might weaken it, because the competition for prime spots is extremely tight and really drives the original game. The extra guys actually seemed to increase the tension though, as everyone had extra moves to play defensively and block off spaces. Before the expansion, that was a bit of a losing proposition since you needed every colonist available to focus on your strategy. Another neat addition were the 'Spoils of War', which pop up in the technology building tiles. These are free techs that provide a one time bonus and they do a nice job of making the technology box something to fight over, even when everyone is out of money. I want to play it a few more times, but I'm pretty sure this expansion is going to be a '10' and a permanent addition to my game.
Saturday also saw Team Digression take a swing at Plaid Hat Games new release Dungeon Run. It's too bad they didn't make the show with copies to sell, because I'm pretty sure they would have moved a boat load. I'd have to say it was the best of the new games I demoed. It's fast, simple and full of player interaction. It also looks like it's going to have lots of re-playability as well due to the large amount of special abilities each character can be built with. Expandability will also be fairly easy, so I am absolutely going to pick this up when it comes out. Plaid Hat did give away a couple of copies in a drawing, one of which was won by Devo, the newest member of Team Digression. Of course he's staying back east, so Sasquatch and I will have to wait until September...
Finally, Saturday night we learned two new Small Box Games, Irondale and Omen: A Reign of War. Irondale was alright, perhaps a little dry, but Omen was fantastic. The advanced draft mode makes for an excellent head-to-head card game. I hope the publisher has plans to expand it, because the ONLY weakness the game has is it's smallish pool of cards. We played a couple of times and I enjoyed every game.
Overall it was another great trip to Indy. I got to hang out with my dudes (whom I've sorely missed), play a bunch of new games and revisit some old favorites. The only thing I forgot to do was get my copy of Wilderness Survival out of storage and mail it back for the Yeti that make up the West Coast Arm of Team Digression . I guess I'll just have to go back next year!
Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:00 pm
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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I'm usually pretty good about selling off games that I don't like playing. I've even gotten rid of a grail or two. Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit and Star Wars: Epic Duels left my collection because I just didn't see myself ever really enjoying them. (I found the three-tiered board of the former game disasterously flimsy and the simplicity of the latter game made it fairly worthless to me.) I know both of them are well designed games; that's why they're grails, but they didn't fit my personal tastes...So I got rid of them. I sold off a gigantic collection of Mechwarrior: Dark Age when I dropped out of the tournament scene and did the same thing again with Dreamblade when I realized that it's tournament structure was drying up. I really liked both of these games, but I knew that I would never play them casually.
It wasn't hard, really.
There is another batch of games though, that I am having a very hard time with. Most of them are games that reflect my interest in history. Titles like Britannia, The Republic of Rome, Founding Fathers and Napoleon in Europe. I can't bring myself to get rid of them, because I know I would absolutely love them if I managed to get them played. Unfortunately, I also know that I will not be finding three other people anytime soon that would enjoy them as much as me. So I know they will go unplayed and the logical part of my brain will continue to question why the hell I'm keeping them around. I don't have a good answer...But no, telling me that you have played those games and they suck is not going to change my mind.
It's not just historical themes that get me. Over the years I have also acquired a few games that have great reputations on BGG. I know I probably won't even like them, but I have a hard time getting rid of anything that I haven't actually taken for a ride. Titan, Warrior Knights, and Taj Mahal come to mind here. Most of these I got through online fire sales or by spending store credits from World of Warcraft Trading Card Game tournament winnings. I have heard enough people speaking fondly of these games, which is why I never minded picking them up...but again, these are generally monster games that I have almost zero chance of convincing someone to play with me.
But wait, there's more.
High Frontier, why is your rulebook so damn incomprehensible? I can clearly see that this is not a complex game, but an hour with the game manual and I don't even know where to start.
Stronghold, do you mean to tell me that whatever sucker I trick into playing this is going to have their own DIFFERENT rulebook to read? How the hell will I teach this?
Dominant Species, I think you might be the perfect game for me. If only you didn't last four hours and have a twelve-step turn structure. I'm sure it's all very easy to follow in practice, but I'm also pretty sure I have virtually no chance of getting any of said practice.
These all should hit the road.
They won't.
See you at Gen Con!
Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:00 pm
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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There have been a few posts on BGG over the last couple of weeks about the overwhelming number of games that are being released each year. Reading over the discussions on those threads has gotten me to thinking about my own experiences with new games. Over the years, it seems that most of my gaming eras were dominated by a single game. There was no Cult of the New because:
A) There wasn't that many new games being released at any given time and...
B) If there was, I was unlikely to even know about it unless a copy happened to crop up at the local hobby shop. Of course, it also had to possess an adequately intriguing box cover to make me buy it blind. This was all pre-internet and yes, this is how we did it back then.
I played the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Game (as well as Advanced) from about age 8 until I was 12 years old. Those old AD&D books were like novels...easily a couple of hundred pages long. I knew them like the back of my hand though, as I had literally years of boredom to take them all in.
Next was Star Fleet Battles. Unquestionably the most complicated game I have ever played. This rulebook was easily as long as two AD&D books combined, but written in 1.1.34.a style legalese. I still flip through my Star Fleet Battles: Captain's Edition Basic Set now and then for a laugh. I am amazed that I ever knew how to play through that behemoth, but again...in those days that was the ONLY game I was playing. Nothing else in that period of my life ever came close to capturing my attention from it. I played for about four years or so. Again, the rulebook was daunting...but what else was I doing? It's amazing how much down time we kids had to fill back in the days before X-box Live.
Then came Paydirt. This was an NFL football strategy simulator. The rulebook was much shorter than my previous two obsessions, but it's still a little shocking to look over them now. I'm surprised that I was able to puzzle it all out by myself. (Until this point, all of the games I had played had been taught to me. This particular rulebook must have done a good job of breaking me in, because now I do love my rulebooks!)
I followed those games up with periods of BattleTech, Star Wars CCG, Mage Knight and Mechwarrior: Dark Age. I played all of these rather well and rarely, if ever, had to consult a rulebook. All of these games were played more or less in a gaming vacuum, with no other games competing for my leisure time.
In the end, Twilight Imperium (third edition) was the game that led me down the path of boardgaming. It is one of my favorite games and some of my best gaming memories come from it. Still, I wonder if I would have ever been able to learn it, if I had been playing a dozen other titles at the time, as I do now. The sheer volume of boardgame releases is rapidly becoming overwhelming and the longer and deeper games are harder and harder to make time for. The Republic of Rome is still sitting in my closet, untouched. All of the reviews and session reports I have read absolutely scream that this will be a game I'll love...but every time I break out that rulebook my eyes glaze over and I find an excuse to do something else.
I like to tell myself that my favorite games are the big-themed and complicated simulation types, but when I look at my ratings (which I always try to be very objective and honest with myself about) they just don't support that. The vast majority of my favorite games seem to have 4-8 page rule sets. Short, sweet and easy to digest. I guess I'm just beginning to accept that you can focus better on the strategy in a game when you don't have to keep a 30-step turn order in your head. It's becoming more and more valuable for me to be able to know a game by heart, rather than having to re-read the rules every time I play. I simply don't have five years worth of free time to dedicate to learning the nuances of a game anymore.
My head may want Advanced Squad Leader, but my heart always seems to go back to Memoir '44...
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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About three months ago I picked up the new Stronghold Games edition of Survive: Escape from Atlantis!. I had very fond memories of playing it as a kid, so I was super excited to get my hands on the reprint. I already knew that the game had held up over the years, because right before I moved out of Ohio my buddy Matt had brought an old copy he had found to one of our gaming sessions. We were all so caught up in gleefully killing each other's Atlanteans that I think we played it three or four times in a row. I spent the next three years kicking myself for not storing my childhood copy someplace safe when I was eleven and punished myself by trolling all the local thrift shops, endlessly searching for a used copy. None ever surfaced, but thankfully rumors of a new revised version started cropping up on the Geek...and eventually a copy worked its way into my anxious little hands.
While Stronghold was floating their teasers, they hinted at the whales being left out in favor of adding the giant squid to the monster mix. Of course, a small scale nerd shit storm soon erupted. Looking back, it's pretty clear that the whole controversy was a perfectly executed hype generator. Normally that kind of thing irritates the crap out of me, but this time I found the whole thing to be fairly entertaining, not to mention impressively clever.
After the dust of the controversy died down, Stronghold announced that the squid meeples were real and that they were going to be released as an expansion. I of course, having completionist sickness, simply had to have them. The best part of Survive! is feeding the monsters, so what could be better than more of them? I added them onto the Survive! order without a second thought. Sure enough, when they arrived they looked absolutely awesome, just like the rest of the reprint.
I set the game up straight away, read through the expansion rules and dove right into a four player game with the kiddies. The squid, with the rules as written, turned the game into an absolute bloodbath. We finished having only saved one or two meeples each and the island was completely depopulated before the jungle tiles were even removed. We set up and played again...and once more the land hopping giant squid ate nearly the entire fleeing populace of Atlantis. This thing needed toned down...badly.
Now I normally have a pretty strong dislike for house rules, I think that comes from years of playing in competitive tournament games like Magic, Mechwarrior and Dreamblade. Rules ambiguities wreck havoc in that environment, so I've always been of a mind set to play the game as written. Knowing the rules is half the battle when it comes to becoming tactically proficient in a game, so I always try to understand them completely.
House rules muck that up. Besides, There's nothing worse than being taught a game with someone else's made up rules and then being completely lost when you jump into that same game at a different venue. Sometimes the reverse is true, you go to play a familiar game and the whole table is playing a completely different way that someone in that particular group made up. You end up challenging all the crap the other players are doing and just generally come off as a rules lawyering Killjoy. I don't like it when that happens to me and I try not to trip up others by doing it myself, even when I really hate a rule.
However, this squid release is just really sticking in my craw. The Squid-eeples are amazingly cool and I absolutely need to use them in my games. Still, I can't stop thinking that the rules as written make them far too powerful. Now that it has been out for a few months, it seems that many out here in BGG land are starting to agree. Stronghold did take notice and offered a FAQ fix to tone them down. It helps, but still...I just don't feel right with squids crawling up on land (or having quarter-mile long tentacles) to eat people. They also have the side effect of making the other creatures, especially the whales, become almost inactive for most of the game. Given the choice it's just about always better to activate a squid, rather then mess around with one of the other critters. I want to play with them, but early on...those squid were wrecking the game.
I decided to access the great think tank of the Geek to get some suggestions. I figured if I threw up a couple of ideas, I could gather some input and find a more comfortable way to use them. The idea I was going for was this (previously posted):
One of the great things about Survive! is how well the theme comes together with the mechanics. The creatures all behave iconically, as popular fiction has always imagined them. The whales act like Moby Dick, the sharks behave like Jaws and the sea serpent wrecks the boat AND eats the crew, basically a diabolical combination of the other two creatures. Again, the gameplay meets popular expectations. The squid doesn't (at least in the originally printed rules) feel this way. Giant squid plucking people off of the island, devouring an islander literally every other player turn and having the ability to kill a whale if it strikes first just feel a little bit off.
I think that to thematically tie in the giant squid, they should have primarily preyed upon meeples aboard boats. That's what all those old carvings of the Kraken always depicted, right? That was the intent of my rough draft of a house rule set for them. I thought it would be neat if you could use them to aggressively peel enemy meeples off your boat, the trade off being you just might feed it some of your own if your opponents were lucky. I even thought it might be neat to place them so that they could guard empty boats and make it harder for your opponents to use them. It seemed like a more fitting use for them than the current land shark rules...
Unfortunately, the post was quickly devoured by a British Kraken. He stomped all over it and screamed POWER-UP from the roof tops at every suggestion I made. Now I've been inhabiting the inter-webs long enough not to let things like that really bother me. I'm sure he had fun and despite shooting everything down, he wasn't really all that rude or anything. He did however, almost single handedly shut down the thread. When I dropped my ideas, I erred on the side of things being too powerful as I figured it would be good to start aggressive and then tone things down based on feedback. Nope. All I got was an angry Brit and a suggestion from Kevin at Stronghold games to just play the FAQ. No playtest reports, no ideas, not even a suggestion to change the expansion name from Survive: The Giant Squid to Survive! The Giant Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus expansion. There was nothing but crickets.
Now here we are a couple of months later and I see that finally some others are starting to take issue with the power level of the Squid. I still haven't seen a very good fix though, so I wonder...Is anyone out there playing around with them? I've ran a couple of games using this rough draft:
Giant Squid
1. Whenever a whale tile is revealed, the active player may also place a giant squid in any hex already occupied by a manned or unmanned boat. The whale is placed in the original tile's space as normal.
2. A manned or unmanned boat in the same hex as a giant squid may not be moved in any way until the squid is destroyed or moves away.
3. A squid may be activated instead of a whale anytime a whale symbol is rolled on the creature die.
4. If a whale moves into the same hex as a giant squid, the whale immediately attacks and consumes the giant squid. Remove the giant squid from the game. If the squid was holding a boat (manned or unmanned), it is also destroyed in the encounter. Any meeples aboard become swimmers, as per the normal whale vs. manned boat rules.
I've played two games with this set-up. I haven't decided if I like it or not. It made the board seem kind of static in the early game as the squids pounce early and often on the first surge of manned boats, but things picked up once more empty boats came into play. I feel like there is an over-abundance of boats anyway, so it's nice to have a reason for spawning more of them (to run rescue missions!). The first set of boats to launch typically have a pretty high success rate, so slowing them down might not be such a bad thing. I also like having the squid and whale be a one-two punch. They share spawn tiles, so it's pretty neat to have them work in tandem. Even in normal Survive! Whales don't get a whole lot of action, so having the squid hold the boats in place until the whales get in position to sink them just works...and I can thematically justify it. 
Try it out, see what you think. I am very open to suggestions. Just don't stomp up and down and scream Borken! Borken!
I already know that, I want to fix it...
On a side note, I'm also kind of curious as to what everyone thinks of the dolphin challenge rules. I like the idea of having the dolphin figures on the board protecting swimmers, but they hardly ever activate (the wild card symbol is almost always used to eat someone)...so they are just not that useful. I saw one suggestion that players use the tile as in basic Survive! to move a swimmer three spaces, THEN place the dolphin in the swimmers space. The best of both worlds! Has anyone tried it?
Thu Jun 16, 2011 12:00 pm
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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If you've looked over my profile, it's probably pretty clear to you that I am a card carrying member of the Cult of the New.
The Cult certainly has its perks. I get to snort an innumerable amount of poly-something chemicals everytime I sit down for a gaming session, because my games never actually air out. One or two plays and then off to the storage box with it, hopefully sealing the moisture out and the neurotoxins in. I also never run out of reading material for the bathroom. You'd be surprised how well the manual for Through the Ages passes the time during an extended engagement on the crapper. You all might not admit it, but I know for a fact that eighty-two percent of all published role playing game supplements are nothing more than deluxe edition toilet reading material.
Sometimes I wish I could be the guy that logged eight hundred plays of Puerto Rico or even better yet, be among those that can predict the final score of an Agricola game simply by looking at everyone's hand of cards. It's a pretty impressive skill, for sure, but realistically I know I'll never have the dedication (or time) to achieve it. The depth of analysis put forth by some BGG'ers about the games they play is actually pretty amazing. It would seem that some of you out there think about games at a level that I can't even comprehend. Maybe that's why I game hop. If you can't beat 'em, well then go play something else.
I've also noticed that being a member of the Cult is frowned upon in real life almost as much as it is here on the Geek. I got very spoiled in my old game group, since the core of those guys were always up for absolutely anything. We played a new game almost every other week...and the vast majority of the time we had fun doing it.
Recently though, I've come to realize what a tremendous mistake it is to assume that other people in the hobby feel the same way. Indeed, many of them probably prefer to play the same old comfy Settlers game they have been playing since 1996. I'll be glad to stand right here and tell you that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, because honestly, there isn't...but it still drives me bat-shit crazy. After all, I just got Dominant Species for my birthday. How on earth is your 239th game of Dominion a better option than diving into this new box of glorious glaciation?
At any rate, despite being stuck with Sasquatch as my closest neighbor, I have met a few people to game with. The most prominent is:
Bobby Kalahan
United States
Mount Vernon
Washington
A great guy I met through BGG. He and his wife have provided a much needed gaming outlet for me, not to mention helping to get my wife back into the groove. But man...I'm not sure if Bobby and I just have drastically different taste in games or if it's my predeliction for the hotness that irritates him, because I'd say almost every game I've recommended to him or even taught directly has been met with a resounding Meh.
It's not like every game failed. He loved Railways of the World, Battlestar Galactica, and Dominion so much he rushed out and bought them. The failure rate has simply been far higher than I'm used to seeing with my old group. I assumed after a few conversations that he was into playing everything the boardgame world had to offer...as often as possible. After a good year or so of meeting up with them off and on, I'm just now realizing that I was too swift with presenting the new stuff. I let my desperation for a good game of Chaos in the Old World get the best of me. It was too much work and too little fun for them to learn so many new games, I'm sure.
I enjoy knowing and learning everything I can about the hobby. That's part of why I spend so much time on the Geek. I guess I just like having my finger on the pulse of gaming. I also like to share that information. Maybe I come off as a know it all jackass and he's trying to tell me something by shooting everything down. I think I'm generally an all right dude, but you never know. I mean, most people don't set off with the intention of being an asshole. 
There is, of course, always the possibility that we just have different taste in games. After all, some of his all-star games barely rate with me. I think The Settlers of Catan is just about the dullest game in all of existance, but Bobby would probably jog 200 miles into the desert without a lick of water just to get a game in. Different strokes, I guess.
I never really thought about the Cult of the New being another form of door to door preaching, but now that I am stepping back and taking a good, hard look at it...
Well, I'm sorry everyone. The Cult made me do it. I'm better now, I swear.
On a side note: Sorry Bobby, I STILL say that Small World is just a glorified version of Mancala. 
Sun Jun 12, 2011 12:00 pm
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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Another rainy game day has come and gone. As usual, Sasquatch was a no show, so I went ahead and had another solitaire run through Fantasy Flight's new The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. My first impression is that the game feels like a souped up version of the terrific Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game. Much like Death Angel, the new game has punishingly difficult scenarios (at least against the included starter decks), a timer mechanism to move you along and a very similiar way of handling character actions. You must choose between committing your characters to move (along the quest line), attack or defend against a relentlessly growing number of enemies. You get to pick one and only one, yet you'll almost always need a character to do at least two or three things on any given turn.
It's not an identical system between the two games, but it feels very similiar. The action limitations and the uncertainty of the shadow deck create nice tension and tough decision making, which is always a key factor in making a co-op game exciting and entertaining.
In case you haven't detected my enthusiasm in the description, I like the game. It's got all of the makings of a classic right out of the box. So what's my trepidation?
It's this whole Living Card Game idea. I'm not sure that I get it. Now I understand the general concept behind it. I know it's supposed to offer the collectible game experience in an allegedly lower cost package, with the added benefit of eliminating blind purchases and chase rares. But I'm not really talking about all of that. What I don't get is how is this supposed to work in a co-operative game?
I love what collectible games bring to the table. Yes, it's a money sink. Yes, the format breaks when one player lavishly out spends another. Honestly though, those detractions rarely crop up when you are just playing casually and the benefit these games offer is one of complete engagement. There's nothing like taking a bunch of random card effects and combining them into a finely tuned machine. I often enjoy the deck building aspect of collectible games even more than the head-to-head games themselves.
Obviously, not everyone enjoys deck building. For many people it's just work...and hard work at that. Therein lies what may be the problem with this game. I'm not sure casual fans are going to want to mess with deck building at all. The difficulty of the scenario packs has to ramp up, to keep up with the increasingly efficient deck builds that are sure to evolve with each adventure pack release. The casual crowd is more than likely to get frustrated and quit in this type of environment.
As for the deck building crowd, I see some different problems. First, a major part of the allure of deck building is having a large toolbox of card effects to explore. If the monthly packs are only going to have a few new cards in them, there just isn't much to work with. Decks will be fairly static and quite frankly, will feel like Fantasy Flight is actually building the decks for you. Second, an equally huge part of the deck building experience is trying to build a deck that can consistantly perform towards a specific strategic goal, yet still have enough defense and flexibility to counter strategies meant to stop it.
In other games, you do most of this in the dark. You have no idea what tricks your opponent has lurking in their deck. (Yes, there are net decks and specific predictable archetypes...but we're talking casual, remember?) That's what makes the deck building fun. Trying to predict and counter the unknown is what drives deck builders to keep going back to the binders and searching for the perfect build.
Lord of the Rings might lack that. After all, the shadow deck for each scenario is fixed. You can look at the pool of cards for a scenario and build perfect counters. Is that going to be fun?
As for myself, I'm not really sure. I can see the first time through being fun. Am I going to want to rebuild decks every time I change scenarios? For some reason that seems like it would be very tedious.
Finally, I'm not sure why the base game didn't give you a full set of cards. Shorting everyone two or three cards for each deck's playset might generate extra sales, but holy cow...Three sets? I wouldn't mind having 3 copies of the player decks, that would provide 6 extra copies of a lot of cards to splash into multiple decks. But what the hell are you supposed to do with three sets of each shadow deck? It certainly seems excessive, if not an out and out rip-off.
Alright...I have other questions and concerns about the LCG format in general, but that can wait for another day. For now, I'm going to go track down the Wookie and see if we can knock out a couple of new Warcraft decks to bash together.
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Jeff Pratt
United States
Anacortes
Washington
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I spend a lot of time on the Geek, usually an hour or two a day. That's pretty small potatos compared to many other users. Still, it's starting to weird me out. Mostly because I don't actually play games anymore, at least not very often. When I do, it's either a solitaire romp through Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game or a quick game of Survive: Escape from Atlantis! with the kids. (Gaming with the kids is great of course, but to be honest about it...I spend WAY more time breaking up the sibling fisticuffs than actually enjoying the games.)
For the most part, my days of 6 hour long Twilight Imperium (third edition) sessions are long gone. I'm alright with that. I don't suppose many of us in grown-up land have it all that easy when trying to clear that kind of time in a busy family schedule. The problem is that I've gone from an extremely active gaming life to a nearly non-existant one. Yet here I am, still spending my free time reading blogs about everything new in the hotness or rushing over to the Fantasy Flight page to see if there are anymore sneak peeks of the new Arkham Horror expansion. (On a side note, can you believe they are actually releasing an expansion expansion? I guess the jokes on us after all!) I'm still completely entranced with the hobby.
At the moment, I'm sitting on an absolute treasure trove of games. I have acquired most of my wishlist. I have piles of games by Wallace, Kramer, Vlaada and Konieczka. Most of them are unplayed...but I know I will love them if I ever get them to the table. Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that's going to happen anymore, or at least not very often. See, my wife is a social gamer. She loves sitting around a big table and diving into whatever game happens to be there. She likes the competition and the table talk. She can enjoy almost any game and if you're not careful, she will beat your face...Yet, for whatever reason, it's purely a social convention for her. Take away the party and she has almost no interest. You'd think that someone who loves Power Grid and Glenn Drover's Empires: The Age of Discovery would be thrilled to dive into Agricola or Cyclades, but nope...She's barely batted an eyelash at anything I've picked up over the last couple of years. Whatever the reason, the message seems to be: No group, no game.
I've known this for a while, but I had this little hope that when we moved out here to this little hamlet in the Pacific Northwest that she'd be bored enough to give some of my two player games a shot. I even invested in quite a few co-ops, again hoping for some action. So far it's been pretty futile, but I suppose there is always the hope that Alien Frontiers will be the one to inspire her...
Is this how you end up on Hoarders? Will life imitate art when that copy of Dominant Species I just bought ends up behind the toilet sheltering an entire ecosystem of slime molds and arachnids? Will I be really pissed when the cleanup crew wades into the sea of empty 2-liters and pizza boxes and accidently throws away that plastic Burger King statue that used to pimp my El Grande?
I hope not, but in the meantime I'm going to start doing something productive on here. Hopefully, sharing what's on my mind in the world of gaming might make me fell a tad less insane.
Maybe.
Sat May 28, 2011 12:00 pm
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