The Actual Table

#1310

The new edition of John Company sounds so good!

While waiting I finally got my own copies of a couple of games I’ve been looking for.

20210326_205340_(1)
20210326_205340_(1)3480×4177 2.01 MB

NBD, they’ve only been around more than fifteen and ten years, respectively. A pair of odd, but brilliant games, I’ve played them often and never had the chance to get them before. Ostensibly fairly straightforward wargames, they are different in many ways, with players playing opposing sides simultaneously, hidden unit strengths, 1 vs all gameplay, combat decks dedicated to different regions, and so on.

To add to my card game woes, I got a great example.

20210327_012037
20210327_0120373480×4640 2.89 MB

As impeccably presented as it is, it’s not going to fit in a deckbox and it’s probably only just going to fit in its original box when sleeved. At some point this is going to get so annoying I’m going to stop buying games.
20210327_013022
20210327_0130223480×4640 2.36 MB

Not yet though. It’s a trick-taker with weighty player powers and I love it, the art is muy appropriado, and it makes people curse each other mightily.

3 Likes
#1311

Nice haul. Friedrich is good. Maria is amazing. Looking forward to John Company, 2nd Edition.

1 Like
#1312

I’m interested to see what differences the second edition of John company brings to the table. They seem to have done away with the awful, complicated system of Indian territory cards, which is obviously quite a relief to me.

I do wonder if they’ve done anything to mitigate dice luck, or if I just have to accept it’s a d6 dice game with all the swings of luck that brings with it. I had one game where my chairman just wouldn’t retire (a 50/50 chance at the end of every round!). If you don’t retire, you can’t score points. I also struggled to promote my own people because of the nepotism penalty. Gruelling.

I still want to get it to the table again, even though probably half my group feels otherwise. Maybe the 2nd edition would get some more play.

2 Likes
#1313

With my wife, games are completely hit or miss. She loves traditional trick taking games, for example, but doesn’t like Fox in the Forest. She enjoys Terra Mystica but it is pulling teeth to get her to learn even a medium-weight game. On a whim I broke out Star Realms, assuming she would hate it and she is hooked. Looks like there will be many games of Star Realms in my future.

5 Likes
#1314

Star Realms is great. Playing that on IOS is a daily ritual. I’m a TM naysayer, but I quite liked the Gaia Project.

2 Likes
#1315

can’t wait for the Gaja Project app.

i like Cthulhu Realms even more than SR.
you should give it a try and join the Cthulhu Realms Challenge

2 Likes
#1316

I’m sure it is easy to learn but the completely unnecessary iconography is quite the turn off, especially when there are plenty of alternatives to the game.

#1317

learning curve or iconography or whatever…it’s just the better game, alone because of the preview feature.

1 Like
#1318

I got my wife to learn Fox in the Forest. She beat me regularly, but now prefers to play lighter games. Cribbage and dominoes (fives) are great classic games.

1 Like
#1319

I had a similar experience. I was able to get my wife into the Catan 2-player card game, and she won at least 75% of the time. But during the pandemic, we’ve been playing almost nothing but whist with her parents (who we’ve been living with), which is a more straight-forward game.

#1320

John Company 2e has launched, with me on board.

3 Likes
#1321

IMG-20210402-WA0025
IMG-20210402-WA00251600×1200 154 KB

After a couple of cases of the Carlton House box set, it’s fair to say it’s just not worth the money. We’re enjoying ourselves despite, not because of, the game, and the errors in the first case were so plentiful it really began to mess with our ability to solve the crime; there was an enormous infodump of irrelevant information, and the map for the case doesn’t match what happens in the text. We solved it because this is the third box of cases and we’re experienced. The errors were common, and of such varying type, it made things much more challenging, for the wrong reasons, than they had to be. I won’t start on the speech that introduced an extended family tree of fourteen completely new characters.

The second case was better, albeit clearly based on a famous hard-boiled mystery, which I realised early on. This might have helped, but when we got to the end we found the scoring criteria changed without warning. Ace. :-l

Oath should be here in a week or so. I can stare at the box and dream.

1 Like
#1322

So, Final Hour was … fine. Mostly it made me realize that what I like about Arkham Horror is the flavor. Strip out most of the flavor to make the game quicker and simpler, and you have a perfectly adequate game whose appeal overlaps essentially not at all with Arkham Horror’s. So it doesn’t really have a good reason to exist.

By contrast, AH3 is going great. I was ordering a shower curtain liner from Amazon, and figured I’d throw in the small expansion, because I always feel bad making someone drive to my house to deliver a small, inexpensive package. The incentives of Prime bother me. Of course, I’m also realizing that I need to stop thinking of Amazon as a place, since lots of my purchases will be shipped from different warehouses, anyway. That aside, we just finished the first scenario, and it was a blast. The setup is basically A Fistful of Dollars, but with Lovecraftian interference. I played Kate Winthrop, who seems like a pretty standard seeker build with some tricks to make her more consistent; an excellent option for a player who hates the unreliability of a lot of the actions in the game. Meanwhile, my son’s Michael McGlen had a backstory which tied in nicely to the scenario, which was thematically pretty cool. He got up several times during the game to go tell a story about what had just happened to his sister, because he was so excited. That play alone justified the purchase price for me, with lots of memorable moments. I’m really looking forward to the other scenario, as well.

And the Amazon Basics shower curtain liner is the best I’ve seen. And I just got my first vaccine shot yesterday. Everything’s coming up Milhouse!

4 Likes
#1323

I haven’t played AH since AH1, and I enjoyed the atmosphere and the location exploration, but me and my entire group all hated the combat. Has it become (a lot) more streamlined? and a lot less constant? I think the consensus was that we just wanted to run around Arkham exploring places and combating once in a while.

Amazon benefits from our preconceived ideas about physical stores–one location, the same people handle your stuff each time, you have a “cart”, etc. And none of that is true, of course, and–cruel irony–amazon is putting lots of physical stores out of business. I don’t know how to reconcile that either and feel a slight pang of guilt when I place orders for pens or whatever, when I should just go over to the local stationary store and get some there. But, that said, I don’t feel the slightest bit of guilt over making amazon work harder to fulfill what they’ve promised with Prime. It’s the only way to keep them honest.

Hopefully, they will get broken up as a monopoly.

2 Likes
#1324

I’m finding that we tend to have one combat-focused character and one who isn’t. But the fun exploration happens in a separate phase. During the investigator phase, you pretty much cope with bad stuff, which is monsters and “doom” that get placed around. Then, after the monsters do their thing, you get an encounter unless you’re still fighting. It’s a little weird, because, for example, you can’t just go to the store and buy an item; you have to end your turn there and hope that the encounter that comes up will let you buy an item. Usually it does, but sometimes weird stuff happens in stores in Arkham.

What sucks is that encounters are also how you get clues, which are needed to make good things happen in the story. So, if you’re the person who’s really good at doing stuff with clues, you can go to the neighborhoods where they’re more plentiful, but you can’t get encounters more often than anyone else. So progress on clue acquisition is capped at a pretty low rate about which you can’t do much, which feels frustrating.

It’s also, like most other narrative games in my experience, not particularly fussed about balance. You can choose characters to make things easier or harder on yourself, and some of the curveballs you’ll be randomly thrown are much less forgiving than others. I’m good with that—if you’re not expecting fairness, but are looking for interesting and dramatic events, it’s perfect. Increases the variance pleasantly. But I do think Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Files are pulp dressed in horror, rather than horror, so picking up a submachine gun and gunning down scary monsters is more likely than being creeped out by incomprehensible horrors.

2 Likes
#1325

Ok, they’ve changed the mechanics about some things, but it doesn’t sound as though they’ve made it more streamlined. I think what our issue came down to was that we wanted to be able to control what our characters were doing rather than be reactive to stuff that was randomly happening to them and often keeping them from doing something that seemed very basic (like buying an item). It doesn’t sound like that has changed.

I don’t think we minded the idea of “unbalanced” because, AIR, there were things you could to do to offset that (like becoming the Sheriff, for example). I think we minded the seemingly constant and random interfering in what you were trying to do with your character.

Also, I meant to say congrats on your vaccination! I got my first on Thursday and was overjoyed.

2 Likes
#1326

Combat’s typically just a roll, so resolution is pretty quick, and the new system is a bit clearer and simpler. It also feels to me like enemy health is effectively lower than it used to be, so, where I often felt trapped in AH2, struggling turn after turn, in AH3 enemies are usually killed in a single attack. That might be more a factor of my tendency to avoid combat with non-combat-focused characters, though. But I’m often rolling six dice, looking for 5s or 6s and needing only one or two, and able to spend clues or focus tokens to get rerolls or use items for other helpful effects.

So, to me, it feels streamlined, both because of the system and because, with enemies dying faster, there’s less inter-turn bookkeeping. Might be worth trying out for you, though I doubt I’d want to buy it without trying it first.

2 Likes
#1327

I just want to play the campaign again, even if it does take eighty hours. Is that too much to ask?

#1328

That’s nothing. I’d do that in a night with my buddies.

1 Like
#1329

I’ve had the chance to play Thomas Spitzers coal trilogy. The series deals chronologically with the development of the coal industry in Germany, starting with small scale mining, the transport of coal on the Ruhr, and finally the consolidation of coal fields.

The first game, Haspelknecht (or Shaft Master, according to my often juvenile sense of humour) is somewhat of a mid weight euro game with little player interaction. The winning player got there by simply building buildings and not mining any coal. Opinions were mixed, but most agreed they’d probably play it again.

The second game covers the transport of coal on the Ruhr, and is thusly called “The Ruhr”. No one had a good time with this one. The tech tree was quite limited, and a series of random events in the mid game further restricted our options, until we all ended up basically doing the same thing. This game was also won by building buildings, and not necessarily transporting coal.

Finally we had Kohl and Kolonie, which covers large scale mining across Germany. Kohl had lots of interesting mechanical ideas, allowed us to pursue divergent strategies, and was a stand out in the series because it was not won by the player building buildings, instead it was won by the player building lots of trains. There were a number of core mechanics on Kohl that didn’t see any play, namely the disasters and the coal trust, as these mechanics were entirely neutered by careful play. An interesting game we’d play again, though it’s a shame that there is little incentive to invite disaster when it’s so easy to play around.

4 Likes