Some of the previous posts were ones I had started and then abandoned after a few words, planning to finish them off, but actually never coming back to them.
However that doesn’t mean I gave up with the whole tabletop gaming thing. I have been spending far too much money on them recently and have acquired several new ones.
I bought:
- Expeditions: Gears of Corruption
- Sleeping Gods
- Marvel Champions
- Obsession
- Dune: Imperium1
The Great
Out of these games, excluding Gears of Corruption2, the absolute best game has got to be Marvel Champions by far. This game is so much fun to play, with a wide range of different cards, aspects, heroes, villains, schemes. It’s pretty great, and can be played solo, two (or three?) handed, or with an actual human3.
Right now, as I am still learning the decks, and having a go at customising, I have only beaten Rhino on standard difficulty. That is another way of saying that I’ve been playing on super-easy-tutorial-mode, and I am still having a great time as Spiderman, Iron Man, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Captain America4.
In fact, I’ve enjoyed each game so much (even the ones where I’ve lost) that I have already bought THREE expansions (The Rise of Red Skull, Mutant Genesis, and The Mad Titan’s Shadow). To be fair, that third one was a really good price and was also the last one in stock, so I grabbed it before it was sold out like a lot of these expansions and hero decks. I doubt I will get around to playing it in the short-term as from what I have read, it is apparently quite a lot more difficult than the others I have acquired. But I am still glad I own it.
The Good
Another fantastic game I am glad I have added to my collection is Obsession. I only have the base game for now, but I love the theme of Victorian prestige building, and the mechanics of tile drawing and worker-placement. The different families are all broadly the same, but have some asymmetric aspects to keep it interesting. For instance one family starts with an extra family member allowing the player a more versatile round than their opponents, while another family begins with more wealth, allowing them to grab some better tiles on the board ahead of their opponents.
I am looking forward to getting the Upstairs, Downstairs expansion at some point. If only I could bring myself to play something other than Marvel Champions for a bit.
The Average
It was the right choice to buy the digital version of Dune Imperium. The game itself is ok. I am not sure why it is hyped as much as it is. I suspect its because Dune is a popular film series right now5. What puts me off is that the artwork is all designed to look like the actors playing their characters in the Villenueve film. I have only seen the films once, so that means that I’m not looking at Paul, Jessica, and Leto Atreides, I’m looking at goddamn Willy Wonka, Rose the Hat, and Nathan from Ex Machina. That’s the trouble when using actors for artwork; I’m reminded of them in their other roles. Also the gameplay is super repetitive over the ten rounds. It’s ok for that single game I’m playing, but I don’t feel like a second game afterwards.
The Bad
I was really surprised with myself for this swing and a miss, but Sleeping Gods is awful. I am stunned at how differently it plays to what I was reading about, considering it cost quite a lot of money.
First off, it is very complicated. I am not hard-of-thinking, but I was finding the huge array of cards, effects, command tokens, characters a little overwhelming. It also takes up massive amounts of table space, and I had to “save” the game after each time I played it in order to reclaim part of my house, which was a massive pain.
Also, a large part of the game is that you remove quest cards that you have completed from the game, placing them in a cool little box. However if you sleeve your cards, like I do, then they no longer fit in the box, so you’re stuck awkwardly arranging your cards so they fit in at an angle instead.
I found the artwork really bland and amateurish6, and the story punishingly brutal. There is no way to avoid a bad scenario. For example, a decision I had made earlier meant that when I explored another area I was immediately attacked by something I wasn’t prepared for.
The amount of command tokens that could be divided among the crew was ridiculously stingy. I accidentally played the game incorrectly for a few turns, and started recovering spent command tokens back to my hand rather than to the supply, and the game improved to an almost enjoyable level.
The worst part of the game has got to be the godawful rulebook that doesn’t go into nearly enough detail on the nuances of combat. One of the most highly rated pinned forum posts on Board Game Geek is the errata, which should have been a red flag to me.
I didn’t intend to rant about Sleeping Gods quite so much, but I’ve reminded myself of how much it cost me, and how many hours I put into it, which is probably getting on for about 15 to 20. Now I just want to unsleeve all the cards and sell the game.
What a waste.
What have I learned
From this experience I can say that I am a fan of the Fantasy Flight Living Card Games. I have already bought Lord of the Rings Revised Core Edition7 and am hyped for that arriving. I know that the Lord of the Rings game is “dead” already, but I disagree with that label. It is no more “dead” than the Lord of the Rings books. There will never be another Lord of the Rings book published by Tolkien, with him being long-dead and everything, but that doesn’t mean I won’t read them again. The same is true for this card game, though it may become more expensive and difficult to track down the expansions. We shall see.
I guess I also realised that heavy games aren’t actually my kind of thing at all. I used to believe that a really in-depth game that takes hours to play is what I liked, but I am no longer so sure.
I have also decided to cross some previously-wanted and bad-decision-purchase games off of my list, as they just don’t look like the sort of things I want to invest time into any more.
Games that I own that I will never play again
- Gloomhaven
- Far too difficult and massive. The box is absolutely enormous and the gameplay feels like I am forced into make the least worst decision each time. Not fun.
- Wingspan
- This is another super-boring game that I convinced myself I liked. I have the digital and tabletop versions and both bore the tits off me. This engine-builder is not for me.
- Scythe
- This is actually one of my favourite games but as I own the digital version now I can’t see myself getting this tabletop version out. Not unless I have people come over to play, and that involves A: knowing people, B: having them come over, and C: them actually wanting to spend the evening playing Scythe. Those particular venn diagram circles do not overlap.
- Everdell
- Never really clicked for me. I have played it maybe three or four times, each time I felt like I would rather have been playing something else. I did look into expansions for it, and maybe if I put some more effort into learning about the cards I would have more fun. But, there are just so many other games that grab my attention.
- Sleeping Gods
- See previous rant.
Games that I thought I wanted but not any more
- Gloomhaven - Jaws of the Lion
- I am done with this franchise.
- Frosthaven
- I mean … it’s Gloomhaven again.
- Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island
- This looked exactly like my sort of game, but due to my experience with Sleeping Gods, I don’t think I will take the risk.
- Frostpunk
- I bought the digital version and it is too difficult and therefore boring.
Anyway, that’s about it for this post8. I think I will try and add some Marvel Champions (and Lord of the Rings) playthroughs, and possibly an Obsession or two. I am not sure of the best way to do this via this blog. I don’t really want to record myself playing due to my total lack of equipment. I might be able to think of a way to write out the various turns like I did for Arkham Horror, though I wonder whether that could have done with some more images of the hand and the card layouts themselves.
29th July 2024
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Digital version ↩︎
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Which I am yet to play ↩︎
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I have even managed this on three separate occasions, with two separate humans ↩︎
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I gave in and bought his hero deck. I haven’t gotten around to playing as She-Hulk yet as she looks pretty lame ↩︎
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Again, I am not sure why. It’s long and boring, like the book ↩︎
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Which is another surprise, as what I had read from numerous forum posts was how much people loved the artwork. I suspect people either have an extremely low-bar for what they consider “good”. All the characters look the same, albeit with different skin colour and clothes ↩︎
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Another difficult one to track down. I bought the last copy (allegedly). Probably as there are no more decks or expansions being produced ↩︎
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For fun I asked a LLM what it thought of this post. After telling me how great it was it said I was too harsh on Sleeping Gods and I should give a more balanced review. No. Sleeping Gods sucks ↩︎