I can only speak from personal experience, and I don't remember seeing any spelling mistakes that impacted on the gameplay. I'd be interested to hear if there's an example of that, though. That would be a problem, yes.
Is it that good? Well we've had a huge amount of fun with it. I can see that it is flawed though - some of the cases are complete duffers. It's also the only game of it's type I've played, so I'd love to try these other similar games. Any in particular you'd recommend?
I posted about Homes and Watson up-thread, which is similarly about piecing together solutions to mysteries, though with a an admittedly different atmosphere.
If the co-operative nature isn't a must-have, you could take a look at Watson & Holmes instead, which I really liked. It's more of a Cluedo-type race to find the solution, with each player keeping notes of the evidence and testimony they gather at the locations they choose to visit. Here's the SU&SD review.
In the original Sherlock, possibly until about the 2010 printing there was a typo made in the translation from French that made one case impossible to solve and almost nonsensical. There's a good thread on BGG somewhere which lets you review a spoiler free "what they fucked up" for each case before you begin.
The Ripper version, as far as I can remember, we were fairly excited for and as we opened the manual it had a spelling mistake in the first sentence :D Or at least in the print we played it did. Which was fucking incredible. And many of the cases were utter duffers as you say.
Try looking at some of the EXIT series and other stuff if you like that sort of deduction game, but done a lot cleaner and simpler. In a weird way 7th Continent has aspects of cooperative problem solving and discussion that remind me of Sherlock.
I'm going on a board game retreat with some pals next month. One of them moved from our fair city to the countryside and seems to have spent all his spare money on table top games during that time.
We've already agreed to play Scythe and despite my protests there's also a session of Arkham scheduled (I just don't really like it, it hasn't ever really felt fun to me and it feels overly complicated for what it is).
He sent a list of things he's thinking about bringing – does anyone have experience/recommendations for any of the following:
Barenpark
Raja’s of the Ganges
Champions of Midgard
Batman Gotham chronicles
Hellboy
Who goes there?
Dinogenics
Rising sun
Legendary alien
The only one of those I've played is Bärenpark, which I really like. It's a chill little puzzle game about building a bears-only (plus koalas) zoo. There's maybe not as much player interaction as I'd like but that's a pretty minor complaint.
despite my protests there's also a session of Arkham scheduled (I just don't really like it, it hasn't ever really felt fun to me and it feels overly complicated for what it is).
Oh, good, it's not just me; I know a few people who love Arkham, while I just about tolerated it for their benefit the couple of times we played.
Barenpark: simplistic and a fairly fun filler.
Raja’s of the Ganges: fine tile layer/worker placement. Can be quite a marmite game.
Champions of Midgard: Meh
Batman Gotham chronicles: Double meh
Hellboy: no idea
Who goes there?: Rules slog, too long for what it is. If people aren't 100% into boardgames then there are better picks.
Dinogenics: no idea
Rising sun: Some people love it. Typical CMON style over substance.
Legendary alien: Again, some people love it. Theme carries it a little, but there are better deckbuilders. Fine though. Don't ever play the Firefly version, the art is tremendously bad.
Scythe is also very much the 7/10 of boardgames.
I think if the group are fairly conversant with boardgaming it's a reasonable list.
I’ve got the Marvel Legendary game and it’s pretty good - it’s simple enough that you don’t have to spend an hour working out the rules when you want to play it, thematically it’s strong and the balance between co-op and competitive play is well judged. I’d imagine you could swap out the Marvel characters for pretty much any other franchise and therefore the Alien version should be decent too.
Set up time is too long and it doesn't have much going on in the meaningful gameplay decisions category, but as with any in the series, if you like the theme you'll probably get some enjoyment out of it.
Thanks for those responses. It's one of those things, we used to play together regularly then became more spread out geographically so making a proper effort to get together an play through some things. The days have already been timetabled by the organised guy (when he gets excited he gets very organised) so there are sessions for longer games and sessions for lighter things in between. There's already a sense from the guy with the list that he wants to get through a lot which is kind of the opposite of the way we used to rinse one game over a couple of long sessions but we'll see how it goes.
You could always do a 12 hour game of Twilight Imperium or Democracy.
More thoughts from UKGE – see also the RPG thread.
Everyone gets cards with letters on them, and has to spell a 4- (or 5- or 6-) letter word with them; the cards for your word get shuffled and passed to the player on your left. You don't look at the new cards you get, but set one in a stand in front of you, where everyone else can see it. Players then offer to spell words using the letters they can see (plus a wildcard in the middle), placing numbered counters to indicate the order of the letters, but not saying what the word is. Based on the letters you can see, and your own unknown letter, you have to work out what cards you were given, and ultimately what word they spell out.
This was actually pretty great (I played it twice). It's a much more straightforward and family-oriented game than almost everything else I played over the weekend, and the overall goal needs to be figured out before it apparently launches at Gencon, but it's something I could see myself playing with Miles when he's older, and it's not as brain-dead for adults as some word games I saw.
This is FFG's follow-up to Netrunner, another "Living Card Game" which uses mini-expansions of set cards instead of random booster packs to increase the card pool. I've been interested to play Five Rings for a while, but it's an expensive one to take a punt on.
It was okay – the two-tier economy felt like an over-complication (especially since neither one was actually money) and I wasn't entirely sure at any point if I was winning. We ended up abandoning it, unfinished, because we didn't know what we were supposed to do once all five Rings had been allocated.
This was an interesting area control-type game about herding giant silkworms around a randomized grid of pastures, while avoiding, chasing or using the "ookami" – a hideous eldrich monster which would eat any silkworms it shared a tile with.
I feel like it would have been better if all four players had been as aggressive as I was, but two of the slots were taken by random other attendees, whose pacifist streak let me completely run away with the game, directing the ookami right through their undefended flocks.
I'd be very interested to give it another go, but the £35 asking price at the con was a little on the steep side.
You send villagers into a mysterious cave system, where they encounter monsters, merchants, and long-lost civilizations, or find money and resources you can use to expand your village. You hire and train new villagers with skills to build, explore or train yet more villagers, which builds a nice little engine which will hopefully lead you to glory before the seven rounds are up.
I had a lot of fun with this one, even though I came dead last by a not-inconsiderable margin.
Roll dice to summon monsters or cast spells, hopefully killing your opponents before they kill you.
I liked this one a lot too, though the price was a bit steep considering the relative lightness of the box. The cost has been driven up by the component quality – it's a very nice-looking game – but the plastic tokens could have been cardboard and the deck could have been a little thicker. If it'd been £25 instead of £32, I think I'd have brought it home with me.
An okay party game about guessing numbers. You're asked a question with a numerical answer, but you don't need to get the exact answer – you guess lower and upper limits, with whoever gets the smallest correct range winning the points.
It was fine, but it's gonna date horribly.
Take tiles, try to build a mosaic, earning points based on how many adjacent tiles you've got.
I enjoyed this, though part of that is undoubtedly because we played the double-sized version, which made interacting with the tile pieces very satisfying. I can't see myself especially keen to replay it, though.
This looks like the kind of game you'd find in a cupboard at your grandparents' house. It's all baize-green, uses playing cards for components, and has plain plastic tokens for marking the board.
Each player gets a hand of seven cards from two decks shuffled together; the board is a grid of playing cards, with each card represented twice. The goal is to play cards, putting your counter on one of its two spaces, so that you get five of your counters in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row. (Twice.)
With a new theme and some minor rules tweaks, this could be amazing.
The main problem is that the grid of cards isn't laid out by any logic I could fathom, so I couldn't just look at my hand and know which card(s) would be best to play; for each of the seven, I had to search the board for two spaces, which took forever. Most of my hand was frequently useless, but there was no mechanic to discard and redraw. And it was just so boring to look at.
A spiritual successor to, and from the same designer of, Stuffed Fables, this is a more grown-up themed game about going into someone's dreams and dealing with the threats of their subconscious.
We played a chapter from quite late(?) in the campaign book, which left me without much context and presumably featured some mechanics that would have been introduced much more slowly than "here's a key, GO" on the floor of a convention hall.
The core of the game is drawing dice out of a bag; different coloured dice are used for different actions, and your character gets bonuses to rolls with some colours or some actions.
There are some cool ideas in here, but overall it kinda felt like there was too much to keep track of – mostly because there were so many colours of dice.
Black dice get added to a threat track (which, when it hits five, spawns enemies) unless they have red pips, in which case they only get added if your character has been marked as suspicious. There are also white, blue, red, purple, yellow and green dice, plus one special translucent blue die, which can all be used to do different things, except for the things you can do which use any dice. There are counters and cards for six different things, with icons which don't mean the same thing in every context (keys on the board don't give you the cards with the keys on, for instance; you get those from different cards).
I wanted to like it – I did like it, in a lot of ways – and honestly if it wasn't £45 I'd be tempted to give it a proper go, assuming I could find a group to play with regularly – like Pandemic Legacy, it feels like it would benefit from recurring players.
I was away for the gaming weekend. It was fun. We played some games:
Kraker Laken/Cockroach poker
Nice bluffing card game. Really fun and just the right amount of stress on player calls.
Arkham 3rd edition
What a revelation! I’ve previously found Arkham had too much downtime and not enough agency for the player vs the group. This has arguably too many mechanics cribbed for other games but it made the overall experience a lot more engaging than previous games of Arkham/Eldrich have for me. Did remind me that I’d really enjoyed Cuthulu Pandemic and this is arguably Arkham x Pandemic but with all of the delicious Arkham flavour text. One of the biggest revelations was having another player read out test cards so there was no idea of what the pass/fail was going to bring until the die were cast.
The Quacks of Quedlinburg
Game of the weekend. So good I’m going to see if I can pick up a copy next weekend. It’s sort of a deck builder, everyone plays a charlatan making potions essentially drawing ingredient tiles from their bag blind and putting them into a potion pot but there’s one standard ingredient – cherry bombs – that can explode your pot. At the end of the round you can buy more ingredients for your bag which should let you earn more as the rounds progress but you always have to keep an eye on the cherry bomb count as you go through the game. Really easy to learn, excellent catch up mechanic so no one ever seemed to race ahead and if they did it was unlikely to stay that way for long. Reminded me of Ticket to Ride mainly because that’s my standard-bearer for games that are fun and easy to get to grips with.
Welcome to the Dungeon
A small bluffing game which was fine. There’s a character with items and attributes, players pull cards with monsters to build a dungeon deck. If they decide not to put a monster into the dungeon they remove one of the items from the character. Gets to a point where players pass on drawing a monster, when everyone passes the remaining player goes into the dungeon as the character aiming to kill monsters or at least survive against the deck. Game ends when someone succeeds on two dungeon runs or one player is left alive.
Hellboy
Heroquest reskinned. There’s no DM but other than that you have your party, you explore rooms, fight monsters, look for clues, interact with scenery. Each member of the party is good at some of these things so you work together to resolve the mystery. It’s fairly polished but not massively exciting.
On Tour
A hellish maths puzzle you have to create then resolve. By this point we’d had a massive meal and too much to drink to be any good at this game so the impression of it suffered massively.
Barenpark
Loved this, lovely game.
Tail Feathers is really good. Also very different to anything else we’ve got, which is nice because things have felt a bit samey recently. A two-player battle skirmish game with each player controlling a mixed army of mice (or rats) and flying birds, trying to destroy each other’s nest. Cheers to cav to pointing out when this was really cheap on Amazon because it sure is a lot of game (and miniatures) for what we paid for it.
I can't remember if you've ever played FFG's X-Wing, but it shares a lot of similarities with that (and Armada). If you like the general style of gameplay, then the elegance of X-Wing takes it to another level. -
I can recommend Gaslands too. It's Hot Wheels vehicle combat using X-Wing mechanics.
Anyone have any tips for me on Through the Ages? I’ve played seven games against the tutorial AI, who has a handicap and is the easiest setting, and my best so far is one third of their total score.
No matter what I do, I never have enough resources and the AI is always swimming in them. They can somehow build a strong army, and have loads of tech buildings and culture points, without any trouble.
My only recommendation for Through the Ages is always not to play it.
Play Nations the board game instead.
My long-ago kickstarted copy of Nemesis finally arrived today! I've only had a brief scan of the bits, but the manual has been available as a PDF for backers for a while, so I have a fair idea of how it works already.
For those not familiar, it's basically Alien: the board game; 1-5 players wake up from hypersleep to discover their ship (the unfortunately-named Nemesis) infested with gribblies, and have to choose between personal and corporate objectives to escape the ship, redirect the ship, blow up the ship, wipe out the Intruders, wipe out other survivors, steal eggs, and so on, all while pretending to be working together (and maybe you are?).
The tier I backed included two (…and a half?) expansions, so there's also the option of a second alien race, or Aftermath, a quick epilogue game designed to be played pretty much immediately after the core game, or a fully cooperative mode with an accompanying graphic novel.
One thing I'm actually very impressed with is the box; it comes with a really well-thought-out organiser tray, so everything has its place and doesn't need a lot of bags or a third-party solution. It also keeps all the miniatures (and there are quite a lot) snug and secure instead of rattling around and risking damage.
Really looking forward to getting some folks around for this.
blows dust off thread
We played Nemesis on Saturday night (/Sunday morning). It was my second game (and Sarah's), but last time we only had 3 players - this time we ran with the full 5.
With a better handle on (most of) the rules, we were able to get up to speed a lot faster; we unlocked a couple of intruder weaknesses fairly early on, which saved people's skins a couple of times. I even remembered that I (as the Pilot) could check the destination coordinates without going all the way to the cockpit.
(I lied, and told everyone we were going to Earth instead of our actual destination: deep space, which suited my "destroy the ship" Corporate objective. Unfortunately, nobody believed me, and they were able to reroute.)
By the time the game ended, only one player died (not me!), and we even had a winner (also not me; I didn't leave it late enough to sabotage the second engine, and the others were able to repair it before getting back to the hibernation pods. Foiled again! 
)!
A major difference from the previous 3-player attempt was the speed we uncovered the board - I'm almost certain that last time there were a handful of rooms that we just never explored. Although, five characters stumbling around meant a ton of noise rolls, and we had a lot more aliens turn up - at one point, I'm fairly sure every adult intruder in the box was on the board, plus a couple of larvae, a creeper, and the queen.
I really, really like Nemesis. Next time, though, we'll definitely have to start earlier; it took about four hours, though that did include a lot of rules explanation for the new players, and a few of us were starting to flag by 2 AM.
I got to play Scythe a couple weeks back. I was expecting more combat but it's not really a mech game so much as a worker placement game with mechs, but it's good all the same. I had fun choosing my path through the upgrades and did well enough that I won without realising the massive impact of your team's popularity on the final score.
Scythe has a very interesting aesthetic, but I've been wary of worker placement stuff since Carcassonne, because there's always something (or lots of things) that I can't keep track of and either don't realise I should be doing, or don't realise is a waste of time.
Carcassonne isn't a great game though so it's not the best example.
Carcasonne isn't really a worker placement game. It's also shit.
Scythe is OK. Nice production values, but very similar to a lot of Stegmeir games in so much as it's a sort of diffuse cloud of point scoring opportunities which isn't particularly engaging. The best thing he's done is Viticulture with the Tuscany expansion. Probably my go to worker placement for people transitioning from simpler stuff into middleweight games.
I think I just don't have a tactical enough brain for them; thinking moves ahead isn't really my thing in games. I have the same problem with chess.
We like worker placement games in this family - my son tends to prefer co-op stuff but worker placement is sufficiently non-confrontational to meet with his approval.
We haven’t really progressed much beyond Uwe Rosenberg games (Caverna being a particular favourite) and simpler stuff like Stone Age but I should probably try and diversify a bit.
We made it to the end of our third scenario (#4) in Gloomhaven yesterday. Well, most of us did; I ran out of cards one round before the end, thanks to some poor choices early on.
But still, complete is complete, and we have another two scenarios unlocked, meaning there's a choice of five for next time.
My favourite worker placement game is Viticulture.
Love the theme, feels like you have a chance of winning even late in the game.
Scythe is good, but it has so many different variations to play, that it feels like a different game every time. I’ve yet to open any of the legacy element of the game.
And as for new board games in my collection - I’ve picked up Discworld - Ankh Morpork, Tapestry (because I’m a Jamey Steigmeier fan boy) and I’ve still to open Journeys In Middle Earth.
Over lunch, I played the first campaign mission from Undaunted: Normandy – and it seems pretty good! This first map is pretty basic, with fairly limited access to units (each side only gets scouts and rifles), but as an intro to the rules it's a very smooth on-ramp.
It's part deck-builder, part territory-control, with each player using their cards to command their units on the board. Scouts can explore new territory, but every un-scouted space you move into adds more Fog of War cards to your deck. Riflemen can capture objectives, but can't move through un-scouted squares. New soldiers can be added using a couple of commanding officer cards, which also let you pick up and re-play cards already used this turn. Attacking a unit requires rolling a number of d10s, attempting to get at least one result higher than the target's defence (which also takes into account the distance between you and them).
When your turn's over you discard everything in your hand (which makes long-term strategy a bit harder, as you can't be sure you'll actually get any cards you need to control the squad you're relying on next turn), but it's actually not as swingy as I worried – helped in this mission by the limited squads you've actually got to use.
I definitely enjoyed it, and I'm keen to try a less, rulebook-reliant match, but we were definitely acting much more confidently by the end.
Been playing a fair bit of Caverna: Cave vs Cave while in lockdown.
I'm biased perhaps because I think Caverna may be my favourite board game of all time - although it's a big old beast that takes an age to set up, so it doesn't get played as much as I'd like. Cave vs Cave is a very smart distillation of that game's core themes down to a 2-player game that sets up in seconds and takes about half an hour to play. You need to excavate a cave network by digging out caverns and then populating them with rooms that give you different bonuses: it's simple enough to learn but can be a real head-scratcher with a lot of different strategic options at every turn. I've lost every game I've played of it so far, but it's a good'un.
Only problem with it is that it's a bit repetitive and there isn't a lot of variation, and the expansion doesn't sort that (it just makes the game longer). It's a good re-imagining of full fat Caverna though and we've played it a fair bit.
If you like it I'd recommend Agricola: All Creatures Great and Small - the Big Box version. Similar vibe, but I think it's better. Plus sheeples, obviously.
Yep, I’ve got that (well, the original release plus one of the expansions). It’s very good.
I should get some more worker placement games really as both my boy and I really enjoy them and we’re going to need stuff to do as civilisation burns around us. Looking at either Viticulture or Glass Road at the moment. Uwe in particular churns them out at a hell of a pace.
Viticulture is great. The Essential edition alone is a good game but the Tuscany expansion really makes it shine.
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. Bloody hell this takes a while to play. It took us about an hour to set up the decks, go through the rules and play the first turn, which is fair enough for a brand new game with some complexity involved; but then another hour later and we were still on the first objective card of 4 and were starting to run out of enthusiasm.
We'll have to come back to this I think when we've got our dedicated play space back (currently co-opted for use for working from home) and can play things in short bursts over a few days. Also not losing that first hour to the learning curve will help a bit hopefullly. As it is I think it'd be quicker to read The Lord of the Rings than it would be to play the card game.
Have you tried the game on Gamepass?
I mentioned in the Covid-19 thread that I've been trying to get my soon to be seven-year-old into board games a bit. We played Quadropolis and Gabe did enjoy it. It might be too abstract for him really though, as it's quite a complex game about building a scoring engine, and remembering how things score is pretty tricky. He beat me and ilweran anyway, of course.
We've tried a couple of games of Stuffed Fables too, and that went down extremely well with all three of us. Essentially it's a dungeon crawler, a miniature game, like Gloomhaven. It has a story book that you work through, with branching narratives. The story and gameplay is pitched at a level that a kid of that age can grasp. We help him with the rules, but frankly we're all helping each other with the rules, and he seems to remember more of the Watch It Played video we watched than me. I've blocked some of it out due to being terrified of the guy who presents it. The eyes of a shark. The smile of a man with a fridge full of body parts. Anyway…
Each turn consists of a few interesting decisions, and he can make these decisions himself. We can tell him what sort of options he might have (you can move, or search for an item. You can attack, but you might get attacked back.) but he can decide what to do, roll the dice, and see the results. There are also simple single-card side quests where you can make a moral decision based on a scenario. At the end of each story, there's even a little talking point to discuss as a group. The miniatures are lovely, although some of the baddies are a bit freaky. There are mechanical spider things with broken doll's faces, for example. My biggest worry about the game is that it might end up getting a bit dark. We're not far in, so I don't know where the story goes yet. The age rating is 7+ and there's no threads on BGG expressing horror at the game's content as far as I can see, so fingers crossed. So far, it certainly seems a perfect introduction to dungeon crawling.
Yep. Stuffed Fables is great. So is Mice & Mystics by the same designer (earlier game, slightly more clunky mechanics, better story though). We love these games.
We have Quadropolis and have played it precisely once. We all remember enjoying it but it was very abstract and no-one’s suggested going back to it. Good reminder though, I’ll dig it out this week.
Anyone fancy picking up some of the cheap Asmodee games on Steam and having a few games?
Scythe, Splendor, Isle of Skye are all decent.
Yeah, I'm up for that.
Can you cross-play with iPad? If so I'd be keen – I don't have a PC.
Some are cross platform I think…
Played a game of Raiders of the North Sea via Tabletopia last night and really enjoyed… Almost everything about it. A pal got a sub for the service so we all got invites from him as the game is part of the premium collection and we chatted over discord. It took somewhere around 30 minutes to get familiar with the environment and have the game explained but after that it all went well. A little slower than real life but not by too much. One pal found the chat aspect not so great (and wouldn't stop going on about it), he wanted video which is fair enough. The rest of us were thinking of it as an 'online game' I guess.
Really like the game though and fairly keen to get a copy post lock down. Tabletopia served us well, it's an slightly odd tabletop simulator, there's no logic for the game itself so it's all very manual which works in its favour as a sim. Thumbs up overall.
I have Tabletop Simulator, and I've tried playing around with it, but I just can't get the hang of it. It seems really clumsy, and the tutorial is very basic. Maybe it'd be different if I was actually playing a game with people instead of just messing about with it, but I just don't get it.
We have Quadropolis and have played it precisely once. We all remember enjoying it but it was very abstract and no-one’s suggested going back to it. Good reminder though, I’ll dig it out this week.
We did indeed dig out Quadropolis and have played it several times. I find it a bit dull, and there's a lot of faffing around setting up the board four times or five times in course of one game. I'm absolutely terrible at it, too, though my wife really enjoys playing it. The whole thing reminds me a bit of Machi Koro, another city-based game with nice colourful artwork that I find slightly dull to play.
I have Tabletop Simulator, and I've tried playing around with it, but I just can't get the hang of it. It seems really clumsy, and the tutorial is very basic. Maybe it'd be different if I was actually playing a game with people instead of just messing about with it, but I just don't get it.
There's nothing to get the hang of really is there? It doesn't really enforce a great deal of logic, so it's sort of using Gary's Mod or something to play a boardgame. Boardgame Arena is impressive and all browser based if you want more locked down mechanics - or you can pay for some of the licenced games on TS.
Some of the mods are scripted - I have a couple - but it just seems so much slower and more difficult to set anything up than it is in reality.
The free mods can have limited scripting, for setup for example, but you have to buy licenced stuff for full logistics normally. Boardgame Arena remains a better choice for fiddle-free gameplay, or just buying the app of the game you're interested in, if it exists.
Been playing Beasts of Balance this week, a beautifully-designed stacking game with an integrated app that has you piling different creatures on a plinth together with various elements that boost them or weaken others. It's really fun, very clever and there are lots of ways to try and maximise your score so there's actually quite a lot of depth for something that basically involves piling up bits of plastic.
The main problem is that we immediately want more creatures, but all the expansions are completely unavailable. I literally can't find any of them anywhere. Which means it's always going to feel like half a game (especially with the app tracking which creatures you've been able to create). It looks like the developers were acquired by Niantic of Pokemon Go fame, and put to work on internal projects, so I guess this one's completely dead. What a shame.
I’ve been playing with Table Top Simulator during lockdown. Have a regular Lord of The Rings LCG game, and trying to set up a Journeys In Middle-earth game too.
I’ve played Wingspan on there and a few others.
As a Mac man, I ended up having to subscribe to Nvidia remote streaming to play some of the more complex games on TTS.
I tried Tabletopia as it did work on the Mac but felt it was too controlled.
As for board games as iOS Apps - we’re on round five of Charterstone, been playing the. Old Carcassone as the new Asmodee version has forced the old one from the store, and currently has a majority of one star reviews. Also playing Terra Mystica, which I think I’ve finally figured out how the game works.
Finally, Viticulture is our as an app, Digidiced, same developers as Terra Mystica, I’ve only played against the AI so far, and the problem with it is that the summer and winter ‘boards’ are on separate screens. Not sure it’s been a great conversion.