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On 2/10/2023 at 9:07 AM, jazzygeofferz said:

Just watched a fascinating video about a solo D&D resource kit for people who for whatever reason can't get a group together to play with. 

 

Mörk Borg has a solo supplement and it's pretty rules light so even easier than setting up DnD.

https://1d105.itch.io/solitary-defilement

There are others, too, seeing as the game has a truly open and free license.

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Played Dune Imperium which is completely different to the original Dune board game (which is all about hidden powers/win conditions, area control and forming/breaking alliances). Imperium is apparently less explicitly thematic, but is mechnically very sound and at a level I enjoyed (took two hours, took a lot of rule teaching but was straightforward and intuitive once we were playing).

It's key selling point is that it's a combination of a deckbuilder (eg Dominion) and a worker placement (eg Stone Age, Viticulture). Both that and the balance of the various action spaces means you don't get the problem of some worker placement games where there's a clear winning strategy and it becomes very predictable what people will do (eg first player always goes for agriculture in Stone Age). Instead the randomness of what five cards you get in your hand each turn means it's very tactical and you have to find a way to make the most of each round and pick your battles well (each round ends in a massive fight where you lose all the troops you put in, win or lose). While you may get a duff hand, over the course of the game the luck element evens out.

It's probably not for hardcore Euro-game enthusiasts as there's little scope for developing a long-term strategy, but it's great if you like the principle of Euro games but not the whole "you have to build up an engine/strategy, you wind up doing the same thing every turn, and you can tell very early who's going to win" elements.

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Bought Lost Ruins of Arnak, but just could not get any joy out of it.  Was recommend Dune Imperium as an alternative, and it is awesome.  Cracking solo mode.  Theme really works too.

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Three player chess, anybody? Looks like there are a couple of variants as well. 

 

 

 

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As regards that Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and Mork Borg supplements, are either of those usable with other TTRPGs for solo play? I got the entire original Traveller series on Humble Bundle a while back, and I'd like to do a solo campaign, if possible.

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Played Genotype last night. It's the rather odd premise that you're an assistant to Gregor Mendel, the man who fucked about with pea plants to figure out how genetics worked. It's a combination of worker placement and dice rolling. The dice determine what genetic traits you can create and you're trying to get specific combinations of traits to get a particular plant. One of the actions is fixing the genes so that there's a better chance (or even a certainty) of getting the particular traits you need. 

While it looks very complex and takes a while to learn, it flows very nicely once you're into it. There's not much downtime and a nice level of interaction where you can fuck people over but not in an aggressive manner. It's definitely one I'd be happy to play again.

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Played Coinbra, which is ranked #200 on BoardGameGeek (ie among the very best) and I don't know why. When we were setting up, I joked it looked like somebody told an AI tool to create a Euro-game, but it turned out to play that way too. Whatever theme its meant to have is impossible to detect while playing, so it's just a bunch of mechanisms. You roll dice and pick one to decide the order in which you pick a card (and the price) which lets you push a cube up a track and at no point do you really understand why.

For example, there are two main resources (money and troops) but they work in exactly the same way and there's no thematic reason why you need money to acquire some cards and troops to acquire others. It just leaves it as a massive maths/probability puzzle where at some points you have to look at 12 dice and 12 cards, each of which has a bunch of unintuitive icons and figure out which combo is going to work out best in the long run, so turns take ages and there's no logical story behind any strategy.

I didn't actually hate the experience of playing but I wouldn't be keen to do it again and I'd keep it well away from anyone who was new to modern board gaming because they'd never come back.

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Picked up 7 Wonders Duel this week as I am a longtime Civ fan so I knew I'd love it and it's the kind of game my wife enjoys too. It's really fun. We've only had a couple games so far. It feels like it will have a decent amount of depth and variation for subsequent plays and it's nice and fast. I will say that it seems like the military / science victory approach seems really high risk so I'm not sure how often it will happen once we're good at the game. Time will tell! 

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Backed a Kickstarter for Migration: Mars, which I ended up waiting quite some time for, but got last year. Hadn't had a chance to play it, though.

Finally got round to it with some friends, and it's a fun little resource management/city-builder game. Looking at about an hour per game, and overall it's a pleasant set to look at, the rules are quite easy to understand and mess around with, and it's got a fair bit of replay value, as the players choose one of four different factions with different abilities. 

Sort of a slightly more advanced Settlers of Catan IN SPAAAAACE, but it's a good little game.

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Played Just One for the first time last night. It's a very fun cooperative game (though actually scoring/winning is pretty much arbitrary and tacked on, it's more of a fun activity). One player has to guess a word based on clues from every other player. The catch is the clues can only be one word, and if two or more people put the same clue then that clue is removed. It's very tactical trying to figure out the right clue that's obvious enough to be useful but not obvious enough that someone else puts it. However, you might want to put it because you assume everyone else thinks it's obvious. For example, we had the answer Australia and two people both put Perth because they figured somebody else would put a more obvious city.

I think I've forgotten to mention Scout which is now a common evening-ending filler in our group. It's a simple card game (with a theme that you can completely ignore) where you're trying to put down your cards and collect points by beating the previous players hand (or pick up a card if you can't), either with a set of matching numbers or a run of consecutive numbers. The catch is that you can only put down a group of cards that are next to each other in your hand and you can't rearrange your hand (though if you pick up a card, you can put it in anywhere). It gets surprisingly tactical between getting down cards as often as possible and tactically taking cards so that you can build up groups. It's a little fiddly to get your head round which hands beat which, but once you've got it it becomes a lovely balance of luck and skill.

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Has anybody played Hail Hydra? It looks fascinating and something I'm thinking of picking up for the Adult Autistic group I go to. From the blurb on the back of the box it sounds a bit like Secret Hitler? It's like £6 in The Entertainer.

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3 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Has anybody played Hail Hydra? It looks fascinating and something I'm thinking of picking up for the Adult Autistic group I go to. From the blurb on the back of the box it sounds a bit like Secret Hitler? It's like £6 in The Entertainer.

Not played it, but here’s the BGG page for it.  6.5 is a good score on there.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/256877/hail-hydra

Incidentally, Fanboy 3 in Manchester often holds events for people with Autism and other groups who may not want to attend the more mainstream ones for one reason or another.  Good bunch in there.

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