Reply With QuoteHaving other players dump your people dump in the sea or send sharks to munch them builds character. ;-)
Thanks for your impressions, guys! Looks like I'll need to pick this one up. It sounds like a fun one to play with my wife and kids, although the confrontational nature makes me a tiny bit leery. The kids are old enough to handle it — but am I?Originally Posted by Jason Lutes
Having other players dump your people dump in the sea or send sharks to munch them builds character. ;-)
I thought Mansions of Madness was AH-lite. I wonder how they compare. I'll need to check this out.
Mansions of Madness is more like a light version of the Call of Cthulhu role playing game. Structurally it has a lot more in common with the likes of Descent than with Arkham Horror.
Plaid Hat said that Summoner Wars would be playable on iOS at Gencon. Anyone given it a go?
Yaaaaaaaaaaay!
Some FFG news from GenCon tweeted by Ethan Parker of the Gamer's Haven podcast:
FFG's Dune reissue is finally official today. Will come out later this year at $60 and rethemed as a Twilight Imperium spin off. Uh, yay? I think I'll stick with my plan of buying regular Dune off of eBay.
They also announced the second edition of Descent with campaigns and a greater focus on characters and narrative for release next year. An upgrade kit will be available for current Descent owners. I sort of want to like Descent so I hope this is good.
They also announced a remake of a 1983 game called, I am not making this up, Wiz War. They are going to print up labels that say "Wiz War" and actually put them on boxes and then try to sell these boxes to people. I assume it is a 900 piece board game adaptation of a pissing contest. Or maybe a game where everyone runs a cheesesteak shop. Anyway, Wiz War.
Last edited by Mike Cathcart; 08-05-2011 at 12:16 PM.
Go wash your mouth out with soap. Wiz War is an awesome game and I'm looking forward to the reissue as I've lost some of the cardboard pieces from the previous edition.
It plays 2-4 and is a ton of fun.
It's about time--they've been promising that remake for years and years.
I heard they're radically changing the nature of Wiz War though. Apparently, it's being rethemed to be about the NFL's never ending battle against Onterrio Smith.
I'm hoping that the revised Descent has a vs AI option. The Overlord play can be fun, but there are times that no-one wants to be the bad guy.
Good idea, it's full of Wiz War. I'll probably buy it, though. FFG owns my wallet.
Well clearly you didn't like enough to build your own Wiz. Man, that does look cool. Now I want to play Wiz War. Damn it.Wiz War is an awesome game and I'm looking forward to the reissue as I've lost some of the cardboard pieces from the previous edition.
This guy knows what I'm talking about.
Fun and frustrating as you can foiled at the last second. A great beer and pretzels game.
Why in the world would they change Dune when it's one of the most perfect games ever? The only downside is finding the right mix of players but that's true for every game!
Wiz War is neat but I never really felt like the treasure hunt that's the actual goal of the game really gelled with the rest of the mechanics. I would have had far more fun with it if it were more deathmatchy.
By "TI spinoff" do you mean that all the game mechanisms will be preserved, but the art / flavor text will change the factions to seven of the TI races? Or will game mechanics be changed to be more like TI?
The first thing.
One of the board games I designed is almost exactly that. I basically took Wiz War, created five themed class decks rather than one unified deck, and then gave each player three secret quest cards to complete. Some quests are to kill other players, steal their treasure, collect the most loot, escort NPC's, etc. I called it Deathmatch Dungeon. Its an awesome game, but its severely deficient in original art so I've never been able to show it off on BGG.
Hell, I made this game because Wiz War was out of print and my friend with a copy moved away. I'd love to get a copy of it someday.
No-one can get the Dune licence, that's the primary reason it's been out of print for so long. FFG did a deal with the people who owned the rights to the board game, tried to get the licence, failed, and so this TI retheme of it is the compromise.
So no news on Summoner Wars iOS? Boo.
So, question.
If I find that I really enjoy Ascension, is Dominion worth a look? For the most part I will be playing with two people, with occasions of playing with four. Will it play well with just owning one copy of the game, or is it one of those things that requires getting multiple copies to play with more people?
Also, is the Lord of the Rings card game superfun in and of itself, or as a Star Wars nerd who can give or take Tolkien should I just go ahead and wait for FFG to release their Star Wars game next year?
Dominion was the first of the deck building games, and is a little simpler than some of the newer titles. While sometimes it can feel like 4-player solitaire, the cards often work together in cool and unexpected ways. The theme is a little thin, though. It's easy to teach, though, and is a great gateway drug.
LotR LCG is a co-op game and can be hard to beat. The real problem is that Fantasy Flight is trying to milk the players... charging more for an unnecessarily huge box, putting just enough in the game to push you to expansions, etc.
Dominion is worth a look and comes with everything you need for four people. If you buy Intrigue you can play with up to 6 in a single game or even split into two groups of 4. Though it isn't the world's best interface you can play Dominion online for free.
Dominion is an easy game to learn, but weak on the gameplay compared to other deck builders. I find ascension similarly easy for new players to pick up and there's a lot more going on there. Dominion suffers from card balance issues as around half of the cards in most sets are not worth buying, ever, because money upgrades are more powerful.
No Summoner Wars on iOS was shown at GenCon. They said it would be out in September/October though.
The guy who covers iOS stuff for Boardgamegeek got an early look at the Summoner Wars port (scroll down the post a bit).
Hello everyone,
My turn to jump into the frey. : ) My wife and I are getting back into boardgames after being out of them for a bit. We played Arkham Horror until 3am last night with Merryprankster, and the weekend before kept both Merryprankster and Omniscia here until midnight. Anyway, we're down with a lot of rules (like to get into something you can really chew into and debate), and we're looking for something that we can do either one of two things... or both.
1: Spend a couple hours playing just the two of us
2: Something persistent that we can leave setup somewhere and come back to once or twice a week, but still has an end... and is meant for 2 players.
D&D isn't really going to work, because we want something co-operative, as well as guided. So, if anyone knows some great 2 player games, please, let us know! We'd greatly appreciate it! :D
-Inspectigater
For just two players my mind instantly goes to card games. Any of the Living Card Games or games based on CCGs should work, like the Cthulhu LCG, Warhammer Invasion, A Game of Thrones LCG, War of Honor, even Race for the Galaxy would work. Otherwise I'd go with either Memoir 44 or Battlelore, whether you prefer a WW2 or fantasy setting.
Co-operative, persistent and two player is a tough ask. The new edition of Descent is what comes to mind, it's a dungeon crawl type game and it's bringing in rules so you don't need someone to play an evil overlord, so you can play against the board. I think it's also bringing in (or already has) persistence rules. If you leave out the co-operative aspect, there are tonnes of wargames, both miniature and board game style that are two player and persistent with campaign rules.2: Something persistent that we can leave setup somewhere and come back to once or twice a week, but still has an end... and is meant for 2 players.
D&D isn't really going to work, because we want something co-operative, as well as guided. So, if anyone knows some great 2 player games, please, let us know! We'd greatly appreciate it! :D
-Inspectigater
I like Knizia's Lord of the Rings quite a bit. It's abstracted, but does a great job of evoking the narrative, and can be really challenging if you set the difficulty right.
Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Arshdalon are D&D-light -- tactical co-op dungeon crawls that can be played in an evening.
Prophecy is a pretty good fantasy adventure game in the style of Talisman, but tighter in some ways better designed. It can run up to 3-4 hours, so on nights when we've played it, my girlfriend and I have done what you mention -- left the game set up so we could pick up where we left off. It's a competitive game, but think there's a co-op variant in the rulebook.
Pandemic is a decent co-op that has you racing around the world trying to thwart outbreaks, but it is prone to the alpha player syndrome, where one person can analyze the situation better and just tells the other player(s) what to do. A fair number of co-op games suffer from this issue, actually.
Defenders of the Realm is what happens when you take Pandemic and illustrate it with Larry Elmore paintings. Haven't played it (can't get past paying $80 for a box god-awful graphic design), but everyone I know who has loves it.
I've also never played Ghost Stories, but it's highly rated, and apparently brutally difficult.
Space Alert is a nutty and fun co-op game wherein you crew a space ship in a crisis situation, programming your characters' moves in real time as prompted by an audio CD (that randomizes some elements), and then play out the scenario step by step to see how you fared. Hilarity and death by space amoeba usually ensue.
Two-player co-op to me says LOTR CCG.
On an unrelated note, I played Starcraft today with my son. Or rather, not a whole game, but a couple of turns of it. This game is intimidating to learn, because there are like eight different kinds of tokens, four decks of cards, plus a zillion plastic minis to go with the 45-page rulebook -- but it's actually pretty straightforward. A phase where you place your order tokens, a phase where you execute the orders (of which there are three kinds to have chosen from), and then the necessary cleanup/resolution phase. Combat is simple, buliding is straightforward, resource management is simple.
Without having even finished the game, I can't say much about it, but as a FFG big box game goes, its complexity seems to have been all subsumed into a pretty elegant and streamlined system, so I approve that far.
I'm not sure that I agree that building is straightforward. That's probably the weakest part of the Starcraft design - executing a build order generally takes longer than everything else you do during a turn combined, and it's comprised of about four different phases of building that have to be done in order. It makes executing a build in TI seem simple in comparison.
I really do like the game and am glad you're finding it enjoyable.
A recent thread on BGG explored two-player co-op options, actually.
I'd also put a plug in for two absolutely classic 2 player games: Twilight Struggle and 1960: The Making of the President. Similar mechanics (the games share a designer) and quality, so you can easily pick based on your preference for the subject matter (Cold War vs. US politics). The games are quite deep (with TS perhaps having the longer legs) and can be left on the table and returned to quite easily (the on-board turn markers and unplayed cards in your hand can help you jump right back in). Each game can generally be played in 2 hours or less, though, once you've gotten through a first session.
Posting Permissions