Category: Syndicated

by TheGargoyle
We always play with just 3 or 4 bases (4 only for 5+ player games). It really makes the game more aggressive. And even more important: it reduces the number of cards people have to keep track of, since there are only 3 bases with pow…

by TheGargoyle
Related Item: Thematic Solitaires for the Spare Time Challenged Why isn’t it next month already?

Definitely on the rise in my favorite euro games. And so far I only played learning games with the solo variant. Really great game.

I found **Pandemic: The Cure** to be quite easy to play with new players, since uses the well tested “roll and reroll until satisfied or dead” mechanic. I did notice a bit stumbling with new players while trying to grasp the special powers, so I would not randomly select characters but assign them in the first play throughs. The best thing though is that it is coop and so you can easily help new players along and help them getting comfortable (both with games and your group, if needed), since even a new player can feel like they contributed to the overall effort. Another lightish dice game I had good success with new players was **VivaJava: The Dice Game**, especially since you can introduce it slowly to them by starting out with the basic powers and only very slowly work up to more complex setups. I think it is quite a bit lighter than P:tC, though. The already mentioned **Tiny Epic Galaxies** is a fun dice chucker, too, and it’s not too complex to introduce even to muggles. And it presents quite a bit more depth. But due to that deeper game play it might pose more problems to get new players in. It is much more a civ development game hiding behind a friendly dice chucking face.

In the same boat, after having it on my shelf for almost two years, finally played my first solo game yesterday and totally love it. But I will have to reorganise it a bit, the insert is serviceable, but makes setup unnecessarily long. But game play is…

**Robinson Crusoe** and **Castaways** maybe, but they concentrate mire on the survival and less on the mystery.

by TheGargoyle
Well, is it that much weirder than having three cards with your own character in play at the same time?

A new one of his is **Renegade** which is currently in beta at Victory Point Games to be going into print probably next year.

Can we go a bit further in the depth department? In that case: **The Gallerist** gives you quite easy to get mechanics that are even thematically grounded and so IMO easily remembered, but the depth is really beyond any expactations. There are tons of …

It is my favorite single-mission-play miniature game. It has great dungeon crawl feel and fun enemy AI that make them really feel different. I quite like it. But be aware that you don’t have any form of character progression – you have your characters …

by TheGargoyle

I decided to put my money into the S&S KS for the simple reason that in case of a game failure with S&S (which is not something I expect, but which can happen with KS games sometimes) I at least get a pile of miniatures out that I can throw in many generic fantasy settings, too. The minis in Perditions Mouth are much more thematically specialized and so not as universally useable.

The second reason is that – despite me really loving the idea of rondels for action selection and preferring the card based combat a lot over dice based combat – the actual implementation, especially of the cards, is a bit of a letdown. Really, most of the cards boil, down to just a big printed number and a selection of icons, making any check solely a “select cards with the right icon and add those numbers” thing, which I can’t see to hold up during play thematically. Sure, mechanically it will work, dice aren’t much more than just numbers to add, too. But while dice are unobstrusive, the cards stare me in the face with just a big fat number and irrelevant fluff text that tries to paste on theme.

Third reason is that while the minis are really cool, they do feel a bit thematically samey to me. Which is to be expected in a game with a much more strong thematic focus, but well, I just like variance. Going against a Gremlin+Orc group one day and against some Demon-conjuring necromancer next day and against a Dragon with some dragon-kind fighters on the third day just tickles my fancy more.

Lastly, with a game with more bare-bones and non-elaborate structure I can easily retrofit mechanics into it. For example if the dice get on my nerves, it’s easy to build a card deck that mimics the combat cards from PM in the S&S game (the main problem I have with dice sometimes is that thhey don’t remember they fucked me over several times already and continue doing so, while a stack of cards with a bunch of bad cards slowly get’s reduced and so I WILL finally get to the good stuff 😉 ). It’s harder to pull out elaborate mechanics that don’t work and replace them with simpler stuff without breaking the game than it is to replace simple mechanics with other simple mechanics. So in a way S&S is more “repairable” to me than PM.

And, of course, the cold hard truth is that my wife would kill me if I would buy both 😉

There is no hidden information worth talking about (because even in multiplayer you can easily show your hand of cards to others or tell them what is there), so you can easily play it multi-handed. Which is an accepted way to play coop games that officially (usually for balance reasons) start with 2 players. That’s not “very loose”. “Very loose” is people listing two player games without hidden information as “playing left hand against right hand”. Think about soloing chess. But so far the games Ricky listed are all good and solid solo options, even if some of them are played multi handed.

by TheGargoyle
I think one reason why some people skipped this or didn’t go all in is the more generic theme. For me that’s actually a plus, because if all fails at least I will have a bunch of miniatures I can use with many generic fantasy themed g…

I quite liked it. I had different problems than others, because I played the german version and that one just had really bad translations, up to cards where the german version actually said the opposite from the english version, which really annoyed me so much that I didn’t go for more than the base set. But I like the concept, because I usually am able to provide my own “head space role playing” to flesh out the story. But then Lone Shark came out with the Apocrypha kickstarter and I went for that, because it seems to really improve on the PACG mechanics. So I doubt I will ever go back to PACG, even if newer versions actually might get better translations.

by TheGargoyle
Well, I am in for this years list, sent my top 20. Actually was astonished that I already have a top-20 and not just top-10 or something like that. Looks like I got quite a bit of solo-able games in the last year.

I’m throwing money at my screen but nothing happens 🙁

by TheGargoyle
Spieleschmiede has it listed as “probably starting next week”.

The only formats of MTG I ever had interest in are nonrotating and eternal formats (mostly EDH and Modern), so I completely disagree. The good thing about card games like the named ones are big card pools, the bigger the better, the more fun with deck …

It is a great game and the only negative thing I could say about it so far is that the box is just so damn big. But other than that – especially with regard to the aesthetics of the game materials and the actual storage of components in the box – it is…

by TheGargoyle
30 plays in, mostly playing 2 player but playing with 4th age, games take us between 1 and 1.5 hours, with tendencies more towards the 1 hour mark. But we are quite knowledgeable of the tech tree and rules by now, so no need to refere…

I like **The Golden Ages** for that. You explore the world by building the world map, expand your civ by learning new technologies and physically moving on the world map, exploit ressources by controlling areas where they are, turning them into VP and gold, and fight your opponents in wars (although the “exterminate” is rather weak, because they lose control and get their cubes and meeple back to place another turn). Takes round about 2 hours to play, single player turns are quick and there are lots of things you can (and want to) do on your turn. It adds a fun twist that people who pass – because they don’t have any useful options for their turn left – will get gold every time the turn comes back to them while others are still busy doing stuff. Lots of setup variability and scoring variability (for example the first player to pass in an age selects the end age scoring card to use), wonders to build, buildings to construct and with the expansion cults to found and religions to spread, but every action you can take is understandable and logically founded in the theme, with lots of iconographic help on the player boards. A lot of fun to play.

This. And it has the benefit of being quite easy to teach to muggles, too, because even if they don’t really get the card powers at first, they still will be able to play the game by constructing words.

by TheGargoyle
Alan Emrich wrote:If they build me 4 more instead of 3, I’ll figure out what to do with the extra.Maybe you need some overseas tester? 😉

well, the best way to start with some working archetype is to go base + the first LOTR saga expansion and build a hobbit deck with that stuff. It should produce a nicely working deck that you can run against many of the early cycle scenarios without to…

To this day the Dwarrowdelf cycle scenarios are among my favorites. I love to play Watcher in the Water – the boss fight just feels awesome and cheating the scenario with some scrying deck from time to time evens out getting beaten down with thematic decks ;). Or Into the Pit, which I like because it has an interesting structure that requires a more rounded deck to handle it, much like Journey down the Anduin from the core box (which I still love to play and which is the first adventure I run new decks against). I’m ok with some of the Mirkwood cycle adventures – Conflict at the Carrock for example I think is great. I was a bit let down with the Ringmaker cycle, because the time mechanic is just plain fiddly and annoys me no end when playing, because it is yet another thing to keep track of. The Against the Shadow cycle on the other hand was fine, but I played it with a much larger card pool than when it first came out. The new Angmar stuff is cool and they reduced the usage of time compared to the Ringmaker stuff, so that is acceptable, too. But complexety definitely goes up and makes the scenarios more “work” to handle. For all those reasons, Dwarrowdelf still feels the best to me – tough scenarios with some astonishing variation in the scenario structure, but far less fiddly and complex than newer cycles. But then, Dwarrowdelf was what I started with (I only got Mirkwood for the player cards later on), so it might just be that 😉

Each adventure pack comes with one scenario and a bunch of player cards. The scenario is based on it’s most recent deluxe expansion (or in the case of Mirkwood cycle on the base game). The base game and the deluxe expansions (and the saga expansions) come with three scenarios. The scenarios are quite different over the different cycles. The Mirkwood and Dwarrodelf cycle were the first ones and the scenarios are quite straight in structure. Starting with the Heirs of Numenor cycle, they extended the scenario structure quite a bit with each new cycle (Numenor gave battle and siege questing, where the quest phase is based on different attributes than in the previous cycles, Ringmaker cycle started with a time mechanic that triggers events based on time spent on parts of the adventure and the angmar cycle has side quests that distract you with, well side quests). So they really feel different and there are quite a lot of scenarios you want to explicitely tune your deck if not even build specific decks to beat them. An alternative is to go the saga expansion route, because those come with three scenarios each and a bunch of player cards and so each one gives you quite a lot of the original LOTR content in game form. Of course the overall structure of quests stays the same – you have essentially a tower defense situation where different cards twist the rules in ways that are most often to your detriment. But those twists are really quite different over different scenarios, especially if you get to the later cycles. Downside: each cycle consists of one deluxe expansion and 6 adventure packs and quite often you will want them if only for the player cards, because many of them have at least 2-3 bombs in it that are really useful for other scenarios and decks, too. To give some context: I myself come from MTG which I totally love and where the most loved part was building decks. But I had nobody to play against and the usual “horde” variants for MTG just felt too samey. So I went into LOTR:LCG and it gave me everything I wanted in allowing me to keep several different deck archetypes pre-built and – with all the scenarios – differently structured “opponents” to try my deck building and playing skills against. It is by far my favorite solo game with time spent on theory-building decks and running wild deck ideas against some key scenarios to try them out. Hours and hours of fun for me. But I did end up with the full collection of player cards for LOTR:LCG. But well, in the end it is much cheaper than my far-from-full collection of MTG cards 😉 (about 1800 MTG cards with a value of something between 3K-4K EUR)

We are playing Legends of Andor with one of our groups for over a year now, every 1-2 months another legend. We really like it, but it is far less an adventuring game like Gloomhaven but a action optimization puzzle dressed up as adventuring. It really…

by TheGargoyle
Smuggling. Arthur is on his way on a rowing-boat over the atlantic to make it in time for January delivery.

**Space Hulk: Death Angels** because I can take it with me on business travels and have some fun games to play at the hotel. **Friday** could fill the same role. Number three in that group would now be **Tiny Epic Galleries** because it’s tons of fun to play solo and can be played with multiple players, too. It is more a mood thing than anything else which one I take with me, but TEG feels like it will get much more selected than the other two in the future. **Jaipur** because my wife and I can play it while waiting for our meal at the restaurant or just when out to get some coffee. We overplayed it a bit, so it gets less plays now than before, but it still is the one we throw in the bag when we go out. **San Juan** (the old version actually, because it has fewer cards) because it packs in a typical rummy-package and gives a nice deeper game to have with you when you are out, while not taking up too much table space. It slowly replaced the next one. I hope to “upgrade” this one with my wife to Glory of Rome in the not too far future. **Valley of the Kings** because it is the best deckbuilder in such a small package and small playing foot print. Sadly doesn’t get that much play anymore, Jaipur and San Juan killed it for my wife (she prefers realistic theme, with actions grounded somehow in understandable concepts). **Smash Up** because I can cram three different boxes into one small cardboard box and so have something with me on game nights I can throw on the table if we want to play with higher player numbers and just want to have silly fun. If you go into Smash Up wanting a deep and strategic game, it might turn bad, but I found it to be a real hoot if people play it fast and loose.

by TheGargoyle

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Your Most Played Game (and more): Oktober 2015