I finally posted my review of the abstract tile-laying game, Azul.
I don’t really do abstracts, but this is a fun one!
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Good on you for listing the number of plays. Most don’t do that because their number would be frighteningly low.
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Yeah, I heard some people complaining about that in other reviews and thought it was important.
Went looking for a certain game more than a decade old. Promptly found a new copy for sale for half what it’s worth.
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Yesterday, I got another play of Azul in, but before that…
Terraforming Mars with Venus Next expansion. And I won! With one of the new corporations.
73-65-65-61-53.
I really liked it. And not just because I won. It adds a bunch more options.
It did take us 3.5 hours, though, so there is that strike against it (my last play, admittedly 4-player, was about 2.5)
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It’s funny because outside of Hive, I am really not a fan of abstracts, in general, and I think I only like Hive because it is awesome for travel/camping. Yet there are a number of recent abstracts on my wishlist now. I just picked up Santorini and really want to get my hands on a copy of Azul. Onitama always begs me to grab it off the shelf, too. Oh, and Sagrada has gotten a lot of plays in my house. Are abstracts becoming more interesting or at unjust starting to acquire the taste?
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Have you seen Tao Long yet? How about Dragon Castle? I think they’ve always been great, they’re just starting to get more attention.
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Good idea. I can start adding this info to my board game reviews as well.
Don’t feel compelled, as it’s often grounds for “You haven’t played it enough.” regardless of the number, but it’s interesting to see. I’m just sceptical of places that do 500 board game reviews a year and refuse to talk about the number of plays.
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I have heard of them but they aren’t on my radar yet. I’ll keep my eyes open, though.
God damn, I love abstracts. It’s probably a sign of incipient brain disease.
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I got additional bills this year from ShipNaked which brings the total fullfilment price to over $100,000. (This comes to over $25 per backer when divided by the backers in the Bios:Genesis KS campaign. For reference, Bios:Genesis is a $37 game). Although I was able to pay off my staff, my personal savings took a big hit.
For those who partner with ShipNaked, two warnings: If you supply data instructing ShipNaked where to ship the games, they may accept the data but nevertheless disregard the instructions, and bill you for the misshipments. In my case about 5900 games were misdirected, which meant that (for instance) games for EU customers were sent to the USA warehouse instead of the EU one. Chinese distributers saw their games shipped from China and imported back again. The import fees for shuttling the misdirected games back and forth between continents came to perhaps $60,000 extra. Dan Yarrington told me personally that he admitted that he had received and ignored my data, but that it was fiscally my fault because two weeks later he sent me a spreadsheet that, if reviewed carefully, showed that the intent was to ship to warehouses many continents distant from where the customers were.
I suffered a further example of ShipNaked’s policy of charging client’s for ShipNaked errors. ShipNaked sent hundreds of my games to customers who had not ordered them, and unilaterally told an unknown number of them they could keep for free the games they did not order. Dan Yarrington told me that, for each game lost by ShipNaked, he was willing to compensate me only a small fraction of what I had spent to make the game.
No more Game Salute for me.
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That’d be funny if it wasn’t quite so tragic
Update.
Just seconds ago I got a call from Dan Yarrington, who told me that he had reviewed his books, and that I was due a “substantial reimbursement” for the fulfillment of the Bios:Genesis/Bios:Megafauna/John Company KS campaign and website orders. And that they would be issuing a statement for the backers shortly.
If so, then the year might not have been a total loss.
I’m going to take any money I was going to spend on GS games and their subsidiaries and just buy Sierra Madre Games instead. Life is too short for this shit.
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I didn’t realize that Ship Naked was a Game Salute thing. Happy I was one that already received my copies of Bios: Genesis and Megafauna.
Game Salute is a complete joke and it’s been known for a long time. The other time they screwed me over was when I Kickstarted Wok Star a few years back. The colors didn’t match what was shown, the graphics in the game looked lo-res and shitty and it was such an ugly piece of shit that it ended up never getting played and, eventually sold. Of course, by then the problems with the Game Salute version were well known so I think I dumped it for $5.
https://rpggeek.com/geeklist/171113/game-salute-cautionary-tale/page/2?
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The really weird thing is, for me, GS & ShipNaked have been perfect. Games delivered on time, any errors quickly sorted, etc. I still have a couple of things in the pipe to come from them. But this is the kiss off, Yarrington.
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ShipNaked took over two weeks to get a couple of Yomi decks across the country to me. Not very impressive. I’m pretty sure USPS could have done it in at most half that time if Sirlin had just dropped them in a blue box.
Just posted my review of Hanamikoji, a great 2-player card game that can be done in 10-20 minutes.
Also posted my (very sparse) New to Me: January 2018 post as well.
Dave’s post today really has me itching to play London again, though.
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Suddenly I’m Mr. Popular (it won’t last, it never does) as Expanse fever has hit my local with all the tardygrades suddenly finishing the series and wondering where the game is. The UK copies sold out months ago, plebs. Anyway, we played my copy a bunch and I hardly lorded it over them at all. It’s a little bit Twilight Struggle, card-driven with Ops (APs actually, peasants) or events, and scoring cards with area majority scoring.
The 2P game is a little different and I find it a tad annoying; the card selection is reduced, and certain areas are simply not in play, and various small mechanics are simply no longer used. While some of this makes perfect sense, putting my blinders on to simply no longer see sections of the board is irritating. I do find consolation in that this is done through clever use of components. The 2P game feels different enough as it is, with a lot of the little edges gone from the design, you’re left with a purer head-to-head fight of Earf versus the MCR.
The game changes at 3 & 4P, and that’s where everything comes into play, from initiative, to resources, wider use of factional events, and all areas of the board. The Rocinante features as the catch-up mechanic and is both versatile and powerful. The basic system of buy card - use card is simple but offers plenty of knobbly decisions including hate drafting/use, and sacrificing your place on the initiative track to use a hefty event is not done lightly. One thing I do love dearly is that although the decisions are much easier on average than those in most CDGs, you buy cards with VPs. And if you want to hold the card for later, that costs you another VP. This is deliciously painful.
The design is very good. I wish there was more variety in the card events; the deck construction is top notch, but the events are often simple and lack any unique dimension (Place 2 influence/Remove 2 influence, Place a fleet/Remove a fleet). This is probably down to the multifactional gameplay, with more powerful, unique events being much harder to balance, so I will shut up about this while at the same time pouting a little. I love the gameplay dynamic with 4P, it’s the same reason I love COIN: you can do simple stuff but you’re doing your simple actions amidst three people doing theirs, and what are they doing? They’re all messing you up. Time to teach them a lesson. All three of them. And bonus, you can do this in 60-90 minutes.
It’s WizKids, so you may wish to avert your eyes when I mention pr*duction quality. It’s actually not bad. The rulebook is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t even have an accurate components manifest, but the rules themselves are clear and simple. The board is of good quality, but could have used some brighter elements. Same with the cards, which feature production stills because if you think they had a budget for art you can think again. The images on the cards need to be a touch brighter, usually they’re easily discernible, but not under some common lighting conditions. The event cards are of a common size, the faction tech cards are not, and are in fact the first I have seen of this size. The cubes are cubes, the counters are counters.
I really like this game and I am smug as fuck I bought it.
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