Balls deep this weekend.
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It’s a push your luck kinda dice game, so my initial reaction was “Oh, RNG, no skill or strategy required.” But it really does have a good balance with variety of dice and how you use them in conjunction with the bonus cards you can acquire.
And should you do poorly with you dice rolls, consistently, there’s also some “catch up” mechanics in the rules that make comebacks feasible in any round of the game.
The theme fits really well with the art and mechanics (your dice are a band of dwarven excavators, trying to dig up the ruins of their fallen empire).
I bounced off their first game pretty quickly (Boss Monster) but Unearth I love and it’ll probably keep a spot on my shelf permanently.
Finally got Sagrada to the table, and while it’s diverting enough, I felt it was only an average game. It’s not a bad game by any means, but there’s also no real depth either. I’d delayed and delayed picking it up at all (because, you know, lots and lots of dice equates in my mind to “no skill required”), but people in my group were interested, so I gave in.
It’s essentially dice drafting, but you don’t ever use the dice for anything other than as a token in a board you have to fill. There’s strategy in how you decide to build your board (many spots are blank and will therefore accommodate any color or value die), but most of the strategy is in your “objective” cards which are things like “get face value points for all of your blue dice” and “get 5 points for every row that has one of each color die”. The objectives are, in fact, the only way you score points. There’s also strategy in drafting–do you take a die that will best benefit you or take one that you know another player needs? Do you take dice to fill your board more easily or only to meet your objectives?
And that is the extent of it. A little shallow for me, but a pretty quick to play filler and a very eye-appealing gateway game. Solely as a gateway game, I can imagine it could have staying power; there is an assortment of pattern maps for the boards of varying difficulties, so a new player could use an easy one vs. an experienced player using a hard one, which is a nice feature. I also played it solo (which was the feature that I personally was most interested in), and it’s not at all bad, but it just feels like a puzzle with one player, not a game experience so much. With opponents, it’s more interesting because there are more opportunities for strategic decisions and the dice pool can change rapidly.
In all, I’ll keep it for a while and see whether it’s one that gets requested a lot. But I won’t be the one suggesting it, I would guess.
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Its a Spiel des Jahris-style game. The way I see them, with a few exceptions they aren’t all that particularly deep, but the offer “gamer” mechanics in nice packages that are easy to teach and easy to learn. I can typically get my friends and family to play these but they aren’t going to hit the table much when I’ve got my gamer groups around.
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I bought Villainous yesterday for a couple of reasons: 1) With a 3- and 5-year-old, we are neck-deep in the Disney love these days, and 2) I think it might be a good gateway game for my wife to learn card games a bit better. I’ll give an update once it gets to the table this weekend.
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@Neumannium’s awesome latest [post]( http://statelyplay.com/2018/08/03/asmodee-announces-gloomhaven-and-more-coming-to-digital/](http://statelyplay.com/2018/08/03/asmodee-announces-gloomhaven-and-more-coming-to-digital/) about all the awesome games Asmodee will be bringing to digital reminded me that I got to play Bang! for the first time recently with real dice and cards and people at a real table.
I drew the sheriff role and the character that gives immunity to gatling guns. Lots of gatling happened to get fired in the initial rounds and my deputy was the first casualty. By this point I had correctly figured out who the renegade was, so I naively finished him off, and then everyone else realized they were all outlaws and efficiently murdered me. In retrospect I should have made a deal with the renegade to try to take down most or all of the bad guys together and then duke it out 1v1.
Was fun and everyone seemed to get the rules after 5-10 minutes and the game was over in about 15 minutes after that. Would play again.
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I found the Bang! news interesting, especially considering that Bang! used to have an app.
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Huh, there’s no forum discussion thread for that post. I would have missed it if you hadn’t linked it.
The old bang app was excellent but it got pulled from the store a while ago (I could just be terrible at searching, idk). I managed to dig it out of my purchased section only to find multiplayer was naturally dead
I’m just curious, with the announcement of a digital Gloomhaven, does that make those of you with a physical copy less inclined to put the effort into playing it? Does it make those of you without a copy less interested in purchasing it? I can say that it has been on my wish list for a while but both price and the sheer size of it have kept me from purchasing. Now that I’ll be able to play it digitally, I’m not all that interested in the physical version.
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I’m not bothered about the digital version. The attraction for me was a long-term campaign with the same people, sat around a table. Not to mention, I backed the first KS nonchalantly, not realising it would be such a massive game.
Digital’s absolutely, obviously, the way to go for anyone not looking to do a very specific thing.
I am 100% in the camp that gaming around the table with friends is superior in every way to digital games. I don’t have any friends near who would much enjoy Gloomhaven, though.
I think for the vast majority it’s going to be a no-brainer, even if it’s just to see if they like it. The board game always has a lot going on and having to juggle it all and teach and play can be no fun.
I’ll be impressed if the 3-year-old can pick it up, but it’s very promising in my house, with a 8- and 10-year-old. Had the wonderful experience of being able to explain why my son couldn’t get into the Cave of Wonders at first by referencing the events of the movie. He went from annoyed to feeling the thrill of understanding and expertise. It was one of my favorite moments gaming with him.
Oh, my kids can’t play it yet, for sure. But they like watching my wife and I play.
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I just bought the game last week…and now I feel like I wasted my money.
I have considered buying it at various points over the last 9 months or so, and I haven’t because I don’t think my group would be into enough to justify the expense and shelf profile. The digital release is making me glad I didn’t pick it up, and I now have no interest in doing so. Same for Scythe.
digital Gloomhaven might not deliver the same experience as the boardgame.
“a single-player roguelite where you’ll use characters from Gloomhaven to fight monsters from Gloomhaven in dungeons that look remarkably like the dungeons in Gloomhaven.” [neumannium]
not even confirmed yet that card play will make it into digital.
“What’s less clear is if the game’s remarkable card play is making it into the digital version. If not, it’s hardly Gloomhaven.” [neumannium]
so we might get “just” a kind of Warhammer Quest 3?
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If there’s no card play, then no, that’s not Gloomhaven. Might be a fine game, but it won’t be the board game.
Cephalofair Games has confirmed on reddit that it will be an adaptation of the game, still using the cards. The IGN article (http://m.ign.com/articles/2018/08/02/gloomhaven-digital-game-announced-for-early-next-year-gen-con-2018) says it will start like the random Gloomhaven dungeon, with the intent to add the campaign and multiplayer.
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They’d be mental to leave out the card play.
On hols this week and getting lots in every day. Terraforming Mars (I won, fuck you, Dad), Sherlock Holmes (our first bad result in ages), Arboretum, Arctic Scavengers, Flamme Rouge, Trieste, Spy Club, The Climbers, No Honour Among Thieves, and others.
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