Lurker > NBIceman

Colegreen_c12 posted...

So far I agree with the the four I've played completely (44, 42, 39, 38) and also have no desire to play any of them again.

I would personally put mysterium below dead of winter though because i feel like its more likely to have extended downtime

As much as Mysterium aggravates me, there's nothing in it that I hate as much as I hate the Dead of Winter exposure die. It's also shorter.

That said, rankings within tiers are going to be fairly arbitrary until we get into the top ~third of the list.

37. Wavelength
Expansions Played: N/A

Wavelength is a team vs team game that plops down a big, colorful dial on the table and makes it into a fun little guessing game. The dial has a sweet spot spectrum on it that gets randomly turned and revealed to one player on a team. That player draws a card with a pair of opposites on it (anything from HOT/COLD to GEEK/DORK) and gives a one-word clue to tell them where the bullseye is. So, if the card is TALL/SHORT and the sweet spot ended up aaaaall the way to the left of the dial, that player might say "Wembanyama." Other players discuss, turn the dial indicator as appropriate, and score based on how close they get.

I often seem to see this lauded as a top-tier party game, but honestly, it just feels like most other party games to me. You've got a central gimmick (the dial) and mechanics designed for table talk with a lot of freedom for creativity and opportunity for post-round incredulity along the lines of "You think Timothee Chalamet is attractive?" It works well for family functions and other mixed-generation gatherings and/or people that just feel like drinking a bit and not thinking too hard.

The novelty wore off kinda quick for me, though. Most of the cards aren't that interesting, especially after they've come up once or twice, and some of the ones that are... Well, it's not exactly in a good way for a game that wants to appeal to those mixed groups and such. Imagine bringing this game to a work luncheon and having "Worst person in the world / Best person in the world" come up. There is no clue that could be given that wouldn't start a fistfight.

The dial itself mostly works well as an implement, but there are times when the sweet spot alignment accidentally gets changed when you're opening and closing the cover to hide it. Usually doesn't make a big difference but it's an odd defect for something that's so integral. Also, this is maybe just a personal nitpick, but the dial probably could do with being a bit smaller. Bullseye placements can end up being a little too abstract for my tastes if they're not at an extreme or very near the center, especially when plenty of cards don't have a ton of room for nuance.

I'll give Wavelength points for not being super group dependent, which is what lands it in a tier above the Exploding Kittens of the world.

Collection Status and Future Outlook: Owned by friends in my regular gaming group, but I think the novelty wore off a bit for them too because it hasn't hit the table in a while. Granted, that's partially because we haven't had a lot of bigger gatherings in a while. I'm sure I haven't played my last game of this and while I can't say I'm looking forward to next time, I don't dread it. It just isn't likely to ever get any better for me.

36. Sequence
Expansions Played: N/A

The go-to game for my family for many years, and I think it's overhated. Good? No. Essentially completely luck-based? Sure. But by the standards of its era, it's not a terrible time. When so many other families in the world reach for Monopoly anytime they want to play a board game and mine reaches for Sequence, I'm a very lucky man.

Draw cards from a combined deck of two standard 52-card decks, play cards, put a chip down on the board for the card you played. Each card has two spots on the board except Jacks - two-eyed Jacks are wild, one-eyed Jacks let you remove an opponent's chip. First to get 5 in a row (or two separate instances of 5 in a row if you like) wins. Can play with up to three teams or individuals. Teams are better, especially if you agree to limit talk between teammates.

It's uber simple, but you at least have to pay a little attention. Cards on the board are arranged only semi-sensibly, so if you're completely autopiloting you might miss things every once in a while. You might also get the odd satisfying moment where you remove an enemy chip for a card that is no longer in the deck and therefore would require a wild card to replace - very possible to really mess up an opponent like that.

Not much more to say about it. Good for what it's trying to be.

Collection Status and Future Outlook: Owned by me. Certain to come out plenty of times in the future but will never be anything more or less than what it is now.

FE is such a weird series, man. It's amazing to me how it's one of my absolute favorite franchises and I've happily sunk triple-digit hours into multiple entries for multiple playthroughs, and yet every second or third entry I end up saying, "Welp, this clearly isn't for me" within 30 seconds of watching the first trailer.

I played and enjoyed both Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes and they're obviously going to be compared frequently (I've done it myself), but I don't really think your opinion on one is a great predictor of whether you'd like the other. They're fairly different games despite sharing a genre and sources of inspiration.

39. Mysterium
Expansions Played: None

Well, it's pretty, at least.

In all seriousness, I do understand the appeal and popularity of this game... Sort of. Personally, though, it just feels silly, and I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say maybe that's because I simply don't think in the sort of abstract ways Mysterium wants me to think in. Regardless, this is a personal ranking where I'm not trying to evaluate "objective" quality, so since it's fallen flat every time I've played it, it's dropping here.

It's a cool idea. Mysterium is another co-op game where one player is a ghost who was murdered long ago. Everyone else plays as a medium trying to communicate with it and solve the mystery of its demise. Cell reception isn't great in the spirit world, so not only do the mediums have a limited time to link up with the ghost, but the ghost also can't really say much. That "communication" involves the ghost drawing a hand of cards with nothing on them but art, handing a couple out to each medium that are supposed to serve as clues, and hoping that they can mind-meld enough that they can eventually identify the suspect, location, and weapon. Yes, it's Clue, but ABSTRAAAAACT.

Here are a few examples of the kind of cards you'll be seeing. A cannon shooting fireworks. A bear reading a book. A top hat. An umbrella hanging from a moon. A rat playing chess... or standing on a chessboard... or something. Even the art itself is confusing; forget trying to interpret some kind of meaning for it. It's often completely arbitrary, and that's if the ghost even gets something useful. The fact that they have to draw all the cards they use means that there will be plenty of times where nothing in their hand has anything to do with anything else.

Every step of this game just feels like a stretch of the mind. So many instances of "Well, I'll just pick this card, I guess, since I don't know what the hell" on the side of both the ghost and mediums. What ends up happening is that a group meta will unfold very very quickly with repeated plays (and sometimes it doesn't even take that long) where everyone decides the most effective method is just to match up the colors on the cards or something and eliminate all actual thought. And so the game becomes pointless, because either you're playing that way (the "right" way) or you're artificially making things harder in a COOPERATIVE game.

It's just... Messy. Multiple phases within multiple phases, a final stage that makes absolutely no sense thematically and barely any sense mechanically (where you can pretty easily lose even if you've done everything else perfectly), a big box with useless components, all for what is really just a glorified party game.

Sorry, Mysterium, but any game where I'm a spirit detective but am not actually Yusuke Urameshi is a game that has failed.

Collection Status and Future: No one I know has ever owned this - only ever came out at board game cafes. Not likely to ever be played again.

38. Exploding Kittens
Expansions Played: Imploding Kittens (... I think)

Dumb, harmless simplicity. Players take turns drawing from a deck until they draw a bomb, in which case they're eliminated from the game. Other cards do things like let you peek at and rearrange the top of the deck, force other players to draw multiple times, or defuse the bomb you just drew. Wacky art and humor brings the experience together.

It's, you know, fine. You have to be willing to embrace the intended mindlessness of it. I wouldn't suggest this for a game night with my regular group in the same way that I wouldn't take a New Year's Eve party with my wife's friends as an opportunity to bust out Eclipse. It teeters on the edge of being more of an activity than a game, but if you're playing multiple rounds (which is easy - they're quick) it can be fun to see the mind games that people fall into where they're suspicious of whether someone's trying to take revenge on them for an attack in the previous game.

All in all, I've had fun times with this every once in a while. Granted, I think that's mostly been because the group dynamics were just too good those nights (in other words, it was more in spite of the game being played than a direct reflection of its quality), but I think it's fair to count that as a mark in its favor. Group dynamics can't save every game, after all - that at least speaks to some amount of fun included. Exploding Kittens comes out in the same kind of instance where people would otherwise be reaching for CAD or TCGCP, and I'll choose this over either of those 1000 times out of 1000.

Collection Status and Future: I actually own this myself because I bought it before I ever got involved in serious board gaming. It's buried in a closet at my parents' house somewhere and I'm not going to go looking for it.

And with that, we've come to the end of our first tier!

Games I'd Rather Never Play Again Tier
44. Cards Against Humanity
43. Fury of Dracula (Third Edition)
42. Dead of Winter
41. Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
40. Eldritch Horror
39. Mysterium
38. Exploding Kittens

Fine in Certain Contexts Tier
37. ???
36. ???
35. ???
34. ???
33. ???
32. ???
31. ???
30. ???
29. ???
28. ???

re: Dead of Winter, it's certainly possible that some of the longer playtimes are the fault of my group, which at the time included more members and so was pretty much always played at 5 and definitely had some people that are prone to overthinking things. And hell, it's entirely possible that some of those games just felt longer than they were because of overall dullness.

Anyway, it occurred to me that it might be fun to include an ownership status and future outlook for the games in the ranking, so here are those for the stuff that's already gone out.

CAD: Owned by multiple friends outside the normal gaming group. Certain to be played again in the future and I see no way it'll ever get any better.

Fury of Dracula / Eldritch Horror / Dead of Winter: All owned by a friend who used to live nearby and now lives very far away. Doubt they'll ever get played again, because I'm sure not buying any of them, and they probably wouldn't rise much anyway.

TCGCP: Mentioned in the writeup.

The wife and I were moving apartments this weekend so there wasn't a ton of time for games, but we still managed to get in one play apiece of Root and Flamecraft, though everyone was exhausted for the latter and kind of sleepwalking through everything we did. One of those games has steadily gotten to the point where it's falling on my list a bit, but the other is rising.

Hat in Time is probably my favorite 3D platformer ever. Only competition is Spyro: Year of the Dragon. So I guess I also fall into that "similar tastes" category.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say competitive games are "nicer," but I get the argument and certainly agree that cooperative games can be frustrating a lot of the time.

Not even from a disagreement standpoint; they're just hard to get right. Unless all players are at an exact equal skill level, you're almost always going to run into an issue of quarterbacking unless A) the game is designed around reducing or explicitly limits table talk between players, both of which hurts the overall cooperative feeling, or B) the game is easy enough that some players can kind of just do the tabletop equivalent of button mashing without compromising success, which also isn't exactly a satisfying experience for anyone.

The more sprawling co-op games like Eldritch Horror feel like they should be littered with memorable moments of team triumph, where even the most disastrous playthrough leaves you with the recollection of one incredible roll of the dice that everyone around the table is sitting on the edge of their seat for, where weeks later you can collectively relive the exact circumstances and board state that led up to it. That would make all the overhead and frustration worth it - a unique shared experience that you can't get from competitive games because you're all on different teams there and, by definition, one player's success is another's failure.

But my group has way more stories like that from competitive games. And I guess you could say that part of the reason is that in at least some aspect of the design philosophy (at least for good games), there's a consideration that even players who are losing should be having fun. Everyone losing together, especially in an utterly dominant fashion, after struggling against unfair odds just leads to a feeling that time was wasted. A competitive game at least ensures that one person comes away feeling accomplished, and usually it's more than that because the others can feel like they made them earn it in a balanced battle.

So maybe in a way, you're right that they're nicer. Guess it depends on your definition.

Hell yeah, I got one.

Slow at work today, so here's one more.

40. Eldritch Horror
Expansions Played: Forsaken Lore, Mountains of Madness, Strange Remnants, Under the Pyramids
We've had a One vs All game, a semi-cooperative game, and now a fully cooperative game already - noticing a pattern yet?

We're still in the realm of games I never want to play again, but I will at least give Eldritch Horror credit for producing the odd enjoyable session out of the relatively many that we played once upon a time. You and up to seven other people play as, uh... Researchers? Investigators? People? People. People from wildly different places and backgrounds, trotting around the globe trying to stop a Lovecraftian evil from obliterating the world. There's a ton going on here, decks upon decks upon decks of cards, flavor text for days, tons of different characters all with varied upgradable attributes and unique abilities, and at the center of it all is an Ancient Monster that also comes with its own abilities and card decks.

Despite all that, the win condition for the players is always effectively the same: complete a number of tasks determined by player count before enough time passes and things happen for the horror to enter the world. Fight monsters, find clues, close otherworldly gates - it's a regular ol' supernatural adventure with twists and turns aplenty. In the end, though, success or failure will all come down to the whims of a bunch of D6s. Run afoul of a local crime syndicate in Europe? Roll a die to see if they break your leg and impair your movement for the next round. Looking for a clue in Africa? Roll a die to see if you actually find it or become afflicted with a horrible disease. Travel through a gate? Roll a die to see if you go insane on the way back. In combat with a Cultist? You guessed it - roll some dice. Generally speaking, you succeed on your current mission if you roll a 5 or 6. Anything else is a failure.

This is meant to be a tough, punishing game, so it feels a little wrong to complain about the amount of times things don't go your way. But man, too often, this game just feels like it's repeatedly kicking you in the crotch. Every action matters here - you've got a supremely limited amount of time to accomplish everything you need to do to win while putting out little fires all over the place, and failure on one turn is often completely crippling because problems will snowball out of control very quickly. With the odds being so against you on nearly every roll, it just creates a feeling of hopelessness for the majority of time spent playing. Thematic? Sure. Fun? Not usually. And with the need to be so efficient and coordinated, you're often going to be forced to quarterback at least some of the time if you want to have any shot at winning at all.

The bottom line is that most of our sessions with this game didn't exactly come down to the wire. Either we officially lost relatively early, or we knew we were going to but felt obligated to see things through anyway. Why would we do that? Sunk cost, mostly. This game's setup time alone is obscene with the amount of decks that need to be separated and shuffled, and (stop me if you've heard this before) it takes forever to actually play, too. I feel the need to clarify that I don't mind long board games - in fact, I tend to prefer them. But they have to be interesting all the way through, not just for portions. And "challenging" for a co-op game becomes a problem when it crosses over into "unbalanced." Forget the random nature of the dice; there are basically no controls in place for what kind of Encounter cards you might draw at the end of each turn. Some of them will include negative effects even for successes, some of them will target attributes for your character that make things impossible even when that sort of thing is supposed to be somewhat mitigable, etc. Even drawing monsters is completely random more often than not - it's like a really bad Dungeon Master using random.org to determine encounters and sending a giant pack of wyverns at a Level 1 party with no additional thought.

In short, there have been way too many attempts at this game that seemed to just descend into an unwinnable state early on, and rarely did it feel like we had anything to do with that when it happened. Even some things that are determined by player count feel wonky - setup and victory conditions are the same for 4 players as 3, for example, or for 6 as 5, and that extra player who is or isn't there makes an enormous difference.

I think I can sum up the problem with Eldritch Horror by telling you about our most successful playthrough, which came when I, through a combo of lucky rolls and draws, quickly amassed a large arsenal of weapons (and other helpful things, but mostly weapons) early on that allowed me to pretty much steamroll every instance of combat for the rest of the game. We won fairly handily, but while it was fun in the moment (especially as I was annoying my friends by repeating the "Anyway, I start blasting" meme every time I fought something), it doesn't feel that satisfying on reflection. I don't even remember what Ancient One we were facing or what character I played or any other details from the session beyond the fact that I had guns. Another time, victory or defeat came down to one dice roll, for which my best friend's wife confidently stepped in and said, "I got this," only to roll a 1 and seal our loss - again, one memorable moment at the end of a very long session that we can recall no other details of.

I WANT to like this game badly, but it just rarely hits its sweet spot, and even when it does, it doesn't make for an experience that's all that satisfying. Having so much luck inherent to every part of the adventure means that not only do you feel cheated when things go completely off the rails, but you also don't feel particularly accomplished. You just happened to roll better that time. I've got no problem with luck-based games in and of themselves, but when one lasts for 3 or 4 hours and I spend the whole time fairly convinced that any decisions I'm making are secondary to the dice, it's asking a lot.

Maybe it would help a little if I had more attachment to Lovecraft and the flavor text didn't wear thin so quickly. I'll at least give it credit for being written much better than something like Dead of Winter. But again, if we're two hours in and I've just been Cursed for the third time and my sanity both in and out of the game is rapidly depleting, I just don't want to hear it. I want to accelerate the inevitable loss so we can do something else.

I just eventually hit a point with Eldritch Horror where I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of it. "Fun" feels like it was a tertiary or quarternary concern here.

SHINE_GET_64 posted...

3

one tracked me down at a PAX they were stalking me

one other lived near me and I sold a spare PS4 to them

one I met at Michigan Masters and defeated them in a Windjammers tournament

Scarletspeed and I are just chopped liver, apparently - the three of us met at the G1 show in Dallas a few years back.

42. Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Expansions Played: None
One of the first modern board games I ever played, and it's a wonder that it didn't send me running from the hobby at all speed.

Dead of Winter is a semi-cooperative zombie game, which is a bad start. "Semi-cooperative" is not an adjective that most board gamers tend to enjoy, and there are few genres of media I'm less interested in than zombie stories. But close-mindedness never did anyone any favors, so I accepted the offer to give it a shot, and it was just all downhill from there.

You and your friends play as members of a small colony of survivors of whatever apocalyptic event led the world to this state. Broadly, the game revolves around these survivors making excursions out of the colony to look for stuff - food, gas, that sort of thing. The harder you look, the more chance you have of drawing the zombies' attention. Each round, you have to find enough supplies to put into a community pool while fending off those zombies. Everything that goes wrong decreases the community morale, and if you lose too much, game over. And oh boy, will things go wrong.

For example, every time you go anywhere, you have to roll a die to see if anything bad happens to you. Most of the time, something bad will happen to you, up to and including INSTANT DEATH. You've set up the game. You've set up your character. If there are new players, you've sat through an interminably long rules teach that eventually just amounts to "you can do a few basic actions and roll dice to see what happens." On your first turn, you decide to go to the Hospital to look for some supplies, aaaaaand you roll the die and are killed immediately. That effect can even cascade to other players, killing multiple at once through pure chance. What a worthwhile experience that was.

What else is going on? Well, the semi-cooperative part of Dead of Winter is twofold. First, everyone has a secret personal objective to go along with the overarching group objective. For an individual player to win, not only does the group as a whole have to achieve victory, that player also has to complete that objective. But beware - there may also be a traitor in your midst! They win if the rest of the group loses and they accomplish some other stuff too. Honestly, I don't really remember the traitor mechanic that well because we tried it once or twice and then never again. Why? Firstly, because the game is hard and random and full of those self-serving secret objectives enough already. More importantly, the traitor's primary method of sabotage is to add utter junk to that collection of community resources I mentioned earlier. The biggest problem here (not the only one, but the biggest) is that all non-starter items tell you what location they come from. So if at the end of the round, the pile is full of garbage from the Hospital and only one player has been there, gee, I wonder who the traitor is.

That's an oversimplification, of course, and there's ways to mitigate the obviousness, but those ways are riskier and I think y'all get the idea of why I hate the mechanic regardless. It never made the game better, and even if the traitor gets found out relatively early, they've probably had plenty of time to do enough damage to the colony that everyone else is going to lose anyway. The personal objectives suck too, though. Too often, you'll realize partway through the game that you have no shot of accomplishing yours (frequently through no fault of your own) and be forced to sit there for another 90-120 minutes with no hope of victory, just trying to help the group now. Putting aside that this is punitive and boring beyond words, it also really gets in the way of the whole theme and intrigue of the scenario. And yes, you read that time right - this is another game that is just way too damn long for how repetitive it really is. Apparently there's a variant in the rulebook that removes the personal objectives and makes the game fully cooperative. We never played that, but even if it solves a couple of the problems I've listed here, it won't solve the boring turns or game length, and it'll introduce new ones like quarterbacking.

I haven't even mentioned the Crossroads cards, which are essentially flavor text dumps that are so far up their own ass that they should have the Ouroboros on the back instead of the actual crossroads symbol. On your turn, another player secretly draws one of these, and if you meet conditions listed on it, the card activates and crap happens. Usually bad crap. Actually, always bad crap, because even if the card effects aren't punishing, you still have to listen to someone read a long, overly dramatic paragraph to set it up.

I hate this game. I'll give it points for the atmosphere, I guess, sort of, but that's all it has going for it and I could get 95% of that tension from a 30-minute social deduction game. The only reason it ranks over Fury of Dracula is that if everyone does die and lose immediately, the game was at least short. It's idiotic, but it was short.

41. Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
Expansions Played: N/A
Party game. Players flip over cards from their hand, like in War, into a central pile while sequentially saying the titular words. If the card you flip over matches the word you say, everyone slaps the pile. The last slapper takes all the cards. First one out of cards wins.

I played this once because my wife's non-board-gamer best friend owns it. Someone's hand got hurt (because that's what happens in hand-slapper games) and that was a wrap on TCGCP for the night. It wasn't my hand and it didn't take all night, so it still ranks above the bottom 3. I'm sure I'll have to play this multiple times again in the future and I'm not looking forward to it.

Furil. Slick as hell game that could probably be most concisely described as a boss rush with a hybrid of hack-and-slash and bullet hell gameplay. Also hiding one of the best and most memorable stories I've ever encountered in an indie game.

I'll also throw out TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children, an SRPG with one of the most insane cost-to-content ratios out there. Some of the deepest character customization you'll ever see, dense and challenging missions, a monster taming system, and quite a bit of other stuff I know I'm forgetting offhand. There's a certain type of gamer for which I think it would be a strong contender for their favorite game ever - the only thing keeping it out of my own personal top ~10 is that the translation can be a little rough at times and make the story a bit hard to follow.

Does LMS have, like, colleagues? People that interact with him on a day-in, day-out basis?

What must that be like?

Ark Nova is a game I'm curious to try, but something about its look has always turned me off of it a bit. I didn't realize it was on BGA, though - good opportunity to give it a go.

I definitely saw a lot of praise for Evacuation post-Essen, been meaning to check out a playthrough video. Love the idea of the game.

Anyway, let's get the ranking started with some stuff I don't care for.

44. Cards Against Humanity
Expansions Played: None
I know it's pretty low-hanging fruit among "serious" members of this hobby to hate on CAD, and it's not like it completely ruins my night if we've got seven or eight people hanging out and one of them drops this on the table, but I still would never come close to describing it as an enjoyable time. I'd rather just, like, talk to people. It was kind of funny the first couple times I ever saw it when I was, like, 14 years old. Nowadays, I just spend an hour-plus hoping for maybe one little laugh, or maybe finding some humor in disturbing our especially prudish friend. Even then, though, we can accomplish that without this "game."

I don't know, I've already spent more words on this writeup than it deserves. Next.

43. Fury of Dracula (Third Edition)
Expansions Played: N/A
I wish I had better things to say here, because I quite like the very base idea of this game. It's a One vs All, Hidden Movement battle where one player controls Dracula and the others control hunters from the original novel trying to stop him from growing his influence over Europe. Dracula moves using a deck of secret location cards (played facedown) while the hunters attempt to track him - if they visit a location he's been to recently, that card gets flipped up and the trail is found, hopefully granting enough info to deduce where he's gone since.

In theory, this should lead to a lot of tense, interesting decisions where you slowly piece together what little clues you find and try to get into the Dracula player's head and eventually come to a reasonably educated conclusion about how to proceed. In practice, you're really just going to end up flipping a mental coin more often than not. Stumbling on the city Dracula visited four turns ago is rarely helpful because there's probably no one close enough to take advantage of it, and even if there is, there's probably still not enough information to actually determine which direction he went afterwards with any confidence. I don't know - maybe my friends and I are just really bad, but anytime we found Dracula, it felt like luck instead of cleverness.

But even if there is some deep deduction gameplay here that I missed, your elation at being smart enough to find your quarry would likely be short lived once you remember that means you have to fight him now. Your prize for winning a guessing game is another guessing game. The combat system here is just a card-based Rock-Paper-Scissors farce that most closely resembles one of those soccer penalty kicks where the goalie jumps in the complete opposite direction of the ball. Unless you're playing against poor, predictable Bart Simpson with his "always pick Rock" strategy, there's no way to play the mind games needed to succeed as the hunter - Dracula will almost always have multiple options available to him that are advantageous, to the point that you simply can't counter all of them and you'll be, yes, flipping a mental coin again. One of these options is for Dracula to take bat form and, unless you play the exact card to stop him, teleport multiple cities away and force you to start the metal-detector-on-a-beach search again.

All of this would be more acceptable if it was a quick affair, but it's not - this game's #1 problem is that it takes forever to play for even experienced groups, and it simply does not justify its length. I enjoy the original Dracula lore and I'll give Fury credit for being thematic, but there's just too much annoyance going on in this box for too few moments of fun. I should note that I never played as Dracula, and I've had people tell me that I'd probably like the game better if I did. I could believe that, but in a One vs All game, if the only player having fun is the One, that's still lousy design. This is not a solo game and my having a good time shouldn't be predicated on getting a specific role. It actually soured my opinion on One vs All forever. I'm sure there's decent stuff out there, but it seems like a setup that's absurdly hard to balance from both a fairness and fun factor standpoint.

Can someone just make a good Castlevania board game instead? Maybe one where fighting is actually fun? Just spitballing here.

Leonhart4 posted...

ya go my Spurs

Damn right. Even with Phoenix missing Booker and Beal, that's the sort of comeback you don't expect to see from the youngest team in the league.

Here's a list of what I'm including in the ranking to begin with.

7 Wonders
A Feast for Odin
Anomia
Azul
Boss Monster
Calico
Cards Against Humanity
Cascadia
Codenames
Dead of Winter
Dice Forge
Dune: Imperium
Eldritch Horror
Everdell
Exploding Kittens
Flamecraft
Fury of Dracula
Great Western Trail
Happy Little Dinosaurs
Here to Slay
Hues and Cues
Inis
King of New York
King of Tokyo
Kingsburg (2nd Edition)
Last Bastion
Machi Koro 2
Marvel Dice Throne
Mysterium
Obsession
Photosynthesis
Root
Sagrada
Scythe
Secret Hitler
Sequence
Spirit Island
Sushi Go!
Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
Tidal Blades: Heroes of the Reef
Twilight Imperium: 4th Edition
Viticulture
Wavelength
Wingspan

That's 44 games total, but I reserve the right to add games to the list if they happen to hit the table from my group's unplayed shelf of shame, which currently consists of:

Dwellings of Eldervale
Merchants of the Dark Road
Vindication
Windward

Would love to know if anyone here has experience with any of those that they want to share!

Rankings and writeups will be posted more or less as I have the time and feel like it - not gonna try to adhere to any kind of schedule and I'm not in a particular hurry since the ranking is kind of secondary to the discussion I'm hoping for here.

In the meantime, anyone have any crowdfunded games (or other preorders) that they're waiting on? I've got a few, but it's gonna be quite a while before any are in my hands.

Guards of Atlantis II
https://gamefound.com/en/projects/wolffdesigna/guardsofatlantis2new
Absurdly excited for this one - seems like a very high percentage of people that play it have it as one of their absolute favorite games. I held off on the initial campaign because it seemed pointless to get without a consistent group, but now that I do have one of those I finally pulled the trigger on the game and one hero pack.

Hybris: Disordered Cosmos
https://gamefound.com/en/projects/aurora-game-studio/hybris-disordered-cosmos-rivalry
This game seems like it could be a complete mess with just too much going on, and even if it's not, it might end up being a little too out there for my friends. But a heavy steampunk-Greek-mythology game with all of these different mechanisms that I tend to enjoy is so perfectly up my alley that I feel like I owe it to myself to try it. Think the resale market should be good enough that I can at least get most of my money back if it flops.

The Old King's Crown
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eerieidolgames/the-old-kings-crown-a-tale-of-royalty-rebels-and-ruses
This wasn't on my radar at all until a couple weeks ago, and now the hype train seems to have suddenly gone out of control for it. I definitely think the rulebook needs another few passes (which the creator is aware of), but this has a chance to be a really, really cool bluffing/bidding game that makes you feel really clever to win. And it goes without saying but that art is incredible.

I think we've got some other folks here that enjoy board games, right?

My regular group has recently reformed thanks to two of our four members moving back to our hometown, so I'm getting the chance to play very regularly on weekends after a few years of sessions that were few and far between. Figured it might be fun to get a little discussion topic going here so I have another outlet for engaging with the hobby during the week besides just mindlessly exploring BoardGameGeek and Kickstarter.

And, because it's been a good while since I did any kind of ranking project here, I thought I'd make it a twofer. I've got a little over 40 games that I feel experienced enough with to include in a full ranking. Rookie numbers to some but still enough to be of interest to people, maybe?

Beyond that, even though I just plastered my username into the topic title, my hope is that anyone will feel free to come in here and share everything board game-related that they want - their own rankings and reviews, reports from their game sessions, whatever crowdfunding launch is triggering their FOMO that day, it's all welcome. I just feel like chatting about tabletop gaming.

As much as I like 9th Child, it's probably my least favorite of all the boss themes from LM2. La-Mulana music is just so great.

MZero posted...

Two games deep and we're already down Beal and Book

That said the rest of the team is keeping pace with a contender on the road, which looks good for our depth

A contender? I thought they were playing the Lakers tonight.

Late replying to all of this because the last few weeks have been insane, but I'm very pleasantly surprised to still have 3 songs in the upper half. My VGM tastes have never seemed to do all that well in related board projects.

For A Place in the Sun, you're definitely right that "Like, this song is designed specifically to build to something greater, without doing anything particularly special itself." It's the second phase of the final boss out of three, so the big finish is still to come. I've always really loved it anyway, though. The melody just has a tendency to get stuck in my head.

I was a little worried when you said that The Usurper was a little too bombastic for you, because I tend to like bombast. Especially for final bosses and so forth. But I guess it hasn't destroyed me yet! I figured there probably wouldn't be a whole lot of flutes in these noms, so I'm glad you enjoyed that aspect of it. King's Bird's OST doesn't have many individually memorable pieces but it's so nice to listen to.

Dr. Wily Stage 1
Zero Gravity Area
Skyway

Tundra Man Instrumental

Can't imagine it wins here, but what a hell of a run.

Wtf that sucks. Always loved him. He was one of the big names I most remember from the time I was just getting into the FGC.

Tundra Man Instrumental

Lopen doing Lopen things.

Dr. Wily Stage 1

Franz and Banchero are already better than anyone on the Pistons and I don't think the theoretical ceiling of ceilings for Cade or Ausar are so far above theirs that I would use them as an argument in Detroit's favor.

I'm high on the Magic's other pieces as well. It's a reasonable discussion but I'm definitely more confident in Orlando's future as of today.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Who the fuck subscribes to Starz?

Everyone should, to watch Black Sails.

Then once that's done they should unsubscribe.

Pretty surprised a track I nominated made it to the semis since my music tastes rarely seem to jive with the rest of this board. I know I've got a pretty good winrate up there but I suspect that's partially because I've abstained a good bit during this contest. Go go Tundra Man.

Final Transmission

Hey cool I survived the first tier.

Tundra Man Instrumental

Dr Wily Stage 1

Change my vote for Match 2 to the MM3 Title.

Thunder Tornado
Final Transmission

Tundra Man Instrumental
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Other people here liked this one better than I did but I still thought it was quite good.

Galaxy Fantasy
Zero Gravity Area

Dr. Wily Stage 1
Metal Man

Pharaoh Man
Title MM3

Sea of Stars (PS4)
I get married ~15 hours from now, so this game gets the fun distinction of being the last one I'll ever beat as a single man.

Normal ending, so I'm gonna hold off on most of my thoughts until I come back in the near future to do everything I didn't get to just playing through casually. For now, suffice to say that I was heavily, heavily anticipating this game as an original Kickstarter backer, and while I definitely don't think it's a perfect game, it was worth the wait and I loved it.

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Tundra Man Instrumental

I think we could all benefit from more one-off conversations with strangers that never lead to anything more than that. Especially for introverts like me, it's a good reminder that people can be cool sometimes and that's all there is to it.

I remember I went to Best Buy once as a teenager and my cashier was a really cute girl with some coloring in her hair, which I've always had a bit of a thing for. She complimented a necklace I was wearing, I complimented her hair, we chatted a bit about whatever I was buying, and then I left. Never saw her again. For a while I kicked myself for not just casually giving her my number, but then I came to regard it as just a nice one-off interaction that made me smile sometimes to think about. Like others have said, that's not a bad thing to have.

And that's without considering that your instincts were warning you against this girl, which is always good to think about for sure.

Zero Gravity Area
X vs. Zero

Pleasant Thief Marino
Galaxy Man

Jakob
Metal Man

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Title MM3

The first few seconds of Tank! from Cowboy Bebop.

Final Transmission
Pharaoh Man

Pharaoh Man is probably my second favorite Mega Man song. My absolute favorite is... We're the Robots. But that's the original version, and the Smash remix is, as per usual, not even in the same universe quality-wise.

That being said, I'd vote for all four of these songs above a good 3/4 of the total field, I think. Strong day for my tastes.

Surge of Power!
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R2 is too close to call for me.