Board Games

Fyff said:

I played Scythe a bunch but the game is horribly balanced. The "Russians" are way too good. When playing with people of equal skill unless everyone gangs up on them they run away with it. It's too bad because I enjoy the base mechanics of the game. It hit the sale pile after about 10 plays.

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Its gota be group dependent, Blue and Yellow are the 'over powered' factions in my playgroup. I know someone was building a game log aggregater on BGG for people to dump results in, I wonder if there is a clear unbalanced faction after a large sample size.

That said, we love the game. 3 or 4 players is the best IMO. We have not tried the dreaded '7 man just play it once to say we did it' marathon game yet.

Kuro said:

avoid the expansion races themselves when we do race-drafts or race-bidding, because I loathe their lack of +1 Movement.

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Who needs +1 when you can just warp to your tokens?

Ratina said:

Its gota be group dependent, Blue and Yellow are the 'over powered' factions in my playgroup. I know someone was building a game log aggregater on BGG for people to dump results in, I wonder if there is a clear unbalanced faction after a large sample size.

That said, we love the game. 3 or 4 players is the best IMO. We have not tried the dreaded '7 man just play it once to say we did it' marathon game yet.

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I have heard a lot of buzz about this from multiple groups. The ability to focus your actions in the early game and late game is huge. It doesn't matter as much in the mid game. They can build up quickly and they can sprint to the end when needed.

It also makes them a game-shifting military threat, since they're the only faction that can *always* move as their next action (at least until you can get a factory card on the other races... which the Russians always gets to first and takes the good one, reducing the value of going for one with your hero). Russians change the ballet of maneuvering around the "dangerous" bits of the board (mines and their adjacent spaces) pretty hardcore.

I've never found Blue all that threatening, since their peninsula is specifically set up so that your maximum production openers split your forces with no easy option of re-centering. And it gets worse for them with Celts added to the game, especially if celts go before them in turn order and get to the village first. Heck, with celts covering up the land you normally expand into from that village after producing up, it's probably just best to ignore the celt peninsula altogether with blue, if they're in the game, which'll hurt.

Yellow's a super solid faction, though. Great starting peninsula, great teleport ability to reach whatever resources you want or need for objectives/building adjacency. Only downside is starting next to black, so needing to watch your back a bit.

I think Poland's my favorite faction to play, just because each game warps substantially based on how you get to abuse the double quest rewards. Keeps things mixed up.

Scythe - Boardgame

only 78 logged games tho

I wish I had noticed this earlier so I could have shared it with more time, but there is another keyflower kickstarter

This may be my favorite game, definitely top 5 and is for the most part available mostly through their kickstarters.

The Key games are pretty fun.

Fyff said:

Agricola got straight up replaced. Caverna is just a strictly better version of the game. Haven't played Feast for Odin yet but I have heard it's different enough that it doesn't replace Caverna.

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Lords of Waterdeep still fulfills our worker placement quota fairly often. It's like Agricola but distilled down to the essence of gameplay, but with a way better setting (IMHO).

Lords of Waterdeep | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

Kuro said:

It also makes them a game-shifting military threat, since they're the only faction that can *always* move as their next action (at least until you can get a factory card on the other races... which the Russians always gets to first and takes the good one, reducing the value of going for one with your hero). Russians change the ballet of maneuvering around the "dangerous" bits of the board (mines and their adjacent spaces) pretty hardcore.

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Yeah, YMMV on what the best Scythe faction is depending on how aggressive the table is. Our group is pretty cutthroat, so not sure we've discovered dominant faction.

There's some reviews of the game that mention "little player interaction" ... I'm like wtf game are you playing? You can fuck people's shit up in Scythe pretty badly.

Lords of Water deep is pretty good.

The problem with Scythe interaction is that after a certain vp point interacting with players is a detriment. My experience is that the person boning other players loses.

Man, I picked up Mansions of Madness second edition wekkend before last. Looked really interesting, so we broke it out and played Friday night. 4 Players, we lost but it was down to the wire. I LOVED it, 2 others really liked it, and one guy just kept saying "Bullshit" the last 20 minutes on every die roll.

Saturday morning I went ahead and played a game solo (Something I've never done on any game own) and beat the first mission. Just ordered one of the tile sets, the other tile set and expansion are way overpriced currently.

But yeah, I can see the need for a lot more content on the app, but totally digging whats available. Can't wait to talk some suckers into the big 10 hour campaign thing!

Got Anachrony in. Going to need a god damn time machine to travel back to now and play it after I spend the next 30 years punching shit out.

Kuro said:

Got Anachrony in. Going to need a god damn time machine to travel back to now and play it after I spend the next 30 years punching shit out.

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Ha, that is the reason I don't open large board games anymore until help is nearby.

Doesn't look like something I'm especially interested in, but my friend's cousin helped make this, so posting it in case any of you want to support it:

Ok, so I put in my email for the late backer notification on Kingdom Death Monster and just got the pledge manager.
So, anyone want to sell me on why it's worth $300 for the core game or $400 for Core + Gambler's Chest?
Thanks.

If you like worker placement, try Manhattan Project: Energy Empire. Its a step up from Lords of Waterdeep, but not where near as cumbersom as Agricola/Cavernia. I have heard good things about the new D&d/Gf9 giants game, but $80 is pretty steep. And I am still enjoying Lords of the Underdark.

Gloomhaven is fucking amazing.

Got to play Anachrony last night. Quality game, but I don't know how much replay it'll get. The density of decision-making (not really the complexity, most choices are relatively simple) piles up to make the game feel a bit taxing. I was the only one at the table who wanted to play anything after we played through Anachrony, everyone else was just ready to quit the night 2 hours early, despite liking Anachrony.