Board Games!

[Faraday]

Everyone who I played hanabi with it seemed to like it? I was drunk for mascerade but I'm a big fan of bluffing type games like that. Citadels was fun too.

Betrayal was fun too but some of those haunts are pretty bad.

Oh. Cosmic encounter is awesome without uberninja!

[Lady Lambdadelta]

Everyone who I played hanabi with it seemed to like it? I was drunk for mascerade but I'm a big fan of bluffing type games like that. Citadels was fun too.

Betrayal was fun too but some of those haunts are pretty bad.

Oh. Cosmic encounter is awesome without uberninja!

The house rule we have for betrayal is that if we end up with a fucking awful Haunt that no one likes, we check to see what other haunts correspond with the omen drawn, and if we can play any of those.

[Faraday]

well none of us had played this particular haunt before <_< so yeah, it was just kind of swingy/luck based, unfortunately.

edit: well even more so than usual, I felt

[ChannelDelibird]

That haunt was such bullshit.

Will talk about Hanabi and Mascarade and also Legendary later, but goddamn that haunt was stupid

[quadz08]

That haunt

was

bullshit. Poor CDB.

I enjoyed the bit of Hanabi I got to play. It's a strategic / memory / co-op game that I felt fairly relaxed while playing, despite there being some fairly tense moments.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

What haunt was it?

[Faraday]

cdb had a bunch of bats that could suck our blood. uh, 2 of us started right next to the organ room and got a lucky role to start the organ despite our poor might, so it kind of ended before he had a chance to attach many bats.

i guess, as i said, it could be potentially close - but yeah. it seems in general it's harder on the traitor with more players? (idk maybe not but IME it's been true)

[Gammagooey]

yeah a lot of the time you only need one to three good rolls to do something important so having more players to do that makes it a lot easier and punch things better, one of the earlier ones i played was a rat spawning thing that was borderline literally impossible for the good guys with only 3 players

also betrayal is just not amaaazingly balanced in general

but it's usually pretty fun for me at least

[Axxle]

I forget, does Betrayal self balance as you add more people? Or is it the same no matter how many players you add?

[Sudo_Nym]

Betrayal never really balances itself, in my experience. Most of the haunts are just chaos, and who it favors varies on the nature of the haunt, the layout of the mansion, the items that have been collected, and how far into the game it triggered. It's almost impossible to know if the game is going to be balanced.

[xRECKONERx]

Nobody played Space Cadets with me. Was sad.

[sthar8]

Aww I've heard awesome things about space cadets. I'm trying to con somebody else into buying it so I can try it out.

[ChannelDelibird]

I know plenty people who went to the Reckoning have frequented this thread, so give me some thoughts! What type of people liked those games? I've looked into both but they just seem like they cater to specific types of people.

The type of people who seemed - to me at least - to be enjoying Mascarade the most were those who wanted to take it seriously enough to facilitate a high level of fucking with people, but not so seriously that the frequent inability to have better than a vague idea of what's actually going on bothered them. I was a little too skewed to the latter end of the spectrum, I think, and even though I won perhaps half of the games I played I don't think I had as much fun as others. Mind you, they were often more drunk than me.

Like Faraday, everyone with whom I played Hanabi seemed to enjoy themselves. As long as your players won't throw a hissy fit if they can't win at something straight away, the challenge of finding that elusive perfect score is really attractive. Would recommend to more or less anyone.

[ChannelDelibird]

Nobody played Space Cadets with me. Was sad.

I would have played!

[xRECKONERx]

Hanabi was a fun process but it still felt kinda "so what" when I played it.

[Thesp]

If anyone is interested in playing Hanabi online, let me know.

[Vi]

I am apparently successful at recruiting people to play/purchase Sentinels of the Multiverse... without owning any of it myself.

[Axxle]

I am apparently successful at recruiting people to play/purchase Sentinels of the Multiverse... without owning any of it myself.

I am not. It was a complete flop at the Reckoning. Mostly because we played on a really easy mode.

[Shmugen]

It's pretty decent, but I'm not sure it's much to write home about.

[Vi]

That's understandable. Any cooperative game is basically a single-player optimization experiment with the joy or frustration of dealing with other people. Maybe I haven't hit the point where it loses its fun.

[Shmugen]

Eldritch Horror, on the other hand...

[GreyICE]

That's understandable. Any cooperative game is basically a single-player optimization experiment with the joy or frustration of dealing with other people. Maybe I haven't hit the point where it loses its fun.

I feel like some achieve a really good balance. Then again, my favorite is by far and away Darkest Night, and no one even knows what that is. So, like, yeah, there's a point to that.

If you like co-op but hate the "optimize the board and argue with others" Archipelago is semi co-op, but everyone has their own objectives (and one person could have the objective of completely fucking everyone over, so you can't 100% trust people to act in the Archipelago's interests).

Only warning I'd toss in is that it's basically about being colonial bastards and brutally exploiting, enslaving, and killing the natives. It's under a layer of abstraction, but that's the theme, and some people don't like that.

[Shmugen]

I've heard of Darkest Night lately, tell me some more?

Just got done with a gaming con this weekend, Archipelago was the one game I wanted to play there that didn't end up being available.

[GreyICE]

It's a lot of fun. The game is just very well put together.

Basically, you start out, small party of heroes. 4, to be exact. And the goal is to try and defeat a Necromancer, either by recovering holy relics, or by actually doing battle with him and beating him (this is hard). Meanwhile, he spawns these irritating blights that will start to overwhelm the board.

You have to go around the board, searching for keys to unlock the relic, and collecting artifacts, cards, and keys. The monastery is your "safe zone", close locations are mediocre (but safer) and the far locations have the best stuff, but are far away.

Okay, so what makes it tick? Just, so much cool stuff. Like, each class gets 10 ability cards, and you only get 3 (out of 4 predetermined abilities) to start. So you want to go after those other 6, because there's some REALLY cool skills hiding in there. But it doesn't directly help you out. But you want them! And you want the artifacts (they're amazing!). And all of the limited use stuff is awesome too! So you want to get it.

But see, you have this meter called "stealth." Different heroes have different amount, but a lot of the things you're doing are going to lower your stealth. And see, the necromancer rolls to determine how he moves, and if he gets a roll above your (steadily decreasing) stealth, he's going to stop moving randomly and charge you. The only way to recharge it is to move or retreat to the Monastery (where the Necromancer can't track you). So you can only do so much before the Necromancer notices you and starts to track you down. And you think you can control it, right? But you get an event card every turn. And some of the events get worse if you're at low stealth. So you might think "Oh I have at least a turn before he notices me" then get a bad event, lose stealth, and suddenly you're Necromancer bait. And you have to go running across the board to go cower in the Monastery until it's all over.

So the result is that you really feel a desire to push your luck. If you're on one of the far spaces, busy earning awesome artifacts, abilities, keys, chests, important things, you want to stay there. But each turn you do the likelihood rises that something goes terribly wrong.

Oh, and cool stuff? The heroes. Each one is different. We're not talking "different ability names." Oh no. The Prince rallies support from the countryside. He starts with horrible stealth (meaning even out the gate the Necromancer can notice him) but his abilities are often placed on locations, giving everyone there cool bonuses. Because he's rallied the locals, see? And there's the Acolyte, who is like a mini necromancer - his abilities work similar to the Necromancer's, and can even raise the darkness for bonuses (but bringing your loss closer). And there's the usual Rogue (Stealthy, can backstab people and spend and regain stealth in awesome manners), Priest (great healer), Fighter (obvious), Druid (transforms into awesome forms - you WANT to go diving for his abilities, because he has some great forms). There's a scholar who doesn't do great in combat, but he's absolutely great at finding things - he just wants to be left alone to research while everyone does important combat thingies.

The quality of components is a little meh, if that matters to you, and definitely get the hard board over the fold out mat - but the game itself is really, really, really fun. The "push your luck" mechanic and the chance (different from randomness) that can change your decisions means it's rather hard to just "solve" the way Pandemic can be. Everyone has a slightly different tolerance for risk, and if the dice like you, you might get far with some finger crossing. The different heroes make every game feel sufficiently different, and even replaying heroes you can end up with different abilities and a different feel.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

That's understandable. Any cooperative game is basically a single-player optimization experiment with the joy or frustration of dealing with other people. Maybe I haven't hit the point where it loses its fun.

I think it's because it's much more malleable than many other co-op games; Pandemic might change which cities are in the danger zone but it's mostly the same structure but Ra plays rather different to the Argent Adept and Citizen Dawn plays different than the Ennead who plays different than Spite so the gameplay can be tuned to difficulties and preferences. Also having your own hand makes it so that we trend against optimization via consensus/discussion when we play unless things are dire because you do have some "hidden" information.