Category: Syndicated

My wifes favorite is **Paperback**, so that gets the most plays. She is a non-gamer, so I have to introduce stuff slowly, which often means gateway games or lighter games. Other games that worked great are **Waggledance** (still gets played quite a lot…

by TheGargoyle
well, Schwerkraft now have it on pre-order in their shop in german. Yay!

**Valley of the Kings** still is one of my favorite travel games, plays 2-4. **Paperback** recently joined the ranks, plays 2-5 and is quite easy to teach. I just use a standard 100+ deckbox for it. It uses a good bit more table space than VotK, though…

by TheGargoyle
bhz1 wrote:The real killer on this deal is that they have to be carried around in an extra box.You don’t have to. You can be “innovative” and just play the game as it comes in its box. You know, with card board chits. Only when you ar…

The Keldon AI is obviously better, because it simulates a real opponent. And a quite good one, even. But I really like playing with physical cards, so GS is as close as I get to a good solo experience with RftG. The robot is hard, really hard, you just…

Spaxe Empires 4x maybe – war game system and components, but scifi theme.

Started to play **Warfighter: the Tactical Special Forces Game**, and totally loving the game system. I kept away from it for a while since it came out, because the theme normally isn’t to my liking, but the system itself is really great. I gave in bec…

I think you have two solid options: **Lord of the Rings: LCG** if the deck construction is what you are primarily looking for in customizability. It is my favorite game of all time, because it gave me the magic-like pre-game deck construction fix (and quite frankly, I am much more fiddling and optimizing with my decks than actually playing them, and I play them a lot). The good thing is that the card pool is much smaller than Magics, and so you can faster catch up, and it is predictable – you know what cards you buy. So if you concentrate on some deck archetypes, you can concentrate on those packs that enhance these. I myself over time just got everything and have multiple decks prepared and under constant optimization. But maybe I am a little bit crazy. **Pathfinder Adventure Card Game** would be another option, if you look more for the RPG part. But be warned that you actually have to bring a lot of imagination to the fight, just like with normal RPGs – the system itself is quite barebones and simplified. Deck construction is limited to a smallish part of the card pool that you have available after every adventure, it feels much more like the “sealed” format in Magic, if that was played with a starting base deck and once every adventure – if you survive it – you get another booster. If you go for PACG, I guess it is bessed to start with the newer base boxes, not the first one, as that was when they started building these gamesa nd so had a much smaller design space – mostly it is digging through card stacks to look for some bad guy. Supposedly got better in later boxes (I only have the first one and didn’t mind the repetition of the adventures too much). Both games are highly coop in that are many card effects and abilities that are built to help your other players. As an EDH nut myself I would lean towards LOTR:LCG, because it is much deeper in story and has a really wid variety of scenarios to play agains. But be warned that it will be even weirder with it’s “theme pressure” when building decks, because it just feels wrong to throw together Grima with Celeborn and Galadriel to build a – actually quite functional and working! – silvan deck. Especially when they bring on Saruman as their big beater to pummel some orcs 😉 If you are willing to leave the fantasy theme, there are some other games that might give you some of the same, but just in a very different setting. I myself recently got **Warfighter: the Tactical Special Forces Card Game**. It is – of course – based in real world war themes, in this case three different ones in the base box: fighting drug traffickers in the columbian jungle (or somewhere in south america anyway), militant insurgents in the middle east or military in the middle east. You kit out your squad of soldiers with equipment up to the points given in the mission and then try to find your way to the objective to finish the mission. It has a lot of exploration elements in that you have to build the track to your objective from location cards on your hand and is highly customizable. I am only a few plays in, but man do I love it.

How is the PR solo game playing? Is it an “cheating opponent” like in RftG:GS or is it a race against “VP depletion” like in Thunderstone? Or an AI opponent simulating human play?

Android lately is catching up, so if you don’t have as much money, one of those might be an option. Still more games available for iOS, but Android is not too far away. And really, I wouldn’t want to play any of my physical games on a train table, if I…

Just player warfighter myself today for the first time and really like it as solo game, very smooth system and interesting game play. Thunderbolt Apache Leader is waiting in my cupboard, to get played, too 🙂 – DVG is moving up in my interest list late…

**Assault on Doomrock** – I loved the idea of an abstracted RPG-like exploration and dungeon crawl style game. The way it is implemented, though, can turn out really horrible. You are at the fate of the dice every round and in leveling up or buying up …

exactly this. Especially since /u/wil gives the reason what changed fromseasons 1 and 2: he himself didn’t get comfortable with the rules the same way he did in the first two seasons. It is simple like that: if there are multiple factors that didn’t ch…

For me it is solo one-handed all the time, and allmost allways in thematic decks (my current favorite Treebeard/Merry/Pippin). So to actually have a chance on winning, I just run newer scenarios in easy mode (an additional ressource per hero at start and take out all cards marked as “not for easy mode”). Two handed for me really breaks the theme most of the time and just adds too much clutter to the table (and the table space is limited, too 😉 ). Yes, you lose out on ranged and sentinel, allthough there are some nice things for especially ranged (Hands upon the Bow for example) characters. There are a few scenarios that will be a big pain with just one deck, but I just don’t play them – I have enough alternative scenarios to choose from.

Another LCG lover here, I went with LOTR:LCG because it gives me the deck construction fix withouth having to bother with finding pesky opponents 😉

one core set and all expansions except the hobbit saga expansions here. I like the ability to freely build my decks, the more cards the better. I probably would get additional core sets if there wasn’t the problem of then having lots of stuff that I do…

by TheGargoyle
I like the dwarf, too. I gave mine Prep Work, so he can buy something nice at the start of the mission. Very helpful!

Totally love this one, it is the core and root of one of my game groups – a semi-regular meeting of friends where we have good food and good game play, slowly working our way through all the scenarios that are there. We recently finished the core box a…

yes, his play throughs and reviews are usually really great, I like to watch him, too. Especially since I share some of his likes, so know that if he likes a game, chances are good that I might enjoy it, too.

well, as I wrote, it is one of my longest-owned-but-unplayed games, so probably I am not the right one to ask 😉

Aside from another run of **Friday** (where Robinson horribly failed and didn’t even make it out of the yellow part), I got **Nations: The Dice Game** on the table and I think this might turn to be a favorite filler game here, because of it’s streamlined and quick play (and because it’s theme is agreeable with my wife). And I got **Progress: Evolution of Technology** and gave it a test run in solo – and I really love this game! The art is great, the technologies make sense and the game play is enjoyable. Definitely a full game, not a filler, so will try to get it going with my weekly game group. Might take a bit effort, it is a little more complex than what we normally play, but I think it is well worth the effort. Oh, and we got some more **Paperback** in at the weekly game night. Longest unplayed games are **Arctic Scavengers** and **Mage Knight** – the former because I can only play it with one specific group in one setting, due to the language problems – all occasions where I normally can play, my wife joins in and she doesn’t speak english. And Mage Knight didn’t get play time, because I need a day where I can hog the table for many hours, to get started with it – so it has to be one of my wifes wife-meets-friends days 😉 I talked myself out of buying games at last minute quite a few times, mostly with kickstarters, when my brain kicked in and said “you don’t need that game”. Mostly it happens when I realize that the game won’t get much play time – I have too many games of that kind already, don’t need more of those.

Eowyn, Theoden (spirit), Idraen? Just throwing that combo of heroes out, because two of them will come with good combat and Herugrim can bring one even further by adding willpower to combat. That can even turn Eowyn in a good beater. Main focus would p…

That one is still on my should-really-get-this list of games. It triggers lots of things in me, so I am quite sure I will like it, but so far didn’t pull the trigger. But can’t be too far away, I guess. It really is tempting.

A long-time and probably never-ending obsession for me is **Lord of the Rings: The Card Game** – I just totally love deck building, but nobody around really likes to do that, too, so aside from online MTG or maybe going to FNM (where I am just not part…

I have two game groups. One is a semi-regular meeting with friends where we play through all of Legends of Andor (currently at the fight for cavern and then on to the travels to the north) and sometimes other games if the andor play goes fast enough. T…

Waggledance, ranked 1381, is a great light worker placement gateway game that is easy to teach to people and has a very friendly and inoffensive theme (managing a beehive). One of our favorites for our little weekly game events.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on a cursed island. Just live through it.

Valley of the Kings is not really that complicated, cards come in duplicates and the number of cards is limited (no expansions), so after a few plays you have seen them all. It’s setup is super fast – just shuffle two stacks of cards, stack them on eac…

**Glory to Rome** could work, or **Race for the Galaxy**, if you are more SciFi-inclined. Both have a quite streamlined system of cards, so even though there are lots of cards, most of them can be understood quickly with a glance, if you have the symbo…

I still haven’t played it myself, even though it sits on my shelf for quite a while, but **Space Empires 4X** might be interesting for you. It has a lot of combat, but has – according to the rule book – quite a lot of civ building to prepare for the all-ending combat, too. And has tons of exploration in deep space. It is based on a chits-and-hexes war game-like engine, though, and sometimes called spreadsheets in space. For a more classic civ-building experience the upcoming re-imagine and re-print of Mare **Nostrum: Empires** might be interesting, too. But for me games in that direction (classic civ-building) aren’t really 4X, in case of Mare Nostrum it is mostly the “explore” part that is missing.