haha, got that part. I meant it looks like a hot mess.
Not only is the game’s design not ready, it appears none of them are particularly adept with TTS, so this has been a failure on all counts.
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Oh wow, look, Die Macher! I have a copy of Die Macher.
I’ve never played my copy because I bought it and then a fucking pandemic happened.
Survive! I can see my copy on the shelf from here. A classic.
I adore Dune. I did actually manage get some plays in before the pandemic, but not the expansion, which remains unloved.
Thanks/blame goes to @rinelk for this one. Cobble & Fog is rarer than rocking horse shit here in the UK, so I settled for Robin Hood vs Bigfoot instead.
I’m quite impressed, against my inclination. The production has bags of style, even things like card backs have excellent designs that are cohesive with the rest of the game. It plays quickly and easily, and I’m even happy with the amount of differences between the decks. I was quite prepared for a situation where most of the cards in each deck were the same, but no, not only are the cards mostly different from deck to deck, there’s a good range of difference between the three decks I’ve seen in terms of distribution between attack/defend/abilities/allies. Bigfoot is an appropriate beast with big hits and moves, and he has the Jackalope to make up for having no ranged attack. Robin Hood has ranged attacks, he’s a fast mover, he has his merry men to help him, and good card manipulation abilities.
Everything about the game is well presented, the board is double-sided which is a nice touch, the minis are good (not that I care), perhaps the only thing not so good thing is the Jackalope and merry men pieces are basically thick tiddlywinks with stickers on, but they’re still okay, the game never stoops so low as to use cardboard counters. Even the health dials are pretty good for a component that’s usually quite bad, in most games. Quality production all round. I’m looking forward to the pubs reopening next month, as I bought a friend the Bruce Lee box, and it needs a base set to play with…so he’s going to have to fight me until he buys a set of his own. How sad.
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There are some cardboard counters in other sets, so don’t get your hopes too high, but I feel like Unmatched hits my sweet spot for production–lovely, but not $300-kickstarter-with-all-the-trimmings shiny. Though I will say that I wish there were better storage available; the boxes are all marvelous, and look superb on shelves, but what I want is to be able to quickly and easily scan every hero in my collection, choose one, and pull it with all its bits off the shelf. My moderately crappy, but functional solution has been to buy a bunch of 4"x6" photo keepers, and use those.
What’s coming continues to look amazing, too. They’ve recently previewed the fan-made sets (which include Houdini, Shakespeare, Rosie the Riveter, and the Genie of the Lamp) and one of the heroes from their next base set: Yennenga, which was the first time I saw art from the new artist, I think. I will shock no one by saying it was excellent.
As for what’s been on my table recently, I stumbled on a Barnes and Noble clearance, and picked up Arkham Horror 3rd edition, intending to play it solo. It interested my son, though, and he was so into it that I went back and bought Final Hour, which we’ll be trying tomorrow. For myself, AH3 seems more focused on narrative than balance, which I think works pretty well for the setting, so I think it’s a solid experience. I appreciate that it’s less of a table hog than AH2, but the interlocking cardboard is going to be fraying at the edges pretty soon, so I’m overall neutral on that change. As with FFG products generally, it’ll benefit from some expansions to give the encounters more variety and offer more scenarios; like the LCG, it’s a pretty different experience the second time you play through a scenario and know what to expect, so it’d be nice to have enough of them that, by the time you repeat, you’ve mostly forgotten the details.
I didn’t buy the Journeys in Middle Earth which was also on sale, but still $50. It sounds fine, and I don’t mind app-enhanced games at all, but app-required games seem like they need to be high enough priority that I’m confident I’ll get my money’s worth before the app stops being supported. With AH3 and Final Hour drawing my attention right now, Jaws of the Lion on deck for big games and the new Villainous expansion for easier fare, and, of course, the rest of my too-large collection, it just didn’t seem like JiME would matter enough to make it worth it. But I’m happy to hear others’ thoughts, which could possibly sway me into going back.
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This must be the fourth or fifth game I’ve been after before the pandemic, that I’ve managed to find during the pandemic, that play so many people I literally am legally not allowed to play them.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Nice haul. Friedrich is good. Maria is amazing. Looking forward to John Company, 2nd Edition.
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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.
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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.
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Star Realms is great. Playing that on IOS is a daily ritual. I’m a TM naysayer, but I quite liked the Gaia Project.
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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
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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.
learning curve or iconography or whatever…it’s just the better game, alone because of the preview feature.
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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.
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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.
John Company 2e has launched, with me on board.
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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.
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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!
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