The Boardgames Thread / Board games

Cascadia looks lovely, I've not seen that one before.

How is that even possible?

is the question on all the players lips... considering keyforge decks are £6-9 each to buy and due to the generative nature of them opening competitive decks basically comes down to dumb luck so most people who play in tournaments will own a couple of hundred decks at least, it's a game lots of people have invested thousands into to play competitively and now it's just dead, they havent even kept up community support for existing players.

i don't know anyone who will be buying keyforge 2.0 if they make it and i think ffg might realise that so it'll never see a release.

FFG can go suck a fuck, they've killed the two best games ever.

Everdell is my partner's favourite game, but then she's a sucker for any anthropomorphic animals and the artwork is pretty nice.
It's also an enjoyable game to play.
Carcassonne + variations
Caverna Cave vs Cave
Fast Flowing Forest Fellers
Dominion
Ticket to Ride

just remembered I snapped a couple of pics of my new gaming room in our loft last night and forgot to post them. still need to organise the games a little better and bench is a smidge too low so could use a couple of bolster cushions to sit on but otherwise very happy with it.

was playing Roll Player Adventures. storybook driven adventure game where you move around a map reading entries and making choices then using cards to manipulate dice for placement on skill and combat checks. little bit of resource management and push your luck thrown in to keep it from feeling like you're just a passenger but is quite "on-rails" albeit fun if the story is as important to you as the gameplay itself.

has 12 story books and they take about 2-3 hours each to play through at a relaxed pace (up to book 4 at least)

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Tidy. We still need that Arkham Game.

My girlfriend loved the Robin Hood game, as did I, I’m a sucker for that theme, introduced her to codenames which went down well. Currently working through Cantaloupe. Which I’m loving the retro feel.

I’ve also got Radlands on the way, looking forward to it.

I keep adding bits to my arkham collection as they're released but havent played it in ages. I stalled halfway through a campaign so need to make an effort to get it to the table now i have somewhere nice and quiet to sit and play.

and thanks for reminding me about cantaloop I meant to see when next one is out and just pre-ordered book 2 which is either coming in a couple of weeks or end of the year depending on the retailer you look at.

I've played my mates copy of radlands a few times, it's good fun. it you don't have the deluxe version with the playmats i'd look to print out / draw your own on some paper as the layout helps makes the game so much easier to follow and learn.

I find it all surpassingly strange--they have a game that somehow induces people to spend thousands of readies on it to buy hundreds (I don't even) of decks, and they lose something that for some reason (not that I understand why an algorithm was needed to make the decks, and not that I am keen to look into why :) ) was essential for continuing this commercial (and seemingly critical) success, incurring the wrath of addicted and committed players in the process?

I mean, I used to be into games that by the standards of the time (30+ years ago) needed a lot of game materials, but certainly nothing on this scale ...

Amazing. I think you and Drakien are the two people who know the most about games that I've ever met.

since nov 2018 they sold and registered 2.6million decks( and it's been pretty much dead for about a year now! )

for a little background on the game it was designed by the guy who made magic the gathering and it's unique selling point was each deck was complete and along with a handful of tokens was everything you needed to play a game against an opponent, each deck was made of up 3 randomly chosen "houses" (of seven), each with 12 cards per house and could not be changed. it was given a uniquely generated name and image as the card back and there wasn't another exactly like it.

each deck was randomly generated using a number of rules so that no other deck would ever exist that contained those exact 36 cards.

the problem was that randomness essentially made it like opening packs of football stickers or scratchcards, you were making a very expensive gamble that it would be a good deck and more often than not it would not be (opening a display box of 12 would typically yield 1-3 serviceable decks for local competitive play).

when opening a deck you were first trying to get the houses that worked well in tandem with each other, then within each house you had to hope that you got the right combination of the more powerful rare cards and that those cards provided a good balance that worked with all of the various mechanics in the game (points generation, points steal, creatures, combat, defence, artifacts, special actions).

all that meant that you could open a deck and immediately tell it was a waste of money because it just contained bad cards or lacked any ability to counter specific kinds of opponent tactics rendering it toothless or you could open a deck with a specific card combo that could lock your opponent out of the game with ease and sell for hundreds of pounds on the open market to people looking for the very best decks for the national/international tournaments where you brought your most powerful deck to play.

on top of that they would release new sets every 4-6 months or so with completely different houses and cards so there were continually changing things to see and of course new metas and gameplay mechanics introduced. gotta buy them all!

you could of course buy a single deck and only ever play with that but you would see only a fraction of the available cards. the most interesting format of the game saw a pool of players each open a brand new deck and then play in a round robin style tournament pitting the deck they have just opened against their opponents brand new deck so it relies on a lot more skill to play "blind" not knowing what cards are in their deck to counter you. throw in a couple of quid to cover prize support and you were looking at the cost of 3 pints for an evening of entertainment, do that 2 or 3 times a month and maybe buy a display here and there to check out a new set and all of a sudden you have 100+ decks in no time at all.

So did all that increase the appeal or decrease it? I personally never liked collecting anything that included this random factor, e.g. where you'd end up with lots of superfluous stickers. I realise that's something many kids (and probably adults) specifically like, but it was never for me. I always just thought it was pure moneymaking.

Still bizarre that they then just throw their cash cow away ...

weirdly a bit of both. all the players i know though feel a little shameful about their collections now. in the heat of the moment though it was fun. i'll probably hang onto my "good" decks in a box in the loft for the next few moves in case it ever sees some weird retro resurgence down the line.

It definitely increased the appeal for me, having played Netrunner and loved it, and then went to a meetup and got trounced because everyone I played had all the expansion packs and just better decks (nothing to do with my skill level, honest).

I was really interested in a competitive deck-builder-like card game where you wouldn't have to spend £100's to get a good deck, you could just luck into one. And the game itself plays really well.

Shame it's all fucked up now. Glad I only bought a couple of decks :D

So Netrunner worked on the Panini principle, did it? I can see the appeal of the Keyforge model in contrast to that. Cheers.

RNG IRL though? Genuis idea to tap into the market that spends thousands on microtransactions in video games.

yeah it was very lootbox'y

Not exactly, it wasn't random packs you were buying, more like pre-defined expansion packs of 25 new cards at a time, so you knew what you were getting.

But if you bought all the expansion packs you could craft a much better deck than if you didn't so if you wanted to be competitive you had to buy them all. That's why I was attracted to Keyforge.

Looks Keyforge didn't solve that problem either, people just buy loads of random packs until they hit on a good deck by chance. Spenders gonna spend, I guess.

Flesh and Blood tcg is a bit more like the football stickers stuff as you buy starter decks and then rely on getting better cards by opening booster packs which are random. it has an insane secondary market where people pay ridiculous money for single cards that puts me in mind of the groupthink of the NFT markets with how people value things. would love to give it a go but that's a non-starter for me now.

Vampire: the masquerade - rivals is a decent new competitive card game. the starter set lets you build up to 4 player decks (less if you want to mix them up) and they release an expansion with 2 more vampire clans every 6 months or so to increase the card pool. but it's not a crazy amount of buy-in.

the deck construction in the game is solid with lots of options for viable decks and if you can get the recommended 3 or 4 players you can get some real backstabbing going on.

I started playing FaB and really enjoyed it. I came from Magic the gathering and it felt like every FaB match was close. It did however become clear that without putting money into the legendary equipment for the class i played i'd never be able to really up my game. Then they dropped two ban announcements that effectively hamstrung my my decks. I'm not sure i can afford to buy into a currently competitive deck even if i offload my current stock of high priced cards. Its frustrating as the cards i'd need are all insanely rare and thus obscenely expensive in the secondary markets. It means new players are effectively forced to play pack lottery.

Not played Halma before. Pretty basic chequers game. 4 player mayhem version curtailed by playing with the elderly.

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Just played Escape The Dark Sector for the first time since buying it months ago.
I’d played ….Dark Castle once before, which was great. Sectors got slightly more complicated combat, but we’d all picked it up and got the game rolling pretty quickly. Scrappy, nice pace and really easy to die, but in a good way. Would recommend.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/280748/escape-dark-sector

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Been playing the above a bit more - hard recommend.

Has anyone on here done much creating of their own games? I did a re-theme of Machi Koro a few years back, which was fun to do, but ive never actually designed the mechanics of a game before. I'm currently tinkering with a solo card-based game that I'm designing from scratch and I wanted to hear from someone who's done it before and could give me any pointers!

Don't we have the designers of a cycling-themed card game on here?

Oh, which game is that?

I'm nearly at play testing stage with my game. It's a bit nerve-wracking as I know full well that play testing will in all likelihood mean a meaty re-think and throwing off half the rule system in the bin!