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Post by Martin Stett on Nov 28, 2022 23:49:51 GMT
I just finished my first playthrough of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. I've never played anything with sooooo many rules - I gather that it is similar to Magic: The Gathering or other games in which every card has its own rules and can change the way things are played. I've just never played anything remotely similar before.
That made it somewhat frustrating (it took 4+ hours, mostly in reading the rules, to play through our first game), but it was a fun experience. My sister was a little orphan girl who went to the cellar and hid there for the whole game clutching a frozen turkey and never seeing a monster, which was hilarious (she kept failing a skill check that would allow her to move, it was glorious). I played as an ex-con (I was in prison for flashing) that really, REALLY liked killing things, and my father was a librarian that was moderately annoyed by evil monsters as he single-handedly won the game for us.
The fun of the randomization creating characters for us really helped sell the experience, as the multitude of rules was extremely difficult for us uninitiated.
The following review sold us on trying it, and as is usual for SU&SD, it pretty well nailed our experience. It just didn't mention how the rules explanation would be so hard for people that have never played a game of this sort before:
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Post by Martin Stett on Dec 21, 2022 1:42:15 GMT
After two practice runs of Arkham Horror: TCG, we decided to do the first round again with the agreement that this would be our official run through of the first scenario, come hell or high water. (We actually have a grasp of the rules this time - only two rules mistakes that anyone noted, and they were rectified fairly easily!)
My father decided at the end of the game that the best way to deal with the ghoul trying to kill him was to, you know... LIGHT SOME DYNAMITE AND BLOW HIMSELF UP. And then, after they were both wounded, he proceeded to punch it in the face with no enhancements and a less than 50% chance of succeeding. Thrice. Knowing that if he failed more than once, everybody would die.
It worked. The crazy son of a bitch pulled it off. Nobody died, nobody went nuts (aside from the obvious insanity of one player turning into a suicide bomber), and we got a best case scenario victory.
The game is a hassle to play because there are so many moving parts to it, but boy does it make for cool stories.
Edit: Mission 2: We failed. At everything. Absolutely everything. We are the worst investigators on the planet. We succeeded at not dying and at killing a really annoying cultist that wanted to dance with us. That is all. I feel that this will be the expected outcome of everything from here on out. (To be fair, I'm playing as Wendy, and this girl is TOTALLY USELESS YOU HAVE NO IDEA, choosing her makes the game far harder... I quite enjoy her really.) In retrospect, we could have parleyed with the undertaker and/or thrown some dynamite into the graveyard and then hacked him to death with a machete (which I was trying to mentally tell my dad to do, as he accidentally showed me his dynamite card), but alas, we... didn't do that.
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Post by Martin Stett on Aug 1, 2023 18:26:36 GMT
I just played my first game of Hive. Hive is incredible. Hive is the new love of my life. Hive is Chess without the suck. Like Chess, Hive is a game of math, but the ability to place your pieces when you want to do so creates endless strategic possibilities. I never even deployed my full army because I crippled everything but my opponent's grasshoppers with two ants. (I planned on using those ants for offensive maneuvers, but it turns out that they can also be used as emergency forces to spread the hive.) On top of that, I bought this game because it is highly mobile and I can easily set it up on trips. It definitely succeeds as a travel piece, because it can be stored in a small bag (conveniently packaged with the game) and can be played on any flat surface. The rules are simple, so it can easily be taught in just a couple of minutes. The number of possibilities means that new players could conceivably throw established veterans for a loop with unorthodox play and maybe even win. (How many completely open games with no randomness can boast that?) I wouldn't want to play this all the time - my brain would implode - but I could easily store this and travel with it and have fun at any time. This is all just a first impression from one match, but DAAAAANG, I've never had a first impression wow me this much.
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Post by Martin Stett on Aug 10, 2023 13:34:52 GMT
My dad wanted to play Gloomhaven. I wasn't terribly interested, but he wants someone to play it with and he decided to buy it for a hundred bucks(!), so sure, I'll give it a try for your sake. (To be fair, the box is bloody massive - 18 pounds of components! - and I'm sure that there is a lot here for people who enjoy it.) I'm reading the rulebook right now, and I am crying. The individual rules are all simple enough, but it is going to be a bitch to remember how all of them interact in the moment. I can see how this is conceptually interesting, though. The basic idea of choosing two cards per turn and slowly losing them is a cool way of (a.) setting a timer on the battle, and (b.) constricting player movements, forcing us to make tough decisions as we spend our resources. It's just that when you combine that with elements and negative status effects and positive statis effects and summoned monsters and loot and special discarding rules for certain cards and monster movement and terrain obstacles and ohmygod I've gone cross-eyed. I'm still gonna go for it and do my best to enjoy the game - he really wants somebody to play it with and I'm the guy that got him into this board game stuff in the first place - I'm the sucker that told him this was the #1 game on Board Game Geek - but hoo boy, I am dreading having to work this out in the moment. Edit: The game is surprisingly fun, and not THAT complicated! We are very, very bad - not helped by the fact that we chose Scoundrel (me) and Mindthief (Dad) as our starting characters, neither of which have much firepower outside of niche situations (if either of us chose Tinkerer or Brute, I think we'd be hitting for much more damage), but we're slowly... uh, failing miserably, tbh. And we are *not* communicating, frequently stepping on each other's toes - "WHY DID YOU MOVE TO THAT SPOT, IT IS THE ONE SPOT ON THE BOARD THAT SABOTAGES MY ENTIRE PLAN FOR THE NEXT TURN" is something that comes up A LOT, for both of us - which is also... painful. I am liking the game, but yikes, I don't think it is meant to be *this* difficult. (We could use an easier difficulty setting, but I'm not sure that would help us. )
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