Category: Syndicated

Sadly it is out of print in the German versions and it does not look like a new translated version is coming soon, despite the license changing to asmoodee. On the other hand, I haven’t even played the base game, yet, so probably don’t need the expansi…

Yeah, the bot is the only reason I even have RftG – no available German version, so only way to play for me is solo (and my wife doesn’t like SciFi anyway, so even a German version would not help much). And the bot is quite fun to play.

**Paperback**, because at the start tjey can just jump into the word building and learn the card effects by just playing “it is just kinda like scrabble with cards”. And **Waggledance**, because actions there just make sense, turns are fast even for noobs and it just looks cute and harmless on the table. For coops **Forbidden Desert**, because it comes with an accessible story and I found it easy to teach and even if a noob doesn’t get it at the first play, they usually still can contribute. Rhose are the games I carry with me when going to mwetups where I know there will be people nit into the hobby.

well, WHQ:ACG isn’t really a card game like LOTR:LCG, it is just a game that uses cards 🙂 – you only have your 4 action cards to use, much like the three action cards you have in Space Hulk: Death Angels. You can upgrade those cards during play and yo…

oh yeah, the legendary encounters are interesting. Firefly not so much for me, but big Trouble in Little China is really interesting. And unexpected. Only problem for me for that stuff is that there is no german version of any of the Legendary games on…

**Warhammer Quest: Adventure Card Game** because it came completely out of nowhere.

by TheGargoyle
The more I read about it, the more I like it. I get a strong “Space Hulk: Death Angel with player upgrades and a more story-oriented mission structure” vibe from it. And that sounds great to me.

yes, spy glass and bird are essentials, because they help you to optimize your moves (and avoid some moves completely).

well, if you expect it to become less puzzly: sorry, nope, won’t happen. I can spoil that much for you, it continues to be very puzzly. But the first two legends are teaching legends that are very linear and really are more of the “find the one way to solve it”. Starting with legend 3 it opens up and gives you more options – the designer needed to do that to accomodate for the variability of those legends. I personally really like the star shield legend, it’s so far the most RPGish legend, but legnd 3 comes close to that. Legend 4 is more of the puzzly kind again, but different setting and more evolved. Legend 5 has a very boss-battle feel to it. Haven’t yet started on the travels to the north, but from looking through the box, they don’t leave the path they layed out with the first box. Since I love the game for that path, I am quite happy. I think one of the biggest problems is people going into LoA and expecting an RPG or a dungeon crawl. It’s not. It is very euroish in it’s structure. But it is a damn good coop if the group you play with have fun finding those optimal moves every time.

Mission 2 definitely is possible, but it is slightly easier with only 2 players, I think. At least that was what I got from replaying it with my wife alone after being beaten with our 4 player group before. The general thing with Legends is that it is very much a time/action optimization puzzle. You have to be very careful what you do and how you do it, which turns into quite long discussions when we play. Usually my wife wants to get started beating up a monster or grabbing some loot, but we are still discussion “todays” tasks and how to organize them between us. That’s why we like this game so much. Regarding thematicity of the narrator to move on monster killing: you have to keep in mind that in this game you are not actually living the adventures, but you are telling them. That’s why the narrator is called the narrator and not the calendar 🙂 If a narrator allways talks about war and killing, his narrative gets boring, that’s why he hurries on. That’s the – quirky, but in a way interesting – reasoning for how that part of the game works. And it is one of the most important thing you need to get right to win: you need to correctly manage the threats and only kill monsters if there is no other way to handle the situation. And you usually only surgically kill monsters where the killed monster gives the highest benefit for the loss on the narrator track. For example killing that one monster that would trigger a cascade of monster jumps that would bring monsters faster towards the castle than if this one monster wouldn’t be there. But admittedly, from what I recall, the second mission is very linear and tight. There is really not much leaway, so I could totally imagine that you could luck out with some poor rolls on that mission. The later legends are not as tight, you have a bit wiggle space there, especially legend 3 (which is the main legend with high replayability – legend 2 still is on the tutorial track). So just chalk down legend 2 losses as learning the game and move on to legend 3.

Rather typical week for me with lots of **Paperback** both with my wife, my weekly group and some other people in between. Of course my usual bunch of **LOTR:LCG** plays (poor Treebeard got really beaten up in Ithilien lately) and some **Waggledance**….

Both are a bit low in mech count – they don’t even have one single mech, which was the point of the original post. And you complain that my suggested Imperial Assault has only one mech like mini 😉

Not exactly that, but with **Shadowrift** you have (in addition to player hands) a public “village deck” and “villager hand” where when your villager hand is all corpses, you lose. But it’s coop, so you all lose.

Yeah, I know, thats why I said “some”. I don’t know that many board games that have even one mech mini and are tactical skirmishes.

Warmachine has Mechs and is touted to have more streamlined rule sets. But it has the same problem as any miniature game: you need to evaluate your available options, first. What play groups are available to you? Because otherwise you sit on a pile of plastic that will never see play time due to a missing local scene. An option is going for board games, which have much more streamlined rules and allow to play with what is in the box with anybody – you only have to teach a board game itself, not a complex tabletop miniature game rule set. As streamlined as a tabletop miniature rule set might be, it will still be quite different from board game experiences – usually board games are called “on rails” from the perspective of miniature gamers. Games with Mechs I know of are two upcoming titles: **Valkyrie** from DVG (failed Kickstarter that will be restarted later this year, war game with mechs, supposedly to be very solo friendly in the restart), **The Undercity** from Privateer Press (just released at GenCon, steampunky Mechs, but they are more a byproduct, not the focus) and **Scythe** from Stonemayer Games (currently in development, no idea of an ETA). Sadly I don’t know about any current board games with cool mech miniatures. But some warhammer titles like **Forbidden Stars** or stuff like **Imperial Assault** (both FFG) might come close with some of their minis.

**Waggledance** is my weapon of choice to get people hooked on worker placement. Not too deep, cute theme and graphics (you run a beehive to make honey) and worker placement just makes sense with bees. Some nice random elements in the dice that tell yo…

Can speak for **Rune Age** – nice little deck builder with many different play modes and great asymmetric factions. But if you get it, you might want to get the expansion at the same time. It gives additional cards and modes and expands the available modes and felt to me like it was something left out of the base game. But my plays all were with the co-op and solo modes. **Thunderstone Advance** is great, too, but can feel a bit like multiplayer solitaire due to the lower interaction (especially with the early base sets). It is in a weird place of competitive point race and semi-coop feel. But due to the village much less random than Ascension. You can “fix” the inherent randomness for **Ascension** by laying out the cards to buy in a different pattern – for example using the pyramid scheme of Valley of the Kings gives you some pre-sight of what will come up and still allows direct access if your hero has that ability. Or have two rows, two stacks – one heroes and constructs and the other monsters (especially with expansions, so the stacks are more manageable to shuffle). Especially the two stack variant makes it much more strategic, since you know there will be heroes and constructs if you go for point buying and monsters if you go high fighting power.

Yeah, a different IP in the lotr engine would be great, because I finally could build thematically broken decks without feeling bad. Shoving Grima into my elf deck felt weird, but at least less weird than slapping Steward of Gondor on Celeborn to get a…

With 2. It turned into who could get tri prime and mostly turned into a stale mate.

well, don’t get me wrong, they are two very different games from the outside. Mechanically they have similarities, but you have to disregard theme, structure and even the little fact that one is coop and the other competetive 😉 So don’t expect VivaJava as just a coffee-themed elder sign. It can’t be. It is just that for us, it is about rolling some dice and having a game we can play without too much thinking, where outcomes of games can just be blamed on the dice. And for that VivaJava is better for us, because setup and play are much quicker. Both games have a yahtzee-like base mechanism for your dice handling, and the “match some expected patterns to score” aspect with some “abilities that can manipulate dice results”. But the similarities end there. Since my wife disregards the theme anyway, it boils down to “throw a bunch of dice in a cup, roll them, manipulate them, look how you score, next turn”. And VivaJava adds an excuse to drink coffee during play time, which is a plus for her, too.

**VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game** came out in German a little ago and I finally grabbed it. Happy I did, because it is a nice dice chucker with a fun theme that I can bring to the table easily, and it’s builtin expansions can extend it’s tac…

by TheGargoyle
How about this: in a round where you don’t skirmish, add a mercenary (without looking at it) to one of the still available hands of the robot opponent. This will give you a strong incentive to skirmish as fast as possible, because oth…

by TheGargoyle
DAAAN wrote:Skinbark is rock solid, and will probably trigger me to build my (lore) Pip (Tactics) Merry and Treebeard deck that I’ve been eyeing up for a while. I think it’s viable now.Yeah, my favorite Merry+Pippin+Treebeard deck sit…

by TheGargoyle

Scheinbar gibts die PnP Version nicht mehr im Shop auf der Website. Jedenfalls kann ich die nicht mehr finden. Ok, meine selbstgedengelte PnP Version hat damit an Seltenheitswert gewonnen, aber irgendwie doch schade, wenn das nicht mehr vom Spielentwickler unterstützt würde.

One I don’t see mentioned: **Paperback** – it can pack in a simple 100+ card deckbox easily. The big benefit of it: from all deck builders I own it is the one I would without problems bring on the table with my parents or anybody else. It is really eas…

Nah – I play lots of games with pasted on themes (**Valley of the Kings**, **Nations: The Dice Game**, **Elder Sign** – just to name a few) and that doesn’t stop me from enjoying it. Even a pasted-on theme can help with the enjoyment of a game by givin…

Hah! I see what you did there! 😉

Never played it solo, but played it quite a bit with two and it worked fine. When playing alone I probably would play it with two or three investigators, because that way you have more starting items to throw at quests. With two we played with one investigator each. Was a fun little dice chucker. Not too brain burny. And don’t expect to much story in it – mostly it turns into “how many icons of what type do I need to roll and what do I have to modify dice rolls” and not into “oh, lets go out to that other world and kill some monster to claim some magic tome”. It IS Cthulhu Yahtzee, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun 😉 – we switched from Cthulhu Yahtzee to Coffee Yahtzee, though, and I guess the VivaJava Dice Game more or less replaced Elder Sign for us, because it has much faster setup and teardown.

by TheGargoyle
Well, Foe Hammer needs a weapon to exhaust, so I guess the question was more about where the weapon to exhaust for Foe Hammer is. And I guess the answer is the same as for “who is supposed to use Fast Hitch” – playing the saga quests,…

by TheGargoyle
TheNameWasTaken wrote:TheGargoyle wrote:Gandalf leaves at the end of your round, not phase.Only if you played him by paying his cost during the planning phase.Ah right, sorry. Reading works better if I pay attention 😉