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mygif

I’m The Boss is one of my favourite games, but now all I can think of is how bad I want to play Greed Incorporated.

Oh how I wish everyone I knew who played board games hadn’t moved away from the city.

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mygif
Viktor Haag said on August 14th, 2012 at 11:28 am

It might be useful to point out that cities in Indonesia are not “owned”, despite your implication that they might be. It’s useful to own resource areas that are “near” a city where you own the boats between your resources and the city (because then you don’t pay another player for shipping). But the cities are all shared resources, and the only things determining which boats get used to ship goods to which city are boat-shipping-capacity (each ship can only get used to ship so many of your goods) and city-size (each city can absorb only so many goods).

It’s a shame you also didn’t provide an overview of Duck Dealer. Despite the goofy name, it’s another excellent player-entwined economic game from Splotter with relatively simple rules and deeply emergent play. Like Ticket To Ride, the game employs the interesting tempo governing mechanic of letting you each turn decide whether you want to gather energy for later use, or spend your gathered energy on actions. Unlike TTR, it poses no limit on how much energy you can spend to act. The game, therefore, poses an interesting brain-burney problem for players: it’s not just about the “save or invest” conflict, it’s also about trying to spend as efficiently as possible and chaining a whole bunch of actions together in a bewildering and brain-hurting sequence. Highly recommended.

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mygif

It’s a shame you also didn’t provide an overview of Duck Dealer.

I owned Duck Dealer for about five minutes before trading it for GI, which I wanted more. It’s on my to-get list, though.

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mygif

All right, ya hipster geek, I’ve got a copy of Antiquity coming my way. This better be as good as you say.

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mygif
The Unstoppable Gravy Express said on August 14th, 2012 at 3:41 pm

Yay, board game posts!!

MGK, have you tried your hand at Dominion at all? (Granted, not a board game, but wanted to ask regardless)

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mygif

Hey, random question – have you ever written a post on good 2-player games? Generally my wife and I play a lot of boardgames, but we’ve run out of good 2-player ones, recently.

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mygif

@Gravy Express: MGK has not only played Dominion, he has played so much of it that he’s burned himself out on it at LEAST once.

@MGK: MGK, I love all your boardgame posts. I have purchased Eclipse based solely on your recommendation. May I make a small request that you may or may not honor as you see fit?

Any chance we could get a ‘MGKs Top Ameritrash Picks’ post or something equivalent? When you talk about your personal recommendations or do reviews, its always exclusively euros, or at least games that fall heavily on the euro scale. I think the only ameritrash I’ve seen you review was King of Tokyo.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some euros. But I also love things like Arkham Horror.

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mygif

I managed to get a chance to play the game Rise! (Crash Games) last week, and loved it. It has simple mechanics that still manage to lend themselves to acts of great sneakiness and treachery.

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mygif

I got a chance to try a friend’s copy of Roads&Boats a while back, and was pretty impressed with it.
At first it seems like just another engine snowball game, where you build buildings which produce resources, and other buildings which turn those resources into scarcer ones, and finally you get points out the end of the process. But complicating matters is 1. the tight map, with other players competing for space 2. some of the buildings don’t make resources, but modes of transport (you start off with mules, but can make trucks, rowboats, steamers, etc.) 3. you don’t own anything except these transports and the goods they carry. This means that you can cooperate and build a building between you and the other player, then share in the use of it, or go first and make an end run into their territory to steal the gold that’s been accumulating on their mines.
The final thing which makes it great is that as all this is going on, there is a ‘wonder’ project that all the players are contributing to and earning points. So, there’s a tension between climbing the tech tree to make as much as you can of the few things that are worth points, and enough trucks to warehouse them in -or- just building the wonder as fast as you can to shut out the players going for tech.

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mygif

I’ve known about Antiquity for a while, and I’ve thought about purchasing it. But I have four problems with Antiquity, only one of which MGK alluded to.

1) It’s only four players. My group is usually five to six, so I already own far too many excellent four-player games.

2) It’s a three-hour playing time. At my game nights we usually play three or four or five games, with a variety of styles so that everyone at the table plays something they really like, and so that nobody spends half the evening playing a single game they know they’ve lost from round three. Three hours is at the far end of the curve for us, barring those occasions where we block off a whole day for a single epic game. So again, Antiquity wouldn’t get to the table very often.

3. Can’t find it. Out of print for a long time, never coming back.

4. If you can find it, it’s going to start at $150 and go up from there, likely plus an exorbitant shipping charge from the US or UK. I’ve paid silly amounts of money for games before (TI3, Puerto Rico: Anniversary Edition, Eclipse wasn’t cheap), but nothing like $150+, and most are in the $40 – $50 range. Buying Antiquity means not buying four other games.

Antiquity is good, but is it four times as good as the four games I might buy otherwise and would actually play more often? Nope.

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mygif

I hear on Munchkin not being funny. I first played it among fellow RPG geeks who all could appreciate the puns (and the illustrations, some of which I still find quite funny) and who all could get in the spirit of the game, having the necessary cultural training. I assumed that the game itself was fun, rather than the environment.

I have since tried taking the game out of the environment and introducing non-nerds and non-RPGers to it. It’s fallen flat every time.

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mygif

You haven’t played Roads & Boats yet?

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