So, Party House.

[Whiplash]

Am I the only person that wants a actual physical version of this since it's basically a card game? Because I would buy that in a heartbeat.

[Songbird]

It would be cool for sure. Some of the abilities in the digital version are not friendly for physical play, though. Stylists, grillmasters/athletes (and tracking guests whose ability has been used after they are shuffled back), and climbers wouldn't be doable with cards. There would also be a pretty excessive amount of shuffling, especially with "fetch a guest" abilities.

It would probably work better as a bag builder, to cut down on the shuffling a ton. You'd still probably want to rework the aforementioned guests. Including a popularity value and ability tracker on each piece would be theoretically doable, but unbelievably fiddly and unnecessarily expensive. Probably better to modify an entire category of guests with stuff like the stylist and climber instead (easier to track on a seperate component), and reworking grillers/athletes to remove themselves from the deck while resetting abilities or something?

Personally, I'd actually be more excited for a physical version of Avianos. A lightweight, fast 4x with its action system (leveling up with use, having five sets of three actions, sharing the action lists between players and allowing someone to deny one for a turn by using it, allowing shuffling of the abilities between ancestors) would be pretty cool. I do feel a lot would be lost with the loss of real-time simulated combat (where unit speed, clumping, terrain and height advantage, real-time hold/raise/retreat all add meaningful elements), but the core is still solid enough. 4x games are notoriously difficult to approach because they go on so long, but an easy-to-start two-player one is a very underfilled niche. Also, it has a bird + dinosaur theme, and that is the best theme.

[sgt johnson]

Originally posted by Songbird:

It would be cool for sure. Some of the abilities in the digital version are not friendly for physical play, though. Stylists, grillmasters/athletes (and tracking guests whose ability has been used after they are shuffled back), and climbers wouldn't be doable with cards. There would also be a pretty excessive amount of shuffling, especially with "fetch a guest" abilities.

It would probably work better as a bag builder, to cut down on the shuffling a ton. You'd still probably want to rework the aforementioned guests. Including a popularity value and ability tracker on each piece would be theoretically doable, but unbelievably fiddly and unnecessarily expensive. Probably better to modify an entire category of guests with stuff like the stylist and climber instead (easier to track on a seperate component), and reworking grillers/athletes to remove themselves from the deck while resetting abilities or something?

Personally, I'd actually be more excited for a physical version of Avianos. A lightweight, fast 4x with its action system (leveling up with use, having five sets of three actions, sharing the action lists between players and allowing someone to deny one for a turn by using it, allowing shuffling of the abilities between ancestors) would be pretty cool. I do feel a lot would be lost with the loss of real-time simulated combat (where unit speed, clumping, terrain and height advantage, real-time hold/raise/retreat all add meaningful elements), but the core is still solid enough. 4x games are notoriously difficult to approach because they go on so long, but an easy-to-start two-player one is a very underfilled niche. Also, it has a bird + dinosaur theme, and that is the best theme.

It might just be that you have a color-code for each of a particular type of guest, then you could always remember that, say, the Climber with a green-dot on the top-corner is the one with three markers on her, or something like that. Then you could just have like, a large, legend card that you can use to keep track of all the stats by just placing markers, or whatever. :O

I just love the colors/art-style in Party House so much that I definitely want it in physical form, too! XD

[Gametto]

What you are looking for then is a board game called Quacks of Quedlinberg. It recently dropped from $50 to $40 MSRP this year in the US.

In the game you pull chips out of a bag. Don't pull too many chips or your potion will explode.

If you stop early. You use your VP and money from the potion to buy modular ingredients that change every game.

Sound familiar? It won the Goty in 2017 too (spiel des jahres)

[DrakeFox]

Bag/deck builder with push your luck is a good genre. I can agree with Gametto that Quacks is a fun little game.

For some reason Party House reminds me of Port Royal. Flip a card, decide to stop or flip another card.
If two ships of the same colour (there are 5) show up, you bust and get nothing.
Otherwise you get to either take a ship for its money, or a non-ship if you can pay the cost, some of these can help you get more money or mitigate unfortunate ships in the future.
Push your luck for 4 or 5 different coloured ships and you get to choose two or three cards.

You don't build a deck, and yet, Party House's push your luck still feels quite similar.

And just to add to strange *-builders. Cubitos, in which you buy dice of different colours. When it's your turn you roll the dice. As long as you roll at least one non-blank face you set them aside and can choose to re-roll. Roll all blank faces on your remaining dice and you bust. Otherwise you get the effects of the dice which allows you to move or buy more dice.
Then again I'm just easy to please, and rolling a handfull of 11 dice is just a nice feeling :-)