Tuesday 31st January

karl_b wrote:Mike - yes, 7pm. Although it's not massively long so no need to worry about squeezing it in.

DK - you're in!

Right. I've watched a play through and read some of the rules. Should be enough to keep it moving along. I might throw INIS in a bag just incase we play really quickly. It's meant to play in an hour but I'm guessing first time through will take longer.

See you tomorrow.

Is there still a spot on GoT tonight? If so I will be up for it. 6.30 start is fine by me also.
Cheers
Ian

Ianm wrote:Is there still a spot on GoT tonight? If so I will be up for it. 6.30 start is fine by me also.
Cheers
Ian

You're in, welcome on board Ian!

Great stuff, we now have 6 for GoT. I'll be down for 6:30. If everyone else is there for 6:30 we'll make an early start; otherwise will just get everything setup and ready to go for when everyone arrives.

See you all tonight!

paulyg wrote:After having to cancel last time, I'd like to have another attempt at playing New Angeles. Corporate negotiations and shenanigans in a cyberpunk near future. I'll give preference to those who signed up the first time - let me know if you still want to play!

1. paulyg
2. Dave B
3. Carl
4. Sam S?
5. Jen?

Absent sorry Paul

psychomansam wrote:

paulyg wrote:After having to cancel last time, I'd like to have another attempt at playing New Angeles. Corporate negotiations and shenanigans in a cyberpunk near future. I'll give preference to those who signed up the first time - let me know if you still want to play!

1. paulyg
2. Dave B
3. Carl
4. Sam S?
5. Jen?

Absent sorry Paul

No worries!

Spare spot in New Angeles if anyone fancies it?

I will sadly not be able to join. Now that I know of this group, I will keep my eyes open for another opportunity to join you. Have fun!

Aneurin has bailed - room for one more on Russian Railroads.

New Angeles sounds good

Seemed super busy tonight. Great to see. How did everyone enjoy the games?

Game of Thrones was epic, but we did finish on turn 7 at about 11:30 with a win to Scott, who took two of my castles for victory (this seems to happen a lot -- both our Risk Legacy games ended with a (C/K)arl taking my HQ to win! -- must do better). It felt like I was squabbling with Scott in the south for most of the game, but he had a very strong defensive position. Perhaps I should have pushed North to pray on the Lannisters and Greyjoys, who seemed to be having trouble. Lannister, Baratheon and Greyjoy all seemed a bit squashed in the middle of the map, with not much to work with.

I've seen that the game does actually have two expansions -- or maybe mini-expansions, as they are only sets of cards. Still, they sound cool. The first, A Feast For Crows, adds rules for objectives and makes a balanced and shorter four player game, as well as adding House Arryn.  The second, A Dance With Dragons, replaces all the character cards with ones that reflect the state of the world during that latest book. For instance, House Stark is still, nominally, a faction, but the Bolton's have had their way with it, as reflected in the character cards.

For book fans wondering what happened to A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, they were expansions to the first edition of the game, which looked like this:

https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1095807_lg.jpg



Anyway, I was thinking about buying one of the second edition expansions and donating it to the club, if people want to play. A Feast For Crow's shorter playtime might make it a more appealing Tuesday night option. And I just think they both sound great and want to play the game as much as possible. It's really one of my favourites. I would gush about it all night, except I kind of don't know where to start. Amazing stuff, we really must play more of it.

Curious about a couple games that were going on tonight. Thoughts on New Angleles, Masmorra, and INIS, if it was played?

I did play Masmorra last week with Andy M. We played with six players when the max is five (just needed another counter to track their health, as there are plenty of player cards and figures). It was pretty horribly slow, and I'm not sure it would have been much better with five. Me and Andy had to play a side game via phone in between turns Didn't feel like you had much interesting to do on your turn. Nice minis, though.

Sam wrote:Seemed super busy tonight. Great to see. How did everyone enjoy the games?

Game of Thrones was epic, but we did finish on turn 7 at about 11:30 with a win to Scott, who took two of my castles for victory (this seems to happen a lot -- both our Risk Legacy games ended with a (C/K)arl taking my HQ to win! -- must do better). It felt like I was squabbling with Scott in the south for most of the game, but he had a very strong defensive position. Perhaps I should have pushed North to pray on the Lannisters and Greyjoys, who seemed to be having trouble. Lannister, Baratheon and Greyjoy all seemed a bit squashed in the middle of the map, with not much to work with.

[...]

Anyway, I was thinking about buying one of the second edition expansions and donating it to the club, if people want to play. A Feast For Crow's shorter playtime might make it a more appealing Tuesday night option. And I just think they both sound great and want to play the game as much as possible. It's really one of my favourites. I would gush about it all night, except I kind of don't know where to start. Amazing stuff, we really must play more of it.

.

Glad you enjoyed it. Just for balance, my thoughts on GoT: I can make a greater number of more interesting and worthwhile decisions in a 10 min game of Star Realms. Almost certainly the biggest waste of time of any game I've played. GoT is mostly about standing around bullshitting, bluffing and chancing. But then, some people play 'games' made entirely of that, so each to their own.

You should come round for Tash Kalar some time. It's like a cross between Summoner Wars and an abstract.

Really enjoyed New Angeles last night - thanks for trying it out with me! I think there's quite a lot of game there so definitely keen to try it again soon now that I know 'the parameters' (i.e. the sorts of events that come up, likely demand targets, the types of action cards available).

Sam wrote:
Curious about a couple games that were going on tonight. Thoughts on New Angleles, Masmorra, and INIS, if it was played?

I did play Masmorra last week with Andy M. We played with six players when the max is five (just needed another counter to track their health, as there are plenty of player cards and figures). It was pretty horribly slow, and I'm not sure it would have been much better with five. Me and Andy had to play a side game via phone in between turns Didn't feel like you had much interesting to do on your turn. Nice minis, though.

I enjoyed Masmorra. We played with five and I think it was still too slow though. Nice little twists on the genre with the dice monsters and dungeon master phase after character turn. Asymmetric Powers, plus lots of dice to throw! I do love randomly generated dungeons and having the next tile revealed was a nice touch. Good tile variety too. The mix of large and small tiles plus the treasure chests and gold very much reminded me of Binding of Isaac.

Would have liked a little more player conflict, since sending monsters after other people just seemed to feed them XP rather then slow them down. Could have just been the way our treasures and tiles came out though. We only had a single large room, a single large monster die, and one trap the whole game.

But the artwork.. its not super easy to tell which monster is on those dice, then with the XP amounts being tiny little dots on already busy dice.. Not great. Sure they put the XP on the reference cards for the monsters, but thats also just tiny little dots. Also whats with the super excessive amount of cleavage on some of the characters, looks like they are wearing a g-string for their tits... That all aside, it is a beautiful game.

Sam wrote:
Curious about a couple games that were going on tonight. Thoughts on New Angleles, Masmorra, and INIS, if it was played?

Five of us played New Angeles, which I really enjoyed. I like the Android Universe and the unfolding story, and this fits directly into the current data cycle in Netrunner with the mega-corporations trying to retain the special economic status of New Angeles (and preventing government intervention) whilst jostling with each other for power and wealth.

It's a semi co-op, with each player taking the leadership of a corporation. Role cards are dealt at the start of the game and you end up with either:
- Another player's corporation, in which case your win condition is that you end up with more capital than them (and the threat doesn't hit 25)
- Your own corporation, in which case your win condition is that you end up with more capital than any three other players (and the threat doesn't hit 25)
- The Traito... sorry Federalist who wants the government to intervene and wins by getting at least 25 capital and then causing everything to burn and getting the threat up to 25

It's split into thirds, essentially, with each third setting a public objective (demand level required for various resources) and giving each player a private objective (e.g. exceeding demand level on a particular resource, or getting loads of crime units on the board). Once that's all set up there are three rounds (per third of game) - two 'normal' rounds and one 'demand' round (basically a scoring round where secret objectives are revealed and scored and the consequences of unmet demand are carried out).

Each normal round consists of a small number (3-5) of player turns, during which there a 'deal' must be agreed and an asset (conferring a special power) is up for grabs. The person whose turn it is proposes one of their action cards as the action to take. Other players then have the option to put in a counter-proposal from their hand of cards and a vote is made between the main offer and the most recent counter-proposal (discarding cards for votes). The person to put forward the winning proposal then enacts it, not necessarily in the way that they said that they would when they were persuading people to vote, and claims the asset.

At the end of the round, there's a production phase where districts may (depending on whether the workforce is on strike, the district has a power outage, etc.) produce resources to help meet the demand needed. An event then happens which screws everything up (there's a little bit of a heads-up about what that will be on the back of the card) and can cause threat to increase. You end up with organised crime gangs hampering production, 'Human First' protestors smashing up bioroids and messing up your plans and everyone getting sick.

It was a first play for all of us, with the usual re-reading of rules and puzzling a couple of things out that that entails, but the mechanics are pretty simple and, after the first couple of rounds, it was fairly easy to understand them. I don't think we messed too much up and it felt like a close game.

There are some nice elements to it. Much like Battlestar Galactica, each player (corporation) is a specialist in certain areas and so gets cards of particular types (as construction / murder company Weyland I was picking up construction and 'security' cards). Each corp also gains capital when particular things occur, which just HAPPEN to be related to the types of things that come up frequently on the cards they collect. "Guys, guys, don't worry! I can end the outages on these districts... Oh, and it *turns out* that if I do that then it also makes me loads of money. Well, that's nice but OBVIOUSLY I'm just proposing this for the good of the group...". The secret objectives also help to throw suspicion of the Federalist around a bit (a player might seem keen to get a load of Human First protestors on the board... perhaps they have the secret objective which scores them more capital for that or PERHAPS THEY'RE THE FEDERALIST).

It's definitely a game where it's helpful to have played it once, I think. The heart of it is negotiating over what actions to play and, until you know how bad the events are or how strong individual actions are, it's hard to know what's good or bad. Going into it, my main concern was whether it would be too long and I don't think it was. Even for a first play with five players I think we were done in just over 2.5 hours, which I think is fine for a game like that.

The artwork is nice, though it's a bit of a shame that so much of it is recycled from Netrunner (different pictures of some of the familiar characters would have been cooler) and the design and layout of everything is pretty clear. It suffers a little bit from lots of cards with fairly dense text, but the person playing the card is typically trying to justify it anyway (so explaining what it will do is part of that) and there aren't *too* many different actions so eventually it gets to "I'm doing the thing where we get a free production there but then it goes on strike".

As I said, I really liked it and hope to play again soon...

paulyg wrote:

Sam wrote:
Curious about a couple games that were going on tonight. Thoughts on New Angleles, Masmorra, and INIS, if it was played?

Five of us played New Angeles, which I really enjoyed. I like the Android Universe and the unfolding story, and this fits directly into the current data cycle in Netrunner with the mega-corporations trying to retain the special economic status of New Angeles (and preventing government intervention) whilst jostling with each other for power and wealth.

It's a semi co-op, with each player taking the leadership of a corporation. Role cards are dealt at the start of the game and you end up with either:
- Another player's corporation, in which case your win condition is that you end up with more capital than them (and the threat doesn't hit 25)
- Your own corporation, in which case your win condition is that you end up with more capital than any three other players (and the threat doesn't hit 25)
- The Traito... sorry Federalist who wants the government to intervene and wins by getting at least 25 capital and then causing everything to burn and getting the threat up to 25

It's split into thirds, essentially, with each third setting a public objective (demand level required for various resources) and giving each player a private objective (e.g. exceeding demand level on a particular resource, or getting loads of crime units on the board). Once that's all set up there are three rounds (per third of game) - two 'normal' rounds and one 'demand' round (basically a scoring round where secret objectives are revealed and scored and the consequences of unmet demand are carried out).

Each normal round consists of a small number (3-5) of player turns, during which there a 'deal' must be agreed and an asset (conferring a special power) is up for grabs. The person whose turn it is proposes one of their action cards as the action to take. Other players then have the option to put in a counter-proposal from their hand of cards and a vote is made between the main offer and the most recent counter-proposal (discarding cards for votes). The person to put forward the winning proposal then enacts it, not necessarily in the way that they said that they would when they were persuading people to vote, and claims the asset.

At the end of the round, there's a production phase where districts may (depending on whether the workforce is on strike, the district has a power outage, etc.) produce resources to help meet the demand needed. An event then happens which screws everything up (there's a little bit of a heads-up about what that will be on the back of the card) and can cause threat to increase. You end up with organised crime gangs hampering production, 'Human First' protestors smashing up bioroids and messing up your plans and everyone getting sick.

It was a first play for all of us, with the usual re-reading of rules and puzzling a couple of things out that that entails, but the mechanics are pretty simple and, after the first couple of rounds, it was fairly easy to understand them. I don't think we messed too much up and it felt like a close game.

There are some nice elements to it. Much like Battlestar Galactica, each player (corporation) is a specialist in certain areas and so gets cards of particular types (as construction / murder company Weyland I was picking up construction and 'security' cards). Each corp also gains capital when particular things occur, which just HAPPEN to be related to the types of things that come up frequently on the cards they collect. "Guys, guys, don't worry! I can end the outages on these districts... Oh, and it *turns out* that if I do that then it also makes me loads of money. Well, that's nice but OBVIOUSLY I'm just proposing this for the good of the group...". The secret objectives also help to throw suspicion of the Federalist around a bit (a player might seem keen to get a load of Human First protestors on the board... perhaps they have the secret objective which scores them more capital for that or PERHAPS THEY'RE THE FEDERALIST).

It's definitely a game where it's helpful to have played it once, I think. The heart of it is negotiating over what actions to play and, until you know how bad the events are or how strong individual actions are, it's hard to know what's good or bad. Going into it, my main concern was whether it would be too long and I don't think it was. Even for a first play with five players I think we were done in just over 2.5 hours, which I think is fine for a game like that.

The artwork is nice, though it's a bit of a shame that so much of it is recycled from Netrunner (different pictures of some of the familiar characters would have been cooler) and the design and layout of everything is pretty clear. It suffers a little bit from lots of cards with fairly dense text, but the person playing the card is typically trying to justify it anyway (so explaining what it will do is part of that) and there aren't *too* many different actions so eventually it gets to "I'm doing the thing where we get a free production there but then it goes on strike".

As I said, I really liked it and hope to play again soon...

I enjoyed it as well - there are a fair few moving parts to keep track of but it's fairly simple mechanically. I think we only scratched the surface of some of the options (such as influencing votes and so on) but I'm sure that sort of thing will come with increasing familiarity to the game.

I really enjoyed it, definitely be up for playing it again sometime

DaveB wrote:
I enjoyed it as well - there are a fair few moving parts to keep track of but it's fairly simple mechanically.

Yes, totally agree. You're operating on several levels at once... you need to try to help meet demand BUT you also need to get the board to a state where the next event won't screw you/everyone BUT you kind of want to play an action that will get you some immediate capital BUT you also want to meet your secret objective to get more capital later BUT the person that played the best option to achieve this is your rival and you don't want them to have the asset that they'll get if you vote for them. Lots of really interesting decisions and timing is crucial!

At one point yesterday I'd convinced (I think) everyone that I should play my emergency action to get rid of three outages (and get myself lots of lovely capital). But I held off so that we could do something else to improve the board state first, and then suddenly my action became increasingly irrelevant and I couldn't find a good justification to play it. There's a lovely continuous tension between co-operating (avoiding losing) and advancing your own agenda (making sure you win).

paulyg wrote:There's a lovely continuous tension between co-operating (avoiding losing) and advancing your own agenda (making sure you win).

Yes agreed, I think that's the very crux of what makes the game so intriguing

psychomansam wrote:
Glad you enjoyed it. Just for balance, my thoughts on GoT: I can make a greater number of more interesting and worthwhile decisions in a 10 min game of Star Realms. Almost certainly the biggest waste of time of any game I've played. GoT is mostly about standing around bullshitting, bluffing and chancing. But then, some people play 'games' made entirely of that, so each to their own.

What?! Bluffing has barely come into any game of GoT I have played. Not even last night, and Jamie was playing that one! There is twice as much bluffing in Risk. GoT is very much a game of tactics and strategy (and handling the randomness of the events). Sure, you can discuss alliances and whatnot, like any dudes-on-a -map game, including Hey, That's My Fish!, but you have to make decisions based on what you're aiming for, what cards you have, and what you can afford to lose (and when).

psychomansam wrote:You should come round for Tash Kalar some time. It's like a cross between Summoner Wars and an abstract.

Any time, man

Sam wrote:What?! Bluffing has barely come into any game of GoT I have played. Not even last night, and Jamie was playing that one! There is twice as much bluffing in Risk. GoT is very much a game of tactics and strategy (and handling the randomness of the events). Sure, you can discuss alliances and whatnot, like any dudes-on-a -map game, including Hey, That's My Fish!, but you have to make decisions based on what you're aiming for, what cards you have, and what you can afford to lose (and when).

Found it interesting how nobody trusted me! No idea why what was! The game pretty much demands that you make and break alliances. I think we were all doing that to a degree. I don't think I was doing it, anymore than anyone else? Was I?

I really like GoT, but for some reason, it did seem to drag a bit last night. I guess, with it being so long since we played last, some of the mechanics had gone out of my head. Feel like I need to play a few games, just to properly familiarise myself with the games' mechanics and strategies. Keen to play again; but would be nice to do it on a weekend rather than a club night; just think the 6 player game is too long for a Tuesday evening.

Jamie wrote:
Found it interesting how nobody trusted me! No idea why what was! The game pretty much demands that you make and break alliances. I think we were all doing that to a degree. I don't think I was doing it, anymore than anyone else? Was I?

Did anyone really have an alliance with you? I didn't try to make an alliance with anyone, and I don't think Scott did either. Everyone around table talked about what we should and shouldn't do, and what we would like other players to do, and when someone needed to be brought down a peg -- which is part of what I love about the game, it being so crowded you have to step on each others toes, and really care about what everyone is doing -- but I don't think there is any real Diplomacy style play.

I could be wrong, that's just what it feels like to me. Maybe I'm missing a chance at getting an advantage by bullshitting and all the rest, but it doesn't seem like it. Even in Risk, which is again not really a game of diplomacy, you can turn a well timed betrayal into a massive advantage, into a continent for example. Here... not so much? It's just not designed that way.

I think one player could play in silence, and if they knew the game better than everyone else and were better at playing it, they would still win.

Cosmic Encounter or Spartacus or Twilight Imperium, now those are combat games with diplomacy and betrayal and bullshitting.

I was going to write about Masmorra, but I might as well just copy and paste AntW's thoughts, as I agree with everything he said. There was quite a bit of downtime with 5. I'd be interested to play it with 3 or 4 (I don't think it would be fun with only 2) and also to try the co-op variant. I don't think I'd buy it myself, though I'm still interested in Arcadia Quest.

Cheers to Arun for bringing the game.

AntW wrote:
But the artwork.. its not super easy to tell which monster is on those dice, then with the XP amounts being tiny little dots on already busy dice.. Not great. Sure they put the XP on the reference cards for the monsters, but thats also just tiny little dots. Also whats with the super excessive amount of cleavage on some of the characters, looks like they are wearing a g-string for their tits... That all aside, it is a beautiful game.

Yeah, that is the weird part about the game. Very specifically the boobs. I actually really like the cartoons and the way they are coloured...



...and the tiles are beautiful, a ton of personality, especially in the large ones...



... then almost all the girl characters looks like this.

[/quote]

On these otherwise cutesy cartoons, I half find it quite funny, and half am just a little weirded out by it.

New Angeles sounds cool, Paul Cheers for the explanation. I'll be up for it next time you play.