That does look like an interesting game! Maybe a bit above my range right now. I need to get re-acclimated to wargames before really delving into them.
I used to be a big-time wargamer, but that was back in college and when I was younger.
I very much enjoy It’s A Wonderful World, so a sequel is welcome news.
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It took me a minute to realize I was in a gaming thread rather than the movie thread and for a few seconds I was angry and though you’d lost your mind. It all makes sense now.
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Haha, lose my mind, as if.
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I’m off to play imperial struggle for the 4th time today. France has won every time across my entire extended group. I intend to put that right today as the brits. My theory is the “…struggle” DNA is still in knowing the cards, specifically how to work around the opposing French ministers. I’ll let you know how it goes
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Oooooooooo I have Imperial Struggle (it was one of the two that I had sent up here and got charged duty for) but while I’ve punched it, I haven’t played it.
I’m really itching to get it to the table, but it’s not a game I can play with the wife.
Targi’s a classic, GoT is good with the right group, TIME Stories is an awful exercise in trial and error gameplay that belongs several decades in the past (lol).
I’m accruing games I’ve got no use for currently, including Cosmic Frog and Beyond the Sun, but I saw this volume of SHCD and had to pick it up. The first volume is great, the second volume offered the very different Jack the Ripper cases, and then Carlton House was a big shitty mess. I play these with the same group, going back years, and they’re very special to me. No idea what we’ll do after this volume.
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TIME Stories is one of my favorite games : ) It’s flawed, but it’s also working on a different level. Every expansion alters the mechanics of the game, offers an entirely new setting and narrative, and features a new art style and design. And, at a certain point in the long-arc, very weird things start happening. The long-arc ending is a major let-down, but the experience is worth it.
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With Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently added to Amazon Prime, our family’s been watching that together. Consequently, my kids (son especially) have been delighted with the Buffy set for Unmatched, and it’s led to a bit of a renaissance in our interest in the system. I love it; packs so much flavor, long-term/short-term decision interplay, and drama into so quick and simple a package. Still not sure about the Red Riding Hood/Beowulf set, because we have so many fighters already. That problem will be even more acute soon, as, unbeknownst to him, I’m working on both a new 3D board and a new fighter for him for Christmas. Following the rousing success of Barkham Horror, I’m making a Cathulhu deck using this miniature: https://www.darkswordminiatures.com/shop/bean-the-cthulhu-cat/ . So far, I’m thinking that Cathulhu will spawn cultists when he takes damage, and have a card which instantly wins him the game if he has more cultists in play than life. There’s a few other fun mechanics I’m trying, but, mostly, it’ll just be a bunch of references to other cats from games and media he likes (e.g. Cow from Cat Lady, Mr. Grumpers from Smash Up, the flerken from Captain Marvel, etc.). He seems at the age where reference- and pun-based humor is totally his bag.
I’ve also put in a big enough Hollandspiele order to get their free game for the year’s Black Friday sale, Reign of Witches. And, since I didn’t buy it, I figured I don’t need to save it for Christmas, so I’ve been playing that two-handed against myself to get a sense for the mechanics. Very cool little game. I hope they offer it for purchase at some point (though I likely wouldn’t have bought The Wars of Marcus Aurelius without it as an inducement to get above the $100 threshold, so the free game thing does serve a purpose!).
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The Hollandspiele sale, I’ve never been more envious.
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Played The Crew this weekend for the first time. What a great game. We had 4 players. It took a little time to remind everyone how trick taking games work and to figure out communication. But once we got going it was hard to stop.
I highly recommend.
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A few more two-handed plays in, and I’m really admiring Reign of Witches. An example: you’re trying to gain a majority in two of the three categories of political machinations, public opinion, and military. Adams always goes first, but Hamilton can play political machinations cards without having to discard a card to do it, which is huge. When I first read that, I thought it probably went too far in compensating for the first turn. But there’s a balance to the balance: a card which, if played and activated, eliminates all of Hamilton’s political cards (it’s the Reynolds Papers). Hamilton isn’t entirely powerless against this; if he can lure Adams into penury then Adams won’t be able to activate the card, or if he’s careful about playing and keeping unused one of the cards which discards an opponent’s unprotected card, he can squash the Reynolds Papers before they’re published (presumably this represents defanging the corruption allegations which he fought with the papers in the first place). But, of course, if you play a card which can eliminate an opponent’s card, they have numerous options for incentivizing you to use it.
The game has 20 playable cards. They aren’t excessively complex or overburdened with multiple roles; each one can be played for their suit and activated for an effect (or discarded as a cost to play others). Your hand size is three. But the layers of threats and counter-threats are deep enough to be a real joy. Playing two-handed, I don’t have a sense for how much it matters that players start with two hidden cards; everything else is public information, so bluffing about those two might be a valuable ploy among experienced players. What a neat design!
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Wow, I’d love to get my hands on that.
On the one hand, it was a time-limited giveaway, so there’s no announced plan to make it available. On the other, it’s pretty nice, and apparently the sale in which it was available was three times as successful as their prior sales, so it’s hard not to wonder whether that reflects the sort of outsized demand that would justify adding it to their regular catalog. I understand all their games are print-on-demand, so there’s no obvious obstacle.
If you’d like to learn more, the designer’s notes are great: https://hollandspiele.com/blogs/hollandazed-thoughts-ideas-and-miscellany/notes-on-reign-of-witches?_pos=1&_sid=06f396733&_ss=r
Among other things, I learned from them that I’ve been playing “unprotected” wrong. Apparently any card which has been used is protected, so it’s harder to just blow up Hamilton’s political value than I’d been playing. However, that puts even more pressure on the game’s closed economy, because it costs a coin to activate a card, and there are only ten coins in the game. The game has literally two cards worth of rules, and I still managed to play it wrong.
I must confess, I did not expect to so appreciate this, but I ought to have. I love learning how big games with many systems interact and how the themes are implemented by the mechanics, but there’s a lot to that. More than anything else, I feel like Reign of Witches gives me that experience of finding out how all of this interlocks at a much lower cost in time and attention. That seems so obviously valuable that I’m disappointed not to have had a clearer vision of it.
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Speaking of Unmatched, they’ve announced 4 new sets featuring Marvel heroes. I’m a comic nerd so that’s some good news for me!
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I had seen the announcement of two, but hadn’t heard about the other two. Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel are two of my daughter’s favorites! I seriously considered waking her up to tell her, I’m so excited.
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My son and I have been enjoying Marvel Legendary so we decided to drag my wife into it today. Picked Red Skull as the mastermind to ease her in with a wimpy villain. Our scheme was the Skrull invasion and the gods of RNG decided that they wanted to slap us around a bit. A majority of our early villain draws were high cost heroes meaning we had villains on the board that cost 8-10 attack. We lost the game after about 4 rounds around the table. It was ridiculous. I don’t think we won my wife over.
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Anybody play Architects of the West Kingdom? Shem Phillips (of Raiders of the North Sea fame) and SJ McDonald created a really cool worker placement game that is still one of my favourite games.
Love the Age of the Artisan expansion but only got a chance to play it once.
Now a new expansion is coming in 2021.
Works of Wonder sounds really cool.
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Yes! My favorite designers. All of their games are fantastic.
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