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wautd wrote:

Zinegata wrote: 6) People who liked playing Sid Meier's Pirates! may want to check out Merchants & Marauders. It seems heavy at first, but it's actually a simple and fun pirating game. Downtime is kinda long though.
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Got to play it last night. Truly an epic game, and very unforgiving when you loose combat (I've learned that the hard way). The way how we played it, was that you don't restart with any gold at all (well, 10 gold but you need that to buy a new ship). Not sure if that was the correct way or not though.

Official rule is you start with a ship, and either 10 gold or gold that you had previously banked in your treasure chest. It makes dying early on much less painful.

Dominant Species is nice, albeit a bit long (or maybe we just played slow for the first time). It's a board domination game where each player is a class of animals (insect, birds, mammals, etc...) and from then it's all about survival of the fittest, adaptation/evolution, who's on top of the food chain, competition with other species, surviving the creeping ice age, etc...

Dominant Species is in my "okay" pile. Easy enough to grasp, but hard to master. My main problem with the game is that it takes too long; playing it doesn't really get faster even with rules experience due to the fiddliness of the whole thing.

So last night, after being slaughtered at Puerto Rico (one of the players appeared to be 2 times belgian champion I heared later), we also played London. The latter seemed pretty nice, but I sucked mighty at it (I ended with -25 points or summit). I could try blaming the beer, but then again, we all had a lot of beer.
In other news, I might going to check out the Essen board game fair soon. Appearantly it's the place to be for boardgames.

So I had my first 1 on 1 game of Ankh-Morpork last night. It's a bit comparable to London (see above) but much more forgiving and me being a Discworld fan it was a blast (the other person never heared of it but she loved it too).

I'm a bit confused with the trouble markers though. While it makes sense that moving a minion to a location with an enemy minion will cause trouble, I heared that moving a minion to an area with one of your own minions also causes trouble. Same with moving out a minion out of an area. Say that an area has 2 blue and 1 red minions + the trouble marker on it, and one blue goes to another area/gets assassinated. Does the trouble marker stay or not?

Not sure if it relates, but if anyone is a fan of Settler's of Catan, this guy has come up with a great 'addition' to the game in the form of a movable, very nicely done board frame.

wautd wrote:So I had my first 1 on 1 game of Ankh-Morpork last night. It's a bit comparable to London (see above) but much more forgiving and me being a Discworld fan it was a blast (the other person never heared of it but she loved it too).

I'm a bit confused with the trouble markers though. While it makes sense that moving a minion to a location with an enemy minion will cause trouble, I heared that moving a minion to an area with one of your own minions also causes trouble. Same with moving out a minion out of an area. Say that an area has 2 blue and 1 red minions + the trouble marker on it, and one blue goes to another area/gets assassinated. Does the trouble marker stay or not?

I haven't gotten to play the game yet, but I've been looking over the rules.

1) Yes, putting a minion where you already has a minion places a trouble marker.
2) "As soon as a minion is moved or removed from an area, any trouble marker in the area is also removed
(even if there are two or more minions remaining)." - The Rules

Neat, there's a boardgame version of Space Empires. Anyone got to play it yet?

Also, for nostalgia reasons, I had a game of Hotel(s) last weekend. In my version there's a river between Fuiyama and L'Etoile and based on the graphs it looks like the territory either belongs to Fuiyama or no-mans-land. However, on the same site's there's also pics of versions without the river, where the area obviously belongs to l'Etoile. So which one is it?

wautd wrote:Neat, there's a boardgame version of Space Empires. Anyone got to play it yet?

Yes it's fun. The short answer is, though, if you're looking for a good space war game, I'd wait for Eclipse to get distributed in your area, or for a few more reviews of Eclipse. By most accounts (from Finland which is where it was developed and had mos of its prototype playing) Eclipse is a Twilight Imperium killer.

The longer review of Space Empires.

The game board is a printed Hex grid with color coded areas for easy set up. To set up the game a bunch of card board chits are distributed all over the map. The card board chits (which start unrevealed) all represent planets, or minerals you can mine, or some navigational hazards. Each player's starting area will start with the same stuff. So you should have relatively even starts. About 1/4 of the board is "deep space" where the rewards are higher (include the potential to get free tech), but the chances of dying are increased as well.

Ship combat is where the game starts to improve a bit. Each ship has 4 stats related to its combat: An initiative (represented by a letter), an attack value from 1-10, a defense value also from 1-10, and a hull size (or hitpoints) from 1-3. Combat isn't simultaneous, but proceeds alphabetically, with the shooting ship choosing its target. Space Empires 4x is a dice game, which is where the attack and defense ratings come into play. The mechanic for determining hits is to add all the attacking ship's combat rating to any bonuses it has (from tech for instance) and subtract of the opponents defense rating, and defensive technology bonuses. That gives you a number you need to roll below. For example say your fully upgraded Dreadnought has an attack rating of 6 and 3 attack technology. That gives you an attack of 9. You choose as a target an opponents ship yard which has a defense rating of 0 and for this example defensive tech of 1. 6+3 (attack rating + tech bonus) - 0 - 1 (defensive rating and defensive tech) = 8. You'd need to roll an 8 or less on a d10 to get a hit. There's an element of hidden information to the game; your purchases and tech are private. Also all your ships are face down, and the number of ships in a fleet is represented by a counter which is under the ship so only you know the number and composition of your fleets. The goal of the game is elimination of other players by bombing their home planets out of existence. My game group's experience is that while the element of civilization building is nice, usually by the time your economy is fullly up ( i.e. lots of colonized planets) someone's making a game ending push to someone else's home planet. The game is fun but there's a lot of book-keeping.

Overall opinion:

Pro's:
Nice Combat system.
Hidden information means bluffs and sneaky attacks can be very surprising.
No real management required to make your colonies productive
Ship tech is very straight forward

Con's:
Too many card board chits. It makes set-up and take down tedious.
This isn't an objective or victory point game, your goal is to blow up someone's home system. None of the subtlety of Twilight Imperium.
No real civilization building aspect. Everyone's planets grow to the same level, and everyone's economy's will be pretty similar.
Most of the tech is built around improving combat values of your warships, there's no research that really improves your economy.

This is a combat oriented game, if that's not your cup of tea you might want to stick with Twilight Imperium. You might be able to get a more diplomatic game out of it if you found a way to introduce victory points based on objectives. Our experience was that combat didn't happen til about 1/3rd of the way into the game which is when everybody's economies are well established. And then after that you start seeing more interesting space battles.

I'm very fond of this one game where you invaded the other player's planets and moons (it was like risk, but you had these race cards that gave different abilities to each player, damn I can't remeber wahat it was called)

another fun one would be Junta

Wasn't really impressed by SE 4X. Too much book-keeping.

Also, I think Yosemite Bear is thinking of Cosmic Encounters.

The Yosemite Bear wrote:I'm very fond of this one game where you invaded the other player's planets and moons (it was like risk, but you had these race cards that gave different abilities to each player, damn I can't remeber wahat it was called)

You are probably thinking of Cosmic Encounter.

your probably right I used to have a zillion avalon hill games

Fantasy Flight publishes Cosmic Encounters now, if you're interested in looking into it.

Anyone who's wanted to pick up Twilight Struggle should put in a pre-order for the reprint, the preorder pricing is pretty sweet:

http://www.gmtgames.com/p-347-twilight- ... print.aspx

Uraniun235 wrote:Anyone who's wanted to pick up Twilight Struggle should put in a pre-order for the reprint, the preorder pricing is pretty sweet:

http://www.gmtgames.com/p-347-twilight- ... print.aspx

I love that game. I only played it once as the USSR and I nearly won twice during our session, coming only 2 points away.

It also has the deluxe edition board, which is much better than the original Twilight Struggle's paper map.

I got Last Night on Earth for my birthday last month.

It's pretty good fun. Of five or so people, one plays as a zombie horde, and the others play as human survivors. It's silly enough to be awesome.

Dungeon Twister is pretty neat. Score points by getting your heroes (each with their ups and downs) to your opponents base on the other side of the dungeon. The dungeon is a maze that can change during the game, so you can really trap your opponent(s).

I also played a game (I can't remember the name - it was in German) where you were a Renaissance lord and you had to bid for items to expand your castle, which in turn allowed artists to create works that you could use to get money and/or score prestige points. Very good game.

Played the fuck out of Frag over the last few days.

It's a decent board game that can be finished inside 2 hours and that's including time to explain the rules.
Upsides of this game:
Fast and furious, after the fumbling of the first round or two (which take 10-15 minutes), action is swift and there's little to no downtime. Watching combat between other players is also fun.
Very understandable rules, coming from some other board games, there's very little rule-lawyering or ambiguities. This again, makes the game fast.
Tactical depth, the amount of nice tricks you can pull off using simple cards is amazing. Even with our little experience. This isn't Twilight Imperium, but it's good enough for two hours.

Downsides:
Dice rolls, there's a bajillion dice rolls to be done every few moments and they can get pretty tedious, whether rolling accuracy when the outcome is known, to respawn locations. Ace is not amused.

Overall, I really had a blast with this one, and as far as I know, it's not exactly expensive.

Frag has looked interesting to me, but it is a Steve Jackson game, which usually means that you're either winning or losing, and that doesn't change over the course of the game.

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Frag has looked interesting to me, but it is a Steve Jackson game, which usually means that you're either winning or losing, and that doesn't change over the course of the game.

Well, maybe it was playing with only one experienced gamer (of Frag) and multiple noobs, but this didn't seem to happen. It is easier to keep winning once you've won abit (more special cards, more attributes in this case) but I haven't played enough to notice if it's total dogpiling.

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Frag has looked interesting to me, but it is a Steve Jackson game, which usually means that you're either winning or losing, and that doesn't change over the course of the game.

Uhm, I'd disagree on principle. The main flaws with SJg successes like illuminati and munchkin was that it was too easy to hit/stop the leader so the more players the more the game was likely to draw out into oblivion. With first one player drawing to a lead, being ganged up on, then the next got into a leading position and ganged up on, etc etc ad infinitum, without a clear endgame.

wautd wrote: In other news, I might going to check out the Essen board game fairsoon. Appearantly it's the place to be for boardgames, biggest one of ze vold.

Man, I spent over 300€ on games and tomorrow will be another day. My wallet hates me.
Of the games I didn't buy (yet?) looked panic station and Eclipse interesting to have. Panic station got old rather quickly but it's a game loosely based on The Thing so that was enough to get my interest. Eclipse looked like a lighter version of Twilight Imperium but I couldn't find the stand back in time.

The 'Geek-List spiel 2011 preview has a pdf map of the entire expo in the comments. Link Plus the list has I think all the games that are at the expo, so you can have more structured browsing.

wautd wrote:Dungeon Twister is pretty neat. Score points by getting your heroes (each with their ups and downs) to your opponents base on the other side of the dungeon. The dungeon is a maze that can change during the game, so you can really trap your opponent(s)

It's very fun 4-player as in addition to the normal 1 team kills the other they have some fun scenarios like a king-of-the-hill or capture the flag variant.