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Id like to see Space empires 4x with expansion as well as Twilight Struggle and Twilight imperium NEW edition thats coming.
Thnx a lot for this, love it.
PS Talisman is awsome too....Republic of Rome too....
I looked on Amazon for the game, pretty pricey, and also a ton of add-ons available. Wonder if those are necessary, nice, or just fluff. DLC for board games basically I guess :)
I have twilight struggle on iOS and need to play it more. Could be a good one to cover.
The new version of Twilight Imperium would be awesome - but I don't have quite the group or time to play it. Runewars can be managed in a long evening session - but TI is more of an all day affair.
There is a new Sid Meier Civilization boardgame launching this fall, and the Master of Orion game is coming out in a few days. Trying to get review copies of both. The MoO game is more of a tableau builder like Race for the Galaxy but a little more streamlined. Maybe I should review Race for the Galaxy. Has a dedicated PC and Mobile app that is quite good as well.
Caverns is a big euro-style game. I generally don't like eurostyle games because I don't find them directly interactive enough. Too much focus on engine building and optimization with usually long complex scoring routines at the end. The games becomes more a function of learning the system of mechanics and optimizing it rather than outwitting your opponent per se
The entire "hero" system for example is a complete waste and thematically disconnected. You could literally remove the heroes and quests completely and it would make nearly zero difference.
Edition 4 got announced like only a few weeks back. Though they have only slightly tweaked it.. and have not attempted to lower the play time as far as I can tell from the rule changes.
The best, imo, TI-Lite game is Exodus : Proxima Centauri. Also the new "Empires of the Void" looks interesting, but I am still waiting for my kicker to turn up. There is Eclipse, but it is more like Hegamonic as it is a 4x-like game with much more heavy euro elements .
Caverna is a Uwe Rosenberg game, maker of Agricola, GlassRoad and Patchwork (my personal favs).
It is not very good imo, though many people like it. Uwe is a genius level designer but has been creativity bankrupt for a long time. All his games are nearly identical and his main design idea is "more stuff".
Caverna and Feast basically ARE Agricola.. all his games are nearly identical.
Caverna's and Feast of Odin are both all about complexity of CHOICE not of decisions making. With literally 100s of tile offers and actions. That is not creating interesting decisions, just lots of them.
If you are looking for a top Euro designer Try Vital Lacerda (Libosia / Gallerist / Co2) or Vlaada Chvátil (Dungeon Pets / Lords, Mage Knight, Through The Ages)
I play Twilight struggle often with my son when we are travelling on ipad, add me for a match or two (diablo2211 on game center)
The heroes exist, so the inpact is not zero, they are there and you do move them... but they have little impact.
The heroes are a completely separate sub set to the rules, they have no impact by design. They move freely, they do not force combat, they can not be attacked or w/e (unless from other heroes) They tried to fix it in the expansion but they only added the ability to add to them as a "wild" unit to the combat stack. The weapons and items ONLY effect other heroes. Nor do they even take damage.
There only function is to basically fund runestone cards. The entire phase is completely tacked on and superfluous. Just terrible design. A great example of a thematic "requirement" the devs felt they needed that didn't fit inot the design, and was forced in.
Granted it has been about 5 years but I can not see how any of what you said is even possible.
there is a fantastic Twilight Imperium mod on TTS, though it is a amalgum of all the last 14 years of community house rules.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=478727953&searchtext=twilight+imperium
as I said, they do not have zero effect, they are things in the game.. but have 2 or 3 cards in the entire stack and 2 heroes in the entire set that effects things dose not negate the point
The heroes in Runewars are certainly an example of "chrome." For those that don't know the lingo, boardgamers talk about mechanics or game content that may not be critical to the gameplay, and could maybe even improve and tighten up the game were it not included, as chrome. And yet chrome plays an absolutely vital role in building drama and narrative in Ameritrash-style games - which is why you see so much of it in Fantasy Flight games in general. Replace the Runewars setting with Lord of The Rings - you'd expect Gandalf and the fellowship and all other key characters to have some place in the gameplay, even if it were just a minor role.
Personally, we spent more time making fun of each other's heroes and their misfortunes as table banter than anything else in the game. While I agree that heroes are not strictly necessary for the game to work, they do add a an important layer to the game and help build the narrative - and more importantly help build a unique narrative each game session. We had one game where heroes did their own thing, and another where they were dueling each other left and right to steal treasures. Both experiences stood out because of how radically different the play was. This is why chrome is important to this type of game.
There are two board game meta genres. Euro and ameritrash. The latter isn't inherently an insult though it sometimes can be. So can the former for that matter.
The big difference is in efficiency of design. Euros tend to want to winnow away unnecessary mechanics until they clearly showcase simple game mechanisms that allow for complex strategic choices. They also tend to strongly favor forms of competition that keep all players in the game in some capacity to the very end.
Ameritrash revels in theme, and will happily include extra mechanics and components if they tell a story. It doesn't worry very much about elegant mechanics, often trusting that players literally won't notice that a huge percentage of them use the same underlying strategic choices, since those choices are concealed under a layer of theme.
One simple game mechanic might be called "kill the leader." It's when everyone is jockeying for first place, you can slow a players win by attacking them, or hasten it by cooperating with them. A TON of games use this. The strategic choices involved are incredibly simple.
1. Figure out who the leader is.
2. Band together to beat him up so he doesn't win.
3. But don't divert too much effort towards that because you want to be on top once he goes down.
This game mechanic arises automatically in like... 90% of conflict oriented ameritrash games. But no one notices because they're so busy, say, managing a hundred and fifty plastic soldier pieces, and rolling thirty dice at a time, and reading cards describing the epic challenges their empire is facing. Examples include everything. But also Risk.
In a euro, that mechanic would be, like... right up front, with mechanics specifically designed to facilitate it. And the other players would get REALLY TESTY if you didn't understand it, because your failure to understand it might give someone else the win. Examples include Settlers of Catan. (That's why the cards and army/road scorings are in there- to make it less obvious how close each player is to victory, in order to complexity a kill the leader mechanic).
I wrote all this to say that 4x as traditionally understood is almost inherently ameritrash because 1) rich theming plus 2) exterminate phase plus 3) cavalier attitude towards a players ability to be functionally eliminated as a competitor in the first ten minutes of a six hour game equals 4) ameritrash kill the leader game.
But if you broaden your expectations to include games that leave out an X or two...
I strongly recommend Terra Mystica for a euro style 4x.
It leaves out explore and exterminate. But it focuses very well on expand and exploit, on a hex grid, with thematic-for-a-euro factions.
It's a terrestrial fantasy game with some mechanics that will remind you of space 4x. Each hex has a terrain type which must be terraformed to be settled. Each race has preferences for terrain and each terrain can be terraformed easily in some ways but not others. Once settled a space is owned permanently. Space is limited and some settlement types reward adjacency to your opponents. And different factions and technologies permit different expansion rules. The result is a land grab scramble mixed with development as everyone alters, exploits, and develops a limited and shared set of resources.
Then it ends quickly (for a heavy weight euro) and scores, rather than grinding out a finish like all too many 4x win conditions.
It's really good. It's kind of a model for what I would like to see in a 4x. I think disallowing player versus player war and restricting space to a narrow, shared environment is about the best thing you can do if your goal is to change a 4x from an ameritrash style story driven or war focused experience to a strategic mind bender.
Not to say that every game should be that, I really like story driven 4x, and I like war driven 4x. I just don't like the stuff in the middle that tries to serve too many masters.
Just finished a 5 player fast game of 7 wonders. Got to love simplicity (euro style and similar in some things to Citadels which is an awsome game we once upon a time had tournaments for!)