Board Game General - /bgg/

Godamn weaboo faggot.

aren't people pretty excited for the arkham horror lcg though? have to admit I didn't keep super up to date on all the things ffg announced, I just know they announced tons of stuff right before gencon

:^) reddit might be more your speed friend.

Seeing the latest update for Conan showing all the finished stretch goals and core game has gotten me all excited for it again. I now regret not having gone for the King's Pledge rather than just the standard. Ah well, I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

I'm not. Honestly I hadn't really heard the news, but my reaction is mostly, "Maybe this will keep Nate French too busy to fuck up L5R."

And now that I've gone and looked at it, I'm even less whelmed. The Lord of the Rings LCG is a game I never play already. This is that but lovecraft, which less of my friends are into.

Any particular thought on Dice Masters other than
>Wizkids

I like the game and all but damn, I can't wait for Avengers and Xmen dissapear once for all the next year.

So I went through the first 4 pages of FFG news articles. There are a total of 3 new game announcements. Arkham Horror LCG, which barely counts as a board game, The Doom Board Game, which looks like a reskin of the Gears of War Board game (which is fine, that was a good game), and the fourth book in the End of the World line, which is a RPG. Baron Munchhausen might as well be new, but still an RPG.

So, I feel the early statement that they aren't doing anything in the BG market is justified.

>Not a lot happening in the boardgame world
It's always kind of quiet between GenCon and Essen.

Alright nerds, what are some good 4x games?

I have played a few games of the Others recently since getting my pledge delivered. I really enjoy it, since it's simple enough that my group can swap between the heroes and the sin easily, unlike say Imperial Assault where I have to Empire all the time

Oh you suck. I'm with "the rest of the world", along with everyone else scattered all over the states. I guess I won't be getting my copy for another 3 weeks or so.

I got all the expansions because I loved the theme and art, and I was not ready for so much stuff.

Whats the new edition of thunderstone called? What do we know about it?

Also wondering what everyone thinks about android netrunner, planning to get that one as well, same kinda deal as thunderstone without added bonus of oop. Basically its 50 bucks for the game plus creation and control and "lots of expansion decks"

What's the best version of Ticket to Ride to get?

Funny how the games almost always look like they're roll-to-move. Did the "revolution" not hit Japan?

There's also New Angeles which announced around the same time as the Arkham Horror LCG. Kind of sad I'll have to hold back on buying that one due to already having too much 'points collection' games.

On the topic of the Arkham Horror LCG, can any players of the LotR LCG who have been following the news highlight any immediate differences? Or are they looking to be pretty similar?

i really regret not backing this.
i love the theme and all but i dont think its a board game i would have played a lot to get my moneys worth.

that kinda happened with zombicide. played a few games but ultimately just stopped because people got bored. i have the expansions but still havent even touched it.

>What can be done
Usually someone who's watching the thread bumps it. There's no shame in having to bump the thread
No Essen hype? A Feast for Odin hype is super high for me. Inis hype is also high, but not as high as that price :/
I was hyped, but honestly I'd be more interested if it weren't campaign-based. I wish higher level cards weren't just more powerful copies of lower level cards, and I wish there was a little more variety in the narrative. As it is, I'll look for it on clearance in a year or so
Neither is better than the other, just make sure you get the 19xx expansion that matches the version you choose. Do NOT get Rails and Sails

I'm pretty big on netrunner, especially as a kitchen table game, though the competitive scene is getting a bit healthier again after a while in a weird place.

Thunderstorm definetly feels a little more interesting and thematic if not as mechanically elegant when compared to dominion. I like arctic scavenger a little better for the more aggressive conflict, but it's shorter on variety.

Hoping star trek: ascendancy holds up well as a more streamlined 4x, despite the terrible name, but it'll be most of a month before I know for myself.

Bump

youtube.com/watch?v=MVQk2SEZ0l8

holy shit how does this exist

Right now it has no name, just Thunderstone Third edition. There's going to be more options available in the dungeon apparently, and it uses the Launius\Vasel "epic" variant as a base.

Not that much info for now.

>watches vid
>doesnt recognise a single person on the cards

My birthday is coming up and traditionally ive went and bought some boardgames, do you guys have suggestions? I love arkham horror, pandemic and coup but is there any eurogames that arent so heavy on autism

I like Thebes, Scoville, Lords of Waterdeep, Pergamon, Suburbia.

Scoville is a bit on the high side of the autism scale, but the other seem fine to me.

have you checked out any of ryan laukat's games? particularly above and below if the reason you like arkham horror is for the story

I'm not crazy about Euros but do enjoy Castles of Burgundy.

Again, $50 for core, C&C and a few random datapacks is a great deal, I'd go for it.

These 3 zombie games you mentioned are black plague related? Where should i look for info on cmon work in progress? Their twitter?

I got Krosmaster Arena prepared to be disappointed, mostly getting it for all the Wakfu and Dofus tie in characters. To my surprise its a really fun pretty well paced game with a bunch of interesting abilities that make combat a lot more than just standing still trading dice rolls and a good way to represent all the characters. It's just a shame that this game is still ruined to me by distribution. Half the characters I want are promos, and characters I hear from now on only come in blind drafts or promos. At least they were nice enough to put all the Dofus book one movie characters into a reprint of the base game, but I'm sure when book 2 comes out, it's gonna go back to promos only.

Does anything about the gameplay look particularly good? I mean yeah, the minis look nice, but the rest of it looks uninspired. An inn for Conan? Really?

I've got a hypothetical question for you guys. let's say Blizzard takes notice of how well the Dark Souls Kickstarter did, they remember their days of licensing out their properties to companies like FFG and they decide to give it another shot now that board games are even more popular than they were 10 years ago

let's say they decide the time is right for a Diablo game. what would you want it to look like? would gaining loot be a necessary thing for you, or would you be fine if your character just got stat upgrades along the way? what game currently out there do you think it would most resemble? how likely would dice based combat be?

let's be real though. if they did decide the time was right for board games again, they'd just make a physical edition of Hearthstone.

>let's be real though. if they did decide the time was right for board games again, they'd just make a physical edition of Hearthstone.
That's a joke right? You know Hearthstone is the WoW TCG, right?

physical version of hearthstone would never happen.

mostly because hearthstone can easily be played on mobile which is something almost everyone has. physical card players would probably be too alienated from the rest.

well if it did happen it'd almost certainly be a limited edition to get people hyped enough to buy it without thinking too much

and you do realize it's Blizzard, right?

Why would that be a joke? (not the poster btw)

I mean it would definitely make sense, fans would get it so they could have those "exclusive", "only included in physical version" cards. .. shit man, i bet people would even buy those cards if it wasnt meant for a game but just to have like a collectors item! I think you underestimate blizzard and especially fans of hearthstone...

I actually liked what I saw of the gameplay. The stamina gem system is a really elegant system to allow for the fun of dice combat, yet give the player a means to mitigate it. I actually backed it from a 2 player perspective as it appears to nail that kind of skirmish game style, but with light rpg/dungeon crawl elements and great theming. I really dig all the little elements like weight limits, swimming, being able to throw furniture and quest objectives etc.

I tried to fill that same niche with Claustrophobia and whilst I do like that game, Conan looks for more interesting to me and on a personal level, it really does just tick all my boxes of what I'm after.

It isn't one of the heavier more complex games that I'll own, but I am quite confident it'll be my favourite.

If that's you Jeff, can you release the Overwatch patch already.

nah, just a thought that popped into my head. mainly from the combination of the new wow expansion, titan quest anniversary just coming out, and me regularly thinking about how game mechanics integrate into the theme

Shit, it worked. Thanks jeff.

I did actually laugh when I saw it begin updating. Hanzo is absolutely insane now, he's going to give me nightmares.

Anyway, I saw CMoN are publishing a game called Gateway: Uprising that appears to have been a failed kickstarte that is being made by videogame devs. Anyone else fearful of the growing regularity with which game devs see turning their eyes towards board games as an acceptable side-step?

With Asmodee set on emulating E.A. I'm genuinely concerned that board games are soon to end up in the same sorry state as vidya.

As long as there's some actual game behind the blatant cashgrab, I'm alright with vidya creeping into boardgames. Even TV or comics. If a game's good, it's good. If it has a theme you enjoy, then why the fuck not?

I for one would love seeing Don't Starve as a boardgame

There's still plenty of room for bullshit, but at least graphics will never be as much of a concern. There's only so good you can make a tile or card look before you have to get actual art talent.
Plus, it's a lot harder to do microtransactions since you'd have to mail them out, and that cancerous "in-game currency you can only buy with real money" is thankfully nearly impossible to implement.

lcgs are probably the closest thing to microtransactions, and you actually get something of worth with those

but we could still see bullshit like preorder bonuses. retailer specific games are starting to pop up with target, so hopefully that doesn't spread.

>harder to do microtransactions
Stretch goals, expansions & promos

So I'm looking at picking up a new game and some of my group have expressed interest in 4x.
Any suggestions as to good ones?

Twight Imperium is king.
But if you're planning on 6+ players, maybe something faster is in order. TI3 can technically do 8, but it's a bad idea, excessively long and many dead interactions where geographically distant players aren't going to be very relevant to each other.

Can I get sauce on the original pic?

I just want an excuse to talk about Keyflower.

pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=57349656

So... discuss.
I have Keyflower but my pleb friends don't wanna play it.
I went for that last KS pledge that included all expansions and promo tiles, but chickened out at the last minute precisely because I didn't know i it would be played enough. So I just bought the base at a brick & mortar. Did I miss out?

Ohhhhhh 4x Yah!

As STEEV pointed out, there's TI3 which is the King of the heap falling solidly in both the 'Space 4x' and 'Grand Strategy' games categories. But it can be a long game which makes it tough to get to the table top.

Other games that are good:

Exodus / with the Edge of Extinction expansion has a lot of meat on the bone, and doesn't take nearly as long to play out as TI3, but doesn't have the same total depth as TI3 either. Definitely worth looking at.

Hegemonic. Interesting game but has some odd game mechanics that can be cumbersome to teach. Players can contest each other for control of systems via Military, Industrial / Economic, or Political means. One of its more interesting mechanics is the ability to give up a tech advancement card and use the card's influence points in a conflict instead.

Eclipse - a solid 4x game. Pros: Easy to teach and fun to upgrade ships with new tech. Cons: Random Tech draws and crappy dice luck in combat can hose an otherwise sound strategy. Also, there isn't really any significant advantage to engaging in politics / alliances in terms of game mechanics.

So I'm going to be hopefully playing some board games with a fairly large group soon (about 8 people max).
Most of them are the "I've played candy land and monopoly" type, what are some good board games to expand their horizons a bit?

I've heard good things about Dominant Species, is it worth looking at?

>tfw i will never get the chance to play TI3 with my group of friends.

im lucky i got to play a full game of eldrich horrow and that took us like 4 hours with max players. they liked it but felt it was too long even though this is coming from a group of people that can play D&D for 10 hours straight.

Has anyone here tried the bloodboard board game coming out next month ?

It's not a 4X game.
It is, however, a fantastic strategy game where you directly/indirectly compete for points via conditional area control. Every turn is going to require you to spend a lot of time thinking, because every action has massive consequences.

If they enjoy candy land, try moving to tivket to ride. That's usually a good guess. If you like shorter games, For Sale is pretty good.

Another space 4x game in addition to the ones mentioned by STEEV and is GMT's Space Empires, which iirc is getting reprinted sometime later this year or early 2017. There's also a couple of expansions for it, the newest of which will allow for a 5th player.

Playing all 8 at once? Codenames, the Resistance, and Deception Murder in Hong Kong
For groups go with co-ops. Leacock's games like Pandemic and Forbidden Island would work well. They're not super hard, they're solid games, and right off the bat they introduce something board games of old didn't have, cooperation
7 Wonders is also relatively easy, can play 7 people, is quick, and is an obvious choice if any of them ever played magic.
Any if the 10 minute dice games like Fuse or Escape. Obviously short, light on the rules, dice are fun, they show off new ways to use them, and they're fun to watch

I was talking more about the people involved in games, not the license of a game series. I worked in the AAA industry for several years and the level of incompetence is astounding. I'll admit I see the devil in every corner now, but I see the hallmarks of bad games/studios immediatley now and I don't want to start seeing them in board games.

It's not really the horrible business side I'm really talking about. It's the absolute lack of creativity, homogonised pallet swapping that happens in games (think open world blueprint A). It's all marketting driven hype bubbles and from the inside you see that the devs neither have any ideas of what to do nor do they have any passion. I think it's pretty clear that well markettes mini driven kickstarters share quite a few similarities these days and that BGG's hotness and ranking chart is now more a "wait to see if the hype fades" gauge on whether something is god or not. It shares too much with Neogaf for my liking.

*marketed

well you could argue we have a bit of a theme drought. it feels like designers don't work with a theme they're passionate about, they just decide if cthulhu or zombies would be more appealing

I honestly feel bad for designers who legitimately love lovecraftian stuff. I'll still assume they plastered the theme on in an attempt to sell more.

>BGG's hotness and ranking chart
Are the histories of those available? It'd be interesting to do a bayesian average or any more sophisticated modelling.

It'd also be good if people didn't buy so hard into whatever new shiny thing just came out.

that'd definitely be interesting to see

>marketting driven hype bubbles
>absolute lack of creativity
>hallmarks of bad games/studios

Yeah, we're getting there. I'm looking at you, Cryptozoic.

>going to uni on Sunday
>have been itching for a copy of Here I Stand to play with tabletop gaming club
>been hyping it a little bit to people and they seem interested
>dad just gives me his copy
Didn't see that one coming. Then again, he's got a copy of Virgin Queen and he's probably going to get his own copy
Now all I need to do is find a copy of Dune somewhere

I personally love Marklin because it's fucking huge.

Bless you, user

You know about that "learn HIS in 20 minutes" pdf right? I mean, at least one person should read the full rulebook, but for the rest the pdf seems like a.. kinder alternative

Where is that picture from?

I've already played several times already (and just played a three-player game) but I'd probably use that, yeah.

The people in the club can into heavier weight games, so I'm not too concerned with their being able to pick it up easily.

I just want to do something besides constantly playing Betrayal at House on the Hill

Carcassonne is a very good intro game, I've found. The rules are easy to grasp, the theme is nonthreatening, and the little meeples are funny-looking without looking "too geeky". This is important because a lot of people have sort of internalized that they can't understand complex rulesets and geeky things, and will not try to do so even when they are otherwise much smarter than the rules actually demand if they get scared before starting.

What are some /bgg/ approved mobile versions of games? Stuff I can play on the shitter. Already have Carcassonne, Pandemic & Galaxy Trucker

The Tokaido mobile is dope, not out yet I think, but I played it at Gencon and I was sold almost immediately

Anyone else get this and play it? I've gotten 3 games in and I've enjoyed each one, the random faction and action boards give some solid replayability and since units don't die you can play really aggressively without feeling like you'll just fuck yourself after one lost fight

Incredible art, awesome theme, definitely a solid game, but not as vicious and aggressive as I'd hoped, too much of an engine-builder most of the time. One I'll play if someone brings a copy and that's what the crows wants, but won't be picking up a copy for myself.

Well, there's Heroes of Normandie, but it isn't very good. There's also the XenoShyft app, and you'll want to play that one sitting down since it tends to kick you right in the balls at time.

San Juan is pretty great. Might get sick of it after not too long though

I have Le Havre, Agricola, Lords of Waterdeep, Caylus, Ascension, Star Realms, Ingenious, Dominion, Blokus, Elder Sign, Neuroshima Hex, Summoner Wars, Ticket to Ride, Catan...

All good, though the free ones have ads and loasds of microtransactions

Thoughts on the Gods War? I don't know the source material but I'm glad it's a bit more varied gameplay-wise than Cthulhu Wars.

This is before they took the full list down; they moved up and unlocked the bigger map and the next one they'll hit will complete the moon faction

Bump

Anyone played Big Book of Madness? My group is interested in it, but I'm not super convinced after watching rahdo's video on it.

>like One Night Ultimate Werewolf
>expansion makes it too complicated
>like Coup
>expansion makes it too complicated
>Hanabi is too complicated
>Love Letter is my ideal game

Any suggestions? How's ONU Vampire? I guess I didn't like Werewolf expansion because of the relics/items, it'd be fun with just more cards.

Citadels, Mascarade, Sushi Go, 2 Rooms and a Boom, Mafia de Cuba, Guillotine, Ladies & Gentlemen, Saboteur, Cash N Guns

I haven't played it, but one night vampire just doesn't look fun to me. Too much extra stuff
You might want to check out codenames. It's gone over well with everyone I've played it with.

Pretty nice, more a relaxing co-op more than anything (and of course it can suffer from alpha player syndrome). Bit lackluster in the ending though and oftentimes (well, twice for me so far) you'll lose on every single monster and then just completely blow out a win at the end. Still you could do a lot worse for the price and it lends itself well to expansions down the line.

Introduced it to someone a week ago. They bought it immediately after. They wanna play again tomorrow too

I fucking want the base game promos, but I will never get all of them so I chose to ignore that they exist entirely

Re:expansions. Keeping track of which animals are on which fields, while still keeping track of your resources, while there are these giant fucking ugly plastic monopoly hotels on your tiles...it's just a big mess. I don't need that for a game that has enough going on already

Las Vegas + Expansion

I think someone makes a geek list every month. There're definitely geeklists for other stats, like games that have the most new owners each month, and most plays each month

I really got a kick out of Scotland Yard

I recommend the Android free version called Condado

If Daybreak is too complicated for you, ONUV is definitely too complicated. I agree about the relics, and Vampire is centered around a similar premise. Upcoming ONU Alien seems more intriguing

I really like codenames, I just think that you need 6+ people to actually play it. 4 is bare minimum and that cuts out the interaction between teammates that lets them rationalize stuff that they shouldn't or make leaps that one alone couldn;t make. It's so rare that I have more than 4 or 5 at a table that I never get to play it despite it being an insta-buy after I played it at a flgs's board game night.

We sometimes take Daybreak cards and put them into ONUW, but only cards that don't deal with relics. Relics really destroy the flow.

BGG is fucking retarded. How does a game that hasn't even been published get a 8.4 rating?
I can only imagine it's the idiots that got to demo it in a convention, and based on that single play went "ZOMG bestest gaem EVAR!!!!!!11one!!" and they just HAD to fucking shit the place up posting a bullshit biased rating on the interwebs.