Board 8 > my top 32 tabletop games

(+) Yeah! (+)

Heck yea Splendor

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Love splendor. My friends and I have been saying we're going to write splendor AI bots and have them play each other. Hasn't happened yet

29. VisualEyes (2003)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Real-time, dice, judging, word game, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 2-3 minutes per hand
Experience: 30+ hands over 4+ sessions (2016-2019) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - A bunch of dice depicting images are rolled. Each player then races to think of phrases that connect the images (a die with the sun and a straight arrow might be taken to be "sky-line," for example). In "slow rounds," everyone writes these phrases down, and after the time limit, the sheets are read and judged, while if anyone shares your phrase, it is crossed off for both players (Boggle-style). In the "fast rounds," everyone calls out their phrases in real-time and then takes the dice they use, if judged appropriate.

Design - VisualEyes is obviously a mass-market and not a designer game. I'd played it enough times to rank in 2018 but didn't really deem it "hobbyist" enough to rank. In any case, the game is arguably less "game-y" than many other entries here as well. No ingenuity really went into the game, though I will say the dice themselves are great. In particular, I'd criticize the relative lack of structure: players mainly decide whether or not a phrase is fine, and it can lead to slight vindictiveness if people vote you down. There's also zero arc between rounds - a gentleman's agreement not to use the same phrase between rounds is about all the "continuity" you expect, other than adding scores.

Experience - Almost none of the lack of "game-y-ness" matters. Essentially, I just love real-time games, wordplay, cool pictures, and the like. Fast-paced word association gets my competitive juices flowing in a way where no one has to really suffer for it. In comparison, many other games involve making a loser out of someone. Many solitary engine-builders, for example, let you run your engine even if you're losing... but other, more successful players might take longer running their engines if they're superior, meaning you sit around longer. The real-time aspect of VisualEyes takes care of that bit.

Future - I couldn't in good conscience ever really play VisualEyes twice on the same game night, which is rather unusual for filler-weight games. But there are really only so many dice, and its biggest weakness is that after five to ten rounds, you'll start seeing repeats, and avoiding those repeats (if that's a rule) or hitting on them (if that's a rule) starts becoming the game, and that lowers the fun-factor. On the other hand, this is the type of game I'd love to play like four-to-six times a year after the heavy game(s), preserving that sense of delight.
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28. Captain Sonar (2016)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Real-time, hidden movement, player combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 20-30 minutes
Experience: 5-10 games over 3-5 sessions (2016-2018) with 6-8 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 24/80 (2018)

Summary - Two teams. Each team represents a submarine crew on a grid-shaped map, trying to sink the other's sub. However, the teams don't know the others' location. The Captain of each team is responsible for directing the sub's movement "North! East!" which charges the sub's weaponry. The Radio Operator listens to the Captain of the opposing team and tracks the other sub's movements to make educated guesses. Charged weapons can be fired at any time to any spot within range. There are two other roles: a First Mate, who does much of the management, and an Engineer, who manages the breakages that cause the subs to resurface (and give info to the opposing team).

Design - There are very few games cooler than Captain Sonar. A giant divider physically blocks one side of the table from the other, which actually insulates you with your crew. The teamwork is vital because it goes in real time; if one person tried to handle multiple roles (other than arguably Captain + First Mate), you'd have a high likelihood of breaking a rule and dealing damage to your own sub. The tension is high because health is low; the game is entirely played as mutual cat-and-mouse.

A lot of fiddliness surrounds the game, which aids thematically, creates roles for involvement, and gives info to the opposing team, which is vital. A sub's motion is restricted by several things, which allow the Radio Operator to zero in: the map has natural barriers, so navigating those causes you to leave a telltale track; a sub can never double back on its tail before it resurfaces; the ship breaks down, so you need to resurface; and of course you can ping your opponent's sub to gain information (though of course, this requires charging your weapons). You can specifically try to locate your opponent's sector (i.e., the box they're in), or you can request "Captain, Sonar!" in which case the opposing captain must play "one truth and one lie" in providing info - a row and/or a column and/or a sector. This scattering of the brain is excellent, like a mix-up card appearing in Jungle Speed.

Experience - My first play of Captain Sonar, at a meetup, was sublime. Playing as captain with an experienced player who enjoyed being first mate, it was incredibly evocative of actually being submerged and having to trust people around me. Round and round we meant, with communications coming in from the left about our systems (both breakages and charging), from the right about where we thought the enemy sub was, and from across the table questioning our location...

Like Specter Ops, though, I've never really had another session with quite that same level of immersion. Have had a lot of fun (and a few duds), but that level of immersion might have been as much the player as the game. Nonetheless, Captain Sonar definitely always feels like an event, and an achievement just to have gotten to the table. It's adrenaline-pumping and exciting... except those times when the Captains have quieter voices.

Future - Unfortunately, it's hard to envision when Captain Sonar will next hit the table, because eight is the ideal count, and it's hard to get that number of players together for this game anytime soon. Nonetheless, if the ideal circumstances arise again, there are few games I'd rather play over it, if only to see if that magic can be recaptured.
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Captain Sonar! That is such a wonderfully silly fun game. Has a few obvious problems but I forgive it because it's just so zany and unique. Also stressful as heck to be captain. Every other position is a joke.

i had fun the one time i tried captain sonar! to get the full 4v4 experience requires a lot of folks though

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tag

Have you ever played LotR Journeys in Middle-earth? I just got it recently. It's pretty fun, feels a bit like Gloomhaven.

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Pretty sure I've played that one.

Cant remember which of the 3 LoTR games I've played it is though atm.

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Captain Sonar is great. I've only played it twice and I've been the Radio Operator both times which I definitely enjoyed being.

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Captain Sonar is such a great party game. Very few games produce as much laughter consistently as Captain sonar. Just don't bother with the inferior Sonar version.

The best is when you have a player who panics easily, but doesn't really mind panicking or getting yelled at. Make them the radio operator and let the chaos unfold.

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27. Kemet (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Player combat, dudes on a map, tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 8-12 games (2017-2019) with 2-5 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 14/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is a warlord competing for territory and victory points in ancient Egypt. Temporary victory points are awarded for holding temples and high-level pyramids, while permanent victory points are gained by winning (and surviving) offensive battles. Actions include raising pyramids, which also enable access to techs that eventually result in asymmetric player powers that can affect how combat takes place.

Design - Part of what what makes area control games with heavy player combat painful is that they're zero-sum, and bashing-the-leader often winds up being the go-to move - smash the guy with the most territory and bring the game closer to equilibrium and further from its conclusion. Turtling becomes a big deal.

Kemet understands the pain of this paradigm and instead gives us a more interesting way to be smashmouth. Start with the action selection mechanism. Kemet is divided into rounds, and during each round, each player gets five turns. These turns must all occupy different spots on your pyramidal player board. The structure of it forces you to perform at least one martial action (marshaling troops or marching) each round... but it also prevents you from marching more than twice, putting a cap on your aggression each round. Inherently balanced gameplay is enforced.

Then there's the tech tree: from the very get-go, there are 48 available skills you can acquire - four per each of the four tiers per each of the three colors. This isn't necessarily a positive - you absolutely need a crib sheet to play Kemet - but the race to acquire these powers and distinguish yourself becomes key to Kemet. You can buy the skills only by controlling a pyramid that is of the tier of the power or higher. The coolest and most impactful of these in battle are almost certainly the beasts that you can add to your troops (and which get badass minis!), while it's also a good idea to have a few economy-minded techs. You need to pay for all your cool powers after all! Cleverly, Kemet slims its fiddliness by using only one currency - prayer points - for everything it wants to do: marshaling troops, raising pyramids, buying techs, and teleporting your troops.

Wait, teleporting your troops? Yes - Kemet allows you to teleport your troops for prayer points as part of your marching order, instead of hoofing it like a peasant. That means that you don't have to fight the person sitting to your left and right all game; it's a free-for-all at all times.

But even more accurately - and this is perhaps the best part of Kemet, and what gives it its unique flavor - you're not that concerned about the person you're attacking at all, unless you find them the most likely to give you victory points. The majority of permanent victory points will come from attacking and winning battles on the offense. As a result, the best target to attack will often be the most easily accessible and assailable troop. (Given that troops are often encamped in temples that you can teleport to, it shouldn't be hard to find a fight if you're looking for it.) Kemet also anticipates that you won't want to leave a weakened conquering army as sitting ducks by allowing even the victor to decide to recall their troops, taking only the victory point and not the territory.

There are two issues I have with Kemet. The first is the turn order mechanism - Kemet has the player in last place (VP-wise) choosing the entire turn order each round, which seems outsized and political for the person in second-to-last. This has since been addressed in the revised Kemet rules (which I have yet to play with).

The other, and perhaps more of an issue, is that its rules explanation is kind of tedious. Rodney Smith on Watch It Played effectively taught it to me, but it took thirty minutes. Kemet is just a long teach if you're new to the game, and worse, all 48 techs are available at the beginning of the game. I've never played the game without printed reference charts for those abilities, and the initial onslaught of information can be significant.

Experience - Which is all to say that I haven't really gotten regular plays of Kemet the way I've wanted. I got the game because I won $50 of store credit once and had heard it was good. It is excellent, and I've enjoyed every game I've played. But that teach has been onerous every time, and I always feel that knowing the tech tree (and not having to pore over the list of them) always seems like an overwhelming advantage. Despite having played it near-double-digit times and always had fun, I'm still seeking that play that is effortless.

Future - Kemet is the first of perhaps five or so high-ranking heavyweight games that I've played/own a good amount but am thirsty to play with my friends and to educate them how to play. I want to play it more and I want my friends to get comfortable with it, so they're not re-learning the rules again. In the absence of that, I'll settle for whenever I just get it to the table again, period...
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Peridiam posted...

tag

Have you ever played LotR Journeys in Middle-earth? I just got it recently. It's pretty fun, feels a bit like Gloomhaven.

haven't played any LOTR game, i think.

... and i haven't played gloomhaven either :(
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Kemet sounds like it might potentially be up my group's alley, hmm

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KommunistKoala posted...

Kemet sounds like it might potentially be up my group's alley, hmm

it plays up to 5 and is probably best at that count. how big is your regular group?
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There's also a revised edition of Kemet coming to Kickstarter soon called Kemet: Blood and Sand. According to the bgg page it "features a redesigned map with a twist, bigger and more detailed figurines, and other surprises."

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Great_Paul posted...

There's also a revised edition of Kemet coming to Kickstarter soon called Kemet: Blood and Sand. According to the bgg page it "features a redesigned map with a twist, bigger and more detailed figurines, and other surprises."

man, i wonder if they offer upgrade kits. matagot put out new rules for base kemet (9 VP endgame instead of 8, trimming some night phase confusion, fixing turn order) that blood and sand is supposed to include by default.
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I tried playing those new 1.5 rules the last time I played Kemet and they went pretty well. If the new edition was just the redesigned board and bigger minis then I wouldn't care too much, but if it adds new elements or mechanisms then I'll be hoping for an upgrade pack. I'm interested to hear what the "other surprises" part is.

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I tried Kemet a couple of times and one of the beasts (I think it was the scorpion? It's been a while since we played...) was so much better than the other creatures it was silly. The player who got that creature won by a mile each time and it sucked the fun out of the game for us.

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SeabassDebeste posted...

it plays up to 5 and is probably best at that count. how big is your regular group?

typically 5-6 (more often 5).

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Kemet always seemed so cool, but I never picked it up. That new Kickstarter sounds perfect for me!

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im sure kemet is good but it never looked like the kind of game for me

my friend who had a copy moved away before i ever got the chance to give it a go

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Been playing Castles of Burgundy

Might be my favorite game in my limited experience thus far!

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its a great one, i'd say a classic at this point

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Castles of Burgundy is definitely a modern day classic and it's one of my favorites. I wish the art wasnt so drab, but it's an overall great game that's easy to teach.

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26. Word Slam (2016)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, clue-giving, word game, real-time, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 1-10 minutes per hand
Experience: 50+ hands over 5-10 sessions (2018-2019) with 4-10 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each team has a clue-giver who knows the same word. Simultaneously, they begin clueing their team in... by using a massive deck of word cards, which include both concrete words (green, man, animal, job) and more abstract concepts (up, not). The twist is that while each team can only see its own clues, it can listen to the other team's guesses. The first team to guess a word wins it.

Design - Simple but exceedingly clever. Cluegiving is one of my favorite mechanisms, especially in party games, and Word Slam... well, it is a clue-giving party game. To be fair, it's about as vanilla as it comes in terms of design, but given that it's a "players make the game" situation, that's entirely fine by me.

The twist in Word Slam comes from the fact that cluegivers are giving simultaneous clues for the same word. So you're getting the usual manic energy as a cluegiver scrambles to put together the set of cards that will lead someone to the solution ("round," "food," "yellow," "brown")... but now there's some tension, since you don't necessarily want to guess everything right away. If you're a guesser and you see "round" and immediately start saying "wheel," "basketball" immediately, the other team will quickly deduce that you received the clue "round." If they were first to get "food" and "yellow," they would be highly likely to get "pancake" thanks to your giving away "round."

Word Slam's biggest "learning curve," if you can actually describe the game as having that, is its deck of cards. My friends and I, when we played, would spend a few minutes before the game laying out the entire deck like a massive keyboard. Deciding how to organize the deck so you can access your clue-cards is half the game. It's a solitary half with little madness, but it can be satisfying and empowering.

Experience - A friend got Word Slam in mid-2018, and it immediately became one of our party games of choice for months afterward. With new gaming pal's being lower on clue-giving games and groups overall being smaller, it hasn't really seen any play in a relatively long time for how much fun it is.

Future - I'd gladly play Word Slam again. There are two big strikes against it. The first is opportunity - gaming pal #1 isn't a big fan of word games, so I'm guessing it wouldn't go over amazingly. The second is that Word Slam's niche is rather well-worn: it's not my #1 cluegiving party game, so when the scarce opportunity arises, I may prefer to go a different route.
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are pancakes really yellow

as for cluegiving i have OG codenames and I think that's the only one we've really played much

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Word Slam's premise sounds almost exactly like Password, but with a limited clue pool, which adds a layer of puzzle to it. Seems fun!

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25. Dominion (2008)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Deck-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 50-100 games online/vs AI with 2-3 players (2014-2015), 5-8 games in person with 2-6 (2015-2019)
Previous ranks: 8/100 (2016), 15/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a deck consisting of action cards, treasure cards, and victory point cards. Each turn, you can play one action and spend treasure to buy one card from a static marketplace. All cards drawn and purchased then go in the discard pile, and you draw a fresh new hand. When your deck is empty, you reshuffle your deck. When certain stacks in the marketplace are emptied, your score is the sum of the VP cards in your deck.

Experience - I played an absolute ton of Dominion before I properly got "in the hobby," online. Simple, addictive, yet with undeniable depth of strategy. Playing it in person is almost a bit of a disappointment, since tracking the number of gold or actions or buys in your turn is kind of tedious, and it got me used to expecting others' turns to move lightning-fast, too. Watching someone else draw out their deck in person is much less fun.

Design - Dominion is the granddaddy of the deck-builder. The genius of it is comes from the restraints it places on you. Since deckbuilders are such a well-worn genre, we can examine each design element of Dominion individually and see why it is still superior.

- The fixed market - Many deckbuilders, in an attempt to inject randomness (or something), give you a draftable market of available cards. This reduces overhead in setup and in reading the cards at the beginning of the game, but it makes the game less strategic. Dominion does have this overhead, but the tradeoff is that you can form a tremendous strategy, that you'll never be denied cards based on luck and that you won't have to read what cards do during the game.

- One action and one buy - Fantastic. The one-action part means you can't just pick up every good card, which is boring - you need to synergize them in the right ratios of extra-action cards, non-action cards, and of course those powerful action cards (like Smithy, the draw-3 card from the base set).

- You discard your entire hand on each turn, which means you must tune your deck to get the best five-card-draws - no waiting around for it to clear up.

- VP cards make your engine worse. This is arguably the most radical part of Dominion. It's without question an engine-builder (as deck-builders are), and like most engine-builders it has a point where you should "flip the switch." But other engine-builders don't actively punish you for flipping the switch too early the way Dominion does.

Future - I love the game for what it's been, but it scores more here on respect and past love than on current desire. For my taste, at this point, Dominion is arguably too pure. Its setup time and what downtime there is act against it. That said, if the right expansion is used for a 2-3-player game and everyone pitches in for the setup, I'm still game.
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Dominion isn't my favorite game, probably not even top 10, but it's a game I'm always happy to play. I don't think I've ever once thought "eh, just not in the mood for Dominion atm". Any time it's been on the table and I didn't vote to play it was simply due to there being something else I was especially excited to play, or knowing that if we wear it out then the others in my group won't want to play it any more.

Unfortunately I've found that in my circles the simplest strategy nearly always wins. Just buy money then provinces, or dukes/duchies, etc. People often get tangled up in an overly complicated strategy where they rattle off 12 actions all to just end up with 2 buys and 7 copper, or something.

Hard agree on the notion of static market = good. For games that have randomness in the market, I prefer if they come packaged with a secondary objective separate from the deck itself, a la Clank! or Quest for El Dorado. If ALL I'm doing is strategically buying cards, let me buy the damn cards I want.

Trains, Clank, Quest for El Dorado and Legendary (as a full co-op) are all really good deck builders. But I'm not sure any of them are quite as good as Dominion - especially Dominion with Intrigue and/or Prosperity. (Dominion Alchemy is Garbage, though. Burn it and bury it in the back yard.)

Side note - I finally got to play Ascending Empires last night after owning it for 2.5 years. It was a ton of fun. For those who don't know this one, it's a somewhat simple 4X game that is unique because you move your ships by actually flicking/ hitting them to send them flying across the board (ala Crokinole or Pitchcar). It moves quickly and creates some memorable moments by literally sending your ships across the galaxy. I highly recommend it.

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Dominion still the best. In theory I like the idea of a non-fixed market and multiple buys, but I've never seen it really executed well enough that I'd take it over Dominion. Playing online eliminates a lot of the fiddliness too, and the current implementation does not suck.

turbopuns3 posted...

Unfortunately I've found that in my circles the simplest strategy nearly always wins. Just buy money then provinces, or dukes/duchies, etc. People often get tangled up in an overly complicated strategy where they rattle off 12 actions all to just end up with 2 buys and 7 copper, or something.

This will wreck bad/new players but once you git gud there's almost always a better strategy! (even if it's just adding one or two cards to that plan)

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Dominion is a classic for a reason. Restrictions and limitations make the game, attempts from others in the genre to soften those edges all ultimately make the games weaker.

El Dorado's market randomness is fine because of the ultimate goal of the game, but I'd still almost always rather just play Dominion.

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Tom Bombadil posted...

This will wreck bad/new players but once you git gud there's almost always a better strategy! (even if it's just adding one or two cards to that plan)

Oh I didn't mean literally zero action cards. Usually I end up with 3-5 or so.

This is actually a running joke among my gamer friends.

"How to Win at Dominion" -

Only... Buy.... Money....

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base (1st edition) dominion is a little weak in engine potential, but if you're playing with basically a handful of any of the expansions (and certainly if you're using all of them) multi-card engines tend to be much much stronger than any fairly basic money strategy

anyway, dominion is my favorite game. it's a mechanical triumph, ingeniously working together deck-building CCGs with euro engine builders through the now-ubiquitous "deck-building game" mechanics

more amazing to me is that it's a game whose most important game options can and will vary every time. yes, there are many +cards, +actions, etc cards, but the fact that the game not only works with any choice of 10, but shines because of what's missing or included each time, still blows me away.

donald x's other games have similar variety included, and i like several of them a lot, but none meets the same exceptional standard impossibly set by dominion

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love this topic

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Peace___Frog posted...

El Dorado's market randomness is fine because of the ultimate goal of the game, but I'd still almost always rather just play Dominion.

El Dorado's biggest problem, imo, is that trashing is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too strong. Spend a few turns in the first board piece abusing the trash space then you just blow by everyone and win in 5 turns. The game literally comes down to just "who had the lucky positioning/draw to lock down the first trash space". Such high potential for a game idea that it's a big disappointment.

i tend to find that the deckbuilding games with market rows boil down to "who gets the trashing card"

amazingly dominion figured out first try that it's ok if there's trashing or not as long as everyone gets the chance to do it, which is why chapel costs 2.

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turbopuns3 posted...

El Dorado's biggest problem, imo, is that trashing is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too strong. Spend a few turns in the first board piece abusing the trash space then you just blow by everyone and win in 5 turns. The game literally comes down to just "who had the lucky positioning/draw to lock down the first trash space". Such high potential for a game idea that it's a big disappointment.

I agree that trashing is really strong and can take some of the competitiveness away. My group does a house rule for trashing where you can only do it once per space.

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24. Spirit Island (2017)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Hand-building, dudes on a map
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 7
Game length: 120-180 minutes
Experience: 6-10 games with 2-4 players (scenario 0)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - In a reversal of Settlers of Catan-type games, each player controls a native spirit of a lush island, which is divided into several territories of desert, mountains, wetlands, and jungle. However, the island must be defended against invaders, who arrive first as single explorers, then move on to build towns and then cities, ravaging the land and producing blight (the loss condition). Each round, you get to grow your presence/power (by spreading your "presence tokens" around the board and gaining new cards) and play those power cards, which help repel the invaders. Different spirits have vastly different innate powers, which can repel invaders in different ways.

Design - I love so much about Spirit Island's design. Start with the theme - so many games casually glorify the process of building into fresh lands. By placing you in the island's POV, Spirit Island reminds you right away that there are often victims to this (usually white) exploration. It's anti-colonial and environmentalist, and it's notable that the native Dahan (which never strike first) and the spirit presences are made of wooden tokens of various colors, while the Invaders are all white plastic. Rich flavor text also adorns each spirit's player mat.

The player mats are essentially what make each spirit different. There are usually passive powers/different rules associated with each spirit - for example, the Vital Strength of the Earth spirit (dat name!) has a cool bonus rule where if you've got a sacred site (double-presence in any area), then it provides a passive defense of three, while the River Surges in Sunlight spirit lets you gain the powers of sacred sites in areas where you only have one presence instead of two, as long as they're areas where the spirit is naturally strong (wetlands). That passive power is only the beginning of it - each spirit also grows differently in terms of how it spreads presence and gains power cards and recovers the cards it has played, the ways its income curve (used to pay for cards to play) grows, and its innate powers. Each card has elemental icons on it, and when combined in specific patterns on a given turn, they enable spirits to take further unique abilities.

These abilities of course must all serve a purpose, and while they vary greatly - slow powers, fast powers, push powers, gather powers, Dahan powers, blight powers, fear powers - they all move you closer to your victory conditions. Each turn, the invaders explore one type of terrain, build on another type of terrain, and ravage on yet another type of terrain. (Later rounds, and depending on scenario, the number of terrains they perform actions on increases, which hearkens to Pandemic's (and really any good co-op's) escalation of threat.) While the order in which the invader cards are drawn is random, the build and ravage orders always proceed in order from that initial explore.

Because of how much in advance Spirit Island telegraphs its moves, the players are afforded an incredible amount of planning and agency - and possible analysis paralysis. The decision space is absolutely insane here; I haven't even covered fear tokens (which can give benefits, but more importantly, eventually ease up the win condition from eradicating all plastic to simply erasing the biggest cities to eventually auto-win). Or how different spirits let you interact with the Dahan in different ways. Or how it's so interesting that the most powerful effects all seem to be slow powers, but how counterintuitive using them seems to be.

Experience - Ultimately, what makes Spirit Island so tantalizing is exactly what also has prevented it from going even higher on this list: its complexity (and playtime) make it daunting to get to the table. After hearing the hype for months and months, I finally played it at a board game cafe meetup, twice (with two and three players) and loved it, despite getting wrecked as we moved into the stage 2/3 invader cards each time. My friend I played it with then got the game and gave it to me for free since she was moving away. I've gotten it to the table four to six times since then, but each time it was preceded by a rules teach. (Making it worse, the one time I played it with my regular group, we discovered after four hours - and a win - that four-player Spirit Island is probably too intense of a brain-burner for us.) And yet the feeling of getting more powerful, trying to turn the tide, and desperately trying not to get run over... it's so damn appealing.

Future - I'm not particularly encouraged by the track record, but Spirit Island is best at two. The one time I tried to get it played with the new gaming buddy, she ran out of patience after two and a half hours or so on a weeknight. That said, I think I'll keep pushing to see if I can get it to the table, because there's tremendous depth to the game, and I think it's worth it. If there is ever a game that gets me into solo-board-gaming, though, we're probably looking at it.
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Spirit Island is one of my favorite games that I own. My friend and I have played so much of this game and have gotten to the point where we pretty much always win even with scenarios and such. It's a huge brain-burner though, and the time it takes to play means we rarely get it on the table and definitely never when there are more people around since it's too complex for a lot of my friends to handle. Great, great game.

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Heard a lot of hype on that one; am interested

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That sounds really cool but man that time and complexity.

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Good grief. If Spirit Island is max complexity, where would you put Twilight Imperium???

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I've played Spirit Island quite a few times, mostly because it's the #1 game for a guy in my game group. I don't mind it, but I'm not enamoured with it. Also I don't think it's a max complexity game.

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I have a love/hate relationship with Spirit Island. I appreciate the design of it. You give it a Rules Complexity '7', though honestly, the rules themselves aren't that complicated. What gets complicated is the intricate board states that arise, that sometimes completely fry your brain when looking at all the planning involved and how overwhelming it can seem. The game does have a very cool design, and it can be fun to play it out, and it's certainly satisfying when winning (though I have to admit, I think the game is scaled in a way where it's meant to feel overwhelming before getting to the third Fear phase where it just becomes a simple pushover), but at the same time, the game absolutely feels like work, which is where the rub lies for me. Games are fun as games, but Spirit Island often just feels like such a brain killer at times that I stop having fun with it; it almost feels like I should be getting paid to play it. For a purely co-op game, I have to say it does avoid the quarterbacking aspect, largely in part to how much you have to think about just your own stuff, that trying to plan what your allies should do would make games take over an hour. The closest thing to quarterbacking in this game (if you want to finish in a reasonable time) is just saying "anyone able to take care of this area?" "yes" "ok good". I've done 2 player and 3 player versions, and 2 player was by far the best. 3 player was so bloated, and I can't even imagine what 4 player would be like.

But yeah, Spirit Island is very cool, but also, it's hard for me to really love it like other high profile games.

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SeabassDebeste posted...

Or how it's so interesting that the most powerful effects all seem to be slow powers, but how counterintuitive using them seems to be.

I've played with most of the spirits (including expansions), and it's no surprise that the phoenix guy that turns slow powers into fast powers was my favorite. The slow powers are what really turns games into a snail's pace, though I can appreciate the amount of thought required to use them.

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cyko posted...

Good grief. If Spirit Island is max complexity, where would you put Twilight Imperium???

i haven't played twilight imperium, so this list is all relative! the scale is only up to seven, after all. the game probably takes 30 minutes to teach.

while this isn't stritcty related to the front-loaded "rules teach" part, SI also gives you a ton of cards to look at when you perform growth. parsing those is part of the complexity, even if they're technically distinct from the rules. and since they can't be stared at ahead of time like in kemet, they "complexify" the game even more

TomNook posted...

But yeah, Spirit Island is very cool, but also, it's hard for me to really love it like other high profile games.

i think all your concerns you mention are valid and interesting. it really is very brain-burny. spirit island right now ranks super-high on design and future desire; i'd love to have enough plays where i can decide "it's too much."

in particular you have a good point about how the fear cards work. the biggest criticism i've seen about spirit island, even from fans, seems to be how the game can end on an anticlimax in victory.
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i haven't played twilight imperium

No interest or just something you haven't gotten around to?

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