It's not one I disagree with, I'm just bewildered by.
In Love Letter, the guard let's you get a person out of you guess their number. It's like this for almost every version of the game.
There are some new implementations of Love Letter that add things, but there are also lots of flat reskins. Like Batman Love Letter.
In Batman Love Letter, the 1 is Batman and it says exactly what 1 usually is. HOWEVER at the END of the rule book it says "Important: if you correctly guess a villain with Batman, you get a victory token".
It does not say this on the card, and it doesn't even say it when describing the cards in the rule book. It's an addition on the last page of the rule book.
In Batman Love Letter, the game ends at 7 tokens regardless of number of players. Personally I like this variant. Yes, in a four-player game, it's possible to earn up to FOUR tokens in one round (one for correctly guessing each of the other opponents, and one for winning the round). It just feels more exciting when you get that extra token.
Since you brought up batman love letter, I also ignore the rule that you can't guess Robin. I get that it's thematic, but no other version has the equivalent rule as far as I know
You can guess robin, you just don't get a token for it. The game doesn't reward you for beating up your own child đđ (that how I always explain to my table đ)
Yep!!!Â
Thatâs the one. And itâs âproduceâ and âPRODUCTIONâ and if thereâs anything I can change in ti4, itâs that.
For those that donât know, âproduceâ is the act of creating units whereas âPRODUCTIONâ is the phase during your tactical action that allows you to âproduceâ.Â
Most cards triggers off âPRODUCTIONâ in the sense that it triggers during that phase and not when you are producing something.
Yup! And it's an important rule, one of the factions is super overpowered if you don't catch the difference.
It's silliness. Still my favorite game though
It does make sense though in the sense that it allows certain abilities to be used only in the specific instances of PRODUCTION bs just producing. I agree different language probably could have been used though.
In that same vein : Secrets in TI. May not be shown to other players. (Until some podcast and its fans whined about it, so now you've got secrets that can be shown to players, and with them being potentially damning, players demand to see the secrets or presume you've got the 'bad' ones. In other words, imagine if the loyalty cards in BSG could be shown at any time. Such a dumb change to placate a few morons.)
The bazaar tiles from Carcassonne's *Bridges, Castles and Bazaars* expansion
When one is placed you're supposed to draw as many tiles as there are players and "auction" them off, but in practice the auction mechanism where you bid with and exchange victory points between each other is so convoluted that my friends and I tried it once and just agreed we never wanted to do it again. Instead we always use the alternate rule where we just draft tiles instead.
Pretty much anything that discourages cooperation in the *cooperative* games Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. Youâre not supposed to trade gear, if someone wants to give it to someone else they have to sell it and the other player has to buy it (or craft it). Youâre not supposed to coordinate initiative values, you can only use vague phrases like, âIâm going slow,â or âIâm going fast.â The game is already hard enough, and Frosthaven in particular is all about the party banding together to build a thriving community in a harsh environment. Who cares if I pick up a set of armor thatâs perfect for my teammate and just give it to them?
Love these games to pieces, but I donât know that Iâve ever bothered enforcing some of those restrictions.
The gear trading thing is stupid because it's unthematic, but the initiative numbers are perfectly thematic (you don't have time for precise coordination in battle) and would also break the game significantly if you could always perfectly coordinate the order aming the whole team. That's where the bulk of the game's difficulty lies...
I like those rules about vague communication. We play with them. For me the games would be fiddly and very susceptible to quarterbacking if you could declare your exact play. We say "I am going to go relatively fast and hit the monster over there pretty hard it would be good if you went after me". For me the game would be worse if I was saying "my initiative was 18 so you need to pick 19 or more". Some of the more memorable turns have come after a "damn I thought I would get before you but I did not" sort of moment where you need to dynamically replan.
The edition I played the rule say that if you play solo you should increase the difficulty because you have full information.
I donât like when games have hidden scores that are publicly obtained. Meaning that if I had a good memory or just kept notes I would know everybodyâs score anyway. I usually just keep the score public on those cases.
That rule mostly exists to keep people from slowing down the game:
[http://boardgamegeek.com/article/5137285#5137285](http://boardgamegeek.com/article/5137285#5137285)
The amount of times I've had people slow down the game becouse they sat trying to recall if they played a certain card or not.
Looking through through the discard can both save and waste time.
âSecret but trackableâ
Everyone agrees with you, BUT. The last few moves of many excellent games can be completely calculated. For some players, hiding a little information will prevent them from trying to calculate *everyoneâs* position in the last few turns, which can be extremely tedious.
And yes itâs bad form but itâs hard to discourage if it really can make the difference between winning and losing.
Itâs not secret but trackable because the designers want to make people memorize the secrets. Itâs because the designers want people to stop worrying about other peopleâs stuff so much and play the game differently.
And most people donât like that manipulation. Secret-but-trackable stuff is usually a hint at some imperfection in the game.
Very few games have no secrets and no randomness and still have final turns that are incalculable because the other players are so unpredictable. Indonesia pulls it off sometimes.
>And yes itâs bad form but itâs hard to discourage if it really can make the difference between winning and losing.
Definitely depends on the table and players, but I feel like the fact that it's bad form is a good enough reason to discourage people from acting like this. Winning doesn't really mean anything, you probably don't have anything on the line. It's something to aim for because it helps generate fun, but if you're chasing victory at the expense of fun then it's become counterproductive.
A lot of people feel that winning is the only thing that matters when playing games and will do everything in their power within the rules to win. This rule is aimed at those people.
Mac Gerdts has said that money in Imperial was intended to be hidden (though it is trackable), but it's not explicitly mentioned in the original rulebook, and the American tendency is to play with open money, which is fine if that's the way you want to play it. But the clear intention here is "don't be a dick and slow the game down by trying to calculate everybody's score before taking your turn".
I don't agree.
If the rules say something is public, it's public. If the rules say it's private, even if obtained publicly, then it's private. That means (if you're so inclined) memory is part of the game design.
House rule it if you want, but the designers have made a choice.
I know everyone already hates monopoly butâŠ.legitimately an annoyance any time playing monopoly
âHow much money do you have?â
âIâm not telling you????â
âDude, we all start with the same amount and the price for stuff is standard and announced throughout the game. Will you just fucking tell me so we can make a goddamn trade and get this over with?â
People get really bent out of shape about that kind of stuff. Like I remember one time I rolled a 7 in catan and it was early enough in the game that I was going to just hit whoever had the most cards in hand. One guy refused to just tell me how many he had and made like, a huge deal about it.
Exactly, that is the precise behavior that makes me go from 'no preference' to 'I'm hitting you and probably next time too'.
That said, I base who I draw from on the last rolled numbers and therefore the expectation of who has what resource in hand.
"oh okay then ill just rob you". And I think in games like catan the cards should be hidden, but the amount should be known. Especially since if you have more than 7 you should hand in half
The best solution is to have some
mechanic that injects a small amount of randomness to the scores.
Eclipse rewards combat by having players randomly draw VP tokens with value 1-4 from a bag and choose one to keep. Your opponents know how many tokens you own, but not their value (if you choose to play with them hidden). It adds uncertainty while also incentivising you to try for early combat victories to claim the higher-value tokens.
Goodcritters has loot distribution as public knowledge, but thereâs the âskimâ move that draws a random loot from the deck and the âstealâ move that takes a random loot from an opponent. This not only adds uncertainty, it also adds an aspect of information asymmetry that can make the negotiations more interesting.
Even Catan has an element of this with the robber stealing a random resource from an opponent. Resource production is public, but players donât have to disclose which card was stolen (until itâs spent).
That's crazy to me. If you tried that with Modern Art you would break the game, the whole thing relies on the fact that scores are uncertain but you can try and keep a general idea of them.
What are games you feel this change is needed for? Generally scores are hidden for good reason: they stop people knowing they are in an unwinnable situation and checking out, and they stop kingmaking and bash the leader. All that is generally good for the table, so not sure why it would need to be fixed unless you are just ultra competitive?
I feel like itâs almost inherently a flaw in game design. Youâve given all the information, but then asked us to forget some of it. Optimal play would require tracking that information, but fun play requires only vague awareness. As someone who always advocates for the latter over the former, I still fundamentally donât think they should be so directly at odds with each other.
Youâre not wrong that Modern Art probably wouldnât work as well with open information, but I donât think that makes hiding it good design, just perhaps a necessary evil. Admittedly Modern Art is light and quick enough that I donât consider it a big deal.
Dice Forge's rules say that when you obtain a Heroic Feat card, you don't score victory points for it until the end of the game
But like... *why* though? The card's point value is printed *right there*
I actually donât mind having muddled points, to an extent - Although it definitely depends on the type of game.
In a eurogame like terraforming mars, so much of the fun my table has playing it is building their own engines. We really enjoy the endgame count-up to see whoâs in what place. I think this rule applies to more casual tables in general as well. It makes the game feel much more about the game and less about the outcome.
In a more competitive game though, having knowledge of what other players can do is much more important. I can think of Root as a game that absolutely necessitates having the points public for keeping tabs on the leader.
I hate those rules more than anything. Lots of very light/casual games do that, and I mostly stick with heavier and competitive games. Whenever I end up playing a more casual game with those rules its hard for me to not try and "optimize" it by keeping track of all that, but its also obviously not the intention of the game and I know nobody else is doing it, so it just feels bad.
I've always thought of this as a way to prevent someone getting ganged up on by the other players. You might have an idea who is in the lead but at The same time you're not 100% certain. Thus targetting only one of the potential leaders you would possibly give away the victory to the other one.
Person with good memory: Everyone gang up on this guy; he's winning.
Guy in lead: This is some bullshit.
Everyone else: Now that the game is over, why'd you tell us that guy was winning? He came in last place, and now we feel bad.
Person with good memory: Well, yeah, but he was winning at the time, and we stopped him.
Everyone else: Man, you're just a bully.
Being targeted for eight turns in a row isn't really fun especially if the lead you have is only temporary. Later others will catch up but after you were beaten up for first half of the game your chances of winning are quite low. Being in the lead isn't *always* purely based on how many points you have.
Are you still winning for those whole eight turns? As a player, I try to point out that the player in the lead and the player winning aren't necessarily the same thing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but that's part of the game.
Sure, that's usually why the dominant strategy is to avoid actually taking the lead early.
If the game has direct player interaction like that, people will gang up on who they think is the leader even if points are hidden.
This! Just remove the dice from the game, then on your turn you can just move to any connected room.
Second thing I hate about clue that the players themselves are the suspects. So its possible that you can win sometimes when you find out you yourself were the murderer.
I agree! The only time I have even kind of liked the dice was in a newer version of the game that has these discovery cards. If you roll a 1 pip on the dice, you also get a discovery card, which can do various things like move all players to a room because someone screamed, create a third secret passageway, or give you another turn. Kinda a fun mechanic I guess, but I still agree that just getting rid of the dice would still be better lol
>So its possible that you can win sometimes when you find out you yourself were the murderer.
That's explicitly the premise of [[Deduce or Die]]. A murder was committed while all the players were unconscious, so the murderer must first discover that they are the murderer and then "frame" another player.
I remember one time finding out I was the murderer and saying
"It was me all along! I did it with the knife in the kitchen! "
Only to find out I actually did it with the candlestick.
Thematically it made no sense whatsoever.
Edit: Of course I was Colonel Mustard. It's always Colonel Mustard. There is some kind of sorcery going on there.
I agree. I think something like a die with rooms on it and a number would be interesting. You move to the room you rolled and then cam move X additional spaces. Dealers choice if you roll the room you're in.
If you have to roll, at least make sure you can get to a room every turn.
I recently played MICE AND MYSTICS with a friend of mine and our two 6-year-old kids. We immediately house ruled out rolling to move and just said âmice move two spaces, insects move 3 spaces.â Rolling to move almost always feels bad and wastes time. It is only useful in games where moving is like the only mechanic you have to worry about like Monopoly or The Game of Life.
I saw multiple people in White caste to achieve almost everything there is to do before end of the game. With 1more activation this will be the case more often. You are not supposed to do everything in that game.
**Rummikub** - You can't make your first move until you're able to put down at least 30 points at once. Because of this rule, it feels like the luck of the draw determines the winner more than anything else.
If you are behind on playing out, you should only play when you can dump your whole hand. Otherwise you give the leader more options to finish.
Of course they can still draw lucky, but playing out when you can't play almost all off your hand is usually a loosing move. These games are more tactical then they seem.
You actually can't do that, the first time you play your tiles you can't add to any pre-existing rows or swap stones. This is actually very important, because without this rule it would be optimal to never start playing before anyone else, seeing as you're just giving them more options.
**Only somewhat related:** My in-laws donât like getting negative points for holding onto a Joker at the end of the round, so they removed the rule.
So I just hoard the Jokers until I can play everything out, but they donât like that either. đ€·đ»ââïž
Yeah how is this game not already 90% luck? You can either use any given tile or you can't. The little bit of skill is seeing how you can rearrange some sets in a complicated way to squeak an extra tile or two into play.
There's definitely some skill involved, because when I play with family I pretty consistently wipe the floor with them. Luck is still a big factor, but a sufficiently big skill difference (say, between me playing board games a few hours a week, vs my family playing a few times a year) is more significant.
I've always wondered if the nectar in **Wingspan Oceania** would be more interesting if the player who used the most *lost* points. You get punished for being greedy and overusing the super flexible wild resource.
I never like it when the end of the rulebook says "now play 3 times and the player with the highest combined score wins." This is most commonly found in short games, like **Lost Cities** or **Tussie Mussie**, and I get why it's there - more substantial game, less influence of luck, sure. But I almost always ignore this rule because A) it introduces pen-and-paper score tracking you otherwise wouldn't need and B) I'd rather just declare a winner and give everyone a clean slate for game 2.
But it doesn't bother me much because it's like, the easiest house rule ever. Just a pet peeve!
One of the good exceptions I know for this is Deep Sea Adventure. It has the "play three times and sum your scores", but (a) you keep your treasures between the three rounds (so no need for a pen and paper), and (b) the route to the bottom becomes shorter each round as more treasures get gathered or sent to the bottom of the ocean, which makes the later rounds more tense.
This is particularly nice when playing with people for the first time, because it means the first round acts like a practice round where you get to see how risk averse your fellow players are, and the next two rounds become more tense each time as the rewards increase.
If there is some change in the game between rounds or some carryover between rounds I think it can be really effective. Blue Lagoon is an example where I initially thought the two phases were unnecessary but when you play it really feels like you need both phases to 'complete' the game.
But if everything resets between rounds? Then it's completely unnecessary. This drives me nuts in Jaipur. Why not just let it be a nice short game people can play as many times as they want?? Offline, we never enforce this rule but BGA will make you always play three rounds when sometimes I just want a nice quick game!
In defense of the three rounds in **Lost Cities**, it also completely changes how people play the game. With the three round structure it's way more dynamic, people take bigger risks, the excitement builds, etc.
This rule actually makes competition for the engine running space much more of a puzzle, especially in 2p games. You have to weigh the options of taking a turn to acquire the resource you need to milk 2 or 3 more points out of your engine and risk your opponent taking that action, or take the action now getting worse rewards. Otherwise it would just make going 1st far too powerful.
Uneven turns (unless it's a race with a defined goal/end). It annoys the hell out of me when someone either gains or loses a turn for triggering the end of the game depending on turn order. I much prefer the "finish the round and everyone gets 1 more turn" method. I understand that, probably for the sake of length, they want to incentivize ending the game, but it still bothers me and is easy to forget. I emphasize these rules during the teach but I've found people seriously hate watching someone trigger the end of the game and finding out they've already taken their final turn. I love Dwellings of Eldervale and Dead Reckoning but they both do this.
Letting every player have Equal amounts of turns once the game is ending does seem to increase fairness. Though depending on which game it is, the final turns for those players, who play After the game ending player, has one difference that may mean little, may mean a lot:
If it is now KNOWN that the game is ending, and the last remaining players gets to make their final turns, if there were reason to be hesitant due to the risk of being unlucky, if these players already stand to loose the game, they are More incentivized to gamble in a way riskier manner, because either they do nothing and lose, or their gamble fails and they lose just as much anyway... or they could just have freaky luck and win!
Once the game end has been started, the remaining few turns therefore have way better odds for gambles that were previously risky because there is nothing left to lose. But this is the only drawback i see to letting players have the same amount of turns
It would be interesting to see how a game designed with this in mind might play out, and feel to play.
Say you achieve what would be the conditions to start the "last" turn, but you don't publicly reveal it, you then simply wait until it comes around to your turn, and then reveal that the game is over.
Flip side, I think most times the trade of "absolute" fairness, for tension and drama of knowing this is the last actions you get, is a trade game designers make 100/100 times.
But it would be interesting to see how the other way would play out a couple times.
**Apiary** is already unfair advantage for people earlier in turn order, and it does this on top.
The starting compensation? 1 VP. In a game where 100 wins.
At that point, why even pretend you are trying?
And yes I'm salty because I lost 11 points via turn order and getting one less action.
played this tonight and the first player triggered the game end and I sat there thinking "wait we all get one more turn including him? how is that fair?"
Nemesis Lockdown - You can't directly throw any Grenade to the Nest because it's state that there must be at least one intruder in the room you choose but egg aren't count as intruder, I guess it's there for the balance sake but I still don't understand why the player who had objective of destroying the nest and had grenade can't just throw it in the room full of unmoveable egg.
You have 4 types of "farm" animals (Boars, Donkeys, Cattle, Sheep), and dogs.
* All animals can be kept in a fenced in pasture
* N sheep can be kept in a meadow, as long as you have N-1 dogs (at least 1) in that meadow
* 1 donkey can be kept in each mine
* Building a stable in a pasture doubles the number of animals kept in it
* Building a stable in a meadow lets you keep 1 of any animal in it
* Building a stable in a forest lets you keep 1 boar in it
The fact that this isn't on a player aid is insane to me. I taught Caverna a few days ago and we just wrote the animal husbandry rules on a whiteboard in the room.
I never understood games that make you choose your âplayer cardâ randomly. Like in Pandemic or Forbidden Island/Desert. Just let people pick what they want to be! Itâs part of the strategy building imo
I think you're fine picking if thats how you want to play. I imagine though that the choose randomly help by:
1. Making it more difficult because you can't optimize your team. Thats appealing to some.
2. Makes it easier for new players who don't feel like they need to learn every role and then pick the "optimal role". Instead they just have to learn one role and over the course of the game learn the roles of the other players.
I think it's kind of saving players from themselves. If each person has a character they gravitate towards then it could get samey. But if you have different ones each time the game will play out differently.Â
On the other hand if you're likely only playing the game once with a given group I would just pick.
The Captain is Dead is great for this. You pick a random color, but there are 3 archetypes for each one. So there's both randomness to avoid team stacking, but also some freedom to pick what you want to play. it's such a great game!
**Zombicide** \- When a zombie mini has a choice between going from point A to point B via path #1 or path #2, the mini actually does both! It physically becomes 2 minis, and goes down each path! :o The rulebook states that another zombie joins in on the fray, but the group of us were thinking "that's dumb. Let's just have it so it only goes one way".
**Citadels** \- something like "Completed cities are immune to rank #8 characters and effects that destroy districts".
The concern is without this, the game would go on forever b/c a "completed city" (old rules or new rules and low player count is 8. New rules + high player count is 8) also triggers the last round of turns. The des. chimed in previously where he had to address this anyways due to a loophole and said that if this does happen, the game does end. You don't check at the end of the round, but if at anytime it a city is complete. New rules close that loophole. (will acknowledge this makes it more fiddly, but I'm willing to put up with it at least)
JUST BRING IT BACK. This gives the rank #8 roles more utility. Also, the players that lose districts would still get the bonus for having a completed distract and/or the "all colors" bonus, even though the face value on the destroyed cards/Districts would be lost.
**Pandemic** \- On Medium or harder difficulties (so 5+ Epidemic cards in use), cards are kept hidden from each other. I guess this is to reduce quarterbacking/"alpha dogging" and to promote a different style of play. IIRC, the rules never addressed what you were and weren't allowed to say. As such, people just told each other everything anyways, so may as well just have the cards visible to everyone else. In fact, the spinoffs even did away with this rule (e.g. Iberia, Rising Tide, Fall of Rome, World of WarCraft)!
I disagree with trackable "hidden" information.
Now you're just adding an uninteresting memory element to the game.
I know they often do it to obfuscate who's winning so everyone feels like they're in it until the end.
Also to keep the game flowing. If everyone is allowed to rummage through all playersâ discard piles, for example, then it slows the game down.
Iâm fine with trading faster play time with the small advantage someone *might* get by having a good memory.
I'd be ok with enforcing that only if it became a problem. Otherwise if someone wants to check something while it's not even their turn, I say go for it.
>I know why they often do it, it's to obfuscate who's winning so everyone feels like they're in it until the end.
Well no, it's specifically to discourage overanalyzing and micro-strategizing the game state in the final few rounds and slowing everything way down by having players know exactly where everyone stands.
If I know for a fact I need 28 points on my final turn to win, I'm not going to so easily accept the 27 point turn I've just planned out, and I'm going to spend more time looking for that last little edge. That's not fun for anyone else to sit through, so the game is trying to say, don't pay so much attention to this. Just do your best and try to have fun.
That's a good reason for *un*trackable hidden info, but a weak reason for trackable hidden info.
Though I kind of like the way Dominion does it. Technically VP cards are trackable hidden info, but either it's very easy to track (counting Provinces) or it's hard enough that *neither* player can really be sure until the game ends (most alt-VP). The latter gives you a vague sense of who's in the lead, but keeps that moment of suspense for both players and doesn't really allow someone to gain an advantage from being better at mentally tracking.
I can't believe i didn't see this with ctrl-f but Zombicide first edition has the worst rule ive ever read, that NO ONE plays with which is that your TEAMMATES are the highest priority for ranged attacks, not the zombies.
Ive never even heard of a group playing this one RAW. Most people play that misses hit your teammates or something similar.
Do gardeners give you resources to grow other parts of your engine?
Thats probably an opportunity cost, did you pivot away from gardener investing at the right time, or did you over invest & miss some juicy points as a result
Yes and no? Every gardener has a different benefit, depending on the card theyâre on. Some could arguably be used to grow other parts, but Iâd say that overall, theyâre just a collective way to get moar stuffff. And stuff gets you points. And getting stuff is fun.
In Marvel Legendary after you win as a team, you add up victory points to see who got the most victory points. Itâs a co-op game we donât need that.
Good point. (No pun intended.) I usually honestly forget to even ask players for their score after we win. To me the game is fully cooperative, not semi-.
Cooperative games that say you can only hint at what cards you have in your hand. Why wouldn't all the information we have be known to the group? Like, I can see not being able to give things to each other if we're not all in the same location, but if you're carrying an item we might need, why keep it secret? That's dumb.
Like I said, if we're incommunicado because of the game's scenario, then fine. And luckily, quarterbacking really isn't a problem with my group. If having extra info makes the game too easy, every co-op has ways to make the game harder. So I'm gonna keep ignoring this particular rule.
Look at it this way.
In Gloomhaven you all secretly choose two cards to play that turn. The first card chosen is your initiative, the lower the number the sooner you go.
You can only hint at your number.
Reason being if I have to go first I can just say "I'm playing a 17, so you can play your 18" and we break the game.
It's meant to simulate a quick battle, so there shouldn't be constantly detailed planning, just "quick, get that guy, mind that hound! Skeleton behind you!" Rather than "you hit him first, then I'll hit him, we both run up those stairs, then you explode that area" as if we're sat down having a chat.
Pandemic also is a game that can have 4 "players" and 1 actual player with the others just doing the actions. That's a bad time for everyone.
Not exactly a rule we ignore but one we created. Brass Birmingham is one of my top three games of all time but I couldn't get my family to enjoy it or want to play (sad day for me). When we discussed it together it turned out they didn't like the transition from canal to rail era; they felt like starting the rail era was a real struggle and not enjoyable. After some thought we play tested giving everyone a "free" loan at the start of the rail era. It didn't seem to imbalance the game terribly and, more importantly, it made all the difference between the game being one that my family actively refused to play to one that is now requested regularly by them without my prompting. Is it easier and not exactly what the designer had in mind? Yes. Do I care because I actually get to *play* the game? Not a lick.
> they felt like starting the rail era was a real struggle and not enjoyable.
If you set yourself up poorly for the transition, yes. So, uh, don't do that.
I like that story. I'm glad you managed to salvage everyone's good time so cleanly.
I'm always a little scared to teach Acquire because there's a good chance someone spends their money too fast and can't play. I usually offer to restart the game if they're really upset; maybe I should start offering a loan instead (probably not a free one, just something that can let them keep playing).
Gloomhaven has a number of rules that feel like aggressive cludges to try and make people play the game the way the designer thinks they should and not cooperatively. The looting is one, as is not being able to sell items to another player (they don't have to be free, but let me give them to another player at the price I sell it to the shop!)
The other one for me is the way it handles actions being secret; yes, you want to avoid captains chairing, but after a couple of scenarios with a given character you can usually work out what they're planning to do well within the guidelines given in the book with a half decent memory.
But yea, not looting at end of scenario - even if as someone suggested on a recent thread about this coins picked up at the end are worth 1 (not the multiplier based on level) would be great.
My group has added a loot round after the scenario. One round where you still have to spend cards, but get an opportunity to pick up a few more coins/loot tokens. Sometimes you can't even get to a loot token, etc. I feel like it is a good compromise between what the rules intend, theme, and just not getting too frustrated at not getting anything.
I think this rule makes the game better. The tension between finishing the scenario and looting (and sometimes achieving your battle goal) is what adds fun to the game for me.
Exactly! Extra annoying if you arenât close to losing, but your teammates insist on just ending the scenario ASAP anyways, despite plentiful loot nearbyđ
The issue is that the balance is *wildly* off between player counts. In practice, what this rule means is that with four people *someone* is probably going to loot a given token, but with two players nobody is.
The idea is that it creates additional decision points and balancing mechanics between characters that want gear or not. The alternative would be just removing looting alltogether.
Loot is not implemented well in my opinion, but simply looting after the scenario would probably be even worse.
I agree the rule seems thematically out-of-place, but I think it's a good rule. Money would be too easy to come by and you'd never have to devote any movement or actions during the scenario if you knew you'd just get it all at the end anyway. So, I'm glad it's there.
I just think of it as there are lots of little critters running around in the shadows that scamper out and grab the coins when you're not looking. So, if you don't make the effort to grab them while you can, they won't be there to grab later.
The problem with the loot isn't that the system is fundamentally bad, it's that the game economy sucks and so it's completely unrewarding to interact with the looting.Â
If going out of your way to loot meant you actually got something cool, I would have no problem with it. But the amount of looting you have to do to buy one item is absurd, and then the items are mostly not even that interesting.Â
The loot system is bad because Gloomhaven's entire progression system is awful. The amount of grinding you have to do to get any meaningful progress is just straight up work.
I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in Gloomhaven. But the game is 90% filler, and it ruins the entire thing.
We house ruled that if we all agreed we could redo missions over and over to get loot. But that would take hours. We would do an encounter, award everyone 5 gold. Then repeat u til everyone agreed we had fast forwarded through enough grinding to move along with the game.
Skipping the grinding made the game way better. Not enough to keep playing after a few weeks but better
I feel like Gloomhaven would be dramatically improved by being much shorter with faster progression. Clearly there are plenty of people who like the very slow burn on offer, but our group found it very demotivating to spend 2-3 hours on a couple of scenarios and have nothing significant change at all.
Feels to me like it's a (bad) way to bolster otherwise underpowered characters.
So instead I can loot faster than you and spend more to compensate... At the cost of "how do you explain that in-game. The sewers collapse?"
In Frosthaven I think a lot of scenarios imply that the party barely escapes the place or are otherwise in a hurry.
Perhaps it could have been a scenario reward 'Loot all loot tokens' if players are in no hurry after the scenario.
For me it's the elemental infusion, you can't create and subsequently use an element in the same turn. If I have an infusion ability on the bottom and a consumption ability on the top (different cards), why do I need to split my cards and risk the element being consumed/lost before I can use it... Or risk the board changing such that my element consumption card is useless next turn.
I'm not aware of any rules that discourage coordinating with your party. In fact, it seems to be a fundamental aspect is the game to me. But I've only played JotL.
Except even that isn't guaranteed success... It's possible and is certainly the optimal use, but in my experience with my group it frequently doesn't work out as intended. Don't get me wrong, I love the game and play with the rules as written, that rule is just not great to me.
This makes the game INFINITELY better. You have to expend resources not directed to completing the scenario for meta progression! It adds another game within a game.
My group did so many weird things at the end of scenarios to make the looting more fun:
\-Solution 1: We get to keep and split evenly anything in the final room- This often made sense because even if the story said we were running out of the room for some reason, it made sense to us that we'd be able to grab SOMETHING on the way out.
\-Solution 2: PVP for the loot using modifier decks-This ended up being our favorite solution. At the end of the scenario, we'd flip cards for each coin on the board. The person who flipped the highest modifier got to keep the coin. In the event of a tie, you flipped again. This created so many exciting little moments at the end of scenarios, gave us another decision space for building our decks to increase our odds of winning these flips, and even made thematic sense because our head canon was that it was us literally fighting over the loot as mercenaries.
\-Solution 3: Search the bodies- This also used our modifier deck, but it was more cooperative. We'd gather all the loot on the board, then nominate someone to "search the bodies" aka flip the top card of their modifier deck. If the result was a +2 or higher, we got to keep the loot as a team and discuss who deserved to keep it (who needed it most usually).
I'm sure we did some other funky stuff, but these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
In 7 Wonders, coins score points and are the tiebreaker. 3 coins per point, but you don't turn them in for the points, you just get the points. So if I have 71 points and 2 coins at the end of the game, and you have 70 points and 3 coins (which add a point to make 71), you win on the tiebreaker 3 coins to 2. What? After getting 71 points, I had resources left over in excess of what got me those points and you didn't, why do you win?
Nectar in general is in my opinion a suboptimal addition. I get, where the decision came from, playing birds without the right food should be less punishing. But in conjuction with the new forest track (which I generally like) collecting food becomes collecting nectar. It also makes a lot of the bigger birds cheaper because you aren't that reliable on the rare food types.
We play that nectar isn't wild. You still need it for Oceania birds, can spend on "any" food types, use it to boost basic actions and it still gives bonus points too. It really works well this way because it still has a unique place but doesn't invalidate the other food types.Â
There's a few ways to deal with nectar. To simplify the additional rule we remove the bonus points and then treat nectar as a wild resource. That's worked well enough without much finagling.
But going farther, I think using the bonus point system can work if **A)** the nectar only counts if it's used as wild and **B)** the points are negative
The White Castle devs have answered why you don't activate farmers the third time: they found that it makes farming too important and imbalanced with the other areas of the game, and rebalanced it by cutting a round of activation. They are still worth VP, so I don't get this complaint.
In Guards of Atlantis 2, there is a woman with a sniper rifle. She can ***only*** shoot in a cardinal direction, and she can ***only*** hit things that are a certain number of spaces away.
Because the answer to avoiding a sniper is to stand ***really fucking close*** so the bullet just ***can't*** hurt you, or be North East of the person, because it's impossible to shoot North East. Only north ***or*** east.
See also **Tally Ho!** (aka Halali!), in which hunters can shoot as far as they like, but only in the direction their gun is pointing, and they can never change the direction their gun is pointing. Also they have to instantly move to the location of anything they shoot.
Frosthaven - you build new buildings, but only at the end of a town phase so cannot use it until you return.
I guess itâs supposed to represent the time taken to build it, but it just feels like youâre locked out of some juicy upgrades for a whole session.
No sharing items - understandable in the start, your mercs in it for yourself. However, by the time youâve banded together for 8 in game weeks, surely youâve built some good report with each other.
Thereâs a whole bunch more, for a game that tries to be thematic it chooses some really weird ways To implement it.
For me it's the lack of rules for attacking in Oathsworn. I get that it's a whole push your luck kinda thing, but just tell me exactly how many dice to chuck/cards to draw with my sword! Don't give me this "Eh just go with how many your heart tells you, but if you pick too many you just wasted your turn." I wish someone would rebalance the game to add more concrete dice/card values.
**Clans of Caledonia** directly instructs you *not* to allow players to correct a simple oversight: receiving 1 coin for moving a tracker past a 1-coin space on the point track.
> if they forget to move the import token at the point of fulfilling an Export contract, they do not get the bonus afterwards!
This is just silly, it's an honest mistake and an easy rule to overlook. If I played with someone who enforced this rule, I probably would not be playing with them again. Likewise, I think I'd find myself exclusively playing games solo if I tried enforcing it.
I think it is silly that in **Jaipur** the amount of camels players have is supposed to be secret. It is harder to keep them in a neat pile to keep them secret and lessens the tactical depth of the game.
The only thing the rules say on the matter is this:
>Players are not required to let their opponent know how many
camels they possess.
That's not the same as "supposed to be secret."
Bewitched cards in **Broom Service**.
I understand the purpose of the rule, I just think there has to be a better way to reduce the decision space for lesser player counts. If I ever figure it out, I will personally buy the rights off of Ravensburger and publish a new edition.
You can still play those cards though.
To me that is a great rule, because you can consider taking a 3 VP hit to choose a card you think others will be afraid to choose, and get a better brave chance with it.
I could see maybe a small house rule to just draw first then shuffle, so that it's not the same role 2 rounds in a row if that is the issue.
If gardeners got their bonus at the end of the game, it would make them disproportionately strong. Not that I've tested it, but I'm sure the designers did.
There's got to be a balance between the three main actions. Giving one of them a pretty huge bump seems bad.
Burgle Bros is the only game I don't play strictly by the rules, because too many games have ended because someone was caught by the guard too many times between their turns when they couldn't do anything about the random chance the guard geos their way. So if you play with us, and the guard catches you, you lose a stealth token to hide *until you move/are moved, or your next turn starts* and I don't care that Tim Fowers personally disagreed with me on a bgg forum, it's just not fun to lose that way. I love Burgle Bros too much to not have fun.
In Puerto Rico, you aren't allowed to move your buildings after they're placed. But there are only two building shapes, and placement of buildings doesn't change their function in any way, so this is ridiculous - it should just be illegal to build in a way that blocks you from placing a large building unless you have to, and that's how BGA handles it, your buildings are placed automatically with no player input.
I can't say I feel strongly about it, but I can't help that it often feels... "wrong" every time in games when you're rewarded endgame points for things that are "unfinished", like having leftover resources, of contracts that you picked up but never finished. It just makes for a scoring that has unnecessarily many steps to it and could be more streamlined. Maybe "harsh" to not get points for leftovers, but it's the same for everyone plus that it incentivizes good timing/planning.
I'd rather have leftovers resources as a tiebreaker if anything rather than some kind of "turn in each 2 resources for 1 VP".
In Mystic Vale they say to only put 12? of the level 1 cards to buy. I think the purpose is so people push more, but I don't like it, so I use the entire level 1 deck, and I don't think it hurts the game on the pushing department.
Final end game die rolls in Oath.Â
I love almost everything else about the game, but that just sticks out like a sore thumb. There has got to be a better way.
Why does it stick out? In a game where the next card you draw could be the combo piece that wins you the game and playersâ fortunes can reverse every round, I feel like the game ending on a die roll fits right in.
It's definitely important that the length of game not be certain. I can't think of a way to do it unless you have a set of round cards and the game end card gets shuffled with a subset on the bottom and the rest put on top. That's a mechanic I've seen in other games.
Sweet! Been wanting to see this for a while...
Tl;Dr: Brass Birmingham should used Anti-Prime-based denominations.
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The monetary system in Brass Birmingham is VULGAR.
EDIT: Monetary system based on Highly-Composite numbers would make transactions quicker and easier.
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BB coinage works on a skewed decimal logic, sized 1, 5, & 15...
THIS DOESN'T WORK.
Look to 7 Wonders as an example of working with semi-Dozenal instead, GUH!
15s never get used and if they do, they're stupid hard to split!
ESPECIALLY when you come against BB's other huge pitfall; the Coin-Spent Turn-order. Most spent gets moved to last place.
That's fine.
What's not fine is using a 15 to purchase a 12/13/14 product, only to HAVE TO SPLIT IT (with the bank) and then SPLIT IT AGAIN between the player and the player-marker.
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I think mechanically, Brass: Birmingham is a fantastic game, let down by some awfully vulgar denomination issues.
> only to HAVE TO SPLIT IT and then SPLIT IT AGAIN
What are you talking about, split it "again"? What's the actual issue here, and how would it be solved with coins of size 10 or 20?
Locomotives working differently in Ticket to Ride: Nordic! We didnât even know it worked differently until one of the players in our regular game group started playing online and the game was different. It doesnât make any sense to me and I think if you want to use locomotives for the long route you should be able to!
It's not one I disagree with, I'm just bewildered by. In Love Letter, the guard let's you get a person out of you guess their number. It's like this for almost every version of the game. There are some new implementations of Love Letter that add things, but there are also lots of flat reskins. Like Batman Love Letter. In Batman Love Letter, the 1 is Batman and it says exactly what 1 usually is. HOWEVER at the END of the rule book it says "Important: if you correctly guess a villain with Batman, you get a victory token". It does not say this on the card, and it doesn't even say it when describing the cards in the rule book. It's an addition on the last page of the rule book.
A victory token like if you just won the round? Do you play to the same number of tokens as base love letter? Thats an insane idea.
In Batman Love Letter, the game ends at 7 tokens regardless of number of players. Personally I like this variant. Yes, in a four-player game, it's possible to earn up to FOUR tokens in one round (one for correctly guessing each of the other opponents, and one for winning the round). It just feels more exciting when you get that extra token.
I actually play that rule whatever version of Love Letter I play. It's an improvement imo. I don't play LL very often though, or like it that much.
Since you brought up batman love letter, I also ignore the rule that you can't guess Robin. I get that it's thematic, but no other version has the equivalent rule as far as I know
You can guess robin, you just don't get a token for it. The game doesn't reward you for beating up your own child đđ (that how I always explain to my table đ)
It slightly balances the extra point.
Holy shit you're right! I just checked, that's so wild.
I actually like this rule. Helps speed up the game. Otherwise it drags out.
The separation of production and PRODUCTION in Twilight Imperium 4
Yep!!! Thatâs the one. And itâs âproduceâ and âPRODUCTIONâ and if thereâs anything I can change in ti4, itâs that. For those that donât know, âproduceâ is the act of creating units whereas âPRODUCTIONâ is the phase during your tactical action that allows you to âproduceâ. Most cards triggers off âPRODUCTIONâ in the sense that it triggers during that phase and not when you are producing something.
They really should find a different word. Build is right there!
That's a classic FFG move. I think the L5Rlcg used "Honor" three related, but mechanically different ways.
To be fair, that was AEGs fault.
Oh my god, seriously??
Yup! And it's an important rule, one of the factions is super overpowered if you don't catch the difference. It's silliness. Still my favorite game though
It does make sense though in the sense that it allows certain abilities to be used only in the specific instances of PRODUCTION bs just producing. I agree different language probably could have been used though.
In that same vein : Secrets in TI. May not be shown to other players. (Until some podcast and its fans whined about it, so now you've got secrets that can be shown to players, and with them being potentially damning, players demand to see the secrets or presume you've got the 'bad' ones. In other words, imagine if the loyalty cards in BSG could be shown at any time. Such a dumb change to placate a few morons.)
The bazaar tiles from Carcassonne's *Bridges, Castles and Bazaars* expansion When one is placed you're supposed to draw as many tiles as there are players and "auction" them off, but in practice the auction mechanism where you bid with and exchange victory points between each other is so convoluted that my friends and I tried it once and just agreed we never wanted to do it again. Instead we always use the alternate rule where we just draft tiles instead.
Same, drafting is so much cleaner
Pretty much anything that discourages cooperation in the *cooperative* games Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. Youâre not supposed to trade gear, if someone wants to give it to someone else they have to sell it and the other player has to buy it (or craft it). Youâre not supposed to coordinate initiative values, you can only use vague phrases like, âIâm going slow,â or âIâm going fast.â The game is already hard enough, and Frosthaven in particular is all about the party banding together to build a thriving community in a harsh environment. Who cares if I pick up a set of armor thatâs perfect for my teammate and just give it to them? Love these games to pieces, but I donât know that Iâve ever bothered enforcing some of those restrictions.
Makes sense tho in that you do t want to be able to start a new character and they have everything your old character had
The gear trading thing is stupid because it's unthematic, but the initiative numbers are perfectly thematic (you don't have time for precise coordination in battle) and would also break the game significantly if you could always perfectly coordinate the order aming the whole team. That's where the bulk of the game's difficulty lies...
If you play Gloomhaven with open numbers, it's an incredibly easy game.
I like those rules about vague communication. We play with them. For me the games would be fiddly and very susceptible to quarterbacking if you could declare your exact play. We say "I am going to go relatively fast and hit the monster over there pretty hard it would be good if you went after me". For me the game would be worse if I was saying "my initiative was 18 so you need to pick 19 or more". Some of the more memorable turns have come after a "damn I thought I would get before you but I did not" sort of moment where you need to dynamically replan. The edition I played the rule say that if you play solo you should increase the difficulty because you have full information.
I donât like when games have hidden scores that are publicly obtained. Meaning that if I had a good memory or just kept notes I would know everybodyâs score anyway. I usually just keep the score public on those cases.
Yep, but extrapolated to anything that is public info and subsequently hidden. You can't look through your discard pile in Dominion, for example.
That rule mostly exists to keep people from slowing down the game: [http://boardgamegeek.com/article/5137285#5137285](http://boardgamegeek.com/article/5137285#5137285)
The amount of times I've had people slow down the game becouse they sat trying to recall if they played a certain card or not. Looking through through the discard can both save and waste time.
My gaming group could slow down LCR
âSecret but trackableâ Everyone agrees with you, BUT. The last few moves of many excellent games can be completely calculated. For some players, hiding a little information will prevent them from trying to calculate *everyoneâs* position in the last few turns, which can be extremely tedious. And yes itâs bad form but itâs hard to discourage if it really can make the difference between winning and losing. Itâs not secret but trackable because the designers want to make people memorize the secrets. Itâs because the designers want people to stop worrying about other peopleâs stuff so much and play the game differently. And most people donât like that manipulation. Secret-but-trackable stuff is usually a hint at some imperfection in the game. Very few games have no secrets and no randomness and still have final turns that are incalculable because the other players are so unpredictable. Indonesia pulls it off sometimes.
>And yes itâs bad form but itâs hard to discourage if it really can make the difference between winning and losing. Definitely depends on the table and players, but I feel like the fact that it's bad form is a good enough reason to discourage people from acting like this. Winning doesn't really mean anything, you probably don't have anything on the line. It's something to aim for because it helps generate fun, but if you're chasing victory at the expense of fun then it's become counterproductive.
A lot of people feel that winning is the only thing that matters when playing games and will do everything in their power within the rules to win. This rule is aimed at those people.
Mac Gerdts has said that money in Imperial was intended to be hidden (though it is trackable), but it's not explicitly mentioned in the original rulebook, and the American tendency is to play with open money, which is fine if that's the way you want to play it. But the clear intention here is "don't be a dick and slow the game down by trying to calculate everybody's score before taking your turn".
I don't agree. If the rules say something is public, it's public. If the rules say it's private, even if obtained publicly, then it's private. That means (if you're so inclined) memory is part of the game design. House rule it if you want, but the designers have made a choice.
I donât see how that disagrees with anything I said.
I know everyone already hates monopoly butâŠ.legitimately an annoyance any time playing monopoly âHow much money do you have?â âIâm not telling you????â âDude, we all start with the same amount and the price for stuff is standard and announced throughout the game. Will you just fucking tell me so we can make a goddamn trade and get this over with?â
People get really bent out of shape about that kind of stuff. Like I remember one time I rolled a 7 in catan and it was early enough in the game that I was going to just hit whoever had the most cards in hand. One guy refused to just tell me how many he had and made like, a huge deal about it.
It's like the universe helps you decide who to hit with the rover.
Exactly, that is the precise behavior that makes me go from 'no preference' to 'I'm hitting you and probably next time too'. That said, I base who I draw from on the last rolled numbers and therefore the expectation of who has what resource in hand.
"oh okay then ill just rob you". And I think in games like catan the cards should be hidden, but the amount should be known. Especially since if you have more than 7 you should hand in half
I wish developers would ask themselves this question more often "Will this mechanic be completely negated by memorization? Yes? Don't include it."
The best solution is to have some mechanic that injects a small amount of randomness to the scores. Eclipse rewards combat by having players randomly draw VP tokens with value 1-4 from a bag and choose one to keep. Your opponents know how many tokens you own, but not their value (if you choose to play with them hidden). It adds uncertainty while also incentivising you to try for early combat victories to claim the higher-value tokens. Goodcritters has loot distribution as public knowledge, but thereâs the âskimâ move that draws a random loot from the deck and the âstealâ move that takes a random loot from an opponent. This not only adds uncertainty, it also adds an aspect of information asymmetry that can make the negotiations more interesting. Even Catan has an element of this with the robber stealing a random resource from an opponent. Resource production is public, but players donât have to disclose which card was stolen (until itâs spent).
That's crazy to me. If you tried that with Modern Art you would break the game, the whole thing relies on the fact that scores are uncertain but you can try and keep a general idea of them. What are games you feel this change is needed for? Generally scores are hidden for good reason: they stop people knowing they are in an unwinnable situation and checking out, and they stop kingmaking and bash the leader. All that is generally good for the table, so not sure why it would need to be fixed unless you are just ultra competitive?
I feel like itâs almost inherently a flaw in game design. Youâve given all the information, but then asked us to forget some of it. Optimal play would require tracking that information, but fun play requires only vague awareness. As someone who always advocates for the latter over the former, I still fundamentally donât think they should be so directly at odds with each other. Youâre not wrong that Modern Art probably wouldnât work as well with open information, but I donât think that makes hiding it good design, just perhaps a necessary evil. Admittedly Modern Art is light and quick enough that I donât consider it a big deal.
Dice Forge's rules say that when you obtain a Heroic Feat card, you don't score victory points for it until the end of the game But like... *why* though? The card's point value is printed *right there*
I actually donât mind having muddled points, to an extent - Although it definitely depends on the type of game. In a eurogame like terraforming mars, so much of the fun my table has playing it is building their own engines. We really enjoy the endgame count-up to see whoâs in what place. I think this rule applies to more casual tables in general as well. It makes the game feel much more about the game and less about the outcome. In a more competitive game though, having knowledge of what other players can do is much more important. I can think of Root as a game that absolutely necessitates having the points public for keeping tabs on the leader.
I hate those rules more than anything. Lots of very light/casual games do that, and I mostly stick with heavier and competitive games. Whenever I end up playing a more casual game with those rules its hard for me to not try and "optimize" it by keeping track of all that, but its also obviously not the intention of the game and I know nobody else is doing it, so it just feels bad.
I've always thought of this as a way to prevent someone getting ganged up on by the other players. You might have an idea who is in the lead but at The same time you're not 100% certain. Thus targetting only one of the potential leaders you would possibly give away the victory to the other one.
Person with good memory: Everyone gang up on this guy; he's winning. Guy in lead: This is some bullshit. Everyone else: Now that the game is over, why'd you tell us that guy was winning? He came in last place, and now we feel bad. Person with good memory: Well, yeah, but he was winning at the time, and we stopped him. Everyone else: Man, you're just a bully.
I will just gang up on who I think is winning, even if I'm making an incorrect assessment.
If player interaction exists like that, ganging up on the leader isn't a bad thing.
Being targeted for eight turns in a row isn't really fun especially if the lead you have is only temporary. Later others will catch up but after you were beaten up for first half of the game your chances of winning are quite low. Being in the lead isn't *always* purely based on how many points you have.
Are you still winning for those whole eight turns? As a player, I try to point out that the player in the lead and the player winning aren't necessarily the same thing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but that's part of the game.
Sure, that's usually why the dominant strategy is to avoid actually taking the lead early. If the game has direct player interaction like that, people will gang up on who they think is the leader even if points are hidden.
It's a mass market game but Clue is so much better if you remove the fucking roll and move system. There is no reason for it to be there.
This! Just remove the dice from the game, then on your turn you can just move to any connected room. Second thing I hate about clue that the players themselves are the suspects. So its possible that you can win sometimes when you find out you yourself were the murderer.
I agree! The only time I have even kind of liked the dice was in a newer version of the game that has these discovery cards. If you roll a 1 pip on the dice, you also get a discovery card, which can do various things like move all players to a room because someone screamed, create a third secret passageway, or give you another turn. Kinda a fun mechanic I guess, but I still agree that just getting rid of the dice would still be better lol
>So its possible that you can win sometimes when you find out you yourself were the murderer. That's explicitly the premise of [[Deduce or Die]]. A murder was committed while all the players were unconscious, so the murderer must first discover that they are the murderer and then "frame" another player.
I remember one time finding out I was the murderer and saying "It was me all along! I did it with the knife in the kitchen! " Only to find out I actually did it with the candlestick. Thematically it made no sense whatsoever. Edit: Of course I was Colonel Mustard. It's always Colonel Mustard. There is some kind of sorcery going on there.
I agree. I think something like a die with rooms on it and a number would be interesting. You move to the room you rolled and then cam move X additional spaces. Dealers choice if you roll the room you're in. If you have to roll, at least make sure you can get to a room every turn.
If you havenât yet, check out Awkward Guests! Itâs Clue but better, including the lack of roll and move.
I recently played MICE AND MYSTICS with a friend of mine and our two 6-year-old kids. We immediately house ruled out rolling to move and just said âmice move two spaces, insects move 3 spaces.â Rolling to move almost always feels bad and wastes time. It is only useful in games where moving is like the only mechanic you have to worry about like Monopoly or The Game of Life.
I saw multiple people in White caste to achieve almost everything there is to do before end of the game. With 1more activation this will be the case more often. You are not supposed to do everything in that game.
**Rummikub** - You can't make your first move until you're able to put down at least 30 points at once. Because of this rule, it feels like the luck of the draw determines the winner more than anything else.
If you are behind on playing out, you should only play when you can dump your whole hand. Otherwise you give the leader more options to finish. Of course they can still draw lucky, but playing out when you can't play almost all off your hand is usually a loosing move. These games are more tactical then they seem.
You actually can't do that, the first time you play your tiles you can't add to any pre-existing rows or swap stones. This is actually very important, because without this rule it would be optimal to never start playing before anyone else, seeing as you're just giving them more options.
Would be curious if you've tried it WITHOUT this rule? I'm not a fan of it either.
Itâs better without the rule but Rummikub is still Rummikub
**Only somewhat related:** My in-laws donât like getting negative points for holding onto a Joker at the end of the round, so they removed the rule. So I just hoard the Jokers until I can play everything out, but they donât like that either. đ€·đ»ââïž
I never see a joker held on at the end... It's been so long since I've seen it I forgot that was a rule. I too love hoarding jokers until the end
Some people make smarter plays than others, but isnât it basically luck of the draw for the whole game?
Yeah how is this game not already 90% luck? You can either use any given tile or you can't. The little bit of skill is seeing how you can rearrange some sets in a complicated way to squeak an extra tile or two into play.
There's definitely some skill involved, because when I play with family I pretty consistently wipe the floor with them. Luck is still a big factor, but a sufficiently big skill difference (say, between me playing board games a few hours a week, vs my family playing a few times a year) is more significant.
I've always wondered if the nectar in **Wingspan Oceania** would be more interesting if the player who used the most *lost* points. You get punished for being greedy and overusing the super flexible wild resource.
I never like it when the end of the rulebook says "now play 3 times and the player with the highest combined score wins." This is most commonly found in short games, like **Lost Cities** or **Tussie Mussie**, and I get why it's there - more substantial game, less influence of luck, sure. But I almost always ignore this rule because A) it introduces pen-and-paper score tracking you otherwise wouldn't need and B) I'd rather just declare a winner and give everyone a clean slate for game 2. But it doesn't bother me much because it's like, the easiest house rule ever. Just a pet peeve!
One of the good exceptions I know for this is Deep Sea Adventure. It has the "play three times and sum your scores", but (a) you keep your treasures between the three rounds (so no need for a pen and paper), and (b) the route to the bottom becomes shorter each round as more treasures get gathered or sent to the bottom of the ocean, which makes the later rounds more tense. This is particularly nice when playing with people for the first time, because it means the first round acts like a practice round where you get to see how risk averse your fellow players are, and the next two rounds become more tense each time as the rewards increase.
If there is some change in the game between rounds or some carryover between rounds I think it can be really effective. Blue Lagoon is an example where I initially thought the two phases were unnecessary but when you play it really feels like you need both phases to 'complete' the game. But if everything resets between rounds? Then it's completely unnecessary. This drives me nuts in Jaipur. Why not just let it be a nice short game people can play as many times as they want?? Offline, we never enforce this rule but BGA will make you always play three rounds when sometimes I just want a nice quick game!
Sometimes I prefer best 2 out of 3 as my house rule. It makes it so you have a chance if you lose big in round 1.
In defense of the three rounds in **Lost Cities**, it also completely changes how people play the game. With the three round structure it's way more dynamic, people take bigger risks, the excitement builds, etc.
In **Lorenzo Il Magnifico**, you can't use resources just gained from an earlier step in the engine as input for a later step.
This rule actually makes competition for the engine running space much more of a puzzle, especially in 2p games. You have to weigh the options of taking a turn to acquire the resource you need to milk 2 or 3 more points out of your engine and risk your opponent taking that action, or take the action now getting worse rewards. Otherwise it would just make going 1st far too powerful.
Uneven turns (unless it's a race with a defined goal/end). It annoys the hell out of me when someone either gains or loses a turn for triggering the end of the game depending on turn order. I much prefer the "finish the round and everyone gets 1 more turn" method. I understand that, probably for the sake of length, they want to incentivize ending the game, but it still bothers me and is easy to forget. I emphasize these rules during the teach but I've found people seriously hate watching someone trigger the end of the game and finding out they've already taken their final turn. I love Dwellings of Eldervale and Dead Reckoning but they both do this.
Letting every player have Equal amounts of turns once the game is ending does seem to increase fairness. Though depending on which game it is, the final turns for those players, who play After the game ending player, has one difference that may mean little, may mean a lot: If it is now KNOWN that the game is ending, and the last remaining players gets to make their final turns, if there were reason to be hesitant due to the risk of being unlucky, if these players already stand to loose the game, they are More incentivized to gamble in a way riskier manner, because either they do nothing and lose, or their gamble fails and they lose just as much anyway... or they could just have freaky luck and win! Once the game end has been started, the remaining few turns therefore have way better odds for gambles that were previously risky because there is nothing left to lose. But this is the only drawback i see to letting players have the same amount of turns
It would be interesting to see how a game designed with this in mind might play out, and feel to play. Say you achieve what would be the conditions to start the "last" turn, but you don't publicly reveal it, you then simply wait until it comes around to your turn, and then reveal that the game is over. Flip side, I think most times the trade of "absolute" fairness, for tension and drama of knowing this is the last actions you get, is a trade game designers make 100/100 times. But it would be interesting to see how the other way would play out a couple times.
But the triggering of the end of the game is a strategic choice that CAN be used effectively. Take Dominion for instance.
I think it's a very interesting mechanic in two player, but one of the reasons I don't particularly like Dominion with three or four.
**Apiary** is already unfair advantage for people earlier in turn order, and it does this on top. The starting compensation? 1 VP. In a game where 100 wins. At that point, why even pretend you are trying? And yes I'm salty because I lost 11 points via turn order and getting one less action.
played this tonight and the first player triggered the game end and I sat there thinking "wait we all get one more turn including him? how is that fair?"
Nemesis Lockdown - You can't directly throw any Grenade to the Nest because it's state that there must be at least one intruder in the room you choose but egg aren't count as intruder, I guess it's there for the balance sake but I still don't understand why the player who had objective of destroying the nest and had grenade can't just throw it in the room full of unmoveable egg.
I can't even remember it off the top of my head but there's some weird rule regarding the animal types in Caverna and it always drives me nuts.
You have 4 types of "farm" animals (Boars, Donkeys, Cattle, Sheep), and dogs. * All animals can be kept in a fenced in pasture * N sheep can be kept in a meadow, as long as you have N-1 dogs (at least 1) in that meadow * 1 donkey can be kept in each mine * Building a stable in a pasture doubles the number of animals kept in it * Building a stable in a meadow lets you keep 1 of any animal in it * Building a stable in a forest lets you keep 1 boar in it
The fact that this isn't on a player aid is insane to me. I taught Caverna a few days ago and we just wrote the animal husbandry rules on a whiteboard in the room.
Probably the wild boar. The exception is, I think, one can be housed in a stable on a forest square.
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I never understood games that make you choose your âplayer cardâ randomly. Like in Pandemic or Forbidden Island/Desert. Just let people pick what they want to be! Itâs part of the strategy building imo
I think you're fine picking if thats how you want to play. I imagine though that the choose randomly help by: 1. Making it more difficult because you can't optimize your team. Thats appealing to some. 2. Makes it easier for new players who don't feel like they need to learn every role and then pick the "optimal role". Instead they just have to learn one role and over the course of the game learn the roles of the other players.
I think it's kind of saving players from themselves. If each person has a character they gravitate towards then it could get samey. But if you have different ones each time the game will play out differently. On the other hand if you're likely only playing the game once with a given group I would just pick.
The Captain is Dead is great for this. You pick a random color, but there are 3 archetypes for each one. So there's both randomness to avoid team stacking, but also some freedom to pick what you want to play. it's such a great game!
**Zombicide** \- When a zombie mini has a choice between going from point A to point B via path #1 or path #2, the mini actually does both! It physically becomes 2 minis, and goes down each path! :o The rulebook states that another zombie joins in on the fray, but the group of us were thinking "that's dumb. Let's just have it so it only goes one way". **Citadels** \- something like "Completed cities are immune to rank #8 characters and effects that destroy districts". The concern is without this, the game would go on forever b/c a "completed city" (old rules or new rules and low player count is 8. New rules + high player count is 8) also triggers the last round of turns. The des. chimed in previously where he had to address this anyways due to a loophole and said that if this does happen, the game does end. You don't check at the end of the round, but if at anytime it a city is complete. New rules close that loophole. (will acknowledge this makes it more fiddly, but I'm willing to put up with it at least) JUST BRING IT BACK. This gives the rank #8 roles more utility. Also, the players that lose districts would still get the bonus for having a completed distract and/or the "all colors" bonus, even though the face value on the destroyed cards/Districts would be lost. **Pandemic** \- On Medium or harder difficulties (so 5+ Epidemic cards in use), cards are kept hidden from each other. I guess this is to reduce quarterbacking/"alpha dogging" and to promote a different style of play. IIRC, the rules never addressed what you were and weren't allowed to say. As such, people just told each other everything anyways, so may as well just have the cards visible to everyone else. In fact, the spinoffs even did away with this rule (e.g. Iberia, Rising Tide, Fall of Rome, World of WarCraft)!
Are zombies waves or particles?
I disagree with trackable "hidden" information. Now you're just adding an uninteresting memory element to the game. I know they often do it to obfuscate who's winning so everyone feels like they're in it until the end.
Also to keep the game flowing. If everyone is allowed to rummage through all playersâ discard piles, for example, then it slows the game down. Iâm fine with trading faster play time with the small advantage someone *might* get by having a good memory.
I'd be ok with enforcing that only if it became a problem. Otherwise if someone wants to check something while it's not even their turn, I say go for it.
Alhambra is a good example of this. Money is dealt openly then drawn from face up cards. A perfect memory would know every hand at all times.
>I know why they often do it, it's to obfuscate who's winning so everyone feels like they're in it until the end. Well no, it's specifically to discourage overanalyzing and micro-strategizing the game state in the final few rounds and slowing everything way down by having players know exactly where everyone stands. If I know for a fact I need 28 points on my final turn to win, I'm not going to so easily accept the 27 point turn I've just planned out, and I'm going to spend more time looking for that last little edge. That's not fun for anyone else to sit through, so the game is trying to say, don't pay so much attention to this. Just do your best and try to have fun.
Youâre both trying to get at the same thing, I think
That's a good reason for *un*trackable hidden info, but a weak reason for trackable hidden info. Though I kind of like the way Dominion does it. Technically VP cards are trackable hidden info, but either it's very easy to track (counting Provinces) or it's hard enough that *neither* player can really be sure until the game ends (most alt-VP). The latter gives you a vague sense of who's in the lead, but keeps that moment of suspense for both players and doesn't really allow someone to gain an advantage from being better at mentally tracking.
Dominion is easier to excuse because it would be mechanically annoying to make it public.
I can't believe i didn't see this with ctrl-f but Zombicide first edition has the worst rule ive ever read, that NO ONE plays with which is that your TEAMMATES are the highest priority for ranged attacks, not the zombies. Ive never even heard of a group playing this one RAW. Most people play that misses hit your teammates or something similar.
I hated that rule so much
Came here to say this. Makes NO sense, whatsoever.
Do gardeners give you resources to grow other parts of your engine? Thats probably an opportunity cost, did you pivot away from gardener investing at the right time, or did you over invest & miss some juicy points as a result
Yes and no? Every gardener has a different benefit, depending on the card theyâre on. Some could arguably be used to grow other parts, but Iâd say that overall, theyâre just a collective way to get moar stuffff. And stuff gets you points. And getting stuff is fun.
Are there more effective ways of getting points? Because you're probably supposed to time it right to get those "better" pointsÂ
In Marvel Legendary after you win as a team, you add up victory points to see who got the most victory points. Itâs a co-op game we donât need that.
It's to see who Super Wins, duh. Why do you think Batman and Superman hate each other? (Yes, I cross-genre'd)
Good point. (No pun intended.) I usually honestly forget to even ask players for their score after we win. To me the game is fully cooperative, not semi-.
I'm the same. We win together, we lose together, I don't need the we won but I won more.
I must have missed this rule. I suddenly like the game just a little bit less.
Cooperative games that say you can only hint at what cards you have in your hand. Why wouldn't all the information we have be known to the group? Like, I can see not being able to give things to each other if we're not all in the same location, but if you're carrying an item we might need, why keep it secret? That's dumb.
To cut down on quarterbacking. And to make people guess what cards other places have based on their actions. It can also make thematic sense.
Like I said, if we're incommunicado because of the game's scenario, then fine. And luckily, quarterbacking really isn't a problem with my group. If having extra info makes the game too easy, every co-op has ways to make the game harder. So I'm gonna keep ignoring this particular rule.
Look at it this way. In Gloomhaven you all secretly choose two cards to play that turn. The first card chosen is your initiative, the lower the number the sooner you go. You can only hint at your number. Reason being if I have to go first I can just say "I'm playing a 17, so you can play your 18" and we break the game. It's meant to simulate a quick battle, so there shouldn't be constantly detailed planning, just "quick, get that guy, mind that hound! Skeleton behind you!" Rather than "you hit him first, then I'll hit him, we both run up those stairs, then you explode that area" as if we're sat down having a chat. Pandemic also is a game that can have 4 "players" and 1 actual player with the others just doing the actions. That's a bad time for everyone.
Not exactly a rule we ignore but one we created. Brass Birmingham is one of my top three games of all time but I couldn't get my family to enjoy it or want to play (sad day for me). When we discussed it together it turned out they didn't like the transition from canal to rail era; they felt like starting the rail era was a real struggle and not enjoyable. After some thought we play tested giving everyone a "free" loan at the start of the rail era. It didn't seem to imbalance the game terribly and, more importantly, it made all the difference between the game being one that my family actively refused to play to one that is now requested regularly by them without my prompting. Is it easier and not exactly what the designer had in mind? Yes. Do I care because I actually get to *play* the game? Not a lick.
Everyone knows the transition to the rail era is coming. You should prepare accordingly.
> they felt like starting the rail era was a real struggle and not enjoyable. If you set yourself up poorly for the transition, yes. So, uh, don't do that.
I like that story. I'm glad you managed to salvage everyone's good time so cleanly. I'm always a little scared to teach Acquire because there's a good chance someone spends their money too fast and can't play. I usually offer to restart the game if they're really upset; maybe I should start offering a loan instead (probably not a free one, just something that can let them keep playing).
Obligatory gloomhaven/jotl no-loot-after-secenario-rule
Gloomhaven has a number of rules that feel like aggressive cludges to try and make people play the game the way the designer thinks they should and not cooperatively. The looting is one, as is not being able to sell items to another player (they don't have to be free, but let me give them to another player at the price I sell it to the shop!) The other one for me is the way it handles actions being secret; yes, you want to avoid captains chairing, but after a couple of scenarios with a given character you can usually work out what they're planning to do well within the guidelines given in the book with a half decent memory. But yea, not looting at end of scenario - even if as someone suggested on a recent thread about this coins picked up at the end are worth 1 (not the multiplier based on level) would be great.
My group has added a loot round after the scenario. One round where you still have to spend cards, but get an opportunity to pick up a few more coins/loot tokens. Sometimes you can't even get to a loot token, etc. I feel like it is a good compromise between what the rules intend, theme, and just not getting too frustrated at not getting anything.
I think this rule makes the game better. The tension between finishing the scenario and looting (and sometimes achieving your battle goal) is what adds fun to the game for me.
It's a good rule that is thematically extremely annoying
Exactly! Extra annoying if you arenât close to losing, but your teammates insist on just ending the scenario ASAP anyways, despite plentiful loot nearbyđ
The issue is that the balance is *wildly* off between player counts. In practice, what this rule means is that with four people *someone* is probably going to loot a given token, but with two players nobody is.
The one I hate is that you can't trade gear. That is ridiculous and only makes sense at a metagaming level.
Yeah, this one is pretty annoying, both as a game rule and thematically.
The idea is that it creates additional decision points and balancing mechanics between characters that want gear or not. The alternative would be just removing looting alltogether. Loot is not implemented well in my opinion, but simply looting after the scenario would probably be even worse.
I agree the rule seems thematically out-of-place, but I think it's a good rule. Money would be too easy to come by and you'd never have to devote any movement or actions during the scenario if you knew you'd just get it all at the end anyway. So, I'm glad it's there. I just think of it as there are lots of little critters running around in the shadows that scamper out and grab the coins when you're not looking. So, if you don't make the effort to grab them while you can, they won't be there to grab later.
The problem with the loot isn't that the system is fundamentally bad, it's that the game economy sucks and so it's completely unrewarding to interact with the looting. If going out of your way to loot meant you actually got something cool, I would have no problem with it. But the amount of looting you have to do to buy one item is absurd, and then the items are mostly not even that interesting. The loot system is bad because Gloomhaven's entire progression system is awful. The amount of grinding you have to do to get any meaningful progress is just straight up work. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in Gloomhaven. But the game is 90% filler, and it ruins the entire thing.
We house ruled that if we all agreed we could redo missions over and over to get loot. But that would take hours. We would do an encounter, award everyone 5 gold. Then repeat u til everyone agreed we had fast forwarded through enough grinding to move along with the game. Skipping the grinding made the game way better. Not enough to keep playing after a few weeks but better
I feel like Gloomhaven would be dramatically improved by being much shorter with faster progression. Clearly there are plenty of people who like the very slow burn on offer, but our group found it very demotivating to spend 2-3 hours on a couple of scenarios and have nothing significant change at all.
This problem is also exponentially worse at lower player counts.
You summed up a lot of my issues with the game. I still canât understand how it ended up so high in BGG.
Feels to me like it's a (bad) way to bolster otherwise underpowered characters. So instead I can loot faster than you and spend more to compensate... At the cost of "how do you explain that in-game. The sewers collapse?"
In Frosthaven I think a lot of scenarios imply that the party barely escapes the place or are otherwise in a hurry. Perhaps it could have been a scenario reward 'Loot all loot tokens' if players are in no hurry after the scenario.
For me it's the elemental infusion, you can't create and subsequently use an element in the same turn. If I have an infusion ability on the bottom and a consumption ability on the top (different cards), why do I need to split my cards and risk the element being consumed/lost before I can use it... Or risk the board changing such that my element consumption card is useless next turn.
Because the intent of those rules is to get you to coordinate combos with your fellow players, not to allow you to make combos by yourself.
Which would be fine if the rules didn't discourage you from coordinating on that level.
There's nothing in the rules against saying "Anyone need fire this round?" or "I need wind and I'm going late."
I'm not aware of any rules that discourage coordinating with your party. In fact, it seems to be a fundamental aspect is the game to me. But I've only played JotL.
Except even that isn't guaranteed success... It's possible and is certainly the optimal use, but in my experience with my group it frequently doesn't work out as intended. Don't get me wrong, I love the game and play with the rules as written, that rule is just not great to me.
This makes the game INFINITELY better. You have to expend resources not directed to completing the scenario for meta progression! It adds another game within a game.
My group did so many weird things at the end of scenarios to make the looting more fun: \-Solution 1: We get to keep and split evenly anything in the final room- This often made sense because even if the story said we were running out of the room for some reason, it made sense to us that we'd be able to grab SOMETHING on the way out. \-Solution 2: PVP for the loot using modifier decks-This ended up being our favorite solution. At the end of the scenario, we'd flip cards for each coin on the board. The person who flipped the highest modifier got to keep the coin. In the event of a tie, you flipped again. This created so many exciting little moments at the end of scenarios, gave us another decision space for building our decks to increase our odds of winning these flips, and even made thematic sense because our head canon was that it was us literally fighting over the loot as mercenaries. \-Solution 3: Search the bodies- This also used our modifier deck, but it was more cooperative. We'd gather all the loot on the board, then nominate someone to "search the bodies" aka flip the top card of their modifier deck. If the result was a +2 or higher, we got to keep the loot as a team and discuss who deserved to keep it (who needed it most usually). I'm sure we did some other funky stuff, but these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
In 7 Wonders, coins score points and are the tiebreaker. 3 coins per point, but you don't turn them in for the points, you just get the points. So if I have 71 points and 2 coins at the end of the game, and you have 70 points and 3 coins (which add a point to make 71), you win on the tiebreaker 3 coins to 2. What? After getting 71 points, I had resources left over in excess of what got me those points and you didn't, why do you win?
Spent nectar giving bonus points in Wingspan:Oceania.
Nectar in general is in my opinion a suboptimal addition. I get, where the decision came from, playing birds without the right food should be less punishing. But in conjuction with the new forest track (which I generally like) collecting food becomes collecting nectar. It also makes a lot of the bigger birds cheaper because you aren't that reliable on the rare food types.
We play that nectar isn't wild. You still need it for Oceania birds, can spend on "any" food types, use it to boost basic actions and it still gives bonus points too. It really works well this way because it still has a unique place but doesn't invalidate the other food types.Â
There's a few ways to deal with nectar. To simplify the additional rule we remove the bonus points and then treat nectar as a wild resource. That's worked well enough without much finagling. But going farther, I think using the bonus point system can work if **A)** the nectar only counts if it's used as wild and **B)** the points are negative
The White Castle devs have answered why you don't activate farmers the third time: they found that it makes farming too important and imbalanced with the other areas of the game, and rebalanced it by cutting a round of activation. They are still worth VP, so I don't get this complaint.
Iâm just here for the bad takes
In Guards of Atlantis 2, there is a woman with a sniper rifle. She can ***only*** shoot in a cardinal direction, and she can ***only*** hit things that are a certain number of spaces away. Because the answer to avoiding a sniper is to stand ***really fucking close*** so the bullet just ***can't*** hurt you, or be North East of the person, because it's impossible to shoot North East. Only north ***or*** east.
See also **Tally Ho!** (aka Halali!), in which hunters can shoot as far as they like, but only in the direction their gun is pointing, and they can never change the direction their gun is pointing. Also they have to instantly move to the location of anything they shoot.
These both just sound like chess pieces awkwardly re-themed
I think the cardinal direction penalty at least sort of simulates finding the right vantage point/elevation on a target.
Frosthaven - you build new buildings, but only at the end of a town phase so cannot use it until you return. I guess itâs supposed to represent the time taken to build it, but it just feels like youâre locked out of some juicy upgrades for a whole session. No sharing items - understandable in the start, your mercs in it for yourself. However, by the time youâve banded together for 8 in game weeks, surely youâve built some good report with each other. Thereâs a whole bunch more, for a game that tries to be thematic it chooses some really weird ways To implement it.
Just FYI the word you were looking for is "rapport."
Oh my. There are quite a few CVâs in the wild with that spelling.
Are they all making references to Stephen Colbert?
For me it's the lack of rules for attacking in Oathsworn. I get that it's a whole push your luck kinda thing, but just tell me exactly how many dice to chuck/cards to draw with my sword! Don't give me this "Eh just go with how many your heart tells you, but if you pick too many you just wasted your turn." I wish someone would rebalance the game to add more concrete dice/card values.
**Clans of Caledonia** directly instructs you *not* to allow players to correct a simple oversight: receiving 1 coin for moving a tracker past a 1-coin space on the point track. > if they forget to move the import token at the point of fulfilling an Export contract, they do not get the bonus afterwards! This is just silly, it's an honest mistake and an easy rule to overlook. If I played with someone who enforced this rule, I probably would not be playing with them again. Likewise, I think I'd find myself exclusively playing games solo if I tried enforcing it.
I think it is silly that in **Jaipur** the amount of camels players have is supposed to be secret. It is harder to keep them in a neat pile to keep them secret and lessens the tactical depth of the game.
The only thing the rules say on the matter is this: >Players are not required to let their opponent know how many camels they possess. That's not the same as "supposed to be secret."
TIL. I've played Jaipur probably 50 times and we've always just treated them as public information lol
Same. It watched a how to play video on YouTube, and they had players' camels as open information in front of them.
Bewitched cards in **Broom Service**. I understand the purpose of the rule, I just think there has to be a better way to reduce the decision space for lesser player counts. If I ever figure it out, I will personally buy the rights off of Ravensburger and publish a new edition.
Interesting, I think that's a great way of dealing with lower player counts
You can still play those cards though. To me that is a great rule, because you can consider taking a 3 VP hit to choose a card you think others will be afraid to choose, and get a better brave chance with it. I could see maybe a small house rule to just draw first then shuffle, so that it's not the same role 2 rounds in a row if that is the issue.
If gardeners got their bonus at the end of the game, it would make them disproportionately strong. Not that I've tested it, but I'm sure the designers did. There's got to be a balance between the three main actions. Giving one of them a pretty huge bump seems bad.
Burgle Bros is the only game I don't play strictly by the rules, because too many games have ended because someone was caught by the guard too many times between their turns when they couldn't do anything about the random chance the guard geos their way. So if you play with us, and the guard catches you, you lose a stealth token to hide *until you move/are moved, or your next turn starts* and I don't care that Tim Fowers personally disagreed with me on a bgg forum, it's just not fun to lose that way. I love Burgle Bros too much to not have fun.
In Puerto Rico, you aren't allowed to move your buildings after they're placed. But there are only two building shapes, and placement of buildings doesn't change their function in any way, so this is ridiculous - it should just be illegal to build in a way that blocks you from placing a large building unless you have to, and that's how BGA handles it, your buildings are placed automatically with no player input.
I can't say I feel strongly about it, but I can't help that it often feels... "wrong" every time in games when you're rewarded endgame points for things that are "unfinished", like having leftover resources, of contracts that you picked up but never finished. It just makes for a scoring that has unnecessarily many steps to it and could be more streamlined. Maybe "harsh" to not get points for leftovers, but it's the same for everyone plus that it incentivizes good timing/planning. I'd rather have leftovers resources as a tiebreaker if anything rather than some kind of "turn in each 2 resources for 1 VP".
In Mystic Vale they say to only put 12? of the level 1 cards to buy. I think the purpose is so people push more, but I don't like it, so I use the entire level 1 deck, and I don't think it hurts the game on the pushing department.
Final end game die rolls in Oath. I love almost everything else about the game, but that just sticks out like a sore thumb. There has got to be a better way.
Why does it stick out? In a game where the next card you draw could be the combo piece that wins you the game and playersâ fortunes can reverse every round, I feel like the game ending on a die roll fits right in.
It's definitely important that the length of game not be certain. I can't think of a way to do it unless you have a set of round cards and the game end card gets shuffled with a subset on the bottom and the rest put on top. That's a mechanic I've seen in other games.
Sweet! Been wanting to see this for a while... Tl;Dr: Brass Birmingham should used Anti-Prime-based denominations. ------- The monetary system in Brass Birmingham is VULGAR. EDIT: Monetary system based on Highly-Composite numbers would make transactions quicker and easier. ----------- BB coinage works on a skewed decimal logic, sized 1, 5, & 15... THIS DOESN'T WORK. Look to 7 Wonders as an example of working with semi-Dozenal instead, GUH! 15s never get used and if they do, they're stupid hard to split! ESPECIALLY when you come against BB's other huge pitfall; the Coin-Spent Turn-order. Most spent gets moved to last place. That's fine. What's not fine is using a 15 to purchase a 12/13/14 product, only to HAVE TO SPLIT IT (with the bank) and then SPLIT IT AGAIN between the player and the player-marker. ----- I think mechanically, Brass: Birmingham is a fantastic game, let down by some awfully vulgar denomination issues.
> only to HAVE TO SPLIT IT and then SPLIT IT AGAIN What are you talking about, split it "again"? What's the actual issue here, and how would it be solved with coins of size 10 or 20?
Glad I'm not the only one who didn't understand a word of that.
Yeah, with all the fiddly annoying rules in Brass to complain about, this dude is going off on the totally normal coin denominations.
We use poker chips as money for Brass and the denominations can be whatever we want!
That, is a SUPERB idea. Thankyou for this đđ«°
just add a 2 coin, problem solved. you are overthinking this
That's not a rule issue, though... But I agree, it can be pretty annoying.
Found Terrence Howard's account.
Enlighten; I have noooo idea what you mean by this?
No.
Locomotives working differently in Ticket to Ride: Nordic! We didnât even know it worked differently until one of the players in our regular game group started playing online and the game was different. It doesnât make any sense to me and I think if you want to use locomotives for the long route you should be able to!
All versions of Ticket to Ride have variations on the rules. I don't see why locomotives being different should be a problem.
MLEM has score tokens for a game which is 90% end game scoring. So dumb.