New character review for Snowflake/Snow Dancer
Frosthaven character review. All picture taken from this character guide .
A review and highlight reel of table top board games and whatever other nerdery I participate in.
Frosthaven character review. All picture taken from this character guide .
All pictures grabbed from this great imgur post on the Deathwalker.
Broaldly speaking there's two general builds ranged and melee. Melee consumes more shadows while ranged attacks require more moon. I went with the melee build.
The melee build relies on shadows, both their summoning and their positioning. The best attacks are single target 'pop up' attacks (5 attack at L1, 6 attack at L5) that appear within and consume a shadow. Shadow adjacency is the only thing that matters, this means the Deathwalker figure can be anywhere so long as he has a shadow next to the monster. Attacking this way also does not provoke retaliation.
Situationally, this build can be the party MVP. Shadows aren't effected by terrain, the only thing that stops them are walls. So, a hard to target monster is almost certainly reachable by the Deathwalker. Also the no retaliation mechanic can also be ridiculously important.
The general hand cycle goes : Generate a shadow, use the 'pop up' attack, use the supporting cards to generate a new shadow, then manuever for another 'pop up'.
Every character has several Level 1 or X cards that will stay in the build for the life of the character. Here's mine.
Fluid Night : The hard hitting 'pop-up' attack with a situationally useful bottom half as well. The melee builds best attack until level 5. Note for the bottom, current card printing says after teleporting to the shadow you discard this card.
Dark Fog : Moving Shadows is pretty hard, and this is 100% the best shadow moving card available. I should have liked the top better, but in practice it was really difficult to get muliple monsters lined up for the AoE
welcome back to the annual FTG post on Blood Rage, a game released 6 years ago so right in line with my review schedule.
I've previously played Eric Lang's Ankh, which is absolutely a spiritiual successor to Blood Rage, but this was my first time time playing the original.
It's Norse themed. Ragnoarok is coming and all your clan can do is die gloriously, the player who accumaltes the most glory wins!
The card draft: special upgrades, allied monsters, quests and battle cards you may select.
Area Control : two aspects of this. Having the most units in the area makes a fight easier, and also during the quest phase most quest cards read "have the most power in this region"
Rankings were generated into tiers of what I think I like most, then within those tiers subdivided further by a quick gut response "what would I rather play". So SCIENCE!
Only one play so far, but I really want to play again. It's really fast paced with reasonably difficult decisions. The auction mechanic is very interesting and I watched bidding tactics evolve during that one play through.
This is played out for me but rarely is there a game I am so bad at so entertaining.
Also played out for me. There was nothing truly novel about this game, but it was well balanced and well designed.
Terraforming Mars : Ares Expedition
Only one play so far. It's diet Terraforming Mars combined with Race for the Galaxy role selection; all the resources none of the area control. Still have the million cards to sort through, still have the plants and heat and oceans. I'd say it's a good way to introduce a n00b to TM.
I really really like this game, but we're not likely to play it at my table any time soon.
I haven't played Keyflower for probably 5 or 6 years. I remember liking it, but not really sure why anymore. We might get back to it in 2022 as we cross the backlog of 5 player games off our list.
This is a good game, and if not for the existince of Eldritch Horror would be much higher on this list. As it is, every time I play it I end up comparing to Eldritch. The one thing it does much much better than EH is it sets up much quicker.
19 Space Base
This is currently 'played out' for me. But the reason it's played out is because I played it a lot this year. It's quick, easy and the decisions are surprisingly impactful for a game who's core mechanic is roll 2D6. It's an excellent choice to close out the night.
18 Maracaibo
At first glance, this game looks fantastic. But the fighting actions may prove too powerful for a 'fighting specialist'. It could be that the secondary fighters are playing wrong, there's a factional Area Control mechanic that fighting specialists love but everyone else should probably ignore. Either way, not using the area control mechanic is not the least bit intuitive and the other paths for victory points aren't nearly as efficient. I'm interested enough to try another couple times, but this barely made this years list.
17 Everdell
I've only played Everdell on Tabletopia, and the game is cute enough to make you want to teach your muggle family but complex enough to stop you from trying.
16 Skull King
Trick taking game where the bidding strategies and play have totally evolved. First we thought decided 'nils' was too powerful, but then we started setting them. So maybe not? It's not like I'm good at this game anyways.
15 No Thanks!
The godfather of end of night, unwind games. about 5 to 10 minutes a round, and you have to play to the personalities; I play with spite and I don't have a chance to win I will for sure bust your inside straight.
14 Trajan
Trajan is probably on the list because I think I'm good at it. I feel my strength in games is analyzing the board and finding tactical oppurtunities. That basically is Trajan, and the rondell action wheel proves difficult for a lot of players to manuever. By my 2nd play through I was quite happy with my manipulations of it.
13 Tzolkin
Only two plays so far. This game is one gimmick, but it's a really interesting, unique gimmick. I haven't come close to figure this out yet but I want to try more!
Fantastic coop game where the players are faced with a tug of war between not losing, and making progress towards the win. Fun fact! I think trying to keep a crippled character alive is more damaging to the game than just going full speed ahead with him until he dies. Top of the World Ma!
Cheating to include this and Brass : Birmhingam? Fine, I'll feel shame. But the game is radically different. Lancashire is a spiteful knife fight, and you've got be very sure when you unlock anything. And when emptying a resource track, overbuilds are common in Lancashire.
We played Race for the Galaxy etnirely too much. It's one of the few games that play reasonably well with more than 5 players and at the time, we regularly had more than 5. It got played out, but it's also been years since we played. I'd totally play again :)
Steam, as a stand alone game isn't terribly intriguing. RotW improved on that by better end game scoring, better in game goals, and several differnt maps. Vastly more replayable than steam.
8 The Crew
Such a clever idea for a game! Completely cooperative trick taking card game! That's great but the no talking/communication rule just seals this as a good time.
7 Wingspan
Wingspan was a victim of Tabletopia implementation. Tapletopia and Board Game Arena have some really clunky implementations so when I find one that works well I tend to stick to this. We played this a lot last spring, to the point that I got really burnt out. But it's still a fantastic game that's well paced!
We ran out of content. Interestingly, it wasn't the lack of missions that played this game out. It was running out of new character classes. When the party was faced with recycling a bunch of guys because no one drew the right retirement goal, we lost interest. But still, we played this game every week for 9 months. Hours and hours and hours of enjoyment.
This is the epitome of a game where you can't eliminate luck, but you sure can mitigate it. Also amazingly paced for the decisions a player must make.
Combines the "Drink from the firehose" card selection of Race for the Galaxy with complex resource management. To me the most intriguing thing is, how much is something worth? Because it you raise the terraform level, you get more money, so it's worth more isn't it?
If this was just worker placement, this game would be dumb. If it was just tile placement, this game would also be dumb. But it combines the two into something special. And the on tableau bonuses! I've seen games that skip all of them or strive for all of them and both have been amazingly successful or ridiculous failures.
2 Azul
The first time I played Azul I thought it was so brilliantly simple that I got angry at myself for not thinking of it first. My favorite part of the game is that there is some spite involved; you can hate draft and force an opponent to take a bunch of tiles they can't play and cost them points!
If I do this next year, this is the best candidate to take a big tumble. Iron Works seems the most powerful industry, but I'm 100% not convinced of that yet. For one thing, we've let the Iron Monger auto-flip up to the L4 industry in the canal phase; it definitely needs to be more competitive.