@dpunked My gaming group lives by Terraforming Mars. I’ll play it but I just can’t get into it. I strongly prefer Ares Expedition, but they don’t. #firstworldproblems
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Hoping to borrow Ares Expedition from a friend soon. Played it once in Essen and wasn't wowed. Gonna be tough beating TFM after that...
Probably quite lukewarm at this point, but Gloomhaven. Too much effort to set up and manage, losing often is annoying, losing often with no consequences for losing is even more annoying. It always felt like it would be better as a video game, and guess what? There is one now. It's probably good.
Risk. Just rolling the dice and let the highest one win would be an equally well designed game.
It's a shame that risk Europe is so good and so connected to the name risk.
Mage Knight. This game threw me in to an unbridaled rage with how much I loathed it. I couldn't understand why it was rated so highly. So, I went to BGG to see just how so many people could like this awful game.
Turns out everyone plays it cooperatively. Not a soul plays nor recommends the competitive mode; the mode I was playing in.
Munchkin. I guess nowadays hating on Munchkin is no longer unpopular, but when I first played it the game had a rabid cult following. I understand that it might be fun to play with alcohol involved and with everyone just looking to have a good time and to laugh at silly things happening, but as a game where all the players are playing with the intention of winning the game isn't enjoyable to me at all.
Munchkin is a great game, but it's one you can't play with board game or TTRPG people. You need either alcohol or people who aren't used to/don't worship strict board game rules and who aren't afraid to muck about with stupid shit or pile on other players. The sort of person who's favourite game is CAH or "uh....I dunno chess maybe?', not "here's my six hour dissertation on why Jamestown: now with Wheat is the best"
There are better sober games and there are better drunk activities than Munchkin.
If you're at a point where you're having fun with Munchkin you'd be having fun without it as well...
I agree entirely, hate Munchkin with a passion
Stone Age. Worker placement and set collection point salad and not much else.
Yeah. It got recommended to me as an easier Tzolkin. Well, it IS easier but not anywhere near as interesting and every game feels sooo samey.
Yeah. I like worker placement games, but Stone Age seems to think "oh player X goes before you this turn and gets dibs on spot Y so revise your plans" is the most interesting part of worker-placement. Which, no, it isn't. It's an important mechanic, but it feels like that and collect-em-up is basically the whole game in Stone Age.
I can't say I was disappointed, because I liked it at first, but Gloomhaven really became a drag after a year or so of playing. I feel like you really need to be invested in the lore and story to get anything out of it after a while, otherwise it's basically glorified, over-complicated chess. It doesn't help that 90% of scenarios have the same winning condition: "kill all monsters". I feel like there could have been a lot more depth to the actual gameplay, and not just the fluff in-between. What's more, each scenario takes 2-3 hours at best, and to make any real progress you need to set aside at least 6 hours per session, which is crazy. It's basically a job at that point.
Also, in the later stages, when you have a level 3-4 party with unlocked classes, encounters become exhausting, because you need to keep track of a million modifiers and buffs/debuffs, sometimes cancelling out eachother twice. And it's not a Gloomhaven session if you don't keep going back to the BGG forums for rule clarifications. It's a mess of a game, really.
After seeing what the scenarios with different win conditions looked like I am GLAD most were just "kill all monsters".
As for session length we always played just a single scenario (unless we lost the first super quick). It took us a good year maybe one and a half to play through the campaign. IMO the problem is less the session length and just how much of a time hog this game is in general. We're talking 150+ hours dedicated to a single game.
Yeah, I see your point. My group could only meet up once every so often due to differing work schedules and adulthood responsibilities, which I guess contributed heavily to the slow progress and the fact that we wanted to cram as much progress as possible into a single session. We were going on 2 years when I dropped out, and had made it halfway or two thirds into the campaign. The sad thing is that we could've exhausted several other games by that time instead of barely finishing the one.
Despite my rant, I'm not trying to put people off Gloomhaven entirely. It might be the best thing ever for some people. Just know what to expect when getting into it.
I can't blame you. It literally took us pretty much weekly sessions for over a year to reach the final scenario. That's a daunting comittment. I actually low key burned out on the game a few times during that period. But it always pulled me back in again.